13/04/2021

(AU) Gas Consortium Seeks Approval To Drill 7,700 Wells In Queensland, Including Near National Parks

The Guardian - 

Australia Pacific LNG wants environmental approval to drill across nearly half a million hectares of central and south-west Queensland

Carnarvon national park, one of two parks bordering the area where Australia’s largest east coast gas producer wants to drill up to 7,700 new wells. Photograph: Auscape/UIG via Getty Images

Australia’s largest east coast gas producer has sought federal environmental approval to drill up to 7,700 new gas wells in Queensland, prompting concern from environmentalists due to the project’s sheer size and its proximity to two national parks.

Australia Pacific LNG – a joint venture between Origin, ConocoPhillips and Sinopec – has lodged a referral under the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act to expand its “Gas Supply Security Project” and drill across an additional 476,492ha of central and south-west Queensland.

The relevant tenements include land bordering both Carnarvon national park and Expedition national park. Referral documents show the proposal would potentially impact 26 plant and animal species and six threatened ecological communities.

Two environmental groups, Lock the Gate Alliance and Don’t Frack the Outback, say the plan would “transform rural localities and communities into industrial gasfields”.

Origin seeks fossil fuel leases in 'incredibly fragile' Queensland channel country.  Read more
“I could not believe it when I heard about this application,” Leanne Brummell, spokeswoman for Don’t Frack the Outback, said.

“This expansion demonstrates the insidious nature of unconventional gas – once a company starts pockmarking the landscape with gas wells, it doesn’t stop.

“Landowners in this region have spent years battling drought, and they will now be forced to negotiate with gas companies over access to water.”

In its referral documents, APLNG says a justification for the expansion includes predictions by the Australian Energy Market Operator of a gas supply shortfall from 2024. Aemo’s most recent “gas statement of opportunities” provided an improved outlook for gas supply, based on the impact of a new import terminal at Port Kembla.

Lock the Gate Queensland spokeswoman Ellie Smith said the most recent Aemo report showed there was “absolutely no justification for new fracking gasfields that destroy water and farmland”.

APLNG’s referral documents also propose using horizontal or directional drilling to allow pipelines to go “under threatened ecological communities, threatened flora, threatened fauna habitat and migratory fauna habitat”. Pipelines would not be allowed under national parks.

“While [APLNG] may not technically be able to drill within Carnarvon Gorge national park, it will be permitted to destroy many thousands of hectares of surrounding land that currently supports threatened animals like the koala,” Smith said.

The referral seeks permission for a “maximum development scenario” that would involve 7,700 wells, each requiring a construction footprint of about 1.5ha, gas and water pipelines, gas processing facilities, water management facilities and supporting infrastructure.

In a statement, Origin Energy, the “upstream” operator of APLNG’s gasfields in Queensland, said the documents outlined maximum well numbers.

A company spokesman said that decisions about the eventual scope of the project – including about the requirement for hydraulic fracturing – would be made “during final development planning” and would comply with state and federal approvals.

“Our natural gas production delivers secure domestic supply, where APLNG provides about 30% of annual east coast demand, and plays an important role in supporting Australia’s transition to renewable energy,” the Origin spokesman said.

Origin said Queensland communities gained significant economic benefits from its gas projects.

“From 2017-18 to 2019-20, the value of Origin’s expenditure with local businesses across Banana Shire, Central Highlands, Maranoa and Western Downs was approximately $187m.”

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Scientists Warn 4°C World Would Unleash 'Unimaginable Amounts of Water' As Ice Shelves Collapse

Common Dreams - Jessica Corbett

"Limiting warming will not just be good for Antarctica—preserving ice shelves means less global sea level rise, and that's good for us all."

Icebergs Weddell Sea are seen near Snow Hill Island, Antarctica. (Photo: David Tipling/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

A new study is shedding light on just how much ice could be lost around Antarctica if the international community fails to urgently rein in planet-heating emissions, bolstering arguments for bolder climate policies.

 "The findings highlight the
importance of limiting
global temperature
increases."
—Ella Gilbert, University of
Reading
The study, published Thursday in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, found that over a third of the area of all Antarctic ice shelves — including 67% of area on the Antarctic Peninsula — could be at risk of collapsing if global temperatures soar to 4°C above pre-industrial levels.

An ice shelf, as NASA explains, "is a thick, floating slab of ice that forms where a glacier or ice flows down a coastline." They are found only in Antarctica, Greenland, Canada, and the Russian Arctic—and play a key role in limiting sea level rise.

