Friday, October 06, 2017

Planet B


It’s happened again.

Another mindless attack on innocent people. This is the Sustainable Futures Report. It's about sustainability, but I cannot ignore these dreadful events. In the relatively short time since I’ve been doing a weekly Report there have been attacks in Orlando, Paris, Brussels, Manchester, Marseilles and Las Vegas. Let’s remember all those who died, those who were injured and the many more who will have been touched by the loss of of a family member or a friend. Let’s not forget either, those who have suffered the hurricanes across the southern states of America and the Caribbean, those suffering from floods and storms in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, from earthquakes in Mexico, from famine in West Africa and from conflict and disease in Yemen and the Middle East.
Whatever the cause of all these disasters, let’s unite to stand together against these challenges.


Hello I’m Anthony Day and this is the Sustainable Futures Report for Friday 6th of October in a sobering world. 
First a welcome and thanks to my patrons and special thanks to John Cossham who has just signed up at patreon.com/sfr as a Silver Supporter. He gets a badge, this shout-out “Hi John!” And answers to any sustainability questions he may have. Welcome John Cossham of York.

This week:
    • Plan B.Earth and why another group is out to sue the government
    • No fracking in Scotland
    • Why London’s mayor is putting out fires
    • Energy from evaporation 
    • Electric planes
    • More on drinking straws
    • Why the diesel market is all at sea
    • Let’s bring back heavy metal
    • And Drawdown. Is this the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming?

Plan B
The aim of the government, as set out in the Climate Change Act, is to cut carbon emissions by 80% of 1990 levels by 2050. That looks hard enough, but former chief scientific advisor Professor Sir David King says that the target needs to be 100% to avoid disaster. He’s supporting a small organisation, Plan B.Earth, which argues that Business Secretary Greg Clark is obliged under the act to tighten targets if the science shows it is needed. Plan B.Earth believes that tighter targets are clearly needed, because even if all signatories to the Paris Agreement fulfil their pledges, global temperatures will rise well above 2℃. Even 2℃ is no solution, they claim, and if they receive no response from the government they will go to law. Former government lawyer Tim Crosland, who will lead the legal action, says "If scientists are telling us our current course of emissions potentially takes us to catastrophe, then to stick to the current course is irrational.
"The best available science tells us the risks of crossing tipping points rise very sharply between 1.5℃ and 2℃. And that means the UK cutting emissions to zero.”
Sir David King supports the legal action telling the BBC: 'This is crazy. The Government knows very well what needs to be done but isn't doing it. If it takes legal action to force ministers to behave properly, then so be it – I'll support it.’
Client Earth, another group of campaigning lawyers which has repeatedly prosecuted the government for failing to meet clean air targets, also supports the move.

How can we cut emissions? 
Two news items this week show small steps forward.
It’s timely that this week the Scottish government announced that its moratorium on fracking would be extended indefinitely. This is a good thing not just because of fears of contaminated water tables, escaping methane, expanding road traffic or pollution ponds, but because the objective of fracking is to produce fossil fuels. If we are to avoid climate breakdown, the last thing we should be investing in is new fossil fuel resources.
Meanwhile in England, where preparations for fracking continue, more demonstrators at a site in North Yorkshire were arrested.
Open Fires
Open fires are becoming more and more popular, helped by the controversial belief that burning wood is balanced out by new trees grown elsewhere to replace it. Whether or not this is true - and it takes many years of careful management to grow the amount of timber burnt in an afternoon - in the short term carbon dioxide is released as the wood burns, and polluting particulates - soot - are blown into the atmosphere as well. This is an increasing problem in London, which already has some of the worst air quality in the UK. It is estimated that between a quarter and a third of all of London’s fine-particle pollution comes from domestic wood burning. In January, during a period of very high air pollution, it contributed half the toxic emissions in some areas of the capital, according to King’s College London research.
Now London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has written to the Environment Secretary demanding increased powers which will allow him to ban domestic wood-burning stoves as well as control emissions from river craft and from plant on construction sites.
Clean air craft
And what about pollution from aircraft? London’s Heathrow airport is one of the most polluted sites in Europe, but easyJet announced this week that they could be flying electric planes on short-haul routes in Europe within 10 years. They are working with Wright Electric of the US to develop a prototype, and the plan is eventually to build a plane that can take 120 passengers from London to Amsterdam, Berlin to Vienna or Geneva to Paris solely on electric power. I wonder if they will recharge the batteries in the plane, or just put in a new set, to minimise turn-round time.
Other companies are talking about hybrid electric planes with a range of up to 700 miles. It’s a long way ahead of Solar Impulse 2 which flew round the world last year totally on electric power, but took about 6 months to do it.
I recommend you look at 
…which has a full account and short video of easyJet’s recent innovation day. As always, full links to all these stories are on the blog at www.sustainablefutures.report 
Evaporation Energy
What we’ll need more of if we are to achieve zero carbon emissions and power these planes is more clean energy. The latest story is about energy from evaporation. Writing in the journal Nature Communications, researchers at Columbia University estimated that lakes in the US could generate 325 gigawatts of power, equivalent to about 70 per cent of the country’s total electricity generation. Professor Ozgur Sahin, a biophysicist involved in the research, has developed one kind of ‘evaporation engine’, which works by using the movement of bacteria in response to changes in humidity.
Shutters either open or close to control moisture levels, prompting bacterial spores to expand or contract. This motion is then transferred to a generator and turned into electricity.
He warned, however, that harnessing this source of energy could affect water quality, recreation on lakes and other “freshwater resources”. Maybe not quite clean enough.


