carbon trading won't stop climate change

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This New Scientist article is just bloody brilliant!

"All these methods of pricing carbon permit the creation of a carbon market that will allow us to pollute beyond a catastrophic tipping point. In other words, they require us to put a price on the final "killing" tonne of CO₂ which, once emitted, tips the balance and triggers runaway global warming. How can we set such a price? It's like saying, how much is civilisation worth? Or, if you needed a camel to cross a desert alive, what is a fair value for the straw that breaks its back?"

"Even if you could price the killing tonne, it is a transaction that should never be allowed. Economics becomes redundant if it can rationalise an exchange that sells the future of humankind."

"Governments are there to compensate for market failure but seem to have a blind spot about carbon markets. They could counteract the impact of low carbon prices by spending on renewable energy as part of their economic stimulus packages, yet they have not done so. The UK, for example, has spent nearly 20 per cent of its GDP to prop up the financial sector, but just 0.0083 per cent in new money on green economic stimulus."

Green Stimulus or Simulus?

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Report out a few days ago from Greenpeace and the New Economics Foundation. Pertinent statistics include:

• New and additional green spending included in the green stimulus package of the government’s Pre-Budget Report (PBR) is astonishingly small compared to other recent spending commitments, at just 0.6% of the UK’s £20bn recovery plan. This key element makes up just 0.0083% of UK GDP, but in the wake of the banking crisis nearly 20% of UK GDP has been provided to support the financial sector.

• New and additional green measures could save just 0.128 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (MtCO2) per year from the atmosphere and will only delay the accumulation of UK carbon emissions by six and a half hours by the end of 2011.

• Just over £100m is being allocated to spending that is genuinely new and additional; this is a fraction – less than 13% – of the annual bonus package given to staff at the failed Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) which is estimated at approximately £775m. £100m represents just 0.0083% of UK GDP. Estimates for necessary new annual spending on environmental economic stimulus and transformation range from £11bn to £50bn.

• Figures from HSBC and the IMF indicate that among the major economies, the greater the proportion of GDP spent on bailing out banks coincides with a lower proportion spent on green stimuli.
  

• Several of the government’s measures are, in fact, in conflict with the environmental stimulus. By comparison with the new and additional spending of the PBR’s green stimulus, £2.3bn – around 22 times – has been put aside to assist the car industry. If spent on energy efficiency measures this would save about 3 MtCO2 annually.

• £27m has been put aside specifically for development of a new Land Rover vehicle, the Land Rover Group are one of the most climate-unfriendly manufacturers in Europe. The potential CO2 savings of the proposed vehicle have not been specified. This is not encouraging, particularly given that this financial support is likely to delay a shift to greater use of public transport and that historically much of the gain in efficiency in vehicles has been negatively counter-balanced through a gain in weight of the vehicle concerned.

• There has been a further commitment to spend on building 520 lane miles of road expansion. Research indicates that the provision of new lanes leads to relative increases of between 30 and 50% in the number of vehicle miles travelled on that road – in other words, more car use. This happens due to the phenomenon known as induced traffic: building new roads merely encourages more traffic.

There's another report from Greenpeace detailing how investment in an energy-efficiency programme to insulate public buildings and private homes could generate 55,000 jobs, reduce expenditure on energy consumption and bills and reduce carbon emissions.


What's the betting the government fails utterly to address any of these points?

NI Environment Minister is a climate change denialist!

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Punkscience calls for Sammy Wilson MP to be sacked on account of his ignorance. The little fuckstick can't even understand why his views are a problem.

"Why should I resign? I fulfil all my ministerial obligations in all areas of my department, and the idea that I should resign just because I hold a different view from other people on what is a very controversial topic is nonsense. And it just shows the intolerance of these people if they think I should resign because I have a different opinion."

In other news, Thabo Mbeki's health policies based on his belief that AIDS was not caused by the HIV virus, is thought to have been the direct cause of 300,000 deaths due to his rejection of offers of funding and free antiretroviral drugs.

So just what is the difference between Mbeki's incompetence and Wilson's? Both result in mass deaths of innocents.

punkscience: Enemy of the people

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Or so Sir Bernard Ingham, former civil servant, would have you believe.

I'm proud.

I got it from a book by David MacKay called "Sustainable Energy Without The Hot Air" that's currently being deconstructed on Open Democracy. Its awesome. Here's a question:

"If climate change is “a greater threat than terrorism,” should governments criminalize “the glorification of travel” and pass laws against“advocating acts of consumption”?"

