UK Will cut emissions by a third

So, now we all know. The bodge-it is finalised, and the renewables sector gets an allocation of some £1.4 Billion to boost the UK's investment in projects to reduce our carbon emissions.

I love the confidence of the headline "Greenhouse gas emissions will be cut by a third in world's first carbon Budget" in today's Telegraph. Note that key word 'will'. Oh, and it is a legally binding target - "Alistair Darling committed the UK to cutting greenhouse gases by 34 per cent by 2020 in the first legally binding "carbon budget" in the world."

Now just what does 'legally binding' mean in this respect? If we fail to make the cuts by 2020, does AD get sent to prison?

But best of all in this article is the typo (well, I hope it is a typo!) - "He also found £45 for small scale renewables like wind turbines on houses and £25 million for community heating schemes"
It looks like he doesn't have much faith in small scale wind turbines - only £45!

It was this little section that intrigued me the most though - "Some £405 million will go towards encouraging so-called 'green collar' jobs in the environment industry through boosting manufacturing in low carbon goods like solar panels." Now I have been unable to find anything that details just where that £405M will go, but it sounds like a rather tasty gravy train to get on board if you can.

Move over Canute?

Obama to regulate 'pollutant' CO2

While there is much to ponder and possibly even commend behind some of the rhetoric (followed by sensible enviROI+ actions, one trusts) that 'inspired' this headline, I have to say the words themselves really seem as daft in combination as almost any I have seen from the political classes, and the often way too compliant media that serve them.

I had thought Richard Black one of the less narrative enhancing of the national broadcast news performing monkey troupe, but this one puts him right back down in the 'barely worth paying heed to' class with such as Susan Watts on both scientific comprehension and reporting objectivity.

The 'Great British Refurb'

News of this announcement was leaked last week so most of the content, as summarised in The Guardian, is not overtly surprising.

"All (anyone want to bet that that's not true?) UK households will have a green makeover by 2030 under government plans to reduce carbon emissions and cut energy bills.

Cavity wall and loft insulation will be available for all suitable homes, with plans to retrofit 400,000 homes a year by 2015. Financial incentives for householders will also be available for low-carbon technologies such as solar panels, biomass boilers and ground source heat pumps, paid for by a levy on utility companies."

So is this all new? There seems to me to be little difference from any of the previous initiatives, none of which have proved to be particularly successful. There are a couple of points worth noting though:-

Firstly, yet again, these are seen only as targets. Another all process initiative with little productive output other than the favoured box-ticking exercises?

Secondly, if you read it carefully, you will see that the funding is to be provided via a levy on the utility providers, which, as previous attempts at similar initiatives have shown, simply means that, in the end, we pay for it out of our own pockets anyway!

As my Granddad used to say years ago - 'You get nowt for nowt in this life'.

Let's hope that we genuinely get some real 'doing' this time, rather than the usual hot air, spin and target playing. I'll keep my fingers crossed, though I'm not particularly hopeful.

More doom and gloom

These reports seem to be coming so thick and fast at the moment it is becoming quite easy to, well, simply avoid reading them, but this, from the New Scientist, is short and quite illuminating.

The essence of the piece? Even if we stopped all fossil fuel burning right now, the planet could take over a thousand years to recover from the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

Carbon Negative Cement?

Sound a bit far fetched?

Given that cement, the backbone of almost all of mankind's basic building blocks, accounts for some 5% of global CO2 emissions (that's more than the entire aviation industry), any breakthrough in reducing the cement industry's emissions ought to be very welcome.

Well, step forward a new cement from Novacem that not only reduces CO2 emissions during production, it also absorbs CO2 as it hardens, arguably making it carbon negative. Full story from Aggregate Research.

"Novacems cement, based on magnesium silicates, not only requires much less heating, it also absorbs large amounts of CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative. "

It will be very interesting to see just what the EnviROI of this new product might be, but it sounds to me like it could be a BIG winner, not just for Novacem, but also for the environment.

A nail in the coffin of old king coal?

That's what some new scientific research reported by SoftPedia suggests; that coal is far more damaging in terms of CO2 emissions than is burning petroleum or gas.

"by burning fossil fuel, power plants emit 40 percent more deadly CO2 than facilities using natural gas or crude to generate electricity."

"by using oil and gas alone, humankind may be safe from the effects of global warming for a long time".

So we all have to give up burning coal. Hmmmm, I don't think it is going to be quite that simple, even though the evidence is slowly building up - see TreeHugger.

Twenty Twenty Twenty (Deal or No Deal?)

With all the targets under discussion over in Poland, the number twenty does seem to appear with amazing regularity, as noted in this piece from the FT.

Talking about how to get the message across about global warming, especially now we are officially in a bad recession, the author makes a lot of good points, and there is little that one can disagree with.

