(AU) Making Sense Of Australia’s Climate Exceptionalism

Al Jazeera - Stephen Pascoe

Why does Australia act as if it can ignore the climate crisis, and how long can it keep to this seemingly suicidal posture?

Fire burns in the grass near Bumbalong, south of the Australian capital, Canberra, Feb. 1, 2020. [AP Photo/Rick Rycroft]

Author Stephen Pascoe is a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine. Originally from Melbourne, Pascoe's research spans the histories of cities, infrastructure, imperialism and popular resistance, with a focus on the modern Middle East.

2020 has had no shortage of images of catastrophe and suffering, but the ones that haunt me the most are from the inferno that engulfed my home country, Australia, at the very beginning of the year.

For us Australians, the year started with images of giant flames climbing up the cliffs of the Blue Mountains and the news that over a billion animals had perished in the fires raging across the continent. 

Over the previous month, we had witnessed the Sydney skyline disappear under a dystopian, orange pall of smoke and would soon watch in worry as hundreds of vacationing families huddled together on beaches to be rescued from fast-approaching fires.

We Australians have long imagined ourselves as a uniquely nonchalant and irreverent nation. But at the dawn of 2020, long before COVID-19 even reached our shores, we found ourselves dismayed by our apocalyptic present and terrified of what likely lies in our future.

This year’s bushfires, and the unprecedented devastation they caused, have left an indelible scar on the collective consciousness of Australians. As the carnage we experienced made clear that the climate is changing faster than our worst fears, we hoped that our elected representatives would finally take the necessary steps to address the global climate emergency.

Yet, just a few months after the fires, in an attempt to swiftly lift Australia out of the COVID-19 recession it found itself in, Prime Minister Scott Morrison authorised a “Gas-Fired recovery”: a raft of new policies that completely ignores the country’s gloomy ecological reality and aims to revitalise the economy by getting “more gas into the market”.

Australia’s seemingly suicidal posture towards climate change often puzzles foreign observers. Indeed, the Australian state’s persistent reluctance to take meaningful action as the country wilts from the worst effects of climate change defies rational explanation.

Noting that “Australia is already having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change”, renowned British conservationist David Attenborough once described the Australian government’s disinterest in responding to the climate emergency as “extraordinary”.

Coming to terms with our exceptionalism

Australia’s apparent indifference towards this global emergency is not so much a case of climate change denialism as it is exceptionalism. There are some climate change deniers on the far right who exercise an inordinate amount of political power relative to the size of their support base. 

However, more fundamentally, what guides the Australian state’s problematic stance on climate change is a form of exceptionalism. Australia’s climate change exceptionalism rests on several pillars.

First, the conviction on the part of successive Australian governments that our national consumption patterns have no material effect on climate change and the resulting belief that we can extract ourselves from the global effort to combat it without this causing much harm.

Second, a purposeful downplaying of the contributions of Australian extractive industries to carbon supply chains, which paints the country as an incidental intermediary in the production of global emissions, encourages Australians to view climate change as somebody else’s problem. This, despite Australia now being the third-largest exporter of carbon dioxide in fossil fuels, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.

These convenient fictions allow Australian governments to ignore the scientific consensus on climate change when politically and economically convenient and opt in an out of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures as they see fit.

This was not always the case.

In the 1980s, when the public first became aware of the “greenhouse effect”, as it was then commonly termed, Australia was among the countries taking the problem seriously, developing policy frameworks that began to address the problem and participating in international forums on the issue in good will.

The turning point on this issue was the election of the conservative Liberal-National Party (LNP) leader, John Howard, as prime minister in 1996. Howard defied expectations and became Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister, remaining in office for eleven long years.

During his time in power, he fundamentally altered Australian political discourse in ways that influence the country’s stance on important issues, such as climate change, to this day.

In the international sphere, Howard’s tenure saw Australia break its commitment to multilateralism and international cooperation and focus solely on its relations with “countries that share its values” – namely the Anglosphere.

Under Howard’s leadership, Australia quickly signed up to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars but refused to ratify the Kyoto pact on climate change. Trying to explain his reasons for refusing to ratify the protocol in 2002, Howard claimed such a move would “would cost us jobs and damage our industry”.

He and his ministers persistently argued that purposefully reducing greenhouse gas emissions would unnecessarily harm the economy while bringing marginal environmental gain. After all, what was the point in us making sacrifices while more populous nations like India and China were free to pollute all they liked?

This cynical reasoning has since become a cornerstone of Australia’s environmental exceptionalism – it is not so much that Australian politicians do not believe the climate is changing, they simply do not think they should be the ones paying the price to fix it.

Racism and a chronic indifference towards the suffering of communities of colour, both inside and outside Australia, also play a significant role in the country’s climate exceptionalism.

In 2015, for example, three of Howard’s former ministers – Peter Dutton, Tony Abbot and Scott Morrison – were overheard mocking and ridiculing the plight of Pacific Island nations facing rising seas from climate change.

During a conversation about Pacific Island leaders supposedly arriving late to a meeting, Dutton quipped that “time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door”.

It was textbook environmental racism, marrying, in a single breath, the old white colonialist trope of non-western peoples not respecting industrial capitalism’s nexus between time and work-discipline with callous indifference to the communities of colour that are most exposed to climate change.

