15/01/2019

Australia Could Hit 100% Renewables Sooner Than Most People Think

The Guardian - *

There are still people talking up coal and talking down renewable energy but we have installed more solar panels and wind turbines than ever before
2018 was a boom year for renewable and you can expect it to continue in 2019.
Photograph: Scott Barbour/Getty Images
Not since the invention of the steam engine have we seen the pace of change occurring in energy systems around the world. In Australia our electricity system is changing rapidly, from new technologies and business models to changes in policy and perhaps even regulation. As the year begins, here are five energy trends you should expect to see in 2019.

1. More action towards 100% renewable energy
Last year was a boom year for renewables. Despite rhetoric from some political quarters talking up coal and talking down renewable energy, we installed more solar panels and wind turbines than ever before. There are at least 40 large-scale wind and solar projects in construction in Australia, totalling over 6000MWs of new generation capacity. This means renewables will continue on a steep growth curve as analysis by the Melbourne University Climate and Energy College shows.
This rapid growth in renewables and soon battery storage is at least in part driven by a corresponding reduction in cost. Bloomberg New Energy Finance analysis reveals a compound annual reduction in cost of battery storage of 21% over eight years. Facts such as these are the engine driving us towards 100% renewables at a pace much faster than most pundits think.
IMAGE
At a political level California has just legislated a move to 100% renewables, while at home South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT are on track to be net 100% renewables in the next few years. With everyone from tech billionaires to school students demanding 100% renewables, pressure for a more rapid shift to renewables is likely to continue to build.
Many still think that 100% renewables can’t be done. In 2017 ANU, Energy Networks Australia and CSIRO joined the ranks of Australia’s leading institutions on energy that have now done their own plans to show Australia can reliably achieve 100% renewables. This takes the number of 100% renewables plans for Australia to more than 10.
In the corporate sector, global initiative The RE100 has arrived in Australia. This initiative which encourages companies to commit to 100% renewables has seen global companies headquartered outside of Australia such as Carlton United Breweries and Ikea lead the way. In late 2018 Commonwealth Bank became the first Australian company to join, signing a large power purchase agreement in the process.

 2. Solar for renters and other locked-out energy users
The coverage of rooftop solar hit two million roofs in 2018 – a huge achievement considering a decade ago there were less than 100,000 roofs with solar panels on them. However, while households and businesses that own a sunny roof can now benefit from greater energy independence, lower electricity bills and that good feeling of lessening their climate pollution, there are at least 30% of households that cannot put solar on their roof. These households rent, live in apartments, cannot afford the upfront cost or have shaded roofs. Research by startup incubator Energy Lab found that only 4% of rental properties and 4% of apartments have solar on the roof, compared with 29% of owner-occupied households and 38% of owner-occupied standalone houses.
For a long time these households have been in the too-hard basket for policymakers and industry alike. However, there are signs that in 2019 this could be changing. The Victorian and South Australian governments have announced policies to support 50,000 rental properties to access solar, and for South Australia, batteries also. In NSW the government is trialling a program of solar for 15,000 low-income energy rebate customers. These are small steps, but if scaled could start to change the current trend towards solar energy haves and have-nots.

Proportion of owner-occupiers and renters with rooftop solar
Installations < 10kW per occupied dwellings
Guardian Graphic | Source: ABS, APVI, EnergyLab

Proportion of apartments, semi-detached dwellings
and separate houses with rooftop solar
Guardian Graphic | Source: ABS, APVI Solar Map, EnergyLab


 3. Community energy going gangbusters
Communities are also taking matters into their own hands, developing innovative community-owned clean energy projects and implementing plans to move to 100% renewables. Despite a lack of interest from mainstream energy players and little policy support, Australia’s community energy sector has grown to more than 105 groups and 174 operating projects. Most famously the communities of Yackandandah and Daylesford.
Last year Totally Renewable Yackandandah in independent Cathy McGowan’s electorate of Indi set up a community retailer Indigo Power to help it on its way to 100%. In Daylesford, flagship community energy enterprise Hepburn Wind is planning a solar farm and received a Victorian government grant to help them progress.

4. A battle between good and bad hydrogen
Hydrogen fuel is not a new idea, yet in 2019 hydrogen is likely to make significant strides towards becoming a major part of our global energy ecosystem. Last September, the Australian Renewable Energy Agency funded 16 renewable hydrogen projects to the tune of $22m, aimed at helping to drive down costs and create a supply chain. Renewable hydrogen could be huge, using excess wind and solar to split water, create hydrogen and export it to sunshine- and land-constrained countries like Japan and South Korea as a renewable fuel for industry and heavy transport.
However, hydrogen has also been latched on to by the coal and gas industries. Hydrogen fuel can be created from coal, but generates carbon pollution in the process. Hydrogen can also be injected into the gas grid, up to a certain level (with upgrades), which could help prevent gas pipelines become stranded assets as households and industry increasingly electrify.
The question is will hydrogen become yet another lifeline for the polluting coal and gas industries or will it become something that is genuinely used to expand renewables and reduce climate pollution?

