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Feeding Bryde’s whales, fighting seals and a Harry Potter spider are among this week’s pick of images from the natural world

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Patrick Muhayirwa was trapped in an ambush while patrolling to protect gorillas in Africa’s oldest national park

• Another day, another dead wildlife ranger. We must do more to help them
  

A 26-year-old wildlife ranger has been gunned down by militia operating in the Virunga National Park in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

According to park authorities, Patrick Prince Muhayirwa was part of a group of rangers and DRC army personnel patrolling the huge park to prevent poaching.

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Mexican authorities try to save the world's smallest porpoise by seizing illegal fishing nets.

Improved light, ventilation and heat control can boost workers’ productivity by thousands of dollars a year and reduce instances of sick building syndrome

People working in green buildings think better in the office and sleep better when they get home, a new study has revealed.

The research indicates that better ventilation, lighting and heat control improves workers’ performance and could boost their productivity by thousands of dollars a year. It also suggests that more subjective aspects, such as beautiful design, may make workers happier and more productive.

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Scientists stepped outside their comfort zones to protest the attacks they face from the incoming administration

Desperate times call for desperate measures, and for scientists, these are desperate measures.

Tuesday in San Francisco’s Jessie Square, approximately 500 people gathered for a ‘rally to stand up for science.’ Many of the attendees were scientists who had migrated to the rally from the nearby Moscone Center, where some 26,000 Earth scientists are attending the annual American Geophysical Union (AGU) conference this week.

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'Most humans are smarter than a fox, and yet …'—What the Fox pays poetic attention to the population of red foxes with which we share our urban and suburban environments. While often unperceived, these hardy creatures—so well established in Australia—are deeply fascinating to the human ear, eye, and imagination.

Company owned by Centrica gave $20,000 to TPPF, praised by new US energy secretary for opposing ‘hysteria of global warming’

British Gas’s parent company, Centrica, has given tens of thousands of dollars to a US thinktank that denies climate change and is backed by Donald Trump’s energy secretary.

Direct Energy, a US energy company wholly owned by Centrica, donated $20,000 to the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) in 2010, according to tax filings.

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Stanage, Derbyshire On a bleak night, with a folk memory of wolves and belief in evil spirits, who wouldn’t need protection?

The long flowing line of Stanage Edge is, for rock climbers, one of the world’s great crags, segmented, like a gritstone worm, into various buttresses and features, each of them named, each providing many different routes to the top, each of those – and there are hundreds – also named.

I am at a buttress at the crag’s southern end known, paradoxically, as Apparent North, near a short tough climb called Hamper’s Hang. I am shrinking inside my jacket against a dismal wet day. I thought I knew this place, having been here as a climber scores of times, but my understanding of it has just been turned on its head.

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For more than a decade, Australia has been held back by climate science denial and an antipathy towards environmentalism

If you can hear what sounds like a faint drumroll coming from across the Pacific then it’s the sound of millions of jaws dropping on hard surfaces.

President-elect Donald Trump is a phrase journalists are regularly typing into their keyboards. That was jaw dropping enough, even for some Republicans.

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In the wash up of this week's COAG Energy meeting, there's a real risk the importance of the Finkel Review will be lost.

Lazard report says rooftop solar costs on "by far the steepest cost decline of any technology," with energy storage looking like following suit.

GE technology chief says days of "relying solely on synchronous generation for everything are over". In a direct challenge to those who say grid security can only be assured by spinning coal and gas turbines, the world's biggest provider of energy equipment says wind and solar can do the job just as well.

How much will the Hazelwood coal power plant closure really cost you? Let's shed some (energy efficient) light on the matter.

New guideline on "ring fencing" still gives too much latitude to the networks, and may work against the interest of consumers.

A global map of areas without roads shows large tracts of wilderness remain unprotected.

Business here and households here, already we’re paying twice the cost of the US for electricity. – Craig Kelly MP, chair of the backbench environment and energy committee, ABC Radio National Breakfast interview, December 6, 2016. (Listen from 7.38)

Environment and energy minister Josh Frydenberg recently left open the possibility of some form of carbon trading in the electricity sector. He later ruled out that option, saying he wanted to keep electricity prices down.

