Alex White » Environment

Assessment of the “Clean Energy Future” policy

Alex — Wed, 13 Jul 2011 00:16:15 +0000

When the new carbon price policy was announced, I was fairly skeptical about it – especially given the failure of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Media reporting suggested that there were serious deficiencies in the policy, as many or more as the CPRS.

However, I’ve taken the time to acquaint myself more closely with the “Clean Energy Future” carbon price policy and am now much more supportive. It is a good step in the right direction, and while it is not perfect, it is a significant and important platform to reduce Australia’s carbon pollution.

There are a few elements of the package that I really like:

Higher 2050 target: The new target is 80% reduction in carbon emissions on 2000 levels
Creation of a $10 billion clean energy finance corporation, to directly stimulate the clean energy sector
Fixed initial price that moves to a emissions trading scheme: a permanent fixed price would be a disaster and an ETS means a total cap on emissions
Limitations on overseas carbon offsets that can be used in Australia, from 80% to 50%
Individuals and groups can purchase and retire carbon permits, thereby hastening carbon reductions

Will this help us reach our target of limiting global warming to 2 degrees C? Not by itself. International action is still required.

Bottom line: I’m glad to see that Australia has gone from being a laggard to a leader with this policy.

Read the Australian Conservation Foundation’s assessment here.

Investment in clean energy jobs three times more effective than oil and gas

Alex — Wed, 15 Jun 2011 22:30:53 +0000

Over at Grist, there is a report that confirms (yet again, as if more proof was needed) that investment in clean-tech is three times more effective than government spending on oil and gas jobs.

Cleantech generates 17 jobs for every $1 million spent on it, compared to just 5 for every $1 million we throw at an oil and gas industry that doesn’t need it but will fight to its dying breath to preserve the government largesse shoring up its bottom line.

… Robert Pollin, an economist who studied the impact of green stimulus dollars for the Commerce Department, said clean energy gets a better payoff because kick-starting a new industry requires a lot of manpower.

The slide above is from the LEAN presentation, focusing on US Commerce Dept data. In my view, the case is clear. Australia needs to end our inefficient, polluting subsidies to the fossil fuel industry if we serious about job creation.

The argument that I’ve heard bandied around – that there are fewer jobs in clean energy than fossil fuel – is wrong. Let’s not forget that the fossil fuel industry slashed jobs and destroyed communities in the 1980s when privatisation happened. The fossil fuel industry is no friend to workers – their primary concern is to make a profit, not build communities. The creation of jobs is a by-product of their destructive profit motive.

It is vitally important not to make connections

Alex — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 01:24:55 +0000

I came across Bill McKibben’s opinion piece in the Washington Post and an associated video of the piece, narrated by Stephen Thomson that are well worth looking at.

Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections. (Photo from: http://pollutions.asia/)

McKibben (of 350.org fame) takes on the current reluctance of climate activists and action advocates to link specific extreme weather events (floods in QLD, Pakistan and the US, fires in Victoria and Texas, droughts in the US, Europe and elsewhere) to climate change.

It’s far smarter to repeat to yourself the comforting mantra that no single weather event can ever be directly tied to climate change. There have been tornadoes before, and floods — that’s the important thing. Just be careful to make sure you don’t let yourself wonder why all these record-breaking events are happening in such proximity — that is, why there have been unprecedented megafloods in Australia, New Zealand and Pakistan in the past year. Why it’s just now that the Arctic has melted for the first time in thousands of years. No, better to focus on the immediate casualties, watch the videotape from the store cameras as the shelves are blown over. Look at the news anchorman standing in his waders in the rising river as the water approaches his chest.

Bill McKibben is right to challenge this. While no individual event is directly caused by global warming, they are made more frequent and more intense. The systemic problem that McKibben talks of is that global warming is the cause of the record breaking extreme weather events – two “hundred year” droughts in the Amazon happening within five years.

Actually, rather than read McKibben’s op-ed, watch the video created by Stephen Thomson which narrates the opinion piece and adds powerful images to it.

