Ecology/Science | ukwatch.net

Just a Middle-Class Issue?

Tim Holmes — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 01:03:36 +0000

The news was depressing, to say the least. Two weeks ago, a poll conducted for the Observer found that a majority of the British public still think that the scientists are arguing about the causes of climate change. The reality, as I and many others have repeated more or less ad nauseum, is that the debate was settled a long time ago, and that the major areas of scientific uncertainty are about how far and how fast, not whether climate change is happening at all.

I blame the media almost entirely for this discrepancy between public understanding and scientific reality. The Daily Telegraph, for instance, still pumps out climate-denialist articles on a regular basis, and carries frequent antideluvian commentary on the subject from the likes of Christopher Brooker (whose latest piece excoriates “fanatical upholders of the [climate change] dogma”). The Mail does likewise, though Melanie Phillips has been curiously silent on the subject for several months.

Like the tobacco lobbyists who spent years denying the links between smoking and cancer, global warming denialists don’t have to win the debate – they simply have to confuse the public indefinitely to successfully undermine any political action which might hit the interests of their backers in the fossil fuel industries. The arguments change all the time: this year it is “global warming has stopped“, while last year it was “hurricanes aren’t linked with warming”, and the year before “satellites don’t show any warming of the atmosphere“. As each argument is laboriously refuted by scientists, the deniers simply drop it and skip onto the next one.

The second headline finding from the Observer poll further underlines this confusion. An equal number of people (about 40% in each case) think that “climate change might not be as bad as some people say”. Again, the frequent cries from the anti-environment right about global warming “alarmism” have clearly hit home.

There is further bad news on the environment versus economy debate. While concern about the economy is seeing its highest score since 1993, concern about the environment is flatlining in the June 23 Mori poll, and is well down from the higher levels seen during the launch of the Stern and IPCC reports in early 2007.

But with polls, detail is everything. Today’s new poll result shows that a clear majority favours government action on the environment v the economy, while an even larger majority supports the introduction of green taxes. So why the contradiction? The discrepancy may lie with different techniques used by different pollsters – the Observer poll was carried out by Ipsos Mori, while the latest Guardian survey was conducted by ICM. It may also lie with the exact wording of the question, which in the latter case probably leaves more room for individual interpretation. Also, people know that they are “supposed” to be concerned about the environment, so may prioritise it when questioned by a pollster, but fail to volunteer it in their own list of suggested priorities.

The ICM poll does throw up some other interesting results. When asked whether they thought their friends would now by cheaper groceries – rather than more expensive environmentally friendly alternatives – given the recent rises in the cost of living, a majority of nearly 60% went for the cheaper option. This suggests that in buying patterns at least, the economic downturn is indeed having a clear impact on ethical choices.

But perhaps the most fascinating result of all emerges from the small print of the different social classes of the ICM survey respondents. Environmentalists are constantly accused of being middle-class lifestyle faddists, who don’t understand the day-to-day financial pressures faced by “ordinary” working people. But the number of people who thought that environment should be the government’s priority rather than the economy was substantially higher (56%) among the lower income, less well-educated DE demographic than among the better-off ABs (47%). Lower-income social groups also have a much lighter environmental footprint overall: only 42% of DEs took a foreign holiday over the last three years, whilst 77% of ABs did. Better-off people also own more cars, as you might expect – only 5% of DEs have three or more cars, whilst 15% of ABs do.

So perhaps anti-environmental class warriors like the editors of Spiked need to find a new cause to champion. The working-class people who they claim “can’t afford to be concerned about climate change” actually care more about the future of the planet than the rich – and are doing a lot less damage to boot. So next time you hear someone defending motorway expansion or cheap flights on behalf of the British poor, ask yourself the question: whose side are they really on?

Green Lifeline

Tim Holmes — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 14:48:41 +0000

Almost everyone seems to agree: governments now face a choice between saving the planet and saving the economy. As recession looms, the political pressure to abandon green policies intensifies. A report published yesterday by Ernst and Young suggests that the EU’s puny carbon target will raise energy bills by 20% over the next 12 years(1). Last week the prime minister’s advisers admitted to the Guardian that his renewable energy plans were “on the margins” of what people will tolerate(2).

But these fears are based on a false assumption: that there is a cheap alternative to a green economy. Last week New Scientist reported a survey of oil industry experts, which found that most of them believe global oil supplies will peak by 2010(3). If they are right, the game is up. A report published by the US Department of Energy in 2005 argued that unless the world begins a crash programme of replacements 10 or 20 years before oil peaks, a crisis “unlike any yet faced by modern industrial society” is unavoidable(4).

If the world is sliding into recession, it’s partly because governments believed that they could choose between economy and ecology. The price of oil is so high and it hurts so much because there has been no serious effort to reduce our dependency. Yesterday in the Guardian, Rajendra Pachauri suggested that an impending recession could force us to confront the flaws in the global economy(5). Sadly it seems so far to have had the opposite effect: a recent Ipsos Mori poll suggests that people are losing interest in climate change(6). Opportunities for energy populism abound: it cannot be long before one of the major parties abandons the pale green consensus and starts invoking an oil cornucopia it cannot possibly deliver.

The British government maintains both positions at once. In his speech last week, Gordon Brown said he wanted “to facilitate a reduction in short term global oil prices” while seeking “to reduce progressively our dependence on oil”(7). He knows that the first objective makes the second one harder to achieve. The government’s policy is to build more of everything – more coal plants, more nuclear power, more oil rigs, more renewables, more roads, more airports – and hope no one spots the contradictions.

Is there a way out? Could we abandon the fossil fuel economy without provoking a blistering backlash? Two things are obvious. We need a global system, and the current one, the Kyoto Protocol, is bust. It sets no cap on global carbon pollution, its targets bear no relation to current science and are unenforceable anyway, it contains loopholes and get-out clauses wide enough to sail an oil tanker through.

Until recently I supported an alternative system called contraction and convergence. Every country, this system proposes, should end up with the same quota of carbon dioxide per person. The richest countries must produce much less than they do today; the poorest ones could pollute more. Another proposal flows logically from this one: carbon rationing. Having been assigned its carbon quota, each nation would divide up part of it equally among its citizens, who could use it to buy energy or trade it among themselves. These proposals have the merit of capping global pollution, of being fair, progressive and easy to understand and of encouraging us to think about our use of energy.

