Climate Change And Renewables Driving New Mining Boom, Mining Chief Says

Fairfax - Cole Latimer

The mining industry is addressing climate change head-on as it prepares for a new boom driven by renewable energy demand, a global mining council chief says.
The mining industry has been under fire following a recent UN report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which said Australia must limit and eventually phase out its thermal coal mining to help fight rising global temperatures.

ICMM chief Tom Butler says demand for energy will drive a new resources boom for copper and lithium. Credit: ICMM

The mining industry and Australian government pushed back, saying mining has a long role to play in the country.
Speaking ahead of the International Mining and Resources Conference on Tuesday, International Council on Mining and Metals chief executive Tom Butler told Fairfax Media mining and a carbon price are both needed to achieve the IPCC’s climate goals, supporting a renewable energy boom that will drive more mining.
“Our materials will be critical to enabling the decarbonisation of the planet,” Mr Butler said.
“The mining sector has a critical role to play in the sustainability effort. We can choose whether to be a leader or follow in that."
Mr Butler said the ICMM has also called for a carbon price. He said in order to achieve the two degree Celsius reduction in global temperatures the world will need more copper and lithium to support renewable technologies.
"If we're to achieve 2 degrees Celsius, we'll need around 20 million tonnes more copper and around ten times the amount of lithium - for batteries - that is currently mined to supply demand, and that isn't including electric vehicles," Mr Butler said.
Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Tania Constable refuted claims the mining industry was in denial over climate change but said Australian coal could play a role in addressing it.
"I don't think there are companies that are climate change deniers, and they understand the risk of it to industry," Ms Constable told Fairfax Media.
"While a value on carbon is important, you have to take multiple avenues, and one single way is not the best way to address it."
It comes as the mining industry highlights its alignment with the United Nations sustainable development goals, a series of global aspirations to improve society and environmental conservation to 2030.

Glencore has been singled out for its rehabilitation of its former coal mines.

In the report commissioned by the Minerals Council of Australia, it examined how Australia’s mining industry was promoting gender equality, education, economic growth, and water and environmental conservation.
The report focused on the work of Glencore’s coal business in rehabilitating more than 1000 hectares of former mining land at Mangoola, in the New South Wales Hunter Valley, and turning its Liddell coal mine into cattle grazing land.
It also covered BHP’s biodiversity conservation project and its $13.4 million land conservation operation in Tasmania.
“This report is the first step in our work to further understand, listen and import how Australia’s minerals sector work to support strong, resilient and inclusive communities across the country,” Ms Constable said.

Links

• Government funds feasibility study into $250 million pumped hydro project
• Morrison energy pledge at risk from hung parliament
• 'Watershed moment': Victoria launches first grid-scale battery
• Scott Morrison escalates threats to energy companies as experts dispute price claims
• Coal's days are numbered, top government adviser says
• New trial launched to create 'green' gas from solar power
• Thousands of solar panels to deliver CSIRO big savings
• Mandurah suburb to get communal Tesla battery in Australia-first trial
• Online renewable marketplace aims to help business cut power bills

Clean Energy Is Cheap, Surging – And Headed For A Fall

The Guardian - Adam Morton

Solar and wind projects are transforming Australia’s power grid, but unclear policies will slow new investments

Stage 1 of the Bungala Solar Farm, outside Port Augusta in regional South Australia. Photograph: Che Chorley for the Guardian

