Your Food Choices Can Have A Big Climate Impact, So Be Picky, New Study Says

InsideClimate News - Georgina Gustin

A sweeping study of the food chain, from farm to table, singles out choices that can cut greenhouse gas emissions. The biggest impact: switch to a plant-based diet. 

A new study that attempts to calculate the climate impact of foods across the global production system finds big differences, even for the same type of food, depending a variety of things, including how it's produced, packaged and transported. Credit: Andreas Rentz/Getty Images

When it comes to the climate impacts of our diet, it pays to be particular.
One bowl of rice can have six times the climate impact of another. Beer from a bottle can result in more greenhouse gas emissions than beer from a keg. One cup of coffee's carbon footprint may be 15 times bigger than another's. Those are some of the findings in a sweeping study, published Thursday in the journal Science, that looked at the complexities of the world's food and agricultural systems to determine the environmental impacts of food production.
It found that if the world's consumers want to put a genuine dent in greenhouse gas emissions from food production, they should make one choice above all: Switch to a plant-based diet.
The world's food and agricultural systems produce more than a quarter of man-made greenhouse gas emissions, the study notes, and nearly two-thirds of those emissions are linked to animal products. If consumers switched to a plant-based diet — or even cut their consumption of animal products in half — the shift could have substantial environmental benefits.
That's especially true for Americans, who consume about three times more meat per person than the rest of the world.
The authors of the study, from Oxford University and a Swiss government research institute that specializes in life-cycle assessments, attempted to calculate the impact of individual producers across the globe by looking at thousands of studies on the impact of food production, from the farm to the consumer. Ultimately, they focused on 570 studies, covering nearly 39,000 farms and 1,600 processors across 119 countries and 40 products, representing about 90 percent of global calorie and protein consumption.
Research has, for some time, made it clear that a plant-based diet has lower climate impacts than a diet high in animal products. But Joseph Poore, a co-author of the study, said he believes this is the first study to look at the environmental impact of food production throughout the supply chain and across countries. In addition to greenhouse gas emissions, the study also looks at water use, land use, and emissions from acidification and eutrophication — the excess runoff from agricultural fertilizers that starves plant life of oxygen.

Trading Beef for Veggies Slashes Emissions
The researchers found that shifting from current diets to a diet without animal products would cut greenhouse gas emissions by nearly half, or about 6.6 billion metric tons. In the U.S., shifting to a plant-based diet would cut emissions by 620 million metric tons, or about 61 percent of the country's emissions from food. (The figures are based on a reference year of 2010, which was the median average year across all the studies the researchers used.)
Overall, the researchers found that the world's food supply chain in 2010 generated 13.7 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions, about quarter of all man-made emissions. The study found that about 61 percent of the food supply chain's greenhouse gas emissions are linked to the farm. That percentage rises when deforestation, mostly to open up land for feed and cattle-grazing, is factored in.
Meat, aquaculture, eggs and dairy use about 83 percent of the world's farmland and contribute 56 to 58 percent of food-related emissions, though they provide only 18 percent of calories, the study found.

Same Foods Can Have Big Climate Differences
Poore and his co-author, Thomas Nemecek, also determined there can be huge differences between the environmental impact of different samples of the same types of food—something that surprised them.  They attributed the differences to a range of factors, including feed, pasture type, fertilizer use, climatic conditions, transportation, packaging and consumer waste.
"Two products that look the same in the shops can have very different impacts on the planet," Poore explained in an email. "For example, high-impact beef creates 1,100 percent more GHG emissions and uses 4,900 percent more land than low-impact beef." Beef from the Amazon or Indonesia, for example, has a much higher climate impact because forests are razed to graze the cattle.
But the differences between the impact of plant-based food and animal-based food is even higher.
"Even the lowest-impact animal products exceed the impacts of vegetable substitutes," Poore explained. "It will always be better to consume vegetable proteins and milks, rather than trying to purchase sustainable animal products."
He suggested that producers and processors could convey the range of impacts to consumers by labeling foods using low- and high-impact categories.

