UK Floods And Extreme Global Weather Linked To El Niño And Climate Change

The Guardian - John Vidal

Scientists say flooding in Britain, record US temperatures and Australian wildfires linked to El Niño making effects of man-made climate change worse

Fire and rescue services evacuate a woman from her flooded home in Littleborough, Greater Manchester. Photograph: Demotix/Corbis

From some of the worst floods ever known in Britain, to record-breaking temperatures over the Christmas holiday in the US and and forest fires in Australia, the link between the tumultuous weather events experienced around the world in the last few weeks is likely to be down to the natural phenomenon known as El Niño making the effects of man-made climate change worse, say atmospheric scientists.
El Niño occurs every seven to eight years and is caused by unusually warm water in the Pacific Ocean. This year's event is now peaking and is one of the strongest on record, leading to record temperatures, rainfall and weather extremes.
"What we are experiencing is typical of an early winter El Niño effect," said Adam Scaife, the head of Met Office long-range forecasting.
"We expect 2016 to be the warmest year ever, primarily because of climate change but around 25% because of El Niño," said Scaife, who added that the phenomenon was not linked directly to climate change but made its effects worse.
Scientists have warned for years that extreme weather would become more common as a result of climate change, but have until recently fought shy of attributing single events to global warming.
But researchers at Oxford University and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KNMI) calculated earlier this month that man-made climate change was partly responsible for Storm Desmond's torrential rain, which devastated parts of Scotland, the Lake District and Northern Ireland. The scientists ran tens of thousands of simulations of the flooding event and found it 40% more likely with climate change.

A wildfire burns out of control on Christmas Day in Victoria state, Australia. Photograph: Keith Pakenham/AFP/Getty Images

The UN's World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) also expects 2015 to be the hottest year on record worldwide, with Europe experiencing its second hottest year. It was marked by heatwaves in India, Pakistan and elsewhere.
The latest floods, droughts and extreme weather are what might be expected of a strong El Niño, according to the WMO. "Severe droughts and devastating flooding are being experienced throughout the tropics, and subtropical zones bear the hallmarks of this El Niño," said the organisation's chief, Michel Jarraud.
"Much of eastern Europe has been exceptionally warm, with temperatures higher than in 2014. Only in parts of Ireland were temperatures lower than the 1981 to 2010 long-term average, according to the climate indicator bulletin from WMO's European regional climate centre.
The widespread El Niño effects are are now being felt in Africa, Latin America, Indonesia and Papua New Guinea, the WMO said.
In Central America, one of the most severe droughts on record has left 3.5 million people in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador in need of food aid. The UN says that more than 2 million people have been affected in Peru and Ecuador.
In Ethiopia, the government estimates that 10.2 million people will need help in 2016 at a cost of $1.4bn (£944m). Elsewhere in Africa, staple crops have been devastated in Kenya, Malawi and South Africa. Food shortages are expected to peak in southern Africa in February.
"Over 39 million people in Africa are expected to face food insecurity by January 2016, an increase of more than 70% on January 2015", said a spokeswoman at the Department for International Development.
The warm Pacific temperatures have also led to a record number of hurricanes and cyclones. According to the US government's national oceanic and atmospheric administration, there were 18 named storms in 2015, including 13 hurricanes, nine of which were category three or higher. This is the highest number recorded since reliable measurements started in 1971.
In the US, many states experienced record high December temperatures. The mercury reached 30C (86F) in Tampa, Florida; 28.3C in Houston, Texas, and 18.8C in New York.
"Extreme weather will increase with global warming and thus climate adaptation measures, like flood defences, need to constantly be updated. What may appear to be sufficient to withstand a 1 in 100-year event can become quickly out of date as the incidence of extreme weather ramps up and becomes more unpredictable," said Gail Whiteman, the chair of the Pentland centre for sustainability at Lancaster University.

Links

• Failed flood defences cast doubt on UK readiness for new weather era
• Record US temperatures are work of El Niño and polar vortex, experts say

OPEC Faces A Mortal Threat From Electric Cars

Telegraph (UK) - Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

The oil cartel is living in a time-warp, seemingly unaware that global energy politics have changed forever

A charger stands on display next to a Toyota hydrogen-powered vehicle in Tokyo Photo: Bloomberg

 OPEC remains defiant. Global reliance on oil and gas will continue unchanged for another quarter century. Fossil fuels will make up 78pc of the world’s energy in 2040, barely less than today.

