Fukushima accident triggers reappraisal of nuclear power

The unprecedented Fukushima nuclear power accident is the worst since Chernobyl and is causing a significant reappraisal of plans to develop nuclear power everywhere in the world.

The latest news is that a third reactor has lost its cooling system. A second explosion has injured 11 people, one of them seriously.

The authorities have so far categorised it as a level 4 event on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale - an accident with local consequences, where there is a minor release of radioactive material, unlikely to result in implementation of planned countermeasures other than local food controls.

Radiation levels and secrecy

However, independent journalists from the Japan Visual Journalist Association (JVJA) and Ryuichi Hirokawa, editor-in-chief of DAYS JAPAN (magazine), went on Sunday to Futaba Town where the Fukushima Daiichi reactors are located to undertake independent monitoring.

Hirokawa said measurements taken near the high school at Futaba were higher than when he had taken measurements approximately 200 meters from unit 4 at Chernobyl shortly after that explosion.

He added, "At the front of the Futaba Town Hall, all our three radiation monitors went off scale and became inoperable (we could not take measurements). At the entrance of the hospital, stretchers were turned over, many things were scattered, a feeling that evacuation had been undertaken in a very rushed way."

Yet, a statement today by the International Atomic Energy Agency said "Radiation dose rate measurements observed at four locations around the plant's perimeter over a 16-hour period on 13 March were all normal."

These discrepancies in reports do not inspire confidence. Secrecy is a major issue in public confidence about nuclear power. In 2002 a scandal about widespread falsification of safety documentation lead to the shutting down of all of Tokyo Electric Power Company’s 17 nuclear reactors.

It will probably be some time before we find out exactly what has transpired, and there may be more explosions. However, the fact that there is now a 12 mile exclusion zone around the site gives some idea of its seriousness.

Security against earthquakes

Masashi Goto, the designer of the containment vessel at the Fukushima plant, a former employee of Toshiba, held a press conference on 13 March with the Citizens' Nuclear Information Center in which he catalogued how the industry in Japan had been warned about the vulnerability of its reactors to earthquakes and ignored the warnings.

He said that the intensity of the quake in 2008 which cracked the reactor cooling towers at the Kurihara Nuclear Power Plant, spilling wastewater and damaging the reactor core, exceeded the design capability of the vessel to withstand it by almost three times, and that the only reason why a major disaster did not happen on that occasion was pure coincidence.

Reuters reports that even faithful workers have had their trust shaken. "The company has been saying such a thing would not happen and the plant was fine even after 40 years in operation...It only raised my distrust of TEPCO." said Mikiko Amano, a 55-year-old woman who had been recently evacuated from her home close to the quake-stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex.

Four plants have been shut down since the first Fukushima explosion, closing 20% of Japan’s nuclear capacity. 34% Japan's history comes from nuclear power. Even Tokyo Electric Power has called it "a considerably serious situation."

Doubts over the reactor type

The Fukushima plant is a General Electric Mark I reactor. There are 23 of this type in the U.S. It is a Boiling Water Reactor (BWR) of which there are 192 in the world, some still under construction.

The design has been criticised by nuclear experts and even Nuclear Regulatory Commission staff for decades as being susceptible to explosion and containment failure.

As early as 1972, Dr. Stephen Hanuaer, an Atomic Energy Commission safety official, recommended that the pressure suppression system be discontinued and any further designs not be accepted for construction permits.

Shortly thereafter, three General Electric nuclear engineers publicly resigned their positions citing dangerous shortcomings in the GE design.

An NRC analysis of the potential failure of the Mark I under accident conditions concluded in a 1985 report that Mark I failure within the first few hours following core melt would appear rather likely.

In 1986, Harold Denton, then the NRC's top safety official, told an industry trade group that the "Mark I containment, especially being smaller with lower design pressure, in spite of the suppression pool, if you look at the WASH 1400 safety study, you'll find something like a 90% probability of that containment failing."

