The Cost of Energy Transition, Part 3: In with the New

 The Alta Wind Energy Center in California, currently the country's largest wind farm.  (Photo from Wikipedia)

In a previous post, I talked about how transitioning to clean power generation over the next decade and a half will pose challenges that are more political than logistical.  I focused on the closing of existing plants in that post, but now I would like to delve into the cost of building clean energy, and how this cost compares to the cost of the existing fossil fuel infrastructure.  One company that compares relative costs is the financial advisement firm Lazard. Lazard issues a report on the levelized cost of energy every November.  The November 2020 publication includes updates on the price of coal, gas, solar, wind, and nuclear, and also has a section on the cost of battery storage.

Let's begin by looking at the very first graph, which lists the price of different forms of energy generation in units of dollars per megawatt-hour (MWh).  The price of rooftop residential solar ranges from $150-$227/MWh, while the price of rooftop commercial and industrial solar ranges from $74-$179/MWh.  These costs are actually pretty high, but the cost of utility scale solar range is only from $31-$42 per megawatt hour. The big difference comes simply from the economy of scale; the larger the assemblage of panels, the cheaper the cost per unit energy.  Wind power ranges from $26-$54/MWh. The orange diamond that says $86/MWh corresponds to offshore wind.  So wind is cheaper than solar in some places but more expensive in others. Offshore wind is noticeably more expensive than land-based wind, but it came down by $3 MWh relative to 2019 and could still be a very important contributor to the energy sector in coming years if the price continues to drop, or if the available land for generating energy is insufficient.  

How do these costs compare with more conventional forms of energy? Coal ranges from $65-$159/MWh.  This is generally more expensive than utility-scale solar or wind. But this is the cost of constructing new coal plants, compared to the cost of constructing new solar farms or new windmills.  Notice, however, the orange diamond that says $41/MWh. That's the cost of generating energy from a coal plant once the cost of the plant’s construction has been accounted for.  So on one hand, you do still need to consider the cost of stranding an operational coal plant. But I discussed this in the previous post post, and the cost is actually fairly manageable.  On the other hand, there are plenty of places where it would save money – right now – to replace the existing coal plant with a solar or wind farm.  That is an important factor to keep in consideration when deciding which coal plants to retire first, and how quickly.  Natural gas, looking specifically at the combined cycle, ranges from $44-$73/MWh. This is cheaper than coal, in continuation of a trend that's been going on for a decade.  New gas plants are mostly more expensive than new solar and wind farms.  But again, a rapid transition to clean energy will require replacing existing operational plants.

That brings us to nuclear power.  The cost of new nuclear power ranges from $129-$198/MWh.  If you scroll down four graphs to the unsubsidized levelized cost of storage, you'll see that wholesale photovoltaics plus storage costs $81-$140/MWh.  In other words, building a solar farm with battery storage today will generally cost quite a bit less per energy generated than building a new nuclear plant will. This does not bode well for nuclear power as a means of providing clean energy in the future.  But if you go back to the first graph and look at the diamond next to nuclear power, you'll see that nuclear power costs $29/MWh when you subtract the cost to build the plant. So nuclear plants are the most expensive power plants to build, but they’re actually cheap to maintain.  This suggests that existing nuclear power plants have a role to play in providing clean energy today.  Many of these plants are struggling, however, because it is very difficult for them to provide energy at a competitive price right now while the cost of construction is still being paid off. And a small number of plants, most notably Indian Point in upstate New York, have reached a point where it would take a major, costly structural overhaul to keep them running. But for the time being at least, existing nuclear plants are the cheapest source of zero-emission, non-intermittent energy.  The current administration has expressed a willingness to support taxpayer subsidies for existing nuclear plants to keep them from closing.  I think this is sensible, even if the burden of proof is now squarely on the nuclear industry where future energy generation is concerned.

To be fair, it’s important to acknowledge that intermittency (the inability of solar and wind farms to generate power at a constant rate) will require the introduction of a significant amount of battery storage as renewables gain a greater share of power generation.  The timing of this matters, as the cost of battery storage remains high but is heading downward.  Lazard estimated the cost of wholesale photovoltaics plus storage to be $102-$139/MWh in 2019 and $108-$140/MWh in 2018.  So the trend is in the right direction, but work needs to be done and time is short.  It’s important to get a real sense of how much battery storage will be needed and when as the energy market transitions.  A little bit of smart planning could make a huge difference in the overall cost of the clean energy transition.

