Greenhouse effects: Light bulbs

Tony Juniper
The vast majority of the 600m or so light bulbs in British homes are of the old-fashioned tungsten filament kind. This won’t be the case for long.
Recent legislation means that these bulbs, which are incredibly inefficient — only about 10% of the power used produces visible light, the rest is heat — will be consigned to the recycling bin. From September 2011, 60W clear incandescent bulbs will be outlawed, followed by a ban on all remaining incandescent bulbs in September 2012.
Instead, homeowners are using lower-wattage halogens, new compact fluorescents and, more recently, light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which all offer good energy-efficient alternatives.
LEDs are semiconductors that convert electrical energy directly into light. This means they require far less energy. The early generation of LED bulbs gave a low-intensity coloured light and were used in displays for calculators, televisions, watches and traffic lights. Now they are brighter and available in many colours, including high-intensity white light. They are compact and robust, light up fast, can be dimmed, produce little heat, and have long lives (more than 25 years for many).
That said, a report published last week by the Institution of Engineering and Technology found that the quality of light that energy-saving bulbs produce becomes significantly dimmer over time, losing up to 22% of their brightness. For more advice on what will suit you, visit The Energy Saving Trust (energysavingtrust.org.uk) for a rundown of the various types of energy-efficient bulbs, which can cut your electricity bill by as much as 20%.
We have replaced the 10 35W halogen bulbs in our kitchen ceiling with 3W LEDs, reducing the electricity used by more than 90%. While LED bulbs are much more expensive than regular bulbs, the cost should be recovered within two to three years.
In September, Philips launched a range of retrofit LED bulbs for the home (consumer.philips.com/c/led-light/19964/cat/gb). These are designed to fit the most common bayonet and screw light fittings found in the home and are suitable for replacing old bulbs of up to 40W equivalent. We plan to install them in the rest of the house.
Tony Juniper is an environmental campaigner and former director of Friends of the Earth; tonyjuniper.com

Food waste to provide green gas for carbon-conscious consumers

Biogas sourced from food waste and sewage is to piped into British homes under a new ‘green gas’ tariff
Adam Vaughan
The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009

Rotting leftovers, wilted salad and even sewage are to provide a new source of “green gas” to heat our homes.
From today, British householders will be able to register for Ecotricity’s new tariff to buy green gas – commonly known as biogas – as a way of reducing their carbon footprint and cutting landfill waste. It will be a first for carbon-conscious consumers who have previously only been able to buy “green electricity” from suppliers.
Britain discards about 18 million tonnes of food waste a year, which Ecotricity said could generate enough biogas to heat 700,000 homes. The Conservative Party believes 50% of the UK’s natural gas supply could be replaced by biogas .
Dale Vince, the company’s founder, said: “We’re the real British Gas now. We’re kickstarting the market to move Britain from brown to green gas.” He said natural gas sourced from countries such as Russia was expected to run out in 15-20 years.
Householders who sign up to Ecotricity’s deal will be supplied from January, although initially their gas will come from conventional “brown” natural gas – a percentage of biogas will only be injected into the national grid later in the year. The company, which currently has about 30,000 electricity customers, said it wanted to eventually source 50% of its gas tariff from biogas and would match British Gas on dual-fuel pricing. Vince said he planned to invest about £50m to build two “green gas mills” to make the biogas, but would also look at buying in biogas from other sources, including suppliers in Holland.
Audrey Gallacher, energy expert for the government watchdog Consumer Focus, said she welcomed the idea, but warned that confusion could arise over what the green tariff will initially provide: “Green gas tariffs could be good news for customers who want to buy environmentally friendly energy. However, it must be made clear to any customer signing up that they are investing in creating a demand and supply of energy-efficient fuel for the future.”
Biogas is generated in anaerobic digesters, where organic material is fed into tanks where microbes break down the material without oxygen and release methane and carbon dioxide, the main elements of biogas. The biogas can then be used to make electricity or, as Ecotricity plans, processed and injected into the pipes of the national gas network.
The raw material for digesters can come from a variety of sources, including food waste, sewage and farm waste, although Vince ruled out the latter. “We’d probably avoid agriculture waste because we don’t want to support factory farming, and a properly run organic farm won’t produce excess slurry,” he said.
The National Grid said there was no technical reason why Ecotricity’s plan wouldn’t work and added that it supported using renewable gas to hit carbon-cutting targets. Extra momentum for UK biogas should arrive in 2011, when the government is due to introduce a renewable heat incentive, giving financial assistance to generators of heat from renewable sources, from householders using ground-source heat pumps to companies such as Ecotricity.

