A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

April 2nd 2013

A Cheeky Update On Where The Hell I’ve Been For So Long?!

I thought it might be time to throw some words on here quickly, just to let anybody who may actually still be checking back know…that I will be back, and my opinion and oddly chosen photos shall grace this site once again in the very near future!

Unfortunately, for the past (almost) two months, my masters degree decided to step up the heat and pile on the work finally, lobbing all manner of policy reports, technical essays and intense examinations my way, and thus I had to sacrifice the weekly updates to this, my baby, whilst I got them out of the way.

The good news is, that after writing many thousands of words on the subject of an EU Supergrid, peak oil theories, the state of nuclear energy and so so many repetitions of the term ‘EMR’, it is over, and all that lies between me and graduation is a 20,000 word dissertation; fortunately they’ve been so kind as to give us 5 months to do this, although I am yet to finalise an idea…Therefore, I hope to be writing a comeback piece (that’s right, I’m claiming this as a comeback), within the next week or possibly two, once I’ve gotten some job applications out of the way, so if there’s anybody still out there, you lucky lucky people will have some more brain food to feast on soon.

Once again, thanks hugely for the support and any feedback some of you have left, I do intend to keep this blog going for as long as my life allows, as it not only really helps me and my own development, but I like to think it gives something interesting for one or two of you out there to read on your days off, and that makes me feel good.

Regards!

Posted at 4:29pm.

February 13th 2013

As EDF Goes On The Offensive, Is UK Nuclear Fading Fast?

|#

Image Source

The Treasury sure is in a pickle right now, of that there is no doubt. EDF is playing the hardest ball they’ve likely dealt with in quite some time over the increasingly controversial and murky Hinkley nuclear reactor, a project set with such promise coming into the new year, that many, myself included, heralded this as the beginning of the UK’s nuclear renaissance. How foolish I may have been!

Centrica and EDF had planned to rejuvenate British nuclear with their plans for extensive new builds at Hinkley Point, signifying the first nuclear reactors in the country for, ooh, two decades or so. Considering how many are viewing the Energy Bill, or electricity market reform (EMR), as a policy mostly bent on kickstarting the fission industry through some appetising price promises and long-term certainty signals from the Coalition. Of course, there’s some side dishes for renewables and gas in there, but for all intents and purpose, it’s a sign Cameron et al want more of the green stuff (that’s uranium, I’ll come to waste briefly later before this scares you) on our grid.

Key to this, and the subject of a lot of rumour milling and grapevine wringing, is the strike price, the set price at which the government will pay nuclear, and other generators, for their electricity onto the grid. This is regardless of how much the generators bid in at during the selection process, with those plants selling below the strike price simply being paid up to it, and those selling above will have to pay back to the government, naughty people. It’s relatively simple and effective in enticing somewhat risky investments in nuclear and renewables , which inherently are risky compared to fossil fuels, by providing clear policy signals going forwards.

There’s been much hoohah about the nuclear strike price, likely the first to be set out of the myriad others, with some papers citing ‘sources’ with figures around £99/MWh, but we can’t be sure until official release. What we can be sure of, is why they might be teasing the £100/MWh mark…if the government sets this price at anything above £100/MWh, they’ll likely have the EU and angered Member States bearing down on them claiming uncompetitive and unfair subsidies to nuclear, of which the UK has pledged not to do. Whilst the strike price is literally this very thing, it has to be very carefully balanced, to both draw in investment, and keep the EU off our backs.

Posted at 10:00am.

February 1st 2013

So That ‘Peak Oil’ Thing…Is It Still Happening?

|#

Picture Source

Amongst all the myriad dangers and threats that lie stretched out so far in front of humanity, from the simply worrying to the downright existential, what we really need is more of them on our overflowing plate. As if climate change, poverty, overpopulation and famine weren’t enough eh. So what is this new threat I’m whining on about? Well, it’s not really a new idea whatsoever, but one which I feel has taken, or had taken until recently, very much a backseat in the narrative of modern society. And that topic my friends, is peak oil. Let the words ring about your ears, for their undoubtedly words you’ve heard before, and loathe to hear again, but alas, they’ve begun creeping back into our cynical and depressing lives (or is that just mine…?). Whether we like it or not, it’s one we need to talk about.

