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Reasons To Be Hopeful?

Tim Holmes — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 17:22:02 +0000

First the bad news. If we had thought the public debate on climate change had been firmly shifted from the basic “experts are divided” stage to the equally illusory but more propitious “it’s happening, but we’re dealing with it” phase, the public may have just given us a reality check. According to an Ipsos MORI poll, referenced in last sunday’s Observer, around 60% of people in Britain still believe that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change”, and another 40% “sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say”. Only a meagre 22% of the population seem to be aware of the current status of the scientific debate.

There are further serious obstacles when it comes to action to deal with the problem. There is widespread cynicism about green “stealth” taxes and regulation, also discerned in a recent poll for the Independent, which found over 70% of people unwilling to “pay higher taxes in order to fund projects to combat climate change … while two-thirds of Britons think the entire green agenda has been hijacked as a ploy to increase taxes.” Ipsos MORI similarly finds that “only 13%” believe their personal responses “should involve significant and radical lifestyle changes”.

What’s going wrong? I suspect there are a number of things. First has been the disgraceful acquiescence of British broadcast media in the agenda of denial industry, which seems to have had a clear impact on public opinion. British broadcasters, weaned on a notion of “impartiality” that favours powerful interests, just don’t seem able to stop themselves giving time to fraudsters, industry front-men and purveyors of sheer ignorance. We’ve seen it in last year’s “Great Global Warming Swindle” on Channel 4, a documentary surely as baseless and discredited as it’s possible for any broadcast to be, aired in line with specious conceptions of journalistic “balance”, and in spite its creators’ well-earned reputation as fraudsters; in the BBC’s decision to cave on “Planet Relief”, motivated by the very same notion of “impartiality”, the belief of at least one prominent editor that the “causes of climate change” represent “a matter of controversy”, and the helping hand of “Swindle” producer Martin Durkin; in the BBC’s impromptu festival of climate change denial, “Sceptics’ Week”; and in the efforts of blissfully ignorant media clowns like Richard Madeley, Peter Hitchens and (whisper it) Jeremy Clarkson to parade their ignorance as widely as possible – the list goes on, and on, even if among climatologists the debate concluded a decade and a half ago.

Among print media the record of the broadsheets is less than perfect. The Telegraph in particular has played its part in publicising Lord Monckton and Nigel Lawson’s quixotic struggles with reality, and recently gave prominent coverage to the re-vamped, Exxon-sponsored “Oregon petition”, signed by “31,000 scientists”, some of whom, when they exist, apparently even have PhDs. This overall standard of reporting led the late John Theobald and Marianne McKiggan, in a recent study of UK media coverage, to note that the “corporate mass media are, predominantly, still presenting human-induced climate change as a basic argument between “believers” and “unbelievers”. The debate is stalled at square one.”(1)

But one of the most serious culprits is without doubt Britain’s tabloid press. In a series of studies investigating how far the scientific consensus on climate change is reflected in US and UK media, Max Boykoff of Oxford’s Environmental Change Institute found that, between 2003 and 2006, there was a largely insignificant divergence from the scientific consensus in British broadsheets, while coverage also improved over time.(2) Among tabloids, on the other hand, Boykoff and Maria Mansfield found that “UK tabloid coverage significantly diverged throughout the study period from the scientific consensus that humans contribute to climate change”, failing to improve in line with the broadsheets. The Daily Mail had a particularly bad record – partly a result, Boykoff and Mansfield suggest, of “the politically conservative stance of the newspaper, where economic status quo and non-regulatory preferences routinely permeate the editorial pages”; as another study of UK broadsheets found, such “similar ideological constellations indeed shaped media representations of climate science and policy issues”. If such “ideological constellations” do play a key role, it is surely significant that the polls bear the clear mark of the “common-sense” economic libertarianism that characterises so much of the discourse of the tabloid and right-wing press.

The “smoking gun” here, however, is surely that socio-economic patterns linked to patterns of newspaper readership tally exactly with those noted in the UK tabloids study. According to Ipsos MORI,

“Those in social class AB, in affluent households, and also those with a university educated/professional qualification background all tend to be more concerned about climate change, back more government intervention and acknowledge a greater need for individual responsibility.

“Newspaper readership is also strongly implicated, with broadsheet readers – particularly those who read The Guardian, The Independent and The Times [the same three UK dailies examined in the broadsheets study] – significantly more likely to cite the environment as a key issue facing the country compared to those who read the mid market and tabloid press.”

Also precisely in line with Boykoff and Mansfield’s predictions is the apparent impact of the tabloids’ misleading coverage on public support for policies to deal with the problem. “Divergent UK tabloid newspaper coverage of anthropogenic climate change found in this study”, the authors note, “may diminish public support for concrete greenhouse gas mitigation programs when the time for behavioral change comes. … Specifically, as ongoing adherence to the journalistic norm of balanced reporting has contributed to a skewed public understanding of human contributions to climate change, it may continue to significantly contribute—along with other factors—to eventual public resistance to climate mitigation and adaptation plans in the UK.” Every word of this prediction seems to be coming true.

But there is another major culprit we ought to mention, and that is the government. The extraordinary blatancy with which it has continued to plough ahead with policies entirely at odds with its public rhetoric on climate change will undoubtedly, and not unreasonably, have bred cynicism among the public. But it is through the prism of popular economic libertarianism that this cynicism is likely to be expressed. Indeed this conclusion is echoed by Mike Childs of Friends of the Earth, cited in the Independent. “People do get cynical”, he suggests, “unless they see benefits. The Government is playing a dangerous game. They are using climate change to identify potential new taxes and revenues but the public aren’t seeing anything in return.” Ipsos MORI’s Phil Downing makes a similar observation: while green taxes are “backed by the public in principle”, people are “asking the question: where is the money going?” In the context of a government that is so clearly not serious about dealing with the problem, perhaps a reaction of profound cynicism should not surprise us.

Yet these latest polling results, while on the face of it shocking and demoralising, suggest some clear points of light. Indeed, one continual finding of recent research has been that media reporting on public opinion consistently exaggerates its right-leaning components, both through selective choice of questions (something Anthony Barnett points to over the recent, widely-covered and apparently influential polling on the issue of 42 days’ detention) and selective reporting of results. Since a great deal goes unreported, and what is covered is often hopelessly skewed, we need to exercise a good deal of caution in assessing the implications of such polls.

Poll results published in May, for instance, provide a potentially illuminating contrast with the most recent results. According to this poll, “a majority of voters believe local councils should force their residents to take action on climate change”; “56% of respondents thought that councils should force people to take action on climate change while 33% did not. 64% of respondents also felt that local authorities should introduce financial incentive schemes to encourage people to reduce greenhouse gases, and 53% felt councils should also introduce penalty schemes for residents who do not act”; a “large majority of respondents – 74% – believe climate change is happening and can be attributed directly to greenhouse gas emissions resulting from human activity” (my emphasis); and “61% of people would be likely to vote for a candidate” in general elections “that had policies to combat climate change”.

It is also worth remembering that a poll taken a year ago by Ipsos MORI found similar results to those of its most recent survey on the status of the scientific debate, also finding 70% support for government taking a lead on the issue, “even if it means using the law to change people’s behaviour”, and 78% “willing to do more and go further”. Since then, poll results from last September found 78% of people in Britain believing “human activity IS a significant cause” of climate change, and 70% that it is “necessary to take major steps very soon” to deal with it”; a poll in November found 81% “ready to make significant changes to the way I live to help prevent global warming or climate change”, and even 76% in favour of higher energy taxes (including 22% conditional on revenues being used to fund clean or efficient energy sources). One obvious conclusion seems to be that, when asked whether climate change is happening, people in the UK overwhelmingly reply that it is, and clearly favour government-led action to deal with it. When asked about the opinions of climate scientists, on the other hand – perhaps influenced by the media-endorsed framing of duelling scientific “experts” the question evokes – they are far more likely to convey a picture of division, uncertainty and ongoing debate.

