Neil Eckert, chairman of the European Climate Exchange, has defended carbon offsetting projects against critics who say they are simply a way for those in developed countries to shirk their environmental responsibility.
Speaking at the International Financial Services London forum at London’s Mansion House, Eckert said carbon dioxide emissions are a global problem and the whole point of carbon offsetting projects is to engage developing countries.
He said: ‘In a lot of developing nations you’ve got immense amounts of land and great natural resources, and in a lot of these nations you can build cheap alternative energy. It doesn’t matter where you cut carbon, just cut carbon.’
Market-based strategies for trading CO2 emissions like the European Climate Exchange (ECX), which is a marketplace in which buyers purchase emission allowances under cap-and-trade regimes are vital for mitigating global warming, said Eckert.
Cap-and-trade refers to when a cap, or limit, is set on the amount of carbon that companies can emit. Companies are given allowances or credits to emit a certain amount of carbon and if their credits exceed the cap, they must buy credits from those who pollute less.
The ECX plans to add other greenhouse gas credits to its range of exchange-traded commodities in September. The commodities will be futures and options contracts based on Certified Emission Reduction units, which are tradable units of greenhouse gas emissions from clean energy projects in developing countries.
Eckert believes emissions trading is superior to environmental taxes because the government will not necessarily put tax revenue toward emission reduction projects.
full article
Saturday, 14 July 2007
Friday, 13 July 2007
Flat screens are energy hungry
Plasma televisions are sending home power bills sky high as more people install bigger and more energy-intensive screens.
Electric hot-water systems remain the No.1 energy guzzler in the home but plasma TVs are fast overtaking refrigerators and freezers as a greenhouse gas culprit, with poorly performing sets adding as much as $100 to electricity bills, energy experts say.
Plasma screens can use up to four times the energy consumed by a standard TV, as well as using more standby power, according to Energy Australia's efficiency expert, Paul Myers.
"Unfortunately, unlike whitegoods, we don't have energy rating labels for televisions, so there is no simple way to compare the running costs of different makes and models," he said.
"In general, however, the bigger the screen, the higher the electricity use."
Over the past five years, there have been significant energy efficiency gains made in the manufacture of whitegoods. Federal Government-mandated energy ratings have also made it easier for consumers to choose the most energy-efficient appliance.
But for many families the electricity savings they have made could be wiped out if a large plasma or LCD TV is installed in the home.
"With TVs we have had quite a dramatic shift to bigger sets, so that drives energy use higher," Mr Myers said.
"But at the moment the consumer has no way of knowing which model if more energy efficient … there is a case for star rating plasma TVs."
Even where there are energy ratings, some appliances are being imported into Australia with misleading labels, according to an ABC Four Corners program. Some air-conditioners were claiming ratings well above their real performance, the program revealed.
The environmental group ACF has called on the Federal Government to implement tougher controls of the accreditation process, to commission an independent audit, to strengthen the testing of appliances and to extend the scheme to cover TVs, ovens, hobs and other appliances.
The ACF Green Home campaigner Clare Donovan said a 68-centimetre cathode TV consumed 98 watts of energy costing, on average, 1.18 cents an hour. That compared with 214 watts and 2.6 cents an hour for a 100-centimetre LCD TV, and 350 watts at 4.2 cents an hour, on average, for a 106-centimetre plasma screen.
"That is why you need to extend the rating system to include TVs," Ms Donovan said.
A spokeswoman for the federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said consultations on TV labelling would begin this year with the aim of introducing them in 2010.
A voluntary labelling scheme based on the regulatory proposal could start in 2009, she added.
Hobs and stoves were also under consideration and the Government was committed to examining the possibilities of regulating those appliances in the future.
full article
Electric hot-water systems remain the No.1 energy guzzler in the home but plasma TVs are fast overtaking refrigerators and freezers as a greenhouse gas culprit, with poorly performing sets adding as much as $100 to electricity bills, energy experts say.
Plasma screens can use up to four times the energy consumed by a standard TV, as well as using more standby power, according to Energy Australia's efficiency expert, Paul Myers.
"Unfortunately, unlike whitegoods, we don't have energy rating labels for televisions, so there is no simple way to compare the running costs of different makes and models," he said.
