Australia’s plunging wind, solar, storage costs stun fossil fuel industry: Renew Economy

"This week the federal Coalition government decided to dump 90 per cent of the coal projects that had been submitted to its big underwriting program, and chose instead a shortlist dominated by renewables backed by battery storage and pumped hydro, and some gas and just one coal upgrade.


The choice may have been driven more by politics than economics, given the project developers were asked for only a broad outline of their proposal and there is an election just a few weeks away.


But when the final detailed tenders come in later this year – assuming the program survives the upcoming election campaign – the economic case for favouring renewables and storage projects should be crystal clear, if the latest numbers from global analysts BloombergNEF are anything to go by.

The stunning fall in the costs of wind, solar and storage – estimated on a global scale – has already put the fossil fuel industry on notice, as we reported earlier this week."

Read the article 

See also: The Age of Stupid

#coal  #coalgeneratedenergy  #electricity   #renewableenergy  #renewableenergy

Rolling Stone: Journey to Antarctica: What Scientists Think of Trump’s Latest Climate Tweet “You like carbon dioxide so much?” one researcher mused. “Try putting a plastic bag over your head and see how that works out.”

Pic from NY Post

"To scientists in Antarctica, President Trump is weirder than a sea pig. On Tuesday, Trump tweeted a quote from Patrick Moore, a well-known climate denier who claims to have been a co-founder of Greenpeace. (He wasn’t, and Greenpeace has disavowed him as a “paid lobbyist.”) “The whole climate crisis is not only Fake News, it’s Fake Science,” Trump quoted Moore as saying on an episode of Fox & Friends."
 
"I showed Trump’s tweet to Larter on my iPhone. As he read it, he smiled slightly and shook his head. “It’s crazy talk,” said Larter, who is British. “Do any Americans really believe that stuff?”"

Read the Rolling Stone Article

Vote for your children's climate. Vote for your climate.

• Suddenly, many conservative politicians in Australia have 'backflipped'  and now publicly accept that we are living in an age of rapid climate change.... 

BUT

Vote for my future climate

• Many politicians still fail to grasp the catastrophic impacts of climate change all life on Earth will soon experience, therefore they are only 'greenwashing' their election campaigns.

• Most scientists believe we are very likely to heat the planet well beyond 2 degrees.

• The Liberal - National Party Coalition has loudly and publicly rebadged Tony Abbott's Direct Action funding, which inefficiently used your taxes to bribe polluters but has the proposed funding allocation by $200 million at the same time.

• Under the threat of an election defeat by a

The young want climate action

climate activist, Tony Abbott now says he believes in climate change.

• NSW has the biggest state economy yet it's contribution to planning for climate change and slowing global heating is pitiful.

• Yet some National Party and Liberal Party MPs still want to build new, subsidised, coal-powered energy generators even though renewable energy is cheaper and as reliable.

• The Federal Labor Party still supports the Queensland Labor Party's support of new, massive, coal mines. It has no plan to transition coal workers out of coal mining jobs.

• The above parties have no real planning for slowing and mitigating the effects of climate change. It is unlikely we will meet the Paris targets, (don't believe the false accounting of the the Liberal Party - National Party Coalition). 

• Only candidates promising a massive attack on the causes of climate change and promising real planning for more economic downturns, droughts, heat waves, bush fires, epidemics, food and water shortages, health epidemics, ocean acidification, animal extinctions, sea inundations, property devaluations and waves of climate refugee immigration deserve your first vote.

Vote for your children's climate.

Vote for your climate. 

Related: Will predicted sea rise inundation affect property values in Coffs Harbour NSW?

#climate change  #globalheating  #searise  #Liberal Party  #Labor Party
 

The Age of Stupid revisited: what's changed on climate change?

Ten years after climate movie The Age of Stupid had its green-carpet, solar-powered premiere, we follow its director as she revisits people and places from the film and asks: are we still heading for the catastrophic future it depicted? 



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#climate catastrophe #2.0 degrees  #1.5 degrees  #carbon emissions  #youth  #children

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Will sea rise affect property values in Kempsey? It looks like it.

Kempsey NSW with a 7m sea rise. Click to enlarge.

• We are looking more and more unlikely to prevent global heating.

• Scientists are predicting the melting of the ice covering Greenland  with a subsequent sea level rise of 7m.

