Another Visit from the Political Police

Further to yesterday's post about police visiting someone for tweeting rigorously annotated references to UKIP's policies and, despite having no power to do so, asking for them to be deleted, it seems a good time to remember another political police visit.

In 2008 a group of climate protesters stopped a coal train on its way to the largest single point of carbon emissions in the UK, Drax power station in North Yorkshire. After their arrest, most had their homes raided by police. Officers confiscated material that would indicate the protester's political views.

Despite their remit to take anything political, in an illuminating video shot by one of the protesters' parents we see police take 30 bags of War on Want promotional material, anti-G8 DVDs and copies of the New Statesman but leave a letter from an MP because it's 'not political'.

The footage has extra resonance as we now know the Drax 29 case was a police-engineered miscarriage of justice and earlier this year all 29 people had their convictions quashed.

Fracking - We Are Winning

Barton Moss near Manchester has been the front line of the anti-fracking campaign in the UK. Police have shown a predictable level of impartiality.

They arrived one rainy day saying that a flare had been fired at a police helicopter two days earlier, cordoned off the tents and undertook searches that involved pulling out everyone's clothes and bedding and leaving it in the rain. Had there actually been any such flare fired the police would not have left it two days to come and investigate.

Older protesters are taken away from the site by the police using a favourite pretext for action with no legal basis, 'for your own safety'.

They have arrested people on a range of trumped up charges. Perhaps the most extraordinary is the incident of a non-protesting Lawful Observer, Dr Steven Peers, who was shooed away from filming an arrest and then arrested for drink-driving even though he was a sober pedestrian. Top tip; don't fit up a person whose role is to film things until you've checked their camera is switched off.



Prosecutors dropped the case as soon as it got to court and he is now suing the police for wrongful arrest and false imprisonment.

Most of the arrests have been whilst walking in front of the delivery trucks. Enclosed in a moving kettle of officers who tread on their heels and kick their ankles, people walk slowly down the access road ahead of the convoy as it arrives in the morning and leaves in the evening. Around fifty people, myself included, have been arrested. Like many of those nicked, I wasn't doing anything that the others weren't, but they tend to pick off the new arrivals or the veterans of other protest camps.

The access road isn't a normal road. It's a private road and a public footpath. The police dug up and nicked the public footpath sign in December, but this does nothing to the legal status of the place.

They were told repeatedly, every day, including just before arresting me, that it was a public footpath and Obstruction of The Highway doesn't apply and such arrests were unlawful.

Yesterday a judge at Manchester Magistrates Court confirmed this. So today people sat in front of the trucks and stopped them for eight hours until the convoy turned around and went away.

The police will now have to fall back on their slurs of protesters turning up for a ruck with the police and what a great job the police are doing of resisting such rabid provocation. That imaginative press release is  believed to be tipped for the Man Booker shortlist, though it will face stiff competition from my strikingly creative arresting officer's statement.

I have never seen a UK environmental campaign that looks so likely to win as the one against fracking. It has the vulnerable fledgling industry element that made the GM campaign successful. Then there is the robust mix of locals, direct activists and NGOs all doing what they do best and working in concert that made the roads campaigns so successful. It has the climate imperative underneath and the sense that drastic looking measures are the only ones that square up to the problem, elements that made the climate camps capture the imagination and move the grounds of debate.

Cuadrilla, the company that had the fracking operation in Balcombe last year, announced a fortnight ago that they were pulling out of all their Lancashire sites. A couple of days later climate denying fuckweasel Environment Secretary Owen Paterson admitted that the protesters are winning the argument, though he didn't say it was due to having better values, science and facts. He attributed it to us having 'exciting clothes'. Last week BP ruled out any fracking in the UK, plainly saying it was because of the protests it would attract. Each new poll shows public opposition to fracking increasing.

We are winning.

Testing the Waters

Remember folks, the lack of adequate flood defence and relief is because all the money goes on foreign aid, not because flood funding was slashed to fund tax cuts for the super rich.

We are the fourth biggest economy on earth because of our own hard work and natural superiority, and not because we spend several centuries looting the wealth of countries that we now throw the odd crumb of aid to on condition they let our corporate interests cherry pick their economy.

Whilst we are the fourth biggest economy, we are far from being the fourth-richest nation measured by average incomes. One that is rather better off on a per capita basis is Norway, which in the 1980s decided to keep 51% state ownership of its valuable (and finite) North Sea Oil resources, instead of chucking all that to the private sector. It has since been able to afford to protect its infrastructure from the very high levels of rainfall it endures. And also a load of that social democratic stuff too. you can go to university for free in Norway, even if you're from Eritrea.

Meanwhile, in the UK, we're told the coffers are empty, but since the 2008 banking crisis, banks have paid more than twice as much in bonuses as they have in corporation tax.

As the Met Office links the floods with climate change, long term flood prevention should have a focus on climate change abatement measures. Instead, the government has slashed such funding even when it saved far more money than it cost.

And so we end up wringing our hands and upholstery, demanding that the government answer the real question -  “how many BMWs have to get wet before the government stops trying to impress stupid African babies?”

stopping the wind

The 2010 Coalition agreement spelt it out in clear terms.

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations... provided that they receive no public subsidy. 

So, the most ardently pro-nuclear stance was one in which they were entirely privately funded. Liberal Democrats will oppose it nonetheless.

Two weeks ago Liberal Democrat Danny Alexander announced £10bn of public guarantees to investors in just one new nuclear power station, Hinkley Point.

This week the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) published a report on the smothering at birth of Britain's offshore wind industry. With so much coastline and much of it relatively shallow, this country has an enviable position to establish  massive offshore wind infrastructure. It is much more expensive than building on land, but then it also avoids many of the problems such as spoilt landscapes. Additionally, out at sea you get greater production and efficiency as there aren't the obstacles that create turbulence around turbines.

However the government's lack of enthusiasm means we are building much less than anticipated. It had been expected that a hefty kickstart would see turbine manufacturers set up factories in the UK, but because of the reduced potential this hasn't happened. Increased capacity would, in turn, reduce the cost of offshore wind, leading to increased uptake. More renewable energy, more jobs, everyone wins. Except the fossil and nuke corporations such as EDF, currently lining up to build Hinkley Point as well as the new 'dash for gas' stations such as West Burton.

