19/10/2016

We’re Placing Far Too Much Hope In Pulling Carbon Dioxide Out Of The Air, Scientists Warn

Washington Post - Chelsea Harvey

In this July 1, 2013 photo, smoke rises from the Colstrip Steam Electric Station, a coal-burning power plant in Colstrip, Mont. (Matthew Brown/Associated Press)
In  the past decade, an ambitious — but still mostly hypothetical — technological strategy for meeting our global climate goals has grown prominent in scientific discussions. Known as “negative emissions,” the idea is to remove carbon dioxide from the air using various technological means, a method that could theoretically buy the world more time when it comes to reducing our overall greenhouse-gas emissions.
Recent models of future climate scenarios have assumed that this technique will be widely used in the future. Few have explored a world in which we can keep the planet’s warming within at least a 2-degree temperature threshold without the help of negative-emission technologies. But some scientists are arguing that this assumption may be a serious mistake.
In a new opinion paper, published Thursday in the journal Science, climate experts Kevin Anderson of the University of Manchester and Glen Peters of the Center for International Climate and Environmental Research have argued that relying on the uncertain concept of negative emissions as a fix could lock the world into a severe climate-change pathway.
“[If] we behave today like we’ve got these get-out-of-jail cards in the future, and then in 20 years we discover we don’t have this technology, then you’re already locked into a higher temperature level,” Peters said.
Many possible negative-emission technologies have been proposed, from simply planting more forests (which act as carbon sinks) to designing chemical reactions that physically take the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere. The technology most widely included in the models is known as bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage, or BECCS.
In a BECCS scenario, plants capture and store carbon while they grow — removing it from the atmosphere, in other words — and then are harvested and used for fuel to produce energy. These bioenergy plants will be outfitted with a form of technology known as carbon capture, which traps carbon dioxide emissions before they make it into the atmosphere. The carbon dioxide can then be stored safely deep underground. Even more carbon is then captured when the plants grow back again.

The idea sounds like a win-win on paper, allowing for both the removal of carbon dioxide and the production of energy. But while more than a dozen pilot-scale BECCS projects exist around the world, only one large-scale facility currently operates. And scientists have serious reservations about the technology’s viability as a global-scale solution.
First, the sheer amount of bioenergy fuel required to suit the models’ assumptions already poses a problem, Peters told The Washington Post. Most of the models assume a need for an area of land at least the size of India, he said, which prompts the question of whether this would reduce the area available for food crops or force additional deforestation, which would produce more carbon emissions.
When it comes to carbon capture and storage, the technology has been used already in at least 20 plants around the world, not all of them devoted to bioenergy. In fact, carbon capture and storage can be applied in all kinds of industrial facilities, including coal-burning power plants or oil and natural gas refineries. But the technology has so far failed to take off.
“Ten years ago, if you looked at the International Energy Agency, they were saying by now there would be hundreds of CCS plants around the world,” Peters said. “And each year the IEA has had to revise their estimates down. So CCS is one of those technologies that just never lives up to expectations.”
This is largely a market problem, according to Howard Herzog, a senior research engineer and carbon capture expert at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“There’s no doubt you can do it,” he said. “We have coal plants that do CCS, you can have biomass that can do CCS — the technology’s not a big deal. The question is the economics.”
Because it’s more expensive to produce energy with carbon capture than without it, there’s little incentive for the private sector to invest in the technology without a more aggressive policy push toward curtailing emissions, he pointed out. A carbon price, for instance, would be one way of creating a market for the technology.
It’s not that the modelers have no reason for incorporating BECCS so heavily, though. Over a long enough time period, and at the scale needed to make a dent in our global climate goals — especially assuming a high enough carbon price in the future — it may be the cheapest mitigation technology, Peters said. But this may not be enough for policymakers to invest in its advancement now.
“Decision-makers today don’t optimize over the whole century,” he said. “They’re not asking: What technology can I put in place now to make a profit in 100 years? So the sort of strategic thinking in the model is different from strategic thinking in practice.”
Additionally, the models that are commonly relied on to project future climate and technological scenarios assume that the CCS technique works perfectly within the next few decades, when it’s only just emerging.
“The models don’t have technical challenges; they don’t run into engineering problems; the models don’t have cost overruns,” Peters said. “Everything works as it should work in the model.”
The bottom line, he and Anderson note in their paper, is that all these assumptions make for a huge gamble. If policymakers decide we’re going to meet our climate goals only with the aid of negative-emission technologies, and then these technologies fail us in the future, we will already be locked into a high-temperature climate scenario.
In this light, the authors write, “negative-emission technologies should not form the basis of the mitigation agenda.” Indeed, they conclude, nations should proceed as though these technologies will fail, focusing instead on aggressive emissions-reduction policies for the present, such as the continued expansion of renewable energy sources.
Other scientists agree. Daniel Kammen, an energy professor at the University of California in Berkeley and director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory, has published several recent papers on BECCS technology, and agrees that it is “nowhere near ready to be considered a component of a viable carbon reduction strategy.”
“The paper is right,” he continued in an emailed comment to The Washington Post. “A run to endorse BECCS as a key component of the needed 80 percent or greater decarbonization we need by 2050 is unproven, premature and potentially costly. It is worth research, but has a ways to go before it can enter the realm of a solutions science for climate change.”
Herzog also agreed that “the focus of today should be on mitigation as opposed to worrying about negative emissions sometime in the future.” In the future, he said, as we approach the end of our decarbonization schemes, negative emissions could still have a place when it comes to offsetting carbon from those last activities it’s most difficult or most expensive to decarbonize.
But Herzog added that, in his opinion, we’ve likely already overshot a 2-degree temperature threshold, to say nothing of the more ambitious 1.5-degree target described in the Paris climate agreement. At the very least, he noted, a reliance on renewables alone would be unlikely to get us there, if it were still possible. Indeed, multiple recent analyses have suggested that the combined pledges of individual countries participating in the Paris Agreement — very few of which have even considered negative emissions — still fall short of our temperature goals.
“I think what you’re going to see in the long run is a mix of technologies coming in to help solve the problem,” he said. “You need a mix of renewables, efficiency, nuclear, CCS, lifestyle changes — just a whole litany.”

