Please, please, can we get this right?
A properly designed FIT rewards early adaptors, helps kick-start a new industry and creates jobs. The German PV industry added 10,000 jobs last year.
"Creating jobs" is a cost of such schemes, not a benefit. Jebus, why are all the writers on this subject such morons? Have they not learned the very basics yet?
The environment minister, Phil Woolas, tells the programme it is also a moral issue that bottled water is being sent to Britain when many countries have no access to safe drinking water.
Some of the most expensive bottled mineral water comes from Fiji – yet one in three Fijians does not have access to safe tap water.
Excellent, so they sell stuff that comes bubbling up out of the ground for free to rich idiots on the other side of the world and then build a mains water system with the money. Pretty neat idea, hunh?
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.
It\’s one of those things we\’re urged to do, isn\’t it? Instead of slathering the crops with pesticides and herbicides, we should look to integrated management, think holistically, use natural predators to control pests.
An insect that once held promise as a natural pest controller was branded the most invasive species in Britain yesterday by researchers.
…
Because it eats so many aphids, its staple diet, as well as other ladybirds, it has threatened the number of native ladybirds and species, such as lacewings, which also eat aphids. It also threatens aphid numbers. The two-spot and seven-spot ladybirds are particularly threatened.
The harlequin ladybird’s voracious appetite for aphids attracted interest in its use as a biological pest control but after it was released in several European countries in the 1980s and 1990s it rapidly became established and spread widely.
What would the earth be like if we finally manage to bring about our own extinction?
Finally? Manage?
This diatribe rather brought on a fit of the giggles.
The uncomfortable fact, which is ignored or denied by both ends of the environmental debate, is that an energy-intensive lifestyle of the kind enjoyed in the rich parts of the world cannot be extended to a human population of nine or 10 billion, the level forecast in UN studies for the middle of this century.
John, have you actually tried reading the UN reports? Specifically, the SRES, the economic models upon which the whole edifice of the IPCC, and thus global warming, is built?
Far from denying that the energy intensive lifestyle can be extended to 9 or 10 billion people, the whole system is predicated on the idea that it will happen. If you look at the A1 family, for example, it assumes that in 2100 the average living standard around the globe will be equal to that of the US in 2000.
So far from it being impossible, as you state, it is assumed. Which leaves you with one of two choices. You can carry on with your claim, that it is not possible, in which case you must reject the IPCC report, or you can accept the IPCC and reject your assertion.
Green activists, free-market economists and religious fundamentalists may not seem to have much in common, but they are all agreed there can be no such thing as overpopulation, or at any rate, nothing that can\’t be solved by better distribution, faster growth or a change in human values.
You seriously underestimate free market economists there. It\’s generally accepted (and indeed is again an assumption in the SRES models which underly the IPCC) that at a certain level of wealth (meant in its true sense, things like increasing lifespans, decreasing child mortality) fertility falls. All industrial nations (except the US) are below replacement fertility levels. We assume, as again the IPCC does, that as other nations get to similar levels of wealth as we were in the 60s and 70s, that their fertility will fall also to below replacement.
This is what leads, as with the A1 family again, to a population of 7 billion globally in 2100.
Far more than fantastical schemes for renewable energy, we need to ensure that contraception and abortion are freely available everywhere. A world of fewer people would be far better placed to deal with climate change than the heavily overpopulated one we are heading for now.
And that is simply ignorant. We know very well that what reduces the number of children is not access to either abortion or contraception: they have an effect only when the desire to reduce fertility is there. The more important point is for desired fertility to fall: the current state of knowledge is that 90% of changes in actual fertility come from changes in desired, only the last 10% from access to abortion and contraception. And as above, we know what reduces desired fertility, increased wealth.
Apparently this is extracted from his new book. Don\’t think I\’ll bother reading it (unless, of course, someone is interested in a review, one which might not be all that kind).
I\’m a little confused here:
For two days now, two crew members of a Sea Shepherd Conservation Society vessel have been held on a Japanese whaling ship, which they boarded in the Southern Ocean. They were delivering a letter informing the captain that his ship was in violation of both Australian and international conservation law.
