Climate change - time to take direct action 31 August 06

I am all for closing coal power plants down but we must make sure the plant is not required for the grid to supply electricity.

I protested a small coal plant sponsored by an environmental group over here and directly asked this question and was given assurances that the plant was not needed. Unknown to me, this analysis was apparently not done and simply assumed. In all the hollering and law suits and pollution figures, I received an email which stated that the plant was “ordered” to operate to meet electric demand. Interestingly, this thought did not even register on the radar screen of the sender responsible for leading the protest. I am still upset over this because I felt like I wasted my time by joining the protest and it really does not help matters to place blame on a utility when consumers are using the product.

As long as electric demands require any plant to operate, then protesting may have little effect and create the illusion that the plant is merely producing carbon dioxide. Its main purpose is to produce electricity for consumers.

I strongly suggest a focus on where this electricity is being used and if efficiency upgrades can reduce local demand. Before any plant can shut down, alternatives must be found for their consumers. Without this analysis, the protest is not going to do much and may get people to think only the utility is to blame.

One thing we all have to do is not give a one sided message. Coal is bad but we have to use less energy, use it more efficiently, use low carbon sources, and utilize the waste heat as an energy source when possible.

A proper protest should be designed to not only protest the coal plant but to protest why other measures are not taken to reduce and eliminate the need for the electricity supplied by that power plant. Then not only the utility is a target but consumers and policy makers responsible for not investing in better solutions. Without focusing on solutions, then the coal plant will remain and be needed to meet electrical demand and worse, the protest will fail to achieve the important goal of mitigating climate change.

This UK power plant is not the only one to focus on. China is building a coal power plant every week and using them to help manufacture products which we all buy. What we need to discuss is the world-wide growth of coal, nuclear, alternatives, population, etc. We have to find a total global plan which will work. We have to determine the level of sacrifice required and what mechanisms can help us in a nearly impossible transition. Once this plan is developed, then it must be implemented. When it is not implemented on a global or even a local scale, then protest vigorously.

Maybe protests can help raise public awareness. This is good. But after this awareness is raised, then we must have guidance.

All the best, Dan

I remember the Civil Rights movement. At first MLK was thought to be an extremist, radical. Then others came who were more extreme & radical, & it made MLK look quite moderate & reasonable to those who had at first feared him.

It’s like bargaining. You’ve got to start high (if you’re the seller). Shout, “Close it Down,” be real mean & serious, then settle for “replace it with a small, efficient, less polluting station + some alt energy; and make all customers efficient, so they can live better with only half the energy.”

As I understand it, the UK only produces 5% of the world’s CO2 production.

Meanwhile, the burning of rainforest/peatbogs is responsible for 40%

Education and protest against that kind of activity is probably going to be far more beneficial.
The peat-bog burning islands of Indonesia are pretty low in the water…
Mark, surely this is your speciality?!

Much as I think that buring coal is the worst way of making electricity; as Dan says/implies, it’s better to have alternatives in place first.
Ideally, alternatives so great that it makes power generation obsolete.

As of next week we will have had our solar hot water heating system going for a year. I can tell you now, we’ve used nearly 40% less electricity than we did the previous year.
We could afford to do this because the government here in NZ provides a two-year interest-free loan to people wanting to do this.
Changing to the longlife fluorescent lights saved us about 15% the year before that.

If most people did the same,
then surely most coal-fired power stations could then be closed as surplus to requirements? :-)

Cheers!

Derek

There are 2 considerations to reducing the need for a power plant. One is lowering energy use and even more important is lowering demand load.

In order to eliminate a power plant, the peak demand capacity must be determined and where the energy is going is also important (number of residential consumers, industrial plants, etc) An older less efficient plant should be the target instead of a larger efficient plant and one whose capacity is within reach of reducing load easily.

Instead of targeting the plant, target residential consumers of this plant first by educating them on the need to change to compact fluorescent bulbs, and to dry their clothes during off peak hours (one of many ideas).

Let me illustrate how these 2 simple ideas can help.