There will be no meaningful advances in technology. Rivals will sputter and mostly waste money. The old energy order is preserved in aspic.

Emissions of CO2 will carry on rising as if nothing significant had been agreed in a solemn and binding accord by 190 countries at the Paris climate summit.

OPEC’s World Oil Outlook released today is a remarkable document, the apologia of a pre-modern vested interest that refuses to see the writing on the wall.

The underlying message is that the COP21 deal is of no relevance to the oil industry. Pledges by world leaders to drastically alter the trajectory of greenhouse gas emissions before 2040 - let alone to reach total "decarbonisation" by 2070 - are simply ignored.

Global demand for crude oil will rise by 18m barrels a day (b/d) to 110m by 2040. The cartel has shaved its long-term forecast slightly by 1m b/d, but this is in part due to weaker economic growth.
One is tempted to compare this myopia to the reflexive certainties of the 16th Century papacy, even as Erasmus published in Praise of Folly, and Luther nailed his 95 Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church.
The 407-page report swats aside electric vehicles with impatience. The fleet of cars in the world will rise from 1bn to 2.1bn over the next 25 years – topping 400m in China – and 94pc will still run on petrol and diesel.
“Without a technology breakthrough, battery electric vehicles are not expected to gain significant market share in the foreseeable future,” it said. Electric cars cost too much. Their range is too short. The batteries are defective in hot or cold conditions.

OPEC says battery costs may fall by 30-50pc over the next quarter century but doubts that this will be enough to make much difference, due to "consumer resistance".
This is a brave call given that Apple and Google have thrown their vast resources into the race for plug-in vehicles, and Tesla's Model 3s will be on the market by 2017 for around $35,000.
Ford has just announced that it will invest $4.5bn in electric and hybrid cars, with 13 models for sale by 2020. Volkswagen is to unveil its "completely new concept car" next month, promising a new era of "affordable long-distance electromobility."
The OPEC report is equally dismissive of Toyota's decision to bet its future on hydrogen fuel cars, starting with the Mirai as a loss-leader. One should have thought that a decision by the world's biggest car company to end all production of petrol and diesel cars by 2050 might be a wake-up call.
Goldman Sachs expects 'grid-connected vehicles' to capture 22pc of the global market within a decade, with sales of 25m a year, and by then - it says - the auto giants will think twice before investing any more money in the internal combustion engine. Once critical mass is reached, it is not hard to imagine a wholesale shift to electrification in the 2030s.

Goldman is betting that battery costs will fall by 60pc over the next five years, driven by economies of scale as much as by technology. The driving range will increase by 70pc.
This is another world from OPEC's forecast. Even this may well be overtaken soon by further leaps in science. A team of Cambridge chemists says it has cracked the technology of a lithium-air battery with 90pc efficiency, able to power a car from London to Edinburgh on a single charge. It promises to cut costs by four-fifths, and could be on the road within a decade.
There is now a global race to win the battery prize. The US Department of Energy is funding a project by the universities of Michigan, Stanford, and Chicago, in concert with the Argonne and Lawrence Berkeley national laboratories. The Japan Science and Technology Agency has its own project in Osaka. South Korea and China are mobilising their research centres.
A regulatory squeeze is quickly changing the rules of global energy.The Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics counts 800 policies and laws aimed at curbing emissions worldwide.
An electric car is charged in Oslo, Norway Photo: Alamy
Goldman Sachs says the model to watch is Norway, where electric vehicles already command 16.3pc of the market. The switch has been driven by tax exemptions, priority use of traffic lanes, and a forest of charging stations.
California is following suit. It has a mandatory 22pc target for 'grid-connected' vehicles within ten years. New cars in China will have to meet emission standards of 5 litres per 100km by 2020, even stricter than in Europe.

