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Climate change could make cities 8C hotter – scientists
Combination of carbon emissions and ‘urban heat island’ effect of concrete and asphalt gives rise to worst-case scenario by end of 21st century
Under a dual onslaught of global warming and localised urban heating, some of the world’s cities may be as much as 8C (14.4F) warmer by 2100, researchers have warned.
Such a temperature spike would have dire consequences for the health of city-dwellers, rob companies and industries of able workers, and put pressure on already strained natural resources such as water.
Continue reading...Who tilts at windmills? Explaining hostility to renewables
Arctic peatlands may release potent grenous gas as permafrost thaws
National eNews - COALlapse, Eco-Circus, Climate Chaos webcast, National Conference abstract submissions close soon
Bangalore water woes: India's Silicon Valley dries up
Environmental lawfare a 'marvellous use of democracy': Thornton
Solar supplied 3.2% of Australia demand in 2016, heading to 30%
Fact v fiction: Adani's Carmichael coalmine – video explainer
A reality check on some of the big claims made to justify the proposed new mine, which would be the biggest in Australia. From ‘tens of thousands of new jobs’ to ‘good for the environment’, we unpack several of the most common claims to see if they stand up to scrutiny
• The new coal frontier: Australia’s carbon bomb
• Indian solar power prices hit record low
Sky high carbon tax needed to avoid catastrophic global warming, say experts
Leading economists, including Joseph Stiglitz and Nicholas Stern say taxes of $100 per metric ton could be needed by 2030
A group of leading economists warned on Monday that the world risked catastrophic global warming in just 13 years unless countries ramped up taxes on carbon emissions to as much as $100 (£77) per metric ton.
Experts including Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz and former World Bank chief economist Nicholas Stern said governments needed to move quickly to tackle polluting industries with a tax on carbon dioxide at $40-$80 per ton by 2020.
Continue reading...EU moves to crack down on carmakers in wake of VW emissions scandal
European commission given more powers to monitor testing and fine firms after Germany’s initial objections are overcome
The European Union has moved towards cracking down on carmakers who cheat emissions tests by giving the EU executive more powers to monitor testing and impose fines.
The European council overcame initial objections from Germany and agreed to try to reform the system for approving vehicles in Europe in the wake of the Volkswagen emissions scandal.
Continue reading...Leave oil rigs in the North Sea, say conservationists
Under ‘rigs to reefs’ idea, oil firms asked to consider turning decommissioned platforms into artificial reefs for marine life
Conservationists want oil companies and regulators to consider leaving more old rigs in the North Sea rather than removing them, with the savings paid into a fund to protect sealife.
After the Brent Spar debacle in 1995 when Shell provoked public outrage with plans to sink an old storage buoy, international regulations were imposed that work on the presumption that operators will remove rigs. Exemptions can be granted but are rare and on limited grounds.
Continue reading...Fisherman on his shark encounter: ‘it knocked me off my feet’ – audio
Terry Selwood, 73, from New South Wales, Australia, describes the moment a great white shark launched itself into his boat while he was out fishing on Saturday afternoon. Speaking to Australia’s ABC News Selwood says the coastguard initially didn’t believe his story when he called them for help
Continue reading...The heavy legacy of lead in the world's most toxic town – in pictures
Kabwe in Zambia has been left with extreme levels of lead pollution after almost a century of metal mining and smelting, harming generations of children
Continue reading...Smog is making you sick
Batteries are sexy and synchronous, but will energy ministers trust them?
The myth that Adani coal is boom or bust for Queensland economy
Who tilts at windmills? Explaining hostility to renewables
Studying the catastrophe that has been Australian climate and energy policy these past 30 years is a thoroughly depressing business. When you read great work by Guy Pearse, Clive Hamilton, Maria Taylor and Phillip Chubb, among others, you find yourself asking “why”?
Why were we so stupid, so unrelentingly shortsighted? Why did the revelation in 2004 that John Howard had called a meeting of big business to help him slow the growth of renewables elicit no more than a shrug? Why did policy-makers attack renewable energy so unrelentingly?
About now, readers will be rolling their eyes and saying either “follow the money, stupid!” or “they are blinded by their marketophilia”. Fair enough, and they have a point.
