Clean-energy deadline is sooner than we think

Smoke is emitted from chimneys of a cement plant in Binzhou city, in eastern China's Shandong province. (Jan. 17, 2013) Photo Credit: AP

Everyone knows that at some point, if we want to contain climate change, we’ll have to stop building polluting power plants. New research suggests that moment may come much sooner than we realize.

In some areas, the world is making progress toward reducing harmful emissions. Earlier this year, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy reported that the use of coal-fired plants for electricity generation in the U.S. fell to the lowest level in 60 years. Some of the biggest U.S. coal mining outfits have filed for bankruptcy. Electricity from coal looks set to become increasingly rare in China as well. That’s good news for anyone hoping that humanity might still manage to reduce carbon emissions enough to avoid warming the Earth’s climate past the two degrees Celsius that scientists see as dangerous.

Even so, trends globally aren’t so encouraging. Developing nations plan to build a lot more fossil-fuel generating stations, and global carbon emissions are still increasing. Electricity generation still contributes about one-fourth of all human-created greenhouse gas emissions. The crucial question, then, is whether we will manage the transition to zero carbon production in time — and how much time we have.

A new study by researchers from Oxford University’s Institute for New Economic Thinking offers an answer. In short, we have only a year or so to stop investing in new fossil-fuel power stations. After that, the expected emissions from those plants over their economic lifetime will commit us — barring other exceptional changes — to shoot past the 2 degree limit. This means we face crucial choices right now.

The trouble, as Alexander Pfeiffer and colleagues point out, is the amount of emissions already built into the system. Electricity infrastructure lasts a long time: Some thermal plants in the European Union are as much as 50 years old, and we should expect new plants to be used over a similar period of time. So the stock of existing plants, and any new construction, has repercussions for emissions decades into the future.

Climate dynamics add to the inertia. Once put into the atmosphere, carbon dioxide lasts for centuries, contributing to warming all the while. It’s the total stock of carbon in the atmosphere, not what we happen to be emitting now, that matters most. Even if we reduce emissions quickly, the stock will decline much more slowly.

By their estimate, if we don’t shift all new electricity generation investment to zero-carbon technology by the end of 2017, we will face a number of unpalatable alternatives. They include accepting the likelihood of warming beyond the two degree limit, shutting down and writing off lots of the world’s energy assets or putting our hopes on carbon-capture technology that does not yet exist.Taking these inertias into account, and using data from the IPCC on global carbon budgets and various scenarios for plausible future emissions and technology changes, Pfeiffer and colleagues analyzed how long we can go on building new fossil fuel power plants if we want to have a decent chance — say, 50 percent — of staying within the two degree limit. To that end, they introduced the concept of the “two degree capital stock” — the total amount of electricity generating capital we can create before we’ve locked ourselves into dangerous warming.

Pfeiffer and colleagues don’t mean to be doomsayers. Their aim is to help policy makers get a more realistic view of the time available for making the shift to clean energy. National commitments to phase out fossil fuel power generation tend to focus on targets for emissions reductions. The EU, for example, aims to cut 40 percent by 2030. But emissions at any moment aren’t directly linked to the atmospheric carbon stock that causes warming, nor do they reflect the future trajectory of carbon emissions implied by existing infrastructure. Policymakers need to think a lot more about the repercussions of the fossil fuel power plants currently being planned, as well as associated coal mines and oil and gas fields. What we do today will affect the options available to us for decades to come.

Mark Buchanan, a physicist and science writer, is the author of the book “Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics.”

Shift to zero-carbon power must start by 2018 to avoid extra warming: study

The world must begin the shift to zero-carbon sources of electricity as soon as 2018 to avoid adding new fossil-fuel power plants that will lock in dangerous climate change, according to a team of Oxford University researchers.

Taking the average operating life of coal or gas-fired plants as 40 years, the world's fleet of carbon-emitting power stations had already committed by 2014 a total of 87 per cent of the emissions required to ensure a 50-50 chance of reaching two degrees of warming compared with pre-industrial levels.

The window on curbing climate change is more narrow than many realise, a new study argues. Photo: Pat Scala

By 2017, the remaining stock of potential emissions will have been locked in, necessitating a transition to renewable or zero-emissions electricity from then on. Alternatively, radical technologies will be needed to sequester carbon dioxide or extract it from the atmosphere, the researchers including Australian Cameron Hepburn wrote in a paper published in Applied Energy journal.

"For policymakers who think of climate change as a long-term future issue, this should be a wake-up call," the authors said in a statement. "Whether we succeed or fail in containing warming to 2 degrees is being determined by actions we are taking right now."

