The office of the Mayor launched this week the strategy for climate change adaptation. It is an online consultation initiative - you can give your ideas and have your say: www.london.gov.uk/climatechange

 

To watch the launch video clip click below

 

 

Earlier this month the government announced a £100bn plan to boost wind power to an unprecedented scale. The Crown Estate confirmed the latest round of
leasing of UK waters for offshore farms, which will add 25 GW of electricity generation (to the existing 8GW); this will be enough to power every household in the UK.

Additional plans for offshore wind farms in Scotland could bring the total capacity to about 40GW.

This is all very impressive. Construction is planned to begin 2013-2015. I was at parliamentary seminar on energy policy earlier this week where the shadow
minister for Energy Charles Hendry rightly commented on these plans en passant "we have a shortage of ships, skills, engineers, manufacturing capacity, and absolutely
no money, but other than that everything is going fine". It's a typical "Yes Minister" moment, and probably spot on, but there're reasons to be optimistic.

There is a huge challenge in delivering the necessary volume to build these offshore farms and the cost involved, especially at a time when Britain is
risking a rating downgrade and needs to keep a lid on printing money, but I have no doubt that we will rise to the challenge. It also beside the point
that in all likelihood all this technology will be sourced from abroad.

The concerns about the unreliability of windpower are unjustified. If there's wind for a net 50% of the time during the year, and we need to resort to burning coal and gas for the
remainder to make up for the shortfall, that is a 50% cut in emissions already. There is no objective need to expect that any one renewable source will produce electricity
at a continuous level 24/7. The key is to diversify the energy mix and securing that the main elements of the mix delivering the lion's share of the demand are low carbon.

The same applies at a micro-generation or household level. Solar panels can be a great investment because the excess production can be sold to the National
Grid. The limited number of hours of daylight means that a household needs to buy back from the grid part of the time. However the net balance
is that an average set up with an initial outlay of £30000  can bring dividends of about 5-7% p.a. by selling the electricity, which is more than one would get from
putting the money in a savings account, plus there's the added advantage that the household becomes a carbon negative contributor to reducing emissions.

This is far from a trivial point. Micro-generation and energy efficiency can play a crucial role in decreasing demand that would otherwise spiral out of control.  

 

Mikel Susperregi

 

 

When economists sit down and scratch their heads to find a solution for a problem, the first word that comes to mind is “tax”.  So it’s no wonder that many leading economists of the world think that a carbon tax will solve global warming.  

Unless a carbon tax is used as a form of revenue for environmental purposes and to fund decarbonisation, it’d be a hard sell. In ordinary circumstances there is no appetite for new taxes, and in the current climate to sell the idea of a carbon tax is nearly impossible.  

Usually the idea of a carbon tax is discussed versus cap-and-trade as though they’re mutually exclusive. There is no objective reason why this should be so. A carbon tax can be introduced in developed countries as a form of value added tax to reflect the carbon footprint of goods and services and to incentivise decarbonisation.

In this way, when products follow a strict code of carbon disclosure, they can be taxed according to their environmental cost (and this could include toxicity and level of sustainability, not just GHG emissions). This tax could then be reclaimed by businesses who offset their emissions or fund projects to remedy their environmental impact.   

The revenue collected will then be used to give grants to those businesses who take measures to reduce their impact.  In effect this form of carbon tax creates three tiers where those businesses who minimise their environmental impact receive the greatest financial incentive.  

A uniform carbon price or carbon tax worldwide would be completely unrealistic because of the huge wealth gap between developed and developing nations.  

Cap and trade has got a bad reputation because in the EU it has miserably failed to deliver emission cuts. CDM is also widely criticised for delivering carbon credits of questionable additionality, creating a bloated market of carbon assets to the service of financial interests but not necessarily the best formula for climate change mitigation. This can and should change in future.  

