Adaptation  

David at Carbon Sink notes that the Rodent has a new policy for dealing with climate change: Adaptation - especially if those who are affected by it might be thinking of moving to Australia.

Minster for Hypocrisy Ian Campbell today signalled what could be the Howard government's new policy on climate change: Adaptation.

Denial is no longer credible, prevention and mitigation are too hard, so we'll adapt. Easy! Ok, so we'll have to say ta ta to coral in the Great Barrier Reef, snow in the Snowies, water in the Murray-Darling, agriculture in the Riverina, wheat in the wheat belt, food, water that kind of thing ... but hey, we're a resourceful lot us Aussies, I'm sure we'll think of something!

Ian Campbell was interviewed on AM this morning about helping our neighbours deal with climate change:

TONY EASTLEY: The Federal Minister for Environment, Senator Ian Campbell, says the Government is taking measures to help its neighbours.

Do you agree that some of Australia's neighbours face a very bleak outlook as a result of global warming?

IAN CAMPBELL: I don't think there's any doubt that the impacts of global warming will have major impacts right around the world. And I think the crux of the report, which says that these are very small economies, many of them lying low in the sea, will be impacted, possibly ahead of some of the larger countries with, you know, that are higher out of the water, quite frankly.

TONY EASTLEY: So you agree with Reverend Tim Costello when he talks about environmental refugees?

IAN CAMPBELL: We've had refugees coming, or we've had people coming out of the Pacific for a long time. The major impacts, the long-term impacts of climate change will take many decades to unfold.

I think the short-term impacts of, for example, storm surges and potential increases in cyclonic activity, are issues that we need to address as a world. And I think Australia and the developed countries do have a substantial role to play in helping smaller, less developed countries adapt to the already built-in climate change that's already built into the atmosphere, because we have pumped a trillion tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere already in the last 150 years.

TONY EASTLEY: Am I right in saying, though, that in the next 50 years or so we can expect to receive some of these environmental refugees from some of the Pacific Islands?

IAN CAMPBELL: Having spent a lot of time in the Pacific generally on whaling-related issues, I've got no doubt that the Pacific Island nations would like to see us work with them on adaptation measures. They would much prefer to stay on their own islands, and I think that is where the focus should be.

Torres Strait Islanders might be a little luckier - as citizens they should be able to make it onto the mainland.

Australia’s poorest neighbours will fail unless urgent action is taken to tackle climate change, a CSIRO report to be released today says.

The report, which includes recommendations for the Federal Government, concludes that millions of people in the Asia-Pacific region will be displaced by soaring temperatures and sea level rises of up to 50cm by 2070.

Bangladesh, India, Vietnam, China and small Pacific islands would be the worst affected and Australia would be looked to for leadership. They would suffer threats to water security, prolonged drought, storm surges, rising sea levels and more extreme weather events.

An independent report for the Climate Change and Development Roundtable will also be launched today, calling for Australia not to ignore the climate change threat.

World Vision chief executive Tim Costello said the poorest people in the poorest countries would be the hardest hit by climate change. “Climate change will fundamentally change the way we aid the world’s poor,” Mr Costello said. “It will undermine the value and impact of current aid spending and will lead to far greater calls for assistance from those hurt most.”

Recommendations for the Government include giving priority to renewable energy programs for developing countries, helping communities prepare for disasters and reviewing immigration programs to consider support for the region’s displaced people.

A draft of the fourth United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, written by the world’s top climate scientists and due for official release next year, came to similar conclusions.

It said king tides had exposed a need for better coastal protection and long-term planning to potentially move half the 4000 people living on the Torres Strait islands.

Just how much the sea level might change is an interesting topic - David from Carbon Sink points to an exaggerated view of how Australia might look - it would be interesting to see what a more realistic sea level rise looked like though.

A 100m sea level rise is way beyond the most catastrophic forecasts for climate change. According the the IPCC the West Antarctic ice sheet (WAIS) has enough ice to raise the sea level by 6 metres, Greenland by 7.2 metres, and even if the entire Antarctic ice sheet melted into the ocean, the sea level would rise by 'just' 61.1 metres.