But, after reading the proofs of a book by the independent thinker Oliver Tickell, to be published this month, I have changed my view. In Kyoto2: how to manage the global greenhouse, Tickell slaughters my favourite ideas(8). He shows that there is no logical basis for dividing up the right to pollute among nation states. It gives them too much power over this commodity, and there is no guarantee that they would pass the pollution rights on to their citizens, or use the money they raised to green the economy. Carbon rationing, he argues, requires a level of economic literacy that’s far from universal in the most advanced economies, let alone in countries where most people don’t have bank accounts.

Instead Tickell proposes setting a global limit for carbon pollution then selling permits to pollute to companies extracting or refining fossil fuels. This has the advantage of regulating a few thousand corporations – running oil refineries, coal washeries, gas pipelines and cement and fertiliser works for example – rather than a few billion citizens. These firms would buy their permits in a global auction, run by a coalition of the world’s central banks. There’s a reserve price, to ensure that the cost of carbon doesn’t fall too low, and a ceiling price, at which the banks promise to sell permits, to ensure that the cost doesn’t cripple the global economy. In this case companies would be borrowing permits from the future. But because the money raised would be invested in renewables, the demand for fossil fuels would fall, so fewer permits would need to be issued in later years.

Tickell calculates that if the cap were set low enough to ensure that the world became carbon neutral by 2050, the total cost of permits would be about $1 trillion a year, or roughly 1.5% of the global economy. The money would be spent on helping the poor to adapt to climate change, paying countries to protect forests and other ecosystems, developing low-carbon farming, promoting energy efficiency and building renewable power plants.

But his figure seems too low. Like many of the world’s climate scientists, Oliver Tickell proposes that the concentration of greenhouse gases should eventually be stabilised at 350 parts per million (carbon dioxide equivalent) in the atmosphere, and his calculations are based on this target. Last week Lord Stern suggested that meeting a less stringent target (500 parts per million) would cost 2% of world gross domestic product(9). If the price of the carbon permits sold at auction were much higher than Tickell suggests, the extra money could be used for massive tax rebates and social spending, aimed especially at the poor. But could the world afford it?

This money doesn’t disappear, it gets spent. Tickell’s proposal could represent a classic Keynesian solution to economic crisis. The $1, $2 or even $5 trillion the system would cost is used to kick-start a green industrial revolution, a new New Deal not that different from the original one (whose most successful component was Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps, which protected forests and farmland(10)). This would not be the first time that business was rescued by the measures it most stoutly resists: there’s a long history of corporate lobbying against the kind of government spending that eventually saves the corporate economy.

Do we want to save it, even if we can? It is hard to see how the current global growth rate of 3.7% a year (which means the global economy doubles every 19 years) could be sustained(11), even if the whole thing were powered by the wind and the sun. But that is a question for another column and perhaps another time, when the current economic panic has abated. For now we have to find a means of saving us from ourselves.

George Monbiot has received an honorary doctorate from the University of St Andrews.

References:

1. BBC Online, 30th June 2008. Green target ‘to hike fuel bills’. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7480204.stm

2. Juliette Jowit and Patrick Wintour, 26th June 2008. Cost of tackling global climate change has doubled, warns Stern. The Guardian.

3. Ian Sample, 25th June 2008. Oil: The final warning. New Scientist.

4. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking Of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy. This was originally leaked and found its way onto this site: http://www.hilltoplancers.org/stories/hirsch0502.pdf

5. Rajendra Pachauri, 30th June 2008. The world’s will to tackle climate change is irresistible. The Guardian.

6. Juliette Jowit, 22nd June 2008. Poll: most Britons doubt cause of climate change. The Observer.

7. Gordon Brown, 26th June 2008. Creating a low carbon economy. http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page15846.asp

8. Oliver Tickell, forthcoming. Kyoto2: how to manage the global greenhouse. Zed Books, London.

9. Juliette Jowit and Patrick Wintour, ibid.

10. Neil M Maher, 2008. Nature’s New Deal. Oxford University Press.

11. http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/survey/so/2008/res040908a.htm

In Dangerous Denial

Tim Holmes — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 16:59:10 +0000

According to an Ipsos Mori poll, carried out for the Observer this month, most Britons believe climate change is at least partially down to natural causes, and not solely to human activity. A majority also believe scientists are divided on the causes and more than a fifth say the whole thing has been exaggerated.

Now where would they have got those ideas from? One Channel 4 programme, claiming global warming is “a swindle”, has no doubt played a role, as have internet blogs arguing all the world’s scientists are party to a Marxist conspiracy bent on destroying western civilisation. But the press, though declining, still counts. It contributes to the framework within which public debate proceeds. It lends respectability to the opinions it highlights.

A study by the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University found US newspapers have improved their coverage of global warming. By 2006, only 8% of what they published failed to reflect the scientific consensus: that human activity is more than 90% likely to be responsible. The UK tabloids – the Sun, Mirror, Mail, Express and their Sundays – show no improvement, with 23% of their 2006 coverage at odds with what nearly every climate scientist believes.

Happily, the Murdoch empire has gone green, thanks to James Murdoch, chairman of News Corporation in Europe and Asia. The Sun and the Times now rarely give space to deniers of man-made global warming. The latter was once full of sceptics but then a leader graciously announced “the planet deserves the benefit of the doubt”. But neither paper gives consistent and/or prominent coverage. The Sun is currently dominated by UFOs, with an “exclusive” last Wednesday about a 13-strong army of alien craft over Shropshire, and other recent front-page stories about police helicopters chasing little green men over Cardiff.

These stories didn’t include even a final-paragraph quote expressing scepticism – a “balance” newspapers observe scrupulously when they report evidence of global warming. It’s harmless fun, I suppose. But Sun readers could be forgiven for concluding that, as a matter of public concern, global warming is on the same level as extraterrestrial visitations.

Several other papers continue to give a high profile to global warming denial. In the Daily Mail, Melanie Phillips, Richard Littlejohn, Tom Utley and Andrew Alexander all scorn suggestions that we need to reduce carbon emissions. None has anything beyond a science O-level. Nor does the Sunday Telegraph columnist Christopher Booker, a former Private Eye editor. He gleefully reported this month that, since January 2007, global temperatures have fallen 0.77C. This figure, from satellite and balloon readings, is correct but, down here on Earth, where we happen to live, spring 2007 land temperatures were the highest on record (the figures go back to 1880) and those for spring 2008 tied with 2000 as the third highest.