Potentially carbon trading could deliver the economic benefits that developing countries require to fund decarbonisation. Public money alone will not be sufficient to fund a technology transfer that developing countries need to grow and curb their GHG emissions at the same time. At the moment, developing countries are taking positions to show up at Copenhagen and demand around $500bn per year for “technology transfer” whilst developed nations are only prepared to commit $100bn per year (and even that might be tricky to pull off).   

It is probably too late now to expect that Copenhagen will give us a global emissions trading mechanism that will effectively make up the shortfall but this should be articulated sometime in the next year, as it is our best chance to fund decarbonisation, rather than through a carbon tax.   

Indonesia is the world's third biggest CO2 emitter, owing to its forestry emissions. According to the World Bank, its emission figures for 2007 are 3 billion tons of CO2 per annum (about half that of the US), and this is mostly from illegal logging and palm oil plantations for biofuels.

Indonesia is the best example of how key it is to preserve the world's rainforests.

For a population of 230 million, many of whom live under the poverty line, this means the carbon footprint per capita is 11.1 tons p.a. (which is 2.2 tons more than EU emissions).

Indonesia emits 5 times as much through deforestation than other means (energy production), so its emissions problem could be addressed rapidly without a radical transformation of its economy, but simply through forestry preservation. This would bring its emissions down to about 450 million tons p.a.

In Copenhagen the UN-REDD programme (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in developing countries) is going to play a key role in determining emission cuts in countries like Indonesia (as well as other smaller rainforest-owning countries). However, UN-REDD is still at its infancy. At the moment it has only 7 programmes, with a trust fund of $37 million, which was only set up a year ago. This is loose change to even start addressing the problem.

Indonesia has a project approved in the UN-REDD framework for $5.6m and the province of Papua New Guinea another one for $6.4m. Potentially Indonesia should be the main recipient of these funds together with Brazil.

The REDD trust fund is at the moment smaller than the budget of a round-of-the-mill Hollywood movie.

These are tiny figures to create any form of incentive for a country where the palm oil industry is growing at 13% p.a. and there are huge financial interests to continue with deforestation and the drainage of peatlands.

Papua's forests in the island of New Guinea have a vast wilderness spanning 42 million hectares, and its carbon sink capacity is comparable to the EU's annual GHG emissions. At the current rate of deforestation (such as is experienced in Bormeo and Sumatra), most of it will be gone by 2030. This is what we stand to lose - it will cause an alarming reduction of the Earth's capacity to sequester CO2 from the atmosphere.

My concern with UN-REDD funds is that this system can only work if the government officials involved make good use of the funds. Indonesia's notoriously corrupt regime is a doubtful candidate to carry out this task and the likelihood is that forest degradation will continue, with or without the REDD subsidies.

Illegal logging is directly correlated with poverty, and the root causes of it have to be addressed. Otherwise loggers are bound to move away from protected areas and carry on logging elsewhere. This activity is virtually impossible to police in large areas of forest.

Indonesia needs to articulate a credible proposal to be a worthy recipient of UN-REDD funds. It must eradicate both illegal and legal logging and confine land conversion to areas of shrub and grassland, where palm oil can be produced, not through the depletion of rainforests. Once it can show it can manage its rainforests as protected carbon sinks and ultimately as financial assets then the case for UN-REDD funds will be a no-brainer.

 

Brunella

 

India is one of the main CO2 emitters in the world but unlike other developing countries it does not want to set itself emission reduction targets. It is advocating a continuation of Kyoto, whereby developing countries are under no obligation to reduce emissions.

India's carbon footprint is 1.4 billion tons of CO2 per annum (that's 23.3% that of the US), but in per capita terms, India only emits 1.2 tons per inhabitant, which is per se a model of sustainability. The problem is that 400 million people are without electricity, and it is predicted that economic development will reach these people sooner than expected, so India's carbon footprint can skyrocket in the coming decades to China's levels or beyond if the generation of electricity and economic development moves forward with old technologies and fossil fuel burning.

