Zero Emissions: It’s Simple!
Denial and half-baked proposals for action constitute much of the debate about climate change in this country. There are, however, creative people quietly going about providing real solutions to the challenge. In this article, Brad Schultz outlines a well-developed plan for meeting our energy needs without producing carbon emissions.
As a young boy, I was inspired by things that people built. I was amazed how radios operated, how computers got faster and clearly remember one day walking through one of the cooling towers at Tarong Power Station, Kingaroy, and thinking “Wow!” I marveled at its grandness.
I’ve been an Engineer for over ten years now and I’ve gradually, sometimes nervously, come to see how such “grandness” is also a part of humankind’s undoing. While the media may have you believe that there is still a debate as to the science of climate change, those in the science community itself have long moved on to assessing the impacts of climate change.
Although it took me some time to reach the point where I’ve accepted the academic reality of climate change and that it would probably be calamitous, it took me a little longer to accept it at an emotional level. Last year, after reading Clive Hamilton’s not exactly ‘chipper’ book, Requiem for a Species, I finally accepted a reality that was grim and depressing.
The level of debate in Australia remains discouraging to say the least. The proverbial freight train has already started to plough into us, as evidenced in the increasing intensity of fires, floods and droughts. But some people remain either involved in the faux-debate as to whether the freight train exists at all, or suggest that by taking a couple of steps further along the proverbial track we may avoid calamity. Luckily, it was around this time that a bright light shone through that hubris: a plan called ‘Zero Carbon Australia’ was released.
The Zero Carbon Australia plan has leap-frogged the pathetic level of public debate and answered two key questions. Firstly, “what does the science say we need to do to have a high chance of minimising climate change?” Secondly, “how can we achieve that change using existing technology?”
It was as simple as that. Well, not so simple in practice.
The solution is the result of several years of hard work by Beyond Zero Emissions – a sizable team of largely volunteer engineers, scientists and others – working with researchers at the University of Melbourne’s Energy Research Institute.
The plan takes as its starting point a widely accepted premise put forward by Professor Hans Joachim Schellnhuber from the Potsdam Institute in Germany. This premise specifies a carbon budget for the world between now and 2050 which gives us a 67% chance of avoiding two degrees of warming. Based on this carbon budget being equitable amongst people everywhere, and given Australia’s world-beating per capita emissions today, this gives Australia a scant ten years to bring our emissions levels down to zero. You won’t hear that goal touted by any politicians.
The first part of the Zero Carbon Australia plan which was released in July 2010, outlines how Australia will produce its electricity without emitting any carbon dioxide. The main technologies involved are wind power, concentrated solar thermal power with storage as well as a large range of energy efficiency measures.
Wind power is the most technologically mature renewable energy available. Concentrated solar thermal has been proven in the USA for more than 20 years and is currently being rolled out on a large scale in Spain as well as seeing a renaissance in the USA. This is the energy that can reliably supply base-load power to our nation.
Before you start to say “It can’t be done,” the plan is modeled to supply Australia’s energy needs based on real wind and sunlight data taken at various locations around the country. Also quantified are the materials, people and skills required to build it. That’s where this story gets even better: this plan will create a peak workforce of around 140,000 jobs, with 40,000 of those continuing in the operation and maintenance of the plants. That dwarfs the 20,000 jobs currently involved in the domestic fossil fuel industry.
To make this plan a reality, the finance required would be around $37 billion to be invested per year for 10 years; that’s about 3% of our GDP. Australia currently spends around $40 billion per year on insurance, and $20 billion on gambling. It would seem to be a pretty poor bet to insure your house without insuring the climate on which it depends.
Pulling our weight in terms of avoiding dangerous climate change is only the first of many plusses. Producing our own energy removes our dependence on foreign oil, and avoids the $1.2 trillion we are set to spend on it over the next 30 years. It eliminates the problems of coal seam gas and the damages it will do to lives and the environment as it takes more and more viable farmland and plays Russian roulette with our ground water.
