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The Generator news service publishes articles on sustainable development, agriculture and energy as well as observations on current affairs. The news service is used on the weekly radio show, The Generator, as well as by a number of monthly and quarterly magazines. A podcast of the Generator news is also available.
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  • US puts climate debate on hold for five weeks despite plea by Merkel

     

    The delay, which would push a Senate vote on a climate change bill into next year, frustrates a last-minute push by the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, to get America to commit itself at home to cut greenhouse gas emissions before the Copenhagen meeting. World leaders – and US officials – have repeatedly said US legislation is crucial to a deal on global warming.

    Merkel used a historic address to a joint session of Congress today to urge America to act on climate change, stating that success at Copenhagen rested on the willingness of all countries to accept binding reductions in carbon emissions.

    The first German leader to ever address both houses of Congress, Merkel said a deal was comparable in importance to the tearing down of the Berlin wall 20 years ago. “We need the readiness of all countries to accept internationally binding obligations,” she said to loud applause from Democrats. Republicans largely sat in silence. “There is no doubt about it. In December, the world will look to us: the Europeans and the Americans. I am convinced once we … show ourselves ready to adopt binding agreements we will also be able to persuade China and India.”

    Merkel also raised her concerns with Barack Obama in a visit to the White House earlier today. He told reporters: “Chancellor Merkel has been an extraordinary leader on the issue of climate change. And the US, Germany, and countries around the world are all beginning to recognise why it is so important that we work in common to stem the potential catastrophe that could result if we see global warming continuing unabated.”

    Ban is also pressing the Senate to act before Copenhagen. Speaking in London, he said he would next week meet all the US senators involved in the deliberations over the energy and climate bill. Agreement on that bill is seen as vital: without it, the US team in Copenhagen will have little domestic mandate to agree a deal. The announcement of the personal intervention of the UN secretary general is a clear sign of the importance of the matter.

    However, the appeals for urgent action were overridden by political concerns in the Senate, which formally began debate on a proposed climate change law last week. The House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate change bill in June. But the Senate version has been repeatedly delayed, first by the battle over healthcare reform and now by Republican demands for more time to study the proposals.

    In a move to stem the Republican protest, and quieten Democrat critics, the Democratic leader in the Senate, Harry Reid, said he would ask the Environmental Protection Agency to spend five weeks reviewing the potential costs of the bill. Opponents of the proposal argue the target of a 20% cut in emissions on 2005 levels by 2020 is overly ambitious, and will be too costly for US businesses and families.

    The five-week delay would all but rule out passage of a bill before the Copenhagen meeting begins on 7 December.

    The president of the European commission, José Manuel Barroso, acknowledged progress before the Copenhagen meeting was likely to be limited: “Of course we are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty, Kyoto-type, by Copenhagen,” he told reporters today, before meeting Obama. “There is no time for that.”

    Ban also pressed another key component to a deal: climate finance. He said countries would have to increase the $100bn (£61bn) a year on offer for developing countries to deal with climate change. “Financial support is the key,” said Ban. “I think this can be a good start, which needs to be scaled up as we go on.”

    Development groups have estimated the money needed at up to $400bn a year. But the amount was uncertain, Ban said: “We have to see how measures are effective. As time goes by we may need to change arrangements.”

    Ban’s senior climate adviser, Janos Pasztor, added: “The needs are obviously much larger over time and [the funding] will need to be scaled up.”Developing countries are demanding significant new funding at the climate negotiations, which are continuing this week in Barcelona, and deep cuts in rich countries’ emissions in exchange for pledges to curb their own emissions. Problems in the talks erupted in public today with African nations boycotting meetings, forcing their cancellation. They want rich nations to promise much bigger cuts in their emissions than they have so far, arguing that African countries will suffer most from global warming, yet are least responsible.

  • We only have months, not years, to save civilisation from climate change

     

     

    And second, since it takes years to negotiate and ratify these agreements, we may simply run out of time. This is not to say that we should not participate in the negotiations and work hard to get the best possible result. But we should not rely on these agreements to save civilisation.

     

    Saving civilisation is going to require an enormous effort to cut carbon emissions. The good news is that we can do this with current technologies, which I detail in my book, Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

     

    Plan B aims to stabilise climate, stabilise population, eradicate poverty, and restore the economy’s natural support systems. It prescribes a worldwide cut in net carbon emissions of 80% by 2020, thus keeping atmospheric CO2 concentrations from exceeding 400 parts per million (ppm) in an attempt to hold temperature rise to a minimum. The eventual plan would be to return concentrations to 350 ppm, as agreed by the top US climate scientist at Nasa, James Hansen, and Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC.