"In general, however, the bigger the screen, the higher the electricity use."
Over the past five years, there have been significant energy efficiency gains made in the manufacture of whitegoods. Federal Government-mandated energy ratings have also made it easier for consumers to choose the most energy-efficient appliance.
But for many families the electricity savings they have made could be wiped out if a large plasma or LCD TV is installed in the home.
"With TVs we have had quite a dramatic shift to bigger sets, so that drives energy use higher," Mr Myers said.
"But at the moment the consumer has no way of knowing which model if more energy efficient … there is a case for star rating plasma TVs."
Even where there are energy ratings, some appliances are being imported into Australia with misleading labels, according to an ABC Four Corners program. Some air-conditioners were claiming ratings well above their real performance, the program revealed.
The environmental group ACF has called on the Federal Government to implement tougher controls of the accreditation process, to commission an independent audit, to strengthen the testing of appliances and to extend the scheme to cover TVs, ovens, hobs and other appliances.
The ACF Green Home campaigner Clare Donovan said a 68-centimetre cathode TV consumed 98 watts of energy costing, on average, 1.18 cents an hour. That compared with 214 watts and 2.6 cents an hour for a 100-centimetre LCD TV, and 350 watts at 4.2 cents an hour, on average, for a 106-centimetre plasma screen.
"That is why you need to extend the rating system to include TVs," Ms Donovan said.
A spokeswoman for the federal Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said consultations on TV labelling would begin this year with the aim of introducing them in 2010.
A voluntary labelling scheme based on the regulatory proposal could start in 2009, she added.
Hobs and stoves were also under consideration and the Government was committed to examining the possibilities of regulating those appliances in the future.
full article
George Monbiot on Climate Meltdown
Reading a scientific paper on the train this weekend, I found, to my amazement, that my hands were shaking. This has never happened to me before, but nor have I ever read anything like it. Published by a team led by James Hansen at NASA, it suggests that the grim reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change could be absurdly optimistic.
The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimeters this century. Hansen's paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn't fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees Celsius above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 cm but by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.
We now have a pretty good idea of why ice sheets collapse. The buttresses that prevent them from sliding into the sea break up; meltwater trickles down to their base, causing them suddenly to slip; and pools of water form on the surface, making the ice darker so that it absorbs more heat. These processes are already taking place in Greenland and West Antarctica.
Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it "implausible" that the expected warming before 2100 "would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century." As well as drowning most of the world's centers of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. "Civilization developed," Hansen writes, "during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end."
I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
Or we are led there. A good source tells me that the British government is well aware that its target for cutting carbon emissions -- 60 percent by 2050 -- is too little, too late, but that it will go no further for one reason: it fears losing the support of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Why this body is allowed to keep holding a gun to our heads has never been explained, but Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just appointed Digby Jones, the former director-general of the CBI, as a minister in the UK government department responsible for energy policy. I don't remember voting for him. There could be no clearer signal that the public interest is being drowned by corporate power.
The government's energy program, partly as a result, is characterised by a complete absence of vision. You can see this most clearly when you examine its plans for renewables. The EU has set a target for 20 percent of all energy in the member states to come from renewable sources by 2020. This in itself is pathetic. But the British government refuses to adopt it: instead it proposes that 20 percent of the UK's electricity (just part of Britain's total energy use) should come from renewable power by that date. Even this is not a target, just an "aspiration," and it is on course to miss it. Worse still, the British government has no idea what happens after that. I recently asked whether it has commissioned any research to discover how much more electricity we could generate from renewable sources. It has not.
It's a critical question, whose answer -- if its results were applied globally -- could determine whether or not the planetary "albedo flip" that Hansen predicts takes place. There has been remarkably little investigation of this issue. Until recently I guessed that the maximum contribution from renewables would be something like 50%: beyond that point the difficulties of storing electricity and balancing the grid could become overwhelming. But three papers now suggest that we could go much further.
Last year, the German government published a study of the effects of linking the electricity networks of all the countries in Europe and connecting them to North Africa and Iceland with high voltage direct current cables. This would open up a much greater variety of renewable power sources. Every country in the network would then be able to rely on stable and predictable supplies from elsewhere: hydroelectricity in Scandanavia and the Alps, geothermal energy in Iceland and vast solar thermal farms in the Sahara. By spreading the demand across a much wider network, it suggests that 80 percent of Europe's electricity could be produced from renewable power without any greater risk of blackouts or flickers.
