Election 2016: How Well Are The Major Parties Meeting The Needs Of Rural And Regional Australia?

The Conversation - Stewart Lockie

A lack of differences in major policy areas such as agriculture and trade means local project funding – for roads, boat ramps and the like – reinforces the adage 'all politics is local'. AAP/Alan Porritt

How far do policies announced during the 2016 federal election campaign go towards addressing key policy issues for non-metropolitan Australia?
Much of what we've heard has been packaged up in funding announcements. Most of these are followed by accusations of overspending, pork-barrelling and/or incompetence.
Still, there is a compelling simplicity to funding announcements. Dollar values take the complexity out of policy communication. Numbers in the millions say, "we're serious about this". Numbers in the billions say, "we're really serious".
Contrast this with more considered approaches to policy development. In recent years, federal governments have released white papers on agricultural competitiveness, Northern Australia, energy and the food industry. None of the major parties have promised to review or change the policy directions set out in these documents. Neither have they promised to initiate new white paper processes in other policy domains important to rural and regional Australia.
The obvious conclusion is that non-metropolitan Australia can expect little substantial policy reform regardless of who wins the election. True, planned changes may not have been announced. But there has been little to suggest over the last decade or more that the major parties have substantially different views on key areas like agriculture and trade.
What significant policy movement we did see following the last election had been clearly signalled during the 2013 campaign. We all knew the incoming Coalition government would be investing in Northern Australia, paying farmers to store carbon in soils, establishing the Green Army and rationalising Indigenous programs into one agency.
Many will be surprised at how little debate we've seen during the 2016 campaign about these initiatives.

Infrastructure
Despite (or because of) the potential for major infrastructure projects to create local opportunities there have been myriad like-for-like announcements.
All major parties are promising to fund road upgrades and to contribute A$100 million towards a new football stadium in Townsville. All support extension of the Mobile Black Spot Program. None have proposed unwinding existing initiatives such as the $5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility or $2 billion National Water Infrastructure Loan Facility.
North Queenslanders will be happy about the stadium funding, just as other communities will be pleased to receive support for local projects. Lack of detail on energy and information and telecommunications (ICT) infrastructure, however, will be a disappointment.
Modern ICT offers substantial opportunity to improve the competitiveness of rural industries as well as to reduce social isolation. Rural people are acutely aware of this. They want more than finger pointing over who is responsible for problems in delivering the National Broadband Network.

Unemployment
All major parties propose policies to promote national employment growth – for example, using trade agreements to expand exports and economic growth. However, place-specific strategies are also needed to deal with rural and regional unemployment due to variation in the composition and dynamics of non-metro labour markets.
Place-specific employment strategies have certainly not been absent from the campaign. They do, however, lack coherence.
In Cairns, for example, the Coalition has promised $20 million for businesses willing to employ local workers and $10 million for an Innovation Centre linking students, researchers and entrepreneurs. Cairns is my town and I'll be happy to see projects like this go ahead.
Other electorates provide similar examples of nationally small, but locally significant, commitments to tackle unemployment. The question will be whether we can learn enough from these to generate more widespread impact.

Both sides of politics will fund a new stadium for Townsville, promising it will create jobs as well as boost tourism and small business. AAP/Mick Tsikas

Townsville is particularly interesting in this regard because there is an overarching conceptual framework that, if successful, could be replicated elsewhere. Following the lead of British cities, the Coalition has promised a "City Deal" for Townsville. This is intended to integrate long-term infrastructure investment across all tiers of government to boost productivity and employment growth.
Implementing City Deals (or something like them) will require bipartisan support and meaningful negotiation with local stakeholders. Such a process will stand as a direct challenge to ad hoc, announcement-driven campaigning in future elections.

