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Glut in Indian coal market, plans to phase out imports and lower than forecast energy demands cast doubt on future for exports from proposed Adani mine

Malcolm Turnbull is adamant that Australian coal will play “a very big role” in powering India’s future despite a glut in the local market and clear signals from Delhi that it aims to eliminate imports of the fossil fuel as soon as possible.

The prime minister touched down in New Delhi on Monday for his first official visit to the south Asian giant. Selling Australia as an attractive destination for Indian students and reviving negotiations over a free-trade agreement are high on the agenda as the government vies for a slice of the world’s fastest growing major economy.

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A man stretches his leg on the bank of the Han River as a ship passes by amid thick haze. Tens of thousands of premature deaths in east Asia every year are caused by shipping pollution. REUTERS/Stringer

Do you wear runners, drink coffee or own a mobile phone? The chances are that these products cruised to you on a ship. In 2015, the global merchant fleet carried a record 10 billion tonnes of cargo, a 2.1% increase from the previous year.

However, while it’s an essential part of international trade, shipping also poses serious risks to the environment. Apart from damage caused by dredging shipping channels and the spread of marine pests around the world, there is also growing concern about pollution. According to a report from the European Union, international shipping contributes 2.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions annually. This is predicted to rise by between 50% and 250% by 2050.

As well as contributing to global warming, ship pollution includes toxic compounds and particles that cause a host of other health hazards. A 2016 Chinese-led study found the shipping boom in east Asia has caused tens of thousands of premature deaths a year, largely from heart and lung disease and cancer.

Commercial ships are designed to be used for a long time. As a result, their engines are typically older and less efficient than those used in many other industries, and replacing them is prohibitively expensive. But there are some immediate solutions to this problem that use existing technology: increasing fuel quality, treating engine emissions, and adopting other energy-conservation measures so that ships burn less fuel.

Improve fuel quality

When diesel ship engines burn poor-quality fuel, their smoke stacks release oxides of nitrogen and sulfur as well as carbon. These pollutants, as well as contributing to greenhouse warming, are highly toxic. Sulfur dioxide readily dissolves in water, creating acid rain that causes harm to both people and the environment.

Refinement of crude oil removes sulfur, which reduces the amount of sulfur dioxide produced when the fuel is burned. Higher-grade diesel also reduces the volume of heat-trapping nitrous oxide, but is more expensive to produce because it requires more purification at the refinery.

The International Maritime Organization, the UN body that regulates the safety and security of shipping, is planning to reduce the amount of sulfur allowed in fuel. However, it is currently considering whether the change will take place in 2020 or will be deferred to 2025.

Install exhaust scrubbers

Clean fuel is an important part of reducing emissions, but the higher cost of low-sulfur fuel will deter many companies. Another way for ships to meet clean-air requirements is by capturing engine exhaust and passing it through scrubbers. These scrubbers convert nitrous oxide gases into harmless nitrogen and water.

This process requires retrofitting older ships, and updating the design of new ship exhaust systems. One advantage of this approach is that it allows ships to meet the different pollution regulations around the world without having to swap fuels.

Another way to reduce production of nitrous oxide is by reducing the temperature at which diesel fuel burns, but this leads to decreased fuel efficiency and increased fuel consumption. Scrubbers are potentially a cheaper and more accessible option.

Reduce energy use overall

Ships don’t just burn diesel fuel to propel themselves through the water. Fuel also generates electricity so that people on board can do things like use computers and read at night.

To increase fuel efficiency, other energy conservation measures can be adopted so that ships burn less fuel and decrease their emissions. The US Navy’s Green Fleet has, for example, replaced their old light fixtures with energy-saving LEDs.

They have also undertaken a temperature control initiative, where thermostats have been checked to ensure they are in proper working order and faulty parts in their water cooling systems replaced. Some ships have gone further, and installed stern flaps that modify the flow of water under the ship’s hull to reduce drag, thus increasing fuel efficiency.

All of this means the shipping industry can lower its fuel bill through conserving energy, and at the same time reduce its negative impacts on the health of humans and the planet. With more than 20,000 ships in the global fleet, these immediate solutions to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and other types of pollution will make a real difference.