So, from the perspective of somebody who believes that the climate crisis necessitates cleaning up all our energy use as quickly as possible, what should we do with this information?  I think the first step should be to declare a moratorium on the construction of any new power plants that emit any carbon dioxide.  This may sound controversial, but it's easily defensible given current energy economics.  Second, I think you can tip the markets in favor of cleaner energy by removing the subsidies on fossil fuels and replacing them with a carbon tax.  To avoid some serious economic and political risks, the tax would have to be balanced by a dividend so that it is revenue neutral.  That means, however, that the revenue necessary to clean up power generation would have to come from other sources.  I’ve already said in a few places that the Biden Administration will need to walk a tightrope to make this happen the right way.  But they can do this if they are smart.

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The Cost of Clean Energy, Part 2: Closing Yallourn

 

In my last post I wrote about the cost of a just transition, noting some of the logistical difficulties that may arise as fossil fuel plants are closed and replaced with cleaner sources of energy. I mentioned an article from 2017 about Australian coal plants closing on short notice (for economic reasons, not environmental ones) and leaving their employees with no time to adjust. This is obviously an example of what to avoid, but it appears that Australia is starting to learn from its mistakes. Last week, EnergyAustralia announced that it would shut down its Yallourn W coal plant in 2028, four years earlier than expected. It will be replaced with renewable sources of power, coupled with a large grid-scale battery to be completed in 2026.

The Yallourn site has a long history of generating power from coal, going back exactly one century. In 1921, a temporary power plant was built on the grounds. A permanent one replaced it in 1924, and a major station called Yallourn A was built on the grounds in 1928. Stations B, C, D, and E followed over the next few decades. Eventually the stations reached the end of their utility. Stations A and B were demolished starting in 1968, and Yallourn W was built during the 1970s. The remaining stations other than Yallourn W were demolished in the 1990s, but Yallourn W remains in use for now.

According to an article in The Guardian, the approximately 500 employees at the coal plant were notified of the advanced date of the impending closure at the beginning of March. They have seven years to prepare, and EnergyAustralia has promised a workforce support package worth ten million Australian dollars (about eight million American dollars). This is what happens when closures are planned out. There is no reason why every single one of those employees cannot land on their feet when the time comes. But that is much, much harder to do when employees are reassured that they have nothing to worry about until the plant closes on short notice. There is a right way and a wrong way to go about closing carbon-emitting power plants, and I think that we can agree that the needs of the affected workers need to be carefully considered and addressed.

But that brings us to the question of whether keeping an old coal plant open for another seven years is good enough. The Guardian article reports that “Climate campaigners said the closure was inevitable, but not soon enough given the scientific evidence about what was needed.” I’d have liked to have seen a specific quote from a specific person or organization, but I do think it’s fair to acknowledge that keeping the global temperature increase under 1.5ºC requires closing fossil fuel plants (coal plants especially) with a sense of urgency. And it can’t just be one aging plant that closes, either. But the comment does underscore the need to strike a balance between doing right by affected workers and doing right by a rapidly destabilizing climate that has the potential to affect a great many more people.

The plant closure also provides an interesting example of how different media outlets can spin the same story in two very different ways, despite presenting the same set of facts to the readers. The Guardian has a reputation for being left-leaning, for example. Reuters, by contrast is more centrist. Both news outlets mention in their articles on the closure that Australia’s energy and emissions reduction minister, Angus Taylor, is worried that “reliability and affordability concerns” will ensue. His concerns stem at least partially from price spikes that happened in the aftermath of sudden plant closures in 2016 and 2017. But Reuters made that a part of the headline for their article, and The Guardian didn’t. And yet, the articles themselves are not dramatically different in tone or content from each other; more than anything, it’s the headline. I think an important conclusion to draw from this, regardless of your taste in reading material, is to go beyond the headlines – which say a lot less than people give them credit for, regardless of what they think about media bias and who is or isn’t engaging in it – and look at the details. As far as the details go, I think projecting the fallout from a closure planned seven years in advance based on what happened with abrupt closures that weren’t entirely expected is unreasonable and unfair.

