Category Archives: Climate change issues

Carbon farming | when to rant and rave

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carbon farming farmland

The other day I received an invitation from the Australian government’s Department of Industry, Innovation, Climate Change, Science, Research and Tertiary Education to a forum with the Domestic Offsets Integrity Committee (the DOIC). This is the committee that approves carbon accounting methodologies for the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI) scheme that was touted as providing Australian farmers with the opportunity to earn carbon credits from land management change.

The invite was keen to point out that “there are now 16 methodologies available for farmers and landholders to undertake carbon offsets projects” and that “The CFI is a ground-breaking scheme offering Australian farmers and landholders the opportunity to earn carbon credits while potentially achieving environmental and productivity benefits”.

What to do?

My first rational thought was not to go. Why should I spend my own funds and contribute to greenhouse gas emissions by travelling from Sydney to Melbourne to attend a 2 hour discussion on a policy that so far has delivered nothing that a farmer could actually use. The 16 approvals to date are for methodologies related to capture of landfill gas [that most landfills had the infrastructure to do anyway], various approaches to growing trees that you cannot cut down, and avoided emissions from a few specialist activities such as piggeries. These have nothing to do with the bulk of real-world farming practices.

My instinct, however, was to attend and at some point in the proceedings stand up and bellow at the top of my lungs a string of obscenities to vent my frustration at what has been a slow and hugely inefficient process of bureaucratic numbness — not to mention the unnecessary reinvention of a wheel already fashioned by international carbon offset schemes.

Unfortunately such actions would only give me temporary relief and would be be swiftly followed by long-term personal damage. Even writing down my thoughts in this post is probably not very smart.

So instead of the rage filled rant, I will reply to the invitation politely saying, “unfortunately I am unable to attend”.

It is worth looking more closely at my frustration [and maybe at my copout].

The frustration

I have never been wholly convinced by the global approach to climate change policy.

I accept that 7 billion humans plus 10,000 years of agriculture and 200 years of global commerce have had an impact on the climate system and I know that we need to take some action.

What has always troubled me is the premise of the chosen policy that we can actually fix the damage we have caused simply by reversing our actions. As I have blogged before, King Canute really had a better chance.  That we can take an engineering solution as naive as emission reduction to a problem of this magnitude seems to be a scandalous inflation of our capability.

Does it also mean we going to fix Milankovich cycles by tweaking the tilt of the planet or take on the variation in the solar wind [both major climate drivers]? Craziness.

That said, emission reduction is prudent for two key reasons: 1) it will help economies transition away from fossil fuel energy sources to sources that are cleaner and less likely to run out and 2) in the short run will help make business more efficient. Both of these are important outcomes that have little to do with the climate.

What is missing from the policy is an understanding of the need to adapt to climate change particularly in the way we manage landscapes. Yes indeed, the very landscapes that supply almost all the food and water for all those people.

So for the CFI not to have methodologies that give farmers an opportunity to sequester carbon into soil, to rehabilitate vegetation in grazing lands, and to obtain co-benefits from more sustainable land management practices is a huge failing of the policy. And not least because these actions will also deliver adaptation as the climate changes.

So carbon, and by extension the CFI, is really about creating more sustainable and resilient landscapes and helping farmers leave behind unproductive practices  – and by the way, there is the potential for around 100,000,000 tCO2e per annum on the positive side of the national carbon account.

What is more, should carbon permit price track the international markets and come in below $10 tCO2e, land management practices that deliver carbon sequestration into vegetation and soil as well as avoiding emissions may still be cost-effective. Most land management activities sit towards the left of most cost-abatement curves and so are cheaper per ton of abatement than many of the engineering solutions.

The cop out

So why did I choose not to accept the invitation when it provided a great opportunity to scream and shout?

There is an element of shooting the messenger. Public servants are there to deliver the policy frame not necessarily to create it. It is likely that there are higher political forces that have chosen to slow down policy delivery and to steer away from the farming sector, higher than those charged with delivery.