The relentlessly corrosive nature of political debate about climate change can sometimes mask that this is a golden moment for the clean energy industry in Australia.
A near-constant stream of investment announcements suggests a barrier has been knocked down such that leading renewable technologies, so long dependent on public subsidies, have assumed market supremacy.
In the Pilbara, Macquarie Bank has joined a proposed $22bn project that plans to use solar and wind to run local mines, create “green” hydrogen energy for north Asia and possibly export electricity to Indonesia. In regional South Australia, the British billionaire industrialist, Sanjeev Gupta, has said he considered building a coal plant to run the Whyalla steelworks he bought last year, but decided it was cheaper to throw roughly $1.5bn at solar, pumped hydro storage, battery storage and co-generation (creating energy from waste gas) as he adopts his “green steel” model. Outside Townsville, zinc refiner Sun Metals recently opened Australia’s first large-scale solar farm built by a major energy user to service part of its own needs and feed the grid.
The Clean Energy Council lists 69 large-scale projects across the country that have recently reached “financial close” and are either under construction or presumably about to be. They should mean $15.6bn investment and add 10,978 megawatts of renewable energy capacity to the system. These projects – just those the council knows of – are in addition to the 30 new clean energy plants that started operating in the first nine months of the year. Contracts are being signed at historically cheap prices – a reported $52 per megawatt-hour for the giant Stockyard Hill wind farm in central Victoria, for example.
Meanwhile, rooftop solar panels are being installed at an astonishing rate. In May, the head of the Australian Energy Market Operator, Audrey Zibelman, said six panels were going up across the continent every minute, adding the capacity of a large coal power station each year. The consumer watchdog recently recommended incentive schemes for small-scale systems be wound back. Some in the energy industry have suggested there will soon be more solar power coming into the grid than Australia can use but a new study by consultants Green Energy Markets, which examined the amount of solar power expected every 30 minutes out to 2021, rejects this idea. The energy minister, Angus Taylor, says the federal incentive scheme will stay.
The investment avalanche is driving an unprecedented transformation of the electricity grid. At the time of writing, clean energy had met 21.8% of national electricity market demand over the past week, suggesting the country is on the cusp of meeting the 2020 renewable energy target of about 23% ahead of schedule. The Clean Energy Council’s chief executive, Kane Thornton, says the momentum is massive; Green Energy Markets suggest it could mean renewable generation hits 33.3% by 2020. Analyst and advocate Simon Holmes à Court says it is likely as much clean energy capacity will be built over the next two years as over the previous 40.
In July, the market operator found a business-as-usual path, without policies ramping up, was likely to lead to about 46% clean energy by 2030. It underlined the hollowness of the government’s now-dumped pledge to introduce a national energy guarantee to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from electricity by 26% below 2005 levels over that timeframe, and implied Labor’s 50% renewable energy target would take little effort. (Both targets are less than the change in coal use the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change suggests is necessary for Australia to play its part in limiting global warming.)
But while the direction is clear, the picture is murkier than this moment suggests. There are signs investment may soon slow markedly.
Most of the investment is being driven by the renewable energy target, which peaks in 2020 and stays at that level for the following decade. The spending to meet the target has come in a rush lately, mainly because then-prime minister Tony Abbott commissioned a review by businessman and climate sceptic Dick Warbuton, who wanted to end it. The uncertainty triggered an investment strike that lasted the better part of two years before the target was ultimately reduced.
But the target has done its job. With no policy to replace it, the incentive to build clean energy plants is expected to fall off significantly. This is already being seen in wholesale energy futures markets, where it is playing a role in prices trending upwards again. There is consistent evidence, from the market operator down, that it is cheaper to build variable clean energy with “firming” support than alternatives. New performance standards requiring investors in areas flooded with renewable energy to install expensive grid-stabilising technology needed to smooth the transition are not expected to change this. But demand for electricity is barely growing. Without a policy that gives the industry a map for when new clean generation will be needed, new plants are unlikely to come online until coal plant owners announce more closures.
There are exceptions. Tristan Edis, a Green Energy Markets analyst, points to companies signing contracts with state governments: Victoria recently announced six wind and solar farms had won contracts under its first renewable energy tender after a similar round for battery storage, and Queensland has promised to soon follow with the result of its auction. Also, some large energy users with deep pockets may build or fund their own generation needs to hedge against market costs, as Sun Metals did in Queensland. But these are investment spikes, not maps.
“Beyond that there is no appetite for the major energy retailers to do deals, so I expect we’re not going to see the large-scale investments,” Edis says. “Instead of seeing thousands of megawatts of new capacity a year we may see a few hundred.”
Other energy system experts agree. Holmes à Court, from the Energy Transition Hub at the University of Melbourne, says it is little understood that consumers are no longer subsidising new developments under the renewable energy target through their bills. Long-term pricing contracts being signed between wind and solar farm owners and energy retailers are now setting such low prices that large-scale generation certificates – documents that retailers must buy and hand in to the government as proof they are meeting their renewable obligation – are effectively being thrown in for free. The target’s role recently has been to provide investment confidence to ensure that long-term contracts are signed. Holmes à Court says without it or a new policy to replace it uncertainty associated with selling electricity on the spot market could increase the risk margin on finance or make a project “unbankable” until the next coal plant closes and pushes up the wholesale electricity price.
AGL has announced it will shut and replace its Liddell black coal plant in NSW in 2022 (and copped no shortage of opprobrium from the Coalition for doing so). Yallourn, a brown coal station in Victoria, could be squeezed out by the large-scale solar rush already announced in that state. But in terms of closures that will spark new investment the timeframe is unclear, especially given the government hopes to extend the life of existing coal plants and possibly underwrite new ones.
This is why interested parties from across the spectrum – the energy industry, business, consumer and welfare groups and climate activists – have been united in calling for a bipartisan policy. While Taylor has dismissed claims the government should try to eliminate uncertainty as naïve, and the gap between the major parties has widened to a gulf since Scott Morrison replaced Malcolm Turnbull, those invested in the debate want the best chance for the transition to happen as smoothly and cheaply as possible for everyone.
“Basically, as Audrey Zibelman says, we can have a managed transition or a chaotic disruption,” Holmes à Court says. “In a chaotic disruption people get hurt, whether they are consumers, employers or prime ministers.”

Links

• Scott Morrison contradicts energy advice, saying Paris targets can be met 'at a canter'
• Greenpeace and GetUp launch campaign to kill national energy guarantee
• Replacing Liddell coal plant with clean energy $1.3bn cheaper – analysis
• Australia's politics only barrier to clean energy system, report finds
• Q&A: panellists spar over coal as energy debate dominates

Best Way To Fight Climate Change? Put An Honest Price On Carbon

New York Times - Editorial Board

Washington State voters will decide next week whether to impose a fee on carbon emissions. We hope they do.

