All posts by Brian

Brian Bahnisch, a survivor from Larvatus Prodeo, founded Climate Plus as a congenial space to continue coverage of climate change and sundry other topics. As a grandfather of more than three score years and ten, Brian is concerned about the future of the planet, and still looking for the meaning of everything.

Climate Policy & Planning, Climate Science

Climate clippings 100

June 24, 2014 Brian 1 Comment

1. Climate clippings reaches 100

Generally speaking I don’t rate the number 100 much except that it’s the number after 99 and the number before 101. Which might be just as well because when I was going through all the posts after transporting them (thanks tigtog) from Larvatus Prodeo I found two with the same number. So the 100th edition was actually number 99!

If you like to laugh Graham Readfearn has assembled 11 climate change comedy video clips to celebrate his 50th post on Planet Oz. I can recommend John Oliver and Australians for Coal, for example. There’s a bad language warning on the latter.

Huffpost has 9 Political Cartoons That Put Climate Change In Perspective:

2. Dust increases Greenland’s ice melt

A ‘normal’ Greenland summer melt is illustrated by the left-hand panel taken at 8 July 2012, when about 40% of the ice sheet was subject to melting.

The right-hand panel shows what happened for about a week thereafter and is not relevant except as a harbinger of things to come.

A new study looks at the increased melting from dust and soot. It found that a relatively minor decrease in the brightness of the ice sheet could cause double the average yearly rate of ice loss seen over the period 1992-2010.

Soot resulting mainly from wildfires in North America and Russia has a greater melting impact than dust as such. However, increased dust is being produced in the Arctic and finding its way to the Greenland ice. Now 150 times as much dust as soot has been found at a site in the north-east.

While this can’t be extrapolated to the rest of the ice sheet, there is concern that Greenland melting could be greater than previously thought. See also Antarctic images for context.

3. Green jobs declining in Australia

Yes green jobs are declining in Australia:

Australia is one of the few places in the world where green jobs are decreasing according to figures released by the International Renewable Energy Agency.

Globally the sector now provides an estimated 6.6 million jobs, an increase of 800,000 from 2013 figures, but in Australia, jobs across solar photovoltaics and solar heating have declined, with up to 22 per cent of jobs lost in PV and 20 per cent in heating, according to Ethical Jobs general manager Michael Cebon.

This is happening:

entirely the result of government policy, both through loss of incentives at the federal level and backpedalling by state governments.

While a structural shift is occurring in the workforce elsewhere, Australia is regressing. The graphic shows the jobs potential of investment in various sectors:

4. Climate change impacts will ‘cost world far more than estimated’

That’s according to Lord Stern. He says that:

the economic models that have been used to calculate the fiscal fallout from climate change are woefully inadequate and severely underestimate the scale of the threat.

That includes those cited by the IPCC. They ignore the science, the full range of risks and simply assume away some of the worst economic impacts.

5. Historians will look back and ask ‘why didn’t they act?’

That’s the question asked by science historian Naomi Oreskes in her

latest book, The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future, [which] imagines a Chinese scholar in 2393 analysing the slow-motion disintegration of 21st-century democracies as they fail to tackle a growing environmental catastrophe.

It’s not a pretty picture.

By the end of the book, co-written with fellow historian Eric Conway, the Netherlands and Bangladesh are submerged, Australia and Africa are depopulated, and billions have perished in fires, floods, wars and pandemics. “A second dark age had fallen on Western civilisation,” Oreskes writes, “in which denial and self-deception, rooted in an ideological fixation on ‘free’ markets, disabled the world’s powerful nations in the face of tragedy.”

Oreskes and Conway say it’s a worst-case scenario, not a prediction.

One way or another, the game is up, we need to act with vigour and determination.

6. Coal to fuel human progress for decades – Tony Abbott

Our fearless leader has been strutting his stuff on the world stage, ignoring the science and embarrassing us all. He told Texan business leaders that:

we don’t believe in ostracising any particular fuel and we don’t believe in harming economic growth.

“For many decades at least, coal will continue to fuel human progress as an affordable energy source for wealthy and developing countries alike.”

Under the fig leaf of Direct Action anything goes.

Meanwhile Julie Bishop confirms that climate change won’t be high on the G20 agenda.

Once again they are out of tune with the nation. In a recent opinion poll 57% of those polled said the government should take climate change more seriously.

while more than half of respondents felt the federal government was the primary body which should address climate change, there was a negative rating of -18 when people were asked to rank the government’s performance.

This compares to a -1 rating from last year. These rankings are the differential between respondents’ “good” versus’ “poor” response to the government’s performance.

Reminder: Use this thread as an open thread on climate change.