At about the same time, Mark Barrett at University College London published a preliminary study looking mainly at ways of altering the pattern of demand for electricity to match the variable supply from wind and waves and tidal power. At about twice the current price, he found that we might be able to produce as much as 95 percent of our electricity from renewable sources without causing interruptions in the power supply.
Now a new study by the Center for Alternative Technology takes this even further. It is remarkable in two respects: it suggests that by 2027 the United Kingdom could produce 100 percent of our electricity without the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power, and that it could do so while almost tripling its supply: British heating systems (using electricity to drive heat pumps) and transport systems could be mostly powered by it. It relies on a great expansion of electricity storage: building new hydroelectric reservoirs into which water can be pumped when electricity is abundant, constructing giant vanadium flow batteries and linking electric cars up to the grid when they are parked, using their batteries to meet fluctuations in demand. It contains some optimistic technical assumptions, but also a very pessimistic one: that the UK relies entirely on its own energy supplies. If the German proposal were to be combined with these ideas, it's possible to see how one might reliably move towards a world without fossil fuels.
If Hansen is correct, to avert the meltdown that brings the Holocene to an end we require a response on this scale: a sort of political "albedo flip." The British government must immediately commission studies to discover how much of our energy could be produced without fossil fuels, set that as its target then turn the economy round to meet it. But a power shift like this cannot take place without a power shift of another kind: the UK needs a government which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.
Editor's Note: George Monbiot is a British journalist and author whose expertise is on climate change and other environmental issues. Monbiot's article reveals that government ineptitude in the face of increasingly frightening scientific data on climate change is not limited to the United States: The UK government is dangerously negligent on energy and climate issues even though it knows better.
Hansen paper
full article
The IPCC predicts that sea levels could rise by as much as 59 centimeters this century. Hansen's paper argues that the slow melting of ice sheets the panel expects doesn't fit the data. The geological record suggests that ice at the poles does not melt in a gradual and linear fashion, but flips suddenly from one state to another. When temperatures increased to 2-3 degrees Celsius above today's level 3.5 million years ago, sea levels rose not by 59 cm but by 25 meters. The ice responded immediately to changes in temperature.
We now have a pretty good idea of why ice sheets collapse. The buttresses that prevent them from sliding into the sea break up; meltwater trickles down to their base, causing them suddenly to slip; and pools of water form on the surface, making the ice darker so that it absorbs more heat. These processes are already taking place in Greenland and West Antarctica.
Rather than taking thousands of years to melt, as the IPCC predicts, Hansen and his team find it "implausible" that the expected warming before 2100 "would permit a West Antarctic ice sheet of present size to survive even for a century." As well as drowning most of the world's centers of population, a sudden disintegration could lead to much higher rises in global temperature, because less ice means less heat reflected back into space. The new paper suggests that the temperature could therefore be twice as sensitive to rising greenhouse gases than the IPCC assumes. "Civilization developed," Hansen writes, "during a period of unusual climate stability, the Holocene, now almost 12,000 years in duration. That period is about to end."
I looked up from the paper, almost expecting to see crowds stampeding through the streets. I saw people chatting outside a riverside pub. The other passengers on the train snoozed over their newspapers or played on their mobile phones. Unaware of the causes of our good fortune, blissfully detached from their likely termination, we drift into catastrophe.
Or we are led there. A good source tells me that the British government is well aware that its target for cutting carbon emissions -- 60 percent by 2050 -- is too little, too late, but that it will go no further for one reason: it fears losing the support of the Confederation of British Industry (CBI). Why this body is allowed to keep holding a gun to our heads has never been explained, but Prime Minister Gordon Brown has just appointed Digby Jones, the former director-general of the CBI, as a minister in the UK government department responsible for energy policy. I don't remember voting for him. There could be no clearer signal that the public interest is being drowned by corporate power.