Diversification and new economy jobs
Innovation and STEM (science, technology, engineering and maths) are very much terms in vogue. Labor and the Coalition alike are spruiking their role in the development of the rural R&D system and launching a host of additional innovation programs. Agriculture and mining will both rely heavily on research and innovation in ICT, robotics and (for agriculture) genetics to maintain their competitive edge.
This will mean that, regardless of whether or not they are profitable, agriculture and mining will also employ fewer and fewer people.
So what is the plan then to boost innovation and research in ways that diversify rural and regional economies? Is it enough to ensure that at least some of the national expenditure on research and higher education lands in the regions?
Labor is promising to create a network of 20 regional innovation hubs. While it is difficult to imagine that expenditure of up to $500,000 per hub over three years will itself be transformative, at least it demonstrates awareness of the need for regional specificity.
Similar conclusions can be drawn about the Coalition's Industry Growth Centres and promise of an innovation centre in far-north Queensland.
Both parties' regional innovation commitments have merit, but greater and longer-term investment will be required, I suspect, to achieve any kind of scale outside established industries. City Deals (or let's call them Regional Deals) that are as focused on knowledge and innovation infrastructure as they are on transport, energy and communication infrastructure might provide a useful framework.

Indigenous participation
A Senate inquiry into the federal government's Indigenous Advancement Strategy identified multiple failures. The National Congress of Australia's First Peoples released a statement calling for urgent and far-reaching reform of Indigenous affairs.
Yet we have heard nothing of substance from either the Coalition or Labor about their plans for Indigenous affairs.

Health, education and social services
Through this campaign we have heard many claims about how much money has been removed from the human services and health portfolios, or been misspent, by previous governments.
We have heard claims about secret plans to privatise services like Medicare. But we have heard little of substance about rural health, education or social services.

Climate change
The bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef ensured climate change figured somewhere in this election. The Greens aside, though, no-one has campaigned hard on climate change. Nor have they released new policies.
Despite all the claims and counterclaims about climate policy, both Labor and the Coalition have proven keen to talk up their support for carbon farming and revegetation.
It's easy to see why the major political parties want to talk up carbon farming – it offers landholders a potential source of income while sidestepping politically messy arguments about the reality of climate change.
At some point, though, these arguments need to be had.

Natural resource management
Discussion about natural resource management through this campaign has been almost exclusively focused on how much money (those funding announcements again) will be spent to protect the Great Barrier Reef.
Improving water quality by improving land management in the reef catchments is an important thing to do, but lack of detail on how money will be spent makes it difficult to compare the real value of electoral promises.
We know even less about the implications of these promises for land and water management outside reef catchments. Will the politics of the Greater Barrier Reef revive our national commitment to sustainable resource management? Or will money be siphoned from other resource management programs to pay for the reef's protection?

Agriculture
Agriculture arguably receives more policy attention than any other predominantly non-metropolitan industry.
White papers, policy reviews and industry plans emerge with remarkable regularity.
Again, though, these do not reveal major policy differences between the major parties. Trade agreements, biosecurity, export support, agribusiness development, foreign investment and so on are shared priorities.

To the election …
Lack of policy differentiation on national issues will not necessarily be mirrored on an electorate-by-electorate basis. The importance of local projects – a road upgrade here, a boat ramp there – cannot be dismissed. Any local member capable (or seen to be capable) of getting things done will increase trust in themselves and their parties.
As the major parties blame their opponents for everything that is wrong with the world one moment and then echo each other's policies the next, trust will be an important factor.
The wild card in all this is the independents. Katter's Australian Party and the Glenn Lazarus Team are campaigning to restrict foreign investment in land. In the event of a hung parliament the major parties will need to start negotiating.
Who knows what they'll be willing to trade off?