Beijing's pilot scheme to promote electric cars has fallen short - chiefly because there are not yet enough charging sites - but this will change soon with drastic rationing of permits for petrol cars. If you want a car as the authorities grapple with 'airpocalypse', it may have to be electric.
China's Geely Automobile aims to generate 90pc of its sales from electric vehicles by 2020. Bill Russo from Gao Feng Advisory in Shanghai says China is about to "leapfrog" the rest of the world and become the epicentre of the electrification drive.
OPEC does not deny that the Paris accords change the energy landscape, but they view this as a problem strictly for the coal industry. There will be a partial switch from coal to gas, with a little nuclear thrown in, along with a risible contribution from wind and solar.
Their own charts seems to show that coal, gas, and oil will together emit a further 1,200 gigatonnes of carbon by 2040. This would blow through the maximum carbon budget deemed allowable by scientists if we are to stop temperatures rising by more than 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2100 - let alone to achieve the 1.5 degree 'ambition' agreed by world leaders in Paris.
Saudi Arabia's belief that it can carry on with business as usual into the mid 21st Century is what informs the current OPEC strategy of flooding the crude market to eliminate rivals.
The report admits that this is proving to be a costly undertaking. Tight oil and shale in North America has not buckled - as presumed in last year's forecast - and OPEC now expects it to keep rising slightly in 2016 to 4.5m b/d, and again to 4.7m in 2017.

In the meantime, OPEC revenues have crashed from $1.2 trillion in 2012 to nearer $400bn at today's Brent price of $36.75, with fiscal and regime pain to match.
This policy has eroded global spare capacity to a wafer-thin 1.5m b/d, leaving the world vulnerable to a future shock. It implies a far more volatile market in which prices gyrate wildly, eroding confidence in oil as a reliable source of energy.
The more that this Saudi policy succeeds, the quicker the world will adopt policies to break reliance on its only product. As internal critics in Riyadh keep grumbling, the strategy is suicide.
Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states are lucky. They have been warned in advance that OPEC faces slow-run off. The cartel has 25 years to prepare for a new order that will require far less oil.
If they have any planning sense, they will manage the market to ensure crude prices of $70 to $80. They will eke out their revenues long enough to control spending and train their people for a post-petrol economy, rather than clinging to 20th Century illusions.
Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, the former Saudi oil minister, warned in an interview with the Telegraph fifteen years ago that this moment of reckoning was coming and he specifically cited fuel-cell technologies.
"Thirty years from now there will be a huge amount of oil - and no buyers. Oil will be left in the ground. The Stone Age came to an end, not because we had a lack of stones."
They did not listen to him then, and they are not listening now. 

It's Not Easy Being Green On The ASX

AFR - Patrick Commins

The powerful mood for change following this month's historic Paris climate accord may have left you, as an investor, itching to get involved.
Well, you'll be hard-pressed to find opportunities on the local stock exchange.
To recap: for the first time nations have committed to "pursue efforts to stop warming beyond 1.5C" – before the target was 2 degrees. According to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to achieve that target energy-related emissions would need to be cut to zero by around 2050.
Serious steps towards achieving those goals would clearly also force businesses all over the world to sharply reduce their use of fossil fuels.
The agreement has "absolutely" moved us forward towards a lower-carbon future, says Australian Ethical Investment chief investment officer David Macri.
"The fact that they mentioned the need to stick to a 1.5-degree limit is a huge step forward," Macri says. "Increasing more than 2 degrees would be pretty catastrophic for large parts of the world."

Wasteland for renewable energy
 So for the far-sighted investor, putting some of their long-term savings into companies set to benefit from "clean and green" future would make sense.
But where?
"Australia has been a bit of a wasteland for renewable energy," Macri says. "Most of the clean energy exposure we have is via international shares; it's a big part of our international equities portfolio."
Thanks to an abundance of cheap coal in our country, the economics of clean energy have been particularly unfavourable in the absence of legislated penalties for carbon emissions.
More recently, industries such as wind and solar power generation endured a period of actively antagonistic government policies under the prime ministership of Tony Abbott. The change of government has brightened the prospects of more favourable policy support.
"Renewable energy listed plays on the ASX are few and far between, but obviously [wind power business] Infigen is going to be one," Macri says.
He also points to two Kiwi hydroelectric companies he holds in his portfolio: Mighty River Power and Meridian Energy. The dual-listed utilities-style stocks will satisfy investors looking for a clean energy investment, but it's doubtful they will benefit from a move towards lower emissions: New Zealand already derives most of its power from renewable sources such as hydro and geothermal.
Energy-efficient technology But there are other ways to play the theme, such as "cleantech" businesses. These do, however, tend to be small and in the early stages of development, limiting their appeal to more mainstream investors.
"We would be happy to invest in those sorts of things, but it's often the case they are not profitable," says Nathan Parkin, who runs Perpetual's SRI Ethical Australian shares fund.. "If it's unproven technologies, we'd prefer to wait and see how they go."
Macri is more open.
"There are a lot of names, you just need to be prepared to go into the small cap space," he says. "We love that space, that's where we generate our outperformance."
A big area of interest for Macri is in technology that helps businesses become more energy-efficient. He points to companies such as Energy Action, which specialises in helping businesses monitor and manage their energy use.
Macri also mentions a business which has just listed on the ASX, Building IQ, which uses CSIRO software to predict temperature changes in buildings using weather data and to ensure the most efficient operation of air-conditioning systems.
"The first thing you can do is underweight the high carbon emitters," Macri adds. "There are a lot of high intensive industries that are still on the ASX which we call 'old economy', and in this low carbon world that Paris has committed the world to, you really don't want to be exposed to the old economy."