Well?

missing the point

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Steve Richards dithers a bit but ultimately makes his point:

"Heathrow will now be a running story, sapping ministerial energy and attention. That is why the whole affair is misjudged. It is not as if the rest of Britain's transport problems are resolved and we have the luxury of moving on. The railways remain an overpriced and chaotic disgrace. Over Christmas we took a sleeper from Euston to Fort William in Scotland. We were kicked out at 3am in Edinburgh because the train was defective. On the way back there was chaos from Glasgow station with Scotrail officials having no idea what Virgin trains were doing. The fragmented monopolies are not delivering. Sorting out the railways is where the intense ministerial focus should be, for economic reasons as well as quality of life ones."

Whereas the UK government (condom machine in vatican) has missed the important details almost completely. Because they are shit.

I love the idea of sleeper trains. I wish they ran to more locations. I remember travelling to Southern Germany when I was young. It was magic. Sleeping in bunks and watching the landscape roll past. Like I said: Magic.

Rajendra Pachauri is a dude

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From Google News.

"(Yet) here, you've got agencies, you've got organisations that are not only responsible for their own failure but the failure of the entire economic system, and they get cheques worth 2.7 trillion dollars. I find this amazing... What can you say, what can you do?"

Rajendra Pachauri shared the Nobel Peace Prize along with the rest of the IPCC.

as previously observed, nuclear generation sucks big, floppy donkey dicks

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Merrick rules:

"No British nuclear power station has ever been built to budget. The last one, Sizewell B, cost more than twice the estimate. The first of the new generation stations, Olkiluoto in Finland, found itself more than a billion pounds over budget and two years behind schedule at only two and a half years into construction.

Even with the taxpayer coughing up for a load of British Energy's debts, it couldn't stay afloat on its own. In 2002, just six years after privatisation, the government bailed it out with over £5bn of taxpayer's money.

These days, our government assures us that the owners will pay for all the decommissioning. They are lying. In order to get the industry and investors to sign up, the government agrees a set maximum price for waste disposal and decommissioning when it gives approval for the station. Any over-runs in cost (and when has the nuclear industry not delivered those?) will be paid for by the taxpayer."

Labour rebels try to save the world

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Needless to say all here at punkscience hope they succeed.

READ THIS ~ READ THIS ~ READ THIS ~ READ THIS ~ READ THIS ~ READ THIS ~ READ THIS ~ READ THIS ~

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"As humanity teeters on the brink, the corporate media are sure to give increasing coverage to these dubious and risky "technofixes." Influential business lobbyists will make ever-greater efforts to push for lucrative, but diversionary, "solutions" to climate chaos. We need to be alert to such self-serving manoeuvres and willing to expose them.

This much is clear: after more than twenty years of ever more urgent scientific warnings, and government and corporate obstructionism, we really have arrived at the edge of the climate abyss."

Fucking WORD!

a challenge to climate change denialists

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This is primarily aimed at the racist CCD David Duff and the CCD Bishop Hill but I'm happy for anyone to chip in. I might regret this but we'll just have to see.

Duff et al, I invite you to post a peer-reviewed reference supporting your position of denial. I'll make a special exception for it. That's a promise.

However- and do take note of this Duff as your cherry-picking of references makes me very wary of offering you any sort of licence to abuse others' ignorance- your reference cannot simply be methodological critiques a la McIntyre & McKitrick (2005). I am talking about original, peer-reviewed research that demonstrates that anthropological forcings are negligible in comparison to natural ones.

I'm actually interested to see what you come up with.


Addition:

Anyone interested in entering the discussion should focus on this paper, as preferred by Duff.

infotainment

today's statistic of interest

The Lazy Environmentalist quoting Phil Woolas MP.

""UK economic activity accounts for 15% emissions worldwide" . . . (note: this is a rarely alluded to fact by our government . . .), "2% of which comes directly from within our shores.""

UK government buries head further in sand over climate change

The government refuses to adopt meaningful targets- even the lproposed increase from 60 to 80% emissions reductions by 2050 is useless. They have no power on the international stage to push others to adopt similar emissions becuase they have lost all credibility over Iraq. And the closing paragraph to this article states this:


"Department for the Environment officials said the bill had been 'strengthened quite significantly' by the amendments, but 'remains largely unchanged', both raising and dashing hopes that they have accepted some or all the changes. Some campaigners fear the government, under pressure over rising oil prices not to introduce what are seen as expensive 'green' policies, are not ready to bow to the demands in full."

You see? Head In Sand. The government still fears to take effective action because it might cost a lot. Its as if the Stern Report had never been produced.