Attending only to have a shout at the wrong people makes no sense.

There is also a feeling that attending would both validate a process that I do not agree and have little impact, particularly as providing feedback seems to have had little effect in the past. The system is still slow, lacks focus, and technical clarity.

An example from the many challenges faced by methodology developers is that the positive list cannot actually be a list of activities to take care of additionality if each methodology has to prove the validity of an activity already on the list. That negates the whole concept of a positive list approach [one tried and rejected by other schemes] seems to fall on deaf ears.

Ultimately though, I have folded and chosen not to point out the faults but to stay silent.

This does not make me feel any better.

Postscript

Whilst I was drafting this post I received n update from one of the major laws firms with an interest in the carbon market. Their take on the status of the CFI is quite contrary to mine — it seems that everything is dandy. In fact they must be drinking out of a glass so half full it’s overflowing.

If only I still had the energy to talk it up.

97% said their cats prefer it

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Its official, 97% of peer-reviewed science papers, that expressed a preference, agree that climate change is caused by human activity.

Academics have surveyed nearly 12,000 academic papers penned by 29,000 scientists. There were 4,000-plus papers that took a position on the causes of climate change and less than 100 of these disputed the scientific consensus that climate change is the result of human activity.

Here is what the lead author had to say about the survey

Call me a cynic but all I could think about was the “8 out of 10 owners who expressed a preference said their cats preferred it” Whiskers ad and how I didn’t believe that either.

And later I imagined what it was like back in the day when every intellectual believed that the earth was flat until some crazy dude decided to sail all the way around it.

And later still I decided that it really is missing the point because it does not matter what the cause is, it is the effects we have to worry about.

 

The heart of the matter

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This article was written back in 2010 and was published online on The Climate Spectator. Nearly three years on it still makes fascinating reading as the rhetoric ramps up ahead of the federal election.

rocky shore NSWRecently the NSW Natural Resources Commissioner, Dr John Williams, hosted a workshop in Canberra on resilience thinking that was attended by a platoon of scientists, agency staffers and consultants, all concerned about the environment.

In his opening remarks, the Commissioner urged the participants to consider a simple enough question: What matters most?

A ripple went around the room as things that matter jostled for space in everyone’s head. No doubt thoughts of happiness, love, friendship, the mortgage and a few thoughts we don’t usually admit to arrived, and it was clear that there was not just one thought. The one thing that mattered did not appear instantly to everyone.

Caught as we are in the policy vacuum on climate change, with backflips and peculiar ideological positions to frustrate us, it might be useful to ask the same question of the climate change debate: What matters most?

Those representing heavy emitters will cry that exposure, unnecessary liability and uncertainty matter. Few of us like threats to business as usual. However, some exposed businesses have used climate change as an opportunity. We have all been offered the option to offset a flight or visit a carbon neutral office, where the most important thing is to be seen to be doing something good. Catastrophe can make for great PR, and so matters most, but for very different reasons.

Unless you install roofing insulation, climate change is of little consequence to small business. There is not much beyond the upward creep in the quarterly energy bill to keep your attention away from more pressing issues of cashflow, customers and the late arrival of a key staffer.

A couple of years ago, the general public in Australia thought climate change itself mattered most. They even elected a new government with a Prime Minister who claimed it was “the biggest moral challenge of our time”. Today polling suggests the majority see climate change as just another opportunity for politicians to renege on a promise. And a third of them think we should not pay a cent to fix it.

Climate scientists, at least those gathered under the banner of the IPCC, reached a consensus that greenhouse gas emissions matter most. Concentrations of gases that absorb reflected radiation, the atmospheric blanket that makes life as we understand it possible, were the key regulators of climate. Human activity was upsetting the delicate balance of greenhouse gas composition and we needed to stop that or risk catastrophic warming.

Emissions matter most because they lead to warming that puts more energy into the cyclical systems of atmosphere and ocean, changing the pattern of circulation, making it wetter, drier, and perhaps more stormy on an increasingly voluminous ocean. In short, having some very specific local climate effects.