"Ice shelves are important buffers preventing glaciers on land from flowing freely into the ocean and contributing to sea level rise," explained Ella Gilbert, the study's lead author, in a statement. "When they collapse, it's like a giant cork being removed from a bottle, allowing unimaginable amounts of water from glaciers to pour into the sea."

"We know that when melted ice accumulates on the surface of ice shelves, it can make them fracture and collapse spectacularly," added Gilbert, a research scientist at the University of Reading. "Previous research has given us the bigger picture in terms of predicting Antarctic ice shelf decline, but our new study uses the latest modelling techniques to fill in the finer detail and provide more precise projections." Gilbert and co-author Christoph Kittel of Belgium's University of Liège conclude that limiting global temperature rise to 2°C rather than 4°C would cut the area at risk in half.

"At 1.5°C, just 14% of Antarctica's ice shelf area would be at risk," Gilbert noted in The Conversation.

While the 2015 Paris climate agreement aims to keep temperature rise "well below" 2°C, with a more ambitious 1.5°C target, current emissions reduction plans are dramatically out of line with both goals, according to a United Nations analysis.

Gilbert said Thursday that the findings of their new study "highlight the importance of limiting global temperature increases as set out in the Paris agreement if we are to avoid the worst consequences of climate change, including sea level rise."

"If temperatures continue to rise at current rates," she said, "we may lose more Antarctic ice shelves in the coming decades."

The researchers warn that Larsen C—the largest remaining ice shelf on the Antarctic peninsula—as well as the Shackleton, Pine Island, and Wilkins ice shelves are most at risk under 4°C of warming because of their geography and runoff predictions.

"Limiting warming will not just be good for Antarctica—preserving ice shelves means less global sea level rise, and that's good for us all," Gilbert added. Low-lying coastal areas such as small island nations of Vanuatu and Tuvalu in the South Pacific Ocean face the greatest risk from sea level rise, Gilbert told CNN.

"However, coastal areas all over the world would be vulnerable," she warned, "and countries with fewer resources available to mitigate and adapt to sea level rise will see worse consequences."

Research published in February examining projections from the Fifth Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as the body's Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate found that sea level rise forecasts for this century "are on the money when tested against satellite and tide-gauge observations."

A co-author of that study, John Church of the Climate Change Research Center at the University of New South Wales, said at the time that "if we continue with large ongoing emissions as we are at present, we will commit the world to meters of sea level rise over coming centuries."

Parties to the Paris agreement are in the process of updating their emissions reduction commitments—called nationally determined contributions—ahead of November's United Nations climate summit, known as COP26.

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(AU) Cyclone Seroja Has Demolished Parts Of WA – And Our Warming World Will Bring More Of The Same

The Conversation - 

Bureau of Meteorology
Author
 is Professor of Physical Geography, James Cook University.     
Tropical Cyclone Seroja battered parts of Western Australia’s coast on Sunday night, badly damaging buildings and leaving thousands of people without power.

While the full extent of the damage caused by the Category 3 system is not yet known, the event was unusual.

I specialise in reconstructing long-term natural records of extreme events, and my historic and prehistoric data show cyclones of this intensity rarely travel as far south as this one did. In fact, it has happened only 26 times in the past 5,000 years.

Severe wind gusts hit the towns of Geraldton and Kalbarri – towns not built to withstand such conditions.

Unfortunately, climate change is likely to mean disasters such as Cyclone Seroja will become more intense, and will be seen further south in Australia more often. In this regard, Seroja may be a timely wake-up call. Seroja: bucking the cyclone trend

Cyclone Seroja initially piqued interest because as it developed off WA, it interacted with another tropical low, Cyclone Odette. This rare phenomenon is known as the Fujiwhara Effect.

Cyclone Seroja hit the WA coast between the towns of Kalbarri and Gregory at about 8pm local time on Sunday. According to the Bureau of Meteorology it produced wind gusts up to 170 km/hour.

Seroja then moved inland north of Geraldton, weakening to a category 2 system with wind gusts up to 120 km/hour. It then tracked further east and has since been downgraded to a tropical low.

The cyclone’s southward track was historically unusual. For Geraldton, it was the first Category 2 cyclone impact since 1956. Cyclones that make landfall so far south on the WA coast are usually less intense, for several reasons.

