Revealed: the cost of government support for nuclear power

The full costs of managing the country's stockpile of plutonium was estimated at £3 billion last December.

The Government's budget for developing and delivering new nuclear was £11 million from January to April 1.

And £167 million, or almost 30%, of the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC)'s budget went to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority in the first three months of this year.

These are astonishing figures gleaned from DECC's last quarterly report.

They show just how much the government is spending on supporting nuclear power.

They reveal that DECC is experiencing severe budget cuts at the same time as this is going on, and that this is impacting particularly on delivery of Green Deal measures and the Renewable Heat Incentive.

For DECC, its quarterly budget of £468 million was down to just 52% of the same time last year.

Of this, just £13 million was spent on bringing about a low carbon Britain.

Although the full costs of managing the country's stockpile of plutonium was estimated at £3 billion last December, and this figure dwarfs the other budgets, it is not up to date, the report admits.

Moreover, we are unlikely to find out the true figure even when it is finally determined.

This is because, the report says “it is likely that these [figures] will be commercially sensitive.

"This cost data is therefore not included in the aggregated whole life cost figure for all DECC's major projects."

This means that the public will not know the true amount it pays for managing existing nuclear waste.

The budget for developing and delivering new nuclear is £11 million.

This is almost as much as the £13 million for developing a low carbon Britain - or is it part of that figure?

Of course, the government will argue that this is not a subsidy.

Nevertheless it is taxpayers' cash spent on promoting nuclear power as a policy objective and trying to secure new nuclear power stations, despite nuclear operators pulling out.

The latest companies to be interested are Chinese. Do we really want our new nuclear power stations to be built and managed by Chinese companies?

That £11 million should instead be spent on developing and supporting new renewable energy installations made by British workers in this country.

These would certainly be up and running far earlier than any new nuclear power station.

Everyone on the planet helps subsidise fossil fuels by £45 per year

NASA's James Hansen

Fossil fuel companies get between $400 and $500 billion in subsidies per year. This must end.

The first major scientist to alert the world to the dangers of climate change, NASA's James Hansen, has issued a new challenge to the world based on the latest science surrounding the issue.

In a new paper published on the NASA website, Scientific Case for Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change to Protect Young People and Nature, he calls for governments around the world to stop using public funds to subsidise fossil fuels.

If anything is holding back investment in clean tech to save the planet, this is.

Fossil fuel subsidies

The paper uses scientific analysis to calculate the world’s total subsidies to oil, coal and gas companies at between $400 and $500 billion per year.

That's about £45 for each man woman and child on the planet.

This hardly seems possible, but this is a peer-reviewed paper.

Moreover, these companies are not required to pay their costs to society.

The paper notes that air and water pollution from the extraction and burning of fossil fuels kills over one million people a year and affects the health of many more.

But its greatest costs are likely to be the impact of climate change.

The greenhouse gas emissions from our use of fossil fuels up to now are only a fraction of the potential emissions from known reserves and potentially recoverable resources.

With shale gas, tar sands and other technologies we are seeing more and more of these reserves become economically recoverable.

Without legislation from governments to the contrary, and with these subsidies, there is no doubt that they will be recovered.

Hanson and his co-writers place the blame for the lack of action by the world's political leaders on the “undue sway of special financial interests on government policies aided by pervasive public relations efforts by organisations that profit from the public's addiction to fossil fuels".

In other words by overt and covert lobbying of politicians and political parties by the fossil fuel industry and those that benefit from it.

It is understandable, if not scientifically acceptable, that the UK government wants to continue to exploit the fossil fuel reserves within its waters and under its soil, such as shale gas. After all, other countries are doing.

But it must, morally, resist the temptation.

The scientific imperative is undeniable, and the longer we wait, the harder it will be.

If emission reductions began this year the required rate of decline is 6% to restore the energy balance of the Earth and stabilise the climate by the end of the century.