Talking of pollution…
…you’ll remember that I reported last week on how plastic straws are a problem. They nearly all get thrown into landfill because they are too fiddly to separate out for recycling. And in the US they use - and throw away - more than 500m each day.
Here’s a comment from an insider at a national restaurant chain in the UK.
“Yes, we're working on a few things in this area.  We would have to acknowledge that our self-service style means that we had a comparatively flattering starting position with straws - customers have always had the choice as to whether or not they would like one.  We've never foisted straws upon customers unlike Wetherspoons or Byron.
From there we have been running a trial in about 15 restaurants for two periods whereby we have withdrawn straws from the self service stands and customers need to ask if they'd really like one.  Unsurprisingly, this has led to an 84% reduction of usage with very few obvious grumbles.
We're also investigating paper straws.  They would cost more than ten times our current plastic straws per unit and whilst we're comfortable that anything close to an 84% reduction in usage would make this near cost neutral, there are alarm bells ringing as to what sort of inputs do these paper straws have to be so expensive?  So, we're looking into the supply chain and energy inputs behind the straws.  We're also looking at biodegradable plastic straws made from plant cellulose but we haven't found a supplier who will commit to our volumes yet.  It may be a question of finding the right supplier, or it may be a more nuanced commercial arrangement whereby we help them financially with their volume problems.
Oh, ...and our head of sustainability literally already has the Plastic Pollution Coalition "See Turtle" t-shirt!”

#BringBackHeavyMetal 
Have you any used batteries lying around? Apparently there are 178 million in the UK which don’t work any more, but no-one’s got round to disposing of them. 52% of us send them to landfill and only 47% of us realise that these batteries contain valuable heavy metals which can be reused. Or which could cause pollution if sent to landfill. That’s lead, cadmium, zinc, manganese, lithium and mercury. #BringBackHeavyMetal is a joint venture between Ecosurety and Hubbub.
Ecosurety is one of the UK's fastest-growing producer responsibility compliance schemes, with over 1,000 clients and big plans to continue driving change and progress towards a circular economy.
Hubbub says: “We’re a charity that creates environmental campaigns with a difference. We're positive and design playful campaigns that inspire people to make healthier, greener lifestyle choices, which more often than not help save money and bring people together.”
So seek out those batteries and get recycling. And while you’re about it, is that an old mobile phone at the back of the drawer? You’ll probably get money for that, someone else might be able use it or if not there’s metal in that which could be recycled too. I’m sure you reduce and reuse. Why not make this week your recycling week!


Drawdown. 
Is this the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming? Thanks to patron Lucas Smith for telling me about this.
Drawdown is a big book both in terms of physical size and in terms of ambition. If you go to drawdown.org you’ll find that there’s a great deal more to it than a book.
Editor Paul Hawken writes, “In 2001 I began asking experts in climate and environmental fields a question: ‘Do we know what we need to do in order to arrest and reverse global warming?’ I thought they could provide a shopping list. I wanted to know the most effective solutions that were already in place, and the impact they could have if scaled. I also wanted to know the price tag. My contacts replied that such an inventory did not exist, but all agreed it would be a great checklist to have…”
Drawdown the idea, is the point at which the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere peaks and starts to fall. Drawdown the book, is a detailed analysis of how global warming can be slowed and reversed. It covers energy, food, women and girls, buildings and cities, land use, transport and materials. It is the work of more than 60 research fellows, supported by essayists, staff, a board of directors and funders, donors and supporters. Drawdown is an independent non-profit organisation. It is based in California but takes an international perspective. I’m surprised I’d not heard of it before. I recommend you look at drawdown.org. I’m sure I’ll be talking about Drawdown again in the future as I read further into it.

And finally…
Last week I reported that Greenpeace were campaigning against the makers of Velvet luxury toilet tissue and accusing them of using timber from ancient forests for their product. The company, Essity, has reacted angrily and you can find their response on their website. Needless to say, Greenpeace hasn’t given up. More on their website too.
And finally, finally…
Why is the diesel market all at sea? Well the market for diesel cars has collapsed since the VW pollution scandal and at the same the standards for fuel oil used by ships have been tightened up. Given that refineries are built with a particular pattern of demand in mind any changes in demand are very difficult, and costly, to meet. Strangely these two current problems may go some way to cancel each other out. For a fascinating insight into how it all works I recommend that you read James Spencer’s September Oil Market Report. You’ll find it at: 

And that’s it for another week. 
I’m Anthony Day. 
That was the Sustainable Futures Report. 
Remember, the Sustainable Futures Report is brought to you without advertising, sponsorship or subsidy, but if you like what I do you can help me cover my costs by becoming a patron for as little as $1 per month at patreon.com/sfr . John Cossham did - thanks John! And thanks to all my other patrons for staying with me. 

