Merrick Godhaven | ukwatch.net

Hydrogen: Not the Vehicle Fuel of the Future

Ellie Keen — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 00:25:04 +0000

Hydrogen; the smallest, lightest and first element on the periodic table, and most abundant element in the universe. As we bask in the radiance of the vast hydrogen reactor at the centre of our solar system, hydrogen has a poetic rightness as an alternative vehicle fuel. It burns cleanly and the only exhaust gas is water vapour. All our climate and energy security problems solved at a stroke.

Sadly, as is often the case with the nice-feeling alternative technologies, it’s not that easy. It would be colossally expensive to introduce, doing so would commit us to long-term fossil fuel consumption and, most importantly, we can’t make it without significant climate impact worse than if we just carried on using petrol.

HYDROGEN THE FOSSIL FUEL

There aren’t any naturally occurring deposits of hydrogen for us to tap into like coal or oil, nor does it flow freely and abundantly around us waiting to be used like wind and sunlight. Hydrogen only comes bonded to other molecules; it takes energy to separate it. Like a battery, it needs a primary energy source to make it from – gas, coal, or something made into electricity – so it is only an energy carrier, rather than an energy source in the true sense.

Hydrogen is not a new product at all. We have over a century’s experience of industrial production (it’s used in the production of nitrate fertilisers and oil refining among other things). We’ve done much of what could be done to economise. It is still very expensive.

Manufacturing it from natural gas is the cheapest and most experienced method. But gas is rapidly being depleted. We are on course to hit ‘peak gas’ before mid-century, after which demand will outstrip supply and the price will go through the roof. We will hit it sooner if we use more of it, such as a switch away from coal to gas for electricity, or a switch to using it for making large amounts of hydrogen.

But there’s another consideration, the whole point of us even thinking about it in the first place; the climate angle. Manufacturing hydrogen means separating it from the CO2 in natural gas. This ‘clean’ fuel only gives off water vapour from a car exhaust, but that’s because the carbon’s already been emitted at the factory. This climate friendly renewable fuel is actually a carbon-emitting fossil fuel. The climate doesn’t care where you emit CO2, only that you do it at all.

IT’S NOW OR NEVER – THE KEY POINT

The science is clear. In order to prevent runaway climate change, carbon emissions need to be stabilising within ten years, and we need at least a 60% global cut within 30 years (which means the over-emitting nations – ie the major car-driving ones – cutting by at least 90%). So if a technology can’t be developed and deployed in the next decade or so, it’s of no use to us as a response to climate change.

This means that the people currently touting nuclear power as our primary solution are wrong, as it cannot be on-stream quickly enough. It also means that the roll-out of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel – even if it were magically carbon-neutral to manufacture – cannot be any of use to us either; the safety and engineering issues would take too long to surmount.

Dr Joseph Romm served in the US Department of Energy during the Clinton administration when the ‘hydrogen economy’ became big news. Running the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy from 1993-98, he oversaw significant increases in funding for hydrogen fuel R&D. Yet, although he’s a believer in the possibility of clean hydrogen, he’s firm in his belief that in 2030 we’ll have less than 5% of vehicles powered by it¹. There’s not a credible voice that disagrees.

Since it cannot be part of a 90% emissions cut in thirty years we should, at least for those three decades, turn our attention elsewhere. But there are also other reasons – practical, engineering and economic – why hydrogen can never work.

H2 WITHOUT THE O

There is a way of making it without using fossil fuels as the raw material; electrolysis of water. Put simply, an electrical charge breaks the bond in H2O, separating it into hydrogen and oxygen.

Because the raw material is water rather than gas or coal, this is often touted as ‘carbon-free’. Except that the electricity is coming from the national grid, which is not carbon-free, it’s mostly fossil-generated. This isn’t preventing emissions therefore, it’s merely displacing them, just like the ‘clean’ car exhaust that emitted all its CO2 at the factory.

As electrolysis uses so much electricity, once again the emissions are greater than if we were using a petrol vehicle. Powering BMW’s new hydrogen car with electrolysis hydrogen made from the UK grid would create around eight times the emissions of driving a normal petrol car².

The only genuinely carbon-free hydrogen would be using renewable electricity to power electrolysis of water. But if we were to do this, we increase the overall demand for electricity. What we give to hydrogen from renewables makes a shortfall in the grid that will be taken up by extra fossil generation. Again, it just displaces emissions.

The only time it becomes genuinely carbon-free is when the whole grid is powered by renewables and we have spare capacity to start powering our vehicles. Even then, hydrogen isn’t the best option. Rather than losing half the energy of electricity making hydrogen and liquefying it, why not just use that electricity directly?

In his book Heat, George Monbiot advocates a proposal by Dave Andrews for using electric cars³. The problems with electric cars are their comparatively short range, and the long time they take to recharge. If we have a lot of renewable generators, we’ll have a lot of unused electricity – the wind and waves keep going through the night when our electricity demand is low. So, we use that off-peak power to charge batteries. When your battery runs low, you pull into a filling station and the battery is removed and swapped for a charged one. It would take the same time as refilling with petrol. More, it would do away with tankers entirely – the vehicles themselves are the delivery fleet.

Some hydrogen enthusiasts have suggested similar ideas for using off-peak renewable electricity to make hydrogen from electrolysis of water, but this ignores the huge inefficiency. If you use renewable electricity to produce hydrogen – instead of electricity made from coal, oil and gas – then you save about 225kg of CO2 emissions per megawatt-hour of electricity produced. On the other hand, if you use that electricity directly as electricity you save about 1,000kg of CO2 emissions.

To replace our vehicle fuels with electrolysis hydrogen would take more than our present electricity consumption⁴.

Do we think we can double electricity generation whilst doing away with fossil burning? Or is electrolysis hydrogen as a vehicle fuel a non-starter?

When the Bush administration used the 2003 State of The Union address to announce the kickstart of the hydrogen economy for vehicles, they neglected to mention any of the emissions that come with making it. Under their National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap plan, fossils would be the source of the vast majority of hydrogen, but 10% would come from electrolysis of water, powered by dedicated nuclear power plants⁵. As if there weren’t enough safety issues with manufacturing hydrogen already.

HYDROGEN AS A VEHICLE FUEL

The most prevalent idea for using hydrogen in a vehicle is the fuel cell. Fuel cells are essentially a battery that can be continually charged up. As a technology they’re well established, actually pre-dating the internal combustion engine. Hydrogen is fed through, producing an electric charge and also heat. Very large cells used to power buildings can also use the heat (making them quite efficient and more plausible as a future technology), but in a vehicle this heat – much of the energy we’re getting from the hydrogen – is simply wasted.

Then there’s the issue of having a hydrogen tank in the vehicle. At room temperature and pressure, hydrogen has one three-thousandth of the energy of petrol. Assuming you’re not going to have a fuel tank a couple of hundred times the size of your car, your hydrogen needs to be either compressed or liquefied.

To be liquefied, hydrogen needs to be cooled to -253 degrees centigrade. The energy used to do this is equivalent to 30 – 40% of the energy the hydrogen contains⁶.

Let’s look at that from a climate perspective. It takes 12.5-15 kilowatt-hours of electricity to liquefy 1kg of hydrogen⁷. With the UK’s emissions from generating electricity, that’s 6kg-7.2kg of CO2 emissions⁸. Burning a gallon of petrol releases around 9kg of CO2 to give us about the same amount of energy as 1kg of hydrogen in a fuel-cell vehicle⁹.

That’s 66-80% of the emissions of burning petrol just for the liquefaction process! This is before we count the emissions of the raw material involved in production (if it came from natural gas, that’s another 9kg of CO2¹⁰). This fuel is worse than petrol.

To avoid the practical problems and monstrous energy consumption of cooling to -253 degrees and keeping it there, hydrogen can instead be left at room temperature as a gas but compressed. Compression takes less energy than liquefaction, but then compressed hydrogen contains less energy than liquefied hydrogen. The energy to compress it to 5,000lbs per square inch is only 4-8 percent of the energy it contains¹¹.

However, this isn’t much use for a car; by volume, it contains one-tenth of the energy of petrol. A fuel tank ten times the size of current ones is out of the question, but then again having such a short driving range that you need to refuel ten times as often is utterly impractical. You’d also need many more tankers, pipelines and the rest of the distribution kit.

There is also a solid-state form of storage, ‘metal hydrides’, materials impregnated with hydrogen that release it when reacted with water. It’s a no-hoper for vehicles. The reactions involve very high temperatures, the hydrides are heavy, are highly prone to leaks and we have yet to develop a practical way to remove and recycle the spent hydrides from a vehicle.

As the American National Academy of Engineering concluded, ‘no hydrogen storage system has yet been developed that is simultaneously lightweight, compact, inexpensive, and safe’¹². As those are the four key factors for a vehicle fuel, it’s a practical non-starter even before we consider the emissions issue.

As a liquid, it needs to be maintained at -253 degrees centigrade constantly until the point of use. This can be equivalent to another 10-15% of the embodied energy. By now, not only are the emissions the same or worse than burning petrol, but we’ve lost half the energy we put into making the stuff. It’s like a battery making machine that uses two batteries for every one battery it manufactures.

There are certainly good cases for having a few very inefficient devices – it’s far handier to power your camera off a battery than a small diesel motor. But using grossly inefficient technology for such a huge energy consumer as our vehicle fleet is an extravagant waste of resources that we can’t afford.

As Alec Brooks put it, ‘fuel cell vehicles are energy pigs. Fuel cell vehicles that operate on hydrogen made with electrolysis consume four times as much electricity per mile as similarly-sized battery electric vehicles’¹³.