It is preaching to the converted, but after the failures of Cophenhagen, defeat of climate action in the US Congress, Australia and elsewhere, and the rise of climate deniers funded by extremists like the Koch Brothers, it’s important to remind “true believers” that we still need to do something.

(Thanks to Grist for highlighting the op-ed and video.)

Hiding the meltdowns in Fukushima

Alex — Tue, 24 May 2011 00:57:29 +0000

I read recently that the Japanese nuclear crisis at Fukushima continues. Amazingly, if you read newspapers in Australia on a daily basis (as I do) you probably wouldn’t know it.

Thankfully, The Guardian has a report on the latest on crisis - and the scary news that authorities may have tried to hide the fact that there was a nuclear meltdown shortly after the earthquake and tsunamni.

Rubble near Fukushima Daiichi plant's No 3 reactor building. The sign reads: 'Attention high radiation dosage. Stay away from this area due to high dosage rubbles 1000mSv/h found'. Photograph: Ho/Reuters.

The operator of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant said fuel rods in two more reactors were likely to have suffered a meltdown soon after they were crippled by the 11 March earthquake and tsunami in north-east Japan.

Confirmation by Tokyo Electric Power (Tepco) that fuel in the cores of reactors 2 and 3 had melted came days after new data confirmed a similar meltdown in reactor 1 about 16 hours after the disaster.

The utility, which last week suffered the biggest annual loss by any Japanese firm outside the financial sector, said most of the melted fuel in all three reactors was covered in water and did not threaten to compound the world’s worst nuclear accident since Chernobyl.

…

Tepco said it had been unable to confirm the meltdowns until it had finished analysing data, but Koichi Nakano, a political science professor at Sophia University, suggested the revelation was timed to minimise its impact on the public.

“In the early stages of the crisis Tepco may have wanted to avoid panic,” he told Reuters. “Now people are used to the situation … nothing is resolved, but normal business has resumed in places like Tokyo.”

Tepco’s handling of the crisis will come under closer scrutiny with the arrival in Tokyo of a delegation from the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United Nations nuclear inspectors will visit the Fukushima plant and present their findings at a meeting of ministers from IAEA member-states on 20 June.

The crisis in Japan continues. Over 21 workers at Fukushima have suffered radiation sickness and experts estimate that more than 4000 people (or many times more) will die from cancer caused by the radiation from the nuclear disaster.

It is clear that nuclear energy is not the answer.

The “why” of carbon pricing

Alex — Tue, 19 Apr 2011 06:17:00 +0000

Like many of my readers, I am concerned at the turn the public debate has taken on carbon pricing – lead principally by climate-denier Tony Abbott, rent-seeking big polluters and an ignorant and conflict-obsessed media pack.

There are already hundreds of good quality guides to climate messaging (and little of the advice in them is being followed), so I won’t rehash them here.

Nevertheless, I wonder if the main problem is that the pro-carbon price advocates have skipped an important step – the “why” of carbon pricing.

I was recently directed to the work of a fellow called Simon Sinek, a lecturer in … well, a bunch of stuff… who sees his mission as helping organisations, businesses, movements, etc focus on the “why” – why do they do what they do.

These kind of purpose-driven organisations are typically (from the behavioural economics case studies I’ve read) more successful than their counterparts.

Here’s a TED talk he gave back in 2009. Think about the carbon price debate and how it’s focused on “what will be done” and “how it will implemented” rather than the “why we need a carbon price”.

Now, I know that it’s Catch-22 with this debate. The media have already decided that the only way to report the carbon price story is through the prism of conflict and criticism with the Government. The media lost interest in climate change and its devestating effects in 2009. Many climate activists rightly feel that we talked about the “why” non-stop from 2006-2009 and the media only listened for 6 months in the lead up to Copenhagen.

Perhaps though, if we all talked again about the “why” of carbon pricing, the “what” and “how” wouldn’t be so difficult.

UPDATE

If you haven’t seen the latest Essential Report on carbon pricing, here it is. (Click on the image to see a large view.)