5. Clean energy elections
No 2019 trend article is complete without mentioning the upcoming elections. According to researcher Rebecca Huntly climate change is a top issue with the electorate and as such both the NSW and federal elections are going to have a focus on climate and energy policy whether politicians like it or not.
The federal ALP recently announced its energy policy. Their plan does just enough to show they want to do something, but no more than they have to, given they are so far ahead in the polls. At this point, future announcements are likely to focus on climate and clean transport rather than clean energy. It’s true that sectors other than electricity do need attention to reduce climate pollution. That said, refraining from further renewables commitments would be a missed opportunity to capitalise on the popularity of clean energy in the electorate.
The federal Coalition meanwhile looks like it will double down on coal and an electricity price scare campaign if Barnaby Joyce’s diatribe this month is anything to go by. It remains to be seen whether increasing public pressure on the government and the popularity of acting on climate and renewables will lead to a last-ditch course correction as the federal election gets closer; it’s possible, but don’t hold your breath.

*Nicky Ison is a research associate at the Institute for Sustainable Futures at the University of Technology Sydney and co-founder of the Community Power Agency.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,

Adapting Yourself To Take Action On The Environment

University of Melbourne - Terry Bowles*

Disillusionment with politics is reason enough to want to take action yourself on climate change and the environment, but actually doing it is harder. Here is a model to help you plan and do.
Getty Images
Are you frustrated by the lack of national action being taken to tackle climate change and protect the environment? Have you made a New Year resolution to start doing something yourself?
The good news is that there is plenty of advice out there on what individuals can do, like David Suzuki’s top 10 things to do about climate change. But making the resolution to do something, and even deciding on what to do, is the easy part. The hard part is actually doing it, and that requires not just understanding what needs to be done but going through the next step and organising ourselves and sustaining our commitment.
Taking action to tackle climate change can seem too hard, but having a plan can make action achievable.
Picture: Shutterstock
It requires what psychologists call “adaptive” thinking and behaviour that facilitates people being able to change in response to circumstances and solve problems.
Ordinarily, when we deal with changing our behaviour we tend to use very simple processes and typically rely on specialists (therapists, coaches) to bring about changes that are complex. Even when we make major decisions like job changing, buying a car or a house, we often don’t account for all the elements and consequences of the change, sometimes because it would be overwhelming to think of all of the issues – just as we have collectively done with climate change.
To assist people in adapting to change, we have been developing a model to help better understand effective, positive and adaptive change processes. We call it the Adaptive Change Model. There are eight factors to the model, five of which are processes to consciously follow, and three support factors that help you get where you are going.
Process Factors
  1. Create a mindset of Openness to Opportunities – be truly open to the possibilities, all the possibilities. Look for opportunities and seek out many possibilities before deciding on what to commit to change.
  2. Visualise possibilities and imagine yourself doing things. Perhaps even write out or draw your opportunities.
  3. Plan. Once we have imagined all options we need to make plans that address the complexity and multilayered nature of what needs to be done, and then operate very flexibly, responding to new opportunities and going through more visualisation and planning to refine the action plan.
  4. The next stage is Taking Action and this needs to be strategic, focused, achievable, self-affirming and self-rewarding – and if possible fun and easy, at least in the first instance.
  5. Pursue Closure by soundly defining a measurable achievement, followed by celebration of the achievement. 
Managing negative emotions and seeking support from others can help sustain your inner drive.
Picture: Shutterstock
Support factors
  1. Social Support – build networks of people to support every aspect of the five processes and two other support factors
  2. (Management of) Negative Emotions – regulating and channelling negative emotions to focus on the five processes and the other support factors
  3. Inner Drive – providing the grit, gumption, motivation and drive to stay the course and achieve the goals and maintain the five processes and the other support factors
For example, perhaps one evening you notice that there are suggestions on the council’s rates notice on how to reduce your environmental footprint, including installing solar panels on the roof, storing run-off rainwater in upright tanks and setting up a compost bin. You feel excited and motivated (Inner Drive) at the prospect of doing something, but a little anxious (Management of Negative Emotions) because you’ve never done these things before. But you know your partner will support you and work with you on the options (Social Support).
You imagine (visualise) what it would be like to have solar panels on the roof or water tanks or a compost bin. You think about it often and imagine what it will be like. You visit a friend who has gone ‘environmental’ and they talk to you about what they did and how it would fit into your house and lifestyle. You realise this is going to take some effort (Inner Drive) and feel disappointed (Management of Negative Emotions) that it will change your beautifully landscaped backyard. But your partner is still very encouraging (Social Support).
In your plans you commit (Inner Drive) to an easier task to start planning to manage garbage better by putting a compost bin in the backyard. You visit staff at a local Environmental Centre (Social Support) who assist with siting the compost bin, which means taking out some plants (Management of Negative Emotions).
Decide what success is and celebrate it with those that helped you on the way.
Picture: Getty Images
Your friend and partner (Social Support) return with you to the Environmental Centre where you buy the compost bin and worms, which seem expensive (Management of Negative Emotions) but you have committed to this and you think it is worthwhile (Inner Drive).
You are determined to celebrate your achievements, first when you install everything and get it working – and that evening you celebrate with your partner with a glass of wine (Social Support).
You realise that you have committed to a new process that is going to be time-consuming and maybe uncomfortable – you have to tramp outside in the cold of winter or heat of summer (Management of Negative Emotions). However, you’re glad that you’ve committed to this change (Inner Drive) and you’ve decided to celebrate your first bucket of compost, when it’s ready, with your partner and your friend.
Following and managing these processes isn’t easy. Learning to be comfortable with patiently and conscientiously applying new, more complex ways of managing our attitudes, our values, our emotions, our ways of thinking and doing things, requires effort, understanding and self-compassion to become truly adaptive.
People should feel free to experiment with the process and support factors as you work in your own way to meet the challenge of responding to human induced climate change. Failures should be embraced as a learning experience to build on, and when you succeed you should celebrate, with fireworks, if preferred!
Our politicians aren’t yet ready to decisively and collectively lead on climate change, however, if enough individuals begin their own courageous, quiet, personal adaptive change revolution, politicians will follow.

