Copenhagen in numbers: how to get less gas for your buck

China came to Copenhagen offering to cut its economy’s “carbon intensity”. So what if everyone did it this way rather than cutting emissions?

Israel Deputy FM Danny Ayalon: An Open Letter to the Arab World

ETS awards millions in windfall profits to oil companies and heavy industry

As national ministers meet this week in Copenhagen to discuss a new climate change deal, Open Europe has found that under the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), oil and gas companies’ operations in the UK were granted a surplus of carbon permits worth €28.6m in 2008. For example, ExxonMobil received €4.3m and Total received €5.4m.

Meanwhile, heavy industrial polluters such as Corus received €47m, while cement firms Hanson and Lafarge received €17.3m and €20.2m.

The EU is keen to be seen to take the lead at the UN climate change summit in Copenhagen and has already announced ambitious targets to reduce its carbon emissions. However, the EU’s principle policy for achieving those reductions, the ETS, is fundamentally flawed.

Due to the economic downturn, many heavy polluters, such as oil and gas companies and heavy industrials, have been left with a surplus of carbon permits - essentially a free asset that firms can sell on to bolster their short term profits.

The glut of surplus permits on the market has driven down the price of carbon and led to a sharp increase in the number of permits being traded via carbon exchanges. Open Europe has found that the two largest carbon trading exchanges, European Climate Exchange[1] and Bluenext[2], which includes members such as Barclays Bank, JP Morgan, Merrill Lynch and Shell, have earned a combined average of €245,000 a day from the trading of carbon permits so far in 2009, in transaction fees alone. In total, they have made over €57m between them in 2009.

Instead of producing a firm carbon price to encourage investment in greener technologies, the ETS has become a subsidy to some of the UK’s biggest polluters and has simply created a new breed of carbon traders, which are cashing in on a policy that is failing to achieve its core objective.

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China Hits Out at U.N. Carbon Office

By SHAI OSTER
BEIJING — China lashed out at the United Nations and warned clean energy investment could be hurt after the U.N. denied 10 Chinese wind farm carbon credits earlier this month and accused China of fudging the numbers to make the projects eligible for international subsidies.
China has been the chief beneficiary of the U.N.’s Clean Development Mechanism, or CDM, under which rich countries can invest in carbon-abatement projects in poor countries and get carbon credits that can be traded. But China has been accused by critics of gaming the system and the U.N. CDM board earlier this month said that China deliberately set electricity tariffs so that the 10 wind farms, with a combined investment of some six billion yuan (about $879 million), couldn’t be profitable without the subsidies.
The rejection of the 10 projects has sparked an unusually public response for China’s biggest wind power developers, who banded together to issue a public letter Monday protesting the U.N. decision. The Chinese government and companies called the U.N.’s decision-making process arbitrary, opaque and unfair.
“If you reject wind power, what else is there?” said Sun Cuihua, an official at the National Reform and Development Commission which oversees CDM projects in China.
“They say that we made up the electricity prices; that is an irresponsible thing to say,” Ms. Sun told reporters.
The rejection “is sending a strongly wrong signal which will seriously damage the enthusiasm and confidence of investors to continue their investment in wind power industry,” said a statement by nine companies including the wind power units of some of China’s biggest state-owned companies including such as utility China Datang Corp., and coal miner Shenhua Group Corp. The companies said Monday they planned to present their letter at the climate-change summit in Copenhagen.
The fight over a handful of projects illustrates the much bigger battle being waged in Copenhagen over how and who will pay for reducing global warming and which countries will benefit from the developments of new technologies.
The spat has called into question the legitimacy of the entire U.N. process created as a way to help poor countries pay for the costly upgrades needed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. In theory, the credits are a way for rich countries to meet their domestic greenhouse gas commitment by paying for a carbon abatement project in a poor country that wouldn’t have been built otherwise. But critics say the system has been distorted and abused, saying that China has sought to unfairly get investments for projects that fail to meet the U.N.’s standards because they would have been profitable to build anyway.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@wsj.com

