Us British are a funny old bunch of people. To us, things like queuing, having half-hour long conversations about the weather and all rituals surrounding the art of making a cup of tea are part of the fabric of everyday normal life. To the rest of the world they are, at best, eccentricities, and at worst, something a lot ruder. A certain European friend of mine sometimes refers to Britain as “the Island”, and although she means this in the literal geographic sense, it strikes me that this description works on many, many more levels.
In 2008, as part of the Climate Change Act, our honourable government announced that it intended to cut the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions by 80% below 1990 levels. Most of the rest of the world is planning on maybe perhaps cutting their emissions by 50% by 2050 if everyone firstly agrees to do so and secondly if everyone actually looks like they might make a respectable attempt at doing so. In this context, the UK’s policy on climate change looks a tad over-ambitious, if not slightly schoolmarmish (you get the impression that the need to “take the lead on climate change”, i.e. boss the rest of the world around, was discussed at great length when the Climate Change Act was first thought up). Anyway, we’ve somehow managed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 21% below 1990 levels, so we’re on the right path. In The UK Low Carbon Transition plan, those ambitious fellows at the Department for Energy and Climate Change aim to have 40% of our electricity coming from “low carbon sources” by 2020. However, heed the wording of this because they plan to get only 30% of this 40% from renewable energy sources. There are plans afoot to install carbon-capture technology at coal-fired power stations, but there are also plans afoot to build new nuclear power stations.
Nuclear power is like marmite; you either love it or you hate it. It has to be said that in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, it is one of the cleanest, most economical ways of producing lots of electricity. The trouble is that, as a society, we have started to regard readily available electricity as a right, not a privilege. I am the last person on earth who would want to be thrown back into the dark ages (she says, whilst using her laptop to update her internet blog, sitting next to an electric lamp with a cup of tea made using an electric kettle). There are a lot of very negative aspects to nuclear power, such as toxic nuclear waste that hangs around for centuries, the possibility of leaks and accidents, not to mention what would happen if nuclear material fell into the wrong hands. Just this week, a scientist working at the Cern laboratory in Switzerland, which also houses the Large Hadron Collider (of Angels and Demons fame), was arrested for having links to al-Qaeda. But we can’t turn the clock back 500 years and start using fat lamps and wood fires again just to cut our greenhouse gas emissions. Therefore, it seems logical that, for the time being at least, nuclear power may be one of the only ways we can quickly and drastically cut our greenhouse gas emissions whilst keeping the technological revolution going full steam ahead. The technology behind renewable energy needs much more development before it can be regarded as a practical alternative to anything which generates a large amount of toxic substance, be it greenhouse gas emissions or rocks that could give your unborn child nine fingers instead of ten. Currently, your average wind turbine can power about five houses (unless you’re the leader of the Conservative party, in which case it can power one house, one party manifesto and several right wing-ish newspapers for an infinite amount of time, it seems). But, here in windy, rainy Britain we are sitting on a veritable green goldmine of renewable energy sources, if only we had a way to tap them effectively. The development of renewable energy technology has the potential to create jobs in the short term, create UK investment and income in the long term and could potentially mean that one day we can proudly decommission our last toxic nuclear assets and run entirely off renewable energy. Nuclear energy may be the short-term answer, but renewable energy is still the long-term solution.
However, all this um-ing and ah-ing over where our future electricity will come from might well be in vain, because the government seems to be suffering from an extreme case of Iwanttohavemycakeandeatitisis. In other words, they seem convinced that we can have prosperity, rocketing growth and low carbon emissions. In particular, I’m thinking about the government’s policy on aviation. In 2003’s The Future of Air Transport, the Department for Transport infamously earmarked London Heathrow and London Stansted airports for expansion. Ever since, it seems they have been hell-bent on insisting that the Aviation industry must continue to grow. Predictions for London Stansted alone estimate that 68 million passengers will pass through its check-in desks every year by 2030 if BAA have their wicked way and build a second runway on prime Grade 2 arable farmland. Here’s the problem: Aeroplanes run on aviation gas, which is a fossil fuel. More growth in the aviation industry = more aeroplanes in the sky. More aeroplanes in the sky = more filthy greenhouse gases being guffed into the atmosphere by said aeroplanes. Not to mention the fact that scientists are still frowning and scratching their heads over the actual effect of emitting greenhouse gases at high atmospheric altitudes. As recently as September, the Climate Change Committee, who are the government’s climate advisors, warned that if aviation is to be allowed to grow at its forecast rate, the rest of the UK economy will have to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 90% by 2050 instead of 80%. A 90% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050? Now you’re talking silly numbers.
