Good to see you contributing to the debate - any plans to return to Twitter/X? Your presence is missed there. What are your impressions of other platforms?
Re: COP28 deal confirms what Australia already knows: coal is out of vogue and out of time
'the world has finally committed to weaning itself from these carbon-based drivers of climate change'
Q- what are the ramifications of not going along with the commitment?
'Australia must now decide what kind of energy superpower it wants to be: the home of a sustainable future, or the last refuge of coal and gas extraction.'
'Given the absence of a domestic motor vehicle industry in Australia, the current government’s inaction on electric vehicles is surprising. It appears driven in part by a fear of populist campaigns by the Coalition and others about the effects on motorists.'
These paragraphs make it seem like you think that Australian governments have a choice. Well maybe a future one will in 2025 hopefully eg. minority Labor with many Teals/Indies, but at the moment isn't it a duopoly controlled by corporations & the Murdochracy ( I know you don't think they hold much sway, but many commentators do).
Be good to get your opinion on the 2party Lib/Lab mutualism.
sorry to hear that. I've not been subjected to anything disparaging on Twitter/X but I can empathise.
Re: you article '‘Progressive’ Labor is dead — supporting stage three tax cuts is pointless.'
Why is so much intellectual effort expended critiquing the same old Lib/Lab 2party duopoly.
I read BK's article 'Why progressives should get behind the stage three tax cuts — no, really' as a little bit facetious, goading Labor into continuing its course to a minority govt with lots Teals/Indies in 2025. What's wrong with that? Labor have no choice anyway. They are being dictated to by FF corp/Murdoch etc. Love to hear your views on a nation post 2party. Cheers
Yes, Australia will be the last refuge of coal and gas extraction. Approval of new mines? ~ no worries! Accountability for handouts such as for phantom CCS or planting some sort of trees, untended, somewhere? ~ Nope.
Addressing climate change and the health of the environment should be the most important issues driving the government and the economy. There should be investment in protecting mangroves (though I don't know if climate change has already kiboshed that) and trying to leave the lightest footprint possible in whatever tasks are carried out. Is it possible to build homes using hempcrete rather than concrete. If not, can hempcrete and other sustainable alternatives be developed further? The time to act really is now. The government needs to focus on building electric buses, running in dedicated bus lanes, to complement existing train and tram services. You need to get non-EVs off the roads as quickly as possible and why haven't fuel efficiency standards been legislated and implemented already?
Legislation also needs to be implemented on such matters as minimum building and occupancy standards. Why should people who are renting, have to make decisions about whether they can afford to heat or cool a room when there's no insulation? Lack of insulation of course means that heating and cooling appliances are switched on sooner and are used for a longer period of time.
As for Australia becoming an energy superpower? Perhaps not in this country when you're dealing with having to chuck more millions at dud projects like the sequel to the Snowy Hydro project; you can't resolve where power wires can be erected; and there's no plan concerning access to battery storage of solar energy.
Agree on the main points, but not energy exports. Apart from microstates, most countries have enough renewable resources to meet their own energy needs without incurring long-distance transport costs and exposing themselves to the demonstrably high political and economic risks of trade dependency. The default and baseline solution is energy autarky. From that starting-point, many countries will find that comparative-advantage trade in energy with neighbours, overwhelmingly in the weightless form of electricity, will save them money at acceptably low risks, as within Europe (here including the UK) and North America. There won’t be any energy superpowers in a renewable world, and good riddance to them.
Australia has only one suitable neighbour for energy trade, New Zealand, which has plentiful cheap hydro at home, and it's too far for an HVDC cable to be worthwhile. Who else can Australian solar energy be sold to? Indonesia is cloudy, so its solar power will be more expensive, but the cost of HVDC cables across a deep oceanic trench will be very high, and Indonesia is not exactly a close ally. Then there is Japan. It has poor solar resources like the UK, and a similar irrational objection to onshore wind, though plenty of ocean for out-of-sight floating wind farms.