Electrical energy is measured in kilowatt-hours or the total power in kilowatts multiplied by the number of hours. An electric clothes dryer which operates at 5,000 watts (5 kilowatts) for 1 hour uses 5 kilowatt-hours of energy. A single 15 watt compact fluorescent light bulb would have to be on for 333.33 hours or 13 days, 21 hours and 20 minutes to use the equivalent amount of energy that the electric clothes dryer used in 1 hour. This illustrates energy usage comparing one appliance used for short periods at high power and efficienct lighting which uses less energy but used over a longer time frame.

In a household, if we have four 15 watt lights on for 12 hours each day and use a clothes dryer once a week for an hour, then the energy used by the clothes dryer is the same for all our lighting. This assumes we use compact fluorescent light bulbs. If they were incandescent bulbs instead, then the lighting energy would be 4 times higher than that used for the dryer.

Interestingly, once we convert to efficient lighting and this becomes the “new standard”, the dryer starts to look pretty bad. Because of this, I recently converted an old swing set to a “solar clothes dryer” with an investment of 7 dollars in clothesline and clothes pins.

Now, there is the next consideration which is demand load. If a million people use four 60 watt incandescent bulbs at the same time, this equals 240 megawatts required by an electric utility to provide. If 1 percent of these people use their clothes dryers at the same time they have their lights on, then add another 50 megawatts totaling 290 megawatts in this illustrative example.

If this portion of demand occurs during peak demand hours, then this represents part of the total peak demand load which requires a certain number of power plants to exist to supply this electricity to the grid. If the same million people changed their bulbs to compact fluorescent, then peak demand drops 180 megawatts. When these same people commit to not using their dryer during peak demand hours, then peak demand is lowered another 50 megawatts (assuming 1 percent are using their dryers during the same peak time period). This reduces the peak power by 230 megawatts!If three bulbs were used rather than 4 (ie turning lights off when not used), then add another 15 megawatts of reduced peak power.

Those protesting power plants must also educate and motivate the public to take actions to lower demand load and energy use. Lowering enough demand load can either eliminate the need for a power plant or to reduce the need for building another one. Lowering overall energy use helps to make low carbon resources more viable.

Low-cost efficiency and conservation can go along way to save energy.

Kind Wishes to all, Dan

“Meanwhile, the burning of rainforest/peatbogs is responsible for 40%”

That sounds a bit high to me, can you let us know where you got this from?

I’m a fan of protests, but I think protestors should stay within the law. If climate change activists gain the same notoriety as animal rights activists then I think the cause will suffer as a result.

The figure of 40% of all our CO2 coming from peat fires is care of James Lovelock (his book The Revenge of Gaia).

Of course it varies.
According to Almuth Ernsting (here on this site) peat fires in Borneo alone were responsible for 40% of all CO2 emissions in 1997/8. Her information in this case comes from Nature magazine.

Cheers,

Derek

Mr. Lovelock is here in the USA promoting his book which just came out a month ago. He wrote an article which appeared in today’s Washington Post where he suggests all is lost. Some excerpts below:

“Within a decade or two, Lovelock forecasts, Gaia will hike her thermostat by at least 10 degrees …. maybe 200 million people will migrate close to the Arctic and survive this. Even if we took extraordinary steps, it would take the world 1000 years to recover”....(last year a forest the size of Italy burned in rapidly heating Siberia, releasing from the permafrost a vast sink of methane, which contributes to global warming).....He found Gaia trapped in a vicious cycle of positive feedback loops”

In my opinion, Mr. Lovelock is to be taken very seriously. He holds many patents and helped us already by discovering that ozone-destroying chemicals were destroying the ozone layer which resulted in the Montré Protocol.

One solution idea mentioned in the article he dismisses but I support is a space shade to control a small portion of insolation reaching the earth counteracting the warming from humans and feedback loops. Space shades plus increased land albedo from eliminating black tarmac and opting for reflective pavement may augment our dismal response at controlling GHGs. If it were simply fossil fuels, our task is already close to impossible with expanding world populations and increases in prosperity. Our emissions continue to increase rather than decrease. Add feedback loops of increased emissions by nature and a reduction of carbon sinks and then it can easily become impossible to stop or even reasonably mitigate.