Tensions Increase as Poor Nations Stage a Protest

Hopes Dim for Tough Decisions on Money
By JEFFREY BALL, ALESSANDRO TORELLO and STEPHEN POWER
COPENHAGEN — Tempers flared Monday at the United Nations climate summit as poor nations staged a walkout to protest what they called inadequate aid offers from rich countries, and the U.S. and China jockeyed for position.
World leaders, including President Barack Obama, are expected to arrive in Copenhagen later this week, ostensibly to try to seal an international agreement to curb greenhouse-gas emissions and subsidize efforts by developing countries to adopt low-carbon energy technology and adapt to shifts in weather patterns or rising sea levels.
But the talk in Copenhagen is increasingly about scaled-back expectations. One possibility is a very general agreement in which developed countries promise to try to reduce their collective emissions by some amount and to provide a pot of money to help pay for a cleanup in the developing world. But such an agreement would leave the toughest questions — how much each country would cut, and how much each would pay — up in the air.

“Maybe the result you get from here is going to be less ambitious than we would like. But it would be better than nothing,” said Sergio Serra, Brazil’s ambassador for climate change.
The divide between rich and poor boiled over Monday when negotiators for the Group of 77 — which represents developing countries as well as large emerging economies such as Brazil, India and China — walked out of the negotiations in the morning.
They returned to the conference later in the day, but the underlying issues remained unsolved, Swedish Minister Andreas Carlgren said. This prompted a suspension in the official negotiation, and the chairman of the conference appointed two ministers to pursue consultation on how to solve the problem.
China, the world’s biggest greenhouse-gas emitter, is casting the talks as a referendum on what it calls the developed world’s failure to clean up its act. Rich countries should “honor the commitments they have made” in the past, said Li Ganjie, China’s vice minister of environmental protection.

At the heart of the disputes in Copenhagen are sharp disagreements over money. An existing treaty intended to curb global warming requires emission cuts from developed countries that ratified it but not from developing countries. That treaty, the Kyoto Protocol, doesn’t demand emission cuts from the U.S. or China, which together produce 40% of global greenhouse-gas emissions, because the U.S. didn’t ratify it and because China is classified as a developing country.
China argues that any new international agreement should continue to make more demands on developed countries than on developing ones. But most studies project that essentially all of the increase in global greenhouse-gas emissions in the next few decades will come from developing countries, with China topping the list, and so the fight is over how to ensure environmental action there.
That is a position that Chinese negotiators are intent on telegraphing back home. The Chinese delegation closed a scheduled news conference Monday to all but Chinese media, because it wanted “to urge the domestic population to support our endeavor” at the climate conference, said Lai Xing, a Chinese delegation spokesman. “We have a message for the domestic audience.”
Speaking to reporters late Monday, U.S. climate envoy Todd Stern said governments have “a long way to go if we’re going to produce the kind of agreement we need.”
“We don’t have very much time. The clock is definitely ticking,” he said, adding that the walkout hadn’t helped. “Any time that’s lost is not helpful.”
The European Union has pledged a total of €7.2 billion ($10.52 billion) between next year and 2012 to jump-start efforts to curb emissions in developing countries. Officials from developing countries have called that offer inadequate.
“We need to see developed nations give us a plan of what [financial] transfers will come in five years, 10 years and how much over the years ahead, and we aren’t seeing that,” said Mamadou Honadia, who is part of the negotiating team for Burkina Faso.
A Nigerian delegation official said the EU offer of short-term funding was “pathetic.”
That criticism drew indignation from European officials. “We are the only part of the world that has put money on the table, and we’re criticized for it,” said Stavros Dimas, the EU environment commissioner.
Jo Leinen, a member of the European Parliament from Germany, called on the U.S. and China to set more-aggressive targets for controlling their emissions.
The G-77 showed signs of disunity as well. Saudi Arabia and Brazil sparred Monday over carbon capture and storage, technology that the kingdom is pushing to shore up in its own emission-reduction efforts, said an official from a G-77 nation familiar with the matter. Brazil is concerned that carbon capture could dent its biofuels industry, as nations opt to burn more fossil fuel and bury emissions underground, rather than use clean-burning biofuels such as ethanol, of which Brazil is a leading producer.—Noah Buhayar and Spencer Swartz contributed to this article.
Write to Jeffrey Ball at jeffrey.ball@wsj.com, Alessandro Torello at alessandro.torello@dowjones.com and Stephen Power at stephen.power@wsj.com