The dream for Australian promoters is to export hydrogen, matching a similar delusion by Japanese officials and corporations. The obstacles are immense, and the dreams depend on massive and irrational subsidies. Hydrogen is even harder to ship than fossil gas: you either have to use very high pressures or very low temperatures, both costly and quite risky. Hydrogen is simply too dangerous for heating buildings, let alone cooking. For transport, hydrogen fuel-cell cars have decisively lost the market battle with BEVs, unsurprisingly so as inserting two lossy conversions from and to electricity in the pathway creates a large and unavoidable drop in comparative efficiency.
I go along with Mike Barnard’s conclusion that in a green economy hydrogen has just two assured future markets, for chemical reasons rather than energy ones: virgin ironmaking and nitrogenous fertiliser. He is rather bearish on the volumes, a nerdy dispute we can leave aside for now. Since hydrogen is a pig to transport, and can readily be made by electrolysis anywhere you have both sunshine and water, there is a strong case for reducing iron ore near the mines. I don’t know enough about fertiliser to have an opinion on it. The main iron ore ones are currently in Western Australia and the Brazilian Amazon, which tick the boxes, though Namibia and Mauretania may weirdly have futures as industrial powers. In addition, shipping iron pellets rather than ore saves 40% of the weight. Building hydrogen DRI plants near Pilbara may not turn out to be optimal, but is certainly a better bet than shipping both ore and hydrogen in separate carriers to identical DRI plants in Japan. Technically Australia could go further downstream and add the electric furnaces to make steel, but the payoff is less obvious. Unlike iron, steel is a differentiated product and there is a lot to be said for staying closer to the customers.
In the long history of humanity up to the Industrial Revolution, energy supplies, though scant, were local and sustainable: wind- and water-mills, sails, firewood, and the labour of draught animals and humans themselves. Towns and cities had to be supplied with firewood, which came from fairly local coppiced forests. Gilgamesh had to venture far into Anatolia to find intact cedar forests to plunder, against the strong opposition of the indigenous deity Humbaba, but that was for much scarcer construction timber for ships, temples and palaces. IIRC the transition to technically inferior coal was forced on English ironmasters around 1700 AD by deforestation – there wasn’t enough wood left, and transport costs limited Nordic timber, plentiful then as now, to high-value uses like shipbuilding. For a mere three centuries we have foolishly been running our economies wastefully on unsustainable and climate-wrecking fossil fuels. That nasty interlude will come to an end in the next 20 years, tapping the sun as well as the winds. Goodbye coal, goodbye oil, goodbye fossil gas. And good riddance to you too.
The IPCC reviewed carbon capture and storage (Carbon Dioxide Removal - CDR) and found “CDR deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C.”
Therefore to continue discussion on something that does not exist is an absolute waste of time.
Is there ever likely to be a scenario where CCS functions effectively? I'd be interested in some expert opinion. If the fossil fuel lobby are hoping that CCS will become like renewable energy - cheaper and more reliable over time - will there be a time, say later this century, where the technology will work? I can see them now, claiming the hellish conditions we will have to endure as the climate deteriorates will abate once we get CCS working as intended.
I'm not impressed by new language about "transitioning" away from fossil fuels. I'd be more impressed if the discussion centered on how to make countries' taxation of the net CO2 emitted in each country compatible with free international trade in goods.
Discussion should also include using some of the revenues from taxation in rich and formerly high CO2 emitting countries should go to poorer countries to help them adapt to the harm done by past net emissions.
Focusing discussion on net CO2 taxation also should send a more credible signal, more credible than language about "transition," to fossil fuel investors, particularly in coal that these will have real risks as taxation of net emissions will reduce demand for their output. But as long as demand persists, I see no reason for producing jurisdictions restricting production or transmission investments. Why should the last profitably mined ton of coal not come from Australia?
Maybe there are no international regulatory issues to talk about but international transmission in zero net emission energy is likely to be another outcome of taxing net CO2 emissions, especially with the eventual development of ambient temperature superconductors.
Rhetorically, why bother being negative on nuclear and CCS? Taxation of net CO2 emissions provides and incentive to develop these. Remove the regulatory barriers and see if they will become profitable or not.
