The Times (A Murdoch rag of all things) has an editorial celebrating the UK's plummeting carbon emissions - A Cleaner Future.
Without much fanfare and four years ahead of schedule, Britain has achieved an ambitious policy goal that should have significant public health benefits and serve as a case study for other large economies. The UK has cut its carbon dioxide emissions to a level last seen during the General Strike of 1926. Apart from that exceptional year, when most coal mines were closed, the last time emissions were this low was in 1894, when Karl Benz produced the world’s first car. Most of this reduction is the result of a 52 per cent cut in a single year in the use of coal, which, like diesel, fouls the air with sooty particulates when burned. This should have an immediate and positive impact on illness and …
Crikey has a summary of the new carbon tax introduced by the Australian government over the weekend (dubbed Australia's "Clean Energy Future" - sounds like a good title for a blog) - Carbon tax: Gillard’s ‘Clean Energy Future’ at a glance. The price is lower than I'd hoped, oil is exempt and there is lots of compensation for polluters - but its a start and the tax free threshold for income tax has been increased from $6000 to $18000 (ie. they are replacing income tax with a tax on pollution) so its a start I guess.
The government has announced its “Clean Energy Future” package to commence from July 1, 2012.
Price:
* Carbon price of $23 a tonne starting July 1, 2012, rising by 2.5% in 2013-14 and 2014-15 * Floating price from July 1, 2015 * Price floor of $15 a tonne (indexed), ceiling of $20 above the expected international price (indexed).
Pollution target:
* 5% reduction by 2020 as default position, new target of 80% reduction by 2050 * First 5 years’ caps announced in 2014 budget, extended every year by one year * Nine-member Climate Change Authority (headed by Bernie Fraser) to recommend caps and targets and advise on all aspects of the scheme * First report February 2014, then every two years. Government required to explain why if it does not adopt CCA targets.
Coverage:
* Stationary energy, industrial processes, fugitive emissions, emissions from non-legacy waste * Agriculture not covered, light commercial and household transport not covered * Other transport to face reduced business fuel tax credits outside agriculture, aviation to face higher excise; * PC to review fuel excise arrangements regarding emissions intensity * International permit use not permitted until >2015; maximum of 50% of international permits can be used by an entity.
Expected economic impact:
* 0.7% CPI rise in 2012-13 * GDP growth reduced by >0.1% pa * 10% increase in electricity prices in 2012-13.
Household compensation:
* Pension to rise by 1.7% * Self-funded retirees to receive increase in Senior Supplement * Family Tax Benefit to rise by 1.7%.
Tax cuts:
* Two-stage increase in the tax-free threshold from $6000 to $18,200 on July 1, 2012 and $19,400 in 2015-16 – tax cut of $300pa for incomes up to $68,000 * Matching adjustment to tax rates to increase second tier (30%) to 32.5% and then to 33%; other tier rates to remain the same; no one to face a tax increase as a result of tax changes * One million people no longer have to lodge tax return.
Industry compensation:
* $9.2 billion in compensation
Emissions intensive trade exposed industries
* Under Jobs and to receive assistance on three tiers:
1. 94.5% of free permits for industries with average baseline of a minimum 2,000t CO2-e/$m revenue or 6,000t CO2-e/$m value added 2. 66% of free permits for industries with average baseline of a minimum 1,000t CO2-e/$m revenue or 3,000t CO2-e/$m value added 3. 50% for LNG industry
* Assistance to be scaled back 1.3% pa * Assistance to apply for at least six years * Productivity Commission to review assistance in 2014-15 (or earlier if there is evidence of windfall gains) with the goal of assistance being wound back in 2018 to levels proposed by Garnaut Review if PC agrees
Steel Transformation Plan: $300 million for “innovation” in steel manufacturing (in addition to EITE assistance plus an additional allocation of free permits)
Coal Sector Jobs Package: $1.26 billion over six years to assist with emissions from gassy mines
Clean Technology Program: $1.2 billion to support low-emissions manufacturing
Energy Security Fund: to pay for closure of up to 2000MW of highly-emissions intensive generation capacity by 2020, provide $5.5 billion in free permits and cash to the sector to 2016-17, establish an Energy Security Council
Clean Energy Finance Corporation: to invest $10 billion over five years from 2013-14 in renewables and low emissions technologies (not Carbon Capture and Storage), run by an independent board
Australian Renewable Energy Agency to oversee $3.2b in renewables funding, in addition to any dividends from Clean Energy Finance Corporation
Fiscal impact:
* Revenue: $7.7-$8.6 billion pa to 2014-15 * Fuel tax savings: ~$600 million pa * Household assistance: $4.1-$4.8 billion pa * Industry compensation: $2.8-$3.3 billion pa * Total impact: Additional cost to the budget (beyond scheme revenue) of $3.96 billion over four years including this year — spending to be accommodated within goal of return to surplus and 2% real spending cap.
SO NOW, supposedly, we know exactly what to expect when, as seems likely, the carbon tax comes into effect on July 1 next year.
The average household's costs will increase by about $10 a week. All but the top 10 per cent of households will receive tax cuts and benefit increases to compensate them for this higher cost and two-thirds of households will be fully compensated.
Uncertainty over? Don't you believe it. Now begins the search for the devil in the details. And what a frantic, spine-tingling, imaginative search it will be, led not by seekers after truth but by all those who stand to gain by convincing us disaster is about to befall us and our economy. Advertisement: Story continues below
There is much distrust of Julia Gillard and her assurances, particularly since she has broken her election promise not to introduce such a tax in this term. But how much trust can we place in her critics? Since the Coalition, in its day, has supported putting a price on carbon emissions, can we be sure Tony Abbott's change of heart isn't motivated primarily by desire to win back government?
We will be assailed by business people telling us how devastating the tax would be for jobs in their industry. Can we be sure they aren't exaggerating as they jockey for concessions? If we doubt the word of politicians, can we trust the predictions of business people?
This scheme is hellishly complex, so it contains much scope for apprehension, justified or otherwise. It is designed to change our behaviour without penalising most households - itself a puzzle to many people - so this will in time change the shape of the economy.