Coal conundrum: shut down power plants early, but will emissions end up being higher? Photo: Paul Jones

The papers come in a week when environmental groups warned as many as 1500 coal-fired power plants are being planned or being built worldwide, scientists found coral bleaching in the Great Barrier Reef to be worse than first thought, and Antarctic ice sheets were declared to be melting faster than expected.

Electricity generation accounts for about one quarter of man-made greenhouse gas emissions and about one third of Australia's total. The researchers assumed other emission sources, such as transport and agriculture, would track towards a 2-degree warming limit, an assumption "which may well be optimistic", the paper notes.Australia was one of almost 200 nations to sign up to limiting warming to a 1.5-2 degree range at the Paris climate summit late last year.

The lower end of that target has been well exceeded, the researchers argue: "Meeting a 1.5-degree target without [carbon capture and storage] or asset stranding would have required all additions to the electricity sector were zero carbon from 2006 onwards, at the latest".

The Moree solar farm in NSW built by Fotowatio Renewable Ventures of Spain with Origin Energy taking its output from April 1. Photo: Supplied

Malte Meinshausen, director of Melbourne University's Climate & Energy College, said the research confirmed work by the International Energy Agency and others "that we now have enough fossil fuel infrastructure globally in place to emit a detrimental amount of carbon".

"With the correct market signals in place - such as a price on carbon emissions - it will be more economical even for the utilities to abandon fossil fuel [plants] and switch to renewable investments instead," Associate Professor Meinshausen said. "If the time for halting investments into new fossil fuel infrastructure is 2017 for the world, that time has been 10 years ago for Australia - the highest per-capita emitter in the developed world." 

Some 14,000 megawatts (MW) of wind or solar plants are seeking approval. Photo: Fairfax

As it happens, the combination of Australia's flat or declining demand for grid-supplied electricity and the need to meet the mandated 2020 Renewable Energy Target (RET) means there is little likelihood of new coal or gas-fired power plants being built in this country for at least the next decade, said Dylan McConnell, a research fellow at Melbourne University's Melbourne Energy Institute.

While there are several proposed gas projects and one black coal project in NSW at AGL's Bayswater site, renewable energy ventures are likely to meet any near-term need for additional large-scale capacity, Mr McConnell said.

Some 14,000 megawatts (MW) of wind or solar plants are seeking approval, a tally that is "certainly much more than needed for the RET", he said. "The cost curve for fossil fuel [plants] is going in the other direction."

This week, Origin Energy  signed up for its first power purchase agreement for large-scale solar, taking output from a 56 MW solar farm in Moree in northern NSW. 

"Ten years ago, 15 years ago the prospectors were in Queensland looking for [coal seam gas] resources," Grant King, Origin's chief executive, said last year. "I would think the next great round of investment in Queensland will be utility scale solar."

Origin is among the prospectors, applying to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency for funding to support a 106 MW solar farm of its own to be built on the Darling Downs next to its existing gas-fired plant.

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African Diet, Jobs Will Be Hit Hard by Climate Change

African farmers will lose much of their crops to global warming in the coming decades

Corn, beans and bananas could start to disappear from sub-Saharan Africa—where those crops are among the most important for local consumption—by century’s end. The culprit? Climate change.
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africa climate change set to wreck Bean farming

A new study of staple crops in that region, published Monday in the journalNature Climate Change, predicts that by 2025, 30 percent of land in the region currently cultivated for bananas, primarily in West Africa, will become unsuitable for the crop, say researchers with the Consultative Group for International Agricultural Research. Bananas are significant for local consumption, say researchers.

Meanwhile, 60 percent of bean agriculture will cease to be productive by 2050, as will 41 percent of land currently dedicated to maize, the study says. Those crops are incredibly dominant in the sub-Saharan diet, featured in dishes ranging from githeri, a flavorful corn and bean stew, to ugali, a mush made of cornmeal and water.

Five other prominent crops—millet, sorghum, cassava, groundnut and yams—are expected to maintain production levels through 2100. Crops grown primarily for export, such as coffee, cocoa, and tea, were not studied.

The research marks the first quantification of crop “transformation”—planning for the inevitable decline of certain crops—in Africa, said lead researcher Julian Ramirez-Villegas, a research fellow at the University of Leeds. In addition to projecting crop viability through the century, researchers also describe a three three-stage process for managing the shift.

The research has serious implications for sub-Saharan Africa, said Ramirez-Villegas. Agriculture contributes nearly two-thirds of all employment in that region and food insecurity rates there are already the highest in the world. “ “It’s kind of a combination of a lot of different vulnerabilities coalescing at the same time,” said Ramirez-Villegas. “And, at the same time, agriculture is a key sector for africanAfrican livelihoods.”

As those crops fail, farmers will need to adjust, either switching crops or, in extreme cases, give up agriculture altogether. And if crop outputs diminish, that could pressure sub-Saharan Africa, already a net importer of food, to rely even more on other countries to stay fed.