Martina Doblin has received funding from the Australian government to advise them on the risks of invasive species being introduced to Australian waters via shipping.

It's not a household name, but an ancient amphibian found in the Scottish borders fills a crucial period in the evolutionary record.

They had been kept indoors to protect them from an infectious strain of bird flu.

A Nottingham chemistry professor takes a hammer to the tough new plastic fiver.

Scientists say coral bleaching has damaged the World Heritage site for two years in a row

It's the second year in a row that the reef has suffered from coral bleaching.

ENGIE Executive Vice President has signed eight agreements to develop sustainable and clean energy solutions, in line with the Group’s strategy.

Opposition says Turnbull government must not fund new coal-fired power plants because they are not value for money

Labor is calling on the Turnbull government to create a national framework for the “orderly exit” of ageing power stations, with a transition plan for thousands of workers who will lose their jobs from station closures in coming years.

It also says the Turnbull government must stop funding new coal-fired power plants because commonwealth funding does not represent value for taxpayer dollars.

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Bosch and Daimler are working together to take the development of fully automated, driverless vehicles forward.

New data shows that for a couple of hours on Sunday, wind and solar were about 15/16 of South Australian demand and something like 70% of the total over the day.

Willaston, Cheshire Sorting through the bits and bobs, gathering leaf litter and twigs, they work in harmony like ants

There is a frisson of excitement, giggles and whispers, as the seven-year-olds file out of the school building, clutching bamboo canes and tiles, bits of corrugated cardboard and roofing felt, along with broken terracotta crocks.

Today Year 2 are making a bug hotel. A great way of recycling and giving homes to all kinds of creepy crawlies, their teacher had explained earlier in the week before sending them home to raid garages and sheds.

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University of Texas team develops low-cost, high energy density, non-combustible battery that could be game-changer for EV uptake.

Junior telco amaysim buys on line retailer Click Energy to create an "asset light" company that can specialise in "smart home" and challenge energy retailer and telco incumbents utilities without the burden of legacy fossil fuel plants.

Evidence is growing that air turbulence is becoming stronger and more frequent because of climate change.

President Donald Trump is keeping some of his promises. Late last month he signed an executive order that tore up Barack Obama’s Clean Power Plan. Some commentators see this as putting the world on “the road to climate catastrophe”, while others have described it as an effort at “killing the international order”.

Will America lose out? Will China, which has chided Trump for selfishness, be the prime beneficiary as its solar panel industry continues to expand?

Here in Australia, in response to Trump’s order, Liberal backbencher Craig Kelly, chair of the government’s Environment Committee, took predictable aim at Australia’s international climate commitments, labelling the 2015 Paris Agreement “cactus”.

Kelly is on the record as disputing climate science and poured scorn on the Paris deal when it was struck. He is certainly not alone among the government’s ranks in this view.

The day after Trump’s election win last November, Australia ratified the Paris deal and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said that it would take four years for Trump to pull out.

So is the Paris deal really “cactus”? What would we have lost if so? And does it matter?

What was agreed in Paris?

The Paris Agreement came after the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (agreed at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992) had suffered a body blow at the 2009 UN climate talks in Copenhagen .

Opinion was divided on the reasons for the failure of the Copenhagen summit, but the then prime minister Kevin Rudd didn’t mince words in blaming the Chinese, infamously accusing them during the negotiations of trying to “rat-fuck us”. (For what it is worth, the British climate writer Mark Lynas agreed, albeit in less incendiary tones.)

A series of fence-mending meetings and careful smoothing of frayed nerves and wounded egos followed over the next five years. The French took charge and, with the price of renewable energy generation plummeting (and so making emissions reductions at least theoretically “affordable”), a deal was struck at the Paris summit in December 2015.

The agreement, notably silent on fossil fuels, calls on nations to take actions to reduce their emissions so that temperatures can be held to less than 2℃ above the pre-industrial average. This limit, which is not actually “safe”, will require a herculean effort and luck. If you add up all the national commitments, they will most likely take us to roughly 3℃ or beyond.

Australia’s commitment of a 26-28% reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2030, relative to 2005 levels, was seen as being at the low end of acceptable, and not enough to help meet the 2℃ limit.

