Environmental Thinker

Time to start your own Schindler's list

2010-01-09T20:13:00.007Z

What interesting times we live in. The biggest bargain in history is sitting there right in front of our nose and nobody knows or cares about it. Everyone now has the opportunity not only to be a part-time philanthropist but also to save human lives by the dozen. Everyone can afford it but can they understand the need for it? And can they overcome the weight of social conventions to achieve it?

Let's hope they can.

We all have a pretty big impact on atmospheric pollution. Atmospheric pollution in turn drives temperature change which drives ecosystem destruction and species extermination. Each one of us contributes to climate change which in turn kills the poorest people in the developing world, the ones who do not have the means or the resources to live off of anything else but what they can grow. According to a scientist's calculations, the average Brit is responsible for around 9-10 deaths over the course of their lifetime in the developing world through their carbon emissions (5). If we can kill through negligence can we not save lives simply by caring?

One of Nature's most potent lines of defense against excessive build ups of atmospheric pollution are forests. Whether we can see the relationship between our own consumption and deforestation or not, forests are being cut down at breakneck speed to make room mainly for palm oil plantations used in 40%+ of the products we consume in supermarkets and soya plantations to feed cattle. When we buy mundane stuff like crackers or cheeseburgers, our wants are contributing to deforestation and climate change.

The Amazon has reduced in size by 20% over the past 20 years. It accounts for 20% of the world's supply of fresh water and oxygen. It is also one of the world's most important carbon sinks helping to stabilize the climate. If we lose the Amazon, we lose mankind. This, essentially, is the message that the Prince's Rainforest Project is attempting to pass on to us.

The 2005 drought in the Amazon is a fine example of what happens when an ally in regulating the climate becomes an enemy. In 2005, the Amazon released in the atmosphere the equivalent of 5 billion tonnes of CO2. That was more than the combined emissions of Japan and Europe. Let me stress this: that was more than the emissions of 900 million people who also happen to be some of the world's biggest emitters of CO2.

The Amazon released that much carbon into the air because instead of absorbing 2 billion tonnes of the stuff as it usually does through tree growth, trees shrank as a result of the heat wave and released carbon in the process. The drought was due in part to deforestation but also to climate change. The Amazon ecosystem is extremely sensitive to changes in ambient temperatures and very poorly equipped to deal with higher temperatures. As the forest is cut down, every other major ecosystem is affected because The Planet's ability to regulate the carbon cycle is weakened. And as temperatures rise as a result of excess CO2 in the atmosphere, the entire Amazon rainforest could burn down. With it, 20% of the world's supply of fresh water and oxygen would go as well as a gigantic carbon sink that helps to regulate the climate and facilitates life.

Only recently, charities have began to realize that there was a way to stop deforestation simply by insuring that the rainforest is worth more alive than dead (1). The most effective means to protect the forest it has been found has been to entrust it to the locals and to give the locals the means to look after it. (2) A large fund for the Amazon rainforest has already been set up by Norway. (3)

I first found out about the importance of these schemes when I read eminent climate scientist James Lovelock's Vanishing Face of Gaia. In his book he said that perhaps the only means us commoners had to make a difference was to support charities protecting rainforests. He mentioned two: Cool Earth (4) and the Prince's Trust.

So at Christmas, I jumped on the opportunity to make a difference. I made my Christmas and birthday present shopping list a no brainer and spent £30 buying half acres of rainforest for everyone I wanted to buy Christmas presents for. I was hoping that with a bit of luck I might inspire others to buy their relatives some rainforest too but I was kidding myself. I spent a little above £400, insuring that 1820 tonnes of carbon stayed where they were, offsetting the equivalent of almost 2 Brit's lifetime emissions and based on Craig Simmon's calculations, saving the lives of around 18 people in the developing world (5). In addition, the certificates told me that I had protected 22 mature trees, 95 saplings, 6 endangered species of animals, 322 types of plant and over 11,000 species of insect and worm. That's per £30 certificate. Not bad for so little money hey? The gift of life, what more could you offer to someone for Christmas?

Not even my parents or my wife respected my wish to receive some rainforest for Christmas.To them, if a gift wasn't something that you could touch, it wasn't good enough. Saving someone else's life didn't capture their imagination or maybe they just didn't know about the link.

The only person I inspired to do the same thing was a committed green. When I explained it to him, he straight away saw the value of buying rainforest for others for Christmas. When you've spent £4000 on solar panels offsetting 2 tonnes of carbon a year and you can get an offset of 130 tonnes for £30, you kinda realize that it's good value for money. Even when you compare it to a one tonne offset from installing renewables with say Pure, it's still 56 times cheaper. 23 pence per tonne, what a bargain!!!

But for others the bargain seemed decidedly too good to be true. One chap said that he had talked to his sister about the possibility of getting her some rainforest for Christmas only to be told that con men were selling rainforest on the markets in Kingston. People apparently, were being sold the same batch of rainforest 3-5 times. He was right I found out later (6). Just because some con men are taking advantage of people's empathy doesn't mean that everyone supplying the service is involved in one great big con.

I don't like wasting money. As a matter of fact, I tend to hoard it as I like to have something set aside for a rainy day. So you can imagine that I wasn't going to spend my hard earned money on a con. Prior to buying all my rainforest, I rang Cool Earth to inquire as to exactly what was the nature of the protection that was being offered to me and I was satisfied with the answer.

Cool Earth uses my £30 to place the half acre I buy into a local trust protected by legislation with the same power as EU and US style legislations. The land is put in a trust and the trust belongs to Cool Earth. Locals are then paid to look after it. The area I've bought is subsequently monitored by satellite every 5 days. What's more the half acres sold are located in areas at the frontier of deforestation and protect many more acres behind them. If anyone decides to cut the forest down, my £30 can be extracted and placed to protect another area. This however, is highly unlikely to occur as the rights to the trees on the land belong to the Trust and the Trust would have to sell it to speculators for any legal deforestation to occur. Of course, the Trust has been set up so that it cannot do that. So the only threat is illegal logging which is addressed by the satellite monitoring and the monitoring by the locals on the ground. All of this gives me about as good a guarantee as I could hope for in an area threatened by all sorts of profiteers and ruthless corporations.

I know my relatives are going to hate me and find me boring but I couldn't care less. As of now, I am going to use the social convention of buying presents for birthdays and Christmas to systematically buy rainforest for my loved ones. The other reason I want to be doing that is that it bothers me that every £1.25 I spend on presents generates one kilo of carbon. The average Brit's annual consumption footprint is 3.7 tonnes and a lot of that comes from Xmas shopping.

I hope that others will see the wisdom of doing the same. We all have the awesome opportunity of saving someone else's life for £30 and of preserving an incredibly important ecosystem for future generations. At such a low price, we should all exploit every opportunity that presents itself to MAKE A BIG DIFFERENCE, for ourselves, for others and for the only home we have. It's not up to anyone else but us.

Sources:

(1) http://www.rainforestsos.org/
(2) http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/269029/small_and_local_saves_the_rainforest.html
(3) http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/380887/obama_sings_its_praises_but_what_is_the_amazon_fund.html
(4) http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/doing_more/charities/donate.html
(5) Carbon Detox, George Marshall, p25

(6) http://www.theecologist.org/blogs_and_comments/commentators/Dan_Box/339022/conmen_are_already_selling_dodgy_forest_carbon.html

Not looking in the right place

2009-12-24T20:26:00.002Z

As I watch entrepreneurs and businesses attempting to offer green products and services or attempting to minimize the environmental impact of their operations, I realize that something is wrong.

We are now on a timeline, a timeline that is not defined by us but by Nature. Nature is acting like a landlord that is not receiving rent payment. It is taking action to kick us out. It will do so by making our conditions of life impossible, by starving us, by contaminating us, by destroying our habitats, by making the ongoing operation of our lives impossible. And it will do so faster than we think.

Yet we remain focused on our economic system. This is wrong. We need to turn the economic system’s concept on its head and use it as a means to an end. The goal now is to insure our survival as a species because we’re worth it. So what we need to do is use our economic system to insure our survival, not to meet our needs. And the only way to do this is to use the wealth generated by the economic system as a means to finance our ability to rebuild ecosystems.

The need is simple: we have ecosystems, which we rely on to sustain life, in an advanced state of degradation. Things are worst than I thought. Methane hydrate has already begun escaping from the Ocean underneath the Arctic (1). As far as I was aware, that was not supposed to happen until we reached 6 degrees of global warming (2) and there's enough methane under the Ocean to generate an explosion equivalent to 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. According to James Lovelock, the melting that occurred in the Arctic in 2007 was not predicted to occur by any climate model until 2050 (3). Methane is escaping from the thawing of the permafrost in the Arctic Circle and peat bogs worldwide are drying up and releasing significant quantities of methane in the atmosphere (4). Forest fires are on the rise and more devastating than they have ever been. (5) Combined, the degredation of all these ecosystems, and the accentuation of that degredation will cause an increase in temperatures at a faster pace than before. Both ecosystem degreadation and temperature increases are dependent variables, the occurance of one causes the occurance of the other. Thus temperatures will just keep on rising possibly causing the death of the whole Planet.

We are now in a situation where Nature has turned against us. But I do believe that we have the resources, the creative potential and manpower necessary to turn things round. The problem is that we are not looking in the right direction. We need to find a way to rebuild rather than just mitigate. I have already proposed two geo-engineering solutions in the business ideas section of the Ecochanges website (6). There are more simple solutions: biochar (7), preserving the Rainforest (8). Only it is a combination of all these solutions and a mobilization of the masses on the solutions that we need to insure our survival. Nature is a whore for it capitalizes on our human weaknesses to put us in a checkmate situation. So long as ecosystems do not turn against us, we do not have a sense of urgency to act. When they finally do turn against us, the heat becomes unbearable; we have massive crop failures and rising sea levels all at once, that’s checkmate. At that point in time, everyone of us will want to act but it will be too late because every ecosystem will be degrading in a perfect symphony making our efforts at reducing our emissions fruitless. The pace at which ecosystems will be sending carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere will be far faster than what we’re capable of doing ourselves. The time-bomb reservoirs of global warming gases trapped in the Oceans, the soils, forests and permafrost (9) are far greater than the ones we currently cause from the burning of gas, oil and coal.

To have a fighting chance at survival we have to turn the game around. What we need from business is not zero carbon goods and services, it’s negative carbon goods and services. What we need is not carbon capture and storage from usage of energy, it’s carbon capture and storage of what we’ve already put in the atmosphere. It has to be done through a carbon market that aims not at neutralising emissions but at making them negative several times over in a bid to outdo the damage we have already caused. There lies our only hope of redemption: a blind belief from each and everyone of us in our ability to restore.

(1) Science et Vie, 10/2009, p38
(2) Six Degrees by Mark Lynas
(3) The Vanishing Face of Gaia, James Lovelock
(4) Science et Vie, 01/2010, p24-25
(5) Science et Vie, 06/2009, p83-89
(6) http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/educational/business_ideas.html#_CARBON_ABSORPTION_DEVICES:
http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/educational/business_ideas.html#OPEN_WATER_FREEZING_SYSTEM
(7) More info on biochar: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/24/woodchips-with-everything/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/mar/13/charcoal-carbon http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20126921.500-one-last-chance-to-save-mankind.html?full=true http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/0804/0804.1126.pdf http://carbonscape.com/carbon-stories/ http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/cif-green/2009/mar/24/response-biochar-chris-goodall
(8) The best way of preserving the rainforest I’m aware of is to donate money to Cool Earth
(9) http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/educational/education/interaction.html

3.5 billion years of evolution and 9 billion people down the drain

2009-12-22T13:09:00.004Z

Two years ago when I first started looking into the climate change problem, I had no idea that what I would find out would affect my life so much.

Now with Copenhagen negotiations down the drain, it is time to morn the likely loss of my species and to dogedly persist in finding solutions to our problem.

My research, and particularly the book 6 Degrees by Mark Lynas showed me a world in which there was no future. Later I found an expression coined by Paul Hawken: the death of birth. I can try to explain it but there really is no substitute for reading 6 degrees. We have maybe 7 years left to stabilize temperatures to 2 degrees. To do that, we have to reduce our carbon emissions. This means using less energy at home, eating vegetarian or vegan whenever possible, flying as little as possible, consuming less and using public transport. Not too complicated since it can be summarized in one sentence. But doing this insures our survival as a species. Not doing this insures our extinction as a species. Staline said that one death was a tragedy but a million was a statistic. To imagine our extinction as a species, you have to first think of who you love the most, then picture them dead. Then start thinking about all the people you know dead. Then picture yourself dead. Not from old age but from the consequences of war, famine, poverty, natural disaster or suicide. Not a natural death, not a nice death... The extinction will occur soon and rapidly. By 2050, the world will be unrecognizable (1). By 2100, more than 90% of the human population is likely to be dead. Our children, grand-children and great grand-children will pay the price for our failure to act.

Our problem stems from a fundamental misunderstanding in our culture. And the misunderstanding is that our Planet has limits that we ignore at our own peril. So far as climate change is concerned, the limits stem from the ecosystems we rely on for our survival (oxygen, water and food come from Nature and they're not to be taken for granted). They are in an advanced state of degredation and if we go past 2 degrees of global warming, the degredation will become irreversible. Irreversible degredation means that we will have runaway, unstoppable global warming with temperatures rising gradually but inexorably until we reach our collective death warrant: 6 degrees. In a way, runaway global warming is something we can't possibly imagine. What with all our resources and technology surely there's something we can do about it isn't there? The answer is quite simply no. Once the ice caps melt, the Gulf stream will shut down, the Amazon rainforest will burn down, the permafrost will thaw and every ecosystem that helps to maintain life will start to help destroy life. Rather than being net carbon sinks, oceans, forests and soils will start releasing carbon in massive quantities. More than half of our emissions are currently absorbed by Nature and even with her help temperatures have still risen inexorably over the past two decades. Imagine what will happen when the ecosystems we rely on to absorb our atmospheric pollution no longer store carbon but instead release it in quantities far greater than we can produce ourselves... At 6 degrees; the 10,000 billion tonnes of methane trapped at the bottom of the Ocean will start to be released. An explosion of that methane is equivalent to an explosion of 10,000 times the world's stockpile of nuclear weapons. That's easily enough to destroy every last piece of life on Earth and to turn our wonderful paradise into a burning ball of fire. Expected fireworks date: 2100, just 90 years from now. Time to stop it? 7 years max as of today. More on this here. (2)

When it comes to us as individuals, the cultural misunderstanding is still there. We fail to see that our actions in one part of the world affect people in another part of the world. A simple example is beef consumption. It takes a hundred thousand litres of water to make one kilogram of beef. When I eat at restaurants and see meat on the table I try to picture how much of the restaurant's space would be occupied by the water it took to get that meat to the table. I imagine water up to the sealing with all the hosts drowned and still more water in the parking lot. Cows are fed soya, soya is pure protein it helps the cows grow faster. But feeding them the soya requires to grow it first and that's where the bulk of the water consumption occurs. But we don't think about this when the meat comes on the table. An empty stomach needs to be taken care of whilst the head... remains empty... Meanwhile, in India, the Punjab region, considered to be the breadbasket of India, is running out of water whilst it exports a large proportion of its production to Europe and the US. 15 years down the line, Indians will be starving because right now, we as individuals, did not make the decision to eat a diet requiring a low amount of water, land space and carbon emissions. In 40 years, Bangladesh and millions of the poorest people in the world will lose everything they have as their country is engulfed by sea level rises. Sea levels rises due to carbon emissions, 51% of the world's carbon emissions due to meat consumption (3)! Cause and effect... The Matrix Reloaded... We live an illusion; the illusion of choice without consequence. And if ytou don't want to take a moral responsibility for your consumption choices you can always blame someone else! That's the beauty of freedom of choice afforded by a consumer democracy. Only Nazture's law couldn't care less about democracy. It's coming after your children with every piece of meat sinking in your stomach. Someone always pays. Cause and effect... Meat packaging should carry images of starving somalians on the same token as cigarettes have images of people with cancer. But they don't. Why? It's the economy stupid.

And it is precisely economic growth, our national preoccupation with MORE that means that 9 billion of us will die in the name of greed. It's down to mismanagement. We elect politicans to represent our choices and our choice is that we want more. Politicians don't meet our demands and we elect new ones. We're selfish, opportunistic and greedy. And our culture encourages us to move further in that direction. Switch on the TV to find out how irresistible you could be with the new Givenchy perfume, how much fun you could have with the latest videogames or why you need to have life insurance. All that stuff, the adverts, that's consumption. So whilst you unwrap your Christmas presents consider that every £1.25 you spent on presents for others generated on average one kilogram of carbon emissions. Carbon emissions from consumption that add up over the course of a year to 3.7 tonnes per person in the UK, more or less the same weight as a Range Rover.

But it's not over till it's over. Negotiations in Copenhagen failed, according to Ed Milliband because ... of the Chinese (4)! Ha! Nicely put by a man responsible for fraudulent accounting of our own carbon emissions. Apparently the UK's carbon emissions are around the mark of 634 million tonnes. But these statistics assume that nobody in the UK buys any of the stuff that is taunted to us on television. So no WII consoles at Christmas, no toys for the kids, no crackers... We are all reliant to meet our needs on stuff produced at home. Anything coming into the country, produced for us, to meet our demands, we are not responsible for. BLAME CHINA!!! Because you see, goods produced for us in China account for another 200 million tonnes of carbon (30%+ of the declared total) but it's not our fault; it's the Chinese! We don't care if the stuff we buy is cheap or expensive, it's the Chinese's responsibility to make sure it works. So long as it works, who gives a rat's arse of how it's made. And if the Chinese can't do it cheap enough, sod them, we'll find someone else who can! No wonder they didn't want to lower their carbon emissions. We wouldn't buy their stuff if they did!