Companies that fit the vibe
 Parkin's ethical fund uses what is called a "negative screen" that removes not only high carbon-emitting businesses but also removes other stocks that investors may believe are involved in industries that have negative effects on the community or environment.
But based solely on the size of a company's carbon footprint, Perpetual's screen would remove around 16 per cent of the ASX 300 by market cap. That's the other way to play the green theme, if more indirectly, by avoiding those companies that are going to come off second best in the move to a more clean and green future.
Freedom Foods is a company that is not directly tied to the low carbon theme but fits "the vibe".
Parkin says it's a major holding in his ethical fund. The firm produces nut-free, gluten-free and allergan-free muesli bars and cereals. Freedom Foods has gone from strength to strength, and the share price has tracked that success all the way. After a period of consolidation, the company has "grown into its share price", Parkin says.
"We're quite confidence about the company's future prospects," Parkin says. "They have been investing a lot in growth projects and efficiencies."
"From here on, we'll start to see some interesting results from all the work they've done over the past three years.
Freedom Food, he says, "is operating the right way producing a product that people genuinely see as helpful".
That might not save the world, but for Aussie investors starved of options, it might have to be enough for now.

Australia's Carbon Emissions Are Increasing, Government Report Shows

The Guardian

A report quietly released on Christmas Eve shows Australia’s emissions rose by about 1% in 2014-15, compared with the previous year

Loy Yang coalmine in the Latrobe Valley, Victoria, which supplies emissions-intensive brown coal to nearby power plants. Australia’s energy market increased its brown coal use in 2014-15, environment department figures show. Photograph: Bloomberg via Getty Images

Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions increased in 2014-15, a report released with obscure timing by the Australian government has shown.
The December 2015 quarterly update of carbon emissions, which covers the period to the end of June 2015, was released with no fanfare on Christmas Eve. The quarterly update forms part of Australia’s international reporting of its emissions.
It shows that Australia’s emissions increased by 0.8% last financial year compared with the previous one, and 1.3% when land use and deforestation were taken into account. Australia generated 549.3 mega-tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2014-15.
The Australian government promised at the Paris climate talks to reduce emissions by 26% to 28% by 2030 and will likely come under pressure to do more after the world agreed to work to keep the global temperature rise to 2C.
The report points to increases in electricity, stationary energy (excluding electricity), transport, fugitive emissions, and industrial processes and product use. However it says there was a steep decline – 3.8% – in emissions from agriculture.
Emissions from electricity generation rose 3% in 2014-15, despite demand from consumers remaining flat in 2014-15. Power generation from black coal increased by 1.4%, and brown coal generation increased by 9.7%.
Electricity from wind and other renewables (excluding small-scale solar) increased 12.2% on the previous 12 months, but hydroelectric generation fell by 30.3%.
Electricity generation was the largest source of emissions, accounting for 34% in 2014-15.
Prof Will Steffen from the Climate Council told Fairfax Media the December figures showed Australia needed to urgently wean itself off coal to meet its global commitments.
“If we’re putting more into the atmosphere than the year before, than we’re heading in the wrong direction,” he said. “We’ve got to drop emissions fast. We’ve got to get out of fossil fuels very quickly, coal first – there can no new coalmines anywhere in the world.”