Booker is the most plausible global warming denier among regular columnists because he packs his pieces with “facts” sourced to “experts”. But he is none too particular about his experts’ credentials. Take another of his campaigns, concerning white asbestos, which the World Health Organisation regards as a class one carcinogen. According to Booker, it is harmless (he admits the dangers of blue and brown asbestos) and claims to the contrary are attributable to commercial interests that make money from disposing of it.

The most quoted “expert” for this story is a Professor John Bridle who runs something called Asbestos Watchdog. In 2006, Radio 4’s You and Yours – in a 20-minute item denounced by Booker as “reckless” and “laughable” – reported Bridle had been convicted under the Trade Descriptions Act for passing himself off falsely as a qualified asbestos surveyor. He claimed connections to an impressively titled European body that couldn’t be traced. His professorship is an honorary one from Russia. As for Asbestos Watchdog – which, writes Booker, offers “honest advice” to an “ever larger number of people” – I tried to contact it last week and both its website and telephone number were inaccessible. Bridle went to Ofcom about You and Yours; this month, the regulator rejected all his complaints.

Dig deep enough and you find that, just as Bridle proved to have connections to the asbestos industry, so many of the “experts” journalists quote on global warming receive money, directly or indirectly, from the oil industry. There’s nothing wrong in newspapers challenging consensus views, and many scientists who have been proved right in the end – for example, those who warned of how lead in petrol could affect children – began as lone mavericks. But sceptics themselves merit scepticism, and journalists should give their scientific credentials and their relationship to vested interests the most careful scrutiny. Berating the EU, as Booker frequently does, or denouncing school standards, as Melanie Phillips does, won’t kill anybody. Asbestos is different. So is measles and, as Cardiff University research has shown, MMR vaccinations fell in step with press claims that they were linked to autism.

Global warming could kill millions. If Ipsos Mori is right, the deniers are gaining ground. Its polls show the proportion of Britons who are unconcerned has risen from 15% to 23% in the past year. Many politicians believe government action to arrest climate change is still a vote loser. It is likely to remain so as long as much of the press remains wilfully ignorant of science.

So Nick is now right of the Times?

Nearly three years ago in this column, I asked of my former colleague Nick Cohen, “how far right is he going?”. At that time, I detected signs that the Observer and New Statesman columnist, once the most unshakeable of leftists, might extend the change in his political allegiances beyond his support for the Iraq war.

Last Wednesday, I was surprised to find in the London Evening Standard that my old friend is wobbling even in his previously reliable defence of civil liberties and fair trials. By ruling that anonymous witnesses could make trials unfair, the law lords, Cohen wrote, would leave themselves “with blood on their hands and the rest of us with corpses on our streets”. The contrary view was put in a Times leader: “Without knowing who a hostile witness is, no defence lawyer can properly assess his or her credibility for a jury.” Anonymity, it continued, could protect those who wished to settle scores “and prejudice a jury against a defendant as evidence of fear that he or she inspires”.

If he had written it, the old Cohen would have put it more robustly.

Dirty secret exposed

Congratulations to the Lords committee on communications for exploding the myth that media ownership doesn’t matter any more because the internet allows a thousand opinions to bloom. Opinion lacks clout without the backing of information and, as the committee points out, nearly all fresh information is generated by a handful of established news organisations. Even the most sturdy critics of the mainstream media use material from the same media to demonstrate how they are fed a pack of lies. That, as one witness told the committee, is “the dirty little secret of the information revolution”.

The Era of Oil Wars

Ellie Keen — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 21:36:35 +0000

Gordon Brown meeting Britain’s oil chiefs to discuss higher North Sea output to bring down prices is prompted by oil prices hitting a record high of $135 a barrel, twice as high as a year ago and a staggering 12 times higher than a decade ago. The well-sourced website petrolprices.com is now predicting that petrol will reach £1.50 a litre by September, just 4 months away. Jeff Rubin of CIBC World Markets is forecasting “oil prices almost doubling over the next five years”. That would mean $270 a barrel by 2013. It perhaps explains why the government is now strongly backing BP to get a big new slice of the oil drilling licences soon to be issued in Iraq, and – astonishingly – has now also made clear it intends to annex a third of a million square miles of the seabed off Antarctica to pre-empt any rights to the oil it may contain. The fight for oil has begun in earnest.

But is there the oil to go round? The authoritative International Energy Agency foresees an oil supply crunch within 5 years forcing up prices to unprecedented levels and greatly increasing western dependence on Opec. And the oil industry itself in its own report Facing the Hard Truths about Energy, produced by 175 authorities including all the heads of the world’s big oil companies, for the first time predicted that oil and gas may run short by 2015.

The geopolitical implications of this gathering crisis for world oil supply 2010-15 are immense. The risk of further military interventions and conflicts in the Middle East is clearly high. Total world oil reserves are estimated at 2.5-2.9 trillion barrels, of which half has now been already consumed, while half of the 51 oil-producing countries reported output declines in 2006. Non-Opec production is expected to peak and decline within the next five years, driven mainly by burgeoning demand from China and the US, together with restricted output from Iraq. Then in the following five years Opec’s diminishing spare capacity will probably become increasingly unable to accommodate short-term fluctuations, depending on how fast world demand grows and how extensively Opec invests in new capacity. The latter may well not raise production capacity high enough or quickly enough, whether for political reasons or because internal decision-making is too slow or the security environment too hostile.

There are of course exits from this doom-stricken scenario, though none is at all credible. First, discovery of major new oilfields could alter the picture. However, though billions have been spent on the search for new fields, discovery peaked in the mid-1960s and the last big ones were found in the 1970s. Only Iraq has undeveloped super-giant oilfields – at West Qurna, Majnoon, and East Baghdad – and the capacity to increase production rapidly to 8-10 million barrels a day; but ironically the US invasion, designed to produce this effect, has ruled out this outcome for a long way ahead. Already four-fifths of the world’s oil supply comes from fields discovered before 1970, and even finding a field as large as the world’s current biggest (Ghawar in Saudi Arabia) – which is anyway almost inconceivable given the huge improvements in geological knowledge in the last 30 years – would only meet global oil demand for another 10 years.

