Sir David Attenborough addressed world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference claiming if we don’t take action: “the collapse of our civilisations … is on the horizon.”
How many warnings will it take before we demand climate action?
Not enough is being done in fact our emissions are growing.
A man made disaster of global scale is the mess we are leaving for our children and future generations.
We must demand climate action now.
Time to join the scientists and the students demanding climate action.
This Saturday we can stand with our children and demand a better future.
The Australian Academy of Science released this Video of Sir David Attenborough at COP24
If want to look at solutions for the climate crisis we face watch Bernie Sanders Town Hall with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Solving the Climate Crisis
We urgently need a Global Green New Deal It’s Humanity’s Greatest Moral Challenge.
Time is up. The Liberal party won’t reform, so it is time to stop fighting, split and take the opportunity to compete for the support of the public.
TheLiberal partyis now broken, brand-damaged and unable to attract new members that would enable it to represent a “broad church”.
The failure of the existing Liberal party to address climate change or to support an integrity commission is unacceptable.
Nowhere is this failure more obvious than in its continued support for the Adani coalmine and new coal-fired power stations.
I expected more from Scott Morrison after theVictorian walloping. Instead we get the very same. Slippery answers to everything. Coal, coal, coal and soaring greenhouse gas emissions.
Scott Morrison Australia’s new Prime Minister loves coal
Refusing to reduce emissions as cheaply as possible is irrational, immoral and economically reckless. Achieving emission reductions of just 2% a year as proposed by the Labor party in the electricity sector costs very little and won’t risk system stability or security.
We should be aiming for a 2% reduction in emissions every year to ensure Australia does its fair share to tackle climate change. Instead, emissions are increasing and are at a seven year high.
Something must lie behind the failure of the Liberal party to accept policies that are economically rational and environmentally sound, so some sunlight from an integrity commission should be welcomed by all Australians.
Wherever you look, something is wrong.
The pursuit by ministers of baseload coal power when we need dispatchable renewable energy and storage.
Claims by ministers that we need more fossil fuels and that they are cheaper than renewables or that clean coal is the answer.
Claims by ministers that as Australia only emits 1.3% of global pollution we have no role to play, ignoring the fact that we are only 0.3% of the population and that we will be heavily damaged by the impacts of climate change.
Students protest against the Adani Coal Mine in Parliament House
And the final insult – allowing the Adani coalmine to proceed when it lacks a social licence, is completely inconsistent with the need to tackle climate change and frankly smells withdonations, overseas trips and wedding parties.
We desperately need an integrity commission to investigate potential conflicts of interest that see a revolving door between the coal industry and minister’s offices. It is hard to believe donors don’t have influence on the selection of ministers to some degree.
Adani donations to the Liberal National Party
Members of parliament that are selected to be ministers stand to receive additional pay of more than $150,000, boosting their remuneration towards $500,000. It seems obvious that such ministers would be more likely to promote the views of the large donors that influenced their appointment in the first place.
We need a parliament that accepts science.
We need a parliament that respects our geography and rationally accepts that our neighbours and their views have special relevance and their concerns deserve special attention, just as my neighbours on my street deserve my special consideration.
We need a root and branch review of the political remuneration system that ensures that it provides the right incentives for all politicians to work for the benefit of our country rather than fight against each other to secure the “spoils of government”.
As a Liberal, I have had enough and, as evidenced by the swing in safe Liberal seats in Victoria, I am not alone.
Students in their thousands protesting for climate action
We must provide alternatives for Liberals to vote for at the next federal election, and I hope to see independent Liberals provide electors in safe Liberal seats with that choice. We need to return to the day where politicians know that their job is not to retain their job but rather to represent their electorate, who, if they are lucky, reward them with their job.
The Liberal party brand has been so damaged and trust so completely destroyed that no amount of “shuffling the deck chairs” will change the outcome of the next federal election.
It is simply impossible for many Liberal voters to vote for a party that:
works to prevent any action on climate change
has the potential to be controlled by the mining industry or whichever new industry is willing to pay for favours (clubs, internet gambling, pokies, firearms and many more)
rejects the establishment of an integrity commission
rejects donation reform and transparency and promotes members for their fundraising skills rather than policy and communication skills
backs the Adani coalmine, which has no social licence and is inconsistent with our need to tackle climate change; and
regardless of the election result seems to be heading towards installing Tony Abbott or Peter Dutton as the next party leader
Liberal voters will align with independent Liberals who have real world experience, who will put the interests of their electorates first and who support:
tight fiscal responsibility so the country operates within its means
strong border controls, backed by a compassionate approach to the treatment of refugees
free enterprise and small business, balanced with appropriate regulation to ensure competition is fair
transparency, integrity and trust; and
real action on climate change that is consistent with what the science is demanding
While I am sure many “shock jocks” who are doing daily damage to the Liberal party will yet again venture to their usual corner of scare tactics about the arrival of independent Liberals, there is no justification for that.
Independent Liberals will move with transparency and integrity, and will clearly state their principals and beliefs so electors know what they are voting for. Just imagine how refreshing that would be in the current world of dark party politics where trading principles for position and power is considered a positive skill.
Once the Liberal party reforms and rebalances, Liberal independents might elect to join again.
•Oliver Yates is a member of the Liberal party and former chief executive of the CleanEnergyFinance Corporation
This morning, perhaps the most famous naturalist in the world, David Attenborough, addressed that conference and said: ‘It is a man-made disaster on a global scale and our greatest threat in thousands of years of human existence.’
This very grave statement by the most legendary naturalist on the face of the planet follows the recent publication of a confronting report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC, which laid out the impacts of climate change at a level of two degrees Celsius of global warming on the one hand and 1.5 degrees Celsius following the Paris climate agreement of 2015.
