13/02/2022

(Podcast) Changing How We Cover Climate Change

Whooshka - Podcast

This week, Prue Clarke talks with Julian Cribb, co-founder of the Council of Human Future, and Kyle Pope, the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, about how to cover climate change.


Kyle Pope

Kyle Pope is the editor and publisher of the Columbia Journalism Review.

He has worked as editor of the New York Observer, the Wall Street Journal, and Portfolio magazine.

Pope has served as a judge for The Pulitzer Prizes and the National Magazine Awards.

In 2016, he was hired by the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) as editor and publisher.

Covering Climate Now, a collaborative approach by media outlets committed to improving their climate journalism, is an initiative of CJR.
Julian Cribb
Julian Cribb AM is an Australian author and science communicator.

He is a Fellow of the UK Royal Society for the Arts, the Australian Academy of Technological Science and Engineering (ATSE) and the Australian National University Emeritus Faculty.

Cribb's career includes appointments as scientific editor for The Australian newspaper, director of national awareness for CSIRO, editor of several newspapers including the National Farmer.

He is president of national professional bodies for agricultural journalism and science communication.

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(AU The Conversation) Time For A Reckoning: Cricket Australia, Fossil Fuel Sponsorship And Climate Change

The Conversation - 

Shutterstock

Author
 is Professor of Media and Communications, Monash University     
As we head towards the end of the summer sporting calendar, Cricket Australia is facing pressing questions well beyond replacing Justin Langer as coach of the men’s national teams.

Chief among them is the question of climate change.

While other sporting codes and teams around the world are starting to use their clout to push for more and faster action, Cricket Australia’s powerbrokers seem to be largely paying lip service to climate action.

Meanwhile, many players are taking action.

You might think cricket and climate change have nothing in common. Sadly, that’s not the case.

On a practical level, steadily rising temperatures and heightened natural disasters make it harder to play the sport safely over summer.

And on a cultural level, fossil fuel power companies have long used sponsorships to “sportwash” their reputations.

It’s time for Cricket Australia to take a stronger stance on climate and turn away from fossil fuel sponsorships.

Is cricket really at risk?

There is clear and growing evidence rising temperatures, bush fire smoke, cyclones, floods and drought brought by climate change are hurting cricket and the health of its players around the world.

Smoke from the Black Summer bushfires overshadowed the Sheffield Shield match at the SCG on December 10, 2019. Craig Golding/AAP
That’s to say nothing of sea level rise and stronger hurricanes, which threaten to take chunks out of cricket-mad island nations in the Caribbean.

In June last year, Grenada Prime Minister Keith Mitchell called on Cricket Australia and the International Cricket Council to sign on to UN efforts to harness sport for climate action.

In response, Cricket Australia said they would look into it. We’ve heard nothing further.

No doubt some readers will baulk at the idea of putting the politics of climate change and cricket together. But if the last century of sporting history has taught us anything, it’s that high level sport and politics go hand-in-hand, from Cold War Olympics, to race relations, to nationalism.

Climate change is the single biggest issue of our time, dubbed “code red for humanity”. It’s an exceptionally well established issue seen across atmospheric, chemical and physical patterns.

To tackle it requires a massive collective undertaking. That means politics. But to make big changes requires public buy-in.

Sport, which absorbs so much of our attention, has a vital role to play.

Players are taking the lead on climate action

Many of Australia’s leading players – including men’s Test captain Pat Cummins – are not waiting. They are calling for urgent action to protect the sport and the generations of younger players to follow.

For Cummins, the realisation was personal. In January 2020, his local cricket club in Penrith sweltered as Western Sydney became the hottest place on earth. Smoke haze from Black Summer megafires forced match cancellations.

Two years earlier, Cummins watched as English captain Joe Root was taken to hospital after battling 47℃ heat.

Last week, Cummins launched Cricket for Climate, which will install solar panels on club facilities around the country. He’s not alone in his activism. This is just the latest surge of support for urgent climate action by our athletes.