Just love the concluding statement .... "The way to mobilise the masses is to recast the argument. Opportunity sells a lot better than do hair shirts."

And from the same publication, an interesting comment on the future of electric cars, or, perhaps the lack of one!

Update:
The deal in Poznan is finally agreed - see the Indy.

Looking through just what has been agreed, I can't really see anything much different to what was 'agreed' before. But it is interesting to note that Ireland has been offered 'concessions' in order to swing a second referendum vote on the Lisbon Treaty in its favour. Hmmm, the Irish get a second chance to vote on it and we still can't have even one?

And the EU deal is not enough, and too watered down, says OxFam.

Update - 15/12/08:
Hmmm. The Poznan 'deal' seems to have rather wound up Caroline Lucas! From today's Guardian letters.

And it looks like the 'deal' isn't going to do much to save the planet's remaining rain forests - reported in eGovMonitor.

Surprised?

At what?

That the EU has backed down on the CO2 emission targets for new vehicles.

Well, I, for one, am not at all. It just shows what power big automotive industries still have over our Pols, elected or otherwise.

• CO2 goals relaxed
• Car makers now have until 2015 to hit 130g/km
• Niche car makers such as Jaguar Land Rover exempt

Full story from What Car.

OCO to monitor CO2

Reported on Economist.com, the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) [hey, isn't that yet another CO2 molecule?], to be launched in 2009, is going to gather and monitor planetary wide data with the objective of providing a high resolution global map of CO2.

It all sounds highly intriguing and extremely complex, but, hopefully, will provide some much needed genuine empirical data.

Just love the conclusion ...... "Understanding what might happen is essential. Even if we don’t like the answers."

EU new car CO2 rules

The EU's rules on all new cars averaging CO2 emissions of under 130 g/km now look as if they are not going to come to pass, as the EU's own internal legal committee has declared the new rules to be illegal, according to this from AutoWired.

Oh, the joys of large scale bureaucracy. You simply couldn't make this up, could you?

Time to join the 350 club?

This article from Axis Of Logic is a very sobering comment on the state of our biosphere's atmosphere, specifically with regard to the increasing levels of CO2, and the consequences seen already on rainfall patterns. The article repeatedly uses the phrase 'without historical precedent' to make some very key points, and suggests that mankind is approaching dusk on planet earth in terms of human history.

Well worth a read, and maybe, if you feel strongly enough, time to join the 350 club?

The natural CO2/temperature balance

Probably the most important piece of climate research for years.

For some 25 years scientists have argued that there must be an entirely natural mechanism that regulates the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and the planet's temperature. It is this assumed natural mechanism that is the basic evidence that skeptics use as a primary argument against mankind having anything to do with climate change.

Well, according to new research published in the journal Nature Geoscience and reported by Reuters, there is evidence that there IS indeed a natural mechanism in operation.

So, there IS a natural CO2/temperature cycle. Should all the climate change 'deniers' start celebrating?

Well, errrmmm, no. Why? Because the evidence from Antarctic ice indicates that the natural cycle prior to the industrial revolution shows that "The average change in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the last 600,000 years has been just 22 parts per million by volume, Zeebe said, which means that 22 molecules of carbon dioxide were added to, or removed from, every million molecules of air." I.e. All of the pre-industrial warming (vineyards in Greenland and Northern England) and cooling periods (mini ice age etc.) have occurred naturally over long periods of time with a variation in CO2 levels of only 22 ppm!

But, since the industrial revolution, "the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has risen by 100 parts per million". "That means human activities are putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere about 14,000 times as fast as natural processes do"

And the rate of increase in CO2 levels appears to be speeding up.

The natural mechanism will eventually remove the excess CO2 from the atmosphere, but we are talking about something that would take several hundred thousand years. As we appear to be accelerating the natural mechanism by some 14,000 times the norm, I rather suspect that mankind does not have that sort of time frame in which to address the problem!

It will be interesting to see how widely this gets reported. My guess is that as it is pretty bad news, it will generally get ignored. Let's see.

Addendum 29/4/08:
As I suspected, nothing really mainstream at all - the only coverage I can spot so far is from News.Com.AU, TreeHugger (the first to state what this research actually means - global warming IS man-made) and RedOrbit. I'll keep checking though.

What a hummer!

This from WhatCar had me smiling somewhat.

Seems that Hummer have made huge inroads into improving the efficiency of their engine for the Hummer H2 (Yours for only £48,995!!).

The new engine has reduced CO2 emissions 20%, some 100g/km. Sounds great, doesn't it? But the new engine still emits a stonking 412g/km!! Oh, and its fuel economy has improved from 13.2 mpg to 16.2 mpg.