It’s also worth noting just how far reporting of the most recent poll, troubling as it is, has taken one particular interpretation and portrayed it simply as fact. The precise scope of “many scientific experts” leaves significant room for ambiguity over their number, and their significance in the (perceived) debate; reporting in the Observer, therefore, that the “majority of the British public is still not convinced that climate change is caused by humans” remains unproven by this poll, and as we have seen, is actually contradicted by other recent polls in which the question is posed directly and unambiguously. Similarly, the poll simply does not demonstrate, as the Observer suggests, that “many” people “believe scientists are exaggerating the problem” – in fact the question is not even posed. The question that is posed – “I sometimes think climate change might not be as bad as people say” – refers only to “people”, not to scientists. To put this in perspective, similar sentiments have in fact been expressed by members of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, leading Oxford climate scientist Myles Allen and NASA’s Gavin Schmidt, who can hardly be accused of not taking the problem seriously.

Even in the most recent Ipsos MORI poll, indeed, 77% of people “still professed to be concerned about climate change”, and 68% “want the government to do more” about it (suggesting that its list of questions on specifically individual responsibility may be a red herring). Similarly, a robust majority of 59% want more investment in renewables, “even if it increases the price of energy bills”. This finding has been replicated again and again in polls of the British public. One Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology research paper published last October, reviewing 23 recent polls and studies on public attitudes and energy policy, found “a high level of awareness of the connection between fossil fuel sources of energy and environmental problems such as climate change”; “very low levels of public support for the use of fossil fuels”; “high levels of concern about the possibility of using up finite resources”; and that “[s]ecurity of supply is a key issue and of growing concern.” Moreover, “all the reviewed polls and studies showed that renewable energy was the public’s preferred energy source”; people “were aware of the potential environmental benefits of renewable energy and recognised it as being important for climate change mitigation”; and “[t]ypically around three quarters of respondents expressed a preference for renewables over nuclear energy”.

Unfortunately if unsurprisingly, after a recent high point last year following the release of the Stern and IPCC reports, “the environment” has now been displaced by “the economy” as a more important issue in the public mind. Clearly this is not encouraging, but nor is it necessarily quite as bad as it looks. In a YouGov poll in May, a majority of 53% blamed “[i]nternational conditions, such as the credit crunch and rising oil and world food prices” for “Britain’s current economic difficulties”. On oil specifically, a WPO poll in April found 85% of people foreseeing a higher oil price in the next ten years (including 58% who see it getting “much higher”), and the same percentage believe that “[o]il is running out and it is necessary to make a major effort to replace oil as a primary source of energy”.

Overall, then, the public are concerned about the economy, which they connect at least partly to the price of oil; there is widespread understanding that the oil price is likely to keep climbing; public support for renewable sources of energy is strong and consistent, as is opposition to fossil fuels; there is a very strong willingness to replace our dependence on oil – linked to issues of depletion, sustainability, security of supply, and the environment; and the public consistently want the government to take a lead and do more on climate change. It is not too difficult to conceive of ways in which these widely-held attitudes can be translated into gains for climate campaigners. If the economy is foremost in the public mind, the issue of its precarious foundation on fossil fuels may be the key to reconnecting public concern with sustainability and environmental issues, especially if we are able to point to clear, positive alternatives. But media campaigners may also have an important task ahead, which is to start taking the tabloid press (along with papers like the Telegraph) a lot more seriously. Good use of the Press Complaints Commission in particular, as Climate Campers demonstrated in the case of the Evening Standard, can be very effective in exposing misleading and inaccurate reportage. Nonetheless, time is short, and serious obstacles remain to be overcome.

References:

1. John Theobald and Marianne McKiggan, “The Mass Media, Climate Change, and How Things Might Be”, in David Cromwell and Mark Levene (eds), Surviving Climate Change: The Struggle to Avert Global Catastrophe, London: Pluto, 2007, pp. 158-175.

2. It is worth noting this study’s slant towards the “liberal” end of the mainstream spectrum, however – four of its six sample papers (The Guardian, Observer, Independent, Independent on Sunday, Times and Sunday Times) are “liberal” papers, and it significantly excludes the Telegraph, Britain’s highest-selling broadsheet.

After the oil crunch?

Tim Holmes — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 03:29:34 +0000

There are two competing explanations for today’s high oil prices. One sees the price rise as the result of a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, exacerbated by a weak dollar and a bubble of speculative commodities trading. Fix these problems, adherents suggest, and the price can return to previous low levels, allowing business to continue as usual. The other sees the current price spike as symptomatic of a much deeper crisis, one that could end life as we know it in the rich, consuming west as global supplies of cheap oil begin to run short, not temporarily, but for ever. As Chris Skrebowski, editor of the UK Petroleum Review, puts it: “This is what I would describe as the foothills of peak oil.” An imminent oil peak is no longer just a fringe theory: increasing numbers of experts view the topping out point as very close, if not actually upon us. “Easy, cheap oil is over, peak oil is looming,” warns Shokri Ghanem, head of Libya’s National Oil Corporation. If they are right, we are about to move into a very different world.

But while the reality of global warming is now nearly universally accepted, the potential problem of peak oil is still widely doubted or ignored. There is no official policy for a smooth transition to a post-oil future; the British government blithely reassures us (in response to a peak oil petition on the No 10 website) that “the world’s oil and gas resources are sufficient to sustain economic growth for the forseeable future”. Both the International Energy Agency and the US government issue projections based on oil reserve estimates which many geologists and oil industry insiders suggest are grossly inflated. This complacency smacks of a fatal combination of ignorance and denial. Recent oil production figures suggest that the peak oil crowd is winning the debate. For the past three years world crude production has flatlined at about 86 million barrels per day, despite a rapid upward trend in prices. This lack of increase in supply, combined with rapidly rising demand in countries such as India, China and Brazil, lies at the root of today’s soaring prices.

Unlike the oil price shocks of the 1970s, caused by political factors, the present crisis is caused by something far more intractable even than the Middle East conflict – geology. David Strahan calls this “the last oil shock” in his book of the same title; the one after which supply and demand can never be rebalanced and the world totters towards economic catastrophe. As Strahan points out: “For three years the oil supply has been a zero-sum game in which if one country consumes more, another has to consume less.”

In this case, unusually, it is the rich world which is losing out: countries which are members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have seen crude oil use falling for two years, as price rises choke off demand. Indeed, what we do here no longer seems to matter much: car sales in Russia leapt by a staggering 60 per cent last year, while new vehicles flooded the roads in India and China. With oil massively subsidised in many Opec countries, some of the strongest growth in demand is now coming from oil producers themselves. Whether the actual moment of peak oil is now, next year or in five years’ time is not what matters most; what defines this new era is the conclusive end of cheap oil. Never again will oil be bought at $20 a barrel, as it was through much of the 1990s. Instead, we will see crude prices rising steadily – if not uniformly – towards $200, $300 and $400 a barrel in years to come.

The oil crunch has created a crisis for western leaders. George Bush made two humiliating trips to Riyadh to beg the Saudis to pump more. He was rebuffed: whether the Saudis can’t or won’t remains unclear. In France, President Sarkozy has had to contend with striking fishermen, and in Britain the hauliers are blocking roads and refineries once again. Gordon Brown’s absurd response was to ask North Sea producers to increase output – despite the fact that offshore production peaked in 1999 and has since fallen by 40 per cent. The hauliers’ protests have now spread to France and Spain. All seem to believe that the rising cost of energy should be borne by someone else, not them. They huff and puff to no avail – the rules of geology cannot be broken.

But peak oil may not be quite the crisis the catastrophists predict. So far, the price hike has been an environmental boon: the rise in fossil fuel prices has made emitting carbon more expensive, helping to make up for the more or less total failure of world climate change policymaking. Higher oil prices have made renewables more competitive, spurring rapid developments in wind and solar power: installed capacities of each are now doubling every two years. In the US, SUV sales have slumped – General Motors may now drop t he Hummer and focus production instead on its new plug-in electric hybrid model, the Chevrolet Volt. The aviation industry has seen its profits evaporate, with many analysts declaring that the era of cheap flights is over. All of these should be causes for celebration. In global warming terms, oil at $139 a barrel has been the best thing to happen for a decade.

Betting on failure

But high oil prices cannot substitute for proper carbon regulation indefinitely. Even as the “green tech” sector soars to new heights – $100bn flooded in last year – equally big investments are being ploughed into the dirtiest fuels of all: unconventional oil and coal. An upcoming report from the WWF and the Co-operative Insurance Society suggests that oil sands in Canada are three times as carbon-intensive as conventional oil, while oil shale in the US Rockies may be up to eight times more so. And these reserves are vast, estimated at 1.7 trillion barrels for Canadian oil sands and up to 1.5 billion barrels for US oil shale. Proven reserves of 174 billion barrels in Canada place the country second only to Saudi Arabia, which claims 260 billion barrels.