BURN BABY BURN

So much for hydrogen fuel cells. But in the no-idea-too-profligate world of hydrogen vehicle fuels, there is an even worse concept. BMW have launched their hydrogen vehicle, the H7. As mentioned earlier, there can be no doubt that it is several times worse for CO2 emissions than the worst 4×4¹⁴. It uses hydrogen not to power a fuel cell, but burns it directly in an internal combustion engine. Being even more inefficient than a fuel cell, it means it has a smaller driving range, a mere 125 miles on 8 kilos of hydrogen. The fuel is kept in liquid form in an insulated tank.

The thing with internal combustion engines is that the fuel is, well, combustible. You only want it to burn in a controlled way, rather than have it explode at an inopportune moment. With petrol cars, there’s a problem if the fuel and its gases get too hot; leave it parked somewhere on a blazing summer’s day and it could explode. Fortunately, there’s a little safety valve built in to release it safely. Hydrogen combustion cars regard anywhere above -253 degrees as a blazing hot sunny day.

The H7’s tank is not cooled – how would you find an on-board energy source for such refrigeration? – but is wrapped in layers of fibreglass and aluminium. The insulation cannot prevent the fuel warming, only slow it down. Which means that it reverts to gas and pressure in the tank increases. This isn’t a safety issue as, like a petrol car, there’s a valve that allows it to escape. It is, however, an economic issue. In case it wasn’t already expensive and wasteful enough, after about a day your H7 is preprogrammed to start jettisoning your fuel. A full tank empties itself completely in 10-12 days.

Joseph Romm, despite being something of a hydrogen advocate, is incredulous at the BMW combustion idea, commenting, ‘BMW has managed to develop the least efficient conceivable vehicle that you could invent’¹⁵.

This horrendous inefficiency means that it is more expensive for the owner, worse for the climate and cannot be taken seriously. As David Talbot put it in Technology Review, ‘a car like the Hydrogen 7 would probably produce far more carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline-powered cars available today. And changing this calculation would take multiple breakthroughs – which study after study has predicted will take decades, if they arrive at all. In fact, the Hydrogen 7 and its hydrogen-fuel-cell cousins are, in many ways, simply flashy distractions produced by automakers who should be taking stronger immediate action to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions of their cars’¹⁶.

THE FINANCIAL COST – THE INDUSTRY

Even with the American gusto for the hydrogen economy, how likely is it to happen, how quickly and how much would it cost?

With current technology, the infrastructure to supply just 40% of the light-duty vehicles in the USA alone has been estimated at over 500 billion dollars¹⁷.

Don Huberts, CEO of Shell Hydrogen, confirms this estimate. ‘The initial investment has been estimated by Shell at around USD 20bn for the U.S. alone, to supply 2% of the cars with hydrogen by 2020 and to make hydrogen available at 25% of the existing gasoline retail stations. In the subsequent decades, further build-up of the hydrogen infrastructure will require hundreds of billions of US dollars’¹⁸.

Even these mindboggling figures are calculated using the cheap methods like gas which result in CO2 emissions comparable to or worse than burning petrol and do not address the secondary issue of ‘energy independence’, reducing reliance on imported sources of energy.

When we’re throwing half a trillion dollars (and that’s for the USA alone) into climate change mitigation and emissions reduction, we need to ensure the best bang for our bucks. We could do an awful lot more with an awful lot less money, and see results an awful lot sooner. Hydrogen is not something we can have before we’ve done serious emissions cuts, and certainly not as part of them.

Even if it were a clearly good idea, it’s hard to see how it would happen. It’s a chicken and egg problem. Who would shell out hundreds of billions of dollars to supply a fuel nobody uses yet? Yet who would buy a car that you can’t readily refuel? Nobody will be a customer until there’s the infrastructure. But nobody builds pipelines without customers.

It’s not like the growth of car use, comparatively slow and piecemeal. To have any part in climate impact mitigation (let’s just pretend that it even could), this needs to be huge and rapid. Yet with numerous other alternatives looking just as viable and only one or two ever going to be the winner, who’s going to throw hundreds of billions of dollars at what will may well turn out to be the automobile industry’s answer to Betamax?¹⁹

Then there’s the resistance from the old guard to deal with, inhibiting any quick deployment and uptake on this or any other climate response industry. Both the construction of the infrastructure and the take-up by the public will be stymied by those old industries who stand to lose. As if the fossil barons are going to take this lying down.

Just as they bought the politicians to scupper the Kyoto treaty and then did it again last December in Bali, so they’ll move their muscle to stop any transition away from their present dominance, and even resist any incursion to clean up their own industries as such action reduces profits which, if their behaviour is anything to go by, are much more important to them than human survival.

BP, feted as part of the vanguard of the hydrogen industry, are clear that using renewables for electrolysis of water is not part of their plan. ‘We view hydrogen as a way to really grow our natural-gas business,’ said Lauren Segal, BP’s general manager of hydrogen development²⁰.

THE FINANCIAL COST – INDIVIDUALS

At present, hybrid petrol/electric cars are doing well commercially because they are more economical. It’s easy to sell someone the environmentally friendly option when it’s going to be cheaper for them. No driver, irrespective of their environmental feelings, will buy a car if they can’t afford it.

In December 2002 Yozo Kami, Honda’s engineer in charge of hydrogen fuel cells, said it would take at least ten years to get the price of a hydrogen car down to $100,000 (around £50,000). This from the people making one of the cheapest prototypes²¹.

Fuel cells of the type used in cars (proton exchange membrane cells) have a short lifespan too. The industry is aiming at around 4,000 hours of use, which might equate to ten years of driving. As it stands, a good prototype can only manage about 1,000 hours²². Buying a car that costs £50,000 and will be useless in three years isn’t going to appeal to anyone.

And even once the industry were scaled up, as a vehicle fuel hydrogen is still likely to be at least twice as expensive as petrol²³.

This is compounded by the poor efficiency of the hydrogen vehicles. Alec Brooks again; ‘the commonly held belief is that fuel cell vehicles will have two to three times the fuel economy of gasoline powered vehicles. But so far, fuel cell vehicles are losing. The mid-sized petrol powered Toyota Prius has 13 percent better fuel economy than the subcompact Honda FCX fuel cell vehicle’²⁴.

Alec Brooks is a big electric vehicle advocate, but his view is shared not only by the research scientists quoted above, but by those with a vested interest in hydrogen. Shell Hydrogen’s CEO Don Huberts bluntly conceded, ‘at the end of the day, hydrogen and other alternative fuels will be three to four times as expensive as oil based products, and if no one wants to pay for that, we can’t make those fuels’²⁵.

SAFETY

Being a small molecule and very light, hydrogen is particularly leak prone. It is also odourless. Natural gas can have varying or no odour, so an odorising agent is added to it. That smell we think of as gas isn’t gas at all, it’s a chemical blend made in a factory in West Bromwich and added to the supply. It must be weird living round there, how would you tell a gas leak from the smell of the factory?

But anyway, an odoriser cannot be added to hydrogen as not only might it damage the fuel system technology (especially in sensitive fuel cells) but it wouldn’t actually work – the hydrogen would be substantially lighter and separate from its smell.

This gets worse. Not only is it leaky, invisible and odourless, but it burns invisibly too. The first you’d know about a raging fire would be when you stepped into it and went up in flames.

NASA use a lot of hydrogen (it’s in those fat tanks on the side of the space shuttle). Being NASA, all high-tech and with as much experience of handling hydrogen as anyone, they developed a special device for detecting burning leaks issued by their Office of Safety and Mission Assurance. Walk round pushing a broom in front of you and see if the bristles catch fire²⁶.

It is a very dangerous substance to be handling in large quantity, in populated areas, at thousands of forecourts with untrained members of the public.

Some safety factors work in hydrogen’s favour – it is essentially non-toxic and dissipates rapidly in the air, making its way swiftly upwards and bonding with oxygen. If only pools of petrol did the same instead of lingering round waiting for a fag end.

However, you’re in real trouble if the hydrogen leak is already burning. And that’s easily done. It is flammable over a wide range of concentrations and has ignition energy twenty times smaller than natural gas or petrol. ‘Operation of electronic devices (cell phones) can cause ignition’, and ‘common static (sliding over a car seat) is about ten times what is needed to ignite hydrogen’²⁷. Electrical storms several miles away can generate enough static to ignite hydrogen²⁸.

But surely, with it being so volatile and also with it being a new technology needing public confidence, the motor manufacturers have taken extra care and got all this covered, right?

Wrong. In May 2003 Toyota recalled all its hydrogen vehicles after a leak was discovered in the tank of one. Not by engineers, but by the driver noticing a strange noise when refuelling²⁹.

Safety isn’t just an issue for the filling stations and vehicles. Just think about the tankers on the roads.

A study examining the possibility of trucks carrying compressed hydrogen in tubes showed that for every 150 miles the truck drives, it uses energy equivalent to 20% of the fuel it delivers³⁰. Because it carries so little fuel, more tankers would be needed. The study said ‘it would take 15 tube-trailer hydrogen trucks to serve the same number of vehicles that are nowadays energized by a single 26 ton gasoline truck’.

Fifteen times the number of tankers on the road isn’t just an emissions nightmare, it’s a serious safety issue too. They went on, ‘today about one in 100 trucks is a gasoline or diesel tanker. For surface transportation of hydrogen one may see 115 trucks on the road, 15 or 13% of them transporting hydrogen. One out of seven accidents involving trucks would involve a hydrogen truck. Every seventh truck-truck collision would occur between two hydrogen carriers’.

All the new infrastructure would need serious safety testing before rolling out nationally and globally. Even with a massive and unflinching political, industrial and financial push, we’re talking a couple of decades turnaround. From a climate perspective, we don’t have that sort of time to tackle vehicle emissions.

AND IT GETS WORSE

There are other safety and cost factors too. Hydrogen is highly reactive; it bonds easily with other substances so it doesn’t exist in isolation anywhere on earth and has to be ‘manufactured’ by splitting it from whatever it’s bonded to. It’s reactiveness causes metals, including steel, to become brittle. Pipelines, tanker trucks and other things for storage and supply would need to be made of higher grade materials and/or replaced more frequently. The infrastructure costs would be astronomical.