See you next week!
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, September 29, 2017

The Truth

Welcome

Hello and welcome once again to the Sustainable Futures Report. I’m Anthony Day and it’s Friday 29th September.
Welcome to you all, welcome to my patrons and a particular welcome to those of you in Australia. After the US and the UK, the largest number of listeners seems to be in Australia, closely followed by Canada. Hello to you in Canada as well. I’ll be in Australia in December, so just supposing I’ll be in your part of the country let me know if you’d like to get together for a chat about sustainability. Contact me about that or about anything else sustainable at mail@anthony-day.com.
This Week
The Met Office says the slowdown in global warming is over, but does everyone believe it? Is climate change a really urgent issue? Carbonbrief takes issue with the Daily Mail over this. Are we doing enough recycling? The Marine Conservation Society sees straws in the wind, but sadly they’re plastic. The British government announces a Green Finance Taskforce. Haven’t I heard of something like that before? And then there’s the Green Supply Chain. Listen up before you eat that chocolate! Sustainability, or at least renewable energy, seems to be becoming a political football down under, and they’re growing salads down underground. Hot news from the Sahara on the energy front. Energy from there might help us replace all those diesel cars which got another bad press this week. Or maybe we’ll get it from a new solar plant, plus batteries, just commissioned nearer to home.
And would you rather trust Boris or Matilda?
The Truth
The truth is not always clear and may often not be what people want to hear. It's been said before that constantly repeating a lie doesn't make it true. The sad fact though, is that constantly repeating a lie makes some people more ready to accept it as truth. Last week the UK Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson, repeated the claim that after Brexit there would be an extra £350 million, some of which  could be spent on the National Health Service. This claim was originally made during the Brexit referendum campaign and strongly disputed. This time it was described as an ‘egregious misuse of statistics’ by the head of the Office of National Statistics, Sir David Norgrove, but there are still many people prepared to believe it. 
https://www.ft.com/content/c6f647d2-9c66-11e7-8cd4-932067fbf946
Last week the Daily Mail claimed that: “Fear of global warming is exaggerated, say scientists: Experts now have longer to reduce amount of fossil fuels we burn”. This was not a lie, but it was a misunderstanding of the facts which, incidentally, fitted the Daily Mail’s agenda. It was based on an article in Nature Geoscience, and the authors responded angrily via carbonbrief.org to complain that it was a total misrepresentation. Looking at the comments on the Mail website, many people took the article as gospel and further proof in their eyes that climate change is a hoax. They are unlikely to read about the carbonbrief.org response in the pages of the Mail. If they do track down the report they will find that it is a complex piece of work, and that the full document is behind a paywall.
My point is that if you believe, as I do, that sustainability and climate change and all the related issues are important and require urgent action it’s very difficult to get the message across. Quite apart from politicians and the mainstream press each with their own axes to grind, we now have social media and fake news and stories crossing the world and read by millions in minutes without provenance, proof or verified facts. Fake news frequently hits the headlines. Expert corrections hardly ever do.
Sir David Attenborough was quoted this week saying: “All we have to do is keep declaring the facts as we see the facts, and producing the evidence whenever we can”
Quite.

There’s No Slowing Down
Meanwhile, the Met Office reports that while a slowdown in the rise of average global temperature had been observed in the recent temperature record, with the last three record years, this slowdown has ceased. The slowdown in global warming is over. Professor Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office Hadley Centre, said that with 2015 and 2016 exceeding the 1°C threshold above pre-industrial Global Mean Surface Temperature, there was increasing pressure on limiting global warming to a 1.5 °C warming threshold, as agreed in Paris in 2015. So far 2017 has also exceeded the 1 °C threshold, although the Met Office has forecast that 2017 is unlikely to be a record-breaking year as temperatures this year have not been influenced by El Niño conditions.

The Last Straw
There’s been a lot of comment about plastic pollution and particularly plastic bottles recently. The plastic pollution coalition is now campaigning against plastic drinking straws. Plastic straws have the same problems as other plastics. They’re persistent, and unless they have been burnt every straw that was ever made still exists somewhere on earth. Plastic straws are too small and fiddly to be collected up for recycling so they tend to be sent to landfill or just thrown away. It’s estimated that more than 500m of them are used in the US every day. That’s nearly two for every man, woman and child in that country, but when you think about it, many drinks are served with two straws whether you ask for them or not. The key question then is do you need two straws, or any straws, in your drink? If you really do, biodegradable straws are available. Of course they are more expensive, but what price the environment?
UK pub chain JD Wetherspoon has confirmed that from January 2018, all its 900 pubs across the UK and Ireland will no longer use single-use plastic straws. They will only add a straw if specifically requested - and then it will be a biodegradable one.
 http://www.plasticpollutioncoalition.org/no-straw-please/

Water Plants
An update on hydroponics. I featured Bowery Farming in New York earlier this month. They have developed a vertical farm in an industrial unit to grow salads in totally controlled conditions. They can guarantee quality and minimise delivery distances because they are close to their customers in the city.
Now I’ve come across Growing Underground, which is producing salad crops in a similar way in disused railway tunnels in Clapham, southwest London. It seems to be an altogether bigger operation, with a wider range of products and customers. They offer to supply wholesale through New Covent Garden Market and plan to make their produce available through Ocado and other online retailers from January 2018. 
Is this the future of agriculture? It certainly has its attractions. The yield per acre can be greater than traditional agriculture, pests can be excluded, nutrients can be accurately delivered to each plant and any agricultural run-off can be managed long before it gets anywhere near the water table. But when you consider the need to feed 7.4bn people world wide, and the reliance on major crops like wheat and rice which are unsuited to hydroponics, industrialised salad production will probably only ever be a niche product, albeit an important one.

