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All the Kingsnorth's Men

Ellie Keen — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:23:34 +0000

Reports coming in from the Camp for Climate Action (see SchNEWS 641) Day of Mass Action on Saturday 9th August suggest that the day was more successful than many mainstream media sources made out. Despite coverage claiming E.ON continued their coal-chugging business as usual, arrestee charge sheets tell a different story. One of four people arrested inside Kingsnorth reveals they shut down the plant's cooling system and disrupted the running of the station.

Activists set about besieging the coal-powered giant by land, sea and air. Four contingents were deployed.

The Blue Group was the highly organised Great Rebel Raft Regatta (GRRR), which set out to sail the high seas (well, the river Medway) and sneak into the power station via the jetty that carries coal to the plant. Members of ‘Operation Ikea’ set sail on rafts made from pallets and oil drums; ‘Operation Treasure Island’ on inflatable dinghies previously stashed away in the woods and located using elaborately hand-drawn treasure maps.

All treasure came with its own paddles, inflating pump and small bottle of rum. Several affinity groups were seen rummaging around in the woods, some having spent the night avoiding the helicopter that circled overhead searching for pirates.

A total of 29 vessels made it onto the water, including 8 kayaks and a currach (made in the woods overnight). Despite police interceptions (termed ‘rescues’ in the press), at least one vessel made it all the way and the crew dropped a banner reading “COAL: Starter Gun For Climate Chaos” - before collapsing from sheer exhaustion having paddled hard for an hour. The other pirates succeeded in tying up plenty of police vessels with cheeky water-bound cat and mouse antics. The Jolly Roger was later seen flying from a police boat and an officer wearing a pirate hat – a convert perhaps?

The green group made their way over land to the coal-powered colossus. They used the outer Harris fence - a temporary extra security measure - as a ladder to scale the tall spiky middle fence, before the cunning use of a warning sign thrown at the final electric fence established that it was in fact turned off. A small number of triumphant activists made it into the plant to be immediately jumped on by riot cops just as the first raft appeared on the horizon.

The silver group aimed to storm Kingsnorth by air using fighter jets, I mean, erm, balloons and kites. At least one parachute was seized by police while making its way onto site – pushing the definition on seizing offensive weapons just a bit!. Unfortunately weather conditions were not quite right and Betsy the helium balloon pig never made her giant leap to the skies. Keep a look out above Kingsnorth for future piggy action.

The orange pod was the fluffy contingent, made up of kids, locals and non-arrestables - and seems to have suffered the largest number of arrests. Having been told by loudspeaker from a police helicopter that if they did not disperse immediately at the agreed finish time then police dogs, horses and long batons would be deployed, a mere 19 protesters decided to stand their ground in defence of the right to protest.

All were promptly arrested.

The camp might be over, but the campaign against Kingsnorth and other polluters continues, with other actions taking place including:

** Protesters scaled an electricity pylon and unfurled a ‘Shut Down Kingsnorth’ banner.

** Campers occupied the roof of Smithfield Meat Market and dropped a ‘Stop Climate Change: Go Vegan’ banner.

** 15 campers descended on Mildenhall US Air Based in Suffolk, some dressed as planes to highlight military co2 emissions.

** 9 campers invaded offices of coal-mining giant BHP Billiton, some gluing themselves to the doors, others scattering coal in the lobby and educating staff.

** SEPT 26-28th: The first Post-Climate Camp National Gathering, to be held in Manchester. Crash Space available. More details to be released soon.

Visit www.climatecamp.org.uk

Picking Up the Gauntlet

Ellie Keen — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 12:29:07 +0000

Arthur Scargill is a brave man. He was brave to come to the climate camp last week. Though we disagreed with most of what he said, he earned our respect for his willingness to debate. He is brave to return to public life, after suffering one of the nastiest vilification campaigns in British history, and he is brave to be fighting for coal again. He is especially brave to offer to asphixiate himself in the interests of science. Many people would be willing to help him perform this experiment at the earliest possible opportunity.

But he is also wrong, on almost all counts. In his article last week demanding a return to coal and accusing me of selling out, Scargill suggested that radioactive discharges are more dangerous than carbon emissions(1). This, of course, is nonsense, but if he really believes it he should be campaigning against the burning of coal.

The odd and widely-ignored truth is that routine radioactive discharges from coal-burning are greater than those produced by nuclear plants. Coal contains trace amounts of uranium and thorium. Though these are present at much lower levels than in nuclear fuel, a lot more coal is burnt, which means that total emissions are greater. An article in Scientific American last year maintained that levels of ionising radiation in the bones of people living around coal plants are up to six times higher than the levels in people living around atomic power stations(2).

The people most at risk from the radioactivity associated with coal (not to mention far greater hazards such as dust, heavy metals and sulphur and nitrous oxide pollution) are the workers – both in the mines and in the power plants. Coal mining is associated with some of the most unpleasant industrial diseases ever recorded. Why would a trade unionist wish to expose working people to these dangers, when they could instead be employed, at minimal risk to their health, building and installing wind turbines, wave machines and solar power plants?

Scargill maintains that nuclear power is four times as expensive as coal-fired electricity. There’s a standard model for estimating future costs, of which he should be aware, produced by the International Energy Agency(3). This shows that it’s likely to be 10-50% more expensive to save a tonne of carbon through coal burning with carbon capture and storage than by means of nuclear energy. (Wind power, incidentally, is much cheaper than either)(4). The agency’s figures are not definitive (nothing in this field is), but the estimates it gives are for coal bought at anticipated market prices, not for the much more expensive fuel Arthur proposes: coal produced only from deep mines in the United Kingdom.

I feel I need to point out that I have not become an advocate for nuclear power. My position is that environmentalists should stop trying to pick technologies for electricity generation. Instead we should demand a maximum level for the carbon dioxide produced per megawatt-hour, impose a number of other public safety measures, then allow the energy companies to find the cheapest means of delivering it. Otherwise we are in danger of backing the solutions we find aethestically appealing and delaying the massive carbon cuts that need to be made. If nuclear power meets the very tough conditions I proposed last week, we should no longer oppose it; though that remains a big if. This is too subtle a point for Arthur and other commentators, who are shrieking that Monbiot has gone nuclear.

Scargill claims that the closure of most of the UK’s coal plants has not been accompanied by lower carbon emissions. In fact carbon pollution has faithfully tracked coal burning for the past 18 years. In 1990, when consistent carbon data for the UK begin, this country used 108.3 million tonnes of coal(5) and produced 592.4mt of carbon dioxide(6). In 1999, coal consumption fell to its lowest level since 1970 (55.7mt) and the UK’s emissions fell to their lowest level since 1990 (540.3mt). Emissions rose in 2006 because coal burning increased when gas prices shot up. They fell back again in 2007 when the gas price dropped. In all cases, coal has been the key swing factor for CO2 production.

When Arthur suggests that, by mining and refining coal, “we can provide all the electricity, oil, gas and petrochemicals that people need, without causing harm to the environment”, he shows that he is living in a world of make-believe. He rightly demands that we “end the import of shale oil, tar sands and other so-called unconventional oils” and calls them “the dirtiest fuels on the planet”. But while the total carbon emissions from petrol made out of tar sands are 30-70% higher than those from conventional petroleum(7), turning coal into transport fuel raises emissions by 85%(8). The process also requires ten gallons of fresh water for every gallon of fuel produced. Coal, not tar sand, is the dirtiest fuel on the planet.

When he speaks of a resurgent coal industry, he pictures deep seams hacked out by grimy workers romantically dying of silicosis. But, with a few minor exceptions, this is no longer how coal is produced in the UK. New research I’ve commissioned, published for the first time here, shows that the industry is planning a great opencast revival. Since January last year, 22 new opencast coal mines or mine extensions have been approved by British planning authorities. Only two schemes – both of them quite small – have been rejected without appeal. My researcher, Ketty Dean, has discovered that mining companies have applied for planning permission for a further 22 schemes, while 11 more applications in England alone are about to be submitted(9).

Altogether, if the new proposals are accepted, 55mt of coal extraction is in the pipeline. If we accept the outer limit proposed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for the carbon cut required to prevent more than 2ºC of warming (85% worldwide(10), which means 95.9% in the UK(11)), the coal these pits will produce equates to the sustainable annual emissions of 280 million people(12).

This digging can happen only at the expense of the communities Scargill claims to support. The Coal Forum is a government-funded lobby group in which coal companies and civil servants plot against the public interest. Its latest minutes reveal that if - as the Welsh Assembly government now proposes - there is a minimum distance of 500 metres between opencast pits and the nearest homes, this would “sterilise” all the useful coal reserves in Wales(13). This means that they could no longer be dug. The pits are viable only if they are allowed the wreck the lives of local people. Even before a lump of clean coal is burnt, its extraction trashes the environment.

Arthur Scargill ends his column with a final appeal to reason: by challenging me to a duel. “I am prepared to go into a room full of CO2 for two minutes, if he is prepared to go into a room full of radiation for two minutes.” I accept his challenge, as long as I can choose my source of radiation. I invite Arthur to propose a date and send me the name of his second. I hope he can hold his breath.

www.monbiot.com

References:

1. Arthur Scargill, 8th August 2008. Coal isn’t the climate enemy, Mr Monbiot. It’s the solution. The Guardian.

2. Mara Hvistendahl, 13th December 2007. Coal Ash Is More Radioactive than Nuclear Waste. Scientific American.
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nu...

3. The MARKAL model.

4. The MARKAL figures are reproduced in Department of Trade and Industry, 2003. Energy White Paper - Supplementary Annexes, p7.