‘Higher strength materials are more susceptible to hydrogen embrittlement,’ says Jim Campbell of hydrogen manufacturer Air Liquide³¹.

Lower strength materials are, of course, more susceptible to rupture. Any potential solution would have to see the high strength material lined with a less reactive low-strength one, adding more R&D time and costs on to this already slow and prohibitively expensive plan.

There are the previously mentioned problems about the high number of hydrogen delivery trucks and their likelihood to be in accidents – one in seven accidents involving a truck would involve a hydrogen transporter.

There are some possible ways around this. There are some proposals to have filling stations producing their own hydrogen. This would remove the delivery fleet and pipeline issues. However, putting a hydrogen production plant in every filling station would be phenomenally expensive and, with production dotted at thousands of small sites scattered round the country, completely rule out any chance of ‘carbon capture and storage’ (technology for large fossil-using sites that could catch and bury their CO2 – more on that in a minute).

Also, the smaller scale plants at filling stations would be even more inefficient than making hydrogen centrally, so what we gain by not transporting it we lose in inefficiency.

HEY KIDS, LET’S MAKE THE HYDROGEN RIGHT HERE!

Astonishingly, some manufacturers are looking at on-board hydrogen manufacturing from a variety of sources. As the manufacture of hydrogen takes place in the car itself, there is no possibility of either using renewable electricity or carbon capture and storage. Most flabbergasting is the suggested use of petrol as the source fuel. Rather than burning it directly, the car uses it to make hydrogen as fuel for its fuel cell. Renault have been working with a company called Nuvera Fuel Cells to develop this³².

Despite all that talk about hydrogen granting countries energy independence, they want to make it from the very oil we’re supposedly becoming independent of! And, in case the idea wasn’t mad enough already, a study found that energy consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of such a vehicle would be greater than a hybrid petrol vehicle³³. (And there are plenty of existing cars that way outperform the hybrids, appalling guzzlers of oil products whose level of consumption is something that has to become a thing of the past if we’re to have any hope of tackling climate change³⁴).

In-car hydrogen manufacture is the worst of both worlds, as the EU concluded; ‘Indirect hydrogen (via a liquid fuel and on-board reformer) combines high costs with low greenhouse gas savings except when the fuel is from biomass origin’³⁵.

CARBON CAPTURE AND STORAGE

In theory, hydrogen from fossil sources needn’t involve carbon emissions. We could make hydrogen and have carbon capture and storage (CCS), whereby the CO2 is removed during production and piped to an underground geological gap such as an old gas field or saline aquifer.

In 2005 BP announced it would be piloting the world’s first industrial scale hydrogen production with CCS. The plan was to build a power plant taking natural gas, separating the hydrogen from the CO2, then immediately burning the hydrogen at the same site to generate electricity. This means no compression, liquefaction, storage or transport, making it far more efficient and safe. It also means that this is not a model for production of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel.

The captured CO2 would be stored in a North Sea oil field, pumping it down would flush out about 40 million barrels of oil that are not currently recoverable. In consecutive paragraphs of their press release, BP brag about the climate benefit of capturing CO2 and brag about the extra oil they’ll get to burn!³⁶

The emissions from the oil would have been around ten times the CO2 being captured³⁷. Just like ‘clean’ hydrogen for vehicles and biodiesel from palm oil, the result of this supposed solution would be a large increase in carbon emissions.

Even though they would only be capturing 90% of the CO2, and using that to generate far more emissions than they save, BP still called the plan ‘carbon free’³⁸. No shame, no irony, no way they can be trusted on climate issues.

In May 2007 BP cancelled the plan citing governmental delays in approving the project and giving incentives. They were in a rush because the Miller Field is reaching the end of its life, so they want the CO2 in a hurry to extend it. The cancellation was met with dismay by all who spoke of it including those who should know better like Friends of The Earth³⁹.

They’re looking to build these pilot CCS plants where there’s a dividend like bonus oil, yet we need fossil fuels to stay in the ground to avert runaway climate change.

Still, if Chinese power stations don’t get CCS sharpish then we face severe risk of climate catastrophe, and somebody’s got to develop the technology and deliver it to them. So even allowing for the extra oil, a pioneering project like that could perhaps have had some mitigating merit.

In February 2003 the US government’s Department of Energy announced the billion-dollar ten year FutureGen project to design, build, construct, and demonstrate a 275 megawatt prototype plant that would co-generate electricity and hydrogen and have Carbon Capture and Storage to sequester at least 90% of the CO2. It aims to validate the viability of the technology by 2020⁴⁰.

Assuming they manage it, getting it all mass produced and on stream would take around a decade, which means that, even with generous assumptions on the push behind it, we’re not looking at this being part of the solution until 2030. By which time we’re almost certainly past the climate’s tipping point. Which means this stuff is not going to help us.

We have to find another way – again I find myself thinking ‘leave this shit in the ground’ is the only one that seems safe and certain – and maybe, if this technology works and we have happy skippy clean hydrogen in future we can get our cars back out of the garage. But to keep going on the promise of something that can’t arrive in time is like saying to an alcoholic they should keep on drinking because in thirty years time we’ll be able to grow them a new liver in a laboratory.

THE SPECTRE OF HYDROGEN COMMITTING US TO COAL

Carbon Capture and Storage could be possible by 2030. In that time the world will have doubled its coal-fired generation; the lifetime emissions of those new coal plants are equal to half of the total carbon emissions from all fossil fuel use globally since the industrial revolution⁴¹.

Coal is by far the most CO2-intensive energy source. It emits 80 percent more carbon per unit of energy than gas and 29 percent more than oil. Half of Britain’s electricity already comes from coal, and power generation using coal is expanding. Even madder, the government is planning new coal-fired power stations. With oil and gas prices rising and energy security becoming increasingly problematic, the coal option looks more attractive to government. But if a new era of energy expansion is based on coal then we’re all toast.

Put bluntly, we can’t wait for Carbon Capture and Storage to save the day because it can’t arrive in time. We need to avert new coal generation. This means efficient use of all non-coal sources of energy, which more or less puts hydrogen out of the window automatically. Any solution that would inevitably produce a huge leap in energy demand as well as a massive increase in heavy industry should be squarely placed in the ‘absolute last resort’ pile.

Hydrogen requires large amounts of energy to produce, large amounts of energy to store and large amounts of energy to distribute. To increase the demand for natural gas by making it the primary fuel for hydrogen means the price of gas would go up, making coal even more viable for electricity generation.

Yet the gas supply is only temporary too. If we invest in the trillions of pounds of infrastructure to make a global hydrogen economy then we are committing to many decades of hydrogen use. When ‘peak gas’ hits by mid-century, coal – which there is plenty of – will become the cheapest way of making hydrogen.

In the meantime, the emissions figures for gas are underestimates; they presume gas is piped in gas form. However, as the European fields reach the end of their life, gas is being shipped in liquid form from the Middle East. (Once again, the talk of the hydrogen economy creating energy independence and security is shown up as a lie). To be liquefied, gas is cooled to minus 162 degrees centigrade then kept at that temperature, with all the energy consumption that implies, so the emissions from using gas effectively increase.

Increasing hydrogen production – from whatever source – will have a further climate impact. Having so much hydrogen at so many sites will invariably involve leaks. Once it gets in the troposphere (the lower atmosphere) it reacts with hydroxyl to form water vapour. This makes hydrogen indirectly become a greenhouse gas.

Not only is water vapour a greenhouse gas, but hydrogen affects methane levels too. Methane is a greenhouse gas over twenty times as potent as CO2. The primary ‘sink’ for reducing methane in the atmosphere is reaction with hydroxyl. The more hydroxyl has reacted with leaked hydrogen, the less there is to clear away the methane⁴².

THE HYDROGEN DREAM IS JUST THAT

The vision of hydrogen as a vehicle fuel isn’t new. In 1874, Jules Verne wrote in The Mysterious Island, ‘yes, my friends, I believe that water will one day be employed as fuel, that hydrogen and oxygen which constitute it, used singly or together, will furnish an inexhaustible source of heat and light, of an intensity of which coal is not capable. Some day the coalrooms of steamers and the tenders of locomotives will, instead of coal, be stored with these two condensed gases, which will burn in the furnaces with enormous calorific power… water will be the coal of the future.’

It’s easy to dismiss a novel as an inaccurate prediction, and those who do – like those in the year 1984 who said George Orwell was ‘wrong’ because we weren’t living in the place his novel described – miss the point of fiction entirely. Verne’s work is staggeringly visionary to the point of feeling plausible.

But from a literalist standpoint the glaring problem is the absence of the primary source of energy that will separate and compress the hydrogen and oxygen.

Still, Verne’s imaginative work is extraordinary, and as a fiction author his pipedreams do us no harm. The same cannot be said of those who know better and do act in the real world on a grand scale.

BEYOND PARODY

Aware of the rising need to reduce carbon emissions, the oil companies have responded in several ways to appear as if they’re taking it seriously. BP have got a pretty sunflower logo, but in their move to produce hydrogen they’ve been outpaced by the oil industry’s PR master, Shell.

Shell are the most visible company pushing the idea that Iceland will be ‘the world’s first hydrogen economy,’ implying that it’s just Iceland leading the way and proving we can all do it. They opened a Shell hydrogen filling station in Reykjavik, and proudly said that they’d immediately signed up 4% of the city’s bus fleet.

That, though, is only three buses. Because this is the thing. Iceland is not only peculiar because it is sat on more renewable energy than it can use (a few huge hydroelectric plants and a hell of a lot of geothermal energy); it is also little more than a city state. It has a population the size of Bradford and two-thirds of them live in one city. So all you need is three or four filling stations and you’re covered. That simply cannot be scaled up to the UK, or anywhere else. The rest of us need a different solution.