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Climate Change Is Burning Up Australia: Are We Losing The Battle?

Engineering and Technology - Amy Spurling

 We may ‘muddle through’ and adapt to climate change, but the latest disturbing news from Australia shows that it may be too late to save some of its ancient wonders, like Tasmania’s prehistoric forest and Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef.
On  28 September, the entire state of South Australia lost power. Severe storms brought down pylons, lightning hit generators, wind turbines had to stop and the whole SA power system, including back-ups, went into auto shut-down, leaving 1.7 million people in the dark. Then another struggle began. Australia’s climate change policies came under the spotlight and it seemed they were diverging. South Australia’s impressive 41 per cent power generation from renewables was called into question by the federal government. Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull spoke of the intermittency of solar and wind power and said that although emission targets were important, energy security should come first.
This was echoed by the environment and energy minister, Josh Frydenberg, who wants to bring other states’ “unrealistic” renewable-generation targets into line with the federal one: from 15 per cent to 23.5 per cent by 2020; compared to Victoria - from 12 per cent to 40 per cent by 2025, Queensland - from 4.5 per cent to 50 per cent by 2030 and SA’s target of 50 per cent by 2025.
Meanwhile,  SA’s Labour-party premier Jay Weatherill said that the blackout was due to weather and not renewables; any source of energy would have failed.
Frydenberg has conceded that renewable energy was probably not to blame, but has called for an inquiry.
Earlier in September, two board members from the advisory Climate Change Authority criticised a report produced by their colleagues, saying that stronger measures were needed to cut emissions than the  government target of 26-28 per cent by 2030. Frydenberg responded that others on the board agreed with the report and there would be five-year reviews in order to keep within the 2°C target agreed at the 2015 Paris climate conference.
In August, well-known scientist Professor Brian Cox came face-to-face with Queensland senator Malcolm Roberts on Australia’s ABC television ‘Q&A’ panel programme. Roberts, who represents the nationalist, right-wing One Nation party, has a background in coal mining and is a climate change sceptic. When Cox produced a global-warming graph to show temperature increase and its human correlation, the senator blamed  manipulated data, citing Nasa as a culprit. “Nasa?” exclaimed an incredulous Cox.
Before that, a new and controversial chief executive of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) - the federal government agency for scientific research in Australia - downsized CSIRO’s climate science group. About a week before the ‘Q&A’ broadcast, the new science minister reinstated CSIRO’s climate change focus and some of the jobs, but the balance has still not been fully redressed.
In January, around 11,000 hectares (110km2) of Cretaceous World Heritage Area forest was lost to fires in Tasmania. “The survival of these ecosystems is truly in doubt, just like the Barrier Reef is under threat from climate change,” warns Professor David Bowman of the University of Tasmania. So can the Great Barrier Reef survive, what is the future for Tasmania’s prehistoric forest, how is Australia being affected by climate change in general and how should it cope?
According to a 2011 Climate Change report by CSIRO, temperatures in Australia have risen by 1°C from 1910 to 2009 and 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record. CO2 is increasing by two parts per million (ppm) per year, due to the burning of fossil fuels, deforestation and industrial activity.
Yet in 2013, Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s government (a conservative Liberal-National Party coalition) abolished the Climate Commission. Like a phoenix out of the global-warming flames, the commission crowd-funded itself and is still alive today as the Climate Council.
Commission chairman Tim Flannery now heads the Council. Flannery is former director of the South Australian Museum and is involved in conservation, sits on sustainability boards and writes and broadcasts for the world’s press. He is unenthused about Australia’s emission reduction targets. “I’ve lost interest and lost track,” he says. “All the indications are that we won’t make even modest targets. Policies are not adequate.”
In 2014, the same Tony Abbott abolished Labour’s carbon tax, which had been having an effect, says Flannery. However, Abbott’s successor, Malcolm Turnbull, has reversed a plan to disband the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
