The Conversation

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.

In case you had forgotten, electricity prices were a really big deal in the last federal election campaign in 2013, albeit often disguised under the rubric of axe the tax. Then Coalition spokesmen quite deliberately and repeatedly conflated the term carbon tax with electricity tax.

Clearly, this conflation was deemed acceptable in the court of public opinion. The justification was that Labor’s carbon pricing mechanism specifically targeted the electricity sector rather than other key emission intensive sectors of the economy such as land-use and transport.

This time round, in the 2016 election campaign, electricity prices are much less prominent. The Coalition would have us believe that by axing the tax they have driven electricity prices down. The flow on effect from reduced household expenses is a rise in consumer confidence. And that, we are told, is a key stimulus in maintaining growth in face of strong economic headwinds, and one we shouldn’t risk by changing government.

Given the success of the Coalition strategy in the last election, Labor is understandably gun-shy on electricity prices. It also likely wants to avoid provoking further Coalition delight in spruiking one of their favourite epithets - Electicity Bill.

However, this is all a bit strange, because wholesale electricity prices have almost doubled over what they were at the equivalent stage of the last election cycle. Incredibly, they are 300% above what they were in the 2010 election.

Wholesale electricity prices in the 4 week period prior to the last four Australian federal elections. For the 2016 election cycle, the period is 23rd May - 20th June. For the previous three elections it is the 4 week period finishing on the election day. Prices are volume-weighted and differentiated by the region. Data from AEMO half-hour aggregated price and demand tables.

The current record wholesale electricity prices provoke a number of questions, not the least of which is if electricity prices are so important why is consumer confidence so buoyant? Perhaps the answer is that wholesale electricity prices really don’t matter that much. And if that is the case then shouldn’t we fess up to the idea axing the tax may have been largely immaterial to our economic outlook.

What’s happened to prices

The figure below shows the wholesale electricity prices for NSW since 2011, with the four week period May 23 through June 20 indicated in red.

Half-hour trading interval prices for NSW, from 2011 on. Red colours highlight the 4-week period 23 May - 20 June, with volume weighted prices in red boxes. The period of carbon pricing is shown in purple shading. Black boxes show the prices adjusted by removing the carbon prices assuming an emission intensity of 0.9 tonnes per MWhour. Units are $/MWhour. Numbers along the top indicate the number of intervals when prices exceeded $250/MWhour in grey for the calendar year, red for the 4-week period.

Prior to the start of carbon pricing period in July 2012, NSW wholesale prices averaged about $30-35/MWhr, reflecting subdued market conditions due to an ongoing decline in demand for grid supplied electricity. That decline started around 2009 and continued to 2015. During the carbon pricing years (mid 2012 - mid 2014) prices jumped by ~ $20 (per megawatt hour), but volatility remained very subdued as indicated by the spread in the half hour prices. Following the rescinding of the carbon pricing legislation, wholesale prices fell back to near 2011 to early 2012 levels, but only for a short period of time. Over the last year prices have risen relentlessly, and volatility has returned dramatically. Half hourly prices now regularly hit $300 per megawatt hour.

In NSW, at $101/MWhour for the last four weeks, prices are almost 250% higher than the same period last year and almost double the equivalent period in the carbon pricing years. As illustrated below, other states show comparable trends, highlighting the exceptional nature of current prices. With the exception of anomalous prices in SA in 2013, current prices are way above anything that has been experienced in recent times.

Volume-weighted wholesale prices in four mainland states for the 4 week period May 24 - June 21, for 2011 on. Data from AEOM half-hour aggregated price and demand tables. Why are prices so high?

In fact, across the eastern states prices are now averaging higher than at any time since the height of the Millennium Drought in 2007. Then drought conditions affected the supply from hydro stations and from some thermal (coal) generation due to limited availability of cooling water. With demand then growing at around 2% each year, the drought tipped the balance between demand and supply, driving up prices dramatically. The breaking of the drought in 2009 coincided with a sustained decline in demand for electricity, at around 1% per year, though to 2015. Despite some power plant closures (notably Anglesea and Northern) and mothballing of others, the market has been in a state of considerable oversupply. Notwithstanding the impacts of carbon pricing, both prices and volatility have been remarkably low, especially in NSW and Victoria.

Since early 2016, rises in price arguably reflect a tightening of the demand-supply balance, as demand has begun to pick up.

While that is what might be expected in a market that is operating efficiently it is unlikely to be the full story, since there is still very substantial underutilised capacity. For example NSW black coal generation is still only operating at about 50% full capacity.

With such excess in relatively low cost generators, there is suspicion that the market is not operating particularly efficiently. This suggestion has been made recently in Queensland, and the AEMC has indeed flagged this issue with a request for rule change that is supported by both the regulator and the operator in their submissions (see Note 1).

Should electricity prices be part of the election agenda?

Clearly the question of price manipulation in our energy market is significant and speaks to existing market rules and the powers of the regulator. The question of market efficiency is crucial and should be addressed as part of a bipartisan approach to energy pricing.

The broader question, and one that will no doubt divide the key parties, relates to the causes and consequences of the current high electricity prices.

As alluded earlier, there would appear to be an incongruency in the Coalition position with regard to the current prices. However, it is important to note that the market prices have yet to flow through to domestic retail prices. The Coalition should be worried if and when they do. According to the logic of their own axe the tax mantra, any flow through of the wholesale price rises should stymie what it argues is a somewhat fragile consumer confidence. And along with that, so to the edifice it has built in its own attacks on Labor’s economic plans.

However, it is important to understand that even at $100 MWhour, wholesale prices are still less than 50% of the standing offer of most domestic retail contracts (see note 2). That there is fat in the system is indicated by the preparedness of most retailers to offer discounts of up to 30% on standing offers for such things as paying on time. Such sweeteners amount to more than the rise in wholesale price we have seen over the last year, and given the vertically integrated nature of the much of the industry, at least some of what is gained on the generation side can delivered by the retail side with little detriment to shareholder value.

For small generators without retail arms, and for new entrants, the wholesale price rises are a godsend. For the first time in a decade wholesale prices are approaching the cost of new generation build. With an ageing, emission intensive generation sector, there is a desperate need for new build. No matter what technology is contemplated nothing is viable at less than a long-term average of about $70-$80/MWhour.