But extracting this oil is environmentally devastating. Some open-cast mines in Canada’s oil sands are so huge they can be seen from space, and they have already laid waste to vast areas of fragile boreal forest. This is not oil that can be drilled easily out of the ground: each barrel requires the extraction of two tonnes of tar-soaked sand, which is then washed with hot water to remove the hydrocarbons, using both gas and water in massive quantities. Current operations use enough natural gas to heat a quarter of Canada’s homes, according to the WWF/CIS report, while 300 million cubic metres of water are diverted from the nearby Athabasca river. Ponds to hold the resulting toxic sludge measure up to 50 sq km each.

Coal-to-liquids technology is also being ramped up worldwide, using the Fischer- Tropsch chemical process to produce synthetic petrol, diesel and kerosene from solid coal – but again this is vastly more carbon-intensive than pumping conventional oil, doubling CO2 emissions. The Economist suggests both oil shale and coal to liquids become competitive with world crude prices at $70 a barrel or above. With high prices likely to continue, all the majors are moving rapidly to invest in this area.

Even after making record profits on the back of high prices – $27bn for Shell and $40bn for Exxon-Mobil in 2007 – the evidence suggests that oil companies are moving away from renewables and instead “recarbonising” by ploughing billions into unconventional oil as they run down their conventional reserves. In May this year, Shell pulled out of the London Array, expected to be the world’s biggest wind farm. Instead, the company plans to double its output from the Canadian oil sands, and is being closely followed in investing in unconventional oil by BP, Exxon-Mobil and ConocoPhillips. However, as the WWF report asserts, these companies are exposing their shareholders to a significant investor risk: essentially they are betting that world policy failure on greenhouse-gas regulation will continue indefinitely.

If policy improves, high carbon prices will likely make dirty fuels uncompetitive when compared with renewables, and investors in solar, wind and other clean energy sources will win out at the expense of the oil majors. This has to be the best-case environmental scenario: that high oil prices continue, and that the pricing of carbon in world markets chokes off investment in dirty replacements. Then a true transition to a post-oil, low-carbon future becomes a real possibility. But this scenario depends on policymakers having the vision to squeeze fossil fuels further even as restive populations protest at losing their foreign holidays and big cars. As David Strahan concludes: “All it needs is some brave political leadership. What a terrifying thought.”

What we need is a new dawn

Ellie Keen — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 23:02:06 +0000

Gordon Brown’s apparent decision to build more nuclear power stations because fuel prices are going through the roof is bizarre. It takes 15-20 years to build a nuclear power station. Hard-pressed hauliers and the fuel poor cannot wait that long. Nuclear power is irrelevant to addressing the present cost of fuel. And it can do next to nothing to ease the cost of heating homes.

Rising oil prices are already significantly reducing car and plane use. For home heating, the sensible way to proceed is by a rapid shift to domestic renewable energy: solar, wind-power, air or ground heat pumps, biomass (wood-burning boilers) and micro-generation. Germany is already proving the huge success of this policy through feed-in tariffs which enable families to generate their own energy and sell on any excess to the national grid at a profit.

Sadly, the British Government has turned its back on such ideas because it is committed to industrial vested interests. We hear a lot about empowering the consumer, but where this would really count – with decentralised energy systems – the fossil fuel and nuclear industries have the inside track.

This is not the only example of Government prejudices holding back desperately needed changes. In the current turmoil in financial markets, as the crisis broke and it became clear that City trading in near-worthless financial derivatives or “structured investment vehicles” had been a major ingredient in the collapse, it was decided there would be no change in light-touch regulation.

No committee of inquiry would be set up to deal with the rottenness of the financial system. Despite the toxic mix of poor accounting transparency, risk-laden financial products, evasive offshore operations, weak banking regulation and a gross lack of public accountability, a return to business-as-usual (if that were possible) was judged better than cleaning out the Augean stables.

As far as housing is concerned, the shortage of social, affordable housing has reached crisis levels. There are 1,634,000 households on the waiting list in 2004, according to the latest available data. The actual figure is probably nearer two million. In addition, nearly 100,000 households are registered homeless. Yet virtually no council houses have been built over the past 10 years.

Local authorities get no grant from the Government for house-building and are forbidden to borrow on the open market against the security of their housing stock to fund the tens of thousands of affordable houses for rent that are needed. However, housing associations are permitted to borrow on the market, to an extent equal to their grant from the Government, so that their house-building is doubled. Making a political point against council housing because of an obsession with owner occupation is wholly unacceptable.

If council tenants want their homes to be repaired and modernised, they have been required to vote in a ballot either to be transferred to a private landlord, a housing association or a so-called arm’s length management organisation. If they reject these options and opt to stay with the council, their homes have simply been left to deteriorate.

This is about ideology, not meeting housing need. Are ministers oblivious to the needs of the quarter of the population with the lowest incomes who do not have the wage levels or the regularity of employment to afford owner-occupation when mortgage debt to income is now on a six-to-one ratio or even higher?

Some people are rather better off. The chief executives of the FTSE 100 companies now take home on average more than £71,000 a week. Meanwhile, employees in their companies on the minimum wage take home £200 a week – 350 times less. Like other bosses before him who brought down their companies, Adam Applegarth was able to walk away from Northern Rock with a golden goodbye (£760,000 in his case), while hundreds of jobs could be lost in the north-East of England with little or no compensation.

Non-domicile tax refugees, many of them millionaires, are untroubled by the Inland Revenue because taxing the rich is a reminder of the bad old days. The Treasury has even retreated from the minimalist proposals on non-doms.

The fiasco over the abolition of the 10p tax band has still not been properly rectified. Alistair Darling’s compensation scheme, which still leaves 1.1 million of the 5.3 million losers worse off, comes to an end after one year. What is needed is not a bit more tax credit adjustment, but the re-introduction of the 10p tax rate with the £6.6 billion cost funded by redistribution from the richest 5 per cent in society with incomes over £150,000 whose wealth has quadrupled under this Government.

The enthusiasm for the private sector in all things has led to more problems. Through 1997-2002, the public accounts were in surplus. However, instead of the huge public rebuilding programme being financed cheaply via the Public Works Loan Board, the decision was made to hand over the construction and management of new hospitals, schools, roads and prisons to Private Finance Initiative schemes. This is a distinctly “unsound money” policy – top-slicing public expenditure for 30-50 years ahead, pushing a number of health trusts into bankruptcy and opening up re-financing scams offering even bigger profit rake-offs. And it has been pushed through with future liabilities for the public purse of more than £100 billion, even though many surveys have found that the PFI does not generally offer the best value for money.

The poorest in our society are probably more vulnerable now than at any time for a century and workers can still be arbitrarily dismissed in their first year of employment without any rights. Yet the Government continues to restrict trade union rights. Nor will it implement the European Union’s Charter of Fundamental Rights for all citizens, which all the other 26 EU member states have accepted without demur. The charter bans excessive working hours (British workers work longer hours per week than anyone else in Europe) and would allow secondary action in industrial disputes (which is not an issue anywhere else in Europe).

It’s not Gordon Brown’s leadership that’s the problem. It’s the policies that have alienated Labour’s core vote. Changing the leader will alter little unless the policies are altered in a manner to convince those voters Labour is now fully on their side.

Michael Meacher is Labour MP for Oldham West and Royton and a former environment minister

Political will is a renewable resource

tim — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:07:53 +0000

You may have seen the ads – enough to make any football fan’s blood boil: “Germany 200, England 1”. No, this was not a report from the World Cup qualifiers, it was a straightforward calculation of how much further forward Germany is in implementing the clean-energy revolution. Germany has 200 times more solar power installed than the UK – and this is not because Germany gets any more sun. The difference is down to a simple piece of legislation called a “feed-in tariff”, which a coalition of environment groups and other campaigners is pressing the British government to adopt.

As this article went to press, a new Energy Bill was being debated in the Commons. Yet it seemed unlikely that the energy minister, Malcolm Wicks, would allow a cross-party amendment to introduce a feed-in tariff, even though 276 MPs have now signed up to an early-day motion supporting such a move. As Friends of the Earth’s Dave Timms says: “The UK’s feeble performance on renewable energy is a national disgrace. If we want families and businesses to tackle climate change by investing in clean technologies such as solar panels for their homes and offices they must get a guaranteed premium payment for all the renewable energy they generate.”