5. DBERR, 2007. Long Term Trends. Table 2.1.2 Inland consumption of solid fuels: 1970 to 2006.
stats.berr.gov.uk/energystats/dukes2_1_2.xls

6. Defra, July 2008. UK Climate Change Programme. Annual Report to Parliament, July 2008, Table 2. http://www.defra.gov.uk/environment/climatechange/uk/ukccp/pdf/ukccp-ann...

7. Institute of Physics, 7th December 2006. Greenhouse gas emissions set to rise as new sources for transport fuel are used. Press release. http://www.iop.org/News/Community_News_Archive/2006/news_9600.html

8. Natural Resources Defence Council, February 2007. Why Liquid Coal Is Not a Viable Option to Move America Beyond Oil. http://www.nrdc.org/globalWarming/coal/liquids.pdf

9. If you want a copy of the spreadsheet, please contact george@monbiot.com

10. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007. Fourth Assessment Report. Climate Change 2007: Synthesis Report. Summary for Policymakers, Table SPM.6. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/syr/ar4_syr_spm.pdf

11. CO2 production in 2000 (the baseline for the IPCC’s proposed cut), divided by the current population gives a figure of 3.58 tonnes of CO2 per person. An 85% cut means that (if the population remains constant) the global output per head should be reduced to 0.537t by 2050. The UK currently produces 9.6 tonnes per head. But the world population will rise in the same period. If we assume a population of 9bn in 2050, the cut rises to 95.9% in the UK.

12. Coal contains an average of 746kg C/tonne. The molecular weight of CO2 is 3.667x that of C. Multiplied by 55.1mt, this gives 150.7mtCO2. Divided by 0.537 gives 281m.

13. UK Coal Forum, 13th May 2008. Eighth Meeting. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file46985.pdf

A Dangerous Untruth

Ellie Keen — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 12:55:04 +0000

Imagine the impact of the second world war. This, according to former World Bank chief economist Nicolas Stern, captures the scale of the economic impact of climate change, left unchecked. The social and environmental effects are predicted to be similarly catastrophic. Given the widely accepted need for rapid and deep cuts in CO2 emissions, the response to E.ON's application to build the UK's first coal-fired power station in 30 years, at Kingsnorth in Kent, and news that business secretary John Hutton seems minded to give it the go-ahead, has been bewilderment and anger.

A new high point of opposition starts this weekend as the Camp for Climate Action embarks on an eight-day protest to press the government and E.ON to abandon the scheme. This is no fringe issue: they will be taking action to stop a proposal potentially so destructive that increasing numbers of scientists are speaking out against it.

Over recent years scientists have become increasingly vocal about the need to take action to cut CO2 emissions. In 2005, the science academies of the G8 countries along with Brazil, China and India - three of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases in the developing world - signed a joint statement to push political leaders to tackle climate change as an urgent priority. By 2008, this group was calling for a rapid, planned transition to a low-carbon economy.

Opposing plans for new coal-fired power plants in developed countries has become an international frontline of climate change politics. Jim Hanson, senior climate change scientist at Nasa, wrote to Gordon Brown last year calling for a ban on new coal, stating that Brown's decision on Kingsnorth has "the potential to influence the future of the planet". This is because coal is one of the most polluting and carbon-intensive forms of fossil fuels - producing twice the carbon emissions per unit of electricity as gas. Coal is the cause of fully half of the fossil fuel-caused increase of CO2 in the air today, and there is plenty left to burn. If we don't limit the use of coal, avoiding catastrophic climate change will become impossible.

However, Paul Golby of E.ON, in these pages yesterday, dismissed anyone opposed to his company's plans to annually emit at least 6m tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere - more than the total emissions of Costa Rica or Cameroon - as naively ignorant of power generation realities. He has tried to scare the public into thinking that new coal is necessary to keep the lights on.

Yet the independent energy consultancy Pöyry, in a report out today (ilexenergy.com), gives the hard numbers showing projected demand can be met, while respecting strict emissions limits and energy security concerns, using renewables and not resorting to new coal. Meanwhile Cambridge professor of physics David MacKay's book Without Hot Air presents five different plans of how we can meet the UK's energy needs and radically reduce emissions. Of course there are no easy answers, but for Golby to deny that there are no answers other than business as usual is dangerously untrue.

Let's be clear. Either coal usage must stop, or the CO2 released from any coal burned must be kept out of the atmosphere, by burying it under the sea, using an unproven technique known as carbon capture and storage. The Royal Society has made a clear proposal that all new coal plants must capture 90% of their CO2 emissions by 2020, or have their operating permits revoked. If agreed, this would send a clear signal that if carbon capture and storage works, coal use is acceptable, otherwise it is not. However, last month, when E.ON and energy minister Malcolm Wicks were before parliament's environmental audit committee, both evaded accepting the Royal Society proposals' impeccable logic.

E.ON's preference is to use the carbon market to reduce emissions. This won't deliver real cuts, as its own business case shows: Golby believes E.ON can participate in the European scheme, provide competitively priced electricity and turn in a good profit for 20-40 years by burning the dirtiest fuel. Such delusions must be exposed: it is not possible to keep releasing large quantities of CO2 into the atmosphere and avoid the social, environmental and economic consequences of climate change.

The Climate Camp is creating space for serious debate about the kind of world we want to live in. More than that, the campers give shape to a force that can perhaps override the profits-now catastrophe-later logic of the government and E.ON: they form a broad-based movement of people committed to a socially just transition to a low-carbon society. I certainly don't want to live in E.ON's world, where business as usual trumps avoiding dangerous climate change. So I'll be joining the campers in Kent. Anyone else with concerns about the future should do the same.

Simon Lewis is a Royal Society research fellow at the Earth & Biosphere Institute, University of Leeds

Why Kingsnorth?

Ellie Keen — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 23:40:40 +0000

Given how much CO2 you get when you burn coal, building a coal fired power station in the middle of a climate crisis would be really stupid. Really, really, stupid. But incredibly, down at Kingsnorth that's exactly what power company E.ON and the Government plan to do.

Here’s our top 10 reasons for not building Kingsnorth, or burning coal or digging it up or well, doing pretty much anything with it other than leaving it in the ground. You don't have to read them all. Any one will give you reason enough to join us this summer. A new power station at Kingsnorth really is that daft.

1. Let's build a coal-fired power station!

If built, Kingsnorth will emit between 6 and 8 million tons of CO2 every year. That’s a hell of a lot of CO2, more even than the proposed third runway at Heathrow would produce. Scientists are usually a fairly reserved bunch but even they are starting to sound frantic about what’s happening with the climate. That’s not surprising given that, if we carry on treating the planet like a cheap boil in the bag dinner, we risk causing catastrophic climate change. That’s probably a bad idea. To avoid it we need to rapidly reduce emissions. So, in a world where we respect the ecology of the planet and the lives of those whose home it is, no Kingsnorth.

2. Kingsnorth is just the beginning. Six other similar power stations are planned.

How do you multiply stupid? We're not sure, but that’s what the power utilities want to do. Unless there’s a big fight over Kingsnorth these companies, with the backing of Government, want to build six more atmosphere-crunching coal fired power stations in the next few years. Collectively these power stations would emit around 50 million tons of CO2 a year. It’s hard to understand such a callous disregard for your fellow humans but if you want to, start by following the money. Power stations make lots of it and, given the amount of coal around, they're a ‘safe’ long term investment. It’s an age-old story but the ending isn’t written yet.

What happens at Kingsnorth is vitally important. When people get together determined to make the world a better place there is history-making potential. Look at the Suffragettes, the struggle for workers rights, the anti-roads movement. Kingsnorth can and will be stopped if enough of us get together to make it happen.

3. Because coal is the most polluting fossil fuel.

Coal was a really cool idea for the convenient long term storage of a load rotting prehistoric forests but burning it to make electricity is a monumentally bad one. It might have made sense at the beginning of the industrial revolution but then so did child labour, slavery and woollen swimming trunks. Now we know burning coal is wrecking the climate. Of CO2 in the atmosphere from human activity around 50% has come from the burning of coal. Mainly this is from Western nations who industrialized first.

Today burning coal is responsible for around one quarter of our global CO2 emissions. One of the great challenges for this generation is to find ways of living on this planet whilst leaving fossil fuels (especially coal) in the ground. We are quite literally the Power Generation. We have to change the ways we generate power and we need to find the power to make these changes happen.

4. Because coal is about as clean as an anthrax sandwich.

Proudly brandishing the phrase ‘clean coal’, the coal industry is confidently striding forth into our warming world. It’s a brilliant piece of PR greenwash. However, like ‘friendly’ fire or the ‘great’ war, it sounds kind of good but actually, when you get down to it, it really isn’t. Modern coal fired power stations are slightly more ‘efficient’ than old ones but the bottom line is: coal burning is responsible for one quarter of global emissions and those emissions are causing serious problems.

Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) is an important part of the ‘clean’ coal myth. It’s basically a method of capturing and compressing the waste CO2 from a power station and then pumping it into salt aquifiers and old oil wells for long term storage. There’s a few problems with CCS. The biggest one is that it doesn’t exist, it's science fiction. Sure there’s the odd experimental trial but at the scale of large coal fired power stations even the industry themselves say it's 10 years away at best.

