Category: Climate

Climate, Climate Denier, Electricity, Global Warming

Planned cut to renewable energy target ‘a free kick’ for fossil fuels The federal government’s plan to reduce Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) could jeopardise billions of dollars in…

The federal government’s plan to reduce Australia’s Renewable Energy Target (RET) could jeopardise billions of dollars in investment while giving a boost to the fossil fuel sector, experts have predicted.

Industry minister Ian Macfarlane and environment minister Greg Hunt have proposed a reduction in the target, from 41,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) of renewable energy by 2020 to around 27,000 GWh.

The ministers said the reduced target would represent “a real 20% of electricity production in Australia, as was the original bipartisan intent” of the scheme. Declining electricity demand means that the current target represents around 27% of Australia’s projected 2020 energy use.

The new proposals stop short of the measures recommended by the Warburton review, which set out a range of options to narrow the existing scheme, including ending all subsidies for new large-scale renewable energy projects and for rooftop solar panels.

Dylan McConnell, a research fellow at the Melbourne Energy Institute, said that “shifting the goalposts will decimate the large-scale renewable industry” and endanger more than A$10 billion of investment.

“Despite what Mr Macfarlane might think, Australia signed up for a 41,000 GWh Large-scale Renewable Energy Target,” he said. “Importantly, this is also what the energy industry signed up for.”

“The proposed “real 20%” target effectively reduces the existing target by 60% – a substantial disruption to a longstanding, popularly supported and (previously) bipartisan policy,“ he said.

“There is no technical limit preventing more than 20% renewable energy in a power system, and the fact that 27% might come from renewable sources is something to celebrated, not condemned. In addition, the Warburton review itself showed that the impact of the RET on prices is far from significant, and in fact will deliver lower electricity prices in the long term.

“I find it hard to believe that removing policy that decreases both prices and emissions and increase renewable energy generation is what Australians signed up for.”

Tony Wood, energy program director at the Grattan Institute, said a real 20% renewables “always seemed like a reasonable outcome”. “But I’m not clear on how this will avoid trashing existing and committed projects,” he said.

He also welcomed the government’s plan to protect emissions-intensive industries such as aluminium from having to pay subsidies towards renewable energy generation, although he said it was not clear how this would affect the scheme overall.

‘Free kick’

Andrew Blakers, director of the Australian National University’s Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems, described the new policy as a “free kick for fossil fuels”.

“The RET is a specific target: 41,000 GWh by 2020. It is not a percentage. A reduction from 41,000 to 27,000 GWh is a massive impediment to growth of the renewable energy industry, and a corresponding free kick for fossil fuels. Because of the resulting reduction in competition in the wholesale market, the price of electricity would go up, as would carbon emissions,” he said.

“In contrast, retention of the RET at 41,000 GWh by 2020 allows Australia to reach more than 90% renewable electricity by 2040 by natural attrition of existing fossil fuel power stations – the deployment rate of wind and solar required to achieve the 2020 RET target is readily achievable, and fast enough to replace each fossil fuel power station in an orderly fashion as it reaches the end of its working life.”

Solar subsidies to stay

Mr MacFarlane said the government would not change the financial incentives for installing solar panels, worth about A$2,500 for a typical 3 kilowatt system. The Warburton review recommended that this program, known as the small-scale RET scheme, be brought to an end.

Labor has said it will not support the changes to the large-scale renewables target, which was aimed at brokering a compromise over the RET’s future.

The situation will be clouded still further by the confirmation that the government-funded Climate Change Authority will go ahead with plans to produce yet another review of the RET scheme.

Tony Wood applauded the government’s move to reduce uncertainty over the scheme by scrapping the requirement for it to be reviewed every two years. But he said there would be a long way to go to reach a clear bipartisan policy.

“There’s quite a gap to close and I don’t see Labor in any mood to compromise. One has to wonder why we had to go through all the pain of the Warburton review to get here.”

Climate, Government score, Uncategorized

Abbott takes Australia to last place on global climate change leadership we dropped 33 places…wow

View image on Twitter

, Australia has the ignominy of being easily bettered by Colombia (ranked 14), Peru (16), Kenya (17), Zambia (24), Ethiopia (26), Rwanda (27) and the Philippines (32).