Barack Obama ready to offer target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions

Suzanne Goldenberg, Washington
The Observer, Sunday 22 November 2009

President Barack Obama is considering setting a provisional target for cutting America’s huge greenhouse gas emissions, removing the greatest single obstacle to a landmark global agreement to fight climate change.
The Observer has learnt that administration officials have been consulting international negotiators and key players on Capitol Hill about signing up to a provisional target at the UN global warming summit in Copenhagen, now less than three weeks away.
Todd Stern, the state department climate change envoy, said the administration recognised that America had to come forward with a target for cutting its emissions. The US, which with China is responsible for 40% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, is the only major developed nation yet to table an offer.
“What we are looking at is to see whether we could put down essentially a provisional number that would be contingent on our legislation,” Stern said from Copenhagen, where he was meeting Danish officials. “We are looking at that, there are people we need to consult with.”
A provisional target – if accepted by other nations – would solve Obama’s dilemma. The Senate will not have passed a domestic law before Copenhagen, meaning that, if he makes an offer there, it could subsequently be rejected in Washington. But if he makes no offer, the deal is likely to crash anyway, and with it hopes of rapidly combating global warming.
Stern did not go into detail on the level of emissions cuts being considered, but it is thought likely that a provisional target would be a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions of 14-20% by 2020, compared with 2005 levels. The White House and state department have also discussed the idea of putting forward a range of targets rather than a specific figure.
“I think the president has several options,” said Jonathan Lash, president of the World Resources Institute. “One which seems to be under discussions inside the administration is to offer a range: to say “here is what we hope to be able to propose” and that range might go from what the president has always committed to since his campaign – 14% – to the highest number in any pending legislation, which is 20% in the Senate.”
The House of Representatives narrowly passed a bill in June that would cut US emissions by 17%. A proposal now before the Senate would cut emissions by 20%, but a number of key Democratic senators have said the target is too stringent.
Even at the higher end, such figures fall short of the emissions targets adopted by other industrialised countries in Europe and Japan, and recommended by scientists to avoid the worst ravages of climate change.
Many negotiators are frustrated with America – especially given the high expectations for the Obama presidency. “One could perhaps argue that this could have been a much higher priority and this should perhaps have been pushed before any of the other initiatives the administration has taken, particularly given the fact that there was a deadline of December for getting an agreement,” said RK Pachauri, chairman of the intergovernment panel on climate change.
Obama and other world leaders have already conceded that Copenhagen will not produce a legally binding treaty. But the leaders are looking to the meeting to seal firm political agreement about specific action plans by the industrialised and rapidly emerging economies that can go into immediate effect.
But ensuring success at Copenhagen carries a risk that could ultimately defeat efforts to reduce global greenhouse gas emissions, Lash warned. Setting too strong a provisional target could provoke a backlash from Congress, which might damage efforts to pass climate change laws in the US.
“Without the US passing legislation, we can’t move an overall agreement,” Lash said. “My greatest concern is that the administration does nothing in Copenhagen, because that ultimately undercuts everybody’s efforts to achieve an international agreement.”
Democratic leaders in the Senate are growing increasingly wary about taking up a controversial climate change bill. The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, said that leaders would not turn to a bill until March 2010 – but even that date is in doubt because of congressional elections in November.
On Thursday, John McCain, Obama’s presidential opponent and a sponsor of past climate change legislation, said about the backers of the current bill: “Obviously, they’re going nowhere.”
Despite the paralysis in the Senate, Obama has been edging towards a concrete commitment to cutting America’s emissions. During his summit in Beijing with China’s Hu Jintao, Obama said America would come forward with emission reductions targets so long as China offered specific measures of its own.
But the administration is mindful of a re-run of the 1990s, when the Senate voted down ratification of the Kyoto treaty by 99-0, despite the US having already committed to it internationally.
Such concerns make it more likely that other nations would view favourably a more modest provisional target at Copenhagen. Stern said there was a generally positive reaction in the international community to the idea of a provisional target.
“On the one hand, people are keen on having the United States put a number down,” Stern said. “On the other hand, people are extraordinarily keen on getting [US] legislation done and don’t want us taking steps that will make that more difficult.”

