09 Nov 2009:
Australia Invests in World's
First Utility-Scale Wave Power Project
A UK-based renewable energy company has received a $61 million grant from the Australian government
to build the world’s first utility-scale wave power project. Ocean Power Technologies will begin construction of the 19-megawatt project in the waters off Victoria in 2010. The project will provide enough electricity to power 10,000 homes.
Wave technology uses buoys riding up and down on waves to drive an electrical generator, and then sends the power ashore via underwater cable. The project is part of a larger $218 million government investment in renewable energy that officials say will help Australia meet its goal of generating 20 percent of its electricity demands with renewable sources by 2020. The other projects receiving government funds include two geothermal projects and a mini-grid that coordinates wind, solar, biodiesel and storage technologies.
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29 Sep 2009:
Prolonged Drought and Salinity
Threaten Water Supplies in Australian City
Portions of Australia’s largest river are running so low and have become so salty because of a crippling drought and increased consumption that
the nation’s fifth-largest city may soon have to deliver bottled water to its residents. Government officials warn that some stretches of the Murray River could be
The Murray River
undrinkable by next week, particularly in 11 rural townships east of the city of Adelaide. Salinity levels in parts of the river already are higher than the World Health Organization’s recommended drinking water standard. Experts point to population growth, increased agriculture use, and
a decade-long drought as contributing factors. Officials with the Murray-Darling Basin Authority, which oversees water resources for southeast Australia, say water reserves in the region are at about 25 percent of normal levels. “Another dry year will deplete our reservoirs and the water in the Murray will become too saline to drink,” said South Australian MP David Winderlich. “We are talking about 1.3 million people who are not far off becoming reliant on bottled water.”
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17 Sep 2009:
NOAA Reports World’s Oceans
Had Warmest Summer Temeratures on Record
Surface temperatures of
the world’s oceans were warmer this summer than for any Northern Hemisphere summer since records were first kept in 1880, according to data released by the U.S.
NOAA
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. From June to August, ocean temperatures reached an average of 62.5° F worldwide, about 1.04° warmer than the 20th century average of 61.5°. NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center also reported that the average global land and ocean temperature for August was the second-warmest on record, behind only 1998. In August, the average global land surface temperature of 58.2° F was 1.33° above the 20th century average of 56.9°. While some areas, including the central United States, had cooler temperatures than average, large portions of the world's land mass had warmer temperatures than average, including both Australia and New Zealand, which had their warmest Augusts ever.
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16 Sep 2009:
Heat-Resistant Forests Could Reverse Warming in the Sahara, Study Says
Planting forests of quick-growing trees in the world’s most arid deserts and sustaining them with desalinated water from nearby oceans
would cool the regions significantly and draw down billions of tons of carbon dioxide, according to climate simulations being published in the journal
Climatic Change. The concept, proposed by cell biologist Leonard Ornstein of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, includes transporting desalinated water to parched deserts with aqueducts and pumps to support growth of such heat-resistant trees as eucalyptus. By watering the plants with drip irrigation, in which water is sent directly to the trees’ roots via plastic tubing, engineers could reduce water loss, says Ornstein, who calculated the climatic effects with NASA modelers. According to the models, planting heat-resistant trees in the Sahara Desert or the Australian outback could draw down about 8 billion tons of carbon annually. In the Sahara, temperatures in the forests could drop by as much as 8°C. The costs of building and running reverse-osmosis plants for desalination and transporting the water would be about $2 trillion per year. “Any solution to climate change has to be a multitrillion-dollar project,” Ornstein says. “The issue is what the payback is.”