The previous GGEI released in 2012 showed Australia ranked 10th on performance, out of 27 nations then evaluated. In 2011, for which only the top ten were shown, Australia was outside that elite.

Data available from the four GGEI reports issued so far suggests Australia’s performance peaked in 2012 and has fallen badly since. (There was no report in 2013.)

On global leadership on green energy, Australia in 2012 was ranked equal third with Sweden, behind Germany and South Africa. This year Australia ranked last.

This latest humiliation for Australia follows more than nine earlier embarrassments on the world stage caused by inept decisions, actions or inactions by the Abbott Government on environmental issues.

These include:

  • Obstructing the UN climate meeting in Warsaw last November with damaging  ‘bad behaviour’.
  • Allowing three million cubic metres of dredged seabed to be dumped in the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park to make way for the Abbot Point coal export facility.
  • Logging Tasmania’s endangered  forests.
  • Repealing Australia’s modest carbon tax/price.
  • Abbott’s call for an alliance with Canada and others in June to oppose the global climate initiatives of US President Obama. The Canadian Star ridiculed this folly with the heading, ‘Climate disdainers Canada and Australia form Axis of Weasels’.
  • Abbott’s refusal to attend UN Secretary General Ban-Ki-Moon’s climate summit in New York in September.
  • Recalcitrance at that UN climate summit in New York by the Australian representatives who did attend.
  • Earning Australia the title ‘world’s dirtiest nation’ in The Slate. The influential US journal headlined its analysis: ‘The Saudi Arabia of the South Pacific: How Australia became the dirtiest polluter in the developed world’.
  • Cutting the renewable energy targets.

Those episodes created the strong impression worldwide that the Abbott Government was failing Australia’s people, their local environment, the global community and the planet. This report shows with rigorous research that this highly negative impression is indeed sound.

This further undermines Australia’s once proud reputation as a good global citizen. The GGEI report has received prominent media coverage worldwide, including in Denmark, the USA, Brazil, Spain and Argentina.

Australian Economy, Climate, Syria/iraq

Australia is not punching at all we are just a token. For this country’s sake we are better spending the money elsewhere

Cost of symbolism

If Australia taking dramatic action on climate change is merely symbolic, what are we to make of our commitment to the fight again Islamic State forces? Adam Lockyer writes.

By now the Abbott Government’s rationale against taking dramatic action to combat climate change is familiar to most Australians. Its logic follows four steps:

1) Australia’s contribution is just a drop in the ocean; 2) As such, any action Australia takes will largely be symbolic; 3) As such, we can put to one side any assessment of how serious the original threat is and concentrate on whether we should make a symbolic gesture to this global problem; 4) Hence, the choice becomes: what is going to be the economic cost to Australia for this merely symbolic gesture?

We can largely limit the costs of our involvement to the dollar sum (and potentially the loss of our soldiers’ lives). Confronted by a “budget emergency”, is $500 million (and this a is conservative sum) worth symbolism? I would argue that Australia’s small symbolic contribution to fighting IS is a luxury that we, as a nation, can currently do without purchasing.

There is, however, one significant difference between climate change and the fight against IS. That is, even if Australia was to cut its emissions to zero, it would not significantly affect global temperatures. It would be a positive symbolic gesture and show moral leadership, but have no practical difference. In contrast, there is no reason why the Abbott Government needs to keep Australia’s contribution to the fight against IS at mere symbolic levels.

Unlike climate change, Australia could make a significant contribution to the course of the war against IS. Hypothetically, if IS was as big a threat to Australia as the political hyperbole suggests, then the Government could throw three regular brigades at IS, call up its reserves, introduce conscription and raise Defence’s share of GDP to World War II levels.

However, this level of commitment to the war against IS is completely unrealistic. So, we are left with a simple question: is half a billion dollars a year over an indefinite period worth mere symbolism?

Climate, Coal

Bees are good for Humanity not coal

Climate, crime

Ending our criminal ways. We have the worst mammal extinction rate in the world

Why do we ignore behaviour that not only sends plants and animals to extinction but, ultimately, condemns humanity to life in a wasted world, asks Robert Hollingworth.

