Galilee Basin - Unburnable Coal

Climate Council - Will Steffen

This new report reveals that if all of the Galilee Basin coal was burned, an estimated 705 million tonnes of CO2 would be released each year – more than 1.3 times Australia's current annual emissions.

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KEY FINDINGS

Tackling climate change effectively means that existing coal mines will need to be retired before they are exploited fully and new mines cannot be built.

• Burning coal for electricity is one of the key drivers of climate change.
• 195 countries have agreed to limit temperature rise to no more than 2°C. This puts a cap on how much coal the world can burn. Even under the most optimistic assumptions, only 12% of the world’s coal reserves can be burned.
• Moving away from fossil fuels means that new energy sources, like solar and wind, must come online rapidly.
• Any new coal mine is fundamentally at odds with protecting Australia from the impacts of climate change.

The Galilee Basin coal could emit more than Australia’s entire emissions each year.

• More than 90% of known, extractable coal in Australia’s existing coal reserves must stay in the ground. Therefore, there is no justification for opening new coal mines - the most pressing challenge Australia faces is how to phase out existing coal mines well before their reserves are exhausted.
• If all of the Galilee Basin coal was burned, it is estimated that 705 million tonnes of CO2 would be released each year – more than 1.3 times Australia's current annual emissions.

Potential export markets for Galilee coal are rapidly dwindling as the world moves away from coal toward renewable energy.

• China’s coal use dropped by 3% in 2014 and is projected to fall a further 2.5% in 2015. In March, China announced that it will cut coal consumption by 80 million tonnes by 2017 and by a total of 160 million tonnes between 2014 and 2020.
• Global investment in new renewable capacity is now greater than investment in fossil fuels, and the gap is expected to widen as investment in renewables surges ahead.
• Potential export markets for Galilee Basin are dwindling fast. Only India remains a possibility and it is wavering in its commitment to importing coal.

There are increasing signs from global investors that they consider Galilee coal too risky of an investment.

• A total of 11 international banks have now publicly announced that they will not be involved with any projects in the Basin.
• HSBC, one of the world’s largest investment banks, has cited plummeting cost of renewable energy and the reduced coal demand from China as having significant consequences for Australia’s coal investments and increasing the risk of stranded assets
• The $890 billion Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, the largest pension fund in the world, recently announced it would reduce its exposure to fossil fuel risk by divesting more of its coal-related holdings, sending a strong message to the financial sector.

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Fresh Hope For Combating Climate Change

National Geographic - Robert Kunzig

If a climate disaster is to be averted, we’ll have to move forward without relying as much on fossil fuels. It can be done.

Meltwater gushes from an ice cap on the island of Nordaustlandet, in Norway’s Svalbard archipelago. The Arctic is warming faster than any other place on Earth. Photograph by Paul Nicklen

This year could be the turning point. Laurence Tubiana thinks so. She’s a small, elegant, white-haired woman of 63. At a press briefing in a noisy restaurant near Washington’s Capitol Hill, she apologized for being incapable of raising her voice—which in a diplomat is no doubt an excellent quality. Tubiana is no ordinary diplomat: She’s France’s “climate ambassador,” charged with the greatest cat-herding project in history. For the past year and a half she has been traveling the world, meeting with negotiators from 195 countries, trying to ensure that the global climate confab in Paris this December will be a success—a watershed in the struggle against climate change. “This notion of a turning point—that’s super important,” Tubiana says.
There are at least 20 reasons to fear she will fail. Since 1992, when the world’s nations agreed at Rio de Janeiro to avoid “dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system,” they’ve met 20 times without moving the needle on carbon emissions. In that interval we’ve added almost as much carbon to the atmosphere as we did in the previous century. Last year and the past decade were the warmest since temperature records began. Record-breaking heat waves are now five times as likely as they once were. A large part of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, scientists reported last year, is doomed to collapse—meaning that in the coming centuries sea level will rise at least four feet and probably much more. We’re already redrawing the map of the planet, especially of the zones where animals, plants, and people can live.

