“taking cars off the road”, or climate tokenism?

There’s no shortage of references these days in corporate and government reports to earnest, new steps to fight climate change. Often they promise to make carbon emissions cuts equivalent to taking millions of cars off the road…

For example, take Europe’s fourth biggest single source of carbon emissions, Britain’s Drax coal plant. It said in March that as a result of efficiency improvements it had cut carbon emissions equivalent to taking 195,000 cars off the road.  But of course that was a cut against a theoretical projection of rising emissions — not an absolute cut.

Take a similar announcement from Canada this week. The oil industry in Alberta is busy trying to extract oil from tar sands. That is a far more polluting, energy-intensive way than just sucking the stuff out of oil wells, because steam must first be injected into the sand to make the oil flow. Now Alberta is experimenting with a technology, called carbon capture and storage, with three test projects which by 2015 would “achieve annual carbon dioxide reductions equivalent to taking about a million vehicles off the road”, the province says.

Funnily enough, 2015 is also the year when a U.N. panel of climate scientists says global greenhouse gas emissions worldwide must stop rising to limit global warming to 2-2.4 degrees celsius, a widely perceived threshold for dangerous effects (page 20 here). It seems a little disingenuous — in that wider context — for  Alberta to talk of taking cars off the road from test projects to trim carbon emissions under a wider programme to expand one of the most polluting forms of oil drilling known to man.

Biochar backlash tries to bury carbon plan

Last year scientists at Cornell and elsewhere announced that they may have found a new weapon against climate change — in the soils of the Amazon Basin.

Amazon peoples thousands of years ago ploughed charred plants into the ground, perhaps to improve soil fertility or just as an ancient means of waste disposal. 

Plants suck carbon out of the air as they grow and charring them keeps most of that stored carbon in a solid form which can be buried. What scientists found interesting was that the ancient Amazon ”biochar” soils still contained up to 70 times more carbon than the surrounding ground. And so the idea was born of how to trap carbon dioxide and stop it from reaching the atmosphere and cooking the planet. The notion of ploughing into the soil charred organic waste including food, woodchips, straw etc drew favourable reviews in the media .

Perhaps predictably, the biochar backlash swiftly followed. The anti-lobby feared that the private sector would bend biochar support to char whole forests, all in the name of stopping global warming, but really just to cash in on carbon credits or whatever other payments emerged. Among critics, British environmentalist George Montbiot wrote that “the last mass fuel cure, biochar, does not stand up.”

Climate a new threat for Poland’s wolves-expert

By Piotr Pilat

Climate change worries Professor Andrzej Bereszynski of the Poznan Agriculture Academy, who runs a 30-year-old wolf sanctuary.

What hope for U.N. climate talks in Poland?

This week the U.N. leads a new round of global climate talks, in its 14th meeting since the world signed up to the convention on climate change in 1992.

It’s all about replacing the Kyoto Protocol with a more ambitious climate deal from 2013. Kyoto is widely regarded as toothless, but so could be its successor. (For a story, click here)

After all, fighting climate change isn’t easy – it involves limiting emissions of greenhouse gases which are a by-product of everyday essentials from energy to food, from burning fossil fuels and making fertiliser, for example.

Planet sick; do the doctors care?

    The UN’s climate surgery opening hours this week in Bonn, Germany, are 10am-1pm and 3pm-6pm.

    Several times they’ve finished early — lack of demand?

    “That’s good. Often they just go on and on. Next week it may be a bit later,” a UN spokesperson told me.

    Welcome to a new round of talks to find a successor to the UN-administered Kyoto Protocol on global warming. Bonn is the second of eight meetings of 190 countries and 2,000 people or so to agree a new climate pact by December 2009.

So what happened to global warming?

So what happened to global warming?

It’s not just that it’s disappeared from media headlines this year – shoved off by the credit crunch and natural disasters, for example. It can’t be ignored that 2007 came and went as another very warm year – the 7th hottest on record since 1850 according to the World Meteorological Organization.

But it wasn’t a record. In fact that was 1998, a full 10 years ago — the year of an exceptional El Nino, a Pacific weather pattern which heats the whole globe. So is global warming not living up to the hype?

Two weeks ago Leibniz Institute’s Noel Keenlyside stirred an academic hornet’s nest by saying that we may have to wait longer – a decade or more – for another peak year, because a natural weakening in ocean currents may be cooling sea temperatures.

What’s a Kyoto sceptic doing at the Bali talks?

His work at the Bali climate change conference isn’t sponsored by world oil giant Exxon Mobil, although he has held past conferences which were, says Alan Oxley.