So even if both polar icecaps melted completely the sea level rise would be well short of the 100m rise that would supposedly result from 'extreme global warming' and a fraction of the 300m rise depicted the picture above. Quite frankly I don't know where the extra ~230m would come from. That's an awful lot of thermal expansion.

Putting this alarmist nonsense aside, what does the IPCC really say about sea level rise?

Crikey points out that the Rodent has set one of our intelligence agencies the task of investigating the impact of global warming (maybe he's worried the coal industry hasn't been telling him inconvenient truths - though as Crikey points out, he'd still prefer not to prefer to remain blissfully ignornat of other energy related issues).

John Howard is nothing if not cautious. Indeed, Gerard Henderson often reminds us of the problems he has had in the past with indecision.

Caution can be bad. It can also be safe. On the roads, for example, caution pays. And on global warming, it appears, the PM is behaving like a model driver. Geoffrey Barker writes in the Fin today:

Welcome signs are emerging that the federal government has realised that global warming is infinitely more threatening to Australia than Islamist terrorism.

To his credit John Howard has reportedly asked Australia's intelligence analysis agency, the Office of National Assessments (ONA), to prepare a detailed report for cabinet on global warming and its security implications.

By contrast he has not sought a national intelligence estimate on terrorism, perhaps because he does not want to be told, as US intelligence agencies have told President George Bush, that the Iraq War has increased the overall terrorist threat…

It’s cute, getting ONA involved. A very nice angle. And what a wonderful driving lesson we’re getting from the PM on how to do a u-turn – pull over to the side of the road, draw to a complete stop and then head in the opposite direction.

Crikey also speculates that Rupert Murdoch's about turn on global warming might be a contributing factor - and he may have read GBN's report for the Pentagon as well.

Geoffrey Baker speculates today in the Fin Review (not online) that the PM's request for an ONA report on the security implications of global warming coincides pretty neatly with Rupert Murdoch’s green light on global warming. But Crikey understands that the idea for a paper on the security implications of climate change came up at a high-level meeting around a year ago.

Maybe the government was taking its cue from Washington -- a secret Pentagon report on the global security implications of climate change that was leaked back in February 2004 made for some pretty scary reading. The London Observer obtained a copy of the Pentagon report that painted Biblical scenes of global catastrophe costing millions of lives, with “nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting" that could erupt across the world and “bring the planet to the edge of anarchy."

The Pentagon report warned that global warming was a far greater risk than terrorism, advised that climate change should be considered "immediately" as a top political and military issue and concluded: "Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life ... Once again, warfare would define human life.” Among the catalogue of unbelievable predictions was that “catastrophic" shortages of portable water and energy will lead to widespread war by 2020.

So what would an ONA report on the security implications of global warming for Australia look like? Clive Hamilton of The Australia Institute told Crikey that “the most startling claim of the Pentagon report for Australia was that we, along with the United States, could find ourselves building 'defensive fortresses' around our country to protect our resources from desperate outsiders and aggressive states created by rapid and unpredictable climate change.”

I forgot to include Treehugger's review of George Monbiot's new book in yesterday's post - George Monbiot Turns Up the Heat.

“I am not writing this book to confirm what you believe is true… As always, I seem destined to offend everyone.”

These are the words of British journalist and environmental campaigner George Monbiot, recently described by the Observer newspaper as “the most astute political and environmental cartographer of his time.” The opening quote was taken from the introduction to his new book Heat – How to Stop the Planet Burning, which is now available in the shops. It looks set to become an important work in the growing literature on climate change. The author challenges the facts and figures promoted by both the oil industry and the environmental lobbies, waging war on both deliberate deceit and well-meaning woolly thinking alike. Monbiot claims that even the most ambitious targets for emissions cuts, such as the UK government’s promise of a 60% cut by 2050, are way below what is needed. He argues that cuts in the magnitude of 90% are vital by 2030 in order to avoid climate change slipping out of our control.