So there are a number of conclusions to draw from the announced closure of the Yallourn plant. First, a good plan will leave ample time for affected employees and their communities to adapt. Second, the urgency to close coal plants is real. It will take good, smart leadership to face that urgency without adversely affecting workers, and the balance will be delicate, but it can be done. Finally, I think we all need to agree to go beyond the headlines and the “clickbait” and understand the details. This applies to issues well beyond energy and climate, but looking at news in a shallow way or simply absorbing somebody’s spin isn’t helping the public discourse any.

The Cost of Energy Transition, Part 1: Out with the Old

 

An aerial view (from Apple Maps) of a solar farm in Wading River, NY.

When I started The Measure four years ago, I described it as a blog about energy and global warming. You can’t talk about climate change and global warming without also discussing energy and how to generate it more cleanly. A big part of the resistance to taking action against global warming comes from discomfort with changing how we’ve turned on the lights and transported ourselves for many decades. Usually, the discomfort is directed in particular at the cost involved in switching to greener energy. Will we pay dearly to change all of our energy over to clean sources, to the point that the cost of dealing with the warming will seem trivial in comparison? Given the inevitable flooding, the increases in frequency and intensity of major weather-related events, and above all the subsequent human displacement and the political consequences, I personally think it’s more than clear enough that the cost of accepting climate change is unacceptably high. And the cost will just keep rising the longer we continue to do basically nothing to rein global warming in. Plenty of reasonable people are not convinced, however, so it’s still important to consider the costs of a massive transition of our energy production.

One part of this cost comes from the closing of coal- and gas-fired power plants before the end of their operational lifetime. Power companies invest in new construction at a considerable expense, under the assumption that the cost will pay for itself over the long term. And these companies have continued to invest in fossil fuel infrastructure, despite being fully aware of the consequences. Entirely moving away from electricity generation from fossil fuels by 2035, as President Biden has set as a goal, will require some early closures and the stranding of some assets. The good news is that the closures would affect a minority of the existing power infrastructure. Based on an article written for Science in December by Dr. Emily Grubert of the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Georgia Tech, “a 2035 deadline for completely retiring fossil-based electricity generators would strand only about 15% (1700 GW-years) of fossil fuel–fired capacity life, alongside about 20% (380,000 job-years) of direct power plant and fuel extraction jobs remaining as of 2018.” The main reason for that is that 73% of existing fossil fuel generators will reach the end of their expected lifetime before 2035. In terms of dollars, Grubert (through personal communication) suggested a very rough estimate of between $200 billion and $400 billion in terms of stranded assets. That’s not a small hit, but it is smaller than the cost of the COVID-19 relief packages. Plus, the cost would be spread out over more than a decade. I have heard arguments against the federal government bailing out utilities for stranded assets, most notably in Leah Cardamore Stokes’ excellent book Short Circuiting Policy, which chronicles the efforts of utilities and special interest groups to thwart policy changes designed to promote clean energy. But I also think that Stokes’ analysis makes it clear that power providers need to be on board with a clean energy transition for it to have any chance of happening. So unless you can replace the existing power providers, you need to find a way to work with them.

Implementing major changes in our energy infrastructure will also cause short-term hardship for a lot of people, and that makes it a very tough sell. Dr. Grubert’s article talks about a just transition, where the needs of people whose lives will be disrupted are met. (The term “just transition” was first popularized by the labor movement over twenty years ago, and is part of the various manifestations of the Green New Deal.) Mitigating the disruption will first require establishing a detailed timeline, so that affected people and communities will know when the change is coming. Having time to respond will make it easier for communities to make not only their needs known, but get those needs met. This is something that has not been done with past closures of plants, especially when the reasons for closing the plant have been economic rather than environmental. For example, a 2017 article in The Guardian about the closing of a coal plant in Australia talks about how workers and communities have had an average of four months to prepare for the loss of their jobs when Australian plants closed. This amount of time is unacceptably short, but a properly considered phaseout would not impose such abrupt transitions on people. Biden’s predecessor in the White House made a habit of telling coal miners what they wanted to hear. That got him significant votes in battleground states, and those votes mattered in 2016. But hopefully people whose jobs and towns have depended to this point the fossil fuel industry will appreciate that honesty will benefit them a lot more in the long run than empty promises.

