Category: Environment

Nuclear starts stop

John Quiggin40 Comments

A steady stream of negative evidence hasn’t shaken the faith of believers in nuclear energy. Many of them are under the impression that the failure of nuclear energy is specific to the developed world, where some combination of environmentalism and NIMBYism prevents the adoption of an obviously sensible solution. It is widely imagined that China, India and other countries are forging ahead. This idea was plausible until fairly recently, but the latest evidence suggests that nuclear power is in terminal decline. Globally, only four nuclear plants commenced construction between 1 January 2016 and 30 JUne 2017. China hasn’t started any new plants this year and is sure to miss the 58GW target set for 2020.

The problem, simply, is that while China’s problems with delays and cost overruns have been less severe than those in the developed world, the same patterns are evident. New nuclear plants simply can’t compete with renewables.

I don’t expect that this will have the slightest impact on the Australian and US right, who have long since ceased to regard evidence as relevant to anything. But, for anyone who is still open to evidence, this debate ought to be over.

Pumped hydro

John Quiggin34 Comments

In my Conversation article on the Turnbull government’s plan to keep coal-fired electricity alive, I said that most of the opportunities for hydro-electric power had already been exploited. I was thinking of primary power generation, and in this respect, I maintain my view. However, I neglected the option of pumped storage, where water is pumped uphill when excess electricity is available, then run downhill through turbines to (re)generate the electricity when it is most needed.

My old university friend, Andrew Blakers, now with the Research School of Engineering at ANU emailed me to point out this study, looking at the large number of sites potentially available in Australia, more than enough to backup all the renewable energy we will be generating in the foreseeable future.

This isn’t just a theoretical proposition. The Kidston hydro storage project in the advanced stages of planning, will offer 2000MwH of storage combined with a co-located 270MW solar PV project. The same report mentions some big wind + storage projects.

Still, if Labor is silly enough to endorse Turnbull’s NEG idea, it’s hard to see any more progress being made.

Breaking ground in Adani’s Utopia

John Quiggin12 Comments

Having argued for some time that Adani’s Carmichael mine-rail-port project is unlikely to go ahead, I was initially surprised to read the announcement that Adani says it will break ground on Carmichael rail link ‘within days’. My mental image was of heavy earthmoving equipment excavating the route along which the line is to be laid. This seemed surprising to me, since there had been no evidence that the project was anywhere near that stage.

But a closer reading suggests that the “ground breaking” is of the kind seen in a typical episode of Utopia, in which lots of dignitaries are presented with shovels and turn over a piece of dirt, to “mark the official start” of the project. That is, presumably, a different “official start” from the one that was marked by another ceremony back in June. Obviously, this ups the pressure on governments to lend public money to the project since a failure to do so would mean abandoning a project that is “officially” under way.

Who will pay for Adani’s infrastructure? We will

John Quiggin19 Comments

A couple of days ago, it was announced that the Fly In Fly Out workforce for Adani’s putative Carmichael mine would be split between Townsville and Rockhampton. Since I’ve long argued that the mine is highly unlikely to go ahead, I didn’t read the news stories closely. So, I missed the fact, buried in the middle of this ABC news report, that the deal requires Townsville and Rockhampton councils to build Adani an airstrip at a cost of $20 million. It turns out that not everyone in Townsville is happy about having their money spent on a project far away from the city.

This outcome is consistent with what I and others have been arguing for some time. Adani has to keep the project alive to avoid recognising the loss of the money its spent so far, and admitting that coal volumes at its Abbot Point port will be far lower than planned. On the other hand, there’s no point throwing good money after bad. So the strategy is to move slowly on the development, building a railway with money from the Commonwealth government and, now, an airstrip paid for by the people of Townsville. When, with much regret, the mine is deferred indefinitely, the Australian public will be the proud owners of a railway to nowhere, with the option of a flight back.

The Minerals Council of Australia pushing zombie ideas

John Quiggin28 Comments

Fighting zombies is a tiresome business. Even when you think you’ve finally killed them, they bounce back as often as not. But it has to be done, and there are some benefits. When you see a supposedly serious person or organization pushing zombie ideas, it’s an indication that nothing they put out should be presumed to be serious.

There can be few zombies more thoroughly undead than nuclear power in general, except for the idea that nuclear power is a sensible option for Australia. The strongly pro-nuclear SA Royal Commission demolished this zombie so thoroughly that it should have taken a decade at least to regenerate.

But here’s the Minerals Council of Australia, which has taken a break from promoting coal to push the idea that Australia needs a nuclear power industry and that the biggest obstacle is a legal prohibition imposed in 1998. The supporting “analysis” is riddled with absurdities, some of which have already been pointed out. I’ll give my own (incomplete) list over the fold

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Alternatives to Adani

John Quiggin10 Comments

It’s obvious to anyone who cares to look that the Adani rail-mine-port project is an environmental and economic disaster area, and that claims that it will generate thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in revenue are nonsense. But that’s little comfort to people in the region, facing high unemployment following the end of the mining boom and the general slowdown in the economy. What’s needed is a positive alternative, and a development strategy that’s adapted to the future rather than the post. Adani’s application for a $900 million concessional loan from the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility to finance the rail component of the project raises the obvious question: if this money is available, what more productive ends could it be used for?