Controversially, for many environmentalists at least, Monbiot believes that campaigning for self-enforced abstinence is a waste of time: “Why bother installing an energy-efficient lightbulb when a man in Lanarkshire boasts of attaching 1.2 million Christmas lights to his house?” Regulation, he argues, is the only way to achieve the cuts in emissions that are needed. He claims that many environmentalists, including himself, are hypocrites. He cites examples of friends who campaign against climate change, yet holiday in the Pacific, or work to protect biodiversity, yet serve tuna to their guests. The kinds of change that are needed, according to Monbiot, can only be achieved with constraints that “apply to everyone, rather than to everyone else… Manmade global warming cannot be restrained unless we persuade government to force us to change the way we live.”

Whilst such massive cuts may, at first, seem unrealistic, Monbiot then sets out to show the means by which he believes they can be achieved. He claims to have succeeded, albeit “by the skin of his teeth”. In fact, he argues, cuts can be achieved in almost every sector of society without significant loss of material comfort or alteration to our way of life. The one exception to this, he believes, is aviation. No amount of innovation or change in the aviation industry is likely to offset it’s projected growth and, he claims, the only option is to significantly curtail our “right to fly”. He accepts that this may well be hard to swallow, but points out that it is only a real hardship for a small, relatively wealthy minority of the world’s population.

Many of the solutions that Monbiot advocates will be familiar to environmentalists – renewable energy, greater efficiency, electric cars etc. However, he is also ruthless in picking apart ideas that he believes won’t work. Building-integrated micro wind turbines are dismissed as “a waste of time and money”, biofuel imports may “accelerate rather than ameliorate climate change”, and carbon offsets are like “pushing your food around your plate to give the impression you’ve eaten it.” Whilst many of Monbiot’s assertions will surprise environmentalists, including myself, there is no doubt that he backs up his arguments with extensive facts and figures. I have not had time, nor am I really qualified, to work out whether these figures add up, but Monbiot’s relentless questioning of, as he puts it, “both friend and foe” is admirable. We need rigorous debate and constant self-reflection if we are to come up with a viable vision for the future. There is no point in promoting solutions that do not work.

Monbiot's latest column is largely about his dismissal of micro wind turbines and the like - personally I think he's being a bit too focused on the economics - micro wind turbines aren't the best or most cost effective way of generating renewable energy - but I for one won't complain if I see people putting them up on their homes...

In seeking to work out how a 90% cut in carbon emissions could be achieved in the rich nations by 2030, I have made many surprising findings. But none has shocked me as much as the discovery that renewable micro generation has been grossly overhyped. Those who maintain that our own homes can produce all the renewable electricity and heat they need have harmed the campaign to stop climate chaos, by sowing complacency and misdirecting our efforts.

Some campaigners accept that micro generators can make only a small contribution, but argue that they are still useful, as they wake people up to green issues. It seems more likely that these overhyped devices will have the opposite effect, as their owners discover how badly they have been ripped off and their neighbours are driven insane by the constant yawing and stalling of a windmill on a turbulent roof.

Far from shutting down the national grid, as the Green MEP Caroline Lucas has suggested, we should be greatly expanding it, in order to produce electricity where renewable energy is most abundant. This means, above all, a massive investment in offshore windfarms. A recent government report suggests there is a potential offshore wind resource off the coast of England and Wales of 3,200TWh. High voltage direct current cables, which lose much less electricity in transmission than an AC network, would allow us to make use of a larger area of the continental shelf than before. This means we can generate more electricity more reliably, avoid any visual impact from the land and keep out of the routes taken by migratory birds. Much bigger turbines would realise economies of scale hitherto unavailable.

The electricity system cannot be run on wind alone. But surely it’s clear that building giant offshore windmills is a far better use of our time and money than putting mini-turbines in places where they will generate more anger than power.

Business 2 has a look at 20 Smart Companies to Start Now - listing 20 ideas that venture capitalists want to fund and the price they have put on the head of each concept. 4 of the 20 are green / energy related - but these don't seem to rate as highly (financially speaking) as some of the entertainment related prospects. Elon Musk of tesla Motors caught my eye, as he's looking to fund (unsurprisngly to smart grid geeks) - ultracapacitors. Maybe he should look around for some relevant 1960's patents and see if he can liberate them from oil companies...

