The Conversation

In case you had forgotten, electricity prices were a really big deal in the last federal election campaign in 2013, albeit often disguised under the rubric of axe the tax. Then Coalition spokesmen quite deliberately and repeatedly conflated the term carbon tax with electricity tax.

Clearly, this conflation was deemed acceptable in the court of public opinion. The justification was that Labor’s carbon pricing mechanism specifically targeted the electricity sector rather than other key emission intensive sectors of the economy such as land-use and transport.

This time round, in the 2016 election campaign, electricity prices are much less prominent. The Coalition would have us believe that by axing the tax they have driven electricity prices down. The flow on effect from reduced household expenses is a rise in consumer confidence. And that, we are told, is a key stimulus in maintaining growth in face of strong economic headwinds, and one we shouldn’t risk by changing government.

Given the success of the Coalition strategy in the last election, Labor is understandably gun-shy on electricity prices. It also likely wants to avoid provoking further Coalition delight in spruiking one of their favourite epithets - Electicity Bill.

However, this is all a bit strange, because wholesale electricity prices have almost doubled over what they were at the equivalent stage of the last election cycle. Incredibly, they are 300% above what they were in the 2010 election.

Wholesale electricity prices in the 4 week period prior to the last four Australian federal elections. For the 2016 election cycle, the period is 23rd May - 20th June. For the previous three elections it is the 4 week period finishing on the election day. Prices are volume-weighted and differentiated by the region. Data from AEMO half-hour aggregated price and demand tables.

The current record wholesale electricity prices provoke a number of questions, not the least of which is if electricity prices are so important why is consumer confidence so buoyant? Perhaps the answer is that wholesale electricity prices really don’t matter that much. And if that is the case then shouldn’t we fess up to the idea axing the tax may have been largely immaterial to our economic outlook.

What’s happened to prices

The figure below shows the wholesale electricity prices for NSW since 2011, with the four week period May 23 through June 20 indicated in red.

Half-hour trading interval prices for NSW, from 2011 on. Red colours highlight the 4-week period 23 May - 20 June, with volume weighted prices in red boxes. The period of carbon pricing is shown in purple shading. Black boxes show the prices adjusted by removing the carbon prices assuming an emission intensity of 0.9 tonnes per MWhour. Units are $/MWhour. Numbers along the top indicate the number of intervals when prices exceeded $250/MWhour in grey for the calendar year, red for the 4-week period.

Prior to the start of carbon pricing period in July 2012, NSW wholesale prices averaged about $30-35/MWhr, reflecting subdued market conditions due to an ongoing decline in demand for grid supplied electricity. That decline started around 2009 and continued to 2015. During the carbon pricing years (mid 2012 - mid 2014) prices jumped by ~ $20 (per megawatt hour), but volatility remained very subdued as indicated by the spread in the half hour prices. Following the rescinding of the carbon pricing legislation, wholesale prices fell back to near 2011 to early 2012 levels, but only for a short period of time. Over the last year prices have risen relentlessly, and volatility has returned dramatically. Half hourly prices now regularly hit $300 per megawatt hour.

In NSW, at $101/MWhour for the last four weeks, prices are almost 250% higher than the same period last year and almost double the equivalent period in the carbon pricing years. As illustrated below, other states show comparable trends, highlighting the exceptional nature of current prices. With the exception of anomalous prices in SA in 2013, current prices are way above anything that has been experienced in recent times.

Volume-weighted wholesale prices in four mainland states for the 4 week period May 24 - June 21, for 2011 on. Data from AEOM half-hour aggregated price and demand tables. Why are prices so high?

In fact, across the eastern states prices are now averaging higher than at any time since the height of the Millennium Drought in 2007. Then drought conditions affected the supply from hydro stations and from some thermal (coal) generation due to limited availability of cooling water. With demand then growing at around 2% each year, the drought tipped the balance between demand and supply, driving up prices dramatically. The breaking of the drought in 2009 coincided with a sustained decline in demand for electricity, at around 1% per year, though to 2015. Despite some power plant closures (notably Anglesea and Northern) and mothballing of others, the market has been in a state of considerable oversupply. Notwithstanding the impacts of carbon pricing, both prices and volatility have been remarkably low, especially in NSW and Victoria.

Since early 2016, rises in price arguably reflect a tightening of the demand-supply balance, as demand has begun to pick up.

While that is what might be expected in a market that is operating efficiently it is unlikely to be the full story, since there is still very substantial underutilised capacity. For example NSW black coal generation is still only operating at about 50% full capacity.

With such excess in relatively low cost generators, there is suspicion that the market is not operating particularly efficiently. This suggestion has been made recently in Queensland, and the AEMC has indeed flagged this issue with a request for rule change that is supported by both the regulator and the operator in their submissions (see Note 1).

Should electricity prices be part of the election agenda?

Clearly the question of price manipulation in our energy market is significant and speaks to existing market rules and the powers of the regulator. The question of market efficiency is crucial and should be addressed as part of a bipartisan approach to energy pricing.

The broader question, and one that will no doubt divide the key parties, relates to the causes and consequences of the current high electricity prices.

As alluded earlier, there would appear to be an incongruency in the Coalition position with regard to the current prices. However, it is important to note that the market prices have yet to flow through to domestic retail prices. The Coalition should be worried if and when they do. According to the logic of their own axe the tax mantra, any flow through of the wholesale price rises should stymie what it argues is a somewhat fragile consumer confidence. And along with that, so to the edifice it has built in its own attacks on Labor’s economic plans.

However, it is important to understand that even at $100 MWhour, wholesale prices are still less than 50% of the standing offer of most domestic retail contracts (see note 2). That there is fat in the system is indicated by the preparedness of most retailers to offer discounts of up to 30% on standing offers for such things as paying on time. Such sweeteners amount to more than the rise in wholesale price we have seen over the last year, and given the vertically integrated nature of the much of the industry, at least some of what is gained on the generation side can delivered by the retail side with little detriment to shareholder value.

For small generators without retail arms, and for new entrants, the wholesale price rises are a godsend. For the first time in a decade wholesale prices are approaching the cost of new generation build. With an ageing, emission intensive generation sector, there is a desperate need for new build. No matter what technology is contemplated nothing is viable at less than a long-term average of about $70-$80/MWhour.

So the current prices should be encouraging with regard to many of the challenges facing the industry. Providing current prices are reflective of an efficient market one would hope for bipartisan recognition that current prices are appropriate to the challenge at hand.

However it should also be acknowledged that such prices are not sufficient to encourage new build alone. We know that adding new capacity to the system without any withdrawal will collapse the price back to the marginal cost of coal-fired-power production of around $30/MWhour or lower. This is particularly the case for new-build renewables which have the paradoxical effect of lowering market clearing prices because of their negligible short run costs. The prospect of such a collapse in prices has an analogue in what we have seen in the recent Saudi-led onslaught against largely US-based unconventionals, and is a powerful disincentive for new investment.

Given a primary driver for new build is the necessity to reduce emissions, rational economists are unanimous that the most efficient mechanism to facilitate transition to a low emission generation portfolio is to appropriately price emissions.

While we suspect the Prime Minister really does know this, we also know he is bound by a party room that is still a long way away from abandoning ideology for rationality, on this issue at least.

So on this point we must acknowledge any chance for bipartisanship ends. In the meanwhile, the rest of us might contemplate whether market prices would actually be any higher if we still had a carbon price.

While I don’t know the answer, my suspicion is probably not.

Notes

[1] The request for the rule change was motivated by recent incidences of strategic late bidding by generators and purported manipulation of the market by withdrawing Queensland generation, seen by some as a market distortion accentuated by the current market structure of 5 minute dispatch intervals and the 30 minute trading intervals.

[2] Of course, the elephant in the room in electricity prices remains the distribution network. The cost we are paying for the poles and wires is unacceptably high, especially with the cost of capital tumbling across the world.

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from the Australian Research Council for his geological research.

The Fat-tailed Dunnart is found in box gum grassy woodland. Damian Michael

There a many reasons to be unhappy about the state of the environment. But we’ve recently found some good news: a conservation program that works.

You probably haven’t heard of the Environmental Stewardship Program (ESP). It was a market-based agri-environment program that ran between 2007 and 2012, which funded farmers to conserve threatened ecosystems on their property. Land managers were given contracts for up to 15 years to deliver results.

Overall, 297 land managers will receive about A$152 million over roughly 18 years to implement their conservation management plans. The last of these contracts will end in 2027. No new funding rounds are expected.

There’s been a variety of market-based programs for conservation on farmland in Australia, but we don’t know what the total investment is to date. And we are not aware of scientific monitoring that demonstrates their impact.

Endangered ecosystems

The box gum grassy woodlands of eastern Australia are home to several hundred species of native birds, including the iconic superb and turquoise parrots, thousands of native plants (such as the chocolate lily that leaves a deliciously rich and sweet aroma in native pastures), and beautiful mammals like the squirrel glider.

Box gum grassy woodlands have been 95% to 99% cleared for wheat and sheep grazing and are listed as nationally critically endangered.

Box gum grassy woodland is found across eastern Australia. Author provided.

Under the ESP, more than 150 farmers from southern New South Wales to southeast Queensland have been funded to conserve the box gum grassy woodland ecosystem. This is one of the largest projects of its type in the world.

Farmers undertake controlled grazing by livestock in woodland remnants, replant native woodland, avoid firewood harvesting, cease bushrock removal, and control weeds and feral animals.

But we can’t know if a conservation program is working unless we monitor it. Fortunately, soon after it started, the Australian National University was commissioned to design a monitoring program for the ESP. We have now been monitoring these efforts for six years - and the results are exciting.

Better for wildlife…

So far, the data show that the farmers are doing a good job and it is money very well spent.

To find out if the program is working, we have to compare managed (conserved) areas with “control patches” - patches where land owners haven’t done anything. This comparison shows that funded management patches have fewer environmental weeds, greater native plant species richness, more natural regeneration of native plants, smaller areas of erodible bare ground, and more species of woodland birds.

In the space of six years, the Australian government, in concert with Australian farmers (through modest investment), has generated significant, positive environmental changes on farms. In fact, the box gum project can set the bar for many other conservation programs.

…better for farmers

The positive impacts go beyond improvement of the environment, because there have been notable social benefits too.

Farmers are now highly motivated to deliver better environmental outcomes on their farms and showcase the integration of the multiple objectives of agricultural production and conservation.

The income stream they received also helped some survive the almost unprecedented hardships associated with the Millennium Drought in the mid- to late 2000s.

More generally, regular feedback and discussions between ANU field ecologists and landholders over the past six years has provided anecdotal evidence that farmers engaged in successful environmental programs suffer fewer problems with mental illness. This landholder goodwill and change in attitude towards land management is something that will far outweigh the 15-year investment in the program.

A model for conservation

Despite its success, the program has not been without detractors who see the policy and monitoring as over-engineered or boutique. This is primarily because its design, implementation, and monitoring standards are politically and bureaucratically inconvenient. They are not well suited to a reactive, short-term focused society.

In the case of monitoring, some considered it wasteful to establish and monitor control sites (areas where there has been no management). Yet without the controls, we couldn’t tell this positive story.

This is an exciting example of successful private-public land conservation and how it can be integrated with agricultural production (the primary land use of much of Australia’s land surface).

The long-term funding model is a more sensible approach than one-off payments, and provides a realistic timeframe to achieve results.

The Australian government should be congratulated and encouraged to invest in more programs of this type. It has worked because it was designed specifically to link farmers, scientists and policy makers.

Billions of dollars are expended on the environment in Australia every year. Landscape recovery will span multiple governmental cycles and every dollar must be spent wisely. Programs like ESP give some guidance on how large-scale environmental programs can be more successful.

