Feed aggregator
How residential demand tariffs could add $1000s to your bill
Boost for WA solar uptake as government cuts red tape
Donations to restore Great Barrier Reef could dry up if land clearing continues, says donor
Exclusive: Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist says private investment to clean up reef ‘doesn’t make sense’ with current land clearing
Private investment in work to restore the Great Barrier Reef is likely dry up if the Queensland government fails to pass tighter land-clearing laws, warns Australia’s biggest environmental philanthropist.
David Thomas, who has donated $30m and bequeathed another $30m to environmental causes in Australia, told Guardian Australia that state and federal governments’ drive for private investment in Great Barrier Reef water quality projects would be unsuccessful if rampant land clearing continues.
Continue reading...What if all German households went renewable?
The 7th Energy Storage Australia Conference is drawing near
Fiddling the books on renewables while the planet burns
Solar and storage in apartment blocks: innovations and road blocks
Millennials want solar, storage, shared energy – and an app for all that
The fall and fall of rooftop solar prices: four years of data
Locals invited to invest in Sydney community solar project, to help make “solar beer”
United Energy taps solar, storage, software to defer network upgrade
Satellite tagged Aberdeenshire raptor missing in Highlands
A Trump presidency would spell disaster for the Paris climate agreement
The upcoming US presidential election could make or break the Paris climate agreement.
Unlike the previous Kyoto Protocol, the entire Paris Agreement (which is yet to enter into force) was shaped to allow the US to legally join through a presidential-executive agreement. The lack of binding targets for emissions cuts or financing means that the agreement just needs President Barack Obama’s approval, rather than a majority vote in the US Senate.
It was a politically expedient move that I predicted in a paper earlier last year. Clearly the world has learned, for better or for worse, from the experience of the Kyoto Protocol, which the US never ratified due to the politically divided Senate.
But watering down the treaty to allow US participation is a risky strategy. Rather than relying on strong rules or ambition, the Paris Agreement depends on legitimacy through universal participation. With enough countries on board there is hope that it could change investment and policy patterns across the world.
That legitimacy hinges on US participation, and Obama will not determine the continued involvement of the US. The November election will decide what role the US plays in the agreement.
The Trump cardI suggested in a recent paper that a presidency under a Republican candidate such as Donald Trump could be fatal to the Paris Agreement. The damage could be done on two counts: the US withdrawing from the agreement and/or rescinding its domestic actions and targets.
Trump has already been vocal about his intention to “cancel” or “renegotiate” the agreement. However, some have claimed that having the agreement enter into force before November would bind Trump to the agreement for at least three years (due to one clause in the agreement).
Entry into force essentially means the agreement becomes operational and has legal force under international law. This would require 55 countries accounting for at least 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions (so far 22 countries representing 1% of global emissions have signed). However, there are three problems with this simple analysis.
First, it is unlikely that the Paris Agreement will enter into force before the inauguration of the next US president. While US ratification of Paris only requires the approval of Obama, for other countries the process is much more strenuous and time-consuming. Having 55 countries and at least three of the biggest emitters in the world ratify the agreement in the next six months is a high expectation. The Kyoto Protocol took eight years to go from agreement to entry into force.
Second, Trump could simply drop out of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the overarching treaty under which Paris was created. This would take only a year and would lead to automatic withdrawal from Paris. Dropping out of the entire climate negotiations would generally seem like an extreme move. However, for a loose cannon like Trump it may be just another day in the White House.
Third, Trump would not need to withdraw officially to throw the agreement into chaos. Refusing to send a US delegation to the negotiations, or simply reneging on the US’s national climate target would do just as much, if not more, damage than withdrawing.
And let’s be clear, a Trump presidency would mean the US would miss its domestic climate targets.
Analysis by Climate Action Tracker suggests that the US would need additional measures to meet its pledge of reducing emissions by 26-28% on 2005 levels by 2025. This is still the case even if the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plan is carried out.
Trump will be further weakening, rather than strengthening, climate action. The Republican platform on energy can be roughly summarised as “drill baby, drill”. It promises to approve the Keystone XL pipeline, maximise use of domestic fossil fuel reserves as part of an “all of the above energy policy” and rein in the powers of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
Is there anything the Paris Agreement could do to stop a renegade US under Trump?
Unfortunately not. The agreement lacks any measures to deal with countries outside the agreement and has only a “non-adversarial and non-punitive” compliance mechanism. Paris has far fewer teeth than the Kyoto Protocol.
A rogue US missing its targets with no consequences could be a fatal blow to the legitimacy of Paris – it would showcase to the world just how weak the agreement truly is.
Clinton’s climateIt’s clear that Trump would be an unmitigated disaster for the Paris Agreement, but what would Clinton mean for the climate?
The impact of a presidency under Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is more difficult to predict. In the short term it is likely to be business-as-usual for the climate talks.
Clinton is a supporter of the Paris agreement, having declared in her keynote speech to the Democratic National Convention: “I’m proud that we shaped a global climate agreement – now we have to hold every country accountable to their commitments, including ourselves.” Under Clinton, the US would remain a party to the agreement or legally adopt it if Obama had not yet done so.
