A Green Degree Blog: New Angles On Sustainability

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

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 16:29:00 +0100

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!

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

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 10:00:47 +0000

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.

So when Centrica decided to bail out of the Hinkley joint venture, blaming the very uncertainty and high costs the strike price is designed to appease, EDF was left alone at the helm of an immensely important but leaking ship. Whilst this puts them in a slightly dodgy position in terms of finding outside support to continue their plans, with the Chinese apparently priority choice, it simultaneously places them in quite the power position over Osborne and his Treasury. Now they’re going solo, they’ve been playing games around this strike price, stating they could pull out altogether unless Bruce’s price is right.

Not only this, but they’re demanding a price which guarantees a 10% rate of return on their investment, stretching the maximum 8% rate the government had in mind. This would indicate a strike price set at just shy of £100/MWh, as has been rumoured, so it would seem that they may indeed get what they want even without this bullish behaviour. However, it doesn’t end there. EDF is also attempting to have some of the upfront costs underwritten, or effectively paid off by the government, to ensure the project can go ahead without issue; this would be even more damaging to government rep, as this really does constitute direct subsidy and aid to the nuclear industry. Tut tut.

So it seems that EDF may, for the moment at least, have the Treasury tied up in a little bit of a power struggle, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they get their £99/MWh strike price, with a long term CfD contract in the bag pretty soon. Underwriting of the costs however, I really don’t see going ahead given the political volatility of such an idea, but EDF is in a far better position to bargain for this when it holds the keys to the country’s first, and very much needed nuclear plant for 20 years. With our nuclear and fossil fuel fleet desperately in need of some upgrades and new paint, and our pledges towards 2020 for emissions reductions nearing, nuclear is for now, a clear and logical solution to these problems.

Whilst some people might not feel too amicably towards the idea of Chinese companies taking a fat share in our future energy mix, especially nuclear, I fear it’s something we now cannot avoid. Centrica, E.ON and RWE, our main options for new builds, have all shut the door on us, and as for homegrown skills, we have none. If EDF, the effective fission King in Europe can’t get the industry going, we’re in some serious trouble, trouble which a second ‘dash for gas’ won’t be able to meet head on. China has some expertise in nuclear, and has a large and growing fleet of them at home, and seem really quite keen to stride in and prop us up, so why not let them?

This is undoubtedly a flexing of muscles by EDF and the French, but I sincerely hope it doesn’t sour the relationship we should be doing everything to strengthen in the wake of past failures. Sure, we have Hitachi waiting on plans to continue the Horizon project, and with new gen technology to boot, but losing Hinkley and leaving them high and dry would send some inexcusably awkward signals.

Of course, some of you might be wondering about the other issues with nuclear (the horrible stuff!), not simply the political hot air and investment jargon. I want to very briefly highlight three of the biggest and most oft-quoted fears associated with the nuclear industry, and analyse them with some down-to-earth and rational thoughts, in an attempt to assuage concerns.

What about the terrorists!? - I’ve seen this quoted a few times, and at first I couldn’t help but take it as a serious problem; what if someone intentionally crashed a plane or bombed a nuke plant? Now however, after a lecture by nuclear engineer, who has spent his academic career playing with simulations and attempting to blow reactors up himself, I can see this just isn’t a reflection of reality, for one reason, and one alone.

The containment buildings, those big white concrete domes you see at nuclear plants, are so incredibly solid and reinforced, that you could throw anything - a plane, a bomb, an anti-nuke billboard, a 50m tsunami, and you would not crack it. It is the last line of defence against a reactor gone bad, and is precisely the reason Fukushima did not end up being a Chernobyl (which didn’t have a containment building, because you know, that’s lame).

Ewww, all that waste! - This one is slightly trickier to explain. Nuclear waste does contain some high-grade stuff, the real dangerous to humans stuff, but it’s a tiny proportion of the overall waste produced. In real terms, the entire current UK amount of nuclear waste, which is a lot considering we’re the world’s dumping ground, could fit entirely within 10% of the inside space of the Royal Albert Hall (email me if you’d like the slides/data on this). Gather all of it, low/medium/high, and you’ve got maybe 5 Albert Halls, the majority of which is intermediate level in grade (3.6 Albert Halls). Bear in mind this intermediate waste is stored in concrete barrels at Sellafield and nowhere else, and it puts into perspective how little there really is.

Obviously, the recent rejection by Cumbria council to be a nuclear waste storage site is a big spanner in the works, but in all honesty they made the right decision. The whole plan was a terrible idea technically speaking, just read the link above, but it’s not the end of the waste debate as we know it, not at all, it just caused us all to shout loudly about it for a while. This all also misses out the fact that technology to reuse waste for energy exists, and don’t even get me started on the relative radiation and health dangers prevalent in all fossil fuel activities and simple things we never complain about, like hospital scanners or naturally occurring radiation in rocks. If you live in the SW of England, I’d maybe read up on this a bit…

Making nukes out of the stuff - proliferation of waste is a prominent and important issue for the industry, but again, one blown out of proportion by the media and protesters alike. The IAEA, or International Atomic Energy Agency, was setup precisely to police this, and has serious clout in the industry. With the IAEA looming over any nation giving off the slightest whiff of proliferation, I’d be very surprised, as would industry experts we’ve had speak to us, if anybody managed to build a working nuclear bomb out of their fission reactors. Just look at N Korea now, who despite testing their 3rd nuke just yesterday, are under the watchful eyes of every vested interest on the planet; they won’t get far.

Reactors also simply cannot blow up like a bomb. People have tried! You need to actively prime, prepare etc the stuff to even get close to being able to detonate it. This ties in with the terrorist stuff above - even if you crack the containment building with a plane, you won’t set a nuclear bomb off.

I feel these are the main themes running through every story on the woes and dangers of nuclear energy, so Ill stop here. I don’t want to go into the whole disaster/Fukusima debate, as I’ve written posts on this before, and there’s plenty of sane evidence out there doing just that, and also because this post is once again far too long. The effect on human health also comes under this particular topic, so I urge you to research this yourself, as you will be pleasantly surprised at how benign and safe nuclear energy really is. Obviously I’m slightly biased being a ‘pro-nuclear’ person, but I’m also someone who has read both sides of the argument throughout, and been informed by the some of the best minds in the biz, and I for one know the information you seek is just a few Google’s away.

Suffice to say, nuclear energy will play an ever increasingly important role in future mixes of not just the UK, but the wider world. The only worthy argument against the industry as it currently stands, is one of economics. It’s simply hella expensive to finance and build one of these things. But this can be fixed, as the UK is currently attempting, with some success at least, and we must not let other lesser ‘threats’ from splitting the atom cloud our judgement, it would be a disservice to extremely clever science, and future generations.

So That 'Peak Oil' Thing...Is It Still Happening?

Fri, 01 Feb 2013 10:00:25 +0000

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

With the advent of such vast resources, and the money and industry to suck the stuff out of the ground, all over independent agencies such as the IEA and EIA are forecasting huge increases in production, some as high as 11mb/d purely from the US alone, compared to today, where imports of oil equal somewhere around 7-8mb/d. All of this I may add is expected to occur within maybe the next five years, at rates the industry has never experienced in it’s entire 50 year boom.

For some quick context, the world production today sits around 92mb/d, with the majority of that harking from OPEC, the Middle Eastern oil powerhouse, who have controlled the market more or less since the inception of the industry. Some see this control as good, stabilising thing, others not so much, but that’s for another time. What is known, is that OPEC contains most of the so-called giant oil fields, the real mammoths of the bunch, fields which we rely on so greatly for production it really boggles the mind. For example, just 20 of these fields provide 25% of the global supply, with 500 of them gobbling up 60% of the market. I’ll let that sink in for a moment. What’s more, most of these giants were discovered back in the booming 60s, and when you’re finding the biggies first, there’s very little chance left of us stumbling across anything like these beasts now, or ever.

So what? Why is this important? Surely there’s enough oil in these giants, plus this supposed wonder-reserve in US (and others) unconventional reserves right? Wrong.

Graph detailing how crucial the top 20 giant fields are to world production, taking 25% of the share. Source - Hook et al 2009

Before I dig into this, let’s just clarify four key terms in the oil production world. URR, or ultimate recoverable reserves, is the absolute volume of oil we can commercially extract and use today, and is constantly being revised up or down depending upon oil price, which influences economic viability, or by another term known as reserve growth, which covers all the things which help improve oil recovery, such as new technology, yet higher prices, or new geological finds resulting in a net expansion of the field itself. Some numbers for this may be global cumulative production up until 2007, equating to ~1130Gb (gigabarrels, or a billion barrels), which contrasts with an average estimate of 2500Gb for world URR. This last figure varies hugely, from 1250-4000Gb, but much of the academic literature would lean more towards a median figure as realistic.

The next key terms are decline and depletion rates, which directly influence how much you can produce, and how quickly a field begins to drop off in production once it has peaked. Depletion rates detail the rate at which oil is extracted, in the order of anything up to 10%, whilst decline rates are generally held around 4-6% for most oil fields studied. Decline rate is particularly important, as higher values mean a much faster loss in production once 50% of the reserve is sucked dry; we don’t want high rates. It’s also unlikely for a field to be depleted 50% before peaking, due to technical and geological constraints, so it’s much more likely that at 40-45% you’ll see your decline rates kick in.

What leads Maugeri and his friends to believe we’re doing just fine revolves around the application of especially low decline rates of maybe 1.6%, and high global URRs, meaning that their projections portray current and future production to tail off very slowly and fairly calmly, allowing us to adjust and mitigate as we see fit. Problem is, taking a rate so low is entirely going against the growing number of studies on the state of world oil fields. Stephen Sorrell and his team are effectively the top-dogs on this subject, and their 2010 paper reviewing the evidence is long but eloquent in it’s discussion of this very issue.

General consensus puts average global decline rates at a much higher 4-4.5%, with some as high as 10%, greatly reducing the time it takes for a once prosperous and productive field to run dry after peak. Some more numbers for context, show that under such assumptions, by 2030, global supply would have fallen by ~45mb/d, almost half current production, and even the optimistic scenarios detail losses of maybe 20mb/d, still I’m sure you would agree, a sizeable and worrying chunk.

Why do I trust these figures and rates? Because they’re calculated by independent bodies and authors, who avoid the pitfalls associated with publicly available data provided by, you guessed it, the oil companies and field-owners themselves, such as OPEC, who, as it is well held, falsify such data to suggest larger reserves and more manageable production curves to those asking the questions. Unfortunately, the IEA and others can sometimes fall foul of this, utilising data likely to contain errors in their projections. There are multiple reasons for this murkiness, such as lying about reserve estimates to cement market share, or to avoid panic such information may incite. The same sources are also thought to purposefully revise down production rates just so that they always that extra bit of possible oomph in case of emergency; this is generally deemed a smart move by OPEC et al, but does not detract from the potential of flawed data.

Therefore, those studies which use either their own data, or purchased reports from trustable sources such as the Upsala database, a renowned and accurate resource, will offer much more realistic observations on the state of oil reserves. In short, the crude oil reserves, that which is currently being guzzled as we speak, are facing some dangerously high future decline rates, and many of them are in fact already past their peak, and experiencing reductions in production in orders of magnitude large enough to spark concern in those studying them.

But what of the unconventional stuff I hear you say, won’t that matter? Well, various estimates are out there, with some of the latest from the IEA and BP/Shell suggesting outputs of perhaps 9-11mb/d from the US alone, when combined with a meagre crude supply but a much meatier tight/shale industry, expected to contribute 6mb/d purely on it’s own. Others revise these figures down to maybe 6.5mb/d, citing costs, technical limitations and over-exaggerated reserve figures as reasons for doing so, but the fact of the matter is, which ever way you slice it, US production won’t be able to meet the loss of crude supply, even in the optimistic scenarios. I focus on the US especially, as they’re now held as the bastion of hope for future oil supply, with their undeniably vast resources, and so logically the majority of new supply should come from them.

While it’s also true that OPEC may be able to ramp it’s production back up again with some new technique for squeezing every last drop out cost-effectively, they don’d hold nearly as much unconventional reserves, and have built their market monopoly on top of now steadily dwindling fields which will simply not keep up with future demand, mainly Asian driven.

Some have also attempted to project what the future contribution from what’s known in the biz as YTF fields, of yet-to-find reserves, those that may exist, but we just ain’t discovered them yet. How you predict the rate of production of these I don’t quite understand, but safe to say they’ve tried. Again, the IEA set’s a value of ~22.5mb/d by 2030 from new fields, a massive valuation we can’t deny, but a little too large it seems. Aleklett and his team are prominent throughout the peak oil debate, and see it fit, after accounting for risk-adjustment, tech/economic limitations and the historical rate of finding new fields, and then exploiting them (this last one is a lot slower than the IEA predicts), to revise the figure down, to ~9mb/d. Takes the air out of it a bit doesn’t it.

But hold on, that’s still pretty large relatively speaking, where does it fit into the data though. As a very back-of-the-envelope calculation, combining the 9mb/d with the revised US total future production of 6.5mb, we get 15.5mb/d, which is puny when you remember back to the figure for how much we may lose come 2030, 45mb/d. That’s one large gap to fill no? And, given the decline rates and state of the currently producing crude fields, I severely doubt there’s enough oil left in them to keep up the pace necessary to plug this gap, and I’m not alone in thinking this. Even the IEA and EIA, with all their optimism, still foresee a shortfall in production, even with extreme US output and an abundance of new and wonderful fields.

I think it’s time to wrap up this horribly long and laboured piece, and I apologise now, and will send you a reward if you somehow managed to make it to the end. From what I’ve seen, and trust me, what I’ve blabbed here is just scratching the surface, the peak oil debate is deep and complex, and riddled with uncertainty and lack of trustworthy data. However, what is looking increasingly likely, is that conventionally speaking, we’ve probably hit the limit, and if anything, production is peaking as we speak. Have a look at OPEC output this year and you’ll see it dropping for the first time in years, and although this is partly to do with reduced demand and increased US output, an underlying peaking trend cannot be far away.

