The Conversation

Australia’s economy may have ridden on the sheep’s back but the colonies’ first export was actually Eucalyptus oil. From a small batch of oil distilled from Sydney peppermint gum sent to England by First Fleet Surgeon-General John White, an industry grew around the use of the oil for medicinal and industrial purposes.

As demand grew around the world, Australia dominated the global supply. But as the 20th century progressed, cheaper production from plantations in Spain, Portugal, South Africa and China drove Australia’s market share down to less than 5%.

Today the global market for Eucalyptus oil sits at around 7,000 tonnes each year, with a slowly growing demand and price. In fact, Australia is now a net importer of its own iconic oil!

But a range of cutting-edge new uses for plant-based oils appear set to give this old dog some new tricks, potentially jolting the local eucalyptus oil industry out of its sleepy niche and into the high-tech limelight.

What’s in the oil?

Eucalyptus oils are a cocktail of aromatic compounds called terpenes. The oil that is sold in pharmacies and supermarkets is dominated by one compound called eucalyptol that instantly gives it a recognisable medicinal scent. This oil is sourced from about a dozen species.

There are many other types of oils from Eucalyptus. Oil from the lemon-scented gum, for example, is full of citronellal, which is used in perfumes and insect repellents. What makes a specific oil valuable are the commercial uses for the major terpenes found in that oil.

Eucalyptol is a flammable terpene. Carsten Kulheim Jet fuel grown on trees

Powering a modern jet aircraft with anything other than fossil fuels is a big ask. Renewable ethanol and biodiesel might do fine in the family SUV, but they just don’t possess a high enough energy density to cut it in the aviation industry.

Certain terpenes commonly found in oils from eucalypts, such as pinene and limonene, can be refined through a catalytic process, resulting in a fuel with energy densities in the same league as JP-10 tactical jet fuel.

Turpentine from pine trees is another potential source of these terpenes, but pines grow more slowly than eucalypts.

As a pure fuel, or as an additive to standard aviation fuels, the potential exists to carve out a renewable slice of the enormous aviation fuel market, if the volume of terpene production can be increased to economically competitive levels. Current plantations produce up to 200kg of oil per hectare per year, but by selecting the best genetic stock it is estimated that yields could be more than 500kg per hectare.

Graphene from terpenes

The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for the discovery of the physical properties of graphene, a two-dimensional carbon grid or film, less than one-millionth of a millimetre thick yet more than 100 times stronger than steel.

In fact, a square metre of graphene can support the weight of a house cat, but weighs less than one of its whiskers. Production value in 2012 was US$9 million and growing fast, and new ways of producing graphene are keenly sought.

Terpinene-4-ol, which is found in Eucalyptus and its close relative tea tree, is an ideal starting material for the direct production of high-quality graphene. This method is scalable and sustainable, potentially providing the solution to the growing demand for graphene and opening up further innovative uses for Eucalyptus oil.

Australia’s advantage

Worldwide, more eucalypts are grown for the production of pulp, paper and timber than any other type of tree. However, all of that global production comes from just over a dozen of the almost 800 Eucalyptus species that occur naturally in Australia, and mostly from a limited ancestry. This means the existing plantations lack genetic diversity and they also lack diversity and variability of oils.

This is where Australia’s advantage lies. We have the choice of 800 species growing in every imaginable ecological niche and possessing vast genetic diversity. For example, within a single species the amount of oil found in leaves can vary 30-fold among wild individuals, which can contain as many as six different major oil variants.

Australia has a veritable smorgasbord of variation from which to select plants with high yields of the right oil for new commercial purposes.

Ecologically a good alternative

Growing eucalypts for oil can provide benefits beyond the commercial value of the terpenes. Several Eucalyptus “mallee” species, which happen to be prolific oil producers, are purposely planted in wide rows on agricultural land to combat dryland salinity and prevent soil erosion.

Mallees are known for their bushy form, which is best described as a “ball of leaves”, and can be re-harvested for oil every 1-3 years. This puts them in the rare class of being renewable oil crops with added ecological benefits.

Ramping up oil production would still require large, dedicated plantations. A frequent criticism of biofuel crops is that land suitable for food production is diverted to fuel production, in turn pushing up food prices. But many eucalypts can grow well on marginal land that is not used for other agricultural purposes, skirting this issue altogether.

With the right genetics from the right species grown in the right places, the humble Eucalyptus oil may be on the verge of an ecologically sustainable renaissance.

David Kainer receives funding from the Australian National University and Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation

Carsten Kulheim receives funding from Rural Industries Research and Development Corporation and Australian Research Council.

Koalas face many threats, and our conservation efforts are failing them. Koala image from www.shutterstock.com

Koalas are a much-loved Australian icon and a tourism moneyspinner too, contributing more than A$1 billion each year to Australia’s economy.

Worringly, however, there is growing evidence that koala populations are declining rapidly in many parts of Australia. They are thought to be declining in all but one bioregion (a way of classifying ecosystems) in Queensland and New South Wales.

They also face the growing threat of climate change. Recent modelling found that koala habitat could be considerably reduced as the world warms, particularly due to heatwaves and rainfall.

These declines are deeply concerning and failure to reverse them can result in only one outcome: the loss of koalas from many parts of the Australian landscape. But conserving koalas is a complex job.

A wicked problem

In western Queensland, koala numbers declined by 80% between 1995 and 2009, mainly because of habitat loss, drought and heatwaves.

In southeast Queensland, where threats from urban development are a key factor, some populations fell by 55-80% between 1996 and 2015.

The picture is similar in NSW, where there is evidence for a substantial decline in koala numbers over the two centuries from European settlement in 1788 to the first major statewide survey in 1986-87. Subsequent studies have identified steep declines and local extinctions of koala populations in the past 30 years.

Unfortunately, there may be no quick fix: koala recovery has many of the characteristics of a wicked problem, riddled with dilemmas, trade-offs and tough choices.

For a start, koalas are declining for several complex reasons. In the western parts of Queensland and NSW, the main factors are climate change (drought and heatwaves) and habitat loss. Along the coast, koalas are chiefly threatened by rapid urban development and the associated impact of vehicle collisions and dog attacks.

There is also considerable uncertainty about the role of disease (such as chlamydia and retroviral infections) in driving koala declines. We don’t know whether this is a cause or a symptom of the koalas' plight, but we know that it is likely to be having an important impact.

These complexities make it difficult to identify the best management strategies to try to improve things.

There are also social and political complexities that tend to polarise, or at least confuse, the debate about koala conservation. For instance, there are strong trade-offs between koala conservation and other human needs and wants, such as land for urban development, agriculture and economic progress. In reality, these trade-offs tend to limit what is possible for koala recovery.

Finding solutions

In our research we are looking at koala recovery strategies that factor in different threats and trade-offs. In a recent study we looked at which recovery strategies to prioritise across NSW.

Interestingly, instead of spreading conservation efforts thinly across the state, we found the best option by far is to concentrate on particular regions.

If funding is low (say, A$2 million each year) we found it better to focus on koalas in eastern parts of NSW and reduce threats from urban development, particularly dog control.

But if funding is higher (say, A$40 million per year) it is possible to spread conservation efforts more easily between eastern and western parts of the state (reducing the impact of urban development in the east, and habitat loss in the west).

The NSW government has pledged A$100 million for threatened species over five years. With only some of this going to koalas, our work indicates that the strategic prioritisation of limited funding is critical (and potentially should favour eastern over western populations).

Planning for koala recovery

Koalas were listed as “vulnerable” in Queensland, NSW and the Australian Capital Territory under national threatened species legislation in 2012. This is helping to limit impacts on koalas from future development.

But true koala recovery will require a concerted effort by all levels of government and the community to implement measures to combat existing threats. In this process, identifying the best strategic actions and locations for action will be vital.

The federal government has begun a koala recovery planning process, drawing on past efforts. However, a review of koala conservation found that while the objectives were basically fine, the implementation was largely missing.

A key issue is that planning is principally a state matter and detailed planning a local government matter embedded within state legislative frameworks. This means that planning for koala survival and recovery must include all levels of government and their legislative and policy frameworks.

Our research shows the importance of strategic investment in koala conservation, rather than a scattergun approach. The challenge is to formulate an integrated strategy across governments that funds the activities that really work, to yield the highest return for the funds invested. This is not a modest challenge, but is essential to provide koalas with the best chance of long-term survival.

Jonathan Rhodes receives funding from The Australian Research Council, and the Australian, Queensland and New South Wales Governments.

Clive McAlpine has been supported by the Australian Research Council, the Australian Koala Foundation and the Southwest Natural Resource Management body.

Daniel Lunney receives funding from ARC, Office of Environment and Heritage NSW, Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife NSW, and Environmental Trusts NSW. He is affiliated with the School of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Sydney, and the Office of Environment and Heritage NSW.

Kerrie Wilson receives funding from The University of Queensland, The Australian Research Council, the Australian Department of Environment and the Woodspring Trust.

Truly Santika receives funding from the Australian Government.

An electric field could help avoid getting any closer than this. Sharkdiver.com/Wikimedia Commons

A wearable electric shark deterrent can effectively repel great white sharks, according to our independent tests of the device.

The manufacturers of the A$749 Shark Shield Freedom 7TM say it works by emitting an electric field around the wearer. This causes uncomfortable muscle spasms in sharks that swim too close and discourages them from coming into contact.

Our research, published in the journal PLoS ONE, shows that the device does indeed make sharks keep their distance. Upon first encounter with a Shark Shield, all approaching great white sharks were effectively deterred, staying an average of 1.3m away from a baited canister with the device attached.

After multiple approaches, individual great white sharks showed signs of habituation to the Shark Shield, coming an average of 12cm closer on each successive approach. Despite this increase in tolerance, 89% of white sharks continued to be deterred from biting or interacting with the bait.

Don’t take the bait

We carried out our testing in Mossel Bay, South Africa, in 2014. We used custom-built cameras equipped with bait and either an inactive (control) or active Shark Shield. Using a video analysis technique traditionally used to measure the size of fish, we were able to determine exactly how closely the sharks approached the device.

We analysed a total of 322 encounters involving 41 individual white sharks, ranging from 2m to 4m long.

Only one great white shark came into contact with the bait in the presence of an active Shark Shield, and only after multiple approaches. The interaction in question simply involved a bump of the bait canister rather than a full bite. In contrast, bites were common during control trials.

Although the effectiveness of the Shark Shield probably varies between shark species, it is encouraging to note its effect on great white sharks, the species implicated in the majority of fatal incidents worldwide. This suggests it could be an important safety consideration for a range of ocean users such as surfers, divers, spear fishers and open-water swimmers.

We also found no evidence that the Shark Shield attracted sharks from further away, which is a common myth among surfers.

A useful tool

Besides showing that the Shark Shield can ward off sharks, our method provides an accurate way to test the effectiveness of any type of shark deterrent that is currently available or likely to enter the market.

But, most importantly for now, we have finally given the public some evidence that there is an effective way to reduce the risk of a negative encounter with a shark.

Instead of the redundant debate about culling sharks as a response to shark-bite incidents, ocean-goers can now proactively take extra precautions, by using proven technology to reduce their already very low risk of injury.

There are many shark deterrent devices on the market, particularly those that use electric or magnetic fields. But without robust, independent scientific evaluation we can’t be sure which of these products actually work. In fact, not only may some devices not be as effective as others, but it is also possible that some of them could actually attract sharks rather than repel them.

Robust scientific evaluation of these types of devices will help the public make informed decisions about how they can reduce their risk of encountering a shark.

It’s important to note that the likelihood of being involved in a negative encounter with a shark is exceptionally low. As a result, some will argue that the use of expensive technology to mitigate that risk even further is unnecessary. Furthermore, no device is likely to guarantee 100% protection from any species of shark.

But at present, under the conditions in which we tested it, this is one device that does seem to offer a genuine benefit. So if you feel that you need extra protection from sharks when entering the water, this device will offer you exactly that.

This article was written with the help of Channing Egeberg, a University of Western Australia marine euroecology MSc graduate and cofounder of Support our Sharks.

Ryan Kempster received funding from WA State Government Shark Hazard Mitigation Applied Research Program, which provided over $220,000 for this research as part of a larger package to investigate the effectiveness of existing shark deterrents. He is also affiliated with the non-profit shark conservation group Support Our Sharks.

Shaun Collin received funding from the WA State Government Shark Hazard Mitigation Applied Research Program, which provided $220,000 for this research.