In 2001 Shell produced a report called Energy Needs, Choices and Possibilities: Scenarios to 2050. They describe several possible futures. One talks of ‘developing a new “fuel in a box” for fuel cell vehicles’.

BMW’s admittedly inefficient hydrogen combustion car the H7 uses about a litre of fuel to go 2km⁴³, yet in Shell’s scenario ‘a six-pack of fuel (12 litres) is sufficient for 400 km,’ or over 16 times the efficiency of the H7. Even more curiously, they talk of this fuel in a box as being ‘distributed like soft drinks through multiple distribution channels, even dispensing machines’⁴⁴.

For Shell, all the safety problems of having hydrogen vending machines seemingly don’t exist. Presumably they disappeared around the same time as the mystery safe canister material was invented. They neglect to say whether these will be high-pressure gas canisters (with the risk of rupture and explosion), or ones holding liquid at-253 degrees (necessitating a hell of an electricity bill for the vending machine, or else a super-insulated canister that leaks the fuel and, if it’s been sat in some underused vending machine, may be empty by the time you buy it).

All this, remember, comes from the company whose current slogan is ‘real energy solutions for the real world’.

It’s all a load of fanciful nonsense made up out of thin air, deliberately ignoring the serious and presently insurmountable engineering and safety problems of hydrogen. It certainly isn’t a scenario that could possibly be in place by its projection of 2025. It’s a decoy to make the public think that there’s a safe, easy future and the oil companies have got it all figured out, so we leave them alone and don’t stop them producing oil, nor do we feel the need to cut back on our consumption of it.

Consumption itself is our problem. Even if there were some proven method of Carbon Capture and Storage that definitely locked it away for all eternity without major leakage, it would only address the carbon issue. Simultaneously, it would commit us not only to ongoing coal consumption and all the products that high energy use bring; all our other resource depletion and pollution issues would rampage onwards unchecked.

IT CANNOT HELP US

For hydrogen to be viable as a vehicle fuel it needs numerous technological breakthroughs in all major areas; production, distribution and storage.

The fuel and vehicles, even with some optimistic assumptions about technological breakthroughs, will be more expensive than conventional vehicles to buy, more expensive to refuel, and not last as long.

For it to be a climate technology, we need a glut of renewable electricity or universal effective Carbon Capture and Storage within a decade. The likelihood of the infrastructure that would make it work being put in place within four or five decades is slim. So, the technical and economic issues mean it cannot be a climate solution.

There won’t be enough renewable electricity to make carbon-free hydrogen possible for decades, if ever.

The hydrogen industry has no part to play in reducing emissions if there are fossil fuels anywhere in the equation. The emissions will be equivalent or worse than conventional vehicles, which are already enough to take us to hell in a handcart.

It cannot help us.

FOOTNOTES

Joseph Romm, The Hype About Hydrogen, Island Press, 2003
A back of the envelope calculation. Electrolysis ‘requires 39 kWh of electricity to produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen at 25 degrees C, and 1 atmosphere’ [J. Levene, B. Kroposki, and G. Sverdrup, Wind Energy and Production of Hydrogen and Electricity — Opportunities for Renewable Hydrogen, US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, March 2006, p2. [link] ]
The BMW H7 has an 8kg hydrogen tank.

39×8=312kw/h

8kg=200km driving range [BMW press release, 14 May 2007 [link] ]

312 divided by 200 = 1.56 kw/h per km

UK grid emissions 480g kw/h (see footnote 8)

480 × 1.56 = 749g/km to make the hydrogen gas

Then it has to be liquefied:

With UK energy mix, 6-7.2kg CO2 emissions per kg hydrogen (see footnote 8)

8kg=200km, so 25km per kilo.

6-7.2kg for 25km, 240-288g for 1km for liquefaction

749 + 240-288 = 989-1033g/km

For comparison, a Toyota Prius emits 104g/km, a Renault Megane emits 117g/km, a vicious gas guzzler like the Porsche Cayenne emits 310g/km. The car the H7 is based on, the BMW 750, emits 271g/km.
George Monbiot, Heat: How To Stop The Planet Burning, Penguin/Allen Lane, 2006, p165
Decarbonising the UK – Energy for a Climate Conscious Future, Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, 2005, p4 [link]
United States Department of Energy, National Hydrogen Energy Roadmap, November 2002, p11 [link]
US National Academy of Engineering Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs, 2004, p38 [link]
Raymond Drnevich of major American hydrogen supplier Praxair, Hydrogen Delivery: Liquefaction & Compression, May 2003, p8 [link]
UK CO2 emissions – 480 g/kwh
[table 3, Fuel Mix Disclosure Data Table, DBERR 2006-07, [link] ]

480g x 12.5-15(see footnote 7) = 6-7.2kg
This is a back of the envelope calculation. Dr Joseph Romm, (using that wonderful American mix of imperial and metric units that sees NASA craft shooting past Mars), calculates that with the USA’s electricity generation there are emissions of 17.5-21 lbs CO2 per kg hydrogen. Burning 1 gallon gasoline (about the same energy as 1 kg hydrogen) releases 20 lbs/CO2.

[Joseph Romm, The Hype About Hydrogen, Island Press, 2003, p95]

20lb=9.071kg.
Manufacturing hydrogen from natural gas emits 9.1 kg CO2 per kg H2
(IPCC, Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p 131. [link]
US National Academy of Engineering Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs, 2004, p38 [link]
US National Academy of Engineering Board on Energy and Environmental Systems, The Hydrogen Economy: Opportunities, Costs, Barriers, and R&D Needs, 2004, p27 [link]
Alec Brooks, CARB’s Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles, Electric Vehicle World, 7 May 2004 [link]
See footnote 2.
Hell and Hydrogen, Technology Review, MIT, March 2007 [link]
Hell and Hydrogen, Technology Review, MIT, March 2007 [link]
Marianne Mintz et al, Cost of Some Hydrogen Fuel Infrastructure Options, Argonne National Laboratory Transportation Technology R&D Center, January 2002 [link]
Don Huberts, testimony to House Science Committee, “The Path To A Hydrogen Economy”, March 5, 2003 [link]
For those born after 1975ish: In the early days of home video tape recorders there were three different competing formats: JVC’s VHS, Philips’ V2000, and Sony’s Betamax. You couldn’t play a tape of one format on the machine of another.
As a household would only buy one video machine, they would go for the one that had the best range of movies available, the longest record time on a blank tape, and cheapest retail price. Video rental shops found it expensive stocking every film on two or three formats. There was only going to be one winner. V2000 died a rapid death but Sony forged ahead for years throwing good money after bad plugging Betamax long after it was clearly going to lose.
Barry C. Lynn, Hydrogen’s Dirty Secret, Mother Jones, May/June 2003 [link]
Business Week, Fuel Cells: Japan’s Carmakers Are Flooring It, December 23 2002 [link]
Joseph Romm, The Hype About Hydrogen, Island Press, 2003, p122
Marianne Mintz et al, Cost of Some Hydrogen Fuel Infrastructure Options, Argonne National Laboratory Transportation Technology R&D Center, January 2002 [link]
Alec Brooks, CARB’s Fuel Cell Detour on the Road to Zero Emission Vehicles, Electric Vehicle World, 7 May 2004 [link]
Looking Ahead: Fuel Producers Weigh in on Hydrogen’s Fit in Cleaner Energy Production, Fuel Cell Industry Report, January 2003
NASA, Office of Safety and Mission Assurance, Safety Standard for Hydrogen and Hydrogen Systems, 1997, paragraph 601b(4) [link]
Arthur D. Little, Inc. for US Department of Energy, Guidance for Transportation Technologies: Fuel Choice for Fuel Cell Vehicle, Final Report Phase Two, appendix p107, 2001
James Hansel of Air Products and Chemicals Inc, Safety Considerations for Handling Hydrogen, presentation to the Ford Motor Company, Allentown, Pennsylvania, 12 June 1998
Toyota Recalls Fuel-Cell Cars Due to Hydrogen Leak, Agence France-Presse, 20 May 2003
Bossel & Eliasson, Energy and the Hydrogen Economy, 2003, p19 [link]
Jim Campbell, Hydrogen Delivery Technologies and Systems: Pipeline Transmission of Hydrogen, presentation to US Department of Energy, Strategic Initiatives for Hydrogen Delivery Workshop May 7-8, 2003, p6 [link]
Fabien Boudjemaa, The Onboard Reformer: A Transitional Solution?, CLEFS CEA, no 50-51, winter 2004-2005, p35 [link]
Weiss, M., Heywood, J., Schafer, A., Natarajan, V. Comparative Assessment of Fuel Cell Cars, Report LFEE 2003-001 RP, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003 [link]
George Monbiot and Merrick Godhaven, Greenwash Exposed – Toyota, Turn Up The Heat website, 10 May 2007 [link]
Well-To-Wheels Analysis Of Future Automotive Fuels And Powertrains In The European Context, European Commission Joint Research Centre, January 2004 [link]
Introducing hydrogen power: BP’s plan to generate electricity from hydrogen and capture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy, BP press release, 30 June 2005 [link]
Jim Bliss, Oil Companies and Climate Change, The Quiet Road website, 17 January 2008 [link]
Introducing hydrogen power: BP’s plan to generate electricity from hydrogen and capture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy. BP press release, 30 June 2005 [link]
BP pulls out of green power plant, BBC News website, 23 May 2007 [link]
FutureGen – A Sequestration and Hydrogen Research Initiative, US Department of Energy Office of Fossil Energy, February 2003 [link]
David Hawkins, director of Natural Resources Defense Council’s climate center, testimony to U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce Hearing on Future Options for Generation of Electricity from Coal, June 24, 2003 [link]
Anil Ananthaswamy, Reality bites for the dream of a hydrogen economy, New Scientist Magazine issue 2421, 15 November 2003 [link]

See also ‘Atmospheric Impact of Hydrogen’, Platinum and hydrogen for fuel cell vehicles, AEA Technology, 2003 [link, or full report as pdf]
A back of the envelope calculation. The 8kg tank gives around 200km driving range [BMW press release, 14 May 2007 [link] ]
According to Ecoglobe, liquid hydrogen 1.8kg=25litres [link], making the tank about 111 litres. (Wikipedia suggests hydrogen is 0.07kg/litre, making the 8kg tank about 115 litres).