I think I'm going to use the same logic as the department of energy and climate change to complete my tax return this year. If the government can suit itself for the accounting of the country's carbon emissions, why shouldn't I suit myself for the accounting of my income. I wonder what they'll say when I deduct my home's rent, gas, electricity and water bills as a business expense. I might even try to talk my landlord into sending me copies of the maintenance expenses. That's a big bill he racked up for refurbishing the bathroom... Ah I forgot, the tax inspectors... Funny how there's no carbon inspectors to check on the department of energy and climate change statistics. But in a world where money is more important than the lives of people in the third world and the lives of our children, should we be even remotely surprised?

Well there's a simple solution to our problem with the Chinese: a carbon tax. Showman French President set one up this year. At least in France, with the media rattling on about climate change all the time, brain dulled French TV viewer Joe Blogg has started worrying a bit about climate change. And with political popularity at stake the French President had to whip out the green credentials didn't he? If we tax everything that's being made in China at around £10 per tonne of carbon emissions, it will cost us £20 billion a year but that's a lot less than the economic losses we'll rack up if the Gulf Stream shuts down and we start having winters at minus 22 degrees. The good news is this: if we reinvest the £20 billion into building renewable energy or nuclear energy power stations in China, we'll soon own a sizeable proportion of the Chinese energy supply and within 10-20 years there'll be no need for a carbon tax because we'll be receiving that much in income from the Chinese who will be producing goods for us that aren't causing climate change. In the long-run, they'll lose out because we'll own their power supply. The fact of the matter is that our basic nature is that we are greedy. And there's no point in trying to change our nature. We might as well use it to our advantage. Sure enough we might lose out a little in the short-term but in the long run, we'll end up wealthier. What the Chinese have failed to act on; we can profit from in the names of the ones we love: our children. This may seem crude but there's oppportunities made available by those who do nothing.

(1) See our blog on the world at 4 degrees
(2) http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/educational/education/interaction.html
(3) http://www.worldwatch.org/files/pdf/Livestock%20and%20Climate%20Change.pdf and summary at: http://www.sincerelysustainable.com/food/new-study-reports-51-of-global-co2-emissions-attributed-to-livestock
(4) http://www.grist.org/article/2009-12-21-brown-blames-china-for-farcical-climate-talks/

Will we make it?

2009-10-19T20:13:00.001+01:00

"We are virtually certain that climate change is occurring, and occurring because of man’s activities. We’re virtually certain the probability distribution curve is all bad. There’s no good things that’s going to come of this. But what’s uncertain is exactly which one of those things are going to occur and in what time frame. In the probability distribution curve is about a 50 percent probability that about half of all species will become extinct or be subject to extinction over this period of time. What we will never know on an ex ante basis is whether or not man be one of those casualties or not." J. Wayne Leonard, the Chairman and CEO of Entergy Corporation, the utility giant based in New Orleans

Energy Efficiency in the home: a mortgage valuation problem

2009-09-25T11:12:00.015+01:00

Our homes may well become energy and water efficient much faster if mortgage valuers start taking into account the energy & water performance of a house in their valuations. I find it difficult to believe that both here and in the US, this is not already being done.

With the rising cost of energy, the average UK gas and electric bill is around £1300 according to Uswitch. According to the Energy Saving Trust, this can be easily reduced by 30% saving £390. By plugging back the savings into other energy saving measures, over a few years' time, the home's energy consumption could be cut by 50-60%.

A 50% saving on energy consumption and water consumption would result in an annual saving of £806 which should be enough to make one monthly mortgage payment a year. Surely that's worth something to a bank. Over the 25 years of a mortgage, the saving would amount to £20,150. Taking into account inflation of energy prices at an average of 5% a year*, the saving would be around £38,500. It is difficult to say how this embedded saving should be factored in to the value of a property. The easiest way to measure it is to look at similar trends in the US. A study in California reveals that buyers are willing to pay an extra $20 for every $1 saved on permanent home energy efficiency investments ** (1). This is a far cry from what buyers are willing to pay in the UK. The Energy Saving Trust (EST) have assessed from market studies that buyers are willing to pay on average an extra £3,350, whilst some are willing to pay up to £15,000 for energy efficient homes. They found that 68% of people don't want a highly energy inefficient F or G rated home. Unfortunately, they don't have any info yet on what home improvements buyers value most. This makes it very difficult to determine whether or not home improvements are worth more than what people pay for them as they seem to be in the US.

The fact that some are willing to pay up to £15,000 seems like a reasonable premium but, mathematically, it's odd that they are a minority.

Their valuations certainly makes more sense than the current valuation of properties. At 28 times their annual average rental potential, the prices are far out of touch with reality (3). If a similar valuation were to be used for energy savings (money that stays in your pocket is as good as or better than money that comes into your pocket), taking into account 5% inflation over 25 years, the increment to the property's valuation should be £43,000!!

But we will not advocate such a high valuation. Current property valuations in relation to equities are unsustainable. They indicate that a property crash or a dramatic slow down in the increase of property prices over a number of years must occur to bring them back to reasonable levels in relation to their earnings potential. Of course, markets can stay irrational for extended periods of time so when prices will fall or stop growing could happen in a year or in 20. Nobody has a crystal ball to determine that.

Going back to our valuation problem, I think that a reasonable valuation for the moment would be 7-10 times the amount saved on permanent energy efficiency improvements. This in equity valuations is considered to be a bargain and 10-15 times the earnings (savings in this case) potential is considered to be fair value. Our valuation indicates that energy saving are incredibly undervalued in comparison to the valuations given by people surveyed by the Energy Saving Trust. But then again, average Joe hasn't a clue as to how to value stuff scientifically. The value of something is not just what people are willing to pay for it. This is one area where modern finance has come up with a better alternative: the value of something is equal to the present value of its discounted cash flows plus its value on disposal.

Our yardstick valuation of 7-10 times the energy savings would leave enough margin for the madness that usually takes place when it comes to valuing assets and allow for prices to get out of hand and valuations to climb up to 20 or 25 times the amount saved***. Energy saving investments will one day become fashionable. Everything in the press and on telly points to this. The latest round of EST adverts coupled with the government's adverts are going to have an impact and property buyers are going to become savvy to the presence of energy saving installations on properties. Once energy saving investments become fashionable, it is possible that their valuation will get out of hand, just as property valuations got out of hand as a result of greater availability of credit.

Looking back at the Californian valuations, we are not surprised at all that permanent energy efficiency improvements are valued at 20 times each $1 saved and that they effectively beat stock market returns and other investments. Indeed they should. It isn't rocket science: valuing energy savings is easy and straight forward. Once your cavity walls are filled, the work will last for the life of the property. Same for loft insulation and a host of other measures. Compare that to trying to value the future earnings stream of Intel, Dell, Dow Chemical, Shell or British Airways. Even pension fund manager who are supposed to be experts aren't very good at their jobs due to its complexity (90% of fund managers can't beat the performance of indexes). Take into account the recent stock market crash and you'll get it: stock market investments are insecure because they assume linear valuations and are vulnerable to 'Black Swanns' which makes valuations approximate and vulnerable to fear and greed. Property prices too are difficult to value. They are vulnerable to bank's willingness to lend, lending terms and the health of the economy. Now look at energy saving investments: what are they vulnerable to? Nothing. Their only caveat is that they decay. I have a boiler in my home that is 25 years old. It is woefully inefficient and the landlord won't replace it until it completely stops working. A new condensing boiler would save us £170 a year according to the Energy Saving Trust and around £200 according to my calculations. If it lasted as long as the old clunker we have, it would save us £4250-5000 over its lifetime, paying for itself twice over. Where else can you get such a straight forward easy to value return on investment? Permanent energy saving investments should be worth a lot just because of the security of the cash flow stream they provides in the form of savings.

The main reason why people invest in energy saving measures at the moment is because they can save money by implementing the measures. But not everyone believes the energy savings are possible and some people seem to be paralyzed or in no hurry when it comes to spending money on this. They're happy spending money on trivialities, things 'they like' but not on dull old energy saving stuff. And there maybe a good reason for that: take 2 fridges that look exactly the same, one is priced at £300 and the other at £500. The only difference is that one is more energy efficient. Which one is the buyer most likely to go for? The £300 one of course, because they see the extra £200 as an indulgence, even if it saves them money. People think short-term not long-term. The fact the £500 fridge is worth £300-600 as a fitting because it saves £30 a year isn't understood and the fact that it will pay for the extra cost in less than 7 years is not taken into account enough. With this kind of psychological blockage, it's no surprise that enthusiasm for energy efficiency isn't picking up speed faster. We prefer cheap, not running cheaply.

We've noticed from experience that the people who invest in energy saving measures tend to be quite savvy. The rest are perfectly happy to pay the utility bill when it comes in the post and look at forking out £250 for cavity wall insulation as something that means spending money now with no real assurance they'll get it back in the form of savings. That's probably why you hear politicians saying: "people won't invest in energy investments" whilst in the same breath mentioning the necessity to build incinerators. There's a very simple way to deal with the problem:

1) Get mortgage valuers to value the property's energy performance into the cost of the properties. The government should be ruthlessly lobbied about this by FOE, Greenpeace, EST and any other organization who understands that the reduction of our carbon emissions is intimately linked to the attractiveness of energy saving investments. If energy saving investments improve a property's value and save money: that makes them far more appealing than if they just save money.

2) Securitize energy saving investments (we've already posted on this topic) and enable people to pay for their energy efficiency investments through their bills. Utility companies could estimate the savings on each bill and bill the difference to people who've had improvements made. That will deal once and for all with the problem of a large proportion of the population who won't invest in energy savings.

There is one thing that flies in the face of government with regards the whole energy efficiency issue: people don't do it because it's boring and they don't believe in it. Our values are against conservation. It may have been easier to sell energy savings in the 30s or the 50s but not now because of the comfort and convenience culture. We don't have time and we don't really care about saving a few hundred. There's only one way to get the message through: by appealing to our greed. The day that people understand that they can take equity out of their homes through energy efficiency investments is the day that demand for that type of improvement will soar and that property speculation on that type of improvement will also kick in. Waiting for fuel prices to go up to motivate people to make improvements in energy efficiency will take too long.

Sources and notes:
* Energy prices have increased dramatically in the last few years however prior to that they were relatively stable. With world population growing and getting richer it is quite reasonable to assume energy prices will grow at a faster pace than inflation which historically has grow at 2.5-3%. Oil reserves are decreasing and so we should see an increase in demand for replacement technology. It is expected electricity demand will increase dramatically as a result. Gas prices which are correlated with the oil price should also increase as a result of increased oil scarcity.
The growth in energy prices could be countered by improvements in renewable energy technology but new technology may also increase demand for energy. An example in point is electric cars.
(1) http://realtytimes.com/rtpages/20010628_energy.htm
** We believe this "aberration" is due to Californian culture. California has been the cradle place of renewable energy technology for the past 40 years. The Governor is pro anything that has to do with green measures and Silicon Valley is becoming a major intellectual pole for the development of clean tech. Why Californians have historically been so interested in everything green, we don't know but one thing's for sure: with the threat of uncontrolable global warming looming the rest of the world is catching up quickly. If anything, what happens in California right now is the best crystal ball we can use to determine what to expect in the future.
(2) http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Home-improvements/Moving-Home/Unlock-the-hidden-value-of-your-home
(3) http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/educational/business_ideas.html#URBAN_FARMER
*** It should be noted here that the best energy efficiency investments are invisible. For example, you cannot see cavity wall insulation but it is far cheaper and more cost-effective than solar panels. Yet people will attach more value to poor performing, 20 year old solar panels than to the existence of cavity wall insulation. This is just amazing! People have a tendency to overvalue what they can see and undervalue what they can't see. That's how property developers get away with making huge profits from implementing quite simple measures.
When looking at energy savings, people will attach disproportionate importance to what they can see such as the condition of the double glazing or the state of the boiler. They'll bearily notice that the toilet has been converted to a highly water efficient version or that the running cost of the house is half the national average. We are dealing here with a public transfixed by aesthitics. Selling a house has become an artful exercise in the manipulation of people's perception.

How much would it cost to end deforestation?

2009-09-23T13:30:00.004+01:00

THE FACTS:

The rate of loss of primary forest as last measured between 2000-2005 was 6 million hectares. That's equivalent to 60,000 km2, an area the size of Ireland. And this is only for primary forest, that is ancient rainforest.

Stating that the rainforest is permanently lost in this case however is incorrect. The forest is not necessarily being clearcut or converted to other land use, it is reclassified from primary to modified natural rainforest due to the fact the forest have been subject to logging or another disturbance. (This is according to the Forest Assessment and Reporting Service)
The actual global deforestation rate is estimated at 13 million ha. per year.

The total forest cover is 4 billion ha. It is estimated that 1% of that, an area equal to 40 million ha is burnt down each year. This area is equal to 6.5 times the area of deforested primary forest and 3 times the area of total deforested area each year.

It has been estimated by the IPCC that deforestation accounts for 17-20% of global carbon dioxide emissions.

ON FOREST FIRES

It seems to me that whilst all the publicity is on deforestation, very little publicity goes into forest fires mitigation. When I was a boy, the mountain next to where I lived was set alight. Hundreds of thousands of trees burned. The fire was spectacular. 20 years later and the forest is managed appropriately: it has been reforested, the land is grazed by feedstock and large strips of grassland divide the forest so that if it is set alight again, the fire's progress will be put in check when it reaches the grassland border. Forest fires really are a vitally important area of forest management we need to focus on because when a forest burns, we don't just lose a carbon sink, the carbon stored in the forest over decades of growth is released into the atmosphere all at once.

We are lucky in that respect that most of the forest fires occur in developed countries where we have enough money to protect our forests. The main forest fires I have heard of over the past few years were in California, Australia, Portugal, France and Spain. Most of the fires occurred in countries that are particularly dry in summer and occasionally windy. If the forest located in these areas were managed properly, a vitally important carbon sink would be preserved.

ON PROTECTING THE PRIMARY FOREST

Primary forest is located mainly in the tropics. Deforestation for logging is one of the causes of deforestation but another more important reason is natural resource extraction which is also very polluting.

One way to stop deforestation is to ensure the forest is worth more standing up than logged. By giving money to locals to protect the rainforest instead of selling their land, it is possible to avoid a substantial amount of logging. For larger scale projects, the idea has the potential to be extended to paying governments from developing countries but there is a lot of potential for corruption in that respect and for the money to go astray.

One of the charities trying to encourage the protection of the rainforest by ensuring it is worth more standing up than logged is Cool Earth. Based on the costings provided by Cool Earth to protect an acre of rainforest, the annual cost of protecting the rainforest could be between £891 million and £1.5 billion. Of course, this is a purely theoretical figure, there's only so much mileage in the work they can do.

If we take into account the fact that to protect the rainforest, the main job involves protecting the border most vulnerable to deforestation rather than the whole area at risk of deforestation, the cost could be considerably less. It may well be that the true cost is £445 to £750 million, it depends on whether deforestation only occurs at the borders of the forest or if areas deforested cut deeper into the forest.

Birth Control

2009-09-12T13:38:00.007+01:00

The cheapest way to cut down carbon emissions would be for us all to have less children. It's an easy equation: the average person living in the UK has a carbon footprint of 12.5 tonnes. Over a lifetime, that equates to more than 981 tonnes of CO2 per person. The lifetime environmental impact of a single individual is thus huge.

I remember an illustration from the Ecology of Commerce comparing us to algae. When algae grows in a lake, it can continue growing to take over the whole lake. However, if it does that, it will asphyxiate itself. Algae sucks up the oxygen in the water in order to grow and if there's no oxygen left in the water it dies. Algae grows so quickly that it is capable of doubling in size each day. However something odd happens when it reaches a life threatening level of growth. When algae takes over a lake, it stops growing once it reaches half of the lake's size. Paul Hawken seemed to hint to the idea that even algae is cleverer than us! Have a look at a boring video on the topic on our website (be patient with it, it takes some time to get interesting):
Arithmetic, Population and Energy

Several centuries ago, Malthus determined that our population should stop growing once it reached 1 billion. He thought that if it continued growing above that number, the Planet's resources would be over-stretched. He was right, scientists have calculated that our exploitation of the Planet's resources right now is 20% above what the Planet can cope with meaning that every year that goes by, we are accumulating ecological debt whilst our population is still growing.

On September 10 2009, the Sun published an article with an odd title: "Carbon mating, use a condom to err... cut down emissions" on page 31 (it's rare that environmental issues make front page news in the Sun, football was more important that day). It reported that contraception would be five times cheaper than any other method of tackling the world's greenhouse gases. The report came from the optimum population trust, a charity we recommend donating to.

The Study was compiled by the London School of Economics who found that every £4 extra spent on family planning for the next 40 years would reduce global CO2 emissions by a tonne. It would cost £19 to achieve the same result with low carbon technologies. The Trust recommended giving free condoms to women worldwide who wanted them and the Sun noted that the United Nations estimated 40% of all pregnancies were unintended. The total saving from making condoms freely available could be 34 gigatonnes of CO2!

I was discussing this with my wife when she came up with a very interesting idea. She said that we could learn from China's single child policy, whilst not repeating its mistakes. I insisted we couldn't: you can't stop women from having children if they want them, what we need is a complete cultural overhaul.

Well you made me think about having a second child, my individual responsibility and the importance of the small decisions we make, she said. I was impressed, I never remotely entertain the idea that my rants can make a thread of a difference. And birth control is far easier than cultural overhaul. When you have a problem, the simplest solution is often the best. My wife had a far better solution than I.

She pointed out that it is not necessary to impose birth control on the general public. I always thought there was no other way. The Chinese apparently forced women to have abortions and there was no end to the list of human rights infringements perpetrated for the application of the policy. No wonder most people find the thought of single child policy chilling.

There's no need for controversy about birth control. It's a plain fact that we cause pollution however much we would like to avoid it just by being alive. James Lovelock put it in a nice way: he said that the 7 billion of us just by breathing, were putting out 4 times as much CO2 in the air as all the airlines of the world and 10 times as much if we take into account our livestock. He said that if we really wanted to improve our carbon footprint, we could just hold our breath!

Since even the staunchest environmentalists have an ounce of survival instinct, we must look for more convenient solutions...