Links

• NBN benefits regional centres, but rural Australia is still left wanting
• Election 2016: the issues in non-metropolitan Australia
• PolicyCheck: What are the parties really offering to save the Great Barrier Reef?
• State of the states: 19 reasons why Turnbull and Shorten keep flying to Queensland

Turnbull And Shorten Ignoring Voters On Coal And Climate

Fairfax - Sarah Gill*

Illustration: Andrew Dyson

Here are two statistics to ponder as we prepare to head to the polls this weekend: voter support for action on climate change has surged to historically high levels since the last election and; four fifths of us believe neither of the major parties actually gives a toss.
Polling released by the Climate Institute last week reveals that 72 per cent of us are worried about global warming, and that while only 17 per cent think the Coalition's climate policies are credible, the plausibility of Labor's response is ahead by just a whisker, at a paltry 20 per cent.
And, really, is it any wonder? While the Coalition and the ALP have emission-reduction targets – neither of which, it must be said, will avoid dangerous global warming – the policy detail underpinning them is woefully inadequate. It's like trying to build the Eiffel Tower with a box of matchsticks.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, remain unequivocal in their support for Australian coal mining. Photo: Peter Braig

After a decade of flip-flopping on climate policy, the electorate, it seems, has wised up. We're not buying Labor's pledge of an "orderly" closure of coal-fired power stations – remember how well that went last time? – any more than Environment Minister Greg Hunt's enthusiasm for the Coalition's Emissions Reduction Fund which, as everyone knows, is about as effective as an ashtray on a motorbike.
Maybe the reason for our distrust, our incredulity, is that at the core of this policy vacuum, on the most burning issue of all – the fate of Australia's gargantuan coal reserves – both major parties are intransigent.
You don't need to be Einstein to know that curbing emissions requires us to stop burning fossil fuels – and if you can't burn them, why dig them up? And why, more to the point, expand our already significant coal production with a swathe of new "mega mines" planned in the Galilee Basin along with expansions across the Upper Hunter and the Liverpool plains?
Undeterred, though, by estimates that around 90 per cent of Australia's coal reserves need to stay in the ground, or recent mining moratoriums announced by the US and China, the Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and the leader of the opposition, Bill Shorten, remain unequivocal in their support for Australian coal mining. Indeed, without a hint of irony, Turnbull has overlooked not just the climate impact but also the deteriorating economics and what analysts say are "delusional" asset valuations to urge us all to approach the issue of coal mining in a "clear-eyed, cool-headed and rational way". The audacity is simply breathtaking.
There's no point in calling a halt to Australian exports, says he, because others will rush to fill the gap and anyway our coal is cleaner. But hardly anyone is suggesting an export moratorium – just a ban on new mines – and, for the record, coal from the Galilee Basin is relatively poor in quality. As for jobs and growth – the new three-word slogan haunting this election campaign – the industry is around 80 per cent foreign owned, and mining giants across the board have indicated a willingness, perhaps even an enthusiasm, to import foreign workers.
If you thought Resources Minister Josh Frydenberg was on thin ice spruiking the benefits of coal for the third world – asserting, I kid you not, that coal will reduce air pollution – then the Australian coal lobby recently dispensed with reason altogether by claiming, in the wake of the Paris climate agreement, that "coal will play a part in reducing emissions globally".
Where will this end? And why do we find it so hard to shrug off the enduring fiction that shackles our destiny to this shiny black rock? Because it's too politically unpalatable to do otherwise, you say? But unpalatable to whom? Not, it would seem, the two thirds of Australians who favour phasing out coal mining to address global warming, or even the majority of northern Queensland voters who support the same. Not to six out of 10 people in the Prime Minister's own seat of Wentworth, either. And not, ultimately, to the burgeoning number of local government, finance, tertiary education or religious institutions that are choosing to divest from fossil fuels and the big banks that fund them.
Naturally, major resource companies – a significant source of political donations – would probably take a dim view of any alternate reality. Let's not forget that in the lead up to the last election, the Coalition snared $1.8 million from companies in favour of a carbon price repeal. Mining industry executives – who are drawn, with disturbing regularity, from the ranks of former politicians and political staffers – would, no doubt, be similarly disgruntled. And when you factor in the effect of marginal seats – such as northern Queensland's Capricornia, home to the largest mining workforce of all north Queensland electorates – all the pieces start coming together.
Which is why Queensland Liberal Senator and Federal Attorney-General George Brandis has been toiling away in the State's north, cranking out the "six point economic plan" and Adani Coal's now discredited pledge of 10,000 jobs to anyone who will listen.
All of this just underscores what we already knew: that not every vote will be equal this Saturday, not every vote counts, despite what our leaders say. On issues as critically important and as broadly supported as climate change and coal mining, for the time being at least, we're snookered.
The world's largest privately-owned coal producer, Peabody Energy, may have recently filed for bankruptcy protection amid a slump in global demand and tighter environmental regulation, but our political leaders are resolutely peddling a narrative on the merits of Australian coal that could have been drafted by the Minerals Council of Australia. Who knows, maybe it was?