7. Pacific presidents speak out against Australia’s stand on climate change

Out in the Pacific they are not happy with Abbott’s policy stance. The sea is coming up and they are going down. Here’s Fanning Island in Kiribati:

Politics & Government

Lost in a mid-winter Canberra fog

June 23, 2014 Brian 13 Comments

Laura Tingle’s Friday AFR column ends with:

The despair in Coalition ranks is extraordinary. As thick as a mid-winter Canberra fog.

At the beginning:

“What on earth does the government think it is doing?” was the mystified question du jour in Parliament House. You might expect it from business executives who don’t have time to focus day to day on politics. It’s just a little more alarming coming from government backbenchers and even ministers’ staff.

The latest kerfuffle is over the use or non-use of the term “occupied” to refer to East Jerusalem and occupied West Bank territories. Apparently the term “disputed” preferred by Israel has been used. Rural Liberals are seething over Attorney-General George Brandis’s remarks about East Jerusalem, accusing him of “intellectual arrogance”.

They have very real concerns over live cattle exports. In Jedda, 57 Arab foreign ministers condemned the Federal Government’s decision not to use the term “occupied” when referring to east Jerusalem.

Their statement, issued in Jeddah, also calls on member states to “take necessary measures” in response.

The declaration was made as the Foreign Minister Julie Bishop sought to assure ambassadors from many of those countries that Australia’s position hasn’t changed.

It’s not clear if her efforts will have the desired effect.

Tingle says that Bishop apologised. No-one seems to know whether there has been a considered change in position, or whether it was a Brandis stuff-up. Bishop claimed on Insiders that there had been no change in position, claiming that practice is to use “East Jerusalem”, “West Bank” or “occupied territories”, but not in combination. She claims that they were verballed by Lee Rhiannon. Nevertheless they seem to have gotten themselves into a twist.

Beyond the East Jerusalem dispute Tingle says:

the government is under deadly attack from those communists at the Australian Medical Association. Its new president, associate professor Brian Owler, wrote this week the health measures in the budget “add up to bad health policy”.

“The health of Australians is too important for healthcare to be an ideological toy,” he said.

“The AMA is supportive of some co-payments, but not the one proposed by the government.”

This is the AMA leading the fight against a co-payment, an organisation that fought Medicare for decades.

Then business is reconsidering their relations with government finding Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen “are open to talking and that there are some Labor policies that are actually more pro-business than those of the government.”

Then there are all the welfare bludgers, the people Joe Hockey refers to as parasitic “leaners”. Tingle continues:

Liberal MPs report the outrage of aged voters who will lose their $800 seniors supplement.

But what is striking is that these voters aren’t angry about losing the $800 as much as they are about feeling they have been portrayed as welfare bludgers.

The feedback about an anger that is not going away is it is very different to what MPs have felt before because it isn’t just about hip pockets but a sense the budget has broken something at a community level, particularly universal healthcare and access to education.

What causes despair on the Coalition backbench is that the senior ranks of the government don’t seem to recognise that something has been genuinely broken that the Coalition team will never be able to get back. That an electorate that never quite got a handle on Tony Abbott has one it will now never let go.

You will recall back in May the fearsome grilling Abbott suffered from ABC talkback radio callers who accused him of lying, fearmongering and endangering the health of pensioners. Photographers can be cruel. This was the occasion of Abbott’s famous wink, but take a look at this shot by Penny Stephens:

This post can serve open thread on politics.

Life, Sundries

Saturday salon 21/6

June 21, 2014 Brian 16 Comments

An open thread where, at your leisure, you can discuss anything you like, well, within reason and the Comments Policy. Include here news and views, plus any notable personal experiences from the week and the weekend.

For climate topics please use the most recent Climate clippings.

The gentleman in the image is Voltaire, who for a time graced the court of Frederick II of Prussia, known as Frederick the Great. King Fred loved to talk about the universe and everything at the end of a day’s work. He also used the salons of Berlin to get feedback in the development of public policy.

Fred would only talk in French; he regarded German as barbaric. Here we’ll use English.

The thread will be a stoush-free zone. The Comments Policy says:

The aim [of this site] is to provide a venue for people to contribute and to engage in a civil and respectful manner.

Politics & Government, Social Science and Society, Sundries

High Court rules federal funding of school chaplains invalid again

June 20, 2014 Brian 4 Comments

As The World Today story makes clear, it is the funding methodology rather than the school chaplains program itself that has been, for the second time, ruled unconstitutional by the High Court.