A similarly hostile indifference has been displayed by successive governments towards Australia’s own Indigenous citizens. Torres Strait Islanders, whose homes are at risk of being submerged by rising sea levels in the near future, have taken the extraordinary step of launching a complaint with the UN’s Human Rights Committee against the national government over its failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Coalaphilia and Its Legacies

Australia’s current Prime Minister Scott Morrison is very much an inheritor of the Howardesque technique of appealing to the so-called “silent” Australians, against the troublesome noise of critics and environmentalists.

In a theatrical stunt in the national parliament in 2017, Morrison brandished a lump of coal and shook it in the air as he goaded his opponents, whom he accused of being afflicted by the malady of “coalaphobia” – an “ideological, pathological fear of coal” that allegedly harms the economic prosperity of everyday Australians.

Morrison’s performance of coalaphilia, while containing a decent dose of “petro-masculinity”, was not entirely chest-thumping cosplay. His unshakeable conviction in the inherent benefits of mining tapped a deep reservoir of cognitive dissonance.

Like other settler-colonial nations, Australia’s official identity has always been built upon twin, mutually-reinforcing logics: the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty over the land, and overreaching optimism in the national territory’s boundless potential for capital investment and extraction of mineral resources.

While extractive industries have always played a prominent role in Australian politics and economy, their power has paradoxically grown over the past quarter-century alongside the necessity to regulate their atmospheric “externalities”.

The mining industry, in concert with the Murdoch press, has the power to make and break elected governments in Australia.

In his first tenure as prime minister (2007-2010), in the midst of a phenomenal mining boom tied to China’s rising demand for minerals, Australian Labor Party (ALP) leader Kevin Rudd attempted to increase the government’s take of the super-profits from mining, in the form of a Minerals Resource Rent Tax.

The backlash, orchestrated by mining tycoons employing tactics similar to the Koch brothers in the US, was astonishing. After months of hostile press and slipping approval ratings, Rudd was deposed in an internal coup and replaced by Julia Gillard.

After taking office in June 2010, Gillard immediately dropped the fight with the mining magnates. But when she tried a modest route towards emissions reduction, in the form of a tax on carbon, she received her own drawn-out political crucifixion.

Upon assuming office as prime minister in 2013, Tony Abbott’s first item of business was to repeal Gillard’s maligned “Carbon Tax”, which, during its brief period of operation, had succeeded in reducing our emissions.

Australia thereby became the first country in the world to abolish a demonstrably effective pricing mechanism on carbon. Having crushed the brief interregnum on climate inaction, Abbott restored the environmental exceptionalism in which we remain mired to this day.

Tragically, at precisely the moment Australia needed to take radical action to decarbonise its economy, its government determined that the country’s economic prosperity was irrefutably tied to its capacity to allow multinational corporations to dig minerals and fossil fuels out of the ground. This, despite the said corporations paying minimal contributions back to the citizenry.

However, in Australia, the psychological inability to accept the scale and implications of the climate crisis is not limited to the government. In 2019, for example, Australians responded to the emerging calls to reduce unnecessary air travel on environmental grounds with near-universal derision. 

Even the left-wing press baulked at the suggestion that like others living in Asia, the Americas and Europe, Australians too should alter their travel plans to help the global fight against climate change. It was as though geographical remoteness gave us a free pass not to act: 

Surely the famous “tyranny of distance” that shaped Australia’s history would also mean its residents would continue to fly as often as they wish, without even considering their carbon footprints, amid a climate crisis?

This is a classic feature of Australian environmental exceptionalism: any uncomfortable discussion is closed before it begins, bargained away into a corner of the collective Australian consciousness where it might not bother anyone too much.

The end of exceptionalism?

Will 2020 prove, finally, to be the turning point in Australia’s climate exceptionalism?

In July of this year, a substantial and sudden erosion of the New South Wales shoreline near Sydney demonstrated how vulnerable the majority of Australia’s inhabitants who live in proximity to the coast will be to future sea level rises, king tides, and other extreme weather events. Further north, the main beach at Byron Bay, one of Australia’s most famous beachfronts, has dramatically collapsed into the sea.

For a nation obsessed with the pursuit of homeownership, it may be the threat of a changing climate to individual private property that will strike the strongest chord. There are warnings that flood- and bushfire-prone communities will face increasing insurance premiums and may even become uninsurable in the near future.

As pressure mounts on the federal government to change course, the corrosive influence of the Murdoch media empire on our political discourse has been highlighted from various angles. The current government and the Murdoch press have been accused of working as a team, coordinating messaging, and the timing of the release of sensitive information. 

News Corp’s active promotion of climate scepticism has been more meticulously documented. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd launched a petition for a Royal Commission into media ownership in Australia; this has garnered more than half-a-million signatures from Australians fed up with Murdoch’s monopolisation of the media.

Meanwhile, internationally, a series of developments this year have highlighted the distance between our glaring inaction and the gathering action of other countries.

As our major trading partners have announced they will enforce new standards for environmental reporting among agricultural producers, calls are being made for Australian exports to be subjected to “climate tariffs”. Importers of Australian coal – China, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines – have all announced in recent months that they are banning coal in the near future as part of moves towards zero net emissions.