Cricket for Climate follows on from AFL Players for Climate Action, which now has 260 members.

On a broader scale, there’s The Cool Down, a national climate campaign led by Emma and David Pocock which has more than 300 top athletes as backers, including cricket’s Alex Blackwell, Rachel Haynes and Sean Abbott.

Our athletes want faster, stronger action. So what’s the hold up?

Cricket Australia supports climate action through the fine work of the Sports Environmental Alliance as an organisational member. But it could do much more.

While Cricket Australia has signed on to Cummins’ new initiative, it has not committed to either of two UN initiatives, Sports for Climate Action Framework or the Race to Zero Initiative.

You’d be hard pressed to find detail on Cricket Australia’s environmental initiatives. There’s no information about this in their current five year plan or their annual report.

There’s no reporting on the “holistic” sustainability strategy the organisation stated it was developing in 2020 in the face of concerns about extreme heat.

The problem of sportswashing and sponsorships

Unfortunately, professional sport is awash with lucrative sponsorships from fossil fuel companies. The main sponsor of our men’s cricket team is Alinta Energy, which owns one of Victoria’s largest coal-fired power plants, Loy Yang B.

While Alinta is moving into wind and solar, its parent company, Pioneer Sail Holdings, is still the sixth highest carbon emitting corporation in Australia as of 2019-2020.

These kinds of sponsorships are coming under increasing scrutiny nationally and internationally, with comparisons drawn between our current fossil fuel corporation sponsorships and tobacco company sponsorships in the 1980s.

Fossil fuel companies seek out the “soft power” of sport as a way to improve their public image and create positive brand associations.

India’s Sourav Ganguly suffers from heat exhaustion in the 2007 Test in Australia. Andrew Brownbill/AP

So what would it take to deny fossil fuel companies this kind of social license? Cricket managers don’t have to look far at all. There’s an excellent example at Rod Laver Arena, just over the train tracks from Cricket Australia’s head office.

In January, Tennis Australia sent shockwaves through sport by cancelling its multi-year sponsorship with their “official natural gas partner” Santos ahead of this year’s Australian Open. The cancellation came after a long campaign targeting “sportswashing”.

This sudden shift is positive. It means the comparison with tobacco companies now has real teeth. Remember that in the 1980s, tobacco advertising was everywhere.

To reduce the damage done by smoking, Australia progressively denied tobacco companies the social license offered by sponsorships and advertising, as part of a broader push.

We need a similar effort to encourage a wholesale shift away from fossil fuels.

The question now for Cricket Australia is simple.

How long will it hesitate at the climate crossroads, caught between the health of its players and planet and the fossil fuel interests of its sponsors? The players aren’t waiting.

Pat Cummins and many other players are leading the way to a safer future for cricket and those who love it.

It’s time for their national governing body to follow them.

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(AU RenewEconomy) Australia’s Bushfire Threat Already Beyond Worst-Case Scenarios, Thanks To Climate Change

RenewEconomy - 

Australia's bushfire threat is beyond 'worst case scenario's experts say. (AAP Image/Darren Pateman)

Australia will continue to experience more extreme impacts of climate change, with the bushfire threat already exceeding the ‘worst case’ scenarios, experts have told the Australian National University’s 2022 Climate Update event.

The director of the ANU’s Institute for Climate, Energy and Disaster Solutions, Mark Howden, said that the observed impacts of climate change were indisputable evidence of the human effects on the environment.

“The human influence on the global climate is now unequivocal. Essentially, as a matter of fact, it’s not uncertain,” Howden said.

“We can put to bed a lot of that argument that it’s not human influence. It was clear that there was widespread rapid intensifying an unprecedented influence of humans on many different aspects of the climate system.”

Howden pointed to the worsening threat posed by the increasing severity of bushfires, no longer limited to Australia’s summer months, and now becoming a year-long issue.

“Across most of Australia, the fire danger index is increasing and increasing significantly, particularly in the southeast,” Howden said.

