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  • Carbon Graveyard

     

    According to the government’s provisional figures for 2009, the UK has cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 198MtCO2e since 1990. But the Carnegie Institution for Science estimates that we have outsourced 253Mt. The sad and shocking truth is that the apparent success of the UK’s carbon-cutting programme, on which the government bases its boast that we’re a world leader in reducing pollution, results from the collapse of our manufacturing base and its re-establishment overseas.

    So throw in 253Mt for outsourced emissions, 7Mt for the international shipping we use, 67Mt for international aviation plus the 2Mt the government has failed to include for extra greenhouse warming (not CO2) caused by domestic flights, and you discover that the UK has left 329Mt of carbon off its national accounts, or very nearly 50% of the 2007 total (636Mt). The figure would have been even higher had the team included the net 40Mt of emissions which Professor Dieter Helm calculates is caused by UK citizens holidaying abroad (net means that the emissions from foreign tourists holidaying here have been subtracted).

    Even if the calculator achieves nothing else, highlighting this massive discrepancy should shake up the debate and change our view of what the UK has achieved.

    Just as striking are the figures for manufacturing and consumption. When I started playing with the calculator, at first I skipped over the top category. This is because, like many environmentalists, most of my work has been focused on efforts to tackle our direct consumption of energy: the heat and electricity we use at home and in offices, and the fuel we use for transport. I immediately ran into trouble. However many wind turbines and nuclear power plants I commissioned, however many drivers I shoved on to the railways and businessmen I dragged kicking and screaming out of aeroplanes, I couldn’t get the totals down by anything like the required amount. Only then did I notice how great a proportion of our emissions come from manufacturing and consumption.

    Consulting my book Heat, first published in 2006, I now realise that I used to be half-aware of the scale of this issue, but somehow, in the midst of all the excited debates about how our electricity should be generated, our homes improved and our transport networks run, I had managed to forget it. So it was a shock to discover that manufacturing and consumption (if you include the construction industry) accounts for 541Mt of our emissions, or 57% of the true total. This is a good bit higher than I thought in 2006, because the sector’s impact is massively boosted by the outsourced emissions the official figures don’t count. The great majority of the UK’s offshore total results from our consumption of foreign goods. The exclusion of these figures from official accounts is one of the reasons why we have neglected this sector.

    Of the 541Mt caused by manufacturing and consumption, 223Mt is embodied in the imported goods (minus food) we consume; 141Mt arises from the energy used by UK industries; 87Mt from all food production and consumption (onshore and offshore); 19Mt from industrial process emissions (the CO2 released by chemical processes like cement manufacture); 23Mt from the waste we create and 48Mt from the freight vehicles (some of them excluded from official figures) required to move our stuff around.

    Like most people in the environment movement, I spend my time talking vaguely about the need to reduce the consumption of goods, but specifically – with figures attached – about the need to reduce the direct consumption of energy. But however well we insulate our homes, change our travel habits, alter the electricity supply and switch to more efficient appliances, however much the public sector cleans up its act and the efficiency of commercial buildings is improved, we’ll still be only scratching the surface of the problem. The real issue is not our direct consumption of energy but the greenhouse gases embodied in the goods we buy. It strikes me that in focusing on direct consumption I’ve helped to give both the government and business an unduly easy ride.

    So here we bump into the second probable reason why Labour and the Conservatives have chosen not to try out the calculator (Simon Hughes of the Lib Dems did run the calculator and shared the result). It highlights the glaring contradiction in the manifestos of all three main parties: they all seek to boost economic growth by raising consumption, but consumption has already pushed greenhouse gas levels way beyond the point that they consider sustainable. You can pursue a policy of economic growth and reduced carbon emissions only by engineering a fudge of the kind the calculator exposes: offshoring one third of our emissions, most of which arise from the goods we consume. The impacts of rising consumption are hidden by excluding them from national accounts.

    Only the Green party has approached this issue honestly, by accepting upfront that economic growth is the problem and that current levels of consumption cannot be sustained. It’s time we called out the other parties on their failure to acknowledge, let alone tackle, this contradiction. And it’s time we all recognised that consumption is the big issue.

    monbiot.com

  • BP swamped by criticism

    BP swamped by criticism

    Anna Driver and Matthew Bigg, Reuters May 22, 2010, 6:40 am

     

    HOUSTON/VENICE, Louisiana (Reuters) – Anger, scepticism and accusations of lying washed over energy giant BP Plc on Friday as it desperately pursued efforts to contain a month-old seabed well leak billowing crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

    U.S. lawmakers and scientists have accused BP of trying to conceal what many believe is already the worst U.S. oil spill, eclipsing the 1989 Exxon Valdez accident in Alaska. It represents a potentially environmental and economic catastrophe for the U.S. Gulf coast.

