Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Australia. Show all posts
Friday, June 06, 2008
Climate change will probably beat us: Garnaut
June 5, AAP
Economist Ross Garnaut thinks humanity will probably lose the fight against climate change.
The architect of Australia's response to climate change says the issue is "too hard" and there is "just a chance" the world will face up to the problem before it's too late.
Professor Garnaut issued the chilling prognosis in a speech in Canberra tonight.
"There is a chance - just a chance - that Australia and the world will manage to develop a position that strikes a good balance between the costs of dangerous climate change and the costs of mitigation," his prepared speech said.
"The consequences of the choice are large enough for it to be worth a large effort to take that chance, in the short period that remains before our options diminish fatefully."
Prof Garnaut was pessimistic about Australia's ability to tackle climate change.
"An observation of daily debate and media discussion in Australia could lead one to the view that this issue is too hard for rational policy-making in Australia," he said.
"The issues are too complex, the vested interests surrounding it too numerous and intense, the relevant timeframes too long. Climate change policy remains a diabolical problem."
And Prof Garnaut said the effects of climate change on the planet could outlive human beings.
There was one positive note in his speech - the soaring price of of oil, gas and coal of recent months will see the nation's greenhouse gas emissions fall below the limits set under the Kyoto Protocol.
Higher prices for petrol and electricity will reduce demand and the effects of higher prices will be felt over the next few years, Prof Garnaut said.
"If we had been more or less in line with the Kyoto requirements, we will now be tending below," he said.
Prof Garnaut was delivering the HW Arndt Memorial Lecture at the Australian National University.
He will release a draft report on how the federal government should tackle climate change in July, and a final report in September.
The report is expected to influence the design of an emissions trading scheme, the government's main response to climate change, which will start operating in 2010.
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Carbon trading to hit poor hard
Reid Sexton, April 27, The Age
LOW-INCOME families in areas with poor public transport will be hundreds of dollars a year worse off than hard-up households in the inner city, under the Federal Government's plan to introduce a carbon trading scheme.
The scheme could add more pressure on families already struggling with mortgage stress and rising petrol prices in Melbourne's outer suburbs, where cars are often the only way to get around.
According to a Brotherhood of St Laurence report, poor households in municipalities without public transport will pay up to an additional $1220 a year if the new scheme imposes a levy of $35 a tonne on carbon.
Inner or middle municipalities with good access to public transport will pay between $905 and $1018.
The report, Carbon Use in Poor Victorian Households by Local Government Area, looked at the municipalities with low-income families where carbon emissions were highest — Melton, Brimbank, Yarra Ranges, Cardinia and Whittlesea.
Only Brimbank is identified as having adequate public transport, underlining the link between a far-reaching network and carbon emissions.
Low-income households have less carbon output than the state average — 34.7 tonnes versus 36.5 tonnes annually — but as a proportion of total income they would pay far more under the proposed carbon scheme.
Rural Victoria, where households spend the same on electricity but more on petrol and cars, will be particularly hard hit, with rises of up to $1300 a year.
The findings, the report's authors say, underline the link between poor public transport and car use, and the massive task facing Canberra to ensure the carbon trading scheme doesn't penalise households that are already disadvantaged.
The study supports the findings of a report by Monash University last year, which found that more than 20,000 Melbourne households had incomes of less than $500 a week but used two or more cars because of a lack of public transport.
It found that "forced car ownership" perpetuated social disadvantage by compelling households to spend on cars and car-related products.
Janet Stanley, co-author of the Brotherhood of St Laurence report, said its finding were particularly grim for those in the outer suburbs who would have to continue using cars when carbon trading was introduced.
"It suggests a strong argument for better public transport services around those suburbs," Dr Stanley said.
"These people need to get to work, they need to get to the doctor … these people have no choice but to pay out extra money for mobility.
"It's at a cost to other things in their life. It could be their child can't afford to go on a school camp or they can't afford the school uniform."
Monday, April 28, 2008
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
World's new crisis: soaring food prices
Lesley Wroughton, Washington, and Jewel Topsfield, April 15, The Age
THE World Bank has issued an urgent call to rich nations to help stem rising food prices, warning that social unrest in poor countries is spreading and that 100 million people are at risk of being plunged deeper into poverty.
"We have to put our money where our mouth is now, so that we can put food into hungry mouths. It is as stark as that," said World Bank president Robert Zoellick, as he called for more contributions to the $500 million World Food Program.
The plea, issued after a meeting of aid officials in Washington, follows a dramatic surge in world prices for staple foods — rice, for example, has shot up by 75% in just two months — and resulting food-related riots in Haiti, Indonesia, the Philippines and Cameroon in the past week.
World leaders were quick to respond to Mr Zoellick's plea, with Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd among those pledging to put world food security on their political agendas.
Mr Rudd said his world tour, from which he returned at the weekend, had changed his vision for Australia's global agenda. "One of the things that I discussed with various world leaders was (that) we have an unfolding food crisis around the world," Mr Rudd told ABC.
"We had 10 major sets of food riots across the world. So if you want something which should be close to our global agenda, therefore our national agenda, (it is) how do we contribute to better food security around the world."
But a pledge by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown to raise the issue at the next G8 summit of world leaders failed to impress Mr Zoellick. "Frankly speaking, that G8 meeting is in June and we cannot wait," he said, after the meeting involving the IMF and the World Bank's Development Committee. "We estimate that a doubling of food prices over the last three years could potentially push 100 million people in low-income countries deeper into poverty."
Anger over food prices led to last week's riots in Haiti, in which at least five people were killed and the country's prime minister was ousted.
Developing countries claim that rich countries, in their rush to tackle global warming, are helping to drive up food prices by encouraging the use of crops to produce biofuels rather than to feed people. Most of the rise in global corn production from 2004 to 2007 went to biofuels in the United States.
According to the 2008 World Development Report, more than 240 kilograms of corn — enough to feed one person for a year — is required to produce 100 litres of ethanol, enough to fill the tank of a sports utility vehicle.
Other contributing factors to rising food prices are the high price of oil (which increases costs of food production and distribution), population growth in Asia and drought in wheat-producing countries including Australia and Kazakhstan.
The price of wheat has jumped 120% in a year, resulting in the price of bread doubling in many poor countries.
The World Bank has warned that food prices will remain elevated this year and next year and will probably stay above 2004 levels until 2015. "We estimate that the effect of this food crisis on poverty reduction worldwide is in the order of seven lost years," Mr Zoellick said.
He said that almost half of $500 million that the World Food Program recently requested in additional pledges for food aid had been committed, but the May 1 deadline for raising the money would not be met.
The parliamentary secretary for international development assistance, Bob McMullan, said yesterday Australia was one of the largest donors through the World Food Program, giving $61.7 million last year.
"We have responded positively when the World Food Program asked us to do a little more in Afghanistan and Zimbabwe and we will look sympathetically at this most recent approach," Mr McMullan told ABC.
National Farmers Federation chief executive Ben Fargher said that despite the impact of the drought over the past five years, Australia was well positioned to respond to the world food crisis. "If countries overseas are looking for food security, one of the best things they could do is reduce barriers to the export of our produce to them," he said.
He said Australia also needed to have the world's best research and development policies to get more crop per drop, and improved rail and road infrastructure to ensure produce can reach overseas markets as efficiently as possible.
World food security will be discussed at a session on Australia's future security and prosperity at this weekend's 2020 Summit. Panel member Alan Dupont, director of the Centre for International Security Studies at the University of Sydney, said a key role for Australia could be to raise global awareness about the links between climate change and the food crisis.
He said Australia could also help developing nations affected by food shortages with technological solutions — such as the greater productivity of hybrid grains — and it could lead the way in the creation of strategic stockpiles of food.
With REUTERS
Wednesday, April 02, 2008
Labor resurrects Howard's uranium plan
Katharine Murphy, April 2, The Age
THE Federal Government has quietly resurrected John Howard's plan to expand uranium mining in Australia.
Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, an enthusiastic industry advocate, has reconvened the Uranium Industry Framework, a hand-picked advisory group appointed by the previous government.
Policies on its agenda include a forthcoming information campaign, paid for by the uranium industry, to address public concern about uranium mining.
The group also wants to introduce national rules for the industry, better training for workers exposed to radiation, and a national register recording mining workers' levels of exposure to radiation.
There is a separate strategy to use uranium mining to improve the economic fortunes of indigenous communities and to improve "engagement" between traditional owners and mining companies.
But Mr Ferguson says the Government will not pursue an idea the previous government flirted with — over-riding state bans in Western Australia and Queensland that prevent new uranium mines or other nuclear activities.
Uranium mining remains an extremely sensitive subject in the Labor Party. An emotional debate at the party's national conference last year resolved, by the narrowest of margins, to drop a long-standing ban on new uranium mines, but Queensland and WA declared they would keep their laws preventing new mines.
Mr Ferguson says Canberra will not override those states, but says it is only a matter of time before mining developments occur in those states, which have large uranium deposits.
"Queensland and Western Australia, at a point, will fall into line," Mr Ferguson said. "The uranium industry will open up."