Perhaps most significantly, as measured by the political calculus of Morrison’s government, even our allies in the Anglosphere are abandoning us, like the uncomfortable, drunk cousin at a birthday party we have consistently shown ourselves to be. 

Morrison was reportedly “livid” when sidelined by Boris Johnson from speaking at a UN-sponsored climate summit because of Australia’s well-publicised laggardness on climate action.

Likewise, Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election promises a definitive shift in international carbon politics that may punish Australia or at least further expose our carbon isolationism.

Perhaps, finally, the pressure will have become too great for us to keep making excuses. Lame explanations for why our history, our geography and our culture render us uniquely exceptional when, across the globe, other countries are taking responsibility for tackling the climate emergency. 

 Perhaps we can finally acknowledge that on a continent highly vulnerable to climate change and as a nation that has wreaked especially damaging ecological and cultural harm through colonisation, claiming exceptionalism is a particularly disturbing – and self-destructive – form of delusion.

Links

• Climate change: 11,000 scientists warn of ‘untold suffering’
• The coronavirus outbreak is part of the climate change crisis
• Lessons learned from COVID-19 can help us fight climate change
• US wildfires: How climate change is spurring deadly blazes
• Climate change spurs doubling of disasters since 2000: UN
• Lessons from 2020: Reconnecting with nature, a force for good
• Vietnamese pick up the pieces after 2020’s relentless storms
• Climate catastrophes cost nations billions in 2020, report finds

(AU) Black Summer: Why Australia Had To Change How It Fought Bushfires

NEWS.com.au - Charis Chang

The way Australia fights fires has changed dramatically since the Black Summer blazes and those who think backburning is the answer are stuck in a “time warp”. 

The Gospers Mountain fire burned through more than 500,000 hectares. Picture: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

A year ago Australians couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Sydney Harbour shrouded in smoke, red apocalyptic skies, footage of fires rising up and “crowning” among the trees, a firenado in Queensland and burned koalas being rescued from the ashes of their once-safe homes.

Australians were seen fleeing to beaches in tourist towns and had to be evacuated by helicopters and Navy ships as the flames came dangerous close.

It almost seems unbelievable that these scenes were playing out across Australia just one year ago.

By this time in 2019 the blazes were already well underway, with the first fires having started in August. On November 8 for example, there were already an unprecedented 17 fires in NSW for which emergency warnings had been issued.

By the time they were done the Black Summer bushfires had ripped through 24 to 40 million hectares of bushland across multiple states and territories — nearly double the area of any previous major bushfire in a fire season.

The Royal Commission said this had “set a new benchmark for an extreme fire season in Australia’s temperate forests”.

The fires claimed the lives of 33 people including a volunteer firefighter whose truck was overturned by a “fire tornado” and two other volunteer firefighters who died in a truck accident and whose deaths brought a holidaying Prime Minister home.

The World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that nearly three billion animals including mammals, birds and reptiles were either killed or displaced by the fires.

The bushfire smoke also caused its own public health emergency, cloaking cities like Sydney and Canberra in an oppressive haze, which Asthma Australia estimated was responsible for more than 400 deaths. At one point Canberra had the worst air quality in the world and it was more than 20 times above hazardous levels.

Sydney Harbour Bridge was blanketed in smoke and the sky was tinged orange during last season’s bushfires. Picture: Joel Carrett/AAP

The crisis continued for months and it was not until late February that most of the blazes were extinguished.

This year the outlook is less grim, although a bushfire has already razed half of Fraser Island in Queensland.

But we have not seen the last of these unprecedented scenes and even though this is an “La Nina” year, which usually brings cooler temperatures, cyclones and rain, Mother Nature is continuing to surprise us.

Last month Sydney broke a heat record in place since 1960 when it recorded temperatures of 40C on back-to-back days starting on Saturday, November 28 and continuing the following Sunday.

This was the first time the city had recorded two 40C days in a row for any month, not just in November. The last time this happened was in January 1960.

November was also recognised as the hottest November on record globally, with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service saying it was the warmest such month since its records began in 1979.

“What this says is that bushfire risk can change virtually overnight,” former Fire & Rescue NSW Commissioner Greg Mullins told news.com.au.

‘THE WHOLE PROFILE HAS CHANGED’

Mr Mullins said this year’s fire season was not expected to be as bad as last year because the moisture profile in forests had changed but it was still likely there would be bad grass fires in the western districts of NSW and in the northern districts of Victoria. There was also the probability of blazes in Western Australia’s southwest.

“We could still get some bad days, although we probably won’t have bad weeks or bad months,” he said.

However, Mr Mullins warned that things could change overnight because Australia was experiencing things like flash droughts and odd days of extremely high temperatures — like what occurred in Sydney last month.

The Black Summer fires ripped through up to 40 million hectares of bushland. Picture Rohan Kelly

“So if we get a series of heatwaves, we could all of a sudden be back dealing with major bushfires, although they wouldn’t be as widespread as last year.”

It’s just one more change those in the field have had to adapt to as Australia’s Black Summer bushfires overturned people’s assumptions and forced authorities to rethink how they respond to emergencies.

Mr Mullins said the fires had forever changed how Australia deals with the fire threat in this country.

“I’ve watched this for 50 years and the whole profile has changed,” he said.