*Sarah Gill is an Age columnist who has worked as a writer and a policy analyst.

Links

• The climate change letter most candidates won't answer
• Federal election 2016: Vast majority of Coalition environment funding in marginal seats
• Australia's environmental peril revealed in five charts
• Federal election 2016: Reef bleaching serious threat to tourism, jobs: OS poll

Tragic Lack Of Leadership Puts Red Hot Climate Change Out In The Cold

The Guardian - Graham Readfearn

Environment and climate groups publish final scorecards rating main political parties as Australians prepare to vote

The prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, with the environment minister, Greg Hunt, in Townsville in June. Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

If ever there was going to be a climate change election, surely this was going to be it.
As May came and the election date was announced, the implications of the global Paris agreement between more than 190 countries just months earlier were still resonating – the world was moving away from fossil fuels and the challenge to keep global warming well below 2C was agreed.
The globe had just had its hottest year on record. April was the 12th consecutive month to break global heat records. In Australia, we just had the warmest autumn on record.
Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, taken at Cape Grim in Tasmania, passed a symbolic 400 parts per million, driven by the burning of fossil fuels. Moves to cut climate research at the CSIRO made international headlines.
And then, of course, there was the worst global coral bleaching event on record, bookmarked by the worst known bleaching event on the Great Barrier Reef, killing about a quarter of all corals mostly in the once "pristine" northern section.
This disaster coincided with the hottest sea surface temperatures on the reef in the Bureau of Meteorology's records going back to 1900.
So climate change and clean energy should have been the red-hot issue.
But instead, at least between the ALP and the Coalition, the reaction to these seismic events was, mostly, meh.
David Ritter, chief executive of Greenpeace Australia Pacific, says the reef's plight should have been the "tragic starting gun" for an election where all parties pitched a vision "for how Australia can flourish in a world of new technologies, renewable energy and cleaned up political economy".

It is as if the onion eater may have gone, but the bad breath of climate denialism still lingers across the government.
David Ritter, Greenpeace Australia Pacific

Instead, the political response was "tragically inadequate".
"The political debate has lacked all sense of proportion," he says, reserving particular disappointment that the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, had turned away from his previous passionate advocacy for action.
"It is as if the onion eater may have gone, but the bad breath of climate denialism still lingers across the government."
I've spoken to several leaders in the climate and environment movement in the past couple of days and one message comes through consistently.
While poll after poll shows the Australian public wants action, there's a distinct lack of leadership from the ALP and the Coalition.
Only the Greens have consistently shown leadership – which goes almost without saying.
John Connor, chief executive of the Climate Institute, says climate was "knocking on the door" but continued to be only a "tier two issue" for the main parties.
Although the ALP had a "demonstrably stronger platform" for climate change and a transition to clean energy, there was a "credibility gulf" between both main parties, their leaders and the public.
"The public just doesn't believe them," he says.
Connor believes that whichever party gains power, the Paris climate agreement will force the hand of the next government.
As part of the process, the UN will carry out a global stocktake of climate pledges from all countries in 2018. The Paris agreement also ensures that future pledges to cut emissions improve over time.
"They've danced around it this time, but they will have to grapple with it very soon," he says. "This is all a curtain raiser for the next 12 months and the parties' credibility will be put to the test."

