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Managing director of Ebono Institute and major sponsor of The Generator, Geoff Ebbs, is running against Kevin Rudd in the seat of Griffith at the next Federal election. By the expression on their faces in this candid shot it looks like a pretty dull campaign. Read on

  • Asia’s silent victoms of pollution and emissions.

     

    Ironically, road fatalities and the noxious clouds of industrial and hydrocarbon emissions from vehicles could be thought of as a success in development terms, indicating increased wealth. The problem is that we seem to be in perpetual catching-up mode to fix the ailments that go with success. The World Bank admitted that:

    Road crashes cost approximately 1 to 3% of a country’s annual GNP … developing countries currently lose in the region of $100bn every year … almost twice as much as … total development assistance received worldwide.

    Despite Harvard and the World Health Organisation (WHO) both insisting that road and occupational accidents look to outstrip infectious disease as the major causes of death and disability in the south, there is little evidence that donor agencies have shifted their priorities accordingly. Trauma medicine and rehabilitation centres remain rarities. Road and occupational deaths remain like wallpaper on the modernisation agenda: striking when first noticed, then increasingly invisible.

    But figures can only be indicative. Lao colleagues told me that for cultural and financial reasons, corpses are often taken away by families and cremated, the death not reported. When I arrived in 2004, the number of motorcycles was beginning to exceed China-made Hare bicycles immortalised by Dervla Murphy. Hares may have been better value than Chinese motorbikes, which street talk asserts have unreliable lights and brakes, but are affordable. An acquaintance’s $600 motorbike had her repeatedly borrowing my tools as various parts failed, and her collection of scars increased. In many parts of Asia, vehicle-testing standards are non-existent. The Chinese-built Chery cars, found by the Russians to be “unsafe at any speed” (a claim the manufacturer denied) is the colourful choice among Vientiane’s successful women before they upgrade to something with more élan.

    Visiting experts advocate rational and linear solutions. But in Asia, the cause and effect relationship is often non-rational. A Thai or Lao surviving a crash is more likely to erect a spirit house than reflect on the use of wing mirrors, or make merit at the temple rather than look before entering a stream of traffic. Passers-by may be reluctant to help a bleeding victim in case they “catch the lousy luck”. These are factors that cannot be changed simply with asphalted roads or traffic lights. And infrastructure solutions, such as the new poorly designed major arterial through Vientiane, may actually raise accident rates by enabling greater speed. Systematic corruption, such as enabling a proxy to buy a driving licence, undermines progress. New wealth also enables new drivers to drive powerful cars such as a Maserati (along with Humvees, and Mercedes sports, which are increasingly popular) they are ill-equipped to handle.

    Posh cars driving under the Asian Brown Cloud, a toxic haze that can be easily seen dozing over most of south and south-east Asia, may be how people will come to think of Asia in the future. This murky mix of combustion products, vehicle and industrial emissions, can easily be seen from an aircraft, and is responsible for spiralling respiratory deaths in most Asian countries. It drove me out of Jakarta. Valleys like that of Chiang Mai and Katmandu fill with diesel fumes and other polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, and held in by seasonal temperature inversion layers. Some cities such as Manila are trying their best to tackle the problem with emissions testing and new electric jeepneys. But China’s spectacular addiction to cars is corroding any headway made by other nations.

    The Asian Brown Cloud also contributes to localised climate changes by reducing photosynthesis, drastically effecting food production for Asia’s expanding populations. Recent studies indicate that stormwater run off from roads carries toxic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons from truck and car exhausts, as well as heavy metals such as lead and zinc into waterways. Up to 4kg of zinc can be found in large truck tyres – and released when friction hits the road. Runoff finds it way into water courses and contaminates fish. In Asia, the poor are dependent on fish as the primary source of dietary protein. The implications should be apparent.

    I used to regularly encounter a handsome but severely brain-damaged young man on my morning Mekong walks. The victim of a crash, he was severely disabled. I have not seen him for months. He’s only one of the growing mass of victims who are silent statistics.

    • This article was commissioned via the You tell us page. If you have your own suggestions for subjects you would like to see covered by Cif, please visit the page and tell us

  • The Times’ EU climate targets ‘exclusive’ is gibberish

     

     

    It’s all gibberish, but where Europe is concerned, anything goes. Of all the myths published about the EU, I wish the one on the front page of today’s Times were true.

