Sustainable Development Strategies

Sustainability - the Balanced Scenario

2010-10-12T16:26:00.000+01:00

Oh no, not another article on green issues! We’ve got a recession to dig ourselves out of, we’ve got the dreaded cuts just round the corner...

But...

We need to stimulate growth, we need to get our businesses going again...

But...

Yes, we’re very sorry about the polar bears and the Gulf of Mexico is a bit of a mess, but the economy needs energy and we all need jobs...

But...

And anyway the scientists can’t agree, can they? And what about that lot down at the University of East Anglia?

But...

You still here?

It’s not easy being an environmentalist. One of the major problems I find is other environmentalists, whose ideas are often impractical, naive and extreme. Of course if you believe that we are on the threshold of a total global catastrophe and no-one is doing anything about it, it’s tempting to climb up a power station chimney, ram a whaling ship or devastate a field of GM crops. It’s easy to write people like that off as vandals (and some of them are!) and go back to business as usual.

Business is what it’s about. Sustainable business. Staying in business and staying in profit, in spite of what’s happening in the environment at large. Business has always faced threats - from competitors, from technology, from politicians, from the bank! Successful businesses - sustainable businesses - have recognised these threats, made plans, taken action and survived and prospered. They have recognised that business as usual is an illusion, and all too often a primrose path to ruin.

So what’s changed? All the traditional risks are here, with the added excitement of government cuts and a global recession. I could add a whole litany of environmental threats, with the added assertion that it’s all the fault of business as so many activists like to believe. Passing round the blame will not get us anywhere, but nor will ignoring realities and failing to plan. And let’s not forget there’s good news - opportunities - as well as bad.

If we look at the whole field of sustainability, it’s about a whole lot more than just climate change. Yes, climate change is a significant threat. Regardless of whether it’s our fault or not, increased-intensity weather events can devastate markets and cut supply chains. Since most governments believe that it is our fault, businesses are increasingly faced with taxes for emitting CO₂.

From a physical point of view there are increasing constraints. Rare earth metals, key components of wind turbines and electric cars, are becoming rarer. Helium will run out well before the end of the century at the current rate, and that won’t just mean no more party balloons but no more MRI scanners, LCDs or fibre optics! Agriculture is struggling to keep pace with ever-increasing population and natural disasters. Floods in Pakistan this year and wild-fires in Russia have sent up the price of grain. The loss of habitat and bio-diversity means the loss off potential new medicines and new crops. Peak Oil and the increasing reliance on oil from hostile nations and hostile locations threaten the price and security of our energy supply.

All right - that’s the bad news, and I accept that the natural reaction of most people is that it’s very sad and very serious but they don’t have the time or the clout to do anything about it. True. But whatever happens you can take action to protect yourself.

Planning, and in particular scenario planning, is becoming increasingly vital. Let’s just distinguish this from contingency planning.

Contingency planning is being ready to keep the business going in an emergency; so you’ll have a plan for a public transport strike that keeps half your staff from getting to work, for a power cut that could threaten your freezers, for a suspicious parcel in the post room and other things like that. It’s essentially about preserving the current business model.

Scenario planning is taking a point in the future - five, ten, twenty-five years ahead - the period will be governed by your capital investment cycle - and predicting what the world will then be like from a social, economic, competitive and technological point of view. It is usual to produce one or two scenarios, changing the major assumptions each time. The key question is then “In the projected scenario, is my business going to be viable?” For example, in the face of increased health propaganda, will a tobacconist be a viable business in 2020? If the government achieves its 35% CO2 reduction by 2020 should we still be selling petrol cars or electric ones? Remember what happened to the radio valve when transistors were invented? What happened to saddlers and harness-makers when Henry Ford brought out the Model T? And who makes a living out of developing photographs these days?

So sustainability is all about staying in business, as well as saving the planet and doing what we can to preserve a future for our kids. We need to reduce, re-use, recycle - and re-engineer if our businesses are going to survive. But first, forget about the alligators and draining the swamp for a minute. Take a moment to look at some future scenarios and ask yourself whether where you’re heading is where you want to go - or even if you’re likely to get there!

Anthony Day is director of Cyber Associates, the environmental management consultancy He worked on the Management Accounting Guideline on Sustainability published by the international accountancy bodies and joined the DEFRA consultation on the greenhouse gas reporting standard.

He delivers workshops to senior management on scenario planning for sustainability, has made conference speeches throughout UK and Europe and now facilitates regular webinars. http://cyber-associates.com/scenario-planning

More on CRC

2010-07-29T16:31:00.001+01:00

944 down, 9 weeks to go - Registration: use an agent - how safe is saved? - online guide - Last call for disaggregation - EAM: Kitemark Energy Reduction Verification scheme; don’t forget gas meters - Help the helpdesk - Is your guidance up to date? - Chris Huhne has seen our energy future, but you can make up your own mind on the DECC website - You too can have an energy monitor like DECC - Next CRC Webinar

944 organisations had registered as full participants for CRC by 27th July. Original estimates were a total of 5,000; some people have calculated as many as 12,000, so on the face of it with only 9 weeks to go the situation looks pretty dire. The reality is somewhat different. Many organisations are gathering their data in stages and have already started the registration process. Beware, however, if you are one of those who has started and saved, that the system only stores incomplete registrations for 30 days and after that they are irrevocably deleted.

If you are still not sure about how to approach registration there are two detailed guidance documents showing showing shots of each screen at each stage of the process. This one is for private sector organisations http://tinyurl.com/2v9eagx and this one is for the public sector: http://tinyurl.com/35r4jg8 . Of course these only show you how to enter the data. If you have issues with getting the data together Cyber Associates can help and can handle registration as your agent.

Of the remaining 15,000 or so organisations that must make an information disclosure but are not full participants, some 3,900 have registered. If your organisation comes into the disclosure category don’t miss the deadline. There are penalties for you, too!

The deadline for disaggregation is 31st July, which in practical terms means tomorrow. If you don’t know about disaggregation, don’t worry. You’re too late. (Special rules apply for the public sector.)

Early Action Metric. The Environment Agency has now approved the Kitemark Energy Reduction Verification scheme to count towards the Early Action Metric. This is based on the new BS EN 16001 Energy Management Standard. You now have a choice of this, CEMARS or the Carbon Trust Standard. Get any of these in place by 31st March 2011 to qualify.

Voluntary AMRs complete the other part of the Early Action Metric. As noted before, it’s the percentage of total annual energy that goes through the meter in 2010/11 that is taken into account, so the sooner you instal the AMRs the greater the benefit. And gas meters also qualify.

There are signs that the CRC Helpdesk, not surprisingly, is coming under increasing pressure. Of course there are extensive guidance documents on the website, but some people have raised concerns that they don’t carry version numbers. From time to time they are updated, so how do you know that you are referring to the latest edition? Document properties should give you the creation and modification dates, though that won’t tell you what’s changed. (I suppose you could open two versions in Word and get it to do a document comparison, but you really shouldn’t have to do that!)

This week Chris Huhne, Energy and Climate Change Secretary, presented his first Annual Energy Statement to Parliament. His objectives are to keep the lights burning and to meet the 80% carbon footprint reduction by 2050. The model which his department has used, balancing supply against demand, is available for anyone to work with at http://2050-calculator-tool.decc.gov.uk/. What is most revealing is the sort of changes we will need to make to achieve these targets - including heating homes to no more than 17°C, reducing our use of gas, installing micro wind generation on 450,000 properties and extensive use of electric and fuel-cell cars and vans. Fascinating! Realistic? You decide.

Incidentally, if you go to the DECC website www.decc.gov.uk you will see that they are displaying the energy consumption and carbon footprint of their HQ building in real time. I wish I could say that it’s an example of the work of our strategic partner, NoWatt, but it’s not. In fact NoWatt does better than that: it can report not just to the nearest building, but to the nearest floor, department, circuit or appliance. It’s a key tool for managing energy efficiency and for feeding back to all groups of staff to show how they are doing and to reinforce their engagement with energy saving.

I’ll be presenting the next CRC webinars for the Low Carbon Best Practice Exchange on 7th and 14th September. You can find full details at www.carbon-innovation.com

This content is available as a podcast at www.susbiz.biz And if you want to talk to me live about any of this, I’m available at on 07803 616877

CRC Update

2010-07-14T18:27:00.001+01:00

More than 4,000 organisations still to register - less than 12 weeks to the 30th September cut-off - more time for disaggregation - PFI: who’s responsible? - landlord and tenant - Early Action Metric - monitoring carbon footprint - buying allowances - evidence pack and audit - super-smart metering to save energy and save cost.

The total number of CRC full participants was estimated at 5,000 and according to the Environment Agency only 651 have so far registered. That leaves less than 12 weeks for the remaining 4,349 to complete the process by 30th September. Of course you may already have started, but if you’re waiting to clear up some minor query or you have some doubts about your particular case the Environment Agency urges you to register now and sort out queries and errors later. No doubt there will be increasing pressure on the system as we get closer to the cut-off.

Good news if you were planning for disaggregation. The Environment Agency has extended the initial deadline until 31st July, although all your SGUs still have to be registered on their own account by 30th September.

Some organisations operate facilities provided under PFI and the PFI company has claimed that the organisation which uses the facilities is responsible. The Environment Agency has now made it clear that the “counterparty to the supply contract” principle applies, so if the PFI company is paying the bill then the PFI company is the participant.

CRC remains an issue for landlords. Remember, if you bought more than 6,000MWh of half-hourly electricity in 2008 you are a full participant even if you sold that electricity on to your tenants. When we get to the reporting phase, the landlord is responsible for reporting the total carbon footprint from all energy sources, including energy used by tenants. Can you negotiate an amendment to the lease? The CRC legislation gives you obligations, but no additional rights vis-à-vis the tenant.

If you are a tenant and taking steps to improve your energy efficiency, will the landlord pass on the benefit of lower CRC costs to you? Again, can you re-negotiate the lease?

Your Performance League Table position and your total CRC cost are both affected by the Early Action Metric and it’s not too late to get the benefit. The earlier you put in voluntary AMRs (automatic meter reading) the better, because the benefit is calculated on the proportion of your total energy that flows through them in 2010/11. Don’t forget gas meters. You have until 31st March 2011 to achieve the Carbon Trust Standard. As long as you have it in place by that date you qualify in full. The Environment Agency has just approved CEMARS as an alternative to the Carbon Trust Standard. Other standards are under review.

Quite apart from the Early Action Metric and your league table position, the surest way to reduce your CRC costs is to improve your energy efficiency and cut your energy bills. Have I told you about the super-smart metering that gives you instant feedback and detailed analysis for close cost control? Give me a call on 07803 616877 and I’ll tell you more!

Once registration is complete the next task is to prepare for the annual report and for the purchase of carbon allowances in April 2011. You need to have an evidence pack, and 20% of all participants will be audited. Have you been monitoring your carbon footprint since April? Have you got detailed records and an audit trail?

If you would like to discuss any of these points in more detail please give me a call on my direct line: 07803 616877. Together with strategic partners, Cyber Associates can help and advise on CRC registration, obtaining benefit from the Early Action Metric, monitoring your carbon footprint and establishing an employee engagement programme to maximise your energy efficiency.

I look forward to talking to you!

Best wishes,

Anthony Day

PS NoWatt, our super-smart metering partners, have a window in August due to customer holidays. If you want a rapid assessment and installation we can help you to start saving money on energy in a matter of weeks. Call me on 07803 616877!

CRC - do you need to buy allowances next April?

2010-06-03T15:18:00.001+01:00

The CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme which came into effect on 1st April 2010 is a sort of carbon-trading system for larger organisations. I say “sort of” because the government sells carbon allowances in April and gives all the money back in October. Those organisations which do really well in controlling their emissions, and hence find themselves at the top of the league table (more of that later!), will get their money back with a bonus of up to 10%. In order to pay these bonuses those who do less well will be penalised to the same extent. Over 5 years this bonus/penalty will rise to 50%.

Let’s look at the first year. In April 2011 you have to buy allowances to cover your EXPECTED emissions in 2011/12. In October 2011 the cost of those allowances will be returned to you with a bonus or penalty depending on your ACTUAL performance in 2010/11. Your cost is therefore the cost of having your money tied up from April to October, offset or increased by the bonus/penalty. This bonus/penalty, by the way, at 10% of your allowances will be less than 0.7% of your energy bill.

What if you don’t buy any allowances next April? You don’t have to surrender them until July 2012 and there will be another sale of allowances in April 2012. By then you will know exactly how much you need and allowances can be transferred from year to year within each phase. If you adopt this procedure you will defer the cash flow effect (not increase it, because you will not buy anything for the following year either. When you get to the end of Phase 1 you can buy exactly the allowances you need, which is important because if you have any extras they cannot be carried into Phase 2 and so will be worthless.

Of course, if you do this you’ll miss out on a possible bonus in Year 1, but is 0.7% of your bill such a big deal?

Disaggregation could save you money, if you move fast!

2010-05-20T16:40:00.003+01:00

Carbon Reduction Commitment

The key issue here is that if part of a group of companies uses enough electricity to make it liable to participate in CRC, the whole group must register and report. Every part of the group must measure and report its carbon foot print and purchase carbon allowances under the scheme. Disaggregation is a concession which means that groups can apply to exclude those parts of the organisation which would not be liable under CRC on their own, but only on certain conditions:

You must register the whole group by 30th June 2010 if you want to take advantage of this. This gives you the time to re-register the parent company before the 30th September deadline.
You cannot split up the group so that no element is big enough to be liable. The parent company must register with enough subsidiaries to bring usage up to participant level.

If you don’t disaggregate you must report on the whole group and buy allowances for the whole group for the three years of the first phase before you will get a chance to apply for disaggregation again.

So, to save both time and money you must make a decision on disaggregation as soon as you possibly can. Call us now on 01904 654986

The Low Carbon Innovations Network has invited Anthony Day to present a series of webinars on the Carbon Reduction Commitment. He will also be presenting a conference session - How to Win at the CRC Game - at the Best Practice Exchange at London Olympia in June 2010. More...

CRC - is the league table a red herring?

2010-05-20T16:36:00.002+01:00

For most people, the Performance League Table is a red herring.

Depending on how scheme participants manage their carbon footprints, they will be assigned a ranking on the Performance League Table. This will be publicly available, so the theory is that organisations will not wish to be named and shamed for appearing low down in the league. Secondly, there are financial penalties associated with your league table position.

Since the Environment Agency took over much of the information on CRC seems to have become both more complicated and more vague. For example, the fixed price for carbon allowances was originally announced at £12/tonne. This does not appear to be confirmed on the current CRC website. When participants get their money back through recycling payments, the original plan was that they would get a bonus or a penalty depending on their position on the league table. This could be between 5% and 50%. Again, these figures do not appear on the new CRC website.

Cyber Associates has requested clarification of these points from the CRC helpdesk, but in the meantime let’s use the original figures. On that basis a 5% bonus or penalty on your recycling payment is about 0.3% of your bill. That’s why we believe that the League Table is a red herring.

You will gain far more by reducing your energy usage than by trying to improve your league table position.

After all - as will be revealed at the 10th June conference - many participants will be prevented from taking advantage of the early Action Metrics and will have no way to improve their position at all.

