Adani mine 'a financial house of cards' as coal meets its Kodak moment | ABC

The woman who led the world to a global climate change agreement has a message for Australia: "You really do have to see that we are at the Kodak moment for coal."

Christiana Figueres, until last year the executive director of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, doesn't mean happy snaps for the family album.

Rather, the decimation of the once dominant photographic company Kodak by digital change — in the same way that coal-fired power is being eclipsed by renewable energy.

She hopes to see coal, like those sentimental moments in time captured in photographs, confined to history — with the world remembering the contribution the fossil fuel has made to human development, while recognising the need to retire it as a fuel source because of its contribution to global warming.

And, she says, it's happening.

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A Time Machine for Climate Risk: bringing the future forward with 2˚C scenario analysis | Carbon Tracker

It has been two years since the Bank of England’s Governor, Mark Carney, cautioned London’s insurance industry and the world’s capital markets concerning the “catastrophic impacts of climate change [that] will be felt beyond the traditional horizons of most actors”.[1]

Since then, Carney’s message has been echoed by a string of financial regulators. Under his chairmanship, the Financial Stability Board established a Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (hereafter Task Force), which scrutinised the ways in which the adverse impacts from climate change might ripple across sectors to become “systemic.”

The Task Force concluded that a key forward-looking tool is scenario analysis and recommended that companies analyse the potential business impacts from a reference scenario that results in a global average warming of 2°C or lower.

Companies’ scenario analyses are now entering the market and a two-day conference on the subject hosted last week by the Bank of England and the Task Force indicates the significance of issue for the financial community. Here, we explore how the use of 2°C scenario analysis by fossil fuel companies can be made useful for investors and regulators.

Read more or download the report here.

Ice Apocalypse | Grist

In a remote region of Antarctica known as Pine Island Bay, 2,500 miles from the tip of South America, two glaciers hold human civilization hostage.

Stretching across a frozen plain more than 150 miles long, these glaciers, named Pine Island and Thwaites, have marched steadily for millennia toward the Amundsen Sea, part of the vast Southern Ocean. Further inland, the glaciers widen into a two-mile-thick reserve of ice covering an area the size of Texas.

There’s no doubt this ice will melt as the world warms. The vital question is when.  More

India's Electricity Sector Transformation | IEEFA

IEEFA's latest report entails a comprehensive analysis of India’s electricity sector transformation with a focus on the coming decade.  

The report presents a sectoral model out to FY2027 that predicts dramatic market share gain by renewable energy with a sustained deflation in renewable tariffs, premised on 50% reduction already in last two years with a record low solar energy tariff of Rs2.44/kWh (US$38/MWh) in 2017. 

With record low renewable tariffs of US$18 and US$21/MWh set in Mexico and Chile respectively this past week, further Indian cost reductions are set to continue. This translates into likely peak power sector coal usage not more than 10% above the current levels by FY2027, subsequently, import thermal coal demand in India will continue to decline as a result. 

A combination of India’s ambitious energy policy and ongoing solar and wind energy tariff deflation will enable India to catalyse US$200-300Bn of investment in renewable energy infrastructure over the coming decade. Improvements in energy efficiency and reduction in technical and commercial losses will deliver better electricity production per coal tonnage. To conclude, the transformation will ensure India can support its economic growth while keeping GHG emissions in check.

Acciona aims to more than double Australian renewables capacity | AFR

The global head of energy at Acciona, the world's biggest green utility, is undeterred by the uncertainty of Australia's future energy and climate policy and is earmarking about $600 million for new solar, wind and storage plants over the next three to four years. More

New Finkel report finds no need to panic about energy storage | Renew Economy

A new report into energy storage commissioned by chief scientist Alan Finkel highlights the enormous opportunities for storage in Australia, but underlines how little is actually needed over the short to medium term, even at relatively high levels of wind and solar.

