18/09/2018

Australia's Rank On Global Development Index Hurt By Climate Change Inaction

The Guardian - 

Australia ranks 14 after New Zealand, with Scandinavian countries in top three spots
The report points to Australia’s low petrol taxes, high fossil fuel production and high emissions per capita. Photograph: Ashley Cooper/Alamy
Australia’s commitment to global development has improved over the past year, driven by strong trade, education and finance outreach to the developing world, but it has been criticised for its poor action on the environment and climate change.
The Centre for Global Development annually ranks 27 wealthy countries on their commitment to development across the policy areas of aid, finance, technology, environment, trade, security and migration.
The Commitment to Development Index is dominated by Scandinavian countries – which fill the top three spots – and European countries, which complete the top 12. The world’s biggest economy, the US, is at number 23 on the list: it has the worst aid and finance ranking of the assessed countries.
Australia trails New Zealand (13th), in 14th position overall, with a jump of four spots on last year. Australia and New Zealand are the highest ranked non-European nations on the index.
Report author, Ian Mitchell, said: “Australia’s trade policies are among the most development-friendly and the foreign aid it gives is high quality. But if Australia wants to become a development leader, it needs to increase the quantity of aid, and tackle environmental issues and focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”
The report said that, on the environment, Australia was a laggard.
“Its low rank is largely due to its poor performance curbing climate change. It has very low gasoline taxes (only the United States and Canada have lower), high fossil fuel production and the highest greenhouse gas emissions per capita of all [index] countries, although it has also had among the steepest emissions reductions over the past 10 years.
“Australia is also the third-largest tropical timber importer.”
Australia has a strong trade rating in the index, ranking third of all countries on that policy, with low tariffs and agricultural subsidies.
“It’s a leader in providing equal access to goods from development countries … its barriers to trade in services are also low,” the report said.
It also ranks well on migration “in part because of its exceptionally open borders for students from developing countries”.
“Its integration policies are also above average. But Australia could improve the number of refugees and asylum seekers it accepts. The proportion of positive asylum decisions is below average and has fallen for the past three years. The number of refugees in Australia is below average relative to population and relative to land area.”
The report also said Australia’s treatment of migrants would be improved by ratifying the convention on the treatment of migrant workers and the migration for employment convention.
Australia has dedicated just 0.23% of its gross national income towards development assistance, a decrease on 2016, and its smallest contribution in 15 years. Australia’s aid contribution has been falling for half a decade.
The UN set out the 0.7% commitment to development spending in 1970, and it has been consistently reaffirmed as a benchmark since. But few countries meet it.
“[Australia’s] foreign aid is of good quality, however,” the report found. “Australia spends 70% of its aid bilaterally and 30% multilaterally.”
Mitchell told Guardian Australia that the dominance of Scandinavian and European countries was a product of historical commitment, community expectation and conscious government policy.
“When you talk to the officials in these countries, they take it competitively, it’s something that has a profile in the public arena, it’s a matter of pride in their public policy.”
He said the 0.7% of GNI target for aid spending – when compared with Nato’s declared 2% goal for defence budgets – was a sensible and achievable target.
“I think if all the countries got there, the acceleration of development would be substantial, and we’d live in a much more prosperous world, and that would be to the benefit of everybody and every country’s national interest.”
But Mitchell said the current global uncertainty – the retreat to economic isolationism through tariffs and trade wars, and the rise of populist nationalism – was a threat to the progress and prosperity of developing countries.
“I think the move against migation, against open trade, will damage development. We’ve had a remarkable period of development over the last half a century, with open trade, rising aid levels. And I think that’s in real danger.”
The president of the Centre for Global Development, Masood Ahmed, said: “Good development policy is about much more than foreign aid.
“While aid is important, policymakers in rich countries need to assess all the ways their choices, from the environment to trade to migration, help or hinder developing countries.”

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The Big Problem With Climate Storytelling--And How To Fix It

