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ScoMo’s Climate Plan to Save the Planet

ScoMo-climate-Plan — Image: twitter@GeorgeBludger, reposted from 2018 because it is so clever.

It occurred to me, having just volunteered to work for three different community groups, that what I need, apart from worrying about the Australian government’s failed policies on Covid, climate change and refugees, not to mention bushfire risk mitigation, is a Plan.

I use the capital letter deliberately as it seems that is what our peerless leader, Scotty from Marketing, wants us to do. His Plan (well, actually it’s not his Plan) should be called a Process because after all, that is what the National Party agreed to support. As we know, Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce and his country party cohorts emerged from days of climate talks to announce with fanfare great that it had ‘agreed to support a process’ to meet the government’s bare minimum target of zero net emissions by 2050.

Australia’s emissions are still among the highest in the world on a per capita basis, well behind similar developed countries.

At the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow this week, PM Scott Morrison somehow wangled his way into the discussions. It’s not that long ago (December 2020), that he was snubbed by a United Nations climate conference in London hosted by the UK and France.

British PM Boris Johnson had invited Morrison to speak at the December 12 summit but reneged. Selwin Hart, the special adviser to UN Secretary-General António Guterres on climate action, said at the time Australia had ‘not met the threshold needed to speak’.

But given a platform at COP26 (after pledging to meet zero net emissions by 2050), Morrison gave an optimistic speech, claiming that Australia’s emissions could fall by 35% by 2030. Greens leader Adam Bandt described the speech as ‘cringeworthy’, saying it contradicted statements made in Australia. The national climate plan (NDC) merely reaffirmed the formal 2030 target of 26-28% set by former PM Tony Abbott, he said.

“Australia is also siding with Russia and China to block global action on the climate crisis, refusing to phase out coal and gas, the leading causes of global heating,” he added.

The Guardian said Morrison’s 2050 plan lacked modelling, with almost a third of the abatement task comprised of cuts via unspecified “technology breakthroughs” and “global trends”, while a further 20% will be achieved through offsets.

To be fair, Morrison has been thwarted by climate change resistance from his Coalition partner, the National Party. The Plan may or may not be influenced by trade-offs demanded by the Nationals (which has a rural support base), regarding the issue of methane emissions.

Michelle Grattan wrote in The Conversation that Emissions Reduction Minister Angus Taylor had rejected the US push for a 30% reduction of methane emissions by 2030.

For city folk, methane is a global warming gas produced by cows burping and farting. Morrison backed his Minister, saying the government never had any intention of agreeing to the (methane) reduction.

Veteran finance commentator Alan Kohler has had a bit to say about climate change and the urgent need to keep temperature increases below 1.5 degrees celsius. As he wrote in The New Daily a few months ago, precise risk analysis of global warming is difficult because ‘feedback loop tipping points’ are unknown and unpredictable.

“It’s known that with 1.5 to 2 degrees of warming, the combination of permafrost melt in Siberia, wildfires in the world’s forests and warming of the ocean will release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

“(This) means a feedback loop could take the temperature to 2.5 degrees above pre-industrial temperatures – and perhaps beyond – no matter what we do.”

Kohler is good value, in that he often exposes seemingly turgid reports that no-one else has looked at and translates them into plain English.

For example, the Australian Prudential Regulatory Authority (APRA) issued a draft prudential practice guide on climate change which included 4 degrees of warming as one of its two “scenarios” for banks to use in their future planning.

“A 4 degree rise in the average global temperature would make large parts of the planet uninhabitable and lead to the total collapse of the banking system. No need for any planning,” Kohler commented.

“The other APRA scenario was for 2 degrees of warming or less, consistent with the Paris Agreement of December 2015, which should happen if all countries meet their Paris pledges (which they haven’t).”

Successive Australian governments have been terrified about drafting tough new laws to support carbon reduction. This is a country which cleared vast swathes of forest and scrub to establish pastoral land and open-cut coal mines. We have allowed fracking, built a vast network of gas pipelines, supported offshore oil drilling and relied on coal-fired power stations for much of our energy.

We also export millions of tonnes of coal to countries which have dirtier power stations than ours. We have exacerbated the global crisis rather than mitigating the effects of carbon emissions.

