Anthony Albanese and the environment

By Jess Harwood, Guardian Australia 

Heat pumps are booming in cold countries

From Euronews Green

Heat pumps are now the most common method of warming homes in some European countries. In others, the technology is still met with scepticism.

The disparity in heat pump uptake around Europe depends on multiple factors including the subsidies on offer, electricity prices and policies in place to encourage people to install them.

Euronews Green talked to two experts about why some countries have a higher uptake of heat pump technology than others and why policymaking is key to the green energy transition.

Plenty of myth-busting about heat pumps and their ability to function in the cold or in old buildings has improved peoples’ general understanding of how versatile this technology is.

“It is a common perception that heat pumps can only be installed in modern, well-insulated, renovated detached houses,” says Sarah Azau, Head of Communications at the European Heat Pumps Association (EHPA).

“This is however not the case: we have countless examples of heat pumps working successfully in multi-family homes, ancient listed buildings and even in the Arctic permafrost.”

Jan Rosewood is the Director of European Programmes at the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), a clean energy non-profit organisation.

He adds that “a key factor in determining whether or not heat pumps get adopted is not so much to do with the building types and the architecture but the economics of using them”.

In those countries where electricity prices are several times higher than gas and heating oil prices, few people have switched to heat pumps. 

This includes the UK for example, which has around 412 heat pumps per 100,000 people compared to a European average of 3,068 heat pumps per 100,000 people, according to Air Source Heat Pumps London.

Where electricity prices are at the most twice as high as gas and heating oil prices we see significant heat pump uptake, explains Rosenow. This is the case in Norway, Sweden, Finland and Estonia for example.

“In terms of the running costs, the electricity price must be no more than twice the price of gas,” Azau adds.

“Heat pumps are very energy efficient - about three to five times as efficient as gas boilers - but they do need a small amount of electricity.”

Different European countries offer financial incentives for heat pumps that include low-interest loans, grant programs and tax rebates.

These are key drivers in the uptake of the technology considering upfront expenses are, on average, two to four times higher than they would be for a gas boiler - usually around €11,500.

Azau adds that support schemes that have changed too quickly or unexpectedly are one of the reasons that heat pump sales have dipped recently - by as much as 47 per cent between the first half of 2023 and the first half of 2024.

“It is essential that a clear direction of travel is set by the EU and national governments through lasting, stable policies,” says Azau.

“This reassures both heat pump manufacturers and consumers. We look forward to seeing this in the planned measures from the new EU Commission, such as the electrification action plan and industrial decarbonisation accelerator act.”

Germany has some of the most generous subsidies for heat pump installation. Landowners can get a grant of up to €18,000 if they buy a ground source heat pump and up to €15,000 for an air source heat pump for an existing property.

France follows close behind with homeowners eligible for grants of up to €15,000 if they buy a ground source heat pump and up to €9,000 for an air source heat pump for an existing property.

In October 2023, the British government increased heat pump grants by 50 per cent, from £5,000 (€5,795) to £7,500 (€8,692).

The full list of grants available in European countries is listed here.

While heat pumps are now the default heating technology in many Nordic countries, in less mature markets they have been met with a degree of scepticism by consumers, Rosenow explains.

He says this is often fuelled by misinformation from the incumbent fossil fuel heating industry.

“In Germany, the heating law resulted in a very polarised debate about heat pumps last year with consumers being uncertain which way to go,” he says.

“Policymakers have a responsibility to provide people with robust and independent information on heat pumps.”

To increase heat pump uptake, Rosenow says that an effective policy mix is the main prerequisite.

This includes “getting energy prices right so that the running costs of heat pumps are lower than fossil fuel alternatives, providing financial support to deal with the upfront cost, regulation to prevent new fossil fuel heating systems from being installed in new and also increasingly existing buildings and good coordination and communication,” Rosewood says.

Emissions from heating and cooling account for ~13% of total global CO2 emissions.  This is the third-largest source of emissions, excluding agriculture and forest clearing. (The largest source is electricity generation, the second largest is land transport)

Rising heat kills one person a minute

 From The Guardian

Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed.

It says the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.

The report, the most comprehensive to date, says the damage to health will get worse with leaders such as Donald Trump ripping up climate policies and oil companies continuing to exploit new reserves.

Governments gave out $2.5bn a day in direct subsidies to fossil fuel users and producers in 2023, the researchers found, while people lost about the same amount because of high temperatures preventing them from working on farms and building sites.

Reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade, the report says, and renewable energy production is rising fast. But the experts say a healthy future is impossible if fossil fuels continue to be financed at current rates.

 

Dr Marina Romanello, of University College London (UCL), who led the analysis, said: “This [report] paints a bleak and undeniable picture of the devastating health harms reaching all corners of the world. The destruction to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate until we end our fossil fuel addiction.

“We’re seeing millions of deaths occurring needlessly every year because of our delay in mitigating climate change and our delay in adapting to the climate change that cannot be avoided. We’re seeing key leaders, governments and corporations backsliding on climate commitments and putting people increasingly in harm’s way.”