Forbes - Solitaire Townsend*

Harrison Ford against climate change GCAS2018

“Let’s kick this monster’s ass!” roared Harrison Ford at the Global Climate Action Summit yesterday.
Now, as a girl, Indiana Jones and Han Solo got me hooked on storytelling, character and yes, fighting monsters. So, the idea of climate change as a monster story hooked my imagination.
But there’s a problem.
Because if you review most climate messages in the media, then this story actually has two acts: man makes monster, then monster destroys man.
It’s a grand morality tale which neatly fits a primordial structure in our subconscious. This plot sings to something deep within us, a tale we’ve told since we sat around fires weaving myths in the dark. From the Minotaur and the crazed Golems of ancient legend to the morality plays of medieval England and the modern incarnations of rampaging Godzilla born from a nuclear test, or the AI dystopias of the Terminator or the Matrix. We learned this narrative arc in childhood, even if we only discovered the science of carbon dioxide as an adult.
Climate change isn’t presented to the public as plucky rebels against the empire. Instead climate is told as a Frankenstein story: that with our avarice and vanity, we have created the horror that will ultimately defeat us.
The narrative necessity of this climate story is hard to escape. Throughout this summer of ‘hothouse earth,’ and the decades leading up to it, this human hubris story has been the basic blueprint of climate change messaging.
For decades I’ve advised campaigners, policymakers and businesses to oppose this narrative, and tell the story of climate solutions instead. Last year, I asked the global research firm Ipsos to check which message--destruction or solution--was winning. They surveyed adults aged between 16-64 across 26 countries asking if they believed ‘we can deal with climate change’?
The results were encouraging, with the majority of us (56%) reasonably optimistic about solutions, agreeing that we might be able to solve climate change. And I expected the result showing 20% of people are now pessimists, who think we have the ability and technology to deal with the climate threat, but not the willpower to do so. Also, it’s worth mentioning that climate deniers make up only 4% of the global population (although they are remarkably over-represented in online comments sections).
But one finding was profoundly shocking. The survey revealed that 14% of people across the world are now what I call ‘climate fatalists’; who believe that humans are doomed. And as we dug into the data, we found that a staggering number of them are young. Worldwide, 22% of those aged 16-35 believe that it is now too late to stop climate change. In some countries, the number of young fatalists is even higher: with 39% of under-35s in India, 30% in Brazil, 27% in Spain and Sweden, and nearly 30% of young people in the USA believing there is no escape from this monster.
Climate Optimist Chart climateoptimist.org

Why does that matter? Considering the severity of the science, wouldn’t these young fatalists be better dubbed as ‘climate realists,’ preparing for a dystopian future they can’t avoid?
None of us can predict the future, but we can see the mess of the present. Psychologists call fatalism a ‘defeatist performance belief’ and claim it’s disastrous for mental health. Fatalistic attitudes dissuade people from trying to improve their lives, allow anti-social behaviour and even undermine physical health. It seems this climate fatalism may indeed be fatal to wellbeing, ambition and action in the young. And it could also be fatal for climate solutions, because assuming nothing is worth it, means you need do nothing. Fatalism is the enemy of action. And the climate-Frankenstein story is creeping into people’s psyche, sucking the will to act from them.
Today’s tragedy of climate change, with the moral that man is the real monster, is so narratively satisfying it’s become dangerously believable. For many environmentalists, giving up this story would be a wrench. Even those who understand the dangerous psychology of fatalism struggle with their own addiction to the ‘it’s all our own fault, and we deserve what's coming' narrative.