So the current prices should be encouraging with regard to many of the challenges facing the industry. Providing current prices are reflective of an efficient market one would hope for bipartisan recognition that current prices are appropriate to the challenge at hand.

However it should also be acknowledged that such prices are not sufficient to encourage new build alone. We know that adding new capacity to the system without any withdrawal will collapse the price back to the marginal cost of coal-fired-power production of around $30/MWhour or lower. This is particularly the case for new-build renewables which have the paradoxical effect of lowering market clearing prices because of their negligible short run costs. The prospect of such a collapse in prices has an analogue in what we have seen in the recent Saudi-led onslaught against largely US-based unconventionals, and is a powerful disincentive for new investment.

Given a primary driver for new build is the necessity to reduce emissions, rational economists are unanimous that the most efficient mechanism to facilitate transition to a low emission generation portfolio is to appropriately price emissions.

While we suspect the Prime Minister really does know this, we also know he is bound by a party room that is still a long way away from abandoning ideology for rationality, on this issue at least.

So on this point we must acknowledge any chance for bipartisanship ends. In the meanwhile, the rest of us might contemplate whether market prices would actually be any higher if we still had a carbon price.

While I don’t know the answer, my suspicion is probably not.

Notes

[1] The request for the rule change was motivated by recent incidences of strategic late bidding by generators and purported manipulation of the market by withdrawing Queensland generation, seen by some as a market distortion accentuated by the current market structure of 5 minute dispatch intervals and the 30 minute trading intervals.

[2] Of course, the elephant in the room in electricity prices remains the distribution network. The cost we are paying for the poles and wires is unacceptably high, especially with the cost of capital tumbling across the world.

Disclosure

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

The Fat-tailed Dunnart is found in box gum grassy woodland. Damian Michael

There a many reasons to be unhappy about the state of the environment. But we’ve recently found some good news: a conservation program that works.

You probably haven’t heard of the Environmental Stewardship Program (ESP). It was a market-based agri-environment program that ran between 2007 and 2012, which funded farmers to conserve threatened ecosystems on their property. Land managers were given contracts for up to 15 years to deliver results.

Overall, 297 land managers will receive about A$152 million over roughly 18 years to implement their conservation management plans. The last of these contracts will end in 2027. No new funding rounds are expected.

There’s been a variety of market-based programs for conservation on farmland in Australia, but we don’t know what the total investment is to date. And we are not aware of scientific monitoring that demonstrates their impact.

Endangered ecosystems

The box gum grassy woodlands of eastern Australia are home to several hundred species of native birds, including the iconic superb and turquoise parrots, thousands of native plants (such as the chocolate lily that leaves a deliciously rich and sweet aroma in native pastures), and beautiful mammals like the squirrel glider.

Box gum grassy woodlands have been 95% to 99% cleared for wheat and sheep grazing and are listed as nationally critically endangered.

Box gum grassy woodland is found across eastern Australia. Author provided.

Under the ESP, more than 150 farmers from southern New South Wales to southeast Queensland have been funded to conserve the box gum grassy woodland ecosystem. This is one of the largest projects of its type in the world.

Farmers undertake controlled grazing by livestock in woodland remnants, replant native woodland, avoid firewood harvesting, cease bushrock removal, and control weeds and feral animals.

But we can’t know if a conservation program is working unless we monitor it. Fortunately, soon after it started, the Australian National University was commissioned to design a monitoring program for the ESP. We have now been monitoring these efforts for six years - and the results are exciting.

Better for wildlife…

So far, the data show that the farmers are doing a good job and it is money very well spent.

To find out if the program is working, we have to compare managed (conserved) areas with “control patches” - patches where land owners haven’t done anything. This comparison shows that funded management patches have fewer environmental weeds, greater native plant species richness, more natural regeneration of native plants, smaller areas of erodible bare ground, and more species of woodland birds.

In the space of six years, the Australian government, in concert with Australian farmers (through modest investment), has generated significant, positive environmental changes on farms. In fact, the box gum project can set the bar for many other conservation programs.

…better for farmers

The positive impacts go beyond improvement of the environment, because there have been notable social benefits too.

Farmers are now highly motivated to deliver better environmental outcomes on their farms and showcase the integration of the multiple objectives of agricultural production and conservation.

The income stream they received also helped some survive the almost unprecedented hardships associated with the Millennium Drought in the mid- to late 2000s.

More generally, regular feedback and discussions between ANU field ecologists and landholders over the past six years has provided anecdotal evidence that farmers engaged in successful environmental programs suffer fewer problems with mental illness. This landholder goodwill and change in attitude towards land management is something that will far outweigh the 15-year investment in the program.

A model for conservation

Despite its success, the program has not been without detractors who see the policy and monitoring as over-engineered or boutique. This is primarily because its design, implementation, and monitoring standards are politically and bureaucratically inconvenient. They are not well suited to a reactive, short-term focused society.

In the case of monitoring, some considered it wasteful to establish and monitor control sites (areas where there has been no management). Yet without the controls, we couldn’t tell this positive story.

This is an exciting example of successful private-public land conservation and how it can be integrated with agricultural production (the primary land use of much of Australia’s land surface).

The long-term funding model is a more sensible approach than one-off payments, and provides a realistic timeframe to achieve results.

The Australian government should be congratulated and encouraged to invest in more programs of this type. It has worked because it was designed specifically to link farmers, scientists and policy makers.

Billions of dollars are expended on the environment in Australia every year. Landscape recovery will span multiple governmental cycles and every dollar must be spent wisely. Programs like ESP give some guidance on how large-scale environmental programs can be more successful.

For further information on conservation programs like the Environmental Stewardship Program, see our new e-book

David Lindenmayer receives funding from the Australian Government, the Australian Research Council, the Murray Local Land Services and the Riverina Local Land Services. David Lindenmayer is a member of the Canberra Ornithologists Group and Birdlife Australia.

Chloe Sato was employed by ANU under the National Environmental Research Program to complete research on the Environmental Stewardship Program. ANU received funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Environmental Stewardship Program.

Dan Florance is an employee of ANU and ANU receives funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Box Gum Grassy Woodlands Project of the Environmental Stewardship Program.

Emma Burns receives funding from the Australian Government through the National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy. Emma is an employee of ANU and ANU receives funding from the Australian Government Department of the Environment to conduct scientific monitoring for the Box Gum Grassy Woodlands Project of the Environmental Stewardship Program.