For further information on conservation programs like the Environmental Stewardship Program, see our new e-book

David Lindenmayer receives funding from the Australian Government, the Australian Research Council, the Murray Local Land Services and the Riverina Local Land Services. David Lindenmayer is a member of the Canberra Ornithologists Group and Birdlife Australia.

Chloe Sato was employed by ANU under the National Environmental Research Program to complete research on the Environmental Stewardship Program. ANU received funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Environmental Stewardship Program.

Dan Florance is an employee of ANU and ANU receives funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Box Gum Grassy Woodlands Project of the Environmental Stewardship Program.

Emma Burns receives funding from the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Emma is an employee of ANU and ANU receives funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Box Gum Grassy Woodlands Project of the Environmental Stewardship Program.

If you despair of Australia’s lacklustre climate policies, you might take heart from the Greens’ stated goal of limiting global warming to 1.5℃. But are the party’s own policies up to the job?

Shortly after announcing this target late last year, the Greens launched an ambitious renewables policy, promising to achieve 90% renewable electricity by 2030 and save money in the process.

But as wonderful as it sounds, even this plan is insufficient to meet a 1.5℃ target.

The arithmetic is simple. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to preserve a two-thirds chance of avoiding 1.5℃ warming, future carbon dioxide emissions must not exceed 200 billion tonnes. As annual global emissions are now around 40 billion tonnes, we will blow the budget within five years.

Now let’s suppose that the entire world achieves the Greens’ emissions reduction targets of 60-80% by 2030 (relative to 2000 levels), and 100% by 2040. Assuming a steady trajectory to 70% in 2030 and another steady move to full decarbonisation a decade later, that puts global CO₂ emissions by 2040 at more than 400 billion tonnes – far beyond the budget described above.

Idealism vs realism

Does it matter if the numbers don’t add up? After all, the rest of the world has exactly the same problem. If we want to avoid losing hope of averting dangerous climate change, surely wishful thinking and calls to action are better than no target at all?

But there is a growing group of energy experts, environmentalists and conservation scientists who are worried by the environmental movement’s failure to process the full implications of the climate challenge.

Take the Greens’ promise to achieve 90% renewable electricity by 2030. There are several major economies – Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, France – that already have near-zero-emission electricity. But all of them use large amounts of hydroelectricity, nuclear power, or both.

Rather than follow the only proven path to clean electricity, the Greens propose that Australia should emulate Germany’s Energiewende policy.

While Energiewende has expanded renewable energy, it has failed to cut emissions. True, the emissions intensity of German electricity is about 40% lower than Australia’s. But both Germany’s total greenhouse emissions and the carbon intensity of its electricity have plateaued, despite record investments in renewable energy. German emissions intensity remains an order of magnitude higher than those of the nuclear/hydro countries such as Switzerland and France.

Germany’s problem is that it has had to back up its intermittent wind and solar generation with fossil fuels. The Greens promise that canny Australian engineers will succeed where Germans have failed, by using “pumped hydro” power storage power storage and concentrated solar thermal energy.

However, the jury is still out on these technologies – and even ClimateWorks, whose modelling the Greens uses, acknowledges that “large investments in Research and Design are needed to improve the performance of existing low-carbon technologies to required levels”.

Spain’s 20-megawatt Gemasolar power plant shows that solar thermal and storage can supply baseload power. But it would take around 100 Gemasolars to replace a typical major coal-fired power station, and bigger solar thermal plants, such as Ivanpah, the world’s largest, have not produced the expected output. While it would be foolhardy to write off solar thermal, it’s also mightily brave to bet the climate on it.

Making up the shortfall

Is an all-renewables future possible in Australia? Of course. But it won’t come fast, cheaply or without significant environmental impacts. The most authoritative “100% renewables study” so far was released in 2013 by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). Although the Greens requested this report, they didn’t like its conclusions: that an all-renewable grid would need baseload power from geothermal (not yet a scalable technology) and bioenergy (which has a range of knock-on environmental impacts).

Part of the problem with the Greens' approach is that it made many of its energy choices long before climate change was a major issue. The party emerged as a political force through campaigns against nuclear technologies and the Franklin River dam. It has always backed wind and solar (which now provide around 2% of global energy), but has opposed the world’s two largest sources of low-carbon energy: hydroelectrcity (6.8%) and nuclear (now 4.4%).

Am I suggesting that the Greens embrace nuclear power? While that is unlikely given their deeply held political commitments, it is not unreasonable to ask for an end to the anti-nuclear fearmongering. The Greens’ national policy platform demands the closure of the OPAL reactor south of Sydney, which produces radioisotopes for cancer detection and treatment. Without such reactors, life-saving nuclear medicine would become impossible.

The Greens are right that nuclear cannot compete on cost with coal, and if we only wanted to halve our emissions then gas and renewables would be the logical choice. But if our goal is zero-carbon electricity, and given the uncertainty about the pace of innovation in other low-carbon technologies, it is worth heeding the advice of South Australia’s nuclear Royal Commission that “action is taken now to plan for [nuclear’s] potential implementation”.

Of course the Greens are right that wind and solar must make a much larger contribution to our future energy mix. But to hope that we can avoid dangerous warming without drawing on every available tool is to put ideology before arithmetic.

Truly radical climate action means we shouldn’t unconditionally rule out any promising technology – from carbon capture and storage to low-methane genetically modified crops.

Rather than accept the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) findings about carbon budget overshoot and the consequent need for “negative emissions” technologies such as carbon capture and storage, Green politicians promote alternative research outlining all-renewable paths to global decarbonisation. Such studies assume both unprecedented technological progress, and extreme global inequality in energy use (for example by assuming that Indians will be content to use 84% less energy than Australians).

Embracing science

Of course, this is not to say that the two major Australian parties, with their underwhelming climate ambitions, are any better. Yet so successfully have the Greens cast themselves as the party of climate science that it’s easy to forget how radically they dissent from a scientific worldview in their responses to climate change.

Former NASA climatologist James Hansen, often dubbed the father of climate awareness, has branded green opposition to nuclear power as a major obstacle to solving the climate problem. In response, he was pilloried and branded a “denier”.

The idea that greedy polluters are the only barrier to an all-renewable future presents climate action as a simple moral choice. Unfortunately, caring for the planet is not so easy. Effective mitigation requires tough choices among imperfect options.

To be effective, we environmentalists must examine our own biases as carefully as we do those of our opponents. And we must do more than accept climate science; we must also use science in our search for solutions.

Jonathan Symons is a former Greens campaign manager in the federal division of Melbourne. He will be a participant in the Breakthrough Institute's 2016 annual dialogue.

The Great Barrier Reef has become a major issue in the federal election campaign, with the stakes raised by the most severe bleaching ever documented and suggestions that the next few years will be our last chance to avert major damage to this World Heritage-listed icon.

Last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and federal environment minister Greg Hunt announced a further commitment of up to A$1 billion over ten years, from an existing A$10 billion “special account” administered by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Turnbull said that this new Reef Fund will provide loans to finance more energy- and water-efficient irrigation systems on farms, as well as improved pesticide and fertiliser application systems. He also raised the possibility of the fund being used to finance solar panels on farms, saying:

The Reef Fund will support clean energy projects in the Reef catchment. It will finance solar panels and other renewable energy substitutes on farms as well as more energy efficient equipment in agriculture, local government and tourism.

The government says that this financing will be on top of A$461 million already pledged for the Great Barrier Reef, currently planned to be spent on incentive programs to help farmers move to more “water quality friendly” management practices as has been happening over the past seven years.

Labor, for its part, has pledged A$500 million over five years – including A$123 million as a continuation of an existing Coalition pledge – to be split between scientific research, pollution reduction and restoration projects, and reef management.

Is this enough money?

We already have relatively robust estimates of the funds needed to bring the reef’s water quality into line with the government’s official water quality guidelines set by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in 2010. Unfortunately, we also know it will cost much more than either major party has pledged so far.

One estimate (on which I worked) puts the cost at between A$5 billion and A$10 billion over ten years. These amounts are far in excess of the current spending trajectory, based on what has already been spent: just under half a billion dollars on farming and water-quality management, as outlined above.

This funding has achieved some limited success in reducing pollution on the Great Barrier Reef. But it is now clear that much more funding and regulation will be needed to meet the required water quality guidelines.

How much money have the parties pledged?

Financial commitments, both in government budgets and election pledges, are difficult to assess accurately. Funding can be committed across several budgets, and it is important to distinguish between no-strings funding and loan financing.

Here is a breakdown of what the three leading parties are promising to deliver.

The Coalition will spend A$450 million over 6 years (from various programs including Reef Trust and Reef Plan) or about A$350 million over 5 years (from this July) plus the new A$1 billion loan facility, which will be portioned out over 10 years.

Labor has made a A$500-million, five-year commitment, albeit contingent on maintaining A$123 million of funding previously pledged by the Coalition, with A$377 million representing newly pledged funds.

Labor’s half-billion-dollar total can be broken down into A$377 million of direct, on-ground spending plus other current ongoing budget funding. The other roughly A$130 million is designated for research and organisational management.

The Greens have pledged A$500 million in new funding, to be spent on improved farming practices and other land restoration projects, plus a A$1.2-billion loan facility to help farmers transition to low-pollution farming methods. Both schemes would be administered over five years.

The Greens have also promised to retain A$370 in existing funding for water-quality projects, which it says brings its total financial plan for the reef to more than A$2 billion.

The Greens have also promised to use the law to protect the reef, by using the powers of the GBR Marine Park Act of 1975 to regulate polluting activities in the reef’s nearby river catchments. Tightening these regulations could help to reduce pollution faster, potentially reducing the amount of money needed to hit the reef’s pollution targets.

The Queensland government has also allocated A$90 million to spend on direct water quality improvement measures over the next few years. It will also use its regulatory powers under the state’s Great Barrier Reef Protection Amendment Act of 2009 to improve the region’s farming practices.

Loans and profits

One large question hanging over the the Coalition and Greens' loan pledges is whether farmers will be keen to accept this financing, even at “low” interest rates. As many farmers are currently unwilling even to accept grant money to improve practices which provide them with little financial benefit, it is difficult to foresee a wide takeup of a loan facility.

Many environmentally beneficial changes to farm practice bring no net profit for the farmers themselves. Farming lobby group Canegrowers has questioned whether this is the best approach, arguing that the industry would rather receive dollar-matching grants than loans.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) is currently providing loans via the major banks to allow farmers to invest in energy-efficient equipment, with interest rates discounted by up to 70 basis points relative to commercial rates. This would be the model that would most likely be followed for the new proposal.

Future loans doled out under the Coalition’s A$1 billion fund would need to remain within the CEFC’s broad investment mandate of funding projects and technologies that reduce greenhouse emissions. Thus, more efficient fertiliser use, higher-efficiency irrigation pumps, and low-till cropping would all fit the bill.

It is unclear, however, whether other farming improvements that could benefit the reef – such as gully stabilisation or repair – would be judged to come under the mandate of the CEFC loans, or whether they might be excluded.

Regardless, the proposed loan program will still not put nearly enough funds into what is a pressing issue, and a parallel system of focused grants for individual pollution-reduction projects would seem to us to be a sensible approach.

Without stronger regulation (which only the Greens are suggesting) and considerably more funding than any of the main parties is yet willing to provide – not to mention stronger action on emissions reductions throughout the economy – none of these policies promises a particularly rosy future for the Great Barrier Reef.

This article was co-written by David Rickards, Managing Director of Social Enterprise Finance Australia.

Jon Brodie receives research funding from the Australian and Queensland Governments, the UN, Bancroft Station Wines, Queensland NRM bodies such as the NQ Dry Tropics NRM Group.

Fossil fuel industry-funded organisations have played a big role in climate denial. Coal power image from www.shutterstock.com

The fossil fuel industry has spent many millions of dollars on confusing the public about climate change. But the role of vested interests in climate science denial is only half the picture.

