Yin and yang of clean energy

Ma Xuelu, chief strategy officer for solar panel manufacturers Yingli, sketches a vision of the future of solar power.

We want solar to be the green energy that the common man can use. It’s not like oil, solar is a harmonious resource, a peaceful resource.

Ma Xuelu, Financial Times

In these words, I hear echoes of the ancient teachings of Taoism which promotes harmony or union with nature, virtue and self-development.

China has a long cultural history where patience is a core value, so I am interested to see that their forward planning gives prominence to clean energy. China plans to spend $27 bn in 2012 to promote energy conservation, emission reductions and renewable energy.  Their goal is to reduce emissions by 40-45% by 2020, compared with 2003 levels, and boost use of renewable energy to 15% of overall energy consumption.

Its deep history gives China a long term perspective. In contrast, many Western democracies have relatively new national identities and seem driven to make their mark quickly. Western cultures are impatient for results. When we encounter obstacles we sometimes want to crash through, or change course.

Li Junfeng, a senior policy official, brings a different perspective in this comment about difficulties encountered by fledgling solar and wind industries.

Our industries are still very young. A child will stumble as he walks, because he’s still young. But eventually he will grow up.

Li Junfeng, Financial Times

This reminds me that solar power has been described as the teddy bear of renewables because it is small and lovable. What will it be when it grows up? A 360kg grizzly?

This graphic from the Financial Times shows how China's fledgling wind industry compares with that of the USA (click to enlarge).

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News from the Transformation tab.


World solar energy usage almost doubled in one year. In 2010 the world used 30 terawat-hours and in 2011 this had risen to 55.7 terawatt-hours.  Source: e360.

Waste not, want not

Waste not, want not.

Did you grow up with this homily? I seemed to hear it quite often when I grew up — mostly when I pushed vegetables around on my dinner plate. But then, I grew up in a time and place that is now foreign, even to me.

When I was five, I lived on a dairy farm and attended a rural one-teacher school. Electricity came from the diesel generator, water came from rainwater tanks, and the school even had a horse paddock for the couple of kids who rode horses to school.

That was post-WWII Australia — a foreign land compared with my current life in Sydney, one of the world's most liveable cities.

So, why am I thinking about "waste not, want not" when I could be thinking about Luke Nguyen's new restaurant?

It was triggered by this Eurostat data that ranks European countries on their use of renewable energy. One column of data shows the proportion of their energy that comes from 'Biomass and renewable wastes'. Here's a graph of the top countries.

Share of biomass/wastes in gross inland energy consumption, 2009

Latvia already gets 29% of its energy from biomass and renewable wastes!

These countries are so much better-prepared for the future than countries like Australia where we rely so heavily on fossil fuels for our energy. Less than 1% of our energy comes from biomass/renewable wastes.

It seems to be taking enormous effort for Australia to move to more sustainable energy, however our new carbon tax, starting 1 July, will make a difference. For example, it will give an incentive for major rubbish dumps to harvest their methane emissions and generate power, instead of letting the methane leak into the atmosphere where it contributes to global warming.

Another helpful measure is our State target to increase the proportion of ethanol in petrol. Ethanol in NSW is made as a byproduct from processing wheat into protein and starch. After these food elements are produced, ethanol is made, and finally the waste from ethanol production is turned into feed supplements for cattle. Waste not, want not. 

Nevertheless, it will take us decades to catch up with countries that already get more than 10% of their energy from biomass and renewable waste. Our efforts now will build a bridge to the new Clean Energy Economy that will appear when the Dinosaur Economy based on fossil fuels collapses.

Human societies are fast approaching the limits of some critical resources. The earth has only limited quantities of oil and gas. It is foolish to waste things that are in short supply.  Indeed, it is foolish to waste anything at all.

In a world of constrained resources, coming generations will re-learn what our grandparents knew. They will live again in a world where "waste not, want not" is the rule to live by.

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News from the Transformation tab. 

Vale, the world’s second-largest mining company, and leading Australian renewable energy company Pacific Hydro will jointly build and operate two wind farms in Brazil’s northeast. The power produced will be used by Vale in its mining operations. Source: Pacific Hydro.

Low hanging fruit

Non-carbon dioxide pollutants are the low hanging fruit of the climate fix. Carbon dioxide is the big baddy because it stays in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, but other greenhouse gases contribute 40% of the warming effect, and some of them are easy targets.

They include factory-made hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), used as refrigerants and to make insulating foams; methane that leaks from landfills and oil and gas production, including fracking; and black carbon soot from dirty diesels, brick kilns, coke ovens, and wood and dung cooking fires still used by nearly half of the world.

See the blue band showing 10.2% bioenergy in this graph? Most (60%) of it is wood and dung used for cooking by the poorest of the poor.

IPCC: Total Primary Energy Supply by Fuel Type, 2008 (click to enlarge)

Because these non-CO2 climate pollutants wash out of the atmosphere in a matter of days to a decade and a half when you stop emitting them, almost all of the heat they are trapping disappears quickly, along with their impacts. Reducing or eliminating them would show quick results, and wouldn't that be inspiring!