Farmers for Climate Action commissioned me to do a report on this, focusing on alternative investments in the agricultural sector. It was release at the weekend, and got some coverage, including in The Guardian. The report is here, along with a summary

Can we get to 350 ppm? Yes, we can

John Quiggin27 Comments

In a recent post, I made the optimistic argument that, despite all the obstacles thrown up by rightwing denialism, the world is on track to reduce CO2 emissions to zero by 2050, on a trajectory that would hold atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases below 450 ppm. On current models, that gives us a 67 per cent chance of holding the long term increase in global temperatures below 2 degrees. Warming of 2 degrees would not be cataclysmic for humanity as a whole but it would be a disaster for many people and also for vulnerable ecosystems such as coral reefs. That’s why 350.org wants to reduce concentrations to 350 ppm from current levels above 400 ppm.

Is that even possible?
And, what would it mean for global warming?

In this post, I’ll argue that the answer to the first question is definitely yes. I’m going to start with the assumption (based on this post) that we can reduce emissions from fossil fuels to zero by 2050, and keep concentrations below 450 ppm at that point. What are the options to reduce concentrations over the following fifty years? In the absence of some new technological fix (not implausible, but there’s nothing in sight as of 2017), there are three main possibilities

* Reducing methane emissions and concentrations. Methane emissions arise mainly from agriculture (paddy rice and ruminants), with some possible addition from fracking. It appears feasible, though not trivial, to greatly reduce these sources at fairly low cost. And because methane has a short residence time, a reduction in emissions will lead fairly rapidly to a reduction in concentrations. The conversions are very tricky, but the radiative forcing associated with methane is currently about 0.5 watts, compared to 1.94 for CO2. So, if methane concentrations were reduced by 40 per cent, that would be equivalent to a 10 per cent reduction in CO2, or about 40 ppm.

* Natural absorption. Only around 50 per cent of the CO2 we emit (the so-called atmospheric fraction) ends up as increase in atmospheric concentrations, with the rest being absorbed by oceans. After that initial addition to sink, CO2 stays in the atmosphere for a long time. However, there is still some additional absorption by sinks. Yale Climate Connections suggests that around 50 per cent is absorbed in 50 years, and around 70 per cent in 100 years. So, by 2100, an additional 20 per cent or so of the CO2 emitted around now will have been absorbed by sinks. A rough estimate would be 0.2*(450-280) or 35 ppm, where 450 is the peak concentration and 280 the stable pre-industrial level. Of course,this is far from an ideal solution, since CO2 contributes to acidification of oceans and therefore to coral reef decline.

* Reforestation and other land use changes. Land use change is currently a big net contributor to global warming, but a systematic program of reforestation could turn this around. The potential has been estimated at 85 ppm.

Against these possibilities, there is currently a net cooling effect, equivalent to around 50 ppm, from aerosols associated with air pollution. Hopefully, pollution will be reduced over the coming century, but that makes the task of stabilizing the climate a bit more difficult.

A question I haven’t yet been able to find a good answer on is: how much warming would a trajectory peaking at 450 ppm and declining to 350 ppm ultimately produce? If anyone can point me to a good source, that would be great.

Finally, at least some of the pollutants we’ve emitted over the past century will, on our current understanding, stay there for hundreds or thousands of years, leading to long term problems of sea level rise. But if we can get to 2100 without destroying the planet through climate change or nuclear warfare, I’m sure our great-grandchildren will work out some way of cleaning up what’s left of our mess.

Sense and senselessness in transport policy

John Quiggin32 Comments

I’ve been doing various pieces of work on transport. Here’s a quick update:

* I’ll be speaking at a one-day seminar organised by the Institute for Sensible Transport in Sydney on 8 August. It should be a good event for those with a professional interest in road pricing and related topics.

* For those with a general interest, I have a section over the fold from my book-in-progress, Economics in Two Lessons. Comments and criticism much appreciated.

* While I was a Member of the Climate Change Authority, I put a lot of work into a report the Authority did on vehicle fuel efficiency standards. With the rejection of just about every other policy measure to reduce CO2 emissions in Australia, this was the government’s last chance to do something useful. Naturally, Turnbull and Frydenberg went to water the moment the denialists who dominate the LNP raised an objection. Perhaps, now that the laws of mathematics have been subordinated to Australian law, Turnbull can solve our problems by simply decreeing a change of sign, so that an increase in emissions becomes a decrease.

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Technology to the Rescue ?

John Quiggin38 Comments

There’s been a fair bit of buzz about an article in New York Magazine with an apocalyptic picture of climate change over the next century. I’ll for a more complete response later. But as it happens, I was already thinking about a much more optimistic post.

From the Climate Change Authority, of which I was a Member until recently, here’s a set of emissions trajectories consistent with a 67 per cent probability of limiting warming to 2 degrees.

There’s a pretty good case to be made that we are on the blue trajectory, and that, with decent political outcomes, we will be able to go below it and hold warming to the Paris aspirational target of 1.5 degrees. That would still have plenty of negative effects, for example on coral reefs, but it would not be an existential threat to humanity.

The points that are critical in the blue trajectory are a peak in emissions, right about now and a drop to zero net emissions by 2050. The first looks to have been achieved. As for the second, we are already seeing commitments to this goal from developed countries and jurisdictions, and there’s every reason to think it can be achieved at low cost.

As an economist, this is about the outcome I would have expected given a global commitment to an emissions trading scheme with a carbon price on a rising trajectory to $US100/tonne or so. In fact, we’ve seen nothing of the kind. There has been no real global co-ordination, and where carbon prices have been imposed, they have been low and limited in scope.

Instead, we’ve had a series of favorable technological surprises of which the most striking have been the plummeting cost of solar photovoltaics, and advances in battery technology allowing both low-cost electricity storage and affordable electric vehicles. There’s no reason to think these advances have run out, or that any of the remaining problem areas (air transport, cement manufacture and so on) will prove insuperable.

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