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  • Lobby group ready to get up Rudd’s nose on climate

    Lobby group ready to get up Rudd’s nose on climate

     

     

    Ewin Hannan | May 07, 2009

    Article from:  The Australian

    THE organisation that helped deliver young voters to Kevin Rudd at the last election will campaign in marginal seats to pressure Labor to shift ground on climate change.

    Lobby group GetUp warns that the Government faces an electoral backlash from ALP supporters at the next election, due before April 16, 2011.

    GetUp will start door-knocking voters in marginal seats within weeks in the wake of the Rudd Government’s backdown on its emissions trading scheme.

    The changes, announced after secret negotiations with business and green groups over the past few weeks, include a one-year delay on the scheme’s proposed start date of July 1 next year, taking it beyond the next federal election.

    They also include a low $10-a-tonne fixed carbon price for its first year of operation, bringing it much closer to the scheme design advocated by the Coalition since before the previous federal poll.

    Simon Sheikh, the organisation’s national director, said GetUp members were disappointed the Government “seems to be listening to industry more than people”. “What we hear a lot is that the Prime Minister was given a mandate at the last election to act on climate change and now our members are asking, ‘Well, how can we possibly be in a space where no serious climate action will be taken in this term?”‘ he said.

    Mr Sheikh said GetUp had surveyed its members, including ALP voters in marginal seats, and they were prepared to move away from Labor. “Our members had a great degree of optimism in November 2007,” he said.

    “When we have asked the question, ‘Are you prepared to change your vote on the back of any issue, and what is that issue?’, it’s climate change that comes out No 1.

    “People are prepared in huge numbers — certainly the majority of our Labor-voting members are prepared — to switch their vote if they don’t see strong action.”

    Mr Sheikh said GetUp had almost 18,000 members in the seat of Melbourne, which Finance Minister Lindsay Tanner won on preferences by less than 5 per cent from his Greens opponent, and 16,000 in Housing Minister Tanya Plibersek’s seat of Sydney, another with a big Greens vote.

    “These are seats where significant shifts in voting patterns can make an impact,” he said. “We have thousands of members in other marginals across the country and I think it’s very clear that if those members mobilise in any united way, then the Prime Minister will have electoral problems.

    “In the lead-up to Copenhagen (the UN’s climate change meeting in December), who is he going to listen to? Big polluters or people who voted for him?”

    While the campaign was aimed at pressuring the Government, Mr Sheikh ruled out GetUp formally campaigning against Labor at the next election.

  • Domestic Hydro Power

    Domestic Hydro Power

    Renewable energy is a hot topic at the moment, however few people know about hydro power. This is especially true when looking at using hydro power in your own home, so what can you use it for?

    When people think about renewable sources of electricity people think about fairly new technology, however hydro power is without a doubt one of the oldest forms of renewable energy generation. Water wheels, the first form of hydro power were used for irrigation in the fareast over 2000 years ago. Waterwheels were then used for milling.

    During the 19th century water turbines were created, these turbines were much smaller, and more efficient.

    In England, water mills have been used for over 900 years, during the 19th century there were over 20,000 water mills just in England. Throughout the world, water wheels have been used to power numerous pieces of machinery.

    China has over 85,000 hydropower stations, all of which are small scale plants. Many other developing countries are realising the importance of using hydropower to generate electricity.

    If you have naturally falling water in or near your home then it will also be possible to harness the energy by using a domestic hydro power system. These are very small systems which can be used without damaging the environment.

    There are several different types of turbines which can be used, depending on the project in question. In each case the turbine spins a shaft which is used to generate electricity. There are two main categories of turbine.

    Impulse turbines are where pressurised jets hit shaped cups. This means that virtually all of the waters energy can be captured.

    Reaction turbines on the other hand are where the water is not pressurised into a jet, the water simply passes over the blades. This causes the blades to spin, and so creates movement which can be converted into electricity.

    Large scale hydro power schemes have been seen to be damaging to the environment, however these small scale plants do not cause as much disturbance. As long as they are managed correctly they shouldn’t create any environmental problems.

    Before you consider installing hydro power systems you check whether or not you need to apply for planning permission before building such a scheme.

    By using small scale systems there are actually environmental benefits, for a start it reduces the need to use fossil fuels, and other methods of energy production. Micro hydro power systems can also provide power for properties located in isolated areas who have no other options when it comes to electricity.

    Hydroelectric power stations account for 20% of the worlds electrical supply. Norway is very keen on hydro electrical power stations and produces most of its electricity from this method. Iceland and Austria are also keen, they produce in excess of 70% of their electricity using hydro power plants.

