Yesterday Tony Hayward announced that he is stepping down and Bob Dudley will be the new CEO from October. It's a perfect moment to reinvent BP and invest in renewables and "Beyond Petroleum", the initiative started by Lord Browne.

Bob Dudley has some background experience in solar and wind, so the appointment could be promising.  

Even though the Gulf of Mexico leak has stopped (more or less), BP's woes have only started. The estimate of costs is about £20bn and the company is already planning to sell assets worth about that amount in the next year to prop up its balance sheet. With record losses, suspended dividends and uncertainty about its future, there's the additional Damocles sword of a huge appetite for litigation in the sourthern states, where many industries have suffered immense losses. BP can face lawsuits for loss of earnings from people from all walks of life, and until legislators draw a line and cap its liabilities, there will be huge uncertainty about the future of the company and the market is unlikely to react positively to that.

It's unfortunate that BP has been the punchbag of American politicians in the eve of the primaries in November, and Tony Hayward the "ass-to-kick" of choice of president Obama.

A company under such pressure is going to find it much more difficult to turn to the more challenging industry of renewable energy, and is more likely to stay firmly focused on oil and gas, its more profitable area of operation. Now it plans to exploit Canada's tar sands, a massively damaging operation from the environmental point of view, as this operation will result in approximately 3 times the amount of GHG per barrel of oil extracted than by conventional means. It should be deterred from pursuing this and other forms of risky exploitation.

BP briefly flirted with Beyond Petroleum with Lord Browne, but it has only invested £2.6bn in renewables since 2005, and Tony Hayward's reign was characterised by a return to oil, so the company has been firmly anchored in its traditional remit more than ever. BP's own forecast of expenditure in renewables is a mere £5bn by 2015, which is less than 25% of what the Gulf of Mexico spill will cost.

The figures are quite discouraging, but there is room for fundamental change. A turn to renewables will be a good PR coup for BP in the United States and it is likely to help it to cap its oil spill liabilities. BP can take the initiative to spend a further £10bn in renewables by 2015 in exchange of a deal with American legislators to massively reduce the oil spill bill and cap its liabilities vis-a-vis civil lawsuits and the like. The environment would benefit, and it would be a good solution for the company and for the US.

Mikel Susperregi

mikel@carbonica.org

Copenhagen ended without an agreement but a lot of progress has been made, so we shouldn't be too discouraged.

For the first time ever, specific proposals have been discussed to fund REDD (reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation) and there's widespread support from many countries to put a price on the preservation and rehabilitation of the rainforests, and to allocate funds to do so.

The "accord" presented (a five-page draft document presented by the UNFCC without specific signatories and certainly not ratified) contains a statement of funding REDD with up to $30 billion during the period prior to the expiry of Kyoto (i.e. 2010-2012) and setting up a "Copenhagen Green Climate Fund" that will put together up to $100 billion per year by 2020 to "address" the needs of developing countries.

This so-called accord is remarkably unspecific, but the explicit inclusion of REDD in all this is very good news.

The devil is in the detail and all of it is missing. It's not clear where this money is going to come from and how it's going to be spent, when and if put together, and in particular the REDD scheme needs a detailed protocol of verification and disclosure so that it achieves the right objective. We are not there yet.

This accord was put together in haste pressumably in the early hours of Friday morning and tweaked by world leaders during the day, and by all accounts it's a very sloppy document, containing meaningless statements such as the intention of keeping global warming under 2C (I am afraid we don't have such supernatural powers or control over the laws of physics). The Appendix contains a table of emission reduction targets for 2020 and it is tellingly blank. A statement of intentions that emission reductions would be worked out sooner rather than later during 2010 would have reassured the markets.

The first predictable reaction to this uncertainty has been a nose-dive in the price of carbon. The long term damage is that carbon markets are left to their own without any clear sense of direction.

Copenhagen has shown that the UN can always be counted on to mount a circus, and a very slow moving one. Perhaps this demonstrates that  serious climate change agreement can only happen outside of this framework.  After all, world leaders haven't taken this meeting seriously, only showing up in the last minute and trying to dash off a poorly structured document just to save face.