IN AUGUST, Radio National aired the last in the series Animal People, which discussed the plight of many mammals facing extinction.

Presenter Sarah L’Estrange addressed American author Elizabeth Kolbert:

“There are only 250 lions left in West Africa, but this doesn’t change your day-to-day life. So what do you lose when animals become extinct?”

For anyone, this is a difficult question and Kolbert seemed to have some trouble with it.

Her lengthy reply concluded:

“It is devastating if we lose these creatures. Personally, I don’t want to live in a world that doesn’t have tigers…”

We know what she means, but do her words adequately explain why we want to save individual species?

It should follow that Kolbert would not want to live in a world without mammoths, or a world without the Lake Pedder earthworm, which went missing in the 1970s. But she does, as we all do.

So, what’s so special about preserving creatures of uncertain relevance in our rapidly changing world?

I believe it has everything to do with criminality.

The Oxford Dictionaries list two main definitions of ‘crime’:

  1. An action or omission which constitutes an offence and is punishable by law.
  2. An action or activity considered to be evil, shameful or wrong.

It’s likely that both apply in this case.

The crime we are committing is the offence against our planet and the laws that we break are the laws of nature. We plunder, pillage and murder and we steal aspects of our children’s future. And perhaps the most concrete evidence of this, the most emphatic affirmation of these broken laws, is the eradication of an entire species.

Who is guilty? All of us.

Each time we waste food or condone unsustainable food practices, each time we use plastic or paper irresponsibly, each time we drive our cars unnecessarily, buy bottled water, plant exotic species, ignore issues of coal power, native forest harvesting – or just turn a blind eye – we are committing subtle but incrementally lethal crimes. And it is only when something approaches extinction – like the Amazon Rainforest or lions in West Africa – that we are suddenly caught out.

But isn’t the natural world always changing?

More than 90 per cent of the organisms that ever lived on earth are now extinct and most of these disappeared suddenly due to catastrophic events. The first of these occurred some 450 million years ago, a length of time hardly imaginable, and a “sudden event” on this time scale can mean millions of years.

Today, many scientists feel a sixth mass extinction is imminent.

It will not be caused by volcanic eruptions or asteroids, but by human activity and, rather than occurring over hundreds of thousands of years, this new event may take less than a century and erase half the world’s species.

It is happening so fast we can even observe it in our daily lives.

I spend weekends on a secluded property in Central Victoria. It is a residual remnant of native bushland on a granite mountain and, here, I monitor and record just about everything that lives. In the mere space of fifteen years, I have noted the subtle changes that humans alone have wrought. Due to shrinking habitat, introduced species and a drier environment, plant and animal life in this location, is gradually changing. The number and variety of wildflowers has dramatically declined ‒ particularly corm or bulb species such as ground orchids and various native lilies ‒ and at least four species of frog have disappeared completely.

Of course, these creatures still cling on elsewhere, but my little mountain can be seen as a microcosm of a larger, burgeoning scenario.

In Australia, pollution, land clearing and the introduction of foreign species since colonial settlement has resulted in the loss of more than 220 plants and animals. We have the worst mammal extinction rate in the world and all this represents an explicit transgression against our living-breathing planet; a criminal act.

Who pays for these terrestrial crimes? Not us.

With duplicity and crafty evasion we continue to lead our double lives, rarely facing the consequences. Instead, it is our descendants who will suffer for these contraventions, even as they may be set to perpetuate them.

We are supposed to be intelligent. We are supposed to have foresight, wisdom and great technological know how. If this is so, why do we still ignore the repercussions of behaviour that not only sabotages the planet’s biodiversity but, ultimately, condemns humanity to life in a wasted world?

Climate, Uncategorized

New Data Suggests Global Ocean Warming Rates May Have Been Severely Underestimated

http://www.iflscience.com/environment/new-data-suggests-global-ocean-warming-rates-have-been-severely-underestimated

Abbott, Climate

Tony Abbott sends Australia off to fight the wrong war

While Tony Abbott send Australia’s warplanes, bombs and soldiers into Iraq, the far more deadly war against climate change is being ignored by his Government.