We here at FOMM HQ reckon we have been hearing about climate change, greenhouse gases and global warming since we became conservationists in the 1960s. She Who Taught Geography says she was aware of it when studying at university in the late 60s. We were called ‘tree huggers’ then and probably still would be now, despite knowing what we know.

So here in Australia, 50 years later, we are still in rampant denial about what rising carbon dioxide levels have done to the planet.

It’s no new thing. Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first predicted in 1896 that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels could substantially alter the planet’s ground temperature through the greenhouse effect. In 1938, Guy Callendar connected carbon dioxide increases in Earth’s atmosphere to global warming.

By the 1990s, a consensus emerged among scientists that greenhouse gases were deeply involved in most climate changes and human-caused emissions were bringing discernible global warming.

Unhappily, many people are climate change deniers. Just like those who subscribe to Covid-19 vaccine conspiracies, they defy the majority opinion of the world’s scientists.

Perhaps they were not paying attention when some of the world’s biggest fund managers started selling off their fossil fuel investments circa 2016. The latest local example of this was the State’s biggest investor, Queensland Investment Corporation, which manages State employees’ superannuation.

The topic of fossil fuels and divestment (selling oil, gas and coal stocks) was also debated at COP26. The pro-investment argument is that 80% of the world’s energy is still sourced from fossil fuel and a sudden rush for the turnstiles is unlikely.

Fossil fuel opponents understand how divestment can turn the tide quickly by shutting down fossil fuel ‘sponsorship’ (sometimes known as ‘greenwashing’).

Yet another conference, then, where world’s leaders (average age 60), left COP26 without doing anything meaningful.

The Greenhouse Gas Bulletin’s stark message this week is that from 1990 to 2020, the warming effect on our climate by long-lived greenhouse gases, increased by 47%, with CO₂ accounting for about 80% of the increase. The numbers are based on monitoring by the World Meteorological Organisation’s Global Atmosphere Watch network. As WMO Secretary-General Prof. Petteri Taalas said: “We are way off track.”

If I make it to 2050, I can imagine 102-year-old me, spilling jelly and custard on my vintage Homer Simpson T shirt muttering: “Meh” (having been moved in a dinghy to a nursing home on high ground).

Unfortunately, ‘meh’ (shorthand for callous indifference), is the attitude of far too many people who won’t see 2050. They have all obviously forgotten climate activist Greta Thunberg’s fiery speech at the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos.

“I don’t want your hope. I don’t want you to be hopeful. I want you to panic,” she said. “I want you to feel the fear that I feel every day and I want you to act. Our house is burning.”

More reading: Seven years ago!!!

A cold snap, firewood and a short history of chimney sweeps

cold-snap-firewood-chimney-sweep — Image by Steven Helmis, https://pixabay.com/photos/chimney-sweep-roof-chimney-housetop-2792895/

Almost on schedule, a cold snap arrived, coinciding nicely with our completely running out of firewood. Oh you too, eh? I thought as much, queuing up on Saturday at the fill-your-own-boot firewood supplier. It took a while. Chatting to a friend on the same mission, I mentioned that the fire was not drawing very well.

He then told me about an organic solvent you could buy from the hardware store.

“You just get a good fire going then chuck the sachet on the embers,” he said. “It took three (sachets) but it’s burning pretty good now.”

The helpful chap at the hardware store knew which product I wanted and we had a chat about the era when young orphan boys were press-ganged into manually cleaning chimneys in return for board and lodgings.

This same chap also gave me a contact for someone down the coast who cleans chimneys (the instructions on the soot-remover packet recommend having the flue professionally cleaned annually).

“When did we get the chimney swept last?” I asked She Who Pays the Bills.

“Not sure,” she said. “I threw out all the receipts that were older than five years, so that could be a clue.”

Of course, once we had bought more firewood and I had chopped it into wood stove-size pieces, it clouded over and the overnight temperature rose to 15, as opposed to 5 the night before. Fortunately, the cold south-easterlies returned mid-week and my labours were justified.

The nature of a ‘cold snap’ is a sudden, brief, severe drop in temperature. The ‘severe’ was felt in Tenterfield (-8), Stanthorpe (-8) Warwick (-4.7) and Brisbane (3), among other south east Queensland locations (average June low in Brisbane is 12 degrees). There were reports that Quart Pot Creek (which flows through Stanthorpe) froze over. Well, not froze over in the Manitoba sense but yes, a layer of ice.

