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New Zealand was a friend to Middle Earth, but it’s no friend of the earth

Then there are the US and Australia, which both reneged on the protocol after signing it. And Canada, which never reneged but still has emissions up by a quarter (worse than the US) and shows no sign of contrition or of being called to account by the other signatories.

But my prize for the most shameless two fingers to the global community goes to New Zealand, a country that sells itself round the world as “clean and green”.

New Zealand secured a generous Kyoto target, which simply required it not to increase its emissions between 1990 and 2010. But the latest UN statistics show its emissions of greenhouse gases up by 22%, or a whopping 39% if you look at emissions from fuel burning alone.

Some countries with big emissions growth started from a low figure in 1990. Arguably, they were playing catchup. There is no such excuse for New Zealand. Its emissions started high and went higher.

They are today 60% higher than those of Britain, per head of population. Among industrialised nations, they are only exceeded by Canada, the US, Australia and Luxembourg. In recent years a lot of Brits have headed for Christchurch and Wellington in the hope of a green life in a country where they filmed the Lord of the Rings. But it’s a green mirage.

To rub our noses in it, last year New Zealand signed up to the UN’s Climate Neutral Network, a list of nations that are “laying out strategies to become carbon neutral“.

But if you read the small print of what New Zealand has actually promised, it is a measly 50% in emissions by 2050 – something even the US can trump.

Where do all these emissions come from? New Zealand turns out to be mining ever more filthy brown coal to burn in its power stations. It has the world’s third highest rate of car ownership. And, with more cows than people, the country’s increasingly intensive agricultural sector is responsible for approaching half the greenhouse gas emissions.

You might expect the UN Environment Programme to throw New Zealand off its list of countries supposedly pledged to head for climate neutrality. Sadly no. These steely guardians of the environment meekly say that the network “will not be policed… nor will UNEP verify claims“.

Indeed, it seems to go to great lengths to deny reality. Check the UNEP website and you will find an excruciating hagiography about a “climate neutral journey to Middle Earth“, in which everything from the local wines to air conditioning and Air New Zealand get the greenwash treatment.

After extolling the country’s green credentials, it asks: “Have you landed in a dreamland?” Well, UNEP’s reporter certainly has. He cheers New Zealand’s “global leadership in tackling climate change“, when the country’s minister in charge of climate negotiations, Tim Groser, has been busy reassuring his compatriots that “we would not try to be ‘leaders’ in climate change.”

This is not just political spin. It is also commercial greenwash. New Zealand trades on its greenness to promote its two big industries: tourism and dairy exports. Groser says his country’s access to American markets for its produce is based on its positive environmental image. The government’s national marketing strategy is underpinned by a survey showing that tourism would be reduced by 68% if the country lost its prized “clean, green image”, and even international purchases of its dairy products could halve.

The trouble is, on the climate change front at least, that green image increasingly defies reality.

Trillions of dollars needed to cut climate change

World leaders will need to invest more than $10 trillion to halt climate change by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

The World Energy Outlook 2009, the annual flagship publication from the IEA, was presented by Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the agency in London this week.

Mr Tanaka believes this huge investment will be more than offset through savings in transport, buildings and health care.

While pointing out energy use has fallen in the past 12 months, as a result of the economic downturn, Mr Tanaka fears it will ‘soon resume its upward trend if government policies don’t change’.

If policies don’t change Mr Tanaka sees a ‘reference situation’ where demand will increase by 40% between now and 2030.

He said: “The cumulative incremental investment of $10.5 trillion is needed in low-carbon energy technologies and energy efficiency by 2030.

“In addition to avoiding severe climate change, this cost is largely offset by economic, health and energy-security benefits.

“Energy bills in transport, buildings and industry alone are reduced by $8.6 trillion globally over the period 2010-2030.”

He also highlighted the energy poverty challenge with 1.3 billion people still without electricity in 2030, a small decrease from 1.5 billion today.

He said: “Universal access could be achieved with investment of only $35 billion per year in 2008-2030.”

Luke Walsh

The future of oil

Superficially, the so-called “super majors” appear to be in good health. Fortune‘s Global 500 list places the “big six” – Shell, ExxonMobil, BP, Chevron, Total, and ConocoPhillips – among the seven largest corporations in the world, as measured by 2008 revenues. In third place, Wal-Mart stands alone as the only top seven company not dedicated to finding, extracting, processing, distributing and selling the liquid transportation fuels that drive the global economy, although few business models are as dependent on the ready availability of relatively cheap oil.

Worryingly for such companies, 2008 may prove to have been the high water mark for the global oil industry, with geological, geopolitical and climate-related pressures now creating new market dynamics. The oil question is now, more than ever, a transport question. Cheap and reliable supplies of transportation fuel are the very lifeblood of our globalised economy. So it matters profoundly that we are entering an era in which oil supplies will be neither cheap nor reliable.

