Port Grocer

Please excuse the time since I've last posted on this blog. Around that point, I took the skills I'd learned in ten years of fast fashion sport retail to a new project more in line with the values that I've been writing about here: a not-for-profit social enterprise grocery store in the somewhat downtrodden and de-industrialised suburb of Port Kembla. You can learn more about Port Grocer on our Facebook page.

 

Port has been going through something of a cultural revival over the last decade, and a business which sets out to do groceries and essential goods differently - keeping our packaging and food waste footprints as small as possible along the way - has been the right idea at the right time in many ways, but it has also been a massive challenge to get it up and running, especially during a pandemic. 

I've always liked sorting out and properly disposing of waste in my old workplaces, to the point where people thought I was wasting my time. Here I'm in charge of doing just that - and developing bin systems in the store, so our team of a handful of paid staff and around 30 volunteers can get food from paddock to plate while keeping our waste footprint as small as possible. It's a small thing and we're still less than 6 months into trade, but I'm pretty proud of what we've done!

One particular part of the project that I have been organising is our Library of Things. The idea is simple - take common household appliances or power tools that are expensive to own, take up space, collect dust and often end up in landfill without having done much to justify the emissions and labour that went into making them, and instead make a communal library of them. Unlike a hire shop, we are built with communal access, environmental benefits and facilitating people to make do with less in mind from the get go. 

The idea is simple but at the same time it runs at odds to most of our society's impulses, and our initial uptake has been slow. If you're local to the Illawarra and would like to browse our library, check out the catalogue here. Membership is $25 for six months. </endspiel>

Anyway, regularly scheduled content on here will resume soon. What time I have been making for writing, I have been dedicating to more creative historical fiction. I did even attempt to tackle NaNoWriMo, although my head of steam really only lasted for a week or so, until I ran into a conundrum and felt like starting over - but I have still been learning a lot about the issues of food waste and climate change which I'm itching to write about!

SuperMarkets - or, you're doing it right

"The propaganda is strong," Youtuber friendlyjordies tells us in a video extolling the power of switching superannuation to fight climate change. "We've all been sold a big lie."

Unfortunately, he is selling a big lie himself - that market mechanisms can do the job of averting climate change. Or, as he put it later in said video: "the platitude that 'you vote with your wallet' is actually true."

It's not.

friendlyjordies in said video, singing the praises of an Adani-loving government

This post is a follow-up to my 1.5c lifestyle challenge one analysing how much impact switching bank can make - and as I make it clear there, I have personally already switched my super (and bank) to one that invests in renewables (or doesn't invest in coal). I'm not trying to claim that private investment in renewables won't do anything. But, like switching lightbulbs, it's a "solution" that is vastly undermatched to the severity of the crisis we are facing.

Now, in his defense, while he might seem to relish in dunking on climate activists for painting "crap signs" like they are in Year 1 and taking to the streets, friendlyjordies didn't just pull this argument out of nowhere. As I mentioned in the prior post, Australian Ethical markets itself on the promise that their super will help to finance the zero carbon transition. His video is in support of another super fund - Future Super - and it actually draws on a report comissioned by them, alongside climate campaign group 350.org and the UTS Institute for Sustainable Future (ISF).

Sounds great, right? A well-researched plan that doesn't require us to get our lazy arses off the couch? And only 12.4% of Australians have to do it to decarbonise our entire economy - or as few as 7.7% to get us to 100% renewables by 2030? If that's all it'll take, why hasn't it happened already?

Unfortunately, friendlyjordies has fudged the numbers by more than a little. He says less than the 300,000 people who marched in days of action need to switch their super, and they'll make lots of money doing it, when the real number is more like half of all Australians, and returns are definitely not guaranteed. But before we get to that, there are a few big problems with the plan itself.

The biggest warning sign for me was the price tag. According to the report by these research and campaign heavyweights, the cost of transitioning Australia to a zero-carbon grid within ten years is a whopping $788 billion AUD (in 2018). That's several times the amount the federal government recently splashed out to stop our economy going into freefall because of the present pandemic; but more to the point, it's a lot larger than the price given by Beyond Zero Emissions (BZE). Nearly double as much. Their 2010 plan to decarbonise our grid is fully costed, and their initial capital investment is much lower at $370 billion AUD (in 2018 terms, $434 billion AUD). So why the difference?

The reason is, the frame of reference is completely different. The BZE Stationary Energy Plan is, above all, an engineering one; they look at the technical challenge and devise a way to overcome it. The ISF plan, on the other hand, is written from the point of view of an investment firm; they are more preoccupied with the return on investment (ROI), and how technologically sound the solution is doesn't matter as much as if it will generate a 7% ROI.

From the ISF plan

Although they haven't published the technical details the way BZE have, the overall breakdown of energy type in the ISF plan suggests the oversimplification that has led them to arrive at a figure nearly double that of BZE: more than half of power would come from solar photovoltaics (PV).

 

Solar PV and wind power have both been very good investments in recent years, with returns of around 10% on investment. So if that's the metric you're starting with, they seem like a good bet - just keep building them until we have enough, right?

This is the finance world equivalent of everyone in the country just buying 100% renewable energy. As I've talked about in the first post of the 1.5c lifestyle series, our grid doesn't actually work like that - and in fact, we're very close to reaching the limit at which intermittent distributed PV power and wind will start causing problems, unless there are major reforms by the regulators and governments. We are already likely to have days of 75% renewable energy by 2025 - and at that point, the regular will have to switch off power plants to maintain stability. Once that happens, the ROI on those assets will plunge.

The major changes that we need are ones that friendlyjordies and the ISF plan don't talk about - they are ones that market investment can't give us - and they are ones that the BZE plan has modelled and costed. They are grid connections from coast to coast, upgraded transmission lines, large-scale storage, and flattening our evening peaks.

