Toxic Greenwash Alert

So unless you’ve taken a spontaneous trip to Jupiter’s Moons in the past week, you can hardly have failed to hear that the Government has finally published its Comprehensive Spending Review, a.k.a. how it plans to reduce government spending to 1920 levels. The ConDems have claimed that they intend to be the greenest government ever, and if you believe what each respective culprit promised us in their party election manifestos, you’d certainly be forgiven for mistakenly thinking this was the case (for a quick reminder, see Who’s the Greenest...Yellow, Red or Blue?).

I have to admit; years of seeing the environmental lobby sidelined, laughed at and generally ignored in UK politics have left me with a deeply ingrained sceptical streak. This doubt was fuelled by the presence of bodies such as Natural England, the Carbon Trust, the Energy Saving Trust, the Environment Agency and the Forestry Commission on a leaked list of Quangos whose future was being seriously re-considered. All of the above have been spared Osborne’s Axe, although some are to undergo “substantial reform”. However, it seems Chris Huhne, the Energy and Climate Change secretary, managed to get his department spared – relatively – from the worst of the cuts, with only 5% annual budget cuts over four years. Certainly, the Department for Energy and Climate Change got off more lightly than the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, which faces 8% annual budget cuts, which adds up to 29% by the end of the spending review period. But a cut is still a cut, so where is money going to be saved? Is the devil in the detail, after all?

George Osborne pulled a green rabbit out of a hat last Wednesday by announcing that a key election manifesto pledge for both the Conservatives and the Lib Dems, the creation of a Green Investment Bank, would go ahead. Much heralded and trumpeted in his hour-long dismembering of the state in the House of Commons, Osborne knew that to the working single mother about to lose her child tax credit, £1bn for the transition to a low carbon economy was going to sound like an awful lot. What Osborne didn’t mention was that the creation of the Bank is to be delayed until 2013, and that the £1bn of public money to be put up to fund the Bank is drastically short of the £4-6bn that many in government such as Chris Huhne and Vince Cable, backed by independent analysts and a timely report from Ernst & Young, believe is needed to kick-start the transition to a low carbon economy by 2025. It is not even clear if the Green Investment Bank will be an independent, stand-alone entity or whether is purse strings will be tightly controlled by Westminster. However, there is a vague reference to extra funding coming from “private companies and the sale of government owned assets”. So, to sum up, £1bn of public money is to go towards an entity, of some kind, in 2013, to fund the decarbonising of the UK’s infrastructure, even though everybody who knows anything about the finances behind greening the economy say that up to six times that amount is needed if we’re to really encourage businesses to invest in low carbon infrastructure projects on any meaningful scale.

Far be it for me to suggest that big business is hard done by, but many in the business world are less than impressed by the announcement that money collected from the Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme will no longer be recycled back to the companies taking part. The scheme, in which companies paid money to the Treasury on the understanding that the money would be repaid to them if they reduced their carbon emissions, will now simply be a means of collecting extra revenue to support public finances. Already, this is being called a “stealth carbon tax”. Unfortunately, businesses are businesses and Tory Governments are Tory Governments. It is hard to see why a business should now reduce its carbon emissions if there is no financial support available to do so. Yes, I know they should cough up their own money from their own profits to finance their own bit towards the Greater Good, but a business is a business at the end of the day and, in my experience, if you expect them to do something for nothing chances are you’ll end up bitterly disappointed. And yes, at the end of the day a Tory Government is a Tory Government (and make no mistake, this is a Tory Government) and if you expect them to cough up money for anything, you will again be bitterly disappointed.

