Gerard Wynn

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.

The wider context does seem relevant if we're not to pat ourselves on the back as catastrophic climate effects creep up. And it may be especially relevant this year, as climate talks and rhetoric ratchet up ahead of a meeting in December in Copenhagen, meant to seal agreement on a new climate pact to replace the Kyoto Protocol.

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."

For me this has highlighted growing suspicion of private sector solutions to fighting climate change. The argument runs that industry created the problem of climate change, aided by consumer demand, through large scale combustion of fossil fuels, so don't trust the private sector to solve the problem with market solutions like carbon trading or green certificates or other subsidies. Instead, carbon should be regulated through tough emissions caps, for example. The case of carbon markets has borne suspicion out to some extent.

For example steel lobbies and power companies have earned multi-billion dollar windfalls under the European Union's emissions trading scheme, a scheme meant to curb emissions from those two high-carbon sectors especially, Reuters analysis has showed.

Ambitious estimates by the International Biochar Initiative of the merits of the technology may have helped sow the seeds of the backlash. The IBI says biochar could remove 1 billion tonnes of carbon annually by mid-century. That's more than one tenth of annual carbon emissions now. The trouble is uncertainty in how those numbers are calculated. Certainly, the IBI acknowledges its figures depend on a few "optimistic plus" assumptions.

The IBI says its estimates require charring of no more than 3.2% of the planet's entire net production of energy from plants and trees, on farms or in the wild. That still sounds like quite a lot to me...

The problem of using plants to fight climate change was well debated two years ago in the case of biofuels, a new car fuel now blamed for hiking food prices by competing with crop production. The trouble is you can't tackle a problem as big as climate without making mistakes and losing a few dollars.

Big claims for solutions may best be avoided for now.

(Pictures: top left - Brazilian farm workers burn off felled trees and brush in the typical slash-and-burn method of converting jungle into farm land, near the northern town of Acailandia in the Amazon Basin, some 1,600 kilometers north of Brasilia, September 22, 2003. By Rickey Rogers

Right - The sun sets over the Amazon port of Abaetetuba, near the river's mouth, September 26, 2008. Picture taken September 26. By Paulo Santos)

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.

But where does that leave Kyoto – a multilateral process which requires unanimity for every decision?

Oxford University’s energy expert Dieter Helm last week compared the entire emissions-cutting effort of Kyoto from its base year 1990 to 2012 to the increase in emissions from aviation alone over the same period.

At the moment Kyoto excludes the United States, which didn’t ratify the pact, and all developing countries, including China and India. And it gave too much emissions headroom in its target for Russia.

So the pact has had no binding effect on four of the world’s top five emitters.
Now 190 countries are meeting in Poznan, Poland, to try and lay the foundations of a new agreement next year on a sharper treaty. What chance have they got?

While Barack Obama could follow Europe with cuts in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions, the problem is more about changing energy use in developing countries, which they’re worried will curb their economic growth, too.

If you believe U.N. climate scientists, global greenhouse gas emissions must peak by 2015 to avoid dangerous global warming.

There’s no chance of that on current trends, most scientists and economists say, given that emissions from top carbon bad boy China are rising by about 10 percent a year.
Is it time to shelve the Kyoto process and hand over to a centralised agency, to dish out tough climate medicine?

Or is the climate problem over-blown? Perhaps the world should wait for a new energy breakthrough, like nuclear fusion…

    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.

    All right, on the two-week agenda there's also a lot of side events, lobby group huddles and so on, while delegates wake up very early to attend busy, ad hoc sessions, one told me.

    But from the outside at least there's no sense of rush - the plenary sessions are often dry presentations from government bureaucrats, re-hashing well known positions with erudite allusions to climate convention text written 16 years ago.

    UN chairmen tried on Friday to steer talks towards "concrete proposals" for a new pact, to discuss in more meetings.

    Some NGOs said ideas were emerging to fund efforts to prepare for global warming and cut greenhouse gas emissions which are rising several percent annually. Scientists want emissions to peak within 10 years to avoid dangerous warming.

    Those ideas included a Swiss-proposed carbon tax, the UN's shipping organisation's suggestion for a carbon auction and Norway's proposal to sell emissions rights to rich countries.

    Nevertheless talks are slow. Last December was a more dramatic meeting -- ministers struggled in Bali, Indonesia, but finally succeeded to agree to launch these post-Kyoto talks.

    Why isn't there more urgency here in Bonn, I asked a UN official. 1.) it's not our fault, the United Nations is a facilitator, he said, 2.) some meetings are more technical than others, and 3.) you need leadership, and one country can provide that.

    That was a swipe at the United States, the only industrialised country not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, and the world's top or second biggest emitter of the planet-warming gas
carbon dioxide (after China). The United States hugely lags many countries' ambition, for example President George W. Bush plans to halt emissions growth by 2025, while the EU says it will cut its greenhouse gases by 20 percent by 2020.

    But I still have sympathy with the U.S. delegation.

    Some ideas may be naive, like one from a major developing country that we compel Western entrepreneurs to sell their intellectual property rights, to speed up emissions cuts.

    "The private sector is private property. I think this process could use some common sense and honesty because it's still out of touch with the world as it is," the U.S. delegate
told me. I could agree.

    But where does that leave urgency?

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.

Many scientists flatly rejected the idea, saying Keenlyside had over-estimated the effect. But some pointed out that a recent switch in a weather pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation could indeed cool temperatures globally.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said last year recent warming was
"unequivocal" and most of it "very likely" manmade. And almost all scientists in the latest debate, including Keenlyside, agree that any temporary cooling doesn't alter that - blips due to natural effects are to be expected.

But how long is a blip? No-one knows.

It could be many years before there's an El Nino as bad as 1998, scientists say. And in the meantime the doubts will grow, just as policymakers try to negotiate one of the most complex global treaties ever. A new Kyoto Protocol will affect issues of equity and poverty: in the case of poor countries the right to grow, for island states perhaps the right to exist, and for rich countries the right to compete on a level economic playing field.

Meanwhile one or two doubters are already saying the present lull in warming
casts doubt on just how far manmade greenhouse gases are influencing the climate. MIT's Richard Lindzen reckoned that if it was as bad as all that temperatures would be rising faster.

What do you think?

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.

Oxley isn't convinced that global greenhouse gas emissions need to peak in the next few years, one scenario proposed by a U.N. panel of scientists. Twenty to 30 years is fine, he says. He isn't too worried, either, about a 2 degrees centigrade hotter world. "We need a very long-term perspective, so what's the rush?"

Oxley is in Bali to try and calm everyone down and promote his publication -- on the threat emissions cuts pose to the world's poor. But his main agenda appears to be to argue for free trade.

He's worried that climate change policies such as Europe's emissions trading scheme could unleash a new wave of protectionism, whereby countries slap tariffs on imports of goods like steel and cement, to try and compensate for carbon taxes on their industry at home.

And he's opposed to any position that smacks of unfairness -- including paying developing countries like China to cut their greenhouse gas emissions, a key issue at the Bali talks.

"Over time, as prosperity rises, they'll take more action."

What about a global carbon market, to help cut the costs of fighting change?

"It would be easier to negotiate a global currency. It's beyond the technical capacity of governments to negotiate."

By the way, I'm updating this blog after Alan Oxley objected to the implication, in the original, that he was sceptical about whether climate change was happening. He called me to say that World Growth accepts that human activity is a cause of global warming but is sceptical about the Kyoto Protocol. 

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)

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.

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.