• This rise does not factor in sea rise from the melting of Antarctica and other ice.

• Already many properties are likely to flood when a high tide is combined with high local rainfall. What were a hundred year rainfall events are now ten year events.

• The frequency of high rainfall events will increase with global heating and more and more severe hurricanes are predicted because of warmer seas.

• Low coastal areas will be subjected to severe storm surges.

• Would you buy a property likely to be inundated in twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years? Many wouldn't. Even the perception of possible inundation will greatly affect property values. Insurers are already reluctant to insure many properties that were once only likely to flood every 100 years.

• When certain properties are in less demand their value falls.

• Would you buy a property with a value likely to fall?

•  The view of Kempsey above shows areas likely to be inundated by a 7m sea level rise.

• Property above a 10m rise will become highly sought after and will greatly rise in value.

Learn more about how sea rise inundation will affect Australian property.

Click here to go to Coastal Risk Australia site

'Retreat' Is Not An Option As A California Beach Town Plans For Rising Seas: NPR 


#inundation  #sea rise  #searise  #climatecrisis  #climatechange  #ice  #melting ice  #insurancerisk  #floods  #climate catastrophe 

Will sea rise caused by climate change affect property values in Nambucca Heads? It seems so.

Nambucca Heads with sea rise of 7m. Click to enlarge

• We are looking more and more unlikely to prevent global heating.

• Scientists are predicting the melting of the ice covering Greenland with a subsequent sea level rise of 7m.

• This rise does not factor in sea rise from the melting of Antarctica and other ice.

• Already many properties are likely to flood when a high tide is combined with high local rainfall. What were a hundred year rainfall events are now ten year events.

• The frequency of high rainfall events will increase with global heating and more and more severe hurricanes are predicted because of warmer seas.

• Low coastal areas will be subjected to severe storm surges.

• Would you buy a property likely to be inundated in twenty years, fifty years, a hundred years? Many wouldn't. Even the perception of possible inundation will greatly affect property values. Insurers are already reluctant to insure many properties that were once only likely to flood every 100 years.

• When certain properties are in less demand their value falls.

• Would you buy a property with a value likely to fall?

•  The view of Nambucca Heads above shows areas likely to be inundated by a 7m sea level rise.

• Property above a 10m rise will become highly sought after and will greatly rise in value.

Learn more about how sea rise inundation will affect Australian property.

Click here to go to Coastal Risk Australia site

'Retreat' Is Not An Option As A California Beach Town Plans For Rising Seas: NPR 


#inundation  #sea rise  #searise  #climatecrisis  #climatechange  #ice  #melting ice  #insurancerisk  #floods  #climate catastrophe 

Earth at 2° hotter will be horrific. Now here’s what 4° will look like. | David Wallace-Wells

Big Think

This is what the world will be like if we do not act on climate change.

 - The best-case scenario of climate change is that world gets just 2°C hotter, which scientists call the "threshold of catastrophe". - Why is that the good news? Because if humans don't change course now, the planet is on a trajectory to reach 4°C at the end of this century, which would bring $600 trillion in global climate damages, double the warfare, and a refugee crisis 100x worse than the Syrian exodus. - 

David Wallace-Wells explains what would happen at an 8°C and even 13°C increase. These predictions are horrifying, but should not scare us into complacency. "It should make us focus on them more intently," he says. David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City. His latest book is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (https://goo.gl/ih35YX) 

Read more at BigThink.com: https://bigthink.com/videos/earth-at-...
Follow Big Think here:
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#sea level rise, #2.0 degrees, #4.0 degrees, #ice, #albino effect, polar ice melt, #climate catastrophe, #climate refugees,  #wewantclimateactionnow

Published on Mar 14, 2019

This is what the world will be like if we do not act on climate change. - The best-case scenario of climate change is that world gets just 2°C hotter, which scientists call the "threshold of catastrophe". - Why is that the good news? Because if humans don't change course now, the planet is on a trajectory to reach 4°C at the end of this century, which would bring $600 trillion in global climate damages, double the warfare, and a refugee crisis 100x worse than the Syrian exodus. - David Wallace-Wells explains what would happen at an 8°C and even 13°C increase. These predictions are horrifying, but should not scare us into complacency. "It should make us focus on them more intently," he says. David Wallace-Wells is a national fellow at the New America foundation and a columnist and deputy editor at New York magazine. He was previously the deputy editor of The Paris Review. He lives in New York City. His latest book is The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming (https://goo.gl/ih35YX) Read more at BigThink.com: https://bigthink.com/videos/earth-at-... Follow Big Think here: YouTube: http://goo.gl/CPTsV5 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BigThinkdotcom Twitter: https://twitter.com/bigthink