In truth, some industries will gain while others lose. We will hear at full voice from those fearing they will lose, while the winners stay mum, as do the great majority of industries that will be little affected.
Psychology sheds as much light on these questions as does economics. The safest prediction is that the tax won't be as bad as its critics fear, nor as benign as its defenders claim.
We can be sure of this because of humans' well-researched inability to accurately predict the future.
We almost always expect bad things to be worse than they prove to be and good things to be better than they prove.
And psychology teaches us another lesson: once the tax starts we will get used to it very quickly.
This is a better package than the CPRS it is so closely modelled on, but not by a lot.
The key problem with the CPRS was that compensation for emissions intensive industries was so great and went for so long that it neutered the price signal, meaning the entire scheme was a giant money circulator that wouldn’t have started decarbonising the economy until well into the 2020s.
The same levels of assistance will apply to big polluters again, but this time the Productivity Commission will be on the case to review whether the assistance is justified and there’s an in-built bias toward reduction in assistance to the levels proposed by Ross Garnaut in his updated report if the PC agrees. But big polluters have a guarantee that their assistance won’t be cut until at least 2017, although the PC can start its 2014-15 review early if it believes there are industries making windfall gains from compensation.
In which case, the PC should start today, because it’s the scheme is a bonanza for big polluters.
There will also be an independent body to examine the case for accelerating Australia’s laughably unambitious target of 5% by 2020. The Climate Change Authority should become a potent independent source of advice that will pressure future governments inclined to recalcitrance in the key issue of how quickly we proceed with decarbonising the economy. In this regard, the increase in Australia’s emission reduction target from 60% to 80% by 2050 will become increasingly important.
So two independent sources of pressure on future governments to improve this scheme in its two critical features: how much the price signal is neutered by compensation, and how fast we should be reducing emissions. The effectiveness of these two bodies in making the case for harder and faster progress will determine the effectiveness of the scheme. Yesterday, the Greens were fairly sanguine about that, suggesting that between the 80% target and the sheer volume of money being spent on renewables, going faster won’t be a problem. We’ll see.
The other key advantage over the CPRS is the use of tax cuts aimed at addressing EMTRs for low-income earners. This isn’t merely sensible policy, it’s actually consistent with the government’s own reform efforts so far under Julia Gillard, aimed at increasing workforce participation. The Government has correctly picked up, at least partly, on Ross Garnaut’s recommendation that the Government try to get more bang for its microeconomic buck by using compensation to improve Effective Marginal Tax Rates.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that, like the CPRS, the biggest polluters will get the biggest handouts. The coal industry will get a staggering $1.2 billion from taxpayers in straight cash - an outrageous cave-in to the industry that is responsible, more than any other, for Australia’s contribution to global warming. The steel industry will get $300 million plus an increase in free permits above and beyond the 94.5% it will already get.
And the Clean Energy Finance Corporation may turned out to be problematic. Why is a government investing directly in an industry? What at happens if and when investments in renewables and low-emissions technology go bad? On the other hand, like the new ARENA, having industry and financial expertise guiding government spending on renewables rather than bureaucrats and ministers might achieve more than years of sub-par renewables industry policy has.
And buying abatement from the electricity sector is the kind of policy garbage we’re used to from the Opposition — clear government winner-picking. It’s an implicit acknowledgement that a low carbon price and heavy compensation won’t drive a rapid transition to less emissions-intensive electricity generation.
Indeed, courtesy of the Greens and a low carbon price, between the purchase of electricity generation abatement, the investment in renewables and the Government’s carbon farming initiative, there is much “direct action” about this plan. That means taxpayers will, yet again, be spending far too much to buy abatement - although this lacks the sheer lunacy of Greg Hunt’s “soil magic”, a plan in which the majority of Australia’s carbon abatement task would be achieved by a process owing more to Old Moore’s Almanack and biodynamic farming than science or economics. ...
This is about as voter-friendly a package as you can get while still doing something about climate change. With tax cuts for low income earners, generous overcompensation for pensions recipients and handouts to rentseekers to mute claims of job losses, the package minimises the potential for scare campaigns and special pleading.
Australia's Black Saturday fires of February 2009 burned over a million acres of land and killed 173 people. It happened because of record high temperatures and a 20% drop in rainfall over the previous 12 years. It was what climate experts had been predicting for some years: the megafire. A megafire is hell come to earth.
The energy equivalent to 1,500 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs was released in a fire storm that saw rivers of flame – sometimes rising 100 metres in the air – flowing through the countryside, generating winds of up to 120km an hour with new fires spotlighting 35km ahead of the main fire front.
Black Saturday reminded many Australians of what they know only too well: that of all the advanced economies, Australia is perhaps the one most vulnerable to climate change. And yet support for action on climate change, which was a key factor in the ending of 11 years of conservative government in 2007, has now largely collapsed.
In a story of ironies, a Labor government rarely characterised in recent times by either vision or courage has just announced a raft of measures, centred on a carbon tax, to reduce Australia's carbon emissions, an act at once brave and visionary. It was, though, forced on them by others.
It has been the strangest of battles that has already claimed two opposition leaders and one prime minister. And depending on who wins it, the rictus smile of Australian public life – behind which has hidden for years a paralysis of thought and action and has seen the coal and iron ore barons, the shock jocks and the Murdoch press seeming to set the political agenda as much as parliament – will continue or begin to break. ...
That there is to be any action at all is to the credit of the Greens, who won the balance of power in the Australian senate in that election and made the carbon tax the condition of their support for Gillard's minority Labor party. But the package of measures now announced are far from what the Greens argue is necessary to combat climate change by a nation which in spite of its small (22 million) population is one of the world's top 20 carbon polluters.
Perhaps it could not be otherwise. Australia has avoided recession because of its resource industries. Unemployment is under 5%. The coal, iron and gas barons combine massive wealth with a certain psychological dominance – without us, where would Australia be? – which is implicit in all their public posturing and pressurising. They interpret national interest as their profit and loss ledger and that, they regard, along with their successful bullying of public life, as being under attack from a carbon tax.
