Mark Lynas | ukwatch.net

Why greens must learn to love nuclear power

tim — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 22:18:37 +0000

“If nuclear power is the answer, it must have been a pretty stupid question,” went an oft-cited slogan of the 1970s environmental movement. But the question was not stupid, and it is even less so today when the challenge is even blunter: how are we going to provide for our energy needs in a way that does not destroy, via global warming, the capacity of our planet to support life? The hard truth is that if nuclear power is not at least part of the answer, then answering that challenge is going to be very difficult indeed.

Unfortunately, just by writing the sentence above, I will already have prompted many readers to switch off. Being anti-nuclear is an article of faith (and I use that word intentionally) for many people in today’s environmental movement and beyond, just as it was during the 1970s. That the Green Party, Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace have held the same position on the subject for 30 years could show admirable consistency – but it could also be evidence of dogmatic closed-mindedness.

When I first broached the issue in these pages three years ago, the reaction was extraordinary. A close acquaintance sent me a tearful email saying that I had “destroyed” her motivation for environmental campaigning. Other friends here in Oxford accused me – jokingly, of course – of having formed a romantic liaison with BNFL’s spokeswoman. Just last week, after tackling the subject once again, I received a one-line email from a well-known environmentalist accusing me of having “done a considerable disservice to the cause of combating climate change”.

So why does the nuclear issue evoke such strong reactions? For answers, I think we need to look to nuclear’s past, when today’s entrenched positions were first formed. Civil nuclear power began life as a heavily state-subsidised industry largely designed to produce plutonium for bombs. Civil nuclear power was part of the military-industrial complex and shrouded in secrecy. An association with the mushroom cloud has tainted the nuclear industry ever since – and clearly continues to be an issue in countries such as Iran, North Korea and Pakistan.

Then there is radiation. Most people are terrified of radiation precisely because it is invisible, making it all the more threatening, and because of its potential to cause cancer and genetic deformities. (Many other cancer-causing agents such as food or smoke seem innocuous by comparison.) Nuclear accidents and near-meltdowns – such as Three Mile Island in 1979 – provoke scary headlines throughout the media, as did popular treatments such as the film The China Syndrome (released, by an extraordinary stroke of luck for the film-makers, just 12 days before Three Mile Island), in which a sinister nuclear cabal covers up evidence of an accident.

It is undeniable that nuclear fission generates radioactive by-products, some of which will inevitably enter the environment. It is also undeniable that exposure to radiation increases the risk of cancer (though radiation can also be employed to treat cancers). But it is the level of risk that counts, and here the story is less fearsome than many would have us believe. Take Three Mile Island, which exposed local populations to one millirem of radiation on average(1). This equates to roughly what we all receive from natural sources (cosmic rays and naturally occurring radioactive elements in the ground) every four days(2). The number of deaths from Three Mile Island – the worst civil nuclear accident ever in a western country, and one that ended the US nuclear programme (not a single reactor has been built since) – is therefore officially estimated to be zero(3).

Even Chernobyl, surely the worst-imaginable case for a nuclear disaster, was far less deadly than most people think. In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, 28 people died due to acute radiation sickness(4) – all firemen and power plant workers, some of whom had been exposed to radiation doses as high as one million millirems(5). By comparison, 167 men were killed during the Piper Alpha disaster on a North Sea oil rig in 1988. But it is the long-term effects from Chernobyl that tend to scare people most. In a 2006 report, Greenpeace claimed that “60,000 people have additionally died in Russia because of the Chernobyl accident, and estimates of the total death toll for the Ukraine and Belarus could reach another 140,000”(6).

These figures, if correct, would make Chernobyl one of the worst single man-made disasters of the last century. But are they correct? The United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation reports 4,000 cases of thyroid cancer in children and young people in Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, but very few deaths (thyroid cancer is mostly treatable). Indeed, it concludes, “There is no evidence of a major public health impact attributable to radiation exposure 20 years after the accident”, and no evidence of any increase in cancer or leukaemia among exposed populations(7). The World Health Organisation concludes that while a few thousand deaths may be caused over the next 70 years by Chernobyl’s radioactive release, this number “will be indiscernible from the background of overall deaths in the large population group”(8). Without wishing to downplay the tragedy for the victims – especially the 300,000 people who were evacuated permanently – the explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone(9).

A plentiful supply of free fuel

One way of statistically assessing the safety of nuclear power versus other technologies is to use the measure of deaths per gigawatt-year. This technique is cited by Cambridge University’s Professor David MacKay in his book Sustainable Energy – Without the Hot Air (available free on the web), and shows that in Europe, nuclear and wind power are the safest technologies (about 0.1 death per GWy), while oil, coal and biomass the most dangerous (above 1 per GWy)(10).

A focus on statistics is also useful when assessing the financial costs of nuclear power. The high price for nuclear waste disposal and decommissioning – with a hefty chunk always payable from public funds – is surely one of the environmental lobby’s strongest arguments, particularly if any subsidy from taxpayers means taking money away from investment in renewables. Helen Caldicott’s book Nuclear Power is Not the Answer discusses the finances of nuclear under a chapter subheaded “Socialised Electricity”, quoting figures for nuclear’s subsidy in the US over recent decades of $70bn. To make a direct cost comparison, the International Energy Agency in a 2005 study looked at life-cycle costs for all power sources – including construction costs, operations, fuel and decommissioning – and concluded that nuclear was the cheapest option, followed by coal, wind and gas(11).

But how about nuclear power’s potential contribution to mitigating global warming? One persistent myth is that once construction and uranium mining are taken into account, nuclear is no better than fossil fuels. However, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), total life-cycle greenhouse-gas emission per unit of electricity is about 40g CO2-equivalent per kilowatt-hour, “similar to those for renewable energy sources”(12).

But why not ditch nuclear and focus only on renewables, as the greens suggest? MacKay calculates that even if we covered the windiest 10 per cent of the UK with wind turbines, put solar panels on all south-facing roofs, implemented strong energy efficiency measures across the economy, built offshore wind turbines across an area of sea two-thirds the size of Wales, and fully exploited every other conceivable source of renewables (including wave and tidal power), energy production would still not match current consumption(13).

This is rather different to Britain being the “Saudi Arabia of wind power” as many in the environmental movement are fond of asserting. Indeed, MacKay concludes that we will need to import renewable electricity from other countries – primarily from solar farms in the North African desert – or choose nuclear, or both. Indeed, it is vital to stress the neither I nor MacKay nor any credible expert suggests a choice between renewables and nuclear: the sensible conclusion is that we need both, soon, and on a large scale if we are to phase out coal and other fossil fuels as rapidly as the climate needs. As MacKay told me: “We need to get building.”