AUSTRALIA’S WARPLANES ARE FLYING OVER IRAQ. Soon they will be dropping humanitarian bombs.

2013 has been Australia’s hottest year on record. An already dry sunburnt country, Australia is in the firing line of climate change.

Our Government of fools fails to join the dots.

The global peoples’ climate march coincided with Tony Abbott promoting himself as a saviour, in a war against a so-called “death cult” — ISIS.

Captain Ahab Abbott is intent on taking us all down with the ship.

In contrast to this, the worldwide September action for the climate was a pro-life movement. It called for a lifesaving switch to renewable energy.

Carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions are now at the highest level in human history. The threat level is beyond high — it is extreme.

In Melbourne, I marched with 30,000 people. This march felt as massive as the protests in 2003 against the invasion of Iraq. An estimated six to ten million took part in that march in over 600 cities and 60 nations.

Nevertheless the ‘coalition of the willing’ ignored the people and proceeded on their disastrous invasion path. It was a war based on lies that lead to half a million Iraqi deaths and fostered the conditions that created ISIS.

My first protest march was back in the days of Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam War. As an 18-year-old student I sat down with tens of thousands of people in Burke Street Melbourne, to demand a moratorium on the war. Western involvement in that war was also based on political lies.

Having now infamously repealed the price on carbon and attacked all measures already in place to reduce emissions. He has his eye on scrapping the RET and vandalising renewables.

Abbott is killing our action on climate change, while promenading on the world stage claiming ‘to lead by example’ and to ‘work for the benefit of mankind’.

 

The climate movement is a struggle in which all our rights are at stake. We can win the day.

The challenge is to shift paradigms, understanding and ideas. These struggles are not won on killing fields.

Climate, Coal, Tony Abbott

We like the Australian People but not the Australian Government

 

Merkel adviser lashes Abbott’s ‘suicide strategy’ on coal

 

German Chancellor’s adviser on climate policy: Hans Joachim Schellnhuber. Photo: Scott Morton

A lead adviser to German Chancellor Angela Merkel on climate policy has attacked Australia’s complacency on global warming and described the Abbott government’s championing of the coal industry as an economic “suicide strategy”.

He said calling for continued coal use was not only poor climate policy, it made little sense economically when the rest of the world was turning to renewable energy.

“China will soon come up to peak coal consumption,” he said.

“Other Asian economies might peak even sooner.

“It’s almost a suicide strategy for the Australian economy.”

His comments come after countries savaged Australia’s performance at a special climate summit of world leaders in New York last week, where US President Barack Obama said combatting global warming was a joint effort by all nations and “nobody gets a pass”.

Germany, one of the world’s biggest producers of wind energy, has set emissions cuts of 40 per cent on 1990 levels by 2020, although it is lagging behind this target.

It has also set targets of 55 per cent by 2030 and 80 per cent by 2050 – a goal that would require most of the country’s fossil-fuel energy stations to cease operating.

Professor Schellnhuber, who is also director of the Potsdam Institute, said it had been disappointing to see Australia’s retreat on climate policy after it became “the darling of the world” when Kevin Rudd ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2007.

Asked about the reaction to Australia’s performance in New York, he said: “Everybody likes Australian people but nobody liked the Australian government there.”

Professor Schellnhuber said instead of backing away from policies such as Australia’s renewable energy target, the Abbott government should be exploiting Australia’s enviable position as the country with the “biggest potential” to produce renewable energy.

He said this was especially important when Australia was one of the continents most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, which would hit the country in the form of unprecedented heatwaves, fires and coral bleaching.

 

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/federal-politics/political-news/merkel-adviser-lashes-abbotts-suicide-strategy-on-coal-20141002-10ouu6.html#ixzz3FAL0kLkD

Andrew Bolt, Climate, Climate Denier, Global Warming

Abbott’s advisers hate rationality it interferes with money….their’s

Blessed Are The Stupid For They Shall Inhibit The Earth – Tony Abbott, Maurice Newman and What To Do About People Who Insist On Looking At Facts!