One thing the current administration could do to assist affected communities and workers would be to ensure that they reap benefits from the clean energy transition. These benefits could include preferential treatment of affected communities in the location of new clean-energy plants, and of affected workers in the availability of and training for new jobs in clean energy. The 2020 U.S. Energy and Employment Report, put together by The National Association of State Energy Officials (NASEO) and the Energy Futures Initiative (EFI), states that solar employed 248,000 Americans last year and wind employed 114,800. By contrast, the coal industry employs 185,689 Americans, which is already less than solar and down 5.9% from 2019. Natural gas employs 636,042 total, less than twice the amount of labor employed by solar and wind while accounting for roughly four times the present power production. In other words, solar and wind are more labor intensive than gas for the amount of energy produced. So there’s plenty of reason to think that an increase in solar and wind generation at the expense of coal and gas will result in a net increase in available jobs, not a decrease.

Transitioning to clean power generation over the next decade and a half will be difficult, but the difficulties are ultimately a function of politics much more than they are a function of logistics. As I’ve already said in a previous post, a large amount of salesmanship will be required to make it happen. I can only hope the Biden Administration is up to it. The alternative is a choice in 2024 between ineffectual lip service on one hand, or a return to a boldly blind embrace of the harmful status quo on the other.

When Other Things Take Precedence, Part 3: Lies, Damn Lies, and...

Shannon Stapleton/Reuters

 

So once again I am deviating from my usual discussion about energy and climate to address something that just happened which necessarily requires our attention. The US Capitol in Washington DC was stormed and looted on Wednesday, and five people lost their lives in the chaos. The people responsible were supporters of outgoing President Trump, who has repeatedly claimed without presenting evidence that the election was unfairly stolen from him. What is truly frightening about this is that many people went to the length of committing what is essentially treason because they were lied to. However, having a quarter century of experience in climate science, I can tell you that the lying is nothing new. As hideous as Donald Trump is, and I see nothing to be gained by continuing to be diplomatic about that, he is more of an effect of the culture of lying that has developed in this country than the cause.
 

When I first started doing graduate research at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City in 1996, I didn't appreciate the degree to which basic science was being questioned by the public at large. I understood why some people had concerns that addressing the problem of global warming would do more economic harm than environmental good, but I didn't think people would go so far as to deny the actual science and attack the character of the scientists. I was in my mid 20s, and I was naïve. I soon realized that people were being fed misinformation through all layers of the media, from talk radio, to relatively unknown sites on the nascent World Wide Web, to large newspapers and television networks owned and run by Rupert Murdoch. Some people had honest enough intentions, but spread falsehoods regardless. Others had intentions that were more genuinely malevolent. Most of the malevolence came from people in the fossil fuel industry, who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo and maximizing their profits regardless of the damage their industry causes to the long-term stability of the Earth’s climate. Some even came from a tiny minority of scientists themselves. These scientists took grant money from the fossil fuel industry, and reveled in getting far more press for being contrarian than their peers got for filling in the details. Meanwhile, the rest of the climate science community were (and still are) frequently accused of being willing to say anything for money and attention. As somebody who lived in Manhattan on $30,000 a year as a grad student and $50,000 a year when I became a postdoc, I tried to laugh off the insinuations. But they were not intended to be funny, and they got progressively more sinister as time went on. I suppose being on the low end of the totem pole had some benefits, as I never did anything that warranted enough attention to expose myself to death threats. Other people I worked with got such threats routinely. And once Andrew Breitbart (co-founder of the conservative website that bears his name) posted a tweet calling for the execution of my boss, I never felt comfortable working in my office again.
 

When Andrew Breitbart passed away in 2012, full control of the Breitbart website passed to its other co-founder, Stephen Bannon. Bannon, of course, is now best known for being the chief architect of Donald Trump’s successful Presidential campaign in 2016. So the people who had created and profited from a media ecosystem that actively misinformed a large portion of the population, and had made a point of using dehumanizing and threatening language against anyone who contradicted their narrative, didn’t simply have their foot in the door in the halls of government in Washington – they had control of the White House.
 