This is all part of the obligation under the Climate Change Act to cut CO2 by 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. With UK emissions still growing, even standing still will be difficult. The oil price has been on the rise for most of this year, so energy is going to be expensive to buy and if you use it inefficiently the government is making it even more expensive to use!

Cutting Fuel Costs

2010-04-01T09:15:00.000+01:00

Petrol duty rises today by 1p/litre.

Have you had that email forwarded and re-forwarded from a friend of a friend of a friend? The one that urges you to boycott Esso and BP when buying petrol, to force the wicked oil companies to bring prices down to £0.90/litre?

I class it as a "quasi-virus". It urges you to send it to all your contacts and if everyone does that it truly means millions of messages. Why a virus? Because it's just setting out to clog up and slow down the internet with all these messages.

What about the boycott of Esso and BP?

First, it's not true when they claim that the oil price is "as low as it has been for a while." It hit $147/barrel in July 2008 and then fell back, but it's been climbing since the beginning of last year and today is at $83. In sterling that's £73 in July 08 and £55 now - the gap is closing because sterling has fallen against the dollar. The long term average for oil is around $30, but as it runs out and we have to get it from increasingly remote and unstable regions the cost of production goes up and up. Industry experts predict the $200 barrel within 5 years!

So what happens if we stop buying from Esso and BP? The truth is that Morrisons, Sainsbury's, Tesco and all the rest don't own oil wells or refineries. They buy petrol from the oil companies - like BP and Esso. Even if we managed a 100% boycott there would be no change to the price - though there might be queues at the supermarket forecourts! As with electricity and gas, we cannot do anything to drive down the price of what is becoming a scarce resource in the face of growing world demand and population increase. The only solution is to get the very maximum out of every gallon: drive carefully, drive only when you have to, choose an economical car. Very boring, but I'm afraid it's the truth.

FUEL DUTY RISE DEFERRED

2010-03-26T12:22:00.002Z

No 3p petrol duty increase on 1st April - instead it will be 1p, with the rest phased in after the election. Undoubtedly rising petrol prices will increase inflation, but we cannot soften the blow of rising oil prices through the tax system. Oil is running out - or hadn’t you heard? Yes, we may be able to get it from tar sands, from corn or from beneath distant oceans, but it is still running out and as we attempt to mop up the last resources it will get more and more expensive.

Should we encourage people to use less oil by pushing the price up? In the long term that may work, but in the short term it will make life difficult for many “hard-working families” and most other people as well. Few can afford a £20,000 electric car; fewer still can find anywhere to charge it. Will there really be a significant number of buyers prepared to put up with a range of only 100 miles?

Taxation is always a blunt instrument, and never a substitute for policy. Instead of arguing about petrol we should be debating the whole transport and mobility issue. Instead of reserving £30bn for new high-speed rail links across the country shouldn’t we be looking at the millions of shorter journeys that millions of people make every day? Considering how video links and high-speed broadband can reduce the need for travel? Planning to increase home working? Questioning why our lifestyle and working patterns demand more and more travel?

[Written on a train]

Motivating Staff to be Sustainable

2009-07-09T16:36:00.001+01:00

Staff motivation is always an issue and it has been a recurring theme at the Low Carbon Best Practice Exchange events held around the country. Very often the question is “How do you keep people interested once the first enthusiasm has worn off?”

Representatives from all sorts of industries - from bus companies to barristers and hotels to hospitals - have all shared ideas. So, how do you keep the ball rolling once the first few months have passed?

The first point that nearly everyone makes is self-interest. “What’s in it for me?” People are often happy to help an organisation succeed, but after a while, if it’s all about how much money the company is saving and how much better the bottom line looks, they want a share of the savings for themselves. A leading confectionery manager addresses this head on with a bonus scheme. One of the nation’s largest bus companies does much the same. Fuel is a very significant cost for them. An extra 1p/litre on diesel increases their bill, (and reduces their profits) by no less than £1m annually, so they send all their drivers on economical driving courses. The drivers then qualify for a share of all the savings made.

Some people have a personal commitment to sustainability and are less motivated by money than by recognition of their personal achievements. A major telecoms company has Carbon Clubs with a website, news and awards. There is a pledging scheme where staff choose from a list or post their own targets. There is clear top-level endorsement, and 66% of staff say they take pride in the company’s environmental performance. Some organisations go further and encourage their staff to set targets for home as well as work. Incentives like a mountain bike can get people interested and sometimes it is possible to set up competitive rivalry between different departments. Some very generous organisations will advance loans for the purchase of hybrid cars or send employees off on trips to save the rain-forest or help with conservation projects.

Travel-to-work plans, involving car-sharing and cycling, can be popular, but there can be resistance to some green initiatives in this time of cost-cutting. There is often resistance, too, from middle managers who see other things as more important. Training is essential so that these people - many of whom are strongly sceptical of anything green - fully understand the business reasons for adopting environmental best practice. Sometimes a phased approach can help, rather than laying on a whole raft of new initiatives all at once.

In many cases the importance of environmental policy is gauged by the importance of the people who support it. The lead must come from the top. The green agenda must given due prominence in senior management briefings, and not just tacked on at the end. Don’t underestimated the difficulty of getting senior management on board. One organisation tried reimbursing business miles on the basis of the least reward for the least eco-friendly cars. The problem with this was motivating senior management. They were very reluctant to approve a scheme which penalised the sort of prestige car which they thought they ought to be driving!

Industrial psychology makes it clear that people will not respond if things are simply imposed; they must understand and agree before they will buy in. So while top management may be persuaded to buy in, the next essential is effective communication to all levels of the organisation.

I worked with a business machinery supplier where the green policy came from world head quarters. Nevertheless, local sales staff didn’t see it as a priority, so an environmental manager was appointed in each country to help middle managers and to provide a link with the policy-makers at HQ. They also worked with the local community and organised initiatives like farmers’ markets or cycle-to-work schemes. Many companies also use such environmental champions; often they are unpaid volunteers and sometimes their managers begrudge them the time off. In other cases heads of department may send along someone to environmental committees just to make up the numbers, not necessarily a person who is committed to the green agenda. Again this emphasises the need to inform and motivate management at all levels.

Experience shows that encouraging staff to work with the local community on green initiatives is a good motivator - and good PR. Some organisations will formalise environmental responsibilities as part of a staff member’s role and putting people on projects can be valuable learning experience for them. It is important to celebrate their successes. Feedback is essential. How about summarising key successes in bullet points and pasting them on the back of the toilet doors? Hard to ignore!

One problem with feedback is that many of the statistics about climate and emissions are very difficult to imagine. What does a tonne of CO2 look like, for example? These things need to be related to everyday experience - maybe something like the volume of Wembley Stadium. Or you could have a graphic on your website. What about a green tree which grows additional leaves as the company increases its carbon savings?

Sometimes there can be negative motivation at corporate level. The attitude of major customers and pressure from taxes and other outside factors can all make their mark. For example, supermarkets are very keen that their suppliers should be as efficient as possible, but then they expect these efficiencies to be passed on to them in lower prices. Secondly, since energy prices and waste disposal costs are rising, companies have to make continued efforts just to stay in the same place. BT is introducing its Climate Stabilisation Index to take account of the fact that while its emissions are rising the number of clients and services provided is rising as well, and the net footprint per transaction is falling. (This may be good PR, but the fact is that the objective is to cut CO2 emissions by 80% absolutely, regardless of the level of economic activity.) The Carbon Reduction Commitment comes into force next year and already some people are concerned that it will be biased against organisations that are already efficient.

So, in summary, here are our TOP TEN TIPS for motivating staff to be green:

1. Align messages with your corporate commitment

In other words - walk the talk. Make sure your policy is consistent both internally and externally - and seen to be so.

2. Provide an incentive

Maybe a bonus scheme, maybe an award ceremony, maybe both.

3. Choose an initiative that will reach everyone

Or let people choose their own challenges

4. Monitor progress

Otherwise how do people know what they’ve achieved?

5. Provide positive feedback

Thank-you may be enough; others may need a cash reward. Make it a win-win situation.

6. Provide resources to support action

Time can be as valuable as money

7. Be imaginative

Keep the ideas coming

8. Keep the momentum

Have a plan. There must always be the next success to strive for.

9. Continue to improve the process

Build on the knowledge gained from feedback

10. Empower people to get involved

The best way to ensure success in any field!

Cyber Associates can design your sustainability strategy, train your staff and set up the feedback loop to keep them engaged and motivated.

www.cyber-associates.com

Carbon Reduction Commitment

2009-07-09T12:20:00.002+01:00

Is CRC just another tax?

If you’re liable for the Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) you should have heard from the Environment Agency by now. This measure will affect about 20,000 UK organisations - public and private - who pay for their electricity via a ‘half-hour’ meter. That’s any organisation with a peak load exceeding 100kW. About 5,000 of these will be spending £500,000 or more annually on electricity, and they will be full participants in the scheme. What does this mean? Any organisation with a half-hour meter will have to report its energy use and its carbon footprint. Not just for the department with the heavy electricity usage, but for the whole organisation including subsidiaries, branch offices and remote sites. Not just electricity consumption, but gas and fuel oil as well. Auditable records must be kept and there are penalties for non-compliance. Reporting starts now and in April 2011 the 5,000 largest users will have to pay for their CO2 emissions at £12/tonne, both for actual emissions in 2010/11 and forecast emissions in 2011/12. How much will that be for your organisation?

So is this just another tax? The government might say not, because in October 2011 it’s going to give all this money back - yes, every penny. What’s the point? On the basis of actual emissions in 2010/11 the government will construct a league table, ranking organisations according to how good they have been at reducing their emissions. When the government returns the levy the best performers will get more than they paid and the worst performers will get less. And the following year the targets will get harder.

This is all part of the obligation under the Climate Change Act to cut CO2 by 34% by 2020 and 80% by 2050. With UK emissions still growing, even standing still will be difficult. The oil price has been on the rise for most of this year, so energy is going to be expensive to buy and if you use it inefficiently the government is making it expensive to use!

Whatever the size of your organisation, have you got an environmental management system (EMS)? An EMS is a system of procedures and controls providing a framework for the management of energy, resources and waste. It will help you identify your energy usage and carbon footprint, to control them and monitor the savings achieved.

Cyber Associates have the skills and experience to help you design, implement and maintain an Environmental Management System for your organisation to ISO 14001.

More information at www.cyber-associates.com

Low Carbon Futures - The Prince's May Day Summit

2009-05-04T18:51:00.003+01:00

Last Friday I attended the Prince’s May Day Summit. That’s the Prince of Wales’s third annual convention of businesses committed to a low carbon future, sponsored by Carbon Action Yorkshire, CE Electric UK and KCom Group. The event links London to regional centres all round the country, at least the first one did two years ago. We voted on issues, shared the results with the nation and spoke direct to the national audience. A bit like the Last Night of the Proms, actually, with big screens and reporters across the country. Not this time, though. This year we watched as the Prince and other speakers addressed what looked like a very small London audience. And we only watched - there was no feedback from the regions.

Strange - and disappointing - because since the Carbon Budget and Obama’s green grandstanding, low carbon and climate change are almost mainstream. I was at the regional session in Hull, an enthusiastic meeting ably chaired by Peter Hobday. If we hadn’t had the London link I’d have come away encouraged that more and more people were on side. In Hull the presentations were positive. They didn’t minimise the climate change risks and they showed us best practice and they showed us opportunities. They made us realise that the world is fundamentally changing, that established and accepted business models may suddenly cease to be relevant and unimagined models may suddenly steal your market. Think Amazon. Think iTunes store.

Case studies showed how companies are actively reducing their carbon footprint, and doing it for business reasons. Ariel low-temperature detergent was developed because more CO2 was released through heating water in the washing machine than in the rest of the production, distribution and usage cycle. Marshalls the paving people were the first to footprint all 500 of their products - the nearest competitor has footprinted nine - and they now know how and where to cut carbon further. Their customers know that this is a company which is serious about the environment. ASDA recycles, sources locally and deals with sustainable suppliers. KCOM engages with staff to support its green initiatives.

We learnt about scenario planning; not as a means of predicting the future nor as business continuity planning. Scenarios ask “What if?” What if your key materials double or quadruple in price? What if energy rises by a factor of 10? What if your major customer goes bust? Examining such scenarios helps your company be prepared. The value is in the process, not the result; the process of questioning unquestioned truths, establishing the consequences, weighing the risks and defining the options.

One statistic that I won’t forget showed that while material wealth has steadily grown in the UK since 1960, satisfaction has stayed at the same level. Apparently, we do not need material wealth for a fulfilling life. The problem is that growth has been the only goal for more than a generation; we have no alternative vision and people are scared to give up what they have.

So here’s the challenge. Let’s stop scaring people with global meltdown, climate catastrophe and the end of the world. Let’s draw up our low carbon futures and show people how they can be more relaxing, more fulfilling and maybe more stimulating than the ambitions we have now. At least I came away from the May Day Summit believing that we certainly have the people who can imagine these futures - and the people able and determined to make them reality.

Is the future of your business a low-carbon future? It’s got to be! If you want to talk about how, give me a call - 01904 654986.

Electric Cars? Electric Dreams!

2009-04-16T08:48:00.001+01:00

Why do government pronouncements keep bringing the phrase "Away with the fairies" to mind? So the future is the electric car. Where are we supposed to get the electricity from? We have no surplus electricity; we have ageing power stations with replacements at least a decade away and a national grid close to capacity. We generate our electricity from imported coal (dirty), imported gas (expensive since the pound fell) and nuclear (overdue for replacement). Renewables provide 5% at best and will take time and money to increase their unpredictable and intermittent output.

The UK is on the brink of an energy crisis and the answer is not Noddy cars but urgent and comprehensive energy conservation.

Insulate, insulate, insulate, and dare to ask the question, "Is your journey really necessary?"

Sustainable Savings

2009-03-27T11:20:00.003Z

SUSBIZ Sustainable Business Strategies.

A few notes on how climate change and sustainability affect business. I’m going to talk about the Archbishop of Canterbury, Lord Stern and the Institute of Directors. I’m running a teleclass with a few places left on Tuesday, and next week I shall be going up to the Low Carbon Best Practice Exchange in Newcastle. The RPI has come down, the CPI has gone up but the COBRA Matrix will help you deal with it, and at the beginning of May the Prince of Wales has his Mayday Summit on Climate Change.

Although the economy is in a state that nobody has seen for many, many years, it hasn’t pushed climate change and sustainability off the agenda. Pressure is coming from all quarters. The latest is the Archbishop of Canterbury who said that the case for action on climate change was a moral as well as a practical one. On Tuesday’s Radio 4 Today Programme he warned that billions could die if governments and individuals did not take moral responsibility for climate change now. Didn’t James Lovelock say much the same a few weeks ago? This comes after Lord Stern’s presentation to the Copenhagen Climate Conference when he said that the situation was very much worse than he had thought when he prepared his report on the economic consequences of climate change back in 2006.

