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  • Why growing virgin vegetable oil to burn is crazy

     

    But Andrew Mercer, chief executive of Blue-NG, the company which owns the UK’s first power station running on vegetable oil, appears to believe that he is doing the world a favour.

    In arguing the case for his grotesque trade, Mercer begins by maligning the Green party. He contends that “The Green party toured the country this summer during the European elections campaign in a bus fuelled by UK-sourced rapeseed biodiesel”. Because this is a less efficient use of virgin rapeseed oil than burning it in power stations, he is greener than the Greens (or so he says). That someone else has allegedly done something even more damaging is hardly a persuasive justification. But is it true?

    I spoke to the Green party this morning, and discovered that Mercer had left out a crucial piece of information. The biodiesel used in its bus was made from waste cooking oil, not virgin oil. As I’ve been arguing since I first started attacking the practice of feeding cars rather than people, used cooking oil is currently the only sustainable feedstock for biofuel: once it is unfit for human consumption it can only be dumped or burned. It makes sense to burn it in place of fossil fuels. The Green party has now published a response in the comment thread and is requesting a correction.

    Burning virgin vegetable oil is an entirely different matter. In doing so, you are directly commissioning farmers to do one of two things: divert cropland which would otherwise have been used to grow food, or break land which would otherwise have been left fallow. In either case you are harming people or the environment.

    Mercer says: “There are millions of hectares of land lying idle across the EU”. Another way of putting it is that there are millions of hectares currently supporting wildlife and storing carbon. If farmers bring them back into production to fuel power stations like his, there would be dire consequences for wildflowers, butterflies, songbirds and other wildlife. Were it a choice between preserving this wildlife and feeding the hungry, I could understand the need for a pay-off. But the only reason that it’s commercially viable to burn virgin vegetable oil in power stations in this country is that the government is perversely offering a massive subsidy. It gives generators two renewable obligation certificates for every megawatt hour of electricity they produce, which is twice as much as you get for onshore wind. I refuse to accept that the EU’s wildlife must be sacrificed for what looks like a grant-harvesting operation.

    As two papers published last year in Science show (here and here), the carbon released by ploughing idle farmland to grow biofuels takes many years to repay. If we’re to have a high chance of preventing climate breakdown, the major cuts must be made today, so this policy makes no sense at all.

    When you consider the other greenhouse gases produced by growing crops it looks even dafter. The Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen has estimated that emissions of nitrous oxide – a greenhouse gas arising from the use of nitrogen fertilisers – wipe out all the carbon savings biofuels produce (pdf), even before you take the changes in land use into account. It’s significant that Andrew Mercer talks only about CO2. Even then he doesn’t say how he has produced his figures – I strongly suspect that he doesn’t take land use change into account. Were he obliged to consider all greenhouse gases from all sources, I suspect he would discover that burning virgin vegetable oil is far more polluting than burning fossil fuel.

    Mercer then contends that oilseed rape is roughly the same price as it was 10 years ago. This isn’t true either, as you can see from the IMF figures reproduced here. In October 1999, oilseed rape cost $398/tonne. Last month the average price was $857. Prices this year have consistently been about twice those of prices ten years ago. The idea that oilseed rape is just a “break crop” is risible. It is a major international commodity, grown because it makes money.

    The notion that you can draw any conclusions about commodity trends from a single year’s production in one small country is equally daft. It’s as stupid as saying, for example, that a cold snap in the United Kingdom shows that global warming isn’t happening. And no one would be dumb enough to do that, would they?

    The reality is that whenever there’s a global shortfall in rape production, as there was last year, palm oil helps to fill the gap. Compare this graph of palm oil prices to this one of rape oil prices and you’ll see that the price trends are almost identical.

    So while Mercer boasts that he is not burning palm oil in his power station, whenever his trade helps to cause a shortfall in rapeseed stocks, the result is likely to be an increase in the sales of palm oil. Growing rapeseed to burn is crazy, growing oil palm to fill the gaps is madness on a different scale altogether, in view of the massive impacts on climate, indigenous people and wildlife when the forests of Indonesia and Malaysia are cleared to plant it.