If you despair of Australia’s lacklustre climate policies, you might take heart from the Greens’ stated goal of limiting global warming to 1.5℃. But are the party’s own policies up to the job?

Shortly after announcing this target late last year, the Greens launched an ambitious renewables policy, promising to achieve 90% renewable electricity by 2030 and save money in the process.

But as wonderful as it sounds, even this plan is insufficient to meet a 1.5℃ target.

The arithmetic is simple. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), to preserve a two-thirds chance of avoiding 1.5℃ warming, future carbon dioxide emissions must not exceed 200 billion tonnes. As annual global emissions are now around 40 billion tonnes, we will blow the budget within five years.

Now let’s suppose that the entire world achieves the Greens’ emissions reduction targets of 60-80% by 2030 (relative to 2000 levels), and 100% by 2040. Assuming a steady trajectory to 70% in 2030 and another steady move to full decarbonisation a decade later, that puts global CO₂ emissions by 2040 at more than 400 billion tonnes – far beyond the budget described above.

Idealism vs realism

Does it matter if the numbers don’t add up? After all, the rest of the world has exactly the same problem. If we want to avoid losing hope of averting dangerous climate change, surely wishful thinking and calls to action are better than no target at all?

But there is a growing group of energy experts, environmentalists and conservation scientists who are worried by the environmental movement’s failure to process the full implications of the climate challenge.

Take the Greens’ promise to achieve 90% renewable electricity by 2030. There are several major economies – Switzerland, Norway, Sweden, France – that already have near-zero-emission electricity. But all of them use large amounts of hydroelectricity, nuclear power, or both.

Rather than follow the only proven path to clean electricity, the Greens propose that Australia should emulate Germany’s Energiewende policy.

While Energiewende has expanded renewable energy, it has failed to cut emissions. True, the emissions intensity of German electricity is about 40% lower than Australia’s. But both Germany’s total greenhouse emissions and the carbon intensity of its electricity have plateaued, despite record investments in renewable energy. German emissions intensity remains an order of magnitude higher than those of the nuclear/hydro countries such as Switzerland and France.

Germany’s problem is that it has had to back up its intermittent wind and solar generation with fossil fuels. The Greens promise that canny Australian engineers will succeed where Germans have failed, by using “pumped hydro” power storage power storage and concentrated solar thermal energy.

However, the jury is still out on these technologies – and even ClimateWorks, whose modelling the Greens uses, acknowledges that “large investments in Research and Design are needed to improve the performance of existing low-carbon technologies to required levels”.

Spain’s 20-megawatt Gemasolar power plant shows that solar thermal and storage can supply baseload power. But it would take around 100 Gemasolars to replace a typical major coal-fired power station, and bigger solar thermal plants, such as Ivanpah, the world’s largest, have not produced the expected output. While it would be foolhardy to write off solar thermal, it’s also mightily brave to bet the climate on it.

Making up the shortfall

Is an all-renewables future possible in Australia? Of course. But it won’t come fast, cheaply or without significant environmental impacts. The most authoritative “100% renewables study” so far was released in 2013 by the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO). Although the Greens requested this report, they didn’t like its conclusions: that an all-renewable grid would need baseload power from geothermal (not yet a scalable technology) and bioenergy (which has a range of knock-on environmental impacts).

Part of the problem with the Greens' approach is that it made many of its energy choices long before climate change was a major issue. The party emerged as a political force through campaigns against nuclear technologies and the Franklin River dam. It has always backed wind and solar (which now provide around 2% of global energy), but has opposed the world’s two largest sources of low-carbon energy: hydroelectrcity (6.8%) and nuclear (now 4.4%).

Am I suggesting that the Greens embrace nuclear power? While that is unlikely given their deeply held political commitments, it is not unreasonable to ask for an end to the anti-nuclear fearmongering. The Greens’ national policy platform demands the closure of the OPAL reactor south of Sydney, which produces radioisotopes for cancer detection and treatment. Without such reactors, life-saving nuclear medicine would become impossible.

The Greens are right that nuclear cannot compete on cost with coal, and if we only wanted to halve our emissions then gas and renewables would be the logical choice. But if our goal is zero-carbon electricity, and given the uncertainty about the pace of innovation in other low-carbon technologies, it is worth heeding the advice of South Australia’s nuclear Royal Commission that “action is taken now to plan for [nuclear’s] potential implementation”.

Of course the Greens are right that wind and solar must make a much larger contribution to our future energy mix. But to hope that we can avoid dangerous warming without drawing on every available tool is to put ideology before arithmetic.

Truly radical climate action means we shouldn’t unconditionally rule out any promising technology – from carbon capture and storage to low-methane genetically modified crops.

Rather than accept the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) findings about carbon budget overshoot and the consequent need for “negative emissions” technologies such as carbon capture and storage, Green politicians promote alternative research outlining all-renewable paths to global decarbonisation. Such studies assume both unprecedented technological progress, and extreme global inequality in energy use (for example by assuming that Indians will be content to use 84% less energy than Australians).

Embracing science

Of course, this is not to say that the two major Australian parties, with their underwhelming climate ambitions, are any better. Yet so successfully have the Greens cast themselves as the party of climate science that it’s easy to forget how radically they dissent from a scientific worldview in their responses to climate change.

Former NASA climatologist James Hansen, often dubbed the father of climate awareness, has branded green opposition to nuclear power as a major obstacle to solving the climate problem. In response, he was pilloried and branded a “denier”.

The idea that greedy polluters are the only barrier to an all-renewable future presents climate action as a simple moral choice. Unfortunately, caring for the planet is not so easy. Effective mitigation requires tough choices among imperfect options.

To be effective, we environmentalists must examine our own biases as carefully as we do those of our opponents. And we must do more than accept climate science; we must also use science in our search for solutions.

Jonathan Symons is a former Greens campaign manager in the federal division of Melbourne. He will be a participant in the Breakthrough Institute's 2016 annual dialogue.

The Great Barrier Reef has become a major issue in the federal election campaign, with the stakes raised by the most severe bleaching ever documented and suggestions that the next few years will be our last chance to avert major damage to this World Heritage-listed icon.

Last week, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and federal environment minister Greg Hunt announced a further commitment of up to A$1 billion over ten years, from an existing A$10 billion “special account” administered by the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.