Following Frydenberg’s initial comments, Liberal MP Craig Kelly said businesses and households in Australia are already paying twice as much as Americans for their electricity.

Is that true?

Checking the source

When asked for sources to support his statement, Craig Kelly referred The Conversation to a range of sources, saying that:

… a report titled 2015 Residential Electricity Price Trends lists [on page 212] the average Australian price at 28.72 cents per kilowatt hour for 2014/2015.

In comparison, the US Energy Information Administration lists the average price for residential electricity [in the US] at 10.44 cents for 2014.

Converting 10.44 US cents at A$1/US$0.74 – is the equivalent of 14.11 cents Australia.

So using these sources (in Australian cents) we have 14.11 cents in the USA and 28.72 cents in Australia. Therefore I think to say that “we’re paying twice the cost of the US for electricity” (on average) is pretty much right on the money.

You can read Craig Kelly’s full response here.

Do Australians pay more?

It’s definitely true that Australians pay much more for their electricity than US citizens do (and Australian prices are set to rise even further, according to the Australian Energy Market Commission.

Using OECD data, there’s one measure that says it is twice as much – or at least it was twice as much as recently as 2014. Another measure – a better measure, in my view – shows Australians pay about 50% more than US citizens do for their electricity.

As Craig Kelly notes in his full response, there is significant variation in electricity prices across states and territories in Australia and in the United States, so comparing the two is not a simple matter. The Australian Energy Market Commission’s annual Electricity Price Trends report shows that retail prices in Australia vary from 18.44 c/kWh in the Australian Capital Territory to 29.75 c/KWh in South Australia.

But we can use Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) data on wholesale and retail indices energy prices to check Craig Kelly’s statement.

The wholesale price is the cost of generating the energy that is sent to the grid. Retail prices are what householders are more used to talking about. Retail prices factor in extra costs like transmission and distribution (“poles and wires”), retailer margins and other levies (such as Feed-in Tariff and Renewable Energy Target costs). In other words, it’s what we’re paying on our power bill.

Let’s examine the data.

A tale of two measures

The two measures I have used to compare prices in the US and Australia are called “market exchange rates” and “purchasing power parities”. Craig Kelly’s calculations rely on market exchange rates, so we will start with that one.

Market exchange rates simply means converting the price in one country’s currency to that of another country’s currency, as Kelly did. This measure of comparison is more volatile than purchasing power parity exchange rates.

Using market exchange rates, OECD data show that Australian electricity prices have, in recent years, been approximately twice as high as electricity prices in the US. Recently, the gap has narrowed. In 2015, using market exchange rates, electricity prices in Australia were about 70.3% higher than in the US.

The Australian Energy Market Commission projects that Australian prices will rise even further in coming years.

By converting Australian electricity prices into US dollars (market exchange rates), we can see Australian electricity prices have been an average of twice as high as in the US over the past four years – though the gap narrowed in 2015, down to a 70% difference. Chart provided by author, using data from the OECD.

That broadly supports what Kelly said. But if we use purchasing power parity exchange rates, the data show that Australia’s prices are approximately 50% higher than the US.

Purchasing power parity exchange rates, or PPP, factor in inflation and the cost of living in a particular country, and eliminate differences in price levels between countries. This measure allows a cleaner, less volatile comparison between the US and Australia.

The chart below compares the retail prices of electricity in Australia and the United States when adjusted for cost of living differences using purchasing power parity.

Using purchasing power parity exchange rates, OECD data shows household prices of electricity are approximately 50% higher in Australia than in the US. Chart by author, using data from the OECD.

As the above chart of the OECD data shows, household prices of electricity are about 50% higher in Australia than in the US when you use purchasing power parity data.

Why are the prices so different?

As this chart shows, data from OECD indicate there has been a substantial divergence between Australian and American electricity prices since about 2008.

Retail price index: average power prices for householders in the US and Australia. The year 2000 is indexed to 100 (that is, 2000 = 100) Author provided, using data from the OECD Wholesale price index: the average price the generators charge to the retailers (or distributors) for the power they put into the grid. The year 2000 is indexed to 100 (that is, 2000 = 100) Author provided, using data from the OECD.

