Group hopes to kick-start wind and solar projects that have stalled because of uncertainty over the renewable energy target
A group of Melbourne councils are banding together to bypass the renewable policies of the state and federal governments and directly appeal to clean-energy providers.
In what could evolve into a national initiative to directly boost renewable energy uptake, the City of Melbourne, City of Maribyrnong and City Of Yarra will open a dialogue with clean energy producers ahead of a potential full tender process.
The trio of councils have partnered with businesses including Mirvac and Federation Square for the project. Renewable providers, such as solar and wind farms, will be asked whether they can supply the group’s combined 100GWh worth of energy at similar or lower cost than fossil fuel providers.
This 100GWh is the equivalent to around 250,000 solar panels or 15 wind turbines.
The consortium hopes to find renewable energy projects that are ready to proceed but have been hindered by uncertainty over the renewable energy target, which has seen investment in the sector grind to a virtual halt.
Victoria’s renewable energy industry has also been hit by severe restrictions on new wind farm developments, allowing states such as South Australia surge ahead of it in terms of clean energy.
By joining together, councils and businesses can offer a reliable demand for renewable providers to allow their projects to proceed, while at the same time potentially driving down the cost for users.
The City of Melbourne has a goal of zero net emissions by 2020. This target is supplemented by a goal of sourcing 25% of electricity from renewable sources by 2018. Just 5% of this target has been achieved via rooftop solar panels in Melbourne’s CBD, prompting the council to look to large-scale renewable projects in other parts of the state.
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City of Melbourne councillor Arron Wood said the new approach will help counteract the “worrying” renewable energy policies of both state and federal governments.
“We are literally going out to test the market and find out what the price is,” he told Guardian Australia. “Our hope is that they will be on a par with fossil fuels or cheaper, because then the business case becomes a no brainer because renewables are cheaper than fossil fuels in the long-term.
“There are certainly some worrying signs over the state government’s attitude to renewable energy. There are genuine business opportunities for the state and we’re saying we’re open for business for renewable energy.
“There’s been the removal of the carbon price and uncertainty over the RET, meaning that in quick time a $1bn industry has ground to a halt. We can demonstrate a model that isn’t just a purchase of green energy, it can drive investment in new renewable energy.”
Wood said he expected other councils in Melbourne and across Australia to look closely at the concept in order to bolster renewable uptake. The City of Sydney, for example, has a 30% renewable energy target by 2030.
“Most metropolitan councils in Australia have a renewable energy target,” he said. “Cities are well set-up to band together for large-scale renewable generation. I feel many of them would be interested in this.”
WestWind, a German wind farm developer that has two approved projects in western Victoria, said it welcomed the initiative.
Tobi Geiger, managing director of WestWind, said there should be plenty of interest from solar and wind providers.
“I’d say there are around 10 projects in Victoria that would go for it, predominantly wind because we are blessed with wind all year round in Victoria,” he told Guardian Australia.
“We’ve had to wind back activities quite dramatically because of uncertainty over the future of the RET. We’ve been Abbott-proofing our company by looking at opportunities in renewable energy that don’t require government support.
“I think this kind of partnership will do well as long as we have a recalcitrant government. There’s a lack of government leadership so councils are stepping into the vacuum. The more Neanderthals that go back to fossil fuels, the more of these things we’ll see.”
What a week! First President Barack Obama announces a massive climate agreement with China designed to lower both countries’ carbon emissions while doubling down on clean energy development. Now this morning, the New York Times is reporting that the president will soon announce a $3 billion contribution to the Green Climate Fund, a UN-administered account that will help developing countries clean their energy sectors and adapt to the impacts of global warming.
A $3 billion pledge from the United States would double the size of the fund; the biggest donations up to this point were $1 billion each from France and Germany. More countries are expected to make commitments at a UN meeting in Berlin next week. The fund’s stated goal is to reach $15 billion before a key meeting next month in Lima, Peru.
Obama’s pledge “is a strong and important signal to developing countries that the US is serious ahead of climate negotiations in 2015,” said Alex Doukas, a sustainable finance analyst at the World Resources Institute.