The feed-in tariff owes its success to this very simplicity: all it does is mandate that electricity companies must buy renewably generated power at a substantial premium, and must continue to do so for at least 20 years. This makes investing in renewables much cheaper, because investors are guaranteed a premium-rate payback over a long time period. Countries which have introduced feed-in tariff laws, such as Spain, Italy and Germany, have seen their renewable power sectors boom. Meanwhile Britain languishes at the very bottom of the European clean-energy league.

Every year that passes without a feed-in tariff law represents a huge missed opportunity for this country. Germany’s renewables sector employs 250,000 people, and had a turnover of 24.6bn Euros (£19.4bn) last year. The country is the world’s number-one producer of solar panels, putting it in prime position to be the manufacturing powerhouse – with China at number two – of the clean energy revolution that transforms our energy systems as the world moves towards a low-carbon economy.

Under the Germans’ approach, 13 per cent of their electricity comes from renewable sources, as opposed to a mere 5 per cent in the UK. And it is not just solar: Germany has ten times our installed wind-generating capacity, too. Portugal and Spain, despite having much less wind resource than the UK, have already shot past us in the clean energy race thanks to feed-in tariff laws.

The government does have a policy to increase renewables generation – it just doesn’t work very well. Instead of guaranteeing a good price for clean energy over a long time period, Britain has a system of tradable “renewables obligation” certificates, which energy generators can buy and sell between themselves to ensure that they reach a government-mandated target. The system is cumbersome and allows only the large-scale players to make a profit – which is why the feed-in tariff is so important if household solar panels and other microgeneration technologies are ever really to take off. (This is particularly true now that the government has cut installation grants for domestic microgeneration.)

Hermann Scheer, the German MP who pioneered feed-in tariff law, complains the British system is “too bureaucratic”. Instead of helping shift “power to the people” so that everyone with a roof can generate their own electricity at home, the government’s policy seems designed to protect only the big energy suppliers, he says.

One of the objections is cost: higher prices are eventually passed on to consumers in the form of higher bills. But as Scheer says: “Each household pays 24 Euros [£19] a year more due to the feed-in tariff law.” With 250,000 new renewable energy jobs, he jokes, “it is the cheapest job-creation programme ever”. The price also seems a bargain compared to the costs of climate change, not to mention the problems of depending on rapidly depleting imported oil and gas supplies. So what is lacking to make this happen in Britain? Just political will – and as Al Gore is fond of remarking: “Political will is a renewable resource.”

Protest exposes ‘black hole’ in climate change policy

The Staff — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 15:58:41 +0000

from The Coal Hole:

Tuesday, 1st April, 2008: At the finale of today’s occupation of Ffos-y-Fran opencast coal mine, Merthyr Tydfil, south Wales, a group of protesters unfurled a 36 metre banner across the main building stating “Coal: the black hole in UK climate policy.” Thirty-six metres is the distance between the mine and local residents’ homes.

Protesters occupied the mine since 6am this morning, barricading the main entrance to the site, climbing on the roof of the coal washery and chaining themselves to machinery. The action halted work at the mine, one of the biggest in the country, before protesters left this afternoon.

Protester Esther Tew, who sat on top of an eight metre high Komatsu digger for most of the day, said: “We just want the Government to take its own climate policies seriously. By supporting opencast mining at Ffos-y-Fran and encouraging the building of new coal power stations, Gordon Brown is undermining any chance the UK has of making the 60% cuts in emissions the Government is currently committing to, let alone the 80% target the climate change committee is likely to recommend at the end of the year.”

The protest at the Ffos-y-Fran site highlights the hypocrisy of the UK Government, which claims to be taking climate change seriously while approving new coal mines and coal-fired power stations.

Coal has the biggest climate impact of any fuel – despite opposition from the world’s leading scientists, the Government is supporting an outdated and dangerous technology that has no future.

Local residents have opposed the scheme for many years, and invited protesters to Merthyr last December to support their campaign. In England and Scotland, the scheme would have been rejected due to legislation requiring a 500 metre buffer zone between opencast mines and residential areas.

As the team leave the mine for the pub after a hard day’s work, others around the world are picking up their banners and getting ready to expose the ‘fossil fools’ making a mockery of climate change policy. In the US there are at least 100 ‘Fossil Fools’ protests planned later today.

A short film of the action is also available from VisionOnTV.

Kill King Coal

Tim Holmes — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 19:04:25 +0000

Everyone should be concerned that the UK’s energy department wants new coal plants. Gordon Brown must intervene urgently to halt these plans. He must ensure new coal plants are not built on his watch without their carbon captured from the outset.

Reserves are hotly debated, but we know that enough oil and gas remain to take global warming close to, if not into, the realm of dangerous climate effects. But coal contains enough carbon to produce a vastly different planet altogether – a more dangerous and desolate planet from the one on which civilisation developed. Our climate is near critical tipping points that could lead to loss of all summer sea ice in the Arctic – with detrimental effects on wildlife, the beginning of ice sheet disintegration in West Antarctica and Greenland and a progressive, unstoppable global sea level rise. The shifting of climatic zones will lead to the extermination of many animal and plant species, the reduction of freshwater supplies for hundreds of millions of people, and a more intense hydrologic cycle with stronger droughts and forest fires, but heavier rains and floods. Stronger storms will be driven by latent heat, including tropical storms, tornados and thunderstorms.

Coal caused fully half of the fossil fuel increase of carbon dioxide in the air today, and on the long run coal has the potential to be an even greater source of CO2. Due to its dominant role, agreement to phase out coal, except where the CO2 is captured, is 80% of the solution to the global warming crisis. Of course, it is a tall order. Yet it is doable – compare that task with the efforts and sacrifices that went into the second world war.

If the west makes a firm commitment to this course, we can begin discussing the problem with developing countries. Given the potential of technology assistance, the growing grasp of the likely effects of climate change, and leverage that global trade gives us, securing the cooperation of developing countries is entirely feasible.

Great Britain, the US and Germany have contributed most to fossil fuel CO2 in the air today, on a per-capita basis. This is not an attempt to cast blame. It merely recognises the early industrial development in these countries, and points to our responsibility to lead in finding a solution to global warming.

Energy departments, influenced by fossil fuel interests, take it as a God-given fact that we will extract all fossil fuels from the ground and burn them before we move on to other ways of producing usable energy. The public is capable of changing this course dictated by fossil fuel interests, but clear-sighted leadership is needed now if the actions are to be achieved.

Can we find a country that will place a moratorium on any new coal-fired power plants unless they capture and store the CO2? Unless this happens soon, there is little hope of avoiding the climate tipping points, with all that implies for life on this planet.

E.ON Should Be Turned Off

Tim Holmes — Fri, 04 Jan 2008 11:35:32 +0000

Just before Christmas one of the world’s leading climate scientists wrote to Gordon Brown. Jim Hansen, who heads up the NASA Goddard institute in New York, is best known both for his research in the field of climatology and for his congressional testimony on climate change that helped raise broad awareness of the global warming issue.

In the letter (pdf), he makes a plea to our prime minister. “Your leadership is needed”, Hansen states, “on a matter concerning coal-fired power plants in your country, a matter with ramifications for life on our planet, including all species. Prospects for today’s children, and especially the world’s poor, hinge upon our success in stabilizing climate.” Hansen goes on to remind Brown that coal has caused “fully half of the fossil fuel increase of carbon dioxide in the air today”.

Last night the Conservative controlled Medway council in Kent, which unlike the Queen was not cc’d in to Hansen’s letter, approved plans for Britain’s first coal-fired power station in over 30 years. The plant will emit more than eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide every single year – more than the 30 least polluting nations of the planet combined. Its developer, the power company E.ON, is the single largest polluter in Britain.

E.ON and the other power giants are trying to blur the edges of what should be a simple black and white argument by talking about “clean coal” technology. This myth needs to be addressed. Clean coal, carbon storage, sequestration – all these terms are jargon, mythologising an untested, expensive and potentially unviable future process. No clean coal plants are operational anywhere in the world today, all the technologies have serious question marks hanging over them, and even the chancellor admits the techniques “may never work”. Meanwhile, those eight million tonnes of carbon dioxide are pumped into the atmosphere each year, every year. And if E.ON get their way, there will be many more coal plants to follow.