“Starting from spring and ending early in autumn, and we can see [the area burned] going up, essentially linearly. But if we look at the winter period, the autumn and winter period, the cool season, what we see is the area burnt is actually going up essentially exponentially.”

“There is no reason to feel comfortable about how fire is evolving at the moment. And this is beyond the worst-case climate change scenarios for this type at this time span, which were produced just a few years ago,” Howden added.

The latest Annual Climate Statement, recently published by the Bureau of Meteorology, found that while 2021 brought the coolest average temperatures for Australia since 2012, it still ranked amongst the top 20 hottest years on record at 0.56 °C warmer than the 1961–1990 average.

The lower temperatures are partially attributable to the ongoing influence of a La Niña event, which usually brings cooler and wetter periods to Australia’s east coast that can help spur the growth of vegetation.

Howden said that it formed part of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) cycle that can amplify the bushfire risk when the warmer and drier periods return.

"A lot of our fire danger arises through our climate variability, which in large part is driven by El Niño,” Howden said.

“So that’s the difference between the wet years when we grow a lot of biomass and the dry years where that dries out and becomes an immediate fire risk.”

“We’re likely to see the rainfall variability associated with the ENSO cycle likely to increase. The difference between the wet years and the dry years in a place like Australia is likely to increase with a whole series of implications for droughts and floods and fires.”

Howden, who also serves as vice chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said that he saw the government response to the Covid-19 pandemic, with linkages being made by policymakers between public health and economic health, as a potential model that could be replicated in response to climate change.

“In COVID, we very demonstrably showed that if you look after your people, you look after your economy, those countries which acted well and very proactively, in terms of COVID, also fared well, economically,” Howden said.

“And the same goes for climate change. If we don’t look after our people and environment, our economy will suffer. And it’s increasingly become clear across a whole range of studies.”

At the end of February, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its next landmark report on climate change, detailing the anticipated impacts of climate change, the vulnerability of natural systems, and options for adaptation measures.

It will follow last year’s IPCC report, which outlined the latest scientific understanding of the physical basis of climate change and detailed global warming projections.

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12/02/2022

(USA The Atlantic) Biden’s Biggest Idea On Climate Change Is Remarkably Cheap

The Atlantic - Robinson Meyer

It’s one of the most cost-effective climate policies the U.S. has ever considered, according to a new analysis.

David Paul Morris / Bloomberg / Getty

Over the past year, my climate reporting has had a few preoccupations. They include:
  1. Whether President Joe Biden will succeed in passing a major climate bill;
  2. The degree to which climate change is already a profound concern to the economy, and indeed whether the climate problem is more about “money” than “science”; and
  3. Carbon taxes.
Now, I have an occasion to bring all three together! A new analysis from researchers at the University of Chicago and the Rhodium Group, an energy-research firm, finds that one of President Joe Biden’s marquee energy proposals—the one of the most likely to make it through Congress—has a good chance of working.

Biden’s clean-energy tax credits—a set of incentives that would push the United States to generate more electricity through wind, solar, and other zero-carbon resources—would be one of the most cost-effective climate policies in American history, according to the analysis.

The researchers’ study, which has not been peer-reviewed, finds that the policy’s benefits will be three to four times larger than its costs, creating as much as projected $1.5 trillion in economic surplus while eliminating more than 5 billion tons of planet-warming carbon pollution through 2050.

“I will confess I was always a little skeptical of the tax incentives. I was concerned that they were expensive on a cost-per-ton-abated basis,” Michael Greenstone, a co-author of the study and the Milton Friedman Distinguished Service Professor in Economics at the University of Chicago, told me.

“I came away from this quite surprised at how beneficial this was.” (I should disclose that I worked with Greenstone last year when I was a journalist in residence at the University of Chicago’s Energy Policy Institute.)

“It’s very rare that we get opportunities to have policies with a benefit-to-cost ratio of 3 or 4 to 1. Normally it’s, like, 1.3 to 1, and we economists get very excited,” he said.

