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Absurd placard spotted at climate demo

2006-11-28T15:52:00Z

I’ve been to a lot of demos in my time, and I’ve seen some pretty ridiculous banners and placards being wielded at them. But none of them have been quite so absurd as the placard spotted by several correspondents at the recent 4 November climate change demonstration in London…

Several people have asked if I was responsible – not guilty! (I have a good alibi – I was not even in the country, since I was giving a lecture in Prague for the British Council). And no, I did not pay any money to the lady in the hat!

Australia's climate change shame

2006-11-20T13:22:00Z

I don’t generally give real-estate advice, but here’s a tip – don’t buy property in Australia. One of the world’s greatest polluters is now one of the hardest-hit by climate change. Farms are being abandoned, livestock destroyed and cities are wilting in the heat, as perennial drought tightens its grip. In years to come huge areas of land will be abandoned, and widening zones of the country will become essentially uninhabitable.

If you own land or property anywhere outside the wetter tropical north or cooler Tasmania, get ready to sell it now – preferably to a climate-change denier. There’s plenty of deniers still around. One of them heads the government.

I wrote recently in this column that the Arctic has likely passed a crucial climatic tipping point, beyond which the ice cap will disappear in its entirety whatever we do with greenhouse gas emissions. I now think a tipping point has also been crossed in Australia, pitching the continent into a permanently drier climate regime that will wipe out most of its agricultural base and leave its cities constantly threatened by water shortages, heatwaves and uncontrollable wildfires. Following five years of below-average rainfall, water managers are now talking about this being the “worst drought for 1,000 years”. They should be so lucky. Global temperatures are now as high as they have been for 6,000 years, and in a couple of decades will be reaching heights not seen since the last interglacial, 135,000 years ago. This is the scale of drought we’re talking about here. Australia’s new climate will be different from anything ever experienced since humans first settled on the continent.

Australia’s story has all the elements of a Shakespearean tragedy, especially in the way its leaders have dragged everyone else down with their blindness and greed. John Howard’s government has for more than a decade been mired in global-warming denial, partly as a badge of loyalty to the Bush administration, which it also supported with troops in Iraq. Not content with negotiating an 8 per cent increase in allowable carbon dioxide emissions at the 1997 Kyoto talks, Howard then refused to ratify the agreement on the now-familiar basis that it could harm the economy. As one of the world’s biggest producers of coal, Australia’s contribution to global warming even extends outside its own boundaries. “I’m not going to betray those associated with the resource industry,” Howard replied, when asked his opinion of the Stern report.

But national politics, as it has been here in the UK, is now in a period of rapid transition. Australia saw the largest turnout for the 4 Nov ember global climate demonstrations (bigger even than London). A recent poll put climate change third on the list of people’s top perceived threats to the country (after international terrorism and nuclear proliferation). Media coverage of global warming has been enormous, allowing opposition politicians to portray Howard’s government as “asleep on the watch” while farmers suffer and livestock die in the dusty outback.

The government’s response has been to turn a reluctant, pale shade of green. It remains committed to meeting its absurd 108 per cent Kyoto target, even without formally acceding to the protocol and even though doing so is “not going to be easy”, according to environment minister Ian Campbell. Economy minister Peter Costello has given lukewarm support to an international carbon trading system. A hefty federal grant has also been announced for a solar power project in Victoria – but millions more are going towards new coal projects which either burn more “efficiently” or might one day capture and store CO2 underground. The government is not about to kick its fossil fuel addiction any time soon.

All this confusion of denial and delay is particularly tragic, given that Australia is one of the few countries in the world that could comparatively easily have converted to a 100 per cent renewable energy economy, primarily by harnessing its vast solar power potential: with huge, cloud-free desert areas, all of Australia’s electricity could easily come from the sun. This is Australia’s real shame – by staying trapped in denial for so long, it is now too late to save itself as soaring temperatures gradually transform this giant and varied continent into one of the most parched and desolate land surfaces on earth.

(By Mark Lynas. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)

France proposes carbon sanctions on Kyoto renegades

2006-11-14T10:13:00Z

Following in the footsteps of the UK, Australia and – partially – the United States, France has become the latest country to see climate change hit the political agenda in a big way. Whilst Australia had the biggest turnout for the 4 November demonstrations (40,000 people in both Sydney and Melbourne), and in the US climate-unfriendly legislators got wiped out in the recent mid-term elections (see below), the French electorate has so far been relatively quiescent on climate.

Not any more. Faced with a potential ‘green’ challenge from a television celebrity in the upcoming presidential elections, parties of all colours have been rushing to take global warming seriously. Most striking, the French PM Dominique de Villepin has proposed that countries which refuse to join up to Kyoto should see a ‘carbon tax’ on their imports – potentially a very powerful incentive for current Kyoto naysayers to come on board in future.

South of the border things are also beginning to move. In Spain every new building must now be equipped with solar panels – to generate hot water in domestic residences, and PV to generate electricity in business premises. There are also new regulations to tighten up energy efficiency standards, potentially saving 30% of so of a building’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Here in the UK we are all waiting for details of the new Climate Bill to be announced in the Queen’s Speech in Parliament on Wednesday. Word has it that year-on-year targets won’t be included – a big disappointment to Friends of the Earth, which has campaigned for a mandatory 3% annual carbon cut. We await the news with interest.

Good news of the week

2006-11-13T14:24:00Z

The severe drubbing given by US voters to the Republican party at last week’s mid-term elections removes two of the most notorious climate deniers from their Congressional positions of power. First to walk the plank will be Republican Richard Pombo, who lost his seat in the House of Representatives. Pombo had previously spent much of his time trying to gut the Endangered Species Act, and was a virulent opponent of greenhouse gas controls.

