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Getting to grips with the brave new world of future climate and energy – notes from a Promethean environmentalist

El Niño and sunspots return, sea ice doesn’t

Posted by Barry Brook on 5 July 2009

The two main reasons why 2008 was the coolest year since 2000 was that the Pacific ocean was in its La Niña phase, and the sun was remarkably inactive and showed us a blank face for essentially the whole year. Both of these factors (oceanic and solar) exert a mild to strong influence on year-to-year climate variability. The forcing effect of additional greenhouse gases is more subtle in the short term, but ultimately dominates because it is inexorable (until we mitigate our emissions) and accumulative (due to long residence times).

In the first half of 2009, La Niña conditions persisted, despite a brief excursion to a more neutral phase. Now, however, the relevant signs — such as the southern oscillation index (SOI) and Pacific sea surface temperatures — point to the return of El Niño in the second half of 2009 (and perhaps continuing through 2010). There are also clear signs that the sunspots are returning in 2009, after the particularly extended period of quienscence, which recently had some speculating that we may be entering a new Maunder-Mininum-like period (more here).

The Bureau of Meteorology in Australia runs an excellent webpage on the El Niño-Southern Oscillation , updated weekly, called ENSO Wrap-Up. They have concluded the following:

“More evidence of a developing El Niño event has emerged during the past fortnight, and computer forecasts show there’s very little chance of the development stalling or reversing…

Another adverse sign for southeastern Australian rainfall is the recent trend to positive values in the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD), as measured by the Dipole Mode Index (DMI)…

The sub-surface of the equatorial Pacific has also continued to steadily warm through June. A large volume of warmer than normal sub-surface water is evident across the entire tropical Pacific…

All international climate models predict the tropical Pacific to continue to warm and to be above El Niño thresholds throughout most of the second half of 2009.”

Both the oncoming El Niño, and the positive values of the IOD, is bad news for the rainfall outlook in eastern Australia. As reported in The Age, “Such an event could send Melbourne’s water storages, already at a record low level of 26 per cent, plummeting well below 20 per cent by next year and force stage 4 restrictions. Rivers — especially the Yarra — farmlands and crops look set to be stressed further. The prediction comes as the bureau confirmed that Melbourne had a record dry start to the year, with just 126.2 millimetres of rain falling from January to June — eight millimetres below the previous record set in 1967 and less than half the long-term average of 307 millimetres.”

Look out for the next update of ENSO Wrap-Up in 3 days time (as of this post).

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Posted in Climate change Q&A, Hot news in climate science | 31 Comments »

Brave new power for the world

Posted by Barry Brook on 1 July 2009

Here is the follow-up post on the IFR by Steve Kirsch. The first can be read here. This is long (loooong), but it really says it all. Steve worked on a tonne of revisions to this piece before finally submitting this to HuffPo. It has been checked and confirmed by a bunch of the key IFR scientists. If you really want to know the real situation of the IFR story, and where it currently stands, take a deep breath, and read this!

———————–

Climate Bill Ignores Our Biggest Clean Energy Source (first published on The Huffington Post)

Steve Kirsch, Entrepreneur and philanthropist

Do you think our country’s energy policy is in good hands now that the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) climate bill has passed the House? I’m very worried and I think you should be too. Experts fret about balancing energy, environment, and the economy. But there is a way to have all three at the same time if we are willing to take a fresh look at an old technology. And that great solution is nowhere to be found in the ACES bill.

First, let’s start by assuming science of global warming is correct. We’ll see later that we’d want to do exactly the same thing even if we didn’t believe in global warming at all. 

To stop global warming, we must virtually eliminate the use of coal worldwide

Dr. James Hansen, one of our nation’s leading experts on global warming, is very clear about the necessary attributes of any solution: we must stop building new coal plants immediately and start retiring existing coal plants worldwide. If we cannot virtually eliminate coalworldwide within a couple of decades, then the sum total of all of our other efforts to reduce our carbon footprint will be like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

The “worldwide” requirement is critical. The best way, and for all practical purposes, probably the only way, to get other countries to abandon coal is to give them a seemingly magical new technology that is lower cost than coal, with the same 24×7 baseline power reliability, but without the CO2 emissions. Existing coal plants could be “upgraded” simply by replacing the “burner” with a the new technology.

We invented a superior power generation technology in 1974, but killed it for political reasons in 1994

The good news is we have such a magical power technology. The big surprise is that it isn’t new. It’s old. It is a fast nuclear reactor known as the Integral Fast Reactor (IFR) that was developed by a team of hundreds of scientists working for more than 20 years at our top government national laboratory for nuclear energy (Argonne National Laboratory, at its branches in Illinois and Idaho). 

The bad news is that the IFR development was abruptly canceled in its final stages in 1994. A decision was made in the early weeks of the Clinton administration by people who formerly worked for the oil and natural gas industry to cancel the project. The three reasons publicly given for canceling the program were all based on misconceptions. Since then we haven’t done a damn thing to exploit their marvelous invention.

The convenient solution invented at Argonne is simple: instead of spending billions to dispose of our nuclear waste, we can re-use that “waste” to generate power by using advanced “fourth generation” nuclear power technology. Using just our existing nuclear waste, we can power the entire planet for centuries.

Our uranium “waste” is our biggest and most valuable energy resource

Did you know that our uranium waste is our nation’s #1 energy resource? In fact, just in the depleted uranium (DU) waste alone (the stuff left over after natural uranium has been enriched), we have more than 10 times the extractable energy than we have from coal in the ground! 

Using fast reactors (a type of fourth generation nuclear), we can make use of this “waste” and extract enough energy to power the entire planet (at the current usage rate) for 700 years. 

Yet the Department of Energy (DOE), due to an admitted lack of funds to properly study the problem, currently plans to spend $428 million to permanently get rid of the DU. Such an action would be as nonsensical as Saudi Arabia suddenly deciding to pay someone to destroy all their oil reserves! 

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Posted in Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 39 Comments »

Discussion Thread: Is the EIA forecast of 2016 energy prices realistic?

Posted by Barry Brook on 27 June 2009

The US Energy Information Administration (EIA) recently (April 2009) made a forward projection of estimated energy generation costs for 2016 in its Annual Energy Outlook 2009. The results are given in the table I’ve reproduced below (click on it for a larger version) — the original comes from the Next Big Future blog, here. Nuclear Green also has a post on it, with an alternative figure, here, NEI Notes here, and there is an excellent summary provided by the Institute for Energy Research, here and here. The IER are the guys who extracted this data from the AEO 2009 report and summarised it in a useful format. Make sure you read these links: they’re packed with useful analysis.

