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Category: Articles

  • Revealed: the electric BMW

     

    BMW says the lithium-ion battery packs – one is positioned under the bonnet, the other under the car – don’t restrict the coupe’s four-seat interior room, though the electric motor almost halves boot space, to 200 litres.

    The ActiveE also weighs about 400kg more than a regular 1-Series Coupe, though BMW claims the car can accelerate from 0-100km/h in less than nine seconds and reach an electronically governed top speed of 145km/h.

    According to BMW, a driver can also extend the ActiveE’s range by up to 20 per cent by lifting off the accelerator pedal rather than pressing the brake pedal to slow the car.

    This is made possible by the electric motor switching its function from propulsion unit to generator that tops up the battery pack after converting the kinetic energy into supplementary electric power.

    BMW says its electric car’s recharging time can be as fast as three hours using a fast-charging system, though owners can also use conventional electrical sockets.

    BMW has incorporated the electric motor into the rear axle to ensure the ActiveE adheres to the company’s preference for rear-wheel drive. The motor generates 125kW of power, as well as an instantaneous 200Nm of torque.

    The positioning of the battery packs is said to further aid the car’s handling by lowering the centre of gravity and contributing to a near-50/50 weight balance.

    Special alloy wheels (designed to reduce drag), the absence of exhaust pipes at the rear, and electrical-circuit graphics ensure the ActiveE concept won’t be confused with a regular 1-Series Coupe.

    The interior is near-identical, though the ActiveE’s dash features instruments specific to the electric-drive system.

    The Concept ActiveE will join the Mini E in real-world field trials, leased to both private and fleet customers for daily use.

    BMW will use the feedback from these customers to help develop its future city cars, including the Megacity Vehicle that will become part of a new sub-brand.

  • Copenhagen hands Kevin Rudd an emissions trading scheme dilemma

    Copenhagen hands Kevin Rudd an emissions trading scheme dilemma

    • Lenore Taylor and Sid Maher
    • From: The Australian
    • December 21, 2009 12:00AM

    THE Rudd government faces a dramatically more difficult task in selling its emissions trading scheme as a result of the weak result from the Copenhagen conference, which has delayed critical decisions on national targets and international timelines.

    The government has now conceded it will not be able to set its own emissions-reduction target until February at the earliest.

    That complicates its attack on Tony Abbott’s “direct action” climate plan, which is based on trying to prove that it would be a more expensive, less efficient way to meet the national target.

    The failure of Copenhagen to set clear timetables or targets will strengthen the Opposition Leader’s claim that Copenhagen was always a false deadline for the passage of the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

    Mr Abbott yesterday described the final outcome of the talks as an “unmitigated disaster” for Kevin Rudd and a vindication of the opposition’s anti-ETS position.

    “Kevin Rudd was very unwise to try to rush Australia into prematurely adopting a commitment in the absence of similar commitments from the rest of the world,” the Opposition Leader said.

    Climate Change Minister Penny Wong accused Mr Abbott of “willing the talks to fail”.

    She said the government remained committed to reintroducing into parliament in February the CPRS negotiated with the Malcolm Turnbull-led Coalition, prior to his axing as opposition leader.

    The government will, in the meantime, be forced to decide its final emissions-reduction goal in private talks with other countries.

    These bilateral talks are necessary because of the Copenhagen summit’s failure to set targets or timetables to cut greenhouse gases.

    The so-called Copenhagen Accord, which continues to be bitterly opposed by some countries and was finally only “noted” by the UN meeting, sets out the range of emissions-reduction promises that developed and developing countries have already made – in Australia’s case, cuts of between 5 and 25 per cent by 2020.

    Senator Wong said major economies, many of which, like Australia, had made promises dependent on what others would do, would now have to talk privately about what final target each would take.

    The talks would occur after all countries had submitted their pledges by a deadline of February 1.

    “We will have to work with other nations to make clear what people are prepared to put forward under the Copenhagen Accord . . . these are discussions that will continue between the countries who back this agreement, which include the majority of the world’s nations and the majority of the world’s economies,” Senator Wong said as she prepared to leave the Danish capital.

    While the CPRS retains support from some key business groups and the powerful Australian Workers Union – the AI Group and AWU boss Paul Howes both yesterday continued to back the amended CPRS deal – the failure of Copenhagen has emboldened opponents of the scheme.