The New Power Play

The Investor: Elon Musk, co-founder, PayPal

What he's backed: SpaceX, Tesla Motors

What he wants now: As Musk's two most recent investments - in a space rocket and an all-electric sports car - suggest, the 35-year-old entrepreneur likes to think big. So he's intrigued by the promise of a next-generation battery called an ultracapacitor, capable of powering everything from cars to tractors. Unlike chemical batteries, ultracapacitors store energy as an electrical field between a pair of conducting plates. Theoretically, they can be charged in less than a second rather than hours, be recharged repeatedly without sacrificing performance, and far outlast anything now on the market.

"I am convinced that the long-term solution to our energy needs lies with capacitors," Musk says. "You can't beat them for power, and they kick ass on any chemical battery."

Musk would know: He was doing Ph.D. work at Stanford on high-energy capacitors before he helped get PayPal off the ground. At least one startup, EEStor in Texas, and a larger company, Maxwell Technologies in California, are working on ultracapacitors. Yet Musk believes a university-based research group has an equal shot at a commercial breakthrough, since universities are where the most promising research is bubbling up. "The challenge is one of materials science, not money," Musk says.

The team to pull this off, he says, would need expertise in materials science, applied physics, and manufacturing. Musk wants to see a prototype that can power something small, like a boom box. "Make one and show me that it works," Musk says. "Then tell me what's wrong with it and how it can be fixed."

What he'll invest: $4 million over two years for a working prototype

Send your pitch to: mbb@spacex.com. -- M.V.C.

A Better Energizer

The Investors: Samir Kaul and Vinod Khosla, partners, Khosla Ventures

What they've backed: BCI, Codon Devices, iSkoot

What they want now: Khosla, a legendary Silicon Valley VC whose winners have included Juniper Networks and Redback Networks, and Kaul are looking for an engineering team to build a lithium-ion battery with five times the life of anything found in cell phones, PDAs, or cameras. Matsushita and Sanyo are pushing the limits on lithium-ion cells, as are a couple of promising startups. But as with ultracapacitors, Khosla and Kaul think the right inventor will come from an academic lab. "We see research that proves it's attainable," Kaul says. "This is not a flying car. If it was, I'd ask for 20 times."

What they'll invest: $2 million for a 10- to 15-person team to show proof of concept

Send your pitch to: cj@khoslaventures.com. -- S.H.

The Australian has a report that the WA government and Woodside have come to an arrangement over the Pluto project and guaranteed allocations of gas for local consumption (just one aspect of creeping resource nationalism that we'll see more of as we go past the peak).

WOODSIDE and the West Australian Government have come to an accommodation over the future development of the Pluto gas reserves on the North West Shelf. Pluto, which was found only in April last year, is being fast-tracked by Woodside to supply LNG to Japan by 2010.

But Woodside chief executive Don Voelte earlier this year lashed out at the state Government when it was proposed that up to 20 per cent of gas resources would have to be reserved for future domestic use. He said the Pluto project, estimated to cost around $US5 billion ($6.73 billion), would not go ahead if the gas reservation policy was applied.

Woodside owns 100 per cent of Pluto and has already signed up two Japanese customers to take 3.7 million tonnes of LNG a year for 15 years. The economics of Pluto, which is estimated to contain around 4.1 trillion cubic feet of gas, are so fine that an LNG development would not be viable if 15 per cent of field reserves were unavailable for LNG production.

Last week, West Australian Premier Alan Carpenter said the Government was flexible on how companies chose to implement the policy, so long as 15 per cent of the overall gas stock was retained locally."We've told the companies that the flexibility will allow them to supply the gas from other fields, if that is easier for them, or to enter into trade arrangements between different companies or partners they may have in various projects," the Premier said.

It is understood one way for Woodside to sustain the integrity of Pluto for an LNG project is for the company to swap gas from other reservoirs to cover the shortfall on its domestic gas obligation.

WorldChanging has a post on The Canary Project.

The Canary Project is bringing us striking visuals of global warming from across the planet. We’ve already mentioned the project a couple of times, so it's worth taking a closer look at what makes it so powerful.