That report shows that two degrees of global warming will have a devastating impact on our natural environment and human society as we understand it.
Just as one example, the IPCC has said that, at two degrees of global warming, more than 99 per cent of the world’s coral reefs will be destroyed—almost all of our world’s coral reefs will be destroyed.
Our own coral reef, the Great Barrier Reef, one of the seven natural wonders of the world, has already been subject to two major bleaching events in the last three years. And the Bureau of Meteorology only recently advised that there is a 70 per cent chance of an El Nino building in the Pacific over the course of the coming summer, which would place the reef under threat of a third major bleaching event in just four years. Before these last three years there has been only one major bleaching event in the recorded history of the Great Barrier Reef.
It’s not just the IPCC report that has underlined the gravity of even two degrees of global warming. The World Bank only a couple of years ago indicated that two degrees of global warming would wipe out as much as 20 per cent of global cereal production, including fully 50 per cent of cereal production on the continent of Africa, which, as we know, is already struggling to feed its people and will be the area where most of the world’s population increase over coming decades occurs. The grave thing about these reports is that we are not even close to tracking to keeping global warming below two degrees. At the moment we’re advised that we’re currently tracking to somewhere between three and four degrees of global warming, whose impacts are barely able to be imagined.
The world is now facing a climate emergency. This emergency won’t unfold over the course of the coming year or even few years; this emergency will unfold over coming decades, but we are starting to see the impacts of climate change now. Much earlier than 20 or 25 years ago we were advised that we’d see those impacts. We’re starting to see them now and they are frightening. Barack Obama said when he was President of the United States:
We are the first generation to feel the impact of climate change and the last generation that can do something about it.
Last week here in Australia literally thousands of students, overwhelmingly with the permission of their parents, decided to take a day off school and march in the streets to protest at the lack of reasonable action by this parliament and this government. We all want kids to go to school, but I think on this side of the parliament we also understand the deep frustration that young Australians at school and beyond school age feel at the lack of action by our generation on climate change, particularly in this building. I talk to young Australians, as I know members of this House across the aisle talk to young Australians, all the time. I hear them saying just how let down they feel by our generation in dealing with something that they feel is going to be such a substantial issue over the course of what we hope will be their very long lives. They feel let down in an unforgiveable way.
None of us should fall for the rubbish that is often spouted by commentators—and unfortunately some on the other side of the House—that what Australia does doesn’t matter in this debate.
Yes, we are a small nation.
We don’t even rate in the top 50 of the world’s nations in population, but we rate in the top 15 in the total amount of greenhouse gases emitted from this economy.
We are a wealthy nation that has, along with other members of the OECD, grown wealthy on the back of long-term industrialisation.
We are the highest per capita producer of greenhouse gases.
If Australia won’t act and take responsible strong action on climate change, which nation on the face of the planet should be expected to act?
We have a deep responsibility in this area, as a good global citizen, a friend and a neighbour to communities in our region for whom climate change poses a threat.
As parents, grandparents, uncles and aunties we have a generational responsibility to do everything we reasonably can to ensure our children and grandchildren enjoy a natural environment at least as good as the one that we enjoy.
We are a wealthy nation, but it is in our own self-interest to act on climate change, because our continent is deeply vulnerable to the impacts of climate change.
This continent already pushes us up right against the limits of human tolerance to heat.
This continent has agricultural regions that are deeply vulnerable to very clear structural trends, already identified by the Bureau of Meteorology and the CSIRO, in rainfall, particularly the Murray-Darling Basin region in eastern Australia and the Wheatbelt in the South West of Western Australia.
We largely live on coasts, with coastal communities that are deeply vulnerable to very quickly accelerating sea level rise, which over time will pose risks to literally billions and billions of dollars of assets. And we know that already the increase in heat events and other extreme weather events is posing a substantial risk to the health of Australians.
In this area, government action and government policy matter. When we were in government, carbon pollution levels came down by more than 10 per cent in those six years. We were the fourth most attractive investment destination in renewable energy. We had state governments in New South Wales and Queensland finally acting on an end to broadscale land clearing of remnant vegetation.
This government’s record could not be different. Carbon pollution has been rising since this government came to office and is projected to continue to rise all the way to 2030, which is as far as the government’s projections go.
The new climate change minister can’t even pinpoint a day on which she thinks carbon pollution might eventually peak.
We are now pretty much the only major advanced economy where carbon pollution and greenhouse gases are going up rather than coming down.
In spite of the Prime Minister and all of his ministers getting up at the despatch box and doing media conferences to say that we’ll meet our targets in a canter, no-one believes them.
Their own data doesn’t show it and the United NationsEmissions gap report 2018from a couple of weeks ago doesn’t show it, because it simply is not happening. As Malcolm Turnbull said again today, as Rob Stokes said on the front page ofThe Sydney Morning Herald, this federal coalition is simply genetically incapable of taking climate change action. It is so deeply divided that it is incapable of taking action in this policy area.
It doesn’t have to be that way. The UK Conservatives understood that this was in the national interest. They’re tracking to a budget at around 2030 of not a five per cent reduction in carbon pollution, which is this government’s track record, but a 61 per cent reduction in carbon pollution. At the same time, they’re producing about three times as much steel as Australia and have 800,000 workers still working in the automotive industry—an industry that this government shut down in Australia—which demonstrates that decarbonisation and the maintenance of a strong industrial base are possible and are consistent with a strong, growing economy.