Fossil-fuelled politics?
Could one reason for the lack of leadership and low profile for the issues be down to the funding that major parties get from the fossil fuel and mining industry and the close relationships which those industries have forged across the political spectrum?
Blair Palese, chief executive of the climate campaign group 350.org Australia, thinks that is a big part of the story.
Her group ran a Pollution Free Politics campaign trying to get candidates to sign a simple pledge: "I support a ban on donations from fossil-fuel companies and a ban on subsidies to fossil-fuel companies."

350.org Australia's campaign video to push politicians to sign a pledge to get fossil fuel cash out of politics.

Palese says the campaign clearly touched a nerve with the Liberals who cited it six times in its "Greening of Labor" scare campaign.
Not surprisingly, no Liberals signed the pledge, but there were some successes. All sitting Greens MPs and senators signed, as have 18 Greens candidates.
Serving ALP member for Richmond, Justine Elliot, signed the pledge, as did three ALP candidates: Janelle Saffin (Page), David Atkins (Cook) and Steve Hegedus (Ryan).
Other notable signatories include independents Andrew Wilkie (Denison), Rob Oakeshott (Cowper) and Rob Taber (New England).
Palese says after the election her group will push harder for a reform of the opaque system of political donations and for a national corruption commission to be established.
Palese, too, says there has been a lack of leadership, particularly on the need to prepare communities and workers for the unfolding transition away from coal to renewables.
'There is a terrifying lack of leadership – at national and state level – and it means workers are being left high and dry," she says.

Leadership lacking
Announcing its election scorecard (links to others at the bottom of this post), WWF Australia's chief executive, Dermot O'Gorman, said as the environment faced huge challenges "this generation of political leaders has not yet stepped up to reflect the concerns of the vast majority of Australians".
The Australian Conservation Foundation's chief executive, Kelly O'Shanassy, is similarly unimpressed with the political leadership. Only thanks to momentum from community groups and the tragic bleaching of the reef had the issues been pushed briefly into the limelight.
"The Coalition just didn't want to talk about it – their policies are quite weak," she says. "The ALP has much stronger clean energy transition policies, but neither leader has led the charge."
O'Shanassy believes one campaign from a coalition of environment groups, including ACF, WWF and The Wilderness Society, called Places You Love, has helped to push environmental law reform on to the ALP's policy platform.
The Coalition did make one major environmental announcement when Turnbull joining the environment minister, Greg Hunt, in Townsville to reveal a $1bn reef fund.
But campaign groups were quick to criticise the plan. Not only was it several billions short of what one group of scientists say is needed, but the announcement was just a shifting of existing cash from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation which the Coalition has been trying to shut down.
"There's no additional carbon reduction benefit from that," says Imogen Zethoven, Great Barrier Reef campaign director at the Australian Marine Conservation Society. "We did send the Coalition a series of questions on that announcement, but we didn't get any answers. It raises more questions than it answers."
She says one major win was a policy commitment from Labor to regulate pollution levels flowing into the reef. "That is not to be underestimated," she says. "That would be a major step forward."

Your vote?
So who should you vote for if you want to improve the chances of survival for the reef and Australia's unique habitats and help the country make the inevitable transition away from fossil fuels?
To help with that decision, in recent days the Climate Institute, WWF, the Australian Conservation Foundation and the Australian Marine Conservation Society have all published assessments of the key parties on their environment and climate polices.
You should read them and then go and vote.

Links

• Climate change: John Hewson accuses Coalition of 'national disgrace'
• Australia's censorship of Unesco climate report is like a Shakespearean tragedy
• Carbon dioxide's 400ppm milestone shows humans are rewriting the planet's history
• Mourning Loomis Reef - the heart of the Great Barrier Reef's coral bleaching disaster
• Why even climate science denialist Marc Morano knows not to bet against global warming data

Scientists: Window For Avoiding 1.5c Global Warming ‘Closed’

Climate Home - Megan Darby

World is almost certain to breach danger threshold for millions of vulnerable people, study finds