Links

• What does the Paris climate agreement mean for Australia?
• Australia could increase emissions 26% and still meet Kyoto pledge, says climate group
• Greg Hunt says overseas emissions credits will 'probably' be allowed
• Welcome to the wonderful world of climate talks, where less means more
• Australia to claim success on climate target, with help of accounting rules
• Shorten: Coalition rightwingers forcing Australians to 'pledge loyalty' to coal

Why Addressing Climate Change Is Not Enough

Huffington Post - Mariajosé Aguilera*

The celebratory mood accompanying the recent Paris Accord, in which the entire UN membership agreed to hold global temperature increases to no more than 2°C, is quickly dissipating. As the Accord itself acknowledges, there is a "significant gap" between countries' climate change mitigation pledges and the 2°C goal (not to mention the more aspirational 1.5° C limit). This means that promised reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, even if realized, will be insufficient to stave off major consequences of climate change.
Yet bolder pledges alone will not prevent impending failure because the Paris Accord reproduces the flaws of the Kyoto Protocol. Although reporting is binding, countries face no penalties for missing their targets. Most of all, market-based schemes for emissions reductions enable wealthy countries and corporations to continue "business as usual" by paying low emitters for their pollution rights, ultimately stalling real and equitable progress. As we write, environmental groups across the world are gearing up to challenge these shortcomings.
But before this struggle -- and the planet -- gets even more heated, it is worth examining the larger context of environmental stewardship. The central issue, which goes beyond climate change, is degradation -- that is, the depletion and contamination of the earth's resources.
Climate change both exacerbates environmental degradation, and results from a growth-at-all-costs economic system that makes certain groups -- especially indigenous peoples and marginalized and low-income populations -- particularly vulnerable to both climate change and resource scarcity and contamination. Recognizing this fact can help climate-related activism and policymaking do a better job of protecting the planet and all who depend on it.
Focusing on single temperature-change targets (and the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions levels required to achieve them) is a handy, unifying strategy for social movements and governments, but it sidesteps other important environmental problems and their underlying, economic, social, and political determinants.
The most pressing environmental degradation problems, leading to a colossal 10 million deaths and untold illness each year, include:

• Depletion, contamination, and unfair distribution of water
  Two-and-a-half-billion people lack access to safe water and adequate sanitation, resulting in up to 3 million annual deaths. Meanwhile, the agricultural sector, dominated by large agribusiness, is responsible for 70% of world water consumption.
• Threats to air quality
  The important focus on industrial and vehicular emissions overlooks the problem of indoor air pollution. According to the World Health Organization, three billion people use open stoves burning biomass (wood, dung, and crop waste) to cook and heat their homes. Smoke and soot inhalation causes a staggering 4.3 million annual deaths from cardiovascular and lung diseases, including half of all childhood pneumonia mortality. 
• Ongoing deforestation and contamination of ecosystems
  Forests are essential to livelihoods, ecosystems, and mitigating climate change and other environmental damage (such as soil erosion), but they are severely threatened by corporate interests such as agribusiness (e.g. massive palm oil plantations in Indonesia and West Africa), mining, and oil and gas development. Worldwide, net forest coverage declines by about 5.2 million hectares per year, concentrated in loss of tropical forests.
• Chemical contamination
  Since World War II, over 85,000 new chemicals have been manufactured and released into the environment. When the U.S. Toxic Substances Control Act was enacted in 1976, the powerful chemical industry ensured that 62,000 existing chemicals were "grandfathered" into the program without health or environmental impact assessments. To this day, only a fraction of chemicals have been assessed. In the farming sector, about 2 million tons of pesticides are used annually, causing 7 million non-fatal poisonings and 70,000 fatalities each year among farmworkers across the globe.
• Toxic waste disposal
  Hundreds of millions of people, especially in low-income countries, are exposed to toxic waste, leading to outcomes such as cancer and acute poisonings. High-income countries are perpetrators of this injustice (and consumers, accomplices) by illegally exporting millions of tons of chemical hazards. For example, each year, 50 million metric tons of e-waste (e.g. cell phones, computers) end up in landfills in Ghana, Nigeria, China, and other low-income settings, where surrounding environments and local populations are contaminated with toxins.

Underpinning all of these problems is an unfair economic system that privileges profits over people's lives, exploiting the environment and humans alike.

Those concerned about the long-term sustainability and health of humans and the planet need to look beyond reducing greenhouse gas concentrations and adapting to climate change impacts, and recognize the role of the extraction, production, and consumption processes that drive all aspects of environmental degradation and cause tremendous social injustice.