     

     

    It reports – “exclusively” – that the European commission will raise its target for greenhouse gas cuts today, from 20% by 2020, to 30%:

     

     

    “The European commission is determined to press ahead with the cuts despite the financial turmoil gripping the bloc, even though it would require Britain and other EU member states to impose far tougher financial penalties on their industries than are being considered by other large economies.”

     

    The “surprise new plan”, it says, commits “Britain and the rest of the EU to the most ambitious targets in the world.”

     

     

     

    I phoned the commission this morning. I was told that the story is “totally wrong. The position is exactly the same as it was.” This means that the EU will stick to its 20% target until there’s a legally binding global agreement to replace the Kyoto protocol. At this point the target will be raised to 30%. This was all reported in a Guardian story two weeks ago and the FT has covered it before too.

     

    It was the plan long before the Copenhagen summit in December. But as no legally binding agreement was struck then, and as it’s unlikely to happen in Mexico at the end of this year either, there’s no immediate prospect of the EU’s target being raised.

     

     

     

    All the EC has done is to write an analysis paper looking at what the consequences – for European industry, trade policy and other matters – would be if such a target were to be adopted. This is the routine business of any civil service: produce analyses and impact statements for possible policies, before they are adopted. The only surprise is that it hasn’t been done before.

     

     

     

    But as the Times story shows, there are good reasons why the tougher target should be adopted, regardless of whether a global deal is struck. The recession, or stagnation, or whatever it is now, has already slashed emissions in Europe. A tougher target would bank those accidental cuts and prevent them from making a mockery of the Emissions Trading Scheme, as they do today. The decline in greenhouse gas production ensures that the carbon price remains so low that it won’t stimulate investment in energy saving and alternative technologies. Unless the targets are tightened, the EU emissions cap will remain so loose as to be all but useless.

     

     

     

    And while the tougher target waits on a binding global treaty, to some extent a binding global treaty waits on a tougher EU target. When the world’s biggest economic block shows that it means business, poorer nations will be more inclined to follow.

     

     

     

    Anyway, we dream on, assisted by the Times’s nonsense.

     

     

     

    monbiot.com

  • Government’s chief scientific adviser hits out at climate sceptics

     

    “It has been suggested that the society holds the view that anyone challenging the consensus on climate change is malicious – this is ridiculous,” said Professor Martin Rees, the society’s president.

    “Science is organised scepticism and the consensus must shift in light of the evidence.

    “In the current environment we believe this new guide will be very timely. Lots of people are asking questions, indeed even within the fellowship of the society there are differing views.”

    In his first interview since the election, Beddington agreed that true scientific scepticism was healthy and must be encouraged but he criticised individuals and organisations that cherrypicked data for political ends.

    “There is no doubt that there are organisations and individuals who will choose to characterise the science as being nonsensical on the basis of what are not reasonable criticisms,” he said.

    He highlighted the spurious argument that because the UK winter had been so cold, climate change science must be wrong.

    Beddington said there was a difference between weather and climate. “The fact that we have had a very cold winter in Britain does not mean that the climate is not getting warmer,” he said, adding that rejecting global warming on those grounds was wrong. “This is just not science. This is commentary,” he said.

    Lawson’s thinktank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, has deployed similar arguments to downplay the significance of climate change.

    Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University who is the foundation’s director, said in December last year: “We look out of the window and it’s very cold, it doesn’t seem to be warming.”

    Lawson has said that “global warming … is not at the present time happening”. Peiser has previously said the GWPF does not challenge climate science but concentrates on examining policy implications.

    Beddington, who gave a public lecture on climate change at the University of York yesterday, was also highly critical of the mistakes made by the UN’s climate science body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which he called “fundamentally stupid statements”.

    Referring to the incorrect claim that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, he said: “Nobody in their right mind would see that as even a scientific statement. There’s no uncertainty, there’s no caveats.” But he added that overall the IPCC report had a “remarkably small number of problems”.

    Beddington said that he had yet to have a formal meeting with David Cameron or Nick Clegg, but he said the coalition government faced a slew of scientific and engineering issues.

    “Just about anywhere I look around the portfolio of government problems in any department, there are big issues of science and engineering including social science,” he said.

    He highlighted climate change, obesity, the volcanic ash cloud and vigilance to pandemic influenza as pressing problems for government to address.

