A Green Degree

This blog intends to bring a new perspective on all things 'green' and sustainable, covering (mostly) energy, politics, the economy & more, what I feel as the most pressing concerns we face. In short, sustainability needs to progress & become the social everyday. That's my passion, and our solution. Screw business as usual people!













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January 7th 2013

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

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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to yet again derail our well-earned trust and faith in wind farms worldwide, through the examining of some questionably outdated data on bird and bat deaths in Spain, Germany, Europe and elsewhere, written by what we should rightly assume to be a well-educated and reputable character,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.

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

December 17th 2012

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 31st 2012

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

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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. 

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Posted at 10:01am and tagged with: us, china, energy, climate, COP, debate, money, global, climate change, science,.

October 23rd 2012

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

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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.

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Posted at 9:50am and tagged with: john hayes, UK, energy, policy, politics, science, coalition, DECC, ofgem, ccs, carbon, gas, oil, wind, solar, fracking, shale, supply, anti, green, low carbon, debate, uni, talk, imperial, offshore, drilling, nuclear, market, big six,.

September 13th 2012

Japan Nuclear-Free By 2030s, But How Will They Fill The Gap?

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It would seem a decision on the fate of nuclear power in Japan has potentially been decided this week, with the announcement by the prime minister’s leading democratic party that policy will be settled soon which intends to ‘realise a situation where the number of nuclear plants operated be zero in the 2030s’, effectively hammering home the final nail in the industry’s coffin.

It has long been thought by followers of the nuclear market that Japan would eventually cut all ties and close down their operations post-Fukushima, but for a long time the prime minister was caught in two minds; on the one hand, he had an angry Japanese public to answer to for the Fukushima disaster, whilst he and the business sector believed Japan would need to nuclear to progress without blackouts and that the benefits outweighed the possible risks. Now it seems that the public may have won, with this statement no doubt gratifying many concerned citizens, although it may not seem to be coming quick enough for some. 

Since the Tohoku earthquake, all of Japans fifty reactors have been offline, bar two in the same plot restarted earlier this year, for regulation and safety checks, leaving the country with a gaping energy deficit of 30%, the amount fission provided up until the fateful tsunami. With the closure in full effect and possible edgings towards restarting the nuclear fleet being banded around, a country normally peaceful and well conformed to government life was up in arms, with protests in the thousands rattling the streets of Tokyo, demanding an end to nuclear and it’s inherent dangers. This was certainly a Japan not often seen by the global public, not least the media.

Unfortunately, Japan has had to heavily rely on oil imports since the shutdowns across the country, ramping up their consumption of Middle Eastern black gold considerably, whilst at the same time employing strict and tough efficiency rulings and energy-saving requirements back home, just to stop the nation from all out blackouts during the summer months. In effect, this increased oil consumption not only stalled what looked to be a peaking industry, but also contributed greatly to the carbon being dumped into the atmosphere, carbon which otherwise would have been left in the ground had the nuclear plants been left on or restarted.

This is the crucial point of the entire ‘end to nuclear’ debate currently being hotly contested all over the developed world. If we choose to dump nuclear, an industry which provides a large chunk of global energy supply, we must be prepared to replace it with something else, and that doesn’t mean more oil, coal and natural gas from elsewhere in the world. That is clearly backward thinking and progress.

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Posted at 10:05am and tagged with: nuclear, energy, fossil fuels, carbon, emission, coal, oil, shale gas, natural gas, generation, japan, protest, UK, china, US, fracking, lignite, plant, reactor, science, technology, politics, anti, fukushima, middle east, offshore, renewable, wind, solar, biofuel,.

September 9th 2012

Shell Gets The Arctic Green Light & Melting Ice Paves The Way For Offshore Madness

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What a summer we’ve had eh, not just here in the UK where it was terrible, but globally; a season where weather went mad and Arctic ice caps took a long-awaited vacation from their comfy ocean abodes, whisked into the atmosphere by a warming world and natural craziness that literally none of us saw coming. Considering the summer isn’t actually even over yet, the impact of these factors is made all the more potent, and is much of the reason for such fervour in the media over drought, floods and food prices. What next?

Well for one thing, more ignorant foolishness is on the horizon, in the form of offshore drilling, perhaps the most lucrative and most idiotic fossil fuel resource we [apparently] have easy access to. Whose leading the revolution at sea? Why Shell of course, with backing by the American Interior and Obama’s government. 

As we all have undoubtedly heard via the blaring sirens of the news outlets and internet aggregators, summer Arctic ice hit some pretty fancy milestones last month; let’s go over them quickly to put this post into context. 