Prices are expressed in 2007 US dollar terms per megawatt hour [MWh]. To convert these figures to kilowatt hours [kWh] — more relevant to you, perhaps, because you probably use between 120 and 250 kWh per day — simply divide these figures by 10, and read as cents instead of dollars. So, for conventional coal, the table tells you the cost is projected to be 9.4 c/kWh, whilst for wind it is 14.2 c/kWh. O&E stands for “operations and maintenance”. The levelised energy cost is an economic assessment of the cost the energy-generating system including all the costs over its lifetime: initial investment, operations and maintenance, cost of fuel, cost of capital. These costs deliberately exclude state and federal subsidies, to give you the real figures. The AEO 2009 report also includes an energy demand projection through to 2030.

eiaenergy2016One might choose to dispute any of the entries given above, for a variety of sound reasons. For instance, the cost of Advanced Nuclear is based on an overnight capital cost of about $8 billion per GW installed capacity for the US, when the recent Asian experience (Japan, Korea, China) is considerably lower (between 1/2 and 1/4 this price). Likewise, the price of gas might rise considerably higher than the EIA anticipates, especially regionally, as geographically important supplies dry up in places like the US and LNG prices rise concomitantly due to export/import bottlenecks. I’ll be interested to see the debate that ensues in the comments below, especially from those who advocate cheap renewable energy.

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Posted in Nuclear Energy, Renewable planet | 15 Comments »

Lovelock’s dire vision

Posted by Barry Brook on 23 June 2009

James Lovelock, the man who is often credited with being the first ‘Earth Systems Scientist’, has written a new book on the threat and consequences of climate change, called “The Vanishing Face of Gaia“. If you are looking for a dark and dystopian vision of the future, read Lovelock’s prognostications.

In brief, his view is that we have almost certainly gone past the point of no return. That is, climate ‘tipping elements‘ have been set in motion by past and ongoing changes to the Earth’s atmosphere and other interconnected systems (oceans, land surface, cryosphere). Because of this, according to Lovelock, we cannot now avoid a mass extinction of species and a major distruption to the human enterprise — though we may be able to execute a ’sustainable retreat’ as a means of adapting to some of the challenges ahead and avoiding the very worst outcomes. As I understand it, his new book explores these ideas in some detail and evaluates the likelihood of success.

I have not yet read Lovelock’s new book (it’s now on my short-term list!), but I was certainly impressed by his previous treatise, The Revenge of Gaia, which included strong arguments for the use of nuclear power (even without describing the many benefits of Generation IV technology, epitomised by the IFR). On that topic, see also here, for an essay by Lovelock published in 2004 in The Independent: “Nuclear power is the only green solution“.

Lovelock’s views are considered by most in the scientific community to be at the extreme end of the optimism — pessimism scale, but certainly not beyond the bounds of possibility, and frankly, a near certainty if a ‘business-as-usual’ pathway of carbon emissions is kept up for another few decades. A good review of what a ‘1000 ppm’ world might look like can be found here and here. What many would dispute is whether we’re too far gone already. I personally think we still have time to avoid the worst, if we start emergency action now.

Anyway, to whet people’s appetite, below I reproduce an excellent review of the book by a friend and colleague of mine, Tim Flannery. It was published in The Monthly. Tim and I first met back in 2002 at a conference on extinctions in Japan, and have since published a few papers together. You can also click on the image of the book for another interesting perspective by Justin Ritchie.

————————————————-

Goodbye to All That

James Lovelock’s “The Vanishing Face of Gaia : A Final Warning“

Review by Tim Flannery (Copehagen Climate Council)

The Monthly » June 2009, No. 46

http://www.themonthly.com.au/node/1673

James Lovelock’s latest book,The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (Allen Lane, 192pp; $29.95), has an important message. In a few years, or a few decades at most, abrupt changes in Earth’s climate will begin, which will end up killing almost all of us and cause the extinction of almost all life on Earth. The tropics and subtropics will be rendered uninhabitable by this shift, and the few survivors will cling to favoured regions such as Britain and New Zealand. Lovelock believes there is little we can do to avert our fate, for the causes of the climatic shift are now so entrenched that they are in all likelihood irreversible. In his view the best we can hope for is personal survival in a world of warring nations or, if we are particularly unfortunate, a world ruled by warlords.

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Posted in Future shock | 40 Comments »

Why is the US ignoring the Integral Fast Reactor?

Posted by Barry Brook on 20 June 2009

Cartoon by Nicholson from The Australian newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

Cartoon by Nicholson from "The Australian" newspaper: www.nicholsoncartoons.com.au

Here is something written by Steve Kirsch, and published recently on the Huffington Post. It is obviously highly relevant to our discussions on IFR and ETS bills in Australia, so I thought BNC readers would find it of interest. I’ll ask Steve if he wants to join in the commentary herein…

Waxman-Markey: Three Tough, Unanswered Questions

Steve Kirsch

On June 10, 1Sky sponsored a conference call with Waxman, Markey, and their staff to talk about the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES) a.k.a. the Waxman-Markey bill. I had three really tough questions that weren’t addressed in the call, so I e-mailed the House staffers who spoke on the call.

I received a response which I’ve included below, but the response didn’t directly answer my questions.

So I thought it would be fun to speculate at how they might have responded if they were required to answer each question directly, without being “politically correct.”

Question #1: Jim Hansen did an analysis of the bill. He told me on June 7 that he will write something soon showing that Waxman-Markey “locks in terrible results for two decades.”

Now we all know that Hansen is a really smart guy that we wished we had listened to back in 1988 when he first testified about global warming. His prognostications have all materialized.

Since we are so late in addressing climate change, and we really cannot afford to make any mistakes this time around (our last chance), how can you be so certain that Hansen is wrong in his assessment of Waxman-Markey? Do you have an expert who is as smart as Hansen (and as right in his prognostications) who has convinced you that Hansen is wrong?

Answer #1: No, we haven’t seen Hansen’s analysis.

Question #2: Both Secretary Chu and the President of MIT point out that nuclear has to be a key part of the energy mix going forward. We can’t supply all our clean energy needs relying on just renewables.