    There are three different types of hydroelectric system:-

    Diversion This is where a portion of a river is diverted through a manmade canal, this can be done without using a dam and so is not as damaging to the environment.

    Impoundment This is the most popular system for large scale systems, a dam is constructed across the river which creates a lake behind it. This creates a body of water which can be used to drive a turbine to create electricity.

    Pumped Storage If not much electricity is required water can be pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher reservoir. When more electricity is required the water can be used to turn a turbine and create electricity. In other words the water is being used to store the energy, like a battery.

    Domestic hydro power projects are encouraged by the Low Carbon Buildings programme and therefore may be eligible for grants.

    Hydro Power – The State of Play

  • Bursting the carbon bubble

    Bursting the carbon bubble

    The world economy may be recovering, but inaction on climate change could cost far more than the current financial crisis. 

    A new Economist survey found over 100 articles in the month of April hailing “green shoots” of recovery for the world economy. Not so fast. Ultimately, recovery should be judged by the extent to which global demand is revived in the short term, global imbalances are corrected in the medium term and the world economy is put on a climate-friendly trajectory in the longer term.

    As the IMF’s recent World Economic Outlook shows, most economists predict growth for 2010, the glimmerings of which are now evident in such indicators as mortgage re-financings. Even if this is true, it is only the first step. If we stop here, the effort to date may be a mere bridge loan to the next bubble.

    That’s what happened last time, and what got us into this mess. After the dotcom bubble burst and the US slumped into a recession in 2001, low interest rates and fiscal stimulus (of tax cuts) followed. Such actions made credit cheap and spending in vogue.

    So borrow and spend we did. We borrowed to buy homes. We filled them with goods from China. With the profits, China loaned us more. We spent even more. The results were massive and unsustainable global imbalances – a huge US current account deficit and an equally large Chinese surplus. This, along with deregulation and no regulation in the case of the shadow banking system, sowed the seeds of the crisis.

    True, expansionary policy is needed in the short term to boost global demand. But in the medium and long term, the US has to consume less and the world’s poorer countries have to consume more in order to correct global imbalances. Yet this has to be done in a cleaner way than ever before.

    Global imbalances also swelled the carbon dioxide emissions bubble that is yet to burst. Since the turn of the century, emissions surged as China became the world’s factory, and US emission remained large. China and the US are now the two largest emitters at 46% of the annual world total.

    On climate change, there are true glimmerings of hope amid the response to the financial crisis. Yet we will need to be much more audacious in order to recover.

    In the US, a new ICF study says $52bn of the $787bn stimulus package is “green” (6% of total). The report cites the home weatherisation programme, smart grid, loan guarantees for renewable energy and some of the transportation funding as examples of measures that will remove 61m tons of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, the equivalent of taking 13m cars off the road.

    Up to 12% of China’s $500bn stimulus package is climate-friendly. China will be spending stimulus funds on high-speed rail, low-carbon car production, renewable energy and energy-efficient buildings. China already leads the world in installed renewable energy capacity with 42 gigawatts of capacity (compared to 23 in the US).

    It is true that China and the US have stimulus packages with climate-friendly components that couldn’t have been dreamed of in either country seven years ago. Yet these measures are far from adequate. China’s green industrial policy is swamped by a “brown” energy policy based on cheap coal – a policy that accounts for over 80% of its emissions.

    The US still hasn’t passed climate legislation, let alone put together a green industrial policy.

    Last week the journal Nature published a study that shows how we may exhaust our “carbon budget” in 20 years. In other words, without a drastic reduction in global emissions within the decade, we lose our chance to prevent dangerous climate change. This could lead to more than two degrees (celsius) of global warming – a tipping point that could trigger catastrophic global change.

    Economist Frank Ackerman points out in a new book, Can We Afford the Future: The Economics of a Warming World, that most economists who look at climate change don’t consider worst-case events. When factored in, the costs of doing nothing on climate change that have been put at 5-20% of global GDP by economists such as Nicholas Stern, don’t look so out of this world.

    In other words, the costs of inaction on climate change could be far worse than affects of the current financial crisis.

    Some shoots may get us through the season, but we have to plant the seeds for medium- and long-run sustainability. Such efforts also need to be treated like a bank bailout. Rather than asking “How much does it cost?”, we need to ask “What does it take?” The benefits of living in a more stable and healthy economy far outweigh the costs of a warming world more susceptible to crises.

  • Anaconda wave-power generator snakes into nexr stage of production

    Anaconda wave-power generator snakes into next stage of production

    The device is said to be at the forefront of a new generation of wave-power machines that could slash renewables cost

    Link to this video

    Giant rubber sea snakes could harness the plentiful clean power off Britain’s coasts within five years, according to the inventors of a new type of wave-energy generator.