In the Senate, James Inhofe remains in the chamber but will lose his chairmanship of the powerful Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. It was during Inhofe’s chairmanship that he called global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” and invited the sci-fi writer/climate denier Michael Crichton to testify as an ‘expert witness’ in front of the committee.

He will likely be replaced by California Democrat Barbara Boxer, who has a much more encouraging record on environmental issues, and promises to prioritise climate change – perhaps even by pressing for a national version of Arnie’s California carbon reduction plan.

Reality check of the week

2006-11-13T14:08:00Z

Global carbon emissions are now growing four times faster than they were in the past decade, according to a report in the scientific journal Nature. Between 1990 and 1999 the average CO2 growth rate was 0.8%. Now it is 3.2%. Worryingly, 40% of this growth is attributable to China’s current economic boom – and the Chinese leadership has ruled out any emissions targets.

Given all the depressing news about countries missing their targets (see below) this should hardly be suprising, as the report concedes. But what is most striking is that the world is now increasingly far away from any of the IPCC’s ‘stabilisation pathways’ which would have begun to scale back emissions and their associated warming impacts.

In other words, all the efforts so far to reduce global emissions – from Kyoto downwards – have had a very clear impact: zero.

Is it too little, too late?

2006-11-06T21:13:00Z

If someone had told me, just six months ago, that the UK government would be sponsoring a major report which – in Tony Blair’s words – “demolishes the last remaining argument for inaction on climate change”, I would have refused to believe it. Yet, so it came to pass with the publication of the Stern report. In accepting the report’s findings, the government achieved several things at once. First, it regained ground lost to the Tories and countered David Cameron’s dog-sled photo opportunity in the Arctic. Second, it suggested that Gordon Brown – as the man who commissioned Lord Stern and who introduced several proposals at the report’s launch – would be a prime minister who “gets it” on climate.

Last, and most usefully, the government has helped environmentalists tear down the last bastion of climate-change denial: economics. For several years the Danish statistician Bjørn Lomborg has generated unwarranted press attention with his gatherings of famous economists who have declared that climate change is too expensive to tackle and that we would be better off spending the money elsewhere.

Now, Nicholas Stern has ridden out in full armour and slain the Lomborgian dragon. His 700-page report entirely demolishes that last ditch of climate-change denial – that the world “cannot afford” to cut fossil-fuel emissions. Stern points out that the potential cost comes in at roughly 1 per cent of global GDP, a tiny price to pay for averting the greatest crisis ever to face human civilisation.

This in itself is cause for celebration: after years of deliberation and the submission of thousands of pages of evidence, Stern has come to essentially the same conclusion as Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace: that “we can grow and be green”. And this draws the sting from objections made by renegade rich countries such as Australia and the United States, whose governments persist in claiming, absurdly, that even making tiny Kyoto-style cuts would bankrupt them. I have some objections to a purely economic approach to climate change. How do you assign a monetary value to the disappearance of the polar bear, for example? How do you put a price on people losing their livelihoods, and their lives, to droughts, floods and food shortages? But the forthright approach of the Stern report makes it, in many ways, more radical than numerous papers put out recently by environmental groups.

Stern challenge

Stern also implicitly throws down a challenge to the British government with regard to its own policies, a challenge that the government must respond to urgently if it is to avoid charges of hypocrisy. First, it should make the bold stroke of cancelling the entire £12bn roads programme: the last thing we need now is to be spending billions on catering for motorists when pitiful amounts of cash are being spent on helping households use less energy and generate their own power. Next, as I argued two weeks ago in these pages, David Mili band must embrace carbon rationing with enthusiasm and announce a strategy for national implementation.

Crucially, the government must commit itself to a clearer framework for the next stage of international negotiations: as Stern points out, the UK’s carbon emissions are only 2 per cent of the global total and an equitable agreement based on contraction and convergence is the only way to bring in China, India and other developing nations.

Nicholas Stern’s report could be a step change in British politics. As always, there is a catch, and it is a grave one: Stern’s 1 per cent price tag would not actually save us from the worst effects of global warming. Specifically, his figure refers to the estimated cost of stabilising atmospheric greenhouse-gas levels at 500-550 parts per million (ppm). We are currently at 430ppm. Stabilising in the 500-550ppm range would require global emissions to peak in the next ten to 20 years, and then fall by between 1 and 3 per cent a year.

However, the European Union and many environmental groups believe that global warming must never exceed 2°C. That danger threshold, according to the latest science, is the line beyond which global warming could run rapidly out of control because of “positive feedbacks” – the collapse of the Amazon rainforest or the release of methane from melting permafrost in Siberia. But, according to Stern’s own figures, his 550ppm stabilisation target gives us only a 10 per cent chance of keeping temperature increases below 2°, and a 50-50 chance of passing 3°. This is rather like playing Russian roulette with four out of the five chambers loaded – the odds are not just silly, but suicidal. Stern dismisses the target of 450ppm, which is much more likely to keep us within the magic 2° threshold, as “almost out of reach, given that we are likely to reach this level within ten years”.

Yet what choice do we have but to grasp at this straw? It might cost much more than 1 per cent of GDP, but the earth does not strike bargains: we have to reach the targets that are set by the planet, or else go out of business. Two degrees is that target, and yes, we have less than ten years to act. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.

Why we must ration the future

2006-10-23T12:36:00Z

You can’t bargain with the planet because it doesn’t care whether or not targets are “politically acceptable”. So unless we secure a deal determining how much carbon each nation and each person can emit, we simply will not survive. By Mark Lynas

The best indication of whether a person truly grasps the scale of the global climate crisis is not whether they drive a hybrid car or offset their flights, nor whether they subscribe to the Ecologist or plan to attach a wind turbine to their house. The most reliable indicator is whether they support carbon rationing. The received political wisdom is that the general public will recoil in horror at a scheme whose very name recalls wartime national emergencies and austerity. Rationing is the opposite of today’s consumerist free-for-all, where economic growth is the highest objective of government policy.