Climate crunch

Unless they end in promises, and a treaty within months, Ed Miliband believes the Copenhagen talks will be a disaster. But can the British energy secretary, in Denmark for a frantic round of pre-summit diplomacy, win the argument?

John Harris
The Guardian, Saturday 21 November 2009

It’s breakfast time in the biggest of Copenhagen’s Scandic hotels. Over the obligatory croissants and coffee – and, for those who want it, an off-beam version of the English breakfast – 42 international delegations are preparing to go into a second day of talks. Phones tweet; hushed conversations within teams of negotiators form a low conversational hum.
Look closely, and some of the outlines of modern geopolitics are clear. This morning, the Chinese and Indian delegations are seated together, and locked in conversation. Elsewhere in the hotel, the UK’s representatives are doing their thing at an early “EU co-ordination” meeting. In a corner of the restaurant, meanwhile, the US special envoy on climate change – an elusive, austere-looking man named Todd Stern – sits completely alone.
From 7-18 December, the Danish capital will fill up with an extra 20,000 people, there to play their part in what officialspeak calls the 15th Conference of the Parties (or Cop 15), but the rest of us know as the Copenhagen summit: the great global coming-together aimed at securing a much more ambitious successor to the Kyoto treaty, and thereby marking a turning point in the human race’s fight against climate change. This week’s event, organised by the Danish government under the title Pre-Cop Consultations, is much more low-key, though the guest list includes a huge array of energy and climate change ministers, their aides and negotiating teams – called here to compare notes, have brief and not-so-brief “bilaterals”, and somehow inject a slow-moving process with some political momentum.
Among them is Britain’s own Ed Miliband, who will turn 40 six days after the summit closes, and has the road-worn air of man who has been travelling far too much. In the build up to December, he has been to China, Brazil, India, Mexico, South Africa and Bangladesh, as well as Poland, Russia, and France (before anyone asks, he and his team offset their flights).
On the flight from London, he underlines the gravity of Copenhagen by alluding to past summits, and describing it as “Bretton Woods plus Yalta multiplied by Reykjavik”. In Scandic’s restaurant, where he sits for the interview, he comes up with an even more mind-boggling analogy: “Imagine if you knew 189 people, and you got them all together and said, ‘Here’s how we want you to run a significant part of your lives in the next 30 or 40 years – and by the way, you have to unanimously agree that that’s how you want to do it.’”
Give or take sleep, and the closed-off proceedings in the main conference room, I shadow Miliband for around 40 hours. On his first morning here, I hear the stiffened small-talk at early-morning bilaterals, best illustrated by the opening exchange between him and his German counterpart Norbert Röttgen:
“Congratulations on your first presentation in the parliament. I heard some reports that it was a triumph.”
“It was OK.”
“You’re being hailed as a great environmentalist, which is good for your first week in the job.”
“Second week.”
What really defines my time in Copenhagen, though, is a thrice-daily ritual whereby I collar Miliband as he emerges from the formal negotiations, and try – in vain, usually – to get a firm idea of where the conversation has been going. Usually, he wears a pretty much unreadable expression, though it doesn’t take any great effort to understand how much work – somewhat worryingly – has still be done. At the end of Day One, for example, I manage to extract a few brief words from 55-year-old Jairam Ramesh, India’s stoic minister of state for environment and forests, who audibly sighs, and will only tell me that “there is still a long way to go”.
This week, the news media’s understanding of what Copenhagen might achieve has pinballed between pessimism and qualified hope. On Monday, headlines confirmed what most insiders knew, when Barack Obama served notice that a legally binding agreement at Copenhagen was now beyond reach, and he was signing up to the Danish government’s plan to exit 2009 with a “politically binding” deal, and follow it with a full treaty in the very near future. By Tuesday, rather more optimistic coverage greeted America and China’s joint promise that December would see a “comprehensive” agreement, though plenty of voices still counselled caution and doubt: as far as one Greenpeace spokesperson was concerned, the Sino-American declaration was vague enough to suggest the possibility of both “a real ambitious climate rescue deal” and “another meaningless declaration”.
