04/01/2021

(AU) Last Year Was Dismal In Many Respects But It Was A Landmark For Renewables In Australia

The Guardian - 

As we kick off 2021, state governments are embracing decarbonisation to popular acclaim

‘In 2020 the residential solar sector smashed all previous records, no doubt buoyed by housebound families turning their attention to their homes and yet another year of falling system costs.’ Composite: Carly Earl
In his speech to the Smart Energy Summit in mid-December 2019, New South Wales energy minister Matt Kean fired a shot that has reverberated all year.

As Kean spoke, smoke from the bushfires enveloping Sydney permeated the hotel conference room such that a cone of illuminated particulates appeared to hang beneath every ceiling light.

“This is not normal and doing nothing is not a solution” said Kean, breaking ranks with his federal counterparts. “We need to reduce our carbon emissions immediately”.

Kean was pilloried by the Murdoch press, but stood firm. In July, he announced a plan to build transmission lines opening up two massive new renewable energy zones, and in November he legislated a plan to underwrite the $32bn of renewables and storage required to fill them.

Kean’s ambitious moves, which prepare NSW for the coming wave of coal power station retirements, received almost no pushback from conservative media. Whimpers of protest from federal energy minister Angus Taylor barely registered. (To nobody’s surprise, a recent poll of AFR readers voted Taylor “worst minister” of 2020.)

Other Liberal states have stepped up too. Tasmania, already at 100% renewables, announced plans to double renewable generation. In 2019 South Australia announced a goal of 100% net renewable generation by 2030 and in 2020 announced a 500% renewables target by 2050.

Labor-led governments haven’t sat still either. Victoria announced a “humongous” new battery for Geelong, a huge housing energy efficiency program and development of six renewable zones. Queensland committed to developing three new zones and appointed a minister for renewables and hydrogen.

Refreshingly, Australia’s conservative media have largely bitten their collective tongues. It is now politically safe to pursue clean energy.

Globally, the decarbonisation drumbeat has become impossible to ignore.

The number of countries committing to net-zero emissions reached 121.

The number of globally significant financial institutions announcing coal-exit policies almost doubled to 155.

Oil companies conceded that oil’s best days are behind us.

The International Energy Agency declared solar as “the new king” of electricity. US president-elect Joe Biden has made it clear that he’ll be aggressively pursuing climate action and will rejoin the Paris agreement on day one.
Watch Morrison gradually reposition on climate in 2021, just as Howard did before the 2007 federal election
Our three biggest coal customers — Japan, China and South Korea — each committed to net-zero emissions. And with the pool of debt, equity and insurance providers shrinking, the long-term decline of our coal sector is now certain. Australia’s energy transition continues apace.

In 2009 Kevin Rudd’s government extended the Howard era renewable energy target (RET) to a nominal “20% by 2020”.

Worried that the RET would be too successful, Tony Abbott took an axe to the scheme in 2015, cutting about 40% of the remaining demand.

Despite years of sustained attacks, and thanks to states, corporates and literally millions of households and their solar panels, we’ve blown past Rudd’s target.

In 2020 more than 26% of energy in the national electricity market (NEM) was delivered by renewables.

2020 marked the lowest coal use in the NEM this century and the lowest gas usage since 2006 — so much for the “gas led recovery”. It’s increasingly clear that multiple coal power stations will close this side of 2030.
In 2020 the residential solar sector smashed all previous records, no doubt buoyed by housebound families turning their attention to their homes and yet another year of falling system costs.

South Australia continued to power ahead with an average of 59% of demand met by wind and solar. In earlier years, renewable generation exceeded the state’s total demand for moments — in 2020 it did so for 10% of the year. In a marked turnaround, over the last half-year South Australia recorded the lowest wholesale energy prices in the country.

Despite dire warnings from (inexpert) pundits, record heat and fire-related transmission outages, our grid performed exceptionally well over summer.

A freak storm at the end of January knocked out a major power line between Victoria and SA.

Thanks to new levels of preparation and conservatism in the wake of the 2016 blackout, this time SA didn’t skip a beat, and ran “islanded” from the NEM for 17 days straight.

Sadly, Audrey Zibelman, CEO of Aemo, the electricity market operator and system planner, returned to the US. Zibelman leaves behind a transformed organisation, no longer struggling with the pace of change, but one approaching the transition with the rigour required to manage such a critical service.

One of Zibelman’s crowning achievements at Aemo is the integrated system plan, one of the most detailed network planning processes globally.

The ISP models multiple “least cost” development pathways for our national grid.

The “step change” scenario, arguably the most plausible, has our grid at 96% renewable energy in 2042 — solving the energy trilemma of affordable, reliable and clean power.

Two massive renewables projects were granted major project status.

Between the 26GW Asian Renewable Energy Hub (which plans to produce cheap power for the Pilbara and massive quantities of green hydrogen for export) and the 10GW Sun Cable project (which aims to send power by undersea cable to Singapore) the projects would increase total electricity generation in Australia by more than 50%.
Australia’s energy transition continues to play out between the states, business and households
Despite our great progress in greening the electricity system, Australia is floundering in the transport sector. Preliminary 2020 sales numbers indicate flat growth in electric vehicle sales, in stark contrast to much of the rest of the world.

While a growing number of countries are introducing future bans on new fossil-fuelled car sales and have provided subsidies on EVs for years, Australia has no federal electrification policies and disincentivises with high taxes on electric vehicles.