Still, I reckon it demonstrates that even the really 'dirty' players in the auto market are starting to take note that humanity needs to do something about reducing carbon emissions.

Bringing back the man with the red flag?

Sometimes you come across something which at first glance seems 'okaaaaayyyy' but with a deeper read is actually so badly thought out that it makes you think 'how on earth did they come up with that?'

This is one such, from the Telegraph over the Easter break.

"Speed limits of just 15 miles-per-hour are to be introduced on major roads in planned new towns across the country as part of an effort to reduce global warming."

Ok, so when the internal combustion engine is only efficient at reasonably high RPM speeds, then just how does this reduce global warming? See, driving at maximum 15mph, probably in 1st or 2nd gear in most vehicles, will dramatically increase fuel consumption (many vehicles at low revs will manage only about 10mpg), it will dramatically increase pollution (vehicles running at low revs emit more none-combusted fuel and waaaayyyy more CO2 (and even worse, carbon monoxide), not to mention the fact that increased journey times (well, in many, but obviously not all cases) would generally increase fuel consumption too.

But it's only proposed for new 'eco-towns', where everybody will be living within "within 400 yards of public transport stop and 800 yards from shops." Sorry, but without some amazingly high housing packing density, that sounds much more like a small village to me. Oh, just realised, most villages no longer have public transport, pubs or shops now anyway, do they?

Despite being proposed for the new 'eco-villages' [sorry, 'towns'] only, it has, of course, brought the usual mass howls of protest and declarations of lunacy from the majority of posters. If, (and it really is a big if), the public transport system is planned, put into place and operated, correctly, it might just work. If not, then it will, without doubt, create more environmental pollution.

But then, not much that our Gov puts into place seems to ever work out too well; so what are the chances of these 'eco-towns' schemes being a success? I'm not overtly optimistic.

New build or refurb?

Now it seems to me to be reasonable common sense that the refurb and renovation (i.e. Re:Use) of any building ought to be less costly to the planet than building new from scratch, but, until this from Inside Housing, reporting on research undertaken by the Empty Homes Agency,I'd never seen any actual figures.

The CO2 "produced to build a new home is 4.5 times that needed to refurbish a long-term empty home".

"the carbon impact of the government's new homes target could be cut by 10 million tonnes if part of it was met by reusing and upgrading England's 288,000 long-term empty homes."

Sounds like a pretty reasonable win-win situation to me, but, despite this evidence, I really don't see our Gov reviewing its 'build - build - build' (even on flood plains) policy, do you?

The sub 100 club

Well, the sub 110 club really, as only the Bluemotion is actually less than 100g/km in terms of CO2 emissions. Nevertheless, it's quite a useful summary of the lowest emission vehicles that are available, from MotorTorque.

And all are VED and Con Charge exempt!

No suprise at all

Given that our Gov cannot even decide what actual CO2 emissions are (see previous post), it comes as no surprise, too, that they are failing to meet their own internal CO2 emission reduction targets, as reported in the Guardian.

"Apart from the Ministry of Defence, which significantly reduced its emissions in 2005/6 following a part privatisation, central government now emits 22% more than it did in 1999, according to the sustainable development commission."

Looking good to achieve the set targets then? (Even though they are probably not sure what the targets actually are.). I think not!

"It recommends that each department urgently reduces its annual energy budget and only uses air travel when there is no alternative."

Hahahahahahaha! Sorry, I'm rolling about laughing at that one! It seems to me that when it comes to the great and good in our Gov, air travel IS the chosen option at ALL times EXCEPT when there is no flight available to a specific destination.

To be fair, sometimes there really is no option; after all, it a damned long way by train from Kings Cross to Bali or Washington.

ADDENDUM 1 (from Junkk Male):

To be fair, it seems they are on the case. PR as provided in full, with a few highlights and comments by yours truly:

New centre of expertise for cutting carbon emissions across Whitehall

Government response to Sustainable Development Commission's Sustainable Development in