Along with Abbott's Liberals, they are keenly aware of Labor's tenuous hold on power. Gillard's minority government survives on just a one-seat margin and is languishing in the polls at 27%. Whoever wins the carbon tax battle wins government at the next election.
Gillard, on her side, has to placate her coalition of Greens and independent rural MPs, soothe an electorate worried about cost of living increases, and throw enough protection money at the big resource companies to stop them fully setting their dogs on her. The measures thus contain a large reform of tax in favour of the poor and large subsidies to big business to compensate for reduced profits. Her dilemma is that the only package she can get up in consequence is one that fails to deliver the very change that is needed.
And so, though designed with mechanisms for increasing decarbonisation, the tax begins life as modest in its impact, riddled with compromises, exclusions, bribes to both voters and corporations, a low carbon price of $23 (£15) a tonne and a very low carbon emission reduction target of 5% by 2020 – about half that required to stabilise carbon emissions at 550 parts per million (ppm), if other countries take comparable action.
The government's own climate change adviser, Ross Garnaut, has calculated that halting the growth in emissions at 550ppm-650ppm would lead to an average temperature rise of 3C to 4C – a rise with disastrous implications for Australia. Selling such a convoluted raft of measures is difficult: former Labor prime minister Bob Hawke has compared it to making "ice cream out of a bucket of shit''.
And selling it is a prime minister with the speech and appearance of a dying metronome – sometimes seeming so inept it has been said she couldn't sell the wheel – dragging along behind her a Labor party that must now present the measure Labor didn't want as Labor's achievement.
It may be that the carbon tax is the final chapter in the strange death of Labor Australia. A once great reforming tradition is now too often the captive of fears and dogmas generated in the service of corporate Australia; under attack from the right by an able populist leader, who has never been burdened by the need for consistency or coherence and rarely challenged on either; and from the left by the increasingly popular Green party.
Many arguments are already being made against the tax. The best argument that can be made for it is that, like all great reforms, it is a historic beginning. And perhaps it is the hope implicit in the carbon tax that is its most important feature.
Among many other reforms, Australians pioneered the secret ballot and universal suffrage. Whether Australia still has the courage it once had, or whether it has simply become the United Arab Emirates of the west, content to roll on for a decade or two more glossing over its fundamental problems while brown coal and fracked gas continues to keep the country afloat, remains to be seen.
The carbon tax thus looms over Australia as a large question: does Australia have the desire to move into the 21st century, or will it continue its retreat into a past as a colonial quarry for the empires of others, its public life ever more run at the dictate of large corporations, its people ever more fearful of the megafires of the future?
Yesterday the Sunday Telegraph ran a headline about Tim Tams and Weet-Bix — and how Gillard would use them as ‘typical Aussie’ products that would rise only a fraction under the carbon price. Today as I open the newspaper I can see that the headlines are similar: how much will this cost? What will the compensation be? Who will be better off when we introduce a policy to put a price on pollution?
The government even has a calculator on its website where you can work out how much it will cost you (I’ll be $33 better off, in case you were wondering).
But despite the government banging on and on about the fact that Australian families won’t be worse off under a carbon price, people still aren’t listening, because we have forgotten to talk about the ‘why’.
Why are we doing this in the first place?
Many polls have shown that people are willing to pay something to clean up our environment and invest in the future, because they can see that the outcome is worthwhile. But in this climate debate we have got sucked into the cost frame and stopped talking about what we’re trying to achieve — and people won’t pay for something if they don’t understand the point of it.
So let’s talk about what is worth paying for:
Powering Australia by 100% renewable energy is worth it.
Cleaning up our skies so we can breathe easier is worth it.
Shutting down the most inefficient power stations in the world, is worth it.
Stopping our biggest polluters pumping tonnes of pollution into the atmosphere for free, is worth it.
And ensuring that our kids still have a planet to live on in the future, is definitely worth it.
The policy announced yesterday, with $10 billion of new money for clean energy projects, and increasing the government’s emission reduction target from 60% to 80% by 2050 is a really great step in the right direction, and we need all politicians to support it, because it will start getting us to the future we want to see.
A Toowoomba-based company's carbon emissions-free concrete could be the latest weapon in the fight against carbon emissions. Wagners CFT's Queensland-made "green concrete" has already been used in Brisbane and Toowoomba footpaths and has been recognised by the state government's ClimateSmart program.
In the company's home city, the "earth-friendly concrete" has been trialled in some building slabs and it is estimated the concrete could save 9.2 tonnes of carbon emissions in every 300 square metre slab. If it was used in every house slab that went down in Queensland, it could save about 270,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions a year.
Wagners general manager Michael Kemp said the carbon-free concrete used two very common waste products with very little carbon; fly ash and slag from blast furnaces On Friday, his product development crew took out the biggest environmental award at the Premier's Climatesmart Sustainability Awards.
The more commonly used Portland cement is limestone and the carbon has to be "driven-off"' the fine, grey cement so it can be mixed with the concrete.
"That process of making the cement creates the massive carbon dioxide emissions associated with concrete," Mr Kemp said. "In a typical house in Queensland for example, using our concrete at market as opposed to traditional concrete, in one housing slab you will save 9500 kilograms of carbon dioxide. "There are something like 30,000 homes built a year in southeast Queensland, so when you do the maths, the potential savings for carbon dioxide is massive."
To defend against accusations of a tax grab, carbon revenue goes three ways: to compensate households and big polluters who are trade-exposed, and to fund low-emissions technologies.
With household compensation set in stone, big polluters are exerting maximum pressure for compensation in the form of free permits, and every dollar they get comes straight out of funds available for cleaner technologies. In an all-out brawl for public money, it is hard to see how renewables will win this time around, as the climate change adviser Ross Garnaut had hoped.
A carbon price fixed at the mooted level of $20-$25 a tonne will probably trigger a wave of investment in new gas-fired power generation, not renewables. Most analysts say the carbon price has to move north of $70 a tonne before renewables become competitive, based on current costs.