From 7,500 feet up, the nocturnal grid of New York looks more like a circuit board than a city. The glow of LED bulbs—seen here illuminating Times Square and other parts of midtown Manhattan—accounts for the blue-violet hues. Photograph by Vincent Laforet

And yet there’s also an unmistakable trace of hope in the air. A lot of it is still just talk. China and the United States, the two largest carbon emitters, have announced a deal to reduce emissions. Six European oil companies say they’d welcome a carbon tax. A giant Norwegian pension fund has pledged to stop investing in coal. And the pope has brought his immense spiritual authority to bear on the problem.
But the reasons for hope go beyond promises and declarations. In 2014 global carbon emissions from fossil-fuel burning didn’t increase, even though the global economy was growing. We won’t know for years if it’s a trend, but it was the first time that had happened. One reason emissions were flat was that China, for the first time this century, burned less coal than the year before. And one reason for that was that the production of renewable energy—wind and solar and hydropower—is booming in China, as it is in many other countries, because the cost has plummeted. Even Saudi Arabia is bullish on solar. “The world is tipping now,” says Hans-Josef Fell, co-author of a law that ignited Germany’s renewable energy boom. It’s the kind of tipping point we want.

Lit by morning sun, smoke from burning trees obscures the Amazon rain forest in Mato Grosso, Brazil. In recent decades nearly a quarter of the forest in Mato Grosso has been cleared for farming, releasing millions of tons of stored carbon into the air. Photograph by George Steinmetz

We’ve seen others. In the past half century we’ve created a world in which people on average live two decades longer than they did before, in which they cross oceans in a day with barely a thought, in which they communicate instantaneously and globally for barely a penny and carry libraries in the palm of their hand. Fossil fuels helped make it all possible—but by the second half of the 21st century, if a climate disaster is to be averted, we’ll have to be moving forward without them. Anyone who thinks we can’t complete that revolution doesn’t appreciate how utterly we’ve already changed the world. Anyone who thinks we won’t choose to complete that revolution—or at least not fast enough—well, that may turn out to be true. We’re on an unprecedented adventure whose outcome can’t be known and whose stakes couldn’t be higher. We’ve lived through other global transformations, but for the first time ever we’re trying to steer one, to secure a more hopeful future for the whole planet.
The late novelist E. L. Doctorow once described his writing process this way: “It’s like driving a car at night—you never see further than your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.” Fixing climate change is going to require improvisation like that. We don’t have to be able to see the whole road ahead to a happy end—but we do have to believe that we can get there. That’s what the negotiators will be trying to achieve in Paris. They’ve stopped thinking they can write a treaty that will bind every country to a specific quota for reducing emissions. Instead they’re looking for a way to “send a very strong signal to the business sector,” Tubiana says, to “create a self-fulfilling prophecy that the low-carbon economy is happening.” When we look back at 2015 from our warmer future, we’ll know if this was when the prophecy started to come true.
Here’s the challenge.
The Earth has warmed 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit, on average, since the late 19th century. Most of the warming has occurred since 1960, the period covered on this map. It reveals the regional variety buried in the global average: A few areas, most near the Antarctic, actually have gotten colder since 1960, while some parts of the Arctic have warmed as much as 15 degrees. Natural climate cycles explain why the warming has happened unevenly and fitfully, but not the warming trend itself, which has overwhelmed the cooling effect of the ash from volcanoes. It has coincided over the past half century with a surge in carbon emissions from our rapidly industrializing world. Finding a way to stop those emissions—and climate change—is the challenge for the next half century.

Temperature trend, 1960-2014

Change in degrees Fahrenheit

NG STAFF. SOURCES: STEVEN MOSHER AND ROBERT ROHDE, BERKELEY EARTH.

Links

• How to Fix It: Germany Could Be a Model for How We’ll Get Power in the Future
• How to Live with It: 5 Ways Climate Change Will Affect You
• How Do We Know It's Happening?: Amazon’s Ability to Cleanse the Air Is Diminishing

Adani Coal Mine Approval ‘Grossly Irresponsible’

Australian Conservation Foundation
 
Federal environment minister Greg Hunt’s approval of what could become one of the world’s largest coal mines sets back global efforts to combat climate change, the Australian Conservation Foundation said today.
“To approve a massive coal mine that would make species extinct, deplete 297 billion litres of precious groundwater and produce 128.4 million tonnes of CO2 a year is grossly irresponsible,” said ACF President Geoff Cousins.
“At a time when the world is desperately seeking cleaner energy options this huge new coal mine will make the effort to combat climate change all the more difficult.”
If it goes ahead the Carmichael mine would be the largest ever dug in Australia.  It would take up five times the area of Sydney Harbour.  The climate pollution resulting from burning its coal would be more than New Zealand’s entire annual emissions.
In August the Federal Court set aside Minister Hunt’s original approval of Adani’s controversial proposal to dig the massive coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.
Minister Hunt’s re-approval of the Carmichael coal mine flies in the face of rising public opposition to the proposal and scientific evidence that shows the mine would destroy 10,000 hectares of habitat for endangered species, including the largest known population of the southern black-throated finch.
“Tens of thousands of ACF supporters from all over Australia have written to Greg Hunt, asking him to reject the Carmichael mine once and for all,” Mr Cousins said.
“Just as Woodside lost its social license to build a gas factory at James Price Point in the Kimberley, most Australians do not want Adani to dig a massive coal mine and export the coal across the Great Barrier Reef.
“ACF will scrutinise this approval decision and carefully consider our options.
“We will use all appropriate means to stop this mine,” Mr Cousins said.
ACF and other environment groups ran ads in major newspapers in August urging Minister Hunt not to re-approve Adani’s Carmichael proposal.