The bigger question is whether Clinton will drive action to ensure the US increases its targets. The current Democratic platform gives hope that she will.
The platform calls for a second world war-style mobilisation to address climate change. It explicitly calls for a price on carbon and aims for 50% of US electricity generation to be from “clean energy” sources within a decade.
However, Clinton is by no means bound by the party platform, which has been moulded to appeal to supporters of the more pro-climate Bernie Sanders within the party. Clinton’s climate credentials have been called into question, particularly with her controversial support of fracking.
It is also uncertain how much Clinton could do without congressional support. Arguably, Obama is already pushing the limits of presidential powers. Indeed, the Clean Power Plan is being contested in the Supreme Court.
A Clinton administration will likely do little to hinder climate action, but it also looks unlikely to take the drastic action needed to put the world on track to limiting global warming to 1.5℃ or 2℃.
Ultimately, the reason for Paris’s success may prove to be its undoing. Relying on the goodwill of a single president is a short-sighted gamble. Come November, the world may once again have a heavy price to pay for investing so much hope in US leadership.
![The Conversation](https://counter.theconversation.edu.au/content/59737/count.gif)
Luke Kemp has previously received funding from the Australian and German governments.
The Guardian view on the heatwave: still hope on climate change | Editorial
The documentary broadcaster Ira Glass, the man behind the hit radio programme This American Life, is in Britain this week with his theatre show, Three Acts, Two Dancers, One Radio Host. The production, a collaboration with the experimental dancers of Monica Bill Barnes & Company, puts storytelling and dance together in an improbable but, the reviews say, endearing and entertaining combination. The dancers like to bring dance into places were no one expects it. Mr Glass does the same with documentary. The collaborators are united in wanting to tell serious stories in an engaging manner.
Not many subjects defeat Mr Glass’s creativity. But climate change, he admits, is beyond even his midas touch with a tale. “Any minute I’m not talking about climate change it’s like I’m turning my back on the most important thing that’s happening to us,” he said recently. The trouble with it is that it is “neither amusing nor surprising”. It is “resistant to journalism”.
Continue reading...Tidal energy support ebbs and flows | Letters
Steve Emsley is wrong when he compares tidal lagoons with Hinkley and asks why tidal energy is not even being discussed (Letters, 17 August). The latest estimated cost of the lagoon proposed for Swansea Bay is £1.3bn. Hinkley would produce 65 times as much electricity, all day, every day – true “baseload”. Tidal lagoons would produce variable amounts (four times as much on a spring tide as on a neap tide in Swansea and a bigger difference further up the Severn estuary) and the generation would be intermittent (four three-hour blocks a day) – that’s not “baseload”.
Lagoons could only produce 8% (about 25TWh a year) of the UK’s electricity requirements (a figure challenged by tidal energy experts), if five others followed Swansea, each many times larger and much more costly than Swansea (many times more than £5bn in total). But consent for the next two (huge lagoons further up the Severn estuary off Cardiff and Newport) is most unlikely because of various EU environmental designations (special area of conservation, special protection area etc). As to why no one is discussing them: in fact, Charles Hendry is conducting a review of tidal lagoons to assess, among other things, whether they could play a cost-effective role in the UK energy mix (see www.hendryreview.com). Some think the review was prompted by belated government realisation that the figures bandied around for lagoons just don’t add up.
Phil Jones
Ynystawe, Swansea
Star snapped before and after nova explosion
New species of fossil dolphin found
The coral die-off crisis is a climate crime and Exxon fired the gun | Bill McKibben
This week we’re staging protests on the ‘crime scene’ of the world’s affected reefs to send a signal that we’re not going to let fossil fuel firms get away with murder
Coral reefs are probably Earth’s most life-packed ecosystem; those who’ve had the privilege of diving in the tropics know the reef as an orderly riot of colour and flow, size and shape.
Which is why a white, dead reef is so shocking – as shocking in its way as a human corpse lying on the street, which still takes the form of the living breathing person it used to be, but now suddenly is stopped forever, the force that made it real suddenly and grotesquely absent.
Continue reading...Visitors rush to the Great Barrier Reef to catch it before it’s gone
Survey finds that 69% of visitors to the world’s largest coral reef system are motivated by the fear that it might disappear, reports Climate Home
In a reversal of the normal travel bucket list, tourists are rushing to see the Great Barrier Reef before it dies.
Half of the reef’s coral has disappeared in the past three decades due to a combination of warming ocean temperatures, coastal development, invasive starfish and agricultural runoff.
Continue reading...A deep sea dive into Bermuda’s hidden depths – video
Guardian environment reporter Oliver Milman joins a group of scientists on an underwater expedition off the Bermuda coast to help chart its hidden depths and gauge the general health of the area’s reef and coral. Travelling in a two-man submersible, Milman and submarine pilot Kelvin Magee go on a journey 500ft below the surface
Continue reading...