24/03/2021

(USA) Does Solving The Climate Crisis Require Antiracist Feminist Leadership?

Forbes - Kevin Kruse

Dr. Jennie Stephens

“Climate isolation” is a term coined by Jennie Stephens, Ph.D., Director of Northeastern University’s School of Public Policy & Urban Affairs, and Dean’s Professor of Sustainability Science & Policy.

Traditionally, climate change is discussed as distinct from other crises, and potential solutions are focused on technology options. But Dr. Stephens argues that this technocratic focus and its associated language has reduced public engagement.

In her new book, Diversifying Power: Why We Need Antiracist, Feminist Leadership on Climate and Energy, Dr. Stephens argues that transformation to a just, sustainable renewable-based society requires leaders who connect social justice to climate and energy.

Recently, I was able to ask Dr. Stephens about her new book.

Kevin Kruse: In your book, you make the case that we need more diverse leadership to effectively act on climate and energy.  Why does diversity matter on this topic?  

Jennie Stephens, Ph.D.: Diversity matters in climate and energy policy because for too long, concerns of vulnerable communities have been minimized and dismissed while white-male-dominated-fossil-fuel interests have profited from exploiting marginalized people. Without diverse leadership, the United States has invested in concentrating wealth and power by supporting the “polluter elite” rather than investing in the basic needs of people and communities.

Research shows us that when women, people of color, and indigenous folks show up in leadership spaces where they have been historically excluded, they bring with them different lived experiences and different perceptions of risk that lead to more socially just outcomes. Research also shows that more diverse teams, more diverse organizations, and more diverse sectors are more innovative.

For the transformative changes that are needed to effectively respond to the climate crisis and equitable transition to a renewable-based future, diverse leadership is essential.

Kruse: What does antiracist and feminist leadership look like for climate and energy?

Dr. Stephens: Antiracist, feminist leadership involves constantly acknowledging and resisting the problematic power dynamics associated with conventional patriarchal systems, practices and policies that privilege men and whiteness. Antiracist, feminist leadership focuses on collaborative and inclusive approaches to distributing wealth and power and prioritizing investments in communities, workers’ rights, and public health. 

Anyone – including people of any racial or gender identity, any sexual orientation and any cultural and religious backgrounds - can practice antiracist, feminist leadership. Climate and energy leaders who embrace antiracist and feminist principles are actively resisting the concentration of wealth and power and fossil fuel interests that have been strategically working for decades to prevent a transition to a renewable-based society.

Antiracist, feminist leadership involves connecting climate and energy investments to jobs and economic justice, health and food, housing justice, transit equity and education.

Kruse: How have your own professional experiences informed your views on this issue?

Dr. Stephens: I have been working on climate and energy issues for the past 25 years. My professional experiences as a woman in a male-dominated technical field have taught me that the inadequacy of our efforts to respond to the climate crisis—our inability to end fossil fuel reliance and transition to a renewable-based society—is not due to a lack of technological innovation or scientific expertise.

Rather, our ineffectiveness results from a lack of investment and attention to social innovation and social justice. A narrow technical focus on climate and energy, a male-dominated dangerous belief that technology will somehow save us, has resulted in so many missed opportunities to invest in people and communities. Instead, I believe we need an inclusive approach to climate and energy policy with antiracist, feminist leadership that prioritizes the needs of all people.

We need diverse leadership to advocate for social innovations that center climate action and the renewable energy transformation on social justice, racial justice and economic justice.

Kruse: Some people anchor their hopes for a climate change solution to technological fixes. You don’t believe such “climate isolationism” is the answer, preferring instead energy democracy. How do these two differ?

Dr. Stephens: All too often the climate crisis is framed as an isolated scientific problem that requires a technological fix. With this framing, social justice, social change, and institutional innovation are usually ignored – and then the challenge seems distant to most people.

I coined the term “climate isolationism” to characterize this common but unproductive framing of climate change as a narrow, isolated, discrete, scientific problem in need of technological solutions. 

Energy democracy is an alternative way to frame our response to the climate crisis as an opportunity for investing in communities and redistributing power literally and figuratively. The social changes resulting from investments in a new distributed renewable economy have huge potential to be politically and economically transformative.

Investing in a future powered by renewables including wind (both onshore and offshore), solar power (utility-scale and household scale and community solar), as well as geothermal and maybe micro-hydro, wave and tidal – allows more people, communities, and organizations to benefit and be involved – and could bring widespread benefits by allowing for local and community-owned energy.  

Kruse: Do you believe the Biden/Harris Administration will have an antiracist, feminist leadership approach to climate and energy issues?

Dr. Stephens: I am optimistic about the Biden/Harris Administration’s commitment to a “whole-of-government” approach to transformative change on climate and energy. The appointment of Gina McCarthy, a feminist leader who has been advocating for decades to link climate and energy policy with investments in public health, as the first White House National Climate Advisor, demonstrates an innovative approach that centers on social justice. 