E.ON are saying that the power station they plan to build will be CCS ready. But ready for what exactly. We might be ready for the second coming but that isn’t going to help solve climate change that’s happening in reality in the here and now. Given that the next few years are crucial and that other ready-to-go alternatives exist, CCS is just a distraction. E.ON want to talk about CCS because they don’t want to talk about CO2 emissions. They want to obscure the truth: Kingsnorth power station will emit at least 6 million tons of CO2 every year and damn the lot of you.

5. Oh dear we're running out of oil. Wahey there's loads of coal!

No need to worry about the coming oil crunch, there’s loads of tar sands and coal - we’ll burn that instead. If you’ve got big investments in fossil fuels or you’ve just bought a villa in Greenland then maybe this ‘solution’ to the oil crunch makes sense. To the rest of us it makes about as much sense as a petrol-filled fire extinguisher.

Most of the geological evidence suggests that there is a lot of coal left, up to 200 years at current rates of consumption. But burning it really isn’t an option if we want a planet to live on (forget Greenland, those villas have sold out and the neighbours would be horrible).

6. But if we don’t burn coal the Chinese will.

Blimey. Where do you start? Yes the Chinese are building coal fired power stations but...

1. Climate change is a global problem and nearly every country is going to have to reduce emissions - the British, the Chinese, the Americans - we all have to get our shit together and change the way our societies make and use energy. If we're going to do it fairly (which in our view is essential), that means countries like the UK will have to cut a lot more than the Chinese. If you're burning coal you're making the problem worse. We're burning it here in the UK so that’s where we’ve got to stop it.

2. Not only are average emissions for each person significantly lower in China than in Britain, a large percentage of Chinese coal is burnt so that Chinese factories can make the throwaway consumer items that fill the shopping centres and refuse dumps of the west.

3. We’ve got to start somewhere. The very ecological systems we rely on for life are in jeopardy. If someone doesn’t wake up and try to turn off the gas we'll probably fry sleeping. Arguing about who should set the alarm is as pathetic as it is suicidal.

7. Without these power stations there will be an energy gap.

The old ones are the best ones. Problem: a load of companies want to make big bucks but can only achieve it by doing the rest of us over. Answer: come up with something scary so people are distracted and don’t notice what you're up to. O’oo the energy gap. A frightener isn’t it. It’s meant to be what happens if we don’t build new coal and nuclear power stations to replace the ones that are being decommissioned. We run out of energy, the Christmas lights go out , rubbish blows in the streets and we’re all transported back into the 70s and forced to listen to crackly Val Doonican records on pedal powered stereos.

But the energy gap is a nonsense.

Check out the Government's own projections:

• The amount electricity generating capacity reduction by 2027 from closing old coal and nuclear power stations: 35%
• The amount of energy Gordon Brown has said we will generate from renewable sources by 2020: 40%

On these figures there is no energy gap. In fact we're up five percent seven years early. There are other gaps. A commitment cap, a vision gap, a take the bull by the horns and do something useful for a change gap. But no energy gap.

8. Because there is a growing movement against coal.

It’s not just about Kingsnorth. In Wales and Derbyshire people are trying to stop new open cast mines. And from Bangladesh and the Appalachians to Columbia and Ecuador people are fighting against coal and fossil fuel extraction. This summer there are five other climate camps in other countries all focused on the issue of coal.

This is an essential way of facing the energy and climate change crisis. It’s a call to get together and work for something better in solidarity with people across the globe. It might sound like an old fashioned idea but then these days so does a stable climate and hell, if flares can make a come back anything has to be possible.

9. Because we need to talk about work.

Here’s a crazy idea. Instead of employing people to burn coal how about we build install and run an energy system based on renewables. They’ve started doing it in Germany and the industry already employs 250,000 people which is a lot more than work in our entire power sector. Here’s another one. We know that we need to make a transition from one energy system to another so what about building that transition around the workers in those industries, what about making it a just transition. And one final one. How about instead of working more and being exploited more so we can compete more just to produce more and more stuff, we work less to produce what we need and want, compete less and share more so we have more time and live better. Phew.

10. They don't have to build Kingsnorth.

There are a load of brilliant alternatives that would solve the energy issue without messing with the planet. If we're serious about these other options then it's crucial we stop the building of Kingsnorth and the other five power stations.

We’ve probably already said it so sorry to go on, but if enough of us get together and say no, then Kingsnorth will never get built. Last year a new runway at Heathrow was seen as a done deal. The Climate Camp helped galvanise almost universal opposition to that stupid plan. With enough of us, we can do the same with building new coal-fired power stations. See you at Kingsnorth on August 9th.

A Just Transition?

Ellie Keen — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:38:17 +0000

In the past few months, outbreaks of industrial unrest and protest have been occurring throughout Europe in the industries most affected by the rising price of oil. Starting with Grangemouth refinery, Unite workers in went on strike over reduction in pension rights. Workers in haulage companies delivering to petrol forecourts followed in a dispute over pay. More recently we have seen the protests of the haulage companies themselves demanding special reductions in tax on fuel – by the time this article goes to press, we will know whether Gordon Brown has held his nerve on that. In France, railway workers and fishermen have been involved in industrial action and in Spain public transport workers have likewise struck over the impact of the rising price of fuel. Meanwhile, oil companies continue to make record profits. These are signs of things to come. At the end of June, the list of oil companies invited to tender for lucrative contracts in Iraq was published. On the same day, the price of oil increased to $140 a barrel, the highest ever recorded. Each month for the past six months, the price of oil has been the highest on record. As we approach peak oil, when supply cannot meet demand, the price of oil is spiralling upwards, and the distribution of the costs and benefits of this are profoundly unequal and increasingly contested. Ten years ago, the economist James O’Connor described how states treat oil as not just a commodity but as an extension of state security, backed by military apparatus.

These are elements of the supply side of the oil industry. If we look at the waste stream, the carbon dioxide emissions which are accumulating in the atmosphere and disrupting the climate, we are seeing increasing frequencies in the occurrence of cyclones, hurricanes, floods, although the debate often takes an apparently more arcane, esoteric form. Is it possible for the climate to withstand a carbon dioxide concentration of 450 parts per million, or will it be necessary to reduce to 350 ppm or less? Just how disrupted will the climate be with each 0.1 degree Celsius and at what point do the changes become irreversible? Essential though these debates are – and each scientific report which hits the public domain points towards more worrying scenarios – it should not be forgotten that two thirds of the excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere originates from the G7 countries, with currently 13 per cent of the world’s population. There is no doubt that there is a crisis, and that the rich countries need to cut oil consumption almost to nothing.

Currently, the principal mechanism for cutting carbon dioxide emissions is carbon trading, which essentially entails enclosure of the last remaining commons – the carbon absorption capacity of the atmosphere – by allocating property rights to those who are already destroying it. This is none other than a neoliberal extension of commodification of the atmosphere, whilst shifting costs onto the poorest who are dispossessed by ‘green development projects’. Ideological justification is provided by individualising responsibility as a form of consumer choice. Climate disaster is happening because western consumers made the wrong choices! Whatever happens to the climate, the interests of global capital cannot be jeopardised.

How are we going to get out of this mess? In short, we don’t know, but the solution must be radical, it must be socially just and it must challenge the interests of big business. We can transform this oil-drenched economy *and* overturn poverty *and* have decent jobs. Potential solutions are emerging in debates across the left, but a solution must emerge from social processes more than ideas. As we stand in Scotland, the only party in Parliament which is opposed to the interests of big business is the Green Party whose support comes, more or less, from the professional middle classes who support the NGOs and the ‘new’ social movements of which they are part. The most directly affected working class movements are challenging the oil companies, but in terms that ignore the climate crisis that we are facing. The other left parties are recognising the ecological challenge, and despite their current relative weakness, remain active in community and working class struggles. We need the collective knowledge of all political movements critical of or operating out with the neoliberal framework of economic growth, all groups whose interests are being actively damaged, in Parliament, in communities, in the social movements and in the trade unions. Only by working towards some kind of bloc will we shift the hegemony sufficiently to implement change. We need such a broad alliance like never before if we are to work out a just transition to a sustainable solution.

Justin Kenrick, in SLR earlier this year, argued for a transitional alliance to tackle climate change. This has been interpreted in different ways and stimulated an important debate, generating significant connections across the left as well as raising fears. As a result of these debates, a conference is being organised by activists from across the left and green movements to explore how we can move forward. None of the parties which might form a government in the foreseeable future will implement a radical changes needed on their own, and to imagine that they can be persuaded otherwise before the damage is done is unfortunately a false dream. The damage is already well underway, and it’s time for a new dream.

Conference: transition to tackle climate change, Edinburgh, 18th – 19th October 2008

Eurig Scandrett is a member of the Scottish Green Party and Democratic Left Scotland

Out of Sight, Out of Mind

Ellie Keen — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 10:57:50 +0000

As climate change increasingly becomes a defining political theme for the 21st Century, coal, oil and gas companies have not suffered the existential crisis that might have been expected. Instead, they are betting on a technological solution to the problem, in the form of carbon capture and storage. But, ask Gabriele von Goerne and David Santillo, how safe is the technology?

To avoid dangerous anthropogenic climate change, which would place millions of people and the natural systems on which they depend at risk, global greenhouse gas emissions need to be reduced by at least 80% by the middle of this century. This, and more, can be achieved by a combination of greater energy efficiencies, phasing out the use of coal and switching from fossil fuels to renewable energies. But this vision of the future is not one that fossil fuel companies can accept. Led by the coal industry, those companies are insisting that carbon capture and storage (CCS) can square the circle between everincreasing sales of their products and a major decrease in greenhouse gas emissions.