Actually one can say that we don't need the nearly 200 countries that took part in Copenhagen to agree on a consistent and strong climate change treaty. We just need to put together the top 10 emitters around a table and agree on specific emission cuts and the logistics -and  costs- of how to achieve them. The agreement will be global, but to be blunt, we don't particularly need to know the opinion of countries whose emissions are negligible - the emissions game has relatively few players. And more to the point, we certainly do not need the oil/gas rich countries to sit around the table determined to derail the talks, as has happened in Copenhagen.

The challenge in all this is to get the US to extricate itself from the financial interests of the oil industry. It is difficult. We already know that we will never persuade the likes of Saudi Arabia or Russia to support global decarbonisation and turn the taps off. Decarbonisation will only happen by addressing energy policy consistently and creating capacity for low-carbon energy, effectively reducing demand for fossil fuels as much as possible (the supply side is not something we can aspire to change).

Mikel Susperregi

Scientists at the Met Office are responding to the unprecedented attack on the science of climate change by putting together a statement in support of the overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrating global warming, that will be signed by many in the science community in the UK. I think the list of signatories will be long.  

The timing of the attacks is significant, and the sceptics, emboldened by a handful of hacked emails are being very orchestrated. The question is who is behind all this. The Times and the Telegraph are running stories today suggesting that the FSB might be the culprit behind the attacks. (Well, thankfully no climate scientist has tasted polonium - yet). Apparently the hacking originated from the Siberian town of Tomsk, also known for originating other notorious cyber attacks, such as on Estonia and Georgia. And the data was hosted by a company called Tomline, allegedly with a shadowy track record. 

In Russia there’re many IT companies operating as hackers-for-hire working for international cyber terrorism, so ultimately anybody could be behind the attack. It is clear though that it has taken some effort. 13 years of data and thousands of emails have been processed, read and selected snippets fed to the world’s media just in the nick of time for the Copenhagen talks.  

The access and echo that the stories have received in some of the world’s most influential media is also significant. Today Forbes.com runs a battery of stories fuelling the sceptic discourse, and bloggers in the Telegraph and Republican media and networks are running similar stories. Obviously no one is suggesting that these media are bankrolled by a conspiracy of sceptics, but there are many corporate interests to keep the fossil fuel tap open, rather than closed, and quite simply the largest and most successful companies in the world have made their fortunes out of oil, gas and coal. It is not inconceivable that some of these interests are backing the access to the media that the sceptic discourse is enjoying.  

In order cases, such as the Spectator in the UK, it’s pure ignorance.  

The surprising thing of all this is that we’ve had a relatively easy ride so far. It’d be naïve to think that countries like Saudi Arabia, Russia and corporate interests in the United States will stand by while the climate change movement succeeds in securing an international agreement that will undermine their key financial interests. Saudi Arabia and Russia make no secrets of their intention to derail Copenhagen but maybe this is simply a taste of things to come, and the heat is bound to go up and gloves to come off as we move forward. 

After all American oil companies succeeded in putting a stop on the electric car industry for many years, and they are certainly not above dirty tricks. I think now things are different – they know that the scientific evidence is overwhelming and even they need a planet to live on, so there is a limit to the resistance that the oil and gas industry will put up, but they won’t go without a fight. 

It’s good to keep the focus on the right place and away from these distractions.  Nicholas Stern from the LSE writes today on the FT an excellent article emphasising that business should be the driving force to take our economies to decarbonisation (and to fund it also in developing countries). This is key, because our governments will certainly not be able to afford it.    

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 Earth receives at any given time 120,000 terawatts of sunlight (1 terawatt is 1 trillion watts), whereas the global need of power is 16 terawatts (to increase to about 20 terawatts in the next decade).

This means that 0.013 per cent of the sunlight reaching us is enough to satisfy all our energy needs.

Clearly the challenge is to tap from this endless source of energy, and if we are clever enough renewables will help us keep the lights on and fight climate change at the same time. There's no need for lowering thermostats and jumpers all around, sharing showers and living with frugal amounts of electricity. Our priority has to be to switch to ways of producing clean and abundant electricity, not using less of it.

If we do it well, our high-tech societies can become decarbonised not by decreasing power consumption but by increasing it by as much as our technologies require it.  

The September issue of National Geographic contains an interesting feature article on Solar Energy "Plugging into the Sun". If focuses on the example of the 250 acre compound of 182,000 mirrors in the Mojave Desert, called Nevada Solar One. It is owned by a Spanish utility company and it is capable of pumping 64 megawatts into the grid, enough to serve 14,000 households in the Las Vegas metropolitan area.