Interest in this topic has spiked with the latest revelation regarding coalmining company Peabody Energy. After Peabody filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, documentation became available revealing the scope of Peabody’s funding to third parties. The list of funding recipients includes trade associations, lobby groups and climate-contrarian scientists.

This latest revelation is significant because in recent years, fossil fuel companies have become more careful to cover their tracks. An analysis by Robert Brulle found that from 2003 to 2010, organisations promoting climate misinformation received more than US$900 million of corporate funding per year.

However, Brulle found that from 2008, open funding dropped while funding through untraceable donor networks such as Donors Trust (otherwise known as the “dark money ATM”) increased. This allowed corporations to fund climate science denial while hiding their support.

The decrease in open funding of climate misinformation coincided with efforts to draw public attention to the corporate funding of climate science denial. A prominent example is Bob Ward, formerly of the UK Royal Society, who in 2006 challenged Exxon-Mobil to stop funding denialist organisations.

John Cook interviews Bob Ward at COP21, Paris.

The veils of secrecy have been temporarily lifted by the Peabody bankruptcy proceedings, revealing the extent of the company’s third-party payments, some of which went to fund climate misinformation. However, this is not the first revelation of fossil fuel funding of climate misinformation – nor is it the first case involving Peabody.

In 2015, Ben Stewart of Greenpeace posed as a consultant to fossil fuel companies and approached prominent climate denialists, offering to pay for reports promoting the benefits of fossil fuels. The denialists readily agreed to write fossil-fuel-friendly reports while hiding the funding source. One disclosed that he had been paid by Peabody to write contrarian research. He had also appeared as an expert witness and written newspaper op-eds.

John Cook interviews Ben Stewart, Greenpeace at COP21, Paris. The bigger picture of fossil-fuelled denial

Peabody’s funding of climate change information and misinformation is one episode in a much larger history of fossil-fuel-funded misinformation. An analysis of more than 40,000 texts by contrarian sources found that organisations who received corporate funding published more climate misinformation, a trend that increased over time.

The following figure shows the use of the claim that “CO₂ is good” (a favourite argument of Peabody Energy) has increased dramatically among corporate-funded sources compared with unfunded ones.

Prevalence of denialist claim from corporate funded and non-funded sources. Farrell (2015)

In 1991, Western Fuels Association combined with other groups representing fossil fuel interests to produce a series of misinformation campaigns. This included a video promoting the positive benefits of carbon dioxide, with hundreds of free copies sent to journalists and university libraries. The goal of the campaign was to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”, attempting to portray the impression of an active scientific debate about human-caused global warming.

ExxonSecrets.org has been tracking fossil-fuel-funded misinformation campaigns for more than two decades – documenting more than A$30 million of funding from Exxon alone to denialist think tanks from 1998 to 2014.

Exxon’s funding of climate science denial over this period is particularly egregious considering that it knew full well the risks from human-caused climate change. David Sassoon, founder of Pulitzer Prize-winning news organisation Inside Climate News led an investigation into Exxon’s internal research, discovering that its own scientists had warned the company of the harmful impacts of fossil fuel burning as long ago as the 1970s.

John Cook interviews David Sassoon from Inside Climate News.

Even Inside Climate News’s revelation of industry’s knowledge of the harmful effects of climate change before engaging in misinformation campaigns has precedence. In 2009, an internal report for the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing fossil fuel industry interests, was leaked to the press.

It showed that the coalition’s own scientific experts had advised it in 1995 that “[t]he scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO₂ on climate is well established and cannot be denied”. Nevertheless, the organisation proceeded to deny climate science and promote the benefits of fossil fuel emissions.

Ideology: the other half of an “unholy alliance”

However, to focus solely on industry’s role in climate science denial misses half the picture. The other significant player is political ideology. At an individual level, numerous surveys (such as here, here and and here) have found that political ideology is the biggest predictor of climate science denial.

People who fear the solutions to climate change, such as increased regulation of industry, are more likely to deny that there is a problem in the first place – what psychologists call “motivated disbelief”.

Consequently, groups promoting political ideology that opposes market regulation have been prolific sources of misinformation about climate change. This productivity has been enabled by the many millions of dollars flowing from the fossil fuel industry. Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt, refers to this partnership between vested interests and ideological groups as an “unholy alliance”.

Reducing the influence

To reduce the influence of climate science denial, we need to understand it. This requires awareness of both the role of political ideology and the support that ideological groups have received from vested interests.

Without this understanding, it’s possible to make potentially inaccurate accusations such as climate denial being purely motivated by money, or that it is intentionally deceptive. Psychological research tells us that ideologically driven confirmation bias (misinformation) is almost indistinguishable from intentional deception (disinformation).

Video from free online course Making Sense of Climate Science Denial (launches August 9).

The fossil fuel industry has played a hugely damaging role in promoting misinformation about climate change. But without the broader picture including the role of political ideology, one can build an incomplete picture of climate science denial, leading to potentially counterproductive responses.

John Cook does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

As the world becomes more connected, invasive species are spreading further. While these species pose threats to our ecosystems, they arguably pose an even greater threat to our agriculture and food security.

Insect pests such as silverleaf whitefly, Asian gypsy moth, and Khapra beetle, are all ranked as major threats and can have significant and far-reaching impacts on agriculture and forest industries around the world.

Many researchers have looked at individual pests to assess their potential threat to particular countries. But no one has ever looked at the invasive threat from a large number of invasive species on agricultural systems at the global level.

Today we have published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which attempts to do this. We assessed almost 1,300 insect pests and fungal pathogens. We looked at where they are currently found, trade between those countries, and which crops in each country are vulnerable to attack from these species.

For each country, we estimated the potential impact of those invasive species on their agricultural industries. The most vulnerable countries are developing nations, with sub-Saharan African countries in particular being the most vulnerable, as you can see in the map below.

Our research identified the country’s most threatened by invasive species to be from sub-Saharan Africa. CSIRO Arrival

We combined a great deal of information to estimate a country’s vulnerability to invasive species, such as the global distribution of invasive species, the direction of trade data between countries, the types and value of crops grown in each country, and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of each country.

We assessed each country individually, and identified which of the 1,300 pest species were not currently found there. We then determined whether any of those species are known to have an impact on any of the crops grown in that country.

If a species was known to have an impact, we then looked at which countries that species was found in and if the country in question traded with any of those countries.

If it did, we estimated how likely it is that species could travel to the country in question based on the level of trade (this has been repeatedly shown to be correlated to the number of invasive species in a region).

Establishment

If a species could arrive at a country, the next question was whether it could establish. To determine how likely it would be for a species to establish, we used a novel method, which uses artificial intelligence to compare the source country with the target country.

The method (called a “self organizing map”) compares the collection of species present in each country to determine how similar the two countries are. The more similar they are, the more likely it is that a species from one country could establish in another. The map is able to simultaneously analyse thousands of species and hundreds of countries, making a global analysis possible.

Impact

Once we’d figured out if a species could arrive and establish, we wanted an estimate of potential impact. Economic impact is very difficult to estimate even just for one species in one location and the data was simply not available for us at the global level.

As an alternative, we identified the impact of 140 of our 1,300 species and used this to represent the range of possible impacts. We used this to estimate the impact of all the other species on every crop in every country.

Vulnerability

Once we’d done this for every species in every country, we put these together to get an estimate of the total potential impact of all invasive species that could invade a particular country.

We found that invasive species would have the largest potential impact on the US and China. This isn’t surprising: these two countries not only have the largest agricultural economies, but also have the largest trade values.

But they are also huge economies with many other economic sectors, so we wanted to know which countries are most vulnerable to the impact of invasion from these species.

We assumed that a country’s GDP represents how much money a country has available to either prevent species from arriving, or to manage them if they do arrive and establish. By dividing the potential impact of invasive species by a country’s GDP, we could get an estimate of its vulnerability.

The larger the impact of invasive species and the smaller the GDP, the more vulnerable a country is. Sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Burundi, Guinea, Mozambique, and Ethiopia were all ranked in the top ten for vulnerability.

This is mainly because these countries tend to have narrow economies that are heavily dependent on agriculture and so are more vulnerable than developed countries with more diverse economies, where agriculture is only one of a large number of industries that contribute to the overall wealth of the country.

As trade volumes continue to increase and more trade connections are made between countries it could be argued that the pressures from invasive species will only intensify. The spread of invasive species is a shared responsibility at the global level, and those countries most vulnerable to these invasions will need the most help in combating them.

Dean Paini has received funding from the CRC for Plant Biosecurity.

Cassandra Leigh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

This week’s decision by four Australian Catholic orders to divest fully from fossil fuels can be interpreted as a direct response to the encyclical on the environment, issued by Pope Francis almost exactly a year ago.

The amounts of money managed by these Australian groups may be modest, but the announcement is part of the launch of a much wider initiative by the Global Catholic Climate Movement, which aims to encourage Catholics to reconsider their investment options, on both an individual and organisational level.

The movement will be holding seminars and provides an online divestment hub to encourage Catholics to take their money out of fossil fuels and promote reinvestment in low-carbon technologies.

The papal view

A year ago, Pope Francis was very clear in his assessment of the fossil fuel industry. His encyclical warned of the dangers of climate change, arguing that:

…technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay.

He also noted that “politics and business have been slow to react in a way commensurate with the urgency of the challenges facing our world”, and stressed:

Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.

It is only a small step from this position to argue that continued investment in fossil fuels, which profit from activities that damage the natural environment, cannot be morally justified. As Bill McKibben, founder of the campaign group 350.org which strongly advocates divestment, puts it:

If it’s wrong to wreck the climate, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.

The same sentiment was echoed in a 2015 statement by Catholic bishops from all continents in response to the encyclical. The bishops called on the world to:

…put an end to the fossil fuel era … and provide affordable, reliable and safe renewable energy access for all.

Practical steps

What does this Catholic divestment drive mean in practice? Contrary to popular imagination, the Catholic Church is not a monolithic command structure controlled by the Pope. It consists of hundreds of thousands of organisations, all relatively autonomous: dioceses, religious orders, lay organisations (such as the St Vincent de Paul Society), charitable and social welfare bodies, educational bodies, superannuation institutions, insurance groups and so on.

All have bank accounts and many have investment portfolios of one type of another. While their funds might vary from thousands to many millions of dollars, the total amount of money within the church as a whole is very substantial.

In my experience, Catholic bodies are also quite tribal. For example, while many other religious bodies in Australia and internationally – including Anglican, Uniting Church, Presbyterian, Quaker and Jewish groups – have divested, Catholic bodies have been slow to take the first step within their own denomination. Each has been waiting for some other Catholic organisation to take the lead.

That is why the recent announcement by four religious orders in Australia is so important, in symbolic terms if nothing else. They have taken the lead where others have been hesitant.

The focus in Australia will now shift to bodies such as Catholic dioceses, Catholic Church Insurance and Catholic Super. All of them operate under investment guidelines that are consistent with the church’s teaching on various matters. So, for example, they would not invest in firms that produce contraceptives.

Given the Pope’s strong position on climate change, the onus is firmly on these organisations to show how they are responding constructively to his teaching. Saying it is “too hard” is not a responsible option.

Any institution as long-lived and as large as the Catholic Church will have accumulated significant assets over the 2,000 years of its existence. This wealth is used to fund activities in welfare, international aid, health care, education and pastoral support around the world. In more recent times it has been used to fund the church’s liabilities in relation to the sexual abuse scandals that have engulfed it.

It is naïve and simplistic to argue that the church should not be wealthy. What is at issue here is where this wealth is invested. While Pope Francis has made no explicit statement on divestment, many in his church are now poised to respond to his environmental message by reassessing their investments in fossil fuels.

Neil Ormerod is married to Thea Ormerod, president of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC) which is campaigning for divestment among religious bodies in Australia.