Will Straw, associate director at the IPPR, said: "The current policy trajectory could achieve a worst of all worlds outcome – low volume [of energy generated], low jobs and high costs.

It's a straight choice - runaway climate change or stopping the fossils to switch to renewables. A large proportion of our old coal stations are closing in the next few years. What we choose to build now decides the source of our electricity for the next forty years. With the new gas stations, the government is setting us up to fail our already paltry carbon emissions targets. Unlike Labour they are refusing to commit to decarbonisation by 2030 and are striving to scupper EU targets for the same date. The greenest government ever. Vote blue, go green.

The lack of investment in renewables and the duplicitous state funding of new nuclear are not two stories. They are one. Money is being steered away from what is sustainable to what is in the interests of the energy giants. They have ceased to offer inadequate solutions to the climate crisis and are now blatantly disregarding the entire issue.

Meanwhile, despite it being banned in many parts of Europe, the UK is pressing ahead with fracking for shale gas even though its climate impact is comparable to coal. The same right wingers who decry the eyesore of wind turbines are happy for fracking drills to cover the countryside (it's been seriously sugggested we could be looking at 50,000-100,000 in Lancashire alone). So again, this looks feels like one story, not two, and that there are other motives at work. And again, follow the money to the shareholder dividends.

This isn't just about climate, it's also about fuel poverty. The government's own Committee on Climate Change said whilst gas is cheaper in the short term, by 2050 a gas-based electricity system would cost households £650 per year more than renewables. This makes the tax breaks for fracking look like an attack on social justice as much as climate justice.

MAKE THE CHANGE

The climate imperative means we have to act now, against the corporate distraction and deceit. It was like this five years ago. But with such a huge swathe of the population aware of the scale of the climate threat, it was relatively easy for small campaign groups acting in unison to have a big impact. Being the only folks with solutions that matched the scale of the problem, being so clearly right that they could prove it in two minutes to a 5 year old with a crayon, it swiftly changed the course of events. The NGOs did what they do best with lobbying, local organising and commissioning reports. The direct activists added the ramshackle pizzazz that tipped the scales.

When Climate Camp went to Heathrow to occupy land earmarked for a new runway in 2007 they expected to be vilified and dismissed. By the end of the year aviation emissions had been forced into the Climate Change Act and plans for the runway were eventually shelved. The following year they didn't know if they'd be facing the bulldozers at the site for the new coal power station at Kingsnorth. Not only did that plan get dropped, so did the raft of others that were due to follow.

The first of the projected 40 new gas fired power stations are being built. Next month Climate Camp style action returns with Reclaim The Power, a camp at the nearly-finished West Burton power station in Nottinghamshire running from 16th to 21st August. The pressure has worked before and it can work again, but only if those who know it's right come together to make it happen.



 

no dash for gas

In the early hours of Monday morning around 30 activists invaded West Burton power station on the Nottinghamshire/Lincolnshire border. Although a massive coal fired power station has been there since the 1960s and was blazing away, the protest is aimed at a different target.

European laws restricting sulphur dioxide emissions to reduce acid rain come into effect in 2015. Rather than face the vast expense of retrofitting coal fired power stations that breach the new rules, many will simply close. A new swathe of electricity generation is going to be built in the coming years. Whatever we choose will be in service for decades to come. Essentially, we are choosing our childrens' power sources.

This is exactly the time to switch to renewables. As the redoubtable Danny Chivers explains, the arguments against doing so are pushable over with a feather. With technologies that are here today we could readily be producing most of our electricity renewably. Britain's geography gives us vast potential for offshore wind, wave and tidal generation and there are credible, detailed sources saying we could be Zero Carbon Britain by 2030. So the government is committed to building two dozen new gas fired power stations instead.

Gas is cheaper than renewables today, and the fossil burning corporations have friends, lobbyists and board members in high places that the renewables sector can't even dream of. But it's a short term vision that passes on the true cost to those yet to come. If I were building a house next door to you it might be cheaper to put my sewage outflow into your garage. It would not be fair.

Gas is lower carbon than coal, but that's shifting. Rather like unconventional oil such as tar sands is way more carbon intensive, so we're starting to buy what is, in its way, unconventional gas. Gas is extracted in Qatar, cooled to minus 162 degrees C, with all the carbon cost you'd imagine. It is then kept at that temperature as it is shipped round to us.

This isn't just about climate change, it's about national independence and social justice.We will be subject to price hikes dictated by our suppliers, notably Russia, as they get control and more customers compete. Energy prices will rocket, pushing more and more people into fuel poverty. instead, we could be producing electricity with minimal environmental cost and no greedy suppliers with their hands on the taps.

The 'dash for gas' is a new target for environmental and social justice campaigners. In an audacious opening salvo they got 17 of them up two chimneys at West Burton, where the second of the new stations is being built, right alongside one of the condemned coal ones. Thirty or so people organising in secrecy and pulling it off, a great bounceback from the Kennedy-hobbled climate action of previous years.

They've taken enough supplies to last a week and, at the time of writing, have been up there for nearly four days. They've got a solar panel with them to keep their phones charged and are tweeting some pretty spectacular pictures as well as eloquently explaining their position to the media. You can follow them @nodashforgas and check their website here. Here's hoping this is just the start.

going for the nuclear option

Really, I'd forgotten what it was like living under Tories. Once or twice a week they roll out something utterly outrageous, so obviously cruel, duplicitous and/or corrupt that it stuns you with its gall and makes you feel powerless to stop it even though it's a once-in-a-generation horror. Then a few days later it's superceded by the next one.

Earlier this month I flagged up their new law to monitor every phone call, text and email. Imagine if Royal Mail were obliged to open all letters and keep photocopies for police and security services to look through. This goes beyond that. Through long term logging of your texts, emails and websearching I could get a more complete and accurate picture of you than you could ever describe to anyone.

And this is from the government whose foundational policy document said

We will implement a full programme of measures to reverse the substantial erosion of civil liberties and roll back state intrusion.

So, another day, another bit of jaw-danglingly bold hypocrisy from the government. That same Programme for Government promised us:

Liberal Democrats have long opposed any new nuclear construction. Conservatives, by contrast, are committed to allowing the replacement of existing nuclear power stations provided that they are subject to the normal planning process for major projects (under a new National Planning Statement), and also provided that they receive no public subsidy.

