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.    

I think it’s unhelpful to have the climate sceptics trumpeting at this stage the contents of some private emails that in their view demonstrate global warming is a big con. It is an unwelcome distraction from the Herculean task that is on the agenda next week.  

If a bundle of informal emails from the head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia is the best they can do to underpin their case, then bring on the debate, I say. That won’t change the fact that the excess concentration of CO2 is retaining heat in the atmosphere, and if they want to explain to me by which thermodynamic process the excess 15 gigatons of CO2 that we are pumping every year into an already out-of-kilter carbon cycle is having no impact on the heat balance, then I am more than willing to sit back and listen. 

 The leaked emails apparently show discussions between Prof Phil Jones at CRU and others where the sceptics claim there’s evidence of tampering with the data and hiding the reality of global cooling. This “evidence” is very questionable. Scientists as a matter of routine remove statistical aberrations from graphs when processing data, although the methodology must the made explicit in the published papers. Mike Mann, the first scientist to publish in Nature in 1998 the famous “hockey stick” plot showing a peak of temperature in the last century is believed to have processed data in this way.  

In fact the whole point in assessing global trends is to remove local variations from the data. Phil Jones discussed on an email a methodology to remove local variations from tree ring data, a suggestion that from the scientific point of view doesn’t sound crazy to me.  

There’s the more serious charge of an apparent reluctance to comply with  Freedom of Information requests --with suggestions to delete compromising emails--, which if true would be illegal. There clearly needs to be an investigation into all this, including the illegal hacking of private email. After all even scientists are entitled to their private chats without expecting these to be all over the papers. 

The funny thing that’s come out of all this is the indignation in some of the papers and blogs about the scientists concerned. How can we trust scientists! They are all plotting to keep their jobs! Follow the money! They are fiddling with the data to keep this global warming con going and get more and more grants! 

Well, I should know a thing or two about how scientists work, being one myself --  and the first (and most important) scientific truth in my opinion is that, for every crazy idea you can come up with, you will always find a scientific following (often of very respectable tenured people). You can grab any journal on Theoretical Physics and find tons of articles on alternative theories of gravity. Now, you probably know that General Relativity is widely accepted as the paradigm of how the force of gravity works. That doesn’t stop lots of researchers from publishing their suggested alternative scenarios, most of which are incompatible. I wouldn’t dare to call them sceptics or verbally abuse them. It’s how it is – science in the making is a big mess of conflicting ideas. 

And that is in the realm of the published work. Let us not even go to private email, where you may be brainstorming to yourself while emailing a colleague all sorts of questions or insecurities about your theory. One would die of shame at even the possibility of seeing these embryonic thoughts in print on a national newspaper! 

This is why I wouldn’t be surprised to see climate scientists doubt their own beliefs -  I would expect them to, if they are doing their job.  

I wouldn’t like to badmouth East Anglia University - in every other respect an academic backwater except for the CRU’s close involvement with the IPCC. However, I didn’t know that the CRU was the epicentre of climate change research in the UK, let alone in the world.  

Well, it isn’t. To cite an example, the Department of Physics at Oxford, with a 5* top rating in research excellence has launched an excellent site, trillionthtonne.org, to illustrate that for the most likely temperature increase to be under 2C then cumulative emissions must be under 1 trillion tonnes of carbon. The site shows a counter that moves forward keeping track of all emissions and our decreasing likelihood of achieving the 2C target.  

The list of eminent scientific institutions with few or no links to the IPCC but with a clear acceptance of the global warming paradigm is immense. The sceptics only peddle the lone voices such as Ian Pilmer and non-scientists like Lord Lawson. Where are their arguments? They are most welcome to publish their research and I am most willing to listen to their arguments, if indeed there’re any.

Mikel

 

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 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.

 

The new green film from Franny Amstrong, director of "McLibel".  