With limited fanfare, Basslink resumed operation this week for the first time in almost 6 months. Basslink is Tasmania’s proverbial umbilical cord - a 500 megawatt submarine HVDC cable that connects to the mainland providing both electrical power and data exchange. Its failure back in December last year resulted in an unprecedented energy crisis in the Apple Isle.

To help avert the crisis 200 diesel gensets were installed at a cost of around $44 million. The moth-balled, gas-fired Tamar Valley Power Station was bought back online, and deals were brokered with large industrials to cut back on their energy consumption. Some analysts have estimated the total cost of the crisis at around $400-500 million (see also).

So with Basslink’s resumption the process of repairing the damage begins.

Notwithstanding the immense flood damage, drenching rains in May followed by torrential rains in early June have helped stymie the energy crisis. With HydroTasmania’s smaller catchments now overflowing, many of its run-of-river power stations are operating at more-or-less full capacity. In a matter of a few short weeks Tasmania has gone from acute energy shortage to excess.

Basslink flows for the 4 days period June 13th - 17th. Re-connection occurred on June 13th, around midday. Flows are in megawatts and are positive northwards. Basslink failed on December 20th 2015. Data from AEMO 5-minute dispatch tables.

Meanwhile, the larger hydro catchments such as Gordon have received much needed replenishment. Total storage has doubled over the last six weeks to 27%, increasing at a near record rate of about 2% per week. Storages are now back to levels comparable to mid June in 2014 and 2015.

Tasmanian hydro storage as percentage of total capacity. Data from HydroTasmania. Yellow diamonds show mid-June levels for each year since 2008.

Because of the recent rains and the excess power production, Basslink has this week been flowing northwards into Victoria at an average of about 140 megawatts and, at times, as much as 350 megawatts. That represents about 10% of total Tasmanian dispatch, none of which is being contributed by the emergency 200 diesel generators that were bought in to deal with the crisis, and only a tiny bit from Tamar Valley and Bell Bay gas units.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the NEM

With mainland wholesale prices now averaging around $90 per megawatt hour, HydroTasmania will be relishing Basslink’s resumption. Now that the rains have come, their prayers will be for those prices to remain high. Such is the crazy brave new world of energy supply, HydroTasmania’s exports are now worth around $2 million a week.

Map of power flows across the 5 state regions in the National electricity map including interchanges for the period 14th-17th June. Note the prices for this period have averaged close to $100 per megawatt hour in volume-weighted terms. Negative values for NETINTERCHANGE imply imports, positive values exports. Data from AEMO’s 5-minute dispatch tables.

However, with mainland prices currently way above what they were even in the Carbon-tax years, questions will be asked. Why they have risen so much? If we factor out the contribution of the carbon tax, prices in New South Wales and Victoria are almost three times what they were in the comparable period two years ago.

Map of power flows across the 5 state regions in the National electricity map including interchanges for the period 16th-19th June, 2014, for comparison with the image above. Note that with the exception of QLD, prices for this period have averaged close to $50 per megawatt hour in volume-weighted terms, about half what they have been in the comparable week, 2016. Note also the 2014 prices include the carbon tax, so in equivalent terms, prices were even lower. Data from AEMO’s 5-minute dispatch tables

Some pundits will no doubt point to recent changes in the South Australian market, following the closure of the Northern Power Station in Port Augusta. However with the national electricity flows mostly converging on New South Wales, the drivers for price setting their would appear much more important.

NSW volume weighted wholesale prices for the 6-week period early May to mid June, 2008 on, shown in red circles. Half hourly prices are shown in small background including the subset for the 6 week period shown in red. Black squares show the carbon tax years adjusted downwards by removing the carbon price (assumed at $20 per megawatt hour). Data from AEMO half hour price and dispatch tables.

And as indicated in the two maps shown above, there have been no obvious changes to the demand and dispatch settings in New South Wales over the last 2 years. So with no obvious reason for such a price spike, it wouldn’t surprise if the regulators were taking a keen interest, not to mention large energy consumers with market exposure.

I doubt HydroTasmania’s latest prayers will be answered in the short-term. At least not until we see some major structural transformation in mainland generation, such as the closure of one or more of the Latrobe Valley brown coal generators. With the Victorian Government this week setting ambitious targets to generate 25% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020, and 40% by 2025, that may not be very far away. When that happens, HydroTasmania will be hoping its dams are full and Basslink is operational. And by then I hope the Apple Isle has invested more in its exceptional wind resource.

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from the Australian Research Council for geological research.

Recent revelations about the sledgehammering to death of what seem to be Australian cattle in Vietnam provide further evidence of the government’s inability to control how exported livestock are slaughtered overseas.

An Animals Australia investigation reported by ABC’s 7.30 showed what are reportedly Australian cattle being slaughtered in three abattoirs. Australia has suspended trade to the facilities while they are investigated.

The government’s tool to try to ensure humane slaughter is known as the Export Supply Chain Assurance Scheme (ESCAS). This requires cattle to be killed in accordance with World Animal Health Organisation standards. Killing cattle by hitting with a sledgehammer, although common practice in Vietnam, is not allowed by the standards.

The other requirements of ESCAS offer little reassurance to the Australian community that welfare will be safeguarded. Under the standards, cattle must be traced. This means we should know which cattle are Australian, and be able to control and audit the supply chain.

There are problems with this model. Supply-chain control is desirable but potentially contravenes the principles of the World Trade Organisation. Auditing is only as good as the manner in which it is undertaken, and there has been much recent debate about this.

But beyond problems with Australian regulations, there are broader issues with sending live cattle overseas, and to Vietnam in particular.

What do people in Vietnam think about slaughter?

Vietnam is a relatively poor country, and has been even poorer in its recent history. There is little culture of caring for animal welfare when human welfare is the primary concern. Of even greater concern regarding the animals is the fact that Vietnam now acts as a staging post for Australian cattle that are ultimately en route to China and other Asian markets.

In 2015, Australia exported 311,523 cattle to Vietnam, up from 3,353 in 2012. That’s a hundred-fold increase in just three years. Increasingly these exports are of young “feeder” cattle, which need an additional period of feeding before they are ready for slaughter.

At the Centre for Animal Welfare and Ethics (CAWE) at the University of Queensland, we have led a World Animal Health Organisation project to run training courses in Vietnam on livestock slaughter last year. This included research into Vietnamese attitudes to livestock slaughter, in comparison with other Southeast and East Asian countries.

For a forthcoming scientific paper, we surveyed future stakeholders in the industry – veterinary and animal science students. We found that those in Vietnam are more accepting of livestock transport by ship and road than those in China, Malaysia and Thailand. They also more readily agree that exporting livestock from a developed country to developing countries is acceptable.

In another survey, we investigated attitudes of those directly involved in the livestock slaughter and transport industry in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and China. Over 1,000 respondents took part, including 210 from Vietnam.

Similar to respondents from China, Vietnamese respondents were not confident that they could make improvements to the welfare of animals in their care, whereas those from Malaysia and Thailand were. Vietnamese respondents had the least agreement with the survey statement: “In the past I have tried to make improvements to the welfare of the animals in my care.”

In Malaysia, respondents identified religious beliefs as one of the motivations for improving slaughter. For Vietnamese respondents, the main factors were the law, their knowledge, the attitudes of co-workers and company approval.

Vietnamese respondents also rated having the right tools and resources as less important in welfare improvement. This suggests that lack of access to stunning machines isn’t a major factor.

While all respondents thought that welfare improvements would work best when driven by legislation and government, those in Vietnam (and China) also thought that the police played an important role.

Phasing out live export

Our surveys indicate the major differences between the attitudes of the cattle industry in Vietnam and Australia. The police play almost no role in livestock welfare improvement in Australian abattoirs, yet they are considered an important player in Vietnam. Unlike Muslim countries, there is no argument in Vietnam that exports support religious festivals.

By sending young cattle to Vietnam, the Australian agriculture industry is losing out on jobs from growing them to a mature weight and processing them before sending them overseas. There is now a state-of-the-art killing and processing facility in Darwin to achieve this; the first new cattle abattoir to be built in Australia in 50 years.

The latest revelations should act as a signal that Australia should phase out the export of livestock, not immediately, but over five to ten years. This would enable exporters to build trade relations for meat export, delivering a high-quality product to overseas markets for the benefit of Australian producers, the consumers and the Australian conscience.

Clive Phillips is a member of the Voiceless Scientific Expert Advisory Panel, is on the Board of Minding Animals and has recently received funding from Australian and New Zealand governments for provision of training and conducting research on livestock transport and slaughter in SE and E Asia.

By itself, concrete is a very durable construction material. The magnificent Pantheon in Rome, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, is in excellent condition after nearly 1,900 years. And yet many concrete structures from last century – bridges, highways and buildings – are crumbling. Many concrete structures built this century will be obsolete before its end.

Given the survival of ancient structures, this may seem curious. The critical difference is the modern use of steel reinforcement, known as rebar, concealed within the concrete. Steel is made mainly of iron, and one of iron’s unalterable properties is that it rusts. This ruins the durability of concrete structures in ways that are difficult to detect and costly to repair.

While repair may be justified to preserve the architectural legacy of iconic 20th-century buildings, such as those designed by reinforced concrete users like Frank Lloyd Wright, it is questionable whether this will be affordable or desirable for the vast majority of structures. The writer Robert Courland, in his book Concrete Planet, estimates that repair and rebuilding costs of concrete infrastructure, just in the United States, will be in the trillions of dollars – to be paid by future generations.

Old bridges need new money to replace. Phil's 1stPix/Flickr.com, CC BY-NC

Steel reinforcement was a dramatic innovation of the 19th century. The steel bars add strength, allowing the creation of long, cantilevered structures and thinner, less-supported slabs. It speeds up construction times, because less concrete is required to pour such slabs.

These qualities, pushed by assertive and sometimes duplicitous promotion by the concrete industry in the early 20th century, led to its massive popularity.

Reinforced concrete competes against more durable building technologies, like steel frame or traditional bricks and mortar. Around the world, it has replaced environmentally sensitive, low-carbon options like mud brick and rammed earth – historical practices that may also be more durable.

Early 20th-century engineers thought reinforced concrete structures would last a very long time – perhaps 1,000 years. In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less. Building codes and policies generally require buildings to survive for several decades, but deterioration can begin in as little as 10 years.

Many engineers and architects point to the natural affinities between steel and concrete: they have similar thermal expansion characteristics, and concrete’s alkalinity can help to inhibit rust. But there is still a lack of knowledge about their composite qualities – for example, in regard to sun-exposure-related changes in temperature.

The many alternative materials for concrete reinforcement – such as stainless steel, aluminium bronze and fibre-polymer composites – are not yet widely used. The affordability of plain steel reinforcement is attractive to developers. But many planners and developers fail to consider the extended costs of maintenance, repair or replacement.

Cheap and effective, in the short term at least. Luigi Chiesa/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

There are technologies that can address the problem of steel corrosion, such as cathodic protection, in which the entire structure is connected to a rust-inhibiting electric current. There are also interesting new methods to monitor corrosion, by electrical or acoustic means.

Another option is to treat the concrete with a rust-inhibiting compound, although these can be toxic and inappropriate for buildings. There are several new non-toxic inhibitors, including compounds extracted from bamboo and bacterially derived “biomolecules”.

Fundamentally, however, none of these developments can resolve the inherent problem that putting steel inside concrete ruins its potentially great durability.

The environmental costs of rebuilding

This has serious repercussions for the planet. Concrete is the third-largest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, after automobiles and coal-fuelled power plants. Cement manufacturing alone is responsible for roughly 5% of global CO₂ emissions. Concrete also makes up the largest proportion of construction and demolition waste, and represents about a third of all landfill waste.

Recycling concrete is difficult and expensive, reduces its strength and may catalyse chemical reactions that speed up decay. The world needs to reduce its concrete production, but this will not be possible without building longer-lasting structures.