111 divided by 8 = 13.875 litres per kilo.

13.875 divided by 25 = 1.8km/litre.
Energy Needs, Choices and Possibilities: Scenarios to 2050, Global Business Environment, Shell International 2001, page 48 [link]

Down To Earth

Tim Holmes — Fri, 20 Jul 2007 20:00:25 +0000

Next month sees the Camp for Climate Action take place near Heathrow Airport. As pressure mounts for people to stop using aeroplanes, there are some questions that need answering.

Demanding people stop flying? Isn’t that a bit unrealistic?

We’d love to say we could carry on, but the science is very clear. We have to drastically cut carbon emissions and mass aviation takes us over safe levels.

There’s no point in going for an easier objective if it’s not going to actually work. We need to join the dots between what we know we should do and what we actually do.

So many vital social changes were unrealistic. As if the economy could keep going without slavery! As if women would ever get the vote! As if we could nationalise the medical profession and just give out free treatment to everyone! But some people see it’s necessary and start pushing for it; as everyone else, even those with something to lose, see the justice of the case, the change occurs.

We’re already seeing the beginnings of a change ñ flying is being seen as damaging. Once we’re clear that offsetting is fraudulent (which I’ll explain in a minute), we have to conclude that flying is simply socially unacceptable.

It’s hard to imagine that being a widespread view, but then cast your mind back. Imagine going round in the 1970s telling people they shouldn’t smoke in front of their children. It was socially acceptable, normal, everyone was doing it because they liked it. If we’d ignored the facts because it didn’t fit with the view of the people doing the wrong thing, where would we be now?

You could similarly look at the 70s macho bravado about being able to drink-drive. And at least drink-driving only risks lives; climate change definitely kills.

No matter what our political inclinations, all of us felt America’s pain for weeks after 9/11. According to a Christian Aid report(1), climate change is likely to kill over 180 million people this century in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s more than ten 9/11s a week. To keep flying is to inflict that. It makes a mockery of our concern about aid and debt relief.

Who are you to say I can’t have my holiday?

I’m not saying it. The climate is. Everyone loves sunshine and adventure, and all of us would love to be able to travel wherever we want. But the science demands other things. We have to drastically cut carbon emissions swiftly if we’re to have a habitable future. When we have to make cuts, surely we should start with the high-emitting luxuries.

Everyone has a right to a break

Yes they do. But everyone has a right to life too. And climate change is already impinging on that. The World Health Organisation conservatively estimates that 150,000 people a year are already dying from the effects of climate change(2).

It’s those without welfare systems, those in the hotter places that are suffering the most, and that will get worse.

The IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has made clear, ‘it’s the poorest of the poor in the world, and this includes poor people even in prosperous societies, who are going to be the worst hit’(3).

Their right to life beats your right to the break of your choice. You still have a right to a break; but it’ll have to be a different kind.

Flying is no worse per passenger mile than a car

Rarely true, but often broadly comparable. However, you can’t cover 10,000 miles a day in a car. For many drivers, their annual aviation emissions are worse than their car’s(4). A jumbo jet’s emissions in a minute are worse than your electricity for a whole year(5).

More, these figures often talk about the emissions and ignore the damaging effect of emitting at altitude. The scientific term is ‘radiative forcing’. This uplift factor makes it somewhere between 1.9 and 2.7 times worse than emitting on the ground(6).

And car use is not a nice clean yardstick. Comparing aviation to something else unsustainable is ridiculous.

It’s possible for people to fly and stay within a safe carbon limit

Technically, yes. But find me one person that does. Anyone who can afford to fly does it as a luxury, after they’ve paid for the more essential things in their life that cause emissions.

Aviation, by its very nature, is the preserve of the rich, who are the largest emitters in other parts of their lives. More likely to be car owners, have large houses to heat, etc.

But I offset my flights

Offsetting is a fraud. There is a simple and, when you think about it, very obvious reason why it’s nonsense.

Your emissions happen now. A ton saved today is very different to a ton saved over a few years. The emission is doing damage in the time between emission and absorption. If we keep offsetting a day’s emissions over a period of years, we can never catch up. It’s like putting water in the bath by the bucketload and saying you’ll stop it overflowing by taking it out by the spoonful.

So, if it is to be a real offset, it’d have to save the emissions in the same timeframe as they’re released. That’s not one or two low-energy lightbulbs for a flight to Malaga, it’s tens of thousands. Come to me with an offset receipt for £50,000 for your holiday and then we’ll start talking about the injustice of the rich buying luxury pollution at the expense of poorer nations’ necessities.

Just because you donate to the RSPCA doesn’t mean you have the right to kick your dog. To stay have any real chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change, we have to be dishing out the low-carbon technologies, planting the trees and stopping flying.

If you’re calling for airports to be closed you’re living in fairyland

I think you fail to understand the seriousness and urgency of the problem. Keeping them open is a commitment to runaway climate change that will dry rivers, see sea levels flood farmlands, make drought move across presently fertile areas; it will take away the essentials of survival for hundreds of millions of people, wipe out entire ecosystems and cause the deaths of up to a third of all species. Quite possibly within the lifetimes of people alive today. If you think a week in Barbados, a wedding in Auckland or a meeting in Strasbourg is worth that, it’s you that’s living in fairyland.

What are we going to do instead, a rainy weekend in Bognor?

Much of the sane response to climate change is about reducing consumption. We’re not kidding ourselves that it’s going to be as sunny holidaying in Rhyl as Malta. But a lot of the reduction will be positive; relocalising means spending more time near where you live. Who wants to do more commuting?

We can transform our lives into something we don’t feel we need to escape from. With less stress there’s less need to have a break. There’s more time with the people you love. There’s a regeneration of community and a stronger sense of roots in your town.

By the same token, holidaying domestically gives a stronger sense of understanding and identity with your country.

Our grandparents did not consume like us and our grandchildren will not be able to. We have to recognise that it was a blip in consumption for a couple of generations and make the transition back down as comfortable as possible for us and those who follow. If it carries on unchecked, climate change will have drastic effects well within the lifetimes of most of us alive today; there’s a good dose of self-interest here!

Cheap flights help the poor fly more

Firstly, climate change is a global phenomenon, and in global terms – the only way to look at climate change – anyone who flies is not poor.

Most people will never fly out of straightforward poverty. And if they did fly, the climate couldn’t take it. It is intrinsically unsustainable and inequitable.

But even in the UK, cheap flights aren’t the poor starting to fly, they’re the rich binge-flying.

Even on budget airlines, around 80 per cent of trips are by people in the top three social classes, A, B and C1(7). Most of the growth predicted for 2030 by the government will be the wealthiest 10 per cent flying overseas at weekends(8).

People with second homes abroad take an average of six return flights a year(9). The richest 20% of the population take half of all flights, while the bottom 28% only take 8%(10). The aviation industry’s own figures show that the poorest 10 per cent of people rarely fly at all. Nor are they likely to fly over the next 30 years, because of the overall cost of trips(11).

The average income of a Stansted user is over £50,000 – and that’s a ‘budget airport’!(12)

Most people in Britain won’t fly at all this year(13).

The aviation industry already enjoys a unique zero tax regime on all manner of its elements from fuel to tickets to in-flight meals. Giving tax breaks to this particularly destructive industry to address ‘flight poverty’ is ridiculous. Why not drop the tax on wines to address champagne poverty while you’re at it?

But cheap flights help the young go off and discover the world and become spiritually fulfilled.

Only the young of those who, in global terms, are very wealthy. And it is now clear that they do it at the expense of the world’s poorest. We can all understand a lot about the world and feel genuine compassion for those elsewhere without having to personally go there first. In fact, we need to do so; to say we’re going to wait until loads of us have been to, say, Arctic polar bear habitat before we act to save them is to damn them to extinction.

But isn’t the new Heathrow East terminal all eco-friendly?

Firstly, construction is incredibly carbon intensive. Every tonne of cement is responsible for around a tonne of CO2 emissions.

Like the third runway, the new terminal is a long-term investment in Heathrow being a very large airport, facilitating a huge and disastrous amount of flights.

Obviously, all buildings should be done in as environmentally friendly a way as possible. But that’s really not the problem with Heathrow. It’s the planes. If someone’s coming to spray sewage all round your house it doesn’t matter if they wipe their feet on the way in.

But I recycle and use my bike and do my bit, aren’t I allowed this one treat?

Just like the government’s airport expansion undoing all the good it’s doing on climate change, so your flight undoes much of the good you do elsewhere. It’s not a small treat like the occasional mango. A return flight to America is beyond a safe level of emission for the year, before you do anything else like buy a potato or a bus ticket. The scale of the damage done by flying is huge – 20% of the UK’s emissions even though only a minority of people will do it this year.

But the plane is taking off anyway whether I’m on it or not

Stop kidding yourself. You know that when you buy something it stimulates demand, and when you don’t buy something it discourages supply. If you don’t buy as many apples then, yes, the shop will still have them in stock. But they’ll stock less tomorrow. It’s a knock-on effect that will mean fewer flights.

But it’s a big sacrifice for me to make for such a tiny effect

Once you know aviation is unethical then, like other immoral acts, you should want no part in it. It’s not only about your power as a consumer, it’s also about having a clear conscience. Just because something is socially acceptable doesn’t make it morally acceptable.