But let’s not be negative! At a recent Institute of Directors event addressed by IOD environment spokesman David Boomer and by Todd Holden from Enworks we were told how adopting environmental policies could lead to a direct improvement in the bottom line. On the basis of studying more than 2000 companies it’s been shown that they saved 8% on energy, 2% on materials, 13% on water and up to 50% on waste. You can do a lot of this without spending any money. Apparently 70% of savings come from behaviour change. If you do need to invest to save, there’s a range of low carbon grants and soft loans. I’ve recently been looking at the work of Bob Willard who is a specialist in sustainable business based in Canada who also talks about the savings on staff costs which can be made from environmental policies; from improved morale and productivity to lowered recruitment costs and less turnover. It all depends on the structure of your business, of course, but anything that can make a quantifiable improvement to your bottom line, particularly in the present economic climate, must be valuable regardless of where it comes from.

Next Tuesday 31st March I’m running a teleclass which will cover these points and expand on them. This event is by invitation only but there are one of two places still available so if you want to take part please log on now to this link and you’ll find full details. The session will take place at 18:00 BST but if you can’t make it there will be a recording which will be available the following day.

Next week on 2nd April I shall be running a roundtable discussion session at the Low Carbon Best Practice Forum in Newcastle. If you haven’t already registered for the event go to www.Carbon–innovation.com

The big news this week is that inflation is going up, or at least it is as far as the Consumer Price Index is concerned. It’s risen from 3% to 3.2% while the Retail Price Index has declined to zero; no change. The difference is that the RPI includes housing costs which have been falling as house prices fall and mortgage rates are cut. Both these inflation indices are very crude instruments; it all depends on your lifestyle as to whether your costs are rising or falling. The other issue is the oil price. It peaked at $147 last July and crashed to $36 in January. Now it’s on the rise again - and after adjusting for the exchange rate in the UK it’s halfway back to last year’s peak.

In business, each organisation has its own set of risk factors and I’ve derived the COBRA Matrix to help managers balance impact against possibility. I’ll be covering this in Tuesday’s teleclass and there will be examples of the COBRA approach in the accompanying working papers. Download them here.

As I said to start with, pressure and the realization of the impact of climate change are coming from all quarters. On 1st May the Prince of Wales’s Mayday Summit on Climate Change takes place for the third year running. It brings together businesses at regional centres all over the country to report on progress and to commit to Carbon Reduction and environmental improvements for the year ahead. You can sign up here.

Government regulations demand that business become environmentally responsible and despite the economic environment, consumers are continuing to demand that organisations are green as well. You can find details of a survey published by the Carbon Trust here.

You don’t have to look far to find people who say how dreadful, how terrible, how earth-shattering the risks from climate change are. I prefer to concentrate on the opportunities for staying in business and staying in profit. In the coming weeks I shall be interviewing people from the Carbon Trust and Virgin Media among others to reinforce the positive message.

If you want to add your comments I look forward hearing from you. Add them to this blog or give me a call.
My name’s Anthony Day and my number is 01904654986. I hope we’ll talk soon.

The Age of Stupid

2009-03-16T06:28:00.004Z

Do we need another misery movie?

Review: The Age of Stupid - premiere at Leicester Square and 65 cinemas across the country.

In The Age of Stupid Pete Postlethwaite addresses us from the wrecked planet of 2055 and asks how we could be so stupid as to let climate change destroy humanity. He flicks through endless archives showing us the obvious clues to catastrophe from 2009 and before. It seemed a long film, partly because technical problems meant that about 30 minutes of footage was played twice. Partly, too, because it replayed the breast-beating and lamentations already seen in Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, Leonardo di Caprio’s The Eleventh Hour, The Day After Tomorrow and all the rest.

What these films lack, and that includes the live debate following The Age of Stupid, is a credible call to action. Watching this film you might conclude that the best thing to do is to run your car on chip fat, live self-sufficiently on a small holding and protest against the nasty nimbies who oppose wind farms. It goes without saying that there’s not enough chip fat and not enough smallholdings. The effectiveness of wind farms is also very much in doubt. After the film Pete Postlethwaite pledged to give back his OBE if the government approved the proposed new Kingsnorth coal-fired power station. Ed Milliband was there to respond, but they let him off extremely lightly by not once mentioning government support for Heathrow’s third runway. Surely that’s a much more powerful national political issue than some power station down in Kent.

Sustainable economic growth is still possible in a low carbon economy, but if we are going to solve this problem we must all drive less, heat less and consume less. Life will be very different - potentially much more pleasant - if we take the low-carbon route. The Age of Stupid has missed the opportunity to show what ordinary people can do to safeguard our future, and to show what sort of future we can all enjoy if we act now. Certainly the showing raised enthusiasm both in Leicester Square and in the cinema where I was, but I fear that people will be rushing off to protest, rather than rushing off to change their lives.

Panic Over?

2008-06-23T18:34:00.002+01:00

Tanker drivers back at work - oil price stable (more or less) - Dyson to build electric cars and Honda launches a hydrogen car - five new main railway lines - retail sales up in May - Gordon in Saudi - ...and a renewable energy strategy which will cut our use of oil. So is it all over?

I’ve been away on holiday and it’s amazing what can change in a week. Before you ask, no, we didn’t fly anywhere, we went to Newcastle by train and walked the whole length of Hadrian’s Wall. (Well, all but 10 miles!)

Hello. I'm Anthony Day and I’m back again to talk to you about staying in business and staying profitable. Last time we were worried about the price of oil and a tanker drivers’ strike which was making petrol unobtainable as well as unaffordable. This week the drivers have gone back to work for a pay rise of only 14% and oil has (almost) stopped rising. But who’s worried about oil when there are suddenly a range of alternatives?

First, James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner king, is turning his talents to designing electric cars. He’s developed a super-efficient electric motor. Honda have announced their hydrogen car and Network Rail are looking into building no less than five new high-speed rail lines across the UK. The feel-good factor is reinforced by the news that retail sales in May were the highest for 22 years, but if you still think we need cheaper oil Gordon’s been out there in Saudi not only asking them to pump faster but also suggesting that they should invest in renewables in the UK.On 26th June the government publishes its Renewable Energy Strategy. The predictions are that this will include plans for 3,500 wind turbines and will reduce the nation’s use of oil by 7% by 2020.

So is this all good news? Is the panic over? Can we all go back to making money? People accuse me of being depressing, but all I’m trying to do is be realistic and look at the best choices for business in a future that’s far from clear.

The most important point is that we have an energy crisis, and while there are solutions like electric cars, new railway lines and thousands of wind turbines; none of these can become a reality in less than 5 years and the rest will take more like ten or twenty. Oil prices are high today. They may drift up and down over the coming months, but they are unlikely to drop below $100. My prediction is $180 by the end of the year and $300 by the end of 2010 unless we see a dramatic global recession. as I predicted last time, gas and electricity are on the rise and some reports talk of a 40% increase by Christmas.

As business people, what can we do? Maybe we should try a protest - it worked well for the tanker drivers! However, few businesses can hold their customers to ransom like that. Rather than waste time and effort on protests and demonstrations (a bit like Canute trying to turn back the waves) we should consider what to do to make the best of it. We need to assess the effect on our supply chain; on our suppliers and our customers. This need not be negative - suppliers of home insulation are surely going to see an upturn!

We need to act now, but we also need to plan for the future. Scenario planning lets you prepare for a number of alternative futures and therefore be more ready to cope with what actually happens. Take some time with your team to brainstorm to think the unthinkable and decide what you could do about it.

The truth is that the future is not rosy for those who believe that we can go back to business as usual. The good news is not good when we examine it in detail. For example, electric cars need to be built and bought, and are you going to buy one? How much energy will it take to replace the UK’s 30m cars? We’ll all charge them up a night when electricity demand is low - except demand won’t be low because we’ll all be charging our cars. So we’ll need more coal or gas or nuclear to run the power stations. Could be a bit of a problem as we are already finding it difficult to cope with current demand for electricity without all this demand displaced from oil. Much the same applies to hydrogen. The car itself is pollution-free but there’s a massive carbon footprint at the power station where they generate the energy to produce the hydrogen. The renewables strategy will apparently reduce our dependency on oil by 7% over 12 years. Given that North Sea oil output is declining by about 6% per annum, this is merely a drop in the bucket. And even Gordon Brown admitted that his visit to Saudi would have no immediate effect on prices at the pumps.

My message is that we have to plan for a different future in order to succeed. Those that don’t, like Canute, will first get their feet wet and then be washed away.

I’m Anthony Day. If you want to talk about scenario planning for how energy, climate and resources will affect your business, give me a call on 01904 654 986.

Fuel Prices and Your Business

2008-05-28T10:18:00.001+01:00

It’s always tempting to say I told you so, but those of you who have attended one of my workshops or seminars will know that I have been predicting energy shortages and fuel price increases and I always said that they would hit us much sooner than climate change.

Will climate change your business? Yes that’s still an issue, but what about the current fuel situation? We have hauliers protesting and threatening a blockade if the government doesn’t cut tax within a week, we have politicians saying that the government should shelve the increase in car tax and the proposed 2p increase on fuel duty. Apparently the Prime Minister and the Chancellor are meeting the oil industry today to find out whether they can pump more oil out of the North Sea.
So what’s the background to all this? Simply, supply and demand. Rapid economic expansion in China and India are driving the demand for oil and the supply of oil is finite. There is only a certain amount of oil in the ground and at the moment there are some problems with refinery capacity as well, which is restricting supply. Last week the International Energy Agency revised its forecasts for future oil production downwards leading to some of the speculation which has also driven up the price. So oil has gone up, and this has driven up the price of petrol and diesel, but it’s the government which is getting the pressure. It’s all too easy to blame the government and at the moment people are busy blaming it for everything. But it’s not just this government; it’s the previous government and every government we’ve had for the last half century. This is not an oil shock; this is not a surprise. Shortages and price increases have been predicted for about 50 years. Anyway, we are where we are so what do we do about it?

As you will have noticed, prices accelerated over a relatively short period of weeks. Any solutions like finding more reserves, just supposing there are any, will take years if not decades to bring on-stream. Even though the government may bow to pressure in the short term, we have a problem. In the long term we face continually rising energy costs and we may well see the pace of that increase rising rapidly.
In today’s Guardian, Gordon Brown talks about free insulation for people on low incomes, smart metering, carbon capture and storage generating stations and more nuclear power. None of this will solve the price or supply of petrol and diesel. Oil prices are going up and gas and electricity will not be far behind. This will affect you individually and it will affect your business.

Governments can be criticized because they have assumed that oil and energy will continue to be widely and cheaply available, in spite of the evidence which has been around for at least 50 years. It does not make sense to build more roads and more airports if there is going to be an energy shortage. It does not make sense to close post offices and to centralize schools and hospitals and other public services if there’s going to be an energy shortage. It does not make sense to encourage out of town shopping and the growth of supermarkets if there is going to be an energy shortage. Supermarkets are fine for the operators because they rely on the consumers to handle the last part of the distribution. The last part of the supply chain –from store to home – is arguably the most expensive and has the biggest carbon footprint. But it’s the consumer that pays for this.

Let’s also remember that oil and gas are not just fuels. They are raw materials for plastics, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers and many other products. We have not yet seen the full effect of the oil price on product prices, due not only to increased distribution costs but increased costs of manufacture. So everyone is going to see increased costs of living.

Your business will be affected because it will cost you more to run your vehicles, it will cost you more for lighting and heating and it will cost you more for energy used in the production processes. Most of us, though, are in a global supply chain so we need to understand the effects all this will have on our customers and the effect this will have on our suppliers. Even if the government cuts road tax and fuel duty there is a point beyond which it cannot go, and in any case it will have to replace lost revenues through other taxes. As the oil price continues to rise, the cost of fuel, the cost of travel, will rise. As an individual you will become increasingly aware of the costs of driving to the supermarket, of taking the kids to school, and taking trips at the weekend. You and your staff will become increasingly aware of the costs of commuting to work and for some people that will be a deciding factor on who they work for. We need to look at how people can work from home and we need the government to ensure that the bandwidth is available so that people can work from home. Of course we have to recognize that many jobs cannot be carried out from home so we have to plan to be able to get the right staff in the right places.
We live in a global economy and very many organizations now either have their own factories in China and the Far East or buy from suppliers in those countries. The decisions to rely on those sources of supply were not taken overnight and were frequently many years in the planning. You need to look again at your supply chain and ask how increasing energy costs and material costs will affect it in the future. If you need to change, you need to plan. You may be facing a process which will take years to implement. Unless you start now you could be out of business if things get really bad in a few years time. Now is the time for scenario planning. What if? What if? What if?

I know it’s a cliché but the pace of change is accelerating and only those who plan will survive. Oh, and what about climate change? Climate change is still a business issue in even though the signs are that the government will cave in to pressure over fuel prices and help people to continue to use as much energy and emit as much carbon as before, at least in the short term. Nevertheless, there is still the Climate Change Bill shortly to be passed and there is still a wide range of environmental regulations affecting all businesses. We have still got to make sure that we comply.

Next month I present a workshop entitled Best Practice for Environmental Champions at the Low Carbon Innovation Exchange in London. I shall be covering all these issues, and whatever else has arisen in the meantime.

Maybe see you there, but if you want to talk about scenario planning and how these issues affect your business give me a call on 01904 654986.

I’m Anthony Day and I look forward to hearing from you.

Listen here!

2007-10-21T17:35:00.000+01:00

I know I haven't been posting for a while. That's because I've been podcasting. You can catch up with my latest thoughts at www.susbiz.biz

This week you'll hear thoughts on keeping your business in business - fossil fuels or bio-fuels? - Paul Clarke on why it makes sense to drive a green car (www.green-car-guide.com) - carbon targets, carbon trading and better use of resources from Mike Smith at Yorkshire Forward (www.yorkshire-forward.com) - and has someone got it in for cows?

You don't need an iPod or MP3 player - you can listen in Windows Media Player on your desktop. Click here to give it a try!

"The time for doubt has passed"

2007-09-25T08:40:00.000+01:00

That’s what U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at yesterday’s Climate Change summit. The chief U.N. climate scientist, Rajendra Pachauri, said, “The time is up for inaction.”

Billed as the largest ever high-level meeting on climate change, the event re-emphasised the commitment of global governments to action. The next opportunity will be the Bali conference in December, when delegates meet to design a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. This commits nations to a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2012. The task of Bali is to set targets for future decades.

Doubts remain, however, with George W Bush. The US president did not attend the summit, although he joined the delegates for dinner. He has his own climate change event later this week and has invited the world’s sixteen top polluting nations. Environmentalists are concerned that the US wants to hijack the debate, or at least muddy the waters. The US is believed to oppose mandatory carbon targets, preferring each country to set voluntary levels. They also want developing countries to reduce their carbon emissions, even though they are far lower than American emissions.

The US has an increasingly difficult energy supply situation, though it has plenty of coal – one of the most polluting fuels. Cutting back on energy use or making energy more expensive by installing carbon clean-up technology will impact the American economy – currently showing signs of weakness - and George Bush will protect it at all costs.AAfter all, wasn’t it George Bush Snr who said, “It’s the economy, stupid”?

Some people are beginning to say, “No, it’s the environment, stupid.” Without an environment there can be no economy.