    Like Biofuelwatch and other green groups, I will keep putting pressure on the government to drop its perverse subsidies. I’m offering Andrew Mercer a £10 bet that if we succeed, Blue-NG will stop burning virgin vegetable oils. This is what happened in the Netherlands: as soon as the Dutch government stopped paying companies to make electricity from food, the business ground to a halt. Let’s bring this obscene, subsidised trade to an end here too.

    Monbiot.com

  • Copenhagen is only the start of climate change

     

    Only then, say scientists, will it be possible to prevent global temperatures from rising by 2 degrees Celsius by the year 2100. This figure, they argue, is the maximum warming that our planet can tolerate. If we go beyond it, we will face global calamity in the form of spreading deserts, increasingly violent storms, destruction of swaths of farmland, flooding and widespread loss of life. It is a grim list, one that should guarantee delegates give maximum concentration to their work in Copenhagen. This is their last chance, if not to save the world, then at least to prevent major losses of life later in the century. Failure should not be an option.

    Yet there are now signs that a deal which would tie every nation on Earth to a declared cut in their carbon emissions, and which would do so much to tackle global warming, will not be achieved.

    Despite the urgency of negotiators’ work and despite the fact they have been meeting regularly for the past two years in order to prepare for this summit, most observers now believe it is unlikely that a strong, ratifiable agreement will be signed on 18 December, the meeting’s final day.

    A key problem has been the failure of Barack Obama’s administration to pass a climate change bill in time for Copenhagen. This has left the US, the world’s major carbon emitter, unable to participate meaningfully in discussions. Without an American lead, not much can be achieved, it is argued. Thus the talk is of squandered opportunities instead of expectations of breakthroughs. Agreeing long-term global deals is simply beyond human nature, suggest the sceptics, obsessed as we are with our own local, short-term concerns.

    Politicians have known for a long time that this day was approaching and should have realised they would have to sit down to work out a meaningful agreement. However, it would be premature to suggest that everything that has happened over the past two years has been a waste of time and to dismiss, out of hand, the talks that will take place in Copenhagen – no matter how unsatisfactory they turn out to be. Much has happened in the run-up to the summit to indicate there is sufficient goodwill in the political system to tackle the crisis posed by global warming – if not at Copenhagen then in the following months and years.

    China, once the most difficult nation to convince about the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, has pledged that it will make “substantial reductions” in its citizens’ individual carbon output. Countries such as Indonesia and Norway, as well as the European Union, have promised to make tight, binding cuts. Europe has also proposed to make significant contributions to a £90bn a year fund that would help developing countries cut their carbon emissions while the US has begun a process that should lead it to establish carbon emission legislation.

    A few years ago, such progress would have seen improbable. Today, it is a reality. The world may not get a good global warming deal from the Copenhagen summit, but enough has been gained in its preparations to suggest that a binding agreement will eventually be signed. Whether that can be done in time to halt the worst effects of climate change is a different issue.

  • World leaders accused of Myopia over climate change deal

     

    Senior officials and negotiators are increasingly gloomy about the prospects for a global warming deal next month, with the British government admitting there is now no chance of a legally binding treaty.

    Speaking as officials gather in Barcelona tomorrow for a final round of negotiations, Rajendra Pachauri, head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said: “I gave all the world’s leaders a very grim view of what the science tells us and that is what should be motivating us all, but I’m afraid I don’t see too much evidence of that at the current stage.

    “Science has been moved aside and the space has been filled up with political myopia with every country now trying to protect its own narrow short-term interests. They are afraid to have negotiations go any further because they would have to compromise on those interests.”

    British officials say the negotiations have been progressing too slowly, and the best Copenhagen can achieve is a “politically binding” agreement. But they insist this does not represent a lowering of ambition for the talks, and say a political deal would still be a major achievement.

