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  • Shell faces shareholder revolt over Canadian tar sands project

     

    Shell, which will hold its AGM in May, has been one of the lead companies in moves to develop oil reserves that are either mined or sucked out of the ground using expensive and energy-intensive techniques. BP and Total of France are also engaged in the sector.

    Shell has insisted that “unconventional” hydrocarbon sources such as tar sands are all justified to ensure that the world does not run out of oil too soon.

    But environmentalists have ­condemned their exploitation as “the biggest environmental crime in history” and said it must be stopped before it tips the planet over into runaway climate change.

    Al Gore, former US vice-president and Naomi Klein, the author and campaigner, urged the Canadian government to abandon its support for tar sands at the climate change talks in Copenhagen.

    Shell disputes the scale of the pollution but also says it will use carbon, capture and storage techniques to mitigate any negative impact. This argument has not stopped environmentalists – or shareholders – from opposing the plans.

    “Given Shell’s level of commitment to oil sands there is a greater obligation to shareholders to reassure how it would cope under a number of scenarios,” said Niall O’Shea, head of responsible investing at Co-operative Asset Management.

    “What if carbon capture and storage proves too costly in the oil sands? What if sustained high oil prices and carbon regulation lead to switching away from marginal, high-cost, high-carbon sources? And then there’s the cost of cleaning up the locality. Companies must be more rigorous and transparent with their investors,” he added.

    John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace UK said he was pleased that the Co-op and other investors were putting the oil company on the spot.

    “The exploitation of the tar sands is an environmental scandal on a massive scale, and is set to become a campaign battleground for years to come,” he said.

    But Shell played down the significance of the shareholder rebellion over tar sands and pointed out this unconventional source represented less than 2.5% of total oil and gas production.

    “The resolution is basically a request for further information around the economics and other aspects of our oil sands operations. The resolution is submitted by shareholders representing some 0.15% of our total outstanding shares,” it said in a formal response.

    But Catherine Howarth, chief executive of FairPensions, which has ­coordinated shareholder opposition to the tar sands investments, described the move as ­historic. “All (shareholders) are united in ­registering concern with the risks involved in Canadian oil sands. We expect that Shell’s 2010 AGM could prove a ­watershed in the history of corporate accountability,” she said.

  • Haiti earthquake: city’s plight leads to worst humantitarian crisis in decades

     

    “The Asian tsunami may have strained the emergency services of countries, but it did not disable capital cities like Jakarta or Colombo … Haiti is very poor. It just does not have the resources or the money to respond to an emergency. What capacity it did have to respond was completely knocked out. This earthquake hit a country which was already barely functional.”

    Factors specific to Haiti have made the emergency harder than usual to respond to. The UN already fed more than 1 million people in Haiti before the quake, which destroyed many of its warehouses as well as its Port-au-Prince headquarters. Key Haitian government officials and civil servants also died, making co-ordination between the emergency services and the international aid effort more complex.

    Alison Evans, director of the Overseas Development Institute, said contact between citizens and the government was important for recovery efforts, and the lack of government institutions would slow down any legitimate relief.

    Evans also said the element of surprise in the Haiti earthquake meant it had been harder to mobilise relief efforts compared with natural disasters in other poor countries.

    “Often with flood warnings or food crises there’s a degree of warning and a period of being able to build up a response. But the Haiti earthquake was absolutely like a bolt out of the blue,” she said.

    Oxfam’s International’s director, Penny Lawrence, said: “It was made far worse because all the leading international organisations lost staff and equipment. We all had contingency plans and equipment stores in Haiti. But everyone’s warehouses were damaged in the earthquake. We lost 90% of our emergency kit. Pre-positioned water [purification] equipment, tanks, latrines, pumps were all buried … We managed to rescue some tools, but we lost satellite phones, everything.”

    Another problem was that almost all communication systems were destroyed. Mobile and landline phone services were lost, and for more than 48 hours it was only possible to make contact on satellite phones, although many of these had also been lost. This meant that organisations could not communicate with either their staff or with each other.

    The mobile phone system only started working yesterday.

    The first few days of a major disaster are always chaotic, but Haiti has presented unique logistical problems. Although its small airport is open, it is only able to handle a few planes an hour and has no fuel to allow aircraft to leave.

    The main port is unable to offload supplies from ships, and the key road to neighbouring Dominican Republic is clogged, as hundreds of lorries try to get in and out of Haiti. Governments and NGOs say that the full aid effort will not be possible without sea and road access.

    “It is not possible to do everything by air. You need sea or land access to feed and water so many people. And we just have not had that,” said Laurent Dedieu, a Médecins Sans Frontières logistics supervisor. “We cannot find any diesel fuel in the city. We have roughly two to three days maximum of fuel in stock. So we need to start work on an emergency supply chain, either from Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic, or from Miami.

    “We are assessing the possibility of using sea transport, but the problem is that the city’s port is damaged.”

  • United Nations’ blunder on glaciers exposed

     

    It has also emerged that the New Scientist report was based on a short telephone interview with Syed Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.