But that is precisely the point. It is because carbon rationing represents a total break with business as usual that it is the only climate-change policy that will work. Let me put it simply: if we go on emitting greenhouse gases at anything like the current rate, most of the surface of the globe will be rendered uninhabitable within the lifetimes of most readers of this article. We must reduce our emissions by 90 per cent or so within three or four decades if we are to have any chance of avoiding this looming catastrophe.

That challenge requires collective, conscious action, involving a planned transition from a high-carbon economy to a low-carbon one. Just as we did not hope to win the Second World War by muddling through with a pre-1939 economy, we cannot hope to face down today’s emergency without completely altering our national priorities. Defeating Hitler was our number-one aim in 1940: it ranked above health, education, crime and all the other day-to-day concerns of government, requiring a supreme effort of mobilisation. Defeating global warming must be our priority today, or we will lose this war, and with it our very existence as a civilisation.

At an international level, some variant of rationing is nothing less than a mathematical inevitability. Let us assume that at some stage in the near future – perhaps after a change of regime in Washington, DC – world governments hammer out an agreement about what constitutes a “dangerous” level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Today, atmospheric CO2 stands at 380 parts per million by volume (ppm), a higher level than at any time since the Eocene era (35 to 55 million years ago). According to the modellers, stabilising at 400ppm yields a three-to-one chance that global temperature increases would level off on this side of 2°C, saving us from calamitous rates of sea-level rise and a mass extinction that would otherwise wipe out more than half of life on earth.

But this 400ppm target means that only 80 billion tonnes more carbon can be emitted by humanity over the next few decades. This figure is non-negotiable: you can’t bargain with the atmosphere. How the remaining carbon budget is divided between human beings, however, involves a decision about rationing. The most likely outcome is that it will be divided among the world’s countries on the basis of their populations – in other words, we will all get an equal ration.

Equity is inevitable, and not because future world leaders will be bleeding-heart liberals, but because no developing-world government will ever accede to an agreement that freezes existing global inequalities. The choice facing rich-country governments, in other words, is between inequity or survival. The government of India, for example, will not sign an agreement that gives its people 20 times less of the remaining budget on a per-person basis than Americans get, and nor should it be expected to. China will not sign a document that gives the Chinese only a third of what British people receive. (Annual per-capita carbon-dioxide emissions are approximately one tonne in India, 20 tonnes in the United States, ten tonnes in the UK and three tonnes in China.) Indeed, given the rich world’s disproportionate historical responsibility for causing climate change, developing countries may well demand a higher ration of the remaining budget than rich countries receive.

This mathematical equation, of a convergence towards equal per-capita carbon allocations in the context of a contraction of overall global emissions, is the framework known as contraction and convergence (C&C). Many people – environmentalists included – have railed against it, but no one has ever been able to propose a viable alternative. Plenty of other initiatives and proposals exist (of which the Kyoto Protocol is one) but they all add up to nothing more than guesswork, with no definable outcome, when set against the remorseless logical framework of C&C. (The originator of C&C, Aubrey Meyer, was profiled as one of “ten people who could change the world” in the New Statesman of 17 October 2005.)

If climate change is to be solved, global emissions will have to contract (to sustainable levels) and converge (towards zero). There is no other way to join the dots on the graph. The question is whether world leaders will face the inevitable before it is too late. If we are to hit the 400ppm target, scarcely a decade remains before we must begin cutting emissions across the whole global economy. And after that particular climatic window closes, global warming may spiral quickly out of control.

To say that 400ppm is an ambitious target is a colossal understatement: Sir David King has advocated 550ppm as the lowest politically achievable target. Given his role as chief scientific adviser to the government, Sir David is presumably aware that this represents nothing less than a death sentence for half the world’s population. In advocating it, he is veering dangerously close to what some campaigners have called “the economics of genocide”. It is irrelevant to the biosphere what any of us considers to be “politically realistic”: it obeys the hard laws of physics and chemistry, not the rather more flexible laws of economics and politics.

Make carbon allocations tradeable

Domestic carbon rationing is the national corollary of contraction and convergence. Like the monetary budget within which all governments and individuals are accustomed to operating, the carbon budget is non-negotiable. Unlike “green taxes” or any of the other assorted climate policies recently discussed at party conferences, only a top-down carbon rationing scheme can deliver a predetermined outcome with any certainty. Whether taxes, for instance, actually reduce carbon consumption depends on what people are prepared to pay. Taxes are also important to raise revenue, presenting the government with a conflict of interest.

Moreover, taxation is simply a hidden way of rationing via the price mechanism – something likely to be as unpopular as it is unfair. If conspicuous carbon consumption by the rich goes unchallenged (think of David Beckham’s sports cars), any popular effort on climate change will collapse, just as the war effort would have been fatally undermined had the royal family been given a higher food ration in 1940. Instead, the sight of aristocrats and dock workers all mucking in showed a country united in its determination to defeat Nazism.

One important difference from war time rationing is that future carbon allocations would need to be tradeable in order to make the system flexible. If person A really wants to fly to Australia to see his mother, and person B (who doesn’t have a car) is happy to sell him some unused quota, so much the better – the overall objective of carbon reduction is still achieved (because the annual national budget declines), but people don’t lose their freedom of action. Moreover, trading gives a financial incentive for low-carbon innovations: if a new invention needs less of your ration, it will become more attractive. If having solar panels on your house allows you to cash in your unused ration, they become not just affordable, but desirable. At a macro level, business has an incentive to make long-term investment decisions.

For individuals, carbon rationing would operate as a parallel currency: when purchasing high-carbon goods (petrol for a car, overseas flights) a proportion of carbon currency would be surrendered at the point of sale. Given that only half the national carbon output stems from individuals’ direct choices, the other half would probably be auctioned by the government to private business to cover manufacturing and services. So if you’re buying bananas or having a haircut, the carbon ration will already have been paid for by the company, and its cost built into the end price for the consumer.