Turnbull said that this new Reef Fund will provide loans to finance more energy- and water-efficient irrigation systems on farms, as well as improved pesticide and fertiliser application systems. He also raised the possibility of the fund being used to finance solar panels on farms, saying:

The Reef Fund will support clean energy projects in the Reef catchment. It will finance solar panels and other renewable energy substitutes on farms as well as more energy efficient equipment in agriculture, local government and tourism.

The government says that this financing will be on top of A$461 million already pledged for the Great Barrier Reef, currently planned to be spent on incentive programs to help farmers move to more “water quality friendly” management practices as has been happening over the past seven years.

Labor, for its part, has pledged A$500 million over five years – including A$123 million as a continuation of an existing Coalition pledge – to be split between scientific research, pollution reduction and restoration projects, and reef management.

Is this enough money?

We already have relatively robust estimates of the funds needed to bring the reef’s water quality into line with the government’s official water quality guidelines set by Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in 2010. Unfortunately, we also know it will cost much more than either major party has pledged so far.

One estimate (on which I worked) puts the cost at between A$5 billion and A$10 billion over ten years. These amounts are far in excess of the current spending trajectory, based on what has already been spent: just under half a billion dollars on farming and water-quality management, as outlined above.

This funding has achieved some limited success in reducing pollution on the Great Barrier Reef. But it is now clear that much more funding and regulation will be needed to meet the required water quality guidelines.

How much money have the parties pledged?

Financial commitments, both in government budgets and election pledges, are difficult to assess accurately. Funding can be committed across several budgets, and it is important to distinguish between no-strings funding and loan financing.

Here is a breakdown of what the three leading parties are promising to deliver.

The Coalition will spend A$450 million over 6 years (from various programs including Reef Trust and Reef Plan) or about A$350 million over 5 years (from this July) plus the new A$1 billion loan facility, which will be portioned out over 10 years.

Labor has made a A$500-million, five-year commitment, albeit contingent on maintaining A$123 million of funding previously pledged by the Coalition, with A$377 million representing newly pledged funds.

Labor’s half-billion-dollar total can be broken down into A$377 million of direct, on-ground spending plus other current ongoing budget funding. The other roughly A$130 million is designated for research and organisational management.

The Greens have pledged A$500 million in new funding, to be spent on improved farming practices and other land restoration projects, plus a A$1.2-billion loan facility to help farmers transition to low-pollution farming methods. Both schemes would be administered over five years.

The Greens have also promised to retain A$370 in existing funding for water-quality projects, which it says brings its total financial plan for the reef to more than A$2 billion.

The Greens have also promised to use the law to protect the reef, by using the powers of the GBR Marine Park Act of 1975 to regulate polluting activities in the reef’s nearby river catchments. Tightening these regulations could help to reduce pollution faster, potentially reducing the amount of money needed to hit the reef’s pollution targets.

The Queensland government has also allocated A$90 million to spend on direct water quality improvement measures over the next few years. It will also use its regulatory powers under the state’s Great Barrier Reef Protection Amendment Act of 2009 to improve the region’s farming practices.

Loans and profits

One large question hanging over the the Coalition and Greens' loan pledges is whether farmers will be keen to accept this financing, even at “low” interest rates. As many farmers are currently unwilling even to accept grant money to improve practices which provide them with little financial benefit, it is difficult to foresee a wide takeup of a loan facility.

Many environmentally beneficial changes to farm practice bring no net profit for the farmers themselves. Farming lobby group Canegrowers has questioned whether this is the best approach, arguing that the industry would rather receive dollar-matching grants than loans.

The Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) is currently providing loans via the major banks to allow farmers to invest in energy-efficient equipment, with interest rates discounted by up to 70 basis points relative to commercial rates. This would be the model that would most likely be followed for the new proposal.

Future loans doled out under the Coalition’s A$1 billion fund would need to remain within the CEFC’s broad investment mandate of funding projects and technologies that reduce greenhouse emissions. Thus, more efficient fertiliser use, higher-efficiency irrigation pumps, and low-till cropping would all fit the bill.

It is unclear, however, whether other farming improvements that could benefit the reef – such as gully stabilisation or repair – would be judged to come under the mandate of the CEFC loans, or whether they might be excluded.

Regardless, the proposed loan program will still not put nearly enough funds into what is a pressing issue, and a parallel system of focused grants for individual pollution-reduction projects would seem to us to be a sensible approach.

Without stronger regulation (which only the Greens are suggesting) and considerably more funding than any of the main parties is yet willing to provide – not to mention stronger action on emissions reductions throughout the economy – none of these policies promises a particularly rosy future for the Great Barrier Reef.

This article was co-written by David Rickards, Managing Director of Social Enterprise Finance Australia.

Jon Brodie receives research funding from the Australian and Queensland Governments, the UN, Bancroft Station Wines, Queensland NRM bodies such as the NQ Dry Tropics NRM Group.

Fossil fuel industry-funded organisations have played a big role in climate denial. Coal power image from www.shutterstock.com

The fossil fuel industry has spent many millions of dollars on confusing the public about climate change. But the role of vested interests in climate science denial is only half the picture.

Interest in this topic has spiked with the latest revelation regarding coalmining company Peabody Energy. After Peabody filed for bankruptcy earlier this year, documentation became available revealing the scope of Peabody’s funding to third parties. The list of funding recipients includes trade associations, lobby groups and climate-contrarian scientists.

This latest revelation is significant because in recent years, fossil fuel companies have become more careful to cover their tracks. An analysis by Robert Brulle found that from 2003 to 2010, organisations promoting climate misinformation received more than US$900 million of corporate funding per year.

However, Brulle found that from 2008, open funding dropped while funding through untraceable donor networks such as Donors Trust (otherwise known as the “dark money ATM”) increased. This allowed corporations to fund climate science denial while hiding their support.

The decrease in open funding of climate misinformation coincided with efforts to draw public attention to the corporate funding of climate science denial. A prominent example is Bob Ward, formerly of the UK Royal Society, who in 2006 challenged Exxon-Mobil to stop funding denialist organisations.

John Cook interviews Bob Ward at COP21, Paris.

The veils of secrecy have been temporarily lifted by the Peabody bankruptcy proceedings, revealing the extent of the company’s third-party payments, some of which went to fund climate misinformation. However, this is not the first revelation of fossil fuel funding of climate misinformation – nor is it the first case involving Peabody.