World’s Top Polluter Emerges as Green-Technology Leader

By SHAI OSTER
BEIJING — Xu Shisen put down the phone and smiled. That was Canada calling, explained the chief engineer at a coal-fired power plant set among knockoff antique and art shops in a Beijing suburb. A Canadian company is interested in Mr. Xu’s advances in bringing down the cost of stripping out greenhouse-gas emissions from burning coal.
Engineers led by Mr. Xu are working to unlock one of climate change’s thorniest problems: how to burn coal without releasing carbon into the atmosphere.
Mr. Xu is part of a broader effort by China to introduce green technology to the world’s fastest-growing industrial economy — a mission so ambitious it could eventually reshape the business, just as China has done for everything from construction cranes to computers.
China looms large over the global climate summit in Copenhagen, where Chinese officials are pressing the U.S. and other rich nations to accept new curbs on their emissions and to continue to subsidize poor nations’ efforts to adopt clean-energy technology. China is the world’s biggest source of carbon emissions. Less understood is the way China is now becoming a source of some of the solutions.
China’s vast market and economies of scale are bringing down the cost of solar and wind energy, as well as other environmentally friendly technologies such as electric car batteries. That could help address a major impediment to wide adoption of such technologies: They need heavy subsidies to be economical.
The so-called China price — the combination of cheap labor and capital that rewrote the rulebook on manufacturing — is spreading to green technology. “The China price will move into the renewable-energy space, specifically for energy that relies on capital-intensive projects,” says Jonathan Woetzel, a director in McKinsey & Co.’s China office.
China’s government is backing the trend. It wants to replicate the success of the special economic zones that transformed cities such as Shenzhen from a fishing village near Hong Kong into one of the biggest manufacturing export centers in the world. Set up when China began its economic reforms in the 1980s, the zones were designed to attract foreign investment into light manufacturing to kick-start exports. They became engines of China’s economic boom.
Regulators will announce several low carbon centers next year that will have preferential policies to promote low carbon manufacturing and exports.
China’s Push for Clean Coal

China’s goals face big challenges. China could end up becoming simply a low-cost manufacturing base, not a source of innovation. Worse, its drive to cut costs could stifle innovation overseas.
And Beijing has a long way to go to reducing China’s carbon footprint. For each out-of-date power plant it shut down in a two-year cleanup campaign, it added the capacity of roughly two more. Even some of the better power plants are run poorly because company bosses don’t want to pay to clean up their emissions.
In the fight against global warming, some of the biggest gains are to be made in scrubbing carbon from coal-burning power plants. China and the U.S. together have 44% of the world’s coal reserves, and aren’t about to give up on the cheap and reliable source of power. According to U.S. government projections, world coal use could increase nearly 50% by 2030.
“If emissions aren’t reduced from power plants, global warming cannot be avoided,” says Jonathan Lewis, a climate specialist at the U.S.-based Clean Air Task Force, which has sought to pair U.S. utilities with Chinese companies. “The solution can be led by the U.S. and China.”
Capture technology traps carbon dioxide gasses released by coal plants. The gas can be pumped deep underground, typically into salt caverns or aging oil fields. The carbon can be stripped either before or after the coal is burned. Post-combustion capture is simpler and can be retrofitted on existing power plants. Current versions cut energy output by a fifth or more.
Far more complicated is precombustion carbon capture, which involves completely redesigning plants. Coal is turned into a gas, the carbon is stripped out and the rest is burned. Called “integrated gasification combined cycle” plants, these cost billions of dollars and haven’t been developed on a commercial scale yet.
China has a technological lead in turning coal into gas. It has been using the technology widely to make petrochemicals and fertilizers as a substitute for pricier natural gas. Houston-based Future Fuels LLC has licensed gasification technology from China to use in a plant in Pennsylvania.