The stakes could not be higher. If at any point in the future the technology failed, resulting in either gradual or sudden leakage of stored carbon dioxide (CO2), the world could be faced with substantial, unexpected greenhouse gas emissions about which little or nothing could be done, as well as the potential for severe direct impacts on ecosystems in the vicinity of such leaks. Given that the storage would have to remain intact for many centuries, an extremely high level of confidence in the system's integrity would be necessary before proceeding with CCS.

Storage science shortfall

CCS technology is still very much in development. Its principle sounds simple – CO2 that would usually be emitted to the atmosphere is captured at the power plant, transported and injected into deep geological formations where, according to theory, it is stored safely for a long period of time. But in reality, the process turns out to be highly complex, not least because the scale of both sources and storage formations are so vast, and knowledge and experience so limited.

Scenarios indicate that a single 1000MW coal-fired power plant, producing 8.6 million tons of CO2 per year for 30 years, could generate an underground CO2 plume which, within a further 20-50 years, could extend over an area of between 200 and 360 km2, depending on the type and thickness of the storage formation1. Continuous injection of CO2 will also cause formation pressures to rise over large areas, not only in the plume area but well beyond.

Simulations indicate that after 30 years of injection, a pressure increase of 1 bar could extend over an area of about 2500 km2,2 which will modify the local mechanical stress field and could cause deformation of the surrounding geological formation itself. This would make it far more likely that the cap rock could be compromised, particularly where there are any existing weaknesses, such as faults or fracture zones, providing pathways for CO2, and, in the case of saline aquifers, metalladen brines to escape to the biosphere.

Cap rock integrity is therefore an essential key for storing CO2 safely in geological formations. However, largescale injection of CO2 will induce a range of strongly coupled physical and chemical processes, including multiphase fluid flow, changes in effective stress and solute transport, and even chemical reactions between fluids and minerals in the geological formation. The more impurities present in the CO2 stream, the more complex and unpredictable the system inevitably becomes.

To date, most risk assessments and models assume that only pure CO2 will be stored. In reality, this is very unlikely to be the case. Less-pure CO2 waste streams, also containing other substances like SOx, NOx, hydrogen sulphide or even mercury, are significantly cheaper to generate (albeit with the possibility of higher transport costs), requiring less technological investment and energy to separate from a flue gas, coal gasification process, etc3. This economic incentive makes it likely that some companies will choose to store mixed gases.

Keeping carbon captured

Yet these mixtures and impurities could have a major impact on storage integrity. Mineral trapping of CO2 in a storage formation is hampered by hydrogen sulphide (H2S), for example. Although it has been suggested by some that large amounts of co-injected H2S should not prove problematic, interaction with the rock formation cannot be ruled out. Moreover, if conditions in a geological formation allow sulfur to be oxidized, or if CO2 was to be costored with SO2, very different patterns of pH distribution and mineral alteration would be expected compared to those arising from CO2 injection alone. Mineral alteration can lead to significant changes in porosity, and hence permeability, which could modify the fluid flow4. SO2 is much more corrosive in the presence of water than CO2 , such that the mobilization of metals in groundwater and overlying soils or sediments may be higher, leading to a greater risk of trace metal contamination in the surrounding environment5.

Even if only pure CO2 was injected, it could still induce dissolution of minerals, especially iron-bearing oxides, that could mobilize toxic trace metals6 and ultimately create pathways through the sealing rock for CO2, displaced brines and other associated substances7. Although current geophysical techniques allow broad identification and characterisation of fractures in a rock formation, relatively fine (open or sealed) fractures may remain undetected at the time of injection, representing possible pathways for CO2 sometime in the future.

A much more obvious and, perhaps, immediate pathway for leakage are the wells themselves, whether those used for injection or others in the vicinity which have, at some point, connected with the formation. The potential for leakage of CO2 through existing and abandoned wells is particularly relevant in regions that have been intensively explored and exploited for hydrocarbon reserves, such as in the North Sea. Although well completion and abandonment practices have evolved considerably over time, even wells drilled and abandoned by today's standards are unlikely to be entirely resistant to the corrosive effects of CO2 that comes in contact with water.

In short, the risks and uncertainties surrounding CCS are significant, manifold and complex. Despite assurances from industry and government, leakage of CO2 from storage reservoirs cannot be ruled out. Although the IPCC regards the risks to be low, it is vital to remember that problems may occur long after injection has ended, well beyond the timeframes over which the efficacy and safety of CCS has so far been demonstrated. The big question decisionmakers need to ask themselves is not just whether they want to take the risk, but whether it is responsible and sustainable for them to pass the burden of a continued reliance on fossil fuels to future generations.

The choice is real – CCS is not unavoidable – if only they put their efforts and money into renewable energies and energy efficiencies, the real solutions to climate change.

Dr Gabriela von Goerne is a geologist working with the Climate & Energy Unit of Greenpeace’s office in Hamburg, Germany. Dr David Santillo is a marine biologist and environmental chemist working with the Greenpeace Research Laboratories, based at the University of Exeter in the UK

1 Benson S., Hoversten M., Gasperikova E., Haines M. (2004): Monitoring protocols and life-cycle costs for geologic storage of carbon dioxide. Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Greenhouse Gas Control technologies, Vancouver, Canada

2 Pruess K., Xu T., Apps J., Garcia J. (2003): Numerical modeling of aquifer disposal of CO2. SPE Journal, 49-60

3 Andersson K., Johnsson F., Strömberg L. (2003): An 865 Mwe lignite-fired power plant with CO2 capture – a technical feasibility study. VGB Conference “Power Plants in Competition – Technology, Operation and Environment”, Cologne.

4 Xu T., Apps J., Pruess K., Yamamoto H. (2007): Numerical modeling of injection and mineral trapping of CO2 with H2S and SO2 in a sandstone formation. Chemical Geology xx (2007) xxx-xxx

5 IPCC (2005): Special report on Carbon dioxide capture and storage. p250

6 Schütt T., Wigand M., Spangenberg E. (2005): Geophysical and geochemical effects of supercritical CO2 on sandstones. In: Carbon dioxide capture for storage in deep geologic formations (Eds.: D.C.Thomas, S.M. Benson) Vol.2, Chapter 7, 767-786

7 Kharaka Y., Cole D., Hovorka S., Gunter W., Knauss K., Freifeld B. (2006): Gas-water-rock interactions in Frio Formation following CO2 injection: Implications for the storage of greenhouse gases in sedimentary basins. Geology, Vol.34, 577-580

Public in the Dark about Biofuels in their Petrol

Ellie Keen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 22:16:35 +0000

Almost nine out of ten Britons have no idea that biofuels will be added to their petrol from tomorrow, according to the first ever public attitudes survey on the controversial alternative fuels. The research also revealed that, of those who knew what biofuels are, three quarters would prefer the Government to curb emissions by improving public transport or making cars greener.

The YouGov survey, commissioned by Friends of the Earth, also revealed that 78 per cent of the public agree that European governments should make vehicle manufacturers double the fuel efficiency of new cars by 2020 in order to tackle climate change. And that more than two thirds of people think the Government is not doing enough to improve public transport.

The Government's Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation, brought in to meet EU regulations, means all petrol sold in the UK will have to include at least 2.5 per cent biofuels - made from crops- from 15 April 2008. But although the move aims to reduce reliance on fossil fuels and cut carbon emissions, new scientific evidence shows that the growth in biofuels could actually increase greenhouse gas emissions through land conversion and greater use of chemical fertilisers.

Worryingly, two thirds of those surveyed by Friends of the Earth were unaware that the growth in biofuels is contributing to the destruction of rainforest.

Friends of the Earth believes the UK Government and the EU should scrap their biofuels targets and tackle transport pollution by investing in better public transport and strengthening proposals for mandatory emissions limits on all new cars.

Friends of the Earth biofuels campaigner, Kenneth Richter, said:

"Most people will be horrified to know the Government is putting biofuels in our petrol when the damage they do to forests could make climate change worse.

"People want to see real green transport solutions that make a difference to their lives instead - like better public transport and smarter cars that burn less fuel. It's now up to the Government to put transport policy on the right track."

Notes:

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from YouGov Plc. Total sample size was 2,183 adults. Fieldwork was undertaken between 3 - 7 April 2008. The survey was carried out online. The figures have been weighted and are representative of all GB adults (aged 18+).

[1] The survey results are:

When asked whether they thought European Governments should make vehicle manufacturers double the fuel efficiency on new cars by 2020, 78 per cent of all respondents either agreed or strongly agreed.

Overall more than two thirds (70 per cent) think the Government is not doing enough to improve public transport.

When asked, "are you aware that the growth in biofuels is contributing to deforestation in countries like Indonesia?" only 33 per cent of respondents answered yes.

89 per cent of people in Great Britain do not know that biofuels are going to be added to their petrol from 15 April when the Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation comes into force.

Of the 1,209 respondents who knew what biofuels were (55 per cent), fewer than one in seven people (14 per cent) thought they were the best way to reduce emissions from road transport. 44 per cent singled out improving public transport as the best option.

[2] Recent research has suggested that the carbon dioxide emissions released when land is converted to grow biofuels could take centuries to pay back. Globally the push for biofuels is resulting in increased pressure on the worlds remaining rainforests which hold huge stores of carbon.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2008/February/07020802.asp

Nobel prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen has calculated that using chemical fertilisers to grow biofuel crops can release twice the amount of the potent greenhouse gas nitrous oxide (N2O) than previously thought.

http://www.rsc.org/chemistryworld/News/2007/September/21090701.asp

[3] There are increasing calls for Government caution on biofuels, The King Review of Low Carbon Cars, commissioned by the UK Government and published on 12 March 2008, urged the EU to shift the focus of its policy from biofuels to cleaner automotive technology. It also recommended adopting a target of 100 grammes of carbon dioxide emissions for each kilometre a car travels. Friends of the Earth is calling for European governments to go even further and make vehicle manufacturers double the average fuel efficiency on new cars by 2020 - something supported by the vast majority of people in our survey released today.