He says exploration for new uranium deposits is under way in all states, including WA and Queensland, and new mining developments are likely in the Northern Territory.
He says Australian uranium will play an important role in powering nuclear reactors in other countries wanting to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
He predicts substantial growth in nuclear power outside Australia. "Some countries see nuclear as part of their commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Mr Ferguson said.
"Uranium mining has got a bright future and it's going to lead to increased export earnings for Australia and jobs."
THE Federal Government has quietly resurrected John Howard's plan to expand uranium mining in Australia.
Resources Minister Martin Ferguson, an enthusiastic industry advocate, has reconvened the Uranium Industry Framework, a hand-picked advisory group appointed by the previous government.
Policies on its agenda include a forthcoming information campaign, paid for by the uranium industry, to address public concern about uranium mining.
The group also wants to introduce national rules for the industry, better training for workers exposed to radiation, and a national register recording mining workers' levels of exposure to radiation.
There is a separate strategy to use uranium mining to improve the economic fortunes of indigenous communities and to improve "engagement" between traditional owners and mining companies.
But Mr Ferguson says the Government will not pursue an idea the previous government flirted with — over-riding state bans in Western Australia and Queensland that prevent new uranium mines or other nuclear activities.
Uranium mining remains an extremely sensitive subject in the Labor Party. An emotional debate at the party's national conference last year resolved, by the narrowest of margins, to drop a long-standing ban on new uranium mines, but Queensland and WA declared they would keep their laws preventing new mines.
Mr Ferguson says Canberra will not override those states, but says it is only a matter of time before mining developments occur in those states, which have large uranium deposits.
"Queensland and Western Australia, at a point, will fall into line," Mr Ferguson said. "The uranium industry will open up."
He says exploration for new uranium deposits is under way in all states, including WA and Queensland, and new mining developments are likely in the Northern Territory.
He says Australian uranium will play an important role in powering nuclear reactors in other countries wanting to cut their greenhouse gas emissions.
He predicts substantial growth in nuclear power outside Australia. "Some countries see nuclear as part of their commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions," Mr Ferguson said.
"Uranium mining has got a bright future and it's going to lead to increased export earnings for Australia and jobs."
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
Hansen to Australian PM: stop coal plants now
Open Letter From Dr James Hansen to Kevin Rudd, Australian Science Media Centre
Reproduced from Energy Bulletin
27 March 2008
The Hon Kevin Rudd, MP
Prime Minister of Australia
Australian Parliament
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, 2600
Dear Prime Minister,
Your leadership is needed on a matter concerning coal-fired power plants and carbon dioxide emission rates in your country, a matter with ramifications for life on our planet, including all species. Prospects for today's children, and especially the world's poor, hinge upon our success in stabilizing climate.
For the sake of identification, I am a United States citizen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute. I am a member of our National Academy of Sciences, have testified before our Senate and House of Representatives on many occasions, have advised our Vice President and Cabinet members on climate change and its relation to energy requirements, and have received numerous awards including the World Wildlife Fund's Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal from Prince Philip.
I write, however, as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, USA. I was assisted in composing this letter by colleagues, including Australians, Americans, and Europeans, who commented upon a draft letter. Because of the urgency of the matter, I have not collected signatures, but your advisors will verify the authenticity of the science discussion.
I recognize that for years you have been a strong supporter of aggressive forward-looking actions to mitigate dangerous climate change. Also, since your election as Prime Minister of Australia, your government has been active in pressing the international community to take appropriate actions. We are now at a point that bold leadership is needed, leadership that could change the course of human history.
I have read and commend the Interim Report of Professor Ross Garnaut, submitted to your government. The conclusion that net carbon emissions must be cut to a fraction of current emissions must be stunning and sobering to policy-makers. Yet the science is unambiguous: if we burn most of the fossil fuels, releasing the CO2 to the air, we will assuredly destroy much of the fabric of life on the planet. Achievement of required near-zero net emissions by mid-century implies a track with substantial cuts of emissions by 2020. Aggressive near-term fostering of energy efficiency and climate friendly technologies is an imperative for mitigation of the looming climate crisis and optimization of the economic pathway to the eventual clean-energy world.
Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.
Feasible actions now could still point the world onto a course that minimizes climate change. Coal clearly emerges as central to the climate problem from the facts summarized in the attached Fossil Fuel Facts. [See note below] Coal caused fully half of the fossil fuel increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air today, and on the long run coal has the potential to be an even greater source of CO2. Due to the dominant role of coal, solution to global warming must include phase-out of coal except for uses where the CO2 is captured and sequestered. Failing that, we cannot avoid large climate change, because a substantial fraction of the emitted CO2 will stay in the air more than 1000 years.
Yet there are plans for continuing mining of coal, export of coal, and construction of new coal-fired power plants around the world, including in Australia, plants that would have a lifetime of half a century or more. Your leadership in halting these plans could seed a transition that is needed to solve the global warming problem.
Choices among alternative energy sources - renewable energies, energy efficiency, nuclear power, fossil fuels with carbon capture - these are local matters. But decision to phase out coal use unless the CO2 is captured is a global imperative, if we are to preserve the wonders of nature, our coastlines, and our social and economic well being.
Although coal is the dominant issue, there are many important subsidiary ramifications, including the need for rapid transition from oil-fired energy utilities, industrial facilities and transport systems, to clean (solar, hydrogen, gas, wind, geothermal, hot rocks, tide) energy sources, as well as removal of barriers to increased energy efficiency.
If the West makes a firm commitment to this course, discussion with developing countries can be prompt. Given the potential of technology assistance, realization of adverse impacts of climate change, and leverage and increasing interdependence from global trade, success in cooperation of developed and developing worlds is feasible.
The western world has contributed most to fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, on a per capita basis. This is not an attempt to cast blame. It only recognizes the reality of the early industrial development in these countries, and points to a responsibility to lead in finding a solution to global warming.
A firm choice to halt building of coal-fired power plants that do not capture CO2 would be a major step toward solution of the global warming problem. Australia has strong interest in solving the climate problem. Citizens in the United States are stepping up to block one coal plant after another, and major changes can be anticipated after the upcoming national election.
If Australia halted construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester the CO2, it could be a tipping point for the world. There is still time to find that tipping point, but just barely. I hope that you will give these considerations your attention in setting your national policies. You have the potential to influence the future of the planet.
Prime Minister Rudd, we cannot avert our eyes from the basic fossil fuel facts, or the consequences for life on our planet of ignoring these fossil fuel facts. If we continue to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture, we will lock in future climate disasters associated with passing climate tipping points. We must solve the coal problem now.
For your information, I plan to send a similar letter to the Australian States Premiers.
I commend to you the following Australian climate, paleoclimate and Earth scientists to provide further elaboration of the science reported in my attached paper (Hansen et al., 2008):
Professor Barry Brook, Professor of climate change, University of Adelaide
Dr Andrew Glikson, Australian National University
Professor Janette Lindesay, Australian National University
Dr Graeme Pearman, Monash University
Dr Barrie Pittock, CSIRO
Dr Michael Raupach CSIRO
Professor Will Steffen, Australian National University
Sincerely,
James E. Hansen
Kintnersville, Pennsylvania
United States of America
[See original for additional documentation at:
www.aussmc.org.au/documents/Hansen2008LetterToKevinRudd.pdf
Reproduced from Energy Bulletin
27 March 2008
The Hon Kevin Rudd, MP
Prime Minister of Australia
Australian Parliament
Canberra, Australian Capital Territory, 2600
Dear Prime Minister,
Your leadership is needed on a matter concerning coal-fired power plants and carbon dioxide emission rates in your country, a matter with ramifications for life on our planet, including all species. Prospects for today's children, and especially the world's poor, hinge upon our success in stabilizing climate.
For the sake of identification, I am a United States citizen, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Adjunct Professor at the Columbia University Earth Institute. I am a member of our National Academy of Sciences, have testified before our Senate and House of Representatives on many occasions, have advised our Vice President and Cabinet members on climate change and its relation to energy requirements, and have received numerous awards including the World Wildlife Fund's Duke of Edinburgh Conservation Medal from Prince Philip.
I write, however, as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, USA. I was assisted in composing this letter by colleagues, including Australians, Americans, and Europeans, who commented upon a draft letter. Because of the urgency of the matter, I have not collected signatures, but your advisors will verify the authenticity of the science discussion.
I recognize that for years you have been a strong supporter of aggressive forward-looking actions to mitigate dangerous climate change. Also, since your election as Prime Minister of Australia, your government has been active in pressing the international community to take appropriate actions. We are now at a point that bold leadership is needed, leadership that could change the course of human history.
I have read and commend the Interim Report of Professor Ross Garnaut, submitted to your government. The conclusion that net carbon emissions must be cut to a fraction of current emissions must be stunning and sobering to policy-makers. Yet the science is unambiguous: if we burn most of the fossil fuels, releasing the CO2 to the air, we will assuredly destroy much of the fabric of life on the planet. Achievement of required near-zero net emissions by mid-century implies a track with substantial cuts of emissions by 2020. Aggressive near-term fostering of energy efficiency and climate friendly technologies is an imperative for mitigation of the looming climate crisis and optimization of the economic pathway to the eventual clean-energy world.
