Lillian’s Eden

by Cheryl Adam

  Fossil fuels remain our absolute enemy. Renewables, the IEA 2017 report states, put a brake on emissions, but renewables don’t stop coal, oil and gas from being dug out of the ground. The world’s carbon budget for 1.5°C, the agency predicts, will be exhausted by 2022 and for 2°C by 2034.

  The most sobering statistic in the Agency’s research is that 81% of global energy comes from fossil fuels. And it’s been the same for the past three decades.

  Even more alarmingly is the later article in The Guardian published on 5 April 2018227 that accuses the IEA of undermining the global shift towards renewables, claiming it is influenced by the oil industry and is undermining the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement. Citing a study from NGO Oil Change International, the article warns that the agency’s investment projections are massively skewed towards oil and gas encouraging Governments to overshoot emission targets and worsen climate change.

  If the Adani Carmichael mine goes ahead and the other large mines planned for the Galilee Basin follow, our current Australian politicians, both Federal and State, will have played a major role in contributing to the world’s greenhouse gases. Adani’s mine alone, according to the Joint Report to the Land Court of Queensland on Climate Change Emissions, by Associate Professor Chris Taylor and Associate Professor Malte Meinshausen from the University of Melbourne,228 will leave a legacy of a massive 4.6 billion tonnes of carbon footprint if it mines 2.3 billion tonnes of coal during its 60-year operation. This is the contribution to the global footprint of fossil fuels whether it’s burnt far away from Australia or not.

  Other mines in the Galilee are proposing similar outcomes for production. The authors of the Joint Report claimed the mine’s cumulative emissions would be “among the highest in the world from any individual project.”

  According to environmentalist, Kathryn Kelly229 who gave evidence at the Queensland Land Court, farmers and environmentalists’ challenge to Gina Rinehart’s partly owned multi-billion Alpha coal mine in 2013, if all of the proposed nine or ten mine projects go ahead in the Galilee Basin, they will produce the equivalent of more than 700,000 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year once they are in full production. Gina Rinehart is one of those who does not accept the science of human-caused climate change. “This,” Kelly said “would exhaust the carbon budget in a flash.”230 There is, however, apparently no requirement under Australian law to outline the impact of approving mining leases on climate change, nor do environmental approvals need to take that into consideration. As Kelly told the court, as though the court needed this explained, “This is a decision of global importance.” As the ACF found when it went to the High Court, climate change really is not a factor we have bothered to incorporate into our legal framework.

  Importantly, the IEA identifies weakening Government policy as one of the major issues that affects global energy demand.

  The goals set by nearly 200 governments in Paris in 2015 are far from being reached. India, where I began this story, is the coal industry’s last great hope – and, in particular, the Australian Government’s main hope in its greed for royalties and supposed jobs.

  There is some good news though but it remains to be seen whether it’s all too late. China has added as much solar power in a single year as the total installed capacity across France and Germany combined. The USA, in spite of Donald Trump’s first year as President, recorded the steepest drop in emissions as new renewable energy generation came on-line. The seeds for this increase, presumably, would have predated Trump’s rise as President. Internationally, there has been, thankfully, a faster than expected rise in solar power, squeezing out coal projects. Even in India. On 3 June 2017, Modi was photographed hugging French President Emmanuel Macron during an official visit to Paris where they both pledged to achieve emissions reductions beyond what their nations had promised under the Paris Agreement.

  According to an article in The Conversation231 on 9 June 2017, India is expecting to reach 40% renewables by 2027 instead of 2030 and is laying out aggressive plans for investments in solar and wind. India’s installed capacity for solar energy has tripled in the past three years to 12 GW and is expected to jump to 175 GW before 2030. It is, according to Forbes Magazine,232 because of Modi that Gujarat attracted investment in industries such as solar power offering a nearly 24-hour electricity statewide compared to, between 2011 and 2014, the country running a power deficit of up to 9%. From January 2016, the cost of producing utility-scale solar electricity in India fell from 4.34 rupees per kilowatt-hour in January 2016 to 2.44 rupees in May 2017, which makes it cheaper to produce than coal.

