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  • National broadband network to cut power bills, says Conroy

    National broadband network to cut power bills, says Conroy

     

    April 28, 2009

    Article from:  Australian Associated Press

    THE national broadband network could significantly reduce Australia’s carbon footprint and cut consumers’ power bills, Communications Minister Stephen Conroy says.

    Consumers connected to “smart grids” via the $43 billion network will pay less for electricity through a more efficient use of power, also reducing the need for more power generators, he says.

    “Australia has set ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions by 2020 and this will require an economy-wide response,” Senator Conroy said during an address at the National Press Club in Canberra.

    “The fact is broadband is a green technology. In fact, it is an enabler of efficiencies that could drive major reductions in carbon emissions.”

    He said energy providers were already planning to use broadband to improve the way they monitor and manage power distribution. The national broadband network would help energy companies balance the peaks and troughs of daily usage.

    “Smart grids connected by broadband raise the potential to not only monitor energy use but to allow remote adjustment of lights or temperature,” Senator Conroy said.

    “For households this means opportunities for reduced power consumption and costs. This in turn allows them to sell the recovered power on the market, reducing the need for new power generators.”

    Estimates in the United States had put the cost savings for consumers connected to smart grid networks at between five per cent and 25 per cent. Other research pointed to further savings for Australia stemming from the national broadband network.

    “In fact, (climate change analysis company) Climate Risk has estimated that local energy and travel savings alone could be worth up to $6.6 billion annually.”

    The Opposition remains critical of the broadband plan, with communications spokesman Nick Minchin scoffing at Senator Conroy’s claims about the network’s contribution to the climate change fight.

    “According to Senator Conroy there is no need for an ETS (emissions trading scheme) because the NBN is going to slash our emissions on its own,” Senator Minchin said.

    “Senator Conroy is claiming this all singing, all dancing NBN is also going to save the planet.” 

  • Arctic CO2 levels growing at an “unprecedented rate’ say scientists

    Arctic CO2 levels growing at an ‘unprecedented rate’, say scientists

    Figures from a measuring station in northern Norway show that CO2 levels are increasing by 2-3 parts per million every year

     

    The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has reached a record high, according to the latest figures released by an internationally regarded measuring station in the Arctic.

     

    The measurements suggest that the main greenhouse gas is continuing to increase in the atmosphere at an alarming rate despite the downturn in dip in the rate of increase of the global economy.

     

    Levels of the gas at the Zeppelin research station on Svalbard, northern Norway, last week peaked at over 397 parts per million (ppm), an increase of more than 2.5ppm on 2008. They have since begun to reduce and today stand at 393.7ppm. Prior to the industrial revolution, CO2 levels were around 280ppm.

     

     

     

    CO2 levels recorded in Svalbard tend to be higher than the global average, but scientists said the CO2 level they had measured was unprecedented even for that location. “These are the highest figures collected in 50m years,” said Johan Strom, professor of atmospheric physics at the government-funded Norwegian Polar Institute, which collected the data.

    “It is not the level of CO2 that is the problem, because the earth will adapt. What is very worrying is the speed of change. Levels [here] are now increasing 2-3ppm a year.

     

    “The rate of increase is much faster than only 10-20 years ago. You can almost see the changes taking place. Never before have CO2 levels increased so fast,” he said.

     

    The global annual mean growth rate for 2007 was 2.14ppm – the fourth year in the past six to see an annual rise greater than 2ppm. From 1970 to 2000, the concentration rose by about 1.5ppm each year, but since 2000 it has risen to an average 2.1ppm.

     

    “There can be week-to-week or day-to-day variability,” said Thomas Conway, research chemist at US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) Earth Systems research lab in Boulder, Colorado. But he said a 2.5ppm annual increase was “on the high end”.

     

    “This is part of an overall pattern of CO2 increasing in the atmosphere. Unless the burning of fossil fuels decreases, then the CO2 will not decrease. And if the rate of fossil fuel burning increases, so will the rate of CO2 increases,” he added.