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20 Aug 2009:
Australian Parliament Adopts
20 Percent Renewables Standard By 2020
Australia’s Parliament has passed a law requiring that
20 percent of the country’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2020, an increase from the current level of 8 percent. The standard, which matches the European Union’s, means that the households of all 21 million Australians could be powered by renewable energy in a decade. Green Party leaders said, however, that the standard should be 30 percent, and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong noted that even with the new renewable standard, the nation’s CO2 emissions are expected to be 20 percent above 2000 levels in 2020 because of the growth of the Australian economy. Meanwhile, a new report shows that electricity generated by renewable sources in the U.S. reached an all-time high in May, with
alternative energy accounting for 13 percent of total electrical generation. That’s 7.7 percent higher than May 2008, with most of the growth coming from wind and solar power. Hydropower remains the largest source of renewable energy, accounting for 9.4 percent of U.S. electricity production.
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29 Jul 2009:
Wave of Extinctions in Oceana
Habitat destruction, overfishing, and the spread of invasive species
now threaten a large number of species in Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific Islands with extinction, and governments must act quickly to create far more extensive parks and reserves on land and sea, according to a new study. An international team of 14 scientists combed through 24,000 scientific publications to put together a sobering picture of biodiversity loss across much of the southern Pacific Ocean. Published in the journal
Conservation Biology, the report said that more than 1,200 bird species have become extinct on southern Pacific islands in recent centuries, that 50 percent of Australia’s forest ecosystems have been modified or destroyed by agriculture and that nearly three-quarters of remaining forests have been degraded by logging, that habitat destruction accounts for 80 percent of all threatened species in Oceana, and that invasive species have caused 75 percent of all terrestrial vertebrate extinctions on the region’s islands. Among other measures, the scientists recommended setting aside 10 percent of terrestrial regions and 50 percent of marine areas as parks or reserves, as well as restoration of degraded ecosystems such as wetlands.
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18 May 2009:
Australia Introduces Plan
To Build World's Largest Solar Plant
The Australian government
plans to build the world’s largest solar power station, a 1,000-megawatt plant that would generate three times as much electricity as the world's largest solar electric plant, now located in California, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd announced. Preliminary plans call for the construction of four individual plants — two
solar thermal plants that use mirrors to focus the sun's heat on steam-generating pipes or towers and two plants that use photovoltaic cells. Over all, the proposed facility would cost about U.S. $1 billion, Rudd said, and would generate electricity equivalent to a large coal-fired power plant. Calling solar energy “Australia's biggest natural resource,” the prime minister said he hopes the plants will be the first in a network of solar installations across Australia, making the nation a global leader in solar power. Construction plans will be developed over the next six months and the government hopes to open the new solar power power station by 2015.
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04 May 2009:
Australia Delays Carbon Plan
Facing a global recession and stiff political opposition, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has
delayed by a year the start of an emissions trading scheme and also increased concessions to big polluters. Rudd announced that a plan to cap and trade CO2 emissions would begin in July 2011 instead of July 2010, thus starting the new regime after the next elections. Once the scheme is launched, Rudd said that the price of emitting a ton of carbon would be fixed for a year at the low-level of $7 U.S. per ton and that certain emissions-intensive industries that could be at a competitive disadvantage internationally would be able to pay less for CO2 permits for a “finite period.” Rudd pledged that if an international agreement on fighting climate change is reached in Copenhagen in December, Australia would vow to make even greater cuts in its greenhouse gases, reducing them by 25 percent below 2000 levels by 2020. But if no agreement is reached, Australia will only commit to cutting emissions by 5 to 15 percent, Rudd said.
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09 Feb 2009:
Lethal Fires, Drought
Focus Australian Action on Climate
With the death toll from Australia’s wildfires surpassing 170, climate scientists and environmentalists are urging the government to recognize the link between the blazes and climate change and to
act more forcefully to curb greenhouse gas emissions.The recent fires in southern Victoria, caused in part by years of prolonged drought and a record heat wave, have prompted green groups to call on Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to vow to cut the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 25 percent by 2020; Rudd has set a target of CO2 emissions cuts of 5 percent by 2020, with possible reductions of 15 percent if a global climate change agreement is reached. Leading climate scientist Kevin Hennessy said that should temperatures in Australia continue to rise — some researchers have predicted that parts of the country could see increases of 3 C (5.4 F) by 2050 — the rich agricultural land of southern Australia will experience even more severe drought. The Green Party's Christine Milne said Australia must prepare to adapt to a hotter world, adding, “Over the last few days, we Australians have looked our own future in the face.”