I bring peak oil up seemingly out of the blue for two reasons. One goes by the wonderfully controversial name of Leonardo Maugeri, a Harvard research fellow and distinguished economist whom you’ve no doubt heard murmurs of. The other is a more simple reason…my university assignment, namely, to research and produce an essay on peak oil, and in my case, what the general consensus in academia seems to be, and what the hell is actually going on with it. Thus, I spent many hours digging into the topic as far as my brain would allow, produced my essay, and am now writing this piece as a sort of abridged version, more to test whether I actually learnt anything, but also to shed some light on what is seen as a very black or white subject.

Peak oil is the name given to the point at which our global oil production reaches its absolute maximum, a point from which we never go higher, generally followed by a plateauing in supply, or even a sharp drop off the edge into the deep, dark abyss of a world constrained by scarce oil reserves. It gained some pretty good traction maybe a decade or two ago, when the theory dominated media and science alike, and even more so it scared many different actors witless, with various prophets foretelling of the end of our cheap and abundant oil glut, and a spiralling of society as we know it to breaking point. It’s fair to say a lot of people listened, but not for long. Like all scary things, we ignored it, we studied and counter argued against it, and slowly it fell out of fashion and drifted into nothingness. As big oil companies and government alike brought out their own studies trashing the very idea that we were anywhere near the limit of our oil resources, it all seemed like one big hype, which never actually bore fruit.

However, it has continued to sit at the back of our collectively paranoid mind throughout it’s dark ages, and now it’s back in the front-page news making loud noises again. BP and their enigmatic chief Bob Dudley appear to have been passed the baton of denial from past generations, calling peak oil theory ‘groundless’ and increasingly weak, whilst the wonderfully passionate but unfortunately misguided (as we shall see) Maugeri has prepared a paper which, for all intent and purpose, wipes the very idea off the face off the face of the planet, claiming that, if anything, we’ll have so much oil we won’t know what to do with it! How wonderful that would be.

Leaving these two things aside for the moment, we need to know what it is that’s driving this renewed rebuttal of peak oil, the very reason big players like this believe we have endless supplies. It lies solely in the unconventional stuff, the shale oils and natural gas liquids that recent technological advances and high oil prices have allowed to flourish in great beauty. Much of this newfound reserve finds it’s home within US borders, although Europe and Asia think they have some too, but nothing on the scale of the blessed land of the Americas.

Projected oil production to 2035 from IEA - note the peaking of conventional oil from 2009 onwards, with unconventional supplies and new-found/yet-to-develop fields entirely mitigating this loss. Source - Hughes & Rudolph 2011

Posted at 10:00am.

January 28th 2013

Reduced Climate Sensitivity & A More Resilient Greenland - Reasons NOT To Abandon Our Worries

|#

Photo source

I can envision the newspaper headlines already - “New climate change reports tell us it’s going to be alright!”; “Turn those thermostats back up, we’ve got nothing to worry about says actual science!”.

So what am I talking about? Well, recently two potentially important and controversial papers were given unto the world by their respective and respected authors and bodies, detailing two key aspects of the climate science debate, namely, the sensitivity of the climate to our meddling, and the impact melting ice in Greenland will have on rising sea levels. I’m sure most of you who stumble across this piece will be familiar with the papers I speak of, so bare with me here.