     

    “These are quite large numbers. It sounds like this is an Arctic phenomenon,” said Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office Hadley Centre in Exeter. “It fits with the general increase in emissions. You would expect the concentrations of CO2 to grow.”

     

    Last week, NOAA released preliminary figures for its annual greenhouse gas index, which incorporates data from 60 sites around the world – including Zeppelin. Total global CO2 concentration topped 386ppm. In 2008 the global average increased by 2.1ppm, slightly less than the 2.2ppm increase in 2007. NOAA’s primary CO2 measurement station is Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii.

     

    CO2 levels are typically higher in the Arctic than the global average because there is more landmass and human activity in the northern hemisphere. As a result, human emissions from factories and transport tend to lead to higher CO2 levels here.

     

    The figures will concern policy-makers ahead of global talks on a successor to the Kyoto Protocol in December. Climate scientists advise that the world must prevent CO2 levels from rising higher than around 450ppm CO2 equivalent (a measure of global warming potential that incorporates other gasses such as methane and is higher than the measured CO2 levels) to avoid a 2C increase on preindustrial global average temperature.

     

    The Zeppelin research station is situated on a mountain top approximately 1100km from the North Pole. The closest town, Ny Alesund, is the northernmost human settlement in the world, mainly inhabited by research scientists. Although the research station is far from major sources of human pollution, atmospheric circulation brings air from Europe and North America into the Arctic region.

     

     

     

    “There is less human influence here and most of the pollution comes straight here at this time of the year. From now on levels will reduce until the end of August when they will pick back up,” said Strom.

     

    “It is clearly the effect of human activity. Even if we stopped emitting now, we would have to live with this … we will have to live with it for thousands of years, but that does not mean we should do nothing.”

    The figures come as Al Gore hosts a conference in Tromso, northern Norway, on melting arctic ice. Last week he told the US senate committee on energy and commerce that the arctic is now melting at an “unprecedented” rate.

    “The most recent 11 summers have all experienced melting greater than the average 35 year time series,” he said.

     

    He is expected to warn ministers in polar regions that the arctic ice cap may totally disappear in as little as five years if nothing is done to curb greenhouse emissions.

     

    Earlier this month, US scientists reported that annually forming sea in the Arctic region covered roughly the same area as in previous years, but had significantly thinned.

  • Study says Warming Poses Peril to Asia

    Study Says Warming Poses Peril to Asia

     

    By THOMAS FULLER
    Published: April 26, 2009

    With diminished rice harvests, seawater seeping into aquifers and islands vanishing into rising oceans, Southeast Asia will be among the regions worst affected by global warming, according to a report scheduled for release on Monday by the Asian Development Bank.

    The rise in sea levels may force the sprawling archipelago of Indonesia to redraw its sea boundaries, the report said.

    All these changes will occur progressively over the next century, the bank estimated, giving countries time to improve their flood control systems, upgrade their irrigation networks and take measures to prevent forest fires, which the report predicts will become more common.

    “Our modeling shows that sea levels will rise up to 70 centimeters,” or about 28 inches, said Juzhong Zhuang, an economist at the bank and one of the authors of the report. “That will force the relocation of many millions of people.”

    Brackish water seeping into the water table in Jakarta, Indonesia, and the rice paddies of the Mekong Delta in Vietnam is already a growing problem, the report says.

    Some of the 92 outermost small islands that serve as a baseline for the claims of coastal waters by Indonesia could disappear, according to the report.

    The margin of error of such complex projections so far into the future remains a nagging question but the report’s conclusions are nonetheless sobering for Southeast Asian nations, which have a combined population of more than 563 million.

    The report focuses on Indonesia, the Philippines, Thailand, Singapore and Vietnam.

    A projected one foot rise in sea levels in the Philippines by 2045 would flood about 5,000 acres, affecting 500,000 people, the report says. Under another sequence of events, sea levels could rise 39 inches by 2080, affecting 2.5 million people in the Manila Bay area.