Australia has high per capita energy use. Fossil fuel is cheap and transport distances are large, so how much of Australia’s energy comes from it? About 77 per cent, thinks Flannery, though a number of mines have shut down or are in receivership. However, a giant new coal mine could still be built in Queensland, which will produce enough coal for 100 million people to have electricity. Yet he is cautiously optimistic that coal will become less dominant, saying that economic forces are changing its profitability.
Jeff Angel heads The Total Environment Centre (TEC) lobbying and campaign group. Part of a recent TEC campaign showed a battered plastic bottle lounging in a fishtank. It is labelled ‘Kindergratus abandoni’. The label goes on to detail its lifespan of 100-1,000 years, its behaviour - washed out to sea - followed by a list of its pollutants. You could even be ingesting some of those pollutants in the fish you eat. The campaign, Ocean Action Pod, was made to raise awareness in schools.
Angel thinks it is important to control land clearing if we want to keep emissions under control. A Labour government tends to put more rigorous controls in place, he says, whereas the current coalition of conservative Liberals and the farmer-representing National Party winds them back. He agrees with Flannery that fossil fuels will have diminishing influence and thinks climate sceptics are dwindling, too.
Amongst the 11,000 hectares of World Heritage Area that was burnt down this year was “a temperate wilderness with plants and animals that were more widespread in geological time,” including living fossil species and whole ecological communities. Professor Bowman describes it as a region of extraordinary beauty with “a cultural history dating over 35,000 years”.
Bowman is professor of environmental change biology at the School of Plant Science at the University of Tasmania. He describes himself as a pyrogeographer - someone who studies the geographical spread of fire - with an interest in “how people use and abuse fire and how this affects the environment.”
Tasmania is particularly vulnerable to climate change, Bowman says, because it has unique vegetation that depends on moist, cool conditions. Yet, he warns, “the climate is becoming increasingly variable with more extreme floods, winds and droughts...fires are increasingly destructive due to strong winds and dryness.” He goes on to say that floods on burnt ground then cause “erosion and destructive flooding - with bridges and roads being washed away.” So how much longer can Tasmania’s prehistoric forest survive under current trends?
Seven years ago, a former chief scientist of Australia’s Institute of Marine Science, Dr John Charlie Veron, gave a talk in London, where he was introduced by David Attenborough as a modern-day Charles Darwin. His talk was called ‘Is the Great Barrier Reef on Death Row?’
In fact, Veron was first nicknamed Charlie after Darwin when he was six years old. More recently, he has been called the godfather of coral. In between, Veron has done a lot of diving (about 6,000 hours) and got higher degrees in reptilian physiology, insect neurobiology and coral taxonomy. He was the first full-time Great Barrier Reef researcher, has named about a quarter of the world’s coral species and has mapped them all.
Why are the corals on death row? As it stands, the main threats to them are mass bleaching caused by warming temperatures, more crown-of-thorns starfish consuming coral (because of increased nutrients and decreased predators) and sediment in the water. When sea temperatures rise and the water quality is low, marine algae called zooxanthellae start to deplete. It is these that gives the coral its energy and colour - so now the coral begins to starve.
This is our last chance, as reefs cannot be artificially conserved elsewhere. Veron says they are ecosystems. Although about A$1bn of government money is being invested over the next 10 years, mainly for clean energy, improving water quality and tackling the starfish threat, Veron says that climate change was completely omitted from the coalition’s election platform.
Flannery dived on the Reef earlier this year. “Catastrophe,” he comments. “It was still bleaching in July [Australian winter] - the temperature was 27°C and it was supposed to be 25°C.”
The CSIRO report states it is “increasingly likely that the level of global warming will exceed that 2°C threshold of ‘dangerous’ climate change.”
For Australia, Dr David Jones, manager of climate monitoring and prediction at the Bureau of Meteorology, says the amount of future warming will depend on greenhouse gas emissions, with low emissions producing a rise of 1-2°C by 2100, while high emissions could potentially result in warming of more than 4°C. The warming trend will be faster inland than nearer the coast, he adds.
Yet the coast will have other problems. John Church, a sea-level expert and one of the senior scientists let go from CSIRO, said in The Sydney Morning Herald that “with unmitigated emissions we will be in for metres of sea-level rise in the longer term...The only issue is how quickly we get there.” As he points out, Australia has a population concentrated along the coast.