*Associate Professor Terry Bowles has a background in practice and leadership in school, educational and developmental psychological and clinical psychological practice and research.  Professor Bowles works at the University of Melbourne, training Educational and Developmental Psychologists and Research Higher Degree Coordinator.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels:

Business Needs To Get Real On Climate

AFR - Craig Emerson

Craig Emerson is managing director of Craig Emerson Economics, a distinguished fellow at the ANU and an adjunct professor at Victoria University's College of Business.
The looming election will determine the course our nation takes on an issue of vital importance not only for humankind, but for Australian businesses as well. If business organisations such as the Business Council of Australia (BCA) persist with their support for the Morrison government's carbon-emissions target of a 26 per cent reduction on 2005 levels by 2030, they will position their members as being opposed to meaningful action on climate change.
A pattern has already emerged. The BCA backed an emissions-trading scheme – but not the Rudd government's emissions-trading scheme. It continued to mouth support for an emissions-trading scheme after the election of the Gillard government – just not the carbon price, which after three years was legislated to morph into an emissions-trading scheme anyway. Now the BCA is backing the National Energy Guarantee (NEG) that the Morrison government has abandoned but which remains Labor policy – just not one with a 45 per cent emissions-reduction target for electricity generation.
Instead, the BCA describes the 45 per cent target for electricity as "economy wrecking", supporting only a 26 per cent reduction. Modelling by the Energy Security Board forecasts a 24 per cent reduction in emissions from the electricity sector on 2005 levels by 2021-22. This would leave only a 2 per cent reduction to be done from 2022 to 2030 if a 26 per cent target were adopted. During the 2020s, two or more ageing coal-fired power stations will be retired regardless. In other words, the BCA supports the NEG as long as it doesn't do anything.
Earlier droughts underscored the danger of a perfect storm to John Howard.  Glenn Campbell
Existing policy settings
The BCA's support for a do-nothing target for electricity generation fails to recognise that the cost of installing and transmitting large-scale renewable energy has fallen so rapidly that increasing renewable energy in the system now drives electricity prices lower.
Prime Minister Morrison has declared Australia will reach its Paris commitment "in a canter" under existing policy settings. That is untrue. Our Paris commitment is a 26 per cent reduction in emissions for the whole economy, not just for electricity generation. Official government projections released, conveniently, just before Christmas are for Australia's total emissions to rise between 2020 and 2030, for an overall reduction on 2005 levels of just 7 per cent – a long way from a 26 per cent reduction. If the Morrison government is re-elected Australia will miss its Paris target by a country mile.
Fortunately some of the BCA's more-enlightened members are supporting the transition to a low-carbon future, installing renewable and low-emissions energy capacity and refusing to buckle to Coalition pressure to keep open coal-fired generators beyond their economic lives. Householders, too, are installing rooftop solar panels at unprecedented rates.
The Coalition's conservative faction, urged on by its backers on shock-jock radio and Sky After Dark, continues to propagate the conspiracy theory that climate change is an elaborate hoax. They are supremely confident that, given a choice between lower electricity prices and emissions reductions, voters will follow the money every time.
There are two problems with this short-term, cynical analysis.
First, voters don't believe they should be required to make a choice; they support lower electricity prices and action on climate change.
The Andrews government's renewable-energy policy went over a treat in the Victorian state election.  Supplied
Second, this polling is getting old. When John Howard later reflected on his own announcement of an emissions-trading scheme ahead of the 2007 election, he described the political environment at the time as "a perfect storm". Ironically, chief contributor to the "perfect storm" was the prolonged drought. Voters were constantly reminded of global warming by water restrictions in the cities and horrible images of devastation in the bush.