Without federal electrification policies, states and territories are going their own way. At one end of the spectrum, the ACT is removing taxes and providing interest free loans for EVs. Victoria, on the other hand, is planning to impose a new tax on EVs. Given the mess, it’s no surprise that Volkswagen has chosen to pass over Australia for their new EV range.

When Matt Kean prodded Scott Morrison to sharpen up his climate stance a year ago, the prime minister shot back dismissively that “most of the federal cabinet wouldn’t even know who Matt Kean was”.

As we kick off 2021, every cabinet member has seen how Kean and his state counterparts have deftly transcended the party’s historical opposition to renewable energy and are instead embracing decarbonisation to popular acclaim.

The emergence of centre-right advocacy group Coalition for Conservation and thinktank the Blueprint Institute have emboldened MPs acutely aware the party’s position is untenable.

Credit where credit is due, the government dropped plans to apply Kyoto carbon credits against our Paris agreement commitments and re-committed to funding clean energy research and development, including for the nascent hydrogen industry.

But after seven years in government, the federal government still has no credible emissions reduction plan, so it was no surprise that when UK prime minister Boris Johnson held the Climate Ambition Summit in December, Morrison was denied a speaking slot.

For all his failings, Morrison knows how to read the room. His many “micro-pivots” indicate that he knows coal’s best days are behind us, that his advisors over-egged the promise of gas, that renewable energy is extremely popular and climate science denial a major turn-off.

Watch Morrison gradually reposition on climate in 2021, just as Howard did before the 2007 federal election, and for the same reasons.

The need for economic stimulus provides Morrison with the perfect opportunity to complete his slow pivot and the conservative media appear ready to give him the requisite leeway.

In the meantime, Australia’s energy transition continues to play out between the states, business and households.

Veteran environmentalist Bill McKibben makes the point that, on climate action, winning slowly is the same as losing. Are we winning fast enough? No, but we are accelerating.

Are we accelerating fast enough? Maybe.

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Climate Change Is Best Tackled Through Lots Of Small-Scale Solutions – Here Are Nine Reasons Why

The Conversation -  |  | 

Andre Nery / shutterstock

Authors
  •  is Reader, School of Environmental Science, University of East Anglia
  • is Research Scholar, Transition to New Technologies, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA)
  • is Research Associate, Engineering, Imperial College, London
Massive amounts of public money are being mobilised to kickstart economies out of COVID-induced recessions. Many countries are allocating parts of their stimulus packages towards ensuring the recovery is green.

As we emerge from the COVID shock and try to accelerate progress on decarbonisation, should we prioritise larger or smaller-scale solutions?

  • A million 1 kilowatt solar panels or a single 1 gigawatt nuclear reactor?

  • 250 electric bikes or a single tram on a light transit system?

  • £150 smart thermostats or £50,000 whole-home energy-efficient retrofits?

There are many low-carbon ways to supply energy, provide mobility in cities and heat homes. These solutions vary on what we have called the granular-lumpy continuum.

More granular options are relatively small in size, low in cost, and modular – they scale through replication. More lumpy options are relatively large, costly and non-divisible – they scale by growing larger.

For a study published in Science earlier this year, we collected data on a wide variety of energy technologies along the granular-lumpy continuum and then tested how well they performed against nine characteristics of accelerated low-carbon transformation.

We found that more granular technologies have nine important advantages over more lumpy alternatives. These advantages set clear priorities for policymakers deciding how to allocate limited resources.

Faster and cheaper energy supply

The first three are all essential ingredients of a rapid technological transformation of how we supply and use energy in buildings, transport and industry. With the UK and the world falling well behind on progress towards net-zero emissions, speed is of the essence.

First, we found more granular technologies deploy faster, with lower cost barriers and less specialised capital requirements. Whereas it takes decades and billions to get a nuclear power station up and running, the energy equivalent in distributed solar power can be deployed in years for a fraction of the cost.

Second, we found more granular technologies are less risky for investors, with lower cost overruns and construction delays.

Third, we found more granular technologies improve faster in cost and performance, as they provide more opportunities for experimentation and learning. Learning rates, which measure the percentage cost reduction for each doubling of cumulative experience, are twice as high for smaller-scale technologies.

Big projects create inertia

The second set of advantages of granularity all help contribute to escaping inertia or “lock-in” in our current energy system with its long-lived, slow-to-change and ever-expanding infrastructure.

Powerful but inert. Drone Motion Stock / shutterstock

Fourth, we found more granular technologies have shorter lifetimes, enabling quicker turnover of existing capital stock. In contrast, power stations, jet aircraft and skyscrapers once built will last decades or centuries creating inertia to change.

Fifth, we found more granular technologies offer more opportunities for efficiency improvements that downsize the magnitude of the decarbonisation challenge.

Sixth, we found more granular technologies are less complex, enabling more rapid innovation cycles. This means product and process improvements move faster from lab to market.

Widely shared benefits

The final three advantages all recognise that climate action and climate justice go hand in hand. Rapid decarbonisation is not possible without the social and political legitimacy that comes from widely shared benefits and jobs.

Seventh, we found more granular technologies are more equitably distributed among the world’s population. You’re eight times more likely to have access to a mobile phone than to a car.

Eighth, we found more granular technologies provide higher social returns on every public dollar invested in innovation. More economic productivity, more air pollution benefits, more energy security.

And ninth, but not least, we found more granular technologies mean more jobs. Per unit of power generated, a solar plant creates ten times the net employment of a fossil fuel or nuclear power facility.

In our study, we are careful to point out that these nine advantages of granularity do not fall like manna from heaven. They are the result of concerted research, innovation, investment, standardisation, mass manufacturing and policy advocacy.