Unlike the ration books of the wartime era, modern rationing could be electronic, operating on the same principle as debit cards do with a current account. If a person lacks the carbon credits to cover a purchase, he or she could buy on the “spot” market at the point of sale, just as pay-as-you-go mobile-phone users top up their credit in order to make a call.

So will the general public accept rationing? David Miliband, the Environment Secretary, one of the few senior politicians who seems to “get it” on climate change, suggests they will, and floated the idea of carbon rationing at a major speech to the Audit Commission on 19 July. I am told privately that, for the Conservatives, Oliver Letwin is an “anorak” on the issue, having spent hours poring over the nuts and bolts of a rationing scheme. Most surprisingly, whenever I propose carbon rationing at public meetings around the country, it seems to generate a spontaneous round of applause. Perhaps the public is less backward on climate change than many politicians like to assume. Perhaps people also realise that the kind of society carbon rationing would usher in, with resurgent communities and small-scale agriculture, would actually be highly beneficial for most of us.

Nevertheless, imposing such a scheme – and imposed it must be, as participation could not be voluntary – would require political leadership and vision of the sort that seems to be in scarce supply in today’s corridors of power. But such leadership need not, in the long term, be unpopular. Nor would it be incompatible with democracy. Who would march in Trafalgar Square against solving climate change? Probably about as many people as marched against rationing in 1940: none.

So how would it actually work? By Sam Alexandroni

Every adult receives an equal carbon allowance (children get less) based on a yearly budget, which is reduced each year and set by an independent committee.

This allowance is divided into units. These are often referred to as tradeable energy quotas (TEQs). Every time you buy petrol, pay an electricity bill or book a flight, a number of units, equivalent to that amount of energy, is deducted from your TEQ account – in most cases automatically via direct debit. If you do not have enough units in your account, the price goes up to cover the shortfall.

TEQs behave like any commodity, fluctuating in price depending on demand and availability. If too many people use too much carbon, the units become scarce and the price goes up, making it uneconomical to live far beyond your personal allowance. This creates a powerful economic incentive to reduce carbon output, and to profit by selling the excess units.

Only part of the yearly carbon budget is divided among individuals; the rest is sold to governments and industry at a weekly tender. Each business must manage its carbon output to remain profitable. For example, a transatlantic flight might initially account for one-third of a person’s carbon allowance, but as this allowance decreases, aviation would have to become greener or flights more expensive.

The demand this would create for low-carbon living would produce a ready market for green technology and new opportunities for industry. The growth in this sector would balance any economic slowdown elsewhere and lead to a gradual shift in technology and lifestyle, enabling people to live within their personal carbon allowance despite yearly reductions.

Rationing by numbers Research by Sam Alexandroni

10 tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted per person in the UK each year

20 tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted per person in the US each year

3 tonnes the target for maximum annual carbon-dioxide emissions for each person by 2020

2.4 tonnes annual cost in carbon dioxide of powering the average British home

5.5 tonnes carbon-dioxide cost of a return flight from London to Sydney

25 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are emitted globally each year

This article first appeared in the New Statesman.

Planet Earth . . . but not as we know it

2006-10-09T12:55:00Z

You may find it hard to believe, but most environmentalists are optimists. Their doom-monger image is actually the opposite of the truth: their most consistent message is not that we are doomed, but that we have the time and the technology to avoid the worst calamities, if we act now.

This insistence on human agency irritates true doom-mongers, such as John Gray, who, reviewing George Monbiot’s new book Heat (NS, 18 September), complained: “The assumption that we can stop [global warming] becomes less scientifically tenable by the day, and is in fact not much more than a green version of anthropocentrism.” In this, Gray was echoing James Lovelock, who told the New York Times of 12 September that solar panels and wind turbines are “largely gestures”, but “no answer at all to the problem” of global warming, which is already essentially out of control.

To environmentalists, this is little short of heresy. But what if Lovelock is right? What if the global warming “tipping point” has already been passed, and escalating “positive feedbacks” indicate that accelerating climate damage is now inevitable? The current scientific consensus suggests that, because of the great thermal inertia of the planetary system, roughly another degree of further warming is already in the pipeline, whatever we do with emissions.

However, no scientific computer modelling study has suggested that irreversible positive feedbacks are already in operation; nor will the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change make such a suggestion. Lovelock’s bleaker analysis stems more from a gut feeling than from verifiable data.

Yet this does not mean he should be ignored: Lovelock’s Gaia theory – now accepted as the basis for earth system science – was also initially rejected because it differed sharply from the drift of mainstream science. Lovelock’s strength is that he eschews reductionism: by analogy, he is a GP, checking the health of the patient as an entire organism, while most scientists are experts solely in the heart, or lungs or brain.

This is slightly unfair to climate science – the best computer models now integrate almost every aspect of the earth system. Yet I share with Lovelock the suspicion that, far from overemphasising the earth’s plight, these models are too conservative. This is not through any unique scientific insight, but because the news coming in suggests that our climate is changing faster than any model simulation yet designed.

Moreover, it is important to remember that there is no single “tipping point” after which it will be too late to save the planet. Rather, there are multiple tipping points for different aspects of the earth system. The biggest Antarctic ice sheets, for example, are stable, and it would take dramatic worldwide warming to melt them. But, for the more fragile Arctic, I suspect the critical threshold has indeed been crossed.

On 14 September Nasa reported that perennial Arctic sea ice had declined by 14 per cent in a single season between 2004 and 2005: astonishing, and a finding which suggests a flip to an ice-free North Pole is already under way. This will mean open water at the pole within a decade or two, wiping out polar bears and drastically altering northern-hemisphere weather patterns decades sooner than modellers have projected. Because white ice is much more reflective than blue sea, the ice cap also acts as a giant solar mirror. Once it has melted, the planet will absorb more of the sun’s heat, giving a boost to global warming.

