Windfall: Unlocking a Fossil-Free Future

By Ketan Joshi

We've had a decade of distraction and inaction on climate change, but what made things go so very wrong in Australia? And what can the rest of the world learn from our mistakes—and opportunities? In Windfall, renewable energy expert Ketan Joshi examines how wind power inspired the creation of a weird, fabricated disease, and why the speed with which emissions could have been reduced—like putting a price on carbon—was hampered by a flurry of policy disasters. He then plots a way forward to a future where communities champion equitable new clean tech projects, where Australia grows past a reliance on toxic fuels, and where the power of people is used to rattle fossil fuel advocates from their complacency. Renewable energy can become a key player in the effort to upgrade our species from one on a path to self-destruction to a path of sustainability and fairness. With the knowledge of how the last decade was lost, the next decade can work the way it's meant to.

• Language: English
• Publisher: NewSouth
• Release date: Dec 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781742244921

Book preview

WINDFALL

UNLOCKING A FOSSIL-FREE FUTURE

KETAN JOSHI has a decade of experience in the renewable energy industry, ranging from data analytics to communications. He has worked in corporations, government and freelanced for non-government organisations, and has built a large following on Twitter specialising in climate, clean tech and science communication. He has also written for a range of media outlets, including The Guardian, The Monthly and Cosmos magazine. He can be found on Twitter @KetanJ0

For Kim and Amelia.

Perfect people who deserve to live in a beautiful world.

WINDFALL

A NewSouth book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Ketan Joshi 2020

First published 2020

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

ISBN9781742236469 (paperback)

9781742244921 (ebook)

9781742249452 (ePDF)

Cover design Peter Long

Cover image Alhovik / Shutterstock

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

1CLIMATE ACTION FEAR: THE FIRST OUTBREAK

Trough of weirdness

Good science doesn’t cure bad science

The spoken disease

Give people what they want

The impending rise of solar syndrome

2ACTION THAT LEAVES NO ONE BEHIND

The pioneers of Danish community wind

Germany’s landscape and the asparagus conundrum

Shit hit the turbines

Benefit sharing in Australia

Customising community participation

A beating heart and a clear head

3UNLOCKING THE BENEFITS OF NEW MACHINES

The blackout that changed everything

The political power of darkness and fear

Guide rails of the next decade’s decarbonisation

Steady hands take us to clean power

The electrifying potential of electrification

Living things and their emissions

Finding Kardashev: the road back to humanity

4THE CLIMATE INACTIVISTS

The birth of inaction through distraction

The carbon tax turned my lamb into a house

When Abbott had nothing left to destroy

The man in the middle

Morrison: inaction through distraction reborn

Distraction’s dying power and a nervous PM

5INFURIATED OPTIMISM

The rising climate roar

People power

Visiting the mouth of the carbon river

Boycotting unboycottable fossil fuels

The rise of doomism

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX

INTRODUCTION

The first thing I felt in Australia was the thick grip of bushfire smoke. It clung to the walls of my throat, while a cloud of oven heat covered my face. It was January 1994. We had just flown from London and the experience was a jarring departure from the inert, grey British cold. The air was thick with ash because Australia was in the tail end of a crisis. ‘Australia has not seen a fire of this magnitude in the last 200 years’, Phil Koperberg, commissioner of the New South Wales Rural Fire Service, had told the New York Times a week before I arrived.¹ Those fires raged in the heart of Australian suburbs, encroaching far past the bush-suburb interface. Homes in the suburb in which I would eventually grow up, Marsfield, were swallowed by flames. News footage from that week shows people running through smokefilled driveways. I felt like I had landed on a different planet. That catastrophe was winding down when we arrived, but its fingerprint lingered in the air. My first ever crisis.