Raised houses in Bangladesh protect inhabitants from rising flood risk (Flickr/Nasif Ahmed/UNDP Bangladesh)

Scientists have bad news for people on the front line of climate change impacts.
The 1.5C global warming limit vulnerable countries fought hard to include in the Paris Agreement may already be out of reach.
There is slim chance of stabilising temperature rise at that level without controversial negative emissions technology, according to a study published in Nature.
"The window for limiting warming to below 1.5C with high probability and without temporarily exceeding that level already seems to have closed," the report found.
It is a blow for those living near the coast of Bangladesh or low-lying islands like Kiribati, which is preparing for an exodus as rising seas swallow homes.
Coral reefs dying and tropical heatwaves are also expected to kick in at moderate levels of global warming, affecting millions of people worldwide.
In the most up-to-date analysis available, researchers found national climate pledges were consistent with temperature rise of 2.6-3.1C above pre-industrial levels.
Some poorer nations said they could cut greenhouse gas emissions further with financial support. These conditional targets would cool the planet a further 0.2C.
That still leaves a lot of work to bend the curve to "well below 2C", the main Paris goal.
Lead author Joeri Rogelj, at the Vienna-based International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, stressed the importance of periodic reviews.
"The grain of hope for these most vulnerable nations is that the Paris Agreement provides a regular forum where ambition can be increased," he told Climate Home.
Governments meet for a "facilitative dialogue" in 2018 and a stocktake in 2023. These provide opportunities to ratchet up their commitment.
The grim numbers do not rule out eventually bringing average temperatures back below 1.5C, but this will involve sucking carbon dioxide out of the air.
This d bioenergy with carbon capture and storage: growing plants to absorb CO2, burning them for energy and pumping the emissions underground.
Bioenergy is contentious because it puts energy crops in competition with food production for land, water and nutrients.
"It is a really important precondition to do this in a sustainable and a just way," said Rogelj, adding: "The faster one cuts emissions, the less one relies on these massive negative emissions afterwards to clean up the atmosphere."
The 1.5C threshold is still important and should not be dropped, he said. "The 1.5C limit is an expression of a risk assessment of dangerous climate interference. Even if we overshoot… the validity of that limit is still there."

Links

• Is avoiding 2C of global warming possible?
• Global warming 'slowdown' did not exist, say scientists
• Global warming 'hard to reverse' say scientists
• Rhetoric or reality? Climate scientists divided on 1.5C warming goal
• Activists row over bioenergy role in meeting 1.5C climate target

The Climate Change Letter Most Candidates Won't Answer

Fairfax - Fiona Stanley*

I recently wrote to more than 1000 candidates in the federal election.
I described how climate change is a real and growing threat requiring urgent attention, and that health professionals are seeing its impacts in medical practice right now and will be increasingly in the future.
The results distressed me.
More than 100 independent candidates and those from virtually all minor parties and Greens responded to me with comments that were often constructive and extensive.
There was only one individual response from a Labor Party candidate, and a courteous response from Labor campaign headquarters detailing official Labor policy.
No Liberal Party candidate acknowledged my letter and there was no official response.
Doctors' organisations such as Doctors for the Environment Australia, the AMA and the Royal Australasian College of Physicians are pleading for action on climate change, yet our governments are ignoring their advice.

Much of Queensland has been declared drought-affected. Photo: Glenn Campbell

Margaret Chan, director-general of the World Health Organisation, explained why we need our political leaders to act when she addressed the 69th World Health Assembly last month:

As the international community enters the era of sustainable development, the global health landscape is being shaped by three slow-motion disasters: a changing climate, the failure of more and more mainstay antimicrobials and the rise of chronic non-communicable diseases as the leading killers worldwide. These are not natural disasters. They are man-made disasters created by policies that place economic interests above concerns about the well-being of human lives and the planet that sustains them.