Flannery predicts rainfall increase in the north-west of Australia, with decrease in the south and east. CSIRO predicts more extreme rainfall, storms and floods, more fire, more coastal erosion and loss of plant and animal species. There will also be less water security and wheat quality and quantity. So what are the choices? Adaptation or reduction?
The CSIRO report says that adaptation could include urban greening, heat-resistant transport, drought-tolerant crops, coastal defence, flood-and-fire-tolerant architecture and species management. Energy solutions could be in this order: solar energy, followed by wind (although as this is intermittent, storage options will have to keep up), carbon capture and storage, and biofuels.
Angel says that there is a lot of scope to reduce. “Our most potent weapon is a new energy target, if there is no new fossil fuel baseload.” He describes adaptation as “things get bad and people live with it”. In other words, “people will die, be less healthy and prosperous”. What does he think about carbon capture sinks? Not much, is his brief answer. “Ridiculous expense. Pipelines are needed, energy is required to pump, then online monitoring, ridiculous add-ons etc.”
What about solar panels? Angel says the public has realised that their neighbours with panels aren’t sitting in the dark, but he adds that feed-in tariffs from the Australian government are ending this year. If it is no longer cost-effective to sell to the grid, then on-site storage, i.e. batteries, will have to become more affordable. Angel calls that “the next big energy challenge.”
Flannery gets all his home energy from solar panels. “The cost of solar has reduced 10 per cent per annum year on year,” he notes. But is it too late for individual lifestyle choices? Flannery doesn’t think so, and it’s good to be a conscientious citizen, he says. He urges people to carry on recycling and using ‘bags for life’ and ‘keep cups’.
Angel agrees that it’s always good to change, but he argues that it takes too long to ‘mainstream’ green-conscious behaviour. “I’ve never been a fan of the boutique approach,” he says. “It will take centuries.” Most people are passive supporters “and not everyone has the capacity.” We don’t have that much time, he insists. “Instead, it’s down to the government, and even solar panels are a ‘boutique exercise’ until the government makes them mainstream.” So onward with the vigorous campaigns.
Flannery seems to think that we will adapt somehow. Unbridled growth has slowed. “In the last two years, emissions have flat-lined - that’s the first time that has happened without a recession,” and the ‘population bomb’ has also defused, with birth rates reducing. “I expect that we’ll muddle through, at greater social cost than required.”
While we are adapting or muddling through, what do the experts predict for Tasmania’s ancient forest and Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef?
On an island with weather not unlike that of Great Britain, Bowman predicts that “temperature rise is certain and I expect the intensity of climate variation will increase. Sea level rise will become a bigger issue, with storm surges destroying infrastructure on the coast.”
It is too late for response and recovery, he says. “In reality, the only way to save the wilderness is to decarbonise and stabilise the climate, but I am not optimistic that we can do this quickly enough.” Bowman has three solutions. Firstly, to control invasive plant growth through native or exotic animals (elephants have been suggested). Another idea is the ancient practice of “Aboriginal patch burning”, where fires are deliberate and controlled rather than random, spontaneous and out of control. His last solution is a massive ecological restoration programme, “building repositories, where we save as many of the valuable plants and animals as possible.” This could include husbandry, translocation and storage.
Meanwhile, over in tropical Queensland, what chance is there for the Reef algae to adapt to harsher conditions?
Veron says temperature-tolerant zooxanthellae have adapted in the past, but it has taken thousands of years.  He mentions the same solution over and over: “drastically reducing global CO2 emissions...warming can only be counteracted by lowering CO2... reducing Australia’s role in CO2 emissions”. This does not foresee new coal mines being built. “If [the Carmichael coal mine] goes ahead, which seems increasingly unlikely, it will be the worst thing Australia could possibly do to the Great Barrier Reef.”
Veron believes the Great Barrier Reef is dying and will eventually perish. Mass extinction will be “in full swing by the end of the century,” he believes.
Flannery describes adaptation as natural selection, genetic diversity or death - “mass mortality with only a few surviving species”. Whilst the southern end of the reef has minor bleaching, he says that the Northern Great Barrier Reef is devastated, and this will spread to every reef on the planet “The era of reefs as we know them is finished.”
Only time will tell whether more adverse weather and climate change will defeat this climatically-diverse continent or whether it will win the battle to reduce emissions.