But more, it’s about setting an example to those around you. If the people who know about this won’t change their lives, who will? How do we expect change to happen – by us all keeping going until the last person agrees to stop before any of us do? Or by showing that it can be done, starting here and now with you?

The government should compel people to fly less

Yes they should. But they’ll do it quicker if we make it plain that it won’t be political suicide. There was enough of a fuss when Gordon Brown put air duty up to £10 (which wasn’t actually a real increase, just a reversal of the cut he made in 2001). What better way – indeed, what other way – is there to show compulsion measures are acceptable except by cutting demand?

To carry on doing something you know is wrong until laws stop you is absurd. If you know you shouldn’t punch your child you don’t keep smacking them going, ‘well, I should – thwack! – stop it but lots of other people – thwack! – are hitting their kids too, so I’m just – thwack! – going to carry on until the police come round and – thwack! – stop me from doing it’.

What about Richard Branson and Boeing making biofuel for planes?

It’s very likely to be fruitless. There are very particular problems with biofuels in planes. Biodiesel forms a gel at the kind of low temperatures planes are subjected to.

Again, we’re looking for a miracle unknown breakthrough technology to be discovered, developed, mass produced and have totally replaced the current global fleet in the next decade or so. It’s simply not going to happen in time.

And in fact, let’s hope it doesn’t work. Biofuels for cars are far worse for the environment than burning oil; there’s every reason to believe biofuels for planes will be the same. A recent study found, because of forest clearance and soil decomposition, carbon emissions from making palm oil biodiesel are at least ten times worse than from burning oil(14).

And, as with biodiesel and ethanol for cars, where are you growing this? To grow oilseed rape for the UK’s cars would take nearly five times the UK’s arable land(15); we can safely assume we’d need at least several UKs for our planes. Meanwhile, we need the forests we’d clear to plant this stuff to stay up to slow the warming process. The crunch is worsened by the increasing population; there are 6 billion of us now, by 2050 there’ll be 10 billion and every one of them will need to eat; that will mean more forest falls, exacerbating climate change.

Branson’s looking at using soya. The big soya growing region is Brazil. One of the main causes of Amazon deforestation is soya production, mostly for livestock feed. Imagine how that’d expand if we were to grow our plane fuel too. Taking down the Amazon forever for a brief luxury is outrageous. It gives a whole new meaning to the phrase ‘Virgin rainforest destruction’.

He’s trying to look a bit greener by saying he’ll use old newspapers. Try telling that to anyone – expert or layperson – without them bursting out laughing.

If Branson were to ground his fleet until the fuel existed, we could take him seriously. Until then, he’s just like Heathrow’s new eco terminal or BP putting solar panels on a handful of petrol stations. It’s a decoy to make us feel like they’ve got the problem in hand instead of decrying them as the climate criminals they are.

Investing in new clean technology without disinvesting in the dirty technology is like saying you’ll lose weight by eating more burgers as long as you think you’ll to go on a diet some time in the distant future.

The government’s White Paper said there’ll be a 50% cut in aviation emissions by 2020 thanks to new technology

Yes it did. By misquoting a report by the Advisory Council for Aeronautical Research in Europe that said we could do that if we found some breakthrough technologies that we don’t know what they are and that certainly don’t exist(16).

What about the poor in foreign countries who depend on tourism?

Sea level rises have already ruined vast areas of Bangladeshi farmland. Sea temperature rises are moving the rainfall in eastern Africa, drying up farmland in Ethiopia and starving people off their land. Climate change – driven by luxury consumption such as flying – is taking food from the poorest people on earth. Tropical diseases are spreading further and further from the equatorial zone. Should we wait until they get here before we do something, or do we care about those who are suffering for our luxuries?

Already the inhabitants of the pacific island nation of Tuvalu are having to permanently evacuate their home because of rising sea levels. People on islands in the Maldives – a favoured luxury holiday destination – face the same prospect.

We can’t seriously suggest that depriving millions of people of their food, water and health is alright because a few thousand get some tourist money. Most tourist destinations employ people at poverty wages, the wealth goes to the few. This, coupled with the diversion of precious water for swimming pools and golf courses makes tourism often do more harm than good.

If the effects were being felt in our country, or even in any Western country, there’s no way we’d be doing it. If we really felt that people in Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Tuvalu and elsewhere were fully human, we’d never fly again. If it were Lincolnshire being flooded out, we’d all be pitching in to the relief effort, and certainly stop exacerbating the catastrophe. But we take our luxury at their expense because we really do believe their right to life is actually less than our right to a holiday. They are lesser humans, we are racist.

But aircraft are only 2% of global emissions

That figure’s commonly quoted. That figure’s commonly quoted; Ryanair prominently used it in their recent advertising, and the Advertising Standards Authority ruled that it was untruthful and banned Ryanair from repeating it(17).

For just one number it is wrong in an amazingly large range of ways.

Firstly, it’s out of date. It’s from 1992. Aviation has grown exponentially in the last fifteen years; the EC estimates that aviation fuel use increased by 73% between 1990 and 2003, and projects an increase of 150% by 2012(18). It is still fastest growing emissions sector.

Secondly, it’s misleading because it doesn’t measure the real effect. Because they emit at altitude, the warming effect is somewhere between two and three times worse, making aviation around 8% of emissions and rising fast.

Thirdly, it’s a global emissions figure. In the UK, where we can really affect things, it’s a much bigger proportion.

The government says it’s a whopping 13% of our emissions(19), and that’s an underestimate. (They use a low radiative forcing of 2, and they only count departing flights rather than including all flights made by UK citizens). It’s somewhere around 20%. That’s twice as much as our cars emit, yet it’s from a smaller proportion of the population. Most of us are motorists but most of us won’t fly this year.

The 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change commits us to keep emissions below levels that risk dangerous climate change. It also says that the higher emitters bear greater responsibility. That’s us.

Globally, aviation emits around the same amount as all human activities in Africa(20). When we’ve got to make cutbacks, it’s obviously aviation that goes.

Australia, the UK, Canada, the aviation industry, they all keep saying ‘we’re only 2% of global emissions’; but it only takes 50 lots of that to make 100%. Everyone’s using everyone else as an excuse to do nothing. Unlike electricity generation or food production and supply, aviation is the one industry for which there is no helpful low-emission technology to ease us out of the problem, the one industry that needs to be all but eradicated. Fortunately – unlike food and heating – aviation is a luxury we can live without.

Shouldn’t they just tax the fuel?

It’s amazing you can pay VAT on a chocolate biscuit but not on a plane ticket to Dusseldorf. It’s amazing you pay tax on car fuel but not aircraft fuel. But the fuel can’t be taxed for flights abroad; Article 24 of the 1944 Chicago Treaty expressly forbids it, and it’s all but impossible for a government to wriggle out of that.

Hasn’t aviation been added to the European Emissions Trading Scheme?

Yes it has, but this is more likely to mean that the EU-ETS will collapse than reduce emissions from aviation. The impossibility of taxing the fuel – or even tickets for internal European flights – means that aviation will be cheap and so keep expanding. If we’re to keep within the cap of the EU-ETS, other industries will have to contract. This is unlikely to happen at a fast enough rate to stay within the limit. The only place to go from there is for the EU-ETS to be ignored and cease to apply.

What about these new efficiencies – towing planes on to runways and whatnot?

They can only reduce emissions by a small amount.

And any good done there is being undone by the huge growth in the number of flights. The climate doesn’t distinguish between emissions from a one-tonne flight or two half-tonne ones.

Isn’t the government doing something about it?

Yes. They’re making it worse.

They expect a doubling or even trebling of air passengers in the UK by 2030. They are deliberately and gladly encouraging it by pushing for expansion of 21 airports. Their projected increase is equivalent to a new Heathrow every five years.

The government wants carbon dioxide emissions stabilised at the equivalent of about 550 parts per million by 2050 (‘equivalent’ because it doesn’t just includes CO2 but other greenhouse gases – the standard unit is ‘carbon dioxide parts per million equivalent’ or ‘CO2ppme’). Given the projected rate of growth and then applying the conservative ‘uplift factor’ of 2, by 2050 aviation will account for all of our emissions, and could be up to twice as much(21). And that’s before we turn on a single light or heat a single room.

Worse, and most crucially, that’s before we address the inadequacy of aiming for 550ppme by 2050 when the science demands 450ppme by 2030.

Why do we need that big cut? How bad could it get if we don’t?

In order to have a good chance of avoiding runaway climate change, we need to keep the global temperature from going more than two degrees above pre-industrial levels. We’re already at 0.7, and the gases we’ve released probably commit us to another 0.6. So, at current rates, we’ve got about 30 years to stabilise at 450ppme.

Even then, we’re likely to see almost all coral reefs die and the collapse of the arctic ecosystem, leading to the extinction of polar bears.

The conservative and sober Stern Report, even though it aims for 550ppme, concedes that at that level ‘there is at least a 77% chance – and perhaps up to a 99% chance, depending on the
climate model used – of a global average temperature rise exceeding 2C(22), giving us a ’30-70 percent’ chance of exceeding three degrees and ‘a 24 percent chance that temperatures will exceed 4 degrees’(23).

But though the odds drop – though not by enough to make anyone sleep easy at night – there’s a crucial point to realise. Once we’re beyond two degrees, the problem is no longer ours to do anything about. Forests dry, die and burn, releasing their carbon. Peat bogs dry and decompose, releasing their carbon. Emissions cause warming which causes more emissions which causes more warming. After about two degrees the biosphere is the big emitter and we will be mere spectators and victims. If it does keep rising after four degrees, there will be nothing we can do to stop it. The Stern target that the UK government uses is all but a guarantee to exceed two degrees.