Unconventional supplies, although vast and important, are just too unknown and expensive currently to warrant gallantly predicting their slaying of peak oil and stupendous rates of production, like never before seen. But to me, and the wider science, if this stuff manages to hold off a global peak event for more than say 20 years, I would be incredibly surprised. There just simply isn’t enough of it to stop the inexorable decline of crude oil and ever-increasing demand for the black stuff. Good thing we’re burning more coal now eh!

References

Read anything by Sorrell, Aleklett, Hook, Owen or Hirsch for the academic side of things, or check out Chris Nelder and David Strahan online for a more bloggy but still balanced perspective on things.

Oh, and read Maugeri for kicks, but don’t by any means believe it, Stephen Sorrell has a powerful and watertight rebuttal to it posted online which I urge you to read.

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

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 10:00:40 +0000

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?

It would appear that climate sensitivity has actually decreased in recent years, which instantly begins alarm bells ringing in the ears of deniers and skeptics alike, who will take this news as evidence for the end of solid climate change science as we know it. They would be foolish to do so. Whilst this paper is undoubtedly important, thus far multiple sources have failed in finding the actual document itself, short of acquiring this PowerPoint presentation describing the modelling. One site’s author provides evidence that this is in fact an English translation of a paper from October, but it still remains impossible to track down. I’ll let you decide what that means, as I don’t really know.

However what we do know is that there are some things to be cautious about here. When you run such models, and produce results for a proceeding period demonstrating temperature rises of almost half the magnitude of the period leading up to it, there is something slightly odd going on. What is more pressing, is that it is increasingly well recognised that climate change has been dampened in the past 16 years or so, due to natural suppression from ocean currents (or ocean ‘weather’ as some say) and weather systems in play, but it is also well known that these only serve to wiggle the data around a trend; and this trend is still rising in the long-term. We may be seeing a reduction in extreme warming, as bare in mind this report still details 1.9C of warming, still toasty enough to worry us, but this won’t last forever. Clearly this report clarifies these mechanisms in decreasing short-term sensitivity, but I would bet running the model past 2010 would set us back on track for some serious warming down the line. The following quote from the authors mirrors my point:

“We are most likely witnessing natural fluctuations in the climate system – changes that can occur over several decades – and which are coming on top of a long-term warming. The natural changes resulted in a rapid global temperature rise in the 1990s, whereas the natural variations between 2000 and 2010 may have resulted in the levelling off we are observing now.”

Moving swiftly on, we come to a paper which has much greater implications than that previously. A paper published in Nature recently looked in great depth into the most recent of Earth’s interglacials, a warm period between Ice Ages, known as the Eemian, which spanned ~130,000-115,000 years ago, and experienced temperatures up to 8C warmer than today for well over 6,000 years. This can be seen in the graph below, with the Eemian period to the very left.

What is crucial about this new study, which involved rigorous analysis of key Greenland ice cores by 133 individuals, is that the Greenland Ice Sheet (GIS) appeared to weather this 8C heat with surprisingly little melt, contributing ‘just’ under half the 12-24ft (4-8m) rise in sea levels over the period recorded. Prior to this, the GIS has long been thought as the dominant factor in the release of meltwater into the oceans and a global rise, but this now seems challenged.

Of course, there’s more to this than simply that, but the papers likely won’t discuss it. The report goes onto specifically state that this does not mean we can just forget about global warming flooding our coastal regions and get back to the good old days of burning coal in our front rooms; oh, quite the contrary. What this study shows is that the GIS isn’t ultimately responsible for the projected sea level rise we have simulated today; Antarctica and more specifically, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS) is, a region of ice dynamics and glaciers scientists know comparably little about. It’s been suggested that a warming and catastrophic collapse of the WAIS is entirely possible, and would contribute greatly to sea levels rising, but this new report would seem to cement this theory, or at least harden it. Sea levels were still 4-8m higher, but now we have two players in the mix.

Unfortunately, whilst the authors have made it clear what their results mean for the wider science, all the papers will see is something along the lines of ‘Greenland no longer as vulnerable to warming as we thought, as evidenced by science and detailed in ice core data’. There will simply be no mention of the other side I have just whined on about, and once again junk science and cherry-picking of data will seek to veil the truth. If anything, the report should act to worry coastal insurers and planners even more, as it now places the source of future sea level rise in the far less well-understood WAIS, with the chances of a rapid melt event much more likely in comparison with the GIS. This, again, won’t be communicated.

We commonly see bloggers, newspapers and deniers of the science quote past interglacials as evidence for their anti-climate cause, but the ground beneath them is rapidly shrinking, and these two papers only serve to rip away yet more of it.

One other little thing I’d like to add to the end of this discussion over the GIS paper, is the rate of warming the Eemian Period endured. As a very (and I mean very) rough estimate from the graph, we could say that temperatures increased perhaps 8C over 6,000 years, a pretty darn high rate right? Now let’s look at the current consensus on what we’re in store for. Taking the commonly quoted 2C projection by mid-century, which I add seems increasingly likely to be surpassed, we have a rate of 2C over maybe 250-300 years, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. That’s a 1/4 of the Eemian warming, in 1/20th of the time. Now THAT is what I call a high rate of change, and that’s being relatively conservative. With estimates from respected sources as high as 8C warming by 2100, we’re accomplishing what took nature 6,000 years in just 400 at most. I’ll leave my point at that.

Personally, whilst the GIS looks more resilient than we thought, and perhaps even the short-term climate itself, I’m not sure how resilient they can be when put in the context of the warming we are forcing upon the Earth I so crudely tried to contextualise above. Call me a cynic (I am, and proud), but these papers mean anything but an optimistic future; I’m actually kinda scared now…and will no doubt be angry once I wake up to the papers tomorrow.

What Actually Is The Deal With The Coalition's 'Green Deal'?

Sat, 12 Jan 2013 10:00:00 +0000

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).

Now this all sounds like a fantastic idea no? Simultaneously bringing our woeful housing efficiencies up to European standards, whilst keeping cost-neutral and possibly even benefiting everyone involved, government and public; it’s almost too good to be true. Well, unfortunately, as with all things, parts of it are, at least until the government sort its act out.

It launched in October last year, and so far, not one single assessment or deal has been agreed. It’s being properly launched again at the end of this month (I don’t get the double-release either) with the hope that the currently non-existent market will prosper and grow as kinks are ironed out and more suppliers come online, but we’re not looking at a short process here.

It’s also an extremely complex service when you begin to look into the actual process each loan has to go through. The energy saving measures are carried out by private suppliers and bodies, even some recognisable names such as M&S or B&Q, who are all guaranteed and accredited by the government so us untrusting Brits can be sure they won’t stitch us over at some point, in an attempt to free pressure and costs from the government and smooth the system out. Within this, consumers of the loan must shop around a hell of a lot of information to make a decision, and have multiple avenues of support in the form of impartial and remote advisors and quotes from the Green Deal itself, many of which vary throughout the selection stages.

Carbon saving obligations involve our legal emission reduction requirements, and the so-called ‘Affordable warmth obligation’, an attempt to mitigate issues surrounding fuel poverty, as well as personal finance and finance providers all intertwine amidst all this madness, but are designed to be carried out without any real interaction from the consumer. They just say ‘I want this’ and the Green Deal does the rest. Supposedly anyway…

It all starts to fall apart however not from this complexity, but from how it is being marketed to both suppliers/providers of the Deal’s installations etc, and the public, who as we know, are skeptical even at the best of times. In short, it has been terribly framed by the government & unfortunately by DECC, my beloved government department who can normally do no wrong. They have played this Deal up as an incredibly effective way to reduce costs, save money and improve your standard of living without upfront costs or loan uncertainties, but this really just isn’t the case, not the most realistic at least.

True, you reduce your energy bills by putting in a tasty new condensing boiler and double glazing, but you end up negating that saving by paying back the loan. True, you don’t have to actually purchase the item in question, but there are still upfront costs in the form of assessments to test what your house needs. True, some things will be easy to pay back, but those more expensive delicacies, say solar panels or heat pumps will have higher interest rates on the loans than other options on the market, meaning you may be paying that Green Deal loan back long after you wanted to. This is partly mitigated by the suppliers subsidising such options until they are cheap enough on the market, but that’s not easy to sell to the lay person.

Perhaps one of the biggest issues is that your Green Deal scheme doesn’t move with you if you sell; the new buyer takes up the loan from where you left off, and there’s no certainty you’ll get a better sale value or be able to sell your property with such a loan attached to it. People simply may not understand what this loan is for unless it is explicitly stated. This is made more confusing with rental markets, where landlords take out the loan and pass the costs onto their tenants, who may take umbrage to an extra cost on their contract for something they may not actually benefit from, like winter insulation during a summer stay.

This last point however is one I do not hold to be particularly fair or useful in the debate. It’s only right to me, for a landlord to charge his tenants for use of the newly upgraded and Greed Deal’ed property, considering the efficiency improvements and improved comfort such a scheme would bring to it, and it’s not like they will see these costs anyway, as they will be paying the same, if not lower energy bills than prior to the loan agreement, not more. I think that’s simply part of our culture of distrust and dislike with most landlords, who are always out to screw us for as much money as possible. That’s not always true.

But undoubtedly it is the framing of the policy which has been so badly misjudged. Bringing out a new loan system at a time of austerity and economic downturn is either bad luck or plain stupidity, and the lack of proper clarity or education on the upfront costs, repayment guarantees and supplier choice only acts to worsen the situation. What the government needs to do is to actively and aggressively reframe the Green Deal as something not devoted to market mechanisms and force, a policy which can make you better off, as right now, it can’t really do that.

What the Green Deal can do however, is bring about a huge improvement in comfort and living standards to people of any income, especially those in fuel poverty, and can greatly contribute to reducing our domestic energy needs and losses of heat coinciding with our legally binding carbon targets, which we er, kind of have to meet by 2020. It can further our nation’s proud strides towards a greener future, where all our houses are efficient and run off solar PV and heat pump systems; a society we will all enjoy living in. It won’t generate you money, but you won’t be paying anything on-top of what you pay now, and you will actually be getting a better house for it, almost like a free upgrade.

Stop banging on about how it is a ‘loaning scheme’ and focusing on the money side of things, and instead bang on about the social, environmental and emotional aspects of such a project, which should hit right at the heart of a nation feeling put out and depressed by cold, wet weather and the prospect of 2-3 more years of ‘hard times’. Of course the market needs to be built up, but there’s no reason why that can’t happen with economics sitting on the sideline for once.

I mean, it costs you nothing, like, absolutely nothing, and you’re better off for it. How is that not attractive?!

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

Mon, 07 Jan 2013 10:00:30 +0000

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.

His data is partly good, if not as I stated earlier outdated and therefore slightly suspect. He quotes a 1993 paper on the impact of wind turbines on bird and bat populations, when as far as I know, the presence of wind turbines on the same scale, regulation, development of the technology and understanding of the industry as a whole like we have today, was pretty darn weak to say the least. While this doesn’t and shouldn’t instantly disregard the data, in a topic where cutting edge research and complimentary studies are key, there’s surely something better than a 20 year old paper no? Here is the paragraph where he states this citation;

Every year in Spain alone — according to research by the conservation group SEO/Birdlife — between 6 and 18 million birds and bats are killed by wind farms. They kill roughly twice as many bats as birds. This breaks down as approximately 110–330 birds per turbine per year and 200–670 bats per year. And these figures may be conservative if you compare them to statistics published in December 2002 by the California Energy Commission: ‘In a summary of avian impacts at wind turbines by Benner et al (1993) bird deaths per turbine per year were as high as 309 in Germany and 895 in Sweden.’

Now these figures are undoubtedly sobering if we are to truly believe them; bird and bat deaths in the millions is nothing to shrug about, and is certainly something the wind industry should take into account when planning their projects. Actually, no wait…they do, and not only this, but there’s multiple policies and regulations in place (think SEA, IEA, planning committees) which determine these very factors. Admittedly some of these processes are perhaps a bit too weak or flimsy in some circumstances, but on the whole they get the job done with species protection in mind.

You only have to consider this beautifully ironic article posted a few months ago regarding the RSPB’s stance on the very dangerous things that are wind turbines, to have this side of the debate instantly dashed. In short, they’re all for them. To reduce their carbon footprint and mitigate what has been repeatedly called the greatest single threat to biodiversity and species worldwide (that’s climate change if you weren’t sure), the RSPB has announced multiple projects for farms on its premises, giving the sector one big green thumbs up. They also reminded everybody about how they comment on thousands of UK wind farm developments for the precise reason of assessing damage to birds and bats, and only a tiny proportion of those studied show signs of unacceptable risk to wildlife - those that are generally clean up their act sharpish when told this.

We also don’t have to go far to get yet another angle on this decidedly silly argument (and apologies, this is the last bit of me bashing the data and shooting the bird-killing approach down, not literally of course though). Just check out the wind turbine section of Professor David MacKay’s seminal book ‘Sustainable Energy - Without the hot air’ for some seriously logical and down-to-earth data which even the most lay of people can pick up. The approach he takes is mirrored in multiple other studies and articles you can Google yourself, but the basic premise is that wind turbines killing birds and bats is the least of our troubles.

True, they kill, and that’s not great, but what about some CONTEXT people? Well, here’s some vague but nonetheless reliable numbers for other things that kill birds and bats.

Cars and traffic - perhaps 80 million
Windows - between 90-900 million (!!) in the US alone annually
Cats - hundreds of millions to possibly a billion
US power lines - 130 million

I could go on to mention fisheries, radio towers and merely shooting them for leisure, but I think you get the point. Basically, damning wind farms on their indiscriminate killing of wild birds without even glancing at the wider issue is just plain baloney. If the anti-wind turbines clan can gather such momentum with data like this, why haven’t we banned large and unsightly (another supposed con of wind farms) power lines or radio towers? I don’t have the answer to this, but you can be damn sure people aren’t getting the right information when something like this is broadcast in the media. I know I’ve said it plenty now, but there just ain’t any context!