  Coal, however, accounts for almost 60% of India’s installed electricity generating capacity of 330 GW. Thermal energy power plants (those powered by coal) were cancelled by the Indian Government in Gujarat, Odisha and Uttar Pradesh with a combined capacity of almost 14 GW of power according to the article. It is, of course, still about money, but if the traditional power sources are more expensive, renewables surely will come into their own.

  Even Adani has joined the bandwagon. Adani Solar in Mundra is already operational and its Australian project – a 100–200 MW solar plant near Moranbah in the Bowen Basin is to begin its first phase in October 2018. In February 2018, eight renewable energy companies were short-listed in Newcastle (New South Wales) to put in tenders for a five MW solar farm on a former landfill site at the coal town. In Gladstone, Queensland, the place where so much environmental destruction has occurred in the past decade, five companies have been short-listed to tender for the job of developing an up to 450 MW renewable energy hub at the fossil fuel shipping port which is home to a 1680 MW coal-fired power station. It will be the largest electricity generator in Queensland.

  In our own backyard – the Whitsundays – plans are afoot for what is claimed to be Australia’s first co-operatively owned concentrated solar thermal power plant between the farmlands and the reef. Billed as ‘Not for Profit Public Power’, the SolReflection Concentrated Solar Thermal Power Plant is working on a sustainable model of renewable energy power stations that can be replicated by other communities Australia-wide.

  Renewable energy sources are expected to increase in Australia substantially with more than 49 projects either constructed, under construction, or having secured funding and proceeding to construction. Australia’s first Renewable Energy Index produced by Green Energy Markets,233 funded by GetUp, released its initial Report in August 2017. It estimated that in 2016 and 2017, Australia generated enough renewable energy to power 70% of the country’s households. A decade ago, renewables made up only about 7% of national electricity output. Once the wind and solar projects in the pipeline are complete at the end of 2018, enough energy should be generated to power 90% of the country’s homes according to the Index. This reduction is the carbon pollution equivalent of taking more than half of all cars in Australia off the roads, a major source of carbon emissions.

  Less than 2% of this renewable energy will come from large solar farms, which, the Reports states, means “the best is yet to come from this arm of the renewables industry which has an array of large-scale projects underway.”

  The Index notes that Queensland is taking its share of jobs from this new growth with 2625 jobs created by mid-2017 – a thousand more than the Adani spokesman had said in the Land and Environment Court in April 2015. The 46 large-scale energy projects that were under construction by July 2017, the Index stated, helped the renewable sector to employ 10,000 people full-time for a year. Most jobs were in New South Wales (3018), thanks largely to wind farms, while Queensland was next, with 70% of the renewable sector’s jobs (2625) coming from solar farms.

  As for the Great Barrier Reef, however, according to the scientists and environmentalists and our most famous of all commentators, David Attenborough, the predictions are dire. In spite of warnings from people like Attenborough that we should have acted back in the 1980s, countering fossil fuel is one major reason we are in the predicament we are in now.

  B
ack then, according to Oreskes and Conway in their 2010 book, Merchants of Doubt,234 when American scientists forecast to the powers that be in Washington that carbon dioxide levels would double in 50 years and would have major impacts on the planet, they were told to come back in 49 years. “But in forty-nine years it would be too late,” Oreskes and Conway wrote (p. 174). We would be ‘committed’ to the warming. Perhaps ‘sentenced’ might have been a better word.

  After writing this book, I still cannot understand why we have elected Governments who control our environmental future by making dangerous decisions for our planet. After the US 1978 National Climate Act, Oreskes and Conway note, Congress began looking into climate change and established a national climate research program. More research was needed. Good move. We could have been tackling the issue straight after the diagnosis. Instead today, the country historically responsible for more emissions than any other country in the world235 – the USA – walked away from the Paris climate deal in June 2017. The economists, however, won the debate when the scientists might have changed government policies way back then.

