EcoRadio

Category: News

Add your news
You can add news from your networks or groups through the website by becoming an author. Simply register as a member of the Generator, and then email Giovanni asking to become an author. He will then work with you to integrate your content into the site as effectively as possible.
Listen to the Generator News online

 
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.
As well as Giovanni’s articles it picks up the most pertinent articles from a range of other news services. You can publish the news feed on your website using RSS, free of charge.
 

  • Cross your fingers and carry on

    Cross Your Fingers and Carry On

    Posted April 14, 2009

    Why does the government refuse to make contingency plans for peak oil?

     

    By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian, 14th April 2009

    Here’s how the British government describes the risk of a smallpox outbreak. “We are currently at alert level 0. Smallpox remains eradicated. No credible threat of a smallpox release.”(1)

    So, in response to this non-existent threat, it has published 122 pages of central plans(2,3). Each of the nine English regions maintains a Smallpox Diagnosis and Response Group, which in turn supports five Smallpox Management and Response Teams, one of which is on duty at all times. There are smallpox centres all over the country, and lists of doctors, nurses and support staff prepared to run them, laboratories ready to multiply vaccines and planning committees involving scores of different agencies.

    The plans, in other words, must have cost millions. They use thousands of hours of specialist time every year. But step forward the man or woman who believes the government should abandon them.

    The chances that this extinct disease might break out here are extremely remote – one in a million perhaps – but they cannot be dismissed while the US and Russia disgracefully refuse to destroy their stockpiles. Stealing, weaponising and distributing the virus would require capabilities beyond those of any known terrorist group. The government’s plans are almost certainly a waste of time and money. But they are a waste of time and money that makes sense.

    This is what government is for: to prepare for the worst, however unlikely it may be. The UK, like all rich nations, maintains an elaborate network of agencies to defend us from unlikely events: the Ministerial Committee on Protective Security and Resilience, the Civil Contingencies Secretariat, the Domestic Horizon Scanning Committee, the National Risk Register, the Capabilities Programme Board, the National Recovery Working Group, the Regional Resilience and Emergency Response Division, the Centre for Emergency Preparedness and Response and endless departmental and regional bodies.

    But this great state safety net is full of holes. The government has a strangely unbalanced approach to risk, over-emphasising some contingencies – terrorism, anarchy, attacks by rogue states – while underplaying, even promoting, others. It was Gordon Brown, for example, who told the bankers of the City of London in his Mansion House speech of 2004 that “in budget after budget I want us to do even more to encourage the risk takers”(4).

    There is one respect in which the government’s approach seems utterly bonkers: a threat with a high likelihood of occurrence, for which it refuses to make any plans at all. I’ve been banging on about this for a while, with my usual absence of results. But now I’ve received a letter which makes its dismissive response look like outright lunacy.

    There is nothing certain about the hypothesis that global supplies of conventional petroleum might soon stop growing and then go into decline. There is a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive statistics, which is convinced that peak oil is imminent. There is also a large body of expert opinion, marshalling impressive statistics, which insists that it’s a long way off. I don’t know whom to believe. The key data – the true extent of reserves in the OPEC nations – are state secrets. Anyone who tells you that oil supplies will definitely peak by a certain date or definitely won’t peak ever is a fraud: the information required to make these assessments does not exist.

    In February 2008 I sent a freedom of information request to the Department for Business, asking what contingency plans the government has made for the eventuality that global supplies of crude oil might peak between now and 2020. The answer I received astonished me. “The Government does not feel the need to hold contingency plans specifically for the eventuality of crude oil supplies peaking between now and 2020.”(5)

    As it revealed in a parliamentary answer, the government relies primarily on the International Energy Agency for its assessment(6). When I made my first request, its cavalier attitude chimed with the IEA’s. But at the end of last year the agency suddenly changed tack. Its World Energy Outlook report upgraded the annual rate of decline in output from the world’s existing oilfields from 3.7% to 6.7%(7). Previously it had relied on guesswork. This time it had conducted the world’s first comprehensive study of decline rates, covering the 800 largest fields.