Rebar reclamation: an expensive job. Anna Frodesiak/Wikimedia Commons

In a recent paper, I suggest that the widespread acceptance of reinforced concrete may be the expression of a traditional, dominant and ultimately destructive view of matter as inert. But reinforced concrete is not really inert.

Concrete is commonly perceived as a stone-like, monolithic and homogeneous material. In fact, it is a complex mix of cooked limestone, clay-like materials and a wide variety of rock or sandy aggregates. Limestone itself is a sedimentary rock composed of shells and coral, whose formation is influenced by many biological, geological and climatological factors.

This means that concrete structures, for all their stone-like superficial qualities, are actually made of the skeletons of sea creatures ground up with rock. It takes millions upon millions of years for these sea creatures to live, die and form into limestone. This timescale contrasts starkly with the life spans of contemporary buildings.

Steel is often perceived to be inert and resilient too. Terms such as “Iron Age” suggest an ancient durability, although Iron Age artefacts are comparatively rare precisely because they rust. If construction steel is visible, it can be maintained – for instance, when the Sydney Harbour Bridge is repeatedly painted and repainted.

However, when embedded in concrete, steel is hidden but secretly active. Moisture entering through thousands of tiny cracks creates an electrochemical reaction. One end of the rebar becomes an anode and the other a cathode, forming a “battery” that powers the transformation of iron into rust. Rust can expand the rebar up to four times its size, enlarging cracks and forcing the concrete to fracture apart in a process called spalling, more widely known as “concrete cancer”.

Concrete cancer: not pretty. Sarang/Wikimedia Commons

I suggest that we need to change our thinking, to recognise concrete and steel as vibrant and active materials. This is not a case of changing any facts, but rather of re-orientating how we understand and act on those facts. Avoiding waste, pollution and needless rebuilding will require thinking well beyond disciplinary conceptions of time, and this is especially true for the building and construction industries.

The collapsed civilisations of the past show us the consequences of short-term thinking. We should focus on building structures that stand the test of time – lest we end up with hulking, derelict artefacts that are no more fit for their original purpose than the statues of Easter Island.

Guy Keulemans does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

Flatworms of the genus Temnosewellia liivng on the Orbost spiny crayfish (Euastacus diversus). Andrew Murray

I am so proud of our recent publication, mostly because it has been a long time coming. We received an Australian Research Council grant in the year 2000 to work on this so it has taken us some time to achieve our goal.

The characters in this story are the Australian freshwater spiny crayfish and their flatworm friends, which are called temnocephalans. These worms spend their entire lives living on the bodies of the crayfish, and in many cases, one species of flatworm is found on only one species of crayfish.

Their partnership has endured for 100 million years. To put that in perspective, our own species Homo sapiens has occupied the earth for 0.2 million years, so we are a blink compared to these ancient creatures. There are three genera discussed in our paper: one genus of crayfish and two types of temnocephalans. I will introduce them in turns.

Spiny crayfish (genus Euastacus)

The genus Euastacus are cool-climate specialists who live in leafy upland rivers, where they hide under rocks and burrow into the banks. The genus originated on the ancient continent of Gondwana and persists only in eastern Australia.

Unlike their more familiar relatives such as yabbies, spiny crayfish grow slowly and live for a long time. The larger species, such as the Murray Cray, take up to 7 years to become sexually mature and can live for 50 years or more. Nobody knows exactly how long, and really large specimens (which could be very old indeed) are increasingly difficult to find.

Fishing pressure and habitat alteration has caused serious declines in many species, while climate change puts all of them at risk. No less than 75% of the Euastacus species are endangered. Those most at risk reside on isolated mountains in northern Queensland.

We collected 37 different species of Euastacus for our study. Each one lives in a different river system or National Park, and some were collected by hand, others using nets. Patience and persistence were required in every case.

I remember one trip in particular, when David, Kim, my husband and I were in the Grampians National Park on New Year’s Eve 2003 – after a day of collecting we set up our microscopes on a picnic table in the campsite to pick worms from our crayfish and label our specimens. Members of the public were intrigued and after looking down our microscope, one young camper presented us with a drawing of a crayfish (probably Euastacus bispinosus) that has hung on my office wall ever since.

Drawing of a spiny crayfish by Daniel Artus, age 5. Original artwork, Daniel Artus

Temnocephalans – ectosymbiotic flatworms

I have written about temnocephalans before, and it is worth looking at the video in my article here to see how they move.

Basically, they look like little hands with eyeballs and they stay attached to the crayfish using large suction discs. The “fingers” are tentacles that they use to catch prey from the water.

We have no evidence that they harm the crayfish, so we say that they are symbiotic (meaning the relationship is probably of mutual benefit). It may be that temnocephalans keep the crayfish clear of other parasites and that crayfish stir up sediment providing sources of food for the worms.

There are two genera of temnocephalans in our study: Temnohaswellia have six tentacles and are usually white, while the genus Temnosewellia are brown and have five tentacles. The former genus was named after William Haswell, a director of the Queensland Museum, while the latter was named after our own co-author Kim Sewell.

Some temnocephalan species live on more than one crayfish species, a pattern common among the Temnohaswellia. Others are found exclusively on one species of crayfish, a pattern common among the Temnosewellia. This is true especially among the far northern populations, which are most at risk of extinction.

In order to complete this study, we dissected individual worms so we could send samples to London for DNA analysis and keep enough of the animal in Australian so we could identify each species.

In some cases, the temnocephalans we found did not even have names. Kim, Lester and David had to complete careful microscopic and taxonomic work and publish species descriptions before we could continue.

Co-evolution

By analysing DNA sequences from 37 crayfish species and 33 species of temnocephalans, we were able to describe the ancient association between them.

The evolutionary history was reconstructed in matched evolutionary trees (called a co-phylogeny) allowing us to see patterns of divergence over a period of time that included extensive climate change as continents separated and drifted north.

Host-shifts are evident in the patterns revealed, meaning when one group diverged (as in when a new crayfish species formed) the other followed (a new temnocephalan species was born). There are few datasets available of this type and they are of great interest to evolutionary biologists.

Co-extinction

Unfortunately, the close association between crayfish and flatworm species means that if one goes extinct the other is likely to follow. Our analysis suggests that if all the endangered Euastacus species go extinct, then 60% of temnocephalan species will follow suit.

Both types of organisms are so unique and special they deserve protection, but climate change will make this challenging due to their reliance on clear cold water and shady habitats.

It is our hope that by highlighting these issues, more people will care about the future of freshwater crayfish and the tiny animals (there are others) that live on them or in their burrows. In any case, we are delighted to be able to offer this unique insight into the phenomenon of co-evolution.

Disclosure

Susan Lawler and co-authors received funding from the Australian Research Council.

Coal is the biggest source of electricity. Coal image from www.shutterstock.com

As the world moves to combat climate change, it’s increasingly doubtful that coal will continue to be a viable energy source, because of its high greenhouse gas emissions. But coal played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution and continues to fuel some of the world’s largest economies. This series looks at coal’s past, present and uncertain future.

CC BY-ND

China's coal future is up in the air. Coal image from www.shutterstock.com

As the world moves to combat climate change, it’s increasingly doubtful that coal will continue to be a viable energy source, because of its high greenhouse gas emissions. But coal played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution and continues to fuel some of the world’s largest economies. This series looks at coal’s past, present and uncertain future.

Something remarkable happened in China in 2014. China’s coal consumption - the highest in the world - appeared to stabilise for the first time in 16 years. Many commentators proclaimed a new era for China’s energy mix and perhaps even the beginning of the demise of coal in China.

As China is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, this was heralded as good news for the climate.

But the future is rather more uncertain. China is a major regional power with a major energy economy. Its primary energy consumption has grown by more than 500% over the past 30 years. China overtook the United States as the world’s largest primary energy consumer in 2010.

Not surprisingly, the world has been watching the role of coal in China’s energy development with considerable interest over the past few decades.

Twin threats: pollution and climate change

In 2010, China released its 12th Five-Year Plan (FYP), the country’s defining economic plan for 2011-15. It fundamentally changed China’s approach to energy and climate policies.

Instead of broad goals and statements, the plan shifted to specific policy instruments aimed at reducing emissions. It was driven in no small part by domestic environmental concerns centred on smog, air and water pollution.

The 12th FYP established binding targets to reduce energy intensity by 16%, reduce carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions intensity (emissions per unit of GDP) by 17%, and increase the proportion of non-fossil fuels in the primary energy mix to 11.4% – all by 2015.

These targets were reinforced by the historic US-China Joint Announcement on Climate Change in 2014.

Through the announcement, and its pledge ahead of the Paris climate summit in December 2015, China promised to peak in CO₂ emissions around 2030 (and try to peak earlier), cut emissions intensity by 60-65% of the 2005 level, and source around 20% of its primary energy consumption from non-fossil fuels by 2030. Provided that economic growth is limited to 5.5% (China’s economy grew by 6.9% in 2015), China’s emissions in 2030 would return to close to 2005 levels.

After the Paris Agreement, China announced its 13th Five-Year Plan, covering 2016-20. With a focus on capping energy consumption to within 5 billion tonnes of coal equivalent (capping overall energy use, not only coal use) by 2020 and addressing air pollution, energy intensity will be reduced by 15%, CO₂ emissions intensity will fall by 18%, and the proportion of non-fossil fuels will increase to 15%.

What does this mean for coal?

BP’s 2016 Energy Outlook shows China’s fuel mix is changing. The share of coal in primary energy is projected to fall from 66% in 2014 to 47% by 2035. Demand for coal is likely to peak in 2027 and then fall by 0.3% each year over the next seven years.

To compensate for China’s reduced reliance on coal, the share of natural gas is expected to more than double, with the share of non-fossil fuels also increasing rapidly to bridge the gap.

One interesting question is what does this mean for coal-fired power infrastructure in China?

Two main drivers influence the building of new power plants.

The first is growth in future electricity demand. This is influenced by population growth and the intensification of energy use in developing economies, such as China.

The second is “business-as-usual retirement” of infrastructure. This is driven largely by regulatory compliance and competitiveness in the electricity market, as well as a preference to shift to low-carbon sources to assist in meeting emissions reduction targets.

Most power plants approaching retirement age are located mainly in the USA and Europe, as you can see in the chart below. China, on the other hand, has a remarkably young fleet with a median age of 10 years.

And this is where the dilemma emerges. Very few plants are approaching the age of natural retirement in China, even by 2030 when emissions are scheduled to peak.

Global Data/Author provided, CC BY-ND

Given the age of coal-fired infrastructure in China, it doesn’t appear as though business-as-usual retirements will drive a dramatic reduction in China’s coal use.

Increasing climate action

Of course the pledges announced prior to Paris are only part of the story. The Paris Agreement aims to hold warming to well below 2℃ and attempt to limit warming to 1.5℃.

Estimates suggest the Paris pledges would result in warming of 2.7-3.6℃. Accordingly, much greater emissions-reduction efforts are likely to be required to hold global average temperature increase to less than 2℃.

A recent study looked at the implications for global coal-fired power investments (operating, committed and planned) for a 2℃ average temperature rise scenario (in line with the International Energy Agency’s global mitigation scenario).

The investments in recent and new coal-fired power plant capacity are dominated by expansion in Asia, in particular China and India. A global reduction in coal-fired power infrastructure to shift from the business-as-usual scenario to the 2℃ mitigation scenario unsurprisingly would require China to make a significant contribution to this reduction.

Accordingly, China would need not only to reverse its growth trend in installed capacity by 2030, but also decommission some 400 gigawatts of coal-fired infrastructure, approximately equivalent to a third of its capacity, before the end of its useful life.

The implication is that non-OECD countries including China could be asked to carry more of the economic burden to transform the global energy system because these countries will need to prematurely retire cost-effective coal power assets. Questions about whether this is realistic and around compensation for the cost of such early retirements may influence the prospects of addressing the risk of climate change.