Direct CCS, including olivine weathering, has the advantage, if it becomes cheap enough, of reducing the CO2 from the atmosphere which will still be causing harm after net zero is achieved in 2050 or sooner or later. It seems quite likely that we will have overshot the optimal concentration and want to reduce it.
CCS: carbon capture at point emitters, followed by underground storage - tried and failed.
CDR: carbon dioxide removal, including CCS but also dispersed emissions, biological storage in trees and soils,, and geochemical storage by conversion to carbonate rock. Enhanced weathering is a CDR method but not CCS.
Research has shifted from CCS to CDR, about time too. The argument for boosting R&D on CDR is simple. The current trajectory peaks at nearly 3 degrees C of warming. That's too hot, so we will need gigatonne CDR to row back if we ever go there. With reasonable optimism on technology and policies, we could peak at the main Paris target of 2 degrees warming. That's too hot - all the corals will be gone -, so we will need gigatonne CDR. With unreasonable optimism, and everything goes right, we could just peak at the stretch Paris target of 1.5 degrees warming. That's still too hot, so we will need gigatonne CDR. In fact it's too hot now, at 1.2 or 1.3 degrees of warming, and we will need gigatonne CDR to get back to the decent climate we still had in 2015 with CO2 at 400 ppm. Conclusion: there is no scenario in which we will not need gigatonne CDR.
So we must invent it, starting yesterday. Nobody, not even me, is suggesting we start throwing trillions of dollars at technologies that don't yet exist - but we must spend the billions to develop them. There will be plenty of time to decide how much to buy and w ho will pay for it. Plan B is to hope something will turn up. Your choice.
Afternoon PJQ,
Good to see you contributing to the debate - any plans to return to Twitter/X? Your presence is missed there. What are your impressions of other platforms?
Re: COP28 deal confirms what Australia already knows: coal is out of vogue and out of time
'the world has finally committed to weaning itself from these carbon-based drivers of climate change'
Q- what are the ramifications of not going along with the commitment?
'Australia must now decide what kind of energy superpower it wants to be: the home of a sustainable future, or the last refuge of coal and gas extraction.'
'Given the absence of a domestic motor vehicle industry in Australia, the current government’s inaction on electric vehicles is surprising. It appears driven in part by a fear of populist campaigns by the Coalition and others about the effects on motorists.'
These paragraphs make it seem like you think that Australian governments have a choice. Well maybe a future one will in 2025 hopefully eg. minority Labor with many Teals/Indies, but at the moment isn't it a duopoly controlled by corporations & the Murdochracy ( I know you don't think they hold much sway, but many commentators do).
Be good to get your opinion on the 2party Lib/Lab mutualism.
Thanks, cheers
I had a piece about Labor's strategy in Crikey yesterday, which I'll send out as a newsletter tomorrow, I hope.
As for Twitter, I am definitely an X-tweeter. I may have to leave Substack too, if they don't fix the Nazi problem here.
sorry to hear that. I've not been subjected to anything disparaging on Twitter/X but I can empathise.
Re: you article '‘Progressive’ Labor is dead — supporting stage three tax cuts is pointless.'
Why is so much intellectual effort expended critiquing the same old Lib/Lab 2party duopoly.
I read BK's article 'Why progressives should get behind the stage three tax cuts — no, really' as a little bit facetious, goading Labor into continuing its course to a minority govt with lots Teals/Indies in 2025. What's wrong with that? Labor have no choice anyway. They are being dictated to by FF corp/Murdoch etc. Love to hear your views on a nation post 2party. Cheers
Yes, Australia will be the last refuge of coal and gas extraction. Approval of new mines? ~ no worries! Accountability for handouts such as for phantom CCS or planting some sort of trees, untended, somewhere? ~ Nope.