Climate Choices Come Down to Consumers
Ultimately, the study concludes, consumers will play the biggest role in making choices that reduce the environmental and climate impacts of food.
"Today, and probably into the future, dietary change can deliver environmental benefits on a scale not achievable by producers," the authors write. "Moving from current diets to a diet that excludes animal products has transformative potential."
This week, a new index from the Farm Animal Investment Risk and Return (FAIRR) group finds that more than 70 percent of the world's 60 largest meat and fish producers—representing about one-fifth of the global market—are failing to adequately report their greenhouse gas emissions to investors and the public.

Links

• Avoiding Meat And Dairy Is ‘Single Biggest Way’ To Reduce Your Impact On Earth
• Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study
• Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert
• Meat and fish multinationals 'jeopardising Paris climate goals'
• What is the true cost of eating meat?
• Meat tax ‘inevitable’ to beat climate and health crises, says report
• Proof that sustainable meat and dairy farming can work
• Organic consumers avoiding processed and red meat, sales show
• Meat tax far less unpalatable than government thinks, research finds
• Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert
• Halving meat and dairy consumption could slash farming emissions
• Premature Birth Rates Drop in California After Coal and Oil Plants Shut Down
• Industries Try to Strip Power from Ohio River's Water Quality Commission
• Norfolk Wants to Remake Itself as Sea Level Rises, but Who Will Be Left Behind?
• Scientists Say Ocean Circulation Is Slowing. Here’s Why You Should Care.
• Pruitt’s Defense Fund Draws Ethics Complaint: Critics Call It His ‘Tip Jar’
• Arctic Methane Leaks Go Undetected Because Equipment Can’t Handle the Cold
• Keeping Global Warming to 1.5 Degrees Could Spare Millions Pain of Dengue Fever
• Pruitt’s Anti-Climate Agenda Is Facing New Challenge From Science Advisers
• Fish Species Forecast to Migrate Hundreds of Miles Northward as U.S. Waters Warm
• Pruitt 'Secret Science' Rule: Public Gets More Time for Say as Criticism Grows

Avoiding Meat And Dairy Is ‘Single Biggest Way’ To Reduce Your Impact On Earth

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Biggest analysis to date reveals huge footprint of livestock - it provides just 18% of calories but takes up 83% of farmland

Cattle at an illegal settlement in the Jamanxim National Forest, state of Para, northern Brazil, November 29, 2009. With 1,3 million hectares, the Jamanxim National Forest is today a microsm that replicates what happens in the Amazon, where thousands of hectares of land are prey of illegal woodcutters, stock breeders and gold miners. Photograph: Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images 

Avoiding meat and dairy products is the single biggest way to reduce your environmental impact on the planet, according to the scientists behind the most comprehensive analysis to date of the damage farming does to the planet.
The new research shows that without meat and dairy consumption, global farmland use could be reduced by more than 75% – an area equivalent to the US, China, European Union and Australia combined – and still feed the world. Loss of wild areas to agriculture is the leading cause of the current mass extinction of wildlife.
The new analysis shows that while meat and dairy provide just 18% of calories and 37% of protein, it uses the vast majority – 83% – of farmland and produces 60% of agriculture’s greenhouse gas emissions. Other recent research shows 86% of all land mammals are now livestock or humans. The scientists also found that even the very lowest impact meat and dairy products still cause much more environmental harm than the least sustainable vegetable and cereal growing.

More than 80% of farmland is used for livestock
but it produces just 18% of food calories and 35% of protein