    The London-based energy giant, facing growing federal government and public frustration and allegations of a coverup, said its engineers were working with U.S. government scientists to determine the real size of the leak, even as they fought to control the still-gushing spill with uncertain solutions.

    President Barack Obama’s administration was keeping up the pressure on BP to do everything possible to stop the leak.

    “We are facing a disaster, the magnitude of which we likely have never seen before, in terms of a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters. “And we’re doing everything humanly possible and technologically possible to deal with that.”

    BP’s next planned step is a “top kill” — pumping heavy fluids and then cement into the gushing well to plug it. That operation could start next week, perhaps on Tuesday, BP Chief Operating Officer Doug Suttles said.

    Adding to the confusion, BP revised downward on Friday an estimate from Thursday that one of its containment solutions — a 1 mile (1.6 km)-long siphon tube inserted into the larger of two seabed leaks — was capturing 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons/795,000 litres) of oil per day.

    A BP spokesman said the amount of crude oil it sucked from the leak fell to 2,200 barrels (92,400 gallons/350,000 litres) a day in the 24-hour period ended at midnight on Thursday.

    “The rate fluctuates quite widely on this tool,” Suttles told reporters at a briefing in Robert, Louisiana.

    Many scientists dismiss an original 5,000 bpd estimate of the total leaking oil — often defended by BP executives — as ridiculously low and say it could be as high as 70,000 barrels (2.9 million gallons/11 million litres) per day or more.

    “There’s a huge amount of uncertainty around that number and it could have a fairly wide range,” Suttles said. A federal panel will release its estimate of the actual flow rate as early as next week, a Coast Guard official said.

    “HOT POTATO”

    “It’s very clear that BP has not been telling the truth,” Massachusetts Democratic Representative Ed Markey told CNN.

    BP denied any coverup and said some third-party estimates of the leak were inaccurate. The company’s shares fell more than 4 percent in London.

    Michael Gordon, chief executive of Gordon Strategic Communications, a corporate and crisis public relations firm in New York, called BP’s handling of the spill “a case study in failed crisis communications.”

    “It would not have been possible for them to handle this worse. They are not taking sufficient responsibility for what happened. They’ve played a game of ‘hot potato’ with the other companies involved,” he said, referring to BP’s public trading of blame with its partners in the drilling of the well.

    A month after the well blowout and rig explosion that unleashed the catastrophic spill, sheets of rust-coloured heavy oil are starting to clog fragile marshlands on the fringes of the Mississippi Delta, damaging fishing grounds and wildlife.

    Scientists fear parts of the huge fragmented surface slick will be sucked to the Florida Keys and Cuba by ocean currents.

    At a briefing in Mobile, Alabama, Coast Guard Incident Commander Captain Steven Poulin said an overflight on Thursday of the oil slick showed that while “minor portions of sheen” were in the Loop Current there was “really no trail or elephant trunk” of oil extending down into the moving current flow.

    Markey said it was clear BP was only siphoning off “just a small fraction.”

    “BP has mismanaged this entire incident from day one,” he said. “They should not be trusted.”

    BP spokesmen say the original leak estimate came from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, one of its federal partners in the joint spill response.

    “I understand the frustration,” Suttles told CBS. “We’re supplying information.”

    LIABILITY ISSUE

    “It’s obvious they are trying to limit information to protect their economic liability,” said Markey, chair of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming.

    In a sign of the Obama administration’s mounting anger and frustration, senior U.S. official have demanded BP share more data on the spill with them, accusing the company of falling short in keeping the government and public informed.

    There were signs of growing tension between BP officials and the U.S. government at the briefing in Robert. As Suttles described the “massive amount of information being gathered through this exercise,” Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry interrupted.

    “I have to challenge the word ‘exercise,’ Doug,” Landry said. “This is a full response.”

    BP said it was working with a newly created Flow Rate Technical Team to determine the exact amount of oil escaping.

    Suttles said BP had spent almost $700 million on the spill response and had “thrown absolutely everything” at the job. BP also is drilling a relief well to try to plug the leak but it probably would not be finished until August.

    On the Louisiana coast, fishermen counted the cost to their livelihoods. “This is going to keep killing stuff and it will make whole areas incapable of supporting marine life,” said George Barisich, president of the United Commercial Fishermen’s Association.

    BP has promised to pay legitimate damages claims and faces billions of dollars in expected cleanup and damages costs.

    (Additional reporting by Anna Driver and Chris Baltimore in Houston, Matt Spetalnick in Washington; Tom Bergin in London; Writing by Pascal Fletcher; Editing by Bill Trott)

     

  • Out of sight, Out of trouble

     

    I suspect that no amount of evidence will sway some of these people. There’s a large contingent which seems to hate renewables come what may. However often you point them to papers showing how a European supergrid, which could one day stretch from Iceland to North Africa, allows us to balance renewable resources against each other, ensuring constant supplies; however often you explain the potential of smart appliances, a smart grid and new energy storage technologies, they just clamp their fingers in their ears and shout: “No, no, no!” I don’t know how to explain this unreasoning antagonism, but it casts an interesting light on the oft-repeated myth that it is environmentalists who are hostile to new technologies.