In for a big shock
History is now repeating. Much of Australia is in the grips of another severe drought. Concern about climate change is firmly back in the public's consciousness. As the Morrison government moves towards the election, musing about the underwriting of new coal-fired power stations and boasting about doing nothing on climate change, it is in for a big shock.
The Andrews government's renewable-energy policy went over a treat in the Victorian state election. Just ask voters in blue-ribbon Liberal seats, several of which fell to Labor and which make up the federal electorates of several staunch Liberal conservatives.
If Labor wins the coming federal election it will try to get an NEG with a 45 per cent emissions-reduction target through a Senate in which conservatives are likely to have a majority. If Labor fails in that endeavour, it will move to contracting for generating capacity consistent with the 45 per cent target and an integrated system plan that addresses and manages reliability and grid stability.
As the BCA and others campaign against that target and in favour of a do-nothing target, they will isolate themselves, forfeiting any influence on government policy and will end up, again, on the wrong side of history.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

14/01/2019

An Ocean Of Evidence On Warming Is Our Cue To Take Action - Now

Fairfax - John Church

John Church is a professor at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of NSW, and the first Australian to receive the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge in climate change award, for his work on rising sea levels.
Over 90 per cent of the heat trapped in the climate system by increasing greenhouse gas concentrations from our burning of fossil fuels is stored in the oceans. With much less variability than surface temperatures, ocean warming is one of the most important indicators of the ongoing pace of climate change.
Two new studies published last week confirm the world’s oceans are warming. The first,
published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows that ocean warming has accelerated since 1870. The second, a perspective published in the prestigious iournal Science, reports studies that indicate the rate of ocean warming over recent decades is 10 per cent or more greater than the studies considered in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Assessment published in 2013, and that the rate has increased since 1991.
Broken sea ice emerges from under the hull of a Finnish icebreaker as it traverses the Arctic's Northwest Passage.
Credit: AP
The updated observations are in agreement with the results of climate model simulations of the impacts of our continuing release of greenhouse gases. These models show the ocean will continue to warm through the 21st century and beyond.
Greenhouse gases have a long life time in the atmosphere. Even if carbon dioxide emissions were to cease completely, atmospheric concentrations would only decrease slowly over thousands of years unless we discover a way to artificially remove them from the atmosphere.As a direct consequence, surface temperatures would remain elevated. As result of the oceans’ ability to store heat, they will continue to warm for centuries.
Decisions we make now about greenhouse gas emissions have long-term consequences for the world and Australia’s climate and sea level, and of course for the natural environment and our modern society.
Continued greenhouse gas emissions at a business-as-usual rate would result in the ocean warming accelerating through the 21st century, and a contribution to sea-level rise of about 30cm from ocean thermal expansion alone by 2100. The warmer ocean would be accompanied by warmer surface temperatures, increased frequency of climate extremes, and increased intensity of extreme rainfall events and hurricanes, with major disruptions to society.
The ice sheets are even more important for long-term sea-level change. Unabated emissions this century would commit the world to metres of sea-level rise over coming centuries. We would likely cross the threshold, well before 2100, leading to an accelerating melting of the Greenland ice sheet and a sea level rise of up to about seven metres. An acceleration of the Greenland contribution to sea level rise has already been observed.
For Antarctica, a warming ocean would lead to the decay of ice shelves and an accelerating flow of ice into the ocean, as revealed by recent observations of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. The rate of sea level contribution from Antarctica is more uncertain but could equal or exceed the contribution from thermal expansion by 2100, and could be metres over coming centuries.
Global average temperature is already about 1C above pre-industrial levels and we have already seen an increased frequency of coastal flooding events. Unabated emissions would see permanent inundation and a dramatic increase in the frequency of coastal flooding events, disrupting the lives of tens to hundreds of millions of people.
Urgent, significant and sustained mitigation of our greenhouse gas emissions are required if we are to meet the Paris targets of “limiting global average temperatures to well below 2C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels”, and thus significantly reduce the impacts of climate change. Current mitigation “promises” are not sufficient to meet these goals, and planned mitigation is even further away. Every day we delay action makes the Paris targets more difficult to achieve.
The long time scales of the ocean means we will have to adapt to climate and sea level change resulting from past emissions. However, further sea level rises and other changes in our climate can be greatly reduced, but not eliminated, by reaching the Paris goals.
We should remember that sea levels were six to nine metres above current levels at a global average temperature about 1C above pre-industrial values.
Current Australian government figures do not indicate Australia is on track to meet our committed greenhouse gas emission mitigation target of 26 to 28 per cent reduction in emissions by 2030 “in a canter”. Meeting this target will require the urgent development of an effective Australian climate policy.
Perhaps more importantly, this target is completely inadequate. To make a proportionate commitment to meeting the Paris targets, Australia needs to ratchet up our targets, as expected by the Paris agreement, and to urgently develop realistic plans to meet these targets.
Actions we take now will affect the lives of our children and grandchildren and that of future generations. We know what is required for significant mitigation and we have the knowledge and technologies to do it. What we require urgently is the will to do it.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , , , , ,

