EcoRadio

Category: Climate chaos

The atmosphere is to the earth as a layer of varnish is to a desktop globe. It is thin, fragile and essential for preserving the items on the surface.150 years of burning fossil fuel have overloaded the atmosphere to the point where the earth is ill. It now has a fever. Read the detailed article, Soothing Gaia’s Fever for an evocative account of that analogy. The items listed here detail progress on coordinating 6.5 billion people in the most critical project undertaken by humanity. 

  • Carbon bill burns as Rudd fiddles.

    Carbon bill burns as Rudd fiddles 

    Phillip Coorey Chief Political Correspondent

    May 5, 2009
    Page 1 of 2 | Single page

    THE Federal Government’s emissions trading scheme was clinging to life last night after a series of changes designed to win the support of the Senate failed to shift sentiment.

    In the biggest policy reversal of his prime ministership, aimed at wooing big business and the Liberal Party, Kevin Rudd announced the scheme would be delayed by one year to July 1, 2011, beyond the next election.

    Compensation for the nation’s heaviest polluters would be more generous and the price of a tonne of carbon for the first year would be fixed at a low $10, reducing by half the original projected impact on energy bills.

    As a sop to environmentalists, there was a heavily conditional commitment to increase from 15 per cent to 25 per cent the maximum amount by which greenhouse gases would be reduced by 2020.

    “I am in the practical business of responding to realistic challenges,” Mr Rudd said of his reversal, which, he said, would mean “a slower start” but a “stronger, greener conclusion”.

    After warning repeatedly that any delay would be reckless and costly, Mr Rudd said the changes were driven by the pressures on business caused by the recession.

    Also, with the original plan headed for certain defeat in the Senate, the Government needed bargaining power in the form of a regulated scheme to persuade other nations to take action at a climate summit in Copenhagen at the end of the year.

    Despite the delay, business still wanted a legislated scheme in place so it could start making long-term investment decisions.

    Mr Rudd said the changes were similar to those being called for by Malcolm Turnbull and he demanded the Liberals support the legislation to be introduced to Parliament this month.

    “It’s time to get off the fence, Mr Turnbull, and it’s time to act in the national interest and to secure this legislation and certainty for the future,” he said.

    Rejecting the legislation twice would give the Government the trigger for a double dissolution election this year. But the Opposition Leader said the changes were “tinkering” and “no, we wouldn’t support it”.

    But he left open the possibility of compromise. He said there was no need to pass the legislation this year because of the delay and there needed to be more analysis.

    “Why not give ourselves more time to get it right?” he said.

    Mr Turnbull faces internal pressures. The Coalition is split on the veracity of climate change and how to tackle it. The Nationals leader, Warren Truss, said the changes were “not enough to rescue this dog of a scheme”.

  • Rudd signs off on emissions trading scheme compromise

    Rudd signs off on emissions trading scheme compromise

    Lenore Taylor, National correspondent | May 04, 2009

    Article from:  The Australian

    THE Rudd Government is about to announce a package of amendments to its own proposed emissions trading scheme designed to soften its effects during the recession and win Senate support from the Coalition.

     The package includes a one year delay and then a very low fixed price on carbon for the first year of the scheme’s operation from July 2011 to July 2012. It also extra assistance for each of the two categories of so-called trade exposed industries for the duration of the recession.

    Industry sources said that the most polluting industries currently eligible to get 90 per cent of their permits for free will now get up to 95 per cent for the first five years of the scheme, and industries eligible for 60 per cent of their permits for free will now get up to 70 per cent for up to five years.

    It is also understood to include the concession that the government will consider a tougher emissions reduction target of 25 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020, in the unlikely event of a global agreement designed to limit the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere at 450 parts per million. Otherwise the government’s previously announced target range of 5 to 15 per cent would apply.

    The amendments, signed off by the Cabinet subcommittee on climate change this morning, and due to be announced by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd at a press conference after midday, are designed to win support from Malcolm Turnbull’s opposition in the Senate and appease mounting industry concern about the costs of the scheme during the global recession.

    The Australian Greens yesterday wrote to Mr Rudd with their “bottom line” for Senate support for the scheme, which is that the government’s “unconditional” emissions reduction cut should be 25 per cent, rather than 5 per cent, and that the government should consider cuts as high as 40 per cent in the event of a tough international deal at the Copenhagen talks in December.

  • The media laps up fake controversy over climate change

    The media laps up fake controversy over climate change

    Proof of paid-for climate denial at the Global Climate Coalition comes as no surprise, but it is no less depressing for that.

    There are three kinds of climate change denier. There are those who simply don’t want to accept the evidence, because it is too much to bear, or because it threatens aspects of their lives that they don’t want to change. These are by far the most numerous, and account for most of those whose comments will follow this post.

    I have some sympathy for their position. Denial is most people’s first response to something they don’t want to hear, whether it is a diagnosis of terminal illness or the threat presented by the rise of the Axis Powers. The moral, intellectual and practical challenge of climate change is unprecedented. The urge to duck it almost irresistible.

