The celeb-endorsed 10:10 campaign is at best a badge a hypocrisy for celebs to grab a share of the limelight with the cause du jour. It was famine in Africa, now it's climate change.

Companies must take emissions reductions more seriously than meaninglessly sign up to a campaign that doesn't provide any guidance on how to actually cut emissions.

In the United Kingdom the only meaningful and real commitment that the government can make to cut carbon dioxide and GHG emissions is via the Carbon Reduction Commitment, which sets out a timetable of reductions via the carbon budgets in order to achieve ultimately the goal of cutting emissions by at least 80% with respect of 1990 levels by 2050. The CRC protocol is the only effective way to achieve and objectively measure our progress with emission cuts.

If companies want to voluntarily cut emissions, there is a wonderful thing called the Carbon Trust. It offers a free service and can advice companies on how to achieve emission cuts to as high a level as they wish to. They are immensely successful in what they do and have managed to get major corporates in the UK and abroad to cut their emissions very significantly. Given that this service exists already, what is the point of signing up to 10:10, claiming to commit oneself to reduce emissions by 10% during 2010? The commitment in itself is not very impressive to start with, and clearly misses the point that there is a abyss of difference between signing up and actually doing something. But that's it - the people behind 10:10 are not into "doing" things, they are into preaching. Any company can just put a call to the Carbon Trust and get the ball rolling to reduce emissions by 20% during 2010 and quietly a better result would be achieved, minus the boasting.

The 10:10 campaign is the brainchild of Franny Armstrong, the director of "Age of Stupid", who led the "not-so-stupid" campaign of promoting her film under the banner of "fight climate change" (ie "buy a ticket=you are doing something to combat global warming"). When the campaign anticipated running out of steam (as you can only watch one movie so many times), then the 10:10 campaign was born. It was launched at the Tate Modern some weeks ago with the Guardian's PR machinery as launch pad, and a host of celebrities with the carbon footprint of the size of St Paul's cathedral and no idea on how to reduce it but very determined that signing up for 10:10 was very cool. I don't need to say that there was no one of any scientific calibre present, and the big guns of climate change in this country were absent and have not said much to endorse this campaign. One admires the dignified silence of the learned.. Some celebs wrote on the Guardian that they "have no idea" of the size of their carbon footprint, and "would prefer not to know" but "someone must do something about this". Yes, someone.. hopefully someone else. And they should do something pronto while I am busy preaching and parading myself on the papers. You have to laugh - bless. Celebrity endorsement is well and truly a kiss of death, and the global warming cause does not need this.

Just like pop concerts to fight poverty/AIDS/famine are uniquely self-serving to the celebs backing them, this is pretty much the same. The intention is probably good but the result is the opposite: the public gets the false impression that something is being done in raising awareness and taking action, when in reality nothing is being done.

The same applies to Greenpeace, who believe that climbing Big Ben is tantamount to some global warming mitigating action.

We need the green agenda at the centre of government policy and streamline this by ambitious plans in the CRC, and ultimately this boils down to turning our energy production to renewables and nuclear energy. No amount of signing up is a substitute to get the utilities to take this path to decarbonise Britain.

The 10:10 website gives individuals helpful information such as "lower your thermostat and jumpers all round!". I won't continue, it's just too absurd. For companies who want some practical advi ce it helpfully sends them packing in the direction of the Carbon Trust. Sooner or later they all end up in Rome, or the Carbon Trust, as it should be, albeit via a convoluted road, so the whole point of 10:10 is defeated, apart from keeping Franny Armstrong and her troupe bankrolled until they get funding for their next film.

The Cabinet signed up to 10:10 to save face with the media, and so did the opposition, but when crunch came to vote, the commitment did not become policy in yesterday's debate at the House of Commons. Again, here are discussing the difference between signing up and doing something.