For the likes of Shell, BP, and ExxonMobil, whose rates of liquid hydrocarbon production peaked in 2002, 2005, and 2006 respectively, the current economic paradigm requires them to replace reserves. Investors primarily value IOCs on this basis, as well as their ability to execute projects on time within budget. A key problem for the IOCs is that petroleum-rich countries feel increasingly confident in the ability of their own national oil companies to steward their domestic resources. So generous concessions once offered to IOCs in return for technical and managerial expertise are now deemed unnecessary.

The imperative to satisfy investor expectations fuels an increasingly risky growth strategy, which drives IOCs towards energy-intensive (and potentially climate-destabilising) unconventional oil substitutes, such as tar sands (in Canada), gas-to-liquids (in Qatar), and coal-to-liquids (in China and elsewhere). These pathways are not chosen as ideals: they are more or less reflexive responses to external market pressures.

Meanwhile, the uncomfortable fact is that our economies are addicted to liquid hydrocarbon transport fuels, the consumption of which creates a catalogue of negative side effects. And we cannot hope to address this addiction by way of our “dealers” developing even more damaging derivatives of the same drug.

As if that were not enough, there is the hot topic of “peak oil“, defined as the point at which global oil production reaches a maximum rate, from where it steadily declines. The basic principle is uncontroversial: production of a finite non-renewable resource cannot expand endlessly, and this has been demonstrated in practice at national level all over the world. The heated debate centres on the point at which the peak in global oil production is likely to be reached.

“Early toppers” argue that the peak has already been passed, and that the world will never produce more than 85 million barrels per day. By contrast, “late toppers” point to the huge scale of unconventional reserves – for example, Alberta’s tar sands resource is vast – that remain untapped, as well as the potential bounty locked away in frontier regions such as the Arctic Ocean, where global warming is opening up new areas for oil and gas exploration.

Unfortunately, what matters is not the absolute size of these unconventional and frontier resources, but the rate at which they can be developed and brought to market. By definition, this is the “difficult” oil. Production rates are determined by a series of significant financial, social, and environmental constraints that raise grave concerns for the viability of a global economic system made possible by liquid transport fuels.

At the same time, leaders of all the major economies finally acknowledge what scientists have long been warning: to avoid catastrophic climate-change impacts, the global average surface temperature increase must be limited to 2° Celsius compared with the pre-industrial era. To stand any reasonable chance of avoiding a 2° Celsius rise, our best understanding of the climate change science suggests that global greenhouse-gas emissions must peak within the next five to 10 years, and then decline by more than 80% on 1990 levels by 2050. Realistically, meeting this requirement will demand that we engineer a transition to a zero-carbon energy system by mid-century.

So what might a zero-carbon energy system look like? As well as dramatic improvements in the energy efficiency of buildings and appliances, and massive deployment of sustainable renewable energy technologies, we will no longer be allowed to burn fossil fuels without capturing and sequestering the carbon dioxide emissions. This implies that we must restrict our use of fossil fuels to stationary facilities, such as power plants, where carbon capture and storage (CCS) is practical (see “Outlook and obstacles for CCS“). Strikingly, a zero-carbon energy system will also mean that no liquid hydrocarbon fuels, with the exception of biofuels, can be consumed in mobile applications such as transport.

This does not make pleasant reading for international oil companies. Their core business today may be described as: digging geological carbon resources out of the ground, converting those resources into liquid fuels, then marketing those fuels to consumers who set them on fire in internal combustion engines to move around. By 2050, these activities will all be considered to be strikingly primitive.

SustainAbility and of Volans. His personal website is http://www.johnelkington.com. Gary Kendall is director of SustainAbility’s Energy Sector and Climate Change Programme.

John Elkington is co-founder of

Revealed: polluters’ fear tactics on climate

In Australia, 20 companies who have already won the most concessions from the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme employ 28 lobbying firms with well over 100 staff, many of them former politicians, political advisers or government officials.

In the US there are more than 2800 climate lobbyists, five for every member of Congress, an increase of more than 400 per cent over the past six years. From Washington to Canberra and New Delhi to Brussels, companies and their lobbyists are often raising the same widespread fears about jobs, power blackouts and economic losses unless governments weaken commitments to combat climate change.

The report by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists examined the climate lobby in eight countries including the US, Canada, Australia, India, Japan, China, Belgium and Brazil. It relied on more than 200 interviews, lobbying registers and political donation records. The Herald collaborated in the investigation for Australia.

The findings come as hopes are fading that a binding climate change agreement will be reached at Copenhagen next month.

This week African nations staged a day-long boycott of UN climate talks in the lead-up to the summit, demanding that rich countries make more ambitious pledges to cut emissions. And the President of the European Commission, Jose Manuel Barroso, bluntly told reporters: ”We are not going to have a full-fledged binding treaty – Kyoto type – by Copenhagen”. Instead, a political agreement is being flagged with a treaty not being concluded until at least next year.

The consortium’s investigation found big greenhouse-polluting industries in all countries, developed and developing, are pushing back against ambitious targets to cut national emissions.

In China, the Government’s plans to boost renewable energy has not been embraced by many of the nation’s power companies which rely on coal. Only one of the top power companies, all state-owned, will meet the Government’s goal to get 3 per cent of their power from renewable energy by 2010.