Meanwhile, Down Under…
Turning to politics, the Guardian newspaper reports that former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott says that dumping clean energy targets would help the Coalition win the next election. Abbott has campaigned on energy issues before, and used it as an issue to defeat rival Julia Gillard in a previous election. His chief of staff admits: “Along comes a carbon tax. It wasn’t a carbon tax, as you know. It was many other things in nomenclature terms but we made it a carbon tax,” Peta Credlin told Sky News in February 2017. “We made it a fight about the hip pocket and not about the environment. That was brutal retail politics and it took Abbott about six months to cut through and, when he cut through, Gillard was gone.” Surely some things are too important to play politics with. The average Australian has one of the largest carbon footprints in the world. Not likely to change any time soon. 

…and At Home…
By contrast, this week the British government announced its Green Finance Taskforce. It says:
“To build on the UK’s global leadership in the sector, BEIS and HMT will be co-hosting a Green Finance Taskforce that will bring together senior leaders from the financial sector. This Taskforce will work with industry to accelerate the growth of green finance, and help us deliver the investment required to meet the UK’s carbon reduction targets. The Terms of Reference will be published following the first meeting in late September.
• Proposals announced today [18th September 2017] will build on the UK’s global leadership, including development of world’s first green financial management standards with the British Standards Institute.
• The transition to a low carbon economy offers Britain a multi-billion pound investment opportunity, creating high-value jobs and boosting exports.

But didn’t we use to have a Green Investment Bank? Oh yes, but the government sold it to the Australians.

Outlook Sunny for Energy
In Tunisia a company has just filed a request in the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Renewable Energy for the authorisation of a 4.5GW solar energy export project destined to fuel Europe. It’s a solar farm in the Sahara Desert.
The technology that will be used is Concentrated Solar Power (CSP), using parabolic mirrors to heat a tower containing molten salt that in turn heats water to generate steam to run a turbine- a technology that has seen significant cost reductions in the past few years. The beauty of using molten salt is that it’s a heat store, so the station can produce clean energy 24/7. I suspect that the mirrors will be cheaper and longer-lasting than PV panels and using molten salt as an energy store is likely to be much cheaper than using batteries. 
The plan is to deliver the power by submarine interconnector cable to Malta, and then to France. There may also be a direct link from Tunisia to Italy.

A more conventional solar farm opened in the UK this week, billed as the UK’s first subsidy-free solar power plant. It’s in Bedfordshire, has photovoltaic panels with a capacity of 10MW and 6MW of batteries.

Cleaning Cars
Diesel cars came in for criticism again this week. We’re well aware of the efforts of VW and others to falsify emissions test results by using specially programmed engine management software. Now there are complaints that the official tests are unrelated to real-world driving conditions. Independent testing has shown that some cars in slow-moving traffic can emit up to 118% more nitrogen oxides than their official rating. So is the electric car, maybe running on solar energy from the Sahara, the answer?

Time to Tip?
Mining company BHP-Billiton said this week that 2017 would be the tipping point for electric cars. They predicted 140,000,000 electric vehicles would be on the world’s roads by 2035. Interesting for them, because electric cars use four times as much copper as internal combustion cars. But this 140m is still only about 8% of the world’s vehicles, which sounds an unambitious number if we are going to meet global emissions targets.
And where are we going to get these electric cars from? James Dyson, the vacuum cleaner man, said this week that he was investing £1bn in developing an electric car and had another £1bn for the manufacturing plant. His car would compete with the Tesla and come to market in 2020.
Do you remember the last vacuum cleaner company which manufactured electric cars? Hoover built the C5 for Sir Clive Sinclair. I wonder what happened to them. 
https://www.forbes.com/sites/neilwinton/2017/09/27/dysons-electric-car-plans-prompt-more-questions-than-answers/#36f0ba867fc5 

More on the Green Supply Chain
I’ve spoken in the past about conflict minerals - tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold: the 3TGs. They come from violent areas of the world, sometimes from mines guarded by child soldiers, and end up in our smartphones and other electronic devices. At least they did, but the major manufacturers have committed to do everything they can to end this trade, although traceability is not yet perfect. Depending on supplies which in turn depend on violence and exploitation is not good business and not good PR. That’s why it’s important to keep your supply chain as green as possible.
There are now doubts over the integrity of the supply chains for completely different  industries. Not about violence and exploitation, but about environmental damage. The first case is chocolate. The major producers of cocoa beans are Ghana and Ivory Coast in West Africa. 
Ivory Coast is losing its forests at a faster rate than any other African country – less than 4% of the country is covered in rainforest. Once, one quarter of the country was covered in rainforest. Farmers are cutting down the trees and planting cocoa beans. They are cutting the trees down gradually so as to leave shade for the new plants, but the deforested areas are getting gradually bigger. Without shade the cocoa plants cannot survive, so after a very few years the land becomes useless and may be on the way to desertification. Gone is the forest which preserved wildlife and acted as a carbon sink. It sounds trite to say “Once it’s gone it’s gone,” but it’s no less true for all that. The chocolate companies say they are aware of the situation and are doing their best to avoid unsustainable supplies. Are they doing enough?