The diplomats at the UNFCCC thought this mattered too, but not as much as the necessary diplomacy. So they negotiated at length to agree that net emission reductions matter, but that we need to negotiate some more to agree on the reduction targets and how to achieve them. Clearly, among the policy makers, it is debate that matters most.

Ask residents on the beach front at Byron Bay the question and it’s all about saving their homes from storms. They may not even know that warming will raise sea levels and may make some storm surges more acute, for it has always mattered that the ocean was only a wave away from your beachfront retreat. Save a thought for the 200 million citizens of Bangladesh on the Ganges delta who don’t even know that sea level rise matters most to them.

Irrigators along the Murray River in NSW who, despite having a legal license to extract water, have not seen any reach them for a long time, have another answer. What matters most to them is the real prospect of losing their livelihood altogether.

Clearly, there are as many things that matter most about climate change as if we had asked the question without the qualifier. Climate change is a threat and an opportunity, a challenge and a risk. For some it is real, but for most of us it is not the most important thought in our heads. So perhaps what matters most is not climate change at all.

Perhaps we have missed the real risk, the real challenge that we face, and the hint of what that is comes from all these specific concerns. What matters most is that we have the capacity to adapt and transform to a changing world.

It is critical that we give ourselves the flexibility to make our food production more efficient, ensure our environments will deliver all the services we take for granted and that our economic and social structures remain viable as they transition.

It also matters that we act on that capacity now, for the world is changing rapidly. The shifting climate just makes some of the inevitable the changes more acute and immediate. None of this should be a surprise, given that there are now close to seven billion souls trying to fix what matters most to them.

———

Here in April 2013 I am not sure if the timelessness of the sentiment in this article is what matters most.

Perhaps we should get our arses in gear.

TED | Alan Savory

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CattleTED lectures are a neat idea. Somehow they have managed to legitimise thinking outside the box and I suspect we don’t fully appreciate how important this is.

Most ideas that stick come from our current paradigms for anything really new must be pretty special to succeed in a society dominated by commerce and naturally conservative mind-set. So ‘good on ya’  TED.

About a decade ago I met Alan Savory on one of his trips to Australia to promote his ideas on holistic management. It was an interesting encounter [for me at least] that took me back to my time in Zimbabwe in the late 1980’s and then to thoughts of what it must have been like to both wander through the bush and the corridors of parliament in the time leading up to Zimbabwean independence in 1980 as Alan Savory had done.

He claims in his book that it was a combination of his science training, days on end tracking in the bush, and his time in politics that brought him to understand the importance of intensive, timed grazing by larger herds for the health of our grazing lands. Now he has extended his idea as a solution to two huge global issues: desertification and climate change.

Check out his TED lecture, it starts slowly but is worth persisting to the punch line.

http://on.ted.com/Savory

The elephant in the bathroom may have farted

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elephant02Well it would seem that somebody close to the policy makers might have noticed the elephant in the bathroom.

This week an article in the Financial Review talked of a carbon tax budget hole that could be $4 billion deep thanks to a carbon price that might not continue to rise after the fixed price period after all.

Blind Freddie can’t help but chuckle and the elephant’s stomach rumbles with contentment.

It seems that there has been some new modeling of the carbon price beyond the fixed price period on behalf of Australia’s Climate Change Authority. The numbers suggest a “fall from July 2015 to $10.72 a tonne”.

This should be no surprise given the current European market prices are hovering around $5 tCO2e — this difference from $23 per tCO2e and rising to the reality of current market price is the elephant standing quietly next to the bassinette.

Now if you are a government that has been struggling to get the balance sheet back in the black because it was one of the core things you promised to do, then $4 billion less revenue is a problem. Especially given that the carbon price policy was hugely unpopular in the first place and will continue to give you trouble in an election year.