Students Strike for Climate Action in Regional NSW

Students in Bellingen, NSW

"School strikes were held across Australia today, 15 March 2019, but it was the students, not the teachers, leading the charge. The strikes were held to demand more meaningful climate action from the government; something the organising students believe to be truly lacking." Student Edge

Bellingen Students

Bellingen student strike for climate action

Bellingen Student Strike for Climate Action in park

Adults supporting student strike for climate action

Grey Power supporting the student strike

Be careful who you vote for in the NSW state election

Climate change strikes across Australia see student protesters defy calls to stay in school: ABC NEWS

#climateaction #climatechange #climatecatastrophe #youth #students #globalheating

Students Marching in Coffs Harbour

March preparations in Kempsey

'Time is not on our side': Big Oil is bracing for future after petrol: SMH

Aramco's Amin Nasser

"Saudi Arabia is bowing to the inevitable. Aramco, the state-owned oil giant, is launching radical plans to switch its oil output from cars to petrochemical use over the next decade, implicitly accepting that the curtain is coming down on the era of petrol and diesel.

Amin Nasser, head of the giant state producer, said the global oil industry "faces a crisis of perception" and is failing to convince the opinion elites - or rising millennials - it has any place in a world imperilled by climate change.

"Time is not on our side," he told the annual IP Week gathering of oil and gas chiefs in London. "Our stakeholders are clearly tuning out. There is a worrying and growing belief among policymakers and regulators, investment houses, and NGOs, that we are an industry with little or no future."

Read the original SMH article, its worth it.


 Read also: Why Growth Can’t Be Green


#oil companies #petrol  #diesel  #climate change  #economic impact  #corporations #fossil fuel industry

'Change now or pay later': RBA's stark warning on climate change: SMH

"The Reserve Bank has warned climate change is likely to cause economic shocks and threaten Australia's financial stability unless businesses take immediate stock of the risks."

"Dr Debelle said the bank was speaking about the issue because of the size of the impact climate change would have on the economy.

"Some of these developments are actually happening now," he said.

Dr Debelle said the current drought across large swathes of the eastern states has already reduced farm output by around 6 per cent and total economic growth by about 0.15 per cent.

Victoria can, and should, lead the country on climate change: SMH

Grey Power Climate Protectors

"Many people see climate change as a federal domain, but actually the states are responsible for energy supply and have most of the regulatory levers – like the EPA – to cut pollution across all sectors of the economy. Plus Andrews has already done the hard yards cranking up the renewables we will need as we phase out Victoria’s ageing coal power stations.

All of which means Victoria can, and should, lead the entire country on the issue.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that human civilisation has just 12 years to avert an ecological and humanitarian catastrophe. We live in an extraordinary time and it calls for extraordinary leadership, not merely sound management. The Andrews government has just won an election with a massive mandate on climate change and renewable energy and here is the perfect political moment to act. Will they seize it?"

Read the SMH article

Why Growth Can’t Be Green

"New data proves you can support capitalism or the environment — but it’s hard to do both."

"But ending growth doesn’t mean that living standards need to take a hit. Our planet provides more than enough for all of us; the problem is that its resources are not equally distributed. We can improve people’s lives right now simply by sharing what we already have more fairly, rather than plundering the Earth for more. Maybe this means better public services. Maybe it means basic income. Maybe it means a shorter working week that allows us to scale down production while still delivering full employment. Policies such as these — and countless others — will be crucial to not only surviving the 21st century but also flourishing in it."

Read the Medium article

This Statistic Changed My Entire Perspective about Climate Change: Medium

Climate Criminals

"It’s time to stop blaming individuals and start holding institutions and corporations responsible for climate change. This is not to say that individuals cannot do their part to take care of the planet, but that it is going to take more than aggregate small scale change to fix the problem. It is important to remember that we live in a democratic country, and it is our civic duty to contribute to and protect our democracy, especially in a world where the idea of a government by the people, for the people is at risk. 

