A secure and sustainable energy future?

In a week of news on sustainability, and on a day of news on our future energy supply, I am reflecting on the British people's awareness of what we use energy for and their expectations of where it will come from in future.

Eric Pickles launched the Government's new National Planning Policy Framework this week, retaining its "presumption in favour of sustainable development".  While its intention is to empower local authorities to implement local plans, the new planning framework risks both commercial development of environmentally sensitive habitats and incoherent implementation of national infrastructure imperatives. The problem is that sustainable development means different things to different people and, when it lies in the hands of local planning departments, consistent interpretation seems unlikely.

The "Planet under Pressure" conference has also taken place in London this week and has today published its "State of the Planet Declaration" . While the passion and concern of the 3,000 delegates in London and the further 3,000 online participants is beyond question, I think the turgid and inaccessible language of this declaration is a missed opportunity to create widespread awareness of the challenges we face in maintaining a sustainable habitat for humanity and all life on earth.

The next piece of today's news is, to my mind, a good thing that could be better.  DECC has published provisional figures for Britain's greenhouse gas emissions in 2011, showing a welcome reduction on 2010 figures.  Home heating emitted 22% less carbon dioxide than the previous year - but just look at the weather we had in those two years!  December 2010 was the coldest December in recorded history, while 2011 started and ended with truly extraordinary warmth.  As DECC notes, the mean temperatures experienced here in the first and last quarters of 2011 were 2.2°C and 4.1°C, respectively,  warmer than the previous year.  This fall in domestic heating emissions is great but is no more sustainable than the weather.  As the Americans say, we have to invest in "winterizing" our homes, businesses and public buildings.

Emissions from electricity generation also fell from 2010, by around 6%. This is attributed both to lower demand (3% less than 2010) and to greater availability of our nuclear generating capacity: the consequence was a 17% fall in gas usage for power generation and an 11% rise in nuclear power.  Some interesting statistics are buried in the Tables (remember that these figures are provisional).  In 2011:

• Coal accounted for one-quarter of our electricity supply but two-thirds of our CO2 emissions from power stations.  
• Renewables generated more than 5% of our electricity supply.

CO2 emissions from transport (including domestic flights) were almost flat, falling by just 1.4% from 2010 and remaining within half a percent of 1990 levels.  A growing share of a diminishing pot.   

In this morning's latest headline, Eon and Npower's owner, RWE, announced their withdrawal from the UK nuclear new build consortium, Horizon.  Amid cheers from respected environmental organisations including WWF (an organisation I have supported since their inception over 40 years ago) and Friends of the Earth, who see nuclear power as an unmitigated environmental disaster, there should also be caution.  Our demand for electricity in this country will certainly grow in the coming decades, as population and consumption (the march of the gadgets) both increase and as heating and transport move from fossil fuel combustion to low carbon electricity.

But where will this low carbon electricity come from?  So many concerned nature lovers tell me of their abhorrence of wind turbines, which they see as despoiling this green and pleasant land.  Even offshore wind farms are described as an intrusion into coastal views that have been uninterrupted since the dawn of time.  What I need to know is where these custodians of our beautiful landscape imagine we will get our energy from in the coming decades - a period that will include the rest of my life and the best years of my children's lives.

Youth negotiators asked a critical question at the international climate change negotiations in Bonn in 2009:  "How old will you be in 2050?"  That's the date by which Britain has committed in law to cut its greenhouse gas emissions to 20% of 1990 levels.  The Committee on Climate Change (CCC) has set a trajectory to meet this commitment, in our national carbon budgets.  This requires us to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2027 and effectively to decarbonise our electricity generation by 2030.  This is seen as achievable through a combination of renewables, nuclear power and carbon capture and storage (CCS).  Yet the National Trust and almost everyone who has a window with a view opposes further deployment of wind energy, energy and engineering companies are walking away from new nuclear construction and the Government remains unable to invest its promised £1 billion in a CCS demonstration project because no power generator believes it is affordable, achievable or that there will be sufficient return on investment.

It is for this reason that DECC's new Minister sneaked out his announcement, at midnight on Friday 16 March, that investors in new gas-fired power stations will be able to run them unabated - ie., without CCS - for the next 33 years!  The Committee on Climate Change wrote this week to Ed Davey asking him to reflect on the CCC's carbon budgets, in the light of DECC's granting of these "grandfather rights" to gas generators, and to set clear decarbonisation objectives in the current Energy Market Reform.

What is missing from this story of shortsighted squabbling and failure to act when we must?  Leadership, that's what.  If you manage to read that far, page 6 of today's State of the Planet Declaration includes the succinct phrases, "We must show leadership at all levels.  We must all play our parts".  In Annexe 2, Ban ki-Moon declares his intention to appoint a chief scientific advisor on global sustainability.  Let's hope he picks someone who is not only a scientific virtuoso but also a master communicator.  Without an eloquent and attention-grabbing figurehead to spell out the choices we must make, the squabbling will continue to cover our inaction and the public will continue to believe that their iPads, Sky boxes and microwaves run on pixie dust that won't hurt a fly.

Climate Safety - a clear and present danger?