There are two tracks to the build-up to Copenhagen. Politicians travel, and meet, and keep their eye on the stuff that will define the summit’s headlines. Meanwhile, negotiators who are devoting their entire working lives to the pre-summit process must regularly congregate in some of the world’s major cities, and try to push their way through the detail. Britain’s chief negotiator is Jan Thompson, an official on loan from the Foreign Office who, in red patent leather biker boots, looks like anything but. She and Pete Betts – a genial, straight-to-the-point kind of operator, who described himself as “a career bureaucrat” – are known to Miliband as “the two degrees”, a reference to the rise in average global temperatures that the world has now resolved to avoid. Miliband says he has long conversations with them at least once a week; on their second night in Denmark, they are still talking animatedly well past midnight.
There is, of course, no end of stuff to discuss. The negotiations’ key theme is an ongoing and complex face-off between developed and developing countries (needless to say, post-imperial baggage is unavoidable). For countries already panicked by the effects of climate change – most notably, the 43-strong Alliance Of Small Island States – the prospect of a potentially indefinite delay to a legal deal is evidently causing no end of fear. Such rising powers as China, India and Brazil are watched closely, but the story regularly comes back to the US, whose uncertain stance is partly down to its cagy exit from what Miliband calls “20 wasted years”, and the delicacy of America’s political system: for a president to come to Europe and dish out commitments before the requisite legislation had passed the Senate would be risky, to say the least.
“What is the art of politics?” he wonders (like a lot of New Labour politicians of his generation, Miliband has a habit of asking himself questions). “It’s to simplify, not complexify [sic]. Yes, this is complicated. But actually, in the end, it does boil down to some relatively simple things: how much you’re going to cut your emissions, how much finance you’re going to provide, what you’re going to do about deforestation, and what you’re going to about technology. I often think that when people say, ‘Oh, this is so complicated,’ it becomes an excuse. You get, ‘Oh, this is all too complicated – it’ll take another five years.’”
But how does he gauge success? “Well, you go on trips, and you have a series of dreadful and depressing meetings where you think nothing is moving. And then you have a really good meeting when you can visualise a breakthrough … in Brazil, I said to the foreign minister, ‘Are you going to put 2020 numbers on the table for Copenhagen?’ And he said, ‘Yeah’. And we all looked at each other and said, ‘Well, they’ve never said that before.’ And you come out of the meeting and think, ‘That was a pretty significant moment.’”
After the first day’s talks, there’s a dinner at the Royal Danish Playhouse, which ends with a solo ballet performance titled The Egg. But before those delights, he has to go to a Danish TV studio, do British TV and radio spots, frets about how quickly he talks, and tries to face down scepticism at home.
The script he performs for Channel 4 News and BBC Radio is reiterated to me, with additions, later that night. Despite the uncertainty now hanging over any legally binding deal, Miliband says he wants a full enforceable treaty “within months” of Copenhagen, and says that even the end of 2010 is too late. As one of his advisers frantically scribbles down her version of the conversation (the departmental MiniDisc recorder is kaput), he sets out a simple version of what first has to materialise in December: “a set of commitments from developed and developing countries that can show emissions peaking by about 2020.”
He also talks endlessly about the importance of “numbers”, by which he chiefly means pledges of specific cuts in emissions from all the major developed countries, and hardened commitments on the funding of “adaptation and mitigation” – where richer countries spending billions on poorer countries’ defences against a radically altered climate, and the technology needed to curb their output of greenhouse gases.
Britain, via the EU, has already committed to cutting CO² emissions by 34% by 2020 on 1990 levels. EU governments have also promised €22bn-€50bn (£20bn-£45bn) a year for the developing world as part of a proposed €110bn global package, which, relative to claims that the total annual bill may be four times that, looks deeply disappointing. But right now that is not the main point: outside Europe, even if emissions targets are starting to come in, few developed countries have yet come up with figures for financial help for poorer ones – and in the case of the US, neither have been put on the table.