Using violence to board a ship on the high seas. Don\’t we have a name for that?
Piracy?
The only major industrial country with a fertility rate that replaces its own population is the US. It\’s just hit 2.1 per woman again, why?
Also, American men are more likely to share childcare duties.
So, note to all of those who concern themselves with rising population numbers, those who think it\’s a bad idea. People do respond rationally to incentives, so you should be campaigning for less paternal leave, less involvement of fathers in their childrens\’ care and quite possibly, less State provided child care.
That\’ll be amusing to watch, as those who do obsess about population tend to be those who obsess about gender equality as well.
Err, hellooo?
A staggering £8billion-worth of food is thrown away in Britain every year – a third of everything we buy, according to campaigners.
And most of the 6.7 million tons of food we discard from our homes each year – enough to fill Wembley Stadium eight times – could have been eaten, according the Government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (Wrap). And the startling figures refer only to waste from households – when waste from businesses is included the numbers will be considerably higher.
For every three bags of shopping brought home, one ends up in a landfill. Experts said too much food was being thrown away because consumers let it go off in the fridge or cupboard, or portions are too big and leftovers are simply binned.
Didn\’t we go through all of this a few weeks ago? Included in that "one third" is potato peelings, cabbage stalks and tea bags? So that this figure is, at the very best, extremely misleading?
As well as the cost, the wasted food is a major contributor to the production of greenhouse gases. Most of the food thrown away ends up in landfill, where it produces methane, a potent greenhouse gas.
And that methane is, by law (2004 Landfill Act) collected and used to generate energy: it supplies 30% of Britain\’s renewable energy. Not to note that is extremely misleading….to the point of (almost) being a lie.
Wrap is something of a problem as an organisation anyway. They\’ve produced a report which is really rather good. They measured the emissions saved by the recycling that we already do. They were really rather open and honest about it all: recycling aluminium cans is a great idea, saves money and emissions. Turning green glass into roads increases emissions. However, far too many people use this report to argue that further recycling will save further emissions: this might be true, certainly, but it also might not be. The report certainly doesn\’t prove it. Whether reycling something is a good idea or not (on financial, or emissions grounds) depends upon what it is, what is the current disposal method and how you\’re actually going to recycle it. Unfortunately all too many are infected with the idea that if some recycling is a good idea (which it is) then all recycling must be, which simply isn\’t true.
Think of it this way: my ingestion of 2,000-3,000 caloriues a day keeps me fit and healthy (I do quite a bit of exercise so that higher number is OK). This does not mean that my ingestion of 4,000-6,000 calories a day would also keep me fit and healthy.
So with recycling: more is not necessarily better. And Wrap seem to have morphed from an organisation writing a decent report about which types are a good idea to one which says that all are.
After years of secret preparation, the world\’s cheapest car will be unveiled in Delhi this week – delighting millions of Indians as much as it is horrifying environmentalists.
Thyere is a part of the environmental movement driven by an insistence that the peasant life is the best one. Of course, for them, the idea that the peasantry might have cars, or even transport, is a horror. What next? They might start demanding a decent diet, even liberty and freedom itself and we certainly can\’t be allowing the proles to do what they want now, can we?
As you know, we\’ve all been told that we must have those little windmills on our house in order to appease Gaia.
Home wind turbines are significantly underperforming and in the worst cases generating less than the electricity needed to power a single lightbulb, according to the biggest study of its kind carried out in Britain.
An interim report revealed that homeowners could be being misled by the official figures for wind speeds because they are consistently overestimating how much wind there is – sometimes finding that real speeds are only one third of those forecast. In the worst case scenario, the figures indicate that it would take more than 15 years to generate enough \’clean\’ energy to compensate for the manufacture of the turbine in the first place.
Ah, so they don\’t work and the reason they don\’t is because those pushing them upon us have been lying. What a surprise.
Matthew Rhodes, Encraft\’s managing director. \’There is no doubt that microgeneration as a whole has a critical role to play in delivering a low carbon and secure energy future for the UK.
Eh? we\’ve just found out that microgeneration is both an economic and environmental disaster, yet it\’s still vital? Might we not be putting the ideology before the facts here?
Wow! This is amaaaazing:
The populations of falcons, kites and eagles have increased sharply in the wake of reintroduction programmes and improvements in their environments.
But now the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) has discovered that their success is leading to a decline in ground nesting birds such as the grey partridge, one of the most endangered birds in the UK, the capercaillie, the black grouse and its red cousin.
Waders such as the curlew, lapwing and golden plover are also at greater risk.
Stunning, eh? Increase the number of predators and the prey species are at greater risk. Who would have thought it?
This really isn\’t a surprise. People like David Pimental have been saying it for at least a decade.
Using biofuels made from corn, sugar cane and soy could have a greater environmental impact than burning fossil fuels, according to experts. Although the fuels themselves emit fewer greenhouse gases, they all have higher costs in terms of biodiversity loss and destruction of farmland.
The problems of climate change and the rising cost of oil have led to a race to develop environmentally-friendly biofuels, such as palm oil or ethanol derived from corn and sugar cane. The EU has proposed that 10% of all fuel used in transport should come from biofuels by 2020 and the emerging global market is expected to be worth billions of dollars a year.
And, as noted, the idiot politicians (the US Congress is in fact worse than the EU here, if such a thing can be believed) are insisting that such biofuels, which are worse for the environment than fossil fuels, must be used in order to protect us from the environmental effects of fossil fuels.
If you think that the politicians are going to protect us from climate change then you\’ve obviously not been paying attention.
I\’m afraid that Jared Diamond has got things terribly, fatally, wrong here. Well, fatally for his argument, at least.
Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let’s suppose they rise to our level. Let’s also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens … China’s catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.
If India as well as China were to catch up, world consumption rates would triple. If the whole developing world were suddenly to catch up, world rates would increase elevenfold. It would be as if the world population ballooned to 72 billion people (retaining present consumption rates).
Some optimists claim that we could support a world with nine billion people. But I haven’t met anyone crazy enough to claim that we could support 72 billion. Yet we often promise developing countries that if they will only adopt good policies — for example, institute honest government and a free-market economy — they, too, will be able to enjoy a first-world lifestyle. This promise is impossible, a cruel hoax: we are having difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people.
The problem with this argument is that there really are people crazy enough to insist that we can support 72 billion people. But you may not think that they are total lunatics, for they are the IPCC. Yes, the International Panel on Climate Change does indeed think that we can support 7 billion (their prediction in the A1 family) all of whom have a living standard equal to (at least on average) that of a US citizen in 2000. Seriously, look it up here at the SRES. Using the same construction as Diamond, those 7 billion living high on the hog in 2100 are the same as the 72 billion he talks about.
So far from not having met anyone crazy enough to think this is possible, Diamond needs to realise that everyone worried about climate change believes that very thing. For the models being used to predict future CO2 emissions have, at their heart, this very assumption. That living standards will continue to improve, that there will be convergence in living standards and that that convergence will be upwards, not down.
Now I don\’t mind if Diamond wants to insist that this is not possible. That\’s up to him. But if he does want to then he\’s also got to revise his view of climate change, because that is based not on the idea that this increase in wealth is impossible, but that it is certain.
One or the other, not both.
Sadly, another indication that we are ruled by idiots.
With pilot schemes already going well, within two to three years she is determined to see pails of rotting food routinely collected along with the rubbish, then processed at local plants to generate electricity. She foresees a day when every town will have its own anaerobic digester.
The aim of all of this is to stop food going into landfill where it rots and produces methane. "She" is the head of WRAP, the organisation trying to get us all to recycle more.
But why is this idiocy? Why not do this?
Well, the thing is that food that goes into landfill goes through anaerobic decay to produce that methane. Which is then collected and used to generate energy. The proposal is that we should all have rotting food in our houses, waiting for the weekly collection, have a new and discrete collection system (with all of the associated emissions) and new plants, one in every town, where the food wastes can go through anaerobic decay so that the methane can be collected and used to generate energy.
That is, that we\’re going to do what we already do, just in a new and vastly expensive manner, a method with higher, not lower, emissions.
As I say, we\’re ruled by idiots.
There\’s a reason this is happening:
The Chinese town of Guiyu is the graveyard of Christmas past.
It is where presents – game consoles, laptops, mobile phones – come to die.
It is also where they are reborn. In this giant scrap-yard, so dangerously polluted that its children are being clinically poisoned, the electronic objects of desire, a million tons of them a year, are broken apart, melted down, and washed in acid to be recycled into a new flood of imports for Christmas future.
Money, of course.
But no, it\’s not the gross capitalist exploitation of the workers sort of stuff at all. Rather, it\’s the environmental regulations imposed here in Europe that are causing it. A pile of electronics contains a number of valuable metals: copper, lead, tin and gold just to start with. There are a couple of ways to extract it: the hand method these Chinese are using (which allows you to extract the working chips as well) or you can have a highly mechanised operation. Essentially, you chop everything up into fine powder and then separate the metals as if it were an ore.
You can also be more sophisticated, there\’s a plant in Cheshire that recycles the solder for example, by exploiting a certain property of gold and solder. At 280 oC or so, they form a eutectic alloy (ie, the gold dissolves into the solder) so you can run the boards through a bath of the solder you have previously melted, and you get all the solder and the gold off the board. The chips then fall off and you have the copper and the board itself, which you can separate by chopping and flotation tanks. The fibres can be made into excellent insulation, the metals all recycled.
Now all of these methods are roughly comparable in cost….some cost more to do but you get more value from the recyclables, so the nett outcomes are comparable.
Except….except….most electronics waste streams also include monitors. The electronic parts can be treated the same way (there\’s also nice plug of tungsten in there as well). But the glass on CRT or TV is 25% lead oxide. There\’s no sensible (ie economic) method of recycling this. The logical thing is to recycle all the rest and stick the glass into landfill. But, of course, you\’re not allowed to stick lead into landfill, are you?
Which is something of a pity, for while metallic lead, or lead oxide, would indeed be dangerous to those in the future, lead tied up in glass is not. Glass is, in fact, one of the most stable materials known to man. The lead does not leach out into the groundwater. Not even acids extract it (which is why we use glass carboys to transport acids of course).
But the environmentalists see "lead" and insist that it cannot be landfilled, it must be treated as poisonous and thus disposed of in a very expensive manner. This then means that the more sophisticated, mechanical, recycling methods do not make economic sense to do here in Europe. Thus the trade to China where people are, as the article points out, killing themselves and their children in doing said recycling.
Wondrous, isn\’t it? By insisting on too much recycling, the rules make certain that not enough is done, by insisting that there should be no landfill, no lead entering the environment, they make sure that more lead does enter it.
Well done, eh?
I know, I know, you\’ll not see that sort of headline around here very often.
However. Which environmental NGO did not take European Commission money to lobby the European Commission?
Which environmental NGO got right up the noses of the Comissars by getting people to email them?
No, of course I don\’t agree with why they did so and yes, of course I know that they\’re Luddites who want us all to convert to eating yurts around the tofu fires.
But full marks to Greenpeace for actually being independent of the Commission so that they can effectively lobby the Commission.
Hunh?
Why are local authorities favouring commingled systems? \’Recycling is the front line of capitalism,\’ argues Matthew Thomson of the Community Recycling Network charity. \’We spend 1.5 per cent of our GDP on treating waste and we\’re at the bottom half of the European league. If you\’re looking for a growth opportunity, then you\’re going to come into the international waste market.\’
Where in hell does that number come from? GDP is about £1.2 trillion, so 1.5% is £18 billion. Last time I looked (at the PM\’s report which launched the whole game) the statement was that we spent £1.6 billion (which would rise to £3.2 billion) treating domestic waste. That \’s 0.15% of GDP, not 1.5%.
Anyone know?
Via:
The Greenpeace whale naming competition. I\’m not sure whether this is a result of a lack of knowledge or a very dark sense of humour indeed:
– means \’little love\’ in Japanese
"Little" love is, of course, what the Japanese tend to show to cetaceans of all kinds. But it looks like the runaway winner is going to be Mr. Splashy Pants.