The report, The role of Energy Storage in Australia’s Future Energy Supply Mix, funded by Finkel’s office and the Australian Council of Learned Academies (ACOLA), says the required investment in energy security and reliability over the next five-10 years will be minimal (see graph above), even if wind and solar deployment moves far beyond levels contemplated by the Energy Security Board.  More

World’s biggest sovereign wealth fund proposes ditching oil and gas holdings | The Guardian

The Norwegian central bank, which runs the country’s sovereign wealth fund – the world’s biggest – has told its government it should dump its shares in oil and gas companies, in a move that could have significant consequences for the sector.

Norges Bank, which manages Norway’s $1tn fund, said ministers should take the step to avoid the fund’s value being hit by a permanent fall in the oil price.

The fund was built on the back of Norway’s hydrocarbon wealth, and around 300bn krone (£27.73bn), or 6%, is invested in oil and gas companies.

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China Is Over Coal, Bored With Oil as It Charts Green Future | Bloomberg

The world’s worst polluter is leading the clean energy revolution, according to the International Energy Agency.

China will account for a third of new wind and solar power installations and 40 percent of electric vehicle investments through 2040, the Paris-based agency said Tuesday in its World Energy Outlook. Meanwhile, the country’s coal use peaked four years ago and it will cede its role as the driver of global oil demand to India after 2025.  More

'Political watershed' as 19 countries pledge to phase out coal | The Guardian

A new alliance of 19 nations committed to quickly phasing out coal has been launched at the UN climate summit in Bonn, Germany. It was greeted as a “political watershed”, signalling the end of the dirtiest fossil fuel that currently provides 40% of global electricity.

New pledges were made on Thursday by Mexico, New Zealand, Denmark and Angola for the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which is led by the UK and Canada.

“The case against coal is unequivocal,” said UK climate minister Claire Perry, both on environmental and health grounds – air pollution from coal kills 800,000 people a year worldwide. “The alliance will signal to the world that the time of coal has passed.” The UK was the first nation to commit to ending coal use – by 2025 – but the electricity generated by coal has already fallen from 40% to 2% since 2012.  More

Natural gas has no climate benefit and may make things worse | Faster

In fact, a shocking new study concludes that just the methane emissions escaping from New Mexico’s gas and oil industry are “equivalent to the climate impact of approximately 12 coal-fired power plants.” If the goal is to avoid catastrophic levels of warming, a recent report by U.K. climate researchers finds “categorically no role” to play for new natural gas production.

Back in 2014, a comprehensive Stanford study published in Science concluded “A review of more than 200 earlier studies confirms that U.S. emissions of methane are considerably higher than official estimates. Leaks from the nation’s natural gas system are an important part of the problem.”  More

Medibank to dump holdings in fossil fuels over climate change health fears | SMH

Climate action group 350.org Australia said the Medibank decision was critical in the absence of strong federal government action on the issue.

"At a time when we are seeing no federal leadership on climate change, Medibank's decision to drop polluting, high-carbon investments, and instead invest in low carbon alternatives, shows that the health sector is stepping up to fill the void," chief executive Blair Palese said.

"By citing the health impacts of climate change as the driving reason for its decision, Medibank has shown that moving from fossil fuels not only can be done, but must be done to protect customers, our environment and to mitigate risk."

HSBC Commits $100 Billion to Combat Climate Change | The Independent

South Australia experiences dramatic fall in energy costs after gas deal | The Guardian

15,000 Scientists Who Issued the Bleak 'Second Notice' to Humanity Say These 9 Steps May Save Us | Fortune

“By failing to adequately limit population growth, reassess the role of an economy rooted in growth, reduce greenhouse gases, incentivize renewable energy, protect habitat, restore ecosystems, curb pollution, halt defaunation, and constrain invasive alien species, humanity is not taking the urgent steps needed to safeguard our imperiled biosphere.”

