The CCA just released an issues paper on Australia’s targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, before it takes submissions and prepares an interim report in October, just a month after the next federal election. It is expected to deliver its final report in February, 2014.

The concept of a carbon budget is important in climate policy, since the magnitude of climate change is not determined by emissions in any given year, but by the total level of pollution emitted over time. As with any ‘budget,’ the idea is that if we save less now we have to save more later and vice versa. The longer you delay action the more you pay to catch-up.

The report, Unburnable Carbon 2013: Wasted capital and stranded assets, says that at least two-thirds of oil, gas and coal reserves of publicly-listed companies are ‘unburnable’ if the world is to have a chance of not exceeding global warming of 2°C. This means that the world could be heading for a major economic crisis as stock markets inflate an investment bubble in fossil fuels – a carbon bubble – to the tune of trillions of dollars, according to Carbon Tracker and Lord Nicholas Stern, a professor at the London School of Economics.

A Guardian article quotes Stern as saying : “The financial crisis has shown what happens when risks accumulate unnoticed.”

The Guardian also ran a short video and global interactive map of fossil fuel reserves vs investment, to illustrate the carbon bubble. Access that tool by clicking here.

The upper end of this estimate is around 30 per cent more than what the Australian government spends annually on natural resource management and landscape restoration through the Caring for our Country Program. Even the lower end estimates would be a welcome and much needed boost, the piece says.

It also says that “Australian farmers and environmentalists aren’t always the most comfortable bedfellows, but most would agree that significant new funding will be needed to deal with the many environmental and natural resource challenges facing rural Australia.

For the full article, click here.

The full BNEF White Paper - ”Will Australia’s carbon price last?” – can be found by clicking here.

The analysis projects, among other things, that the Coalition will have to win a majority in the House of Representatives and control enough votes in the Senate to successfully pass legislation through parliament to rescind the Clean Energy Act.

Also it projects that (in a Coalition win and Tony Abbott being Prime Minister scenario) if Abbott secures a majority of votes in the Senate, the earliest he could rescind the carbon price is the second half of 2014 after the Senate changes hands on 1 July 2014.

Obama said: “I urge this Congress to get together, pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”

He continued: “I will direct my cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable of sources of energy.”

“The perception that fossil fuels are cheap and renewables are expensive is now out of date”, said Michael Liebreich, chief executive of Bloomberg New Energy Finance. “The fact that wind power is now cheaper than coal and gas in a country with some of the world’s best fossil fuel resources shows that clean energy is a game changer which promises to turn the economics of power systems on its head,” he is quoted as saying on the Bloomberg New Energy Finance site.

Taxing Energy Use: A Graphical Analysis provides systematic statistics on energy and carbon taxation across all OECD member countries.  It shows that carbon pollution from energy is taxed in every OECD country.

Australia’s carbon price of $23 (EUR 18) comes in near the bottom of the list of 34 countries – below Japan, South Korea and the UK, among many others.  Effective taxes on CO2 from energy range from EUR 107 per tonne ($AU 140) in Switzerland to EUR 2.80 ($AU3.70) in Mexico, the OECD estimated. The weighted average of all OECD countries is EUR 27 ($AU 35) per tonne.

Emissions trading schemes are going to start in China and South Korea, adding to existing schemes in the European Union and New Zealand and those that began recently in California and Quebec. South Africa is introducing a carbon tax.

The full OECD report can be found here.

While net support is quite thin +2 per cent, this is the first time since at least September 2011 that the price on carbon laws have more fans than critics.

In fact, as Crikey points out in a lead article today, the carbon ‘tax’ is now far more popular than its chief detractor, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott.

The piece cites support for Abbott is at -31 per cent (voter satisfaction compared to dissatisfaction, in today’s Newspoll published in The Australian).

Crikey reports: “The rehabilitation of the carbon tax has mostly occurred since it began on July 1, although Essential found when people were directly asked they were fairly evenly split on how the tax had affected them. A quarter of those polled said the impact on their household was worse than expected, and a quarter said the impact was not as bad as expected. The most common response (36 per cent) was that the impact was about the same as expected.”

For more, read here

All regions of the world would suffer – some more than others – but the report finds that the poor will suffer the most.

The report, Turn Down the Heat, was prepared by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and Climate Analytics. It says that the world is on a path to a 4 degree Celsius warmer world by end of this century and current greenhouse gas emissions pledges will not reduce this by much.

World Bank Group President Jim Yong Kim said: “A 4 degree warmer world can, and must be, avoided – we need to hold warming below 2 degrees. Lack of action on climate change threatens to make the world our children inherit a completely different world than we are living in today. Climate change is one of the single biggest challenges facing development, and we need to assume the moral responsibility to take action on behalf of future generations, especially the poorest.”

The report says that the 4°C scenarios are potentially devastating: the inundation of coastal cities; increasing risks for food production potentially leading to higher under and malnutrition rates; many dry regions becoming dryer, wet regions wetter; unprecedented heat waves in many regions, especially in the tropics; substantially exacerbated water scarcity in many regions; increased intensity of tropical cyclones; and irreversible loss of biodiversity, including coral reef systems.