 

I finally got round to watching "The Age of Stupid", with some apprehension, because I suspected it would be an angry movie. Also, some of us can't stop thinking of Pete Postlethwaite as a rather gruesome character, after all the ghastly roles he's played, including Kobayashi, the somber and loyal assistant of Kaiser Soze in Bryan Singer's "Usual Suspects". As it turns out, "gruesome" is perfect for the role, and Postlethwaite is perfectly cast as a man living alone in 2055 and moaning about the past destruction of the world.

I suspected the film would be Greenpeace meets Michael Moore meets the town vicar. It's all of those things. Then you have the totally anti-climatic recommendation of former major of London Ken Livingstone, who said that everyone should be forcibly made to see this film. Oh dear! London is such a happier place now that he and his Stalinist ethos are banished. In fact a recommendation from him would be in my eyes enough reason not to see the film, a very comprehensive anti-recommendation, but I thought that given that we don't have many environmental movies on at the moment, I might as well give it a chance.

Having said all those things, I think it's an interesting film. Do go and see it.  

It does help raise awareness, which is essential, given that most of us are in limbo, and quite literally sleep-walking into a global disaster. So, the film does greater good than harm, and as we are all in the same boat, -by "we" meaning those of us who're environmental activists- but we don't all articulate our thoughts in the same way. Personally I think that doom doesn't sell (and has no impact if it's not articulated logically, like in Al Gore's "An inconvenient truth", as opposed to the bag of emotions presented in this movie) and doesn't particularly fix problems either.

It is much more effective in the fight against climate change to start thinking of solutions rather than waste any amount of energy finding whom to blame.

And onto the subject of blame, of which there's plenty in the movie.

Obviously the pet hate here is the oil industry and the global mega-emitter, the United States. Well, actually an Eurovision "zero points" on both accounts. As it happens, the main culprit of the situation we find ourselves in is not oil, but coal, which is hardly mentioned in the movie. And the US may be the main emitter now, but it wasn't several decades ago, and we mustn't forget that the problem we have now is very much an inherited problem, and the outcome of decades of industrial activity, so it is the accumulation of past emissions (current emissions will have an impact in the future). In fact, our generation is probably the greenest ever after the industrial revolution, and we all try to do our bit, including with our recycling, etc. If we compare this with the situation in the 1950s in a big city like London, the Big Smog of 1952 was the outcome of such a universal use of coal in households that people back then had a carbon footprint of astronomically orders of magnitude greater than that of present-day Londoners.

In spite of the wastefulness of our present day, and rampant consumerism, our industrial activity, and disposal of waste etc, we are much more efficient and greener in our industrial production and as a result we have a fraction of the carbon footprint than most people had in industrialised countries during the best part of the twentieth century.

The movie is sentimental about the past and perhaps indulges too much in castigating the present generation.

One can go too far with the blame game and cause more havoc than good. This reminds me how the green movement inadvertently contributed in a significant measure to the situation we're in now, by opposing nuclear energy with such fanatism during the last decades. If we are emitting too much CO2 because of our dependence on fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil, in that order) to generate electricity is due to the fact that we sidelined nuclear energy as our main source of energy. There are reasons for this. There was a widespread fear of all things nuclear because of the Cold War, the safety issues, concern about waste disposal, etc. But the main reason was that the green movement stalked the nuclear industry and lobbied governments very successfully until the coffin was well and properly nailed.

Actually radioactive waste decays to safe emission levels within 100 years and the myth that was created around the fact that waste was active for millennia was played and replayed by the likes of Greenpeace, and very successfully spun in the media. We all found it awfully romantic to see these brave men on speedboats chasing the nuclear waste boats as they dumped the nasty looking barrels of concrete-sealed waste in the Atlantic. No one could fail to find this outrageous and feel indignant at these wanton acts of environmental terrorism.

The angry activist can be a force of evil, quite unwittingly. If back then the debate had been constructively focused on finding better ways of dealing with nuclear waste, investing more in nuclear research, then today we would be in all likelihood living in a totally decarbonised society, tapping from the endless energy source that we can derive from that wonderful "free meal" that nature gives us: the atom.