On a funny note, back in July we invited la Armstrong to come to the Lansdowne Club in Mayfair to present her movie at a fund raiser where we talked about climate change and raised funds to plant several thousand rainforest trees. That is several thousand rainforest trees more than she or her movie proceeds have planted. She declined as "glam" was not on the table and soon we got an email saying she was a Vogue model and was photographed for a Vogue feature -- we are pleased to see she was busy saving the world via the means of vogue.. Another email of the "not-so-stupid" campaign pleaded support in cash to cover £100,000 which -she said- was "the extent of our personal debts".

 One day someone should do a Dispatches programme about all these people. It's just too much.

Brunella

brunella@carbonica.org

E.ON's decision to shelve plans for a new coal power station at Kingsnorth in Kent has elated environmentalists and activists have been quick to boast victory. But it's obvious that things are not quite what they seem..

Yesterday my Inbox was filling up with messages pouring thick and fast from various groups claiming victory. Most prominently, Greenpeace's Jamie Wooley writes "Kingsnorth shelved but our campaign continues - our campaign and direct actions against dirty coal are only possible with your support - DONATE NOW!". OK, so it's thanks to all this money donated to Greenpeace that this has happened. Mmm.. Let me munch that over. In case we missed the message, it continues: "So we still need your help to make sure we stop ANY new dirty coal power stations and we're already discussing our next steps - in the meantime you can save our climate by making a donation to Greenpeace".

Please do feel free to take a moment to laugh. Thanks God for Greenpeace -- who needs a God if you can have Greenpeace?

So Donate to Greenpeace = save the planet. Very conveniently forgetting that decades ago Greenpeace was, with all good intentions, pivotal in the demise of the use of nuclear energy for electricity generation purposes, which to a large extent got us where we are now, but let's not go into that for the moment.

Next in claiming a share of victory was the Stop Climate Chaos Coalition. They declare: "Well done on Kingsnorth! Bring on The Wave!". Then blah blah about dirty coal, and yes, you guessed, it's not long before we get onto the matter of the Donation.

Funnily enough, the decision at Kingsnorth has nothing to do with these issues and E.ON would have reached the same conclusion regardless. So you can save the donation. E.ON are not saving face when they say that they've reached the decision to delay the project owing to financial considerations, it is quite true - and a very obvious truth to anyone who actually read the nitty-gritty of what the project was supposed to be about.

The project was supposed to be subject to fitting the power station with Carbon Capture and Storage technology (CCS). Currently this technology is only in the prototype stage of testing at approx 3 sites worldwide. Tests have encountered with technical problems as well as local opposition and planning hurdles. It is obvious that there's a long way to go before CCS can go commercial and applied by utilities companies for the provision of electricity at competitive prices. It may be a decade before this happens.

Therefore it defies logic why on earth would a company apply for planning or put forward a project at all on an untested technology that is not ready yet?

Quite simply it wasn't going to happen. Clean coal or CCS will be the holy grail when and if it happens, but the problem, and this is the crux of it, is that it may add a cost of somewhere between £20-£70 to the price of the ton of CO2 captured causing a sky-rocketting of the cost of electricity. The challenge therefore, is one of making the financial proposition make sense, and for the time being it looks that it may not.

Now back to Kingsnorth..

Government minister John O'Brien wrote to our chief executive Mikel Susperregi earlier this year saying that Kingsnorth would only be granted permission to go ahead if fitted with CCS technology. He re-iterated the same point even when it was explained to him that the technology could hardly go ahead within the planning timescale as it is still within an early phase of the testing stage/feasibility study. So the obvious conclusion was that either it would be delayed, or..

...my guess is that E.ON intented to make it look like the good intention was to proceed with CCS, get permission, and after it was all done and dusted make an announcement to the effect that they had problems fitting the CCS after all and that it wouldn't happened as planned etc.. so we would eventually get a dirty coal power station through the back door, just like Olympic budgets escalate in an apparently unpredicted fashion.

Someone somewhere has told that E.ON that the government won't play ball with that -- (which obviously they didn't before?) -- and so the hypothetical CCS Kingsnorth is no more (for the time being).

Brunella

www.carbonica.org