Liberal Helping

2007-09-22T09:18:00.000+01:00

As the LibDem conference comes to a close we’ve seen another expression of green policies. The LibDems are particularly upset, because alone of the three major parties they have been talking about environmental issues for years. Both Labour and the Conservatives now have a green agenda, but the worrying thing is that there’s no consensus.

Measures that will really make a difference to our carbon emissions will not be popular with the voters. Two million signed a Downing Street petition against road pricing, and last week I saw one of those chain emails claiming that high petrol prices were an oil company conspiracy and we could drive prices down to 69p a litre if we only stopped buying from Esso and BP. If all the political parties adopted the same policies on the environment then elections would change nothing. Unfortunately there is still argument between the parties – and argument within parties. One LibDem was heard to say that green policies were about as realistic as perpetual motion! More public education clearly needed.

And will the parties stop arguing about green issues and work together to actually do something? As the Labour Party gathers for this week’s conference we can only wait and see.

They think it's all over

2007-09-20T08:15:00.001+01:00

Latest reports from the IPCC, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate that a 2 degree rise in world temperatures is inevitable – within 10 years. There is now so much excess carbon dioxide in the global system that it is too late to stop this happening; there’s nothing we can do. It’s time to face up to the consequences and prepare to adapt to them.

Ironically the prosperous West may benefit form the temperature rise in the short term. Higher temperatures will mean substantially increased crop yields in North America, Northern Europe and Russia. Elsewhere the opposite is true. In some parts of the Third World flash floods will wash the crops from the fields and destroy buildings, bridges and roads. Rising sea levels will make other places uninhabitable – already parts of the Maldives have had to be abandoned.

Too much water in some places; too little elsewhere as the Himalayan glaciers melt and the rivers they fill run dry. Up to a billion people will lose their water supply. Many species will become extinct and diseases will appear in places where they have never been seen before.

All this sounds apocalyptic. Too dreadful to be true. Turn the page – let’s not think about it. And what can we do about it anyway? And there on the next page is an advertisement from the energy company Total. “Total is pursuing the development of gas fields across the globe…” And burning more gas releases more CO2. Three degrees? Four degrees? Six degrees?

It needs government action. It needs big business to take action. What we can do is be aware of what is going to happen and be aware of how it will change our lifestyles. We need to do as much as we can to cut our individual carbon footprints. We can change public opinion. Enough public opinion influences government and changes business behaviour.

Within 10 years. That means it won’t just affect our children or our grandchildren. It’s going to affect us.

More on Biofuels

2007-09-16T18:15:00.000+01:00

We can't just write off biofuels, but we can't accept them blindly either. My view is that there are only three solutions to the coming energy crisis: reduce, reduce and reduce. (Yes I know it's an old one) Once we have minimised our fuel use, where do we get the remainder from?

In some circumstances biofuels are economically viable, but in some cases they are not. US farmers are heavily subsidised to grow crops for bio-ethanol, but it is very doubtful that the energy in the bio-fuel exceeds the energy needed to plough the fields, fertilise the crop, irrigate it, spray it against diseases and pests (and produce and deliver the fertilisers and insecticides to the farm), harvest it, process it and deliver it to the refinery and then refine it. It's good business for US farmers, but it's pushed up the world price of wheat which is affecting UK pig farmers and third-world countries trying to buy food.

Have you seen this month's Ecologist magazine? An article talks about how Colombia is becoming a major producer of African oil palm, a biofuel plant. This development is supported by the US and the EU, and on the face of it, it's attractive. It provides a source of green fuel (plant growth is more effective in warmer Colombia) and it can displace some of the drug barons' coca crops. The drug barons see an opportunity too. They are taking over the land, if necessary driving out the local farmers at gunpoint, and planting the oil palms. The government plans to cover an area twice the size of Belgium with the trees. If necessary they cut down the rain forest. Mono culture is rarely viable, and before long the land is exhausted and turned to scrubland. The rain forest has been destroyed, the ecosystems have been destroyed, the livelihood of the local people has been destroyed and the possibility of growing more biofuel crops on that land has been destroyed - and for what? To allow Westerners to continue to drive highly inefficient vehicles!

Our fatal assumption is that we will be able to continue with our present lifestyle and continue to enjoy the same access to energy, but just get it from different sources. There is a serious risk that if we don't wake up to reality, and if chase solutions without thinking through their consequences, we will destroy the planet faster than ever before!

Every little helps

2007-09-12T18:43:00.000+01:00

Yesterday I met Ian Berry, past president of the National Speakers Association of Australia. Ian speaks and advises companies on management and leadership, based on his long experience at senior level in major corporates. www.remacue.com He’s concerned, too, with the future of businesses. Climate change is a key issue, but he sees it as part of the wider sustainability picture, which also includes resource depletion, energy security and corporate social responsibility. In his view business has the key to our future survival. He believes that businesses and pressure groups will form alliances and take actions long before governments get round to doing anything – and businesses truly have the power to make significant changes.

Today we hear that Tesco is giving £25m to Manchester University to set up the Institute for Sustainable Consumption. It’s easy to accuse the retailers – and others – of riding the green bandwagon just to keep up with their competitors, but £25m is serious money and once the Institute is established it will surely be difficult to ignore it. And if I heard Terry Leahy correctly, the ultimate objective at Tesco is an 80% carbon reduction.. That’s far more than the target the government is set to miss. It will be interesting to see which other organisations will set themselves similar challenges.

For the moment, the prize for leadership goes to Tesco.

Too late to save the planet

2007-09-09T09:54:00.000+01:00

The BBC can be criticised for the way it justified abandoning Planet Relief, but the truth is that a television spectacular would have achieved nothing. Yes, many people would have made pledges and yes, some may have sent money, but most of us have excellent reasons for making long-haul flights, driving large cars and constantly consuming. In any case we cannot stop climate change. Even if all nations fulfilled their Kyoto targets the best we could hope for would be slowing it down, but with the US refusing to sign and the UK and the rest falling short even this will not be achieved.

British government action on climate is largely lip-service and superficial. They continue to build roads, support airport expansion and subsidise wind farms – the most ineffective form of renewable energy. The implication of their policies is that fossil fuels are limitless; they ignore the carbon consequences of burning all these fuels. They dare not tax energy, cut petrol use though road pricing or restrict air travel. There lies electoral suicide. That leaves action up to us.

Concern for climate change must not blind us to the threats of pollution, resource depletion and particularly energy shortages. It makes sense to address all of these by reducing, re-using and recycling as environmentalists recommend. This won’t save the planet but it may help us cope with the dire conditions we can expect as the oil and everything else starts to run out.

Let’s face up to the consequences of climate change rather than pretending that a TV show or anything else we do will stop it happening.

Careless Words - an aside

2007-07-23T14:45:00.000+01:00

As I hope you're aware, one of my taglines is "Will climate change your life?" - it's even the title of my book. Bit disappointing then to realise is that "change your life" is a phrase that triggers many spam filters. So if I sent you this by email you probably wouldn't ever get it!

Happily, "Will climate change your business?" is where I am now concentrating my efforts, and I've also registered www.towardsustainability.com in anticipation of market developments. Still, it just shows you can't be too careful!

Have a good week!

Let’s go carbon neutral!

2007-07-17T09:34:00.000+01:00

Channel 4 was severely criticized for its programme about the "Great Global Warming Swindle" and last night turned its attention to carbon offsetting. This was an altogether more balanced documentary and demonstrated that the ideas of carbon offsetting and carbon neutrality need to be approached with scepticism.

Many big names on the high street, including HSBC, Barclays, Sky and Marks and Spencer either claim to be carbon neutral or to be on the way to achieving that state. What does this mean? Every individual, household or organization causes a certain amount of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, to be emitted. The major trigger is energy; we all use energy and most of it is created from the combustion of fossil fuels – oil, gas or coal.

Organizations that want to be carbon neutral try and reduce their use of energy as far as possible. For the energy that they cannot avoid using, they deal with the emissions caused by buying offsets. For example, if a lorry travelling the length of the country day in and day out creates ten tons of carbon dioxide, planting a specified number of trees will cause that CO2 to be absorbed. The programme showed other offsetting projects: the pig farm where methane from the pig manure was trapped and prevented from escaping into the atmosphere; the hydroelectric power station in Eastern Europe which emits no CO2 at all. If an organisation buys enough offsets it can claim that the net effect is neutral - overall it is adding no CO2 to the global atmosphere.

The problem is that there are inconsistencies and imprecision at every stage of the process. To start with, you need to define exactly how much carbon dioxide is being emitted before you know how much you have to offset. There are no universally agreed standards and this can lead to farcical situations. If you want to offset the emissions created by your air travel, British Airways will sell you offsets provided by Climate Care. However, if you approach Climate Care directly to offset your flights, they will charge you more because they use a different method of calculation from British Airways and they believe that the emissions caused by flights are greater.

Suppose we have agreed on how much carbon dioxide needs to be offset. How effective are the proposed solutions? There is no doubt that trees absorb CO2 as they grow. It will, however, take several decades to absorb the CO2 that your flight emits in an afternoon. Some of the trees shown on the programme were far more heavily subsidized by the Forestry Commission than by the purchasers of offsets. If the trees would have been planted anyway, they cannot be considered as truly offsetting a particular purchaser’s emissions. There is also the problem that trees do not live for ever and while they may a lock up the carbon dioxide for a time, it will be released when the tree eventually dies and rots or is burnt. In any case, when you think of the hundreds of thousands of people in the UK who make flights every day, it is clear that trees cannot be the whole solution.

What about the hydroelectric power station in the Eastern Europe? Suppose the developer has the choice between a fossil fuel power station emitting CO2 and a hydro station which emits none. If this is a new development, building the hydro station avoids a certain amount of CO2 emissions, but it does not reduce emissions unless a fossil fuel station of the same size is closed down. There was no suggestion in the film that this was the case, (and by the way it seemed unlikely that the carbon offset payments made by Sky to the project had had any effect on whether it was going to be built or not.) The scheme does not appear to have reduced the global CO2 burden so it cannot be considered as an offset. Sky’s claim to be a carbon neutral organization is difficult to support.

As I said at the start, there is no clear universal definition of carbon footprints or carbon neutrality. Organizations can define them as they wish and can, in their own terms, claim to be carbon neutral. This is good marketing and attractive to responsible consumers. The problem is that it is doing practically nothing to reduce the CO2 in the atmosphere or to have any effect on climate change.

It is very much like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. It may make people feel more comfortable and make them believe that something is being done about the dangers ahead. In fact there are icebergs ahead – only this time the problem is that they’re melting!

Taking Precautions?

2007-07-16T17:43:00.000+01:00

Have a look at the video on this link. It’s called “The Most Terrifying Video You’ll Ever See”. What it sets out to do is to simplify the climate change issues so that the solution becomes obvious.
Dangerous Climate Change will either happen or not happen: two possibilities. We can either take action or take no action: two strategies. This is then resolved into a simple 2x2 matrix:

Plan A
Plan A is Take Action. If climate change is NOT real, this strategy brings negative consequences. We cut back on carbon emissions by suppressing economic activity and we end up with a severe depression and then we find that it was all a waste of time.
However if climate change IS real this strategy helps us adapt and survive. Although we will have changed lifestyles and business models our actions will help us cope with the consequences of climate change.

Plan B
Plan B is Take NO Action. If climate change is NOT real and we take no action then things go on as they are, just getting better all the time.
However, if it IS real and we have done nothing about it, we are in serious trouble. We will see economic collapse, famine, flood, starvation, epidemics war and refugees. This is the worst case scenario.

As you will see from the video, the presenter says our course of action is a no-brainer. If Plan B could lead to the worst case scenario then the prudent course of action is to follow Plan A, because the worst case scenario will then be avoided.

No contest?

Well if we adopt Plan A and eliminate the worst case scenario we also eliminate the best case scenario – no action, no problem, no change. If we adopt Plan A things are going to get worse whether climate change is real or not. Even if climate change is real and Plan A helps us deal with it, our lives will be very different and will be seen by many to be worse. Never mind that they might have been far worse if we had done nothing; people will not have experienced that situation, only the relatively comfortable situation that existed before we started taking action. Many will refuse to accept that action was the right thing.

If dangerous climate change is as likely as no climate change, people will be more likely to accept the status quo and do nothing. If they think that climate change is less likely than no climate change then they will certainly do nothing. After all, two weeks ago a survey revealed that 56% of people in the UK believe (wrongly) that scientists are still in doubt as to whether human activity plays any part in global warming. And if the scientists can’t agree, who’s going to sell their car, stop the foreign holidays and turn down the central heating? Plan B – do nothing – will be favourite.

Maybe the shock of increased energy prices will make people think again, but until something like that happens no government that wants to get re-elected is going to take sufficient action to have an effect on climate change.

Footprints in the sky

2007-07-16T17:26:00.000+01:00

Private air travel is growing dramatically. Charter passengers, including those using private jets, have risen from 3.5 million to 34 million in the 10 years from 1996 to 2006.

A private jet is attractive to those who can afford it because it saves time. You don’t need to head for a major hub like Manchester, Birmingham, Heathrow or Gatwick – you can leave from your local airfield. You can arrive 15 minutes before departure and embark without all those hours of security checks. At the destination your driver can meet you on the tarmac. It may be more expensive than business class, but for some people it’s worth it. London’s position as the leading financial centre in the world means that there are many wealthy people who will spend their money to save their precious time. Not just for business trips either: private jets make it perfectly possible to have weekends at the villa or on the ski slopes.

And what about the carbon footprint? The whole idea of one family jetting off in a private plane seems reckless, irresponsible, profligate. On the other hand, to paraphrase a well-known saying, the rich are always with us. And the rich would say that they create an enormous amount of the wealth of the UK that keeps people in jobs, funds the infrastructure through taxes and allows others to afford their own holidays in the sun. What these people don’t have is much time, so they spend their money to get the most out of it.

The wealthy people who take these flights can do so precisely because they are successful. They are the people who get things done and they are the people who will be crucial to taking the actions that will address climate change. We cannot afford to meet them head on. All we can do is present the evidence, suggest alternatives, map out the consequences. We all need to work together on this.

I hope we can reach consensus in time.

Save it!

2007-07-12T09:29:00.000+01:00

We all know that we need to save energy to save the planet. What most people don’t realize is that everything we eat, use or wear involves the use of energy and indirectly causes carbon dioxide emissions. One of the things we take least notice of is water, particularly in the UK where many households still pay a fixed fee for their water, regardless of how much they use. Of course, commercial premises and more and more homes are on metered supplies, but the cost of water, at least at present, is ignored by most people.

One cubic metre of water requires 1kWh of electricity or other energy to pump it, filter it, purify it, and deliver it to the consumer. Every cubic metre of water therefore has a carbon footprint. Although Britain has been suffering from floods in recent weeks, droughts and hose pipe bans are becoming more and more common in the summer and if we do experience the weather extremes as predicted, water shortages can only get worse.

