What a waste the car is.

Isn't it absurd that the average car in the UK weighs 1.3 tonnes, is used for 4% of the year, and when in use carries an average of only 1.6 occupants?

It means that most of the time most cars have excess capacity and/or underused and heavier than their cargo. What a waste of fuel and resources!

We are running out of raw stuff. To be more specific: global resources of minerals are becoming increasingly scarce.

This is not news; some farsighted policymakers and visionaries have been attempting to draw attention to the value of resource efficiency for at least 20 years.

Over this time the evidence of the cost of mineral extraction and the processing of raw materials has grown into a substantial body of well-documented data.

Amongst other things, we now know a lot more about the wasteful use of water and the high energy and climate-damaging affects of the dash for growth happening in many parts of the world.

For example, we know that five key materials: steel, cement, plastics, paper and aluminium, dominate emissions from industry and producing them accounts for 20% of all global emissions from energy use and industrial processes.

And this is before these materials are actually processed into their final form.

The situation is worse in China because of its dependence on coal and its inefficient energy system. There, construction and manufacturing adds a further 2% of global energy and process emissions.

If, therefore, we could concentrate on tackling the efficiency of use of these 5 materials we would be going a long way towards reducing pollution, emissions and water use globally.

This depends in turn on the ability of these five sectors to cooperate.

You might think that because of the trends of globalisation and consolidation in these industries, this would not be too difficult.

In fact they are still surprisingly fragmented.

The top 10 global companies produce less than a quarter of all steel, and the largest of these, ArcelorMittal, accounts for only 6% of the total.

The effect of this is that there is much competition for inputs, especially iron ore and coke, which, contradicting the ideology of free market thinkers, does not result in increased efficiencies.

A group of researchers from Cambridge University led by Julian Allwood and Jonathan Cullen have been exploring solutions to this issue.

I've been reading their book, ‘Sustainable Materials With Both Eyes Open’, and it is full of brilliant ideas.

It also illustrates how tough the mountain of resource efficiency is to climb; harder than climbing a mountain of slag wearing roller-blades.

One of their solutions is that if goods were designed to use less metal, global metal production could be reduced by a staggering 30% without any loss of final service.

Another solution is to change the practice of construction and deconstruction so that buildings are designed to be reused.

To achieve this, they say, we need some pioneers who, they suggest, might be retailers seeking brand advantage, or the government through its procurement policies, to stimulate demand.

The supply of re-used steel will follow the demand for it, and could be increased with changes to demolition practice, perhaps as an extension of the requirements of Considerate Construction guidelines.

The voluntary eco-standard BREEAM gives accreditation for the sustainability features of buildings. However, it does not set minimum targets for reducing the embodied life-cycle impact of buildings.

The authors note that it is surprising that only approximately 5% of total credits are allocated in BREEAM to reducing a building's footprint.

In contrast, the Australian Green Star rating system, revised in February 2010 to drive best practice in steel production, has much more rigourous standards.

Of course, we can make products which last longer, and which can be repaired and renovated more easily. Prime candidates for this are vehicles and household appliances.

But as long as companies obtain financial benefit from the early obsolescence of their products, this is not going to happen. It is therefore up to national and regional governments to create and impose standards, just as they are doing, for example, with the End of Life Vehicle Directive.

Alternately, we can rent the service of transport, clean clothes, or whatever, instead of owning a machine which provides this. It is then in the interests of the service provider to maintain in an efficient way the product that is on loan to us.

I am sure that in the future people will look back on our time and marvel at how wasteful we were.

There are many barriers to material efficiency strategies, but they boil down to two things: firstly, material efficiency requires a greater level of cooperation between the many companies involved in producing a product with metal components; secondly most changes the authors propose require a radical change in company strategy.

One of the biggest of these changes is that companies within sectors and even across sectors need to cooperate more instead of competing.

This is a strategy that has been followed, but not nearly widely enough, by the National Industrial Symbiosis Programme, which takes as its starting point the idea that one company's waste might be another company's raw material.

NISP, which receives some funding from Defra, but not nearly enough, is a free business opportunity programme that delivers bottom line, environmental and social benefits, and deserves credit for being the first industrial symbiosis initiative in the world to be launched on a national scale.

In an age of austerity, resource efficiency and industrial symbiosis makes sense. Costs can be saved and raw material usage and emissions reduced.

But it does require vision and almost unprecedented degrees of cooperation between companies. Farseeing firms are doing it already and reaping the benefit.
I don't know what the car of the future will look like. But I do know it must leave a far smaller scar on the planet.

Will Britain exceed its carbon reduction targets? Post 2

This is the second of two posts that examine the UK's claims and efforts to reduce its carbon emissions.


Its conclusion: the UK must stop burning coal to win the battle to cut carbon emissions.

The Government claimed last week in its Carbon Plan that it is on track to meet its carbon reduction target, but this is contradicted by other independent evidence.