Yet this bill has over 932 pages, and the word “nuclear” only appears twice.

That seems pretty odd considering that 70% of our CO2-free power is from nuclear. Even more odd considering we haven’t built a new nuclear plant in 30 years and it’s still 70% of our clean power!

I’m sure you all know that the energy content contained in light water reactor (LWR) spent fuel and depleted uranium exceeds all the known oil reserves in the world. It’s an energy resource that is 10 times bigger than the energy of the coal we have in the ground. And that’s just the stuff we have on hand! That’s not even counting the stuff we haven’t mined. Using fast reactors, we can run the entire planet for over 700 years on just the uranium “waste” we have on hand and for millions of years if we are willing to use the uranium that hasn’t yet been mined.

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Posted in Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 34 Comments »

Steel yourself – a clear role for hydrogen

Posted by Barry Brook on 16 June 2009

Oil, and its major liquid-fuel derivatives (petroleum [gasoline], diesel, kerosene and aviation fuel), are incredibly convenient energy sources. They are energy dense, easily combustible yet relatively stable, and represent an abundant, naturally available energy carrier. Oil underpins our massive modern transport fleet. But what do we do when the oil runs dry (or, indeed, as prices rise following the plateau/peak that we may have already reached), and carbon restrictions tighten?

Well, there’s no other obvious natural energy carriers for use in transport. But we can make them, by drawing on natural processes (biodiesel and bioethanol), or using stationary energy inputs to create chemical-electric batteries, hydrogen fuel cells, purified metals, etc. In the former case, the enegy input comes from a solar source in the form of biomass (via photosynthesis), and in the latter, it must come from technosolar, nuclear, or fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.

Hydrogen is often touted as the obvious future energy carrier (other than electricity), but it faces substantial technological and logistical obstacles, such as high conversion losses (60 to 80% reduction compared to original energy input), extreme volatility, energy required for compression to a liquified form, piping embrittlement and leakage, storage volume problems, the need to construct a new, massive distributional network, and so on. The problems are detailed here and here (but for a counter-critique of some points, see here).

I should note that hydrogen is NOT an energy source, despite the oft repeated allusions in the media, because hydrogen does not occur naturally on Earth). Some are optimistic that storage of hydrogen in metal hydrides will solve some major problems, but that requires considerable R&D. I’m cautiously optimistic of metal hydrides, electrochemical compression, and proton exchange membrane fuel cells and parallel path magnetic technology, in particular. But they’re not ready and proven — yet another area where a massive investment in energy technology and engineering development is needed NOW, if we are to have readily exploitable fossil-fuel-free energy systems in the medium- to long-term.

But speaking the other day with an engineer from one of Australia’s largest steel manufacturers (OneSteel Whyalla), he raised an interesting issue regarding hydrogen that is quite separate from its use as an alternative transport fuel. I was previously quite unaware of this remarkably important role for hydrogen.

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Posted in Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 49 Comments »

Solar Credits – just bad policy!

Posted by Barry Brook on 14 June 2009

Guest Post by Tim Kelly. Tim works as a Principal Climate Change Advisor in the Water Industry and is a regular contributor to Brave New Climate.

From June 9, 2009 when a householder is seduced into signing across Solar Credits associated with their small scale Solar, Wind or Hydro generation schemes, they will continue to reduce their emissions yet for every deemed megawatt hour (MWh) created, they will displace 5 MWh of accredited Renewable Energy already required under Australian Law. They will be causing a net 4 MWh to be continued to be produced from fossil fuel sources and therefore will cause more greenhouse gas emissions and do more harm to the environment than doing nothing.

When the Government released its exposure draft legislation on the design of the Renewable Energy Target in December 2008 there were many issues created in the legislation that should have been relatively straight forward. In my submission on the Exposure Draft, I raised concerns including that the Expanded Renewable Energy Target did not neccessarily secure the Government’s 20% of electricity sourced from renewable energy by 2020 Election Pledge, and might also count the voluntary efforts of individuals and businesses towards the expanded target effectively creating a ceiling on what could otherwisede be achieved.

Now the Exposure Draft Legislation has been re-released and is due to be presented to Parliament next week. There have been some changes such as maintaining the mandatory component at 45,000 gigawatt hours (GWh) per year from 2020 through to 2030, rather than eroding this requirement from year 2025 onwards.

In this posting I would like to concentrate on the policy consequences of the Solar Credits proposal.

Why has the Government moved to a Solar Credits mechanism?

The reason that the Government has moved from its Small Scale Generation Unit Rebate Scheme to a Solar Credits Scheme is simply about Government cost cutting. The current scheme was costing the Government too much money and the replacement Solar Credits scheme shifts the cost burden back to all electricity consumers.

What has the Government Actually proposed?

The Government has proposed that a multiplier be used in relation to the deemed output from small scale generation units that are eligible to create Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs). Between 9 June 2009 and 30 June 2015, instead of just 1 REC being created from 1 deemed MWh of generation, a multiplier can be used to ‘create’ more RECs.

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Posted in Renewable planet | 33 Comments »

An inconvenient solution

Posted by Barry Brook on 11 June 2009

Here is an article written by me that was published in The Australian newspaper on 9 June 2009:

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25607083-7583,00.html

If climate change is the “inconvenient truth” facing our fossil fuel dependent society, then advanced nuclear power is the inconvenient solution starting right back at the environmental movement.

Since the 1970s, when the Sierra Club and other prominent environmental groups switched from being active supporters to trenchant detractors, nuclear power has fought an ongoing battle to present itself as a clean, safe and sustainable energy source.

Today, a mix of myths and old half-truths continue to constrain people’s thinking on nuclear power. Some of the most regularly raised are that uranium supplies will run out, nuclear accidents are likely, long-lived radioactive waste will be with us for 100,000 years, large amounts of CO2 are produced over the nuclear cycle, it’s too slow and costly, and that a build out of nuclear power will increase the risk of weapons proliferation.

Yet, the surprising reality is that none of these perceived disadvantages of nuclear power need to apply in the future. Indeed, many don’t apply now.

Worldwide, nuclear power is undergoing a renaissance. There are 45 so-called ‘Generation III’ reactors currently under construction, including 12 in China, and another 388 are planned or proposed.