A statement issued by the Japanese Citizens' Nuclear Information Center expressed concern for the people living in the vicinity of Japan's nuclear power plants and called for a phasing out nuclear energy.

"Last December the Japanese government began a review of its nuclear energy policy," said Philip White its international liaison officer. "The review was commenced in the spirit of essentially confirming the existing policy. That approach is no longer viable. The direction of the policy review must be completely reversed."

The industry is countering that at least a major explosion of the containment vessel itself has been avoided. This is not 3 mile Island or Chernobyl, they say.

However, the accident is without precedent, and so were these others. The industry can only prepare within its economic constraints for probable accidents, and it is the improbable ones which are the most catastrophic.

Countries around the world are now commencing an evaluation of nuclear safety - India being one of the first to announce this move.

Renewable heat incentive rewards solar water heating but will increase air pollution

Chris Huhne has finally announced much-awaited details of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme.

It covers such technologies as solar water heating, using wood, wood pellets and woodchips, air and ground source heat pumps, energy from waste, on-site biogas, deep geothermal and injection of biomethane into the grid.

36% of the UK’s overall energy is used for heat, creating 175 million tonnes of carbon emissions a year.

The industry had originally hoped that the scheme would start at the same time as the Feed-In Tariffs for renewable electricity a year ago, then it was expected this April, but now payments won't be be available to households until October 2012.

The scheme has become a victim of government cuts and will be smaller in size than originally thought and introduced in phases.

Importantly, because of criticism of the potential impact on fuel bills, the RHI will not be funded by an RHI levy but from general Government spending.

As a result, it will be introduced in two phases. In phase 1, more than a quarter of the first year's budget, around £15 million, is to be guaranteed up to 25,000 household installations through a premium payment scheme.

Phase 1 will focus on people living off the gas grid, who typically spend more on their heating and whose fuels, like coal, have a higher carbon content.

Participants will then provide feedback on how the scheme works to help design the second phase.

In this phase, coinciding with the introduction of the Green Deal, the scheme will expand so that by 2020 there will be an estimated 13,000 installations in industry, 110,000 in the commercial and public sector supply 25% of this sector is demand, and creating 150,000 jobs.

Carbon savings and air pollution

It is hoped that the scheme will help deliver 44 million tonnes of carbon dioxide savings by 2020, though 8 million of these are already accounted for by the European Emissions Trading Scheme. Those emissions within the emissions trading scheme will cost £35/tCO2 and those outside the scheme a further £12 per tonne.

However, there are concerns about the impact on air quality of a lot of new biomass combustion, particularly from particulates such as PM10. The final RHI proposals could lead to 28TWh of biomass burned. and assessment by Defra of the proposals shows that this could lead to up to £2.6 billion of potential lifetime social cost.

This is a staggering amount.

The Tariffs

The highest tariffs will be paid to solar thermal water heating (8.5p/kWh) small biomass schemes (7.6p/kWh or 1.9p/kWh - see below why), and biomethane (6.5p/kWh). Small ground source heat pump schemes will receive 4.3p/kWh, and large schemes 3p/kWh.

Municipal solid waste schemes including Combined Heat and Power (CHP) will receive 4.7p/kWh or 1.9p/kWh, depending on which tier they are in, and large biomass schemes 2.6p/kWh.

Solar water heating was by far the most popular renewable energy technology under the previous renewable energy subsidy schemes like Clear Skies. It works very well in the UK and can supply between 40 and 50% of domestic hot water requirements, so it is good that it receives the most support.

Because of doubts about their efficiency air source heat pumps will not be eligible at the start of the RHI. Nor will heat pumps that deliver the heat to air as opposed to water. Some will consider this unfair, but it is to do with the difficulty of metering this kind of heat.

Heat meters will need to be installed at the point of generation and, where appropriate, at the point of usage in order to claim payments.

Bioliquids also will not be eligible from the start because of the complexity of the market and their uses in transport etc. They can also have a high energy density.