The government are to bump up electricity bills to subsidise new building of energy sources it deems to be low carbon. This isn't just developing new technologies that need investment to get up to scale. The phrasing - we can only assume deliberately - makes no mention of the word 'renewable'. It includes nuclear power.

earth day

Oops, bit late.

The other day was Earth Day, and I published a guest-post at On This Deity about it.

climate camp is dead, long live climate action

The Camp for Climate Action has announced that it is disbanding. The statement is bold and clear, acknowledging the Camp's achievements - tangible in the cancellation of Heathrow's third runway and the shelving of Kingsnorth power station - and is certainly a brave move.

I want to be clear that I admire the work the Camp has done, and I genuinely don't have a clear idea as to whether the disbanding is a wise move or not. What I am uneasy about is the unreserved glee with which it is being met, and the underlying reasons for that.

Climate action requires long term effort with little chance of major success, and even less chance of being able to measure your contribution to that success. As such, it is really not very rewarding. I should know, I'm one of the people who was involved in the Camp and has latterly ducked out.

It also demands that we all change much of the way we live our lives. This is never going to be comfortable. It is much easier to have 'me and my friends good, those people over there bad' campaigns. This tendency was seen in Climate Camp with some people saying action should never impede the actions of individuals and that 'government and corporations' should be the sole targets.

The anti-cuts campaigns are much more comfortable from this position (as long as we ignore the contradiction of anarchists complaining about a reduction of state intervention in our lives).

The austerity issue should not distract people from continuing vigorous climate action. Take it from The Onion.

climate change, the popular mid-2000s issue that raised awareness of the fact that the earth's continuous rise in temperature will have catastrophic ecological effects, has apparently not been resolved, and may still be a problem.

Back to the Climate Camp statement itself, there are elements that smell a bit funny to me.

Climate Camp leaves a space. What fills that space is up to us. This is a unique opportunity to work together with others to create a more co-ordinated, dynamic and stronger movement against climate change and its root causes.

Climate Camp acted as a lightning rod for those who wanted to take action. Much of climate action away from the Camp has been taken by people who have met and bonded through the Camp. With such loose structure and affiliations, it was easy for people to be involved in different ways and to different degrees and yet still feel part of it, to be propelled by its underlying momentum.

With no other organisation having a similar role, it is very hard indeed to see how taking it away will create something stronger and more dynamic.

we can’t demand that society changes radically, while we ourselves do not.

This is a rationalisation hiding in a word game. The implication is that drastic change of methods and views is, in and of itself, a good thing. That is simply wrong.

Doggedly holding on to a tactic that has become useless is stupid, sure. Refusing to revisit your fundamental philosophy to see if it still makes sense leaves you open to inconsistency and irrelevance. And as William Blake said, 'The man who never alters his opinion is like standing water, and breeds reptiles of the mind'.

However it is perfectly possible to hold a radical political perspective and advance it by the same methods for a lifetime. If we oppose some of the fundamental structures of our culture - the profit motive, consumer-capitalism, enormous concentrations of power - then we're unlikely to be in for a quick win. We are probably going to spend our whole lives working on this stuff. Radically changing away from that is not going to help the cause. Doing so for its own sake would actually reduce our chances of improvement.

The movements for women's rights and trade unionism took several generations to make solid advances. Had they been distracted by more popular issues or decided to change for its own sake, we may well not be enjoying the fruits of their work today.

None of this is to say that Climate Camp has taken the wrong decision. Time will tell whether it was the right move or not, and I can readily see how it might turn out to be the right thing. But regarding such change as an intrinsically good thing is erroneous, and engendering that idea could damage radical movements in future.

kyoto remembered, and what has to come next

Following last month's piece about the Newbury Bypass, I've written another article for Dorian Cope's kickass On This Deity site.

This one's for the anniversary for the day the Kyoto Protocol came into (non) effect

hydrogen planes won't fly

The BBC reports that the aviation industry is giving up on its promise of hydrogen powered aircraft.

Millions of taxpayers' money has been funnelled into projects that did not seemingly take on board the the fact that hydrogen power would remain costly and polluting for some time to come.

They knew it wouldn't work. It was never intended to work. The whole point of alternative fuels for cars or planes is to pretend that the answer is just around the corner, so it's OK to keep burning oil today.

Anyone who thinks that there's a readily available sustainable alternative to fossil fuels doesn't understand what fossil fuels are. They are millions of years of solar energy captured and stored. You're not going to get that off a year's worth of plants or whatever.

"Kerosene is a very good fuel and very difficult to compete with," explains Rainer von Wrede who works in Airbus's research and technology department.

But we all want to be able to fly round the world, we all want to be able to take a tonne of metal as a security blanket with us every time we pop down the shops, so we want to think there's an alternative fuel to make it happen.

As one false solution becomes exposed, another rises to take its place. Oftentimes, the public ditching of one will be saved until the next one's ready to dazzle us with.

"The big deal at the moment is alternative jet fuels. Principally biofuels that come from sustainable sources, and do not compete with food and water, ecetera," Christopher Surgenor, editor and publisher of GreenAir Online tells the BBC.

Hate to tell you this Christopher, but all biofuel crops compete with food and water.

Just because we switch from using edible crops like sugar or corn to inedible ones like jatropha does not mean there's no competition. It's not the crop that's the issue, it's the land use. There is already something growing there, either crops or forest. The water supply is already in use. There simply isn't a load of 'spare' land and 'spare' fresh water lying around.

We can safely ignore all the guff about using 'marginal' land. Firstly, there isn't waste land - the harder it is to support life the more fragile and vulnerable the ecosystems we find there. Additionally, much of the land they speak of as 'marginal' certainly isn't regarded that way by the people who live graze their livestock there. But the real clincher is the fact that the gargantuan industrial processes involved want intensive farming and maximum production. That means using high quality land.


When Virgin started using a little coconut oil in its planes it was calculated that it would take a coconut plantation twice the size of France to supply the world's aircraft. And that's what we're facing. Next year Lufthansa begin using 50% biofuel on a (woohoo) short haul service. Wherever you grow biofuels, it puts the squeeze on food production and raises prices.