    Related Coverage

    Mr Hasnain, who was then the chairman of the International Commission on Snow and Ice’s working group on Himalayan glaciology, has since admitted that the claim was “speculation” and was not supported by any formal research.

    The revelation represents another embarrassing blow to the credibility of the IPCC, less than two months after the emergence of leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, which raised questions about the legitimacy of data published by the IPCC about global warming.

    One email written by a scientist referred to ways of ensuring information that doubted the veracity of man-made climate change science did not appear in IPCC reports.

    Several emails also revealed that some scientists at East Anglia tried to bully colleagues who challenged the theory of man-made climate change.

    Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on Himalayan glaciers in the 2007 IPCC report, said on the weekend he was considering recommending that the claim about glaciers be dropped.

    “If Hasnain says officially that he never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, then I will recommend that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be

    removed from future IPCC assessments,” Professor Lal said.

    The IPCC’s reliance on Mr Hasnain’s 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview for New Scientist. Pearce said he rang Mr Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine.

    “Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report containing those numbers to Britain,” Pearce said. “The report had not been peer reviewed or formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I reported his work on that basis.

    “Since then I have obtained a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words, it does not mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt.

    “However, he did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan glaciers, not the whole massif.”

    The New Scientist report was apparently forgotten until 2005 when environmental group WWF cited it in a report called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China. The report credited Hasnain’s 1999 interview with New Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper.

    Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Professor Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

    When published, the IPCC report gave its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the melting of the glaciers was “very likely”. The IPCC defines “very likely” as having a probability of greater than 90 per cent.

    Glaciologists find such figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are hundreds of metres thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035 unless there was a huge global temperature rise.

    Julian Dowdeswell, director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said: “A small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120m thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of kilometres long. The average is 300m thick so to melt one at 5m a year would take 60 years.”

    Some scientists have questioned how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Professor Lal admits he knows little about glaciers.

    The Sunday Times. Additional reporting: James Madden

     

  • Grinding poverty and tectonic volatility make a devastating combination.

     

    In Port-au-Prince, which has some of the largest slums in the world, even the best constructed buildings have reportedly collapsed, suggesting that the sprawling, densely populated hillside slums would be devastated .

    “With major buildings destroyed it is likely that less well-constructed homes will be even more seriously affected. The island has not yet recovered, let alone been able to protect itself ­properly,” said an Oxfam spokeswoman today. “That construction is a recipe for disaster when an earthquake strikes,” said Kate Hutton, a seismologist with the Massachusetts Institute of ­Technology. “This is an area that is particularly vulnerable in terms of construction practice.”

    The geological conditions in Haiti are similar to those at the San Andreas fault in California, where two tectonic plates are sliding past each other. The Enriquillo-Plantain Garden fault has been accumulating stress for more than two centuries and this energy has now been released in a very large, magnitude seven earthquake.

    In addition to being large, the quake was at a shallow depth – six miles (10km). “Closeness to the surface is a major factor contributing to the severity of ground shaking caused by an earthquake of any given magnitude,” said David Rothery, a planetary scientist at the Open University.

    “Shaking tends to be greatest directly above the source. In this case the epicentre was only nine miles (15km) from the centre of the capital, Port-au-Prince. From the pictures I have seen, and from what I know of Haiti’s impoverished economy, I doubt if buildings there have been constructed with earthquake resistance in mind. They are at risk of further collapse caused by aftershocks, of which there have been several strong ones. The debris in the streets suggests that people would have been killed or injured by falling masonry if they tried to flee buildings while the ground was shaking, rather than sheltering under a table until motion had ceased.

    “It is many decades since a comparably strong quake has hit Haiti, and I wonder if the population was adequately aware of what they could do to protect themselves,” he said.

    The north Caribbean Islands are not frequently hit by large earthquakes. This one was caused by a sideways slip on a fault that marks part of the northern edge of the Caribbean plate grinding against the North American plate.

    Further to the east the plate boundary changes direction and becomes a subduction zone that is the cause of the volcanoes of the Caribbean arc, including the erupting Soufriere Hills volcano on Montserrat. David Kerridge, head of earth hazards at the British Geological Survey, said that with a big earthquake in mountainous terrain there was a strong possibility of landslides, which could cause many casualties in more remote parts. “Due to disruptions in communications the extent of the disaster might not be clear for a few days.”

    Deadly decades

    1963 Hurricane Flora kills 8,000 Haitians

    1986 Duvalier dictatorship falls, ­destabilising the country

    1998 Hurricane Gordon causes mudslides that kill almost 1,000 residents

    2004 Flooding from Hurricane Jeanne leads to 3,000 deaths

    2004 Military coup drives out former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide

    2008 Hurricanes Fay, Gustav, Hanna and Ike strike, leaving 1,100 people dead or missing and causing $1bn worth of damage

    2008 Food riots in Port-au-Prince

    2008 School building collapses in Pétionville, killing nearly 100

  • We need new energy guidance

     

    Only recently has it become clear that these seemingly disparate issues are a collective manifestation of a dysfunctional energy system. Globally and at the national level, energy is still conceptualised and managed in terms of energy sources, not in terms of the energy services these sources provide. Yet consumers have no particular interest in what sources of energy fuel their production, transportation, lighting, heating, air conditioning, or appliances. The existing paradigm serves to rigidify decision-making at a time when extraordinary flexibility and rapid change are essential.