First, intense cyclones draw their energy from warm sea surface temperatures. These temperatures typically become cooler the further south of the tropics you go, depleting a cyclone of its power. Second, cyclones need relatively low speed winds in the middle to upper troposphere – the part of the atmosphere closest to Earth, where the weather occurs. Higher-speed winds there cause the cyclone to tilt and weaken. In the Australian region, these higher wind speeds are more likely the further south a cyclone travels.

Third, most cyclones make landfall in the northern half of WA where the coast protrudes far into the Indian Ocean. Cyclones here typically form in the Timor Sea and move southward or south-west away from WA before curving southeast, towards the landmass.

For a cyclone to cross the coast south of about Carnarvon, it must travel a considerable distance towards the south-west into the Indian Ocean. This was the case with Seroja – winds steered it away from the WA coast before they weakened, allowing the cyclone to curve back towards land. Reading the ridges

My colleagues and I have devised a method to estimate how often and where cyclones make landfall in Australia.

As cyclones approach the coast, they generate storm surge – abnormal sea level rise – and large waves. The surge and waves pick up sand and shells from the beaches and transport them inland, sometimes for several hundred metres.

These materials are deposited into ridges which stand many metres above sea level. By examining these ridges and geologically dating the materials within them, we can determine how often and intense the cyclones have been over thousands of years.

At Shark Bay, just north of where Seroja hit the coast, a series of 26 ridges form a “ridge plain” made entirely of one species of a marine cockle shell (Fragum eragatum). The sand at beaches near the plain are also made entirely of this shell.

The ridge record shows over the past 5,000 years, cyclones of Seroja’s intensity, or higher, have crossed the coast in this region about every 190 years – so about 26 times. Some 14 of these cyclones were more intense than Seroja.

The record shows no Category 5 cyclones have made landfall here over this time. The ridge record prevents us from knowing the frequency of less intense storms. But Bureau of Meteorology cyclone records since the early 1970s shows only a few crossed the coast in this region, and all appear weaker than Seroja.

Emergency services crews in the WA town of Geraldton, preparing ahead of the arrival of Tropical Cyclone Seroja - an event rarely seen this far south. Department of Fire and Emergency Services WA
Cyclones under climate change

So why does all this matter? Cyclones can kill and injure people, damage homes and infrastructure, cause power and communication outages, contaminate water supplies and more. Often, the most disadvantaged populations are worst affected. It’s important to understand past and future cyclone behaviour, so communities can prepare.

Climate change is expected to alter cyclone patterns. The overall number of tropical cyclones in the Australian region is expected to decrease. But their intensity will likely increase, bringing stronger wind and heavier rain. And they may form further south as the Earth warms and the tropical zone expands poleward.

This may mean cyclones of Seroja’s intensity are likely to become frequent, and communities further south on the WA coast may become more prone to cyclone damage. This has big implications for coastal planning, engineering and disaster management planning.

In particular, it may mean homes further south must be built to cope with stronger winds. Storm surge may also worsen, inundating low-lying coastal land.

Global climate models are developing all the time. As they improve, we will gain a more certain picture of how tropical cyclones will change as the planet warms. But for now, Seroja may be a sign of things to come.



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12/04/2021

(AU) Too Hot, Heading South: How Climate Change May Drive One-Third Of Doctors Out Of The NT

The Conversation -  | 

from www.shutterstock.com
Authors
  •  is Senior Staff Specialist, Alice Springs Hospital. Honorary, Australian National University
  • is Visiting researcher, Australian National University
A sizeable chunk of Northern Territory’s doctors are thinking about leaving the territory because of climate change, our new research shows.

Our study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health, shows for 34% of doctors in our survey, climate change is already, or is likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.

If they do, this would leave a large gap in the territory’s health-care system, which already suffers from a fast turnover of staff. These doctors would leave behind communities already suffering from the effects of climate change.

Extreme heat and getting worse

The two summers of 2018-20 were the hottest ever recorded in the NT.

From December 2019 to January 2020, temperatures were about 4℃ above the long-term average. And in late 2019, it was so hot, remote kidney dialysis centres struggled to cool water for their life-saving dialysis machines.

Summer 2018-2019 temperatures relative to every other summer since 1910. Data from AWAP (Jones et al 2009). Pandora Hope/BoM, Author provided

Some of the hottest conditions in 2019 were in the Katherine region, which shattered previous records. However, this shouldn’t have been a surprise.
In 2004 the CSIRO reported the average number of days over 40℃ in the Katherine region would increase by up to 35 days a year by 2030, due to climate change.

