Quicker rollout for energy smart meters  

The Australian reports that smart meters may be rolled out nationally rather than via individual state programs - "Quicker rollout for energy smart meters".

THE rollout of smart meters allowing households to calculate the cost of their electricity consumption is to be accelerated. The Ministerial Council on Energy - at its first meeting to be chaired by new federal Resources and Energy Minister Martin Ferguson - yesterday decided on the minimum information the meters will collect.

Smart meters are seen as a way of allowing people to take responsibility for their electricity consumption and help curb the growth in demand. Mr Ferguson said after the meeting in Perth the decision put in place a framework for the rollout of the meters nationally.

The next MCE meeting early next year would discuss the cost benefit of the meters' introduction in different markets. Victoria has already committed to smart meters, while NSW Premier Morris Iemma included their introduction in his electricity reform measures announced earlier this week. "We are going to go down the path of national uniformity on smart meters and that's a decision related to the Prime Minister's overall climate change agenda," Mr Ferguson said after the MCE meeting. He said state energy ministers - all Labor - had supported Kevin Rudd's approach to climate change at the UN summit in Bali.

The SMH has a report on the Bali global warming summit - "Defining steps in a global dawning".

When two climate scientists last year projected that the great Arctic ice sheets could melt away altogether by 2040, they surprised and alarmed their colleagues. Now, according to new satellite data from the US Government's National Aeronautics and Space Agency, the volume of Arctic ice at the end of this year's northern summer has shrunk to half its size of four years earlier.

A NASA climate scientist, Jay Zwally, remarked this week: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions.

"The Arctic is often cited as the canary in the coalmine for climate warming. Now as a sign of climate warming, the canary has died. It is time to start getting out of the coalmines." The human canaries from the low-lying South Pacific island cluster of Micronesia are trying to get out, but there are limited options for flying. As the sea rises, the people of Micronesia are already moving houses and roads.

"For us this not about politics," a member of the country's delegation to the United Nations climate change conference in Bali, Jackson Soram, said. "It's about survival." So the negotiations under way this week are timely, and they are also too late.

They are too late because global warming is well advanced and some serious consequences are already upon us. The chairman of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri, said last month: "If there's no action before 2012, that's too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment."

Yet the UN negotiations under way this week in Bali are supposed to design a program of action to begin from 2012. But the talks are timely because we need to start somewhere, because this grouping is the best option for bringing all the world's major economies together, and because now is better than later.

Yet the UN negotiations under way this week in Bali are supposed to design a program of action to begin from 2012. But the talks are timely because we need to start somewhere, because this grouping is the best option for bringing all the world's major economies together, and because now is better than later.

It's pointless getting worked up about the Kyoto Protocol. It was not the solution. Even if the US and Australia had ratified the treaty, it would not have cut global carbon emissions. It was far too flatulent. But the American-Australian state of denial was costly, nonetheless. There was a great deal of policy work that might have been done in the past decade. But the Bush-Howard ideological belligerence towards the very existence of global warming delayed serious policy work and carried a real opportunity cost.

The Howard government, as a courtier to the Bush Administration's intransigence on global warming, put Australia on the wrong side of history. Kevin Rudd has acted swiftly to put the country on the right side. He is working to make Australia a part of the solution, rather than part of the problem. In the closed-door negotiations that will run late into tonight, Australia is seeking to craft an agreement that can bring the rich countries and the poor countries together to act. ...

Rudd is awaiting the report he has commissioned from the eminent economist Professor Ross Garnaut. For a leader in office less than two weeks, this is the responsible course to take. Garnaut said in a speech at the Australian National University last month that the world in the early 21st century was living through an era of prosperity so great, spreading growth and wealth so widely through the countries of the world, that he called it the "platinum age," greater even than a golden age.

"It is now clearer than it has ever been that the natural course of global development is for more and more of the world's people to aspire to, and to realise, living standards similar to those in the developed economies." He posited two risks to such an unprecedented spread of prosperity: "Climate change, and poorly designed responses to it, could bring the platinum age to an end." The world has to deal with climate change, but the policy responses have to be the right ones. It's a time for haste, but not panic.

Rudd told the UN conference in Bali this week: "The community of nations must reach agreement. There is no Plan B. There is no other planet that we can escape to." Unless, of course, it's the planet that Brendan Nelson inhabits.