    Then there is a smaller group of people – almost all men, generally in their sixties or above – who are not paid for their stance, but who have achieved a little post-retirement celebrity through well-timed controversialism. It has kept David Bellamy in the news, long after his wonderful career on television sadly (and wrongly, in my view) ended. It has lent more recognition to people like Philip Stott and Tim Ball than anything they published during their academic careers. It attracts adoring fanmail (from people in category one) for journalists like Christopher Booker and Melanie Philips. It permits men like Lord Monckton to indulge their fantasies of single-handedly rescuing humanity from its own idiocy. Their intellectual acrobatics are as blatant as that of the people in the third category, but they appear to be driven by vanity, not cash.

    The third category consists of those who are paid to deny that climate change is happening. Patrick Michaels and Steve Milloy, whose work for fossil fuel companies has been repeatedly exposed, are good examples. There are probably a few paid stooges contributing to the Guardian’s discussion threads as well.

    Even when the risk of exposure is high, journalists working for newspapers, television or radio have secretly taken money from undisclosed interests to champion their views. Fossil fuel companies have inserted their message into every medium by means of hired hands who don’t reveal their sources of funding. Why would they not take advantage of the anonymity of these threads? Some of the contributers here are astroturfers, but we’ll probably never know which ones they are.

    Whenever you challenge anyone in categories two or three, they come over all innocent, claiming that the science is unsettled, that the other side are all liars, and all they are doing is telling the public what it needs to hear. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or who subscribes to Science or Nature knows that they cannot possibly believe this, or are able to believe it only by tying their minds into such elaborate knots that they have succeeded in deceiving themselves.

    We knew it, but we couldn’t prove it. But now we have a smoking gun. Last week the New York Times revealed that the Global Climate Coalition, the industry-funded body that led the campaign to persuade people that manmade climate wasn’t happening, knew all along that it was. In 1995 its own experts warned that:

    The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied … The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change

    It seems to me that the real suckers in this story are the media organisations – the BBC and Channel 4 are the outstanding examples – that gave 15 years of free access to companies like ExxonMobil, by inviting their paid experts to “balance” the views of genuine scientists, without demanding that they disclosed their sources. (Channel 4 appears determined to continue being suckered).

    They had only to look at Exxon’s annual accounts to see that the people they introduced as independent experts were neither expert nor independent. But they chose not to, as fake controversy provided better copy than the boring old scientific consensus. Now we know just how fake it was.

    monbiot.com

  • Rudd lacks courage and vision says ex ALP president

    Speaking at Eco Forum in Sydney last week, Australia’s longest service Science Minister and long term federal president of the Australian Labor Party, Barry Jones, said that the Rudd government showed no signs of taking the necessary steps to combat climate change. He commended the analysis of Liberal whistle-blower Guy Pearce as explaining why Australian governments rule for vested interests and said, “observers could be forgiving for not being able to distinguish the Rudd government from Howard’s [in term of its position on global warming]” Jones addressed 300 local government and engineering professionals on the future prospects for Australia. Describing the developed world generally, he said, “Our governments lack the leadership and vision necessary to discard the systems that got us into this mess. Political parties have become increasingly irrelevant. They are basically job placement agencies for an ailing membership.”

  • No green shoots on climate change

    No green shoots on climate change

    The first ‘green budget’ is very balanced – every measure to stop climate change is balanced with one that makes it worse

    Faced with worsening projections for global warming and energy security, learning that the wind turbine maker Vestas will be closing its factory on the Isle of Wight is a bit like hearing that pharmaceutical companies are closing down the production of flu vaccines just as the alert for swine flu goes from level five to full pandemic.

    The comparison is useful in more ways than one. It reveals how governments can recognise and act to avert systemic risk in some areas like high finance and flu, but have blind spots or grossly inadequate responses in others, such as climate change. It’s also a useful reminder that when natural systems cross a critical threshold – for example, the number and distribution of people infected with a virulent flu virus, or the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – humanity quickly finds that it is no longer in the driving seat and able to control the direction of travel.

    Last month the budget demonstrated the continuing confusion of a political system still struggling to come to terms with the inescapable parameters set by natural systems. The budget was balanced, but only in the sense that anything positive done to promote a low-carbon economy was cancelled out by other measures that will lock in fossil fuel-intensive infrastructure. Both the car and oil industry were happy recipients of budget bungs.

    Grasping at the few optimistic straws still blowing around the economy, the chancellor, Alastair Darling, pointed out that the global economy still stood to double in size over the next 20 years.

    What he forgot to mention, or didn’t know, is that with each “doubling” of the economy, you use as many resources as with all the previous doublings combined.

    Prof Roderick Smith of the Royal Academy of Engineering at Imperial College identified these resource implications of economic doubling. Engineers, it seems, are more adept at understanding material limits. He wrote that the physical view of the economy “is governed by the laws of thermodynamics and continuity” and so, “the question of how much natural resource we have to fuel the economy, and how much energy we have to extract, process and manufacture is central to our existence”.