At four degrees – which Stern and the government think has a 1 in 4 chance of happening – Stern says ‘the proportion of land experiencing extreme droughts is predicted to increase from 3 percent today to 30 percent’, ‘entire regions may be too hot and dry to grow crops’, ‘rising sea levels will result in tens to hundreds of millions more people flooded each year’ and ‘global food production is likely to be seriously affected’.

At six degrees, the upper limit of what’s predicted for this century, we risk truly terrifying consequences. Around 250 million years ago a series of volcanic eruptions poured enormous quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in short space of time. The global temperature rose by six degrees in a few decades. Over 90% of species died, life itself nearly ended. The biosphere took 150 million years to get back to full strength.

So we’re all doomed then?

No, far from it. Climate change is the most serious threat humanity has ever faced and time is short. But if you noticed your kitchen on fire you wouldn’t sit there in the living room saying you were doomed and watch it spread through the house.

We are probably the last generation that can do anything about climate change. With that realisation comes the duty to act on it. We still have time, but not for long. Make it count.

We are surrounded by ways to make a difference. One of the biggest, simplest and most immediate can be done by you right now, this second. You can decide to stop flying.

We don’t just need to stop flying, we need to make many other changes too, and to tell our friends and colleagues why we’re doing it. If they too are reasonable people with a conscience, they will recognise the justice of it and act likewise.

Flying is such a colossal source of emissions, and it is a luxury with no safe alternative. The aviation industry cannot ever be run sustainably. So it just ignores sustainability and, as every company with shareholders is obliged to do, keeps trying to expand in order to maximise profits at the expense of all other considerations. Yet, precisely because this industry can never be sustainable, it must be reined in swiftly.

They are a powerful lobby with friends in very high places. As Chris Mullin MP told the House of Commons, ‘during my 18 undistinguished months as Aviation Minister, I learned two lessons about the aviation industry. First, its demands are insatiable; secondly, successive Governments have always given way to them’(24).

Aviation is a special case because corporations and governments have kept it out of the upcoming Climate Change Bill, the Kyoto Treaty and other faltering first steps to controlling emissions. It means that this one is entirely up to us.

More than any other source of emissions aviation has to be cut by grassroots action, it has to be those who can afford to fly but choose not to.

Our choosing to stop flying is a great first step. But as other people will take more and more flights, we need to do more. We have to make this more than a personal lifestyle choice and into a public campaign that makes flying socially unacceptable and makes government policy changes inevitable.

All the great reports and words will remain just that without a movement to animate them. Collective action has to be more than sixty million guilty individuals changing light bulbs at the behest of rock stars. It’s essential those of us who know that BP, Branson and the Beastie Boys aren’t going to save us make ourselves heard before the corporate stampede to claim the issue drowns out our voices and hopes.

The anti-roads campaigns of the 1990s were comprised of a wide variety of people who knew enough to make a stand. Within a short time, the idea that there were other values than the industrial ones, and that providing more roads didn’t solve congestion but actually encouraged car use were understood and agreed with. The government had no choice but to listen. The roads budget collapsed and we went into a far saner policy of trying to manage demand rather than provide for it.

We’re at a similar stage with aviation. The huge growth planned for airports will take us beyond a safe level of emissions, but the sane alternative is possible.

Heathrow’s third runway faces vehement opposition not only from locals and environmental groups, but also from establishment figures like Ken Livingstone and even the Conservatives. It’s eminently winnable. Local people are running a brilliant campaign, but there’s not enough of them and it’s a fight that belongs to us all. If we stop this one, we prevent millions of flights from ever happening.

More, we make it the high water mark for expansion. Once this campaign is won the whole idea of expansion is called into question and discredited. Other campaigns around the country and the world will stand a greater chance of success. As we pull back from the brink, we encourage others to do the same.

The Camp for Climate Action at Heathrow will be a springboard for this burgeoning movement to move on up. It’s time to step up and act with the boldness that the times ask of us.

The Camp for Climate Action
14-21 August, near Heathrow Airport
24 hours of mass action from noon on Sunday 19th
http://www.climatecamp.org.uk/

FOOTNOTES

1. ‘The Climate of Poverty; Facts, Fears and Hope’, Christian Aid, May 2006.
http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/indepth/605caweek/caw06final.pdf

2. http://www.who.int/heli/risks/climate/climatechange/en/

3. ‘Billions face climate change risk’, BBC News website, 6 April 2007

4. ‘Aviation and Global Climate Change’ (2nd May 2000, Friends of the Earth, the Aviation Environment Federation, the National Society for Clean Air and Environmental Protection and HACAN/Clear Skies) calculates that the average UK motorist produces 2255 kg of CO2 in one year, while one return flight from London to Miami produces 2415 kg of CO2 per passenger.
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/aviation_climate_change.pdf

5. Assumes;
CO2 emissions: 0.17kg/km per passenger (as cited in footnote 4)
Seat occupancy: 370 passengers
Distance of return flight: 14,207km (London-Miami)
Journey time 9 hours 40 minutes (580 minutes) each way (average for London-Miami)
Radiative forcing of 2.7 for emission at altitude

0.17 × 370 = 62.9kg/km for the whole plane.
14,207 divided by 580 = 12.25km/min (average speed of 735 km/h, or 457mph)
62.9 × 12.25 = 770.525 kg/min
770.525 × 2.7 = 2080.418kg/min equivalent

This is almost identical to the average individual emissions for domestic gas and electricity use (2088.57kg/CO2).

Let’s do the maths again, being really generous to the aviation:

Assumptions as above except:
CO2 emissions: 0.11kg/km per passenger (UK government figure)
Radiative forcing of 1.9 for emission at altitude

0.11 × 370 = 40.7kg/km for the whole plane.
14,207 divided by 580 = 12.25km/min (average speed of 735 km/h, or 457mph)
40.7 × 12.25 = 498.58 kg/min
498.58 × 1.9 = 947.293kg/min equivalent

This is still bigger than average individual’s household electricity emissions for a year (854.38kg/CO2).

I go into it in even more detail (including sources for the domestic energy consumption) here:
http://bristlingbadger.blogspot.com/2007/05/jumbo-electricity.html

6. ‘Aviation and The Global Atmosphere’, IPCC, 1999 says 2.7 and this has been the generally accepted figure.
http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc/aviation/064.htm

This is quite an old figure now. A more recent report by Environmental Change Institute at University of Oxford says 1.9. it seems that this is starting to be generally accepted.
http://www.stopstanstedexpansion.com/documents/Aviation_Emissions_&_Offsets.pdf

The UK government uses a factor of 2.

7. Civil Aviation Authority 2002, cited in ‘The Sky’s the Limit: Policies for Sustainable Aviation’, Simon Bishop and Tony Grayling, Institute for Public Policy Research, May 2003, page 65.
http://www.ippr.org.uk/members/download.asp?f=/ecomm/files/the_skys_the_limit.pdf

8. Department for Transport, cited in Friends of The Earth factsheet ‘Aviation: The Plane Truth’
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/factsheets/aviation_myths.pdf

9. HACAN/ Clear Skies, 2005, cited in ‘Facts and Figures: Aviation’, Transport 2000
http://www.transport2000.org.uk/factsandfigures/FactsGroup.asp?FactGroupID=15

10. Civil Aviation Authority Passenger Survey Report 2005, table 17, shows 44% of flights are taken by social groups A and B, 8% taken by social groups D and E.
http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/81/2005CAAPaxSurveyReport.pdf

According to the Market Research Society, approximate proportions of the population in the different social categories are: A – 3%, B – 20%, C1 – 28%, C2 – 21%, D – 18%, E – 10%
http://www.mrs.org.uk/publications/downloads/occgroups6.pdf

11. Friends of The Earth factsheet ‘Aviation: The Plane Truth’
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/factsheets/aviation_myths.pdf

12. Civil Aviation Authority Passenger Survey, 2005, table 16.4
http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/81/2005CAAPaxSurveyReport.pdf

13. Ipsos MORI poll, ‘Attitudes Towards Air Travel’, commissioned by pro-aviation lobby group Freedom To Fly, January 2002
http://www.ipsos-mori.com/polls/2001/freedomtofly.shtml

14. Delft Hydraulics in cooperation with Wetlands International and Alterra, December 2006.
http://www.wetlands.org/ckpp/news.aspx?ID=0d0b9dd8-bc61-499a-a939-0dad0fdb222d

15. ‘Feeding Cars, Not People’, George Monbiot, The Guardian, 22 Nov 2004.
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/11/23/feeding-cars-not-people/

His maths works like this: ‘Road transport in the United Kingdom consumes 37.6 million tonnes of petroleum products a year. The most productive oil crop which can be grown in this country is rape. The average yield is between 3 and 3.5 tonnes per hectare. One tonne of rapeseed produces 415 kilos of biodiesel. So every hectare of arable land could provide 1.45 tonnes of transport fuel. To run our cars and buses and lorries on biodiesel, in other words, would require 25.9m hectares. There are 5.7m in the United Kingdom.’