When Toowoomba father of six Ron Williams won the original High Court challenge to the chaplaincy program in 2012 the Gillard Government passed ‘catch-all’ legislation which sought to enable to make such grants directly to schools. This ‘bandaid’ solution has now failed. While the court case has only been about the school chaplaincy program specifically a precedent was set that placed a question mark over some 400 other Commonwealth direct funding programs, past and present. I gather these programs had been implemented by the executive without legislation.

It appears that the Commonwealth will now have to use legislation specific to the program, by which means it can make special purpose payments to the states with as many conditions as it likes. This legislation would then have to run the gamut of the senate, which may be difficult, if Labor comes to its senses and opposes the legislation.

I agree with Angelo Gavrielatos, head of the Education Union:

We’ve always opposed this program, considering it a badly designed and quite frankly not in the interests of our kids and what they actually need.

It also compromises the secular traditions of public schools. This money is better directed to specialist, expert support for our students. What our students need are expert trained school counsellors, psychologists and welfare workers.

It’s also important to note that this program has been costed at $250 million. This is at the same time when there’s been a real cut in funding for students with disabilities.

The Abbott Government is so far reserving its position until they examine the ruling, as one would expect.

There is a summary article by Michelle Grattan at The Conversation.

Retiring Senator Louise Pratt has condemned the program, saying that it has driven gay and lesbian children to self harm:

Senator Pratt said an online survey by gay rights group All Out, which attracted 2200 responses, had uncovered dozens of firsthand student accounts that describe chaplains as being “explicitly anti-gay”.

One respondent said their school chaplain had described gays and lesbians as “unnatural, indecent and perverse”. Another said a gay friend had overdosed on medical pills after their school chaplain said being gay was a “degrading sin” that sends people to hell.

“As well as the two stories I have just quoted, students described chaplains helping them to ‘pray the gay away’ and advising them to sleep with a member of the opposite sex to ‘correct’ their same-sex attraction,” Senator Pratt said.

“One very serious story involved a student being told by a chaplain that they should leave home because they had homosexual parents . . . Regardless of the outcome [of the High Court challenge], it is important to see this program stopped.”

Proponents of the program say such incidents would be rare and in breach of the code of conduct under which chaplains operate.

According to Peter Sherlock schools have been able to use the money to employ secular counsellors. In the 2104-15 budget, however, this was narrowed to chaplains from religious organisations alone.

Sherlock, who is Vice-Chancellor at University of Divinity, says that the program recognises that schools have a socialising role in the formation of a child that goes beyond the door of the classroom and the skills and content imparted there. He thinks, however, the chaplains from religious organisations will almost inevitably be motivated to proselytise, and the secular counsellors would be more appropriate.

I couldn’t agree more. Problem is, part of the purpose of the program is to win votes from particular sectors of the church-going community.

Climate Action

Another way to cook the planet

June 20, 2014 Brian 8 Comments

Around 80 to 85% of coal in the ground cannot be mined by conventional methods. That’s 18 trillion tonnes according to the International Energy Agency’s Clean Coal Centre – enough to supply the world for 1000 years, at current requirements. Fred Pearce in the New Scientist (paywalled) takes a look at efforts to liberate this potential by a process called underground coal gasification (UCG). Apparently that’s enough to add about 10°C to global warming, if the carbon is not sequestered.

The process involves burning the coal in situ underground, bringing the gases thus created to the surface and then burning them in a conventional power station. This image from the British Geological Survey illustrates the process:

The “Zero emissions power generation” is totally misleading (see below).

Stalin’s engineers and their successors have been doing it to a brown coal seam for 50 years near Angren, a town east of Tashkent in Uzbekistan. Air is piped 300 metres down one well, the gas comes up another. It is cooled, scrubbed of coal dust and compressed on site, then piped across the plain to Angren. Australians bought the operation seven years ago, with a view to scaling up the technology to transform the world’s energy markets.

A cocktail of gases is created when the coal is burned – methane (natural gas), CO2, which can be disposed of safely, carbon monoxide (CO), and hydrogen. There are four ways the gases can be used:

Gas to electricity. Methane is burned in a power station.

Gas to chemicals. Hydrogen, methane and CO have value as feedstock in the chemicals industry.

Gas to liquid. Methane can be liquified to LNG, or CO and hydrogen can be turned into synthetic diesel.

Gas to tech. Hydrogen can be used as a transport fuel.

As methane burns it oxidises to CO2 and water. Potentially, it is said, the same infrastructure of pipes can be used to pipe the CO2 from the power station back to the mine and insert it in the place vacated by the burnt coal. Obviously you’d have to double the pipeline for continuous operation. And obviously the process would add to the expense.

A second concern is that chemicals can leak to contaminate groundwater. If the rocks above the seam are impermeable before the process, they may not be after. Fracturing is estimated to occur up to 60 times the width of the seam. In fact fracturing the nearby rocks could release even more gas for use.