With this in mind I was interested to see the Interflush device at a conference at York University. This is a simple way of varying the amount of water which is used to flush the lavatory. Although there are some dual-flush units, most flushing systems deliver a full cistern of water every time. The same amount of water is used whether liquids or solids need to be flushed away. The Interflush adapts the traditional flushing siphon so that the flow stops as soon as the handle is released. At the level of the individual household, the savings are relatively small. However, we know that if each household fitted a single compact fluorescent lamp (CFL) electricity demand would fall by the equivalent of the output of a whole power station. Similarly, if every household adopted an Interflush the carbon footprint of the water industry would be cut by 250,000 tons of CO2 . The cost of water would be reduced for all consumers and the existing infrastructure would be able to cope with an increase in the number of consumers without upgrading.

Have a look at the website and see what you think!

Spot the Difference

2007-07-12T08:56:00.000+01:00

The Great Global Warming Swindle, the Channel Four programme which claimed that carbon dioxide was not the cause of global warming, suggested that sunspots and solar activity were major force. The theory is that solar winds drive away the particles that cause clouds to form and the reduced cloud cover means that the surface of the earth warms. In fact, while this is a respected theory, the actual observations show that there was little solar wind at the time the global warming was observed.

Dr Michael Lockwood of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratories in Oxford has published a paper in the Proceedings of the Royal Society complaining that the programme was selective in the use of his research findings. The graphs that were displayed were cut short at the point at which global warming and solar activity clearly diverged. As Dr Lockwood said, the sceptics were “..taking perfectly good science and bringing it into disrepute.”

It looks as though man-made carbon dioxide is still firmly in the frame as a major cause of global warming.

Public opinion, however, still wants to believe that everything can go on as normal.

Mac mileage

2007-07-03T15:01:00.000+01:00

So McDonalds are going to use waste cooking oil to power their vehicle fleet. This is a company we all seem to love to hate, and at first sight we could be critical and point out that biofuels are certainly not carbon neutral and that growing crops for biofuel is already having an effect on the price of wheat. Nevertheless, McDonalds deserve congratulation for this initiative because they are using waste cooking oil to create the fuel; oil that would otherwise have to be disposed of carefully to avoid creating pollution.

A plant already exists in Scotland which creates biodiesel from organic waste. It’s pure recycling. It’s getting a useful product from material which otherwise would be dumped.

In the north east of England two major plants are under construction for the production of biofuel. These will use specially grown – and imported – raw materials and there is already much doubt and debate about the effects that growing these crops will have on rainforest clearance and on food production in poorer countries. I also wonder how long the producer countries will be prepared to export the raw materials. If they harvest and process the biodiesel at home, they have a much higher value product to sell, and surely it makes more sense to export finished goods than vast quantities of bulky primary goods.

Biofuel from waste is truly green – so three cheers for Ronald McDonald!

Talking of Climate Change…

2007-07-02T16:30:00.000+01:00

I spent this weekend at the Professional Speakers Association. We’re a group of experts who speak on our specialist subjects. My main activity is communicating the issues on energy and climate change to business audiences. As an expert on the topic it is essential that my communication skills are as good as they can be. Nothing is ever achieved if a message is sent but not properly received or understood. As a speaker I’m a member of Toastmasters International, which means that nearly every week I’m speaking in front of an audience – prepared speeches or impromptu – and getting feedback from the audience in a structured way. I know what I mean to tell them; often it’s very instructive to find out what they actually heard! Change of emphasis, change of pace, change of structure can all have a radical effect on the message received.

The Professional Speakers Association is for speakers making a business of speaking. Friday was a Board meeting and Chapter Leadership forum, but Saturday was one of our National Events. These events are designed for members but invited guests are welcome too. Our first session, which raised a lot of discussion, was given by Nick Oulton on the use of PowerPoint. Many people believe that slides have no place in a keynote speech because we are giving a speech, not making a presentation. Our speaker (presenter?) showed how badly PowerPoint can be used, and how dramatically different a well-designed presentation can be. Generally I’m with the purists: if it’s a slide show it’s not a speech. On the other hand, some of the statistics involved in energy and climate change are difficult to get across without a graph, and a flip-chart looks amateur. I can’t think of a prop I could use instead, but any suggestions gratefully received.

Our second speaker was Fergus McClelland, expert in all things vocal. He explained the different characteristics of all the microphones we are likely to come across. Each has different advantages and disadvantages and each must be tuned to your voice, so it’s important to make friends with the sound man who is likely to be working long hours and getting paid far less than the speaker. Fergus told us about recording equipment, mixing software and how to make our own CDs and podcasts.

Our third speaker was Terry Brock, stopping over on his world tour on his way back to Florida. Terry is into all things technical. He’s an entertaining and accomplished speaker and he was showing us how the latest technology can help us develop products and promote ourselves. It’s difficult to do him justice on the page, so I suggest you visit his website for yourself and find out the sort of things he’s recommending. I shall be adopting some of them myself, and you can be sure that I’ll let you know all about them.

As you know, I’m an expert who speaks about energy and climate change. I’m convinced that these are the greatest challenges that businesses and individuals currently face. The PSA helps me get that message across. Our Annual Convention will be at the Radisson Heathrow in November. Come and find out what Professional Speakers can do for you.

A World Without Oil (and Gas and Coal)

2007-06-15T12:47:00.000+01:00

Yesterday the Independent published a front-page article about the coming oil crisis. At last the media, or this part of it at least, have recognised that there’s an energy crisis ahead. The article was triggered by the publication of the latest edition of BP’s Statistical Review of World Energy. A number of industry experts have taken issue with the rosy view they claim the report is taking. Some of them believe that oil supplies will begin to run out in four years. Some believe that cheap oil has run out already.

Paradoxically, taxation is one of the factors that have cushioned the British public against the evidence of an increasing oil price. Petrol is taxed at a fixed sum per gallon; unlike VAT which is calculated as a percentage of the selling price. Because UK petrol duty is relatively high, the cost of the oil at the pump is only a small portion of the price paid. If the cost goes up, the petrol duty per litre does not. Thus in the UK the price of petrol has risen from 85p to 97p over the last few months; an increase of some 14%. Over the same period US prices have risen from $2 to $3 – a 50% increase caused by the same underlying rise in oil prices. Another factor is the dollar rate: as oil prices have gone up the dollar has declined, offsetting the increases for us in Europe. This cannot continue, however. The signs are that the oil producers are less willing to accept payment in dollars as the American economy weakens. This will push prices up for the rest of us.

Going back to the BP review; there are some startling figures. The report calculates R/P - the reserves to production ratio. So if a country has 100 barrels and uses 10 barrels per year the R/P is 10: they have enough reserves for another 10 years.

Take a look at the UK figures:
Coal R/P = 12 years
Oil R/P = 6.5 years
Gas R/P = 6 years

Of course we will not be able to maintain our production rates as these resources get harder to find and more difficult to extract, so they will last longer than implied. They are still running out, though, and the UK is increasingly dependent on foreign supplies.

Heavy Weather

2007-06-12T18:43:00.000+01:00

Climate change and global warming. Many people think we can look forward to more of the same only warmer, and particularly for those of us in the UK the prospect of warmer summers can’t be bad. The truth is that climate change is climate destabilisation, and the experts predict more unusual, more unseasonable and more violent weather.

Are we now seeing the evidence? Across a major part of the United States there are serious droughts. Droughts have gone on for so many years in parts of Australia that the government is planning to evacuate whole communities from areas that have become totally unviable. Then just this week, in the wine-growing Hunter Valley, another part of Australia, there have been torrential storms, flash floods, property damage and fatalities.

Last week there was a cyclone, though in the UK at least we heard little about it. It caused serious property damage and a number of people lost their lives. The scary thing about this cyclone, though, is not that it’s perhaps a bit early but that it occurred not in the US or Australia but in the Persian Gulf. They just don’t get cyclones there, but it tore through Muscat and Oman – you can see pictures of the damage in this blog.

Experts in climate change have mapped the weather over thousands of years, so it’s impossible to say whether the events of the last three or four years are evidence of a new trend. Even so, these storms are not inconsistent with the unpredictable, violent weather that climate change could bring. They may be a taste of things to come!

Festina lente G8!

2007-06-08T12:27:00.000+01:00

Festina lente – hurry slowly.

After a lot of pre-conference posturing and sabre-rattling, Angela Merkel the German Chancellor and G8 president announced that the agreements on climate change were "the most important decision for the coming two years."

It really all depends where you’re coming from. Arguably the situation is better than it was before the conference. The United States will “strongly consider” ways of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by 2050. George Bush has said that the US will take a lead on meeting the climate change challenge and appears to agree with the Europeans that the United Nations and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) are central to the process.

Hurry? Well they hope to have something in place by 2009 to replace the Kyoto Protocol which expires in 2012. Some people would argue that targets for 2050 are all very well, but if we don’t make real changes within five or ten years, then climate change will be out of control. (The same lack of urgency is written into Britain’s Climate Change Bill, by the way. Progress will be reviewed once every five years. Do you know of any project, business, public authority which can get away with reporting less than once a year? And the climate is an immediate and crucial issue!)

Going back to G8. Few commentators are happy with the outcome because it is so full of caveats and maybes. Fifty percent of what? Fifty percent of 1990 levels is more than 50% of current levels. The UK and Europe were aiming at 60% of 1990 levels; the US is proposing 50% of current levels. The climate is uncompromising. We need what the climate needs. George Bush is largely uncompromising: China and India as the two largest developing nations must come to the table and commit to cuts. No matter that emissions in the US are six times per head what they are in China. George Bush will not accept actions which put the US economy at a disadvantage. And "strongly consider" achieves nothing. Somebody has to act. Plenty of room for negotiation – some would say for delay.

Of course everyone admits that it’s urgent, but no-one in power seems ready to take urgent action.

Lente is just not in it. Festina, festina, before it’s too late!

Managing the message on climate change

2007-06-04T17:50:00.000+01:00

I’ve already commented in the past that the climate change debate is a dialogue of the deaf. Certainly there’s lots of dialogue – maybe it’s because it’s World Environment Day tomorrow and the G8 Summit starts later this week.

Looking again at George Bush’s announcements on climate change we see a worrying message. He wants to call a global summit in America to discuss the issues to an American agenda. We already have the G8. We already have the IPCC. The last thing we want is the world’s biggest polluter trying to take over the debate. The US has made it clear that its economy depends ultimately on coal, and certainly that country has massive reserves. We know that burning coal releases CO2 – and many other substances that are far more harmful. The US line is that technology will find a way and we don’t need to cut consumption while we’re looking for the solution. No carbon trading or limits, they say, - we must not prejudice economic growth. The US is gambling on undiscovered technologies – and some believe that science proves that gamble is already lost.

Today China has entered the debate. In advance of the G8 they have announced a climate change initiative, but they too emphasise that the protection of economic growth is crucial. They recognise that there is much to be done, because China’s rapid industrialisation has led to far worse pollution than anything in the West, quite apart from CO2 emissions. As I’ve mentioned before, China is a major polluter but the pollution per head is much lower than in America and in many other countries.
We need to support China’s efforts to clean up.

We need to get used to using less energy ourselves (-not a bad strategy as it’s going to get scarce and expensive) and we need to build on what has already been developed by the G8 and IPCC – not start a new debate. We need a clear and constructive dialogue – not a dialogue of the deaf.

US to act on climate change?

2007-06-02T10:43:00.000+01:00

In advance of the G8 summit, where climate change will be a prominent issue, George Bush has announced America’s commitment to action. This has been met with some cynicism, given that apart from Australia the USA was the only country to refuse to ratify the Kyoto Protocol. The view of the present US administration has always been that specific emission targets would hamper the American economy, and while China was doing nothing to cut emissions America could not afford to put itself at a disadvantage.

Kyoto did not put restrictions on China or any of the other developing nations because their per capita emissions are so much lower than those of the western world. China is accused of building coal-burning power stations – the most polluting form of energy – and opening a new one almost every week. On the other hand it still has 3 million citizens without electricity, it has very little oil or gas, it will produce clean electricity from the Three Gorges Dam and it is a leader in solar power. Every member of the Chinese cabinet is an engineer, so the consequences of climate change and energy shortages are not lost on them. Much of what China produces is destined for the American market, so it could be argued that they are making American emissions by proxy.

At the end of the day the important issue must be to cut energy use and cut emissions, not argue about who is doing what and why. George Bush is talking about a policy to be in place by the end of 2008. Even if we suspect his motives we must welcome the fact that he is talking about the issue, even if 2008 is probably too late if those who say we have only 5 years left to save the planet are correct!

Good Housekeeping

2007-05-31T16:28:00.000+01:00

More and more organisations are adopting environmental policies and taking specific actions to implement them.

Eclipse Internet, the ISP within Kingston Communications, has recently announced that it is carbon-neutral. The main input to an IT company is power and in calculating the organisation’s footprint Eclipse also included the emissions due to the daily commute of the workforce. This proved to be a not insignificant 23% of the total. Beyond making sure that heating and lighting in the offices is as efficient as possible there is only so far that such a company can go to reduce its carbon footprint without offsetting.

Carbon neutrality has been achieved in collaboration with the CarbonNeutral Company, by investing in projects which will either produce power without CO2 emissions or positively reduce CO2. Eclipse has invested in wind-farm technologies in India, a methane capture project in Pennsylvania and a Ugandan forestry project. All of these are designed not only to reduce carbon dioxide but also to support the local economies.

Carbon neutrality has a money cost – the cost of investing in the offsetting projects. The return is more difficult to quantify, but consumers are becoming more insistent that everything they buy should be “ethical”, “green” and “eco-friendly”. In response many big names on the High Street are making the investment. In time carbon neutrality may become the norm - or at least the aim - for every company (though not every company will be able to achieve it). Some progress towards carbon neutrality is likely to be expected of any organisation seeking public contracts.

Those who are first into this area will probably find their goals easier to reach through a wide range of offsetting projects. Later converts will have a smaller choice, but hopefully will sign up anyway.

Hopefully too, the market will be regulated so that the marginal operators who have been giving offsetting a bad name will be squeezed out.

Expanding Stansted

2007-05-29T18:35:00.000+01:00

The British government is supporting the building of a £2.7bn second runway at Stansted airport. Already the atmosphere in the area is polluted to twice the level known to cause environmental damage. Increased airport use is expected to cause more pollution which will seriously damage Hatfield Forest, one of the oldest in Europe.

Quite apart from this, it is difficult to understand how the government balances this expansion with its commitment to cut carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. UK carbon emissions fell at the end of the 90s but they are on the rise again, and the 64,000 additional flights each year will mean that deeper cuts must be made elsewhere.
And then there’s the issue of resources.

Peak Oil means that fuel for all sorts of transport is starting to run out. There is no substitute for oil for aviation fuel, and even the oil industry itself is beginning to admit that future supplies will be more difficult to get and much more expensive. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) believes that energy shortages are much closer and much more serious than the effects of climate change. (Read their newsletter.)

Nevertheless, the government continues to act as though economic growth can last for ever. When resources become scarce will we come to resent the resources wasted on airports we can no longer use?

It's a washout!

2007-05-25T16:46:00.001+01:00

Do you have a washing machine? If it's British model, chances are that it's connected up to the hot and cold water systems. I've heard a rumour that new washing machines will be cold-fill only, as is standard practice in Europe. On the face of it, that's a good thing. Only one water valve, less wiring, simpler plumbing in the kitchen. But what if you have a lot of hot water, from your solar panel or from an older boiler with a hot-water cylinder? You can't use that. Your machine will fill up from the cold supply - and then use electricity to heat the water.