In 2015, Ben Stewart of Greenpeace posed as a consultant to fossil fuel companies and approached prominent climate denialists, offering to pay for reports promoting the benefits of fossil fuels. The denialists readily agreed to write fossil-fuel-friendly reports while hiding the funding source. One disclosed that he had been paid by Peabody to write contrarian research. He had also appeared as an expert witness and written newspaper op-eds.

John Cook interviews Ben Stewart, Greenpeace at COP21, Paris. The bigger picture of fossil-fuelled denial

Peabody’s funding of climate change information and misinformation is one episode in a much larger history of fossil-fuel-funded misinformation. An analysis of more than 40,000 texts by contrarian sources found that organisations who received corporate funding published more climate misinformation, a trend that increased over time.

The following figure shows the use of the claim that “CO₂ is good” (a favourite argument of Peabody Energy) has increased dramatically among corporate-funded sources compared with unfunded ones.

Prevalence of denialist claim from corporate funded and non-funded sources. Farrell (2015)

In 1991, Western Fuels Association combined with other groups representing fossil fuel interests to produce a series of misinformation campaigns. This included a video promoting the positive benefits of carbon dioxide, with hundreds of free copies sent to journalists and university libraries. The goal of the campaign was to “reposition global warming as theory (not fact)”, attempting to portray the impression of an active scientific debate about human-caused global warming.

ExxonSecrets.org has been tracking fossil-fuel-funded misinformation campaigns for more than two decades – documenting more than A$30 million of funding from Exxon alone to denialist think tanks from 1998 to 2014.

Exxon’s funding of climate science denial over this period is particularly egregious considering that it knew full well the risks from human-caused climate change. David Sassoon, founder of Pulitzer Prize-winning news organisation Inside Climate News led an investigation into Exxon’s internal research, discovering that its own scientists had warned the company of the harmful impacts of fossil fuel burning as long ago as the 1970s.

John Cook interviews David Sassoon from Inside Climate News.

Even Inside Climate News’s revelation of industry’s knowledge of the harmful effects of climate change before engaging in misinformation campaigns has precedence. In 2009, an internal report for the Global Climate Coalition, a group representing fossil fuel industry interests, was leaked to the press.

It showed that the coalition’s own scientific experts had advised it in 1995 that “[t]he scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO₂ on climate is well established and cannot be denied”. Nevertheless, the organisation proceeded to deny climate science and promote the benefits of fossil fuel emissions.

Ideology: the other half of an “unholy alliance”

However, to focus solely on industry’s role in climate science denial misses half the picture. The other significant player is political ideology. At an individual level, numerous surveys (such as here, here and and here) have found that political ideology is the biggest predictor of climate science denial.

People who fear the solutions to climate change, such as increased regulation of industry, are more likely to deny that there is a problem in the first place – what psychologists call “motivated disbelief”.

Consequently, groups promoting political ideology that opposes market regulation have been prolific sources of misinformation about climate change. This productivity has been enabled by the many millions of dollars flowing from the fossil fuel industry. Naomi Oreskes, co-author of Merchants of Doubt, refers to this partnership between vested interests and ideological groups as an “unholy alliance”.

Reducing the influence

To reduce the influence of climate science denial, we need to understand it. This requires awareness of both the role of political ideology and the support that ideological groups have received from vested interests.

Without this understanding, it’s possible to make potentially inaccurate accusations such as climate denial being purely motivated by money, or that it is intentionally deceptive. Psychological research tells us that ideologically driven confirmation bias (misinformation) is almost indistinguishable from intentional deception (disinformation).

Video from free online course Making Sense of Climate Science Denial (launches August 9).

The fossil fuel industry has played a hugely damaging role in promoting misinformation about climate change. But without the broader picture including the role of political ideology, one can build an incomplete picture of climate science denial, leading to potentially counterproductive responses.

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

As the world becomes more connected, invasive species are spreading further. While these species pose threats to our ecosystems, they arguably pose an even greater threat to our agriculture and food security.

Insect pests such as silverleaf whitefly, Asian gypsy moth, and Khapra beetle, are all ranked as major threats and can have significant and far-reaching impacts on agriculture and forest industries around the world.

Many researchers have looked at individual pests to assess their potential threat to particular countries. But no one has ever looked at the invasive threat from a large number of invasive species on agricultural systems at the global level.

Today we have published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, which attempts to do this. We assessed almost 1,300 insect pests and fungal pathogens. We looked at where they are currently found, trade between those countries, and which crops in each country are vulnerable to attack from these species.

For each country, we estimated the potential impact of those invasive species on their agricultural industries. The most vulnerable countries are developing nations, with sub-Saharan African countries in particular being the most vulnerable, as you can see in the map below.

Our research identified the country’s most threatened by invasive species to be from sub-Saharan Africa. CSIRO Arrival

We combined a great deal of information to estimate a country’s vulnerability to invasive species, such as the global distribution of invasive species, the direction of trade data between countries, the types and value of crops grown in each country, and the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of each country.

We assessed each country individually, and identified which of the 1,300 pest species were not currently found there. We then determined whether any of those species are known to have an impact on any of the crops grown in that country.

If a species was known to have an impact, we then looked at which countries that species was found in and if the country in question traded with any of those countries.

If it did, we estimated how likely it is that species could travel to the country in question based on the level of trade (this has been repeatedly shown to be correlated to the number of invasive species in a region).

Establishment

If a species could arrive at a country, the next question was whether it could establish. To determine how likely it would be for a species to establish, we used a novel method, which uses artificial intelligence to compare the source country with the target country.

The method (called a “self organizing map”) compares the collection of species present in each country to determine how similar the two countries are. The more similar they are, the more likely it is that a species from one country could establish in another. The map is able to simultaneously analyse thousands of species and hundreds of countries, making a global analysis possible.

Impact

Once we’d figured out if a species could arrive and establish, we wanted an estimate of potential impact. Economic impact is very difficult to estimate even just for one species in one location and the data was simply not available for us at the global level.

As an alternative, we identified the impact of 140 of our 1,300 species and used this to represent the range of possible impacts. We used this to estimate the impact of all the other species on every crop in every country.

Vulnerability

Once we’d done this for every species in every country, we put these together to get an estimate of the total potential impact of all invasive species that could invade a particular country.