While friendlyjordies does also lampoon the backward-thinking, bucket hat-wearing Dad for asking "what about when the sun doesn't shine?" - the truth is, that's a serious technical challenge. Australians use the most electricity on hot evenings in the summer and shoulder seasons, when they get home and switch on the AC - right as the sun is setting. This isn't an insurmountable challenge; the BZE plan fixes it, by investing in solid upgrades to our transmission infrastructure, linking the two main WA grids to the east coast NEM, and making concentrated solar thermal (CST) with inbuilt molten salt storage the backbone of our grid. That way, when the sun has set on Sydney and Melbourne, our AC units can still be chugging away on daylight in Perth.

The cost of linking the grids like this is significant, and returns on investment are not likely to be 7%. The Australian Energy Regulator recently approved a major interconnector between NSW and SA, which will provide both states with extra stability for distribution in peaks and troughs, as well as reducing the upfront cost of new renewable plants in western NSW. Even this 850km expansion, costing $1.53 billion (in 2020 dollars), is only estimated to return $269 million in likely net benefits - 12.5% overall, but most of these come in indirect consumer savings from dispatchable power and new investment in renewables, not directly from the interconnector's operational income.

The BZE plan puts a price tag of $93 billion AUD on the transmission upgrades required to convert our grid to renewables. This is a cost that will have to be paid, sooner or later - but without a likely ROI from the asset, a responsible super fund manager would never shell out the funds for it.

Then there's the question of energy storage. This is the main answer to Mr. Bucket Hat Dad, and Malcolm Turnbull's Snowy 2.0  is the kind of answer we've been given. There are major problems with that approach - which is why BZE made concentrated solar thermal, with in-built molten salt storage systems, the backbone of their plan. But the up-front costs are higher than solar PV, and despite it being commercially proven overseas, the market will not invest in CST in Australia.

At this point, I can only repeat that the ISF plan hasn't released detailed schematics of their plans. But it would seem that they have arrived at their huge number of $788 billion by picking the most profitable assets, and then massively duplicating them, until enough is built to run the NEM and WA's disconnected grids separately, and there is enough wind and solar power assets to keep on running the grid even when wind doesn't blow or sun doesn't shine.

The kicker is, as they don't seem to have incorporated any kind of storage, that most of these duplicated assets will be sitting idle most of the time. That isn't the case for renewable energy assets today. Bye bye 7% ROI - idle assets that are not selling electricity to the market don't make money.

This plan doesn't hold any water.

Even without all of those details, how has friendlyjordies fudged the numbers? Well, he himself admits 80% of Future Super's money goes into other things than renewable assets, even for their renewable-focused Renewables Plus. The rest sound like good things, don't get me wrong. But in order to reach our 7.7% of super fund assets needed to fund the switch to 100% renewables, then 38.5% of Australians would have to switch to Future Super, or other funds which are putting an equal amount of money into renewables. That's a lot more than the 300,000 who protested over the last summer; it's more than the 4.7 million (33%) who voted Labor in the last election.

So if the 300,000 people protesting in the streets all switched their super (assuming none of them were already ethical investors), we'd get a small portion of the way to 100% renewables. It might tip the stationary energy balance something like 5% towards renewables over the next ten years - not nothing, but a drop in the ocean compared to the task ahead of us.

But surely, friendlyjordies might ask, that 5% is better than achieving nothing, like you and your "crap signs" did in days of climate strikes?

It is true that our government doesn't seem to have budged very far on climate change. But Australians have. In the six months from July 2019 to January 2020, we went from 37% of Australians being "very concerned" about climate change to 47%, and from 43% thinking we are already suffering the impacts to 57%. The number of us "not very concerned" shrank over the same period from 16% to 11%.

Climate protests in that time cannot take sole credit. The summer of bushfires - and the fact that emergency service bureaucrats came out to say they were the product of climate change - no doubt helped shift the conversation. But so did hundreds of thousands of passionate youth. They may not have much in their super balance (and let's be honest, neither do I) - but they know that we cannot leave it up to the markets to solve climate change.

And as someone who attended the climate protests, there's another flaw in friendlyjordies logic; above all, the protests were an expression of anger by a generation of youth, whose future is being trashed - and who don't have much in the way of superannuation balances to switch. In 2017-18, even 25-34 year olds only had an average balance of $33,200 for women and $41,700 for men. Under 25s (the majority of the 300,000) don't even rate a mention. Those aged 45 and up have the decisive amount of the super pool, to invest as they see fit. Definitely not the majority of the protestors.

Voting with your wallet? It means that those with more money get more votes, even though they won't be the ones still around to live with the consequences.

My super is due to mature in 2055. If we haven't ditched our neoliberal obsession with market mechanisms and bloody well built the kind of smart grid that can support 100% renewables within a few years, then the worst-case scenario is collapse of civilization five years before I'm due to claim my lump sum. So I'm not particularly concerned about 7% returns, and I don't want us to fart around with the most profitable solutions when we have the technical know-how to do the job.

Protestors 10 or 15 years my junior, no doubt, care about it even less. They aren't voting with their wallets - they are voting with their feet. And they are doing it right.

We must take action now, regardless of the ROI.

Here comes Hydrogen?

I restarted this blog to start writing some articles about climate change, but also to challenge myself to brush up on things I haven't read about for a while, and to learn things I didn't already know. The past few weeks have been a big exercise in learning things I didn't already know, with the big announcement on June 12 that a new company, H2X, wants to start manufacturing hydrogen-fuelled cars... right down the road in Port Kembla! So, while I've been twiddling my thumbs waiting for a sprained knee to heal, I've been looking into what exactly hydrogen means for the climate.