Global climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic with detrimental effects on wildlife, initiation of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland with progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise, shifting of climatic zones with extermination of many animal and plant species, reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but also heavier rains and floods, and stronger storms driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.
Feasible actions now could still point the world onto a course that minimizes climate change. Coal clearly emerges as central to the climate problem from the facts summarized in the attached Fossil Fuel Facts. [See note below] Coal caused fully half of the fossil fuel increase of carbon dioxide (CO2) in the air today, and on the long run coal has the potential to be an even greater source of CO2. Due to the dominant role of coal, solution to global warming must include phase-out of coal except for uses where the CO2 is captured and sequestered. Failing that, we cannot avoid large climate change, because a substantial fraction of the emitted CO2 will stay in the air more than 1000 years.
Yet there are plans for continuing mining of coal, export of coal, and construction of new coal-fired power plants around the world, including in Australia, plants that would have a lifetime of half a century or more. Your leadership in halting these plans could seed a transition that is needed to solve the global warming problem.
Choices among alternative energy sources - renewable energies, energy efficiency, nuclear power, fossil fuels with carbon capture - these are local matters. But decision to phase out coal use unless the CO2 is captured is a global imperative, if we are to preserve the wonders of nature, our coastlines, and our social and economic well being.
Although coal is the dominant issue, there are many important subsidiary ramifications, including the need for rapid transition from oil-fired energy utilities, industrial facilities and transport systems, to clean (solar, hydrogen, gas, wind, geothermal, hot rocks, tide) energy sources, as well as removal of barriers to increased energy efficiency.
If the West makes a firm commitment to this course, discussion with developing countries can be prompt. Given the potential of technology assistance, realization of adverse impacts of climate change, and leverage and increasing interdependence from global trade, success in cooperation of developed and developing worlds is feasible.
The western world has contributed most to fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, on a per capita basis. This is not an attempt to cast blame. It only recognizes the reality of the early industrial development in these countries, and points to a responsibility to lead in finding a solution to global warming.
A firm choice to halt building of coal-fired power plants that do not capture CO2 would be a major step toward solution of the global warming problem. Australia has strong interest in solving the climate problem. Citizens in the United States are stepping up to block one coal plant after another, and major changes can be anticipated after the upcoming national election.
If Australia halted construction of coal-fired power plants that do not capture and sequester the CO2, it could be a tipping point for the world. There is still time to find that tipping point, but just barely. I hope that you will give these considerations your attention in setting your national policies. You have the potential to influence the future of the planet.
Prime Minister Rudd, we cannot avert our eyes from the basic fossil fuel facts, or the consequences for life on our planet of ignoring these fossil fuel facts. If we continue to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture, we will lock in future climate disasters associated with passing climate tipping points. We must solve the coal problem now.
For your information, I plan to send a similar letter to the Australian States Premiers.
I commend to you the following Australian climate, paleoclimate and Earth scientists to provide further elaboration of the science reported in my attached paper (Hansen et al., 2008):
Professor Barry Brook, Professor of climate change, University of Adelaide
Dr Andrew Glikson, Australian National University
Professor Janette Lindesay, Australian National University
Dr Graeme Pearman, Monash University
Dr Barrie Pittock, CSIRO
Dr Michael Raupach CSIRO
Professor Will Steffen, Australian National University
Sincerely,
James E. Hansen
Kintnersville, Pennsylvania
United States of America
[See original for additional documentation at:
www.aussmc.org.au/documents/Hansen2008LetterToKevinRudd.pdf
Monday, March 31, 2008
NASA scientist urges PM to stop coal exports
NASA chief climate scientist James Hansen has written to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd asking him to consider halting plans for mining and export of coal in Australia.
Dr Hansen is one of the world's leading climate scientists and in a letter addressed to Mr Rudd, he has asked him to show leadership on the issue.
He says the "continuing mining of coal, export of coal, and the construction of new coal-fired power plants" should be halted and a transition is needed to solve the global warming problem.
He says choices of alternative energy sources are local considerations, but a decision to phase out coal use is a "global imperative".
The letter has been delivered to Mr Rudd's office today and has also been sent to the state and territory leaders.
Former head of the CSIRO's Climate Impact Group Barrie Pittock supports the letter and says Australia must take urgent action if climate change is to be addressed.
"We're increasing the global emissions at the rate of about 3 per cent every year now, and what we have to do is decrease emissions by 2 or 3 per cent every year," he said.
"That's the only way we are going to keep global temperatures down to something that might be safe.
"What he is asking [is] for us to not to do any more until the carbon capture and sequestration is in place."
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
Big polluters demand billion-dollar 'ransom'
Adam Morton, March 18, The Age
AUSTRALIA'S electricity generation industry is demanding massive compensation from the Federal Government in return for its co-operation in efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions.
In a challenge to the Government's climate adviser, Ross Garnaut, the power generators have warned of soaring costs to consumers and disruptions to supplies unless they are compensated for the costs of complying with anti-greenhouse laws.
With most of Australia's electricity coming coal-fired generators, the industry is the nation's largest producer of greenhouse emissions, and the main focus of efforts to curb them. A planned carbon trading system will force the industry to pay to emit greenhouse gas.
The National Generators Forum, in a submission to Professor Garnaut's Climate Change Review, has argued that failure to compensate the biggest polluters could, perversely, hurt the environment by directing industry funding away from clean energy research to maintaining baseload energy supply.
Climate Change Minister Penny Wong yesterday unveiled a timetable for drawing up carbon trading legislation. The scheme, to start in 2010, will involve carbon emissions being capped and pollution permits sold at a market-set price.
The push by power companies for a payout is at odds with an interim report from by Professor Garnaut last month, which argued against sweeping compensation.
Climate Institute policy director Erwin Jackson has rejected the suggestion that refusing compensation to power generators would hurt the environment, arguing a strong emissions cap would force the market to invest in cleaner forms of energy.
"We shouldn't be giving (compensation) to industries that have failed to respond to what the market has been telling them was on the way for a long time," he said.
The debate coincides with worsening predictions about the pace of climate change, including a UN report that found glaciers melted nearly twice as fast in 2006 as in 2005.
With growing evidence that Asia-Pacific will be severely affected by climate change "in our lifetime", the Australian Climate Group — a collaboration between scientists, environmentalists and insurers — will today release a report calling on the Government to stabilise greenhouse emissions by 2010.
The National Generators Forum, representing 22 power generators, has estimated that Australia's electricity costs will soar from $78 billion to $150 billion if the Government target of a 60% cut in greenhouse emissions by 2050 is met.
Ms Wong said details of the emissions trading legislation would be released in December, preceded by a public discussion paper in July.
Professor Garnaut will release a report on emissions trading on Thursday. www.garnautreview.org.au
Farmers pay for heatwave
Chris Hammer and Chee Chee Leung, March 18, The Age
THE record-breaking heatwave across south-eastern Australia is predicted to ease today, but farmers are already counting the cost in the millions of dollars.
Temperatures in Adelaide hit 40.5 degrees yesterday, the 15th straight day they have soared above 35 degrees.
The heat has had a devastating effect on South Australia's farming sector and raised serious doubts about the sustainability of irrigation in the lower Murray River. "It's fair to say it's costing many millions of dollars a day, and the damage bill will get higher the longer it continues," South Australian Farmers Federation president Wayne Cornish said.
Mr Cornish said apple and pear growers had suffered severe damage from heat and wind.
"Most crops, like soft vegetables, can tolerate three or four days of extreme temperatures, but that's about the limit," Mr Cornish said.
The situation is at its most severe in the final reaches of the Murray River, including Lake Alexandrina, where water levels are so low even farmers with irrigation rights are finding their pumps left high and dry.
"Certainly because of the low levels and because of salinity, I don't know how many irrigators are using that water. I know some are carting in water because it's too salty for stock and plants," said Wendy Craik, chief executive of the Murray-Darling Basin Commission.
Di Davidson, a grape grower in the Langhorne Creek region beside Lake Alexandrina, said wine grape yields had fallen by half or more in just a week.
"For many producers, it's been the difference between making a reasonable amount of money and failing to break even," she said. "I've had calls from people who have decided not to pick any more because it's not worth it."
In Melbourne, a top of 38.4 degrees yesterday helped bring the state's peak energy demand to a record high. A maximum of 33 degrees is forecast today.
The city maximum is then expected to remain in the 20s from tomorrow until at least Easter Monday, with a few showers but no significant rainfall.
Melbourne is also in with a chance to break the 68-year-old record for its hottest March.
The city is averaging 30.7 degrees for the month, and the record is 28.9 degrees. "It's a tough record to break, and the fact that we're in a position to possibly break it is an indication of an exceptional month," said Blair Trewin, climatologist at the weather bureau's National Climate Centre.
Across Victoria, energy demand peaked at 9818 megawatts yesterday in the half hour to 5pm, breaking the record set last Friday of 9514 megawatts.
The Metropolitan Ambulance Service has received 15 calls for heat stress over the past four days.