I sometimes feel that we are collectively doing everything we can to make the ending as poignantly noir as possible. It's as if we actually want the horrifying denouement: the narrative necessity driving us to fulfil the tragic role.
And we can’t replace this climate disaster story with a policy, a clear argument or a set of facts. We have science, politics, profit and cultural norms all in tension between the causes and solutions to climate change. A merging and rippling of factual factors like the rough surface of an unquiet sea. But below all of that, there is the deep tide of story. The story must have an ending, it must pass through its scenes, and our collective unconscious won't allow for anything else.
Only a story can beat a story.
So, what has the narrative power to replace the current plot? Climate change can’t be a comedy, a love story or a rags-to-riches tale. And the monster of our making is all too real.
But every 8-year-old knows how to kill a monster. Harry Potter knows it, Dorothy in Oz knows it, Beowulf knows it, James Bond and Sam of the Shire know it. It’s the story that killed Dracula and blew up the Death Star. At its most simple – it’s the hero’s journey.
In every group of script-writers or novelists, Joseph Campbell’s 1949 tome The Hero With A Thousand Faces is treated as a totemic icon. After a life dedicated to researching mythology, Campbell set out the ‘meta-myth’ of mankind. Simply put, this is a journey where courage, friendship and guile are pitched against overwhelming odds. This ‘overcoming the monster’ story often works best when a new generation, the youth, rally against the threat created (or allowed) by the old. You have told, read and watched this story all your life. The small against the big. The downtrodden against the overlord. Plucky humanity against the growing darkness.
If climate change were an asteroid, alien invasion or Hans Gruber type baddie we’d know exactly what to throw at it (Bruce Willis in all cases). The narrative wheels would start turning as we slotted ourselves neatly into a heroic plot track.
This is the new climate story we desperately need. Of overcoming the odds rather than being overwhelmed by them.
The story starts when we find the courage to believe in something worth fighting for: holding onto hope even in the face of unimaginable odds. To say ‘I have a dream’ or ‘it always feels impossible until it’s done’. Then we harness the power of friendship and alliances. We love a plot twist where enemies become allies. And for climate change, we’re going to need unexpected allies indeed.
And the magic elixir of the heroic story has always been guile. Tricking the monster, inventing a solution, spotting a fatal flaw and exploiting it. From Indiana Jones feigning zombiedom in the Temple of Doom, John McClane taping a gun to his back, or Eowyn revealing her gender on the battlefields of Gondor. Heroes invent and misdirect their way around unsurmountable odds. This is the most crucial part of our new climate story – and we’ve already found that magical way to trick ourselves out of the jaws of doom. Electric cars, solar panels and wind turbines are just the start of the innovation explosion coming from carbon constraint. Renewable energy is the ultimate cheat of the climate monsters’ plans (not least because our inventiveness is a more believable ploy than our self-sacrifice.)
We must teach our children this new ‘heroes’ journey’ story of climate change. And it’s not a small story, nor a short one. This is an epic. We face a gargantuan, enormous and near impossible task. We need our Henry V before the battle of Agincourt declaiming, “We few, we happy few”, Frodo holding the ring and nervously offering, “I will take it, though I do not know the way” and Ripley rising in her rig and shouting, “Get away from her, you bitch!”.
We need swashbuckling daring, bravery and courage, guile and desperate invention, unlikely friendships and alliances forged in fire.
I invite you to become the hero of this climate journey, rather than a doomed bit-part player. Instead of grief, we need your grit and bravado.
So that solving climate change becomes the greatest story of the 21st century.