    “Nobody thinks we will get a full treaty,” said a spokesman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change. “Copenhagen must deliver a comprehensive politically binding agreement … This must cover all the major issues including binding economy-wide emissions reductions from developed countries, significant action from developing countries to slow their emissions growth, and finance. Only this can deliver a legally binding treaty which puts the world on a trajectory to a maximum global average temperature increase of two degrees and provides a fair deal for developing countries.”

    In an apparent effort to lower expectations ahead of Copenhagen, billed by Gordon Brown as the world’s last chance to prevent “catastrophic” climate change, senior figures are playing down the chances of producing a binding treaty.

    Yvo de Boer, the UN’s most senior climate official, said last week: “It is physically impossible, under any scenario, to complete every detail of a treaty in Copenhagen.” He added: “It is absolutely clear that Copenhagen must deliver a strong political agreement and nail down the essentials.”

    Lars Løkke Rasmussen, prime minister of Denmark, said: “We do not think it will be possible to decide all the finer details for a legally binding regime.”

    Hanne Bjurstroem, Norwegian cabinet minister and chief climate negotiator, told Reuters: “I don’t believe we will get a full, ratifiable, legally binding agreement from Copenhagen.”

    De Boer pointed out that the 1997 Kyoto protocol, the world’s existing treaty on greenhouse gas emissions, took several years to finalise and to come into force.

    Pachauri said although negotiations had not moved far and many leaders are playing down expectations, he has not given up on an agreement. “My feeling is leaders don’t want to be left with the responsibility for any possible failures so they are hedging their bets. They are downplaying expectations because if we don’t get an agreement that reaches people’s expectation, there will be a lot of finger-pointing,” he said.

    On current trends, he warned global temperatures are on course to reach the high end of the IPCC forecast of 6.4C by 2100 with dire consequences for social stability, food production and health.

    The Nobel prize winner co-ordinated 1,250 of the world’s leading scientists and 2,500 reviewers to draw up an IPCC report in 2007 that asserted climate change was a fact and all but certainly caused by carbon emissions from human activity. He said: “It is a fact that unfortunately negotiations haven’t moved very far, but that is not a major indicator of lack of progress because this is the way negotiations go. Often these things fall into place two minutes before the midnight hour. I am cautiously optimistic.”

    Pachauri said that a six-month or one-year delay in the search for a deal was not the worst outcome. “This is certainly not desirable, but if it meant a stronger agreement that addressed the seriousness of the problem, it may not be that bad.”

  • Solar power from Sahara a step c;oser

     

    The German-led consortium was brought together by Munich Re, the world’s biggest reinsurer, and consists of some of country’s biggest engineering and power companies, including Siemens, E.ON, ABB and Deutsche Bank.

    It now believes the DII can deliver solar power to Europe as early as 2015.

    “We have now passed a real milestone as the company has been founded and there is definitely a profitable business there,” said Professor Peter Höppe, Munich Re’s head of climate change.

    “We see this as a big step towards solving the two main problems facing the world in the coming years – climate change and energy security,” said Höppe.

    The solar technology involved is known as concentrated solar power (CSP) which uses mirrors to concentrate the sun’s rays on a fluid container. The super-heated liquid then drives turbines to generate electricity. The advantage over solar photovoltaic panels, which convert sunlight directly to electricity, is that if sufficient hot fluid is stored in containers, the generators can run all night.

    The technology is not new – there have been CSP plants running in the deserts of California and Nevada for two decades. But it is the scale of the Desertec initiative which is a first, along with plans to connect North Africa to Europe with new high voltage direct current cables which transport electricity over great distances with little loss.

    Leading European energy industry expert Paul van Son has been appointed chief executive of DII and will recruit staff to build up a framework to make the building of both power plants and the grid infrastructure.

    “We recognise and strongly support the Desertec vision as a pivotal part of the transition to a sustainable energy supply in the Middle East, North Africa and Europe,” he said.