These reports, which I will dive headfirst into shortly, have been swiftly snapped up onto the blogosphere and circled in almost record time, with summaries and opinions abound, and for the most part, they have been calm, collected and rational in the grand scheme of junk media science. However, as I’ll hopefully give you a small insight into, the topics they cover, and more importantly, their conclusions, I fear are so open to misuse, misunderstanding and miscommunication by media outlets far and wide (Daily Mail, Delingpole, Boris Johnson I’m looking at you) in the coming days, that I desperately had to splurge down onto digital paper my thoughts on how to avoid this, through the medium of, wait for it, understanding the results! Novel I know, but here we go.

The first paper, a study into the sensitivity of Earth’s climate to increased CO2 in the atmosphere, was carried out by the Norwegian Research Council, and subsequently had its findings verified by climate scientist Caroline Leck of Stockholm University, who I’ve read is a respected and trusted third party. I won’t go into the gritty details of the work, as it involves Bayesian statistics and intensely complex calculations which I will never hope to understand, but luckily, given my somewhat educated background and knowledge of scientific papers, we don’t need to scratch that deep into it’s methods.

In short, the paper analysed millions of repeated simulations and applied these to two different periods of climate warming, in an attempt to study what magnitude of temperature increase we should expect with a doubling of atmospheric CO2. They established a figure of 3.7C for the period up to 2000, somewhat higher than multiple other simulations, but found something more alarming in the 2000-2010 run; this sensitivity reduced, with just a 1.9C warming expected, far lower than we’re used to being told. What’s with that?

Posted at 10:00am.

January 12th 2013

What Actually Is The Deal With The Coalition’s ‘Green Deal’?

|#

Source

I’m going to start this hopefully entertaining and educating post with it’s conclusion (now that is brief!) just so we can get straight into the nitty gritty of it, but with some context of where I’m going in mind.

The Green Deal in my opinion, is a potentially powerful and highly effective way of cleaning up our frankly appallingly leaky houses and energy track records, and should be celebrated as a notch on the bedpost for Cameron et al. It does what it says on the tin, and sorry for the inadvertent ‘Ronseal/Cameron’ references there. Only, at the moment, they’ve got some things seriously wrong. And trust me, I thought this subject was one for the boring box, but it’s surprisingly engaging when you really get down into it; seriously, trust me. Please. Now for some background.

In terms of what I can only describe as some seriously flimsy green agreements and policies, from what will no doubt become the lamented nickname of the ‘greenest government’ ever, the Coalition have been really rather poor on their grandiose original plan. Admittedly, the recent Energy Bill does a lot more for the green economy than pretty much anything prior, and John Hayes could be seen to have won a hard-fought battle against Osborne and his Treasury which some though impossible, but aside from this, there’s really not many other successes to write home about.

Well, this is what I initially thought, at least until being given a lecture on housing policy, and specifically, the much-maligned and laughed at Green Deal, which I wholeheartedly did not look forward to hearing about yet again. So what made me come out the other side feeling so differently? Well, basically, I think it’s a great idea, and one which we desperately need to invest in now now now if we are to even begin thinking about lowering our emissions and, let’s say healthy demand for energy. Only thing is, that our ever-wise government has made some wonderfully bad decisions in advertising and framing the Green Deal, and have therefore smothered it’s potential beneath a pillow of complexity and poor education.

First things first, the Green Deal itself, as summarily as I can. At it’s heart, the Deal is a loan system, whereby you, as the owner of a leaky and cold British home (there’s plenty of them, perhaps 14m in need of help) can choose from a luscious menu of roughly 45 energy saving options, anything from new boilers to cavity wall insulation or personal solar panels, all of which have a price tag associated. The draw is that you don’t have to pay anything upfront towards the real cost of the options you choose, meaning that hefty multi-thousand pound solar panels are now entirely affordable; you then pay back the loan with the savings you make on your energy bills, and gradually houses all over the UK patch themselves up at no cost to, well, anybody really.