    He said he would advise Cameron to shield funding for scientific research from future spending cuts as far as possible.

    “If you then think about how the UK as an economy is going to compete in the future, the underpinning of science and engineering having the best quality students, the best quality scientists and engineers is absolutely imperative.”

    When asked about the BP oil spill off the coast of Louisiana, Beddington said there would be lessons for the UK.

    “I think we need to understand it,” he said. “I think deep offshore [drilling] presents formidable engineering problems as you can see from the attempt to actually deal with it.

    “I think that one will have to be asking questions about the appropriate levels of regulation that are operating in licensing deep offshore drilling in the North Sea.”

  • Out of sight, Out of trouble

     

    I suspect that no amount of evidence will sway some of these people. There’s a large contingent which seems to hate renewables come what may. However often you point them to papers showing how a European supergrid, which could one day stretch from Iceland to North Africa, allows us to balance renewable resources against each other, ensuring constant supplies; however often you explain the potential of smart appliances, a smart grid and new energy storage technologies, they just clamp their fingers in their ears and shout: “No, no, no!” I don’t know how to explain this unreasoning antagonism, but it casts an interesting light on the oft-repeated myth that it is environmentalists who are hostile to new technologies.

    But even the defeatists might be swayed by some of the findings of the Offshore Valuation report, just published by the Public Interest Research Centre (Pirc). It’s the first time anyone has tried to work out how much electricity could be produced by offshore renewables in the UK, and the results are fascinating.

    It examines only existing technologies – wind turbines with both fixed and floating foundations, wave machines, tidal range and tidal stream devices – and the contribution they can make by 2050.

    It accepts the usual constraints on offshore renewables: maximum water depths, the need to avoid dense shipping lanes and other obstacles, the various technical limits. Having applied these constraints, it finds that the practical resource for offshore renewables in the UK is 2,130 terawatt hours per year. This is six times our current electricity demand.

    Were we to use only 29% of the total resource, the UK would become a net electricity exporter. We would be generating energy equivalent to 1bn barrels of oil a year, which roughly corresponds to the average amount of North Sea oil and gas the UK has been producing over the past four decades.

    The report estimates that this industry would directly employ 145,000 people and produce annual revenues of £62bn. The construction effort would be roughly similar to building the North Sea oil and gas infrastructure: eminently plausible, in other words, if propelled by strong government policy.

    Were we to make use of 76% of the resource, the UK would become a net exporter of total energy. This is a tougher call, but not necessarily impossible: we’d be producing the equivalent of 150% of the energy output from UK’s peak production year for oil and gas (1999).

    It would mean building an average of 1,800 7.5 megawatt wind turbines every year. This is likely to stretch available manpower and construction capacity to the maximum, possibly beyond. But if enough investment is sunk into training, manufacturing and transport, the potential for creating both employment and income is enormous.

    The national grid, the report estimates, could accommodate about 50% variable renewables (power sources whose output depends on the weather) by 2050, as long as it had 34 gigawatts of backup capacity, energy storage and interconnectors linking it with the continent. This is both plausible and affordable. (Backup, to address another persistent myth, does not mean that the necessary thermal power plants are kept running all the time, just that they are available if needed.)

    There are some interesting implications. The UK could close its looming energy gap without using new sources of fossil fuels. It could do this without encountering the public hostility which often scuppers onshore windfarms.

    The best wind resources are mostly way out of the sight of land: the further out to sea you go, the stronger the wind becomes. A recent study shows that offshore windfarms can greatly increase the abundance of fish and crabs. (My hope is that the foundations could be connected by a web of steel cables, so the windfarms could function as marine reserves which never needed to be policed, as trawling through them would be impossible.)

    It also raises some important questions. If the offshore resource is so abundant and its deployment likely to cause hardly any political fuss, should we give up fighting for onshore windfarms? I don’t know, but I would appreciate your views.

    The report also makes me wonder whether, in the light of the damage they will do and of the far greater resources in the open sea, a Severn barrage and other tidal range devices are worth developing. The report suggests that the total practical resource for offshore wind is 1,939 terawatt hours per year, while the total tidal range resource is just 36 – and more expensive to deploy. Given the aggro tidal barrages will cause and the habitats they will destroy, are they worth developing?