Greenpeace is campaigning. Whenever was it not? This week it’s about toilet paper. They claim that the supply chain of manufacturer Essity extends into the Great Northern Forest, a massive area of woodland extending from Scandinavia to China and easternmost Asia and across the northern regions of North America. According to a report by Greenpeace, Essity is sourcing timber from protected parts of this forest in northern Sweden for the manufacture of Velvet luxury toilet tissue. While the Velvet brand claims to be environmentally responsible by planting three trees for each one felled, Greenpeace says that by planting non-native species it is destroying the wild-life habitat and in turn threatening the survival of the tribes which live in these remote northern regions. A luxury for some means the future for others is just being flushed away.
Oh, and apparently Velvet isn’t the only brand implicated in this.
As always, there are links on the blog at www.sustainablefutures.report so you can read the background to these stories. 



We are coming to the end of this week’s episode of the Sustainable Futures Report. I'm Anthony Day and I'd like to thank you for listening. If you’d like to show your appreciation don't forget Patreon. Go to patreon.com/sfr to find out more.
And finally…
I asked at the beginning of this episode whether you would rather trust Boris or Matilda. “Who’s this Matilda?” you ask. Victorian poet Hilaire Belloc explains.

Matilda told such Dreadful Lies, 
It made one Gasp and Stretch one’s Eyes;
Her Aunt, who, from her Earliest Youth, 
Had kept a Strict Regard for Truth, 
Attempted to believe Matilda: 
The effort very nearly killed her
And would have done so, had not she 
Discovered this Infirmity. 
For once, towards the Close of Day,
Matilda, growing tired of play, 
And finding she was left alone, 
Went tiptoe to the telephone 
And summoned the Immediate Aid 
Of London’s Noble Fire-Brigade. 
Within an hour the Gallant Band 
Were pouring in on every hand, 
From Putney, Hackney Downs and Bow, 
With Courage high and Hearts a-glow 
They galloped, roaring though the Town, 
"Matilda’s House is Burning Down" 
Inspired by British Cheers and Loud 
Proceeding from the Frenzied Crowd, 
They ran their ladders through a score 
Of windows on the Ball Room Floor; 
And took Peculiar Pains to Souse 
The Pictures up and down the House, 
Until Matilda’s Aunt succeeded 
In showing them they were not needed 
And even then she had to pay 
To get the Men to go away! . . . . . 
It happened that a few Weeks later 
Her aunt was off to the Theatre 
To see that Interesting Play 
The Second Mrs. Tanqueray. 
She had refused to take her Niece 
To hear this Entertaining Piece: 
A Deprivation Just and Wise 
To Punish her for Telling Lies.
That Night a Fire did break out- 
You should have heard Matilda Shout! 
You should have heard her Scream and Bawl, 
And throw the window up and call 
To People passing in the Street- 
(The rapidly increasing Heat 
Encouraging her to obtain 
Their confidence)-but all in vain! 
For every time she shouted "Fire!" 
They only answered "Little Liar!" 
And therefore when her Aunt returned, 
Matilda, and the House, were burned.

A cautionary tale. Be sure your lies will find you out.

Till next time!
Posted by at No comments:

Friday, September 22, 2017

The Four-Ton Life

Find the Sustainable Futures Report  on iTunes or here.

It’s Friday 22nd September, I’m Anthony Day and this is the Sustainable Futures Report. Welcome to listeners across the world and a special mention to my patrons. If you too would like to be a patron, please keep listening.
This week’s episode is devoted to an interview. My guest today is Professor Karl S. Coplan who is professor of law at the Pace University, White Plains, New York and he's also director of the Environmental Litigation Clinic. Karl enjoys an American lifestyle on a four-ton carbon budget. Among other things he’s going to tell us how he does it.
Before we start, just a word of warning. In this interview you’ll hear Karl refer to carbonfootprint-dot-org. Unfortunately that appears  to be a malicious site. The one you want is carbonfootprint.com. 