    But even the defeatists might be swayed by some of the findings of the Offshore Valuation report, just published by the Public Interest Research Centre (Pirc). It’s the first time anyone has tried to work out how much electricity could be produced by offshore renewables in the UK, and the results are fascinating.

    It examines only existing technologies – wind turbines with both fixed and floating foundations, wave machines, tidal range and tidal stream devices – and the contribution they can make by 2050.

    It accepts the usual constraints on offshore renewables: maximum water depths, the need to avoid dense shipping lanes and other obstacles, the various technical limits. Having applied these constraints, it finds that the practical resource for offshore renewables in the UK is 2,130 terawatt hours per year. This is six times our current electricity demand.

    Were we to use only 29% of the total resource, the UK would become a net electricity exporter. We would be generating energy equivalent to 1bn barrels of oil a year, which roughly corresponds to the average amount of North Sea oil and gas the UK has been producing over the past four decades.

    The report estimates that this industry would directly employ 145,000 people and produce annual revenues of £62bn. The construction effort would be roughly similar to building the North Sea oil and gas infrastructure: eminently plausible, in other words, if propelled by strong government policy.

    Were we to make use of 76% of the resource, the UK would become a net exporter of total energy. This is a tougher call, but not necessarily impossible: we’d be producing the equivalent of 150% of the energy output from UK’s peak production year for oil and gas (1999).

    It would mean building an average of 1,800 7.5 megawatt wind turbines every year. This is likely to stretch available manpower and construction capacity to the maximum, possibly beyond. But if enough investment is sunk into training, manufacturing and transport, the potential for creating both employment and income is enormous.

    The national grid, the report estimates, could accommodate about 50% variable renewables (power sources whose output depends on the weather) by 2050, as long as it had 34 gigawatts of backup capacity, energy storage and interconnectors linking it with the continent. This is both plausible and affordable. (Backup, to address another persistent myth, does not mean that the necessary thermal power plants are kept running all the time, just that they are available if needed.)

    There are some interesting implications. The UK could close its looming energy gap without using new sources of fossil fuels. It could do this without encountering the public hostility which often scuppers onshore windfarms.

    The best wind resources are mostly way out of the sight of land: the further out to sea you go, the stronger the wind becomes. A recent study shows that offshore windfarms can greatly increase the abundance of fish and crabs. (My hope is that the foundations could be connected by a web of steel cables, so the windfarms could function as marine reserves which never needed to be policed, as trawling through them would be impossible.)

    It also raises some important questions. If the offshore resource is so abundant and its deployment likely to cause hardly any political fuss, should we give up fighting for onshore windfarms? I don’t know, but I would appreciate your views.

    The report also makes me wonder whether, in the light of the damage they will do and of the far greater resources in the open sea, a Severn barrage and other tidal range devices are worth developing. The report suggests that the total practical resource for offshore wind is 1,939 terawatt hours per year, while the total tidal range resource is just 36 – and more expensive to deploy. Given the aggro tidal barrages will cause and the habitats they will destroy, are they worth developing?

    If any of this is to happen, the big decisions will need to be taken in the next year or so. So if ever you meet ministers or officials, ask them these questions. Have they read the report? What do they intend to do about it?

    www.monbiot.com

  • GetUp A Friday Cartoon

    2 – An important win for the river red gums on the Murray-Darling.
    On Wednesday night NSW Premier Kristina Keneally reversed her position and passed a bill to protect river red gum trees in the Murray-Darling basin. Thousands of hectares of these sacred old trees were set to be logged, but in the last month 11,000 GetUp members faxed, emailed or called the Premier’s office asking her to protect the trees. Congratulations! Thanks to your efforts, and the tireless campaigning of our friends in the environment movement (particularly the Wilderness Society and the National Parks Association), these ancient trees will now be safe from logging. Click here to send a message of thanks to Premier Keneally on twitter, or here by email.

    3 – We’re Australia’s largest progressive advertiser
    This week alone we have an incredible two newspaper ads and three television ads running across the country.

    Page 5 of the Australian yesterday featured our parody ad on the mining super profits tax — and because members hit the target of $105,000 you can find a new ad today in the Oil and Mining Markets page (p. 31) of the The Australian Financial Review: the paper delivered straight to the desks of mining executives.

    Three GetUp ads are also running on TV at the moment, made possible by donations from GetUp members. Did you know you were such a media powerhouse?

