Monthly Archives: March 2015

Climate Change & Sustainability

Keystone XL pipeline bill vetoed

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President Obama has vetoed a bill to approve construction of the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would bring tar sands oil from Canada down to Texas refineries on the Gulf coast.

It’s important to note that the pipeline bill has been vetoed, not the pipeline.

For starters, pretty much everyone has noted that Keystone is not dead. All the veto means is that Congress isn’t able to force the pipeline’s construction through legislation — the process is just going back to being centered on the State Department’s administrative review procedure, as it largely has been for the last six years.

The State Department will consider the proposal and in their own good time make a recommendation to John Kerry as Secretary of State.

The bill was a political Tea party move to pre-empt State Department approval.

Meanwhile important court proceedings are taking place in Nebraska and South Dakota. The pipeline authority TransCanada is claiming ’eminent domain’ giving then the right to drive the pipeline through properties. About 90 Nebraska landowners claim that state law giving TransCanada the right to seize land under eminent domain is unconstitutional.

If the landowners succeed TransCanada does not have a route for the pipeline.

At Climate Central we learn that

the energy required to process tar sands oil is so great that oil piped through the Keystone XL will emit 1.3 billion more tons of greenhouse gas emissions over the pipeline’s 50-year lifespan than if it were carrying conventional crude oil.

President Obama has said he would only approve Keystone XL if it didn’t significantly increase carbon emissions. To me that makes the decision quite straightforward, but the argument is being put that the tar sands will be developed anyway, so the pipeline makes no difference.

Obama has said also that there is no need for the US to use oil from tar sands. Apparently energy security is a factor in his thinking.

A new study suggests that the majority of the oil will be used in the US.

My guess is that Obama does not want a tar sands pipeline approval as part of his legacy.

Politics & Government, Social Science and Society

Brandis – doing his job?

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Graeme Innes was a human rights commissioner under five attorneys-general from both sides of politics. He writes that George Brandis was the only one to question his integrity.

Innes was appointed in 2005 under Philip Ruddock, who said he must do the job “without fear or favour”.

I disagreed many times on policy issues with Howard ministers and staffers. Our discussions were sometimes “free and frank”, usually civil and never personal. My views were regularly questioned, my integrity was not.

Under Rudd Robert McClelland became attorney general. He said to commissioners:

Sometimes you’ll give us a kicking. Sometimes you’ll support us. That’s your job.

He took the Ruddock approach, sometimes questioning our recommendations, but never our integrity, as did attorneys-general Nicola Roxon and Mark Dreyfus.

Things changed under Brandis, he says. Now on the Triggs matter, Innes says:

Part of our democratic system, and the rule of law, provides that a key duty of any attorney general is to defend judges and statutory officers doing their jobs, because they are not in a position to easily defend themselves.

In attacking her, Brandis is not doing his job. Innes told The World Today:

“It changed under that of George Brandis, where the officers ourselves, the commissioners ourselves, the statutory officers ourselves were questioned, rather than what we were putting to the Government and the attorney from the perspective of the Human Rights Commission.

“Our integrity was questioned in the same way that Gillian Triggs’ integrity has been questioned in the last month.”

Yesterday Brandis’s peers in the Senate passed a no confidence motion in him, declaring him “unfit to hold the office of Attorney-General”.

The motion was supported by Labor, the Greens, the Palmer United Party’s two senators and Tasmanian independent Jacqui Lambie. South Australian independent Nick Xenophon and Family First Senator Bob Day both sided with the Government.

Brandis argued that the Human Rights Commission is not a court and not protected like the judiciary:

It should never be above criticism. No institution of the executive Government should be beyond criticism and beyond scrutiny. Not the ministry, not the public service, not agencies within the executive Government.

This Parliament should be a guardian, a fierce guardian of its rights to call members of the executive, and agencies of the executive Government into account.

On that basis it is the duty of politicians under parliamentary privilege to attack public servants who can’t defend themselves.

Michael Bradley, the managing partner of Marque Lawyers, says that Brandis has trampled all over the conventions that govern his own role as first law officer. In the the Westminster system the Attorney-General is supposed to have a higher duty, beyond politics, as the primary defender of the rule of law and our system of justice. He sees the HRC as included in the system of justice. It’s important that the HRC should be free to say what the Government does not want to hear. His bottom line:

If Triggs’s testimony is correct, the fact that Brandis sought to remove her from her position by offering her another job raises serious questions about his integrity. Where his actions leave us is in the untenable situation that his working relationship with Professor Triggs is irretrievably broken.

Consequently, one of them will have to go. It shouldn’t be her.

Denis Muller at The Conversation argues that The Australian newspaper has been running a concerted campaign on the Triggs issue. The paper’s position is ideological, he says, and inappropriate for the fourth estate.

ABC FactCheck has found Gillian Triggs’ assertion that in the first months of the Coalition Government the time children spent in immigration detention “was reaching quite exceptional levels” is correct.