Yesterday I attempted step two of the chemical chimney clean – remove excess soot from the drop plate. I took a torch and shone it up the stainless-steel shaft of the wood stove chimney. My thoughts turned to the poor urchins of the 17th and 18^th centuries forced to climb spaces like this and clean them by hand. Well, perhaps not that narrow a space, but you get the picture.

Master chimney sweeps would suborn young orphans into this line of work and boys were sometimes ‘sold’ by parents who needed the money. I gleaned some of the following information from a blog written by George Breiwa on behalf of Chimney Specialists Inc. of Dubuque, Iowa.

If a boy was showing some reluctance to climb inside the chimney and navigate to the roof, the master chimney sweep would light a small fire. Hence the expression, ‘to light a fire under someone’. I never knew that.

As you’d imagine, these boys (and girls), suffered from deformed bones (from cramming themselves into tight spaces. It was a short life span on account of inhaling soot, or if they became lost or stuck inside a brick chimney, (where they subsequently died).

That’s a long way from ‘Chim chiminey, chim chiminey, chim chim che-ree.”

If this subject fascinates you, here is a link to a (5,000-word+) academic article by Karla Iverson.

The most important point in this story is the Act for the Regulation of Chimney Sweeps, passed by the English Parliament in 1864. This was 22 years after, I might add, an act of Parliament which put an end to mining companies sending children to work in underground mines.

Since I have shared my experience with a few people re: the wood stove not drawing properly (the wood should burn cleanly), much advice was imparted. Ironbark and mixed hardwood is still the preferred fuel for wood stoves and fireplaces.

The main issue if you are trying to burn timber salvaged from your own (or someone else’s) property is that it takes a long while to dry out.

Our resident firewood expert, Dr. John Wightman, who harvests firewood from his 12ha property, says drying under cover takes 18-24 months. He saws and splits fallen trees and the occasional tree that is endangering property or whose time has come.

“We had our chimney swept a few weeks ago – first time in five years. We only had half a bucket of soot. The sweep said it was because of good quality wood which I took to mean dry wood.

“I also remove as much bark as possible because certain constituent chemicals can gum up the chimney.”

Dr. John reminisced about the first half of the 20^th century, when coal fire smog was a killer.

“I lived in London during the 50s and remember the incredibly impenetrable coal- induced smog,” he said. “It disappeared entirely once smokeless fuel fires were made compulsory.”

The Clean Air Act of 1956 followed the great London smog of December 1952, which led to “5,000 more deaths than usual”. U.K. citizens began to use electric and gas heaters and rely less on coal.

The Clean Air Act required coal fire owners to burn coal with low-sulphur content (i.e. ‘clean coal’) or coke, which is the less polluting by-product of gas production.

Those who lived in Scotland in the first half of the 20^th century would remember that Edinburgh was once referred to as ‘Auld Reekie’. The dubious nickname referred to the dense coal fire smog which settled upon the old town.

I asked Dr. John (a scientist) to comment on the cold snap and comparative air pollution caused by wood smoke, as I worry about it every winter, and of course it is Climate Week.

“The energy content of dry wood is 17 MJ/kg, and of coal 24 MJ/kg. So a bit less heat and less carbon dioxide from wood combustion,” he said.

“In theory, the CO₂ should be sucked up by the trees around us.

“Coal can have a lot of impurities such as sulphur and sulphur oxides (the killers in London’s smog)”.

But, as he remarks, both wood and coal produce particulate matter when combusted.

“We call it smoke which is bad for the lungs, irrespective of the source – wood smoke can smell better than coal smoke.”

While domestic wood fires are visibly more polluting than electric heaters or reverse-cycle air conditioning, the latter are powered by electricity produced primarily by coal-fired power stations.

Australia’s emissions totalled 538.2 million tonnes of greenhouse gases in 2018, up 0.7% on the previous year. That was the third year in a row of rising numbers under the Liberal government, although the long-term per capita trend is down. The figures were released this week by the Department of the Environment and Energy.

https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/energy-minister-defends-australia-s-growing-greenhouse-gas-emissions-20190531-p51t8s.html

Australia has one of the highest per capita emissions of carbon dioxide in the world, at 21.5 tonnes per person, down 38.2% since 1990.