“The Earth system’s responses to climate change appear to be non-linear,” said John Schellnhuber, director of  the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “If we venture far beyond the 2 degrees guardrail, towards the 4 degrees line, the risk of crossing tipping points rises sharply. The only way to avoid this is to break the business-as-usual pattern of production and consumption.”

The report notes that a 4°C world is not inevitable and that with sustained policy action warming can still be held below 2°C, which is the goal adopted by the international community and one that already brings some serious damages and risks to the environment and human populations.

It summarizes a range of the direct and indirect climatic consequences under the current global path for greenhouse gas emissions. Key findings include:

• Extreme heat waves, that without global warming would be expected to occur once in several hundred years, will be experienced during almost all summer months in many regions.  The effects would not be evenly distributed.  The largest warming  would be exptected to occur over land and range from 4° C to 10° C.  Increases of 6° C or more in average monthly summer temperatures would be expected in the Mediterranean, North Africa, Middle East and parts of the United States.
• Sea level-rise by 0.5 to 1 meter by 2100 is likely, with higher levels also possible. Some of the most highly vulnerable cities are located in Mozambique, Madagascar, Mexico, Venezuela, India, Bangladesh, Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam.
• The most vulnerable regions are in the tropics, sub-tropics and towards the poles, where multiple impacts are likely to come together.
• Agriculture, water resources, human health, biodiversity and ecosystem services are likely to be severely impacted.  This could lead to large-scale displacement of populations and consequences for human security and economic and trade systems.
• Many small islands may not be able to sustain their populations.

The report states that the science is unequivocal that humans are the cause of global warming, and major changes are already being observed. The global mean temperature has continued to increase and is now about 0.8°C above pre-industrial levels.

The World Bank has kept a webpage of reactive comments made by global leaders, including United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. That page can be found by clicking here.

The state Air Resources Board sold all 23.1 million carbon permits at a Nov. 14 auction for the first compliance period of the program starting Jan. 1, the agency’s website shows.

The sale raised almost US$300 million. But the permits were estimated to clear between $12 and $15 a ton in the first auction, Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported.

It quotes Piers Verstegen as saying that the arrangement creates real economic potential, through forest management, for south-west communities.

“Our logging industry is in a state of collapse and Australia’s largest logging industry has gone into receivership but at the same time there’s huge growth in the carbon credits industry globally,” he said.

“That’s the kind of industry that the south-west needs to be plugging into.”

“The logging industry is clear-felling and wood chipping giant 600-year-old karri trees in our south-west for next to no economic return but the decision to allow forest carbon credits means the forest will be worth much more economically if we protect them from logging and instead manage them to preserve their capacity to take carbon pollution out of the atmosphere.”

For the full article read South-west urged to cash in on carbon credits

The blog says a tax would meet the conservatives’ quest for consumption taxes, the liberals’ quest for new revenues and the economist’s quest for market efficiency. It also reports that some of the biggest policy players in Washington are holding an all-day event on carbon taxes today, sponsored by the liberal Brookings Institution and the conservative American Enterprise Institute, with co-sponsorship by the International Monetary Fund and the non-partisan Resources for the Future.

For the full article, read Big buzz on carbon taxes

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet this morning announced that Australia’s commitment to the second period of Kyoto was “not a blank cheque.”

Speaking at the CarbonExpo in Melbourne, he said: “Australia is taking this position to the UN Conference at Doha in a very clear context … First countries right around the world are increasingly taking real action to combat climate change. Secondly, all countries are now working on the new global agreement that will be concluded by 2015, and take effect from 2020.”

He said that Australia’s commitment to the second Kyoto period was based on the understanding that developing and developed countries alike would work toward the new agreement. The announcement comes two weeks ahead of the kick off for the next UN climate talks in Doha.

On July 1, a $23-a-tonne tax on carbon emissions was introduced, which pushed up wholesale electricity prices sharply, to about $58 per megawatt hour, although the price has since eased to about $50 due primarily to sluggish demand, the article says.

The carbon tax lifted hydro-power generation to 10.2 per cent of the total electricity produced in the national electricity market from 8.4 per cent previously, the analysis found. At the same time black coal dropped to 51.1 per cent from 53 per cent, while brown coal dropped to 23.3 per cent from 24.1 per cent.

“The carbon price saw a shift in spot prices, a change in the mix of generation sources and changes to the flow of power … between states,” the managing director of the AEMO, Matt Zema, said.

Click here for the full article: Carbon tax triggers shifts in electricity generation

Satellite mapping of soil carbon

By Caddie Brain

Thursday, 08/11/2012

Land owners may soon be able to measure how much carbon is in their soils using satellite data.

Sydney company GCS are trying to find a cost effective way of estimating carbon levels in rangeland soils, by correlating satellite data and soil samples from Beetaloo Station and Utopia in the Northern Territory.

Research manager Jenny Sinclair says the development of this measurement tool, is an essential step towards the approval of a rangeland soil methodology under the Carbon Farming Initiative.

“At the moment there’s just no accurate or affordable method of measuring carbon on a project scale in a rangeland environment.

By using data that’s being collected on an ongoing basis by satellites, it would minimise the cost and the amount of time spent trying to get baseline estimate of your carbon.”

To here the interview follow the link Jenny Sinclair Interview