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Green energy firms fear new feed-in tariffs will be too low

The DECC has been heavily lobbied by the big energy firms, and tomorrow’s announcement has been delayed several times. The Clean Energy Cashback, or feed-in tariff, will reward households, businesses or communities by paying above-market rates for the electricity they produce and feed into the grid.

When the tariffs were unveiled last year, they were criticised for offering rates of return too low to encourage people to install micro-generation plants. Germany introduced feed-in tariffs a decade ago offering double-digit rates of return and sparked a green revolution.

But Alan Simpson, special adviser to energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband, fears the battle to get higher tariffs has been lost and believes the DECC will stick to its aim of getting just 2% of the UK’s electricity from smaller scale renewables by 2020. He says three times that would be easily achievable at an additional cost per household energy bill of £1.20 a year.

“Germany needed starting rates that gave a 10% return on investment to kickstart their leap to the top of the renewables league. Britain needs to do the same,” he wrote in a letter to Gordon Brown last week. “At the moment, we don’t have a renewables industry. We have survivors; firms that exist despite government policy rather than because of it.

“A coalition of groups – from farmers to the fuel-poor, environmental NGOs to eco-builders, ethical bankers to engineers and installers – has been lobbying DECC officials for all they are worth. But little seems to be working.”

Andrew Melchior, head of the EIC Partnership, which is setting up the Horizon energy co-operative in Manchester, said his business was only viable because of an EU grant. The feed-in tariff would not be enough, he warned.

“The Germans created an efficient industry that is able to provide solar installations at competitive prices. The UK does not have this industry, more a collection of enthusiasts experimenting with new technologies or proponents well versed in the pragmatics and dark arts of exploiting pots of grant funding.

“We must provide a decent incentive so that the public begin to accept the concept of economically viable solar energy in the UK.”

The Election Will Not Be Fought On Climate

federal politics (NEW MATILDA COM)

29 Jan 2010

The Election Will Not Be Fought On Climate

By Ben Eltham

Before Parliament resumes, Ben Eltham takes a closer look at the speeches made by Rudd and Abbott during the holiday break: what do they tell us about the year ahead?

You have to hand it to our hard-working politicians: after only a couple of weeks holiday, both the Prime Minister and the Opposition Leader are now back at work trying to woo voters and stake out their positions. The election year has begun.

Kevin Rudd returned from a holiday in Tasmania — where he still managed to get himself on TV at the cricket — to embark on a national speaking tour. Those speeches dealt with meaty policy issues, so were largely ignored by the mass media in favour of his new children’s book Jasper and Abby and the Great Australia Day Kerfuffle.

But there is actually some merit in many of Rudd’s recent speeches. He has examined issues such as social exclusion, the challenges of an ageing population, infrastructure and productivity. While there is a lot of repetition — especially if you read them as transcripts — they all address the long-term issues faced by the nation.

For instance, Rudd’s speech in Brisbane on the topic of productivity sets out a fundamental fact of life: that productivity is the key long-term determinant of a nation’s standard of living. As Nobel-prize winner Paul Krugman once noted, “how much productivity is in the economy is almost the only thing that matters.” Better productivity — all other things being equal — means higher rates of economic growth, with all the resources for governments, firms and workers that growth brings.

And what is productivity, exactly? In technical terms, it’s the rate at which we can deliver goods and services for a set unit of inputs — chiefly labour. It’s not so much building a better mouse-trap, as a better mouse-trap factory. Across an economy, productivity is also influenced by innovations. Information technology, for instance, has had a massive impact on important sectors of the economy like freight and logistics, where better IT systems have allowed innovations like “just in time” delivery to help firms lower the amount of inventory they need to keep in stock.

But productivity is also a constantly moving target. As new technologies and innovations are implemented, productivity typically rises. Once the new systems are in place, productivity tends to slow again. Australia’s productivity, which whipped along at approximately 2 per cent in the 1990s, then slowed to around 1.4 per cent in the 2000s. No one is quite sure why.

Kevin Rudd’s speech on productivity makes obvious, but nonetheless valuable, points. He quotes Treasury figures suggesting that “if average productivity growth was lifted back towards the 1990s mark of an average 2 per cent per year … our economy would be $570 billion bigger in 2050, [and] on average, every Australian man, woman and child would be $16,000 better off a year in 2050.”

And what will get us back up to 2 per cent productivity growth? Why, Labor policies such as the National Broadband Network, the “education revolution”, health reform and infrastructure spending. Rudd is setting up his new agenda for 2010, which is to seize the economic high ground by framing the Government’s policies in a nation-building narrative.