New cars sold in the UK in 2007 emitted 164.9 grammes of carbon dioxide per kilometre (g/km CO2). The latest figures for the EU as a whole showed that average emissions of new cars sold in 2006 were 160g.km CO2. Doubling average fuel efficiency would reduce average emissions to 80g/km CO2.

The EU is currently deciding on emissions targets for the next decade or more. And has recently weakened its plans to reduce average emissions from new cars sold in the EU to no more than 120g per kilometre by 2012 in the wake of lobbying from car companies like Porsche.� As well as relaxing the limit to 130 g/km it has not proposed any firm longer term targets for 2020. Car manufacturers are calling for the 2012 target to be weakened still further and, according to reports, Porsche is considering legal action against the EU if it sticks to its original 120g/km CO2 target - see http://www.forbes.com/markets/feeds/afx/2007/09/14/afx4117266.html for further information.

For further information about low carbon cars and the current EU negaotaitions, see http://www.foe.co.uk/resource/briefings/delivering_greener_cars.pdf

For further information about Friends of the Earth, visit www.foe.co.uk.

To Fly or Not to Fly

Ellie Keen — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 21:53:44 +0000

The plane is over the English Channel when the pilot’s voice crackles over the loudspeakers.

‘Just to warn you that there’s been a bit of trouble at Heathrow with people protesting about the impact of air travel on climate change. Nothing to worry about, but when we land you may see a bigger police presence at the airport than you would normally expect.’

The tone is jocular and clearly intended to draw us all together into a kind of community of ‘sensible’ travellers who might have to suffer the disruption of ‘extremist’ campaigners.

So what exactly am I doing here, in August 2007, given that I feel a much greater sense of kinship with the Climate Camp protesters down below than with the pilot’s cosy set of assumptions? It’s a good question. I’m on my way back with my family from a holiday in Italy. Last time we went, a few years ago, we drove there and back, via Luxembourg and Switzerland, taking our time and making many stop-offs on the way to break the journey. This time when we booked, almost a year in advance, we knew our time would be squeezed between work commitments and being back for our daughter’s exam results. So, not without qualms, we took advantage of ludicrously cheap flights that would get us there within a couple of hours rather than a couple of days.

I tell you this to indicate my starting-point when I began to research this magazine – for all that I bike to work, compost like crazy and am vegetarian, I am far from being in the environmental vanguard, and certainly don’t feel able to lecture people about what they should or should not do.

Given this, I was not exactly burning to pick up the topic of Ethical Travel. I had no problem considering the effects of tourism on the Majority World. But since most tourism depends on air travel I knew I was likely to find myself in the unenviable position of having to offer readers some guidance as to when flying is acceptable and when it isn’t.

And the more I sounded people out, the more my suspicions were confirmed. People are concerned and looking for guidance on an issue which has leapt to public attention in recent years – at least in Britain, where the debate about flying rages much hotter than it does in Australasia or North America.

Mind-boggling statistics

My earliest research left me shocked by the statistics on aviation emissions. Put simply, jet aircraft not only emit carbon from vast quantities of kerosene fuel, they also do it at high altitudes, where it has a much greater warming effect than it would in the lower atmosphere. In addition, jets emit other greenhouse gases, including nitrous oxide and water vapour (‘contrails’). The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates the net effect of all these emissions from jet aircraft at 2.7 times the carbon consumed in the fuel. The chart below shows that an individual’s share of carbon emitted on a return flight from London to New York exceeds the carbon used up by a full year’s modest driving of an average car.

How such statistics are calculated is always a contentious issue. But the exact numbers are less interesting than the broad-brushstroke comparisons: you can easily dump more carbon into the atmosphere from one return flight than from the gas and electricity you use in your house for an entire year. This was, to be frank, a quite mind-boggling discovery for me, which couldn’t help but challenge my attitude to flying.

Travel has played an enormous part in my life. I cannot easily conceive what kind of person I would be had I not been able to board an airplane. But I do recognize that the profound implications of climate change (and the fight to prevent it) are going to force us all to take stock of our lives, to challenge all our assumptions. Just how far, I wonder, are we prepared to go in challenging the flying culture?

My tentative proposal to the NI editorial team was that we should oppose the expansion of aviation – especially the development of new airports or runways – and encourage readers to reduce the amount they flew. But we should stop well short of calling for an end to all holiday flights.

A great deal of heat was generated in the discussion that ensued, but not a lot of light. It soon became plain that the issue of flying is a particularly thorny one, in which emotions are perhaps too readily engaged. And this was despite the fact that, perhaps surprisingly, there was no-one in the room arguing that the magazine should rule out flying for leisure or experience altogether. One or two people argued that it would be so impossible to pin down reliable estimates of the emissions of various forms of transport that we would be treading on dodgy ground even to enter the flying debate.

Adam Ma’anit

I DEFINITELY AGREE with the need to deal with aviation’s impact on climate change. My worry is about the focus on individual consumption, on individuals taking flights. I think the emphasis needs to go back towards political, economic and environmental policies. Too much of the flying debate is about individual one-upmanship and not about real substantive change. It’s natural for the environmental movement to go down that path because it’s easier to appeal to their base – environmentally minded folk who will accept the wisdom of flying less and peer-pressure each other – but the movement shouldn’t shy away from the difficult questions.

Lifestyle politics may be a hit with the hairshirt crowd, but it’s small fry compared to the huge socio-political changes needed to avert the worst excesses of climate change. Just as telling people to eat better won’t solve the obesity crisis, so too will the ‘you fly, we die’ message fall on deaf ears. And let’s not forget the importance of building up the alternatives. Telling people to fly less and travel by train instead when the rail system in many countries is so mind-boggingly expensive, over-crowded and unreliable is hardly a convincing argument. Rather than solely appealing to people’s better consciences, let’s focus our energies on the big wins that can be made with modest political will.

Aviation’s growth is very worrying and that does need to be curtailed. The big target is short-haul flights to destinations that could easily and comfortably be serviced by rail, bus or ferry. But those services need to run well, they need to be just as heavily scrutinized for their environmental impacts and they should be reasonably affordable and safe. At the moment, they’re often not, so it’s no wonder people take to the skies. But not flying has become an iconic badge of environmental commitment and I think that’s misguided.

If there were the political will to do something about climate change so much could be done in so little time and aviation would play a relatively small role in reducing the global footprint. For example, if government said tomorrow we’re going to ban all electronic devices with standby mode it would reduce electricity consumption by a huge amount at a stroke. How many people factor the standby mode into their purchasing decisions? Not many. But if you deal with it at a macro level you actually take it out of the equation.

Same with government-sponsored housing insulation, combined heat and power units for residential blocks, support for micro-renewables. Stopping the war would deliver massive carbon savings and free up resources that could be used to steer us away from climate disaster. There are lots of things that simply can’t be done at an individual level and have to be done by society as a whole – reining in corporate power and wasteful energy transmission, decentralizing energy grids and promoting renewables, stopping subsidies of fossil fuels, ending aviation’s tax-free fuel ride. And that’s just for starters... There is so much we can do now. So let’s stop the incessant navel-gazing and agonizing over our personal carbon ‘footprints’ and build the momentum for real change.

Mark Lynas

It’s worth looking at work travel as well as holidays because that’s probably the largest component of most people’s carbon footprint. When people fly for their work, are the ethical considerations their own responsibility or their employer’s?

None of these things are completely black and white and it’s finding a way through the greys that has become an ethical minefield. There’s a cultural value shift going on and things haven’t quite settled yet when it comes to what’s moral and what isn’t. But in the mean time there are a lot of accusations and counter-accusations.

Is there a danger that focusing individuals on their own carbon footprint is a distraction?

You need to know where you stand in terms of what your contribution is to the collective problem. Of course, simply doing things at an individual level is not going to be enough – it’s got to be a collective approach to a collective problem and that comes down to politics, to building a movement. That’s more important than what you do at home but you’ve got to do both – they’re complementary.

When a right-wing group in the US got hold of Al Gore’s [massive] electricity bill it played well for them because it sowed cynicism and that in turn has an effect in paralyzing social action. I wrote defending Gore because it does strike me that this ‘green hypocrisy’ argument about individual behaviour has gone too far. Some people’s aggregated impact on the climate should be seen as positive despite their air miles.

I make the calculation – we all do. And it’s not just flying, though that has become symbolic because of the big numbers attached to it; it’s everything – every time you turn on the heating in your house it’s worth a certain amount of CO2.

But flying consumes much more carbon even than heating...

It does, but only when you look at it from an individual point of view. When you look at it from an aggregate point of view, the flight component of a national carbon budget is still very small because most people don’t take trips to New York. The biggest source of carbon is still space heating, which is a lot less interesting but is much more important than flying. On the other hand, flying is a relatively easy thing not to do. Here in Wolvercote [his village] we’re going low carbon and we’ve found that most behaviour hasn’t really changed except that people have been taking fewer holiday flights.

Don’t you find it problematic, saying people shouldn’t fly when you’ve travelled so much yourself?