We found that invasive species would have the largest potential impact on the US and China. This isn’t surprising: these two countries not only have the largest agricultural economies, but also have the largest trade values.

But they are also huge economies with many other economic sectors, so we wanted to know which countries are most vulnerable to the impact of invasion from these species.

We assumed that a country’s GDP represents how much money a country has available to either prevent species from arriving, or to manage them if they do arrive and establish. By dividing the potential impact of invasive species by a country’s GDP, we could get an estimate of its vulnerability.

The larger the impact of invasive species and the smaller the GDP, the more vulnerable a country is. Sub-Saharan countries such as Malawi, Burundi, Guinea, Mozambique, and Ethiopia were all ranked in the top ten for vulnerability.

This is mainly because these countries tend to have narrow economies that are heavily dependent on agriculture and so are more vulnerable than developed countries with more diverse economies, where agriculture is only one of a large number of industries that contribute to the overall wealth of the country.

As trade volumes continue to increase and more trade connections are made between countries it could be argued that the pressures from invasive species will only intensify. The spread of invasive species is a shared responsibility at the global level, and those countries most vulnerable to these invasions will need the most help in combating them.

Dean Paini has received funding from the CRC for Plant Biosecurity.

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

This week’s decision by four Australian Catholic orders to divest fully from fossil fuels can be interpreted as a direct response to the encyclical on the environment, issued by Pope Francis almost exactly a year ago.

The amounts of money managed by these Australian groups may be modest, but the announcement is part of the launch of a much wider initiative by the Global Catholic Climate Movement, which aims to encourage Catholics to reconsider their investment options, on both an individual and organisational level.

The movement will be holding seminars and provides an online divestment hub to encourage Catholics to take their money out of fossil fuels and promote reinvestment in low-carbon technologies.

The papal view

A year ago, Pope Francis was very clear in his assessment of the fossil fuel industry. His encyclical warned of the dangers of climate change, arguing that:

…technology based on the use of highly polluting fossil fuels – especially coal, but also oil and, to a lesser degree, gas – needs to be progressively replaced without delay.

He also noted that “politics and business have been slow to react in a way commensurate with the urgency of the challenges facing our world”, and stressed:

Doomsday predictions can no longer be met with irony or disdain. We may well be leaving to coming generations debris, desolation and filth.

It is only a small step from this position to argue that continued investment in fossil fuels, which profit from activities that damage the natural environment, cannot be morally justified. As Bill McKibben, founder of the campaign group 350.org which strongly advocates divestment, puts it:

If it’s wrong to wreck the climate, then it’s wrong to profit from that wreckage.

The same sentiment was echoed in a 2015 statement by Catholic bishops from all continents in response to the encyclical. The bishops called on the world to:

…put an end to the fossil fuel era … and provide affordable, reliable and safe renewable energy access for all.

Practical steps

What does this Catholic divestment drive mean in practice? Contrary to popular imagination, the Catholic Church is not a monolithic command structure controlled by the Pope. It consists of hundreds of thousands of organisations, all relatively autonomous: dioceses, religious orders, lay organisations (such as the St Vincent de Paul Society), charitable and social welfare bodies, educational bodies, superannuation institutions, insurance groups and so on.

All have bank accounts and many have investment portfolios of one type of another. While their funds might vary from thousands to many millions of dollars, the total amount of money within the church as a whole is very substantial.

In my experience, Catholic bodies are also quite tribal. For example, while many other religious bodies in Australia and internationally – including Anglican, Uniting Church, Presbyterian, Quaker and Jewish groups – have divested, Catholic bodies have been slow to take the first step within their own denomination. Each has been waiting for some other Catholic organisation to take the lead.

That is why the recent announcement by four religious orders in Australia is so important, in symbolic terms if nothing else. They have taken the lead where others have been hesitant.

The focus in Australia will now shift to bodies such as Catholic dioceses, Catholic Church Insurance and Catholic Super. All of them operate under investment guidelines that are consistent with the church’s teaching on various matters. So, for example, they would not invest in firms that produce contraceptives.

Given the Pope’s strong position on climate change, the onus is firmly on these organisations to show how they are responding constructively to his teaching. Saying it is “too hard” is not a responsible option.

Any institution as long-lived and as large as the Catholic Church will have accumulated significant assets over the 2,000 years of its existence. This wealth is used to fund activities in welfare, international aid, health care, education and pastoral support around the world. In more recent times it has been used to fund the church’s liabilities in relation to the sexual abuse scandals that have engulfed it.

It is naïve and simplistic to argue that the church should not be wealthy. What is at issue here is where this wealth is invested. While Pope Francis has made no explicit statement on divestment, many in his church are now poised to respond to his environmental message by reassessing their investments in fossil fuels.

Neil Ormerod is married to Thea Ormerod, president of the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC) which is campaigning for divestment among religious bodies in Australia.

With limited fanfare, Basslink resumed operation this week for the first time in almost 6 months. Basslink is Tasmania’s proverbial umbilical cord - a 500 megawatt submarine HVDC cable that connects to the mainland providing both electrical power and data exchange. Its failure back in December last year resulted in an unprecedented energy crisis in the Apple Isle.

To help avert the crisis 200 diesel gensets were installed at a cost of around $44 million. The moth-balled, gas-fired Tamar Valley Power Station was bought back online, and deals were brokered with large industrials to cut back on their energy consumption. Some analysts have estimated the total cost of the crisis at around $400-500 million (see also).

So with Basslink’s resumption the process of repairing the damage begins.

Notwithstanding the immense flood damage, drenching rains in May followed by torrential rains in early June have helped stymie the energy crisis. With HydroTasmania’s smaller catchments now overflowing, many of its run-of-river power stations are operating at more-or-less full capacity. In a matter of a few short weeks Tasmania has gone from acute energy shortage to excess.

Basslink flows for the 4 days period June 13th - 17th. Re-connection occurred on June 13th, around midday. Flows are in megawatts and are positive northwards. Basslink failed on December 20th 2015. Data from AEMO 5-minute dispatch tables.

Meanwhile, the larger hydro catchments such as Gordon have received much needed replenishment. Total storage has doubled over the last six weeks to 27%, increasing at a near record rate of about 2% per week. Storages are now back to levels comparable to mid June in 2014 and 2015.

Tasmanian hydro storage as percentage of total capacity. Data from HydroTasmania. Yellow diamonds show mid-June levels for each year since 2008.