There are millions of educated couples having children and not realizing what the impact on future generations will be. As I listened to my wife, I envisioned the government running advertising campaigns on how much it could help if couples decided to limit themselves to a single child.

I remembered the taxi driver who took me to hospital after my daughter was born. His theory was that you always needed to have an extra child to keep company to the latest one. He was certain I would have another. He had 8 children and had resolved to keep adding to his family to insure that the last one wasn't lonely. I dared not tell him about my views on the topic...

It is a plain fact that in the developing world, large families are seen as insurance policies to look after the parents in old age. The logic is that the more children you have, the more likely it is that one of them will hit the big time and be able to look after the family when they can no longer look after themselves. So when we think about population growth, we turn our sights to the developing world. Here in the UK however, given that people are richer and more able to consume, consumption has overshot the Planet's ability to regenerate. Our lifestyle has become unsustainable due to population growth. If there weren't so many people on the Planet, there would be nothing wrong with it. The reality is that there's 7 billion of us and we only have one Planet to share. The Planet can tolerate 3 tonnes of CO2 per person at the most. This indicates that in terms of CO2 emissions, every child born in the UK requires 4 times the Planet's resources to meet their needs. Thus, when a child is born in the UK, it is equivalent to 4 children being born in the developing world. This is controversial but it is a fact. And that's why it's so important that we do something fast about our carbon emissions otherwise epidemics, famine and war; the consequences described by Malthus await us.

It would be worthwhile conducting further research on the psychology of people who decide to have small to medium size families so that appropriate advertising could be implemented to raise the level of awareness about the consequences of these choices.

One of the best ways you can support the fight against global warming is by supporting the main charity dealing with the Optimum Population Trust. They don't need much. Click here to donate.

Don't despair

2009-08-19T09:51:00.004+01:00

I was touched by Monbiot's latest post. I've only been interested in the environment for a recent period of time but in that time, I've been able to read about and get a sense for the despair of the environmental movement. I remember an article published by the Ecologist a few months ago about an environmentalist who'd finally reached the end of his tether, this seemed to be an article also reflecting the writers of the Ecologist magazine's stance. That was touching too. Being an environmentalist is a combination of irresistible optimism and fighter spirit. Invariably, it is challenged by the grim reality: on one side there are the interests bankrolled by consumers full of cash and causing massive environmental havoc, on the other, there are the democrats and social activists, those who seek to weigh on government decisions and make a difference in society. The voice and will of the people sometimes looks like a weak counter weight to powerful economic interests especially when the fate of these economic interests is interlinked with the fate of the voice and will of the people.

Paulo Coelho once said in the Alchemist that when you really want something, all the Universe conspires in helping you to achieve it. Every billionaire intuitively knows that and so does every activist. Paulo Coelho also said that every search begins with beginner's luck and ends with the victor's being severely tested. So I thought I'd write something to cheer myself up and other people who's energies have been severely tested.

The energy we put in fighting and defending the planet doesn't come from our training or knowledge. It is a leftover from the energy of our youth. Emotions in child, teenage and early adult life are much stronger than they are in adult life. They're like a ship's rudder that guides us through our lives as adults.

I think that every new generation is an opportunity for a new beginning, they are the carriers of change. So whilst things might look grim with the current generation, imagine what they would look like if every new adult realized that they could be agents of change, if that was inbuilt in the culture. Only in the last 5 years has environmental culture gone mainstream but it is still in its infancy. It is maturing but not yet in full swing. Technology may be a burden to the environment but it is a friend of culture. When the media, internet and other tools we have take up the environmental agenda fully as they are already doing in some countries, change will occur at a much faster rate. We may be running out of time, but the culture is catching up.

If corporations can cause damage on a massive scale in a relatively short period of time, restoration should also be able to occur in a relatively short period of time. As environmentalists, we have to be patient despite the fact we have no time left. Being an environmentalist in these times is a matter of faith. The fact that no one can see God or have proof of it hasn't stopped billions of people from believing in it or believing in miracles. This faith was built over centuries with missionaries. It was subjective and difficult to believe in. Environmental faith on the other hand is objective and scientific. It's main obstacle is human psychology. There are a host of interests, behavioral and psychological biases that stand in the way of our ability to appreciate the full magnitude of the catastrophic situation we are in. But I don't see why these obstacles shouldn't be eventually overcome and vanquished.

We need faith in the problem: us. We are a magnificent species endowed with wonderful qualities but like the rest of nature, we are yin and yang. We have imagination, we have number power, we have intelligence, we have advanced technology, we have creativity, we have the ability to influence and mold our world. We have will power. What was once the privilege of God, the ability to destroy the Planet is now in our hands and we need the wisdom and determination to change our fate.

It may seem impossible to overcome the problems we face but environmentalists should brace themselves for a surprise. What has happened in a short time, in a fast paced world can be undone in an even shorter period of time. Hope and faith is what we need however irrational these emotions and values may seem to a scientifically minded movement.

The World at 4 degrees of global warming

2009-08-18T09:02:00.009+01:00

"In 2010, 50 million people will be trying to escape the effects of environmental deterioration" (The Planet Documentary)

On the 25th of February 2009, New Scientist published a map of the world at 4 degrees of global warming. This map can be found here: http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/educational/education/tables_pictures_and_maps.pdf

It is shocking as it shows the bulk of the inhabitable world becomes uninhabitable due to droughts, flooding and extreme weather. I suppose that in order to create the map, they used Mark Lynas's excellent book 6 degrees which describes the impact of each degree of global warming on the world's ecosystems and land. Although the book seemed to emphasize the bulk of the changes would take place in the second half of the century. The idea that the world could be 4 degrees warmer as soon as 2050 didn't seem to be included.

Last week, I finally got round to simplifying the map to show the areas that were inhabitable and those that weren't. Then I added up the populations currently living in the uninhabitable areas and factored in a 35% growth rate corresponding to the expectation that the world population will grow from 6.7 to 9 billion people by 2050 (calculations available here). The total number of people living in uninhabitable areas adds up to a little over 8 billion people, 95% of the 2050 human population. I'm making the map public domain and it can be used for commercial purposes. Email me at info@ecochanges.co.uk if you want a map with no comments.

MAP 1: Geographical area affected

Map 2: Impact on populations

One fact that has long bothered me is James Lovelock's assessment that 8 billion people will die by 2100 ( watch: too little too late?). He believes it is already too late. I long wondered how he got to his 8 billion figure as I had not found it anywhere else. The answer's in the map: if 8 billion people live in uninhabitable areas, James Lovelock assumes that they will die. That's not an unreasonable assumption. It is reminiscent of a quote from The Planet Documentary: "An environmental refugee has to leave, has no options whatsoever to remain in the area where he or she is coming from because of a lack of opportunities, lack of a viable environment, lack of ecological services" James Bogardi, United Nations University.

What would be the consequences of 8 billion people being displaced? I can only picture flows of refugees to inhabitable areas. I have often heard people complaining that they lost their job to a polish immigrant and that they felt like voting for the BNP. A flow of immigrants will likely cause those countries accepting refugees to close their borders but that won't stop refugees from trying to get in. Eventually the refugee's frustration will be reflected in their governments who will have no choice but to go to war to secure a livelihood for their inhabitants. What will happen then? What's already happened in the past and is described in the book Collapse by Jared Diamond. The best example was Easter Island. The population peaked at 7000 people around 1300. When they'd finished deforesting and could no longer build boats to fish, they ate and killed each other. A few centuries later, less than a thousand people remained. Nuclear bomb technology wasn't available at that time. Unfortunately, the countries that will become uninhabitable have it.

VIEWS ON THE NEW SCIENTIST MAP:

I found the map visually striking and it stuck with me. I was however surprised by the fact that instead of trying to establish the populations affected the map focuses on how the new lifeless areas can be exploited for renewable energy. This view it seems, is the one that got us in trouble in the first place. By over-exploiting our ecosystems, we've brought them to the brink of the limits they can tolerate.

I found the idea that we had a future in a globally warmed world disturbing. New Scientist and Mark Lynas didn't explore the consequences of the world warming beyond 4 or 6 degrees. There is no doubt that it will. Mark Lynas was content with his assessment that if the world does indeed warm by 6 degrees, it is unlikely that mankind will survive. Nobody knows how much the world could warm by but it has warmed by up to 20 degrees in the past. With all the world's ecosystems as a whole capable of creating far larger amounts of global warming than us humans can, it's not the impact caused by humans we need to be concerned about beyond 2 degrees, it's the impact caused by the world's ecosystems. Two degrees is the point of no return. Once we move past it, we're doomed.

The greatest concern of our time is the fact that we live at a time when we may still be able to avoid disaster yet the world's culture hasn't caught up with this truth. Evidence of this is most easily seen on television where the topic isn't covered enough, the programming is still mainly focused on trivial entertainment and news bulletins focus on the return to growth. I saw one news bulletin at the week-end where a presenter interviewing a French government representative appeared to praise her for their good management and the return of their country to growth. The mood was focused on assessing when our country would return to the "rosy path". Growth in economies 80% dependent on fossil fuel for energy is catastrophic. It's not something to look forwards to.

It seems at this point in time, that the only thing that will make us wake up to the threat of global warming, is the world warming beyond 2 degrees, at which point it will be impossible to avoid runaway global warming.

You can do something to avoid this: visit www.ecochanges.co.uk to find out how to reduce your own carbon footprint, how to set up a green business or charity, how to volunteer and how to sign petitions to ask for change.

Finding a green laptop

2009-08-12T10:10:00.005+01:00

My computer recently broke. According to the repairmen, the mother board is often the element that causes the computer to die an early death. It is broken by handling the computer horizontally rather than vertically. When you move your computer around, if you grab it by one side without giving the other side support, you are causing the weight to be disproportionately heavier on one side than on the other and if repeated enough, this can cause enough pressure on the mother board for it to break.
Considering a laptop generates 4000 times its own weight in waste, it's worth spending money on one that will last longer or getting yours repaired. Based on my knowledge of laptops (which is not extensive), I would say that the IBM thinkpad from the perspective of screen and mother card protection is the most likely to last long.
It costs £200, most likely £300 to send your laptop back to the manufacturer and for them to repair the mother board. On the other hand, some companies specialize in dealing with this particular repair. Laptop repair in Cambridge will collect and deliver laptops free anywhere in the UK and if the mother card is broken, is able to repair it for roughly £155 (http://www.cambridgelaptoprepair.co.uk 01223852777).
On the other hand, if you live in Colchester and your laptop's broken, I would recommend my repair man The Computer Doctor because he's successfully repaired my laptop a number of times and he's very cheap since he operates from home and his turnover is below the VAT threshold. His number is 01206520174.

Tree Hugger has just published an article about an upgradeable laptop that's 10 years old. That's pretty amazing for a laptop. They don't make them like that anymore. I've dreamed of something like that before and published it as a business idea here. I am convinced that there is a huge extraordinarily lucrative market for niche operators who know how to build laptops to create computers that are durable. Since all the main brands are decidedly positioned on short-term throw-away crap, there's another Michael Dell out there just waiting to happen. If that sounds like you, the world needs you urgently.

Is money saving expert Martin Lewis an environmental scourge?

2009-07-24T19:49:00.014+01:00

I emailed Mr Lewis to ask him to stop recommending cheap flights on his website offering him to take him off my list of key people irresponsible enough to cause global warming. He responded on his blog. This is my response to his assessment:

Dear Mr Lewis,

A whopping 3,000,000 people receive your weekly newsletter. Let's try to estimate the take up on your cheap flight offers (correct me if you have better data, this is just a back of the envelope calculation). If 10% are using your newsletter tips to board one flight a year to a European destination, the annual carbon footprint of that (see footnote 1) is 210,000 tonnes. In order to make your recommendations you are using, like many other businesses, a subsidy from Nature to the tune of £7,350,000 (see footnote 2). That's not a negligible amount.

To illustrate the size of the estimated carbon emissions generated through your newsletter, it is equivalent to insulating just short of 350,000 homes a year with cavity wall insulation. A large town’s effort to become energy efficient is canceled out by your readers. As you know, the government subsidizes the cost of cavity wall insulation and in this case, it costs the taxpayer a little over £86,000,000 to insulate these homes. Of course, there are other reasons outside of CO2 cuts why insulation is subsidized but I simply want to highlight some of the taxpayer and environmental costs caused by people taking advantage of cheap flight offers.

Another estimate is that the carbon footprint generated through your newsletter is equivalent to the annual carbon footprint of more than 27,500 Brits (see footnote 3). I understand you don't want to offset your readers flights and hope that they will be wise enough to offset through the savings you’ve helped them achieve. The reality however is different as I will demonstrate, most of your readers will not offset.

I find these carbon emission estimates quite alarming, disturbing and unacceptable. You may well have the most polluting newsletter in the world.

Most of the time you'd expect polluters to be involved in big business but you're not, you're involved in ethical business which makes your particular case unique in the UK. I cannot understand how you have managed to take an ethical standpoint fighting the consumer’s side for years and failed to give some serious consideration to the considerable environmental impact your newsletter has had.

I have reviewed the points you made in your blog extensively and the content of the transport section of your site and tried to the very best of my ability to understand your values, beliefs and motivations. I’ve come to the conclusion that cheap flights actually do have their rightful place on your site so I don't think you should stop trying to save people money on them altogether.

What bothers me is the fact that you are not just providing advice on cheap flights; you are actively encouraging people to take advantage of cheap flight offers. In respect of flights, you may well be defending the less well off but I want to vividly attract your attention to the fact that you are simultaneously delivering a poison pill to your readers children, grand-children, great-grand children and right at this moment in time, to the poorest citizens of the developing world, the ones who live on less than $2 a day and who are damned if they can’t extract their food supply from the soil. A few consecutive droughts and they’re dead. Surely you must be sensitive, perhaps sad when you contemplate the dreadful consequences of your cheap flight recommendations? I'd like you to do something about it.

As an eager recipient of your newsletter, I can’t help but notice every time I get it that you’ve insured through the positioning of the text, the font, size and design that I absolutely cannot miss the flight bargains you want to attract my attention to since whenever they are available they're right at the top.

It seems that your website is severely lacking in a responsible environmental policy. I have a suggestion for you, something deadly simple that you can do that may affect the site’s income, but I’m sure it won’t break the piggy bank and since you’re a person of ethical standing, I expect that you are willing to make an effort and if it comes to it, pay the price when it comes to ethical matters. My suggestion is this:

You could stop attracting your visitor’s attention to cheap flights on your homepage and stop putting them at the top of your newsletter. If you do that, you'll stop people who aren't actively looking for cheap flights to take advantage of the information and you will be discouraging what might be termed as opportunistic flying. If people want to save money on their flights, they can still use all the tools on the website but at least the people using your tools will be ones who have already decided to go on holiday, not the ones you've incentivised to go on holiday.

I have surveyed 32 of your newsletters from the past few months and found that at the top of each of these newsletters, cheap flights are recommended 50% of the time. I suspect that matches the timing of the offers from the airlines rather than an ethical concern you may have about incentivising too many people to board planes too often.

I was concerned in your response by your hopes about voluntary carbon emission offsets and your assumptions about people’s ability to make responsible decisions when it comes to flying so I did some more research.

The WORLDWIDE voluntary carbon offset market is worth a paltry £55 million a year according to Wikipedia. Humans emit 32 billion tonnes of CO2 a year, 10% of that is said to be due to the airline industry (this includes CO2 and other greenhouse gases that are quite difficult to quantify) so the annual emissions from airlines is 3.2 billion tonnes. The voluntary carbon offset market would need to be worth £112 billion a year to offset airline emissions. This means that only 0.05% of the emissions from airlines are actually being offset. In the case of the estimated £7 million you expect to be offset, the reality is that probably only £3600 of that actually does get offset! If you had to foot the bill for the environmental cost of your recommendations, I suspect it would cause you to have to take your own online advice about solving your debt problems!

Your hope that people will fly more cheaply but not necessarily more often is not realistic. With bargain basement flights so easily available, there’s nothing stopping people from flying for any and whatever occasion they fancy. If I’m looking for a romantic week-end with my wife, nothing stops me from nipping into Rome on Saturday and coming back on Sunday. Going to Rome beats going to a local posh restaurant. But how is the person making the flight decision expected to know that the carbon footprint of going to Rome is probably 70 times higher than going to the restaurant and that it represents 23% of an individual’s ANNUAL sustainable carbon footprint allocation? Most of the time, people won’t know or ignore it. One other problem is that we are not yet affected by the consequences of climate change in the UK. If people could see the problem, they'd probably act but since it's going to take another few decades before things start getting seriously ugly, they are still sheltered from the damage they are causing. When they finally wake up to it and want to do something about it, it will be too late. Once temperatures exceed two degrees, that's it, we're finished, we will have runaway global warming and it will be impossible to stop it.

We only have a five year window, maybe less to start making some drastic changes to our lifestyles. This is URGENT.

You hope that people will use your site responsibly. How can you expect a poorly informed public to make responsible decisions? You quoted yourself a survey showing 53% of your visitors don’t think or aren’t sure there’s a problem with global warming. If they don’t think it’s a problem and they can fly cheaply, why should they fly responsibly?

I’ve searched for more information on consumer attitudes to flying and understanding of global warming and found the following: according to an HSBC survey from 2007, only 19% of UK consumers state that they are making a significant effort to reduce climate change through how they live their daily lives. Only 6% believe that we can stop climate change. 56% agree to the fact that many leading experts still question if human activity is contributing to climate change. Further, according to a British Air Travel Association survey, only 12% state that they are very concerned about the effects of air travel. According to that same survey, only 3% state that they no longer travel by air due to their concerns. (Source) And you expect people to fly responsibly?

You also highlighted that people are being educated by the media in environmental matters but there is an awful lot of misinformation about our problem in the media which could well explain why so many doubt global warming is occurring and we are the cause. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore highlighted that “a study reviewed a sample of 928 articles in the scientific, peer reviewed press. Out of those 928 articles, none were in disagreement as to the fact that global warming was a serious problem and that mankind was the cause. Another study of the articles in the popular press found that out of 636 articles, 53% were in doubt as to the cause of global warming.” Not a week goes by where I open a paper and read another inaccurate and flawed analysis on global warming. They are so frequent that I’ve given up black listing journalists where you're listed because there’d be just too many for me to keep count of. People are as informed as they are misinformed by the media, which is exactly what needs to be done to foster doubt and inaction.