If reductions are delayed until 2020 the required level of reduction is 15% per year.

If we had begun in 2005 it would have been just 3% per year.

That is the rate of acceleration of the problem.

This transition to a post-fossil fuel world of clean energy will not occur as long as fossil fuels remain so cheap and the market does not incorporate their full cost.

After discussing the current consensus level of scientific understanding of the issues, and outlining all of the possible implications for humanity and the planet, Hanson argues that the initiation of the phase-out of fossil fuel emissions is urgent and that it is necessary to garner public support to fight such influence.

This depends upon persuading the majority that a prompt, orderly transition to a post-fossil fuel world is technically feasible and economically beneficial, aside from its benefits to the climate.

A matter of morality

The costs of climate change, loss of biodiversity, acidification of the ocean, loss of food supply, international conflict, refugee problems and so on will all be borne by young people and future generations.

This makes the issue “a matter of morality; a matter of intergenerational justice".

Hansen and his co-writers conclude their paper by comparing the moral challenge of climate change to that of slavery, “an injustice done by one race of humans to another", so “the injustice of one generation to all those to come must stir the public's conscience to the point of action".

Hanson expresses surprise that more young people are not shouting for change. Perhaps they are disillusioned with politics or unaware of the threats and possibilities.

But he does put his faith in the judicial system. He says that in some nations it may be possible to apply legal pressure to governments to develop realistic plans to protect the rights of young people and those yet to be born.

“Such a legal case the young people should demand plans for emission reductions", the paper argues.

Carbon tax

It then discusses what economic levers might be employed to engage the transition to a post-carbon future, plumping for a carbon tax.

It quotes economic analysis that indicates that a tax beginning at $15 per tonne of carbon dioxide per year and rising by $10 per ton each year would reduce U.S. emissions by 30% within 10 years.

He is not a supporter of-and-trade because politically it has not found favour.

But a rising price for carbon emissions would not be sufficient on its own. The writers advocate considerably more investments in clean energy and carbon efficiency standards for buildings, vehicles and other products; global climate monitoring systems including and climate mitigation and adaptation in undeveloped countries the planting of forests.

I will let James Hansen and his co-writers finish this piece in their own, eloquent, words:

"The era of doubts, delays and denial, of ineffectual half-measures, must end. The period of consequences is beginning.

"If we fail to stand up now and demand a change of course, the blame will fall on us, the current generation of adults.

"Our parents did not know that their actions could harm future generations.

"We will only be able to pretend that we did not know. And that is unforgiveable."

IEA chief says scrap fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe

As academics warn the world could exceed "safe" temperature levels in our lifetimes, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged the world to slash hundreds of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe.

Fatih Birol, speaking in an interview with EurActiv, says that the "$409 billion equivalent of fossil fuels subsidies in place around the world "encourage developing countries - where the bulk of the energy demand and CO2 emissions come from – [towards a] wasteful use of energy” and calls for their abolition.

He says that cutting these subsidies in major non-OECD countries is “the one single policy item” which could help decrease the rate of increase of global warming, so that it stays within "safe" limits.

These limits are estimated to be around 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The likelihood of dangerous warming

Two papers, to be published in the latest edition of the journal Nature are warning that emissions could reach much higher temperatures during the lifetimes of many people alive today.

This could mean that "large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada could potentially experience individual five-year average temperatures that exceed the 2 degree Celsius threshold by 2030 -- a timescale that is not so distant," one paper says.

Two degrees was the maximum limit set at the Copenhagen COP15 UNFCCC summit in 2009, and was reckoned to equate to a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of 450 parts per million (ppm).

It is considered just about bearable, but with considerable costs.

Many consider this level itself to be dangerously risky and would prefer the limit to be 1.5 degrees Celsius, which equates to 350ppm.

The papers find that "most of the world's land surface is very likely to experience five-year average temperatures that exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2060" at the current rate of increase.