Lily Padula

Will voters in Washington State breathe new life into the idea of taxing carbon emissions? Plenty of people worried about the earth’s future certainly hope so.
Climate scientists and economists have long argued that the single best way to slow global warming is to put a price on greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and raise that price over time, thus creating a sensible market incentive to reduce emissions and invest in cleaner energy sources. Carbon pricing was also high on the list of urgent recommendations of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned in a major report two weeks ago that without swift action to control emissions the world will begin suffering global warming’s worst consequences — including, but not limited to, the displacement of millions of people by drought and sea-level rise — as early as 2040, much sooner than previously forecast.
It is thus encouraging that in this time of torpor and climate denial at the highest levels of the federal government, voters in the state of Washington will soon be given the chance to adopt, by initiative, a carbon pricing plan that would charge polluters like refineries a fee for emitting greenhouse gases. This would be what economists call a Pigovian tax, after the British economist Arthur Pigou. In this case, the fee would factor in the now unaccounted for costs of more frequent and intense hurricanes, wildfires, droughts and other natural disasters linked to climate change. In the words of George Frampton, a senior environmental adviser to Bill Clinton and co-founder of a group that favors carbon taxes, Partnership for Responsible Growth, it’s an overdue stab at “honestly pricing carbon,” which industry has until now been able to hurl into the atmosphere pretty much for free.
Polling so far suggests a close vote. Opponents of the measure, including such big oil companies as BP and Chevron, have raised more than $25 million to get people to vote no; in addition, Washington voters soundly defeated a carbon tax the last time it appeared on the ballot, in 2016. But other powerful forces, including Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, the former New York mayor, have ponied up in support this time.
If the proposal, Initiative 1631, wins — as we hope it does — the result could ripple beyond Washington’s boundaries. No state can match California’s impressively broad suite of clean-energy programs, but the initiative, if successful, could catapult Jay Inslee, Washington’s governor, into the climate leadership role long occupied by the outgoing California governor, Jerry Brown. More important, it could provide a template, or at least valuable lessons, for other states to follow; and (let’s dream for a moment) it might even encourage Congress to take action on a national program.
Initiative 1631 is substantially different from the measure that failed spectacularly two years ago, and which Mr. Inslee voted against. That measure was advertised as revenue-neutral (meaning no net gain to the government). The money raised through carbon taxes would have been mostly returned to state residents through a reduction in the sales tax. This was intended to appeal to conservatives who didn’t want the tax to underwrite new government programs, but it turned out that many conservatives, like a lot of others, wanted real programs for their money, not just a tax shift.
Initiative 1631 aims to do that. On the revenue side, it would impose a $15 per metric ton fee on carbon emissions starting in 2020, increasing by $2 per year until the state’s 2035 carbon reduction goals are met. The state estimates that the levy would generate $2.2 billion in its first five years. The initiative’s supporters say that gasoline prices would rise about 13 cents a gallon in 2020, and would, overall, cost most citizens about $10 a month.
As for spending the money, about 70 percent of the proceeds would be invested in projects to accelerate the state’s transition from fossil fuels — public transportation, energy efficiency, wind and solar plants, and so on — and the rest on protecting forests and streams and shielding low-income ratepayers from higher electricity bills. There are exemptions — for the state’s only operating coal-fired power plant, which is scheduled to close in 2025, and for the state’s largest employer, Boeing, which competes in foreign markets. All in all, the initiative covers about 80 percent of Washington’s climate-warming emissions.
Groups that opposed the 2016 initiative, like the Sierra Club, have flocked to this one. As David Roberts has noted in Vox, “Tying the revenue from a dirty-energy tax to clean-energy investments is intuitively appealing.” He has also noted, however, that carbon pricing is no cure-all.
The dream among many carbon-pricing enthusiasts is that a smoothly functioning carbon tax will eliminate the need for messy government regulations like those imposed by the Obama administration after Congress failed to pass a cap-and-trade program. Carbon pricing would help, and could do wonders to drive private investment toward cleaner energy. But it won’t eliminate the need for government involvement; as the I.P.C.C. report made clear, rapidly decarbonizing a global economy is a gigantic undertaking, and will require government involvement and an array of responses.
And in the meantime, of course, and indeed into the foreseeable future, all present strategies to reduce emissions must continue, including the kinds of things Mr. Trump refuses to do — build out the electric vehicle fleet, reduce emissions from power plants, clamp down on methane pollution from oil and gas wells.
As of now, about 40 governments around the world, including the European Union and California, have put a price on carbon, some through cap-and-trade programs, with an average price per ton of $8, nowhere near the level the I.P.C.C. thinks necessary (at least $135 a ton by 2030, if not much higher) to cause meaningful reductions. But lately the idea of carbon taxes is showing signs of life in many parts of the world. Portugal launched a carbon tax in 2015, and Chile followed in 2017, and just last week Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, announced a sweeping plan to tax industrial emitters.
A yes vote in Washington State would add further momentum — and possibly focus a few minds in the other Washington.

Links

• Opinion | Auden Schendler And Andrew P. Jones: Stopping Climate Change Is Hopeless. Let’s Do It.
• Opinion | The Editorial Board: Wake Up, World Leaders. The Alarm Is Deafening.
• Opinion | Naomi Oreskes And Erik M. Conway: Fixing the Climate Requires More Than Technology
• Rich Nations Vowed Billions for Climate Change. Poor Countries Are Waiting.
• On the Attack Against Climate Change

Will Climate Change Split The Liberal Party?

AFR - Andrew Clark

Divided for a decade over climat change ... Protestors dressed in costumes of Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull at Bondi Surf Bathers SLSC polling booth for the Wentworth byelection. James Brickwood

Cross-dressing is not a top-of-mind Liberal Party metaphor but, politically speaking, that's what it's doing. Robert Menzies' party of government, where a former Liberal prime minister, John Howard, once warned that "disunity is death", is threatening to fragment over climate change.
It is even taking on some of the historic characteristics of the Labor Party, which spent decades in the political wilderness as a result of dividing over issues like communism. "For many years when we talked splits and factions it was Labor, and the Liberals were much less subject to that," says John Warhurst, Emeritus Professor of Politics at the ANU. "Now the boot is on the other foot."
Divisions over climate change have twice contributed to Malcolm Turnbull's loss of the Liberal Party leadership and the prime ministership. Five weeks after he jetted off to New York, the issue continued to fester and played a significant role in the Liberal Party losing Turnbull's formerly blue-ribbon seat of Wentworth.
To be fair, climate change as an issue has dogged both sides of Australian politics for more than a decade. A global failure to come up with firm emissions targets at the 2009 Copenhagen Summit flummoxed the Kevin Rudd-led Labor government, which had framed climate change as the "great moral challenge" of the modern era.