If you're buying a new washing machine this weekend check how green it really is. And if you're planning to install a solar panel to heat your water, make sure you can use all the hot water you generate!

Have we got the energy?

2007-05-25T16:37:00.000+01:00

I received a post today asking why I thought that renewable energy could only ever account for about 20% of our total requirements. Surely if we cut our total energy use that proportion could be greater? I also said that microgeneration could actually increae co2 emissions. Why?

Here's my answer:

"I suggest you read "Energy beyond oil" by Paul Mobbs which is an excellent review of our energy options - and challenges. It explains all the technical issues in detail but in a very readable form.

Yes, I agree we can go a long way towards reducing our energy demand, but in spite of those people who are already cutting down, UK energy demand continues to grow. We will have to make life-changing decisions to really have an effect. The problem with renewables - wind, wave, tide and solar - is that they are intermittent and cannot be controlled to match the fluctuating demand from the grid. Indeed, if they account for a major proportion of electricity production they provide great difficulties for the grid controllers who have to deal not only with fluctuating demand but fluctuating supply as well. If they can't balance supply and demand the risk is that the grid becomes unstable with cascading failures and power cuts. Biomass and biogas are renewables which can provide power 24/7 and are controllable, but the problem here is that growing biofuel crops competes for land where food is grown (or in some cases where rain forest grows) and the planting, harvesting, processing and transporting of biofuel all takes energy so biofuel is not carbon neutral and some studies have suggested that the process absorbs more energy than it yields.

Microgeneration? Microgeneration of electricity comes from wind or solar. Micro-hydro is possible, but very, very few people will have a suitable water source. In all cases we must look at the total life cycle, which includes the energy used and CO2 emitted in the manufacture, installation and disposal of the turbine or solar panel. Unless the unit saves more CO2 during its useful life than is emitted at these stages, it is actually contributing to CO2, not saving it. A wind turbine needs a steady flow at about 10-12 metres per second. If you go to the DTI wind speed database you will find the average speed for your postcode. The average is only about 6mps. A turbine running at 6mps produces a lot less than half the electricity of a unit at 12mps - it is not a simple straight-line relationship. The other problem - which rules turbines out for most urban locations - is turbulence. Trees, roofs, chimneys and lamposts all cause turbulence which means the airflow - and direction - is constantly changing. The turbine may overspeed, which will damage it, or run too slowly to produce any power. If it is swinging backwards and forwards in the gusts it will not produce a useful output. Once you have the electricity you either have to convert it to ac and transform it to mains voltage (a process absorbing energy) or use it to charge a battery. In the second case you have the additional cost of the battery and of your low-voltage dc lighting circuit or whatever you are using, together with the CO2 emissions involved in manufacturing this kit. In the first case you can sell electricity back to the grid if you aren't using it, but the bit left after transformation and rectification will be subject to further losses in the grid and you will be paid only 4p per unit compared with the 10 or 15p it will cost you to buy it back.

Solar panels have the same problems of rectification and transformation if you go for mains voltage and the same extra costs of batteries etc if you go for low voltage dc. I believe the disposal of solar panels is problematical because of the heavy metals and rare elements they contain. In fact the increasing scarcity of such substances will probably severely limit the availability of solar panels.

Sorry this is such a long answer. Hope it makes sense!"

Energy White Paper

2007-05-23T10:27:00.000+01:00

Today the government publishes its energy white paper. Already there is speculation and comment in the press, but there seems to be a danger that the whole debate is going to be taken over by an argument over nuclear power. Nuclear power accounts for about 20% of electricity generated, and therefore less than 8% of the energy used in the UK. People claim that renewables will take care of the other 92% in time, but the fact is that they are deluding themselves. Wind farms, tidal schemes, biomass and solar can all make a contribution, but they can never replace more than about 20% of our energy needs.

At least people are beginning to realise that we use more gas than anything else and in the very near future most of it will be coming from Russia, not the North Sea. Even if we can maintain gas supplies and develop our renewables sector, neither of these will replace oil as a transport fuel. Biofuel and hydrogen are not an option (see elsewhere in this blog). Even if electric cars were viable there is no incentive to build 30 million of them to replace our existing fleet.

A columnist in the Independent complains that nuclear power is only viable because it receives government subsidies. On the letters page someone complains that there are not enough subsidies for domestic micro-generation. At least nuclear power produces electricity, but in the majority of UK locations micro-generation will never pay for itself even after subsidies, and actually causes more CO2 pollution than it saves.

The truth is that we are approaching the point where we will be unable to obtain enough energy even to satisfy current levels of demand. We are approaching the point where available energy will decline each year to levels which will demand radically changed lifestyles – no big cars, no commuting, no foreign holidays, colder houses and so on. Of course, this is far too horrible to contemplate.

Let’s just argue about side issues like nuclear power and rooftop windmills instead!

Fred Flintstone didn't drive a gas guzzler...

2007-05-22T12:38:00.000+01:00

This is the title of an article by Ruth Lea in the latest New Statesman. You can find it here. Here's my reply:

"Yes, I agree, we can’t control climate change, and natural cycles and solar activity are probably part of the problem. But we can’t ignore that mankind has increased the amount of atmospheric CO2 dramatically in the last two centuries. We know that the greenhouse effect is real – it keeps the surface of the planet at a temperature that supports life – so upsetting the balance of greenhouse gases must be a risk.

Yes, the UK emits only 2% of the world’s greenhouse gases so we cannot change the world on our own. It’s a truism to say that if no-one does anything then nothing gets done, Yes, China is opening new power stations, but it’s trying to bring its population – 30 million of whom still have no electricity – up to a standard that’s still far lower than our own. China will generate carbon-free electricity from the Three Gorges Dam and is very advanced in the use of solar power. We must support them by our example.

We can cut our carbon footprint by cutting fossil fuel use. This will help us to adapt to the coming global energy crisis as fuels, led by oil, begin to run out. (And we’re talking within the next five years!) There is no alternative fuel with the capacity to replace oil and no technological solution to the shortages. It is just too horrific for most people to consider that the energy that drives our cars, heats our homes and produces everything we eat, use or wear is coming to an end. Read what the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas www.peakoil.net has to say. Check on the statements of Dr Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, formerly of the National Iranian Oil Company; the presentations of international energy banker Matthew R Simmons and the books of Richard Heinberg and many others.

Changing to low-energy light bulbs is a step forward, but nothing to the changes that global energy shortages will impose on us in the next few years. We need to adapt to this now. Doing nothing is just not an option. Recognising the true problem would be a start."

Catch 22

2007-05-22T08:16:00.000+01:00

I was with a group of businessmen last week discussing climate change. Chatham House rules so I can’t be more specific, but the conclusions will reach Whitehall in due course.

One of the more obvious conclusions we came to was that encouraging more people to work at home would benefit the environment. Less commuting means less travel and less pollution. If people do not travel in every day the head office can be smaller, with lower energy bills, lower water usage and a lower carbon footprint. The company saves money and so do employees. Unfortunately there’s a catch.
Employers have a statutory duty to provide employees with a safe working environment. They are responsible for proper lighting levels, an adequate temperature and for ensuring that the employee has a work station with a chair that will provide proper support. The employer must ensure that all equipment is safe and that electrical equipment has been PAT tested.

To do all this in the employee’s home would infringe the employee’s rights. Not to do it lays the employer open to a claim if the home worker has a problem, like breaking a leg by tripping over the cat or getting a shock off a faulty fax.
For the employer it’s therefore safer to make everyone work in the office. Generally employees commute in their own time and at their own expense, so there’s no problem to the organisation there.

Saving the planet? Sorry, it just doesn’t make business sense.

Dialogue of the Deaf

2007-05-19T17:21:00.000+01:00

Tony Blair made his farewells to George Bush this week and the President confirmed that climate change "is a serious issue and the United States takes it seriously." Meanwhile the US, represented by its chief climate negotiator Harlan Watson, was rejecting caps on US emissions and refusing to consider participating in carbon trading. The position of the US delegation was that targets and timetables were unimportant - the priority was not to jeopardise economic growth.

Although the US is about to be overtaken by China (a country with five times the population) as the biggest polluter in the world, the actions of the US are crucial to controlling carbon emissions on a global scale. Global warming is , after all, global. The Americans may believe that the economy is more important than the climate, but there are thousands of scientists who believe that to carry on as we are will damage the planet irreparably and destroy the economy at the same time. In some parts of the US government these scientists are loudly quoted, but when it gets down to business they go unheeded.

And what of Gordon Brown? Will Britain take a more robust position with the US on green issues in future? Sadly no. Gordon does not see the environment as an important priority!

They win some, we lose a lot more!

2007-05-18T15:25:00.000+01:00

The government has announced a plan to shut 2500 POst Offices in order to save money.

Closing Post Offices may save the government £4m per week (very tiny in total expenditure terms) but it puts the cost of travelling to more distant central offices on to the consumer - many of whom are elderly or poor, or both. If people have to travel into town then maybe they will do their shopping there and the local shops near the closed post offices will lose business until they too close. Then everyone has to travel into town.

I thought the government was committed to lower carbon emissions, but these extra journeys will do the opposite. They may save £4m per week, but the hidden costs will be far, far more!

One Billion Climate Refugees

2007-05-15T12:04:00.000+01:00

One of the consequences of climate change that the IPCC report has noted since the beginning is the problem of refugees.

We generally live in a stable climate and although there's a wide range of difference between the equator and the poles, we usually find people who think the place where they live is "not too hot - not too cold." As climate change destabilises weather patterns there are places which will become uninhabitable. Places like Egypt and Bagladesh will suffer from floods as sea levels rise. Other places will suffer from drought and desertification as the rains fail. Either way, these places will no longer support crops, livestock or people. People must move to find somewhere to survive.

Even in prosperous Australia the drought has gone on so long that the government is seriously considering evacuating whole communities.

The IPCC has estimated the number of refugees at 3m per year. That's 150m by 2050. Just yesterday Christian Aid published its report "Human Tide". It predicts 1,000,000,000 refugees by 2050; that's 1,000m

The message is clear - we must do what we can about climate change. This means cutting our CO2 emissions, but let's be in no doubt - that may stop things getting worse, but it will take a time for it to have an effect. In the meantime we need to be ready for the floods and forest fires with defences and rescue plans. We need to stop people being displaced, but if they do become refugees we need plans and locations for resettlement.

There's no doubt that there's a climate crisis - and no end to the different problems it throws up!

Electric Dreams

2007-04-05T10:19:00.000+01:00

Johan Hari has an article in today's Independent called "Big Oil's vendetta against the electric car."

You have to admit that Johan Hari writes a good conspiracy. A lot of what he says is true, but it’s only part of the story. Electric cars are clean and silent, but only because the pollution and noise are generated at the power stations. Over 50% of the energy input to a conventional power station is lost in the process and more energy is lost as it travels across the grid, making electric cars very inefficient. Of course he may claim that we should be using green energy, but we would need to double our total electricity output to meet our transport needs. With only 4% of electricity coming from renewables at present – mostly from landfill gas and waste incineration – there is a long way to go.

The capacity of the grid would have to be doubled as well; will Mr Hari accept twice as many pylons? The other problem is that many of us have to park on the street and could not plug in our cars “like a mobile phone.” However, assuming you could charge your car and drive from London to Scotland as he claims, a 300 mile range would still leave you 100 miles short of Edinburgh.

The quoted fuel economy is impressive. Mr Hari tells us that he can buy the electrical equivalent of a gallon of petrol for only 30p. Given that a gallon of petrol contains 36kWh of energy, that is equal to less than 1p per unit. Can he tell us the name of his power supplier?

Coal on a Roll

2007-04-04T13:41:00.000+01:00

The UK’s carbon emissions are rising. Ten years ago they began to decline because of the ‘Dash for Gas’. Coal-fired power stations were closed and new, clean gas stations took their place. Ten years on gas is more expensive and more and more of it has to be imported. Some say that we will be importing 80% of our needs as early as 2015.

The problem is that UK demand for gas continues to grow and so does world demand. With the power industry accounting for a third of the UK’s carbon emissions the choice of fuel for generators has a direct effect on whether the UK meets its targets. Coal is cheaper at present and government subsidies for desulphurization plant mitigate the cost to some extent. Clean coal requires investment to deal with carbon emissions as well as the sulphur and other pollutants. Powerfuel plc has recently entered into a joint venture with KRU, one of Russia’s largest coal producers To re-open Hatfield Colliery in South Yorkshire and build a clean coal generating station. The unit will produce gas from coal slurry, treat it for impurities and burn it to generate electricity which will be sold to occupants of a new business park planned for the site, and to the grid. By-products will be sold to the pharmaceutical industry.

Carbon sequestration – the storage of CO2 from conventional generation - in mines, spent oil wells or at the bottom of the sea; is theoretically possible but not yet in commercial operation. To make it a reality will take time and public money. With a five to ten year lead-time on major power stations we probably won’t have these systems in place in time to meet the targets. There may be a problem raising the money as well. It will all come from taxation, of course, but there’s still a great deal of resistance from the man in the street to spending money on going green!

Are you local?

2007-03-19T12:07:00.000Z

I see that an on-line petition about Peak Oil has been lodged with No 10 Downing Street. Sign it if like me you believe that energy is running short and government should be doing far more about it.

Oil is our principal transport fuel and it is also a valuable chemical feedstock. As shortages begin to bite the will be pressures on transport – it will get just too expensive to drive. We may be talking about 30 years hence, but it won’t be a case of going on as usual and suddenly adapting at the end of year 29. Lifestyles will have to change. Principally that means making things local – local schools, local hospitals, local places of work, local sources of food. We could see the renaissance of the community, if that’s not too elaborate a phrase.

Without doubt there will be change – when wasn’t there? This change will be different. In some ways we will be going backwards – losing our freedom to just up and go, to spend today here, tomorrow on the other side of the Atlantic and the next day almost anywhere else in the world. We’ll lose our freedom to just get in and drive, unless it’s really necessary and justifies the cost. On the other hand, we may see an end to not knowing our neighbours, and become part of a mutually supportive community. Of course this is in the future, and someone, I forget who, said “I never make predictions – especially about the future!” Still it makes sense to examine the possibilities. Have a look at this blog. See what Steve “Habib” Rose has to say on the subject of neighbourhoods.

More about the bill

2007-03-16T14:36:00.000Z

The government’s Climate Bill has been published. It has already led to much debate and it is, after all, a discussion document. Nothing is expected to be approved and implemented much before the end of 2008. There are many grounds for criticism, but first of all let us welcome the fact that something is being done, even if we don’t think it’s enough. Hopefully we can get it changed before it’s put in place.

The overall target of the bill is to reduce the country’s carbon emissions by 60% by 2050. There will be a series of five-year objectives and there will be legal sanctions if these are not met. If carbon emissions are as serious as we are led to believe, you could almost expect that progress towards targets should be monitored on a weekly basis rather than every five years. The government’s reaction is that if they were to set annual targets it would be easy to fail to reach them in any one year which suffered a very harsh winter. These things should average out over five years. Nonetheless, there should certainly be annual targets and annual reports on how close we are to meeting those targets because otherwise there will be no chance of meeting the five year target.