Guardian Graphic | Source: Poore and Nemecek, Science

The study, published in the journal Science, created a huge dataset based on almost 40,000 farms in 119 countries and covering 40 food products that represent 90% of all that is eaten. It assessed the full impact of these foods, from farm to fork, on land use, climate change emissions, freshwater use and water pollution (eutrophication) and air pollution (acidification).
“A vegan diet is probably the single biggest way to reduce your impact on planet Earth, not just greenhouse gases, but global acidification, eutrophication, land use and water use,” said Joseph Poore, at the University of Oxford, UK, who led the research. “It is far bigger than cutting down on your flights or buying an electric car,” he said, as these only cut greenhouse gas emissions.
“Agriculture is a sector that spans all the multitude of environmental problems,” he said. “Really it is animal products that are responsible for so much of this. Avoiding consumption of animal products delivers far better environmental benefits than trying to purchase sustainable meat and dairy.”
The analysis also revealed a huge variability between different ways of producing the same food. For example, beef cattle raised on deforested land result in 12 times more greenhouse gases and use 50 times more land than those grazing rich natural pasture. But the comparison of beef with plant protein such as peas is stark, with even the lowest impact beef responsible for six times more greenhouse gases and 36 times more land.

Beef results in up to 105kg of greenhouse gases

per 100g of meat, while tofu produces less than 3.5kg

Guardian Graphic | Source: Poore and Nemecek, Science

The large variability in environmental impact from different farms does present an opportunity for reducing the harm, Poore said, without needing the global population to become vegan. If the most harmful half of meat and dairy production was replaced by plant-based food, this still delivers about two-thirds of the benefits of getting rid of all meat and dairy production.
Cutting the environmental impact of farming is not easy, Poore warned: “There are over 570m farms all of which need slightly different ways to reduce their impact. It is an [environmental] challenge like no other sector of the economy.” But he said at least $500bn is spent every year on agricultural subsidies, and probably much more: “There is a lot of money there to do something really good with.”
Labels that reveal the impact of products would be a good start, so consumers could choose the least damaging options, he said, but subsidies for sustainable and healthy foods and taxes on meat and dairy will probably also be necessary.
One surprise from the work was the large impact of freshwater fish farming, which provides two-thirds of such fish in Asia and 96% in Europe, and was thought to be relatively environmentally friendly. “You get all these fish depositing excreta and unconsumed feed down to the bottom of the pond, where there is barely any oxygen, making it the perfect environment for methane production,” a potent greenhouse gas, Poore said.
The research also found grass-fed beef, thought to be relatively low impact, was still responsible for much higher impacts than plant-based food. “Converting grass into [meat] is like converting coal to energy. It comes with an immense cost in emissions,” Poore said.
The new research has received strong praise from other food experts. Prof Gidon Eshel, at Bard College, US, said: “I was awestruck. It is really important, sound, ambitious, revealing and beautifully done.”
He said previous work on quantifying farming’s impacts, including his own, had taken a top-down approach using national level data, but the new work used a bottom-up approach, with farm-by-farm data. “It is very reassuring to see they yield essentially the same results. But the new work has very many important details that are profoundly revealing.”
Prof Tim Benton, at the University of Leeds, UK, said: “This is an immensely useful study. It brings together a huge amount of data and that makes its conclusions much more robust. The way we produce food, consume and waste food is unsustainable from a planetary perspective. Given the global obesity crisis, changing diets – eating less livestock produce and more vegetables and fruit – has the potential to make both us and the planet healthier.”
Dr Peter Alexander, at the University of Edinburgh, UK, was also impressed but noted: “There may be environmental benefits, eg for biodiversity, from sustainably managed grazing and increasing animal product consumption may improve nutrition for some of the poorest globally. My personal opinion is we should interpret these results not as the need to become vegan overnight, but rather to moderate our [meat] consumption.”
Poore said: “The reason I started this project was to understand if there were sustainable animal producers out there. But I have stopped consuming animal products over the last four years of this project. These impacts are not necessary to sustain our current way of life. The question is how much can we reduce them and the answer is a lot.”