These modern reactor designs are efficient, with capacity factors exceeding 90%, and have a high degree of passive safety based on the inherent principles of physics. For instance, the risk of a meltdown as serious as the Three Mile Island incident (which resulted in no fatalities) for GE-Hitachi’s Economic and Simplified Boiling Water Reactor (ESBWR), has been assessed as once every 29 million reactor years. So judging the ESBWR against the type of reactor that was destroyed at Chernobyl is like comparing the safety of a World War I biplane against a modern jetliner.

In terms of costs and build times, standardised, modular, passive-safety designs, which can be factory built and shipped to site, are game changers for the industry.

The future of nuclear power is brighter still. Although the 2006 Switkowski report on nuclear power in Australia hardly mentioned so-called `fast reactors’, these have the potential to provide vast amounts of clean, baseload energy, for thousands of years.

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Posted in Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 106 Comments »

Memo to Stephen Fielding: It’s not the sun

Posted by Barry Brook on 8 June 2009

‘Solar variability does not explain late-20th-century warming’, says the title of a short paper published earlier this year by Philip Duffy, Ben Santer and Tom Wigley in Physics Today. The reason I bring up the topic of the sun and climate now is that an Australian Senator, Stephen Fielding of the Family First party, has recently been concerned that the solar variability could be a cause of recent warming, as the vote for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme comes before the Upper House. Apparently, he got this information from the American Heartland Institute. Well, let me put the good Senator’s concerns to rest.

This topic was dealt with in some detail on BraveNewClimate last year, in the post ‘What if the sun got stuck?‘. There is also an excellent coverage of this issue here, here and here. As Graeme Pearman said in the ABC story linked above, it’s an old debate. Pearman:

“Senator Fielding might have just learnt about it, but in fact the science community has been aware of it for many years. The changes of output of the sun are well and truly documented. We’ve been observing this for over a hundred years. We understand that there was probably some warming earlier last century, due to changes of emissions from the sun, but no evidence that the recent warming is due to that. And therefore there’s no anticipation that that will be a major factor through this century.”

The Duffy et al. 2009 paper (download the PDF here) was written in response to an Opinion Piece published in Physics Today in March 2008, by Nicola Scafetta and Bruce West, entitled: “Is climate sensitive to solar variability?” (download here). I strongly recommend that you read the Duffy et al. paper in full (it’s only 2 information-packed pages long), but the conclusion really does say it all:

In summary, the hypothesis of Scafetta and West — that solar variability is the dominant climate influence during the late 20th century — is a non-solution to a non-problem. There is no problem because the history of global temperatures during the 20th century is adequately explained by known phenomena: greenhouse gases, volcanic eruptions, aerosols, and, yes, to a small degree, solar variability. That conventional explanation is simple, self-consistent, and relies on well established physics. The Scafetta and West hypothesis is a non-solution because it is inconsistent with a range of observations and invokes new an unproven physics. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof; Scafetta and West have failed to provide it.

It’s always been amazing to me that some people go to such lengths to try to explain most of the warming over the last 150 years by reference to the sun, rather than ascribing it to an increase in greenhouse gases (GHG). Both, obviously, can change the climate; no argument there. But what about the principle of parsimony, folks? This argument distorts it to the extreme.

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Posted in Climate change Q&A, Non-greenhouse theorists ('sceptics') | 51 Comments »

“Spooked” by IFR on TV

Posted by Barry Brook on 4 June 2009

Here’s something intriguing — an indication that the wider world is starting to pay some attention to the IFR. I suspect Tom Blees’ message is getting out into the popular culture further, faster than we may have suspected…

There’s a British TV show called “Spooks“, which is a spy drama. Episode 9 of this year’s season (sixth series) is about a race against time to find and deactivate a bomb planted in central London by an ex-IRA operative, and discover who is really behind the plot to kill them. It ends up involving Iran and nuclear power.

So why is this of interest to BNC readers? Well, here is the link — go forward to 47 min 42 sec:
http://www.abc.net.au/tv/spooks/episodes.htm (EPISODE 9)

We have the UK Home Secretary talking:

Home Secretary UK: “Iran maintains that her nuclear programme is peaceful. We know to our cost that the reactionaries are interested in more than domestic power supply, but I’ve found a way to call their bluff. If Iran wants a peaceful nuclear programme, we’ll give it to them.”

[He spins computer screen, showing a reactor blueprint (I guess the S-PRISM!)]

Home Secretary UK: “The plans for an Integral Fast Reactor. It’s a nuclear plant. A safe nuclear plant. Bottom line: these plants cannot be used to produce nuclear weapons. Nobody has an excuse to bomb Iran, nobody has an excuse to invade Iran. Not if a nuclear programme is driven by these reactors… This plan represents our last, best hope for an enduring peace.”

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Posted in Nuclear Energy | 17 Comments »

SA sets a 33% renewables by 2020 target

Posted by Barry Brook on 3 June 2009

Today I attended a press conference at the University of Adelaide, at which Premier Mike Rann delivered a pre-state-budget announcement of support, to the tune of $800,000 pa for two years, for a new centre focused on RD&D in hot dry rock geothermal energy (HDRGE). There was also a broader target on renewable energy announced, summarised by the Government as follows:

“Premier Mike Rann today announced that this week’s State Budget will outline plans to create an even greater renewable industry in South Australia, and to increase the state’s renewable energy production target to 33 per cent by 2020. The first project to be funded from the Renewable Energy Fund will be the South Australian Centre of Excellence for Geothermal Research at the University of Adelaide, which will receive $1.6 million over two years.”

A PDF of the 2-page media release is available here. Below are snippetts describing some of the key features:

“Mr Rann, who is also Minister for Sustainability and Climate Change, and Economic Development, announced a new $20 million Renewable Energy Fund to accelerate investment in this sector…

So we’re now announcing an even tougher target of 33 per cent by 2020 which will keep us at the forefront internationally of jurisdictions supporting renewable energy…

South Australia is home to 56 per cent of the nation’s wind power, 90 per cent of its geothermal investment and nearly 30 per cent of its grid-connected domestic solar systems, by far the highest in Australia…

Recommendations on the application of remaining funds will come from the new RenewablesSA Board lead by Bruce Carter, the Chair of the Economic Development Board.”

For reference, South Australia’s current target of 20% of the state’s electricity generation sourced from renewables by 2014 looks set to be met a year early, in 2013.