But gas is a transitional fuel at best: there is growing debate whether gas is very much cleaner than coal-fired power at all. Liquefaction of natural gas is already one of our biggest polluters and is set to grow rapidly with the added problem of rising fugitive emissions of methane (a far more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) from coal seam gas extraction.
McLennan Magasanik Associates and the CSIRO have estimated Australia will need to get between 50 and 75 per cent of its electricity from renewable sources to achieve our 60 per cent emissions reduction target by 2050 - and that is assuming carbon capture and storage comes good. If it doesn't (and it is not looking promising), that proportion will need to be even higher.
If a low and gradually rising carbon price promotes gas, not renewables, we are in trouble. We're reliant on the RET, but that only promotes the adoption of lowest cost renewable energy. At current prices, that means wind, which is unlikely to supply the vast quantities of power available from higher-cost sources like solar or geothermal.
Greg Buckman, a PhD student at the Australian National University (and former adviser to the deputy Greens leader, Christine Milne) reviewed our renewable energy policy in a paper for the Journal of Australian Political Economy - coinciding nicely with last month's 10th anniversary of the introduction of the first mandatory renewable energy target in 2001.
''If we just look at least-cost renewables, which we're doing at the moment,'' Buckman says, ''we're going to get a shitload of wind. If we just want a modest level of renewables, we should look at wind. But if we want a high proportion of energy to come from renewables, we have to go beyond wind.''
Buckman says economists such as Sims and Garnaut take a narrow view, that the renewable energy target and feed-in tariffs represent government ''picking winners''.
That ignores real-world experience: the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries with a high penetration of renewables either have robust national feed-in tariffs or so-called renewable portfolio standards, like our renewable energy target.
The federal Energy Minister, Martin Ferguson, has already indicated he sees the RET and a national feed-in tariff as mutually exclusive - it's one or the other. That's debatable, but accepting that a national feed-in tariff is unlikely, Buckman argues our RET needs reform.
Successful schemes overseas, he argues, have banding or carve-outs that ensure support for all types of renewable technologies - stipulating a certain proportion come from solar, wind, wave and so on. A wide range of renewable energy sources distributed geographically, linked by a smart grid with a capacity for energy storage, is the best way to tackle the problem of intermittency, and keep costs down.
''There can be several advantages in having [such an RET] operating alongside an emissions trading scheme,'' Buckman writes. ''One is that an [RET] can lower the carbon price needed to achieve abatement outside of the electricity sector. Another is that an RET can bring forward renewable energy technology cost reductions, lowering the carbon cost needed to bridge the gap between fossil fuels and renewables.''
That's the main thing - and the real threat to our incumbent generators - not the relative cost of renewables now, but what it will be in five years or a decade. Alan Pears, an energy expert at RMIT University in Melbourne, concedes the recent spate of stop-start, feed-in tariff schemes may be ''too generous if viewed in narrow terms or if continued too long, but they have transformed the industry''.
Hundreds of megawatts' worth of rooftop solar panels have been installed nationwide, quick-time. That is saving emissions and helping to defer investment in new baseload generation.
At the household level, Pears says, ''what's exciting is that, at present prices, even without subsidies, PV is getting close to a 10-year simple payback in sunny climates. That is zero net cost abatement.''
In a review of 300 emissions reduction programs published by the Grattan Institute this month, the RET came out pretty well: by 2020 it will be delivering the most abatement of any scheme analysed - 30 million tonnes of greenhouse gas a year - at an abatement cost of $30-$70 a tonne - and with plenty of capacity to scale up. Only energy efficiency schemes come out better.
OK, if we get a carbon price let's review subsidies for small-scale renewables. But let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, or take a short-term view of lowest cost abatement, which cruels development of our own renewables industry.
AUSTRALIA'S climate change policies will lead greenhouse gas emissions to balloon out of control in the next few years, the federal government says in an annual report to the United Nations.
Instead of the 5 to 25 per cent cut being offered by the government, the nation would pump out 24 per cent more carbon dioxide by 2020, the Climate Change Minister, Greg Combet, said, using the data to make the case again for a price on carbon. ...
Mr Combet said the national emissions data, to be published today, show that Australia needs to cut at least 160 million tonnes of greenhouse gases from its ledger on an annual basis before 2020 to make even its minimum 5 per cent target. "Clearly more needs to be done, and that's why we need a carbon price soon,'' he said in a statement. "While there is a warning in this report, it is important to remember that it is not too late for us to act.''
The government's projections take into account the renewable energy target, which aims to generate one fifth of electricity from non-fossil sources by 2020, and some energy efficiency measures, but no future emissions trading scheme.
"At some point the government will have to confront the reality that its energy policy and climate policy are on a collision course, with ever-growing investment in coal, gas and coal-seam gas undermining any moves to turn our economy around,'' the Greens senator Christine Milne said.
Australia, one of the world's top carbon polluters, can cut carbon emissions by at least 15 percent by 2020 without hurting its economy, business leaders at a climate conference said on Thursday.
By espousing the right policies, the country could cut its emissions by 25 percent by 2020, the conference heard. A price on carbon was a key component, but by no means the only one.
"Australia has very large scope for reducing emissions through energy efficiency," said Jonathan Jutsen, executive director of energy and climate change consultancy Energetics.
"The Australian economy is only about 10 percent efficient -- this means that 90 percent of the energy in the fuel we dig up is lost in the supply chain and end uses," Jutsen told business leaders in a message just nine days from a national election.
Climate change has been a major issue and the government has been pressed by power generators to put a price on carbon to give certainty to long-term investment plans.
Wealthy inner-city voters have also urged tougher climate policies in a nation that faces major costs from rising seas, the impacts of more extreme weather on crops and hotter bushfires.
Heavily reliant on cheap coal for power generation, the country ranks among the developed world's top per-capita emitters of carbon.
Energy efficiency programs, wind, solar and other green power, as well as greener buildings and cars can all cut emissions with the right policy incentives, the delegates heard. ...
A survey of 82 conference participants, from mining to manufacturing representatives from Australia and New Zealand, showed 20 percent favored government incentives as the way to cut emissions, while 19 percent chose regulations. Seventeen percent backed a price on carbon via a cap-and-trade scheme.