ANTHONY: Karl thank you very much for joining us today. Would you like to start off by telling us a bit about your work at the Environmental Litigation Clinic.?
KARL: The Environmental Litigation Clinic is part of Pace Law School and we train law students to be lawyers and perform a public service by basically having them take on environmental enforcement cases and pollution control cases on behalf of our primary client which is the Hudson River keeper. And so, our primary focus is been cleaning up the Hudson river and a lot of cases enforcing the Clean Water Act against industries and municipalities that were operating in violation of the permits; cleaning up hazardous waste sites, but I’m also involved in larger planning issues; power-plant issues, anything that affects the water quality and the recreational opportunity in the community of the Hudson river basically.
And then through that I've been involved and the clinic has worked with other water keeper organizations around the country and around the world. Though our focus is in New York, we've involved in cases, involved mountain-top removal mining in Kentucky and even years ago on stopping the naval bombing exercises on the Island of Vieques in Puerto Rico. And so I'm also on the board of water keeper alliance and services treasure, so I work with water keeper organizations around the world.
ANTHONY: Okay, well there’s quite a wide range of things and I noticed from your page on the university website that you've done a lot of publications in quite a lot of different areas. We first got in touch when Kim Nicholas and Seth Wynes from the University of British Columbia published a guide to cutting your carbon footprint [see Sustainable Futures Report 21st July 2017] and they set out the four things that you should do which were;
  1. Have fewer children.
  2. Get rid of the car.
  3. Avoid air travel.
  4. And eat a plant-based diet.
Now that caused quite a lot of controversy and you certainly picked it up and you wrote about it on your blog which is livesustianablynow.com . Just back-track on that and explain to people that may not be aware of the controversy what that was all about?
KARL: Well, first off I think Kim Nicholas and Seth Wynes did a great public service by pointing out kind of how environmentalists and government agencies working on climate change are focusing too much on these small ticket items and ignoring the big ticket items. But where I disagree with them with a controversy is, as they came up with a number for the impact of having one child in a developed world which is just completely a fantasy and I'll explain why in a moment and way too high. And I think that's a disservice because people who care about climate change, but have not focused on the details and the numbers of how things compare. Look at this chart, I'm sure I printed it out, you probably cannot see it there, but there's a chart where that number for having one child is just enormous compared even to giving up air travel or giving up your car. And that’s misleading because that number they come up with 60 tonnes per year is not a real number, there's no year in which you add 60 tonnes by having one child.
Unfortunately, if it was simply have fewer children in the developed world, that might be one thing, but the implication seems to be that if you’re having any children at all right, even if it's your first child, that's somehow even more irresponsible than getting on a plane 12 times a year. And I think that actually disserves the climate cause because people outside the climate movement look at that and say; oh my God, these climate activists, they are telling us that we should just stop having children. So let's end civilization, let's have no more human beings on the planet, because that's the only way to solve climate change and forget about it because you're actually never going to be successful, you're never going to have a political movement that is based on ''have no children ever again''.
So I think that's really a disservice and it also makes it look if you actually haven't reduced your flying. So you're a childless person who hasn't reduced their flying, so see I'm better than the people who don't fly but have a child because their impacts are huge. But those impacts just have nothing to do with the actual underlying paper calculating the impacts of having one child in a developed world and are really misleading I mean it. It's a challenge actually when you're trying to get down to the numbers of your carbon footprint because at some level it becomes an accounting problem. You get on an airplane and some people say the impact of me getting on an airplane is zero because that airplane was flying anyway, which means that airplanes have no climate impact, but that's not true, we know it’s not true. And so they did an accounting trick in this chart which had a result of making the impact of one child many multiples of what it really is under any normal accounting process.
ANTHONY: Well, I did ask Kim Nicholas and Seth Wynes if they would appear, but they were unavailable. But we're all aiming at the same thing; we all want to cut carbon footprints, now you say that you can live well on a 4 ton carbon budget, which is quite ambitious really because the average American is pushing nearly 20-22 tons I think.
KARL: That's right.
ANTHONY: And a lot of people say “Oh, four tons, well that means you must be living in a tent by candlelight and eating grass”, but I don't think you are. But what do you do, how do you achieve this level?
KARL: I think actually if you're trying to reduce your carbon budget, it will be just like if you are trying to reduce how many calories you eat in a day. The best thing you can do is start keeping track and so when you make choices in life you know what the actual impact of that choice is and how that fits into your diet. If it's a calorie restricted diet or under your carbon budget if you’re trying to live on carbon budget. And so when I looked at it and drill down and really you can tell, I like to look behind the supervision numbers and see what's behind them. It became obvious to me that the big ticket items in my life before I started doing this were; getting to work on a regular basis, heating my house, electricity consumption and air travel. This has been, I can’t say I’ve one day had a big awakening, I've been environmentally conscious for decades, but it really came about 10 years ago; I went on sabbatical and started thinking and used the time to think a little about what could I do to improve my own footprint and that's when I kind of thought air travel is a big one. When I look at it at the end of the year, my 4 ton carbon budget, a quarter of that goes to heating my house with natural gas. And even that, now I've reduced it to about a ton, but a typical house in the New York area heated with natural gas even if you've got every energy efficiency improvement would actually work out to be more like 3 tons per person in the house.
And so I do some things, like I do keep the temperature lower in the house and I do supplement it with a wood stove, but that's one thing I can do. The other thing is, got rid of my gas powered car, actually for several years I didn't own a car at all, but about a year or two years ago now, believe it or not electric cars became so cheap. I know it's hard to hear me say that, but the little Smart car; I don't know if you've seen them, they were big in Europe before they came to the States.
ANTHONY: That's interesting because Smart launched an electric car and then they discontinued it, but now they've re-launched the Smart range as electrics. So you have one of those, one of the first ones?