Maurice Newman (image from theguardian.com)
Maurice Newman (image from theguardian.com)
Strange that during the period of so-called “global cooling”, there was no suggestion that the figures may be wrong. These were “facts” that the green movement were told were indisputable.Yet now it seems that the BOM may be fallible after all. How do we know? Well, Maurice Newman says so! And he’s Tony Abbott’s Business Adviser, so he must know what he’s taking about. I mean, he was attacking wind farms even before Joe realised that they were incredibly ugly and lacked the raw beauty of a coal-fired power station.

Maurice Newman has refused meet with scientists about his comments. After all, scientists are part of that whole conspiracy that began with the Age of Enlightenment. They probably even suggest that just transporting convicts to Australia won’t actually put an end to crime.

Mr Newman, like Tony Abbott, arrived in Australia by boat from England as a young boy, but neither were convicts as the English stopped sending their convicts here some time before either of them arrived. In the twentieth century, they only sent people who understood the superiority of the English class system while preferring the Australian weather.

Mm, perhaps there is a strong case for stopping the boats, after all.

Climate, Global Warming, ISIS, Syria/iraq, Tony Abbott

Study this and be a Foreign Policy expert

The irony is obvious to many of the commenters, understanding the threat starts with those three. It is the continuing follies of U.S. policy and our involvement in them, that make us a potential target for domestic terrorism — not some bogus perceived external threat.( pic above)

If you listen to what U.S. presidents say, they always invoke freedom, peace, democracy and human rights as they launch their brutal forays into other countries. However if you look at what the U.S. does in the world, then it is clear freedom, peace, democracy and human rights are irrelevant to U.S. policy.

The U.S. talks democracy, but doesn’t hesitate to cuddle up to brutal tyrants, nor to overthrow elected governments. Democracies were replaced by repressive and usually corrupt governments with power bases among the wealthy elites. The Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is among the most notorious for his reign of terror, involving torture, murder and “disappearances”, from 1973 until a popular uprising ousted him in 1990.

Iraq played no role in the 2001 attack on New York’s World Trade Centre, but President George W. Bush used the attack as an excuse to invade Iraq, which was allegedly harbouring Al Qaeda groups. Somewhere between 100,000 and 500,000 civilians are reported to have died as a result of the invasion and subsequent fighting, effectively retribution for the 3,000 who died in the WTC attack.

Meanwhile, Saudi Arabia, governed by a repressive family plutocracy, is maintained as a staunch ally of the U.S., even though it too is accused of supplying some groups in the Middle East accused of terrorism. The key, of course, is that Saudi Arabia hosts a large fraction of the world’s oil reserves.

Human-rights abuses are being cited as a prime reason for U.S. intervention, yet the U.S. saw no reason to intervene directly in other barbarities ‒ even including genocide ‒ in places like Cambodia from 1975-79, Rwanda in 1994, the civil wars in the Congo over a long period, in Liberia in the 1990s, and many other parts of Africa and the world.

The consistent factor in U.S. policy clearly is to defend or enhance U.S. “interests” — which means, in practice, the commercial interests of U.S. business. Oil underpins all the other interests. U.S. presidents have always allowed their foreign policy to be bounded by the interests of the country’s rich and powerful.

Why is this apparently so beyond the critical faculties of what passes for Australia’s political conversation? That the US is doing what’s always been normal and can’t afford it so coopts us. Iraq will pay for this excercise whatever the outcome.

The solution ‒ not easy, but clearly available ‒ is to desist from further military intervention. There will, unfortunately, continue to be violence within the Middle East, but the defensible course is to try, by nonviolent means, to reduce the violence as much as possible. Intelligence analyst Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning argues for the viability of such an approach

There is already an overwhelming case, from global warming, for a rapid shift away from oil to renewable, non-polluting sources of energy, such as solar-generated hydrogen.  The further pursuit of control over oil is wrong-headed in every respect, not least because of its costs in blood and money.

As to the so-called leadership of Australia, it adds the spectacle of being a pathetic lap dog to all the US follies it chooses to be complicit in.

Climate, Coal, Julie Bishop

Julie Bishop rejects UN request to strengthen Australian climate targets

Lisa Cox

Lisa Cox

EXCLUSIVEPushing direct action: Foreign Minister Julie Bishop will attend a UN climate change summit next week.