“Those people who say it’s all about fuel reduction, well I’m sorry but you’re stuck in a time warp from 50 years ago and you don’t understand the issues and you’re not bothering to read or digest what’s happened in the climate, because it has all changed.”

WE CAN’T RELY ON TRADITIONAL METHODS ANYMORE

The ferocity of the Black Summer bushfires meant that hazard reduction and backburning were less effective at keeping blazes under control. In fact, in the dangerous conditions backburning got away from crews and made fires worse.

Mr Mullins said every bushfire inquiry in all the states impacted including NSW, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, as well as the federal Royal Commission found hazard reduction was not as effective as it used to be because the fire weather is so much more extreme.

“During extreme and catastrophic conditions, fires just jump over areas that are burnt or simply burn through them — they don’t slow the fires down anymore,” he said.

“Hazard reduction was our biggest mitigation tool for bushfires for the last century and it’s been rendered far less effective because of climate change.”

The inquiries also pointed to the smaller window of time that authorities now had to conduct hazard reduction due to the hotter and drier weather.

“There are very small periods of the year now where we can safely burn off,” he said.

Another limitation is the difficulty in burning enough forest to make any sizeable difference to the risk.

There’s less time to do hazard reduction and it’s less effective against high intensity fires. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

Mr Mullins pointed out that last season’s fires burnt through about 5.4 million hectares of broadleaf forest in NSW and Victoria — about 21 per cent of the forest. Only a fraction of this could realistically be burned during hazard reduction operations.

“Most of the workforce in NSW are volunteers so hazard reduction happens mostly on weekend, you would have to triple the workforce to do enough burning and this is just impractical,” he said.

He also noted that hazard reduction also impacted other animals living in the bush.

“Should wipe out another three million species? We are not the only species on the planet and it’s all about balance,” he said.

“(Those in favour of hazard reduction) are advocating no balance and it’s quite infuriating when so-called experts say this stuff.”

Similarly, backburning, which is a last-resort measure aimed at setting containment lines in the face of a major blaze was also less effective.

“They didn’t work last year because it was so dry, the fires just got away,” Mr Mullins said.

“Climate change is taking away the traditional tools we have.”

On top of this, fires started by dry-lightning have also become more common thanks to changes to the climate.

Dry-lightning started numerous fires during the 2019–20 season including the Gospers Mountain fire in the Wollemi National Park that burned through 512,000 hectares and was the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia. The fire began on October 26, 2019 and was not extinguished until February 2020 when heavy rains arrived.

The Gospers Mountain fire burned through more than 500,000 hectares. Picture: Dan Himbrechts/AAP

“The only thing we can do is act differently, and focus on fast initial attacks using ground crews and water bombing aircraft,” Mr Mullins said.

“However, a proportion of the fires will still get away from us in the worst weather conditions.”

DRONES, SATELLITES AND ‘FAST-ATTACK STRATEGIES’

Mr Mullins believes Australia is now acting to embrace ‘fast-attack strategies’ that have been used to good effect in places like Canada, France, Spain and parts of the United States.

This places the focus on spotting fires when they first begin and sending crews in quickly, along with water bombing aircraft to extinguish blazes.

NSW will trial the dispatch of water bombing helicopters as soon as a fire is identified rather than waiting for ground crews to investigate first.

“This is good but it all costs money, it's very expensive,” Mr Mullins said.

“You will have aircraft in the air for many false alarms but it’s the price we’ve got to pay because of climate change driving worse fires.”

Last year Mr Mullins and other former emergency services leaders struggled to be heard over their concerns more water-bombers would be needed to tackle what they correctly predicted would be a horror fire season.

But the Morrison Government has now agreed to provide an extra $11 million a year to the National Aerial Firefighting Centre for more large air tankers for firefighting efforts and to support the fleet’s costs.

The private sector is also making huge investments to develop new technology using satellites, infrared detection systems, drones and other methods to spot fires.

Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo foundation is providing a $70 million grant to the “Fire Shield” program that wants to use satellites, infrared sensors and drones to identify and extinguish fires within an hour by 2025.

The Australian National University Institute for Space will put $1 million towards developing a satellite system to detect forest fuel load and vegetation moisture that will help predict where fires are likely to start, so controlled burns can be better targeted.

Meanwhile, Ninox Robotics says its drones can already search large areas for fires, map fire-fronts in real-time and guide firefighters.

A national program to detect ignitions and accurately monitor all fire edge intensity and progression across Australia is being supported by all state and territory governments except Western Australia.

‘PUT THE MONEY IN THE RIGHT PLACE’

Mr Mullins warned that while changing fire response strategies will help, it’s not the panacea.

“The only thing that will help eventually is driving down emissions and driving down the risk,” he said.

Mr Mullins has welcomed the softening in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments on climate change but said it was “nowhere near enough”.

“At the very least we need to match the states and territories and adopt a net zero 2050 target, and then beat it by at least a decade,” he said.

The so-called “gas led recovery” must also be abandoned in favour of renewables.

“Let’s not invest in Blockbuster and try to slow down Netflix,” he said.

“The economics will drive this and the government is not listening to the market.”

Mr Mullins said it was inevitable that people would stop buying Australia’s coal.

“Regardless of the policy, in the background things are changing and we need to catch up and put money into where it should be going.”