The level of melt reached its peak last August, on the 26th, falling to levels not seen for 30 years of recording, and a full 3-4 weeks before the usual point at which summer temperatures drive the highest reductions in ice, around mid-September. Not only was this melt way off the charts in terms of rapidity and severity, but it has now been touted as a rate so ‘amazing’ that it is considered by Dr Hansen, the famed climate scientist, to be unprecedented in scale in at least as much as 1,500 years, let alone 30, and that we as polluters should be trembling in our boots. 

Carrying on with this theme, Hansen recently released a video detailing data for Northern Hemisphere average temperatures, where he compares 1951-1980 ranges to 2000-2011 records, and there’s an obvious contrast. The most common peak temperatures are a whole standard deviation away from the 1951-1980 means, and altogether the data shows deviations of up to 5 towards warmer temperatures, effectively stating that as we’ve progressed as a society, the past decade has seen more N Hemisphere warming than the whole 30 year period studied prior. It’s not a huge leap of logic to see that these massively pumped up temperatures, only set to increase, are likely responsible for most, if not all of the accelerated ice-melt being experienced in the Arctic.

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Posted at 9:19am and tagged with: oil, drilling, exploration, offshore, oil rig, Shell, BP, tar, disaster, money, politics, science, arctic, ice, melting, record, warming, temperature, climate, global, wind, energy, independence, obama, EPA, US, summer, Hansen, government, election,.

September 7th 2012

Carbon-Capture & Storage: Why All The Bother?

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I’m sure many of you have, at some point in your journeys through the energy and renewable world heard the term ‘carbon-capture and storage’, or more simply ‘CCS’, but might not have known fully what it was, how it works or why it is being given such prominence in modern policy discussion. Well here’s my attempt at giving you a brief but hopefully in-depth look at the technology and the science surrounding some of the obsession associated with big oil companies, the Republicans and general economists.

CCS does mostly what it says on the tin; it aims to capture carbon or CO2 from the fumes and emissions given off by dirty industry, such as oil, coal or gas burning power plants, usually by grabbing the stuff out of the air with scrubbers or biological substances, before condensing it down into liquid form which can be easily transported. This lovely carbon-ooze is subsequently pumped elsewhere, generally far from the source, and deep into the Earth’s crust, within depleted fossil fuel reserves or geologically appropriate formations, such as aquifers or rock beds.

Via this technology, it is greatly hoped that carbon emissions from our already well-established dirty fossil industries can be hugely reduced, without radical changes in attitude and infrastructure required. We’ll see why this is not the grand idea is sounds to be.

The whole science of capturing the CO2 has been relatively well-tested on a small scale, with multiple projects spanning from the start of the millennia, such as simple scrubbing of power plant chimneys. However, capture on a larger scale has proved a much more ambitious and expensive venture, with price-tags commonly running into the hundreds of millions if not billions just for the initial CCS stages. Examples of these include projects in Denmark through Vattenfall, pilot capture facilities in Sweden and Norway and greater Europe, with plenty more in the planning stage (http://www.bgs.ac.uk/qics/). Unfortunately practically all of the projects currently in play, whether they’re still in planning or near-completion, only involve the ‘capture’ part of CCS, merely test-beds for working out the kinks in collecting the stuff for subsequent storage, with the resultant carbon being released into the atmosphere once the experiments are complete. Only eight (in 2011) CCS plants were actually injecting CO2 back into the ground worldwide, with at least three of them acting purely as partners to deep-sea offshore drilling platforms, collecting their waste and pumping it back into the seabed, to no real net gain to society.

As for the larger scale storage aspect of CCS, nearing 100 projects are in place since mid-2012, but current financial and political woes have all but put the majority of these on the shelf, no doubt for the indefinite future, seen as far too expensive, risky and a distraction from the real issue at hand. Specifically, the EU recently slashed its fund for CCS from a prospective £4.8bn to just £1bn, with finalised figures coming in a month or so, meaning that the 12 projects originally guaranteed funding are no in serious jeopardy. Similar issues are being experienced by the industry globally, as the idea of big, high-risk, high-dollar energy resources such as nuclear rapidly fall out of favour with both the public and professionals. 

This however does not seem true in the US, where the [unfortunate] boom in shale gas extraction has fuelled great interest in ways to reduce the already disgustingly damaging practice of fracking and shale prospecting. Shell has been a major player in this region of the world, jumping on the natural gas bandwagon without hesitation, setting up shop in Alberta, where one of the world’s largest reserves of shale gas resides. Just google this yourself and switch to images and before long you will understand why myself and many others recoil at the very idea of extracting this utter mess. Anyway, back on topic. 

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Posted at 9:48am and tagged with: carbon, CCS, capture, storage, oil, coal, gas, fossil, fuels, industry, climate change, risk, fields, power plants, energy, dangerous, science, technology, money, CO2, wind, solar, renewable,.