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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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  • Climate change biggest threat to health, doctors say

     

    “We have not just underestimated but completely neglected and ignored this issue,” said Richard Horton, editor of the Lancet, which published the report commissioned from University College London. “This has not been an issue on the agenda of any professional body in health in the last 10 years in any significant way. This report is one of the stepping stones in changing that culture within the health sector. It is the biggest employer in Britain and it should be a leading voice in the debate.”

    The lead author of the report, Prof Anthony Costello, a paediatrician who works on maternal and newborn health in the developing world, said his own views had changed. “I thought there were other priorities 18 months ago,” he said. Now he believed that mitigating the impact of rising temperatures was urgent. “Every year we delay, the costs go up. We are setting up a world for our children and grandchildren that may be extremely turbulent.”

    The biggest impact could be in food and water shortages, which in the past have led to war and mass migration.

    Prof Hugh Montgomery, of UCL’s institute for human health and performance, who was one of the report’s authors, noted that Mikhael Gorbachev had linked 21 recent conflicts to water instability.

    The report says that the poorest people in the world will be worst affected. Although the carbon footprint of the poorest billion people is about 3% of the world’s total footprint, loss of life is expected to be 500 times greater in Africa than in the wealthy countries.

    Despite improvements in health, 10 million children still die every year, more than 200 million children under five are not developing as well as they should, 800 million people are hungry, and 1,500 million people do not have clean drinking water. All those things could worsen very significantly, the report says.

    The impact of heatwaves, flooding and global food shortages will be felt in Britain too, the authors warned. “This is an immediate danger. It is going to affect you and it will certainly affect your children. While there is the injustice that the poorest will be worst affected, you will be affected too,” said Montgomery.

    The report says evidence on greenhouse gas emissions, temperature and sea-level rises, the melting of ice-sheets, ocean acidification and extreme climatic events suggests the forecasts by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007 might be too conservative. The UK target, to limit global warming to two degrees more, is unlikely to be achieved.

    Costello, however, said the message from the report was not entirely negative. “There is an awful lot we can do,” he said. Reducing carbon emissions would encourage people to cut use of vehicles, and if that led to more walking and cycling it would tend to lower stress levels, reduce obesity, and lessen heart disease, lung disease and stroke risks.

  • Green feed-tariff needs to maximise solar power

     

    For solar PV, the government has already come a long way from its dismissive treatment of the technology in the 2008 Renewable Energy Strategy consultation, and with good reason. Under the level playing field of the government’s own grants programme, for example, solar PV has been the technology of customer choice, accounting for 70% of completed projects to date.

    But currently, we are only scratching the surface of the potential of this technology in the UK. The absolute resource potential of solar PV is 460 terrawatt hours each year, more than current total demand for electricity in the UK. That message is beginning to get through to MPs and others, helped by the launch of the “We Support Solar” campaign, which is backed by the Federation of Master Builders, Friends of the Earth, RSPB, and more than 220 MPs.

    MPs and others now recognise one of the prizes of a well-structured and properly implemented feed-in tariff will be green jobs, and lots of them. Our own modelling, which reflects assumptions made by the government’s own independent consultants, shows that by 2020 the tariff could create more than 100,000 solar PV services and installation jobs.

    So how are we going to ensure that the feed-in tariff really does maximise the jobs potential in solar PV, but also in the other small-scale renewable electricity technologies? Here’s how we think the UK feed-in-tariff should operate.

    The government must keep it simple. The tariff should be structured to pay for generation not export to the national grid, to encourage the broadest range of take-up in small-scale renewable energy, from homeowners to investors. They must ensure it’s easy for people with small green energy systems to connect to the grid.

    Secondly, the tariff needs to encourage investment. That means setting the price for each unit of green electricity generated high enough to allow suitable returns for investors. We also need support for low- or zero-interest loans, to help people get beyond the up-front cost of many small-scale renewable technologies.

    Lastly, the UK’s feed-in tariff must create green jobs. The tariff should be structured to encourage microgeneration on buildings. For example, solar PV on buildings is more job-intensive than mounting PV on the ground and involves a broad range of skills from the construction industry (roofers, surveyors and consultants). In hand with this job creation, government should subsidise the re-training of electricians, roofers, engineers and others whose jobs are now lost or under threat from the construction industry’s decline.

    You can help the government to create an effective feed-in tariff for green energy too – email your MP asking them to sign early day motion 689, or demonstrate your support online.