Jutsen said a number of firms were already on track to achieve reductions of up to half, such as retail giant Woolworths Ltd, with energy efficiency programs being the primary source as well as switching to renewable energy sources. "What they (Woolworths) are saying is they will have a zero increase in their emissions footprint while they will double the physical footprint of their organization," said Jutsen.
"The carbon price is seen by the supply-side as essential to make rational investment choices but from the demand side it is quite clear that a much more complex set of measures is needed to achieve reduction," he added.
Climate change organization ClimateWorks Australia analyzed 54 emission reduction opportunities across 10 sectors in a report on www.climateworksaustralia.org.
"With the right policy mix Australia could achieve a 25 percent reduction in emissions from 2000," John Thwaites, chairman of ClimateWorks Australia told the conference.
The Business Spectator reports that WalMart is looking to exert pressure on its suppliers to reduce embedded carbon emissions in the products it sells - WalMart's carbon ultimatum.
Last week, the world’s largest retailer, WalMart, laid down a challenge to its more than 100,000 suppliers around the world: it told them it intends to cut 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions from its supply chain within five years.
Whatever you think about the course of international climate change negotiations or even of a domestic cap-and-trade policy in the US, when the largest company and biggest private employer in the world’s biggest economy decides that its long term competitiveness, value and costs will gain from a lower carbon footprint, then it is likely to have just as big an impact on global commerce and goods and the further development of energy efficiency and sustainability.
The $US405 billion retailer is the first to address its supply chain on a global scale, although other corporate leaders such as the carpet group Interface have also looked to cut their emissions dramatically through the supply chain.
WalMart estimates that 90 per cent of its carbon footprint comes from the supply chain, and this move will add to other measures it has taken on its own emissions, which include the installation of solar energy sources on top of its stores and sourcing power from wind turbines as it seeks a move to 100 per cent renewable energy, and take a whole range of other environmental measures.
The US Environmental Defense Fund, which has helped Walmart shape its policy, said it would have the effect of launching “a race and a treasure hunt among its suppliers to reduce carbon”.
A pilot scheme had already proved successful, with 28,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions eliminated last year because its DVD supplier, Fox Home Entertainment, reduced packaging.
Walmart’s other major suppliers include the likes of Procter & Gamble, Unilever, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Kraft, Sony, Apple, HP, and Dell – a who’s who of the US’ largest corporates who will now have to focus on their own carbon emissions, and look to use less energy, do more recycling and make things more efficiently. It is very likely to have a cascading effect through the economy.
Crikey's Bernard Keane has finally given up on commentating on the progress of our laughably ineffective proposed carbon emissions trading scheme (aka the CPRS), something I did a long time ago - I'm sick of the CPRS. To hell with you all. . Ditch the whole thing and implement a carbon tax says I, droning on like a broken record year after year.
I'm sick of Barnaby Joyce and the National Party, so plum-stupid that they can't even understand when the National Farmers Federation tells them it'd be a good idea to back the scheme. I'm sick of the rentseekers, the whingers, the sooks and Hookes, who preach the virtues of the market when it suits them but whose natural posture is of a hand stuck out, demanding assistance, and assistance in ever greater quantities, like blackmailers who just keep coming back for more.
And I'm sick of the media and their inability to understand what's going on or their blatant support of denialists as part of an infantile ideological game. I'm fed up with ever more iterations of the CPRS that seek to obliterate, like an artillery shell aimed at an ant, any skerrick of carbon price signal, which is the only damn point of the entire exercise beyond the political gamesmanship of Kevin Rudd and Nick Minchin.
I'm sick, above all, of the vast gap between the farce being played out before our eyes and the real human and economic consequences of failing to stop the planet cooking, consequences I probably won't see the worst of, but which my kids will.
Fortunately they and all the future generations who'll really enjoy the fruits of out stupidity don't get to vote now.
So I'm giving this elaborate production, this whole, interminable, mind-numbingly banal show, zero.
Let us hope that decades hence, the descendants of our current MPs -- I mean their political descendants, not their actual kids, assuming the major parties don't adopt preselection by hereditary right -- will not have to stand up in the Great Hall and apologise for it. Apologise to the people who died of dengue fever or in bushfires, apologise to the families of the elderly who succumbed to heatwaves. Apologise to the tourism employees who lost their jobs when our great reefs died. Apologise to the farmers forced off the land as the Murray-Darling dried up. Sorry, dried up even more.
Apologise to the whole community because of all the economic opportunities we missed by locking our economy into some sort of carbon-era cryogenic freeze when we could have started the transition to the low-carbon economy that we will need to be in the future, now.
Hell, they may even apologise to all those foreigners who will die in far greater numbers than Australians because of the actions of developed countries like ours, one of the world's premier carbon dealers on a planet unable to kick its addiction to the stuff.
Hysterical? Alarmist? Green religionist? If only. I'd give anything to see the Andrew Bolts and Barnaby Joyces of the world proved correct, to be shown that the whole thing is a left-wing con, the ultimate scam cooked up (ha!) by some lazy academics and watermelon greenies who accomplished what millennia of Illuminati and weird hand-shaking Masons and sinister religious orders failed to do -- fool the world with a global conspiracy.
Because that's the only basis on which our international position and the CPRS make any sense.
Concrete may seem an unlikely material for scientific advances. At its most basic, a block of concrete is something like a fruitcake, but even more leaden and often just as unloved. The fruit in the mix is coarse aggregate, usually crushed rock. Fine aggregate, usually sand, is a major component as well. Add water and something to help bind it all together — eggs in a fruitcake, Portland cement in concrete — mix well, pour into a form and let sit for decades.
Let a lot of it sit. Every year, about a cubic yard of concrete is produced for each of the six-billion-plus people on the planet.
Think of it this way. The stretch of sidewalk in front of your house? That is you and your spouse’s share. That concrete truck rumbling down the street? It holds a yard for each member of the New York Yankees’ starting lineup. Add the Mets and the Red Sox, and you have enough for the typical house foundation and basement floor.