But the first thing we need to address is the supposed reason they're moving to biofuels - carbon savings. The simple fact is that biofuels usually cause greater carbon emissions than oil. That should be enough to get them discounted before we even look at the food and water issue.

Clearing land causes a huge amount of carbon to be released (and taking over farmland for biofuels causes new land to go under the plough, so either way biofuels are responsible for deforestation), and it takes years for this to be balanced by savings from not using oil - in some cases longer than the global oil supply will last.

In Indonesia the researchers found that converting land for palm oil production ran up the worst carbon debts, requiring 423 years to pay off. Producing soybeans in the Amazon would take 319 years of soy biodiesel to offset the carbon debt.

What's more, everybody knows it

Britain's promise to more than double its use of biofuels by 2020 is "significantly" adding to worldwide carbon emissions, the Government admitted yesterday.

They can power cars with electricity from renewable sources (though those are hardly oversupplied right now) and give us equally fast alternatives on road and rail. But for planes, there's no electric alternative, nothing so swift, nothing but planes and oil and biofuels.

Faced with the decline of oil production, they're moving to biofuels in the full knowledge that it is a climate disaster, yet are dressing it up as carbon savings cos, y'know, it's made from nice green natural plants and stuff.

So the roll-out begins, the carbon emissions increase and millions more of the poorest people on earth are on course for starvation.

ratcliffe on trial

Last April police in Nottingham arrested 114 people meeting in a building on 'suspicion of conspiracy to commit aggravated trespass and criminal damage'.

It seems there was a plan being hatched to shut down Ratcliffe on Soar coal-fired power station. You know, like the people who shut down Kingsnorth and were found to have acted lawfully.

No charges were brought against the majority of the 114 (not surprising, given that nobody was on their way to do anything and 'suspicion of conspiracy' puts you two steps away from any visible deed). They did eventually charge 26 of them. There will be two trials; six defendants say they were not on their way to the action and will be tried in the new year.

The other twenty say they were planning to shut down the power station but were justified as they were acting to prevent a greater crime. Their trial starts today, and is being blogged at RatcliffeOnTrial.org



Supporters outside court this morning

alex salmond's renewable coal

Last week Alex Salmond, Scotland's First Minister, announced that Scotland's target of generating 50% of its electricity from renewables by 2020 has been upped to 80%.

This week he went one better, suggesting it could be 100% by 2025.

This is interesting, given the plans for a new coal-fired power station at Hunterston, already dubbed by activists the 'new Kingsnorth'. The new power station would run for many decades, burning coal far beyond 2025. It's not only opposed by Scotland's kickass anti-coal activists, but also such rabid revolutionaries as the RSPB, Christian Aid, WWF, the World Development Movement and the Church of Scotland.

Nonetheless,

Salmond's government aims to fast track the Hunterston proposal by using a new streamlined planning process, bypassing the often lengthy and expensive public-consultation rules that normally apply.

In 2007 Salmond said

Coal is king ... If you can use clean-coal technology, coal has a dynamic future. It means coal, far from being environmentally unacceptable, is becoming environmentally attractive.

The Scottish government will only oblige Hunterston to have 300 megawatts (MW) of production with carbon capture and storage. The station is planned to be 1600MW, in other words over 80% without carbon capture. This makes it more carbon intensive than any other way of generating electricity, except for unabated coal.

The Scottish government has also granted the massive Longannet coal power station an life extension so it can keep burning well past its 2015 sell-by date.

Anyone can set targets, especially ones that are mere suggestions for a time fifteen years hence. Just as every warmongering aggressor talks about peace and self-defence, so every fossil burner talks about the importance of aiming for sustainability.

sharks, ice cream, methane and hot water bottles

Analogy of the week has to go to Gary Younge in his piece about immigration and job losses.

Because two things are correlated does not mean one causes the other. Shark attacks and ice-cream sales both rise in the summer. They're linked by the season. But that doesn't mean ice-cream attracts sharks or people react to fear about shark attacks by eating more ice-cream.

This image outstrips another analogy that I found in the new issue of The Land. It's an obscure yet vital magazine. Produced by The Land Is Ours crew, it always gets into the fundamental cogs and gears of land ownership and use. Intelligent, thoughtful and informative, every issue has a number of things that make you want to read them out loud to people. I lifted their article Can Britain Feed Itself? for U-Know.

In the run-up to the Copenhagen Climate Blahblahblah, I pointed out that the Chinese and Indian use of measuring 'carbon intensity' rather than carbon emissions was a way of wriggling out of reducing emissions. The current issue of The Land has chewed the pencil and crunched the numbers. Check out these graphs.



Elsewhere there's a discussion about the climate impact of methane. It's a far more potent greenhouse gas than CO2, but it breaks down quicker. The convention is to measure a gas' potency over 100 years. At that level, methane is about 25 times stronger than CO2 [IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Chap 2, table 2.14]. Some people are arguing that we should pick a shorter term (over 20 years, it's 72 times stronger), as cuts in methane mean greater cuts in the immediate greenhouse effect.

Anyway, the silver medal analogy of the week comes in a piece about this. The Land's Simon Fairlie argues that the longer-term impact of CO2 is what actually makes it more important than methane, not less. He quotes a piece by Geoff Russell:

a tonne of methane contributes 100 times more warming during the first five years of its lifetime as a tonne of CO2, yet under current Kyoto rules, its comparative potency is set at 21. This is because the relative impacts of ALL greenhouse gases are averaged over the same period 100 years, regardless of their atmospheric lifetimes.

This is like applying a blow torch to your leg for 10 seconds but calculating its average temperature as just 48 degrees because that’s what it is when averaged over 20 minutes, with 20 minutes being used because that happens to be some agreed international standard when measuring heat sources applied to legs. The implication being, of course, that a blow torch for 10 seconds and a 48 degree hot water bottle for 20 minutes have the same effect.

Fairlie then runs with it.

The analogy is potentially illuminating, but it is misleading because the methane blowtorches and the CO2 hot water bottles aren't being applied to anything as sensitive as a leg, but are heating up the atmosphere, as in a room.

Also, it is incomplete because there isn't just one blowtorch and one hot water bottle, there are hundreds of them being brought into the room continuously. Although the blowtorches are individually intensely hot, they go out within a matter of seconds, whereas the hot water bottles keep piling up until their collective heat far outstrips that of the relatively few blowtorches that remain ignited at any one time.