Critics say current carbon capture technologies are merely a Band-Aid for global warming. That’s because they’re so inefficient that even more coal has to be burned to produce the same amount of electricity. Also, the technology uses a lot of water and sequestering carbon underground isn’t proven.
Still, some analysts estimate carbon capture could account for between 15% to 55% of the world’s cumulative carbon emissions reduction by 2100.
Among those leading the ramp-up is Mr. Xu. These days, he is busy with three clean coal projects. One is on the outskirts of Beijing, underneath looming cooling towers of the Gaobeidian Huaneng power plant.
Mr. Xu and colleagues work at a state-run research institute partly owned by China Huaneng Group, China’s biggest utility. The state-owned giant produces about 10% of China’s electricity, nearly all from coal.
The Beijing project, started before the 2008 Summer Olympics, traps a fraction of the carbon dioxide emitted by the plant, purifying and selling it for use in food packaging and for the fizz in sodas. Using what he’s learned in Beijing, Mr. Xu is building another capture facility in Shanghai that will be 30 times bigger.
If Mr. Xu’s team can figure out how to bring the costs down — mostly by recycling energy lost in the process of scrubbing out the carbon — these units could be retrofitted to coal-fired power plants around the world.

Mr. Xu is also involved in the GreenGen project, a $1 billion power plant led by Huaneng that will turn coal into a gas before burning it. The project is scheduled to go online by 2011. Burning gas is more efficient than burning coal — meaning less coal is required to make the same amount of electricity. The less coal burned, the less carbon released.
Though carbon capture has moved into the mainstream, it is still at least five to 10 years away from becoming a widespread technology, analysts say.
In the meantime, China is reshaping two of the biggest green technologies in use already — wind and solar power.
In 2004, foreign firms owned 80% of China’s wind-turbine market, according to energy consulting firm IHS Cambridge Energy Research Associates. Now, Chinese companies own three-quarters of the country’s market, thanks to companies which make turbines a third cheaper than European competitors.
Chinese wind-turbine makers are starting to export. In October, Shenyang Power Group struck a deal to supply 240 turbines to one of the largest wind-farm projects in the U.S., a 36,000-acre development in Texas.
China already has a 30% share of the global market for photovoltaic solar panels used to generate electricity. Solar-power panel makers, including Suntech Power Holdings Co., Yingli Green Energy and Trina Solar Ltd., export most of their product to Europe and the U.S., contributing to a 30% drop in world solar-power prices.
Chinese competition is forcing rivals to shift production. U.S. Evergreen Solar Inc. said it will move its assembly line from Massachusetts to China. General Electric Co. said it will shut a facility in Delaware. BP PLC’s solar unit said this spring it would stop output in Maryland and rely on Chinese suppliers instead.
Yet, despite China’s armies of fresh engineering graduates, foreign companies still create and own most of the key technologies. “China lags about 10 years behind in technology,” says Bernice Lee, a research director at Chatham House, a London-based think tank that analyzed patent holders on renewable and low-carbon technology.
As in other industries, China’s cheap manufacturing may spark protectionism. In one hint of battles to come, Sen. Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) wrote a letter to the U.S. energy secretary protesting the use of federal stimulus money to support the $1.5 billion wind project in Texas unless it relies on U.S.-built turbines.
Critics in rich countries accuse China of unfairly subsidizing companies via cheap loans from state-controlled banks and dumping excess supply overseas.

