Beyond the carbon price, a Faustian bargain

by David Spratt, a Crikey cross-post

The carbon tax starts on July 1 this year, so there’s some tidying up to do around the edges -- appointments, financing, regulations -- and then a big tick next to the climate policy box on the cabinet whiteboard. Minister Greg Combet has already taken on the additional portfolios of industry and innovation.
     If only. A barely reported new study on Earth’s energy imbalance from NASA climate chief James Hansen and his research team contends that, far from answering the climate challenge, we have constructed "a Faustian bargain".

Climate in the media to 5 February 2012

PICKS OF THE WEEK---------------

Canberra’s push to be the nation’s solar capital
http://reneweconomy.com.au/2012/canberras-push-to-the-be-nations-solar-capital
Giles Parkinson, RenewEconomy, 30 January 2012
The ACT government has called for tenders for the first round of contracts to build up to 40MW of large scale solar facilities in the territory, with the winners of the first tender to be announced in July.

Greenpeace chief warns of ‘perfect storm’ of crises
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2012/02/03/greenpeace-chief-warns-of-perfect-storm-of-crises
Agence France-Presse, February 3, 2012
The head of environmental pressure group Greenpeace warned Friday the world faced a “perfect storm” of crises and was heading for what he termed a crisis of “epic proportions.”

So the planet stopped warming, says Rupert

This week, Rupert Murdoch's "The Australian" dutifully reported as news an opinion piece, from 16 denier–scientists, claiming that the world had stopped warming, which had originally been published in Murdoch's Wall Street Journal as No Need to Panic About Global Warming: There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.

Insights from addictions recovery applied to climate change

Chris Johnstone

For many years I worked as an addictions specialist in the UK health service, part of my role being to run groups exploring how to prevent relapses. One day the topic was ‘dealing with crisis’. John, a middle aged man, started the group by saying “I’m not sure I need to be here, as I don’t really have any crisis in my life”. Just a few weeks previously, John had been told he might only have a few months left to live if he carried on drinking. The life-threatening emergency of his alcoholic liver disease didn’t seem to have sunk in.

Climate in the media to 29 January 2012

PICKS OF THE WEEK---------------

Shale Gas a Bridge to More Global Warming
http://www.ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=106531
Stephen Leahy, IPS, 24 January 2012
Hundreds of thousands of shale gas wells are being "fracked" in the United States and Canada, allowing large amounts of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, to escape into the atmosphere, new studies have shown.
AND...
Abbott backs coal seam gas over coal mining
http://www.abc.net.au/pm/content/2012/s3415749.htm
George Roberts, ABC PM, January 25, 2012
The Federal Opposition Leader, Tony Abbott, has cautiously backed the controversial coal seam gas or CSG industry.

As emissions rise, we may be heading for an ice-free planet

An ice-free world isn’t impossible – even though it seems the stuff of science fiction. —  Alistair Knock

by Andrew Glikson

Last December’s meeting of the American Geophysical Union featured three of the world’s leading climate scientists: James Hansen (NASA’s chief climate scientist), Elco Rohling (National Oceanography Centre, Southampton) and Ken Caldeira (Stanford School of Earth Science). But it was Hansen who attracted the most attention when he stated:

If you doubled CO₂, which practically all governments assume we’re going to do, that would eventually get us to the ice-free state (and) We would be sending our climate back to a state we haven’t adjusted to as a species.

Climate in the media to 22 January 2012

PICKS OF THE WEEK---------------

McKibben's efforts pay off as Obama kills pipeline
http://www.burlingtonfreepress.com/article/20120118/NEWS02/120118042/McKibben-s-efforts-pay-off-Obama-kills-pipeline
Nicole Gaudiano, BFP, 18 January 2012
Vermont climate activist Bill McKibben isn’t used to environmentalists scoring a win over the oil industry. But that’s what happened Wednesday when President Barack Obama rejected a permit for the controversial Keystone XL pipeline — a project McKibben has been fighting since August.