Of course no one wants to halt economic development anywhere in the world. Our challenge must be to combat climate change while keeping the lights on. This also applies to the developed world. No one should listen to the greener-than-thou who advocate to turn the heating down and the lights off, and reduce your comfort levels; turning your standby off will make no difference to climate change if utilities keep on burning coal. Our small collective efforts have negligible impact and the onus is on governments to articulate energy policy to decarbonise the production of electricity. We as individuals cannot do it: it's beyond our control.

I think that India eyes with suspicion the West's insistence to curb its carbon emissions, and interprets it as an obstacle to its own development. After all India's share to cumulative carbon emissions is about 2%, so it bears no responsibility for global warming.

However there are signs of dissent within the Indian government, perhaps because they themselves predict their carbon footprint will grow exponentially if something is not done about it. A leaked letter from the Indian environment minister argues that it would be in India's interest to curb emissions.

The highly visible president of the Maldives Mohamed Nasheed has been relentessly advocating for a technology transfer from developed countries to developing ones to fund their development during a transition of a low carbon economy. It is not clear how astronomical these figures are, but they could be on the high end of the hundreds of billions of dollars, comparable only to last year's financial bailout. India and China are the two obvious recipients of this financial interest, and this will be a key negotiating element to find a convergence of targets.

The timing is however all wrong, with the developed world still recovering from the credit crunch and maybe on the eve of plunging into a second dip with problems such as Dubai looming and other countries finding it hard to meet their debt liabilities.

It's not the right time to write blank cheques to the developing world, and developed countries may find they simply cannot afford to foot the bill.

 

Brunella

 

 

 

From today our blog becomes daily in the countdown to Copenhagen, and we will discuss the issues as well as the shifting positions as leaders try to converge to an agreement.

Today China has announced that it will reduce its "carbon intensity" by 40-45% by 2020. What this means is not that it will reduce carbon emissions. We will see much of this kind of game of words, that is the staple of politicians, in the following days.

"Carbon intensity" is amount of emissions produced per unit of GDP, typically measured in metric tons of CO2 per $1m of wealth creation. At the moment China emits 1,046 tons of CO2 per $1m of GDP, compared to 475 tons by the United States and 285 by the United Kingdom. This means its economy is vastly reliant on dirty energy and is so inefficient that it emits twice as much as the US and more than 3 1/2 times as the UK to create the same amount of economic output.

China's commitment to cut its carbon intensity by 40-45% means that by 2020 it will emit about 420 tons per $1m of GDP, which is just a touch below the US but still 50% more inefficient than the UK at the present time.

In terms of real emissions, China has yet to state when its emissions will peak (it's expected it will be around 2020, though it could be later), and what rate of cuts will follow thereafter. It is impossible to predict what will be China's position in 2050 and the rate of cuts from 2020 to 2050 unless we have some idea of the magnitude of the peak of emissions that will be reached. At its current rate of growth, it's predicted that China's economy will double by 2020, so if we extrapolate emissions and then subtract 40% in reduction in carbon intensity, then it would be expected that from 2009 to 2020 China's emissions will grow by 10%. That is 6bn tons of CO2 too many (and soon to become 7bn) that are emitted to the atmosphere every year.

It's not particularly what I call an express route to decarbonisation.

 

Brunella

 

With a few weeks to go to Copenhagen, participants are preparing the ground to accept a declaration of intent rather than a landmark agreement on climate change mitigation.  

A big meeting such as the one scheduled for December at Copenhagen is bound to produce few surprises.

For the last weeks and months, the environment ministers of the main GHG emitters have been holding talks, negotiating positions and recriminating one another, so at this stage everyone knows where they stand and what they are likely to expect.  We know that rich countries have little hope of meeting ambitious emission cuts without a complete rethinking of their energy policy, i.e. abandoning oil, gas and coal immediately and embracing nuclear energy with the urgency and determination of a military operation. There seems to be little sign of that.