Roman Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, Frank Little with Bob Santamaria with painting of former Archbishop of Melbourne Daniel Mannix in the background. Santamaria's formation of the DLP led to a Labor party split that kept the power out of government for years.

Further, an about face on introducing a carbon tax by Rudd's successor and victor in an internal party leadership coup, Julia Gillard, made her an easy target for then opposition leader, Tony Abbott, over what he called a "great big new tax".
But over the past couple of months climate change has morphed into something much bigger and politically destabilising. A centrist like Turnbull, with a past record of supporting an emissions trading scheme (ETS), being forced out of the PM's job by, among others, climate change sceptics like Abbott and Craig Kelly, lent an ideological tinge to a week of brutal blood-letting.
Turnbull and Abbott were bitter rivals with a near decade-old history of supplanting each other as party leader. But the contentious policy issue was Turnbull's carrot-and-stick National Energy Guarantee program. The abandonment of Turnbull's NEG, the role climate change played in the victory of an independent, Dr Kerryn Phelps, in the subsequent Wentworth byelection; and the demonstration effect the Wentworth result, including its climate change element, is having on other, similar, safe Liberal seats, has been stunning.
The metaphor may not be appropriate for climate change, but it's as if an accelerant has been poured on a long-burning fire in Coalition ranks.
This accelerant effect was obvious two weeks before the Wentworth byelection vote at a forum in the iconic Bondi Beach Pavilion. There 14 of the 16 candidates discussed issues ranging from tax policy to the position of refugees on Nauru, population growth and immigration. But the debate kept reverting back to climate change, with many candidates citing the explosive contents of the new IPCC report, released the day before in Incheon, South Korea.

Tony Abbott made Julia Gillard a target over what he called a "great big new tax". David Rowe

'There's always exceptions to the rule'
According to this latest IPCC document, the impacts and costs of a 1.5-degree forecast increase in global warming will be far greater than earlier expected. This follows a decade of record-breaking storms, forest fires, droughts, coral bleaching, heat waves and floods around the world as average mean temperatures increase. The IPCC report, which was based on more than 6000 studies, said the 1.5-degree increase in average temperatures could be reached in as little as 11 years – and almost certainly within 20 years – without major cuts in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.
It is these sorts of warnings, combined with what the great American jazz singer Billie Holliday referred to as "stormy weather", that have sharpened differences between Liberal Party moderates like Turnbull, and conservatives like Abbott, over the climate change issue.
It has not split the Liberal Party – so far. But there are reports that independent candidates – many are female, and some, possibly, may even emanate from the Liberal Party – will promote a climate change-related suite of policies, alongside a conservative approach to economic management, in the coming federal election in what had been regarded as safe Liberal seats.
Interestingly, this policy mix does contain elements of earlier peelings away from the Liberal fold. These include the 1966 formation of the Australian Reform Movement – led by the head of the IPEC transport group, Gordon Barton. It sharply differed from the Liberal Party over Australia's military involvement in the Vietnam War while espousing mainstream conservative economic policies. Eleven years later in 1977 former Liberal minister Don Chipp formed the Australian Democrats, a party with centrist characteristics that was later dismissed by then Labor finance minister Peter Walsh as "fairies at the bottom of the garden".
Indeed, "there's little aspects of the story that don't fit", Professor Warhurst acknowledges. "There's always exceptions to the rule. We are yet to see this issue play out and keep the Liberals out of office. But this highly charged situation in the Liberals does remind me of what Labor was like. "
There are echoes going back to the of the great Labor split. The record 23 years Labor spent in opposition from 1949 to 1972 were partly due to the long post-war boom, Liberal Prime Minister Robert Menzies' political dominance, Dr. H.V. Evatt's erratic leadership of the ALP, and Labor clinging to its nationalisation platform. But the principal factor was the communist bogey.
Soon after Menzies won the December 1949, election, "Doc" Evatt proposed banning the communist party. Not long after the first proxy conflict of the Cold War began in the form of the Korean War, inflaming domestic Australian tensions over the communist issue.

Labor divided
From the start, the ALP was sharply divided. "Doc" Evatt campaigned successfully against a later Menzies-sponsored referendum to ban the Australian Communist Party (CPA), warning against the rise of a police state. However, other labor figures were in favour of the ban.
The referendum was lost but the issue was never far from the headlines. There were persistent claims that Labor was "soft on communism", that left-wing members of the ALP such as Jim Cairns were "lover boys of the communist press", that Labor was suspect on issues such as the US Alliance, opposition to the claimed "downward thrust" of Communist China etc.
The issue was central to Labor's great split in 1954, when a largely Catholic, right-wing, virulently anti-communist faction directed by Bob Santamaria, head of the secretive Catholic Social Studies Movement, peeled away from the ALP to form the Democratic Labour Party, or DLP.
With Labor split, and the DLP distributing its preferences to the Coalition, the ALP remained out of office for another 18 years. The incessant, virulent guilt-by-association rhetoric of Santamaria helped to frame Labor during this long period as untrustworthy. It was a political fault line that lasted until the DLP was extinguished as an effective force by the results of the May 1974, double dissolution election.
Now the Liberal Party is threatening to fragment over climate change. Of course, the parallels are inexact and the Liberals have been in office for five years. But as Professor Warhurst points out, "the same apocalyptic language" is being used now on the climate change issue on the Liberal side "as the language which characterised the debate in the 50s and 60s on the Labor side".
Events in coming months will tell us if the parallels will come closer.