Another option much touted is a large-scale shift to so-called unconventional oil – the Athabascan tar sands (from Alberta, Canada), extra-heavy oil (from the Orinoco belt in Venezuela), oil shale, and mature source rocks. But the almost insurmountable problem is recoverability, whether poor quality oil (extra-heavy oil), poor quality reservoirs (oil from source rocks), or both (oil shale). Worse, production may be uneconomic because of a very low net energy gain, ie it requires almost as much energy to extract the oil as is made available for subsequent use. And the enormous hike in greenhouse gases generated could produce a turbo climate change effect that would wipe out any benefit from a global post-Kyoto agreement.

But even if supply constraints are ineluctable as the explosion of Chinese growth coincides with falling non-Opec oil production and the beginnings of a slow but remorseless slippage in Opec capacity, the coming crisis could still be eased by significant demand restrictions. Clearly there is substantial room for energy-saving when half the energy generated every day is wasted and when propulsion of an average car is only about 20% efficient, heating of a standard oven only 25%, and electricity generated in some power stations only some 35%. The question, however, is whether improvement can be secured globally on the level and timescale required to push back the crisis more than a few years. Equally, taking the CO2 out of fossil fuels, especially coal, may be crucial, but a decade at least is needed even to test the carbon capture technology in pilot projects, let alone begin to mainstream it. But the most direct means of constraining world demand would be the proposed Rimini protocol, which prescribes that oil-importing countries cut their imports to match the world depletion rate (ie annual production as a percentage of remaining global reserves) now running at about 2% a year. Of course, the fundamental political problem remains that the most powerful oil-hungry countries will not agree. If not Kyoto, why Rimini?

What is most disturbing of all is that the big powers, so far from seeking major adjustments of their energy policies on either the supply or demand fronts or making a major switch into renewables, are actually massively intensifying their competitive struggle short-term for the limited oil reserves left. Despite an unwinnable war in Iraq, the US is still constructing at least five large permanent military bases there in order, according to evidence given to a US Congressional Committee, to control access to Gulf oil, including in Saudi and Iran. As one neocon recently put it, “one of the reasons we had no exit plan from Iraq is that we didn’t intend to leave”. The US is also trying to force through a new Iraqi oil law that would give western, primarily American, oil multinationals control of Iraqi oilfields for the next 30 years.

The US maintains 737 military bases in 130 countries under cover of the “war on terror” to defend American economic interests, particularly access to oil. The principal objective for the continued existence and expansion of Nato post-cold war is the encirclement of Russia and the pre-emption of China dominating access to oil and gas in the Caspian Sea and Middle East regions. It is only the beginning of the unannounced titanic global resource struggle between the US and China, the world’s largest importers of oil (China overtook Japan in 2003). Islam has been dragged into this tussle because it is in the Islamic world where most of these resources lie, but Islam is only a secondary player. In the case of Russia, the recent pronounced stepping up of western attacks on Putin and claims he is undermining democracy are ultimately aimed at securing a pro-western government there, and access to Russian oil and gas when Russia has more of these two hydrocarbons together than any other country in the world.

The struggle has also spilled over into West Africa, reckoned to hold some 66 billion barrels of oil typically low in sulphur and thus ideal for refining. In 2005 the US imported more oil from the Gulf of Guinea than from Saudi and Kuwait combined, and is expected over the next 10 years to import more oil from Africa than from the Middle East. In step with this, the Pentagon is setting up a new unified military command for the continent named Africom. Conversely, Angola is now China’s main supplier of crude oil, overtaking Saudi Arabia last year. There is no doubt that Africom, which will greatly increase the US military presence in Africa, is aimed at the growing conflict with China over oil supplies.

As Joe Lieberman, former US presidential candidate, put it, efforts by the US and China to use imports to meet growing demand “may escalate competition for oil to something as hot and dangerous as the nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union”.

GM won't yield a harvest for the world

Tim Holmes — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 14:12:42 +0000

The biotechnology industry has never been shy of making outlandish claims on behalf of its products. Back in the late 1990s we were sold genetically modified soya and oilseed rape on the promise that it would feed the world. On closer examination, it became clear that these first-generation GM crops were more about intensifying chemical agriculture and sealing corporate control of the food chain than feeding starving babies in Africa. Consumers, especially in Europe, rose in revolt, and the industry was forced into retreat.

But big companies like Monsanto, Syngenta and BASF are not easily kept at bay for long. Now their PR-men have discovered a new line in emotional blackmail: that without GM crops we will be unable to produce enough food in an era of climate change. Transgenic crops will be able to grow in drought-stricken, saline areas, we are assured, helping to augment food supplies in an era of rapidly intensifying crisis. So is it time to follow in the steps of the UK environment minister Phil Woolas and reassess the potential of GM? As Woolas says: “There is a growing question of whether GM crops can help the developing world out of the current food price crisis. It is a question that we as a nation need to ask ourselves.” So is he right?

I doubt it. For starters, the current food price crisis is only partly about supply. Yes, falling harvests have affected the amount of food available, and the recent severe flooding in the US midwest certainly won’t help the situation. But, as with oil, rising demand is the biggest factor driving prices towards the stratosphere. As countries such as India and China get richer and adopt more western diets, they consume more meat, sucking grain off the market to feed growing numbers of livestock. The misconceived rush to biofuels has further intensified the problem, gobbling up vast quantities of corn and soya in order to produce the fuel Americans and Europeans need to feed their addiction to the car. Underlying all this, the human population continues to grow, adding another 80 million mouths every single year.

But look a little closer at the companies which are promising our salvation – and which Woolas rushed to meet yesterday under the aegis of the Agricultural Biotechnology Council – and their motivations seem somewhat less than altruistic. According to the Canada-based ETC Group, big biotech companies have already filed some 532 patents on “climate-ready” genes at patent offices around the world. I doubt these companies have any intention of giving out free seeds to the world’s poorest farmers: instead, they seal up intellectual property rights in transgenic crops and force growers to pay a licence fee. Traditional practices of saving or exchanging seeds are of course forbidden. This concentration of ownership of the food chain is not going to reduce hunger; it is much more likely to intensify it.