Interesting development: 1Sky and 350.org merge

Alex — Sun, 17 Apr 2011 08:53:29 +0000

I know almost nothing about 1Sky, but I do know that 350.org is one of the more successful new climate action global organisations that sprung up in the lead up to Copenhagen in 2009. 1Sky looks to be a similar organisation – entirely US-based – the coordinates public action focused on climate change.

Now it looks like they’re merging:

For too long, the fossil fuel industry has had its way on the climate issue–its money has overwhelmed the scientific facts, delaying action on the largest challenge humanity now faces.

Right now, the the Clean Air Act is being threatened, the EPA is under attack, and big polluters are mounting an all-out onslaught that threatens to destroy our lands and scorch our planet. In short, we are losing ground.

In the face of these challenges, one thing is clear: if we want to win, we will have to come together like we never have before.

That’s why we at 350.org and 1Sky have important news to share: starting today, our organizations are officially merging. We’ll be called 350.org, and together we’ll be smarter, bolder, faster, and more creative than we were before.

Over the last three years, 350.org and 1Sky have frequently teamed up for U.S. campaigning. Many of you have been with us every step of the way. Together, we’ve coordinated over 5,000 climate demonstrations in all 50 states. We’ve helped protect the Clean Air Act and won a campaign to get solar panels back on the White House. We’ve launched creative projects to get science at the center of the climate debate, trained thousands of new leaders, and built a network of strong local groups.

No doubt there will be almost no change for 350 Australia or most of the global action. The battle in the US however has challenges of a different scale to the ones we face in Australia: the US Chamber of Commerce and the Koch Brothers.

We hear that your next campaign targets the US Chamber of Commerce, how does that reflect the new organizations long-term mission and goals?
Our long term mission remains to create the power and space needed to craft and enact solutions to climate change and create a clean energy future. In the United States, we have realized that the biggest thing standing in our way is the power that has been built through lobbying and campaigning dollars pouring into influencing Congress and the U.S. government as a whole. We need to hold politicians who take advantage of those dollars accountable for their voting in favor of dirty energy industries, we need to expose who is being represented by those votes, and we need to make it clear the difference between standing up for corporate profits and standing up for the American people.

This merger makes me ponder: what is the role for tiny climate action groups compared to larger, more resourced groups? The point of 350.org (and presumably 1Sky) is local community coordinators who connect regionally and globally. To combat the giant polluters, do climate groups need to get bigger?

Gas should be included in carbon price

Alex — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:00:58 +0000

I heard this morning on ABC NewsRadio that the natural gas giants in Australia are pushing back on Federal Government plans to include gas in the carbon price.

Image courtesy of TruEnergy.

The negotiations over the carbon price are following the same, predictable line that the negotiations over the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme followed: the carbon lobby and various other industries that contribute significant amounts of carbon pollution to our air are asking for exemptions and compensation.

Don Voelte, the CEO of the largest Australian-owned oil and gas producer Woodside, says LNG can help deliver a “better world” and should be excluded from the carbon tax.

“Everywhere else in the world understands gas,” he said.

“People in the United States see gas as the saviour – cheap, clean, transitional fuel to a better world.

“Gas is good and Australia is penalising it. We don’t get it.”

Before trotting out the line that Australia is “going it alone” (a bald-faced lie which the ABC did not correct), Don Voelte claimed that if the carbon price was to go ahead, it would be “game off” for gas.

In fact, gas (far better than coal) is a fossil fuel, is non-renewable and is a source of significant greenhouse gas emissions – predominantly from the burning of gas, and from “fugitive emissions”. Fugitive emissions are green house gases that are released through as a by-product of extracting the resource (whether coal, gas, uranium, or whatever). Typically, large amounts of methane and carbon is released as fugitive emissions from the extraction of gas. As the gas industry has expanded in recent years, the raw amount of fugitive emissions has grown significantly in Australia.

The point of the carbon price – as explained simply by Julia Gillard – is to make polluting more expensive. If gas is much less polluting than coal – the “cheap, clean” fuel that is “good” that Don Voelte claims – then it will have a clear advantage over coal under a carbon price. If it pollutes – which it does – then it should pay for the pollution. It will obviously pay less than coal.