A year ago, I wrote that Biden’s infrastructure bill is the climate bill. Since then, that bill has been cut in two, renamed the Build Back Better Act, killed, resurrected, maybe killed again, and generally muddled over by Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and the rest of the Senate Democratic caucus.

Considerable controversy persists over what social-spending programs should go in the bill. But the climate and energy section has remained one of the most popular aspects of the bill—and one policy that has, so far, stayed within Manchin’s favor. “I think that the climate thing is one that we probably can come to agreement much easier than anything else,” he told reporters early last month.

As you may know, the United States already has a set of policies that could be described as “clean-energy tax credits,” a mishmash of tax breaks for solar panels, wind turbines, and geothermal systems. But they are overly specific and kind of a mess, written at different times by different legislators.

The tax credit for solar, for instance, gives developers a break whenever they invest in new solar capacity, while the wind tax credit gives them credit only when they produce a kilowatt-hour of wind power. They’re also designed in such a way that big banks end up capturing a lot of their economic value.

The new tax-credit scheme fixes those problems. The new tax credits are technology-neutral, allowing developers to use them when producing or investing in any kind of zero-carbon electricity (although they can’t claim both for the same project). And the new credits’ simpler design—they’re fully refundable—should eliminate banks’ overbearing role.

The credits also  include a few other tweaks that will make it easier for normal utilities, and not independent power producers that sell electricity to the highest bidder, to use them.

These tweaks make the tax credits much more efficient than other policies. At their peak, the incentives would eliminate 33 to 45 percent of carbon emissions from the country’s electricity sector, compared with a world without the policy, the analysis found.

Because Biden’s strategy for decarbonizing the American economy depends on zeroing out carbon pollution from the electricity grid first, carbon savings in the electricity sector propagate through the system. The cleaner the grid, for instance, the cleaner electric vehicles become.

Under a conventional economic analysis, most of the government’s existing climate policies cost hundreds or even thousands of dollars to prevent a single ton of carbon from entering the atmosphere. The existing solar tax credits, for instance, can effectively cost up to $2,218 to abate a ton of carbon pollution.

The new policies will cost the public only $33 to $50 to prevent a ton of climate pollution from entering the atmosphere, which is well below economists’ median estimate of how much each ton of carbon pollution costs the economy.

Not all of America’s climate policies are designed to maximize carbon reductions on a per-ton basis. According to the University of Chicago and the Rhodium Group’s estimates, the cost of preventing a single ton of carbon pollution under various policies can range from less than $50 to more than $3,000. (University of Chicago / Rhodium

“Most of those other climate policies are just getting a small amount of tons,” Greenstone said. “But this is a quite broad policy that would give you a lot of tons.”

That’s in large part due to the huge collapse in the price of solar and wind, John Larsen, another co-author of the study and a partner at the Rhodium Group, told me.

“Wind and solar are so cheap now and are projected to get even cheaper this decade. When you extend and enhance federal tax credits for a decade, it really leverages all this cheap tech in a way that just wasn’t possible five or 10 years ago.”

That places the clean-energy tax incentives at an unusual sweet spot: Although they’re normally explained as innovation policies, aimed at bringing down the cost of alternative and zero-carbon energy, they will also cheaply eliminate tons of carbon pollution.

And because their per-ton cost is below the social cost of carbon, the tax credits may in some cases be more efficient than a carbon tax. Yet they seem unlikely to generate the political blowback that tends to greet a carbon tax.

“It’s cost effective, it gets a lot of tons, it gets at the sector that everyone says we have to get right the fastest—and we can do it without the tools everyone said we needed,” Larsen said. That sets a good precedent for the next time that Congress takes a look at the climate problem.

“Prior to 2021, the only way that people felt they could make big gains was with a comprehensive climate policy,” he said. “This shows that there’s a lot of ways to get points on the board with spending.”

In an email, Lynne Kiesling, an economist at the University of Colorado who was not involved in the study, agreed that the study found the tax credits may be cheaper than other policies. But she pointed out that the cost of paying for the policy isn’t the necessarily the same as its dollar-and-cents efficiency.