So... what does hydrogen fuel mean for the climate?

To answer that question, I've had to learn the answers to a few more. How does hydrogen fuel even work? How is it made?

The simple answer is, the same way as most other fuels - but unlike other fuel sources, when pure hydrogen is burnt, it releases only water vapour. Also unlike other fuel sources, pure hydrogen doesn't occur naturally - though it can be found in most fossil fuels, as well as in water. These are the three sources from which pure hydrogen can be derived for industrial use:

• from a hydrocarbon like natural gas through steam reforming
• from coal through gasification
• or through separating water into pure H & O using electrolysis

From Australia's National Hydrogen Strategy

The former two sources are emissions-intensive, while the latter only produces the emissions that go into making electricity. Within Australia, these are overall quite substantial, making grid-fuelled electrolysis more emissions-intensive than any other source. However, with 100% renewable energy there are zero emissions generated (other than those that go into manufacturing the systems themselves).

Thus the various "colours" of hydrogen as outlined in Figure 1.1 - labels that describe how it was produced, and that suggest what hydrogen can mean for the planet. "Brown" hydrogen is derived from coal, "blue" from natural gas, "grey" from fossil-fuelled sources. The last sort, the one which excites environmentalists, is "green" hydrogen from renewable electricity-powered electrolysis.

Unfortunately, green hydrogen presently only accounts for 0.3% of hydrogen actually being produced. Around the world, steam reforming (blue hydrogen) makes up the largest portion of all industrial hydrogen production.

It turns out, quite a lot of capitalists in Australia are ready to start making green hydrogen. I first heard of the concept from Beyond Zero Emission's plan to make the Northern Territory a clean energy export superpower - a project which excited Atlassian's Mike Cannon-Brookes. At the time, the thinking was that nations in South-East Asia without our capacity to produce renewable electricity (like Japan and Singapore) would be the destination for green hydrogen from the NT. But, if H2X leads to a boom in domestic consumption, it might be right here in Oz.

After the H2X announcement I started looking into it some more, and it turns out there is a whole wealth of proposed green hydrogen facilities across Australia, including a number in Western Australia, the other main state not connected to the NEM and thus not able to share renewable electricity to the east coast in the traditional way. Thanks to seed funding from ARENA, up to $3 billion AUD of proposals are on the table.

That hasn't stopped our coal-loving Prime Minister from attempting to throw a lifeline to fossil fuel capitalists, by passing legislation to support brown hydrogen production from coal. The promise of carbon capture and storage being integrated into the production is a fig leaf, covering up the fact that there is no need to produce hydrogen in this way when we can do it in others. This is another front in the war on climate action - but it does also show that the coal barons know the writing is on the wall for coal-fired power, and they are looking for a new market to keep their mines from becoming stranded assets.

So, I've gotten a clearer picture on the climate impact of hydrogen... so if the hydrogen is "green", then switching cars from petrol or diesel to hydrogen should be great for the climate... right?

The big announcement for H2X was the "consumer halo", an SUV dubbed the Snowy. With a hydrogen-electric hybrid motor, it will have a range of 650km, and refuel in 3 minutes.

Concept art for the Snowy

That one has got all of the auto journalists excited and writing headlines dubbing it the "modern Ford" - but "the catch is that the hydrogen refueling infrastructure is no better in Australia than in the United States." Both the ACT and Queensland governments have announced they are installing fuel-cell hybrid infrastructure for their vehicle fleets, with hydrogen-powered Hyundai Nexos already on order. But for ordinary motorists, there is no practical means to refuel, and for this reason, Hyundai is only selling Nexos to government fleets for the time being. It looks like residents of the ACT will get the first chance for private ownership, with public access to the new refuelling infrastructure scheduled in a few month's time.

And that brings me to the elephant in the room - the fact that fully electric cars like the Nissan Leaf, BMW i3 or Tesla are already on the market and have started to reach the point where the charging infrastructure can support most people's needs. Like hydrogen, electricity is as dirty or as green as how it is made, but it requires no major supply lines or new fuel refineries to be set up - they already exist in the form of our grid. So will the Snowy reduce our number of petrol-chugging SUVs, or will it short-circuit the switch to electric vehicles?

There has been some commercial uptake of LPG over the last thirty years, which hydrogen could easily replace, particularly when it comes to buses. But electric vehicles seems to have beaten hydrogen off the mark here as well; Volgren in Victoria has already begun producing electric buses that are hitting the roads, while NSW plans to convert its entire bus fleet to electric.

H2X is no doubt aware of these limits, which is why the consumer halo of the private market isn't all they are looking at. ""Hydrogen fuel cell systems are greatly aligned to the power outputs required for tasks found in industry, mining and marine," Brendan Norman, the CEO and founder of H2X Australia, told CarAdvice."

Concept art for a hydrogen tractor, as seen on ABC

That's where this announcement is, for me, the most exciting. As of yet, electric vehicles for heavy applications haven't made a big dent in Australia. The headlines have hailed the "consumer halo", but the "industrial floodlight" (if you will) of concepts for tractors, vans and trucks that H2X has released are applications where hydrogen might have the edge over straight electric vehicles anyway; a big hydrogen tank that gets emptier gets lighter, whereas a big empty battery weighs just the same, and requires the same amount of energy to haul around. And it takes a lot of time to recharge, while hydrogen refuels in much the same way (and with much the same speed) as conventional petrol or diesel.

H2X plan to start manufacturing up to 20,000 vehicles within 5 years. That sounds impossibly ambitious - until you hear the qualification that the vehicles will only be "80%" made in Port Kembla, built around imported drivechains. Shipping major components from Europe or the Americas does increase the carbon footprint of manufacturing these vehicles, but if it means they are able to start getting made and reducing emissions from our transport sector (#2 only to energy generation itself) soon enough to make a difference for staying within our 1.5c timeline, it may be an acceptable cost.

