Image - Danny Lawson - PA Wire
Kill the cows, save the planet.
Sorry, but they have to go. Lord Stern, who wrote the 2006 Stern Review on the cost of tackling climate change, has singled them out. To put it politely, they produce too much 'waste product' (methane is a much more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide) and raising livestock consumes water and land in large quantities.
As practical solutions to the issue of climate change go, this one's not really ticking many boxes. Lots of people like eating meat. Lots of people rely on farming and selling it to make a living. We could raise meat prices, perhaps through taxes. But how much public support is that going to get? And I suspect that black market steak would become surprisingly popular.
The good news is that Lord Stern's suggestion doesn't form part of the recommendations from the latest report from the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), which was set up in 2008 to monitor how we're doing with cutting carbon emissions. The bad news is that the CCC reckons we do need to act rapidly to cut emissions faster. So how can we do it?
Before I start, this is not a piece about the rights and wrongs of climate change and whether tackling it should be as far up our priority list as it is.
Instead, I am starting from the premise that governments around the world have already decided they want to target emissions of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide in particular.
How to cut our carbon emissions
So far, one of the key methods of attack (in Europe at least) has been carbon trading under the EU Emission Trading Scheme.
In a nutshell, the idea is that you issue a set number of carbon credits - licenses to pollute, basically - across Europe. Industries who are big polluters can either buy extra credits from other polluters or cut back and pocket the money from selling their spare credits on the carbon market.
It sounds like a great idea and it has worked in the past - a similar emissions scheme (tackling sulphur dioxide) to cut acid rain in the US in the 1990s has been widely viewed as a success.
Trouble is, our attempts so far aren't sucking carbon out of the atmosphere nearly fast enough to meet our somewhat arbitrary goal of slashing carbon emissions by 80% on 1990 levels by 2050.
Chairman of the CCC, Lord Adair Turner, reckons that we need emissions to fall by 2-3% a year, rather than the current 0.5%. In other words, we need to slash emissions perhaps six times as quickly as we are now. As the CCC put it understatedly, that's a "step change".
And that means the gloves are coming off. David Kennedy, the CCC's chief executive, said: "We've stuck with the market a long time. We don't think we can stick by it anymore."
Why isn't the market delivering?
It's pretty easy to see why this isn't working. Markets function on the basis of supply and demand. Prices go up when demand is higher than supply, which encourages producers to improve supply and thus reap the profits. So for the market to work we need to make clean energy more profitable than dirty energy.
But consumers just want plain old energy. For now, most don't especially mind whether it's low-carbon or not and it's impossible to tell from your energy bill anyway. For now, at least, it's easier and cheaper to make energy from carbon-emitting sources.
That's why the carbon market was introduced. But the price of carbon has been whacked by the recession, so it isn't high enough to make it worthwhile for power companies to take the sorts of long-term risks involved in building riskier and more costly low-carbon power sources, such as renewables, nuclear power stations or clean coal (particularly expensive and risky as it's an unproven concept which most greens object to in any case).
Meanwhile, on the energy efficiency side, people aren't buying into more fuel-efficient cars or getting their homes insulated fast enough for the CCC's liking.
So what can we do?
I'm a great believer in markets simply because I think they're the most efficient way to allocate scarce resources. And I think that greater transparency and better consumer information would help in this case.
British consumers are generally quite an ethical bunch. Organic and Fair Trade food cost more and arguably don't taste different, but British people are happy to buy them for their added ethical value.
So if energy bills were easier to understand, had some sort of carbon rating and you could more easily compare providers, I suspect consumers would become much more potent forces for change.
Similarly, if people could more easily see how much each individual appliance in their home was costing, then I suspect we'd all cut back on our usage quite rapidly. That's why I like the idea of smart grids and smart meters, to make energy consumption both more efficient and more transparent.
As for the car industry, well, it would help if the US government hadn't bailed out the least progressive car companies when they were on the verge of going bust. But with oil prices likely to stay high by historical terms, the likelihood is that consumers will start to see fuel efficiency as a far more important aspect of their purchase choice when they're buying a car.
