Pledge to ditch renewables target could cost Guy in sandbelt: poll

Matthew Guy's determination to scrap Victoria's renewable energy target will cost him votes in some of Melbourne's most marginal electorates and reduce his prospects of becoming premier, a poll has found.

The Macarthur wind farm in western Victoria. The Victorian
 government has set a target of 40 per cent renewables by 2025.

A clear majority of voters surveyed in the four swinging "sandbelt" seats of Bentleigh, Mordialloc, Carrum and Frankston in Melbourne's south-east supported moves to boost the proportion of wind and solar power generated in Victoria at the expense of coal.

A ReachTel poll of almost 3000 people in the four electorates found there is strong support for the Andrews government’s ambitious renewable energy target of 25 per cent by 2020 and 40 per cent by 2025.

Read Adam Carey’s story from The Age - “Pledge to ditch renewables target could cost Guy in sandbelt: poll.”

Emotional toll of covering climate change in the Trump era

Andrew Freedman - becoming
a dad brought an urgency to
his reporting on climate change.

I never found covering climate change to be difficult on an emotional level until two years ago. When I became a father.

Suddenly, projections of temperature changes in 2050 were more real. Where I used to be able to dismiss them as time periods when I wouldn't be around anymore, or be old enough not to care so much, now, those years were a pertinent reality.

Now, there's this adorable creature, full of hope, joy, and temper tantrums, who has no idea how screwed up his future might be due to decisions we're making today.

Since then, I've doubled down on the beat, with grit and determination. But then came November. The election of Donald J. Trump sent me into a temporary tailspin.

What does this mean for my son's future, and what does this mean for my profession right now?

In short: Nothing good.

Read the Mashable Australia story by Andrew Freedman – “Emotional toll of covering climate change in theTrump era.”

ARENA dips into wave energy

ARENA CEO,
Ivor Frischknecht.

The Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA) is providing $181,000 funding to support Bombora Wave Power (Bombora) to complete a detailed cost of energy study for its Wave Energy Convertor (WEC).

Bombora’s WEC design uses a responsive rolling membrane fitted to a long concrete arm resting on the sea floor. The membrane pressurises air, which is passed through a turbine to generate electricity.

ARENA CEO Ivor Frischknecht said harnessing energy from the ocean required determination, ingenuity and time.

Read the ARENA release - “New study to uncover wave energy costs.”

Humanity needs to replicate tenacity, innovation, determination, inventiveness, commitment adaptation and damn sheer hard work to escape this dilemma

H

uman tenacity, innovation, determination, inventiveness, commitment adaptation and damn sheer hard work have allowed us to build an earthly superstructure that we now discover rests on massively inadequate foundations.

Responding from innate human needs we built from the ground up, but lacking vision at the time we were unable to comprehend that this human experiment would become so grand that its demands would outstrip earth’s natural recovery abilities and seriously disturb its equilibrium.

Humanity was for millennia simply another life form that plodded about the planet competing with others for space and resources upon which they depended until its inherent desire to know, understand and exploit whatever it found, led to the unlocking of fossil fuel energy, bringing on the Industrial Revolution and, in the last 200 years or so, the drip-feed of disaster that has measurably unsettled earth’s atmosphere.

Aided by the abundant amounts of apparently free energy in fossil fuels, our wants quickly overtook our needs and grandiose dreams replaced more utilitarian goals of simply answering our necessities.

The unsettling of earth’s atmosphere, measured in tiny numbers, but illustrated through large, complex and difficult outcomes, can only be addressed if we are able to re-apply those qualities that got us to where we are, but with a different intent.

The commitment it took to get us to where we are today was unquestionably impressive, but will we be able to replicate that commitment to extricate ourselves from this present dilemma.

An event in Melbourne earlier this week illustrates that our commitment will probably fall well short of what is needed.

The event, “Climate Change: What happens after the Paris conference?” at the 200-seat Village Roadshow theatrette at the State Library was booked out within two days of being announced.

Organizers, Melbourne’s Grattan Institute and the Melbourne Energy Institute quickly organized a waiting list, which equally quickly blew out to 300 names, but it was at this point the commitment of people died.

The event went ahead as scheduled, but the official count of the audience was 160, illustrating that 40 of those who had pre-booked had decided something more important needed attending to, and the 300 on the waiting list simply missed out on what was an illuminating and educative session.

The speakers were the Energy and Program Director at the Grattan Institute, Tony Wood; the lead secretary, Strategy and Planning at the Department of Economic Development, Anthea Harris; and the Professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Melbourne’s School of Earth Sciences, David Karoly, while the moderator was the Environment Editor from the Melbourne Age, Tom Arup.