*Solitaire Townsend is co-founder of the global change agency, Futerra, and author of The Happy Hero - How To Change Your Life By Changing The World.

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Climate Change Should Transform How We Live And Care For Each Other

Climate Council - Hilary Bambrick*

 On August 16, the New South Wales Rural Fire Service posted on Facebook “there’s 79 bush and grass fires across the state, with 32 uncontained…And we’ve just checked. Yes, it’s still winter”.
That same day saw Queensland enact a total fire ban across the south-east.
This earliest ever start to the eastern Australia fire season is just one of the many signs that our climate is changing.

This same month, Europe has suffered through record heat, Athens burned, fire tornadoes engulfed California, and Tokyo recorded its highest ever temperatures.
Sweden enlisted overseas firefighting personnel and expertise to cope with their increasingly fire-prone landscape, manifesting as firestorms in the Arctic Circle.
In Kerala in India’s south, massive floods displaced 800,000 people and directly killed more than 350.
Around the same time, the entire state of New South Wales was declared to be in drought.
These aren’t isolated, statistically unusual events that just happened to coincide. Records are now continually being broken as we experience new extremes. They are off the charts, and we better get used to it.
Here in Australia we’re being newly challenged by increasingly hot days, severe bushfires, storms and floods, and prolonged drought, while sea-level rise is threatening housing and infrastructure in our coastal cities.
Our new extremes of heat and other severe weather mean we now need to re-imagine how our towns and cities function, ensure we provide essential climate safety services, and rethink how we go about our daily lives and care for others.
Escalating temperatures are putting more lives at risk. Older people and those with chronic health conditions are especially vulnerable, but so are people living in poor thermally performing houses, or in less green parts of the city, or who don’t have air-conditioning or can’t afford to run it, or who don’t feel safe to open their windows at night, or who are less mobile, or who are socially isolated, or who don’t have a home, or who work outside.
In recognition of increasingly hot summers, Queensland has just opened up a conversation about changing the start date of the school year to attempt to shorten the season where children’s capacity to learn, and their wellbeing, is adversely affected by heat.
Similarly, we also need to rethink how we structure our daily activity, including what standard work and school hours look like, so as to minimise exposure to dangerous temperatures while working or during the commute.
Rescheduling sporting events to protect both the players and the crowds from worsening heat should no longer be delayed, highlighted by the on-court temperatures hitting 69 degrees C during the most recent Australian Open.
Next year’s review of national building standards is none too soon, as we’re a long way from ensuring structures are suitable to the current climate in which they are situated, let alone what’s on the way.
Take a journey through the expanding footprint of Western Sydney and you’ll see large houses with black roofs and no eaves on small blocks with no trees, oriented inappropriately so as to maximise developer income, and each with air-conditioning to make up for poor design and materials. Just this last summer the temperature in Penrith soared to 47.3 degrees; the last thing cities need are more energy-inefficient hot boxes.
We also don’t need to grow our cities ever outwards and over prime agricultural land, or further into bushland that is increasingly fire-prone.
A more thoughtful, climate-ready approach to urban development would ensure cooler cities through ample greenspace and heat-reflective materials, welcoming and accessible public amenities where people can escape from the heat, and mixed-use street plans that encourage community-building and active transport rather than isolation and car use.
Such a city would run on affordable and effective public transport that reduces congestion, improves mobility and withstands climate extremes. Within these cities, small scale urban farming and community gardening can bring people together, forge stronger links with food production and the environment on which we depend, and provide refuge for key pollinator species of bees and birds.
We need to prioritise investment in affordable, reliable renewable energy to address the health impacts of climate change and minimise risk to the most vulnerable.
As outdoor temperatures soar, nights no longer cool down, and heat waves become seemingly interminable, cheap and clean energy will directly save lives. Now is the time to invest in this clean energy future for all rather than continue to prop up a dirty, dangerous and increasingly expensive fossil fuel industry.
A well planned, timely energy transition will be good for workers and their communities, and provide much needed certainty in the energy sector.
Major climate related events should no longer come as a surprise; the reactive, short-term responses to acute events, such as the tax levy implemented following the 2011 Queensland floods, are inadequate and unsustainable.
We need to plan now for future climate shocks even if we’re not one hundred per cent sure the shape that they will take or where they will occur. They may seem unpredictable yet the fact of these events is entirely foreseeable.
When a major event strikes, we also need to move beyond our traditional stoic tendency to simply rebuild and replace what was lost and face the hard truth that it might instead be time to up stumps and move.
That once peaceful bushland community may be at risk of repeated catastrophic infernos. That one-in-a-hundred-year floodplain may soon see a major deluge every 7 years.
That family farm that was managed productively for 100 years may never again see significant rainfall. A dose of climate reality is unpleasant but necessary medicine. We need to know our place, understand more deeply the environment on which we depend, and become more adept at being caretakers of the land.
In our increasingly hostile climate, we will also need to take greater care of others. Checking up on family and looking out for our older neighbours during a heat wave or other emergency saves lives. This neighbourliness should extend regionally, as Pacific islands are lost to sea level rise, and island livelihoods are lost to unprecedented cyclones.
As a wealthy and robust neighbour, Australia can afford to provide refuge to people whose nations are damaged by climate change. Given our role as a major emitter of greenhouse gases through both our home industries and our exports, it is also the morally right thing to do.
It’s not only the wellbeing of people that matters and that requires our additional care during extreme weather, but also animals.
What do we do when we can’t take a beloved pet to an evacuation centre? What happens to the horses when a farm is threatened by bushfire? How are dairy cattle managed and given relief during extreme heat? How do we provide care for bush animals injured in fire?
Unfortunately as resources of land, water and food become more severely threatened by climate change, we risk shifting away from a culture of offering care and shelter and towards greater conflict, with civil disturbance, war and mass population displacement the likely outcome when people fight for survival.
The changes we need to make to meet the challenges of climate change are not just structural, but cultural as well, and require a shift in thinking from short term electoral cycles to long term adaptive planning; from mere survival to a society that flourishes.
Rethinking how we structure our physical, economic and social worlds to be more mindful of the environment, build strong communities and a culture of care, and reduce socioeconomic disadvantage, will have a profound impact on how we as a nation experience and cope with our increasingly hostile climate.
Some of these things, such as checking in on our neighbours more often, require just a little tweaking in the way that we do things. Others, such as rethinking our transport and energy systems, are necessarily transformative.
We can plan now for the inevitable to ease these transitions, to be adaptive rather than merely reactive. We can choose the directions we take and the Australia we wish to live in. The time to do this is now.

*Professor Hilary Bambrick is Head of the School of Public Health and Social Work at Queensland University of Technology (QUT). She is an environmental epidemiologist and bioanthropologist researching health impacts and adaptation, especially in more vulnerable communities. Working in Australia, the Pacific, Asia and Africa, her research is focused on the health challenges facing communities and the ways in which to strengthen climate resilience.