Brunella

 

brunella@carbonica.org 

 

 

A study published in Nature last week shows that the extra CO₂ in the atmosphere is causing trees to grow bigger in the rainforests, absorbing a net extra 5bn tons of CO₂.

Tropical trees are absorbing more carbon than they would naturally, grow bigger, and unwittingly provide a helping hand in the fight against climate change.

It is very much a case of eat as much as you can, while food is abundant and readily available. It appears that trees, like humans, do have a good go at the buffet while it's there. It's not surprising that in areas such as the tropics, where rain is abundant and growth can be sustained, the excess of CO₂ can just be the thing for the largest tree specimens to go supersize.

This emphasises the importance of the rainforests as carbon sinks and how urgent it is that we restore them to their past glory. The earth has lost over three quarters of its forests during the last century, so we do have quite a lot of ground to recover. This is the challenge to combat climate change.

It's good news that governments are now talking about REDD (reduction of emissions by preventing deforestation) to include reforestation and prevented deforestation in the successor to the Kyoto protocol. For a while reforestation projects didn't have a good reputation but this is fortunately changing and there's now talk of financial commitments to prevent deforestation.

The UK government commissioned a report, the Eliasch Report, on financing global forests and the cost of preventing deforestation. Indirectly, all this has a lot to do with the financial incentives for countries such as Brazil and Indonesia to prevent illegal logging. I think this might be the wrong angle - paying people to stop destroying their own forests doesn't address the issue of why they are doing it in the first place. Illegal logging can move elsewhere and the subsidies will be money wasted. The real solution is to turn deprived communities into skilled farming communities who will benefit from sustaining the rainforests. So long as everyone can have a vested interest and views the rainforest as an asset of greater financial value than its timber content, then we will have a solution.

I believe, as we all do in Carbonica, that reforestation is the only acceptable form of carbon offset. The rainforests are the only mechanisms we have to absorb carbon from the atmosphere. Other projects, such as renewable energy projects are often a disguised form of deception. For example, if I was to put a wind turbine on my roof and sell carbon offsets from the emissions I have saved (by not connecting to the national grid and being self-sufficient in my electricity consumption), I would probably be able to get CDM certification, the Gold Standard and all possible rubberstamped "certified" and "authenticated" credentials one can imagine. However, it does seem ethically objectionable. Why should I pay for my own wind turbine by allowing other people to emit CO₂ into the atmosphere with these so-called carbon "credits"?

How can we talk about "credits" or "allowances" to release CO₂? It is a farce in this day and age of global warming. 

I don't know how my wind turbine differs from some hydroelectric project in the developing world. Such a project would be deemed as contributing to "renewable energies" but it would create tons of CO₂ in carbon credits because the local community is no longer using a coal-fired station. Well, my question is that they shouldn't be using a coal-fired station in the first place. If they stop doing that, then that's great, but that does not entitle someone else to spew into the atmosphere all the junk that the coal-fired station would have emitted. Otherwise the end result is the same, and we have gained absolutely nothing in terms of addressing climate change.

If, on the other hand, we restore the rainforest as a form of carbon offset, we recapture the CO₂ emitted and in the long term even more than was emitted, as well as adding to the planet's biodiversity, and helping local communities earn a living. And it's important that we talk about reforestation and not only about prevented deforestation. Reforestation means progress in the fight against climate change, because we increase the capacity of the planet to absorb CO₂. Prevented deforestation simply leaves us where we are.

In my opinion deforestation can be prevented by turning illegal loggers into farmers and effectively the drivers of reforestation.  

 

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

 

 

 

 

 

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.

CARBONICA - PROTECTING THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS 

Click  here to reduce your carbon footprint

 

 

"Even if your steak was reared in the UK, there's a good chance it was fed on food grown on land that was once rainforest" is the message of a report by Friends of Earth ("What's Feeding Our Food?"), discussed on this month's issue of The Ecologist.

It is a chilling message, showing that our appetite for meat (and the growing trend in China) is turning huge areas of rainforest in Mato Grosso into monoculture soybeans farming at record speed. 

Apparently, the area of land required to produce soybeans for Europe's livestock farming industry since 1996 is roughly equal to the amount of rainforest that has been cut down in Brazil to make way for plantations since then.

In the last 15 years, production of soybeans has skyrocketed by 170% since it became the preferred animal protein feed since the BSE crisis. The large soybeans plantations are detrimental to local communities because they're industrially run and require very small numbers of staff (on average 1 employee per 500 acres).

I think that now more than ever before a true commitment to fight climate change means to eat less meat. The carbon footprint of meat is simply astronomical. Livestock production is a major source of emissions, using valuable resources such as drinking water (often in countries such as Australia where these resources are a more valuable commodity than they are at the country of consumption, e.g. UK). Then for good measure the feedstock is produced largely from depleting rainforest (greenhouse emissions from change of use of land amount to more than all our transport emissions combined).

A low-carbon footprint diet is to a large extent an "almost vegetarian" diet. Eating red meat is an archaic and barbaric habit that stems from our most primary instincts as hunters. After all, each time you are taking a bite at a steak you're munching a bit of muscle. How disgusting is that? It's positively pre-historic. Besides it clogs your arteries and it is a major factor in causing cancer (because you're eating less veg if you're appetite is satiated with animal protein). Obviously clogging one's arteries was not a problem when men lived to the age of 30 before the Stone Age, but in our day and age it does matter once you hit the age of 80 and beyond.

I can see the roaring abuse and rotten eggs coming my way from opinionated food critics and red meat fundamentalists, but it is true.

A sensible low-carbon footprint diet derives animal protein exclusively from fish and low-fat dairy. A switch to a much more significant consumption of fish should make us rethink sustainable fisheries and creative ways to regenerate fish stocks quickly to keep up with demand. But that's another topic altogether.

It's a fact that a vegetarian person using a 4x4 (SUV) as sole means of transport has a much lower footprint than a meat-eater who cycles. Here's some food for thought for all meat-eaters out there.

 

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

 

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British environmentalist George Monbiot writes in The Guardian that the expansion of London's Heathrow airport is about class war.

His ludicrous articles are embarrassing and a disservice to the green movement.

Everyone with minimal common sense agrees that the planned third terminal for Heathrow is simply crazy. Opposing the expansion of the airport has nothing to do with being pro or against business, and still less to do with socio-economic status. It has a lot to do with being consistent with a commitment to tackle climate change and of course with the additional issue that the airport is already as it is a great noise and pollution nuisance to millions in the capital. The UK government must live up to its obligations to reduce emissions, in the spirit of the Climate Change Bill that was passed in 2008, and ensure that the airport and its immediate environment meet environmental standards.

Even at its present size, Heathrow will fail to meet all those targets.

I find Monbiot comical but given that he has so much impact I think the whole thing is really tragic. He begins his article moaning about all the middle-class Brits who have Agas and this somehow builds up the argument that it is really the rich and their second homes in France that is the cause of the increase in air traffic and ultimately the expansion of Heathrow airport.

He presents some statistics to show that 54% of people using budget airlines are in fact rather affluent. From this it follows (apparently) that we should dispel the myth of the "anorak tourist" who flies to Sicily for the weekend on a flight that's cost him less than a cab fare, stays at a cheap hotel and eats out at fast-food joints. No, it turns out they are a well-heeled lot jetting off to their home at la Dordogne - and it's just one of those funny things that they pay less for their flight than for their organic camembert.

The angle of the analysis misses the point completely. If Ryanair had to rely only on Brits with second homes in France and Spain, they would fold up tomorrow. Naturally there are passengers from all income brackets, and most are simply spending a few days abroad, whether they earn £30,000 a year or £90,000. This does not discount the fact that it all amounts to excessively frequent, unnecessary and frivolous travel.  And that's the key of the problem. It's not a class issue, it's an issue of bad habits. 

Naturally it is no miracle that the more affluent will be able to indulge in budget travel more frequently, just like they have a greater share of most goods and services. After all, consumption is correlated to income.

It is quite clear that the second home owning travellers are a very small minority. In the routes to France that Ryanair decided to wind up because of a drop in passenger numbers (and high fuel costs), the Brits who'd purchased second homes there were left to hang and dry. Not only they couldn't get there for the weekend cheaply as before, but also the value of their properties plummeted. Clearly they were not the driving force of the demand.

If then we look at the really rich, then we are talking about tycoons jetting off in their private planes. Their carbon footprint is astronomical, and thankfully the a still smaller minority. All I can say is that they should offset their footprint if they can't reduce it. But they remain outside of the argument because this is such a tiny contribution to the bulk of total aviation emissions.

 

Brunella Bell

brunella@carbonica.org

 

 

CARBONICA - PROTECTING THE WORLD'S RAINFORESTS 

Click  here to reduce your carbon footprint

 

The definition of "carbon-free" is that it is produced without any emissions, what is called "fully decarbonised". On the other hand, something that is "carbon neutral" does have emissions, a carbon footprint, but it is offset by energy saving, reforestation or other programmes, so the net effect of this is zero.

If we ask ourselves the question, "do I prefer to be carbon-free or carbon neutral?" obviously the best choice for the environment is to be carbon-free. It is best not to produce a carbon footprint to start with, to be fully decarbonised. It is great in theory, trickier in practice. During the pre-industrial era societies were almost entirely decarbonised, so our existence as human beings is not impossible in a decarbonised environment. This is the general principle of pursuing CO₂ —and other greehouse gases— emission cuts. The goal is to get as close to full decarbonisation as we can.

During this week's UN Climate Change talks in Poland the crux of the matter is emission cuts. We can go a long way closer to decarbonisation than we are today, and the core of the argument is to get rich countries to dramatically cut their emissions and developing countries to follow suit without getting into a cycle of pollution and excessive emissions that rich countries engaged in for decades to get to the level of industrial development they enjoy today. Developing countries feel a lot is being asked from them, and rich countries are not even setting the right example.

So the first step is cut emissions, but while we have a footprint, the second step (or rather, simultaneous step) must be to offset it. At any given time we should aspire to be carbon neutral even if we are not carbon-free, which is obviously infinitely better for the environment.

At the moment we are running a campaign to raise awareness about the carbon footprint of the internet, and the emissions that we cause by producing and maintaining websites. We offer our customers a personalised service to make your websites carbon neutral and also we want to encourage everyone to produce websites as carbon-free as possible to start with.

Google, Fujitsu, Hewlett-Packard and other companies have been successful in adopting technologies to make their servers carbon-free. Google's "sea-faring solution" is an imaginative concept that uses tidal energy and waves to produce electricity to cool and power data centres. This kind of concept will be more widely used in the future, given that data centres contribute to nearly one fourth of the internet's carbon footprint - obviously it will be key to look at ways to change how we run them in order to cut emissions.

For smaller companies not quite in the league of the internet giants, the vast majority of us who rely on data centres powered by conventional energy sources, the way forward to achieve emission cuts is to demand from service providers to switch to greener and renewable sources of energy, and to offset the remainder of the carbon footprint in order to remain carbon neutral.

 

George Monbiot writes in yesterday's Guardian ("The planet is now so vandalised that only total energy renewal can save us", 25/11/08) saying that to prevent runaway climate change we need a total decarbonisation of our economy. 

 This is correct. Emission cuts on their own will not deliver the mitigation of climate change that we need.

"Mitigation" is a widely brandished term to talk about how to combat climate change. We talk of a "mitigation model" to prevent our planet from warming, and usually this involves CO₂ emission cuts, in the hope that we lessen the damage we are causing to the environment. This is not the same as reversing it.

We can take the analogy of an obese person who is getting fatter and fatter every day because they eat 20 hamburgers a day. Telling them to cut their intake and eat 10 burgers a day instead, will help them decrease the rate at which they are putting on weight, but it will not be a recipe for slimming. If they are more drastic and cut their intake to just a few a day, that will bring them closer to a stable situation, but to reverse this and start slimming requires other ingredients in their life, such as physical exercise.

Our atmosphere has a concentration of greenhouse gases of 430 ppm in CO₂ equivalent, which is tremendously high, and very close to the threshold of 450 ppm that is widely accepted to be a point where climate change can begin to take a very dramatic turn. It is time to start slimming. Eating fewer burgers or cutting down our emissions will not do the job. Any threshold of CO₂ emissions, however low, is a form of environmental vandalism and adds to the already existing problem.

The high concentration of greenhouse gases is already retaining an excess of heat in our planet and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future (see our article on global warming).

Even if the UK's Climate Change Bill delivers the target of 80% emission cuts by 2050 and the world joins in with the successor of Kyoto (to be decided in Copenhagen next year) delivering the same level of cuts as the UK (which is very unlikely and over-optimistic), then all we will be able to say is that we have vandalised the environment much less than we would otherwise have done, but the problem of global warming in 2050 will still be much worse than it is now in any event, because during 4 decades of emission cuts there will be emissions nonetheless.

The crux of the matter is that to reverse the problem we must have negative net emissions. This means that our target must be to go beyond zero emissions, beyond decarbonisation and being simply carbon neutral, we must look into capturing carbon from the atmosphere on quite a gargantuan scale.

The world has lost most of its forests in the last century. Redressing the balance involves a reforestation process on a vast and fast scale, in order to dramatically increase the Earth's ability to capture carbon from the atmosphere. The UN's working group on Climate Change has suggested financial compensations to tropical countries who halt deforestation and illegal logging. This is encouraging but not strong enough. Deforestation must stop immediately and we ought to be putting all our financial resources on a very ambitious and long-term reforestation effort.

 

The Kyoto Protocol expires in 2012 and its successor will be determined next year in Copenhagen. There is every sign that Copenhagen 2009 will not be ambitious enough to tackle climate change.

The UN is convening under the Framework Convention on Climate Change next month in Poland to discuss an action plan, following the "Bali action plan" for a framework of cooperation and mitigation that will pave the way to the Copenhagen treaty.

 

In preparation for this meeting, a UN working group has published a document that puts together the submissions of different countries, their expectations and wish-lists of what the future agreement should be like. The document is not very encouraging reading. As everything with the UN, a gigantic slow-moving organization, whose policies have a decades-lag of where we ought to be to see to the current needs, the document is a toned-down and unambitious action plan that is the outcome of putting together many conflicting interests.

 

The document suggests a "level of stabilization" of 2^oC for the global temperature increase, and states that we should make sure that temperature rises do not exceed 2.4^oC. This is amusing. We hope the UN knows that we do not have any control over temperature rises, not least because we cannot even predict them with entire certainty. We have in principle control over the level of greenhouse gas emissions, but not over how our atmosphere will react to this and the temperature increase that will follow.

 

Furthermore, emission cuts will diminish the rate of warming of our planet, but the temperatures will continue increasing over time for as long as the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere (currently 430 ppm) remains high. Therefore the concept of any "level of stabilization" makes no scientific sense until the concentration of CO₂ returns to a sustainable level. In order to achieve that, we need to go beyond emission cuts and deep into the territory of carbon capture.

 

The document also discusses that the concentration of CO₂ should be kept below 450 ppm for as long as possible. However it is entirely possible that even within the current projected emission cuts, we will reach this level in about 10-20 years, at any rate much before 2050.

 

Norway makes the encouraging suggestion of offering financial help to tropical countries who commit themselves to halt deforestation. The importance of this is enormous. The document also makes the important point that rainforest restoration as a form of carbon capture is to be encouraged. We very much believe that it ought to be a key ingredient of the future agreement.  

 

This is the latest video from The Prince’s Rainforest Project, called Vanishing Species, created to draw attention to the fact that over a million species will be endangered within 40 years, due to deforestation.

It is a powerful video clip and definitely worth seeing. Add it to your site and spread the word.

For more info on The Prince's Rainforest Project, visit  www.princesrainforestsproject.org/