I am also inspired by the appointment of other antiracist, feminist leaders like my friend and colleague, Shalanda Baker, who is now serving in the newly created position of Deputy Director for Energy Justice within the Department of Energy where she is designing and implementing policies and practices that ensure that at least 40% of all climate and energy investments benefit frontline and marginalized communities.  

At the same time, I am a bit concerned about some senior members of the Biden/Harris administration who are supporting public investment in dangerous technological approaches to climate including solar geoengineering research. 

Advancing the idea of injecting aerosols into the atmosphere to reduce global warming by blocking incoming solar radiation further concentrates wealth and power exacerbating existing injustices and creating additional risks in climate governance.

Kruse: Why did you title chapter one of your book “Growing the Squad”?

Dr. Stephens: I am so inspired by the four junior Congresswomen known as The Squad who demonstrate hope through a new kind of leadership. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, and Rashida Talib of Michigan have transformed the national discourse on climate and energy since coming on the national stage just two and a half years ago.

By explicitly linking the climate crisis with economic justice and jobs, health and wellbeing, the criminal justice system, and the need for public investments in housing, these four leaders demonstrate the power of centering social justice and linking our responses to the interconnected crises that we face.

By centering climate action on the need for public investments in people and communities, the Squad has demonstrated how to build multiracial and multigenerational coalitions in climate and energy policy. 

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(AU) ‘One-In-100 Year’ Rain Could Become Norm, Say Climate Watchers

NEWS.com.au - Benedict Brook

The extreme rain is being called a once in a century event, but there are warnings similar deluges could happen far more often due to climate change.

Several areas of NSW are suffering under intense rains and flooding in what has been dubbed as a one-in-one-hundred-year event.

The extreme weather walloping NSW has been described as a “one-in-100 year” event.

In some areas, a metre of rain has fallen while the Bureau of Meteorology has flood alerts in place for every river in the state from the Queensland border to Victoria.

But we might need to get used to there being far less than a century gap between the next deluge, climate watchers have said.

Short, sharp episodes of extreme rain amid drought and rising temperatures could be the new weather normal for Australia.

“It’s very conceivable that we could get average rainfall decreasing, but extreme rainfall events where it just dumps in a single day,” Dr Ailie Gallant from the Monash University Climate Change Communication Research Hub told news.com.au.

On Sunday, NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian spelled out the seriousness of the current rain event that has seen mid north coast towns flood as well as several Sydney suburbs.

“One in 50 year floods (are being seen) in the Sydney metropolitan area, one in 100 year floods in the mid-north coast,” Ms Berejiklian said.

“So this is a very serious storm and flood event, and there will be a big clean-up operation on the other side.”

A cow seeks high dry ground in the Gold Coast after it was swamped by flood water from torrential rain fell which on the city overnight. NCA NewsWire/Scott Powick
The BOM describes a one-in-100 year weather event as one in which there is statistically only a 1 per cent chance of it be equalled or exceeded in the year after it occurs.

But that doesn’t meant it won’t happen for another century – it could happen again the very next week. After a decade, for instance, there is a 10 per chance that the same extreme weather could rear its head again.

NSW has seen several major floods over the last few decades. A major Sydney flood in 1986 killed six people. Northern NSW experienced major floods in 2013 and 2012.

Fresh rain is marching across NSW and the east coast. Picture: Sky News Weather

But Dr Gallant cautioned about assuming all these events, extreme as they all were, were the same.

“Every weather event is unique in its spatial signature in how much rain falls,” she said.

For instance, the current weather is remarkable for its vast geographic spread across the east coast.

“But there is some evidence that particularly in northern Australia extreme rain events are increasing,” she added.

Yet, it’s often assumed that climate change means drier conditions. That was true, said Dr Gallant, but extreme rainfall can also be a by-product of a warming planet.

“A warmer atmosphere can hold more water vapour and scientists calculate that this can increase moisture in the atmosphere by approximately 7 per cent per degree of global warming.”

Unfortunately, it doesn’t mean more rain neatly spread out through the year gently watering crops.

Instead, it can mean less moisture concentrated in intense and damaging one or two day downpours that wash the crops away.

“The evidence is for really extreme events, with several days of heavy rainfall which cause floods,” she said.

Aerial images over Sancrox near Port Macquarie areas as NSW flood waters rise. Picture: Luke Bullus

A study led by Dr Nicholas Herold from the NSW Department of Planning, Industry and Environment on future climate projections over south eastern Australia found that extreme rainfall events for Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane – that now occur roughly once every 20 years – are expected to occur every 10 years or so, or double the frequency, in the second half of this century.

The emphasis is on one or two day rain events. The long running prolonged extreme weather outbreaks – like we’re having now – may not be as common. We may get the same one-in-50 or 100-year rainfall, but over a shorter period.