KARL: I've got one of those and only it costs me $130 a month for a lease and it’s a wonderful little car and it has plenty of range to get to work and back. And then again, right now there are some really simple things to do that may cost you a little bit, actually don’t cost much at all. So I found out that many people put solar panels on their house; my house is in a wooded area so there’s not enough sunlight really to justify that and having them professionally installed. But you can get a renewable energy contract where basically buying the energy from in my case wind generation, but they are a combination of wind and solar and of course hydro has its own environmental problems too. But right now you can count that as zero carbon impacts when you’re buying electricity from a green source. And in the United States, almost all electrical consumers now have the option of choosing their electric source and so that’s another very simple thing you can do that reduces that impact. And with an electric car and a renewable energy contract, all of a sudden getting to work is now zero on my carbon budget.
ANTHONY: Right, but what if you want to go longer distances, I mean if you want to go to remote places in the States, it is very difficult to do it without air travel, isn't it? And even electric cars won't take you very far.
KARL: That's true and so in living well on my 4 ton carbon budget, I really try to get my daily impacts pretty much down to zero or very close to it, which means I have some carbon budget to use on some luxuries. And so we have a little cabin up in the mountains about a 4 Hour drive from here, my electric car won't make it there. We have a Hybrid, my wife's car is a Hybrid, it's 50 miles per gallon and I can't convert that into kilometers.
ANTHONY: No, in the UK we're still on miles per gallon, but our gallons are different size to yours.
KARL: Do you go a little further on one of your gallons?
ANTHONY: Yeah.
KARL: So that ends up being a significant part of my actual carbon budget for a year as we do get to go places that way. I can usually get away with one either transcontinental or I haven’t been to Europe a little while, a transatlantic flight per year and still stick to my 4 ton budget, but that's a limit. You know the other thing actually that can be a big one is meat eating, and so but I still like some beef every once in a while, but I just limit it and say if I'm going to have a steak, that 12 ounces of beef which works out to something like 20 pounds of carbon dioxide, that goes on my budget and I'll do it when it's really worth it, but not every day.
ANTHONY: Right, so you haven't gone vegan like Al Gore?
KARL: No, I'm impressed and I respect people do and you know it’s funny how even among environmentalists people look at me and say you know, what difference are you making, you reduced your own footprints, but somebody else is still on the plane and you know you’re not going to stop climate change with individual action. And I look at them and say, when you meet a vegetarian, do you tell them why bother, that cow was still going to be slaughtered anyway? Of course not, it's right because, once you recognize as a personal matter that fossil fuel consumption is part of an entire system that is going to cause extreme devastating impacts on human beings and the environment around the world, then this is a personal matter. You say, I want to not participate in that system any more than actually necessary to have a decent life, right. And as to me it’s very much like vegetarianism, we can call it climaterianism and have that same kind of philosophy.
ANTHONY: Just going back to your lifestyle, what do you do in your spare time? You find things you can do which don’t actually significantly impact your carbon footprint.
KARL: As I said we go up to the mountains and then we go cross-country skiing or hiking in the mountains. I’m very lucky and I've been a sailor, sailing is one of my hobbies since I was a teenager in high school and so we actually have a sail boat that we've sailed transatlantic on a couple of times. I know not everybody can do that, but the money I saved by not buying a big car right and not having a big house more than means that I can have a luxury like a sail boat in my life and that's when we want to go on big adventures, that’s what we do. Two years ago we sailed from New York to the Azores in Spain and Iberia and came back via Dakar in Senegal and the Caribbean and nobody can say I've got a ……?
ANTHONY: Well, it's not what most people will expect from a 4 ton carbon level at all, now that's really interesting. There are concerns of course I'm afraid with the current American administration, they've decided to turn their backs on the Paris Climate Accord and we've seen in these last few weeks these terrible hurricanes in Florida and in Texas. And the response from the EPA was, this is no time to talk about climate change, but do you think that public opinion is going to force them to start thinking seriously?
KARL: I think we're moving in that direction, I think we are and you know it is going to take unfortunately; it may take a humanitarian crisis in the developed world. We're talking about Harvey and Irma which had casualties in United States that are numbered in dozens. But at the same time there were floods in Asia which killed thousands of people and it barely got a mention on the world media and certainly United States media. And so, unfortunately you know the developed world as the biggest emitters of carbon and the ones that will have to be the leaders in doing something about it, unfortunately, I'm afraid our political system and human nature and the nature of human political systems - you'd like to think it could be proactive, but it usually takes some kind of obvious crisis. And so, Irma and Harvey will keep the conversation going and that’s good and I think I have no hopes for the Trump administration, though Donald Trump has so little in the way of actual beliefs of his own, you just never know what's going to come out of him. I mean at one point he was saying that it was his proposal that in the wall he wants to build with Mexico he'll put solar panels on it, I don't know if you heard about that.
ANTHONY: Yeah I read about that, I thought to myself, they'll have to put the panels on the Mexican's side, so will they be allowed to go into Mexico to maintain them.
KARL: I don’t know, I could picture it to get the angle on the sun they'd have to be leaning over to the US's side so they're facing towards the angles of the sun, but I don't know. I could get behind the wall on that if they were going to put that much solar infrastructure in, so you just never know what's going to come out of this administration, but there's no reason to be hopeful on the Federal US political level. But that is in a way there's a reaction to it that is hopeful that people said; wow, we didn't know it will be this bad. Somehow in November 2016, we didn’t realize that it was a choice that was going to take us out of the Paris Accord. And so there’s hopefully a chance for a backlash that will get climate back on the map and on the map for the first time. And if hurricanes get people talking about it, I think that’s a good thing.
I've got to say the little bit of irony there; I’m actually married to a geophysicist who's involved in climate issues, my wife is Robin Bell; she's the President-elect of the American Geophysical Union and she is involved in Antarctic ice research which is her primary research focus, but in trying to figure out whether you can pin Irma and Harvey on climate change, you can't say that those hurricanes were caused by climate change. You can say sea level is higher definitely because of climate change. You can say that the kind of thing that there is a good chance we'll see from climate change. I like to be very strictly scientific, that’s maybe I'm not the best advocate because I’m not going to exaggerate. Scientific community is very certain that climate change is going to happen, the temperature is going to rise, sea level is going to rise, ocean acidification is absolutely happening, they don’t agree that it's going to result in more or stronger hurricanes. The people who are hurricane specialists basically say that warmer oceans tend to make stronger hurricanes, but a warmer upper atmosphere at the same time might suppress hurricanes and they can’t really say.
