Skip to content

climate change

Dear Mr. Bliss

Aha!

You might recall Monbiot earlier in the week. And his mention of Jim Bliss\’ calculations about the amount of CO2 stored and the amount emitted by BP\’s Peterhead scheme.

You know, the one which strips the CO2 from natural gas, burns the hydrogen, pumps the CO2 into an oil reservoir and thus pumps up more oil?

The calculations which I said I didn\’t trust. Although, I have to admit, I got the reason I didn\’t trust them entirely wrong. Mea Culpa.

In 2005 BP proposed to build a new gas-fired power station at Peterhead, capture the carbon dioxide produced and use it for enhanced oil recovery in the Miller field below the North Sea; this innovative project could have been up and running in 2009. Monbiot is wrong to suggest that the plan would have led to more carbon emissions than savings: between 1.8m and 2m tonnes of carbon dioxide would be injected each year over 20 years, producing an additional 40m-60m barrels of oil. Taking the higher numbers, 40m tonnes of carbon dioxide remains underground, while burning the oil produces approximately 20m tonnes; twice as much carbon dioxide is stored than emitted.

The abandonment of the Miller scheme due to lack of government support means a loss of $6bn in oil revenues and a missed opportunity to take a lead in reducing carbon emissions.
Professor Martin Blunt
Department of earth science and engineering,
Imperial College London

Ah, you see, Jim compared the annual storage of CO2 with the emissions from 20 years of oil pumping.

When, in fact, we should either be comparing the 20 years of CO2 storage with the 20 years of oil pumping, or the annual CO2 storage with the annual oil pumping.

Comparing an annual input with a two decades long output is bound to give us some dodgy numbers.

Now this of course depends upon the Professor above being correct. Perhaps Jim would like to revisit his figures and tell us who is correct here?

Eh?

50% of observed global warming is the result of socioeconomic factors?

The logic, in a nutshell, being that if the warming is global then it should be the same in countries getting richer as in those not.

However, there\’s a discrepancy, meaning that at least some (50% is claimed) of the warming observed in rich countries is as a result of things like urban heat island effects, formerly rural stations becoming urban etc.

Anyone seen a discussion of this paper elsewhere? Any climate change warriors addressed it?

Monbiot Today

A quite wondrous column today. He starts off by quoting The Daily Mash, good man, showing some taste at last. Then, well, at the centre of his assertions is this:

A few weeks ago, the green thinker Jim Bliss roughly calculated the environmental costs of this technique. He used as his case study the scheme BP proposed but abandoned last year for pumping CO2 into the Miller Field off the coast of Scotland. It would have buried 1.3m tonnes of CO2 and extracted 40m barrels of oil. Taking into account only the four major fuel products, Bliss worked out that the total carbon emissions would outweigh the savings by between seven and 15 times.

Now I\’ve something of a soft spot for Jim Bliss, he\’s certainly sound on the stupidity that is the criminalisation of cannabis. But I\’m really note sure that I would take his calculations upon matters economic very seriously. A couple of tasters:

We all know by now that late-capitalism has reduced us all, in theory, to mere consumers; units of potential economic exploitation.

Erm, how does one get exploited as a consumer? It\’s producers that capitalism and markets are so good at exploiting, surely?

I believed — as I still believe — that the human race has both the talent and the resources to ensure that millions of us don’t have to live in a condition of extreme poverty on the very edge of starvation. Yet we allow it to happen. More that that, we’ve built a global economic system that positively encourages it. Requires it, even.

Eh? The tired old trope that they\’re poor because we are rich?

Well, let\’s just say we\’ve got a very specific view of the world here, one that might not have all that much connection with it as it really is. As I say, I wouldn\’t rely upon economic calculations from this source.

But the really crucial part of Monbiot\’s assertions is this:

It will take many more years for the technology to be retro-fitted to existing power stations, by which time it\’s all over. On this schedule, carbon capture and storage, if it is deployed at all, will come too late to prevent runaway climate change.

This is the bit that is untrue: climate change is indeed a problem, but it\’s not an immediate one nor a catastrophic one. There is no need at all for a radical change in policies this year or next, nor within five or ten years. After all, we do indeed have the scientific consensus, represented by the IPCC, to inform us, and there is nothing in that compendium of work to suggest that we only have x years to save the planet. There\’s nothing like that at all.