  The chapters in the ensuing 1983 ‘Changing Climate: Report of the Carbon Dioxide Assessment Committee’,236 ordered by the US Congress and written by natural scientists, mostly agreed that global warming would occur with serious physical and biological ramifications. One scientist, Roger Revelle, wrote about sea level rise and warned of the possible disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, which (p. 23) “would release about 2 million kms of ice before the remaining half of the ice sheet began to float.” The resulting worldwide rise in sea level would be between five and six metres. The likely result (p. 442): “The oceans would flood all existing port facilities and other low-lying coastal structures, extensive sections of the heavily farmed and densely populated river deltas of the world … and large areas of many of the world’s major cities.” Revelle warned that if temperature increases of 2°C to 3°C were reached by mid-century, thermal expansion alone would produce a 70 cm of sea level rise and a further two metres would occur by 2050 if the ice sheet began to fail.

  Ironically, the results from the most comprehensive study of the Antarctic have just been released. In June 2018, two studies from scientists in the UK and the USA, using satellites to collect data were both published in Nature magazine. One confirms that the Antarctic ice sheet has accelerated threefold in the last five years and is now vanishing faster than any other time on record and the second study found that unless urgent action is taken against global warming in the next decade, the melting ice could contribute more than 25 cm to a total global sea level rise of more than a metre by 2070. This would result in the collapse eventually of the entire West Antarctic ice sheet, which would result in a 3.5 metre sea level rise. Reported in The Guardian,237 one study found that before 2012, the Antarctic lost ice at a steady rate of 76 billion tonnes per year, but since then there had been a sharp increase with a loss of 219 billion tonnes of ice per year. The second study assesses the state of Antarctic in 2070 under two different scenarios – the first where urgent action on greenhouse gas emissions is taken and the second where emissions continue to rise unabated and the Antarctic is exploited for its natural resources. The study found that much of the change the continent had experienced already was irreversible.

  Blindly ignoring these calamitous predictions, back in the early 1980s, Oreskes and Conway wrote, the economists began by agreeing with all that had been said by the scientists, concluding, according to one of them, Yale economist, William Nordhaus, that the only solution was to impose “a large permanent carbon tax” but he added, “that would be hard to implement and enforce.”238

  “Rather than confront their own caveat that changes might happen much sooner than their model predicted – and thus be much more costly than prevention – the economists assumed that serious changes were so far off as to be essentially discountable,” the authors observed.

  Worse, in the final chapter of the 1983 Research Report, economist Thomas Schelling – much like the politicians I’ve encountered in the writing of this book – although agreeing that climate change was the real issue and the impact of carbon dioxide needed to be assessed with all sorts of “other climate-changing activities” such as dust, land use changes and natural variability – advised against making carbon dioxide the major focus. Schelling argued against controlling carbon dioxide.

  “It would be wrong to commit ourselves to the principle that if fossil fuels and carbon dioxide are where the problem arises, that must also be where the solution lies,” Schelling argued (in Oreskes and Conway, 2010, p. 179).

  Oreskes and Conway countered that Schelling’s attempt to ignore the cause of global warming was “equivalent to arguing that medical researchers shouldn’t try to cure cancer, because that would be too expensive, and in any case, people in the future might decide that dying from cancer is not so bad,” the authors observed (p. 180).

  That was almost 40 years ago. As those scientists predicted in 1979, the temperatures are warming mostly because of generated human carbon dioxide. Back then, there had been discussion about the cost of fossil fuels going up and so usage of these fuels would go down and this would permit conversion to alternative energy sources at a lower cumulative carbon dioxide concentration BUT – and here’s the message we well and truly knew 40 years ago – the sooner we begin the transition from fossil fuels, the easier the transition will be. Ironically, economists such as Schelling suggested this was a good reason to do nothing. Market forces, after all, would take care of it, so no need to regulate fossil fuels.

  Renewables worldwide are finally on the brink of being economically viable, without government subsidies, according to the IEA, so market forces have come into play. In the UK alone, an estimated £20 billion worth of wind and solar farms will be built without subsidies between now and 2030. But even if we are developing cheaper renewable energy as an alternative, is it all too late?