Adani Carmichael Mine In Queensland Gets Another Green Light From Coalition

The Guardian - Oliver Milman
 
Australia’s largest coalmine, which green groups consider a threat to the Great Barrier Reef, is approved again only two months after being knocked back in federal court challenge

The Abbot Point coal terminal, slated for expansion if mine and rail project goes ahead.

Photograph: Tom Jefferson/Greenpeace

Australia’s largest coal project, Adani’s Carmichael mine, has again been given the green light by the federal government two months after it was stripped of its approval after a federal court challenge.
The $16.5bn mine and rail development, earmarked for the Galilee basin region of central Queensland, had its federal approval set aside in August after it emerged that Greg Hunt, the environment minister, had not considered its impact upon two vulnerable species, the yakka skink and the ornamental snake.
Hunt has reassessed the project and approved it for a second time, subject to “rigorous conditions” that would protect threatened species.
“The proponent is required to provide a groundwater management and monitoring plan, which must receive approval from myself before mining can commence,” Hunt said.
“The previous decision to approve the project was set aside at the request of the Australian government in August 2015 as a precautionary measure.”
Environmentalists have said the mine will endanger the Great Barrier Reef by increasing the amount of shipping through the ecosystem. The emissions from the burnt coal will also threaten the reef by accelerating ocean acidification and rising water temperature, which can lead to coral die-offs.
Hunt considered information from the Mackay Conservation Group, the Environmental Defenders Office and Australian Conservation Foundation before making the decision.
The Mackay Conservation Group initiated the federal court case that saw the approval overturned and has argued the mine would severely impact groundwater supplies and exacerbate climate change. The court case prompted the federal government to propose new laws aimed at curbing perceived “lawfare” by “vigilante” green groups.
Ellen Roberts, coordinator of the Mackay Conservation Group, said Hunt had failed the Australian people by ignoring the “devastating” impacts of the mine.
“Minister Hunt is sacrificing threatened species such as the black-throated finch and precious groundwater resources for the sake of a mine that simply does not stack up economically,” she said.
“Adjacent landholders are also rightly concerned about the impacts on their property from the billions of litres of water that will be taken from precious groundwater resources.”
Among the 36 conditions placed on Adani is a commitment to “protect and improve” 31,000ha of habitat used by the southern black-throated finch. The site of the mine is one of the threatened finch’s last remaining holdouts.
This protection will be in the form of an offset, where habitat is found elsewhere and secured. A further 135ha and 5,600ha will be offset for the ornamental snake and yakka skink, respectively. Adani will have to pay $1m over 10 years towards threatened species in the Galilee basin.
Adani will also be required to implement all advice from the independent expert scientific committee on coal seam gas and large coalmining development and return 730 megalitres of water each year for five years to the Great Artesian basin to replace water used during mining.
Geoff Cousins, president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said the approval of the mine is “grossly irresponsible” and indicated further legal challenges may follow.
“At a time when the world is desperately seeking cleaner energy options this huge new coal mine will make the effort to combat climate change all the more difficult,” he said.
“ACF will scrutinise this approval decision and carefully consider our options. We will use all appropriate means to stop this mine.”
Adani has welcomed the decision and said its mining project will bring “much needed economic benefits” to Queensland while protecting threatened species.
“Today’s announcement of the final federal approval for the Carmichael mine and north Galilee basin rail by minister Hunt makes clear that these concerns have been addressed, reflected in rigorous and painstaking conditions,” a company statement read.
“Adani has said for some time now that what is required for companies planning major job creating and infrastructure generating projects in Australia is certainty on approvals.
“It is certainty over the remaining approvals that is now key to the company progressing its plan to deliver mine, rail and port projects in Queensland that will deliver 10,000 direct and indirect jobs, and $22bn in taxes and royalties to be reinvested back into community services.”
The Carmichael mine, originally going to start production in 2017, is set to become the largest in Australia, extracting a maximum of 60m tonnes of a coal a year for export via a new rail line to an expanded Abbot Point port, near the town of Bowen.
Adani has welcomed the decision and said its mining project will bring “much needed economic benefits” to Queensland while protecting threatened species.
“Today’s announcement of the final federal approval for the Carmichael mine and north Galilee basin rail by Minister Hunt makes clear that these concerns have been addressed, reflected in rigorous and painstaking conditions,” a company statement read.
“Adani has said for some time now that what is required for companies planning major job creating and infrastructure generating projects in Australia is certainty on approvals.
“It is certainty over the remaining approvals that is now key to the company progressing its plan to deliver mine, rail and port projects in Queensland that will deliver 10,000 direct and indirect jobs, and $22bn in taxes and royalties to be reinvested back into community services.”
The Coalition and mining lobbyists have vigorously supported the benefits of the mine, despite an Adani contractor admitting in court that it would create far fewer than the 10,000 jobs purported by the government.
The project has been plagued by legal challenges and protests from environmentalists and Aboriginal representatives and complications around its financing. More than a dozen banks ruled out backing the development.
Michael Roche, chief executive of the Queensland Resources Council, said: “The exploitation of the technical legal loophole that caused the delay was merely a tactic used by green activists in an attempt to thwart efforts to develop the Galilee Basin.”