With all nations beginning to debate in earnest how this vast and complex problem might be solved, consider the sad little effort by the new Leader of the Opposition. Nelson told reporters on Wednesday: "What is very important is that all of us as Australians and as global citizens know that we do have to act on climate change. We need, however, to fully understand what is going to be the cost of that action. And whatever the medium or long-term targets that Mr Rudd signs us up to, it's absolutely essential that we don't end up exporting jobs and industries from Australia to other parts of the world." That is not an extract - that is the entirety of his thinking on the subject so far this week.

Together with the Liberals' position on Work Choices, this confirms that the Opposition has not processed the enormity, and the reality, of what has just happened to it. As Rudd works to put Australia on the right side of history, Nelson should be offering constructive advice in how to succeed.

Instead of contributing to the great civilisational challenge, he's making juvenile political points. Stop echoing the failed lines of the Howard era, Brendan, and help the Liberals find a new voice.

Unfortunately, the SMH notes that the Bali summit has ended in deadlock -" March for a climate accord falters".

THE UN climate summit stumbled last night towards a compromise for launching a new global agreement, but it fell well short of the expectations that many countries took to Bali.

To the last minute, the United States fought hard to stop the declaration referring to the UN's scientific advice: for developed countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 25 to 40 per cent by 2020 if the world wants to stop global temperatures rising above 2 degrees and avoid the most severe impacts of climate change.

Australia's Climate Change Minister, Penny Wong, was playing a key role in the final effort to drive a deal between the US and Japan on one side and the European Union, China and developing countries on the other. The battling delegations reached a consensus to launch formal negotiations in a bid to have a deal signed by 2009. And in key breakthroughs, nations agreed:

■ Cutting emissions by stopping deforestation should be included in the new deal;
■ To develop measures to transfer clean energy technology to developing countries;
■ To formulate policies to help poorer countries adapt to climate change that is already happening.

Delegates at the summit were warned that without deep cuts to emissions, the world faced a possible loss of 30 per cent of its animal and plant species, and as many as 50 million climate refugees in the next decades. ... Australia was criticised by both European diplomats and environment groups for its failure to stand with Europe and the developing nations to keep the scientific advice in the Bali test.

The SMH also has an article on the opening of a new runway in Antarctica.

Fittingly Wilkins's name is now etched onto the Antarctic continent in a blue ice runway stretched across four kilometres of a remote glacial plateau. The first touchdown on the Wilkins Runway this week by Australia's vessel of Antarctic discovery - an Airbus A319 jet - opens a new era in scientific exploration of the ice, and the possibility of a leap in understanding equivalent to the one Wilkins sensed as he scrawled excitedly into his notebook.

The opening of the air link between Australia and Antarctica, decades after it was first imagined, is belated but timely. The secrets held in the ice have never been more valuable to humanity, revealing the planet's climate history and exposing the minutia of unfolding change. As the American writer Barry Lopez observed on his Antarctic journey, it has become "a place from which to take the measure of the planet".

Deep ice core records, which contain bubbles of long-lost atmosphere, are fundamental to understanding the baseline of climatic history, says the veteran Australian Antarctic researcher and glaciologist Dr Bill Budd, whose work dates back 30 years.

The surrounding icy seas are the nursery of the krill and plankton that sustain marine food chains. The air link opens the way to more scientists to track ice sheet dynamics - their still mysterious movement and melt - and to plot atmospheric and biological changes happening now, says Dr Graeme Pearman, one of Australia's eminent experts on climate change, and the former head of CSIRO atmospheric research.

Ian Dunlop and Bruce Robinson from ASPO Australia have been featured in this article on "Carbon's Rocky Road", looking at the fading of interest in "clean coal":

Dr Peter Cook, who heads the Canberra-based research centre CO2CRC, said the disappearance of the CET "had left a bit of a gap". CO2CRC is a collaboration between all the major fossil fuel companies, several universities and some government departments.

It is managing a CCS demonstration plant in the Otway Basin, near Warrnambool, the installation of which has been bumpy. So far, extracting naturally occurring carbon dioxide and methane from a gas well has been successful. Not so easy has been transporting it 2km overland to a compression chamber and then injecting it down a 2km pipe through layers of rock into a depleted natural gas layer. ...