You’ll notice one important policy area that Rudd doesn’t mention much: climate change. In the wake of the debacle of Copenhagen, the Prime Minister is moving to de-emphasise climate as an issue which no longer appears to be cutting through. Although he will still keep it up his sleeve as a handy stick with which to beat the Opposition, Rudd appears to want to move on from the ETS and fight this year’s election on the issue of the economy.

It’s good short-term politics, but woeful policy. In the medium and long-term, many of the greatest productivity gains are likely to emerge from a more sustainable economy. Think about the time lost in traffic congestion alone, or the productivity drain represented by the increasingly creaky public transport systems of our major cities. In contrast, big productivity gains are likely to be found in the renewable energy and clean tech sector which is currently languishing due to Australia’s addiction to cheap and dirty fossil fuels.

Actually, it’s poor long-term politics too. This is because Labor is “losing the ground war” on climate change. A revival of climate scepticism, stoked in no small part by the increasing polarisation of the debate between Labor and Coalition voters, has flowed through to increasing opposition to an emissions trading scheme. The result is that Labor is going backwards on an issue that was an important vote-winner in 2007. Not only are we unlikely to have a double-dissolution election over climate change, we now may not even see an emissions trading bill enacted at all.

Over on the conservative side of the fence, Tony Abbott is making headlines for the things he’s been saying too. Unfortunately, they’re all the wrong headlines. Instead of gaining traction with the intriguing gimmick of a workforce of 15,000 environmental workers — “a standing environmental workforce, perhaps 15,000-strong, capable of supplying the skilled, motivated and sustained attention that large-scale environmental remediation needs” — Abbott instead got himself noticed for his views on the virginity of his daughters.

As my colleague Jeff Sparrow argued yesterday, Abbott may have copped brickbats from predictable directions, but that probably won’t have hurt his perception among key demographics like parents of teenagers, who are probably uncomfortable about the idea of their children having sex too young.

Sparrow thinks Abbott’s tenure as Opposition Leader has already shifted Australian politics to the right. I’m not so sure, but there is some recent opinion poll evidence that suggests Labor is struggling on issues it should comfortably own — and not just on climate.

According to the latest Essential Research poll, Labor is actually trailing the Opposition on the issue of “better management of the economy”, surely an uncomfortable statistic for Alistair Jordan and the backroom boys in Rudd’s HQ. It’s also trailing on “controlling interest rates”, which is arguably worse for Labor, as interest rates are only headed in one direction: up. On the other hand, it comfortably leads in environmental issues, education and jobs, so it’s not all bad news but the numbers are certainly encouraging for an Opposition at the start of an election year.

The big dilemma for Rudd and Labor is whether to use its political advantage to press ahead with its agenda in the remainder of this term or to go negative on climate change and health reform, play it safe and try to protect its lead heading into the election. Everything we know about Kevin Rudd suggests he will choose the latter.

Pentagon to rank global warming as destabilising force.

“While climate change alone does not cause conflict, it may act as an accelerant of instability or conflict, placing a burden on civilian institutions and militaries around the world,” said a draft of the review seen by the Guardian.

Heatwaves and freak storms could put increasing demand on the US military to respond to humanitarian crises or natural disaster. But troops could feel the effects of climate change even more directly, the draft says.

More than 30 US bases are threatened by rising sea levels. It ordered the Pentagon to review the risks posed to installations, and to combat troops by a potential increase in severe heatwaves and fires.

The review’s release coincides with a sharpening focus in the American defence establishment about global warming – even though polls last week showed the public increasingly less concerned.

The CIA late last year established a centre to collect intelligence on climate change. Earlier this month, CIA officials sent emails to environmental experts in Washington seeking their views on climate change impacts around the world, and how the agency could keep tabs on what actions countries were taking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The CIA has also restarted a programme – scrapped by George Bush – that allowed scientists and spies to share satellite images of glaciers and Arctic sea ice.

That suggests climate change is here to stay as a topic of concern for the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, in acknowledging the threat of global warming, will now have to factor climate change into war game exercises and long-term security assessments of badly affected regions such as the Arctic, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.

Military planners will have to factor climate change into war game exercises and long-term security assessments of badly affected regions such as the Arctic, sub-Saharan Africa, and South Asia.

“The leadership of the Pentagon has very strongly indicated that they do consider climate change to be a national security issue,” said Christine Parthemore, an analyst at the Centre for a New American Security, who has been studying the Pentagon’s evolving views on climate change. “They are considering climate change on a par with the political and economic factors as the key drivers that are shaping the world.”

Awareness of climate change and its impact on threat levels and military capability had been slowly percolating through the ranks since 2008 when then Senators Hillary Clinton and John Warner pushed the Pentagon to look specifically at the impact of global warming in its next long-term review.

