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After being criticised by Canberra, South Australia is leading the race, with ACT and Tasmania close behind, says Climate Council

Australian states and territories are powering ahead, developing policies that will meet the federal government’s internationally agreed greenhouse gas emission targets, with South Australia, the ACT and Tasmania leading the race.

Despite being chastised by the federal government for unilateral action, South Australia is leading the race, with the ACT and Tasmania not far behind, according to a report by the Climate Council.

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Beulah Johnson, an evacuee, films the inside of a shelter in Houston that has been overwhelmed by water in the wake of tropical storm Harvey, forcing about 100 weary people to retreat to bleacher seats with their belongings. Marcus McLellan of Jefferson County sheriff’s office said on Wednesday that the Bowers Civic Center in Port Arthur had been inundated overnight, owing to rainfall and an overflowing canal nearby

• Tropical storm Harvey – live updates
  

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The order prevents the government from exploiting a protected area bigger than Denmark.

Campaigners urge court of appeal to overturn communities secretary’s decision to allow Cuadrilla to drill in Lancashire

The communities secretary, Sajid Javid, “misunderstood key local and national planning policies” when he gave the green light to fracking in Lancashire, campaigners have told the court of appeal.

Leading judges were urged on Wednesday to overturn a government decision to approve a fracking site at Preston New Road in Lancashire.

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Houston has experienced an unexpected side-effect of the floods that have hit the Texan city – floating islands made up of thousands of venomous fire ants. The naturally aggressive ants are able to survive the rising water by forming rafts with their own bodies, and can survive for weeks before breaking up

Flotillas of fire ants add new layer of horror to post-Harvey flood havoc

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每头大象都是巨大的象群数据库和信息网络的一个神秘入口，让我们守护这份自然的奇迹。

• Elephant 2.0. - nature’s invisible information architecture
  

大象有着一 副如此悲伤的面孔，很难现象任何人会去伤害它们。它们有着苍白的嘴唇和下垂的肩膀；它们的姿态悠长而松弛，眼睛若有深意，可以让罪过者动容。但似乎单凭负 疚感并不能拯救大象。八年前，非洲象和亚洲象的种群总数大约有600万到900万头。如今，大约只剩50万头。日复一日，大象距离灭绝越来越近。

也许我们需要一些新的观念。也许是时候从新的角度考虑我们为什么需要保护大象。对于我们来说，珍贵的或许并不是它们的身体，而是它们共享的记忆和经验。这就是我在这篇文中想要提出的观点。

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Today Malcolm Turnbull met with energy retailers to discuss high power prices, for the second time this month. The retailers agreed to try even harder to inform their customers of cheaper contracts, but they also took the opportunity to call yet again for urgent commitment to a Clean Energy Target (CET).

The prime minister hopes to deliver a CET by Christmas, but has not indicated what the target would actually be.

This is just one more step towards the elusive goal of certainty in the energy market, which politicians, the energy industry and businesses have been calling for with increasing frequency. But underlying the ongoing political scrimmage is the reality that certainty means something very different to each player. It’s particularly difficult to achieve in a time of disruptive change.

Read more: Turnbull to tell power companies: do better by customers

What is certainty?

For politicians, certainty means getting energy prices and policy out of the media, ensuring construction of a new coal-fired power station, or both.

On the other hand, incumbent energy companies want to protect profits by blocking emerging competitors and guaranteeing their revenue.

For emerging energy businesses that sell renewable energy, batteries and smart energy solutions, it’s about opening markets to fair competition and finding a role in a rapidly changing environment.

For business and industry, it’s about access to stable, reliable, reasonably priced energy, so they can get on with their core business.

Households (and voters) also want affordable and reliable energy bills (and some basic respect from energy companies and politicians) but that doesn’t necessarily mean low prices: it can mean low fixed charges, access to energy efficiency programs, and finance for rooftop solar and batteries. Then they can buy less energy while living in comfortable homes with efficient appliances.

The traditional energy system involves large capital investments and long timeframes. This doesn’t sit comfortably with the agendas of many of the people described above, who want quick solutions – which can be delivered by emerging alternatives.

New solutions create new challenges

Any inflexible baseload power station faces the growing problem of the “duck curve”. That is, solar power is reducing baseload demand for energy during the day, but leaving the evening peak-time demand untouched – creating an exaggerated upswing in demand after about 4pm.