Links

• Your Food Choices Can Have a Big Climate Impact, So Be Picky, New Study Says
• Humans just 0.01% of all life but have destroyed 83% of wild mammals – study
• Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert
• Meat and fish multinationals 'jeopardising Paris climate goals'
• What is the true cost of eating meat?
• Meat tax ‘inevitable’ to beat climate and health crises, says report
• Proof that sustainable meat and dairy farming can work
• Organic consumers avoiding processed and red meat, sales show
• Meat tax far less unpalatable than government thinks, research finds
• Giving up beef will reduce carbon footprint more than cars, says expert
• Halving meat and dairy consumption could slash farming emissions

Insurers Will Be Hard-Hit By Climate Change But They're Not Investing In The Low-Carbon Economy

Forbes - Mike Scott

• The insurance sector is on the front line of the battle against climate change
• All but three US insurance firms surveyed have no plans in place to decarbonise their portfolios or address climate-related financial risks

A  man walks through flood waters in Hoboken, New Jersey, after Hurricane Sandy. Flooding will become much more severe as climate change intensifies, increasing payouts by insurers. Photographer: Emile Wamsteker/Bloomberg

The insurance sector is on the front line of the battle against climate change – it is having to pay out more to policyholders as extreme weather events such as flooding, droughts, storms and heatwaves become more frequent and more severe.
At the same time, as some of the biggest investors in the world, insurance companies also face significant losses as climate change hits the companies they invest in. “Climate change poses risks for insurance companies, so do responses to it by markets, businesses, consumers and governments,” says Dave Jones, California’s Insurance Commissioner, in a new report by the Asset Owners Disclosure Project (AODP), which sees itself as the world’s benchmark of climate leadership in the investment system.
“The impacts of climate-related risks are a growing reality for the insurance sector. This reality has key implications for that sector's valuation,” the report adds. “Weather-related financial losses, regulatory and technological changes, liability risks, and health impacts related to climate change have implications for the business operations, underwriting, and financial reserving of insurance companies.”
Insurers know this – one of their key functions is to price risk so they know how much to charge in premiums to insure their customers. As a result, they devote significant resources to assessing various risks, and they have a better idea than most of the financial impacts of climate change.
And yet the sector is not aligning itself with the emissions reduction targets set out by the Paris Agreement, to limit average temperature rises to “well below 2°C”, according to AODP’s report, Got it Covered? Insurance in a Changing Climate.
The report examines 80 of the world’s largest insurers, with $15 trillion Assets Under Management, on their management of material climate risk.
“Less than 0.5% of assets invested by the world’s 80 largest insurers are in low-carbon investments that provide solutions to climate change, despite the insurance sector being highly exposed to its financial risks,” the report says, and nine out of ten investment strategies in the sector make the Paris Agreement goals currently unattainable.
In addition, progress is very uneven across different regions. “A handful of insurance firms in Europe are showing true leadership on climate change and are actively managing the financial risks it poses in capital markets,” the report says. The four top performers in AODP’s ranking – AXA, Aviva, Allianz and Legal & General – are all European, while all but three US insurance firms surveyed have no plans in place to decarbonise their portfolios or address climate-related financial risks.
Some companies are taking steps to improve their disclosure in line with the recommendations of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosure, with AAA-rated Legal & General moving up eight bands from last year. Japanese insurers have made significant progress in disclosing their climate risks and have overtaken US firms in their efforts to address climate risks in their portfolios. Tokio Marine, which was rated D in 2017, is now rated six bands higher at BBB.
This may be a knock-on impact of the move by the Government Pension Investment Fund, the world’s largest pension fund, to integrate environmental, social and governance factors into its investment strategy.
In contrast, all but three US insurers were rated D or X, the two worst ratings, including giants Prudential, AIG and New York Life, even though SEC disclosure rules have been in place since 2010, much earlier than in Europe.
AODP drew on both publicly available information and private survey responses. Only 24 of the 80 insurers surveyed responded, but this was up from just three last year, suggesting that the industry is starting to recognise the importance of climate risks. This perception is backed up by the fact that more than a third of the sector saw their ranking improve from last year.
Jones recently published the results of a stress test of the insurance sector that showed that many firms were heavy investors in coal, “with portfolios consistent with a trajectory of six degrees of global warming.
While European insurers’ higher rankings are consistent with the greater focus on climate disclosure in the region, campaigners say that they are not immune to risks. The average allocation of funds to low-carbon investments even in Europe is just 0.79% of total assets.
“Global campaigners, such as Unfriend Coal, point out that even top-rated insurers in AODP’s leader category do not always exercise their power as shareholders and underwriters but instead continue supporting high carbon businesses whose activities are inconsistent with the globally agreed two-degree goal,” the report says.
Pavel Kirjanas, report author, says: “This year, AODP has put the insurance industry in the spotlight. We applaud the leading and innovative approaches taken by the sector’s leaders. Unfortunately, there is no time to celebrate. While the world is being shaken by climate-induced catastrophes, the world’s largest insurers keep pressing the snooze button. US insurance companies seem complacent about portfolios that put us on a disastrous six-degrees pathway.”
The report recommends that regulators strengthen regulatory frameworks and mandatory requirements for climate-related disclosure and that investors prioritise engaging with the US insurance sector to promote better disclosure and management of climate-related risks and opportunities.