But there is an alternative. John Hutton announced last month that Britain could generate around half of Britain’s electricity from offshore wind farms by 2020 – easily negating the need for new coal. With efficiency, renewables and a radical new decentralised energy system we could slash our emissions within just a few years. Instead it seems that this government, in thrall to an outdated civil service, is convinced that large centralised plants are the only grown-up way of keeping the lights on, regardless of the consequences for our climate.

Hansen’s letter continues. “You have the potential to influence the future of the planet. Prime Minister Brown, we cannot avert our eyes from he basic fossil fuel facts, or the consequences for life on our planet of ignoring these fossil fuel facts. If we continue to build coal-fired power plants without carbon capture, we will lock in future climate disasters associated with passing climate tipping points.” Coming from a top scientist, this kind of stark language is remarkable. Let’s listen to the scientists, not the industry spinners. Kingsnorth may be the most important climate change decision that Gordon Brown will have to make, but it should not be a difficult one.

Good, But Not Good Enough

The Staff — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 18:44:27 +0000

from zerocarbonbritain:

Energy Secretary John Huttton MP has announced a massive drive for offshore wind power, providing all the electricity for Britain’s homes by 2020.

The Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT) applauds the government for recognising the urgency of climate change and the potential of offshore wind farms in Britain’s future energy mix.

In its zerocarbonbritain report released earlier this year, CAT detailed how the UK could generate all its energy from renewable sources by 2027, meeting around 50% of this demand with offshore wind farms.

This would require approximately 140 offshore wind farms the size of the 1GW London Array spread out around our 8,000 mile coastline. This is more than four times the Government’s proposed 33GW from offshore wind.

Zerocarbonbritain details the policies and technologies that could reduce our emissions from fossil fuels to zero within 20 years. The report demonstrated how we could reduce our energy use by 50% through energy efficiency measures, then deploying a wide range of renewable energy technologies to meet the reduced demand.

“Crucially, we need to reduce our energy demand significantly in the first place,” CAT Engineering Consultant David Hood said. “The government plans to produce 20% of our energy from renewable sources by 2020 – but if we used energy more efficiently, we could produce around 40% of our total energy needs from renewables by this date, en route to becoming 100% renewable by 2027.

“Reaching zero carbon emissions is now clearly a scientific necessity; this report shows that doing so is technically possible – it now needs to become socially and politically thinkable,” he said.

On top of the offshore energy provision, approximately 30% of electricity would come from marine technologies such as tidal and wave power, and the rest from a mix of biomass-fuelled combined heat and power (CHP), building-integrated photovoltaic panels, onshore wind turbines and hydroelectric schemes. Heat could come from CHP, solar thermal, ground-source heat pumps, biomass and efficient electric systems.

Balancing a completely renewably-powered is the biggest engineering challenge for a fossil fuel-free Britain – but there are many emerging technologies detailed in the report which can solve this problem.

Following the success of zerocarbonbritain, CAT (in collaboration with the Public Interest Research Centre) is planning a Europe-wide zero-carbon energy strategy, mapping out a pathway to show how the entire EU could rapidly decarbonise – watch this space for zerocarboneurope!

The Tip of the Iceberg

Tim Holmes — Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:22:11 +0000

The news that the UK intends to file a claim for sovereignty over the seabed adjacent to its Antarctic territorial claim will significantly change the way we think about Antarctica. When the original 12 signatories signed the Antarctic treaty nearly 50 years ago, they agreed to put their territorial claims over the remote continent into abeyance. This was a major geopolitical milestone. The international agreement stated that the interests of individual nations should come second to preserving Antarctica as a common heritage for all countries. So, even at the height of the cold war, the idea of Antarctica as a demilitarised continent dedicated to science in a spirit of international cooperation was born.

But the high seas surrounding Antarctica, technically speaking, lie outside the bounded land of the Antarctic continent and are therefore subject to the UN convention on the law of the sea treaty (UNCLOS), which was signed in 1982. Whether the seabed will be considered as an extension of the land and therefore subject to the Antarctic treaty, which covers territory south of 60 degrees, or whether it will be treated as part of the high seas and governed by the law of the sea remains to be seen. Britain and Australia (which has signalled its intention to register a similar Antarctic claim) appear to believe that the law of the sea will take precedence in seabed disputes. Created under the aegis of UNCLOS, the International Seabed Authority (1994) enables states to register territorial claims to sovereignty over their continental shelves. Shelves come in all shapes and sizes. Some go well beyond the recognised 200-mile exclusive economic zones, and can therefore be critical for accessing greater resource rights.

Why is this happening now? The answer, in a word, is energy. The world’s largest economies, including the UK, are seeking new supplies of energy away from the instability of the Middle East, without wanting to depend on the whim of Russia. The ocean seabed is a resource frontier with immense mineral wealth. Take, for example, the remote Falkland Islands, seen in the past by the British government as a problem rather than an opportunity. If we cast our minds back to our school geography, we recall how Africa and South America once fitted together as a single landmass before drifting apart. A more careful examination of the Atlantic Ocean basin reveals that the Falkland Islands and Ascension Island are merely the tip of the iceberg. Beneath the ocean surface is an undersea plateau bridging the east of the Atlantic Ocean to the west, linking the oil-rich black shale deposits off the coast of Angola to those of Brazil. The UK government is betting that the sub-oceanic shelf contains mineral deposits (as well as fishing licence revenues) could help Britain heat its homes, fuel its cars, and power its industries in coming decades.

The UK government’s intention to lay claim to a section of the Antarctic shelf signals an expansionist phase in its South Atlantic foreign policy. The British sector of Antarctica belongs to the same geographical imagination as its other Atlantic colonial outposts at Ascension and the Falklands. The UK claim in effect imposes a southward extension of its economic self-interest. Whereas UK interests have until now been aligned with discourses of scientific cooperation and conservation, staking a claim to the Antarctic sea bed sends out a clear signal that the currency of Antarctic internationalism is being devalued, or at least limited to the land.

The UK’s decision is a calculated response to the recent Russian declaration of sovereignty over the North Pole basin. Russia sent out a submarine to plant a flag at the North Pole on the ocean floor in the vicinity of the Lomonosov Ridge that connects the Arctic shelves of Russia and Canada. National approaches differ. Many thought the Russian flag-planting unnecessarily theatrical, echoing an overtly imperialist Soviet tradition. By contrast, the British Foreign Office, anticipating that other Antarctic signatories may soon make similar claims, will hope that the UK is given credit for abiding by international law and following the formal procedures of the International Seabed Authority.

Expect a sharp backlash and a storm of criticism as this story travels quickly around the world. Critics will draw parallels in Britain’s geopolitical stance between the race for the Antarctic seabed and the heroic race for the South Pole, resonant with images of British imperialism. Argentina and Chile will interpret it as a repudiation of the Antarctic treaty itself, because the British claim to the seabed shelf only makes sense in relation to the force of our claim to territory on the adjacent Antarctic landmass. For that reason, British foreign policy will be seen to be riding roughshod over the interests of other Antarctic stakeholders.

Conservation organisations will see this as nothing short of a disaster. They will say it undermines the trust necessary to advance environmental governance – and they will have a strong case if they argue that the British action damages the very fabric of the Antarctic treaty, reversing the principle of putting science and the common good before national interests. Some years may pass before the Antarctic seabed claim and counter-claims are adjudicated, but two consequences will be felt much more immediately. The decision to make a claim will inflict serious damage on Britain’s much cherished reputation as a privileged defender of the forgotten continent. Pushing the national interest in this way will turn up the geopolitical temperature and heighten the anxieties of other states and stakeholders in the polar regions.

The New Coal Age

Tim Holmes — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:24:21 +0000

As I watched the machine scraping away the first buckets of soil, one thought kept clanging through my head. “If this is allowed to happen, we might as well give up now”. It didn’t look like much: just a yellow digger and a couple of trucks taking the earth away. But in a secure compound behind me were the heaviest beasts I have ever seen – 1300 horsepower or more – lined up and ready to start digging the one of the largest opencast coalmines in Europe. In Romania perhaps? The Czech republic? On a hilltop in south Wales. The diggers at Ffos-y-fran, on the outskirts of Merthyr Tydfil, will excavate 1000 acres of land to a depth of 600 feet. There has never been a hole quite like it here, and our government’s climate change policies are about to fall into it.

