Feed aggregator

Plans to open a new mine have been criticised by local residents and NGOs for contradicting government commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and phase out coal, reports ENDS

A new surface coal mine could be created on the scenic Northumberland coast if an application is approved next month.

Banks Mining wants to create a three million tonne (Mt) opencast mine which will operate for seven years from an area of 250 hectares at Druridge Bay, between Widdrington and Cresswell.

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Scientists discover corals that look healthy but cannot reproduce, dashing hopes such reefs could repopulate bleached areas

Zombie corals, which look healthy but cannot reproduce, have been discovered by researchers, dashing hopes that such reefs could repopulate areas destroyed by bleaching.

Scientists have also found that a common ingredient in sunscreen is killing and mutating corals in tourist spots.

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As sightings in populated areas increase, authorities are trapping leopards and keeping them captive, often in small cages without adequate food. The solution is to educate the public on coexisting with the big cats, reports Environment 360

When an escaped leopard tackled a man at a poolside on a school campus in the southern Indian city of Bangalore early this year, the video went viral. The victim was one of the wildlife managers trying to recapture the animal. His colleagues finally managed to tranquilize it late that night and return it to a nearby zoo that was serving as a rescue center for a population of 16 wild-caught leopards. A week later, the leopard squeezed between the bars of another cage and escaped again, this time for good.

All the news and social media attention focused on the attack – and none on the underlying dynamic. But that dynamic affects much of India. Even as leopards have vanished in recent decades from vast swaths of Africa and Asia, the leopard population appears to be increasing in this nation of 1.2 billion people. The leopards are adept at living unnoticed even amid astonishingly high human population densities. But conflicts inevitably occur. Enraged farmers sometimes kill the leopards. Trapping is a standard response, but religious and animal rights objections have made euthanasia for unwanted animals unthinkable.

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Australia’s third longest river, the Darling river, has been suffering from low flow for many years. Wilcannia residents say the river system has been mismanaged and problems will affect future generations. Led by the local Barkindji people, approximately 100 protestors blockaded the Barrier Highway, which crosses the river, at the weekend, to highlight their concerns

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Queensland government’s $7m purchase aims to cut back on sediment flowing on to the reef, where it can smother coral and prevent its recovery from bleaching

Environment groups are applauding a “fantastic move” by the Queensland government to protect the Great Barrier Reef by buying a Cape York cattle station responsible for a disproportionate amount of pollution that flows on to the reef.

The Queensland government has spent $7m buying the 560 sq km Springvale Station, situated south of Cooktown, the ABC reported on Wednesday.

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In the 1990s almost all rubbish in the UK went to landfill. Today nearly half of household waste is recycled, thanks to EU legislation

We recycle and compost far more in Britain today than at the turn of the millennium.

Recycling targets come from Europe, and are the result of decades of directives from Brussels to reduce the environmental harm from our rubbish.

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Wenlock Edge There is something about the wildness of the dog rose, the way it stands outside cultivation with a beauty that inspires so much imitation

Days of rain and wild roses, a very British June. After the breathless spell of hot weather and sunshine, the showers were inevitable. Although some have been gently summery – good growing weather, as gardeners say – many have been epic downpours, looming like fantastical cities of cloud, bursting into tempests, thunder and lightning, cats and dogs, stair-rods, flash floods.

Sometimes the whole Wagnerian spectacle comes and goes in minutes, fascinatingly local when a mile or two down the road remains bone dry. The weather feels personal, purging, and inside the storms is another, existential world. Or that’s how it felt, broken down on the motorway. Mercifully, we were in a service station car park, and once the vehicle was fixed enough to get us home, we churned through the carwash of motorway spray back to Wenlock.

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The next phase of a national citizen science project is looking into which bird species are visiting backyard bird feeders

Pollution from many popular diesel cars is much worse when it is colder than 18C outside, new research suggests.

AAP/Lukas Coch

The endorsement for coal mining from the Labor-Coalition duopoly that the election campaign has seen in the last week makes the token appeals that have been made about tackling climate change even more disingenuous.

In this election campaign, the major parties have only brought up climate change when they have been pressed to do so at public forums, like leaders’ debates, the ABC’s Q&A, or when they treat social media as something that needs to be quelled.

The Coalition’s response is simply to say that Australia participated in the Paris agreement, and that is good enough. Labor, on the other hand, points to having outbid the Coalition on targets. Yet neither party is planning to deliver the cuts needed for Australia to play its part in keeping global warming below the 2℃ threshold.

Which leads us back to a question I will deal with at the end of this article: if polls are consistently showing that Australian voters want climate change on the election agenda, why are the leaders keeping so quiet about it?

Neither party is shy of talking up coal, however. Bill Shorten declared last week that a Labor government would not ban coal mining – and that it would be part of Australia’s energy needs for the foreseeable future.