Links

• Aussie fire season could mark beginning of new ‘ice age’
• Video shows sky turning from ‘day to night’ in three minutes
• Before and after photos show Australia’s bushfire crisis
• Fake and misleading images of Australia’s bushfires
• World reacts to images of Australia’s bushfire crisis
• Lethal Heating: Bushfire Posts

Why 2021 Could Be Turning Point For Tackling Climate Change

BBC - Justin Rowlatt

The world is not on track to meet its goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C. Getty Images

Countries only have only a limited time in which to act if the world is to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

Here are five reasons why 2021 could be a crucial year in the fight against global warming.Covid-19 was the big issue of 2020, there is no question about that.

But I'm hoping that, by the end of 2021, the vaccines will have kicked in and we'll be talking more about climate than the coronavirus.

2021 will certainly be a crunch year for tackling climate change.

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, told me he thinks it is a "make or break" moment for the issue.

So, in the spirit of New Year's optimism, here's why I believe 2021 could confound the doomsters and see a breakthrough in global ambition on climate.

1. The crucial climate conference

In November 2021, world leaders will be gathering in Glasgow for the successor to the landmark Paris meeting of 2015.

Paris was important because it was the first time virtually all the nations of the world came together to agree they all needed to help tackle the issue.

The problem was the commitments countries made to cutting carbon emissions back then fell way short of the targets set by the conference.

In Paris, the world agreed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change by trying to limit global temperature increases to 2C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The aim was to keep the rise to 1.5C if at all possible.

Getty Images

We are way off track. On current plans the world is expected to breach the 1.5C ceiling within 12 years or less and to hit 3C of warming by the end of the century.

Under the terms of the Paris deal, countries promised to come back every five years and raise their carbon-cutting ambitions. That was due to happen in Glasgow in November 2020.The pandemic put paid to that and the conference was bumped forward to this year.

So, Glasgow 2021 gives us a forum at which those carbon cuts can be ratcheted up.

2. Countries are already signing up to deep carbon cuts

And there has already been progress.

The most important announcement on climate change last year came completely out of the blue.

At the UN General Assembly in September, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, announced that China aimed to go carbon neutral by 2060.

Environmentalists were stunned. Cutting carbon has always been seen as an expensive chore yet here was the most polluting nation on earth - responsible for some 28% of world emissions - making an unconditional commitment to do just that regardless of whether other countries followed its lead.

That was a complete turnaround from past negotiations, when everyone's fear was that they might end up incurring the cost of decarbonising their own economy, while others did nothing but still enjoyed the climate change fruits of their labour.

China is responsible for around 28% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Getty Images

And China is not alone.

The UK was the first major economy in the world to make a legally binding net zero commitment in June 2019. The European Union followed suit in March 2020.

Since then, Japan and South Korea have joined what the UN estimates is now a total of over 110 countries that have set net zero target for mid-century. Together, they represent more than 65% of global emissions and more than 70% of the world economy, the UN says.

With the election of Joe Biden in the United States, the biggest economy in the world has now re-joined the carbon cutting chorus.

These countries now need to detail how they plan to achieve their lofty new aspirations - that will be a key part of the agenda for Glasgow - but the fact that they are already saying they want to get there is a very significant change.

3. Renewables are now the cheapest energy ever

There is a good reason why so many countries are now saying they plan to go net zero: the collapsing cost of renewables is completely changing the calculus of decarbonisation.

In October 2020, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation, concluded that the best solar power schemes now offer "the cheapest source of electricity in history".

Renewables are already often cheaper than fossil fuel power in much of the world when it comes to building new power stations.

And, if the nations of the world ramp up their investments in wind, solar and batteries in the next few years, prices are likely to fall even further to a point where they are so cheap it will begin to make commercial sense to shut down and replace existing coal and gas power stations.

That is because the cost of renewables follows the logic of all manufacturing - the more you produce, the cheaper it gets. It's like pushing on an open door - the more you build the cheaper it gets and the cheaper it gets the more you build.

Think what this means: investors won't need to be bullied by green activists into doing the right thing, they will just follow the money. And governments know that by scaling up renewables in their own economies, they help to accelerate the energy transition globally, by making renewables even cheaper and more competitive everywhere.

EPA

4. Covid changes everything

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken our sense of invulnerability and reminded us that it is possible for our world to be upended in ways we cannot control.

It has also delivered the most significant economic shock since the Great Depression.

In response, governments are stepping forward with stimulus packages designed to reboot their economies.

And the good news is it has rarely - if ever - been cheaper for governments to make these kind of investments. Around the world, interest rates are hovering around zero, or even negative.

This creates an unprecedented opportunity to - in the now familiar phrase - "build back better".The European Union and Joe Biden's new administration in the US have promised trillions of dollars of green investments to get their economies going and kick-start the process of decarbonisation.

Both are saying they hope other countries will join them - helping drive down the cost of renewables globally. But they are also warning that alongside this carrot, they plan to wield a stick - a tax on imports of countries that emit too much carbon.

The idea is this may help induce carbon-cutting laggards - like Brazil, Russia, Australia and Saudi Arabia - to come onside too.

The bad news is that, according to the UN, developed nations are spending 50% more on sectors linked to fossil fuels than on low-carbon energy.

5. Business is going green too

The falling cost of renewable and the growing public pressure for action on climate is also transforming attitudes in business.