    If any of this is to happen, the big decisions will need to be taken in the next year or so. So if ever you meet ministers or officials, ask them these questions. Have they read the report? What do they intend to do about it?

    www.monbiot.com

  • Greenies and business unite on climate action

     

    The roundtable was remarkable for teaming an environmental group, the Australian Conservation Foundation, with six big members of the corporate world: Westpac, the re-insurer Swiss Re, Insurance Australia Group, Origin Energy, Visy Industries and BP Australasia.

    The group’s landmark report of 2006 warned of grave economic harm if Australia did not take early action on global warming – a view that ” took courage” at the time, one of the founding members recalled this week.

    ”Between them the chief executives of these companies lobbied all the east coast premiers, the then prime minister, and the opposition leader. A lot of senior-level heavy lifting went on behind the scenes after the launch of our report, and that probably had more effect than the report itself.”

    When the Howard government reluctantly moved to adopt an emissions trading scheme, the group faded, thinking its work done.

    But the decision to delay the emissions trading scheme raised the prospect of a new alliance.

    ” We have got some early feelers out to resuscitate something like the roundtable,” a key player told the Herald.

    When the emissions trading scheme was defeated in the Senate late last year – paradoxically with the support of the Greens, who wanted an even tougher scheme – coal-dependent enterprises were relieved.

    But executives looking ahead to a world of renewable energy, carbon offsets, and gas as a first step to replacing coal, were anxious. Their investment plans hung on emissions trading being around the corner. With Labor effectively wiping the issue off its electoral agenda, that prospect is no longer bankable.

    Budget papers reveal the government may not even bother with an emissions scheme after 2013 unless the international climate has shifted. ”It’s a disastrous loss of momentum,” said one industry leader.

    ”If you had to do a casebook study in how you can burn every single ally you have, the government could not have done better,” fumed another insider.

    ”They have severely impacted on the renewables industry, the banks that supported them … the Investor Group on Climate Change, which was very strongly supportive, and people inside groups like the Business Council of Australia that tried to steer it through their organisations.”

    In the service sector the effect has been immediate. ”In the banking and finance sector they are not hiring carbon people, they are disbanding those teams,” said David Mitchell, of carbon consultancy Energetics.

    Nathan Fabian, the chief executive of the Investor Group on Climate Change, told the Herald: ”We are all taking stock. We think there is a need for leading corporates, leading investors and leading academics to create a platform and deliver the right message together.”

    Several days ago the chairman of Origin Energy, Kevin McCann, let fly at a conference in New Zealand. ”I am going to lobby like hell to get it back on the [political] agenda” he said. ”The issue cannot be ignored.”

    Origin is heavily invested in gas, which would have been the halfway house to a cleaner energy sector under an emissions trading scheme. Without a scheme, Origin said, the economic drivers are not there to phase out carbon-heavy coal-fired power stations in favour of baseload gas energy generation.

    The government’s strengthening of renewable energy programs will not be enough, it said.

  • Feds push solar solution to coal addiction

     

    The recipients are companies developing technology to store energy generated by solar thermal plants so that it can be used at night or when the sun doesn’t shine. In the utility biz, that’s called baseload power. (Solar thermal plants typically use vast arrays of mirrors to focus the sun on a liquid-filled boiler to create steam that drives an electricity-generating turbine.)

    It’s hardly a huge amount of cash. But it’s going to a mix of startups and big old-line tech companies — many in California — that are working on some potentially game-changing technology.

    But how much of the game needs to be changed? That question seems heretical — we’ll have achieved renewable-energy nirvana when solar farms grow electrons 24/7, right? But it was raised by J.D. Sitton, chief executive of Infinia, a solar startup backed by prominent green-tech venture capitalist Khosla Ventures as well as eSolar founder Bill Gross’ Idealab and Vulcan Capital, the Seattle investment firm run by Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen.

    “There’s a raging debate in the solar thermal business about how much is storage worth and how much it matters,” says Sitton, whose, Kennewick, Wash., company, scored $3 million from the Department of Energy to create storage technology for its Stirling solar dish.

    Resembling a large mirrored satellite receiver, Infinia’s 21-foot-tall PowerDish focuses the sun on a Stirling engine suspended on an arm over the center of the device. The heat causes a gas inside the engine to expand and drive a piston that generates electricity.