In 2019 there were 54 days of 40℃ or above in Katherine. This surpassed CSIRO’s predictions more than a decade earlier than projected.

Climate change is predicted to affect the NT in other ways. According to the territory government’s own report, the NT can expect warmer spells to last longer, more frequent fire weather, to have more intense/heavy rainfall, more intense tropical cyclones, and rising sea levels.

Norman Frank, Warumungu Senior Elder, on the impacts of climate change on Tennant Creek

NT has enough trouble retaining health workers anyway

Even without the effects of climate change, health workforce shortages in the NT have been significant challenges. The persistent challenges of attracting and retaining staff leads to high rates of churn. An entire clinic’s staff can turn over in just months, and the impacts can be shattering.

When Katherine’s only GP clinic closed last year, many people were forced to travel more than 300 kilometres to Darwin to see a family doctor.

For us doctors in the NT, knowing how hard it can be to recruit other doctors, summers like that of 2019-20 have raised the stakes. I’ve heard colleagues lament the impact of climate change and talk of moving south. Now we have the data to show how real this threat is.

We found out exactly the extent of the problem

We surveyed doctors working in the NT, with 362 responses, representing over 25% of the workforce.

Our study showed NT doctors believe climate change is a serious public health issue. A total of 85% indicated climate change is already or is likely to negatively impact their patients’ health; 74% believed climate change is already causing or likely to cause parts of the NT to become uninhabitable. And for 34%, climate change is already, or likely to, make them consider leaving the NT.

Extreme heat poses real risks, especially to the elderly and those with chronic conditions. Extreme heat is associated with increased rates of illness and death. Hot weather exacerbates existing heart, lung and kidney disease, and compounds mental illness.

For people living in the NT, the reality of this new and predictably worsening heat is tangible. Weekend sports are being affected, the period of relief in the cooler months is becoming shorter, and it’s uncomfortable simply going outside on very hot days. It is hard to contemplate living in a future NT hotter than it already is.

Why not move south?

One means of adapting to climate change is to move to cooler climates. But such migration is an option only for people with the means to move. People without such means will have no choice but to stay.

It is unlikely our findings about climate change affecting migration plans are confined to doctors, or to the NT. In Australia and globally, many regions are facing the dual burden of health workforce shortages and increasing exposure to climate risks.

In many of these regions, even small increases of out-migration could have significant impacts on health care.

It’s true most doctors in our survey did not think climate change would make them leave the NT, thought this unlikely, or were undecided. However, the 34% of our respondents who thought climate change might affect their plans represent 115 doctors, who we can’t afford to lose.

To address these issues, we need to urgently consider climate change when planning future health workforce needs. And we need to include health workers when Australia assesses the risk of climate change impacts.

These are vital if we are to ensure rural communities, in particular, have secure access to health care in the face of rapidly emerging climate threats.

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How Children Are Taking European States To Court Over The Climate Crisis – And Changing The Law

The Conversation - | |

Children join the 20th September 2019 climate strike in London, thought to be the largest climate strikes to date. World History Archive / Alamy Stock Photo
Authors
Even before Greta Thunberg launched her school strike for climate at age 15, youth activists have been key players in public action on the climate crisis. Now they’re breaking new ground in court.

On November 30, six Portuguese children and young people brought a historic court case to the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR). Dubbed Duarte Agostinho and Others v. Portugal and Others – or the Agostinho case, for short – it argues that those states which fail to solve the climate crisis are breaching human rights.

In an exciting development last December, the ECHR agreed to fast track the case. The 33 European states - including the UK (which, post-Brexit, remains part of the ECHR system), France and Germany - now have to respond with information about how they will reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that are destabilising the climate.

This case is part of a growing body of systemic climate litigation, which targets broad state policies. Much of it involves youth applicants for a number of reasons, including the fact that so many children and young people are climate-educated and tech-savvy. Unlike other cases, however, this particular application makes the key argument that states are engaging in youth discrimination.

Youth burden

The applicants to the ECHR – one of whom is as young as eight years old – have argued that, as well as violating their rights to life and to private life, governmental failure to tackle the climate crisis constitutes discrimination. They justify this claim by stating that “children and young adults are being made to bear the burden of climate change to a far greater extent than older generations.”