Dr Gallant said climate models were pointing to overall less rainfall in Australia.

Those drier conditions would be concentrated in southern Australia with heavy rainfall events focused in the northern half of the country, where tropical moisture is more prevalent.

The current rain in NSW was a combination of factors, Dr Gallant said. The La Nina climate driver had led to wetter conditions anyway, and then two weather systems had combined to pour rain onto the east coast.

However, it might not be 100 or even 50 years until we see a similar damaging burst of intense weather in the future, she said.

“We should expect increases in extreme rainfall events – we can say that with high confidence. But by how and where those events are, the jury is still out on that.”

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(AU) Is NSW Flooding A Year After Bushfires Yet More Evidence Of Climate Change?

The Guardian -

Experts say it’s unusual to see so many places with such high rainfall across such a wide area. But identifying the cause is complicated
The return of another extreme weather crisis so soon has some asking if this is another display of force from the long arm of the climate crisis. Photograph: Jason O’Brien/EPA
Life-threatening floods have washed away homes and businesses with a deluge of rain inundating hundreds of kilometres of the New South Wales coast.

Falling on already soaked soils, the rains sparked dozens of flood warnings, with residents in parts of Sydney’s north and west also fearing for their homes and their lives.

The floods come a little over a year after the same areas were ablaze from unprecedented bushfires fueled by global heating that burned entire towns and killed billions of animals.

The return of another extreme weather crisis so soon has some asking if this is another display of force from the long arm of the climate crisis. The answer is a complex and nuanced one.

How wet has it been?

The extreme rainfall came after three weather systems combined, the Bureau of Meteorology has said.



NSW floods bring new misery to community devastated by black summer bushfires. Read more
A tropical low over the Kimberley coast in Western Australia drove moisture across the continent, hitting a coastal trough off the east coast. Further east in the Tasman sea, an area of stationary high pressure was holding the rain event in place.

Senior climatologist at the bureau Dr Blair Trewin is still crunching the rainfall numbers from recent days, but he says two things stand out.

While it is not unusual to have places with very high daily rainfall totals, it is unusual to see so many places with such extreme totals across such a wide area.

“Really the only area that’s missed out is the south coast so far,” he said, adding even that area is predicted to get good rainfall by the middle of the week.

He said the daily rainfall totals seen in some areas of the mid-north coast were not, on their own, unusual.

The highest reading of 406mm in one day fell near Kendall, south of Port Macquarie, on 20 March. But Trewin said in five of the last 12 years, a location in that area had recorded similar totals.

The focus, he said, was on analysing four-day totals, which would give a clearer picture of the sustained nature of the deluge.

The highest so far was at Comboyne, west of Port Macquarie, that saw 843mm in the four days up to 9am on Monday morning.

Kate Fotheringham and Wayne Bell on their wedding day on Gloucester Road Wingham. Photograph: Amanda Hibbard

Trewin said he was seeing numerous sites with four-day drenchings above 600mm.

The reason the rains of recent days were causing flooding, he said, was it was falling on areas that have just had a wetter-than-average summer.

The bureau was still analysing the data, but Trewin said there were other unusual factors to the event.

While a La Niña weather pattern is generally associated with wetter-than-average conditions, he said usually this had more impact in inland areas of NSW, not all the way along the coastline.

So what about climate change?

Whenever Australia experiences extreme weather events, the inevitable question arises: was this caused by climate change?

Some climate scientists will argue all weather events are influenced by human activity because we’ve rapidly changed the composition of the atmosphere.



Australia's summer the wettest in four years amid cooling La Niña. Read more
Burning fossil fuels and deforestation has increased the amount of climate-warming CO2 in the atmosphere by about 50% since the start of the industrial revolution.

And while the rainfall totals experienced over recent days are not yet confirmed as record-breaking, this does not mean that climate heating has had no effect at all.

Professor Steve Sherwood, of the Climate Change Research Centre at the University of New South Wales, says that basic physics shows a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture – about 7% for each degree of warming.

“So we know that something like 5-10% of the rain we are getting now [in the current downpours] is from global warming and the rest would have happened anyway.

“It’s not a game changer, but it is making things worse and that gets worse still as emissions keep going up.”

How much extra rain could climate warming deliver?

As some climate scientists have said in relation to previous extreme events, a question that gets us closer to understanding what’s going on is how might climate heating have made an event worse than it would otherwise have been?

Australia’s latest State of the Climate report, released in 2020, says there has already been an increase in the intensity of heavy rainfall events in Australia. More warming will make things worse in the future, the report says.

One study Sherwood helped to carry out has suggested that 2C of warming in Australia could add between 11% and 30% more rain to the heaviest daily downpours.

‘Horrific’: swarms of spiders flee into homes – and up legs – to escape NSW floods. Read more
Australia has already warmed by about 1.4C.