I'll make one final point about government (I apologize for taking so long). I don't think it is your job to cut down carbon emissions, it should be the government's. However the government, as you probably know has contradictory policies on global warming action plans. These contradictions have enraged some of the more knowledgeable commentators such as George Monbiot (see footnote 4).

How can the government announce it wants to cut down emissions by 90% by 2030 and not restrain the growth of the aviation industry? Aviation accounts for 13.4% of the country's emissions and is forecast to grow to 30% by 2030. This is just another reason why you should be concerned about your cheap flight recommendations. As far as government goes, I'm afraid we the individuals are going to have to show the way so that the government follows. I wouldn't place too much hope on the government doing too much to restrict the amount of flying we do be that through taxes or allocating flying limits, that is if past policy so far can serve as a guide to future policy expectations. Mr Monbiot's views on this in footnote 4 are worthwhile reading. And I also refer you to a Daily Politics poll that shows that despite only 3% of the population giving up flying altogether, it appears that they support taxation of airlines for the pollution they are responsible for. The poll shows that 52% of respondents support David Cameron’s plan to increase taxes on air travel and would be happy to fly less in order to reduce carbon emissions. (Source)

I’ve pointed out to you that you rely on an estimated subsidy from Nature to the tune of £7 million to provide the recommendations you do. You’re almost on benefits Mr Lewis. I find it annoying that the host of economic benefits provided by your service are somewhat canceled out by taxpayer funded efforts to reduce carbon emissions. To me that seems counterproductive and reminiscent of the expression coined by sustainable architect Macdonough of "intergenerational tyranny". It can be paraphrased as an attitude of "it's not my problem, it's the next generation's". Implicitly, you are "passing the buck" to the next generation.

I agree that flying has tremendous benefits and that it has indeed democratized society, but in a world where it is vital that we make some choices on the areas in which to cut our carbon emissions, reducing our amount of flying is simply a no-brainer. Better have a less democratic society than total chaos a few decades from now don’t you think? Unfortunately, when it comes to environmental decisions, we are often faced with a "least bad" set of alternatives and we are already handicapped by the pollution of previous generations.

Your free subsidy would not be a problem if carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were not 30% higher than they were prior to the industrial revolution and human population had not grown exponentially to the current level of 7 billion people. The world is over populated and this is resulting in a strain on the Planet’s ability to cope with the environmental impact. Right now, our consumption is already 22% above what the Planet can cope with. This is alarming. We have to reduce our carbon emissions by 90% in the developing world by 2030 otherwise the science tells us global temperatures will rise above 2 degrees and mankind may well become extinct as a consequence. The greatest UK scientist, Stephen Hawkins said the following about runaway global warming: "We don’t know where the global warming will stop but the worst-case scenario is that Earth would become like its sister planet, Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees centigrade, and raining sulfuric acid. The human race could not survive in those conditions."

In the UK, to switch to a sustainable lifestyle, we have to reduce the average carbon emissions per individual from 12.5 tonnes to 3 tonnes. By encouraging people to fly, you are encouraging them to live an unsustainable lifestyle and tragically, they don't know better. The average lifestyle in the UK is already four times more carbon intensive than what is considered to be sustainable. Flying less is the only difficult lifestyle adjustment we are required to complete. Are you going to help with that or are you going to be a hindrance?

Leonardo da Vinci once said that he who does not punish evil commands it to be done. This is a philosophy you seem to apply across your website at the exception of your cheap flight recommendations. I sincerely hope Mr Lewis that you reflect on your views, find the strength to change your mind and do your bit to pass on the gift that was passed on to you to future generations: life.

Footnotes:

(1) Assuming CO2 emissions of 700 kilos per passenger per flight, the equivalent of a London to Rome trip.

(2) Based on the current price per tonne of carbon using Atmosfair's prices of roughly £35 (read the carbon offset section of my website to see why I recommend them)

(3) Based on Chris Goodall's, how to live a low carbon life's book estimate of 12.5 tonnes of CO2 emissions per person per year.

(4) More info here: http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/07/06/subsidising-the-climate-crash/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/05/22/crash-landing/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/04/14/cross-your-fingers-and-carry-on/

Sources:

http://www.energysavingtrust.org.uk/Home-improvements/Home-insulation-glazing/Cavity-wall-insulation

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_offsets

http://www.lowcarbonlife.net/downloads/Edinburgh%20presentations.pdf

http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/revenge-of-the-rainforest-1638524.html

www.atmosfair.de

The Planet documentary

Chris Goodall, How To Live a low carbon life, p218

The 11th Hour

LATEST UPDATE:

Had I managed to convince Martin Lewis to stop advertising cheap flights on his newsletter, it would have saved me and my team from having to visit 60-90,000 homes. The only change made on the money saving expert site was: "We hope this helps you fly cheaper, but not necessarily more often. Remember the environment" on the flight checker tool. My wife thought that was a result. I note it's at the bottom of the flight checker tool in small characters. If you're not looking for it, you won't notice it. This campaign has been a waste of time. Mr Lewis's lack of understanding is symptomatic of our society's story and attitude. Unless we see a problem, we don't know it's there. By the time we see the global warming problem, it will be too late. We are where we are now because of our lack of mindfulness and we will get where we are going because of that. It is best summarized by the quote from the film La Haine:

"It's the story of a man falling from a skyscraper. As he passes each floor he repeats to himself: up to now all is well, up to now all is well. But it's not how you fall that matters, it's how you land."

We will not realize what we've done until we land. Once a 200,000 year journey ends, by the end of the century, there will be no new beginning for us. Hope is now but hope is already gone.

AWARD FOR THE DODGIEST ENERGY SUPPLIER

2009-07-16T09:52:00.005+01:00

And the winner is.... EDF

Every time I see an advert from a major Blue Chip trying to shmooze me on their green credential I put on my suspicion cloak.

Look at Shell and BP, both companies were trying to advertise their green credentials, both companies are amongst the world's biggest polluters and now both have moved out of their green investments and to add insult to injury, they're getting involved in extraction of oil in the Canadian Tar Sands, extraction that is the most polluting form of oil extraction on Earth. Liars.

The problem with being green is that you want to believe polluters when they make their promises to pollute less but almost everytime that those promises are made, it's purely based on financial reasons and because of that, the promises aren't credible. No one in the corporate world will try going green out of ideology but they will sell it to the general public that way. It's no wonder authors like Chris Goodall note that the British general public is cynical about the "going green" thing. When you're being lied to and deceived by corporate interests all the time you start thinking twice on who you really want to trust.

I must say that I am impressed by M&S efforts, the Coop and Tesco's. Not all blue chips are out to lie to their customers. But one certainly is: EDF AND WE ARE ADDING THEIR CEO TO OUR KEY PEOPLE IRRESPONSIBLE ENOUGH TO CAUSE GLOBAL WARMING LIST.

You've no doubt seen their schmoozy patriotic, we can do it, we did it before advert on being green for one day and polluters the rest of the year. Well... Read our section on Green Electricity to see what we think about the Big 6 energy suppliers: http://www.ecochanges.co.uk/individual_footprint/green_energy/green_electricity.html

The point of the matter is that these companies are phenomenal polluters and that we should not trust them to supply us our energy. If it were not for the government imposing renewable energy sourcing on them, they would gladly pollute the Earth until it was no more. Their save today, save tomorrow website is laughable. I could do a better website than that and I have, for less than a hundred quid and they've got millions.

But what really gets me is the fact that they are HUGE POLLUTERS marketing themselves as a "WE CARE ABOUT THE PLANET" company. GREENWASH!!!
Check their energy mix here: http://www.electricityinfo.org/
33.5% of the electricity we use in the UK comes from coal according to a coal industry website, 35.2% according to the above website. Note that the proportion of energy coming from coal from EDF is 49% (Source), 16% above average. Out of the Big 6, only Scottish Power uses more coal than EDF do as a proportion of their energy mix. THEY ARE THE SECOND MOST POLLUTING ENERGY SUPPLIER IN THE UNITED KINGDOM AND THEY'VE GOT THE NERVE TO ADVERTISE THEMSELVES AS CARING ABOUT GREEN ISSUES. THEY'RE LIARS AND HYPOCRITS.

What's more they don't even invest in renewables, it's all well and good them advertising that they're going to do it but the point is right now, they're not. Check the amount they invest in renewables per customer here.

They are currently being sued and rightly so by Ecotricity for misuse of the green flag (Source). And I'll add that they are a French company with considerable investment in nuclear. Nothing wrong with that, it might have been a good source of energy to use in the 70s, better than coal at least but not today, not with wind energy cheap and able to serve the almost 90% of the UK's needs. Yet EDF, alongside E.ON have bought plots to build Nuclear power plant and are lobbying the Government to persuade them that Wind Energy is unreliable (Source 1, Source 2, Source 3, Source 4). Now Nuclear is both uneconomical and highly polluting. It's not because it doesn't create CO2 that it qualifies as clean. Nuclear waste lasts 200,000 years and if you read George Monbiot's book Heat prepare yourself for a heart attack when you find out where that Nuclear Waste has ended up in the past.

A letter sent to me by my local MP on the lib-dems energy plans emphasized that Nuclear had so far cost us well over 50 billion pounds and that the costs of course will keep adding up for the next 200,000 years because you have to pay to insure that the waste is properly looked after. That's why no private company in their right mind is willing to purchase a nuclear power plant without government subsidies and guarantees that they won't have to pay for the costs of disposal. Who ends up paying for it? US MUGS!

That's my bit about Nuclear power but going back to EDF, the real reason for this post is the outrageous article I received in a Greenpeace newsletter with this morning mail. The article reproduced from Greenpeace's website :

16/04/09

Paris, France — Electricité de France (EDF) has been spying on Greenpeace since 2004 according to a report this morning on the French news website Mediapart, which cites evidence from official investigation files. According to the files EDF was also seeking intelligence on Greenpeace activities in the United Kingdom, Belgium and Spain, where it has substantial business interests.

On March 31, Greenpeace France discovered that its former campaign director's computer was hacked in 2006, and that the organisation had been targeted by the private investigation company Kargus Consultants under instruction from EDF. It is possible that the whole of the Greenpeace network was penetrated.

At least two contracts were signed between EDF and Kargus, in 2004 and 2007, for the provision of 'operational support for the ongoing strategic surveillance of environmental organisations and their activities and practices'. This 'operational support' suggests regular reports from Kargus to EDF on Greenpeace's activities. Kargus used various surveillance techniques and may even have infiltrated Greenpeace. In 2004, Kargus invoiced EDF for more than EUR 13,000 per month.

Regarding the 2007 contract it appears that EDF was aware of the use of illegal hacking.

"How can we trust a public company that devotes resources to spying on its critics?" asks Pascal Husting, Director of Greenpeace France. "How many contracts are we talking about here anyway? Are other agencies monitoring the activities of other environmental organisations?"

Following today's revelations, Greenpeace is calling for the suspension of EDF CEO, Mr. Gadonneix, and demands that the Government establishes an independent assessment of the nuclear industry as well as an open and democratic debate on nuclear power in France.

"The role of nuclear power in France, and its international business interests need to be thoroughly investigated," said Dr Rianne Teule, Greenpeace International Nuclear Campaigner. "Globally we need energy resources that maintain energy security and protect the climate, not ones that create more security issues and detract from the real solutions to climate change."

Greenpeace France, which is party to the case against EDF, will this afternoon present its evidence to the investigating judge.

The Carbon Standard

2009-07-07T14:47:00.002+01:00

"Tout est pour le mieux dans le meilleur des mondes." Candide, Voltaire

I'm pretty convinced that basing a currency on gold as a standard is pretty meaningless when you have a global economy that has grown beyond available reserves of gold. In 17 years, gold is gone, what are we going to do then, rely on existing reserves? Sure enough there is no cap on how far the price of gold can go but there is an issue with the fact that the higher the price of gold, the more difficult it is to share wealth. This insures the powerful who have gold stay in power and creates circumstances ripe for war and civil rebellion. Maybe this is a poor point but I don't like the idea of gold being used as a standard to govern commercial exchanges. The only reason why we use gold is that it is scarce, durable, easily divisible and that we universally agree on its' value.

Money is essentially an abstraction. It is just an idea. But unfortunately, it is also more than that. Essentially, money is what we think has value. It should not be an impediment to human potential and to human development. Yet money always gets in the way. Because money is scarce, we are constrained to purchase less goods than what we might want. Because of this constraint, we tend to be price takers meaning that all things equal, it is natural for us to prefer the cheapest priced goods. Worst, in order to create more value in the economy, we need to renew goods frequently so that people stay employed. This creates more wealth and more disposable income to produce more crap we will eventually end up throwing away.

In our society, the cheapest priced goods are systematically the ones with the highest carbon footprint. To produce cheap, you have to use the freebies from the Earth. What freebies do we have? Take coal for example; coal is abundant, there's at least 150 years of reserves available and it's easy to mine. This makes coal cheap and as a form of energy, it makes it very desirable. In the UK, 33.5% of our electricity comes from coal. This is a disgrace: we're a so called developed economy yet we rely on the most polluting form of energy to meet our needs. For every kilowatt of energy produced from coal, almost a kilo of carbon is emitted. The tragedy is that both nuclear and gas only produce a fraction of the emissions of coal but we chose coal because it's CHEAP. Our society, because of scarcity, has produced an abundance of absurdities and because the environment is not valued, it has lead to its over exploitation and to a tipping point where we risk losing everything we have.

Allow me to bring this point home to you. Suppose a friend of yours spent £300,000 on a house and then knocked it all down piece by piece until it eventually fell apart. You ask him why he did that and he answers: I wanted to see what it would look like torn apart.
"How are you going to pay your mortgage back?"
"I don't know, I'll worry about it later."

The same friend now plants a large trunk in the ground in the middle of the rubble. Climbing at the top of it, he attaches himself to the trunk in such a way that no one can take him away from it. You stand at the bottom of the trunk and ask your friend "but why have you done that?" To which your friend replies: "I've decided to go on a diet. I'm not going to eat for 10 days."
"Are you suicidal?" you ask. No, the friend replies, I'm too fat.
A little cold in the middle of the night, your friend puts a plastic bag on his head and accidentally suffocates himself to death.

The following morning, you discover your friend dead with a plastic bag around his head and you conclude he was suicidal. A medium comes along and assures you your friend is communicating with her from the grave, he wants to let you know that he had no idea that depriving himself from air would result in his death. What would you say then? Like me, I suppose you would argue your friend was deeply and profoundly disturbed.

Unwittingly, at this point you would have the same point of view as an environmentalist observing the Western way of life. The Western way of life is a collective aberration where we exploit resources to extinction with no consideration for future generations, we pollute without restraint, we pay no attention to the future consequences of draughts, water shortage and climate change and we gradually eliminate our oxygen and food supplies. We're exclusively focused on the short-term and we couldn't care less about long-term planning. As a culture, we've had the arrogance to imagine we were able to transcend the basic limitations of organic existence: the fact that we need food, air and an environment to survive. Like the friend who thought a plastic bag would warm him up and forgot it would suffocate him, we've forgotten that we were organic creatures at the top of the food chain. We take the kind deeds of Nature for granted and since they are not novel, we assign no value to them but we assign value to everything that's of our own making at the expense of Nature. As a result, we must conclude that Western culture is deeply and profoundly insane.

When an economist tried to price the value of Nature's services some years ago, he found that they were roughly equal to twice the global GDP. When your firm discloses its annual turnover, remember that if it weren't for Nature, this turnover wouldn't even exist, never mind the small profit margin. Yet we assign no value whatsoever to Nature's resources, we reproduce with no consideration as to whether the Planet can sustain our astronomic population and we promote our waste and energy intensive way of life abroad as the best model to follow. The worst possible name you could be called in this day and age is communist. If you doubt for one minute the supremacy of capitalism, you're labelled as an idealist and dreamer. And the cynics argue that the only thing that is going to get us to realize the extent of our collective stupidity is a disaster of biblical proportion. Supreme relativists, they are.

When we consider the biggest threat to the sustainability of Nature's services, the first word that comes to mind is carbon. Carbon, as it was put in a pro pollution advert in America is life. They were very right and because carbon is the currency on which all life depends, carbon is far more valuable than Gold.

Let me explain how the Gold-backed currency is in fact an illusion. Prior to the Second World War, most of the World's stockpile of Gold was owned by European nations. As they fought one another, most of the Gold was spent on warfare and transferred to the United States. At the end of the Second World War, the US was effectively the wealthiest nation on Earth in terms of Gold. All the State's Gold was detained in the legendary Fort Knox. In the 70s, the US debased its currency meaning it was no longer indexed on Gold. Since the Second World War, the US has become the most indebted Nation in the World and that was before the credit crunch. Since the era of Eisenower (1953), not a single independent auditor has been allowed to verify the Gold Reserves in Fort Knox (Source). Even if there was still gold left in the most secure facility in the world does it even belong to the US? The fact that no one has been allowed to check the Gold in Fort Knox for more than 50 years speaks volume. What speaks even more volumes is that when France and Switzerland, concerned about the cost of the Vietnam war, attempted to redeem their dollar holdings for gold, the US bought an end to the Gold standard. Since the 70s, the dollar is effectively a currency based on paper. The fact the US is the biggest military power in the world, the fact that it supposedly has $137 billion in gold reserves and that petrol is only quoted in dollars (Saddam wanted it quoted in Euros, but they made sure that didn't happen) has been enough to insure the dollar was the strongest currency in the world and 35 years of unparalleled growth.

You now understand that the strongest and most emblematic currency in the world is defacto worthless yet if you check its current value against other currencies, you will be surprised by the fact that there has not been any kind of major run on the dollar for the past 50 years. So long as no one officially knows that there is no Gold in Fort Knox, the deception can continue. This deception has not in any way prevented the US from becoming the richest country in the world. This lends credit to my assertion that money is just an idea, although keeping it that way requires a lot of political engineering.