And thus we come to my other point of this longer-than-planned post; science reporting in the media. I come across it all the time, in the best and the worst of the newspapers and blogs. Say the subject of the day is a new power plant of some form, let’s say a renewable one, which is planned for a certain part of the UK, which is destined to power ‘x’ million homes or provide ‘x’ amount of TWh to the grid. What does this mean to the lay person on the street? It’s all well and good a new wind farm juicing up 1.5m British homes, but how many homes are in Britain? Or how many homes does your average coal plant power? While environmentalists may not want this coal data next to power ratings for wind farms for fear of looking puny, this is only not true, but entirely necessary to fully inform the public of things directly affecting them.

This is also the same for the impact such projects may have on the local wildlife, or the future energy bills of consumers. Simply stating a likely loss of birds in one figure, or a suspected price hike due to wind subsidies is only good for those who understand the science, policy and economics of such things to a sometimes extreme level. Pairing up these sort of data with expected losses of wildlife due to climate change and impacted weather events, or the inflation of energy bills due to another alternate but polluting source of energy, although potentially very uncertain and difficult is, I feel, a much safer and more respectful way of educating the masses rationally, without feeding them one-sided opinions devoid of balancing fact.

Of course, we are all guilty of doing this at some points in our careers, from scientists to politics, to activists and professors. Take Clive Hambler for example, a no-doubt respected and intellectual man who presented his single side of the coin well and with data which would make those reading it feel comfortable in his knowledge. However, when such a gaping hole in his article is so obvious to us who understand the subject well, but almost entirely invisible to those without prior context, we find ourselves in a very tough situation.

If the media is going to steadily start including climate change and renewables in their daily broadcasts to the world, they’ve got to start adding in some more balance and fact, not simply opinions with some figures tacked on the side to back up an already flawed point of view. I mean, if the Daily Mail can finally concede climate change may actually be manmade and happening, can’t the others sort themselves out??

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

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 11:05:30 +0000

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.

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

Sat, 08 Dec 2012 12:46:00 +0000

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.

How Delingpole, and the blog this was taken from, can be allowed to wave such prejudice and obvious delusion in the faces of readers without issue is beyond me. Firstly, they call into judgement the ‘so-called’ think tank that is the Cambridge Econometrics team, seemingly suggesting that because it makes ‘a cool £2 million’ and therefore pays Dr Barker rather well, somehow makes it’s suggestions and scientific reports bogus from the outset. While it’s unfortunately true that much of the public is now hard-wired to think that any head of an organisation earning anything in the hundreds of thousands (although no salary is actually mentioned here) is instantly a person who should be stripped of their status and ignored, to call this into question completely out of context if just disgusting.

But it goes on; they then comment on Dr Barkers past careers, which varies in academic, political and scientific rigour and clearly shows him to be someone entirely well-positioned to be carrying out such reports and publishing them like he and his team have. Although, in Delingpole et als view this, if anything, completely nullifies any data or comments he should make, and that his clearly ‘violently anti-capitalist, deeply green activist’ self is so far biased to the left of things that the report should be scrapped before being opened, as should his reputation.

This is tantamount to questioning the validity of a surgeon and his suggestions pre-op on the basis that they have an academic background in surgery, have sat on multiple different advisory boards and have worked across various hospitals until this point, therefore meaning they are so ‘clearly biased towards a surgical response that they can’t be trusted’. Forgive the analogue, but I just can’t believe Delingpole is even justifying his views in such a way. In that respect, coming from an English Literature background and openly stating he does not read peer-reviewed journals presumably makes James a much more seasoned professional on the subject?

He also attacks the fact that it was commissioned by Greenpeace and the WWF for their own use, to be published as it was, effectively saying that due to their known views on fossil fuels and the green agenda, and the fact that anyone being paid to write for them would be skewed to saying good things about wind farms, they too are just as pointlessly biased and involved in the process as Dr Barker. Would anybody pass Delingpole’s validity test with this precedent? It’s not uncommon to disregard science done by the Heartland Institute or a fossil fuel lobbyist on the same grounds, but only when their data is refutable, not simply their character or personal life. That’s being reasonable.

What strikes me about the whole article is the next part, where he attempts, I emphasise the word attempts, to add some statistics to it all to backup his claims. I thought when I saw the title to this article that I would be presented with a reasoned analysis of the WWF report, pointing out how perhaps one technique they used was ill-advised, or that data was picked erroneously, but how wrong I was. Delingpole proceeds to pluck, seemingly out of the air, two figures for his entire article:

So let us instead apply some incredibly basic, entry-level commonsense. Here’s what we know about wind power: Onshore wind power requires 100 per cent subsidy from the government/taxpayer/energy user. Offshore wind requires 200 per cent subsidy. Not a single wind farm anywhere in the world would be economically viable without this state-enforced support. Besides being far less cost-effective than any form of fossil fuel power, the energy produced by wind – being intermittent and unpredictable and invariably unavailable on the coldest and hottest days when it is most needed – is essentially worthless in any free market. And that’s before we start considering the hidden costs of wind: the destruction it wreaks on bats and birds; the health risks of low frequency noise; the blight it inflicts on property prices; the near-irreparable damage it inflicts on the natural landscape…

I haven’t been able to find these percentages anywhere on the web, and of course there were no references or citations for me to follow from his blog, so it’s hard to tell if they are indeed wrong or right. However, given that he omits any mention of fossil fuel or gas subsidies in this article, let me - if we’re going to take 100% as the onshore wind subsidy rate, then that does not mean gas, coal etc is at 0%. In actuality, these fuels probably receive subsidies of at least 40-50% if we’re talking in Delingpole-statistics, so the sensational context in which he presents those numbers is clearly not as it seems. I only use these figures as a way of putting his claims in context, not as an actual referenced piece of data, but it is useful to understand what that ‘100%’ may actually mean. He tries to cover this up by taking a supposed ‘basic, entry-level common sense’ approach, but it would be nice to see some actual data to go on before condemning pages and pages of statistics with just two percentages.

He also attempts to list as many negatives for wind energy as he can muster, including the ‘health risks’ which have repeatedly been debunked as bad science, although noise pollution is an issue but not on a dangerous scale, as well as the ‘destruction…on bats and birds’, without bearing in mind the fact that wind projects carry out bat studies before construction can go ahead, the involvement of multiple wildlife trusts in the project planning process, and the simple fact that deaths from turbines are a minute fraction of birds killed by cars, cats and windows (just read David MacKay’s book and the wind chapter to see this). I imagine even fracking would lead to bird deaths somewhere along the way.

The idea of intermittency being wind’s absolute killer is simply wrong, with real-life examples in Germany, Denmark, the US and even here in the UK demonstrating peak generation and massive amounts of energy produced by wind alone, in a way which can be handled effectively to meet demand. As storage technology evolves and grid systems smarten up, we can rapidly reduce this ‘intermittency issue’ to practically nothing. The idea that ‘if the wind ain’t blowing, you’ve wasted your money’ is a rapidly ageing one, and Delingpole needs to catch up.

In stark contrast however, he sings the praises of gas:

Relative to wind it is cheap, efficient and clean. In the US, the shale gas revolution has not only brought the US closer to energy independence but it has more than halved the price of gas, bringing down the cost of energy for individual consumers and business alike, with a healthy knock-on effect on prosperity and economic efficiency.

For starters, where are the negatives in this balanced debate? How about some of these: it still emits carbon, there’s no escaping that eventuality; it may be cheap initially, but costs rapidly ramp up; multiple gas analysts believe that replicating the US success in shale gas over here in Europe is a pipe-dream, and simply will never come to fruition, regardless of funding and policy; fracking is a highly untested and potentially damaging process, most of all to the environment James so happily berates wind farms for destroying; he says gas brings economic efficiency and prosperity, when the green economy is the only growing section of the UK economy and is doing so at a staggering rate, and worldwide is adding more jobs than any other energy sector. These are just a small selection from a raft of negatives for gas and positives for wind and renewables, and yet Delingpole seems to forgo them.

The article finishes off with a completely off topic and almost random overview of an ITV radio survey on the national debt and whether the public knows what is happening via a simple multi-choice question, and to his glee reports that they don’t have a clue, and it is worrying. He links this tenuously back to the original point he was trying to make by suggesting that alongside the media and the Government misleading the public, organisations designed to help us (Greenpeace and the WWF) are in fact pumping out ‘junk science and Mickey Mouse economic reports’ to further confuse us.

So why should James Delingpole therefore be getting away with this sort of media spinning and sheer lying in the face of the current energy climate and loss of direction in the public? His articles are certainly not providing the correct information; rather, he is using his clever way with words and overly-confident air to do serious and perhaps irreversible damage to the environmental sector, which is only trying to aid society now, and into the future. Considering they use sound and robust science and are backed by multiple past successes, to say their data is ‘Mickey Mouse’ is astoundingly brash.

It boggles my mind how he thinks he can outright deny the validity of such a potentially important report, without any scientific justification of his own, without any serious rational, balanced argument, and most of all, whilst he screams about how misguiding and full of bull**** the media currently is, when he’s sitting at the centre of it.

No doubt he could into play the fact that he took opinions from a blog which outright insulted the academic rigour of one of my lecturers, Dr Rob Gross, and therefore I am emotionally invested, but in all honesty it boils down to the truth that what he said was wrong, and much of what he tries to force on the uneducated public is just nauseatingly hypocritical. Let’s not even get started on his coining of the term ‘warmist’, that’s just plain nuts.

http://www.treehugger.com/corporate-responsibility/leading-climate-skeptic-reportedly-complains-of-intellectual-rape.html

George Osborne Shows Us He's Ready To Do Just As We Expected: Create Yet More Hot Air

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 10:00:37 +0000

George Osborne today finally made crystal clear exactly what he thinks of the green agenda and renewable energy economy - that unless he gets smacked round the head by a spinning wind turbine, which lets face it, may do some good to his outrageously deluded mind, he won’t give it the time of day, or night, or anything inbetween. It’s all about the gas my friends.

With his Autumn Statement came many expectations from the climate and energy hawks amongst us, and it’s pretty safe to say that effectively all of them came to fruition as he stood defiant and commanding at the microphone, with an air which seemed to suggest he knows what he’s doing, and what he’s doing is in the best interest of us all. May have to think again on that one George.

It’s no secret that Mr Osborne and fellow energy minister Ed Davey generally sit at either end of the scale when it comes to the future of renewable energy and a low-carbon economy in this country, with the Treasury becoming increasingly characterised as the evil, gas-guzzling, fund-slashing body that it pretty much is. All the while, Davey is effectively fighting an uphill battle on every aspect of energy policy within the coalition, and despite having what should be powerful and influential bodies backing him, such as DECC, BIS and the CBI, he is being consistently shortchanged.

I will admit just quickly however that what Davey managed to achieve with the Energy Bill announced just last week was most probably the very best he could have gotten out of such a confused and lost government, and in many ways there’s plenty to praise about it. Contracts for difference and a multi-billion pound fund set for low-carbon projects and the development of a single counter-party setting the price alongside a capacity mechanism which could work means there’s plenty of good things going renewable’s way.

There was of course a huge omission in the delaying of the decarbonisation target decision until 2016, and the idea of excluding carbon-intensive industry just boggles the mind, but considering what Davey was actually up against, I find it hard not to applaud him. When you’ve got people like John Hayes and George Osborne throwing their weight and silly statistics around it’s damn surprising he got anything done at all.

So it must be a real kick in the teeth, groin and all other areas to Davey to hear what the Chancellor has planned for the UK energy market over the coming years, whilst he fights even harder to produce the goods over in Doha. Undoubtedly he knew some, if not all aspects of the announcement today, but that can’t make it any easier.

Osborne is so clearly wrapped up in the enticing aroma of fracked gas that he just cannot open his eyes for one second to see the real data coming through. He has set out two plans going forward, both of which entail some level of gas infrastructure being built into the UK economy. The first involves roughly 30 new plants to the tune of 26GW of new capacity, replacing old and inefficient fossil fuel burning plants, which would just about squeeze into our pledged emissions reductions goals of 50% cuts by 2025, but only, and I repeat only, if they are used mainly as backup generation for further renewable projects.

The second genius plan, also known as ‘Plan Z’ by David Kennedy, head of the Climate Change Committee, brings about roughly 37GW of new unabated gas to our ‘green and pleasant lands’, which as a side note is completely incompatible with the aforementioned emissions goals and would no doubt mean some hefty fines and a huge slap on the wrist from the developing world.

And yet I can go on. Myriad analysts in the energy markets and shale gas industry have categorically explained that the UK will not be seeing the same wonderfully cheap electricity prices the US is experiencing, and even Ed Davey himself has come out stating that so many things are unknown in the shale gas sector here in the UK, that to rely on it for future generation is far too premature. Some things however are known: relying too heavily on shale gas could lead to vulnerability from highly volatile market prices, the technology may be cheap to initially build but to keep it running will escalate costs, and depletion of reserves is so quick that we could be seeing the closure of some sites within six or seven years of opening. Hmmm.

Oh and one other really rather crucial piece of data from a recent WWF report, undertaken by the Cambridge Econometrics team has demonstrated outright, that a UK economy which focuses heavily on offshore wind for generation over a gas-centric mix results in ~£20bn of extra cash in the coffers, and creates over 70,000 more jobs. When a study like this, from a respected and influential body such as the WWF and Cambridge comes out stating things like this, how are we possibly letting this man go ahead with a ‘dash for gas’ so brutal we actually lose money? Madness.

It would also seem that the Chancellor is to set up a special Office for regulating shale gas and making sure the procedure is as smooth and simple as it could possibly be, and this is most likely to happen even before fracking is actually given the go-ahead by the government itself. Considering how untested the idea of fracking gas here in the UK is, it seems ludicrous that Osborne is even entertaining the idea of painting such a rosy picture of the future of British shale gas without first letting somebody try the bloody thing out without causing a minor earthquake.

