Cutting the Carbon

I started to take climate change seriously when I concluded that the sea ice at the North Pole was melting so fast that the Arctic would be completely ice-free during the summer months in my lifetime.(1)

“Ice doesn't vote. Ice doesn't contribute to any political party. It just melts.”(2)

The quote above is from Rear Admiral David Titley, Chief Oceanographer of the US Navy. He was a climate sceptic, but the changing Arctic convinced him too.

A drip-feed of worsening environmental news stored away in the recesses of my brain became a personal tipping point back in 2005 when I read about the demise of the Arctic ice on the front page of The Independent. This was a seismic shift in my understanding of what was happening.

Suddenly I saw the need for change – by me and by human society as a whole. Not because of the polar bears – although the recent news that polar bear cubs are struggling to swim the larger distances melting sea ice implies is tragic - but because the existence of ice at the North Pole is one of the fundamentals of our world and when you start looking behind the melting ice it is clear that we are in deep trouble.

Every now and again it seems like a solution has been found to our energy problems, one that will allow us all to go on consuming (and wasting!) for decades, if not forever. For many years nuclear fusion was billed as the answer. The research began with the hydrogen bomb in the 1950s, but the timeline for rollout to the civil nuclear industry keeps getting pushed out and currently stands at 2040 at the earliest.(1)

In the 1980s Japanese scientists proved that it was theoretically possibly to extract uranium from sea water, which appeared to suggest that a key physical limit to nuclear power – the availability of uranium supplies – was no longer an issue. Unfortunately (or maybe fortunately given all the other problems associated with nuclear power) nobody has actually been able to make usable uranium via this process because of the high level of carbonate in sea water.(2)

In the last few years shale gas has bubbled to the top of the pile and is now being widely touted by the oil and gas industry as: a) a clean, green alternative to coal and oil; b) proof that Peak Oil/Gas is many years off; and c) a cheaper use of government subsidies than support for renewables.(3)(4)

Those are pretty mighty claims, but do they really stack up? And even if they don’t, might there be some pretty unpleasant home truths in the shale gas story?

It’s probably fair to say that most of us remember growing up and that some of our best memories are about the outdoors: playing with friends in the park; going for a walk with the family; climbing a tree or that feeling you get when you’re standing on top of a mountain. Remembering those experiences is not just sentimentalism for a time when we were young or had more freedom to explore. Those experiences and a continued relationship with nature were and are essential for our development and wellbeing.

As David Cameron recently wrote in an essay 'In praise of general well-being’: “Central to our wellbeing is environmental sustainability. I believe very strongly, that clean, green environment is absolutely pivotal to our quality of life. I am in no doubt how important it is that we pass this inheritance on to future generations”.(1)

There is an increasing basis of scientific evidence that shows the value of nature to enhance and improve our levels of wellbeing and happiness. This is not an argument about protecting and preserving the environment, but a framework of evidence which underlines how access to a rich natural environment improves the health and quality of our lives. The implications for policy are that bringing the provision of outdoor space for the enjoyment of everyone, should be at the heart of urban and rural planning, not be set aside in a box labelled "green issues". Bluntly, access to a high quality natural environment needs to be seen as a social and public health issue not an environmental issue.

This will be “the greenest government ever” said David Cameron exactly a year ago. The bar set by the previous Labour government was low. Incredibly, even with the supposedly eco-friendly Liberal Democrats in government, it looks like this coalition will go under that bar.

Environmentalist Jonathan Porritt says of the 77 measures he’s reviewed for Friends of the Earth: “the bad and the positively ugly indisputably outweigh the good.” And adds that: “All in all, [it is] as close to a nightmare as one can imagine.”(1)

The Guardian's environmental commentator George Monbiot argues that, based on the coalition’s Red Tape Challenge, which puts at risk every environmental protection law we have: “The “greenest government ever” presents the greatest ever threat to our environment.”(2)

Sustainable food expert Prof. Tim Lang says: “I am not alone in being extremely frustrated at the coalition dropping the work that began to emerge under the last government. Goodness knows, it took a long time to get going. It was painfully slow but at least it got going. The Cabinet Office’s Food Matters (2008) led to Defra’s Food 2030 (2010) and implementation plans were underway only to be parked as the ‘bonfire of the quangos’ (SDC included) took over.”(3)

It’s almost impossible to find an academic, a commentator or an environmentalist who is positive about the coalition’s environmental record. Which is hardly surprising given what’s happening.