And now we’re here, with people from all parts of the country and walks of life (at least, all the ones where you’ll find white people) converging on Washington and going to absurd and horrifying lengths to defend a bald-faced lie. I pity them, but I will not forgive them so easily – plenty of otherwise decent, well-intentioned people who believed the wrong information lived in Germany in the 1930s. I have always wanted this blog to be a dialogue, where nobody needs to agree with me to feel welcome here. But in light of recent events, I am going to require a few things from my readers moving forward.
 

First of all, nobody is under any obligation whatsoever to like President-elect Biden. I’m personally concerned that his response to the climate crisis will consist of too much lip service and not enough aggressive action. But a free and fair election was held in this country in November, and Joe Biden won it. That is not up for discussion. Second, we are in the middle of a global pandemic that has already killed well over 300,000 Americans and is presently getting worse. You can feel that our economic needs have not been properly accounted for in our response to the pandemic. That is a reasonable and defensible position. But you cannot argue that COVID-19 isn’t real or is not a big deal, or that we have in any way overreacted to it. The body count overwhelmingly indicates otherwise. And finally – since this is a climate blog, after all – you have to acknowledge that global warming is real, and serious, and our doing. You can have honest questions about the science or how we know what we know, and I will happily answer any that you have, but I am 100% finished with debating the existence of the problem. We should be debating what to do about it, and there is plenty of room for people of all perspectives and persuasions to contribute. But there is no room for lies. It does not matter if you’re one of the people who knows the truth but doesn’t care, or if you are their willing conduit. We have lost too much time.  And this week made clear that we are in imminent risk of losing far more than that, before we even consider the consequences of a warming world.

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John Kerry's Uphill Climb

 

By United States Department of State - Department of State, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=24395911

Two weeks ago, President-elect Biden announced that former Secretary of State and one-time Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry will serve as Biden’s special envoy on climate. This newly-created Cabinet position will also be part of the National Security Council, indicating that Biden believes that responding to climate change is indeed a threat to American stability. Having been the leader of the American delegation to the Paris Conference in 2015, Kerry is a logical choice for the role. But Kerry has an uphill climb not only to make significant progress on the issue internationally, but also to sell serious action to combat climate change at home.

One of the first tasks of the new administration, and perhaps of Kerry in particular, will be to undo the damage done to America’s standing in the international community by our withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Five years ago the world, as it so often has on a broad range of issues in the past, looked to us for leadership on the most important long-term issue facing humanity this century. Presently, we are a non-participant. Kerry’s role in making the Paris Agreement happen allows him to command considerable respect beyond our borders, however, and I expect that restoring our reputation internationally will be the relatively easy part of his job. But President-elect Biden will need to get the American people to support action on climate change strongly enough that we will not tolerate another retreat on this issue, regardless of who succeeds him in the White House. And to do that, the Biden Administration will need to excel at salesmanship. It seems very likely at present that the most important salesman in this regard will be John Kerry.

An example of what Kerry needs to avoid can be seen in an exchange he made in Congress last year with Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. To put it mildly, Massie’s line of questioning was idiotic. He referred to political science as a “pseudoscience,” and then proceeded to ask some questions concerning geology that would be acceptable coming from somebody with a pre-middle school level of education, not a Congressman who has been tasked by voters to make serious decisions on serious issues. I need to point out here that Massie’s educational background is not the problem – he has multiple engineering degrees from MIT, so it’s not that he should know better, he does know better. But this is the country we live in right now.  A particular facet of science is overwhelmingly accepted by the people who study it the most closely – i.e., the people from whom Kerry got his data – but the public at large is confused and misled about it by people whose motivations are selfish at best and genuinely malevolent at worst. Massie’s intent that day was to rattle Kerry, and he succeeded.  Sure, Massie got skewered in the media outlets where you would expect him to get skewered, but Kerry lost his composure, and with it the chance to change even a few minds.  If and when Kerry gets the opportunity to go back to Congress in his new role, he will need to do better than that.