How The Fossil Fuel Industry Got The Media To Think Climate Change Was Debatable

Washington Post - Amy Westervelt

A brown-coal-fired power plant in Bergheim, Germany. (Sascha Steinbach/EPA-EFE/REX)
Late last year, the Trump administration released the latest national climate assessment on Black Friday in what many assumed was an attempt to bury the document. If that was the plan, it backfired, and the assessment wound up earning more coverage than it probably would have otherwise. But much of that coverage perpetuated a decades-old practice, one that has been weaponized by the fossil fuel industry: false equivalence.
Although various business interests began pushing back against environmental action in general in the early 1970s as part of the conservative “war of ideas” launched in response to the social movements of the 1960s, when global warming first broke into the public sphere, it was a bipartisan issue and remained so for years. On the campaign trail in 1988, George H.W. Bush identified as an environmentalist and called for action on global warming, framing it as a technological challenge that American innovation could address. But fossil fuel interests were shifting as the industry and its allies began to push back against empirical evidence of climate change, taking many conservatives along with them.
Documents uncovered by journalists and activists over the past decade lay out a clear strategy: First, target media outlets to get them to report more on the “uncertainties” in climate science, and position industry-backed contrarian scientists as expert sources for media. Second, target conservatives with the message that climate change is a liberal hoax, and paint anyone who takes the issue seriously as “out of touch with reality.” In the 1990s, oil companies, fossil fuel industry trade groups and their respective PR firms began positioning contrarian scientists such as Willie Soon, William Happer and David Legates as experts whose opinions on climate change should be considered equal and opposite to that of climate scientists. The Heartland Institute, which hosts an annual International Conference on Climate Change known as the leading climate skeptics conference, for example, routinely calls out media outlets (including The Washington Post) for showing “bias” in covering climate change when they either decline to quote a skeptic or question a skeptic’s credibility.
Data on how effective this strategy has been is hard to come by, but anecdotal evidence of its success abounds. In the early 1990s, polls showed that about 80 percent of Americans were aware of climate change and accepted that something must be done about it, an opinion that crossed party lines. By 2008, Gallup found a marked partisan divide on climate change. By 2010, the American public’s belief in climate change hit an all-time low of 48 percent, despite the fact that those 20 years saw increased research, improved climate models and several climate change predictions coming true.
By demanding “balance,” the industry transformed climate change into a partisan issue. We know that was a deliberate strategy because various internal documents from ExxonMobil, Shell, the American Petroleum Institute and a handful of now-defunct fossil fuel industry groups reveal not only the industry’s strategy to target media with this message and these experts, but also its own preemptive debunking of the very theories it went on to support.
It need not have been such a successful strategy: If news purveyors really wanted to be evenhanded on coverage of climate change, they could certainly weave in the insights of more conservative scientists — those whose predictions err on the sunnier side of apocalypse. Instead, many took the industry’s bait, routinely inserting denialist claims into stories about climate science in the interest of providing balance: In an analysis of 636 articles covering climate change that appeared in “prestige U.S. outlets” from 1988 to 2002, researchers from the University of California at Santa Cruz and American University found that 52.65 percent presented climate science and contrarian theories as equal. The practice continued into the mid-2000s. As recently as 2007, PBS NewsHour invited well-known (and widely debunked) former weatherman Anthony Watts on to counterbalance Richard Muller, a former Koch-funded skeptic who had shifted his view.
By about 2008, most mainstream print outlets had moved past the notion that “balance” means including climate contrarians in coverage of climate science. These outlets do still trip up occasionally, though. In 2017, ProPublica published a remarkably uncritical Q&A with Happer, for example, describing him as “brilliant and controversial,” and characterizing his view that global warming is good for the planet as merely “unusual.” That same year, the New York Times was roundly criticized for hiring climate contrarian Bret Stephens as a regular editorial columnist (and his first column didn’t help).
While print outlets aren’t perfect, TV news has lagged further behind on climate, often presenting climate contrarians as an equal and opposite balance to climate scientists. In coverage of the national climate assessment, for example, multiple cable news shows featured both climate scientists and climate deniers, as though the two are simply opposite sides of a debate. “Meet the Press,” “Anderson Cooper 360” and “State of the Union” all brought on climate deniers to provide balance to their shows. Republican politicians made the cable news rounds, too, spouting familiar tall tales about climate change being normal and cyclical or sun spots and volcanoes being the real culprits. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) repeated the “the climate always changes” story on CNN, while Rick Santorum, informal White House adviser Stephen Moore and British politician Nigel Farage pushed the “climate scientists getting rich” narrative.
Though some outlets have moved to extricate deniers from the conversation, too many television news programs continue to bring on “contrarian” experts, giving a platform to tired lies. I say “lies” because fossil fuel industry scientists debunked these theories themselves decades ago, so they are knowingly perpetuating falsehoods. In a “global warming primer” prepared in the 1990s by the Global Climate Coalition, a since-disbanded consortium of fossil fuel producers, utilities, manufacturers, and other U.S. business interests (including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), a Mobil scientist debunked all of the prevailing contrarian theories of the day on climate change. That part of the primer was left unprinted, of course, and oil companies went on to fund scientists promoting those very theories — the same ones that industry spokesmen and conservative politicians spout today.
In addition to propping up experts and leaning on media to use them as sources, oil companies have spent millions on advertising and advertorials over the years. Which seems innocuous — most companies advertise — but oil companies don’t sell a consumer product so much as a commodity. Most people aren’t loyal to a particular brand of gas; they buy whatever is most convenient or cheapest. So, when oil companies take out ads, it’s with the intention of shifting the opinions of the voting public, policymakers, and the media.
In an exhaustive survey of ExxonMobil’s advertorials from 1977 to 2014, science historian Naomi Oreskes and researcher Geoffrey Supran found that these pieces often took the form of “op-ads” that look and read a lot like op-eds but are paid for by an advertiser. Some simply presented positive stories about the company (heavily focused on their investments in algal biofuels, for example), but others argued for more relaxed policies on offshore drilling or a “common sense” approach to climate change regulation. The researchers found that “83 percent of peer-reviewed papers and 80 percent of internal documents acknowledge that climate change is real and human-caused, yet only 12% of advertorials do so, with 81 percent instead expressing doubt.”
A 1981 internal Mobil memo discovered by the Climate Investigations Center is an evaluation of the first decade of Mobil’s advertorial program, and it makes the company’s goals clear: “Not only is the company presenting its opinion to key opinion leaders, but it has been engaging in continuing debate with the New York Times itself. In fact, the paper has even changed to positions similar to Mobil’s on at least seven key energy issues.”
Granted, Mobil communications staff are giving themselves a lot of credit here, but whether they accomplished their goal is almost beside the point. This document shows the intention of these campaigns, and that’s something that should be taken seriously by any media outlet agreeing to run them, especially because many still do today. Campaigns that bring in big money at a time when the business of news is struggling are surely hard to turn down, but media outlets need to seriously consider the impact these campaigns have on their ability to inform the public, and work to mitigate that impact, above and beyond the usual “church and state” division between advertising and editorial. They could stop running these campaigns alongside climate reporting, do a better job of labeling campaigns, or refuse to run them altogether.
It’s well past time the media stopped allowing itself to be a tool in the fossil fuel industry’s information war. Oreskes likens the push for “balance” on climate change to journalists arguing over the final score of a baseball game. “If the Yankees beat the Red Sox 6-2, journalists would report that. They would not feel compelled to find someone to say actually the Red Sox won, or the score was 6-4,” she says.

