Red, Green, and Blue

The Indian government released a report recently which predicted a fourfold increase in carbon emissions output in the next two decades. According to the government report, India’s carbon emissions would increase to 4 to 7 billion tonnes from last year’s level of 1.4 billion tonnes by 2031.

India’s environment minister, however, preferred to point out another finding in the report. The report predicts almost 100 percent increase in per capita emissions but the minister noted that even with a 3.5 to 4 tonnes per capita output it would remain below the global average. The globally agreed limit of per capita emission for sustainable development is 2 tonnes.

That is the argument that the Indian government has put forward frequently in order to dodge international pressure to reduce its carbon emissions. India maintains that its per capita carbon emissions are way below those of the developed countries and thus it would be unfair to ask it to set mandatory emission reduction targets. Read the rest of this entry »

September isn’t usually the silly season, but this week’s protests are all weird, wonderful, whacky or … missing!

No protest for polluted Peruvian town

On 31 August the union supporting workers at the currently suspended Doe Run smelter in Peru said they would not be protesting after all. They had planned  roadblocks and other protests the following day, to force the national government to fund the reopening of the struggling plant, but so few people turned up to a planning meeting that they are re-thinking their strategy.

Doe Run Peru’s smelter at La Oroya was closed in June when banks cut off credit and the government is refusing to extend the time-frame for a environmental cleanup, which could allow new loans to be negotiated. The plant must meet a 1 October deadline to clean up local conditions and establish better implement environmental controls but it says it lacks the money to fulfil its environmental contract and wants an extension of the deadline to mid 2010.

Around 3,000 employees and a further 16,000 indirect jobs are linked to the plant, which is why local union leaders want action on reopening the plant, even though the town of La Oroya is considered one of the most polluted on the planet.

Naked protest for PR company

On 1 September the London offices of Edelman’s were invaded by six naked environmentalists. The campaigners were protesting the PR firms involvement with Eon who are planning to rebuild the coal-fired power plant at Kingsnorth with two replacement ‘cleaner coal’ plants.

The protestors, some male and naked, some female and wearing knickers, superglued their wrists together in the lobby of the firm, while other protestors scale the roof of the building. The were removed by police carrying blankets.

Rocky protest in Australia

Latvala of Finland took a 2.2-second lead in the 4 September stage of Rally Australia in New South Wales but the first day’s racing was marked by protests.

Environmental activists had already forced the cancellation of two of the 15 stages when state police found boulders on the road at one rally stage. Later that day, the first car to take that stage was pelted with rocks. The driver, Hirvonen, was unharmed but the stage was stopped as there were concerns for the safety of the drivers and spectators.

Two groups, ‘No Rally’ and Peacebus, had already staged a campaign, trying to get the World Rally stage in Australia stopped because they claimed it would damage environment and frighten wildlife in the remote areas in which it is being held, a local government officer also tried to get a court injunction to prevent the rally but failed.

Rally car courtesy of Repco Rally Australia

Utility withdraws from the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, the troubled coal industry group

Duke Energy, the North Carolina-based electric utility announced on Wednesday it would be leaving the clean coal lobbying group, the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity (ACCCE), over differences with the organization’s opposition to clean energy and climate legislation being considered by Congress.

Officials from Duke Energy said that “While some individual members of ACCCE are working to pass climate change legislation, we believe ACCCE is constrained by influential member companies who will not support passing climate change legislation in 2009 or 2010.”

Duke said that ACCCE’s position is not consistent with Duke Energy’s work to pass economy-wide and cost effective climate change legislation as soon as possible. Read the rest of this entry »

If it were possible to make perfect public policy, we would not be in the middle of our nation’s 111th Congress. Alas, there is no “set it and forget it” formula for governing. Add in complex scientific questions, global-scale economics and technological innovation, and you have the energy and environmental policy challenge: how do we succesfully incentive and subsidize renewable fuels (or penalize emissions and fossil fuels)? Feed-in tariffs pose problems. Cap-and-trade has proven thorny. Green power options still need a lot of fine-tuning.

One universal difficulty is the continuing cost gap between renewable and fossil fuels. Creating an incentive program that works within the prevailing market - even a heavily regulated one - without interfering with normal market operation is very difficult when the price points are so far apart. Internalizing some of the costs of burning fossil fuels would help close that gap, and that is what cap-and-trade is all about: promote and subsidize clean energy and put downward pressure (both economically and through command and control) on dirtier fuels. Read the rest of this entry »

Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt movement and winner of the 2004 Nobel Peace Prize, criticised many forestry projects this week.

She was giving the keynote address at the second World Agroforestry Conference in Nairobi and her concern was that imported tree species often became invasive and when they did so, two things happened. Either the trees took over the ecosystem and then, when they were felled, left nothing behind, or they damaged elements of the environment that were essential to local people and wildlife. She used the example of eucalypts, which are often planted in African agroforestry programmes and said, ‘they [the trees] are over promoted for commercial reasons. These trees are good for beauty but consume a lot of water when they are planted along rivers, wetlands and water shed areas.’ Maathai fears that such plantings cause havoc in Kenya’s complex biodiversity. Read the rest of this entry »

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce wants to force the Environmental Protection Agency to hold a “trial” on climate change. Characterizing it as the “Scopes monkey trial of the 21st century,” the trial would come complete with witnesses, cross-examination, and a judge to “rule” on whether human activity is contributing to dangerous climate change.