Everything about this scheme is odd. The edge of the site is just 36 metres from the nearest homes, yet there will be no compensation for the owners, and their concerns have been dismissed by the authorities. Though local people have fought the plan, their council, the Welsh government and the Westminster government have collaborated with the developers to force it through, using questionable methods. I have found evidence which suggests to me that a member of Tony Blair’s government used false information to seek to persuade the Welsh administration to approve the pit. But perhaps the most remarkable fact is this: that outside Merthyr Tydfil hardly anyone knows it is happening.

It looks as if we are about to re-enter the coal age. Though the electricity companies spend millions telling us about their investments in renewable energy, at least four of them – E.On, RWE npower, ScottishPower and Scottish and Southern – are developing plans for new coal-burning generators, which produce roughly twice the carbon emissions of gas burners. According to one government document, there are “£20 billion of new coal-fired power stations planned to be built in the UK before 2020″(1).

The power companies are confident that the government will back them. Its Energy White Paper, published in May, begins by explaining the need to develop a low carbon economy. But buried on page 112 is a commitment to “secure the long-term future of coal-fired power generation”(2).

This is justified by the prospect that one day carbon emissions might be captured and buried in geological formations: a process known as carbon capture and storage, or CCS. But while the government has asked companies to build a demonstration plant by 2014, there are no firm plans for any commercial venture. The energy white paper admits that “CCS would not be commercially viable unless costs fell substantially … or unless the carbon price rose sufficiently to provide a larger financial incentive.”(3) In a parliamentary debate in May, Alastair Darling, then in charge of energy, acknowledged that the technologies required for CCS “might never become available”(4). We could be stuck with a new generation of coal-burning power stations, approved on the basis of a promise which never materialises, which commit us to massive emissions for 40 years.

There is another policy buried in the white paper which is already being implemented. This is to “maximise economic recovery … from remaining coal reserves.”(5) In 2006, British planning authorities considered twelve applications for new opencast coal mines. They rejected two of them and approved ten(6). They have done so, the story of Ffos-y-fran shows, with the active support of the government.

At first the people of Merthyr Tydfil could not understand why their representatives were siding with the developers. Merthyr has a long Labour tradition of social solidarity. While many people lament the passing of the deep mines, open-casting is unpopular. Petitions circulated by the local protest group raised 10,000 signatures. But the council, which is dominated by the Labour party, the Labour assembly member and the Welsh assembly have all helped the mining company to fight the objectors.

There are 432 local authorities in the United Kingdom. Life expectancy in Merthyr comes 429th(7). As a result of the legacy of heavy industry, smoking and bad diet, it has Wales’s highest rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, strokes and certain heart conditions(8). All these diseases are exacerbated by air pollution and stress. The pit will be dug into a steep hillside overhanging the town.

To reach the 10.8 million tonnes of coal they are hoping to extract, the developers must remove 123 million cubic metres of rock(9). The digging and infilling will last for 17 years, with explosives used to loosen the rock and machines working from 7 in the morning until 11 at night, generating smoke and dust(10). While the World Health Organisation identifies 55 decibels as causing “serious annoyance”(11), the planning conditions set maximum noise levels at 70dB(12). When local people say that the scheme will ruin their lives, I do not believe they are exaggerating.

But they are not the only ones who will be affected. A tonne of coal contains 746 kg of carbon(13): burning it produces 2.7 tonnes of carbon dioxide(14). This means that the coal in Ffos-y-fran will be responsible for almost 30 million tonnes of CO2: equivalent to the sustainable annual emissions of 25 million people(15). The only certain means of preventing climate change is to leave fossil fuels in the ground: when they are dug up, they will be used. This point has been ignored by the government. It has concentrated all its efforts on reducing the demand for fossil fuels, but has done nothing to reduce supply. It still subsidises exploration for oil and gas and it has been pouring state money into the coal industry.

Miller Argent, the consortium digging the pit, calls Ffos-y-fran a “land reclamation scheme”. It will “reclaim c.1,000 acres of acutely derelict, unsafe, unproductive and unsightly land”(16). By digging out the coal, the company says, it can restore the land without the need for public money. The scheme will also provide “direct employment for over 200 people” and “generate tens of millions of pounds for the local economy and to the benefit of the local community.”(17)

There is no doubt that some of the land in the scheme, comprising old workings and spoil heaps, is unsafe. But local people claim that only a small part of the site is acutely derelict. As I saw for myself, much of it consists of moorland and rough pasture, on which sheep graze and the people of Merthyr walk and picnic. “Reclamation would be sensible on some of the worst features,” one of the objectors, Leon Stanfield, told me. “But you don’t go down 600ft and blast 5 days a week to reclaim an area.” Today, he says, most opencast coal mines are promoted as reclamation schemes in order to try to win public approval. He calculates that reclamation without coal mining at Ffos-y-fran would take just three years. Because Merthyr Tydfil qualifies for European Objective One funding(18), the clean-up could be sponsored by the European Union.

The protesters maintain that few of the promised benefits will come to the town. The workers who operate the vast machinery used in opencasting are specialists who tend to move from mine to mine. The pit, local people believe, will blight the area, discouraging businesses from moving there and driving away tourists. One of the campaigners, Terry Evans, took me onto the hill and pointed down to his bungalow – on the other side of the road, 36 metres away.

As far as I can discover, no other opencasting scheme in recent times comes this close to people’s homes. In Scotland, planning rules require a buffer zone of at least 500m(19). But the people of Merthyr, through an extraordinary omission, have been left without the usual protections: after 12 years of delays, there is still no planning guidance for coal workings in Wales.

In 1997, the Welsh Office planned to publish a technical advice note, laying down the conditions new mines would have to meet. Nothing happened until the Welsh Assembly government was formed. It promised to publish the guidance in 2005(20), but the note is still only at the draft stage. The delay has been convenient to the developers: had the note been published, obtaining planning permission for schemes like Ffos-y-fran would have been more difficult.

The draft proposes a separation zone of 350 metres between opencast workings and the nearest homes(21). It also insists that a health impact assessment is published. Researchers at Cardiff University twice offered to conduct an assessment of the Ffos-y-fran scheme, but the council turned them down on the grounds that “there was no statutory requirement”(22). “We have been denied the protections the technical advice note would have given us,” Leon Stanfield told me. “No decision should have been made until it was published.” He suspects the note has been deliberately delayed in order to push through Ffos-y-fran and other schemes. When I approached the Welsh government, its spokesperson denied this. She maintained that the assembly is awaiting the results of “further research to look at the close geographical relationship between coal resources in Wales and Welsh communities.”(23)

This was not the only issue the objectors found odd. The borough council offered an extraordinary deal to Miller Argent. It would allow the company to recoup the costs of making its case at the public inquiry – £800,000 – out of the royalties that it would pay the council for the coal(24). The people of Merthyr, in effect, paid the developers’ barristers to argue against them. There was no such support for the objectors: they had to fund their case at the inquiry out of their own pockets. They lost. After a temporary victory for the protesters in the High Court, the digging began a few weeks ago.

Local people began to suspect that the mining company, Miller Argent, had friends in high places, so they made a freedom of information request. The results astonished them. First they received a letter sent in January 2004 by Stephen Timms, then minister for energy in the Westminster government, to the first minister of Wales, Rhodri Morgan(25). “My officials,” Timms revealed, “have had regular contact with Miller Argent”. He wanted the company’s application “resolved with the minimum of further delay”. Among the advantages he listed was that the mine would help to keep the Aberthaw power station in Barry in business: if it knew it had secure supplies from Ffos-y-fran, the power firm would fit sulphur scrubbers to comply with European rules, which would allow the plant to stay open for longer. This, in turn, would “assure the future” of the Welsh opencasting industry.

The letter is extraordinary in three respects. First that a minister in a department responsible for cutting carbon emissions (the department for trade and industry) should be supporting an opencast coal-mining scheme on behalf of its developer. Second that he should be seeking to extend the life of one of the most inefficient coal-burning plants in the UK (Aberthaw has been operating since 1971). Third that Aberthaw uses coal from many sources (50% of it is imported) and it is hard to see why its survival should be dependent on Ffos-y-fran.

But this was not the end of the lobbying. In December 2004, Timms’s successor, Mike O’Brien, sent Rhodri Morgan a second letter(26). He repeated the pleas Timms made on behalf of Miller Argent. He also used a new argument. Without the Ffos-y-fran scheme, Aberthaw might not be able to stay open, because its ability to bring in coal from abroad is “constrained by port and railway capacity limits”.