The Trump administration just published a major report saying 'there is no convincing alternative explanation' for climate change | Business Insider

The Trump Administration just released a report that says there’s strong evidence for ‘continuing, rapid, human-caused warming of the global atmosphere and ocean.’

The scientific report is required by law, and must be submitted to Congress once every four years.

The findings conflict with the climate change-denying language President Trump and many of his advisors have used, but the results align with what scientists have been documenting for years.

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Exxon Quietly Researching Hundreds of Green Projects | Bloomberg

One of the world’s biggest oil companies is working on hundreds of low-carbon energy projects, from algae engineered to bloom into biofuels and cells that turn emissions into electricity.

The work by Exxon Mobil Corp. includes research on environmentally-friendly technologies in five to 10 key areas, according to Vice President of Research and Development Vijay Swarup. While any commercial breakthrough is at least a decade away, Exxon’s support for clean energy suggests the world’s most valuable publicly-traded oil company is looking toward the possibility of a future where fossil fuels are less dominant.

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New NASA Maps Have Very Bad News For Greenland's Melting Glaciers | Inverse

Nestled between the Arctic and Atlantic oceans is Greenland, a slab of ice and rock that has caused more controversy than one might expect from the least densely populated country in thew world. For a long time, the Mercator map misrepresented Greenland as a giant land mass almost as big as Africa, but a 1970s reassessment cut it down to size, showing that it’s actually only about one-fourteenth of the continent’s area.

Now, in a cruel coincidence, new NASA maps show that Greenland is actually — physically — shrinking, and it’s happening at a much quicker pace than scientists once thought.

On Wednesday, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of NASA scientists together with collaborators from over 30 institutions published the most accurate high-resolution maps of Greenland’s bedrock and coastal seafloor, using data from NASA’s OMG campaign — short for Ocean Melting Greenland, but apt for describing its scary findings. The maps revealed some terrible news for the country’s 54,100 inhabitants: While scientists had long known that some of the glaciers comprising the icy landmass were melting because of climate change, it now appears that up to four times the original number of glaciers are under threat.

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Greenhouse gas concentrations surge to new record | World Meteorological Organization

Concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere surged at a record-breaking speed in 2016 to the highest level in 800 000 years, according to the World Meteorological Organization's Greenhouse Gas Bulletin. The abrupt changes in the atmosphere witnessed in the past 70 years are without precedent.

Globally averaged concentrations of CO2 reached 403.3 parts per million in 2016, up from 400.00 ppm in 2015 because of a combination of human activities and a strong El Niño event. Concentrations of CO2 are now 145% of pre-industrial (before 1750) levels, according to the Greenhouse Gas Bulletin.

Rapidly increasing atmospheric levels of CO2 and other greenhouse gases have the potential to initiate unprecedented changes in climate systems, leading to “severe ecological and economic disruptions,” said the report.

Climate change is much, much worse than we thought, study finds | The Independent

The research challenges the ways that researchers have worked out sea temperatures until now, meaning that they may be increasing quicker than previously suggested.

The methodology widely used to understand sea temperatures in the scientific community may be based on a mistake, the new study suggests, and so our understanding of climate change might be fundamentally flawed.

The new research suggests that the oceans hundreds of millions of years ago were much cooler than we thought. If true, that means that the global warming we are currently undergoing is unparalleled within the last 100 million years, and far worse than we had previously calculated.

The published research paper can be found here.

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Germany set to pay customers for electricity usage | The Independent

German power producers are poised to pay customers to use electricity this weekend. 

Wind generation is forecast to climb to a record on Sunday, creating more output than needed and driving electricity prices below zero, broker data compiled by Bloomberg show. It would be the first time this year that the average price for a whole day is negative, not just for specific hours.

Germany’s grid operators can struggle to keep the balance between how much energy people are using and how much is being produced when there are high amounts of wind generation. Negative prices mean that producers must either shut down power stations to reduce supply or pay consumers to take the electricity off the grid.

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