Implications of the Arctic permafrost thaw

by Ian Dunlop, cross-post from Club of Rome News

 Of the many “Elephants in the Room” in the climate change debate, none are larger than the potential release to atmosphere of carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane contained in the Arctic permafrost. Preliminary findings from the latest research, discussed at the American Geophysical Union’s annual conference in San Francisco in December 2011, highlighted the extreme risks that humanity is now exposed to from global warming. 
     The Arctic has been warming 2-3 times faster than the global average, one consequence being that the volume of Arctic sea ice has reduced dramatically, by around 80% in summer since 1979, far faster than expected.  If current trends continue, the Arctic may be sea-ice-free in summer by around 2015, and all year by around 2030.  This would likely lead to further positive warming feedback as the ice albedo effect diminishes, accelerating melt of the Greenland ice sheet, ultimately contributing several metres of sea level rise.

Why emissions need to drop off a cliff

How quickly do global greenhouse gas emissions need to drop to get back to a safe climate?  It’s a pertinent question when the Australian government is making great claims for its 2011 carbon legislation, but its aim is to reduce emissions by only five per cent by 2020. And even that is an illusion, because a significant share will come from buying offsets in the international market.
     And when proposed new and expanded coal mines in Australia are tallied up, they will add about 1.75 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide annually – about eleven times what the Australian government estimates will be saved by the carbon tax legislation. By 2020 or soon thereafter, Australia will be exporting nearly twice as much carbon dioxide as is Saudi Arabia today, as Guy Pearce explains.

Climate in the media to 15 January 2012

PICKS OF THE WEEK---------------

Much ado about methane
http://wwwp.dailyclimate.org/tdc-newsroom/2012/01/opinion-methane-release
David Archer, Daily Climate, Jan. 9, 2012
The climate change story has many frightening pieces. Methane venting from oceans and the Arctic has grabbed the public's imagination lately, but it is not the scariest part of the tale.

Australian coal’s expansion plans make a mockery of government’s carbon tax claims

David Spratt

The expansion of Australian coal mining will add about 1.75Gt (gigatonnes) of carbon dioxide annually to the atmosphere – about 11 times what the Australian government estimates will be saved by the carbon tax legislation that recently passed Parliament.

That’s Guy Pearse speaking at Woodford on 31 December.   He says that even the emissions from smaller players have a staggering impact, for example:

• the annual emissions from Aston/Whitehaven’s new mines, or of QCoal's mines will each be greater than all the CO2 saved by all the hybrid cars ever sold world-wide;
• The new mines of the relatively small Jellinbah Coal add nearly 100 times as much CO2 as is saved by all he household solar panel installations in Australia.

Climate in the media to 8 January 2012

PICKS OF THE WEEK---------------

Climate Cognitive Dissonance: The “Profound Contradiction” Between Science and Markets on the Road to 10°F Warming
http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2011/12/21/393713/climate-cognitive-dissonance-science-markets
David Roberts, Grist, 21 December 2011
Earlier this month, Nicholas Stern — respected U.K. economist and author of the famed Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change — cast a spotlight on what he calls a “profound contradiction at the heart of climate change policy.”

Professor Kevin Anderson - Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous

This is the best presentation we have seen all year. It's a must watch!

Professor Kevin Anderson - Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous

View another webinar from DFID

Climate in the media 21 December 2011

PICKS OF THE WEEK---------------

2011 Science News of the Year: Environment
http://www.sciencenews.org/view/feature/id/336997/title/2011_Science_News_of_the_Year_Environment
Science News, 1 December 2011

Carbon tax pitch misses the mark: it’s the climate, stupid!

First published in Crikey, 18 July 2011

by David Spratt

Can you sell people an answer, when they’re not sure of the question?

The carbon tax TV campaign confirms the government’s strategy of framing the case largely in economic terms: a "clean energy future" for investment and jobs and innovation, building Australia for the 21st century. Long gone are the days of the "great moral challenge" of our time.