But those are small projects. The St. Anthony Falls Bridge used about 50,000 yards of concrete. Hoover Dam used more than three million. And the Three Gorges project in China contains more than a yard for every man, woman and child in Canada, population 33 million.
All that concrete may seem the same. And the basic product did remain relatively unchanged since the invention of Portland cement in the early 1800s. (The ancient Romans made concrete, too, but from volcanic ash.) Producers have always tinkered with the mix to find the right proportions of concrete’s basic ingredients, but the recipe never varied much.
Now the experimentation is more elaborate, designed to tailor the concrete to the need. Increasingly, that need includes the environment. Aesthetic considerations aside, concrete is environmentally ugly. The manufacturing of Portland cement is responsible for about 5 percent of human-caused emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide.
“The new twist over the last 10 years has been to try to avoid materials that generate CO2,” said Kevin A. MacDonald, vice president for engineering services of the Cemstone Products Company, the concrete supplier for the I-35W bridge.
In his mixes, Dr. MacDonald replaced much of the Portland cement with two industrial waste products — fly ash, left over from burning coal in power plants, and blast-furnace slag. Both are what are called pozzolans, reactive materials that help make the concrete stronger. Because the CO2 emissions associated with them are accounted for in electricity generation and steel making, they also help reduce the concrete’s carbon footprint. Some engineers and scientists are going further, with the goal of developing concrete that can capture and permanently sequester CO2 from power plants or other sources, so it cannot contribute to the warming of the planet. ...
Some researchers want to eventually eliminate Portland cement entirely and replace it with other cements to produce zero-carbon, or even carbon-negative, concrete.
Portland cement is at the heart of concrete’s environmental problems. About a ton of CO2 is emitted for every ton of cement produced. The basic manufacturing process involves burning limestone and other minerals at about 2,700 degrees Fahrenheit to create an intermediate product called clinker.
“Essentially, we’re trying to make the same minerals that they did in 1825,” said Mr. Stehly, who is head of a committee addressing sustainability issues at the American Concrete Institute.
The cement industry, particularly in the United States and Europe, has reduced CO2 emissions through the use of more efficient kilns and processes, and is now allowed to add some ground unburned limestone to the clinker, reducing the actual cement in the mix. But about half of the CO2 from cement cannot be eliminated — it is produced in the reaction, called calcination, that occurs as the limestone (which consists of calcium carbonate) is being burned.
So to reduce concrete’s carbon footprint to near zero or less, different approaches are needed. Novacem, a British startup, is developing a cement that does not use carbonates and can make concrete that absorbs carbon dioxide. Carbon Sense Solutions, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, wants to bubble CO2 through wet cement, sequestering the gas through carbonation (a process that occurs naturally, though very slowly, under normal conditions).
At a site adjacent to a gas-fired electricity generation plant in Moss Landing, Calif., the Calera Corporation is developing a process to bubble power plant flue gases through seawater or other brackish water, using the CO2 in the gases to precipitate carbonate minerals for use as cement or aggregates in concrete. The process mimics, to some extent, what corals and other calcifying marine organisms do.
Calera calculates that producing a ton of these minerals consumes half a ton of CO2, so the resulting concrete could potentially be carbon negative — sequestering carbon dioxide permanently.
Brent R. Constantz, the company’s founder, has a background in cements, having made specialty products for use in orthopedic surgery. But he does not describe Calera as a cement company. “We’re primarily driven by the need to capture large amounts of CO2 and sequester it,” he said.
The company probably will begin by making aggregate, because the barriers to making a commercially acceptable product are lower than with cement. Even with aggregate, any new product must meet standards and must be accepted by the concrete industry, which can be conservative. “Any time you introduce anything new,” Dr. Constantz said, “it’s a challenge.”
The Australian has an article on the looming danger of ocean acidifcation. This is a good one to run past any global warming skeptics out there that are happy to pretend that carbon emissions don't cause global warming - how about acid oceans ?
NOW that Ross Garnaut's draft report has been released, most of the climate change debate in Australia will focus on the economic effects of any emissions trading scheme.
However, there's another carbon problem, which will profoundly affect our oceans, that has received scant attention beyond a small band of marine scientists and is largely independent of global warming.
The public, aware of the role of carbon dioxide in climate change, doesn't know of its function in acidifying the oceans and the hundreds of years that would be required for recovery.
Ocean acidification refers to the natural process whereby carbon dioxide dissolves in the sea, forming a weak carbonic acid. The ocean is a major sink for atmospheric carbon dioxide and has absorbed about 48 per cent of the CO2 emitted by human activities since the pre-industrial age.
A recent report from the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Co-operative Research Centre claimed that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is at its highest level in 650,000 years, and possibly 23 million years, and half has been dissolved in the oceans, making them more acidic.
Australia has a direct stake in the ocean acidification problem: it will affect every part of our marine environment. And our offshore estate has just become a lot bigger. Three months ago the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf, while not accepting all bids, recognised Australia's claim to the continental shelf where it extends beyond our exclusive 200 nautical mile economic zone. This is a vast oceanic area: 2.5 million square kilometres, or 10 times the size of New Zealand and 20 times the size of Britain.
Rising levels of acidity in the oceans surrounding Australia could have a profound impact on marine industries and dire consequences for many Pacific Island communities, presenting strategic and humanitarian challenges.
Mounting levels of CO2 in the Southern Ocean has caused deep concern among scientists studying the long-term productivity of the world's oceans. Under conditions of increasing acidification, parts of the oceans will deteriorate and progressively become uninhabitable for certain types of plankton, central to the ocean food chain, and coral structures. The Southern Ocean is particularly important because it is very efficient at absorbing CO2 from the atmosphere: it's here where the first effects are being felt.
Ocean acidification is likely to have a cascading effect, reaching parts of the food chain such as fish and shellfish. Marine researchers are saying that a business-as-usual scenario of CO2 production will ultimately result in destruction of marine life on an enormous scale.
Grist has a look at Lester Brown's latest version of Plan B.
Lester R. Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute and author, most recently, of Plan B, Version 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, released a new study today called "Time for Plan B: Cutting carbon emissions by 80 percent by 2020." I was invited to participate in a conference call in which Lester explained many of the highlights of the plan; I will do my best to share what he said (any mistakes are my own).