Because of the recent rains and the excess power production, Basslink has this week been flowing northwards into Victoria at an average of about 140 megawatts and, at times, as much as 350 megawatts. That represents about 10% of total Tasmanian dispatch, none of which is being contributed by the emergency 200 diesel generators that were bought in to deal with the crisis, and only a tiny bit from Tamar Valley and Bell Bay gas units.

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the NEM

With mainland wholesale prices now averaging around $90 per megawatt hour, HydroTasmania will be relishing Basslink’s resumption. Now that the rains have come, their prayers will be for those prices to remain high. Such is the crazy brave new world of energy supply, HydroTasmania’s exports are now worth around $2 million a week.

Map of power flows across the 5 state regions in the National electricity map including interchanges for the period 14th-17th June. Note the prices for this period have averaged close to $100 per megawatt hour in volume-weighted terms. Negative values for NETINTERCHANGE imply imports, positive values exports. Data from AEMO’s 5-minute dispatch tables.

However, with mainland prices currently way above what they were even in the Carbon-tax years, questions will be asked. Why they have risen so much? If we factor out the contribution of the carbon tax, prices in New South Wales and Victoria are almost three times what they were in the comparable period two years ago.

Map of power flows across the 5 state regions in the National electricity map including interchanges for the period 16th-19th June, 2014, for comparison with the image above. Note that with the exception of QLD, prices for this period have averaged close to $50 per megawatt hour in volume-weighted terms, about half what they have been in the comparable week, 2016. Note also the 2014 prices include the carbon tax, so in equivalent terms, prices were even lower. Data from AEMO’s 5-minute dispatch tables

Some pundits will no doubt point to recent changes in the South Australian market, following the closure of the Northern Power Station in Port Augusta. However with the national electricity flows mostly converging on New South Wales, the drivers for price setting their would appear much more important.

NSW volume weighted wholesale prices for the 6-week period early May to mid June, 2008 on, shown in red circles. Half hourly prices are shown in small background including the subset for the 6 week period shown in red. Black squares show the carbon tax years adjusted downwards by removing the carbon price (assumed at $20 per megawatt hour). Data from AEMO half hour price and dispatch tables.

And as indicated in the two maps shown above, there have been no obvious changes to the demand and dispatch settings in New South Wales over the last 2 years. So with no obvious reason for such a price spike, it wouldn’t surprise if the regulators were taking a keen interest, not to mention large energy consumers with market exposure.

I doubt HydroTasmania’s latest prayers will be answered in the short-term. At least not until we see some major structural transformation in mainland generation, such as the closure of one or more of the Latrobe Valley brown coal generators. With the Victorian Government this week setting ambitious targets to generate 25% of its electricity from renewable energy by 2020, and 40% by 2025, that may not be very far away. When that happens, HydroTasmania will be hoping its dams are full and Basslink is operational. And by then I hope the Apple Isle has invested more in its exceptional wind resource.

Disclosure

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

Recent revelations about the sledgehammering to death of what seem to be Australian cattle in Vietnam provide further evidence of the government’s inability to control how exported livestock are slaughtered overseas.

An Animals Australia investigation reported by ABC’s 7.30 showed what are reportedly Australian cattle being slaughtered in three abattoirs. Australia has suspended trade to the facilities while they are investigated.

The government’s tool to try to ensure humane slaughter is known as the Export Supply Chain Assurance Scheme (ESCAS). This requires cattle to be killed in accordance with World Animal Health Organisation standards. Killing cattle by hitting with a sledgehammer, although common practice in Vietnam, is not allowed by the standards.

The other requirements of ESCAS offer little reassurance to the Australian community that welfare will be safeguarded. Under the standards, cattle must be traced. This means we should know which cattle are Australian, and be able to control and audit the supply chain.

There are problems with this model. Supply-chain control is desirable but potentially contravenes the principles of the World Trade Organisation. Auditing is only as good as the manner in which it is undertaken, and there has been much recent debate about this.

But beyond problems with Australian regulations, there are broader issues with sending live cattle overseas, and to Vietnam in particular.

What do people in Vietnam think about slaughter?

Vietnam is a relatively poor country, and has been even poorer in its recent history. There is little culture of caring for animal welfare when human welfare is the primary concern. Of even greater concern regarding the animals is the fact that Vietnam now acts as a staging post for Australian cattle that are ultimately en route to China and other Asian markets.

In 2015, Australia exported 311,523 cattle to Vietnam, up from 3,353 in 2012. That’s a hundred-fold increase in just three years. Increasingly these exports are of young “feeder” cattle, which need an additional period of feeding before they are ready for slaughter.

At the Centre for Animal Welfare and Ethics (CAWE) at the University of Queensland, we have led a World Animal Health Organisation project to run training courses in Vietnam on livestock slaughter last year. This included research into Vietnamese attitudes to livestock slaughter, in comparison with other Southeast and East Asian countries.

For a forthcoming scientific paper, we surveyed future stakeholders in the industry – veterinary and animal science students. We found that those in Vietnam are more accepting of livestock transport by ship and road than those in China, Malaysia and Thailand. They also more readily agree that exporting livestock from a developed country to developing countries is acceptable.

In another survey, we investigated attitudes of those directly involved in the livestock slaughter and transport industry in Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand and China. Over 1,000 respondents took part, including 210 from Vietnam.

Similar to respondents from China, Vietnamese respondents were not confident that they could make improvements to the welfare of animals in their care, whereas those from Malaysia and Thailand were. Vietnamese respondents had the least agreement with the survey statement: “In the past I have tried to make improvements to the welfare of the animals in my care.”

In Malaysia, respondents identified religious beliefs as one of the motivations for improving slaughter. For Vietnamese respondents, the main factors were the law, their knowledge, the attitudes of co-workers and company approval.

Vietnamese respondents also rated having the right tools and resources as less important in welfare improvement. This suggests that lack of access to stunning machines isn’t a major factor.

While all respondents thought that welfare improvements would work best when driven by legislation and government, those in Vietnam (and China) also thought that the police played an important role.

Phasing out live export

Our surveys indicate the major differences between the attitudes of the cattle industry in Vietnam and Australia. The police play almost no role in livestock welfare improvement in Australian abattoirs, yet they are considered an important player in Vietnam. Unlike Muslim countries, there is no argument in Vietnam that exports support religious festivals.