A 3.5 degree increase would cause “irreversible impacts”, such as the mass extinction of an estimated 40%-70% of the world’s species and rendering the equatorial belt largely uninhabitable, according to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

The New Zealand scientists say that only if emissions are "substantially lowered", will the two degree threshold possibly be delayed by "up to several decades".

The second paper, by Zurich's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Hadley Centre of the Meteorological Office, calculates that to achieve a greater than 66% chance of limiting temperature rise by this amount, global emissions will probably need to peak before 2020 and fall to about 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020.

Reducing fossil fuel subsidies

This puts Birol's call into perspective.

Speaking in advance of the release of the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2011 report on 9 November, he said that it will say that cutting fossil fuel subsidies would "help renewable energies such as solar and wind power to get a bigger market share".

The IEA's analysis finds that “the door for a 2 degrees trajectory may be closing if we do not act urgently and boldly,” Birol said.

The report examines seven scenarios. "“In our central scenario, seven countries introduce some form of carbon pricing which brings us to a 3.5 degree trajectory,” he explained.

“But if we want to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees, many more countries need to do so. The most important condition is that there’s coordinated international action in place.”

The world in 2008-10 was subsidising fossil fuels by almost 13 times more than renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and biofuels, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Fossil fuels received $557 billion compared to $43-46 billion for renewables.

Rather than going down, fossil fuel subsidies are increasing. The IEA expects them to reach $660 billion, or 0.7% of global GDP by 2020.

Reducing the subsidy would cut energy demand by 4.1% and CO2 emissions by 1.7 gigatonnes, with consequent increases in energy efficiency and more investment available for renewables.

Most of the subsidies are actually in the less developed countries, trying to compete with the developed ones.

Green Climate Fund

The United Nation's committee responsible for designing the £100bn fund which developing countries will use to help them tackle climate change before 2020, has produced its draft proposals, but not to unanimous agreement.

This fund was agreed at the COP15 and COP16 summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancun, Mexico (2010) and discussion of the draft will be a highlight of this year's summit in Durban, South Africa, beginning in six weeks.

However, the United States and Saudi Arabia have reduced their support for the overall design of the fund.

The draft was welcomed by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The Committee ended its work by submitting for consideration and approval in Durban both a draft instrument for the Green Climate Fund and recommendations on transitional arrangements to get it launched quickly," she said.

Developing countries are generally satisfied with most of the wording, especially that the fund should have its own legal status and independent secretariat, but disagreement remains over access to the funds, including the need to minimise the involvement of the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank.

Pa Ousman Jarju, chair of the Least Developed Countries negotiating block at the UN climate change talks says: “Enhanced direct access would allow more devolved decision-making to reflect local and national concerns and it would enable countries to integrate the funding into their national plans and strategies for dealing with climate change.”

For these reasons, Trevor Manuel the former finance minister of South Africa, who co-chaired the meeting on administering the fund with Kjetil Lund of Norway, called the outcome "sub-optimal".

Germany said that the committee’s failure to formally agree a design “will likely result in not having the Green Climate Fund this year or the next”.

Former chief of the UN climate change convention Yves de Boer has also criticised the fund.

He told the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative event in Washington, DC last Wednesday, that the GCF “is going to be governed by a bunch of climate change negotiators, rather than by a lot of people that understand economics.

“The whole debate is around grant-based finance, instead of about how you catalyse significant funding, and basically the approach is to keep the private sector out - to the extent that you can - rather than to make this a consortia of public and private financing.”

The U.S. negotiators agree with him. They want developing countries as well as developed countries to contribute to the fund and for the private sector to be able to engage more. They also questioned the section on the fund having its own juridical personality.

But developing countries are suspicious. They believe the engagement of the private sector would open the potential for funds to be diverted away from developing countries towards developed countries’ companies and financial institutions, bypassing their governments.

If finally agreed, the fund will be used only for mitigation and adaptation initially, while many developing countries also want to use it for technology and capacity building, the very tactic which the IEA's Birol is calling for.