    The report also contained a word the agency had hitherto avoided: peak. It proposed that “although global oil production in total is not expected to peak before 2030, production of conventional oil … is projected to level off towards the end of the projection period.”(8) When I interviewed the IEA’s chief economist for the Guardian, he tightened this up: “in terms of non-OPEC, we are expecting that in three, four years’ time the production of conventional oil will come to a plateau, and start to decline. … In terms of the global picture, assuming that OPEC will invest in a timely manner, global conventional oil can still continue, but we still expect that it will come around 2020 to a plateau as well … I think time is not on our side here.”(9) He told me that we would need a “global energy revolution” to avert this prospect. Nothing of the kind is happening.

    So I sent the British government a new request: in the light of what the IEA has revealed, what contingency plans has the government made? The response has now arrived. “With sufficient investment, the Government does not believe that global oil production will peak between now and 2020 and consequently we do not have any contingency plans specific to a peak in oil production.”(10)

    I just don’t get it. Let’s assume that there is only a 10% chance that the International Energy Agency and everybody else predicting that global oil supplies will soon peak or plateau are right. That still makes peak oil about 100,000 times more likely than a smallpox outbreak in the United Kingdom.

    As the report by Robert L Hirsch, commissioned by the US Department of Energy, shows, the consequences of peak oil taking governments by surprise are at least as devastating as a smallpox epidemic. “Without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented.”(11) Hirsch estimated that to avoid global economic collapse, we would need to begin “a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking.” If he’s right and the IEA’s right, we’re already 10 years too late. But my conversations with government officials suggest to me that they wear the absence of plans almost as a badge of honour, like the Viking beserkers who went into battle without armour to show how mad they were.

    The only explanation I can suggest is that the concept of insufficient oil cannot be accommodated within the government’s worldview. Its response to a smallpox epidemic accords with its messianic tendencies: government as superman, defending us from nutters carrying vampire pathogens. The idea that we might be undone by an issue as mundane and unresponsive as resource depletion just doesn’t fit.

    But at least we know where we stand: we’ll have to make our own contingency plans. Does anyone have a spare AK47?

    www.monbiot.com

    References:

    1. http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

    2. Department of Health, 15th December 2003. Guidelines for smallpox response and management in the post-eradication era, Version 2. Downloadable at http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

    3. Department of Health, 15th December 2003. Appendices. Downloadable at http://www.dh.gov.uk/en/Publicationsandstatistics/Publications/PublicationsPolicyAndGuidance/DH_4070830

    4. Gordon Brown, 16th June 2004. Speech to Mansion House. http://www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/speech_chex_160604.htm

    5. BERR, 8th April 2008. Response to FoI request, Ref 08/0091.

    6. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200708/cmhansrd/cm080402/text/80402w0045.htm

    7. International Energy Agency, 2008. World Energy Outlook 2008, page 43. IEA, Paris.

    8. ibid, p103.

    9. http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/video/2008/dec/15/fatih-birol-george-monbiot

    10. DECC, 23rd March 2009. Response to Freedom of Information request, Ref 09/0277.

    11. Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek and Robert Wendling, February 2005. Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation, & Risk Management. US Department of Energy, page 4. http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf

  • The media laps up fake controversy over climate change

    The media laps up fake controversy over climate change

    Proof of paid-for climate denial at the Global Climate Coalition comes as no surprise, but it is no less depressing for that.

    There are three kinds of climate change denier. There are those who simply don’t want to accept the evidence, because it is too much to bear, or because it threatens aspects of their lives that they don’t want to change. These are by far the most numerous, and account for most of those whose comments will follow this post.

    I have some sympathy for their position. Denial is most people’s first response to something they don’t want to hear, whether it is a diagnosis of terminal illness or the threat presented by the rise of the Axis Powers. The moral, intellectual and practical challenge of climate change is unprecedented. The urge to duck it almost irresistible.

    Then there is a smaller group of people – almost all men, generally in their sixties or above – who are not paid for their stance, but who have achieved a little post-retirement celebrity through well-timed controversialism. It has kept David Bellamy in the news, long after his wonderful career on television sadly (and wrongly, in my view) ended. It has lent more recognition to people like Philip Stott and Tim Ball than anything they published during their academic careers. It attracts adoring fanmail (from people in category one) for journalists like Christopher Booker and Melanie Philips. It permits men like Lord Monckton to indulge their fantasies of single-handedly rescuing humanity from its own idiocy. Their intellectual acrobatics are as blatant as that of the people in the third category, but they appear to be driven by vanity, not cash.