“The cost of financing the tax credits is likely to be the variable of the most concern, both for the policy itself and for its broader macroeconomic tax consequences,” she said.

Remarkably, the study may actually underestimate the public benefit of the tax breaks, Larsen added, because he and his colleagues did not include an estimate of the money saved in medical bills from reducing conventional toxic air pollution.

During the Obama administration, the benefits of reducing this conventional air pollution often paid for climate policy by itself. “Typically, the co-benefits of conventional pollutants are quite large—they’re usually of the same magnitude as the climate benefits,” he said. “It shouldn’t be dismissed.”

Society could reap the benefits of such a prosperous policy. But first, the bill has to pass.

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(AU Canberra Times) Climate Change Robs Australia Of Rain

Canberra Times - Tracey Ferrier

Australia's fire risk has gone beyond worst-case scenarios developed just a few years ago.

Vast swathes of Australia have already lost 20 per cent of their rainfall and the country's fire risk has gone beyond worst-case scenarios developed just a few years ago, a renowned climate expert says.

Australian National University Professor Mark Howden is a vice-chair of the world's leading authority on climate science and says despite dire, repeated warnings "our foot is not off the climate change accelerator".

He warned that without urgent action, conditions that spawned the devastating Black Summer bushfires of 2019-20 could be the new normal by the end of this decade.

"That becomes a relatively normal condition under our climate change scenarios say for 2030 and 2050," said Prof Howden, who contributed to the most recent IPCC report on climate risks.

Late last year, the CSIRO also warned Australia was at risk of more "mega fire years", with the nation now dealing with fire hazards year round. Areas lost to fire in autumn have increased three fold, and four-fold in winter.

"In south west Australia and south east Australia we've already lost around 20 per cent of our rainfall compared with that of 100 years ago," he said.

"In those mid-latitudes - where Australia sits - there have already been very strong drying trends. We're likely to see a strong intensification of that."

"As we go to the higher levels of climate change, we will not be able to keep up with our current type of agriculture - so agriculture as we currently conceive it.

Last year was, depending on which set of records are consulted, either the 5th or 7th warmest on record.

Regardless of that broad cooling effect, Prof Howden said people must remember the succession of disasters the world dealt with, all compounded by climate change.

Hurricane Ida hit the US, the fifth costliest globally. There were devastating floods across Europe and in China.

But he says there is still a "glimmer of hope" that the world will take the narrow opportunity it has and chose a future climate that's "relatively benign", something around the 1.5C of warming that's the best case objective of the Paris pact.

"We have to have immediate, rapid and large scale action."

"Climate adaption is now unavoidable and it's urgent," he said.

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(AU AFR) How Australians Can Cut Emissions – And Save $5000 A Year

AFR - Saul Griffith

The electrification of households, powered by renewables, can halve energy use, fire up the economy and cut our living costs.

Inventor and entrepreneur Saul Griffith: If Australia did all the things we do every day with clean electricity, instead of fossil fuels, we would use less than half the energy. Leigh Vogel

Author
Saul Griffith grew up in Sydney and studied engineering at the University of New South Wales. He earned his PhD at MIT and moved to Silicon Valley, California, where he started a series of technology companies. He is the founder of Rewiring Australia and Rewiring America, two non-profit organisations focused on electrification to address climate change. The Big Switch: Australia’s Electric Future by Saul Griffith will be available from February 14.
Every nation is still profusely emitting carbon. If we wait for a perfect solution to arrive we won’t avoid catastrophe in time.

The electrification of almost everything, powered by renewables, can do the heavy lifting, immediately.

This is the pathway that offers the cheapest, fastest way to eliminate the most emissions. Australia is uniquely placed to light this path up for the world.

The next federal government could pilot the electrification of a suburb or town, funding hundreds of households to go fully solar and electric, a world first.

Australians love solar. We do it cheaper and better than anyone. Our continent has extraordinary renewable resources and low population density.