First, it appears that the only comprehensive plan to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2020 is the one put out by Brown and his associates at the Earth Policy Institute. Partly this may be because Brown explicitly stated that he was not presenting what is politically feasible, but what is needed to cut emissions by 80 percent by 2020.
Cutting emissions by 80 percent by 2050, as he pointed out, is more politically comfortable because it means you don't have to do much now, but it is not what is needed. He discussed Jim Hansen's goal of getting CO2 emissions down to 350 parts per million, a goal which could be targeted after 2020, as the next step after reducing emissions by 80 percent.
Brown's plan consists of three main goals: raising efficiency, moving from fossil fuels to renewable energy, and biosequestration -- or basically, increasing the Earth's forest cover. Most of his talk focused on moving to renewables.
The core of the plan is to replace 40 percent of the world's electricity that is generated by coal -- there are currently about 2,400 coal-fired electricity generation plants in the world -- with wind power. This would mean, roughly, the construction of 1.5 million 2 MW wind turbines, which he said could be done over the next 12 years, using just the production capacity of idle U.S. auto factories. Although it seems like a huge amount of turbines, considering that the world produces 65 million automobiles a year, it's really quite doable.
Brown noted that Texas is aiming to supply 60 percent of residential electricity with the construction of huge wind complexes in that state. Brown travels quite a bit to China, and he says that the Chinese could supply twice the total electricity they now generate, which is currently mostly coal plants, with the enormous wind potential that they have. As for the U.S., he pointed out that Texas, Kansas, and North Dakota contain enough wind potential to replace all of our energy needs, much less electricity.
Solar energy has three main potentialities, according to Brown: solar water heaters (40 million of which have been installed in China alone), solar cells, and solar thermal plants (concentrating solar plants). He pointed out that Algeria wants to construct a 6,000 MW CSP plant in their desert; they plan to be a major of exporter of electricity, which will replace their oil exports when those run dry.
The ABC's Catalyst show this week had a segment on green cement from a company called Zoobond - trying to reduce the huge carbon emissions that cement making currently entails.
An Australian company has started to make concrete which promises to dramatically cut the carbon dioxide ordinarily emitted during production. Concrete is the second most widely used material on earth, after water. Figures vary, but it’s estimated that the manufacture of cement, the reactive ingredient in concrete, is responsible for over 5% of the world’s CO2 emissions.
Using a technique to make geo-polymers similar to those found in some natural volcanic rocks, a concrete alternative called E-Crete is now being manufactured in Melbourne, which claims to have reduced the amount of CO2 ordinarily emitted in the manufacture process by an estimated 80-90%.
Narration: What’s the fast growing source of greenhouse gas?
You might be surprised but it’s cement. Cement’s already the 3rd largest man-made source of carbon dioxide - more than two billion tonnes of it a year. That’s after fossil fuels and defrorestation. And because of all the construction going on around the world, cement’s carbon footprint is growing rapidly.
In May 2007, the Mayor of London laid down a gauntlet: 60% cuts in carbon emissions by 2025 – that’s 25 years ahead of the UK’s national target – 25 years ahead of anywhere else in the world. So can a city do what a nation can’t?
London has faced many challenges in its long and colourful history, but this could be its biggest. Like all great cities, it has an insatiable hunger for power. 75% of the worlds’ carbon emissions come from cities. And yet cities are some of the places most at risk from climate change.
Stopping the City drowning is an unenviable responsibility, but it has fallen on the shoulders of Allan Jones MBE because of the extraordinary thing he did in the English town of Woking. Once there, he set the town on the path to independence of the national electricity grid, by generating all its own power.
Now, Allan has been asked to repeat what he did for Woking in Greater London - a city 75 times the size. London has a proud history of transformation under duress, but like the barriers on the Thames itself, the barriers that Allan and his compatriots face are immense. ...
Combined heat and power is not new – Manhattan was set up with it in the 1880’s. But when modern, centralised power stations were invented, CHP was quietly abandoned – Manhattan’s surrounds are on the grid.
In energy terms, though, centralised power stations are far less efficient. 2/3 of the energy produced is thrown away into the atmosphere as heat – with further losses over the grid.
Alex Steffen has an essay up at WorldChanging recommending that we need to be shifting to zero carbon emissions immediately. I'm a little uncomfortable with the claim that we are in overshoot at present though. Personally I define the onset of overshoot as the point at the population exceed's the planet's theoretical carrying capacity (something we are nowhere near) or goes beyond the point from which it is still possible to adjust back to a sustainable state without the occurrence of some manifestation of collapse. Using this definition we aren't in overshoot - however we do need to re-engineer industrial civilisation so that it is on a sustainable footing, in order to avoid this happening in future. Aiming for zero carbon emissions is a good start towards this goal.
The time has come to reconcile ourselves with a fundamental truth. Most of us were already alive when humanity went into overshoot and (sometime in the late 80's) began using up the planet faster than the planet could replenish itself. And many of us will still be alive, when, by mid-century at the latest, we have returned again to being a sustainable, one-planet civilization.
Of course, we may prove ourselves to be an evil and criminally shortsighted generation. We may melt the 'caps, log the Congo, burn the Amazon, slushie the tundra, acidify the ocean, drive half of all life into extinction and needlessly cause the deaths of billions of our fellow human beings. But I don't think we will. I think enough of us are better than that, braver than that and bolder than that.
Which means that we have to stop pussy-footing around and speak plainly: our goal is to have zero impact within our lifetimes. Our goal is to provide reasonable affluence and high qualities of life for everyone of the planet, while reducing our CO2 emissions, toxic releases, ecosystem impacts and resource draw-downs to essentially nothing, because anything more than zero is wrong.
Put more precisely, any ecological impact beyond global biocapacity tends to undermine Earth' natural systems, destroy ecosystem services and climate stability and ultimately destroy the options of our descendants. Worse yet, we are beginning to understand that more and more unsustainably intensive uses of the Earth bring increasing risks of passing catastrophic tipping points, and, indeed, that those tipping points may be closer than we think. These effects, and the risks they bring, are largely cumulative. With all of this in mind, it ought to be our goal to have no impact -- to bring our ecological footprint below biocapacity, perhaps even to start healing the planet (to change our ecological footprint into an ecological handprint -- as soon as possible.
The idea of zero impact ought to be non-contraversial. It is simple common sense that practices which are unsustainable cannot continue, and we know that it is true that propping up unsustainable practices with non-renewable resources has even more dramatic consequences. And we are currently growing rapidly less sustainable, and using more and more non-renewable to keep the ecological consequences at bay. This must stop. All of this is just plain speaking, and ought to be obvious to any informed observer.
What is less obvious, even to those who think about these issues a lot, is how quickly this must stop. When do we need to arrive at zero?
The answer, more and more clearly, boils down to now.
Take climate. Just today the Washington Post reported on two major recent studies which both concluded that zero energy emissions ought to be our goal by mid-century:
Their findings, published in separate journals over the past few weeks, suggest that both industrialized and developing nations must wean themselves off fossil fuels by as early as mid-century in order to prevent warming that could change precipitation patterns and dry up sources of water worldwide.
Using advanced computer models to factor in deep-sea warming and other aspects of the carbon cycle that naturally creates and removes carbon dioxide (CO2), the scientists, from countries including the United States, Canada and Germany, are delivering a simple message: The world must bring carbon emissions down to near zero to keep temperatures from rising further.
"The question is, what if we don't want the Earth to warm anymore?" asked Carnegie Institution senior scientist Ken Caldeira, co-author of a paper published last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters. "The answer implies a much more radical change to our energy system than people are thinking about."
Expect, in the next few years, to see a lot more reports like these from nearly every field. Most of the smart scientists and researchers I know expect both scientific modeling and scientific moxie to converge on much more plain-spoken assessments of our need for radical change in the ways we're treating the planet.
Some people fear that telling people the truth will result in a loss of our credibility or a despairing retreat from action. I don't think that's right or true. I think our job is to tell the truth, help people come to grips with it, and help them imagine how their worlds could improve as we solve these problems.
Bargaining with the universe is a pretty universal human reaction to bad news. Even those of us who have no belief in the supernatural tend to drop into a pleading negotiation with some unseen power when the doctor walks in with a grim look on her face.
It's pretty easy to look at humanity's reaction to the environmental crisis from this light. We can already see people coming to grips with the diagnosis. We ought to encourage a rapid ratcheting down of our denial reactions as we all come to peace with the reality that everything needs to change, and set our resolve to change it.
We'd all better hope it happens soon. The longer we wait, the tighter the window, of course; but there's also a lot more upside to be had if we act quickly. And I think the upside of a zero footprint civilization is what we really ought to be focusing on here.
I, for one, do not believe that we must be worse off for this transition. Under most models, the economy will continue strong growth even if we push hard on reducing emissions -- indeed, many of the things we need to do will actually improve productivity, more than paying for themselves. (This is true, by the way, not just for carbon emissions, but for toxics, waste reduction, water conservation, ecosystem service preservation, greater access to education and health care and host of other sustainability priorities). On pure GDP terms, making this transition quickly may be a huge winner.
And, of course, GDP isn't everything. There are a whole host of human security, moral happiness and quality of life questions that tackling this crisis will help us answer. If we move quickly, we could not only have staved off disaster by mid-century, but built a profoundly better world. And that is far more than nothing.
But to get there, we have to be honest about the goal of having no impact at all. We have to be willing to stand up, in public, and say the words: zero, now
Kiashu reckons that zero carbon is impossible, but that we can get close enough - "Can we be zero carbon ?".
Probably not. But we can be low-carbon, and that should be enough. ...
But is the solution being "zero carbon"? That would certainly solve our problems, but is it possible? I don't think so. Now, there are two basic ways of being zero carbon, apart from dropping dead: living as a sort of secular Amish, and living with some kind of high technology, solar panels and so on. I'm assuming that we're talking about the second one, living in an ecotechnic society. After all, we don't need to discuss whether we can live like the Amish, it's been done so it must be possible. Only the possibility of an ecotechnic society is in question.
The fact is that burning fossil fuels is not the only source of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So even if we change to entirely renewable energy, we won't be zero carbon. We'll be considerably lower carbon, and it may be enough to avoid catastrophic climate change - but we won't be zero carbon.
From the IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers report we get the following breakdown of greenhouse gases, given in CO2 equivalent in terms of greenhouse effect. ...
This leaves us with 18% of current emissions as still present even with no use of fossil fuels at all, or 8.82Gt CO2e annually. That would be an 82% reduction on present emissions, and as I've noted many times before, the IPCC November 2007 report told us that a 50-85% reduction by 2050 would keep eventual CO2e to 450ppm and warming to 2-2.4C, which is very serious but most likely not catastrophic. ...
We don't do ourselves any favours by being overly optimistic or pessimistic, by looking at just one side of the story ... We need to examine the facts seriously and thoroughly, and try to understand the way the world works. Some say we need to do nothing because Science! or The Market! will save us all. Others say that we need to do nothing because we're all doomed anyway. Neither is the truth.
The truth is that failure is not inevitable, and success will come through first understanding the problems we face, and next working hard. Knowledge and effort. It's rather like the workplace where we earn our money: knowing your job and working hard does not guarantee success, but it makes it much more likely; not knowing and not working makes failure certain. We're frequently offered dreams of success with no real work or effort. The hooker with the heart of gold meets and marries the handsome millionaire, the trailer park family wins the lottery, someone invents the hula hoop and sells millions of the things. But the reality is that we usually have to work for rewards.
What's important is to have faith in ourselves as humans, as a society. We can hope for scientific advances, for government to step in, or whatever. But let's not hold our breaths. There's an old saying in my faith, "pray as though everything depends on God, act as though everything depends on you."
We probably can't be zero carbon. But we can be low-carbon, and that should be enough. But it depends on us, you and me, the work we do, work that does not have to convert the world, just change the way we live day-to-day.
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