The dangers we saw were quickly balanced against the incredible experience of the Australian summer. As nervous immigrants, we cautiously dipped our toes in the powerful Australian surf. We picked up bluebottles thinking they were litter and had to be treated by surf lifesavers. We fed rainbow lorikeets in the backyard. I caught wriggling skinks between my fingers and pulled fruit from trees. It was paradise compared to London’s grey and brown concrete. What we did not know is that we arrived in the very first moments of a change. The catastrophic bushfires of 1994 were the beginning of the shattering of a balance when the Australian summer began shifting away from bright blue paradise and towards bushfires that began to ratchet upwards in their threat.

I left Australia when that shift became horribly manifest. My wife scored a job in Oslo, Norway, and the whole family moved there in 2019. Watching the lives of my friends and family from across the world, I expected my first Christmas away from home to be filled with social media posts about sand, water and sky. Instead, cruising through my feeds I saw photographs of Manly beach filled with a thick, brown haze, with the scattered few people braving the toxic air barely visible through the smog. There were photos of backyard swimming pools, but they weren’t filled with friends and fun – they were photos of the layer of black ash and burned plant matter that had settled onto the surface of the pool’s water. I opened Facebook and saw a post from an old acquaintance – a video of her childhood home at the base of a tower of fire reaching high into the brown sky. Friends living on the South Coast of New South Wales wrote about how their son thought bedtime was far earlier in the day, because the sky had been darkened by bushfire smoke. I called my parents and we struggled to talk. Both were coughing badly, impacted by the bushfire smoke blanketing Sydney. My dad had tried to avoid being outdoors, but the alarms in his office had tripped due to the smoke, forcing them all outside into the hazardous atmosphere. Koalas died. Kangaroos died. Volunteer firefighters pictured in articles with their beautiful young, grinning children died. The losses from the 1994 bushfires were surpassed in late November before summer even began. The venue my wife and I were married in, where we danced wildly with our friends and family, was burnt to a crisp. Pictures after the fire show a crumpled heap of rubble. The town my wife and I honeymooned in saw its main street razed, just prior to the close of 2019. The zoo we visited on that trip was emptied of its animals, with monkeys and pandas staying in the home of the zoo’s director. More people died – a firefighter with a heavily pregnant wife; a father and son trapped in an inferno. The cell phone network went down as mobile phone towers burned, and tens of thousands of homes went without power over the New Year. For many Australians, the decade closed amid panic, grieving, fury and loss.

As I watched the disaster unfold from distant Oslo, which was sunny, bright and clear, I felt nothing but guilt and emptiness. Australia became the world’s focal point for the impacts of climate change, as it suffered the most literally hellish, blatantly apocalyptic scenes one could imagine. It was on the front pages of the Norwegian newspapers, and indeed papers across the globe. Well before summer had rolled around in Australia, experts had warned of dangerous bushfires. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation began researching this threat in the early 1990s, and influential Australian economist Ross Garnaut wrote in 2008, ‘fire seasons will start earlier, end slightly later, and generally be more intense. This effect increases over time, but should be directly observable by 2020.’² In the year leading up to the disaster, former fire chiefs repeatedly requested meetings with federal politicians to warn them of the predictions, only to be rebuffed and ignored.³ Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, Australia’s bushfires dominated global news. The opening chords of the climate crisis rang out just prior to the fast burn of the pandemic, which hit Australia only weeks after the last fires flickered out.

As short-term crises like pandemics flare up and die out, longer-term crises continue unabated. Australia is experiencing bushfire seasons that are starting earlier, are more intense and ending later. This is because the conditions required for extreme bushfires happen more often. Longer-term seasonal trends (like shifting currents in the Indian Ocean bringing drought) all contribute to fire in Australia. However, among the roiling mix of changing natural factors is a human fingerprint. A signal in the noise. A constant pressure, leaning on the whole system so it tends towards worse conditions. As a consequence, disaster soaks into the lives of far more Australians than ever before, and summer becomes a moment of anxiety, rather than anticipation.

