Page 1242 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 11 April 2018
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contribution to global emissions is small ignores our greater contribution per capita and that it will take a series of local responses to tackle a global problem.
Our weather also impacts our livelihoods beyond the immediate effects. Here in Australia, while 2016-17 was a bumper year for agriculture this was very much against the trend. Recent CSIRO modelling suggests that potential wheat yields have reduced by around 27 per cent since 1990, due to climate change. This far exceeds the decline in global wheat yields of around 5.5 per cent between 1980 and 2008. Declines in winter rainfall in southern Australia have had a dramatic impact on wheat, barley and canola crops and there is strong evidence to suggest the significant role climate change has played in this.
The CSIRO have also documented how the heat island effect in the ACT leads to summer land surface temperatures of up to 10 degrees hotter by mid-morning and up to eight degrees hotter than surrounding rural areas at night. Neighbourhoods with tree canopy shade of 30 per cent or more can be up to 13 degrees cooler on a hot summer day. With low income groups having fewer resources available to manage extreme heat and the elderly being particularly vulnerable to suffering from heat-related illness, these groups are most impacted by these effects.
At a national level, rather than debate how we can meaningfully respond to climate change, the federal government would prefer to talk about what to name their “we love coal” social club. While it seems that the only heavy lifting being done by the federal government is to wave around a lump of coal in the parliamentary chamber, the states and territories have been left with the task of driving the policy agenda.
Despite this, the Turnbull government has only sought to criticise states and territories when they have shown leadership in energy policy. For example, in 2016 Malcolm Turnbull criticised the then South Australian Premier Jay Weatherill for suggesting that states and territories introduce their own carbon emissions scheme in the absence of federal leadership. When South Australia announced its energy plan in 2017, Turnbull again criticised it as a problem for other states and territories.
In response, Weatherill gatecrashed a Josh Frydenberg press conference to claim that the Turnbull government had “bagged South Australia at every step of the way”. Now, when the ACT attempts to show leadership in ensuring Australia meets its Paris agreement targets, the federal minister reminds us how small we are. Nonetheless, the ACT will continue to push ahead to achieve the target it has set for itself.
In doing this we must also look at the next generation of renewable technologies and how these can support the grid. Battery storage programs are a good start, as is the ACT’s trial of a small-scale virtual power project. But we must look to see how this can be expanded. A virtual power plant is a network of rooftop solar and battery storage systems that all work together to generate, store and feed electricity back into the grid. Energy generated from a household’s rooftop solar PV that is connected to a virtual power plant will provide electricity to meet the household’s needs, with any excess energy being dispatched to the grid. But this is done in a smart way, in a way that helps support the grid and provide this energy in an optimal way.
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