Another of Wednesday’s announcements which betrays the fact that the Tories are firmly in the driving seat of the ConDem-ing Cuts was the revelation of up to £1bn of funding for a Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) plant at one of the four proposed new coal power stations. Forget for a moment, if you can, that building new coal power stations, albeit with CCS technology attached, was a Conservative Election manifesto pledge. For a minute, put out of mind that coal is the dirtiest of the dirty when it comes to fossil fuels, and that the Government has just axed every single last Quangos advisory committee on CCS. Ignore, for a few precious moments, that every single CCS expert in the country is incredibly sceptical about the feasibility of making coal power plants immaculately clean simply by tacking on a CCS plant. To understand what the real world thinks of this particular shade of greenwash, please note that on Wednesday morning, just before the state’s public guillotining in the House of Commons, the energy company E.ON announced it was shelving plans to build a new coal power plant in Kingsnorth, Kent. E.ON had planned a new coal power plant at Kingsnorth for years, and after the government last year announced a ban on the building of new coal power stations unless they were fitted with CCS technology, E.ON entered its Kingsnorth plans in the competition to build the first of four new coal-fired power plants that were to trial the use of CCS on a commercial scale. On Wednesday morning, E.ON decided that current market conditions were not good enough to justify building Kingsnorth. Does this perhaps imply that if there had been more funding available from government for CCS, market conditions might have been less of an influencing factor? E.ON are unfortunately not answerable to the electorate, although it would have been interesting to know exactly how much of an impact Osborne’s proposed £1bn fund for CCS had on E.ON’s decision to scrap its plans for Kingsnorth. Is it possible that Osborne’s magic figure of £1bn is the figure that he has decided will sound sufficiently large enough to the policeman whose job is on the line in order to convince him that the government is still doing something about climate change, but is in fact the figure that, in the real world, qualifies as The Bare Minimum?

As much as it makes us choke on our tea that £1bn really doesn’t go that far in the great battle against our warming climate, it is, unfortunately, the sad truth, and as much as anything a mark of how much trouble we’re really in. And as much as it stings that such amounts are still being spent on the environment when we’re faced with half a million public sector job losses, £7bn cuts in welfare spending, a drastic decrease in social housing, and a rise in the retirement age, not to mention the possibility of sliding back into recession, we need to remind ourselves that much, much more could be lost if we sit back and do nothing in the fight against climate change. Let’s just hope that Osborne’s flimsy greenwash does a little more than just act as a fig leaf for the so-called greenest government ever.

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A note on the impromptu hiaetus

As you may have noticed, there has been quite a gap in my nonsensical moan-a-thons on The Noisy Tree of late. This is due to a combination of me trying to develop some new ideas for the blog, including a potential website move, and my trying to lead about four lives at once, and not giving myself enough time to research and write articles that don't entirely massacre either the english language or the art of journalism.

Anyhoo, this is just a note to say please bear with me, and stay tuned for some exciting changes in the (hopefully) not-too-distant future!

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Exactly how far would you go to keep your lights on and your iphone charged?

Aw. Pretty, isn’t it?

This is a picture of the Canadian Rocky Mountains, somewhere between Lake Louise and Jasper (sorry, it was a long journey, I lost track of where exactly we were). You are looking at the playground of grizzly bears, black bears, elk and mountain lions, to name but a few of the weird, wonderful, and downright dangerous creatures that Parks Canada went to great lengths to warn us about. Not far from this spot is the Athabasca Glacier, part of the Columbia Icefield, the last remaining fragment of a mighty ice sheet that once covered most of Western Canada’s mountains . Here’s a random fact about glaciers that you won’t know unless you’ve been near one: they “sing”. When the wind blows through their many narrow cracks and crevices, there’s a high pitched humming sound, a bit like that which results from blowing on the rim of a glass bottle half filled with water, except on a somewhat larger scale.

The Athabasca Glacier, the Columbia Icefield and Jasper National Park, in which they are situated, are facing one heck of a threat. For the last 125 years, the Athabasca Glacier has been retreating, due to, yep; you guessed it, a warming climate. This monument to the last Ice Age has lost half its volume in the last century, receding a total of 1.5 km¹. Now I know that doesn’t sound like a lot, in the grand scheme of things, and yes, I know that there’s no way we could know how much the glacier might have receded if the planet’s thermostat hadn’t jumped an average 0.76°C in the last hundred years . But when you consider the distinct possibility that this enormous river of ice has been hanging around quite happily since the end of the last Ice Age, that is, for the last 10,000 years, it puts this recent melting into perspective. And, if you really trust the author that much, which you shouldn’t by the way, you can take my word that the walk between the sign that marks the position of the glacier’s foot in 1950 and the actual foot of the glacier is a lot longer than the walk between the sign for the glacier’s foot in 1900 and the sign for 1950.

In an ironic twist, the Athabasca glacier lies in the same province as the scene of what some environmentalists consider to be the most destructive mining project on Earth. You may or may not have heard mutterings about the Canadian Tar Sands before, probably from people you would normally dismiss as eco-nutters, extremists who wear hemp jumpers and claim to be friends with Swampy (that guy that lived in a tunnel to stop a road being built years ago – whatever happened to him, eh?). Well, prepare to suspend your disbelief. Tar sands, which are basically oily sand deposits, are what the likes of BP and Shell have resorted to mining to keep up with our society’s insatiable hunger for the thick black stuff.