It is thus not so far fetched to propose that currencies be based on thin air. Since the dollar is just paper, what's to stop us from assigning an imaginary value to it? So long as everyone agrees on it, trade can continue.

What I propose next is a little complicated and it assumes no manipulations which is unlikely but let's assume for a minute we can get a grip over politician's trickery. The Carbon Standard would be based on the carbon levels necessary to keep temperatures below two degrees ie less than 400ppm. Each tonne of carbon could be assigned a nominal value and the currency would be based on that.

Ever heard the expression money rules the world? What if money was an illusion, what rules the world then? Whatever we want it to be. Now let me sell you on the Carbon Standard.

Carbon is easily dividable, durable (it lasts more than 1000 years in the atmosphere) and it is scarce. Those who argue that carbon is not scarce need to understand there are two kinds of carbon: there's the carbon that keeps us alive, the carbon that has enabled us to evolve to where we are now, the carbon that allows a natural greenhouse effect and then there's the excess carbon, the additional 30% we've added to the atmosphere since pre- industrial levels. This carbon comes directly from stored sunlight. Over the past 60 million years, plants and vegetation on earth have been absorbing sunlight. As time has passed, this vegetation has died and thanks to some wonderful natural processes that happened over millions of years, we now have reserves of coal, gas and oil. This is all stored sunlight and this is precisely what our economies rely on worldwide to function. If we continue burning it just because it's free and still abundant, we're going to kill ourselves. Stored sunlight is carbon; the climate and the planet are only stable and facilitating life because there is just the right mix of carbon in the atmosphere and just the right ecosystems in place to regenerate the Planet. There is an active Yin and Yang process on this Planet that is just stable enough to enable life.

Since the Natural imperative is survival of the species and since we've been gifted by Nature with intelligence, we should use this to our advantage. Intelligence, and for that matter common sense dictate that we should do what we can to sustain life. How?

The Carbon Standard is a currency that we would use to overturn the negative effects from excessive carbon emissions to curb their growth.

If goods are priced in terms of carbon value as well as economic value, the environmental cost of production is reflected in the price. The outcome is a non-subsidized price that assigns a value to what we take away from Nature and what we add to it. This is the best way to insure that, through market forces, the price of every product accurately takes into account its environmental cost. Note that this is going a step further than the normal function we assign to currency which is exchange. In the process of exchanging we assume that the only thing that matters is the value of the good produced. In the Carbon Standard, that's taken into account but another dimension that is taken into account is the goods' ability to preserve or destroy life through the amount of carbon emissions it generates. And we know that above 400ppm, there's a 75% chance of irreversible climate change. This is the clever bit so pay attention: 400ppm is the scarcity target assigned to carbon, once reached, carbon is defacto no longer acceptable: you can either have goods and services that produce zero carbon or goods and services that produce carbon but that offset the production. AND THIS IS HOW YOU SWITCH TO A ZERO CARBON ECONOMY WITHOUT ANY AGGRAVATION, because carbon is automatically priced in everything. You don't need it traded on an exchange, you don't need all the wasted money on corporate lobbying, you don't need the bureaucracy of permits, you don't need the full weight of the legislation, carbon is plainly and simply priced in everything.

Implementing this should result in products with a high environmental impact being highly priced in comparison to products with a low environmental impact or both being priced the same or a narrow price gap between them.
As Chris Goodall notes: in a modern economy in which competition is working actively, no company can chose to make decisions that raise its cost compared to its peers. But Paul Hawken adds that competition should not be based between a company trashing the environment and one trying to save it. Since one is subsidized by Nature's freebies and the other isn't, the competition just isn't fair. In fact, I am surprised that, to my knowledge, no polluter has been sued under the unfair competition legislation by a company supplying the same product at a higher cost because it took into account its environmental impact. Maybe environmentally friendly companies have a duty of care towards nature to sue the competitors who are trashing it.

Note that the whole point of pricing carbon into everything is to provide a price incentive for carbon intensive products and services to be priced out of the market in favour of products with low environmental footprints, much the same as in the carbon permits system. If carbon intensive products aren't priced out of the market through the first incentive, you need a second incentive of the type "rob Paul to pay Peter". You add in a tax penalty for carbon intensive products and you use the proceeds to subsidize products environmentally friendly products. The final outcome is a shift from a dirty to a clean economy where polluters either go broke or adapt.

Key people irresponsible enough to cause global warming

2009-07-03T11:38:00.021+01:00

Martin Lewis:
Mr Lewis has responded to his listing here and he's made some good points so I've decided to edit both the title of this article because the wording was too harsh and changed the bit on Mr Lewis below.
In his weekly newsletter, money saving expert Martin Lewis regularly advises his eager public on money saving deals. Among these is at the top of his list: dirt cheap flights. By recommending the UK's 2 most environmentally damaging business models of Ryanair and Easyjet as well as cheap long haul flights to destinations as far fetched as Australia, Mr Lewis is inadvertently encouraging millions of people to get on-board flights that collectively will generate tens of thousands of tonnes of greenhouse gases resulting in global warming killing millions of citizens from the developing world. I don't understand how an intelligent man can do that, live with it and manage to justify it. I think he really should reconsider whether saving money on flying or even helping people get on board cheap flights is in line with his ethical beliefs about helping consumers and yes, I think that if possible all of us should avoid flying in all circumstances but family emergencies. He may be helping his readers in the short-term but in the long-term, their flying will result in further global warming with dire consequences for everyone including their kids.
Following on the points he made which were interesting, I have posted a response looking at why the carbon footprint of flying is a problem and why I think that Mr Lewis is inadvertently creating huge carbon emissions through his weekly newsletter. Unfortunately, he's sticked to his position on the matter, choosing to ignore the environmental impact of his newsletter. When one intelligent man is in control of as large a carbon footprint as he is and refuses to do anything about it, the scale of the environmental problem we all have to face is spelled out in capital letters: BIG, VERY BIG.

Michael O'Leary, Ryanair boss:
“We will take [passengers] off British Airways and the other old carriers who are flying gas-guzzling, ancient aircraft and pack them into fuel-efficient planes. So Ryanair will be saving the environment – not that we care much. [...] I listen to all this drivel about turning down the central heating, going back to candles, returning to the Dark Ages. You do that if you want to. But none of it will make any difference. It just panders to your middle-class, middle-aged angst and guilt.” Michael O'Leary

The problem with freedom of enterprise is when guys like Michael pop up on the scene and think it's okay to trash the biosphere, create global warming, indirectly kill people in the developing world over a period of decades and centuries and get away with it whilst all the while lying to the cameras and the press missleading the general public who don't know any better into thinking that everything's okay and that what Ryanair's doing is perfectly alright. The problem of the legal system as it is is that it does not punish white collar crime. Hitler killed 6 million jews. But he didn't do it directly, he got other people to do it for him. Yet it is internationally recognized that he was responsible for it. What of crimes that indirectly kill hundreds of millions and billions of people, more so than have ever been killed by any dictator in history. If I sell you a shower gel and it corrodes your skin and gives you a fatal cancer, you've got a right to sue me for manslaughter haven't you? What if someone can't eat because of a drought that is not natural but caused by global warming, what if there are millions of others like him? Who can you blame then but the people who caused unnecessary and intentional pollution for profit?
It is a disgusting world we live in where a man like O'Leary is not prosecuted for crime against humanity and gets praise in the media for his successful business. It is not the people flying his planes I blame, it is him for trying to book a profit at all costs, for opening new lines all the time, for denying the existence of global warming to suit his needs, for advertising to create the need for people to get on board his flights, for pricing them so cheaply that no one even considers less polluting alternative. There is a whole system that is rotten that enables this man to get away with what he does. We have a government incapable of understanding that the propaganda of freedom of enterprise is killing our world and killing our people.
For the record, I have flown Ryanair but that was before I knew the environmental impact of flying. They can price their flights as dirt cheap as they like, I'd rather be shot dead than board one of their planes. We hope you get prosecuted O'Leary and spend your last days in jail.

Jeremy Clarkson
This well loved petrol head is part of the cultural propaganda that is threatening mankind and he should be stopped. He's a dinosaur from an older generation when there weren't 7 billion people on the Planet and there was no global warming living in a world where all of that is a reality but he's somehow not capable of appreciating that for those who can afford the big cylinders he loves so much, he is encouraging consumerism. I don't dislike the guy but he's a gauge of our ill advised addiction to fossil fuel. We love to dream ourselves in big cylinders, we love the freedom and sensation but we're not capable of realizing this love is going to screw the very ones we love and care for the most: our kids.

Ray Krock, founder of McDonalds
It would not hurt McDonalds' business in the slightest to switch all its burgers to vegetarian alternatives using organic vegetables. McDonald's isn't in the hamburger business, it's in the real estate business. If they can produce cheap beef, there's nothing stopping them from producing cheap vegetables. Their service comes at the cost of things like foot and mouth and potentially a destructive virus the likes of which we have never seen. I can't see how animal who develop antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria won't eventually be responsible for a virus that we can't treat with existing vaccinations. Beef, accounting for 30% of the food we eat is responsible for 78% of the emissions from the cattle sector. McDonalds is in the beef business, they need to find a way out of it.

George Bush
Everyone knows how that idiot made it to this list.

Ruppert Murdoch
Now apparently, Mr Murdoch was convinced by his son to make an effort to green up his media empire. Despite his efforts, I still can't stand him. He is a conservative who's had a lifelong flawed philosophy about what the French call "capitalism sauvage" which maybe translated literally as wildcat capitalism. His view is that business are perfectly able to look after themselves and that government should not intervene. Credit crunch is all I'll say.

I don't really mind him or his business (although if Fox were consciously trying to turn their public into cavemen they'd put on the exact same programming as they are now) but I especially don't like the concept of the Sun. Using paper to print pictures and not text at a time when deforestation accounts for 25% of mankind's emissions is outrageous. They can argue the paper is recycled but that's besides the point. Paper pulp can only be recycled 5-6 times, after that it has to rot in landfill. And if they claim it's sourced from sustainable forests, that's not acceptable either. Like Mcdonough said, you can't call something better just because it's less bad. What is called sustainable is in fact a monocrop Eucalyptus forest where there cannot be any biodiversity because the leaves are toxic to any other wildlife, the crops can be sprayed with pesticides to grow faster and they pump up a huge amount of underground fossil water most often in countries where water is already scarce. I contacted the FSC to ask if they considered Eucalyptus forests to be sustainable and their reply was neither yes or no, more along the lines of: if the rainforest isn't being chopped down, the world's a better place. Yeah right...
I also note Murdoch was opposed to the election of Barrack Obama because he thought his socialist policies would damage business so he's evidently one of these free market libertarians who think the State shouldn't regulate. Businesses are accountable for trashing the Planet to a huge degree and if not regulated they will trash it eagerly and faster. A business will do anything to maintain a linear profitibility even if it involves ultimately the demise of the business. Businesses in our culture are short term entities and they need to be regulated for their own good so that they can last long-term. What are they going to do when we run out of all our natural resources in one hundred years?
Further, I note that it's not just the Sun printing nonsense, it's the entire country's press industry. It's no good printing words if they are a total waste of time and most of the stuff printed in the press is just that. I have in mind in particular a distastful article about female orgies in London printed in the Independent over the week-end and I'm sure that if I were to collect a sample of papers on any given day, more than 50% of the content could enter the useless, irrelevant or paper wasting category.
In my view the worst are the Guardian. They have a very activist section on the environment yet one week-end copy is roughly the same weight as an encyclopedia Britannica. Who needs that much information? Why is it that every paper is now selling a sports section, culture, holiday etc... If the public wants to read about sports, let them buy a paper on sports. If they want to read about holidays, let them buy a magazine on that. Stop being a one stop shop for everything you're trashing our trees you imbeciles.
And if you want to continue with your business models, that's fine so long as you're not using paper. Start using infinitely recyclable synthetic paper. Go to the business ideas section of ecochange.co.uk for some info on a company supplying that.

Vincent de Rivaz, EDF’s chief executive officer, the entire board, their PR and marketing people

The law needs to change to make excessive CO2 emissions a crime against humanity. The first person who should be prosecuted for that is Vincent de Rivaz. Some companies are hypocrits, opportunists and liars and in my view EDF as a group is worst than Ryanair's boss O'Leary. At least Ryanair doesn't try to pretend they're green. EDF are right up there with the countries biggest polluters and yet they have the nerve to advertise themselves as green. We are so furious with their latest advertising campaign that we've dedicated an entire post to their lies. If you are a client of EDF, you are assisting climate criminals. Switch to Ecotricity now to save your soul!

I do realize that some people are going to be disappointed not to find more names of corporations and people who are turning our world into an oven but I can assure them that we will be adding to this list as time goes on and if you have any suggestions as to who else should make it to the list, feel free to comment and we will be delighted to investigate your suggestions.

Waste

2009-06-25T17:58:00.004+01:00

The amount of waste we generate is phenomenal.
In Cradle to Cradle, McDonough argues that we're not dealing with the real problem: industry. I wonder...
What is the problem, is it industrials creating needs and supplying cheap goods or is it the general public's lack of understanding about the implications of purchasing all these goods?
I personally prefer the second option. Realistically, I don't see how you can change industry. Companies trying to do the right thing can't compete with the ones that don't because their costs for trying to do the right thing are almost always going to be higher. People flog to the cheapest. Everyone has a limited income, needs to fulfill and it just makes more sense to buy cheap than to buy dear. In that respect, economists got it right: individuals are utility maximizers and they seek to maximize the utility of the dosh they have.
But what gives me hope is that people also have brains, they have the ability to think about what they do and they're not just impulsive creatures. With each purchase comes a choice and people's lack of awareness of that choice is a problem. Consumption is a minldess process but it doesn't need to be. Eco consumption is thoughtful process. If we can get enough of the general public to shift their purchasing decisions from mindless to mindful then we don't need to persuade industry to change. They'll just have to because industry's only there to serve the marketplace. Where people go to buy, industry will have to follow to sell.

So I'm not sure I agree with McDonough about the real waste problem being industry. Yes the waste is created upstream by them by a factor of 70 to 1 or 32 to 1 depending on who you listen to but it's downstream that the real potential lies with the people who call the shots on what they decide to buy and what they refuse to buy.

People can vote... with their wallets.

Next Generation Investment Banking Business Model

2009-06-02T15:02:00.009+01:00

You sharpen the human appetite to the point where it can split atoms with its desire; you build egos the size of cathedrals; fiber-optically connect the world to every eager impulse; grease even the dullest dreams with these dollar-green, gold-plated fantasies, until every human becomes an aspiring emperor, becomes his own God... and where can you go from there? The Devil, The Devil’s Advocate, 1997

There is one word that is associated to the investment banker right now and that is disgrace.
But investment bankers weren't always the scorn of society and in fact the future for investment banking could be very bright.

The future is shaping up in America through "energy efficiency" capital pools and is being trialled in New York. As everyone knows, investment banks have been very efficient at creating junk bond capital pools and securing them with insurance products certified by the ratings agencies. So efficient were the banks at doing this that prior to the onset of the credit crunch, the junk bond market was insured for eight times the amount of junk debt that had been pooled into high yielding bond products.

The next generation of securitisation deals not with pooling junk debt but with pooling energy efficiency investments. When you speak to people about greening up their lifestyle about 50% of them will tell you that they think that involves taking large chunks of money out of their pockets to finance investments the savings of which they don't understand and may be too small to justify the capital expenditure. Not so, is the answer being given by modern American urban planners.
One way to get high quality retrofits is to get the upfront costs paid by investors and then invoiced by the utility company. The utility bill shows the savings achieved through the retrofit and a portion of the savings is billed back to the homeowners. Energy bills go down, property values go up, jobs are created, investors get a return on their investment, pension funds are less volatile and investment bankers play a valuable role. So what could get securitised? Loft insulation, cavity wall insulation, windows, PV, solar thermal, boiler replacement, energy efficient cars etc... As much as £30,000 per household could be securitised.

Any forward-looking senior investment banker would do well to be setting up appointments with government officials to set up a top down approach policy to getting the City out of the pickle its' in otherwise Wall Street will become the platform of choice for energy efficiency investment securitisation.

For more information on what the American competition is doing view the video in the link below from the 24th to the 38th minute:
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2009/05/clean_greenjobs.html

What is America doing about climate change?

2009-06-02T14:25:00.005+01:00

The headlines are depressing. Looks like they're going ahead with coal and cutting down on the most environmentally friendly technology of all: hydrogen. But it's not all bad, if you want cheering up, you gotta look at what's happening at the grassroots level, watch the video at the link below to find out more:

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/2009/05/clean_greenjobs.html

Small Potatoes

2009-05-21T17:54:00.005+01:00

Have you tried implementing a recycling scheme in your office?

It can be a bit more hard work than you think. Just because the bins are there doesn't mean they're going to be used and just because they've been told to use less paper, doesn't mean that employees won't continue wasting.

After having tried everything else, a carrot and stick approach - if nothing else has worked- is necessary. We have a penalty whereby employees using too many forms pay 10p. Realizing that 10p wasn't enough to deter them, the fine was increased to 40p. Now they're hiding the forms so they don't get fined. But the repressive machine is just round the corner. Asked if they wanted training on how to complete forms without re-writing them, one of them, having previously vigorously protested as to his ability to use a single form, was all of a sudden "perfectly able to use just one form"!

A bit of managerial prodding is all takes. Our office waste has noticeably reduced since implementing the penalties.

With this small victory, I'm still left wonder how much of an environmental impact we've really achieved. With the summer days coming up, the air conditioning machine is on full blast 6 hours a day at 1400 watts an hour and the building's electricity certainly doesn't come from renewables.

I guess what's important is to keep on trying.