From the Times:
It is not clear whether Mr. Obama’s $3 billion pledge will come from existing sources of funding, or whether he will have to ask Congress to appropriate the money. Since 2010, the Obama administration has spent about $2.5 billion to help poor countries adapt to climate change and develop new clean sources of energy, but Republicans are certain to target additional requests for money linked to climate change and foreign aid.
So there are still some details to work out. But like the US-China climate deal, the most immediate impact of this pledge announcement will be to encourage other countries to up the ante on their own commitments.
This story originally appeared in The Atlantic and is republished here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
I’ve been offline for many hours and am just now seeing the announcements from Beijing. The United States and China have apparently agreed to do what anyone who has thought seriously about climate has been hoping for, for years. As the No. 1 (now China) and No. 2 carbon emitters in the world, and as the No. 1 (still the US) and No. 2 economies, they’ve agreed to new carbon-reduction targets that are more ambitious than most people would have expected.
More coverage of the historic US-China climate deal.
We’ll wait to see the details—including how an American president can make good on commitments for 2025, when that is two and possibly three presidencies into the future, and when in the here-and-now he faces congressional majorities that seem dead-set against recognizing this issue. It’s quaint to think back on an America that could set ambitious long-term goals—creating Land-Grant universities, developing the Interstate Highway System, going to the moon—even though the president who proposed them realized that they could not be completed on his watch. But let’s not waste time on nostalgia.
Before we have all the details, here is the simple guide to why this could be very important.
1) To have spent any time in China is to recognize that environmental damage of all kinds is the greatest threat to its sustainability—even more than the political corruption and repression to which its pollution problems are related. (I’ll say more about the link some other time, but you could think of last week’s reports that visiting groups of senior Chinese officials have bought so much illegal ivory in Tanzania that they’ve driven the black market price to new highs.)
You can go on for quite a while with a political system like China’s, as it keeps demonstrating now in its 65th year. But when children are developing lung cancer, when people in the capital city are on average dying five years too early because of air pollution, when water and agricultural soil and food supplies are increasingly poisoned, a system just won’t last. The Chinese Communist Party itself has recognized this, in shifting in the past three years from pollution denialism to a “we’re on your side to clean things up!” official stance.
Analytically these pollution emergencies are distinct from carbon-emission issues. But in practical terms pro-environmental steps by China are likely to help with both.
2) To have looked at either the numbers or the politics of global climate issues is to recognize that unless China and the US cooperate, there is no hope for anyone else. Numbers: These are far and away the two biggest sources of carbon emissions, and China is the fastest-growing. As John Kerry points out in an op-ed in tomorrow’s NYT, reductions either of them made on its own could just be wiped out unless the other cooperates. Politics: As the collapse of the Copenhagen climate talks five years ago showed, the rest of the world is likely to say, “To hell with it” if the two countries at the heart of this problem can’t be bothered to do anything.
We see our own domestic version of this response when people say, “Why go through the hassle of a carbon tax, when the Chinese are just going to smoke us to death anyway?” This new agreement does not mean that next year’s global climate negotiations in Paris will succeed. But it means they are no longer guaranteed to fail.
3) China is a big, diverse, churning, and contradictory place, as anyone who’s been there can detail for hours. But for the past year-plus, the news out of China has been consistent, and bad.
Many people thought, hoped, or dreamt that Xi Jinping would be some kind of reformer. Two years into his watch, his has been a time of cracking down rather than loosening up. Political enemies and advocates of civil society are in jail or in trouble. Reporters from the rest of the world have problems even getting into China, and reporters from China itself face even worse repression than before. The gratuitous recent showdown with Hong Kong exemplifies the new “No More Mr. Nice Guy” approach.
A nationalistic, spoiling-for-a-fight tone has spilled over into China’s “diplomatic” dealings too. So to have this leader of China making an important deal with an American president at this stage of his political fortune is the first news that even seems positive in a long while.
We’ll wait to see the details. But at face value, this is better news—about China, about China and America, and about the globe—than we’ve gotten for a while.
GREENBELT, Md. — I’M a climate scientist and a former astronaut. Not surprisingly, I have a deep respect for well-tested theories and facts. In the climate debate, these things have a way of getting blurred in political discussions.