A second driver of China’s coal consumption trend is the push to reduce air pollution, in particular damaging pollution known as PM2.5. While BP’s Energy Outlook for 2016 suggests that this will drive the switch from coal to natural gas, in the absence of serious constraints on carbon emissions, energy security drivers may favour the use of coal-derived synthetic natural gas (syngas or SNG).

While this reduces air pollution, the production process is very carbon-intensive. China has made ambitious plans to develop this technology.

With the release of the 13th FYP earlier this year, the energy sector was expecting a limit on total coal consumption and cuts to coal production in order to peak emissions by 2030.

Yet while some production cuts have been announced, precisely how this will play out for coal-fired power infrastructure and actual coal consumption remains to be seen.

Caroline Stott, UQ Energy Initiative Research Officer, contributed to this article.

Chris Greig owns shares in Rio Tinto, BHP and Wesfarmers. He is chief investigator on a grant provided by ACALET (Australian Coal Association Lowe Emissions Technologies Ltd).

In April 2011, not long after Julia Gillard was returned to power in the 2010 federal election, I asked a representative sample of Australians about their attitudes to climate policy.

Climate was a water-cooler issue at the time. The carbon tax legislation had been introduced into Parliament in March, paving the way for a subsequent emissions trading scheme.

That scheme bit the dust in 2014 after becoming a hotly debated issue during the rancorous 2013 election campaign, but carbon policy has not had the same high profile during the current campaign. My colleagues and I decided to repeat our survey and see whether attitudes really have cooled on global warming.

Despite climate policy being something of a sleeper issue in this election, our results suggest that concern about the climate is more widespread now than it was five years ago.

We found that 75% of people surveyed believe it to be an important global issue, and 74% see climate as an important issue for Australia.

As to what we should do about it, we found that 57% of people want Australia to act on climate change irrespective of whether other countries do or not. This is significantly more than in 2011, when 50% of people were in this category.

A further 28% in our new survey think that action should be taken only if there were concerted international policy action, whereas just 15% would prefer that Australia take no action at all. When asked why they did not want to proceed, 34% of them stated that they only wanted to proceed if global action was taken.

These are fairly clear indicators that Australians are not complacent about the need for climate action.

What policies do voters want?

Both of the major political parties have committed to emissions targets: the Liberals have a target of a 26-28% reduction relative to 2005 levels by 2030, whereas Labor has pledged a 45% cut over the same time frame. Both are modest in comparison with the Climate Change Authority’s recommended cut of 40-60% by 2030 relative to 2000 levels.

As for the policies needed to meet these targets, Labor has proposed an emissions trading scheme, but some details are still vague. The Liberal Party is persisting with its Direct Action plan to “auction” emissions reduction projects to the cheapest corporate bidders.

Our survey, however, suggests that many voters' preferred policy is a mixture, potentially including a carbon tax, an emissions trading scheme and other direct action policies. Some 40% of respondents preferred this policy mix, up from 31% in 2011. Support for carbon taxation or emissions trading as standalone policies both fell relative to five years ago.

When divided according to voting intentions, all groups preferred a policy mix to any of the other choices. This preference was strongest for “unsure voters”, who made up nearly a quarter of our respondents. For Labor and Greens voters, the most favoured second-choice option was a carbon tax, while no single policy (not even Direct Action) came a close second among Liberal voters.

The numbers get even more intriguing when we split them by gender, age and income. We found that 82% of females see the issue of climate change as important at a global level, and the same proportion described it as important at a local level; this was 15 and 16 percentage points, respectively, greater than among their male counterparts. There was a similar 15-point gender difference in the desire to proceed on climate policy irrespective of global action.

This desire for climate policy irrespective of global action was the dominant view in every age group, although we found that it declined among older groups. The 55-59 age group was the weakest in its support for climate action and the most likely (at 36%) to select “no policy” as the desired climate response.

In our 2011 study, higher incomes were associated with less desire for climate policy. This was replicated in 2016, as can be seen in the graph below – note the significant increase in support for “no climate action” among those with salaries over A$110,000.

As these stats show, concern about climate change is relatively steady until we get to the highest income bracket, where it drops off significantly. There are several potential explanations, including the suggestion that those with higher incomes will be less adversely affected by climate change because they can afford to ameliorate its impacts.

But if there is a take-home message for politicians in these numbers, I would suggest it is this: even in those groups with the lowest levels of climate concern, a majority is still worried about the issue and wants to see action.

Perhaps, in the midst of the longest election campaign since the 1960s, it might be worth finding a bit more time to acknowledge that.

Deborah Cotton received funding from Macquarie University Higher Degree Research Fund for the survey in 2011 and The University of Technology Sydney Business School for the 2016 survey.

Victoria has joined three other states and territories in setting a renewable energy target. Wind energy from www.shutterstock.com

The Victorian Labor government has announced an “ambitious and achievable” Victorian Renewable Energy Target (VRET). This target will commit the state to generating 25% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020, and 40% by 2025.

While details of the VRET are yet to be fully fleshed out, it is set to be based on a similar mechanism to the scheme used in the Australian Capital Territory (ACT), which has managed to sidestep the uncertainty that has plagued the renewables industry in recent years. The ACT deputy chief minister, Simon Corbell, called Victoria’s announcement on Wednesday “a game-changer”.

In fact a key motivation identified by the Victorian energy minister, Lily D'Ambrosio, was “restoring the confidence needed to invest”.

National tally

The federal Renewable Energy Target (RET) was reduced by 20% following the Warburton Review in 2014. Since then, state and territory governments have announced their own targets to support the industry.

Earlier this year, the ACT announced it would bring forward previous commitments. It is now aiming to meet 100% of its electricity needs by 2020.

In 2014, South Australia announced a 50% target by 2025. More recently, Queensland committed to generating 50% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.

Based on forecasting by the Australian Electricity Market Operator, these commitments add up to a considerable expansion of renewable energy. In total, these commitments represent 56 terawatt hours (TWh) each year, above baseline generation. Baseline generation is renewable generation that existed before 1997, almost exclusively hydro power.

Comparison of national renewable energy target and state renewable energy targets Author

The remaining states already have renewable generation and these facilities presumably won’t be torn down. So even assuming that these states don’t build a single new project, in combination with the targets, Australia is headed towards a total of 61TWh above the baseline.

This compares to the current national target of 33TWh. If the states fulfil their commitments, they will deliver almost twice as much renewable generation as the national RET requires.

If we add baseline hydro back into the equation, total renewable energy generation in Australia is set to be at least 77TWh by 2030. Depending on how electricity demand changes, and how rooftop solar is included, Australia is on track to meet 30-35% of its power demand from renewables by 2030.

What does the target mean for coal?

Victoria has always been a major exporter of electricity in the National Electricity Market. In 2014-15, it generated more than 55TWh of electricity and exported over 8TWh. Generally, Victoria exports to South Australia, New South Wales and Tasmania (although Tasmania’s flows have been more interesting in recent times).

It is unlikely that Victoria will substantially increase exports. Indeed, it has limited ability to do so. The South Australian government recently announced funding for a study into new interconnection for South Australia to import power when required, and export more renewable energy to other markets.

Consequently, such a significant increase in renewable generation in Victoria – expected to be in the vicinity of 5,400 megawatts – will have dramatic implications for the state’s existing power stations.

An increase in market share of renewables, from roughly 14% today to 40% in 2025, will necessarily come at the expense of market share for existing power stations. And in Victoria that means brown coal, Australia’s most carbon-intensive power source.

The question now is can the brown coal generators collectively survive such a reduction in market share? And if they can’t, who drops out, and when? Or perhaps brown coal can be progressively phased out without too much pain.

This is, however, good news for Australia’s national climate change mitigation commitments. At average Victorian emissions intensity, by the time the 2025 Victorian target is fulfilled, the new renewable generation in Victoria would be avoiding the emission of some 18 million tonnes of CO₂ per year.

National policy implications

At the national level, several different policies and pathways have emerged through the election campaign. These includes a national 50% renewable energy target, an emissions trading scheme, a brown coal exit plan and potential modifications to the government’s cap on emissions (known as the safeguard mechanism).

Whatever emerges at the federal level, the Victorian scheme is well adapted to future changes to both the energy market and energy policy developments. Indeed, it is expressly designed to complement national schemes in the long term, and to provide certainty and confidence for investors in the short term.

In response to the VRET, the Business Council of Australia has called for climate policies that are “integrated with broader energy policy”. A decade of policy uncertainty and toxic political debate has thus far prevented this from occurring.

As the Grattan Institute reported earlier this year: “An economy-wide carbon price remains the ideal climate policy. But pragmatism and urgency demand a practical, next-best approach.”

Given the popular support for renewable energy, perhaps this policy is actually such a pragmatic approach.

Dylan McConnell received funding from the AEMC's consumer advocacy panel.

Among the increasing sums of money being pledged to help save the Great Barrier Reef is a federal government pledge to spend A$40 million on improving water quality. The Queensland government has promised another A$33.5 million for the same purpose.

One of the biggest water-quality concerns is nitrogen runoff from fertiliser use. It is a concern all along the reef coast, and particularly in the sugar-cane regions of the Wet Tropics and the Burdekin. The government’s Reef 2050 Long Term Sustainability Plan calls for an 80% reduction in dissolved inorganic nitrogen flowing out onto the reef by 2025.

Our recent research suggests that “nitrogen trading” might be worth considering as a flexible economic mechanism to help farmers deliver these much-needed reductions in fertiliser use.

What is nitrogen trading?

You probably already know about carbon trading, which allows polluters to buy the right to emit greenhouse gases from those with spare carbon credits. Nitrogen trading would work in a similar way, but for fertiliser use.

A nitrogen market could offer a flexible way of encouraging farmers to use fertiliser more efficiently, as well as rewarding innovations in farming practice. It could be a useful addition to existing fertiliser-reduction schemes such as the industry-led Smart Cane Best Management Practice. These are making headway but evidently not enough.

A nitrogen market isn’t going to happen tomorrow, but it could be part of a future in which an annual limit (called a cap) is set on the total amount of nitrogen flowing out from river catchments to the reef.

One way to enforce this cap would be to set a limit on fertiliser applications per hectare. Cane farmers would have to manage the best they could with that fixed amount of nitrogen.

But nitrogen trading would offer more flexibility, while still staying under the same total nitrogen cap. Instead of a fixed limit, farmers would receive a certain number of “nitrogen permits” per hectare of cane. Then, if they wanted or needed to, they could buy or sell these permits through a centralised online “smart market”.

How would it work?

Imagine you’re a farmer with a property that sits on good soil. The amount of fertiliser you can apply to your crop must match the number of nitrogen permits you hold. But you know that, on your good land, you would get more profits if you could apply more fertiliser.

To do this you would have to buy extra permits through the nitrogen market. These extra permits would be worth buying as long as they deliver more than enough extra profit to cover the cost.

The total number of permits is limited by the cap – so buyers can only buy extra permits if other farmers are selling them. So who’s selling?

Putting fertiliser onto a field with poor soil won’t increase your profits as much, because a lot of that fertiliser will just run off before the crop can use it. On a bad paddock, nitrogen permits aren’t worth much in terms of extra crop yield, so you might make more money by just selling them to other farmers with good paddocks. That is why trading happens.

The overall effect of this trading would be to switch a significant amount of nitrogen fertiliser away from less profitable, leaky soils, and onto more profitable, less leaky land. As a result, the total nitrogen cap would be distributed more efficiently across the farming landscape.

For individual farmers, the reward for low-nitrogen farming practice is the opportunity to sell unused permits at a profit. This incentive will help to drive ongoing improvement and innovation.

Our simulations suggest that overall sugar cane profits and production would be higher with trading than they would under a fixed per-hectare nitrogen limit – with the same overall cap on the amount of nitrogen hitting the Great Barrier Reef.

Opportunity for the future?