I can’t imagine how I would have been had I not spent a lot of my life in the South. I’m happy to rule out future holiday travel for myself – I’d felt yucky about being in places as a tourist for a long time, so that’s easily done. But it’s such a big sacrifice for other people to make and that’s why I think aviation is the one thing for which we need a ‘technofix’. We’ve got a totally globalized world with families all over the place and you just can’t unpick all the threads.

The low-hanging fruit is insulating your loft [attic]; stopping aviation is the highest-hanging fruit there is in terms of the bang people get for their carbon buck.

Say to the industry: ‘Look, you’ve got 15 years to do this or you go out of business’ and I think they’d come up with something. There has to be a role for technological innovation and Manhattan Project-type approaches to this.

George Monbiot

It’s possible to have a technological effect on almost every other area of climate change apart from aviation. You could run almost the entire energy system on renewable power if you did it in the right way. Aviation is the one area for which there is no available technological solution in the foreseeable future. We’re not likely to see battery-powered jetliners.

It’s not just a question of blocking future airport expansion; we have to reduce what’s already there. We have to cut aviation emissions by 95 per cent if we’re going to keep overall emissions to the level we need to. That means people can fly only 5 per cent of the amount they are now – and that’s a maximum.

People shouldn’t be flying for leisure or tourism purposes at all. They also shouldn’t be flying for business. If you’ve got a pressing family obligation, a relative who’s sick or dying, then fair enough. And if you’re doing something important with human rights or raising awareness of the environmental threat and there’s no other way of getting there, you might be able to justify it. But even then you have to think very carefully because it’s going to be rare that the importance of the work will outweigh the damage done by the flight.

What about damage done to communities in the Majority World that are currently dependent on tourism?

I do accept that some communities are going to be hit hard by this. But you have to set that against the enormous and much greater damage that will be done to other communities all over the world by climate change. We have to make it a priority to help those communities and countries to develop better ways of surviving and thriving that do not depend upon transporting 150 pounds of human halfway across the planet and back.

What would the world be like without the intercultural exchanges that derive from air travel?

Cross-cultural international connections don’t depend entirely on flying. You can travel by boat or by train almost anywhere – it just takes a lot more time. So travelling without flying is still possible.

And in terms of bringing about change, it isn’t really necessary to travel to become an internationalist. At the time of the Make Poverty History campaign most of the people in the West who became deeply concerned about Africa had never visited there but had been moved by what they had seen on television. You don’t become an internationalist by travelling – just as travelling in itself doesn’t make you an internationalist.

You started as a travel writer, though – you’ve benefited in all kinds of ways from international travel that have helped make you the person you are. How can you deny those benefits to young people now?

I do feel bad that I’m having to say to young people now that they cannot have the opportunities I had for guilt-free experience of other lands and cultures. But there’s no alternative. That experience of travel is simply not available to people now. It’s another example of how the sins of one generation have been handed to the next generation who have to pay the price.

There was also an argument that for the New Internationalist to concentrate its attention on individual behaviour – when and whether people should be travelling by plane – would be a mistake. There are much more important battles to be fought than this in the war on climate change, ran this strand of thought, than encouraging people to think about their ‘carbon footprint’. I invited one of my editorial colleagues, Adam Ma’anit, to lay out this position (see box, above).

There is no doubt that the primary need is for governments, rather than individuals, to take action.

Climate change is the greatest issue of our time, yet politicians the world over continue to funk it, fearing that if they derail the globalized consumer bandwagon it will cost them their jobs. Given how huge is the task in front of us, the primary requirement has to be to campaign, to do all we can to change the political landscape so that it reflects the real (planet-)burning issues rather than the pre-eminent concern with the dollar in our pocket.

But I still felt it was important to include in the magazine some recognition of the dilemma faced by individual readers concerned about the ethics of flying in an overheating world. Those of us who try to reduce or constrain our carbon footprint are not likely to be distracted from campaigning for the big-picture political changes. One can reinforce the other. Don’t we all feel much more comfortable campaigning for a cause if we are doing our bit? That way at least we can’t be charged with hypocrisy. And our own individual actions may have a ripple effect, whether by inspiring others or by contributing to a statistical trend. Changing our lifestyle could reinforce pressure on politicians to pull us out of this tailspin. After all, we know more clearly than ever that every kilogram of carbon we propel into the atmosphere is doing some very dirty work.

Consulting the oracles

One of the main proponents of the ‘carbon footprint’ way of looking at this problem is Mark Lynas, author of High Tide, Six Degrees and Carbon Calculator: Easy ways to reduce your carbon footprint.

When I met Mark, he was just back from a mammoth journey by boat to Norway. ‘It took 10 days – it was a disaster,’ he said ruefully. ‘If I’d done it in a plane trip in a day it would have been a hell of a lot easier than dragging the whole family out there for 10 days. You can go a bit too far in terms of being puritan on this. Mind you, it always plays well because people always ask how you got there. And it’s nice to be able to say: “Well, train and boat!” It even makes headlines in the papers because people don’t expect it.’

While he has ruled out holiday flights for himself, he readily acknowledges the moral complexity of the issue – as well as stressing that he too sees individual effort as secondary to the vital job of building a movement that will shift governments. And he hankers after a technofix (see box, below), even though, he added: ‘George will kill me for saying so.’

The George in question is Monbiot, the Guardian columnist and author of Heat: How We Can Stop the Planet Burning. The chapter of Heat on aviation (‘Love Miles’) lays out very starkly the damage done by air travel – and the impossibility of meeting any meaningful emissions targets if we continue our love affair with it.

‘A 90-per-cent cut in carbon emissions means the end of distant foreign holidays, unless you are prepared to take a long time getting there… It means that journeys around the world must be reserved for visiting the people you love, and that they will require both slow travel and the saving up of carbon rations… If you fly, you destroy other people’s lives.’

Ulp. You can’t get much more categorical than that. Reading my interview with George (see box, overleaf), you might wonder why I didn’t ask him the most obvious follow-up question: how many times have you yourself flown somewhere in the last year? Actually I didn’t need to ask him – he was so primed for that question that he misheard one of my others and answered that he has taken two flights in the last 18 months, both to climate-change events where he judged that he could make more of a difference by attending in person than by not flying.

I was more concerned to probe how he, who began as a travel writer and has benefited in all kinds of ways from experiencing other countries and cultures, feels able to say that young people now should not avail themselves of the same opportunities. His answer is pretty much that, however bad he feels about it, the problem is so huge and so all-trumping that there is simply no alternative.

I cannot bring myself to say the same. As I write, my daughter is experiencing her first day of teaching in a village in Malawi, having just spent a week of ‘orientation’ in the capital, Lilongwe. I am proud that she has chosen to spend her gap year before university working in Africa. What she learns about the world and its injustices and inequalities will reverberate through her entire life and will give her a connection with Malawi, and with Africa as a whole, that no amount of book reading or film watching could have achieved. Should I really have said to her, at a time when the rest of the world seems to be leaping on a plane at the drop of a hat to sun themselves on a beach or to go shopping, that she should forego the whole experience because we have just begun to understand the climate-changing contribution of aviation? I don’t think so.

What would happen in a no-fly world?

What would happen at New Internationalist if we introduced a no-flying policy? The issue has already caused some soul-searching within the co-operative. People travelling to the Frankfurt Book Fair, for example, have had to weigh the environmental impact against the cost (since the advent of budget airlines, ridiculously enough, it is actually cheaper to fly from Britain to Germany than to go by train) and the significant extra time involved. Even if a company has a policy that supports (and is prepared to pay for) an employee wishing to go overland, there are often family or work reasons why that person is loath to be away longer than need be.

Given that we have editors in Canada, Australia and Holland, and that we focus on the concerns of the Majority World, eschewing flying altogether would not look to be an option for us as an organization. Certainly the need for editors to be in touch with the realities of everyday life in Africa, Asia and Latin America – on which the magazine’s reputation stands – depends upon their being able to hear ordinary people’s testimonies first hand rather than just relying on printed reports or local journalists.

And New Internationalist is, after all, only the tip of the ‘One World community’ iceberg, which has been founded upon international travel in both directions – on people visiting and migrating to our own countries from far-flung locations, and on our learning from and adjusting to other peoples and cultures.

What would happen to a world in which the only people who travelled by plane were those most committed to its rapacious exploitation? Would airways become the de facto province of the most unscrupulous corporations? Besides, where is the sense in rejecting one aspect of international aviation (tourism) while accepting other aspects (air-freighted goods and foodstuffs, air mail and so on)?

No more new runways

But in the context of an ever-warming world, if we continue to fly for our pleasure and education, we need to ensure that such tourism is not itself damaging, and that it genuinely benefits the host communities at the other end. In the articles that follow I’ll look at what is wrong with most tourism now and whether more sustainable forms of travel that benefit local communities are actually possible.

It also means we have to increase pressure on policy-makers to contain and reduce air travel. Governments all too readily point the finger at individuals rather than demonstrating leadership on the issue. I encountered an example of this recently when, at a Christmas party, I got talking to a civil servant working on transport issues. I was explaining why I thought the British Government’s intention to build a third runway at Heathrow to meet anticipated demand was the purest folly. ‘It’s not up to the Government to take a lead on this issue,’ he said, ‘it’s up to individuals to stop taking advantage of cheap flights.’