    The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Australian Coal Association yesterday called for a rethink of the government’s plans in the wake of the Copenhagen summit.

    ACCI chief executive Peter Anderson said: “We now have the green light from the global community to undertake a cost-benefit analysis of what Australian industry is already doing, of the government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme versus the direct action ideas the Abbott-led Coalition might come up with, and versus other options or policy mixes comparable nations might develop.”

    Australian Coal Association chief executive Ralph Hillman said the coal industry’s treatment under the CPRS should be rethought as Copenhagen had left the issue of burden-sharing of emissions cuts among countries “ambiguous”.

    Mr Hillman said any ambitions for Australia to lift its emissions reduction towards 15 per cent from its current unconditional 5 per cent should be “put on the backburner” pending the signing of binding agreements.

    The weak and non-binding accord, muscled through by US President Barack Obama after a day of desperate bargaining to salvage something from the much-hyped meeting, aims to stop global temperatures from rising by more than 2C, but does not specify the cuts needed to get there, and allows developing countries to monitor their own emission reductions and report them to the UN every two years.

    The deal promises to deliver $US30 billion in aid over the next three years to combat global warming in the poorest countries.

    One of the Australian government’s preconditions for cuts of more than 5 per cent is that developed and developing nations must make their emission reduction promises part of an “international agreement”.

    So how the UN picks up the pieces after Copenhagen’s divided and confusing conclusion is likely to be critical to what Australia ultimately decides.

    An extraordinary game of brinkmanship between the world’s superpowers and biggest greenhouse gas emitters – the US and China – saw Mr Obama finally clinch a deal with China, India, South Africa and Brazil for a watered-down agreement brokered earlier with more than 20 countries, including Australia.

    Mr Obama then unilaterally announced the deal at a private news conference for US journalists, and flew out of Copenhagen late on Friday night.

    Developing countries – outraged at the process and the weak content of the deal – threatened to block it when it was presented to the meeting for approval.

    Angry debate continued through the night until the accord was finally “noted” late on Saturday morning, Copenhagen time.

    Sudan, Venezuela, Bolvia, Nicaragua and Tuvalu blocked the accord from being adopted by the meeting.

    The Australian-based negotiator for Tuvalu, Ian Fry, said the money being offered from a proposed climate change fund for poor countries was not enough to make up for the effect on the small island of rising seas.

    “In biblical terms it looks like we are being offered 30 pieces of silver to betray our future and our people – our future is not for sale,” Mr Fry said.

    In a statement, Sudanese negotiator Lumumba Di-Aping said it was “a solution based on the very same values, in our opinion, that channelled six million people in Europe into furnaces”.

    And a Venezuelan negotiator cut her own hand, asking if she had to bleed to be able to speak.

    The accord does little to advance moves to try to get legally binding treaties covering developed and developing nations, which was the summit’s main aim, but according to leaders it avoids the “disaster scenario” of negotiations for binding treaties being closed down.

    Developed nations now hope that a binding deal can be sealed at next November’s conference in Mexico.

    Mr Rudd conceded that, at times during the chaotic negotiations, disaster had been close.

    “There was a very strong parallel push to see this thing not produce anything, and to collapse the negotiations,” the Prime Minister said.

    “We prevailed. Some will be disappointed by the amount of progress. The alternative was, frankly, catastrophic collapse of these negotiations.”

     

  • Rich and poor countries blame each other for failure of Copenhagen deal

     

    “Today’s events are the worst development for climate change in history,” said a spokesperson.

     

    Pablo Solon, Bolivian ambassador to the UN, blamed the Danish hosts for convening only a small group of countries to prepare a text to put before world leaders. “This is completely unacceptable. How can it be that 25 to 30 nations cook up an agreement that excludes the majority of the 190 nations.”

     

    But rich countries said that developing countries had wasted too much time on “process” rather than the substance of the talks. An epic stand-off over whether to ditch the Kyoto protocol‘s legal distinctions between developed and developing countries and their obligations to cut their emissions caused a huge delay to the negotiations.

     

    But Martin Khor, director of the South Centre, an intergovernmental think tank for developing countries said, “Developing countries are very disappointed because they’ve invested a lot of time in the documents they’re negotiating here.”