I am not arguing that these companies are somehow bad or evil. It is their job to maximise profits – anything else, and their directors would quickly be punished by loss-making shareholders. It is entirely natural therefore that they seek to retain ownership over their inventions, in this case by seeking patents on transgenic seeds. But on the other hand, they should not claim that their products are going to feed the world either – allowing their public relations teams to create soft-focus adverts of hungry people being fed is utterly misleading.

There are also much deeper ethical questions around GM which have never been addressed – and cannot be addressed by science, because they lie outside the scientific arena. One is the question of whether it is ethically justified to mix genetic material from completely unrelated organisms, like viruses and potato plants. GM proponents constantly argue that this is simply another stage on from traditional selective breeding techniques, but this is clearly untrue. Mixing DNA from unrelated species is an entirely different undertaking, and one which raises all sorts of new risks – as well as deeper questions about humankind playing God. In my view, the technology moves entirely in the wrong direction, intensifying human technological manipulation of nature when we should be aiming at a more holistic ecological approach instead.

If something goes wrong with a transgenic organism, this raises a whole new category of risk. Traditional pollution – whether of toxins like DDT or radioactive waste – will mix and eventually be dispersed or broken down in the environment. Genetic pollution on the other hand is self-replicating because it is contained in living organisms; once released, it can never be recalled, and possibly never controlled as GM superweeds, bacteria or viruses run rampant and breed. I am not raising scare stories here: there are countless cases recorded internationally now where GM crops have begun to infest supposedly organic or GM-free fields.

It may be, as Woolas suggests, that we need to swallow these ethical and ecological concerns in an era where rapidly rising global temperatures and diminishing oil supplies are already putting serious constraints on food production. Would I be prepared to reconsider my opposition to GM so that a million Sudanese or Ethiopians don’t have to watch their children starve as the rains fail once again? Yes, of course. But am I prepared to accept GM just so that rich consumers – whether in Beijing or Birmingham – can drive around in biofuelled SUVs? No. Which of these options is more likely is not about technology or science, it’s about economics and social policy. And that requires us to keep asking difficult questions, and to not be browbeaten by emotionally manipulative advertising from profit-seeking corporations.

Reasons To Be Hopeful?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

References:

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

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

Big Oil's Big Lie

Ellie Keen — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 21:49:32 +0000

Of course, it’s not a crime, and it’s hard to see how, in a free society, it could or should become one. But the culpability of the energy firms the climate scientist James Hansen will indict in his testimony to Congress today is clear. If we fail to stop runaway climate change, it will be largely because of campaigning by oil, coal and electricity companies, and the network of lobbyists, fake experts and thinktanks they have sponsored.

The operation sprang directly from Big Tobacco’s war against science. It has used the same fake experts, the same public relations companies and the same tactics: as I showed in my book Heat, the campaign against action on climate change was partly launched by the tobacco company Philip Morris. But while the tobacco companies’ professional liars were smoked out by a massive class action in the US, the sponsored climate change deniers still have massive influence over public perception. A survey published yesterday by the Observer shows that six out of ten people in Britain agreed that “many scientific experts still question if humans are contributing to climate change.” This is an inaccurate perception, which results from Big Energy’s lobbying.

Almost without exception, the scientists who claim to doubt that manmade climate change is taking place fall into two categories: either they are not qualified in the branch of science they are discussing or they have received money from fossil fuel companies. Of all the self-professed climate “sceptics”, I have been able to find only one – Dr John Christy of the University of Alabama – who has relevant qualifications and who does not appear to have received fees from lobby groups or thinktanks sponsored by the energy companies. But even he has had to admit that the figures on which he based his claims were the results of “errors in the … data”.

The others are the very opposite of sceptics. Many of them are paid to start with a conclusion – that climate change isn’t happening or isn’t important – then to find data and arguments to support it. In most cases, they cherrypick scientific findings; in a few cases, like the fake scientific paper attached to the celebrated Oregon petition, they make them up altogether. But people who don’t understand the difference between a peer-reviewed paper and a pamphlet are taken in. The energy companies’ propaganda campaign is amplified by scientific illiterates in the media, such as Melanie Phillips, Christopher Booker, Nigel Lawson, Alexander Cockburn and the television producer (who made Channel 4’s documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle) Martin Durkin.

I don’t believe that the energy companies should be prosecuted for commissioning the truckload of trash their sponsored experts publish. But their campaign of disinformation must be exposed again and again. Like the tobacco lobbyists, they are not only delaying essential public action; they also create the impression that science is for sale to the highest bidder.

The awful truth is that sometimes it is.

The Elephant in the Room

Ellie Keen — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 20:15:56 +0000

From Plane Stupid

A 5 metre high giant inflatable elephant shocked delegates at the Edinburgh Caledonian Hilton today with a massive banner stating ‘Aviation is the elephant in the room’.

This spectacle, created by anti-aviation group Plane Stupid Scotland, is a huge visual reminder that aviation remains a massive elephant in the room as long as emissions from aviation continue to be ignored in the Climate Change Bill.

The display took place outside a Hilton-hosted conference that brings organisations and researchers together to discuss how to “deliver the national transport strategy whilst meeting… climate change targets”.

The message for delegates and the public was clear: we must not repeat the government’s mistake in ignoring aviation, and make it top priority when discussing transport and climate change.

Plane Stupid Scotland member Dan Glass points out that: “The elephant in the room here is that if Scottish aviation grows as predicted its pollutions will swamp all our efforts and sacrifices to reduce emissions. We can forget about 80% by 2050 – we can forget about a liveable world for our children.”

Calls to include aviation in the Scottish Climate Bill are rendered doubly urgent as the Scottish Government will imminently bring legislation to expand both Edinburgh and Glasgow airports, and to outlaw objections to these expansions whether by parliament or public unless on limited planning grounds.

There is a rising tide of dissent against aviation expansion in Scotland, leading recently to the creation of anti-aviation network AirportWatch Scotland. Plane Stupid Scotland too shut down Edinburgh’s private airport in January and occupied the Holyrood rooftops in April. These are part of a growing host of groups and individuals that see airport expansion as a blight upon the environment and upon affected communities.