    The authors of the report urged governments to build infrastructure adapted to climate change, arguing that the current economic crisis was not incompatible with combating and adapting to global warming.

    “The investment in climate change adaptation can serve as an effective fiscal stimulus,” said Tae Yong Jung, another author of the report.

    Southeast Asia is particularly vulnerable to global warming because of the number of people who live near coastlines and the high rate of poverty. About 19 percent of those in Southeast Asian, some 93 million people, live on less than $1.25 a day and are more vulnerable to the projected increase in typhoons, drought and floods.

    The region also has a high percentage of agricultural workers, more than 40 percent of the population, who would face a decline in the production of rubber, rice, corn and other crops because of extreme weather, the report said.

    The number of fish in the oceans is also likely to decline because of changes in currents caused by a warmer atmosphere.

    In cities like Manila, Bangkok and Jakarta, which are already stiflingly hot for several months of the year, average temperatures in 2100 could be nine degrees hotter, the report says, using data from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

    “If that’s the case, the cities will be like an oven,” Mr. Zhuang said.

  • Broadband’s losers could vote Labor out

    Broadband’s losers could vote Labor out.

    Glenn Milne | April 27, 2009

    Article from:  The Australian

    THE political debate surrounding Kevin Rudd’s nationalised broadband plan so far has centred largely on its financial viability in times of stressed budgets and mounting public debt.

    No doubt that debate that will be a factor at the next election. What’s not been focused on, however, has been the pure local politics of the broadband decision seen through the matrix of marginal electorates across the country. Viewed this way, when Rudd does go to the polls he could well be facing a broadband backlash with the targeted capacity to throw him out of office.

    If Rudd hasn’t recognised his vulnerability of this front, the Coalition certainly has, and has begun to exploit it already.

    Let’s begin at the beginning and go back to Rudd’s decision to junk his original election pledge on broadband, which relied on a private-sector rollout, now substituted with a much enlarged taxpayer-backed $43 billion public-private sector partnership.

    Here’s the Prime Minister himself on the subject: “First of all, let’s be very clear about what we went to the last election with, which was to promise speeds of 12 megabits per second to 98 per cent of Australians and for the remaining 2 per cent, speeds somewhat slower than that delivered by what then existed by way of wireless and satellite technologies.”

    “What are we now providing? We are now providing through fibre optic to the home, fibre optic to the business, speeds of 100 megabits per second for 90 per cent of the country. And for the rest of the country, speeds of 12 megabits per second using the next generation wireless and satellite technologies.”

    Translated, Labor’s election plan treated 98 per cent of Australia equally and 2 per cent unequally. The revised version, while delivering faster cyber speeds to a reduced 90 per cent of the population, increases to 10 per cent the number of Australians who effectively will be treated as second-class citizens.

    For those critical of Ruddband mark II as a back-of-the-envelope job whistled up to fill the hole of a botched tendering process attached to the original broadband promise, it is interesting to note that 90 per cent of Australians live in urban areas. The remaining 10 per cent are in rural and regional areas.

    But in electoral terms they amount to a half-million people. And by all accounts they are very unhappy about the digital gap they see opening up between city and country.

    It’s a long time since I worked on The Observer in Gladstone in Queensland, which I’m happy to report is still going strong. But it was an experience that taught me the power of local media, particularly when the outlet has a virtual monopoly.

    And ever since Rudd announced his broadband blueprint the Gladstone Observers of Australia have been going hammer and tongs about the fundamental injustice of what Labor is planning.

    That injustice has to be understood in technological terms. The political sting is that Rudd’s technological lower caste of 10 per cent are concentrated in 1000 towns across Australia with 1000 or less people.

    Unlike their city cousins, who’ll get a much faster 100 megabit connection, they’ll get 12 megabits if they’re lucky. And if they’re unlucky they may have to remain reliant on creaky wireless or satellite. Under the national radar, this is an issue that is starting to get political traction in rural and regional Australia.

