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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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  • Global warming could create 150 ‘climate refugees’ by 2050

     

     

     

    Nasheed urged governments to find ways to keep temperature rises caused by warming under 2C. “We won’t be around for anything after 2C,” he said. “We are just 1.5m over sea level and anything over that, any rise in sea level – anything even near that – would wipe off the Maldives. People are having to move their homes because of erosion. We’ve already this year had problems with two islands and we are having to move them to other islands. We have a right to live.”

     

    Last month, the president held a cabinet meeting underwater to draw attention to the plight of his country.

     

     

     

     

    The EJF claimed 500 million to 600 million people – nearly 10% of the world’s population – are at risk from displacement by climate change. Around 26 million have already had to move, a figure that the EJF predicts could grow to 150 million by 2050. “The majority of these people are likely to be internally displaced, migrating only within a short radius from their homes. Relatively few will migrate internationally to permanently resettle in other countries,” said the report’s authors.

     

     

    In the longer term, the report said, changes to weather patterns will lead to various problems, including desertification and sea-level rises that threaten to inundate low-lying areas and small island developing states. An expert at the Institute for Sustainable Development and International Relations in Paris recently said global warming could create “ghost states” with citizens living in “virtual states” due to land lost to rising seas.

     

    The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) predicts sea-level rise in the range of 18-59cm during the 21st century. Nearly one-third of coastal countries have more than 10% of their national land within 5 metres of sea level. Countries liable to lose all or a significant part of their land in the next 50 years, said the EJF report, include Tuvalu, Fiji, the Solomon islands, the Marshall islands, the Maldives and some of the Lesser Antilles.

     

    Many other countries, including Bangladesh, Kenya, Papua New Guinea, Somalia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Chad and Rwanda, could see large movements of people. Bangladesh has had 70 climate-related natural disasters in the past 10 years.

     

     

    “Climate change impacts on homes and infrastructure, food and water and human health. It will bring about a forced migration on an unprecedented scale,” said the EJF director, Steve Trent. “We must take immediate steps to reduce our impact on global climate, and we must also recognise the need to protect those already suffering along with those most at risk.”

     

    He called for a new international agreement to address the scale and human cost of climate change. “The formal legal definition of refugees needs to be extended to include those affected by climate change and also internally displaced persons,” he said.

  • Carbon markets not working, says Deutsche Bank

    Carbon markets not working, says Deutsche Bank

    Ecologist

    2nd November, 2009

    Carbon markets are not working and UK and US government policy is not encouraging investment in renewable energy, says a leading bank

    A report from Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management division (DeAM) says that the carbon market is not likely to contribute to significantly cutting emissions, ‘for the foreseeable future.’

    It says that governments should focus on introducing stronger incentives like feed-in tariffs if they want to meet emission reduction targets by 2020.

    ‘What investors want is Transparency, Longevity and Certainty – “TLC” – in policy regimes to mobilise capital,’ said Kevin Parker, Head of DeAM.

    ‘Many major emitters such as the US and the UK do not have enough “TLC” in their policy frameworks.

    ‘Our rankings show that China has a lower risk for climate change investors, as does Germany, but the research also shows that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, all countries will have to do more to encourage investment.’

    Carbon markets

    Looking specifically at the carbon markets, the Bank’s report says:

    • Free allocations of carbon credits tend to create market distortions. Therefore, allowances should be auctioned to covered entities so that prices are determined on the basis of fundamental supply and demand.

     

    • On short-term market intervention (i.e. keeping carbon price high), periods of high volatility and low liquidity can discourage investments in clean technologies.

     

    • On offsets, the provision of domestic and international offsets will encourage entities outside the trading system to undertake projects – and potentially programs of work – that reduce emissions.

     

    • On investment in clean technologies, the proceeds of allowance auctioning should be used by government to provide financial incentives that promote investments in renewable energy and other clean technologies integral to a low carbon economy. Interventions that reduce risk for clean technology projects, such as feed-in tariffs or loan guarantees, are particularly attractive.