It can also be challenging to integrate lots of granular technologies into existing infrastructure: heat pumps and solar panels need to connect into electricity networks, electric vehicles into charging stations, insulation products into building envelopes.

Nor can granularity outcompete lumpiness in all contexts. There are no like-for-like alternatives to some lumpy technologies. Think jet aircraft flying long-haul or iron, steel, and cement manufacturing.

In other cases, more granular options are available but offer a different type of service. Bicycles and SUVs can both get us around cities but with different implications for speed, comfort, health, convenience, status and more besides.

So while not a black-and-white picture, we still found compelling evidence that more granular energy technologies tend to deploy faster, improve quicker, offer more ways to escape carbon lock-in, are more equitably accessible and create more jobs.

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03/01/2021

(AU) Making Sense Of Australia’s Climate Exceptionalism

Al Jazeera - Stephen Pascoe

Why does Australia act as if it can ignore the climate crisis, and how long can it keep to this seemingly suicidal posture?

Fire burns in the grass near Bumbalong, south of the Australian capital, Canberra, Feb. 1, 2020. [AP Photo/Rick Rycroft]

Author
Stephen Pascoe is a Mellon Humanities Faculty Fellow in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.
Originally from Melbourne, Pascoe's research spans the histories of cities, infrastructure, imperialism and popular resistance, with a focus on the modern Middle East. 
2020 has had no shortage of images of catastrophe and suffering, but the ones that haunt me the most are from the inferno that engulfed my home country, Australia, at the very beginning of the year.

For us Australians, the year started with images of giant flames climbing up the cliffs of the Blue Mountains and the news that over a billion animals had perished in the fires raging across the continent. 

Over the previous month, we had witnessed the Sydney skyline disappear under a dystopian, orange pall of smoke and would soon watch in worry as hundreds of vacationing families huddled together on beaches to be rescued from fast-approaching fires.

We Australians have long imagined ourselves as a uniquely nonchalant and irreverent nation. But at the dawn of 2020, long before COVID-19 even reached our shores, we found ourselves dismayed by our apocalyptic present and terrified of what likely lies in our future.

This year’s bushfires, and the unprecedented devastation they caused, have left an indelible scar on the collective consciousness of Australians. As the carnage we experienced made clear that the climate is changing faster than our worst fears, we hoped that our elected representatives would finally take the necessary steps to address the global climate emergency.

Yet, just a few months after the fires, in an attempt to swiftly lift Australia out of the COVID-19 recession it found itself in, Prime Minister Scott Morrison authorised a “Gas-Fired recovery”: a raft of new policies that completely ignores the country’s gloomy ecological reality and aims to revitalise the economy by getting “more gas into the market”.

Australia’s seemingly suicidal posture towards climate change often puzzles foreign observers. Indeed, the Australian state’s persistent reluctance to take meaningful action as the country wilts from the worst effects of climate change defies rational explanation.

Noting that “Australia is already having to deal with some of the most extreme manifestations of climate change”, renowned British conservationist David Attenborough once described the Australian government’s disinterest in responding to the climate emergency as “extraordinary”.

Coming to terms with our exceptionalism
Australia’s apparent indifference towards this global emergency is not so much a case of climate change denialism as it is exceptionalism. There are some climate change deniers on the far right who exercise an inordinate amount of political power relative to the size of their support base. 

However, more fundamentally, what guides the Australian state’s problematic stance on climate change is a form of exceptionalism. Australia’s climate change exceptionalism rests on several pillars.

First, the conviction on the part of successive Australian governments that our national consumption patterns have no material effect on climate change and the resulting belief that we can extract ourselves from the global effort to combat it without this causing much harm.

Second, a purposeful downplaying of the contributions of Australian extractive industries to carbon supply chains, which paints the country as an incidental intermediary in the production of global emissions, encourages Australians to view climate change as somebody else’s problem. This, despite Australia now being the third-largest exporter of carbon dioxide in fossil fuels, behind Russia and Saudi Arabia.

These convenient fictions allow Australian governments to ignore the scientific consensus on climate change when politically and economically convenient and opt in an out of climate change mitigation and adaptation measures as they see fit.

This was not always the case.

In the 1980s, when the public first became aware of the “greenhouse effect”, as it was then commonly termed, Australia was among the countries taking the problem seriously, developing policy frameworks that began to address the problem and participating in international forums on the issue in good will.

The turning point on this issue was the election of the conservative Liberal-National Party (LNP) leader, John Howard, as prime minister in 1996. Howard defied expectations and became Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister, remaining in office for eleven long years.

During his time in power, he fundamentally altered Australian political discourse in ways that influence the country’s stance on important issues, such as climate change, to this day.

In the international sphere, Howard’s tenure saw Australia break its commitment to multilateralism and international cooperation and focus solely on its relations with “countries that share its values” – namely the Anglosphere.

Under Howard’s leadership, Australia quickly signed up to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars but refused to ratify the Kyoto pact on climate change. Trying to explain his reasons for refusing to ratify the protocol in 2002, Howard claimed such a move would “would cost us jobs and damage our industry”.

He and his ministers persistently argued that purposefully reducing greenhouse gas emissions would unnecessarily harm the economy while bringing marginal environmental gain. After all, what was the point in us making sacrifices while more populous nations like India and China were free to pollute all they liked?

This cynical reasoning has since become a cornerstone of Australia’s environmental exceptionalism – it is not so much that Australian politicians do not believe the climate is changing, they simply do not think they should be the ones paying the price to fix it.