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: ,

How 300 Years Of Urbanization And Farming Transformed The Planet

CityLab - David Montgomery

Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the Earth’s land. Now, it’s almost half.
Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)
Humans are transforming the Earth through our carbon emissions. Arctic sea ice is shrinking, seas are rising, and the past four years have been the hottest since record-keeping began. But long before the first cars or coal plants, we were reshaping the planet’s ecosystems through humbler but no less dramatic means: pastures and plows.
Environmental scientist Erle Ellis has studied the impact of humanity on the Earth for decades, with a recent focus on categorizing and mapping how humans use the land—not just now, but in the past. And his team’s results show some startling changes. Three centuries ago, humans were intensely using just around 5 percent of the planet, with nearly half the world’s land effectively wild. Today, more than half of Earth’s land is occupied by agriculture or human settlements.
“Climate change is only recently becoming relevant,” said Ellis, a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. “If it keeps going how it is, it will become the dominant shaper of ecology in the terrestrial realm, but right now the dominant shaper of ecology is land use.”
In contrast to the typical division of the world into ecological “biomes,” Ellis and his team at the Laboratory for Anthropogenic Landscape Ecology map what they call “anthromes,” or “anthropogenic biomes.” These show the intersection of ecology and human land use.
Using a range of sources, Ellis’s team mapped out that land use, dividing the planet into grids and categorizing each cell based on how many people lived there and how they impacted the land. The densest areas were cities and towns, followed by close-packed farming villages. Less populated areas were categorized by their dominant land use—crops, livestock pasture, or inhabited woodlands—while other areas were marked as largely uninhabited. (See image Land use, above.)
Even with only one snapshot per century, the animation makes some of the trends obvious. Large swaths of Russia and the United States become cropland over the 19th century, while livestock occupies increasing amounts of previously semi-wild land in Africa and Asia.
“Asia is pretty much the dominant transformed area, and transformed the earliest,” Ellis said. “Europe is also pretty dense ... The rest of the world has a different trajectory. Much slower, less dense.”
All of this is a mixture of estimates and approximations. One reason Ellis and his team only looked every hundred years and divided the world into cells that stretch for miles was to avoid giving a false impression of precision.
People ask Ellis, “‘What was my backyard like?’” he said. “Well, we don’t have any solid evidence … The further back in time you go, the more you have to consider [this], in a sense, educated guesswork.”
Even more recent data can have issues, based on political decisions that countries make about how to self-classify their land. Saudi Arabia, for example, reports “almost every part of their country as being rangeland” even though much of that arid land is seldom if ever grazed.