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17/09/2018

Australia Has No Climate-Change Policy — Again

Nature - Adam Morton

Scientists say the country will now struggle to meet it commitments to the Paris agreement.
Large parts of Australia are enduring a crippling drought. Credit: David Gray/Reuters
Australia’s new prime minister has abandoned the country’s policy for cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. Climate scientists say the move means the government has effectively dropped its commitment to the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
“They’ve walked away from Paris without saying it, hoping no one would notice,” says Lesley Hughes, a climate-change scientist at Macquarie University in Sydney. Without a policy to cut carbon dioxide pollution, the government is dropping its international commitment by default, she says.
Australia now becomes the second advanced economy after the United States to drop emissions-reduction policies since the 2015 Paris climate conference. President Donald Trump signed an executive order to start removing climate regulations in March 2017 and pulled the US out of the Paris agreement in June 2017.
Australia’s effective abandonment of Paris can be traced back to late August, when the ruling conservative Liberal Party abruptly replaced former leader Malcolm Turnbull with Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The leadership change came after some party members objected to a policy that would have required electricity companies to meet emissions targets. Morrison subsequently said that he was abandoning the policy, called the National Energy Guarantee (NEG), and would instead focus on reducing the cost of energy for the public.
The NEG is the fourth national climate policy rejected by Australia’s conservative government since it was elected in 2013, and comes as large parts of country feel the effects of global warming — a crippling drought grips the eastern states and dozens of bushfires have erupted unseasonably early in those regions.
Some government members have even suggested that the country should join the Trump administration in officially withdrawing from the Paris agreement. Morrison has rejected this idea. He says Australia is on track to meet the target it announced before the Paris conference: to cut emissions by 26–28% below 2005 levels by 2030.
But there is little evidence to suggest the government will be able to meet this target without new policies. In August, government advisers said it was unlikely that the electricity sector, responsible for one-third of Australia’s emissions, would reduce its emissions by 26% unless a policy was introduced to drive cleaner energy generation over the next decade.
National emissions have risen each year since 2014, when the government repealed laws requiring big industrial emitters to pay for their emissions. There are also no significant policies to reduce the other major sources of pollution, such as transport, agriculture, heavy industry and mining, which together generate nearly two-thirds of Australia’s carbon emissions.
Although the NEG was a modest policy, proposed after several more effective schemes failed to win political support, it had the potential to win the backing of the centre-left opposition Labor Party, says John Church, a specialist in sea-level rise at the Climate Change Research Centre (CCRC) at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. That would have enabled the policy to pass through parliament and into law. The policy also had the support of the business community, which has been calling for climate and energy strategies that encourage investment in new and cleaner power plants, he says. “Walking away from it was a disaster.”
Sarah Perkins-Kirkpatrick, an authority on heatwaves, also at the CCRC, says government motivation to do something about climate change seems to have disappeared altogether. When she briefed senior officials on the latest climate-change science in August, she left the meeting feeling optimistic that more policies were coming. “People were trying to get things done, but now that’s not the case at all,” she says. “I’m extremely frustrated.”

Public concern
The decision to drop the policy also goes against the public’s support for action on climate change, says Hughes. A poll of 1,756 people, published on 12 September by research and advocacy organization the Australia Institute, found that 73% of respondents were concerned about climate change and 68% wanted domestic climate targets in line with the country’s Paris commitment.
But Australia’s lack of climate policy could be short-lived. A national election is due by May 2019, and recent polls suggest that the Labor Party, led by former union boss Bill Shorten, is favoured to win. Labor says it would set a new emissions target of a 45% cut by 2030, although it has not revealed how it would reach the target. In the meantime, some states have mandated ambitious renewable-energy targets, and business leaders say investment in clean energy is increasing because it is now the cheapest option.

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'Tsunami' Of New Wind And Solar Projects Drives Renewables Output To A Record

Fairfax - Peter Hannam

Large-scale solar's contribution to the grid is just beginning to soar. Photo: Supplied
Talking points
  • Wind, solar and hydro supplied 25.6% of the National Electricity Market in August.
  • South Australia led mainland states, with renewables including solar supplying 58% of power.
  • SA and Victoria, the mainland states with the largest clean energy share, had the lowest wholesale prices.
  • New renewables planned to be online by the end of 2020 would equal almost a 10th of generation over the past year.
Renewable energy supplied more than a quarter of the National Electricity Market last month amid windy weather and a "tsunami of new wind and solar projects" reaching completion, The Australia Institute said.
The progressive think tank's latest energy and emission audit found renewables including hydro and rooftop solar generated a record 25.6 per cent of electricity supplied to the market that serves about four in five Australians.
Clean energy's share of total grid supply for the 12 months to August was 16.1 per cent, beating the previous peak reached in the 12 months to 2014 when hydro plants went full-bore to take advantage of the carbon price before its scrapping by the Abbott government.
When rooftop solar is added, the 12-month share rose to 19.7 per cent - or not far shy of the 2020 Renewable Energy Target set for large-scale renewables.