The UK’s Sustainable Development Commission, in its 2006 report on nuclear power, argued that new plants should be ruled out until the existing waste problem could be solved(14). But what if a new generation of nuclear plants could be designed that, instead of producing more waste to leave as a toxic legacy for our grandchildren, actually generated energy by burning up existing waste stockpiles? This is the solution proposed by Tom Blees, a US-based writer, in his upcoming book Prescription for the Planet(15). Blees focuses particularly on so-called fourth-generation nuclear technology – better known as fast-breeder reactors. While conventional thermal reactors use less than 1 per cent of the potential energy in their uranium fuel, fast-breeders are 60 times more efficient, and can burn virtually all of the energy available in the uranium ore.

This gives these fourth-generation reactors a big advantage. As Blees puts it: “Thus we have a prodigious supply of free fuel that is actually even better than free, for it is material that we are quite desperate to get rid of.” Moreover, fast-breeder reactors can also run on the “depleted” uranium left behind by conventional reactors, and help reduce the proliferation threat by burning up plutonium stockpiles left over from decommissioned nuclear weapons. Blees estimates that supplies of nuclear waste and depleted uranium are sufficient to “provide all the power needs of the entire planet for hundreds of years before we need to mine any more uranium”. Although these reactors produce plutonium – which might be used for nuclear weapons, and could therefore pose a proliferation threat – weapons-grade material is never isolated in the fuel-cycle process, making fast-breeders less dangerous to international stability than conventional reactors, and relatively simple to inspect.

But what about the waste these reactors themselves produce? Since the by-products of fast-breeder reactors are highly radioactive, they have much shorter half-lives – rendering them inert in a couple of centuries, instead of the longer time over which conventional nuclear waste remains dangerous. (Once again there is a powerful myth here – that high-level waste from reactors remains dangerous for enormous lengths of time. Greenpeace states that “waste will remain dangerous for up to a million years”(16). In fact, almost all waste will have decayed back to a level of radio activity less than the original uranium ore in less than a thousand years.)(17) Fourth-generation nu clear technology is also inherently safer than earlier designs. The Integral Fast Reactor (IFR), discussed at length by Blees, operates at atmospheric pressure, reducing the possibility of leaks and loss-of-coolant accidents. It is also designed to be “walk-away safe”, meaning that if all operators stood up and left, the reactor would shut itself down automatically rather than overheat and suffer a meltdown.

So why, given the purported advantages in safety and fuel use, have fast-breeders not been developed commercially? The US Integral Fast Reactor programme was shut down in 1994, possibly – Blees suggests – because of political pressure levied on the Clinton administration by anti-nuclear campaigners. (Even so, fourth-generation nuclear power plants are being built in India, Russia, Japan and China.) Ironically, the Clinton administration may have inadvertently killed off one of the most promising solutions to global warming in an attempt to please environmentalists. Even if the decision were to be reversed immediately, 20 years has been lost.

It is worth remembering the contribution that nuclear power has already made to offsetting global warming: the world’s 442 operating nuclear reactors, which produce 16 per cent of global electricity, save 2.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide per year compared to coal, according to the IPCC. Blees agrees that “the most pressing issue is to shut down all coal-fired power plants” and urges a “Manhattan Project-like” effort to convert the world’s non-renewable power to IFRs by the thousand. This sounds daunting but it is not unprecedented: France converted its power supply to 80 per cent nuclear in the space of just 25 years by building about six reactors a year.

An anti-nuclear report published by the Oxford Research Group in 2007 concluded that an additional 2,500 reactors would need to be built by 2075 to significantly mitigate global warming(19). The report’s authors suggested that this was a “pipe-dream”. But it sounds eminently achievable to me, given that it is only a five-times increase from today. The question is this: are those who care about global warming prepared to reconsider their opposition to nuclear power in this new era? We are no longer living in the 1970s. Today, the world is more threatened even than it was during the Cold War. Only this time nuclear power – instead of being part of the problem – can be part of the solution.

References:

(1) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm…
(2) Chapter 5 in ‘The Nuclear Energy Option’ by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter5.html
(3) United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Fact Sheet on the Three Mile Island Accident, http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.htm…
(4) World Health Organisation, ‘Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes’, 2006. http://www.who.int/entity/ionizing_radiation/chernobyl/WHO%20Report%20on…
(5) Chapter 7 in ‘The Nuclear Energy Option’ by Bernard Cohen, 1990. http://www.phyast.pitt.edu/blc/book/chapter7.html
(6) Greenpeace, ‘Chernobyl death toll grossly underestimated’, 18 April 2006. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/news/chernobyl-deaths-180406
(7) UNSCEAR, ‘The Chernobyl Accident: UNSCEAR’s assessments of the radiation effects’, http://www.unscear.org/unscear/en/chernobyl.html#Health
(8) World Health Organisation, ‘Health Effects of the Chernobyl Accident and Special Health Care Programmes’, 2006.
(9) National Geographic News, April 26, 2006: ‘Despite mutations, Chernobyl wildlife is thriving’. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2006/04/0426_060426_chernobyl.ht…
(10) David McKay, ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’, Part 2, ‘Making a difference’, p174. http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/sustainable/book/tex/cft.pdf
(11) IEA, ‘Projected costs of generating electricity – 2005 update’.
(12) IPCC, 2007: ‘Mitigation’. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf
(13) David McKay, ‘Sustainable Energy – without the hot air’, Part 1, ‘Numbers, not adjectives’.
(14) SDC, ‘Is nuclear the answer?’, http://www.sd-commission.org.uk/pages/060306.html
(15)Tom Blees, 2008: ‘Prescription for the Planet – The painless remedy for our energy and environmental crises’. http://www.prescriptionfortheplanet.com
(16) Greenpeace, ‘Nuclear power – the problems’. http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/nuclear/problems
(17) World Nuclear Association, ‘Radioactive Wastes’, see figure ‘Decay in radioactivity of high-level waste’. http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf60.html
(18) IPCC, 2007: ‘Mitigation’. p. 269. http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg3/ar4-wg3-chapter4.pdf
(19) Oxford Research Group, 2007: ‘Too Hot to Handle: The future of civil nuclear power’, p.7 http://www.oxfordresearchgroup.org.uk/publications/briefing_papers/pdf/t…

Seeing the bigger picture

tim — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 14:53:12 +0000

This might sound hyperbolic, but it is true: there is no longer any part of the globe that remains “natural” in any meaningful sense. Even the apparently pristine ice-clad poles are contaminated by man-made chemicals, many of which concentrate in the food chain – through fish, whales and seals – making the breastmilk of Inuit women so loaded with poisons as to constitute, in effect, toxic waste. Humanity bestrides the planet in a way no single species has ever achieved before: enough now, according to many scientists, to merit our name being applied to a new geological era, the anthropocene.