Climate scientists carry out formal studies and have them peer-reviewed before they’re willing to say how climate heating has affected individual events.

But these “attribution studies” are especially challenging when it comes to rainfall because of all the different factors that can influence the systems that deliver rain.

One study on the 2010/11 floods in the north-east of Australia found the extra heat in the oceans had likely increased the amount of rain that fell. A study of extreme rainfall in the south-east of the country the following year failed to detect any human influence.

Extracting the fingerprint of human influence amid all that noise is a major challenge, says Dr Michael Grose, a climate projections scientist at CSIRO.

13 year old Ella Saul has braved the floodwaters on horse back to help save her family’s cows. 85 of Gavin Saul’s cattle were swept away in Kempsey, NSW. Photograph: Gavin Saul

He says in simple terms, the oceans and the atmosphere are already warmer and so there’s more moisture available to fall as rain.

He said climate change could also be affecting the frequency of the weather systems that tend to deliver downpours, but this was “trickier to get at”.

He said: “The effect of climate change on the dynamics of the kind of weather patterns bringing the current flooding rains, including the high in the Tasman Sea and troughs creating ‘atmospheric rivers’, is a subject of ongoing research. It may be that this influence offsets or enhances the first effect.”

What about that one-in-100-years flood?

The NSW premier, Gladys Berejiklian, has said the mid-north coast is facing a “one-in-100-year event”.

Describing extreme flood events in this way – as the probability of an event happening in a given timeframe – is common but potentially misleading, argues Thomas Mortlock, a senior risk scientist at Risk Frontiers – a risk management and catastrophe modelling consultancy.

“We really need to get away from that terminology,” he said.

“People think that if it’s a one-in-100 year flood, that the chances of them experiencing that in their lifetime is practically zero. And it’s not.”

He said it is entirely possible to get three or four “one-in-100-year floods” coming along in close proximity.

Often, he said, these statements were based on incomplete data and were calculated presuming that other factors – such as flood mitigation or the climate – were stationary, which they are not.

“We need instead to talk about the probability of an event happening each year, or say, within the life of a mortgage,” he said.

In an unpublished briefing prepared by Risk Frontiers before the current floods, Mortlock writes: “To generalise, if you’ve experienced a large natural hazard event yesterday, it doesn’t necessarily lessen the chance of you experiencing the same or higher magnitude event tomorrow.

“You’re not safe for another 100 years if you’ve just been flooded by the 100-year event today.”

Andrew Gissing, a general manager at Risk Frontiers and an emergency management expert with the Bushfire and Natural Hazards CRC, said it had been long known that Sydney’s Hawkesbury and Nepean rivers often flooded (the New South Wales governor general Lachlan Macquarie wrote to settlers in 1817 warning them of the flood risk in that area.)

“Floods in Australia are more damaging than bushfires and they kill more people in the historical record. They are often an under-appreciated hazard,” Gissing said.

Climate heating was adding urgency to the need to improve flood mitigation, he said, and the current floods should add focus to actions like building flood levees, raising houses, voluntary acquisition of homes in at-risk regions or raising dams and weirs.

“The more we can invest in flood mitigation, the better,” he said.

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23/03/2021

(AU) Former Emergency Chiefs: Climate Change Pushing Flood Events To Unprecedented Extremes

Emergency Leaders for Climate Action

Former emergency chiefs have warned that climate change is worsening extreme rainfall and flood events such as the current situation in NSW and QLD, putting immense pressure on emergency response services and communities. 


“In my 40-year career I have never seen rainfall and flooding as widespread as the events occurring across much of NSW and QLD,” said Jim Smith, former acting Commissioner, NSW State Emergency Services and Emergency Leaders for Climate Action (ELCA) member.

“Climate change is increasing the intensity and severity of extreme rainfall and flood events, and we are seeing the devastating consequences of this on people’s safety, homes, and livelihoods.

“It has long been the norm for states to help each other by sending personnel and resources across borders during emergencies, but the simultaneous extreme flooding in NSW and QLD shows how climate change threatens this practice.

“Many flood-affected communities also suffered during the climate change-fuelled Black Summer bushfires. People who are waiting to get back into their homes now have their makeshift housing damaged by flood waters.”

Major General (Retd) Peter Dunn, former Commissioner, ACT Emergency Services Authority, added: “The Royal Commission into National Natural Disaster Arrangements outlined 80 recommendations to improve Australia’s disaster response and preparedness, but the Federal Government has shown resistance at fully accepting and implementing all 80 of the recommendations.

“Australians are on the frontline of back-to-back extreme weather events fuelled by climate change, and cannot afford the growing costs of inaction.

“It’s time for the Federal Government to stop ignoring the evidence about the threat climate change poses to Australia. We need urgent action on getting to net zero emissions well before 2040, and ensuring that communities and emergency services are adequately resourced to cope with the worsening climate threat.”