    Useful links
    Deutsche Bank report

      READ MORE…
    INVESTIGATION
    Carbon Trading and the limits of free-market logic
    Carbon trading, its backers claim, brings emissions reductions and supports sustainable development in the global south. But, argues Kevin Smith, it may do neither, and is harming efforts to create a low-carbon economy

  • Climate expert Clive Splash ‘ heavied’ by CSIRO management

     

    Dr Spash said he believed the letter was intended to, and did, intimidate him and denied him due process. None of the matters were raised with him prior to the letter being sent and each of the alleged misdemeanours could be explained.

    “We are not members of the Defence Department, we are scientists who are supposed to be discussing research in an open forum. How do you advance knowledge if you stop people from publishing their work?

    “I am totally happy to have my work criticised and debated but I’m not happy to have it suppressed.”

    Dr Spash said it was impossible to publish research in his field that did not have an impact on government policy. “The idea that you cannot discuss something like ETS policy when you’re working on climate change as a political economist seems ridiculous,” he said.

    The gagging of Dr Spash’s work is embarrassing for Science Minister Kim Carr, who defended academic freedoms in opposition and last year trumpeted a new CSIRO charter he said would give scientists the right to speak publicly about their findings.

    Yesterday, Senator Carr told The Australian he supported the publication of peer-reviewed research, even if it had negative implications for government policy. He said he had not tried to gag the research.

    Last night CSIRO chief executive Megan Clark said the organisation would work with Dr Spash on his paper.

    “There is some important science in the paper and we will now work with Dr Spash to ensure the paper meets CSIRO internal review standards and the guidelines of the Public Research Agency Charter between the CSIRO and the federal government,” she said.

    “I encourage CSIRO scientists to communicate the outcomes and implications of their work and one of the underlying core values of CSIRO is the integrity of our excellent science.

  • Why growing virgin vegetable oil to burn is crazy

     

    But Andrew Mercer, chief executive of Blue-NG, the company which owns the UK’s first power station running on vegetable oil, appears to believe that he is doing the world a favour.

    In arguing the case for his grotesque trade, Mercer begins by maligning the Green party. He contends that “The Green party toured the country this summer during the European elections campaign in a bus fuelled by UK-sourced rapeseed biodiesel”. Because this is a less efficient use of virgin rapeseed oil than burning it in power stations, he is greener than the Greens (or so he says). That someone else has allegedly done something even more damaging is hardly a persuasive justification. But is it true?

    I spoke to the Green party this morning, and discovered that Mercer had left out a crucial piece of information. The biodiesel used in its bus was made from waste cooking oil, not virgin oil. As I’ve been arguing since I first started attacking the practice of feeding cars rather than people, used cooking oil is currently the only sustainable feedstock for biofuel: once it is unfit for human consumption it can only be dumped or burned. It makes sense to burn it in place of fossil fuels. The Green party has now published a response in the comment thread and is requesting a correction.

    Burning virgin vegetable oil is an entirely different matter. In doing so, you are directly commissioning farmers to do one of two things: divert cropland which would otherwise have been used to grow food, or break land which would otherwise have been left fallow. In either case you are harming people or the environment.

    Mercer says: “There are millions of hectares of land lying idle across the EU”. Another way of putting it is that there are millions of hectares currently supporting wildlife and storing carbon. If farmers bring them back into production to fuel power stations like his, there would be dire consequences for wildflowers, butterflies, songbirds and other wildlife. Were it a choice between preserving this wildlife and feeding the hungry, I could understand the need for a pay-off. But the only reason that it’s commercially viable to burn virgin vegetable oil in power stations in this country is that the government is perversely offering a massive subsidy. It gives generators two renewable obligation certificates for every megawatt hour of electricity they produce, which is twice as much as you get for onshore wind. I refuse to accept that the EU’s wildlife must be sacrificed for what looks like a grant-harvesting operation.