RHI support will only be available if the installation in question has not received (and will not receive) any other public funding.

The tariffs will be paid for 20 years to the eligible technologies that have been installed since July 15, 2009 with payments for each kilowatt of renewable heat produced.

Payments, which will be administered by Ofgem, are to be claimed by, and paid to, the owner of the heat installation or the producer.

These payments will be fixed for the lifetime of the scheme, once a measure is installed, adjusted in line with inflation. But the levels of support available for new entrants as time goes on may decrease.

Rewards linked to energy conservation

Following criticism that there might be no requirement that the building in question has an efficient fabric, by being introduced with the Green Deal, homes must be insulated to reduce demand, as with earlier schemes, such as the Low Carbon Building Programme, because everyone knows is more cost efficient to save energy than to generate it.

There has been a worry about what happens when some smart meters enter into the market. When buildings are metered on a half hourly basis energy the incentive will be to run your equipment as much as possible because the more your meter ticks over, the more money you make.

This has to some extent been met by introducing a two-tier tariff system for biomass boilers to reduce incentive to over-generate. Upon reaching a prescribed level of heat generation, the tariff drops to a lower tier 2 tariff. For solar thermal, once the equipment is installed, the amount of heat generated is not controlled by the owner.

The RHI has been a long time coming. There are many in the industry raring to get installing, and there is a huge potential market. But most will have to wait a good while yet before they can take advantage of the scheme.

Koch Suckers

A quick one: when it comes down to it there really aren't that many people funding climate change denialism.

Greenpeace and others keep coming down on the easy-to-mock Koch brothers, Big Oil financiers of the Tea Party and many front groups for climate change denialism, in order to win their tax breaks and contracts.

Now it appears that they are paying a PR company to manipulate Wikipedia entries to try and cover up their activities - with the aid of a cute sock puppet.

Read more about it and the comments here.

The Coalition's Carbon Plan is a rehash - what should it really say?

It certainly comes across as well-meaning and earnest. There are no less than 186 measures in the Excel spreadsheet accompanying The Carbon Plan launched jointly today by the leaders of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government.

But the Plan currently – it is a draft - is little more than a summary of already existing government policies. What it indicates is that the coalition is keen to regain the initiative after criticism that it is not meeting its promise to be the “greenest government ever".

Critics will be asking why, if the government wants to get us onto public transport, are so many bus services being cut across the country?

They will say, why are the revenues from the Carbon Reduction Commitment, and the forthcoming climate change levy (CCL) on all fossil fuels used in electricity generation, instead of being ploughed directly into low carbon activities, to go to the Treasury to fill the budget deficit?

Much of the commentary in the Plan will be familiar to long-term observers of government attempts to reduce the nation's environmental impact. One must ask: if governments have failed before, what are the real impediments to progress that this one must overcome in order to succeed? How can future drafts improve on this one?

Undoubtedly the Plan's signatories, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Chris Huhne, need to lean on the Treasury. Its mandarins have been opposing Huhne's attempts to set up the Green Investment Bank as a proper bank.

They appear to have failed in this - it will be launched next year - but they have recently succeeded in blocking a source of finance for the bank by issuing green investment bonds for the public to buy. For the Treasury, such a solution is too messy - they prefer to stick with the big investors. And yet, if we could all invest in the green industrial revolution this would certainly galvanise a much greater proportion of the population.

Planning is another obstacle to be surmounted. The Carbon Plan acknowledges this by saying, for example “The Government is committed to reducing carbon emissions from new buildings through successive changes to The Building Regulations and to enabling new non-domestic buildings to be zero carbon from 2019."

But alongside this, it needs vigorously to retrain and motivate planning departments across the country to support low carbon designs, which all too often fall foul of petty objections. Furthermore, Building Controllers need to be retrained and motivated to properly police implementation of the environmental aspects of the Building Regulations and, if necessary prosecute offenders with the same rigour as is applied to Health and Safety breaches. No one has ever yet been prosecuted for a breach of Part L.