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Climate Fight 'Is Undermined By Social Media's Toxic Reports'

The Guardian - 

Scientists warn that Nobel summit and long-term decisions to save the planet are at risk from targeted attacks online

Silver-back gorillas in DR Congo’s Virunga National Park. Wild animals now make up just 4% of Earth’s mammal population. Photograph: imageBROKER/Alamy

Fake news on social media about climate change and biodiversity loss is having a worrying impact in the battle to halt the growing environmental threats to the planet, a group of scientists and analysts have warned.

In a report published by the Royal Swedish Academy of Science, they say measures needed to create a healthier, more resilient planet – by reducing fossil fuel emissions, overfishing and other threats – will be hard to enforce if they continue to suffer targeted attacks in social media.

The international cooperation that is needed to halt global heating and species loss could otherwise be jeopardised, they say.

“Social media reports have created a toxic environment where it’s now very difficult to distinguish facts from fiction,” said one author, Owen Gaffney, of the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

“One of the biggest challenges now facing humanity is our inability to tell fact from fiction. This is undermining democracies, which in turn is limiting our ability to make long-term decisions needed to save the planet.”

This view was supported by the report’s lead author, Professor Carl Folke, director of Sweden’s Beijer Institute of Ecological Economics.

“Improvements are occurring – we are getting a lot of promises from big nations about tackling environmental threats – but the media still causes polarisation of views and that is not helpful. We need to tackle that.”

The group’s report is published on Monday as a background paper to the first Nobel Prize Summit, which will be held next month, on the subject “Our Planet, Our Future”.

Originally scheduled to take place in Washington last year, the meeting was postponed because of Covid-19. This time it will be held – from 26 to 28 April – as a virtual event.

Smoke rises from an illegally lit fire near a rainforest reserve, in Sinop, Brazil. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

Those taking part will include Nobel laureates such as Al Gore, the gene-editing pioneer Jennifer Doudna, and immunologist Peter Doherty, as well as Anthony Fauci, the chief medical adviser to US president Joe Biden, and the Dalai Lama.

“The aim is to highlight ways to reduce climate change, biodiversity loss and inequalities and suggest how new technologies such as AI and synthetic biology could help save the planet,” added Gaffney, who is also one of the summit’s organisers.

However, the report makes it clear that this task is a daunting one. As it points out, humanity’s dominion over nature has now reached startling levels.

Three hundred years ago, there were 1 billion people on our planet. By the end of this century that figure will approach 10 billion or possibly surpass it.

As a result of these dramatic increases, the totality of human beings alive today, plus the livestock that provides us with food, represent 96% of the sum weight of all mammals on Earth. The residual 4% is made of the planet’s remaining wild animals.

Today, there is no place on our world that is untouched by homo sapiens, state the report’s authors.

Three-quarters of all Earth’s ice-free land has now been directly altered by humans.

Every eight days, we build the equivalent of a city the size of New York.

We simplify landscapes to ensure they provide maximum economic benefits and in the process erode the biosphere’s resilience.

One result is the emergence of new pathogens such as Covid-19.

The relatively cool years that make up the Holocene epoch, which began 11,700 years ago, have now been replaced by the Anthropocene, an epoch in which humanity is the main driver of ecological events.

We are destroying rainforests that absorb carbon dioxide and are driving countless species – from insects to gorillas and chimpanzees, our closest evolutionary cousins – towards extinction.

At the same time, global heating – caused by our continued burning of fossil fuels – is triggering unprecedented heatwaves, droughts, storms, floods and wildfires.

“Climate change impacts are now hitting people harder and sooner than was envisaged only a decade ago,” states the report, Our Future in the Anthropocene Biosphere.

Given the vast scale of the problem, the report concludes that “modest adjustments” to our current industrial and agricultural practices are now going to be insufficient.

“Transformative changes are now necessary,” it concludes.

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(AU) Resistance Is Futile: Why Technology Is Key To Australia’s Green Energy Future

Sydney Morning Herald - Alan Finkel
Alan Finkel was Australia’s chief scientist between 2016 and 2020, and is currently special adviser to the Australian government on low-emissions technologies. This is an edited extract of his Quarterly Essay, Getting to Zero: Australia’s Energy Transition, published on Monday.
Like others, I dream that my great-grandchildren, whom I might never meet, will grow up living on a planet just as magnificent as it was when I was young.

Fulfilment of this dream will require that we preserve our planet’s unique beauty in the face of global warming, armed with ambition and realism. We do not have time for fatalism or despair.

Field of dreams ... Australia needs to seize the global energy transformation. 
Achieving net-zero emissions will be difficult, but is not impossible. We cannot simply shut down the use of fossil fuels overnight, because our civilisation needs energy. Instead, we must harness science and technology to develop alternatives that make fossil fuels obsolete.