Links

• Banks And Insurers Support Task Force Recommendations On Climate-Related Financial Disclosure
• Trump Might Not Believe In The Risks Of Climate Change - But Investors Do And They Are Taking Action
• European Insurers Lead Global Industry On Climate Risk Action
• Now Even Insurance Regulators Are Turning Up The Heat On Climate Change

Why Blowing The 1.5c Global Warming Goal Will Leave Poor Tropical Nations Sweating Most Of All

The Conversation - Andrew King | Luke Harrington

Poor tropical nations are likely to feel the effects of climate change most acutely. Apiguide/Shutterstock.com

Almost all of us are going to be worse off as climate change takes hold, whether through heatwaves, changing rainfall patterns, sea level rise, or damage to ecosystems. But it’s the world’s poorest people who will suffer the biggest disruptions to their local climate, as our new study, published in Geophysical Research Letters today, explains.
The Paris Agreement aims to keep global warming well below 2℃ above pre-industrial levels, and ideally no more than 1.5℃. Meeting the more ambitious 1.5℃ target will be extremely challenging, given that we have already had more than 1℃ of global warming so far, and global greenhouse emissions are still rising.
We examined the likely consequences of missing the 1.5℃ global warming target in terms of perceptible local climate change, by looking at the “signal-to-noise ratio”. The idea is that 1℃ of warming is more noticeable where there is very little variation in temperature (such as in Singapore, for example) compared with places where the temperature variations are much higher (like Melbourne). Where temperature variations are smaller less warming is needed before the change in climate becomes noticeable.
Society and ecosystems are adapted to the range of temperatures experienced in their location, so the signal-to-noise measure of climate change reflects this effect. In simple terms, it is a measure of how soon global warming will push the temperature beyond the normal bounds of variation at a given location. This will happen sooner in places where the weather doesn’t vary much, and later in places where it does.
Because global warming is likely to overshoot the ambitious Paris goal of 1.5℃, but perhaps not the more modest 2℃ goal, we looked in particular at the signal-to-noise ratio created by using state-of-the-art global climate model projections to move between 1.5℃ and 2℃ of global warming.

More perceptible warming is projected over the tropics than at higher latitudes. CREDIT, Author provided

As expected, the signal-to-noise ratio is high in the tropics, where the variability in temperature is lower. This means that local temperature changes due to global warming will generally be felt more keenly in the tropics than at higher latitudes if the world exceeds the 1.5℃ Paris target.

The inequality of climate change
Next, we overlaid the signal-to-noise ratio data with population and gross domestic product (GDP) data to investigate the relationship between local climate change and wealth.
As the less economically developed areas of the world are predominantly in the tropics, and the more developed economies are at higher latitudes, we predict that the world’s wealthiest countries will experience less perceptible climate change than the poorest.

Locations in the poorest countries tend to experience greater local climate change. Author provided

For example, we project that the people of the UK, the first country to industrialise and one of the world’s richest nations, would experience less than half the level of perceptible climate change, as measured by our signal-to-noise ratio, than the people of the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the world’s poorest.
This means that if we do exceed the 1.5℃ Paris target, the countries that will face the biggest impact are those who are least to blame for creating the problem, and least equipped to deal with the resulting problems.