Saturday, March 01, 2008
James Hansen - No more conventional coal and carbon stabilisation below 350ppm
[Firstly apologies for neglecting this website in recent weeks. It has been a busy time of year politically in Australia and I haven't had 5 minutes to post anything. Hopefully i will have more time to update this website from now. For now im adding this very important interview by Beyond Zero Emissions with James Hansen and a piece written in September last year from Znet. In the Znet article Hansen stated that "it seems to me that young people, especially, should be doing whatever is necessary to block construction of dirty (no CCS) coal-fired power plants."]
Beyond Zero Emissions, February 22
Beyond Zero Radio show spoke to James Hansen the world's leading climate scientist about his call for CO2 emissions stabilisation at 300-350ppm, well below todays 385ppm.
Interview with James Hansen - Nasa Goddard Institute of Space Studies
Scott Bilby: In the studio with me are Beyond Zero team members Miwa, Matthew and special guest Philip Sutton from the Greenleap Strategic Institute. This morning on Beyond Zero we'll be interviewing James Hansen often described by many as the world's leading climate scientist. He is the director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA and adjunct professor at earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Wieslaw Maslowski has recently said that Arctic ice could be
free in summer by 2013. Dr Hansen, are you there?
James Hansen: Yes I am. I hope you can hear me.
SB: We certainly can hear you - As Wieslaw Maslowski has said the Arctic could be free of ice in summer by 2013. You've said that we need to keep to levels well below 350ppm. What do humans have to do to get Arctic sea ice? to basically get it back again?
James Hansen: Well, we will have to restore the point of energy balance because as it stands now we will lose the arctic sea ice without any more greenhouse gases, because there is additional warming that's in the pipeline, because the planet is out of energy balance, just because of the inertia of the system.
That means we would have to reduce the amount of CO2 at least to the 350ppm level, and we are already at 385. So, we've actually got to go backwards and it's really too bad that we didn't realise this earlier. We probably should have, based on the earth's history.
We can see that 385ppm is really going to produce a significantly different planet. And also just looking at what's now happening, not only in the Arctic, and the fact that the ice sheets are not stable with the current CO2 amount, and the fact that the sub-tropical regions have expanded noticeably by a few hundred kilometres, that's enough to effect the southwest US, the Mediterranean, and Australia I should point out.
So there's a lot of things, also coral reefs are another example. If we want to reduce the stress on coral reefs, we have to both reduce CO2 and the warming of the ocean temperatures. So there are a number of things like that which make it clear that we've already passed the target level that we should be aiming for.
Philip Sutton: Jim, how would you actually make the earth cool or go backwards? How would you actually restore that Arctic ice?
James Hansen: Yes, yes, it's still possible. If we get on the stick very promptly, it's still practical to do that in ways that are quite natural. The most important thing is to have a moratorium on new coal fired power plants that don't capture CO2 and then to phase out the dirty coal use over the next 2-3 decades. If we do that, you know that
the system does still take up CO2, the ocean and the soils and things, so that other things being equal, CO2 would only go up to a bit more than 400 if we phase out coal use. But then we have got to take at least 50ppm out of the atmosphere, and that is possible with improved agricultural and forestry practices, things that we have not being paying much attention to.
In fact the practices have been quite the opposite. They've actually not encouraged the uptake of CO2 by the soils and by the biosphere.
Matthew Wright: And we have touched on that with Professor Johannes Lehmann from Cornell University, and in terms of the Australian political environment we've just had an interim report by Professor Ross Garnaut - he's doing sort of a mini Stern Report and he's just said basically that we need to stabilise global emissions within two years,
and I think we'd agree with him there. But he's saying in a global carbon equity sense that Australia needs to go 90% by 2050, to the shock of media and commentators.
James Hansen: One thing that is important to point out, these goals for 2050 are not a sufficient way to look at it. We actually have to realise that the carbon dioxide is put in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, a good fraction of that will stay in the air for a very long time, about a fifth of this stays in there for about a thousand years.
And we need to recognise the size of the reservoirs of oil, gas and coal; with coal being by far the largest of these and also it's the one which is potentially amenable to not putting the CO2 into the air. It's very difficult to see how we can prevent the oil from being used and the carbon getting in to the atmosphere because it comes from vehicles, but in the case of coal if we're going to use that, we could restrict it to power-plants and we should say it can only be used there if you capture the CO2. That becomes a practical way to look at this, and I think it's a better way than saying lets reduce it 80% or 90% or 60% or any particular number because we really can't let 40% or 20% of the coal to continue to be used; that's the one source that we really need to cut off.
Matthew Wright: Yes and if in somewhere like Victoria, which uses lignite, brown coal, if there was the gas resource available, which according to BHP Petroleum there is, to actually switch away form coal in 3 years and cut our emissions by half; our entire absolute emissions in Victoria by half. Would that be something you would encourage our government to pursue?
James Hansen: Yes absolutely, that would be consistent with the strategy of terminating the coal source as soon as possible.
Matthew Wright: Also Professor Garnaut, it seems like the government sort of started to distance themselves from him even though they commissioned him to run the report, and they're remaining committed to their 60% target. I guess a get out of gaol guard for them is to claim their 60% target by 2050 but adopt a very strong 40% by 2020 or something like that within that, if they're politically manoeuvring. It seems that targets are they way that they are going in terms of setting the cap in their 'cap and trade'. What do you think would be the right approach? Obviously capping global growth in emissions within two years is a very good approach, but beyond that what sort of approach would Australia require?
James Hansen: Well, I think that the target in terms of percent when you're talking about a date which is quite a distance in the future is just not very helpful. It's a way for politicians to get out of doing something now, because they put off the target to a date when they'll be out of office. So I have no objection to that except that if it allows
them to get away from taking actions that need to be done now.
Philip Sutton: We have a bit of a sense that in fact the government in Australia is beginning to gear itself up to take climate change quite seriously, but they're obviously struggling to come to terms with the seriousness of the real position on the ground. Do you have a sense of how long it would take to get the arctic ice back, presumably we'll lose it in a couple of years time; completely during summer. But just interested to know how long you think it would take to actually restore it if we could manage to trigger a cooling.
James Hansen: The Arctic sea ice is a very different problem from the ice sheet, in the sense that the Arctic sea ice is a reversible phenomenon on time scales that we can think about, unlike the ice sheets. If we let those reach a point of no return so they start to collapse then we're really in trouble, because it takes many thousands
of years to build an ice sheet.
But the Arctic sea ice, that would require that we get the planet energy balance back in balance, and that is out of balance now by something between half a watt and one watt, so it's a fairly steep order to do that. It is the order of this 50ppm CO2 that we would need to get.
It can be done with a combination of methane, black soot and other pollutants [these] can contribute to the reduction in the forcing. So it's something that could be done in a time scale of a few decades. Now it's not certain that the Arctic summer sea ice is going to be gone in a few years. Some people say it could be as soon as 5-10 years and others think it could be a few decades. But to get it back is a time scale of decades I think, that's minimum.
Philip Sutton: Do you have any estimates of how much warming would actually be caused by the albedo flip itself. We've sort of seen some rough estimates of about a 1/3 of a degree. I was just wondering if that was anything in the ball park of what you've been seeing or calculating through your models.
James Hansen: If you want to look at it that way, that's the right ball park. It's a positive feedback, an amplifying feedback, which makes the change there go more rapidly, and to a certain extent it will contribute to warming at other latitudes. But I think it is the right order of magnitude. I haven't actually looked at it and done a calculation in
that sense, but that's the right order of magnitude.
Philip Sutton: Right.
Matthew Wright: Matthew here again and just to let everyone know, that was Philip Sutton who has been assisting me with questions, from the Greenleap Strategic Institute, co-author of Climate Code Red which relies on a lot of material from Dr. James Hansen. I noted that you had sent a draft letter the um? the U.K.?
Scott Bilby: Gordon Brown.
Matthew Wright: Gordon Brown, the UK Prime Minister requesting that they don't build any new coal fired power plants without carbon capture and storage, and a similar story where you've been in hearings in I think it was Iowa to stop Coal Power Plants.
James Hansen: Yes.
Matthew Wright: We've got some proposals here unfortunately that don't involve carbon capture and storage there's an HRL energy project in Victoria, and in NSW Michael Costa is pretty bullish on building a new coal fired power station. He sees no other option for them. What do you say to these politicians who are really pushing this line?
James Hansen: Well, I think that it's going to become very clear, I would say within a decade or so, that these coal plants are simply not compatible with keeping a planet resembling the one in which civilisation developed. And I think there is going to be eventually pressure to in effect bulldoze those plants, so economically they just don't make sense. You are not going to be able to leave them there 50 years. It will become clear long before 50 years that we have to get rid of those, so it doesn't make sense.
Matthew Wright: In terms of what we've heard from you and others, generally we've been pushing the line that we need to, as soon as possible, get all our emissions down to near zero emissions, so that could be a time frame of say 2020; halving our emissions in the next 3 years locally here in Victoria and then concurrently developing, you
talked about soils, the agri-char process to draw down atmospheric carbon. Will we require things like seeding the atmosphere with sulphates in order to reflectlight away from the Arctic ice or will that be sufficient, just the agri-char concurrently developed while getting our emissions down near zero?