We must replace our 19th-century energy sources with 21st-century alternatives: low-emissions technologies that will undo the problems wrought by the high-emissions incumbents. Technology to solve technology’s problems. This will take an adaptive, technology-based plan to maintain our quality of living and reap the benefits of the transition.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality,” said the American futurist Buckminster Fuller. “To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

The plan will involve a massive global commitment to solar, wind and hydro (and in some countries, nuclear) electricity, to transmission lines and storage, distributed generation and variable loads.

We will need to change the way we farm food and process it, our vehicles and transport systems, our building designs and heating and cooling systems, our industrial processes. And we will need effective, affordable geosequestration and biosequestration to deal with the hard-to-abate emissions that will remain with us despite all these efforts.

'Prosperity and low emissions': Former chief scientist backs climate policy
A meeting of the minds is required, so that we can use tools that are good, but not perfect, to accelerate the transformation. For most of us, the motivation for a switch to clean energy is to mitigate climate change. 

That is reason enough. But shifting to a net-zero-emissions economy has other advantages. It will rid us of our dependence on a finite resource – fossil fuels – and it will ensure better air quality, cheaper energy, and participation in a global economic transformation.

Thus, even those who are not convinced about the threat posed by climate change should be enthusiastic about the transformations that are under way and contemplated, because they will ultimately contribute to prosperity, new exports and a healthier environment.

We are in the early stages of an energy revolution. The industrial revolution began with the use of coal to create steam for industry and for locomotion. Note, though, that coal did not replace the use of wood, dried manure and other biomass for heating. Instead, it massively expanded energy use.

Along came oil. It eventually displaced the use of coal for locomotion in trains and ships, but not for steam and electricity production. Along came natural gas. It eventually displaced the use of town gas made from coal, and much of the use of oil for heating, but not for transport and electricity production.

Since the start of the industrial age, these three fossil fuels – coal, oil and natural gas – have added to our total fuel use rather than replacing the old. This additive adoption of new fuels has resulted in greenhouse gas emissions increasing year after year.

What is the role of gas in a green economy?
The latest energy revolution, already under way, is different. Electricity from predominantly renewable energy will eventually completely replace all three fossil fuels as energy sources.

Oil and natural gas will likely remain as chemical feedstocks in some manufacturing, but their use as a fuel will fade into obsolescence.

The burning questions are: How long will that take? Can we accelerate the process? Can we do so while reaping economic benefits and creating new jobs to replace the old?

My Quarterly Essay Getting to Zero traces a pathway to a clean-energy future for Australia, a crucially important task that I began to dabble in before my five-year term as Australia’s chief scientist began, and which turned out to be a major component of my work in that role, way beyond anything I imagined when I started.

Chevron's Gorgon LNG project off Western Australia.
In the essay, I tackle some of the controversial and difficult questions, such as the role of natural gas in the coming decades, and share some confounding personal moments from Australia’s recent climate debate.

But my overarching thesis is that just as 19th-century technology has brought us to an urgent moment in the history of our planet, 21st-century technology will light the way forward.

How do we change the practices of our civilisation? We make a plan. The plan must recognise the realities – of scale, difficulty and uncertainty. The plan must be ambitious but not naive, must start by acknowledging how difficult decarbonisation will be, and must keep costs for the con­sumer as low as possible and ensure service remains reliable.

At length in the essay, I discuss what I call “The Electric Planet” and the solutions to the different sectors in turn but in a few sentences it goes like this.

Step 1: Replace all the existing electricity generation with zero-emissions electricity.
Step 2: Generate lots more zero-emissions electricity, so that we can use it for stationary energy and transport.
Step 3: Generate lots more electricity, so that we can use it to make hydrogen for those instances where electrons are not ideal and a high-density molecular fuel is needed, or to replace natural gas and coal in some cases as a chemical feedstock for industry.
Step 4: For Australia, generate many times more electricity, to produce hydrogen for export.
Step 5: Produce lots more electricity, to produce goods that embody large amounts of energy, such as zero-emissions steel and zero-emissions aluminium.

All these steps can happen in parallel.


Although they are simple structures, there are surprises hiding inside wind turbines.

How is Australia travelling with the switch to electric cars?
Change is in the air. The global momentum and enthusiasm for solar and wind as our future primary energy sources, supported by big batteries, hydrogen, other storage technologies, distributed energy generation, managed loads and digital technologies, across all sectors of our economy, including transport and industry, is growing every day.

I sense we will live through a technological revolution this decade as exciting as the conquest of space in the 1960s.

If Australia handles the challenge well, we can build an economy that takes advantage of the transition. If we cling to the past, we will miss opportunities that the rest of the world will seize.

The last thing we want is to be cave dwellers, watching the future march back and forth outside the cave opening.

The scale of the job is vast and it will take decades. But we must be part of the revolution rather than left behind.

As the Borg said in Star Trek: The Next Generation: “Resistance is futile.”