Monbiot here is simply scaremongering. The non- and low- carbon technologies are indeed lumbering along in the background, we really are getting there to such things as low cost solar, low cost fuel cells, low cost local hydrogen generation and the rest. It\’s just that such technologies take years, decades even, to come to fruition and thus Monbiot\’s urgency. For he cannot wait for the technological solution to arrive, for that would obviate the need for the radical change in the structure of society that he so desires.

The urgency therefore is not that of runaway climate change: it\’s that technology will indeed save us, something which would never do. So better get the societal oppression in first, before the technology arrives.

 

Phillip Pullman

As part of their own small contribution to the war on global warming, Pullman and his wife are having a ground-source heat pump installed in their home, a 17th-century farmhouse near Oxford: “It’s costing a fortune, but it will eventually mean that we burn much less fuel. I can only afford to do it because I’ve got enough money. There should be one in every house in the country – and there would be if the government had the sense to invest in such things. But they lack the courage to break away from this insane obsession with the market. They worship the market. It’s desperately destructive.”

His solution is both drastic and nostalgic, harking back to the era of his birth in 1946: “In the second world war people wouldn’t of their own accord have restricted their eating, so we had rationing. And it worked, because it was universal and everyone had the same rations and you couldn’t buy and sell someone else’s rations.” So we should bring back rationing and to hell with the market? “Absolutely.”

And that, folks, is why we don\’t get our economic ideas from children\’s novelists.

On the heat pump issue he seems to think that government has some magic pot of money, that they can spend upon things without having to take the money from elsewhere.

And abandoning the market in favour of rationing? Well, does anyone actually need to me to detail why this is insane?

Umm, Gordo?

Gordon Brown re-launched a joint proposal with French President Nicolas Sarkozy for reduced VAT rates on eco-friendly appliances but it failed to gain widespread support at the leaders’ spring council meeting in Brussels.

There\’s a much simpler solution. One you can do on your own (for you can raise VAT rates as you like, it\’s only cutting hem you must have permission for).

Raise the current 7.5% VAT rate for domestic fuel and power consumption to the full 17.5% rate.

After all, if the aim is to cut consumption, which it is, this would be a good green tax, wouldn\’t it?

Barroso on Biofuels

Aaargh, aaargh, make it stop, please!

Mr Barroso called for international agreement on the types of biofuels that should be allowed but insisted that the EU targets would increase their sustainability. “The only alternative we have for biofuels today is oil. And there is no question, the impact on the environment of oil is much greater than for biofuels.”

No, you pint sized Portugee moron!

We know that biofuels lead to greater emissions than the use of fossil fuels.

You\’re insisting that we all go off to make the problem worse.

Look, please, can you not simply admit that you\’ve all made a mistake, that biofuels are only the answer to the question "how do we cook the planet faster while making everyone poorer?"

I\’ll even draft the speech for you. You know, Keynes and all that. "New scientific evidence has come to light showing that the earlier decision was based on incomplete information. As the late great Lord Keynes once said, "When the facts change I change my mind. Pray, what do you do Sir?".

Or is that too difficult?

Can we leave yet?

Disaster!

OMG, we\’re killing Gaia!

Giving prisoners their own showers has forced up the government\’s carbon dioxide emissions, official statistics have shown. Carbon emissions within former Home Office bodies, including the prison service, rose from 28,237 tonnes in 2005-06 to 28,925 tonnes in 2006-07. The rise has been attributed to the increase in the prison population and the provision of in-cell showers.

Excellent Point!

The most popular micro-generation technology would probably be roof‑top photovoltaic solar panels, since it now seems that domestic wind-turbines have the slight drawback of generating only miniscule amounts of electricity.

But feed-in tariffs for solar panels would be an inequitable subsidy, since, if they are to succeed in stimulating investment, the rate paid to micro-generators per unit of electricity would have to be several times the retail electricity price, as it is in Germany. The result would be to increase everyone’s electricity bill in order to provide a guaranteed income to those with large roofs and the financial resources to invest in solar panels, a demographic one might term “the Camerons”.

The Problem With Feed-in Tariffs

The Guardian Leader praises feed-in tariffs today:

Get past the behemoth of a moniker and the idea is simple: those generating electricity from renewable sources are paid generously for extra power they feed to the grid. Electricity companies have to buy this energy and share the higher cost among all their customers. It is supposed to kick-start investment in greener energy, and it works: Germany\’s adoption of the programme has helped it develop 200 times the solar power capacity of Britain and 10 times the wind energy, despite Britain being a much windier place.

As far as it goes, this is fine. If we do in fact want to encourage the installation of the current generation (sorry) of technology, then such tariffs are indeed a good way of subsidising said installation.

However, we don\’t really want to encourage said installation. The current generation is markedly inefficient. We also know that the next, or the next but one (say, solar in 5-10 years as an example) will be markedly more efficient. If we are to believe the likes of Jeremy Leggett then solar will be competitive with coal in under a decade. That\’s when we want to start installing, not now.  The falls in price which will lead to this desirable state of affairs are of course being driven in part by subsidy expanding the market and bringing economies of scale into play. Fortunately for us, Hans and Fritz are paying those subsidies. We can simply wait and then take advantage of the technology their payments create.

Of course, when solar is so price competitive, then we won\’t need subsidies at all. Far better to wait, to not shell out on the subsidies, to use that money elsewhere, and to adopt an economically rational technology as and when it appears in the near future.

In the UK, both the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats favour the introduction of a similar scheme, but the government prefers to tinker with its Renewables Obligations. These are far dearer and much less effective, mainly helping big energy companies dabble in the easiest, cheapest renewable energy sources.

Quite: we want people to be dabbling in the easiest and cheapest technologies. Indeed, what we really want is people to experiment, to find which are the cheapest and easiest technologies. After all (unless you\’re motivated by guilt) there\’s no reason to do something expensive, just because it is expensive.

The calls for feed-in tariffs, the calls for more subsidy now, are making the mistake of assuming that technology is constant. It isn\’t, it never has been and renewables technology now is going through a great burst of innovation (you could argue that it\’s of a similar intensity to that which greeted electricity itself, or the beginnings of the oil age). What we need is not installation of the current generation but the sorting process to find which of the new technologies actually work, the cheapest and easiest of them.

 

 

George Today

Hmm, I seem to be making long comments at CiF today. Sort of taking it to the moonbats rather than just preaching to the converted here perhaps.

"I can accept that a unit of measurement that allows us to compare the human costs of different spending decisions is a useful tool."

Good, because that\’s the only way it can be done. NICE looks at the cost of drugs by valuing QUALY (quality of life adjusted years) and says that if the use of a treatment gives a year of good quality life for less than £50 k or so then the NHS will pay for it. If it costs more than that then they won\’t (although there are exceptions) as Polly told us recently.
The rail system says that spending upon safety matters should go ahead is one life per year is saved per £1.4 million spent. More than that and we don\’t spend on the safety.
Local councils (I think this is true at least, these numbers are from memory) change road layouts if the cost is less than £100,000 per life saved per year.

There are, as you continually point out George, limited resources in the world (your mistake is in thinking they are fixed over time: they are not, but at any moment they are) and thus decisions must be made about what use to apply them to.
Claiming that human life is invalauable is all very noble but it\’s extremely childish. Should we spend a £ billion to cure one person of cancer (that is, in fact, the sort of sum we do spend in certain pollution reducing regulations)? Or would that £ billion be better spent eradicating malaria in a few countries? Which contributes more to human welfare?
You might argue that we should spend £2 billion: but pretty soon we do come up against the constraint of everything we have and thus need to make decisions and prioritise.
And yes, just as we have to do this with the NHS, with safety spending upon roads, upon railways, we have to do this with climate change.

It isn\’t, you should note, about profits: it\’s about the social benefit of emitting carbon as against the social cost of emitting carbon (or methane, NOX etc). This is exactly the sort of calculation we have to make if we are to even conceptually arrive at a rational decision. What is the cost of a Bangladeshi farmer losing his fields to floods in 2080? What is the cost of Bangladesh either developing to American living standards (as one of the models underlying the IPCC report assumes) or not doing so (as another model does)? What is the cost to us in lowered living standards of reducing carbon emissions?

Now what you can do is argue about the values placed upon all of these things: that\’s how we get the differences that we do in the social cost of carbon. Nordhaus seems to think, in one paper at least, that it\’s $2.50 a tonne CO2-e. Stern came out with $85 per tonne. If you want to say that human life is more valuable than Stern does, fine, argue for a higher social cost of emissions. That\’s a valid and logical thing to do (even if most will disagree with you, there\’s nothing conceptually wrong with the logic).

But to insist that no price can be put upon human life is insane. We do it all the time, we have to do it all the time, for, sadly, we do indeed have limited resources at any one time.

 

The Perils of Bottled Water

Phil Woolas again:

Phil Woolas, the environment minister, added that the amount of money spent on mineral water "borders on being morally unacceptable".

Their comments come as new research shows that drinking a bottle of water has the same impact on the environment as driving a car for a kilometre. Conservation groups and water providers have started a campaign against the £2 billion industry.

He says "up to 6 million bottles a day". Other estimates are of 2 billion bottles a year (roughly the same number).

Driving a car for a kilometre is, say, 130 g CO2? (Not entirely accuratebut it\’s a figure that bandied about).

2 billion x 130 g divided by 1 million to give us tonnage: 260,000 tonnes CO2. Hmm, about ten times what I\’d thought earlier.

My suspicion is that the linkage with driving a km has been rather sexed up. Still, of out 6 GT emissions as a country that is 0.004%.

How wonderful that we\’ve got the government concentrating on the important points, eh?

We\’ve Been Here Before

Sigh.

Drinking bottled water is almost morally indefensible, a government minister has suggested in a scathing attack on the industry.

Phil Woolas, the Environment Minister, said it was daft that six million litres of bottled water were drunk every day in Britain when safe tap water was universally and cheaply available. His comments echoed concerns among environmentalists, who believe that the packaging, transportation and disposal of bottled water products creates unnecessarily high carbon-dioxide emissions.

Even the Shadow Minister leaps aboard this bandwagon:

He received unexpected backing from Peter Ainsworth, the Shadow Environment Secretary, who agreed that the industry and consumers had big moral questions to answer.

“I don’t think Phil Woolas is wrong,” he said. “Huge amounts are imported from other countries — some now ludicrously from the Far East. This is an ecological nightmare and it doesn’t make economic sense either. It certainly raises questions about the basis on which we have constructed our economic lives. By any rational standard it’s crazy to be importing water from countries far away when there’s perfectly good water in our taps.

“It looks like the epiphany of any unsustainable human activity. I think as consumers we should consider the impact we have on the environment. If they think about it they might change their behaviour.”

So, umm, how big a problem is it?

"Well, I\’ve worked it out, very roughly, you know, just some mental arithmetic and it seems that banning bottled water would save 0.008% of the UK\’s emissions over a year."

Vitally important, don\’t you think? It\’s about the same as the emissions from lager.

How did we end up being ruled by fuckwits?

Caroline Lucas

Talking about those numbers showing the CO2 emissions of shipping:

From a technical point of view, this means it is crucial that there be limits on the number of emission rights the shipping sector is permitted to buy from other industries – to prevent it simply carrying on with business as usual, on the back of progress made in other sectors.

She still doesn\’t get it, does she?

And, more generally, it does also ultimately mean looking at the amount and the manner in which we consume. Is it really the best use of fuel and emissions to ferry 13,000 containers of toys, food, clothes and televisions from China to Europe each month on the Emma Maersk and others like her, for example? These are issues to be explored in a hearing I will host for MEPs next month, and I look forward to seeing the same level of debate develop over shipping as we have at long last reached on aviation – hopefully, to be followed up rapidly with rather more effective action than has been generated there.

Aren\’t we lucky to have a Ph.D. in Elizabethan Literature discussing such economic matters for us?

The entire point of tradeable permits (or carbon taxes, if you prefer) is that we reduce emissions in whichever sector we can reduce them most cheaply, allowing us to go on with those emittive activities which we value more. And the determinantors of which activities we value more are we, the consumers. That\’s actually what the whole system is supposed to do: reduce emissions at the least cost to human happiness, that happiness determined by the people doing the happying.

So let us set up something of a straw man. We need to reduce emissions by 90%. Shipping currently is 4.5% of the total, aviation about the same. Call it 10% all in. OK, if we, in our actions as consumers, decide that we\’ll do away with al other emissions and keep the shippingand aviation, as those are the most valuable things to us,. that\’s just fine. Mission accomplished, eh?

Now of course, that is ridiculous, we wouldn\’t actually want to do that: but it is were the logic of permits leads: set the limit and then let the market work out for you which are the activities most valued and thus the ones which get to carry on.

My Word, This is a Surprise

George Monbiot is actually spot on.

Apart from used chip fat, there is no such thing as a sustainable biofuel.

OK, so he blathers around about peak oil etc, but on the biofuels point he\’s entirely correct. As a number of people (ahem) have been saying for some time. We might be able to get somewhere with algae, we might not, but all of these other methods make the problem worse, not better.

The lesson being of course that we rather need to stop governments trying to pick winners, stop them mandating technologies that must be used. They\’re clearly incompetent at it.

Global Warming Hysteria

This is ridiculous:

The UK is to be hit by regular malaria outbreaks, fatal heatwaves and contaminated drinking water within five years because of global warming, the Government has warned the NHS.

Five years? Someone\’s lost the plot here. Further:

While the authors say the UK has proved able to cope with major heatwaves in the past, with no serious increase in fatalities in years with hot summers, such as 1976, temperatures on the scale of those experienced in France in 2003, which resulted in 14,000 premature deaths, would have an impact.

In south-east England, the chance of a severe heatwave on this scale by 2012 is said to be one in 40, and the report says: "In conventional thinking about risks to health, a risk of one in 40 is high."

The NHS has warned that hospitals, nursing homes and other social care institutions need to brace themselves for coping with disasters by planning in advance.

However, fewer old people are expected to die each year from cold, as climate change leads to warmer winters.

Err, how many die from cold? As Lomborg has pointed out, deaths from cold snaps are very much higher than any of these predictions for deaths from heatwaves. We\’re getting another one of our cost reports, when we should be getting a cost benefit report. And malaria? That\’s really not a lot to do with temperature. It\’s to do with things like draining marshes and the like. Where I am in Southern Portugal is already a great deal warmer than anything that is predicted for the UK in coming centuries. Do we have malaria here? No….well then.

What Makes a Green Lifestyle?

In a word – poverty. The most poverty stricken people of the world are usually the most ecologically friendly.

Eh?

That\’s Neil Harding.

He really seems to have missed the point that poverty is the inefficient use of resources. The creation of wealth is the moving of said resources from low value uses to higher value ones. The richer we ae, by definition, the more efficiently we are using resources.

No, Not a Surprise

Transforming ecosystems into farms for biofuel crops will increase global warming and result in net increases in carbon emissions, according to a study.

Scientists have found that converting rainforests, peatlands and grasslands can outweigh the carbon savings made from biofuels and produce "carbon debts" which could take centuries to pay off.

The study will add to concerns about the ability of biofuels to replace fossil fuels. The EU is reviewing its pledge that biofuels such as bioethanol and biodiesel should make up 10% of transport fuel by 2020. Britain has a separate target of 5% biofuels in petrol and diesel by 2010.

In the study, US researchers calculated that converting natural ecosystems to grow corn or sugarcane to produce ethanol, or palms or soybeans for biodiesel, could release between 17 and 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels.

So can we please stop having governments trying to pick winners and making matters worse as they do so?

Apologies, I Don\’t Understand

Angus Deaton\’s got a report out about the difference in American and Brit attitudes to the Stern Review.

Much of it discusses the really important point about Stern, the discount rate used. Only by adopting a near zero discount rate can he show that (large) action now is worthwhile. Deaton says that a low rate can be justified. The American attitude is that if we look at markets then a higher rate should be used. It\’s all rather good as a way of describing the situation.

His final sentence however astonishes me:

Relying on markets to teach us ethics is very much worse.

Eh?

We\’re supposed to look to politicians instead to teach us ethics?

The man\’s barmy.