Racism and a chronic indifference towards the suffering of communities of colour, both inside and outside Australia, also play a significant role in the country’s climate exceptionalism.

In 2015, for example, three of Howard’s former ministers – Peter Dutton, Tony Abbot and Scott Morrison – were overheard mocking and ridiculing the plight of Pacific Island nations facing rising seas from climate change.

During a conversation about Pacific Island leaders supposedly arriving late to a meeting, Dutton quipped that “time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door”.

It was textbook environmental racism, marrying, in a single breath, the old white colonialist trope of non-western peoples not respecting industrial capitalism’s nexus between time and work-discipline with callous indifference to the communities of colour that are most exposed to climate change.

A similarly hostile indifference has been displayed by successive governments towards Australia’s own Indigenous citizens. Torres Strait Islanders, whose homes are at risk of being submerged by rising sea levels in the near future, have taken the extraordinary step of launching a complaint with the UN’s Human Rights Committee against the national government over its failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Coalaphilia and Its Legacies

Australia’s current Prime Minister Scott Morrison is very much an inheritor of the Howardesque technique of appealing to the so-called “silent” Australians, against the troublesome noise of critics and environmentalists.

In a theatrical stunt in the national parliament in 2017, Morrison brandished a lump of coal and shook it in the air as he goaded his opponents, whom he accused of being afflicted by the malady of “coalaphobia” – an “ideological, pathological fear of coal” that allegedly harms the economic prosperity of everyday Australians.

Morrison’s performance of coalaphilia, while containing a decent dose of “petro-masculinity”, was not entirely chest-thumping cosplay. His unshakeable conviction in the inherent benefits of mining tapped a deep reservoir of cognitive dissonance.

Like other settler-colonial nations, Australia’s official identity has always been built upon twin, mutually-reinforcing logics: the erasure of Indigenous sovereignty over the land, and overreaching optimism in the national territory’s boundless potential for capital investment and extraction of mineral resources.

While extractive industries have always played a prominent role in Australian politics and economy, their power has paradoxically grown over the past quarter-century alongside the necessity to regulate their atmospheric “externalities”.

The mining industry, in concert with the Murdoch press, has the power to make and break elected governments in Australia.

In his first tenure as prime minister (2007-2010), in the midst of a phenomenal mining boom tied to China’s rising demand for minerals, Australian Labor Party (ALP) leader Kevin Rudd attempted to increase the government’s take of the super-profits from mining, in the form of a Minerals Resource Rent Tax.

The backlash, orchestrated by mining tycoons employing tactics similar to the Koch brothers in the US, was astonishing. After months of hostile press and slipping approval ratings, Rudd was deposed in an internal coup and replaced by Julia Gillard.

After taking office in June 2010, Gillard immediately dropped the fight with the mining magnates. But when she tried a modest route towards emissions reduction, in the form of a tax on carbon, she received her own drawn-out political crucifixion.

Upon assuming office as prime minister in 2013, Tony Abbott’s first item of business was to repeal Gillard’s maligned “Carbon Tax”, which, during its brief period of operation, had succeeded in reducing our emissions.

Australia thereby became the first country in the world to abolish a demonstrably effective pricing mechanism on carbon. Having crushed the brief interregnum on climate inaction, Abbott restored the environmental exceptionalism in which we remain mired to this day.

Tragically, at precisely the moment Australia needed to take radical action to decarbonise its economy, its government determined that the country’s economic prosperity was irrefutably tied to its capacity to allow multinational corporations to dig minerals and fossil fuels out of the ground. This, despite the said corporations paying minimal contributions back to the citizenry.

However, in Australia, the psychological inability to accept the scale and implications of the climate crisis is not limited to the government. In 2019, for example, Australians responded to the emerging calls to reduce unnecessary air travel on environmental grounds with near-universal derision. 

Even the left-wing press baulked at the suggestion that like others living in Asia, the Americas and Europe, Australians too should alter their travel plans to help the global fight against climate change. It was as though geographical remoteness gave us a free pass not to act: 

Surely the famous “tyranny of distance” that shaped Australia’s history would also mean its residents would continue to fly as often as they wish, without even considering their carbon footprints, amid a climate crisis?

This is a classic feature of Australian environmental exceptionalism: any uncomfortable discussion is closed before it begins, bargained away into a corner of the collective Australian consciousness where it might not bother anyone too much.

The end of exceptionalism?

Will 2020 prove, finally, to be the turning point in Australia’s climate exceptionalism?

In July of this year, a substantial and sudden erosion of the New South Wales shoreline near Sydney demonstrated how vulnerable the majority of Australia’s inhabitants who live in proximity to the coast will be to future sea level rises, king tides, and other extreme weather events. Further north, the main beach at Byron Bay, one of Australia’s most famous beachfronts, has dramatically collapsed into the sea.

For a nation obsessed with the pursuit of homeownership, it may be the threat of a changing climate to individual private property that will strike the strongest chord. There are warnings that flood- and bushfire-prone communities will face increasing insurance premiums and may even become uninsurable in the near future.

As pressure mounts on the federal government to change course, the corrosive influence of the Murdoch media empire on our political discourse has been highlighted from various angles. The current government and the Murdoch press have been accused of working as a team, coordinating messaging, and the timing of the release of sensitive information. 

News Corp’s active promotion of climate scepticism has been more meticulously documented. Former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd launched a petition for a Royal Commission into media ownership in Australia; this has garnered more than half-a-million signatures from Australians fed up with Murdoch’s monopolisation of the media.