We can't expect either promises of huge cash injections to developing countries to walk away from cheap coal and decarbonise their economies and avoid deforestation, particularly as most first world emitters are sinking faster than the Titanic under mountains of debt.

So the planets are aligned for everyone to look at each other, moan about all that and conclude that it can't be done.

The simple message will be diluted in the complexities of the background noise. There will be thousands of attendants representing hundreds of countries, including lobbyists, NGOs, activists, civil servants. All but the most high-profile key players will have very little visibility, although the majority of the participants will be there simply to be in the thick of it.  Politicians will be there to try to cut the best piece of the cake to suit their interests, or walk if they can't, NGOs to scream away their various messages, but the entire cacophony will be distilled in the simple conclusion that we are sleepwalking into disaster if we do not fundamentally change and reorganise our infrastructures, and particularly our energy production worldwide.

It is clear that something has to be done.

Kyoto expires in 2012 and a new treaty needs to be agreed to continue from that date. It now looks likelier than ever that 2010 will be a busy year for the main emitters to forge the agreement that won't happen next month.

 

Brunella

 

brunella@carbonica.org

 

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

 

 

The UN has given green light to two new generations of carbon offsets that will bring carbon reductions to a mass market in developing nations.

The panel that oversees the running of the UN's Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) approved in principle last week a substantial project that will deploy over 30 million compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs) in Mexico.

Details of the project can be found in www.unfccc.int.

The project is designed by energy efficiency project developer Cool nrg International and the CFLs will be distributed in phases over the next 2-3 years with the purpose of generating up to 7.5m offsets under the Kyoto's CDM scheme called Certified Emission Reductions (CER).

Each offset will account for the equivalent of one tonne of CO2 equivalent of greenhouse gas emissions.

CDM has been criticized for the high administration costs of rubberstamping the UN's approval. Trying to put together smaller projects that bring emissions reductions to significant numbers of people, such as energy efficient lighting schemes, is very expensive.

Under what is known as a programmatic CDM, developers deploy projects in unlimited numbers (in theory) providing each uses the same approved standards or methodologies from the outset. Therefore fees and redtape are kept to a minimum.

On the other hand, the UN also recently approved the the first agricultural methodology, or biological approach, for CDM projects. The UN’s announcement coincides with the USDA’s analysis report that shows the economic benefits to agriculture from the US cap-and-trade legislation.

The agricultural methodology, which will be used to design projects that eliminate the use of synthetic nitrogen on legumes like soybeans and cowpeas, was developed by Amson Technology LC, a greenhouse-gas-reduction and sustainability consulting firm, Becker Underwood Inc., a leading developer of bio-agronomic and specialty products and Perspectives GmbH, a Point Carbon company, a high-quality greenhouse gas reduction market solutions provider.

Carbonica very much supports these initiatives. We believe that they are very beneficial to developing nations, and they are pivotal in our global strategy to cut GHG emissions.

Brunella  

 

brunella@carbonica.org

 

 

All comments are welcome, will be immediately displayed and this forum is not moderated. Your feedback is appreciated.

The UK government announced this week the first ever carbon budget to cut emissions by 34% from 1990 levels by 2020. Electricity generated from renewables will go up from 9% to 31%.

Electricity generation is the biggest factor in our carbon footprint and it is essential to generate clean electricity in order to decarbonise the economy.

The disappointing element in the carbon budget is that the share of electricity generated by nuclear power comes down from 13% (at present) to 8% (forecast for 2020). From 2020 onwards it is expected that the share will go up with new nuclear plants being built which are now at a planning/drawing board stage.

Britain is rich in resources for wind and tidal energy generation. These are expensive to implement and notoriously unreliable and are unlikely to meet the UK's escalating demands in the next decades, as more household power demand is switched from gas to electricity and combustion motor vehicles gradually phased out in favour of EVs. In view of this, it is essential that all efforts are made to generate electricity in the cleanest possible way.