    • Jeremy Leggett is the executive chairman of Solarcentury

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  • International seabed claims flood into UN

    In the past two weeks Ghana, Pakistan, Norway, South Africa, Iceland, Denmark, France, Vietnam, Nigeria, Sri Lanka, Kenya and others have delivered boxes of documents to the commission’s premises in New York.

    The hefty files of detailed paperwork – one Australian submission ran to 80 volumes – are the culmination of years of underwater exploration by each state, plotting submarine contours that mark the outer edges of the continental shelf.

    The complex rules of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea permit states to extend their control and exploitation of the seabed beyond the traditional 200 nautical mile limit and up to 350 nautical miles offshore.

    The precise extent of each claim frequently involves establishing the foot of an underwater continental slope, thousands of feet down in the chilly, dark oceans – and then measuring 60 miles outward.

    Some claims, usually the legacies of unresolved international conflicts, are mutually exclusive, generating fresh diplomatic unease along the fissure lines of ancient boundary disputes. Before Wednesday, the UK will present its claim for the seabed surrounding the Falklands, South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands in the South Atlantic.

    The submission is bound to overlap with the Argentinian claim sent in last month which insisted that the waters and extended continental shelf around all those islands belonged to the government in Buenos Aires. The French have raised hackles by claiming the seabed near their Pacific island territories.

    The 13 May deadline applies only to those states that were signatories of the original treaty ten years ago. Other states, which signed at a later date, have more time left to submit their claims.

    The United States has still not ratified the UN Convention of the Law of the Sea, but the prospect of neighbouring countries such as Canada and Russia carving up the seabed for exploration is rapidly shifting opinion in Washington.

    Greenpeace and other marine environmental groups have derided the process as a series of colonial land grabs. Britain will have submitted several major claims, all in the Atlantic, by the end of this week: around Ascension Island, the Falkland Islands and in the Hatton-Rockall Basin to the west of Scotland.

    The UK has signalled its interest in the continental shelf that slopes away from the British Antarctic Territory. All territorial claims at the South Pole are, however, formally frozen by the Antarctic Treaty to which the UK is a signatory.

    Britain, France, Spain and Ireland have also lodged a shared submission for a 31,000 square mile tract of the ocean floor on the edge of the Bay of Biscay.

  • Carbon trading won’t stop climate change

    This is the partly the result of the economic downturn.  As heavy industries mothball factories, energy use drops and demand for permits goes down.  At the same time businesses try to raise cash by selling their unused permits, flooding the market and further depressing prices.  French energy company EDF recently complained that carbon markets were failing just like the market for subprime mortgages.  As a result, all kinds of green energy schemes are grinding to a halt.
    So how do you set a meaningful price for carbon?  The reality is more complicated than the ETS might suggest, which is a problem for those who advocate using market forces to reduce emissions.  As NASA climate scientist James Hansen points out, getting it right or wrong could determine whether or not we can avert irreversible climate change.
    Apart from the ETS, there are many ways to put a value on carbon.  You can, for example, work out what it costs per tonne to reduce emissions.  But calculating this “marginal abatement cost” is complicated by doubts over the effectiveness of carbon offsetting and the true impact of some supposedly green technologies.
    Another method is the “social cost of carbon”, which estimates the cost of the damage from emitting a tonne of carbon over its whole lifetime in the atmosphere.  This has been used by the UK treasury, and the Dutch government and the World Bank have experimented with it.  But with so many variables to account for, estimates range from £35 to £140 per tonne.  The UK has now dropped it for a new “shadow price of carbon”, an approach supported by the French government and some members of the European Commission.
    The shadow price is similar to the social cost but includes “other factors that may affect willingness to pay for reductions”, to use the UK government’s own words.  It is “a more versatile concept”.  In other words, it gives politicians some scope to rig the price.  Although well intentioned, it is vulnerable to abuse.
    Each of these methods has its advantages and disadvantages, but there is one problem that none can solve.  I’ll call it the paradox of environmental economics, in which worthy attempts to value natural resources hit a wall.
    The paradox is this.  All these methods of pricing carbon permit the creation of a carbon market that will allow us to pollute beyond a catastrophic tipping point.  In other words, they require us to put a price on the final “killing” tonne of CO2 which, once emitted, tips the balance and triggers runaway global warming.  How can we set such a price?  It’s like saying, how much is civilisation worth?  Or, if you needed a camel to cross a desert alive, what is a fair value for the straw that breaks its back?
    If you needed a camel to cross a desert, what is a fair value for the straw that breaks its back?
    The paradox reveals the fatal shortcoming of market solutions to environmental problems.  Unless the parameters for carbon markets are set tightly in line with what science tells us is necessary to preventing runaway warming, they cannot work.  That palpably did not happen with the ETS, which initially issued more permits to pollute than there were emissions and now, in the recession, is trading emissions that don’t exist – so-called hot air.
    Carbon markets cannot save us unless they operate within a global carbon cap sufficient to prevent a rise of more than 2 °C above pre-industrial temperatures.
    Governments are there to compensate for market failure but seem to have a blind spot about carbon markets.  They could counteract the impact of low carbon prices by spending on renewable energy as part of their economic stimulus packages, yet they have not done so.  The UK, for example, has spent nearly 20 per cent of its GDP to prop up the financial sector, but just 0.0083 per cent in new money on green economic stimulus.
    Price mechanisms alone are unable to do the vital job of reducing carbon emissions.  They are too vague, imperfect, and frequently socially unjust.  To prevent over-consumption of key resources such as fuel during the second world war, the UK government rejected taxation in favour of rationing because taxation unfairly hit the poor and was too slow to change behaviour.  Rationing was the quicker, more equitable option.  Carbon rations calculated in line with a safe cap on overall emissions provide a more certain way of hitting emissions targets.
    Is there an answer to the paradox of environmental economics that could make the market approach workable?  I can’t imagine one, but am open to suggestions.  Even if you could price the killing tonne, it is a transaction that should never be allowed.  Economics becomes redundant if it can rationalise an exchange that sells the future of humankind.
    Andrew Simms is author of Ecological Debt: Global warming and the wealth of nations (Pluto Press), and policy director and head of the climate change programme at nef (the New Economics Foundation)