If it was just a revenue shortfall [$10 instead of $23+ per tCO2e] that probably wouldn’t be too bad. Only the revenue is already either spent or committed, mainly to ease the pain for exposed industries and for consumers, making a market price dip in 2015 a double whammy.

Awkward for the Australian government but stayers among carbon traders in Europe are not too worried. The say it is just what markets do, they will show price volatility around long-term trends. And just now the price is low. Later it will rise again, not least because this is a regulated market designed specifically to manipulate credit supply to raise the price and reduce demand. Like all markets, success comes from the long play.

Then there is another thing that the elephant symbolizes.

Remember that the carbon price is for a permit to emit and fewer permits purchased mean fewer carbon emissions. This was the policy objective: to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases by making it more expensive to emit than the alternatives.

And as President Obama brings action on climate change to the State of the Union address, it will be hard to ditch the policy now. So here are a couple of options given we can see the elephant.

Ostrich option | Bury the report or, if the electorate cotton on, spin it like a fury.

After all 2015 is a long way off. There is plenty of time for anything to happen, perhaps even something positive. Remind yourself of the positivity of the ballsy carbon traders and wait. In the meantime, do whatever is possible to make the whole thing go away.

Be a honey badger | take hold of the policy, believe in it and shake it hard.

The idea of a carbon price was that it should deliver behavior change and make Australia less carbon intensive.  So embrace that and with the tenacity of a honey badger stick with it. Allow an aggressive permit allocation limit, ease the coupling to the EU carbon market by changing the proportion of credits emitters can source from overseas and explain why to consumers. There is no reason that the domestic market cannot have a higher carbon price than elsewhere other than the fear of ceding competitive advantage.

In short, show leadership.

Now there is a thing.

€0.40 per tCO2e | the elephant in the bathroom

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Elephant-01I wonder what it would be like if there was an elephant in the bathroom given a  mature female African elephant weighs 2,000+ kg, stands over 2m at the shoulder and will drop 100 kg of dung in a day.

She is here folks, right here in the bathroom, the smallest room in the house. And she is so big that she could not hide even in her Majesties powder room.

€0.40 per tCO2e

There she is, wafting her trunk gently from side to side, chewing quietly on some acacia bark.

€0.40 per tCO2e

Can you see her yet? Did you hear her stomach rumble?

€0.40 per tCO2e

Oh yes, there she is. The market mechanism designed to make alternative energy sources more attractive by making greenhouse gas emissions expensive.

Remember, emissions are permitted but only so many of them and you need to buy a permit for some or all of them. These permits cost you money. You can buy offsets against those permits from energy efficient projects, even from projects that reduce emissions from land management, and these would be cheaper than the permits and so create an opportunity for trade.

Only to achieve the outcome of overall emission reduction the offsets cannot be too cheap, otherwise what is the incentive to change your emission profile? That, after all, is an expensive thing to do.

€0.40 per tCO2e

If you would like to read about how not to see this elephant, for after all an elephant in the bathroom makes taking a shower a challenge, try here

Time to save the global carbon markets

Climate change | Google Trends #1

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You have to hand it to Google. They are just all over business development. They have found something that everyone needs, perfected it quickly and delivered it so effectively that nobody else can hope to compete.

Then whilst they continue to improve the core offering they find a great way to make money without most of their customers even realizing it.

Not resting on this success they invest in both the core offering and start to add bells and whistles. At some point along the way they get big enough and powerful enough from unprecedented popularity to start changing and then setting the rules [it used to be that a Panda was just an endangered species].

One of the many bells is Google Trends, a neat tool that spits out data on search behavior for a key word from 2004 to present.

Here is a graphic of what Google trends says about the keyword ‘climate change’

 

GTClimateChange

 

The numbers here are all proportional to the peak of search activity over the period — in this case the peak searching occurred in December 2009. So low numbers represent less interest in the term relative to the peak and trends in the data show if the term is growing or waning in popularity. It is also possible to pick seasonality or specific events that trigger a spike or trend in search activity.