Humans are visual, short-term thinkers. We deal well with acute, visible threats but have trouble mustering the attention to address invisibly creeping, long-term ones. And global warming is the archetypical long-term villain. Concealed and slow, it courts procrastination. Even when we agree on its importance, the clamors of the here-and-now too easily push it from our radars. The Canary Project bridges our cognitive disconnect by exposing what global warming looks like on a scale people can relate to.

The mission of The Canary Project is to photograph landscapes around the world that are exhibiting dramatic transformation due to global warming and to use these photographs to persuade as many people as possible that global warming is already underway and of immediate concern.

The New Hanpshire "Union Leader" has an article on a new documentary called "Crude Impact".

After he sold his Manchester-based software company called Silknet for the jaw-dropping sum of $4.2 billion, Jay Wood showed that he could make money.

Now he's making movies.

His first film -- a 97-minute documentary called "Crude Impact" -- will make its debut on Friday at the Music Hall in Portsmouth as a part of the 6th Annual New Hampshire Film Expo.

"If he puts his mind to it, there's nothing that Jay can't do," said Jim Davis, who was vice president of business development for Silknet. "People use the term, �Renaissance man' a lot, but Jay is just that, a Renaissance man.

"He had fooled around with a guitar in the past, and after we sold the company, he told me he'd always wanted to play in a rock �n' roll band, so he took guitar lessons, went to this place in San Francisco where they put bands together, and he actually did play in one.

"He always wanted to be fluent in another language," Jim added, "so he took Italian lessons, then moved to Italy for a while and now he's fluent in Italian."

Now he's fluent in oil.

That petro-chemical substance is at the heart of "Crude Impact," and Jay has invested a substantial amount of time and money to explore the volatile interconnection between oil and mankind.

"For more than a year, we traveled all over the world, interviewing people we felt best understood the history of oil's impact on our world and the issue of �peak oil,'" he said. "�Peak oil' is the point in time where the quantity of oil extracted from the earth begins to irreversibly decline, and the ramifications of �peak oil' are terrifying."

Nowhere, he claims, are the ramifications more terrifying than in regions like the Amazon rainforest, which is where he had the epiphany that lead him to make "Crude Impact."

"I had gone on a trip to Ecuador in August of 2004 with a group called the Pachamama Alliance," he said. "It's a group that works with the indigenous people to help protect the rainforest from oil development. The Achuar people there had never had contact with the rest of civilization until the 1970s. Texaco and oil development is what forced it upon them, and after seeing what's happened there since -- deforestation, water pollution, skyrocketing cancer rates -- I knew that, when I came back, I had to do something.

"I never knew about this -- the impact of oil extraction and oil usage -- and when I tried to determine the best vehicle for getting this message out, I decided it was film."

MonkeyGrinder is getting with the "peak oil and global warming have the same solutions" program (well - some peak oil solutions are global warming anti-solutions - which is why its best to keep both issues in mind at all times) - in "64 squares and a grain of sand".

One theme I plan on developing – with full comprehension of rapidly enveloping energy constraints, or “peak oil”, is the need to hitch our wagon to a concept that everybody gets. Peak oil is too wonky, too nerdy, and frankly too depressing for the majority of people to entertain honestly and openly, at least in the short term. I can debunk Daniel Yergin any day of the week, but gosh, he has a Pulitzer. It is an uphill battle – to get people to pay attention.

The concept to connect with is Global Warming, of course. It has brand name recognition, and it is well-nigh undeniable, except by sophists and a few crusty scientists who get carted out by Exxon-Mobil once year to shout “I’m not dead yet!”

The real changes we must make to “solve” climate change dovetail nicely with reasonable responses for Peak Oil. Increased use of renewables. Living arrangements which don’t intrinsically waste energy. I expect it won’t be long before the Chinese government orders the bicycles back in Beijing, by dictate.

FN Arena has an introductory article on peak oil by a local from Flinders University called "Crude Assumptions - The State of the Peak Oil Debate" that also notes the need to consider global warming when thinking about adapting to peak oil.