The Bramble Cay Melomys is arguably the first mammal driven extinct by climate change, rather than direct human interaction. Ian Bell/EHP/State of Queensland, CC BY-SA

Australia recently gained an unenviable title: perhaps the first country to lose a mammal species to climate change. The Bramble Cay Melomys, a native rodent found on one tiny sand island in the remote northern regions of the Great Barrier Reef, reportedly became extinct after rising seas destroyed its habitat.

The melomys' likely extinction is a symptom of the massive changes taking place across the natural world. Faced with these changes, we cannot possibly save every species without increasing funding for conservation.

We should be trying to conserve everything we can, or at least minimising the number of plants, animals and ecosystems that are lost. The problem is that Australia’s conservation laws presume that we can preserve everything in its natural state. But in a changing world, we’ll have to be more flexible than that.

The new nature

Our conservation laws were drafted on the assumption that, if human intervention could be avoided or managed, plants and animals would survive in their natural, pristine environments.

We now know that that is not the case. Nature is dynamic. Humans have had a pervasive influence on the environment and recent research suggests that pristine environments no longer exist.

Climate change will rapidly accelerate environmental change. Shifting temperature and rainfall will shift the specific conditions that species depend on to survive. Everything will be on the move.

On top of these gradual climate shifts, more frequent and intense bushfires, storms and heatwaves will destroy some habitats and increase the threatened status of many species. In some cases, these extreme events may result in localised extinctions.

Climate change is creating new problems for biodiversity (such as new invasive species) and is making existing problems worse (such as by changing fire patterns).

What does conservation mean if we can’t save everything?

Far from making conservation law irrelevant, these challenges mean that conservation policy and laws are more important than ever.

Expanding land and marine reserves, restoring and connecting habitat with other areas, and reducing other threats such land clearing or feral animals are all important climate adaptation strategies.

But many Australian plants and animals will not be able to move fast enough to escape extreme events or to keep pace with their specific climate niches on their own. To conserve these species, we may need to engage in high‑intervention conservation strategies, such as assisted colonisation.

This involves moving an individual, population or species to a place where it has never been found before. This tactic is being investigated for the endangered Western Swamp Tortoise in Western Australia, as its wetland habitat begins to dry out.

Conservation laws in Australia were not designed to accommodate these kinds of dynamic and proactive approaches to conservation management.

Legal road blocks

Current conservation laws promote keeping or returning the environment to what it used to be, whether that is pristine or not.

In a recent paper, we looked at three ways laws may impede conservation in a changing world.

First, current laws emphasise maintaining the current status and location of ecosystems and their constituent parts, or returning them to an “undisturbed” state.

Second, they place high value on biodiversity that is rare, native and wild.

Finally, they emphasise reserves (especially on public land) as the sites for most conservation effort.

For example, national park laws typically require agencies to conserve national parks in their natural state. This is usually defined by the plants and animals that are already there or that have been found there in the past.

But some species might need to be moved into national parks, even if they have never been found there before, or out of national parks to somewhere more climatically suitable. Current laws do not let us do this.

Rather than an outdated idea of what is “natural”, we need new objectives that focus on diversity and ecosystem function and health. If introducing a plant or animal into a national park will increase its chance of surviving under climate change and will not undermine the health of the park’s ecosystems, the introduction should not be excluded just because the species is not “native” to that specific park. This approach would help species adapt through movement across boundaries.

Letting species go

Another example of a potential legal roadblock is the emphasis on individual threatened species in both legal protection and funding. For instance, the Coalition government has pledged AU$5 million for specific actions to protect some of the most endangered of Australia’s listed threatened species.

But this is an example of assuming that we can save everything. The contracting ranges and already precarious status of many listed species make it unlikely that we will be able to conserve them all, and impossible to do so in their historic locations.

Choices based on what species we fund are rarely transparent and the public is rarely consulted about what we value the most. We need to have a conversation about how we value species and ecosystems in a changing world. If more people realised that we cannot save everything, perhaps more people would demand that appropriate funding is allocated to saving as much as possible.

While funding remains limited, we need objectives that reflect the certainty of some loss of species in the wild and that clearly define the criteria we are using for targeting some species for protection while letting others go.

Our conservation laws direct how we will act to save species and ecosystems under climate change, and whether we will succeed. But climate change makes our current objectives unachievable.

We must not give up on conserving as much as we can as the climate changes. Laws can be used to help us achieve this goal. But we urgently need a national conversation about what reform is needed to ensure the best possible conservation results for Australia’s precious wildlife, plants and ecosystems.

The authors do 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.

Coal’s impact on the Great Barrier Reef by causing climate change is one of the reasons why environmentalists oppose the development of coal fields and exports in Queensland. But fossil fuels could have a more direct impact on the reef and the waters around it, through chemicals produced during their production and distribution.

When coal dust is released in the marine environment it can damage marine ecosystems. Coal contains a number of different chemicals, but it is polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), which are known carcinogens, that are of most concern.

Some components of coal PAHs cause biochemical changes in fish and can lead to cancer. The coal dust has a very slow degradation rate and will build up in the ecosystem from the continuous input.

Coal dust also absorbs chemicals in the coastal zone and transports things like pesticides and herbicides offshore. Oil spills are another source of PAHs in the marine environment.

It is currently impossible for Australia to assess the impact of these chemicals in marine sediments, because our sediment guidelines are out of date. They need to be updated to match the standards used elsewhere, such as in the United States.

Coal dust and Great Barrier Reef marine life

I have previously looked at how far these chemicals can travel from coal ports. I found they can be detected in suspended sediments all the way to the shelf break 200km offshore. (I also published a corrigendum to this paper to correct data errors and to explain how sediment guidelines need to be updated.)

I used the Australian and the US Environment Protection Authority (EPA) sediment quality guidelines to assess the concentration of PAHs in the sediments and suspended sediments on the Great Barrier Reef. The guidelines are meant to indicate “trigger values” for the concentration of possible toxins. If trigger values are reached then sources should be curtailed.

My study showed the concentrations were below toxic levels as then defined by the US guidelines. But it is impossible to know based on the Australian guidelines because these guidelines don’t target the PAHs contained in coal or oil. To explain why, we have to go into a bit of chemistry.

The composition of the PAHs can indicate the source from coal, oil or combustion processes.

The US guidelines use 34 key PAH groups (a total of about 290 individual compounds) and are currently the best available for assessing oil pollution incidents.

The Australian guidelines do not assess the PAHs that are the major contributor to PAHs in coal and oil. The Australian guidelines specify only 20 “parent” PAHs. These guidelines are more relevant to combustion products.

When is it toxic?

The Australian guidelines consider PAHs reach toxic levels at 10-50 milligrams per kilogram of sediment. But research suggests this is way too high.

Modern assessments of oil spills now rely on the PAH content of oils in addition to the total oil content.

PAHs make up about 1% of total oil content. If you applied these guidelines to an oil spill, the toxic level of 10mg PAH per kg of sediment would equal 1,000mg of oil per kg. This oil content would kill everything in marine sediments.

For example, I and a colleague published a detailed study of fiddler crabs after the West Falmouth oil spill. We determined that total oil concentrations of 100-200mg oil per kg of sediment were toxic to juvenile crabs. Concentrations of 1,000mg per kg were toxic to adults and/or caused a number of impacts before the crabs died.

As PAHs make up around 1% of most oils, this means that the trigger values should be 1mg PAH per kg (with a maximum of 5mg per kg). And this assessment must include the PAHs that are commonly found in oil and coal.

Commercial Australian labs don’t assess all these PAHs yet, but neither did the American labs until it became necessary for assessing major oil spills such as the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska and the Deepwater Horizon spill in the Gulf of Mexico. We should not wait for the next disaster to upgrade our capability.

Cleaning up coal ports

We also need the ports to reduce their inputs. Townsville port has reduced the dust emission from its powdered zinc and lead loadings.

The train cars are covered and one at a time enter a shed which is under negative pressure. The powder is dumped in a hopper, transported to the conveyors and loaded onto the ships with no or little dust escaping the process.

The cars are then rinsed before leaving the shed. Water is retained and filtered so no dust leaves the area.

Why can’t coal be handled the same way? Improvement in loading metal powders was brought on by public objections to the previous operations.

This would eliminate coal piles in the coastal zone which blow dust all over nearby cities such as Gladstone and leach into coastal creeks. We also need the Australian sediment quality guidelines for PAHs brought up to 21st-century standard.

Do we have to wait until we have another incident like the Montara platform explosion in the Timor Sea in 2010 before we update our guidelines and response times?

Kathryn Burns received funding from the Australian Institute of Marine Science for chemistry studies in the Great Barrier Reef lagoon 2008-2010, and retired in 2011.

Should killing too many fish be dealt with in the same way as war crimes? Bob Williams/Wikimedia Commons

Whether we consider wild weather, unprecedented Arctic melting and global temperatures, or the Great Barrier Reef, the global environment is generating alarming news. Predictions of multi-metre sea level rises, the collapse of marine biodiversity and food chains, and global warming far beyond 2℃ are equally concerning. Is our system of global environmental law and governance adequate to this crisis?

Our short answer is “no”, but what should be done? We believe new international institutions and laws are needed, with one fundamental purpose: to give a voice to ecosystems and non-human forms of life.

We say this knowing that the current global system is inadequate to respond to many human crises, but with the conviction that environmental justice often overlaps with social justice.

It is tempting to believe that we can muddle through with the existing system, centred on the United Nations' Framework Convention on Climate Change and Convention on Biological Diversity. But these are not integrated with each other, and are also kept separate from global economic and trade institutions like the World Trade Organisation, the G20 and the World Bank, and from global security institutions like the UN Security Council. The latter has never passed a resolution about the environment, despite growing warnings from military strategists of the potential for climate-catalysed conflict.

Global trade and security are each governed by global agencies. But there is no comparable global authority to protect the environment.

The climate agreement negotiated at last year’s Paris summit was a great diplomatic achievement, but the euphoria was premature. Current national pledges to cut emissions will fail to keep global warming below 2℃, let alone the 1.5℃ that climate scientists and many nations in Paris have argued is the safer limit.

The Paris deal’s predecessor, the Kyoto Protocol, actually saw global emissions rise by 60% to 2014.

Three months before Paris, the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, with its 17 Sustainable Development Goals and its mission to “heal and secure our planet”. The gap between ambition and ability could scarcely be greater.

A new manifesto

We and our colleagues have published a “Planet Politics” manifesto, which argues that the current architecture of international society is failing to see and address the global ecological crisis. Our global governance is too focused on interstate bargaining and human interests, and sees the environment as an inert backdrop and resource for human societies. Yet the reality is that the fates of society and nature are inextricably bound together – and the planet is letting us know that.

In response, we propose three key international reforms: a coal convention, an Earth system council, and a new category of “crimes against biodiversity”.

A coal convention

Every year toxic air pollution from coal burning causes death and disease. Coal is responsible for 43% of global greenhouse emissions and 80% of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration since 1870.

We already have UN treaties banning the use of chemical and biological weapons, on the basis of their threats to human health and security. Based on the same principles, we suggest a similar international convention to outlaw the mining and burning of coal.

This would create a common legal framework in which states can transform their energy economies without fear of “free riders”. It would also add to the pressure already being felt by the coal and energy industries to curb their damaging pollution.

An Earth system council

An Earth system council would function much like the UN Security Council – it would, in effect, be an “ecological security council”.

Its mandate would be to preserve, protect and repair global ecosystems. It would respond to immediate crises while also stimulating action on systemic environmental degradation and ecosystem repair. Its resolutions would be binding on all UN member states, although we do not envisage that it would have the same coercive powers (such as sanctions). The council would be able to refer issues to the International Court of Justice, or create ad hoc international criminal tribunals relating to major environmental crimes.

This is significant reform that would require the revision of the UN Charter, but our proposals for membership go even further. Every meeting would be briefed by the head of the UN Environment Program and by Earth system scientists or ecologists.

We suggest it could have 25 voting seats, 13 of which would go to state representatives elected for fixed terms, allocated among the major world regions. The other 12 would be permanent seats held by “eco-regions”: major ecosystems that bind together large human and non-human communities and are crucial to the planetary biosphere, such as the Arctic and Antarctic, the Pacific and Indian Oceans, the Amazon Basin, tropical Africa, or major river systems like the Mekong and Congo. Alternatively, following WWF’s Global 200, eco-regions could be based on major habitat types.

Each eco-region would be represented by a democratic assembly and have a constitution focused solely on the preservation and repair of its ecology. It would appoint a representative to the Earth system council and have the power to make recommendations for ecosystem protection to regional governments. Each state with territory that overlaps that eco-region would have one seat. Other seats would be elected democratically from communities (especially indigenous peoples) within those regions.