Antarctic Ice Sheets Face Catastrophic Collapse Without Deep Emissions Cuts

The Guardian - Karl Mathiesen

Study finds that a global temperature increase of 3C would cause ice shelves to disappear, triggering sea-level rise that would continue for thousands of years

A British Antarctic Survey photo released on 25 March 2008 shows of a chunk of ice that has started to break away from the Antarctic ice shelf. Photograph: Jim Elliott/AFP/Getty Images

A team of researchers has found that steep cuts to emissions during the next decade are the only way to avoid a catastrophic collapse of Antarctic ice sheets and associated sea-level rise that will continue for thousands of years.
The study, published in the journal Nature on Wednesday, found that should the global temperature increase to around 3C (5.4F) above the pre-industrial era then the ice shelves that hold back the giant continental ice sheets would be lost over the next few centuries.
This would trigger a collapse that would go on for thousands of years, raising sea levels by 0.6 metres to 3 metres (2-10ft) by the year 2300 depending on how high manmade greenhouse gas emissions remain. Our descendants living in the year 5000 will continue to suffer the consequences of today’s fossil fuel burning, as sea levels continue to rise up to 9 metres (30ft) above current levels.

However, the results leave a narrow opening through which humanity can slip. If temperatures remain within 2C (3.6F), the collapse of the shelves will stabilise and the sheets will remain mostly intact. Sea-level rise from Antarctica would remain within 23cm (9 inches) by 2300.
To achieve this, the authors said the world will have to follow the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) lowest emissions scenario. This requires global emissions to peak around 2020 and decline to below zero by 2100.
In preparation for the climate conference in Paris next month, 150 governments representing 90% of emissions have submitted pledges to cut and curb them. However, these still chart a pathway to a world well above 2C – one analysis suggested they lead to 2.7C (4.9F) of warming, not enough to avoid the runaway decline of the Antarctic ice.
The new study “ultimately confirm[s] the suspicions of earlier glaciologists that the fate of ice shelves largely determines whether Antarctica contributes less than 1 metre or up to 9 metres to long-term sea-level rise”, wrote the California Institute of Technology scientist Alexander Robel in an accompanying comment piece in Nature.
Hilmar Gudmundsson, a scientist at the British Antarctic Survey, said the changes between 2100 and 2300 were “large and alarming” although the degree of uncertainty was still high.
In 2014, professor Eric Rignot, a senior researcher at Nasa, made the dramatic finding that the west Antarctic ice sheet and its 4 metres (13ft) worth of sea-level rise had already started slipping away. He said the paper’s assertion that the loss of this ice sheet could be stopped was “hardly believable” because the projections lacked reliable modelling of ocean circulation and iceberg calving. He said the loss of the West Antarctic sheet was “inevitable”; the only thing humans could control was how fast it goes.
“Whether we control our emissions or not will only matter in terms of how fast we get there. I find it disheartening that we are still talking about 2C above pre-industrial as a ‘reasonable’ target when we already passed the threshold for a large share of the ice sheets,” he said.
“It is counterproductive to give the impression that we have to figure out a way out of carbon soon, when we really need to do this yesterday,” he said.
The global sea level has risen roughly 20cm (8 inches) over the past century and is already causing problems for communities in low-lying areas. Only a little of this has so far been caused by melting ice; most comes from the expansion of oceans as they warm. But Golledge and his colleagues warned that this would change in the future if Antarctica’s ice sheets began falling into the sea.
Antarctica’s two ice sheets, east and west, cover an area the size of the contiguous US and Mexico combined and would raise the seas 60 metres (196ft) if lost completely, according to the US National Snow and Ice Data Centre.
The friction of floating ice shelves against the deeply buried rock of the coast slows the flow of ice from the interior. Removing the ice shelves is like taking the chocks from a truck sitting on a slope. Without them, the loss of the giant ice sheets will trigger an “unstoppable” event that will last for thousands of years, said Golledge’s team. Some buttressing shelves have already been lost and others are weakening. Another study this week warned that all may be lost by the end of the century.
At the UN climate summit in Paris, much of the talk will be about the steps that can be taken over the next decade to strengthen each country’s emissions cuts. Professor Andrew Shepherd, the director of the Nerc Centre for Polar Observation and Modelling said the new research added urgency to Paris.
“Ahead of COP [Conference of the Parties, the Paris summit], this new study is a useful reminder that future climate warming might trigger extreme and irreversible ice losses from Antarctica over centuries. But to reliably predict how things could change within the next century, we need to build and use a new class of ice sheet models that can capture the detailed response of each of the continent’s outlet glaciers,” he said.