Source: The Australia Institute
Wholesale prices - which are one component of what households and businesses pay for power - were lowest last month in South Australia at $72 per megawatt-hour. The state sourced 55 per cent of electricity from renewables and 58 per cent when rooftop solar was added, Hugh Saddler, an analyst with The Australia Institute, said.
Victoria's price of $79 per MW-hour was next lowest among mainland states. Renewable projects are surging in that state, with their share of supply jumping by a half in three years from 12.3 per cent to 18.9 per cent.
NSW had the most expensive wholesale power last month at $82 per MW-hour. Clean energy - including hydro running hard - reached only 14 per cent of supply in the state. NSW sources 12 per cent of its power from Victoria or Queensland, the report found.
There were record levels of renewable energy in August. Photo: Supplied
Coal debate
Dr Saddler said since the end of April, new wind farms had lifted capacity by 14 per cent while new solar farms had almost doubled capacity, though from a much smaller base.
"There's no sign of any slowdown of new projects coming on line," he said, noting these would include the 928 MW of new capacity announced last week by the Andrews government as part of its Victorian Renewable Energy Target.
Over the next two years new renewables would increase capacity by almost a 10th, or the equivalent of twice the size of AGL's ailing Liddell coal-fired power plant, the report estimates.
Despite the surge in renewables, the Morrison government continued to discuss the prospect of new coal-fired power stations, a stance at odds with market trends.
"The future is about coal - but about when the coal-fired power stations close," Dr Saddler, who is also an honorary professor at the Australian National University, said.
The rise of renewables meant emissions from the electricity sector continued to retreat, with wind and solar nudging out black coal-fired power. Still, rising fossil fuel use in the transport sector meant total energy combustion emissions "are basically flat", he said.

'Bodyblow'
In a separate blow to coal-fired power, Japan's Marubeni Corporation, one of world's largest developers of coal plants, was reported to be withdrawing from new projects.
Japan's Nikkei said Marubeni would also halve the ownership of plants it already held by 2030 and accelerate its shift to renewable energy.
Tim Buckley, an analyst with anti-fossil fuel group the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis, said the news that Marubeni was shifting its global weight behind renewables was "a bodyblow to the global coal industry and a profoundly important endorsement of the aims of the Paris Climate Agreement".
"It is inevitable that other global coal plant developers like POSCO of South Korea, Siemens of Germany and GE of America will be forced to evaluate their own position in light of Marubeni’s decision," he said.

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16/09/2018

Utilities Have A Problem: The Public Wants 100% Renewable Energy, And Quick

Vox - David Roberts

The industry is groping for ways to talk the public down.
American as apple pie. Shutterstock
Renewable energy is hot. It has incredible momentum, not only in terms of deployment and costs but in terms of public opinion and cultural cachet. To put it simply: Everyone loves renewable energy. It’s cleaner, it’s high-tech, it’s new jobs, it’s the future.
And so more and more big energy customers are demanding the full meal deal: 100 percent renewable energy.
The Sierra Club notes that so far in the US, more than 80 cities, five counties, and two states have committed to 100 percent renewables. Six cities have already hit the target.
The group RE100 tracks 144 private companies across the globe that have committed to 100 percent renewables, including Google, Ikea, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Nike, GM, and, uh, Lego.
The timing of all these targets (and thus their stringency) varies, everywhere from 2020 to 2050, but cumulatively, they are beginning to add up. Even if policymakers never force power utilities to produce renewable energy through mandates, if all the biggest customers demand it, utilities will be mandated to produce it in all but name.
The rapid spread and evident popularity of the 100 percent target has created an alarming situation for power utilities. Suffice to say, while there are some visionary utilities in the country, as an industry, they tend to be extremely small-c conservative.
They do not like the idea of being forced to transition entirely to renewable energy, certainly not in the next 10 to 15 years. For one thing, most of them don’t believe the technology exists to make 100 percent work reliably; they believe that even with lots of storage, variable renewables will need to be balanced out by “dispatchable” power plants like natural gas. For another thing, getting to 100 percent quickly would mean lots of “stranded assets,” i.e., shutting down profitable fossil fuel power plants.
LightRocket via Getty Images
In short, their customers are stampeding in a direction that terrifies them.
The industry’s dilemma is brought home by a recent bit of market research and polling done on behalf of the Edison Electric Institute, a trade group for utilities. It was distributed at a recent meeting of EEI board members and executives and shared with me.
The work was done by the market research firm Maslansky & Partners, which analyzed existing utility messaging, interviewed utility execs and environmentalists, ran a national opinion survey, and did a couple of three-hour sit-downs with “media informed customers” in Minneapolis and Phoenix.
The results are striking. They do a great job of laying out the public opinion landscape on renewables, showing where different groups have advantages and disadvantages.
The takeaway: Renewables are a public opinion juggernaut. Being against them is no longer an option. The industry’s best and only hope is to slow down the stampede a bit (and that’s what they plan to try).