Australian engineers trialled an adapted process at Chinchilla in Queensland in the 1990s. Within two years UCG was shown to be feasible. But in 2011 benzene and toluene leaked into a nearby borehole in an operation near Kingaroy. Similar problems had emerged in the US, so Qld authorities shut the operation down for investigation. Last July ‘Can do’ Campbell’s mob came up with the idea that you could only operate if you successfully decommissioned a commercial scale operation to show that you could do it. So you had to start an operation, stop it, get your operating ticket, then start up again. Brilliant!

There were three companies involved in Qld – Linc Energy, Carbon Energy and Cougar Energy. They responded by shutting Chinchilla down after more than a decade of successful production, and relocating to China, the US, Argentina, Chile and Indonesia.

There are trials elsewhere, including Canada and South Africa. At Cook Inlet in Alaska and Swan Hills in Alberta, Canada, there are plans to go commercial as early as 2015. In Britain, they reckon 70% of coal has never been mined. Furthermore there is 10 billion tonnes of the stuff under 400 square kilometres in the North Sea. An Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil has been set up with £1 billion seed money to stimulate the industry. Half a dozen start-ups have been spawned. There is interest also in supplying feedstock to energise the flagging chemicals industry in Scotland.

All this momentum is a worry unless in practice ‘clean’ coal turns out to be completely clean. For example in Britain it is said that only 30% of CO2 could be sequestered. There they are throwing £1 billion at the problem.

Remember, for a safe climate we need to reduce the concentration of emissions initially to 350 ppm. Or you can go back and depress yourself by re-reading The game is up.

Our best chance lies in the possibility of renewables becoming cheaper than the fossil alternatives. If we rely on the human race acting rationally in its own longer term self interest our prospects are not good.

Climate Action, Politics & Government

Food follies

June 19, 2014 Brian 7 Comments

Fiona Nash is Deputy Leader of the Nationals in the Senate and Assistant Minister for Health. Back in mid-February there was a kerfuffle over taking down a food labelling site and the apparent conflict of interest of her then chief of staff, one Alastair Furnival.

The basic story is this. Food labelling has been under review for years by the Australia and New Zealand Food Regulation Ministerial Council. According to The Guardian back in Labor’s time the ministerial council approved a five star labelling system indicating food nutrition.

The website included a calculator that provided a star rating based on the ingredients and nutrient content of a food item, taking into account energy, saturated fat, total sugar, sodium, fibre, protein and fruit and vegetable content.

It’s a voluntary system. The website, specifically approved by the council, was to provide guidance to manufacturers and distributors who could then, if they wished, include the rating on the labelling. Meanwhile the site would be available to the public.

The staff of the department of health duly set up the site. Within hours Nash demanded that it be taken down. The public servants refused, saying they were working for the ministerial council. Furnival then intervened with their bosses, heavied them and the site came down. This shouldn’t happen.

Much of the controversy then was over Furnival’s former and possibly current links with sections of the food industry hostile to the project, what Nash told the senate about this, how she had to then provide ‘further information’ which was pretty much the opposite.

One bottom line is that Laura Tingle reckons Nash definitely misled the senate. On that basis she should have resigned or been sacked.

A side issue relates to the vetting of Furnival’s appointment in the PM’s Department. Andrew Elder points out that Peta Credlin, Abbott’s supremo, knew personally all about Furnival before he was appointed.

BTW who do you reckon is in charge here?

Elder also points out how dunderheaded and useless your average gallery journalist is.

All these interesting aspects distract attention from what Nash was really up to. She claims the site was premature. She has initiated a cost-benefit analysis which she says needs to be completed first. Other ministers who are part of the Council say that this analysis is a Commonwealth initiative and as such has nothing to do with the Council.

The real agenda seems to be a delaying tactic. The vote in favour of the site was narrow and Nash is hoping to revisit the issue with the prospect of a different result after the elections in SA and Tasmania.

Mike Daube, Professor of Health Policy at Curtin University, speaking to Peter Lloyd, reckons that’s not all she’s done.

Look I think the major issue now is not about one staffer who is gone but about whether the Federal Minister responsible for prevention understands the importance of prevention and will take the action that’s needed.

You look at the three big prevention priorities – tobacco, alcohol, obesity – and they’re also the three big priorities or three of the biggest priorities if we want to close the Indigenous life expectancy gap, and this Minister so far does not have a good record.

She’s scuppered a food labelling system, she’s defunded the major peak national alcohol treatment organisation and her party still accepts tobacco funding. So I think it raises much bigger question marks about Senator Nash than it does about the Mr Furnival.

I couldn’t agree more.