Whilst Osborne hasn’t actually stated which of these two plans he intends on implementing, one thing strikes me as definitely wrong in all this, aside from the obvious. Why is it that the goals we set have to be met by the smallest margins possible, as in, why is the government trying to squeeze the very last gas plant in that it can before we topple over the pledged cuts. In the world climate we currently live in, would it not make more sense socially, ethically, economically and rationally to carry on as far past the target as we could, to try and absolutely smash it out of the water? At this rate, we probably won’t even get the right side of them.

When you look at this in conjunction with the fact that deep cuts will be employed throughout government departments, namely DECC, BIS, Defra and DfT, some to the tune of hundreds of millions, despite the very clear and present need for such bodies to be as bolstered and supported as possible. Of these, DECC luckily seems to come out the other side unscathed, as the majority of its spending goes into nuclear decommissioning, a process which was ring-fenced and protected from the cuts, with just £5m coming out of its next paycheck. Still, that extra £5m could have certainly been used to aid in future green projects, but will now simply be ploughed elsewhere in the system and buried under many more millions.

He has also made it impossible for the newly created and potentially powerful Green Investment Bank to borrow money until at least 2016/17 when the debt begins to fall, a pitiful and aggravating move to disable something he himself set up.

What is horribly surprising is what has been done to the planned fuel price increase of 3p, which was supposed to come into play early next year but has now been scrapped altogether, a point that Osborne was quick to champion as saving many struggling families money on their travel when it was needed the most. Or you could look at this way - he has effectively let car drivers off the hook once again with what can easily be described as a tax break, meaning that more and more cars will stay on the roads, which by the way have a tidy billion or so coming their way, and will absolutely not discourage drivers to switch to more environmentally-friendly means of transport for at least another 3-4 years. At the same time, those who travel by train and do their bit for the climate are facing constantly rising fares to the tune of 7% or 8% whilst seeing no visible improvement in the actual services. What the hell’s up with that??

I guess the only positive thing to come out of this whole charade, and for that matter George Osborne’s mouth, is the increased funding going into science, where an extra £600m will be utilised to advance computing and cloud technology, material sciences, synthetic biology, and, wait for it, energy storage and grid advancements. So at least we’re seeing some comparatively sizeable funding going towards things that matter, although how much of that will be laid aside for storage and grid experiments is as yet unknown. What was quite interesting about this aspect of the announcement is that George Osborne barely focused on it, almost saying it in passing, and without daring to mention that this science-funding would explicitly include money for green projects towards a lower carbon economy. I wonder if it was even his own idea…

Regardless of this last point, it is blindingly obvious how little the Chancellor, and by extension the Treasury cares for solid evidence and the astounding growth in the low-carbon economy which should be spurring further investment.

While I’m not completely averse to the idea of some domestically produced gas in our mix, anything above 15GW, where we safely come in below our pledged reductions, should be considered effectively illegal. I know some gas will be necessary to calm our recent addiction to coal, but when we have so many more options in the renewable field literally screaming in our faces, alongside businesses ready and waiting to jump on the green-train, giving them this sort of news to mull over with such blatant ignorance is surely not good for our future policy? It would have at least been beneficial to see something about green gas in the announcement, where it would surely satisfy both Osborne and the greenies. Oh well.

http://www.link2portal.com/doubts-over-green-investment-banks-future-borrowing-power

The Beginning Of The British Nuclear Renaissance?

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 10:00:28 +0000

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/9642199/Hitachis-700m-Horizon-nuclear-deal-to-create-up-to-12000-British-jobs.html

Call me optimistic, and trust me, that’s not what I’m often called, but to me it’s starting to look like nuclear may finally be back on the radar for the UK, at least in the form of tentative steps towards kickstarting once-ailing projects and renewing ageing others. There may even be some hope lingering in the recently announced Energy Bill, of which there are unfortunately many negative aspects covering some surprisingly positive ones for the industry and it’s future in terms of project certainty and subsidies.

The acquisition of the infamous Horizon nuclear site has undoubtedly proved as the catalyst for this, and has been the butt of many coalition-directed jokes for some time now, after E.ON and RWE put the project up for sale in March following that fateful nuclear-backlash from Fukushima (brief thoughts on that coming later). Many thought it signalled the gradual and undignified death of the industry at the hands of public outcry and atrocious safety hazards, and I included believed it highly unlikely to be seeing any new reactors planned for some decades to come, if at all. Fortunately, it seems our overseas Asian friends think otherwise.

Hitachi recently completed the sale of Horizon at £700million and plans to begin construction of two to three plants at each of the two sites, and more importantly is planning on implementing cutting-edge technology in an attempt to reduce costs and build times, as well as to placate those who feel nuclear is dirty, dangerous and likely to kill us all one day. These AWBRs, or Advanced Water Boiling Reactors are apparently the ‘only advanced nuclear reactors licensed and in production around the world, and have been built on time and within cost’, unlike pretty much any other European reactor currently being constructed.

They intend the plants to produce 1.3GW of electricity each, and to create over 12,000 jobs in the process, yet again boosting one of the only sectors to truly be growing in this current climate, the green and low-carbon economy. With this much extra juice and investment flowing into our ‘green and pleasant lands’ without the added worry of carbon emissions during use, a rather large hole which would have inevitably formed as old plants were shut down can hopefully be plugged.

In more good news, EDF has also finally been granted a licence to build a new nuclear power plant at Hinkley Point in Somerset, to the tune of £8 million in planning and permission-seeking costs alone. EDF’s new build will employ the latest and greatest safety regulations and have to comply with myriad checks and conditions, all of which have been crafted to ensure that the plant does not lead to undue environmental harm or health effects. The last time the UK was granted a licence to build a new plant was in 1987 when Sizewell B was constructed, so this is a definite sign of things changing for the better.

There has also been plenty of interest from other foreign nations in the British future of nuclear, with China and Russia both expressing interest in building new projects, and claiming they could build them safely, cheaply and on time, something the industry so desperately needs to prove it can indeed do.

Jumping back to Horizon quickly however, all is not complete just yet. The company is waiting on the final publication of the Energy Bill to ensure that the coalition government can provide the financial certainty necessary to make such long-term projects worthwhile, as without subsidies or loans tied with steady future prices, the uncertainty kills the industry outright, and is often the reason for the lack of new-builds worldwide.

In the recent Bill announcement, there was some good, and some bad. The good being that the government plans on investing well over £100billion into renewables and technologies like nuclear and CCS over the next eight years, and there was a clear goal of rejuvanating the nuclear industry and driving forwards with more projects being completed and more licences being handed out. In short, it seems the coalition has seen sense in nuclear, and designed a financial incentive system to spur development.

Unfortunately, it would also seem that some of that uncertainty still has not been quashed completely. The omission of any agreement on a Decarbonisation Target and the delaying to 2016, along with the fact that these investment plans only run until 2020 is a serious problem for those wishing to partake in the long-run. With such a short timescale for decision-making, at least in energy terms, if foreign investors wanting to build a nuclear project here in the UK feel that after 2020 they will be bogged down by sudden subsidy losses and price hikes, or by the introduction of unabated gas plants and shale extraction, they simply won’t want to go ahead. This has always been a major factor in determining whether large infrastrcuture such as nuclear plants get built in the first place, as the several-year build times and escalating cost risks have always proved too risky for any real progress to be made.

Hopefully, with Hitachi showing such great interest and with EDF now on board after seemingly backing away with Horizon, investors and contractors will begin to see that the UK is, for now at least, a relatively nice place to start up some nuclear projects. What we’re talking about here may not seem like very much; just two projects which are still yet to actually begin, but the immense power produced by these plants, on comparatively small sites, and with spanking-new technology which aims to tackle safety issues and cost, as well as waste, they are very much a needed boon for our energy-trailing nation.

Of course, I hear you all screaming about the death! The death! What about the children! I have written about this a couple of times before, and there’s plenty more out there stating the very same thing as me, but the growing facts of the matter are actually quite simple.

The supposed risk inherent in nuclear is wildly blown out of proportion. The major three disaster stories we seemingly tell as though sitting around a campfire in the middle of a darkened woods, are not the disasters we perceive them to be. By no means am I stating that Chernobyl, 3-Mile Island and Fukushima weren’t tragedies in their own rights, and the loss of human life is never a good thing, but the media and public have spun them into something so much more risky than they ever could have been alone. There were deaths at Chernobyl, 31 deaths have been officially recorded, although environmental damage has obviously proven worse; life is returning there however, and the tenuous and extremely difficult to prove links to increased cancer in over 6,000 people in Russia and the wider world have been disputed to this day.

3-Mile Island - no deaths. Fukushima - no deaths. Stealing a notion from The Guardian article embedded in the paragraph above, this should surely make people feel better about nuclear safety, not worse? In these apparent ‘catastrophic’ disasters, what was in effect a nuclear meltdown and explosion was contained incredibly well given what actually could have happened. I always consider this point - the Fukushima-Daiichi Plant was over 40 years old, and was built to withstand nature’s strongest. Unfortunately, nature wanted to push that little bit further, as it likes to do, and slammed the plant with a never-before seen tsunami. What happened then? Well, correct me if I’m wrong, but an ageing and out-of-date nuclear plant, battered by Gaia’s best punch, creaked and cracked and let off some steam, there was a minor explosion and some release of radioactive material (now well-below background levels), and then it was taken under control. Is that not astonishingly impressive?

The absurd risk we now apportion to the industry is simply our hysterical selves driven by the media’s doomsday reports following each ‘disaster’ and is not based on rational assessment and reasoning.

If we want to hold those actually responsible to ransom, we should look directly at the fossil fuel industry. Only recently a gas explosion in Indianapolis killed two and injured seven, more than two of the three nuclear disasters, and yet I only heard about it today, and not via the news. Offshore oil is another example, and only some weeks ago an explosion on the Black Elk Rig in the Gulf of Mexico has claimed three lives, again more. And yet the rampant search for shale gas and oil in the Arctic doesn’t seem to be slowing down at all. The media covered some of these stories yes, but not in the same sensational and OTT way as the nuclear events, something I personally find highly distressing.

If we are to save an industry which has a much better chance of saving us back further down the line (think climate change), the media has got to get its priorities right, and the public has to be properly educated and what actually happens when one of these reactors ‘blows’. Hint: historically, not a lot.

The London Climate Forum: The Best Bits (Inc. Talk Of Treason!)

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 10:00:37 +0000

The London Climate Forum, not something I can honestly say I’d ever heard of prior to joining Imperial College just over 2 months ago, but in many ways, I’m unsure as to how I never got wind of it in the first place. In short, it is a fascinating, insightful and cutting-edge forum which anybody interested in climate and sustainability, even those who aren’t, should endeavour to get involved with.

For those, like me initially, who are not clued up at all on this project, let me provide a brief summary. The London Climate Forum is an entirely student-led and organised conference based within Imperial College, and is the biggest in London, and quite possibly the country in terms of size, attendance and speakers welcomed to the stage. It runs over just two days, Saturday and Sunday, but offers up some serious clout with it’s multiple leading thinkers in the worlds of sustainability, business, policy and academia, all of whom grasp the opportunity to reach out to the new generation of green ‘ecowarriors’ in an attempt to inspire the next big thing(s).

The Forum’s goal? To speak directly to those who are on the frontier of the climate agenda across a wide variety of sectors, whilst entertaining the chance that through events like these, the solutions we so desperately seek in solving climate change may be nurtured within it’s walls. So it’s a modest goal to say the least…but one which we are all highly invested in, and one which was in full swing this weekend as the Forum was expertly carried out.

I wanted to, as succinctly as I feel possible doing, summarise some of the major talking points and stances which the stage was party to over the weekend just past, just to scratch the surface of some of the subjects covered. And trust me, there were many, so bare with me!

Day One

The first day was mostly focused on the present; what the current climate is doing, why it is doing this, what we are currently (mostly not) doing to mitigate it, and how business is adapting to tackle the myriad new challenges such change is bringing about. Two eminent and, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind me saying this, highly outspoken campaigners filled the morning, in the form of Tony Juniper and Tom Burke, the latter part of a panel trio who, combined with the director of our very own Grantham Institute, painted a rather desperate and somewhat depressing picture of a story we all have unfortunately come to know intimately.

The world is warming, we’re responsible, 6C is looking increasingly likely according to recent WorldBank, PWC and UN reports, and all in all, politicians and society are doing sweet FA to fix, or even try to fix it, despite science’s best attempts to scream it wildly with flapping arms in their collective faces. Trewin Restorick, CEO of the Global Action Plan and the third speaker of the trio bittersweetly delivered this when he stated how obviously blind the UK government is to be ignoring PWC’s climate report, a company he sarcastically described as “so obviously known for its eco-radical behaviour”. That got some laughs for sure.

The Trillion Fund was next on the agenda, with Michael Stein, founder and director taking the stage, with some exuberance and clear passion for the subject. Crowd-funding is his game if you are not familiar with his company, and he has dabbled in many forms of capital trading and investing, and knows what he’s doing when it comes to money in the renewable sphere. He set the scene with a succinct analysis of the politically astounding Arab Spring of late. “Has anybody made the connection with climate change and the Arab Spring? I have - it’s the first climate revolution, and there will be more” was his punchline piece, detailing how burnt-out crops in Russia leading to rising food prices had more than likely been the trigger for the fateful Middle-Eastern revolt, a boiling pot of repression which was just waiting for something like this to pour out.

He then went on to explain his approach to sustainable business, which uses social media and the internet to bring together thousands of people under the green-agenda umbrella and provides renewable projects for us all to invest in individually. Effectively, he saw the value in our online connected world, and has begun utilising it to kickstart projects all over the world, with the public paying in not only receiving small but still-sizable, and more importantly reliable returns (10-15% was oft-quoted) as well as having the knowledge that they have directly helped build a wind or solar farm somewhere it is needed. It’s a neat idea, and obviously done him well, and if I had money so spare, I’d be straight to his site; think ‘Kickstarter’ but with a renewable twist.