Suggestions for Government Regulation on the environment

2009-05-02T18:25:00.034+01:00

1- Tighten construction regulations in UK to achieve maximum insulation of buildings and to achieve similar construction standards as for the Passiv Haus model.
2- Make all environmental films public domain so that they can be shared and viewed by the masses.
3- Make reducing waste a national priority: make composting compulsory for the domestic marketplace and restaurant industry, make packaging completely biodegradable, make recycling compulsory everywhere.
4- Require that the use of methane producing pesticides and insecticide on UK soil be banned and replaced by organic production standards and for all products imported into the country to be produced based on the same standards.
5- Introduce regulation to stimulate the local economy and to discourage imports through the introduction of a carbon tax.
6- Make all the subsidies to insulation and renewable energy installation indefinite. Subsidize energy efficient boilers along with composting units nationwide.
7- Invest in building new rail tracks and regulate the road transport of merchandise through increased taxation to incentivise more rail transport of commercial merchandise.
8- Increase the road tax on all SUV vehicles by a substantial amount to dissuade their purchase and account for the existing stock's environmental cost. Use the proceeds to subsidize tidal wave power plants and other uneconomical renewable energy type of installations following REF's recommendations.
9- Tighten the regulations on the emissions of all road vehicles.
10- Introduce incentives for employers to get their employees to work from home.
12- Tax the airline industry substantially to dissuade airplane travel.
13- Regulate the beef raising industry and set targets to reduce UK consumption of beef.
14- Read Stormy Weather, 101 solutions to climate change which has many more suggestions for policy makers we don't list here.
15- Invest in biomass and landfill methane capture power stations that capture the greenhouse gas coming out of landfills.
16- Invest in a public transport fleet of buses that use methane instead of oil like Thailand does.
17- A Brit produces in excess of 900 tonnes of carbon emissions over their lifetime along with a huge amount of waste and other environmental externalities. Request that every new born's family be made to pay upfront the estimated cost of the child's carbon emissions over its' lifetime at the estimated "social" cost of carbon ie. ₤25-75 per tonne (79 years is the average lifespan and 12.5 tonnes of carbon). This should come to ₤25-75,000 pounds and should strongly contribute to reducing population growth and making space for climate refugees.
18- Eliminate all subsidies to child birth including married couple tax breaks and child benefits. Human population has been multiplied by 6 over the past century and people will have to die of hunger or not be born when the world begins to warm. A European uses the equivalent resources of 3.5 Planets, this overconsumption means that we need to reduce our numbers to more sustainable levels.
19- Require that all .co.uk websites and all UK companies with .com websites be hosted on environmentally friendly servers generating zero emissions.
20- Prohibit mobile phone providers from offering free mobiles on contract renewals. Get them to offer their customers a reduction in their tariffs. Mobiles contain at least 10 rare metals, offering them free is a waste of resources.
21- Ban the import of beef, soya and corn from Brazil that is destroying the rainforest and announce an official boycott of all Brazilian goods and services in the UK until there is clear evidence that the Amazon rainforest is no longer being logged.
22- Introduce a gradual tax on beef and lamb mounting up to 500% within 5 years to dissuade their purchase.
23- China is responsible for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions and the government has no intention of reducing emissions. Introduce a 100% tax on chinese manufactured goods until we have evidence that China is making an effort to reduce its' emissions.
24- Require that all search engine searches in the UK be made from data centers operating with 100% green electricity.
25- Delist any companies listed on AIM or other markets profiting in any way from Amazon deforestation or causing it.
26- Impose a limit on the use of fossil fuels and a permanent moratorium on prospecting for new reserves. (Source)
27- Adapt the Hammarby Sjostad model to our urban environment. Hammarby Sjostad is an eco-quarter built in Stockholm in 1990. 80% of its home heating is supplied by local resources, water consumption was cut in half and it has 60% less garbage than other quarters.
28- Require that national supermarket chains source a growing portion of the goods they sell locally. Start at 10% and move up to 70%.
29- Outlaw or strictly regulate marketing to children and especially under fives.
30- Regulate and strictly restrict the use of bioaccumulative chemicals.
31- Outlaw media coverage that creates the impression that people should not take action on climate change, attempts to outline any benefits in climate change, criticizes efforts and policies designed to take action on climate change such as the adoption of energy efficient light bulbs or recycling. Any media coverage attempting to persuade people in any way to drop their efforts or not take action on reducing their carbon footprint is criminal and should be outlawed. Media has a strong cultural influence, is intrinsically biased towards business due to advertising revenue and ownership by corporations with other business concerns. As a result it is not an independent power: it is dangerous to have a business-biased press influencing the masses.
32- Increase the breadth of the Landlord's energy saving allowance to reflect the cost of replacing boilers from 1500 to 3500 and include the installation of condensing boilers as a tax deductable investment.
33- Barcode bins so that people who throw less rubbish can be monitored and qualify to receive council tax reductions, as they do in Peterborough.
34- Tax plastic bags. Ireland has a 10p plastic bag tax.
35- Legislate to encourage the use of synthetic paper for newspapers so that the ink can be washed off and the pages reused. This is already in use in America (Silicon Valley Technical Institute)
36- Create delightful streets. The properties of streets that have trees on them are more valuable. Trees serve as habitat to hundreds of species and retain vast amounts of water in floods. 95% of the native woodland in the UK has been cut down. Outlaw the cutting of trees located on pavements and legislate to have every naked pavement in the UK planted with trees. Holes dug out by council workers, trees planted by armies of school volunteers and cleaned up in autumn by the same.
37- Outlaw the construction of incinerators for recycling.
38- Teach ecology in school incompassing the Planet and how it works, how the natural ecosystems have been affected by mankind during the Industrial Revolution, industrial and consumer pollution, marketing to children, energy efficiency, industrial processes, why they pollute, which companies have had the worst environmental track records and why, the ecology of commerce etc...
39- The best way to incentivise less car travel is to make public transport free and to tax all private vehicles to pay for it.
40- Tax large screen TVs and use the proceeds to subsidize cinema style TVs that funtion with a projector and use less electricity. Keep subsidies for the most energy efficient models until the cost of making these home cinema systems aligns with the cost of making large screen TVs and the subsidy is no longer needed.
41- Use the same type of labelling for clothes made out of cotton as for cigaretter packaging. I suggest: "whilst this product is cheaper than organic cotton, it has a huge carbon footprint and contributes to global warming and the extinction of mankind".

Interesting Stuff

2009-04-28T15:14:00.001+01:00

SOME INCONVENIENT QUESTIONS

2009-04-28T03:06:00.009+01:00

What is going to happen when the glaciers in Tibet melt away and India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and China find themselves deprived of drinkable water?

What will happen when the Gulf Stream Ocean conveyer belt stops, an Ice age is triggered in Europe and the Amazonian rainforest burns as a result?

What are we going to do when we run out of natural reserves in the next one hundred years?

What are we going to do when carbon concentrations in the atmosphere are above 400ppm (We're at 389ppm), the level of global warming is above 2 degrees and global warming becomes self-sustaining and unstoppable?

What are we going to do when we have severe draughts, crop failures and not enough food to feed the world population?

What are we going to do if we have a Nuclear war as a result of fights over what is left of available resources on Earth?

What are we going to do if the Amazonian rainforest, home to most of the Earth's wildlife and generating 20% of the world's oxygen is either burned down or logged down?

What are we going to do when we reach peak oil and most of us can't afford to put oil in our tanks because the price is too dear?

What are we going to do when our attempts to reduce our carbon emissions result in less global dimming and the Planet warms at a faster rate?

What are we going to do when the level of global warming reaches 6 degrees and the 10,000 billion tonnes of methane trapped at the bottom of the Oceans are released in the atmosphere triggering an explosion 10,000 times greater than the World's stockpile of Nuclear weapons?

What will happen to us if the atmosphere is destroyed as a result of the release of the immense greenhouse gases trapped all over the Planet by a stable climate?

Is doing nothing about all this a viable option?

As you ponder these questions, I'm sure you'll come to the same conclusion as I: trying to do anything is futile, stick your head in the sand, do nothing and pretend everything is fine. Place your trust in the Science God whilst you keep on flying and shopping until the Earth is no more.

Government

2009-04-27T01:32:00.009+01:00

In my view Government is the most unsustainable type of organisation on the Planet. It collects the largest amount of revenue of any organisation in the country yet it is incapable of generating even a fraction of its expenditure as income. A Government should be at least in part a social organization involved in loss making social enterprise financed by taxes. On the other hand, Governments should be involved in joint ventures with companies to compete against the monopoly of existing corporations. A prime example of that in my mind is the Microsoft software. Every new edition is ever more unsustainable, ever more useless and requires a new purchase. If the people understood the schemes divided by corporations to obtain steady incomes, there would be a revolution before tomorrow morning. In the case of Microsoft, every new version of Windows takes up more space on the hardisk and requires a new computer. Each computer is made out of some rare metals that in some cases only have 2 decades ahead of them before they disappear. Further the software itself may not have been changed for the last decade and no one would notice the difference. Windows is a monument to the engineering of needs for a service that we don't need and that we don't want. Further Microsoft is guilty of several antitrust legislation breaches and of taking legal steps to make the debate about antitrust allegations last as long as possible. Rather than fine them, the State would do better to engineer a product that is better and cheaper. If it could only reap a fraction of the profits of the windows operating system, it would do well for itself. The cost of doing this? Only a fraction of the potential income. My suggestion would be to take the free ubuntu linux system, improve it and commercialize it.
Think about a government earning its own income. We the citizens would no longer be required to pay taxes and companies would end up paying less taxes as well. Obscene amounts of money wouldn't be transfered in such large quantities to obscure shareholders. Everyone would benefit. Instead what does the Government do? It squanders ₤250 of perfectly good money to every couple who has a new born child. As if the world wasn't over populated enough as it is, the Government feels it is a good idea to pay to incentivise the birth of one more child that will end up being responsible for 900 tonnes of carbon emissions over its lifetime. And I'm not even going to go into the incentives for single teenage mums to feed on taxpayer's money.
The Government should be focused on generating some of its own income, cutting its expenses and reducing the tax burden. An easy way to do that would be to instaure a single child policy thereby reducing the need for hospital staff, medication and teachers. The State needs to learn to weed off the taxpayer's breast.

Non Renewable Natural resources how much is left?

2009-04-26T21:29:00.005+01:00

All of the following figures come from the prestigious French magazine, Internationally renowned and highly regarded by the Scientific community: Science et Vie, June 2008.
All the figures are based on proved and probable reserves and assume current consumption stays the same. Of course, both assumptions are unrealistic as more reserves may be found but since world population is expected to rise by another 30% over the next 40 years, new discoveries may be offset by a rising population's needs.

Aluminum: 131 years

Coal: 150 years

Cobalt: 112 years

Copper: 31 years

Gold: 17 years

Iron: 79 years

Lead: 22 years

Natural Gas: 64 years

Nickel: 40 years

Palladium: 15 years

Petroleum: 42 years

Platinum: 56 years

Silver: 13 years

Tin: 17 years

Uranium: 32 years

Zinc: 17 years

Conclusion: 100 years from now, the Planet will have been pillage, future generations will have nothing left to build on and our legacy to them will be a climate in which they can barely live in. That's why they politely call our mode of development unsustainable. In reality, anyone who agrees with it is either barking mad or totally ignorant. Unfortunately, the majority in this instance may be excused for total ignorance. Thank the corporations, the press and your government for that. If any of these representatives are still alive when the shit hits the fan, maybe we can get the guillotine out again for consolation and chop their heads off. Future generations are going to need a triple doze of Prozac to cope with the reality we've left for them to inherit. Smile, you're part of the developped, civilized world.

What do I get out of adopting a green lifestyle

2009-04-26T20:13:00.005+01:00

"I know that as people learn to do better, they do better, they feel better, and they sleep better as a result of making a good choice." Russell Simmons, Hip Hop Mogul, Grist, 28/4/09

Realizing what people will lack in the future gives you a sense of appreciation of what you have today. Most people go through life always wanting more. Where does it stop?
You could live longer.
You would definitely be healthier.
You will have a lower risk of cancer and disease caused by chemicals in the food supply and cleaning products.
You'll benefit the environment.
You'll influence others.
You'll contribute to changing the culture and changing society.
You'll do what most others won't.
You'll become more self-sufficient.
You'll become more knowledgeable.
You'll live the way Nature intended us to.
Greatful to the environment for giving you life, you'll live in harmony with it not destroying it unwittingly.
You'll feel like a new person.
You'll be proud of yourself for doing things you didn't know you could.
You'll be at peace with yourself knowing that you're doing everything you can to avoid the impending disaster.

Moral Obligation

2009-04-25T14:12:00.003+01:00

What does it mean to be green?
What does it mean to be an ecowarrior?
What does it mean to be environmentally friendly?

To me all these terms are fashionable and are used to designate people who are foolish enough to chose an ecolifestyle and self-restraint. Ecowarrior, in particular rings in my head as Don Quichotte, an imbecile on a horse fighting an invisible and for all purposes, inexistent enemy.

This is how the world looks at it. Our culture is heavily under attack from the advertising, corporate and liberal mentality at the same time as it is undergoing a crisis of scale. People do not get the link in between their consumption choices and their pollution because it is not labelled on products, it is not debated enough in the media and for all intents and purposes, why should I restraint from doing something if my neighbour isn't and why should I vote for a government gun-ho on restraining my personal freedom? Screw that!

First and foremost, acting to stop global warming is about change and people don't like change. People are creatures of habit. It's easy to give and to receive but taking away raises havock. Whilst our consumption goes on unchecked, our primitive tribal mind doesn't get the global picture: there are 10 to 14 times more of us than the Earth can sustain on this Planet and we all want everything now. We're only interested in the short-term. Screw the long-term. A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. That's why as a shareholder, I want a quarterly report not an annual one! And you the CEO if you don't show me some kind of growth trend in my shares, I'll dump them.

Despite what you think of it, no matter how difficult it might be, everyone of us has a moral obligation to do everything they can to reduce their carbon footprint. Life is at stake. Since we've all been given that gift, it is our obligation to pass it on to future generations. We are all able to participate in economic activity, able to enjoy the freebies given to us by our beautiful planet, the air, the trees, the food, the habitat. It's up to us to preserve all of that and we all have a tremendous power to do that in our daily lives.

Flight tax

2009-04-10T20:04:00.004+01:00

The government's income's fallen and we're on the brink of bankruptcy?

Not a problem. There's an easy way out.

Here's a policy idea for politicians looking for funding: tax each airline passenger for the estimated amount of greenhouse gases produced by their flight. Ensure that the passenger is not taxed based on the airline's reported emissions but on the true emissions including contrail and nitrogen which triples the reported total. That should make the price of each ticket 50-60 dearer dissuading week-end escapades and bringing much needed revenue to the Treasury.

Use the tax to fund subsidies in cavity wall insulation, loft insulation, condensing boilers and to heavily subsidize the installation of uneconomical renewable energy facilities such as tidal wave and biomass. I recently read alarming reports from the charity REF about the fact that most renewable energy investment goes into the least capital intensive technology, wind, preventing us from having a balanced portfolio of renewable energy power stations.

Any jobs lost in airlines as a result of these taxes could be gained in the renewable energy sector.

Sure enough there would be a public backlash and people would complain for a while but do you notice anyone complaining when they go and fill up at the petrol station?

A note of hope on the politics of climate change

2009-04-04T20:58:00.006+01:00

In my previous post, I noted how useless politicians were in dealing with climate change issues. There is another side to that argument that wouldn't exist if it weren't for the fact that Barrack Obama was elected President. He is living proof of our species potential.

Within his first days of office, he takes decisive decisions to address environmental, social and legal issues in the U.S.. He thereby demonstrates true leadership. At what cost? Demonstrating true leadership is a balancing and highly skilled exercise. A study of Obama's statements is extremely revealing: he is capable like no other politician of speaking to the electorate as a whole.

In dealing with problems, he adopts a dual approach which can be observed in nuanced, balanced statements attempting to find outcomes satisfying opposite views and thereby catering to a wider audience, a true exercise in democracy. He is capable of doing this at the same time as he furthers a single-sided agenda. The secret of his leadership resides in his highly skilled communication ability to satisfy both sides of the electorate in order to get an issue really satisfying one side to move up the agenda.

The cost will come in the future as true leadership means that sooner or later powerful interests in the electorate will be alienated and find a way to undermine the progress that has been made. This is what lead Obama to be elected in the first place: a combination of the financial crisis and Bush's lack of leadership. But the same effect will be at play in the future, change leads on to more change.

The essence of leadership is this: you can either be good to people or good for people. Being good for them justifies taking actions they disagree with in the present but that the leader expects will benefit them in the future. This process can't really be described as good or bad.

Our society is badly in need of true leadership but it is a rare commodity. I'm a big believer that the leadership that society needs exists in every individual who discovers they are capable of taking matters in their own hands and achieving significant changes.

The crisis of inactivity

2009-04-04T13:38:00.007+01:00

"The meaning of the industrial revolution was that nature was turned into a resource that was considered endlessly abundant. The deterioration of the environment of our planet is an outward mirror of an inner condition. Like inside, like outside." Source: the 11th Hour

The problem we are having with our ecological impact is not just one of carbon output. The problem is one of failure of carbon reduction initiatives. If we wanted we could reduce our carbon emissions. The problem is in finding the will. It seems to me that will lacks in politicians, it lacks in individuals, it lacks in industry, it lacks in society as a whole.

Is the problem to do with our economic system? Does capitalism engender unstoppable levels of pollution? Another way to phrase the problem is: can society as a whole change fast enough to dodge levels of global warming that would bring civilization to an end? James Lovelock is pessimistic on the subject judging that mankind isn't intelligent enough to avoid its own unmaking. Most environmentalists would rather live in a state of denial than admit to that, including myself.

Capitalism has huge benefits for mankind. It enables it to secure the basics and fulfill its secondary needs but in the process it is self-destructive judging by what the science tells us about the state of the Planet. As a species we have an inbuilt compulsory need for security. We need the security that we can secure adequate supplies of food and shelter to survive and past that stage, we need to be occupied. Capitalism is the solution to these needs. At an individual level, we are sometimes so caught up in trying to make a living that we have no time to consider the environmental impact of our lives and no time to do anything about it either.