Problem is, there could be a cost to Radio National in reporting inconvenient material like that. I’m expecting a major push to kill off RN coming out of the current reviews of the ABC. I suspect the LNP sees RN as an unseemly steaming cesspit of lefties.

Culture

Blogging hiatus

June 16, 2014 Brian 8 Comments

My dearly beloved sister and her husband from Canada will be staying with us until Friday 20th. Naturally my priority will be with them, so blogging for me will be disrupted during this time. I still have a few posts in the draft bin from the time I was active before the blog opened. I might manage to rummage through the pile and post a couple.

Because of house geography I’m restricted in my computer access and at this time of night must work from my wife’s computer, which for me is less than ideal.

From Monday to Wednesday we will be paying a visit to Byron Bay and Casino sans internet access.

Many moons ago as it happens and not the main reason for our visit, my sister and her husband had their honeymoon at Byron Bay. My wife and I had half ours at Lennox Heads and have not been back since 1982. When the Commonwealth Games was held in Brisbane we decided to take leave and go down to NSW where we could watch on TV.

Anyway bear with me for the next five days and we’ll see what happens.

Life, Sundries

Saturday salon 14/6

June 14, 2014 Brian 16 Comments

For climate topics please use the most recent Climate clippings.

Fred would only talk in French; he regarded German as barbaric. Here we’ll use English.

The thread will be a stoush-free zone. The Comments Policy says:

The aim [of this site] is to provide a venue for people to contribute and to engage in a civil and respectful manner.

Climate Science, Social Science and Society

Blue sky

June 13, 2014 Brian 2 Comments

In Spanish speaking Latin America, and now in some other countries, there is a form of protest where people bang pots, pans, and other utensils to make a political point or register their displeasure. It’s particularly effective in densely populated cities, where people can protest without leaving their homes. The Spanish term is cacerolazo.

In pot banging diplomacy quantity matters. There needs to be critical mass before the authorities feel compelled to respond.

Potentially the Blue Sky movement could colour our suburbs blue, but if not countless conversations will be engendered and you never know where that might lead!

After the last election some friends of my younger brother Len, feeling blue, decided to turn blue into an optimistic colour, and invented the Blue Sky movement. To join all you have to do is ‘like’ the Facebook site put something blue on your front footpath visible from the road, take a photo and post it on the site. And take the Blue Sky Pledge, which includes reducing your own emissions, displaying blue for 12 months, and encouraging others to join.

Here’s one example:

We’ve just joined. This makes me wince:

I’m actually standing with my heels on a pile of yet to be distributed forest mulch, so I’m not that tall.

The blue plastic is an offcut from a new swimming pool cover. Having a swimming pool is not recommended to produce low electricity bills. We’d gladly fill it in and grow vegetables, but that would cost a small fortune. We are planning to post a laminated Blue Sky flier on the wooden fence, which would be easily visible from the footpath, frequented by walkers heading for nearby parks.

If you click on “Community” or “About” at the head of the Blue Sky FB page and then click “more” you’ll get the full Blue Sky spiel.

The goals of Blue Sky are –

* To provide a simple and easy way in which people can show their support for action on climate change.

* To encourage participants in their attempts to reduce their own carbon footprint.

* To encourage others to take climate change seriously

* To build the support for meaningful action and a sense of urgency for this action to be undertaken.

* To encourage as many people as possible to make the Blue Sky pledge.

I’ve included the link to the Blue Sky Facebook page in the sidebar list of Selected Climate Sites. Blue Sky FB is often used to share links.

Whereas cacerolazo requires considerable effort and is necessarily limited in time, once you make the effort of joining Blue Sky the deed is done and the effect continues. And it costs nothing.

Note: I outlined several forms of activism including Blue Sky in Climate clippings 87 last November.

Climate Policy & Planning

Planetary guardrails for sustainable development

June 12, 2014 Brian 2 Comments

The United Nations often gets accused of talk and no action. Perhaps, however, it is necessary to do a lot of talking before action, in order to clarify both purpose and means and to achieve genuine consensus. The UN does have a consensus model of decision-making, where one vote can be a veto. This being so, lots of talk is inescapable.

Two years ago the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU) was highly critical of the leaderless talkfest on development issues. Now two years later, as decisions are soon to be made after tsunami of talking, they have entered the debate with I think an important contribution about the need for planetary guardrails for development.

Civil society groups were scathing.

George Monbiot describes it as 283 paragraphs of fluff.

That’s how I began my post on Rio+20, written in October 2012, when Larvatus Prodeo was in hiatus and Climate Plus did not yet exist, so it has never been on the front page and no doubt has had a very small audience. I commend it to you.