This is a really interesting set of policy announcents for BraveNewClimate readers, given the recent discussion we’ve had on this website about likely upper limits to the capacity of renewable energy to deliver substantial fractions of a modern society’s total power needs. In this context, I’d be very intriuged to hear people’s views on how realistic they think this state target is, and by what means (energy sources) it will be achieved. There is also the issue of complementarity with the national mandatory renewable energy target of 45,000 GWh of renewable energy to be generated in Australia by 2020.

Will South Australia, by adopting this target, just make the job of the other states easier? It is not clear to me, in reading the draft MRET legislation, on whether each state will itself have a quota of x-GWh per annum (Mr Rann implied this in his press conference speech, but it may have simply been an assumption on his behalf), or whether (in theory) just one state could generate the entire allocation (this was my understanding). This obviously makes a big difference, because if the latter is true, SA could simply end up carrying the load for the other states. I suspect the view of the SA state government is ‘lead and others will follow’, and I hope that’s the case, but with a target as large as 33% by 2020, I suspect there’ll be some major laggards instead…

Anyway, to set the framework for discussion, here is my brief take on what it means. Feel free to disagree…

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Posted in Renewable planet | 30 Comments »

Another hockey stick fabrication!

Posted by Barry Brook on 30 May 2009

All is not as it seems with the world’s most famous hockey stick graph, a new study, to be published in the journal Power and Milieu, has revealed.

For decades, school students and the general public have been taught that world human population size has exploded into exponential growth over the last few centuries (see left), with ‘demographic models’ being used to predict that this trend will be ongoing for at least the next 50 years.

Yet many unrecognised academics and independent intellectuals have quietly harboured a suspicion that this reconstruction — based on dubious data at best — was nothing more than a front for socialists and deep greens, who wished to foist on society the increasingly discredited hypothesis that human population size somehow cannot continue to grow indefinitely. Yet to date they have remained largely hidden from public view, fearful that by ‘coming out’ they risk ridicule and loss of lucrative grants.

That is all about to change, according to the new study’s authors, Prof Sherman Quackentire and Dr Rolf McDipstick, of the University of Pangaea. “It’s just this graph, you know…” say Prof Quackentire. Dr McDipstick elaborates: “Xerxes managed to muster an army of a million men at Plataea — on one tiny field of battle! Now I ask you, how is that possible if world population size at the time was mere 50 million? It just didn’t make any sense to us.”

The paper, entitled “World population size revisited: a fluctuating doodle“, is rich with such historical counter-evidence, which builds a powerful scientific and historical case to refute the population hockey stick. Other examples include pictorial evidence from scenes of naked Egyptian dancing girls on ancient tomb walls,  counts of barley and malt husks from a cracked Mesopotamian grindstone, and an isotopic analysis on a small pile of coprolites thought to be derived from a Roman canine which lived along Hadrian’s Wall. After painstakingly piecing together these and many other indirect population proxies, Quackentire and McDipstick came up with the figure illustrated below.

poprecon

In their controversial reconstruction, the 20th century upswing in human population density (circled in red) is revealed to be nothing more than a random blip in a noisy time series. It looks even less impressive when plotted on a logarithmic scale (right panel).

The senior author explains: ”Human population size changes all the time. I mean, it’s just arrogant of us to imagine that we have anything to do with this. Natural events like wars, famine, volcanic eruptions, alien invasions — they’ve all played their part in influencing population size in the past, and they’ll continue to do so long after we’re all gone. The ‘growthists’ who now run our political agenda just refuse to acknowledge this, yet every historian I’ve ever talked to realises this simple fact. Do they imagine we are stupid or something?“.

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Posted in Humour, Non-greenhouse theorists ('sceptics') | 43 Comments »

P4TP chapter 4 – everyone can now read Blees on IFR

Posted by Barry Brook on 25 May 2009

LMFBRFor those who do not yet have the book (tsk, tsk), you can now read Chapter 4 of Prescription for the Planet, “Newclear Power”, by downloading it here. Tom Blees has generously decided to put this chapter (pg 117 — 139) on the web to allow a more rapid dissemination of the basic facts about IFR to everyone you know (family, friends, fellow environmentalists, politicians, the media) — so please do pass on the link: http://tinyurl.com/cwvn8n

I have already reviewed Chapters 4 and 5 of P4TP, here. The downloadable chapter covers the following topics:

– An introduction to the Integral Fast Reactor  (IFR) project and its experimental testbed, the EBR-II at Argonne

– Nuclear Physics 101, a primer to nuclear power generation

– Light Water Reactors and Fast Reactors: similarities and differences

– A comprehensive description of the IFR concept and its revolutionary design principles, in easy to understand terms

Be amazed, be thrilled, learn something new — read chapter 4 of P4TP and pass on the link. It’s a great way to whet people’s appetite and make them hungry for more information on this new type of nuclear power — which can be found by reading the whole book, reading this site, and going over other warehouses of info like Steve Kirsch’s IFR website.

I’m currently up to Part IV of my VI part review of P4TP on BraveNewClimate. I’ve still got important topics to cover, such as the proposed programme of international oversight of IFRs, and the story of what has stalled progress to date.

In other news, BNC reader David Lockwood alerted me to an interesting new study by a group from MIT on global warming, to appear in Journal of Climate (published by the American Meteorological Society). There are a couple of news stories about it, here and here. The graphical ‘roulette wheel’ results of the study are shown below. 

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Posted in Hot news in climate science, Nuclear Energy | 36 Comments »

Al Gore’s blind spot on nuclear power

Posted by Barry Brook on 22 May 2009

I’ve just started reading a book by William Tucker called ‘Terrestrial Energy‘. It’s really very good, and I’ll write up a full review of it here once I’ve finished it. But the reason for this post is to consider a quote from Al Gore that Tucker cites in the Preface, pages ix — x. It comes from his testimony, in March 2007, to the US Senate. Gore says the following, when asked about the possible role of nuclear power in combating global warming:

I think it’s likely to be a small part of it. I don’t think it will be a big part of the solution, Senator… I’m assuming that we will somehow find an answer to the problem of long-term storage of waste… I’m assuming that we will find an answer to the problem of errors by the operators of these reactors…  But the main problem I think is economics. The problem is these things [nuclear reactors] are expensive, they take a long time to build, and at present, they only come in one size—extra-large….

There was quite a bit more said, and you can read the entire transcript of his conversation with Senators Isakson and Alexander, here. Gore added:

So I mean, I’m not a reflexive opponent of nuclear—I just happen to think it’s only going to play a small role….