Mark Lynas, the infamously controversial but brilliant author of multiple climate-related books and Guardian columns combined his views with the deep technical knowledge of Prof. David MacKay of Cambridge, and author of ‘Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air’, a book I urge everybody to read, to produce what was a completely comical but adept analysis of our future energy mix here in the UK. Using DECC’s innovative, albeit sometimes lacking energy calculator, the two plugged in various parameters determining how many solar panels here and how many EVs there (amongst 40 other options), with some audience opinion, in their attempts to bring 2050 emissions levels to 80% of 1990 records, the point of safety and where the world can finally breathe.

They ran over, and we barely got it finished, but the hilarity which ensued from Mark’s quick and clever comments and the astounding ambient knowledge of David provided a spectacle I, and I believe many others could have watched for hours. Tweeting to Mark afterwards, it would seem the only thing which went truly wrong was the choice not to include any nuclear in the future mix, an apparent audience decision which shocked both me at the time. “Dear God. Why did I allow it?” he tweeted, a sentiment I wholeheartedly agree with. Anyway, that’s for another time.

Day Two

Sunday was a day reserved for the next few steps, a day where futurists and ‘blue-sky’ thinkers (God I hate that word) could relish in their study of trends and solutions for the coming 30 years.

The morning keynote set the day up with an act which proved to be seriously hard to follow. James Cameron (not that one), founder and non-executive of Climate Change Capital, member of GE’s ecomagination board, Advisor to government, and so many more things I can only point you to his site opened with some powerfully simple and rational thoughts. Sustainability is only going to work if it is beautiful - “nobody ever feels punished standing in a green and energy-efficient building”. Something doubtless many of us have ever realised, but the truth is, green looks good most of the time, even if you subscribe to the belief that wind turbines are ugly, and we feel good being around them.

He gave us three key points to take home, the three areas he feels we need to focus all our efforts on to bring about this beautiful change: innovation, infrastructure and information. All of his points arise from his work within the UK, but undoubtedly could be applied many times over elsewhere. Our infrastructure sucks, there’s no two ways of saying it, but if we upgrade and smarten it up in the endless ways we could, we could become a leader in green energy worldwide.

Right now though, business regulations just aren’t setup right to accommodate the one crucial thing the sustainable industry requires - new players in the market, those that bring innovation and fresh thinking to the table, not those outdated and bullish Big Six. If we can let go of our ageing ways and open up the world to the little businesses, who knows what fantastic new developments could become the norm. It’s fairly common to hear that the UK has no real manufacturing base anymore, that we effectively make nothing with a British stamp on it anymore, but James argues differently. He picked up on the automotive industry, our passion and skills for Formula 1, and our immense technical prowess in the materials sector, where we lead the world in a league of our own. By combining these two powerhouses of business in new and sustainable ways, with those young fresh-faced ideas we so desperately lack backing it, the idea of the UK being dead in the water and behind on green issues is all but blown out of the water.

Anne Lise Kjaer went on to describe our complete disconnection with many brands we use to perceive as improving our qualities of life, whilst a talk on sustainable city planning and structures introduced how green our 2012 Olympics really set out to be (and subsequently was). Contaminated land was rejuvenated, ecologies sustained and innovative new building techniques such as removable seating ‘wings’ on the Swimming Centre and steel-saving roofing on the Velodrome were widely employed, all within a surprisingly tight budget. They even built one of the main but temporary structures in such a way that it could be taken apart and shipped to Rio for the next Olympics, in a masterclass of recycling; although of course it instantly means we did a better job than the Brazilians can hope to achieve as we basically gave them a building…

As the final day drew to a close, fuelling the future became the prime topic of discussion, as Jeremy Leggett, Prof Nigel Brandon and Dr Ling Ge tackled the future of energy mixes and the technology we could see directing us on a cleaner path, such as space-age battery storage, Solar Century PV projects and hydrogen deployment.

“You can ask any engineer to design you a low-carbon energy system and they could do it today without issue; we can do it, it’s just the cost which gets in the way” was Nigel’s message to us all, and one which strikes at the very heart of the problem. However, it wasn’t just left at that, as any good climate panel should it was argued fervently by Jeremy that it is the social and political willingness which is killing the jump into a sustainable world, not simply cost. If we want to achieve what we desperately need to, we need more guts, more action and more aggressive motions if we are to bulldoze down the barriers in the way.

Oh, and Jeremy also compared what Osborne and his Treasury are doing right now in their blatant disregard for data and blind love for shale gas as tantamount to treason, just if you were wondering why that was in the title. I am in some ways inclined to agree.

To round it all off, our resident Professor Lord Robert Winston brought a measure of class and charisma unlike any other, and proceeded to highlight how we need to be cautious of science and progress if we are to fully grasp its achievements, and that despite a seemingly overwhelming drying up of the sustainability debate, the data clearly shows people believe in it, and in numbers constantly rising. He left us with a sense of there coming a journey ahead which will be both challenging, depressing, at times catastrophic, but all the while rewarding, a journey which those fully invested in the notion of climate change as we all were are the real hope for the future of civilisation as we currently know it. Of course, that won’t happen without global recognition, but it’s always nice to be thoroughly enthralled as we left the room feeling.

Worth It?

Yes. That’s all I’m going to say in conclusion, as not only is it the truth, but this has also been a horrifyingly long post, and if anybody is actually left standing, I doubt they want to hear much more. All in all, the London Climate Forum, and in broader terms, the climate debate is something I feel so privileged and excited to be part of, that seeing these people reaffirm what we’ve come to learn is something special.

Great stuff. See you all next year?

Why Aren't We Kicking Offshore Oil Out For Good? Seriously?

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 10:00:39 +0000

Here’s something I don’t get; offshore oil. As a whole, I simply don’t understand what our global obsession with this wonder-drug fuel source is. It’s dirty, it’s expensive, it requires massive amounts of resources to build, is highly damaging to the environment and so painfully, obviously dangerous in light of recent events (or in fact its entire history) that it astounds me we still continue to advocate new leases and permissions for these things. I mean, who thinks it’s a good idea to slap one of these beasts in the pristine Arctic Ocean? Come on guys, really?

This sheer confusion of mine has been ratcheted up another level as the infamous BP finally gets the bill for it’s excessive throwing up of oil all over the Gulf of Mexico in the now almost myth-like Deepwater Horizon spill of 2010. The sum - a tasty $4.5 billion, and criminal sentences of manslaughter for two supervisors who were deemed responsible for making sure such drilling platforms didn’t spontaneously explode, but failed to do so. The crux of the legal ruling? ‘Gross negligence’, which I think sums it up pretty nicely.

So that’s a mighty fine slap on the wrists for BP then. Company-reputation is no doubt tarnished for life, although it didn’t take a court ruling to make that point obvious, and the damages they’ve been paying out since the event reach into the tens of billions. The world over now sees offshore drilling for what it really can be; a horribly dangerous and potentially catastrophic process of extraction which surely does not warrant the time, effort and money spent on it.

And to take this even further, in what seems like a brutally ironic twist of fate, just a day after this ruling was complete, another oil rig based in the Mexican Gulf went up in flames too, with at least four missing and two possibly dead. I’m not one to call into play an ‘Act of God’, but that kinda stinks of something trying to be said right?

So you’d think with all this negative attention and bad karma within the offshore oil industry that we might be seeing the beginnings of the end for the whole enterprise, or at least of this form of reckless and risky drilling. Unfortunately, I don’t think that happy eventuality will be coming along anytime soon.

The fines BP are being charged, that $4.5 billion, that is barely change for a company as large and wealthy as they are, and is completely trumped by litigation charges and settlements BP will be handling outside of court on the ground of Water Protection Acts and private nuisance. However, this is to be paid out over several years, not in one big wallop, and indeed, BP is not short of cash. The US Department of Defense for one has contracts worth $2.2 billion a year purely to be provided with fuel from the multinational corporation, so in effect, the DoD would have paid off these fines in just over 2 years. More irony?

Another point to consider. BP lost over 1/3 of its share price after the Deepwater explosion, but in a shockingly angering turn of events, their share price actually ROSE by 1% after the hearing where fines and penalties were doled out. I can’t possibly fathom why this might be the case, with my only reasoning being that those who judge BP’s stock price felt that the oil giant had finally been a good citizen in pleading guilty to each charge, and that now it had taken on the burdens of such legal decisions, it deserved a little break and a calming pat on the back. Either way, I smell madness in the air.

And anyway, a projected loss in share price never means that money has actually left the company, simply that people value it at less than before. That can happen purely through market swings in the price of oil regardless, and if they’ve already got coffers the size of nations, then there can’t be too much to worry about.

In this context however, I feel nuclear energy has been cheated most of all. All around the developed world power plants are being sneered angrily at as they’re taken offline, protests and rage the soundtrack to their demise. Safety and the ‘imminent’ danger these nuclear bombs-in-waiting hold is just too much for most to handle, and some countries such as Japan and Germany have all but turned their capacity off, leaving gaping holes in their supply. To replace this gap? Why import more oil and coal of course; one of the most counterproductive mistakes of the 21st century in my books.

Let’s think back to Deepwater. 11 crewman were killed in the explosion, and countless more in the form of birds, fish and coastal dwelling creatures. The most recent event, the oil rig in the Gulf owned by Black Elk Energy, may have claimed two lives. Then we get to Fukushima, the smoking gun for the death of nuclear energy. Zero deaths so far, and no reason to suggest that cancer risks were dangerously elevated or animals and the environment were harmed anywhere near as much as the BP incident, or for that matter most other oil rig incidents.

And yet, despite the fact we explicitly know that Fukushima killed nobody, and that BP killed 11, offshore drills its way forward without any sign of people slowing its steady advance into the poles in search of ever more unstable but lucrative resources. Scientists say we can’t fully know for sure the economic damage done to ecosystems by the BP spill for another generation, and when we live in a society based on precedent and evidence, how is this being allowed to happen. I’m not for one minute pretending to say that Fukushima was anything but a disaster for the whole of Japan, and a tragedy in its own right, but when you compare it to another disaster of our decade, surely only one qualifies as the worst?

It is for this very reason that I am utterly bemused as to why Obama, Cameron and others are calling for more offshore drilling and exploration, whilst killing off any talk of nuclear expansion. The economics of nuclear are, for lack of a better word, terrible right now, there’s no denying that, but that is something which can be fixed in time given the right policies and encouragement, and given how important nuclear can be as an intermediate clean energy source on a large scale, we can’t abandon it on, what are in all fairness, shaky grounds of risk - it just isn’t as risky as the media makes out.

I know calling all offshore drilling efforts off is akin to insanity, but we should at least be campaigning and fighting more openly to slow its growth, both on the political and scientific stage, for it is infinitely more dangerous than nuclear and we have plenty of cases to prove this very point. I just don’t get how we can be so blaze about abandoning nuclear at the drop of a hat, but allow offshore to go on with nothing but a grumble and shake of the fists. We’ve tied ourselves into an oil trading market, do we really want human life to be traded along with it?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/16/bp-historic-deepwater-horizon-fine?CMP=twt_fd

http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/nov/15/bp-deepwater-horizon-plea-agreement?CMP=twt_fd

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/15/bp-oil-spill-fine_n_2137339.html

It's Time To Hand Over UK Wind Projects To The Community

Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:00:45 +0000

UK Wind energy has taken what can only be described as a potentially fatal blow in recent weeks, mostly due to our fancy new and obviously yet to adjust himself Energy Minister John Hayes, who slammed the industry in a poorly veiled release of emotion to various newspapers and public arenas.

His view brings to light issues which many of us were deeply worried about when he took position as the senior governmental minister presiding over energy matters, those pertaining to renewable energy and in particular wind farms, both on and offshore. He was well known for his relatively open anti-wind stance years before his new job was offered, but plenty hoped this rather large crease had been ironed out in the process of waking up and smelling the climate coffee. Apparently not.

John Hayes is a believer of many things wholeheartedly and affectionately, including things like gas, nuclear and domestic offshore drilling, but not of a future where the UK is ‘peppered’ with detestable wind farms ruining ‘this green and pleasant land’ to which he has taken it upon himself to be the guardian of. It is pretty certain that the UK will meet and possibly even exceed its wind deployment targets for 2015 and 2020, and we could undoubtedly carry on far beyond these ageing goals and continue to lead Europe in the generation of purely wind powered electricity, but Hayes doesn’t want that. His view: ‘enough is enough’ on the wind front; we’re going to reach our goals and therefore we should stop blighting the landscape with the bloody things. Because that will solve climate change won’t it John.

Aside from his complete ignorance and obvious political gaming on this subject, in the face of a shambolic energy policy, Hayes did raise one important point, albeit a painful one [for me at least] to come to terms with. If wind is to be deployed on any greater scale then it currently is, investigation and surveying into the impacts on communities must be taken more seriously than it is now for them to come to accept turbines in their backyard.

I personally feel that he said this to simply placate the environmentalists and wind industries out there who may be more angered than most if he had just outright stated his genuine dislike for the technology, but it can be read in another, more rational way.

We are a nation of ‘NIMBY’; we hate to have what is left of our humble British landscape marred by a dirty great wind turbine in our ‘backyard’ or a farm miles offshore polluting our view of the abundant shipping lanes, and this is precisely the reason why the industry hasn’t exploded like it should have done years ago. The UK is a windy place, and a consistently windy place at that, and a lot of the regions where the gusts hit the highest speeds, very little tends to exist, even if that may be due to constraints with the topography; think Scottish highlands and you’ll get this gist.

And yet, despite this bountiful resource all around us, much of our wind industry has come to a grinding halt as communities hold back projects and politicians fight to shut them up. We need to take a leaf out of neighbours books over on the continent when it comes to such altercations, otherwise we could be stuck at this junction for a long time to come.

Denmark for example, has 6,000 onshore turbines and growing, compared to 4,000 over here, and up to 80% of them are co-owned by the local communities, offering them benefits such as direct involvement in the project itself at all stages, cuts on their energy bills and the chance to look after their very own sustainable livelihood.