    A snapshot of these second-class technology citizens of Australia (those who live in towns of less than 1000 people) is as follows. There are 1033 such locations. Broken down by state and territory the ACT has one such town, NSW 284, Victoria 202, Tasmania, 69, Queensland 207, South Australia 103, Western Australia 113, and the Northern Territory 52.

    To say local newspapers have been venting the anger and frustration of voters in these areas is an understatement. Take the Tenterfield Star, in the marginal Labor seat of Richmond in NSW. It reported two weeks ago: “Villages and towns across the Tenterfield Shire have been left out of the federal Government’s national broadband scheme.”

    After outlining the Rudd plan the Star continued: “This means that just under half of the Tenterfield Shire’s residents that live in areas such as Jennings, Deepwater, Emmaville, Drake, Urbenville and Mingoola will not be included on the national broadband network.”

    Then there’s The Gympie Times, which focused on Nick Smith the principal of a local Raine and Horne real estate franchise. The Times reported Smith was “was fuming when he found out that he wouldn’t be able to get faster download speeds and Imbil and other smaller towns would miss out on Labor’s rollout”.

    Such reports ought to be playing on the mind of Kevin Rudd who is wont to remind his caucus that Labor holds nine seats by a margin of less than 2 per cent. The electoral map shows you that at least 11 Labor-held marginal seats contain multiple population centres under 1000 people.

    They are Dawson, Eden-Monaro, Robertson, Ballarat, Bass, Franklin, Blaire, Braddon, Capricornia, Corangamite, Bendigo and others.

    Even Julia Gillard’s seat has towns that are likely to miss out. The bellwether seat of Eden-Monaro, now held by Labor’s Mike Kelly has 20 of these centres.

    The Coalition is already in the field exploiting what it reports as this “polarising issue”. The Opposition is devising a targeted strategy that will tell people how Labor is spending $43 billion to widen the digital divide. Brochures, mail-outs, door-knocking, newsletters and grassroots campaigning are planned.

    Households will be asked: “Back in 2007 Kevin Rudd promised you a new high-speed broadband connection; have you received yours yet?”

    Says one Coalition strategist: “Labor has given us a free kick by basically handing us a list of everyone who will miss out.”

    “Rudd’s going to have MPs pleading for towns in their electorates to be factored in,” another said.

    In fact, that process has begun already. In Canberra, ALP senator Kate Lundy has been fighting off Opposition attacks that virtual outer suburbs of the national capital, such as Hall and Tharwa – a half-hour from the Lodge – will miss out on faster city broadband speeds under Rudd’s plan.

    She says she’ll be knocking on the Prime Minister’s door to have them included. As the electoral contest inevitably tightens, Lundy may only be the first of many Labor MPs in a long line.

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  • Stemming the water wars

    Stemming the water wars

    Water shortages will not go away by themselves. They are a global problem and demand a global reponse

    Many conflicts are caused or inflamed by water scarcity. The conflicts from Chad to Darfur, Sudan, to the Ogaden Desert in Ethiopia, to Somalia and its pirates, and across to Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, lie in a great arc of arid lands where water scarcity is leading to failed crops, dying livestock, extreme poverty and desperation.

    Extremist groups like the Taliban find ample recruitment possibilities in such impoverished communities. Governments lose their legitimacy when they cannot guarantee their populations’ most basic needs: safe drinking water, staple food crops, and fodder and water for the animal herds on which communities depend for their meagre livelihoods.

    Politicians, diplomats and generals in conflict-ridden countries typically treat these crises as they would any other political or military challenge. They mobilise armies, organise political factions, combat warlords, or try to grapple with religious extremism.

    But these responses overlook the underlying challenge of helping communities meet their urgent needs for water, food and livelihoods. As a result, the United States and Europe often spend tens or even hundreds of billions of dollars to send troops or bombers to quell uprisings or target “failed states”, but do not send one-10th or even one-100th of that amount to address the underlying crises of water scarcity and underdevelopment.

