Environment Forum

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.

Biofuel industry in crisis as profits, reputation hit

At a time of record $88 oil prices you’d imagine that a business sector founded on supplying an alternative to diesel and gasoline is well-placed. Not so. The criticism has been building for some time, but I think it’s safe to say the global biofuel industry is now in deep trouble.

The problem for the industry is that bad press and poor performance are now such that the government support it depends on is starting to look precarious. Pull out the credits, grants, tariffs and soft loans and the whole sector would come tumbling down — at least in the United States and Europe.

Just look at the damage the introduction of biofuel taxes has done to the German industry this year. It’s crippled, running at less than half-capacity.

Biofuels are derived from plants, especially food crops like rapeseed, palm oil, sugar cane, corn (maize) and wheat. As a result, they can be sourced locally, cutting dependence on foreign oil imports. They are also meant to help fight climate change. Burning biofuels only releases the heat-trapping carbon dioxide that the plants they’re derived from took from the atmosphere in the first place when they were growing.

So far, so good, right? That’s just the problem. Biofuels problems stem directly from why they are so attractive, those convenient motives that have prompted aggressive U.S. and European subsidies to support them. Now they’ve become a victim of their own success: a boom in U.S./EU production has hoovered up crop supplies and created a glut on the market, squeezing profits between higher prices for corn, wheat and so on, and lower prices for the end product.

The result? Take a look at the share price of almost any European or U.S. biofuels company — many are at or near 52-week lows.

Wise investors saw that coming and have been pulling out of the sector for the past 12 months. But now other issues are hitting, too. Green groups have long blamed biofuel production in Indonesia for rainforest slash and burn, which threatens the orangutan, while human rights groups have said the biofuel boom is also responsible for raising food prices, threatening the poor.

Carbon trader windfall profits

The carbon market has been attracting headlines recently on Reuters for the massive profits some speculators and polluters are making from these emerging schemes.

These markets are meant to help fight climate change by putting a price on greenhouse gas emissions. But are these profits helping drive cuts in those gases? I would argue that often the answer is “no”.

They can even make the problem worse. Take for example carbon trading under the Kyoto Protocol. A U.N. report this month says that under this scheme factories in China, India, South Korea, Mexico and Argentina are getting up to ten times more money than they actually need to eliminate emissions of very powerful greenhouse gases called HFCs.

These carbon offset incentives mean factories will now actually lose money if they invest in widely available technologies to cut these emissions. Not exactly the outcome you’d want from an environmental policy. In addition, speculators who put these Kyoto deals together earn an additional mark-up, potentially worth billions of dollars by 2013. Won’t much of these profits go to the speculators and their investors, not to developing countries, or to help the planet?

Windfall profits are also being earned under a separate scheme, the European Union’s carbon market. Power companies, Europe’s biggest polluters, will earn profits of nearly $30 billion a year directly as a result of the scheme, a Reuters report showed on Friday.

The flaw won’t be corrected until 2013 at the earliest — nine years into the scheme. Utilities are earning these profits by perfectly legally passing on to electricity consumers the price of emissions permits which they get for free. They are treating those permits as an asset, and costing them like that when they redeem them for producing emissions.

The reputation of voluntary carbon offsetting – who cares?

Who wants to offset their flight? Or, for that matter, say they plan to go carbon neutral, joining the likes of Costa Rica, Norway, Google and Yahoo?

Voluntary carbon offsetting involves paying someone to cut their emissions of greenhouse gases, so that you can go ahead and take that flight, car journey or whatever, but not add to mankinds contribution to global warming. Going carbon neutral involves offsetting all your emissions.

Offsetting is a small but growing slice of the global carbon market. Carbon trading is viewed by the European Union and United Nations as a key policy plank in the worlds fight against climate change.

Voluntary offsetting is becoming big news. British media have this month continued their blitz of critical coverage, exposing dodgy practices, and especially examples of project developers earning carbon credits for emissions cuts that were planned anyway.

A group of British parliamentarians weighed into the debate on Monday, relaying some uncomfortable facts. They said that HSBCs emissions rose the year it said it went carbon neutral suggesting that offsetting may not change behaviour. Illustrating the need for standards, it said mangos planted to offset Coldplay rock concerts died from lack of water. And it poured scorn on British Airways service to help customers offset their flights, saying the profile of the service had been non existent and achievements risible. The implication was that BA had no desire to flag up the problem of climate change to its customers.

Does any of this matter?

Yes, according to some of the worlds biggest banks, who are investing billions of dollars in the much bigger, regulated carbon market under the Kyoto Protocol. Banks are buying carbon credits from developing countries to sell to rich countries struggling to meet their Kyoto targets. This is a kind of posh offsetting very transparent, highly regulated and based on mandatory emissions limits.