The rain that falls anywhere on the planet’s surface is different in its chemical constituents from pre-industrial rain; we have doubled the natural flow of reactive nitrogen through living systems, causing enormous algal blooms, not to mention – at the last count – 405 dead zones in coastal waters around the world. There is now a third more carbon dioxide, double the methane and a whole host of artificially manufactured gases circulating in our atmosphere. We have even managed to make the entire global ocean measurably more acidic, a remarkable achievement by any standard.

Our moral and artistic senses have barely begun to comprehend the scale of what is going on. Yes, it is there in black and white for anyone to read in weighty scientific reports such as the United Nations Millennium Ecosystem Assessment. Some of these reports are reasonably readable. Some even have pictures. But works of art they are not, nor are they intended to be. This has a tangible impact: in cultural terms, we still fondly imagine ourselves to be tiny and insig nificant little creatures, beetling about on a vast planet that is relatively impervious to our presence. We terrify and titillate ourselves with stories of natural disasters – earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tsunamis – which seem to prove once again how powerless we are against the “great forces of nature”.

This is a false impression: the greatest force of all is we human beings. Our collective footprint now far outreaches anything this planet has naturally produced for tens of millions of years: even the worst imaginable supervolcano would have less of an effect on the biosphere than humble little Homo sapiens so far has.

Artistic representation is integral to us ever developing a true understanding of our new place in the world. Good art bridges the intellectual/ emotional divide, communicating meaning in a way that UN reports cannot. It can help us think about why something hurts that is lost, why any of this matters, and how we might feel differently about it. It can step outside the rationalist discourse of modern scientific environmentalism into a different mental space where freer thinking is allowed and encouraged, and an impressionistic appreciation of changing nature is as valuable as rigorous facts and figures. Art should not be propaganda – but it can change minds. At its best, it is a connecting rather than a dividing force.

This is the difficult and contested territory that a new and visually stunning photographic collection, Vanishing Landscapes, occupies. Some of the images are truly shocking, such as Robert Adams’s pictures of logged redwood trees in the American north-west. No one can flick through these pages and not be appalled at the scale of devastation that humanity has inflicted on the landscape: not only have the trees been cut, but the whole ground has been butchered and vast areas bulldozed over. Stumps the size of houses are upended, thrown together like so much matchwood. In the final picture of the series, Adams’s wife sits hunched against a tree stump, surrounded by discarded branches and rotting timber as if by death itself. The ethereal quality of the images is highlighted by them being printed in black and white, which makes their content all the more stark.

Similarly striking are Edward Burtynsky’s pictures of nickel tailings in Ontario, Canada. Bright red rivers flow through a charred and blackened landscape, reminiscent of volcanic lava flows in both colour and form. Burtynsky puts it well in the introduction: “These images are meant as metaphors to the dilemma of our modern existence,” he writes. “We are drawn by desire – a chance at good living, yet we are consciously or unconsciously aware that the world is suffering for our success.”

But what of landscapes in which the human impact is less obvious? Walter Niedermayr cleverly juxtaposes the human with the natural in his photographs of Alpine glaciers in Austria: on one side of the page fold sits an apparently natural icescape, and on the other people are emerging – their bright clothes the only colour in the grey-whites of the glacial mass – on duckboards from an ice cave. Other pictures in Niedermayr’s series show people sprinkled over the surface of the ice, like flecks of pepper in a salt-pan. Though the figures appear tiny in comparison to the bulk of the ice on which they are walking, they also dominate it with their sheer numbers when spread out. Thomas Struth contributes photos of intact forests, each named Paradise plus a number: an Australian forest is Paradise 03, a tangled Peruvian jungle is Paradise 31. There is no evidence of human impact at all; indeed, the pictures look as primeval and verdant as the Garden of Eden itself, which I suspect they are intended to evoke.

And yet we know that, even in such landscapes as this, all is not what it seems. As the climate scientist John Schellnhuber says in an interview transcribed in the introduction: “As an image of nature, the landscape can no longer be conceived of as independent of humankind but is always something that we ourselves have created.” We may not know it, but the composition of Peru’s forest in Paradise 31 may be subtly different from how it would have been in a world without human beings. That is not to bemoan our presence on this earth: we have as much right to be here as any other element of the biosphere. But the converse also applies: all the species we are busily wiping out – consciously or unconsciously – themselves enjoy inherent rights of existence. If we can understand and appreciate them more, perhaps we can also learn to respect them.

“Vanishing Landscapes” is published by Frances Lincoln on 18 September (£35)

Say no to biofuels

Alex Doherty — Wed, 20 Aug 2008 19:37:50 +0000

Beware simplistic solutions to complex problems. Humanity is in a fix: for over a century our advanced industrial civilisation has been almost entirely fuelled by fossil hydrocarbons – oil, coal and gas – extracted from geological reserves under the Earth’s surface. We have known for years that the combustion of these fuels releases carbon dioxide, enhancing the planet’s natural greenhouse effect and condemning us all to a fiery future unless we leave the majority of remaining reserves under the ground. What to do? Biofuels are an obvious solution: replace ‘mineral’ petrol and diesel from fossil reserves with biological fuels extracted from plants and the result will be no net addition of CO2 to the atmosphere. This is because the carbon released in combustion was originally sucked out of the air when the plants grew using energy from the sun. So once enough cars run on biodiesel or ethanol, humanity will effectively have switched to a solar energy economy and the problem will be solved.

Or will it? Perhaps the strongest argument against biofuels is that they simply replace one ecological problem with another. Humanity is already exerting tremendous pressure on the planet, largely because of agriculture. The UN’s Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a landmark report authored by thousands of experts, found that over the last 50 years humanity has changed the planet’s ecosystems “more rapidly and extensively than in any comparable period of time in human history”. This has already led to a major loss of biodiversity, and at least 60% of the Earth’s ‘ecosystem services’ (things like freshwater, air purification, fisheries and so on) are being degraded or used unsustainably. In other words, humanity is already living far beyond its means – we are hitting the ecological buffers in many other areas apart from just global warming.

A large-scale shift towards biofuels – extracting fuel from the biosphere rather than underground – can only worsen the human agricultural pressure on ecosystems, as we shift from producing not just food but also fuel from increasingly scarce cultivable land. Some of the worst examples of biofuels causing the destruction of valuable ecosystems – such as the conversion of Indonesian tropical forests to palm oil plantations – are already well-known, thanks to vociferous campaigns by groups like Friends of the Earth and Biofuelwatch. Using palm oil for biodiesel production is little short of madness, even from a strictly climate change perspective – far more carbon is released when the forests are cleared (particularly when the peat underlying them is drained and burned) than will ever be clawed back through the replacement of fossil fuels. A similar equation applies on Amazonia, where the expansion of soya production (soya is another biodiesel feedstock) is also driving deforestation. Indonesia and Brazil are amongst the top ten carbon emitters in the world due to the degradation and destruction of their forests, thanks increasingly to biofuels.