Innes also criticised Tim Wilson’s appointment as human rights commissioner without a selection process and fresh from the Institute of Public Affairs, whose policy was to abolish the Commission. This left Susan Ryan covering disabilities as well as age discrimination, an unfair burden.

My earlier post is here.

Climate Action, Climate Policy & Planning, Climate Science

Climate clippings 128

1. Hot and cold

My sister in Toronto tells us how cold it has been. She can’t remember the last time it reached -5°C.

Yet NASA finds that Feb 2014 to Jan 2015 was the hottest 12 months on record. The picture tells the story:

NASA1-15-550

2. Record megadroughts predicted

The American Southwest and the great Plains could experience the worst megadroughts in ancient and modern times.

According to the findings, future droughts in both regions will be more severe than even the hottest, driest megadroughts of the 12th and 13th centuries, which are believed to have contributed to the fall of ancient Native American civilizations that inhabited the Southwest, such as the Pueblo Indians.

Climate Central gives the odds.

The chances of a megadrought (lasting 35 years or longer) are up to 50%.

The odds of a decade-long drought are around 90%.

There’s also a 5-10 percent chance that parts of the region could see a state of “permanent” megadrought lasting 50 years or longer under the highest-warming scenario, a greenhouse gas emissions path we’re currently on.

3. New era of climate action and hope

Christiana Figueres reckons 2015 is going to be a transformational year in climate change action. She of course is the boss-person of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) which is sponsoring the Paris talks in December.

Amongst other things she mentions the June Live Earth concerts initiated by Al Gore and Kevin Wall (reviving their 2007 effort) to be held in New York, South Africa, Australia, China, Brazil and Paris.

She also plugs the UNFCCC’s Momentum for Change initiative, including Lighthouse Activities.

4. UK parties in pact on climate change

David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband have agreed to work together to tackle climate change, as they warned it posed a threat to national security and economic prosperity.

In what might be seen as a surprising move in the run-up to the general election, the three party leaders have pledged to work “across party lines” to agree cuts to the UK’s carbon emissions.

They have also signed up to seeking a “fair, strong, legally binding” international climate deal, set to be negotiated in Paris at the end of the year, to limit global temperature rises to below 2C – the level beyond which “dangerous” climate change is expected.

And they pledged to move to a low-carbon economy, ending the use of coal without technology to capture and store its emissions for power generation. (Emphasis added)

5. Tesla’s fancy home battery

Tesla will start production in about six months, all going well.

“We are going to unveil the Tesla home battery, the consumer battery that would be for use in people’s houses or businesses fairly soon.”

“Some will be like the Model S pack: something flat, 5 inches off the wall, wall mounted, with a beautiful cover, an integrated bi-directional inverter, and plug and play.”

Thanks to Geoff Henderson who linked to this one recently at Saturday Salon. Yes, it could indeed be a game changer.

6. Laser ignition to replace spark plugs

A team at Princeton Optronics working on replacing conventional spark plugs with laser igniters has produced a running engine and they claim that replacing spark ignition with lasers could improve the efficiency of gasoline powered engines by 27%. Considering that the basic design of the spark plug hasn’t really changed in over a century, this would be a revolutionary step, frickin’ lasers or not.

Because the spark plug is located on the edge of the combustion chamber, not all of the fuel is combusted. Laser ignition can be directed to the centre of the chamber, or in fact to multiple parts of the chamber in extremely rapid succession. Ignition can also be more accurately timed in relation to the movement of the piston. The result is a more complete burn and greater fuel efficiency.

7. Climate oscillations and the global warming faux pause

Michael Mann posts on research he was conducted, with others, on multidecadal climate oscillations in the Pacific and the Atlantic Oceans. They found that the Pacific dominates and was the predominant cause of a slight slowing in predicted warming over the past decade-and-a-half or so.

It is possible that the downturn in the PMO [Pacific Multidecadal Oscillation] itself reflects a “dynamical response” of the climate to global warming. Indeed, I have suggested this possibility before. But the state-of-the-art climate model simulations analyzed in our current study suggest that this phenomenon is a manifestation of purely random, internal oscillations in the climate system.

This has implications for the future.

Given the pattern of past historical variation, this trend will likely reverse with internal variability, instead adding to anthropogenic warming in the coming decades.

The “false pause” may simply have been a cause for false complacency, when it comes to averting dangerous climate change.

Reminder Climate clippings is an open thread and can be used for exchanging news and views on climate.

Life

Seeing is believing

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You may have seen this dress from tumblr:

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It’s meant to be black and blue, or white and gold. Some can see it both ways and some see it differently after going for a walk.

I think it’s blue and gold – definitely!

For different reactions, see Business Insider.

I’ve heard two different academics explain what’s going on. I’d say that colour comes to us through light waves, but is constructed subjectively by each of our brains.

I think the clue on this one is that they used blue and black and ran a yellow light filter over it.

From Mark’s Facebook here are a couple of pics riffing off the original:

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By the way, we used to have a carpet at our place until we ripped it up. I saw it as grey, my wife saw it as green. She was right, of course!