An impetus to act
Keeping global warming to modest levels, as signatories to the Paris Agreement have pledged to do, has many benefits compared with the alternative of a 3℃ or 4℃ warmer world. Previous research has shown that this would reduce the frequency of heat extremes and their impacts in many places around the world, and would reduce droughts and extreme rain events. There would be benefits for many of the world’s plant and animal species as well as entire ecosystems, including the Great Barrier Reef.
Limiting global warming also helps the poorest parts of the world develop. By reducing greenhouse gas emissions more rapidly the developed world would put less of the burden of climate change onto the developing world. This should incentivise stronger emissions reductions globally. The UN Sustainable Development Goals call for action to eradicate absolute poverty and reduce inequality. Our research underlines the fact that both of these goals, and others, depend implicitly on reining in global warming.
Unfortunately, the alternative – and where our current emissions trajectory is taking us – is a warmer world in which the poorest and least culpable nations pay the biggest price.

Links

• Poorest hardest hit by even low end of Paris climate temperature goals
• Ground zero for climate change: the tropics were first to feel the definite effects in the 1960s
• Fossil fuel emissions hit record high after unexpected growth: Global Carbon Budget 2017
• Developing countries can prosper without increasing emissions
• Great Barrier Reef's five near-death experiences revealed in new paper
• Sydney on track for hottest autumn on record

ANU Presents Climate Change In Beer Coaster And Bracelet Form

Fairfax

It's climate change....just presented very, very differently.
Rather than the usual graphs and pie charts, the Australian National University is presenting climate data in the form of beer coasters and even bracelets.
The gadgets have proved so popular that a website has been launched visualising climate change data from 112 locations around Australia to help people get their head around the topic.
Putting climate data into a tangible form was originally the work of researchers Dr Mitchell Whitelaw and Dr Geoff Hinchcliffe from the ANU School of Art and Design.

Dr Geoff Hinchcliffe from the ANU School of Art and Design with coasters made from laser cut wood showing the climate shift for an Australian city.

In late 2017, the pair approached the ANU Climate Change Institute with the idea of collaborating on small tangible visualisations for the Institute’s 2018 State of the Climate event.
The result was - what else but? - a beer coaster.
Sitting on desks, bars or tables, the aim of the coaster was to prompt discussion and reflection on Australia’s rapidly changing climate.

Climate change coasters created by the ANU School of Art and Design.

The coasters, which visualise 12 months of climate data against long term averages for Australian capital cities, proved so popular that the researchers decided to build a website showing the same visualisation for more than 100 different locations around the country.
“Everyone at the event was captivated,” Dr Hinchcliffe said.
“People were handling them, smelling them, asking about them, and everyone wanted more copies.
“So this online version is an opportunity for people to have a look through the
visualisations for themselves.”
Visitors to the site can download coaster images for print and social media sharing, or for laser cutting their own coasters.
The researchers, who have also made bracelets that represent 12 months of Canberra weather data, believe tangible visualisations of data are a powerful way of helping people understand complex topics.
“They are engaging in a way that traditional graphs just aren’t,” Dr Whitelaw said.
“Graphs can be static and hard to read, by having these visualisations live and online it lets people have a play around with them.
“I hope, in particular, that schools can use this website to discuss climate change and build data literacy.”
Each coaster shows two rings that represent 12 months of climate data from the Bureau of Meteorology.
The inside ring compares daily temperatures to that location’s long-term average. The outer ring shows the same visualisation for monthly temperatures.
Of the 112 locations shown on the Climate Coaster website, Charleville in Queensland had the highest temperatures in 2017 compared to long-term averages – with an increase of 2.6 degrees.
Of the capital cities, Canberra came out top with 2017 temperatures, 1.7 degrees above the city’s long-term average.
Halls Creek in the East Kimberly region of Western Australia was the only location that didn’t experience any temperature increase in 2017.
You can visit the Climate Coasters website here: http://gravitron.com.au/climatecoaster/
"We hope that printed coasters will occupy coffee tables across Australia and spark conversation and reflection on our rapidly changing climate,'' the website says.

