Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Giant offshore wind turbines invade UK beaches! Will local residents resist?
By Kwok W. Wan
This time, it was a total surprise. In a taxi on the road towards the beach, Gunfleet Sands appeared out of no-where and without warning. Huge offshore wind turbines lined the English horizon.
My last encounter had been a far more distant affair, requiring a helicopter to see Robin Rigg in Cumbria, but Dong’s offshore wind farm was visible on the shore, visible from a car inland actually, and the giant machines pop up and startle you.
As we drove over the Frinton-on-Sea rail track earlier, the taxi driver pointed to the automatic electric barriers and said they replaced the hand-operated gates only last year, after the rail company overcame a three-year battle by residents who resisted the change.
Due to the conservative nature of the town, the driver said there was a myth that the town didn’t have a pub or fish and chip shop. But it wasn’t true. It got its first pub and fish and chip shop about ten years ago, he said.
“This town’s full of myths, but most of them aren’t true,” he said. Pause. “Yeah, so they’re myths,” he added, helpfully.
Cap and trade not the solution, climate scientist says
Fighting climate change is a huge investment opportunity but not through emissions trading and investors should instead put their money into renewables which will power the economy in the future, says a leading environmental scientist and cap and trade expert.
As yesterday’s walkout by African nations showed, getting anyone to agree on anything at the U.N. Climate Conference is easier said than done. The use of markets to address pollution is no different. Supporters of cap and trade — the system which allows companies or groups who meet their emissions targets to sell their remaining carbon credits — are out in force, but so are the groups who say the scheme prevents less responsible companies from breaking their bad habits.
Scientist Payal Parekh, from International Rivers, has come to Copenhagen to lobby on the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to highlight the failures of the cap and trade system. She said: “We are working here to ensure that we get ambitious reductions in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases so that we can make a smooth and efficient transition to a clean and green economy. This means that we really need to set up a system that rewards innovators as opposed to allowing dirty industries to continue polluting.
“Cap and trade favours dirty industries as opposed to innovators. The reasons for this are that in cap and trade systems that are up and running, most notably in the European Union, polluters are given rights to continue their dirty habits and there are also loopholes such as offsets which allow them to not have to make their emissions reductions at home but instead push them off on to developing countries.”
Proponents of the buying and selling of carbon credits believe that it is vital world leaders reach a deal on emissions targets by the end of the Copenhagen Conference. The head of the Asian Development Bank, Haruhiko Kuroda, recently told Reuters that failure to reach a deal could cause the collapse of the carbon market.
“Cap and trade is vitally important because without a price on carbon there isn’t a clear signal to the market place as to what it is the market should be recognizing as real value going forward. It is possible to put a price on things without a cap and trade scheme … but it will be immeasurably more difficult,” said Fiona Wain, chief executive officer of Environment Business Australia.
The light bulb was invented fairly recently and most power plants are also fairly new. New dirty power plants are being make even today simply because its cheaper and easier to crate dirty power plants than to create green power plants. Another problem is the “NIMBY’s” (not in my back yard) These people do not want wind turbines in their town because they are ugly.
We do need laws that put a price premium on dirty power plants so that the scale can be tipped in favor of green energy. We also need some anti NIMBY laws because we can’t roll out millions of wind turbine towers if people can say they don’t like the way it looks or whatever their complains are.
You don’t like that wind turbine? Well I don’t like smog, acid raid, pollution and I really don’t trust big business to ever do the right thing, unless they have to.
Green Portfolio: Pacific Ethanol plummets
Shares in Pacific Ethanol lost almost half their value in morning trading after the biggest West Coast-based producer and marketer of ethanol announced that it had put its production facilities in California, Oregon and Idaho into Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The company said on May 12 that it would likely need to file for bankruptcy if it was not able to restructure its debt.
A string of energy firms have filed for Chapter 11 recently, suffering from weak U.S. demand that has depressed prices and margins. VeraSun Energy, once the largest publicly listed U.S. ethanol maker, filed for bankruptcy last year.
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in the u.s. good luck. a wind farm off the coast?…there is/would be nothing but objections by most of the populous,even if it/is beyond sight . how will the town feel when the bill isn’t lowered?…..maybe by then they will have grown accustomed to the wind farm, realizing using this technology may well be a entry-point solution. we definitely need to get a handle on our emissions. here in the u.s. there is still an argument if it is actually occurring/and if it is, are humans the cause. ugh