Meanwhile, internationally, a series of developments this year have highlighted the distance between our glaring inaction and the gathering action of other countries.

As our major trading partners have announced they will enforce new standards for environmental reporting among agricultural producers, calls are being made for Australian exports to be subjected to “climate tariffs”. Importers of Australian coal – China, Japan, South Korea and the Philippines – have all announced in recent months that they are banning coal in the near future as part of moves towards zero net emissions.

Perhaps most significantly, as measured by the political calculus of Morrison’s government, even our allies in the Anglosphere are abandoning us, like the uncomfortable, drunk cousin at a birthday party we have consistently shown ourselves to be. 

Morrison was reportedly “livid” when sidelined by Boris Johnson from speaking at a UN-sponsored climate summit because of Australia’s well-publicised laggardness on climate action.

Likewise, Joe Biden’s victory in the US presidential election promises a definitive shift in international carbon politics that may punish Australia or at least further expose our carbon isolationism.

Perhaps, finally, the pressure will have become too great for us to keep making excuses. Lame explanations for why our history, our geography and our culture render us uniquely exceptional when, across the globe, other countries are taking responsibility for tackling the climate emergency. 

 Perhaps we can finally acknowledge that on a continent highly vulnerable to climate change and as a nation that has wreaked especially damaging ecological and cultural harm through colonisation, claiming exceptionalism is a particularly disturbing – and self-destructive – form of delusion.

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(AU) Black Summer: Why Australia Had To Change How It Fought Bushfires

NEWS.com.au - Charis Chang

The way Australia fights fires has changed dramatically since the Black Summer blazes and those who think backburning is the answer are stuck in a “time warp”. 

The Gospers Mountain fire burned through more than 500,000 hectares. Picture: Dan Himbrechts/AAP
A year ago Australians couldn’t believe what they were seeing. Sydney Harbour shrouded in smoke, red apocalyptic skies, footage of fires rising up and “crowning” among the trees, a firenado in Queensland and burned koalas being rescued from the ashes of their once-safe homes.

Australians were seen fleeing to beaches in tourist towns and had to be evacuated by helicopters and Navy ships as the flames came dangerous close.

It almost seems unbelievable that these scenes were playing out across Australia just one year ago.

By this time in 2019 the blazes were already well underway, with the first fires having started in August. On November 8 for example, there were already an unprecedented 17 fires in NSW for which emergency warnings had been issued.

By the time they were done the Black Summer bushfires had ripped through 24 to 40 million hectares of bushland across multiple states and territories — nearly double the area of any previous major bushfire in a fire season.

The Royal Commission said this had “set a new benchmark for an extreme fire season in Australia’s temperate forests”.

The fires claimed the lives of 33 people including a volunteer firefighter whose truck was overturned by a “fire tornado” and two other volunteer firefighters who died in a truck accident and whose deaths brought a holidaying Prime Minister home.

The World Wide Fund for Nature estimates that nearly three billion animals including mammals, birds and reptiles were either killed or displaced by the fires.

The bushfire smoke also caused its own public health emergency, cloaking cities like Sydney and Canberra in an oppressive haze, which Asthma Australia estimated was responsible for more than 400 deaths. At one point Canberra had the worst air quality in the world and it was more than 20 times above hazardous levels.

Sydney Harbour Bridge was blanketed in smoke and the sky was tinged orange during last season’s bushfires. Picture: Joel Carrett/AAP
The crisis continued for months and it was not until late February that most of the blazes were extinguished.

This year the outlook is less grim, although a bushfire has already razed half of Fraser Island in Queensland.

But we have not seen the last of these unprecedented scenes and even though this is an “La Nina” year, which usually brings cooler temperatures, cyclones and rain, Mother Nature is continuing to surprise us.

Last month Sydney broke a heat record in place since 1960 when it recorded temperatures of 40C on back-to-back days starting on Saturday, November 28 and continuing the following Sunday.

This was the first time the city had recorded two 40C days in a row for any month, not just in November. The last time this happened was in January 1960.

November was also recognised as the hottest November on record globally, with the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service saying it was the warmest such month since its records began in 1979.

“What this says is that bushfire risk can change virtually overnight,” former Fire & Rescue NSW Commissioner Greg Mullins told news.com.au.

‘THE WHOLE PROFILE HAS CHANGED’
Mr Mullins said this year’s fire season was not expected to be as bad as last year because the moisture profile in forests had changed but it was still likely there would be bad grass fires in the western districts of NSW and in the northern districts of Victoria. There was also the probability of blazes in Western Australia’s southwest.

“We could still get some bad days, although we probably won’t have bad weeks or bad months,” he said.

However, Mr Mullins warned that things could change overnight because Australia was experiencing things like flash droughts and odd days of extremely high temperatures — like what occurred in Sydney last month.

The Black Summer fires ripped through up to 40 million hectares of bushland. Picture Rohan Kelly
“So if we get a series of heatwaves, we could all of a sudden be back dealing with major bushfires, although they wouldn’t be as widespread as last year.”

It’s just one more change those in the field have had to adapt to as Australia’s Black Summer bushfires overturned people’s assumptions and forced authorities to rethink how they respond to emergencies.

Mr Mullins said the fires had forever changed how Australia deals with the fire threat in this country.

“I’ve watched this for 50 years and the whole profile has changed,” he said.

“Those people who say it’s all about fuel reduction, well I’m sorry but you’re stuck in a time warp from 50 years ago and you don’t understand the issues and you’re not bothering to read or digest what’s happened in the climate, because it has all changed.”