The report says the rate of heat-related deaths has surged by 23% since the 1990s, even after accounting for increases in populations, to an average of 546,000 a year between 2012 and 2021.

“That is approximately one heat-related death every minute throughout the year,” said Prof Ollie Jay, of the University of Sydney, Australia, who was part of the analysis team. “It is a really startling number and the numbers are going up.”

Jay said: “We constantly emphasise to people that heat stress can affect everybody and it can be deadly – I think a lot of people don’t understand that – and that every heat-related death is preventable.”

Laura Clarke, the chief executive of the environmental law firm ClientEarth, said: “We are living through the era of climate consequences. Heatwaves, floods, drought and disease are no longer distant warnings – they’re here now. But as attribution science, climate litigation and grassroots activism grow, accountability for climate impacts is no longer a question of if but when.”

The 2025 edition of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was led by UCL in collaboration with the World Health Organization and produced by 128 experts from more than 70 academic institutions and UN agencies.

In the past four years, the average person has been exposed to 19 days a year of life-threatening heat and 16 of those days would not have happened without human-caused global heating, the report says. Overall, exposure to high temperatures resulted in a record 639bn hours of lost labour in 2024, which caused losses of 6% of national GDP in the least developed nations.

The continued burning of fossil fuels not only heats the planet but also produces air pollution, causing millions of deaths a year. Wildfires, stoked by increasingly hot and dry conditions, are adding to the deaths caused by smoke, with a record 154,000 deaths recorded in 2024, the report says. Droughts and heatwaves damage crops and livestock and 123 million more people endured food insecurity in 2023, compared with the annual average between 1981 and 2010.

Yet there are still imbeciles (or people in the pay of fossil fuel companies) who deny that global heating is happening.

China's consumption of transport fuels falls 4%

 From a skeet by Lauri Myllyvirta

Quarterly results of China's and the world's largest oil refiner Sinopec: China's consumption of transport fuels (gasoline, diesel and kerosene) fell 4% year-on-year in Jan-Sep, due to the impact of "alternative energy" i.e. EVs, speeding up from 3.6% drop in H1.

Demand for main petrochemicals [however], measured in ethylene equivalent, grew 8% - surging plastics and chemical production continues, with lots of new capacity coming online at the end of the five-year plan. Import substitution plays a part but cannot account for most of the growth.

I've been puzzling over the reported growth in transport fuel production in recent months, which doesn't seem to be accounted for by domestic demand or net exports. The Sinopec data suggests that it's inventory buildup (or  under-reported exports?).

Source: paper.cnstock.com/html/2025-10...

China's emissions have either peaked already, or will soon do so.  In which case, world emissions will also peak.  The decline initially will be small, but it will accelerate because of cheap EVs, solar and batteries.   Our task now is to steepen that curve and to accelerate the replacement of fossil fuels.

Source: Our world in data

 

Just stop burning fossil fuels!

 Honestly, it's quite simple. We have to stop burning fossil fuels to stop global temperatures rising.

Simple in concept, but not in execution.  We have to replace a couple of thousand coal power stations with wind, solar, and nuclear power.   And we have to transition our whole car and light truck fleet to EVs.  1.6 billion of them!   And find ways to power air travel with renewable fuels.  Electric planes aren't quite there yet.  Oh, and then there's cement and steel, where the manufacturing processes emit CO2, quite apart from the energy used.   But, essentially, if we can halve emissions, we will also halve the decade-by-decade rise in global temperatures from +-0.2 degrees to +-0.1 degrees.  Which will give us more time to reduce emissions from those harder sectors.

Together, land transport and electricity generation contribute roughly 50% of emissions, globally.  And the good news is that in these sectors, the clean energy alternatives are cheaper than fossil fuels.

For example, in Australia, BYD now sells an electric car (EV) which costs the same as a Toyota Corolla. Since EVs are 4 times as efficient as petrol cars (most of the fuel burnt in a conventional petrol engine is wasted as heat, and isn't used to drive the car forward) they are already much cheaper to run than petrol cars. Now, they're cheaper to buy as well. What's more, when the regulations are promulgated (why so slow, Federal Government?) you will be able to run your house on the electricity in your car. The BYD will have roughly 45 kWh of stored electricity in its battery. Average daily household use in Australia is 15 kWh. So you'll be able to charge your EV when power is cheap (midday, and again after 10 pm) and use it when power is expensive (4 pm to 9 pm). So for the same price as a petrol car, you'll get a giant household battery, cheaper car fuel bills, and much-reduced electricity bills.

This has been made possible by the collapse in battery costs. And that deep, and continuing, plunge has been parallelled by the fall in solar panel costs. While high latitudes will never be able to run on solar alone, in low and mid-latitudes, such as Australia, we will be able to run our grid on 100% solar electricity, combining it with 6 or 8 hours of storage. And EVs will be part of that revolution, as every household and every business gets them.