But there are other less visible problems too. Most farmers apply nitrogen-based fertilisers to their crops to stimulate production. Most of this nitrogen isn’t captured by the plants, but runs off into rivers and lakes, causing algal blooms which kill fish and deplete oxygen levels. Whole areas of the ocean are now classified as ‘dead zones’, because of this agricultural runoff. Indeed, the planet’s natural nitrogen cycle has been even more dramatically altered by humans than the carbon cycle, although this is gets much less attention than the issue of climate change. But the two issues are interlinked: fertilisers also degrade on land to produce nitrous oxide, a very powerful greenhouse gas. A recent scientific analysis by a team led by the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Paul Crutzen found that biofuels can “contribute as much or more to global warming by N2O [nitrous oxide] emissions than cooling by fossil fuel savings”.

These two issues – nitrous oxide and emissions from land-use change – should by themselves be enough to rule out a large-scale shift to biofuels. But the ecological concerns raised by biofuels run even deeper than this. With more than six billion people on the planet, humanity has already run short of agricultural land for food production, and the conversion of virgin forests and grasslands into farmland monoculture can only worsen the current extinction crisis. Some charismatic species like the orang-utan in Borneo and Sumatra are directly threatened by biofuels production, but there are countless other less visible victims of agricultural expansion: in total, one in four mammals, one in eight birds, a third of all amphibians and 70% of plants are currently threatened by human activity, according to the World Conservation Union (IUCN), whose director Julia Marton-Lefevre now talks of a “global extinction crisis”. These species are important not just for economic or aesthetic reasons, but because the whole earth system – air, oceans and climate – depends vitally on living organisms: biology is as much a part of our Earth as chemistry and physics. If we wipe out biodiversity, we risk triggering escalating impacts which will eventually rebound on human societies too.

Biofuels are currently only a small part of this equation, but any increase in agricultural production can only intensify the extinction crisis. Some of this comes about through a displacement effect: even if biofuel feedstocks, whether corn, sugar cane, soya or palm oil, come from supposedly ‘sustainable’ sources, the gap in food supplies caused by their use will necessarily drive further deforestation and agricultural expansion in other areas. But some of the damage is much more direct. For example, 20,000 acres of Kenya’s Tana River wetlands – home to 350 species of birds, as well as hippos, elephants, rare sharks, reptiles and primates – are currently slated by the country’s government for destruction to produce sugarcane for ethanol, to be exported to the west for use in cars. In Cote d’Ivoire another wetland, the Tanoe Swamps Forest – a last refuge for three highly endangered primates – is due to be converted into palm oil, again for biofuels production.

Biofuels supporters frequently advocate the use of plants like the oilseed-producing drought-tolerant shrub jatropha, which they argue can be grown in ‘marginal’ areas in poorer countries without reducing food production. However, these ‘marginal’ areas are often precisely the places where a semblance of biodiversity still clings on. In addition, if crops like jatropha become successful, they will doubtless be expanded into food-producing areas and forests alike: unless strict laws are in place, economic incentives will always trump humanitarian or ecological concerns. Similarly, so-called ‘second-generation’ biofuels are also touted as a radical improvement on current fuel production from food crops. By brewing ethanol from crop waste or wood, the argument goes, biofuels production can be ramped up without driving up food prices and starving the poor. But if this ‘cellulosic ethanol’ were ever to take off in a big way, it might present an even greater threat than today’s generation of biofuels. Entire forests would likely be liquified in order to produce petrol and diesel for motorists – not just in rich countries, but increasingly in rapidly-industrialising nations like India and China. If world oil prices continue to rise, pressure to find substitutes like biofuels can only escalate.

That is not to say that all biofuels are bad. Burning old chip fat in car engines is beneficial, but only on a tiny scale and because it uses waste oil. Biogas produced from human sewage could be used to replace natural gas from underground. And biomass – from coppice woodland, for example – can be a good way to produce heat and power, but again only on a limited scale. So with biofuels largely out of the equation, how should we tackle global warming? The best way to reduce emissions from vehicles is not to find new sources of liquid fuels, but to shift rapidly to the production of electric cars and trucks, which can plug into the grid to recharge. This electricity in turn must come from wholly renewable sources, which means wind, solar and wave or tidal power. A 100% renewable economy may sound like a pipe-dream, but it is technologically entirely feasible, and economically represents an enormous opportunity for growth in jobs and manufacturing, as Germany has already begun to discover. Over the century ahead humanity has to learn how to supply its energy needs in ways which do not destroy the capacity of the planet to support life. Neither biofuels nor fossil fuels meet this test – but luckily there are plenty of energy sources that do.

Climate change catastrophe by degrees

JamieSW — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 17:19:58 +0000

Unfortunately, Professor Bob Watson is not speaking out of turn in telling the world to prepare for four degrees of global warming. “Mitigate for two degrees; adapt for four” has long been the catchphrase among climate negotiators and campaigners. Translated, that means: try to reduce emissions to stay below two degrees of warming, but also prepare for the worst.

And Bob Watson should know – he is the former chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), but was kicked out at the behest of the Bush administration for being too vocal about the threat presented by global warming. (Any sceptic reading who thinks that the IPCC is a conspiracy of environmentalists take note: it is a creature of government as well as of science.) He has long made clear his own personal passion and commitment to tackling the issue – often without mincing his words. He is also someone with a very wide-ranging perspective: after leaving the IPCC, Watson chaired the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a landmark UN study published in 2005 looking at the totality of human impact on the planet’s natural systems. (The news wasn’t good.)

The problem with the “mitigate for two degrees; adapt for four” strategy is that it is doomed to fail. Yes, we should certainly prepare for the worst as far as possible – with flood defences, drought-resistant crops and strategies to ameliorate the loss of wildlife, at the very least – but a look at the likely impact of a four-degrees temperature rise suggests that such a dramatic change would probably stretch society’s capacity for adaptation to the limit, not to mention having a disastrous effect on the natural ecosystems that support humanity as a whole.

By the time global temperatures reach four degrees, much of humanity will be short of water for drinking and irrigation: glaciers in the Andes and Himalayas, which feed river systems on which tens of millions depend, will have melted, and their rivers will be seasonally running dry. Whole weather systems like the Asian monsoon (which supports 2 billion people) may alter irrevocably. Deserts will have spread into Mediterranean Europe, across most of southern Africa and the western half of the United States. Higher northern latitudes will be plagued with regular flooding. Heatwaves of unimaginable ferocity will sear continental landscapes: the UK would face the kind of summer temperatures found in northern Morocco today. The planet would be in the throes of a mass extinction of natural life approaching in magnitude that at the end of the Cretaceous period, 65m years ago, when more than half of global biodiversity was wiped out.