So is this the kind of change we need to see?

The South Coast Labour Council teamed up with Labor and Greens politicians to relaunch a Green Jobs plan for the Illawarra in 2019. They are calling for the shrunken industrial district of Port Kembla to be revitalised as a hub of investment in green manufacturing. The 5000 jobs that H2X says it will create are, no doubt, a welcome answer.

The focus of the plan has, naturally, been the single biggest contributor to Australia's greenhouse emissions - energy generation. Right now, despite the growth in renewables in the last two decades, there are only one factory in Australia each manufacturing wind turbines and solar panels. Port Kembla, as a location with steel supply lines and infrastructure already in place, would be an ideal location to build a 100% renewable grid, and avoid the emissions of transport.

H2X plans to make hydrogen cars, and is looking to make a business case for it without government support. But we cannot leave the survival of the climate we depend on to decisions based on what is or isn't profitable. In this era of pandemic and recession, we can and should be demanding nationalised industries which create profit for the public, not a few capitalists.

Can you live a 1.5c lifestyle? Pt 4

Part one of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part two is here. Part three is here. This information is of a general nature and is not intended to provide you with financial advice or take into account your personal objectives, financial situation or needs.

Alright, so I've finally gotten onto the second email of the 1.5 degree lifestyle challenge. Thankfully, the next email only has one action to tackle, not a whole list; unfortunately, it's one that has taken a bit of work, and has taken me some time to get to. Have a think about who you bank with.

Now, the fact that I'm with Australian Ethical super would suggest that I've already had a think about this one - but the truth is, I found it much harder to tackle switching bank than my super. Superannuation is a background process, and there's pretty simple rollover tools to get old funds switched into new ones. But I've been with Commonwealth Bank since I was in primary school in 1993, so I've put changing everything that goes into and out of my account into the too-hard basket - until now.

There is a campaign website to help you make a more sustainable choice of bank, at least in Australia - Market Forces. They detail all the known lending banks have done to the fossil fuel industries, and have position statements from many banks. Commonwealth is the best of our big four banks, but that's not a very high bar; they have loaned at least $7.2 billion AUD to fossil fuel projects since 2015, four times as much as they have loaned to renewables. None rank among the big twenty global lenders to fossil fuels, but they are fuelling a wave of new projects in this country.

The science is clear - a 2019 study showed that even letting existing fossil fuel infrastructure continue to function for its expected lifetime will only give us a 64% chance of keeping to a 1.5c timeline. If new infrastructure being built today is used for its full lifespan, it will almost certainly guarantee we cannot keep within 1.5c of global warming and the slim chance we have left of avoiding runaway climate change.

Although Commbank has started to get out of loans to the coal industry - with a plan to exit fully by 2030 - it has been funding expansion of gas infrastructure, including new LNG vessels and a pipeline in the USA. So, if I'm going to live a 1.5c lifestyle, I guess I'd better find a bank which isn't funding projects that will destroy a habitable climate.

The Australian Ethical campaign email suggested Bank Australia. They certainly pass muster, with no money invested in fossil fuels, and a statement on the Market Forces website that they have been carbon neutral since 2011. However, looking over the numbers, their accounts charge fees and their interest rates on savings account aren't as high as others right now. So I've decided to switch to another bank that doesn't finance fossil fuels - the Credit Union of Australia. Last week, I finally got the ball rolling, and although it will take some time and follow-up to get it all moved over, I've made sure to let Commbank know why I'm switching. As of yet, I've had no response from them.

If every Australian switched bank (and make clear they were doing it for the climate), how big of an impact would it make? Would it keep us within a 1.5c carbon budget? The answer is somewhat mixed, but when it comes to coal mining, it could have a fairly substantial impact.

Globally, while state subsidies and international financial institutions do play their part, the biggest financiers of coal mining are private lenders. Around 70% of global coal mining operations are actually running at a loss, so without loans and government support, they wouldn't be able to keep operating. When it comes to Australia, many of our mines are run as local subsidiaries of global conglomerates, so some of that "loss" is simply profits being offshored to India, the USA or China, to avoid being taxed locally; without loans from local banks, that couldn't be maintained, and projects here might have to stop operating or start paying their fair share.

The campaigns for divestment from fossil fuels have had a big enough impact that thermal coal companies (those mining coal to burn for power generation, as opposed to steel making) have begun signing non-disclosure agreements with their lenders.

The global campaigns for fossil fuel divestment can have a big impact on coal mining in Australia, but what about globally? Is it producing enough change to keep us within a 1.5c timeline? In the words of Emma Herd, chief executive of the investor group on climate change at Climate Action 100+, "is it happening fast enough? I think the science says no."

When we look at the global picture switching banks or super starts to lose effectiveness. The top lender to coal mines in Australia from 2008 to 2016 wasn't an Australian bank, but the Bank of China, one of those big twenty global lenders. Australians switching our banks won't even dry up all the funds fuelling coal mining in this country. And nor will they touch some of the biggest coal mines globally, such as those operated by the Shenhua group, a state-owned enterprise with other avenues of capital than private banking.

When it comes to other fossil fuels than coal, switching banks is going to do even less to result in meaningful change - and in fact, the argument can be made that it will make things worse. That's because the majority of oil and natural gas producers are state-owned companies, which generally don't have to report their operations to shareholders, and often operate without environmental targets open to external scrutiny. Switching banks won't significantly lower the emissions from Australia's transport sector - which have increased by 60% since 1990.