Germany employs the same idea, with over 1/3 of all wind projects owned by the locals directly beneath and around them, with each and every one helping the nation rake in the clean energy on a world-class scale.

Even within our own ‘green and pleasant’ borders we have similar smaller-scale projects at work. The latest of these developments includes a 25 turbine farm near Invergarry in Scotland, which will not only bring jobs and investments upwards of £500m to the local communities, but will offer scholarships for local students, with those directly involved with hosting the farm given priority. This is a perfect example of how simple coordination with the villages most at ‘risk’ from a development such as this can lead to far better results than most could have imagined beforehand. Rather than whacking the turbines down and hoping for the best, working with the potential opposition can bring wonderful extras.

It goes on as well. I started this post mentioning how anti-wind we tend to be as a nation, but that isn’t necessarily true. Polls show that 22% would be against a wind turbines being erected 2 miles from their home, with 49% for, which is a healthy proportion of pro-wind locals, but it’s not the greatest percentage in terms of those vehemently anti. Ideally, we want to be at, or as near as possible to 0% for the industry to really let loose and expand without protestation at every stage.

So what happens when the survey includes the chance for the local community to be directly involved with the project? Support rockets up to 68%, a respectable increase on the original value, but more importantly, opposition falls to just 7%, clearly stating how eager most people are to just feel involved with wind farm development, even if it is effectively being built just outside their house. People want wind farms, and rightly so, they want some control over them!

Of course, as with all studies this is just a small sample, and there will always be those who oppose wind on any grounds possible (think health effects/being irrationally mad), but there is a prominent case for community interaction.

This isn’t a difficult policy step either; the benefits can be catered to each community and every project will bring with it multiple goodies for all involved, and if Denmark has managed to foster as many locally-owned wind farms as we have industry-owned projects, in a country 1/6th the size, surely we can?

I must admit before wrapping up this post however, that I haven’t always been an advocate of the community-benefit model of wind farm developments, and I’m still only just coming round to the idea. I just always couldn’t quite come to terms with the idea that people needed such blatant rewards before considering letting a wind turbine be built miles from their homes, when the benefit should be instantly embedded with the zero-carbon nature of wind energy and the fact that they’re replacing a much dirtier, disgusting and downright ugly coal or gas plant which would be required otherwise. Given my views on turbines and their mechanical and scientific beauty, I may not be best positioned to understand the other side, but it is becoming clearer.

This approach is different to that described above in one important way - the community gets to have its say, see every step of the project and ultimately lay claim to some part of the wind farm, not simply put up with the turbines for a monetary incentive or flashy new playground as some have suggested, and therefore I’m rapidly beginning to see how we can kickstart an ailing industry using this integrated system study. We could do it like China, who builds where and when it likes without accounting for local people, but I doubt Cameron wants to be seen as someone taking a leaf out of a communist book, even if it does get s**t done.

I wonder if John Hayes has seen those survey statistics? I’m willing to bet he wouldn’t accept anything until it is proven to be 100% approved, you know, like those fracking plants…or offshore drilling at depth…or shale gas markets in Europe. Apologies, it’s just so easy to carried away.

http://greenhousepr.co.uk/blog/show/clean-british-energy-campaign-earn-yourself-a-cbe/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/23/wind-shale-gas-icm-poll

Reconciling China & The US Over Climate Change, Impossible? Just Improbable

Wed, 31 Oct 2012 10:01:00 +0000

As part of my seminar work at university recently, we were tasked with acting out a mock debate between China and the United States, as though we were their respective leaders attempting to form an international agreement on climate change and emissions, all COP-like. Three of us were labelled China (me) and the other three the US, and for two weeks we prepared our sides of the argument with the ideas of fairness, equality and discussing topics which are rarely touched upon in the real world.

Now, our goal was to duke it out for 20 minutes or so, each bringing out our biggest guns on the topics of economy, climate policy, energy and poverty, with the ultimate goal of first debating who bore the better position on the global stage, before forming a bilateral framework to bring the rest of the world on board. Easy task eh! But fun nonetheless.

Our lecturer, an environmental barrister who has seen his fair share of global conventions and knows how they work and (mostly) don’t work, and was keen that we focus on one or two key attributes of a fair debate on this topic. Firstly, historical emissions, the idea that a figure can be derived to demonstrate how much greenhouse gas emissions had been accumulated over time by each industrialising country, generally from 1850 until the present. Secondly, the intent to damage, or mens rea, and associated legal issues such as liability were to be included, as these are generally ignored or swept under the rug in the conventions we’ve come to know and hate.

And who do you think holds the crown of the highest historical emissions between the US and China? Why the US of course, by a margin of about 220,000Gt of CO2, maxing out at ~340,000Gt, almost 30% of the entire worldwide past emissions accounted for. China on the other hand is responsible for around 9% of the share, and much of that has been in the last 30-40 years of rampant coal consumption and becoming the ‘manufacturer of the world’, a moniker the US has had much use out of. When you consider what we know of climate science and carbon dioxide today, that fantastically large proportion of emissions resulting from the States puts pretty much everything else into perspective, not least China’s emissions.

China has tried to use this against the US before, claiming that they should pay up for all the dirty CO2 and the years of unabated, joyful economic growth it brought with it; if China is to be expected to slow growth to mitigate climate change, then the US should compensate all those who have and will be affected by that 30% historical share, i.e. the entire planet. When they brought this demand to the table, the US used their secret weapon to shoot it down instantaneously, quickly brushing it out of sight before anything serious came of it. By claiming ignorance effectively, the US leaders merely stated that they could not have possibly known fossil fuel burning was damaging the environment as we now know, and to ask them to pay compensation for anything earlier than, say, the 1980s would be ludicrous. This is despite the fact that we as a society knew these emissions were damaging at least decades earlier, and certainly by the early 1970s, when the wider scientific community began studying the effects of carbon dioxide and other pollutants.

Throughout our research as the Chinese delegation, it became clearer and clearer that America should have to be fined in some way to account for this gross negligence and lack of responsibility for civil society, and yet when we proposed this to the other team, they had the ‘liability’ argument ready and waiting, and we could do nothing about it. It’s infuriating to say the least that this argument has gained no purchase whatsoever, and has been allowed to be simply disregarded on some very flimsy legal terms. Surely you cannot deny the science of carbon dioxide warming the atmosphere? Not even you America. But by stating they didn’t know what was happening back then makes no difference to the physical facts that it WAS harming the environment, and now someone must pay. I know they’re in debt, trillions of it, but their economy is still one of the strongest known, and they could do some serious good to their reputation if they agreed to these demands.

It was also seen in my research, that China has some absolutely kick-ass green policies and agendas, some far better than anything Europe or America has implemented. Take their auto-emission standards to start. The major cities have accepted some of the harshest regulations of any nation, despite the fact there are just 2 cars to every 100 people in China; compare this to America, where standards are generally laxer, but every single person statistically owns a car, all 340 million of them.

Coal plant efficiency is on the rise in China and has surpassed the US, but this isn’t stopping the Chinese government brutally but efficiently shutting down carbon-intensive factories and promoting the building of newer, cleaner plants. Now I know the idea of ‘clean coal’ is all wrong, and the huge binge China is having on the stuff desperately needs an intervention, but this clearly shows they are making steps towards cleaning up their act significantly, both through emission standards and efficiency improvements. If China is to continue on the fossil fuels however, it is imperative they switch to natural gas as fast as possible, to curb emissions and reduce foreign imports of coal, much of which originates from the US anyway.

Carrying on with the green agenda theme, China currently sits in number one position worldwide for solar and wind developments by quite some way, and continues to invest in nuclear energy whilst we shy away from it. Considering how important nuclear can be as an intermediary energy source between fossil fuels and renewables, it would seem China is sticking up the middle finger, as is the rest of Asia (bar Japan for obvious reasons) to the established fear of fission and driving towards its goal of 15% renewables by 2020, a target equal to that of the UK’s.

Meanwhile the US is attempting to promote green growth by ignoring it in the presidential debates, letting the wind PTC steadily expire and stifling overseas manufacturing with petty trade wars and trade regulations. Oh, and despite the potential for hydro, wind, solar and others in the US, shale gas seems to be the sole focus of domestic energy policy at the moment, combined with offshore exploration in the Arctic. While this isn’t half as bad as China and its coal obsession, as a developed nation condemning many for their carbon emissions, it doesn’t really look good does it.

There is also the poverty issue. China is racked with huge levels of poor people with lack of access to heating, electricity, housing or a good income, with some estimates reaching as high as 30% of the population, some 300 million individuals. This issue will always be at the very top of the modern Chinese priority list, and could easily be getting in the way of promoting carbon-conscious behaviour, and yet, it doesn’t. While it’s undeniable they Chinese do not have the greatest human rights record, it improves each month, and with it a flood of new connections to the grid and an increased need for energy. As more clean energy comes online, more people can have access to higher qualities of life, whilst impacting the environment much less than most of the the US population did, until about 40 years ago.

It is the combination of all these factors that drives me to the conclusion that China holds pretty much all of the cards when it comes to negotiation on the global climate stage, or at least it should. It’s managed to achieve in 20 years what it took the US its whole lifetime, and has in many ways surpassed them, in aspects ranging from green policy, renewable investment, market incentives and a real and palpable sense that the Chinese leaders want to tackle this issue head on.

It amazed me how quickly our mock debate descended into finger pointing and angry posturing, with each side trying to outdo the other on the ‘I’m doing this better than you front’, and we were all guilty of it; I’m probably guilty of it in this post. What wasn’t being focused on was what needed to be done. Instead, we went round in circles repeatedly until 3 hours had passed and we were as our lecturer put it, ‘at the 23rd hour’ and had to cobble together a relatively feeble solution. The US doesn’t want to hear about the past, whilst China will not have its rightful growth stifled by a nation who has shrouded its history of emissions.

What I came away most sure of however, was the simple realisation that it is no bloody wonder nothing ever gets achieved at these mass gatherings of vested interests. We could have argued for hours and hours, deliberating the smallest and biggest of points without reaching a conclusion, and even though we finally made some agreement, it was through boredom and lack of energy over real progress. Unfortunately, the real world doesn’t offer a similar excuse.

http://www.chinahearsay.com/party-hearty-cpc-to-meet-with-republicans-democrats/

Somehow, UK Leads (Mostly) Europe-Wide Overachievement Towards Kyoto Targets

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 10:00:47 +0100

Well I must admit, I for one did not see this news coming, and it has come at quite the shock to me, and I would like to think much of the developed world and climate hawks all around. The EU is set to meet and surpass the greenhouse gas emission targets set out in the Kyoto Protocol way back in 1997, cutting overall amounts by at least 5% per country involved, which is a sizeable amount whichever way you cut it.

Considering many other developed nations have either long given up on reaching these goals, or have simply backed out in the interests of domestic markets (think Canada and their precious tar-sand resources), or never actually ratified the Protocol in the first place, the fact that the EU has achieved this is quite some show of progress in the right direction.

What surprised me even more so, and this is undoubtedly where my powerful cynicism comes into play, or what I like to think of as realistic cynicism at least, is that the United Kingdom is leading the pack in slashing GHG emissions in real terms (actual tonnes of emissions), cutting them by 6% in 2011, equivalent to roughly 36m tonnes of CO2. Compare this to 5% for France and just 2% for solar-rich Germany, and you see what all the fuss is about. Personally, and I don’t believe I was alone in this thought, I always mostly ignored the government’s claims of how well we were doing and how we would easily meet our targets and surpass them, and given recent developments in our energy policy, I would be mad to think of it as truth; but apparently I was wrong.

Now, there are multiple reasons as to why this sudden drop in emissions came to be, and when combined, they would seem to account for much of the cuts we are now seeing and inevitably will be boasting about on the global stage. Firstly, a milder year for weather all round depressed gas and electricity usage, and secondly, cleaner wind and solar energy has steadily been coming online since the mid-noughties, and even though there are relatively few numbers of MWs being produced via renewables, they obviously have a impact.

However, and possibly more importantly, a practically stagnant European economy drove down the use of any form of energy, be it fossil or renewable, in part forcing the decline in emissions, and in others the maddeningly new high bill costs supposedly ‘needed’ to keep the Big Six running our country’s supply of juice.

Still, I don’t want to go diminishing what is by all means an impressive feat of international and national pollution reduction, as even with these factors accompanying it, there will be other more noble reasons for the results we’re seeing. This is where I am most confused however, and I’ll explain why in the remaining part of this post, without trying to put my nation down too much.

As a government, the energy side of things is in pretty bloody terrible shape right now. Ministers such as George Osborne, John Hayes and David Cameron are individually and collectively splintering and scattering what was left of our policy for low-carbon investment, simultaneously scaring away and pissing off some big players in the clean energy marketplace and creating severe uncertainty in a sector of industry which requires utmost certainty to continue growing at such explosive pace. I won’t go into much detail on the specific characters responsible, as both of my last posts attempt this separately, but suffice to say it seems blatant, to me at least, that the UK is not well placed as a leader in reducing emissions and bolstering renewable technologies. This is the first part of my puzzlement.

In another turn of confusion, a report was released today backed by the WWF-UK and written by one of my lecturers a Imperial College London, Rob Gross, detailing exactly these issues. In it, he describes how the UK must target policy to promote green energy or else risk losing massive investment from important international companies. The main argument tackles the now infamous carbon price, a policy which has consistently been cited as the saviour to all our problems, in one single motion, and I will admit I had been a follower of the theory.

Not according to Rob Gross; his paper highlights the major flaws in this thinking, demonstrating the need for proper regulation specifically for renewables, as simply waiting for a carbon price to fix it will not bring about the results we need. If this route is taken, gas will rapidly replace coal and oil, pushing out green tech investment, and if policies are not tailored to avoid this, the UK could miss out on a huge potential windfall. Unfortunately, with both Osborne and Hayes backing shale gas exploration and North Sea offshore drilling, and generally avoiding mentioning wind, I’m astonished we haven’t missed this opportunity already.