The conditions required for Australia to burn occur more often because the planet’s climate is changing. Human actions, like burning fossil fuels, the farming of meat and deforestation, have all contributed to an increase in the concentration of greenhouse gases in the planet’s atmosphere. They’re naturally occurring – they trap heat in the atmosphere, and yes, this heat sustains life on Earth. But too much of a good thing is a bad thing.

Greenhouse gases are being added into the Earth’s atmosphere far beyond the natural levels. Meaning Australia – which has always been on a knife’s edge between the perfect summer and the hell of heatwaves and bushfires – gets a hard shove into the business end of a warming planet. When I landed in Australia, breathing smoke, that shove had only just begun. Today, the fall has well and truly begun.

In the mid 1800s, American scientist, equality campaigner and innovator Eunice Foote – the first to discover the core causal component of the greenhouse effect – wrote that ‘an atmosphere of that gas [CO2] would give our atmosphere a higher temperature’.⁴ (Her experiments have not been recognised as widely as male scientists who published the same discoveries later.)

Over the decades, the science expanded and coalesced, becoming more accurate and more concerning in the possibilities it raised. The year I was born, 1985, Senator Albert Gore Jr, Democrat of Tennessee, sat in a hearing of the Senate Subcommittee on Toxic Substances and Environmental Oversight, in the United States. At that hearing scientist and science communicator Carl Sagan spoke to the panel about the strong scientific consensus that had emerged by the mid 1980s around fossil fuels – they were warming our planet. ‘Here we are, pouring enormous quantities of CO2 and these other gases into the atmosphere every year, with hardly any concern about its long term and global consequences’, he warned.⁵

Over the course of 1985, humans emitted a grand total of 19 793 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. When I reached the end of high school in 2003, the year’s total was 26 687. In 2018, it was 36 831.⁶ Since the turn of the millennium, regardless of countless warnings, including Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports,⁷ our species has pressed the accelerator on this planetary shift. We have operated as if no real alternative exists to breathing life into gears, motors and wires without the large-scale burning of old dead plants.

Today, greenhouse gas levels in Earth’s atmosphere are 1.5 times the highest historical levels, which occurred in ‘interglacial’ peaks between ice ages. Greenhouse gas emissions are cumulative, which means even if emissions stopped today, temperatures would still rise around 0.6 degrees,⁸ because the sky won’t return to its pre-industrial state for many decades. But emissions won’t stop today. We are creating changes that normally occur over hundred-thousand-year timescales in the Earth’s atmosphere in the space of years. ‘In terms of carbon dioxide’s greenhouse effect, today’s world is already as far from that of the 18th century as the 18th century was from the ice age’, published The Economist, in 2019.⁹ The chart showing atmospheric concentrations of CO2 is a smooth, gentle wave for most of human civilisation’s history, but around halfway through the 20th century, it becomes a jagged shard shooting vertically skyward.

Emissions are rising because fossil fuels are an extremely dense energy source, with each kilogram packed with millennia of compressed organic matter. Upon their discovery, they were used to fuel an industrial revolution. Once extracted from the ground, they could be transported to power stations or stored in tanks in cars. They powered machines, generated electricity, and moved humans across lands and through the sky. Humanity was redefined by the discovery of ancient, stored, organic sunlight.

This has only happened in the context of active efforts to obscure the science revealing the long-term costs. These efforts come mostly from the world’s fossil fuel industry, but also by adjacent players like politicians, media commentators, libertarians and conspiracy theorists, each with their own motivations, but each contributing to a single goal: the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels and consequently, long-term harm to people and to our habitat.

There have been counter-efforts attempting to reduce emissions, focusing largely on governments trying to drag economies away from relying so heavily on fossil fuels. The Kyoto Protocol covered the period up to 2020, with limited success. The Paris Climate Agreement – formed in 2015 – aims to limit the planet’s warming to 2 degrees below pre-industrial levels and for a 1.5 degree limit as a stretch target.¹⁰ Humanity needs to halve its usage of fossil fuels each decade, from now on. Our species needs to be at net zero emissions by 2050 (where some emissions do remain, but those are removed from the atmosphere by natural or technological means).