At the point where the heat becomes unbearable, the obvious first course is to reduce the flow of blowtorches into the room. That will be the quickest way of reducing the temperature back to the level it was just before it became unbearable. Reducing the flow of hot water bottles will have comparatively little immediate effect.

But removing the blowtorches won't prevent the hot water bottles continuing to pile up until the heat becomes unbearable again; that will eventually happen even if the flow of blowtorches is completely stopped, and when it does happen it will be much harder to lower the temperature again.

In fact, the shorter lifetime of methane also speaks in its defence. In order to maintain the blowtorch heat, the blowtorches have to come into the room thick and fast. In other words, in order to maintain a given level of methane in the atmosphere we have to keep pumping out regularly otherwise the number of parts per million will fall away rapidly...

On the other hand, if humans stopped burning fossil fuels tomorrow, the burden of CO2 emitted in the 20th century would linger on for several generations.

This means that if the world decided to stabilise greenhouse gases at their current level, we would only need to reduce global methane output by 6.1 percent, but CO2 emissions by anything from 50 to 85 percent.

Any 'targeting' of methane to compensate for the manifest failure to reduce CO2 emissions... would be scapegoating methane to bale out CO2; or put another way, it would be extracting a subsidy from methane emitters for the benefit of fossil fuel users...

Whereas UK and US methane emissions comprise 8 and 9 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions respectively, India's methane emissions, two-thirds of which come from cows and rice, are reported to comprise 35 percent of her total. India, like most poor countries, burns far less fossil fuels per head than the USA or UK, and for many of her poor, a goat or a cow may represent almost the entirety of their greenhouse gas emissions.

Targeting methane emissions such as these to compensate for a failure to reduce CO2 emissions is another facet of the neo-colonialism that has pervaded international climate negotiations.

The Land. Go buy it.

kingsnorth: back from the dead?

The latest in the line of anti-environmental actions from the ConDems is a spectacular U-turn on a central policy promise that, in opposition, they beat Labour round the head with.

David Cameron, 16 June 2008:

We’ll only get the big benefits of going green if we’re really ambitious and really change the way we do things. What I’m talking about is one of the most radical technological and social shifts for generations. I’m talking about reconfiguring our whole economy and overturning our whole hydrocarbon dependency...

So that’s why I can announce today that a Conservative Government will follow the Californian model, and implement an Emissions Performance Standard. This would mean the carbon emissions rate of all electricity generated in our country cannot be any higher than that generated in a modern gas plant. Such a standard would mean that a new generation of unabated coal power plants could not be built in this country.

That's clear, specific and unambiguous.

So, once elected, it was no surprise to see it in the main policy document The Coalition: Our Programme for Government, May 2010:

We will establish an emissions performance standard that will prevent coal-fired power stations being built unless they are equipped with sufficient carbon capture and storage to meet the emissions performance standard.

Again, that's clear, definite and unequivocal.

But three months on when it's time for action, we find out it's actually time to jettison the policy promise, 15 August 2010:

Now government sources confirm they will not be bringing forward legislation in the autumn and will instead spend the summer working on "the larger picture". They will open a consultation on the [Emissions Performance Standard] idea in the autumn with the results being presented to parliament as a white paper in the new year.

You can hear the beast of unabated coal stirring in its lair. See you in front of the bulldozers at Kingsnorth.

bnp in 'bullshitting again' shock

It was pretty mad that UKIP used Churchill on their leaflet for the European elections last year. But not as mad as the BNP putting Nick Griffin next to Churchill on their new leaflet.



Not that they're a hate-based party or anything, no. I mean, who isn't motivated to vote out of a desire to 'get even'?

I've recently had the singular pleasure of seeing the latest copy of the BNP's quarterly magazine Hope And Glory. I know, I know, insert your own barrely-fishy-firearmsy metaphor here.

First up, their slogan for the general election.

In the late 1980s, following Tina Turner's hit single Simply The Best, a significant percentage of small businesses in Britain (and I'm more than willing to bet this was true for the USA too) used 'simply the best' as their slogan.

Lifting someone else's slogan is pathetically unimaginative. It says you've no idea about your own identity and no imagination. And that's true even without it being as vacuous as 'simply the best'. As a practice, it's as bad as the unfunny, desperate, can-we-end-the-meeting-please organisations that agree to call themselves 'The ----- With No Name'.

So, how could the BNP beat their anti-immigration leaflets last year using images of Polish pilots defending Britain in WW2, and foreigners from stock-image sites as the hard-working British taxpayers?

How about an act that involves displaying a lack of identity and importing ideas from a black foreigner?





The magazine itself is, of course, filled with bile and twaddle. Stuff about European Human Rights being 'Islamo-Marxist'. (That's the same European Convention on Human Rights that Churchill signed us into).

One thing did catch my eye though. They have the text of a speech Griffin made to the European parliament. He says that belief in human-caused climate change is

a refusal to accept scientific reality. According to the US National Snow and Ice Data Center, Arctic summer sea ice has increased by 409,000 square miles, or 26 percent, since 2007.

He goes on to say this means human-induced climate change isn't happening and it is, in point of fact,

the most expensive Big Lie in human history

Elsewhere, he says we should pay people of recent foreign descent fifty grand each to leave Britain. In case this isn't offensive enough, he makes an exception for Irish people because he regards them as British. We can, he says, pay for this by stopping our spending on climate change measures.

Back on their election leaflet, they say they'll raise pensions by ending spending on adaptation measures for 'non existent Climate Change'.



Now I don't expect his opinions on climate change to make any more sense than the rest of his lip-diddly fuckwittery. You'd need to be almost as much of an cockwad as Griffin himself to start looking for evidence-based thinking in the BNP.

But still, that Arctic ice figure he cited is very specific, and the US National Snow and Ice Data Center is a body to trust. So what's the score?

Stick that figure into Google and you hit denialist blogs saying what Griffin says and that

most of the Northern Hemisphere is much colder this winter than it's been in decades - and the Southern Hemisphere is cooler, too.

Even though the truth is that

The combined global land and ocean average surface temperature for January 2010 was 0.60°C (1.08°F) above the 20th century average of 12.0°C (53.6°F). This is the fourth warmest January on record.