In September, John P. Holdren, the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, was testifying to a Congressional committee about climate change. Representative Steve Stockman, a Republican from Texas, recounted a visit he had made to NASA, where he asked what had ended the ice age:
“And the lead scientist at NASA said this — he said that what ended the ice age was global wobbling. That’s what I was told. This is a lead scientist down in Maryland; you’re welcome to go down there and ask him the same thing.
“So, and my second question, which I thought it was an intuitive question that should be followed up — is the wobbling of the earth included in any of your modelings? And the answer was no…
“How can you take an element which you give the credit for the collapse of global freezing and into global warming but leave it out of your models?”
That “lead scientist at NASA” was me. In July, Mr. Stockman spent a couple of hours at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center listening to presentations about earth science and climate change. The subject of ice ages came up. Mr. Stockman asked, “How can your models predict the climate when no one can tell me what causes the ice ages?”
I responded that, actually, the science community understood very well what takes the earth into and out of ice ages. A Serbian mathematician, Milutin Milankovitch, worked out the theory during the early years of the 20th century. He calculated by hand that variations in the earth’s tilt and the shape of its orbit around the sun start and end ice ages. I said that you could think of ice ages as resulting from wobbles in the earth’s tilt and orbit.
The time scales involved are on the order of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of years. I explained that this science has been well tested against the fossil record and is broadly accepted. I added that we don’t normally include these factors in 100-year climate projections because the effects are too tiny to be important on such a short time-scale.
And that, I thought, was that.
So I was bit surprised to read the exchange between Dr. Holdren and Representative Stockman, which suggested that at best we couldn’t explain the science and at worst we scientists are clueless about ice ages.
We aren’t. Nor are we clueless about what is happening to the climate, thanks in part to a small fleet of satellites that fly above our heads, measuring the pulse of the earth. Without them we would have no useful weather forecasts beyond a couple of days.
These satellite data are fed into computer models that use the laws of motion — Sir Isaac Newton’s theories — to figure out where the world’s air currents will flow, where clouds will form and rain will fall. And — voilà — you can plan your weekend, an airline can plan a flight and a city can prepare for a hurricane.
Satellites also keep track of other important variables: polar ice, sea level rise, changes in vegetation, ocean currents, sea surface temperature and ocean salinity (that’s right — you can accurately measure salinity from space), cloudiness and so on.
These data are crucial for assessing and understanding changes in the earth system and determining whether they are natural or connected to human activities. They are also used to challenge and correct climate models, which are mostly based on the same theories used in weather forecast models.
This whole system of observation, theory and prediction is tested daily in forecast models and almost continuously in climate models. So, if you have no faith in the predictive capability of climate models, you should also discard your faith in weather forecasts and any other predictions based on Newtonian mechanics.
The earth has warmed nearly 0.8 degrees Celsius over the last century and we are confident that the biggest factor in this increase is the release of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning. It is almost certain that we will see a rise of two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) before 2100, and a three-degree rise (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) or higher is a possibility. The impacts over such a short period would be huge. The longer we put off corrective action, the more disruptive the outcome is likely to be.
It is my pleasure and duty as a scientist and civil servant to discuss the challenge of climate change with elected officials. My colleagues and I do our best to transmit what we know and what we think is likely to happen.
The facts and accepted theories are fundamental to understanding climate change, and they are too important to get wrong or trivialize. Some difficult decisions lie ahead for us humans. We should debate our options armed with the best information and ideas that science can provide.
The ‘Cut and Paste’ section of The Australian on October 8 had the following headline:
So who’s in denial now about what the science is saying about global warming?
It was followed by the sub-heading:
Here at the sheltered workshop we’re enjoying reading the reports from NASA and the IPCC.
‘Cut and Paste’ was principally devoted to attacking my review of Paul Kelly’s Triumph and Demise. The plain suggestion of the headline and the sub-heading is that I am in denial about what the science is now saying about global warming and that both NASA and the IPCC have joined the ranks of the climate change sceptics.
In the age of the internet anyone can discover the current position of NASA and the IPCC on global warming in a matter of moments.