Humans shape even “seminatural” biomes
Significant portions of the world, both now and in the past, have been what Ellis’s team terms “seminatural.” These are areas—frequently forests—with low but real human habitation. This could reflect a large cell of the grid that has a farming village or two but mostly natural forests. But frequently, Ellis says, humans have taken a much bigger role in shaping seemingly natural wilderness than people think.
Take the “pristine myth”—the idea that the Americas before European colonization were dominated by pristine wilderness untouched by human hands. In fact, modern researchers believe that indigenous tribes had actively shaped their landscapes through agriculture and regular burning of American forests.
Because of this, the devastating spread of epidemics among indigenous populations after 1492 also had a huge impact on climate—and not just locally. Some scholars believe disease-ravaged peoples significantly cut back on their management of American forests, which meant far less carbon dioxide put into the atmosphere from fires and far more absorbed into newly grown forests. The combination could have played a significant role in the “Little Ice Age” that lowered global temperatures for several centuries between around 1500 and 1850 C.E.
This kind of active land management was done not just by sedentary populations, but by hunter-gatherers, too. This, Ellis says, is a shortcoming in the data.
“There’s no direct mapping of hunter-gatherers’ land use in these datasets. That’s something we’re trying to rectify now,” he said, noting that evidence suggests even non-agricultural people have major effects on the environment.
The data also shows the massive impact made by cities, the most dramatic way humans transform their environment. In 1700, a negligible portion of the Earth’s surface was covered by cities. Over the three centuries that followed, this boomed by around 40 times. Cities are still just half a percent of the planet’s land area, but they have had the most dramatic increase in impact of any of Ellis’s “anthromes.”
Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)
Densely populated farming villages—which often have similar concentrations of people per square mile as American suburbs—are also big, especially in the developing world. (Ellis’s team don’t map any urban areas in the Americas or Australia before 1900, and never apply the “villages” category to those continents, because those areas didn’t have “histories of intensive subsistence agriculture.”)
Huge portions of India and China are occupied by these kind of villages. So, too, were the hinterlands around major European cities before improvements in transportation enabled produce to be brought from farther away. Paris, for example, used to be surrounded by suburban “market gardens” which, historians André Jardin and André-Jean Tudesq note, could produce five or six harvests per year and had a “virtual monopoly of the Parisian market” for food until the second half of the 19th century.

How cities drive land-use changes
That kind of intensive agriculture to feed a demanding urban market is part of the huge impact that cities have on the use of land even well outside their boundaries. Those thousands or millions of urban dwellers aren’t producing their own food, and thus need more food produced elsewhere in order to eat.
Ellis describes two different ways that cities impact far-away anthromes through their demands for food—one of them devastating to natural ecosystems, the other surprisingly beneficial.
The first sees new land being put under the plow, as societies try to produce more food for a growing population. This is often low-productivity agriculture, reflecting the marginal quality of the farmland: If it was good for farming, it would have been farmed already. But later, as populations grow, comes an “intensification” process as technology increases the yields on low-productivity farmland.
Agricultural expansion has a massive impact on natural biomes, and has for millennia. But the second process, intensification, has the potential to restore some of the natural biomes that humans previously plowed under.
“Dense cities actually have the potential to help areas recover, because dense populations in cities often are basically pulling people out of the rural areas where they’re farming low-productivity land,” Ellis said. The increased production on good land means the marginal farmland is no longer needed.
Author Charles Mann described this process taking place in New York’s Hudson River Valley in his 2018 book, The Wizard and the Prophet. In the late 19th century, this region was dominated by “hardscrabble farms and pastures ringed by stone walls.” Now many of those “hardscrabble farms” are gone. Six counties in the lower Hudson Valley had around 350,000 people and 573,000 acres of timberland in 1875; today those same counties have more than 1 million people but three times as much forest.
“Many New England states have as many trees as they had in the days of Paul Revere,” Mann writes. “Nor was this growth restricted to North America: Europe’s forest resources increased by about 40 percent from 1970 to 2015, a time in which its population grew from 462 million to 743 million.”
But while this intensification of agriculture is allowing the return of nature in parts of developed countries, the first phase—expansion—is still playing out in the developing world. Erle’s maps show the expansion of crops and livestock into areas like Africa’s Sahel and South America’s Amazon rainforest over the past century.
“Land transformation is the big story of biosphere transformation so far,” Ellis said. “If you’re trying to understand how we produced the ecology we have now, it’s the story of land-use transformation.”
Source: ecotope.org (David H. Montgomery / CityLab)
What’s next for Earth
So what will a future mapmaker show for the world’s land use in 2100? Ellis said he expects urbanization to continue, at least doubling the share of the planet’s land devoted to urban areas over the next century.
Similarly, he expects developed countries to see an intensification of agriculture that enables marginal land to be returned to the wild—a process already under way in newly developed countries like China. Poorer countries, on the other hand, may continue to convert marginal wild land into farmland.
“It’s only poor farmers without much investment that can make that work,” Ellis said. “When you’re investing large amounts of money in farm equipment and fertilizers, you don’t invest that in marginal land.”
Much depends, however, on political, economic, and technological changes that will unfold over the next 80 years. For example, Ellis said, the United States has recently seen “a huge shift from beef to chicken” in consumer demand. “That changes the kind of land that’s in demand, from grassland to production of maize and soy.”
Among the factors that could affect the future of Earth’s land use are political decisions in Brazil, where new President Jair Bolsonaro wants to open up more of the Amazon rainforest to agriculture, and technology, where a potential breakthrough in electrical generation such as fusion power could enable transformative changes such as vertical urban farming. Conservation efforts, or lack thereof, could also impact areas of intensive agriculture in developed countries.
“The future of the biosphere… depends partly on economics, partly on politics, but also partly on vision,” Ellis said. “It depends on what people’s values are.”