Australia is already experiencing more and severe weather events, which include damaging fires and environmental catastrophes, while Australia's capital cities are experiencing hotter, longer and more frequent heatwaves.
In Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane respectively, heatwaves now start on average 19, 17 and eight days earlier. Worldwide, more communities are ravaged by drought, flood and storm.
The public is justifiably concerned about the threat of climate change.  A recent Galaxy poll showed Australians' interest in this issue is at its greatest since the 2008 election.
And yet Australian greenhouse emissions are presently 110 per cent of 2000 levels, testifying to the failure of policy over 15 years, and we are among the highest emitters per person in the world.
To bring about the urgent reduction of dangerous greenhouse emissions, in my letter to candidates I asked them to support:

1. The NO case for new coalmines or mine expansions.
If global warming is to stay below the 2 degrees Celsius target agreed by policy makers, a third of oil reserves, half of gas reserves and more than 80 per cent of current coal reserves globally need to stay in the ground.
Yet in Australia more coal is being burned, causing a 6 per cent increase in our emissions.
Furthermore, in Australia this year air pollution from burning coal will contribute to 3000 deaths (double the road toll), and significant illness from heart and lung disease.

2. The removal of tax rebates of more than $7 billion a year to the fossil fuel industry. 
In my view this is like subsidising tobacco.
It would be unconscionable for either party to give subsidies to the tobacco industry. The same must apply to fossil fuels.
The direct health, social and environmental costs of coal are considerable and not included in the market cost of coal.
As one example, the large power stations in Victoria's Latrobe Valley cost between $500 million to $1.2 billion each in health and environmental damage every year.

3. The transition to renewable energy.
Currently in Australia renewable energy creation is stagnating.
We have the ability to lead the world in the transition from the health hazards of air polluting coal to healthy renewable energy, which is fast becoming a cost-effective option.
Like many parents and grandparents today, I want to help shape a future in which the next generation can flourish.
However, I now consider that we are moving to a world that I would not wish future generations to live in.
Without robust action, future generations can expect deadly heatwaves, fires, floods, sea level rises, fields that no longer grow food, abandoned towns, conflict, displaced people, and diseases.
We must all stand together and call our political leaders to account. Action on climate is our insurance policy against an uncertain future.

*Professor Fiona Stanley is a former Australian of the year, a distinguished research professor at The University of Western Australia, vice-chancellor's fellow at The University of Melbourne and a member of Doctors for the Environment Australia.

Wind And Solar PV Have Won The Race – It’s Too Late For Other Clean Energy Technologies

The Conversation - Andrew Blakers

Solar photovoltaics, along with wind energy, now represent the bulk of new Australian energy. AAP Image/ARENA

Across the world, solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind are the dominant clean energy technologies. This dominance is likely to become overwhelming over the next few years, preventing other clean energy technologies (including carbon capture and storage, nuclear and other renewables) from growing much.
As the graph below shows, PV and wind constitute half of new generation capacity installed worldwide, with fossil, nuclear, hydro and all other renewable energy sources making up the other half. In Australia this dominance is even clearer, with PV and wind constituting virtually all new generation capacity.
Moreover, this trend is set to continue. Wind and PV installation rates grew by 19% in 2015 worldwide, while rates for other technologies were static or declined.



PV and wind dominate because they have already achieved commercial scale, are cheap (and set to get cheaper), and are not constrained by fuel availability, environmental considerations, construction materials, water supply, or security issues.
In fact, PV and wind now have such a large head start that no other low-emission generation technology has a reasonable prospect of catching them. Conventional hydro power cannot keep pace because each country will sooner or later run out of rivers to dam, and biomass availability is severely limited.
Heroic growth rates would be required for nuclear, carbon capture and storage, concentrating solar thermal, ocean energy and geothermal to span the 20- to 200-fold difference in annual installation scale to catch wind and PV – which are themselves growing rapidly.
Both wind and PV access massive economies of scale. Their ability to saturate national electricity markets around the world severely constrains other low-emission technologies. Some of the other technologies may become significant in some regions, but these will essentially be niche markets, such as geothermal in Iceland, or hydro power in Tasmania.
Around 80% of the energy sector could be electrified in the next two decades, including electrification of land transport (vehicles and public transport) and electric heat pumps for heat production. This will further increase opportunities for PV and wind, and allows for the elimination of two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions (based upon sectoral breakdown of national emissions data).