 Australia: Five things that have changed
  1. More days of extreme fire weather - Australian householders are supposed to have a fire evacuation plan in place.
  2. In schools, children aren’t supposed to go out in the hotter months without sun hats. They also wear ‘rashies’, rather like wetsuit T-shirts, on the beach.
  3. Sunscreen is often available free at public events. However, all this ‘slip-​slap-slopping’ and covering up means Vitamin D supplements are often needed.
  4. During the hotter months, different stages of water use can be imposed state by state - e.g. restrictions on garden-watering, topping up pools and sometimes even showering if drought is severe.
  5. Plants are flowering earlier and creatures nesting earlier.
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World's Largest Solar Project Would Generate Electricity 24 Hours a Day, Power 1 Million U.S. Homes

EcoWatch - Lorraine Chow

The race to build the world's largest solar power plant is heating up. California-based energy company SolarReserve announced plans for a massive concentrated solar power (CSP) plant in Nevada that claims to be the largest of its kind once built.
The 110 MW Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant near Tonopah, Nevada was the first utility-scale facility in the world to feature advanced molten salt power tower technology. The developer wants to build 10 more of these at an undisclosed location in Nevada. SolarReserve
SolarReserve CEO Kevin Smith told the Las Vegas Review-Journal that the $5 billion endeavor would generate between 1,500 and 2,000 megawatts of power, enough to power about 1 million homes. That amount of power is as much as a nuclear power plant, or the 2,000-megawatt Hoover Dam and far bigger than any other existing solar facility on Earth, the Review-Journal pointed out.
"It's a big project," Smith told the publication. "It's an ambitious project."
SolarReserve's Sandstone project involves at least 100,000 mirrored heliostats that capture the sun's rays and concentrates it onto 10 towers equipped with a molten salt energy storage system. The molten salt, heated to more than 1,000 degrees, then boils water and creates a steam turbine that can drive generators 24/7.
Compared to photovoltaic arrays, the appeal of CSP systems is that solar power can be used after sunset.
"It's really the ability to provide renewable energy that's available on demand 24 hours a day," Smith told NPR.
SolarReserve already operates a CSP plant near Tonopah, a revolutionary 110-megawatt Crescent Dunes Solar Energy Plant that's now powering Nevada homes. The company says on its website that this "completely emission free" CSP plant runs without the requirement for natural gas or oil back up.
"Energy storage provides a firm, reliable electricity product on-demand, day and night," SolarReserve says, adding that the plant "helps meet growing demand for clean, renewable energy sources."
Smith told the Review-Journal that Sandstone construction probably won't begin for another two or three years. Once construction begins, Smith estimated the project should create about 3,000 jobs for about seven years.
He said the company will also have to build a new transmission infrastructure to carry the energy to market, and the generated power will likely will be "exported to the California market."
SolarReserve is narrowing down project sites for its 6,500-hectare project. Smith said two potential sites on federal land in Nye County have been shortlisted. However, as NPR reported, environmentalists such as Solar Done Right's Janine Blaeloch are concerned about the environmental impact of such a project.
"It transforms habitats and public lands into permanent industrial zones," she told the radio station.
Listen here:
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18/10/2016