James Hansen: My comment on that would be, we don't know, you know we're pushing the atmospheric composition beyond the level which will give us a stable climate, so we're overshooting the acceptable level. And we don't know how long we can stay in a state where we've overshot that level. Obviously, if you overshoot for one day, that's not going to cause a problem. It's a question of how many years can you leave it at a level which is going to cause long term unacceptable impacts, like instability of the ice sheets.
We just don't have a good way to make an accurate assessment. That's because there has been no prior examples in the earth's history where greenhouse gases have increased this rapidly. There have been fast changes when negative forcings, when asteroids hit the planet or when large volcano's go off, but we don't have any examples of large positive warming forcings. So it's really a hard question to answer, but I think that sensible actions, phasing out coal use where we don't capture the CO2, and reducing non CO2 forcings may be able to get us back on a track without unnatural geo-engineering type actions. But that's my guess, I don't really have a good way to quantify that.
Philip Sutton: Yes, I think that question about the speed of bringing the system back into a safe sort of configuration is a really key question because when we looked at the recommendations from the Garnaut review, or the interim recommendations, that came out yesterday. It was very clear that they understood that things were much more serious than perhaps the IPCC consensus view had indicated but when you read the recommendations, it seemed like they felt we had a reasonable amount of time to get things under control. Is there any work being done through the scientific community to try and get a handle on that question of how rapidly we'd need to get things back to a safe configuration.
James Hansen: That's the key question, but it's a very hard one because the systems in question are non-linear. Inherently it's very difficult to predict a point of collapse. Whether you're talking about an ice sheet collapsing or whether you're talking about an ecosystem collapsing because as some species go extinct, that effects others because they're all connected. So it's just inherently a very difficult non-linear problem, and the models are just not up-to snuff as far as giving us the numbers for that. We can't simulate the responses that are occurring right now in Greenland and West Antarctica.
Philip Sutton: Do you think its worth, I mean when I look at the issue I tend to focus a fair bit on the arctic ice and then try to work out, I mean it seems to be the most significant big flip that we've had so far, that is very clearly under way?
James Hansen: Ok, that one is a little, a little easier, and it's partly because we can see what is happening empirically and because it is a reversible phenomenon. It's one where I would argue you can base your estimates on the planet's energy balance and we're not measuring that as well as we should. It requires good measurements of ocean temperatures throughout the whole ocean, including the deep ocean and the high latitudes. It is easier than problems like the ice sheets.
Philip Sutton: Right, do you think we can have a safe climate without having the Arctic ice restoration. In other words is that actually an essential??
James Hansen: You know that's a good question and it's probably not, because I can't imagine that in the long run Greenland would be stable if the Arctic is ice free in the warm season. I think we do need to plan on restoring sea ice in the Arctic, preventing a complete loss of sea ice there if we want to assure that our shore lines are going to stay where they are now.
Philip Sutton: Yes, it does seem me that because that was a much more visible and obvious and estimable problem that if in fact it turned out to be one of the critical links then even if we don't know the answer on a number of other parts of the puzzle that that may give us sufficient sort of policy guide in the short term to drive a lot of public policy, then of course as we get better modelling we can refine it in relation to other issues.
James Hansen: Yes I think that's a very sensible way to look at it.
Matthew Wright: On the solutions side, you said that if clean coal came with carbon capture and storage (CCS) - but we've actually got Australian scientists in the United States right who've got a lot of venture capital behind them 50, 100 million dollars, like Dr David Mills from Ausra. His technology uses Fresnel flat plate collectors to mimic
those Mojave desert concentrating solar thermal plants. Wouldn't it be better for us to invest in that basically demonstrated commercial technology rather than keep pursuing coal carbon capture and storage, given that CCS with coal tends to be advocated not as a retrofit option?
James Hansen: Well, I think we have to do both of those and a number of another things. The problem is I don't think there is one silver bullet that is going to solve this problem. We've been putting far too little into research and development to find technological ways of addressing this.
Concentrated solar looks extremely promising but I wouldn't say that's going to solve all the problems so I think we should look at as many things as possible. And of course we would encourage that if we would have a carbon price. It would bring out innovation - some things that we can't even think of so we need to encourage technological innovation.
Philip Sutton: That's definitely one of the strong recommendations from the Garnaut review and the Australian government has indicated that it will in fact move quite strongly on the carbon cap and then generating a price from that.
James Hansen: I think that would be helpful.
Matthew Wright: Is there anything you can say to those people, I think the remaining big excuse that's being kicked around is that you've got your developing countries, you've heard it a million times and they're not doing anything so why should we. How do you frame the response around that? How do we put it to those people we're endangering ourselves here?
James Hansen: Well, they aren't going to do anything until we do, and they're not going to have the mechanisms for fixing the problem if we don't develop them. You know, we've caused the problem and we're going to have to help take the lead in developing the solutions and we don't have any time to waste arguing about whether developing countries will come along, I'm sure they will, we can't ask them to take the lead. We certainly have to do that.
Matthew Wright: So if we are looking at such dramatic cuts, the convergence is going to be clearly quite soon so we're going to have to develop these renewable energy technologies and other zero emission technologies and some people are even advocating that we'd be paying places like China to close down their older coal-fired power stations. Do you envisage that that would be the way?
James Hansen: We're going to have to help them with the technology. It's analogous to the way we solved the ozone problem, or at least that is on a direction which will solve it. We provide technology and we provided some economic assistance in adopting that technology, but China has as much to lose if not more than we do with climate change, so I'm confident that they will come along and they will be able to share the task of reducing the emissions, but we're at least going to have to provide the technological help and we should consider the technology that we develop to be for the global good and not insist that they pay special prices to the people who invented them because we're going to have to get them implemented pretty quickly.
Philip Sutton: Jim, I was just wondering going back to December last year, you gave a presentation to the American Geophysical Union Conference suggesting that the CO2 target might well be somewhere in the range of 300 parts per million to 350. What sort of reaction have you had from the scientific community and from the wider community to that proposition?
James Hansen:There has been some concern that they think this is unrealistic, and therefore they say, 'well, contrarians will use this as an argument that we shouldn't do anything because it looks like its too difficult'. Frankly, I don't agree with that. I think an initial target of 350 is doable provided we phase out coal, and although that sounds
like a real tough job, in fact it's doable and if we don't do it there is no question, if you look at the times in the earth's history when there was that much CO2 in the atmosphere it was a completely different planet. We have to do it and it is doable, if you compare the difficulty of replacing coal-fired power with something else which could include coal provided it has CO2 capture. Well that's not that difficult, I mean if we compare it to how much effort we put into World War II, it's a doable job and the incentives are just as great as they were then. So I'm a little surprised that some scientists are saying we have to make the target something that is doable. I think we have to make the target whatever is needed.
Philip Sutton: My sense is that the scientific community, certainly the Australian community which I make some effort to keep in touch with, has been encouraged if you like to be much more focused on the science, from the very fact that you've been prepared to speak out like that. So I think that one shouldn't underestimate the long term effect on peoples' perception of the issue through taking what was at the time obviously a very courageous position. You know the feedback we're getting is a lot of people are now seeing that they can actually, if you like, put more emphasis on the science because you've done that yourself.
James Hansen: Well I'm glad to hear that.
Matthew Wright: Thank you very much Dr Hansen, we appreciate you joining us on the Beyond Zero show and hopefully we can speak to you again later in the year.
James Hansen: Ok great, it was my pleasure, thanks a lot.
Matthew Wright: You're on the Beyond Zero show with Philip Sutton from the Greenleap Strategic Institute, Scott Bilby campaigner with BZE and Miwa Tominaga - over to you Scott.
SB: We've just been speaking with James Hansen director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA and you're listening to Beyond Zero and it's put on by Climate Change awareness group called Beyond Zero Emissions. If you want to find out more about Beyond Zero Emissions go to www.beyondzeroemissions.org The time now is 8:58, and if you'd like to get a copy of Code Red, a document released recently by Philip Sutton and David Spratt can you tell us what the URL for that is?
PS: OK it's downloadable from, http://climatecodered.net/
Matthew Wright: Thank you Philip our special guest this morning from the Greenleap Strategic Institute
Beyond Zero Emissions, February 22
Beyond Zero Radio show spoke to James Hansen the world's leading climate scientist about his call for CO2 emissions stabilisation at 300-350ppm, well below todays 385ppm.
Interview with James Hansen - Nasa Goddard Institute of Space Studies
Scott Bilby: In the studio with me are Beyond Zero team members Miwa, Matthew and special guest Philip Sutton from the Greenleap Strategic Institute. This morning on Beyond Zero we'll be interviewing James Hansen often described by many as the world's leading climate scientist. He is the director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA and adjunct professor at earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Wieslaw Maslowski has recently said that Arctic ice could be
free in summer by 2013. Dr Hansen, are you there?
James Hansen: Yes I am. I hope you can hear me.
SB: We certainly can hear you - As Wieslaw Maslowski has said the Arctic could be free of ice in summer by 2013. You've said that we need to keep to levels well below 350ppm. What do humans have to do to get Arctic sea ice? to basically get it back again?