Unfortunately, it’s not really clear how much “better than that” Kerry needs to be to make a difference. John Holdren, the Obama Administration’s science advisor, did a superior job handling similarly cringeworthy questions in this Congressional briefing from 2014, but he does not appear to have swayed the argument any either. (The linked clip is from The Daily Show; you do not have to like Jon Stewart’s snark, but ask yourself if you really want that quality of questioning coming from the House Committee on Science, Space, and Technology.) Perhaps there is not much point in making a persuasive argument directly to Republicans in Congress, because it won't go anywhere. But Kerry, and obviously his boss as well, will still need to sell action on climate change to the American people. Some Americans might honestly have questions similar to the ones that these Congressmen had, because either their schools did not teach them adequately on this or because their education has been buried under misinformation coming from people who stand to further profit from inaction on global warming. 

Kerry has to be willing to patiently answer those questions. For example, carbon dioxide levels have certainly been higher in the distant past than they are now. And temperatures have gone up with carbon dioxide. And sea levels have gone up with remperatures. The last time the Earth was this warm, sea levels were 6 to 9 meters (20 to 30 feet) higher than they are now. And the last time the Earth was 3ºC warmer than pre-Industrial levels, which we’ll easily reach by 2100 if we do nothing, the Earth had sea levels 20 to 25 meters (65 to 80 feet) higher than they are now. Life existed and did well enough under those conditions, but most of humanity’s population and infrastructure can be found near the world’s coasts. Where will they go, and who will foot the bill? Furthermore, excepting occasional major volcanic eruptions which can significantly but temporarily lower temperatures globally, geology works on much greater time scales than half a century; global temperatures have risen nearly 1ºC since 1970, and the rate of increase is accelerating. Plus we can monitor the location of greenhouse gases more than well enough to isolate the major sources, so there really is no doubt where the added carbon dioxide is coming from.

In addition, Kerry needs to be willing to put himself in places where people will ask those questions. He may even need to visit communities that might be affected adversely, at least in the short term, by actions that a serious effort to combat global warming will necessitate. And he’ll need to have good answers for some harder questions when he does. 

Lent

Growing up, I had an uneasy relationship with the season of Lent.  I’ve never been really comfortable getting a black smudge on my forehead on Ash Wednesday, and the idea of giving up chocolate or something like that for six weeks just seemed kind of pointless to me.  But I think that now I have a better understanding of it, or at least what it’s supposed to be.  Pretty much every religion has some concept of self-denial — not because it’s something painful that religions make people do, but because some things in life have more value than others,  and sometimes we don’t get to choose what we give up.  There are things that we need, things we can do without, and things that we should do without.  Taking an annual inventory of which category the things we indulge in fall under has value.  Giving something up isn’t meaningful in and of itself, unless we emerge from the period of sacrifice better and spiritually healthier for it. 

When Lent began, I was working on a piece for this blog about the cost of energy.  The basic thesis of that piece, which I will eventually finish, is that creating a world where our energy is obtained without emitting greenhouse gases will come with a price, but that the price is not so big compared to the cost of doing nothing.  The sacrifice, to the extent that there is one, will be temporary.  We will emerge from it in a world where breathing is easier, people who live on the world’s coasts are not in danger of being displaced with no place to go, and fewer people will lose everything to a storm, or fire, or the kind of conflicts that arise when the things we need are hard to come by.  To get there, we will need to reconsider what we really need, and re-evaluate the difference between what we can and what we should do without.  It’s a tough sell.  But giving something up to emerge better for it is a part of the faith of most religious people, and can serve a constructive purpose regardless of what you do or don’t believe.

Of course, while I was thinking about the climate and other things like my family, my job, and the upcoming elections, something else came up.  We all wound up giving up far, far more this Lent than we intended.  Nobody is enjoying this.  And it won’t end with a big celebration on Easter, at least not for anybody with any sense of responsibility.  But we’ve got this.  It’s part of our history, our traditions, our culture.  People have endured worse than this.  We are realizing that there are more things we can do without than we thought.  And we are gaining a greater appreciation of the things we do need, and the people who provide them for us.  Plenty of us are facing or dealing with great loss right now, and that is sad and awful.  But collectively we can emerge from this better, and healthier.  And that doesn’t seem pointless to me at all.

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Thoughts on Australia

Much of the world's focus at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 was on the massive heat waves and fires that afflicted the country of Australia. Multiple reports have suggested that over 1 billion animals have died in the blazes.  Did a change in climate play a role in this?  The answer is not a simple one — it never is — because there are other factors involved that should not be overlooked.  But there is sufficient evidence to implicate a warming, drying climate in the heat waves and fires that the island continent has been experiencing.

