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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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  • Democrats confident as US climate change bill vote looms

     

     

    After weeks of attack from Republicans, the energy reform package got an important boost yesterday when its most formidable opponent in Congress – the Democratic chair of the house agricultural committee – said he would now push for its passage.

     

    “We think we have something here now that can work with agriculture,” Collin Peterson, who led the Democratic opposition to the bill, told a conference call yesterday. “I think we will be able to get the votes to pass this.”

     

    Within the White House and in Congress, the vote is seen as a historic moment, both for Obama’s political agenda and international efforts to reach a climate change treaty at Copenhagen at the end of the year.

     

    “This legislation is a game changer of historic proportions,” said Ed Markey, the Massachusetts Democrat who is one of the authors of the bill. “The whole world is waiting to see if Barack Obama can arrive in Copenhagen as a leader of attempts to reduce green house gas emissions.”

     

    The importance of the bill was underlined by the deep involvement from the White House. Obama earlier this week urged Congress to pass the bill, and aides have been closely involved in efforts to reach yesterday’s compromise. The Democratic House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, took a gamble on moving up the date for a vote on the bill to tomorrow.

     

    The gamble appeared to have paid off, with the Democratic leadership putting on a high-profile meeting yesterday with environmental, labour, war veterans and religious groups to talk up the bill’s prospects.

     

    “We are going to get this done,” said Chris van Hollen, a member of the Democratic leadership in the house of representatives. “It’s long overdue.”

     

    The bill, now swollen to about 1,200 pages, would bind the US to reduce the carbon emissions from burning oil and coal by 17% from 2005 levels by 2020 and more than 80% by 2050.

     

    It also envisages a range of measures to promote clean energy – from a development bank for new technology to new, greener building codes and targets for expanding the use of solar and wind power.

     

    The Democratic leadership is now hoping to pass the bill by a comfortable margin. Some environmental organisations have suggested that the bill might even win over a small number of Republicans, which would mean an important victory for Obama.

     

    For the most part, however, Republicans have almost uniformly opposed the bill, and say it amounts to a hidden energy tax. They have also argued that the bill would drastically raise electricity prices – a claim debunked with the release of a cost-analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office showing it would cost the average family $175 (£107) by 2020, and would save poor families about $40.

     

    The study – together with the compromises won by Peterson – have made the bill more palatable to Democrats from coal and oil states and from the old manufacturing areas.

     

    “We have been taking people out of the ‘no’ column, into the ‘undecided’ column, into the ‘yes’ column,” said Mike Doyle, a Democratic member from a former steel industry town in Pennsylvania. “The momentum is coming to ‘yes’.”

     

    But Peterson’s support appears to have come only after wringing a number of key concessions on the bill over several days of bargaining, overseen by the White House energy and climate advisor, Carol Browner, and other Obama administration officials.

     

    The most significant concession would give the US Department of Agriculture – and not the Environmental Protection Agency – control over a programme that would reward farmers for practices that reduce carbon emissions.

     

    Peterson also forced a four-year delay in a separate environmental regulation that would have cut the profits of corn-based ethanol, and encouraged the development of non-food biofuels instead.

     

    Those concessions have deepened the concerns of some environmental organisations that the bill is not aggressive enough in cutting emissions. However, Henry Waxman, who has been leading the bill through Congress, argued that the most important element of the bill had come through the hard bargaining process intact.

     

     

    “We have not given away the essentials of the bill because the essentials are the reduction of carbon emissions,” he said.

  • Australia filthiest place in the world to make aluminium

    Even putting aside all the obvious arguments that we cannot eat coal, and that food security is a paramount responsibility of government, John Kaye said that the figures about export earnings are dubious. He pointed out that while the coal industry might earn revenues equivalent to one tenth of the total national export income, a lot of that money goes straight overseas to foreign shareholders. “The money from coal that goes into the national economy is a fraction of the revenues earned by the industry as a whole,” he said.