The use of passive solar architecture for heating and cooling of buildings has huge potential. The utilization of solar gain, and standards similar to the ‘Passivhaus’ standard, can help to curb the rate of growth in demand for electricity for these purposes.

Reducing demand is far more cost-effective than building new power stations. But if we are going to build new power stations, then "renewable energy technologies are the only ones to offer a reduction of price rather than an increase in the future" [Arnulf Jäger-Waldau, PV Status Report 2008, Renewable Energy Unit, European Commission].

So, in the long-term, we are undoubtedly shielding ourselves from future pricing insecurity by investing in renewable energy. The Government evades the criticism that politicians only make short-term decisions by acknowledging this.

What it needs to do however, is look more carefully at which technologies it should back - such as the extremely reliable and almost market-ready marine current turbines and anaerobic digestion.

For example, it wants us to “move away from gas boilers to low carbon alternatives, such as heat pumps". And yet in most cases replacing a gas boiler with a heat pump would not result in carbon savings. Has it looked at the carbon balance of this?

Why is it that yet again solar thermal heating hardly gets a mention? If the Government wants to get more carbon savings for its £££s it is far better spending its money on this than photovoltaics. A study [B. Croxford and K. Scott, Can PV or Solar Thermal Systems Be Cost Effective? London, 2008.] found that the costs of reducing overall carbon dioxide emissions using a solar photovoltaic roof are £196/tonne CO2, but for solar thermal individual systems are £65/tonne CO2 and for community solar thermal five times better at £38/tonne CO2.

The Plan is right to support distributed energy, whose benefits coincide with the ideology of the new Localism: local ownership, reduced transmission losses and greater efficiency. At too small a scale, however, the economy of scale is lost because of unnecessary duplication of system components such as inverters (house-by-house, instead of street-by-street).

Renewable energy and building refurbishment at village, street or town scale therefore have a part to play in community regeneration, as communities come together to take responsibility for their own energy consumption and learn what it means.

Consumers of energy also have a lot to learn about how their pattern of use affects overall demand, and how they can reduce their energy consumption. It is hoped as well that the rollout of the ‘smart grid’ can help to manage or smooth out peak loads and reduce overall requirements for generation capacity.

We are on a huge learning climb. The road to a low carbon future will be made up of a million incremental steps that we all must take. Undoubtedly there will be some trips along the way.

The health risk in our recycled cardboard food packaging

A huge potential health risk has been unearthed by the decision of several food packagers not to use recycled cardboard for food products.

Jordans, a supplier of breakfast cereals, was the first to make the move, followed by Kellogg's and Weetabix who say they are looking for alternatives.

The worry is that mineral oils originally in newsprint migrate from the packaging into dried food and pose a potential threat to human health.

But this could just be the tip of the iceberg.

According to the International Union of Food Science and Technology and the Institute of Food Technologists, the compliance of what is called "Food contact materials" (FCMS) "with the basic requirement that human health must not be endangered is widely considered as a work in progress; the problems associated with migration were underestimated for a long time."

The food science unions say that migration from FCMs might be "quantitatively the largest source of food contamination. It is, for instance, 2-3 orders of magnitude higher than that from pesticides and at the same time less controlled (Grob et al. 2006)."

They imply that the health situation is much worse than we are led to believe, and the food industry is quiet on the matter because it does not want negative publicity.

If this is true, it is a shocking state of affairs, and might provide a clue, for example, as to why there is an epidemic of food allergies and intolerances.

It was in 2009 that the FAO/WHO Joint Expert Committee on Food Additives (JECFA) noted that foods packed in paperboard boxes from recycled fibres contain mineral oil in quantities far beyond tolerable limits.

Health concerns were echoed a year ago by the German Federal Institute for Risk Assessment (BfR). The BfR's report said the mineral oil, which derives from ink used in newspaper printing, could potentially contaminate food products into which they came in contact and pose human health risks.