    At the global level, a host of intergovernmental organisations is tasked with addressing various pieces of the energy puzzle. Among these, the most conspicuous is the International Energy Agency (IEA). Created by oil consumers in the 1970s in response to the Opec price shocks and embargoes by Arab oil exporters, the IEA has succeeded in establishing and supervising a system of national oil stockpiles, which has helped to prevent a recurrence. With a small but highly competent professional staff, the IEA has also become the primary source for the world’s energy statistics and is playing a key role in the climate debate.

    But it is nowhere near the truly international organisation that its name implies. The IEA was established by and for a small number of wealthy oil-importing countries, under the aegis of the OECD. Its membership remains restricted to OECD countries, even though surging demand from non-member countries like China and India is rapidly undermining the IEA’s ability to speak for, and co-ordinate responses among, oil importers as a group. Although the IEA’s mandate has expanded beyond oil since the early 1990s to include broader energy policy, several of its own member governments, led by Germany, found its record on renewables so unsatisfactory that they recently established the International Renewable Energy Agency, whose membership is open to all.

    Other key intergovernmental organisations face their own limits. The International Energy Forum, which grew out of a series of meetings of energy ministers, is intended to provide a common forum for fossil-fuel producers and consumers. It has taken some useful steps that may help to stabilise markets, such as the Joint Oil Data Initiative, but it plays a relatively minor role. The Energy Charter treaty has failed to bring Russia into a rule-based framework for international transit via oil and gas pipelines. The World Bank’s energy financing remains overwhelmingly dedicated to fossil fuels, despite limited efforts to establish funding for low-carbon energy.

    Numerous networks and partnerships have emerged in response to the gaps in global energy governance. For example, the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership, founded in the UK, has grown into a multi-stakeholder body supporting renewables and efficiency in numerous countries. So far, however, such initiatives remain quite small. They will not, in the foreseeable future, operate on a scale that can foster a rapid transition away from fossil fuels or provide energy services to billions of new consumers.

    As is true of other global problems, a lot depends on the capacity and willingness of the most powerful national governments to act collectively. Yet these countries’ deeply flawed systems of national energy governance will make such action all the more challenging.

    Indeed, in many ways, the situation has been getting worse. Over the past two decades, advocates of privatisation have promised greater efficiencies and lower energy prices, but the failure to accompany privatisation with appropriate regulation and enforcement has left many countries with poorly governed and often deeply corrupt energy sectors.

    Moreover, given the vast profits available under the current system, the struggle to bring about a significant energy transition faces stiff resistance from deeply entrenched vested interests. Market forces alone are unable to cope with major externalities such as greenhouse gas emissions, with overwhelming government control over major energy sources such as oil, and with huge numbers of people too poor to constitute a market.

    Our fractured landscape for energy governance was not planned. It has evolved piecemeal, with little co-ordination among its various parts. If we are to avoid paying a high economic, strategic, and environmental price for its shortcomings, a better system of developing and enforcing internationally agreed energy rules is essential.

  • British coastal cities threatened by rising sea ‘must transform themselves’

     

    In a model that explores managed retreat from the coast in some areas, Hull’s historic city centre would be limited to an island reached by bridges and Venetian-style water taxis, while in Portsmouth large parts of Portsea island would be given back to the sea while new “hillside living” developments would be built on densely packed hillside terraces, akin to the towns of Italy’s Amalfi coast. “The scenarios we have created are extreme, but it is an extreme threat we are facing,” said Ruth Reed, Riba president. “Approximately 10 million people live in flood-risk areas in England and Wales, with 2.6m properties directly at risk of flooding.”

    Other options include building out into rising waters using piers and platforms to create new habitable space – a strategy known as “attack”. In Hull this could involve floating disused oil rigs up the Humber and reusing them for offices, homes and university buildings, while in Portsmouth two-storey piers could be built with the lower tier used for traffic and the top tier used for pedestrian space.

    Architect David West, one of the report’s author’s, admitted the proposals were “blue sky thinking” and uncosted, but said they had the potential to relieve pressure for housing on inland sites. “I think the concept of arriving at Hull as if you were arriving at Venice airport and taking a boat into the city is really exciting.”

    The proposals were met with scepticism in Portsmouth. “A retreating coastline in this area would have a significant detrimental impact on the internationally designated harbours,” said Bret Davies, a coastal strategy manager at Portsmouth city council.

    The Environment Agency’s coastal policy adviser, Nick Hardiman, warned that extending into the sea was likely to be too expensive and structures were not likely to be sustainable.In the next financial year the Environment Agency will spend £570m on building and maintaining flood defences.