Here are some statements of the current position of the IPCC, all taken from the Summary for Policymakers of the first volume of the IPCC’s Fifth Report published earlier this year:
Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia. The atmosphere and ocean have warmed, the amount of snow and ice have diminished, sea level has risen, and the concentration of greenhouse gases have increased.
Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any previous decade since 1850…
Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence). It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0-700 m.) warmed from 1971 to 2010…and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971.
Over the last two decades, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets have been losing mass, glaciers have continued to shrink almost worldwide, and Arctic sea ice and Northern spring snow cover have continued to decrease in extent (high confidence).
And here is the current position of NASA. All of the following quotes come from its website:
Certain facts about Earth’s climate are not in dispute:
Sea Level Rise—Global sea level rose about 17 centimeters (6.7 inches) in the last century. The rate in the last decade, however, is nearly double that of the last century.
Global Temperature Rise—All three major global temperature reconstructions show that the Earth has warmed since 1880. Most of the warming has occurred since the 1970s, with the 20 warmest years having occurred since 1981…
Warming Oceans—The oceans have absorbed much of this increased heat, with the top 700 meters (about 2,300 feet) of ocean showing warming of 0.302 degrees Fahrenheit since 1969.
Consensus—Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities, and most of the leading scientific organizations worldwide have issued public statements endorsing this position.
It is one thing for The Australian to publish the opinions of dozens of people without scientific knowledge or capacity, like the stockbroker, Maurice Newman, who think they have a firmer grasp on the question of global warming than ninety seven per cent of climate scientists.
This is merely risible.
It is another thing for The Australian to try to lead its readers to believe that the climate scientists represented in the reports of the IPCC or at NASA are now climate sceptics.
This is quite simply an outrageous lie.
It is little wonder that The Australian is now waging a war against the Australian Press Council, the body empowered to expose unethical and unprofessional behaviour of this kind.
Some of the nation’s top scientists have warned short-term political fixes pose a threat to both the environment and the nation’s future prosperity.
The first major report in more than a decade from the influential Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists suggests the Federal Government eliminate fossil fuel subsidies and provide tax breaks to landowners who work to protect threatened species and ecosystems.
“We’re increasingly seeing the consequences of our current short-termism and the cost that will impose on this society in the future, because, in the long run, environmental degradation will come at an enormous cost,” Wentworth Group director, Peter Cosier, said.
The report included contributions from former treasury secretary Ken Henry and Clean Energy Finance Corporation director Martijn Wilder.
The group said the Abbott Government’s tentative steps towards reforming the tax system provided an opportunity to better protect the environment.
“Tax is an effective way [to protect the environment] because it’s something you have to pay and it’s a measure which governments use all the time to pull triggers in the economy,” Mr Wilder said.
“There’s an opportunity here to look at our tax system over the long-term to make it such that it has measures that are beneficial to the environment and the economy.”
There’s an opportunity here to look at our tax system over the long-term to make it such that it has measures that are beneficial to the environment and the economy.
Martijn Wilder
The report recommends removing fossil fuel subsidies and instead paying farmers, indigenous communities and other landholders to restore and protect environmental assets.
“A farmer may take particular steps to look after and manage their land in a more sustainable fashion and by doing that they may be rewarded with some sort of tax concession,” Mr Wilder said.
Professor Bruce Thom, a founding member of the group, said with climate change predicted to bring more extreme heat, bushfires, and damaging storms, smarter planning decisions need to be made now.
“We spend 10 times more on recovery after a disaster than we spend on mitigating their impacts,” Professor Thom said.
He said he believed preparing communities for climate change has not been well coordinated to date between different tiers of government.
Professor Thom said recent discussions about tax and federalism should be expanded to include the management of the natural environment.
“The Federal Government is the driver of the economy and the states are the deliverers,” he said.
“We feel that all three levels of government must be closely working together in better managing our natural capital for the long-term future.”
The authors cite advice from the Productivity Commission, Treasury, and the Garnaut Review that an emissions trading scheme remains the most cost-effective way for Australia to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
A copy of the Wentworth Group’s report will be sent to every state environment minister and every federal MP.
olddogthoughts 