The government's energy program, partly as a result, is characterised by a complete absence of vision. You can see this most clearly when you examine its plans for renewables. The EU has set a target for 20 percent of all energy in the member states to come from renewable sources by 2020. This in itself is pathetic. But the British government refuses to adopt it: instead it proposes that 20 percent of the UK's electricity (just part of Britain's total energy use) should come from renewable power by that date. Even this is not a target, just an "aspiration," and it is on course to miss it. Worse still, the British government has no idea what happens after that. I recently asked whether it has commissioned any research to discover how much more electricity we could generate from renewable sources. It has not.
It's a critical question, whose answer -- if its results were applied globally -- could determine whether or not the planetary "albedo flip" that Hansen predicts takes place. There has been remarkably little investigation of this issue. Until recently I guessed that the maximum contribution from renewables would be something like 50%: beyond that point the difficulties of storing electricity and balancing the grid could become overwhelming. But three papers now suggest that we could go much further.
Last year, the German government published a study of the effects of linking the electricity networks of all the countries in Europe and connecting them to North Africa and Iceland with high voltage direct current cables. This would open up a much greater variety of renewable power sources. Every country in the network would then be able to rely on stable and predictable supplies from elsewhere: hydroelectricity in Scandanavia and the Alps, geothermal energy in Iceland and vast solar thermal farms in the Sahara. By spreading the demand across a much wider network, it suggests that 80 percent of Europe's electricity could be produced from renewable power without any greater risk of blackouts or flickers.
At about the same time, Mark Barrett at University College London published a preliminary study looking mainly at ways of altering the pattern of demand for electricity to match the variable supply from wind and waves and tidal power. At about twice the current price, he found that we might be able to produce as much as 95 percent of our electricity from renewable sources without causing interruptions in the power supply.
Now a new study by the Center for Alternative Technology takes this even further. It is remarkable in two respects: it suggests that by 2027 the United Kingdom could produce 100 percent of our electricity without the use of fossil fuels or nuclear power, and that it could do so while almost tripling its supply: British heating systems (using electricity to drive heat pumps) and transport systems could be mostly powered by it. It relies on a great expansion of electricity storage: building new hydroelectric reservoirs into which water can be pumped when electricity is abundant, constructing giant vanadium flow batteries and linking electric cars up to the grid when they are parked, using their batteries to meet fluctuations in demand. It contains some optimistic technical assumptions, but also a very pessimistic one: that the UK relies entirely on its own energy supplies. If the German proposal were to be combined with these ideas, it's possible to see how one might reliably move towards a world without fossil fuels.
If Hansen is correct, to avert the meltdown that brings the Holocene to an end we require a response on this scale: a sort of political "albedo flip." The British government must immediately commission studies to discover how much of our energy could be produced without fossil fuels, set that as its target then turn the economy round to meet it. But a power shift like this cannot take place without a power shift of another kind: the UK needs a government which fears planetary meltdown more than it fears the CBI.
Editor's Note: George Monbiot is a British journalist and author whose expertise is on climate change and other environmental issues. Monbiot's article reveals that government ineptitude in the face of increasingly frightening scientific data on climate change is not limited to the United States: The UK government is dangerously negligent on energy and climate issues even though it knows better.
Hansen paper
full article
British PM will push through carbon-cutting policies
Recently appointed British PM Gordon Brown has stated that he'll push through a raft of new transport legislation designed to tackle climate change.
In a speech in the House of Commons yesterday, which highlighted key policy alterations under his government, Brown said that "Britain will be the first country in the world to introduce a legal framework for reducing carbon emissions."
He claimed that the measures - which have been drafted in the Climate Change Bill but are yet to come in to force - would set CO2 reduction targets over five year periods up until 2050.
More specifically, the Prime Minister added that the "Local Transport Bill will support the Government's strategy to tackle congestion and improve public transport."
Many motorists see the move as a strong hint toward road charging.
full article
In a speech in the House of Commons yesterday, which highlighted key policy alterations under his government, Brown said that "Britain will be the first country in the world to introduce a legal framework for reducing carbon emissions."
He claimed that the measures - which have been drafted in the Climate Change Bill but are yet to come in to force - would set CO2 reduction targets over five year periods up until 2050.
More specifically, the Prime Minister added that the "Local Transport Bill will support the Government's strategy to tackle congestion and improve public transport."
Many motorists see the move as a strong hint toward road charging.
full article
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