Renewable energy demands a lot of space. The Australian lifestyle, fully electrified, requires about 4000W of constant power per person, or 35,000 kWh per person per year.

Aside from Australia, only Canada, Kazakhstan and Mongolia could provide that lifestyle using only renewable energy, while dedicating less than 1 per cent of their land to the task.

Although those colder nations would likely struggle (compared to Australia) due to a shortage of year-round sunshine.

By contrast, China and India would have to commit 10 per cent of all of their land area to renewables. That’s not going to happen. So nuclear energy and some efficiency and lifestyle changes have to remain on the table.

But for Australia – the sunniest, windiest continent – we have unique potential to benefit from the global energy transition, including making energy-intensive things like steel, for those crowded countries.

Envy of the world

If Australia did all the things we do every day with clean electricity, instead of fossil fuels, we would use less than half the energy.

Some motivated, typically wealthy, households have already realised this. They install rooftop solar, run electric vehicles, cook with induction, use electric heat-pump water heaters and heat-pump space heating for winter. They probably also have a battery so are watching energy bills plummet.

Currently, if you can afford the upfront cost the pathway to zero emissions is obvious and lowers the monthly energy bills.

The challenge is extending this to everyone. For the past two decades, the price of the electrification kit has fallen rapidly, by around 20 per cent every time the industry doubles in size.

Australian rooftop solar, the envy of the world, is a great example. After financing, it generates electricity at 5-7¢/kWh, about a quarter the cost the local distribution network can provide. Solar will likely halve in price again as it permeates the world.

In time, it will shift from being the cheapest delivered source of energy to nearly free. Similarly, the price of electric vehicles has dropped so far that in 2022 Ford will deliver the F-150 Lightning whose enormous battery will cost half (per kWh) of home batteries in Australia – and come with a free truck.

All of this points to a fundamental shift that must occur in our climate change thinking: we will solve this problem through abundance, not scarcity.

Model the falling capital cost of home electrification, and you will see that this year many more Australian families could substantially benefit from all-electric lifestyles.

By 2024, this recipe will save nearly every Australian home money.

By 2030, on current cost reduction trends, you can predict that all 11 million Australian homes will be saving about $5000 a year on their costs of energy and vehicles.

Green steel

Macquarie Bank and the Commonwealth Bank now offer explicit finance products to make these things affordable.

Innovative energy companies, some born in Australia, are already offering incredible financing packages with their services that include helping with the headaches of installation. The future is here, it’s just not quite affordable to everyone yet.

If Australia builds towards a 2025 national roll-out through pilot programs, we can strip out unnecessary costs to make electrification a shovel-ready national project. Yes, there will be a cost – but it will pale compared to the costs avoided.

The average household now sends $2500 a year overseas for someone else’s oil. That is $30 billion a year lost from our communities.

Rewiring our homes, by contrast, will demand a massive expansion of work for tradies installing solar and batteries, wiring up heat-pumps and putting vehicle chargers in place.

These jobs cannot be outsourced because they are physically tethered to a community. This would seriously stimulate the suburbs and regions.

What about the other solutions that governments love to fund?

Biofuels are not plentiful enough. To provide all the world’s people their current energy using fuels made from biological material would require burning every living thing on the planet once a year.

Biofuels will prove useful for aviation and freight, along with some heavy industry and heavy machinery. But that’s probably about all.

Australia undoubtedly has a big role to play in hydrogen, but it is unlikely to fuel many cars and its role in steelmaking is far from certain.

There will be some end-industries that need hydrogen, like ammonia for agriculture, but it will not provide a large part of the world’s energy supply. Even 20 per cent is very bullish. A more likely figure is around 5 per cent.

Carbon sequestration has a small contribution to make, by burying CO2 in soils – a slow process. But it’s unlikely we can sequester as much carbon as is already modelled into the IPCC’s two best-case scenarios of 1.5 and 1.9 degrees. Which means we’ll need to do even more electrification, even faster.