He repeated much the same line in an interview on CBS television in July 2008, and in an interview with the Guardian newspaper in March 2009, so we can safely assume that the position he states above has not changed over the last few years. For those who follow the news on energy futures, you may recall what Gore said about renewable energy in July 2008:

America must commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and other clean sources within 10 years.

So Gore foresees the need for a transformational change in energy supply in a rapid time-frame, but considers that nuclear power is likely to have little or no role in this second industrial revolution. I will leave the matter of whether 100% renewables by 2020, or indeed any other time-frame, is realistic. Suffice to say that regular readers of this blog know that I have concluded that such a target is extraordinarily implausible, from many technical, logistical and socioeconomic standpoints. So what about Al Gore’s view on nuclear power prospects — are these also being overrated by its proponents?

Tucker (pg x — xi) has the following to say in response to Gore’s cited testimony:

Saying that nuclear reactors only come in “one size — extra large” is woefully uninformed. Reactors can come in any size. Experimental reactors in laboratories and universities can generate 1 or 2 megawatts (A megawatt — MW — is the standard unit of commercial electricity, able to power about 1,000 homes.) Submarine reactors in the Nuclear Navy generate between 20 and 50 MW, and battleships run on 70 to 100 MW. When Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the Nuclear Navy, “beached” one of his submarine reactors at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957 to produce the first commercial nuclear plant, it generated 60 MW — about 1/25th the size of today’s.

Utility reactors grew to 300 and 500 MW and beyond, with the largest now reaching 1,500 MW — what Gore calls “extra large”. This is because giant generators are the cheapest way to produce electricity. Coal plants are built to the same size, but this isn’t the only way reactors can be built. The Russians are now powering Siberian villages with 80 MW reactors floated in on barges. China and Japan are building modular reactors of 150 MW to power small communities. There isn’t any reason reactors can’t be built to the neighborhood level, combined with hydrogren production or water desalinization. If we ever colonize the moon, it will probably be with transportable nuclear reactors.

The real problem is public fear of all things nuclear. In truth, nuclear power still terrifies people. It seems unnatural and diabolic, a bastard technology conjured up by guilt-ridden scientists trying to exonerate themselves for inventing the atomic bomb. For many people — even those most concerned about global warming — nuclear remains the embodiment of evil, the symbol of all that is wrong with the modern world. 

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Posted in Nuclear Energy | 76 Comments »

Climate Denial Crock

Posted by Barry Brook on 18 May 2009

In a recent post, I directed BraveNewClimate readers to a couple of excellent information websites, which are designed explicitly to answer/rebutt all of the common ‘arguments’ (for want of a better word) that are recycled by climate change pseudo-sceptics. Those two websites, Global Warming Debate and Skeptical Science, along with other excellent anti-denial sites like Deltoid and Greenfyre’s (which deal with the day-to-day lunacy that crops up in the newspapers and blogosphere), serve this ongoing need very well. But they do require one to take the time to read a lot of stuff, and let’s face it, there is such a morass of reading material thrust at us each and every day, that it can be easy to ’switch off’.

As a way of adding diversity to your climate and energy education, I’ve already pointed to some useful multimedia sources for understanding more about fast reactor nuclear power. This post is to alert you to a similar non-textual resource which tackles the recycled pseudo-sceptical arguments head-on. It’s called ‘Climate Denial Crock of the Week‘, produced by Peter Sinclair (aka ‘greenman3610′).

This is an expanding series of ‘documentary’ videos posted on YouTube, underpinned by excellent production values, and narrated with a dash of humour to keep the material interesting. Each weekly ’smashing of the crockery’ lasts about 5 to 10 minutes, so it’s not a huge time committment to follow this, week in, week out. It’s definitely worth the bandwidth — Sinclair manages to pack a whole lot of useful and accurate information into each video. All in all, it’s a really superb resource and I applaud his ongoing effort.

So far, the following 16 episodes have been posted (listed below in so particular order — you can watch them in any sequence) — the blurbs after the title are by the producer:

Solar Schmolar — A favorite hobby horse of Climate Denialists is that there is some kind of invisible, undetectable influence from the sun that is responsible for the unequivocal warming of the last century. Let’s put that crock under a microscope and see where the cracks are.

Ice Area and Volume –Denialists continually try to confuse the issue of northern polar ice caps. Here are the facts from the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Party like it’s 1998 – One of the enduring classics of denialism, “Global warming stopped in 1998″, is of course, nonsense. Here’s why.

It’s Cold. So there’s no Climate Change – ”I looked outside, and it was snowing, therefore, there is no climate change.” If that’s what passes for rational thought in your social group, you owe it to yourself to watch this edition of Climate Denial Crock of the Week.

The Scoop on Southern Polar Ice — Don’t back down from the watercooler wars. Climate Denial Crock of the Week shoots down the brainless, Rush Limbaugh factoids of global climate denial. Keep coming back each week for more real science on climate change, and send me your suggestions for climate crocks to crush.

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Posted in Climate change Q&A, Non-greenhouse theorists ('sceptics') | 156 Comments »

Voluntary Actions and the Rudd Government’s changes to its proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction System

Posted by Barry Brook on 15 May 2009

Guest Post by Tim Kelly. Tim works as a Principal Climate Change Advisor in the Water Industry and is a regular contributor to Brave New Climate.

The Australian Government is belatedly acknowledging the harm that its proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme will have on the effectiveness of voluntary actions taken to reduce emissions.

The media release from the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Minister For Climate Change and Water on May 4, 2009, stated that : “The Rudd Government has listened to Australian households who have raised concerns that their individual efforts to reduce emissions will not be adequately taken into account under the CPRS”, and a number of measures were proposed.

So did the Government listen enough and has it has fixed the problems in regards to voluntary actions as claimed, or made them worse?

Firstly, this discussion is not about the overall target or whether the potential change to the upper end of the Government’s potential target provides sufficient improvement.  Secondly, whilst I do believe that voluntary choices for businesses and households to avoid emissions intensive products and services are essential in an effective low emissions economy, this comparison can be seen in my joint submission [1] with Professor Barry Brook to the Senate Economics Committee. 

Where do the benefits of voluntary actions currently belong?