Opponents to the idea assert the idea all but abandons the scientific method, upon which modern civilization depends, in favor of what Brenda Ekwurzel, a climate scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists says is reminiscent of “the Salem witch trials, based on myth.”

Read the rest of this entry »

It is strange to be reading so many stories about premium-priced green power programs and net metering programs for excess power right alongside stories about utilities performing record numbers of shut-offs for non-payment.

Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s Camp for Climate Action is actually a training event, taking place within sight of the City of London and preparing activists for the UN Climate Conference in Copenhagen.

The camp aims to provide volunteers with information on four aspects of Climate Change:

1) education
2) direct action
3) sustainable living
4) building a movement to effectively tackle climate change.

Tar Sands damage Canada via British involvement

It’s that second point that has brought five representatives of the Cree First Nations to the camp – they are highlighting the involvement of British corporations in the tar sand extraction taking place in Canada. A spokesman from Fort Chipewyan said that ‘British companies such as BP and Royal Bank of Scotland … are driving this project, which is having such devastating effects on our environment and communities.’

The Cree representatives say that the tar sand mining destroys ancient forestry, contaminates water systems with toxins and disrupts wildlife, which then threatens the aborigine lifestyle of the First Nations. The spokesman said it was ‘… the biggest environmental crime on the planet’ and that it was able to continue because very few people in Britain realised it was happening. BP and Shell oil companies are both involved in extracting oil from the tar sands of Alberta – the oil is removed by using water under intense pressure, a process which uses up natural resources, requires high levels of energy and produces higher CO2 emissions. Royal Bank of Scotland is now part-owned by the British government following its financial difficulties and is being targeted by the Cree representatives because it has been a major funder of tar sand extraction schemes.

Climate Camp Mystery Location

The exact site of the camp is not yet known although campers are already arriving in the Greater London Area – the village will ‘spring up’ overnight on Wednesday and open on Thursday: the organisers fear the police may try to prevent the camp being built if they have advance warning of its location.

Alberta courtesy of fotographix.ca at Flickr under a creative commons licence

Subsistence farmers in Bolivia have been given help to change their technology – moving away from pipe and sprinkle irrigation systems to an aeons-old technique of hand-built raised clay platforms that are surrounded by canals.

The platforms, called camellones, can be up to eight feet above the level of the fields they support, have two purposes: they protect seeds and crops from being washed away by floods and the water stored in the canals can be used when the river system is low, to irrigate the crops.

The camellone construction system is pre-Columbian dating back to around 1000BC to AD1400, which shows that communities, then, as now, faced the problem of flooding succeeded by drought. And this may have been one of the causes of collapse for those ancient cultures, because when workers were diverted from building and maintaining agricultural systems to joining armies, there may have been famines. In modern day Bolivia, serious floods in the past three years have caused more than £119 million of damage to agricultural systems. It’s hoped that with climate change driving more river flooding and more drought, reverting to old technology could help communities cope with water levels rising even as rains reduce.

Around 400 families have been supported by local and international charities to create camellones in five areas to grow corn, cassava and rice.  The first results look good, as the Amazonian floods have now receded, and where the nutrients in the soil would normally be washed back into the river, the platforms have remained above the floods and conserved the rich vegetative topsoil that can grow better crops than the sandy subsoil.

The downside of ancient systems

If you’re thinking it all sounds too good to be true, you could very well be right. This kind of preliminary report on an agricultural or technological ‘throw-back’ is often followed by a bleak silence. The reasons for this are often more political than environmental and include:

1) The cost of investment in building and maintaining such systems, which is subsided by charities for three or five years and then the charity funding moves on and nobody is motivated to carry on the work
2) The transfer of local power from hierarchical systems (which are often based on government or international aid and support) to individuals who may be low ranking, illiterate and unable to drive forward change outside their own behaviour
3) The failure to recognise that while subsistence farmers claim to want to be self-sufficient, such projects tend to recruit the young, healthy and confident: all it takes is illness in the family, a child to win a scholarship or a vehicle or house to need substantial repairs and that family is likely to move away from growing crops to eat back into growing cash crops that generate income to meet their needs.
4) Calls on local labour – if a road or resort is built nearby, all the available labour may be pulled from agriculture to work on the cash-generating project.

What such projects need is a longer term investment, along with social support to ensure that the community recognises that the new systems can deliver everything that cash crops or illegal forestry did.

Bolivan market courtesy of PJFurlong06 at Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence

It’s well known that politics is dirty, but recently, anti-climate bill tactics have sunk to a new low:  forging letters written by senior citizens against the Waxman-Markey climate bill.

The Markey Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming is investigating the fake letters sent by the lobbying firm Bonner & Associates claiming the elderly were opposed to the climate bill for fear it would raise utility costs. Five more suspected forgeries were released today bringing the grand total to 58 letters under investigation.  Read the rest of this entry »