16. This was pointed out by the government’s own House of Commons Environmental Audit Committee, ‘Environmental Audit Third Report’, 10 March 2004.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200304/cmselect/cmenvaud/233/23305.htm

17. European airlines to trade emissions allowances’, New Scientist, 19 December 2006.
http://www.newscientisttech.com/channel/tech/aviation/dn10829-european-airlines-to-trade-emissions-allowances.html

18. ASA adjudication, 18 July 2007
http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_42885.htm

19. Aviation minister Gillian Merron, written answer to the House of Commons, 2 May 2007
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/cm070502/text/70502w0005.htm#07050264000373

20. ‘Aviation and global climate change’, ibid.
21. ‘Growth Scenarios for EU and UK Aviation: Contradictions With Climate Policy’, report produced for Friends of The Earth by Tyndall Centre for Climate Change, 16 April 2005
http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/reports/aviation_tyndall_research.pdf

22. Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, HM Treasury, October 2006, Executive Summary
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/4/3/Executive_Summary.pdf

23. Stern Review Report on the Economics of Climate Change, HM Treasury, October 2006, Chapter 13, p295
http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/media/A/2/Chapter_13_Towards_a_Goal_for_Climate-Change_Policy.pdf

24. Chris Mullin MP, House of Commons, 28 Nov 2002 (Chris Mullin was Aviation Minister from July 1999 to February 2001).
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo021128/debtext/21128-10.htm

Greenwash Exposed - Scottish and Southern Electricity

Alex Doherty — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 17:44:21 +0000

Scottish & Southern Energy’s salespeople claim SSE is the greenest electricity company (mind you, they also claimed there are no 100% renewable suppliers and that gas is a renewable power source)(1). At 8.4% renewable(2) they are the best of the big boys, but that’s really not saying much. They’re barely over the minimum threshold for the Renewables Obligation of 6.7% for 2006/07; it’s still over 90% brown power. And worse, SSE are suing the EU for an increase in their carbon emissions allowances(3).

What’s more, the amount of green they have is not due to any principled stand. When Britain’s state-owned electricity was broken up and privatised, SSE happened to buy up a load of dams, around 75% of the UK’s hydro capacity. SSE categorise this as renewable, and despite some new-build including the massive Shetland wind farm and some investment in microgeneration, it’s these old dams that have formed the basis of their claims to being green.

Under the UK government’s Renewables Obligation, electricity suppliers have to buy a set amount of their energy from renewable sources. They get Renewables Obligation Certificates to prove they’ve bought enough. Those who’ve bought too little renewable electricity can buy spare ROCs off suppliers who’ve bought above the threshold or else pay a fine (proceeds of this ‘buy-out’ fund get split among ROC holders).

The scheme was designed to encourage new-build renewables. By imposing a penalty on ‘brown’ energy supply and rewarding the supply of renewables, it should stimulate growth in the latter. But SSE saw the chance to pick up money for nothing.

Initially the government set the Renewables Obligation limit on hydro plants at production of 5 megawatts (4). Most of SSE’s hydro plants are above that level. After some lobbying by the industry, the government upped the threshold to 10MW(5). SSE’s James Martin lobbied the government for an increase to 30MW(6). This had nothing to do with any SSE commitment to renewables; they were just sniffing out free money for running their existing plants.

So, the Renewables Obligation was designed to encourage growth in new-build, yet it was being used to subsidise paid-for, profitable established plants 40 or 50 years old.

It got worse. When the government eventually decided to go no higher than 20MW for the Renewables Obligation, SSE cynically went round seven of their plants and reduced their capacity to under that threshold, cutting it by around 25%(7). In the precise opposite of what the Renewables Obligation was supposed to do, it led to SSE being subsidised for no new-build and a reduction in generation of renewable electricity!

This is what happens when a company exists not to maximise the amount of renewable energy generated but whose stated ‘core objective… is to deliver sustained real growth in the dividend payable to our shareholders’(8).

There are bigger environmental issues with dams. All but the very smallest have a system of dams and tunnels. They gather silt behind the dam wall, blocking the flow of nutrients and wildlife downstream. Over 45,000 hydroelectric dams have been built – averaging more than one a day last century – fragmenting many of the world’s major rivers. They are an environmental catastrophe in wildlife terms, but that’s not the half of it.

Despite what the government and SSE say, hydroelectric dams are not clean, green friends of the climate. The plant life they submerge decays without oxygen, so it gives off methane. For several years after the land is flooded all the immersed vegetation gives off a huge pulse of methane. Even after it subsides, methane production continues as seasonal drops in reservoir levels allow plants to grow which later get submerged. This is serious stuff – methane’s impact on the greenhouse effect is more than 20 times that of CO2.

So, for example, a study of the greenhouse effect emissions from the Curuá-Una dam in Brazil showed that, even more than a decade after filling, it was nearly four times worse than if the same amount of electricity had been generated from burning oil (9).

The effect varies widely from dam to dam; it is much worse in tropical areas where plant growth is more vigorous, and in reservoirs of new dams (where the entire lake floor is decaying plant matter). These factors don’t apply in Scotland. However, studies in temperate areas show that the greenhouse effect contribution is still significant; at best it appears a dam gives one-tenth of the greenhouse effect of generating the same power thermally (10).

The World Commission on Dams – despite being paid by the largest funder of dams the World Bank – said, ‘Greenhouse gases are emitted for decades from all dam reservoirs in the boreal and tropical regions for which measurements have been made. This is in contrast to the widespread assumption that such emissions are zero. There is no justification for claiming that hydroelectricity does not contribute significantly to global warming.’(11)

A spokesperson for SSE said, ‘we know some environmentalists have a problem with dams. But as far as we see it, it’s power from water running down hills. The water would still run down the hills even if there wasn’t a dam there. We think it’s the greenest form of electricity there is.’(12)

With modern environmental standards, large dams simply wouldn’t get planning permission. There are smaller scale, low impact hydro plants. Principled renewable electricity supplier Good Energy buys from several that are essentially glorified water wheels, and as they have no dam reservoir there isn’t the plant-growth methane issue. So, some small hydro can still be considered as genuinely environmentally friendly renewable energy.

But old hydroelectric dams are really not ‘the greenest form of electricity there is’. Saying so is nearly as absurd as SSE’s publicity claim that being on their Power2 green tariff means you can ‘beat global warming just by baking, clean up the environment just by vacuuming’ (13).

A more recent Power2 leaflet offered to plant six trees a year per customer to ‘balance out’ their gas and waste’s carbon emissions. Planting trees as carbon offsets is a complete fraud. The Advertising Standards Authority ruled that SSE’s leaflet claiming it would offset the emissions was unsubstantiated and untruthful (14).

Scottish & Southern Energy also offer a tariff called RSPB Energy, where they donate £10 per customer to the RSPB, and a further £5 a year thereafter. It costs about 5% more than normal electricity (15). Once again they claim to have come up with ‘the greenest electricity product in the UK’ (16). It proudly declares itself to be from environmentally friendly 100% renewable sources, but 90% of it is from methane-intensive large-scale hydro (17). The risible Power2 tariff, incidentally, is 100% large-scale hydro (18).

Instead of signing up to the RSPB tariff, you could stop funding climate criminals and donate your fiver directly (perhaps out of the 5% premium saved). At a paltry 10p a week to the RSPB, you’ve got to wonder whether customers on the tariff are giving more money to SSE’s lawyers suing the EU for greater carbon emission quotas.

Whichever, the climate change caused by SSE’s fossil and dam installations will surely be far worse for birdlife than any redress £5 a year can buy.

DEAR SCOTTISH AND SOUTHERN ELECTRICITY,

Please feel free to respond if you wish, by emailing me at George@TurnUpTheHeat.org. If you do, I’ll post your letter here.

References:

1. Conversation with Southern Electric door to door salesperson, Collin Green, Nottingham, 28 November 2006. Gas is apparently a renewable power source because ‘it won’t run out for thousands of years’. When it was suggested that he might be confused, the salesperson replied that environmental people are hypocritical ‘like those animal rights people who wear leather shoes’. At this point he was asked to leave.

2. Self-reported SSE figure, cited on http://www.electricityinfo.org/suppliers.php

3. ‘Five British firms to sue EC over CO2 allowances as price falls’, The Guardian, 13 May 2006. http://business.guardian.co.uk/story/0,,1773999,00.html

4. ‘New and Renewable Energy – Prospects for the 21st Century, Supporting Analysis’, p87. Department for Trade and Industry, May 1999

5. ‘New and Renewable Energy – Prospects for the 21st Century, Conclusions in response to the Public Consultation’, p9. Department for Trade and Industry, January 2000

6. James Martin, evidence given to House of Commons Select Committee on Science and Technology, (question 103), 21 March 2001. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/
cm200001/cmselect/cmsctech/291/1032103.htm

7. ‘Subsidies and Subterfuge’, p5-10. Scottish Wind Assessment Project, June 2005. http://www.swap.org.uk/subsidiesandsubterfuge.pdf

8. Corporate Responsibility introduction, SSE website. http://www.scottish-southern.co.uk/SSEInternet/index.aspx?rightColHeader…
=80&TierSlicer1_TSMenuTargetType=4&TierSlicer1_TSMenuID=6

9. ‘Do Hydroelectric Dams Mitigate Global Warming? The Case of Brazil’s Curuá-una Dam’, Philip M. Fearnside, Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, Volume 10, Number 4, October 2005. http://www.springerlink.com/content/fv188860m23w6w63/
fulltext.pdf

10. ‘Dams And Development’, p75. World Commission on Dams, November 2000 http://www.dams.org/report/contents.htm

11. ‘Raising a Stink’, New Scientist issue 2241, 3 June 2000 http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg16622410.300-raising-a-stink.html (paywalled: reproduced in full on WCD’s site http://www.dams.org/news_events/media50.htm )

12. ‘Green Electricity: Are You Being Conned?’, The Ecologist, June 2005 http://www.theecologist.org/archive_detail.asp?content_id=428

13. Intro Flash animation on home page of Power2 website http://www.thepower2.co.uk/(wy0ptl450ea03krokvry1055)/index.aspx

14. Advertising Standards Authority adjudication, 11 October 2006. http://www.asa.org.uk/asa/adjudications/Public/TF_ADJ_41817.htm

15. ‘Reality or Rhetoric: Green Tariffs for Domestic Customers’, p20. National Consumer Council, December 2006. http://www.ncc.org.uk/responsibleconsumption/green-tariffs.pdf

16. ‘Why Choose RSPB Energy?’, RSPB energy website. http://www.rspbenergy.co.uk/Home/Products/RSPB/
WhyChooseRSPB.aspx

17. ‘Reality or Rhetoric: Green Tariffs for Domestic Customers’, p20. ibid.

18. ibid.