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,

Treaty On HFCs Aims To Curb Global Warming From Greenhouse Gases In Air Conditioning, Refrigeration

ABC - Ben Deacon

In many parts of Australia, air conditioners have gone from being a luxury to what many consider a necessity.
It's a trend that's being echoed around the world as billions of people in hot counties lift themselves out of poverty.
But the explosion in demand for the energy-intensive appliance is alarming climate change experts, who say we're heating the world up by cooling it down.
Alice Springs recently recorded more days over 45C in a single week than in the past 76 years.
Victoria MacLean, who runs the Bureau of Meteorology's weather station in Alice Springs, said the start of 2019 was unbearable, even by local standards.
"We had 11 days in a row recently of 40-degree-plus days. We had a 45.6 day. In fact we had another one like this as well and that did break the record for the Alice Springs airport," said the meteorologist.
During the heatwave, Alice Springs had more days over 45 degrees Celsius in a single week than the town has recorded in the past 76 years.
Like most people in the desert community, Ms MacLean coped by running her air conditioner flat out.
"We closed off the downstairs side of the house and we actually stayed down there, we slept down there a few times, just to stay cool.
"We've got two dogs; we had to keep them inside because they just couldn't handle it."
But she does worry about the environmental impact of air conditioning.
"It's kind of ironic that you'd been using the air conditioning, and we've got climate change going on, so we're trying to conserve energy, but then you have to use more of it."

Air conditioners' environmental impact
Air conditioners are a double whammy in terms of climate change.
They're the most energy-hungry appliance in the average home, which in Australia is mostly powered by fossil fuels, and the refrigerants inside air conditioners are potent greenhouse gases.
IEA chief economist Laszlo Varro speaking at the GHGT-14 conference in Melbourne.
Experts say demand for air conditioning is increasing so fast internationally that it will have a real impact on the earth's climate.
Laszlo Varro, chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA), told a recent conference of greenhouse gas scientists in Melbourne that Asia was experiencing an energy transformation unlike anything in history.
"The overwhelming majority of electricity-demand growth comes 10 years after you provide electricity to the village," Mr Varro said.
"You provide electricity to the village and then the kids go to school. Then they work in a factory and they buy a refrigerator and a television.
"This is when electricity demand explodes and the most important household appliance in this respect is air conditioning."
There are 3 billion people living in regions of the world where air conditioning is needed more than 300 days a year, and as the world's climate warms, that number is getting bigger and bigger.
The IEA estimates there could be an extra 4 billion air conditioners around the world by mid-century, which alone could push up the world's temperature by more than half a degree.
"We expect up to 4,000 terawatt hours, which is 10 times the Australian electricity system, [in] additional electricity demand, [which] can potentially emerge only from air conditioning," Mr Varro said.
"And this is coming in parts of the world where today coal is the dominant source of power generation."
Mr Varro said the investment wave into new coal capacity in Asia was so robust that about one-third of coal-fired power stations around the world were less than 10 years old.
"That's not so bad for an industry that's supposed to be dying."
Global cooperation on air conditioners and climate change
On January 1, while Alice Springs endured its heat wave, an international treaty quietly came into effect to limit the impact of refrigeration and air conditioning on the world's climate.
The Kigali Amendment follows the extraordinary success of the Montreal Protocol in banning ozone-depleting chlorofluorocarbons or CFCs.
The new treaty commits signatories to phase down hydrofluorocarbons, or HFCs, the greenhouse gases found in almost all modern air conditioners.
In 2016, the former US Secretary of State John Kerry said Kigali was "likely the single most important step that we could take at this moment to limit the warming of our planet".
Patrick McInerney from the Environment Department (centre) co-chaired the negotiations for the Kigali Amendment.
Peter Brodribb, an internationally recognised expert in the environmental impacts of HFCs, said Australia played a key role in the negotiations.
"In fact the co-chair of the executive committee was an Australian, Patrick McInerney from the Department of the Environment. He was one of the main people that negotiated the agreement," he said.
The Kigali Amendment commits developed countries to reduce production and importation of HFCs by 85 per cent by 2036 and 80 to 85 per cent in developing countries by 2047.
In October 2017, Australia became the 10th of 66 countries to ratify the Kigali Amendment, and began its HFC phase-down on January 1, 2018.
The United States is still to ratify the amendment.
Kigali aims to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions by 72 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2019 and 2050: the equivalent of well over one year's total global greenhouse gas emissions.
Mr Brodribb said Kigali meant more than just the banning of a group of potent greenhouse gases.
"By transitioning to new refrigerants, what this means is that companies have to do new designs, and with new designs they create products that are much more efficient," he said.
"They consume less electricity and once again, that will contribute less to global warming."

Links
Posted by at No comments :
Labels: , ,
Subscribe to: Posts ( Atom )

Lethal Heating is a citizens' initiative