Under emissions trading, the benefits of voluntary actions are changed or cancelled, yet many believe that there are simple fixes that can be applied. It is important to understand how voluntary mechanisms work, whether actions are effective, and who owns the benefits.  This understanding can serve as the foundation to determining whether the actions still have merit under emissions trading.  So lets consider several examples:

1) Energy Efficiency:  Without emissions trading, where individuals, households and businesses find ways to reduce their electricity use, fuel use or consumption of other products and services, their greenhouse gas emissions are reduced and National emissions are reduced.

2) GreenPower:  Under Australian law, GreenPower works as a donation.  Customer emissions are not reduced (despite marketing messages that suggest otherwise [2]) but new renewable energy is created which serves to avoid emissions from non renewable power stations so National emissions are reduced.  

3) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable energy Certificates (RECs) are sold:  Where households esablish these systems, their emissions are reduced, but their RECs are signed across to third parties, either other renewable energy that was already required by law is no longer needed so there is zero reduction in emissions Australia wide or, their RECs are used to create GreenPower that double counts the greenhouse reduction and use benefits as it is sold to other households and businesses negating the additionality of the efforts of the GreenPower Customer.

4) Household solar and hot water systems when Renewable Energy Certificates (RECs) are kept by the householders:  Household emissions are reduced and National emissions are reduced.

So there are a number of good outcomes and wasted outcomes from current voluntary actions, and I maintain that there is an urgency to either reform GreenPower and electricity emissions accounting or clarify that it is really just a donation system for the benefits to be shared amongst all grid customers in proportion of their use so that the Trades Practices Act (1974) is complied with.  (Also note that this matter is about the legal assignment of benefits and has nothing to do with how the grid is used or how inputs or outputs to the grid are measured).

The basic problem of voluntary actions under an emissions trading system.

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Climate change items in the 2009 Federal Budget

Posted by Barry Brook on 13 May 2009

So, the Australian 2009-2010 Federal Budget is delivered. ‘Clean energy’ stands as one of the infrastructure centrepieces – an investment that is hoped to both pull the economy out of recession and get us on the pathway to a low carbon economy. A princely sum of $4.5 billion directed to renewable energy, infrastructure for climate observing systems, and funds for low emissions technology development. It sure sounds imprressive, but under scruity, it turns out to be mostly just smoke and mirrors.

Breaking down the numbers, we find that $1 billion is a rollover of existing funds, while $2.4 billion has been directed towards research, development and demonstration of low-emissions coal technology (that’s ‘carbon capture and storage’ for those not au fait with its prefered euphemism). A little under half a billion will go towards establishing a body to support research into renewables.

I’m ambivalent about the large bucket of money handed to coal. There are severe technical and logstical constraints on ‘clean coal’, which mean that it can never be scaled up to become a major global solution to carbon mitigation.Yet the technology, if developed to maturity, has the potential to be used to drag carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and lock it away underground – if power generation furnaces are fed by biomass rather than fossil fuels. So in a future ‘geoengineering’ role, it remains a promising approach that is worth supporting. The trouble is, it can be so easily used to ‘greenwash’ the rampant expansion of coal use today, while the climate system becomes increasingly, and perhaps irreversibly, hostile to our modern society and the planet’s biodiversity.

As to the investment in renewable energy such as solar power, I’m honestly not sure what value add we’re getting out of this budget. The mandatory renewable energy target (MRET), which will commit Australia to produce 20% of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, is already going to drive major investment in renewables through carrot-and-stick incentives. What is this budget doing that the MRET legislation won’t already do? Almost certainly nothing.

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Posted in Emissions reduction, Renewable planet | 20 Comments »

Australia will break the world’s carbon budget

Posted by Barry Brook on 11 May 2009

As David Spratt explained recently, the Australian Government is keen to boost its carbon mitigation credentials by claiming we are doing our part to avoid dangerous climate change. Australia’s current target — 5 to 25% reductions by 2020 on 2000 emissions levels, and a 60% reduction by 2050, sounds decent enough and will require transformative changes in energy use if it is to be achieved. Other developed countries have similar targets — Obama’s aim for the USA, for instance, is to get back to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80% lower by 2050.

We’re doing our bit, perhaps. But is this bit enough, or fair, or feasible, given the need for strong global cooperation and Australia’s current rejection of the nuclear energy option? No, no and no.

The problem with our emissions reduction target boils down to historical and current inequities. Let’s consider the year 2000 baseline — in that year, human-caused CO2e emissions were about 34 billion tonnes (Gt). For a world population of 6.5 billion people, that’s about 5.2 t per annum for each and every man, woman and child on the planet. What is Australia’s per captia emissions, relative to that world average? At about 25 t, it’s around 5 times larger. Other countries in the developed world range from about the same (USA, Canada) through to about half (UK, Germany) or even a third (France and Sweden — go those nukes and hydro!). As you can imagine, the developing world’s average is far lower — about 4 t for China, 2 t for India, 1 t for Bangladesh, etc.

Okay, I’m going to switch units on us now. For reasons of convenience that will become apparent in a moment, let’s re-express these figures in terms of carbon (C) alone. To do this, we can (roughly) divide the above figures by 3.66 (i.e., 44/12, being the molecular weight of carbon+oxygen+oxygen divided by that of carbon alone) — I’m subsuming methane, nitrous oxide, CFCs etc. in this approximation. So we have 9.3 GtC for the world in 2000 at a per capita rate of 1.4 tC and Australia at 6.8 tC.

Now, in a recent issue of Nature, there were a number of useful papers which explored the idea of total global carbon budgets. David Adam from The Guardian has done a good write-up of them here, and George Monbiot has reviewed the implications of their results for fossil fuel use, asking what it means in terms of how much coal, oil and gas we can afford to burn (answer: we can afford to burn only 33 to 61% of known [proven + provable] fossil fuel reserves between now and eternity). In essence, to have a 50% chance of avoiding 2C of global warming above pre-industrial levels  (already a difficult challenge for adaptation), humanity can afford to emit only 310 GtC between 2009 and 2049, and a maximum of 400 to 500 GtC at any time between now and the point at which humans leave the planet (in whatever way this occurs). For a ‘good’ (>75%) chance of avoiding +2C, the carbon budget tightens to 190 GtC between 2009 and 2049.

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Posted in Emissions reduction, Nuclear Energy | 84 Comments »

Discussion Thread: Should Gen III nuclear power precede Gen IV in Australia?