     

    Politicians from all corners of the world were blamed widely for not setting ambitious enough targets to counter climate change. “They refused to lead and instead sought to bribe and bully developing nations to sign up to the equivalent of a death warrant. The best outcome now is no deal,” said Tim Jones, climate policy officer from the World Development Movement.

     

    China’s prime minister, Wen Jiabao, blamed a lack of trust between countries: “To meet the climate change challenge, the international community must strengthen confidence, build consensus, make vigorous efforts and enhance co-operation.”

     

    But indigenous Bolivian president Evo Morales blamed capitalism and the US. “The meeting has failed. It’s unfortunate for the planet. The fault is with the lack of political will by a small group of countries led by the US,” he said.

     

    Even veterans of previous environmental negotiations were disappointed. “Given where we started and the expectations for this conference, anything less than a legally binding and agreed outcome falls far short of the mark,” said John Ashe, chair of the Kyoto protocol talks.

  • This is bigger than climate change. It is a battle to redefine humanity

     

    The summit’s premise is that the age of heroism is over. We have entered the age of accommodation. No longer may we live without restraint. No longer may we swing our fists regardless of whose nose might be in the way. In everything we do we must now be mindful of the lives of others, cautious, constrained, meticulous. We may no longer live in the moment, as if there were no tomorrow.

    This is a meeting about chemicals: the greenhouse gases insulating the atmosphere. But it is also a battle between two world views. The angry men who seek to derail this agreement, and all such limits on their self-fulfilment, have understood this better than we have. A new movement, most visible in North America and Australia, but now apparent everywhere, demands to trample on the lives of others as if this were a human right. It will not be constrained by taxes, gun laws, regulations, health and safety, especially by environmental restraints. It knows that fossil fuels have granted the universal ape amplification beyond its Palaeolithic dreams. For a moment, a marvellous, frontier moment, they allowed us to live in blissful mindlessness.

    The angry men know that this golden age has gone; but they cannot find the words for the constraints they hate. Clutching their copies of Atlas Shrugged, they flail around, accusing those who would impede them of communism, fascism, religiosity, misanthropy, but knowing at heart that these restrictions are driven by something far more repulsive to the unrestrained man: the decencies we owe to other human beings.

    I fear this chorus of bullies, but I also sympathise. I lead a mostly peaceful life, but my dreams are haunted by giant aurochs. All those of us whose blood still races are forced to sublimate, to fantasise. In daydreams and video games we find the lives that ecological limits and other people’s interests forbid us to live.

    Humanity is no longer split between conservatives and liberals, reactionaries and progressives, though both sides are informed by the older politics. Today the battle lines are drawn between expanders and restrainers; those who believe that there should be no impediments and those who believe that we must live within limits. The vicious battles we have seen so far between greens and climate change deniers, road safety campaigners and speed freaks, real grassroots groups and corporate-sponsored astroturfers are just the beginning. This war will become much uglier as people kick against the limits that decency demands.

    So here we are, in the land of Beowulf’s heroics, lost in a fog of acronyms and euphemisms, parentheses and exemptions, the deathly diplomacy required to accommodate everyone’s demands. There is no space for heroism here; all passion and power breaks against the needs of others. This is how it should be, though every neurone revolts against it.

    Although the delegates are waking up to the scale of their responsibility, I still believe they will sell us out. Everyone wants his last adventure. Hardly anyone among the official parties can accept the implications of living within our means, of living with tomorrow in mind. There will, they tell themselves, always be another frontier, another means to escape our constraints, to dump our dissatisfactions on other places and other people. Hanging over everything discussed here is the theme that dare not speak its name, always present but never mentioned. Economic growth is the magic formula which allows our conflicts to remain unresolved.

    While economies grow, social justice is unnecessary, as lives can be improved without redistribution. While economies grow, people need not confront their elites. While economies grow, we can keep buying our way out of trouble. But, like the bankers, we stave off trouble today only by multiplying it tomorrow. Through economic growth we are borrowing time at punitive rates of interest. It ensures that any cuts agreed at Copenhagen will eventually be outstripped. Even if we manage to prevent climate breakdown, growth means that it’s only a matter of time before we hit a new constraint, which demands a new global response: oil, water, phosphate, soil. We will lurch from crisis to existential crisis unless we address the underlying cause: perpetual growth cannot be accommodated on a finite planet.