Portugal is reportedly a climate change hot spot, with increasingly deadly heatwaves. The young people involved in this case were witnesses to the 2017 fires in which over 120 people died.

They point out how it is children and young people in particular who are affected in the long term as well as the short term. The heat precipitated by the climate crisis can make everyday life – from studying to exercise – very difficult. It makes them fearful for their futures too.

The next step in the case is for states to explain that, where their actions disproportionately affect young people, this is due to objective factors and not to discrimination. They must also outline how they are considering children’s best interests in their policies.

Possibilities for youth?

Most international human rights treaties have a provision protecting groups from discrimination. Agostinho appears to be the first time such a provision is being used to protect “youth” as a category in an international/regional court. Age discrimination provisions are generally understood as protecting older people.

“Youth” is generally taken to include those up to their mid-twenties, but the definition is not clear cut. Under-18s require particular attention as they are generally excluded altogether from discrimination law. This is likely due to a mistaken interpretation of the law, based on the blanket assumption that children cannot have the same rights as adults.

The UN Convention on the Rights of the Child outlines the rights to which under-18s are entitled, and it has certainly been successful in drawing attention to the rights and interests of children.

But its non-discrimination article - which mirrors other human rights instruments - is also almost always applied to minorities, gender and disabled children. It is rarely used, if ever, to protect children (as opposed to adults) as a group from discrimination.

Unfair discrimination can include laws and practices that exclude groups. It can also include those that ignore the unique needs of a specific group. The latter is what is being argued in this case. The claimants’ position is that climate policies place most of the economic and environmental burden on the younger generation. Too little attention is being paid to figuring out how to share that burden and reduce carbon emissions right now.

This same argument has been used by petitioners in other ECHR cases - for example, where the Netherlands gave insufficient consideration to women’s rights in the context of pension policies. The argument has never been used at the ECHR for “youth” as a group, until now.

Youth discrimination

As experts on children’s rights and international law, our current research brings a legal element to a new discipline sometimes referred to as childism – like feminism, but for children.

This climate case is far from the only instance when youth have faced unfair discrimination. In some states (including the UK), there are dramatically lower minimum wages for under-18s (indeed under 25s) for the same work. It is also little known that in the UK children are more likely to be poor or to experience violence than adults.

At least one child per week dies in the UK at the hands of another person, and that figure is likely to be higher as there are difficulties with identifying the death of a young child as homicide. Yet as with many states, the Equality Act 2010 in the UK for the most part excludes under-18s from its protection.

Some social science and psychology academics have argued that bad attitudes to children are much of the cause of the hardships and rights violations they face. For example, beliefs that it is acceptable to hit children for punishment (still essentially legal in England for parents) are likely to be linked to relatively high homicide rates for children in the UK, as there is a clear link between excessive physical punishment and abuse.

By tackling discriminatory attitudes and policies, we can start to combat the actions that harm children. If the rights violations of under-18s were more frequently framed as equality issues (and litigated as such), it would mitigate the disadvantage under-18s as a group suffer due to disenfranchisement.

It would likely prompt states to give greater consideration to children in policy-making. It would also increase perceptions of children in the public consciousness as human beings equal in worth to adults.

Whether or not the ECHR finds that states are discriminating against youth in the Agostinho case, the arguments these children and young people have made are groundbreaking. It should start a conversation about how and whether equality law can benefit children as a group.

Law is far from the only means to achieve progress for children’s interests, but it can be a crucial part of explaining what treatment is and is not acceptable. The potential for developing understandings of youth discrimination in the anticipated judgment shows just how exciting this legal development at the ECHR is.

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Carbon Dioxide Levels Are At A 3.6 Million Year High

Salon - Matthew Rozsa

Despite the lockdown resulting in a slight reduction in emissions, Earth is now at a geological highpoint for CO2

Carbon Dioxide Emissions (Getty Images)

Because the COVID-19 pandemic caused a massive economic slowdown, experts had hoped that the decline in transportation and manufacturing might slow greenhouse gas emissions at least a little.

Unfortunately, a new report by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) reveals that one of the major gases behind climate change has reached its highest level in 3.6 million years.

The NOAA reports that the average amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere was 412.5 parts per million (ppm) in 2020, an increase by 2.6 ppm through the course of the year.

Climate scientists generally agree that in order for life on Earth to be minimally interrupted, Earth's carbon dioxide levels should remain under 350 parts per million. Yet since NOAA begin recording atmospheric composition data in 1960, there has not been a year in which carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere did not increase.