     

    In setting this goal we did not ask what would be politically popular, but rather what it would take to have a decent shot at saving the Greenland ice sheet and at least the larger glaciers in the mountains of Asia. By default, this is a question of food security for us all.

     

    Fortunately for us, renewable energy is expanding at a rate and on a scale that we could not have imagined even a year ago. In the United States, a powerful grassroots movement opposing new coal-fired power plants has led to a de facto moratorium on their construction. This movement was not directly concerned with international negotiations. At no point did the leaders of this movement say that they wanted to ban new coal-fired power plants only if Europe does, if China does, or if the rest of the world does. They moved ahead unilaterally knowing that if the United States does not quickly cut carbon emissions, the world will be in trouble.

     

    For clean and abundant wind power, the US state of Texas (long the country’s leading oil producer) now has 8,000MW of wind generating capacity in operation, 1,000MW under construction, and a huge amount in development that together will give it more than 50,000MWof wind generating capacity (think 50 coal-fired power plants). This will more than satisfy the residential needs of the state’s 24 million people.

     

    And though many are quick to point a finger at China for building a new coal-fired power plant every week or so, it is working on six wind farm mega-complexes with a total generating capacity of 105,000 megawatts. This is in addition to the many average-sized wind farms already in operation and under construction.

     

    Solar is now the fastest growing source of energy. A consortium of European corporations and investment banks has announced a proposal to develop a massive amount of solar thermal generating capacity in north Africa, much of it for export to Europe. In total, it could economically supply half of Europe’s electricity.

     

    We could cite many more examples. The main point is that the energy transition from fossil fuels to renewables is moving much faster than most people realise, and it can be accelerated.

     

    The challenge is how to do it quickly. The answer is a wartime mobilisation, not unlike the US effort on the country’s entry into the second world war, when it restructured its industrial economy not in a matter of decades or years, but in a matter of months. We don’t know exactly how much time remains for such an effort, but we do know that time is running out. Nature is the timekeeper but we cannot see the clock.

    • Lester R Brown is president of Earth Policy Institute and author of Plan B 4.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization.

  • Kilimanjaro ice could vanish within 20 years, study suggests

     

    A study comparing new measurements with those taken in 2000 show that a layer of ice between six and 17 feet thick has vanished from the summit since that time.

    Not only are the mountain’s glaciers retreating at an unprecedented rate, but its remaining ice is thinning.

    The researchers predict that if current conditions persist, the mountain could be ice-free as early as 2022.

    The Snows of Kilimanjaro will then exist only as a memory — and the title of a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

    Scientists made their forecast after combining data from aerial photographs and ground measurements of ice thickness.

    They found that the total area of Kilimanjaro’s ice fields had shrunk by nearly 85% between 1912 and 2007. More than a quarter of the ice present in 2000 was now gone.

    The team, led by Professor Lonnie Thompson, from Ohio State University in the US, pointed out that the snows had survived intact for 11,700 years.

    Even a 300-year-long drought around 4,200 years ago made little impact on the mountain’s ice fields.

    The chief cause of the current trend was likely to be a fundamental shift in climate, although local changes in cloud cover and snowfall may also be having an effect.

    Similar patterns had been seen elsewhere in Africa on Mount Kenya and the Rwenzori Mountains, as well as in the South American Andes and the Himalayas.

    “The fact that so many glaciers throughout the tropics and subtropics are showing similar responses suggests an underlying common cause,” said Thompson.

    “The increase of Earth’s near-surface temperatures, coupled with even greater increases in the mid-to-upper tropical troposphere (lower atmosphere), as documented in recent decades, would at least partially explain the observed widespread similarity in glacier behaviour.”

    One marker of ice loss on Kilimanjaro was the radioactive signature of fall-out from atomic tests carried out in the early 1950s.

    In 2000 the signal was detected 5.25 feet below the surface of the ice. Today, it is no longer there, showing that this depth of ice has been lost.

    The northern and southern ice fields on the summit of Kilimanjaro had thinned by 6.2 feet and 16.7 feet respectively, said the scientists.

    One of the mountain’s glaciers, the Furtwangler glacier, had lost half its thickness between 2000 and 2009.