Links

• Wentworth byelection: Scott Morrison holds ground on policy despite swing
• Australia's new energy mess explained
• States goes their own way on renewable energy
• Coalition Urged To Revive 'Necessary And Inevitable' Emissions Reduction
• Wentworth Wipe-Out Won’t Shift Coalition Idiocy On Climate And Energy
• Wentworth Byelection Backlash Reignites Tensions Inside The Morrison Government Over Climate Policy
• The Morrison Government’s Biggest Economic Problem? Climate Change Denial
• 'No More Hiding': Morrison Government Set Emissions Data Deadlines
• To Tackle Climate Change, A New U.N. Climate Report Says Put A High Price On Carbon
• Mining Sector, Morrison Government On The Defensive Over IPCC Report
• Major Climate Report Describes A Strong Risk Of Crisis As Early As 2040
• The Political Will To Prevent Climate Change Is Lacking, Even As The Cost Climbs

Climate Change Policy: An Unwieldy Wrecking Ball Claiming PM’s Careers

NEWS.com.au - Malcolm Farr

IT HAS already destroyed four prime ministers. And now the very same wrecking ball is about to smash Scott Morrison as well.

Scott Morrison has “big stick” energy policy.
Picture Kym Smith Source: News Corp Australia

IT’S the uncontrollable wrecking ball of Australian politics which so far has smashed the careers of four prime ministers.
And now it could be swinging Scott Morrison’s way, just as it had towards Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard from Labor, and his Liberal colleagues Tony Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull.
This demolition beast is climate change policy and the inability of politicians to present coherent schemes of their own or to resist misrepresenting those of rivals.
To dodge the ball of policy destruction Prime Minister Morrison is attempting to please everyone.
He wants a system which will lower emissions, encourage coal-fired power stations, force private power companies to divest assets, promote new generating technologies, and cut household electricity bills.
It’s a political strategy more than a global warming response, constructed to appease the array of cemented positions on energy policy within the Liberal Party rather than the wishes of consumers, including business.
It has a touch of former prime minister Tony Abbott’s unsuccessful Direct Action scheme and a taste of former prime minister Malcolm Turnbull’s National Energy Guarantee.
And one of its objectives is to blame the power industry, not government, for everything from electricity reliability, price, and technologies.
Scott Morrison is pushing around power companies, threatening them with his “big stick”, in a way he shrank from doing with banks when he was treasurer.
It’s a way of saying, “It’s not our fault you don’t like your electricity bills.”
Which is the gist of Mr Morrison’s comments on the Seven Network on Friday: “That is why we have to put more pressure on the big energy companies so they are doing the right thing by their customers and we are going to back that up with the laws which will give effect to that.
“As I said, we will take the big stick to the energy companies.”

Victims of the wrecking ball? Former PM Malcolm Turnbull and former Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. 
Picture: Saeed Khan Source: AFP

And the timing is right for this blame shifting as the use of cheaper renewables is starting to lower prices.
The Morrison government will be delighted to take the credit. But it underlines the complexity of the power game here.
Australia alone of developed nations has this preoccupation with climate change as a political battleground.
In Australia we can’t even settle on what is at stake.
Is it what Kevin Rudd called the great moral challenge — which portrayed it as something which can’t be measured by a temperature gauge alone — or is it about using more coal?
The climate change debate here can take many identities as political leaders shuffle around priorities to suit their already-existing positions.
So at one moment it’s not about addressing a changing climate, it’s about the unreliability of renewable energy, or about lowering electricity prices, or about supporting coal resources, or about not being told what to do by the United Nations.
There have been times of confusion as to what was being addressed.

Energy policy was a battleground for former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
Picture: Mick Tsikas Source: AAP

What has been clear is that the task is hugely difficult for two reasons Kevin Rudd recently underlined.
One is the daunting task of convincing a current generation to make sacrifices for a future one.
And because of the technical complexity of the climate change responses, which understandably baffle most people. That’s one reason why the Prime Minister uses the clunky term “fair dinkum power” instead of “dispatchable power”.
Desperation has driven some political leaders to absurd proposals.
Remember Julia Gillard’s 2010 “citizens’ assembly”? It was in effect a surrender to the issue and a flick pass to populist opinion.
Stubborn refusal to accept there was a problem at all has clogged policy development. Tony Abbott once declared the science of climate change was “crap” and has only toughened his opinion since then.

Desperation has driven other PM’s to surrender on issues of national importance.
Picture: Kym Smith Source: News Corp Australia

And disgraceful political game playing has made it harder for voters to sift the facts from blatant dishonesty.
Barnaby Joyce set the pace by claiming Labor policies would send the price of the Sunday roast to $100. It was of course rubbish.
It’s that political legacy Scott Morrison is attempting to defy, and the real test is whether he can do so and still produce a viable policy.

Links

• Coalition Urged To Revive 'Necessary And Inevitable' Emissions Reduction
• Wentworth Wipe-Out Won’t Shift Coalition Idiocy On Climate And Energy
• Wentworth Byelection Backlash Reignites Tensions Inside The Morrison Government Over Climate Policy
• The Morrison Government’s Biggest Economic Problem? Climate Change Denial
• 'No More Hiding': Morrison Government Set Emissions Data Deadlines
• To Tackle Climate Change, A New U.N. Climate Report Says Put A High Price On Carbon
• Mining Sector, Morrison Government On The Defensive Over IPCC Report
• Major Climate Report Describes A Strong Risk Of Crisis As Early As 2040
• The Political Will To Prevent Climate Change Is Lacking, Even As The Cost Climbs

How Plants And Animals Are Teaching Scientists To Fight Climate Change

NBC News - James Rainey

In the emerging field of biomimicry, scientists and inventors take inspiration from trees, whales and coral.