    Mental Health: our message from Australian of the Year, Prof. Patrick McGorry, will continue running for the next month, with some 400 ad spots booked across the country.
    Refugees: the GetUp ad featuring Riz Wakil, an Afghan refugee, is running on Border Security (with an audience of 2 million) and SBS world news in major cities.
    Internet Censorship: our Censordyne ad parodying the Government’s proposed internet filter is still showing every Sunday on Channel 10.

    4 – We’re making waves in Parliament House
    In recent weeks, tens of thousands of GetUp members called their Labor representatives at their electorate and Parliament House offices to voice dissent over the Government’s delay on climate action. We asked our MPs and Senators to speak up in the Labor party caucus over the back-flip. It worked: “PM tries to pacify worried caucus” read the headline in The Herald Sun1.

    To drive it home, GetUp traveled to Parliament House and hand delivered a dossier to every parliamentarian showing the number of GetUp members in their electorate, and the total number of actions and donations. One MP in Victoria said he’d received over 150 calls from GetUp members in a day — more than their office usually receives in months!

    GetUp is more than any one campaign or single success. Your actions breath life into the progressive principles of social justice, economic fairness and environmental sustainability. Together our movement, now 350,000 strong, holds power to account, whatever its form, and helps create a fairer, more sustainable and more just Australia.

    Now there’s an election coming–word in Canberra is that it may be upon us as early as July or August. Elections are moments for movements to bind together to make a difference. It is a time to recommit ourselves to achieving real progress and to inspire others to take notice and join the cause.

    Thanks for making these past weeks possible,
    The GetUp Team.

    –RECENT MEDIA COVERAGE OF GETUP CAMPAIGNS–
    Television

    Print

    –Sources–
    1 “PM tries to pacify worried caucus”, Michael Harvey, Ben Packham, The Herald Sun, 11 May 2010.

  • Campbell resigns for ”personal reasons’

     

    However, he does apologise to her and his family, colleagues, staff and the community for letting them down.

    He has asked for his family’s privacy to be respected and says it will be a difficult time.

    Mr Campbell says he will remain the Member for Keira.

    “I am incredibly proud of my achievements while serving as minister for transport, roads, police, small business, the Illawarra, regional development and water utilities,” Mr Campbell said in the statement.

    Mr Campbell has been under pressure to resign several times, most recently for his handling of an accident on the F3 north of Sydney. The accident left motorists stranded for hours.

    The Opposition had also called for him to stand down over the tens of millions lost on the scrapped CBD Metro.

    Tags: government-and-politics, states-and-territories, australia, nsw

    First posted 43 minutes ago

  • Euro in danger: Germans trigger panic over future of single currency

     

    European finance ministers, who have just hammered out a massive rescue plan for Greece, will hear controversial calls from Germany at a meeting tomorrow for changes to the Lisbon treaty to give Brussels powers to co-ordinate national budgets.

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    Ms Merkel believes that the EU should have stronger powers to organise the “orderly insolvency” of countries such as Greece that set giveaway budgets with no means of paying for them. After announcing a ban on speculative share trading in Germany’s top financial institutions and the bonds of eurozone countries until next March, she warned: “This challenge is existential and we have to rise to it. The euro is in danger. If we don’t deal with this danger, then the consequences for us in Europe are incalculable . . . If the euro fails, then Europe fails.”

    Her apocalyptic warning came as David Cameron prepared for his first visit as Prime Minister to Paris and Berlin, where he is likely to come under pressure to commit more British funds to EU bailout programmes.

    His desire to build relations with Ms Merkel will be tempered by his reluctance to see any more powers transferred to Brussels. However, with 54 per cent of Britain’s exports going to Europe, the economy is not immune to the effects of the euro’s problems.

    Ms Merkel may have intended her words to be a rallying cry to stop the crisis of confidence spreading from Greece to Portugal, Spain and Italy. But the markets were shaken because Germany is seen as the bedrock of the euro, which was introduced just ten years ago and now covers 16 countries.

    Fears are growing at the highest level in the European Commission over the size of Italy’s national debt and its ability to cope if markets turn on it. Further turmoil is possible today as Asian investors prepare to dump huge amounts of euros on the market.

    Wolfgang Schäuble, the German Finance Minister, called for an urgent rewriting of the eurozone rulebook. He told the Financial Times: “I’m convinced the markets are really out of control. That is why we need really effective regulation, in the sense of creating a properly functioning market mechanism.”

    Mr Cameron will meet President Sarkozy of France tonight and Ms Merkel tomorrow. He will resist her demand to reopen the Lisbon treaty to beef up European Commission powers to scrutinise national budgets.

    Herman Van Rompuy, the European Council President, called the finance ministers’ meeting in response to Ms Merkel’s demands for a treaty change. Michel Barnier, the EU Commissioner for Internal Markets and Financial Regulation, said: “It’s important that member states act together.”