This bill introduces legal sanctions for failure to meet the emissions targets, but the way they are presented seems quite odd. It is not the polluters who will be penalized, but rather the government minister responsible, who will be hauled before the courts for a judicial review and if found guilty will have to make amends. These amends are the purchase of carbon offsets. This implies that if we don’t actually meet our targets, we can buy our way out of the problems by buying carbon credits. Secondly, these carbon credits will of course be bought with taxpayers’ money although the taxpayers themselves will have little control over the emission levels. Thirdly, ministers rarely stay in a particular office for more than two or three years, so by the time it becomes clear that five year targets have been missed the minister responsible will be far away.

Another aspect of all this is that the government talks exclusively about the control of carbon. The unspoken assumption is that if we restrict our carbon emissions then everything will carry on as normal. In fact, the best scientific estimates are that if we reduce our carbon dioxide emissions we will prevent things from getting worse than they otherwise would. The public does not seem to be aware that global warming, or rather global overheating, is a fact; that climate change is highly probable; that the sea-levels are measurably rising; that glaciers are receding and ice caps are melting and that there is probably nothing we can do to stop this happening within our lifetimes or within those of our children or grandchildren.

If we do cut back on our carbon emissions we may prevent from things being as bad as they might otherwise be. We still need to protect ourselves against the floods, the famines, the forest fires and the violent and more frequent storms that may well be caused by climate change as a result of global overheating. Nobody seems to mention this.

And as for the disruptions that will be caused as fossil fuels run out - well that’s another story that you’ve heard me comment on in previous posts!

No point having a blog

2007-03-13T09:13:00.000Z

..unless people read it! I learnt the other day that people are most likely to visit a blog if they have read about it in someone else's blog. Apparently this beats search engines and any opther form of referral. I got this information from Graham Jones who specialises in internet marketing and optimising your presence on the web. Here's a link to his blog - http://www.grahamjones.co.uk

It's worth a visit - he's always giving away free stuff!

And if you write a blog on energy and climate change issues as I do, send me a link and I'll put it in another post - and I hope you'll do the same for me!

It's the law

2007-03-13T08:56:00.000Z

...or at least it soon will be. Today the British government publishes its Climate Change Bill which is expected to set 5-year targets for carbon dioxide emissions. This comes after a weekend when the Conservative opposition were making it clear how green they were. Bit of a balancing act - they want to restrict air travel, but they don't want to upset families who might vote for them so maybe they will target the frequent fliers. Gordon Brown has also set out his stall in a speech, making it clear that he's green and voter-friendly at the same time.

The bill has already attracted criticism. Why have 5-year targets and not annual targets? If things are as desperate as the press and politicians tell us surely we should be watching the situation week by week. It's easy to be cynical and assume that climate change is just another bandwagon and a convenient excuse for raising more tax.

My own view is that the whole thing is far too simplistic. The unspoken message is that if we cut carbon dioxide we will stop global warming, avoid climate change and everything will go on as normal. In fact, the only effect we may have is to make future climate change less bad than it might otherwise have been. If we cut carbon dioxide by cutting our fossil fuel consumption we will also cut production of the other nitrous and sulphurous pollutants than no-one ever mentions, so that might be a hidden bonus.

The real threat of course is Peak Oil. As production volumes decline we will be forced to use less, travel less and consume less, but we could never tell that to the voters. As conventional oil declines it's likely that we will start exploiting oil from coal, shale or tar sands. And when we do that you can forget carbon dioxide limits or pollution controls!

2020 vision at the EU

2007-03-09T18:21:00.000Z

This week European Union leaders have been debating carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and they have a firm commitment to achieve at least a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2020 compared to 1990. Furthermore, they will increase energy efficiency in the EU so as to achieve the objective of saving 20% of the EU's energy consumption compared to projections for 2020,

Central to this is a binding target of a 20% share of renewable energies in overall EU energy consumption by 2020 and a 10% binding minimum target to be achieved by all Member States for the share of biofuels in overall EU transport petrol and diesel consumption by 2020.

Leaving aside the controversy generated by Channel 4’s film – whether CO2 reduction is possible or worth while – there must still be doubts about whether any of this is achievable. Elsewhere in this blog I have commented on how biofuels are much less green than people would like to think. Biofuel crops absorb CO2, but growing, harvesting and processing them takes up so much energy that the net gain is small or in some cases negative. Growing the crops puts pressure on food crops or rain forests, and to some extent we will burn green fuels while exporting the disadvantages of the fuels to third world countries where the crops are grown.

Biomass is part of the way towards reaching the EU’s 20% target. Today Drax Power, which runs the UK’s largest power station, announced plans to grow biomass on an area equivalent to one fifth of the land of Wales. This will produce sufficient fuel to provide 10% of the requirements of Drax. The station produces 8% of the UK’s electricity, so biomass will account for just 0.8%. If we took over the whole of Wales to grow biofuel crops we would still only achieve 4% of the UK’s electricity – and where would we put the Welsh? -

The Great Global Warming Hoax

2007-03-09T13:03:00.000Z

Last night’s Channel 4 documentary has caused a great deal of comment.
The film didn't say that global warming wasn't happening; just that man-made co2 wasn't the cause. Whether they are right or wrong, we need to cut fossil fuel use because it's finite and it's beginning to run out. That will cut co2 emissions, and, depending on your point of view, that's either a bonus or irrelevant!

Also we should recognise that there are two aspects to global warming (or overheating, as I prefer to call it - warming is stable and essential to life.) One is trying to stop it, and that's undeniably difficult and may not work. The other is that we are observing the effects of global overheating through climate change and we should be doing what we can to protect ourselves, and others, against those effects.

If we go ahead with a high-carbon solution to the 3rd world's energy shortage we will raise expectations, invest a lot of money and end up with something which doesn't work when the fuel gets too expensive. We're talking 3-5 years.

Focussing solely on co2, and solely on its climatic effects, is very short-sighted. It is absorbed by the seas and it changes the acidity of the seas and affects the fish and other organisms that live there. That's the base of the food chain. When we burn fossil fuels and emit co2 we also emit other pollutants, particularly nitrous compounds. These pollute our air, our food and rivers and seas, again damaging the very environment we live in.

It would be great to be able to rely on one television programme and say that there's no problem at all - we can go on as usual, only more so. The oil is running out (gas too, though maybe 30 years later) and in the short term we can get oil from coal, shale and tar sands. All of these are highly polluting, but if we can create a consensus that co2 doesn't matter the oil companies will be happy to exploit these resources. They will ignore the energy inputs, the vast quantities of fresh water needed and contaminated water released. Life will continue as usual, we'll just run out quicker.

I am firmly against the eco-warriors who want to smash capitalism and put the blame on multinationals, George Bush and anyone else they can think of. I am very concerned that the arguments are so polarised, because I believe that there is a middle way, a rational, pragmatic approach to the changes on our planet and a sensible re-evaluation of the risks and the actions we can take. Business as usual is not an option, but selling the car, putting out all the lights and living on bread and water in a tent is not a sensible strategy either!

That’s why I believe in common sense on climate change.

Bush goes bio

2007-03-06T10:09:00.000Z

Newspaper reports claim that there are signs at last that the White House is taking the environment seriously. This week President Bush was in Brazil to discuss the new ethanol economy - road fuel manufactured from plants. To me this seems more of a realisation that fossil oil is running out, rather than a desire to use "green" fuels. There are serious doubts in any case over whether biofuels are truly green. While the plants used for biofuels do absorb carbon dioxide as they grow, they do not absorb all the co2 released by the whole growth/harvest/processingrefining/use cycle. Some say that the energy input is greater than the energy content of the biofuel produced. Land used for fuel crops displaces food crops, or in some cases displaces rainforest. Cutting down the rainforest releases carbon dioxide and so removes part of the largest co2 absorber in the world. Growing fuel crops instead of food means poorer nations may go hungry.

The signs are that fossil fuel shortages -Peak Oil- are just around the corner. There will never be enough biofuel to replace all the oil we now use. It's a good plan to plan to use less. At least you'll save money and it won't hurt as much when shortages really bite!

Learning to commute/commuting to learn

2007-03-01T15:28:00.000Z

Today the nation's 10 and 11-year-olds learn which school they will be allowed to attend from next September. Parents are determined that their offspring will attend a "good" school and make every effort, including moving house into the right area, to make sure this happens. If it doesn't many are expected to appeal.

Unfortunately, the "good" school is all too frequently not the local school. Children are learning to commute for hours each day to get to the chosen establishment. Parents drive them or fetch them, or put them on buses or trains. Some even go by taxi. One father was heard to remark that all this commuting would "prepare them for later life."

You can make up your own mind whether commuting is part of a desirable lifestyle. As long as people can afford it, they'll do it. Whether the planet can afford it is not a question that most people take into account. If Peak Oil truly happens in the next few years then the spiralling cost of petrol will make many people think again. Economy is the only long-term solution, and that means self-sufficient communities which provide the full range of amenities within minimal travelling distance. The government will have to think again about closing local post offices, maternity and A&E departments, and centralising schools. Mind you, that might be more expensive, because governments don't count the extra travelling costs for individuals.

And what would it really be like without a car? Several thousand people in SE England are finding out today as their cars shudder to a halt and need repairs costing hundreds of pounds. Contaminated petrol is supposed to be the cause, but no-one has yet taken responsibility and the actual contaminant has not been identified.

Getting the message across

2007-02-28T17:09:00.000Z

Last night I gave a presentation on energy and climate change to a group of 50 actuaries here in York. It went well, and there were several questions afterwards.

The problem is that it's a very serious subject, and also quite complex. Actuaries are used to difficult concepts of course - they spend their time deriving mathematical models of insurance risks. I think I kept their attention, because no-one walked out before the end!

Still, it would be good to inject a bit of humour into the proceedings. How can I make climate change amusing without making it trivial?

Any ideas? Any climate change jokes?

Some light on the problem.

2007-02-21T14:09:00.000Z

Australia, along with the United States, gets a lot of criticism for not signing up to the Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions. While the US has the highest level of emissions in the world, Australia, at over 500m tonnes of CO2 per annum, has the highest level of emissions per head of population. Surprising, then, that their prime minister has just announced that incandescent light bulbs are to be phased out by 2010, in favour of compact fluorescent lamps (CFL).

Incandescent light bulbs, the normal filament bulbs, produce their light from a white-hot wire. The problem is that 90% of the energy used is lost in heat. CFLs use energy much more efficiently – and they last a lot longer: 8000 hours rather than 1000 hours. They are more expensive to buy, but prices are coming down and the last lot I bought on the internet came to well under £2 each (including postage).

Australia is not the first to introduce a CFL policy. Cuba started to change over to CFLs two years ago, and when I was there in January 2007 I didn’t see a single traditional filament bulb.

Underground Coal Gasification - (Press Release)

2007-02-13T13:58:00.000Z

Last week, London hosted the most significant and extensive conference on Underground Coal Gasification ever held. Over 100 delegates from 19 countries heard speakers from around the globe updating on projects and Technology in China, India, Australia, USA and Europe.

The conference was held at the London headquarters of ABN AMRO and organised by the UCG Partnership, and included major industry players, government and academia.
Underground Coal Gasification is a method of converting un-worked coal into a combustible gas, which can be used for industrial heating, power generation or the manufacture of hydrogen, synthetic natural gas or diesel fuel. The gas can be processed to remove its CO2 content, thereby providing a source of clean energy with minimal greenhouse gas emissions.

World Energy Consumption in 2004* breaks down into 41% from oil, 23% from natural gas, 23% from coal,6% from nuclear, 4% from hydro and 3% from renewables.

However, world proven reserves 2005** has oil accounting for 19%, gas with 17% and coal with a massive 64%. Add total reserves to total resources and coal accounts for 95% of the fossil fuel energy content of the planet*** – hundreds of years of energy.

Delegates heard that UCG represents a real answer to the energy gap issue since UCG provides security of supply and a low cost clean energy with substantial volume. Russia, Australia, USA, India, China, South Africa and the UK all have projects developed or being developed with plans being made for further studies in Ukraine, Poland, Hungary, Ireland and Pakistan.

The technology of UCG is now ready for scale-up to large projects to produce syngas for power generation and coal to liquids. Security of supply, the potential for CO2 capture and storage, the lower costs of gas production and its rapid development to fill the energy gap are the principal motivators for the vast increase in activity in UCG.

The conference urged the UCG Partnership, which represents the industry and provides public information on UCG, to continue to urge Governments to provide a workable framework in which UCG projects can flourish and develop quickly. This includes an easier licensing, a simpler environmental and planning framework, risk management and the removal of unnecessary bureaucratic red tape. Encouragement from the very top of Government is needed urgently.

Sources:
*USEIA, 2005
**BP, 2006
***AAPG and BP

Podcast

2007-02-12T17:40:00.000Z

Here's a brief summary of my views on energy and climate change. Download the MP3 file here.

FAR more

2007-02-12T17:36:00.000Z

Correcting my earlier post…
The Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) published last week by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) was in fact only the preliminary summary. The full report will be published later in the year. The document we have so far is the summary and guide for policy-makers.

As the New Scientist points out, this is a rather special type of document. It is not a peer-reviewed paper. It has been subjected to political scrutiny and editing, to provide a text acceptable to all governments. Apparently the attitude of the US was remarkably different this time, reflecting a power-shift following the success of the Democrats in the mid-term elections.

Some people (not me, unfortunately) have already seen the full report. From this they conclude that much has been left out of the summary. For example, scientists are beginning to think that ice sheets could melt much more rapidly than previously thought. Research is not yet conclusive, and for this reason the theory was excluded from the study. You can argue if nothing is yet proven on this it would be scare-mongering to include it. On the other hand, if we have identified a potential problem, should we not flag it up as a potential risk?

Sea levels may rise faster than expected; there is observable evidence to show that this is the case. This is not in the summary report as it is inconsistent with the models currently used. The full report, due in July I think, will make interesting reading.

There’s no point in waiting; we must take action now. But we must act with care, and be ready to modify our actions as our knowledge grows and our understanding of the climate system develops.

Trapped Wind

2007-02-06T08:22:00.000Z

The problem with wind power is matching supply with demand. High winds at night can produce more power than needed while on cold, still days the turbines produce nothing at all. Storing electricity has always been difficult and most systems, like flywheels, capacitors or lead-acid batteries are either too expensive or too small. Pump storage is a large-capacity solution. It uses surplus power to pump water up to a reservoir. This water is released to turn hydro-electric turbines at times of high demand. Pump storage is expensive, and needs the right kind of geography with mountains and lakes.

Research in Australia (New Scientist 13th January 2007) has developed the flow battery. This uses electrolytes consisting of chemical solutions based on the element vanadium. The electrolytes are pumped into the flow cell where they are charged by the wind turbines and then pumped out to storage tanks. The size of the battery is therefore only limited by the size of the tanks. When the wind drops the electrolytes are pumped back into the flow cell where they release their electricity. Systems have already been successfully installed and improved the productivity of wind farms by buffering the differences between supply and demand. So far the flow battery is too large to fit in a vehicle, but research continues with alternative chemical compounds for the electrolyte.