Crimes against biodiversity

A “crimes against biodiversity” law would act like a Rome Statute for the environment. It could add much-needed teeth to efforts to preserve global biodiversity and prevent large-scale environmental harms. Ecological damage should be criminalised, not just penalised with fines or lawsuits.

We envisage that this law would outlaw and punish three kinds of activity:

• actions that contribute to the extinction of endangered species, such as poaching, illegal whaling or destruction of habitat;

• actions that involve the unnecessary large-scale killing or death of species groups, as happened in the Gulf of Mexico after the Deepwater Horizon drilling disaster;

• activities that destroy ecosystems, such as the dumping of mine tailings or toxic waste into rivers.

It would not criminalise the farming of animals or the catching of fish, but could apply if these practices involve the mistreatment of animals or large-scale collateral damage to biodiversity – for instance, by overly extractive fishing methods. Such global-level regulation will augment enforcement at local levels.

Unlike international laws that punish genocide, our suggested law would not require proof of intent to commit the crime, but merely a strong link between the activity and the destruction of biodiversity or industrial and systemic harm to animals. There are potential legal precedents in the US legal doctrine of “depraved heart murder” in which individuals are liable for deaths caused by wilful indifference, rather than an express desire to harm.

It is easy to see how this kind of legal reasoning could be used to help deter dangerous industrial, mining or agricultural activities.

Readers might ask how the destruction of biodiversity is as morally appalling as genocide or other crimes against humanity. The philosopher Hannah Arendt has argued that the distinct evil of crimes against humanity lies not simply in mass murder but in the destruction of human diversity; an attack on humanity’s peaceful coexistence on our planet.

Now, as we become ever more aware of the complex enmeshment of human and non-human life in the planetary biosphere, the human-caused extinction of species is likewise an attack on our common ecological existence. It is time for this truth to be recognised in international law.

We are aware that these are radical ideas that raise significant political and legal complexities, but the time to start debating them is now. Planet Earth needs unprecedented politics for these unprecedented times.

The authors do 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.

Britain has been a consistently progressive driver of climate policy in the European Union. Given the EU’s significance in international climate change negotiations, Britain’s vote to leave the union has implications both for EU policy and for the global Paris climate agreement struck last year.

The UK has been crucial to EU climate change policy in ways that have evolved over time. Britain’s strong domestic emissions reductions have made more ambitious EU burden-sharing targets possible. This in turn gave credibility to the idea of Europe as a global leader on climate ambition – something that has become a cherished part of many European citizens' self-identity. Britain has also been a crucial bridge between the United States and Europe in the United Nations' climate negotiation process.

Yet the EU’s climate policy ambition has arguably already declined over the past decade as it has struggled with a rising tide of resistance from more recalcitrant member states, chiefly Poland but also including, at various times, Italy, Hungary and Romania. Assuming that the EU manages to stave off any further disintegration, these voices will likely grow louder.

Poland’s recalcitrance on climate change policy has already challenged the EU’s leadership credentials, particularly since last year’s Polish elections, which installed a new conservative, Eurosceptic government.

While it has not always succeeded, British leadership has been an important balancing voice against these reluctant climate actors. Brexit has worrying consequences not just for EU climate policy but also for global progress on climate change.

Consistent vision

One of the reasons for Britain’s strong influence is its consistency across government on climate policy. This stands in contrast with other countries such as Germany and France, and even the European Commission itself, where internal divisions have sometimes meant that different ministries have pursued conflicting goals. The clarity of the UK position has been strategically important for achieving progressive EU climate policy.

Examples of British contributions to EU climate leadership abound. The UK helped broker a crucial compromise with the United States on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. In 2005, then prime minister Tony Blair made climate change the priority of the UK’s presidency of the EU and G8, lending clout to the EU’s claims of leadership. The UK helped shape the EU’s diplomatic efforts in Paris last year, and there were high hopes for the impact of its EU presidency in 2017 on climate policy.

In practical terms, the UK is the EU’s second-largest economy and its second-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, after Germany in both cases. Climate change policy is an area of “shared competence” between the EU and member states, and UK climate policy is deeply embedded within broader EU frameworks such as its Emissions Trading System.

Domestic UK emissions reductions have historically been crucial to the EU’s achievement of its targets. This is due to Britain’s relatively large share of total emissions and to the UK’s pursuit of ambitious domestic targets. The UK has legislated for steeper emissions targets than required of it under EU agreements and is aiming for an 80% reduction on 1990 levels by mid-century. Along with Sweden and Denmark, it has consistently pushed for more ambitious EU-level targets.

Britain’s contribution to EU climate targets

The European Union’s official pledge to the Paris climate negotiations promised a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions, relative to 1990 levels, by 2030. The UK was a key player in the internal negotiations that decided on this target. In fact, it pushed hard for a higher target of 50%.

A Brexit would also make it harder for the EU to meet its target, as the UK’s own significant emission cuts are factored into the overall target. The Paris Agreement does not allow countries to change their submitted climate pledge, except to increase it.

The EU may therefore have to work out how to distribute its 2030 reductions among its 27 remaining members without the UK’s contributions. This will be particularly challenging given the relative size of the UK contribution. Even without this complication, the EU will face the need to re-assert its capacity for leadership on climate change without one of its most ambitious members.

The future of Europe’s Emissions Trading System could also be steered by Poland after the resignation of Britain’s Ian Duncan as head of the committee overseeing the ETS review in the wake of last Friday’s referendum result.

This is not to say that Britain’s impact on EU climate change policy has always been advantageous. The UK’s close ties with the previously recalcitrant United States and its pro-market approach have frustrated the EU’s attempts to find a unified voice on climate change in the past. However, these characteristics have also enabled Britain to play a crucial bridging role between Eastern and Western Europe in internal EU negotiations. And this loss will worry those hoping that EU leadership on climate change will continue.

What does this mean for the Paris Agreement?

The EU has struggled to demonstrate the ambition required to hold the mantle of climate leader in recent years, even with the UK’s full support. The US and China’s increased engagement in global climate negotiations has meant fewer opportunities for the EU to make good on its leadership rhetoric, while the economic crisis and internal divisions have created extra hurdles.

Climate laggards within the EU can now draw out the ratification of the Paris Agreement and the renewed negotiations over how to divide the 2030 emission targets between members. Poland has long argued that the internal burden-sharing arrangements must be worked out before it will ratify the Paris Agreement.

The United Nations' outgoing lead climate negotiator, Christina Figueres, has attempted to calm fears of EU climate policy derailment by urging Britain and the EU to continue working together even after Britain leaves the union.

It is indeed likely that Britain will remain somewhat embedded in the complex architecture of EU climate policy. Iceland, a non-EU member included in much of Europe’s climate policy framework, provides a potential model for how this might work in practice.

But whatever arrangements are made, losing one of its most progressive voices on climate change will be a blow to Europe’s leadership credentials.

Natalie Latter attended the 2015 Paris climate summit with accreditation from Climate Action Network Australia.

To reach zero emissions by 2050, we need to invest in zero emissions technology now. Coal power image from www.shutterstock.com

The Paris climate agreement saw countries pledge to limit global warming to well below 2℃, and to aim to keep it within 1.5℃. The problem is that countries' current emissions targets are not enough to meet these goals.

In a paper published today in Nature, I and my colleagues from Austria, Brazil, China, South Africa, Germany, the Netherlands and Switzerland take a closer look at those pledges, and the studies that have so far evaluated them. The bottom line is that under the existing Paris pledges the world would be facing 2.3-3.5℃ of warming by 2100.

The pledges, known as Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or INDCs, would result in emissions 14 billion tonnes higher than they should be in 2030 under the cheapest pathway to limit warming.

While this path is well below the “business as usual” scenario, it is not yet in the range of the 1.5-2℃ objectives we have set ourselves. So it’s a first step, but bigger steps are needed.

The less effort we make before 2030, the harder it will be to reduce emissions afterwards. However, my colleagues and I have found there are several ways to close the gap.

Why do the current targets make it harder after 2030?

To limit global warming to any level, we ultimately have to completely stop CO₂ emissions and ramp down other greenhouse gas emissions. For any given warming threshold, we have to limit total emissions to a certain amount, known as the “carbon budget”.

It is likely that to keep warming well below 2℃ we have a remaining carbon budget of between 750 billion and 1.2 trillion tonnes. For context, global emissions in 2010 were around 50 billion tonnes.

Remaining on the current path, as laid out by the INDCs, would mean the world would have to make very drastic cuts in emissions after 2030 to keep warming below 2℃ (and would likely make the 1.5℃ limit completely unachievable).

This dramatic cut would mean a lot of stranded investments, as emissions will have continued to rise up to 2030, suggesting continued investment in infrastructure that won’t deliver our long-term target. The same potentially goes for any investments in “transition” fuels, such as gas. If current investments cannot be part of a 2050 world that is close to zero emissions, then they would probably have to be retired before their usual use-by date.

If in 2030 there is a sudden realisation that we have to do more, the world would have to cut emissions by 3-4% each year. Countries like Australia would have to cut them by 10% each year. It’s like walking slowly up to a cliff and then jumping off it.

This is not the cheapest way to keep warming below 2℃. The least-cost option is to start investing now in the right technology. The International Energy Agency has argued that if we want a zero-carbon economy in 2050, or at least one that is close to zero-carbon, we need to make zero-emission investments today, because it takes a long time to turn over the existing investment stock.

The other problem is carbon capture and storage (CCS). The Paris Agreement pledges net zero greenhouse gas emissions after 2050. There is no pathway to this that doesn’t involve “net-negative” emissions, because there will still be some greenhouse gas emissions we can’t reduce, and we will have already overshot the carbon budget for keeping warming below 2℃, let alone 1.5℃. So we are going to have to come up with a way to pull CO₂ from the atmosphere.

How can we do that? The main option is thought to be bio-energy with carbon capture and storage (BECCS). This process involves growing biomass fuel, such as trees, then using the woodchips to produce electricity, then capturing the CO₂ produced, and finally sequestering and storing it underground.

In the past, CCS has been mostly combined with fossil fuels. But the dramatic fall of wind and solar costs will make it easier to decarbonise the electricity sector.

CCS would also likely require a carbon price, to incentivise the necessary investment in CCS by 2030. Retrofitting existing fossil fuel power plants with CCS or keeping coal demand high by supporting new coal power plants with CCS in India and China is hence likely an uphill battle that is lost on economic grounds. However, we would still need CCS and specifically BECCS to remove CO₂ from the atmosphere.

So how can we close the gap?

Our study has found several ways to reduce emissions further before 2030.

The first is to ratchet up the INDCs by using the review mechanism built into the Paris Agreement. This is thought by many to be the single most important element of the agreement, and would see INDCs revised and increased every five years. Of course these increases would have to be underpinned by domestic policies.

Some countries will overachieve their INDCs. China, for instance, has pledged to peak its emissions by 2030, but seems to have the domestic policy in place to get there before 2020 given the concern about clean air.

Other countries have pledged emission levels that are so generously high that they would have to spend serious amounts of money to increase their emissions up to those levels. Turkey, Ukraine, Russia are examples. There are likely a billion tonnes of projected emissions that we will hence never get to see. Fortunately.

The INDCs could also be expanded to cover other greenhouse gases (which aren’t included by some countries), such as nitrous oxide and methane in China.

International shipping and aviation could also play a huge role. Aviation is one of the hardest nuts to crack because of the difficulties of producing sustainable, carbon-neutral jet fuel. So while the near-term emissions reductions options aren’t as big as many people think, these high-value sectors are hugely important because they can help to raise resources for mitigation action elsewhere.

For instance, the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s pledge of no-carbon growth after 2020 would require large offsets. This could unleash a lot of action, and transfer finance to other sectors.

However, both aviation and maritime transport need to part of the whole framework - and given that the Paris Agreement mentions all global emissions in its Art. 4.1, they are already included to some extent.

We found other initiatives – in the business sector and at regional and municipal levels – that could reduce emissions by a further 1 billion tonnes each year by 2030. However, more recent research suggests this could be as high as 6-11 billion tonnes each year, if all those additional initiatives in the solar energy, wind energy, forestry and methane sectors were implemented.

For instance, Europe’s solar and wind initiatives, if both implemented, could increase Europe’s target of 40% below 1990 levels by 2030 to 60%.

And the United States' Sunshot and wind programs could overshoot its current emissions target, from 26-28% below 2005 levels to a staggering 60%.

These initiatives would put us well on the path to keeping warming below 2℃. Now we just have to get serious about it.

In Australia, we have neither an ambitious enough 2020 or 2030 target, nor the policies to get there. Current emissions are likely to overshoot the -5% target by 2020 (although accounting options to use previously banked credits will likely keep Australia compliant with its Kyoto Protocol targets).