CSS is an exciting possibility and it's encouraging that developed countries are investing heavily on research to implement this technology (yet untried and untested on a commercial basis). When and if CSS is a reality, it will be the environmentalist's holy grail because we do have coal by the truckload to see to our energy needs for the next century, and so do China and India, who would greatly benefit from retrofitting their coal-fired stations.

However our surest bet at the moment in order to supply reliable and zero carbon electricty at a scale that we can comfortably predict we will meet all future demand is  nuclear power. Our capacity to generate electricity with nuclear energy must be dealt with urgently and the process of planning and building of nuclear stations should be accelerated as a matter of urgency. It is absurb to sit on our hands for over a decade until 2020 while our nuclear capacity is steadily eroded.

A dramatic increase of nuclear capacity can single-handedly deliver a 57% reduction of emissions by 2020, thus comfortably offsetting other emissions such as aviation.

Brunella

brunella@carbonica.org

 

Comments are welcome and are not moderated.

 

Electric cars help mitigate climate change if you recharge them with green electricity and keep the air in our cities clean and healthy.

 

Electric vehicles (EV) will play a key role in decarbonising our economy. It's by encouraging their use that we can turn our backs on fossil fuels and escalating CO2 emissions. The UK government is right in encouraging the switch to electric cars and offering EV grants, but this incentive should be introduced immediately and not in 2011. It is important that we prepare for drastic emission cuts, and this includes switching to EVs, gradually but in sufficient numbers and with momentum.

Critics of EVs say that they are only 30% efficient in using the power stored in the battery, and if this electricity is generated by a non-clean source such as coal-fired power stations, then the carbon footprint is comparable to a fossil fuel propelled vehicle. There is some truth in this argument, but if we don't switch to EVs, then our dependence on fossil fuels will continue and we will never deal with climate change. What we must do is demand utility companies to turn to renewables and clean electricity. The effort to generate electricty in a clean way and our switch to EV should go in parallel and we don't have to wait for one to happen to start doing the other. Governments are already investing massive sums of money in CSS (which is still an untested technology, but if all goes according to plan, CSS will be the "holy grail" of climate change mitigation). There is a long way to go but there are an increasing number of green electricity providers available, and you can choose to recharge your EV from one of these.

The additional argument is one of heath and our immediate environment. Many people living in our cities have forgotten how clean air can be, and they can only get a taste of this by going to the countryside. This is the extent of how accustomed we have become to live breathing toxic fumes on a daily basis, and our cities are immersed in soot, dust and traffic emissions. The impact of this translates in poorer health and reduced longevity. What is the price of this? No amount of EV grants is too expensive to make our cities healthier places to live in.

 

Brunella  

 

 

Carbonica's "The Future is Paperless" campaign has got to a good start and now enlists 24 participating small businesses, who are running partially or entirely paperless offices. This results in a saving of over 5,000 trees per year.

Carbonica promotes the use of paperless computer-trasmitted fax, electronic signatures and email transmission of documents as a replacement of B2B or B2C communications by post.

Consumers are increasingly technology savvy and have widespread access to the internet and email and most companies find that their market base is not restricted by telling their customers that the communications will be 100% electronic and paperless.

The participating companies are from a broad range of activities in the service sector: from recruitment consultancies to web design/IT to travel consultancies. One company reduced its carbon footprint by 40% by reducing transport emissions by allowing 2 staff work from home in switching all internal administration and paperwork to electronic format. A 2-week plan to scan existing hardcopy files resulted in a neater and more spacious office environment.

For more information on the "Future is Paperless" campaign and to find out how Carbonica can help your business become paperless and carbon neutral, you contact me on perpetua@carbonica.org

 

Perpetua Sachs

 

Going vegetarian is the most effective lifestyle change an individual can make to mitigate climate change. It is comparable to all your transport emissions -in fact it's greener than ditching your car.

No one has a right to tell you what to eat, and I am certainly not going to -- it's very uncool to be greener than thou -- but let's look at what the meat is costing us, in health and environment.