As Malcolm Turnbull has said, this coalition is just incapable. Its division, its ideological obsessions, are holding this nation hostage on a critically important policy area. The division in the coalition party room is holding future generations hostage. That’s why they were marching in the streets last week. Labor isn’t just ready. We’re not just ready to take action here; we are impatient to take action, because we know that this is in the national interest, that this is in our children’s interest, and that this is in our grandchildren’s interest. But to look after those interests, we need a change of government.
School students have joined a group of 100 people peacefully occupying the foyer of Parliament house to call for climate justice now and an end to the Adani coal mine. #ClimateStrike #StopAdani
Speaking at a televised town hall on Monday, Rep.-electAlexandria Ocasio-Cortez(D-N.Y.) said that the government’s next steps toward fighting climate change need to be as momentous as the civil rights movement or NASA’s push to put a man on the moon.
“This is going to be the Great Society, the moonshot, the civil rights movement of our generation. That is the scale of the ambition that this movement is going to require,” the New York Democrat said.
Sitting on a panel during the “Climate Change Town Hall” organized by Sen.Bernie Sanders(I-Vt.), Ocasio-Cortez challenged the Trump administration’s scaled-back approach to fighting global warming and called for more aggression from Congress once she joins the House in January.
“It’s unsurprising that the response to any bold proposal that we have is to incite fear. To incite fear of loss, to incite fear of others.
To incite fear of our future. But the only way we are going to get out of this situation is to be courageous,” she said of the White House.
The comments from the bold progressive, who created shock waves over the summer with her primary win over veteran Rep. Joseph Crowley (D-N.Y.), echo an initiative she’s been pushing since the midterm elections.
The “Green New Deal” is an idea Ocasio-Cortez first introduced during a sit-down at House Minority LeaderNancy Pelosi‘s (D-Calif.) congressional office in late November. It has since been championed by 15 Democratic House lawmakers as a way to create a select committee to focus on transitioning the country toward 100 percent renewable energy.
Sanders, who has been a vocal supporter of the effort, highlighted the need for multiple venues of climate action during his town hall. As evidence for the need for swift action, Sanders pointed to recently released climate reports from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as one from the United States. Both warn of the irreversible effects of warming temperatures.
“We are dealing with what the scientific community tells us is the great crisis facing our planet and facing humanity, and that is climate change,” Sanders said.
“All of these reports make a very simple and profound point. And that is, time is late and as a planet that means countries all over the world, not just the U.S and Russia, are going to have to stand up and take on the fossil fuel industry. … This is a crisis situation, it is unprecedented and we’ve got to act in an unprecedented way.”
Sanders blasted many of his colleagues, including some Democrats, who take money from the fossil-fuel industry in the form of campaign contributions.
Membership to the Green New Deal select committee would include a promise to not accept donations from any fossil fuel company.
Critics have blamed the industry and its lobbyists for binding the hands of Republicans in Congress who are either skeptical of the human role in climate change, or else argue moving toward renewable energy is not economically feasible.
Both Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez decried those as false talking points.
“First of all it’s just plain wrong, that idea that we are going to somehow lose economic activity,” said Ocasio-Cortez.
“It’s inevitable that we will create jobs. We can use the transition to 100 percent renewable energy as the vehicle to truly deliver and establish economic, social and racial justice in the United States of America.”
Ocasio-Cortez, an emerging progressive darling who has faced a number of potshots from Republicans and right-leaning publications during the transition period, took the opportunity at the town hall to chide her critics.
“It’s an interesting puzzle in how media, especially you know right-ring media, but all media treats me. Because in our journey, I am a working person who won a seat against all odds,” she said.
Sanders, interjected adding: “Can we interrupt this program to make an announcement on your shoes?”
The comment was a jab at Fox News’s morning show “Fox & Friends,” which the day of the federal government’s national climate report’s release opted to focus a segment on the future congresswoman’sshoes.
Looking to the future, Ocasio-Cortez pushed the importance of organizing a holistic approach to fixing climate change.
“When we try to solve this issue piecemeal, we will not solve it in time,” she warned.
Poet, scribe, climate activist, runner, builder. My book, Her Animals, is out now:http://bit.ly/2FjfLLP
At the MIT Media Lab’sDisobedience Awardceremony on Friday, someone asked me how I keep going—where I find hope.
As a climate organizer, it’s a question I get all the time, but it struck me a little differently this time. What she said was something to the effect of “On a good day, I can believe that we can win against misogyny and racism over time. But climate change, on such a short timeline?Shit.
How do you keep going?”
I was glad she asked, because we’d been asked the same on our panel, and I’d failed to say what I’d wanted to, which is that I see our job not ashavinghope, but ofmaking spacefor hope.
If we don’t act boldly in the nextcouple of years, we lose most of our leverage to save huge swaths of the astonishing life on this planet, and we fail both existing and future lives almost incomprehensibly.
Globally, acting so boldly as tonotfail is unlikely. But it doesn’t matter how unlikely a thing is; it only matters if it’s possible, and worth working for. Scientists are remarkably unified in believing itispossible, and nothing has ever beenmoreworth working for.
So our job is not to feel hope—that’s optional.
Our job is tobehope, and to make space for the chance of a different future.
Climate Strike students give us hope.
The woman who asked me the question is young, articulate, savvy. She thinks about political change a lot. So perhaps that’s why something finally struck me this morning: when people ask this question, they’re not actually questioning whether thereishope, theoretically; they’re questioning their own ability to rise to this moment in time. They’re surveying the near future and finding themselves wanting—because they’re using the wrong lens.
I should have understood that before, but I’d been distracted by the way “how do you keep going?” is nearly always paired with “how do you stay hopeful?”
So let me state clearly again: only in the Rebecca Solnit sense (where it’s “an axe you break down doors with in an emergency” and located “in the spaciousness of uncertainty [where there] is room to act”) do I have hope.