    The third category consists of those who are paid to deny that climate change is happening. Patrick Michaels and Steve Milloy, whose work for fossil fuel companies has been repeatedly exposed, are good examples. There are probably a few paid stooges contributing to the Guardian’s discussion threads as well.

    Even when the risk of exposure is high, journalists working for newspapers, television or radio have secretly taken money from undisclosed interests to champion their views. Fossil fuel companies have inserted their message into every medium by means of hired hands who don’t reveal their sources of funding. Why would they not take advantage of the anonymity of these threads? Some of the contributers here are astroturfers, but we’ll probably never know which ones they are.

    Whenever you challenge anyone in categories two or three, they come over all innocent, claiming that the science is unsettled, that the other side are all liars, and all they are doing is telling the public what it needs to hear. Anyone who has taken the trouble to read the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or who subscribes to Science or Nature knows that they cannot possibly believe this, or are able to believe it only by tying their minds into such elaborate knots that they have succeeded in deceiving themselves.

    We knew it, but we couldn’t prove it. But now we have a smoking gun. Last week the New York Times revealed that the Global Climate Coalition, the industry-funded body that led the campaign to persuade people that manmade climate wasn’t happening, knew all along that it was. In 1995 its own experts warned that:

    The scientific basis for the Greenhouse Effect and the potential impact of human emissions of greenhouse gases such as CO2 on climate is well established and cannot be denied … The contrarian theories raise interesting questions about our total understanding of climate processes, but they do not offer convincing arguments against the conventional model of greenhouse gas emission-induced climate change

    It seems to me that the real suckers in this story are the media organisations – the BBC and Channel 4 are the outstanding examples – that gave 15 years of free access to companies like ExxonMobil, by inviting their paid experts to “balance” the views of genuine scientists, without demanding that they disclosed their sources. (Channel 4 appears determined to continue being suckered).

    They had only to look at Exxon’s annual accounts to see that the people they introduced as independent experts were neither expert nor independent. But they chose not to, as fake controversy provided better copy than the boring old scientific consensus. Now we know just how fake it was.

    monbiot.com

  • Bugs to listen in on wildlife’s most wanted

    Bugs to listen in on wildlife’s most wanted

    John Stapleton | May 03, 2009

    Article from:  The Australian

    VERY few people have ever seen Australia’s extremely rare Eastern Ground Parrot, noted for its beauty. They are found only in dense thickets of bush on a few patches of heath country along the eastern seaboard.

    Shy and secretive, making their tunnels and nests in the undergrowth, Ground Parrots are almost impossible to find.

    Until now. Traditionally the only way to find a ground parrot or to monitor their density has been to listen at dusk for their calls or have a line of a dozen or more people beating through the scrub to flush them out. Even then, they only fly briefly before scurrying back into their hiding places. They would much rather walk than fly.

    But Australian scientists are forging the use of new technology which will allow them to map the numbers and whereabouts of some of Australia’s most threatened wildlife _ referred to as “cryptic” species because they are so hard to see and so little is known about them.

    The Barren Grounds Nature Reserve on the Illawarra escarpment south of Sydney is one of the only places where the Eastern Ground Parrots, which resemble giant green budgerigars with black and yellow flecking and a red bar on their forehead, are found in any significant numbers. Even then visitors and bird enthusiasts are very hard put to find them.

    Dr Elizabeth Tasker from the NSW Department of Environment and Climate Change is pioneering the use of a new machine known as the Song Meter, sophisticated listening devices which can be left in the bush for months at a time and pre-programmed to record at specific times of the day. The machines can be programmed to automatically adjust to the shifting seasons, so at Barren Grounds for instance, the Song Meter will record for about an hour at sunset.

    The project, known as the Automated Acoustic Monitoring of Threatened Fauna study, is being funded by the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife. It builds on a previous study with the UNSW, University of Wollongong and Hawkesbury-Nepean Catchment Management Authority.

    The Song Meters were developed in the US and have only begun to be used around the world over the past year. Australian scientists are among the first to use it as a monitoring tool for rare and endangered species.

    The key advance on previous audio monitoring is that the new equipment is compact and lightweight and the call recognition software is easily adaptable to identify new species.

    By placing several of the Song Meters in an area, the data received can be triangulated to identify exactly where the birds are and their likely numbers. Software being developed at the University of Wollongong will allow signals from multiple stations to be combined to help locate the animals.