The ‘golden rule’ as it’s known is always in play before the Deal can be completed, which ensures that savings you make are guaranteed to be equal or greater than the expected loan repayments, never leaving you in the lurch financially. Effectively, the government gets all it’s money back from the upfront costs, whilst you, the owner, end up paying nothing, or even saving money in the long-run, as well as that fuzzy warm feeling you get for doing something socially responsible (n’aww).

Posted at 10:00am.

January 7th 2013

Time To Put ‘Context’ Back Into Scientific Reporting: First Stop, Wind Turbines

|#

Picture Source

Before I throw this first post of the new year into top gear, I just want to mention on the side that this isn’t going to be entirely focused on the topic of birds v wind turbines, although of course some of it will, as I’d like to use this opportunity whilst on the subject of context in science, to have a brief but hopefully interesting little poke around in it.

I’m sure many of you have read, or at least heard the debate raging between those who perceive wind turbines to be nothing more than trumped-up avian grinders, doing everything in their power to churn up as many feathered friends of the Earth as they can, or those who, and I’d like to say, with some rationality and understanding of the wider science, believe this to be some seriously outspoken hot air.

The reason I’m choosing to revisit this lovely little topic of conversation is due to a recent article posted in the not-so-environmentally-friendly ‘Spectator’, a well-known paper leaning on the Conservative side of the spectrum, and one which has sparked many angry rebuttals and responses in its time. This one, as I’m sure you can guess already, was aiming to yet again derail our well-earned trust and faith in wind farms worldwide, through the examining of some questionably outdated data on bird and bat deaths in Spain, Germany, Europe and elsewhere, written by what we should rightly assume to be a well-educated and reputable character, Clive Hambler, an Oxford lecturer and graduate in zoology. Seems legit right? Hmmm.

While I do not for one minute want to use this blog as a way to bash this man’s credentials and career, I do want to highlight just one of the biggest issues I, and as you can read in these articles, many others have with his piece; and boy is it a biggy. He’s missing a whole lot of context.

Posted at 10:00am and tagged with: wind, energy, birds, bats, death, anti, environmentalism, species, conservation, media, science, politics, data, context, rational, logical, debate,.

December 17th 2012

‘Chasing Ice’ Should Be This Generation’s Silent Spring; We’re Well Overdue

|#

I’m just gonna come right out and say it. ‘Chasing Ice’ should be regarded as the vital wake-up slap in the face of our generation, akin to how Rachel Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ or the Brundtland Report’s ‘Our Common Future’ brought about a seismic change in the way we perceive and treat our planet.

I say this because ‘Chasing Ice’ has within it a message so clear in its meaning and power that you would be hard-pressed not to come out of this film feeling all manner of things; depressed, angry, confused (perhaps even feeling a trip to the Arctic Circle), but one thing that all involved will share is the profound urgency and blatant apparentness of what the planet is going through. And yes, it is climate change, and yes, it is because of us. You only have to check out the unfortunately leaked IPCC 5th Report due next year to see that the reputable if not conservative climate body now judges, with 99% certainty, that humanity has caused the warming experienced since 1950, and we ain’t about to stop anytime soon.

But what the film, and it’s incredibly dedicated team lead by the indefatigable James Balog manage to accomplish, is something science, and to a wider extent politics has abysmally failed at doing until [hopefully] now - communicate a warming planet in a way which the lay person can absorb and understand, with as little data as possible, whilst still retaining the necessary evidenced nature without alienating those who have become so out of touch with climate this and climate that.

The images and photography employed throughout are, for lack of a better phrase, tragically sublime, and bring to life something we as humans simply cannot connect with emotionally or psychologically, as the global scale and intensely terrifying nature of climate change is too much for our caveman brains to comprehend. Glaciers are undoubtedly one of our most apt indicators of atmospheric warming, fluctuating back-and-forth in relation to the current global state, and it is this attribute that ‘Chasing Ice’ brings to the forefront, with intricately orchestrated time-lapse photography, condensing 3 years of glacial change into 20 seconds of bitesized, jaw-dropping footage.