Yes, some scientists will come out and say yes you can say that Harvey was wetter because of climate change, but that's unlike the actual fundamental conclusion that climate change is happening, it's devastating and it's human caused. There is no scientific consensus on the relationship between climate change and hurricanes, so it's kind of the little ironic that this might be what gets us talking about climate change, but the one thing that scientists don’t actually agree about might be the thing that gets us talking about climate change and I guess that’s a good thing.
ANTHONY: Is there anything in particular that you'd like to add while we're on? 
KARL: I think that the climate movement in a way has to get over its own challenges, which is the risk of being more of a value-based movement rather than a grievance-based movement, which is more about kind of virtue signalling rather than actually addressing a problem. And I think to me, I get more grief for making a big deal about living on carbon budget from environmentalists than I do from the handful friends I have who are kind of conservative you know not really right wing, but conservative free-market economics, even Trump voters I do know a couple. I'd say the people I know who are considerable Trump voters types they respect me for living according to my beliefs and my firm belief that climate change is real and that we're all responsible. I think my environmentalist friends, many of them feel like I’m trying to out-ideal them and they're a little put off.
I mean I heard another environmental law professor saying; I'm not going to give up flying and you're ridiculous for giving up flying because that’s not going to solve the problem. But I actually think it does, but until climate advocates walk the talk and show that they personally believe that climate change is such an important issue with such huge ramifications, they are willing to change their own life and give up things that are important to them, then I don't think we have much credibility. And that’s why I think that individual action just like cities are committing to the Paris agreement even while the United States as a nation has pulled out of it or is pulling out of it, I think individuals should have their own Paris agreement. Here are the voluntary actions I’m going to take that are consistent with the world meeting a 2°C limit on climate change and I'm going to take them now even though I'm under no legal obligation to do it and the government systems haven't come into force yet to make me do it.
ANTHONY: Do you think that individuals like you, governments, and countries will actually do enough in time to stop the worst consequences of climate change?
KARL: I don't want to make a prediction. I hope so, if I think too hard about it, it's very depressing, but I know what I can do as an individual and to try and say; you know you can live a good life with a modest climate budget, carbon budget that fits within a global framework that will get us there. And in a way we have to redefine the good life so that people understand that you can have a great life, but it does not necessarily mean flying, guess what, that's something that's not sustainable.
You know if you and the work you’re doing, strikes me that there could be some organizing done here, there’s room for more organizing. People taking that kind of individual action, I haven't personally been involved much in 350.org because is not my personal style to be in that kind of demonstrative public direct action, which I think has a place in raising public awareness, but I don’t think it's ultimately going to carry the day. I'm a lawyer who might be representing people who were arrested for blocking a pipeline, but I'm not the kind of person who's likely to camp out on the pipeline myself.
But it seems to me that there is room for more organizing and I know there's a handful of people that I've just come across through Twitter and the Internet that are doing similar things. I don't know if you've come across Peter Kalmus who's a climate scientist up in California. I'll tell you, I've got my own book project on this which it's still out to some publishers which I hope I'll find a publisher for. He's got a book that's out called ''Being the Change''. I think I tried emailing him and didn't get a response, but if there is room for organizing people to turn...I can see a picture where there could be like a social media connections and just like people brag about their fitness, their exercise, the Fitbit - you know it goes on the internet; this is how far I ran today and how many calories I burned.
If you could get the similar bragging about carbon footprint, even if it just starts with a handful people, if that gets to be something they're aware of because I think the one thing I would try and get people to do, the number one thing is ''just be aware''. Just once a year, go to carbonfootprint.com ; I have problems with each of the online calculator including carbonfootprint.com , but figure out what your footprint wants from you, take a look at what your big-ticket items really were. Look at your footprint as an environmentalist compares to the average US or average world's footprint. Because I think actually United States environmentalists probably on average have a higher footprint than the average American, which is really a scandal in a way.
ANTHONY: Well Karl, thank you very much for sharing your ideas with us, I think this will probably raise quite a lot of controversies and questions and I'm very grateful for your time. I'll put links to your Facebook page and your blog and so on on the blog version of this and thanks again.
KARL: Thank you very much; it was great to talk to you.

My guest was Karl S. Coplan, professor of law at the Pace University, White Plains, New York and Director of the Environmental Litigation Clinic. His blog is at livesustianablynow.com , you can find him on Facebook and he tweets @kcoplan.
Before I go I promised to mention how you can be a patron of the Sustainable Futures Report. You can sign up at patreon.com/sfr and pledge your support at $1 per month, $5 per month, $10 or more. The Sustainable Futures Report receives no advertising, subsidy or financial support, so pledges help me cover the cost of hosting this podcast. I said that when my monthly pledges got to $500 I would make sure that every interview was transcribed so that those of you who prefer reading to listening don’t miss out and can read them at www.sustainablefutures.report . Pledges at present are nowhere near that level, but I’ve decided to get all interviews transcribed in any case. Your pledge will help cover those costs. You can sign up for as little as $1 per month and stop at any time. Remember,“Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can transform the world.”
Just a few dozen people could make a big difference.
Next week I’ll be back to sustainable current affairs, but there are more interviews in the pipeline and in November, for the first time ever, there will be a guest presenter.
For now this is Anthony Day signing off, thanking you for listening and why don’t you go to carbonfootprint.com and see what changes you can make?

Let me know how you get on!

Posted by at No comments:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)