So, what do the US National Snow and Ice Data Center actually say about the Arctic ice?

At the end of the Arctic summer, more ice cover remained this year than during the previous record-setting low years of 2007 and 2008. However, sea ice has not recovered to previous levels. September sea ice extent was the third lowest since the start of satellite records in 1979, and the past five years have seen the five lowest ice extents in the satellite record

As the Met Office explained

Global warming does not mean that each year will be warmer than the last. Natural phenomena will mean that some years will be much warmer and others cooler.

You only need to look at 1998 to see a record-breaking warm year caused by a very strong El Nino. In the last couple of years, the underlying warming is partially masked caused by a strong La Nina. Despite this, 11 of the last 13 years were the warmest ever recorded.

national carbon calculator

When not being a freeroving performance poet or a raging nuisance to carbon-criminals, the estimable Danny Chivers is a proper pencil-chewing carbon footprinter. He wades through impenetrably dull technical reports and unpicks their reliability so we can have an informed guess as to our carbon impact.

That is certainly essential work, but kinnell, I'm glad it's not me having to do it. But anyway, with his wealth of knowledge, he's produced a National Carbon Calculator for the Guardian's site.

Rather like the BBC's Climate Challenge game that lets you run the country while trying to have climate-responsive policies (staying in power and hitting the targets isn't at all easy), only with the workings laid bare, the calculator lets you alter national behaviour and infrastructure and see if things will work out. This lets you test ideas, whether they're your own or those advocated by others.

Danny talks about some of the trickiness in making it, and gives the breakdown of figures in full, so if you're that way inclined you can you can test the rigorousness.

The thing that becomes swiftly, screamingly obvious is that we cannot meet ever-increasing demand. We have to cut consumption.

As boosting economic growth is the top priority of the main political parties, it's not surprising that none of them manage to hit the target of a minimum 80% cut. You know, the one the government is legally bound by.

Having already got the main parties environment people to have a face to face debate, the Guardian got them to directly address the issue of carbon cuts in light of the calculator.

LibDem Simon Hughes tells us that his party want 'a 90% cut by 2050'. Yet using the calculator they only deliver 50%. He pins the difference - almost half the cuts we need to make - on burning fossil fuels with Carbon Capture and Storage technology (which doesn't exist and, the government says, might never), and then manages to do what scientists in the field can't do and pin a precise figure on carbon savings for changes in land use. Wriggle wriggle squirm squirm, look over there everyone, shiny things!

For Labour, Ed Miliband proclaims the glory of electric cars and the wonders of nuclear power, even though these don't make a massive amount of difference. As I've said before, to replace all our outgoing nukes and have a huge (read: hugely expensive) building programme that doubles our nuclear capacity would only give an 8% carbon cut by 2034. A pound spent on nuclear is a pound not spent on technology that delivers swifter, greater cuts.

But these two spinweasels are nothing compared to the Conservatives' Greg Clark, who says how important it is not to have regulation and obligation on this - or any other - issue, and how we mustn't do anything to obstruct what the profit-driven growth-maximising private sector wants to do. He then goes on about watermelons.

The simple fact - so obvious that it is a form of self-deceit to ignore it, as all the main parties do - is that we cannot have infinite economic growth from the finite resource base of a single planet. Even if carbon emissions didn't force our hand, other limits will be hit soon enough, as the looming threat of peak oil makes clear.

Sustainability is pretty much the opposite of economic growth. Certainly, for our industrial culture, it's an either/or choice. This pretence by government and media (why is economic growth always 'good news'?) that there can be some compatibility is like running toward the cliff telling ourselves that the meadow stretches on forever, but if it really is a cliff then carbon capture will grow us some wings. Time to stop running and turn the fuck around.

The thing the Carbon Calculator doesn't have is the cost of any of the actions, either financial or political. As the BBC Climate Challenge game shows, taking action that will seriously reduce emissions will be costly on both fronts.

The politicians surely know about the clash of values, and they choose power over long-term responsibility. And in a way it's understandable - getting yourself kicked out of power renders you as unable to effect change as doing nothing in the first place. However, it leaves us paddleless, and actually denying the need for proper paddles, as we accelerate up shit creek.

Rather than pretending there's nothing wrong and avoiding doing what's necessary, the task is surely to make it become politically aceptable. The only chance of really addressing climate change is to shift fundamental values so that we live within our means, that we take responsibility, that we don't externalise the cost of our luxury on to those yet to come.

That starts with wresting power from the tiny enclosed space of the ballot box, as Danny himself says.



Try out the National Carbon Calculator, see how effective your ideas would be.

sizing up the seismic advice

The problem with conveying scientific predictions through the media is, as Richard Black noted this week, the lack of caveats and small print. We look to the news for facts rather than best guesses. Especially in the only bit we all read, the headlines.

Some journos don't even notice this is a problem and actually rail against the scientific world about it. George Monbiot spotted Melanie Phillips doing it.

The latest report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (which collates the findings of climatologists), is, she complained, “studded with weasel words” such as “very likely” and “best estimate”. These weasel words are, of course, what make it a scientific report, rather than a column by Melanie Phillips.

So it is that last autumn a Guardian headline told us

Forecasters Predict Mild Winter

Yet in the article the Met Office forecaster gave it a couple of qualifiers before mentioning the likelihood of an uncommonly cold winter

Early indications are that it's looking like temperatures will be near or above average, but there's still a one in seven chance of a cold winter – with temperatures below average.

This sort of 'Met Office predicted a warm winter' thing, in turn, led to a chorus of climate deniers saying in various places that we can't trust the Met Office's climate modelling, and from there we can extrapolate that the concept of anthropogenic climate change is just made up by them because they're Marxist killjoys who want bigger research grants.

This evening, the government continued to ground planes across the UK after Met Office forecasts said it won't be safe to fly due to an invisible cloud of dust from a thousand miles away.

So, go on all you aviation loving carbon-whore climate deniers who think the Met Office's advice is so worthless. Put your money, and your entire anatomy, where your mouth is. Hire a plane and fly yourselves straight into it. Please.

the carbon footprint of whisky

If you want a definitive answer or even any numbers on this one, sorry.

Strangely, when I did the post about the carbon footprint of beer, I touched on studies for wine yet it never occurred to me to look for my favourite bevvy, whisky.