    As two papers published last year in Science show (here and here), the carbon released by ploughing idle farmland to grow biofuels takes many years to repay. If we’re to have a high chance of preventing climate breakdown, the major cuts must be made today, so this policy makes no sense at all.

    When you consider the other greenhouse gases produced by growing crops it looks even dafter. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has estimated that emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas arising from the use of nitrogen fertilisers – wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels produce (pdf), even before you take the changes in land use into account. It’s significant that Andrew Mercer talks only about CO2. Even then he doesn’t say how he has produced his figures – I strongly suspect that he doesn’t take land use change into account. Were he obliged to consider all greenhouse gases from all sources, I suspect he would discover that burning virgin vegetable oil is far more polluting than burning fossil fuel.

    Mercer then contends that oilseed rape is roughly the same price as it was 10 years ago. This isn’t true either, as you can see from the IMF figures reproduced here. In October 1999, oilseed rape cost $398/tonne. Last month the average price was $857. Prices this year have consistently been about twice those of prices ten years ago. The idea that oilseed rape is just a “break crop” is risible. It is a major international commodity, grown because it makes money.

    The notion that you can draw any conclusions about commodity trends from a single year’s production in one small country is equally daft. It’s as stupid as saying, for example, that a cold snap in the United Kingdom shows that global warming isn’t happening. And no one would be dumb enough to do that, would they?

    The reality is that whenever there’s a global shortfall in rape production, as there was last year, palm oil helps to fill the gap. Compare this graph of palm oil prices to this one of rape oil prices and you’ll see that the price trends are almost identical.

    So while Mercer boasts that he is not burning palm oil in his power station, whenever his trade helps to cause a shortfall in rapeseed stocks, the result is likely to be an increase in the sales of palm oil. Growing rapeseed to burn is crazy, growing oil palm to fill the gaps is madness on a different scale altogether, in view of the massive impacts on climate, indigenous people and wildlife when the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are cleared to plant it.

    Like Biofuelwatch and other green groups, I will keep putting pressure on the government to drop its perverse subsidies. I’m offering Andrew Mercer a £10 bet that if we succeed, Blue-NG will stop burning virgin vegetable oils. This is what happened in the Netherlands: as soon as the Dutch government stopped paying companies to make electricity from food, the business ground to a halt. Let’s bring this obscene, subsidised trade to an end here too.

    Monbiot.com

  • Copenhagen is only the start of climate change

     

    Only then, say scientists, will it be possible to prevent global temperatures from rising by 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. This figure, they argue, is the maximum warming that our planet can tolerate. If we go beyond it, we will face global calamity in the form of spreading deserts, increasingly violent storms, destruction of swaths of farmland, flooding and widespread loss of life. It is a grim list, one that should guarantee delegates give maximum concentration to their work in Copenhagen. This is their last chance, if not to save the world, then at least to prevent major losses of life later in the century. Failure should not be an option.

    Yet there are now signs that a deal which would tie every nation on Earth to a declared cut in their carbon emissions, and which would do so much to tackle global warming, will not be achieved.

    Despite the urgency of negotiators’ work and despite the fact they have been meeting regularly for the past two years in order to prepare for this summit, most observers now believe it is unlikely that a strong, ratifiable agreement will be signed on 18 December, the meeting’s final day.

    A key problem has been the failure of Barack Obama’s administration to pass a climate change bill in time for Copenhagen. This has left the US, the world’s major carbon emitter, unable to participate meaningfully in discussions. Without an American lead, not much can be achieved, it is argued. Thus the talk is of squandered opportunities instead of expectations of breakthroughs. Agreeing long-term global deals is simply beyond human nature, suggest the sceptics, obsessed as we are with our own local, short-term concerns.

    Politicians have known for a long time that this day was approaching and should have realised they would have to sit down to work out a meaningful agreement. However, it would be premature to suggest that everything that has happened over the past two years has been a waste of time and to dismiss, out of hand, the talks that will take place in Copenhagen – no matter how unsatisfactory they turn out to be. Much has happened in the run-up to the summit to indicate there is sufficient goodwill in the political system to tackle the crisis posed by global warming – if not at Copenhagen then in the following months and years.