There are good signs – such as state renewable energy targets, which now add up to more than the national target. And there is an immense opportunity for Australia in a zero carbon world: no other developed country is so blessed with solar and wind resources.

If Australia plays its cards right, it could become the energy superpower in a zero carbon world. But there’s still a way to go.

Malte Meinshausen receives funding from the Australian Research Council, advises the German Ministry of Environment and other national and international bodies on climate policy and science. He is affiliated with The University of Melbourne and the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research. He is Director of the Australian-German Climate & Energy College at the University of Melbourne.

Mines typically follow a set path from prospecting, to development, to extraction and finally closure as the finite resources are exhausted. But does that really need to be the end of the mine’s productive life?

All mines generate waste, one type of which is known as “tailings”. Often these solid wastes are stored at or near the mine site itself. Mine site rehabilitation can be expensive, and often the burden falls on the taxpayer rather than the mining company.

However, this burden could be minimised if mining companies change their perception and start to view these disused materials not as waste, but as potential resources. Tailings dumps can be gold mines – literally, in some cases.

The opportunity

Society’s appetite for commodities is shifting in favour of critical or strategic metals such as lithium, indium and cobalt. These metals are vital to support the rapidly diversifying electronics industry.

For example, earlier this year the Indian government announced an ambitious plan for all vehicles to be electric by 2030. Hitting this target will require a lot of lithium – a crucial component of batteries.

Australia is currently the world’s top lithium producer, offering a much-needed boost to Western Australia’s mining sector in particular. But maintaining this position is tough, because building new mines can cost anything between A$150 million and A$2 billion, on top of exploration costs.

But you don’t necessarily need a brand-new mine to get lithium, thanks to new techniques that allow lithium to be recovered from much lower-grade materials. Instead of being simply dumped, mine tailings can be re-mined. Through this process, characterisation of these wastes will allow for tailor-made, environmentally conscientious management strategies to be developed to handle the lower-value byproducts.

This can also help protect the environment from these often toxic wastes. Many of Australia’s 50,000 abandoned mines contain reactive sulphide minerals such as pyrite. These can leach acid into the environment in a process known as acid mine drainage (AMD), potentially costing more than A$100,000 per hectare to clean up.

Acid mine drainage in Western Tasmania. Anita Parbhakar-Fox

Revisiting mine tailings can not only increase the working life of existing mines, it can also potentially breathe new life into long-abandoned mine sites.

There are two main reasons why this might be preferable to developing new mines. First, mining costs are reduced, as these materials have already been extracted from the ground. Second, the older the mine, the greater the proportion of the target commodity that is likely to be left over, because many older mining techniques had lower recovery rates than today’s technology.

For example, the historic Baal Gammon mine in northern Queensland once produced copper, tin and silver, but acid drainage from the disused site now poses a risk to the nearby Jamie Creek and Walsh River. But analysis of the waste boulders shows that they are rich in tin and indium, both of which can be recovered using today’s metallurgical techniques. This would have the added benefit of removing the sulphide compounds that threaten the local waterways.

Similarly, Tasmania’s Zeehan lead-zinc field contains more than 100 legacy mine sites, many of which – such as the Silver Spray mine – are affected by AMD. Again, characterisation of the waste rocks that contain AMD-forming sulphides shows that they also contain significant amounts of indium.

In neither of these cases has a mining project been established to recover these metals – surely a missed opportunity.

Queensland’s abandoned Croydon mines contain sulphide-bearing waste rocks. Anita Parbhakar-Fox

There are signs that re-mining tailings could make more financial and environmental sense than other rehabilitation options. One example is Tasmania’s Old Tailings Dam, which contains mine waste piled more than 30 metres deep between 1962 and 1982.

While many rehabilitation options have been considered, including flooding the tailings or covering them with vegetation, the technical challenges have been considered too great. Yet the pyrite-rich tailings also contain up to 3% cobalt, which is worth well over US$23,000 per tonne.

It may even be possible to retrieve almost all of the cobalt by using bacterial oxidation. This process was initially developed to release gold from pyritic rocks, and is regarded as a greener processing technique.

Elsewhere in Tasmania, a similar project is under way to recover gold, and another is proposed to recover tin from mine tailings. Overseas, mine tailings reprocessing projects are planned as far afield as South Africa and Bolivia.

With technology improving just as the mining sector’s economic fortunes dip, firms have more incentive than ever to comb through their trash in search of treasure. Treating waste as a potential resource could help the industry rise from the ashes of the downturn, while helping the environment too.

Anita Parbhakar-Fox receives funding from The ARC Transforming the Mining Value Chain Industrial Transformation Research Hub.

Solar thermal technology uses the sun's heat to generate electricity, or heating. Beyond Coal & Gas Image Library/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Recently Sandfire Resources, a gold and copper producer based in Western Australia, announced its new solar power plant will soon start powering its DeGrussa mine. By replacing diesel power, the 10-megawatt power station, with 34,000 panels and lithium storage batteries, is expected to reduce the mine’s carbon emissions by 15%.

This is an exciting development because it realises an important potential that has long been recognised but not exploited. Two of Australia’s greatest resources – solar energy and minerals – are, as luck would have it, both highly concentrated in the same parts of Australia.

In this case, solar energy is being used to power the mine, but there is also great potential for solar energy to be used to convert the minerals to chemicals and metals.

In metal production, most greenhouse gases are generated when carbon (often coal) is used to produce metal from the rocky ore. Some of this carbon is used in the actual chemical reactions, but a large proportion is just providing energy for the process.

Replacing the carbon energy source with renewable or other lower-emission energy has the potential to dramatically lower the greenhouse gases associated with metal production.

For example, in iron production, more than 400kg of coke and coal is use to make every tonne of iron. Using renewable energy as a heat source could reduce this carbon input by up to 30%.

The next revolution

Currently, Australia’s use of solar energy is largely limited to homes, for hot water and solar-powered electricity. But solar energy has great potential for regional Australia too.

Mines are often isolated. There is typically limited natural gas and electricity supply, and in remote areas energy supply is limited to liquid fossil fuels. This is exactly the potential being exploited by Sandfire Resources at its mine facility 900km north of Perth.

Recent studies by CSIRO have identified the potential to use solar in high-temperature processing of ores such as bauxite, copper and iron ore. This process would use concentrated solar thermal (CST) energy as a heat supply. This heat can also be converted to electricity, known as concentrated solar power (CSP).

This is different to the solar photovoltaic technology used in Sandfire’s solar power plant (and rooftop solar panels), which converts sunlight directly to electricity.

Solar thermal energy works best at temperatures between 800℃ and 1,600℃ – which can be achieved with existing technology that concentrates the sun’s heat. This is currently too hot for converting the heat to electricity, which generally operates below 600℃.

But processing minerals can make use of these high temperatures, because the heat is used directly for chemical conversion, rather than first being converted to electricity.

It is this rationale that is driving research, at the University of Adelaide, into producing alumina using concentrated solar energy and, at Swinburne University, into producing iron from ore.

We have tested a range of temperatures and mineral mixes, and have produced iron products similar to commercial-grade iron products. We envisage a solar iron-making plant operating in Western Australia and value-adding to our iron reserves before being shipped overseas.

We expect this could reduce energy and emissions by 20-30% compared to current iron-making processes, by replacing carbon-based fossil fuels with solar energy, although carbon would still be used in the chemical processes.

Whether this is cost-effective will depend on the manufacturer, as the saving in energy and carbon will need to compensate for the high capital cost associated with high solar fluxes.

Concentrated solar energy is still relatively expensive. The Australian Solar Institute estimated in 2012 that the cost of electricity from concentrated solar was approximately double the current cost for conventional energy, reflecting largely the high capital cost of solar systems.

This gap can reasonably be expected to close with increases in the scale of operations (lowering manufacturing costs) and in regulatory pressure on conventional power sources.

It may be a way off, but the small step by Sandfire Resources could be the start of a revolution in the Australian minerals industry.

Geoffrey Brooks and his co-workers have received funding from ARENA for work into solar thermal processing and Cartwheel Resources for evaluating the potential of solar thermal processing of iron ores.

The strangeness of last Sunday …

Has there ever been better times for our electricity utilities?

Sunday is typically pretty subdued in terms of electricity demand. Consequently Sunday market prices are at the low-end of the weekly range, even with the extra demands of a chilly winter day.

Since the beginning of 2008, the Sunday market price in Victoria averages about $23 per megawatt hour, factoring out the carbon tax component. That is about half the average weekday price of $43.

Victorian wholesale electricity pricing for Sundays from 2008 on. Note the extraordinary nature of Sunday 26th, 2016. Data from AEMO’s half hour price and demand datasets. Coloured solid lines show Sunday averages. Coloured dashed lines show the volume weighted price for working week-days. Black line shows Sunday 26th 2016. Colour distinguishes carbon pricing (blue) and non carbon pricing (red) intervals. Data sourced from AEMO.

Sunday prices do vary across the year rising slightly in the winter months. Between 2008 and 2015, June Sunday prices have averaged about $31 with a high of $50 on Sunday June 1, 2008.

So what can we make of the last Sunday (26th June 2016), when the volume averaged price in Victoria was a staggering $120, almost four times the average?

It’s not a once off, as the Victorian price for every Sunday this last June has topped $75 - more than 50 per cent higher than any previous June Sunday in the last 8 years.

And Victoria isn’t alone. Right across the National Electricity Market (or NEM), prices have been stratospheric. Last Sunday, South Australia topped the class at $158, closely followed by New South Wales at $133.

As pointed out in my post a week ago, in historical terms these prices are simply staggering, and it’s not very obvious why.

If these prices remain, they will have widespread consequences. So it is important to get to grips with what is going on.

Last Sunday was Melbourne’s coldest morning of the year, with several coldest-day records set across Victoria. So we might expect some extra heating was stretching the power system, helping drive up prices.

However, while the Victorian demand was higher than average for a Sunday, it was about 10 per cent lower than the Victorian average weekday demand. So we really can’t pin Sunday’s extreme prices on unusual demand. Moreover, last Sunday net Victorian exports amounted to about 15 per cent of its electricity production (see note 1). So there was no shortage of supply to meet local demand.

Victorian average Sunday electricity demand in megawatts, from 2008 on. Note while last Sunday (June 26 2016) demand was above the Sunday average, it was substantially lower than the weekday average. Coloured solid lines show Sunday averages. Coloured dashed lines show weekday averages. Black line shows Sunday 26th 2016. Colour fills distinguish carbon pricing (blue) and non carbon pricing (red) intervals. Data from AEMO’s half hour price and demand datasets.

Why are prices so high?

Rather than originating locally, the reasons for the strange pricing events on Sunday morning in Victoria, seem to reside elsewhere on the NEM. They point to the emerging issue of the inter-regional coupling, the tangle of energy policies across the NEM and other energy sectors, and the power of industry incumbents.

In comparison to Victoria, Queensland demand last Sunday morning was significantly above expectation, slightly exceeding even the weekday demand average. Demand has been growing strongly in Queensland, partly because of the commissioning of its gas export processing plants. Still, at not much more than the weekday average, it is hard to understand why last Sunday’s demand in Queensland would be sufficient to drive prices to $115. At the time coal generation was running at around 75 per cent capacity.

Queensland average Sunday electricity demand (grid-based) in megawatts, since the beginning of 2008. Data from AEMO’s half hour price and demand datasets. Coloured solid lines show medians for this period. Colours dashed lines show the average for all times of the week. Black line shows Sunday 26th 2016. Colour distinguishes carbon pricing and non-carbon pricing days. Queensland wholesale Sunday pricing since the beginning of 2008. Data from AEMO’s half hour price and demand datasets. Coloured solid lines show medians for this period. Colours dashed lines show the volume weighted price for all times of the week. Black line shows the morning of Sunday 26th 2016. Colour distinguishes carbon pricing and non carbon pricing days.

As with Queensland, New South Wales demand was close to the highest recorded for a Sunday. But while New South Wales was importing furiously, paying what would seem to be over the odds prices, its coal generators were only running at 68 per cent capacity. Why?

In South Australia demand was not exceptional in terms of recent history, but the recent closure of Northern coal-fired power plant has significantly tightened supply settings there and made it more sensitive to the cost of marginal gas generators. Meanwhile its cleanest, most efficient, and one of its largest gas generators, Pelican Point, sits idle. Why?

Sunday was not only cold in South Australia, but it was also not very windy. As a consequence output from wind generation averaged only about 25 per cent of installed capacity. With only modest wind output, and with no coal, South Australia generation was dominated by gas, with consumption augmented by Victorian imports.