    Yesterday, Checkmate Sea Energy unveiled the final stages of a proof-of-concept trial of its Anaconda device, seen by many experts as at the forefront of the next generation of robust, cheap wave-power machines that could slash the costs of making renewable electricity.

    Made from a composite of fabric and natural rubber, the Anaconda rides oncoming waves and uses the motion to drive a turbine in its tail. The test device is nine metres long but its developers say that a full-scale device could be up to 200m in length and be capable of producing 1MW of power, enough for a thousand homes, and cost £2m to build. Farms of 50 or more could be placed underwater a few miles from the coast.

    Harnessing wave power could contribute significantly to the UK’s target of sourcing 15% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020. The Carbon Trust found that wave and tidal stream technologies could add 10-20GW of electricity capacity to the UK by 2050, in particular from areas such as north-west Scotland and south-west England.

    “It’s a completely new kind of wave power machine,” said Rod Rainey, a chief engineer with engineering design consultants Atkins and inventor of the Anaconda. “The beauty of wave energy is its consistency. However, the problem holding back wave energy machines is they tend to deteriorate over time in the harsh marine environment. Anaconda is non-mechanical: it is mainly rubber, a natural material with a natural resilience and so it has very few moving parts to maintain.”

    Each Anaconda device is tethered to the sea floor and positioned head-on into the coming waves. Floating under the sea surface, the water-filled rubber tube swims with the waves – as a swell hits the front of the device, it creates a bulge that travels to the back of the tube, in the same way a pulse of blood travels along an artery. When the bulge wave reaches the Anaconda’s tail, the energy is used to drive a turbine and create electricity.

    “Wave power has always been the poor relation of wind energy, but a lot of people are resentful of wind turbines on their doorstep, or in vast tracts of coastal waters,” said Paul Auston, chairman of Checkmate. “What we’re offering […] is a new technology which you can’t see, it’s under the water so it’s not as intrusive and it’s made of a natural material.”

    The device has already been given a significant vote of confidence by the Carbon Trust. The Anaconda has been chosen as one of only two technologies to take part in the Trust’s marine accelerator programme, which aims to push new low-carbon technology ideas closer commercial reality.

    “We were attracted to it because of its simplicity – in theory it’s just a rubber structure,” said the Carbon Trust’s Stephen Wyatt. “It has the potential to be robust and quite easy and cheap to manufacture. When you look at some of the severe offshore conditions that wave and tidal devices have to face, then we realise that a structure this simple could be quite cheap.”

    Their analysis of the technology concluded that, because of this simplicity, Anaconda could create a “step-change” in how soon wave devices became commercial. Their research showed that, while wave energy in general costs around 25p per KWh to make, the anaconda had the potential to bring prices down to around 9p per KWh. Mains electricity today form fossil fuels costs around 6p per KWh.

    Marine energy devices that are nearing commercial reality today include the SeaGen and Pelamis, a tidal and wave generator respectively. Both went into trials in the sea last year, SeaGen in Strangfod Lough and Pelamis off the coast of Portugal. Like Anaconda, Pelamis also uses a snake-like motion to capture wave energy by flexing its articulated metal sections on the sea surface. Both devices have had technical problems however, mainly due to the harsh conditions at sea.

    The Anaconda’s designers stress that its key advantage is its survivability. “If the worst comes to the worst it’ll only be washed up on the beach, and you can patch it up and put it back out there,” said Rainey.

    The proof-of-concept trials have been carried out for the past few weeks in a wave tank defence company QinetiQ in Gosport, Hampshire. When these are complete, Checkmate hopes to build a quarter-size version of Anaconda for possible sea trials. If all goes well, the Checkmate thinks the first devices in commercial production could be floating in the seas off Britain as early as 2014.

  • Gurus desert ACF over government targets

    Diesendorf’s resignation letter said, “The real target is the unconditional 5%. All of that can be ‘achieved’ (on paper) by ineffective overseas offsets. Thus CPRS does not require any reduction in Australia’s emissions and it’s debatable whether it would result in any reduction in global emissions either.

    “Furthermore, CPRS transfers billions of dollars to the biggest greenhouse polluters. It makes emission permits into permanent property rights to polluters, instead of temporary licences. It places a ceiling on the carbon price that in effect excludes renewable energy from benefiting directly. It fails to guarantee that actions by households will add to the emissions target — instead such actions reduce the task of the big greenhouse polluters. In short, the CPRS in its present form is a backward step in Australia’s greenhouse response.
     