    Water problems will not go away by themselves. On the contrary, they will worsen unless we, as a global community, respond. A series of recent studies shows how fragile the water balance is for many impoverished and unstable parts of the world. Unesco recently issued the UN World Water Development Report 2009; the World Bank issued powerful studies on India (India’s Water Economy: Bracing for a Turbulent Future) and Pakistan (Pakistan’s Water Economy: Running Dry); and the Asia Society issued an overview of Asia’s water crises (Asia’s Next Challenge: Securing the Region’s Water Future).

    These reports tell a similar story. Water supplies are increasingly under stress in large parts of the world, especially in the world’s arid regions. Rapidly intensifying water scarcity reflects bulging populations, depletion of groundwater, waste and pollution, and the enormous and increasingly dire effects of manmade climate change.

    The consequences are harrowing: drought and famine, loss of livelihood, the spread of waterborne diseases, forced migrations, and even open conflict. Practical solutions will include many components, including better water management, improved technologies to increase the efficiency of water use, and new investments undertaken jointly by governments, the business sector, and civic organisations.

    I have seen such solutions in the Millennium Villages in rural Africa, a project in which my colleagues and I are working with poor communities, governments, and businesses to find practical solutions to the challenges of extreme rural poverty. In Senegal, for example, a world-leading pipe manufacturer, JM Eagle, donated more than 100 kilometers of piping to enable an impoverished community to join forces with the government water agency PEPAM to bring safe water to tens of thousands of people. The overall project is so cost effective, replicable, and sustainable that JM Eagle and other corporate partners will now undertake similar efforts elsewhere in Africa.

    But future water stresses will be widespread, including both rich and poor countries. The US, for example, encouraged a population boom in its arid southwestern states in recent decades, despite water scarcity that climate change is likely to intensify. Australia, too, is grappling with serious droughts in the agricultural heartland of the Murray-Darling river basin. The Mediterranean basin, including southern Europe and north Africa, is also likely to experience serious drying as a result of climate change.

    However, the precise nature of the water crisis will vary, with different pressure points in different regions. For example, Pakistan, an already arid country, will suffer under the pressures of a rapidly rising population, which has grown from 42 million in 1950 to 184 million in 2010, and may increase further to 335 million in 2050, according to the UN’s “medium” scenario. Even worse, farmers are now relying on groundwater that is being depleted by over-pumping. Moreover, the Himalayan glaciers that feed Pakistan’s rivers may melt by 2050, owing to global warming.

    Solutions will have to be found at all “scales”, meaning that we will need water solutions within individual communities (as in the piped-water project in Senegal), along the length of a river (even as it crosses national boundaries), and globally, for example, to head off the worst effects of global climate change. Lasting solutions will require partnerships between government, business, and civil society, which can be hard to negotiate and manage, since these different sectors of society often have little or no experience in dealing with each other and may mistrust each other.

    Most governments are poorly equipped to deal with serious water challenges. Water ministries are typically staffed with engineers and generalist civil servants. Yet lasting solutions to water challenges require a broad range of expert knowledge about climate, ecology, farming, population, engineering, economics, community politics, and local cultures. Government officials also need the skill and flexibility to work with local communities, private businesses, international organisations, and potential donors.

    A crucial next step is to bring together scientific, political, and business leaders from societies that share the problems of water scarcity – for example Sudan, Pakistan, the US, Australia, Spain, and Mexico – to brainstorm about creative approaches to overcoming them. Such a gathering would enable information-sharing, which could save lives and economies. It would also underscore a basic truth: the common challenge of sustainable development should unify a world divided by income, religion, and geography.

     

    Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2009

  • Shaping the post-carbon economy

    Shaping the post-carbon economy

    With the right levels of willing and resources, we can achieve tough new targets on carbon emissions likely to be agreed by the United Nations

    At the end of this year, representatives of the 170 nations that are signatories to the United Nations framework convention on climate change will meet in Copenhagen for what they hope will be final negotiations on a new international response to global warming and climate change. If successful, the centerpiece of their efforts would be a global deal on how to reduce harmful greenhouse gases, by how much, and when. The agreement would go into effect in 2012, when the current Kyoto accord expires.