Links

• ANU Climate Coaster
• 7 Novels That Will Fire You Up About Climate Change
• The Art Of Climate Change Gallery 1: Why Is Our Climate Changing?
• The Art Of Climate Change Gallery 2: How Is Climate Change Affecting Our World?
• The Art Of Climate Change Gallery 3: Who Is At Risk?
• The Art Of Climate Change Gallery 4: What Can We Do To Address Climate Change?

'Record Year For Records' As Renewable Energy Ramps Up Across Australia

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

For Father Peter Smith, the choice of adding solar panels to his presbytery roof in inner-Sydney's Leichhardt wasn't just about cost savings but also protecting the environment.
His 7.2-kilowatt system should repay the $8000 cost in five years but, more importantly, help him promote the "Caring for Creation through Solar" project aimed at bringing renewable energy to more parishioners in the Sydney Catholic Archdiocese.
"If I'm going to advertise, I'd better be first," Father Smith said. "We're looking at the climate issue and just caring for Creation."

Father Peter Smith of St Columba's Catholic Parish in Sydney's Leichhardt is leading the way on solar, as the renewable energy surge gathers momentum nationally. Photo: James Brickwood

The renewables message is catching on, with the latest annual report by the Clean Energy Council revealing "a record year for records", according the industry group's chief executive, Kane Thornton.
Wind energy last year matched hydro generation for the first time, with each providing about 5.7 per cent of the national electricity.
That was partly a result of a widening drought curbing hydro output and trimming total renewable electricity to 17 per cent of Australia's total, versus 17.3 per cent in 2016.
But the bigger story was the 700 megawatts of large-scale renewable energy capacity added last year and about seven times that total either under construction or with financial support, the Clean Energy Council report shows.

Weathering the storm: The Macarthur wind farm in Victoria remains Australia's largest - but for how long? Photo: Steve Hynes

Large-scale solar has particularly ramped up, with capacity rising from 34 megawatts in 2014 to 450 megawatts at the end of last year.
Some 50 large-scale wind and solar projects worth about $11 billion were under construction as of last December or scheduled to begin soon, the council said.
So far this year, some 291 megawatts of new solar projects have already been completed, with almost as much due to start exporting to the grid soon.
Various states are touting their gains, with NSW boasting a pipeline of almost 14,000 megawatts of renewable energy projects worth almost $18 billion in potential investment.
"This is in addition to the over 1200 megawatts of wind and solar farms under construction," NSW Energy Minister Don Harwin told Fairfax Media. "We know the private sector is seeing the opportunities to invest in new energy generation in NSW."
Victoria's first 650-megawatt renewable energy auction, meanwhile, is the single largest renewable energy tender in the country.
While the current boom is driven by the 2020 Renewable Energy Target, which should be achieved at least a year early, the industry is seeking clarity about what comes next.
"Our concern is that the momentum we have at the moment is at risk without strong policy certainty in the post-2020 environment," Mr Thornton said.

Impact Investment Group's Swan Hill solar farm - 21 large-scale projects were under construction at the end of 2017. Photo: Supplied

That certainty, or otherwise, could be determined in coming weeks as states and territories prepare to discuss the final design of the Turnbull government's proposed National Energy Guarantee targeting affordability, reliability and reduced emissions from the electricity sector.
“The continued investment in more supply is essential to driving down electricity prices," Environment and Energy Minister Josh Frydenberg told Fairfax Media.
"That is why we are working to finalise the [NEG] to not only provide investment certainty to spur on more investment but to also ensure there is enough back-up and storage in the system for intermittent renewables.”
Rooftop solar, meanwhile, has now reached 1.825 million Australian households, the annual report noted. Average systems last year were 6.27 kilowatts, more than double the size in 2012.
Interestingly, about one in eight of the 172,000 PV installations last year included a battery, up from 5 per cent in 2016.
For Father Smith, who has already mustered a couple of dozen willing parishioners to take up solar, storage is not the priority.
"Batteries aren't quite there yet, but they're coming," he said.