Others say China’s missteps could hurt the market for all. “China is making prices cheaper in renewables today, by lunging into oversupply, as it does in most industries,” says Daniel Rosen, principal of consulting firm Rhodium Group. “The question — and danger — is whether by oversupplying the market today China is damaging longer-term innovation and competition in the sector for the future.”
In green technology, China has figured out ways to turn excess capacity to its advantage. Until this year, China’s solar-panel makers exported nearly all their output to countries such as Germany and Spain, where government supported growth in the sector.
That changed this year when solar-panel prices fell as dozens of new Chinese polysilicon-makers started operating. The sudden glut in the raw material to make solar panels coincided with a drop in orders from European companies hit by the recession. The result: Polysilicon prices fell by half from January peaks. HSBC estimates they could drop 20% more by the end of 2010.
Softening prices created an opportunity for Chinese regulators. Officials are now talking about raising solar power capacity targets five- or tenfold, so that by 2020 China could have more than double current global solar-power capacity.
Executives at Trina and Yingli say increased economies of scale from making more panels for China will push costs even lower. “We could go to $1 a watt by the end of 2010,” which would be a landmark in bringing solar power in parity with conventionally produced electricity, says Yingli’s Chief Executive, Miao Liansheng, a veteran of the People’s Liberation Army who sold cosmetics before turning to solar panels.
“The Chinese manufacturers can now make [solar panels] a lot cheaper than Europe, the United States and Japan because the whole supply chain is now available in China,” says Martin Green, who runs the photovoltaic center at the University of South Wales in Australia, a training ground for many scientists working in China’s solar industry. “The Chinese are making it more affordable, and they’re more adventurous in introducing new technology as well.”
The ability to manufacture cheaply is attracting the notice of U.S. utilities. Huaneng says it can make gasification equipment cheaper than foreign rivals.
Duke Energy Corp., of Charlotte, N.C., signed a pact with Huaneng in August to share information on clean-coal technology. Duke says it would take eight years to build an IGCC plant in the U.S. — versus three in China.
Write to Shai Oster at shai.oster@wsj.com

Steven Chu pledges $350m clean tech fund to sweeten deal at Copenhagen

US energy secretary attempts to show Obama administration is serious about action on climate change

Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Monday 14 December 2009 18.42 GMT
The Obama administration tried to sweeten a climate change deal for developing countries today with the promise of a $350m fund for the development of new clean energy technologies.
The fund will be used to encourage the development of renewable energy projects such as wind and solar power and more energy efficient appliances in the developing world.
In an appearance at the climate change summit in Copenhagen, the energy secretary Steven Chu likened the initiative to the breakthrough of seed technology which helped lift countries in Asia out of poverty. “We need a gamechanger like the green revolution was for agriculture,” he said.
Chu’s appearance before a packed hall at the US pavilion was part of an ambitious outreach effort by the Obama administration to persuade a sceptical international community it is serious about taking action on climate change. It comes amid rising rancour between rich and poor countries. The talks were suspended for five hours today, with negotiators from African and other developing countries accusing the Danish chair of ignoring their concerns.
But Chu said he detected no sign of resentment from the developing countries. “I don’t feel that at all that there is any mistrust,” he said. “Perhaps in discussion they may see me as a scientist and say: ‘let’s just get on with it. let’s solve the problem’.”
He followed up with an appeal for cooperation. “Rather than competing and trying to bargain to the last advantage let’s approach this all with a feeling of will and compassion and endurance for the long road ahead,” he said. “In the end whatever happens the world has to act on it.”
Obama has dispatched more than half a dozen senior members of his team to try to demonstrate America’s commitment to cutting emissions and bringing in new energy-efficient technoogies.
Chu described the initiative as an expansion of agreements reached earlier this year with India and China for joint research on energy efficiency, electric vehicles, and carbon capture and technology. Under the initiative, the US will provide $85m over five years to the fund. Italy will provide $30m and Australia $5m.
Chu used charts to show the Obama administration committing to the highest levels of spending on energy research since the oil crisis of the 1970s, with the $80bn investment in green technology in the American economic recovery package.
He singled out two promising areas of research: batteries and the development of powerful wind turbines in a more compact size.
But despite the high-visibility campaign – and the huge crush of people trying to get into the room – America still has some explaining to do.
“Because the Senate hasn’t acted [to pass climate change legislation], I think there is quite a lot of interest in what the US is willing to commit,” said Jane Lubchenco, who heads the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
But there is one American whose green credentials are often seen as impeccable - Al Gore. The former vice-president was treated like a rock star when he made his debut at the conference centre to release two new reports on the melting of polar ice in the Arctic. He told the packed room that there was a 75% chance that the entire ice cap could be ice-free by summer in the next five to seven years.