  As I wind up the writing of this book in mid-2018, an ‘upbeat’ story heads the news about a solution to the Reef’s demise. A ‘sun shield’239 50,000 times thinner than a human hair has been designed to sit at the surface of the water, directly above corals. The thin film is meant to be like an umbrella that blocks as much as 30% of the sun’s rays. The shield is biodegradable and is made of calcium carbonate, the same component that coral skeletons are made of. The project has been created by the University of Melbourne and the Australian Institute of Marine Science. Other projects from the same source include creating hybrids and growing multiple generations of the coral’s microscopic algae under heat-stress conditions – but they’ve not yet prevented bleaching.

  Other researchers are refining the cryopreservation process (snap-freezing) to produce algal seed banks with an option of flying planes across the more than 2000 kms of the Great Barrier Reef and spraying heat-tolerant symbionts240 across the bleached reefs. This is described as an aerial first-aid for corals. And the even older idea of covering the reef with a shadecloth is raised as something to consider for future ocean management plans. But how could we ever find one big enough?

  These kinds of geoengineering band aid solutions underline how desperate we are to right the wrongs. How much easier it would have been if we had done the right thing decades ago and kept fossil fuels in the ground.

  Denial and doubt are still doing a good trade. In March 2018, a glossy few pages on Lizard Island appear in The Australian in its Weekend Magazine: ‘What lies beneath?’241 The tone is light and bubbly and full of bustling reef photographs and beautiful metaphors from the journalist who also lists what she ate on the menu at the Resort. There’s no mention of its more recent catastrophic history. All is good. Of the 33 comments readers made at the end of the article, most of them criticise those who believe in climate change. “Told you, it’s fine,” is the general tone of the commentaries. “Much ado about nothing.”

  In June 2018, a report on the impacts on tourism of the 2016/17 bleaching events on the
Great Barrier Reef is handed down. Produced by Central Queensland University and the Reef & Rainforest Research Centre, the report has a sober analysis pointing to the fact that “the GBR is the key destination pull factor for international tourists in Cairns, Port Douglas and the Whitsundays”242 and “further coral bleaching may lead to a significant decline in international tourism, with resultant economic impacts.”243 It warns that “coral dependent tourism destinations are unprepared for a future decline in reef tourism.”244 The report includes research from the GBRMPA which states that “…. bleaching events are expected to increase in frequency and severity as a result of climate change.”245

  In May 2018, we embark on a homeward journey to the Whitsundays bringing our dark-blue hulled 54DS Jeanneau MiLady who has been shipped from Genoa from her faraway European home in Greece to another ancient continent, home to the world’s largest coral reef system. Lady Elliot Island is said to be the real beginning of the 2900 individual reefs and 900 islands that make up the 2300 km Great Barrier Reef. The island is described in our cruising guide as ‘an upturned saucer’. We first notice it about ten nautical miles away. Only around 46 nautical miles away is Gladstone, once a farming and tourist town, now branded far and wide through journalistic headlines as a poisonous relic of industrialisation.

  Later, we anchor in a massive lagoon at Lady Musgrave Island (like so much of the reef appropriated by a colonial namesake): 14 hectares of coral cay. An eight-nautical mile natural coral wall encircles us with its narrow entrance which is carefully charted by red and green channel markers. The evening light after our arrival is shimmering. Around us, the sea is calm, protected by the Great Barrier Reef. But at 4 am, our Four Women Wandjinas, a painting by Robyn Woolagoodja we bought from the Kimberleys five years ago, flickers in the red light from the saloon cabin. The women Wandjinas are our erstwhile harbingers of weather. Robyn is a cousin of Donny Woolagoodja, a Wororra elder responsible for the design and creation of Namarali, the king of the Wandjinas, a giant laser-projected Wandjina that towered five metres high over Sydney’s 2000 Olympic games. Wandjinas, according to Valda Blundell and Donny Woolagoodja’s 2015 book Keeping the Wandjinas Fresh are “the spirit in the cloud.”246