Read more: Slash Australians’ power bills by beheading a duck at night

This reduced daytime power use deprives a baseload plant of the demand it needs to keep running continuously. Excess electricity during the day also drives wholesale electricity prices down from traditionally high levels. Daytime sales have comprised a large proportion of revenue for base load generators.

Large scale wind and solar without storage are price takers: they’re paid the going wholesale price at the time they generate. They have benefited from the high daytime prices that solar is now undermining, and from high prices on tradeable certificates for renewable energy, driven by shortages caused by Tony Abbott’s “war on renewables”.

Certificate prices should moderate as more renewable energy capacity is built. Future investment depends heavily on decisions regarding national and state clean energy targets beyond 2020.

Batteries, pumped hydro and other storage rely on the gap between the lowest and highest price each day. Solar is reducing, and even reversing, this price gap in the daytime. But morning and evening demand offers some opportunity, as long as excess storage capacity doesn’t flood the market with electricity and depress prices at those times. In future, they will store cheap daytime excess power for use at other times. And storage will be increasingly important as variable renewable energy capacity grows.

Improving efficiency is ‘the first fuel’

Demand response, where consumers are paid to reduce demand at times of high wholesale electricity prices, is a serious threat to revenue for generators and energy storage. It usually involves smart management of consumption or use of existing backup generators, with little capital cost.

As the Australian Renewable Energy Agency has found, there is a lot of latent capacity. Its call for bids in May for its pilot scheme – originally aiming to provide 160 megawatts (MW) of reserve capacity – has unearthed almost 700MW available by December this year, and over 1900 MW by December 2018.

Our failure to properly manage demand for decades, despite the recommendations of many inquiries, has led to wasteful overinvestment in network and generation capacity that is now exposed to market forces. Now someone will pay for this policy failure: will it be shareholders or consumers?

Energy efficiency improvement adds another unpredictable factor. As shadow environment and energy minister Mark Butler commented at a recent conference, Australian governments have not performed well in this area. But the Finkel Review highlighted its substantial potential and called for governments to do better. The International Energy Agency calls energy efficiency “the first fuel” because it is so big and so cheap.

Our failure to capture energy efficiency is costly for the economy and consumers. When energy suppliers are prepared to invest in projects with risky annual rates of return of 8-15%, energy efficiency opportunities with returns of 20-100% are ignored.

Another complicating element is consumers, many of whom are no longer passively accepting energy market volatility and increasing prices. “Behind the meter” investment in energy efficiency, demand management, storage, on-site renewables and even diesel generators is making increasing sense. Indeed, social justice campaigners are increasingly calling for action to help vulnerable households be part of the future, not victims.

Lastly, there is the elephant in the room: climate change. Fossil-fuel-sourced electricity generation produces around a third of Australia’s emissions. And there is much more scope to cut emissions from electricity than from many other parts of our economy.

Where to now?

No government can provide certainty for all these competing players. Each face their own risks and opportunities, and powerful disruptive forces are at work. Trying to provide certainty for some involves propping up declining business models, at the expense of positioning the Australian economy for the future.

Despite criticism from the federal energy minister states are likely to continue setting their own clean energy targets.

Businesses and households are investing to insure themselves against the policy mess and, in doing so, are transforming the energy system. Local councils and community groups are coordinating action. Emerging businesses are taking risks to capture opportunities. Existing energy businesses are trying to juggle their existing assets while transforming. State governments are trying to win votes and capture jobs in emerging industries. Meanwhile, the federal government’s party room is split over a clean energy target.

The challenge for governments is to nudge this chaotic system in ways that deliver equitable, affordable and reliable energy services.

Disclosure

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. He has shares in Hepburn Wind.

New data gathered by the Cassini probe suggests Saturn's icy bands formed relatively recently.

St Dennis, Cornwall From the moss-coated fort, spoil heaps dominate the view but close by sits the waste energy plant and a bog has become a nature reserve

From the ancient vantage point of Carne Hill, china-clay works dominate the landscape with vegetated spoil heaps, older conical tips and the whiteness of an open-cast pit at Fraddon.

The curved roofs and twin stacks of the Cornwall Energy Recovery Centre are close by, and lower down, to the north, rows of pylons slung with cables stretch along the flat expanse of Goss Moor towards the electricity substation.

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Energy policy has become a complete circus as Coalition ignores the real policy decisions, and new reports identify more gaming of the energy markets, and why an ambitious clean energy target will be quickest path to a big drop in electricity bills.