Likewise, in 2020, overall carbon dioxide emissions increased at the fifth-highest rate in the 63 years that NOAA has been recording. It was only surpassed by the rates of increase in 1987, 1998, 2015 and 2016.

A senior scientist at NOAA's Global Monitoring Laboratory, Pieter Tans, said that if there had not been an economic slowdown, it would have been the highest increase on record.

As things current stand, the carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere are at a point comparable to the Mid-Pliocene Warm Period, when the temperature was 7 degrees hotter and the sea level was roughly 78 feet higher than today.

Another organization, Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego, released similar results on Wednesday, announcing that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 417.4 ppm at their monitoring station in Hawaii .

These graphs depict the mean global atmospheric burden of carbon dioxide as analyzed from measurements collected by NOAA's Global Greenhouse Gas Reference Network. Credit: NOAA Global Monitoring Laboratory.

The NOAA also reported a "significant jump" in the atmospheric burden of methane in 2020, with the annual amount increasing by 14.7 parts per billion (ppb) in 2020. Not only is this the biggest jump since methane levels began to be systematically measured in 1983, but it is also troubling because of how effective methane is at trapping heat.

Although there is much less methane than carbon dioxide in our atmosphere, it is 28 times more potent at trapping heat over the course of a century.

Still, the COVID-19 lockdowns had a minor effect on emissions.

"The estimates vary among the different groups doing these sorts of calculations, but the consensus seems to be about a 7% decrease [in greenhouse gas emissions] relative to 2019 levels," Dr. Michael E. Mann, a distinguished professor of atmospheric science at Penn State University, wrote to Salon in December.

If climate change is not halted and/or reversed in the near future, experts agree that there will be serious and negative repercussions for all life on Earth, including humans.

There will be an increase in extreme weather events like hurricanes and blizzards, an increase in the amount of wildfires and a reduction in the amount of land that can be used to produce food.

All of this will lead to fierce competition for resources and mass population displacements, even as an increasing amount of the world's surface either too hot or too dry to be inhabitable.

President Joe Biden has said that he will prioritize fighting climate change in his presidency. Shortly after taking office, he said in a statement that "environmental justice will be at the center of all we do."

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11/04/2021

(AU) We Can’t Wait For This Government. Let’s Beat Emissions Together

Sydney Morning Herald - Ketan Joshi

Citizens, industry and communities need to pick up the slack from our politicians, who dropped the reins long ago. Here’s how.

Citizen activists: there has been a wave of climate change protests across the country. Credit: Paul Jeffers

Author
Ketan Joshi is an author and analyst based in Oslo, Norway.
His recent book Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future (NewSouth Publishing) covers the past and next decades in Australian energy and climate.
There is a single emotion common to every climate discussion in Australia. It is not the sandbag of despair, or a sparkle of hope. It is the raw, unfiltered exasperation that comes from decades of inaction.

From the first climate negotiations in the late 1990s to the Paris climate agreement updates wrangled this year and last, Australia’s Liberal-National Coalition has mostly been in government.

It has mostly used that position to ensure fossil industries have the leeway to grow unhindered by responsibility for greenhouse gases discharged into our biosphere.

The people who dig up, transport, sell and burn fossil fuels are the proud beneficiaries of this subsidy-through-omission. An aggressive union of vested interests has created a haven for those who want to profit from an industry incompatible with human life.

“The resulting decades of inaction have eliminated our options for a gradual response,” Ian Dunlop and David Spratt, co-authors of Climate Reality Check 2020, wrote in The Canberra Times.

“The fact is that 10 per cent of the world’s population is responsible for half of the world’s carbon pollution, and Australia is firmly embedded in that 10 per cent. We have known about this inequity for three decades and done nothing to correct it.”

This is a deeply preventable catastrophe. Non-harmful alternatives to fossil fuels exist at a mature technological stage to eradicate the majority of Australia’s emissions, yet action has stalled. Inaction is common around the world, but Australia punches far above its weight in worsening the cause instead of enabling the solutions.

There is nothing stopping politically conservative parties from acting on climate. In Britain, the Conservative government has overseen a program of transformation, establishing clear, science-based five-year carbon budgets and attempting to shift the economy towards non-harmful alternatives to fossil fuels.