South Australian dispatch in megawatts for Sunday 26th 2016, showing the dominant role played by gas generators. In addition to local generation, imports from Victoria averaged around 300 megawatts over the day (see note 1).

The important point is that, for whatever reason, prices are being signalled right across the NEM, from Queensland and South Australia through to Tasmania.

This price signalling is having some paradoxical effects. Just last week, the Office of the Tasmanian Economic Regulator approved an increase in retail prices of 3.43 per cent, effective this Saturday, on the back of the high market prices in Victoria. The surprise is that Tasmania has just emerged from its own energy crisis with recent rains together with the re-connection of Basslink allowing exports for the first time in almost 10 months. Just as supply constraints relaxed for the time being and security restored though Basslink, long-suffering Tasmanian consumers are the first to be hit with price-hikes.

And in Victoria, where prices are responding to distant drivers, brown coal generators must be laughing at their good fortune.

Hazelwood’s super-profits

Across the last 4 weeks, prices in Victoria have averaged $98 per megawatt hour when weighted by volume. In Victorian market terms the total value of dispatch was worth about $370 million. That is almost three times higher than the equivalent period last year, when prices averaged $35.

Victorian price by 5-minute intervals, for the last 4 weeks. red line shown the average prices weighted by volume. Note how regularly 5-minute prices have risen to $300 per megawatt hour as indicated by the dashed line. As with the above figure, for the equivalent period in 2015.

It is boom times for the owners of Victoria’s brown coal stations, like the French energy utility Engie that operates the Hazelwood power station.

In Victorian market terms, the value of Hazelwood’s dispatch over the last 4 weeks is around $70 million.

Total value of Hazelwood dispatch in terms of Victorian market prices, for the 4 week period from May 29 - June 25. Carbon tax contribution calculated using emissions intensity of 1.56 tonnes CO2 per megawatt hour. Costs of $2.50 per megawatt hour are from AEMO estimates(http://www.aemo.com.au/Electricity/Planning/Related-Information/Planning-Assumptions).

That compares with the market value of $17 million in June last year, and around $10 million in June 2014 when the carbon tax liability is factored out.

On an annualised basis, Hazelwood’s latest returns amount to around $900 million, a truly phenomenal turn-around from 2013 when the Commonwealth Bank valued its 8.3 per cent stake at just $1 million, before selling for an undisclosed sum (see note 2).

Hazelwood is Australia’s most contentious power station - a proverbial lightning rod for the debate about our energy system. As Victoria’s oldest, most emission intensive coal fired power station it has been plagued by community concern. At around 1.56 tonnes per megawatt hour it produces about three times the CO2 of a modern gas plant such as the super efficient combined cycle Pelican Point gas plant in South Australia,Engie’s other main asset in Australia. Already it is some 10 years over its use by date.

But, in terms of its balance sheet, Hazelwood has probably never had such good times as the last few months. Meanwhile Engie reportedly disputes liability for the $18 million costs incurred by the Country Fire Authority for fighting a month long fire in Hazelwood’s mine in early 2014.

While Engie enjoys remarkable “super-profits” from Hazelwood, should we ask at what cost. With Victorian electricity exports to South Australia and New South Wales averaging around 1000 megawatts, Hazelwood arguably exists to underwrite those exports (see note 1). Meanwhile Engie’s Pelican Point Power Plant in South Australia sits idle, its gas contracts reputedly on sold presumably to the export market. If Engie were to fire up Pelican Point, it would reduce our national emissions by several million tonnes each year, and arguably put downward pressures on South Australian prices that would then be signalled across the country.

But perhaps that is exactly why. Oh what a tangled web our national energy policy is.

The headache for next Sunday

I doubt next Sunday, on the morning after the federal election, many will be watching the electricity prices. But some will, hoping the electricity market magically returns some normality. After all, it will not just be the first day of the new government, it is also the start of a new financial year.

Could it be that the current market prices are being manipulated by our electricity oligarchs to improve their bottom lines before the end of the financial year? Or will the high prices persist, reflective a fundamental shift in market dynamics, as the various threads of national energy policy tangle more tightly.

Surely we can understand that it is just not right to let the market dynamics encourage the likes of Engie to operate in Australia as if there is no tomorrow, rewarding it handsomely to dump some 15 million tonnes of CO2 into our atmosphere each year leaving Pelican Point idle. Would Engie be given license to do that in France. I doubt so, so why here?

But it is not so much Engie that is the problem, or any other player, as it is the whole tangled web of our national energy policy that is tightening at each turn. Either way, next Sunday will present the new government with the massive headache of untangling this web. We are in desperate need of a bipartisan approach with a sharp focus on how we rebuild our energy system fit for the challenges ahead, adding environmental concerns as an equal to the existing priorities of security and affordability. After all, last Sunday highlights that our existing energy system is not looking particularly affordable. And, like Hazelwood, much of it is beyond its use-by-date, so probably it is not that secure. And for sure it is an environmental disaster.

Notes

[1] The exceptional electricity pricing on Sunday 26th June 2016 is illustrated by the morning period between 8am and 9 am. Electricity consumption (TOT.DEMAND), production (DISPATCH.GEN), interchanges (NETINTERCHANGE) and prices (VWP) by the NEM regions. NETINTERCHANGE are +ve for export. Flows between the regions are coloured by the exporting region, and labelled by INTERCONNECTOR. Note that Victoria was exporting over 1160 megawatts, 380 megawatts to South Australian and 880 megawatts to New South Wales. In turn Victoria was importing 200 megawatts from Tasmania. The difference is essentially equivalent to the output of Hazelwood.

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[2] Hazelwood Power Station was purchased by a consortium led by International Power in 1996 for $2.35 billion, before merging with GDF Suez, now Engie. In 2010, CBA revealed had written down its 8 per cent share to $1 million “The Hazelwood power station probably wasn’t the best investment the bank made,” CBA chairman David Turner said at the time. CBA sold that share to GDF Suez for an undisclosed amount in 2013.

Disclosure

Mike Sandiford receives funding from the Australian Research Council for geological research.

Last month the South Australian Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commission recommended that the state government develop a business venture to store a large fraction of the world’s high- and intermediate-level nuclear power station wastes in South Australia. It proposes to do this by first building an interim above-ground store, to be followed by permanent underground repository.

But the commission’s recommendation is based on several debatable assumptions, including:

• an economic analysis that purports to show huge profits with negligible commercial risk

• the notion that social consent could be gained by “careful, considered and detailed technical work”

• the argument that Australia, as a net exporter of energy, has an ethical responsibility to help other countries lower their carbon emissions by means of nuclear power.

I have analysed critically these and other assumptions of the royal commission in a scholarly paper published in the international journal Energy Research and Social Science.

Risky economics

The commission’s economic analysis rests on the heroic assumption that customers would, upon delivery of their nuclear wastes to South Australia, pay up-front for both interim above-ground storage and permanent underground storage. This would be up to 17 years before the underground repository has actually been built. The estimated total payment would be about A$1.75 million per tonne of heavy metal (tHM) for storing possibly 138,000 tHM in total.

However, this ignores the huge financial risk to the government and taxpayers in the following scenario: the SA government builds the initial facilities – port, underground research and an interim above-ground storage – at a cost of about A$3 billion. Commencing in year 11, customers deliver their nuclear wastes in dry casks, but pay initially only for the costs of interim storage of the casks, declining to pay for geological storage until the underground repository has been built and becomes operational in year 28.

Despite the royal commission’s claim that the government would not develop the project under these conditions, the government could be influenced to accept the wastes by pressure, both positive and negative, from overseas governments, multinational corporations and/or internal politics.

Then, after a large quantity of nuclear waste has been placed into interim storage in SA, the government might not proceed with the geological storage, costing an extra A$38 billion, for technical, political or financial reasons.

A similar situation occurred in the United States with the termination of funding for the Yucca Mountain repository after US$13.5 billion had already been spent.

In this scenario, SA would be locked into managing a large number of dry casks, designed only for interim storage and located above ground, which will gradually erode and leak their dangerous contents over several decades. The physical hazards and the corresponding financial burden on future generations of all Australians would be substantial.

In this scenario, it would also be risky for customers who relied upon it and so failed to provide their own domestic geological repository.

Social consent

Aware that Australians are divided on the nuclear industry, the royal commission acknowledges that gaining “social consent warrants much greater attention than the technical issues during planning and development”.

Then, on the same page of its report, it postulates that community support could be gained by “careful, considered and detailed technical work”. It thus creates the false impression that all social and ethical concerns can be reduced to technical issues.

Ultimately, gaining social consent is a socio-political struggle that draws only slightly on research and education on science, technology and economics. This is demonstrated by current debate in Australia on climate science, in which citizens are influenced by a print media that in many cases is biased towards denial, and a Coalition government that contains several vocal climate sceptics.

Indigenous Australians have successfully opposed for 20 years an above-ground dump for low-level national nuclear waste on their land at Muckaty in the Northern Territory. Indigenous communities are already mobilising, together with environmentalists, to resist very strongly any development of intermediate- and high-level repositories in South Australia. The social impacts of a low-level waste dump are bad enough, but would be dwarfed by the social, physical and financial impacts of a high-level waste repository.

Ethics

One of the assumptions underlying the royal commission’s ethical argument is that nuclear power will continue to be a low-carbon energy source.

However, the life-cycle CO₂ emissions from conventional nuclear power will increase greatly as high-grade uranium ore is used up and low-grade ore is mined and milled with fossil fuels. This limitation could be avoided only if mining and milling are done with renewable energy or if new fuel is produced in fast breeder reactors, but neither of these options appears likely on a commercial scale within the next 20 years.

Second, the royal commission assumes that those countries that lack sufficient indigenous renewable energy cannot be supplied by trade of renewable electricity via transmission lines or renewable liquid and gaseous fuels delivered by tanker. After all, countries that lack fossil fuels or uranium are supplied by sea trade.

Third, it assumes that it is ethically a good thing to foster the expansion of an energy technology that has risks with huge potential adverse impacts, possibly comparable in magnitude to those of global climate change.

The risk with the highest impacts could be its contribution to the proliferation of nuclear weapons (for details see the Nuclear Weapon Archive and chapter 6 of Sustainable Energy Solutions for Climate Change) and hence the likelihood of nuclear war that could cause a nuclear winter.

Politics

In a country that is divided about nuclear power and where the annual economic value of uranium exports is a modest A$622 million (roughly equal to Australia’s cheese exports), the origin of the nuclear waste proposal is puzzling and inevitably involves speculation.

However, one could suggest the political influence of BHP-Billiton, owner of Olympic Dam in South Australia, Australia’s largest uranium mine and the second-largest in the world, and Rio Tinto, owner of the Ranger uranium mine in the Northern Territory.

A global nuclear waste site would lock future generations of Australians into an industry that is dangerous and very expensive. It’s unlikely to gain social consent from Indigenous Australians, or indeed the majority of all Australians. Given the risks, it would be wise not to proceed.

Mark Diesendorf receives funding from the CRC on Low Carbon Living and the Australian Research Council.

Fish are the most threatened group among Earth’s freshwater vertebrates. On average, freshwater fish populations have declined by 76% over the past 40 years. Damaged fish communities and declining fisheries characterise global freshwater environments, including those in Australia.

Fish migrate to complete their life cycles, but water-resource developments disrupt river connectivity and migrations, threatening biological diversity and fisheries.

Millions of dams, weirs and smaller barriers – for storage and irrigation, road and rail transport and hydropower schemes – block the migration of fish in rivers worldwide.

These barriers serve our needs for water supply, transport and energy. But, by obstructing fish migrations, they also degrade ecological integrity and reduce food security.

This is bad news for those who depend on fish for food. For example, in the Mekong River fish supply over 70% of the people’s animal protein, but catches are falling drastically following dam building.

In our paper published today in CSIRO’s Marine and Freshwater Research, we take stock of the impact these barriers have on our freshwater fish, most (perhaps all) of which migrate, and how we can help them.

Dam it all

There are countless barriers across Australia’s rivers. Roughly 10,000 barriers of all kinds obstruct flows in the Murray-Darling Basin. Flow is unobstructed in less than half of the basin’s watercourse length.

Native fish numbers in the basin’s rivers have declined by an estimated 90% through habitat fragmentation by barriers together with altered flows, overfishing, coldwater pollution and invasive species.

Similar problems also affect coastal river systems. One or more barriers obstruct 49% of rivers in southeast Australia.

Local species extinctions and loss of biodiversity have occurred nationwide in developed regions, especially upstream of large dams.

Overcoming barriers

One way to help fish overcome barriers is to build fishways (or “fish ladders”).