    China, once the most difficult nation to convince about the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, has pledged that it will make “substantial reductions” in its citizens’ individual carbon output. Countries such as Indonesia and Norway, as well as the European Union, have promised to make tight, binding cuts. Europe has also proposed to make significant contributions to a £90bn a year fund that would help developing countries cut their carbon emissions while the US has begun a process that should lead it to establish carbon emission legislation.

    A few years ago, such progress would have seen improbable. Today, it is a reality. The world may not get a good global warming deal from the Copenhagen summit, but enough has been gained in its preparations to suggest that a binding agreement will eventually be signed. Whether that can be done in time to halt the worst effects of climate change is a different issue.

  • World leaders accused of Myopia over climate change deal

     

    Senior officials and negotiators are increasingly gloomy about the prospects for a global warming deal next month, with the British government admitting there is now no chance of a legally binding treaty.

    Speaking as officials gather in Barcelona tomorrow for a final round of negotiations, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: “I gave all the world’s leaders a very grim view of what the science tells us and that is what should be motivating us all, but I’m afraid I don’t see too much evidence of that at the current stage.

    “Science has been moved aside and the space has been filled up with political myopia with every country now trying to protect its own narrow short-term interests. They are afraid to have negotiations go any further because they would have to compromise on those interests.”

    British officials say the negotiations have been progressing too slowly, and the best Copenhagen can achieve is a “politically binding” agreement. But they insist this does not represent a lowering of ambition for the talks, and say a political deal would still be a major achievement.

    “Nobody thinks we will get a full treaty,” said a spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. “Copenhagen must deliver a comprehensive politically binding agreement … This must cover all the major issues including binding economy-wide emissions reductions from developed countries, significant action from developing countries to slow their emissions growth, and finance. Only this can deliver a legally binding treaty which puts the world on a trajectory to a maximum global average temperature increase of two degrees and provides a fair deal for developing countries.”

    In an apparent effort to lower expectations ahead of Copenhagen, billed by Gordon Brown as the world’s last chance to prevent “catastrophic” climate change, senior figures are playing down the chances of producing a binding treaty.

    Yvo de Boer, the UN’s most senior climate official, said last week: “It is physically impossible, under any scenario, to complete every detail of a treaty in Copenhagen.” He added: “It is absolutely clear that Copenhagen must deliver a strong political agreement and nail down the essentials.”

    Lars Løkke Rasmussen, prime minister of Denmark, said: “We do not think it will be possible to decide all the finer details for a legally binding regime.”

    Hanne Bjurstroem, Norwegian cabinet minister and chief climate negotiator, told Reuters: “I don’t believe we will get a full, ratifiable, legally binding agreement from Copenhagen.”

    De Boer pointed out that the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the world’s existing treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, took several years to finalise and to come into force.

    Pachauri said although negotiations had not moved far and many leaders are playing down expectations, he has not given up on an agreement. “My feeling is leaders don’t want to be left with the responsibility for any possible failures so they are hedging their bets. They are downplaying expectations because if we don’t get an agreement that reaches people’s expectation, there will be a lot of finger-pointing,” he said.

    On current trends, he warned global temperatures are on course to reach the high end of the IPCC forecast of 6.4C by 2100 with dire consequences for social stability, food production and health.

    The Nobel prize winner co-ordinated 1,250 of the world’s leading scientists and 2,500 reviewers to draw up an IPCC report in 2007 that asserted climate change was a fact and all but certainly caused by carbon emissions from human activity. He said: “It is a fact that unfortunately negotiations haven’t moved very far, but that is not a major indicator of lack of progress because this is the way negotiations go. Often these things fall into place two minutes before the midnight hour. I am cautiously optimistic.”

    Pachauri said that a six-month or one-year delay in the search for a deal was not the worst outcome. “This is certainly not desirable, but if it meant a stronger agreement that addressed the seriousness of the problem, it may not be that bad.”