UPDATE

Some good commentary at the Business Spectator about the role of the media and big (polluting) business in the anti-carbon lobby.

Australia is experiencing a crescendo of nonsense in relation to our contribution to halting anthropogenic climate change. The danger is that by shouting loudest, longest, the proponents of some highly inconsistent arguments are gaining the upper hand.

The government’s round-table meeting on Friday with the heads of some of Australia’s largest companies – BHP Billiton, Rio Tinto, BlueScope Steel, Woodside, Woolworths and NAB – was, by all accounts, a kind of shouting match over the levels of compensation our biggest carbon emitting corporates will receive under the government’s proposed carbon tax.

But no, it’s not those company representatives being inconsistent or nonsensical – they are doing their job, putting their shareholders first and attempting to protect the profitability of their businesses.

Abbott’s “direct action” frame and carbon pricing

Alex — Sun, 20 Mar 2011 07:27:53 +0000

Tony Abbott has used his “direct action” plan as the counterpoint to Labor’s carbon price plan.

Apart from the obvious purpose of “direct action” being Abbott’s desire to directly transfer hundreds of millions of dollars of public funds to private hands, his proposal should fail the “common sense” test.

Climate change is like a fire – it is getting out of control and threatens our safety. The Australian Government (and other Governments) are like firefighters. It can take action by putting the fire out promptly before it gets to big and dangerous, or it could waste time until its too late. The Liberal Party and Tony Abbott (and the Republicans in the USA) are like fire fighters who don’t believe that fire exists. They can’t possibly get the fire under control.

The various policy tools being proposed are like fire extinguishers.

The carbon price is very broad, and affects the entire economy. It’s like lots of fire extinguishers aimed at the fire, so it doesn’t matter if you’re very accurate – you just point it at the fire. Lots of the fire gets extinguished and it makes it easier for other efforts (like fire blankets, water hoses – or energy efficiency and renewable energy targets) to work.

Direct action on the other hand is very narrow. It only affects one part of the fire, so if it’s not aimed at the hottest, most intense part of the fire, or the part of the fire closest to combustible fuels, then it won’t have any affect at all. Direct action means its harder for other measures (like fire blankets or water) to work because it’s too hot and intense to get to the fire.

Direct action won’t work to stop climate change, just like a single fire extinguisher won’t put out a large fire.

Of course, Tony Abbott supports climate change because of his extreme authoritarian conservatism. Direct action is based on the system of rewards and punishments. In the George Lakoff formulation, Tony Abbott is the “strict father figure” who needs to personally act to solve the problem: rewarding businesses who behave and punishing those who don’t.

It’s the role of Government to ensure that we’re safe. By ignoring the fire or proposing measures that won’t put it out, Tony Abbott, the Liberal Party and Republicans are putting us all in danger.

Japanese nuclear emergency now catastrophic

Alex — Sat, 19 Mar 2011 10:57:38 +0000

I’ve written about why nuclear energy is not appropriate for Australia.

Nuclear energy is unsafe. It turns already dangerous, stressful disasters into atomic catastrophes.

U.S. Calls Radiation ‘Extremely High;’ Sees Japan Nuclear Crisis Worsening. http://nyti.ms/eacJdA (Via http://twitpic.com/4a9g6f)

We are now learning just how catastrophic.

Food exports could be halted from areas near the Fukishima nuclear plant if tests find further contamination. The tainted milk was found 30km from the plant.

It now transpires that the nuclear plant and nearby property will not be insured.

The reinsurance giant noted that the coverage for nuclear facilities in Japan excludes earthquake shock, fire following earthquake and tsunami, both in terms of physical damage and liability. Coverage for property policies excludes nuclear contamination.

Insurance companies insure almost anything. But not nuclear power plants or nuclear accidents.

Lessons from behaviour change research: Why Clive Hamilton (and others) are wrong on climate “radicalism”

Alex — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 02:18:39 +0000

Last week’s Crikey had an article by former Australian Institude head-honcho Clive Hamilton, arguing that Australia needs “a new brand of environmental radicalism”.