Feeling hope for any particular outcome—even avoiding the extinction of human beings—is not what fuels me.
What fuels me is the knowledge that we can still make a difference, and therefore we must: we can preserve lives, and life, in the most basic and beautiful sense possible.
It’s an astonishing and surreal luxury to know that some lives, even some species, may continue because of the work that we do. But being attached to anyparticularhope now is a fool’s game; the one thing we know for sure is that in coming decades, nearly everything will change.
If I’m fighting only for my own family, or only for human lives, or only for orcas, or only for monarch butterflies, then when I’m forced to see that one or all of those are exceedingly unlikely to survive past a few more centuries—and they are—then all heart will go out of my efforts—and other families, or humpback whales, or parrots, or wolves, will thereby lose a little bit of their hope too. And that’s senseless, because I would dedicate my life to their survival too, if I understood it to be possible.
It’s a privilege and a profound responsibility, to be born into a moment when nurturing life on Earth into the future is possible, and into a nation that has, in truth, nowhere to go but up in living up to its responsibilities.
In other words, we cannot know who and what will survive, but it’s exceedingly likely that some will, if we fight hard enough, and those are the ones that matter. It’s that “spaciousness of uncertainty”, thespace that we ourselves must make, selflessly, for other lives.
So let me ask and try to answer the question more clearly: how do we rise to this moment in time, especially if we don’t imagine ourselves powerful in the right ways?
I think we have to reconsider what we mean by power, and see that taking responsibility and taking care — for/of ourselves, the work, and others — is one of its deepest manifestations.
The Disobedience Award gathering was one of the most inspiring events I’ve been to, because of the way in which the winners and finalists held/hold power. To a person — to a woman, because all were—they held other people up, and many commented on their own privilege, in one case even while describing her abuse at the hands of state forces.
It seemed that all felt what one expressed, which is that they acted simply because they couldn’t look themselves in the mirror if they didn’t.
Several explicitly rejected the idea of themselves as heroes.
What the event was really honoring, in many ways, was resilience.
They weren’t knights in shining armor, or moved by a narrative urge to sacrifice, or touched with the light of pure faith; they were people who did the right thing under difficult circumstances, and kept doing it, and learned along the way.
In nearly all cases, they did so by joining together with others.
They didn’t have to make change by themselves; they simply helped to catalyze it, making space for others to join them, both because they needed help, and because they wantedtohelp.
I suspect they didn’t feel powerful, either, in other words—or at least, they often didn’t.
Very seldom did, if I’m speaking for myself. And I think it’s exceedingly likely that when Tarana Burke started #MeToo ten years ago, it wasn’t because she was feeling hopeful that she could eradicate sexual violence — no more than I feel hopeful that we can stop climate change.
No single drop of water can renew parched soil.
We will fail utterly if we do not share our strength. There is exactly no time to waste: whatever our gifts are, we must give them now—without specific hope, without pride, without waiting for the thing that feels just right, or the people who feel like exactly the ones we’d choose to do this work with.
We must fail, and then get up and try again.
We must work with what we have, every day that we can, as wisely as we can, together.
It’s that simple.
That’s how we keep going. And some days, at least, there is more joy in this work than I could possibly have imagined.
The collapse of civilisation and the natural world is on the horizon, Sir David Attenborough has told theUN climate change summitin Poland.
The naturalist was chosen to represent the world’s people in addressing delegates of almost 200 nations who are in Katowice to negotiate how to turn pledges made in the2015 Paris climate dealinto reality.
As part of the UN’s people’s seat initiative, messages were gathered from all over the world to inform Attenborough’s address on Monday. “Right now we are facing a manmade disaster of global scale, our greatest threat in thousands of years: climate change,” he said. “If we don’t take action, the collapse of our civilisations and the extinction of much of the natural world is on the horizon.”
“Do you not see what is going on around you?” asks one young man in avideo messageplayed as part of a montage to the delegates. “We are already seeing increased impacts of climate change in China,” says a young woman. Another woman, standing outside a building burned down by a wildfire, says: “This used to be my home.”
Attenborough said: “The world’s people have spoken. Time is running out. They want you, the decision-makers, to act now. Leaders of the world, you must lead. The continuation of civilisations and the natural world upon which we depend is in your hands.”
Attenborough urged everyone to use the UN’s newActNow chatbot, designed to give people the power and knowledge to take personal action against climate change.
TheCOP24summit was also addressed by António Guterres, the UN secretary general. “Climate change is running faster than we are and we must catch up sooner rather than later before it is too late,” he said. “For many, people, regions and even countries this is already a matter of life or death.”
Guterres said the two-week summit was the most important since Paris and that it must deliver firm funding commitments. “We have a collective responsibility to invest in averting global climate chaos,” he said.
He highlighted the opportunities of the green economy: “Climate action offers a compelling path to transform our world for the better. Governments and investors need to bet on the green economy, not the grey.”
Andrzej Duda, the president of Poland, spoke at the opening ceremony, saying the use of “efficient” coal technology was not contradictory to taking climate action. Poland generates 80% of its electricity from coal but has cut its carbon emissions by 30% since 1988 through better energy efficiency.
Friends of the Earth International said the sponsorship of the summit by a Polish coal company “raises the middle finger to the climate”.
A major goal for the Polish government at the summit is to promote a “just transition” for workers in fossil fuel industries into other jobs. “Safeguarding and creating sustainable employment and decent work are crucial to ensure public support for long-term emission reductions,” says adeclarationthat may be adopted at the summit and is supported by the EU.