In a way, it seems almost unfair to blame the oil companies for wanting to exploit the second largest proven oil reserve in the world – their business, at the moment, is oil, and Alberta Energy reckon there are 173 billion barrels of the good stuff that are economically recoverable from the pristine Canadian wilderness . However, the phrase “economically recoverable” hints at one of the biggest problems with Tar Sands oil production. One reason that the Tar sands have not been exploited up till now is because the mining and production process is extremely energy and resource intensive, and thus costly. So in order to justify the cost of exploiting the Tar sands, oil companies such as BP and Shell have been sitting tight waiting for the price of oil to rise³. Frankly, I’d rather they did because we all know about the almighty screw-ups BP alone is capable of when it tries to cut corners and save a few pennies (*cough* gulfofmexico *cough*). Anyway. The National Energy Board Canada’s estimate for the production of oil sands bitumen for 2015 is 474,000m³ per day, based on the scenario of a sustained high oil price and an economically attractive environment, both of which seem likely³. Try and keep that colossal figure in mind...

As mentioned before, oil sands production is incredibly energy and resource intensive. Extraction alone consumes between 3 – 5m³ of water per m³ of bitumen produced . So, producing 474,000m³ of bitumen a day would use up at least 1,422,000m³ of water, every single day. That is a lot of water. And where does all this water come from? The Athabasca River, which is fed by our friend, the 10,000 year old singing glacier. Believe it or not, the amount of water being used is not the biggest problem - how waste water is dealt with reads like something out of a bad horror film. Currently occupying an area of 140km² are a collection of “Tailings ponds”, where waste water that has been previously used in the mining process is held in storage⁴. Too toxic to release back into the environment, these giant lakes of industrial soup have been shown to contain traces of lead, arsenic, benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, which, depending on their structure, can be highly carcinogenic⁴. Expensive to maintain, it is not known whether any of this poisonous potion has leaked back into the environment; however, an alleged explosion of rare cancers in Fort Chipewyan, a small town downstream from the largest oil sands mining operation, has raised several eyebrows and even more questions . A study conducted in 2009 by Alberta Health Services concluded that the incidence of some cancers in Fort Chipewyan – most significantly, cancers of the digestive, blood and lymphatic systems – were higher than expected, however not dramatically so⁵. Still, in a town with a population of around 1,200, 51 cases of cancer in 47 people between 1995 – 2006 does sound like a statistic that should be ringing governmental alarm bells to me⁵.

At the risk of frying dear reader’s brain with figures, here’s a few more for you to mull over whilst you ponder exactly how far we as a society are prepared to go to throw more fossil fuels on the proverbial bonfire – Canada’s Kyoto emissions target for 2020 is 449,202kt CO₂e³. The Tar Sands mining operation’s greenhouse gas emissions estimate for 2015 based on a sustained high oil price and an economically attractive environment is 80,740kt CO₂e, in the absence of mitigation³. Alberta’s own individual greenhouse gas emissions target for 2015 is, even in the case of a low GDP growth rate, 257,536kt CO₂e, which in 2015 would be 57% of the Canadian Kyoto Protocol emissions target³. I wonder if the government of Alberta realises that a) they’re not the only province in Canada and b) they’re not much of a population centre, with more people living in the big cities of Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. Fair targets, or a bow to big business? Here’s something to tell you exactly how seriously greenhouse gas emissions targets are taken in these parts. The Tar Sands mining operation would have to cut CO₂e emissions by 66% in order to stay even within 20% of Alberta’s greedy slice of Canada’s total Kyoto emissions target³. Here’s to daydreams and puddles of water that used to be 10,000 year old singing glaciers.

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1. Parks Canada: Athabasca Glacier and the Columbia Icefield - http://www.pc.gc.ca/eng/pn-np/ab/jasper/visit/visit32.aspx

2. IPCC summary notes for policy makers - http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-spm.pdf

3. Climate Change Policy and Canada's Oil Sands Resources - http://www.wwf.org.uk/filelibrary/pdf/oilsands_report.pdf

4. Carbon Capture and Storage in the Alberta Oil Sands - http://www.co-operative.coop/Corporate/PDFs/Tar%20Sands%20CCS.pdf

5. Cancer Incidence in Fort Chipewyan study - http://www.albertahealthservices.ca/files/rls-2009-02-06-fort-chipewyan-study.pdf