James Hansen: Well, we will have to restore the point of energy balance because as it stands now we will lose the arctic sea ice without any more greenhouse gases, because there is additional warming that's in the pipeline, because the planet is out of energy balance, just because of the inertia of the system.
That means we would have to reduce the amount of CO2 at least to the 350ppm level, and we are already at 385. So, we've actually got to go backwards and it's really too bad that we didn't realise this earlier. We probably should have, based on the earth's history.
We can see that 385ppm is really going to produce a significantly different planet. And also just looking at what's now happening, not only in the Arctic, and the fact that the ice sheets are not stable with the current CO2 amount, and the fact that the sub-tropical regions have expanded noticeably by a few hundred kilometres, that's enough to effect the southwest US, the Mediterranean, and Australia I should point out.
So there's a lot of things, also coral reefs are another example. If we want to reduce the stress on coral reefs, we have to both reduce CO2 and the warming of the ocean temperatures. So there are a number of things like that which make it clear that we've already passed the target level that we should be aiming for.
Philip Sutton: Jim, how would you actually make the earth cool or go backwards? How would you actually restore that Arctic ice?
James Hansen: Yes, yes, it's still possible. If we get on the stick very promptly, it's still practical to do that in ways that are quite natural. The most important thing is to have a moratorium on new coal fired power plants that don't capture CO2 and then to phase out the dirty coal use over the next 2-3 decades. If we do that, you know that
the system does still take up CO2, the ocean and the soils and things, so that other things being equal, CO2 would only go up to a bit more than 400 if we phase out coal use. But then we have got to take at least 50ppm out of the atmosphere, and that is possible with improved agricultural and forestry practices, things that we have not being paying much attention to.
In fact the practices have been quite the opposite. They've actually not encouraged the uptake of CO2 by the soils and by the biosphere.
Matthew Wright: And we have touched on that with Professor Johannes Lehmann from Cornell University, and in terms of the Australian political environment we've just had an interim report by Professor Ross Garnaut - he's doing sort of a mini Stern Report and he's just said basically that we need to stabilise global emissions within two years,
and I think we'd agree with him there. But he's saying in a global carbon equity sense that Australia needs to go 90% by 2050, to the shock of media and commentators.
James Hansen: One thing that is important to point out, these goals for 2050 are not a sufficient way to look at it. We actually have to realise that the carbon dioxide is put in the atmosphere from burning fossil fuels, a good fraction of that will stay in the air for a very long time, about a fifth of this stays in there for about a thousand years.
And we need to recognise the size of the reservoirs of oil, gas and coal; with coal being by far the largest of these and also it's the one which is potentially amenable to not putting the CO2 into the air. It's very difficult to see how we can prevent the oil from being used and the carbon getting in to the atmosphere because it comes from vehicles, but in the case of coal if we're going to use that, we could restrict it to power-plants and we should say it can only be used there if you capture the CO2. That becomes a practical way to look at this, and I think it's a better way than saying lets reduce it 80% or 90% or 60% or any particular number because we really can't let 40% or 20% of the coal to continue to be used; that's the one source that we really need to cut off.
Matthew Wright: Yes and if in somewhere like Victoria, which uses lignite, brown coal, if there was the gas resource available, which according to BHP Petroleum there is, to actually switch away form coal in 3 years and cut our emissions by half; our entire absolute emissions in Victoria by half. Would that be something you would encourage our government to pursue?
James Hansen: Yes absolutely, that would be consistent with the strategy of terminating the coal source as soon as possible.
Matthew Wright: Also Professor Garnaut, it seems like the government sort of started to distance themselves from him even though they commissioned him to run the report, and they're remaining committed to their 60% target. I guess a get out of gaol guard for them is to claim their 60% target by 2050 but adopt a very strong 40% by 2020 or something like that within that, if they're politically manoeuvring. It seems that targets are they way that they are going in terms of setting the cap in their 'cap and trade'. What do you think would be the right approach? Obviously capping global growth in emissions within two years is a very good approach, but beyond that what sort of approach would Australia require?
James Hansen: Well, I think that the target in terms of percent when you're talking about a date which is quite a distance in the future is just not very helpful. It's a way for politicians to get out of doing something now, because they put off the target to a date when they'll be out of office. So I have no objection to that except that if it allows
them to get away from taking actions that need to be done now.
Philip Sutton: We have a bit of a sense that in fact the government in Australia is beginning to gear itself up to take climate change quite seriously, but they're obviously struggling to come to terms with the seriousness of the real position on the ground. Do you have a sense of how long it would take to get the arctic ice back, presumably we'll lose it in a couple of years time; completely during summer. But just interested to know how long you think it would take to actually restore it if we could manage to trigger a cooling.
James Hansen: The Arctic sea ice is a very different problem from the ice sheet, in the sense that the Arctic sea ice is a reversible phenomenon on time scales that we can think about, unlike the ice sheets. If we let those reach a point of no return so they start to collapse then we're really in trouble, because it takes many thousands
of years to build an ice sheet.
But the Arctic sea ice, that would require that we get the planet energy balance back in balance, and that is out of balance now by something between half a watt and one watt, so it's a fairly steep order to do that. It is the order of this 50ppm CO2 that we would need to get.
It can be done with a combination of methane, black soot and other pollutants [these] can contribute to the reduction in the forcing. So it's something that could be done in a time scale of a few decades. Now it's not certain that the Arctic summer sea ice is going to be gone in a few years. Some people say it could be as soon as 5-10 years and others think it could be a few decades. But to get it back is a time scale of decades I think, that's minimum.
Philip Sutton: Do you have any estimates of how much warming would actually be caused by the albedo flip itself. We've sort of seen some rough estimates of about a 1/3 of a degree. I was just wondering if that was anything in the ball park of what you've been seeing or calculating through your models.
James Hansen: If you want to look at it that way, that's the right ball park. It's a positive feedback, an amplifying feedback, which makes the change there go more rapidly, and to a certain extent it will contribute to warming at other latitudes. But I think it is the right order of magnitude. I haven't actually looked at it and done a calculation in
that sense, but that's the right order of magnitude.
Philip Sutton: Right.
Matthew Wright: Matthew here again and just to let everyone know, that was Philip Sutton who has been assisting me with questions, from the Greenleap Strategic Institute, co-author of Climate Code Red which relies on a lot of material from Dr. James Hansen. I noted that you had sent a draft letter the um? the U.K.?
Scott Bilby: Gordon Brown.
Matthew Wright: Gordon Brown, the UK Prime Minister requesting that they don't build any new coal fired power plants without carbon capture and storage, and a similar story where you've been in hearings in I think it was Iowa to stop Coal Power Plants.
James Hansen: Yes.
Matthew Wright: We've got some proposals here unfortunately that don't involve carbon capture and storage there's an HRL energy project in Victoria, and in NSW Michael Costa is pretty bullish on building a new coal fired power station. He sees no other option for them. What do you say to these politicians who are really pushing this line?
James Hansen: Well, I think that it's going to become very clear, I would say within a decade or so, that these coal plants are simply not compatible with keeping a planet resembling the one in which civilisation developed. And I think there is going to be eventually pressure to in effect bulldoze those plants, so economically they just don't make sense. You are not going to be able to leave them there 50 years. It will become clear long before 50 years that we have to get rid of those, so it doesn't make sense.
Matthew Wright: In terms of what we've heard from you and others, generally we've been pushing the line that we need to, as soon as possible, get all our emissions down to near zero emissions, so that could be a time frame of say 2020; halving our emissions in the next 3 years locally here in Victoria and then concurrently developing, you
talked about soils, the agri-char process to draw down atmospheric carbon. Will we require things like seeding the atmosphere with sulphates in order to reflectlight away from the Arctic ice or will that be sufficient, just the agri-char concurrently developed while getting our emissions down near zero?
James Hansen: My comment on that would be, we don't know, you know we're pushing the atmospheric composition beyond the level which will give us a stable climate, so we're overshooting the acceptable level. And we don't know how long we can stay in a state where we've overshot that level. Obviously, if you overshoot for one day, that's not going to cause a problem. It's a question of how many years can you leave it at a level which is going to cause long term unacceptable impacts, like instability of the ice sheets.
We just don't have a good way to make an accurate assessment. That's because there has been no prior examples in the earth's history where greenhouse gases have increased this rapidly. There have been fast changes when negative forcings, when asteroids hit the planet or when large volcano's go off, but we don't have any examples of large positive warming forcings. So it's really a hard question to answer, but I think that sensible actions, phasing out coal use where we don't capture the CO2, and reducing non CO2 forcings may be able to get us back on a track without unnatural geo-engineering type actions. But that's my guess, I don't really have a good way to quantify that.
Philip Sutton: Yes, I think that question about the speed of bringing the system back into a safe sort of configuration is a really key question because when we looked at the recommendations from the Garnaut review, or the interim recommendations, that came out yesterday. It was very clear that they understood that things were much more serious than perhaps the IPCC consensus view had indicated but when you read the recommendations, it seemed like they felt we had a reasonable amount of time to get things under control. Is there any work being done through the scientific community to try and get a handle on that question of how rapidly we'd need to get things back to a safe configuration.