Tilly Gifford From Airportwatch Scotland said:

“We are facing a runaway climate threat but the Scottish government’s reaction is to triple air traffic and expand Glasgow and Edinburgh airports whilst conveniently excluding aviation from the Scottish Climate Bill. The climate scientists have made it clear – we have to stop airport expansion. No more white elephants- real action now.”

Leaving the fossil century behind?

Tim Holmes — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 04:09:44 +0000

The past two years have been thrilling and frustrating in equal measure. We have begun to glimpse the green holy grail: reliable renewable electricity. Studies by people as diverse as the German government and the Centre for Alternative Technology have shown how, by diversifying the sources of green energy, by managing demand and using some cunning methods of storage, renewables could supply 80% or even 100% of our electricity without any loss in the continuity of power supplies.

But while this work has been causing ripples among scientists and green campaigners, the government has appeared stuck in the fossil century. As recently as October last year, the business secretary, John Hutton, was secretly lobbying to abandon Britain’s target for renewable power supplies.

I have not yet been allowed to see the consultation paper, but the details obtained by the Guardian suggest that the government has at last begun to take renewables seriously. Some of its proposals appear to be radical, innovative and bold. It shows how its target of producing 35% of electricity from green power by 2020 might be met by greatly boosting wind, biomass and solar energy. The document will propose a synergy between large-scale renewables and electric cars, which can be charged at night when wind power might otherwise be wasted.

Most radically, and controversially, it suggests forcing people to insulate their homes and to fit renewable devices when they build extensions. The paper suggests that oil-fired central heating might eventually be banned.

The brief summary I have seen raises as many questions as it answers.

Is the government really proposing the mass installation of micro-wind turbines? If so, it will be wasting our money. While solar thermal panels (producing hot water), wood pellet boilers and heat pumps offer good value, micro-electricity doesn’t.

Why is the government proposing to use biomass for generating power, when it would be much better deployed producing heat? Does it support the German government’s proposal to build a European supergrid, using high-voltage direct current lines? I hope so: our renewable resources could then be used as part of a much bolder scheme for balancing supply and demand.

But by far the most important question is this: we now have an idea of what the government will be commissioning, but what will it be decommissioning? Cutting carbon pollution is as much about what you don’t do, as what you do.

The paper proposes that the flights we take will keep growing: by 2020, it says, they will account for 11% of the country’s energy use. If so, then airport expansion, because of the other greenhouse gases flying produces, will cancel all the savings the government proposes, twice over.

Will the government drop its plans to build new coal-fired power stations? It would be profoundly ironic if it bans oil-fired central heating in people’s homes while approving new coal plants tens of thousands of times bigger.

And will it produce a supply-side policy for tackling climate change? At the moment it proposes to maximise the extraction of fossil fuels and minimise their use: these positions are plainly incompatible. Gordon Brown will appear in Jeddah tomorrow to demand that the Saudis raise oil production, just as the consultation paper demands that we reduce consumption. The government cannot pursue both policies and claim to be meeting its commitments on climate change.

Need for a new social alliance

Ellie Keen — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 21:59:14 +0000

Interview with Susan George

FLORENCE, Jun 3 (IPS) – A global alliance of human rights activists, environmentalists and ethically run small enterprises is needed to save the planet from self-destruction, says Susan George, chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam. The institute works “to contribute to social justice.”

Susan George, author of several books on development, now focuses on neo-liberal globalisation mirrored in the World Trade Organisation talks, international financial institutions and in North-South relations.

“Even if committed to the social and environmental challenges, none of these groups individually will be able to save our future, which is dominated by powerful economic forces that have a short-term view and, if allowed, will continue exploiting and destroying the planet,” George says.

We must recognise, she says, that change does not happen at an individual level. “Yes, I can change my light bulbs or reduce my carbon footprint, but we need a radical revolution that cannot be achieved individually.”

IPS Italy correspondent Sabina Zaccaro spoke with Susan George at Terra Futura, an exhibition of ‘good practices’ in social, economic and environmental sustainability held yearly in Florence. In its fifth year, Terra Futura was dedicated to strengthening social alliances — and trying some audacious ones such as alliances among private citizens and financial institutions.

IPS: Will the political-economic system really allow these alliances to happen?

Susan George: The market ideology works to separate people, it is a model that separates people on a competition basis. Social contact is the only response to economy that works all the time to prevent this.

People do not have to abandon their own field and commitment, but become used to working together. We are free agents, and if we understand that there’s an interest, that the vast majority of people can often no longer see where their interests lie — and that is part of the political fight that we have — then it is possible.

If you show to people that they have an interest in alliances, and this is true for farmers, trade unionists, small medium enterprises…then yes, I think it possible to make those alliances.

IPS: And who sets the rules?

SG: It is hard to get binding rules, it could be easier at the level of the regions. In many places this is not possible because of corruption, or because the will of the government is to prevent this kind of thing and allow transnational corporations to do whatever they like. I would say that that’s what the European Commission is there for — to allow finance capitals and transnational capitals to operate as freely as possible.

IPS: Can the ethical argument alone convince business?

SG: No, not at all. They say how green they are, how caring they are, but it’s rubbish to believe it…Corporations and transnational organisations preach self-green regulation; ‘we will bring the proper solution’, they say, but it is totally illusive.

IPS: So, what can be a convincing argument?

SG: The right arguments are the arguments of force you cannot argue with, you don’t discuss; you don’t say ‘please’. When you are in a position where you are able to dictate.

IPS: How?

SG: Well, through alliances! At a much larger scale, at a big scale…the problem is scale. Alliances must be as broad as possible. Economic power is way ahead of us, so to me the problem is, can we go fast enough, become important enough in order to put a stop to that, to escape the current impasse.

IPS: Does politics have a role in that?

SG: If it would be just politics, I would not be that worried, since things due over centuries sort themselves out; but with the environment we don’t have that kind of time. I don’t say it often in public, because I don’t want people be in despair, but I am often in despair.

IPS: Are you totally pessimistic?

SG: I am hopeful; the only thing you can work on is hope. Generally, politicians are the last to move, but we need to make alliance with them.

When politicians have an interest in something, they show that they are able to listen. Look at what happens with prices…and scarcity. Politicians and business do listen to that, they listen to the price of oil — they bring the wrong solutions, but they listen to price signals.

IPS: Can oil be replaced with agro-fuels?