The "Say yes" campaign by civil society groups exhibits the same economism: "Saying yes to a price on pollution means saying yes to investment, innovation, and new jobs based on renewable energy ... Putting a price on pollution will ... protect jobs, drive innovation in adaptation and clean energy projects and technologies ..."

The problem is that barely half the population believes climate change is real and human caused; fewer support the tax. And much of that opinion is soft: it’s one of many concerns.

Carbon price a historic step forward, but political compromise triumphs over scientific necessity

Check out: Carbon tax at a glance on Crikey

It is a historic step forward for Australia to be finally taking action to price carbon. The time for talking is over as the damaging impacts of global warming become ever more apparent. By acting to reduce emissions, the politics of delay and denial will become a historic relic.

The very existence of the legislation is due to the constant pressure and untiring work of thousands of individuals and groups in the climate movement across Australia. These people have kept the issue of climate change -- the greatest threat yet to our species -- alive in the face of powerful vested interests who deny both the science of climate change and the case for action. This is a very significant victory for Australian civil society.

However the long delay in acting makes our challenge today bigger and more urgent than ever. The aspirations of the carbon pricing scheme are low in comparison with what the science community tells us we need to do to avoid great damage to Australia's economy, our environment, and the way we live.

How not to engage the community: the politics of 5 June

by David Spratt and John Rice

On Sunday 5 June, a set of coordinated public rallies in support of climate action, and particularly a carbon tax, under the banner “Say Yes....”, were held in capital cities around Australia.

For many people, including climate activists, they were a disconcerting experience, in which the community was effectively taken out of these events, reduced to little more than extras providing a staged backdrop for an inordinately expensive media stunt, led by GetUp.

The events may have been public, but they had nought to do with community organising and empowerment. In many ways, they were its negation.

“Most of Australia” can expect extreme temperatures of more than 50 degrees by end of century

Climate change is making our planet hotter and wetter on average, but also drier in some places including southern Australia, and with more extreme events as the total amount of energy in the climate system increases.

So how hot will hot be? One answer comes from Andreas Sterl and 10 colleagues from the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute and Institute for Marine and Atmospheric Research at Utrecht University. In “When can we expect extremely high surface temperatures?”, they ask how extreme would temperatures be at end of this century if the global average temperature were to increase by 3.5C by 2100 compared to 2000 (based on the IPCC scenario known as A1B).

Australian government deliberately underestimating risks from rising sea levels

First published in Crikey, 8 June 2011

Last weekend, the Australian government released the latest in a series of reports documenting the possible impacts of climate-change-induced sea-level rises (SLRs) on Australia.

It found a "worst-case scenario sea level rise of 1.1 metres" within 90 years would have a devastating impact, with as much as $266 billion worth of potential damage and loss to buildings and infrastructure.

This upper bound of 1.1 metres is used consistently by government. Inundation maps use three simple sea-level rise scenarios for the period about the year 2100: low (0.5m), medium (0.8m) and high (1.1m).

The big problem is that 1.1 metres is the wrong figure by a wide margin, with serious implications for the efficacy of the risk management and planning such research should underpin.

'Direct Action' could reward polluters rather than discourage

First published in Crikey, 3 June 2011

Without any mechanism to discourage additional carbon emissions, the Coalition’s "direct action" climate plan may perversely reward them.

The Coalition plan proposes cash rewards for actions to "support 140 million tonnes of abatement per annum by 2020 to meet our 5% target", at a cost to taxpayers said to be $3.2 billion over the first four years. (The government now assesses that abatement task at 160 metric tonnes, for the meagre 5% goal of both major parties -- which stands in sharp contrast to the carbon budget approach advocated in the recent Climate Commission report.)

The Coalition plan does not discourage additional pollution, whether from new industrial investment or increased energy use accompanying population growth and increased household consumption. At $25 a tonne, the plan’s budget for 2012-13 would buy 20 million tonnes of abatement. Economic growth of 4% would be enough to nullify most of that.