A new Centre of Expertise is to be set up to help Whitehall departments achieve their targets for reducing carbon emissions and waste across the government estate.
Details of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement (CESP) were unveiled as the Government published its response to the Sustainable Development Commission's latest report on how the Government is meeting its own sustainable objectives for tackling climate change.
Today's annual Sustainable Development in Government (SDiG) report by the independent watchdog and adviser on sustainability shows a small improvement in the Government's overall performance against its key ‘eco’ commitments – including a four per cent fall in carbon emissions across the estate by the end of 2006/7. However, the Commission called on departments to urgently build on initiatives already taken to ensure targets can be met and to demonstrate that the Government is leading by example on sustainability.
The CESP will be set up within the Office of Government Commerce (OGC) alongside the Government's Chief Sustainability Officer – a new post to be appointed to take forward a culture of change across all departments in sustainable operations and procurement.
Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O'Donnell, who took personal charge of work in this area last March, has made sustainability of the government estate one of his four priorities for the civil service. Sir Gus said:
“The Civil Service must be fully committed to sustainable working, reflecting the increasing priority placed on environmental responsibility by the public we serve. We must find new and innovative ways of raising the bar for sustainable working, planning and procurement.
“There is still a long way to go but the establishment of the Centre of Expertise for Sustainable Procurement marks the culmination of significant progress over the last twelve months. This central co-ordination and guidance will help all government departments work to deliver sustainable working practices for the future.”
Environment Secretary Hilary Benn said:
“In the year that has elapsed since the period covered by this report, departments have been working to cut emissions, waste and water use and to increase recycling levels.
“The measures we're announcing today will help us to do better in the year ahead.”
Nigel Smith, Chief Executive of OGC, also spoke about the way forward to ensure sustainable practice and procurement. He said:
“Government is taking the issue of sustainability very seriously, but we recognise that we need to do a lot more in order to meet the targets we have set ourselves. We can only do this if we build on the best practice that exists across Government, and if we have good and robust information, so that we know what's happening, what impact our actions are having and where the gaps are. I'm therefore delighted that the new Centre for Expertise is to be established in OGC, and that all Departments are committed to supporting its work.
“OGC has a strong track record in achieving quantifiable results across Government, based on robust data, clear standard-setting, and close and collaborative working with Departments to achieve delivery. We believe we are now well-placed to lead real change.”
The Government accepts in principle all the recommendations made by the SDC, and among the steps that will now be taken are the following:
* From April 2008 all departmental heads will have a specific objective to meet Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE) targets, against which their performance will be assessed
* A major Green Government IT programme will be launched in the summer - Another one?
* From 2010 all central Government departments will be included in a pioneering emissions trading scheme, the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC), which will compel them to improve their energy efficiency. This mandatory emissions trading scheme will cover around 5000 public and private organisations, including government departments, retailers, banks and local authorities, which combined account for 10 per cent of the UK economy's emissions
* Action to achieve the work space efficiency standard of 12 square metres per FTE will be published in April 2008
* From this summer all new vehicles used by ministers and permanent secretaries (except a small number exempt for operational reasons) will have carbon emissions below 130g/km
* The use of bottled water for meetings and other official business is to be phased (er, can't they just, um, stop?) out across the whole government estate by the summer
In its response to the report, the Government accepts the need for more better and more accurate data against which the progress of departments can be measured. A major validation exercise to upgrade the quality of data provided to the SDC and the baselines used to assess performance has been undertaken in the past two months.

1. The 2007 Sustainable Development in Government (SDiG) report, published today, assesses the performance of central Government operations for 2006/07 against the targets of the Framework for Sustainable Operations on the Government Estate (SOGE).

2. The Government's formal response to the 2007 SDiG report can be found at

I must confess that I only just got around to this by virtue of rolling on the floor laughing silly at the notion of the creation of another 'Centre of Expertise', mind. That those highly talented, highly paid folk in various departments need yet more folk in new ones to help them all do, er, less, is choice.

Addendum 2: (Dave)
Ooooo-errr. A response from Hilary Benn, no less, to an earlier article claiming that our Gov was issuing 'misleading' figures on the overall UK's CO2 emissions. "It is nonsense". So that's OK then.

If we don't know what our emissions are now ....

... how the hell can we commit to set reduction targets?

This from Public Servant Daily defines the problem. It seems our Gov is consistently using two different measures for calculating CO2 emissions, neither of which agree with each other (by as much as 12%!!). Sooooo, OK, just how on earth are we supposed to achieve our targets then?

Oh well, they are only targets, aren't they. And targets, being entirely movable, malleable and stretchable, don't seem to be of much relevance (other than in self promotion and in the 'crowing' stakes) in the great Gov scheme of things nowadays.

I suppose if you are not even sure where the football pitch is, it doesn't really matter how much you move the goalposts.

Insane?

Every now and again you find something that attempts justification which is very difficult to comprehend, occasionally you come across something where such attempted justification appears insane. This from Reuters is one such. It attempts to justify whaling because the CO2 emissions associated with whaling are less than those associated with rearing beef!

What's next? Someone suggesting cannibalism as a low CO2 emission activity? Mind you, (tongue firmly in cheek), the planet is rather overpopulated isn't it?

Whale meat again,..... don't know where,.... don't know when..........

The start of a major slanging match?

That would appear to be what this article from TravelMole is indicating.

It is probably the first major salvo fired by the aviation industry at the shipping industry, which is now recognised as being a major CO2 emitter in its own right.

The thing is, all finger pointing and cross industry sniping will achieve, at the most, is nothing. But I'm sure that this is not the last time it will happen.