As an evasion of responsibility, this takes some beating. Yet it mirrors the approach of most Western governments, which simply put a blind eye to the telescope and continue to chase economic growth whatever the environmental cost. Pointing to booming demand, they plan for new runways and new airports that will soon fill to capacity just like the extra lane for cars on an expressway. As a result, air travel is growing at a rate of some five per cent a year, meaning that air passenger kilometres are set to triple by 2030.¹

Air travel urgently needs to be contained – and physical limits (not enough runways to meet demand) are actually a very practical, sensible method of containment. It also doesn’t take an expert to see that the current convenient practice of excluding international air travel from all national emissions targets is absurdly ostrich-like. Besides, the boom in air travel cannot be accounted for by ‘ordinary hard-working people taking their one holiday a year’, which is the routine claim of the media and the travel industry. British Government statistics show that 62 per cent of adults did not make even one return flight in 2006. Among the richest 20 per cent of the population, 61 per cent took one or more return flights. Only four per cent of people took four or more flights.²

So even in the rich world we are talking about a tiny minority of people who may be flying an insane amount.

The spread that follows this article suggests ‘Ten steps to reduce flying’ – and some of these will affect only that tiny minority. But others will apply to you and me as well, because even if the primary focus has to be on forcing governments into action, we still need to do our individual bit.

In a way, putting this issue together has been a gesture in this direction since, three trips to London by train and bus aside, I have made a point of avoiding travelling (always, depressingly, the most ethical course of action of all). On the home front, my family has already decided to holiday this year in Cornwall, on the English coast, rather than further afield. But, on the other hand, the following year we have long planned to revisit friends and familiar places in Canada – we lived in Toronto for a year in the mid-1990s. And now my brother’s family is on the verge of emigrating to Australia – without one or other of us flying we would never see each other again.

It’s a tangled web, as this article – if it has done nothing else – has made plain. Good luck to all of you as you try to sort out what you think about it.

We're Still too Fixated on Oil

Ellie Keen — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 14:29:16 +0000

Is this Government really serious about climate change? We've just learnt that it is now lining up behind BP to get a decent-sized chunk of the oil-drilling licences soon to be issued in Iraq. That's in line with the discovery that Britain is also planning to lay claim to over 1/3 rd of a million square miles of the seabed off Antarctica because of its oil potential.

And the UK is also already developing sub-sea claims on Atlantic oilfields around the Falklands, off Ascension Island, and in the Rockall basin, as well as large tracts in the Bay of Biscay.

Tony Blair's visit to Gadaffi in 2004 was prompted less by concern about Libyan WMD than by the goal of prising open the huge Libyan oil market. Blair's red-carpet welcome in Downing Street in 1998 for Haydar Aliyev, the ex-KGB President of Azerbaijan, was designed to secure a £5 billion oil deal for BP, which it duly did. The Government also strongly backed the construction of BP's $4bn Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan 1,000 mile oil pipeline which is now transporting a million barrels of oil a day of Caspian oil to the UK and the West. Again, Government support lay behind Shell's massive $20bn Sakhalin Energy gas and oil project in Eastern Siberia (till Russia muscled its way into taking it over in 2006) and Shell's equally costly Athabascan tar sands project in Alberta, Canada, to extract synthetic oil from oil shales even though extracting it generates twice as much C0² as conventional oil. And of course UK participation in the American invasion of Iraq was at least partly motivated by the goal of securing for BP some significant share in Iraq's huge still-unexplored oilfields.

This policy of relentless - and extraordinarily expensive - pursuit of the remaining hydrocarbon supplies wherever they may be found across the world is both shortsighted and wholly contrary to any pretensions to be tackling climate change as being the greatest threat facing the planet. It is shortsighted because peak oil - the point at which oil production reaches its global peak before it then steadily declines - is widely expected to be reached some time between 2010-2015. At the same time the global demand for oil, driven mainly by the frenetic growth rate of the Chinese and Indian economies over the last decade and into the future, will continue to rise inexorably and the 1-1.5 trillion barrels of conventional oil that remain will be consumed in some 40 years and perhaps less. Even if the UK could secure a significant slice of the remaining hydrocarbon deposits across the world which, given that the intense competition between the US and China for the same supplies is the biggest struggle driving geopolitics today, must at best be highly optimistic, it is a policy which is absurdly short-term. Oil has no long-term future, and it is madness that so close to its demise we are not at this stage planning much more systematically for a post-oil world.

The policy also ruthlessly exposes the proud boasts that the UK is leading the world in the fight against climate change. While Government is telling people (rightly) to turn off their electronic stand-by buttons and to recycle more, which will have a useful but small effect, it is still cranking up the last enormous reserves of the fossil fuel mania which will have a vastly greater and negative effect. While 10-25% of electricity generation in Europe is derived from renewable sources of energy, and 35-50% in Scandinavia, in Britain - which as an offshore island has more windpower capacity than most of the rest of Europe put together - it is a pitiful 4%.

Still today almost every aspect of energy policy in Britain is driven by the dominating influence of the old fossil fuel industries. The Government is proposing to triple airport capacity by 2030 even though on current trends air travel emissions may well by 2050 equal emissions from all other sectors combined so that even if all the latter were reduced to zero (which is fanciful), there would still be no reduction at all in the hugely excess level of total emissions that already exists today. And since the abolition of the fuel duty escalator in 2000, there has been no policy to discourage use of gas-guzzling and emissions-inflating SUVs except the mild differential in annual car tax between small and large cars which a recent budget increased for SUVs by 80p a week - which is a joke.

Nor has industry, or at least the largest firms, been required to report annually on their greenhouse gas emissions so that the public can see whether they, and particularly the most polluting industries, are making their due and proper contribution to cutting emissions by at least 60% by 2050, as the scientists say is necessary. There was indeed a Government legislative measure to do just that in 2002, but it was dropped at the last moment in order to burnish the Chancellor's deregulatory credentials with the CBI. Nor, to cut food air miles when produce can be grown locally, are food products required to be labelled with the country of origin and the distance they have travelled to be sold.

There are however two areas where the Government is certainly headed in the right direction. One is the proposal that all new house-building by 2016 should be emissions zero-rated. This is a bold initiative, though it needs to be supplemented with measures to reduce the carbon-rating of existing buildings progressively towards zero. The second is the proposal to introduce a carbon allowance for each family, depending on its size, which will then gradually be reduced year by year, though its date of introduction should be brought forward from 2012.

The ongoing love affair with oil has got to be broken. In 1990, taken as the baseline date for climate change purposes, Britain generated about 160 million net tons of carbon a year. If we are to cut emissions by at least 60% by 2050 (though the scientists are now saying 80% will be necessary), we will have to reduce that to no more than 60 million tons - a reduction of around 2 million tons of carbon every year right through to 2050.

On that basis the total should by now have reduced by some 35 million tonnes compared with 1990. In fact it has reduced by only about 5 million tons. There could be no starker reminder that if we are really serious about stopping catastrophic climate change - in reality, not just in words - then we need as a top priority a blueprint for a zero-carbon post-oil Britain, and we then need to enforce it.

Darling Ducked the Difficult Decisions

Ellie Keen — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 19:28:38 +0000

Like the Lord Almighty, the Chancellor giveth, and the Chancellor taketh away. On the one hand a 10 per cent increase in plane duty will force aviation to pay more of its environmental costs and help reduce emissions. On the other, Alistair Darling’s explicit support for the expansion of both Heathrow and Stansted airports will force emissions ever upwards. A higher rate of first-year tax on polluting 4×4s will reduce emissions. But postponing the increase in fuel duty will increase them.

If his Budget speech to the Commons is to be believed, Darling has made up his mind: climate change is the greatest challenge facing us all, and “there will be catastrophic economic and social consequences if we fail to act”. In response to this, with great determination and steely efficiency, the Chancellor . . . fails to act. There was no more money for the cash-strapped low carbon buildings programme, so the UK domestic renewables sector will continue to decline. Aviation can expand virtually unchecked. By caving in to the roads lobby and postponing the increase in fuel duty, he is making fossil fuel slightly cheaper in real terms, helping to increase consumption.

Darling also wants to “encourage sustainable biofuels”, apparently not realising that in today’s world the phrase is an oxymoron. He is happy to jump on the Daily Mail’s plastic bags bandwagon – a campaign of marginal importance environmentally – but unwilling to do anything to encourage manufacturers to produce goods more sustainably. And so it goes on.

Big decisions have been postponed. Instead of agreeing that the UK’s reductions targets should be bumped up to 80 per cent by 2050, in line with the latest science, this decision has been handed to the Committee on Climate Change and put off until December. There were no headline announcements on road pricing; it will be subject to further study. There was no announcement on feed-in tariffs to support micro-renewables, despite this being heavily trailed.

New houses will be zero-carbon from 2016, and commercial properties zero-carbon from 2019. But there is nothing substantial to reduce pollution from the existing housing stock, which at 27 per cent of UK emissions is one of our big gest sources of CO2. The government will give £26m to something called the Green Homes Service, but that has yet to be launched – and £26m really isn’t very much money. At this rate of progress, our existing homes will be carbon-neutral by about the year 5000, when most of Britain will be under water.

The inescapable conclusion is that if the government does pass the Climate Change Bill as intended and set itself legally binding cuts in carbon, it will be hard-pressed to achieve them – particularly if the 2050 target is indeed raised to 80 per cent, as the green coalition group Stop Climate Chaos and many others are demanding. A little-noticed win for the climate-change movement was achieved recently when the government agreed to annual indicators of progress on carbon cuts, rather than just the five-yearly budgets. But this will make it even more difficult for ministers to duck difficult decisions, as Darling is doing by pledging commitment to acting on global warming while doing nothing substantial to reduce emissions.