Much of the land being threatened by climate change will need to be “transitioned,” said Ramirez-Villegas, and put to other use. While maize, which only became a staple in Africa over the last century, may no longer be as viable, it could be replaced with millet and sorghum, which are native to Africa (and tolerant of heat and drought), and would likely thrive. The other alternative, say researchers, could be swapping crop agriculture for another kind of farming, such as livestock. Kenyan farmers, for example, began exploring camel husbandry as a replacement for cattle—or leaving farming altogether.

Those changes would have a direct impact on the food security and diet of residents in sub-Saharan Africa. With the exception of bananas, the crops in the study are all grown primarily for domestic consumption.

”“Most of the production [studied here] is consumed locally and sold in local markets, or produced for subsistence,” said Villegas-Ramirez. “But African countries are also importing significant amounts of food.”

Researchers plan to expand their research to explore additional substitute crops, said Villegas-Ramirez, as well as project the direct impact of changes in agriculture on the diet available to residents.

Africa: Climate Change Set to Wreck African Bean Farming

By Barbara Axt

Climate change could wipe out 60 per cent of bean production in Sub-Saharan Africa, and decimate banana and maize crops in the region, a study warns.

A paper published yesterday in Nature Climate Change urges policymakers to step up efforts to adapt local farming and limit the effects of higher temperatures and rainfall on food production. The paper found that various parts of Sub-Saharan Africa could become unsuitable for some staple crops by 2100.

"Beans are a very important source of protein in East Africa and are very sensitive to rises in temperature," says co-author Julian Ramirez-Villegas, a climate change researcher at CGIAR, an international agricultural research partnership. He adds that changes in farming habits take time, so policymakers should start implementing them as soon as possible.

The study found that more than half of all bean-growing areas and up to 30 per cent of maize and banana fields could become unsuitable for these crops near the end of the century.

Ramirez-Villegas says local farmers should shift to new species of beans developed to thrive in dry weather, but obstacles remain to adaptation, including the high price and limited availability of some seeds.

"For example, studies from the CGIAR on drought-tolerant maize show that the adoption rates in Southern and Eastern Africa are in the range of ten to 60 per cent," he says.

The study found that farmers growing millet, sorghum, cassava, groundnut and yams are likely to be able to continue to do so this century, as these crops are more tolerant of climate change.

But certain areas, such as the southern Sahel, will become too risky for many kinds of crops, with the researchers suggesting that farmers there might be better off shifting to livestock production.

"This type of projection is very important to allow farmers to make changes in advance, especially in areas with low technology access and capacity building," including some areas in Brazil, says Giampaolo Queiroz Pellegrino, a researcher at Embrapa Agriculture Informatics, a research unit within the Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation. "For example, the development of crops adapted for high temperatures and drought takes an average of ten years."

Camilla Toulmin, an economist who researches climate change at the International Institute for Environment and Development, says governments should take the lead in guiding adaptation efforts so they take into account local conditions.

"Scientists need to work in a dialogue with smallholder farmers," she says. "In many African countries, you can get a huge improvement in crop performance and yield by fairly simple ways of managing soil, water and fertilisation."

References

Ulrike Rippke and others Timescales of transformational climate change adaptation in Sub-Saharan African agriculture (Nature Climate Change, 7 March 2016

CO2 emissions pose massive threat to Antarctic ice sheet: Expert

The world is on track for massive sea level rises resulting from the melting of an Antarctic ice sheet if carbon dioxide emissions continue as predicted, a leading New Zealand expert said Friday.

The melting of the giant East Antarctic ice sheet would raise the global sea level by about 60 meters, Professor Tim Naish, director of Victoria University's Antarctic Research Centre, said in a statement.

Naish took part in an international study that showed the ice sheet would become unstable and melt if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere reached 600 parts per million -- a level that might be reached by the end of the century if the world failed to meet emissions reductions targets agreed to in Paris last year.

"It's a sleeping giant," said Naish.

Drill cores showed that the first Antarctic ice sheet had advanced and retreated many times between 34 million and 35 million years ago before finally stabilizing at its largest extent when atmospheric carbon dioxide levels dropped below a threshold of 600 parts per million.

With carbon dioxide levels already at 400 parts per million and predicted to go higher, the study provided valuable insights into the potential future stability of the Antarctic ice sheet.

"We know that parts of the ice sheet sitting below sea-level in West Antarctica are already melting in response to current global warming, but the much larger East Antarctic ice sheet, which sits mostly on rock above sea-level, was thought to be more stable," he said.

"We found it is vulnerable, and was much smaller the last time atmospheric carbon dioxide levels matched those predicted before the end of the century.