One thing mentioned by Lovelock which may be our truly limited factor is his thought that many people think we have decades and he contends that we do not. I agree with him and can add that it takes decades to implement many actions which may work. It takes time and money to change infrastructure. What is required may be more than our military-industrial investments which only protects unsustainable infrastructure.

The time variable is becoming very important and radical conservation may be necessary. This means giving up amenities much more to the point of it being painful. Radical conservation coupled with an accelerated focus on low-carbon energy may help us reduce more carbon emissions. Renewable options are most viable when we reduce the load. Mr. Lovelock is for nuclear. I support nuclear over coal electric. Still, it takes many years to commission a nuclear power plant while many renewable sources can be developed more quickly. Radical conservation can be applied immediately.

I do not dismiss what Lovelock says as false. He is the creative type and above those who can only think in one dimension. Still, the idea that 6 billion people will become 200 million is not acceptable without a fight despite any suggestion that what we face is hopeless. I do think that Mr. Lovelock truly would want his warnings to push us to solve the problem. He does have children and grandchildren.

Kindest regards to all.

Dan

Why are they burning the peat bogs? What purpose does this serve for them? If it serves a purpose, then do they have other options? Is anyone telling them that their actions are detrimental? Is there anything any of us or governments can do?

On deforestation, will irrigation help in some places? Is there anything we can do?

Kindest Regards, Dan

Dan,

I am just back from the Drax protest. I don’t know about the US protest against a coal plant you mentioned earlier, but the Camp for Climate Action had a very clear and inclusive message about climate change: This was not about stopping one particular local plant or development. The message was that we need to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions drastically and fast, and that this will mean shutting down fossil fuel power stations. The leaflets, the booklet and the workshops were full with information about living in a clean and low energy future, and about the alternatives to fossil fuels.

So far, much of the media and political discussion has focussed on wind and solar energy, other clean technologies, saving energy, etc. Those are simply the means which enable us to shut down plants like Drax. Getting new wind farms does nothing for the climate if they only give us more energy to waste. It’s the shutting down of the fossil fuel plants, including Drax, which ultimately matters!

The other major aim of the action, of course, was to get across to people that to get political action we need to do more than changing our own homes and educating people. Somehow, many of the people who completely accept that non-violent direct action was essential for anti-colonial and civil rights movement will not be necessary or appropriate when it comes to completely changing the global energy system (or stopping deforestation). Given that both the destructive potential of climate change and the scale of action required is far greater than all the social and anti-colonial struggles of the past, surely that is naive!

Dan, you mention how much impact individuals can have by wasting less energy. Of course we should lose less energy because we should do what is morally right and because we cannot demand something from governments that we refuse to do ourselves. I once read an interview by James Hansen in which he commented on this approach: He said that if only part of the population voluntarily reduce their energy use they will drive down energy prices and thus encourage the non-committed people to waste even more energy. This is why government policies are essential, and I would say this is exactly why we need mass protests to get it.

Indonesia’s peat bogs store an estimate 50 billion tons of carbon. The primary cause for the carbon emissions is drainage. The largest-scale drainage project was undertaken in the mid-1990s for the Mega Rice Project, to grow food for the large populations of Java and Sumatra on the sparsely populated island of Borneo. Once it was done, the soil was found to be too acidic for growing rice.

Once the peat is drained the carbon will go into the atmosphere, fires or no fires. Fires just speed up the process. The fires are largely set by oil palm plantation owners, but cutting down the peat swamp forests also helps to feed the illegal timber mafia. As for sources, all the research is published in Nature, but we have collected the best media summaries, plus one open-access Nature article, on our Biofuelwatch website, which I mentioned before.

Only one third of the peat has been drained, but the oil palm plantation boom is threatening the remaining two-thirds.