In the US, chief executives of coal and power companies have hosted a public campaign against climate legislation which is being blocked in the Senate. The millionaire coal chief Don Blankenship appeared at a ”Friends of America” rally with country music stars and prominent Fox TV host Sean Hannity. The rally was designed to warn Americans ”how environmental extremists and corporate America are both trying to destroy your jobs”.

In Europe, ambitious targets to cut greenhouse emissions were significantly reduced after lobbying by heavy industries protesting they would face unfair competition from the developing world.

Industry lobby groups have also carved out a permanent role at the UN talks as representatives of the so-called BINGOS – Business and Industry Non-Government Organisations.

While lobbyists for the renewable energy industry, the carbon traders and environmental groups are also becoming more prominent, the report finds that their voices ”can barely be heard above the clamour of the older, well-capitalised and deeply entrenched industries that have been lobbying on climate change for more than 20 years”.

More reports www.icij.org

Energy entrepreneurs can plug the gap in our power supplies

If we are serious about meeting our energy and climate targets we need to make sure that the market is fully opened up to support the legions of independent project developers, or energy entrepreneurs, who can seize this opportunity and help fill the void.

The main problems with relying only on utilities to build the low-carbon solutions of the future are ones of size, speed, cost and diversity.

In the case of renewable energy such as wind, utility companies are only really interested in investing in or developing projects of a particular size to achieve an economy of scale. These are very slow to get off the ground, take a long time for any decision to be reached within the organisation, and then a long time again to get through planning, order equipment supplies and so on. Large projects also carry a significant financial risk which, especially during a recession, even the most solid of utilities are unwilling to carry.

Without a much higher price placed on carbon emissions or increased renewable subsidies, utilities argue they cannot make the investment necessary to meet renewable targets. We are already seeing large utilities deferring or even cancelling projects for this reason.

By contrast, the independent developers are mostly focused on smaller projects, with lower financial risks, which are quicker to get through planning and buy the necessary equipment for. Each project may be smaller in output, but with a far higher number of potential developers, the aggregate results can plug a vital gap in our energy supplies – and do so far quicker than any company could build a nuclear power station.

This brings us to the final point about the independent sector: diversity. Over the past year alone we have signed Power Purchase Agreements (PPAs) with developers covering wind, anaerobic digestion on agricultural sites, energy from waste, and small hydro, as well as corporate developers building on-site renewables.

Each one of these project developers acts as an entrepreneur or small business outfit, generating not just electricity, but income and jobs too. They are a multiplier in the wider economy, helping to address two of the crises of our current age: recession and climate change.

This decentralised model has the potential to grow exponentially if the UK corporate sector is given the right incentives and motivation to invest in their own generation capacity. While the government talks of providing these incentives, in reality policy and approach is still focused on the large utilities and centralised solutions, as the current push for nuclear shows.

Larger utilities have dictated and monopolised the debate over energy policy for too long. No single company, developer or sector can tackle this energy gap alone. It will take a variety of solutions, including nuclear, from a variety of outlets.

But to accelerate the decentralisation and decarbonisation of our energy supply, we will have to accelerate the decentralisation of ownership and generation first.

• Jo Butlin is vice president of SmartestEnergy, a purchaser and supplier of electricity generated from renewable sources

Can we handle the truth

If oil traders knew the truth about declining energy availability, the per-barrel price of oil would be $300 within a week. If stock traders knew the truth, we’d see capitulation of the markets shortly thereafter. If Americans knew the truth, they just might come to grips with reality, rally together, put their collective shoulders to the wheel, and start building a better world than the ominicidal culture of make believe to which we’ve all become accustomed.

But we’ll never know, because the cabal of morally bankrupt bankers and politicians running this country — and also the industrialized world — will keep playing the shell game as long as they are allowed by the impotent media. Or, more likely, until the reality of oil priced in excess of $200 per barrel interferes with their imperial ambitions.

The consequences of the shell game extend well beyond economic disaster and the likely extinction of our species. In the short term, they include hijacking the world’s marketplace, complete with child labor, hunger, and pollution (especially abroad), continued decline of intellectual “capital” in our universities, ratcheting up the war machine by attacking yet more countries (perhaps bringing a rapid demise to American Empire), further extending imperial overreach, continued shrinking of our credit-based economy, continued enrichment of the financially wealthy (including $100 billion for eight of Warren Buffett’s companies), continued profiteering by the insurance industry, and continued land grabs in poor countries by wealthy countries. All with a U.S. military on the verge of complete collapse and despite widespread acknowledgment that American-style capitalism is not working.

To reiterate the choices facing us: (1) The economically dire truth and potential for chaos, now, or (2) Certain chaos and probable extinction, later. The moral certainty of the former choice is absolute. Perhaps that alone explains why we’re choosing door number two.

Will reality intervene in time to save the living planet, including our own species? Is 2012 soon enough? Stay tuned.

In the meantime, think about what you’d do. Let’s play King For A Day. Would you trust industrial humans with the truth? Or would you commit us to chaos and probable extinction in the name of politics? In your response, please wear two hats: first your own, then, to make the game realistic, the hat of your favorite billionaire.

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