A few days after I read that letter, I found a document published by Mike O’Brien’s department earlier in the same year. It contained the following statement. “Problems were experienced in the year 2000 when demand for imported coal increased substantially. … This has been largely overcome by investment in new rolling stock and some upgrading of rail links. … Both EWS and Freightliner Heavy Haul have invested heavily in new rolling stock and there appears to be sufficient capacity to move the tonnages of coal projected.”(27) As for port constraints which might prevent imports of coal, the document reveals that “there is a surplus of capacity on the West coast” – which includes Wales(28). It seems to me that O’Brien has used false information to seek to persuade Rhodri Morgan to approve the scheme. When I challenged him, a government spokesman was deputed to tell me that “the letter referred to information that we had at the time. There is no question of Mike O’Brien misleading the minister.”(29)

This is not the only support the government has given to coal mining. Between 2000 and 2002 it gave Britain’s coal producers £162 million in subsidies, much of which went into big opencast mines(30). In 2003 and 2004 it gave the industry a further £58.5m(31).

In late 2006, Blair’s government established a body called the Coal Forum, composed of coal producers, electricity companies and government ministers and officials, whose purpose was to lobby for the future of coal(32). The opencast companies used the forum to rail against the planning laws which allow local people to hold up their schemes and to demand a faster approval process(33). They asked for a government statement explaining the benefits of a diversity of energy sources, in order to prevent climate policies from favouring gas(34). They hoped that this would appear in the energy white paper(35,36). They have received everything they wanted. We know that the Labour Party has a long-standing relationship with coal miners and their unions. But while New Labour has maintained its support for the industry, its allegiance appears to have switched from the workers to the bosses.

To see what will come to Merthyr Tydfil, I visited the Selar opencast scheme in the Neath Valley. It is not quite as big as Ffos-y-fran, but it is hard to convey the size of the hole. From the edge of the pit the monster trucks on the other side were reduced to yellow specks. Despite this breadth, I could not see the bottom. The roads zigzagged down the grey slopes for hundreds of feet until they disappeared beneath the cliff on which I stood. Even from the top of Mynydd Pen-Y-Cae, 1500 feet above the edge of the hole, the mine dominated the view. I camped on the mountain and watched the lights moving up and down the pit long after dark. When you think of the fuss people make about a few wind turbines, the neglect of this issue seems incomprehensible.

I hope that this will change. I hope that a new mobilisation, supporting the people of Merthyr Tydfil and other blighted communities, will stop the government from dragging us back into the coal age.

George Monbiot’s book Heat: how to stop the planet burning is published with new material in paperback.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Department of Trade and Industry, 14th November 2006. First Meeting of the UK Coal Forum. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file37293.pdf

2. Department of Trade and Industry, May 2007. Meeting the Energy Challenge: a white paper on energy. Para 4.28.

3. ibid, para 5.4.10, page 172.
4. Alastair Darling, 23rd May 2007. Parliamentary answer. Column 1289. http://www.parliament.the-stationery-office.co.uk/pa/cm200607/cmhansrd/c…

5. Department of Trade and Industry, May 2007, ibid. Para 4.07, page 107.

6. British Geological Survey, 2007. Coal: opencast coal mining statistics 2006, Tables 4 and 5.
http://www.bgs.ac.uk/mineralsuk/minequar/coal/occ/home.html#TABLE1

7. Office for National Statistics, 2006. Life expectancy at birth (years) and rank order, by local authority in the United Kingdom, with 95% confidence limits, 1993-1995 and 2003-2005. http://www.statistics.gov.uk/downloads/theme_population/LE_UK_2006.xls#’UK LA rank order – M’!A1

8. Ffos-y-fran Health Impact Assessment Steering Group, 29th June 2007. A report of a health impact assessment study of an opencast scheme at Ffos-y-fran, Merthyr Tydfil, page 15.

9. ibid, page 13.

10. Clive Nield, 8th November 2004. Report on the application by Miller Argent (South Wales) Limited: Land Situated at Ffos-Y-Fran, East Merthyr.
The Planning Inspectorate, Caerdydd. File ref: APP/U6925/X/04/514548. Para 110, page 21.

11. World Health Organisation, 1999. WHO Guidelines for Community Noise. Table 4.1.
http://www.ruidos.org/Noise/WHO_Noise_guidelines_4.html

12. National Assembly for Wales, 11th April 2005. Planning Conditions Attached to Planning Permission of 11th April 2005 in Respect of Planning Application Ref. 030225. Reference A-PP 152-07-014. Section 18.

13. http://bioenergy.ornl.gov/papers/misc/energy_conv.html

14. CO2 is 3.667 times the molecular weight of C.

15. This refers to the quantity of carbon dioxide which can be absorbed by the biosphere. As my book Heat explains, this is approximately 1.2 tonnes per person per year.

16. Miller Argent, 2006. Response to Minerals Planning Policy Wales.
http://www.ffos-y-fran.co.uk/index.cfm?id=10&pid=9

17. Miller Argent, 27th November 2006. The Ffos-y-frân Land Reclamation Scheme. Press release.

18. http://www.merthyr.gov.uk/Home/Regeneration/External+Funding/Objective+1…

19. The Scottish Government, July 13, 2005. Scottish Planning Policy 16: Opencast Coal. Para 11, page 6. http://www.scottishexecutive.gov.uk/Resource/Doc/55971/0015595.pdf

20. Carwyn Jones AM, 8th October 2003. Parliamentary answer (OAQ28458). Archives of the National Assembly for Wales. http://www.assemblywales.org/N0000000000000000000000000013163.pdf

21. Welsh Assembly Government, January 2006. Minerals Technical Advice Note 2 (Wales). Consultation Draft. Para 35, page 9. http://www.countryside.wales.gov.uk/fe/fileupload_getfile.asp?filePathPr….

22. Alistair Neill, Chief Executive Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council, 26th July 2007. Letter to Leon Stanfield.

23. Email from Sally May, 12th September 2007.

24. The agreement was originally struck between Merthyr Tydfil County Borough Council and the former owners of the site, Celtic Energy. This can be found in para 17.5 of a leaked document setting out terms for the mine.

25. Stephen Timms MP, Department of Trade and Industry, 20th January 2004. Letter to Rhodri Morgan AM.

26. Mike O’Brien MP, Department of Trade and Industry, 14th December 2004. Letter to Rhodri Morgan AM.

27. Department of Trade and Industry, March 2004. UK Coal Production Outlook: 2004-16. Final Report, para 2.4, page 3. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file14151.pdf

28. ibid, para 2.5, page 4.

29. Telephone conversation with Chris Turner, Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform, 12th September 2007.

30. UK Coal Operating Aid Scheme: Coal Subsidy Programme / 823100 Cops0010 – Expenditure Profile by Tranche. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file34209.xls

31. Department of Trade and Industry, 2006. Coal Industry in the UK. http://www.dti.gov.uk/energy/sources/coal/industry/page13125.html

32. Department of Trade and Industry, 11th July 2006. UK Energy policy shapes up to new global energy landscape. Press release.

33. Department of Trade and Industry, 14th November 2006. First Meeting of the UK Coal Forum, paras 10-11, page 4. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file37293.pdf

34. Department of Trade and Industry, 23rd January 2007. Second Meeting of the UK Coal Forum, section 5, page 6. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file37592.pdf

35. Department of Trade and Industry, 14th November 2006, ibid. para 17, page 5.

36. Department of Trade and Industry, 23rd January 2007. Section 5, page 6.

Voices of Descent

Tim Holmes — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:16:18 +0000

Under the catchy title of Transition Town Totnes, the south Devon town is the first in the UK to explore what it means to undergo the transition to a carbon-constrained, energy-lean world at a local level. By consciously planning and designing for changes on the horizon, rather than reacting to resource shortages as they are thrust upon them, the participants hope that their town will become more resilient, more abundant and more pleasurable than the present.

The seeds of the transition town idea lie in the small Irish town of Kinsale, where in 2005 a group of students at the local further education college developed a process for residents to draw up an ‘energy descent action plan’ – a tool to design a positive timetabled way through the huge changes that will occur as world oil production peaks. The action plan covers a number of areas of life in Kinsale, including food, energy, tourism, education and health.

For example, for food, the plan envisions that by 2021 the town will have made the transition from dependency to self-reliance, where ‘all landscaping in the town comprises of edible plants, fruit trees line the streets, all parks and greens have become food forests and community gardens’. As a practical step towards this, the plan recommends the immediate appointment of a local food officer.