*This post was coauthored by Anne-Emanuelle Birn, MA, ScD, Ben Brisbois, MES, PhD and Timothy H. Holtz, MD, MPH:

• Anne-Emanuelle Birn is Professor of Critical Development Studies and Global Health at the University of Toronto. She is the lead author of Oxford University Press's Textbook of Global Health (forthcoming 2016). In 2014, she was recognized among the top 100 Women Leaders in Global Health.
• Ben Brisbois is a postdoctoral fellow in the Healthier Cities and Communities Hub of the University of Toronto's Dalla Lana School of Public Health. He does research on community-based climate change adaptation, and the effects on health of large-scale agriculture and mining.
• Timothy H. Holtz, MD, MPH, FACP, FACPM is an adjunct associate professor of global health at the Rollins School of Public Health at Emory University, and has taught courses in TB and health and human rights. Dr. Holtz trained in primary care medicine at Harvard University/Cambridge Hospital, and is board certified in internal medicine as well as preventive medicine.

With Kids For Climate Action, Strength ‘Is Going To Come From Numbers’

The Globe and Mail - Mike Hager

Members of Kids for Climate Action sing a climate-change themed Christmas carol during a flash mob at the Pacific Centre food court in Vanouver. (DARRYL DYCK For The Globe and Mail)

As a precocious and sensitive Grade 9 student, Kate Hodgson was hit with a wave of fear and then anger when she was taught about how humanity is hurting the Earth's climate.
"They were telling me that there was this huge issue of climate change and they were telling me that I was to blame for it, and that was a very scary thing," she recalls. "No one around me seemed to care. It was very isolating and I felt really alone in my activism.
"I felt like I was a very small person facing a very huge problem and I didn't really have the tools to address it."
What she felt able to do was begin nitpicking through her family's consumption habits as a way to counter this increasing anxiety about the role they were playing in the warming of the world.
The problem was her parents had a relatively responsible carbon footprint: They had already switched their home in Vancouver's Kitsilano neighbourhood over to thermal heating and solar power, biked to work and bought organic groceries.
Ms. Hodgson didn't begin training her focus on the structural problems driving climate change until she decided "off the cuff" to join a 2012 anti-Enbridge rally outside Premier Christy Clark's MLA office in her former Vancouver riding.
"I remember walking down the street holding a protest sign chanting, 'The people united will never be defeated!'" she said in an interview recently. "That was the first time I felt like I could make a difference."
She became the director of the activist group Kids for Climate Action in Grade 11, and organized other Vancouver-area students to protest against regional economic activity they felt was hurting the environment, such as Surrey Fraser Docks proposal to expand a terminal for exporting thermal coal.
Now, as a first-year University of British Columbia arts student, Ms. Hodgson is one of roughly two dozen core members of UBCC350, the campus club pushing the institution to fully divest its $1.3-billion endowment of all firms producing fossil fuels. After helping organize debates for local candidates and drumming up the youth vote on campus during the federal election, her immediate goal is to help the group mobilize people to respond in the event that the university's board of governors votes against divesting $100-million of its investments.
A seasoned veteran of campaigning by the age of 18, Ms. Hodgson says social media "provides a really powerful and really helpful tool for mobilizing people." But she eschews the "clicktivism" of some of her peers for "real action," such as protesting in person, which she said helps people truly learn about an issue.
"It's really important to think about climate change as a movement," she says. "Our strength is going to come from numbers."
Still, forgoing the normal activities of a typical frosh student is not an easy task.
"I never asked to have to spend my evenings organizing forums and meetings," she says. "But I knew that this was my responsibility, that this was so much more important.
"I've had to sacrifice a lot for this fight and I wish I hadn't had to."
She says to be a "climate activist is to feel pain and disappointment so powerfully," but she chalks up her resilience to these "troughs" of hopelessness to her Anglican religion.
"I don't know how people without faith are able to continue to fight because I find so much of my hope, so much of my ability to soldier on, through the hope that is promised by Christianity," she says.
Ms. Hodgson plans to get a geography degree in environmental sustainability, and says she is inspired by writer and activist Naomi Klein and politicians Elizabeth May and David Eby.
Asked what she will do after her studies, all she knows is "that environmental and social work is where my career lies."