Addressing climate change and the health of the environment should be the most important issues driving the government and the economy. There should be investment in protecting mangroves (though I don't know if climate change has already kiboshed that) and trying to leave the lightest footprint possible in whatever tasks are carried out. Is it possible to build homes using hempcrete rather than concrete. If not, can hempcrete and other sustainable alternatives be developed further? The time to act really is now. The government needs to focus on building electric buses, running in dedicated bus lanes, to complement existing train and tram services. You need to get non-EVs off the roads as quickly as possible and why haven't fuel efficiency standards been legislated and implemented already?
Legislation also needs to be implemented on such matters as minimum building and occupancy standards. Why should people who are renting, have to make decisions about whether they can afford to heat or cool a room when there's no insulation? Lack of insulation of course means that heating and cooling appliances are switched on sooner and are used for a longer period of time.
As for Australia becoming an energy superpower? Perhaps not in this country when you're dealing with having to chuck more millions at dud projects like the sequel to the Snowy Hydro project; you can't resolve where power wires can be erected; and there's no plan concerning access to battery storage of solar energy.
Agree on the main points, but not energy exports. Apart from microstates, most countries have enough renewable resources to meet their own energy needs without incurring long-distance transport costs and exposing themselves to the demonstrably high political and economic risks of trade dependency. The default and baseline solution is energy autarky. From that starting-point, many countries will find that comparative-advantage trade in energy with neighbours, overwhelmingly in the weightless form of electricity, will save them money at acceptably low risks, as within Europe (here including the UK) and North America. There won’t be any energy superpowers in a renewable world, and good riddance to them.
Australia has only one suitable neighbour for energy trade, New Zealand, which has plentiful cheap hydro at home, and it's too far for an HVDC cable to be worthwhile. Who else can Australian solar energy be sold to? Indonesia is cloudy, so its solar power will be more expensive, but the cost of HVDC cables across a deep oceanic trench will be very high, and Indonesia is not exactly a close ally. Then there is Japan. It has poor solar resources like the UK, and a similar irrational objection to onshore wind, though plenty of ocean for out-of-sight floating wind farms.
The dream for Australian promoters is to export hydrogen, matching a similar delusion by Japanese officials and corporations. The obstacles are immense, and the dreams depend on massive and irrational subsidies. Hydrogen is even harder to ship than fossil gas: you either have to use very high pressures or very low temperatures, both costly and quite risky. Hydrogen is simply too dangerous for heating buildings, let alone cooking. For transport, hydrogen fuel-cell cars have decisively lost the market battle with BEVs, unsurprisingly so as inserting two lossy conversions from and to electricity in the pathway creates a large and unavoidable drop in comparative efficiency.
I go along with Mike Barnard’s conclusion that in a green economy hydrogen has just two assured future markets, for chemical reasons rather than energy ones: virgin ironmaking and nitrogenous fertiliser. He is rather bearish on the volumes, a nerdy dispute we can leave aside for now. Since hydrogen is a pig to transport, and can readily be made by electrolysis anywhere you have both sunshine and water, there is a strong case for reducing iron ore near the mines. I don’t know enough about fertiliser to have an opinion on it. The main iron ore ones are currently in Western Australia and the Brazilian Amazon, which tick the boxes, though Namibia and Mauretania may weirdly have futures as industrial powers. In addition, shipping iron pellets rather than ore saves 40% of the weight. Building hydrogen DRI plants near Pilbara may not turn out to be optimal, but is certainly a better bet than shipping both ore and hydrogen in separate carriers to identical DRI plants in Japan. Technically Australia could go further downstream and add the electric furnaces to make steel, but the payoff is less obvious. Unlike iron, steel is a differentiated product and there is a lot to be said for staying closer to the customers.
In the long history of humanity up to the Industrial Revolution, energy supplies, though scant, were local and sustainable: wind- and water-mills, sails, firewood, and the labour of draught animals and humans themselves. Towns and cities had to be supplied with firewood, which came from fairly local coppiced forests. Gilgamesh had to venture far into Anatolia to find intact cedar forests to plunder, against the strong opposition of the indigenous deity Humbaba, but that was for much scarcer construction timber for ships, temples and palaces. IIRC the transition to technically inferior coal was forced on English ironmasters around 1700 AD by deforestation – there wasn’t enough wood left, and transport costs limited Nordic timber, plentiful then as now, to high-value uses like shipbuilding. For a mere three centuries we have foolishly been running our economies wastefully on unsustainable and climate-wrecking fossil fuels. That nasty interlude will come to an end in the next 20 years, tapping the sun as well as the winds. Goodbye coal, goodbye oil, goodbye fossil gas. And good riddance to you too.