Highly critical too was the German Advisory Council on Global Change (WBGU), a body set up in in 1992 to advise the German Government prior to the 1992 Rio Earth Summit and remains the official advisory body on climate change. The WBGU has a brief which goes beyond climate change and indeed the environment to change generally.

However, climate change is always front of mind, because one Hans Joachim (John) Schellnhuber co-chairs the WBGU and is also Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK). Schellnhuber perhaps is to European climate science what James Hansen is or was to American climate science, but not held at arms length by government actors. He has personal and official access to the president of the European Union and the German chancellor Angela Merkel. No doubt it helps that Merkel has a background as a research scientist in a similar discipline to Schellnhuber’s PhD, and was minister for the environment in Helmut Kohl’s government.

WBGU saw the verbiage at Rio+20 as exemplifying

an international crisis of leadership and confidence, a “G-Zero World” in which no leading power effectively is taking the initiative and no coalitions capable of taking action are emerging.

Many think this may have now changed with recent decisions made by the US and China and co-operation between the two.

Rio+20 made one significant ‘decision’. The Millennium Development Goals process comes to a natural end in 2015. Obviously it should be replaced by something to continue the work, so Rio+20 decided that there should be a new process to establish a new set of ‘sustainable development goals’ (SDGs).

The cynic in me suggests that this was the outcome planned by bureaucrats before the conference started and the purpose of the pointless verbiage was to ensure that the conference did not stray into inconvenient areas. But as I said in 2012:

The WBGU press release commented favourably on the supporting program, which “showed that the transformation towards sustainability is already in full swing”. The conference site registered over 500 on-site side events over 10 days. In Rio+20 in numbers they suggest there were thousands if you count those off-site as well. In a sense the official summit was a side-show.

At the conference there would have been plenty of bookable rooms like this:

On the official level, having been given a head of power, the UN machine then swung into action, meaning more talk, in spades. It generated a high level panel of eminent persons (you can bet Schellnhuber was there), an Open Working Group withy the main carriage of ‘doing something’ and a UN System Task Team on the Post-2015 UN Development Agenda to undertake thematic and regional consultations. There is also a Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), led by Jeffrey Sachs, economist and advisor to Ban Ki-moon on development issues.

More talk too on the unofficial side. In Melbourne on 20-21 June there will be a C20 Summit of civil society leaders to make recommendations to the November G20 meeting, if Abbott extends the agenda to such trivia.

As discussed here the problem with SDGs is that if you try to do everything then effort becomes dissipated. If you narrow the focus too much then important issues may be missed. The Millennium Development Goals were thought to have struck a good balance. They covered the eight areas of poverty alleviation, education, gender equality and empowerment of women, child and maternal health, environmental sustainability, reducing HIV/AIDS and communicable diseases, and building a global partnership for development.

So far the Open Working Group has wrangled the possible goals into 19 focus areas (now said to be 16) in eight clusters:

Cluster 1
– Poverty eradication
– Promote equality

Cluster 2
– Gender equality and women’s empowerment
– Education
– Employment and decent work for all
– Health and population dynamics

Cluster 3
– Water and sanitation
– Sustainable agriculture, food security, and nutrition

Cluster 4
– Economic growth
– Industrialization
– Infrastructure
– Energy

Cluster 5
– Sustainable cities and human settlements
– Promote Sustainable Consumption and Production
– Climate

Cluster 6
– Conservation and sustainable use of marine resources, oceans and seas
– Ecosystems and biodiversity

Cluster 7
– Means of implementation/Global partnership for sustainable development

Cluster 8
– Peaceful and non-violent societies, rule of law and capable institutions

There’s more detail here.

No-one can say there hasn’t been widespread consultation:

WBGU have now entered the debate by suggesting that development and environmental protection must be considered together and not contradict one another, the key message of the 1992 Earth Summit. Moreover, human change must operate within planetary guardrails to avoid permanent damage. Accordingly they have suggested adding an SDG entitled ‘safeguarding Earth system services’.

Within that goal they recommend six long-term targets:

1. Climate change: The warming of the climate system should be limited to 2°C. Global CO2 emissions from fossil energy sources should therefore be stopped completely by about 2070.

2. Ocean acidification: In order to protect the oceans, the pH level of the uppermost ocean layer should not fall by more than 0.2 units compared to pre-industrial figures in any major ocean region. CO2 emissions from fossil energy sources should therefore be stopped completely by about 2070 (congruent with Target 1).

3. Loss of biological diversity and ecosystem services: The human-induced loss of biodiversity and ecosystem services must be halted. Its direct anthropogenic drivers, e.g. the conversion of natural ecosystems, should be stopped by 2050 at the latest.

