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. 

Fighting for a Frack-Free Future

by Sarah Woods

There’s a growing trend in the production of hydrocarbons. Having taken a lot of the ‘easy’ stuff out of the ground, we’re now moving on to ‘unconventional’ sources. There are massive potential reserves of unconventionals, but their extraction comes at a high risk to the environment.  

Shale gas is obtained by fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, a process whereby large amounts of water, chemicals and sand are injected into underground rock formations to ‘fracture’ them, releasing gas. As with tar sands, previously inaccessible or unviable reserves of shale gas now look more attractive, thanks to new technology and rising fossil fuel prices. Add to this the UK’s importation of more than half its gas supplies this year, now the offshore reserves that made us self-sufficient have peaked, and the second dash for gas gathers momentum.  

Over the last 15 months, I’ve delivered events and community outreach for a ‘Frack Free Future’ as part of The Co-operative’s Clean Energy Revolution campaign, engaging with threatened communities across the UK, staging events where the issues can be discussed co-operatively.  

The Co-operative first started looking into shale gas in the summer of 2010, commissioning the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research to undertake an assessment of its environmental impacts. The findings of the Tyndall Centre report were published in January 2011 (and its update published in November 2011), exposing three main areas of concern and led The Co-operative to call for a moratorium on its extraction across the UK.  

At local level, shale gas extraction presents pollution risks, especially to groundwater. Arguments centre around whether risks can be adequately managed through regulation of well construction and maintenance. Looking at the US, where the industry is much more advanced, there are many concerning examples – see for example, the US Environmental Protection Agency’s report released in November 2011 into groundwater sampling at Pavilion, Wyoming, where numerous hydrocarbons and thermogenic methane have been identified[Footnote]. Assuming that this couldn’t happen in the UK appears naïve. Scaling up to the c.3,000 wells that would be required to produce 10% of the UK’s gas from shale over any sustained period, the risks become substantial: even if well design and site management were good enough to reduce failure rates to 1 in 1,000, this would give us a 95% chance of at least one failure. 

Nationally, there’s a real risk that the development of shale gas will compromise the UK’s ability to hit its emissions targets. If we extract and burn just 20% of the shale gas resources identified under Lancashire this year, it could result in CO₂ emissions of over 2,000m tonnes, or nearly 15% of the UK’s emissions budget through to 2050 – dispelling  the myth that shale gas is a ‘low carbon fuel’.  Additionally, with up to £32bn of investments required to obtain 10% of our current gas use from shale sources and convert it to electricity, investment could be diverted from genuinely low carbon renewables, leaving us overly reliant on unproven carbon capture and storage (CCS) and risking the economic losses from what could ultimately become stranded assets.  

At the global level, we hear that shale gas is good news, because it will displace much more polluting coal. Perhaps it would - if we had a legally binding global cap on emissions. Unfortunately, in our energy-hungry world, it’s likely that countries such as India and China will burn shale gas in addition to their coal reserves, as they quite fairly pursue economic development. This is mirrored by the situation in the US, where the massive expansion in shale gas is simply projected to meet the energy demands of a growing economy without a carbon cap and is failing to displace coal[Footnote]. Scenarios for relatively conservative exploitation of between 15% and 30% of the world’s identified shale gas resources are that it would increase global atmospheric CO₂ by between five and sixteen parts per million by volume, taking up over a quarter of the CO₂ emissions budget that we have left if we are to stand a good chance of avoiding more than 2ºC of warming.  

As governments met in Doha, Quatar, for the latest round of UN climate talks last Saturday, December 1^st, anti-fracking campaigners across the UK joined the Global Day of Action on Climate Change. 

Activists from Frack Off erected a 20-foot drilling rig outside the home of the Chairman of Cuadrilla Resources, Lord John Browne. In Blackpool, members of Resident Action on Fylde Fracking marched and, together with members of Ribble Eastuary Against Fracking, held a rally in St Anne’s. Kirklees Campaign Against Climate Change toured Huddersfield, asking the public to sign postcards calling for a moratorium on fracking. Swansea Against Fracked Energy were out on the streets of Swansea, while Frack Free Somerset brought street theatre to Bath. About 300 environment campaigners held an anti-fracking protest in Parliament Square in London, where residents from Falkirk, Belfast, the Fylde, the Ribble Estuary and the Vale of Glamorgan delivered a letter to David Cameron, calling for a ban on shale gas and coal bed methane exploitation in the UK. 

This month, alongside his Autumn Statement, George Osborne unveiled the government’s new Gas Strategy, which sets out to "ensure we make the best use of lower cost gas power, including new sources of gas under the land", The Chancellor told the Commons. 

The Gas Generation Strategy confirmed that DECC will set up an Office for Unconventional Gas and Oil, joining up responsibilities across Government to provide a single point of contact for investors, to ensure a simplified and streamlined regulatory process. It also states that tax breaks for shale gas will be considered as “HM Treasury has opened discussions with industry on the appropriate structure of a fair tax regime for future shale gas production”,  

According to a recent Greenpeace report, more than 60 per cent of the British countryside could be exploited for shale gas. A decision on whether to lift the current moratorium on shale gas production, put in place after fracking caused two small earthquakes near Blackpool in 2011, is expected from the Secretary of State shortly. 

Community feeling against hydraulic fracturing is strong, combining a desire to keep fracking out of the UK with a passion to find energy solutions. Climate change issues are up close and personal for the first time in the UK, no longer disconnected from us by space or time. It seems to me that the campaign for a Frack Free Future is less of a fight against an industry we don’t want – and more of a call for the future we need.  