We are also shying heavily away from nuclear energy, both in terms of enticing new projects or continuing ongoing ones, and seem paralysed by a powerful NIMBYism which is holding up new wind developments in a nation with the highest wind resources of the EU.

It’s for these reasons that I am entirely confused as to how we have achieved this level of emissions cuts, even with a sluggish economy and mild year helping us along. Perhaps I am being too harsh on the UK government, and in fact the solar incentive programs and few-but-large wind farms spread about the nation are helping greatly towards lowering our fossil-fuel intensity. Then again, a steady switch to gas-fired grids could also be subtly responsible for these trends, and although these produce less emissions, we are a nation which could, if given enough pressure, leapfrog gas and head straight into a renewable-nuclear mix. It’s countries like China which need that gas intervention to kick their addiction to coal and oil, not us.

Of course, I will still be gleeful that we have arrived at such a successful situation regardless of how, as it is for once a stride in the right direction, and will set a precedence for other nations to follow. As for now, the UK can be happy atop the Kyoto throne, but many will be keeping a close eye on emissions over the next few years as weather stabilises and the economy begins growing again. Up or down, what do you think?

http://euobserver.com/economic/24797

http://cleantechnica.com/2012/10/24/uk-must-target-policies-to-promote-renewables-big-clean-energy-companies-pulling-out-of-uk-due-to-uncertainty/

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/oct/24/uk-eu-carbon-emission-cuts

The UK's Changing Energy Supply; A John Hayes Approach (Another Shambles!)

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 09:50:41 +0100

There are an almost endless number of perks to being a student at Imperial College, and in particular one studying the environmental and energy sciences, not least the free wine nights held ‘traditionally’ every Thursday night after a guest talk. However, this week’s treat was one of a slightly higher and more professional calibre - a talk by the recently crowned energy minister of state at DECC, John Hayes, the man leading the ‘greenest party ever’ forward unto the dawn.

I was unashamedly quite excited about this guest spot, as not only was it to be my first experience with a powerful politician in a public speaking environment, but it was also a man who was directly responsible for much of what I define as my most passionate of interests and enjoyments, the energy debate, and within that, the UK’s shambles of an attempt. So with this confidence, and of course a rather large expectation for something to annoy/anger/depress being said, I went to watch him speak to an audience of students, professionals, politicians and interested parties yesterday evening. The focus of the topic? The changing UK energy supply. Fascinating and current stuff for sure.

Unfortunately, it was not to be the case. Not only did I come out the talk feeling let down, disappointed, confused and kinda angry at the whole thing, but these feelings were far stronger than I thought I would experience going in. Politics never fails to surprise eh.

From start to finish, John Hayes, a man who recently replaced the much-loved by all (even greenies) Charles Hendry from an utterly un-environmentally linked background, gave us a masterclass in dodging the elephants in the room, not answering questions but doing enough to move on and being wholly like a Tory politician should be; funny in a way which boils the blood and patronisingly cocky at the same time.

When he finally stumbled onto the topic of energy sources and generation, with me believing at one point that he was never going to mention the words ‘sustainable’, ‘renewable’ or ‘climate change’, it was a speech filled with techno-political babble and attempts at covering everything possible with as little information as possible. He screamed past the likes of biomass production, solar PV and onshore wind without even mentioning offshore or tidal, focusing on the topic long enough to merely list their names, avoiding going into any deep, or even shallow conversation in regards to deployment, costs, future developments or the coalition’s stance. It was all behind us in a matter of seconds and yet it couldn’t have been more of an important topic when debating energy supply.

He only delved into onshore wind briefly when he wanted to point out, in a manner I felt similar to veiled hostility, that he had called for investigations into their costs and effectiveness, and to how best the communities affected by their development could be compensated. Of course, he was basically saying that he wasn’t prepared to talk at any length about them unless he was 100% sure they didn’t piss people off or ruin the countryside. Seems his anti-wind stance people had hoped he had dropped was still living on.

CCS, nuclear and natural gas, spiced up with some North Sea offshore drilling then became the main subjects of conversation, with each one generously fleshed out and described in a detail which was rarely employed anywhere else in his entire talk.

He mentioned how the UK was full steam ahead on the development of carbon-capture and storage technology, to be used in conjunction with the still necessary oil and gas industry (necessary?) and boasted about how fantastic the many competitions being held to pick CCS winners were, gleefully stating results would be announced soon. This struck me as slightly worrying, as CCS has many proven issues, and much less proven positives, not least the fact that as a commercial industry, it is nowhere near even the fully-functional prototype phase. This idea of capturing carbon and stowing it away underground is undoubtedly a beautiful idea, but it raises costs significantly, reduces plant efficiencies, places massive longterm liability issues on the energy investors and is yet to be viably demonstrated, and to many is an innovation heading to a dead-end unless serious backing is considered. Maybe John Hayes will pay himself.

In terms of nuclear, he generally avoided saying anything particularly new, mentioning how it is still a viable low-carbon source and inevitably a part of the energy mix of the future, and this I wholeheartedly agree on. I have always been a nuclear advocate, but understand the myriad issues with costs, safety and regulation, but feel all of these things can be smoothed out if the proper investment and time is spent adopting the correct technology. However, Hayes decided to focus on the apparently good number of UK projects ready to spring into action, when the truth is that only two sites are going ahead in the whole of Europe, with both far over their deadlines and millions over budget, a relic of the poor political and economic structures helping to kill such a potentially powerful energy source.

Horizon was a particular example, the nuclear site abandoned by its original investors E.ON and RWE, who pulled out due to financial issues, which has since been on sale to the next highest bidder, many of which have also backed out due to similar reasons. He used the terms ‘significant interest’ to describe the apparent situation, which puzzled me to say the least. I guess he meant the word significant only in regards to the reputation of the companies involved, but not how far along the line any sort of progress is. Either way though, it was good to see that the UK is at least attempting to kickstart a fledgling industry, but I fear this will be lost in the mire that is the rest of the policy.

Natural gas, as you’d expect, got a nice chunk of his and our time, with Hayes stating how important it is to the nation as a large portion of our energy needs, but surprisingly and I would imagine not by coincidence, there was no mention of ‘fracking’, that oh so dirty and risky term. Shale gas was present however, and the crowd visibly shifted upon hearing the words, with the energy minister explaining that it would most likely make up our future energy mix in a big way, but until proper analysis is carried out and its worth proven, he seemed to suggest that the UK would be cautious of ‘dashing for gas’ for now. This was one of the few apparent positives of his talk, with the announcement that ‘fracking’ may be held off for scientific investigation a surprising turn, although as a cynic I’m still not sure I fully believe him on that one.

Moving on, some things that didn’t get a mention but clearly deserve one. Electric vehicles were nowhere to be seen, energy storage was only touched on upon questioning at the end, and despite constant referencing to the energy market reform (EMR) the grid and associated upgrades were strangers to a party they should have been hosting.

The entire debacle of Cameron’s forced lower energy tariffs was also sorely missed, although Hayes did come close to accidentally talking about it. Warnings of more expensive energy prices and lessened profits for the ‘Big Six’ were flouted and he practically gloated about how his department was bringing transparency and cheaper prices to the public, despite these ideas supposedly killing market competition (what’s left) and blowing the minds of most people who heard the statement just the other day. He even went as far as seeming to suggest contestation and differences between Ofgem studies and DECC’s own, eluding to his departments as being the more trustworthy and ‘interconnected’, whatever that means. Ignore Ofgem at your own peril John, I fear they know better than you.

What made this entire thing just that bit more bitter in the mouth however, was the two main catchphrases of the night - John Hayes’ winning slogans on energy.

The first, ‘any certainty is better than no certainty’ is mostly stupid in this context. He calls for CCS, shale gas extraction and old-gen nuclear when these three sectors couldn’t be more uncertain under a UK perspective, whilst he ignores those renewables of which we know so much more and with much more certainty. Explain that one to me?

And secondly, and this is a real cracker, DECC and the coalition is bringing ‘energy for the many, not the few’. So would that be energy to the ‘many’, whereby the market is dominated by six companies, four of them foreign, who effectively set their own prices, will utterly crush the ‘lowest tariff’ policy and will no doubt be raising prices by 8% for the next few years just because they can? I hear it all the time now; our energy market has failed in providing us with competitive prices, and as a country, we are being totally screwed by suppliers.

Energy for the many is a romantic idea Mr. Hayes, but one I really doubt your charms will be able to bring us.

http://www.imeche.org/knowledge/policy/public-affairs/party-conferences/welcome

The Latest Terror Threat? The 'Environmental Taliban'...What, What?

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 09:21:01 +0100

Oh George, we marvel at how you consistently manage to spout something new and controversial, almost on a daily basis. You really are a character I don’t think people will be forgetting for some time to come, be that for better (unlikely) or for worse. So what has he done now? That’s if you haven’t already stumbled across the latest gobsmackingly stupid comment from the man who has simultaneously managed to upset both the wider public, most of the UK government including his own Party (22% of Tory’s voted for him out in a recent poll), the EU and most of the powerful energy industry players out there, and all roughly within a week or two. Amazing.

Mr. Osborne has now begun referring to those within Parliament who are campaigning for greener futures and a strong climate agenda as the ‘environmental Taliban’, in a stunningly short-sighted comment no doubt directed at Ed Davey and his keen followers, who in most cases are the majority of the public who know a thing or two about clean energy. It would seem that environmentalists have now moved on from being a Satanic cult (no joke, this was a real thing said by a real US political speaker) worshipping the devil that is the Earth/Gaia, and are now a group of radicals akin to dangerous terrorists. And he’s Chancellor of the Exchequer? Satan save us.

This name-calling comes at a very sensitive period for the entirety of UK energy policy, which is, for lack of a better phrase, a complete shambles, primarily driven by Osborne and his cohort of Tory followers who variously are either anti-wind, solar or renewables, and pro-offshore and fracking. Even if he meant the ‘Taliban’ reference as a joke, there will undoubtedly be people out there who do not take it so, and by extending his terminology to environmentalists as a whole, he’s including a huge number of people who believe climate change is real, we are responsible for the majority and that low-carbon is the only real solution. Hence why protests and Twitter campaigns such as #greenisworking have exploded in favour of condemning his actions (I’ve even seen one called #killgeorgeosborne, which is a likelihood seeming ever more likely…).

According to reports, the comment came as Ed Davey desperately attempts to push through a binding emissions cap on power plants for 2030, as well as clarifying legislation on the approaching switch to ‘contracts for difference’, a policy which aims to lock in value for renewable projects and promote low-carbon development, with the Treasury fronting the responsibility of guaranteeing support. Of course, Osborne doesn’t like this idea, and is rapidly becoming an aura of clean-tech skepticism and a loss of interest in decarbonising the grid, and as many fear, a reflection of the general Tory party backbench’s opinion.

Instead, Osborne has long rallied for a ‘dash for gas’, whereby abundances in domestic natural shale gas could be exploited to lower energy costs and secure resources for the future, a notion no doubt triggered by the explosion in gas extraction and a tumbling in energy costs over in America. While the idea of energy security and low costs are his way of appealing to a nation where 9% gas bill hikes are almost common place and keeping the house lit is becoming increasingly painful on the wallet, there are some rather major flaws in his plan.

Namely, the idea of reducing costs dramatically is likely to be wildly overblown. Having spoken to industry experts working on grid policy recently, there seems an academic, economic and policy consensus that falling gas prices in America will in no way be replicated over here in Europe, as the market is just not of the same scale or stability; prices may fall slightly, but nothing on the scale of the US. Secondly, fracking is known to be a detrimental process to the environment and health, can cost silly amounts and in simple terms, does not avoid the issue of carbon emission whatsoever. Switching from oil to gas might be a smart move for countries such as China or India, where renewable energy is still getting going and coal dominates the energy mix, but over here, where proven wind and solar resources are rife, it makes no sense at all.

In fact, and this I find particularly eyeopening, DECC published a report recently stating that if the UK was to go ahead with Osborne’s gas plan, it would 100% fail at meeting its emission targets set for 2020, an action which in effect is illegal, and could result in serious fines from the EU, which we are in no position to pay.

Going further still, Mr. Osborne was directly informed by the ‘Big Six’ energy companies which dominate over 95% of the UK market, that if he pursued his plans for stifling green development, the government would be seeing no more investment or interaction from them unless other measures were taken. In effect, Osborne was slapped on the wrists by some of the most powerful companies in the energy debate, risking a huge portion of our power capacity. I found that quite funny I must say. The EU separately waved an angry finger at the Tory Party when it stated how unhelpful their ‘untrue’ claims over green legislation were, and that continuing to diminish the green agenda would prove most unsatisfactory for all involved.

One of the main points berated by the opposition in Osborne’s energy plan is the cap on renewable subsidies and levies supplied to new green projects, which would effectively ration out government aid and seriously thin out the multiple wind, solar and tidal plans in motion. You don’t have to look far to see how uncertainty in these markets can kill an industry; think of the wind PTC in America. With the tax up for renewal and no clear signs of a decision, big wind companies are cutting jobs in the thousands as projects become increasingly uncertain. Considering how terribly we as a nation are doing towards our renewable targets (15% by 2015, currently ~4%), this sort of approach is like running at the cliff edge blindfolded.

It’s almost like Osborne and his fellow Parliamentary members are actively ignoring the advice of DECC, Ofgem and similar organisations, whose soul job is to research and inform on the best directions for energy policy, and yet they’re data falls on utterly deaf ears.

And just to top all of this madness off, Cameron decides to throw the energy supplier market into chaos by announcing, literally out of the blue, that companies will be forced to provide the lowest energy tariff to customers. Not only do analysts think this will kill what’s left of market competition, but he didn’t state whether this was one tariff for everybody or company-specific, how this would be implemented or why nobody knew about it beforehand. It seems even his own party can’t answer media questions, as they know about as much as we do.