James Hansen: That's the key question, but it's a very hard one because the systems in question are non-linear. Inherently it's very difficult to predict a point of collapse. Whether you're talking about an ice sheet collapsing or whether you're talking about an ecosystem collapsing because as some species go extinct, that effects others because they're all connected. So it's just inherently a very difficult non-linear problem, and the models are just not up-to snuff as far as giving us the numbers for that. We can't simulate the responses that are occurring right now in Greenland and West Antarctica.
Philip Sutton: Do you think its worth, I mean when I look at the issue I tend to focus a fair bit on the arctic ice and then try to work out, I mean it seems to be the most significant big flip that we've had so far, that is very clearly under way?
James Hansen: Ok, that one is a little, a little easier, and it's partly because we can see what is happening empirically and because it is a reversible phenomenon. It's one where I would argue you can base your estimates on the planet's energy balance and we're not measuring that as well as we should. It requires good measurements of ocean temperatures throughout the whole ocean, including the deep ocean and the high latitudes. It is easier than problems like the ice sheets.
Philip Sutton: Right, do you think we can have a safe climate without having the Arctic ice restoration. In other words is that actually an essential??
James Hansen: You know that's a good question and it's probably not, because I can't imagine that in the long run Greenland would be stable if the Arctic is ice free in the warm season. I think we do need to plan on restoring sea ice in the Arctic, preventing a complete loss of sea ice there if we want to assure that our shore lines are going to stay where they are now.
Philip Sutton: Yes, it does seem me that because that was a much more visible and obvious and estimable problem that if in fact it turned out to be one of the critical links then even if we don't know the answer on a number of other parts of the puzzle that that may give us sufficient sort of policy guide in the short term to drive a lot of public policy, then of course as we get better modelling we can refine it in relation to other issues.
James Hansen: Yes I think that's a very sensible way to look at it.
Matthew Wright: On the solutions side, you said that if clean coal came with carbon capture and storage (CCS) - but we've actually got Australian scientists in the United States right who've got a lot of venture capital behind them 50, 100 million dollars, like Dr David Mills from Ausra. His technology uses Fresnel flat plate collectors to mimic
those Mojave desert concentrating solar thermal plants. Wouldn't it be better for us to invest in that basically demonstrated commercial technology rather than keep pursuing coal carbon capture and storage, given that CCS with coal tends to be advocated not as a retrofit option?
James Hansen: Well, I think we have to do both of those and a number of another things. The problem is I don't think there is one silver bullet that is going to solve this problem. We've been putting far too little into research and development to find technological ways of addressing this.
Concentrated solar looks extremely promising but I wouldn't say that's going to solve all the problems so I think we should look at as many things as possible. And of course we would encourage that if we would have a carbon price. It would bring out innovation - some things that we can't even think of so we need to encourage technological innovation.
Philip Sutton: That's definitely one of the strong recommendations from the Garnaut review and the Australian government has indicated that it will in fact move quite strongly on the carbon cap and then generating a price from that.
James Hansen: I think that would be helpful.
Matthew Wright: Is there anything you can say to those people, I think the remaining big excuse that's being kicked around is that you've got your developing countries, you've heard it a million times and they're not doing anything so why should we. How do you frame the response around that? How do we put it to those people we're endangering ourselves here?
James Hansen: Well, they aren't going to do anything until we do, and they're not going to have the mechanisms for fixing the problem if we don't develop them. You know, we've caused the problem and we're going to have to help take the lead in developing the solutions and we don't have any time to waste arguing about whether developing countries will come along, I'm sure they will, we can't ask them to take the lead. We certainly have to do that.
Matthew Wright: So if we are looking at such dramatic cuts, the convergence is going to be clearly quite soon so we're going to have to develop these renewable energy technologies and other zero emission technologies and some people are even advocating that we'd be paying places like China to close down their older coal-fired power stations. Do you envisage that that would be the way?
James Hansen: We're going to have to help them with the technology. It's analogous to the way we solved the ozone problem, or at least that is on a direction which will solve it. We provide technology and we provided some economic assistance in adopting that technology, but China has as much to lose if not more than we do with climate change, so I'm confident that they will come along and they will be able to share the task of reducing the emissions, but we're at least going to have to provide the technological help and we should consider the technology that we develop to be for the global good and not insist that they pay special prices to the people who invented them because we're going to have to get them implemented pretty quickly.
Philip Sutton: Jim, I was just wondering going back to December last year, you gave a presentation to the American Geophysical Union Conference suggesting that the CO2 target might well be somewhere in the range of 300 parts per million to 350. What sort of reaction have you had from the scientific community and from the wider community to that proposition?
James Hansen:There has been some concern that they think this is unrealistic, and therefore they say, 'well, contrarians will use this as an argument that we shouldn't do anything because it looks like its too difficult'. Frankly, I don't agree with that. I think an initial target of 350 is doable provided we phase out coal, and although that sounds
like a real tough job, in fact it's doable and if we don't do it there is no question, if you look at the times in the earth's history when there was that much CO2 in the atmosphere it was a completely different planet. We have to do it and it is doable, if you compare the difficulty of replacing coal-fired power with something else which could include coal provided it has CO2 capture. Well that's not that difficult, I mean if we compare it to how much effort we put into World War II, it's a doable job and the incentives are just as great as they were then. So I'm a little surprised that some scientists are saying we have to make the target something that is doable. I think we have to make the target whatever is needed.
Philip Sutton: My sense is that the scientific community, certainly the Australian community which I make some effort to keep in touch with, has been encouraged if you like to be much more focused on the science, from the very fact that you've been prepared to speak out like that. So I think that one shouldn't underestimate the long term effect on peoples' perception of the issue through taking what was at the time obviously a very courageous position. You know the feedback we're getting is a lot of people are now seeing that they can actually, if you like, put more emphasis on the science because you've done that yourself.
James Hansen: Well I'm glad to hear that.
Matthew Wright: Thank you very much Dr Hansen, we appreciate you joining us on the Beyond Zero show and hopefully we can speak to you again later in the year.
James Hansen: Ok great, it was my pleasure, thanks a lot.
Matthew Wright: You're on the Beyond Zero show with Philip Sutton from the Greenleap Strategic Institute, Scott Bilby campaigner with BZE and Miwa Tominaga - over to you Scott.
SB: We've just been speaking with James Hansen director of the Goddard Institute of Space Studies at NASA and you're listening to Beyond Zero and it's put on by Climate Change awareness group called Beyond Zero Emissions. If you want to find out more about Beyond Zero Emissions go to www.beyondzeroemissions.org The time now is 8:58, and if you'd like to get a copy of Code Red, a document released recently by Philip Sutton and David Spratt can you tell us what the URL for that is?
PS: OK it's downloadable from, http://climatecodered.net/
Matthew Wright: Thank you Philip our special guest this morning from the Greenleap Strategic Institute
Monday, January 21, 2008
Fossil Fools' Day
Link: http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/736/38101
Call for a national day of action against climate change on April 1, 2008 The latest research shows that the effects of climate change are speeding up, with real dangers of self-perpetuating, or “runaway”, global warming. At the same time, global carbon emissions are rising at higher rates than ever before. Australia continues to hold the position of the highest greenhouse gas emitting country per capita, and is the world’s biggest exporter of coal.
The message is clear — the world can’t wait. For far too long fossil fuel industries and other dirty industries have been dangerously fooling around with the planet and our future.
This is a call from Resistance and the Australian Student Environment Network for a national day of student action against the fossil fools in industry and parliament, who are pushing the earth towards climate chaos.
The movement for action on climate change has made a lot of progress in the past two years. We forced climate skeptics to acknowledge the problem and helped to get rid of the Howard government for its inaction on climate change. While the Rudd government’s decision to ratify Kyoto represents a victory for the movement, our job is far from over.
The reality is that if Australia does not move immediately to break its dependence on fossil fuels, no meaningful emission reduction targets will be met. We have to demand that state and federal governments stop the expansion of the coal industry, reverse the approval of the pulp mill in Tasmania, keep electricity generation in public hands and shift the billions of dollars of government funds currently spent each year to subsidise the fossil fuel industries into renewable energy industries.
As students and young people, we have an important role to play in propelling the climate action movement forward and forcing the government to take the necessary action. We have to break the bipartisan consensus on mythical “clean coal” technology and uranium mining. We have to end the wars for oil. And we want to see investment into our universities for researching renewable, not fossil fuel and nuclear, technologies.
The youth blocs of high school and university students at Walk Against Warming in 2007 were an example of what we can organise on a much bigger scale this year, as we build the student environment movement. Resistance and the Australian Student Environment Network are calling on everyone concerned about climate change to initiate discussions and start planning a nationally-coordinated day of student action on April 1 — Fossil Fools’ Day, as part of an international day of action planned for that day.
Call for a national day of action against climate change on April 1, 2008 The latest research shows that the effects of climate change are speeding up, with real dangers of self-perpetuating, or “runaway”, global warming. At the same time, global carbon emissions are rising at higher rates than ever before. Australia continues to hold the position of the highest greenhouse gas emitting country per capita, and is the world’s biggest exporter of coal.