Dominic Lawson is a climate change-denying cockweasel

For someone who writes for the Indy he's remarkably stupid. He has utterly failed to contemplate the trend for rising fuel prices that will make renewable generation profoundly competitive within a few years. He is stupid enough to not have learnt anything from The Stern Report. He also makes no consideration of the apocalyptic consequences of rejecting sustainable development and renewable generation. In fact, this article misses so many glaring chances to point opinion in progressive directions- that is, directions which would lead to progress- that you have to wonder at the man's motives for essentially advocating the end of our society as we know it.

Take the economic point Lawson makes: That the economic downturn turns people's concerns away from environmentalism and towards economic stability. What he has missed completely is that the economic system itself is sick and in dire need of reform. The banks, whose idiocy and greed produced the economic crisis, aren't mentioned at all. Neither is any proposed changes to the system that might allow economic concerns to be mitigated.

That's just one example of an elephant in Dominic's room. Another would be his justified assault upon micro-generation. Damning David Cameron's poxy little turbine is entirely correct and Dominic throws some good figures in there. But this is after he has slated the EU's proposals for renewable energy generation, observing that they will cost the consumer £10 billion in total. The fact that such capacity will produce essential reductions in carbon emissions, increase energy security, generate thousands of jobs, shield us from subsequent rises in fuel costs and another million good reasons also pass mention, as does the fact that we should not be footing the bill for it- the government should be using our tax money to stabilise our economy and energy security!

But the worst piece of misdirection is Lawson's observation that "the British public . . . need educating about [the inconsistency of wind generation]" using the Texan example. His tone implies that, if the public knew about this flaw in the technology's reliability to generate electricity, they would reject such technology whole heartedly.This implication that renewable generation is flawed, uneconomic and inappropriate runs through the whole article. And, of course, it is entirely incorrect. As I have demonstrated time and again on this blog, renewable generation is perfectly capable of powering the world as long as it is applied intelligently.

Finally, and most damning of all, Lawson fails to extrapolate from his condemnation of renewable generation and covert endorsement of unsustainable development to the future: If we don't move to a sustainable society then catastrophic climate change will be inevitable and millions will die, our society will be crippled by food-poverty and mass migration of climate refuges and the economy will collapse. Dominic seems to imply that this is an acceptable alternative.

He is, clearly, a fucking cockweasel.



Addition:

Case closed:

“The burning of fossil fuels sends about seven gigatons of CO₂ per year into the atmosphere, which sounds like a lot. Yet the biosphere and the oceans send about 1900 gigatons and 36000 gigatons of CO₂ per year into the atmosphere – ... one reason why some of us are sceptical about the emphasis put on the role of human fuel-burning in the greenhouse gas effect. Reducing man-made CO 2 emissions is megalomania, exaggerating man’s significance. Politicians can’t change the weather.”

A dirty little propagandist cockweasel.

"Its costly having a carbon conscience" - NO SHIT, SHERLOCK!

The Guardian ran this story. "Fucking weak as fuck!", I thought. Not a mention of any need for government legislation to drive people toward the serious changes in life style that any meaningful assault upon climate changing emissions demands.

A personal example: I have to be on an island in the Netherlands next month for a research cruise. I could get there by flying with FlyBe (£30) direct from the city I work in . . . OR I could get the train to London, Eurostar to Brussels, Thalys train to Amsterdam, a local train to a coast town, a bus to the ferry port, a ferry to the island and a taxi or bus to the ship. Guess which I chose?

Ha! BOOOOOOM, sucker!

I am the ultimate responsible citizen, because I chose the train marathon. Actually its only a full day's travelling, leaving on a 5am train and getting there as the sun sets. But the cost? A cool £250. I really can't crow about this too much because the money comes from my budget but I really do try and get everywhere I can these days via the Eurostar. Its not just that I hate airports and flying generally- besides the trauma to my conscience its a god-awful mess standing in lines to be patronised by blank security robots with hand-held metal detectors- but I just hate the process of taking off and flying over hundreds of miles of obscured countryside. I'd rather have my soul connected to the land I'm traversing through the medium of my eyes.

Anyway, this is not a first. In the past couple of years I have only flown to Lanzarote. I have been on the Eurostar to the continent twice. If I have to go anywhere other than Europe- I will fly and I will make the most of the experience. But if I am heading into the civilisation of the continent, where trains, trams and efficient bus services exist in abundance, why scorn it? Why not experience life as it should be!

barrels, kilos and comments

A very interesting comment on an even more interesting post.

Hmmmm, I might do sum fag-packet sums of my own . . . .