Something broke, between the Paris agreement’s stated goal and the creation of policies to get us there. The current promises and pledges of leaders and governments are insufficient to limit warming to either 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, as assessed by the Climate Action Tracker, a global consortium of scientists and analysts.¹¹ No doubt our problem would be worse without these efforts, but on their own, they are not enough. Global emissions need to bend suddenly downwards at a rate far more aggressive than what the Paris agreement stipulates. Each year that the curve fails to change direction means future reductions need to be steeper to achieve the same levels of planetary safety. Without immediate and dramatic action, the hardest problem ever faced by our species will keep getting more challenging.

Unlike the all-encompassing pandemic that dominated 2020, climate change is an unfamiliar existential threat. There is no absolute measure of success, such as the invention of a vaccine. It is never solved or unsolved. Rather, it is a formula, where the quantity of action put forth to resolve the problem determines the degree to which life on Earth is spared even greater exposure to climate impacts. The impacts already experienced are, in the short term, locked in. The Australian summer is dying, and babies born in 2020 will live far different lives to the sun-soaked joys of my younger years. But the nature of climate change – as something that can be rectified by degrees of effort – means there exists a grand and significant space of unfilled potential action. We can be half doomed, and half saved – an unfamiliar feeling, indeed.

It is important to be clear about what a good future looks like. In a best-case scenario, humanity rapidly decreases its emissions to zero over the next three decades, while developing natural and technological tools for removing carbon from the atmosphere. Over the subsequent decades, the planet’s temperatures stabilise, and over the final decades of the century, return to pre-industrial levels. There is no binary fix, but the threat of a slow descent into hotter summers, worsening disasters and fading memories of blue skies and green grass can be countered.

It is not an entirely unfamiliar problem. Cancer, for instance, can never be ‘cured’ in the sense that it’s eradicated forever, but we still dedicate billions of dollars and immeasurable quantities of effort, and will continue to do so, to reduce lives lost. The very best of human effort might only lead to 50 per cent of climate change being fixed, or 75 per cent, or 90 per cent. As Australia opens the next decade through the gateway of a moment of red hot horror, it is revitalising to realise that every little bit really does count.

What matters is that we heave as hard as we can against that jagged upwards-facing shard of rapidly rising emissions. Every single newton of force applied to this problem translates into real-world change. Everything counts, no matter where it ends. Knowing that today’s efforts have real impact means urgent action can never be a waste.

Climate action is a story about human betterment. Fossil fuels have provided immense quantities of energy to humanity and supercharged industrialisation. We were indeed lucky to find ourselves standing above organic deposits of ancient, organic sunlight, and exploiting them was not a complicated affair. It took little effort, and little ingenuity, to dig them from the ground and use them to increase human comfort (albeit unevenly and inequitably). But this is not the story of human betterment I am talking about. If anything, it was a revelation of the raw toxicity of our short-term thinking. The real story of human betterment will be when we use effort, cleverness and our instincts for fairness and equity to move past the stores of energy underneath the ground, and move closer to the source.

It is possible to access the sun’s energy far more directly, and without the atmospheric chemical burden of fossil fuels. Going straight to the source is a fundamental improvement in the efficiency and sustainability of the way we breathe life into our species. There are simple alternatives to fossil fuels that allow for human flourishing without coupling life to a trajectory of sabotage. And just as Australia sits at the pointy end of the impacts of climate change, feeling fire, heat, smoke and pain, it also sits at the pointy end of the solutions to climate change. Right now, more than at any other time in our lives, we need to understand that we are not at the mercy of crisis. Australia’s new decade has opened with the static anxiety of helplessness, as the dual disasters of fire and disease dominated our hearts, and so it is more vital than ever to know we can fight to control our fate.