At this stage the system is expensive and the future success of flow storage batteries must depend on the cost and availability of vanadium.

FAR Out

2007-02-05T09:10:00.000Z

The Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) has just been released by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. (IPCC) No real surprises. We expected the news to be bad and the report says things are getting worse and urges governments again to take action to avoid total catastrophe.

How likely is it that governments will respond? The United States and Australia refused to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gases, and the process of designing a new protocol, to apply after 2012, is stalled. While Britain will reach its Kyoto target, this is mainly due to the closure of coal-fired power stations in the late 90s. Britain’s greenhouse gas emissions are once again rising. Britain is still building roads and expanding airports. Germany has just buckled under to the automotive lobby and relaxed emission standards for new cars. China, which as a developing country was not required to make emission reductions under Kyoto, continues to expand, to use increasing quantities of coal and to produce 15% of the world’s CO2 emissions.

Cutting emissions means cutting the use of fossil fuels or installing equipment to trap the CO2. In both cases this means extra costs: in both cases this will depress the economy. The US economy is already in bad shape so industrialists resist anything that might make it worse. Their tactic is to attack the science and suppress the evidence. The New Scientist (3rd February 2007) claims this is happening with the support of the US government, and that lobbyists who used to deny the danger of smoking are now attacking the climate scientists.

Not a reassuring prospect.

The Book

2007-02-01T11:30:00.000Z

My book, "Will climate change your life? How to drive a 4x4 and still save the planet" will be published on 26th February.

Click here to find out more and to receive a free copy of my e-book "Europe's Energy Conundrum - the next 10 years."

Peak Oil - a Cuban case study

2007-02-01T11:23:00.000Z

In January I spent two weeks in Cuba, and before I went I saw the video “The Power of Community – how Cuba survived Peak Oil” (www.communitysolution.org/cuba )

Cuba suffered an economic shock when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990. For the previous 30 years it had been receiving substantial support, including technical assistance and cheap oil in exchange for sugar. All this stopped almost overnight. For the same 30 years the United States has operated a trade embargo and travel ban against Cuba, and this continues to the present day.

Cuba has some oil of its own, though not nearly enough for transport, electricity generation and – crucially – fertiliser and pesticide production. At the time of the Soviet collapse Cuba was using more fertiliser per acre than the US; agricultural production fell dramatically. Food rationing was introduced but the population began to suffer from malnutrition. The film shows how large state farms were broken up into individual co-operatives and how every spare piece of land in the cities was turned over to growing vegetables. With no fertiliser, agriculture had to be organic, and with no fuel for tractors, oxen and horses returned to the land. Farming became labour-intensive; more and more people became farmers.

In the early 90s power cuts were common - lasting up to 24 hours. If people could get to work (and transport was severely disrupted) they often had nothing to do because there was no power. It's only in the last few years that electricity cuts have largely disappeared. The solution has come in three ways. First, the ageing national grid has been superseded to a large extent by building a lot of neighbourhood generators to replace the few large power stations and the nuclear station that the soviets never finished. (Not CHP - in that climate you just don't need the heat!) Secondly the government has managed demand, and you don't see filament bulbs anywhere - they're all CFLs. There is also a programme to replace domestic appliances with more efficient ones. (But Cuba is a poor country, and the volume of domestic appliances must be small.) Thirdly, Fidel - or Raoul - is now big chums with Hugo Chavez in Venezuela which has lots of oil. (This is fortunate, as all generating plants, large and small, seem to be oil -fuelled.) Cuba has sent 20,000 doctors to Venezuela and receives oil in return. I've not been able to determine whether this is as much as Russia used to provide.

There is still a transport problem exacerbated both by oil shortages and by the lack of spare parts for vehicles. Mass transit is just that: people packed into goods lorries. Government vehicles of all kinds are expected to take hitch-hikers, and yellow-uniformed hitchhike co-ordinators are stationed at the side of the road to ensure that they do. Cuba was one of the first Latin-American countries to have railways. They are still there, but like the roads they are long overdue for repairs and maintenance.

So has Cuba successfully survived Peak Oil? The country certainly suffered an oil shock with far-reaching consequences, and while things are better than they were in the early 90s people say that things are still not what they were before the Soviet Union collapsed. The on-going US embargo has continued to make things difficult, though ironically Cuba still buys millions of dollars of food from the US, and Cuban expats in the States also send about $1billion back home each year. With only 11m people in 111,000 km2, [UK 60m – 242,000km2] the country has the potential to be self-sufficient in agriculture, but the command economy has been unable to achieve this. The 2006 Annual Economic Review notes that MPs at the Economic Committee complain of labour discipline problems which lead to low productivity, corruption and squandering.

Do we have a lesson for the rest of the world? The world will suffer similar problems from Peak Oil, but it is unlikely that they will arise quite as suddenly as they did in Cuba. The most important difference is that Cuba has replaced its Russian oil, at least to some extent, with Venezuelan oil. The world doesn't have such an option.

On a global scale, when the oil's gone, it's gone!

Peak Oil

2006-12-20T16:51:00.001Z

Peak Oil is the point at which global oil producution reaches its maximum, and from there on it's all downhill. With oil demand continuing to grow, the only consequences can be shortages and rapidly increasing prices. Peak Oil is predicted by some (based on experience and scientific analysis) to occur in 2010.

An excellent site on this subject is http://www.powerswitch.org.uk

It might make you think, it might make you worry; but if we have an understanding of what the likely problems will be, we can at least prepare for them.

The Biofuel debate

2006-12-15T11:52:00.000Z

The Independent published my letter yesterday and today there was a response from Nigel Clarke of York. (I live in York, too.)

His point was that the energy value from an acre of biofuel crop was much less than the energy value of food grown on the same area.

Carbon or Carbon dioxide?

2006-12-13T10:58:00.000Z

Apparently the UK emits 2% of the world’s CO2 or 150 million tonnes. I was confused when I saw an advertisement from the Carbon Trust talking about 648 million tonnes, so I phoned them up and then sent the following email.

“Your advertisement in today's Independent talks about annual CO2 emissions of 648m tonnes, while the DTI report "The Energy Challenge" quotes 150m tonnes. One of your customer advisors pointed out that your figure is for CO2 but the DTI figure is the carbon component only. If we take the atomic weight of carbon at 12 and oxygen at 16,carbon accounts for 12/44 of the weight of CO2, or 27%.

"Dividing 150 by 27% gives 550, not 650. Is your figure for CO2, or have you included other greenhouse gases as well? I'm about to publish a book on this, so I need to know the right answer!”

Here’s their reply:

“Dear Mr. Day,

"The figures cover carbon emissions from fuel use and so do not include carbon emissions from other processes or emissions of other greenhouse gases.

"The figure of 648 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (equivalent to 176.4 million tonnes of carbon) is the total UK carbon emission consumption.
This is different from the UK carbon emission production. Our figures differ from the 2002 UK Production Footprint, produced by Defra in 3 key
ways:
* Ours includes aviation fuel use;
* We use slightly higher water transport figures; and
* Our report talks about UK consumption and so includes carbon
emissions from products produced overseas and brought to the UK for consumption (e.g. Chinese T-shirts and German cars). For consistency, our figure excludes emissions from products and services which are produced in the UK but which are then sent overseas for consumption (e.g. Scotch Whisky sent to the Far East). The UK is a net importer of products and services and so our consumption footprint is higher than our production footprint as a consequence.

"There is a breakdown of these differences on page 22 of our report 'The carbon emissions generated in all that we consume', which is available from the Carbon Trust website at this link.

"Note: The figures presented in this report are in terms of carbon not carbon dioxide.”

A clear and comprehensive answer. So now we know!

Green Motoring for Christmas

2006-12-11T10:37:00.000Z

I saw this in the Private Eye Christmas Gift guide and just had to share it. Do you know a 4x4 driver with a conscience? This is just the thing for their stocking!

Biofuels - the truth!

2006-12-10T12:47:00.000Z

Here's a letter I've just sent to the Independent:

"It’s time to nail the lie that bio-fuels are carbon-neutral. (Brown’s ‘green’ tax changes hit biofuel, 8th November) Growing crops for bio-fuel absorbs the carbon that bio-fuels emit, but it does not remove the emissions created in planting, fertilising, harvesting, transporting and processing these crops before they can be made into fuel.
Bio-fuels are not green. The EU demands that 5.75% of all road fuel should be biofuel by next year but we will have to import the crops to meet this target because Europe does not have enough agricultural land. In Brazil they cut down the rain forest to grow more sugar cane for ethanol; in Malaysia they cut down the rain forest to grow oil palms; in the US they subsidise the production of ethanol from wheat and maize, leaving less grain surpluses for needy nations.
The truth is that in the face of climate change and energy shortages we are desperately seeking substitute fuels so that we can continue our present lifestyles. It is time we managed energy demand rather than assuming we will always be able to expand supply. We must plan for fundamental changes; otherwise the imminent oil shock, gas shock, electricity shock and very-cold-houses shock really will be a shock."

How green is Brown?

2006-12-07T14:58:00.000Z

New green taxes were expected in yesterday's pre-budget statement, and when they came they upset the environmental lobby and everyone else as well.

Sir Nicholas Stern's recent report on the costs of climate change said that every country should devote 1% of GDP to combating climate change, but the new taxes are estimated to cover little more than a tenth of that. We saw an increase in petrol duy of 1.25p/litre and a doubling of air passenger duty. Stamp duty will also be abolished on "zero carbon-emission" homes for a limited period. This will apparently encourage more to be built, though there will be no immediate benefit from the new rules because there is no stamp duty on new homes, only on the sale of existing properties. Apparently such homes could save 8m tonnes of carbon per annum by 2050; not a great deal compared with the UK's total annual emissions of 150m tonnes.

The petrol duty was seen as not nearly enough by Greenpeace. They wanted the Chancellor to bring back the "fuel escalator" which added regualr increases to the price until the government abandoned it in 2000 in the face of the fuel protests which blockaded refineries. Transport organisations said the increase was unjustified as it would simply put up the prices of everything in the shops. There was criticism of the air passenger levy as well: it would not stop people flying but simply cost them more.

The whole problem with green taxes is surely that if people pay them, the policy has failed. If taxes are supposed to stop people doing things that will harm the environment they will only work if people have an alternative. Otherwise, it's just gesture politics and another way of getting money out of people!

Download my presentation

2006-11-30T18:11:00.000Z

Next week I shall be talking to a conference organised by the Institute of Actuaries. My theme is, of course, "Will climate change your life?" and I shall also be looking at the prospects and problems of the energy crisis.

If all goes well, the presentation will be available for download as an MP3 file here. Look for it from Tuesday 5th December.

End of the road for hydrogen?

2006-11-30T18:06:00.000Z

With climate change on everyone’s mind and rumours of an energy crisis, what could be better than a car which doesn’t run on fossil fuels and has no emissions except water? BMW’s new Hydrogen 7 fits the bill. This is the V-12 BMW 7 modified to run on hydrogen. It has a petrol tank as well; it also runs on petrol, which is handy if you are far from the UK’s only hydrogen filling station – one of only six in the world.
Of course, if hydrogen catches on there will be filling stations all over the country, won’t there?
Hydrogen cars sound ideal, but there are practical problems. First, the hydrogen tank takes eight minutes to fill and it takes up most of the boot space. Even then, the hydrogen tank provides a range of only 125 miles. To get enough hydrogen into the fuel tank it has to be chilled and liquefied. Gradually it warms up and boils away, so if you don’t use the car over the weekend you’ll find less in the tank. Park up at the airport while you take your three-week holiday and when you get back it’ll be nearly empty.
The fact that the hydrogen has to boil off for safety reasons may be why hydrogen vehicles are illegal in France. Even over here you are advised not to park the vehicle in an enclosed car park. You cannot see hydrogen, you cannot smell it and it burns with an invisible flame. Like petrol vapour, when mixed with air it is highly explosive. At least you can smell petrol.
Where does hydrogen come from? It is either extracted from natural gas or electrolysed by passing a current through water. Extracting hydrogen from natural gas leaves carbon dioxide, which must be captured – otherwise the process produces as much CO2 emissions as if you had just burnt the gas. Electrolysis produces no CO2, but it does produce a lot of waste heat so the energy content of the hydrogen is significantly less than the energy of the electricity used. Electricity itself comes from coal, oil or nuclear, and the electricity produced is also much less than the fuel put into the generation process. Producing hydrogen this way is very inefficient.
All these factors make it very doubtful that hydrogen will be the fuel of the future. As we approach Peak Oil and petrol becomes more and more expensive, economies and cutting back on our travel will be the only solution.

How will you change your lifestyle when petrol costs £5/litre?

The end of oil?

2006-11-21T15:39:00.000Z

Among all the media fuss we get about climate change, very occasionally we get a hint that there might be problems with energy on the horizon. The British government published an energy review earlier this year, which led to a lot of fuss about whether or not we were going to build more nuclear power stations, and whether we would be consulted about or not. Actually, although nuclear provides 21% of the UK's energy, that's only about 7% of total energy demand. As far as transport is concerned, nuclear is relevant only to electric trains or trams and the very few electric road vehicles that exist, because nuclear only provides energy in the form of electricity. (The day they build a nuclear car I'll give up driving!)

The truth is that the world is facing an energy shortage - not just electricity, but oil, gas and, to a lesser extent, coal. The UK in particular has changed in a generation from a nation totally self-sufficent in energy to one importing over 50% of its coal, 5% of its oil and 10% of its gas. Gas is the fuel we use most of, and by 2020 we will be importing about 90%.

Peak Oil is the point where the world reaches the maximum possible level of oil production. Peak Gas is the same for gas. The US reached its own peak in 1970; the North Sea has also passed its peak. Peak Oil for the whole world is expected in 2010. That's right - 3 years away! That won't be the end of oil, of course, just of cheap oil. We're used to paying more each year. We can cope with 95p/litre or £5/gallon. How would £10/gallon affect you - or £20? The truth is that the level of rises we can expect will demand radical life-style changes. Today you may drive a 4x4 (SUV) because you can afford it; in 10 years many people may not be able to run a car at all.

What started me thinking about this was the new report from LogicaCMG published today: "Mind the Gap" You can find it at http://www.logicacmg.com/United_Kingdom/5012

At least someone is at last taking our energy position seriously! Also have a look at the link for ASPO - theAssociation for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas.

So will climate change your life?

2006-11-06T15:53:00.000Z

The answer seems to be "Yes! Immediately! In all sorts of terrible ways! We must act NOW!"
Maybe. I've created this blog because I believe that people are in danger of overstating the case. I don't deny we've got a problem, I just don't believe that we can be so specific about what it is, and what we can do about it.
I think we're ignoring a bigger and more immediate problem - Peak Oil. Peak Oil is where the oil begins to run out - where the price goes up and we go short. And the price goes on going up. I predict that we'll see $100/barrel by Christmas, and that will just be the start. At least if we can't afford to start our cars we won't be emitting any CO2!

What do you think about global warming and climate change? Is it the biggest threat to human civilisation, or "the biggest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people" ?