Four degrees of warming would also cross many of the “tipping points” which so concern climate scientists: the Amazon rainforest would likely collapse and burn, as part of a massive further release of carbon from terrestrial ecosystems – the reverse of the current situation, where trees and soils absorb and store a good portion of our annual emissions. Most of the Arctic permafrost will lie in the melt zone, and will be steadily releasing methane, accelerating warming still further. The northern polar ice cap will be a distant memory, and Greenland will be melting so rapidly that sea level rise by the end of the century will be measured in metres rather than centimetres.

Hence the current effort – led by scientists, in the main – to drop the two degrees target and talk instead about getting carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere back down to less dangerous levels. This year’s CO2 concentration is 385 parts per million (ppm) – now a campaign is forming to get them back down to 350ppm, about the level they were at in the mid 1980s. This isn’t just about reducing emissions, it is about getting emissions quickly down to zero (by 2050 or earlier), and then removing some of the excess carbon that humanity has already dumped into the atmosphere. The planet will still get warmer, but on nothing like the scale currently predicted.

The harsh truth is that the latest science shows that even two degrees is not good enough, never mind four. And since four degrees would be a catastrophe that many of us, or our children, would not survive, it is surely our absolute duty to do everything in our power to avoid it.

The climate change clock is ticking

JamieSW — Fri, 01 Aug 2008 14:17:47 +0000

The UK is in denial about its real carbon emissions, suggests a report from the Stockholm Environment Institute. The academics conclude that if “outsourced” emissions produced in countries like China on goods which are imported into the UK are included in our total carbon footprint, this country’s total greenhouse gas emissions are 49% higher than currently reported. So we should think twice when blaming the Chinese for emitting the CO2 that is required in the manufacture of our fridges and televisions.

The report illustrates once again – as if we had forgotten – that global warming is an, er, global issue. A tonne of CO2 is a tonne of CO2, wherever it is emitted. How you do the counting is more a matter of politics than mathematics. A much greater concern is that all the politics is in danger of obscuring the increasingly drastic nature of the climate change threat. According to Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, the world has only got 100 months left if we are to have a reasonably high chance of staving off runaway global warming.

This is a pretty dramatic claim, and the associated onehundredmonths.org website has an equally dramatic ticking clock counting down until runaway warming begins. “When the clock stops ticking,” it states ominously, “we’ll be beyond the climate’s tipping point, the point of no return.” Yikes. So how valid is this claim? Luckily, NEF’s website provides a 100 Months technical note (pdf) explaining the calculations behind the new campaign. The first thing I noticed is that there isn’t any new modelling work underlying the claim: it is based on existing science, in particular on an analysis (pdf) by a researcher called Malte Meinshausen which was published in 2006.

Meinshausen was the first scientist to quantify with percentage figures the probability of exceeding certain climatic thresholds: in his 2006 paper he concluded that only by stabilising greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at 400 part per million (ppm) would it be “likely” (defined as 66-90% chance) that the world would stay below an eventual warming of two degrees. The NEF analysis has performed a fairly simple calculation, simply counting the time left before this 400ppm level is reached. The deadline, it turns out, is 1 December 2016.

There are several complicating factors, however. The 400ppm figure in question is not for CO2 only, but for a basket of atmosphere-altering gases – some of which have a positive “forcing” effect (like CO2 itself) whereas others have a negative (cooling) effect, like sulphate aerosols released by industry. Add the sum of these forcings together and you can arrive at a “CO2-equivalence” figure, which is the one that both NEF and Meinshausen use. The timescales need to be borne in mind, however: CO2 resides in the atmosphere for a century on average, whereas aerosols are washed out by rain in just a week or so.

There are other caveats too. Meinshausen is not saying that two degrees of warming will be reached with certainty when we cross the 400ppm threshold, but that the risk of seeing two degrees increases steadily thereafter. (Even at 400ppm there is still a risk of overshooting 2C, of somewhere between 2% and 57%.) At 450ppm the risk of crossing the 2C line rises to between 26 and 78%, whereas at 550ppm the risk of overshooting is between 68 and 99%. Indeed, for 550ppm the risk of overshooting even 3C ranges from 21% to 69%.

So what do all these numbers mean? Reading the small print, sceptics might complain about the false precision implied by the 100 months clock, which seems to suggest that the minute, indeed the second, we pass 400ppm we are certain to see two degrees of warming. The truth is that no one knows where any of the relevant climatic tipping points – from the disappearance of the Arctic ice cap to the release of methane from melting permafrost – actually lie. There are uncertainties regarding both what level of carbon emissions equals what temperature rise, and what temperature rise equals which climatic impacts. All we can say with near-certainty is that the warmer it gets, the further into dangerous territory we stray.

And again, there is the question of timescales. Meinshausen’s two degrees calculations referred to two degrees of warming, not the minute the 400ppm line is crossed in December 2016, but when the atmosphere reaches “equilibrium” – in other words when all the warming processes have had a chance to feed through the system. Like a boiling kettle, the planet has a substantial thermal timelag – it takes a long time for ice sheets to rebalance themselves and for warmer waters to penetrate to the bottom of the deepest oceans. So even at this “tipping point” we still wouldn’t see the expected two degrees of warming until the end of the century at least, if today’s climate models are to be believed.

Reassuring, perhaps – but no cause for complacency. The earth’s thermal timelag also means that today’s emissions will keep on causing warming for decades to come, and that decisions made today on emissions cuts are essential if we are to rebalance the climate in the second half of the century.

The great danger of climate change is that it is a long-term systemic process. Self-evidently urgent threats – like wars or economic collapse – are easy to put at the top of our list of priorities. But climate change is a very slow process (note the current sceptic line of decrying the lack of year-on-year warming as hoped-for proof that it’s all been a big mistake), and one where cause and effect (CO2=climate disasters) are not at all obvious at any intuitive level, hence the continuing predominance of wishful thinking, conspiracy-theorising and outright denial. Climate change clearly does not engage our natural psychological self-defence mechanisms.

This is the value of the 100 months campaign, which injects a sense of urgency into what is in reality a very slow process of cooking ourselves. We need to frame this issue as an urgent one to generate anything like an appropriate response, and indeed NEF explicitly uses the wartime analogy. But the drawback is also clear: in January 2017, after the deadline passes, people might either become fatalistic (“we’ve passed the tipping point, so let’s give up”) or might turn increasingly sceptical (“things don’t look any different – I thought you said the world was going to end?”). In reality, this is a matter of risk analysis: how much risk of destroying our planetary habitat are we prepared to bear in order to keep on burning fossil fuels? Quite a lot, it would seem.