    “The ACF Council and campaign staff must be aware of all these failings and the dubious benefit. So why on earth has ACF lent its good name to this appalling scheme?”
     

     

  • Time to grasp the reaity of climate threat

    Time to grasp the reality of climate threat

    The scientific case has been made but politicians and the public are arguing over the facts of global warming

     

    The good news about the recession is that reduced fossil fuel demand should reduce greenhouse gas emissions, although by how much is not yet observed; the bad news is that the price of carbon allowances in the carbon markets has also been reduced as a result of falling demand. This makes investing in low-carbon technologies harder since they usually start off with higher marginal costs. That then rebounds on the ambitious talk of a “green industrial strategy” to get us out of the recession. Hence, there is now an abundance of reports showing a slowdown in all kinds of green investment, not least in renewable energy. This means that when an economic upturn does arrive, it will be just as or even more likely to be fuelled by fossil fuels.

     

    Alistair Darling’s budget was roundly criticised by environmental NGOs for not doing enough to break this cycle. Indeed, on the face of it the budget and all the other measures announced in the last few months to restore our economy to full steam ahead do far less to fulfil our green industrial strategising than is conscionable. The headline ‘environmental’ element was £1.4bn, which the government said would leverage over £10bn in total. But in today’s market conditions, it is hard to see how much of that will actually be spent. For example, the £250m for electric vehicles will have little or no immediate effect, and some argue that since it doesn’t kick in for two years, it will actually delay the current take-up of electric vehicles. The sum of £250m would have been better spent on reducing the age limit for concessionary bus travel, and if the car scrappage grants totalling £300m also announced in the budget were targeted at public transport, many more immediate carbon savings could be made, and it might go some way towards answering the age-old objection motorists have to buses especially: they’re never there when you want them. Support for car sharing schemes might also have been more welcome. Two people sharing a car to work on my simple reckoning could cut carbon emissions by half.

     

    So why can’t we do more to encourage immediate, low-tech behavioural changes? If there were a conspiracy theory as to why a government that has recently committed itself to a massive renewal of the nuclear power industry would want to promote the idea of electric vehicles, then the cynical explanation is obvious. Alternatively, without spending a penny the government could introduce tobacco advertising-style health warnings on all car promotional material. That might introduce some honesty into the green claims made by manufacturers. I discovered that the motor industry before the recession spent £800m a year on advertising in the UK alone. In the three-year period of the government’s ActOnCO2 campaign, which cost £12m, the competition will have spent £2.4bn. It’s no contest and wholly counter-intuitive to expect people to change their behaviour when most of the daily messages they receive tell them it’s business as usual.

     

    But even when it does come to supporting proven green technologies, we don’t quite seem to have grasped it. Ministers often cite climate change and energy security as equal challenges. Yet the budget allocated just £10m to the development of a long-standing, proven technology – anaerobic digestion. Manure (both human and animal) and other biological wastes could be used to create biogas – a carbon neutral fuel. According to that dangerously radical green group, National Grid, if we really pushed ahead with anaerobic digestion then 50% of our domestic gas supply could be biogas by 2020. So much for reliance on unreliable gas from “Gasakstan”. The “keeping the lights on” scare, often used when it comes to justifying new coal or nuclear, simply does not stand up to close examination.

     

    We are in a four-stage process of addressing the challenge of climate change, as Britain was in a four-stage process meeting the challenge of Adolf Hitler: denial, appeasement, phoney war then total war. I believe we are staggering between appeasement and phoney war at the present time. Our effort is improving, but in dribs and drabs, suggesting that we’ve not entirely convinced ourselves that the threat is real. It is as if we have grasped that the scientific debate has been settled but the hard, practical choices still have to pass through a multitude of sceptical arguments.

     

    Just as Lord Halifax, a member of Churchill’s government in 1940, could still contemplate some form of deal with Hitler, so we are still playing footsy with climate change, searching all the options that might buy us a little more time before we finally admit that our backs are truly against the wall. The political establishment is not as fully convinced of the scientific case as it ought to be. In political terms, climate change has the feel of something that we don’t know enough about and which we’re not sure we care very deeply about either. It’s still “other people”, either living in the present but who live far away, as in Bangladesh, or the unborn. Neither constituency is well represented amid the immediate claims of voters who are wondering when they can next safely have a splurge on their plastic.

     

    Colin Challen has been a Labour MP for Morley and Rothwell since 2001. He is chair of the all-party parliamentary group on climate change. His latest book, Too Little Too Late: the politics of climate change, is published by Picnic Publishing.