What can we say about climate change?

On the graphic I have added a few select events, particularly the various UNFCCC Conference of the Parties (COP) that have been an end of year staple for a few years now

We didn’t really bother too much about it until An Inconvenient Truth tweaked our curiosity in 2006. Then we got really excited around the time of the COP in Copenhagen when then Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was calling climate change ‘the greatest moral challenge of our age’.

And what has happened since those heady days? Well, we have had three more COPs in Cancun, Durban and Doha with progressively more pathetic efforts at tackling the greatest moral challenge, accompanied by a downward trend towards pre-Al Gore levels of interest in the topic.

In a few more years we will have forgotten about it altogether.

Trends also suggests that regional interest in the topic now comes exclusively from the developing world with 8 of the top 10 countries by search volume from Africa. Only these are the places with the least resources to do anything about it.

Stats can also be a hoot. You’ll notice that after each COP there is a trough in search volume as everyone in the northern hemisphere tucks into their Christmas turkey and a regular annual dip in traffic in the northern hemisphere summer when its warmest!

No doubt that many equally critical challenges await and will trend upwards to their moment in the spotlight only to fall away again. Such is that nature of our attention span. It would just be nice if things went away because they were fixed.

On the upside, thanks Google for what will be endless hours of statistical fun.

Chance

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Back in the day one of the first things I used to teach in my undergraduate biostatistics classes was that correlation is not causation.

For example, there may be a pattern between sun spot activity and the number of storks nesting in northern Europe, but you cannot conclude that sunspots cause nesting success. If it were that easy to assign a cause to all the patterns we see then a whole bunch of professions from currency speculation to climate change science would be unnecessary.

In my classes I used the presence of correlation to introduce the two main theme of my course: the concept of chance and the importance of the scientific method in helping us know when it is reasonably safe to ignore it.

Chance, and its measure probability, is a concept more intuited than taught. It was always fun to see the lights go on for a student who got it. More often though the pain of understanding likelihood was forsaken and students reverted to the age old standby of wrote learning.

All this recollection came about after I listened to a radio host who was recounting figures showing a significant spike in poker machine revenue in May and June 2012 (up 10 and 7%) across Australia. And in the same breath he reminded listeners that this coincided with cash payments to households from Federal government as compensation for cost of living rises from its introduction of a carbon price.

Now, of course, the radio host was smart. He didn’t imply or even hint that there was a causal relationship between the arrival of free cash and an increase in gambling revenue; but merely placing the two pieces of information together was enough.

My own emotions leapt to confirm gross inefficiency and lack of foresight in the government policy frame. Obviously people spent the money gambling.

Back in the classroom I would have berated my students for making the connection that I made. And really there is no evidence that a one-off cash payment to pensioners and low-income households ended up in slot machines, or even that some of it did.

Except that 10% of monthly poker machine revenue is roughly $100 million. This is a tidy sum and $500 more than usual in each and every poker machine.

Given that roughly 600,000 Australians play pokers machines weekly, that $100 million will be around $167 each.

The cash payments for families were $100 per child and for pensioners $250.

Chance is a fine thing.

Have we lost the plot?

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This week Colin Barnett, the premier of Western Australia, was quoted in the Australian from a speech at a business leaders forum in Perth as saying that “We’ve lost the plot as to what we are trying to do here” implying there were other ways to reduce emissions than imposing a carbon tax.

“Why would we have a carbon price of $23 when the only somewhat credible trading market in Europe has a market price of $10?” he said.

This is the sort of thing you might expect a premier from the contrary political code to the Federal government to say. More so when it is the colossal revenues from mining that has been the engine of the WA economy for decades. The last thing a Liberal government wants is to dampen that particular fire.

At the same forum and quoted in the same article, the head of Westfarmers, who own a big chunk of Australia’s retail sector, described the carbon tax as “unnecessarily complex” and that “you have to be a rocket scientist to understand this stuff.”