As noted in the preliminary report of the Australian chief scientist Alan Finkel’s review of the National Electricity Market, household energy bills in Australia increased 61% on average between 2008 and 2014.

The main reason for this is the cost of maintaining the electricity network – essentially, the poles and wires that deliver the power. Network costs represent between 45% and 55% of a typical electricity bill. This has been the largest contributor to Australia’s increasing prices over the past six years.

Some observers have said that the “gold-plating” of the network came about because of a regulatory regime that encouraged over-investment in poles and wires. This was been partly driven by an effort to shore up electricity supply and an overestimation of demand.

The US shale gas revolution has also helped keep energy more affordable there than in Australia.

The Productivity Commission reported that, in New South Wales, network costs accounted for 80% of price rises in 2010-11 and 50% of price rises in 2011-12.

Is it really that simple?

Not really. Energy economics is far more complicated than can come across in Kelly’s quick quote or this short FactCheck.

While the Australian price is higher, this doesn’t necessarily mean the cost is higher: Australians use much less energy than Americans. This is because as prices increase, energy productivity and energy efficiency also tend to increase. In total, most countries actually spend a similar proportion of GDP on energy costs.

This holds surprisingly consistent across a range of countries. For example, Japan has high energy prices, but also has high energy efficiency and productivity. Consequently, it spends practically the same amount of GDP on energy cost as the US.

So prices may be higher for individuals, but that doesn’t mean the economy-wide costs are higher. All that said, Kelly was talking about the prices for individuals and business, so that’s what this FactCheck is focused on.

Verdict

If we compare Australian and American electricity prices using market exchange rates, Craig Kelly’s comment is correct: Australia’s electricity prices were essentially double those of the United States as recently as 2014. In 2015, using market exchange rates, the US prices were about 70.3% higher.

If we compare the prices using purchasing parity power exchange rates – which I’d argue is the more accurate reflection of the costs of living in each of the countries – Australia’s prices are about 50% higher than the US.

Overall, Craig Kelly’s broader point is correct: Australians pay a much higher price for their electricity than Americans do. – Dylan McConnell.

Review

I agree with the author’s position that purchasing power parity comparisons are less volatile and more representative of the relativity based on actual living costs. It is true Australian households pay a much higher electricity price than Americans.

There’s one important point I’d add. There is a baseline cost of having a house or business connected to electrical supply, regardless of how much electricity is used. This is called the fixed supply cost. The more electricity a household or business uses, the more the fixed supply cost is diluted in the overall electricity bill. This brings down the cost per kilowatt-hours (kWh).

American households use about twice as much electricity as Australian households. According to the US EIA, average US household electricity consumption in 2015 was 10,812 kWh. 2014 data for Australia shows average Australian household electricity consumption was 5,772 kWh (down from 6,819 kWh in 2008. At 25 cents/kWh that is a saving of $307 for Australians for using less electricity over time).

So we would expect Australian household electricity prices to be higher, because an average Australian household uses less electricity and the large fixed supply costs must be spread across a smaller amount of consumption. This raises the cost per kWh. But because Australians use less, their annual bill may be lower.

Further, in recent years, Australian energy retailers have been raising their fixed supply (or baseline) charges. So small users pay much more overall per unit of electricity they use.

Lastly, it’s worth noting that larger businesses often negotiate much better deals on their electricity prices than householders can. – Alan Pears.

Have you ever seen a “fact” worth checking? The Conversation’s FactCheck asks academic experts to test claims and see how true they are. We then ask a second academic to review an anonymous copy of the article. You can request a check at checkit@theconversation.edu.au. Please include the statement you would like us to check, the date it was made, and a link if possible.

Dylan McConnell has received funding from the AEMC's Consumer Advocacy Panel and Energy Consumers Australia.

Alan Pears has worked for government, business, industry associations public interest groups and at universities on energy efficiency, climate response and sustainability issues since the late 1970s. He is now an honorary Senior Industry Fellow at RMIT University and a consultant, as well as an adviser to a range of industry associations and public interest groups. His investments in managed funds include firms that benefit from growth in clean energy.

NSW new initiative on energy efficiency is good model for the Victorian government's long-awaited energy efficiency and productivity strategy.