Fishways are designed to aid fish travelling upstream or downstream at high (dams, weirs) or low (road crossings, barrages) barriers. These are classed as “technical”, with hard-engineering designs, or “nature-like”, mimicking natural stream channels.

Recognition that dams threaten freshwater fish communities lagged well behind their construction. Nonetheless, European and American observations of declining fisheries for species moving from the sea to breed in rivers prompted early attempts in Australia to provide for fish passage.

The first Australian fishway was built near Sydney in 1913. By 1985, 52 had been built, but they adopted Northern Hemisphere designs for salmon and trout. These were unsuitable for Australian species, which rarely leap at barriers, and their flow velocities, turbulence and other aspects were excessive.

Seeing the failure of these fishways, New South Wales Fisheries sought advice in 1982 from George Eicher, an American expert, who advised on research to create designs for local species.

This led to expanding fishways research and construction in eastern states. The result was markedly improved performance, for example in the Murray-Darling’s Sea to Hume program.

Fishway performance

Our research shows that regrettably few Australian fishways have yet been shown to meet ideal ecological criteria for mitigating the impact of barriers. Furthermore, fishways are in place at relatively few sites.

In NSW, for example, only about 172 in total serve several thousand weirs and 123 dams. They can be expensive to build and operate, so costs retard mitigation at numerous important sites.

Fishways have seldom been built on dams (fewer than 3% of Australia’s 500 high dams have one); they have generally cost tens of millions of dollars; and most operate, with limited effectiveness, for less than 50% of the time. The need for much greater investment in innovation, research and development is pressing.

How to store water and also rehabilitate fish

To reduce the impact of dams on fish we need to look at resolving problems at river-basin scale; improving our management of barriers, environmental flows and water quality; removing barriers; and developing improved fishway designs.

One way to accelerate improvements nationally would be to pass legislation for routinely re-licensing waterway barriers at regular intervals. This would mean that older barriers are re-evaluated and upgraded or removed where necessary. Under the NSW Weir Removal Program, 14 redundant weirs have already been removed, with others under assessment.

We are developing an innovative pump fishway concept at UNSW Australia. It combines aquaculture fish-pumping methods for safe fish transfer with existing fishway technology.

Young Australian bass during trials of an experimental model of the pump fishway.

We hope the project may help transform past practices through less-costly modular construction, adaptability to a wide range of barriers and improved effectiveness.

Better fishway developments will mean that we can store and supply much-needed water while also restoring fish migrations. This will be increasingly important as climate change reduces streamflows in many regions, and will help rehabilitate fish populations.

John Harris receives funding from the NSW Recreational Fishing Trust and has previously consulted with State, Commonwealth and industry water-resources agencies.

Bill Peirson and his affiliates have received funding from a wide range of government and industry sources within the water sector.

Richard Kingsford receives funding from the Australian Government through Australian Research Council, Murray-Darling Basin Authority as well as state governments, including NSW, Victoria, Queensland and South Australia.

When is a jellyfish plague not (necessarily) a jellyfish plague? When time-poor scientists selectively cite the literature to make it look like the oceans are flooded with jellies – even when it’s far from clear that they really are.

What does scientists being in a rush have to do with jellyfish populations? Let’s start from the beginning.

The identification of patterns and trends in nature happens through the accumulation of consistent observations, published in scientific reports. Once observed, the emerging patterns are usually reported in narrative reviews, which often stimulates a flurry of research activity in that field.

Eventually, the purported patterns are formally tested using “meta-analyses” of the published literature, to either confirm the pattern and establish it as theory, or refute it.

This path from the primary observations to theory can be traced through a network of citations.

Science, however, is done by humans and citation practices are subject to errors of bias and accuracy. Citation practices that are biased in a particular direction have the potential to lead to the identification of false patterns and flawed theory.

Enter the jellies

In the 1990s and 2000s, reports began to appear in the scientific literature of increased jellyfish populations in some parts of the world’s oceans. Various reviews reported the possibility that jellyfish blooms might be increasing globally. Over time, these became increasingly assertive about the existence and extent of the trend, until researchers were asking what to do about the increasingly “gelatinous state” of the oceans worldwide.

The question of whether the global jellyfish boom was real or not was tested by two meta-analyses – which came to opposite conclusions. A 2012 study concluded that populations were increasing globally because they found evidence for increasing populations in 62% of large marine ecosystems tested (although low certainty was assigned to two-thirds of these). The following year, another study found that only 30% of populations were increasing. It concluded that jellyfish populations wax and wane over several decades.

So, in reality, the scientific community is still divided over whether there really has been a sustained global increase in jellyfish numbers.

What about perception?

We wanted to know whether the perception of a global increase in jellyfish blooms was at least partly due to poor citation practices in the scientific literature. Our research, published in Global Ecology and Biogeography, suggests that it was.

Citation practices can be flawed in several ways:

• Unsupported citations are when authors cite sources that contain no evidence that could possibly support the author’s claim.

• Selective citations happen when a paper is cited to support a claim but contrasting evidence provided in the same paper is ignored, or when authors choose to cite earlier papers that have since been refuted.

• Ambiguous citations happen when an author’s sentence contains multiple phrases, but the citations used to support each phrase are clustered at the end of the sentence, preventing readers from telling which is which.

• Empty citations are when authors cite a paper that cites another paper as evidence for the claim, rather than the original source (also called “lazy author syndrome”).

We comprehensively searched the literature for papers, published before the two meta-analyses, that issued statements regarding trends in jellyfish populations. We classified each statement according to its affirmation and direction (that is, whether it said jellyfish are “increasing”, “may be increasing”, “decreasing”, or “not sure”), as well as their geographic extent (global, multiple regions, or one region).

We then assessed the papers cited as evidence of the statement, to see whether the citations were accurate or whether they fell into one of the categories of flawed citations outlined above.

A (jelly)fishy tale?

Of 159 papers that had issued statements about trends in jellyfish, 61% claimed that populations were increasing (27% at the global scale and 34% in multiple regions) and 25% asserted that populations may be increasing. Only 10% of papers said the data were equivocal. Just one reported that populations were decreasing (but at a local scale).

Most concerning was that only 51% of papers cited were considered to provide unambiguous support for the statements made by the authors. Almost all statements based on unsupportive citations were those claiming that jellyfish were increasing globally (despite the fact that it would have been impossible to make any claims about global trends before the first global meta-analysis was published in 2012). And in all cases, selective citations were biased towards claims that jellyfish populations were increasing.

Pressure to publish in prestigious journals and win research funds may lead some scientists to make claims that reach beyond the evidence available. In most cases, however, citation errors are not overt attempts to distort the evidence. Rather, they probably arise because increasing academic workloads reduce the time available to evaluate papers accurately and to keep abreast of the almost exponential increase in the volume of literature being published.

As scientists, we need to ensure that our claims are always supported by robust evidence because it is apparent that poor citation practices – and, in particular, selective citation of the literature – can distort perceptions within a research field.

Rob Condon receives funding from US National Science Foundation.

Carlos Duarte, Cathy Lucas, Charles Novaes de Santana, Kylie Pitt, and Marina Sanz Martin do 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.

Coping with floods is just one of the issues dams need to deal with. Tatters ❀/Flickr, CC BY-ND

Ahead of the election, the major parties have released different visions for developing northern Australia. The Coalition has committed to dam projects across Queensland; Labor has pledged to support the tourism industry.

These pledges build on the Coalition’s A$5 billion Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, a fund to support large projects, starting on July 1.

The Coalition has pledged A$20 million to support 14 new or existing dams across Queensland should the government be returned to power, as part of a A$2.5 billion plan for dams across northern Australia.

Labor, meanwhile, will redirect A$1 billion from the fund towards tourism, including eco-tourism, indigenous tourism ventures and transport infrastructure (airports, trains, and ports).

It is well recognised that the development of northern Australia will depend on harnessing the north’s abundant water resources. However, it’s also well recognised that the ongoing use of water resources to support industry and agriculture hinges on the health and sustainability of those water resources.

Northern Australia is home to diverse ecosystems, which support a range of ecosystem services and cultural values, and these must be adequately considered in the planning stages.

Sustainability comes second

The white paper for northern Australia focuses almost solely on driving growth and development. Current water resource management policy in Australia, however, emphasises integrated water resource planning and sustainable water use that protects key ecosystem functions.

Our concern is that the commitment to sustainability embedded in the National Water Initiative (NWI), as well as Queensland’s water policies, may become secondary in the rush to “fast track” these water infrastructure projects.

Lessons from the past show that the long-term success of large water infrastructure projects requires due process, including time for consultation, environmental assessments and investigation of alternative solutions.

What is on the table?

The Coalition proposes providing funds to investigate the feasibility of a range of projects, including upgrading existing dams and investigating new dams. The majority of these appear to be focused on increasing the reliability of water supplies in regional urban centres. Few target improved agricultural productivity.

These commitments add to the already proposed feasibility study (A$10 million) of the Ord irrigation scheme in the Northern Territory and the construction of the Nullinga Dam in Queensland. And the A$15 million northern Australia water resources assessment being undertaken by CSIRO, which is focused on the Fitzroy river basin in Western Australia, the Darwin river basins in Northern Territory and the Mitchell river basin in Queensland.

Rethinking dams

New water infrastructure in the north should be part of an integrated investment program to limit overall environmental impacts. Focusing on new dams applies 19th-century thinking to a 21st-century problem, and we have three major concerns about the rush to build dams in northern Australia.

First, the process to establish infrastructure priorities for federal investment is unclear. For instance, it’s uncertain how the projects are connected to Queensland’s State Infrastructure Plan.

Investment in new water infrastructure across northern Australia needs to be part of a long-term water resource plan. This requires clearly articulated objectives for the development of northern Australia, along with assessment criteria that relate to economic, social and environmental outcomes, such as those used in the Murray-Darling Basin Plan.

Second, the federal government emphasises on-stream dams. Dams built across the main river in this way have many well-recognised problems, including:

• lack of environmental flows (insufficient water at the appropriate frequency and duration to support ecosystems)

• flow inversion (higher flows may occur in the dry season than in the wet, when the bulk of rainfall occurs)

• barriers to fish movement and loss of connectivity to wetlands

• water quality and temperature impacts (unless there is a multi-level off-take).

As a minimum, new dams should be built away from major waterways (such as on small, tributary streams) and designed to minimise environmental impacts. This requires planning in the early stages, as such alternatives are extremely difficult to retrofit to an existing system.

Finally, the federal government proposals make no mention of climate change impacts. Irrigation and intensive manufacturing industries demand highly reliable water supplies.

While high-value use of water should be encouraged, new industries need to be able to adapt for the increased frequency of low flows; as well as increased intensity of flood events. Government investment needs to build resilience as well as high-value use.

Detailed planning, not press releases

In place of the rather ad hoc approach to improvements in water infrastructure, such as the projects announced by the federal government in advance of the election, we need a more holistic and considered approach.

The A$20 million investment for 14 feasibility studies and business cases in Queensland represents a relatively small amount of money for each project, and runs the risk of having them undertaken in isolation. The feasibility studies should be part of the entirety of the government’s plan for A$2.5 billion in new dams for northern Australia.

Water resource planning is too important and too expensive to cut corners on planning. Investment proposals for Queensland need to be integrated with water resource planning across the state, and across northern Australia, and with appropriate consideration of climate change impacts.

Fast tracking dams without considering ecosystem impacts, future variability in water supplies, and resilience in local communities merely sets the scene for future problems that will likely demand another round of intervention and reform.

The authors do 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.

Across the world, solar photovoltaics (PV) and wind are the dominant clean energy technologies. This dominance is likely to become overwhelming over the next few years, preventing other clean energy technologies (including carbon capture and storage, nuclear and other renewables) from growing much.

As the graph below shows, PV and wind constitute half of new generation capacity installed worldwide, with fossil, nuclear, hydro and all other renewable energy sources making up the other half. In Australia this dominance is even clearer, with PV and wind constituting virtually all new generation capacity.

Moreover, this trend is set to continue. Wind and PV installation rates grew by 19% in 2015 worldwide, while rates for other technologies were static or declined.

PV and wind dominate because they have already achieved commercial scale, are cheap (and set to get cheaper), and are not constrained by fuel availability, environmental considerations, construction materials, water supply, or security issues.

In fact, PV and wind now have such a large head start that no other low-emission generation technology has a reasonable prospect of catching them. Conventional hydro power cannot keep pace because each country will sooner or later run out of rivers to dam, and biomass availability is severely limited.

Heroic growth rates would be required for nuclear, carbon capture and storage, concentrating solar thermal, ocean energy and geothermal to span the 20- to 200-fold difference in annual installation scale to catch wind and PV – which are themselves growing rapidly.