In the run-up to the summit,Donald Trumpexpressed denial about climate change, while there wereattacks on the UN processfrom Brazil’s incoming administration under Jair Bolsonaro.
Ricardo Navarro, of Friends of the Earth in El Salvador, said: “We must build an alternative future based on a just energy transformation. We face the threat ofrightwing populistand climate-denying leaders further undermining climate protection and racing to exploit fossil fuels. We must resist.”
Another goal of the summit is for nations to increase their pledges to cut carbon emissions; currently they are on target for a disastrous 3C of warming. The prime minister of Fiji, Frank Bainimarama, who led the 2017 UN climate summit, said his country had raised its ambitions. He told the summit: “If we can do it, you can do it.”
The stunning wind, solar and battery costs the Coalition refuses to accept
By Giles Parkinson
Off shore wind
The response to the Labor energy policy unveiled on Thursday was entirely predictable. “Pink batts”, shouted the Coalition government. “Woah, slow down,” said the business lobby and incumbents. “Not fast enough,” said green groups and the Greens themselves.
Given those reactions, it would seem that Labor’s insistence of a 50 per cent renewable energy target, andthe $15 billion in new funds,abattery storage incentive schemeand other measures might have successfully pitched themselves into the middle green, to awkwardly borrow a golfing term, of this devilish debate. And that is exactly where they would like to be.
The Coalition and the incumbent interests may rant and rail about what they describe as the “reckless” and “wrecking ball” nature of the Labor targets, and what energy minister Angus Taylor now labels as “pink batt-eries”, but technology and economics are not on their side.
As wasrevealed earlier this week by BloombergNEF, the hosts to Labor’s policy launch, unsubsidised wind and solar are now substantially cheaper than coal, even with the added cost of storage that makes these “intermittent” sources fully “dispatchable”.
Now we can also report on BNEF’s price estimates for Australia, and it reinforces the view expressed by any number of large utilities, including the government-owned Snowy Hydro, that wind and solar are killing coal and gas on cost, and that the Coalition is barking up the wrong tree trying to shovel new investments in coal into the grid.
The graph above, provided by BNEF, is self explanatory. The LCOE of wind and solar – at $US37/MWh and $US40/MWh respectively ($A50-54/MWh) – beat the cheapest coal by a country mile. They are also ahead of “baseload” gas on bulk energy, and when added with storage beat peaking gas.
Australia, as senior BNEF analyst Seb Henbest points out, provides some of the cheapest solar in the world, ranking behind only India and Chile on the LCOE for tracking, second on non tracking solar PV, and well below the global benchmark.
And after a 13 per cent fall in global solar costs just in the last six months, Henbest says we can expect a further 46 per cent drop in the LCOE of tracking solar PV, and a 32 per cent fall in the cost of onshore wind by 2030. That puts solar at around $US20/MWh and wind as $US26/MWh. And battery storage costs will also come down.
“There is now no doubt that wind and solar PV will replace coal and gas as the backbone of future electricity systems all around the world,” Henbest says.
“They are cheaper, less polluting and, paired with batteries, increasingly flexible. This offers an opportunity for government to lower emissions and energy bills – surely something both sides of politics should be able to agree on.”
But both sides of politics do not agree on this. The Coalition government, and the incumbent coal lobby, refuse to accept the data, and seek to protect their views, business models and donations by locking themselves into the old paradigm of “base-load” and “24/7 power”.
They fail to accept that if you have dirt-cheap bulk energy such as wind and solar, then the path to a cheaper, cleaner and more reliable power system is then to fill in the gaps with the most efficient technology, and that requires dispatchability and flexibility.
The challenge is to meet demand peaks, the answer is not having too much fossil fuel generation that can’t be switched off in the middle of the night when you don’t need it.
Most of the big utilities and market operators around the world understand that. Baseload is not the only refuge of the intransigent. So too is the denial of climate science, and its half-brother, the demonisation of any proposed action on climate for fear of wrecking the economy.
Reputex, the offshoot of S&P, says it is clear that having more renewables will result in lower prices. It predicts wholesale electricity prices oscillating around $60/ MWh through to 2030, rather than above $80/MWh as seen under the low investment scenario under the 26 per cent reduction target of the current government.
The Australia Institute points out that, on its modelling, having 53 per cent renewable energy capacity by 2030 would create up to 59,000 direct jobs across the country.
And many are now pointing to the huge opportunities for Australia in manufacturing and exports of green fuels. It is impossible for Australia to return to “cheap” fuels with a system based around coal, but it can be done with wind and solar.
This is the basis for Sanjeev Gupta’s plan to install up to 10GW of solar to “solarise” the Australian economy and encourage more manufacturing. Others, like CWP Renewables, are targeting massive projects in the Pilbara to provide cheap green energy for local demand, more manufacturing, exports to south east Asia or “green fuels” to north Asia.
The north Asia markets, in particular, are desperate for these “green” fuels to power their economies. Australia is the country best placed to provide that, with its rich wind and solar resources delivering “green hydrogen”.
And on this point, Labor is quite right when it says that the answer to lower prices, lower emissions and greater reliability is renewables. It is also the answer to economic growth and opportunities for new industry.
Which takes us back to the first question about whether the transition outlined by Labor is fast enough. In terms of climate, as outlined by the IPCC and again this week by the WMO, clearly not. But this is the current state of politics.
By the time Labor gets into power and starts to implement its policies, it will be even more obvious that the transition can and should be quicker, and there will be no reason to resist.
And what did the Coalition offer us? Well, remember how they dismissed the Tesla big battery as nothing more special than the big banana? Or as the Kardashian of the energy world? Now it’s comparing household storage to pink batts.