Recent news of thawing Siberian permafrost is also alarming. On 7 September, researchers reported that five times more methane was leaking from melt-water ponds than had been supposed. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Greenland, too, may have crossed an important line: a Nasa study shows that ice loss from the island has doubled since 2004.

None of these findings, however, tells me to stop campaigning for cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions. Even if the cliff is closer than we thought, it still makes sense to take our collective foot off the accelerator. True, if we’re already over the cliff, it may not make much difference – but even just slowing the rate of warming might give wildlife and human civilisation valuable time to adapt, reducing the extent of the mass extinction that is taking place. Yet the fact has to be faced: temperatures are within a degree of their highest levels in a million years, and a new geological era has begun. Whatever we do, a new planet is coming into existence, a planet different from the one we thought we inhabited.

(This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)

The UK government's record on climate change

2006-09-27T14:09:00Z

Judging by their words, our government leaders already deeply understand the gravity of climate change. Here’s Tony Blair, speaking back in 2004: “Climate change is the world’s greatest environmental challenge… a challenge so far-reaching in its impact and irreversible in its destructive power, that it alters radically human existence.” But judge by the government’s actions, and a different conclusion is unavoidable. Not only do they not get it, but their obsession with business as usual is steadily making the problem worse.

To see where a government’s real priorities lie, a good journalist obeys the Watergate maxim: ‘Follow the money’. A government that took global warming seriously would, just for starters, be pouring money into developing renewable power sources which don’t release greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. About £2.5 million has now been committed under the government’s ‘Low carbon buildings programme’, supporting micro-renewables like domestic solar hot water, solar photovoltaics on household roofs and micro-wind turbines.

Sounds like a lot of money, right? Well, now compare it with the £3.7 billion budget for widening the M1 from Luton to Leeds, a project which will by definition worsen global warming by helping to accelerate traffic growth. Divide one by the other, and you get a startling result – the government is spending 1,500 times more on widening one road than it is spending on converting our entire domestic sector to renewable energy. You can express this equation geographically too: given that the distance of M1 to be widened is 250 kilometres, that means that the government spends more on widening 170 metres of motorway than it spends on this entire renewables programme. I find that this brutal reality gives Tony Blair’s warm words above a bit of real-world context.

There are other calculations one can make too. To date something like £6.4 billion has been spent on the Iraq war. In some ways this figure is a gigantic subsidy to the oil industry, given that one of the agendas behind invading Iraq was undoubtedly to secure access to the second-largest oil reserves on the planet. As the former head of the Met Office, Sir John Houghton, has written, climate change “is undoubtedly a weapon of mass destruction”. So Bush and Blair did find WMDs in Iraq – just not the kind they claimed to be after. This £6.4 billion – had it been spent rather differently – could have insulated and made energy efficient every household in the entire British Isles. The carbon dioxide savings this would have delivered can only be guessed at – but would probably be in the order of 20 to 30 percent, much higher than any other country has so far achieved for a climate change policy.

Future spending also betrays very different priorities from the ones claimed by Tony Blair. Depending on whose estimate you believe, replacing Trident will cost something between £30 billion and £70 billion, a phenomenal amount of money by any definition. Never mind all the arguments about nuclear proliferation – if this money were spent instead on solar panels, we could be generating clean electricity from the roofs of every household in the land. That would allow us to generate half, maybe more, of our entire electricity supply cleanly and renewably, allowing us to phase both coal and nuclear power out of our energy mix entirely.

Billions of pounds are also spent on hidden subsidies to encourage the growth of the aviation industry – the fastest-growing contributor to global warming. The exemption of airline fuel and tickets from taxation represents a huge subsidy from the British taxpayer to the likes of Ryanair and Easyjet, and an additional government contribution to worsening greenhouse gas emissions. Blair’s government now wants to see an additional runway at Stanstead, and rapid growth of other regional airports – an increase in demand equivalent to the building of another Heathrow Airport every five years.

Another reality test is that of actual carbon emissions into the atmosphere. Since Labour came to power in 1997, emissions have risen steadily. In 2005 the then environment secretary Margaret Beckett was forced to admit that the government would miss its own CO2 emission reduction target of a 20% reduction by 2010. Beckett insisted that the UK would still make its Kyoto targets (of a 12% reduction by 2008-12), but even this is questionable once emissions from international aviation and shipping are factored into the equation (at the moment they are left off the books entirely, by dint of an existing UN loophole).

The harsh fact remains that the only government policy to have made any significant difference to the UK’s carbon emissions was introduced not by Labour but by the Tories: Thatcher’s determination to break the miners and the subsequent ‘dash for gas’ in the power sector during the late 1980s and early 1990s produced a hefty unintentional cut in CO2 which the Labour government is now claiming as its own. But the reality is that things have only got worse under Blair, however much he personally claims to lie awake at night worrying about the state of the planet.

So what has gone wrong? Like a smoker who goes on lighting up even as the tumours flower in his lungs, the government is addicted to the mantras of business as usual and fossil-fuelled economic growth. Gordon Brown defends his determination to increase airport capacity in his 2005 pre-budget report in precisely these terms: “Additional airport capacity to meet this rising demand [for aviation] will generate benefits for the wider UK economy.”

What might these benefits to the UK economy look like? Perhaps they will look like last year’s flood in Boscastle, where half a village was washed away in a single flash-flood. Perhaps they will look like a repeat of the 2003 heatwave, when hundreds of British elderly people (and tens of thousands across the Continent) met early deaths. Perhaps they’ll look like faster sea level rise around our coast as the Greenland ice-cap melts, or images on our television screens of the last polar bears drowning in an ice-free Arctic Ocean.