Both wind and PV access massive economies of scale. Their ability to saturate national electricity markets around the world severely constrains other low-emission technologies. Some of the other technologies may become significant in some regions, but these will essentially be niche markets, such as geothermal in Iceland, or hydro power in Tasmania.

Around 80% of the energy sector could be electrified in the next two decades, including electrification of land transport (vehicles and public transport) and electric heat pumps for heat production. This will further increase opportunities for PV and wind, and allows for the elimination of two-thirds of greenhouse gas emissions (based upon sectoral breakdown of national emissions data).

Storage and integration

What about the oft-cited problems with the variable nature of photovoltaics and wind energy? Fortunately, there is range of solutions that can help them achieve high levels of grid penetration.

While individual PV and wind generators can have very variable outputs, the combined output of thousands of generators is in fact quite predictable when coupled with good weather forecasting and smoothed out over a wide area.

What’s more, PV and wind often produce power under different weather conditions – storms favour wind, whereas calm conditions are often sunny. Rapid improvements in high-voltage DC transmission allows large amounts of power to be transmitted cheaply and efficiently over thousands of kilometres, meaning that the impact of local weather is less important.

Another option is “load management”, in which power demands for things like domestic and commercial water heating, and household and electric car battery charging, are moved from night time to day to coincide with availability of sun and wind. Existing hydro and gas or biogas generators, operated for just a small fraction of the year, can also help.

Finally, mass power storage is already available in the form of pumped hydro energy storage (PHES), in which surplus energy is used to pump water uphill to a storage reservoir, which is then released through a turbine to recover around 80% of the stored energy later on. This technology constitutes 99% of electricity storage worldwide and is overwhelmingly dominant in terms of new storage capacity installed each year (3.4 Gigawatts in 2015).

Australia already has several PHES facilities, such as Wivenhoe near Brisbane and Tumut 3 in the Snowy Mountains. All of these are at least 30 years old, but more can be built to accommodate the storage needs of new wind and PV capacity. Modelling underway at the Australian National University shows that reservoirs containing enough water for only 3-8 hours of grid operation is sufficient to stabilise a grid with about 90% PV and wind – mostly to shift daytime solar power for use at night.

This would require only a few hundred hectares of reservoirs for the Australian grid, and could be accomplished by building a series of “off-river” pumped hydro storages. Unlike conventional “on-river” hydro power, off-river PHES requires pairs of hectare-scale reservoirs, rather like oversized farm dams, located in steep, hilly, farm country, separated by an altitude difference of 200-1000 metres, and joined by a pipe containing a pump and turbine.

One example is the proposed Kidston project in an old gold mine in north Queensland. In these systems water goes around a closed loop, they consume very little water (evaporation minus rainfall), and have a much smaller environmental impact than river-based systems.

How renewables can dominate Australian energy

In Australia, if wind and PV continue at the installation rate required to reach the 2020 renewable energy target (about 1 GW per year each), we would hit 50% renewable electricity by 2030. This rises to 80% if the installation rates double to 2 GW per year each under a more ambitious renewable energy target – the barriers to which are probably more political than technological.

PV and wind will be overwhelmingly dominant in the renewable energy transition because there isn’t time for another low-emission technology to catch them before they saturate the market.

Wind, PV, PHES, HVDC and heat pumps are proven renewable energy solutions in large-scale deployment (100-1,000 GW installed worldwide for each). These technologies can drive rapid and deep cuts to the energy sector’s greenhouse emissions without any heroic assumptions.

Apart from a modest contribution from existing hydroelectricity, other low-emission technologies are unlikely to make significant contributions in the foreseeable future.

Andrew Blakers is a professor engineering at the Australian National University. He works in the area of photovoltaics, supported by grants from ARENA, the ARC, private companies and other bodies.

Hepburn Wind is one of Australia's largest community renewable energy schemes. Hepburn Wind/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

The federal election campaign has highlighted the very different visions of Australia’s renewable energy future held by the major parties. The Coalition government supports the present Renewable Energy Target (RET) of 33,000 gigawatt-hours from large-scale projects in 2020, which it negotiated with the Labor opposition in 2015.

It’s expected to deliver just over a 23% contribution of renewables to the Australian electricity sector in 2020. There is, most likely, only one more federal election before then.

For the longer term, the Coalition proposes no change to this target before 2030 which, given future demand growth, might well see renewables' contribution to Australian electricity supply actually fall.

By comparison, Labor has a target of 50% renewable electricity by 2030 and the Greens a 90% target. Complicating the situation further are the ambitious targets of some state and territory governments.

Targets require means to actually achieve them. The RET is a target, but also a mechanism based around trading in Renewable Energy Certificates. Meeting the agreed 2020 target requires new renewable energy generation to provide these certificates.

The Clean Energy Council estimates that an additional 6,000 megawatts of new renewable generation, requiring around A$10 billion of investment, will be required by 2020.

The new generation and investment required to meet Labor or the Greens' far more ambitious 2030 targets is, of course, far greater.

Energy for the people

Community renewable energy (CRE) may have a key role to play. Community energy can involve supply-side projects such as renewable energy installations and storage, and demand-side projects such as community education, energy efficiency and demand management.

In short, community renewable energy revolves around community ownership, participation, and consequent benefits from community-scale renewable energy projects.

Why would these small-scale projects matter for reaching ambitious renewable energy targets? Surely large industry players are better placed to develop renewables than the community?

Perhaps, but the transition to a renewable energy future will almost certainly require high levels of social consensus and engagement, and community renewable energy can play a key role in building this.

The 2016 edition of the highly authoritative Renewables Global Status Report has just been released, and includes a special chapter on CRE.

If we consider industrialised countries with major progress on renewable energy over the past few decades and ambitious future targets, community energy seems to have played a key role in a number of them.

For example, Denmark has already nearly reached its 50% target for renewable electricity by 2020 and was a pioneer in community energy, beginning in the late 1970s.

Germany reached 32% renewable electricity in 2015 with a target of 40% to 45% by 2025, and has some 850 energy cooperatives. Almost half of its installed capacity is owned by households, communities and farmers.

Community ownership has become a well-established part of the renewable energy sector, and to the energy transition in western countries such as Germany, Denmark, Britain and, increasingly, the United States.

But it is still a fairly new concept to Australia.

Australia’s Renewable Energy Target

One reason for this may be the design of our RET itself.

It is actually two schemes: one specifically tailored for households and small business, and the other for far larger-scale projects.

As a result, Australia’s renewable landscape is characterised by large utility-sized projects, mostly wind, hydro and bioenergy. Large-scale solar now looks to be taking off too.

At the other end of the spectrum are some 1.5 million household solar photovoltaic (PV) systems; indeed, Australia has the most household PV systems per person in the world.

Community renewable projects, by comparison, are usually mid-sized. They lack the economics of larger renewable projects, and the targeted RET support and simple PV grid connection available to households.

Do we need them given the community’s enthusiastic embrace of household PV? Well, not all households have a roof to call their own on which they can install a PV system. For example, 14% of Australians live in apartments. There are also other promising renewable opportunities such as mid-sized wind and biomass projects whose deployment is generally beyond the capabilities of individuals.

Australia’s small but growing community movement with over 70 groups and more than 30 operating projects, would certainly seem to highlight the opportunity that now presents itself here – and raises the question of what governments might do to assist them.

Building support

International experience highlights that a range of policy support and other initiatives are a prerequisite for community energy success. Communities often lack the funding, knowledge, capacities or network to organise and construct a project. Specific support for community energy can help reduce risks, build community capability and increase the economic viability of these projects.

Indeed, it is interesting to note that recently announced, more market-focused, changes to the German Renewable Energy Act are being widely criticised because of their likely adverse impacts on community renewable energy.

In Australia, Labor has pledged A$98.7 million and the Greens a total of A$265.2 million to support CRE projects ahead of the election.

Both commitments include support to provide local groups with technical, legal and administrative expertise as seen in so-called “community powerhouses”, which are modelled on the Moreland Energy Foundation. Funding for a network of these new support organisations could help to leverage the efforts of community members, local governments and private business towards CRE projects.

The Greens' plan also comprises a range of other initiatives such as tax incentives to support the emerging community renewable energy sector.

The Coalition, by comparison, has pledged A$5 million for grants of up to A$15,000 to community groups to install rooftop PV, solar hot water, other small-scale renewables, and battery energy storage systems, as part of their Solar Communities program.

This might seem strange given the opportunity for CRE to create rural and regional investment and jobs. The Green Tea Party movement in the United States highlights that even the most conservative can get behind community renewables.

Importantly, experience in Australia and elsewhere shows that we need to revisit electricity market arrangements, including regulations governing connection and network tariffs, to facilitate CRE. Our research (just accepted for publication in the Journal of Energy Research & Social Science) has also highlighted that local governments can play a key role in supporting community engagement with renewable energy.

Given the opportunity to spread the benefits of renewables more broadly across the community, we really need all levels of government to get involved.

Iain MacGill is a Joint Director of UNSW Australia's Centre for Energy and Environmental Markets. The Centre has received funding from a range of government sources including the Australian Research Council and ARENA. Iain is a member of the ARENA Advisory Panel which provides advice to support the development and selection of projects and initiatives for funding by ARENA. Iain is part of a project funded by the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living exploring opportunties to facilitate community renewable energy in Australia. He contributes unpaid expert advice to a number of government organisations, industry associations and not-for-profit groups in the clean energy area within Australia and internationally.

Franziska Mey is a PhD candidate at the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Science at UNSW Australia. She has received a research grant from the Cooperative Research Centre for Low Carbon Living as part of the Engaged Communities Program exploring opportunities to facilitate community renewable energy in Australia. Franziska Mey is also Director of the Community Power Agency a not for profit organisation dedicated to growing the community energy sector in Australia.

It's quiet out there, too quiet. Outback image from wwww.shutterstock.com

There’s a deafening silence in the ongoing Australian election campaign over the environment. Polling shows increasing public support for greater action on climate change but debate has been mostly missing.

And despite some blows traded over the Great Barrier Reef, the wider environment has made almost no appearance. But this hasn’t always been the case.

From the origins of the environmental movement in the 1970s to the 2007 climate change election that toppled Liberal prime minister John Howard, the environment has been a key battleground, and it could become one again.

Green origins

The environment first emerged as a voting platform in the 1970s, in the wake of controversial proposals to dam Lake Pedder. The United Tasmania Group - a precursor to the Australian Greens party - was formed to oppose the project.

Were it not for the mysterious disappearance of a plane carrying environmental activist Brenda Hean in September 1972, the election that brought us Labor prime minister Gough Whitlam might have had more of a green tinge. Hean’s plan was to sky-write “Save Lake Pedder” over Canberra.

According to Hugh Morgan - former president of the Minerals Council, the Business Council, and the climate-denying Lavoisier Group - the first indication that environmentalism had arrived as a major political force in Australia was the Whitlam Labor Party caucus’s 1975 debate over uranium mining and nuclear power.

But it was not until the 1983 election, with incumbent Liberal prime minister Malcolm Fraser facing off against Labor leader Bob Hawke, that the environment became politically salient with another Tasmanian dam.

After losing the Lake Pedder battle in 1972, the green campaigners were older, wiser and more determined in their fight to stop the Franklin dam.

Fraser offered the Tasmanian government a A$500m coal-fired power station instead of the dam, but was rejected.

Labor said it would use federal powers to forbid the dam if elected. It did so, and won the inevitable High Court case.

Hawke and Paul Keating, prime minister from 1991, prioritised financial and political changes (bringing down tariffs, floating the dollar) over environmental challenges. However, the issues of logging and uranium wouldn’t go away, and were joined first by ozone and then carbon dioxide.

In 1984, with a tight election looming, Hawke failed to make the Queensland government’s refusal to nominate forests for World Heritage listing an issue.

Labor won the 1987 and 1990 elections, and environmentalists’ preferences helped them squeak home on both occasions. Climate change hardly rated a mention.

Conned by greenies?

With their rising power, both sides of politics initially courted green voters. But this tactic quickly fell out of favour, first with the Liberals and then with Labor. In 1992 the Greens, despairing of being able to influence either of the big parties, formed their own.

By late 1992, Keating was lashing out at green groups, saying:

…the green movement was extremist and not listened to any more … The environmental lobbies have no moral lien over the environment. The issue belongs to the Government, to the nation.

It’s perhaps unsurprising then that, according to a source of scholar Joan Staples, Keating reportedly walked into an election planning meeting and announced that “the environment will NOT be one of the priority issues in this election.”