4. Land and soil degradation: Anthropogenic land and soil degradation must be halted. Net land degradation should be stopped by 2030 – world-wide and in all countries.

5. Risks posed by long-lived and harmful anthropogenic substances: The substitutable use of mercury and anthropogenic mercury emissions should be stopped by 2050. The release of plastic waste into the environment should be stopped worldwide by 2050. The production of nuclear fuels for nuclear weapons and nuclear reactors should be stopped by 2070.

6. Loss of phosphorus: Phosphorus is an essential resource for agriculture and therefore also for food security. The release of non-recoverable phosphorus into the environment should be stopped worldwide by 2050, so that its global recycling can be achieved.

Moreover:

the SDGs are not an agenda ‘exclusively for developing countries’; rather, they should apply to all states. Only in this way can curbing global environmental change become a joint task for humankind.

I think you’ll find this mob suggested the 2°C guardrail which took more than a decade to be adopted in 2009. In 2009 they came up with the budget approach to emissions stabilisation, yet to be adopted by international negotiators, although it seems the obvious, rational and equitable way to share the burden. Perhaps they will have better fortune this time! At least their suggestion comes when thinking is fluid.

At least it rescues climate from a mere sub-component of Cluster 5, to an essential part of the frame for the whole exercise, which is as it should be.

Climate Policy & Planning

Abbott’s climate play: dropping off the back of the peloton

June 11, 2014 Brian 10 Comments

peloton-1-200

In road cycling terms, Australia’s climate effort is dropping off the back of the peloton. More than that we are now spreading tacks on the road up front.

Abbott, with his soul-mate from “Canadia” Stephen Harper, is proposing to build an alliance of conservative world leaders to block what he calls job-killing carbon pricing.

Dr Robyn Eckersley of Melbourne University who has been conducting research on climate change leadership finds that this would be “a very retrograde step at a very crucial time in international climate negotiations”. She also finds that he may struggle to find partners. The UK under David Cameron are unlikely to join. New Zealand has a conservative leader, and a carbon pricing scheme. Perhaps he’ll enlist the support of Saudi Arabia, who Eckersley sees as the biggest spoiler of all.

Eckersley points out that British Columbia, Quebec and California, one of the biggest economies in the world, have carbon pricing. China is launching seven provincial pilot emissions trading systems.

Abbott claims that the world is moving away from carbon pricing to ‘direct action’ type policies. Sophie Vorrath at RenewEconomy cites the World Bank as saying that carbon pricing is here to stay with more than 60 carbon pricing systems currently in operation or development globally.

At a press conference Abbott said that climate change is “not the only or even the most important problem that the world faces.”

Abbott doesn’t realise that the economy exists within the environment.

In this post last November on the outcomes of the UNFCCC Conference of Parties in Warsaw I referred to a graphic by Climate Tracker:

There is Australia at the back of the peloton. If everyone did what we are doing the world would be toast, and with no economy to speak of. Climate Tracker currently sees Australia’s effort as “inadequate” and getting worse. With our performance the world would be heading towards 600 ppm and 4°C.

Abbott’s Canadian performance was no doubt intended to be one in the eye for Barack Obama, who Abbott sees next. The signal is that Obama would be wasting his time persuading Abbott to put climate change on the G20 agenda.

Laura Tingle, talking to Phillip Adams, opined that addressing climate change in the G20 would be a precedent since the G20 so far has restricted itself to economics. She also said that there was nothing doing in terms of international co-operation, and they were all off doing there own thing.

That would be news to the people currently attending climate talks from 4 to 15 June in Bonn under the auspices of the UNFCCC. In the Warsaw post I laid out the sequence as follows:

The timetable is that leaders will meet with the UN Director General in New York on 23 September 2014 with a show and tell of their thinking on contributions, and no doubt receive some jaw-boning from him in return.

There will be more talking at the 20th COP in Lima from 1-12 December 2014, where a draft new climate agreement will be tabled. Then in April 2015 countries will seriously start putting their “contributions” (rather than “commitments”) on the table “without prejudice to the legal nature of the contributions”. These “contributions” might be targets but could be other efforts to keep emissions down.

All this is aimed to get a legally binding agreement which reflects the “common but differentiated responsibility” of each state to be concluded at the Paris COP at the end of 2015 – for implementation in 2020 when the Kyoto Protocol officially expires.

So the leaders meet in September, but then not again before the deal is sealed in Paris in December 2015. In Lima I believe only the ministers will attend, noting that we did not bother to send a minister to Warsaw.

A new climate agreement is mainstream in policy and planning for the economy.