WE CAN’T RELY ON TRADITIONAL METHODS ANYMORE

The ferocity of the Black Summer bushfires meant that hazard reduction and backburning were less effective at keeping blazes under control. In fact, in the dangerous conditions backburning got away from crews and made fires worse.

Mr Mullins said every bushfire inquiry in all the states impacted including NSW, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia, as well as the federal Royal Commission found hazard reduction was not as effective as it used to be because the fire weather is so much more extreme.

“During extreme and catastrophic conditions, fires just jump over areas that are burnt or simply burn through them — they don’t slow the fires down anymore,” he said.

“Hazard reduction was our biggest mitigation tool for bushfires for the last century and it’s been rendered far less effective because of climate change.”

The inquiries also pointed to the smaller window of time that authorities now had to conduct hazard reduction due to the hotter and drier weather.

“There are very small periods of the year now where we can safely burn off,” he said.

Another limitation is the difficulty in burning enough forest to make any sizeable difference to the risk.

There’s less time to do hazard reduction and it’s less effective against high intensity fires. Picture: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images
Mr Mullins pointed out that last season’s fires burnt through about 5.4 million hectares of broadleaf forest in NSW and Victoria — about 21 per cent of the forest. Only a fraction of this could realistically be burned during hazard reduction operations.

“Most of the workforce in NSW are volunteers so hazard reduction happens mostly on weekend, you would have to triple the workforce to do enough burning and this is just impractical,” he said.

He also noted that hazard reduction also impacted other animals living in the bush.

“Should wipe out another three million species? We are not the only species on the planet and it’s all about balance,” he said.

“(Those in favour of hazard reduction) are advocating no balance and it’s quite infuriating when so-called experts say this stuff.”

Similarly, backburning, which is a last-resort measure aimed at setting containment lines in the face of a major blaze was also less effective.

“They didn’t work last year because it was so dry, the fires just got away,” Mr Mullins said.

“Climate change is taking away the traditional tools we have.”

On top of this, fires started by dry-lightning have also become more common thanks to changes to the climate.

Dry-lightning started numerous fires during the 2019–20 season including the Gospers Mountain fire in the Wollemi National Park that burned through 512,000 hectares and was the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia. The fire began on October 26, 2019 and was not extinguished until February 2020 when heavy rains arrived.

The Gospers Mountain fire burned through more than 500,000 hectares. Picture: Dan Himbrechts/AAP
“The only thing we can do is act differently, and focus on fast initial attacks using ground crews and water bombing aircraft,” Mr Mullins said.

“However, a proportion of the fires will still get away from us in the worst weather conditions.”

DRONES, SATELLITES AND ‘FAST-ATTACK STRATEGIES’

Mr Mullins believes Australia is now acting to embrace ‘fast-attack strategies’ that have been used to good effect in places like Canada, France, Spain and parts of the United States.

This places the focus on spotting fires when they first begin and sending crews in quickly, along with water bombing aircraft to extinguish blazes.

NSW will trial the dispatch of water bombing helicopters as soon as a fire is identified rather than waiting for ground crews to investigate first.

“This is good but it all costs money, it's very expensive,” Mr Mullins said.

“You will have aircraft in the air for many false alarms but it’s the price we’ve got to pay because of climate change driving worse fires.”

Last year Mr Mullins and other former emergency services leaders struggled to be heard over their concerns more water-bombers would be needed to tackle what they correctly predicted would be a horror fire season.

But the Morrison Government has now agreed to provide an extra $11 million a year to the National Aerial Firefighting Centre for more large air tankers for firefighting efforts and to support the fleet’s costs.

The private sector is also making huge investments to develop new technology using satellites, infrared detection systems, drones and other methods to spot fires.

Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo foundation is providing a $70 million grant to the “Fire Shield” program that wants to use satellites, infrared sensors and drones to identify and extinguish fires within an hour by 2025.

The Australian National University Institute for Space will put $1 million towards developing a satellite system to detect forest fuel load and vegetation moisture that will help predict where fires are likely to start, so controlled burns can be better targeted.

Meanwhile, Ninox Robotics says its drones can already search large areas for fires, map fire-fronts in real-time and guide firefighters.

A national program to detect ignitions and accurately monitor all fire edge intensity and progression across Australia is being supported by all state and territory governments except Western Australia.

‘PUT THE MONEY IN THE RIGHT PLACE’

Mr Mullins warned that while changing fire response strategies will help, it’s not the panacea.

“The only thing that will help eventually is driving down emissions and driving down the risk,” he said.

Mr Mullins has welcomed the softening in Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s comments on climate change but said it was “nowhere near enough”.

“At the very least we need to match the states and territories and adopt a net zero 2050 target, and then beat it by at least a decade,” he said.

The so-called “gas led recovery” must also be abandoned in favour of renewables.

“Let’s not invest in Blockbuster and try to slow down Netflix,” he said.

“The economics will drive this and the government is not listening to the market.”

Mr Mullins said it was inevitable that people would stop buying Australia’s coal.

“Regardless of the policy, in the background things are changing and we need to catch up and put money into where it should be going.”

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Why 2021 Could Be Turning Point For Tackling Climate Change

BBC - Justin Rowlatt

The world is not on track to meet its goal of limiting global temperature rise to 1.5C. Getty Images
Countries only have only a limited time in which to act if the world is to stave off the worst effects of climate change.

Here are five reasons why 2021 could be a crucial year in the fight against global warming.Covid-19 was the big issue of 2020, there is no question about that.