“Australians remember the last time Labor wanted to install things in their homes. Under Bill Shorten he’d repeat Kevin Rudd’s pink batts disaster with his pink batt-eries plan,” Taylor said in a statement on Friday, while raising a new scare campaign about “carbon Tax 2.0”, in reference to the industry-specific trading schemes that even industry is now calling for.
“Labor’s reckless 45 percent emissions reduction target and 50 per cent Renewable Energy Target targets strike at the heart of middle Australia,” Taylor said.
Note: Some readers may wonder about the difference between recent auction bids – such as the sub $20/MWh bids in Mexico and the Middle East – and the LCOE cited here.
Henbest says they are different for a number of reasons:
1. The bid is for project delivery at some year on the future whereas the LCOE is for a project reaching financial close today. So often auction bids assume further technology cost declines of several years.
2. The auction bid is just for a predefined tariff period, whereas the LCOE is for the project lifetime. The difference is the merchant tail which is the period of the project life beyond the tariff.
3. Auction bids can manage inflation differently or may have very particular contract details such as multiples for generating at certain times etc.
Giles Parkinson is founder and editor of RenewEconomy.com.au, and is also the founder of OneStepOffTheGrid.com.au and founder/editor of http://www.TheDriven.io. Giles has been a journalist for 35 years and is a former business and deputy editor of the Australian Financial Review.
When on Friday 30 November, big numbers of Australia’s school kids didn’t turn up for class and tens of thousands of them marched in the streets of 30 cities and regional centres, demanding the politicians act on climate change, it sent a shock wave through the corridors of power.
Climate Strike in Cairns
Life for the big polluters and those who cover for them has been made that much more difficult.
The government is acutely aware of the implications of the young turning against it.
This is why prime minister Scott Morrison came out and patronisingly spriuked that kids should be at school and not protesting.
By doing this, of course, he inadvertently made sure the effect was the opposite to what he intended. The word got around, went down the wrong way, and made sure more took part than may otherwise have.
Although the strike was initiated by students at Castlemaine in Victoria, the organisational force was provided by the AustralianYouth Climate Coalition, which has an incredible 150,000 members.
Many more than any political party. But it was the school students from primary and secondary schools that did the work to pull it off.
Kids rally in Sydney
So many taking part suggests that this age group as a whole, cares deeply about the issue, and this is creating a new generation of activists.
Morrison’s inept display took place, because the spread and strength of the passion coming from Australia’s school kids has caught him and his people by surprise, and because the crisis ridden government heading for an election, is increasingly reacting in panic mode, rather than a worked out strategy.
Kids walking out and protesting in such numbers has a longer term and more serious implication. They are the future and what they are doing is an indication of a seismic shift in generational political attitudes. a sign of what is coming.
Years of failure to address the question in an appropriate way, has done a lot to build resentment and put the present government on the nose. Climate warming is not the only issue. It is important. At the same time, in the bigger picture, this is mingled with an overall growing distrust of politicians across society, with perceptions of rampant corruption, the stranglehold of government and society in the hands of the corporate world and growing unfairness. The young are affected by this as well. They don’t trust politicians to do the right thing either, and this is breading a new generation of activists.
Greta Thunberg
Australia’s kids want decisive action on climate change.
They hold that the government is not only not acting.
They destroying the future of the rising and coming generations as well.
They know that they are the ones who will ultimately pay the price and don’t like it one bit.
Anyone who witnessed the turnout in the streets could not help but feel the passion.
Bystanders were stunned by what they were witnessing.
Even big media had to admit something big is going on.
Passion over the threat of global warming is extending towards calling for an end to the stranglehold of big business over Australian politics and society, especially to the political establishment’s bowing before the fossil fuels industry. Failure to stop the Adani mine and rail link in Queensland got special attention. This message was load and clear.
Kids want a society and economy that is for people, and not just to fatten the bottom line not for the few at the top.
On Sunday morning hundreds of politicians, government officials and scientists will gather in the grandeur of the International Congress Centre in Katowice, Poland. It will be a familiar experience for many.
For 24 years the annual UN climate conference has served up a reliable diet of rhetoric, backroom talks and dramatic last-minute deals aimed at halting global warming.
But this year’s will be a grimmer affair – by far.
As recent reports have made clear, the world may no longer be hovering at the edge of destruction but has probably staggered beyond a crucial point of no return.
Climate catastrophe is now looking inevitable. We have simply left it too late to hold rising global temperatures to under 1.5C and so prevent a future of drowned coasts, ruined coral reefs, spreading deserts and melted glaciers.
One example was provided last week by aUN reportthat revealed attempts to ensure fossil fuel emissions peak by 2020 will fail.
Indeed the target will not even be reached by 2030.
Another, by theWorld Meteorological Organization, said the past four years had been the warmest on record and warned that global temperatures could easily rise by 3-5C by 2100, well above that sought-after goal of 1.5C. The UK will not be exempt either. The Met Office said summer temperatures could now be5.4C hotter by 2070.
At the same time, prospects of reaching global deals to halt emissions have been weakened by the spread of rightwing populism. Not much to smile about in Katowice.
Nor will the planet’s woes end in 2100. Although most discussions use the year as a convenient cut-off point for describing Earth’s likely fate, the changes we have already triggered will last well beyond that date, said Svetlana Jevrejeva, at the National Oceanography Centre, Liverpool. She has studied sea-level rises that will be triggered by melting ice sheets and expanding warm seawater in a world 3-5C hotter than it was in pre-industrial times, and concludes these could reach 0.74 to 1.8 metres by 2100. This would be enough to deluge Pacific and Indian Ocean island states and displace millions from Miami, Guangzhou, Mumbai and other low-lying cities. The total cost to the planet could top £11trillion.