There are sound financial reasons for this. Why invest in new oil wells or coal power stations that will become obsolete before they can repay themselves over their 20-30-year life?

Indeed, why carry carbon risk in their portfolios at all?

The logic is already playing out in the markets. This year alone, Tesla's rocketing share price has made it the world's most valuable car company.

Getty Images

Meanwhile, the share price of Exxon - once the world's most valuable company of any kind - fell so far that it got booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average of major US corporations.

At the same time there is growing momentum behind the movement to get businesses to embed climate risk into their financial decision making.

The aim is to make it mandatory for businesses and investors to show that their activities and investments are making the necessary steps to transition to a net zero world.

Seventy central banks are already working to make this happen, and building these requirements into the world's financial architecture will be a key focus for the Glasgow conference.

It is still all to play for.

So, there is good reason for hope but it is far from a done deal.

To stand a reasonable chance of hitting the 1.5C target we need to halve total emissions by the end of 2030, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-backed body that collates the science needed to inform policy.

What that means is making the sort of emissions reductions achieved in 2020 thanks to the massive international lockdowns every year to the end of the decade. Yet emissions are already edging back to the levels they were in 2019.

The truth is lots of countries have expressed lofty ambitions for cutting carbon but few have yet got strategies in place to meet those goals.

The challenge for Glasgow will be getting the nations of the world to sign up to policies that will start reducing emissions now. The UN says it wants to see coal phased out completely, an end to all fossil fuel subsidies and a global coalition to reach net zero by 2050.

That remains a very tall order, even if global sentiments on tackling global warming are beginning to change.

Links

• 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference
• UN Climate Change Conference (COP 26) | United Nations
• Glasgow Climate Change Conference
• Have countries kept their climate change promises?
• Snowy UK winters could become thing of the past
• How hot could it get where you live?
• Nuclear power: Are we too anxious about the risks of radiation?
• What the heroin industry can teach us about solar power
• Greta Thunberg, the climate campaigner who doesn't like campaigning
• Snotsicles and snowdrifts: Extreme climate science
• Download the updated BBC Energy Briefing (pdf 10.4mb)
• The road to clean energy

Is Nuclear Fusion The Answer To The Climate Crisis?

The Guardian - Oscar Schwartz

Promising new studies suggest the long elusive technology may be capable of producing electricity for the grid by the end of the decade

A rendering of Sparc, a nuclear fusion reactor currently under development. Scientists behind Sparc hope it will be capable of producing electricity for the grid by 2030. Photograph: T Henderson/CFS/MIT-PSFC/Wikimedia

If all goes as planned, the US will eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from its electricity sector by 2035 – an ambitious goal set by President-elect Joe Biden, relying in large part on a sharp increase in wind and solar energy generation. 

That plan may soon get a boost from nuclear fusion, a powerful technology that until recently had seemed far out of reach.

Researchers developing a nuclear fusion reactor that can generate more energy than it consumes have shown in a series of recent papers that their design should work, restoring optimism that this clean, limitless power source will help mitigate the climate crisis.

While the new reactor still remains in early development, scientists hope it will be able to start producing electricity by the end of the decade.

Martin Greenwald, one of the project’s senior scientists, said a key motivation for the ambitious timeline is meeting energy requirements in a warming world. “Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster,” he said.

Nuclear fusion, the physical process that powers our sun, occurs when atoms are pushed together at extremely high temperatures and pressure, causing them to release tremendous amounts of energy by merging into heavier atoms.

Since it was first discovered last century, scientists have sought to harness fusion, an extremely dense form of power whose fuel – hydrogen isotopes – are abundant and replenishable. Moreover, fusion produces no greenhouse gases or carbon, and unlike fission nuclear reactors, carries no risk of meltdown.

Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster
Martin Greenwald

Harnessing this form of nuclear power, though, has proven extremely difficult, requiring heating a soup of subatomic particles, called plasma, to hundreds of millions of degrees – far too hot for any material container to withstand. To work around this, scientists developed a donut-shaped chamber with a strong magnetic field running through it, called a tokamak, which suspends the plasma in place.

MIT scientists and a spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, began designing the new reactor, which is more compact than its predecessors, in early 2018, and will start construction in the first half of next year.

If their timeline goes as planned, the reactor, called Sparc, will be capable of producing electricity for the grid by 2030, according to researchers and company officials. This would be far faster than existing major fusion power initiatives.

Existing reactor designs are too large and expensive to realistically generate electricity for consumers. Through the use of cutting-edge, ultra-strong magnets, the team at MIT and Commonwealth Fusion hope to make a tokamak reactor that is compact, efficient and scalable. “What we’ve really done is combine an existing science with new material to open up vast new possibilities,” Greenwald said

Having demonstrated that the Sparc device can theoretically produce more energy than it requires to run in the research papers published in September, the next step involves building the reactor, followed by a pilot plant that will generate electricity onto the grid.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have long made promises about fusion being just around the corner, only to encounter insurmountable problems. This has created reluctance to invest in it, particularly as wind, solar and other renewables — although less powerful than fusion — have become more efficient and cost effective.

But the tide is changing. In Biden’s $2tn plan, he named advanced nuclear technologies as part of the decarbonization strategy, the first time the Democrats have endorsed nuclear energy since 1972. There is also significant investment coming from private sources, including some major oil and gas companies, who see fusion as a better long term pivot than wind and solar.