My recently published paper, titled “Wind beneath their contempt: why Australian policymakers oppose solar and wind energy” outlines the hostility to renewables from people like former treasurer Joe Hockey, who found the wind turbines around Canberra’s Lake George “utterly offensive”, and former prime minister Tony Abbott, who funded studies into the “potential health impacts” of wind farms.
It also deals with the policy-go-round that led to a drop in investment in renewables.
In a search for explanations for this, my paper looks at what we academics call “material factors”, such as party donations, post-career jobs, blame avoidance, diminished government capacity to act, and active disinformation by incumbents.
I then turn to ideological factors such as neoliberalism, the “growth at all costs” mindset, and of course climate denial.
Where it gets fun – and possibly controversial – is when I turn to psychological explanations such as what the sociologist Karl Mannheim called “the problem of generations”. This is best explained by a Douglas Adams quote:
Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Over the past 50 years, white heterosexual middle-class males with engineering backgrounds have felt this pattern particularly keenly, as their world has shifted and changed around them. To quote my own research paper:
This loss of the promise of control over nature occurred – by coincidence – at the same time that the British empire disintegrated, and the US empire met its match in the jungles of Vietnam, and while feminism, civil rights and gay rights all sprang up. What scholars of the Anthropocene have come to call the “Great Acceleration” from the 1950s, was followed by the great (and still incomplete) democratisation of the 1960s and 1970s.
The rising popularity of solar panels represents a similar pattern of democratisation, and associated loss of control for those with a vested interest in conventional power generation, which would presumably be particularly threatening to those attracted to status, power and hierarchy.
Consider the cringeHere are a couple more ideas and explanations that didn’t make the cut when I wrote the research paper. First up is the “biological cringe” – analogous to the “cultural cringe”, the self-loathing Australian assumption that all things British were better.
In Ecology and Empire: Environmental History of Settler Societies, the historian Tom Griffiths notes that:
Acclimatization societies systematically imported species that were regarded as useful, aesthetic or respectably wild to fill the perceived gaps in primitive Australian nature. This “biological cringe” was remarkably persistent and even informed twentieth-century preservation movements, when people came to feel that the remnants of the relic fauna, flora and peoples, genetically unable to fend for themselves, should be “saved”.
Second, and related, is the contempt and hatred that settler colonialists can feel towards wilderness, which in turn morphs into the ideology that there should be no limits on expansion and growth.
This means that people who speak of limits are inevitably attacked. One good example is Thomas Griffith Taylor (1880-1963), an Australian scientist who fell foul of the boosters who believed the country could and should support up to 500 million people.
Having seen his textbook banned in Western Australia for using the words “arid” and “desert”, Taylor set sail for the United States. At his farewell banquet at University of Sydney, he reinterpreted its motto Sidere mens eadem mutate (“The same spirit under a different sky”), as “Though the heavens fall I am of the same mind as my great-great-grandfather!”
I am anticipating that at least four groups will object to my speculations: (vulgar) Marxists, for whom everything is about profits; positivists and Popperians, who will mutter about a lack of disprovability; deniers of climate science, who often don’t like being described as such; and finally, those who argue that renewables cannot possibly provide the energy return on investment required to run a modern industrial economy (who may or may not be right – we are about to find out).
Reader, of whatever category, what do you think?
Boston Energy consortium advances plans for Queensland battery gigafactory
A treasure trove of beetles
The Meadows, Chester The brightest colours drew my novice eyes: a vivid yellow ladybird, a tiny blue weevil and the polished emerald of a dock beetle
A gentle breeze shimmers through the grass and the babble of the breeding season surrounds me. This patch of water meadows, just across the river Dee from the city centre, invites us to take things easy. But last time I visited I was carrying a petrol-powered leaf blower, helping Julie Rose of the Friends of the Meadows users group and entomologist Clive Washington with their beetle biodiversity survey.
Just off the path from Bottom Lane, Clive thrashed a blossoming hawthorn with a big stick, holding a white tray underneath to catch his quarry. A hand lens revealed common leaf weevils, Phyllobius pyri, rose-gold and speckled with pollen. A bronze bead was identified as Anaspis maculata, a tumbling flower beetle; a small longhorn beetle, Grammoptera ruficornis, stood out with its statement headwear and pewter sheen.
Continue reading...Regional centre gets Tesla fast charging stations
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