Emissions and carbon intensity are increasing

This evidence shows that the UK's greenhouse gas emissions actually increased last year by 3.5%; more than double the 1.3% growth in the economy, according to the PwC Low Carbon Economy Index published two weeks ago.

And this is a trend. The previous years' statistics from the UK government also show an increase in net carbon dioxide emissions of 3.8%.

If we carry on in this trend, the UK will undoubtedly miss its 34% reduction target.

Worse, the PWc report shows how, globally, national economies' carbon intensities are increasing everywhere.

Carbon intensity is a measure of how much Gross Domestic Product is produced per unit of energy generated from fossil fuels.

PWc's modelling shows that globally, the annual reduction in carbon intensity required to meet the 2° reduction target in carbon emissions by 2050, required to avoid climate chaos, has increased in the last year from 4.7% to 4.8%.

The UK's requirement is higher than this global average. The carbon intensity of its economy is actually increasing by 2.2% a year, and the annual decarbonisation rate now required to meet the 2° reduction target is 5.6%.

Much of the cause of the previous decarbonisation of the UK economy is actually due to the “dash for gas" which happened in the 1990s and resulted in a decarbonisation rate of 3%.

Its recent rise, correspondingly, is due to an increase in coal burning. The latest energy statistics show that in the last financial year, instead of renewables generating 10%, as is commonly believed, they provided 6.5% of our needs.

We are burning more coal

Coal provided 35.7% and natural gas 48.9%, with the shrinking contribution of nuclear power contributing 5.2%.

(The global warming potential of coal is nearly three times that of natural gas: 910gCO2/kWh compared to 360gCO2/kWh.)

This increase in the burning of fossil fuels to generate our electricity underscores how unfortunate it is that the U.K.'s carbon capture and storage programme is suffering delays.

PWc observe that “the longer the delay in significant action to tackle emissions growth, the steeper the path becomes to stay on track with a 2° reduction target," and the more it will cost us.

In industrialised countries, meeting this target will require massive emissions reductions in the order of 80-95% according to another annual report, the EU Climate Policy Tracker, out today from ECOFYS and WWF.

On the other hand, energy intensive industries have been complaining loudly about the cost to them of carbon reduction policies, and in his Autumn Statement, the Chancellor George Osborne promised to reduce this cost, which has the effect of reducing their incentives to save carbon.

PWc warn that there could be a large funding gap in the amount of investment which the UK needs not just to decarbonise the power sector (£89 billion) but to meet energy needs with coal and gas (hundred and £10 billion).

The big 6 utilities in the UK would have to triple their investment to meet the government's target, and in the current economic climate this does not seem likely.

The government suggested last week that pension and insurance funds could contribute to the sums required.

But for this to happen there must be a stable return with limited downsides risk.

Matthew Brown, the CBI's head of energy and climate change policy, has said that although the government's Carbon Plan gives investors a "clearer" picture of how the nation can transition to a low-carbon economy, "we now need this to be backed by consistent, long-term policies, avoiding any sudden changes of direction which put investors off."

What is the solution?

In an ideal world there would be plenty of funding available for low carbon technology, shale gas would not have been discovered, the Fukshima nuclear disaster would not have happened, and the European Emissions Trading Scheme would be operating perfectly to give a high price for carbon that would allow the necessary investments to take place.

Instead, we have to live with what we've got. Either you believe that there is an almost 100% certainty that we have to reduce emissions very fast in order to his avoid global disaster, or you believe that we should have other priorities, namely, our short-term national economies.

The Chancellor clearly believes the latter. The U.K.'s Energy and Climate Change Department believes the former.

The Chancellor believes that European legislation is holding back British business.

But half of the environmental performance of the average European member state is directly related to European legislation. Without it, the European natural environment and carbon emissions would be in a much worse state.

While the UK is one of the better performers in the European Union in legislation to fight climate change, we must not forget that under the Spending Review the Warm Front Scheme was cut, and the aspirations or funding for the Renewable Heat Incentive, Zero Carbon Homes and Carbon Trust were scaled back.

The Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme has now been transformed into essentially a carbon tax with revenues going to the Treasury instead of scheme participants.

Back in June 2011, the UK Committee on Climate Change warned that UK policies are failing to achieve the needed step change.

Since then there have been many delays in policy decisions and changes of tack, which all impact on investor confidence.

In just one snapshot of the challenge ahead, The Centre for Low Carbon Futures and the Energy Saving Trust warned on Monday that "one building every minute must be retrofitted with carbon cutting solutions to meet 2050 energy targets".

Their report argues that the Government must invest in interdisciplinary research which brings together technical, social and economic expertise.

This is both a huge challenge and a huge opportunity, both for job creation and to save energy costs.

I firmly believe that the nation is hungry for this kind of action, for the sake of jobs, the economy and reduction of energy bills.

But the most important thing we can do is to stop burning coal.