Electricity is the sector producing the most CO₂, at 185.5 million tonnes, followed by stationary energy (97 Mt CO₂), transport (97 Mt CO₂) and agricultural production (71.7 Mt CO₂).

On the latest global figures, Australia is the world’s biggest exporter of coal (389 million tonnes) and the fourth largest producer (503 million tonnes). Three quarters of Australia’s mined coal is exported and most of the rest is burned in domestic coal-fired power stations.

‘Clean coal” – an analysis

So don’t feel bad about burning a half-dozen or so hardwood logs tonight – it is comparatively benign.

Six Prime Ministers and a potato class action

As the dry winter fades away, ushering in a hot and bushfire-prone spring and summer, here’s some sober reflections on ‘Single-use Prime Ministers’.

I borrowed the single-use mention from a clever meme doing the rounds on social media, where, I might say in defence of the humble Kipfler, Sebago and Desiree, potatoes continue to be openly defamed. It might not be long before we see headlines where Tryhard & Associates, no win-no fee, mount a class action on behalf of Mr and Mrs Sebago and 15 other tuber families.

As we now see from former Home Affairs Minister Peter Dutton’s attempted coup, while it worked in principle, the betrayal left Mr Dutton out on a limb, with a centre-right politician seizing the leadership.

At the outset, Australia’s new Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, decided the people needed to know that “we’re on your side”.

“That’s what matters. We are on your side. And we are on your side because we share beliefs and values in common, as you go about everything you do each day.”

Keep playing that one, Scott. Stay away from the line that brings down Westminster democracies; when a leader (be it Whitlam, Hawke, Keating, Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Abbott or Turnbull), have all been caught referring to ‘my government’.

I had a couple of messages from FOMM stalwarts last week in aggregate saying “Get a grip, Bob. The nation’s imploding and you’re talking about stamp collecting?”

I defend last week’s meandering missive as making the case that Australian governments have been lurching hard-right for a very long time now, arguably since John Howard’s 1988 stance on multiculturalism and refusing to make a treaty with the Aborigines. Hence my writing about the stamp-collecting Philip Ruddock, a hard-line Immigration minister in control of our border policies from 1996-2003.

Now here’s the thing – party factions, backroom machinations and political knifings are not what does in a sitting PM – it is narcissism.

As economist and author George Megalogenis wrote in an opinion piece for the New York Times: “The prime minister is not even mentioned in the Australian Constitution, yet the office has evolved into a paradoxical position of supreme authority and permanent vulnerability.”

Megalogenis also wrote: “They have borrowed the worst of United States presidential politics, with its obsessive focus on the leader, and grafted it onto a Westminster system of parliamentary government that was designed for collaboration and compromise.”

Australia has had six Prime Ministers since 2008, the number arguably including a bit of double counting when first Julia Gillard toppled Kevin Rudd, then Rudd came back and promptly lost the next election in a landslide. Then there was Tony Abbott, Malcolm Turnbull and now Scott Morrison. This era was characterised by frantic passing of new legislation in the incumbent’s first year. Fairfax Media research tallied new acts of Parliament passed in the first year for Prime Ministers Kevin Rudd (133), Julia Gillard (132), Tony Abbott (116) and Malcolm Turnbull (104). These are mediocre numbers compared to Paul Keating (212) and Gough Whitlam (161). Surprisingly (well, I was surprised), John Howard’s first year numbers (86), are only marginally better than Ben Chifley (74).

What appears to have brought undone Prime Ministers of the past 10 years is the polarisation caused by climate change policy. It seems nigh on impossible to achieve political consensus on this most serious of issues, even if over 97% of climate scientists active in that field of research say it is a reality, aggravated and accelerated by human activities. (There are, of course, nay-sayers. Just Google ‘what percentage of scientists believe in global warming, if you have a few hours to spare.)

All six of our Prime Ministers thus far have failed or been thwarted in terms of seriously countering climate change. Some even challenging the notion that fossil fuels have had their day. I refer of course to (a) Tony Abbott’s infamous ‘coal is good for humanity’ quote, and incumbent PM Scott Morrison’s stunt, brandishing a lump of coal in Parliament.