    He also pointed out that the money spent in the production of minerals might contribute to the economy but it is not necessarily good for the nation, either economically or environmentally. He said that this is most clearly illustrated by the aluminium industry. Aluminium is manufactured by running electric currents through aluminium oxide to separate the raw metal. It has been described by scientists, politicians and industrial engineers as “bottled electricity”. An act of the NSW parliament makes it illegal for anyone to divulge the price paid by the aluminium companies for their electricity, but it is widely believed to be around three cents per kilowatt hour. Householders pay between 40 and 50 cents per kilowatt hour. Ordinary householders, then, subsidise the production of aluminium in this state.

    On top of that the State governments in Victoria, NSW and Queensland have provided massive cash payments to the multinational companies on a number of occasions. As part of the proposed Carbon Pollution Reward Scheme, the Federal government is proposing to give the aluminium companies over $600million dollars each year to compensate them for producing the 20million tonnes of carbon dioxide they pump into the atmosphere. Otherwise, the aluminium companies have threatened to move offshore.

    “We should let them go,” Dr Kaye said. He points out that the $200,000 per employee in the aluminium industry would be better spent on retraining and equipping those workers to produce renewable energy technology that we could use domestically and export. He also said that the government encourages the assumption that sending an industry like this offshore would be bad for the environment because other countries are not as tightly regulated as Australia. “It is simply not true,” he said. “NSW is the second dirtiest place in the world to make aluminium because of our reliance on coal fired electricity.” He said that China, Rumania or Brazil would be cleaner because everywhere else in the world has a better mix of renewable energy than Australia. “The only place in the world that is dirtier than NSW is Victoria,” he concluded.

    Extracted from an interview with John Kaye by Giovanni Ebono for The Generator. Watch or listen to the interview at www.thegenerator.com.au

  • Scottish parliament agrees tougher 42% target to cut emissions

     

    The measures are tougher than the 34% target set in the UK government’s climate change act last year, which has no statutory annual targets. In common with UK government aspirations, the new act also commits Scotland to an 80% reduction on 1990 levels by 2050.

    The campaign coalition Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, which claims its 60 member organisations represent two million people, said this “hugely significant” vote set a new “moral” standard for the rest of the industrialised world.

    It comes the day after the US stated that a 40% cut by 2020 was “not on the cards”: developing nations have demanded this level of cut from rich nations.

    Kim Carstensen, head of WWF International’s global climate initiative, said: “At least one nation is prepared to aim for climate legislation that follows the science. Scotland made the first step to show others that it can be done. We now need others to follow.”

    However, the new measures are already under intense scrutiny. The act allows ministers to reduce the target later this year if the UK government’s advisory panel on climate change says it is unrealistic, or the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen in December fails to agree on a global deal to replace Kyoto.

    Environment groups are critical of the Scottish government’s refusal to abandon road, bridge and airport expansion programmes, its plans for a new coal-fired power station, and its unwillingness to tackle directly increasing car use.

    Furthermore, Scottish ministers only directly control about 30% of Scotland’s total annual emissions of 68m tonnes of CO2 – which only equates to a 700th of the world’s emissions. Most significant policies are controlled in Brussels and London, critics point out.

    About 40% is covered by the European Union carbon emissions trading agreement, while the UK government has policy responsibilities for a further 30% of Scotland’s emissions. That includes fuel taxation, low emission vehicles, VAT on energy efficiency and air taxes.

    The Committee on Climate Change, the panel set up to advise Gordon Brown’s government, has warned Salmond that Scotland is effectively jumping the gun by setting a 42% target in advance of a deal at Copenhagen.

    In a letter to Stewart Stevenson, the Scottish climate change minister, the committee’s chief executive, David Kennedy, said it believes Scotland should follow the UK strategy of waiting until the Copenhagen conference.

    If a deal is reached, it should follow the UK government’s lead and only then set a 42% target.

    The Scottish government had also increased the pressure on itself by including emissions from international aviation and shipping in its target, Kennedy wrote, even though it has no control over policy for these sectors.