Climate Change Will Lead To Food Chain Collapse Across World’s Oceans, Study Finds

NEWS.com.au

Sea lions swimming off the coast of Manly Beach. Picture: Nick Dawkins

CLIMATE change will lead to a complete food chain collapse across the world’s oceans, an Adelaide university study has found.
Increased ocean acidification and warming is set to reduce numbers of and diversity in key species underpinning ecosystems across the world, University of Adelaide associate professor Ivan Nagelkerken says.
He also says the warmer water will boost the metabolic rates of animals, increasing competition for less food.
“There will be a species collapse from the top of the food chain down,” Prof Nagelkerken said on Tuesday.
He said this “simplification” of ocean ecosystems would have dire consequences for our way of life, particularly regions relying primarily on fishing.
The first-of-its-kind global analysis of marine responses to climate change forecasts a grim future for fish.
Marine ecologists from the University of Adelaide reviewed more than 600 published studies on coral reefs, kelp forests, open oceans, and tropical and Arctic waters.
Their meat-analysis, published in the October 12 edition of the US peer-reviewed journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, showed ocean acidification and warming would cut down on the diversity and numbers of various key species.
“This ‘simplification’ of our oceans will have profound consequences for our current way of life, particularly for coastal populations and those that rely on oceans for food and trade,” Nagelkerken said.
Very few organisms are expected to be able to adjust to warmer waters and acidification, with the exception of microorganisms, which are expected to increase in number and diversity.
But the increase in the smallest plankton is not expected to translate into more zooplankton and small fish, meaning bigger fish will struggle to find enough food to eat.
“With higher metabolic rates in the warmer water, and therefore a greater demand for food, there is a mismatch with less food available for carnivores — the bigger fish that fisheries industries are based around,” he said.
Oysters, mussels and corals are also expected to take a hit from global warming, which will further harm the environment for reef fish.

The Australian Climate Security Panel

Climate Council



Australia and its neighbours are on the frontline of climate change. Soaring temperatures, rising sea levels and increases in extreme weather events will play a role in raising the risk of conflict, increasing the displacement of people and worsening the extent of destruction caused by extreme weather events in our region. Climate change exposes Australian soldiers, sailors and airmen, as well as Australia more broadly, to considerable strategic risk and uncertainty.
UNSW Canberra has partnered with the Climate Council to host The Australian Climate Security Panel. Hosted by UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy, this panel will bring together world renowned Defence leaders and a scientific expert to discuss climate change, its security implications and the steps being taken by the US and UK militaries to be prepared.

Date/Time:
Wednesday the 28th of October 2015, 10am-11.30am

Where:
UNSW Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy
Adams Auditorium, Building 111
Northcott Drive, Campbell ACT
View map

Speakers:

• Rear Admiral David Titley, USN (Ret.), who initiated and led the US Navy’s Task Force on Climate Change whilst serving in the Pentagon.
• Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, RN (Ret.), who acted as the UK Government’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy.
• Admiral Chris Barrie (Ret.), Australia's former Chief of Defence.
• Professor Will Steffen, world leading climate change expert and Climate Councillor.