The beauty of the Climate Change Bill approach is that it will forcibly iron out these inconsistencies in government policy. Future chan cellors will not be able to stand up before the country and simply pledge action; they will be judged by what happens with carbon emissions from year to year. If a future Alistair Darling wants to make petrol cheaper for motorists, thereby increasing emissions, he must force even deeper cuts in another sector of the economy to make up for it. There is no middle way.

But the bill still has a rather large hole in it – one large enough to fly a jet or sail a tanker through. International aviation and shipping are still excluded from our domestic targets, on the grounds that this aspect of our carbon footprint is shared with other countries. Ministers pretend that the issue is terribly complicated, but it really isn’t. We could simply count all the emissions from each departing plane or ship, but ignore those that arrive. It’s all the same to the planet.

Carbon capture is turning out to be just another great green scam

Ellie Keen — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 18:22:08 +0000

“Coal is so clean and fresh that the prime minister brushes his teeth with it, Downing Street said last night. Mr Brown said advances in coal technology meant it was now one of the cleanest substances on Earth, and an unrivalled remover of stains and scaling.” So says the satirical website the Daily Mash(1). The real claims are scarcely battier.

Ministers are about to decide whether to approve a new coal burning power station at Kingsnorth in Kent. This would be the first such plant built in Britain since the monster at Drax was finished in 1986. As well as coal, it will burn up the government’s targets, policies and promises on climate change.

John Hutton, the secretary of state in charge of energy, has started justifying the decision he says he hasn’t made. “For critics,” he argued last week, “there’s a belief that coal fired power stations undermine the UK’s leadership position on climate change. In fact the opposite is true.”(2) Quite so: if we don’t burn this stuff the Chinese might get their hands on it. Or could he be a true believer? Does he really think there’s such a thing as clean coal?

Clean coal’s definition changes according to whom the industry is lobbying. Sometimes it means more efficient power stations (which still produce almost twice as much carbon dioxide as gas plants). Sometimes it means removing sulphur dioxide from the smoke (which boosts the CO2(3)). Sometimes it means carbon capture and storage: stripping the carbon out of the exhaust gases, piping it away and burying it in geological formations. None of these equate to clean coal, as you will see if you visit an opencast mine. But they create a marvellous amount of confusion in the public mind, which gives the government a chance to excuse the inexcusable.

In principle, carbon capture and storage (CCS) could reduce emissions from power stations by 80-90%. While the whole process has not yet been demonstrated, the individual steps are all deployed commercially today: it looks feasible. The government has launched a competition for companies to build the first demonstration plant, which should be burying CO2 by 2014.

Unfortunately, despite Hutton’s repeated assurances, this has nothing to do with Kingsnorth or the other new coal plants he wants to approve. If Kingsnorth goes ahead, it will be operating by 2012, two years before the CCS experiment has even begun. The government says that the demonstration project will take “at least 15 years” to assess(4). It will take many more years for the technology to be retrofitted to existing power stations, by which time it’s all over. On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed at all, will come too late to prevent runaway climate change.

Kingsnorth will produce around 4.5 million tonnes of CO2 every year(5); if all eight of the proposed coal plants are built, they will account for 46% of the emissions Britain can produce by 2050, assuming the government sticks to Brown’s new proposed target of an 80% cut(6). Aviation, using the government’s own figures, will account for another 184% (7)(these figures are explained on my website). Even if we stopped breathing, eating, driving and heating our homes, the new runways and coal burners the government envisages would more than double our national greenhouse gas quota.

The government seeks to bamboozle us by arguing that the new power stations will be “CCS ready”, meaning that one day, in theory, they could be retrofitted with the necessary equipment. But even this turns out to be untrue. In January, Greenpeace obtained an exchange of emails between EO.N - the company hoping the build the new plant (yes the same EO.N that broadcasts footage of fluttering sycamore keys, suggesting that its dirty old habits have gone with the wind) - and Gary Mohammed, the civil servant drawing up the planning conditions(8). Mohammed begins by sending an email of such snivelling obsequiousness that you can almost smell the fear on it. “Drafting the conditions for Kingsnorth. If possible I would like to cover CCS … I admit this suggested condition could be without justification and premature but no harm in trying to gauge your opinion.” (This “suggested condition” was actually government policy. Who’s running this country?) EO.N replied by claiming that the secretary of state “has no right to withhold approval for conventional plant” (in fact he has every right). All it would allow the government to specify was that the potential for CCS “will be investigated.” Mr Mohammed wrestled with his conscience for all of six minutes before replying. “Thanks. I won’t include. Hope to get the set of draft conditions out today or tomorrow.”

This exchange took place in mid-January, a few days before the European Commission published a proposed directive specifying that all new coal-fired power stations must be CCS ready(9). Mr Mohammed must have known that he was helping EO.N to win approval for the plant before the directive comes into force next year.

You might by now be beginning the derive the impression that carbon capture and storage is not the green panacea that ministers have suggested. But you haven’t heard the half of it. Even if it does become a viable means of disposing of carbon dioxide, new figures suggest that it’s likely to enhance rather than reduce our total emissions.

For the companies which will bid to bury the gas, one technique is more attractive than the others. This is to pump it into declining oil fields. The gas dissolves into the remaining oil, reducing its viscosity and pushing it into the production wells. It’s called enhanced oil recovery (EOR). The oil the companies sell offsets some of the costs of carbon storage.

A few weeks ago, the green thinker Jim Bliss roughly calculated the environmental costs of this technique. He used as his case study the scheme BP proposed (but abandoned last year) for pumping CO2 into the Miller Field off the coast of Scotland. It would have buried 1.3m tonnes of CO2 and extracted 40 million barrels of oil(10). Taking into account only the four major fuel products, Bliss worked out that the total carbon emissions would outweigh the savings by between seven and fifteen times(11).

So has the government ruled out enhanced oil recovery? Not a bit of it. Its memo about the demonstration project says that Mr Hutton’s department “will want to ensure that the treatment of EOR and non-EOR projects are dealt with on a level playing field basis.”(12) Another document suggests it favours this technique: enhanced oil recovery will lead to “increased energy security, domestic revenue and employment”(13). But, the government notes, this will have to happen before the North Sea’s oil infrastructure is dismantled. “Now is the perfect opportunity to realise the significant opportunities offered by CCS.”(14)

Like biofuels and micro wind turbines, carbon capture and storage turns out to be another great green scam. It will come too late to prevent runaway climate change, the government has no intention of enforcing it and even if it had the technique is likely to boost our carbon emissions. This is what John Hutton calls “meeting our international obligations”(15). Heaven knows what breaking them might look like.

References:

1. http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=...

2. John Hutton, 10th March 2008. The Future of Utilities. Speech to the Adam Smith Institute. http://www.berr.gov.uk/about/ministerial-team/page45211.html

3. The commonest technique for flue gas desulphurisation is the limestone gypsum process. As well as making the power station slightly less efficient, the chemical reaction produces CO2. The two key reactions are:

CaCO3 + SO2 = CaSO3 + CO2

and

CaSO3 + _O2 + 2H2O = CaSO42H2O

See: Dept of Trade and Industry, March 2003. Flue Gas Desulphurisation (Fgd)
Technologies For Coal-Fired Combustion Plant. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file20875.pdf

4. BERR, 19th November 2007. Competition for a Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage
Demonstration Project. Project Information Memorandum. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file42478.pdf

5. Greenpeace, 2007. Letter to Alistair Darling. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/climate/kingsnorth_objection.pdf

6. Here’s how Greenpeace makes this calculation:
“In December 2007, Gordon Brown said he aspired to an 80% cut in emissions by 2050. That would give us a carbon budget of 117.8mt/CO2/per year. The new coal plants currently proposed – 10.6 GW of capacity - would emit more than 54 million tonnes of carbon dioxide which represents almost half of that quota. (10.6 GW x 7884 hours of generation per year, assuming 90% operational = 83.57 TWH/y. 83.57 TWH/y x 0.65 = 54 mt/CO2/y).”

7. This is 80% of the 1990 level, namely 161.5MtC (please note that this weight refers to elemental C, not CO2). That leaves 32.3MtC.

The Dept for Transport’s conservative figures suggest aviation emissions will rise to 15.7 MtC by 2050. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that net radiative forcing from aircraft emissions is 2.7 times that of the CO2 alone, which gives a nominal carbon equivalent of 42.4MtC. The government’s figures systematically underestimate the UK’s contribution, by assuming that British people are responsible for 50% of the seats on flights leaving or arriving in the UK. The true figure is 70%, which means the total equivalent figure is 59.35MtC.

8. You can read these emails here: http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/files/pdfs/climate/FOI-1.pdf

9. Commission Of The European Communities, 23rd January 2008. Proposal for a Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council on the geological storage of carbon dioxide and amending Council Directives 85/337/EEC, 96/61/EC, Directives 2000/60/EC, 2001/80/EC, 2004/35/EC, 2006/12/EC and Regulation (EC) No 1013/2006. http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=COM:2008:0018:FIN:...

10. BP, 30th June 2005. BP’s plan to generate electricity from hydrogen and capture carbon dioxide could set a new standard for cleaner energy. Press release. http://www.bp.com/genericarticle.do?categoryId=97&contentId=7006978

11. Jim Bliss, 17th January 2008. Oil companies and Climate Change. http://numero57.net/?p=224
Jim Bliss was asked to do this by the environmental writer Merrick Godhaven.

12. BERR, 19th November 2007, ibid.

13. The North Sea Basin Task Force, June 2007. Storing CO2 under the North Sea Basin – a key solution for combating climate change, p9. http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file40159.pdf

14. ibid, p9.