Even the large companies listed on the stock market are, to some extent, willing to defy the economics. They must keep finding and opening up new reserves to exploit in order to keep their "reserve-replacement" ratio - the amount of resources they could extract in the future compared to the amount they are currently selling. Without this guarantee of future dividends, stockmarket investors (like the large global pension funds and banks) wouldn't keep investing in a company.

So, is this action really consistent with a 1.5c lifestyle? At least for those of us living in Australia, switching bank and superannuation (and letting your polluting old funds know why you are doing it) is a useful tactic. But on its own, it's not enough to see to it that fossil fuel projects no longer gain funding; joining in with campaigns to ensure no new fossil fuel reserves are exploited and we convert to a decarbonised grid and industrial base are just as, if not more, important.

Next time I'll tackle another thorny issue that has been vexing me - meat.

Can you live a 1.5c life? Pt 3

Part one of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part two is here.

Let's wrap up the first email of Australian Ethical's 1.5c lifestyle challenge (it's now over three weeks into the challenge after all!) so I can move onto the more meaty topics of future emails...

I'm not going to spend so long breaking down the numbers on the final actions from the first challenge email, mostly because it's hard for me to figure out my own exact numbers or translate them to the whole country. I'm just going to examine how much potential they broadly have, as individual actions or as collective solutions, and the personal ways I'm trying to up my game.

Part three of the challenge is: keep your home well insulated. The individual actions in the challenge are:

•	draught-proof your home with door snakes and curtains

•	invest in carpets and rugs – this helps stop heat escaping through the floor

•	close off unused rooms in winter and help to reduce heat loss.

•	close curtains and blinds to keep the heat in or block the sun out

The connection of heating, cooling and insulation to climate change is well understood in Australia, especially since the Rudd government's "pink batts scheme" which resulted in the deaths of four workers and became a political wedge for the climate-denying opposition.

We already did almost all the things on this list - as residents of a north/west facing rental apartment, we have no choice but to control our temperature passively. We have used a small portable A/C unit in the past, but this apartment has no compatible windows, so in the summer, all we can do is try and shade ourselves and catch a coastal cross-breeze when we can. And in the winter, our glass sliding doors catch the afternoon sun, keeping us cozy so long as there's even a hint of daylight. Our electicity use barely spiked during a cold wet spell last year. The only thing on the list we haven't been doing is using a door-snake to prevent a draught; I've improvised one out of a felt blanket for our front door, and although May has been unseasonably cold for coastal NSW, we haven't had to fire the heater up yet.

I guess I am living a 1.5c lifestyle on this front, then. But I am not going to even calculate how much difference it would make if every Australian lived like I did, because the concept is fundamentally flawed. Our ability to live with a low heating & cooling footprint is intimately connected with the design of our buildings and the appliances installed during construction.

The Beyond Zero Emissions Stationary Energy Plan discusses what an important role buildings, temperature control and insulation have to play in getting Australia to a zero carbon energy grid. For most of our country, the biggest challenge to getting renewables in the grid is the evening peak, as I discussed a little in part 1 of this challenge. Right as the sun is losing intensity or setting, we get home from work, and switch on the air conditioning and cook our largest meal of the day. We have ended up this way, in the plan's words, because "the cost of electricity in Australia has historically been low compared to other developed nations, allowing lowest initial-cost building practices and inefficient design to persist as the norm." So long as electricity is cheap, it's cheaper, simpler and easier to switch on the A/C and pay the annual cost than it is to build our houses well in the first place.

Taking passive, low-energy measures like those of the 1.5c challenge can help us to flatten that peak, but they can only do so much when most of our homes are built like "glorified tents". Not every Australian can live within 1km of the ocean like we do, and catch a cooling afternoon breeze. The BZE plan, on the other hand, identifies policy-level actions which could reduce electricity consumption from buildings by 36%: a program for double-glazing and insulation installation (like the infamous pink batts debacle), and totally phasing out gas as a source of heat and cooking in favour of efficient electrical appliances like induction cooktops and heat pumps. 

These higher-impact actions are difficult to take as an individual working within a market-based system. The cost of replacing an old cooktop and water heater with newer, more efficient models is prohibitively high; the only people I know who have done it are those who have made the decision (and had the means) to renovate their kitchens. Better insulating your house has a lower initial cost and will pay for itself in reduced energy consumption - but so long as natural gas or an inefficient electrical appliance is the source of your heat or cooling, greenhouse gas emissions will still result.

If you are a renter like us and approximately 30% of Australians, you might be able to negotiate with your landlord to split the cost of these upgrades - but if you don't own the asset and can't be sure you'll live there long enough to recoup even part of the cost on lower bills, why would you bother to invest in upgrading it? As much of a disaster as it was, we need a new pink batts scheme, or other society-wide measures to retrofit insulation and efficiency measures.

So long as our housing stock remains inefficient, individual actions cannot reduce emissions within the level of a 1.5c trajectory. Most of the houses currently in supply or being built will still be around by 2050, by which time we should clearly have reached net zero. Even today, 80% of houses are currently being built to the minimum standard of efficiency, which isn't even cost-effective over the life of the building. Australia will require collective actions on the level of policy - especially improving minimum building standards and. phasing out gas as a source of energy - to improve our efficiency and bring ourselves to net zero.

As far as heat generation is concerned, there is a significant untapped resource in Australian cities near industrial hubs, too: cogeneration. While in Australia, most studies have examined the use of gas or biogas inputs for cogeneration, there are examples overseas of capturing waste energy from other means - for example, Sweden harnesses the landfill gas I discussed in the last post to burn for both heat and electricity, while Copenhagen is almost fully heated by a centralised system that captures the waste heat from the city's electrical plants and circulates it as hot water. These systems require municipal or governmental action, even if they are broadly popular.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to leave that point there, and quickly address the final target of the first week's challenge: reducing your consumption. The personal actions are:

•	swap or borrow clothes if you need something new

•	if you see something you want, wait three weeks before buying it – if you’re still thinking about it, then buy it.