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15 Dec 2008:
Australia Sets CO2 Targets;
Critics Say Emissions Cuts Are Too Low
Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has promised
to reduce the country’s greenhouse gas emissions 5 to 15 percent by 2020, prompting criticism from environmentalists that the targets are too low and that the plan offers too many exemptions to industries to continue releasing CO2. Under the plan, Australian emissions could be reduced by as much as 15 percent below 2000 levels if a global greenhouse gas reduction agreement is reached next year in Copenhagen; the European Union last week approved a plan to reduce emissions 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. The Australian plan would create a cap-and-trade program
Kevin Rudd
in 2010 under which industries must steadily reduce emissions and purchase permits to release greenhouse gases. However, Rudd’s plan offers major emissions exemptions for iron and aluminum producers and the agricultural sector, and promises billions of dollars in compensation to the coal-fired power industry. Environmentalists roundly condemned Rudd’s plan, saying the proposed cuts by 2020 are too modest. “You could say the decision came down to a choice between the environment and the economy and at this stage it looks like the economy has won,” said one critic.
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14 Nov 2008:
New Zealand Airline To Test Jumbo Jet Fueled By Jatropha Nuts
Air New Zealand and Boeing will test a jumbo jet powered in part by oil extracted from jatropha trees. The Air New Zealand flight,
scheduled to depart Auckland Dec. 3, will use a 50-50 combination of jet fuel and jatropha nut oil harvested in Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania. Rob Fyfe, chief executive of the airline, called it “the next logical step in our efforts to further save fuel and reduce aircraft emissions.” If successful, it would be the second flight to use biofuels this year. In February, Virgin Atlantic completed a flight using 20 percent biofuel made from coconut oil and babassu palm oil. Environmental groups called the New Zealand campaign helpful, but cited concerns, including the impact on food supplies and habitat destruction. “The amount of jatropha that would be needed to power the world’s entire aviation sector cannot be produced in anything like a sustainable way,” said Robin Oakley, head of Greenpeace UK’s climate change campaign, “and even if large volumes could be grown, planes are an incredibly wasteful way of using it.”
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10 Jul 2008:
Australian Drought Expected to Worsen and Alter River Basin Ecology
Australia’s worst drought in 100 years, which has already cost the nation $20 billion dollars since 2002, is likely to
become even more severe and cause permanent ecological changes in the country’s breadbasket, the Murray-Darling river basin, government officials said. Rice, grapes, and other irrigated crops will be hit hard by the parched June inflows in the basin, which are the lowest in a century, as well as by the 60-70 percent chance of below-average rainfall in the next ten years. Wheat, which relies on rainfall at specific times rather than irrigation, will do better, and due to autumn showers, wheat harvests this year may double the meager 10 million tons of the last two years. And farmers are proving themselves flexible: By switching to more efficient watering systems, they kept last year’s grape harvest up, despite the drought.
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10 Jun 2008:
Facing Severe Drought,
World’s Largest Cattle Ranch Retrenches
Australia’s Anna Creek station, which is larger than Israel, has sold half of its 16,000 head of cattle for slaughter and is moving the rest to other grazing lands
in the face of the country’s worst drought in a century.
The managing director of the company that owns the ranch in the southern Australian outback said this is only the third time since the European settlement of southern Australia that the region has experienced such a drought. Much of Australia has been suffering from the “Big Dry,” which has sharply reduced wheat and rice harvests.
In New Zealand, that nation’s prime minister has called on citizens to cut back on energy use because
a two-year drought has lowered water levels in lakes to the point that the hydroelectric sector, which provides about 75 percent of the country’s electricity, is having difficulty meeting demand.
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