Even then the seas will not stop rising, Jevrejeva added. “They will continue to climb for centuries even after greenhouse-gas levels have been stabilised. We could experience the highest-ever global sea-level rise in the history of human civilisation.”
Vast tracts of prime real estate will be destroyed – at a time when land will be needed with unprecedented desperation. Earth’s population stands at seven billion today and is predicted to rise to nine billion by 2050 and settle at over 11 billion by 2100 – when climate change will have wrecked major ecosystems and turned farmlands to dust bowls.
Residents of Anaroro, Madagascar, paddle through the flooded streets in the aftermath of a cyclone. Photograph: Gregoire Pourtier/AFP/Getty
Unfortunately many experts believe Earth’s population will actually peak well beyond 11 billion. “It could reach 15 billion,” said Sarah Harper, of Oxford’s Institute of Population Ageing. “All sorts of factors suggest women, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa, will still want to have relatively high numbers of children and this might keep the world’s population approaching 15 billion rather than 12 billion.”
The world will have double its present numbers – but with hugely reduced areas of fertile land to provide food. We will be living in a shrunken, scorched planet bursting with human beings. Somaliland gives a grim vision of this future.
In the past few years climate change has killed 70% of its livestock and forced tens of thousands of families to flee from its scorched interior to live in refugee camps. “You can touch it, the climate change, in Somaliland. It is real. It is here,” the country’s environment minister, Shukri Ismail Bandare, said in theFinancial Timeslast week.
Sudan and Kenya are also victims of a drought that has dried the Horn of Africa faster than at any other time in the past 2,000 years. Similarly, in Vietnam, thousands a year are abandoning the once fertile Mekong Delta as rising seawater pollutes paddy fields. By 2050, the World Bank says more than 140 million will become climate refugees.
It will be bad for humans, but catastrophic for Earth’s other inhabitants. Arctic ice loss threatens polar bears, droughts imperil monarch butterflies, and koala habitats are being destroyed by bush fires. In all, about a sixth of all species now face extinction, say scientists, although in the end no creature or plant will be safe. “Even the most resilient species will inevitably fall victim as extreme stresses drive ecosystems to collapse,” said Giovanni Strona of Europe’s Joint Research Centre in a report last week on climate change.
Scientists warned more than 30 years ago that such a future lay ahead, but nothing was done to stave it off. Only dramatic measures are now left to those seeking to save our burning planet, and these can have grim political consequences. In France, for example, President Macron’s new levies on fossil fuels, introduced to cut emissions and to fund renewable energy projects,triggered riots. Had only modest changes been enacted a few decades ago there would be no trouble today, say analysts.
But the most telling example is provided by the US, which has emitted about a third of the carbon responsible for global warming. Yet it has essentially done nothing to check its annual rises in output. Lobbying by the fossil fuel industry has proved highly effective at blocking political change – a point most recently demonstrated by groups such as the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the Heartland Institute, which helped persuade President Trump to pull out of the Paris agreement, thus dashing the planet’s last hope of ecological salvation. “The coalition used its power to slow us down precisely at the moment when we needed to speed up,” said the environmentalist Bill McKibben in theNew Yorker. “As a result, the particular politics of one country for one half-century will have changed the geological history of the Earth.”
Florida
No region of the US has more to lose from climate change than southern Florida. If scientists’ worst predictions are realised, an entire metropolitan area, currently inhabited by more than six million people, is likely to be swamped by a 1.5-metre sea-level rise before the end of this century, a rise that could see the tourist mecca of Miamisimply disappear.
It’s a doomsday scenario that has united the leaders of Miami-Dade county and the cities of Miami and Miami Beach in an attempt to find solutions to the most severe effects of rising oceans before it is too late. Their plan to combat the physical, economic and social challenges of climate change, as part of the global100 Resilient Citiesprogramme, will play a key role in determining whether the low-lying region will still be habitable in the coming decades or surrendered to the ever-rising Atlantic.
“It’s a problem that can be managed, it’s not a problem that can be fixed and you walk away from,” said Susanne Torriente, chief resilience officer for Miami Beach, where hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars have already been spent elevating roads, constructing higher sea walls and investing in modern, high-capacity pumps and stormwater drainage systems.
“Every generation will add to the work that we have begun,” Torriente says. “We are always learning, it’s a constant process of learning, re-evaluating and improving.”
A flooded street in Miami Beach, Florida, one of the areas of the US at greatest risk from rising sea levels. Photograph: Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Up to a million Florida homes, worth an estimated $371bn (£290bn, are at risk of tidal flooding by 2100,one recent studycalculated, but the threats facing the greater Miami region are not just coastal. Hurricanes are becoming more powerful because of global warming, say scientists, who point to the destruction wrought by Hurricane Michael in October, while the combination of a low water table and high “king” tides – occurring in autumn – causes regular inland flooding even on dry days.
This means that the newjoint action planbeing worked on by city and county officials has to be further-reaching than anything that has preceded it, Torriente says. “Our resilience journey began with the climate work, the storm water, [but] this strategy will be much broader and will be defining resilience not only in terms of climate and flooding, but also mobility and housing, property, and how to recover quickly in the event of a hurricane in south Florida.”
These moves reflect the sense of urgency being felt in Florida, where the state leadership has been criticised for neglecting the environment. Its newly elected senator, Rick Scott, banned staff from using the term climate change during his time as governor of Florida, and will be a close Washington ally of President Donald Trump, who took the US out of the Paris climate agreement.
“We’ll be much more successful if we have more cooperation and more attention at all levels of government, [because] it’s a problem for all of us,” Torriente says. “But we do what we can. Everything we are doing is funded locally, so we can continue to invest.”