  • The bullish outlook for lithium

    For tin, it was three days up in a row: on Wednesday, a 7.2 per cent gain (or $US905/tonne), then another $US495 on Thursday followed on Friday by a more modest $US100, ending at $US14,000/tonne.

    How is this working out in the equity markets?

    Firstly, traders are getting excited once again by promising news out of the junior end. But if there’s another rout – and you cannot rule out the possibility of another dreadful shoe yet to fall – then investors will drop the market like a stone. They came back after last year’s shock; it is doubtful if they will bounce back so quickly after a second.

    Shocking though the suggestion may be some of those with a speculative, buy-today-and-sell-tomorrow approach to the market, this may be the time for little long term thinking.

    What is going to be in short supply in the next few years? Well, some say lithium could be such a metal (although there are those who discount this).

    The bullish theory is that lithium, which is so far used mainly in glass and in batteries for laptops and mobile phones, is going to be a supply deficit once the hybrid and electric car business really hits its straps.

    Just look at the battle royal going on over who gets to develop the Uyuni salt flat in Bolivia, which reputedly contains half the world’s known lithium reserves. The government in La Paz will decide between France’s Bollore Group, Mitsubishi or South Korea’s LG Group.

    There have been developments at two of the Australian-listed lithium plays. Orocobre has done a scoping study on its Argentinian project which shows the potential to produce 15,000 tonnes a year of lithium carbonate (along with 36,000 tonnes of potash). A bankable feasibility study (BFS) should be completed mid-2010.

    The financing deal for that was released this morning. First, US-based Lithium Investors will take a $2.6 million placement, and shareholders will be offered a rights issue with a target of another $2.8 million with Patersons Securities to be the underwriter. This means Orocobre has covered the cost of its BFS — and further supports confidence in the lithium story.

    And Galaxy Resources has appointed a Shanghai-based company to do the study on building a lithium carbonate plant in China to process the output of the company’s planned lithium mine near Ravensthorpe, Western Australia.

    This morning Galaxy announced the site of the plant would be at Zhangjiagang, a deep water port on the Yangtze River and the location of a free trade zone.

    One last point: if you go back two years and re-read all the forecasts for demand for various metals (not to mention their prices), chances are that 90 per cent of them have been proved wrong. Keep that in mind when you read any projection into the future – even for lithium.

    The writer implies no investment recommendation and this report contains material that is speculative in nature. Investors should seek professional investment advice.