A device designed to help trees grow in deforested regions of the Amazon. Nucleario

The immensity of a program to reforest large swaths of the Amazon is hard to conceive — it aims to plant millions of trees over a remote area of Brazil roughly the size of Pennsylvania. If that wasn’t a big enough challenge, there’s also the threat seedlings face from dry spells, non-native plants and the voracious leaf-cutter ant.
Enter a Brazilian industrial engineer and his partners, who think they have a solution. The team calls their invention Nucleario — a circular device that creates a safe oasis for a young tree, complete with mulchy ground cover, a water cistern to conserve rainfall and a wall to keep out invasive plants and creatures.
The invention was recently awarded a $100,000 prize in a worldwide design challenge, sponsored by the Biomimicry Institute, a Missoula, Montana-based nonprofit that supports scientists and inventors who find solutions to man-made problems with designs inspired by the natural world.
The concept of biomimicry has been around for years. Designers have replicated the skin of the octopus to invent a camouflage surface that could help robots change color and texture. They have studied squid and jellyfish to look for a better propulsion system for submarines. And a Boston research hospital mimicked the behavior of underwater worms to develop a glue that knits together fragile heart muscles.
Now, advocates of such bio-inspired engineering are urging inventors to apply nature’s lessons to the challenge of global warming. Along with Nucleario’s forest-restoration device, finalists in the global design challenge have included a window-mounted device, designed like the rose-shaped frailejon plant, to cool buildings with less electricity, and a roadside filter that mimics the straining properties of baleen whales to clean fine particulate pollution from the air.

Blue Planet Ltd. of California makes various forms of rock and sand by combining carbon dioxide pollution with calcium. The process prevents the greenhouse gas from polluting the atmosphere. Blue Planet

Some of the most promising biomimicry designs have already been deployed, including several that capture carbon dioxide that would otherwise spew into the air and use it to make everything from plastics to a key element of concrete.
Janine Benyus, co-founder of the Biomimcry Institute, said the Nucleario concept is emblematic of solutions drawn from nature.
“Learning about the natural world is one thing. Learning from the natural world — that’s the profound switch,” said Benyus, author of the 1997 book, “Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.” “We need to restore the rainforest quickly, so it makes perfect sense to study the surrounding ecosystem — how the forest floor and local plants create conditions that nurture new trees — and borrow those strategies to do the same."

Learning from the forest
Nucleario grew out of the profound love three Brazilians had for the rainforest that covers much of their country, but that has been degraded by logging and clear-cutting for new farms and development. The World Wildlife Fund estimates the Amazon lost nearly 3.5 million acres of forest a year in the dozen years after 2000. That’s an area the size of Connecticut stripped annually of oxygen-producing and carbon-absorbing forest.
Nucleario co-founder Bruno Rutman was drawn to the problem of deforestation because of a youth spent kayaking, paragliding and climbing in Brazil’s coastal rainforest. In his day job as an industrial designer he worked on products like furniture, but after hours he thought about how his country might meet its commitment, under the Paris climate accord, to replant nearly 30 million acres of forest by 2030.

A team of three Brazilians -- from left, Bruno Rutman, Bruno Ferrari and Pedro Rutman -- recently won a world design competition for their Nucleario, a device designed to help trees grow in deforested regions of the Amazon. Nucleario

Bruno and his brother and partner, Pedro Rutman, sought out experts in forestry, who taught them that getting seedling trees to survive beyond a year was a huge part of the reforestation challenge. Non-native brachiaria grass, favored by dairy farmers, chokes young trees. Leaf-cutter ants mow away foliage, and intermittent rains can leave seedlings without moisture.
The brothers responded with the circular Nucleario, the size of a small bicycle tire and designed to be set into the ground as a protective barrier for a new seedling. The device’s exterior will biodegrade into mulch that keeps the ground moist. The device collects dew and rainwater into a cistern, modeled on those in the bromeliad plant, which can hold up to three gallons of water.
“Our main customer, in a way, is the seedling,” said Bruno Rutman. “Our second customer is the field worker, who is planting all these trees but does not have the time to come and maintain them.”
The Nucleario is still a prototype, with some 500 installed with seedlings in several test patches around Brazil, according to the Biomimicry Institute. The test groves have been funded by grants from universities and the World Wildlife Fund.

Biomimicry in action
Well beyond prototype stage is another innovation, inspired by the way marine organisms, like coral and clams, grow their hard superstructures. Blue Planet Ltd. of Los Gatos, California, is creating rock-like “aggregate” used as the main ingredient in concrete. It creates the material by relying on two waste streams — disposed and unused cement from building projects and carbon dioxide gas from power plants.
Blue Planet takes the carbon dioxide and combines it with a liquid solution to make a bicarbonate. The company then combines calcium drawn from reprocessed cement and mixes it with the bicarbonate to produce calcium carbonate, or limestone. The limestone can be formed into sand or gravel-sized rock — both major components that are mixed with cement to create concrete.
In nature, corals and mollusks combine calcium and carbon dioxide absorbed in seawater and secrete calcium carbonate skeletons, forming shells and coral reefs.
The ultimate impact of the Blue Planet process is that carbon dioxide — Earth’s principal heat-trapping greenhouse gas — is kept out of the atmosphere and is instead “sequestered” into new buildings. “We are taking something that would be released into the atmosphere and contribute to climate change and making something useful out of it,” said Brent Constantz, a marine scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who founded Blue Planet.