    Ultimately the technology could have many different uses; including expanding the hunt for the mysterious Night Parrot of Central Australia, closely related to the Eastern Ground Parrot but feared extinct. Like the Ground Parrot, its rarity and shy and secretive behaviour in remote areas has until now made it extremely expensive to research. “Ornithologists have been searching for the Night Parrot for years, but it is just so rare the chance of being in the right place at the right time is very small,” Dr Tasker said. “It may turn out not to be extinct; and these units are our best chance to find out whether it has survived.”

    Disputes between conservationists and developers over whether threatened species exist on a particular site could also be resolved through its use.

    Dr Tasker said if the Ground Parrot study proved successful, the technology had great potential to be used across a range of species, particularly birds and frogs because of their distinctive calls. The even rarer Eastern Bristlebird, said to look and behave more like a bush rat than a bird, is likely to be next.

    But all that is in the future. The Ground Parrots at Barren Grounds, where their calls can be heard at dawn and dusk, are the first species to be monitored in this manner.

    Dr Tasker said the power of the power of this tool is that it greatly broadened their ability to study rare and cryptic species. “In studying rare animals you are really limited to where and how often you can get access, so surveys tend to be along roads,” she said. “But a lot of habitats, such as for the Ground Parrot, have no ready access.

    “Another beauty of the technology is you can leave these passive listening devices out for weeks or months. The software can sift through months of recordings in minutes, giving you a much better idea of how many birds are there.”

    The old fashioned method of counting Ground Parrots by flushing them out or by listening for them has already indicated there has been a steady decline in numbers since the last fires swept through Barren Grounds in 1983. The birds are fire sensitive, increasing rapidly in number after a fire because of the diversity of vegetation that thrives after a burn.

    It was Dr Tasker’s work as a fire ecologist which led to her interest in Ground Parrots. She said knowing the fire thresholds for threatened species was essential for their management and survival, with the relationship of many frogs to fires being particularly poorly known.

    “There are a whole bunch of these cryptic species threatened by fire; either they need fire for maintenance of diversity of vegetation, or they are easily damaged by it. How often bushland is burnt makes a real difference to what species survive.

    “This research can help us determine, for instance, when conducting a controlled burn how much of an area should be burnt at any one time.”

    Research assistant Jessica Bryant, who did her Honours degree in science on the impacts of walking dogs on birds, said there had been very little work done on the impact of fire on Australian animals. “The only way we can determine the appropriate fire regime is to know more about the populations. There is a big gap in our knowledge of threatened species.

    “Traditional techniques were very labour intensive.”

    Funder of the project, Leonie Gale, CEO of the Foundation for National Parks and Wildlife, said the project could revolutionise the way threatened species were monitored, located and protected.

    “There is really very little money around for scientific research and remarkably little is known about Australias rarest critters,” she said. “Government will often not fund these sorts of projects because they are high risk, they aren’t proven and might not work. We fund the iffy stuff, the catalysing projects. I was inspired by the credentials of those proposing the project. This is a real first. It is not being done anywhere else in the world.

    “Other organisations set aside land for these species that they fence off to keep the animals safe and study them in what resembles their original native environment, but rather than looking at animals like specimens in a petri dish our focus is on learning about the animals in the wild, where they have to cope with many threats and changed habitats.

    “By using acoustic monitoring we can find out where these animals are without intrusion and can work out how many are present in any particular location.

    “Australia will lose many species in the next 30 years; this is a remote management tool for threatened species which could help stop that happening.”

  • Maude mad about Murray damage

    Advisor to the United Nations on water, Maude Barlow, last week announced a ban on the sale of bottled water from municipal facilities during the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver. Bottled water has recently been implicated in increased levels of estrogen in the human population but it is the commodification of water that has made Maude mad. In Australia to address the Australian Water Summit last month, Ms Barlow flew over the mouth of the Murray River and spoke vehemently about the environmental destruction she saw there. “Until we understand that water is a fundamental right of the environment as well as present and future humans, we cannot live in harmony,” she said. Ms Barlow is spearheading campaigns across Canada to prevent damage to ground water as well as lakes and streams.