One of the most emotionally-heavy scenes of the film comes when the team experience the largest ever recorded calving event in history; a 75-minute long peeling off of skyscraper-sized icebergs and quaking bass-booms, as the Ilulissat Glacier in Greenland crumbles into nothing before the filmmakers eyes. This video was instantly shared and shared again around the internet, but it’s only when you go and actually see the film and watch James Balog present this nigh-on unbelievable force of nature to a crowd during a lecture, do you see the entire footage; Think Manhattan Island, but several times taller and infinitely more important collapsing into nothing, and you’re some of the way to understanding the scale. If there’s any scene in this film which wraps up the entire issue in one immense swoop, it is this one.

The film goes on to show us progressive retreats in all of the glaciers filmed by the crew, in the same time-lapsed beauty that is so accessible and yet scientifically crucial to the entire theme of climate change, and even throws in some absolutely crazy shots of Balog and his team rappelling into deep moulins, cavernous channels (or entrances to Hell) carved into glacial surfaces, directing meltwater into the depths of the glacier and out to the oceans. These things have to be seen to be believed, and should hopefully scare the living s**t out of you as much as they did me, and we’re only seeing more of them as time passes. Think of them as the glacier’s wounds, with the water flowing underneath only aiding in speeding up it’s demise.

Throughout the documentary, the determination and sheer will the entire crew demonstrates as they scale valley walls and brave well-below zero temperatures and hurricane winds to mount recording equipment is inspiring, and at times, weathering to watch. Nowhere else is this near-insane passion for filming the project, named the Extreme Ice Survey, more apparent than in James Balog, the man who started it all. Trained in Earth sciences and an avid photographer, the once-climate skeptic pushes his body to the absolute limit to get what is needed done, even if it involves several knee operations and some stem-cell repair afterwards. He even goes out on duty with crutches at one point, a both funny and poignant moment in the film.

His message is a simple one, and it scares even himself. We are changing the very chemistry and physics of our atmosphere, and within it our planet, and it is at the poles where this is most horrifyingly obvious. Documenting it and showing it to the world is his way of doing all that he can to make up for our wrongs as a society, and this comes through in the emotion experienced when talking about his kids futures, or finds that for a whole season, one of the cameras has been failing to capture any footage of worth. These moments make for sobering watching, but do more to show us just how damn obsessed with this project he is than any words could.

There is of course science and data in this film, not much, but enough to allow conclusions to be made and bold claims stated without being at risk of ‘cherry-picking evidence’, or some other denial trash. His team surveyed glaciers across Greenland, Iceland, Alaska and parts of North America, with backing from bodies such as NASA, the RGS, National Geographic, NCAR and more, as well as the odd talking head in the form of glaciologists and climate scientists; it’s safe to say that his credentials are not in question here. What is in question is why, when we have such clarity on the climate change issue, never before seen with such innovative and explicit footage, are we not doing something?

Only this past month there have been reports from all manner of business, government and science, such as PWC, BP, Exxon, the IEA, NOAA, DECC and so many more I won’t go on. What is also common amongst these is that they are NOT all lefty, liberal-green bodies which could be seen as ‘eco-radical’ and twisting things in their favour. This long list consists of oil and gas companies, government departments, independent think-tanks, reputable scientific bodies and long-running experimental studies. What more could we possibly need?

Well, I would like to think that ‘Chasing Ice’ may be onto something. The breakdown in communication between science and the public is lamentable, and likely ranks as science’s greatest failure, but it is one that can be remedied. We’ve had game-changing paradigm shifts in policy and scientific debate before, almost on a decadal basis, with of course, Carson’s ‘Silent Spring’ sitting pretty at the top of them all, and we did something globally significant because of them. We’re well overdue another one however, and I wholeheartedly believe this is it; and my God, do we need one right now. Climate change is the biggest risk we’ve ever faced, ever even conceived of, and it affects literally every facet of life in our civilisation as we know it, and yet we go on as though it’s all a lie, it will go away if we ignore it, that everything will be alright in the end.