But then on Tuesday, Attorney-General George Brandis, campaigning for Queensland’s most marginal seat of Capricornia, put in one of the pluckiest coal-selling performances of the campaign. He cited the gigantic Adani mine in central Queensland a saviour for the electorate.

We know that Adani, the massive Indian coal company, wants to develop the Carmichael mine, which according to some estimates could generate up to 10,000 jobs. And people in Rockhampton know that and they know that the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to prevent the development of the Adani mine.

They see their future prosperity as being bound up in the development of the Adani mine, and they know that if there were to be a Labor-Greens government, that would be the end of the Adani mine, that would be the end of coal mining in central Queensland, and that would be the end of their best shot at economic prosperity in the future.

But what doesn’t add up here is that around the world, coal is in terminal decline, while the future for renewables is looking very bright and secure.

Just to the north, the federal government has quarantined A$1 billion from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation for projects to “save” the Great Barrier Reef. But this money is demonstrably not going to create any jobs that are relevant to Capricornia. Apparently pork-barrelling is not needed in Capricornia, as the promise of coal is a ready replacement.

But the largest contradiction of all is the complete illogicality of claiming (even if without foundation) to save the reef and solve climate change in one Queensland electorate, while proposing to unleash one of the largest deposits of CO₂ to the world’s atmosphere from the electorate next door.

It is worth heeding 350.org’s Bill McKibben’s warning that if all the coal in the Galilee Basin, of which the Adani mine holds one of the largest deposits, is exported for burning, it would use up 30% of the world’s carbon budget. 100% of the budget gets you 2℃.

And new climate research looking at the difference between 1.5℃ and 2℃, suggests the latter will make what we experience at the upper limits of present-day climate variability the new normal around the globe, and worse closer to the equator.

The influence of the mining and energy industry on election campaigns

This leads us to ask serious questions about the influence that mining and energy companies have on major political parties during election campaigns.

There is some variation in which particular mining companies are favoured by particular parties. Labor is certainly not as keen on Adani as the Coalition is. But, in general, the support for fossil-fuel industries is part of the DNA of the major parties today.

It is well known there is a perpetually revolving door between mining/energy companies and politicians/staffers from the major parties.

Take the Labor Party. When Labor lost the last election, Martin Ferguson, Craig Emerson and Greg Combet either took up management jobs with mining and energy companies and associations or worked as consultants for them.

Combet, a former climate change minister, took up consultancies for coal seam gas companies AGL and Santos. Ferguson, resources minister during Labor’s last term of office, landed the position as chairman of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s advisory committee only six months after leaving politics.

With the Coalition, former National Party leader Mark Vaile is chairman of Whitehaven Coal, the company at the centre of protest and controversy at the Maules Creek mine. Another former National Party leader, John Anderson, became chairman of Eastern Star Gas only two years after quitting Canberra.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Anne Davies last year found a complex web of interlocking networks of influence that tied together NSW Premier Mike Baird’s office, then-prime minister Tony Abbott’s office, and energy and mining companies including AGL and Santos.

At times, these companies brought together high-profile Liberal and Labor politicians. Santos engaged a lobbying company, Bespoke Approach, which listed former Labor senator Nick Bolkus and former Liberal South Australian premier John Olson as directors.

AGL lays claim to the same cross-party alliance between former Labor minister John Dawkins and former Liberal senator Helen Coonan, who co-chair lobbying firm GRA Cosway.

But what is less-well-known is the degree to which mining and energy companies have enticed media advisors from the major parties to walk through that revolving door. Davies included an interactive graphic in her report that shows the rotation of media people between Canberra, mining and energy companies, and state politics.

Understanding the rotation of media advisors does not just open up the question of lobbying – it also explains how governments may feel obliged to legitimate their support for fossil fuel.

Such staffers are a real prize for the companies. They give them access to the media strategies of government departments, which may translate into real influence about the kind of messages that might be most favourable to their company’s operations.

Carbon-laced political donations

It is now a matter of public record that fossil-fuel interests have bankrolled climate denialism around the world for decades. The case of the collapsing edifice of Peabody Energy, once the world’s largest coal company, is a paradigm example of this. Fossil-fuel companies even sponsored the Paris climate summit.

But can the donations of fossil-fuel companies also influence election campaigns? Well, yes they can, but we won’t find out who and how this might be happening until after the election.

A recent Four Corners program delved into the lack of transparency of Australia’s donation process. For example, knowledge of who is funding the parties in this election campaign won’t be revealed until the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) releases its data in February next year.

But we do know from the last election campaign that mining and energy companies loomed large as donors for both Labor and Liberal parties. The AEC’s data release from February 2014 showed the Liberal Party received more than $1.8 million directly from energy companies that supported the repeal of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Even more was donated via the Liberal-linked Cormack Foundation. Two of the biggest “receipts” to the Cormack Foundation were BHP and Rio Tinto.