Like Al Gore, I can see a retired Tony Blair in future touting his slideshow on global warming impacts to audiences around the world. He won’t be short of material. But like Gore before him, Blair is a politician who missed his chance to tackle global warming when the reins of power were actually in his hands.

By Mark Lynas, first published in the Big Issue

Climate change: the Wolvercote connection

2006-09-27T14:02:00Z

[This article was penned for the Flying Goose, Wolvercote’s newly-launched parish magazine. (For anyone who doesn’t know, Wolvercote is my home village, on the north side of Oxford.) Perhaps because of the positive element, it brought me the best feedback of perhaps anything I’ve written!]

How’s this for a checklist of doom: coral reefs disappearing; ice-caps melting; mountain glaciers in retreat; rainforests burning down; droughts and deserts expanding; starving refugees swarming the globe. It’s the sort of dystopian future that environmentalists like me often talk about, and with good reason. For the past two years I have been making an almost daily pilgrimage down the Woodstock Road to the Radcliffe Science Library, stockpiling scientific reports about our likely future in a globally-warmed world. My conclusions will be published next year in a book called Six Degrees, which details the likely impacts we will all face as global warming slowly intensifies, degree by degree.

As you might imagine, what I have discovered has left me profoundly worried, particularly as some of it already seems to be happening, much earlier than scientists predicted. This July was the hottest month ever recorded in the UK, and the drought is now in its second year. If the situation continues to deteriorate, food production will be endangered across large parts of England, and rivers will dry up, leaving millions of people short of water. As I hauled bucket after bucket of slimy green water out of the canal to keep my thirsty sweetcorn plants alive on my allotment at Upper Wolvercote, it seemed that the dire predictions for the future were already coming true.

But living in Wolvercote also keeps me sane. The big picture may be depressing, but living in a village like this means that I can do my bit in helping prevent global warming. I can cycle up and down the towpath every time I need to catch a train. I can forswear the use of a car, and take holidays within the UK (flying is the worst form of transport because of its very high carbon dioxide emissions). I can shop at First Turn Stores and the Post Box rather than going to big supermarkets, and visit the crowded farmers’ market on Sunday mornings. All of these things point the way to a future which is neither doom-laden nor depressing; a future where people unite to keep the globe habitable by acting together in a multitude of different positive ways.

Nay-sayers often accuse environmentalists of wanting us all to live in caves and wear hair shirts, but my experience in Wolvercote proves them wrong. I enjoy my life a lot more because I feel rooted in my community, and through being secretary of the allotments association I have got to know a fascinating cross-section of people in the local area. Yes, we talk about courgettes and carrots, but we also talk about other things in our lives. Call me a gossip, but I enjoy the interaction so much that I feel it is no wonder that so many people find themselves depressed in our atomised and increasingly anonymous society. Who needs therapy (still less retail therapy) when you can have a good grumble to the neighbours?

So even whilst I spent all day researching the problem of global warming, I spent all evening living and experiencing the solution. We don’t all need to shiver in caves to stop the planet frying, we need to re-learn how to live in smaller communities, to travel less, to eat local foods and to generate our own electricity. It’s much greener to spend all summer lounging around sipping ale at The Plough than it is to sit in traffic on the ring road on the way to out-of-town superstores. Now how’s that for a more positive vision? Cheers!

Global temperatures within one degree of million-year maximum

2006-09-26T18:42:00Z

The Earth’s temperature has reached and is now passing through the warmest levels of the early Holocene, according to research by NASA’s James Hansen and colleagues. This makes the planet warmer than at any time for 12,000 years, and leaves us just a degree shy of the highest temperatures seen on Earth for the last million years. This conclusion illustrates the startling rapidity of the warming trend over the last 30 years.

According to Hansen: “That means that further global warming of 1 degree Celsius defines a critical level. If warming is kept less than that, effects of global warming may be relatively manageable. But if further global warming reaches 2 or 3 degrees Celsius, we will likely see changes that make Earth a different planet than the one we know. The last time it was that warm was in the middle Pliocene, about three million years ago, when sea level was estimated to have been about 25 metres higher than today.”

Hansen et al conclude that global warming of another 1C relative to 2000 will constitute ‘dangerous’ climate change (a reference to the UNFCCC’s Article 2) “as judged from the likely effects on sea level and extermination of species”. Note: this is a downwards revision from the 2C-above pre-industrial target advocated by environmental NGOs and the EU. Another degree above 2000 is about 1.8C above pre-industrial temperatures – and the window we have to avoid a commitment to this temperature rise is probably about five years.

At the current rate of warming (0.2C per decade) we will pass this ‘danger’ level in 2050 – but given that the rate of warming is very likely to go on accelerating, it will probably be a good deal earlier. The real-world impact of this warming can be judged by the fact that isotherms (lines of equal temperature) are currently migrating towards the poles on average at 40 kilometres per decade in the Northern Hemisphere. That’s 4 kilometres a year, or about 11 metres per day – much faster than plant or animal ecosystems are able to migrate and adapt. Hansen and colleagues predict that a continued rapid warming will doom a majority of life on this planet to extinction.

There’s a press release on the NASA site, with illustrations, or you can see the whole paper (as published in PNAS) in PDF here.

March of the clone towns

2006-09-25T13:29:00Z

I had the great misfortune, on returning from a public meeting in Abergavenny this past week, to pass through Hereford. With an hour to kill before catching my connecting train back to Oxford, I was in high spirits as I left the station. The meeting had been packed, and MPs from all three main parties had agreed on the urgent need to reduce carbon emissions. The world finally seemed to be coming to its senses.