But I'm hoping that, by the end of 2021, the vaccines will have kicked in and we'll be talking more about climate than the coronavirus.

2021 will certainly be a crunch year for tackling climate change.

Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, told me he thinks it is a "make or break" moment for the issue.

So, in the spirit of New Year's optimism, here's why I believe 2021 could confound the doomsters and see a breakthrough in global ambition on climate.

1. The crucial climate conference

In November 2021, world leaders will be gathering in Glasgow for the successor to the landmark Paris meeting of 2015.

Paris was important because it was the first time virtually all the nations of the world came together to agree they all needed to help tackle the issue.

The problem was the commitments countries made to cutting carbon emissions back then fell way short of the targets set by the conference.

In Paris, the world agreed to avoid the worst impacts of climate change by trying to limit global temperature increases to 2C above pre-industrial levels by the end of the century. The aim was to keep the rise to 1.5C if at all possible.

Getty Images
We are way off track. On current plans the world is expected to breach the 1.5C ceiling within 12 years or less and to hit 3C of warming by the end of the century.

Under the terms of the Paris deal, countries promised to come back every five years and raise their carbon-cutting ambitions. That was due to happen in Glasgow in November 2020.The pandemic put paid to that and the conference was bumped forward to this year.

So, Glasgow 2021 gives us a forum at which those carbon cuts can be ratcheted up.

2. Countries are already signing up to deep carbon cuts

And there has already been progress.

The most important announcement on climate change last year came completely out of the blue.

At the UN General Assembly in September, the Chinese President, Xi Jinping, announced that China aimed to go carbon neutral by 2060.

Environmentalists were stunned. Cutting carbon has always been seen as an expensive chore yet here was the most polluting nation on earth - responsible for some 28% of world emissions - making an unconditional commitment to do just that regardless of whether other countries followed its lead.

That was a complete turnaround from past negotiations, when everyone's fear was that they might end up incurring the cost of decarbonising their own economy, while others did nothing but still enjoyed the climate change fruits of their labour.

China is responsible for around 28% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Getty Images
And China is not alone.

The UK was the first major economy in the world to make a legally binding net zero commitment in June 2019. The European Union followed suit in March 2020.

Since then, Japan and South Korea have joined what the UN estimates is now a total of over 110 countries that have set net zero target for mid-century. Together, they represent more than 65% of global emissions and more than 70% of the world economy, the UN says.

With the election of Joe Biden in the United States, the biggest economy in the world has now re-joined the carbon cutting chorus.

These countries now need to detail how they plan to achieve their lofty new aspirations - that will be a key part of the agenda for Glasgow - but the fact that they are already saying they want to get there is a very significant change.

3. Renewables are now the cheapest energy ever

There is a good reason why so many countries are now saying they plan to go net zero: the collapsing cost of renewables is completely changing the calculus of decarbonisation.

In October 2020, the International Energy Agency, an intergovernmental organisation, concluded that the best solar power schemes now offer "the cheapest source of electricity in history".

Renewables are already often cheaper than fossil fuel power in much of the world when it comes to building new power stations.


And, if the nations of the world ramp up their investments in wind, solar and batteries in the next few years, prices are likely to fall even further to a point where they are so cheap it will begin to make commercial sense to shut down and replace existing coal and gas power stations.

That is because the cost of renewables follows the logic of all manufacturing - the more you produce, the cheaper it gets. It's like pushing on an open door - the more you build the cheaper it gets and the cheaper it gets the more you build.

Think what this means: investors won't need to be bullied by green activists into doing the right thing, they will just follow the money. And governments know that by scaling up renewables in their own economies, they help to accelerate the energy transition globally, by making renewables even cheaper and more competitive everywhere.

EPA
4. Covid changes everything

The coronavirus pandemic has shaken our sense of invulnerability and reminded us that it is possible for our world to be upended in ways we cannot control.

It has also delivered the most significant economic shock since the Great Depression.

In response, governments are stepping forward with stimulus packages designed to reboot their economies.

And the good news is it has rarely - if ever - been cheaper for governments to make these kind of investments. Around the world, interest rates are hovering around zero, or even negative.
This creates an unprecedented opportunity to - in the now familiar phrase - "build back better".The European Union and Joe Biden's new administration in the US have promised trillions of dollars of green investments to get their economies going and kick-start the process of decarbonisation.

Both are saying they hope other countries will join them - helping drive down the cost of renewables globally. But they are also warning that alongside this carrot, they plan to wield a stick - a tax on imports of countries that emit too much carbon.

The idea is this may help induce carbon-cutting laggards - like Brazil, Russia, Australia and Saudi Arabia - to come onside too.

The bad news is that, according to the UN, developed nations are spending 50% more on sectors linked to fossil fuels than on low-carbon energy.

5. Business is going green too

The falling cost of renewable and the growing public pressure for action on climate is also transforming attitudes in business.

There are sound financial reasons for this. Why invest in new oil wells or coal power stations that will become obsolete before they can repay themselves over their 20-30-year life?

Indeed, why carry carbon risk in their portfolios at all?

The logic is already playing out in the markets. This year alone, Tesla's rocketing share price has made it the world's most valuable car company.

Getty Images

Meanwhile, the share price of Exxon - once the world's most valuable company of any kind - fell so far that it got booted out of the Dow Jones Industrial Average of major US corporations.

At the same time there is growing momentum behind the movement to get businesses to embed climate risk into their financial decision making.

The aim is to make it mandatory for businesses and investors to show that their activities and investments are making the necessary steps to transition to a net zero world.