The country’s coal-fired power output has become a blip in annual totals. Germany’s conservative-led government, too, scraped in under its 2020 climate targets (albeit with help from the pandemic). Both are far from perfect or sufficient, but their shifts are injecting momentum into Europe’s broader, accelerating decarbonisation journey.

In terms of policy substance, Australia’s conservative leadership has only moved backwards since the days of Tony Abbott.

The marketing may have changed but the only systemic, long-running downward force on Australia’s emissions right now is the renewable energy industry, catalysed by the Renewable Energy Target of the ALP.

That target froze in 2020 (it would have been higher, had conservatives not fought aggressively to cut it in 2015), which means rising transport, gas mining and industrial emissions will all result in climbing totals.


Scott Morrison has expressed a “preference” to reach net zero by 2050. Yet we know exactly what someone with a preference to hit that goal would be doing in 2021.

They would be planning the closure of all coal power stations by 2030. They would be urgently commencing the transition from fossil-fuel cars to clean cars. They would be aggressively implementing energy efficiency schemes.

They would be figuring out ways to simultaneously wind down and decarbonise fossil fuel extraction, itself responsible for a sizeable chunk of Australia’s emissions (while protecting communities and workers reliant on the industry).

Hitting a 2050 target means doing the bulk of the heavy lifting prior to 2030, with a two-decade tail for the “hard to decarbonise” sectors. But power, transport, households and mining remain mostly untouched by the government’s policies.

 
Morrison and his Energy and Emissions Reductions Minister, Angus Taylor, are not doing these things.

Their flagship climate policy is a lengthy, wonky technological document aimed at incentivising fossil gas, carbon capture, hydrogen and energy storage. It is one-hundredth of a complete policy.

What are the chances of an about-face before the 26th Conference of Parties meeting in Glasgow this November? Morrison may announce a 2050 net zero target, but it won’t result in any real change to what happens in 2021 or 2022.

The exasperation that inaction brings is often followed by a question: is there anything that can be done? The democratic process of lobbying for change in federal policy can’t ever cease but the past three decades suggest that, in parallel, a bottom-up drumbeat of change must be maximised.

This means realising a near-term future in which citizens, industry and communities pick up the slack and end up in the history books as the visionaries and leaders who took the reins from those who dropped them long ago.

Give the people what they want

The deepest well of currently unrealised decarbonisation potential in Australia is citizen participation. This isn’t just changing your light bulbs and walking to the shops. This is climate action on a notable scale, enacted through people, communities and organisations.

A simple example has been the growth of rooftop solar photovoltaic panels in Australia. Australia is easily a world leader in rooftop PV deployment, both in per capita terms and as a proportion of total electricity generation.

In 2020, solar out-generated wind power for the first time ever, generating 19.7 terawatt-hours on Australia’s National Electricity Market (9.7 per cent of total). Thirteen terawatt-hours of that was rooftop solar. That’s 40 per cent of the total energy output of Australia’s brown coal fleet in 2020.

Consider what happened here. Several million people collectively decided to transform their homes into a distributed modular power station fuelled directly by the organic fusion reactor at the centre of our solar system.

And though this change was seeded through federal (during Labor’s brief tenure) and state government schemes, Australia’s solar prowess has proven resilient both to the fading of those subsidies and even the onset of a global pandemic.

Plenty more change will be needed if Australia is to hit decarbonisation goals aligned with the Paris climate agreement. One recent estimate by Climate Analytics suggests the grid needs to be near zero carbon by 2030.

Australia went from around 10 per cent renewable to 26 per cent over the past 20 years. It needs to go from 26 per cent to 97 per cent in the next nine. That means more than just wind and solar.

“In order to reach a highly renewable grid, we need greater investment in enabling technologies, in particular energy storage, demand response and transmission,” says Marija Petkovic, founder and managing director of consultancy Energy Synapse.


Much of this infrastructure will be large-scale. “Investing in transmission and in particular, strengthening the interconnection between different states will be vital in reaching a highly renewable grid,” says Petkovic.

“Large infrastructure projects like this tend to move quite slowly. We anticipate that many of these projects will need to be fast-tracked to keep pace with coal closures and the transition to clean energy.”

The massive infrastructure changes required could be boosted significantly by expanding the power of citizen participation. Helen Haines, the independent MP for Indi, has highlighted this in her community energy plan for regional Australia – in which “everyday people develop, build or benefit from an energy project like a solar installation, a wind farm or a large battery”.