  • Rudd lacks courage and vision says ex ALP president

    Speaking at Eco Forum in Sydney last week, Australia’s longest service Science Minister and long term federal president of the Australian Labor Party, Barry Jones, said that the Rudd government showed no signs of taking the necessary steps to combat climate change. He commended the analysis of Liberal whistle-blower Guy Pearce as explaining why Australian governments rule for vested interests and said, “observers could be forgiving for not being able to distinguish the Rudd government from Howard’s [in term of its position on global warming]” Jones addressed 300 local government and engineering professionals on the future prospects for Australia. Describing the developed world generally, he said, “Our governments lack the leadership and vision necessary to discard the systems that got us into this mess. Political parties have become increasingly irrelevant. They are basically job placement agencies for an ailing membership.”

  • Solar thermal baseload comes on line

    In the high desert of southern Spain, not far from Granada, the Mediterranean sun bounces off large arrays of precisely curved mirrors that cover an area as large as 70 soccer fields. These parabolic troughs follow the arc of the sun as it moves across the sky, concentrating the sun’s rays onto pipes filled with a synthetic oil that can be heated to 750 degrees Fahrenheit. That super-heated oil is used to boil water to power steam turbines, or to pump excess heat into vats of salts, turning them a molten, lava-like consistency.

    The salts are just fertilizers – a mix of sodium and potassium nitrate – but they represent a significant advance in the decades-old technology of solar thermal power production, which has traditionally used mirrors to heat water or oil to generate electricity-producing steam. Now, engineers can use the molten salts to store the heat from solar radiation many hours after the sun goes down and then release it at will to drive turbines. That means solar thermal power can be used to generate electricity nearly round-the-clock.

    The plant in southern Spain, known as Andasol 1, began operating last November and now provides 50 megawatts of power, enough electricity to supply 50,000 to 60,000 homes year-round. Andasol 2 will come online later this summer, with Andasol 3 already under construction. When the entire Andasol complex is completed in 2011, it is expected to generate enough electricity to power 150,000 households – about 600,000 people.

    In the face of mounting concern about climate change, developing alternatives to coal and natural gas

    Seville
     

    Wikimedia
    At this 11-megawatt power tower outside Seville, Spain, sunlight reflects off 624 moveable mirrors to heat water pipes atop the 40-story tower, creating steam that drives a turbine.

    combustion has taken on a new urgency, and the construction of utility-scale solar thermal power plants in deserts and arid areas is looking like an increasingly promising option. In the United States alone, solar thermal power projects are now being built near fast-growing centers of electricity consumption, such as Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Phoenix. The first major solar thermal plant to be completed in decades, dubbed Nevada Solar One, started providing 64 megawatts of power to the neon lights of Las Vegas in 2007, although it lacks the latest molten-salt technology. Across the globe, utilities are currently building or planning solar thermal projects in North Africa, Spain, and Australia, among other regions.

    Some of the recent claims for solar thermal power have been stunning. Researchers at the German Aerospace Center have estimated that 16,000 square kilometers of solar thermal power plants in North Africa – paired with a new infrastructure of high-voltage, direct-current transmission lines – could provide enough electricity for all of Europe. And scientists have estimated that constructing solar thermal power plants on less than 1 percent of the world’s deserts – an area roughly the size of Austria – could meet the entire world’s energy needs.

    Of course, solar thermal has been here before, experiencing a boom in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Its progress then was stalled by collapsing fossil fuel prices, as well as a lack of government support. Today, some critics of the technology fault it for taking up acreage in fragile deserts.

    The case for solar thermal power hinges on economics. The sun bathes the Earth with an average of 6 kilowatt-hours of power per square meter over the course of a day, and a concentrated solar power plant like Andasol is the cheapest way to harvest a portion of that. Photovoltaics – semiconductor panels that convert sunlight to electricity – deliver power at roughly 40 cents per kilowatt-hour, while conventional solar thermal power plants can do so for around 13 cents per kilowatt hour, according to the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory. This is only marginally more expensive than the average U.S. price for coal-generated electricity in 2008 of 11 cents per kilowatt hour. The cutting-edge technology of using molten salts to store solar-generated heat is considerably more expensive, but experts expect that price to fall steadily as the technology improves and is mass-produced.

    “One of the great things about molten salt technology is that you can get more energy out of the same facility,” says Barbara Lockwood, manager for renewable energy at Arizona Public Services.