IEA chief says scrap fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe

As academics warn the world could exceed "safe" levels in our lifetimes, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged the world to slash hundreds of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe.

Fatih Birol, speaking in an interview with EurActiv, says that the "$409 billion equivalent of fossil fuels subsidies in place around the world "encourage developing countries - where the bulk of the energy demand and CO2 emissions come from – [towards a] wasteful use of energy” and calls for the abolition.

He says that cutting these subsidies in major non-OECD countries is “the one single policy item” which could help decrease the rate of increase of global warming, so that it stays within "safe" limits.

These limits are estimated to be around 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The likelihood of dangerous warming

But two papers, to be published in the latest edition of the journal Nature are warning that emissions could reach much higher temperatures during the lifetimes of many people alive today.

This could mean that "large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada could potentially experience individual five-year average temperatures that exceed the 2 degree Celsius threshold by 2030 -- a timescale that is not so distant," one paper says.

Two degrees was the maximum limit set at the Copenhagen COP15 UNFCCC summit in 2009, and was reckoned to equate to a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of 450 parts per million (ppm).

It is considered just about bearable, but with considerable costs.

Many consider this level itself to be dangerously risky and would prefer the limit to be 1.5 degrees Celsius, which equates to 350ppm.

The papers find that "most of the world's land surface is very likely to experience five-year average temperatures that exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2060" at the current rate of increase.

A 3.5 degree increase would cause “irreversible impacts”, such as the mass extinction of an estimated 40%-70% of the world’s species and rendering the equatorial belt largely uninhabitable, according to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

The New Zealand scientists say that only if emissions are "substantially lowered", will the two degree threshold possibly be delayed by "up to several decades".

The second paper, by Zurich's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Hadley Centre of the Meteorological Office, calculates that to achieve a greater than 66% chance of limiting temperature rise by this amount, global emissions will probably need to peak before 2020 and fall to about 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020.

Reducing fossil fuel subsidies

This puts Birol's call into perspective.

Speaking in advance of the release of the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2011 report on 9 November, he said that it will say that cutting fossil fuel subsidies would "help renewable energies such as solar and wind power to get a bigger market share".

The IEA's analysis finds that “the door for a 2 degrees trajectory may be closing if we do not act urgently and boldly,” Birol said.

The report examines seven scenarios. "“In our central scenario, seven countries introduce some form of carbon pricing which brings us to a 3.5 degree trajectory,” he explained.

“But if we want to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees, many more countries need to do so. The most important condition is that there’s coordinated international action in place.”

The world in 2008-10 was subsidising fossil fuels by almost 13 times more than renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and biofuels, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Fossil fuels received $557 billion compared to $43-46 billion for renewables.

Rather than going down, fossil fuel subsidies are increasing. The IEA expects them to reach $660 billion, or 0.7% of global GDP by 2020.

Reducing the subsidy would cut energy demand by 4.1% and CO2 emissions by 1.7 gigatonnes, with consequent increases in energy efficiency and more investment available for renewables.

Most of the subsidies are actually in the less developed countries, trying to compete with the developed ones.

Green Climate Fund

The United Nation's committee responsible for designing the £100bn fund which developing countries will use to help them tackle climate change before 2020 has produced its draft proposals, but not to unanimous agreement.

This fund was agreed at the COP15 and COP16 summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancun, Mexico (2010) and the draft will be discussed at this year's summit in Durban, South Africa, beginning in six weeks.

However, the United States and Saudi Arabia have reduced their support for the overall design of the fund.

The committee tasked with the design work has met four times, and completed its work last week.

Examination of the draft will be a highlight of the Durban talks.

The draft was welcomed by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The Committee ended its work by submitting for consideration and approval in Durban both a draft instrument for the Green Climate Fund and recommendations on transitional arrangements to get it launched quickly," she said.