All these trends are being driven by market forces. Extremely competitive Chinese manufacturers are driving down prices. BYD spends as much on research as its total profit. CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, has introduced a sodium-ion battery. Sodium is a lot cheaper than lithium, and is also much safer. The same vigorous competition is driving down solar panel costs.

That's not to say we're out of the woods. There are powerful regressive forces which want to delay the transition, and useful idiots yelling loudly about how unfair it all is. Bring back steam trains!

Plus there are methane emissions from cattle and sheep, and CO2 from cement and steel. Methane is 80 times as potent a greenhouse gas, over a 10 year horizon (after which it decays into CO2) There's air transport, and sea transport, and home heating (bring on heat pumps!).

However, we must move faster.  The seas are dying, and half the tree of life is going extinct.  We should attempt to halve emissions by 2035, and halve them again by 2045.  With costs of solar and batteries plunging, that's achievable.

The ecological disaster unfolding on Australia's coast

From Australia's public broadcaster, the ABC.

"This is potentially the start of the decay of the oceans, which is the start of the decay of mankind.  This could be the beginning of the end."

Weather control machine

Don't know who the cartoonist is.  If you know, let me know so I can give attribution. 

The January global temperature is really, really bad

 From Brian Bretschneider

Global average January temperature - color coded by ENSO status. One of these years is not like the others.

The chart shows the average January temperature for the world. Red dots show El Niño years, blue dots La Niña. During El Niño, air temperatures are higher, as heat is released from the sea. During La Niña, the reverse is true: air temperatures are cooler as more heat is absorbed by the oceans. Notice how temperatures above the trend line are mostly red dots (El Niño), while temperatures below the trend line are mostly blue dots. January 2025 is the glaring exception. It is now a La Niña phase, yet global temperatures moved to a new maximum.

click on chart to enlarge

January 2025 hottest on record

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

Breaking News! Code Yikes! January, 2025, finished as the hottest January on record since 1940 and likely the hottest January in the last 120,000 years, at 1.745°C above the 1850-1900 IPCC pre-industrial baseline.

 

This is what accelerated warming looks like

 From Leon Simons

Sea Surface Temperatures in this region increased more during the previous 15 years than in the preceding 150 years. This is what accelerated warming looks like [temperature]:

 

Somewhat worse [water vapour]:

Catastrophe awaits us. We stumble towards the precipice like zombies, too stupid and too greedy to take action.

World temperatures still rising.

From Prof Eliot Jacobson

Daily global surface temperature updates were delayed a few days. They were finally posted this morning. And the records keep on falling. [The *temperatures* keep on rising] 

So glad El Niño is over and La Niña is helping cool things down ...

1.8 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  Yet still we do nothing.

Most days in 2024 exceeded 1.5 C warming

 From Zeke Hausfather

The warmest year on record

From Zack Labe 

The first preliminary analysis from the Japan Meteorological Agency highlights 2024 as the warmest year on record globally (since at least 1891 in this data). Additional climate rankings will be released on 1/10/2025 for other datasets.

Graph and methods by https://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/prod

Note the sharp uptrend from the mid-70s onwards, which is about  0.23 C per decade.

Record temperatures in October

Via Earthly Education

 This chart shows the actual temperature, not the anomaly (that is, not the difference in temperature from the long-term average for that day.)    It's falling because of the season.  Even though it's spring moving into summer in the southern hemisphere, at first sight offsetting the reverse process in the NH, because a larger proportion of the NH is land, it cools faster than the SH heats up, since much more of the SH is water.  So you get an annual cycle of actual temperatures for the world as a whole, as opposed to the situation with temperature anomalies.  In other words, the declining temperatures shown in the chart are not secular, but seasonal.  It's not the end of global heating, just a temporary respite.

The short-dash line shows the average temperature for these dates for 1979-2000; the medium-dash 1981-2010; and the long dash, 1991-2020.  Each one is higher than the previous one.  The orange line shows the temperatures for 2023, for these dates, and the red line for 2024.   

The conclusions are obvious.  As is the inaction by our politicians and CEOs.

Zack Labe's monthly climate change health check

From Peter du Toit 

 Why is this trajectory continuing? We keep burning fossil fuels! “Power sector emissions [the largest source] grew by 1.6% in 2023

“There is a growing commitment to accelerate the phase out of unabated fossil fuels. However, NONE of the major fossil fuel-producing countries or companies have committed to phasing out these activities to fully transition away from fossil fuel extraction or production

“Fossil CO2 emissions account for approximately 68% of current GHG emissions”

“Fossil CO2 emissions account for approximately 68% of current GHG emissions”   

There's the cure right there, people:    

STOP BURNING FOSSIL FUELS.   

It's not as if we are without alternatives:  wind, solar, nuclear, EVs, electric planes, electric heat pumps .....  What we lack is gumption and determination, not technology.

2024 to be hottest year ever

 

Yet our politicians do nothing, except impose absurd and sinister prison sentences on people who protest the lack of action by those selfsame politicians; companies greenwash and pretend they care; and the public continues to vote in parties who do nothing.

I can't be any more despairing.  Or angry.