Climate Change Will Change How We Grow Food

National Geographic - Daniel Stone

The world's leading agriculture organization sounds an urgent alarm as temperatures climb and water use is expected to rise.
Farmers worldwide are entering a period of increasing uncertainty as climate change compromises food production in areas already sensitive to food insecurity, a new report from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization cautions. And the group predicted to be most affected will be women.
The annual report by the FAO, the top global collector of data on global food and farming trends, ties together poverty, hunger, and climate change to persuade governments to adopt policy changes that will protect farmers of the future. The 2016 edition of The State of Food and Agriculture urges countries to help their farmers rely less on natural resources and to find ways to use water and fertilizer more efficiently.
"We need to make major changes in the way we produce food and manage agricultural systems," says Rob Vos, director of agricultural economics for the Food and Agriculture Organization. "Climate change is already affecting many parts of the world, particularly in Africa and many tropical areas. If we don't make the systems involved in agriculture more resilient, food security will be in jeopardy."
2016 data showing countries most vulnerable to food insecurity due to climate change. MAP BY FAO
All farmers will be affected by global changes, but the FAO says the impact on women will be the most dramatic. Female farmers account for 43 percent of agricultural workers in developing countries, yet they face substantial disadvantages compared to men, including disproportionally high demands on their time to run a home, paltry access to agricultural tools and methods, and limitations in the credit markets that allow others to remain nimble in the face of environmental changes. Women worldwide tended to invest less money in things that might make their farms more productive.
"The obstacles that confront women farmers mean that they achieve lower yields than their male counterparts," an FAO dossier on Women and Agriculture reported in 2011, the last time the organization comprehensively studied female farmers. "Yet women are as good at farming as men. Solid empirical evidence shows that if women farmers used the same level of resources as men on the land they farm, they would achieve the same yield levels."
Researchers point to particular risk for countries the UN describes as "developing"—those with little access to the farming technology that makes climate change a less daunting foe in wealthier countries. But it warns that warming temperatures and less predictable rainfall are expected to hurt agriculture on every continent. (For more on how this affects African nations, see How African Farmers Face a Warming Climate.)
In North America, yields of major crops, including corn and soybeans, will decline modestly through 2050, followed by a steeper decline by 2100, the report says. The stress of higher heat and reduced quality of forage for livestock is projected to reduce milk quality. South America may see higher wheat and soybean productivity, thanks to higher temperatures, but increased salinity will yield more desert zones in parts of Brazil and Chile that now support a good deal of those countries’ crops.
Scientists expect areas in Europe and Asia to benefit from thawing polar regions that will open new arable land, yet higher temperatures will increase demand for water and cause substantial drop-offs in rice yields over large areas of these continents. Likewise, in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands, farmers will face extended seasons of heavy rain and parching drought.
The continent most at risk is Africa, largely a result of fragmented food systems, high poverty, and government instability. Progress that several countries have made on food security and crop diversity may be undone when those crops, such as maize and rice, are unsuited for a warmer world, and when farmers don't have the money or resources to make investments in new seeds, farming methods, or equipment.
Amid the report's urgent warnings and cautionary suggestions is also some good news. FAO officials say that India and Kenya as examples of countries making the right moves. Both countries are at high risk for climate disaster, but the Indian government has implemented policies to help its farmers diversify their farm production, as well as directly empowered women. In one community project in the Indian state of Maharashtra, builders installed new sources of drinking water and firewood, which reduced the amount of time women spent collecting both.
The worst-case scenarios of climate change could erode much of this progress, however, causing India and Kenya's agricultural sectors to slide back into "developing" status. Officials use this fact to underscore the urgency of instituting smart agriculture practices immediately.
No  country will be inoculated from the harsh impacts of climate change. Every place on Earth trying to feed a growing population an increasingly diverse diet—which is to say, every country—will find significant challenges posed by warming temperatures, even if changes turn out to be modest.
The United States will face its share of challenges. But it is one of the best equipped nations for agricultural adaptation considering its widespread availability of seeds, technology, and weather monitoring systems. A 2015 study from Carnegie Mellon University found that for the U.S. to grow more fruits and vegetables over the next several decades, it would need to increase its energy use by 38 percent, its water by 10 percent. This would also result in an increase in greenhouse gas emissions by six percent.
On top of adapting to climate change, farmers will also face new demands to to meet changing nutrition standards, while at the same time reducing environmental impact of their activities. Individual farmers can do their part, but the lasting solution, FAO officials say, will come from governments. “There are a number of compounding factors that come together," says Vos. "If those factors can be addressed all together, they can drive big changes for everyone."