Smoking gun of Iran’s nuclear weapons project?

The notes, from Iran’s most sensitive military nuclear project, describe a four-year plan to test a neutron initiator, the component of a nuclear bomb that triggers an explosion. Foreign intelligence agencies date them to early 2007, four years after Iran was thought to have suspended its weapons programme.

An Asian intelligence source last week confirmed to The Times that his country also believed that weapons work was being carried out as recently as 2007 — specifically, work on a neutron initiator.

The technical document describes the use of a neutron source, uranium deuteride, which independent experts confirm has no possible civilian or military use other than in a nuclear weapon. Uranium deuteride is the material used in Pakistan’s bomb, from where Iran obtained its blueprint.

“Although Iran might claim that this work is for civil purposes, there is no civil application,” said David Albright, a physicist and president of the Institute for Science and International Security in Washington, which has analysed hundreds of pages of documents related to the Iranian programme. “This is a very strong indicator of weapons work.”

The documents have been seen by intelligence agencies from several Western countries, including Britain. A senior source at the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) confirmed that they had been passed to the UN’s nuclear watchdog.

A Foreign and Commonwealth Office spokeswoman said yesterday: “We do not comment on intelligence, but our concerns about Iran’s nuclear programme are clear. Obviously this document, if authentic, raises serious questions about Iran’s intentions.”

Responding to The Times‘ findings, an Israeli government spokesperson said: “Israel is increasingly concerned about the state of the Iranian nuclear programme and the real intentions that may lie behind it.”

The revelation coincides with growing international concern about Iran’s nuclear programme. Tehran insists that it wants to build a civilian nuclear industry to generate power, but critics suspect that the regime is intent on diverting the technology to build an atomic bomb.

In September, Iran was forced to admit that it was constructing a secret uranium enrichment facility near the city of Qom. President Ahmadinejad then claimed that he wanted to build ten such sites. Over the weekend Manouchehr Mottaki, the Iranian Foreign Minister, said that Iran needed up to 15 nuclear power plants to meet its energy needs, despite the country’s huge oil and gas reserves.

Publication of the nuclear documents will increase pressure for tougher UN sanctions against Iran, which are due to be discussed this week. But the latest leaks in a long series of allegations against Iran will also be seized on by hawks in Israel and the US, who support a pre-emptive strike against Iranian nuclear facilities before the country can build its first warhead.

Mark Fitzpatrick, senior fellow for non-proliferation at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, said: “The most shattering conclusion is that, if this was an effort that began in 2007, it could be a casus belli. If Iran is working on weapons, it means there is no diplomatic solution.”

The Times had the documents, which were originally written in Farsi, translated into English and had the translation separately verified by two Farsi speakers. While much of the language is technical, it is clear that the Iranians are intent on concealing their nuclear military work behind legitimate civilian research.

The fallout could be explosive, especially in Washington, where it is likely to invite questions about President Obama’s groundbreaking outreach to Iran. The papers provide the first evidence which suggests that Iran has pursued weapons studies after 2003 and may actively be doing so today — if the four-year plan continued as envisaged.

A 2007 US National Intelligence Estimate concluded that weapons work was suspended in 2003 and officials said with “moderate confidence” that it had not resumed by mid-2007. Britain, Germany and France, however, believe that weapons work had already resumed by then.