It was quite extraordinary and utterly surreal to hear the Chairman of the Climate Change Committee, Lord Adair Turner, on the radio this morning fantasising about nuclear power being a low cost option.(1)

A 2009 Citigroup report said "We see very little prospect of [civil nuclear] construction costs falling and every likelihood of them rising further" and "three of the risks faced by developers - construction, power price, and operational - are so large and variable that individually they could each bring even the largest utility company to its knees financially."(2)

Earlier this year the European Commissioner for Climate Action, Connie Hedegaard, confirmed that nuclear power was more expensive than offshore wind.(3)

The Fukushima nuclear accident has now been upgraded to level 7 in terms of severity, the same as Chernobyl, and the evacuation zone around the stricken plant has been widened to 40km. Not only is nuclear power not safe (see herehere for Dr Helen Caldicott's response to George Monbiot's hysterical conversion to nuclear power), it’s not green, it’s too expensive, it crowds out renewables investment, it won’t come in time, it can only be an interim solution, it will only provide a tiny fraction of our energy needs, it won’t reduce our carbon emissions significantly, it’s too centralised, the waste can’t be made safe, and the industry has an appalling track record of lies and cover ups.

If the forthcoming review of the UK nuclear industry concludes that new nuclear should go ahead over here because: a) we don’t have, nor are planning to build, any reactors of the same design as Fukushima; or b) we don’t suffer from the sort of seismic activity that Japan does, then that will be a complete whitewash.

There are perfectly good non-nuclear solutions to the climate and energy crises but they all require a lot more intervention than the coalition government seems prepared to contemplate. They are: 1) energy efficiency; 2) renewables; and 3) demand management.

It’s great to see another book out there which looks at the myriad ways that local government can take action on the sustainability agenda. But what’s particularly good about this one - “Sustainability in austerity” by Philip Monaghan – is that it addresses the fundamental question which is on the lips of most in local government: can you spend money on sustainability in a time of draconian public sector budget cuts?

I’m glad to see that Philip’s answer is, like mine, an unambiguous and hearty “yes”. His book is packed with examples from around the world of local government policies that have had an impact on carbon emissions or sustainability more generally, but which have been cost neutral in the short or medium term.

Last week’s Budget was a wasted opportunity from the man who said in 2009, “if I become Chancellor the Treasury will become a green ally not a foe.”(1) Indeed it made it even less likely that the coalition government would be the “greenest government ever” as David Cameron pledged on day two of his administration.(2)

George Osborne’s fancy footwork over petrol prices and oil company taxes did nothing to combat climate change and prepare the UK for peak oil. The so-called “fair fuel stabiliser” is a simply a sop to drivers. When global oil prices are high, as they are now, fuel duty will be lowered, with the loss of revenue compensated for by extra tax on profits for companies producing UK North Sea oil and gas. A UK carbon floor price of £16 per tonne starting in April 2013 was announced. But the carbon price in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme rate is already £17/tonne so the proposed UK floor price is meaningless. The floor price is supposed to rise to £30/tonne in 2020, but it would be far more sensible if it rose steadily year on year. The money earned from the carbon floor price will pay off public debt rather than being invested in renewables infrastructure. Scandalously, if it does ever come in, the existing nuclear power operators would make windfall gains on their supposedly carbon-free electricity. So not a great plan all in all.

The Green Investment Bank will start in 2012, but won’t be able to borrow until 2015 and then only if the public debt has gone down. Until then it’s just a £3bn fund. Nice, but not a Green Investment Bank. At the same time no serious attempt to rein in the conventional banks was announced in the Budget. To put the Green Investment Bank/Fund into perspective, Barclays paid its investment bankers £3.5bn in bonuses for their work in 2010.(3)

The previous government's commitment to zero carbon homes by 2016 is being watered down to a carbon emissions reduction target of 67%. That will make it harder for innovative councils like Milton Keynes who have been seeking planning gain contributions from those developers who fail to hit zero carbon.

The current plan for High Speed Two (HS2), a new railway line from London to the north, is predicated on the idea that it will shift passengers from planes to trains and will therefore produce a reduction in carbon emissions. But it's hard to see how that's likely to happen.

The first thing to say is that, operationally, high speed rail can never be low energy, but it can be low carbon if the electricity used to run it comes from renewable sources. However, based on the government's current plans, renewables are highly unlikely to supply the majority of the UK's power by the time the first part of the line is open in 2025. In other words, whatever else happens in terms of passengers switching from planes to trains, HS2 will be relatively high carbon and very high energy for decades to come.

Nuclear has always been an expensive white elephant. UK taxpayers currently subsidise nuclear directly to the tune of more than £1bn per year. But the indirect subsidies such as decommissioning and insurance are far greater.