Owner of 13MW Mugga Lane Solar Park – winner in ACT govt’s first large-scale renewables tender – has launched a rather unusual tender.

Ideas to enhance the liveability and sustainability of our cities have attracted a lot of interest recently. Examples include establishing or enhancing “urban forests”, or “bringing back nature” into cities to support animals and ecosystems displaced by human activity.

While these projects focus on creating space for nature and enhancing biodiversity within cities, they rarely consider the impact on nature of the artificial lighting used across the urban landscape.

Public lighting is often thought to be essential for improving safety and preventing crime. Most commercial and public structures are lit up at night, although often for purely aesthetic reasons.

A network of street lighting links these “islands of illumination”. The effects of this can, in some large cities, result in “sky glow” that interferes with star visibility at distances of more than 300 kilometres.

A cascade of harmful impacts

While modern life makes some artificial lighting essential, when it’s overused or poorly designed it creates light pollution. It is not widely appreciated that this can have significant adverse effects, which go beyond interference with stargazing. These include serious impacts on humans, plants and animals.

Effects on humans reportedly include (but are not limited to) an increased risk of breast cancer, sleep disruptions and possible links to metabolic disorders, including diabetes and obesity. Furthermore, artificial lighting uses large amounts of energy associated with CO2 emissions.

Adverse effects on animals include interference with reproduction, predator and prey interactions, and orientation and migration. These effects are potentially damaging for entire ecosystems, as well as particular species.

Ecosystems involve a complex balance of interactions between species. Disrupting this can trigger a cascade of harmful effects.

The attraction of moths to lights offers an illustration of this. In becoming disoriented and infinitely attracted to the artificial light, the local moths of a given species become an easy meal for bats and other predators, and the moth population declines. Other species that depend on the moths for their survival are now themselves at risk.

If this particular species of moth pollinates plants, then local pollination may be reduced. And if this moth is the only pollinator of a plant species, then that species’ rate of reproduction will fall. This can be devastating for insect and animal communities that rely on these plants for habitat and food.

A whole ecosystem can be harmed by something as apparently harmless as public lighting.

A need to rethink lighting standards

Despite awareness of adverse effects, the collective ecological impact of artificial light is not well recognised beyond the sphere of ecological research.

Planning regulations and practices tend not to consider artificial lighting as a source of pollution. Rather, the focus is on minimum lighting standards, reflecting perceptions of safety and community expectations.

Questions of unwanted light are more often considered in terms of nuisance or energy wastage. The focus of light reduction tends to be on cost savings, or even CO2 savings, and not wider environmental effects. Ironically, the introduction of energy-saving lighting, such as LED, may lead to even greater impacts on some species.

Being diurnal creatures, we humans tend to have little awareness of night-time ecosystems. Given that light emissions disappear once the source is turned off, it is unsurprising that artificial light has not been identified as an important pollutant.

Global concerns about climate change and energy consumption, and the resulting trend towards greater efficiency and sustainability, create an opportunity to challenge the underlying assumptions about public lighting. For example, the notion that more lighting equates to greater safety and discourages crime may be questionable.

Reconsidering our association of artificial lighting with progress and modernity allows us to reframe the “minimum lighting standards” model to one that seeks to minimise harm in all respects. The key question then is what lighting is needed for human safety while minimising unwanted or harmful light as well as energy consumption?

Possible solutions go beyond a debate of more versus less lighting. We could, for instance, use lights with wavelengths that cause less disruption to key species, as well as “adaptive street lighting” that responds to pedestrian movement. There are doubtless many possible innovations that balance human and ecological needs.

Urban greening programs could play a leading role here in developing smarter lighting solutions that benefit both humans and ecosystems. Such initiatives would be natural inclusions in the emerging protocols to guide biodiversity-sensitive urban design.

Alex Kusmanoff receives funding from the Australian Research Council and through the National Environment Science Programme's Threatened Species and Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hubs.

Georgia Garrard receives funding from the National Environmental Science Programme's Threatened Species Recovery Hub.

Luis Mata receives funding from the National Environmental Science Programme - Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hub.

Sarah Bekessy receives funding from the Australian Research Council and through the National Environment Science Programme's, Threatened Species and Clean Air and Urban Landscapes Hubs.