    For all their earnest self-restraint, the negotiators in the plastic city are still not serious, even about climate change. There’s another great unmentionable here: supply. Most of the nation states tussling at Copenhagen have two fossil fuel policies. One is to minimise demand, by encouraging us to reduce our consumption. The other is to maximise supply, by encouraging companies to extract as much from the ground as they can.

     

    We know, from the papers published in Nature in April, that we can use a maximum of 60% of current reserves of coal, oil and gas if the average global temperature is not to rise by more than two degrees. We can burn much less if, as many poorer countries now insist, we seek to prevent the temperature from rising by more than 1.5C. We know that capture and storage will dispose of just a small fraction of the carbon in these fuels. There are two obvious conclusions: governments must decide which existing reserves of fossil fuel are to be left in the ground, and they must introduce a global moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. Neither of these proposals has even been mooted for discussion.

    But somehow this first great global battle between expanders and restrainers must be won and then the battles that lie beyond it – rising consumption, corporate power, economic growth – must begin. If governments don’t show some resolve on climate change, the expanders will seize on the restrainers’ weakness. They will attack – using the same tactics of denial, obfuscation and appeals to self-interest – the other measures that protect people from each other, or which prevent the world’s ecosystems from being destroyed. There is no end to this fight, no line these people will not cross. They too are aware that this a battle to redefine humanity, and they wish to redefine it as a species even more rapacious than it is today.

  • Climate justice: should the unborn have ltgal rights

    Climate justice: should the unborn have legal rights?

    Andrew Hickman

    8th December, 2009

    The biggest victims of climate change have no voice – in fact they are not even born yet – but the argument for giving them legal rights is not so far fetched

    In 1990, a young lawyer in the Philippines launched an audacious legal action.

    Incensed by the rapid depletion of his country’s natural resources, Antonio Oposa sued the environment minister, Fulgencio Factoran, demanding the cancellation of logging concessions which threatened the 4 per cent of the country’s virgin forest which remained. 

    He named the plaintiffs as 44 children, including three of his own, and the ‘unborn generations’ of the Philippines.

    When the case was rejected, Oposa appealed to the Supreme Court.

    He sent the judges the work of Edith Brown Weiss – an American law professor who pioneered the concept of ‘intergenerational equity’. After long deliberations, the Supreme Court ruled that the case should be heard.

    Before a decision was reached, the Philippine government issued an order prohibiting future logging. But ‘Oposa v Factoran’ remains one of the few cases dealing with the rights of future generations.

    Is intergenerational justice making a comeback?

    20 years after the Oposa case the concept of intergenerational justice seems to be enjoying a quiet resurgence. 

    Last week, UNICEF released a report in which they called for the ‘intergenerational aspect’ to be placed at the heart of climate change discussions.

    Similarly, in a speech at the UN, the Pope’s representative, Archbishop Celestino Mighore, called for ‘intergenerational justice’ to address the way the ‘energy consumption pattern of today impacts future generations’.

    And Ed Miliband, the UK’s Energy and Climate Change Minister, used a speech at the London School of Economics (LSE) last week to call for the rights of future generations to be ‘institutionalised.’

    Legal actions for the unborn

    According to Patrick Hegner of the German NGO Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations (FRFG), we are unlikely to see a spate of legal actions on behalf of the unborn. 

    ‘Even children do not have a full legal standing yet and the fight for women’s rights also took decades,’ he says.

    Instead Hegner believes intergenerational justice may eventually form part of national constitutions. He said MPs in Germany were already pushing for an amendment to the constitution requiring the rights of future generations to be considered before laws are passed.

    Elsewhere, Hungary has taken the unusual step of appointing a Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations.

    The Commissioner Dr Sandor Fulop calls himself the ‘guardian of future generations’ and sees his role as critical because ‘governments elected for a certain period of time often overlook long term interests for overriding short term benefits’.

    What will they want?

    One of the challenges of Fulop’s job is that judgements have to be made about the interests of people who don’t yet exist.

    ‘For example, they might prefer development over nature preservation if it provides them with local jobs and therefore the ability to stay in their hometown,’ says Dr Fulop.