Being an island has its advantages. We’re hard to invade; we, erm, have a historic navy, lots of weird fish dishes like jellied eels, and you’re never a million miles away from the coast, and the chance of a fun cheesy day out at a bucket-and-spade seaside town like Southend. But the effect of taking a lead, or, as others might see it, going it alone on such a crucial global issue such as Climate change might not be as positive as we hope. We might, maybe, succeed in our ambitious plans; we might, maybe, inspire other countries to take the initiative to cut their own greenhouse gas emissions by a similar amount. Or our government could simply end up looking like they’ve collectively got their heads in the clouds at the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this December. Stay tuned.
xx
p.s. Sorry, this one's far too long
p.p.s. In other news, Cadbury's Dairy Milk has gone fairtrade, yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!
Wednesday, 14 October 2009
Monday, 5 October 2009
Political Hot Air, part 1
I once heard that politicians get into politics to help themselves, not other people. Whilst on the face of it this seems odd, as politics is all about people, if you think about this for maybe 30 seconds it pretty much explains everything politicians say or do (ahem, moat maintenance). This also explains the saga that is climate change policy, which has been running for the last twenty years or so.
This is a tale of a big country (the US), a big problem (the amount of c.r.a.p. said country was/is belching into the atmosphere), and big greedy business (I’m feeling mean so I’ll pick on ExxonMobil, or as we know them in the UK, Esso). In 1992, at a big piss-up in Rio (sorry, I mean Summit) (told you I was feeling mean), various individuals with some semblance of authority in the countries they respectively represented agreed that Something Needed To Be Done About Climate Change. This was over a decade after the original scientific evidence, which first suggested climate change was occurring, was published. Needless to say, in between glasses of taxpayer-funded wine, the politicians at Rio realised that they needed to look like they were doing something about this phenomenon that the scientific community was increasingly getting its knickers in a twist over. After Rio, everyone went home and apparently it was one heck of a party over there because they all forgot about that thing they agreed to do for the next 5 years. In 1997, however, the hangover finally wore off and most of the known world agreed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which committed its signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.
Then, in 2001, lead by the idiot king of piss-ups, Bush, the US decided to withdraw its support of the Kyoto Protocol. They were rapidly followed in 2002 by Australia. At the time, the US was one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard rightly said he wasn’t going to bother with greenhouse gases unless the US, and developing countries such as India and China, started bothering with them too, as there was no point. One obvious problem here is that rich countries, which (should) have sound infrastructure, lots of research and development, access to new technology and pots and pots of money, are the original cause of climate change. It was our industrial revolutions, and our addiction to all things hydrocarbon since then, that has resulted in such a large amount of choking gas floating about above our heads. Should the wealthy west turn around to the rest of the world, which we have mostly pillaged and colonised and messed up anyway, and deny them the chance to build their economies and make money in the same way that we made ours by asking them to cut back on their emissions to the same extent that we would cut back ours?