Will it just mean more expensive regulation, green tape and hassle for farmers? Farmers are already signing up to calculate and record actual fertiliser applications paddock by paddock under the Six Easy Steps nutrient management program.

If we’re in a future where the government is monitoring and managing a fixed nitrogen cap anyway, then not much extra work is needed to set up an online trading market.

So could nitrogen trading help the Great Barrier Reef? Maybe. There’s more thinking still to be done, but nitrogen trading schemes are already operating in New Zealand and the United States.

A firm overall limit on fertiliser use seems to be essential for the reef’s survival. The incentives provided by a nitrogen market could give Queensland’s farmers the flexibility they need to thrive in this nitrogen-constrained future.

Graeme Curwen and Michele Burford of the Australian Rivers Institute at Griffith University contributed to the research on which this article is based.

Jim Smart receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program - Tropical Water Quality Hub and Seqwater.

Adrian Volders receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program - Tropical Water Quality Hub.

Chris Fleming receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program - Tropical Water Quality Hub, the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility, the Australian Government Department of the Environment and the Worldwide Wildlife Fund.

Syezlin Hasan receives funding from the National Environmental Science Program - Tropical Water Quality Hub.

Carbon capture and storage can clean up coal power. Coal image from www.shutterstock.com

As the world moves to combat climate change, it’s increasingly doubtful that coal will continue to be a viable energy source, because of its high greenhouse gas emissions. But coal played a vital role in the Industrial Revolution and continues to fuel some of the world’s largest economies. This series looks at coal’s past, present and uncertain future.

Coal is the greatest contributor to climate change of all our energy sources. This means that if the world acts to limit global warming to well below 2℃, coal will likely be constrained – unless its greenhouse gas emissions can be removed.

One of the great hopes of the industry is carbon capture and storage (CCS), a way to burn coal, remove the carbon dioxide (CO₂) emissions and store it safely away from the atmosphere. While there have been several breakthroughs, the technology remains expensive.

Advances in energy technologies mean that adding CCS doesn’t just need to work; it needs to work at a lower cost than its growing legion of competitors. And while the alternatives are good news for avoiding dangerous climate change, it’s a substantial challenge for the coal industry.

Capturing carbon

The current range of CCS technologies can be grouped into “pre-combustion” and “post-combustion” methods.

Pre-combustion methods typically react the carbon in the fuel with high-pressure steam to make hydrogen CO₂. The CO₂ is then separated (captured) from the hydrogen before the hydrogen is burned in the power station to make energy, with the only emissions being water vapour.

Post-combustion technologies try to capture the carbon after it has been burned and becomes CO₂. If the fuel is burned in air, then the CO₂ needs to be separated from the exhaust gas stream which, like air, is mostly composed of nitrogen gas. This is usually done by passing the gas stream through a liquid that dissolves the CO₂ but not the nitrogen.

Another technique, called “oxyfuelling”, separates oxygen out of the air and then uses it to burn the fuel in an atmosphere of oxygen and recycled CO₂. The exhaust gas stream from this process is close enough to pure CO₂ that it can be sent directly to the storage process.

Several options have been explored for storing the carbon. These include the deep ocean, depleted oil and gas wells, deep saline aquifers, as manufactured mineralised carbonate rock, or as naturally mineralised carbonate by injection into basalt reservoirs.

Regardless of the technique, the outcomes for coal combustion are similar. The amount of emissions is reduced by 80-100%, while the cost of coal-fired electricity generation increases by at least the same amount.

These costs come from building the capture plant, CO₂ transport pipelines and the sequestration plant. More than double the amount of coal must be burned to make up for the energy cost of the CCS process itself.

When CCS was first considered as an emissions solution, competition from renewables, such as solar and wind, was weak. Costs were high and production volumes were negligible.

How cheap?

In the 1990s, many believed that renewables (other than existing hydro, geothermal and biomass for heating) might never be able to replace coal cheaply. The future of energy was going to be a centralised grid, rather than the distributed power models being discussed today, and there were only two widely backed horses in the technology race: CCS and nuclear.

But the early part of this century has seen an energy revolution in both renewables and fossil fuels. Among renewables, solar and wind have both taken enormous strides in reducing production costs and building manufacturing scale.

For fossil fuels, the expansion in gas pipeline infrastructure, the development of liquefied natural gas (LNG) shipping and the growth of both conventional and unconventional gas production have encouraged fuel switching from coal in European and US markets in particular.

Trying to compare the costs of different types of electricity can be tricky. Power stations require capital to build and have heavy financing, operational and decommissioning costs. Nuclear and fossil fuel power stations also have to buy fuel.

Analysts use the term “levelised cost of electricity (LCOE)” to aggregate and describe this combination of factors for different methods of electricity generation.

A significant challenge for coal and CCS is that the LCOE for wind and solar at a comparable scale is already competitive with coal generation in many places. This is because the cost of manufacturing has fallen as production has increased.

While this seems not to bode well for coal and CCS, there’s a caveat: a coal with CCS power station makes power when the sun doesn’t shine and the wind doesn’t blow.

It’s easier for wind and solar to compete when traditional fossil fuel power stations are there to back them up, but not so easy when renewables become dominant generators and the cost of storage needs to be taken into account to ensure a consistent supply.

A game changer?

That was until batteries came along and offered the ability to store renewable energy for when the sun doesn’t shine. There is considerable hype around the entry of the Tesla Powerwall into the home electricity market.

But that is only one of numerous home battery solutions from the likes of Samsung, LG, Bosch, Panasonic, Enphase and others. All are designed to store excess solar power for use at night.

The emerging breakthrough of these products is the price, which is bringing batteries into the realm of competition with centralised electricity generation.

While a battery won’t take your family entirely off-grid at first, such batteries mean most suburban households can become largely energy-independent. They need only top up from the grid now and then when a run of cloudy days comes along during the shorter days of winter.

In the longer term, there’s a clear pathway for most homes to disconnect completely from the grid, should battery prices continue to fall.

Why are batteries a threat?

The reason that batteries can compete with centralised generation is because the cost of transmission and distribution from a coal-fired power station to your home is considerable.

These costs are not normally considered in the LCOE calculations, because it is assumed that all power generators have access to the same, centralised electricity grid.

But a battery in your home means that these costs are largely avoided. That makes home energy generation and storage much more competitive with traditional power generation in the longer term.

For developing nations without a strong centralised grid it also means that energy systems can be built incrementally, without large investments in infrastructure.

This is an ill wind for the competitive future of CCS, which depends on the centralised generation model and a lack of low-cost competitors to stay viable.

That doesn’t mean the coal industry should give up on CCS. Having a range of options for a low-emission future is a good thing. Affordable energy is at the heart of our modern civilisation and standards of living.

CCS may also lay the foundations for Bioenergy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), one of the few (albeit expensive) technologies with the potential to recoup significant amounts of CO₂ from the atmosphere. But this points to a renewable biomass future, not a coal future.

The odds that CCS will keep coal alive as an industry into the future are getting longer each year.

What we are seeing is the start of the great transition from fossil fuel mining to manufacturing as the basis for our energy systems. It’s not dominant yet, but you would be starting to get very nervous if you were betting against it.

Gary Ellem has received funding in the past from state and federal governments for research into renewable energy technologies, cleantech industry development and social licence in the Australian unconventional gas sector. He has previously consulted to the solar, bioenergy and mining sectors.

Certainly larger and more frequent storms are one of the consequences that the climate models and climate scientists predict from global warming. But you cannot attribute any particular storm to global warming, so let’s be quite clear about that. – Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, speaking to reporters in Tasmania on June 9, 2016.

In the aftermath of the deadly East Coast Low that swamped eastern Australia, dumping massive amounts of rain in early June, the prime minister toured flood-affected Launceston and announced emergency relief funding.

Turnbull told reporters that larger and more frequent storms were forecast by climate scientists but cautioned that no individual storm could be attributed to global warming.

Is he right?

Checking the source

The Conversation asked the prime minister’s office for sources to support his statement but did not hear back before publication deadline. Nevertheless, we can test his statement against recent published and peer-reviewed research on this question.

The science shows that, just like real estate, climate change is all about location. Different parts of Australia will be affected in different ways by climate change.

And global warming will have different effects on different types of weather systems.

Let’s break Turnbull’s statement into two parts: is it true that we can expect larger and more frequent storms as a consequence of global warming? And is it possible to attribute a specific storm to global warming?

Can we expect larger and more frequent storms as a result of global warming?

Yes – but not for all regions or types of storms.

There are many types of storms that affect different parts of Australia, among them East Coast Lows, mid-latitude cyclones (a category that includes cyclones that happen in the latitudes between Australia and Antarctica), tropical cyclones, and associated extreme rainfall events. Each will be affected in a different way by climate change, and the effect will vary by region and by season.

On East Coast Lows: Acacia Pepler, who is studying extreme rainfall and East Coast Lows in relation to climate change, recently wrote in The Conversation that her research showed that:

… East Coast Lows are expected to become less frequent during the cool months May-October, which is when they currently happen most often. But there is no clear picture of what will happen during the warm season. Some models even suggest East Coast Lows may become more frequent in the warmer months. And increases are most likely for lows right next to the east coast – just the ones that have the biggest impacts where people live.

For all low-pressure systems near the coast, “most of the models we looked at had no significant change projected in the intensity of the most severe East Coast Low each year,” Pepler wrote.

On mid-latitude cyclones: Another study predicted that the overall wind hazard from mid-latitude cyclones in Australia will decrease – except in winter over Tasmania.

On tropical cyclones: Northern Australia is expected to get fewer cyclones in future – but their maximum wind speeds are expected to become stronger.

On rainfall: Scientists tend to be quite confident that climate change will be accompanied by an increase in extreme rainfall for most storms in future. One of the main reasons for this is that increased temperatures will cause increased evaporation. While the total amount of water held in the atmosphere will also increase slightly in future, the total amount of rain has to go up too.

Is it true you can’t attribute any particular storm to global warming?

Turnbull is correct. We cannot say for sure that a particular flooding rainfall event was solely “caused” by climate change, any more than we can say for certain that a particular car accident was solely caused by speeding (even if excessive speed was a likely or even major contributing factor).

Evidence for the effects of global warming on extreme rainfall events that have already occurred is currently equivocal for most regions.

According to a collection of studies published in 2015:

A number of this year’s studies indicate that human-caused climate change greatly increased the likelihood and intensity for extreme heat waves in 2014 over various regions. For other types of extreme events, such as droughts, heavy rains, and winter storms, a climate change influence was found in some instances and not in others.

One recent study in that report found:

evidence for a human-induced increase in extreme winter rainfall in the United Kingdom.

Verdict

Malcolm Turnbull was essentially correct on both points.

It’s true that scientists predict more frequent and intense storms for some parts of Australia as the climate changes. The evidence appears to be strong that extreme rainfall will increase. Some increases in extreme wind speeds are possible – but not in all regions or all seasons.

Turnbull was right to say you cannot attribute any particular storm to global warming. –Kevin Walsh

Review

This is a good FactCheck that summarises the broad conclusions from a range of studies examining the nature of current and likely future storms across Australia.

As the author points out, Australian storms range from tropical cyclones in the northern tropical regions to temperate east coast lows and mid-latitude cyclones.

The consensus regarding tropical cyclones is that they will generally decrease in frequency in the Australian region. In northeast Australia, they are forecast to experience the most dramatic decrease in frequency of any ocean basin globally. Some northern hemisphere ocean basins will see an increase in their frequency.

The intensity of these types of storms is expected to increase. This will not only involve higher wind speeds but also higher storm surges and floods. That will mean greater coastal impacts and damage to coastal developments and infrastructure.

So the prime minister’s statement about more frequent storms resulting from climate change does not apply to tropical cyclones – however, he was right to say that larger and more frequent storms are one of the predicted consequences of climate change. This consequence is predicted to apply to other storm categories, but not tropical cyclones.