Fiddling while the planet burns
But if we really are worried about carbon emissions, then this is all tinkering at the edges. We need to switch away from carbon-emitting power generation. And I don't see how you can persuade a private company to build a nuclear power station if a gas-fired one is cheaper.
So it comes down to making the price of carbon sufficiently expensive so that it makes sense for producers to switch out of such sources. This is where the flaw in the current carbon market lies.
If the purpose of the market is to drive down carbon emissions, then the number of permits available needs to be adjusted in such a way that carbon prices can be relied on to remain at high enough levels to encourage long-term demand for carbon-free power generation.
Recession not helping
A recession will of course cut carbon prices, but for the wrong reasons. When we come out of the recession, demand for power will rise and the proportion generated from carbon-generating sources won't have changed.
So there has to be a constant incentive to raise the percentage of our power generation that comes from carbon-free sources. That suggests that the number of permits available should be adjusted according to electricity demand, so that even when demand for power falls, prices for carbon are either stable or rising.
It's not the way a "true" market works, but carbon pricing is in reality more like a flexible tax - you are taxing "dirty" energy in order to subsidise "clean" energy.
I think it's better to do it like this rather than through a plain old tax, is because it gives individual companies more flexibility and the government can't be tempted to use "green" tax proceeds to fund unrelated causes (such as pension deficits).
Consumers paying the price
Of course, those costs will be passed on to the consumer. That'll provide an added incentive to improve energy efficiency on the one hand but it'll also mean angry consumers.
And that takes us back to the point we started with. If cutting carbon is worth us spending all this money on - and it may well be - then it would be good to get some clearer information on climate change, rather than headline-grabbing calls for a mass conversion to veganism - which, frankly, won't help anyone's case.
Slowly people are realising the whole climate change thing has been massively exaggerated. It is not particularly warm now and hasn't got warmer for 13 years. Hardly the planet burning.
Open water at the North Pole is nothing new, the Chinese recorded it 500 years ago around the end of the Medieval Warm Period. The Orkney Islands have the oldest known dwellings in Europe, they are only a few feet above the current sea level and were occupied when it was 3 to 4 degrees warmer than today in the Holocene Climate Optimum. Why didn't they drown then?
All the so called evidence of climate change is just that, evidence of climate change that has been going on for about 300 years. The runaway warming talked about doesn't exist outside the fantasy world of computer modellers, when the CO2 level was nearly 20 times what is today, the Earth didn't warm up rapidly and die!
So, stop feeling guilty about enjoying life, don't be wasteful and stop scaring our children with unfounded nonsense. Man's cotribution to the warming is minimal - you can do the calculation if you want! Stop wasting money trying to 'control climate' and use it to adapt to any changes.
Sunny Jim
The so-called global warming was blamed on carbon emissions creating holes in the ozone. These holes are now disappearing, despite the 'high' carbon levels.
I agree with sunny Jim about sea levels. Melting ice does not raise sea levels! As an experiment, fill a glass with ice, and half fill with water. When the ice is melted, where is the water level? (the same!)
There was a fascinating article in the sunday times a few weeks ago from scientists who know what they are talking about. Reduction in global warming (I agree it is happening- it is just the cause) has been brought about in a natural way through volcanic eruption throwing sulphur into the stratosphere. For around 150 Million we can reproduce the effect.
There are two sides to the global warming theories. Global warming has been happening for millennia, witness all the evidence of past glaciers across the world. Where are those glaciers now? Global warming caused the disappearance of those glaciers, and there is plenty of evidence of past periods of global warming and cooling. The debate over man's involvement in the current warmijng phase will go one for all our lifetimes. The fear with melting ice is not that the North Pole has enough ice to raise sea levels, but that ice caps such as those at the South Pole or in Greenland may well do.
On the other hand, the carbon fuel resources as well as other mineral resources are finite, and will run out some day. It makes no sense to squander these resources unneccesarily, and we must adopt means of using less, if only to counterbalance the increasing prices of them. Also, it makes no sense to dig minerals out of the ground on one side of the earth, transport them across the world, use them briefly and then bury them. Recycling of all materials is a must if we are to avoid turning the world into a huge rubbish dump.
Find An Acorn, Plant An Oak, The Carbon Soak and do this in any open area where permission is granted or plant any tree seed anywhere in the World and let us individually do our bit to give the Planet back its lungs for the medium to long term future.
