29 March 2017, Renew Economy, How AEMO’s new boss will reform Australia’s energy vision. Audrey Zibelman, the new chief executive of the Australian Energy Market Operator, has been in the job for little over a week, but is already making her mark, signalling the biggest shift in energy management philosophy in a generation. If Australia’s fossil fuel industry had hoped that last September’s state-wide blackout would lead to a u-turn on the shift to cleaner and decentralised energy system, then the release of the Australian Energy Market Operator’s final report in the event would leave them bitterly disappointed. And if they had any thoughts that the new CEO of AEMO, Audrey Zibelman, was going to afford them the indulgences that they had gotten used to over the last few decades, then they are going to be disappointed on that too. Several hundred energy market participants converged on Adelaide’s Hilton Hotel on Wednesday to hear the findings from the final report into the now notorious system black and, more crucially, to hear the first public insights from the new AEMO boss. “Thank god you’re here,” said the Grattan Institute’s Tony Wood, referring to a former TV program, but echoing the mood of most. And while many in mainstream media chose to focus on the role of wind farms in South Australia’s “system black,” and wonder why the shuttered Northern coal fired station is not being fired up again, both AEMO and its new boss were looking to the future, and with a sense of urgency. Zibelman is the former head of New York’s Public Service Commission, charged with implementing that state’s ambitious Reforming the Energy Vision program, and its target of 50 per cent renewable energy by 2030, which is going to focus a lot on decentralised generation. “When I arrived on the scene in New York, it was just after Hurricane Sandy,” she said in her opening comments on Wednesday. “After seeing New York city witout electricity for a number of days and people living in 40-storey buildings walking down to get water and cell phones charged – these were not young people, these were grandmas and granddads – it was clear that this industry was going to have to fundamentally change.” And Australia, she says, is actually going to lead the world on this, both on the breadth and the scale of what she, chief scientist Alan Finkel and many others describes as the inevitable and unstoppable energy transition. “We built systems in the 20th century around large centralised power plants,” Zibelman said. “That made a lot of sense. Now the industry is changing, cutomer preferences are changing, choices are changing, so we are creating what lot of people are calling the internet of things. “The idea is that you need to create a very flexible network that can respond in real time, and truly real time, to a lot of different events and a lot different sequences. “That is going to need a whole different approach … and my excitement about Australia is that, quite frankly, Australian is going to be leading the world on this.” Read More here
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28 March 2017, Climate Central, Trump Moves to Dismantle U.S. Climate Rules. President Trump signed a sweeping executive order Tuesday rescinding numerous federal climate policies and calling for the review and replacement of the Obama administration’s most ambitious effort to control climate pollution — the Clean Power Plan. The order is Trump’s most aggressive move yet to dismantle federal climate regulations even as established climate science shows that man-made global warming is a growing threat to human life and the economy. In all, Trump’s executive order targets at least 23 federal rules, regulations, executive orders, memorandums and reports related to energy and climate change, many of which are likely to be tied up in years of legal wrangling before being decided. The total number is likely much higher because the order directs federal agencies to tally up all their rules and regulations that can be interpreted to “constrain” energy production and prepare them to be rescinded if they’re deemed to be a “burden” on energy production and use. Legal experts and climate scientists say the move abdicates U.S. leadership on climate change and incentivizes nearly unfettered fossil fuels development across the country. Those steps could diminish the chances that countries can prevent the world from warming to levels that scientists consider dangerous — 2°C (3.6°F). ….The details of Tuesday’s executive order show the breadth of the Trump administration’s desire to dispense with existing U.S. climate and energy policy. Read More here
27 March 2017, The Guardian, Trump presidency ‘opens door’ to planet-hacking geoengineer experiments. As geoengineer advocates enter Trump administration, plans advance to spray sun-reflecting chemicals into atmosphere. Harvard engineers who launched the world’s biggest solar geoengineering research program may get a dangerous boost from Donald Trump, environmental organizations are warning. Under the Trump administration, enthusiasm appears to be growing for the controversial technology of solar geo-engineering, which aims to spray sulphate particles into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s radiation back to space and decrease the temperature of Earth. Sometime in 2018, Harvard engineers David Keith and Frank Keutsch hope to test spraying from a high-altitude balloon over Arizona, in order to assess the risks and benefits of deployment on a larger scale. Keith cancelled a similar planned experiment in New Mexico in 2012, but announced he was ready for field testing at a geoengineering forum in Washington on Friday. “The context for discussing solar geoengineering research has changed substantially since we planned and funded this forum nearly one year ago,” a forum briefing paper noted. While geoengineering received little favour under Obama, high-level officials within the Trump administration have been long-time advocates for planetary-scale manipulation of Earth systems. David Schnare, an architect of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition, has lobbied the US government and testified to Senate in favour of federal support for geoengineering. He has called for a multi-phase plan to fund research and conduct real-world testing within 18 months, deploy massive stratospheric spraying three years after, and continue spraying for a century, a duration geoengineers believe would be necessary to dial back the planet’s temperature. Geoengineers argue that such methods would be an inexpensive way to reduce global warming, but scientists have warned it could have catastrophic consequences for the Earth’s weather systems. Scientific modelling has shown that stratospheric spraying could drastically curtail rainfall throughout Asia, Africa and South America, causing severe droughts and threatening food supply for billions of people. Read More here
24 March 2017, Climate News Network, World’s reefs damaged beyond repair. Australia’s Great Barrier Reef and reefs in the Maldives have been dangerously weakened by coral bleaching caused by global warming and El Niño events. The Great Barrier Reef, one of the wonders of the Pacific Ocean, may never fully recover from the combined effects of global warming and an El Niño year, according to a new study in one of the world’s leading science journals. And a second study, in a second journal, warns that increased sea surface temperatures have also caused both a major die-off of corals and the collapse of reef growth rates in the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean. Corals are very sensitive to ocean temperatures, and in unusually hot years – and these have recurred naturally and cyclically since long before humans started burning coal, oil and gas, to accelerate the build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – the corals react to stress by bleaching. That is, they eject the photosynthesising algae that live with them in symbiosis, to the advantage of both creatures. Hotter oceans But the world’s oceans are becoming hotter anyway, because of global warming driven by greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere. The seas are becoming ever more acidic as atmospheric carbon dioxide reacts with the water. And the periodic return of a blister of oceanic heat in the eastern Pacific called El Niño – Spanish for “The Child”, because it becomes most visible around Christmastime – has begun to put the world’s reefs at risk. The El Niño of 2015-16 triggered a massive episode of bleaching throughout the tropics. And, Australian researchers say in Nature, the bleaching continues. “We’re hoping that the next two to three weeks will cool off quickly, and this year’s bleaching won’t be anything like last year. The severity of the 2016 bleaching was off the chart,” says Terry Hughes, of Australia’s Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, at James Cook University in Queensland. “It was the third major bleaching to affect the Great Barrier Reef, following earlier heatwaves in 1998 and 2002. Now we’re gearing up to study a potential number four. “We have now assessed whether past exposure to bleaching in 1998 and 2002 made reefs any more tolerant in 2016. Sadly, we found no evidence that past bleaching makes the corals any tougher.” Read More here