Antinuclear

You don’t turn off R&D spending when there’s a revolution under wayAndrew Blakers, Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems, ANU

Australia’s carbon emissions target – slicing 2000 levels by about 19 per cent by 2030 – would halve pollution on a per capita basis, “one of the biggest reductions” of any G20 nation, Turnbull said.   The government would also double “clean energy innovation” investment over the next five years, and carve out $1 billion from the existing aid budget to help threatened Pacific neighbours build “climate resilience” and cut emissions……….

The pact, which the government plans to ratify later this year if re-elected, aims to limit global temperature increases to between 1.5 and 2 degrees of pre-industrial levels – even if current national offers fall far short of the greenhouse gas reductions needed.

But in the four months since Turnbull’s speech, climate news from abroad and at home has been anything but positive………..

For policy areas directly under Turnbull’s control, it’s been a dismal few months for climate action, not least CSIRO’s assault on climate science launched on February 4 that will see dozens of leading researchers sacked among as many as 450 jobs to go.

Despite pleas of budget penury, the government somehow managed to find $15.4 million a couple of weeks later for a new Oil, Gas and Energy Resources Growth Centre to, among other things, “foster community support” for non-renewables, including coal and nuclear energy.

It is also forked out $3.3 million to two researchers to examine the effects of wind farms on health. Just four researchers made submissions for the cash, a remarkably small number, according to Sydney University public health expert, Simon Chapman.

Taken for granted

And a fresh concern surfaced this week with 61 leading scientists writing to Turnbull decrying the government’s decision last month to end grants from the Australian Renewable Energy Agency (ARENA).

Set up by the Rudd-Gillard government, the agency still had $1.3 billion in funding to disperse by 2022.

Instead, it will now work with the Clean Energy Finance Corp to offer $100 million in loans annually for 10 years to foster “clean and renewable energy”. ARENA still has $130 million to be allocated, with “high interest” from potential proponents, Hunt says.

The proposed end of ARENA’s grant funding removes “an essential component of technology innovation”, the mostly solar researchers said in the letter obtained by Fairfax Media.

Forty years of such grants over had allowed Australia to contribute “very far above its weight” in renewable energy. By contrast, reliance on equity returns “have rarely been effective” in advancing early-stage research, the scientists said.

Richard Corkish, chief operating officer of UNSW-based Australian Centre for Advanced Photovoltaics, said his facility faced “an existential threat” if the $4 million in annual ARENA funds ended. The school continues to spawn world-leading technology, including new types of solar cells using abundant, non-toxic materials.

“ARENA is our major funding source,” Corkish says.

Andrew Blakers, who led development of the solar PV technology being adopted by the world’s largest producers, said all new electricity investment in Australia over the past five years had been in solar or wind energy.

“This is incredible”, says Blakers, who heads the Centre for Sustainable Energy Systems at the Australian National University. “You don’t turn off R&D spending when there’s a revolution under way.”

………Greens deputy leader Larissa Waters said there’s “an obvious disconnect between the Prime Minster’s rhetoric in Paris last year and his actions in Canberra”.

“Presiding over cuts to CSIRO’s world-leading climate research and gutting renewable technology research is stupid on so many levels.

“The government is tipping new money into fossil fuel research so that the big mining companies profiting off the world’s warming don’t have to pay for research themselves,” Waters says……..http://www.theage.com.au/environment/climate-change/walking-in-the-wrong-direction-malcolm-turnbulls-broad-retreat-on-climate-20160420-goat2p.html