It is a success story that needs to be replicated worldwide.

Brunella

The Guardian newspaper published on Monday a selection of the top ten ideas to combat climate change.

The article is entitled "The Manchester Report" - it's so ridiculous, you've got to laugh. The name of the report is apparently "to underscore the city's carbon hungry past" and the Guardian gathered there last weekend a bunch of candidates who pitched their global warming busting ideas to a panel. The result is the top ten selection (plus the ten runners up).

I completely miss the point of meeting in Manchester, that Ian Katz deputy editor calls "the birthplace of man-made global warming". You've got to be kidding. Poor manchunians, they are so doomed. Who is doing their PR? Is there some alignment of planets or secret sorcerer's motive to meet up at the centre of this epicentre of pollution that will bring about the solution? Answers please.

Since Mr Katz (who is described as "deputy editor responsible for environmental coverage") has decided that industrial manufacturing is the key culprit and origin of global warming then we know the answer (and blame) sounds like it's got to be in Manchester. Bless. I adore to be in the company of intellectual giants.

I must apologise for my flippant tone, but this article is infuriating because it's very much a case of the elephant in the room. Let me explain. As it's no secret that we believe in reforestation as the main solution to global warming, imagine the anti-climax when I didn't see it even mentioned in the top ten, or the runners up. The small matter of deforestation (it alone causes more GHG emissions than could be saved by any of the top ten candidates on the list) and the even smaller matter of protecting our rainforests (whose surface area is in direct correlation with the planet's ability to capture CO2) doesn't obviously deserve the attention of the Guardian's panel and we understand that. We wouldn't expect them to be interested in anything so obvious if one tries to be cutting edge and in order to justify a "report" and expenses for a weekend away in the pit of pollution then one needs to be more recherche.

Brunella

brunella@carbonica.org

Comments are welcome and unmoderated. Irrelevant or inappropriate comments will be removed.

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  

James Lovelock, the father of the Gaia theory, has just published a new book "The Vanishing Face of Gaia" available from the Carbonica bookstore for just £11.99 (compared to £20 at shops).

In a brilliant article "Nuclear lies are keeping you afraid" published on The Sunday Times (15 Feb 09) he tells us that far from being dangerous, only nuclear power can solve the food and energy crises ahead.

I couldn't agree more.

The developed world has shied away from nuclear energy because it has played to our worst fears. During the Cold War, we all feared a nuclear attack and life in the aftermath of a nuclear war in a contaminated and radioactive planet. It was a chilling and very real possibility. The Chernobyl accident reinforced our apprehension and the green movement successfully campaigned to turn governments away from nuclear research and energy policy has since been predominantly fossil fuel based for this reason.

At the time it seemed like nuclear energy was the new Prometheus' fire and it wasn't wise for us to play with it.

Obviously with hindsight it's now clear that by turning away from nuclear energy we have played a more dangerous game. Coal does not have the stigma of plutonium, but it is not any less deadly - it has single-handedly landed us where we are now, with the planet's future threatened with runaway global warming and total destruction due to excessive CO₂ emissions.

Even today it still difficult to show open support for nuclear energy. It can land you an immediate fatwa from even relatively moderate greens.

In the Sunday Times article Lovelock tries to make a point about the fact that polonium-210 was used by Russians in the murder of former spy Alexander Litvinenko in 2006 in London. He jokes (I think - or half-jokes? surely he can't be serious..) that the Russians chose this rather expensive, complicated and deliberately cruel manner of killing for maximum PR impact, in order to re-ignite our fears about nuclear energy, radioactivity, etc. The idea being that Russia's worst fear is that if we'd take on nuclear energy with gusto then they'd have no one to sell their gas and oil to.

That is obviously true, but I think Lovelock is being colourful by connecting this with the Litvinenko murder. The FSB (and earlier the KGB) has a long tradition of using poisons against their targets - radioactive or not. It's all in rather poor taste, but there's a very valid point buried there regarding the vital trade interests of the gas and oil producing countries.

It is very true that it is in the UK's best interest to regain energy self-sufficiency. And this can only be achieved (in the shortest timescale) with nuclear energy. It would achieve the double objective of providing reliable and cheap energy in sufficiently large amounts (as any back-of-the-envelope calculation can predict the demand will sky-rocket as we increasingly turn to electricity to reduce carbon emissions - one significant element will be the predominance of electric cars in future), and the second objective of meeting our emission reduction target of 80% by 2050.