Implementing the plan would position Australia as a world leader in this field. As we need to be able to contribute something to a world weaned from our coal reserves, then building skills in renewable energies is a good bet. Finally, this plan is based only on currently commercially available technologies, without accounting for innovation, something which humans are good at and something that will always happen. In that regard it could actually be construed as a worst-case scenario for what it would take to decarbonise our economy.
I’m no longer depressed about the level of climate change debate and I’m back to being the kid going “Wow” and marveling at a new “grandness” of human achievement. I’m getting out into the community and telling everyone about these inspiring and achievable answers to a question long bogged down in the mire of its own confusion. And I’m getting on with contributing to ongoing research into the other parts of the Zero Carbon Australia plan that will be released over the coming months and decade.
Brad Schultz is a volunteer for Beyond Zero Emissions and a Mechatronic Engineer who works as an Energy Specialist reducing energy use in large commercial buildings. More information on Beyond Zero Emissions and the Zero Carbon Australia plan can be found at www.beyondzeroemissions.org. Brad and other volunteers are available to present the details of the plan to interested groups.
Hey Brad – great to see you championing the cause! Keep up the awesome work, and very well said.
Sir, this is a refreshing essay about the lamentable state of Australian politics; the narrow-gauge railway line of our two policitical parties pinned together by the hard-wood sleepers of pragmatism, lack of vision, mediocrity, prejudice, clichés and knee-jerk policies. The line grubs across the political landscape bending to each rise and curve, and being low to the ground, offers no elevated perspective but a ground hog view. We are not inspired to Blue Mountain lofty ideals, long and challenging vistas after which the citizens of our girt-by-sea Nation-City-State can strive. We look at the end of a three year electoral cycle as through a proctoscope to spy the pessimism of more waste and self-interest.
As far as the biosphere is concerned, we are the condemned man in the cell awaiting dawn but all we see through our barred window is the dark sky’s red blush and the morning’s crows and not the trap or noose beyond the door.
Our policital and social life is the domain of the few media nabobs whose reporter-hacks have no knowledge of scientific method or the subtleties of anything more than a seven second grab while catering for a level of 8th grade English and the punch line at the end of tree hundred words of tedious syncopated prose.
Our political masters are mostly lawyers with good connections or otherwise child prodigy apparatchiks. There are but few science graduate or doctors in government to solve the medical and scientific challenges of a diminished and degraded planet. The Australian populace is governed by a second rate oligarchy; a Bunyip Aristocracy who would solve the nations problems by bread and circuses mentality eg burrowing tunnels like mindless wombats under Brisbane to carry cars and trucks rather than an underground metro that Paris and London had before we were a federation.
Let’s rape the earth beneath our feet by extracting coal-seam gas to destroy our aquifers and turn rich farmland into a scene from Mad Max while our oceans acidify some more and the fishes die. Make more gas so we can burn more carbon. Convert the late Cretaceous into the Late Technocene Epoch.
The main innovations in terms of changing human ecological sympathies come from men and women and boys and girls; from Everyman. It springs up from the grass roots like Food Connect and mother’s milk and people with green hearts and a desire to pass on more than a dry paddock to their grandchildren. The vision and change comes not from the rabble and moronic antics of a parliamentary Question Time or from political commissars born on the Tower of Techno-babble or dancing like an organ grinder’s monkey to the cigar-puffing magnate with the biggest cheque book. Play on organ grinder while I have peanuts to feed your monkey.
We need visionaries to lead us; Moses in our Wilderness lest our Promise Land remain a Land of Unkept Promises.
The word denial is disgusting. No room for it.
Matt, don’t be so thin skinned. I’ve been called a warmist, a catastrophist, an alarmist and a fascist. I recognise these are labels of convenience, and tools for propaganda.
If you have a critisicm of the substance of the article, we’d like to hear it.