     

    Research at McKinsey into the effectiveness and cost of more than 200 mechanisms for reducing carbon emissions – from greater car efficiency to nuclear power, improved insulation in buildings, and better forest management – suggests that only concerted global action can ensure levels that the scientific community says is necessary to avoid the disastrous consequences of climate change. Our detailed analysis, conducted in 21 countries and regions over two years, suggests that every region and sector must play its part. If this isn’t daunting enough, consider this: if we delay taking action by even a few years, we probably won’t hit the required targets, even with a temporary decline in carbon emissions associated with reduced economic activity in the near term.

     

    The good news is that we can achieve what’s needed, we can afford to do it, and we can do it all without curtailing growth. The latest version of the McKinsey global carbon abatement cost curve identifies opportunities to stabilise emissions by 2030 at 1990 levels, or 50% below the “business as usual” trend line.

     

    Making these reductions would cost about €200-350 billion annually by 2030 – less than 1% of projected global GDP in 2030. The total up-front financing would be €530 billion by 2020 – less than the cost of the current US financial-sector bailout plan – and €810 billion by 2030, which is well within range of what financial markets can handle.

     

    Developing and developed nations alike must invest in reducing emissions. But the lion’s share of these investments result in lower energy usage, and thus reduced energy costs. Capturing the energy efficiency prize is critical both to climate and energy security – and it relies on a well-known set of policy signals and a proven set of technologies.

     

    None of this lowers growth or increases energy costs, and some of it potentially stimulates growth. Similarly, a global change to a new, more distributed power sector – with more renewable energy and a smarter grid infrastructure – could have growth benefits.

     

    Making all this happen requires moving toward a new model for ensuring that we are more productive globally with core resources that we have long taken for granted. To the extent that we invest across sectors and regions to improve our carbon productivity (GDP per unit of carbon emitted), we will weaken the pollution constrain on global growth.

     

    Improving carbon productivity requires improving land productivity. Forests and plants remove carbon from the atmosphere, potentially accounting for more than 40% of carbon abatement opportunities between now and 2020.

     

    Without carefully managing tropical forests – 90% of which grow in developing nations that have pressure to clear the land for other economic purposes – we cannot meet our global targets for reduced carbon emissions. Helping soybean farmers, palm-oil planters, and cattle ranchers from Brazil to south-east Asia to use land more productively, thereby reducing pressure on tropical forests, must be an integral part of the solution.

     

    If increased agricultural productivity is necessary, so, too, is improved water management. Given that agriculture uses 70% of the world’s reliable water supply (and the potential impact of climate change on water reliability), a comprehensive approach to climate security will need to embrace better water policies, better integrated land management, and agricultural market reform. Our research suggests that annual growth in water productivity must increase from 0.3% to more than 3% in the coming decades.

     

    In other words, resources and policies are inter-dependent. Moving to a model in which carbon emission levels and growth move in opposite directions – what we call a post-carbon economy – may start with agreements in Copenhagen to reduce carbon in the air. But it can succeed only if we embark now on an agenda to boost natural resource productivity more broadly and on a more integrated basis.

     

    What this suggests is that we need new global rules of the road for total resource productivity. If we are to achieve the necessary levels of energy, land, water, and carbon productivity, we must develop an integrated global framework that recognises resource inter-dependencies. A developed nation cannot meet carbon emission targets by outsourcing its dirtiest production to a developing country, and a developing country cannot meet its targets by chopping down forests to build the plants or expand low-productivity agriculture.

     

    To get to the post-carbon economy, countries will have to recognise their inter-dependence, strengthen global coordination of resource policies, and adapt to new, more contingent models of sovereignty. The opportunity in Copenhagen is to begin shaping some of the new collective-action models upon which we can build the post-carbon economy.

     

    Jeremy Oppenheim is global director of McKinsey & Company’s Climate Change Special Initiative; Eric Beinhocker is a senior fellow at the McKinsey Global Institute