Right now, the best estimate is that carbon releases from Indonesia’s peat swamps contribute around 15% of annual global carbon emissions, although annual figures are much higher during the dry El Nino years. Multiply times three and you can guess how high emissions could be in future.

Palm oil is the main driver behind peat destruction in Indonesia. So far, it has served the vegetable oil market and the chemical industry, but increasingly it will fuel our cars via biodiesel.

It’s perfectly possible to stop this – you just need to declare all remaining peat swamps to be protected nature reserves (and actually protect them) and re-flood the drained swamps. People have shown that it can be done and how to do it. It’s the political will that is lacking.

Somebody else opened this threat as a discussion as to whether this should be a more important focus than the UK’s coal plants. Peat fires and deforestation will only be ‘solved’ as part of global or multinational action on climate change and this can only be credibly promoted by those who really tackle their own countries’ fossil fuel emissions.

There is a lot we can do abou peat fires: Speak about it any time people promote biodiesel without stopping the use of palm oil. Sponsor Sawit Watch in Indonesia (they fight against oil palm plantations which destroy peat and rain forests). Demand that governments put pressure on Indonesia and the UN to protect and restore the peat swamps, and that they provide funding for this (the EU and Canada have given some, but only enough for a tiny project just enough to show it could be done).

Just back from the Drax protest also. A veritable hive of incisive minds, communality and de-eco-footprinting. Also featuring some very forward-looking workshops, including four on the pitfalls of biofuels (+ a fifth I gave to a fellow train-traveller home).

I think campaigners need to pay attention to conveying where such protests fit into the longer-running story and debate. The debate over the UK Energy Review became fixated with the perceived energy gap and who supported filling it with nuclear. This completely detracted from the principled importance of early phase-out of centralised brown-coal generation, which should have received more attention by a comparison of impacts.

Right now, there is also the danger that the ‘Big Ask’ Climate Change Bill, which simply stated would legally require 3% annual cuts in UK CO2 emissions until 2050, becomes sold with the message that 3% is enough. The emphasis on a 3% carbon-cutting budget also promotes the idea that emissions cutting is a book-balancing rather than a leadership exercise.

The 2006 Energy Review also touted that road traffic could be increased by compensating for the emissions rise “especially” through increased biofuel use – big false accounting danger here.

I appreciate this information very much not only for myself but for others on the blog. I am in total agreement that we should not trade rainforest and peat bogs for growing anything. Are there any international companies involved? Any companies in the USA which you are aware which promote these practices in any way? We can at least avoid buying products from those companies and expose them to others on the harm they are causing.

One interesting aspect you did mention was that the soil was found to be “too acidic for growing rice”. How tragic can it be that not only did the Mega Rice Project create vast amounts of emissions, it also failed their intentions to grow food for the large populations of Java and Sumatra. Maybe this would not have happened if they had tested the soil to begin with and it seems the most basic information needs to be provided to those responsible for draining that land.

I have to ask what other options are there to feed Java and Sumatra without destroying the climate? With a choice between starving today or dying tomorrow from future climate change, the immediate focus will win.

One focus which may be useful to Kyoto countries is to share how the peat bog emissions are offsetting gains made through EU carbon trading. Maybe a small percentage of the carbon credits could be applied directly to Indonesia in helping them find more viable alternatives.

Maybe, an “atmospheric factor” could be introduced into the carbon trading calculations whereby a higher annual atmospheric increase promotes an economic incentive to promote Kyoto countries to influence countries outside the Kyoto group. Somehow, the carbon trading efforts must be tied to the atmosphere at some point. A carbon mechanism like this would call attention to the peat bog problem since it would affect the trading mechanisms greatly.

Over here in the USA, the bio-diesel focus is mostly about using our own agriculture and our land to grow soybeans to be used for bio-diesel. Ethanol is a big focus. Some environmentalist groups promote bio-diesel over ethanol because it appears to be less energy intensive than using corn for ethanol production.