By sending young cattle to Vietnam, the Australian agriculture industry is losing out on jobs from growing them to a mature weight and processing them before sending them overseas. There is now a state-of-the-art killing and processing facility in Darwin to achieve this; the first new cattle abattoir to be built in Australia in 50 years.

The latest revelations should act as a signal that Australia should phase out the export of livestock, not immediately, but over five to ten years. This would enable exporters to build trade relations for meat export, delivering a high-quality product to overseas markets for the benefit of Australian producers, the consumers and the Australian conscience.

Clive Phillips is a member of the Voiceless Scientific Expert Advisory Panel, is on the Board of Minding Animals and has recently received funding from Australian and New Zealand governments for provision of training and conducting research on livestock transport and slaughter in SE and E Asia.

By itself, concrete is a very durable construction material. The magnificent Pantheon in Rome, the world’s largest unreinforced concrete dome, is in excellent condition after nearly 1,900 years. And yet many concrete structures from last century – bridges, highways and buildings – are crumbling. Many concrete structures built this century will be obsolete before its end.

Given the survival of ancient structures, this may seem curious. The critical difference is the modern use of steel reinforcement, known as rebar, concealed within the concrete. Steel is made mainly of iron, and one of iron’s unalterable properties is that it rusts. This ruins the durability of concrete structures in ways that are difficult to detect and costly to repair.

While repair may be justified to preserve the architectural legacy of iconic 20th-century buildings, such as those designed by reinforced concrete users like Frank Lloyd Wright, it is questionable whether this will be affordable or desirable for the vast majority of structures. The writer Robert Courland, in his book Concrete Planet, estimates that repair and rebuilding costs of concrete infrastructure, just in the United States, will be in the trillions of dollars – to be paid by future generations.

Old bridges need new money to replace. Phil's 1stPix/Flickr.com, CC BY-NC

Steel reinforcement was a dramatic innovation of the 19th century. The steel bars add strength, allowing the creation of long, cantilevered structures and thinner, less-supported slabs. It speeds up construction times, because less concrete is required to pour such slabs.

These qualities, pushed by assertive and sometimes duplicitous promotion by the concrete industry in the early 20th century, led to its massive popularity.

Reinforced concrete competes against more durable building technologies, like steel frame or traditional bricks and mortar. Around the world, it has replaced environmentally sensitive, low-carbon options like mud brick and rammed earth – historical practices that may also be more durable.

Early 20th-century engineers thought reinforced concrete structures would last a very long time – perhaps 1,000 years. In reality, their life span is more like 50-100 years, and sometimes less. Building codes and policies generally require buildings to survive for several decades, but deterioration can begin in as little as 10 years.

Many engineers and architects point to the natural affinities between steel and concrete: they have similar thermal expansion characteristics, and concrete’s alkalinity can help to inhibit rust. But there is still a lack of knowledge about their composite qualities – for example, in regard to sun-exposure-related changes in temperature.

The many alternative materials for concrete reinforcement – such as stainless steel, aluminium bronze and fibre-polymer composites – are not yet widely used. The affordability of plain steel reinforcement is attractive to developers. But many planners and developers fail to consider the extended costs of maintenance, repair or replacement.

Cheap and effective, in the short term at least. Luigi Chiesa/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA

There are technologies that can address the problem of steel corrosion, such as cathodic protection, in which the entire structure is connected to a rust-inhibiting electric current. There are also interesting new methods to monitor corrosion, by electrical or acoustic means.

Another option is to treat the concrete with a rust-inhibiting compound, although these can be toxic and inappropriate for buildings. There are several new non-toxic inhibitors, including compounds extracted from bamboo and bacterially derived “biomolecules”.

Fundamentally, however, none of these developments can resolve the inherent problem that putting steel inside concrete ruins its potentially great durability.

The environmental costs of rebuilding

This has serious repercussions for the planet. Concrete is the third-largest contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, after automobiles and coal-fuelled power plants. Cement manufacturing alone is responsible for roughly 5% of global CO₂ emissions. Concrete also makes up the largest proportion of construction and demolition waste, and represents about a third of all landfill waste.

Recycling concrete is difficult and expensive, reduces its strength and may catalyse chemical reactions that speed up decay. The world needs to reduce its concrete production, but this will not be possible without building longer-lasting structures.

Rebar reclamation: an expensive job. Anna Frodesiak/Wikimedia Commons

In a recent paper, I suggest that the widespread acceptance of reinforced concrete may be the expression of a traditional, dominant and ultimately destructive view of matter as inert. But reinforced concrete is not really inert.

Concrete is commonly perceived as a stone-like, monolithic and homogeneous material. In fact, it is a complex mix of cooked limestone, clay-like materials and a wide variety of rock or sandy aggregates. Limestone itself is a sedimentary rock composed of shells and coral, whose formation is influenced by many biological, geological and climatological factors.

This means that concrete structures, for all their stone-like superficial qualities, are actually made of the skeletons of sea creatures ground up with rock. It takes millions upon millions of years for these sea creatures to live, die and form into limestone. This timescale contrasts starkly with the life spans of contemporary buildings.

Steel is often perceived to be inert and resilient too. Terms such as “Iron Age” suggest an ancient durability, although Iron Age artefacts are comparatively rare precisely because they rust. If construction steel is visible, it can be maintained – for instance, when the Sydney Harbour Bridge is repeatedly painted and repainted.

However, when embedded in concrete, steel is hidden but secretly active. Moisture entering through thousands of tiny cracks creates an electrochemical reaction. One end of the rebar becomes an anode and the other a cathode, forming a “battery” that powers the transformation of iron into rust. Rust can expand the rebar up to four times its size, enlarging cracks and forcing the concrete to fracture apart in a process called spalling, more widely known as “concrete cancer”.

Concrete cancer: not pretty. Sarang/Wikimedia Commons

I suggest that we need to change our thinking, to recognise concrete and steel as vibrant and active materials. This is not a case of changing any facts, but rather of re-orientating how we understand and act on those facts. Avoiding waste, pollution and needless rebuilding will require thinking well beyond disciplinary conceptions of time, and this is especially true for the building and construction industries.

The collapsed civilisations of the past show us the consequences of short-term thinking. We should focus on building structures that stand the test of time – lest we end up with hulking, derelict artefacts that are no more fit for their original purpose than the statues of Easter Island.

Guy Keulemans 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.