But the navy was already alive to the potential threat, with melting sea ice in the Arctic opening up a new security province. The changing chemistry of the oceans, because of global warming, is also playing havoc with submarine sonar, a report last year from the CNAS warned.

US soldiers and marines, meanwhile, were getting a hard lesson in the dangers of energy insecurity on the battlefield, where attacks on supply convoys in Afghanistan and Iraq inflicted heavy casualties.

“Our dependence on fuel adds significant cost and puts US soldiers and contractors at risk,” said Dorothy Robyn, deputy undersecretary of defence for the environment. “Energy can be a matter of life and death and we have seen dramatically in Iraq and Afghanistan the cost of heavy reliance on fossil fuels.”

She told a conference call on Friday the Pentagon would seek to cut greenhouse gas emissions from non-combat operations by 34% from 2008 levels by 2020, in line with similar cuts by the rest of the federal government.

In addition to the threat of global warming, she said the Pentagon was concerned that US military bases in America were vulnerable because of their reliance on the electric grid to cyber attack and overload in case of a natural disaster.

The US air force, in response, has built up America’s biggest solar battery array in Nevada, and is testing jet fighter engines on biofuels. The Marine Corps may soon start drilling its own wells to eliminate the need to truck in bottled water in response to recommendations from a taskforce on reducing energy use in a war zone.

But not all defence department officials have got on board, and Parthemore said she believes it could take some time to truly change the military mindset.

Parthemore writes of an exchange on a department of defence list-serv in December 2008 about whether global warming exists. It ends with one official writing: “This is increasingly shrill and pedantic. Moreover, it’s becoming boring.”

More flaws emerge in climate alarms

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in London’s The Sunday Times and The Australian, the panel was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report.

The IPCC has been put on the defensive as well over its claims that climate change may be increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri was fighting to keep his job over the weekend after a barrage of criticism. Scientists fear the controversies will be used by climate change sceptics to sway public opinion to ignore global warming – even though the fundamental science, that greenhouse gases can heat the world, remains strong.

The latest controversy originates in a report, A Global Review of Forest Fires, that WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organisations. The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF.

In their report, they suggested that “up to 40 per cent of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall” but made clear this was because drier forests were more likely to catch fire.

The IPCC report picked up this reference but expanded it to cover the whole Amazon. It also suggested that a slight reduction in rainfall would kill many trees directly, not just by contributing to more fires. The IPCC said: “Up to 40 per cent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state.

“It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas.”

Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at Leeds University who specialises in tropical forest ecology, described the section of the report by Rowell and Moore predicting the potential destruction of large swaths of the Amazon as “a mess”.

“The Nature paper is about the interactions of logging damage, fire and periodic droughts, all extremely important in understanding the vulnerability of Amazon forest to drought, but is not related to the vulnerability of these forests to reductions in rainfall,” he said.

He believes the IPCC should ban the use of reports from campaign groups.

“In my opinion, the Rowell and Moore report should not have been cited; it isn’t sufficient evidence to back any claim at all, as it contains no primary research data,” Mr Lewis said. The WWF said it prided itself on the accuracy of its reports and was investigating the latest concern. “We have a team of people looking at this internationally,” said Keith Allott, its climate change campaigner.

The Amazon constantly undergoes huge changes because of natural variability in the weather, aside from damage caused by human factors such as logging and agricultural clearance.

Spotting the additional impact of global warming against such a changing background is difficult, especially when the world has so far warmed by about 0.7C since the 18th century.

The Sunday Times

Climate change: Sceptics fiddle while the planet burns

Kathy Maskell

Walker Institute for Climate System Research

University of Reading

■ Robin McKie’s article contains some sensible ideas – well, one at least: the abolition or serious rejigging of the IPCC. This latest blunder is not the only one to discredit the organisation. There is also evidence that the summaries for policy-makers do not always reflect the real scientific findings when these fail to support the widely held acceptance of manmade global warming.

It would seem that the sceptics are charged with having to prove that the consensus is wrong. Surely it is for those who hypothesise – in this instance, that there is a direct link between anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and global warming – to demonstrate that it is true.

Michael Robinson

North Creake, Norfolk

■ It must be remembered that global warming is not an issue of opinion. It is solely about the quantum mechanical interactions between radiation and molecules in the atmosphere and the knock-on effects this has. Unlike questions such as the best policy for dealing with the recession, where two sides could in theory ague for all eternity, with climate change only one side can be correct. We just don’t yet know which side is correct. As climate change deniers have failed to produce a peer-reviewed body of evidence pointing to a mechanism that would negate the impact of our emissions, caution would seem to be sensible.

