Still No Consensus for Bjorn Lomborg, the Climate Change Refugee

Lomborg (AAP/Alan Porritt)

by David Holmes, Monash University, The Conversation: http://theconversation.com/still-no-consensus-for-bjorn-lomborg-the-climate-change-refugee-45423

With much-cited forecasts that the year 2050 will see 200 million climate change refugees around the world, climate inactivist Bjorn Lomborg may qualify as Australia’s first climate asylum seeker.

Yet it is not scorching temperatures or sea level rise he is seeking refuge from, but the political heat he attracts worldwide for his contrarian views on climate.

The second rejection of a Bjorn-again “Consensus Centre” by an Australian university this week raises questions as to whether any university would ever go near Lomborg, even if the federal government is putting up A$4 million to host him. These millions were allocated to Lomborg in the 2015 budget.

The University of Western Australia backflipped on a decision to host the centre in May. And now Flinders University has solidly refused to establish an Australia Consensus Centre for Lomborg.

Lomborg has been rendered virtually “stateless” as a political actor on climate since being defunded by the Danish government in 2012. He then sought refuge in the US. There, he was also unable to find a university to take his centre, but managed to attract considerable private funding for an operation known as the Copenhagen Consensus Centre (CCC), based in Massachusetts.

An image of the so-called centre, which was actually operating from a parcel service in Lowell, Massachusetts, was doing the rounds on Twitter last year as part of the campaign against Lomborg’s presence on US soil.

While the “centre” was operating out of Massachusetts, Lomborg was actually living in Prague and reportedly travelling up to 200 days per year. He drew on the US$775,000 the CCC paid him in 2012 and US$200,484 in 2013. But without a regular salary to back his globetrotting activities, Lomborg has been seeking to replicate his US funding here.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne pledged his determination to find a university home for Lomborg. This brought him back to his home town of Adelaide and negotiations with Flinders University.

Doubtless, there will be a new spike in outrage from conservative commenters over Lomborg’s homelessness. A campaign to give Lomborg’s centre university legitimacy has been hosted by the right-wing think tank Menzies House, which has sought to make it an “academic freedom” issue. It called on supporters in May to fund full-page newspaper advertisements, to:

… stand with Dr Lomborg.

“Academic censorship will NOT be tolerated,” Tim Andrews from Menzies House tells his readers. Pyne sought to characterise the Lomborg rejections as a freedom of speech issue. Former Institute of Public Affairs staffer and current Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson, labelled it “soft-censorship” in an article in The Australian.

In defence of Lomborg, the original UWA proposal was to look at a centre that would concentrate primarily on spending programs for the developing world, and the charge is that he was ousted from the university for his views on climate change.

Even if this were true, however, how would conservatives defend the charge that the abolition of the Climate Commission, or the sacking of Treasury secretary Martin Parkinson, were not simply forms of censorship of groups and individuals for their views and perspectives on climate change?

As noted previously, Lomborg’s policy ideas on climate change have had considerable influence on the Abbott government’s strategies for doing as little as possible to decarbonise the economy. Many of Lomborg’s arguments are familiar in the rhetoric of the Coalition’s pronouncements:

• That renewables are not up to the job of providing baseload;
• That renewables will supposedly lead to electricity price rises;
• That there are much more important problems that Australia could fund than climate change; or
• That exporting coal will help lift developing countries out of poverty.

The Coalition’s enthusiasm for Lomborg coincides with the decline of the intellectual right in Australia. The latter development is most lamentable for Australian politics. It has deprived Australia of the kinds of constructive debates that were once possible across the political spectrum.

Instead, what we now have is a Coalition captive to the mental life of a tabloid front page. Labor is trying to avoid the same front page, while at the same time failing to get its message out.

David Holmes is Senior Lecturer, Communications and Media Studies at Monash University.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Sustainable Oil From Algae: The Technology is Ready, But What About the Politics?

Worlds largest algae farm (Steve Back (used with permission)

by Bojan Tamburic, University of Technology, Sydney and Arunima Malik, University of Sydney, The Conversation: http://theconversation.com/sustainable-oil-from-algae-the-technology-is-ready-but-what-about-the-politics-44969

Ultimately, all of the oil we use to power our modern lives comes from living creatures such as algae - albeit ones that lived 3.5 billion years ago, before gradually morphing into fossil fuel.

But when we talk about algae biofuel, we mean the green, renewable and sustainable version, rather than traditional fossil crude oil. The main requirements for making algae biofuel are: lots of sunlight, plenty of space, and easy access to the sea. Australia is an algae gardener’s paradise.

To scale up any new technology, we need to consider not just whether we can make it, but also whether it is worth doing. Unfortunately, this involves rather dry concepts like productivity, efficiency, energy balance, and supply chain dynamics. These are critical to the development of business models for new technologies, but sadly they don’t translate easily into language that politicians are interested in.

In the absence of a benevolent billionaire, the private sector is unlikely to take on the risks involved in bringing these emerging technologies to scale. This means that some form of government support is critical. With renewable energy investment growing ever more politically contentious, what are the incentives for spending scarce taxpayer dollars on something like this?

Growth industry?

In our recent study, we put algae biofuels under the cost-benefit microscope, to assess the viability of developing a full-scale algae biofuel industry in Australia.

We used a technique called hybrid life-cycle assessment (LCA), which aims to evaluate all of the effects throughout the myriad supply chains of an industry - even one as huge and complicated as the oil industry. The results are striking: a large-scale algae biofuel production facility would create almost 13,000 new jobs and A$4 billion worth of economic stimulus in Australia.

It would generate a total economic stimulus of 77 cents for every dollar invested, compared with just 13 cents in the dollar for traditional crude oil exploration and extraction (see table 1 in our paper). Commercial algae biofuel production is now a challenge of scale. The prize is phenomenal.

Algae ponds covering an area the size of Sydney could satisfy the entire crude oil demand of Australia, which would do wonders for both sustainability and security of supply - currently, 82% of crude oil is imported (see table 2 here).

We know that large-scale algae cultivation is achievable. The largest algae facility in the world is at Hutt Lagoon in Western Australia, where 740 hectares of algae ponds are used to produce the food supplement beta-carotene.

Meanwhile, the US federal government has been backing various large-scale algae projects, including Sapphire Energy’s expansion plans in New Mexico. However, the technological risks are significant, which is where hybrid LCA comes in.

Crunching the numbers

We used hybrid LCA to established a hypothetical case for assessing the viability of algae biofuel production in Australia. First, we identified a rural region in WA with the attributes needed to sustain an algae biofuel industry.

Next, we used cloud computing to develop a hybrid LCA model for this region. For the first time, we integrated multi-regional economic input-output data for Australia with engineering process data on algae biofuels.

This allowed us to quantify comprehensively the employment, economic stimulus, energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of the algae biofuel supply chain, not just at the site itself, but throughout the supply chain.

Our analysis shows that algae biofuel facilities would create local rural jobs, while also activating sectors of the broader economy associated with equipment, trade and business services. Then there is the environmental benefit: our study shows that the combustion of 1 tonne of algae oil instead of traditional crude oil would prevent the emission of 1.5 tonnes of carbon dioxide.

Investing in algae biofuel production is environmentally, economically and socially sustainable, and will provide a much-needed stimulus to the economy while creating much-needed quality jobs in rural areas. Surely every politician would be persuaded by at least something on this list.

Bojan Tamburic is Chancellor's Postdoctoral Research Fellow at University of Technology, Sydney.
Arunima Malik is PhD candidate at University of Sydney.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.