Australia is refusing to take a plan for deeper cuts to greenhouse gas emissions to a special world leaders’ climate summit in New York next week.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott is not attending, despite planning to be in New York a day later for special UN talks on the escalating military situation in Iraq. Ms Bishop said she would reaffirm Australia’s commitment to reduce emissions by 5 per cent on 2000 levels by 2020.

The government will also use the New York meeting to drum up support for an Asia-Pacific rainforest summit in Sydney in November and to join a global declaration to phase down the use of hydrofluorocarbons, so-called “super greenhouse gases” used for refrigeration and air conditioning.

Ms Bishop said the proposal was “an opportunity for governments, business and NGOs to commit to protective steps” for rainforests and preserve their environmental, economic and social benefits.

Earlier this week Mr Ban said he expected Tuesday’s summit to lay the framework for putting a price on carbon.The Abbott government became the first country in the world in July to abolish a carbon price and its alternative direct action policy is in limbo without support in the Senate.

But the Foreign Minister said she would not lay down plans for targets beyond 2020.

“We’re looking at what other countries are doing.”But there is growing urgency from environmental groups for the government to define what its post-2020 target will be and how that will contribute to international efforts to keep global warming below two degrees, which scientists say would avoid the worst effects of climate change.

“The real tragedy in Australia is we’re focusing on 2020 and not on 2050, which is where international negotiations are headed 125 nation states will be attending.

Protecting  the interests of capital is far more important to this government than being a global citizen. Besides Murdoch is a climate skeptic and we still have a lot of dirty coal to sell the promises were made before the election.

ABC, Andrew Bolt, Climate, LIES, Newscorp, Propaganda

I DIDN’T even finish my arts degree, but I still say that the Chief Scientist and two Nobel prize winners should pull their heads in.

The ABC and staff  are so above Newscorp and Andrew Bolt

 

“If you think arguments on global warming are best settled by credentials, then don’t read another word. I’m an idiot.”

Even Andrew Bolt get’s it right sometimes. He certainly didn’t finish his Arts Degree he barely started it and merely deprived someone else of the opportunity. It’s the idiot aspect that reveals itself and the lack of either rationality or balance.

“Viewers would have concluded no scientists question that the world is heating dangerously and man is to blame. The sceptical scientists I know personally must just be hoaxers.”

He sounds like a child ready to throw a tantrum not an adult open to a discussion.  On this topic it is  precisely what he is a moron.

Bolt doesn’t prove or disprove anything he merely states the obvious that there is a minority of scientists that don’t necessarily agree with all the results put forward by the majority for a case of Global Warming. But that’s the nature of science disagreement. You could argue because all the scientific errors made throughout history is the reason science and the world progressed.  Bolt offers no alternative to progress and investigation. The majority of climate scientists seem to believe there is a necessary reason to move foward.

Bolt the self-confessed idiot only believes in  incontrovertible laws of which there are very few. Not Newton, Not Einstein, Not Quantum Physics so the idiot is simply asking for the impossible. If one believes money and power influence science then  the skeptics certainly exemplify the conservatives, much the same as flat earthers did in their day. The majority of scientists are progressives as their results demand a necessary change foward  which however sits against the financial interests of Capital. Why would the most rational thinkers of the world ask the most wealthiest to change? After all isn’t that where their finance ultimately comes from?

Bolt doesn’t broach the question  he merely uses it as a vehicle to have ago at the ABC as a leftist organization with some bias against his  fatuous  conservative position. The man failed his Arts degree he didn’t just  finish it.

His side of the capitalist ledger always turns to the maintenance of profit  to justify  reasons not to change. The ABC in 1984 had a budget of approx $900 mill today it’s $800 mill and has 84% support of the Australian population. More importantly 80% believe in its integrity. That alone places it so far in front of  Newscorp and Bolt it’s lickspittle

 

 

Andrew Bolt, Australia, Climate, Direct Action, Electricity, Global Warming, Tony Abbott

We singled out as leading. OECD Human Rights Violaters, ADF deployment enthusiasts, RET non supporters, Foreign Aid renegers… We stand Tall

 View image on Twitter

With the Abbott Government’s RET review controversially advising abolishing Australia’s renewable energy target, a new international report suggests renewables are the only way forward.