Seventy central banks are already working to make this happen, and building these requirements into the world's financial architecture will be a key focus for the Glasgow conference.

It is still all to play for.

So, there is good reason for hope but it is far from a done deal.

To stand a reasonable chance of hitting the 1.5C target we need to halve total emissions by the end of 2030, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN-backed body that collates the science needed to inform policy.

What that means is making the sort of emissions reductions achieved in 2020 thanks to the massive international lockdowns every year to the end of the decade. Yet emissions are already edging back to the levels they were in 2019.

The truth is lots of countries have expressed lofty ambitions for cutting carbon but few have yet got strategies in place to meet those goals.

The challenge for Glasgow will be getting the nations of the world to sign up to policies that will start reducing emissions now. The UN says it wants to see coal phased out completely, an end to all fossil fuel subsidies and a global coalition to reach net zero by 2050.

That remains a very tall order, even if global sentiments on tackling global warming are beginning to change.

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02/01/2021

Is Nuclear Fusion The Answer To The Climate Crisis?

The Guardian - 

Promising new studies suggest the long elusive technology may be capable of producing electricity for the grid by the end of the decade
A rendering of Sparc, a nuclear fusion reactor currently under development. Scientists behind Sparc hope it will be capable of producing electricity for the grid by 2030. Photograph: T Henderson/CFS/MIT-PSFC/Wikimedia


If all goes as planned, the US will eliminate all greenhouse gas emissions from its electricity sector by 2035 – an ambitious goal set by President-elect Joe Biden, relying in large part on a sharp increase in wind and solar energy generation. 

That plan may soon get a boost from nuclear fusion, a powerful technology that until recently had seemed far out of reach.

Researchers developing a nuclear fusion reactor that can generate more energy than it consumes have shown in a series of recent papers that their design should work, restoring optimism that this clean, limitless power source will help mitigate the climate crisis.

While the new reactor still remains in early development, scientists hope it will be able to start producing electricity by the end of the decade.

Martin Greenwald, one of the project’s senior scientists, said a key motivation for the ambitious timeline is meeting energy requirements in a warming world. “Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster,” he said.

Nuclear fusion, the physical process that powers our sun, occurs when atoms are pushed together at extremely high temperatures and pressure, causing them to release tremendous amounts of energy by merging into heavier atoms.

Since it was first discovered last century, scientists have sought to harness fusion, an extremely dense form of power whose fuel – hydrogen isotopes – are abundant and replenishable. Moreover, fusion produces no greenhouse gases or carbon, and unlike fission nuclear reactors, carries no risk of meltdown.

Fusion seems like one of the possible solutions to get ourselves out of our impending climate disaster
Martin Greenwald
Harnessing this form of nuclear power, though, has proven extremely difficult, requiring heating a soup of subatomic particles, called plasma, to hundreds of millions of degrees – far too hot for any material container to withstand. To work around this, scientists developed a donut-shaped chamber with a strong magnetic field running through it, called a tokamak, which suspends the plasma in place.

MIT scientists and a spinoff company, Commonwealth Fusion Systems, began designing the new reactor, which is more compact than its predecessors, in early 2018, and will start construction in the first half of next year.

If their timeline goes as planned, the reactor, called Sparc, will be capable of producing electricity for the grid by 2030, according to researchers and company officials. This would be far faster than existing major fusion power initiatives.

Existing reactor designs are too large and expensive to realistically generate electricity for consumers. Through the use of cutting-edge, ultra-strong magnets, the team at MIT and Commonwealth Fusion hope to make a tokamak reactor that is compact, efficient and scalable. “What we’ve really done is combine an existing science with new material to open up vast new possibilities,” Greenwald said

Having demonstrated that the Sparc device can theoretically produce more energy than it requires to run in the research papers published in September, the next step involves building the reactor, followed by a pilot plant that will generate electricity onto the grid.

Scientists and entrepreneurs have long made promises about fusion being just around the corner, only to encounter insurmountable problems. This has created reluctance to invest in it, particularly as wind, solar and other renewables — although less powerful than fusion — have become more efficient and cost effective.

But the tide is changing. In Biden’s $2tn plan, he named advanced nuclear technologies as part of the decarbonization strategy, the first time the Democrats have endorsed nuclear energy since 1972. There is also significant investment coming from private sources, including some major oil and gas companies, who see fusion as a better long term pivot than wind and solar.

According to Bob Mumgaard, chief executive of Commonwealth Fusion, the aim is not to use fusion to replace solar and wind, but to supplement them. “There are things that will be hard to do with only renewables, industrial scale things, like powering large cities or manufacturing,” he said. “This is where fusion can come in.”

The plasma science community is generally enthusiastic about Sparc’s progress, though some question the ambitious timeline, given engineering and regulatory hurdles.

Daniel Jassby, who worked as a research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab for 25 years, is skeptical about whether a fusion reactor like SPARC will ever provide a feasible alternative source of energy. Tritium, one of the hydrogen isotopes that will be used as fuel by Sparc, is not naturally occurring and will need to be produced, he said.

The team at MIT propose that this substance will be regenerated continuously by the fusion reaction itself. But Jassby believes that this will require a huge amount of electricity, which will make the reactor prohibitively expensive. “When you consider we get solar and wind energy for free, to rely on fusion reaction would be foolish,” he said.

Mumgaard concedes that the challenges that lie ahead are daunting. But he remains confident.

“There is a broader trend in acknowledging how important climate is and that we need all hands on deck,” he said. “We got into this problem with technology, but with fusion there are big opportunities to solve this with technology.”

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