The cost of decommissioning old nuclear in the UK is now estimated to be at least £73bn. Surely therefore that anyone wishing to provide new nuclear should have to put that sort of sum into an up-front clean-up fund? But of course they won't. They can't possibly afford to.

If there's a nuclear accident in the UK, then who will pay? An insurance company? Not a hope. Existing UK reactors are insured to the tune of £140m each, which the government is talking about increasing to £1.2bn, but that’s still nothing like enough to cover a serious accident like Fukushima or Three Mile Island or Chernobyl.

Nuclear power is uninsurable. It's too risky and the potential payouts are too big. The government, meaning the UK taxpayer, will have to pay as we did to bail out the banks. The free market will never bear the true costs of nuclear.

A report published by the US Union of Concerned Scientists last month said nuclear power had never operated in the United States without public subsidies. The existence of an Office of Nuclear Development at the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) makes a mockery of Chris Huhne’s claim that no public money will be spent on new nuclear.

At last there’s been some movement on the UK Sustainability Communities Act. This innovative law was designed to help local people to protect or create truly localised and sustainable communities by unblocking obstacles at central government level . It establishes the right for local people and councils to submit proposals for government action. Government is then required not just to consult, but to try to reach agreement on the implementation of those proposals.

When the campaign to introduce the Act began there was strong opposition from the government. A group called Local Works began organising constituency public meetings with local MPs in support of the Act. Local Works National Coordinator, Steve Shaw, takes up the story: “Turnouts averaged between 150 and 200 people, with some meetings attracting 500. MPs were astonished and murmurs rippled through Parliament. When the Act became law in 2007, it did so with full support from all the political parties in Parliament. This was a great success and a victory for grass-roots citizen action.”

Last week we visited a Victorian property in Hornsey, North London, which had been refurbished to reduce its energy and carbon use by 80%. The house is owned by Metropolitan Housing Association and was retrofitted by Anne Thorne Architects. Three thoughts occurred to us based on what we saw:

1) Time to address the tension between sustainability and conservation

We need some form of national intervention to move the bar towards what we might call “heritage-friendly sustainability”. Planning departments all over the country are refusing to allow the sort of external, rear wall insulation that we saw at the Hornsey house and much credit is due to Haringey Council for allowing this one. External insulation is easier and cheaper to install, and is more effective in terms of preventing heat loss or rainwater penetration. There needs to be some national guidance that moves us forward on these issues.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Cancun was how little was expected to come out of it. The bar for success was low and the outcome barely achieved the little that was hoped for. Friends of the Earth called it: “a weak and ineffective agreement but at least a small and fragile lifeline for continued negotiations.” In short it revived faith in the UN process – just about.

But there was no agreement on legally binding cuts to keep global warming to under 2°C. The voluntary cuts on the table amount to playing Russian roulette with the planet’s climate.

There’s to be a Global Climate Fund to provide developing countries with money to tackle climate change, but the pledges of finance are a long way from what's needed. It also feels like madness that the World Bank, one of the largest lenders for fossil fuel projects in the world, should have been given a role as trustee of the Fund. That’s a bit like giving your grandmother to the wolf!

The Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, Chris Huhne, has described the Passivhaus comfort and energy efficiency standard as “a watershed moment in our relationship with the built environment” and said he “would like to see every new home in the UK reach the standard.” Mr Huhne was speaking at the first ever UK conference devoted entirely to discussion about the Passivhaus standard, which which was held at Islington Town Hall on Monday 11th October.

"It would be an enormous relief if the recent attacks on the science of global warming actually indicated that we do not face an unimaginable calamity requiring large-scale, preventive measures to protect human civilization as we know it.

"Of course, we would still need to deal with the national security risks of our growing dependence on a global oil market dominated by dwindling reserves in the most unstable region of the world, and the economic risks of sending hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas in return for that oil. And we would still trail China in the race to develop smart grids, fast trains, solar power, wind, geothermal and other renewable sources of energy — the most important sources of new jobs in the 21st century.

This list of UK climate scientists backing the underlying science of manmade climate change is impressive. And this piece by Dr Vicky Pope at the Met Office which was published in The Times is worth reading:

"For Britain’s climate science community, the past few months have come as a profound shock. First we had the so-called “climategate” scandal, where e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia (UEA) showed apparent attempts to thwart Freedom of Information requests.

"More recently we have had a series of reports suggesting that “key” sections of assessments of climate change science by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were in error.