100 percent renewables is a wildly popular goal
The core of the industry’s dilemma is captured in this slide (on the left is the industry perspective):




Utilities don’t think it is wise or feasible to go 100 percent renewables. But the public loves it.
And I mean loves it. Check out these numbers from the opinion survey:


In our polarized age, here is something we almost all agree on: Renewable energy is awesome.
Here’s the most striking slide in the presentation:


In case you don’t feel like squinting, let me draw your attention to the fact that a majority of those surveyed (51 percent) believe that 100 percent renewables is a good idea even if it raises their energy bills by 30 percent.
That is wild. As anyone who’s been in politics a while knows, Americans don’t generally like people raising their bills, much less by a third. A majority that still favors it? That is political dynamite.
Insofar as utilities were in a public relations war over renewables, they’ve lost. They face a tidal wave. So what can they do?

Explaining why 100% renewables is impossible backfires
What they can’t do is tell customers why they can’t do it. Customers do not want to hear excuses.
They tested the following message (this is an excerpt, with emphasis added): “Today, we can choose between a balanced energy mix, which provides reliable energy whenever we need it, and 100% renewable energy. But we cannot have both. We also need to consider the costs. ... The logistics, resources, and costs would be immense.”
Nope. Customers didn’t want to hear it.
“You could tell what side he was leaning toward,” said one Phoenix focus-group participant. “He offered no solutions. It was just problem, problem, problem.”
“I want to hear about how the work would get done,” said a Minneapolis participant. “I don’t want to hear him complain about how much work it will take.”
Other can’t-do arguments drew similar reactions:


Can’t-do arguments get a company branded as anti-renewables, and that means Bad Guy. After that, customers aren’t listening.
If they want people to keep listening, utilities must begin by convincing them that they are on board with renewables. Thus, the very first piece of advice on “framing the conversation” reads, “Positive, pro-renewable message first ... every time.”
An anti-renewables message, even a message that implies anti-renewables, is simply untenable.
That is worth noting. It’s something I’m not sure US climate hawks or political types have entirely internalized. There aren’t many contested political issues on which public opinion is so unequivocally on one side.

The public might be willing to let the experts work out the details
So utilities must convince customers that they support renewable energy, first thing, off the bat. (The best way to do that, of the options tested, was telling customers about investments — highlighting the rising level of investment in renewables. Money talks.)
If they can make that key connection, then they can swing the conversation around. Once customers are convinced that utilities are sincere about supporting renewables, they become more open to the message that getting to 100 percent will take some time, that it needs to be done deliberately, and that costs need to be taken into account.
“Given the cost and the complexities of it, it should be done gradually,” one Phoenix respondent said. “Not the next five years, but maybe by the end of our lifetimes,” said another.
The researchers tested the following message (excerpted): “[A balanced energy mix] helps us maintain consistent service for our customers and avoids over-reliance on a single fuel type or technology. This means we’re able to bring our customers increasingly more renewable energy without asking them to compromise on reliability or cost.”
That worked much better. “It seemed like we all have the same goal that we’re working toward,” said a respondent in Minneapolis. “In the meantime, they’ll use a balance to serve us. It’s sensible.”
In fact, in terms of reasons not to rely entirely on renewables, by far the most potent argument was that it would slow the transition to clean energy: “We can get to cleaner energy faster and more effectively if we use a range of sources and technologies.”
The state-of-the-art message for utilities, then, is this: Yes, we want to pursue renewables, but to protect consumers, we want to do it in a way that is “balanced, gradual, affordable, [and] reliable.” That means we should avoid, ahem, “short-term mandates.”




(How much this message will merely cover for efforts to block legislation and slow the transition depends on the utility.)