The message is clear — the world can’t wait. For far too long fossil fuel industries and other dirty industries have been dangerously fooling around with the planet and our future.
This is a call from Resistance and the Australian Student Environment Network for a national day of student action against the fossil fools in industry and parliament, who are pushing the earth towards climate chaos.
The movement for action on climate change has made a lot of progress in the past two years. We forced climate skeptics to acknowledge the problem and helped to get rid of the Howard government for its inaction on climate change. While the Rudd government’s decision to ratify Kyoto represents a victory for the movement, our job is far from over.
The reality is that if Australia does not move immediately to break its dependence on fossil fuels, no meaningful emission reduction targets will be met. We have to demand that state and federal governments stop the expansion of the coal industry, reverse the approval of the pulp mill in Tasmania, keep electricity generation in public hands and shift the billions of dollars of government funds currently spent each year to subsidise the fossil fuel industries into renewable energy industries.
As students and young people, we have an important role to play in propelling the climate action movement forward and forcing the government to take the necessary action. We have to break the bipartisan consensus on mythical “clean coal” technology and uranium mining. We have to end the wars for oil. And we want to see investment into our universities for researching renewable, not fossil fuel and nuclear, technologies.
The youth blocs of high school and university students at Walk Against Warming in 2007 were an example of what we can organise on a much bigger scale this year, as we build the student environment movement. Resistance and the Australian Student Environment Network are calling on everyone concerned about climate change to initiate discussions and start planning a nationally-coordinated day of student action on April 1 — Fossil Fools’ Day, as part of an international day of action planned for that day.
Friday, November 16, 2007
Aust power stations among world's worst CO2 polluters
Australia's energy industry representatives have admitted Australia does have some of the world's dirtiest power stations and is the world's worst per capita greenhouse polluter.
According to the study by the Washington-based Centre for Global Development, Australian power plants produce more carbon dioxide emissions per person each year than the United States, and almost five times as much as China.
But clean coal advocates say the Australian energy industry is working on a cleaner, greener future.
Early on Wednesday morning, 15 Greenpeace activists snuck into the Munmorah Power Station on the New South Wales central coast.
They chained themselves to the plant's coal-feeder belt. All were arrested, but they claim to have reached their objective of disrupting production at the plant.
Greenpeace says the Munmorah Station represents an old style of power production and its carbon emissions are harmful to the environment.
Greenpeace campaign director Steve Campbell says the activity is part of a fight against coal-fired electricity generation, and he has warned other electricity generators to expect similar treatment.
"Greenpeace around the world has been campaigning against coal for some time and in the last couple of years of course we've been very active to stop the opening of a coal mine in the Hunter Valley, which is Anvil Hill," he said.
"But we are also escalating our focus on coal-fired power generation because clearly this is the biggest issue for Australia in terms of our own CO2 emissions."
Bayswater and Eraring
Two other New South Wales power stations could be on their hit list. The Bayswater and Eraring plants in the Hunter Valley have been identified within a list of the top 100 greenhouse gas emitters in the world.
They are named in an international study of the world's 50,000 power stations, which ranks Australia as the world's worst greenhouse gas emitter on a per capita basis.
The study says Australian power plants produce more than 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions per person each year.
By comparison, the United States comes in second at more than nine tonnes per person, while China is down the list with two tonnes per person.
Frank van Schagen is the head of the Cooperative Research Centre for Coal in Sustainable Development. He says the numbers speak for themselves.
"Australia's average efficiency for coal-fired generation is about 36 per cent in energy conversion - internationally, if you took a global average, it's about 30," he said.
"So Australia has some of the best, and it also has some of the oldest, but it doesn't have the worst, shall we say."
Each of these stations produce more than 18 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year. The operators of the two plants declined to comment on the study.
Brown or black coal
Both the Bayswater and Eraring Plants burn black coal.
To Greens Senator Bob Brown, the whole picture of CO2 emissions from electricity production must include the impact of brown coal-fired power stations such as the Hazelwood plant in Victoria.
"It doesn't take into account the fact that some power stations are putting out two, three, four times as much as electricity as others," Senator Brown said.
"When you look at it per unit of electricity, those brown coal-burning stations in Victoria go right to the dirtiest top of the league.
"Coal itself is a huge menace in terms of greenhouse gas production going into the atmosphere and the threat that's now creating for the world's environment and economy.
"But brown coal is 30 to 50 per cent worse in greenhouse gas emissions for the amount of electricity being produced, even than black coal."
But Mr van Schagen says the future of coal-fired electricity generation is not all bleak.
He says the rapid development of clean coal technologies is making it an environmentally sustainable option.
"What we have is a legacy in Australia of a dependence on cheap coal-fired power electricity, and what's been happening over the last number of years is organisations such as mine and others around the world have been working to look at potential ways of reducing emissions from power stations," he said.
"Hence we have activities that are looking at capturing the CO2 and storing some in aquifers, so potentially reducing emissions from coal-fired power stations to, say, 10 per cent or less than they currently emit."
Federal Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Labor's environment spokesman Peter Garrett were not available for comment.
Munmorah operator Delta Electricity says Greenpeace's actions have not disrupted power generation.
Thursday, November 01, 2007
Australia scores badly on emissions growth report
Tim Colebatch and Jewel Topsfield, November 1, The Age
The bank report shows that between 1994 and 2004, Australia's annual emissions of carbon dioxide (the world's main greenhouse gas) increased by 107 million tonnes, or 38 per cent. Environment Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared yesterday that Australia was "leading the world on climate change".
Australia's emissions grew by more than the combined increase in emissions by Britain, France and Germany, which have 10 times our population.
In Denmark, which has become the world leader in wind energy, carbon dioxide emissions fell by 9 million tonnes, or 13 per cent.
The report, Growth and CO
It said that on a population basis, Australia had the sixth highest emissions of carbon dioxide — 19.36 tonnes per head in 2004, roughly three times that of Sweden and Switzerland, more than five times that of China, 19 times that of India and 72 times that of Bangladesh.
The figures undermine the Government's efforts to present Australia as a world leader in tackling climate change.
Prime Minister John Howard and Opposition Leader Kevin Rudd this week pledged not to sign any new agreement on climate change that does not include developing countries, but the figures show why developing countries will not agree to cut their emissions.
For Australia, there was some good news in the report. First, the bank found the rate of Australia's emissions growth fell sharply in the second half of the decade, suggesting that government, business and households' efforts to slow the pace had some effect.
Second, the figures show no strict correlation between emissions and incomes. Switzerland, Sweden and France, which are as rich as Australia or richer, all produce only a third as much carbon dioxide per head as Australia. All rely heavily on nuclear and hydro power for their electricity.
Australia's emissions are high largely because it relies on heavily polluting coal for electricity; specialises in energy-intensive industries such as aluminium; has a large car fleet with poor fuel efficiency; and lags behind Europe in energy efficiency standards for buildings and appliances.
Mr Turnbull said the post-Kyoto agreement was now the main issue in the climate change debate, and he accused Labor of again adopting a Coalition policy.
"Climate change is the biggest economic challenge the world faces," Mr Turnbull said. "You have to ask yourself whether a team which was wrong all year, and then in the space of a few hours does a complete backflip, has either the commitment, the capacity or the competence to get the job done.
"Australia is leading the world on climate change. We are going to meet our Kyoto target. We are leading the world to reduced deforestation, the second largest source of emissions. Who is leading the world in clean coal research? Australia. Who is slapping the coal industry in the face? Labor."
But Mr Rudd denied that Labor's post-Kyoto policy was a copy of the Government's. "Mr Howard, as a climate change sceptic, has never embraced a carbon target for Australia in the existing commitment period," he said. "His historical scepticism, rejection entirely of the Kyoto framework, stands on the record."
Mr Rudd's plan for Labor to lift its target for "new" renewable energy to 20 per cent of electricity demand by 2020 left the Coalition having a bet both ways yesterday. While Mr Turnbull and Nationals senator Barnaby Joyce criticised Labor's target for shutting the door on future coal-fired power stations, Mr Howard said he was considering adopting it as Government policy.
The coal miners' union, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, said employers were relaxed about it.
"That's what they tell us privately, they're relaxed about emissions trading. Really, it's political scare campaigning by the Government," the union's Tony Maher told the ABC. "You've got to bear in mind the energy growth between now and 2020 will be between 30 and 40 per cent, so there's plenty of room for various energy sources."
Opposition resources spokesman Chris Evans said the renewable energy target would deliver only half the new capacity needed to meet future energy demands.
Meanwhile, the Victorian Government said that proposed legislation creating renewable energy targets, introduced in State Parliament yesterday, would be the first in Australia to cut greenhouse emissions. Under the targets, which would see 10 per cent of electricity come from renewables by 2016, retailers will be obliged to provide incentives to householders to install measures such as energy-efficient lighting and ceiling insulation.
Victorian Energy Minister Peter Batchelor said the scheme aimed to cut the average household power bill by about $45 a year.
With PETER KER and AAP
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