    “Now the time has come to turn this vision into reality. That implies intensive cooperation with many parties and cultures to create a sound basis for feasible investments into renewable energy technologies and interconnected grids.”

    Desertec has gained broad support across Europe, with the newly elected German coalition government of Angela Merkel hoping the project could offset its dependence on Russian gas supplies.

    North African governments are said to be keen, too, to further exploit their natural resources. Algeria and Libya are already big oil and gas suppliers to Europe.

    Höppe said Munich Re had been concerned about the potential impact of climate change on the insurance business since the early 1970s. Extreme weather events related to climate change are already a reality and have the potential to be uninsurable against within a few decades, pointing to a possible crisis for the industry, he said.

    “To keep our business model alive in 30 or 40 years we have to ensure things are still insurable,” he said.

    Munich Re also plans to invest in the new initiative and Höppe said banks were confident that they could raise sufficient funding to make the project work.

    There are already some small CSP plants in Spain and North Africa, with the power used locally. But Desertec plans to see big power stations of one gigawatt operating in five years’ time and exporting some current across the Mediterranean. The consortium stresses, though, that power generated by solar fields in North Africa would be used by North Africans as well as Europeans. North Africa has a small population relative to the size of its deserts. For similar reasons Australia is putting together its own Desertec initiative.

    Dan Lewis, head of a new thinktank, the Economic Policy Centre, and author of a forthcoming energy policy paper, said: “This is just the sort of long-term, big-difference, energy security gain project that our UK short-term targets and policy framework can’t deliver.

    “Instead, we’re spending ridiculous sums on no-hoper, marginal stuff like fusion energy and a massive smart meter rollout, that at best will only shave a fraction off peak demand.”

  • Climate change threatens lives of millions of children, says charity

     

    Its report Feeling the Heat, which is launched today, claims that climate change is the biggest global health threat to children in the 21st century.

    The charity predicts that 175 million children a year – equivalent to almost three times the population of Great Britain – will suffer the consequences of natural disasters such as cyclones, droughts and floods by 2030.

    It warns that more than 900 million children in the next generation will be affected by water shortages and 160 million more children will be at risk of catching malaria – one of the biggest killers of children under five – as it spreads to new parts of the world.

    Save the Children is urging world leaders to put children first during climate change negotiations in Barcelona this week, ahead of the Copenhagen summit in December.

    Ultravox star Midge Ure, a Save the Children ambassador, recently returned to Ethiopia 25 years after the 1984 famine which prompted him to create Band Aid with Bob Geldof.

    “Climate change is no longer a distant, futuristic scenario, but an immediate threat,” he said.

    “We’ve all heard about the East African food crisis but I’ve been in Ethiopia seeing first hand the impact it’s having on children’s lives.

    Erratic rainfall means farmers can no longer predict the weather and have lost their crops which are a vital source of food for their family.

    “I asked one farmer in the highlands of Ethiopia what would happen if the food aid stopped coming. He replied: ‘It is in the hands of the gods.’ Maybe we could lend a hand as well?”

    Save the Children’s director of policy David Mepham said: “Global leaders need to act now to stop the needless deaths of millions of children. It is still possible to avoid the worst predictions for climate change if governments are bold and commit to a binding international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions when they meet in Copenhagen.”

  • MIGRATION : THE TRUE STORY

     

    A predictable orgy of blame-throwing has accompanied the latest influx of boat people, an influx that followed changes in the policy and rhetoric of the Rudd Government, which announced it would use mandatory detention as a last resort.

    The term xenophobia has immediately been thrown about by the usual suspects, the refugee lobby, the human rights lobby, the utopian left and a predictable section of the media. The policy of detention has been portrayed as self-evidently cruel and discriminatory, and the bipartisan political support for a regime that acts as a deterrent to unauthorised arrivals has been presented as proof of this country’s latent xenophobia.