Images of ants swarming together in ‘rafts’ and riding on top of floodwaters alarm Texans

There is a new threat to the millions of people in Texas affected by ex-hurricane Harvey: large “rafts” of fire ants that have been spotted floating in floodwaters.

Displaced by record flooding, the insects have responded by creating rafts built on top of dead ants to stay on the top of water and keep dry.

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CWP Renewables looking to build a 200MW solar farm to partner the 270MW Sapphire Wind Farm under construction near Glen Innes in NSW.

In another sign that the petroleum era is drawing to a close, Denmark is selling off its last oil company with barely a peep.

Most studies on climate mitigation have greatly underestimated the potential of solar power.

Navin75/Flickr, Australian Marine Conservation Society, ANU

The anti-whaling group Sea Shepherd has called a halt to its famous missions tracking the Japanese whaling fleet in the Southern Ocean.

For the past 12 years the group’s boats have engaged in annual high-seas battles with vessels carrying out Japan’s self-described scientific whaling program. But Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson has admitted that Japan’s use of military-grade technology such as real-time satellite tracking has left the activists unable to keep up.

Watson also criticised the Australian government over its response to Japan’s whaling program, despite a global ban on most whaling.

Read more: Murky waters: why is Japan still whaling in the Southern Ocean?.

Scientific whaling is technically allowed under the International Whaling Commission’s treaty, and countries such as Japan have the right to decide for themselves what constitutes “scientific” in this context.

Australia is not the only government to be accused of reluctance to stand up to Japan. But in 2014, Japan’s pretext for whaling was finally discredited when Australia won a case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague. And, for a year, the Japanese whaling stopped.

This episode of Change Agents tells the back story of how that happened through the eyes of two key players, ANU legal academic Don Rothwell and Darren Kindleysides, who was then campaign manager at the International Fund for Animal Welfare. They worked on a strategy to provide both the legal argument and the political will for Australia to take on Japan in the courts.

Change Agents is a collaboration between The Conversation and the Swinburne Leadership Institute and Swinburne University’s Department of Media and Communication. It is presented by Andrew Dodd and produced by Samuel Wilson and Andrew Dodd, with production by Heather Jarvis.

Andrew Dodd does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

On August 30, 1992 in Sydney, media were invited to a press conference to launch a new national political party: The Australian Greens. It was a Sunday, and no television crews bothered to turn up. One journo who did was Robert Garran from the Australian Financial Review, who reported that:

The Greens Party, representing green political groups in Tasmania, NSW and Queensland, has agreed to a constitution, and aims to contest Senate and House of Representative seats in the next federal election. The high-profile Tasmanian Green MP, Dr Bob Brown, said the party offered the electorate the choice of abandoning the two-party system, which had failed to address the nation’s problems.

Brown, who first rose to fame for his environmental campaign against Tasmania’s Franklin Dam, said his party was “more than a one-issue group”, describing its values as being “about social justice, enhancing democracy (particularly grassroots democracy), solving our problems in a peaceful and non-violent way, and about looking after our environment”.

Read more: The Greens grow up.

The launch was also reported by a rather interesting (and useful if you’re an historian/geek like me) publication called GreenWeek. Its editor Philip Luker was sceptical of the nascent Green movement’s momentum (rightly, as it turned out), offering this verdict:

Drew Hutton of the Queensland Greens is talking through his hat when he predicts green governments all over Australia in the next decade.

Almost 20 years later, during the battle over the fate of Julia Gillard’s carbon price, Brown was interviewed by The Australian. He pushed the timeframe back, predicting that “within 50 years we will supplant one of the major parties in Australia”.

Therein lies the main problem for the Greens. Many of the things they’ve been warning about have come to pass (deforestation, the climate crisis, human rights meltdowns), yet still they haven’t managed to break through with their calls for change. This is even more alarming given that the real history of the Greens precedes their August 1992 launch by more than two decades.

1971 and all that

There was something in the air in the early 1970s. Readers of a certain vintage will remember songs like Neil Young’s After the Gold Rush (“Look at mother nature on the run, in the 1970s”), Marvin Gaye’s Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology), and Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi.

Even the Liberal government of the day could hear the mood music, as the new Prime Minister Billy McMahon created the short-lived Department of the Environment, Aborigines and the Arts. (Not everyone was quite so enlightened; the new department’s minister Peter Howson complained to a colleague about his new portfolio of “trees, boongs and poofters”.)