And yes, climate scientists are hesitant to attribute the occurrence of any single storm to global warming. – Jonathan Nott

Have you ever seen a “fact” worth checking? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

Kevin Walsh receives funding from the ARC, Australian government grants and various overseas organisations.

Jonathan Nott receives funding from the ARC.

Winter is here! Despite many Australians opting not to heat their homes to the point of complete comfort, many of us nevertheless will soon receive a nasty surprise when the energy bills arrive.

With Australia’s historically cheap energy, old housing stock in many areas, mild climate and frequent emphasis on low building costs, many homes are little more than “glorified tents” when it comes to thermal performance.

Besides wanting smaller bills, many residents also want to improve comfort, lessen their environmental impact and boost their home’s value.

So here is list of 22 things you can do to improve your home’s energy performance – some cheap, some free, and some that can even make you some money up-front as well as cutting your bills. Of course, to reach the ultimate goal of a home heated and powered by 100% renewable electricity you may still wish to put some solar panels on your roof, but why not consider the following actions first?

1. Make sure you get the maximum discount on your energy bills. Although not available everywhere, in Victoria discounts of up to 38% are available on gas or electricity. Ring up your retailer and just ask, or threaten to switch, or better yet seek out a retailer that doesn’t treat their discounts like state secrets.

2. Monitor your power usage with the help of a “smart” electricity meter or in-home electricity display. This real-time (or near-real-time) information is more useful than the coarse monthly data commonly printed on energy bills. It can help identify appliances that have inadvertently been left on or those that draw excessive power when not in use.

3. Heat your water off-peak. If you have a resistive-electric hot water storage tank, make sure it heats up at night, when off-peak power rates apply. In some areas, “time of use” rates are available.

4. Get rid of your ‘garage fridge’. It can cost hundreds of dollars a year to run an inefficient 20-year-old fridge, especially if it’s in a garage that hits 50℃ in summer.

5. Ditch your super-hot plasma. If you have a 10-year-old television that gets so hot you can fry an egg on the screen, check out the newer models that can use one-tenth of the electricity.

6. Install a modern showerhead, such as those designed with double-impinging jet technology that use only 5 litres of water per minute. Old showerheads can pass up to 35 litres per minute. Why not grab a bucket and stopwatch and test yours?

7. Insulate any exposed hot water pipes, including the pressure-relief valve on your hot water tank. Make sure hot water pipes do not run uninsulated straight into the soil in your garden. Insulate electrically heated storage tanks where it is safe to do so.

8. Check your heaters and air conditioning. Gas heating systems should be checked at least every two years by a qualified person, not least to keep poisonous carbon monoxide gas at bay. All heating or cooling system filters should be cleaned regularly to improve energy efficiency and air quality.

9. Inspect your ducts. Poorly installed or degraded ductwork can lead to big energy losses, which can go unnoticed for decades. Ensure that small children or animals have not gone under your house and damaged your gas heating ducts. Check also that air returns are properly “boxed-in” and do not draw air in from the wall cavity instead of from the living space. However, cleaning the inside of your ducts is not critical for energy saving, and risks damaging them in the process.

10. Banish drafts, for instance by plastering over those ubiquitous wall vents – relics from the days when homes relied on unflued heaters or gas lights. Seal off unused chimneys and fill any other cracks, gaps or holes around doors, windows, skirting boards, floorboards and architraves. Remember to close air-conditioning ceiling vents in winter. Ventilation should be controlled by opening windows, not by having permanent holes in the walls.

Older houses can be full of drafts, including from wall vents which are a throwback to times when homes were full of indoor pollution. Bidgee/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

11. Eliminate ceiling-mounted downlights wherever possible. A small number of modern wide-beam LEDs can adequately replace a larger quantity of narrow-beam halogen downlights. Aim to have as few holes cut into your ceiling as possible, because these holes let heat escape in winter and let it in during summer.

12. Install downlight covers over all downlights that protrude into accessible attic spaces. Not only does this reduce fire hazards and keep out insects, but it will also reduce air flow through the roof.

13. Replace all regularly used lights with LEDs. LEDs use a tenth of the energy of halogen or incandescent bulbs, so will pay for themselves in just a few months (even less in places where free replacement is on offer). Replace less regularly used bulbs with LEDs as and when they burn out, and vow never to buy a non-LED bulb again.

14. Insulate your attic…. If you don’t have roof insulation, buy some. If you do, check it meets the recommended “R value” for your climate. Ensure all vertical attic surfaces (walls, skylight tunnels) are also insulated, and include a layer of aluminium in your attic space. Thermal imaging can be used to identify existing flaws, such as gaps or sections of insulation inadvertently moved by tradespeople working in the attic.

15. …and your floors and walls too. In cooler Australian climate zones, floor and wall insulation can help keep heat in, making your home warmer and cheaper to operate.

16. Cover your windows from the inside… with drapes, curtains or blinds. This will keep in heat at night and on cold winter days, and keep out the sun in summer. Cheaper or do-it-yourself thermal window treatments such as plastic films or even bubble wrap can be applied in some situations (just don’t expect to win any design awards).

17. …and the outside. Trees, plants, external awnings, blinds or shade sails can all keep out the summer sun and stop windows getting hot. Remember that significant heat will reflect onto windows from sizzling decks, paved areas and walls (but not lawns). It’s better to keep out the sun in the first place rather than try to cool your house down.

18. Double glazing for windows cuts out noise, improves security and saves energy too. For many Australian climate zones, I recommend that homeowners never buy a window in future that isn’t double-glazed. Retrofit options options such as “secondary glazing” are also available.

19. Fit a pool cover if you have a swimming pool. Not only will this stop the water cooling down overnight in summer, but a cover can also minimise cleaning, chemical use and the running time for your filter pump. Consider upgrading to a more efficient pump if yours is more than a decade old, and ensure it does not run for more hours each day than required.

Remember to cover up when not sunbathing. Kgbo/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

20. Use reverse-cycle to heat your home…. If your home has reverse-cycle air conditioning (also known as a heat pump), this may be the cheapest way to heat, especially as gas prices rise. On heat mode, reverse-cycle units harvest free renewable ambient heat from the air outside your home and pump it up to the toasty temperature you need inside. Having installed high-efficiency reverse-cycle units, I can heat my own home for one-third of the cost of ducted gas heating.

21. …and your water. If your hot water system is nearing its use-by date, consider replacing it with a heat pump. This is an especially good option for homes that already have solar panels and low feed-in tariffs.

22. If you can eliminate all gas use in your home (for space heating, water heating and cooking), you can eliminate your gas bill with its nearly A$1 per day fixed supply charges.

And then there is solar…

In Australia these days, you won’t be paid much money for selling your electricity back to the grid. However, it might still pay to install solar if you can consume most of the energy yourself, by running your pool pumps, appliances, space heating and cooling devices, hot water system and even an electric car with solar electricity harvested during the day.

In future, as electricity storage batteries get cheaper, there may be even more economic reasons to have solar panels on your roof.

This article doesn’t list every possible behavioural trick or home improvement. Sadly, some homes will never be fantastic energy performers without significant modification. But hopefully there are a few things on this list that will work for you – even if it’s only a case of finally covering that drafty doorstep, or giving your creaking “beer fridge” a dignified retirement.

In addition to his role at the University of Melbourne, Tim has conducted over 400 home energy assessments/consultations working or volunteering with organisations such as the not-for-profit Moreland Energy Foundation - Positive Charge.

We see their spokespeople quoted in the papers and their ads on TV, but beyond that we know very little about how Australia’s lobby groups get what they want. This series shines a light on the strategies, political alignment and policy platforms of ten lobby groups that can influence this election.

Formed in the mid-1960s, the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF) is one of Australia’s longest-running and most influential environmental lobby groups. The non-profit membership organisation campaigns against pollution and mining, and advocates for clean energy and strong environmental laws.

The ACF’s major focus this election is shaping up to be the Great Barrier Reef. The recent, catastrophic bleaching event has thrust the Great Barrier Reef front and centre into the election debate, and the ACF is putting pressure on all major political parties to address this issue.

It seems this pressure is working. Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull this week announced a A$1 billion commitment for the Great Barrier Reef; although the ACF has criticised the lack of reference to climate change in this announcement.

CC BY-SA

ACF membership costs A$10 and those who join are encouraged to give additional contributions. Almost 90% of the ACF’s income derives from donations and bequests. It also receives a small amount of funding from federal and state government, and a modest amount from membership fees.

While the ACF does not explicitly align itself with any particular political party, the greener a party’s credentials, the higher it ranks in the ACF’s estimation.

Screenshot of the ACF's election scorecard.

The ACF’s Environmental Scorecard ranks the three major parties on their environmental credentials. The Greens leads the way with a 77% score. Labor is on 53%, and the Coalition on only 11%.

The ACF has also endorsed the Greens’ climate change policies. But it hasn’t explicitly suggested that people vote for them.

The ACF has made some progress through collaboration with the private sector. Since 2004, it has been part of the Australian Climate Roundtable (previously the Australian Business Roundtable on Climate Change). This unlikely coalition includes the Australian Aluminium Council, Australian Industry Group, Business Council of Australia, and Energy Supply Association of Australia. The coalition has agreed to a set of principles underpinned by an agreement to try and meet the Paris Agreement’s 2℃ target.

This approach of working with businesses, rather than against them, has arguably been one of the reasons for the ACF’s success.

The ACF also has a strong history of working with other environmental groups. The Places You Love Alliance brings together the ACF with other groups including the Wilderness Society and WWF, to campaign for stronger environmental laws.

Screenshot of the Places You Love website.

In recent years, the ACF has retreated from an “insider” approach of lobbying politicians for policy change, towards a more grassroots approach, harnessing community support. This is the basis for the ACF’s drive to put the Great Barrier Reef on the election agenda through amassing public support, rather than lobbying parties directly.

The ACF’s approach is more conservative than some other more radical environmental groups, which may be another reason for its success.

Much of the ACF’s success in achieving environmental objectives over the decades has occurred before the courts. In the late 1970s through the 1980s, the ACF launched several high-profile challenges to development on environmental grounds.

In 1980, the High Court of Australia prohibited the ACF from challenging a decision about a new resort in central Queensland. The High Court stated that “a belief, however strongly felt, that the law generally, or a particular law, should be observed” does not allow a group to challenge a decision.

Despite this setback, tenacity paid off. In a 1989 case, the ACF challenged a decision to grant licences for the export of woodchips. The Federal Court found the ACF had a “special interest” in the subject matter, permitting it to challenge the decision. This case famously extended the ability of public interest groups to challenge decisions made by government.

Even today, the “ACF cases” are still referred to as the basis for standing when a group seeks to challenge a decision.

More recently, the ACF challenged the original Carmichael Mine approval under the EPBC Act. This challenge never made it to final judgment before the Federal Court, as Environment Minister Greg Hunt conceded an error in the decision-making process.

The ACF tries to amass public support rather than lobbying politicians directly. Nathan Paull/AAP

This concession sparked the so-called “lawfare” saga when the then Attorney General George Brandis launched an offensive against the rights of environmental groups to engage in “lawfare”. He described this as litigation brought by groups that:

have no legitimate interest other than to prosecute a political vendetta against development and bring massive developments … to a standstill.

Following Hunt’s concession, the decision was set aside, and a new approval for the Carmichael mine was granted in October 2015. The ACF has since launched a challenge to this revised decision, which was heard by the Federal Court in May. The decision is pending.

The ACF has campaigned hard for strong action on climate change, throwing its weight behind a carbon price in the past. The short-lived carbon price introduced by the Gillard government is counted as one of the ACF’s successes.

But interestingly, a carbon price hasn’t featured as prominently in the ACF’s election campaign lobbying in 2016.

Read the other articles in The Conversation’s Australian lobby groups series here.

Justine Bell-James has previously received funding from the Australian Research Council and the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility.