Bowen told the Australian Clean Energy Summit on Tuesday that he gad asked the Climate Change Authority to update Australia’s Net Zero 2050 plan and replace it with a new plan that lays out robust actions plans for the electricity, industry, building, transport, resources and land sectors.

“As you know, Australia’s currently lodged 2050 plan is a fantasy, invented by the Morrison Government,” Bowen said. “It assumes future technologies will do the heavy lifting without any effort or investment to bring them about.”

He said the new sector-by-sector decarbonisation plans would be crucial to laying out a pathway to net zero and to inform Australia’s 2035 emissions targets. But he rejected calls by the Greens – Australia’s green party – and numerous environmental groups to set a net zero target for 2035.

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“Net zero cannot be a 2050 plan – that timeframe is not in line with our international commitment to keep global warming as close to 1.5 degrees as possible,” said Suzanne Harter from the Australian Conservation Foundation campaign group.

“The science is clear; we’ve got to reach net zero by 2035 and that means government-guided net-zero sectoral plans and the 2035 target that Australia lodges under the Paris Agreement will all need to line up with 2035 as the target year.”

The head of the United Nations Antonio Guterres has called for wealthy countries like Australia to target net zero by 2040, but none of them have done so. Germany has a target of 2045 while all other major  developed economies have a target of 2050 like Australia.

Bowen noted that the opposition Greens wanted a target of net zero by 2035. “Okay, and well, explain how you’re going to do that. It’s not realistic. It’s not achievable,” Bowen said.

He also noted that Labor’s upgraded target of 43% cut by 2030 has been described as both not ambitious, and too ambitious. “It [the 2035 target] will be a good target. It will be ambitious,” Bowen said. That target is lower than the UK, EU or US but similar to Canada, Japan and South Korea.

Bowen’s biggest challenge is to ensure that Australia can meet its current 43%, which is underpinned by an 82% renewable energy target that is currently falling behind schedule, due to a range of issues including transmission, connection policies and the competition for capital.

“Today I have written to the Climate Change Authority asking them to provide their statutory advice under the Climate Change Act on the 2035 target. I expect to receive this advice in late 2024,” he told the summit.

He said the sector-by-sector net zero plans would not include a specific target because they deal with different challenges and different technologies coming forward at different times.

“Agriculture is very different to the built environment. They both need to be working with us and we need to be working with them on decarbonisation, but a very different beast to get into different parts.”

The post Australia will update the ‘fantasy’ net zero plan it inherited appeared first on Climate Home News.

At the annual Bonn climate talks in Germany, Turkiye indicated they may bid to host Cop31, according to the IISD Earth Negotiations Bulletin website.

The country’s deputy environment minister Mehmet Birpinar told Climate Home Turkiye “would love to” host the talks. He did not name a particular city or venue.

Venue rotation

The venue for the world’s most high-profile two-week climate summit rotates around the United Nations regions. In 2026 it will be the turn of the Western Europe and Others group, which includes Australia and Turkiye.

The UN’s regional groupings. Western Europe and Others are in yellow.

Government negotiators from the group will decide on the host before Cop30 in 2025. They include the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Greece and Israel as well as Western Europe.

Turkiye’s long-time president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan recently won re-election for another five years – taking him through to 2028.

Climate politics at play

In their successful election campaign last year, Australia’s Labor Party promised to bid to host Cop31 alongside a Pacific island nation.

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That proposal has been supported by Pacific nations, Switzerland and by US president Joe Biden last month.

Cop28 will be in the United Arab Emirates this year, Cop29 will be in a yet-to-be-decided Eastern European nation in 2024 and Cop30 will be in the Brazilian city of Belem in 2025.

Turkiye ratified the Paris Agreement in 2021, after long resisting signing it because of its refusal to be considered a developed country and therefore be obliged to give and not receive money for climate projects.

At the same time, the nation formally known as Turkey, set a net zero target for 2053 – the 130th anniversary of the Turkish republic’s founding.

The post Turkiye joins Australia in race to host Cop31 climate talks appeared first on Climate Home News.

NGO Feedback has launched a formal legal challenge against the UK government, arguing that it risked flouting its international climate obligations by not properly assessing the environmental impacts of the deal.

The UK-Australia Free Trade Agreement, which enters into force at the end of the month, gives Australian producers better access to the UK market to sell beef, lamb and dairy.

Then UK prime minister Boris Johnson, trade secretary Liz Truss and Australian prime minister Scott Morrison celebrate the trade deal in London in 2021 (Photo credit: Number 10/Flickr)

Agreeing the deal in 2021, the UK government said Australia shared domestic “beliefs in high standards in areas such as animal welfare and the environment” and maintained that the deal would uphold these.

Brexit dash for deals

But critics believe it was passed in haste and risks undercutting UK producers with food that does more damage to the environment.

Carina Millstone, executive director of Feedback, said the UK government had recklessly sacrificed both British farmers and the climate in a rush for positive headlines after the UK left the European Union and faced accusations that it was now globally isolated.

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“At a time of crisis in food and farming,” she said “the government must ensure all trade deals work towards our emissions reduction targets rather than towards further catastrophic heating.”

A government impact assessment of the free trade agreement suggested there would be an increase in transport-related greenhouse gas emissions as more goods are moved between Australia and the UK.

They estimated that increase would be 0.1-0.3 MtCo2 a year, about the annual emissions of Liechenstein.

Claims of uncertainty

But it said data uncertainties on the emissions impact of farming, particularly of beef, made drawing conclusions on these emissions difficult.

Campaigners instead point to a 2021 independent review of the UK’s national food strategy. It used a 2020 study in Global Environmental Change to conclude that carbon emissions from UK beef was 30kg Co2/kg compared to 45kg Co2e/kg from Australian beef.

The authors of that study found that these differences between different countries were “largely attributable to deforestation for grazing lands and higher methane emissions from…belching”.

Campaigners said the food strategy clearly shows that the free trade agreement will have a material impact on the UK’s legally binding climate targets.

Cheap meat

They also say the impact assessment fails to quantify the carbon impact of any changes to overall domestic UK meat and dairy consumption. 

Cheaper Australian goods were touted as one of the key benefits of the agreement for the UK. Australia’s biggest cattle farmer suggested that the trade deal could result in Australian beef exports to the UK rising tenfold. 

However, Feedback says the greater availability of cheap meat on UK supermarket shelves and in the food service industry will increase the amount that gets eaten.

This would go against recommendations from both national food strategy review and those of the UK’s advisory Climate Change Committee that substantial reductions in meat and dairy are essential to tackle climate change. 

G7 calls on all countries to reach net zero by 2050

Feedback sent a letter to environment secretary Thérèse Coffey last year, warning that it was prepared to take legal action, and said the response it received was unsatisfactory. 

Rowan Smith, a solicitor for law firm Leigh Day which is representing Feedback in the case, said they would be arguing that the legislation implementing the new tariff rules was based on an impact assessment that completely ignored the science.

“It is argued that this irrationality renders the statutory instrument unlawful, and our client is asking the court to quash it,” he said.

The government would not comment on ongoing legal proceedings.

The post UK sued over plan to import more polluting Australian beef appeared first on Climate Home News.

The “Safeguard Mechanism” reform legislation is key to the Labor government’s pledge to cut emissions by 43% by 2030 in a country that ranks as one of the world’s biggest carbon emitters per person.

Weeks of talks with the Greens Party, whose support is needed in the upper house Senate, yielded changes including a hard total emissions cap, ministerial review for projects that raise total emissions and compulsory disclosures for polluters that rely heavily on carbon offsets to meet their targets.

The updated legislation requires all new gas projects in the Beetaloo Basin to have net zero carbon emissions and new gas fields supplying existing liquefied natural gas (LNG) plants to have net zero reservoir emissions, imposing new costs. This does not include the emissions from customers burning the gas.

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Australian Greens leader Adam Bandt said “coal and gas have taken a huge hit” and “we’ve derailed the Beetaloo and Barossa gas fields”.

But the Greens gave up their demand that Australia stops approving new fossil fuel projects.

The International Energy Agency has said that new fossil fuel projects are not compatible with limiting global warming to 1.5C.

Former Green leader Bob Brown said new fossil fuel projects were a “a colossal mistake”. But, he said the hard cap on emissions, will stop about half the planned future coal and gas projects.

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“Today, we are a step closer to achieving net zero by 2050,” Energy Minister Chris Bowen, from the governing Australian Labor Party, said.

Support from the Greens leaves the government short two votes in the Senate, where it is wooing independents.

The plan, due to take effect on July 1, aims to make about 215 oil, gas, mining and manufacturing facilities that annually emit more than 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide-equivalent (CO2-e) cut their emissions by 30% over the next seven years.

Under the revised legislation, projects such as the massive Browse field that Woodside Energy wants to develop would have to have carbon capture and storage to achieve net zero.

The government said it would tip in A$400 million (US$266 million) to help the cement, steel and aluminium industries decarbonise.

The post Greens stop blocking Australia’s new fossil fuel projects appeared first on Climate Home News.

The good news is that – despite the views of some vocal skeptics – it can be done. But there’s a bunch of things that need to happen first to smooth the way for the power system – for so long dependent on coal and gas – to be capable of running, at times, entirely on renewable energy.

AEMO chief executive Daniel Westerman says operating a gigawatt-scale power system at 100% instantaneous renewable generation is a feat unparalleled in the world.

South Australia has already operated at “net 100%” renewables, but never without any fossil fuel generation. It exports excess wind and solar to Victoria, and in a few years will do so also to New South Wales through a new transmission link.

By 2025, however, Australia’s entire main grid is expected to reach that landmark event of 100% instantaneous renewables, initially for a half hour period, with nowhere to export to.

Coal exit

And it will quickly move from half hour periods to hours and days as the amount of wind and solar and storage increases to the levels required to meet Australia’s new target of 83% renewables (over a whole year) by 2030, and as more coal generation leaves the grid in the years that follow.

The AEMO report makes clear that the NEM will likely have plenty of occasions when the grid could be powered entirely by wind and solar, but there might be many reasons why it is not.

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This includes market behaviour, such as some renewable generators choosing not to generate at their full available resource potential when the wholesale price of energy is negative, or non-renewable generators bidding themselves into the market for commercial reasons.

There may be network constraints, such as limits on transmission line capacity, that mean not all this resource potential can be dispatched in the market and carried by the network to consumers.

There could be system requirements, such as the need to maintain sufficient essential system services, that may currently result in fossil fuel generators being dispatched to provide essential system services in the absence of capabilities being available from non-fossil fuel alternatives.

Limits to rooftop PV

And there could be limitations on the level of distributed photovoltaic (DPV) generation to manage power system security. AEMO is especially keen to ensure all new rooftop solar systems have inverters that can be controlled or “orchestrated” so it has more levers to pull to manage the grid.

Source: AEMO. Please click to expand.

“In this case, the system can securely operate at 100% renewable penetration during the middle of the day, with gas fired generation coming online later in the day to cover afternoon demand,” it notes.

AEMO makes it clear that it will take a cautious approach, and may only allow 100% renewables penetration across the whole grid if it has renewable resource potential well above the level required to meet customer load at that time, and the system needs.

Reserve margins needed

“The first period where renewable resource potential is sufficient to satisfy 100% of demand may not lead to an instantaneous penetration of 100%, if that would risk reserve margins becoming too low to meet future demand in that day,” it says.

Indeed, AEMO notes that on October 16 this year, in the South West Interconnected System in Western Australia, a gigawatt scale grid with no connections, there was more than enough renewables in the system to reach 100% instantaneous penetration.

But it didn’t happen, mostly because a significant amount of renewables was curtailed for economic reasons – project owners dodging negative prices.

And, in any case, the grid operator doesn’t yet have all the systems in place to allow this. The maximum penetration of renewables to date has been 81% in November, and 74% distributed PV in October.

AEMO also notes there is a lot more engineering work to do in the future. The point where the NEM can operate at 100% instantaneous penetration of renewables will occur many years in advance of the time where it can operate at 100% renewables on an extended basis (over many weeks or months).

This article was produced by RenewEconomy and republished under a content-sharing agreement. Read the original here.

The post ‘Unparalleled in the world’: Australian grid operator maps path to 100% renewables appeared first on Climate Home News.

South Australia leads the world with the penetration of wind and solar in its grid, and has averaged more than 64% over the last 12 months.

It regularly reaches levels where wind and solar produce more than 100% of state demand – in fact it set a new record of 146% of state demand from wind only on Wednesday morning – but this excess is exported to Victoria through its transmission links.

Even when wind and solar have produced much more electricity than is needed in the state at any one time, it has always had to have some synchronous generators, and always gas fired generators in South Australia, running to ensure some of the principal grid services can still be delivered.

This requirement was last year reduced from four generators to two generators after the installation of four synchronous condensers that are spinning machines, but do not burn fuel, and can deliver many of those same services as synchronous generators.

Now the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO) is looking to reduce that number from two to one.

Most of the time the second one is only running as a backup incase the other gas generators suddenly fails, but a growing confidence in the ability of battery inverter technology to provide those services, and the presence of more “fast start” generators that could quickly switch on in case of an incident, means that AEMO is now thinking about reducing its minimum requirement to one synchronous generator.

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The immediate impact of that is that fossil fuel’s share of overall generation in the state (including that for export) could fall from its current minimum of around 5% to just 2%, because only one synchronous generator will be required.

And that in turn will further reduce curtailment of wind and solar, and on the number of “directions” from AEMO for gas generators to run. That has already fallen dramatically in the last year.

It also means, that with the completion of the new link to New South Wales due in 2025/26, the state will likely be able to remove the need for even a single synchronous generator when that is connected.

Christian Zuur, the head of energy transition at the Clean Energy Council, described it as a “remarkable” document in a LinkedIn post.

“South Australia (is) again at the forefront of the clean energy transition,” Zuur wrote.

“AEMO advised that subject to some technical studies being completed, they are looking to reduce the minimum requirement to just one gas generator … and are undertaking further studies to understand whether that last unit can be taken offline.

“This would be a world first, as far as I am aware, and is something to watch very closely in coming months.”

South Australia is a living laboratory of how to manage the transition to wind and solar, and an inverter-based grid, and – as Zuur says – it is remarkable to see how the engineering assessment of system needs has rapidly evolved in recent years.

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The new document says that for some of the critical grid services, the synchronous generators are already redundant. This includes grid forming and grid reference, two qualities that can now be provided by so-called “grid forming inverters” that are deployed at two South Australian batteries – Dalrymple North and Hornsdale.

“The SA power system currently requires at least one large synchronous generator for grid formation and grid reference,” the AEMO document notes.

“Results of power system analysis suggest a synchronous generator may not be required for grid reference. This means grid-following inverter based resources can ‘latch-on’ to the voltage waveform supplied by the synchronous condensers.”

This, of course, doesn’t mean that fossil fuels are not needed and that the remaining unit will be closed. South Australia still has a way to go to build enough wind and solar – and storage – to cover the gaps to provide close to an average of 100% renewables all year around.

Small grids can to it, but the fact that a gigawatt scale grid is now within touching distance of running at times with no fossil fuels, and no synchronous generation is – as Zuur notes – quite remarkable.

It would have been unthinkable a decade or so ago, and it should be noted that some doubters in the industry still question if it is indeed possible. And when it does happen, it will remove the last quibbles about whether a state grid is truly 100% renewables or not.

This article was produced by Renew Economy and republished under a content sharing agreement.

The post South Australia set to become first big grid to run on 100% renewables appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Senate passed legislation supporting the target in a vote of 37 to 30, even though several senators who supported it wanted a more ambitious 2030 target.

The center-left Labor Party government officially committed Australia to the 43% target after it came to power for the first time in nine years at May elections. But entrenching it in law has made it more difficult for any future government to reduce the target.

Climate change and energy Minister Chris Bowen said the Senate vote provided certainty to clean energy investors while strengthening transparency and accountability in Australia’s carbon reduction processes.

“The message to investors is that Australia is open for business,” Bowen told Parliament.

Comment: Australia excels at exporting the climate problem. Now it can finally export solutions

The conservative opposition party voted against the bill. The opposition has advocated since 2015 a target of reducing emissions by between 26% and 28%.

Independent senator David Pocock insisted on several amendments touching on transparency and accountability before he supported the bill.

These were soon passed by the House of Representatives, where the government holds a majority. The government holds only 26 of the 76 Senate seats.

Greens party senators supported the 43% ambition although their proposed amendments to increase the target to at least 75% and ban future Australian coal and gas projects were defeated.

‘End to climate wars’

Environment minister Tanya Plibersek tweeted: “The decade of climate wars is over.” It was a reference to how heated and divisive the issue had become.

Analyst and writer Ketan Joshi responded that such celebrations were premature, “while a slew of new coal/gas projects get hand-waved through”.

In November 2021, the Australia Institute counted 72 new coal projects and 44 new gas and oil projects under development. These would result in 1.7 billion tonnes of CO2 emissions a year if fully exploited, it calculated – equivalent to 200 coal power stations.

The previous government pursued a “gas-led recovery” to Covid-19, which included subsidising several new gas basins. Labor has not substantively changed direction on developing fossil fuels for export.

While Plibersek rejected a proposed coal mine near the Great Barrier Reef last month, the Labor government opened up 47,000 square kilometres for offshore oil and gas exploration.

RenewEconomy reported that Labor received half a million dollars from fossil fuel groups in the 2020/21 financial year. The Liberal-National coalition that was in power at the time got almost $675,000.

The post Australia passes climate law targeting 43% emissions cuts by 2030 appeared first on Climate Home News.

AGL, the country’s biggest coal generator and biggest polluter, has been forced to abandon its ill-considered plans to split in two and keep burning coal for another two decades and more. And it has been forced to do so by shareholder activism.

The fact that coal has been such a touch pad of political debate in the past decade makes this stunning victory by the activist billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes even more remarkable.

For one, it shows that resistance to the green energy transition and science-based climate targets is moving from dodgy back-room political deals and street-based protests, to the plain daylight of the boardroom and financial markets.

Australia now has two of the world’s most powerful and deep-pocketed green energy activists in Cannon-Brookes, the third richest person in the country, and Andrew Forrest, the iron ore billionaire who is the second richest person in the country, and who is making a huge push into green hydrogen and green ammonia.

It also has a super industry with trillions of dollars of investment to manage, and a keen awareness that fossil fuel assets are going to be stranded and worthless within a decade or two. The shift is on.

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Cannon-Brookes and Forrest are already working together on what will be the world’s biggest solar plant and battery storage facility, the $30 billion Sun Cable project in the Northern Territory. And they are both damning in their assessment of those who propose new fossil fuel projects.

Yes, we still have conservative politicians, media and “think tanks”, cheered on by Australia’s richest person Gina Rinehart from the sidelines, still prosecuting the case for coal, and smearing their faces in coal dust, feigning interest in the future of the coal industry workers.

But the federal election, barely a week old, amplifies the green energy shift. At least 55% of people voted for stronger climate action, and at least one quarter for a lot more than that – the supporters of the Teals and the Greens demand science-based targets, and to act on them.

It’s likely that AGL saw the writing on the wall from the election result, and realised it was kidding itself if it thought it could keep on burning brown coal up to 2045 and retain customers at the same time.

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The existing board – many gas and oil veterans – doesn’t seem interested in managing an accelerated transition, so they are heading for the exit.

There are still many big questions to be answered about how this plays out, mostly relating to the speed and extent of the transition that AGL will be able to execute.

The Australian Energy Market Operator has outlined a 20 year blueprint that factors in 80% renewables by 2030, no brown coal generators by 2032, and very few black coal generators by that time. It is very likely to accelerate that scenario in coming years, possibly to a complete exit from coal by 2035, or earlier.

But it is one thing to model this path, and another to execute. So much depends on the rules and the regulations of the market – which everyone knows are not fit for purpose, but which are taking an age to re-write. And there are other important issues, including technology integration, social licence for new projects, and transmission in particular, and of course supply chains.

David Leitch, principal of ITK and co-host of RenewEconomy’s popular Energy Insiders podcast, says the change of management at AGL will be welcomed.

He believes that AGL may try and seek a negotiated bid from Grok Ventures, the Cannon-Brookes investment vehicle. It will be interesting to see whether funds management giant Brookfield rejoins Grok in such a venture and a joint bid.

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Much about the future of AGL’s Loy Yang A brown coal generator, Leitch says, will depend on the attitude of the Victorian government, which has already privately negotiated a new closure date for the Yallourn brown coal generator in the Latrobe Valley, the details of which have been kept secret.

Yallourn was originally scheduled to close in 2032, and it will now close in 2028. It is possible it might have closed even earlier without a state government agreement to support it in troubled times, and when the sun did shine and the wind did blow, but we don’t know.

This is the big question for the green energy transition. We do know, from experience from the sudden exit of Hazelwood, and the drawn out saga over Liddell, that coal closures must be preceded by a sufficient amount of wind, solar and dispatchable storage built beforehand. That’s easier said than done.

NSW has implemented a plan to do just that, while assuming that all its remaining five coal generators could be gone within a decade. Victoria has a less well-defined plan, but its second big renewables option this year and its big new push into offshore wind shows that it knows it must build before it closes.

Comment: Australia excels at exporting the climate problem. Now it can finally export solutions

As it stands, only the Labor governments in Queensland, Western Australia and the Northern Territory do not have credible plans to move beyond 50% renewables in their respective grids, or even reach that target. It is possible that the massive push into green hydrogen could solve the problem for them, but they need a transition plan for their existing workers.

Cannon-Brookes, meanwhile, can help prepare AGL for the green energy transition, but he will need to work with and count on others – regulators, rule makers, developers, suppliers, financiers, state and federal governments – to ensure the infrastructure is in place to meet those climate targets.

But that is what is so exciting about the AGL situation. The transition has claimed nearly as many AGL CEOs (Andy Vesey, Brett Redman and now Graeme Hunt), as it has claimed Australian prime ministers (Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison).

Now, however, we have a federal government with a more ambitious policy (43% emissions reduction and 82% renewables by 2030), and a very big cross-bench in both houses that will be pushing them to do much more, especially on economy-wide emissions. And a public that wants change and is cheering it on.

This article was produced by RenewEconomy and republished under a content-sharing agreement.

The post Billionnaire activist forces Australia’s biggest polluter into climate-friendly U-turn appeared first on Climate Home News.

Successive Australian Governments have ignored global calls for increased ambition and interpreted their national interest as the fossil fuel industry’s interests. Author Naomi Klein remarked that in Australia you cannot tell where the coal industry ends and the federal government begins.

That is best personified in Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, who brandished a lump of coal in Parliament to show his enduring support for the industry. Sorry, I should say former prime minister Morrison. Because on Saturday 21 May, Australians finally and overwhelmingly voted for climate action.

Incoming prime minister Anthony Albanese, from the Australian Labor Party, promises to move the country out of the “naughty corner” on climate change. Unlike the majority of G20 countries, Australia did not strengthen its 2030 target ahead of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, UK.

The new and improved target will be a 43% emissions cut on 2005 levels, up from the current 26% target, but still short of what the science requires. There is an opportunity to go even higher.

Alongside the Labor party win was an unprecedent number of independent candidates, running on stronger climate action agendas.

Analysis: What’s at stake for the climate in Australia’s election?

Six traditionally safe seats for the incumbent conservative government in the wealthiest parts of the country were lost to independent, educated women. Their agenda centred on climate action, integrity, and gender equality – all found wanting from the conservative Morrison government.

These independent candidates are not in the same party though they share similar concerns and together will help push the next Australian government in the right (or is it left) direction on climate action. Add to this the progressive Greens party which also impressively snapped up seats in the city of Brisbane, the capital of Queensland, the state synonymous with Australia’s coal industry.

Australia came dead last on climate policy in the 2022 Climate Change Performance Index. This will change.

To speed up the clean energy transition, the incoming Labor government has pledged to increase the renewable share in the electricity mix to 82% by 2030 (currently at around 30%). It will bring in tax reforms for electric vehicles (given low uptake) and build a national charging network with stations every 150 kilometres. It will also address Australians’ range anxiety fuelled by Morrison’s claims that EVs can’t tow anything or drive distances and therefore would literally “end the weekend”.

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For many Australians working on climate change (author included), this change was a long time coming. It took the suffering and anger over the last three years from unprecedented fires, coral bleaching, and floods, supercharged by climate change and mismanaged by the federal government.

At Cop26, despite the clear push from the US and the UK, Australia refused to increase short term targets. But the former prime minister always found the time and money to support fossil fuels. Just take his economic response to the Covid-19 pandemic, which was to pursue a gas-fired recovery and open five new massive fossil gas basins.

The incoming government has a major task ahead of itself, including on the international front. Morrison pulled Australia out of the UN’s Green Climate Fund on a whim while chatting to a rightwing radio host. It is why one of the most impressive policies from the Labor Party is to bid to host the 2024 UN climate conference (Cop29).

In the 30-year history of the UN climate body, Australia has not hosted and it doesn’t want to do it alone. Recognising the existential threat of climate change to its Pacific neighbours, Labor has invited a Pacific island nation to partner on this bid. That is if they want to.

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As former Kiribati president, Anote Tong said hosting is irrelevant unless it is backed up by action. That could include simple actions like re-joining (and contributing to) the Green Climate Fund. Tong also points to harder actions like a genuine transition away from fossil fuels.

Australia is the third largest exporter of fossil fuels and there are 114 new gas and coal mining projects in the pipeline. They could add over 1.5 billion tonnes of emissions, most of which will not show up in Australia’s carbon accounts as the fuel will be burned overseas. Currently Australia excels at exporting the problem. Maybe it could export the solutions instead.

The incoming prime minister wants to turn Australia into a renewable energy superpower, given the country is rich in renewable resources and all the rare earth minerals necessary to make batteries. He wants to build things in Australia again. That includes building a new reputation for Australia that goes past fossil fuels.

Lets hope so. Lets hope Albanese can build an Australia that channels the wave of climate action that swept him and many others into government.

Richie Merzian is the climate & energy program director at the Australia Institute, a leading public policy think tank based in Canberra.

The post Australia excels at exporting the climate problem. Now it can finally export solutions appeared first on Climate Home News.

Despite frequent bushfires, floods and a bleaching barrier reef putting climate high on the list of voters’ concerns, the main parties have not majored on it in their campaigns. That has created an opening for the “Teal independents” to run on climate platforms in typically conservative areas, while Greens could gain seats in the senate. In the event of a hung parliament, they could be kingmakers.

The outcome matters for the climate. Australia emits more CO2 per person than any other large country, with emissions over twice as high as the European Union. As a wealthy country, it could afford to fund climate action in developing countries and its links to some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations, Pacific islands, mean it could be a huge force for good in the region.

That’s not the role it’s currently playing. Since he forced out his more climate-focussed Liberal predecessor Malcolm Turnbull, Morrison’s rhetoric and policies have been designed to anger environmentalists. Turnbull has accused his former colleague of a “fossil fuel fetish” and sending a “calculated ‘fuck you’ to the global consensus demanding climate action”.

As a result of his policies, Morrison was snubbed by the British hosts of Cop26 when he was not invited to a leaders’ climate ambition summit in March 2021. He only confirmed his attendance at Cop26 itself after Queen Elizabeth II, Australia’s monarch, was recorded criticising leaders who weren’t coming.

On the other hand, Albanese’s Labor Party wants to not just attend Cops but to host one. It promises to bid to co-host Cop29 in 2024 with a Pacific country. That plan faces several diplomatic hurdles but is a sign that they want to repair Australia’s climate image.

Setting climate targets

The 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change works on the principle that countries volunteer to progressively increase their ambition. Most large countries – including the US, , China, EU and Japan – have done this through improved “nationally determined contributions” (NDCs) to the UN deal.

Morrison has refused. Instead, he’s stuck with Australia’s target to reduce emissions by 26-28% between 2005 and 2030, far less than other wealthy countries.

Yeah Australia is last on all baselines, even at 28% pic.twitter.com/LoO3tcdHp2

— Simon Evans (@DrSimEvans) April 22, 2021

Labor wants to increase that target to 43%. That’s still lower than the UK, EU or US but similar to Canada, Japan and South Korea. As Labor’s candidate for climate minister Chris Bowen said, it would put Australia “back to the international pack”.

Bowen defends his target by saying that Morrison’s inaction means he can’t be as ambitious as he’d like to be. “We’re starting in 2022,” he said, “I wish we were starting in 2016 or 2019 and setting out what we could do by 2030”. He adds that 43% is not just a target but what energy modellers said would be the result of Labor’s policies.

Cleaning up Australia

In 2020, Australia was the world’s biggest exporter of the world’s dirtiest fuel – coal. Neither the Liberal-National coalition nor Labor plan to end that dubious record.

Morrison once infamously brought a lump of coal into parliament, telling the Labor Party “don’t be scared, it won’t hurt you”.

He has said he will support new coal mines. Labor’s Albanese has said he would support them too if they “stack up environmentally and commercially”. Both support new oil and gas production.

Richie Merzian told Climate Home the only real difference on fossil fuel production is that Labor “seem a lot more reticent to give additional or new subsidies for fossil fuels”. Data from the OECD shows the Australian government provides US$7.3bn of fossil fuel subsidies a year, $280 per Australian.

On consumption, as its target indicates, Labor wants to move faster away from fossil fuels. Its two flagship policies are to improve the electric grid so that it can handle more renewables and to fix the loopholes in the “safeguard mechanism” so that it does what it is supposed to – reduces pollution from major emitters.

Morrison’s climate policies have focussed on “technology not taxes”, investing in private sector green projects. Another focus is energy efficiency through more efficient appliances and solar power. Climate Action Tracker has rated these policies as “insufficient”.

Cleaning up the world

Australia’s international reputation on climate change is in tatters, particularly in the Pacific. After Morrison went to the Pacific Island Forum and watered down language on climate change in its communique, a former prime minister of Tuvalu said he was “stunned”.

Albanese and Bowen, whose western Sydney constituency includes a large Pasifika community, want to repair that reputation. Part of that is co-hosting Cop29 with a Pacific nation but Pacific islanders want more than a talking shop. They want seawalls and solar panels and the money to build them.

Huge turnout at the climate change election forum for the Pasifika Community organised by @UCA_NSWACT

Aus & our Pacific neighbours working respectfully on climate change is vital

Despite the Uniting Church inviting multiple Liberal MPs no-one from the Govt showed up. pic.twitter.com/RhLOqmBD3h

— Chris Bowen (@Bowenchris) April 28, 2022

Labor’s climate finance plan is thin. It promises to divert A$3.5 billion ($2.4billion) from an existing facility for financing infrastructure in the Pacific towards climate resilience.

The program will consist of both grants and loans in a ratio not yet determined. Labor says it will aim to help Australian businesses.

Australia’s fair share of rich countries’ collective $100bn a year goal is estimated to be $3bn a year and neither Labor, the Coalition or even the Greens have pledged that much.

Labor has dodged questions about whether it would contribute to the UN’s Green Climate Fund, which Morrison stopped funding in 2019.

Merzian said Labor had been “lukewarm” on the GCF, but “it will be very difficult for it not to rejoin”.

Pacific leaders have been focussed on calling for direct climate finance from Australia rather than for them to re-join the GCF, whose funds are distributed across the world’s developing countries.

The post What’s at stake for the climate in Australia’s election? appeared first on Climate Home News.

Grok Ventures, the private investment firm of Cannon-Brookes and his wife Annie, hired brokers to stand in the market late Monday to snap up an 11.28% voting stake, which may be enough to thwart the demerger at the upcoming shareholder meeting in June.

Of all the things that have and will be said about Cannon-Brookes and his landmark siege of AGL, the one that seems to get under his skin the most is the claim that he is the person responsible for the early closure of Australia’s coal generators.

It’s an attack line that is readily deployed by fossil fuel lobbyists and Coalition conservatives, if you’ll excuse the tautology, because there is nothing so easy as throwing darts at someone when you are trying to hide a complete stuff up.

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It fits with the rhetoric that it is the inner city elites that are meddling with the futures of coal industry employees, not global economic, technology and environmental factors. And it annoys the heck out of Cannon-Brookes.

“The thing I push back on is people say like, ‘Oh, Mike wants to shut down the plants’,” Cannon-Brookes told RenewEconomy in an interview earlier this week.

“I’m like, let’s be clear here: These plants are shutting down.

“That makes me want to question how we do that, how we do it in a way that keeps prices down, how we do it in a way that values the workers that work there and doesn’t just throw them on the street, how we do it in a way that can be financed and managed to transition in a more stable sense.”

Cannon-Brookes says the last coal unit should be closed by 2035 at the latest, and big efforts made to ensure that the replacement capacity – renewables and storage – is delivered by then.

Analysis: Macron promises to abandon gas, oil and coal, but will he deliver?

“There’s a number of reasons we need to get it done,” Cannon-Brookes says.

“Certainly the climate science would say that it needs to be done far more rapidly than the company’s current closure date of 2045. And the financiers would say it needs to be happened far more rapidly than that.

“Find me a model outside of AGL that shows that these plants are in any way able to be run in 2045. There is also the case that… attracting capital requires you nowadays to have a plan that is somewhat aligned to various global climate agreements.

“That would necessitate, in my understanding, 2035 is probably the outside date and you need a really credible plan to say that that’s the last day, when the last unit of the last coal plant will be shut down.”

AGL paints this an extreme position. But it’s not got many supporters of that view.

Australian government welcomes high fossil fuel prices, ships coal to Ukraine

After all, the NSW Coalition government is working on the assumption that all of the state’s black coal generators (including AGL’s Bayswater) will be closed in a decade, which is why it is working on a renewable infrastructure plan that will likely turn out to be one of the most significant and rapid transitions in the western world.

And the Australian Energy Market Operator’s latest planning document, known as the Integrated System Plan, assumes that all brown coal generators (including AGL’s Loy Yang A) will also be gone within a decade.

It’s important to note that AEMO’s scenario planning is endorsed by the overwhelming majority of the energy industry, and a growing number believe the transition will – and must – be even quicker than that.

But not AGL. Its business plan assumes Loy Yang A will keep generating, and polluting, for another 13 years, until 2045. It wants to split the business into two to manage the transition at its own speed.

Cannon-Brookes says this position is completely untenable, given what is at stake for employees, the environment and the future of the company, and has vowed to stop the company split.

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It has now turned into a bitter fight. Cannon-Brookes told RenewEconomy earlier this week – a day after launching his market raid – that he was “sick of them [the AGL board] fucking it up.”

AGL retorted on Thursday by accusing the Cannon-Brookes team of making “false claims”, including the observation that AGL has made no direct investment in renewables over the last five years.

AGL says it has invested $4.8 billion over the last two decades in renewables. The irony is that while that may be true, it doesn’t mean that Cannon-Brookes’ claim is false.

The argument that AGL has made no direct investment in renewables in the last five years is supported in the very same document that the company used to attack Cannon-Brookes. As this map below reveals, all the latest projects have been funded by “third parties”.

Source: AGL. Click to expand.

Despite this description, AGL insists it is “direct”, because of has a 20% interest in PowAR and its $357.6 million investment to fund its share of PowAR’s acquisition of Tilt’s Renewables’ Australian business.

But this dispute over direct and indirect investment misses the point.

The central motivation of Cannon-Brookes’ tilts at AGL – first in the rejected joint offers made by his private company Grok Ventures and Brookfield, and now through the on market raid – is about the speed of AGL’s transition.

He says it’s way too slow.

AGL, let’s remember, is the biggest generator of coal in Australia and the biggest single greenhouse polluter in the country, and Cannon-Brookes says its strategy is in no way aligned with a 1.5C or even a 2C target.

A decade ago, AGL’s then CEO Michael Fraser justified his eye boggling investment in coal generators by saying it would provide the cash flow to invest in renewables. Let’s burn coal so we can build more renewables, he argued at the time.

It didn’t sound right then and it doesn’t now. (Bizarrely, Origin Energy’s Frank Calabria is using a similar argument to justify the company’s massive gas investments, even though it has chosen to fast track the closure of its remaining coal generator at Eraring).

Canada: Amid record profits, tar sands companies want more subsidies for carbon capture

And in AGL’s case, it hasn’t turned out the way Fraser suggested it would. He was succeeded by American Andy Vesey, who tried to change the colour of the business plan back to green but got hounded out of the job when he announced the closure of Liddell.

AGL claims to have invested in 2.3GW of renewables in the past 20 years, but given the time-frame, the size of the Australian market and its dominant position, that’s not really a heck of a lot. It has been more interested in rewarding shareholders with its profits from coal.

Now AGL, according to this week’s presentation, is saying it will invest 3GW in renewables and flexible capacity by 2030. Again, that doesn’t come close to what’s likely needed to allow an early closure of its remaining coal generators.

It’s an important point because AGL is suggesting that 2045 is the last possible date for closure of Loy Yang A, not the actual target date. And it is suggesting that this could be brought forward if enough renewable capacity can be built instead.

That sounds a lot like Cannon-Brookes’ plan. The big difference is over the speed of that investment and the transition, and Cannon-Brookes’ contention that this is best done by AGL as a single entity rather than split in two.

IMF’s resilience fund ‘out of reach’ for some nations in need

Cannon-Brookes also points to the contradictory messages sent out by AGL over Liddell, the ageing, clapped out generator that will close its last unit next year, and Bayswater, located right next door that AGL wants to run for at least another decade.

“It boggles the mind that in Liddell, we’re going to make this wonderful green hub with industrial facilities and batteries and all this stuff, we’re using the land and the assets and stuff, but at Bayswater they say we can’t do that, it’s way too hard,” Cannon-Brookes says.

“I’m like, hang on, are they fundamentally different? Explain to me the fundamental difference between Liddell and Bayswater. There isn’t one. It’s bullshit. It’s entirely possible to be done. So you’ve just got to go out and do it.”

The difference between Cannon-Brookes and the multiple others who think that way is the fact that he has the resources, and is willing, to lay $650 million on the table to bring the issue to a head.

That’s a big change from the Twitter exchange with Elon Musk that led to the construction of the Tesla big battery in South Australia, or his social media campaign against Scott Morrison’s “fair dinkum” power dismissal of renewable energy.

This is an all in confrontation with a bastion of corporate Australia and one of the most powerful and influential companies in the country. There is much at stake, not just for AGL, but for the rest of the fossil fuel industry, and the country for that matter.

“It’s not philanthropic. It’s not a charitable exercise,” Cannon-Brookes says. But it does mark one of the key moments in Australia’s green energy transition. And the world is watching.

The content of this article was produced by RenewEconomy and republished under a content sharing agreement.

The post How a tech billionaire is forcing Australia’s coal die-hards to face the future appeared first on Climate Home News.

The seemingly coordinated defence has come from three of Australia’s biggest carbon trading groups, the companies set to be the biggest beneficiaries of a surprise change to the Emissions Reduction Fund that will free them from government contracts and allow them to sell carbon credits into a more lucrative open market.

It follows the former chair of the Emissions Reduction Assurance Committee, professor Andrew Macintosh, revealing that he thought most of the Australian Carbon Credit Units issued by the Clean Energy Regulator were not backed by actual emissions reductions, and represented a “fraud on the environment”.

It’s a period that has seen confidence in Australia’s carbon offsets regime rattled, and sent the market price of ACCUs tumbling.

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CEO of the largest contractor under the Emissions Reduction Fund, GreenCollar’s James Schultz, said in a statement that the firm welcomed the scrutiny of Australia’s carbon credit scheme, while adding that he viewed Australia’s carbon market as “a market we can have confidence in.”

“GreenCollar has been and remains the loudest advocate and supporter of the need for integrity and transparency in the Australian carbon market,” Schultz said.

“This is an idea that is simply in the DNA of our business. It is part of who we are as an independent, science-led, data-driven organisation. We would not be able to operate without it.”

“We don’t simply welcome scrutiny of methods and governance. We demand it. We have been the first to draw attention to the need for change and advancement of methods.”

Australia’s carbon markets have been rocked by the claims that it operates on the basis of flawed carbon offset methodologies.

Concerns have extended to the AU$4.5 billion (US$3.4bn) Emissions Reduction Fund, administered by the Clean Energy Regulator, which sees a considerable amount of taxpayer funds being used to purchase the offset units.

Australian government welcomes high fossil fuel prices, ships coal to Ukraine

The Emissions Reduction Fund’s second-largest contractor, Corporate Carbon Solutions, said that recent criticisms of the Emissions Reduction Fund effectively amounted to attack on landholders and project hosts.

“Recent attacks on the ERF are a direct attack on the more than 1,000 project owners operating to deliver more than 100 million carbon credits over the past decade with approximately 10% of Australia managed under nature-based projects,” Corporate Carbon Solutions said in a statement.

“At a time when more action is required on climate solutions, when more recognition needs to be given to landholders committing to improved environmental outcomes, when all of us need to be increasing our ambition and action in delivering a safe climate, spurious claims designed to undermine and disrupt action need to be called out as being in the same category as climate denial.”

In its own statement, the managing director of Agriprove – a spin off from Corporate Carbon Solutions – Matthew Warnken likewise issued a defence of the Australian carbon market.

“We echo the observations of the Carbon Market Institute that integrity, independence and robust review are at the core of Australia’s carbon scheme and that there are multiple elements of protection built into carbon credits from application and approval through to activation including regular, independent audits,” Warnken said.

“We note that the framework continues to evolve, and we support that evolution, including through our ongoing investment in technology and innovation.”

Carney, Kyte oversee carbon offset rules to address greenwashing concerns

The market price of ACCUs has fallen by almost 50% since the start of the year, falling from an all-time high of around $57 per tonne to about $31 per tonne.

But this remains substantially higher than the $12 to $16 the federal government was set to pay for the offsets under the Emissions Reduction Fund.

Earlier in March, federal energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor announced that the federal government would effectively free carbon traders from their contracts, allowing them to instead sell ACCUs at the higher open market price.

An analysis produced by the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis suggests the Morrison government’s decision to walk away from around 112 million tonnes worth of Emissions Reduction Fund contracts put its ability to deliver on its emissions reduction targets in doubt.

“That 112 million tonnes of abatement was factored in to meet the Federal Government’s official 26-28% target, and the 35% emissions reduction forecast taken to Glasgow,” IEEFA’s lead research analyst for Australian electricity, Johanna Bowyer, said.

“So now, the government is up to 112 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent behind on its emissions reduction task by allowing these fixed delivery contract exits.”

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“Carbon credit prices are now much higher than when the original fixed delivery contracts were signed between suppliers and the Federal Government,” Bowyer added. “It’s highly unlikely the Federal Government will be able to purchase new ACCUs at prices anywhere near the original average of $12.50. Prices closer to the current market rate of $30 or even the previous $47 seem more likely.”

“The change undermines the carbon market as a whole. The unexpected nature of the change and the price volatility it has created reduces certainty for investors in the nascent carbon market. Many will be worse off.”

This article was produced by Renew Economy and republished under a content sharing agreement.

The post Australian carbon traders defend troubled offset market against whistleblower claims appeared first on Climate Home News.

With much of Europe and North America looking to sever ties with Russia, countries have been scrambling for replacement supplies of oil, gas and coal, and it has sent prices surging.

Consumers are bearing the brunt of higher energy prices, with petrol prices surging to unprecedented highs while rocketing coal and gas has seen Australian wholesale electricity futures up almost 30 per cent since the start of the year, also returning to near all-time highs.

The disruption caused by the conflict in Ukraine has contributed to surging global coal prices, exceeding US$450 per tonne (A$608) in some markets.

The price for coal from the Australian port of Newcastle for March delivery is still trading above US$330 per tonne (A$445), a record high. European oil prices are still currently trading above US$110 per barrel, prices not seen since 2014.

Much of the Asian gas market is pegged to the oil price, and so the region’s gas prices have followed oil higher.

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Some one has to pay for it, and that will be the consumer. But rather than being concerned about the consumer impacts of high price of fossil fuels, Australian prime minister Scott Morrison and his government have welcomed it.

“Total coal exports in the three months to January were $24.27 billion – a staggering 159% increase on the same period a year earlier and 18% above the earnings for the three months to October 2021,” federal resources minister Keith Pitt recently celebrated in a statement.

Australia has even promised to make a coal donation to Ukraine which prime minister Scott Morrison said will “power up their resistance”. But doubts remain around when and if the delivery could actually happen.

There had initially been speculation that Australia had simply arranged for additional coal to be sent from a neighbouring country, like Poland, in an arrangement that would mirror those similar to Australia’s provision of arms and humanitarian assistance.

Russia claims sanctions will stop it meeting climate targets

But, on Sunday, Morrison made clear that the coal would be sent from Australia to a destination port somewhere in Ukraine.

“It’s our coal. We dug it up. We’ve arranged the ship. We’ve put it on the ship and we’re sending it there to Ukraine to help power up their resistance and to give that encouragement,” Morrison said during a press conference on Sunday.

“We understand that it can power up to about a million homes and this is incredibly important.” The 70,000 tonnes of coal would be enough to fuel a medium-sized coal fired generator for around 3-5 days.

A spokesperson for Whitehaven coal confirmed that the cost of the coal, and its delivery, will be borne by the Australian government. At current prices that would be paying Whitehaven as much as $31 million for the donated coal, using taxpayers’ money.

The government will entrust the delivery of coal to commodities trading firm Trafigura.

“In a very tight global market where demand for our thermal coal remains very high, Whitehaven has managed to secure the extra supplies without impacting existing contracts to other international partners,” Pitt said in a statement.

It’s not clear if or when the delivery of the coal may be made, given Russian warships are patrolling the Black Sea, effectively blocking access to Ukraine’s ports.

Around one-third of Ukraine’s electricity generation was provided by coal-fired power stations before the conflict. Supplies have been tight, with much of the country’s coal mining industry located in the contested Donbas region.

The post Australian government welcomes high fossil fuel prices, ships coal to Ukraine appeared first on Climate Home News.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report has a new emphasis on “maladaptation”, when measures taken to adapt to the effects of climate change cause more problems than they solve.

While seawalls do protect coastal properties and beaches, they are expensive, damage wildlife, mainly benefit the rich and encourage risky building near the coast.

Experts around the world told Climate Home News that green buffers like mangroves are generally a better way of dealing with sea level rise than hard infrastructure like seawalls and levees, although they are not suitable for every location.

Melanie Bishop is an associate professor of marine ecology at Australia’s Macquarie University. “Hard engineering structures, such as seawalls, have historically been the primary approach to coastal hazard reduction,” she said.

“While these structures have in many instances effectively protected coastal assets from erosion and inundation, their use has come at considerable cost – not only in economic terms, but also environmentally and socially.”

Revealed: How rich and at-risk nations fought over science of climate impacts

A near-final version of the report summary, drafted by scientists and seen by Climate Home News, said that “seawalls reduce impacts to people and assets in the short-term but can result in lock-ins and increase exposure to climate risks in the long-term”.

After government representatives had their say during the approval plenary, this criticism was softened and the advantages of seawalls emphasised. The caveat “unless they are integrated into a long-term adaptive plan” was added into the final version and the word “effectively” was added before “reduce”.

Seawalls are also “inflexible and/or expensive to change,” the summary concluded.

Two sources with knowledge of the talks told Climate Home that European countries emphasised the benefits of nature-based solutions while India, China and small island states argued that all adaptation options should be on the table.

IPCC: Five takeaways from the UN’s 2022 climate impacts report

Seawalls’ price tags have sparked debates around the world over what should be protected and who should pay for it.

In California, tech companies like Google and Facebook have bought billions of dollars of properties next to San Francisco Bay. Due to sea level rise, the area is vulnerable to flooding during a storm surge.

To build a levee, Facebook will pay $7.8 million, while the nearby low-income community of East Palo Alto is chipping in $5.5 million, 13% of its annual budget.

Mark Lubell is an environmental science professor at the University of California. He told Climate Home: “There are equity and environmental justice issues. Seawalls are expensive. Poor communities with people of color have a harder time affording them, and poor communities in the Bay Area (and most parts of the world) are more vulnerable to sea level rise.”

US seeks to remove ‘losses and damages’ from scientific report

Due to their cost, seawalls are less common in the developing world. Anoka Abeyratne, director of Sri Lankan environmental consultancy Aayusha Global, said most of Sri Lanka’s seawalls are “not the type of large scale ones used in the US”.

She added: “Most are rudimentary with just rocks held together with wire mesh. These are used to save the sandy beaches from washing away.”

Unlike the 36-page summary for policymakers, the full 3,675-page report is not subject to line-by-line approval from governments.

It highlights seawalls’ ecological as well as economic cost, saying they “reduce the space available for coastal ecosystems”.

A sea turtle grazes on seagrass (Photo: P Lindgren/Wikimedia)

Walls on beaches can block animals like turtles off from reaching parts of the beach. According to the Sea Turtle Conservancy, turtles are forced to lay eggs nearer the water where their eggs are more likely to be washed out to sea.

Nature-based solutions like mangroves are a cheaper and greener way of blocking storm surges as they suck in carbon and provide a habitat for wildlife. However, planting mangroves is not always possible, particularly in urban areas.

Retreat from the sea is also an option. The report notes that the Fijian coastal community of Vunidogoloa collectively relocated to another site within their customary land.

But the report warns: “The availability of customary land for the new site was a key factor of success in this relocation example, although this will not guarantee success in every case as relocation may expose communities to new risks.”

Mangroves on Indonesia’s Papua island (Photo: Paul Hilton/Greenpeace)

David Smith is a Jamaican coastal engineer working for Smith Warner International. He told Climate Home that, for many Carribean and other small islands, there is nowhere to retreat to.

In Barbados, he said, all the businesses and homes are by the coast. “Once you go into the mountains, they’re subject to landslides and much more difficult conditions for construction”, he added.

Smith said that many engineers are looking at combinations of green and grey infrastructure like a seawall with a belt of mangroves in front of it.

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The community of Ebeye in the Marshall Islands has even less of an opportunity to retreat than in Barbados.

Ebeye is a strip of land around 300 metres wide with the Pacific Ocean on both sides. The Green Climate Fund is contributing $25m towards building a $60m 1.5km-long seawall.

Albon Ishoda, the Marshall Islands ambassador to Fiji and the Pacific Islands, told Climate Home that the IPCC report made valid criticisms of seawalls but that there are no other options for many atoll communities.

A seawall in Majuro Atoll, Marshall Islands. (Photo: Genevieve French/Greenpeace)

“Many times, people think we have options lined up,” he said. “The reality is we don’t, unless some benefactors are able to commit hundreds of millions for some hard adaptation that includes relocating people and raising islands, then perhaps seawalls will be the last option. Some of the places that national efforts have mobilized to create sea walls are critical.”

He added: “Sometimes, people think we can simply move inland. The fact is, as atoll nations, many communities rely on underground aquifers for water. Once that source of water is contaminated with salt water, plants and people will struggle to find fresh water for drinking.”

The post Scientists warn seawalls can make rising waters worse in the long run appeared first on Climate Home News.

Scott Morrison’s government will back the development of yet more gas basins and the construction of new gas pipelines, as part of a new infrastructure plan that sees Australia double down on its status as a leading global producer of fossil fuels.

The post Australia to expand gas industry under Morrison infrastructure plan appeared first on Climate Home News.

The meeting is key to providing momentum for the UN Cop26 climate talks, which begin on 31 October and last for two weeks.

The Italian presidency is hoping to land a statement that commits the world’s largest emitters to accelerate actions this decade in line with limiting global heating to 1.5C – the most ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.

For Rome, that requires signalling the end of unabated coal power both at home and internationally.

Excerpts from one of the latest draft statements seeks a commitment to “achieving largely decarbonised power systems in the 2030s”. This draft was prepared by the Italian presidency and seen by Climate Home News and is likely to be changed.

The draft includes a commitment to “put an end to the provision of international public finance for newly built unabated coal power by the end of 2021”.

The draft text states that countries  “will do our utmost to avoid building new unabated coal power generation capacity taking national circumstances into account with a view to accelerating the transition away from coal to meet timeframes aligned with the goals of the Paris Agreement”.

But getting behind a coal exit has proved contentious among national officials. Climate Home News understand the language of the text is being strongly resisted by some coal users and producers, including Australia.

To close 1.5C gap, countries face call for another round of climate pledges by 2023

Discussions on coal are expected to reach leaders level on Sunday afternoon – a sign of how fast the issue of coal phase out has climbed up the political agenda in recent months. On Friday, the Italian presidency has been working on a new version of the text to move countries closer to a resolution.

While observers are hopeful that countries can at least agree to end the overseas financing of unabated coal-fired power plants, Climate Home understands this is meeting some countries’ red lines – with an agreement on avoiding building new coal plants at home facing an even steeper climb.

The issue has split the G20 between those countries ready to phase out coal and those defending the fossil fuel. China and India were in the latter camp during a meeting of climate and energy ministers in July.

Since then, president Xi Jinping announced at the UN general assembly in September that China would stop building coal power plants in other countries – effectively drying up much of the international finance for coal.

Campaigners are still expecting more details from Beijing over whether the announcement covers existing projects, citing analysis that more than 13GW of announced deals and planned projects could still go ahead.

The G20 statement could be a moment for China to signal greater ambition after it merely formalised existing commitments in its updated 2030 climate plan to the UN on Thursday.

Comment: Treating Russia as a climate change spoiler undermines global action

Both Japan and South Korea vowed to end their financing of overseas coal projects earlier this year. Last week, a group of OECD countries including Japan, South Korea and Turkey agreed on an immediate ban for financial support for international coal-fired power plants.

And there is likely to be movement in Indonesia. Prime minister Boris Johnson told the UK parliament that president Joko Widodo agreed “to bring forward the abolition of coal use in Indonesia to 2040”.

But while Jakarta might move on coal, it has shown resistance to language “committing” countries to carbon neutrality, according to a source with knowledge of the discussions.

A glimpse of the text shared in a video by Argentinian official Jorge Argüello on Friday suggests countries still couldn’t agree on whether to include a date for “achieving global net zero green house gas emissions” with the 2050 date still appearing in brackets and subject to negotiation.

Ahead of the meeting, Laurence Tubiana, CEO of the European Climate Foundation and one of the architects of the Paris Agreement, told reporters that the outcome of the G20 leaders’ summit should not precipitate conclusions about the outcome of the Cop26 talks.

That’s because developing countries are not in the room in Rome “to push the ambition,” she said. While at the G20 “it’s a group of richer countries that decide. It’s the whole of the world who is decision at Cop26 and that is a whole different question.”

The post Dispute over coal exit set to dominate G20 leaders’ summit appeared first on Climate Home News.

According to the modelling – which the government has yet to release – gross national income will be 1.6% higher, and 62,000 new regional mining and heavy industry jobs will be created under the plan.

Scott Morrison and energy minister Angus Taylor released the plan and a “projection” of up to 35% for emissions reduction by 2030. The prime minister will take the plan to the Glasgow climate conference next week.

Morrison reiterated Australia would not make this a “target”, but would stick with its present 2030 target of reducing emissions by 26-28% on 2005 levels by 2030.

The expected overshoot is being driven by three factors: the rapid uptake of renewables, especially solar; business and household energy efficiency using new and emerging technology, and changes in land use.

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Morrison said the target had been an election commitment, while also saying Australia “may even achieve better” than the 35% reduction. He ruled out promising a bigger medium term figure before the election.

But, unexpectedly, the government has not accompanied the plan’s release with a list of what the Nationals won in their agreement to sign up to the 2050 target. The only measure announced was that the Productivity Commission would review progress every five years, starting in 2023, looking at the socioeconomic impacts.

The government says existing priority technologies enabled by the plan would get Australia 85% of the way to net zero by 2050. The gap would be closed by emerging technologies.

The breakdown of the sources of abatement in the plan is: reductions already made up to 2020, 20%; the technology investment roadmap, 40%; global technology trends, 15%; international and domestic offsets, 10-20%; and further technology breakthroughs, 15%.

The government’s plan for net zero at 2050.

Asked about the total cost of the plan, Morrison avoided the question. He said the government would release the modelling underpinning the policy “soon”.

He stressed the economic side of the plan, acknowledging but placing less emphasis on the environmental need to get to net zero by 2050.

The plan was “uniquely Australian”, Morrison said. “It is an energy, trade, an economic plan, not just an environmental plan. It’s about delivering results through technology, not taxes.”

It worked by “enabling” rather than legislating or mandating.

The plan would “not shut down our coal or gas production or exports.

“It will not impact households, businesses or the broader economy with new
costs or taxes imposed by the initiatives that we are undertaking.

“It will not cost jobs, not in farming, mining or gas, because what we are
doing in this plan is positive things, enabling things. It will not increase energy bills.

“It is not a revolution but a careful evolution.”

Morrison said the plan was removing any blockage to investment in technologies, saying: “We are going to do this. If you want to do this thing with us then we’re the place you want to do it.”

He said Australians “understand and they support the need to take action on climate change. So do I. So does our government.”

Morrison indicated he will spruik Australia’s record at Glasgow. “There will be lots of words in Glasgow but I’ll be able to point to the actions of Australia and the achievements of Australia.”

He argued other countries could learn from Australia. “The Australian way shows a way for other countries to follow. The challenges that we face here in Australia, particularly with the nature of our economy are not that dissimilar to those being faced in Indonesia or in Vietnam or in India or places like that or indeed China.

Opposition leader Anthony Albanese said Morrison had announced “a vibe rather than a target”.

Labor’s climate spokesman Chris Bowen said: “I’ve seen more detail on fortune cookies than on the documents released by the government.”

Michelle Grattan is a professorial fellow at the University of Canberra.

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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This week alone, Japan and South Korea committed to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 and the Philippines declared a moratorium on new coal-fired power plants. Last month, China promised to aim for carbon neutrality by 2060. A flurry of Asian investors have said they would no longer finance coal projects. It signals a shift away from coal in three of Australia’s four biggest export markets.

At home, every Australian state and territory has set a 2050 net zero target and public opinion is swinging in favour of a national target to match.

Polling by the Australian Institute released on Tuesday found 68% of Australians believe the federal government should set a net zero emissions target by 2050. Among Morrison’s base, 59% of respondents identifying as centre-right politically supported the goal.

On 9 November – the day the Cop26 climate talks were initially scheduled to start – independent lawmaker Zali Steggall is expected to table a Climate Change Bill, forcing a parliamentary discussion of carbon neutrality.

Analysis: Who will build the world’s last coal plant?

In 2018, Japan, China and South Korea together accounted for more than 55% of Australia’s total coal exports – worth a total of $31.4 billion, according to data from think tank Chatham House. Citing energy sovereignty, India, another top coal export destination, has also moved to reduce its reliance on imports.

Although falling in value year on year, coal remained Australia’s second largest export in 2018.

“Australia is hyper-exposed to facing a remarkably difficult future as the rest of the world moves away from fossil fuels. Its fossil fuel exports now effectively have a time limit,” Tim Baxter, senior researcher at the Climate Council, told Climate Home News.

“The reality is that Australia needs to adopt a credible climate policy or be left behind,” he added – a warning Morrison has so far ignored.

“No I am not concerned about our future exports,” Morrison told reporters during a press conference on Wednesday.

“I’m very aware of the many views that are held around the world but I tell you what, our policies will be set here in Australia,” he added, commenting  on a phone call with UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who urged him to take “bold action to address climate change”.

The UK, set to host the next Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow next November, has made growing the number of countries committing to carbon neutrality by 2050 a key part of its diplomatic strategy.

“Looking ahead to the Climate Ambition Summit on 12 December and Cop26 in Glasgow next year, [Johnson] emphasised the importance of setting ambitious targets to cut emissions and reach Net Zero,” a UK government statement about the phone call said.

UK negotiator: Countries must resolve carbon market dispute to step up ambition

“For a while the Morrison government has been able to get a free pass on this because we have a climate denier in the White House and a number of big Australian partners were seen not to be in the most progressive camp on climate action,” said Thom Woodroofe, senior advisor to former Australian premier Kevin Rudd, who now leads the Asia Society Policy Institute.

But with three of Asian’s major economies committing to carbon neutrality and the prospect of Democrat Joe Biden winning the White House, Morrison has been left exposed.

“The risks of this isolation are not only economic,” Baxter said. “It also has consequences for our standing and influence in the international community. Australia has already seen its reputation in the Pacific take a battering.  Pacific Island countries are extremely vulnerable to climate change and are increasingly impatient with Australia for its lack of action.”

“The government is in a corner and doesn’t want to admit that it has put its bets on something that is fundamentally at odds with the direction of travel of the global economy,” Woodroofe added.

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This week, ANZ Bank announced it will immediately stop funding new coal projects and cease lending to existing coal plants and mines by 2030 to focus on renewables, in direct response to China, Japan and South Korea’s net zero pledges. It is the last of Australia’s big four banks to move away from coal.

At the sub-national level, states have the power to “take extremely deep strides to reduce emissions, regardless of the federal government,” Baxter said.

In South Australia, the government retired all coal generation assets by May 2016 and moved from generating nearly all of its electricity from fossil fuels in the early 2000s to more than half from wind and solar in 2019.

The Australian Institute poll showed that 83% backed a coal phase-out and 59% supported investments in renewable energy as a pathway to economic recovery, with only 12% of respondents backing Morrison’s gas-led recovery.

Woodroofe said the Morrison administration could still present some form of long-term climate strategy before Cop26, outlining decarbonisation scenarios even if the prime minister is reluctant to commit to a target.

Doing so would “enhance Australian influence in the region, and especially among Pacific island states, where such an announcement would help secure Australia’s place as a partner of choice,” Wesley Morgan, adjunct research fellow at Griffith Asia Institute, in South East Queensland, told Climate Home.

With multi-billion-dollar projects slated for construction in Australia’s north to export solar energy and green hydrogen to major economies in Asia, “Australia is well-placed to reposition as a major exporter of renewable energy,” he added.

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The decision was met with widespread anger by environmental campaigners, who say that it will increase greenhouse gas emissions, destroy biodiversity in the Pilliga forest and damage groundwater supplies used by farmers.

It comes as the Australian government pursues a “gas-fired recovery” from the coronavirus crisis. In September, prime minister Scott Morrison described gas as a “critical enabler of Australia’s economy”.

“To help fire our economic recovery, the next plank in our JobMaker plan is to deliver more Australian gas where it is needed at an internationally competitive price,” he said. 

After a decade-long campaign, Santos was given the green light by NSW’s independent planning commission on Wednesday. “Following its detailed deliberations, the commission concludes the project is in the public interest and that any negative impacts can be effectively mitigated with strict conditions,” the commission said. 

In its pitch to the commission, Santos said the A$3.6bn project ($2.6bn) would deliver “more affordable, secure, cleaner energy” and supply up to half of the energy needs in New South Wales, the country’s most populous state.

Tracker: Which countries have a net zero carbon goal?

Around half of Australia’s gas reserves need to stay in the ground if global warming is to stay below 2C this century, according to analysis from the Australian National University.

Gas is commonly touted as a cleaner fuel than coal, because it emits around half the carbon dioxide when burned for energy. But methane leaks – or fugitive emissions – during extraction, processing and transport can worsen the fuel’s climate impact.

Glen Klatovsky, energy strategist at Climate Action Network Australia, told CHN that fugitive emissions are a big concern. “If fugitive emissions are around 3%, then gas becomes as bad as coal,” he said.

The Narrabri project, which involves drilling down on around 850 coal seam gas wells across a 95,000 hectare area, could lead to large volumes of saline, contaminated water, and the destruction of native vegetation, Klatovsky said. Gas drilling also introduces weeds and pest species to the region, he added. 

Richard Denniss, chief economist at The Australia Institute, told Climate Home that plans for a gas-driven recovery are driven by “the government’s political need to simultaneously signal that it is moving away from coal but not moving away from the extractive industries more generally”.

In August, minister of energy and emissions reduction Angus Taylor introduced a bill to change the investment mandate of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation (CEFC) which would enable Australia’s green bank to use its Grid Reliability Fund for gas power projects by defining them as “low-emissions technologies”.

Analysis: 5 burning questions about China’s carbon neutrality pledge

In Morrison’s national energy address in September, he said there was “no credible energy transition plan for an economy like Australia that does not involve the greater use of gas”. Morrison said that Australia would expand its renewable capacity by adding 12.6 GW but the primary focus of the recovery would be unlocking more gas, describing it as “the perfect complement to solar and wind”.

The government continues to back controversial coal mine expansion, with Morrison saying in his address that “coal will continue to play an important role in our economy for decades to come”.

Coal is Australia’s second-largest export industry – in 2019 the country exported A$14bn ($10bn) worth of coal to China alone. But China’s recent carbon neutrality pledge leaves Australia economically vulnerable, Australia’s former top climate diplomat Howard Bamsey told the Sydney Morning Herald.

This week the Queensland government announced that it had signed a deal with mining company Adani to defer royalty payments of A$271 million ($195 million) on a mine in central Queensland.

“Yet again we see Adani being given a free ride and a secret deal,” said Rod Campbell, research Director at The Australia Institute, said in a statement on Thursday. “Subsidising new coal is the last thing Queensland should be doing as global coal demand declines in the wake of the pandemic and in response to climate action.”

Australia came under fire earlier this week for not taking part in the UN biodiversity summit or signing a leaders’ nature pledge which outlined a 10-point plan to halt global biodiversity destruction. A government spokesperson said Australia would not agree to environmental targets “unless we can tell the Australian people what they will cost to achieve and how we will achieve it”.

“Australia is in a biodiversity crisis. The recent bushfires resulted in the death of approximately 3 billion native animals. Australia refuses to be held responsible for our global responsibility,” said Klatovsky.

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Those expecting a repeat of President Xi Jinping’s surprise announcement last week that China was aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 were left disappointed.

Xi outlined no grand plan for reversing nature loss and environmental destruction when he addressed the high-level biodiversity event on Wednesday. 

“The goal is to seek a kind of modernisation that promotes harmonious coexistence of man and nature,” he told political leaders in a pre-recorded message, insisting that economic development could take place while preserving the environment.

“It falls to all of us to act together and turn the earth into a beautiful homeland,” he added, calling on countries to strike an agreement during major biodiversity talks in Kunming, provisionally scheduled for May 2021, when governments are due to agree on a new framework to halt the decline of biodiversity beyond 2020. 

The UN summit on biodiversity convened by UN secretary general António Guterres on the sidelines of the general assembly aimed to build political momentum and bolster financial commitments ahead of the talks in Kunming. 

The UN hoped the event would be a platform for countries to announce concrete action to stem the decline of the planet’s biodiversity. But beyond speeches, few leaders came with a plan.

UN summit highlights $700bn funding gap to restore nature

“If the summit is nothing but rhetoric, then we are repeating the mistakes made in Aichi,” Li Shuo, Beijing-based senior energy and climate officer at Greenpeace, told Climate Home. 

“The lack of substance can’t hide the fact that political will on global nature protection is low,” Li tweeted during the summit. 

On Monday, 64 political leaders and the European Union launched a “leader’s pledge for nature” with a 10-point plan to halt global biodiversity destruction.

The pledge has now been signed by more than 70 countries, but China is not one of them. Australia, Brazil, Russia and the US, whose governments all control vast swathes of land and oceans, have not signed up either. 

Campaigners say that without concrete commitments, next year’s talks will fall flat.

A UN report earlier this month concluded that the world has missed all 20 biodiversity targets for 2020 agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. Funding shortfalls were highlighted as a significant barrier to meeting the targets and campaigners fear the failure could repeat itself if countries do not raise more funds ahead of the talks in Kunming.

UN agencies have warned that countries needed to commit an additional $700 billion per year to reverse the destruction of nature. But at a funding conference on Monday, only Germany made a firm commitment to increase its funding for protecting biodiversity in developing countries.

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires

“China should provide stronger leadership in the current Kunming process. It is crystal clear that the negotiations are heading to an Aichi 2.0. If one looks at the Aichi round, it is essentially a rhetorical boom in 2010 followed by an implementation bust over the subsequent decade,” Li told CHN. 

Other major emitters have also been criticised for their lack of commitment.

The US did not even send a representative to the UN event. And Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro told the UN in a statement last week the country was already subject to “the best environmental legislation on the planet”. 

On Tuesday, Bolsonaro revoked regulations that protect tropical mangroves and other coastal ecosystems. 

“Their deliberate plans to actively destroy nature makes both the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations climate villains,” said Arlo Hemphill, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace US.

Australia was also noticeably absent from the UN biodiversity summit. A government spokesperson said Australia would not agree to environmental targets “unless we can tell the Australian people what they will cost to achieve and how we will achieve it”.

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In a letter to Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison, nine international and climate law professors said Australia’s method would set “a dangerous precedent” for other countries to “exploit loopholes or reserve their right not to comply with the Paris Agreement”.

“Our considered view is that the proposed use of these ‘Kyoto credits’ to meet targets under the Paris Agreement is legally baseless at international law,” the letter read.

Australia is one of the only countries in the world to have explicitly said it would carry over Kyoto-era carbon credits as a means to meet its 2030 climate target.

The credits were initially issued for Australia’s overachievement in meeting its 1997 Kyoto pledge to curb emissions by 2012.

Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, Australia has pledged to cut emissions by at least 26% from 2005 levels by 2030.

Morrison told the UN in September 2019 that “Australia will meet our Paris commitments”, and called the goals “a credible, fair, responsible and achievable contribution to global climate change action.”

But a 2019 UN Environment report listed Australia among a group of 20 nations requiring “further action” to meet its Paris target, along with Brazil, Canada, Japan, South Korea, South Africa and the United States.

Using the credits to meet its commitments under the Paris deal would effectively lower the emissions reductions needed for Australia to achieve its 2030 goal.

EU plans for 2030 climate target can shape Cop26 momentum, ministers warn

The professors, all from Australian universities, argued the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement are “entirely separate treaties”. As such, they said Kyoto credits could only be used to meet Paris accord goals if that was decided and agreed by every party to the agreement.

“It is clear that no such consensus exists,” the letter added.

The experts also noted that the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol expired in 2012.

The Doha Amendment which created the second commitment phase due to run from 2013 to 2020 has not been ratified by enough countries to come into force and this may not happen before the end of the year. Australia is among nations that have ratified the Doha amendment.

But the legal scholars said the lack of formal entry into force means that credits that would have been issued for complying with 2020 targets under the Kyoto Protocol may never materialise, potentially only giving Australia two thirds of the 411 megatonnes of CO2 equivalent the government estimated being due.

Under the Kyoto Protocol, countries also agreed to “cancel” any units that remain unused after countries met their targets under the second commitment phase.

The use of old Kyoto credits “conveys a message to the world that Australia wishes to reserve the right to avoid a significant proportion of the mitigation effort needed to meet its 2030 target under the Paris Agreement,” the letter said.

UK’s Nigel Topping seeks broad movement to drive global economy to net zero by 2050

If other countries were to follow Australia’s carbon accounting method, the professors said this would further increase the gap between current levels of ambition and what is needed to achieve the temperature goals of the Paris Agreement.

They urged Australia to clarify its position on using the Kyoto carry-over credits.

Australia has come under repeated pressure by the international community to abandon its plans to use the Kyoto credits.

At the last UN climate talks in Madrid in December, an alliance of more than 30 progressive countries denounced Australia’s carbon credits plans as not aligned with efforts to limit global warming to 1.5C – the tougher goal of the Paris Agreement.

Countries including France, Germany, the UK, Spain and New Zealand signed up to the ‘San Jose principles’, which aimed to set the bar for successful carbon market rules. This included the prohibition of Kyoto credits and pre-2020 units to meet the Paris goals.

Letter to Scott Morrison on using Kyoto credits to meet Paris goals (Text)

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As one of the world’s wealthiest nations struggles to tackle the blazes that have killed at least 28 people, the need to adapt to prolonged and more intense fire seasons has risen to a national priority.

Solutions to mitigate bushfire impacts will require more land management, community engagement and bipartisan political support at a time when climate change continues to be one of the most polarising issues in Australia, bushfire experts have told Climate Home News.

At stake is Australians’ connection with their landscape and ancient fire management practices by Aboriginal people.

“We need to re-invent and re-think the management of our landscape,” Peter Kanowski, professor of forestry at the Australian National University told CHN.

“We need to partner with indigenous communities and respect our landscape and ecological systems. In the face of climate change, land management will require more intervention not less,” he said.

Australia’s bushfires to cost billions as climate risks rise

Much hope rides on the expectation the crisis of the last few months will spark a nation-wide conversation about the country’s climate policies, resilience building and land management.

Prime Minister Scott Morrison mooted a proposal for a federal royal commission to look at a “full gambit of issues” including the preparation and response to the fires, and adaptation and resilience measures that need to be taken as a result of the changing climate.

“We are going to be living in a very different climate and we need to improve our resilience in our response to that on the ground,” Morrison told ABC Insiders.

In December, the Australian House of Representatives’ environment committee launched an inquiry into the efficacy of past and current vegetation and land management policy on bushfire intensity and frequencies.

Putting the spotlight on resilience measures to protect Australian communities and the economy could be a quick win for the Morrison government, which has so far refused to take more ambitious carbon-cutting measures or change its pro-coal stance.

Australia has planned to meet its 2030 goal to reduce emissions by 26-28% from 2005 levels using old Kyoto-era carbon credits – a carbon accounting fudge that would cut in half what it needs to do to meet its target.

Climate change tops risks for world in 2020 – Davos report

For Rodney Keenan, head of forest and ecosystem science at the University of Melbourne, any national conversation on Australia’s resilience to bushfires will need to bridge the country’s stark polarisation of climate change.

Disinformation spread on social media and some Murdoch-owned press has continued to expose the lack of consensus for climate action. Such events could “further polarise debate over climate change and land management,” Keenan warned.

But debates about land management practices have already been caught in political cross-fire.

Australia’s former deputy prime minister Barnaby Joyce accused the Green Party of having precipitated the bushfire crisis by blocking fuel hazard reduction – something which they deny and for which there is no evidence.

Last year, wildfires ravaging California exposed deep splits on climate policy between the state and President Donald Trump, who is pulling the US out of the 2015 Paris Agreement.

Such splits distract from working out long-term fixes to the blazes.

In November, Trump blamed Governor Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, for doing a “terrible job of forest management”. Newsom retorted: “You don’t believe in climate change. You are excused from this conversation.”

Germany agrees pay-out to states and companies in coal phase-out deal

Land management is crucial to mitigate the intensity of Australia’s bushfires but over recent years, funding has overwhelmingly been allocated to recovery efforts over prevention and land preparation, Kanowski said.

Practices such as hazard reduction enable to reduce the fuel load that a fire could consume to diminish its intensity. This can include prescribed burning, grazing or removing vegetation and trees.

In Australia, drier weather and longer fire seasons have made fuel reduction burning “really challenging,” Shane Fitzsimmons, commissioner for New South Wales Rural Fire Service, told Australian media, citing a narrower window of time for safe burning to take place and a lack of resources.

“Don’t forget as settled Australians, we are now living, working and occupying areas that used to freely burn. We can’t lit a burn and let it freely run,” he said.

Burning land to better manage fires has been used by indigenous communities across Australia for thousands of years.

In northern Australia, indigenous fire management practices have been re-introduced by indigenous ranger groups with the support of federal and state authorities.

While the landscape and conditions are different from the south east of the country where the fires have been raging, the scheme has helped shift fire patterns from late to early season and reduced their intensity.

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“Aboriginal people in Australia have always maintained a positive relationship with fire,” a spokesperson from the Kimberley Land Council in northern Australia, the body representing aboriginal people in the region, told CHN. “Rather than treating it as something which should be avoided, they understood fire as an essential part of the Australian landscape and used it effectively to maintain balanced and fire resilient ecosystems.”

“This is one example of best practices in fire management,” Kanowski said.

In southern Australia, where indigenous people were largely displaced by settlers “a lot of their knowledge of fire practices has been lost,” he added. Efforts to rebuild that knowledge are underway but the programmes are far less advanced than in the north of the country.

While discussions on how to improve land and fire management are slowly taking place, Australia’s scientific community has been warning the government to develop a plan to adapt to climate change for more than a decade.

Between 1939 and 2011, 16 major inquiries into bushfires have also called for greater integrated approaches between land planning and managing fire risks.

During that time, scientists have continued to warn of prolonged and more intense fire seasons driven by worsening global warming.

A 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) stated that “in south-east Australia, the frequency of very high and extreme fire danger days is likely to rise 4-25% by 2020 and 15-70% by 2050”.

China-backed coal plants on EU’s doorstep hide huge carbon costs

And yet, cities and developments have continued to expand further into bushlands and urban fringes, increasing communities’ exposure to high risk fires.

Richard Thornton, CEO of the Bushfire and Natural Hazards Cooperative Research Centre told CHN that besides climate change, Australians would have to re-think where and how they live.

While natural hazards are “an inevitable part of living in Australia”, Thornton said “our exposure is mostly human caused because of where we choose to live and work”.

He added evidence showed some areas bore an “unacceptably high” risk for building homes and infrastructure, such as one road access sites or ridges tops surrounded by bush. “Not coincidently, these are also the areas we often choose to build in because we value the location,” he said.

Many Australians “do not fully understand the risks in their landscape,” Keenan agreed, warning that communities needed access and control of long-term funding for education and building resilience.

For Sarah Boulter, senior research fellow at the National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility at Griffith University, Australia has “outstanding knowledge and capabilities” to adapt to the reality of a warming world.

“But change takes time and requires commitment and support from a political and community level. There are some very hard decisions to be made,” she said.

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At Cop25, Australia will try and keep a low profile, focus on blue carbon and avoid discussing its accounting tricks to meet its Paris promises.  

When it comes to climate change, Australia really struggles. With high emissions, even higher fossil fuel exports, harsh climate impacts (like the current unprecedented bush fires) and weak climate action. Australia’s response is to just keep on digging (literally – which is why it remains the world’s largest coal exporter). To understand this disconnect you have go deeper into the land down under.  

Emissions 

Australia is the 14^th largest emitter of greenhouse gases out of the 196 parties to the Paris Agreement. But apparently being in the top 10% doesn’t mean much to Australia’s prime minister Scott Morrison, who claims Australia is ‘just’ 1.3% of global emissions. Its astounding that the 182 other parties (including smaller emitters like Cop President Chile, or host Spain, or incoming Cop president the United Kingdom) even try. Australia emits more than 40 countries with larger populations, so naturally at a per capita level it is right at the top.

Cop25 Bulletin: The political feedback loop

While Australia’s emissions are high, they are less than half the size of the emissions embedded in the fossil fuels it exports. The country is the third largest global exporter of fossil fuels, in terms of emissions, after Russia and Saudi Arabia. Of the three fossil fuel energy sources, Australia is the world’s largest exporter of two of them; coal and natural gas. Australia exports a greater portion of the world’s coal market than Saudi Arabia does to oil.

According to the latest Global Carbon Budget report, coal is responsible for 40% of fossil fuel and industry emissions. But wait there is more, according to the Production Gap Report Australia is on track to double emissions from fossil fuels production by 2030 (compared to 2005 levels).   

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Understandably, the fossil fuel industry is a powerful lobby in Australia and at one stage, this self-described ‘greenhouse mafia’ bragged about actually drafting Australia’s climate policies. Just last month, realising that fossil fuels are becoming less attractive energy options for its trade partners, the minister for energy and emissions reductions Angus Taylor (who is attending his first Cop), approved a new facelift strategy: turn coal and gas into hydrogen and voila, a ‘cleaner’ fuel (for customers at least – as it comes with zero emissions on consumption). Forget renewable hydrogen, the process receiving the largest share of government funding is turning brown coal (lignite) – the most high polluting form of coal – into hydrogen.  

Impacts 

Australia is no stranger to climate impacts. In fact my flights to Cop25 were delayed and close to derailed because Sydney was shrouded in smoke from surrounding bushfires. Sydney is the capital of New South Wales, the most populous state, where more forest has been burnt this year before summer even begins (in December) than the three previous years combined. World heritage forests are on fire and its a ‘global tragedy’ according to local conservationists.  

https://twitter.com/KarlMathiesen/status/1202810860881596416

Instead of diagnosing the cause, the Australian deputy prime minister Michael McCormack claimed that the only people linking climate to the current bushfires were ‘raving inner-city lunatics’. 

According to the Australia Institute’s Climate of the Nation Report 2019, 76% of Australians agree that climate change is causing more bushfires. Yet David Littleproud (real name), the minister appointed to head up the disaster response, claimed it was ‘irrelevant’ whether climate change contributed. To admit climate change supercharges bushfires, as many fire chiefs stated, would require responding accordingly. Instead other potential causes were brought in like not enough land clearing. Easier to blame others than to come to terms with your own poor efforts to solve a global problem.   

 Its for this reason Australia earned a Fossil of the Day from NGOs as soon as Cop25 kicked off. 

Action 

Australia’s poor efforts on climate action are record-breaking. This current Australian government remains the only one in the world to dismantle a working emissions trading scheme (ETS).

For a few brief years, Australia had a national carbon price that reduced national emissions by 2% and grew the economy by 5%. Since it was dismantled, national emissions have been trending upwards. This makes it hard for the Australian government to meet its modest 26% emission reduction target (on 2005 levels by 2030) so over half of the necessary abatement will come from its leftover allocation of Kyoto Protocol (KP) credits.

The Australian government claims it has 367 Mt of KP credits and it is ‘entitled’ to use them toward its Paris Agreement target. The negotiating bloc that represent small islands states and least developed countries have called it out and there are many legal and moral reasons why it can’t and shouldn’t be allowed. Australia is the only party in the KP intending to do this and it is hoping that other countries don’t care. Certainly not enough to kick up a fuss at Cop25.

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Australia only got those credits by holding up the Kyoto Protocol negotiations, in a last minute objection, to ensure it could use a very generous baseline. And then under the first period it increased its emissions to 108% of that generous baseline, and in the second commitment period cut emissions by (drumroll) 0.5% from that same baseline.  

The prime minister of Australia is best known for bringing a lump of coal into Australia’s parliament house and telling everyone there not to be afraid. Coal itself is not what is scary. It’s the policies that sit behind it and encourage production, export and provide it protection. It is policies that don’t link climate impacts to fossil fuels. And it’s the policy of avoiding climate action required under the Paris Agreement by employing loopholes.   

At Cop25, Australia will be trying to keep a low profile. Will you let it?  

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An annotated draft of the Pacific Islands Forum declaration, seen by Climate Home News, showed Australia trying to suppress references to the climate “crisis”, 1.5C, carbon neutrality, a ban on new coal plants and phasing out of fossil fuel subsidies.

Climate change is high on the agenda at the forum this week, putting small island nations vulnerable to sea level rise on a collision course with Australian prime minister Scott Morrison’s pro-coal government. Morrison is due to arrive in the Tuvalu capital Funafuti on Wednesday.

Ahead of the leaders’ summit, governments were invited to comment on a draft declaration, to form the basis for a political statement to be negotiated over the next couple of days.

Pacific islands criticise Australia’s carbon accounting dodge

Fiji’s prime minister Frank Bainimarama, who presided over the 2017 UN climate talks, directly appealed to Australia to transition away from coal “to energy sources that do not contribute to climate change” during an informal meeting in Tuvalu on Monday.

Bainimarama said that while it was not for Fiji “to be prescriptive” over national affairs, he urged Canberra to appreciate “the existential threat” facing Pacific nations.

But in comments on the draft dated 7 August, Australia sought to wriggle out of its climate commitments and weaken language on limiting global temperatures to 1.5C of warming – the tougher target of the Paris Agreement that small island states say is essential to their survival.

Among suggested edits, Australia deleted references to the 1.5C goal being an “irrefutable red-line” for forum members, instead referring to limiting temperature rise “in line with the Paris Agreement”.

It also pushed back against efforts to bring national policies in line with the latest science on 1.5C from the International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report on 1.5C.

Analysis: Which countries have a net zero carbon goal?

Australia agreed to “recognis[e] the information” in the report without endorsing its conclusion that global emissions must fall 45% by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2050 for a reasonable chance of limiting warming to 1.5C. Indeed, Australia’s version excises any mention of achieving net zero emissions by 2050.

This is something only a handful of largely developed countries have committed to, with New Zealand indicating in notes that it would support achieving net zero carbon “around 2050”.

UN secretary general António Guterres has thrown his weight behind the issue, demanding every country start planning for carbon neutrality by 2050 ahead of his climate action summit on 23 September in New York.

Instead, Australia’s edits call on countries to “formulate and communicate long term [greenhouse gas] emissions development strategies by 2020” – a looser framework that allows for varying levels of ambition.

The draft statement echoes others of Guterre’s demands and calls for “an immediate global ban on the construction of new coal plants and coal mines” and the “urgent phase out of all fossil fuel subsidies”.

Guterres asks all countries to plan for carbon neutrality by 2050

On both instances, Australia suggested deleting the paragraph, asserting that the issue is “not a shared forum priority”.

The draft statement concludes on a call to all countries, “with no caveats”, to take decisive and transformative action – a likely dig at Australia for planning to use Kyoto-era carbon credits to meet its Paris Agreement pledges. Again, Australia pushed to cut the “no caveats” clause.

Morrison appeared to curry favour with small island nations on Tuesday, proposing to redirect AU$500 million (US$340m) from existing aid funds to boost investments in renewable energy and climate and disaster resilient infrastructure.

In a statement, Morrison said the measure highlighted Australia’s “commitment to not just meeting our emissions reduction obligations at home but supporting our neighbours and friends,” adding the country was “doing [its] part to cut global emissions”.

Australia has pledged to cut emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2030 – a target it is yet not on track to meet.

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Pacific nations leaders were left unimpressed by the proposal.

Tuvalu’s prime minister Enele Sopoaga told reporters: “No matter how much money you put on the table, it doesn’t give you the excuse to not to do the right thing that is cutting down your emissions, including not opening your coal mines.”

Sopoaga said the Pacific Island Forum declaration “must push forward and seek urgent actions, concrete actions by the global community” and expressed the hope “our Australian colleagues and others will take heat of this imperative”.

In a statement following Monday’s informal discussions, seen by CHN, the Pacific small island developing states said climate change represented “the single greatest [threat] to the security of Pacific island countries”.

The statement urged world leaders to “acknowledge that we are already facing a climate crisis”, “dramatically accelerate a global response to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement” and take action in line with Guterres’ demands for ramping up ambition.

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Leaders attending the Pacific Islands Development Forum in Fiji this week issued a statement demanding countries “refrain from using ‘carry-over credits’ as an abatement for the additional Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets”.

The Nadi Bay Declaration signed on Tuesday effectively singles out Australia, the only country explicitly planning to use old credits as a shortcut to meet its 2030 climate targets.

Australia has pledged to cut emissions by 26% from 2005 levels by 2030 – a target it is not on track to meet, despite assertions to the contrary by prime minister Scott Morrison.

Russia and Ukraine have also left the door open to using carryover credits towards their Paris targets.

Australia’s emissions rise again, putting Paris climate promise in doubt

The credits were initially issued for Australia’s overachievement in meeting its 1997 Kyoto pledge. Using the credits to meet its commitments under the Paris deal would effectively lower the emissions reductions needed for Australia to achieve its 2030 goal and hinder ambitious action – on which the survival of low-lying Pacific islands depends.

The statement by Pacific leaders declared “a climate crisis in the Pacific” and called for “a paradigm shift” to articulate emissions cutting measures and adaption policies in a coherent manner.

It expressed “deep concern about the lack of comprehension, ambition, or commitment shown by developed nations”, calling on them to stop subsidising fossil fuel production and support climate finance for vulnerable countries.

Addressing the meeting, Fiji’s Prime Minister and chair of the forum Frank Bainimarama asked the world’s developed economies to increase their climate plans “including and most especially our larger neighbours in the Pacific”.

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The statement and Bainimarama’s comments will be seen as a rebuke to Australia’s lack of carbon-cutting policies. It sets the scene for a tense meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum in a fortnight in Tuvalu, where Morrison is due to meet with other regional leaders.

Indeed, Australia’s emissions are on the rise with an increase of 0.7% between last December and March. Experts foresee that trend continuing, in the absence of new measures.

The islands’ declaration also calls on coal producers “to immediately cease any new mining of coal” and develop a strategy to phase-out coal production within a decade. Again, that challenges the pro-coal Australian administration.

In June, Morrison’s re-elected government gave the green light for Indian company Adani to begin construction on a coal mine in Queensland.

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In an interview with ABC ahead of the Pacific nations’ development summit, Australian foreign minister Marise Payne said leaders “should be pleased” that the country was meeting its Paris commitments. “That is something that we are absolutely locked into doing,” she said.

This is not the first time Australia has been pressed to abandon its creative carbon accounting methods.

In a peer-review exchange in June about the performance of signatories to the Paris deal in meeting their climate targets, Canada and the EU raised concerns over Australia’s use of Kyoto credits to meet its 2030 target.

Australia insisted it would use the credits.

With the EU currently negotiating a free trade deal with Australia, some experts have suggested it could be a lever to demand stronger climate action.

Brussels has made implementation of the Paris Agreement a condition of all new trade deals, but it remains to be seen how strictly it will be enforced.

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The quarterly update of Australia’s greenhouse gases, which span December 2018 to March 2019, showed a 0.7% hike in emissions. Save for agriculture and electricity, all sectors were up. Pollution from the manufacturing, construction and commercial sectors and domestic heating shot up by 6%.

The figures were released five days past their due date, despite a senate order calling on the government to meet the deadline. But before they were made public, the data did appear alongside an interview with energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor in The Australian.

Energy and emissions reduction minister Angus Taylor told the newspaper, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch, that the country was on track to honour its Paris Agreement target of 26 to 28% below 2005 levels by 2030. He has previously said this would be done “in a canter”.

Data published by the Department of Environment and Energy in December, however, showed that the country was on course to reduce its emissions by 7% by 2030. Shadow minister for climate change and energy Mark Butler simply dismissed Taylor’s comments as “a lie”.

(Source: Australian government)

Deputy leader of the Australian Greens Adam Bandt said: “The minister has continued with his contempt of the parliament, seemingly dropping the pollution figures to the Murdoch media before making them public.”

“We wouldn’t accept the government selectively dropping the regular unemployment figures to its favourite media outlet. This pollution data needs to be released promptly, regularly and transparently,” Bandt said.

It continues a trend of rising emissions since 2016, making the Paris target increasingly difficult to achieve, experts warned.

“The fact that we haven’t made a big dent in it, is very, very worrying,” climate analyst Ketan Joshi told Climate Home News. “We have made reductions in our electricity sector, a lot of that comes down to technologies such as wind and solar. That is often framed as us on the way to meeting our Paris target, but of course that’s just one sector of Australia’s emissions.”

Head of the climate and energy programme at the Australia Institute think tank Richie Merzian told Climate Home News the newly released data also cemented the failure of one of the government’s key policies to combat climate change: the Climate Solutions Fund.

The fund, which incentivises emissions cuts rather than penalising polluters, has been “insufficient in terms of the reductions that were supposed to flow from the abatement purchase”, he said. In April, the Coalition government axed the fund further, opting to spread $2bn over 15 years rather than 10 years.

“So their plan is to do less of the same, and that plan has failed today and will continue to fail.” The government has said it intends to meet the Paris target using credits won in the era of the Kyoto Protocol – a measure most countries have ruled out.

“Even with Australian government planning to use its credits from Kyoto, it will still fail,” said Merzian.

The government’s delayed release of the figures comes amid growing awareness on climate change in Australia. A poll by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation found that the environment ranked a top issue for 29% of participants, up by 9% in the 2016 election.

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It took Tony Abbott, the architect of a decade of climate agony for Australian progressives, to boil a catastrophic defeat for Labor down to a trademark slogan.

“Where climate change is a moral issue,” the former prime minister and Liberal MP said on Saturday night, “we do it tough. But where climate change is an economic issue, as the result tonight shows, we do it very, very well.”

Abbott was, in fact, giving a concession speech. He’d just been thrashed by an independent who made his climate denial the defining issue for voters in the affluent Sydney seat he’d held for 25 years.

But away from the lilly pilly-lined streets of northern Sydney, Australians were emphatically rejecting the fullest climate offering from a major party in years.

Comment: Australian voters can’t trust the Coalition on climate and energy

Labor, led by former union boss Bill Shorten, had come to the election promising to end Australia’s ‘climate wars’ with energy reforms that would foster the growth of renewable energy over the country’s traditionally powerful coal industry. It was, Shorten said, time to end a decade of inaction as Australia recovered from its hottest ever summer.

Shorten had been heavily favoured, with betting companies even paying out on a Labor victory in the week before. Instead, the governing coalition of Liberal and National parties was returned to power, aided by a resounding victory in coal country.

In the central Queensland seats of Dawson, Capricornia and Herbert, the swing to the Coalition was 11.3%, 10.7% and 7.6%. Herbert was one of two seats Labor lost in a state where they had to make gains to win government.

In this arid corner of the north east, Indian company Adani plans to dig a massive and controversial new coal mine. The Coalition has backed the project, which still faces state regulatory hurdles, as a job bonanza for central Queensland. Resources minister Matt Canavan’s response to the government’s re-election was a two word tweet: “START ADANI”.

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On the other hand, Labor has remained ambivalent, saying that it won’t block the development, but it won’t give the project federal finance to build a rail link.

One of the single biggest potential beneficiaries of the Adani project is a billionaire businessman called Clive Palmer. His Waratah Coal company holds major mining leases near the Adani site. The rail and port infrastructure that would service the first mine would make his Alpha North and China First Coal projects, which he claims have even larger reserves, all the more likely to proceed.

In this election, Palmer, a former MP, financed one of the most extraordinary guerrilla campaigns in Australian political history. He reportedly spent AU$60m on Labor-bashing advertising for his own United Australia Party. He ran candidates in every seat, but didn’t win a single one. Then, under Australia’s preferential voting system, Palmer did a deal that meant his 3.4% of the national vote flowed to the Coalition. Late on Saturday, he claimed credit for returning the government.

Amazing. This table shows how preferences from One Nation and Palmer gave the LNP a massive boost in Qld. From @TomMcIlroy https://t.co/CbLe34ZXEF pic.twitter.com/zP9x3QXnGU

— Patrick Commins (@ComminsP) May 20, 2019

In Queensland, Palmer’s attacks found their mark. According to Richie Merzian, director of the Australia Institute’s climate programme, Labor’s fence-sitting over Adani “meant they were unpopular in Queensland where the Coalition were successful in equating coal and jobs… and not popular enough in Victoria where the population wanted climate action”.

The mining union, which is affiliated to Labor, called on the party to back the Adani project. Instead, Shorten’s election offer to communities impacted by the declining coal industry was the establishment of a ‘just transition authority’, but no finance for restructuring their economies.

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Wayne Swan, Labor’s national president and a former treasurer, told the ABC his party had failed to reassure communities that view coal as their lifeblood.

“What they want is someone who respects the dignity of their work and their lifestyles in their region and the whole country, not just the Labor party, has to come to grips with that challenge,” he said.

After suffering such a major setback, Guardian Australia’s political editor Katherine Murphy questioned whether Labor would “have the resolve to go to another election championing an ambitious policy” on climate change.

But others argued the party needed to double down on its commitments, not only to cutting emissions, but to the regions that feed the biggest coal export industry on the planet.

Greens MP Adam Bandt said on Twitter that if Labor jumped to the conclusion that only a small target could win the climate policy struggle “it could cost us all dearly”. He called for an Australian version of the green new deal, the massive investment in transitioning to a cleaner economy currently championed by progressives in the US and Europe.

Climate Weekly: EU beats the zero carbon drum

“The only way out of this cul-de-sac is with a plan for real jobs in new industries located in these coal communities. A ‘green new deal’ can be picked up and applied across party lines and can work as well in Melbourne as in Capricornia if it’s believable,” said Bandt.

This has international precedent. In Spain, the Socialist government brokered a €250m regional development deal with unions to phase out coal mining. In April, they won back into power campaigning on a ‘green new deal’ platform and increased their vote in mining regions.

Marc Stears, director of Sydney University’s Policy Lab, told Climate Home News Labor needed to “make the economic case for climate reform bigger and more compelling”. He said the idea of an Australian green new deal was “on the right track” but its proponents needed to “persuade people that it is real and not just wishful thinking”.

An even stronger lesson for Australia may come from Germany, where coal is every bit as woven into the political, economic and social fabric. Last week, Angela Merkel said the country would find a path to reach net-zero emissions by 2050. Germany’s coal commission, with representatives from across industry, unions, science and green groups, has set out a plan to manage the end of coal within two decades. That is slower than climate advocates would like, but represents a durable compromise with an influential coal lobby.

Without that type of engagement, Australian Labor remains vulnerable to an industry that has again demonstrated its close ties to power and to the electorate.

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The country’s two largest cities joined an international coalition of states, regions, cities and businesses who have committed to ending coal power generation.

Australia is the fourth largest coal producer in the world. Its federal government is known for its fierce support for the sector and signalled on Wednesday that it would use taxpayer money to underwrite new coal plants.

Neither city provided a specific end date for coal. Sydney has committed to a 100% renewable supply by 2035.

Scotland, gas and electricity company Scottish Power, Senegal and Israel are also joining the alliance, which has been convened by Canada and the UK.

“We all need to get off coal,” Canada’s environment minister Catherine McKenna told a side-event at the UN climate conference in Katowice, Poland. “That is the reality, if we are going to meet the ambitions under [the Paris Agreement], every country needs to get off coal. It doesn’t have to be today, but you need to set a goal – Canada has a goal of 2030 to phasing out coal.”

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UK minister for energy and clean growth Claire Perry said: “We will be off coal by 2025. If the market doesn’t deliver, I will legislate to do so.”

“The fallacy of clean coal is the last-ditch attempt at protecting vested interests,” Marshall Islands environment minister David Paul said. “Coal-fired power is the most significant barrier between us and capping temperature rise at 1.5C. For survival, all must stop now.”

Founded by the UK and Canada in 2017, the powering past coal alliance aims to slash reliance on “unabated coal generation” – or coal generation that does not use carbon capture and storage. Without taking into account its new recruits, there are 75 members, including 28 national governments, 19 sub-national governments, and 28 businesses or organisations.

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It is not the first time the alliance has targeted subnational or local governments in countries where the governments have dropped it. The UK and Canada recruited the US states of Connecticut, Hawaii, Minnesota and New York and cities of Honolulu, Los Angeles, even as president Donald Trump continued to prop up ailing coal plants.

Flying in after a dramatic week in domestic politics, Perry also unveiled a set of measures to bolster climate action. The government is set to plough £170 million into decarbonising its heavy industry, with a focus on achieving this through technologies such as carbon capture usage and storage (CCUS).

The funding initiative, which requires beneficiaries to co-invest and partner up with the government, will look to clean up UK factories producing steel, ceramics, cement, chemicals, paper and glass. Many of these are located in the country’s poorest communities, including in Grangemouth, South Wales, Merseyside, Teesside, Humberside and Southampton.

Extinction Rebellion, a protest group, repeatedly heckled Perry, challenging her over her support for fracking.

Perry also reiterated the UK’s keenness to host the 2020 UN climate summit, also known as Cop26.

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Coal makes up roughly two thirds of domestic electricity and is an essential ingredient in the minerals and metals processing industries.

But ageing coal plants and increased competitiveness of renewables are likely to drive coal power out of the energy mix.

Despite signing up to cut carbon under the Paris Agreement, Australia currently has no legal targets for reducing emissions. But the academics from Australian National University and Melbourne University found market forces alone would achieve serious cuts to coal use.

“Over the long term, transition out of coal appears inevitable; being prepared for a possibly rapid reduction in coal production, use and exports is prudent risk management,” the report said.

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A “moderate” scenario, achieved with little policy intervention, would see coal plant capacity and consumption drop rapidly through the 2020s and 2030s, and decline by over 90% by 2040. A “faster” scenario has coal use plummeting by two thirds in 2030 compared to today, reduced to a sliver during the 2030s.

Rich in renewable energy resources, the report recommends Australia embrace green technology and back a “zero-carbon electricity supply”.

The report was produced as part of a series of global studies by French think tank IDDRI and London-based Climate Strategies. It was written by academics, but is not a peer-reviewed paper.

The fourth largest coal producer in the world, Australia is one of the world’s top exporters of both metallurgical coal, which is used in steel production, and thermal coal. Exports have continued to grow while domestic consumption remained stable. Export volumes far outweigh domestic coal use.

This week, statistics released by the Australian government showed coal mining investments jumped by 20% in the last year.

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Turnbull had wanted to cement in legislation Australia’s pledge to cut emissions by 26% by 2030, based on 2005 levels, but his conservative party colleagues soured on the idea. Poor opinion polls and recent defeats had stoked concerns ahead of federal elections next year.

After Morrison got the nod, the new prime minister moved to shore up his voter base by splitting the environmental and energy portfolios, meaning emissions reduction will no longer be a concern of the latter.

The new setup means price and security of supply will now be the main tent poles of energy policymaking, meaning Australia will now struggle to meet its Paris commitments, according to climate experts, and will have to rely on passive measures.

In a tweet on Wednesday (29 August), Morrison called the new minister for energy, Angus Taylor, his “minister for lowering electricity prices”. Another MP, George Christensen, one of the rebels that helped depose Turnbull, called for more new coal-fired power stations and for “costly green treaties” to be abandoned.

Ousted Australian PM: This government cannot address climate change

Local media reported that senior sources in government are unsure how Australia will now meet its targets, which were set by Turnbull’s predecessor, Tony Abbott, in 2015.

Abbott has since claimed he was “misled” by advisers when signing up to the Paris deal and has backed calls for Australia to follow the United States in withdrawing from the agreement.

But sources also insisted that the new government will try to resist internal pressures to walk away from the 2015 climate accord, which aims to keep global warming well below 2C.

Climate trade-off

The European Commission recently launched trade talks with both Australia and New Zealand, and a report circulated by the EU executive in early August revealed that the early negotiating rounds had progressed well.

Bilateral trade between Australia and the EU topped €70bn in 2017 and an impact assessment concluded that removing certain tariffs could boost that figure by around a third.

But earlier this year, EU trade boss Cecilia Malmström tweeted that a reference to the Paris Agreement is needed in all new commercial deals, as part of the bloc’s attempts to export climate diplomacy across the world through trade.

When asked how Australia’s new approach to climate policy might affect the ongoing talks, a Commission spokesperson told EURACTIV that “it would be difficult to imagine concluding a broad trade agreement without an ambitious chapter on trade and sustainable development”.

The recently brokered Japan agreement contains a chapter on sustainability, and ongoing talks with Mexico and Mercosur are expected to as well.

That stance by the Commission, which negotiates trade on behalf of all member states, has already cast doubt on whether talks between the EU and the US could ever be resurrected, given President Donald Trump’s current intention to withdraw his country from the pact as soon as possible.

This article was produced by Euractiv

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Malcolm Turnbull will be replaced by Scott Morrison, his treasurer, who defeated challenger Peter Dutton 45 votes to 40 for the leadership of the governing right-wing Liberal party.

One of the most dramatic weeks in Australia’s political history began with Turnbull’s admission that he could not pass his signature energy reform – the National Energy Guarantee (Neg). Rebels in his party, led by former prime minister and arch conservative Tony Abbott, had refused to back a policy that would have set – relatively weak – emissions targets for the power sector.

That led to a leadership challenge from Dutton on Tuesday, which narrowly failed. But Turnbull bled support throughout the week as ministers resigned across the government. He did not contest the vote on Friday.

In a valedictory press conference, Turnbull said his party, which governs in coalition with the Nationals, was unable to implement a climate change policy.

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“I think the truth is that the coalition finds it very hard to get agreement on anything to do with emissions. The National Energy Guarantee is a vitally important piece of reform,” said Turnbull.

Turnbull said the opposition to action on climate change within his own party was an article of faith.

“Emissions issues and climate policy issues have the same problem within the coalition of bitterly entrenched views that are more ideological views than views based, as I say, on engineering and economics. It’s a bit like same-sex marriage used to be, almost an insoluble problem,” said Turnbull, who oversaw marriage reform this year despite strong internal opposition from the right.

“As for what the future holds in terms of energy policy, again you’ll have to talk to Scott about that,” said Turnbull.

Speaking to the media on Friday, Morrison would not be drawn on the future of the Neg. His new deputy Josh Frydenberg was Turnbull’s environment and energy minster and was responsible for developing the climate policy.

Morrison, ostensibly the moderate candidate, made global headlines last year when he entered parliament brandishing a lump of coal. But he has also said cheap power from new coal plants is a “myth”.

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The election of Morrison diminishes the immediate likelihood of Australia exiting the Paris climate agreement, which observers said was possible under a Dutton prime ministership. Dutton is aligned with Abbott, who has repeatedly called for Australia to follow Donald Trump’s US out of the deal.

But the narrowness of the leadership contest shows conservative, Abbott-aligned forces are powerful within the party. Environmental advocates called on Morrison to immediately clarify his position on the Paris deal.

Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Kelly O’Shanassy said: “Australia signed up to Paris in good faith. As one of the highest polluters per person in the world, if we were to capitulate on our responsibilities there would be rightful international condemnation and more unnecessary climate damage at home.”

Market operator: South Australia to hit 100% renewable power by 2025

Greens leader Richard di Natale said the only option for Australia to develop a response to climate change was to vote the government out of office.

“They have no climate policy, no energy policy and no economic policy and the paralysis is likely to continue. They are unfit to govern,” he said.

Di Natale called the Liberals “a bunch of spiteful, backwards-looking, anti-immigration, climate deniers with no economic plan. It’s time to turf them out and make a fresh start”.

Turnbull said he would leave the parliament, triggering a by-election and leaving Morrison with no majority in the lower house. Ties will be resolved by the speaker, Liberal party member Tony Smith, whose vote means Turnbull’s resignation will not immediately bring down the government.

Australia is due to hold elections within the next nine months. The Labor opposition is leading in the polls.

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Malcolm Turnbull won a narrow leadership challenge against his home affairs minister Peter Dutton, during a Tuesday morning meeting of the governing Liberal party.

The prime minister escaped the spill 48-35, but another attempt is widely expected.

Dutton resigned from the front bench immediately after the contest.

The former police officer needs a further eight MPs to back him (one Liberal MP was absent from the vote meaning a majority of the party is 43) if he is take over as Australia’s 30th prime minister and seventh in the past decade.

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In an interview with Sky News Australia, Dutton repeatedly refused to rule out a second challenge.

The spill came a day after Turnbull withdrew an energy reform package, which would have set emissions reduction targets for the power sector. Turnbull admitted he could not pass the legislation because he could not guarantee support from the right of his party.

Turnbull’s leadership has come under sustained attack from the conservative wing of his governing coalition.

“They feel liberated now to strike against him, and will continue to strike against him until they destroy him,” Sydney Morning Herald political editor Peter Hartcher told Sky.

Malcolm Turnbull, right, introduces Peter Dutton as his home affairs minister in 2017 (Photo: Commons)

The spill was reportedly backed by members of the cabinet, several of whom had offered their resignations by the time of publication on Monday.

A Dutton government may seek to end Australia’s participation in the Paris climate agreement, according to observers. Some of his most powerful backers, including former prime minster Tony Abbott, have called for the country to follow the US and quit the deal. Rebels have briefed media that they will push for the country to leave Paris, Buzzfeed reported.

Dutton insisted on Monday that he was nobody’s “puppet” and refused to say whether Australia should withdraw from the accord: “If I’ve got something to say about energy at some point I will.”

His policy is likely to depend on what compromises he might make with those to his left and right, said Erwin Jackson, a senior climate and energy advisor at NGO Environment Victoria.

“The government is currently changing its climate policy every second day. What a different conservative leader will commit to depends on what they would need to give to the extreme elements of the party to gain the leadership. Paris could be in the mix,” he said.

“Part of what will be at play is whether parts of the party remember the diplomatic damage and lost investment opportunities that came with the failure to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Unfortunately, long memories and common sense are a very limited resource in the government at the moment,” said Jackson.

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Australia, like the US, is bound by international law to remain in the agreement until at least 2020. Between now and then, Australia will hold a federal election. If the Labor party were to remove the government, they would reverse a decision to leave the deal.

But even a symbolic withdrawal would play havoc with an international climate process already reeling from Donald Trump’s promise to take the US out as soon as he can.

In elections in October, Brazilians could elect Jair Bolsonaro, who has indicated he would also leave the deal.

That discord would impact the major UN climate talks of the year in Poland in December, where the rulebook for the Paris deal is due to be agreed.

Turnbull lost the leadership of his party to Abbott in 2009 after the then-opposition leader backed the Labor government’s emissions trading scheme. That began a decade of political ousters linked to climate and energy policy, while Australia’s emissions and energy prices steadily rose.

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That, at least, is the assessment of the Australian Energy Market Operator, which makes this prediction as part of its Integrated System Plan, its 20-year blueprint for the integration of renewables into Australia’s electricity grid.

The prediction contrasts dramatically with the modelling prepared for the NEG by the Energy Security Board (ESB), of which AEMO is a member.

The ESB modelling (extract below) suggests that South Australia will reach 75% renewables by 2020 and 80% by 2022 – and then it somehow imagines the state installing not a single added megawatt of large scale solar or large scale wind until after 2030.

(Source: RenewEconomy)

Just who the ESB is trying to kid with this sort of modelling nonsense is not clear. The ISP modelling, on the other hand, is alive to the sound of good economics and building intentions.

It factors in developments such as UK entrepreneur Sanjeev Gupta’s plans for up to 1GW of solar and storage, and the numerous other projects in the pipeline.

Tesla: South Australian super battery beats expectations for first month

Gupta, as it happens, was presiding at the launch ceremony for the first of his major solar plants – 280MW at Whyalla – that he says will power not just the Whyalla steel works, but his other steel operations in Victoria and NSW.

He says it will deliver reduced costs, and it is hard to imagine him stopping just because of a vague promise from the ESB to the right wing of the coalition parties. Indeed, he sees up to 10GW across the country as the combination of solar and storage brings down energy costs to half of what they are now.

(See RenewEconomy’s interview with Gupta here).

(Source: RenewEconomy)

What’s really interesting about this graph above – put together by Dylan McConnell from the Climate and Energy College from the ISP data – is the growth in solar – both at a rooftop level but also in large scale solar, with big jumps in large scale solar in particular from 2025 and 2033.

Notice how combined cycle gas generation effectively disappears from around 2024, presumably from the time a new transmission link is completed to NSW, and peaking gas and diesel plays only a minor role behind that – much less than storage.

McConnell says the scenario underlines the value of interconnection and planning – and the fact that while the reduction in synchronous generation presents challenges, they are not insurmountable.

“Indeed they appear to be cheaper than business as usual,” he says. “The ISP suggest that a combination of deeper interconnection and other options such as synchronous condensers are a cheaper option than maintaining gas generation, given that AEMO uses a least-cost engineering optimization approach.”

This is the key point also picked up by another leading energy analyst Hugh Saddler, who wrote a detailed appraisal of the ISP for The Australia Institute, and put together the next two graphs below.

Saddler notes that the ISP modelling assumes South Australia jumps to almost 100% renewables in 2025, as the various gas turbines are shut down – including the ageing 50-plus year old Torrens Island gas-fired steam power stations, and the more modern combined cycle gas turbine (CCGT) stations at Pelican Point and Osborne.

“This is a particularly striking outcome,” Saddler writes.

(Source: RenewEconomy/Hugh Sadler)

“Following the system black event in September 2016, AEMO introduced a requirement for a minimum level of synchronous generation to remain online in South Australia at all times. This requirement remains in force, though it has been somewhat relaxed since then.

“The key reason for the requirement is that during windy conditions, when the state’s entire electrical energy demand can be met by wind generators, the Heywood interconnector to south-west Victoria is the only source of system strength and security services if the local gas generators shut down.

“One of the key components of the first five years of AEMO’s integrated system plan is a new high-capacity synchronous interconnector, called RiverLink, to run from the mid north of South Australia to southern New South Wales and be completed by 2025.

“By implication, AEMO has concluded that, when RiverLink is completed it will be sufficient, in combination with the other new types of grid services mentioned previously, to eliminate the need for local synchronous generation.

“This is the clearest possible example of how a well-planned combination of grid level services can obviate the need for synchronous generation, and do so at lower cost.”

(Source: RenewEconomy/Hugh Sadler)

This next graph shows the share of renewables including the sharing of capacity from Victoria and NSW with those connections. Even counting the interconnector flow, South Australia is still running at around 90% renewable energy.

It is interesting to note the high rate of renewable energy in states like Victoria, and the low share in NSW.

The contrast with the debate being run in Canberra about reliability and the dangers of high renewable energy scenarios could not be any more dramatic.

To be sure, AEMO says there are significant issues in South Australia that will need to be managed, such as system strength, voltage and frequency. These are outlined in the ISP, and form part of the Group 1 and group 2 actions that the CoAG energy ministers have told the ESB to get on top of.

None of them will be affected by the NEG. Despite all the ravings about reliability, the AEMO plan envisages no “baseload” coal, not even any “baseload” gas in South Australia’s electricity mix.

It is all about exploiting the cheapest form of bulk generation – quite clearly wind and solar – and ensuring that these are married with dispatchable capacity that can fill in the gaps and provide the system strength.

Meanwhile, in Canberra, the base-load bovver boys are out in force. Not just the politicians but also the big business guys like Bluescope and smelter in the Hunter Valley. We can’t run the smelters on renewables alone, they claim.

Gupta and South Australia, are about to prove them wrong.

This article was originally published on RenewEconomy

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So why has tiny Nauru – best known in recent years for hosting a contentious Australian immigration detention centre in return for aid dollars – been given $26.9 million in international climate funding to build a port?

At the heart of the question is the vexed and unresolved issue of what qualifies as climate finance, and how it differs from traditional development aid.

The Nauruan project was discussed by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) at a board meeting in Cairo in October after a proposal was put forward by the Asian Development Bank, which had backed it with $20.7 million grant. The Australian and Nauruan governments had committed another $17.6 million between them. But the biggest chunk was requested from the UN agency.

The GCF distributes money donated by wealthy countries as part of their obligations to the Paris climate agreement. It started with pledges totalling $10.3 billion.

Of its current portfolio of 53 projects, the average number of beneficiaries per project is around 3 million. The average outlay per beneficiary is $16. The Nauru project benefits 11,300 residents, at a cost of $2,380 per person. This is a crude measure and Nauru is doomed to such poor ratios because of its size and isolation. But on these raw terms, the project is an outlier.

With unanimous approval needed for a project to win the support of the GCF, the initial round of discussion suggested the project would fail. While no fund member doubted the low-lying nation needed a new port – the failing existing structure regularly leaves ships having to transfer goods manually from beyond the island’s coral reef – several countries believed it did not meet the criteria for the GCF to pay for it.

Green Climate Fund: UK vetoes South American climate finance bids

Japanese board member Tamaki Tsukada spelled out the problem: the port was primarily economic, rather than climate-specific, infrastructure. A cost-benefit analysis of the project had underlined this – though the GCF was being asked to pay two-thirds of the extra cost of transforming it from a basic to a modern, climate-resilient model, it had been calculated that the overwhelming bulk of the benefits were to the Pacific nation’s economy.

“I really hate to appear over-fastidious or finicky about this, but I think this case is posing an important policy question that we should not treat lightly,” Tsukada said.

“The GCF will be funding a project whose climate benefits represents only one-tenth of the entire benefits… Are we ready to set a precedent where climate benefit is a small part of total but GCF will be bearing a majority of the cost?”

Map: Aiwo harbour can be seen on the western coast of Nauru, along with a ship using offshore loading infrastructure

But after debate was deferred for 24 hours, those concerns were reduced to a footnote. The UK, which had argued forcefully against funding the project the day before, formally noted its reservation that the port was not value-for-money for the GCF. Other countries just let it through.

What changed?

It is understood delegates supporting the proposal made a persuasive and private lobbying effort, stressing the project’s benefits. Though not entirely convinced, Japan and France agreed it should be funded as a test case.

Australia argued that climate change was already affecting the Micronesian nation, which at 21 sq km is the world’s smallest island state. It is considered vulnerable to sea level rise and changing weather and storm patterns. Already, the port cannot be safely used for three months each year.

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Australia has close ties with Nauru. The once wealthy nation has effectively become a client state of Australia since its phosphate reserves were depleted in the 1990s. Australian aid makes up 17% of Nauru’s national revenue; its immigration centre is the island’s second largest employer. The operation of the centre, on a small island far from the Australian mainland, has been heavily criticised for its lack of transparency and its treatment of asylum seekers. In late 2016, a United Nations special rapporteur described conditions in the centre as “cruel, inhuman and degrading”.

But observers said Australia’s strong support for the Nauru port bid was less about reciprocity, and more tied to its desire to have its $200m GCF contribution spent in its region.

It is understood the port approval was in part possible because the British, dissatisfied with the way some projects measured up with loose criteria, had already made a statement by vetoing two South American rural development projects at the same meeting and was sympathetic about Nauru’s circumstances.

A British spokesperson told Climate Home News that, given the urgency and importance of responding to climate change, it was vital the world deploy resources in the “most rational, impactful and cost-effective way possible… This is why we ask tough questions about all projects we support”.

Old infrastructure on Nauru once helped load phosphate onto ship moored outside the island’s fringing reef (Photo: d-online)

Several board members strongly supported the Nauruan bid during the board meeting. Diann Black-Layne, from Antigua and Barbuda, publicly argued assessing the port’s benefits was more complicated than the cost-benefit analysis suggested. She said the funding was the difference between the country having a long-term functional port or not.

“It is not as simple to say this is adding value to their port,” Black-Layne said. “We’re repairing a port that climate change has damaged.”

But Tsukada stressed future discussions must be based on clearer policy guidelines about whether the GCF was to fund climate projects, or economic infrastructure with climate-resilient design.

GCF co-chair Ayman Shasly, from Saudi Arabia, agreed the inability to properly define what constitutes climate finance was causing confusion not only at the fund, but in discussions over long-term climate finance under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). “We have a dilemma… to differentiate between financing for development and financing for climate change,” he said.

Civil society organisations largely remained quiet during the Nauru discussion, but it is understood they felt – while the country deserves support for the project – the climate-related justification was to some extent contrived.

Talking points prepared on behalf of the groups seen by CHN noted an independent technical advisory panel report to the GCF incorrectly claimed Nauru had listed the port as a priority project as part of its Paris submission to the UNFCCC. In reality, neither the port nor transport infrastructure were listed as priorities.

But the civil society organisations also stressed Nauru clearly needed the project, and it would be a mistake to try to impose a sharp dividing line between climate adaptation and development funding.

Liane Schalatek, associate director of the Heinrich Böll Foundation North America, said trying to come up with improved definitions and criteria – as the GCF has said it will – would help. But she said it could not eliminate grey areas.

“In cases where climate change endangers the lives and survival of poor people and communities, there can be no hard line.”

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The Tasmanian Labor party has pledged to take the state to “120% renewables”, with an energy strategy that aims to lock in lower electricity prices and secure the island’s status as a clean power exporter.

In a statement released on Friday, ahead of the March 3 state election, Labor leader Rebecca White said her party would – if elected – “restore” and capitalise on the Australian state’s renewable electricity advantage, with a range of new policy measures and targets.

Chief among these are a target of “more than 120% renewables” within five years, and a “Distributed Energy Target” to boost on-site installations like rooftop solar by more than 80% by 2022.

Of course, for Tasmania, a 120% target is not as impressive as it sounds – the state regularly generates 100% renewable electricity from its ample hydropower resources, and also exports to Victoria.

But White said the 120% target was designed to make Tasmania the renewable energy “powerhouse” of Australia, allowing it to sell its excess hydro, wind and solar energy interstate – and in this way boosting the case for a second Bass Strait interconnector to Victoria.

The 80% boost to distributed renewables is perhaps a more significant number, particularly in light of the state’s recent energy crisis, in which drought and a broken interconnector exposed its heavy dependence on hydro, and lack of back-up resources or plans.

In the end, the crisis left the state-owned utility little choice but to resort to diesel generator sets to make up the generation supply shortfall – a dirty and expensive venture that cost a total of $64 million.

Labor’s White said the current state Liberal government – which presided over this crisis – had failed to seize energy opportunities and, in doing so, had put energy security at risk.

Adani: Another blow for giant Australian coal mine

“Not one major renewable energy project has been completed in the past four years,” White said on Friday. “Private investors have been left frustrated by a lack of urgency from the Hodgman government.

“In contrast, Labor would create a more diverse energy generation system to reduce power bills, protect our energy intensive industries, provide energy security in times of drought and enhance the case for a second Bass Strait interconnector.”

Labor’s policy plan also promises to reinvest $25 million in dividends from TasNetworks to fund a range of initiatives to take advantage of technological advances in renewable energy generation and storage – presumably including battery storage and internet of things solutions to load shifting and peak shaving.

Another key initiative targets the state’s agriculture sector, with a scheme designed to help farmers generate and use their own power.

“Farms are producing their own electricity through solar and wind installations, but as it stands their generation can only be used to offset costs behind one meter,” White said on Friday.

“A majority Labor government will work with TasNetworks to change the policy so that energy generated at one site can be used across all meters on the same property, provided it is used in real time.

“It is estimated the policy change could unlock more than $20m in direct on-farm investment.”

The Labor policy also pledges to install solar and battery storage at every new public housing property built – up to 1000 installations over six years; and to create a virtual power plant of connected homes, businesses and government buildings that would contribute to the state’s energy security.

This last pledge bodes well for the solar and battery storage microgrid pilot project proposed for two towns in the state’s south east, which the Liberal government has promised to help fund if it is re-elected.

The Liberal party has also pledged it will withdraw Tasmania from the National Electricity Market, cutting all ties with mainland pricing mechanisms even though it will still export and import power over its sub-sea cable.

Labor, meanwhile, promises to commit $7.5m to a staged roll-out of electric and alternative fuel vehicles in the state, if it is elected.

Increased uptake of EVs in the state would also be a great way to use up that extra 20% of renewable energy generation, other than exporting it to the mainland.  

This article was originally published on RenewEconomy.

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Aurizon said on Friday that it would be withdrawing its application for funding under the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, or Naif, due to a failure to secure “definitive contractual arrangements with any proponent”.

Aurizon was seeking the federal funding to assist with a rail solution for the Carmichael coal mine, a crucial ingredient to opening up the remote Galilee Basin to a potentially huge coal mining and export project that has also caught the attention of Gina Rinehart’s GVK Hancock and Clive Palmer.

In a company statement released on Friday, Aurizon chief Andrew Harding said the company still supported the development of the new Queensland mega mine, but decided it was prudent to withdraw the Naif application in light of the project’s current failure to progress.

“If market circumstances change and our discussions with potential customers progress to commercial arrangements we will look at all possible financing arrangements to develop the rail solution,” Harding said.

Australia: Labor victory a ‘death knell for Adani’ coal mine

The decision by Aurizon delivers a fresh vote of no confidence to the Adani-led project, which has stumbled from roadblock to roadblock, despite having the in-principle support of the federal government and key Queensland Coalition MPs.

Chief among those roadblocks has been the increasing number of banks – both international and local, including Australia’s big four – that have ruled out backing the project, for both economic and environmental reasons.

Most recently, in December last year, Downer Group announced it had relinquished a proposed $A2 billion non-binding Letter of Award received in December 2014.

This followed on from the Queensland government delivering its veto of the proposed A$1 billion loan subsidy and a multitude of leading Chinese banks vowing to avoid the controversial project the week before.

And late last month, in an address to the National Press Club, Labor opposition leader Bill Shorten undermined the project’s prospects further, by pledging it would not receive the party’s support if it didn’t stack up commercially or environmentally.

“Aurizon has joined a long list of banks and services companies walking away from the Adani project,” said Greenpeace Australia Pacific climate and energy campaigner Nikola Casule, in comments on Friday.

“There is no question that this mine would be an environmental disaster and Aurizon’s announcement is another clear demonstration of the economic unviability of the project.

“If Bill Shorten is standing by the criteria he set only a week ago he must commit to blocking the project should he lead a future Labor government,” Casule said.

“Aurizon’s decision reflects the wider public sentiment, which has become increasingly hostile amid revelations of the Adani Group’s tainted environmental and corporate record.

“While this news is welcome, the battle is not over. Greenpeace Australia Pacific and the Stop Adani movement will continue to take the fight to Adani and its enablers until this nightmare of a project is dead and buried.”

This article was originally published on RenewEconomy.

The post Another blow for giant Australian coal mine as rail company steps back appeared first on Climate Home News.

This week it will be ten years since he became prime minister of Australia, a little over ten years since he called climate change “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

It remains foremost in his thoughts and tweets. One of the “great global megatrends”, climate change will define our future as a species, he tells Climate Home News over scones, jam and tea in an Oxford hotel. But Rudd is also keen to deal with the past, where climate change also looms.

Rudd’s 2010 decision to defer an emissions trading scheme is widely seen as a high water mark for Australian climate policy. The point where the tide changed and a decade of lost opportunity began.

Rudd has blamed that decision on the cabinet forces, led by his deputy Julia Gillard, that eventually deposed him.

The current prime minister Malcolm Turnbull faces a similar revolt, led by the man from whom he took the leadership –  Tony Abbott. This has led Turnbull to retreat on climate policy, most recently ignoring the advice of his chief scientist to create a clean energy target.

Given he faces similar internecine tensions to those Rudd dealt with as PM, should Turnbull be cut some slack?

“No,” says Rudd.

Turnbull became leader after a party room coup against the deeply conservative Abbott in 2015, says Rudd. “This guy takes over the Liberal party presumably with an agenda for government and he did so when they had a robust majority of twenty seats.”

The Australian economy was stable, the global economy was rebounding. Rudd says it should have been a platform for ambition for a Turnbull, who had previously held similar positions to Rudd on climate change.

“Turnbull at that point simply choked,” he says. “He choked on climate change, he choked on a whole range of policy measures, hence the collective disillusionment with him. Turnbull’s principle political and policy failing is that it became very clear he just wanted to be there.”

Rudd argues his government achieved significant gains on climate, including a national renewable energy target which remains Australia’s most significant carbon cutting legislation, while facing down the global financial crisis. To be judged on the deferral of a single piece of legislation is unfair, he says, especially when compared to Turnbull’s record.

Australia: Only wealthy nation still breaking energy emissions records

In his current life as peripatetic statesman, Rudd says he takes every opportunity to criticise the Australian government over its “inertia” on climate change.

“I don’t know how those guys face their kids and grandkids in the morning. I really don’t. I just genuinely don’t,” he said.

To the climate policy failures of the Liberal-National government, Rudd suggests adding the neutering of the national broadband network he introduced while in power.

Without economic alternatives for people in rural areas, he said, there was no way Labor could oppose significant rural developments, such as the massive coal mine proposed by Indian billionaire Gautam Adani in Rudd’s home state of Queensland.

Access to high speed broadband would have been “the equivalent of the railway having arrived a hundred years before”, he says, creating opportunities for digital industries to grow beyond the cities. But the speed and ubiquity of the proposed network – the largest infrastructure investment in Australian history – was downgraded by Abbott after he was elected in 2013. Turnbull was then communications minister.

“What do these bastards do? They turn around and shoot it down,” says Rudd.

The Carmichael mine (located by the map above) has become a defining environmental issue in Australia. Both major political parties back its construction despite the prospect of it emitting 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide over its lifetime.

“You can’t just push [the Adani project] aside as a piece of good politics in the cities and marginal politics in the regions,” said Rudd. “There’s a policy reality here which shapes the politics, which is people don’t have economic opportunities anymore in this part of the world and it threatens their sense of local identity, legitimately.”

The former prime minister spoke to Climate Home News near Oxford University, UK, where he has spent the past several months researching Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Rudd is an expert on China and head of the New York-based Asia Society Policy Institute. China’s relationship with the world is changing rapidly, he says, with important consequences for climate change.

Tony Abbott: Climate change ‘probably doing good’

The US withdrawal from activism on climate was seen as an opportunity within China to promote its own policy agenda. However that was being balanced against concerns over the country’s recent economic slowdown, while “at the same time being in the unfamiliar position of it being expected that they will somehow drive the pace”.

Just a day after Donald Trump announced he wanted to pull the US from the Paris Agreement, a strong statement of joint leadership between the EU and China faltered over trade disputes.

Rudd says the development of that relationship was critical but that China had been in a holding pattern for the past couple of years after unexpected economic stagnation spread caution and conservatism.

Within China, Rudd says, “there has not been a lot of progress” on environmental policy. This includes the scaling back of China’s emissions trading scheme launch, which was originally supposed to have been released across multiple sectors of the economy this year. Now, if it does emerge at all in 2017, it is likely to cover only the energy sector.

COP23: China flexes its muscle as talks end with slow progress

This “high degree of caution about overall economic policy direction hopefully will now resolve itself now the 19th party congress is out of the way”, says Rudd.

On the international front, Rudd says the retirement from politics of Xie Zhenhua, who was vice-chairman of China’s economic development ministry, had left a vacuum.

Rudd, who was part of a group of heads of state who crashed headlong into Chinese resistance during the Copenhagen climate talks in 2009, says at that point, Chinese foreign policy was still dominated by an aphorism developed by former leader Deng Xiaoping: “Hide your strength, bide your time, never take the lead”.

But since 2015, Rudd says, “the dictum is an activist foreign policy, with China with new capacity and a new role. But if I’m to try to predict where they will land in terms of Chinese posture [on climate change], I don’t know. That’s why the next several months will be quite critical in looking for new directions to emerge.”

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While the results are not yet declared, Queensland premier Annastacia Palaszczuk is all-but certain to claim last Saturday’s election and deliver on her shock campaign pledge to block a concessional loan for a railway to connect Gautam Adani’s proposed Carmichael mine complex to a port on the Great Barrier Reef.

Analysts say the election result is another blow to the long-delayed coal project, which to date has failed to win the finance it needs, having been rejected by Australia’s major banks.

The Adani Group has said it needs public finance to help secure funding from international banks, and the government agency considering the loan – the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility, known as NAIF – has confirmed the state government has the power to block it.

Australia: Only wealthy nation still breaking energy emissions records

The company continues to pursue backing from Chinese state-owned financiers. Australia’s conservative Liberal-National federal government has confirmed it had written to Beijing on behalf of the company to confirm it had approved construction of the Adani complex.

Professor John Hewson, a former Liberal Party leader and now an economist at the Australian National University, said he believed the project would not go ahead.

He said a political lesson from the Queensland election was that a party could oppose a taxpayer loan to a coal project and not be electorally punished, claims it would create jobs in the state’s north notwithstanding.

At the time of writing the Labor party is favoured to hold at least two of the three seats in Townsville, the major centre closest to the proposed mine site and home to the company’s Australian headquarters.

“I think Palaszczuk will do what she says and that this is sort of the death knell for Adani, really,” Hewson told Climate Home News. “I think this will spell the end of any new coal-fired power stations or projects in Queensland.”

Hewson said China may finance the “pretty dirty, high cost” Adani project, but it would face a lot of pressure not to.

“It is a stranded asset even if it gets some support,” he said. “If you look ahead 15, 20, 25 years I don’t think anyone would get into that [coal] game.”

The 11-mine, A$16.5 billion Carmichael complex could produce 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide if fully developed – an average 77 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year for 60 years, more than twice the annual emissions of New Zealand. The plan is to export the coal to burn in Indian power plants.

Domestically, the Labor state government has an ambitious renewable energy target of 50% by 2030.

The Adani Group did not respond to an interview request. The Australian Financial Review reported the company said it was still committed to the mine and rail project, but funding task would be much harder after the state veto.

Project opponents the Australian Conservation Foundation said the government had created a potential alternative means to publicly finance the Adani project by changing the rules governing the country’s export credit agency, which is usually used to fund projects offshore.

Campaigner Basha Stasak said the state election result showed it would be a political mistake for the government to lend taxpayer money to what would be the largest coal project in the southern hemisphere.

Hewson said he could not imagine the national government would now take a “backdoor route” to fund Adani. He said the issue was now a management issue for prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, who is under pressure from right-wing MPs, some of who continue to call for taxpayer support for coal.

They include Minister for Resources and Northern Australia Matt Canavan, who remains a vocal advocate and says the Adani project still has strong support in regional Queensland.

The post Australia: Labor victory a ‘death knell for Adani’ coal mine appeared first on Climate Home News.

In a strongly worded letter to a government agency, Figueres warned approving the concessional loan to Indian billionaire Gautam Adani would seriously damage Australia’s international reputation and could affect progress on the Paris agreement.

The agency – the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, known as NAIF – is considering an application for a A$900 million (US$680m) loan to build a railway from the site of the proposed Adani Carmichael mine in rural Queensland to a port on the Great Barrier Reef.

Figueres’ plea follows similar calls from several Pacific leaders, and comes amid signs a concerted campaign is having some success in turning the Australian public against the proposal.

Estimates suggest the mine could produce 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide if fully developed – an average 77 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year for 60 years. The plan is to export the coal to burn in Indian power plants.

Figueres’ letter cites research published in Nature that found 93% of coal in the Pacific region had to stay in the ground to give the globe a 50:50 chance of keeping warming below 2C.

“A decision by the NAIF and the Commonwealth government to financially support the Adani project would further damage Australia’s international reputation as a climate laggard committed to prolonging its high-polluting fossil-fuel-based economy into the 21st century,” she wrote.

Internationally, she said it went against a growing fossil fuel divestment movement, and a coal phase-out campaign led by Britain and Canada at UN climate talks in Bonn last week.

In the Pacific, it would be seen as “an indifferent and ill-considered move by a country willing to sell off the interests of some of the most vulnerable countries and communities in its backyard”.

Report: Australian state premier promises to veto funding for giant Adani coal mine

Figueres, now leading the Mission 2020 climate campaign, said NAIF’s enabling legislation sets out why the loan should not go ahead.

It requires the agency to not act in a way likely to damage the Australian government’s reputation, and to adopt best practice corporate governance principles on environmental issues.

“Given my background and deep concern for planetary well-being, I cannot in all good conscience, remain silent on an issue that threatens to unpick the progress represented by the Paris Agreement,” she said.

The Adani proposal has been a central focus of the ongoing Queensland state election campaign, and the result on 25 November may decide its future.

Labor Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk reversed her support for the NAIF loan during the campaign and now promises to block it if approved. She blamed her changed position on what she said was a private smear campaign against her domestic partner, who worked on the loan application. Observers believe polling finding a majority of Queenslanders oppose the loan may have been equally decisive.

Her opponent, the Liberal National Party’s Tim Nichols, wants the loan to go ahead. Pundits expect the election to be close.

Australian Trade Minister Steve Ciobo dismissed Figueres’ argument on Monday, telling the Australian Broadcasting Corporation it was “curious” she would argue against burning Australia’s “more efficient” coal in Indian power plants rather than coal from elsewhere.

The A$16.5bn (US$12.5bn) Adani proposal has struggled to win financial backing. After being rejected by Australian banks, the company is in discussion with a Chinese state-owned financier.

Analyses have found the mine was unlikely to be viable, given existing Indian coal plants are running below capacity and the price of solar power is falling dramatically.

If it goes ahead, the Carmichael mine could open the way for up to eight more new coal mines in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.

Greenpeace has estimated the basin could generate emissions equivalent to the world’s seventh biggest fossil fuel burning country if fully developed.

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“If the opportunity presents itself I will sit with him and relay our concern and I feel that it’s an important issue,” said Umi Sengebau, whose small Pacific island is vulnerable to rising sea levels and a major aid partner for Australia.

“I believe that the future of our planet cannot tolerate us continually burning coal. That needs to be stopped,” he said.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CK40euvBcww&feature=youtu.be

The post Video: Palau to raise Adani coal mine with Australia appeared first on Climate Home News.