Developing countries are generally satisfied with most of the wording, especially that the fund should have its own legal status and independent secretariat, but disagreement remains over access to the funds, including the need to minimise the involvement of the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank.

Pa Ousman Jarju, chair of the Least Developed Countries negotiating block at the UN climate change talks says: “Enhanced direct access would allow more devolved decision-making to reflect local and national concerns and it would enable countries to integrate the funding into their national plans and strategies for dealing with climate change.”

For these reasons, Trevor Manuel the former finance minister of South Africa, who co-chaired the meeting on administering the fund with Kjetil Lund of Norway, called the outcome "sub-optimal".

Germany said that the committee’s failure to formally agree a design “will likely result in not having the Green Climate Fund this year or the next”.

Former chief of the UN climate change convention Yves de Boer has also criticised the fund.

He told the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative event in Washington, DC last Wednesday, that the GCF “is going to be governed by a bunch of climate change negotiators, rather than by a lot of people that understand economics.

“The whole debate is around grant-based finance, instead of about how you catalyse significant funding, and basically the approach is to keep the private sector out - to the extent that you can - rather than to make this a consortia of public and private financing.”

The U.S. negotiators agree with him. They want developing countries as well as developed countries to contribute to the fund and for the private sector to be able to engage more. They also questioned the section on the fund having its own juridical personality.

But developing countries are suspicious. They believe the engagement of the private sector would open the potential for funds to be diverted away from developing countries towards developed countries’ companies and financial institutions, bypassing their governments.

If finally agreed, the fund will be used only for mitigation and adaptation initially, while many developing countries also want to use it for technology and capacity building, the very tactic which the IEA's Birol is calling for.

David Cameron, you must go to Durban this December & end subsidies for fossil fuels

This week David Cameron appeared to play down his party's commitment to tackling climate change by not even mentioning the topic in his keynote speech to the Tory Party conference.

It is unlikely that the shift in rhetorical emphasis will impact on the many commitments and measures in the legislative pipeline, but it may have an impact in two important areas: on investment decisions and on the vital UNFCCC Durban Climate Summit which is fast approaching.

The need for international action has never been more paramount, and it is tremendously important that Cameron is unwavering on the international stage for drastic measures to curb emissions.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. I will discuss some of it, and the single most simple policy that could be implemented to achieve the level of cuts required.

It was announced this week that global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a staggering 45% since 1990, according to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) and other sources.

This puts the world in the region of the high emissions scenarios discussed in the last IPCC report (see below).

At the same time, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said on Tuesday that subsidies for fossil fuel consumption are actually rising - they totalled $409 billion in 2010, compared to $312 billion in 2009, with oil products having the largest share at $193 billion in 2010 with natural gas getting $91 billion.

Iran and Saudi Arabia were the countries with the biggest subsidies.

The IEA's Chief Economist Fatih Birol said that "without further reform, spending on fossil fuel consumption subsidies is set to reach $660 billion in 2020, or 0.7 percent of global gross domestic product".

Yet leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) countries committed in Pittsburgh in 2009 to phase out these subsidies.

OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said doing so is an obvious way to save money. "As they (nations) look for policy responses to the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes, phasing out subsidies is an obvious way to help governments meet their economic, environmental and social goals".

It would also cut global energy demand by 4% and considerably reduce carbon emissions growth, the IEA said.

If David Cameron can't find it easy to support a call to phase out the subsidies, and do so himself, then he should tell us why.

(By the way, if you think renewables get too much in the way of subsidies, research published this week in the States shows that nuclear subsidies there at least accounted for more than one percent of the federal budget over the first 15 years of each subsidies’ life; oil and gas subsidies made up half a percent of the total budget, but renewables have amounted to only about a tenth of a percent.)

Using market measures alone is not working as a way of limiting emissions. The 3.5 million EU carbon emissions permits which the UK sold on the market last Thursday went for a price of 10.38 euros each.