For housing, the plan envisions that by 2021 ‘all new buildings in Kinsale will include such things as a high level of energy efficiency together with a high portion of local sustainable materials’. A suggested immediate practical step towards this is a review of current building practices and future development plans.

The energy descent action plan approach landed in the UK when a Kinsale college tutor, Rob Hopkins, moved to Totnes and held a number of talks and film screenings to introduce the idea. In September 2006 Transition Town Totnes was launched, seeking ‘to engage all sectors of the community in addressing this, the great transition of our time’ and seeking to put ‘Totnes on the international map as a community that engaged its creativity and collective genius with this timely and pressing issue’. The initiative has spread beyond Totnes just one year on; towns and villages around the UK have started developing a transition town approach for themselves (see box).

One reason why the initiative has caught people’s imaginations is that, at its core, is a hopeful message. Many ‘transitioners’ are motivated to change energy use patterns not just because of energy shortages in the future but because of self-imposed energy rationing now – because cutting fossil fuel use is essential if climate change is to be lessened.

The transition movement shakes off the usual gloom and limitation around this message by calling for positive and pro-active changes. These are based in how the world actually is, rather than how we would like it to be if only someone, somewhere, would come up with that miraculous solution that will allow us to expand infinitely and indefinitely, all within a finite world. Rather than a vision of deferred promise and baseless hope it offers community-wide participation to find realistic and workable answers.

Whether the transition town approach can work at a citywide level, or whether its call for reduced consumption will have a wider impact on, for example, international trading systems and their inherently heavy use of fossil fuels, remains to be seen. In Totnes, at least, the creation of new businesses and land use initiatives suggests that the transitioners are in it for the long haul.

Oil on the Slide

Tim Holmes — Wed, 03 Oct 2007 10:06:52 +0000

“Peak oil informs everything,” Zac Goldsmith said recently. “People ought to know about that, but they don’t.” He is right. A premature topping point in global oil production would wipe out most if not all economic and policy plans on offer at the party conferences. This is because the plans universally assume growing supplies of generally affordable oil. But as Goldsmith’s quality of life report recently described, a surprised world could instead soon be facing rapidly falling supplies of increasingly unaffordable oil.

The other main parties seem barely aware of this. Liberal Democrat concerns are led by John Hemming, who chairs the 32-member all-party parliamentary group on peak oil. Their voice is barely heard in Westminster. Labour concerns are led by Michael Meacher, who predicts a rocky road ahead to all who will listen. Few do. This is one issue where the Conservatives can yet grab leadership for themselves. An early peak in global oil production is certainly a big enough issue to determine who governs Britain a few years from now.

Warnings by oil industry insiders recently reached a new pitch that should be sounding alarm bells in every capital in the world. At the annual summit of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil, experts on the issue heard the former US energy secretary, James Schlesinger, conclude that “we can’t continue to make supply meet demand much longer. It’s no longer the case that we have a few voices crying in the wilderness. The battle is over. The peakists have won.” Lord Ron Oxburgh, the former chair of Shell, was no less clear, when conflating peak oil with climate change. “Today I believe is the end of cheap energy. It’s essential that we move away from fossil fuels as fast as possible. The boat is sinking and we have to do everything we can to plug the hole.”

Chris Skrebowski, editor of Petroleum Review, offered his latest estimate for the timing of the peak based on a summary of the largest oil industry projects. This suggests peak production in 2011, maybe 2010. Because it now takes the industry an average of 6.5 years to bring oil to market after a discovery, “the die is cast until 2014,” Skrebowski concludes. More conservative industry insiders were a little less gloomy. Ray Leonard, of Kuwait Energy, a geologist who previously headed exploration for Yukos in Russia, analysed the Middle East and Russia, where so many hopes lie for continuing ability to match demand with supply. There is certainly potential to enhance recovery in existing fields, he said, but there is very little chance of major new discoveries. Global oil production will peak just nine to 13 million barrels per day higher than today’s 86mbd, he concluded. This will happen in five to eight years’ time. Mike Rodgers of PFC Energy, a flagship oil industry consultancy, agreed. “The real crisis will come around 100 million barrels a day, in the next decade.”

Schlesinger is correct that analyses like these are no longer the work of isolated whistleblowers. Leonard described how, at a recent closed industry gathering on supply, speaker after speaker predicted a coming crunch, prefacing their conclusions with words to effect that “this is not my company’s view, but here is what the data suggests to me”.

The main potential escape clauses for peaking conventional oil supply are mining of the vast Canada tar sand deposits, and coal-to-liquids technology. Industry projections show production from the tar sands adding just 2.5mbd by 2015. This figure, included in the projections of overall peak oil above, contributes little to a world depleting conventional oil at up to 4-5mbd. Moreover, using the tar sands will require massive amounts of water and gas to melt the tar. “Forget agriculture, forget industry, forget everything,” Leonard warned, if the more ambitious proposals are pursued.

Coal-to-liquids technology is similarly greenhouse-gas profligate, though here – as with regular coal burning – advocates hold up the prospect of carbon capture and storage, where emissions are pumped to oilfields and buried underground. This may be a good idea if we can make it work, but as Schlesinger concluded, “it will take at least 15-20 years to introduce, if then.”

Politicians face the mother of all crises. Yet the warnings, clear as they are, barely register on the radar screen. Politicians almost everywhere, and the vast majority in the civil service and industry, remain locked in an increasingly breathtaking process of institutionalised denial. This is an issue that needs a Churchill: a leader to warn about the coming clouds, to win the hearts and minds of the British as the threat becomes ever clearer, and make history by leading the mobilisation to survive it.

We've Never Been So Consulted

Tim Holmes — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 14:48:45 +0000

Gordon Brown’s public consultation on nuclear power is being fixed by the market research company carrying out the polling.

Dr Paul Dorfman, a senior research fellow at the National Centre for Involvement at the University of Warwick, told the Guardian that the questions being asked in the consultation were deliberately skewed to get a thumbs up for nuclear power by massively overplaying its role in tackling climate change – because the government knew this was the only way they could ever get people to accept new nuclear power.

According to Dr Dorfman, “partial information was rammed down the public’s throat. It was totally impractical for people to make a rational decision based on the information they were fed. The way it was put together was designed so that a particular view would emerge.”

The fact that a new fleet of reactors in the UK could only cut our carbon emissions by a measly 4% was buried at the back of a huge pile of information that consultation attendees had to plough through in one day. Positive messages about nuclear were made as statements of fact – “Nuclear power stations could make an important contribution to reducing the UK’s CO2 emissions” – while negative issues for nuclear power required answers by degree, with the loaded term “satisfied” included in the question: “How satisfied are you with the government’s proposal to manage new nuclear waste in the same way as existing waste?”

Of course, you have to ignore the small issue of the government not yet knowing what they are going to do with any of the nuclear waste.

Despite entering into this consultation (which, don’t forget, a high court judge ordered the government to do after their first attempt was exposed as a total sham) with the intention of engaging as fully as possible, it soon became clear that the whole thing was little more than a pro-nuclear rubber-stamping exercise. And the longer it goes on, the more we discover just what a grubby and seedy little process it really is.

That’s why Greenpeace issued a formal complaint to the Market Research Standards Board about the role of Opinion Leader Research (OLR), the pollsters employed by the government to run the show. We think OLR has broken its industry’s own code of conduct by designing questions and materials for the public that are misleading and factually inaccurate. Designed, you might say, to get the answer on nuclear power that the government wants rather than allowing people to make up their own minds. Opinion Leader Research told Channel 4 News: “We refute the points made in the complaint. We believe our work is carried out to the highest professional standards. Opinion Leader Research will cooperate fully with the MRS investigation.” We await the verdict.

Some participants apparently saw through the spin. One contacted Greenpeace to say that she “left the event in Edinburgh feeling furious with the government’s blatant marketing of nuclear power”, adding that the “participants of Talking Energy were pushed up against a wall, so they had no choice but to support a new generation of nuclear power plants.”

Can this really be the sort of consultation Gordon Brown had in mind when he talked of having “a very different form of conversation” with the public, with “politicians learning from everyday experience, people engaging in genuine discussion”? It’s clear to us this self-styled conversation consists of a bullying monologue based on shockingly skewed information designed to scare people into accepting new nuclear power – a climate red herring if ever there was one.