George Monbiot's weekly column in the Guardian and at monbiot.com is always bitingly sharp and accurately argued from the recent references that he shares. This week he began by attacking Bush's final acts of environmental vandalism as he slips away into obscurity.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2008/11/25/one-shot-left/

However, Monbiot quickly moved his argument on to recent claims that runaway global warming is much more likely and more imminent than any follower of the IPCC would have imagined. 

Having just read the excellent book by Wally Broecker and Robert Kunzig, "Fixing Climate", I am well aware that many climate changes in the historical record happened incredibly quickly.  I understand that positive feedbacks mechanisms like the lubricated flow of icesheets from meltwater drainage and the release of methane from melting permafrost and Arctic waters have the potential to raise sea levels in decades rather than centuries or millenia. These are the tipping points of dangerous climate change that we have heard so much about since Al Gore's inconvenient lecture in 2006.  What I didn't know was the sheer magnitude of the changes already in progress and the climate impacts still to come - even if we ceased all manmade greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow - as the planet's air, land and water all return to equilibrium under the insulating blanket that we have already discharged into our skies.

I ws sufficiently sceptical of Monbiot's claims to begin trawling through his online references, where I soon found myself in a world so much bleaker than Broecker's. It will take me a while to assimilate this new information and to decide whether this is reality rather than paranoid delusion. However, I would like to share the references here and encourage you to review them and draw your own conclusions.

First, a scientific paper published this year by Jim Hansen et. al. which assesses what level of atmospheric CO2 we need to target in order to retain climatic conditions similar to those that have held throughout human history. 

http://arxiv.org/abs/0804.1126

In dense shorthand of technical abbreviations, satellite observation and ice-core histories, Hansen and colleagues assess the correlation between previous, sudden climate switches and all the possible drivers for these events (e.g., greenhouse gas levels, aerosols, solar irradiance, ocean circulations, etc). 

They draw the unambiguous conclusion that our current atmospheric CO2 level of almost 400ppm wil result in several metres of sea level rise and other dangerous climate shifts that will render many populated areas uninhabitable and undermine any efforts to feed the world's people or protect our remaining biodiversity. They advocate rapid stabilisation at no more than 350ppm CO2 and assert that this is inconsistent with ANY future use of coal without carbon capture.

Having digested this, I was prepared to move onto a beautifully assembled work from the Graduate School of the Environment (GSE) at the Centre for Alternative Technology (CAT), published in collaboration with a charity called the Public Interest Research Centre (PIRC). 

http://www.zerocarbonbritain.com/ 

The centrepiece of this new website is their 2007 report of the same name, giving a powerful and cohesive evaluation of the steps needed to totally decarbonise Britain's energy infrastructure within 20 years. Central to their vision is a system of Tradeable Emissions Quotas (TEQs), to be issued free to individuals and businesses and used or sold as the holders see fit. Numbers of TEQs issued will decrease gradually and drive our investments and behaviour towards carbon-neutral alternatives.   The animation on their home page gives a short, sharp and accessible summary of the challenge and is well worth viewing.

Another incisive home page animation can be seen on the iconic 350 website, which seeks to become the hub of a new global movement to bring about Hansen's vision.

http://www.350.org/

Lastly, I come to what Monbiot was really telling us. Tomorrow, he will be on the panel of an open meeting in London to launch the new report from PIRC, called "Climate Safety".

http://climatesafety.org/

Try as I might, I could not download the report or its conclusions from the PIRC website. It will, however, be available from Amazon for around a fiver and I trust that an electronic version will also be available after the launch event. I am gutted that I cannot be at the meeting on Thursday but I look forward to hearing about it from anyone who can get along.

While this climate of fear about climate seems far from everyday sustainable living, it actually needs to engender the sense of urgency that even now is missing from almost all the debate in Britain, whether in Parliament or in the pub. We're all doing something, we all know we should be doing more but we wonder whether it will make any difference and we're kind of waiting to be told what to do because it's the Government's job to lead on this sort of thing isn't it?

Well, that would be nice but the reality is that it's down to us. You and I have always been part of the problem and, however much we're doing to tread lightly, we remain part of the problem. If you've read this far then you, like me, are also determined to be part of the solution. 

We don't know all the elements of this solution but our journeys of discovery can be guided by the process of Continuous Improvement, the quality methodology pioneered by Joseph Juran, who died this year at the grand old age of 103.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/03/business/03juran.html

Continuous Improvement starts with understanding the issues ("get the facts"), measuring where we are starting from (baseline analysis) and determining the "vital few" actions that will make the biggest difference (using the "Pareto principle"). We then work to establish relevant improvement targets and we continue measuring, to monitor our progress towards these targets, as we implement those actions. Ultimately we are rewarded by celebrating success.

New facts, such as those presented by Monbiot and the websites I have reviewed here, challenge us to go round the loop again, to reassess the targets we have set and think more creatively about the actions needed to reach them. Those actions with the highest impact will, like sudden climate change,  also be discontinuous, step changes - revolution rather than evolution - but this does nothing to diminish the importance of each citizen's responsibility and duty to reduce their own carbon footprint progressively.  I am certain that personal awareness and individual determination will remain at the heart of our response and form the essence of all effective actions to keep our climate safe.

At this point, I feel we need to think very creatively indeed. The "Zero Carbon Britain" report opens with a perfectly chosen quote from President John F. Kennedy.

"The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by sceptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were."