In spreading tacks on the road and trivialising the issue of climate change, Abbott and his government have form. In opposition in 2012 they would not grant Greg Combet a pair to attend the Rio+20 conference. In Warsaw, without a minister (who would have been Julie Bishop, since Greg Hunt is not allowed to conduct international negotiations) the Australian delegation was notorious, earning four “Fossil of the Day” awards and the overall “Colossal Fossil” for the meeting. Civil society groups like Greenpeace, WWF and Friends of the Earth, took the unprecedented step of simply walking out with a day still to go, muttering “Australia” as they went.

Being serious about climate change, the last thing Barack Obama would need is that kind of leadership at the G20.

Climate Policy & Planning, Climate Science

Climate clippings 99

June 10, 2014 Brian 6 Comments

This edition is somewhat themed around climate policy and planning in China, the US and Australia. It also includes items on puffins in Maine, the Lowy Institute poll and the warm weather we’ve been having in May.

1. Petey Puffin dies on camera

Puffins were once common on the coast off Maine but were eliminated by overhunting. In recent years there has been a project to repopulate the area, which was proceeding well accompanied by a cam project where children around the world could watch the birds in their habitat. Petey Puffin, a chick being fed by its parents became a popular focus. The only problem was that the parent birds kept bringing him butterfish which were just too large for him to swallow. This went on day after day until the chick died on camera.

The project co-ordinator then checked the 64 other burrows being monitored to find that only 30% of chicks survived.

Problem was that hake and herring normally abundant around Maine had moved north as the water warmed to be replaced by butterfish.

The warmer water brought many other changes to the waters off Maine.

Incidents such as these remind people that they are living in the midst of climate change.

2. President Obama gets serious on climate change

From John Abraham at Climate Consensus – the 97%:

President Obama just announced a major effort to reduce global-warming gases from United States power plants. These new rules, and his prior strong actions on climate change, signify a major shift for the United States. No longer is the U.S. the world laggard on dealing with climate change – we are quickly becoming the leader.

We finally have a president that understands science. We finally have a president that honestly includes scientists as decision makers – rather than effectively muzzle them. We finally have a president that recognizes the social and economic costs of climate change. We finally have a president who is charting a pathway that may lead us to bend the curve of emissions downward so that the most serious climate change consequences are avoided.

Most importantly, we finally have a president who is a world leader.

3. Not everyone is happy

John Podesta before rejoining the White House inner circle in an interview said history will not applaud the measures taken by Obama as it fails to meet what the science demands. It won’t limit us to a 2°C temperature rise, and 2°C is too dangerous.

A 30% reduction by 2030 from 2005 levels shrinks to 7.7% if you use the international baseline of 1990. Moreover, coal will be replaced by gas, where the ‘fugitive’ methane emissions are not counted.

Podesta says that in Obama’s first term his top aides never took climate change seriously. Ironically, Podesta as Obama’s transition director in 2008 helped select those aides.

4. China to cap emission

China will seek to cap fossil fuel emissions for the first time, we are told.

Reading carefully it seems that emissions will still grow, but not as fast as business as usual.

Pointing out that there are 1.6 billion people in the US and China, Amanda McKenzie CEO of Climate Council thinks the decisions are a game changer.

5. Time for Tony Abbott to admit his climate policy is crap

In case you missed it, that is Giles Parkinson’s advice to Abbott.

Parkinson says Australia should be embarrassed by its lack of action compared to the United States and China, which has indicated it will place a cap on its emissions as soon as 2016.

Ironically, Abbott could have a pretty good collection of climate and renewable energy policies just by doing nothing. Everything Labor put in place is still there, apart from Tim Flannery and the Climate Commission, which has morphed into the Climate Council with private money and public donations.

6. Lowy poll

The Lowy Institute Poll 2014 is now available.

The number of Australians now saying global warming is a “serious and pressing problem” and that “we should begin taking steps now even if this involves significant costs” is now 45%.

Some 38% now say the the problem of global warming should be addressed, but its effects will be gradual, so we can deal with the problem gradually by taking steps that are low in cost. 15% think we should leave it until we are sure it’s a problem if costs are involved. Here’s the graph:

63% of people thought the government should be taking a leadership role in reducing emissions.

I guess Abbott would claim that’s what they are doing.

7. Heat wave in May

Will Steffen talks here and here about the unusually warm period in May, which I believe officially rates as a heat wave.

A remarkable, prolonged warm spell occurred over the period 8-26 May, with daytime temperatures 4 to 6°C above normal over much of south-central Australia, extending from South Australia and northwest Victoria into Queensland and the Northern Territory.

The Scientific American noticed.

BOM think we are in for a warm winter:

And drier for large parts of the southern mainland:

Reminder: Use this thread as an open thread on climate change.

Climate change, sustainability, plus sundry other stuff