For coal industries and electricity generators that depend on fossil fuels, geosequestration is the holy grail. The theory behind it is that carbon dioxide can be harvested before it enters the atmosphere and then put under enormous pressure to turn it into a liquid, before being injected deep into the earth. Trapped between supposedly impenetrable layers of rock where oil and gas once flowed, it ought to be stored safely and indefinitely.

However that theory has not been tested, as CCS critics often remind the coal lobby, and even if it were to be demonstrated after billions of dollars are spent on creating the technology, it could take another 20 years before it becomes a commercial proposition.

If the climate change science is right, and greenhouse gases need to start declining soon, then CCS will be too little too late to be considered a meaningful form of mitigation.

Former head of the Australian Coal Association Ian Dunlop, who now is deputy convener of the Australian Association for the Study of Peak Oil, said he believed "we have probably left it too late for CCS". At the same time he warns that government policy should not pick winners and that there is merit in continuing to encourage research into the technology, if only just to prove whether it will succeed or fail.

Shortly after Australia first signed the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, Mr Dunlop was appointed by the federal government to chair a group that would design an emissions trading scheme for Australia. But Mr Howard squashed the project when he was converted into a climate sceptic by his US allies, according to Mr Dunlop, who had worked as an oil and gas sector executive for years. In the years since, Mr Dunlop has strengthened his resolve to warn governments and industries about the dangers of not taking climate change risk seriously.

In the meantime, CCS polarises the opinion-makers, with many scientists, such as AASPO convenor Bruce Robinson, dismissing it as science fiction.

Others, such as Tony Maher, head of the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, label it as a panacea that must be applied. Mr Maher was selected by an international council of unions to give a short address in Bali's Plenary 1 on behalf of the world's workers.

Former Howard government adviser Guy Pearse, the author of High and Dry, has written that there are no plans on any scale or in any meaningful timeframe to capture most emissions from existing coal fired power stations. "But various co-operative research centres promote the idea that 'clean coal' is here and now," Dr Pearse wrote in his pre-election expose of the political links between the coal lobby and the former prime minister.

Stuff.co.nz has some retro peak oil doomerism, looking at some peak oil survivalists in the south island (mainland) of NZ - "Bags packed for doomsday".

The ‘twin tsunamis’ of global warming and peak oil could spell TEOTWAWKI - the end of the world as we know it - and already, quietly, some people are getting prepared because they believe we are talking years rather than decades. Helen, a petite 42-year-old Nelson housewife, is racing to build her own personal TEOTWAWKI lifeboat. Earlier this year, she and her American husband cashed-up to buy a 21ha farm in a remote, easily defensible, river valley backing onto the Arthur Range, north-west of Nelson.

The site ticks the right boxes. Way above sea level. Its own spring and stream. Enough winter sun. A good mix of growing areas. A sprinkling of neighbouring farms strung along the valley’s winding dirt-track road. The digger was to arrive this week to carve out the platform for an adobe eco-house. A turbine in the stream will generate power. A composting toilet will deal with sewage.

Then there is the stuff that could really get her labelled as a crank (and why she would prefer to remain relatively anonymous, at least until she is completely set up). Back at her rented house in Nelson, Helen shows the growing collection of horse-drawn ploughs, wheat grinders, treadle sewing machines and other rusting relics of the pre-carbon era, she believes she will need the day the petrol pumps finally run dry. ...

Jurgen Heissner is another Nelsonian who is seeing the writing on the wall. A founder member of the New Zealand branch of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (Aspo), Heissner says it was like a blow to the stomach when he first comprehended how close we are to the brink. He immediately began the process of selling out of his thriving bio-paint business and getting ready for a new world order.

Heissner's young son crawls into the room, one foot tangled in the leg of his romper suit, and gazes up at us. Heissner's Japanese wife is in the kitchen making his 50th-birthday cake. Roses bloom at the window. Sun floods across the polished wood floor. And we're talking about TEOTWAWKI. Thank God we are in New Zealand, Heissner says in an accent still gruffly Germanic after 18 years here. The whole damn country is a lifeboat really.

Links:

* After Gutenberg - Aussies R Us