One company that grows fatter by the day living off the west’s oil addiction is ExxonMobil, or Esso. Fair enough, there are a lot of oil companies who make a mint out of this habit of ours, but Esso is a particularly fiendish culprit as they are, to put it politely, a bunch of climate change-denying greedy ignorant eejit scumbags. Here’s an interesting fact for you: ExxonMobil donated the tidy sum of $1,086,080 to the Republican party at the start of Dubya’s first election campaign. Here’s another interesting fact: up until recently, ExxonMobil dismissed the science behind climate change as a load of hot air (it would seem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report has now persuaded them otherwise). It is well known that ExxonMobil actively lobbied Bush to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol as soon as he was elected president. Just think what little men in white lab coats could have achieved in if ExxonMobil had spent half as much time, energy and money funding research into renewable energy sources and energy efficiency as they did denying that climate change existed.
The problem with global warming is that it is global. Up until recently, every miserable little country on earth has carried on as if it were an island; as if what went on at home didn’t have the slightest effect on the world outside. That is not to say that some, such as our own very very very eager Mr Ed Miliband, are not trying to boss around both folk residing in our green and pleasant land and folk living in....other places when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of Political Hot Air....
xx
This is a tale of a big country (the US), a big problem (the amount of c.r.a.p. said country was/is belching into the atmosphere), and big greedy business (I’m feeling mean so I’ll pick on ExxonMobil, or as we know them in the UK, Esso). In 1992, at a big piss-up in Rio (sorry, I mean Summit) (told you I was feeling mean), various individuals with some semblance of authority in the countries they respectively represented agreed that Something Needed To Be Done About Climate Change. This was over a decade after the original scientific evidence, which first suggested climate change was occurring, was published. Needless to say, in between glasses of taxpayer-funded wine, the politicians at Rio realised that they needed to look like they were doing something about this phenomenon that the scientific community was increasingly getting its knickers in a twist over. After Rio, everyone went home and apparently it was one heck of a party over there because they all forgot about that thing they agreed to do for the next 5 years. In 1997, however, the hangover finally wore off and most of the known world agreed to sign the Kyoto Protocol, which committed its signatories to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by at least 5% below 1990 levels by 2012.
Then, in 2001, lead by the idiot king of piss-ups, Bush, the US decided to withdraw its support of the Kyoto Protocol. They were rapidly followed in 2002 by Australia. At the time, the US was one of the biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the Australian Prime Minister John Howard rightly said he wasn’t going to bother with greenhouse gases unless the US, and developing countries such as India and China, started bothering with them too, as there was no point. One obvious problem here is that rich countries, which (should) have sound infrastructure, lots of research and development, access to new technology and pots and pots of money, are the original cause of climate change. It was our industrial revolutions, and our addiction to all things hydrocarbon since then, that has resulted in such a large amount of choking gas floating about above our heads. Should the wealthy west turn around to the rest of the world, which we have mostly pillaged and colonised and messed up anyway, and deny them the chance to build their economies and make money in the same way that we made ours by asking them to cut back on their emissions to the same extent that we would cut back ours?
One company that grows fatter by the day living off the west’s oil addiction is ExxonMobil, or Esso. Fair enough, there are a lot of oil companies who make a mint out of this habit of ours, but Esso is a particularly fiendish culprit as they are, to put it politely, a bunch of climate change-denying greedy ignorant eejit scumbags. Here’s an interesting fact for you: ExxonMobil donated the tidy sum of $1,086,080 to the Republican party at the start of Dubya’s first election campaign. Here’s another interesting fact: up until recently, ExxonMobil dismissed the science behind climate change as a load of hot air (it would seem that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Fourth Assessment Report has now persuaded them otherwise). It is well known that ExxonMobil actively lobbied Bush to pull out of the Kyoto Protocol as soon as he was elected president. Just think what little men in white lab coats could have achieved in if ExxonMobil had spent half as much time, energy and money funding research into renewable energy sources and energy efficiency as they did denying that climate change existed.
The problem with global warming is that it is global. Up until recently, every miserable little country on earth has carried on as if it were an island; as if what went on at home didn’t have the slightest effect on the world outside. That is not to say that some, such as our own very very very eager Mr Ed Miliband, are not trying to boss around both folk residing in our green and pleasant land and folk living in....other places when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. Stay tuned next week for Part 2 of Political Hot Air....
xx
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