As election day approaches, remember that voting on its own does not fulfill our responsibility as free American citizens — informed voting does. By staying informed and engaged, we make better decisions both in and out of the voting booth; in a capitalist society, we vote with our dollar too."

Read the Medium article 

Related: Out on its own: Australia the only country to use climate funding to upgrade coal-fired plants

2018 fourth warmest year in continued warming trend, according to NASA, NOAA

"Earth's global surface temperature in 2018 was the fourth warmest since 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Global temperatures in 2018 were 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit (0.83 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 1951 to 1980 mean, according to scientists at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York. Globally, 2018's temperatures rank behind those of 2016, 2017 and 2015. The past five years are, collectively, the warmest years in the modern record."

Read article  NEWS | February 6

Out on its own: Australia the only country to use climate funding to upgrade coal-fired plants

"Green finance experts say Australia is out of step with World Bank, Europe and the US, which are using funding to combat global warming.

Australia is the only developed country that allows climate change funding to be used to upgrade coal-fired power plants, green finance experts say.

Experts say allowing Vales Point coal-fired power station to register with the Morrison government’s emissions reduction fund, rebadged this week as a “climate solutions” policy, puts Australia out of step with the World Bank, Europe and the US, which have all rejected using climate financing for coal power retrofits.

The World Bank has issued US$13bn in green bonds since

Criminal Countries

2008 to stimulate spending to combat global warming.

China has used green bonds to help build new coal-fired plants to replace older, dirtier stations on the grounds it reduces nitrogen-based emissions causing the country’s oppressive air pollution. But it announced in December it would no longer consider “clean coal” plants – which still emit significant amounts of greenhouse gas – investments in green technology.

Sean Kidney, chief executive of the London-based Climate Bonds Initiative, says China’s shift leaves Australia out on its own."

Read the complete article

Related: The worst-case scenario
 

The worst-case scenario

Vote for my future climate

"Stephen Schneider explores what a world with 1,000 parts per million of CO 2 in its atmosphere might look like."

.... "Fairness must also be taken into account, given that some people would be at much greater risk than others: poor people in hot countries with little adaptive capacity, for instance, indigenous peoples and those exposed to hurricanes or wildfires, or living in low-lying areas. The elderly and children with asthma or other lung ailments would be particularly affected by urban air pollution or wildfire smoke plumes exacerbated by the extreme warming.

The economic outlook is no better. With warming of just 1–3 °C, projections show a mixture of benefit and loss. More than a few degrees of warming, however, and aggregate monetary impacts become negative virtually everywhere; and in a 1,000 p.p.m. scenario current literature suggests the outcomes would be almost universally negative and could amount to a substantial loss of gross domestic product. Millions of people at risk from flooding and

water supply problems would provide further economic challenges." ...

Read Stephen Schneider's essay

See also:

Climate Hackers - 'last ditch solutions to slow global warming': ABC 

.

The (Australian) government thinks we’re idiots and is not serious about reducing emissions : The Guardian

Australia's gas comparative emissions 2016- Click to enlarge

"Tackling climate change is tough and Scott Morrison’s latest policy is an insult"

"This fund of $2bn over 10 years is not just a rebranding of Tony Abbot’s Direct Action, it is actually a diminishment of it. At $200m a year on average it is less than half the money a year that was spent on Direct Action – a policy that was so laughably bad that a government with any level of shame would quietly have dumped it and pretended it never happened.

Yet, here we are. Nine years after Lenore Taylor ripped apart 
 

Vote for my future climate

the Liberal party’s policy of reliance on “soil magic”, we have the prime minister still thinking such measures of carbon sequestration are worth pursuing and will achieve anything close to what is required."

Read the excellent, original The Guardian article 

Related: California votes to extend cap-and-trade climate law to 2030

#carbon emissions  #carbon   #Australia   #scottmorrison   #climate action   #2degreesC

UK MPs debate climate after school strike – but only a handful turn up: The Guardian

 

A handful of MPs debate climate change in the House of Commons. Photograph: parliamentlive.tv

Share

 
 Read The Guardian article

Related: Out on its own: Australia the only country to use climate funding to upgrade coal-fired plants