I for one, am thinking of moving to Germany, or maybe even China, where energy policy is as clear as crystal compared to the oil-thick stupidity of the current Tory stance; but then again, I might miss another one of George Osborne’s cracking comments.

http://gordonlyew.wordpress.com/2012/07/26/george-observations-osborne-reeling-as-economy-enters-the-disaster-zone/

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/the-environmental-taliban-george-osborne-slams-parliamentary-climate-change-campaigners-as-treasury-fights-to-water-down-energy-bill-commitments-8215495.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/jul/22/george-osborne-green-plans-tory?mobile-redirect=false

2 Weeks Into Imperial & Time To Get The Blog Back On Track

Tue, 16 Oct 2012 09:14:10 +0100

Let me start by saying thank you to anybody who actually held out on new content being posted to this blog over the past several weeks, for you harbor some commendable confidence in me and this site, an attribute I doubt the majority of people who stumbled across ‘A Green Degree’ left with, but it was not in vein, I promise you that; I’m back after a massively busy few weeks moving into London and starting my masters at Imperial College, and now it is long overdue that I update my little side project with some real bloody content!

However, this isn’t going to be like the majority of my posts on here, which follow the rule of thumb of collecting stories or articles on news events and forehead-slapping moments in the world of sustainability, putting what I like to think as my personal spin on them, and then tapping them down onto digital paper for the world to see (maybe). This time, as I feel jumping straight into a post about how Romney is bad for more than just energy, or how George Osborne is single-handedly ruining our green policy, I’m going to go for the old-school blog post - one about my recent experiences in the world of a sustainability and environment masters degree.

Coming from a Geography BSc I was pretty surprised to see fellow map-makers and coloring pencil adepts such as myself going for the same thing, and of similar age at that, and it has since been proven that my base foundation in subjects varying from policy to economics, ecology to conservation and beyond give me a slight advantage over many of those who specialized in something crazy like physics or biology. Of course the business graduates slot right in, but then business seems to be applicable to everything these days eh, the science subject that never should have been. Anyway, I’m digressing too far, back on track.

In these first two weeks alone I’ve been introduced to the nitty gritty of pure economics in the form of supply and demand and marginal costs, learnt basic legal law, been taught the ‘philosophies’ involved with understanding knowledge (I thought the same thing…) and had some fascinating guest seminars from people at the top of their game. One of the most notably impressive was a lecture on climate change in the policy and societal frame, by a fellow by the name of Clive Bates, a DECC scientist whose had one hell of a varied career, and one which I was instantly envious of, even if it meant all the handwork involved. In a few days time I will be starting work in a small 6-person seminar with a leading environmental barrister who could talk his way out of a high-security prison if he needed to, focusing on how best to go about creating a post-Kyoto global framework; a massive topic I know, but I sure am relishing the chance to get into the real science and policy of such a hotly debated idea.

It is these few things that make not only studying at Imperial, but studying a masters stick out from the rest of the competition, and anything I’ve experienced prior. Here, we don’t so much get taught ‘stuff’ like in an undergrad degree, but instead we are taught how to think, how to view the world holistically and as critically as we can, and to basically act like the rational, selfless and well-informed monkeys we all really should be. We aren’t being told the history of this, or the importance of that, we’re being given life advice and direction so strong, I’m starting to think the 80% employment rate just months after graduation is not such a ridiculous claim as it seems; and before you think it, that’s employment in relevant sectors, not just part-time behind the local bar.

Not only this, but as quite possibly the first group of generations which really has a stake in the globally apparent climate crisis and all the other bad things associated with it, and a strong responsibility to kick our ancestors hard in the ass before hopefully setting things up nicely for the future, we’re all highly invested in the course, as are it’s directors. Despite the 40+ age of this particular course (Environmental Technology for those interested) I can’t help but feel now is the most important time for this course, and so many others like it popping up around the world, and the fact that they’re thriving is a silver-lining to say the least. In the words of our course manager, we will become the ‘environmental crusaders’ this world so desperately needs; whilst I’m unsure crusader is the best term to be used to be taken seriously, it sure makes us feel good.

Something that really stuck out to me today however, and this is a point that really needs emphasizing, is that I’m frankly not surprised much of the public is neither emotionally or intellectually invested in the green way of life. This occurred to me whilst sitting in a lecture about ‘public perceptions of risk’, in which the ins and outs of environmental risk management, health and safety and security were spelled out, in words about as clear as mud. What’s worrying is that these topics are central to everything us environmental scientists do, as risk governs everything in our society, and yet if I struggled to a) get my head around it, or b) actually bother to pay attention due to boredom, how will the public ever do the same?

You hear it all the time, how information and education is the key to putting the developed world on a path which will save us from that rapidly aging phrase ‘climate change’, and I have always believed it to be true, and yet only know do I see what a huge challenge it will be. Sustainability is what I believe to be the future of a harmonized society, and in particular the clean management of energy resources to power our hungry ways, in both developed and developing worlds, so that emissions are kept low (or ‘optimal’ - typical economic view on the system) and our quality of lives nice and high.

This is just me though, and I only have to speak to three or four other coursemates to hear their plans for fixing the future, one bit at a time; some see water as key, others the market or harsher law on the historical polluters, whilst even more are heading for the hands on approach, designing and implementing the very things which will bring about this necessary change. It’s a great working environment to say the least, and gives me confidence that we may actually be able to get some bloody progress made before it’s too late. Then again, ask me in a month’s time, I may not be so happy-go-lucky as I am now!

Anyway, I’ve rambled on romantically and gushingly on the subject of my past several weeks of life, and this isn’t really what my blog was originally for, but I felt like bringing any readers up to speed about it all before getting back into the real-world stuff, and boy is there no shortage of it right now.

So as of this post, ‘A Green Degree’ will be back to its old ways (please write if you had issue with the old ways, always appreciate feedback) and will hopefully be bolstered by this new fangled degree which I’ve just spent 1,000 words praising, and my newfound holistic (they love that word at Imperial) view of the sustainable world.

If you made it this far, you’re either maddeningly bored or far too kind, so whichever one you were, please check back in a couple of days for some proper content!

Love x

Don't Worry, Content Is On Its Way!

Fri, 12 Oct 2012 18:57:34 +0100

Hello to anybody out there who actually still reads this little project of mine, or to those who stumbled across it as of this post, or to pretty much anyone who glimpses this page, I have an update on the massive lack of content there has been on the site for a good 2 weeks now!

Firstly, there is more on it’s way, don’t you worry (if you even did…), I don’t plan on dropping this blog for anything, but every now and then life gets just that bit too busy for any real quality posts to be published.

In this case, that busyness is due to me just having started a masters degree at Imperial College in good old London, studying the only thing I really care for, the environment! I’m 2 weeks into this mega course and haven’t had any spare time to just sit down, get angry about something in the news and write up a rant about it, but things are finally starting to settle down.

The house is still in dire need of furniture, heating and fixed doorknobs, and the process of making new friends and breaking multiple blocks of ice is consuming most of my free time, but amidst this madness sits one of the best courses on environmental topics the country can pretty much offer (I’m excited and privileged to say the least!) and I’m loving every single second of it.

For those of you who are still reading, and interested in the nitty gritty of what my course actually entails, here’s a brief but hopefully informative executive summary. Environmental Technology is its name, although ‘technology’ in the sense of the practical application of science and policy to solve some of the most pressing matters of our age (cliched eh). So we cover what seems to be everything on the broad topic, such as environmental economics, policy and law, pollution, ecology, the philosophy of it all, all the way down to good old statistics and development. It’s a big one to say the least.

Going further still, I chose my optional module to focus entirely on Energy Policy, with intricate studies of each and every form of energy generation available to us, the good and bad, how we use them, how we implement them and what policies drive them forwards. This is the subject I look forward to the most by a wind-farm filled country mile.

So effectively, this post is just to confirm that ‘A Green Degree’ isn’t dead, not yet anyway, and will, if anything, be rising from the posting drought a much more well-informed, well written and more confident medium, with this mammoth of a masters course injecting a little extra class and professionalism it was deeply lacking.

So for now, keep your eyes on this space, a new post will be with you in the next few days, and enjoy living the good green life!

James Beioley

Total Sees Some Sense In The Arctic Whilst Shell Plans World's Largest Offshore Refinery

Fri, 28 Sep 2012 09:46:00 +0100

In a turn of events unrivaled in recent fossil fuel developments, one of the major world players in oil exploration and refining, has recently stated what many of us rational thinkers had thought would never be uttered; drilling in the Arctic is a bad idea. Joy! Finally someone a the top of the very issues that got us into this climate mess in the first place has perhaps seen some sense.

The CEO of Total, the world’s fourth largest oil conglomerate and not a company known for it’s environmental conscience has turned the table on its head, directly attacking and condemning the efforts of Shell and Gazprom in exploring the melting Arctic for new hydrocarbon reserves. CEO Christophe de Margerie openly admitted the high risks and potential dangers associated with offshore drilling in the Arctic, or anywhere for that matter, but it’s how he phrased the next part that slightly lessens the impact of this revelation.

According to de Margerie, Total will not be carrying out any exploration in the polar region, as a spillage “would do too much damage to the image of the company” and thus is not worth the risk.

So it seems that Total is scared of drilling the Arctic because of something not really connected to environmental or green issues whatsoever; it just doesn’t want to tarnish the record of its oh-so untarnished reputation as an oil demon. What’s instantly and obviously worrying is that there is absolutely no mention of the risks such a spill would have on the ecology, species, humans and general environment of the Arctic region, a highly sensitive and fragile part of the planet, and one which is already taking a considerable beating from a warming climate. It just shows that even when these behemoths of the fossil fuel world seem to be doing something right for once, there’s generally not a pure and environmentally-friendly motive behind it, but just a way of saving their own skins, not those of the ones at risk.

However, if the threat of ruining their rep in the same way that BP has blackened its name with the Deepwater Horizon disaster is strong enough to stop them from drilling up north, then I can somewhat condone it. Hell, it may even be useful to use this idea as a force to turn other companies such as Shell against the idea of drilling, but this is a whole new mission impossible of itself.

Speaking of Shell, this story fits quite nicely, at a time when they have been struggling with their own set of issues and failures, which if keep on happening, may lead them down the same route as Total. Their plans to explore the practically ice-free Arctic ocean for oil and gas was scuppered initially, when a rather large (hundreds of square kms) ice-flow threatened to barrel through their exploration ship. Once this had passed, Shell met yet further problems when a crucial piece of kit designed to cap a leaking well was damaged in testing, making them the laughing stock of many of the protesters and anti-drilling organizations, and forcing them to halt all plans until next year. I’m willing to bet they are relishing the chance for Greenpeace et al to use this newly presented spare time to berate and blast them as much as humanly possible, something they probably thought was long behind them.

Despite these setbacks though, Shell is not one for giving up, and seems to have turned it attention to another sinister venture to draw attention from its mistakes in the Arctic, perhaps to prove itself in the eyes of its skeptics, or to recover from the embarrassing loss of the drilling period. So what would that project be then?

Well, it looks like Shell will be breaking record books this year, by building the world’s largest, I repeat the globe’s absolute biggest, tanker/ship/floating monstrosity. This vessel, to be named Prelude (great name guys!) will act as the flagship for Shell’s innovative and expensive drive towards a fossil fuel rich and high-carbon planet, and will go about this by refining and transporting a HUGE amount of natural gas from the NE seas of Australia.

This thing will be as long as the Empire State Building is tall, weigh six times the tonnage of the largest aircraft carriers in the world, the Nimitz-class, and will cost a whopping $13bn to produce, with the hull expected to be complete by the end of this year. Within this great ark, 3.6m metric tons of LNG and 1.3m tons of gas condensate will be contained as it harvested and refined on-site, to then be shipped to whoever puts in the highest bid. I hear they’ll also be mounting loud-speakers blaring pro-Shell mottos and ship-length posters depicting the company cuddling the Earth for good measure, sailing it around the world as one giant advert for them. Okay, I made that last bit up, but it’s not hard to imagine right?

What’s interesting is how Shell puts the positive spin on this development. They state that by moving their LNG processes offshore, they reduce the manufacturing resources required by 50% and all but negate the need for a pipeline connecting it all up, and with current prices for building onshore LNG plants over $20bn, this ship is anything but a bad idea. While it may be true that a floating refinery is better than an onshore platform cost and project-wise, you shouldn’t let this cloud your judgment on what really matters.

Thanks to Grist, we have some values for the CO2 emissions of a plant of this size. Prelude will produce, annually, well over 22bn pounds of CO2, which equates to roughly 10 million metric tons of carbon emissions, just from this single ship. That is huge. So in this respect, who cares if it costs $7bn less to build and gets rid of the pipeline, there simply is not a need to build something this expensive, this large and this carbon-intensive and to tout it as a step forwards, it just isn’t. But then Shell needs something to make them look good; breaking a few records might do that.

So here we have two sides of the fossil fuel coin, never so starkly portrayed as it is now. On the one hand we have Total, a key player in the global oil drilling game, condemning the movement into Arctic waters and shying away from the risk and potential PR disaster that an offshore spill could bring, whilst on the other hand we have Shell and Gazprom, who are stampeding full-steam ahead, spearheading the new black-gold revolution in the melting polar ocean, despite the clear and present dangers it presents. Even though Shell has firsthand experience of these risks, they carry on unabated, and no doubt hope that their newest toy in Prelude will pump enough carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that when they come back to the Arctic next summer, their chances of being halted by ice-flows or a short ice-free season will be a thing of the past. There just won’t be any left.

You clever devils.

*Update*

Shell have today rejected the risks that it’s rival Total have pointed out, with a spokesperson for the Arctic-keen company stating that “At Shell, we believe the Arctic has significant untapped potential and will play an increasingly important role in meeting the energy challenge. It holds great opportunity and that comes with great responsibility,”.

So it would seem even when oil companies of similar power and stupidity see some sense and pull out, that ain’t gonna make one bit of difference to Shell’s plans.

http://www.treehugger.com/fossil-fuels/french-oil-company-ceo-calls-arctic-oil-drilling-potential-disaster.html

http://grist.org/news/shell-building-worlds-biggest-ship-that-will-sail-on-ever-higher-seas/