Storage and integration
What about the oft-cited problems with the variable nature of photovoltaics and wind energy? Fortunately, there is range of solutions that can help them achieve high levels of grid penetration.
While individual PV and wind generators can have very variable outputs, the combined output of thousands of generators is in fact quite predictable when coupled with good weather forecasting and smoothed out over a wide area.
What's more, PV and wind often produce power under different weather conditions – storms favour wind, whereas calm conditions are often sunny. Rapid improvements in high-voltage DC transmission allows large amounts of power to be transmitted cheaply and efficiently over thousands of kilometres, meaning that the impact of local weather is less important.
Another option is "load management", in which power demands for things like domestic and commercial water heating, and household and electric car battery charging, are moved from night time to day to coincide with availability of sun and wind. Existing hydro and gas or biogas generators, operated for just a small fraction of the year, can also help.
Finally, mass power storage is already available in the form of pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), in which surplus energy is used to pump water uphill to a storage reservoir, which is then released through a turbine to recover around 80% of the stored energy later on. This technology constitutes 99% of electricity storage worldwide and is overwhelmingly dominant in terms of new storage capacity installed each year (3.4 Gigawatts in 2015).
Australia already has several PHES facilities, such as Wivenhoe near Brisbane and Tumut 3 in the Snowy Mountains. All of these are at least 30 years old, but more can be built to accommodate the storage needs of new wind and PV capacity. Modelling underway at the Australian National University shows that reservoirs containing enough water for only 3-8 hours of grid operation is sufficient to stabilise a grid with about 90% PV and wind – mostly to shift daytime solar power for use at night.
This would require only a few hundred hectares of reservoirs for the Australian grid, and could be accomplished by building a series of "off-river" pumped hydro storages. Unlike conventional "on-river" hydro power, off-river PHES requires pairs of hectare-scale reservoirs, rather like oversized farm dams, located in steep, hilly, farm country, separated by an altitude difference of 200-1000 metres, and joined by a pipe containing a pump and turbine.
One example is the proposed Kidston project in an old gold mine in north Queensland. In these systems water goes around a closed loop, they consume very little water (evaporation minus rainfall), and have a much smaller environmental impact than river-based systems.

How renewables can dominate Australian energy
In Australia, if wind and PV continue at the installation rate required to reach the 2020 renewable energy target (about 1 GW per year each), we would hit 50% renewable electricity by 2030. This rises to 80% if the installation rates double to 2 GW per year each under a more ambitious renewable energy target – the barriers to which are probably more political than technological.
PV and wind will be overwhelmingly dominant in the renewable energy transition because there isn't time for another low-emission technology to catch them before they saturate the market.



Wind, PV, PHES, HVDC and heat pumps are proven renewable energy solutions in large-scale deployment (100-1,000 GW installed worldwide for each). These technologies can drive rapid and deep cuts to the energy sector's greenhouse emissions without any heroic assumptions.
Apart from a modest contribution from existing hydroelectricity, other low-emission technologies are unlikely to make significant contributions in the foreseeable future.

Links

• We're set to hit our renewable energy targets – now let's aim higher
• The Greens' plan for 90% renewables by 2030 sounds hard, but it stacks up
• Pumped hydro energy storage – making better use of wind
• How pushing water uphill can solve our renewable energy issues

National Geographic: Climate Change Photographs

National Geographic

Addicted to the 'black stuff'. Heather Levingstone

Fossil Fuel Galore: Aerial image of the largest oil field in California. Jassen T.

Focusing on Climate Change. Duey Moore

Climate changes and us. Debrup Chatterjee

Record Rainfall. Derek Mountney

Pray For Rain. Claudio Flores Fuentes

Drought. Aditya Waikul

Swallowed by the sea. Marcelo Martins