Whilst brewers have commissioned proper reports into their carbon impact and there's an authoritative American one for wine, I can't find anything for whisky. In fact, it almost seems like a deliberate ignorance. I can find references to

the whisky industry’s growing concern over its product’s carbon footprint, thought to be one of the highest for any food or drink.

but nobody's volunteering any actual figures.

Bruichladdich on the Scottish island of Islay is a fiercely independent and independently minded distillery, not needing to be asked twice to do something innovative. They're installing anaerobic digesters to turn its yeasty waste into methane to burn and generate electricity.

The project's being touted as part of some green credentials, but Bruichalddich ships its whisky in some of the heaviest bottles I've ever seen, with a bottom of solid glass a centimetre thick. And then they put each of these anvilesque items in its own metal tin.

A cardboard box is enough for comparable whiskies from Ardbeg or Lagavulin. In fact, blended whiskies come without any box at all, and they seem to do fine. It's just extraneous packaging to make you feel like you've bought summat posh. Unless you're needing a cantenna to hack your neighbour's internet, there's no need for the Bruichladdich tin.

THE ISSUES WITH WHISKY

Put simply, whisky is made by brewing a sort of barley-only beer, then boiling it. The alcohol boils at a lower temperature than water, so they catch the first lot of steam, cool it and it turns back to liquid. This stuff is about 70% alcohol. It gets left in oak barrels for a few years, then diluted to the desired strength, bottled and sold. Most distilleries send casks to bottling plants for dilution, a few - Bruichladdich is one - do the whole thing on-site and use their own source water for dilution.

(So when anyone wants to get snobbish saying that putting a drop of water in your whisky is somehow sacrilegious, point out that it's already watered down and is most likely one-third tap water from some Scottish industrial estate).

It's clear that boiling a liquid will be higher carbon than not boiling it, so whisky will probably be pretty high-carbon. However, there are a few significant mitigating factors.

The largest part of beer's impact is from the manufacture of glass. The second largest is transport. These figures are also true for wine. It's a reasonable guess they're big parts of whisky's impact too.

When I worked out the stuff about the iron content of stout and red wine, it was unfair to compare it ml for ml because you drink stout by the pint but wine in smaller servings. Well, usually anyway.

By the same token, it's not the quantity of whisky in a bottle, but how much drinking it represents. Beer is 95% water. Whisky is, roughly speaking, beer concentrate. If you and I were having a large night we'd get through a bottle of whisky. But to consume the same amount of alcohol, we'd drink 16 bottles of beer. That's a lot more glass and transport. As it's 8 times stronger, it'll have one-eighth of the glass and transport impacts (heavy posh bottles notwithstanding).

Scotch whisky also wins points for being pretty local. As with wine, there's no excuse for Europeans to be buying the American stuff (even before we discover that American whisky basically just tastes of corn and wood).

Also, the way most whisky is only diluted and bottled at large, centralised distribution points reduces the impact further.

Whether this cancels out the extra energy use in distillation is another matter, but it's certainly not as clear cut as it first appears. Nonetheless, getting a specific measure of the carbon footprint of whisky wouldn't be much harder than one for beer, wine or any number of other products for which figures already exist.

AND THERE'S MORE

Whilst the anaerobic digesters are laudable, whisky's impact could be reduced much further by not wasting other by-products of the distillation process, such as heat and barley husks. Just across the bay from Bruichladdich, the Bowmore distillery in the island's main town uses the waste heat from its distillation to heat the municipal swimming pool.

Drinks giant Diageo - owner of many of the best-known names in Scotch whisky - installed a Bruichladdich-style anaerobic digester at the Glen Ord distillery in 2001.  They're now setting up a new distillery that not only has anaerobic digesters to generate methane for electricity and cleaning water, but saves the waste husks of barley for burning as biomass in a combined heat and power (CHP) plant.

This will drastically cut energy consumption, and it's one of those things that government says is always the case, where acting sustainably saves a lot of money (let's just ignore the times when it costs more, eh?).

It shows what can be done. Such drastic changes of technology are usually more expensive to retrofit than to build from scratch. And can these projects deliver the cuts we need, in the region of 90%?

Scottish and Newcastle's brewery in Manchester, home of Foster's, Kronenbourg and Strongbow, installed CHP last year, resulting in an 87% reduction in the site's carbon emissions. They're planning to roll out the change to their other breweries.

This is a hard-nosed profit-driven major corporation, not a co-op of niche-market, fair-trading new agers. If it works for them then it should work for every major brewery and distillery in the land.

the government causing climate denial

The resurgence of climate deniers is something of a puzzle. Three years ago, as the solid science piled up and the IPCC's predictions came to pass, it seemed that denial was dead in the (glacial melt) water. But, basing our position on reason and evidence, we reckoned without the depth of desire not to have to act.

Dealing with climate deniers used to feel like talking to any other flat earther, and to treat them as somehow sensible was to give them too much credibility. But the cultural firmament has changed. In the same way that sticking to the 'no platform for the fascist' attitude and ignoring the BNP (themselves climate deniers, by the way) is to let them speak for themselves in their new prominence, so we have to take the time to take climate deniers down.

They claim that climate change is a vast conspiracy taking in the Royal Society and equivalent bodies all round the world, and tens of thousands of scientists working on everything from tropical algaes to arctic ice structures, and every government on earth. If only they could prove themselves right. I'd love it. Not least because then I wouldn't have to deal with those nobbers on message boards.

Trouncing them is easily done in many ways - they're demonstrably wrong - but they don't concede or reconsider their position. You show them, for instance, that volcanoes don't actually out-emit humans and they respond with, 'look! Over there! The Medieval Warm Period!'. You can point them towards any number of simple authoritative, referenced sites dealing with their stock arguments (or more detailed ones if they try to get technical) and they still come back.

It comes down to a very simple couple of questions - does carbon dioxide act as a greenhouse gas? What effect will increasing it have?

But even then you can be caught out. I've had a climate denier say CO2's effect on temperature is unproven, even though it can be demonstrated in Blue Peter style with stuff in your kitchen - here's one we made earlier.

They vastly exaggerate the meaning of the leaked UEA emails, even though the precise nature of the dodgy info is public knowledge.