SG: It’s criminal. There’s a lot of talk about using plants that are bio — but any plant is bio. I’ve just read that some of the species they’re intending to use are invasive species, they take over, and then will spread all over and take all the water out of the ground, and so on.

So, it’s always the same thing — you cannot have just a techno solution because there’s the entire environment that you have to consider. I am not an agronomist, but I would refuse any introduction, any crop until the impact of that crop on the rest of the environment has been studied. You cannot just say ‘Ok, this is good, we will harvest it, and we will do ethanol out of it’, because you don’t know.

That’s also what’s wrong with GMO (genetically modified organisms) seeds. They only look at the plant and what that plant is supposed to do, to repulse insects or whatever, but they don’t look at the whole of the environment, it’s not their task.

Scientists are perfectly able to make a plant that can repulse insects, but they have no knowledge at all of how the birds, the butterflies, the worms, the bacteria, will react. (END/2008)

Susan George is a Fellow and Chair of the Board of the Transnational Institute. Her latest books are La Pensée enchaînée: Comment les droites laïque et religieuse se sont emparées de l’Amérique [Fayard, 2007], to be published in English as: Hijacking America: How the Religious and Secular Right Changed What Americans Think [Forthcoming, Polity Press 2008], and We the peoples of Europe [Pluto Press, 2008].

Honda's Hydrogen Hype

Merrick Godhaven — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 22:05:20 +0000

Car manufacturer Honda tell us that

If you could read our minds, you’d see dreams of a greener and more environmentally sustainable world.

Judging them not by what we telepathically perceive but by their actions in the external world, we find quite a different picture.

Yesterday it was announced that Honda have begun limited commercial production of the FCX Clarity, their hydrogen powered car.

Over and over and over and over again we’re told that it is ‘zero emission’. This is true in the sense that the only emission from the car itself is water vapour. However, the car is responsible for considerable carbon dioxide emissions – as much as a petrol car.

This is because the nice clean hydrogen has to come from somewhere, and that involves a lot of fossil fuels. The cheapest and most common source is natural gas. It can also be made from water by electrolysis, using an electric current to split water’s hydrogen and oxygen components.

Here’s the maths

Honda say the FCX Clarity does 57 miles on 1kg of hydrogen. Let’s get that in metric; 57 miles is 91km.

Manufacturing hydrogen from natural gas emits 9.1 kg CO2 per kg of hydrogen.
[IPCC Special Report on Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p 131]

9,100g divided by 91km = 100g/km to make the hydrogen gas from natural gas.

Electrolysis requires 39 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce 1 kilogram of hydrogen.
[Wind Energy and Production of Hydrogen and Electricity — Opportunities for Renewable Hydrogen, US National Renewable Energy Laboratory, March 2006, p2]

That electricity is made from a variety of sources, predominantly fossils. UK grid CO2 emissions are 480g/kWh.
[Fuel Mix Disclosure Data Table, DBERR 2006-07, table 3]

480g x 39kWh = 18,720g/CO2 per kg hydrogen.

18,720g divided by 91km = 206g/km to make the hydrogen gas from electrolysis.

But it’s not over, because at this stage all we’ve got is hydrogen gas. This has about one three-thousandth of the energy density of petrol. Assuming you’re not going to have a fuel tank a few hundred times the size of your car, you have to shrink it. It has to be either cooled to a liquid, or else it has to be compressed. Honda use hydrogen compressed to a pressure of 5,000psi.

It takes 2.6-3.6 kilowatt-hours of electricity to compress 1kg of hydrogen to 5,000psi.
[Raymond Drnevich of major American hydrogen supplier Praxair, Hydrogen Delivery: Liquefaction & Compression, May 2003, p14]

2.6-3.6kWh x 480g/kWh = 1248g-1728g CO2 emissions per kg hydrogen.

1248-1728g divided by 91km = 14-19g/km for compression.

Here’s the totals

100 + 14-19 = 114-119g/km for compressed natural gas hydrogen

206 + 14-19 = 220-225g/km for compressed electrolysis hydrogen

To compare, the current petrol powered Honda Civic emits 135g/km, a Toyota Prius emits 104g/km, a Renault Megane emits 117g/km.

As David Talbot from MIT’s Technology Review said of BMW’s Hydrogen 7 vehicle

a car like the Hydrogen 7 would probably produce far more carbon dioxide emissions than gasoline-powered cars available today. And changing this calculation would take multiple breakthroughs – which study after study has predicted will take decades, if they arrive at all. In fact, the Hydrogen 7 and its hydrogen-fuel-cell cousins are, in many ways, simply flashy distractions produced by automakers who should be taking stronger immediate action to reduce the greenhouse-gas emissions of their cars.

The sleight of hand that passes the emissions to the fuel factory and has people calling the FCX Clarity an ‘eco-car’ is unsurprising. If we want to know how corporations will treat carbon accounting, look at how they presently perform tax accounting.

The FCX Clarity is a decoy, deployed by people who surely know about the emissions they’re responsible for. The car manufacturers can see no way of reducing their emissions that won’t similarly diminish their profits.

As the petrol/diesel car is widely understood to be unsustainable, car makers have to offer the hope of an alternative; not so far off that we feel there’s a problem to worry about, but not so imminent that they’ll actually be held to account for failing to do it nor make anyone question why they’re still developing new oil-fuelled models.

Honda are only leasing the FCX Clarity. There are perhaps many reasons, but I can’t help suspecting that chief among them are that it’s too expensive to sell and they want the cars back before they break.

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

Fuel cells of the type used in cars (proton exchange membrane cells) have a short lifespan. The industry is aiming at around 4,000 hours of use, which might equate to ten years of driving. As it stands, a good prototype can only manage about 2,000 hours. Buying a car that costs £50,000 and is guaranteed to need major engine work within five years isn’t going to appeal to anyone.

Hydrogen as a vehicle fuel is thoroughly impractical, prohibitively expensive and, most importantly, does nothing to reduce carbon emissions. On the contrary, it would significantly increase them.

Honda might be able to kid journalists into thinking that hydrogen cars are ‘zero emission’ but unfortunately they can’t fool the climate.