That fact alone makes one particular element of Miliband’s rhetoric remarkable. “I’m willing to say to you, if we don’t get any numbers at Copenhagen, it’s a failure,” he says.
I tell him that strikes me as a rather high-stakes position. “Yeah,” he says. “But I don’t think it would be successful if we haven’t got numbers. What is it if we don’t have numbers?”
The thing is, I suggest, politicians don’t often say things like that. They tend to make a point of leaving wriggle room for themselves. “No,” he says, sharply. “We’re not leaving wriggle room. I recognise that fact. In the end, people are smart. They know when you’ve succeeded, and they know when you’ve failed. And I’ve known for many months that there’s no point in going out and claiming Copenhagen is a miraculous triumph if there’s no numbers.”
There are, inevitably, aspects of the UK’s policy and positioning that plenty of green voices do not like: a new enthusiasm for the uncertain technology known as “clean coal”; enthusiasm for funding half of Europe’s post-Copenhagen commitment to the developing world via private-sector carbon trading; and the fact that the UK has so far only pledged £1bn a year in direct climate-related funding for poorer countries.
But here is the most striking thing. On the couple of occasions that I talk to British officials it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, relative to scores of countries, the UK is on the right side of the argument, and pushing hard. They talk about Copenhagen in the kind of dramatic terms that one perhaps wouldn’t expect from civil servants. “If we can make this work,” says a man from the Foreign Office, “multilateralism has a future. If not, multilateralism goes pear-shaped. And that will affect all kinds of things: food security, water security, energy security.”
By early afternoon on the second day, a few delegations have started to peel away, and are preparing to return home. The hotel foyer is divided between an ever-increasing array of suitcases, the activities of a large number of Chinese journalists and ad hoc huddles of negotiators. Not long after 2pm, Miliband bids me goodbye and disappears into a bilateral with the Brazilians: his flight doesn’t leave until six, which gives time for talks, and more talks.
Hovering near the negotiations’ security barrier, I grab Kevin Conrad, the climate change envoy from Papua New Guinea. Conrad, a climate change star since 2007 when at the UN climate conference in Bali, he challenged the US: “If you are not willing to lead then leave it to the rest of us, get out of the way,” looks urbane, preppy, but also visibly rattled. The previous afternoon, I had heard him vent his spleen to the British team as follows: “What can we do to re-energise this thing? It just feels like it’s all going backwards.”
“I remain frustrated,” he tells me. “How do I put this? There’s a calculated repositioning of aspirations, where it’s being agreed that we’re not going to anything that’s binding, we’re not gong to do anything substantive, and a lot of people blame everybody else for everything going too slow. And for a small island states like ours, that’s very disconcerting.” When would he like to see a legally-binding deal?
“We don’t know why that can’t happen now. And what gives us confidence that there won’t be more excuses in a year? Or a year later? We are relocating people as we speak because their islands are now inhabitable … This is growing. It’s not a theoretical problem.”
He adds: “We want people to stick to the original objective – to come up with the substance of a global deal in Copenhagen. All the elements within the negotiations are moving forward, but we want those settled. We think politicians should come in and settle their differences, and close them off. What do we do? Do we just continue with the differences for another year?”
As if to make British hearts swell, however, when I ask him about his perception of Britain’s role in Copenhagen, he says :”The UK, in my view, is one of the strongest and most articulate advocates for getting something done.”
Having arrived back at home, I book in a call to a British official, which duly happens on Thursday afternoon, when they talk me through some of what was discussed: new moves from Brazil and South Korea, continued uncertainty about how progress on carbon emissions might be recorded, and whether Copenhagen’s outcome might be a matter of one text, or “bits of text”. Their closing verdict on two days in the Danish capital may be entirely innocuous, though to certain ears, they will only underline what a nervous moment this is. “No decisions,” says the voice at the other end of the line. “But useful.”