Oh well, you could say, it’s just a couple of browns in a brown newspaper having a go at what they see as a constraint on the golden goose of capitalism. It’s to be expected.

And that would be a big mistake.

What everyone has forgotten to explain is why such a cost is necessary.

A few years ago we knew it was the “biggest moral issue of our time” at least according to Kevin07. Unless we took action global warming would consume us. And the majority believed that action was necessary.

Then the government prevaricated, forgot whose behviour they needed to change and introduced complex legislation that was more about plugging leaks than achieving a result.

It is emission reduction. Remember?

We thought that if we reduced greenhouse gas emissions then there would be fewer of the molecules that can trap long wavelength back radiation in the atmosphere than under business as usual and, if we managed reasonable reductions, we might slow global warming.

And then there is the real and far more critical reason. In a relatively short time we will run out of oil. If we haven’t at least begun the transition away from our dependence on oil for transport and fertilizers then we risk economic collapse everywhere. This is a huge deal, easily as important to the global economy as spiraling sovereign debt. Emission reduction might seem a bit left field as a means to transition away from oil but it starts the process of introducing and incentivizing alternative fuels and it starts to set the price signal that will come in a hurry when supply cannot meet demand.

Australian politicians must know this. They are well-educated, can interpret a graph and have a day job that puts this sort of issue front and centre.

Only they come up with a clunky policy that they have chosen not to explain to any of the people who really matter.

Maybe they think that because we have seemingly endless coal reserves, and now natural gas too, all will be well.

Or they just cannot bring themselves to explain the details behind the necessary pain of a transition – even though we already know that transitions are painful.

Perhaps they can’t explain something that they do not understand themselves.

Whatever the reason no one in the government has stood up to calmly, and with clarity, tell us why.

Then again, perhaps they really have just “lost the plot.”

Climate change action and Greek debt

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A few days ago I asked this question on HubPages

Why has action on climate change stalled?

More than 250 views and over 30 answers and comments in 48 hours suggests that the topic still fires people up.

HubPages has a useful counter that shows how many people vote each comment up or down. As most of the comments were at the margins reflecting strong views for or against climate change action, the up votes were almost always balance by down votes.

Then today I came across an ‘advertisement’ for the 2012 climate change intercessional meetings – the discussions held between the main UNFCC Conference of the Parties – this year to be held in Bonn, Germany.

Here is an extract:

[Bonn] will need to pick up the momentum generated in Durban. The Durban Platform has the goal of “enhancing mitigation ambition to identify and to explore options for a range of actions that can close the ambition gap with a view to ensuring the highest possible mitigation efforts by all Parties”, and includes a commitment to develop a “new protocol, another legal instrument or agreed outcome with legal force” by 2015.

As the youngsters would say ‘What the…’ Talk about disappearing up our own rear ends.

Somewhere in our subconscious we know that this stuff is important. A wicked problem it may be but it talks to the very fundamentals of our survival as individuals. Not least the challenges of where we will get our food, water and shelter.

Only this importance is playing out as denial. There isn’t a problem, go away and get on with you life and don’t bug me and really don’t expect me to pay to fix a problem that isn’t.

Or if not denial then a fear of catastrophe. If we don’t fix climate change the sky will indeed fall in.

What are we thinking? Feeding us all is, like the Greek debt, not something we should still argue about. We should be figuring out and implementing the best solutions.

For me solutions will have two pillars.

The first is nipping out the drivers. For climate change this will be to hasten the transition to sustainable energy and land management. In Greece (and a whole host of other countries) it is to stop spending money you don’t have.

The second pillar, and the one we seem to have completely ignored so far, is to implement adaptation. We should be channeling all that argumentative energy to think up and implement ways to cope with the change. In climate that is to change our water use, land management and plan for more extreme weather, shifts in seasonality and rising sea levels. Noting that all of these will be easier if we have cheap alternative energy.

In Greece it will be thinking up and implementing ways to employ a generation. Tough call.