Coming to a screen near you - me!

JamieSW — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:48:14 +0000

Three years ago, the environmentalist and writer Bill McKibben made a striking observation: that despite overwhelming evidence of a world-threatening rise in temperatures, our cultural realm seemed unaware of the looming crisis. “Where are the books?” he demanded. “The poems? The plays? The goddamn operas?” Global warming, he concluded, “hasn’t registered in our gut; it isn’t part of our culture”.

How things have changed. Today, bookshops have entire shelves devoted to climate change. Television, too, has belatedly begun to catch up. Which is not to say every contribution has been well-informed or progressive: Channel 4 commissioned a contrarian polemic, The Great Global Warming Swindle, broadcast in March last year. Directed by the committed anti-environmentalist Martin Durkin, the spectacularly misleading Swindle marked a broadcasting nadir for the number of distortions, errors and misrepresentations that can be crammed into 75 minutes.

On 21 July the broadcasting regulator Ofcom handed down a severe censure, ruling that the programme had breached impartiality guidelines and treated contributors unfairly. This should be embarrassing for a scrupulous public service broadcaster, yet Channel 4 seems to have a higher regard for controversy than for truth.

But, into the intellectual and ethical vacuum that is Channel 4’s environmental programming steps the BBC with a new, two-part TV drama called Burn Up. Screened on 23 and 25 July on BBC2, this thriller surely marks the belated coming-of-age of energy politics as a legitimate topic for popular entertainment. Written by Simon Beaufoy, screenwriter for The Full Monty, and starring Rupert Penry-Jones (from Spooks) and Bradley Whitford (The West Wing), Burn Up really is thrilling (if you missed the original transmission, make sure you get hold of the download on the BBC’s iPlayer, quickly).

The story finds the young chief executive of a British-based oil company wrestling with his conscience as the deadline looms in global climate-change talks. There’s a fast-talking scientist and a bad-turned-good government apparatchik, both trying to confront the evil axis of oil blobbyists and the US government.

Yet this is not a televised Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report: there’s sex and murder. I could quibble that, in the interests of gripping drama, the portrayal of climate negotiations isn’t quite as I’ve seen in reality, but I imagine policemen feel the same way about The Bill.

Also well worth watching out for on the cultural front is the upcoming feature film The Age of Stupid, a drama-meets-documentary epic that casts Pete Postlethwaite in the role of “the archivist”, alone in the year 2055 in a specially constructed Arctic museum-cum-fortress, one of the last surviving human beings on the climatic ally devastated planet. The archivist – using his cache of all the world’s broadcast material from past decades – is constructing a digital broadcast for other, future civilisations about why humanity failed to save itself from global warming.

This is where the real documentary comes in. The director, Franny Armstrong, spent years filming people in various countries who illustrate the dilemmas of climate change: an elderly French mountain guide, the chief executive of an Indian low-cost airline and a Shell petroleum geologist who lost his house to Hurricane Katrina, among others. The film is anything but a good guys-versus-bad guys polemic; it is angry but nuanced, despairing but also strangely motivating. Indeed, the hero (in my opinion) – the one who coins the name of the film itself – is none other than the Shell man, who saved dozens of people in his boat in the aftermath of the hurricane, and has clearly done more thinking about the environment than many greens I know.

I should probably mention that I appear in the film (sketching carbon-emissions graphs in the garden shed), and I also had a hand in writing and advising on the scientific content of the script. Armstrong hopes for UK-wide cinema release in October or November this year, and discussions regarding a prime-time television slot are already under way. Watch out for the fast-paced animations and for the peculiarly captivating soundtrack. It seems that, finally, someone is answering Bill McKibben’s lament.

A Green New Deal

Tim Holmes — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 11:38:42 +0000

If you thought a growing economy was bad, try living through a recession. Environmentalists routinely denounce the “mantra” of economic growth, pointing out – quite rationally and entirely correctly – that infinite growth on a finite planet does not make mathematical, let alone ecological, sense. But the idea of a no-growth, steady-state economy has always sounded like pie in the sky – and you have only to read the papers every day to be reminded why. The credit crunch and looming recession in the UK illustrate nicely how the economic system knows only two options: growth or collapse. During good times, it seems almost impossible to imagine how anything could ever go wrong. Hence the willingness of investors and banks to snap up mortgage-backed securities without worrying how “toxic” these might turn out to be. In bad times, the reverse is true.

It is tempting for environmentalists to welcome recessions: after all, if you believe that rampant consumerism is killing the planet, then a sudden decrease in consumption can only be a good thing. A falling property market means that the pressure to concrete over the countryside is lifted. With higher fuel costs, people drive less and buy smaller cars. My local allotments association, once rather neglected, now has a waiting list of several years. Talk of new car-share clubs abounds, and more and more people are breaking the driving habit and taking to the roads on their bikes.

What is particularly noteworthy about the present economic crisis is that it has not – so far, anyway – led to a drop in oil prices. With the world’s largest oil-consuming country, the United States, in full-scale recession, and other western countries beginning to follow suit, the ensuing drop in demand for oil ought to lead to downward pressure on crude prices. That it has not produced such pressure – and the price per barrel continues to hover just below $150 – suggests that fears about long-term supply, often aired by the so-called “peak-oilers”, are well founded.

Combined, the credit crunch and oil crunch have delivered a double shock to the world economy. And with climate change raising the risk of weather-related damage to crops, and so driving up food prices, one group of thinkers has begun to use the term “triple crunch” to describe the present situation.

This group, which launches a landmark report on 21 July calling for a “Green New Deal”, consists of two former directors of Friends of the Earth, the Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott, the Green Party MEP Caroline Lucas and Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, among other luminaries. The report is still under embargo at the time of writing, so I cannot delve into it too deeply, but what I find striking and novel about its content is the clear attempt to bridge the credibility gap between whimsical environmentalism and the harsh real world of everyday economics.

The Green New Deal Group is not talking about incremental changes, however. It is calling for nothing less than a return to pre-war Keynesianism – complete with big increases in public investment spending and much tighter controls on international finance – with a “war economy” social mobilisation harnessed, this time not towards fighting fascism, but towards heading off ecological crisis. What is novel is that this call is directed not just at stabilising the climate, but also at stabilising the economy – lower interest rates and higher government spending are aimed at ending the credit crunch as much as tackling the oil and climate crunches.