    “In the future there will be a year when Furtwangler is present and by the next year it will have disappeared,” said Thompson, whose research appears in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. “The whole thing will be gone.”

  • African nations make a stand at UN climate talks

     

    The African countries were supported by all other developing country blocks at the talks. In a series of statements, the G77 plus China group of 130 nations, the Alliance of Small Island States (Aosis), the Least Developed Countries (LDC) group, as well as Bolivia and several Latin America countries, all broadly backed the African action.

    The move by developing countries reflects their deep and growing frustration over the slow progress that industrialised countries are making towards agreeing cuts. With less than three days full negotiating time left between now and the opening of the final talks at Copenhagen, the split between rich and poor countries threatens to blow the talks fatally off course.

    Bruno Sekoli, chair of the LDC group, said: “Africa and Africans are dying now while those who are historically responsible are not taking actions.”

    Algeria, which chairs the Africa group, backed by representatives from Gambia and Kenya, said rich countries were “more concerned with political and economic feasibility” while the poorest were “struggling to survive” with climate change.

    In a press conference, the poorest countries demanded that the rich adopt the science-backed target of a 40% overall cut on emissions on 1990 levels. So far, rich countries have pledged an aggregate of less than 10%. The US, the world’s second biggest polluter, has pledged to cut around 4% on 1990 levels, or 17% on 2005 levels.

    In some of the most frantic diplomacy seen in the talks so far, delegates to hurriedly agreed to dedicate six of the 10 remaining negotiating sessions to discussions on mid-term emissions reductions. The decision received widespread support from all developing countries who stressed the importance of delivering real progress.

    “African countries have shown they are not going to sit back and accept a bad deal in Copenhagen,” said a spokeswomen for Oxfam international.

    “The poorest countries say they are dying now and the rich are just sitting back doing nothing. Hopefully they will take action now,” said Asad Rehman, head of international climate with Friends of the Earth.

    “The world’s largest historical emitter, the US, is missing in action during the climate negotiations, on its targets, on its finance – and the developing world is rightfully calling them out on it,” said Greenpeace USA climate campaign director Damon Moglen.

    “It is clear that for many countries, enough is enough. The fact that this has come today from countries including Kenya, President Obama’s ancestral home, should be his wake-up call. Obama can no longer hide behind failed congressional legislation. He must provide ambitious, science-based emissions reductions targets and come to table in Copenhagen.”

    The talks, which are some of the most complex ever conducted, depend on all countries eventually agreeing to everything. They would be seriously jeopardised to the point of certain failure in Copenhagen next month if the African countries walk out again.

     

  • UK bans Malaysian palm oil advert

    UK bans Malaysian palm oil advert

    Ecologist

    3rd November, 2009

    Second advert from palm oil industry lobby group is banned for its sustainability claims

    A magazine advert that endorsed the sustainability of palm oil has been banned by the UK’s Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) for making unsubstantiated and untruthful claims.

    The advert, produced by the Malaysia Palm Oil Council (MPOC) and entitled ‘Palm Oil: The Green Answer’ addresses the criticisms levelled at the palm oil industry, including deforestation and unfair treatment of farmers and indigenous peoples.

    It states: ‘These allegations – protectionist agendas hidden under a thin veneer of environmental concern – are based neither on scientific evidence, nor, for that matter, on fact.’

    In banning the ad, the ASA said: ‘We considered that, in conjunction with claims such as “puts minimal strain on the environment”, readers would infer from the claim that palm oil was sustainable and would not have an adverse effect on the environment.’

    This is the second MPOC advertisement that has been banned by the ASA. The first was a television advert banned in its current form for similar reasons. 

    According to the Adjudication record of the advert on the ASA website, it ‘misleadingly [implied] that palm oil plantations were as biodiverse and [sustainable] as the native rainforests they replaced.’

    Useful links
    ASA ruling

  • Solar Industry Emerging from the Darkness

     

    This year, we may see around 350-400 MW of solar PV installations in the U.S. We’ll probably see another 150,000-200,000 square meters of solar thermal collectors, and around 5 MW of CSP. That’s just above last year’s overall installations. Even though we won’t see major growth like in previous years, the industry has held up well, considering the circumstances.

    It took the greatest economic crisis in 80 years just to slow the growth of the solar industry. It’s exciting to imagine what will happen next year when the credit markets are healthier, consumers have more purchasing power and we finally have a carbon-weighted policy in place.

    Our quick take: We are finally emerging from the darkness that descended upon us 12 months ago.