Richard Luscombe, Miami
Madagascar
It’s a 45-minute canoe journey along the coast from regional capital Morombe to Kivalo in south-west Madagascar. Children frolic in the water, palm trees sway, and fishing nets hang along the beach. This tranquillity is deceptive, however – for Madagascar is ranked as one of the countriesmost vulnerable to climate change. Higher temperatures, extended drought periods in the south, intensification of cyclones and rising sea levels are all forecast. For good measure, the country’spervasive povertyrestricts its capacity to adapt to such changes.
In Kivalo, this is already a familiar picture. “The southern wind used to start in January and last until July,” says Bikison Thomas, a fisherman. “But it’s still going now in November.” On very windy days, he cannot put out to sea. “There is also more fog,” he adds. Overfishing, higher sea temperatures and the loss of mangrove, a crucial habitat for fish stocks, are also reducing catches.
Villagers deal with the floods in Madagascar after a tropical cyclone. Photograph: Alain Iloiniaina/Getty Images
The Madagascar government is aware of the country’s vulnerability and has ratified the Paris agreement.Climate changeis listed in every major policy document but budgets usually fall short of producing effective measures, a point that is demonstrated dramatically down the coast in the town of Morondava, where hotels are grappling with sea-level rise.
Two years ago, Chayune Badouraly bought the Coco Beach hotel. It had a few bungalows and a lovely beach. Badouraly added more bedrooms, a reception area and a restaurant.
But in September, powerful tides destroyed two of his bungalows, and the sea has not returned to its previous level. “We used to have 150 metres of beach,” he says bitterly. “Now it’s minus five.”
Although there are plans to build sea defences, Badouraly says that could take months, even years, so he’s taken the problem into his own hands and built a 60-metre-long sea wall, a mixture of stone blocks, steel rods and sandbags. “I knew we had coastal erosion problems, but I didn’t think it would be that bad,” he adds. “I would never have bought.”
Emilie Filou, Madagascar
Antarctica
It is hard to get a grip of the sheerscale of theThwaitesglacierin west Antarctica. It’s more than 300 miles long and 200 wide – and more than a mile thick. It drains an area of ice that is larger than England and stealthily slides towards the sea by several metres every day. Only from satellite images have we understood the shape and power of this ice monster.
These now show the beast is waking up. Thwaites’s uptake of falling snow was once matched, fairly finely, by snow and ice being lost as icebergs. Now it has begun to flow faster, along with some of its neighbouring glaciers. More ice is being lost into the ocean than is being replaced, speeding up global sea-level rise.
The cause of the disruption at Thwaites is straightforward, researchers have discovered. Increasing amounts of warm ocean water coming from the north have been melting the floating parts of the glacier and this, in turn, is letting the inland glacier run more quickly into the sea. This much we know, but we have still to understand how this process is likely to accelerate. At present, Thwaites contributes around 4% of observed sea-level rise, but it is widely agreed that this could grow exponentially. Indeed, some glaciologists believe that a complete collapse of the Thwaites glacier over coming centuries is now inevitable – and that would raise global sea level by several metres, drowning coastal ecosystems around the world, damaging coastal investments and displacing millions of people.
The field support team who will be setting up the camps on Thwaites Glacier, Antarctica. Photograph: Tim Gee/British Antarctic Survey
Research on the ice and frigid waters around Thwaites Glacier is urgently needed but carrying that out is tough. Even by Antarctic standards, this area is cold and remote. I have been working in Antarctica for more than 30 years, and I’ve never managed to reach Thwaites. However, the UK and US governments have agreed to send in scientists as part of theInternational Thwaites Glacier Collaboration. We are finally going to get the chance to understand this waking monster. At the moment, it is merely yawning and stretching. The question we must answer, urgently, is whether it is about to wake up and roar.
David Vaughan, British Antarctic Survey
Great Barrier Reef
Coral reefs cover a mere 0.1% of the world’s ocean floor but they support about 25% of all marine species. They also provide nature with some of its most beautiful vistas. For good measure, coral reefs protect shorelines from storms, support the livelihoods of 500 million people and help generate almost £25bn of income. Permitting their destruction would put the planet in trouble – which is precisely what humanity is doing.
Rising sea temperatures are already causing irreparablebleaching of reefs, while rising sea levels threaten to engulf reefs at a faster rate than they can grow upwards. Few scientists believe coral reefs – which are made of simple invertebrates related to sea anemones – can survive for more than a few decades.
Yet those who have sounded clear warnings about our reefs have received little reward. Professor Terry Hughes, a coral expert at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia, recently studied the impact of El Niño warmings in 2016 and 2017 on Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, the world’s largest coral reef and its largest living entity – and wept when he saw the damage.
Close to half the corals on the Great Barrier Reef have died in the past three years, according to expert Prof Terry Hughes. Photograph: Greg Torda/ARC Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies
“The 2016 event killed 30% of corals, the one a year later killed another 20%. Very close to half the corals have died in the past three years,” he said recently.
For his pains, Hughes has faced demands from tourist firms for his funding to be halted because he was ruining their business. “The Australian government is still promoting new developments of coal mines and fracking for gas,” Hughes said, after being namedjoint recipient of the John Maddox prize, given to those who champion science in the face of hostility and legal threats. “If we want to save the Great Barrier Reef, these outdated ambitions need to be abandoned. Yet Australia’s greenhouse gas emissions are rising, not falling. It’s a national disgrace.”
This grim picture is summed up by the ethnographer Irus Braverman in her bookCoral Whisperers: “The Barrier Reef has changed for ever. The largest living structure in the world has become the largest dying structure in the world.”
Greta Thunberg
jpratt27 