Links

• Climate change: How Canada measures up against the world's top emitters
• Can we beat climate change without killing the economy?
• MINING How the collapse of coal is hitting home in Western Canada
• British Columbia finally updates its eight-year-old climate change plan
• Energy, climate issues give hope for thaw in B.C.-Alberta relations
• Environment Changes to B.C.'s climate-change law to depend on national targets

Solar Technology: The Us And China Look To Australian Innovators For Solutions

The Guardian - Annie Kane

Australian-owned and operated Infratech Industries has sold and will export its ground-breaking floating solar system to Holtville City in California. Similar floating solar system currently in place in Jamestown South Australia Photograph: Infratech

In the last fiscal year, Australia earned $172bn from international sales of its natural resources. But earnings are decreasing. The office of the chief economist estimates that energy commodities earnings declined by 6% to $67bn last year because of a decline in revenue from coal exports, and that exports of refined petroleum products have declined by an average of 11% a year over the last decade.
There are hopes however, that Australia could bolster its position by developing its exports of renewable energy – especially those generated through solar technology. The opportunity is there. China – one of Australia's major coal buyers – has committed to increase its share of non–fossil fuels as part of its primary energy consumption to around 20% by 2030.
Keith Lovegrove, head of solar thermal at the IT Power Group, who is currently helping to develop a roadmap on solar fuels for the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), said: "Here we are in a world where, as of COP21, we're shooting to keep global warming below 2C, and we'll all have to decarbonise. Exporting coal as our major export earner has a limited future. We need to talk about swapping that coal export for a renewable export."
With more than 200 partly sunny days a year, and more than 8m square metres of land mass, solar seems like an obvious direction for Australia to take.
One company that's been successful in this regard is Infratech Industries, an Australian–owned sustainable infrastructure company, which sold and exported its innovative floating solar system – similar to the one currently in operation in Jameson, South Australia that generates around 57% more power than a fixed, land-based system – to the city of Holtville in California earlier this month.
Manufactured to mitigate the need for solar installations to be built on valuable farmland, the 1MW floating solar assembly will float on the surface of water reservoirs at the city's new water treatment facility next year. It will include 276 rafts and 3,576 solar panels, which are fitted with mirrors to concentrate the sunlight on the panels and generate more power.
As well as powering the water treatment processes, the array has the added advantage of reducing surface evaporation of the water. It diminishes the penetration of sunlight below the water surface and limits the growth of blue green algae and consequently the need for chemical treatment. And it's also able to withstand earthquakes due to the assembly's ability to shift on the surface of the water, which is handy given Holtville is situated near the San Andreas fault line.
Dr Rajesh Nellore, chief executive officer of Infratech Industries, says that there is a huge market for the technology – for the anti-evaporation aspects as well as the power generation.
"Practically every water reservation is an opportunity and this could be valued in the billions of dollars," he says, adding that Los Angeles' department of power and water recently purchased 96m rubber balls at a cost of US$34.5m (AU$48.2m) to prevent water evaporation.
"With this kind of renewable infrastructure [acting as] an alternative to rubber balls, the market potential is gigantic."
The US isn't the only market investing in Australian concentrated solar photovoltaic technology (CSPV). China's state-owned power company Three Gorges corporation signed a memorandum of understanding with Australian company RayGen earlier this year for the deployment of 500MW of utility-scale CSPV power over the next five years, which could deliver approximately $1bn of sales for the solar technology provider and its Chinese partners, JuYe Solar.
Dr Nellore believes that more government action is needed to establish confidence in the renewable energy export market.
He says there has historically been "limited [government] support for such decentralised infrastructure and especially for small- and medium-sized companies, which form the backbone of the Australian economy." He calls on the federal government to "change its paradigm to become an exporter of renewable energy."
"The federal government could start to value and monetise water savings [to] encourage local governments to do the same. Policies must support and encourage water savings in view of the changing climate.
With the global climate deal resulting in increased ambition to decarbonise the energy sector worldwide, it may not be long before Australia's renewable energy export takes off.
Ian Kay, acting CEO of the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA), which invested $1.7m in RayGen's CSPV Australian pilot project, said: "The Australian market is relatively small in the global context. By tapping into overseas markets, Australian renewable energy innovation can be rolled out to a much larger customer base to bring down costs and become more competitive."

Links

• Solar energy: Australia is not an innovation nation, it's an inertia nation
• 'Game-changing' perovskite solar tech could be cheaper and more efficient
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