Labor received only $453,000 from mining and energy companies in the context of the immense industry opposition to an emissions trading scheme.

Speculating on 2016 party donations

The 2013 election was all about mining and energy companies donating in return for killing the carbon tax. This has now been completed. Job done, time to move on.

With the carbon tax gone, and millions in corporate welfare flowing directly to the mining and energy companies from taxpayers, all that the PR departments of these companies would be worried about is that climate change is kept off the election agenda.

Such an environment would suit the fossil-fuel industries as they fight for a few more years of viability in a world that is abandoning them. As constitutional lawyer George Williams has observedof all forms of corporate donations:

These companies are hoping that giving money will lead to outcomes. That’s why they’re doing it, and that’s one of the key problems of the current system.

So, here is a hypothetical PR strategy that would make perfect sense for the mining and energy sectors in this election, in eight easy steps.

Step One: Mining and Energy companies donate to major political parties with a request to drop climate change from their campaigns.

Step Two: Major political parties agree not to run on a climate platform and continue to heavily subsidise the operations of mining companies.

Step Three: Parties use money for broadcast and newspaper campaign budgets.

Step Four: Newspapers and TV and radio outlets sell the attention spans of audiences to the advertisers of political parties for large sums.

Step Five: Major parties expect that audiences will be persuaded to vote for one of them, while fossil-fuel company donations are justified by backing both possible winners who will look after their interests. The investment would only fail if one of the parties had to share power with minor parties or independents.

Step Six: Major parties continue to support coal and energy companies, offering them mining exploration licences, mining leases and export licences.

Step Seven: A part of the donations that energy companies give to parties is paid by consumers of increased electricity prices as well as taxpayers who are subsidising the corporate welfare that goes to these companies.

Step Eight: With favourable regulatory conditions for mining and electricity generation, mining and energy companies have greater certainty with which to expand their investments, operations and profits – some of which can be injected back into the political process at election time.

To the extent that this hypothesis is proven to be correct, and repeats the processes at play in the 2013 election, what emerges is that although Australia enjoys the free speech of a multi-party democracy, discussion of climate change is not free from the influence of capital in the election process.

To the extent that the major donors to Labor and Coalition are dominated by mining and energy, it is in the interests of this industry to finance a political duopoly that encourages the closure of public debates that do not conform to its interests.

The winners in this process can be identified as a media-political-industrial complex. This complex is a kind of three-way protectorate, where each group looks after itself by looking after the other two.

Broadcasters and newspapers are winners as they generate large revenues at election time that is channelled to them by political parties from the donors.

Mining and energy companies are winners, as they are able to distract voters from climate change and reduce pressure on parties to decarbonise the economy and regulate against their activities.

The parties are winners as they only need to neglect climate change in return for millions of dollars in donations to their election campaigns.

The losers are the voters, who are not only forced to subsidise the political conditions that make their per-capita emissions four times higher than the global average, but also subsidise the conditions in which climate is taken off the public agenda.

The biggest losers are our grandchildren, who are going to inherit the climate mess created by the manipulative, influence-peddling mediocrity that plays out over three-year election cycles – and not just in Australia.

The Threatened Species Scientific Committee is seeking comments on the assessment of Myuchelys georgesi (Bellinger River snapping turtle). The public consultation period will be open until 05 August 2016.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s happened to prices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should electricity prices be part of the election agenda?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

Disclosure

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

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

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

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

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

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

Endangered ecosystems

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

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

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

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

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

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

Better for wildlife…

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

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

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

…better for farmers

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

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

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

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

A model for conservation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

University of Sydney study, conducted after two shark-related deaths, reveals overwhelming preference for non-lethal responses to attacks

Perth residents overwhelmingly prefer non-lethal responses to shark attacks, a new survey shows. Seventy-five per cent of those polled said they wanted money be spent on education and research rather than catching the shark, according to a survey published by the University of Sydney on Wednesday.

The survey was conducted between June 8 and 15, two days after university lecturer Doreen Collyer was fatally mauled by a great white shark while diving 1km off the Mindarie marina, in Perth’s northern suburbs, and five days after surfer Ben Gerring died in hospital from wounds also sustained in a great white attack.

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Leadership forum hears of ‘huge gap’ between experts’ advice on phasing carbon out of the economy and public willingness to go along with that advice

A group of business and academic leaders have bemoaned the “huge gap” between what experts say ought to be done to decarbonise Australia’s economy and the public’s willingness to accept such a policy.

They want Australia’s leaders to restart a conversation after the federal election about the need to transition the economy towards renewable and cleaner energy.

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In June 1997, astronauts on the Russian space station Mir faced disaster after the worst collision in the history of manned space flight.

Milder winters have contributed to a significant drop in greenhouse gas emissions across the EU over the past quarter of a century.

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

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

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

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

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

Idealism vs realism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Making up the shortfall

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Embracing science

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

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

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

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

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

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