If we look at politicians, they are no different to us. One area of economics that helps us understand their motivations is game theory. Politicians have to operate in a constrained environment of incentives and punishment. Politicians are no different to you or me, they will do what they can to remain in office. In doing so, taking measures that risk allienating them public support in the short term are undesirable outcomes. That's why there is no tax on plane travel or any restriction of any kind on travel routes or number of plane journeys, despite the fact that plane pollution is one of the most important causes of global warming and one of the easiest to address. The market fixes the problem through supply and demand. The only restriction existing on plane travel is that of available runways in the UK. Since the market only regulates itself through supply, demand and price, it is not capable of looking after its long term interest: its ability to continue as an entity indefinitely. Rather, it is preoccupied with the short-term issue of keeping the whole complex system functioning. As the financial crisis demonstrates: to insure its long-term survival, the market needs a regulatory framework that defines the boundaries in which it can operate. That is the Yin and Yang of the market if you like.

The Yin and Yang of the Planet is imbalanced: ecological systems are collapsing and not enough is being done to address their collapse, namely a reduction in the carbon emissions that are aggravating the warming. They say that hindsight is a beautiful thing. In hindsight, we could have regulated the derivatives market and avoided the worst of a crisis that has so far required us to borrow trillions to see ourselves out of it. In the end the market got its way: it wanted freedom to operate as it saw fit, it got it and in the process it created a Yin and Yang imblance: the abscence of regulation. Regulation could have avoided the issuing of so much junk debt and the insurance of that junk debt to a level of eight times the actual amount of the junk debt! It didn't and that created the crisis. In hindsight, people might have preferred regulation at the cost of not being able to live as well as they desired. Now the price they have to pay is insecurity. Insecurity is a better price to pay than life itself. At least if you don't have a job, you still have a life. So long as you scramble to find food and shelter, you'll live.

The next crisis, the environmental crisis, is far worst: what it will deprive us of this time is our lives. James Lovelock made an educated guess that the world's population would decrease from 9 billion in 2050 to 1 billion in 2100. The same happened on Easter Island seven centuries ago. Population peaked at 7000 and then shrinked 90% once the inhabitants had deforested the Island to erect the world famous Moai Statues. With no trees left, the inhabitants were no longer able to build boats so they killed each other to avoid starving to death. A genius wasn't required to see that to insure their own survival, the inhabitants needed to insure the survival of the forest but the inhabitants were to preoccupied in fulfilling their short-term need of securing protection from the Gods to distinguish the tree from the forest. This lack of foresight cost them their civilization. When the island was rediscovered by a Western explorer in the 16th century, only a few hundred starved, bony survivors remained. To this day, the abundant tropical forest that once rellished the island has not returned.

Individuals cannot count on politicians to deal effectively and decisively with global warming before it's too late. Politicians are elected in a democracy to fulfill the needs of individuals and the short-term need of individuals is prosperity. Individuals, like the market, are not capable of looking after their long-term interest: survival of the species. For an individual to gather the motivation to look after their long-term interest, a crisis is needed. Not until they find their homes flooded or their food supply dwindling will individuals take decisive action to protect themselves. Unfortunately, in the case of the global warming crisis, the crisis once it is set is unstoppable and causes total annihilation of the ecosystems and the species that depend upon it. The perversity of the environmental crisis is that it will not manifest itself in life threatening ways until it is already too late and it cannot be avoided.

Why should we expect politicians to deal with the environmental crisis if the reward they get for it is a media storm, discreditation alongside getting voted out of office?

Judging by the most recent scientific reports, it's already too late anyway. But we may still have a shot, albeit a very uncertain one since no one can really tell you how we can take back the carbon we've put in the atmosphere and avoid the methane burried at the bottom of the ocean from coming out. But I trust in human ingeniosity, I just hope we'll find something. In the meanwhile, we need to find ways to reduce our carbon emissions.

Coming back to capitalism, I'm a big believer that adequately manipulated, it can indeed offer a solution to our problem: the environmental crisis. The solution is the week-end.

Thanks to the wealth we are able during week days, we have as a nation, an untapped potential of 51 billion hours, worth at minimum wage, 304 billion a year. Desperate times call for desperate measures. What to do with this free time?

The most important life saving infrastructure that needs to be built is a means to absorb the excess carbon that has built up in the atmosphere over the past 50 years. That carbon needs to be sucked in and stored. Storage reserves exist but what we need is pipeline infrastructure leading to geological areas where the carbon can be stored along with a worldwide network of chimney infrastructure to suck in the carbon. This solution was presented in New Scientist in February 09 but it was among the least economical. In carbon capture and storage, we cannot take into account economical factors. You can't dump stuff in the atmosphere or in the oceans without being able to retrieve it and without knowing its long term effect. It's just too dangerous. I've read of particles that could be sent out in the atmosphere to reflect sunlight that could self-destruct but I'm sceptical about this. How can these particles be controlled? What if they have any secondary or unexpected effects? To me the common sense solution would be to put the carbon back where we found it and for that, we have a huge untapped man hour reserve that could well solve our problems without costing us our lifestyles.

So how do you get people to work on their week-ends? And more importantly, how do you get them to learn the skills required to do the necessary work? How do you mobilize an entire society?

The answer is in our past. In the past, military drafting was compulsory. A cultural, social and economical change of the magnitude of using up people's week-ends for production would require a military-style level of organization. Some people would have to work a seven day week continuing with their normal jobs whilst others would be taken away from their job to work full-time in the carbon sucking manufacturing sector. In the past, peasents use to work a 6 day week, Sunday was God's day and you stopped work that day to honour God. Sunday was never really a day for rest. The idea of resting at weekends to recharge your batteries is nice but would you stop to rest at weekends if your life was endangered?

Now that most of society is without faith, working Sunday isn't such a problem anymore. Even if society was with faith, it would be an honour to work on Sunday to protect God's gift to mankind: the Planet.

Initially, the measure could work by getting people to volunteer to either work weekends in their firms or to work on carbon sucking manufacturing full-time. It could also work on a rota system where people would spend a year in this system, a year out then another year in. I think it would work best targeting the service and public sector industry in the sectors that are deemed the least stressful such as administration, IT, banking, retail etc... where the need for rest is least required.

The untapped potential is there. It's up to us to seize it and do something to address the crisis of inactivity.

Best of Monbiot

2009-03-26T00:41:00.010Z

If only we had more Monbiots... His book Heat is a must to read for anyone looking for answers to how the climate change crisis can be dealt with. I recommend reading his articles, they are enlightening and subscribing to his blog (www.monbiot.com). These are the best articles I've read so far:
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/17/a-self-fulfilling-prophecy/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/03/24/woodchips-with-everything/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2005/12/05/the-struggle-against-ourselves/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/may/07/monbiot-climate-change-evacuation
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/06/02/blue-desert/ (VINTAGE)
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/06/23/stop-building-tanks/
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/08/18/should-we-seek-to-save-industrial-civilisation/ (Probably the best post I've read)
http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2009/09/14/answers-come-there-none/

Hurray for the Credit Crunch

2009-03-04T03:49:00.002Z

You might not be happy about reading this headline if your home has been repossessed and you’ve lost your job but let me cheer you up: things could be a lot worst.

The cost of the ecological crisis that would result from global warming is equivalent to all the economic wealth we’ve produced during the industrial age I would estimate. I believe that our government’s estimate of the cost of 2 world wars back to back falls well short of the actual economic cost. At today’s real estate valuations, if we look at a case scenario where the world’s oceans rise by 25 metres, it’s easy to see that the cost could be much greater. Picture the Eastern Coast of the US, China, Japan, London etc under water. We’re not talking about bombarding or destroying a few cities here and there, we’re talking about a large proportion of our land going under water and what’s left of the land would be absolutely useless to grow anything on it. So I think that a ballpark estimate for global warming potential damage is 50 years of economic production, compare that to about a year or three for the Credit crunch; I’m telling you, things could be worst.

The Oceans won’t rise by 25 meters you say? Read 6 degrees I say.

And that’s not in the distant future either. Once we’ve passed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels of warming, that’s it, “les carottes sont cuites” as the French say (we’re at 0.7 now). What will happen next is a positive feedback loop, runaway global warming or self-fulfilling global warming, call it what you want but in effect, Nature will start competing with us and very successfully may I add at emitting larger and larger amounts of greenhouse gases. In fact, so effective will Nature be at this job that by 2100, only 91 years from now, Nature will be pumping out into the atmosphere the same yearly amount that we emit now. This will warm the Planet even faster.

More carbon in the atmosphere so what you say?

Carbon will cause global temperatures to rise. In a warming world, we will be plighted by flash floods that will erode the land and make it impossible to grow food leading to billions of people dying from famine. Draughts will make this problem even worse and burn what little we have left of forests. This in turn, will reduce oxygen levels in the atmosphere to levels causing us to gasp for air. Billions of people will no longer have access to drinkable water. Sea levels could rise up to 25 meters above their current levels in the long term and 5 meters in the short term. Hurricanes will become far more powerful and destructive than before occurring worldwide and venturing much further into the land. Far worst, billions of buried reserves of methane (23 times worst than carbon) buried under the ice and the oceans will be released into the atmosphere. If lit by lightning, this methane could cause explosions far more powerful and more destructive than any weapons we currently have available. In a warming world, we will have a very large panel of dying options: fry to death, die from starvation or malnutrition, die asphyxiated, die from disease, die from skin cancer, drown, die in the wars caused by social unrest and mass migration... This will happen within our generation, this century; it has already begun. We are at the early stages of the worst mass extinction of all time. So far, nothing too noticeable has happened but once we reach tipping point, the changes will be very large and very noticeable and there will be nothing that can be done about them.

I told you it could be worst than losing your home and losing your job didn’t I? The reason why the credit crunch is such a God send is because when I read the US Economy has contracted by 6% and Chinese exports have fallen by more than 30% in the last quarter: this is fantastic news! It means carbon emissions are coming down and we have a shot at living. In 2007, we had until 2016 to do something before reaching the point of no return. The credit crunch is doing the job for us without us even having to switch to renewable energy right away. I think what we can quite safely say about the credit crunch is that it is buying us some precious time so that we all get a chance to change our lifestyles before it’s too late. Human beings are incredibly slow at getting just how bad that threat is and it’s going to take many more years of press and news coverage for people to get it. But there’s worst factors that are preventing positive change from occurring: everyone’s hooked on consumption. That’s another fantastic side effect of the credit crunch. Everyone’s now realized that you can’t get everything you want right now. This is fantastic. Less greed equals less consumption and the less we consume the less we pollute. Finally, the only viable industry that offers us a way out of this recession is the switch to a green economy as President Obama has understood. When are they going to get it here?

Renewable energy: the possibilities

2009-02-26T21:20:00.001Z

I've been reading Monbiot's book, Heat and the chapter on renewable energy is amazing:
Did you know that 62% of the energy generated in power stations is lost?
Here's some interesting stuff about the technology available now and what we can do with it:
- DC cables are now cheaper than AC cables and they have a major advantage: they can transmit energy across large distances without losing it. Ever wondered why these electricity pylons are so big and high up in the air instead of being buried underground?
The answer is the heat they generate: quite simply, to cool the heat generated by these cables, you would need the equivalent of 2 football stadiums underground back to back. That loss of heat is how the energy gets lost. It's the same concept as for incandescent light bulbs: they're only 90% efficient because they let so much heat escape. Why are these cables revolutionary?
If you can transmit energy over a longer distance, you can install the sources of energy much further. For wind power, this means that we can have large offshore wind farms that have large blades generating more noise and producing more energy offshore where no one will complain about them. More than 100% of our electricity in the UK could potentially be produced from wind so long as we can make adequate changes to the grid. For solar energy, it means that we can have solar panels in the sahara desert producing enough electricity for all of Europe.
The economies of scale that could be generated from both these technologies could enable it to compete with the price of brown energy and in the long run make it much cheaper.
Another interesting technology is solar thermal electricity: it's basically reflective dishes that focus the heat from the sun onto a tube containing water or another liquid. This reaches temperatures of about 400 degrees and the steam drives an engine which generates electricity. They've existed in California since the 80s. Their output costs in between 7 bto 9 pence per Kwh this compares to a current average price for brown of 10-15p per Kwh (Source: consumerfocus.org.uk).

The Energy problem

2009-02-25T15:29:00.001Z

We're making progress. President Obama in America has clearly set the agenda on renewable energy as the nation's priority. Since America is the second biggest polluter in the World anything that reduces the impact it has on the Planet is good news.

We have a massive problem with energy, it's not just the lack of or insecurity of supply, it's the use that we're making of it. Most people can easily see that their cars pollute through engines that burn fossil fuels but I wager most would be surprised to know that car pollution, as bad as it looks actually creates less pollution than cattle and the energy used in our homes. The dirtiest type of energy we use to generate electricity is coal. Coal generates twice as much pollution per kilowatt than the average of all the other forms of generating energy we use. 36% of our electricity comes directly from coal. Such is the urgency to reduce our emissions that this figure should already be zero. Our priority has to be to get rid of coal as a means of generating electricity ASAP.

It is very surprising on that basis that Eon is advocating building a coal power plant in Kingston. You can oppose this by visiting: http://www.nonewcoal.org.uk/. Don't believe the stories in the media about clean coal generation, there is not one power plant in the UK that generates clean coal or sequesters the carbon it emits. Clean coal is an oxymoron.

Instead we need to focus on massively increasing our investment in renewable energy. Renewable energy represents only 1% of the UK's energy capacity. Don't count on government to turn things around. I refer you to the book Heat by Monbiot to get an understanding of just how useless the UK government is and will continue to be at reducing emissions unless its citizens push for change. The only entity we can count on to pioneer change is ourselves. We are extremely fortunate in the UK to have a company that has understood the challenge we face and offered us an opportunity to change our ways. This company is Ecotricity. I believe it is the only company in the world that offers what it does.

There are 6 major players in the energy supply market and none of them is making an effort to increase the nation's renewable energy capacity. The government has requested 5% of their energy come from renewables and only one of these companies has 7% of their energy coming from renewables. They are heavily advertising themselves as being at the forefront of the green revolution!!! 2% more than the rest...

There are 3 key companies in the renewable energy supply sector: green energy, good energy and ecotricity. Of these 3 companies, Ecotricity is the only one that is directly investing in renewable energy. As a matter of fact, they are the only company in the UK that reinvest 100% of the client's spend into building new renewable energy capacity. This is no short of incredible; for someone seeking to reduce their carbon footprint, becoming an Ecotricity customer can make a huge difference.

The average UK citizen's carbon footprint is 12.5 tonnes in direct and indirect emissions. The footprint from electricity per home is only 1-2 tonnes a year whilst the average home generates about 6 tonnes of carbon a year. In 2008, ecotricity was able to remove an estimated 1.75 tonnes of carbon per customer from the atmosphere. This year however, based on the figures on their website and assuming a growth of 1000 customers per month, the average removal of carbon per customer will work out at 5.4 tonnes per customer, almost equivalent to the home's entire carbon emissions. That's an offset of 2 to 3 times more than the actual average household electricity consumption. It almost solves the problem of having to use gas for heating (for the time being only).

I can't stress how impressive that is. I've been investigating the possibilities to reduce our global emissions and the installation of renewable energy to replace coal use is by none the most effective and most realistic option we have available at this point. I had a high opinion of trees but unfortunately trees will not really sink a significant of carbon until 40-50 years in the future whilst they are very useful to fight the future flood problems we'll have along with generating oxygen that will gradually disappear as the rainforest gets the chop, they're not the solution to the drastic and immediate changes we need to make to avoid the catastrophe of runaway global warming (by this expression, we mean that above 2 degrees, nature will start producing vast quantities of carbon in an unstoppable loop and by 2100, will produce more carbon than human beings do thereby exacerbating global warming). Even the Energy Saving Trust recommends that if you are trying to offset your carbon footprint, you need to look at renewable energy projects where the carbon emissions reduction is visible rather than anything else. Find out more about carbon offsets here.

At this point, an important question must be raised: why is it that for the last 10 years Good Energy and Ecotricity have been around, their customer base adds up to less than 70000 homes?
Green electricity is a little more expensive than traditional energy but not massively. Why then? For one, these companies lack a direct sales force. For two, the average UK citizen just does not understand how serious the global warming problem is and they lack the understanding of what they can do to turn things around. It's down to individuals to change the world not governments or companies. Governments follow individuals, they don't take risks. It takes a massively charismatic leader to take political risks and one that can withstand the full blow of the media frenzy and voter loss of support when taking challenging decisions. I can't see one of those in the UK political landscape. Don't count on an Obama down here anytime soon. Understandably, politicians prefer not to gamble away their careers. They are after all in the majority, not idealists but negotiators and in the end, career people.

So unfortunately, Ecotricity has failed to meet its goal of supplying 1,000,000 customers by 2010 by a landslide and generating 500 Mwh of capacity. It's not too late, we can all support Ecotricity, all we have to do is become a customer.

Climate change and the media

2009-02-25T00:24:00.003Z

Extract from Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, 2006:
"Isn't there disagreement among scientists about whether the global warming problem is real or not? Not really. There was a massive study of every scientific article in a peer reviewed journal written on global warming for the last 10 years and they took a 10% sample, 928 articles. The number of those disagreeing with the scientific concensus that we're causing global warming and that it is a serious problem was ZERO. The misconception that there is disagreement about the science has been deliberately created by a relatively small group of people. One of their internal memos leaked and here's what it said: our objective is to reposition global warming as theory rather than fact. Have they succeeded? There was another study of all the articles in the popular press over the last 14 years. They looked at a sample of 636 articles. 53% doubted that we were the cause."

The more I read about climate change the more I am astonished at the lack of discussion and lack of programs about it in the media. We are at a critical point: if we don't do more about it within the next 4 years, the damage will be irreversible. It may already be irreversible. 2009 may be the first summer with no arctic sea ice in Greenland. So what you say? No arctic sea ice in Greenland means the biosphere has lost part of its ability to sink carbon and that the golf stream current will stall. In other words, the disappearance of the arctic sea ice means the onset of our species becoming extinct. Why is there not more media coverage about that?

