Warming ‘like comet speeding to Earth’, expert tells Perth audience

“We have begun to think of two, or 1.5 degrees … over the pre-industrial era as acceptable.

“But at the current 0.8 degrees of warming the Arctic is melting.

“Assumptions about how much temperature increase the Earth’s system can accept were far exaggerated.

“This is not something we can tolerate as a positive outlook. In the Arctic we have … huge stores of methane.

“But they have not melted yet; we do have the chance of keeping most of it in a frozen state.

“That is a mbadive existential challenge … [akin to] a comet heading to the earth.”

He said some modelling showed a worst-case scenario – a small but real risk – of the Earth losing the capacity to regulate its own temperature through biological processes, resulting in temperatures soaring to even 250 degrees Celsius and an atmosphere of mostly carbon dioxide, a planet unable to support human life.

The world had now breached the threshold of 410 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The last time the world was at 350ppm was in 1988. The goal now had to be 280ppm.

The world needed to reduce its emissions 150 per cent, and 2050 was a target too far away.

“It would only get people worrying about it in 2049,” he said.

“By 2020 we have to reach the peak of emissions … that is a mbadive challenge. It has to start today – or yesterday.”

Professor Droege said this was achievable, but only with 100 per cent renewable energy in the system all over the world.

This was both possible and economically sensible, but policy support was coming in unpredictable global waves. At the moment there was a slowing of support, and no country had reached the Paris accord targets (in fact, a recent report from a German based researcher showed that if the WA government approves gas fracking and all WA’s potential unconventional gas reserves were fracked, this would blow Australia’s entire carbon budget under the Paris Agreement three times over).

“This problem is only solvable in a democratic way, by voting,” Professor Droege said.

“What we need is to unleash the innovation drive at all levels.”

Professor Droege described places all over Europe that had managed radical change, upgrading existing urban areas on large scales.

The city of Berlin was 100 per cent renewable. In Spain a whole bioregion had transitioned to 100 per cent wind-farm power in just 10 years. Frankfurt and Munich ran city-wide renewable neighbourhood programs. Paris and New York City were developing similar programs. Freiburg, Germany, ran a cooperatively-managed social housing project with its own shared electric car fleet.

The USA’s Rocky Mountain Institute had proposed a business model for making entire districts renewable through new technologies and efficiency improvements. And the Kalkbreite co-op in Zurich, built from prefabricated panels, created a cooperative communal living space, with commercial and shared public spaces, in one district sitting atop a tram depot.

A seven-year exercise in Hamburg, Europe’s largest river island, had seen the area transformed with solar houses, a building cladded in algae that could be used for bioenergy, a power plant generating biogas from grbad clippings and human waste, and an old Nazi bunker repurposed as a storage tank for solar hot water that supplied a whole neighbourhood

The planners’ GIS modelling indicated it would be 100 per cent renewable energy powered, with zero carbon emissions, by 2030.

Crucially, all projects were commissioned through a competitive process and builder partnerships.

“It is the business model makes these projects possible … the certainty of return,” PRofeesor Droege said.

“Business models need to be propagated.

“This needs to be the standard for new development.

“Energy is everywhere; the opportunity is to look at the city as an energy landscape.”

The future is somewhere else.

But despite ambitious plans to increase renewables overall, Germany’s energy sources remained only 30 per cent renewable. There was still 40 per cent coal in the mix, as well as nuclear power.

Germany had begun a conversation now to discuss the future of a coal power plant near Berlin (a similar scale as WA’s Collie stations), holding consultations to form a vision for when the 45-year-old mine reached the end of its life.

“Rather than a ‘Where will the coal come from them, you bastards?’ there were members of the coal community, the locals, the environment groups, all thinking ahead to how the landscape might one day look, how it could become a carbon sequestering opportunity,” he said.

Professor Droege said Australian cooperative research had significance beyond pure research.

Renewable technology had advanced exponentially and was on the cusp of global realisation but incumbent industries and interests were holding it back.

“We’re creating a world of incubators to bring technologies to markets. But we need more than markets, we need governments to step aside and open the floodgates to innovation,” he said.

“A cultural transformation can only come from the bottom up but leaders need to recognise the groundswell.

“The future is somewhere else.”