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22/03/2021

(AU) Australia's Lesser-Known Ecosystems Are Heading For Collapse. Here's What We Stand To Lose

ABC Science - Nick Kilvert

Australia's arid zones are harsh, but home to some of our most iconic species. ABC: Caddie Brain
A damning report has found several Australian ecosystems are so degraded, they are heading toward collapse if we do not intervene.

Of the 20 systems studied by a group of scientists, 19 showed evidence of collapse in some areas and required "urgent action" to prevent them from undergoing total collapse.

Ecosystem collapse is what happens when a system is so fundamentally altered that it completely reorders, often resulting in a less diverse group of plants and animals and interactions between them than before.

Among those identified in the report in Global Change Biology were some very well-known ecosystems — the Great Barrier Reef, the Murray-Darling Basin, Ningaloo Reef and Far North Queensland's tropical rainforests.

But then there were the less well-known habitats like the Georgina gidgee woodlands, the western central arid zones, and the Gulf of Carpentaria mangrove forests.

So, what are some of these less-well known and arguably less glamorous Australian ecosystems at risk, and why should their decline concern us all?

Gulf of Carpentaria mangrove forests
Mangroves in the Gulf of Carpentaria are vital for prawn and fish stocks. Getty Images: Elizabeth Barnes

In February 1861, doomed explorers Robert Burke and William Wills spotted the waters of the Gulf of Carpentaria.

But despite travelling more than 3,000 kilometres from Melbourne, they never made it to the coastline, thwarted just 10 kilometres from their destination by impenetrable mangrove swamps.

One hundred and sixty years later, the decline of those mangrove swamps has scientists worried.

Today, just to the north of the explorers' turnaround point, is Karumba, the site of an 80-square-kilometre mangrove dieback that surprised and baffled scientists in 2015.

Rising sea levels due to climate change are increasingly known to kill mangroves.

But the researchers were shocked when they discovered the reason why the mangroves died, said Norman Duke, a mangrove ecologist at James Cook University and one of the report's 38 authors.

It wasn't the first time a severe dieback had occurred in the Gulf — it had also happened in 1982, but had gone unnoticed.
"That's important, because 1982 and 2015 were the two most severe El Nino events on record," Dr Duke said.
"Those events, to the surprise of everyone including me, caused a drop in sea level."

El Nino events cause a breakdown in trade winds. Combined with changes in regional climatic conditions, that causes sea levels in the western Pacific, including around Australia, to drop, while they rise in the eastern Pacific.

"In the Gulf of Carpentaria and other places across northern Australia, the [sea level] drop was half a metre in 2015. That half a metre prevailed for five to six months," Dr Duke said.

"So that means that the mangroves in [the Gulf] where it doesn't rain very much didn't get water and died of thirst."

The mangrove dieback was cause by a drop in the sea level during an intense El Nino. Supplied: James Cook University
While they might have been a curse to 19th century explorers, we now know that mangroves are incredibly important.

In the Gulf of Carpentaria, they provide structure to the coastline and are the habitat for juvenile prawns that stock part of Australia's largest prawn-producing region, the northern prawn fishery.

They're also the breeding and nursery grounds for numerous fish species, including barramundi and mangrove jack, as well as mud crabs.

And they sequester what is known as blue carbon. Unlike terrestrial plants that only store carbon until they decompose or are burnt, mangrove leaves and branches are buried in sediment that locks away their carbon stores, potentially for aeons.

While the big dieback of 2015 was caused by a drop in sea levels, the longer term threat is rising sea levels, according to Dr Duke.

But because mangroves are fairly fast growing, in the Gulf they're showing signs of adapting to the trend of sea-level rise, he said.

"They're doing what they're supposed to do, which is growing or walking up the profile [while] the ones at the sea edge are dying and being washed away," he said.
"If it happens holus-bolus as it has with this massive dieback, the whole shoreline gets this widespread erosion."
Climate change models predict El Nino events to intensify, Dr Duke said.

But beyond efforts to combat climate change, the best thing we can do is provide the space for mangrove systems to retreat.

In the Gulf, where the coastline is sparsely populated, that includes managing feral pests that destroy the new growth, Dr Duke said.

"The best way we can help is to contain the pigs and the fires and threats to mangrove retreat."

The Georgina gidgee woodlands
The surrounding yellow grassland has been burnt out, with the unburnt gidgee providing refuge for fleeing wildlife. Supplied: Google Earth
From the air, they look like the skin of a reptile or the bark of a tree. From ground level, they're endless rows of sand dunes, the gullies in between covered in low-growing, scrubby trees.

The Georgina gidgee woodlands are scattered across a vast, almost circular expanse of the south-eastern Northern Territory, into western Queensland and northern South Australia.