Indeed, everywhere you look, environmental thinkers are embracing the market. All the various greenhouse-gas-regulating frameworks under serious discussion depend crucially for their success on high carbon prices sending a signal through the market rather than through direct government regulation. The recent Time for Plan B report from the US-based Earth Policy Institute calls for 80 per cent cuts in carbon emissions by 2020 – but sees this, crucially, not as a belt-tightening sacrifice, but as an opportunity for renewed growth.

For example, to achieve Plan B’s target of three million megawatts of new wind capacity in the next 12 years we’ll have to put up 1.5 million turbines. That seems an unfeasibly large number, until you consider that 65 million cars are produced worldwide each year. Indeed, the report suggests, some of the turbines could be produced “on idled automotive assembly lines, reinvigorating manufacturing capacity and creating jobs”.

Keynes would have been proud.

The global warming deniers

tim — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 18:27:08 +0000

I am finding it increasingly difficult to maintain my optimism that we can stabilise global temperature increases below the “danger level” of 2°C. First, there is no sign that emissions are being reduced; rather, the opposite is happening. Second, it is becoming clear that the danger level for temperature increase is a good deal lower than 2°C.

The Arctic Sea ice cover is already approaching a new low. The new topic of speculation is not whether the Arctic ice will disappear completely in the summer months by 2080, but whether this will happen by 2018. An ice-free North Pole will have a significant effect on the planet’s energy balance, given the important role this huge white “mirror” plays in reflecting incoming solar radiation. Once it is gone, the warming process can only speed up further. Already, a new study suggests that an ice-free Arctic Ocean will dramatically increase warming in surrounding land areas, accelerating the degradation of permafrost and resulting in huge releases of carbon and methane – driving yet more warming. Setting a danger level of 2°C, as the UK and EU have done, now looks dangerously optimistic.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported last year that emissions cuts within a decade could still keep temperature hikes below 2°C. But global emissions are rising year on year, not falling. Many climate models are underpinned by an assumption of 1.5 per cent increases annually in carbon releases. Instead, they have been running at more than 2 per cent.

In the words of the Tyndall Centre scientist Kevin Anderson: “Since 2000 the world has gone ballistic in terms of carbon emissions.” Anderson has recently revised his projections for climate change and now thinks that the “best we can expect” is stab ilising atmospheric concentrations at 650 parts per million CO2 equivalent, equating to warming of about 4°C. He suggests we “mitigate for 2°, but adapt for 4°”.

Adapting to 4°C of warming would be quite a challenge. With this level of temperature change, we can expect a huge increase in drought-prone zones, a mass extinction of half or more of the life on earth, hundreds of millions of refugees from areas deprived of fresh water or inundated by rising seas, and widespread starvation due to food and water shortages.

The Stockholm Network’s Carbon Scenarios report (which I helped draft) reaches a similar conclusion, projecting a warming of nearly 5°C if global policy on climate continues to fail. Against this terrifying backdrop, the denial lobby flourishes, its success almost calling into question the capacity of mankind for reasoned thought.

Nigel Lawson’s dreadful book, laughably entitled An Appeal to Reason, has been riding high in the sales charts and is only one of several denialist tomes on global warming. The last time I looked, four out of five of Amazon’s top sellers on climate were penned by deniers. And these are not just views from the fringe. A MORI poll reported by the Observer last month found six out of ten people think, wrongly, that “many scientific experts” disagree on whether human beings are causing climate change. Four out of ten people asked believed that the impact had been exaggerated.

Many climate-change sceptics like to think they are proudly independent people, refusing to be cowed by UN-sponsored orthodoxy from the IPCC. In fact, the arguments of climate sceptics have largely been moulded by a far more sinister force – the US-based conservative think tanks. A recent academic survey of environmentally sceptical books found that 92 per cent were linked with these think tanks, which include the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Since the early 1990s, these and other industry-funded front groups have been leading an anti-environmental backlash, changing the tenor of the political debate on environmental issues and bombarding the media and the public with disinformation.

The authors of the study, published in the June edition of a journal called Environmental Politics, argue that, far from being a true grass-roots movement, “environmental scepticism is an elite- driven reaction to global environmentalism, organised by core actors within the conservative movement”. The “self-portrayal of sceptics as marginalised ‘Davids’ battling the powerful ‘Goliath’ of environmentalists and environmental scientists is a charade”, given that the “sceptics are supported by politically powerful conservative think tanks funded by wealthy foundations and corporations”.

Next time someone insists global warming isn’t happening, ask yourself where their views come from – and whose interests they serve.

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?

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.

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.”

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.

Political will is a renewable resource

tim — Thu, 29 May 2008 18:07:53 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Green vs Green

tim — Thu, 01 May 2008 13:15:25 +0000

Environmentalists are used to fighting battles. But with environmentalism going mainstream – wind farms, biofuels and nuclear power stations, for example, are fast becoming some of the most controversial issues in British politics today – environmentalists increasingly find themselves skirmishing with one another as they see-saw between pragmatism and idealism.

The Lewis wind farm – rejected by the Scottish Executive earlier this week – is merely the latest example. The Scotsman reported that “environmental agencies welcomed the news” of the massive wind power project’s demise, thanks to concerns about impacts on rare peat bog and birdlife habitat. Yet according to the developers Lewis Wind Power – a coalition of AMEC and British Energy – the wind farm would have made a substantial contribution to reducing Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions, wiping out a quarter of a million tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. With climate change at the top of the list of political priorities, most now agree that Britain desperately needs to expand its renewables sector. How this can be done without major negative impacts on wildlife and landscape remains one of today’s toughest challenges.

Wildlife groups such as the RSPB have a particularly difficult task in deciding where they stand. The Lewis wind farm’s impact on the landscape would have been substantial – with 181 turbines each standing 140 metres tall, erected on massive concrete bases drilled into the fragile peat surface and connected by dozens of miles of new stone roads, this was unavoidable. And while the developers insisted that strenuous efforts would be made to mitigate the effect on birds, including not putting turbines in areas important to rare species such as merlins and golden eagles, the RSPB objected strongly to the proposal.

Yet the real-world result of defeating the wind farm is that the electricity that would have been generated cleanly from the wind will now be generated using conventional means – a mixture of coal and gas. This in turn will worsen climate change, which will in the long run have a far more serious effect on fragile habitats such as Lewis’ peat moors than any number of wind turbines, as temperatures rise and rainfall patterns shift. Indeed, global warming is now thought by many biodiversity experts to be the greatest extinction threat facing the planet today. Up to a half of all species could be consigned to oblivion with just two or three degrees of further warming.