On renewables, “yes, but” is the only countermessage left
So where does this leave us in terms of the messaging landscape?
In the 100 percent renewables debate, there are roughly three camps, at least among the researchers, energy executives, climate advocates, and journalists who pay attention to these sorts of things.
The first, with most activists and advocates, supports 100 percent renewables as a clear, intuitive, and inspiring target, an effective way to rally public support and speed the transition.
The second camp believes that the cheaper, safer way to get to carbon-free electricity is not to rely entirely on renewables but to supplement them with “firm” zero-carbon alternatives like hydro, nuclear, geothermal, biomass, or fossil fuels with carbon capture and sequestration. (See this paper, from a group of MIT researchers, for the best articulation of that argument.) This camp supports the strategy California has taken, which is to mandate 100 percent “zero carbon” rather than “renewable” resources, to leave flexibility.
The third camp, containing many utilities and conservatives, flatly doesn’t believe 100 percent carbon-free electricity is possible anytime soon, and would just as soon not close working fossil fuel power plants before the end of their profitable lives. They would like to continue balancing the rising share of renewables with natural gas.
The first camp has won the public’s heart. Big time. Everyone, even those gritting their teeth, has to signal support for renewables if they want to be taken seriously.
There is some room for the third camp to convince the public that the transition to renewables needs to proceed carefully and “gradually.” That’s the ground advocates and utilities will be fighting on in coming years: not whether to go, but how fast. (There’s a lot of room within “not the next five years, but maybe by the end of our lifetimes.”)
Get used to it. Shutterstock
And there is some room for the second camp to convince the public that the transition to clean energy is best achieved by relying on sources beyond renewable energy, or at least by not locking ourselves into renewables prematurely. One of the survey’s findings is that under a range of questions, the public does not have a strong preference between increasing renewables and reducing carbon emissions. I doubt most people differentiate the two at all — they are vaguely good, environmental-ish things.
Similarly, I doubt the public at large will care much about the distinction between “renewable” and “clean,” which serves as a pretty good argument for the California approach. (The California approach, or at least earlier variants of it, has helped keep existing nuclear plants running in Illinois and New York.)
But these are implementation details. The decarbonization ship has sailed. Renewable energy is in the vanguard and, at least for now, it appears unstoppable. At this point, it is difficult to imagine what could turn the public against it. (Perhaps a giant wind spill?) The more relevant question is when lawmakers will catch on to renewable energy’s full political potential.
The basic message from the public, if I could pull together all the strands of the research, is this: We want clean, modern energy, and we’ll pay for it. We’re willing to let experts work out the details, but we don’t want to hear that it can’t be done. Just do it.
Utilities can’t make that sentiment go away, though they can and will try to soften it. In the meantime, in the off-chance that their messaging efforts fail, they’d better get serious about giving customers the clean energy they want.

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Drought-Stricken Farmers Challenge Coalition's Climate Change Stance In TV Ad

The Guardian - 

‘We need to stick to the Paris agreement, we need to stop burning coal and we need to commit to more renewable energy,’ Longreach farmer says
Jody Brown on her property in Longreach, Queensland, Australia, appearing in a new ad campaign linking drought and climate change. Australian Conservation Foundation
“This drought has really hit our family hard,” says Longreach farmer Jody Brown. “Climate change is making the droughts more severe.”
Those two sentences are the opening lines to a new advertisement challenging the federal government’s stance on climate change and the drought in Australia’s eastern states.
The 30-second ad will begin airing on commercial channels this week and will be beamed into politically important suburban areas of Australia’s three largest capital cities during the NRL grand final on 30 September.
The advertisement has been paid for by the Australian Conservation Foundation and features Brown, a sheep and cattle farmer who runs a 45,000 acre property 65km south of Longreach in central west Queensland.
Brown is a fourth-generation grazier whose family property has been affected by drought.
In the clip, she calls for “politicians to stop dancing around the issue and help us to do something about this”.
“We need to stick to the Paris agreement, we need to stop burning coal and we need to commit to more renewable energy,” she says.

Longreach sheep and cattle farmer Jody Brown features in the new Australian Conservation Foundation ad about drought and climate change. 

The campaign comes after the prime minister, Scott Morrison, described the drought as his highest priority but said the conversation about the connection between drought and climate change should be left “for another day”.
Last week hundreds of farmers and their supporters rallied outside Parliament House in Canberra demanding action on climate change.
Farmers for Climate Action board member and third-generation NSW farmer Peter Holding told the crowd that praying for rain – referencing comments by Morrison earlier this month – “is not going to cut it”.
Brown said she had become increasingly disappointed at Canberra’s unwillingness to discuss the current drought in the context of climate change.
“I think no matter where you stand or what your perspective is, droughts are part of a climate and you can’t separate those two issues,” she said.
“If you’re going to be serious about supporting farmers through drought and adapting to drought-stricken conditions, you need to be talking about climate change.”
She said many farmers were already changing their practices to try to adapt to warmer temperatures.
“It’s not going to work for everyone but there are some interesting management solutions out there,” she said. “These are the kinds of things I’d like to see governments working on as well.”
Kelly O’Shanassy, the chief executive of the Australian Conservation Foundation, said Australia could no longer put off talking about how climate change is making extreme weather events worse.
“We are launching this TV ad to try prompt the national discussion our prime minister doesn’t seem to want to have,” she said.
“Farmers, along with many others in our community, are on the frontline of climate damage. We must have their backs. Inaction on climate change both here and abroad has real-world implications for the safety and productivity of our country.”
A poll published last week showed the Morrison government is politically vulnerable on climate policy, with a growing number of Australians saying they are concerned about climate change and want action.
The prime minister has declared Australia will not pull out of Paris but also abandoned the national energy guarantee that imposed an emissions reduction target on the electricity sector.
New data published by NDEVR Environmental on Friday shows Australia is on track to miss its Paris targets, and the country’s emissions, excluding land use data, were the highest on record for the third year running.

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