Brent Constantz, is a marine scientist and Silicon Valley entrepreneur who figured out a way to "sequester" carbon pollution in building materials. Blue Planet

The company plans to expand, drawing additional carbon dioxide from the Los Medanos power plant in Pittsburg, California, the large natural gas-powered plant that delivers electricity to San Francisco. Already, Blue Planet’s aggregate went into the concrete used to build a new terminal at San Francisco International Airport, which is due to open next summer.
The leader of the agency that oversees air quality in nine San Francisco Bay Area counties said that if the Blue Planet process proves as successful as imagined it could spread to other power plants and heavy polluters, like a cement factory south of San Francisco.
“This process has a lot of promise,” said Jack Broadbent, CEO of the Bay Area Air Quality Management District. “Essentially we are learning from nature itself to be able to address a man-made problem.”

Links

• Building a new generation of sustainability innovators
• Biomimicry Launchpad
• This killer robot could help save the Great Barrier Reef. Here's how.
• New report says world must boost efforts to suck carbon dioxide from the air
• Here's how that weird, rectangular-looking iceberg came to be
• An Antarctic ice shelf is singing, and it sounds like an eerie sci-fi soundtrack
• We're falling short on efforts to stop global warming. Here's how we can get on track.
• Teaching coral to toughen up could help reefs survive climate change

How To Shift Public Attitudes And Win The Global Climate Battle

Yale Environment 360 - Todd Stern*

The world is making progress in decarbonizing economies, but not nearly fast enough, says Todd Stern the former U.S. chief climate negotiator. Here he spells out what forces must come together to marshal the public and political will needed to tackle climate change.

REUTERS/Stephane Mahe

Climate change is on the front pages again. In the space of three weeks, Florida and North Carolina were battered by severe hurricanes whose destructive power was surely intensified by hotter ocean waters and a warmer atmosphere, which holds more moisture. Between those two violent storms, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) delivered a four-alarm warning about the profound dangers of holding global warming even to an increase of 2 degrees Celsius, which not long ago was considered a safe zone. Meanwhile, climate negotiators are currently wrangling with each other to finalize the guidelines and procedures needed to turn the Paris Agreement into an operational regime, a struggle made harder by the absence of U.S. leadership.
These developments serve as a reminder that we are in a race against time. We are making dramatic progress in decarbonizing our economies, but dangerous climate impacts are also coming at us faster than predicted. We need concerted action now, in all major economies, to accelerate the transformation of a world that currently relies on fossil fuels for more than 80 percent of its primary energy and will have to reach net-zero emissions in the next 50 years or less to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement.
From the perspective of innovation, policy, and cost, we know what to do and can do it. Clean-tech innovation is in full bloom, with an unmatched innovation culture in the United States and progress happening all over the world. We know how to set policy standards, provide incentives, introduce carbon pricing, stoke up research and development. And a clean-energy transformation at full speed and scale would likely be cheaper than continuing our dependence on fossil fuels, even before counting the projected costs of disruptive climate damage.

Major shifts in attitude and behavior have occurred time and again in the social and economic spheres.

But the key ingredients that are in short supply are the human factors: political will and the rapidly evolving norms and attitudes about climate change that can generate that will.
Some may look at the scope of the climate challenge and the obstructive power of the fossil fuel incumbency — with its deeply embedded infrastructure and its political clout around the world — and conclude that a change in people’s thinking won’t be enough. But changing norms and attitudes can move mountains. They are about a sense of what is acceptable, what is right, what is important, what we expect.
Major shifts in attitude and behavior have occurred time and again in the social and economic spheres. Think, for example, of the transformation that occurred with respect to cigarettes, as near-universal social acceptance gave way to smokers being relegated to sidewalks or cordoned-off smoking rooms. Consider the rapid shift in thinking we have seen on same-sex marriage or about what is happening right now in regard to sexual harassment and the #Me Too movement. These are different kinds of issues, to be sure, and decarbonizing the global economy is clearly a challenge on a vastly larger scale. Still, all these issues come down to human attitudes. And when norms change, they can change decisively and drive political action with them. Recall that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton both opposed same-sex marriage in their 2008 primary battle. A few years later, that would have been unthinkable, because attitudes and expectations had changed.
Can we expect a similar change in regard to global warming? We don’t know yet, but there is reason to think we can. We are living in a rapidly evolving world when it comes to climate change and clean energy. When our context and surroundings change, new initiatives are launched and the nature of our public discourse shifts, all these things can affect our attitudes and our sense of what seems right and necessary, of what we demand, of what we will no longer countenance. Consider:

The Paris Agreement
The Paris accord was a huge step forward in building up norms and expectations. It sent a powerful signal to the world, from governments to boardrooms to civil society, that leaders had finally made a pivotal decision to tackle climate change, built on strong temperature goals, a system of five-year cycles to ratchet up ambition, and a series of measures to ensure accountability and integrity. Going forward, the Paris regime has the potential to become the symbolic heart of the global climate effort, where countries promote engagement, hold each other to account, take stock of the dangers we face, collaborate in large or small groups, and put their reputations on the line.

With every passing year, the signs from the natural world become starker and more vivid.

Leader engagement
Leader engagement was crucial to getting the Paris Agreement done. We can only make the kind of rapid progress we need with the ongoing involvement of political leaders, which could, for example, take the form of biennial meetings among the heads of key countries, either as a separate gathering or as a day added to an existing summit like the G20. Such meetings could focus on new ways to accelerate the transformation of the global economy and to manage the worldwide impacts of climate change.