•	try not to buy anything new for a month

I work in sports fashion retail, so I know how much of a problem fast fashion is. The bread and butter of our business is people who shop for new outfits for exercise and daily wear multiple times a year. All the extra production this leads to means each item has a higher carbon footprint. Since the year 2000, fashion consumption has gone up by 60%, and it now accounts for 5% of global emissions - more than shipping or aviation.

I'm not going to try and figure out how much I could save or how much difference it would make if every Australian took the challenge on this one, mostly for brevity. It is more of a marginal contribution than electricity, food waste or even household heating, but could do more than individuals voluntarily avoiding flights - like the climate activist Greta Thunberg has famously started doing.

I'm just going to say that, with a little reflection, I'm probably not living a 1.5c lifestyle right now, given the amount I consume. So I've started on the three week rule - even setting myself google calendar reminders once it's been three weeks and I can review if I really want to buy something - and sofar, it's helped me to avoid impulse buying several things, including clothes and household appliances.

Perhaps in a few weeks, I can review how this has gone (as well as my food waste reduction efforts). But let's move on from this first week of challenges for now. Next time, I'll write more about the second email, on ethical investment for the climate.

Can you live a 1.5c life? Pt 2

Part one of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part three is here.

So, I can tick off "renewable electricity" from my challenge. Let's have a look at the rest of the first email from Australian Ethical. What other personal actions can we take to live a 1.5c life, and do they match the science?

Number two on Australian Ethical's 1.5c lifestyle challenge is reducing food waste. This is a big one, and it's been at the forefront of Australia's mind ever since the ABC's War on Waste show aired back in 2017.

I'm going to get very concrete on this one; I'd like to think I do as much as is reasonable on this front, but I've never gotten specific. Am I actually doing enough? How do we stack up?

The average Australian, according to a report prepared for the Department of the Environment and Energy in 2018, produces 540kg of total waste, of which about 45% is recycled. That makes me ask - exactly how much is our two-person household producing?

This much.

This was about 300g of our household rubbish (yes, I got out the kitchen scales and weighed it). I might take out this bin every couple of days on average, so for simplicity's sake, let's say we produce 1kg of rubbish to landfill a week, or 52kg a year. Let's say the amount we throw away to landfill in bins at work or in public is the same again; 104kg total landfill a year. Much less than the 486kg an average household of two would produce. So far, pretty good!

The reycling weighs in a little more, at around 2kg. Again, I'd normally take this bag out every couple of days, so let's say that's 5kg a week, or 260kg a year.

Let's not forget the soft plastics! This bag is about two weeks worth for us (we don't recycle every single scrap that comes our way, only the things that wouldn't take a lot of effort to clean food from). That's 220g, or about 6kg a year. Our kerbside recycling service doesn't accept soft plastic, so this gets dropped off to collection bins at the supermarket. With extra work, we could probably recycle a little more, and shave another kilo or two off our landfill.

And last, the star of the show: our food waste to compost. It has the daily fruit peel and coffee grounds, as well as scraps from dinner. Since we moved into our current apartment we've been composting almost all our food scraps - first through saving them up and delivering to a neighbour I found on the ShareWaste app, and then, once the current pandemic brought that system to a halt, through our own Bokashi compost bin in the basement. This is a relatively small container for us - some nights after dinner there is an entire bowl full of scraps. It weighs 300g, so let's say on average we compost 2.5kg a week, or 130kg a year. If we weren't composting it, our household landfill waste would be more than doubled!

So my estimate of our total waste is an even 500kg a year, of which 53% percent is recycled, and 26% composted. Well under half as much as the average Australian produces, and composting the food waste and adding it to soil can increase soil carbon by 12% - actually drawing down some of the emissions involved in producing the food we eat or other sources. Not too shabby!

In the spirit of the challenge, though, I need to ask myself - how can we do better?

I am already on the composting, and usually shop to a list to avoid buying things I don't need. But Australian Ethical's tips include a couple of new ideas for me - especially storing carrots with the tops cut off and celery in water. I never seem to use a whole head of celery before at least some has gone to waste! And reading around elsewhere I've learnt that cucumbers should be stored at room temperature, not in the fridge - in fact, there's a good half a cucumber that went bad in the above photo of my compost. But citrus is the other way around - I've been keeping it in the fruit bowl when it should go in the fridge!

So, I've picked up a few practical tips to up my food storage game. Taking the challenge, I think we could reduce our waste to 90kg to landfill and 120kg composted a year.

What would happen to our greenhouse gas emissions if every Australian took this challenge, reduced their household waste from 560kg to 178kg?

The total waste generated at the local & council level in the 2018 DOE report was 13.8mt. With the per capita amount reduced threefold, that would come down to 4.38mt. This would result in a major reduction of landfill gas emissions - a major source of carbon dioxide as well as methane, which has a shorter lifespan in the atmosphere than CO2, but a much higher impact over a shorter time-frame. It's hard to calculate how much of an impact landfill gas has overall, but the less rotting food waste, the less methane.

Quantifying food waste emissions, a 2017 study in the Journal of Cleaner Production has shown that it accounts for 6% of Australia's GHG emissions - 57,507 Gg CO2-eq. annually - as well as 9% of our water use.

Do these personal actions, cutting down food waste in the home, match the science for averting 1.5c of global warming?