It appears (at the moment) we have agricultural land available for both fuel and food which does not involve clearing forests or draining peat bogs and may be benign until the industry grows in larger proportions. A lesser but more useful focus has been the recycling of used vegetable oil into bio-diesel.

Kind Wishes, Dan

The issue over here is the chicken and the egg and which comes first. I have talked to politicians who think they cannot do anything because the public will not accept it. They are partly correct. I do not see enough people ready to do mass protests because they still do not know their connection to the climate problem.

On wind electricity, I would contend that it may be needed to help supply the grid. It appears Drax is a big plant and something has to replace some of the electric generation because lowering the load may not be sufficient by itself. I would not make the assumption that more renewable power would not help. It will always offset carbon from the plant. Another option is to replace the coal plant with a nuclear one.

Another consideration mentioned by Martin on this blog has to do with burning biomass mixed with the coal. I appreciated his comments because this seemed to really help reduce the carbon emissions.

All the best, Dan

40% is a phenomenal figure, but I would need to see the original research sources to back this up. Don’t all jump too soon – Lovelock is an inventive thinker but not a great researcher and this just doesn’t sound right.

Any ideas anyone?

I am sure no company would admit to having anything to do with the peat fires (particularly since people who set those fires could be imprisoned under Indonesian law, though this is not enforced). I understand that the plantation owners who are directly responsible are Indonesian and Malaysian. Friends of the Earth have compiled a list of UK companies that buy palm oil from the region, but I am not aware of any list for US companies.

You can get a list of most companies involved in the palm oil business from this website:http://www.sustainable-palmoil.org/ (the list also includes NGOs concerned about deforestation).

Those are the companies which say that they will, one day, make the market sustainable – but so far their commitment only exists on paper and has yet to stop a single tree form being felled. The logging companies involved, I believe, are largely south-east Asian ones. Greenpeace have done a lot of research trying to trace the timber which, via China, is then sold across the world.

Palm oil is used in 10% of all our supermarket products, so it will be pretty impossible to focus on one ‘nasty’ company that can be blamed. However, it would be important to find out whether any biodiesel refineries in the US are going to use palm oil – they certainy are in Europe. This will vastly increase the market for palm oil and really should be stopped!

The whole issue should ideally be raised at the next international climate negotiations, and also at other international and multinational meetings – but it has never yet been on the agenda, as far as I know. If Indonesia was to opt in, then the ‘compensated reductions in deforestation’ proposal now being discussed could make a huge difference – but I doubt Indonesia would be keen.

I don’t know the full background to the Mega Rice Project, but I know that the government had been warned that it would be a disaster and unsuitable for rice. I don’t think anybody warned about the likely CO2 emissions, though. I suspect it was the kind of grand scheme that appealed to a weakened dictatorship, and it was also a smokescreen for logging, with links between logging firms and the Suharto government. Not all that different from many of the oil palm expansion schemes now.

Almuth

In his last book, Sir James says: “In 2002 [peat bog fires] contributed 40% of the world’s total carbon emissions”.

The source for this figure isn’t in the Revenge of Gaia.
I do note however that some <a href=”http://english.people.com.cn/200208/01/eng20020801_100742.shtml ”>10,000km2 of Russian countryside was scorched in 2002. – a particularly bad year.
Apparently peat bog fires are common around Moscow.

Why you accept that 40% of all CO2 can come from the island of Borneo in 1997 and not accept the same figure for the whole world in 2002?

You say Lovelock “isn’t a great researcher”.
No?
As I understand it, he has published over 200 papers as an independent scientist i.e. not useless squibs produced under “publish or perish”.
In what way does he fall short of your definition of a great researcher?

Cheers,

Derek

I am not sure where I agreed about the 2002 figure or the 1997 figure. I have seen nothing to suggest that the 40% figure is valid for global CO2 emissions full stop.