According to Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion, the aim is not to use fusion to replace solar and wind, but to supplement them. “There are things that will be hard to do with only renewables, industrial scale things, like powering large cities or manufacturing,” he said. “This is where fusion can come in.”

The plasma science community is generally enthusiastic about Sparc’s progress, though some question the ambitious timeline, given engineering and regulatory hurdles.

Daniel Jassby, who worked as a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab for 25 years, is skeptical about whether a fusion reactor like SPARC will ever provide a feasible alternative source of energy. Tritium, one of the hydrogen isotopes that will be used as fuel by Sparc, is not naturally occurring and will need to be produced, he said.

The team at MIT propose that this substance will be regenerated continuously by the fusion reaction itself. But Jassby believes that this will require a huge amount of electricity, which will make the reactor prohibitively expensive. “When you consider we get solar and wind energy for free, to rely on fusion reaction would be foolish,” he said.

Mumgaard concedes that the challenges that lie ahead are daunting. But he remains confident.

“There is a broader trend in acknowledging how important climate is and that we need all hands on deck,” he said. “We got into this problem with technology, but with fusion there are big opportunities to solve this with technology.”

Links

• Hot on the trail of cold fusion as a solution to the climate crisis
• Nuclear is not the answer to the climate crisis
• The climate debate must include nuclear
• Does the world need nuclear power to solve the climate crisis?
• Nuclear question splits EU climate talks
• The climate-change deniers have now gone nuclear
• Nuclear power 'cannot tackle climate change'

(AU) Cabinet Papers: How Howard Government Could Have Avoided Climate Wars

NEWS.com.au - Finn McHugh

The dogged opposition of a key minister helped block an emissions trading scheme throughout the 2000s, paving the way for two decades of climate wars. 

The 2000 cabinet papers show John Howard’s cabinet had an almost unanimous view of an ETS as effective and inevitable. Source: News Limited

Australia could have avoided two decades of climate wars had the Howard government pushed ahead with its majority view of an emissions trading scheme (ETS), newly released documents reveal.

The National Archives has released the 2000 cabinet papers, showing John Howard’s cabinet had an almost unanimous view of an ETS as effective and inevitable.

The scheme was ultimately scuppered by internal divisions.

Historian Chris Wallace said the lack of climate change scepticism in the 2000 cabinet was in stark contrast to the current Coalition, which has been mired by factionalism over the issue.

“The distinctive thing about these papers is that they don’t show any science versus politics binary,” she said.

The 2000 cabinet papers reveal John Howard’s cabinet viewed an ETS as effective and inevitable, but the scheme was ultimately sunk. Source: News Limited

“The picture the papers show is one where the science is not questioned, it’s not even mentioned.

“There’s just a broad expectation coming through cabinet submissions … that there was likely to be a neutral market solution to this issue, and that an ETS was only a matter of time.”

The documents reveal cabinet wanted to act decisively to end uncertainty for investors, a problem that continues to hinder the energy sector today.

The government conducted a feasibility study into an ETS in 2000, and then Deputy Prime Minister John Anderson said the debate “lined people up in unusual ways”.

“People you would not have thought of as economic rationalists around the table argued the economic rationalist position,” Mr Anderson said.

“Those who we might have thought of as being deeply committed to a free enterprise model were surprisingly interventionist.”

Industry Minister Nick Minchin staunchly opposed the ETS. Picture: Michael Jones

Chief among those was Industry Minister Nick Minchin, who attempted to derail an ETS by insisting cabinet should only approve it if there was an established international trading scheme.

“Minchin’s perspective was … that we not make ourselves cleaner but poorer and others dirtier but richer,” Mr Anderson said.

A tug of war between Mr Minchin and Environment Minister Robert Hill continued all year.

Mr Minchin ultimately prevailed, defining the Coalition’s climate policy for two decades.

Treasurer Peter Costello’s proposal for an ETS was rejected by cabinet in 2003 before Prime Minister John Howard lost the 2007 election after embracing the scheme.

In 2009, Mr Minchin was crucial in toppling Malcolm Turnbull’s leadership over his support for an ETS.

Dr Wallace said under Mr Turnbull’s successor, Tony Abbott, the Coalition “harked back to a less sophisticated, pre-Howard era of coalition government” on emissions.

Nick Minchin (right) helped topple Malcolm Turnbull over an emissions trading scheme. Picture: Mark Graham / AAP Image

Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s term was partly defined by her acrimonious rollout of a carbon tax, which Mr Abbott savaged as a “great big new tax”.

But Dr Wallace said the Coalition’s experience in rolling out the controversial goods and services tax (GST) showed an ETS would have become “an accepted, unremarked upon aspect of finance in Australia” had Mr Howard won in 2007.

Mr Anderson agreed that a 2007 win would have led to an ETS but denied the “devilishly difficult” issue would have been put to bed.

“Take Melbourne and central Queensland: Australians’ aspirations in this area are miles apart and remain so. As some people worry desperately about their jobs and industries, others want climate change action,” he said.

“I don’t think those arguments would have gone away. There would have been ongoing disputes about the need to intervene at certain times to save this industry, or those jobs, or whatever.