Martin Chalk is an ignorant fuckwit

I didn't know who he was either. Apparently he's an environmentalist airline pilot who wants the 3rd runway at Heathrow to be built. His arguments are flawed and he is massively ignorant of the facts of emissions reductions. So why did CiF give him a podium for his ignorance?

So I could shoot him down, of course!

. . . . . . . you what?

John Hutton has dealt the government's attempts to limit climate change a significant blow by announcing his intention to make nuclear produce significantly greater proportion of the country's electricity than at present. Despite there being little to gain, in terms of carbon emissions from an expansion of nuclear, despite the clear and damning ethical reasons not to expand nuclear, despite the utterly unfeasible economics of nuclear generation that will leave the tax payer footing £billion clean-up bills, despite the absurdity of pushing this technology over truly renewable ones that will generate for millenia- not just for a few decades, despite the shortage of uranium reserves and despite the fact that new plants likely won't be generating for a decade- leaving us with continued rising fossil fuel generation for another ten years to add to the existing carbon emissions . . . . . there's so many more reasons not to do this.

So, so wrong.

greenwash 101

After reading this post from the Lazy Environmentalist I emailed my MP, Alison Seabeck, to petition for her support on the Early Day Motion mentioned. Her reply:

"Thank you for your email. I regret that as a Government
Minister(Whip) I cannot sign EDMs which are used by back bench MPs to
raise issues. Alan Simpson is a powerful advocate for alternative and
renewable energy on Labour's back benches.

I have recently sat on the Energy Bill Committee which discussed a range
of issues including measures which will enable more microgeneration. It
is important though that we encourage the right type of micro generation
in the right places. Too many people have put up wind energy technology
in places where they get very little return.

During the course of the Energy Bill the Minister did announce that
there would be a strategic overview of renewables this summer and that
the issue of feed in tariffs would be included in that discussion. This
is important. They are by no means ruled out and clearly Alan Simpson
is ensuring they remain on the Government's agenda.

Alison Seabeck MP"

Interesting for several reasons: Firstly, her reference to Alan Simpson as "a powerful advocate for alternative and renewable energy on Labour's back benches" is of note because she specifically identifies him to be an advocate. This contrasts sharply with many members of the Parliamentary Labour Party such as Alison herself and particularly the Cabinet, who- if you are to ignore their propaganda and infer their policy objectives directly from their actions- are opposed to any research and development of renewable generation beyond that necessary to appear to be doing so.

Secondly, Alison's role on the Energy Bill Committee is laudable. However the measures she mentions, “ measures which will enable more microgeneration” and “ we encourage the right type of micro generation in the right places”, are problems that have resulted from Labour's own policies on renewables. Their lack of direction on grants for renewable installations has been well documented elsewhere and I will not go into it here. Also, the reason people install inappropriate renewable capacity is because the government haven't shown any inclination to publicise useful information relating to the suitability of the different technologies. Or any information relating to renewables, really.

Thirdly, the Energy Bill itself has been determined to be illegal by Greenpeace.

Fourthly, the issue of Feed In Tariffs should not be a matter for discussion, it should be a matter for immediate action. There are even websites available that explain, carefully and clearly so that even MPs can understand, how to implement FITs.

Time and again I am appalled by the laissez-faire attitude of MPs towards imminent climate change. Ignorance of the facts can't seriously be an excuse for these people and so what is it? Some mass psychosis towards future generations? Outright denial? Any way you spin this these people are perpetuating the status quo that will result in gigadeaths and the end of civilisation as we know it on this planet. They should be removed from power.

Johann describes why libertarians should support all attempts to legislate against climate change

Its always been obvious to me that the moral highground dictates that we must sacrifice our own quality of life to protect the actual biological lives of millions in the developing world. But its always been a hard one to spell out in concise, concrete terms to a skeptic. Johann has saved me the trouble.

-Sweet!

He got one thing wrong though:

"Just as no libertarian would argue you should have the right to buy and fire a nuclear weapon, no libertarian should argue you have the right to burn unlimited greenhouse gases. Once confronted with this argument, the only people who cling to a libertarian defence of fossil fuels are people who take money from the fossil fuel industry itself, like Spiked Online."

His error is in forgetting that many people profess the creed of libertarianism solely to clothe their conservatism in a cloak of morality. When presented with Johann's argument there is a creed of people who will blithely murmur agreement and then, once out of eyesight and earshot of human beings, will spend their every waking moment seeking the next most viable excuse for perpetrating the status quo (you know, the one where they get everything and people of other skin colours, languages, cultures, etc. get nothing except a nasty ending).

"The modern conservative is engaged in one of man's oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness."

- John Kenneth Galbraith