But with wind farms consistently opposed by a powerful coalition of conservationists and locals concerned about the landscape impact of turbines, it is difficult to see how the planned emissions cuts – or indeed the new renewables target of 15% of UK energy by 2020 – can even be approached. The Lewis project, although supported by the Western Isles Council, received 11,000 objections from members of the public, with only 100 comments in favour. Lewis Wind Power responded to the news of its project’s refusal by saying that it was “bitterly disappointed”. Similarly, the British Wind Energy Association – environmentalists all – is furious that £5m has been wasted on a failed scheme, and warns that this will damage investor confidence in new wind projects.

Conservation bodies such as the RSPB are, of course, well aware of the global warming threat – the RSPB was a founding member of the environment and development agency coalition Stop Climate Chaos, and has also launched its own green electricity tariff, RSPB Energy, in partnership with electricity company Scottish and Southern, to supply consumers with renewable electricity, much of it generated from wind.

Some contradiction perhaps? RSPB doesn’t think so. “We are committed to tackling climate change,” it says. But “we cannot support any renewable generation proposal which would have a significant and adverse impact on wildlife and habitats, particularly sites which are protected by law specifically for their wildlife value.”

It denies that there is a conflict between meeting renewables targets and protecting wildlife. But this conflict keeps on happening. The biggest single source of renewable power in the UK would be the tidal barrage that is proposed across the Severn estuary – it could potentially generate 5% of the country’s entire supply. But building it would have severe ecological consequences on the tidal mudflats, which host a panoply of aquatic life and wading birds – and once again, the RSPB, this time supported by Friends of the Earth (FoE), is strongly in the anti camp. FoE has proposed an alternative system of tidal lagoons, but these would generate less power and might not be economically feasible. Jonathon Porritt’s Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) last year proposed building the barrage but ensuring that compensatory habitats were established elsewhere for displaced wildlife – especially if these new habitats could help birds and other species adapt to rising sea levels and other impacts of climate change.

What is clear is that all energy-generation technologies have an impact on the environment – and environmentalists are going to have to think more deeply about what their hierarchy of priorities is. For example, nuclear and hydro power were both anathema to environmentalists for decades but are slowly and reluctantly being accepted back into the fold due to their perceived potential for producing low-carbon energy. The nuclear option was recently considered by the SDC – and although it was still ruled out on cost and proliferation grounds, its report did have to concede that “nuclear is a low carbon technology”, which “could generate large quantities of electricity, contribute to stabilising CO2 emissions and add to the diversity of the UK’s energy supply”.

This is a world away from Greenpeace’s flat refusal to even consider moving away from its outright and long-standing rejection of nuclear power. Similarly on biofuels, even as environmental campaign groups lobby against the new government-sponsored biofuels mandate (a reversal from their favourable position a few years ago), the Royal Society still insists that biofuels “have a potentially useful role in tackling the issues of climate change and energy supply”.

All this suggests that environmental concerns of a generation ago – which were conservation-based, principally – are increasingly being trumped by the climate-change concerns of today. Indeed, if climate change does come top of the list, given its potential to devastate both biodiversity and the British landscape, then it certainly needs to be given more weight in planning decisions.

As Sir Martin Doughty, chairman of Natural England, said in response to the SDC’s Severn Barrage proposals: “We have some difficult choices to make if we are going to get serious about reducing the impact of climate change on the natural environment.” And making these difficult choices means knowing what we value most, and how to protect it.

Why Greens should vote for Ken

tim — Mon, 21 Apr 2008 12:31:58 +0000

Whenever I hear cynics complaining that politicians nowadays are all in hock to vested interests and unprepared to show leadership, I respond with two words: Ken Livingstone. London’s mayor has made the UK’s capital a world leader on environmental and transport issues – often in the teeth of determined opposition from the media and the political Establishment. If he loses the 1 May election to the charming Tory buffoon Boris Johnson, it will be a tragedy both for London and for global environmental politics as a whole.

Ken is that rare thing in today’s world: a politician who is prepared to lead rather than follow public opinion. If the congestion charge had been put through new Labour’s focus groups it would never have happened. Opinion polls were dead set against the scheme right up until it became a success, at which point most people switched allegiances or argued that they had actually been in favour all along. In 2004, the Conservative Party’s mayoral candidate, Steven Norris, pledged to abolish the congestion charge – and lost. Now, even Boris says he wants to retain the scheme, although in what form remains unclear. The progress of the congestion charge has been keenly watched from abroad: New York’s mayor, Michael Bloomberg, is planning to introduce a similar scheme in Manhattan.

Livingstone has been much attacked – particularly by such critics as the London Evening Standard and the NS’s Martin Bright. But Livingstone is by far the best-qualified candidate to run London – and from an environmental perspective, this is even more the case.

While Johnson is on record as opposing the Kyoto Protocol – as the Green candidate, Siân Berry, has repeatedly pointed out – Livingstone helped bring together big cities in the United States to keep the Kyoto flame alive during George Bush’s disastrous presidential reign. Livingstone has forged partnerships on all sides. His London Energy Services Company, which aims to make decentralised energy solutions mainstream across Greater London, is a partnership with EDF Energy, whose parent company operates nearly 60 nuclear reactors in France (Ken is strongly anti-nuclear).

As mayor, Livingstone set up the London Climate Change Agency to co-ordinate the capital’s response to what he identifies as “the biggest long-term challenge facing humanity”. The mayor’s Climate Change Action Plan aims to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 per cent by 2025 – to my knowledge the toughest targets adopted by any major political entity anywhere in the world. These targets would – if emulated by governments internationally – go most of the way towards solving the global warming problem. That written targets are already backed up with practical achievements makes them doubly valuable: London is the only major city in the world to have seen a shift from car use to public transport, and with large-scale investment in bike lanes cycling has increased by a heady 83 per cent. (In the country as a whole, cycle use is still flatlining.)

The contrast with Johnson could hardly be starker. The Tory candidate is still waffling on about recycling and planting trees, suggesting he is stuck back in the light-green era of the 1980s, despite his much-trumpeted credentials as a cyclist. Though he says he will “make London the greenest city in the world”, this turns out to be more about parks than emissions. Johnson’s manifesto says that he will keep Ken Livingstone’s climate-change targets – but there is a lack of both consistency and enthusiasm running through his statements. While both Ken and Boris oppose a third runway at Heathrow – today’s litmus test for climate-change credentials – Boris supports the construction of an entirely new airport somewhere in the Thames Estuary, on the grounds that “London’s airport capacity has to expand”. That doesn’t sound very climate- or environment-friendly to me.

While loyal Greens will no doubt wish to support Siân Berry’s candidacy, I wholeheartedly endorse her and Livingstone’s call for Labour and Green voters to put each other’s candidates down as their second preference.

Let’s keep Boris in the TV studios by all means – he’s a gifted entertainer – but let’s keep him out of City Hall.

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.