3 November 2017, Climate Home: Australian state premier promises to veto funding for giant Adani coal mine. Prospects of massive Indian-owned coal development take a dip after Queensland Labor leader makes surprise announcement. The future of the giant Adani Carmichael coal mine in northern Australian – considered a “carbon timebomb” by opponents – may be decided by a state election this month after the local premier shocked observers by pledging to block a A$900 million loan considered vital for it to go ahead. At a snap media conference late on Friday, Queensland Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk reversed her previous support for Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s application for a concessional Australian government loan to pay for rail line from the outback mine site to a coastal port. She said she would exercise the state government’s power of veto over any loan after learning of rumours circulating about the role her partner had played in the proposed mine’s approval. The announcement comes amid heated political debate in Australia and the Pacific region over the proposal to create one of the world’s biggest coal mines in the Queensland outback. Adani says the fully developed Carmichael mine, to be developed in the state’s north about 340 kilometres south-west of Townsville, would produce up to 60 million tonnes of coal annually for 60 years. It plans to export the coal to burn in its Indian power plants. It would increase Australia’s coal exports by up to 30%. Read More here
Category Archives: The Mitigation Battle
3 November 2017, Climate Home: Australian state premier promises to veto funding for giant Adani coal mine. Prospects of massive Indian-owned coal development take a dip after Queensland Labor leader makes surprise announcement. The future of the giant Adani Carmichael coal mine in northern Australian – considered a “carbon timebomb” by opponents – may be decided by a state election this month after the local premier shocked observers by pledging to block a A$900 million loan considered vital for it to go ahead. At a snap media conference late on Friday, Queensland Labor premier Annastacia Palaszczuk reversed her previous support for Indian billionaire Gautam Adani’s application for a concessional Australian government loan to pay for rail line from the outback mine site to a coastal port. She said she would exercise the state government’s power of veto over any loan after learning of rumours circulating about the role her partner had played in the proposed mine’s approval. The announcement comes amid heated political debate in Australia and the Pacific region over the proposal to create one of the world’s biggest coal mines in the Queensland outback. Adani says the fully developed Carmichael mine, to be developed in the state’s north about 340 kilometres south-west of Townsville, would produce up to 60 million tonnes of coal annually for 60 years. It plans to export the coal to burn in its Indian power plants. It would increase Australia’s coal exports by up to 30%. Read More here
1 November 2017, The Guardian, Fossil fuel companies undermining Paris agreement negotiations – report. Global negotiations seeking to implement the Paris agreement have been captured by corporate interests and are being undermined by powerful forces that benefit from exacerbating climate change, according to a report released ahead of the second meeting of parties to the Paris agreement – COP23 – next week. The report, co-authored by Corporate Accountability, uncovers a litany of ways in which fossil fuel companies have gained high-level access to negotiations and manipulated outcomes. It highlights a string of examples, including that of a negotiator for Panama who is also on the board of a corporate peak body that represents carbon traders such as banks, polluters and brokers. It also questions the role of the world’s biggest polluters in sponsoring the meetings in return for access to high-level events. The report argues that as a result of the corporate influence, outcomes of negotiations so far have been skewed to favour the interests of the world’s biggest corporate polluters over those of the majority of the world’s population that live in the developing world. It finds that influence has skewed outcomes on finance, agriculture and technology. Read more here
18 October 2017, The Conversation, The government’s energy policy hinges on some tricky wordplay about coal’s role. The most important thing to understand about the federal government’s new National Energy Guarantee is that it is designed not to produce a sustainable and reliable electricity supply system for the future, but to meet purely political objectives for the current term of parliament. Those political objectives are: to provide a point of policy difference with the Labor Party; to meet the demands of the government’s backbench to provide support for coal-fired electricity; and to be seen to be acting to hold power prices down. Meeting these objectives solves Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s immediate political problems. But it comes at the cost of producing a policy that can only produce further confusion and delay. The government’s central problem is that, as well as being polluting, coal-fired power is not well suited to the problem of increasingly high peaks in power demand, combined with slow growth in total demand. Coal-fired power plants are expensive to start up and shut down, and are therefore best suited to meeting “baseload demand” – that is, the base level of electricity demand that never goes away. Until recently, this characteristic of coal was pushed by the government as the main reason we needed to maintain coal-fired power. The opposite of baseload power is “dispatchable” power, which can be turned on and off as needed. Classic sources of dispatchable power include hydroelectricity and gas, while recent technological advances mean that large-scale battery storageis now also a feasible option. Coal-fired plants can be adapted to be “load-following” which gives them some flexibility in their output. But this requires expensive investment and reduces the plants’ operating life. The process is particularly ill-suited to the so-called High Efficiency, Low Emissions (HELE) plants being pushed as a solution to the other half of the policy problem, reducing carbon dioxide emissions. Read More here