RENEWABLE ENERGIES ARE INCREASINGLY SEEN as the best solution to a growing global population demanding affordable access to electricity, while reducing the need for toxic fossil fuels that are creating unsustainable levels of greenhouse gas emissions.

That’s the underlying message of a new report ‒ REthinking Energy: Towards a New Power System ‒ published this week by the Abu Dhabi-based International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA).

‘Rapid technological progress, combined with falling costs, a better understanding of financial risk and a growing appreciation of wider benefits, means that renewable energy is increasingly seen as the answer.’

‘Not only can renewable energy meet the world’s rising demand, but it can do so more cheaply, while contributing to limiting global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius – the widely cited tipping point for climate change

‘A technology once considered as niche is becoming mainstream. What remains unclear is how long this transition will take, and how well policy makers will handle the change.’

In the next two decades, the report noted, world electricity generation is expected to increase by 70 per cent.

But the report warned:

‘There is growing consensus on the threat of climate change brought on by increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, prompting worldwide efforts to reduce emissions.’

‘If business continues as usual, these efforts will not succeed. The average emissions intensity of electricity production has barely changed over the past 20 years. Gains from the increasing deployment of renewables, and less intensive fossil fuels such as natural gas, have been offset by less efficient power plants and the rising use of coal. Without a substantial increase in the share of renewables in the mix, climate change mitigation will remain elusive.’

There is also increasing concern about the health impacts of burning fossil fuels, the report said, adding the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency recently found that ill health caused by fossil fuels nationally costs between US $362 billion and $887 billion annually.

In addition, the European Union’s Health and Environment Alliance found that emissions from coal-fired power plants cost up to €42.8 billion in yearly health costs.

The report says something has to change:

‘Fossil fuels powered the first industrial revolution, but even in the new era of shale oil and gas, questions remain about their compatibility with sustainable human well-being. The stage is set for the era of modern renewable energy that is cost competitive, mainstream and sustainable.’

The report noted that the challenge today is how to finance and accelerate the continued deployment of renewables.

The report added that politicians have an important role to play:

‘If they make it clear that renewable energy will be a larger part of their national energy mix, and commit to long-term, non-financial support mechanisms, they could reduce uncertainty and attract more investors.’

Deploying renewables also stimulates economic activity, creates jobs, provides power for those left off the grid, the report said. Most renewables do not deplete finite resources and they also reduce the risk of ecological disasters.

In an accompanying media release, IRENA Director-General Adnan Amin said speeding up the adoption of renewable energy technologies is the most feasible way of reducing carbon emissions and avoiding catastrophic global warming.

Amin was quoted as saying in the release:

“A convergence of social, economic and environmental forces are transforming the global energy system as we know it. But if we continue on the path we are currently on and fuel our growing economies with outmoded ways of thinking and acting, we will not be able avoid the most serious impacts of climate change.”

Climate, Humour

He couldn’t get the Job in Australia because of..Abbott

Smith was forced to leave Australia but hopes to be back

agentsmith

Disgusted with the glacial pace of environmental reform and the gas coal and oil industry’s stubborn refusal to admit culpability for the world’s ongoing climate crisis, President Obama has announced sweeping changes at the EPA including the appointment of a new administrator, Agent Smith.

Agent_Smith_Clone

“Smith knows how to get things done,” said the President, at a brief White House press conference this morning. “We believe that Smith’s ability to replicate himself and seemingly be everywhere at once will save us money on inspectors and help cut through bureaucratic red tape. After all, nearly everyone is terrified of the man, and all those who have taken him on in the past have ended up dead.”

Smith told reporters that he was honored to be taking over the leadership role at EPA, as  he had long wanted to do something about the plague of humans destroying what was once a pristine planet.

agentsmith4

“I’d like to share a revelation that I’ve had during my time here,” said Smith. “It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you’re not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You’re a plague and I am the cure.”

The appointment of Smith was made over protests from nearly every industry leader in the United States, who have had free rein to run roughshod over environmental rules and regulations up to this point.

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