Links

• Mars bars fossil fuels and goes 100pc renewables
• 'Coal is dead': Neoen eyes another $4 billion in Australian investment
• Smoke leaves parts of Sydney with air twice the hazardous level
• Poorest hardest hit by even low end of Paris climate temperature goals
• Sydney on track for hottest autumn on record
• Great Barrier Reef's five near-death experiences revealed in new paper
• 'Record year for records' as renewable energy ramps up across Australia
• Tony Abbott fires warning shot at party leadership on energy
• Renewables not to blame for rising power costs: ACCC boss
• AEMO flags risk of energy crunch in South Australia

Poorest Hardest Hit By Even Low End Of Paris Climate Temperature Goals

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

The tropics, home to many of the world's poorest nations, will be hard hit by global warming even at the lower end of the Paris climate goals, exacerbating inequality and worsening stresses on human populations and ecosystems alike, a new paper argues.
Research published Wednesday in Geophysical Research Letters examined the likely climate change impacts on wealthy and poorer countries under the 1.5 degree-2 degree warming limit - compared to pre-industrial times - as set by the 2015 Paris accord.

People volunteer to be sprayed in Karachi, Pakistan, as the mercury climbed well into the 40s this month. Photo: AP

Australia's tropical north - a region targeted for greater development in the future - will not escape the effects.
“People in Darwin will experience more of a shift in their climate than people in Melbourne, for example," said Andrew King, a climate scientist at Melbourne University and co-author of the report.
While tropical regions have generally warmed less than higher-latitude regions in the past century or so, ecosystems and societies typically experience a more narrow temperature variability over the year.
Polar regions, for instance, can experience anomalies of as much as 20 degrees whereas places close to the equator rarely have departures from the norm of more than a few degrees.

The paper applied a simple signal-to-noise ratio to identify the potential impacts of further warming and found aiming for 1.5 degrees rather than 2 degrees "makes quite a big difference", said Dr King.
"I was surprised by just how clear that outcome was.”
More temperate countries, led by Britain, were much less affected than tropical ones such as Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo - even though the latter nations have been relatively small contributors historically to greenhouse gas emissions, the paper found.
"The tropics tend to be the poorest regions in the world and that means they don’t have the capacity to adapt, even though they’re going to feel the brunt of the climate change," said Dr King, who is also a researcher with the ARC Centre of Excellence for Climate Extremes. “It certainly pushes the limits ... and some people won’t be able to cope.”
While the paper looked solely at temperatures, a warming world is also leading to rising sea levels, more powerful storms and heavier precipitation. The atmosphere can hold about 7 per cent more moisture for each degree of warming.

These changes would likely be "compounding effects", with poorer nations again likely to be harder hit than richer ones.
“It’s seems distinctly unfair given the cumulative emissions of countries like the UK,” Dr King said.
“These are the countries that haven’t benefited from industrialisation and may have their economic development hampered in the future by bigger shifts in the climate than the wealthier countries will experience.”

Animals in Lahore Zoo in Pakistan were given ice to help them cool off as temperatures reached 44 degrees or warmer last week. Photo: AP

Erwin Jackson, senior climate and energy adviser for Environment Victoria, said "current levels of warming are already at dangerous levels".
“While the world’s poorest will be hardest hit by climate change this is not just an issue for our northern neighbours," Mr Jackson said.
"Even current levels of warming are impacting on Australia through severe damage to the Great Barrier Reef, more extreme heatwaves and other weather-related events like bushfires."
While the discrepancy of impacts for poorer nations raised issues of climate injustice, Australia itself could face cascading challenges from abroad.
"What happens to others in our region matters to us," Mr Jackson said. "Severe economic damage and social unrest would have knock-on effects to our economy and national security.”


Sinking shoreline threatens millions in Indonesia

Links

• Why Blowing The 1.5c Global Warming Goal Will Leave Poor Tropical Nations Sweating Most Of All
• Ground zero for climate change: the tropics were first to feel the definite effects in the 1960s
• Fossil fuel emissions hit record high after unexpected growth: Global Carbon Budget 2017
• Developing countries can prosper without increasing emissions
• Great Barrier Reef's five near-death experiences revealed in new paper
• Sydney on track for hottest autumn on record
• 'On the nose': Australians' views favour conservation, curbs on coal