Eminent climate scientist James Hansen labelled Paris a fraud, while Clive Spash (the economist monstered by Labor in 2009 for pointing out that Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was not much cop) thought it was worthless.

British climatologist Kevin Anderson is similarly dubious, arguing that the agreement assumes we will invent technologies that can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere in, well, industrial quantities in the second half of this century.

So why the relative optimism among the climate commentariat? They’re desperate for a win after so many defeats, which stretch back all the way to the Kyoto climate conference of 1997.

Second time as farce?

After Australia’s initial promises to be a “good international citizen”, reality quickly set in during the early years of serious climate diplomacy.

Although Australia was an early ratifier of the treaty that emerged from the Rio summit, it nevertheless went to the first annual UN climate talks (chaired by a young Angela Merkel) determined to get a good deal for itself, as a country reliant on coal for electricity generation and eyeing big bucks from coal exports.

That meeting resulted in the “Berlin Mandate”, which called on developed nations to cut emissions first. Australia, gritting its teeth, agreed. Later that year the Keating Government released economic modelling (paid for in part by fossil fuel interests) which predicted economic Armageddon for Australia if a uniform emissions-reduction target was applied. This work was picked up by the new Howard government.

After much special pleading and swift footwork, Australia got two very sweet deals at Kyoto in 1997. First, its “reduction” target was 108% of 1990 levels within the 2008-12 period (the then environment minister Robert Hill reportedly refused to push for Howard’s preferred 118%).

Second, Australia successfully lobbied for a clause in the Kyoto treaty allowing reductions in land clearing to count as emissions reductions. This meant that Australia could bank benefits for things that were happening for entirely different reasons.

Australia signed the Kyoto Protocol in April 1998, but in September of the same year the cabinet decided not to ratify the deal unless the United States did. In March 2001 President George W. Bush pulled out, and Howard followed suit on World Environment Day in 2002.

Kyoto ratification then became a symbol of green virtue out of all proportion with its actual impact. Rudd got enormous kudos for ratifying it as his first official act as Prime Minister. And then reality set in again when he tried to actually implement an emissions-reduction policy.

Why does it matter?

Reality keeps on impinging. In a beautifully written piece in the New York Times, Ariel Dorfman lists disasters befalling Chile (readers in Queensland will feel like they know what he is on about). He concludes:

As we get ready to return to the United States, our friends and relatives ask, over and over, can it be true? Can President Trump be beset with such suicidal stupidity as to deny climate change and install an enemy of the earth as his environmental czar? Can he be so beholden to the blind greed of the mineral extraction industry, so ignorant of science, so monumentally arrogant, not to realize that he is inviting apocalypse? Can it be, they ask. The answer, alas, is yes.

Will the opinions of politicians like Donald Trump and Craig Kelly matter at all as long as the price of renewables keeps dropping? Well, possibly. “Shots across the bow” of renewables policy have in the past made investors nervous.

As Alan Pears on this website, and Giles Parkinson at Reneweconomy have explained, investors in electricity generation got spooked by the policy uncertainty caused by former prime minister Tony Abbott’s hostility to the Renewable Energy Target. That’s the real (and presumably intended) effect of statements like Kelly’s.

Will it work? Optimists will point to last week’s announcement that a $1bn solar farm will be built in South Australia, regardless of the concatenating Canberra catastrophe. Perennial pessimists will point to the Keeling Curve, which shows a remorseless and escalating rise in the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Time and prevailing politics are certainly not on our side.

New poll reveals most people – including Coalition voters – not buying Turnbull govt anti-renewables rhetoric, want more ambitious action.

Windfarm commissioner’s first report says complainants may fail to seek medical advice ‘due to the possibly incorrect assumption’ that nearby turbines are to blame

The office of the national windfarm commissioner is concerned people are not going to the doctor because they are incorrectly attributing symptoms of illness to windfarms.

Commissioner Andrew Dyer published his first report to the Australian parliament on 31 March which revealed the office had received 90 complaint between November 2015 and 31 December 2016.

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Coal power plant emissions fell by an impressive 11%, according to new EU data, but still accounted for 39% of total emissions.

Falling costs allowed the world to add record new renewable capacity even as investment fell, according to a new report.