    Australia is not a xenophobic nation. The argument is nonsense. Let me count the ways:

    1. The number of refugees or humanitarian cases admitted by the Howard government was the highest of any government in Australian history, other than a brief spike after World War II. This legal intake did not generate significant public opposition or partisan division in Canberra. The number of humanitarian arrivals admitted during the Howard years was more than 128,000, says the field’s leading expert, Dr Katherine Betts.

    2. The number of Muslims admitted to permanent residence was far higher during the Howard years than during any other government. The Muslim population rose from 200,000, in 1996, to 340,000 in 2006, a 65 per cent surge in 10 years. (Figures again supplied by Betts.) This surge took place during a time of rising violence by militant Islamists, and the murder of scores of Australians by Islamic fundamentalists. Yet the historic increase in Muslim numbers via legal channels generated no meaningful political opposition.

    3. Australia has the highest number of foreign-born residents of any large, advanced Western democracy. The proportion is almost one in four. For years Australia has maintained one of the world’s largest per capita immigrants intakes, and the majority of arrivals have been non-European. Debate over immigration has flared only when the immigration stream has been abused by widespread fraud. The most sustained opposition has come from environmentalists concerned with sustainable growth.

    4. People who arrive by boat present a more confronting challenge to legal, security and health screening than those who arrive by air and overstay their visas. Arrivals by air must present valid documentation before travelling. It is common practice for those who arrive by boat to destroy their travel documents, and engage people smugglers, measures designed to create a fait accompli, and make it more difficult to send them back to their nations of origin. This makes a far more difficult and expensive process of checking arrivals’ legal, security and health status.

    5. The rigorous deterrence and screening of unauthorised arrivals is integral to national security. Some of those who have settled in Australia and later engaged in criminal behaviour or welfare fraud have arrived via the refugee or humanitarian programs. The screening process for such programs is more problematic. So, too, is the absorption process. A recent spate of convictions for terrorist activity within Australia has largely involved people who came as immigrants.

    6. The Tamil Tigers, whose campaign for independence from the central government in Sri Lanka led to a long and bloody civil war, have received considerable support from within the Tamil community in Australia. In April more than 1000 ethnic Tamils blockaded the gates of Kirribilli House, the Prime Minister’s Sydney residence, calling for a ceasefire in the Sri Lankan Government’s military offensive against the Tigers. The Sri Lankan high commissioner to Australia, Senaka Walgampaya, said the Tamil Tigers had received significant support from Australia, a view shared by Australian intelligence.

    7. The number of refugees or displaced persons in the world, more than 20 million, is roughly the same as the population of Australia, 22 million. Advanced economies could only accept all these people by incurring domestic social and economic costs, which they are not prepared to make. Immigration policies have ripple-on effects, hence the need for quotas.

    8. The Rudd Government deploys a zero-sum refugee policy. Although it increased immigration and temporary-working visa intakes, it maintained the annual intake of refugee/humanitarian at 13,500. Government policy thus dictates that those who arrive by boat and are given asylum status have displaced people who have registered with the United Nations or the government. The 13,500 annual refugee quota is a real waiting line of people with real needs. It is a queue that cannot simply be rendered invisible or irrelevant.

    9. UN laws and conventions pertaining to the treatment of asylum seekers have no override authority over Australian law. The concept of ”the international community” is no more than a rhetorical device. In reality the phrase refers to other like-minded human-rights activists overseas. Most democracies punish governments that fail the test of border security.

    10. The 78 ethnic Tamils who have illegally occupied the Australian customs vessel Oceanic Viking are demanding rights that do not exist under international law. Most have been in Indonesia for some time. They want to settle in Australia, or another wealthy country, but that decision is not theirs to make.

    The Oceanic Viking needs to be reclaimed, secured, prepared for sea, then sail for Sri Lanka with the 78 recalcitrants on board. They have rejected Indonesia. Anything less is a capitulation to moral blackmail, where children have been used as props and pawns. The impasse is not a test of rights but a test of wills. The prolonging of the Oceanic Viking saga has shown Rudd to be a man who seeks to be all things to all people.