    This year, on a conservative analysis, the UK started to live beyond its environmental means – consuming more and producing more waste than the UK itself can handle – by Easter Sunday, 12 April. This was our “ecological debt day“.

    Given that both the UK and the world as a whole already use more resources and produce more waste than collectively our forests, fields, oceans and atmosphere can safely provide and absorb, where, we must ask, will the resources come from to double the size of the global economy?

    Darling’s speech was to introduce the first “green budget”, a package meant to put the country on a path to sustainability. It included the world’s first legally binding carbon budget. Yet its targets to reduce emissions are roughly half of what is necessary, according to the climate research work of Prof Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre at Manchester University.

    The budget also included roughly £1.4bn of apparently new money to reduce emissions across a range of measures for energy efficiency and renewables. That sum amounts to about 0.09% of the UK’s GDP, and compares sadly to the 20% of GDP that the International Monetary Fund estimates the UK set aside for bailing out its financial sector.

    But even here the green hue is darkened by our continuing dependence on oil, coal and gas, and plans to build more runways, roads and new coal fired power stations that capture only a small proportion of their carbon emissions.

    Support in the budget to extract an additional 2bn barrels of North Sea oil will produce extra greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to the UK’s entire emissions in 2006, including shipping and aviation. Funds for car scrappage schemes, lacking any meaningful environmental criteria, could also see emissions rise rather than fall.

    Plans for electric cars may sound attractive, but you still need the clean energy to power them. More than a low-carbon vehicle strategy, if the UK is to improve its own energy security and environment, and tackle climate change, we need a low-car vehicle strategy.

    Ultimately, the message sent by the budget was confusion. Setting an emissions reduction target in these circumstances is like setting someone a deadline to give up smoking, and then pushing them into a smoke-filled bar where all the walls are lined with cigarette machines.

    Nature may be beautiful, but it also has a mind of its own and can take or leave humanity. That’s why we have to respect it and work within its parameters. Both flu pandemics and global warming are lethal. One difference is that if we go through the next 91 months without changing course, the climate roulette of runaway warming will not blow over. It will endure.

     

    91 months and counting…

     

    • Each month Andrew Simms is analysing how much closer the world has moved to catastrophic climate change. Read his previous blog here

  • UK government missing own carbon cut targets.

    UK government missing own carbon cut targets

    UK government departments will not meet carbon cuts target of 12.5% by 2012 despite a reduction in emissions from road travel and less waste and water consumption, sustainability report finds

    The government is not on track to meet targets to cut carbon emissions from its own departments, its sustainability watchdog warned today.

    A report from the Sustainable Development Commission (SDC) said departments had taken significant steps towards cutting emissions from road travel and reducing waste and water consumption.

    But the SDC said the government had reported a 6.3% decrease in carbon emissions from its offices since the year 1999-2000, an insufficient reduction for it to hit a target of 12.5% reductions by 2011-12.

    And it was not nearly enough to contribute to the legally binding national goal to cut emissions by 80% by 2050, the commission said.

    The annual Sustainable Development in Government report also said future targets for environmental performance by departments, to replace those that will shortly expire, must be “set high” to reflect the scale of the challenge ahead.

    A failure to cut carbon will force departments to buy carbon credits to cover their emissions, under new rules coming in next year to promote energy and carbon savings, the SDC said.

    But a £4bn investment in wind and solar energy generation on the government estate could slash emissions from offices by 68%, save on energy bills and boost the green technology and construction sectors. Last year, a new law requiring public buildings to display their energy use revealed that the head office of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) recorded an E-rating on a scale where A is best and G is worst. The newly created Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) was also shamed this year when it was revealed to be one of the least energy-efficient buildings in London.

    While the government remains on track to meet targets for levels of recycling and electricity from renewables, both fell last year, the report showed. And the amount of electricity used was on the rise, largely due to increased use of IT and the need for more air conditioning of server rooms.

    The SDC welcomed commitments in the budget to support the shift to low-carbon vehicles, but said the government’s current travel arrangements allowed staff to claim mileage at rates above fuel costs, providing “perverse” incentives for car use. Instead they should be given incentives to use more sustainable forms of travel or travel less, it urged.

    The commission also said controls should be put on officials flying domestically and to European destinations where rail travel was an option. And there needed to be greater understanding of the full environmental impacts of government operations, for example developing “water footprints” and investigating the carbon footprint of supply chains of goods bought by departments.

    Rebecca Willis, the vice-chairwoman of the SDC, said: “The government has taken some really significant steps making its own operations more sustainable. But it is still not on track to meet crucial targets, including reducing carbon emissions from offices.”

    William Jordan, central government’s chief sustainability officer, said: “Significant progress has been made by the government in delivering on its commitment to deliver sustainable operations on the government’s own estate.”

    He said he looked forward to working with the SDC to address the issues raised in the report and said the government would be revising targets and commitments on sustainability this year to ensure they reflected “leading practice”.