Armchair army to save the Amazon rainforest

Maurice Chittenden

SPEND a pound and save the rainforest. A conservation group led by a millionaire sports tycoon and a former Labour minister is launching an appeal today to recruit 100,000 green heroes to protect trees in the Amazon.
With less than three weeks to go before the United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen, Cool Earth, which has already protected 125,000 acres of rainforest, is hoping armchair guardians will achieve something world leaders cannot agree upon.
As deforestation accounts for 17% of greenhouse gas emissions globally, it wants people to sponsor individual endangered South American trees for as little as £1 each and keep watch over them by means of satellite images. The idea is to “lock in” 3m tons of carbon before the end of the conference on December 18.
The “Tree for a £” campaign has identified 12 species of tree most prized by loggers. Protecting these will help save the biggest “breaths” in the Amazon, the world’s “lungs”. If the mahogany tree, so prized by loggers, is protected, this will also save other trees of low worth that grow near it, as loggers cut down huge swathes of forest just to get to the mahogany and the Andean walnut — used for veneers.

Johan Eliasch, the sports goods tycoon and co-founder of Cool Earth, has earmarked for preservation an area in Peru that is the habitat of jaguars. This area of forest, once controlled by Marxist guerrillas, is now a buffer to protect millions of acres of mahogany-rich land.
“It doesn’t take that much for people to get involved; this is low-cost entry,” Eliasch said.
“The area is now safe. We have not had to deal with guerrillas, but conflict zones such as the Congo have helped to save rainforests because even illegal loggers don’t want to go in. It is an unexpected upside from a deforestation point of view.”
Cool Earth was launched after Frank Field, the former Labour welfare minister, read in The Sunday Times in 2006 about a previous Eliasch initiative in Brazil. “Preserving the trees is one thing we can do to help beat climate change. Government won’t spend money in this area but individuals will. By helping communities protect their part of the rainforest, we build a firewall around even more of the forest because the loggers can’t get through,” Field said.
A Peruvian tribesman said: “Our environment minister wants to protect the trees, but other parts of my government want to exploit the forest.”
For more information go to coolearth.org

Opec wants compensation if climate deal cuts oil use

Robin Pagnamenta, Energy Editor

The chief of the Opec oil cartel said that oil-producing countries should be compensated for lost revenues if UN climate talks in Copenhagen next month reach a deal that cuts the use of oil.
In an interview with The Times, Abdullah Salem al-Badri, of Libya, who is due to speak in Copenhagen, said that richer oil-consuming countries such as Britain and the US should acknowledge that historically they have created most carbon dioxide emissions and should not be allowed to block poorer countries from raising living standards for their own people.
“We are not emitting. Historically, it is the developed countries. The responsibility is on their shoulders,” he said. “If we want to keep temperatures from rising by more than two degrees [centigrade] we need a comprehensive and sophisticated approach.”
Developed countries should provide financial assistance to poorer oilproducing countries, he said, adding that such a pledge was part of the original Kyoto Protocol and that any attempt to drop it could be fatal for the Copenhagen summit. But he insisted that Opec wanted to reach a deal at Copenhagen, calling it a “noble goal”.

He said that carbon capture and storage technology was essential to cutting emissions while meeting global energy demand, which he said would remain reliant on fossil fuels for decades.
Speaking in Opec’s headquarters in Vienna, Mr al-Badri, 69, also accused City speculators of causing the recent surge in oil prices by holding 130 million barrels in tankers at sea, waiting for prices to rise. Mr al-Badri claimed that tougher regulation was needed in the London and New York financial markets and rejected claims that Opec had driven up prices by cutting production last year by 4.2 million barrels a day.
Crude prices recently rose to almost $80 a barrel, their highest since October lat year, and the average price of petrol in the UK has risen by 26 per cent this year. It is expected to be 110p a litre by the end of the year.

Jeff Corwin: We’re losing a species every 20 minutes

MNN sits down with wildlife biologist and animal expert Jeff Corwin to talk about how climate change is wiping out animal species.

MNN interviews wildlife biologist and animal expert Jeff Corwin, host of the new MSNBC show ‘100 Heartbeats‘, about losing a species every 20 minutes and the role of climate change in the world today.

Source:
MNN, “Jeff Corwin: We’re losing a species every 20 minutes“, accessed November 18, 2009

Criminal libel case dropped against Tempo Semanal