Environment Forum

from Mario Di Simine:

Fossil of the Day Award: And the winner is…

The UN Conference on Climate Change is a weighty gathering of serious folks looking for a way to cut carbon emissions. It's also a great place to bring some much-needed humor and along the way hammer a few perceived laggers in the fight against global warming.

Enter the Fossil of the Day Awards, a tongue-in-cheek dishonor first presented in 1999 and given to the countries with the worst performances at the previous day's talks during UN climate conferences.

Three awards, compiled by CAN (Climate Action Network), a coalition of more than 450 NGOs, are presented each day with the country scoring the most points over the course of the conference winning the grand prize.

While the day's winner seemed a bit anti-climactic -- most of the gathered horde were expecting Saudi Arabia to come out in front -- there were surprises for second and third.

Canada -- nice, quiet, never-a-bad-thing-to-say-about-anyone Canada -- found itself in the spotlight. The nation, whose stance on emissions targets has already irked environmentalists, came third. In a statement the organizers said Canada won after the country's environment minister, Jim Prentice, said it "'won't be swayed' by Copenhagen 'hype'."

Well, maybe it wasn't that big a surprise.

Sweden, Finland and Austria captured second place "for backing a devious EU proposal to cook the books by not fully accounting for emissions from forest management."

from Summit Notebook:

Exclusive look inside Sweden’s greenest paper mill

For most of us, printing e-mails or making copies is just part of the daily routine in the office. But, the paper we use does come from somewhere. Last week, we had the opportunity to visit Stora Enso's Nymolla Mill in southern Sweden to get an exclusive look at how MultiCopy paper is made. Nymolla is an integrated mill (it produces pulp and paper on the same site) and most of the wood used is sourced locally. Also interesting, the mill is the only one I could find in the world that emits zero carbon dioxide from fossil fuels during the paper making process. Check out my look inside the Nymolla Mill.

Inside Sweden's greenest paper mill from Reuters TV on Vimeo.

A Silver Bullet or just ‘Greenwash’?

Can carbon capture and storage (CCS) save the world?

Is this the silver bullet everyone’s been waiting for? Or just pie in the sky? Is capturing and storing carbon dioxide the technology breakthrough to cut greenhouse gas emissions without getting in the way of economic growth and industry’s “addiction” to fossil fuels? Or is it just a “greenwash” — a token gesture by some of the utilities responsible for so much of the world’s CO2 to try to persuade an increasingly green public that the great emitters are doing something to fight climate change?

Those are the questions that were hurled at Vattenfall executives on Tuesday when the Swedish-based utility opened the world’s first CCS plant in a small town south of Berlin called Schwarze Pumpe. The company believes it will be economically feasible before long to capture carbon, liquify it, and store it permanently on a large scale underground. This is only a small pilot plant producing enough power for a town of 20,000. But if it works, Vattenfall plans to build two conventional power plants 10 times larger in Germany and Denmark by 2015 and from 2020 they hope CCS will be a viable option for large-scale industrial use.

Proud as Vattenfall CEO Lars Josefsson and other executives from one of Europe’s largest utilities were at the inauguration of the 30-megawatt lignite-burning plant on Tuesday that cost 70 million euros and removes 95 percent of the CO2 emissions, they were nevertheless pummeled by journalists from across Europe wanting to know about the economics of it (and were told they’re not bad but could be better), whether they have the permits to store the CO2 underground (not yet but expected soon) and whether it was just more “greenwash” (a definite no).

“We take our responsibility seriously,” Josefsson said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with ‘greenwashing’.”

Economists like Nicholas Stern have placed a lot of hope in carbon capture. He told a group of journalists in Berlin last year that with coal so abundant and cheap around the world, it is hard to imagine any solution to climate change without CCS.

But what do the economics of CCS look like? Vattenfall said that CCS will at first cut the efficiency rate from 46 and 43 percent (for hard coal and lignite) by about 10 percentage points — making it roughly 25 percent more expensive to produce the same amount of energy. But they are confident that those efficiency levels would soon be back to their original level before long.