Western intelligence sources say that by 2003 Iran had already assembled the technical know-how it needed to build a bomb, but had yet to complete the necessary testing to be sure such a device would work. Iran also lacked sufficient fissile material to fuel a bomb and still does — although it is technically capable of producing weapons-grade uranium should its leaders take the political decision to do so.

The documents detail a plan for tests to determine whether the device works — without detonating an explosion leaving traces of uranium detectable by the outside world. If such traces were found, they would be taken as irreversible evidence of Iran’s intention to become a nuclear-armed power.

Experts say that, if the 2007 date is correct, the documents are the strongest indicator yet of a continuing nuclear weapons programme in Iran. Iran has long denied a military dimension to its nuclear programme, claiming its nuclear activities are solely focused on the production of energy for civilian use.

Mr Fitzpatrick said: “Is this the smoking gun? That’s the question people should be asking. It looks like the smoking gun. This is smoking uranium.”

Harassment Across Arab World Drives Women Inside

How Global Warming Could Change the Winemaking Map

Many Bordeaux winemakers are declaring 2009 the best vintage in 60 years, but Yvon Minvielle of Château Lagarette isn’t celebrating. Like many vintners across France, Minvielle is feeling uneasy after another unusually warm summer and early grape harvest. “They say everything is going great in Bordeaux, but take a closer look,” he says. Heat-stressed vines ripened at unequal rates this year, and only skillful picking spread over a full month allowed Minvielle to gather a mature crop.

Such seasonal headaches are becoming more commonplace in France, and many vintners are placing the blame on global warming. In the past 30 years, harvest dates have moved up an average of 16 days because of unusually warm growing seasons. Grapes are reaching their sugar ripeness before their aromas fully develop, alcohol levels are soaring and acid levels are dropping — forcing some winemakers to resort to chemistry in their cellars to produce a quaffable cuvée.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that the earth’s temperatures could rise by as much as 6 degrees Celsius by 2100 if nothing is done to combat climate change. “While 2 to 3 degrees [Celsius] may be manageable, if temperatures rise 4 to 5 degrees … the vineyard map will never be the same again,” says Bernard Seguin, head of the Climate Change and Greenhouse Effect Unit at the National Institute for Agricultural Research in Avignon.

Prominent French chefs have given warning in an open letter to President Nicolas Sarkozy that the country’s wines will lose their complexity and the best produce will come from Scotland if the effects of climate change are not tackled. In the letter, the French chefs warn Sarkozy that a shift in the climate could irreparably damage their country’s ability to churn out world class wine. They have already seen the recent damage things like heatwaves and summer hailstorms can do to their vineyards and their not keen on seeing more.

Their letter claims that just a 2 percent change in global temperatures would push the ideal zone for wine grape production 600+ miles to the north. Instead of taking wine tours in more traditional areas like Bordeaux, Champagne, and Burgundy, future wine lovers could end up in places like

Members of the Vignerons Indépendants wine growers associated clinked their bottles to express concerns over the consequences of inaction on climate change.

Scotland, Sweden and England.

Last month, the 8,000-member Vigneron Indépendant wine growers association urged world leaders to take bold measure at this week’s climate change summit in Copenhagen to reverse the trends of global warming. That followed a dire warning by Minvielle and other industry figures in an editorial in the French daily Le Monde this summer: “French wines, elegant and refined, the jewels of our common national heritage, are in danger.”

The signatories of the open letter said that if global temperatures rose by more than two per cent before the end of the century, “our soil will not survive” and “wine will travel 1,000 kilometers beyond its traditional limits”.

“We will have new wine-producing regions in zones where one doesn’t normally cultivate vineyards like in Brittany and Normandy,” said Jean-Pierre Chaban, a climatologist at France’s National Institute for Scientific Research, in an accompanying online film. “It will spread to Great Britain. One can imagine vineyards in southern Sweden and Scotland.”