As with buying renewable power, the shortest answer is yes. The longer answer is a little more complicated. Reading into the facts about food waste globally, we can see that, in developed nations, the share of food waste at the consumer end grows, while in the global south, more occurs from loss at the point of production or in the supply chain. A Food and Agriculture Office of the United Nations (FAO) report into food waste in 2013 found that, in North America and Oceania, food waste from consumers was 40%.

The top three bars are developed nations; section in aqua is waste by consumers

For Australia, the 2018 DOE report documents 16.1mt of agricultural waste which is managed on-site; this is more than all our current municipal landfill production, but it doesn't document how this waste is managed by the agriculture industry. The report also doesn't estimate the impact of food waste generated on-farm, and in many upstream food processing operations; however, worldwide, it is estimated that 50% of all fruit grown is wasted, and, as we saw in the War on Waste, much of that does occur by simply leaving food to rot. One of the chief climate impacts of the current pandemic has been a sudden spike in this kind of food waste, as closure of restaurants and large commercial purchasers have resulted in a sudden oversupply of that part of the market - even though there have been shortages on supermarket shelves!

Milk being tipped down the drain during the Covid-19 lockdowns

However, the food that reaches consumers is the most highly processed (and valuable) of all food waste. The 2017 study found that around half of all of Australia's food-waste emissions came from consumers - 2.8% of total food emissions - while 3.1% of total food emissions were from industrial food waste. Food eaten domestically accounts for 14.2% of total emissions, food exported 20.9% (and if the ratios are the same as in Australia, then at least a third of those emissions are going to food which ends up being wasted too).

And there is a double footprint for this wasted food; the remaining 59% of agricultural GHG emissions come from non-food products, such as the industrial processes required to farm and transport food. Composting can turn the 5.9% of greenhouse gas emissions from food waste into increased carbon in the soil; reducing food waste, and thus, total consumption, would allow these non-food emissions to never be spent in the first place.

There is one extra action we need to be taking to reduce food waste in line with the 1.5c challenge; after all, food consumtion isn't limited to the home. A 2016 RMIT study into food waste within restaurants, cafes and other food service businesses found that 40% of food they purchased ended up in the bin. So I'm also going to challenge myself to buy less takeaway food unless I know the business has good food waste practices in place.

So, the conclusion after reviewing the science is: in developed nations like Australia, the US and Europe, personal actions in the home to reduce food waste will definitely be necessary to keep ourselves under 1.5c of warming. Plan your meals, and don't be afraid to buy ugly food - you can make equally good stock or soups out of a bendy carrot or a skinny celery. There are limits; personal actions won't be able tackle some of big parts of the puzzle avoiding food waste - that wasted within food retail or on the farm, or avoiding producing food that isn't needed in the first place. In a society which is geared towards the generation of profit, choosing not to produce something profitable might sound crazy, but it is undoubtably what we need to do.

There are systemic actions, as well as individual ones, that will address these issues. For food waste within the hospitality industry, stronger laws or incentives are needed to ensure industry-wide changes. Right now, only 22% of businesses even measure the amount of food they waste.

When it comes to composting while living in an apartment, I've had to go to a lot of effort to get our systems up and running; municipal composting schemes can take a lot of the hard individual work out of capturing and sequestering these emissions. In my local area, Wollongong City Council is trialling municipal collection of Food Organics and Garden Organics (FOGO) in a separate bin, to collectively prevent food waste emissions reaching the atmosphere.

There are also agricultural systems which can avoid a lot of the emissions in the first place. In our local area, Green Connect is a social enterprise which runs a permaculture farm, growing low-emissions food with minimal waste and delivering it straight to households in the local area. For people like us, where growing our own food and avoiding the whole supply chain is restricted by our available space, a local, sustainable model for urban agriculture is needed to avoid the food waste from industrial-scale agriculture.

In part three I'll finish with the first email - I promise! - and move on to the successive weeks of the campaign.

Can you live a 1.5c life? Pt 1

1.5c is a pretty important target, as I've written about here. Even under the best case scenarios, the human race has already locked ourselves in for a lot of misery thanks to climate change, but if we can't keep ourselves to under 1.5c of warming, we will almost certainly be creating an extinction-level event. So I was intrigued to see my super fund, Australian Ethical, wanted to tell me "How to live a 1.5 degree life" - and even wanted me to take a "living a 1.5-degree life challenge" this month.

Since I've been doing a lot of reading about the climate science of this target, as well as the politics of action to get us there, I thought I'd better take the challenge and make sure I'm doing all that I personally can - but also run the numbers, and see if they actually add up. I'll do this over the course of a few posts, as the challenge emails come in.

I'm going to set out a bit of a conceptual framework here, as a whole lot of maths isn't really my strong suit. If every Australian made these lifestyle changes, would that alone really put us on track to the reductions we need to keep to our Paris Accord commitments and no more than 1.5c of warming? Of course, Australia has a small population - but we are the fourteenth largest emitter, and one of the highest per capita emitters, with only small island states or countries with oil-centric economies ahead of us. We can, and should, lead the way, not drag our heals and continue to beat the drum for fossil fuels.

So, what are the personal actions Australian Ethical wants us to take?

Number one on the list is switching to renewable energy, either through rooftop solar if you can, or switching to a renewable provider (like Meridian, which the Australian Ethical video admits they invest in).




Now, I'm a renter, so I've already done as much as I can right now - made the switch to Powershop, the subsidiary which retails Meridian's renewable electricity. I did this well before I switched my super to Australian Ethical, back when my partner and I started renting again at the end of 2018, after being referred by a local environmental activist, and I've since referred one fellow activist on myself.

I've passed the first step of the challenge. But am I living a 1.5c life?