But let’s go back 117 years, to an era when coal really did rule – when steam trains, for example, burned through eighty pounds of coal for every mile travelled (a useful factoid from Michael Portillo’s fascinating series, Great British Railway Journeys).

Australia’s leadership changed seven times in the first ten years of Federation (and 11 times between 1901 and 1922). Again, leadership changes involved ambitious men having a second (and even a third) attempt. Andrew Fisher (1909-1909, 1910-1913 and 1914-1915) proved the most persistent, governing during the early years of WWI. Fisher, I’d like to point out, introduced Australia’s first postage stamp. On January 2, 1913, the Fisher-led government issued the Commonwealth penny stamp.

It featured a controversial design – a kangaroo on a white map of Australia. Although later stamps reintroduced the King’s head, the kangaroo design remained in use for some forty years. An example of this rare stamp sold at auction in 2012 for $142,563.

But we were talking about men (and women- Ed.) and their egos and how the Prime Ministership has evolved as the Office of Omniscience. Towards the last days of Kevin Rudd’s Prime Ministership, there were reports of policy on the run, along with statements made with no consultation, and there have been similar reports about other short-term Prime Ministers. To be fair, in the first year of the Whitlam administration, the late Gough Whitlam rammed through a colossal amount of social reform legislation in a fortnight with the help of a two-man Cabinet (the duumvirate) – just Gough and his deputy, Lance Barnard.

Megalogenis observed that post-Rudd, the Labor party has made it harder to remove future Prime Ministers. Changes to internal rules now require the party leader be elected by a combined vote of the parliamentary party and grass-roots members. From this side of the fence, it is hard to see the Liberals coming up with a similar safeguard.

In no time at all, it seems, Australians will be thrust into another Federal election, with a new Prime Minister who will not have had enough time to show his mettle. On the other side, we have Labor leader Bill Shorten, and deputy leader Tanya Plibersek. Mr Shorten’s tactics thus far, apart from keeping his head down and letting the Liberal Party stew in its own juices, has been to divide and conquer, emphasising the class gulf between the left and right.

Tucked away behind the cannot-be-seen hedge, Labor’s Anthony Albanese, passed over for the Opposition leadership in 2013, declared his colours in June, in the Whitlam Oration.

Mr Albanese called upon his party to emulate the Hawke and Keating approach and “collaborate with unions, the business sector and civil society to achieve positive outcomes in the national interest”.

The Labor frontbencher also delivered a warning about the need to find common ground with voters outside the union movement.

“This is not 1950, when most Australians were members of trade unions,” Mr Albanese said. “Indeed many people from working class backgrounds are not members of unions because they were beneficiaries of Gough Whitlam’s education reforms. We cannot afford to ignore this demographic.”

Sigh, it makes my brain burn, like the feeling I got when I saw that clever meme (above) with Scott Morrison feeding a lump of coal into a (red and orange) map of Australia.

Good for humanity my arse.

Solar no easy energy fix

solar-energy-power — Solar-panels-energy Photo by Bob Wilson

Solar energy is great – we’ve got eight panels on the roof, a hot water system and a portable panel in the caravan. Pretty useless on Thursday, though, with ex-cyclone Debbie sending heavy rain our way. It would be great if we’d had a battery bank under the house to store the energy from the sunny weeks we’ve been having.

But battery bank technology is yet to become affordable for the 1.6 million Aussies who have solar PV panels.

I recently wrote about Australia’s troubled National Energy Network. We cited economist Professor John Quiggin, who suggested governments buy back the power grid and give the people what they want: cheap and reliable energy. Continue reading “Solar no easy energy fix”

Government buyback could solve power crisis

Wilpena-Pound-Power-Station — Wilpena Pound solar/diesel power station SA Photo by Bob Wilson

“If you’ve got money in your pocket and a switch on the wall, we’ll keep your dirty lights on.” So goes a song by American alt-country singers Darryl Scott and Tim O’Brien about coal mining and power generation.

Their album Memories and Moments includes a version of John Prine’s Paradise, which remains the definitive song about the downsides of coal mining.

That seemed a noteworthy way to introduce the potentially dry topic of energy, be it coal-fired, hydro, nuclear or solar/wind power. Continue reading “Government buyback could solve power crisis”