After the oil crunch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Betting on failure

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

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

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

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

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

Protest halts Drax coal train as summer of discontent against coal continues

Tim Holmes — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:41:05 +0000

From our friends over at The Coal Hole:

Media – Interviews are available with protestors: call 07944 367755

Photos from the protest at http://www.flickr.com/photos/sitefeed/

Protestors who halted a coal train carrying fuel for Drax power station in Yorkshire, the single biggest source of CO2 in the UK, are settling in to make sure supplies of coal to the power station remain cut off. The protest comes six weeks before the 2008 Camp for Climate Action at Kingsnorth power station – which will also highlight how using coal to supply energy will be a disaster for the planet.

Dressed in white overalls and canary outfits, they used safety signals to stop the train on a bridge overlooking the power station, before climbing on board and dumping coal off onto the tracks.

The train has been stopped on a branch line used exclusively for delivering coal to Drax. Protestors have used a network of climbing ropes to suspend themselves under the bridge from the train – meaning any movement while the protest continues is impossible.

Drax power station is the largest emitter in the UK – producing up to 36,000 tonnes of CO2 a day. That also makes it the third largest polluter in Europe – we are talking global scale climate disaster on this one folks.

Every year Drax burns between 7 and 11 million tonnes of coal – that’s about 23 million tonnes of CO2 released into the atmosphere a year… that’s more CO2 than the 103 countries in the world which emit less. Let’s just run that one past again – Drax emits more CO2 each year than 103 countries put together. Phew.

We Are Serious

“…it demonstrates that the Climate Camp bunch have got nerve and daring, and that their planning is absolutely meticulous. Secondly, it says very loudly We Are Serious.”

From The Guardian

The UK Government is considering giving the go-ahead to a new generation of coal-fired power plants, the first of which would be at Kingsnorth in Kent – an act which would directly contradict all of their fine words on cutting emissions, bringing in climate bills, and being a world leader on the climate issue. Meanwhile, the ice caps are melting, we’re at 387 ppmv carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (that’s very high – higher than we can sustainably stay at) and rising, and people are dying – now.

There is a problem, and there is a solution. Serious commitments to renewables, energy efficiency and a bit of global leadership from our Government could go a long way.

Yes, you’re quite right. As a movement, we are serious. Although we conduct ourselves cheerfully, we don’t think this is a game. Although we can joke, we know why we act. Although we feel anxious and nervous about the consequences, we do it anyway, because it’s important. We are serious – serious about the problem, and serious about solving it.

The protestors have told The Guardian they are intending to stay “until Gordon Brown decides to reverse his policy to expand coal-fired production in Britain.” For more information on the protest as it continues, check out The Coal Hole’s blog.

Climate chaos is inevitable - we can only avert oblivion

Tim Holmes — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 17:11:45 +0000

Sometimes we need to think the unthinkable, particularly when dealing with a problem as dangerous as climate change – there is no room for dogma when considering the future habitability of our planet. It was in this spirit that I and a panel of other specialists in climate, economics and policy-making met under the aegis of the Stockholm Network thinktank to map out future scenarios for how international policy might evolve – and what the eventual impact might be on the earth’s climate. We came up with three alternative visions of the future, and asked experts at the Met Office Hadley Centre to run them through its climate models to give each a projected temperature rise. The results were both surprising, and profoundly disturbing.

We gave each scenario a name. The most pessimistic was labelled “agree and ignore” – a world where governments meet to make commitments on climate change, but then backtrack or fail to comply with them. Sound familiar? It should: this scenario most closely resembles the past 10 years, and it projects emissions on an upward trend until 2045. A more optimistic scenario was termed “Kyoto plus”: here governments make a strong agreement in Copenhagen in 2009, binding industrialised countries into a new round of Kyoto-style targets, with developing countries joining successively as they achieve “first world” status. This scenario represents the best outcome that can plausibly result from the current process – but ominously, it still sees emissions rising until 2030.

The third scenario – called “step change” – is worth a closer look. Here we envisaged massive climate disasters around the world in 2010 and 2011 causing a sudden increase in the sense of urgency surrounding global warming. Energised, world leaders ditch Kyoto, abandoning efforts to regulate emissions at a national level. Instead, they focus on the companies that produce fossil fuels in the first place – from oil and gas wells and coal mines – with the UN setting a global “upstream” production cap and auctioning tradable permits to carbon producers. Instead of all the complexity of regulating squabbling nations and billions of people, the price mechanism does the work: companies simply pass on their increased costs to consumers, and demand for carbon-intensive products begins to fall. The auctioning of permits raises trillions of dollars to be spent smoothing the transition to a low-carbon economy and offsetting the impact of price rises on the poor. A clear long-term framework puts a price on carbon, giving business a strong incentive to shift investment into renewable energy and low-carbon manufacturing. Most importantly, a strong carbon cap means that global emissions peak as early as 2017.

This “upstream cap” approach is not a new idea, and our approach draws in particular on a forthcoming book by the environmental writer Oliver Tickell. However, conventional wisdom from governments and environmental groups alike insists that “Kyoto is the only game in town”, and that proposing any alternative is dangerous heresy.

But let’s look at the modelled temperature increases associated with each scenario. “Agree and ignore” sees temperatures rise by 4.85C by 2100 (with a 90% probability); for “Kyoto plus”, it’s 3.31C; and “step change” 2.89C. This is the depressing bit: no politically plausible scenario we could envisage will now keep the world below the danger threshold of two degrees, the official target of both the EU and UK. This means that all scenarios see the total disappearance of Arctic sea ice; spreading deserts and water stress in the sub-tropics; extreme weather and floods; and melting glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas. Hence the need to focus far more on adaptation: these are impacts that humanity is going to have to deal with whatever now happens at the policy level.

But the other great lesson is that sticking with current policy is actually a very risky option, rather than a safe bet. Betting on Kyoto could mean triggering the collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet and crossing thresholds that involve massive methane release from melting Siberian permafrost. If current policy continues to fail – along the lines of the “agree and ignore” scenario – then 50% to 80% of all species on earth could be driven to extinction by the magnitude and rapidity of warming, and much of the planet’s surface left uninhabitable to humans. Billions, not millions, of people would be displaced.

So which way will it go? Ultimately the difference between the scenarios is one of political will: the question now is whether humanity can summon up the courage and foresight to save itself, or whether business as usual – on climate policy as much as economics – will condemn us all to climatic oblivion.