Then Hereford brought me up short. The quickest route into the town centre involved negotiating the pavement-less exit ramp of a Morrisons car park, after which I spent several long minutes marooned between six lanes of traffic, waiting for rescue by a reluctant green man. Between Morrisons and the BP garage was a small apple tree festooned with bright-red fruit. I hesitated as the traffic roared by, and then – like everyone else – left it well alone.

The pedestrianised town centre seemed like an oasis at first – until I passed Waterstone’s, Starbucks, McDonald’s, Fat Face, Coffee Republic and countless other chain stores on what passes for Hereford’s high street. After a good half-hour searching in vain for an independent food shop of any description, I ended up queuing for a limp pasty at a fast-food outlet called JB’s (or BB’s, I forget) while young Polish staff in identical blue uniforms struggled to work the colour-coded till and understand customers’ shouted requests against the thump of background music.

Outside, consumers shuffled miserably from one homogeneous retail outlet to another, as if directed by some unseen higher power to have the latest jeans, mobile-phone handsets, computer game consoles and sportswear. Clutching my limp pasty, I joined the solemn procession, only to find that I was hopelessly lost in the trackless corporate wasteland of a town with nothing to distinguish it from any other.

Perhaps I had passed through a warp in the space-time continuum at the air-conditioned door of JB’s, and been mysteriously transported to an identical town in another part of the country. Perhaps I was in Darlington, or Dundee, or Guildford (or Rockville, Utah, for that matter). It’s all the same – the same shop names; the same shuffling crowds; the same alienating uniformity, divorced from time and place, where landscape and history are bulldozed, and the only identity that counts is the brand.

This is “clone-town Britain” – where, according to a little-noticed report of this name released by the New Economics Foundation in June last year, a full 42 per cent of our population centres are already fully converted clones, with a further 26 per cent threatened by the march of sameness. The report says: “A generation grew up in the 1970s and 1980s with the spectre of dreary state-centrally planned east European economies. Now that generation is waking up to realise they’ve been replaced by equally dreary economies, centrally planned by corporations.”

I reorient myself at Argos, where shoppers pore over plasticised catalogues with the peculiar intensity that people in less developed countries reserve for their sacred religious texts. Youths with pinched white faces sit munching on their McDonald’s in the doorway of Virgin Records. As I walk, I wonder what the town councillors thought they were doing when they invited the grim reaper of global capitalism to scythe his way through all the independent businesses of what was once a thriving and distinctive market town. Perhaps they felt they were doing the right thing, much as today’s council in still-thriving Abergavenny seems to think it is doing the right thing by granting a prime town-centre development site to Asda/Wal-Mart, which will blow like a neutron bomb through independent retailers. I am reminded of the Cybermen from Doctor Who, who bleat mechanically: “You are incompatible. You will be upgraded!” as the rhythmic stomp of robotic boots grows ever louder.

In need of some spiritual replenishment, I duck into Waterstone’s (oh, the irony) and buy a small anthology of John Betjeman’s poems. Would that the Bard of Middle England were still around to show us how properly to rage at the march of the modernity, which is turning our towns into clones. He might have hoped, as do I, that the need to regulate carbon emissions will throw a spanner in the works of runaway consumerism. Or he might have simply amend ed his classic poem: “Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!/And Hereford, and Exeter/And Reading, and Dumfries, and Middlesbrough/ And Leicester, and Glasgow . . .”

(By Mark Lynas. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)

Big business begins to 'get it'

2006-09-22T07:55:00Z

Given the pressures of short-term shareholder returns and profit maximisation, I’ve always been very sceptical that big business can ever be part of the solution on climate change – it seems as if corporations will have to be dragged kicking and screaming (rather like the auto-manufacturers in California) towards a low-carbon world.

But are things changing, as individual business leaders begin to ‘get it’? Take the rather staggering commitment by Virgin boss Richard Branson to spend all profits from his airline and rail businesses (an estimated $3 billion over the next decade) on fighting global warming. This is a very different Richard Branson to the one portrayed in George Monbiot’s latest assessment.

Or take Bskyb’s James Murdoch – son of the great man himself – who made a speech at the launch of the latest Carbon Disclosure Project report about how his media company’s job was to “bring the climate change debate into the household”.

All of which make the latest shenanigans regarding Exxon’s funding of climate-denial groups like the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the UK-based International Policy Network seem very much like last year’s story. Things are moving rapidly on – the days when climate denial was a lucrative pastime, given the obstructiveness of big business, seem to be well and truly over.

Drax and Today - I really must protest

2006-09-11T13:37:00Z

Sometimes, even amidst the day-to-day deluge of constant news, two events collide in a way that throws an issue into stark relief. Thursday 31 August brought one of those moments. As dawn broke, hundreds of police officers mobilised around the Drax power station in Yorkshire, assuming battle formations to confront a threat from climate-change protesters to close the plant down.

Radio 4’s Today programme ran an interview with the deputy chief constable of North Yorkshire Police, Ian McPherson, focusing on the threat to law and order that the protest represented, a story that was followed an hour later by a polite interview with the chief executive of Drax, Dorothy Thompson.

That’s odd, I thought. Isn’t the BBC supposed to report both sides of the story? At no point was there any attempt to explore why the anti-Drax campaigners had set up their camp in the first place, or why they should want to do such a crazy thing as shut down a power station that supplies 7 per cent of the UK’s electricity “needs”.

No spokesperson from the Camp for Climate Action was invited to appear on the programme, and the presenters seemed far more interested in how many campaigners might be arrested than why Drax’s carbon emissions are a problem.

Then, ten minutes after the second Drax in terview, the BBC’s environment correspondent, Roger Harrabin, was sitting down with John Holdren, the eminent president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and discussing global warming. Holdren put it bluntly: “We are already experiencing dangerous human disruption of the global climate.” To continue to ignore the problem would, he suggested, be “flirting with catastrophe”, given that carbon-dioxide levels in the atmosphere have already “passed the safe level”.