A “bomb” planted on a railway line in northwest Tasmania two days before the 1993 federal election suggested otherwise (it didn’t have a detonator). While media and politician accused “ecoterrorists”; Bob Brown suggested at the time and since that it was a setup to thwart public favour for the Greens.

Nothing changed under the next three year’s of Keating’s government. Another source of Joan Staples recalled that when Keating met green groups before the 1996 election, he walked into the meeting room and pointed at each representative, saying: “Don’t like you. Don’t like you. Don’t know who you are. Don’t like you. She’s alright.”

Despite climbing greenhouse emissions and international pressure on Australia, the environment didn’t feature in the 1998 or 2001 elections, and made only a small but perhaps crucial appearance in 2004 around forestry.

The greatest moral challenge

Liberal prime minister John Howard was unable to ignore the environment three years later. Upon becoming opposition leader in late 2006, Kevin Rudd made climate change not just an issue but “the greatest moral challenge of our generation”.

Howard, who had already tried to keep climate change in a box by reaching for the nuclear option, the Asia Pacific Partnership for Clean Development and Climate and even emissions trading, had no effective reply.

The 2007 federal election, at which Howard became only the second sitting prime minster to lose his seat, has been called, with some justification, “the first climate change election”.

Despite the blood and ink spilt over climate change, it was strangely absent from the 2010 campaign, from which Labor prime minister Julia Gillard eventually emerged victorious. As Laura Tingle has said “it [climate change] wasn’t really something that ever really featured … it just wasn’t there”.

In truth, Gillard had floated a much-derided Citizen’s Assembly ahead of the election. Three years later, despite opposition leader Tony Abbott proclaiming the 2013 poll as a carbon tax referendum, researcher Myra Gurney has found climate change actually rated surprisingly few mentions.

Why the silence?

Besides international positions on climate change, there are any number of local environmental flashpoints that could blow up any day – the Carmichael mine, fracking in New South Wales, or something currently regarded as trivial.
“The environment” has been around as political issue for more than 30 years, and isn’t going to go away, as the environmental and social stresses grow, and the institutional responses lead to “creative self-destruction”.

No doubt both parties will fall over themselves to spruik their support for renewable energy, which is akin to motherhood and apple pie.

What is striking about the history of climate change and federal politics is just how quiet politicians become once they get into campaign mode and face scrutiny for the specifics of their policy proposals.

Perhaps they simply have no answers to awkward questions of what we do to replace our fossil fuel infrastructure and the power of the fossil fuel lobby.

Marc Hudson 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.

Australia's Renewable Energy Target was reduced in 2015. Wind turbine image from www.shutterstock.com

With the Australian federal election just over a week away, it’s a good time to review the key milestones in Australian climate policy since the last federal election in September 2013.

After winning office, the Abbott government successfully repealed the “carbon tax”. However, an eclectic group of senators banded together to thwart attempts to remove other elements of Julia Gillard’s carbon price package, including several influential climate change agencies.

Heading into the July 2 election, both parties are clear on their climate policy platforms, committing to distinct approaches to meet international and domestic obligations.

Labor has pledged to establish two emissions trading schemes and achieve a goal of 50% renewables by 2030. While the Coalition, under prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, is standing by its Direct Action plan and the pursuit of technological innovation.

The timeline below highlights Australian climate policy interventions from the past three years. A more comprehensive survey of the climate and clean air policy landscape since the last election is detailed in a working paper from the Australian-German Climate and Energy College.

The timeline below is best viewed on a full screen browser window. To navigate, click on the arrow on the right to move forward (and on the left to move back).

Annabelle Workman receives funding to undertake her PhD through a Strategic Australian Postgraduate Award scholarship. She has been an employee of the National Health and Medical Research Council, and is affiliated with the Climate and Health Alliance.

Anita Talberg is on an Australian Postgraduate Award PhD scholarship.

AAP/Lukas Coch

The endorsement for coal mining from the Labor-Coalition duopoly that the election campaign has seen in the last week makes the token appeals that have been made about tackling climate change even more disingenuous.

In this election campaign, the major parties have only brought up climate change when they have been pressed to do so at public forums, like leaders’ debates, the ABC’s Q&A, or when they treat social media as something that needs to be quelled.

The Coalition’s response is simply to say that Australia participated in the Paris agreement, and that is good enough. Labor, on the other hand, points to having outbid the Coalition on targets. Yet neither party is planning to deliver the cuts needed for Australia to play its part in keeping global warming below the 2℃ threshold.

Which leads us back to a question I will deal with at the end of this article: if polls are consistently showing that Australian voters want climate change on the election agenda, why are the leaders keeping so quiet about it?

Neither party is shy of talking up coal, however. Bill Shorten declared last week that a Labor government would not ban coal mining – and that it would be part of Australia’s energy needs for the foreseeable future.

But then on Tuesday, Attorney-General George Brandis, campaigning for Queensland’s most marginal seat of Capricornia, put in one of the pluckiest coal-selling performances of the campaign. He cited the gigantic Adani mine in central Queensland a saviour for the electorate.

We know that Adani, the massive Indian coal company, wants to develop the Carmichael mine, which according to some estimates could generate up to 10,000 jobs. And people in Rockhampton know that and they know that the Greens are doing everything they possibly can to prevent the development of the Adani mine.

They see their future prosperity as being bound up in the development of the Adani mine, and they know that if there were to be a Labor-Greens government, that would be the end of the Adani mine, that would be the end of coal mining in central Queensland, and that would be the end of their best shot at economic prosperity in the future.

But what doesn’t add up here is that around the world, coal is in terminal decline, while the future for renewables is looking very bright and secure.

Just to the north, the federal government has quarantined A$1 billion from the Clean Energy Finance Corporation for projects to “save” the Great Barrier Reef. But this money is demonstrably not going to create any jobs that are relevant to Capricornia. Apparently pork-barrelling is not needed in Capricornia, as the promise of coal is a ready replacement.

But the largest contradiction of all is the complete illogicality of claiming (even if without foundation) to save the reef and solve climate change in one Queensland electorate, while proposing to unleash one of the largest deposits of CO₂ to the world’s atmosphere from the electorate next door.

It is worth heeding 350.org’s Bill McKibben’s warning that if all the coal in the Galilee Basin, of which the Adani mine holds one of the largest deposits, is exported for burning, it would use up 30% of the world’s carbon budget. 100% of the budget gets you 2℃.

And new climate research looking at the difference between 1.5℃ and 2℃, suggests the latter will make what we experience at the upper limits of present-day climate variability the new normal around the globe, and worse closer to the equator.

The influence of the mining and energy industry on election campaigns

This leads us to ask serious questions about the influence that mining and energy companies have on major political parties during election campaigns.

There is some variation in which particular mining companies are favoured by particular parties. Labor is certainly not as keen on Adani as the Coalition is. But, in general, the support for fossil-fuel industries is part of the DNA of the major parties today.

It is well known there is a perpetually revolving door between mining/energy companies and politicians/staffers from the major parties.

Take the Labor Party. When Labor lost the last election, Martin Ferguson, Craig Emerson and Greg Combet either took up management jobs with mining and energy companies and associations or worked as consultants for them.

Combet, a former climate change minister, took up consultancies for coal seam gas companies AGL and Santos. Ferguson, resources minister during Labor’s last term of office, landed the position as chairman of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association’s advisory committee only six months after leaving politics.

With the Coalition, former National Party leader Mark Vaile is chairman of Whitehaven Coal, the company at the centre of protest and controversy at the Maules Creek mine. Another former National Party leader, John Anderson, became chairman of Eastern Star Gas only two years after quitting Canberra.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Anne Davies last year found a complex web of interlocking networks of influence that tied together NSW Premier Mike Baird’s office, then-prime minister Tony Abbott’s office, and energy and mining companies including AGL and Santos.

At times, these companies brought together high-profile Liberal and Labor politicians. Santos engaged a lobbying company, Bespoke Approach, which listed former Labor senator Nick Bolkus and former Liberal South Australian premier John Olson as directors.

AGL lays claim to the same cross-party alliance between former Labor minister John Dawkins and former Liberal senator Helen Coonan, who co-chair lobbying firm GRA Cosway.

But what is less-well-known is the degree to which mining and energy companies have enticed media advisors from the major parties to walk through that revolving door. Davies included an interactive graphic in her report that shows the rotation of media people between Canberra, mining and energy companies, and state politics.

Understanding the rotation of media advisors does not just open up the question of lobbying – it also explains how governments may feel obliged to legitimate their support for fossil fuel.

Such staffers are a real prize for the companies. They give them access to the media strategies of government departments, which may translate into real influence about the kind of messages that might be most favourable to their company’s operations.

Carbon-laced political donations

It is now a matter of public record that fossil-fuel interests have bankrolled climate denialism around the world for decades. The case of the collapsing edifice of Peabody Energy, once the world’s largest coal company, is a paradigm example of this. Fossil-fuel companies even sponsored the Paris climate summit.

But can the donations of fossil-fuel companies also influence election campaigns? Well, yes they can, but we won’t find out who and how this might be happening until after the election.

A recent Four Corners program delved into the lack of transparency of Australia’s donation process. For example, knowledge of who is funding the parties in this election campaign won’t be revealed until the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) releases its data in February next year.

But we do know from the last election campaign that mining and energy companies loomed large as donors for both Labor and Liberal parties. The AEC’s data release from February 2014 showed the Liberal Party received more than $1.8 million directly from energy companies that supported the repeal of an emissions trading scheme (ETS).

Even more was donated via the Liberal-linked Cormack Foundation. Two of the biggest “receipts” to the Cormack Foundation were BHP and Rio Tinto.

Labor received only $453,000 from mining and energy companies in the context of the immense industry opposition to an emissions trading scheme.

Speculating on 2016 party donations

The 2013 election was all about mining and energy companies donating in return for killing the carbon tax. This has now been completed. Job done, time to move on.

With the carbon tax gone, and millions in corporate welfare flowing directly to the mining and energy companies from taxpayers, all that the PR departments of these companies would be worried about is that climate change is kept off the election agenda.

Such an environment would suit the fossil-fuel industries as they fight for a few more years of viability in a world that is abandoning them. As constitutional lawyer George Williams has observedof all forms of corporate donations:

These companies are hoping that giving money will lead to outcomes. That’s why they’re doing it, and that’s one of the key problems of the current system.

So, here is a hypothetical PR strategy that would make perfect sense for the mining and energy sectors in this election, in eight easy steps.

Step One: Mining and Energy companies donate to major political parties with a request to drop climate change from their campaigns.

Step Two: Major political parties agree not to run on a climate platform and continue to heavily subsidise the operations of mining companies.

Step Three: Parties use money for broadcast and newspaper campaign budgets.

Step Four: Newspapers and TV and radio outlets sell the attention spans of audiences to the advertisers of political parties for large sums.

Step Five: Major parties expect that audiences will be persuaded to vote for one of them, while fossil-fuel company donations are justified by backing both possible winners who will look after their interests. The investment would only fail if one of the parties had to share power with minor parties or independents.

Step Six: Major parties continue to support coal and energy companies, offering them mining exploration licences, mining leases and export licences.

Step Seven: A part of the donations that energy companies give to parties is paid by consumers of increased electricity prices as well as taxpayers who are subsidising the corporate welfare that goes to these companies.

Step Eight: With favourable regulatory conditions for mining and electricity generation, mining and energy companies have greater certainty with which to expand their investments, operations and profits – some of which can be injected back into the political process at election time.

To the extent that this hypothesis is proven to be correct, and repeats the processes at play in the 2013 election, what emerges is that although Australia enjoys the free speech of a multi-party democracy, discussion of climate change is not free from the influence of capital in the election process.

To the extent that the major donors to Labor and Coalition are dominated by mining and energy, it is in the interests of this industry to finance a political duopoly that encourages the closure of public debates that do not conform to its interests.

The winners in this process can be identified as a media-political-industrial complex. This complex is a kind of three-way protectorate, where each group looks after itself by looking after the other two.

Broadcasters and newspapers are winners as they generate large revenues at election time that is channelled to them by political parties from the donors.

Mining and energy companies are winners, as they are able to distract voters from climate change and reduce pressure on parties to decarbonise the economy and regulate against their activities.

The parties are winners as they only need to neglect climate change in return for millions of dollars in donations to their election campaigns.

The losers are the voters, who are not only forced to subsidise the political conditions that make their per-capita emissions four times higher than the global average, but also subsidise the conditions in which climate is taken off the public agenda.

The biggest losers are our grandchildren, who are going to inherit the climate mess created by the manipulative, influence-peddling mediocrity that plays out over three-year election cycles – and not just in Australia.