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Solar Delivers Cheapest Electricity ‘Ever, Anywhere, By Any Technology’

Think Progress - Dr Joe Romm

Half the price of coal!
Chile exceeded 1000 Megawatts of solar this year. CREDIT: ACERA.
Chile has just contracted for the cheapest unsubsidized power plant in the world, Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) reports.
In last week’s energy auction, Chile accepted a bid from Spanish developer Solarpack Corp. Tecnologica for 120 megawatts of solar at the stunning price of $29.10 per megawatt-hour (2.91 cents per kilowatt-hour or kwh). This beats the 2.99 cents/kwh bid Dubai received recently for 800 megawatts. For context, the average residential price for electricity in the United States is 12 cents per kilowatt-hour.
“Solar power delivers cheapest unsubsidised electricity ever, anywhere, by any technology,” BNEF Chair Michael Liebreich said on Twitter after this contract was announced.
Carlos Finat, head of the Chilean Renewable Energies Association (ACERA) told Bloomberg that the auction is “a strong warning sign that the energy business continues on the transition path to renewable power and that companies should adapt quickly to this transition process.” Indeed, in the same auction, the price of coal power was nearly twice as high!
Grid-connected solar power on Chile has quadrupled since 2013. Total installed capacity exceeded 1,000 megawatts this year — the most by far in South America. Another 2,000 megawatts is under construction, and there are over 11,000 megawatts that are “RCA Approved” (i.e. have environmental permits).

Chile is aided by the fact that its Atacama desert is “the region with the highest solar radiation on the planet,” according to the Inter-American Development Bank. So much solar is being built in the high-altitude desert that Northern Chile can’t use it all, and the government is rushing to build new transmission lines.
Chile is part of a global trend where solar energy has doubled seven times since 2000. In the U.S. alone, it has grown 100-fold in the past decade thanks to a sharp drop in prices that has brought the cost of solar (with subsidies) to under four cents a kilowatt hour in many places, as I detailed last month.
The future for solar could not be sunnier.

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Mass-Produced, Printable Solar Cells Enter Market And Could Change Everything

Minds - Alternative World News Network

Australian solar power experts making up the Victorian Organic Solar Cell Consortium have developed and begun to market solar cells that are created with a 3D printer.
The group,  consisting of scientists from the CSIRO, the University of Melbourne and Monash University have been working on the technology for over seven years and have figured out a way to cheaply print the panels onto plastic, including smart-phones and laptops, enabling self charging electronics.  They are also able to print directly on to walls and windows using an opaque solar film and claim that they can line a skyscraper with panels, making it totally electrically self sufficient.
"We print them onto plastic in more or less the same way we print our plastic banknotes," said Fiona Scholes, senior research scientist at CSIRO. "Connecting our solar panels is as simple as connecting a battery. It’s very cheap. The way in which it looks and works is quite different to conventional silicon rooftop solar."
The next step is to create a solar spray coating to enhance the power of the panel.  "We would like to improve the efficiency of solar panels - we need to develop solar inks to generate more energy from sunlight,” said Scholes. "We are confident we can push the technology further in the years to come."