What would happen if every Australian did this? The simplest answer would be, we would all have renewable energy. But the grid doesn't work that way. Australia is comprised of one main grid or "market" - connecting the east and southern coast states (the National Energy Market or NEM), with others for Western Australia and the Northern Territory. A big part of Beyond Zero Emission's roadmap for a 100% renewable grid in Australia is connecting all the state grids from east to west, so that energy can be moved from regions where renewables are producing to those where it is not. The entirety of section 5 of the plan is dedicated to grid upgrades.

The website OpenNEM actually displays the contribution renewables are making to the NEM over time, if you are interested in diving into the numbers:

OpenNEM snapshot on May 17

The black and brown bars contributing most of our power are coal. In the past year, coal contributed 67% of the NEM's electricity. Powershop's parent company may sell renewable energy to the market, but, as they point out in a recent blog post, they cannot guarantee where the actual electicity arriving down the wire is coming from - and especially in peak times on windless summer evenings, most of it will be from fossil fuels. That is why Powershop also buys carbon offsets, to "undo" the damage being done by that coal power they are selling.

If every Australian started buying only accredited green power from Powershop or other retailers today, it would not solve the fundamental issues with that market within the time frame that we need. The immediate rise in price of green power certificates and carbon offsets would make projects selling renewables a lot more profitable than coal, but without a coast-to-coast smart grid with substantial built-in storage, it won't allow for us to switch of all of our coal-fired power within a decade. That would take major intervention by government or large capitalists.

In fact, it is the present system of markets and price signals which has, so far, failed to deliver on the most significant untapped form of renewable energy in Beyond Zero Emission's report: Concentrated Solar Thermal. In Port Augusta, a plant was proposed, with the backing of the entire local community. But it failed to drum up sufficient up-front capital, and was bought out by company 1414 Degrees - who plan to build traditional photovoltaic solar instead, and add storage later, to reduce the upfront capital cost. 

This is the exact kind of slow, insufficient change that leaving electricity supply up to the market has given us already. From a mandatory renewables target of 5% in 2001, the NEM reached 26% of energy coming from renewables last year. 

Every Australian buying from a renewable provider might drive change a little bit faster than that increase of 21% in 19 years. That's what Powershop's argues on their website:

By purchasing GreenPower you’re minimising your impact on the environment and it means additional RECs are surrendered over and above the compulsory requirements set by the Renewable Energy Target. This clearly demonstrates that there’s a demand for renewables leading to continued growth, investment and promotion of the renewable energy sector.

However, this isn't actually the case. Australian consumer watchdog Choice has warned that GreenPower certification certificates won't lead to any change beyond what our governments have already committed to doing:

Back in 2009, CHOICE complained to the ACCC about misleading GreenPower claims in relation to emissions reductions that were in breach of Australian Consumer Law. After consultation with the ACCC, GreenPower directed electricity companies to change their marketing language – they could no longer say that buying GreenPower lowered emissions or had an 'environmental' impact... if you're hoping for an environmental benefit in the form of cutting Australia's emissions, beyond what the government has already committed to deliver, it's not.

In other words, when it comes to renewables, market mechanisms can't do the job of bringing us in line with a 1.5c target, unless the government introduces policy that matches it - like 100% renewables and net zero by 2035. 

I am not living a 1.5c life.

There is another part of Australian Ethical's ask that I haven't addressed, as it doesn't apply to me, as a renter in a strata-managed building: buying and installing your own rooftop solar photovoltaics (PV). If I owned my own house and generated my own solar, could I be living a 1.5c life?

Right now, there are 2.37 million solar PV installations on rooftops around the country - 21% of all houses, and rooftop solar generated 11,000 gigawatt hours for the NEM in the last year - 5.7% of the market. So if all households in Australia (somewhere around 11 million) generated at the same rate, we could have about 28% percent of our electricity coming from rooftop PV. 

There's a number of problems with this maths, too, though. Once again, technical issues with the grid hold us back. Our grids are designed to take power from large sources and distribute it down the line. Houses providing their own electricity takes load off the grid, but if they try and start feeding it back in on that kind of scale, the energy companies warn it could cause power surges, leading to local transformers tripping off and localised blackouts. That is, unless they slug us for upgrading the grid.

Audrey Zibelman, head of the national regulator AEMO, wrote about the troubles with this approach earlier this year, when they said Australia could be seeing days of 75% renewables within 5 years - but at that point, the regulators would need to update inverter standards and make other reforms, or renewable contribution would have to be limited to 60%. AEMO projects that amount could rise to 90% renewables by 2040 - heartening, but well outside of the point Australia should have already reached net zero to stay consistent with 1.5c of warming.

So, if I wanted to live a 1.5c life, I would have to disconnect from the grid completely, and go "off-grid" with in-home storage like a Tesla Powerwall and rooftop PV. For my partner and I in a small, two-bedroom house (apartment, actually) that would set us back $15,000 - $25,000 AUD; for the average household with 4 bedrooms, this could be up to $40,000. This is inefficient compared to the economies of scale of large solar and wind farms; it also leaves me out of pocket for the up-front cost, not a government or utility corporation.

That leads me onto another big part to this equation, which is the concept of climate justice. As well as applying to the gap in contribution between already developed and currently developing nations, climate justice also applies within developed societies. Massive fossil fuel companies and governments made the decisions that led to our grid being set up to still be running on coal power when a fully-renewable grid could be up and running today. Capitalists have continued to rake in massive profits over the years, even though they have known their investment was causing climate change for decades. 

Yet, if every house makes the same contribution by paying the cost to go off-grid, the individuals who made those decisions would pay the exact same cost as those from the massive majority of society who never had a say. That is not climate justice.

I'll deal with the other main points of Australian Ethical's first challenge in my next post.

Part two of this series of posts on the 1.5c life challenge is here. Part three is here.