Like many pollutants, these greenhouse gases cause other problems. Reducing black carbon, including from cooking fires, would save many millions of lives a year, mostly women and children. Reducing methane improves crop yields and protects forests.

HCFs can be elimintated using the Montreal Protocol which has already eliminated nearly 100 chemicals just like HFCs, and never fails to do its job. It could ensure that only HFCs with very low climate impact are manufactured. Phasing out HFCs is the single biggest climate prize available in the next few years.

On the international stage, governments are forming alliances to legislate for the removal of these harmful greenhouse gases. At the individual level, NGOs are running programs like The Himalayan Stove Project that help the world's poorest people replace smokey and polluting cooking methods with healthier alternatives. It's only with the help of the richer half of the world that the poorest 1 billion people can improve their own lives and reduce greenhouse emissions.

Non-carbon greenhouse gases are the low hanging fruit of climate fixes. Let's support these initiatives at the policy level and at the individual level.

Source: Durwood Zaelke and Andrew Light at The Hill.

A lump sum or a magic pudding?

I had a friend, Miranda, who spent her income as she earnt it. Her view was that she would get another packet of money next week to replace what she spent this week. Just like Norman Lindsay's Magic Pudding that simply re-grew when part of it was eaten, her money was continually replaced with a fresh supply.

I was concerned that she would go into retirement with no savings and I figured that paying rent on the age pension is no fun. So I suggested that instead of thinking about her income as a magic pudding that got replenished each week, she should think of it as a lifetime allowance that is doled out week by week. Across her lifetime, she would earn a limited amount of money, and as each week passed there was one less portion awaiting her.

After that, she started saving. When she retired, she didn't have enough to live on, but she was able to buy a small apartment in a regional town and lived a modest and contented life on the age pension.

It seems to me that Western consumer societies have been living like Miranda, as though natural resources would be magically renewed year after year. But that is not the case. Like Miranda's lifetime income, many of Earth's resources are large, but limited.

Towards the end of her working life Miranda had only a small portion of her earnings still to come. Similarly, some of Earth's resources have only a small portion left. For example, we have used most of the earth's oil resources, most of the arable land is already farmed and most fresh water resources are fully used.

With population due to expand by another 2 billion in coming decades, many of earth's resource budgets can only get tighter.

Fortunately, not all earth's resources are as limited as Miranda's lifetime earnings. Some resources renew endlesslessly in human timeframes. It's good to see countries beginning the transition to these magic pudding energy resources — sun, wind and geothermal.

By conserving our limited resources, we wisely give our children and grandchildren the opportunity to live fulfilling lives, instead of blindly devouring the lump sum of their inheritance.

Eureka! It's a bathtub budget!

When Archimedes noticed the water level in his bathtub go up, he had an "ah-ha" moment. The bathtub holds a limited amount of stuff whether it is water or humans. When you go over the limit, the bathtub overflows. His insight was to recognise that it doesn't matter whether it is water or a grubby human body, when you put too much in, the water spills over the edge.

Similarly, the atmosphere can hold a limited amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) before climate systems go crazy. It doesn't matter who puts them there, when there's too much we get climate catastrophe — droughts, ocean acidification, rising sea levels, storms and floods.

To stop the water spilling onto the bathroom floor, you have to turn the tap off. Even a small drip will cause the bathtub to overflow eventually. It's the same with the atmosphere, we will have to stop GHG emissions altogether or the climate system will go crazy. Carbon sinks don't work like a bath drain because they developed over millennia to balance the amount of natural CO2 emissions and they can't cope with the extra emissions humans have been putting out from fossil fuels. They can't drain it out as fast as we're putting it in, so the water level has been inching higher every year.

How soon do we need to turn off the tap and reduce our GHG emissions to zero? That depends on how close the bathtub is to overflowing. Is it half-full, or lapping the rim?

The best scientific advice is that the size of the GHG tub is about 350 ppm of CO2-e gases. This is a lot higher than the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm when the GHG bathtub was nicely balanced.  For thousands of years GHGs dripped into the tub and the leaky plug (carbon sinks that absorbed carbon dioxide) let them out  at the same rate. 350 ppm is higher and it will have some climate impacts, but they are likely to be manageable.

Right now, measurements of 400 ppm CO2 are starting to come in. This means that the tub is already overflowing. We have no time to waste to move to zero emissions as quickly as possible.  If we don't, we are driving headlong into catastrophe which guarantees that we'll have a big clean up job to do.

All our policies should be directed towards this bathtub budget. But how do we calculate our share of the bathtub budget? For social justice to prevail the only fair measure is to allocate a carbon budget for each per person on the planet. Based on 7 billion people, this works out to be about 5 tonnes of CO2-e per year (c.f. Serbia or Argentina). When world population has grown to the projected 9 billion, then our per-person budget will be 3.9 tonnes of CO2-e per year (think of Jordan or Turkey).

This means that Australia has to move quick-smart from something like 28 tonnes per person (the highest among OECD countries) down to 5 tonnes per person, and then be prepared to shave off a bit more.