In fact the UK should go further and lobby the rest of the world (and in particular the largest polluters) to turn away from coal and into nuclear energy in the shortest time possible.

Wind and solar power are interesting alternatives and they should be developed in parallel with a nuclear programme. However nuclear energy should be the predominant ingredient of our energy policy. Nothing else is realistic to meet the demand that we can anticipate, and to do so in a sustainable way.

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

"The Vanishing Face of Gaia" is published on February 26 by Allen Lane (Penguin) and can be ordered following the link above.

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The ebook has entered the market timidly and with limited impact but it doesn't take a lot of vision to see it's going to be huge.

Ebooks will boom like the mobile phone industry, and in less than a decade will demise all printed papers, books and magazines, which will be a blessing to the environment.

To be honest I can't wait to buy a Sony Reader, now available through Amazon and Waterstones in the UK. This little cute gadget is going to be so much more than the next ipod. It's easy to see this - after all the written word is so much more predominant in our day to day business than music tracks. The ipod demised the CD player, and itunes turned the whole music industry upside down, to the benefit of the consumer - no more trips to the shop to buy a CD while you can download thousands of tracks for the fraction of the price and manage it all in a small gadget very efficiently. 

The ebook will cover so much more ground. Forget about buying expensive books and magazines, if you can browse an itunes equivalent of a bookshop and download all you want to read. I imagine that internet bookstores like Amazon will re-invent themselves to offer ebooks to download and eventually phase out the hardcopy books (except for eccentrics like those who collect vinyl LPs).

I can only dream of all the space that would be freed up getting rid of dusty bookcases, and no more weighty books in the handbag. It sounds like my idea of heaven.

Imagine having the day's newspapers beamed to your ebook on your way to work and then browse all the papers you want while you travel on the tube! No more inky fingers, etc, plus you can get so much more information (and diversity) by reading several newspapers.

There are many reasons to object to printed newspapers - apart from the carcinogenic ink and the waste of paper (we don't read the bulk of it), they are simply impractical to carry and to read. In fact, younger savvier generations are turning to reading news online, which is causing plummeting sales in the printed sector, and a good thing too. The ebook will deliver the final blow and then everyone will simply go electronic.   

At the moment the number of books available to read with the Sony reader is quite limited but it is easy to see this will soon change. You can't help feeling this is a moment like when mobile phones where at their infancy -for those of us old enough to remember that in the 80's only inadequate yuppies carried those brick-sized objects around. We all had opinions on the subject and only the visionary saw the clumsy thing was going to take off the way it did. Now it's obvious the ebook is destined to a similarly stellar future. It is our decarbonised future.

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

PS An update with two interesting articles on Kindle II, Amazon's new ebook reader: "Kindle2: Style Over Substance" (Forbes.com) and "Amazon Unveils Latest E-Book Tablet" (Carbonica News)

For those of you who want to compare, here is an interesting comparison article: "Showdown: Kindle 2 vs. Sony Reader" (as far as I am concerned, I think both are great, and there's plenty of room for many other competitors, but for the time being these two are battling it out to dominate the market).

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It is very disappointing that the expansion of Heathrow airport was approved last night at the House of Commons.

Under the plan, Heathrow will double the number of flights (by over 350 a day) and singlehandedly boost the UK's aviation emissions by 40%, contrary to the Climate Change Bill. So, how can Britain pretend to set an example and tell the rest of the world to reduce emissions?  

Given that under the Climate Change Bill overall emissions in all sectors must drop 80% (with respect to 1990 levels) by 2050, other aviation sectors will have to reduce their emissions by nearly 90% to offset Heathrow's growth. This obviously won't happen, in fact the contrary: we expect other airports will also grow and build additional runways. Therefore other transport sectors will have to compensate for this enormous increase, and it is not clear which. It is already very ambitious to aim for a 80% emissions cut. It is not realistic to achieve it allowing aviation to grow from the current levels unless we expect to have nearly full decarbonisation in our road and rail transport. But where are the plans for this?

The government's plans imply that the aircraft using the new runway will be greener within 10 years. This is almost comical. These aircraft do not exist and they are not even at the inception stage. No single large manufacturer of commercial aircraft has plans to carry out significant alterations of engine design to cut emissions dramatically. So where are these fabulous aircraft?

I am sure that they will come about in due course, but not as quickly as Heathrow's third runway, and the government should be transparent about this. It is not acceptable to approve the expansion of the airport with the condition that it is for use by greener aircraft, and then once the project is completed tell the public that regrettably it cannot be used by greener aircraft because they don't exist. We know this now, so the additional runway should not go ahead under this false pretence because we all know that it will be used by today's polluting and noisy 747's and the like.

Today we have selected an interesting item of news regarding electric airplanes ("Will Electric Planes Take Off?", 29 Jan 09). This is going to be a growth sector that is attracting some very clever investors, who in my opinion, can see where our future is. But you can see from the article that the state of the art with truly green aircraft is still at its infancy. These aircraft are very small and light and we might still be generations away from achieving the technological feat of flying commercial aircraft with electricity. Perhaps this will never be possible, unless nuclear energy is used, in which case it would be extremely expensive and not viable for commercial use.

Realistically we might be able to achieve light small commercial aircraft for short-haul routes. Perhaps hybrid models will come about for long-haul. Watch this space, as I feel this is the little corner for the truly visionary. Electric aircraft are an amazing challenge and it could be this century's big achievement.

Back to the present. The present of Rolls Royce engines, jet propulsion and air travel with dirty old fossil fuels. And that's where we are and that's where we will be in 10 years' time when Heathrow's third runway opens. And that means that the House of Commons has OK-ed Heathrow's carbon footprint to become positively astronomical.

Apart from the natural objection that this is going to cost the UK taxpayer £9bn for the benefit of a private company such as BAA, of course. I am a bit in the dark about distribution of stakeholding. Is the £9bn a grant to Spanish Ferrovial to increase their assets and recover a near monopoly position after the MCC has ordered them to sell two of the London airports to break their [badly-managed] monopoly?

Brunella Bell

press@carbonica.org

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Wed 07 Jan 09 

In the race to build a low-carbon economy by reducing greenhouse emissions, our final goal is to bring our carbon footprint down to the limit. Full decarbonisation is the moment when our society functions with no net carbon footprint.

Is this realistic or a myth?

This means goodbye to all forms of fossil fuels. Our societies must reshape beyond recognition. Can we do this fast enough? It would mean no more gas boilers in our homes. So I couldn't care less if Russia cuts off its gas supply. We would not know what to do with gas anyway. Or petrol. The Gulf states would need to switch day jobs.

Goodbye dirty energy, hello clean electricity. Essentially all our power would come from electricity, supplied to our homes by a combination of clean sources. The socket would be nothing less than an object of worship because we'd plug everything to it, all our gadgets, including our cars, motorbikes, everything. Even airplanes would turn to electricity (has anyone thought of electric aircraft? they should).

We will use over ten times the amount of electricity that we use now, so the logistics challenges for future energy generation are gargantuan.

There would be local sources (such as wind turbines on private homes) as well as "energy hubs" like large wind farms, ocean power generators and solar energy hubs. We can imagine a future where swathes of land in third world countries are dedicated to "energy hubs" or energy production centres to distribute clean electricity to the world.

I have been digesting the report "Building a low-economy" published in December by the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), an advisory group to the British government. It is very meaty, and it has plenty of mileage to comment, so we'll come back to it, I'm sure. It sets a timetable of "carbon budgets" recommending emission cuts in several phases, as the UK's contribution to tackle climate change. This is the inspiration for the UK government's targets. The main target is to cut emissions by 80% (with respect to 1990 levels) by 2050. The global target that this group says the UK should endorse is less ambitious: a 50% emissions cut by 2050, a somewhat arbitrary figure.

The implication seems to be that we would aim for full decarbonisation sometime during the second half of the century. Is this real? And if it is, we better get cracking because the extent of the fundamental changes we'd need to achieve this makes me think that 50 years might be a bit on the short side to adapt the infrastructure, let alone absorb the costs.

Ed Milliband, the Secretary of State for Energy, said at the time that as from 2009 carbon budgets will take their place alongside financial budgets and become pivotal to policy decisions. This is quite an extraordinary statement. We hope there is more to it than just talk. Given that of course climate change  is a global issue, these carbon budgets need to be in sync with what is being done around the world and the UK must engage with the main emitters to encourage a convergence to the same targets.

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

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