Hamilton writes:

After a high-pressure meeting in Canberra, in which the government dangled the carrot of a 25% cut in Australia’s emissions, the Southern Cross Climate Coalition — comprising the ACF, WWF, the Climate Institute, ACOSS, and ACTU — agreed to support the government’s scheme.

How could major environment groups back a scheme that was so compromised and inadequate to the task — a scheme that handed out billions of dollars to coal-fired power plants, endorsed a strong future for the coal industry, allowed offshore compliance and would deliver, according to Treasury, no reductions in Australia’s emissions until 2035? All this was agreed by the ACF, WWF and the Climate Institute in exchange for a hypothetical 25% cut in emissions that Blind Freddy could see was never going to be delivered.

I think there are three reasons that explain how these groups could support such a travesty.

The punchline to last year’s conservative, climate-denialist takeover of the Liberal Party, was climate group after climate group condemning the Australian Conservation Foundation, World Wildlife Fund and Climate Institute for “selling out” on Labor’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

These environmental groups – leaders in the area of climate change advocacy and action – had devolved to accept the neoliberal ideology of carbon trading and the efficiency of markets. They had “abandoned their interest in a different type of society” and focused only on “incremental change” of the existing (sick) capitalist system. Worse still, they had succumbed to “professionalisation” – basically the charge of “careerism” – where the interests of big donors mattered more than the grassroots.

Worse still! These so-called environmentalists “find it hard to accept what the climate scientists are really saying” – they are Manchurian Candidate climate change denialists who “filter the science to rob it of its sting” and “cling to false hopes”.

Hamilton’s diatribe – which could have been written by any of the current crop of climate action vanguardists – unfortunately pushes a party-political barrow, and utterly ignores the science of organisational and behavioural change. What’s more, Hamilton denigrates that hard work of a lot of dedicated, honest and passionate people working at the organisations he attacks.

Getting governments, industries and whole societies to change how they work, operate, think and behave is the largest behaviour change challenge imaginable.

Human societies naturally resist changes – especially radical ones. This is why conservative policy-makers use times of crisis to push through unpopular reforms like cuts to welfare, restrictions on collective bargaining and reduction of environmental protections. (Cf. Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine.) Even relatively popular policy changes are subject to resistance from organised sectional interests. Look at the resistance to the introduction of superannuation in the 1990s, or the gun buy-back scheme after the Port Arthur Massacre.

The very excellent resource “The Psychology of Climate Change Communication” describes it as the “default effects” on decision making: our “tendency to stick with the option that is selected automatically instead of choosing an alternative option”. In public policy, this is called “path dependency”.

When faced with a change situation, a common response is to resist that change. For governments facing a change situation (the global climate crisis), the resistance is both active and passive. It is further complicated by the fact that humans are hard-wired to focus near-term goals and threats (i.e. situations where the costs/benefits are in the present, rather than when the costs/benefits are not realised until some future, possibly indefinite, time).

Active resistance in our political system for example comes in the out-and-out climate denialism of Tony Abbott, Nick Minchin and Corey Bernardi. However, we can also see it in the path-dependency of some Ministers with carbon portfolios (mining and energy for instance) – where public policy continues to be framed around short-term benefits (of increased coal exports), over long-term benefits (of increased investment in renewable energy technology exports).

More insidious is the passive resistance of government, where the defaul option is to just simply wait. Waiting until Copenhagen. Or waiting for India or China to act. When the default action leads to short-term reward (such as more mining royalties), the pressure is even greater to do nothing.

Combined with political imperatives of immediate risk-minimisation (doing nothing – or little – to avoid the short-term pain of a political campaign waged against you by the mining industy for example), and path dependency (or “default effects”) are exceptionally powerful.

These challenges are well known by researches and activists involved in behaviour change programs.

Hamilton’s demon of “incrementalism” is actually a key element of getting someone to change their behaviour. Small changes that are managable are important steps towards larger changes.