Impacts
With every passing year, the signs from the natural world become starker and more vivid. In recent years in the U.S., we have seen mammoth storms and floods, multi-year droughts, and gigantic wildfires scorching California and the West. And this parade of disasters has been matched or surpassed all over the world — in the Philippines, Thailand, China, Japan, Pakistan, India, the Middle East, Europe, Colombia, Brazil. People see this more and more. They live through these events, see their family or friends live through them, watch them on smart phones and television. The snide dismissal of a climate link to these phenomena starts to ring hollow. Our context changes.

Clean technology
At the same time that the dangers of climate change become ever-more apparent, so does the reality that solutions are becoming more available and affordable by the day and could come even more quickly with political support. Look at the astonishing progress made in the past decade on clean energy as the costs of wind and solar plummet, and the cost curve for energy storage follows suit. Look at the rapid growth of electric vehicles in countries such as China and Norway, and the announcements from many countries — including China, India, Britain, France, Norway, and the Netherlands — that they intend to end sales of gasoline and diesel vehicles by 2025, 2030, or 2040.

A Chinese worker installs solar panels at a solar farm in Yantai, Shandong Province. VCG/VCG via Getty Images

And consider the pivotal moment coming soon, whether in 5 years or 10, when electric vehicles cost no more than conventional cars, are far cheaper to operate and maintain, and can be charged almost anywhere in five minutes. And beyond these marquee elements of the clean revolution, major new research efforts are underway around the world on promising new low-carbon technologies. In addition, surveys show that clean energy is hugely popular both in the U.S. and with a wide swath of the global population.

The market context
Carbon Tracker’s recent 2020 Vision report makes a compelling case that a downturn in fossil fuel markets is coming much faster than most people realize. Carbon Tracker argues that a moment is approaching when demand for fossil fuel products will peak, and that this is likely to happen when alternatives achieve just 5 to 10 percent of total supply. Solar PV and wind already accounted for 6 percent of global electricity supply in 2017 and for 45 percent of the growth in supply. After the peak, the impacts on fossil fuels will start to be felt in financial markets in the form of lower prices, disruptions, and stranded financial assets as investors realize that the days of the industry’s supremacy are numbered.

The business context
Major companies across a broad range of sectors are moving to embrace clean and green solutions, and many are collaborating with each other in a range of initiatives dedicated to climate action and sustainable development. Businesses are increasingly acquiring large amounts of their energy needs from renewable sources, setting voluntary targets to reduce their carbon footprints, and marketing their green bona fides to consumers. They are taking these actions for many reasons: because they see the danger climate change poses to their supply chains, markets, and infrastructure, and because they realize that younger generations — which will bear the brunt of climate change’s impacts — strongly support the clean-energy revolution.
There is also room for more direct efforts at persuasion. For example, in the U.S., many Republicans in Congress know climate change is a real and important issue but see it as a third rail they can’t touch because of their political base. But, at least to some extent, there may be a kind of odd feedback loop at work. An article in The New York Times this summer argued that Republican voters are not so much skeptical about climate change as they are skeptical about Democrats, and they see climate as a Democratic issue. The authors conducted an experiment in which Republicans supported climate policies when told that Republican lawmakers or other notables favored the given policy. These respondents were then ready to follow the party line. So, we may have lawmakers afraid to buck a base that in fact would be willing to follow their leaders in more constructive directions — if their leaders had the nerve.

We cannot treat this existential threat as the environmental issue you glance at occasionally before going back to the essential stuff.

Recent polling by the Pew Research Center demonstrates a distinct generational divide in the GOP, with millennial Republicans (22 to 37 years old) much more inclined than older Republicans to believe that climate change is happening and that government should take action.
If trusted leaders and spokespersons raise their voices and make the case to people in their own communities and “tribes,” it could make a difference. Initiatives should be funded and launched that could hasten the change of norms and attitudes. Plenty of Republicans outside Congress understand that climate change is real and getting worse, and they believe the stance of their party’s leadership is untenable. Of course, all of this is more difficult with a president who beats the anti-climate drum. But he won’t be there forever, and work done now to open minds will pay off.
Outside the U.S., the public is not so divided over the urgency of combating climate change. While there are significant differences in views about climate change and its risks among different regions, a 2017 Pew Research Center survey found that climate change was nevertheless identified by respondents from 38 countries as one of two leading global threats, just behind ISIS.
Another important area is educating opinion makers in places such as companies, think tanks, and universities who believe in the issue but don’t understand the speed and scale of action required and don’t grasp that climate has to be lifted to the top tier of domestic and foreign policy concerns. We cannot treat this existential threat as the environmental issue you glance at occasionally before going back to the essential stuff. Climate, now, is the essential stuff.
The fact is that we have only one home and are subjecting it to extraordinary stress. As Jared Diamond demonstrated in his book Collapse, humans don’t always muddle through. Civilizations have disappeared because they lacked the wherewithal to both recognize and address looming environmental crises. Yet the solutions we need are at hand. We can be defeated by the greed of those who know better but can’t walk away from the next dollar; by apathy; by the demagogues whose only objective is to score points, get ratings, get paid. Or we can recognize the stakes, we can learn and discuss, we can vote, and march, and rise to meet this challenge. 

*Todd Stern is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a distinguished fellow at the World Resources Institute. He served from January 2009 until April 2016 as the Special Envoy for Climate Change at the State Department, leading the U.S. effort in negotiating the Paris Agreement and in all climate negotiations in the seven years leading up to Paris. Mr. Stern was a visiting lecturer at the Yale Law School in the fall of 2016. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.

Links

• Climate Change and the Human Mind: A Noted Psychiatrist Weighs In
• Redrawing the Map: How the world's climate zones are shifting
• With Norway in Lead, Europe Set for Surge in Electric Vehicles
• 2020 Vision: why you should see the fossil fuel peak coming