    The DOE grant — and others Infinia has received from the federal government — will allow the company to integrate storage capacity into the dish apparatus. Sitton says that will involve some form of molten salt that will store PowerDish-generated heat that can be released to drive the Stirling engine when the sun is not shining.

    Adding storage to a solar power plant also increases its cost — the more hours you want to run a solar farm, the more storage you need — and Sitton says the key is balancing that capacity with the demand on the grid.

    “We can do a 15-minute system, a one-hour system, and, with the latest award, we can do baseload — 12 hours,” says Sitton. “I don’t think the market particularly needs that — taking a peak solar resource and trying to deliver it at midnight.”

    Rather than allowing a solar power plant to operate around the clock, the real benefit of energy storage, he says, will be to transform solar power plants into a consistent and reliable source of electricity for grid operators.

    In other words, when clouds or other weather conditions cause electricity production to dip, storage systems can release heat to keep the power flowing smoothly to the grid. That enhances the overall reliability of the renewable energy grid and in turn increases the value of solar farms to grid operators.

    And just 15 minutes of stored production could make a world of difference, according to Sitton.

    “Fifteen minutes is a real differentiator as grid operators can count on the solar resource to be there,” he says. “If you go talk to the grid operators in Spain, they’ll tell you they’ve got some headaches due to high penetration of wind — the episodic nature of the wind resource drives them a bit batty.”

    Storage also could give solar thermal technology an edge over increasingly popular photovoltaic farms, which use semiconducting materials like silicon to convert sunlight directly into electricity but do not generate heat. The only current way to store electricity generated from PV power plants is batteries — an astronomically expensive proposition.

    As solar cell prices have plummeted over the past year and some solar thermal power plant projects planned for the Mojave Desert remain bogged down in environmental disputes, California utilities have been signing ever-larger deals for photovoltaic power.

    Energy storage for solar thermal plants would help balance the solar grid.

    So, does that mean there’s no place for solar power plants that can operate 12 or 18 hours a day? Not at all. As the grid becomes more decentralized with the addition of electric cars, rooftop solar arrays, small-scale wind turbines, and other sources of renewable energy, being able to balance supply and demand will become more important than ever.

    And in some hot regions of the country where demand peaks later in the day as everyone turns on their air conditioners upon returning home from work, such solar farms could replace so-called peaking fossil-fuel power plants that sit idle for most of the year at great expense. (Andrew Tang, a PG&E executive, recently told me that some of his utility’s peaking plants operate only 50 hours a year.)

    But there should be no illusion that even round-the-clock solar farms alone will send coal-fired plants to the fossil-fuel bin of history. In the United States, solar thermal power plants are mainly limited to the desert Southwest, a region that receives strong direct sunlight. They are not feasible in the coal-dependent Midwest and East. Still, the Southwest currently relies heavily on coal and will need to find alternatives if significant climate change legislation is ever enacted. (Even California, which does not operate coal-fired plants, imports out-of-state dirty power to meet 20 percent of its electricity demand. Under current law, it will have to replace those imports with green energy.)

    And there’s no shortage of interest by companies seeking to devise energy storage solutions. eSolar, for instance, scored $10.8 million to pursue a new power plant design.

    Bill Gross of eSolar told me the startup wasn’t yet ready to talk in detail about that project, but DOE described the technology this way: “Instead of one central tower and receiver, the plant will employ multiple, modular towers. Using reflective mirrors, the sun’s radiation will heat a liquid salt within each receiver. A specialized molten salt transport system will then move the high-temperature fluid to a molten-salt steam generator that produces electricity.”

    Abengoa Solar, the U.S. arm of the Spanish renewable energy company, will also pursue molten salt technology with its $10.6 million grant. Rocketdyne, the United Technologies subsidiary that pioneered molten salt technology and which licenses it to Santa Monica startup SolarReserve, received $10.2 million to develop a next-gen version.

    The DOE also is funding feasibility studies of more cutting-edge technologies, such as storing energy in solid modular blocks.

    And a company called Terrafore, based in Riverside, Calif., will develop a storage system that “takes advantage of the energy that is transferred when materials melt and solidify.”

    Talk about a hot technology.

    Todd Woody covers green technology and the environment from Berkeley, where he’s a contributing editor at Fortune Magazine and writes his Green Wombat blog. He’s one of the few people on the planet who has seen the rare northern hairy-nosed wombat in the wild.