U.S. Joins The Battle Against Climate Change

Yes, it's true: President Obama has committed the States to cutting carbon emissions.

Up to now, Republicans have been blocking his every attempt, but he's now used his executive powers to bypass them altogether and bring in a bold package of measures.

I'm sure he would have preferred bi-partisan support for this but vested interests and political dogma have stopped him. So he's felt compelled to use his presidential powers. In a speech at Georgetown University in Washington DC, he said:

"As a president, as a father and as an American, I am here to say we need to act."

"While we may not live to see the full realisation of our ambition, we will have the satisfaction of knowing that the world we leave to our children will be better off for what we did."

Well put Mr. President, it's all about our children.

The measures will include: Expansion of renewable energy projects (with the aim of powering the equivalent of six million homes by 2020); emission limits on both new and existing power plants; and, crucially for me, a call for a global climate deal.

There's obviously been a storm of protest from Republicans. Senator Mitch McConnell said it was effectively "a war on coal". Well, d'uh! If you're going to get serious about climate change, the use of coal has got to be dramatically cut.

Either that, or you fit carbon capture and storage (CCS) to all coal fueled power stations. Oh, wait a minute...there's no viable CCS system available at the moment or any time soon.

Now, if only the global coal industry had read the writing on the wall and invested some of their profits in CCS years ago. Then they wouldn't have been under threat now.

Anyway, back to that speech.

Some might say the measures Obama announced don't go far enough (e.g. They will only cut emissions by 4% over 1990 levels by 2020), but they are an important start. Hopefully, the president has ability to the galvanise the American public, businesses, and universities into backing him and taking his country into a new era.

This could be a huge economic opportunity for the U.S.(See here for how) and a chance to gain a lot of respect from the rest of the world.

Don't blow it America.

Nightingales 1 Developers 0

In a previous post, I told you how Medway council's plan to build 5000 new homes on a piece of land being used by one of UK's largest nightingale populations, was under review.

Well, the government's planning inspectors have decided to reject the plan. Amongst their reasons, they said that Medway had not followed the proper procedures, making their decision without considering the impacts. They said that the environmental impacts would have been significant.

So once again, Medway are angry at a decision that's gone against them, and once again they've called upon the government to sort it out.

Medway should just quit whining and admit they've made a multi-million pound cock-up. Whether they agree with the environment winning out over housing (just for once) is irrelevant. The fact is they didn't follow the rules. Get over it councillors.

Facebook's Green Idea Saves Them Money

A few years ago, Greenpeace did some research that showed that data centres (The places that hold all that web data we store in the 'cloud' or make our searches over) used 2% of world's demand for electric.

Think about it: 2% of all the electric we use globally goes to running these huge server farms. Mind-boggling.

And that percentage has probably increased since that research was done!

The big problem with servers is that they need loads of power to both run and keep cool.

Facebook's big idea is to reduce both it's energy bill and carbon footprint by building it's latest data centre in the sub-Arctic town of Lulea, Sweden - It's first ever outside the U.S.

Why Sweden? Well, Sweden has some of the cheapest electric in the world, thanks to it's abundance of hydro-electric, and Lulea is one of the cheapest places in Sweden. This is why Facebook's new data centre is just the latest in the town.

And because the power comes from hydro, it has no carbon footprint.

The bonus for Facebook is that they can use the sub-arctic outside air to cool their servers to cut their energy bill even more.

Green and cheap. Now there's a concept!

More here.

Climate Change: Last Chance Saloon

If you've been listening to the climate scientists over recent years, they've been giving a consistent message: We need to keep global warming to a maximum of 2^o C (The lower, the better) if we are to avoid the worst effects of climate change; and, to do that, carbon emissions have to peak by 2020 at the latest and fall rapidly thereafter.

Typically, the world's politicians have agreed to keep the temperature rise to 2^o, but aren't due to bring in measures to 'ensure' this until 2020. Assuming that these measures are anywhere near good enough, it seems highly unlikely that CO2 will peak that same year, or even close.

So that's it then, the planet is screwed?

Maybe not, say a team of UK scientists led by Alexander Otto of the University of Oxford (Nature Geoscience [Otto et al, 2013]). They've been looking at data from recent decades and come to the conclusion that we will hit that 2^o mark perhaps 5 or ten years later than was expected.

No, climate change hasn't gone away, it's just happening on a slightly longer timescale.

This could be good news for all of us as it means we have a chance to keep things under 2^o after all. That's providing the world agreement to be made by 2015 and implemented in 2020 is strong enough.

5 or 10 years could give us the time to get ourselves organised. Add that to the time we could buy ourselves by tackling soot (See my earlier post), and we have hope again.

Hello?

If you are a regular visitor to this blog I'd be interested in some feedback.

What do like/dislike about the blog? Are there any subjects you want me to write about? Do you find the blog useful and/or interesting?

Your comments would be appreciated.

UK Energy Bill: Why No CO2 Target?

The Energy Bill is currently going through it's various 'reading' in parliament before going into law. On Tuesday 4th June, Tim Yeo, a Conservative MP, attempted to get an amendment passed which would set a carbon emissions target for 2030.

Unfortunately, the goverment (a coalition between the Conservatives and LibDems) don't want a target and instructed their MPs to vote against the amendment. Despite that, there was a mini-rebellion, with both Conservatives and LibDems joining the opposition Labour MPs to vote in favour. The amendment failed by just 23 votes.

So why were the self-proclaimed 'greenest government ever' against this target which would have completely de-carbonised UK electicity by 2030?

Well, they argue that it would put too many restrictions on business at a time of economic difficulty. This despite the fact that many UK businesses were lobbying for the amendment to be passed.

Many, myself included, feel the government has missed an opportunity here. Setting such a target would have:

• Sent out a strong message to the rest of the World that we are serious about climate change.
• Made sure we meet our legal commitment to cut our carbon emissions by 80% by 2050 (The government has been warned that we will have to de-carbonise energy production by 2030 if we are to have any chance of meeting that 80% target).
• Sent a strong market signal to potential investors in our growing renewables industry (One of the few areas of strong growth in our economy in the last few years), providing jobs, much needed economic activity, and give the UK a chance to take a bigger slice of the enormous worldwide market in renewables.

So what's going on? Well, as I said in this post the Chancellor, George Osborne, is hell-bent on commiting the UK to a new dash-for-gas. He knows damn well that if this amendment had gone through, it would have effectively killed off his plan because no investor is going to commit to building new gas-fueled power stations if they're to be phased out by 2030.

In effect, the "greenest ever" government are giving the 2050 target the finger.

More background here.

Cheap Coal - The 21st Century Monster

Coal. It's the dirtiest form of fossil fuel going. More pollution, more carbon emissions. By far.

Coal was there at the birth of the Industrial Revolution and it's still with us well over 200 years later.

Think about it: When Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein in 1818, coal had already been indispensable for decades. Yet here we are in a 21st century world that Shelley would barely recognise, and we're still dependent on it.  In fact our use of coal is actually increasing.

Now it seems the problem's getting even worse because the U.S.'s move to shale gas has resulted in the price of coal plummeting. Some countries have taken that as their cue to increase their use of coal regardless of their own carbon targets. That's what's happening in Britain and even the E.U. (See here).

To be fair, it's power companies that are making that decision for them based on the profit motive, but it amounts to the same thing when they're allowed to do what they like.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was about a monster brought to life with a jolt of electric. Today we are living in the shadow of a climate changing monster given life by our hunger for electricity: Cheap coal.

Neither are a pretty sight. Anyone got a pitch fork?