The discovery that one or two bits of data were wrong, even falsified, is nothing new in any area of science. It does not discredit the whole field, any more than a fiddled black box recorder means aviation is an impossibility. So why is this stuff so persuasive about climate science, and especially why now?

George Monbiot suggests that it's a hardwired psychological response to the advancing inevitability, the death of hope that it mightn't be true. Paradoxically, the more we know a catastrophe will happen the more we deny it. It could also just be, as I said, that recently - especially in the run-up to Copenhagen - the deniers have been a lot more active.

But perhaps, in the UK at least, there is another factor right now. Much as we see politics as a broad arena in which Westminster is only a small part, and much as we like to ignore grey politics and think the power of our argument and the urgency of the climate predicament should hold sway, I think it's got a lot to do with the government.

The anti-roads movement in the 1990s was remarkably successful and really caught the public imagination. There were many reasons for that, but one that's rarely acknowledged is the influence of the prevailing atmosphere dictated by grey politics. It was the last days of the John Major administration, that lunatic headless chicken (Sebastian Coe and Gyles Brandreth as MPs in the party of government!), a runaway gravy train of greed and sleaze.

It created a strong generalised feeling that the established professional political order was out of touch and untrustworthy. This meant that campaigns based on integrity that challenged the ruling elite were warmly welcomed by the population.

Today's Labour government is, like Major's Conservatives, a despised lurching zombie, waiting until the last possible moment to call the election in the vain hope that something, anything, will turn up and save their doomed asses. The more they do this, the worse they make it for themselves.

The feeling is compounded and stretched to cover all parties by the MPs expenses scandal, and beyond that into distrust of the establishment in general fuelled by the widespread hatred of the banks and outrageous police violence at the G20 last April.

So when the government tells us we need to take action on climate change, it's easy to tap into a feeling that they're all just lying scamming scumpigs. This leads to anything contrarian being given more credence. As Ben Goldacre points out, there becomes a confusion between 'establishment views' and 'established views'.

The fact that nobody's going to go all Blair-Obama about Cameron; the deepening discomfort of the recession making people want someone in power to blame whilst feeling more penny-pinching and less altruistic; the increasing dexterity of the climate deniers as communicators while scientists still presume science can speak for itself; none of these point to the decline of climate denial any time soon.

the carbon footprint of beer

After that last post about 10:10, a comment was left from Dunc who said

I'm a craft brewer, and at least 10% of my domestic electricity use is for brewing. I could eliminate that overnight, but if I'm still drinking beer, I'm pretty sure that would actually increase my overall emissions (the bulk of the emissions from commercial beers being located in transport, packaging, and the retail environment, all of which I completely eliminate by brewing at home).

My gut feeling is that he's right about the bulk of emissions not being from the beer itself, but surely I could find some concrete evidence out there.

The Carbon Trust said

The carbon footprint of off-trade beer, the majority of sales, is dominated by its packaging (which for standard size units represents at least 50% of product-related emissions), with the overall footprint of a traditional disposable glass bottled beer generally higher than that of aluminium cans and PET bottles.

Coincidentally, in reading up about 10:10 I came across this article about Suffolk brewers Adnam's.

I've heard of numerous green initiatives they've undertaken in recent years, and my impression is of a company actually trying to cut things rather than just do a little greenwash. (But then, giving you such impressions is the mark of successful greenwash...)

Anyway, this caught my eye.

Adnams has reduced the energy used to produce each barrel of beer from 51.4kWh in 2007 to 46.3kWh in 2008.

The inclusion of an exact figure article set me off on a little arithmetic.

If we take 51.4kWh per barrel as average for beer, and presume that's a normal 72 pint barrel, we're looking at 0.714kWh per pint.

The UK electricity supply emits 460g of carbon dioxide per kWh of electricity.

This makes 328g/pint. That's the same as driving the average car about 2km, or eating four bags of crisps.

I then found the dependable Ask Umbra had covered alcoholic beverages.

Sapporo has started labeling beer cans with carbon footprints; their estimate is that a 350ml can of Black Label beer emits 161g of carbon.

That's about 261g/pint.

Umbra points us to a 2007 study for wine that showed that, in America, transportation accounts for about half of wine's carbon footprint, and the manufacture of bottles a further quarter. It's put numbers on something I've said before, that there's no excuse for Europeans drinking non-European wine.

In 2008 the New Belgium Brewing Company had a serious study done of a six pack of their beer (6x12floz bottles). They found it was a whopping 3,188.8g. By my calculations, that's 889g/pint*.

Perhaps there's something amiss in their having such a huge impact. Then again, it feels more likely that it's due to it being an exhaustive full life-cycle study. Emissions from the company’s own operations and the disposal of its waste accounts for only 5.4 percent of their emissions. They found the biggest single element was pre-chilling beer in those stupid open fridges in shops, accounting for more than a quarter of the carbon.

There are solutions to this, and not just by the obvious move of buying local, unrefrigerated beer (or brewing your own like Dunc). In San Francisco there's Carrotmob, who touted round local stores and had everyone go to the one that would give the greatest amount of the profits to energy efficiency improvements to the store, a total win-win.

THEN THERE'S THE WATER

The really alarming figure in the Adnam's article was this

It takes 8 pints of water on average to make one pint of beer.

(Adnam's have got it down to less than half of that, by the way).

There's so much cleaning of vessels and pipes to be done. But where does this figure come from? Does it include 'virtual water', the stuff used to make the ingredients and containers?

It's something that first hit me four years ago with the Independent's front page that said

The real cost of a bag of salad: You pay 99p. Africa pays 50 litres of fresh water

In soft drinks, made from crops grown in hot and artificially irrigated conditions, the figure can be astronomical.

Coca-Cola's Chief Executive E Neville Isdell said in 2007

it now only takes 2.54 liters of water to make one liter of Coke, compared with 3.14 liters five years ago

However other sources say that

there is as much as 250 litres of water used once growing the sugar cane used in the drink is factored in.

For many places, water is a pressing issue and will become all the more so as population increases and climate change intensifies. Even in well-watered parts of the world, treatment and pumping are large users of energy, so 'embodied water' in a product is part of its embodied energy and carbon emissions.

= = = = = = =

* 3188.8g divided by 2040ml (12floz), multiplied by 568 (number of ml in a UK pint)