According to a New Scientist article (published two years ago) 1 kg of beef has a carbon footprint of 40 kg in CO2 equivalent (mostly in the form of methane released by the cows), which is equivalent to driving a car for 3 hours at 50 mph. This doesn't take into account the indirect emissions of the over 10,000 litres of water that would take to produce that meat, over 100 kg of soybeans (and their emissions in terms of fertilisers and damage to the environment from clearing rainforest land for soybean crops). So the real carbon footprint and cost to the environment is much higher.

Eating meat has also been linked to obesity, cancer, liver, kidney, lung and reproductive disorders, birth defects, miscarriages and nervous system disorders. David Steinman cites in his book "Diet for a Poisoned Planet" that 99% of all toxic compounds in food are in meat, dairy and eggs, and 50% of all animal products contain carcinogenic contaminants. The US Food and Drug Administration put together a Total Diet Study that found that bacon had 124 toxic residues from pesticides and other industrial pollutants. Fast food burgers have 285 residues and butter 384.

It's quite significant that all factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs and dairy, contain antibiotics, pesticides, steroids and growth hormones. Dr Paula Baillie-Hamilton says in her book "The Body Restoration Plan" that antibiotics and pesticides are found to slow down metabolism in humans, cause an increase in appetite, and decrease the ability to burn stored fat. The end result is poorer health and weight gain. Broiler chicken are also found to be a hotbed of disease, and according to the US National Research Council, the majority of poultry (over 90% in some cases) are contaminated with salmonellosis. They also contain carcinogens that survive the process of cooking.

Animals are reared in such inhumane conditions and sprayed with tons of antibiotics and pesticides taht are also prone to developing antibiotic-resistant strains of superbugs, which can then be passed on to humans. The swine flu virus is one such example.  

Brunella 

brunella@carbonica.org  

 

 

 

Going vegetarian is the most effective lifestyle change an individual can make to mitigate climate change. It is comparable to all your transport emissions - in fact it's greener than ditching your car. 

No one has a right to tell you what to eat, and I am certainly not going to -- it's very uncool to be greener than thou -- but let's look at what the meat is costing us, in health and environment.

According to a New Scientist article (published two years ago) 1 kg of beef has a carbon footprint of 40 kg in CO2 equivalent (mostly in the form of methane released by the cows), which is equivalent to driving a car for 3 hours at 50 mph. This doesn't take into account the indirect emissions of the over 10,000 litres of water that would take to produce that meat, over 100 kg of soybeans (and their emissions in terms of fertilisers and damage to the environment from clearing rainforest land for soybean crops). So the real carbon footprint and cost to the environment is much higher.

Eating meat has also been linked to obesity, cancer, liver, kidney, lung and reproductive disorders, birth defects, miscarriages and nervous system disorders. David Steinman cites in his book "Diet for a Poisoned Planet" that 99% of all toxic compounds in food are in meat, dairy and eggs, and 50% of all animal products contain carcinogenic contaminants. The US Food and Drug Administration put together a Total Diet Study that found that bacon had 124 toxic residues from pesticides and other industrial pollutants. Fast food burgers have 285 residues and butter 384.

It's quite significant that all factory-farmed chicken, beef, veal, pork, eggs and dairy, contain antibiotics, pesticides, steroids and growth hormones. Dr Paula Baillie-Hamilton says in her book "The Body Restoration Plan" that antibiotics and pesticides are found to slow down metabolism in humans, cause an increase in appetite, and decrease the ability to burn stored fat. The end result is poorer health and weight gain. Broiler chicken are also found to be a hotbed of disease, and according to the US National Research Council, the majority of poultry (over 90% in some cases) are contaminated with salmonellosis. They also contain carcinogens that survive the process of cooking.

Animals are reared in such inhumane conditions and sprayed with tons of antibiotics and pesticides taht are also prone to developing antibiotic-resistant strains of superbugs, which can then be passed on to humans. The swine flu virus is one such example.  

Brunella 

brunella@carbonica.org