AEMO have forecast the end of coal fired power in Australia before 2040 saying that coal retirements were faster than they had previously forecast.
Renewables are to dominate with gas as a backup - there’s no consideration given to nuclear or CCS.
The IPCC reviewed carbon capture and storage (Carbon Dioxide Removal - CDR) and found “CDR deployed at scale is unproven, and reliance on such technology is a major risk in the ability to limit warming to 1.5°C.”
Therefore to continue discussion on something that does not exist is an absolute waste of time.
Is there ever likely to be a scenario where CCS functions effectively? I'd be interested in some expert opinion. If the fossil fuel lobby are hoping that CCS will become like renewable energy - cheaper and more reliable over time - will there be a time, say later this century, where the technology will work? I can see them now, claiming the hellish conditions we will have to endure as the climate deteriorates will abate once we get CCS working as intended.
I'm not impressed by new language about "transitioning" away from fossil fuels. I'd be more impressed if the discussion centered on how to make countries' taxation of the net CO2 emitted in each country compatible with free international trade in goods.
Discussion should also include using some of the revenues from taxation in rich and formerly high CO2 emitting countries should go to poorer countries to help them adapt to the harm done by past net emissions.
Focusing discussion on net CO2 taxation also should send a more credible signal, more credible than language about "transition," to fossil fuel investors, particularly in coal that these will have real risks as taxation of net emissions will reduce demand for their output. But as long as demand persists, I see no reason for producing jurisdictions restricting production or transmission investments. Why should the last profitably mined ton of coal not come from Australia?
Maybe there are no international regulatory issues to talk about but international transmission in zero net emission energy is likely to be another outcome of taxing net CO2 emissions, especially with the eventual development of ambient temperature superconductors.
Rhetorically, why bother being negative on nuclear and CCS? Taxation of net CO2 emissions provides and incentive to develop these. Remove the regulatory barriers and see if they will become profitable or not.
Direct CCS, including olivine weathering, has the advantage, if it becomes cheap enough, of reducing the CO2 from the atmosphere which will still be causing harm after net zero is achieved in 2050 or sooner or later. It seems quite likely that we will have overshot the optimal concentration and want to reduce it.
CCS: carbon capture at point emitters, followed by underground storage - tried and failed.
CDR: carbon dioxide removal, including CCS but also dispersed emissions, biological storage in trees and soils,, and geochemical storage by conversion to carbonate rock. Enhanced weathering is a CDR method but not CCS.
Research has shifted from CCS to CDR, about time too. The argument for boosting R&D on CDR is simple. The current trajectory peaks at nearly 3 degrees C of warming. That's too hot, so we will need gigatonne CDR to row back if we ever go there. With reasonable optimism on technology and policies, we could peak at the main Paris target of 2 degrees warming. That's too hot - all the corals will be gone -, so we will need gigatonne CDR. With unreasonable optimism, and everything goes right, we could just peak at the stretch Paris target of 1.5 degrees warming. That's still too hot, so we will need gigatonne CDR. In fact it's too hot now, at 1.2 or 1.3 degrees of warming, and we will need gigatonne CDR to get back to the decent climate we still had in 2015 with CO2 at 400 ppm. Conclusion: there is no scenario in which we will not need gigatonne CDR.
So we must invent it, starting yesterday. Nobody, not even me, is suggesting we start throwing trillions of dollars at technologies that don't yet exist - but we must spend the billions to develop them. There will be plenty of time to decide how much to buy and w ho will pay for it. Plan B is to hope something will turn up. Your choice.
Background here on the state of CDR: https://co2re.org/ipcc-report-co2re/