We also know that behaviour changes lead to attitude changes. It doesn’t matter how much someone knows that smoking is bad, it’s still hard to stop smoking. Similarly, every one knows that recycling is the right thing to do, but without recycle bins at work, on the street or at home, few people would bother to separate their rubbish from their recyclable cans and bottles. Reducing your calorie intake can be hard, but by making the small adjustment of switching to smaller plate sizes, you can start down the path of eating less.

What’s more, people are also hard-wired to not respond to criticism well. Most people are automatically defensive when criticised. We are more likely to harden in our pre-existing views about an issue when we’re told that we’re wrong – especially something that relates to us personally (our religious or political views, work practices, etc). Similarly, we are more likely to respond well to praise. No matter how rational we like to think we are, our emotions are powerful drivers of our opinions, attitudes and actions.

Politicians and policy-makers are no different.

The Centre for Research on Environmental Decisions suggests to good starting points for people or organisations seeking to change public policy on climate change. They are soundly based on the psychology of behaviour change.

Make the default option the optimal option. When faced with multiple options, people will typically choose whatever is the default. By making the default option the sustainable, climate-friendly option, we can positively influence individuals’ decisions. In a political context, this means ensuring that decisions that are made by our political leaders which are positive towards climate action are applauded in public, with criticisms made in private. This is a recognition that any progress – even small progress – is better than doing nothing. The power of symbolism is also important, as it reduces resistance to further change as existing change appears easy, positive and the default.

Provide near-term incentives. A challenge for installing solar panels on every roof is that the pay-off period can be a decade or more. It is economical, but not right now, and that is a large hurdle to overcome when trying to motivate action. Similarly, in a government and political context, programs and changes that will have an impact two or three elections away is a hurdle to action now. Politically, climate activists need to try to make the payoff for political action today pay-off today. Promoting policies that have an immediate impact is also good, such as incentives (tax breaks or rebates) for personal or industry clean energy projects are important.

There are a lot of other ways that the psychology of behaviour change should be adopted by climate activists. The totalisation of climate vanguardists is typically not helpful. The radicalism of the Vietnam protests only made a difference politically when the grandparents, public servants, teachers and suit-wearers started to go to rallies. As climate action becomes more “mainsteam”, the huffers and puffers like Clive Hamilton can do more damage than good.

It is certainly counterproductive to attack and undermine the hard work of progressive organisations like the Australian Conservation Foundation or World Wildlife Fund.

Thoughts on carbon price talking points

Alex — Sun, 27 Feb 2011 00:12:08 +0000

The climate denialists in the Coalition has a simple message about the carbon price:

It’s a tax.

Taxes raise prices.

Prices on electricity, fuel and other things therefore will go up.

What about the alternative? The problem for progressives is that our arguments are nuanced. We don’t necessarily see the world in Manichean absolutes, black and white, good and evil.

It's not rocket science.

Electricity prices without a carbon price will continue to rise. Doesn’t really make intuitive sense, but that’s without knowing that degrading energy infrastructure pushes up prices. We haven’t had a carbon price in the last three years (or really, at all) yet elecricity prices have continued to go up – because of the old power lines, substations and other infrastructure.

Energy produced from non-renewable sources cost more than renewables because you need to continually mine coal (or gas or uranium).

Once you build the wind farm or soal plant, you don’t need to pay for the fuel.

The wind and sun are free, so there are almost no ongoing cost.

A carbon price will lead to lower energy prices… because it will mean we use more wind, solar and geothermal energy that don’t have expensive fuel costs.

Whatever our message, we on the progressive side of politics need to significantly simplify our key message about the carbon price and renewables.

Essential climate graphs for dealing with your denialist uncle at Xmas lunch

Alex — Wed, 15 Dec 2010 22:22:39 +0000

Hopefully your family doesn’t have a climate denialist uncle or relative, but if it does, and you’re stuck sitting next to him (or her, if she’s an aunt) at Xmas Lunch, here’s some excellent graphs that you can use to help debunk his (or her) climate denialism (courtesy of NASA).

There are some other really startling graphs and visualisations at the NASA website, so I encourage you to go there.