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Australia Takes Centre Stage On Global Green Climate Funds

Renew Economy - 

Howard Bamsey, Executive Director, $100 billion Green Climate Fund
The political rhetoric about climate and clean energy in the domestic market may suggest Australia is making huge leaps backwards, but things are looking a little different on the international arena.
Over the weekend, long-serving Canberra bureaucrat Howard Bamsey was appointed executive director of the $100 billion Green Climate Fund, one of the crucial bodies in international climate finance, and he has been given the role of steering the fund out of its troubled beginnings.
In the meantime, Australia’s biggest investment bank, Macquarie Group, is said to be one of two bidders short-listed to take control of the UK’s Green Investment Bank, a purchase that will be priced at around £4 billion ($A6.5 billion) that would thrust Macquarie centre stage in the private green finance market.
The two developments suggest that Australia is not totally immune to, or divorced from, international developments on climate change and renewables energy, which are now moving at rapid speed.
Over the weekend, a crucial agreement was reached to reduce emissions from hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) – a particularly potent greenhouse gas – by 85 per cent at the Montreal Protocol meeting held in Kigali, Rwanda.
The move, hailed by the Coalition government, is expected to knock 0.5°C off anticipated global temperature rises, and comes as Australia is rushing to ratify the Paris agreement before the next major climate talks begin in Marrakesh, Morocco, in just over two weeks.
The Paris agreement has been ratified by more than 60 countries representing more than 60 per cent of global emissions, meaning it will come into force in the next few weeks, four years earlier than anticipated when the deal was reached last December.
Australia’s ratification – if it occurs before the Marrakesh meeting – will mean that it can play a key role in talks designed about how to bring that pact into force, notably setting the platform for countries to increase their climate targets over and above those that were brought to the table in Paris.
As it is, Australia will face tough questioning over its Paris commitments before and during the Marrakesh talks, with UN parties posing a list of difficult questions over its targets and commitments, just as it did two years ago in the lead up to Paris.
It is understood that both foreign minister Julie Bishop and energy and environment minister Josh Frydenberg will attend the Marrakesh talks.
But there are other signs – apart from the appointment of Bamsey and indirectly the interest of Macquarie, that Australia may be developing one language on climate change for the international stage and another for the toxic and partisan domestic market.
While the local rhetoric has focused on “cost and security” on domestic energy policy, Turnbull last week acknowledged that Australia’s Paris climate commitment will also be a major factor.
“We need to keep the lights on. We need energy to be affordable—not the most expensive in Australia, as it is in South Australia. And we need to meet our emissions reduction target,” Turnbull said in Question Time. Analysts say that last phrase in important.
This is the missing link between the Coalition’s attack on South Australia and other Labor states renewable energy targets, and the shortfall between its own policies and its Paris commitments.
And on that point, the language around next year’s review of climate policies has also subtlety changed, moving on from a mere “sit rep” – situation report where current policies are merely assessed – to a likely review of what new policies may actually be needed to meet those Paris targets.
The appointment of Bamsey, however, suggests Australia remains kean to play a prominent role. Bamsey has been one of Australia’s leading climate change negotiators, is a former deputy secretary of the department of climate change, a former special envoy on climate change and a former head of the Australian Greenhouse Office.
He was also on the government’s task force on energy efficiency and notably said, when former prime minister Kevin Rudd signed the Kyoto Treaty in 2007, that it was like “coming up from drowning”.
The GCF is key because it will be the means through which developed countries will funnel finance to the developing world, and is one of the key mechanisms of the Paris deal. It will be Bamsey’s job to convince wealthy countries to honour their commitments,” Climate Change News reported.
So, far the fund has been provided with $US10 billion in donations, and is supposed to act as a distribution point for $100 billion a year by 2020.
But in the year since the fund began approving projects, less than one twentieth of that has been committed and just $US5.4 million has actually been disbursed, leading to concerns in Paris last year that it was dysfunctional.
Bamsey is believed to have won the position ahead of 400 other candidates. Last year, in the Conversation, he wrote that the GCF “must succeed and be seen to succeed to keep developing nations in the game. Otherwise the future of international cooperation on climate change will be in jeopardy.”
Bamsey joins another Australian, Ewen McDonald, who is co-chair of the board.
As for Macquarie, it has has been a relatively active investor in clean energy projects overseas, but renewable energy still accounts for just two per cent of the asset base of its main investment vehicle, the
The GIB was created in 2012 by the UK government to invest in UK-based green infrastructure projects and mobilise private sector capital to co-invest.
It has invested £2.7 billion, and brought together £11 billion in total investment, in offshore wind, energy efficiency, waste and bioenergy, and onshore renewables.

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