Posted by Barry Brook on 7 May 2009

Geoff Russell’s recent article on IFR has provoked (in the comments section) a sustained (quite fascinating) discussion on the pros and cons of ‘going nuclear’ in Australia. One of the topics that’s come up is whether there should be a transition from Generation III+ (e.g. ESBWR, AP-1000) to Generation IV (e.g. IFR, LFTR) nuclear power. This Gen III stepping stone is obviously already a reality in many places (e.g., China, Finland, France); but what about countries, like Australia, that currently don’t have any nuclear power?

Is Gen III a necessary transition, given that commercial-scale Gen IV is at least 5 to 7 years off [if we get really serious about it]. Or, would support for Gen III give the impression that Gen IV is just a Trojan horse? [if so, can this be avoided?]

Useful background reading for this thread, which summarises my views, can be found here: A sketch plan for a zero-carbon Australia. Some of these ideas have already been chewed over on the Climbing Mount Improbable thread.

Note: This is not intended to be a discussion about whether or not Australia should have nuclear power — that is a different topic. This thread is for discussion of the currently hypothetical situation where Australia has decided to adopt nuclear power as part of its move to a zero carbon economy. In this context, how should we proceed?

Posted in Nuclear Energy | 95 Comments »

Has Kevin Rudd taken “a significant step forward on climate change”?

Posted by Barry Brook on 6 May 2009

Guest post by David Spratt. David is a Melbourne businessman, climate-policy analyst, and co-founder of Carbon Equity, which advocates personal carbon allowances as the most fair and equitable means of rapidly reducing carbon emissions. He has extensive advocacy experience in the peace movement, and in developing community-campaign communication and marketing strategies. He is co-author, with Philip Sutton, of the 2008 book ‘Climate Code Red – The Case for Emergency Action‘.

Kevin Rudd’s announced changes to the proposed Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme has again split the climate movement, and this time it’s very serious, with three large, rusted-on-to-Labor groups running cover for an appalling policy that won’t guarantee a reduction in Australian emissions for decades.

The grassroots movement, which gathered in Canberra in January with 500 people and 150 groups for the first national Climate Action Summit and unanimously opposed the CPRS legislation, appears uniformly angry. 66 climate action groups have written to the Prime Minister saying that: “We believe that you have abandoned your duty of care to protect the Australian people as well as our species and habitats from dangerous climate change.” 

The re-worked proposals for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme announced on 4 May by Australia Prime Minister Kevin Rudd were described by The Greens as “making the ‘worse than useless’ scheme even worse and giving another $2.2 billion to big polluters. It also fails on voluntary action” and has an “almost irrelevant green distraction of a hypothetical 25% target to undermine criticism”.

John Hepburn of Greenpeace said: “It’s clear that Rudd has been listening to the big polluters and this is another shift towards the interests of polluters rather than climate action. We’re rapidly running out of time and we’d like this scheme to go back to the drawing board until Kevin Rudd can stand up to the big polluters and take action in the interests of the Australian people.”

Friends of the Earth “criticised the raising of the government’s hypothetical target range as an exercise in “smoke and mirrors”, aimed at hiding the further windfall for polluters.”

But the three climate advocacy groups that have acquiesced or actively supported the government’s “clean coal” policies — ACF, the WWF and Climate Institute — again lined up to support Labor, together with the ACTU and ACOSS. Michelle Grattan in The Age noted that “the biggest concessions are the brown ones” and that “Kevin Rudd has stitched key groups in behind a revised emissions trading deal — both browner and greener than before — to put maximum pressure on Malcolm Turnbull”.

John Conner of the Climate Institute on behalf of the Southern Cross Climate Coalition (ACF, ACTU, ACOSS and Climate Institute) said it was now time for all parties to pass the scheme.

Australian Conservation Foundation CEO Don Henry told staff:
We have achieved a significant step forward on climate change. The Government has just announced that it will take on a target of reducing Australia’s emissions by 25% by 2020 in the context of a Copenhagen agreement that has the effect of stabilising emissions at 450ppm or lower.

[That is wrong in science, of which more later.]

ACF climate campaigner Owen Pascoe added:
This is good step forward and the positives outweigh the negatives. However there’s a lot more to be done and we’ll keep pushing for our ask of 30 to 40% cuts.

For the record, the changes to the proposed scheme also:

– delay its introduction for a year to 1 July 2011 and set a nominal price of $10 a tonne with unlimited number of permits till 1 July 2012, so there will be NO effective action for another three years;

– increase the permits to the biggest polluters in the first year from 90% to 95% and from 60% to 70% (so that in the first year the biggest polluters will be effectively paying 50 cents per tonne to pollute, as Environment Victoria noted);

– keeps the provision for unlimited outsourcing of Australia’s national responsibilities by allowing the purchase of permits from overseas without limit, so that the scheme has no mechanism for ensuring that Australia’s emissions (as opposed to domestic permits) will drop by even one tonnne by 2050;

– fails to deal adequately with the question of additionality / voluntary action. As Environment Victoria notes: “The fix to recognise household and business voluntary action through GreenPower is welcome, but the mechanism is awful. By only recognizing additional GreenPower purchases above 2009 levels the Government is guaranteeing the collapse of existing GreenPower customer purchases and therefore jeopardizing the whole program. Furthermore the Rudd Government has failed to recognise the benefit of all other types of voluntary emissions reductions or additional action, which, like GreenPower, can be accounted for.”

– will not, contrary to back-slapping comments by the ACTU, produce an avalanche of “green jobs” because it is not designed to close down the brown jobs. Instead of building a clean, renewable-energy economy and technological capacity, Australia will continue to stumble at the back of the pack.

So why are some of the big climate advocacy groups so keen on this disaster? Is their public position supported by the evidence? Here’s a look at the views expressed by ACF and others, and whether it is justifiable.

ISSUE 1. Passing the CPRS is necessary for Australia to be credible at Copenhagen.

No, quite the opposite. If there were no legislation, Australia’s position would not be tied by law to Rudd’s poor target and pressure would be maintained to catch up with the leading bunch. The targets in the proposed CPRS legislation are out of whack with the major players such as the UK, US and EU, who have agreed to unconditional cut emissions of 34-46%, 20% and 20-30% from 1990 levels respectively. Let’s be honest, what happens at Copenhagen depends more than any other factor on what the G2 – the USA and China — strike by way of a climate deal, and what Australia puts in the table has little relevance to that. They are used to Australia behaving badly. 

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