Meanwhile, a battle was raging in Tasmania over the plan to build three hydroelectric dams that would flood Lake Pedder National Park. In his fascinating and inspiring memoir, Optimism, Bob Brown wrote:

In 1971, Dr Richard Jones, his foot on a Central Plateau boulder, had seen the pointlessness of pursuing ecological wisdom with the old parties and proposed to his companions that a new party based on ecological principles be formed.

The United Tasmania Group, now seen as the first incarnation of the Green Party, contested the 1972 state election, and Jones came within a whisker of being elected.

Lake Pedder was lost, but other battles were still to be fought: green bans, Terania Creek, campaigns against nuclear power and whaling.

In Tasmania the next big skirmish was the Franklin Dam. Green activists mobilised, agitated and trained in non-violent direct action. Amanda Lohrey, in her excellent Quarterly Essay Groundswell, recalls:

An acquaintance of mine in the Labor Party lasted half a day in his group before packing up and driving back to Hobart. “It was all that touchy-feely stuff,” he told me, grimacing with distaste. Touchy-feely was a long way from what young apparatchiks in the ALP were accustomed to.

Those culture clashes between Labor and Greens have continued, despite a brief love-in engineered by Bob Hawke’s environment minister Graham ‘whatever it takes’ Richardson. To the chagrin of Labor rightwingers, the 1990 election was won on preferences from green-minded voters. But by 1991 it was clear that the Liberals would not compete for those voters, and Labor gradually lost interest in courting them.

So in 1992 the Greens went national, and so began the long march through the institutions, with gradually growing Senate success. In 2002, thanks to the Liberals not standing, they won the Lower House seat of Cunningham, NSW in a by-election, but couldn’t hold onto it.

In 2010, after receiving the largest single political donation in Australian history (A$1.68 million) from internet entrepreneur Graeme Wood, the Greens’ candidate Adam Bandt wrested inner Melbourne from Labor, and has increased his majority in 2013 and 2016.

Critics, problems and the future

Doubtless the comments under this article will be full of condemnations of the Greens for not having supported Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in December 2009. Despite Green Party protestations to the contrary, Gillard’s ill-fated carbon price wasn’t that much better at reducing emissions (though it did have additional support for renewable energy).

However, we should remember three things. First, Rudd made no effort to keep the Greens onside (quite the opposite). Second, hindsight is 20/20 – who could honestly have predicted the all-out culture war that would erupt over climate policy? Finally, critics rarely mention that in January 2010 the Greens proposed an interim carbon tax until policy certainty could be achieved, but could not get Labor to pay attention.

The bigger problem for the Greens – indeed, for anyone contemplating sentencing themselves to 20 years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within – is the problem of balancing realism with fundamentalism. How many compromises do you make before you are fatally compromised, before you become the thing you previously denounced? How long a spoon, when supping with the devil?

You’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t. Focus too hard on environmental issues (imagining for a moment that they really are divorced from economic and social ones) and you can be dismissed as a single-issue party for latte-sippers. Pursue a broader agenda, as current leader Richard Di Natale has sought to do, and you stand accused of forgetting your roots.

Can the circle of environmental protection and economic growth ever be squared? How do you say “we warned you about all this” without coming across as smug?

As if those ideological grapples weren’t enough, the party is also dealing with infighting between the federal and NSW branches, not to mention the body-blow of senators Scott Ludlam and Larissa Waters becoming the first casualties of the ongoing constitutional crisis over dual nationality.

Read more: If High Court decides against ministers with dual citizenship, could their decisions in office be challenged?.

The much-anticipated breakthrough at the polling booth failed to materialise in 2016. Green-tinged local councils work on emissions reductions, but the federal party remains electorally becalmed.

The dystopian novel This Tattooed Land describes an Australia in which “an authoritarian Green government takes power and bans fossil fuel use”… in 2022. It still sounds like a distant fantasy.

ANCIENT WHALES: The ancestors of today's gentle giants of the ocean were equipped with the razor-sharp teeth of a fearsome predator and could have hunted seals and penguins, rather than the tiny krill they eat today, scientists say.

‘Last-chance tourism’ spurs on other visitors but there has been lull in bookings after coral bleaching, senators told

Overseas tourists have begun to doubt the value of a trip to the ailing Great Barrier Reef and it is getting increasingly difficult to “show people what they expect to see”, a dive operator has told a federal Senate inquiry.