For starters, Australia suffered from a massive heatwave.  Obviously heat waves are more likely in the warming world. But what about the fires themselves? In a warming world, wet areas tend to get wetter and dry areas tend to get dryer. A regrettably prophetic 2016 study had suggested that California was becoming more vulnerable to forest fires due to a warmer and drier climate, well before the fires that afflicted the state over the last two years. And as it turns out, a paper concerning bushfires in southeastern Australia and their connection with climate change was published in 2007.  It stated, “A study conducted in 2005 examined the potential impacts of climate change on fire-weather at 17 sites in southeast Australia. It found that the number of ‘very high’ and ‘extreme’ fire danger days could increase by 4-25% by 2020 and 15-70% by 2050.”  So the potential for fires to get worse in Australia as the climate warms has been known and documented for at least a decade.

But other factors have exacerbated the extent and damage of this summer’s fires.  One factor is natural: a periodic oscillation called the Indian Ocean Dipole (IOD).  In the positive phase of the IOD, warm waters off the African coast lead to high rainfall in Africa, relatively cool and dry conditions in Indonesia, and relatively hot and dry air in Australia.  That is the present phase of the IOD, making it an important contributor to the fire season.  But there is also the factor of human carelessness and stupidity.  Much press has been devoted to the large number of fire-related arrests in Australia over the last couple of months, including over 40 deliberate fires and well over a hundred more accidental fires.  While that behavior is inexcusable, it is also not unusual; a 2009 survey by the Australian Government concluded that “between 2001–02 and 2006–07, the number of bushfires in Australia varied from approximately 46,000 to 62,000 per year, with an average of nearly 54,000 fires per year. This agrees quite closely with the average of nearly 52,000 fires per year calculated by the Australian Institute of Criminology using data from fire agencies from 1995–06 to 2005–06. It is estimated that 50 percent of fires are either deliberately lit or suspicious in origin.”  This leads to two important conclusions.  The first is that people directly affect the number of bushfires that get started, just like they played a role in the California wildfires.  The second is that a normal amount of human activity cannot begin to account for the extraordinary extent of the damage that this summer’s Australian fires have caused.

But if we are talking about the effects of a changing world on Australia, it is important to acknowledge how the politics and media of Australia are not helping the situation. This past year, the Australians held an election where climate change was very clearly on the agenda.  The party that wanted to do something about climate change lost to the party that didn’t. Why did this happen? Australian voters were more fearful of the consequences of doing something than they were the consequences of doing nothing. This happened despite the heat waves the country has recently experienced, and the Great Barrier Reef suffering massive bleaching events in the past couple of years to the point that it is in danger of dying altogether if the planet continues to warm. This fear of the cost of acting against climate change has been fueled in part by coal interests, predictably, but also the media -- especially Rupert Murdoch (the owner of News Corp. which runs Fox News in the USA), who owns 57% of the newspapers sold in Australia. (That statistic comes for a fairly old study, to be fair, but there's no reason to think that percentage has shrunk in the meantime.) That is a lot of control over a free press for one person to exert.

In 1998 the Australian rock band Midnight Oil, known for their advocacy of aboriginal land rights and their environmental activism, released a concept album called Redneck Wonderland about the state of Australia at the time. The album was prescient in many ways about how politics would change not only in Australia, but also in places like the United States and the United Kingdom, in the subsequent two decades. A song from that album called “Comfortable Place on the Couch” describes how people sit on the couch and absorb whatever their TV channel or newspaper (or website, if you bring it to the present) of choice tells them, without actually going out into the world and experiencing it for themselves. In the chorus, Peter Garrett sings “Some say the truth is what you see, I know the truth is what you feel” — predating Stephen Colbert’s more concise expression “truthiness” by a few years, and also predicting people’s stubborn indifference to what is going on right in front of their faces.  In many ways, this sums up what Australia has become today. Sydney is burning, the koalas are in danger of going extinct, the Great Barrier Reef is dying, and Australians reelected the people who want to sell a billion people in India all the coal that they can burn. As a climate scientist, I can only hope that the rest of the world doesn't wait till the change is right in front of them before they act to stop it.

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