...if you delve into the depths of the debate, you discover a lesser-known method for predicting peak oil that does not rely on abstract mathematics or assumptions about remaining reserves. Chris Skrebowski, editor of the UK Energy Institute's Petroleum Review and former sceptic of peak oil, has painstakingly assembled a database of regional oil production data from around the world. The database includes regions with growing production, regions that are in decline, and new projects coming online in the next few years. Furthermore, according to Skrebowski there is on average a 6-year lag between discovering new oil and that production flow coming online, meaning "any new projects that are to come into production by 2010/2011 would be known by now." That means you can reliably predict production six years into the future based on what you know about today's oil projects, but it also means you cannot extend the forecast beyond the six year outlook. In some ways, Skrebowski's analysis is analogous to the headlights on a car: it doesn't stretch very far ahead, but if there's something there it will enable you to see it just before you hit it!

And the good news (if we put aside the whole issue of climate change) is that there are numerous new projects coming online in the next few years and global oil production can be expected to grow. The bad news is that according to all of the published production data and considering all these new projects, Skrebowski says decline will outweigh growth by the end of 2010. This is basically right in the middle of the range of dates predicted by the mathematical methods, and it is only a few years away.

There may be potential for increasing production from non-conventional sources of hydrocarbons such as coal-to-liquids, gas-to-liquids, heavy oil, tar sands, oil shale and methane hydrates. But as climate change is increasingly being recognised as one of the defining issues of our time, there is good reason for us to think twice before investing enormous sums of money in new, less clean ways to burn fossil fuels. And more importantly (in the peak oil debate, that is), the lag time for exploiting these non-conventional fuels is so great that none will come online (in sufficient volume) in time to offset the net decline due in 2010.

Skrebowski's analysis is not the final word on peak oil – he has had to assume certain values for future growth and decline rates of the various regions. Skrebowski admits to the uncertainty and suggests the peak date could be as early as 2008, but is very unlikely to be later than 2010. In terms of uncertainty, his method is more robust than any method that depends on (a) guessing the recoverable reserve size, or (b) guessing the mathematical shape of the global production curve. And after all, at this stage, arguing about whether the peak will be 2008 or 2010 is a bit like shifting deck chairs on the Titanic to get the best view of the iceberg. The "take-home message" is that according to the most reliable data, and with the most robust analysis of that data, there appears to be no way the world as a whole will avoid a significant decline in energy production starting within the next 4 years and continuing for an unknown length of time – perhaps indefinitely.

I notice I got a mention in Energy Bulletin, with a slightly backhanded compliment (no offence taken of course guys) that Peak Energy is an "Indefatigable and idiosyncratic collector of news items on energy, environment, politics, tinfoil conspiracies.".

While I'm trying not to become a tinfoil site (and obviously failing), I also try not to simply post a set of links each day that simply mirrors what can be found at EB, PeakOil.com, The Oil Drum's DrumBeat and LATOC Breaking News. On the other hand I don't have time to write a detailed essay each day either, so instead I try to find unearth a few untouched gems, put in some local news, a little bit of politics and a tinfoil decoration for colour. If I'm lucky the news flow will line up a few articles that I can weave a little story around, though that has been rare in recent months.

Hopefully that partially explains the idiosyncratic nature of my posts - I suspect the other reason is that its simply in my nature to try and be different (and its hard to overcome your inbuilt tendencies).

A few weeks ago my team at work got sent off on a corporate offsite for a few days. One of the exercises we did was a Myers-Brigg test, then mapped out what traits were most appropriate for the various tasks our team does and then looked at how well our profiles matched these (its psychological mumbo-jumbo but nevertheless it was interesting enough - better than plotting strategy for the next year anyway). My personality type was adjudged to be INTP which could be cycnically described as "Lord, help me be less independent, but let me do it my way." - which isn't all that far from the mark, to be honest.

I'm not sure ranting away at our corporate psychologist about the propaganda industry after a few drinks was a great career move, but I did learn a bit about spiral dynamics which was interesting (an alternative / complementary theory to "Maslow's hierarchy of needs" which pops up in post collapse doomer writings occasionally).