A Port Douglas operator, John Edmondson, said “last-chance tourism” was spurring on other visitors but there had been a “weird” lull in bookings this year after back-to-back mass bleaching events made dead coral an unavoidable sight on reef visits.

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Devastating floods in Nepal have sparked regional tension, with Nepali politicians and media outlets claiming that Indian infrastructure along their shared border has left Nepal vulnerable.

In a visit last week to India, Nepal’s prime minister Sher Bahadur Deuba released a joint statement with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi pledging to work together to combat future flood disasters. But relations between the two countries remain strained, and many in Nepal still resent India for a three-month blockade of supplies in the wake of the 2015 earthquakes.

Read more: Two years after the earthquake, why has Nepal failed to recover?

One source of this tension is simply the geography of the Himalayas, where a dam or road built in one country can cause inundation in its neighbour.

The result is an international blame game, with India, China and Nepal accusing each other of shortsighted and self-interested politics. Without region-wide organisations to effectively share information and coordinate disaster relief, many more people have suffered.

Tangled geography

Floods are almost annual events in the Himalayas. Huge rivers originating in the Himalayas pass through the densely settled Terai flats that span both India and Nepal, and these rivers swell enormously in the monsoon season.

A rough outline of the Himalayas.

But this year’s floods have been particularly devastating. In the past two months more than 1,200 people have been killed and 20 million others affected by floods in Nepal, India and Bangladesh.

These trans-border floods are a political as well as a logistical problem. In the case of the recent floods, Nepal’s Ministry of Home Affairs pointed to two large Indian dams in the Kosi and Gandaki rivers, as well as high roads, embankments and dykes built parallel to Nepal’s 1,751km border with India, arguing that this infrastructure obstructs the natural flow of water.

India, for its part, has blamed Nepal for creating floods in the past and – although disputed in scientific circles – many believe deforestation in Nepal contributes to water overflow into India.

The problem is that infrastructure in one country can have a serious impact on its neighbours, especially in monsoon season. At least a dozen people were injured last year in clashes over an Indian dam that the Kathmandu Post reported will inundate parts of Nepal when completed.

And the problems aren’t just caused by dams. Hydrologists and disaster experts in Nepal claim that recent floods have been worsened by significant illegal mining of the low Churia hills for boulders and sand, for use in the rapidly expanding construction sector in India.

India, China and Nepal

The disputes aren’t limited to India and Nepal. India and China signed a deal in 2006 to share hydrological information on the huge rivers that run through both their territories, so as to cope better with annual flooding. But earlier this year India’s Ministry of External Affairs accused China of failing to share vital data, exacerbating floods in India’s northeast.

This is not an isolated incident. In 2013 a huge flood in northwestern India, called the Himalayan tsunami, killed around 6,000 people and affected millions more.

At that time, India officials claimed that they did not get information from Nepalese officials on heavy rainfall in Nepal’s hills, or on glacier conditions. Nepali officials, in turn, responded that China is in a better position to share information about climatic conditions on that part of the Himalayas. Studies conducted later concluded that efficient information sharing and early warnings would have reduced the resulting damage.

This problem becomes more urgent as the Himalayas come under pressure from climate change. Climate scientists have warned that “extreme floods” in the region are becoming more frequent, driven by less frequent but more intense rainfall.

It is now vital to think differently about how institutions handle these disasters. India and Nepal announced last week that they would establish a Joint Committee on Inundation and Flood Management, and a Joint Team of Experts to “enhance bilateral co-operation” in water management, which is a positive sign.

But the Himalayas urgently needs institutions with a region-wide perspective, rather that country-specific remits. These organisations can effeciently share information on weather patterns, take action to reduce overall impact of floods, and consult each other while developing infrastructures that could have trans-boundary consequences.

Human interference and myopic political action have intensified the impact of these floods. We now need every country in the region to accept shared responsibility and commit to helping those affected, regardless of their nationality.

Jagannath Adhikari does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond the academic appointment above.

At least 14 people have died and tens of thousands evacuated as Houston continues to be battered by catastrophic rainfall. Can we decode the disaster?

• Tropical storm Harvey – live updates
  

A tropical storm that is on course to break the US record for the heaviest rainfall from a tropical system. Meteorologists say the 120cm-mark set in 1978 could be surpassed on Tuesday or Wednesday.

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