The Liberal Democrat shadow Climate Change and Energy Secretary, Simon Hughes MP, this week vowed to become the first politician to live in a Passivhaus home so energy efficient it wouldn’t need central heating. Mr Hughes, who was speaking before a packed audience of planners, building control officers and architects at the inaugural Camden and Islington Passivhaus conference*, called on councils to introduce the Passivhaus standard into their planning rules.

download the conference presentations here

This story is really quite worrying. According to Professor Igor Semiletov, who leads the International Siberian Shelf Study (ISSS) at the University of Alaska, methane leakage from the Arctic seabed appears to have dramatically increased.

Semiletov's team told the BBC they had recorded methane levels in the atmosphere around the region 100 times higher than normal background levels, and in some cases 1,000 times higher. Methane is 23 times more potent than CO2 as a greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, but 33 times if you include its indirect effect on tropospheric ozone and stratospheric water vapour. The Arctic methane was formerly trapped in water ice (methane hydrates), but global warming, which is far stronger at the poles than elsewhere, is causing it to melt.

A number of people have tried to suggest that this week's snowy weather is proof that global warming is a myth. The Conservative MP Ann Winterton was rightly jeered when she said this in the House of Commons. She's quite wrong, as are those at the other end of the belief spectrum who claim the cold snap is evidence that the Gulf Stream has suddenly stopped.

It's not a literary masterpiece nor is it easy to read, but might it be the most important book ever written? Dr James Hansen, the NASA scientist who has done so much over the last 30 years to try to warn a sceptical United States about global warming, attempts to explain why most climate predictions are understatements.

Here are four key thoughts from "Storms of my grandchildren"...

The Copenhagen Diagnosis is a report which was published to coincide with the UN Climate Change Conference in December 2009. It is aimed at providing policymakers with a synthesis of the latest climate science published since the last report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The report serves as an interim evaluation of the evolving science midway through an IPCC cycle. The last IPCC report was published in 2007 and the next one is due in 2013. The Copenhagen Diagnosis was written by 26 authors, many of whom were lead authors of chapters in the 2007 IPCC report.

See here for the most significant recent findings:

Copenhagen was a catastrophic fiasco. Here’s why:

• The US refused to accept responsibility for its historic emissions which amount to more than 25% of all the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere
• The host nation Denmark tried to bounce developing nations into dropping the Kyoto Protocol, under which the developed countries still have emissions reductions commitments
• Denmark was also caught trying to pull together a secret deal struck with only a few rich countries
• The EU failed to lead from the front by offering to increase its emissions reduction target (from 20% to 30%) and is still only offering about half of what scientists say we need by 2020 (a 40% reduction on pre-industrial levels)
• A leaked UN analysis showed that developing countries were offering higher emissions cuts than developed countries
• The money offered to developing countries was woefully inadequate and turned out to be mostly already promised funds or loans
• The rich countries were quick to blame China for the impasse but unwilling to take adequate responsibility for the mess that they have caused
• Barack Obama flew in to universal acclaim but offered nothing new to break the logjam and flew out before the end saying a successful deal had been reached when it hadn’t and still hasn’t

One of the most important climate change campaigners in the US, Dr James Hansen of NASA, was in London this week for an Environment Agency conference. It was a privilege to hear him speak because he's been the only significant voice in a public position in the US speaking out about climate change over the last eight years. The Bush Administration and NASA both tried to shut him up, but he refused to stay silent.

Two years ago Dr Hansen said: "We have at most 10 years - not 10 years to decide upon action, but 10 years to alter fundamentally the trajectory of global greenhouse emissions." He now believes we have to have to reduce the level of CO2 in the atmosphere to under 350 parts per million. The problem is we’re at 385ppm at the moment and rising by 2ppm a year.

Most people now realise that the challenge in terms of housing stock and carbon emissions is not the new buildings but the old ones. 80-90% of our homes will still be standing in 2050. We therefore have to retro-fit them with energy efficiency and energy generation measures if we are to have any chance of hitting the government's new national 80% emissions reduction target. Local authorities have the ability to provide a solution so long as they concentrate not on eco bling like solar panels but on the boring stuff like insulation and double glazing.

At last there is a real debate in high places about how we need to eat less meat to reduce carbon emissions. The highly respected Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has now pitched in saying: “meat production accounts for about 18% of the world’ s total greenhouse emissions so among options for mitigating climate change changing diets is something one should consider.”

It's good to see that Gordon Brown has apparently ruled out direct cash help for fuel bills and will instead concentrate on energy efficiency measures for homes which is by far the more sustainable solution. But there is another answer - tax energy profligacy not profits.