 Sarah Woods (Transition Bro Ddyfi) is a playwright and campaigner, working primarily in the fields of climate change and social justice. She is currently working on THE ROADLESS TRIP, a performance piece about systemic change and future narratives and just reached the end of a year leading the outreach arm of the Co-operative Group’s FRACK FREE FUTURE campaign, delivering events in communities affected by fracking. She currently teaches playwrighting and political theatre to undergraduates at Manchester University.

Article originally published on The Social Reporting Project

  

Further information on The Co-operative’s position on shale gas and the Tyndall Centre’s research can be found at:  www. co-operative.coop/fracking 

 Notes: 

1www.epa.gov/region8/superfund/wy/pavillion/PavillionCommunityPresentation09Nov2011.pdf 

2 Energy Information Administration (2010), Supporting materials for the 2010 Annual Energy Outlook, Report # DOE/EIA-0554(2010).  

3 Gas Generation Strategy (December 2012), DECC. www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/meeting_energy/oil_gas/gasgenstrat/gasgenstrat.aspx 

4 Fracking in the UK (update 2) 30th Nov 2012, Hannah Davey, Harry Kennard and Damian Kahya 

www.greenpeace.org.uk/newsdesk/energy/data/infographic-fracking-backyard 

Images: photo by EnergyTomorrow (Flickr Creative Commons)

There was a Jolly Miller Once - - - -

One of the pleasures of old age is the time one has to mull over things. Even if there is stupidity or concern in them, they often profit from a bit of mulling. So I hope the three I share today will be of interest, although the first stems from a deeply stupid situation and the second raises questions of profound and disturbing depth. I offer the third in the hope that it will seem cheerful enough to balance the other two.

A team were clearing fallen leaves from the pavements in Norwich’s Ipswich Road the other day by forking them into plastic bags and throwing the bags into the back of a lorry. When I asked whether the bags were biodegradable, they said it didn’t matter because it was all going to landfill, because of the danger to the team from syringe needles in the leaf litter.

Not only does it put a new complexion on the action of those who dispose of “sharps” on the pavement – that they are unwittingly causing the city council to design a major disruption of an important recycling process of nature’s materials that could otherwise provide abundant leaf mould for the city’s green spaces – but I walked on amazed that the city council cannot find a more harmonious way of dealing with this little problem.

From the ridiculous to the … disconcerting. A large study in France has confirmed that between 1989 and 2005 average sperm counts in men fell by a third. It is likely that the decline is continuing. This has been accompanied by a rise in testicular cancer and other male sexual disorders. The likely causes are a high-fat diet and environmental chemical exposures. The industrial chemicals used in making plastics, for instance, can mimic the female hormone oestrogen which counters male hormones necessary for healthy sperm.

As there are already too many of us for the world to cope with, I wonder whether this is another, but man-made, example of the sort of negative feed-back that we admire in so many of our natural processes. In the same way as our bodies are designed to switch off our appetite when we begin to have too much food, is nature beginning to do something to regulate our species’ overpopulation of the planet?  If so, what ought we to do about it – and about the specialists in human reproductive health who are working as hard as they can to find a way of combating this decrease in human sperm counts?

The food industry is working as hard as it can to invent for our obese population new more seductive foods to overcome the negative feedback in our digestive apparatus, the media continue to spew out more and more column centimetres on food and cooking it to help the industry, and the sugar beet lorries continue to trundle through our village to supply possibly the most insidious of all positive feedback drugs. Imagine what Mr. Cameron would say if we asked him to put a stop to any of those in order to allow our natural negative feedbacks on food to work as planned!

Of course more research needs to be done on the decline in sperm counts, before anyone begins to think of it as a way of regulating the population without coercion!  For one thing, we would need at the very least to be sure that the decline was across the board (if such a term may be used for such delicate creatures), and that the decline was indiscriminate. There’s already a worrying imbalance in the gender of children in some places, attributed by some to radiation. If the observed decline in sperm was more severe in, say X sperm, than in Y sperm, this would certainly adversely affect the gender balance.

Being my age, I’m occasionally nostalgic for the good old autumn smell of burning leaves, however green I think I am. Whimsically, I wonder whether the time may come when men are urged to lie back and … inhale the smell of plastics manufacture.

Lastly, a stream runs through our parish, dropping some 25 metres on its way towards the River Yare, but it fails to cope with the run-off of fresh water either from our built environment or the fields, so roads regularly flood as the drains have difficulty in dealing with the volumes of road-contaminated water. Wouldn’t it be great if we could all get together with the landowners to dig a series of lakes along the stream by damming it in several carefully chosen places – largely manually instead of wasting time and energy jogging and going to the gym – and routing as much of the water as possible via ditches into the lakes before it reaches the roads?

Then the farmers and gardeners could benefit from the fresh water, and we could install water-driven electricity generators at the outfall from each lake, ie watermills, which would make each lake a millpond. How romantic it would be, yet how much better than nuclear or fracking as a source of electricity!

Not enough water to be worthwhile, you say?  How about a small wind pump downstream of each watermill to pump the water back up into the millpond? Not one of these monstrous wind turbines that generate such carefully orchestrated political opposition, but ones about the height of those that still linger about the Broads, where they used to do exactly the same thing – pump up water a couple of metres – so effectively for so long.

In effect, the mill ponds would be the “batteries” to store the energy for when the wind wasn’t blowing. If we were really keen to do our community thing about electricity, the number of generators-plus-wind-pumps in the parish would only be limited by the number the stream could fit in efficiently. I’m grateful to the artist Ben Quail who suggested this to me at the Norwich Green Party’s Christmas Fair.

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.