David Coley

Senior research fellow

Centre for Energy and the Environment

School of Physics, Exeter

■ A consequence of the intense public debate surrounding the Copenhagen conference has been a widening of the gap between those who accept that humans are affecting the climate system and those who do not. Yet the case that climate change is real and unwise is unchanged: greenhouse gases in the atmosphere warm the surface zone we inhabit. Measurements show that human industry and agriculture have increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air by nearly 40%.

The cost of transforming world society to maintain prosperity and improve equity in a way that is sustainable and reduces the climate risk is a tough challenge. People are key to addressing this challenge, but to act, people must be convinced that there is a problem and that it is a priority.

Professor Chris Rapley

Director of the Science Museum and professor of climate science, University College London, London WC1

■ Despite the well co-ordinated political campaigns by “sceptics” against the IPCC, it remains the most authoritative source of information about the causes and consequences of climate change. Yet every error in its last report is now being portrayed as undermining the evidence that greenhouse gases are driving climate change. Perhaps it is time that the claims of the professional climate change “sceptics” are put to the same test.

Bob Ward

Policy and communications director, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, LSE

London WC2

Cost of UK flood protection doubles to 1bn pounds a year

The rising costs will be incurred from the impacts of climate change that will take effect in the coming decades, meaning the risks to homes and communities will increase unless defences are improved.

FloodLondon

The costs of dealing with floods can run into the billions – the devastating floods of summer 2007 cost a total of £3.2bn according to the EA, including more than £2bn in costs to homeowners and businesses as well as 400,000 of lost school days. The EA estimates that 5 million people live and work in the 2.4m properties in England that are at some risk of flooding and, at present, around £570m is spent every year building and maintaining the defences required for them. Half a million of those properties are in highest risk band, which means they are at risk of flooding due to extreme weather expected once every 75 years.

Climate scientists predict that, by the 2080s, sea levels could be around 70cm higher around the southern parts of the UK, making serious storm surges and floods more frequent. Using predictions from the UK Climate Impacts Programme, the EA estimates that keeping all 2.4m at-risk homes at the existing level of flood risk for the next 25 years will cost £1bn per year by 2035. “Assuming that no new properties are adding to that risk, then that investment is to maintain the existing infrastructure and to invest to make sure it isn’t worsened, taking into account the uncertainties of climate change,” said Robert Runcie, the EA’s director of flood and coastal risk management.

“What we know from the science of climate change is that weather patterns are going to become more extreme. The risk is going to get greater and we need to up our game in response to that,” said Chris Smith, the EA chairman, in an evidence session to the House of Commons environmental audit committee (EAC) last week.

“The case for flood defence is very strong. The cost benefit of any flood defence work that we do, the benefit is at least five times the cost. The average cost to a home of being flooded is £20,000 to £30,000. The average cost to a home of being burgled is about £1000. So the damage that flooding does in terms of its impact on people’s livelihoods is huge.”

But getting this money out of government has proved difficult. “The Treasury have crawled all over our figures and have agreed that our working is absolutely in order and have agreed with the conclusions that we have reached,” said Smith. “What they have not done, of course, is commit the actual figures and that is unlikely to happen this side of an election or, I suspect, the other.”

An Treasury spokeswoman said:”The government will make decisions about the allocation of expenditure, including the allocation for flood risk management, at the next spending review.” She pointed out that spending on on flood and coastal erosion risk management had increased in recent years, from £394m in 2002-03 to £564m in 2005-06.

Not spending the money could have even bigger consequences. The EA estimates that the annual cost of damage to residential and commercial property from flooding in England could rise from £2.5bn to £4bn by 2035 without the extra cash for flood defences. Investing the money would save England some £180bn over the next 100 years.

“Even at a time of unprecedented financial pressure, this is something that has to be given a priority,” said EAC chair and Conservative MP Tim Yeo. “We could be more creative about getting private sector investment in as well. Where you’ve got new developments taking place, it’s quite legitimate in my view for the planning authority to say, look, although what we’re going to ask for [in flood defences] is not directly related to the houses or supermarket you’re putting up there, it is of concern to this community and we do need to accelerate investment in flood-prevention measures so we want to supplement what the taxpayer is being asked for with developer contributions.”

Runcie said that flood management in future would depend on careful planning and preventing the construction of new buildings on flood plains. “One of the things that’s made a huge difference on that is a change to the planning laws where, only last year, we became a formal consultee. In the last 12 months, of the thousands of applications for major developments that have been proposed, only 4% went against our recommendations.”

FloodUK

Author: admin

Green energy firms fear new feed-in tariffs will be too low