    “I would therefore consider that an appropriate Scottish 2020 target could be set slightly below 34% to account for different treatments of international aviation under UK and Scottish approaches.”

     

    Despite these criticisms, the chairman of Stop Climate Chaos Scotland, Mike Robinson, said the significance of the all-party consensus could not be underestimated.

    “It means Scotland’s climate change bill has the toughest target of any industrialised nation in the world and will be held up as an example, ahead of the climate talks in Copenhagen in December, of what can and should be done,” he said.

    “This is a moral commitment and we hope other developed nations will hear this call for action and follow Scotland’s lead.”

    Although on renewable energy the Scottish National party is very likely to surpass its ambitious targets to deliver half of Scotland’s electricity from renewables by 2020, ministers have failed to embark on any politically unpopular measures to combat car use or the growth in short-haul aviation.

    It has authorised a second road bridge over the Firth of Forth and abandoned bridge tolls, paid to extend the M74 motorway, supports a new ring road around Aberdeen and dualing the A9 and wants a major new coal-fired power station.

    Its most ambitious emissions-reduction policies, such as using carbon capture for all fossil fuel power stations, using marine energy, and a wholesale switch to green transport, either have targets set at 2030 or are largely UK-government controlled. The SNP has also completely ruled out any new nuclear power stations.

  • John Kaye outlines Green economy

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    Article about John
    Giovanni on whether a Green economy is possible
    APN column
     

  • What is a Green economy anyway?

    Related articles:
    Giovanni’s article on whether a Green economy is possible
    Dr John Kaye interview
    APN column
     

  • Getting the green message across

    Among environmentalists the preoccupation has shifted away from scare tactics (although it was shock advertising which helped change attitudes to smoking) to trying to find ways to seduce consumers into dramatically changing their behaviour.

    Caroline Lucas of the Green party talks of an urgent need to describe a low carbon future which is not about sitting around flickering candles in caves. What results from this kind of discussion is what the Sustainability Development Commission calls “alternative hedonism”. It amounts to a kind of green communitarianism of shared local vegetable plots. It’s homely, collaborative, local – very appealing if you are that way inclined and have always had a sneaking affection for patchouli and flower power.

    One environmentalist described the low-carbon future as the 1950s standard of living but with better healthcare and the internet. Forget cars, foreign holidays, much less advertising (if any). That could be appealing if you have a puritanical, ascetic streak.

    These options for the future are helpful – they give us hints of where we might be going. But still the gulf between now – the Jeremy Clarkson mentality of petrol guzzling glamour and Paris Hilton obsessive consumer disorder – and there seems to yawn even wider. And the rhetoric reflects that. We need a “mass epiphany” or a “moral renaissance” said different speakers in the course of a conference by Surrey University’s Resolve programme of research on environmental attitudes. This is a huge task – when in history have values changed dramatically? And how did it happen? And if there is a feedback system so deeply entrenched – advertising encouraging, stimulating consumer behaviour which is environmentally damaging – how do you break through its insistent messaging with a radical challenge?

    Increasingly, the environmental movement seem to be looking to social psychology to provide insight into how you change a value system. What are the levers in a personal psyche which can be pulled which could prompt this revolution in values? What comes out of the research of people like Tim Kasser is that the more materialistic you are, the less happy you are. But the task to persuade millions of people that they might be happy – perhaps even happier – in a 50s-style economy is a tall order.

    Where it ends in deadlock is that the politicians – for example Ed Miliband – say they need a mass climate change movement to help provide the political space for them to introduce radical policy. While on the other hand, the environmental organisations feel the politicians are passing the buck, refusing to take leadership on the difficult decisions which might restrict consumer choice or even challenge the assumptions of a consumer economy.

    The priority of the government is getting the economy back on track – getting everyone back in the shopping malls, spending and piling up the debt. There seems no other model for economic growth on offer from Westminster. So while the government can take some credit for pioneering a Climate Change Act, carbon budgets and demanding targets for cutting carbon, those actions are undermined by their preoccupation with getting out of the recession as quickly as possible. The value shift required is not going to be led from Westminster.