The Georgina gidgee woodlands have a widespread distribution in the centre of Australia. Supplied: Glenda Wardle
Defined by the dominance of the gidgee tree — Acacia georginae — at a glance the woodlands appear arid and as good as lifeless.

But dig a little deeper and they're not only diverse, but play an extremely important role in the central Australian ecosystem, according to ecology and evolution expert Glenda Wardle from the University of Sydney, who also contributed to the report.

"There are 81 bird species that use these woodlands. Some use it for nesting and others use it to travel through the landscape," Professor Wardle said.

"And there are a range of mammals and reptiles as well."

Gidgee trees tend to grow where water pools after rare rain events. Supplied: Mark Lithgow 
The gidgee is a slow-growing, extremely hard-timbered tree that tends to dominate in the depressions between hills where water pools after rare rain events.

Partly because the timber is so hard, it doesn't usually burn during the region's periodic grass fires, Professor Wardle said.

Instead, when fires sweep the area, the gidgee provides shelter for animals like red kangaroos, small marsupials, native rodents and bats.

"What makes them special is that they're refuges post fire and post drought," she said.

"Fires over time are recurring [about] every 26 years. During those fires, the areas of the Georgina gidgee woodlands don't burn so easily and they act as refuges for species — this is where fauna is retreating to."

But the woodlands are under threat from climate change, pests and overgrazing.

Pests including camels are doing a lot of harm to the Georgina gidgee woodlands. Supplied: Glenda Wardle

Climate change forecasts predict fires to burn hotter due to longer, more intense dry periods and severe fire conditions, and this is exacerbated by the invasive buffel grass.

Buffel grass is favoured by graziers, but creates a higher fuel load beneath the gidgee that can result in hotter burns.

The fear is that the gidgee itself will burn, leaving wildlife with nowhere to go, according to Professor Wardle.

"[We need] to be making action on climate mitigation in Australia … without that, everything else will just be fiddling at the edges," she said.

But alongside climate mitigation, she said efforts to preserve the Georgina gidgee woodlands need to focus on getting camel numbers down and managing stock in sensitive areas.

"Underneath the gidgee itself, cows remove all vegetation, all habitat, and all other species, so the adult trees can't [reproduce]," Professor Wardle said.

"The other thing is camels — camels browse on these trees."

Without intervention, researchers like Professor Wardle predict that the system will "cascade into desertification".

Western central arid zones
The western central arid zones encompass a vast and environmentally diverse area. Getty Images: Ted Mead
The western central arid zones cover more than 40 per cent of Australia, stretching from the central Western Australian coastline, across to western Queensland and New South Wales, down to the Great Australian Bight and up into the central Northern Territory.

The vast area is characterised by low and episodic rainfall, flat terrain and vegetation spanning low, open woodlands and shrublands, to grasslands, rangelands and desert dunes.

Perhaps because of its seemingly endless plains, the rare changes in elevation in the arid zone — Uluru, Munga-Thirri-Simpson Desert, Tjoritja-West Macdonnell Ranges, and Kati Thanda-Lake Eyre — are some of our most revered landmarks.

The western central arid zones are home to some of our most iconic species, including bilbies. Supplied: Brad Leue, Australian Wildlife Conservancy

Despite the harsh environment, the western central arid zones are home to some of our most iconic species — bilbies, thorny devils, inland taipans and dunnarts to name a few.

But again, researchers have warned that the bioregion is facing collapse and climate change is the greatest existential threat, according to Suzanne Prober, a senior research scientist with the CSIRO and report co-author.
"What is extraordinary is when you go out and you see the mulga dying. Mulga is one of the toughest trees in Australia, it just keeps on keeping on," Dr Prober said.
"It's not dying due to fire, it's just the leaves are dead. I've been getting other reports from all over the place. There are patches of mulga dying in the Gibson Desert and that's way out of the range of livestock grazing."

Buffel grass changes the fire regime and is wiping out mulga trees, researchers say. Supplied: Suzanne Prober
Like the Georgina gidgee woodlands, a combination of climate change, buffel grass and other invasive pests is also changing the fire regime.

"The Great Victoria Desert supports these marble gums all over the desert, but there are just huge landscapes where the fires are killing the trees," Dr Prober said.

But it's not too late to make changes that can help turn things around, according to wildlife ecology expert and report co-author Euan Ritchie from Deakin University.

"We're trying to highlight that yes, things are grim, but it isn't too late. Yes, we can act," Professor Ritchie said.

A "major biological control program" to stop the spread of buffel grass, protection of freshwater refuges from weeds and livestock, cool-burning fire management, and the control of pests like feral cats and camels can all ease the pressure these systems are facing.

According to researchers like Professor Wardle, if we don't intervene to help these systems recover, we'll find out they're not just iconic, but they're quite literally holding the country together.

"If the degradation [we reported] goes to the worst extent, the 2009 dust storm that swept across Australia is the starting point," she said.

"That's when we'll remember we live in a red country."

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