Targets like "5% lower in 10 years time" aren't going to stop the bathtub from overflowing any time soon.

Twitterstorm will challenge fossil fuel subsidies

Growing public pressure is pushing governments to reduce fossil fuel subsidies. Activists are mobilising public opinion using social media.

From a mass of social media platforms, Twitter and Facebook have emerged as dominant players. Using them, climate communicators are finding fresh ways  to spread messages and organise action. Watch Twitter on 18 June for the Twitterstorm campaign that calls for the Rio Earth Summit to address the problem of fossil fuel subsidies.

The total global amount of fossil fuel subsidies provided in 2012 is likely to be at least $775 billion, according to OilChange International. These subsidies have the effect of encouraging fossil fuel consumption and increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Their impact is so big that the IEA's Fatih Birol says ending fossil fuel subsidies could provide half the answer to solving climate change.

Wealthy OECD countries are not the worst offenders, instead Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia have the highest subsidies, as this Guardian graph illustrates.

Countries with fossil fuel reserves, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, use subsidies as a way to spread the wealth by making fuel and fertiliser cheaper. However analysis has shown that little of the subsidy reaches the poorest people, and that there are more efficient ways to spread the wealth.

Poor countries like India have programs that make kerosine, the common cooking fuel, affordable for their poorest citizens. To remove the kerosine subsidy, these countries will need assistance from wealthy countries so their poorest citizens can continue to buy enough kerosine to cook every day.

The worst effect of fossil fuel subsidies is to discourage the uptake of renewables because it is hard for clean energy to compete against artificially cheap fossil fuel.

Organisations like 350.0rg are using Rio's Earth Summit to advocate for wealthy countries to remove their own subsidies and to give assistance to poor countries so they can reduce theirs.

You can add your voice to campaign petitions at 350.org, or Earthday Network. And you can join the Twitterstorm planned for 18 June 2012 by following #endfossilfuelsubsidies.

It's a storm caused by fossil fuel emissions, but it's a good one.

UPDATE 20 June 2012: The Twitter campaign took the hash tag #endfossilfuelsubsidies to No. 2 in the ranking of globally trending topics and No. 1 in the US, and succeeded in mobilising action from tens of thousands of people worldwide.

The Twitterstorm was one element in a suite of related activities – petitions signed by more than 1 million people, banners, screen projections in major cities, and a panel discussion in Rio before the conference.

Among the cacophony of messages at the Rio+20 Earth Conference, the Twitterstorm may have helped to draw attention to fossil fuel subsidies. Early drafts of the Rio text didn't mention oil, coal or gas subsidies at all, and the final draft made only a passing reference. In the end, the impact of this Twitterstorm and the wider campaign will be measured by how quickly fossil fuel subsidies are unravelled over coming years.

Image: Campaign agains climate change

Small island nations: Throw them a lifeline

Everyone loses with climate change. Many countries will lose productive farmland to desertification while others will lose lives and infrastructure to extreme storms or flooding. Small Island States will lose the most, because their homelands will be engulfed by rising sea levels.

Low-lying Pacific island nations, such as Kirabati and Tuvalu, and the Maldives in the Indian ocean, are set to disappear altogether when sea levels rise a meter. 

We know that someone will have to throw them a lifeline.

New Zealand is the first country to throw a lifeline to its neighbours. Since 2001, a limited quota of citizens of Fiji, Tonga, Kiribati and Tuvalu have been able to enter New Zealand under the Pacific Access Category, effectively as environmental refugees displaced by climate change.

OK, it's a miserable quota which make it more of a gossamer thread than a lifeline, but Australia has been even less forthcoming. When Tuvalu requested immigration assistance for its population of 12,000 to move to Australia, the Australian government said its humanitarian obligations were to people who require ''assistance urgently''.

That's not exactly creative thinking, is it? And far from humanitarian.

These small countries are doing what they can to help themselves. The Maldives has established a sovereign wealth fund, drawn from its tourist revenue, to be used to buy land overseas and finance the relocation of the country's population of 350,000. They also aim to be the first country in the world to be carbon neutral.

But direct action is not all they are doing to help themselves, Small Island States have become a force to be reckoned with in international climate negotiations. At Durban, the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) joined with the EU and Least Developed Countries to play a lead role in forging agreement to  keep the Kyoto process alive.

Going into the Rio Earth Summit, AOSIS argues that the Blue Economy (ocean-based economic life) needs as much attention as the Green Economy.

If these Small Island States are regarded as expendable collatoral damage it will be a loss for all of us. Their plight can be a catalyst for preventative action that would benefit everyone. Afterall, degraded ocean life and rising sea levels will affect most countries, not just the Small Island States.

The lifeline we need is preventative action, not migration quotas that try to deal with the mess.

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News of the day on the Transformations menu tab.

The Maldives plans to be the world's first carbon neutral nation by 2020. It has set a mandatory target to generate at least 60% of its electricity from solar power by 2020. The latest initiative, funded by Japan, will install 675kW of solar power at schools and other public facilities. Source: PowerEngineering.