    But according to Clark Wolf, Director of Bioethics and Professor of Philosophy at Iowa State University, intergenerational justice has more to do with our obligation not to harm people rather than guessing what future generations will value.

    ‘We have an obligation to leave them a world capable of supporting their needs and providing opportunities for them to build good lives for themselves. When we do things that undermine this opportunity, we are responsible for harming them and unjustifiably putting their welfare at risk.’

    How old will you be in 2050?

    Guy Shrubsole, a 24 year-old member of the UK Youth Delegation travelling to the Copenhagen Climate Talks agrees.

    ‘We are travelling to Copenhagen to make the case for future generations and this current generation. One of our slogans is ‘how old will you be in 2050?’ Most of the negotiators will be very old or dead. I will be 64 and hopefully about to retire in a low-carbon Britain,’ he said.

    The 23-strong delegation, which will be joined by other youth groups from around the world, wants to see ‘safeguarding the rights of future generations’ at the centre of any agreement that comes out of Copenhagen.

    ‘We have shown how concerned we are as a society about economic debt. Now we need to consider the even greater ecological debt that we are passing on to the next generation,’ said Shrubsole. 

    Intergenerational vs. Intragenerational justice

    Yet it may be intragenerational justice that takes centre stage at negotiations in Copenhagen. 

    At a meeting in Ethiopia last month, 10 African nations called for ‘Africa to be compensated for climate related social and economic losses’.

    The Ethiopian Prime Minister, Meles Zenawi, said Africa would be hit first and hardest by climate change. 

    For Professor Charles Okidi, Director of Centre for Advanced Studies in Environmental Law and Policy at the University of Nairobi, the two types of justice go hand in hand. 

    ‘When we talk about intergenerational justice, we are also talking about intragenerational justice. We cannot consider the needs of future generations without implicitly considering the interests of today’s.’

    Building higher walls

    However Hegner does see a tension between the two notions of climate justice.

    ‘Take New Orleans as a simplified example. People living there today can protect themselves against floods, like in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, with higher and better dams. With enough money at hand they can adapt to environmental changes.’

    ‘But if we decide today that we will follow cheaper adaptation strategies instead of mitigation strategies, future generations will pay the bill when climate change consequences reach a threshold at which adaptation becomes impossible,’ he said.

  • A 480 Pound train ticket to Copenhagen makes it hard to care about the climate

     

    There are two issues here: the expense of the train journey and the cheapness of the flight. In combination they force most people to do the wrong thing, even when they want to do the right one. You have to be either very determined or stark raving mad (you can draw your own conclusions) to take the train, not the plane.

    Continental trains are mostly very good, and quite a bit cheaper than the UK’s, but they are still twice as expensive as they ought to be. If EU governments are as serious as they claim to be about tackling climate change, they would be cancelling their budgets for upgrading roads and putting the money into subsidising train journeys instead. According to UK government figures, a passenger’s journey by car produces seven times as much carbon dioxide as the same journey by train.

    But as well as making train travel easier, governments should also be making flying harder. The only measure which is likely to work is a restriction on the number of available landing slots. This would put an overall cap on aviation emissions. It would also mean that flights became more expensive.

    This is portrayed by people who don’t want any action taken to prevent climate breakdown as an attack on the poor, but the reality is very different. According to the comprehensive analysis conducted by Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute, 46% of people in “higher managerial or professional” occupations fly at least three times a year, while 74% of the long-term unemployed don’t fly at all. Sixty-four per cent of all flights from the five busiest UK airports were made by people whose income in 2004 was £28,750 or more. That’s well above the average income for that year. In global terms it places the majority of passengers in a very small elite.

    Cheap flights allow executives, second home owners and those who can afford to take several foreign holidays a year (often the same people) to pursue their extravagant lifestyles at very little cost to themselves, but at a great cost to the rest of the world.

    The market alone won’t sort this out. The new report by the Committee on Climate Change points out that even with a carbon price of £200 per tonne, flights would grow by 115% between now and 2050, blowing many of the savings the government makes in other sectors. Only a cap on landing slots will do. Otherwise even the environmentalists gathering to discuss this problem will continue to be encouraged to contribute to it.

    monbiot.com