James Lovelock is a clever man, a thinker with some very important ideas, and a prolific writer. But he also has his blinkers on; the recent promotion of nuclear power as the only valid quick fix to the climate problem is a good example of knee-jerk thinking – better research would show that nuclear power is not going to make any difference in the next 5-10 years, by which time it could be too late for anything. The Gaia Hypothesis is sound in principle, but should never have been applied in terms of a “global ecology”. Maybe it is not Lovelock’s fault that Gaia has been taken to extremes by others, but he should have been far clearer where the limitations of its applications lie.

The authoring of 200 papers does not indicate the quality of a person’s research – it is whether that research has been rigorously analysed, is still valid and is repeatable. Lovelock has become a scientific personality who’s headline work needs careful critical examination. If, after this, then the work still stands up, then I will be convinced as to its validity.

However, as a promoter of the need to protect our planet, I have nothing but praise for him.

Keith www.theearthblog.org www.reduce3.com

You haven’t read the article in Nature that Almuth referred to?
Here’s an article by some people in association with NASA that you don’t have to pay to see: Wildland Fires and the Environment: a Global Synthesis

I’ve never seen anything by Lovelock that I would regard as “knee-jerk thinking”, though I have seen it from his opponents, particularly those who don’t understand why nuclear power is a good idea for industrialised countries.

Nuclear power is of course making a huge difference to places like Britain right now.
What I’ve read is of Lovelock arguing to stop the decommissioning of nuclear reactors.
Did you know that Britain imports electricity to get over its shortfalls?
Did you know that France is the largest exporter of electricity in Europe?
Do you know how France generates most of her power?

Nobody denies reducing demand for energy is best thing one can do.
With almost no difficulty, I’ve reduced my family’s usage of energy by over 50% in two years (solar water heating, long-life bulbs, and having moved into town where we all walk.)
Your base supply of electricity cannot be wind. There are times when the wind does not blow hard enough to generate anything.
You cannot run industries that melt iron or smelt aluminium without reliable power.
You cannot run a first-world country without reliable electricity full stop.
There are three reliable sources: hydro, coal and nuclear power. Which would you choose?
You really think Lovelock has his “blinkers” on?? I don’t think you can have read the Revenge of Gaia
It’s true, he doesn’t like having hundreds of thousands of wind turbines everywhere because they ruin the view.
Yes, this is subjective, but it’s not wrong.

Do you think we’re all going to die in 5-10 years?
If not, don’t you think it might be a good idea to have a source of power with as little in the way of emissions as nuclear power? After all, we need long-term solutions if the world is to recover from global warming.
We should look into CANDU reactors – which don’t require refined uranium.
Thorium reactors such as are being built in India – to make use of known reserves 3 times as great as that of uranium.

It’s true, being the author of over 200 scientific papers says little about their quality other than that the publisher e.g. Nature deems them worthy. However, you would be wrong to think that his work hasn’t been rigorously analysed. When you’re under attack – as he so often is for saying things people don’t want to hear – every avenue is investigated in an effort to discredit.
I know of one error he made; he considered CFCs to be handy tracers for atmospheric circulation and said they weren’t in “a quantity sufficient to harm the biosphere”. This research interested other scientists which lead to the discovery of the ozone holes over the poles.
That CFCs were detected in the first place is thanks to Dr Lovelock’s invention the electron capture detector. This device, which is one million times more sensitive than thermal conductivity detectors, made it possible to detect halogenated compounds and nitrous oxide, even at levels of only one part per trillion (ppt), thus revolutionising our understanding of the atmosphere and pollutants.
Unlike his more famous invention (the microwave oven) he patented this and other inventions and so has been able to support his own independent research.

The Gaia Hypothesis was attacked by many people including notables like Richard Dawkins. To back up his subjective gut-feeling that it was workable, he created the Daisy World model. This proved his point, and subsequent more sophisticated versions of the program, more so. Thus is is now known as the “Gaia Theory”.

It’s so often a good thing when he stirs up controversy that I begin to think it is more by design than accident.
I believe this is why he did not shy away from his dire prediction about the World’s future (billons dead.)
The conservative pussy-footing approach has been pretty unsuccessful.

Cheers!

Derek