This is the lowest price since it started auctions in November 2008, and will not encourage anything like the level of investment needed in greenhouse gas emission abatement technology.

It does strengthen the case for the introduction of a robust carbon price floor, but it also shows other types of action are required.

In a sign of its desperation that the message is not getting through to politicians, the Tyndall Centre this week attempted once more to draw attention to a paper it had first published in a Royal Society journal in 2009, saying that the world could very possibly reach an average global temperature of 4oC higher than pre-industrial levels as early as 2060, with catastrophic consequences for all life on earth.

The paper is peer-reviewed and written by Richard Betts at the Hadley Centre of the Met Office and uses the most accurate and authoritative climate modelling systems currently available.

The Tyndall Centre is based at the University of East Anglia, now famous for the hacked emails scandal, yet exonerated of any bias in its scientific reports by three separate investigations.

(The centre is named after John Tyndall, the man who first discovered the global warming effect 150 years ago - this year marks that anniversary.)

What the paper says

The paper looks at a particular set of scenarios that were considered in the (last) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), published in 2007. (The 5th is due in 2014.)

AR4's projections suggested that in the absence of mitigation high levels of warming were possible and the median of these was approximately 4?C.

The modelling used at the time did not include certain climate-warming carbon-cycle feedback features, plus more recent measurements that since became available; and the high-emissions scenario - which we now are confident we are within - was not examined with complex general circulation models (GCMs).

Betts' paper looks at this range of scenarios of future greenhouse-gas emissions without policies, including this information.

In other words, looking as best as we can at the world we live in now, in which, year after year, UNFCCC summits come and go and no legally binding agreements are reached.

The paper concludes: "Our best estimate is that a temperature rise of 4?C would be reached in the 2070s, and if carbon-cycle feedbacks are strong, then 4?C could be reached in the early 2060s."

When originally published, the journal did trigger an alarmist headline in the Daily Telegraph with graphic descriptions of how the world would change. It gave fuel to Ed Miliband's efforts to secure a legally bunding deal at Copenhagen. But it did not achieve sufficient global recognition.

I spoke to Asher Minns at the Tyndall Centre and he said he tweeted the paper in an attempt to give it more recognition.

I then spoke to its author, Richard Betts. I asked him whether he could put a figure on the probability of the world reaching this level of warming by that date, and he said "That entirely depends on the policies adopted by politicians".

I asked him about the current state of climate research, and he said that the Hadley Centre "is now working on a huge project coupled climate models with all modelling across the world being run through a commonly agreed protocol, so we know we are comparing like with like, which ones are more or less sensitive to emissions.

"It is mostly work in progress, and will be ready in next year. The deadline is July, and the papers will be accepted by March 2013 for publication in the 2014 report."

The slowness of this work is frustrating for everyone, but science cannot be hurried. I asked Richard if this frustrates him. "No, we have to get it right," he said.

DECC commissions reports from the Hadley Centre, including a paper for the Durban talks that is "more about drawing together information that is already out there into a tight context".

He said the global carbon project will release its annual update in a month, however.

Richard is typical of climate scientists in refusing to be drawn on policy or urgency, saying it is beyond his remit.

"I have no role in saying this is urgent or anything. We have no political objective whatsoever. We are just trying to find the science."

He says all they can do is lay this before politicians. It is up to them to decide how to act.

Does he think that journalists like myself convey the science well?

"In some cases the messages are too simple," he replied. "But our research can be misused either way. It depends on peoples' attitude to risk - people must be informed. But I do think that journalists should convey the science better."

If climate scientists are clear that it is up to politicians to show leadership on the basis of the science, and the science is as clear as it is, then it is incumbent on the consciences of politicians to give these humble toilers on the frontlines of understanding due weight in their deliberations, in comparison to the clamouring of vested interests or focus groups.

In simple language, Mr Cameron: go to Durban. Demonstrate leadership. Cut subsidies to fossil fuels.