No crop is a better canary in the climate coal mine than the grape, says Jean-Pierre Chabin, a scientist at the University of Burgundy’s Center for Climatology Research. “It records the climatic year, so what’s in the bottle is the result of the six preceding months’ weather,” he says. And to expert palates like that of Antoine Pétrus, voted France’s best young sommelier by the Union of French Sommeliers in 2007, the change in the taste of some French wines is already recognizable. Sun-baked, unbalanced wines like those produced following the European heat wave of 2003 — when temperatures soared above 40 C — were once considered a rarity. Now, Pétrus says, they are becoming much more the norm. “We’ve observed over the last several vintages that temperatures and effects of climate [change] have become far stronger,” he says.

Many vintners have resorted to extraordinary measures to maintain the quality of their batches. In the Côte du Rhone region of France this summer, high temperatures and lack of rain forced some growers to start irrigating their vineyards — a practice forbidden in quality French vineyards, but permitted by the National Appellations Institute (INAO) in 2009 for several southern appellations.

In cooler regions like Champagne and Alsace, many winemakers are doctoring their cuvées in order to maintain acidity levels. “My father’s challenge was to ripen his grapes enough to avoid having to add sugar to the wine,” says Olivier Humbrecht of the Domaine Zind-Humbrecht winery. “Today, my problem is being able to keep enough acidity.”

Meticulous, biodynamic vineyard management has allowed Zind-Humbrecht to retain the structure of their famous Gewurztraminers for now, but many others have turned to using tartaric acid — a practice authorized this year in Alsace by INAO for only the second time since 2003, says Humbrecht, an exceptional measure that could “become common practice in five or 10 years.”

Such difficulties are almost enough to make France envy England, where winemakers boasted the best sugar-acid balance in their history this year. “The idea that we could grow Chardonnay and Pinot Noir and get it to ripen to the level we now can was once unimaginable,” says Stephen Skelton, author of the UK Vineyards Guide. “It’s changed in 10 years, really, and that is entirely down to global warming.”

With English winemaking on the rise, Skelton has been receiving calls to lead prospective French investors like Cristal maker Louis-Roederer on British vineyard tours. And some vintners have already made the jump across the English Channel.

Earlier this year, Didier Pierson, owner of Champagne Pierson-Whitaker, the first Champagne maker to purchase a vineyard in southern England, bottled his inaugural batch of English sparkling wine, which he expects to start selling in 2011. Christian Seely, director of AXA-Millésimes, the winemaking arm of the French insurance group, also launched a joint venture with a Hampshire vineyard this year to begin making a sparkling wine.

Seguin believes that a significant global temperature rise may now be inevitable and French winemakers will need to adapt in order to survive. Some have already begun planning for the worst. “The solutions are to be found in all the common experience of our forefathers,” says Gérard Gauby, owner of the Domaine Gauby winery in the southern Roussillon region.

Gauby advocates a return to ancient Mediterranean “Gobelet” vine training, in which the leaves form a protective umbrella over the grapes — similar to a technique Minvielle used in Bordeaux during the 2003 drought. He is also searching in North Africa for grape varieties like Grenache and Carignan, which have adapted to harsh climates. Likewise, in the southern town of Gaillac, Robert Plageoles of the Domaine des Tres Cantous winery has started planting drought-resistant grapes like Onedenc and Verdanel, which he calls “the wines of the future.”

But Gauby isn’t sure that winemaking in France’s southernmost regions will even survive without large-scale irrigation. If the world keeps getting hotter and drier, he says, “it’s perhaps better to stop making wine, and keep the water for drinking.” A wise plan, undoubtedly, but one oenophiles the world over will hope is never necessary.

Source:
Time, “How Global Warming Could Change the Winemaking Map“, accessed December 14, 2009
The Telegraph, “Best wines will come from Scotland if climate change is not stopped, French chefs say“, accessed December 14, 2009