John Humphrys may have failed to make the link, but the clinking sound I swear I heard must have been the noise of a million Radio 4 listeners’ pennies dropping into their mental slots. If the danger level has already been passed, what the hell are we doing keeping places like Drax open?

So, it is strange that it is the climate-change activists who feel the heavy hand of the law. I was at the Climate camp earlier in the week, and was struck by the continual campaign of police harassment against those entering and leaving the site. Why is trying to stop carbon-dioxide emissions an arrestable offence when the most senior scientists in the world are shouting from the rooftops about imminent catastrophe? Drax is the biggest carbon polluter in the UK, pumping out nearly 21 million tonnes of the stuff each year. Are we mad for wanting to shut the power station down? Or is it the government that is mad for not doing so?

I highly recommend the “biodiversity walk”, which skirts the perimeter of Drax’s barbed-wire fence, and where nature lovers can amble just a few metres from truly colossal mountains of pulverised coal.

You can look up at the enormous chimney, with its ever-present brown plume, and marvel as the conveyor belts chug, dumping 20 tonnes of coal every minute into the power station’s huge furnaces. You can watch as each pile of solid carbon is steadily transformed into gaseous carbon dioxide right in front of your eyes.

I want every anti-windfarm campaigner to take that walk. Every middle-class nimby who whines about their pristine view being spoiled by windmills should be frogmarched around Drax, and forced to confront the insanity of the energy status quo. Remember, people: every megawatt of power that you prevent being supplied from a clean source such as wind means a megawatt of power supplied from a dirty source such as Drax.

Imagine a Martian, here visiting Earth on a weekend break. The Martian hears how our planet’s atmosphere is heating up; how we know it is heating up; how we know, too, that heating the atmosphere is certain to have disastrous consequences; and how we also know that carbon-dioxide emissions are chiefly responsible for this heating. Imagine the Martian’s con fusion as he sees the police advancing towards the country’s biggest CO2 emitter, not to shut it down, but to protect it. Imagine his befuddlement as he tunes in to the Today programme that strange morning, and hears the presenters not draw the oh-so-obvious conclusion.

“Am I mad?” the Martian would ask himself. “Or are they?”

(By Mark Lynas. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)

Holidays be damned

2006-08-28T13:40:00Z

It seems pretty obvious to me that those of us who presume to lecture others about the urgency of climate change have a duty to be – as Mahatma Gandhi put it – “the change you want to see in the world”. Not just because of the emissions themselves, but because we need to be able to demonstrate that what we demand of everyone, we already apply to ourselves. I’d like to be able to report that our climate-concerned political leaders are doing just this, but I’m afraid I again bear bad news.

I’d be the first to admit that no one’s perfect. Well, one man is – the veteran climate campaigner Mayer Hillman. In his book How We Can Save the Planet, Hillman draws up a table with which each reader can calculate his or her carbon footprint. Skip down to the section on air travel, and the conclusion is sobering. A round-trip flight from London to New York costs the climate about four tonnes of CO2, four times the entire annual carbon budget he considers sustainable for a single person. Hillman, now 74, has taken this message to heart and completely given up flying. He recently refused, albeit after much soul-searching, to visit New York to attend his son’s wedding, and is reconciled to perhaps never meeting his new grandchild. Such is the true price of protecting a stable climate.

The CarbonNeutral Company, on the other hand, offers a more reasonable price for a clear conscience: £8.90. If you sign up with its offset scheme, you can buy a “natural woodland portfolio” whose trees will, in theory, soak up the carbon emitted during your flight, allowing you to have your carbon cake and eat it. I say in theory, because there is no guarantee that the trees in question will not release the carbon again one day when they rot or burn. The CarbonNeutral Company is one of several private firms selling offsets for climate-damaging activities. Not all the projects involve forestry; some focus on installing energy-efficient cooking stoves, for example, in places like Bangladesh and Honduras. Though unarguably beneficial for the recipient communities, it is far from clear that these projects really neutralise the impact of flying – for one thing, it is almost impossible, by definition, to quantify their net emissions impact.

I should make clear that some air travel is almost certainly necessary in the all-important cause of building up the climate-change movement. I don’t begrudge Al Gore a single plane trip if he is armed with his powerful slide show. It’s leisure travel I’m after.

So which of our saintly environmental preachers can cast the first stone? Not Tony Blair, this summer’s most egregious climate criminal. Blair’s round trip to Barbados pumped greenhouse gases equivalent to 4.3 tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere, and his strange obsession with speedboats bumps up this shameful total even more. Not exactly responsible behaviour for a man who once warned that “there will be no genuine security if the planet is ravaged by climate change”. The Prime Minister claims to be setting an example by installing low-energy light bulbs in Downing Street, but, by my cal culations, he will need to put in nearly 200 to make up for his Barbados jaunt.

Nor is David Cameron’s environmental record – like his colourful summer shorts – whiter than white. The Tory leader’s holiday in Corfu would have racked up the warming equivalent of two tonnes of CO2. That’s a lot of cycling to work (even without an official car trailing behind). The Environment Secretary, David Miliband, performed somewhat better – he flew to Ireland, and insists on his blog that the flight’s impact has been “offset”, though he does not acknowledge the drawbacks of this approach.

Leaders of environmental groups fare better still. Friends of the Earth’s Tony Juniper went to Cornwall, while Stephen Tindale of Greenpeace, according to his press office, “hasn’t been abroad in years”. The Guardian columnist George Monbiot strayed only as far as Wales.

I know what you’re thinking. Where did I go on my holidays? True, if I’d been to Barbados or Corfu I wouldn’t be in any position to write this diatribe. That’s why I only went to Cornwall. By train. So there.

“How We Can Save the Planet” is published by Penguin (£8.99)

(By Mark Lynas. This article first appeared in the New Statesman.)