In welcome news, the much-maligned but inarguably helpful Office of the National Wind Farm Commissioner is being expanded to batteries and new transmission lines, which should ease development issues for both.

Under stress: Great Barrier Reef corals face multiple threats, especially from climate change. Credit: Dean Miller, GBR Legacy

Australia already has successful community involvement in large-scale renewable projects like the Sapphire Wind Farm and the Solarshare project.

But community batteries are a growing option too. Somewhere between household storage and Tesla’s shiny “big batteries”, community-scale systems can serve to link people directly with the energy transition without the requirement of personal wealth or home ownership.

The impact of community participation and ownership in energy cannot be underestimated. Denmark, a world leader in use of wind power in its grid, mandated community ownership. Germany, second only to the offshore wind-blessed Britain among the top 40 consuming countries, also leans heavily into community-owned wind.

Converting energy systems to zero-carbon options brings benefits far beyond emissions reductions. Cleaner air, cheaper energy and newer technology are all benefits that can flow to those near Australia’s new power generation systems, and well beyond those with rooftop space to spare.

Power beyond the grid

While Australia’s electricity grid is the most pressing first step on climate action, many other sectors must also be decarbonised. Transport, homes, industry, agriculture and – perhaps most significantly – Australia’s export of fossil fuels to other countries.

While public pressure, personal choice and corporate decision-making can accelerate change on domestic emissions, it is fossil fuel exports that remains the most challenging area. When the fossil fuel products extracted in Australia and sold overseas are burned, the consequent emissions far outweigh those from fuels burned within Australia.

It is odd how controversial it is to talk about emissions caused by the fossil products sold by Australia, but none of the protestations change the raw physicality of the harm to human life.

If there is little appetite to tackle domestic emissions within Australia’s government, there is outright hostility from both major parties to reducing fossil fuel exports. It is another component of Australia’s emissions that must be dealt with by citizens.

In March this year, a group of teenagers sued the Australian government for approving the expansion of a coal mine, on the grounds that it provides a product that damages the future health of young Australians. The emissions associated with the coal extracted from that expanded mine will easily wipe out the emissions avoided by all of Australia’s renewable energy over the past decade.

Young Australians have been badly marginalised in the debate, not just from federal policy but within many mainstream venues for national discourse on climate and energy.

“When it comes to climate justice, stopping the mine is part of that. We here in Australia may not be feeling the effects of climate change as much as those in Third World countries are, and they will continue to be the most affected,” says Bella Burgemeister, one of the eight young activists engaging in that legal action.

“When considering this coal mine we have to consider those around the world who will feel the effects first and worst.”

Young WA activist Bella Burgemeister is passionate about climate change.

Bella hits on the heart of the problem, when talking about what a better future might look like: a future “where children don’t have to march on the street or take our government to court, where our leaders just act like leaders and we can just act like kids”.

To pick up the slack of stagnant leaders is exhausting, and is robbing young activists of both the future and the present. What the actions of these young Australians signify is a move beyond the numbers and accounting of global climate agreements, and a more literal, physical approach to the problem.

Every time fossil fuels are left in the ground, it can be banked as a climate win grounded in physical reality. But every coal mine expansion worsens the climate problem, no matter which spreadsheets account for that harm.

What you can do to promote clean energy
  • If you can, install solar, electrify your home (either when building a new one or retrofitting your existing one) and make your home more energy efficient (COVID-19 has shown that reduced demand turns the screws on fossil fuels in the grid like nothing else). 

  • Investigate whether community energy is an option where you live, or consider donating to community energy groups and supporting them on social media. 

  • Make a point of congratulating companies purchasing clean energy and let those dragging their heels know how you feel. The same goes for state and local governments.

  • Lend your voice to campaigns against projects that extract or burn fossil fuels (or that enable either of those things).

Community participation in clean infrastructure and aggressive activism on key climate issues are emerging as the lowest-hanging fruit when it comes to filling the void of federal climate action.

What will happen to our cities (and beaches) at 3 degrees of warming?
Once the government becomes truly isolated – domestically and internationally – they may have to begrudgingly accept the need to change, perhaps on the proviso that they get to revise history and pretend they were always on board. 

There remains the minuscule possibility of the government choosing to begin the big steps of decarbonisation today.

It would be miraculous, but the foundation of new energy on climate action is far more likely to be found in the hearts and minds of those with the most to lose, and the most to gain.

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Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative