Doublethink

By Mark Crutchley

"The power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.... to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies", George Orwell, 1984.

Last Thursday the Prime Minister of Canada, Stephen Harper came to London and was accorded the honour of addressing both Houses of Parliament. One of the key aspects of the recent relationship between Britain and Canada has been the support our government has been giving to Canada's lobbying against the EU Fuel Quality Directive. This would see Canadian tar sands oil recognised as being more polluting than conventional oil and would make it much harder, if not impossible, for it to be imported into the EU; a move which the UK has steadfastly opposed.

Harper was met with three protests, two outside Parliament and another on top of it as we added British voices to those of Canadian environmentalists and indigenous people whose land would be destroyed by tar sands development. In all, an area the size of England could be laid waste to extract the oil if it is fully developed.

However with the difficulties Canada is having in establishing pipelines both to its own West coast and into America (KXL) to export tar sands oil, the EU directive could deal another body-blow to the development of this most dirty and polluting fuel. This is important for all of us because there is so much oil locked up in these sands, that exploiting it all would make it virtually impossible for us to avoid pushing temperatures well beyond the 2C which has been defined as the threshold for dangerous climate change.

I'm highlighting this, not just because it is one of the most critical climate issues we face, but also because of the way it exposes the hypocrisy of our politicians. World leaders have for years signed up to statements of their commitment to preventing dangerous climate change, yet at the same time they apparently have no qualms about supporting developments which would make that threat a reality. George Orwell would recognise this as a classic case of doublethink. Similarly oil companies devote pages of their annual reports to  sustainability, while simultaneously following a business plan based on the unsustainable exploitation of fossil fuel reserves.

We have a government which still professes itself committed to the legally enshrined 80% reduction in our greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, yet which votes down an amendment to its Energy Bill which set a necessary decarbonisation target for 2030. A chancellor pushing a new dash for gas through fracking partly because of the jobs it will create and in so doing  driving investment in renewable energy - which delivers far more jobs than gas fracking ever will - to a seven year low.

All of this doublethink goes unchallenged by the majority of our mainstream media which has neither the wit, nor the will to highlight the glaring contradictions. Somehow we have to hold our politicians to account, but how? I wish I knew.

Burning the Forests

By Mark Crutchley

In the name of saving carbon, our politicians have just taken a disastrously wrong decision on the issue of biofuels. They have agreed that Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROC’s) will be awarded to power stations which burn biofuels, so paving the way for a massive expansion in the amount of wood and palm oil which are harvested and sent to the UK to be burned in our power stations.

Why is this so bad? The old wisdom on biofuels used to be that since the carbon had been recently absorbed by the trees or plants involved, then burning it was essentially carbon neutral. Unfortunately this simplistic analysis missed out two very important details.

Firstly it takes trees a long time to grow and store up that carbon, but it is released effectively instantly. Even if new trees are planted to compensate it will be well over 50 years before they have sequestered the same amount of carbon as has been released. Moreover the desire to have a quick growing simple product means that increasing amounts of land will be given over to biologically deserted monoculture plantations. We have seen the adverse effect of these on our own hills and are moving away from this approach, but this will encourage exactly that same sterile development in other countries on a dramatically larger scale.

Secondly the most productive and flexible of liquid biofuel sources is palm oil. Already implicated in the destruction of millions of hectares of rainforest in Indonesia and other Far Eastern countries, this encouragement is likely to see even larger swathes of ancient forest destroyed to make way for new palm oil plantations. There isn’t much hope for saving the Orang-utan with policies like this being enacted.

A new report from the RSPB in association with Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace – Dirtier than Coal? – documents that even the government’s own analysis shows burning whole trees will increase greenhouse gas emissions by at least 49% compared to coal over a 40 year period. Yet despite this we are going to subsidise a massive expansion of precisely this activity. The Dutch and German governments are not going down this route and even Scotland has set a 15MW cap on the capacity of plants which would receive the subsidy, but here in England we are apparently happy to encourage global deforestation to keep our lights on.

To add insult to injury, the Green Investment Bank, intended to support the development of a low carbon economy here in the UK, has announced that it will be making a £100 million loan to Drax to enable the company to convert half its boilers to burning biomass – largely imported wood. In doing so, Drax is shamelessly harvesting government subsidies to switch from being Britain’s biggest polluter through the coal it burns, to occupying the same position through burning millions of tonnes of imported wood.

Drax isn’t the only former coal fired power station going down this route. Tilbury B has already converted and Ironbridge, Eggborough and Lynemouth all plan to partly or fully convert to burning biomass. Between them they will need to burn five times as much wood as the UK produces each year. They will be importing initially from the USA but increasingly from poorer nations where natural forests will be replaced by plantations to feed this frenzy.

It may be too late to stop this disastrous turn in government policy, but it isn’t too late to put pressure on the companies involved to turn their backs on biomass and on the Green Investment Bank not to fund large scale biomass. Biofuelwatch are co-ordinating a protest at the Drax AGM on 24th April and you can write to the GIB calling on them to stop funding biomass. You can also follow developments on the Biofuelwatch Facebook page. The battle may be lost, but the war isn’t over yet. 

Growing Campaigns

By Mark Crutchley

Norwich and the surrounding region is very well blessed with campaign groups covering a wide spread of activities, from those groups with a specific focus such as Norwich Stop the War coalition and Transition Norwich; to the broader organisations like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth which campaign on a changing roster of issues. The Green Party too is active in many areas and organisations like the Women’s Institute (WI) also promote a positive social agenda.

Too often though as groups we operate in our own areas and have relatively little contact with many other organisations that contain like-minded people who might be interested in getting involved with our campaigns, but just don’t know about them. We need to expand our reach and bring together all the groups which are working for a better society and reach out to those individuals who are not members of any group but would support individual campaigns.

It’s precisely this idea which is behind the creation of Visions for Change (VfC) Norwich. VfC has been set up to provide a resource for groups and individuals in the area who are working for a just and sustainable world. Its objective is to improve communications about campaigns and events happening in the area, hopefully helping increase the numbers involved and the impact they can have.

The website is still in the early stages of its development at the moment, as is the gathering of interested people, but readers of the One World Column are precisely the sort of people we want to connect with and encourage to get active with more of the local campaign groups who so desperately need your support.

So if you are interested in protecting the environment, social justice and a fairer society then please visit the site and sign up; either as an individual or on behalf of any group you may be involved with. And once you have signed up, please pass on the message about Visions for Change and encourage others to join too; the more people who get involved the more we can achieve together.

Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline

Meanwhile over in America scientists, politicians, climate activists, celebrities and ordinary people are coming together – and getting arrested together - to call on President Obama to stop the Keystone pipeline. If built this would deliver tar sands oil to refineries in Texas and open the way for a much larger exploitation of the Canadian tar sands.

This is a crucial battle for the environment because if we exploit all the tar sands available in Alberta, then not only is keeping the rise in global temperatures below 2C going to be completely impossible; but even keeping it below 4C is going to be very difficult. We have to hope – and give whatever support we can – that those opposing this scheme in America and Canada can carry the day and chalk a victory up for the people and planet against the oil industry.

Long on carbon, short on planning

Will the long-awaited energy bill, which is due out this week, mean that the UK finally has an energy policy worth having?

I, for one, would not bet any money on it, having taken due note of Andrew Simms’ article in the Observer: “Every part of our society depends on energy. Yet we don’t have a plan” and the accompanying leader on 21 October.  But there definitely ought to be a sense of urgency in the air – an urgency from the culmination not of months, or even years, but decades of inaction in a country that has taken energy supply for granted due to the geological fortune of North Sea oil and gas.  But this sea-bed fortune has been squandered by a succession of governments. The UK now needs a source of secure and sustainable energy.

Since 2008, two different governments have had the chance to create countless jobs, build a better energy system, ensure Britain has warmer homes in winter and tackle climate change by investing in a “green new deal” but they have failed.  In spite of high prices and climate change targets, there is still a sense in which energy policy is stuck in the mindset that characterised transport and energy policy back in the 1970s and 1980s. Today, the market is over-concentrated, with too few, too large self-interested energy companies that regulators cannot or won’t regulate in the public interest. Second, it is precisely because Britain has failed aggressively to diversify its energy supply, that it remains highly vulnerable to changes in the prices of fossil fuels. 

It cannot be exaggerated how much the fate of transport, farming, households and industry is sewn into the fabric of the energy system. The Government talks the need for a “mix” of fossil fuels and renewables to meet our carbon output targets but it is actually cutting the amount of investment in renewables like solar, wind and tide, while writing a blank cheque in subsidy for the nuclear and gas industries.   Chancellor George Osborne is pushing the so-called “dash for gas” above all else, while the Committee on Climate Change (the government’s official advisor) has warned that extensive use of gas is incompatible with carbon targets and therefore should not be government policy.  Focusing on the two most economically and environmentally expensive forms of energy – nuclear and gas – at a time of austerity proves that the government’s thinking on energy supply is shambolic.  Why is the UK so out-of-step with other countries – like Germany - for instance?

Following the nuclear catastrophe at the Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant, the German government announced a new energy strategy that is nuclear-free, affordable and sustainable. This strategy is based on:
• A fundamental commitment to energy reduction
• Focussed investment to ensure that renewables and energy storage are fit-for-purpose in the 21st century
• Proven bridging technologies such as combined heat and power (CHP)
• A decentralised power supply tailored to regional/local needs
. 

This decision was underscored by courage, vision and commitment. To quote from its report, Germany’s Energy Turnaround – a collective effort for the future:
“Germany must walk down the path of phasing out nuclear power with the courage to try out the new, with confidence in its own strengths and with a fixed procedure in place for monitoring and guiding the process.…Germany could demonstrate to the international community that phasing out nuclear power is the opportunity for a high-performance economy.” 

In contrast, the UK government’s position on our energy future, and nuclear energy in particular, is short-sighted and cavalier. Its determination to secure a new generation of nuclear power stations is undermining our environmental and economic future by:
• compromising the viability of the renewables sector
• increasing the risk of contamination from low-level radiation emissions and from long-term nuclear waste storage
• making us hostage to higher energy bills under the monopoly of the Big Six providers

Yet there is one drastic difference from the ‘70s and ‘80s. Although Margaret Thatcher warned about climate change, then there was still time to turn on the calamitous ship she was steering. Now it is today that we need to effect root and branch reductions in carbon emissions. We must do it today, and for the next nine or ten years, to have any chance of keeping the temperature within anything like reasonable limits. And those years are exactly the years in which any nuclear renaissance would be belching out carbon dioxide most flatulently, as the pilings are driven, the steel forged, the seas dredged for ballast, the concrete poured, the land mined for uranium and the stations erected by monstrous cranes – all done by fossil fuel. Without a watt of electricity to show for it, and without any marked change of direction at all planned by a feckless government.

Look please again at the first bullet point on which the German strategy is based - a fundamental commitment to energy reduction. Lacking that – and sadly there is no genuine sign of it – the government’s energy bill can only be the stuff of bad dreams.

Biofuels – Not the Solution

By Mark Crutchley

It didn’t take long for biofuels to go from saint to sinner destroying early hopes that they offered a low carbon means of meeting our energy requirements. This idea was quickly replaced with the realisation that a full life cycle analysis showed few offered any real benefit over fossil fuels and many produced even greater carbon emissions once land use changes were accounted for.

Unfortunately the political process moves a lot more slowly than scientific knowledge. The analysis that biofuels offered no environmental benefit has not stopped the US government from subsidising the growth of refineries to turn corn into ethanol, or the EU from mandating that transport fuels should have a steadily increasing biofuel content.

Finally though the message seems to be getting through, and leaked documents have indicated that the EU is planning on reducing its 2020 target for the percentage of biofuel in transport fuels from 10% to 5%. Critically it appears to be the fact that these fuels use food crops which has driven the change of policy. In a world where global food production has been lower than consumption in six of the last eleven years and reserves have shrunk from 107 days of consumption 10 years ago to just 74 days now, politicians are finally acknowledging the absurdity of turning food into fuel.

In America too they are debating the logic of a policy which decreed that the ethanol content in gasoline should rise each year and which had led to around half the US corn crop being used to make fuel. In a year when the US maize crop has been devastated by a heatwave, highlighting the vulnerability of our food production to the increasing impacts of climate change, this policy has contributed to food prices reaching record highs with consequences for the number of people going hungry around the world.

But just as we are getting to grips with the absurdity of using grains to make fuel, so here in the UK we are seeing a surge in applications for biomass power stations to generate electricity; typically these will burn wood or palm oil. Drax, the country’s largest coal fired power station has long co-fired a limited amount of biomass mostly sourced locally. Now though it hopes to convert three of its six generating units to run on biomass. This would involve a major increase in the amount of biomass required implying either substantial imports or the conversion of much local land to produce the required volumes. Meanwhile in Tilbury RWE have applied for planning permission to use a former coal station to burn millions of tonnes of timber every year, most probably from the USA and Canada – you can help object to this here.

Elsewhere around the country there has been a surge of applications for power stations which are likely to run on imported palm oil, contributing to the rapid destruction of rainforests and peatlands in Indonesia and other Asian countries. To add insult to injury most of these biomass power stations will only generate electricity, and will dump the heat generated in the firing. This is a very inefficient use of the total potential energy available; it’s like paying for something which costs £4 with a £10 note and then throwing the change down a drain. We have to realise we have limited resources on this planet and we must use them all as efficiently as possible.

Why is this happening now? Because our government is subsidising biomass as a low carbon power source. The premise is that burning wood is carbon neutral because the CO₂ was only recently locked up by the tree growth and replanting will recapture the CO₂ again. Even the most cursory of thought processes though will tell you that there is still a significant time-lag involved of 40+ years before any new tree has locked away an equivalent amount to that being released in a few minutes of combustion. This is time we don’t have. Once again the thinking here is all wrong and an EU analysis has concluded that “the use of trees from forests for bioenergy purposes would cause an actual increase in greenhouse gas emissions compared to fossil fuels in the short term”. So not just not carbon neutral, but actually worse than fossil fuels.

We need to tackle the source of this problem – the subsidy - now before committing ourselves to building more infrastructure which will actually harm the environment rather than benefit it. Subsidising real renewables, such as wind, solar, tidal and wave power will help develop these industries and decarbonise our energy industry in the longer term. Subsidising biomass will do no such thing.

Geoengineering the Planet

By Mark Crutchley

Following on from my last column in which I described the unprecedented extent of the sea ice melt in the Arctic this summer, I want to take you to a dark place that you may never have considered going to before. I want to suggest that we may need to undertake some limited Geoengineering in the immediately foreseeable future. I realise this is a radical suggestion, particularly coming from a committed green like myself, but there is a good reason as I will explain.

To set the stage I want to start by challenging the idea that it would never be right to geoengineer our planet. If it were an ice age we were facing, with great ice sheets set to cover most of Europe, Russia, Canada and a large part of the USA. Crop production would be devastated and hundreds of millions of people would become homeless or starve to death. Would we accept geoengineering then to keep the planet warm enough for our civilisation to continue? I know I would and I suspect so would most other people. 

So now let’s turn our attention to the current situation. The reason I want to suggest we should consider geoengineering is because of methane. It is generally stated that methane has a global warming potential (GWP) which is around 21 times that of CO₂, but while this is the figure used by the UNFCCC, it doesn’t tell the whole story. This is the 100 year averaged figure, but methane only stays in the atmosphere for around 12 years and in that time it has a GWP in the region of 90 times that of CO₂.

At the moment the CO₂ concentration in the atmosphere is around 392 parts per million (ppm). Methane is the next most important global warming gas, with a concentration of around 1800 parts per billion (ie 1.8ppm), this having risen around 150% since the start of the industrial revolution compared to an increase of around 40% in CO₂.

Recent articles have highlighted the risks of significant methane releases triggered by the well above average rate of warming in the more northerly latitudes. On land methane is being released in the tundra as the permafrost thaws and wetland peat bogs warm, and in the oceans lie vast quantities of the gas in the form of frozen methane clathrates, which if mobilised could dramatically impact on our climate. The references in my last column to the Arctic Methane Emergency Group and the interview with Peter Wadhams both highlighted these risks.

Significantly increased methane emissions run the risk of pushing us into unstoppable runaway warming. But crucially their impact would be felt over a relatively limited time period. Within 12-15 years the released methane would disappear from the atmosphere. A temporary programme of geoengineering – I’m not going to discuss of what form, that’s another whole issue – might be necessary to prevent this scenario from becoming a disastrous reality.

But there is one crucial caveat which I would add. A key concern of opponents of geoengineering is that it would be used to avoid addressing the underlying problem of our excessive carbon emissions. Reducing the amount of incoming solar radiation for example might limit the warming of the planet, but unless we cut emissions it will do nothing to address ocean acidification; and without emission cuts the extent of geoengineering required would continually increase. This is a recipe for disaster.

So my suggestion is that if we were to go down this route, it would only be acceptable if it were accompanied by a massive global programme to transform our energy systems permanently to low or zero carbon forms. Otherwise all we are doing is delaying the inevitable. Without this we would be applying a temporary palliative, just pushing back the date of the disaster by a few years.

I can’t pretend that I like this scenario. As a species we have a poor record of taking action to benefit the environment on a large scale, but we may be on the verge of developments for our climate so dramatic that we have little option other than to consider such drastic measures. At least this time we would be doing it for the right reasons rather than the thoughtless geoengineering we have inflicted on the planet so far.