“Every intervention, as was pointed out at the time, would throw more weight on domestically focused industries and households.”

Climate change is already here and it's getting worse

Links

• John Howard 2000 cabinet papers: climate wars and the conservative re-engineering of Australia
• Cabinet papers 2000: the Coalition before climate denialism, but on the path to offshore detention
• Cabinet documents 2000: Don't tie govt's hands on climate action, agencies told ministers
• Going into the new millennium, Cabinet papers show Australia was on the cusp of monumental change
• 20 years of difference: the Coalition before climate denialism
• Bushfires won't change climate policy overnight. But Morrison can shift the Coalition without losing face

(AU) Australia Records Fourth-Warmest Year In 2020, Despite La Niña

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

Climate scientist says another top 10 year is a ‘no shit, Sherlock’ moment, as temperatures across the country were 1.15C above average

Ploughing near Gunnedah in north-west New South Wales in May. La Niña brought much-needed rain to parts of Australia in 2020, but it was still the fourth-warmest year on record.  Photograph: Mark Kolbe/Getty Images

Key Points The Bureau of Meteorology's preliminary data is in and 2020 was Australia's fourth hottest year on record for mean and minimum temperatures But 2020's days were less extreme, coming in at the eighth hottest on record and well below the scorcher of 2019 Rainfall was above average but not to a huge extent, coming in as Australia's 39th wettest year

Last year was the fourth warmest on record for Australia, continuing a run of record warm years over the past decade, according to provisional data released by the Bureau of Meteorology.

Across the country, temperatures in 2020 were 1.15C higher than average, putting the year behind 2005, 2013 and 2019, which remains the hottest year on record.

The data is gathered from the bureau’s ACORN-SAT dataset that takes readings from 112 weather stations across the country and goes back to 1910.

Eight of the 10 hottest years on record for Australia have occurred since 2013, the data shows. Climate scientists said the heat was driven by human-caused climate change.

Dr Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, a climate scientist at the University of New South Wales specialising in extreme events, said human-caused climate change had reliably delivered another top 10 year.

The hottest and driest year on record remains 2019, when mean temperatures were 1.52C above the 30-year average taken between 1961 and 1990.

Australia experienced droughts, heatwaves and devastating bushfires that carried on into 2020.

In March, abnormally high sea surface temperatures across the Great Barrier Reef caused the third mass coral bleaching event in five years.

The hottest spring on record occurred in 2020, with temperatures 2.03C above average. That ended with a November 2.47C warmer than average – the hottest November on record.

The bureau will check the latest provisional data before making a formal climate statement on 8 January.

The bureau declared a La Niña event in September and in late December said its influence was likely reaching its peak, with climate models suggesting a return to neutral conditions around late summer or early autumn.

La Niña is the cooler phase of a cycle known as Enso (El Niño Southern Oscillation), with the warmer phase known as El Niño.

Blair Trewin, senior climatologist at the bureau, told Guardian Australia La Niña’s influence on temperatures tended to come the year after the phenomenon was declared.

But he said: “Clearly 2020 was significantly warmer than a normal year. But it was a return to some level of normality after an exceptional 2019.”

While November was a record hot month, Trewin said it was likely that December had been relatively cool.

Rainfall and cloud cover in the north-west and central parts of the country had brought temperatures down.

Across the year, Trewin said, the underlying warming trend expected from human activity was the main driver of the higher temperatures.

La Niñas are associated with lower ocean temperatures in the tropical Pacific and can bring higher rainfall for northern, eastern and central parts of the country, as well as cooler daytime temperatures.

The provisional data shows the previous hottest year to be associated with a La Niña was 1998, when Australian temperatures were 0.97C above average.

The most recent year that temperatures failed to get above the 1961 to 1990 average was 2011 – the middle year of a La Niña that spanned three years.

Perkins-Kirkpatrick said the record hot November had been a surprise because it was expected that La Niña would have kept temperatures lower.

She said: “2019 was in a league of its own and 2020 I think was not as extreme. The tone for the year was far more placid.

“Even with a La Niña end to the year, La Niñas now are warmer than El Niños were without climate change. We are seeing each year come into the top 10, and each year will shift ever warmer.”

She said human activity – mainly from burning fossil fuels that were loading the atmosphere with extra carbon dioxide – was generating the extra heat.

“It is absolutely us causing this warming. It couldn’t be occurring naturally.”

In December the World Meteorological Organization released a preliminary report saying 2020 was likely to be among the three hottest years globally, using an average across five global temperature datasets.

The UN agency said the warmth of 2020 would mean the past six years were likely to be the six warmest years on record.

Bureau of Meteorology Climate and Water Outlook

Links

• 2020 Weather: The year that dawned in fire and ended in flood
• WA coastline facing marine heatwave in early 2021, CSIRO predicts
• As storms swamp Australia's east coast, some farmers are still enduring relentless drought
• How climate change has impacted the world since your childhood
• Floods, Storms And Searing Heat: 2020 In Extreme Weather
• BOM and CSIRO State of the Climate 2020 shows Australia is experiencing climate change now
• (AU) 2020 Climate Year in Review - Legal Insights
• Counting the cost 2020: a year of climate breakdown (pdf)
• Climate change: Extreme weather causes huge losses in 2020
• This Year (2020) Was A Disaster For The Planet