In my view it's down to the news culture. News is about what happens now, not what will happen and it is what we are being fed on TV every day. There's a complete lack of foresight in the British media that is both appalling and worrying. The media plays a key role in informing the population and if the population is not well informed enough then they can't be prepared for climate change or be motivated to do anything about it.

Take for example the recent articles in the Times and the Mail deploring the loss of incandescent light bulbs or questioning whether we should continue recycling paper considering the market for it has collapsed. This is outrageous! Have they not heard of deforestation contributing to 20% of the worldwide emissions of carbon or of the ever rising levels of carbon in our atmosphere threatening our species of extinction? There's so much wrong with our culture I can't even begin to express my disgust.

Here's some evidence of The Times's campaign to deny climate change and to encourage people to do nothing about it (an action which in our opinion is equivalent to denying the Holocaust or if we put ourselves back at the time of that event: encouraging it):

Read the published section of have your say on articles about the environment: The Times always advertises predominantly negative opinions on articles related to climate change.

18/3/09 Anger as Shell reduces renewables investment, 2/3 comments are negative.

Yes, Joe, edinburgh - Greens should put their money where their considerable mouths are. The trouble is - like all socialists - they only want to play games with OTHER people's money.

JohnW, Manchester, UK

The oil companies are making sound business decisions.

It's enviros who are the hypocrites - Wind projects have high initial CO2 usage and noise pollution; Hydro CO2 usage, flooding of production areas and water shortage downstream: Solar CO2 usage and equipment disposal problems. Main Scam is CO2

Jim Talbot, Auckland, New Zealand

The real problem of carbon capture

2009-02-24T00:50:00.003Z

There are 3 stages to saving ourselves from certain extinction:

1- Reduce our carbon emissions
2- Eliminate or overcompensate our carbon emissions through offsets
3- Find a way to recuperate and trap the carbon we've emitted over the past 50 years

Reducing and eliminating our carbon emissions is possible. We live in world that's taken a long time to realize there was a problem with our emissions but things are looking much better now than they were 3 or 10 years ago. The government is advertising energy emissions reductions, the media has ongoing programs and articles on the topic and the industry is receiving investment. All this is very slow in comparison to how quickly we need to make these changes but at least we're moving forwards.
The trouble with climate change is that it is a function of the carbon we've emitted over the past 50 years and it is a function of the carbon we are going to continue emitting. The level of population is already unsustainable at current carbon emissions and resource consumption per capita levels. Ideally we need 500 million people and we have 6-12 times more. By 2050, we'll have 9 billion people at current population growth rates, 9-18 times more than the planet can sustain. Looking at the growth in carbon emissions of our civilization, it is likely that these 9 billion people will emit more carbon than we are now.
Even if these people somehow manage to emit zero carbon, we're still going to have a problem because temperatures will continue rising and with as little as a 2-3 degrees average global warming, 2-3 billion people will be without water. Can we let these future generations die?
No, not if we have just an ounce of compassion in our make up. So we need to regulate births in Western countries, that's about as important as trying to cut carbon emissions to make room for those future refugees. And if anyone's worried about lack of younger generations to pay for other's retirements; don't worry: with climate change we'll have plenty of immigrants just begging to come to work here because the opportunities in their part of the world will have all but disappeared thanks to us importing our rotten development model. We owe them at least a new home so we should start making space.
Now let's assume we do 1 and 2 and we manage to live in a world without human carbon. It's not impossible you know. What then? Well because of the increase in temperatures, Nature will be generating more carbon than it used to. This will come from increased fires, forest loss, methane released from the permafrost, methane released from the oceans etc... So the one problem that no one seems to be addressing right now is: how are we going to trap all this carbon to avoid ever worsening climate change?
This is the one area where we really need to pin our hopes on science and on our collective intelligence. So far there has only been talks about carbon capture in respect of continuing to burn fossil fuels. Talk about carbon capture is related to trapping the carbon emitted by power plants such as coal plants in depleted gas or oil fields. But there has been no talk about how we can reduce the current 380 particles per million (ppm) of CO2 to the much more sustainable 280 ppm we had just 500 years ago. And that's what we need to address to avoid runaway or positive feedback climate change.
First we need to find a place where to stock all this carbon. The good news is we've found a spot, it's on the Eastern cost of America, under the ocean. Second we need to drill that area and get a pipeline running from North America to the Ocean to send all that carbon down below the Earth's crust. Third, we need to invent a gigantic particle hover(s) that can hover up everything in the atmosphere, filter out the carbon and spit out the rest. That's where we've come unstuck, I have not heard a single report of anyone even researching that option.
So if you're a brilliant scientist, forget about re-conciliating general relativity with quantum mechanics and please focus on saving our arses pronto please.

Finally, I mentioned methane earlier in this article. We have huge amounts of methane available almost everywhere on earth and especially buried in the oceans. Methane is the main ingredient used in the production of natural gas that can be used to power vehicles. The only reason why we are not using it now is because of accidents which made it seem less safe than oil or coal. All our vehicles could be running on natural gas. As a matter of fact, all public transport in Bangkok Thailand now runs on natural gas. For an equivalent amount of heat, burning natural gas produces about 30% less carbon dioxide than burning petroleum and about 45% less than burning coal. According to wikipedia those reduced emissions do not include the methane released in the atmosphere in the drilling process (methane units pollute 23 times more than Co2 units). To me it would make a lot of sense to drill methane where it is likely to naturally evaporate into the atmosphere due to global warming ie in the permafrost and in the arctic circles. If that methane is burned and provides us with more eco-friendly transportation at the same time as we avoid its release into the atmosphere, then it should be much more beneficial to us than burning oil or coal.

Some key Statistics and facts

2009-02-17T02:50:00.004Z

Over 50% of the world population is now urbanized according to the United Nations. The majority of people are out of touch with the natural world.
The levels of carbon dioxide and methane in the atmosphere are now higher than they have been for 650,000 years. (Source: The economics of climate change 2006, Sir Nicholas Stern)
Carbon dioxide levels have been rising over the past century faster than at any time over the past 20,000 years. (Source: The economics of climate change 2006, Sir Nicholas Stern)
The increase in temperature in the twentieth century is likely to have been the largest in any century in the past 1000 years. (Source: World Meteorological Organization, The Eddington Transport study 2006)
If everyone in the world lived like we do in the UK, we’d need three planets – not just one. (WWF Website)
There are over 32,000,000 million vehicles in the U.K.
On average 24.6 miles are driven every day by single user vehicles.
Over 400,000 tones of carbon dioxide emissions are pumped into the atmosphere every day. (isanyonegoingto.com)
Over the last century the total mass of vertebrates has halved. Meanwhile the mass of humans has quadrupled. (The Planet documentary)
Since 1990, China's emissions have increased by 67%. The figure for India is 88%.
A single European consumes 50 tonnes of our planet's resources every year.
The level of CO2 in the atmosphere today is the highest is 750,000 years.
The 22 warmest years ever recorded have occured since 1980.
96% of all surveyed glaciers around the world are currently diminishing in size.
In Western China, 300 million people rely in whole or in part on glacial meltwater during the summer to irrigate their crops. What are they going to do? This is fossil water, they're not going to get it back until the next ice age. The disappearance of those glaciers alone is enough to cause a net food defcit and a global humanitarian catastrophy.
Over one billion people are already suffering from a shortage of clean water.
In 2010, 50 million people will be trying to escape the effects of environmental deterioration.
Natural disasters have increased more than fourfold over the last 40 years. Windstorms, fiverfold. Flooding sixfold. Bushfires tenfold.
What you do now happens in 50 years time with the climate.
CO₂ emissions from U.S. coal-based electricity are greater than emissions from all the cars and trucks in America. (“GHG Emissions and Sinks 1990-2006,” US EPA 2008)
There are roughly 600 coal plants producing electricity in the U.S. Not one of them captures and stores its global warming pollution. (“Electricity Facts,” US DOE 2008 (link); IEA Greenhouse Gas R&D Programme CO₂ Capture and Storage Database (link); Carbon Capture and Sequestration Technologies Program at MIT, CO₂ Capture and Storage Project Database (link))

Why Chinese-made products must be boycotted by Western Consumers

2009-02-16T23:28:00.003Z

“China is still a developing country and the present task confronting China is to develop its economy and alleviate poverty, as well as raise the living standard of its people,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters.

“Given that, it is natural for China to have some increase in its emissions, so it is not possible for China in that context to accept a binding or compulsory target.”

11/06/2009, Source

China is responsible for 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. China in 2006 became the biggest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions in the World. Over the past decade, China was able to lift 500 million out of poverty into the middle class. As a developing country, China is not required to reduce its emissions. China mainly relies on fossil fuels, particularly coal, for energy. Over the next 10 years, China will be building 500 coal fired powered stations. Every 4 days, China is opening a new power station. To give you an idea of the scale of these constructions, the United States has 600 coal fired power station whilst the UK only has 17 but they supply 33% of its electricity.
Dermot O'Gorman, WWF China Country Representative, said that "Developed countries who benefit from importing goods instead of domestic production are also responsible for the rapid growth of China's energy consumption and greenhouse gases emission. It's unfair to put the blame on China for the large emission of greenhouse gases."
Chinese officials have recently stated that they are not prepared to put greenhouse gas emissions ahead of growth on their agenda. In the same way as Western countries have dramatically failed to decrease their carbon emissions and meet the Kyoto protocol Traty targets, China is failing to reduce its own.
It seems obvious to me that as Western consumers eager to purchase cheap goods, we must refrain from purchasing as much as possible anything produced in China until China commits to reducing and managing its carbon emissions properly.

David Attenborough's view on Climate Change

2009-02-16T22:13:00.000Z

What will happen in the US and Botwana when the sand dunes are awaken by global warming

2009-02-16T14:45:00.000Z

The Purpose and Importance of Trees

2009-02-15T17:38:00.004Z

"A tree makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, provides habitat for hundreds of species, accrues solar energy, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates and self-replicates." The 11th Hour

I'm not a tree hugger or a tree lover. The only relationship I had with a tree was when I was smaller and my dad helped me to build a tree house in our garden. Many years later, I was upset when acid rains destroyed the leaves on the tree in spring.
Recently however, I have rediscovered the importance of trees in looking for ways to reduce people's carbon footprint. If you think about it, in economic terms, trees are worthless except for fruit trees they're really not going to make anyone richer are they? Well actually, I've found that trees are much more useful than I previously thought, here's why:
- They produce oxygen through photosynthesis. The Amazonian rainforest generates 20% of the world's atmospheric oxygen.
- They sequester carbon. A word of warning here: you can use trees to offset your current carbon footprint but a tree does not begin to absorb carbon until it has matured which takes 15 years. So if you're trying to offset your carbon footprint with trees now, you need to realize that you're offsetting it decades forwards. A tree over its lifetime will absorb about 1 tonne of carbon. Also, each tree planted may not survive for its full lifetime so if you're trying to offset, you need to consider where the trees are planted and how many trees to plant. Worldwide, 10 trees are cut down for every tree that is planted. If you donate for trees to be planted, make sure the area in which they are planted is protected. I also like getting trees planted in the UK because no matter how un-environmentally friendly we are, I trust UK regulation and efforts for protecting trees more than the ones in the developping world. For instance, in Brazil, 80% of the logging is conducted illegally.
- They prevent erosion: you only need to look at Haiti to understand that. The level of deforestation in Haiti is perhaps one of the worst in the world. The contrast in between Haiti and the Dominican Republic when you look at helicopter views of the frontier is astonishing: on one side you see a huge forest and on the other you see barren land: the inhabitants of Haiti have completely deforested the land to provide for their needs. Add to this the fact that with global warming the oceans are warmer and thus hurricanes are stronger and more frequent and you have a recipe for disaster. Just last year, in September of 2008, Haiti was hit not by one but by 4 hurricanes. This was the worst natural disaster the island has ever known and it was compounded by the absence of trees. A tree can retain 57000 gallons of water in a 10-12 inch flash flood. It can grab that much water, prevent it from running off, cleans it and puts it back in the aquifer. During the hurricane season, a huge amount of soil was displaced into the sea. Soil takes from 100 to 1000 years to settle in any given area so it will take that long for the ecosystem in Haiti to recover. In a world with finite fertile soil, its preservation is essential to our survival. Only 20% of the soil on land on our planet can be cultivated. Furthermore, the soil that runs into the sea at each hurricane season disturbs the ocean ecosystem killing all the fish. When you know that the average inhabitant of Haiti lives on $1 a day, imagine the scale of the disaster acknowledging that they can't hunt in the forest anymore and that there are no fish left on their coast! The same could happen to us in the UK if global temperatures rise by 3 degrees. Hurricanes may begin to hit our coasts along with flash floods. That's a very good reason for us to plant as many trees as we possibly can.
- In addition to the 3 key benefits mentioned above trees also distill water, provide habitat for hundreds of species, accrue solar energy, make complex sugars and foods, create micro climates and self replicate.
- Trees also produce clouds and clouds produce rainfall.
- Finally, forests are the lungs and the water tanks of the planet. Read more here.

Watch a film to find out what some organizations are doing to solve the problems of deforestation: click here.

News on Deforestation:
The UK Government Eliasch Review calculated that allowing deforestation to continue could cost the world $12 trillion and called for emissions from deforestation to be halved by 2020 and to be carbon neutral by 2030. (Source: The Eocologist, November 2008)

Scientists have found A fifth of the world's carbon emissions are soaked up by extra forest growth. Trees in the tropics are getting bigger, which means they are soaking up an extra 5bn tonnes of CO2 a year. Compared to the 1960s, each hectare of intact African forest has trapped an extra 0.6 tonnes of carbon a year. Over the world's tropical forests, this extra "carbon sink" effect adds up to 4.8bn tonnes of CO2 removed each year - close to the total carbon dioxide emissions from the US. Although individual trees are known to soak up carbon as they photosynthesise and grow, large patches of mature forest were once thought to be carbon neutral, with the carbon absorbed by new trees balanced by that released as old trees die. (Source: The Guardian, 18/2/09)

How to reprogram your mind to become an environmentally fridenly citizen

2009-02-15T13:43:00.002Z

1- Forget that freedom of choice is a good thing
A friend of mine is fond of the following saying: "People are like rivers, they take the easy route". This couldn't be more true when we look at their food consumption patterns or indeed the consumption patterns in a wider "free" market. In a free market, people have a choice in between cheap mass produced products that are bad for the environment and more expensive environmentally friendly product. Which do you think is always going to be the larger market if people are given freedom of choice?
There is a French proverb that says: "la liberte des uns s'arrete ou commence celle des autres", literally translated this means that our freedom stops where the freedom of others begin. A liberal market is based entirely on the notion that freedom of choice is good. Is it a good thing to have the choice in between cheap mass produced foodstuffs and expensive organic ones? The answer is unequivocally yes for consumers and no for the environment. Since the environment is what enables consumers to survive; the environment's rights are more important than the consumer's rights however in a free market, the reverse is true.
What is the problem with mass produced foodstuffs? They use a lot of pesticides and insecticides which generate nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide has 300 times the greenhouse effect of CO2 and is responsible for 21% of the greenhouse emissions from the food supply chain. That is the hidden cost of cheap vegetables and meat which is never expressed in the lower "subsidized" price we pay. That's why we need regulation so that people are no longer given the choice but are under the obligation to pay a higher price for their long-term survival. That is what we may call "sustainability" politics.
2- Having one more baby in the UK is very bad news
The current world population is 6.5 billion and it is supposed to stabilize around 9 billion by 2050. The World is already overpopulated and the annual biological debt accumulated by the World population is equivalent to 20%. That means we consume 20% more than what the Earth is able to cope with in terms of its ability to regenerate itself. The average life expectancy of men and women in the UK is equal to 79.5 years and the average annual carbon footprint of a UK citizen is 12.5 tonnes. Therefore the average carbon footprint of an individual in the UK is equivalent to 993 tonnes over their life time. The weight of an empty boeing 747 8i is 211.7 tonnes therefore the weight of the carbon emissions of a UK citizen is equivalent to 4.69 Boeings 747 . A rough estimate of how much it would cost to offset that carbon footprint by planting trees is: £30981 or 2581 trees, that assumes planting 2.6 trees to offset each ton of carbon at a cost of £12 (these figures were provided to me by Trees for Cities a UK based tree planting charity). There is simply not enough land available to plant that many trees for each new born. We have 2 choices: either we regulate births our impose upon ourselves not to have children or Nature takes care of it for us through famine and the spread of diseases.
3- Understand the idea of finite supply
Our entire free market culture is based on the idea that nature offers abundant supplies of everything. However, this is no longer the case. Based on proved and probable reserves, we are running out of almost every available raw material be that metals, oil, coal uranium or anything else you can think of that you might define as a raw material. The discovery of new resources is only delaying what we already know: soon and very soon in some cases we are going to run out of Nature's abundant resources. These are just the resources we rely on for our economy. The resources we rely on to live: water, soil, trees and oxygen are also running out due to intensive use and pollution whilst at the same time global warming through a phenomenon known as positive feedback is reducing further those resources naturally. Soon we may lose control over greenhouse gas emissions due to global warming releasing huge amounts of greenhouse gases trapped in soil, vegetation and oceans. Nature has got finite supplies of everything and unless we reduce the consumption of these finite supplies we will run out of the very essence of what makes our life possible on this planet.
4- Economic growth is bad news
Growth is an exponential function. Exponential functions in a finite supply & overcrowded world are self-destructing mechanisms; they can't last. In a recessionary environment, people lose their jobs and can't find work. It appears that to maintain full employment, there is no other solution but to promote growth. However, if restrictions are imposed on birth rates it is possible to have in the longer-term an environment with zero growth or negative growth yet still have the benefits of a growing economy since there are less people around to benefit from the additional economic wealth.

10 Proposal to combat climate change

2009-01-20T17:28:00.001Z