It’s a fantastic skill of ours to be ignorant in the face of mountains of evidence so stoically and nobly, but we’ve run out of time. Some of you may not think some ice melting here or there matters to anybody, and that you can’t judge something as big as climate change off of some footage gathered by a crazy man, but you couldn’t be more wrong. Glaciers are our best medium through which to experience global warming, and James Balog recognises and captures this tragic reality in a way which is not only beautiful and public-centric, but which hammers home our disconnection with nature more powerfully than any other film, book, report or natural disaster ever has. I have only one question…

…Why the hell isn’t it playing in more cinemas?! This should outsell Avatar three times over, and then some, but alas, maybe I’m now being the ignorant one.

Posted at 11:05am and tagged with: glaciers, Chasing Ice, james balog, ice survey, science, climate change, warming, global, ice, film, documentary, poles, polar, geography, geology, photography, cinema,.

December 8th 2012

My Response To James Delingpole’s Sensational Outburst On The Recent WWF Wind vs Gas Report

|#

James Delingpole, the infamous ‘interpreter of interpretations’ recently posted on his Telegraph blog an article on the latest report by the Cambridge Econometrics think tank for the WWF and Greenpeace, which stated that the UK economy would be £20bn better off if it decided to focus more heavily on offshore wind than gas in the coming decades.

It was a report which garnered widespread praise and support from many in the energy field, and detailed effectively how going down George Osborne’s ‘dash for gas’ path would inevitably lose us money in the long run, something many no doubt already had guessed.

However, Delingpole clearly seems to take an almost unbelievably sensational offense to this piece of science, and proceeds to write one of the most overblown and frankly prejudiced pieces of work I’ve come to read in a very long time, and on an influential media site such as the Telegraph to boot. This is my rebuttal to just some of his lamentable points made, many of which come straight out of a similarly acerbic blog from the ‘Eureferendum’ blog which shares his views.

The article instantly starts out by attacking personally and completely irrelevantly the status of the Cambridge Econometrics group and their head, Dr Terry Barker, as follows;

Turning to the source of this wisdom, we find the “think tank” originator named as “Cambridge Econometrics”, but to call it a think tank is something of a misnomer. The company actually describes itself as “an independent consultancy”, its business being the application of economic modelling and data analysis techniques to the needs of clients in business and government.

As to its “independence”, the company is a trading subsidiary of a charity, theCambridge Trust for New Thinking in Economics, which receives income from the company to pursue its registered objects.

What is interesting here is that Cambridge Econometrics seems to be a very profitable company, which, according to theaccounts submitted to the Charity Commission, turns over a cool £2-million-plus each year and giving its effective owner, Dr Terry Barker, a very comfortable living, plus pension. And Dr Barker has a certain amount of baggage. Hiscv says he is:

… the Chairman of Cambridge Econometrics, having founded the company in 1985. He is also Senior Departmental Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Climate Change Mitigation Research (4CMR), Department of Land Economy, University of Cambridge. He is a member of the Editorial Board of Economic Systems Research, the International Journal of Climate Strategies and Management, the International Journal of Global Warming, and the Scientific Advisory Board of the World Wide Views on Global Warming. He was a member of the Scientific Committee of the Climate Change Congress, Copenhagen, March 2009, and was on the Writing Team of the Synthesis Report of the Congress.This is a warmist personified, which might suggest a certain bias in his approach to the subject of windfarms. And, if that isn’t enough to set an odiferous rat running, we find that the report itself is produced forGreenpeace and WWF-UK, which funded the work.

Posted at 12:46pm and tagged with: delingpole, gas, wind, sensational, media, public, perception, shale, turbines, birds, death, telegraph, wwf, greenpeace,.