Some will argue Australia should stick to its traditional strengths in primary industry and mineral exports. But this is to overlook our extraordinary birthright of abundant renewable energy – far exceeding our needs.

Australia is actually the logical place to become the world’s foundry. Between one-third and half the cost of steel and aluminium production is energy to refine it from ore. If we can produce the world’s cheapest electricity and use it to refine ore into metal we will have a fundamental price advantage over the rest of the world.

It is a strange fantasy to send more expensive hydrogen overseas to turn our red dirt into steel when the metal would be cheaper produced locally. If we converted all Australian iron ore into steel it would be an $800 billion industry, 10 times the size of our exports today.

That scenario may be unlikely, but we can certainly have far more primary processing powered by cheap renewables.

Australia is among the top five producers and reserves for all the critical elements of the global energy transition: steel, aluminium, lithium, copper, zinc, nickel, rare earth elements, even uranium. And while Australia doesn’t need nuclear to power our domestic economy, many other economies will want our uranium.

If Australia commits to the path of electrification we can decarbonise our domestic economy this decade, while buying ourselves time to decarbonise our export economy in the next decade.

We should be creating the next 10 companies in green steel, green ammonia, green aluminium, green copper, green lithium … you get the point.

The winner of the next election should be a party that recognises we won’t win this abundant future if only the wealthiest households can participate and politicians drag their knuckles on the policy front.

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11/02/2022

(AU Gizmodo) Coal-Loving Australia Just Hit Wind And Solar Power Records

Gizmodo - Molly Taft

Renewables are catching up in a country where coal is still king.

Sheep graze in front of wind turbines on Lake George on the outskirts of Canberra, Australia. Photo: David Gray (Getty Images)
January was a banner month for renewables Down Under.

According to an analyst at Rystad Energy, who shared the figures with clean energy site Renew Economy, three of Australia’s six states saw new records for wind and solar power production.

In total, utility-scale wind and solar produced 3,628 gigawatt hours of power across Australia, a new record.

A full quarter of that power came from New South Wales, where wind and solar generated 995 gigawatt hours of energy. But there were standouts outside of NSW, as several wind farms saw great figures in what’s known as capacity output, or the percentage of time a power plant is actually used.

Badgingarra wind farm, a 37-turbine installation in the state of Western Australia north of Perth, saw a jaw-dropping capacity rate of 64% last month.

That capacity rate makes Badgingarra, as well as five other wind farms that hit capacity rates of more than 50% in January, competitive with most of the country’s coal units. (In November 2019, Badgingarra’s capacity output was 70%, its best month.)

Wind’s wins are a big deal, because in Australia, coal is definitely still king. Coal-fired power plants still generate about 60% of Australia’s electricity, making it an outlier as other comparatively wealthy countries race to ditch coal and diversify their grids with wind, solar, and other renewables.

The UK’s History Is Disappearing With Its Peatlands
Coal maintains an iron grip on Australia’s politics as well as the global economy: Australia was the world’s second-biggest exporter of coal in 2020.

Coal has some powerful allies in the country, including conservative media mogul and native Australian Rupert Murdoch, whose various news products, including Fox News, have gone all-in on climate denial.

A Greenpeace analysis released in 2020 revealed that Murdoch’s News Corp drove a “misinformation” campaign during that year’s devastating wildfires in Australia, spreading climate denial and sowing doubt about the wildfires’ causes as the government approved new coal extraction projects.

Extreme Weather Events Cost the U.S. $145 Billion in 2021
Because its fuel—and politics—are so dirty, Australia’s government has also made comparatively measly emissions reductions targets.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison procrastinated all the way up to the beginning of last year’s UN climate meeting to issue a net-zero plan for the country. (That plan still keeps coal and gas significantly in the mix, so it’s pretty dubious.)

Australia isn’t the only place where dirty fuels are celebrated even as clean fuels are performing well. A month after Texas Republicans used the February 2021 blackouts to bash wind energy, wind was the number one source of electricity on the Texas grid last March.

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