Australia is an island so vast that its corners feel like separate continents, and it has unique access to climate change solutions. At its bottom half, the land cuts into the roaring forties, a stretch of the Earth’s atmosphere that churns with powerful intensity. At its top half, it soaks up direct sunlight in cloudless consistency. Underneath the hot, dry surface of Australia lie vast reserves of fossil fuels: 6 per cent of the world’s total coal resources, and 2 per cent of natural gas.¹² Australia is the world’s second largest exporter of coal, and the sixth largest exporter of liquefied natural gas. The land occupied by humans sits between the energy in the ground and the energy in the sky, and the nation’s leaders have only looked in one of these directions.

Australia’s focus on extracting fossil fuels means it has become a country that contributes far more to hurting the world than helping it. It has become a key contributor to global emissions – around 5 per cent, when you consider both the sale of fossil fuels burned overseas and those consumed within the country’s borders. Australia’s population is roughly 0.3 per cent of the world, making our per-capita emissions intensity among the highest. For Australians to live comfortable, fossil-fuelled lives, others in the world pay a disproportionate cost. This climate burden, carried on the shoulders of Australians, is heavy.

It doesn’t have to be like this. Australia could be the planet’s solar panel. Around 2.8 million petajoules of fossil fuel reserves are contained underneath the ground in Australia. Around 58 million petajoules of the sun’s energy blankets Australia’s surface in a single year (that’s about 10 000 times Australia’s annual energy consumption). The kinetic energy stored in the atmosphere – wind power – is created as the sun’s energy heats the planet’s fluid surface could be captured too, and Australia has some of the best wind resources in the world.

Acting to reduce Australia’s emissions, and to stop relying on the export of emissions-causing fuels, would benefit Australia in the long term, as the impacts of climate change are reduced, and in the short term, through the spread of benefits gleaned from selling renewable technologies and resources. Saving ourselves has no downside.

When I joined the renewable energy industry in 2010, fresh out of my university science degree, I was infuriated, because the benefits of climate action were being hidden, and the costs were being exaggerated. The dominant narrative everywhere I looked was that evolving away from fossil fuels is a dangerous, painful and risky decision. For a decade, Australians have been told that reducing emissions will change their lives for the worse and provide no benefit to the environment. This wall of noise has come to dominate public discussion around the science, solutions and impacts of climate change. It has worked far too well. That potential blank canvas of climate action? It remains mostly blank in Australia, due to the success of campaigns designed to instil fear around positive change. The greatest motivator for climate action – a windfall of immediate benefits gleaned from unlocking a fossil-free future – has been denied, blocked and obscured.

The year 2010 marked the beginning of a pseudoscientific hurricane of misinformation. I worked in wind farm operations for several years, then wind farm development, and then in communications. Later, I worked at the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and as a freelance writer for various renewable energy advocacy groups. Looking back on a decade of work, I see a single line threaded throughout my experiences: fighting to tell people about the incredible, bountiful and immediate benefits of decarbonisation. I lost that fight far too often.

To upgrade civilisation away from reliance on fossil fuels is a rewarding, albeit challenging process. I have seen the very human and very tangible rewards of climate action through the last decade. I met people living near large-scale wind farm projects who expressed real, rich love for the machines because they were participating in the spread of benefits from the capture of that constantly replenishing resource. I watched in real time as wind power output in South Australia resulted in lower wholesale electricity prices in the state, which flowed through to every person’s electricity bill. I saw fields of solar panels plugged into deep red dirt in outback Australia, reducing reliance on diesel fuels at remote sites. I witnessed a windfall of climate action benefits that enriched human life.

It is not all direct benefits – some elements of climate action require consuming less, and reducing growth. This does not need to be a disadvantage. Lower electricity use means lower power bills. Buying less stuff also means having more money. Decreased car usage leads to healthier people and cleaner, safer cities. Eating less beef and increasing variety in diet leads to better health outcomes, too. Easing the task of converting everything to zero emissions by reducing demand is an enriching journey into efficiency and a reconnection with simpler, richer pleasures.

Upgrading our species to an energy source that doesn’t inflict a