Oxley, former Australian ambassador at world trade talks and now chairman of his NGO World Growth,  believes the sense of urgency that pervades the Bali talks – meant to launch negotiations to agree a successor to the Kyoto Protocol — is misplaced.

“There’s a surfeit of enthusiasm,” he says.

“I think there’s been a bit of a campaign to engender this sense of urgency,” he says, pointing to Britain and Germany as chief culprits.

Should 10,000 people fly to Bali to fight climate change?

Take more responsibility for your personal carbon footprint. Fly less. Use video link-ups, instead of flying to conferences in exotic places. Sound familiar? All advice you can expect from many governments on how we should all roll up our sleeves in the fight against climate change. But over the next two weeks some 10,000 delegates including representatives from 186 governments, up to 2,000 journalists (including me) and members of 130 non-governmental organisations descend on Bali, Indonesia. They’re attending a two-week conference to kick-start two years of talks to agree a new, tougher, sharper climate change regime to replace the Kyoto Protocol. But why Bali? Indonesia’s environment ministry estimates that the event will produce 47,000 tonnes of the main greenhouse gas blamed for global warming, carbon dioxide. If it had to be Indonesia, why not Jakarta, instead of forcing 10,000 people to take connecting flights? Have the sponsor, the United Nations, made a PR gaffe by hosting a climate change event on a beautiful tropical paradise island at the Westin Resort, pictured above and below, which also happens to be miles from anywhere? Tell us what you think. (BTW these are my photos, taken today)

A quibble with the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has just presented its summary report on how bad climate change is. There’s one inconsistency in there which doesn’t undermine for me the key IPCC message — that climate change is a serious threat towards which mankind is hurtling. But it has left me with a feeling that in one case at least figures have been selected to stress the threat. The IPCC published on Saturday its handbook version of thousands of pages of climate change research.

On page 4 of this 23-page pocket guide it says that manmade greenhouse gas emissions rose 70% from 1970 to 2004. But earlier this year, after an enquiry to the IPCC’s lead authors, I found that emissions of all greenhouse gases actually rose 49%. It’s a still a big increase, but not as big. In its report published on Saturday the IPCC did mention in a footnote that the 70% figure only included greenhouse gases regulated by the Kyoto Protocol. What it didn’t mention anywhere was that there’s a whole bunch of other greenhouse gases not included in the number, and whose emissions are rapidly falling. These ozone-depleting gases (ODP gases) are very strong planet-warming gases, as measured in tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e).

Mankind emitted some 5.9 billion tonnes CO2e of such ODP gases into the atmosphere in 1970, but that fell to just 1.5 bln tonnes in 2004, after global efforts to stop a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer from getting any bigger. So — total global greenhouse gas emissions including ODPs were 51.3 bln tonnes in 2004, up 48.6% on 1970 levels. But excluding ODPs greenhouse gases increased by 74.0% to 49.8 bln tonnes — the IPCC’s headline number. The IPCC summary is based on a more detailed report published earlier this year, which mentions that ODP gases have “declined significantly”, but only in passing. A 70% increase is the headline figure there, too. Like I say, to me this doesn’t colour the IPCC message, but it does comes across as message management.

how to live off-grid

Ever fancied escaping the rat-race, and waking up instead to the sound of bird song over a steaming mug of home-made coffee? According to author Nick Rosen, that’s now becoming possible. It’s down to a combination of weakening restrictions on house-building and the falling cost of installing off-grid electricity like wind and solar power, says Rosen, author of “How to live off-grid”. In addition, flexi-working is now possible even without a phoneline, using wireless 3G technology. Is it really that easy to sell up and build on a plot out West? Britain has tight rules on building new homes — which help account for Britian’s high house prices and pretty patchworks of green fields on the outskirts of big British cities. But the UK’s population is swelling, putting pressure on housing space. Prime Minister Gordon Brown says he wants 3 million more homes by 2020, and all new build to be zero carbon from 2016 on. Surely that plays into the hands of off-gridders seeking a life closer to Nature, where lunchbreaks entail a stroll in the woods rather than a frantic dash for an over-priced sandwich. Britain claims it won’t bend the rules and make it easier to build houses on green fields or in woodlands. But that may not square with its planned, massive house-building programme. Meanwhile, the price of wind and solar power is dropping, although it still involves an outlay of tens of thousands of pounds. What may clinch an off-grid life is getting lucky, then. If you can buy a cheap piece of farmland and then get permission to build a house on it, you may save enough money from selling a house in the city to pay for all the green electricity you want. For that, you only have to hurdle Britain’s convoluted planning system.