In the short term we must all do what we can individually to cut our carbon emissions by dealing with waste, recycling and energy consumption correctly to cut our carbon footprint.
Our so called leaders should get their acts together at Copenhagen and decide on cohesive action not talk.
Okay, admittedly there are two sides to every argument, and please I'm not a layman who will accuse everything as some cynical attempt to tax us. I am an ethical person; I recycle, look out for my carbon emissions but from time to time I get well and truly hacked off at some of the things I hear. 'London is sinking due to global warming!' or some tripe to that effect was published in a very popular (tabloid) newspaper the other week. 'Global warming and melting icecaps mean London is sinking into the sea' paraphrased but that was the general gist. Anybody who has done A-Level geography has heard of isostatic rebound, I was told about the (very gradual) effects of this when I was seventeen, Scotland is ever so slightly rising and the weight of London (a settlement that has been around for, I'm sure, for a few thousand years and isn't growing because I left my light bulb on last night) is not helping the balance.
Please before people start to harass me as been an uneducated mouth off, I am not, and this post is not meant as the 'be all and end all' just purely an example of how the media will exaggerate, expand and sensationalise anything if it sounds good to boost sales. Most of the (I'm sorry to say) complete rubbish I hear about the global climate change argument comes from people who have read the wrong article, been brought up with a bizarre mainstream doctrine. As mentioned earlier, I am not saying climate change is a myth, my geography teacher predicted the changes we are seeing years ago, but please listen to the arguments of the educated who aren't writing this to gain publicity, sales, or shout off about a popular agenda once in a while!
Any readers - PLEASE disregard the contents of the top 3 commenters.
1. Climate change evidence is very much in existence. The first commenter misunderstands and dramatically oversimplifies the case. When carbon dioxide has been high in the past the entire composition of the atmosphere was completely different, and life forms were not as they are now, neither were inputs and feedbacks. These cases simply cannot be compared any more than you can say “I survived on only milk when I was 1 month old, so I can survive on only milk now when I’m 45.”
2. The second commenter, 'malcmax', has misunderstood the problem to such an extent that I would be scared if anyone believes him. He has confused the hole in the ozone problem of a few decades ago (which was caused by CFCs in aerosols, and increased chances of skin cancer from too much UV radiation, not global warming, and has nothing to do with carbon dioxide. If you don’t believe me look it up on Wikipedia or any child’s science textbook. (Also, his oversimplified example of the water in the glass only works if the water is floating - much ice near the poles is partly on land, e.g. Greenland - so obviously a glacier slipping into the sea will raise the sea level.)
3. The third commenter is just circulating baseless myths that nobody who has any expertise in climate science, geography, energy engineering, etc. believes. The evidence and calculations behind climate predictions are entirely logical. I implore you to read any of the publications from the IPCC if you have any kind of understanding of science, and see for yourself.
If you doubt climate predictions and think the 'greenies'/'warmists' are making it up, ask yourself: Why would they want to make it up? What would they be gaining? People who have expertise in these relevant sciences are regular people like you. They enjoy going on holiday, eating meat and imported foods like bananas, buying new things, enjoying life. They face 'loosing out' on some of these things just as much as everyone else, so they are not producing this research for the benefit of themselves in suggesting that everyone should cut down on some of the more carbon-excessive things we do. They are just able to see the bigger picture as well, and realise that if we don't exercise a bit of moderation now, things could be a lot lot worse in a generation's time.
If you don’t believe me, or at least give what I’ve said some consideration, I don’t know what else to say. I have a degree in engineering and I specialize in renewable energy. I have been concerned with this stuff for years. I know what I’m talking about. Please give some credit to possibility that if there are this many thousands of us working tirelessly to try and reverse the current climate changes before it’s too late, we might be doing it for a good reason.
When will all this global warming nonsense stop?
There is no such thing and it it purely a way to raise money and taxes. When everyone realises that it has all been made up, what then?
Kill industry, Save the planet (but too many 'important' people will loose money, that just won't do).
Kill Capitalism, save the planet (money loss again).
Kill yourself, save the planet (because the poor always pay).