It recommended that inner bags be used with foods that have high surface contact with cardboard - such as rice and couscous - to prevent substance migration.

This is how most cereals already come, so as a further precaution the German authorities asked Dr Koni Grob at the Official Food Control Authority of the Canton of Zurich to look at the issue. He has been examining the topic for much of the last decade and is the chief scientist to raise these concerns.

The effects on human health

The laboratory examined a sample of 119 products brought from German supermarkets and found that the mineral oils could pass through many of the inner bags used to keep food fresh and dry.

Only an impervious, non-hygroscopic material could prevent the oil passing through, such as foil or thick plastic.

Dr Grob said: "Roughly 30 products from these 119 were free of mineral oil. For the others they all exceeded the limit, and most exceeded it more than 10 times, and we calculated that in the long run they would probably exceed the limit 50 times on average and many will exceed it several hundred times."

The human digestive system finds it difficult to process mineral oils, which may damage the liver, cause chronic inflammation of various internal organs or cancer.

However, consumers would have to be exposed to contaminated foods over many years for their health to be at risk.

Only dry food is potentially hazardous. This includes products such as rice, lentils, pasta, muesli, oat flakes, flour and sugar as well as cereals.

The agreed safe limit for mineral oil saturated hydrocarbons, outlined in European legislation covering plastic packaging, is a concentration of 0.6mg per kilogram.

Industry reaction

Kellogg's says it is looking at alternative packaging materials, "which allows us to meet our environmental commitments but will also contain significantly lower levels of mineral oil" and alternative inner liners.

Weetabix is also looking for packaging that does not contain recycled newspaper.

The Food and Drink Federation, which represents Britain's food companies, called the Swiss study was "a good starting point for further investigations" - but does not feel this justifies discontinuing the use of recycled card.

The German government has now told its food and packaging industries to immediately reduce the risk and is looking at introducing mandatory rules.

The UK Food Standards Agency is also conducting research, but only into the amount of mineral oil present in recycled packaging, not how much migrates into the food contained within it.

It's acting head of clinical safety, Terry Donohoe said, "Should there be any evidence from our study - and we will carry out a risk assessment - we will take immediate action to protect the public."

Tackling the packaging supply chain

The CEPI, the Confederation of European Paper Industries, acknowledged the issue when the BfR report was published and called on printers to find alternative inks so that recycled newsprint can continue to be used in packaging.

European legislation requires that the components of printing inks must be listed. There is a 'list A' for those that have been toxicologically evaluated and 'list B' for those not evaluated.

The migration of list B substances must be below 0.01 mg/kg. The list delivered by the European Printing Ink Association (EuPIA) in summer 2009 comprised almost 6000 substances, most of which have not been evaluated.

Enforcement of this legislation is expected to become a delicate issue in Europe.

The producers of the recycled packaging often know little about the materials they use. They have little control over it.

Responsibility must therefore lie with legislators.

Recently the EU Commission introduced legislation insisting on production by good manufacturing practice (GMP) as required by Article 3 of Regulation 1935/2004 and requested compliance declarations and evidence.

This moves away from the concept that specific legislation will be provided for every type of FCM, Because there could be hundreds of them.

It establishes that all business operators in the manufacturing supply chain carry responsibility for the compliance of the final product.

At each production stage, the compliance work must be documented and enforcement authorities have to check whether the arguments used to conclude compliance work were valid.

The difficulty in making the process transparent, as so often with legislation at this level, is over the issue of commercial confidentiality.

The Swiss took matters into their own hands. Their FCM producers implemented this system with information campaigns and a tool box.

Now coordinated with Germany and Austria, they are beginning to collect and evaluate the documented evidence in the supply chain leading to a finished packaging material.

UK public buildings waste millions on energy

Last week, David Cameron, not for the first time, said that government departments and publicly-funded bodies must improve their energy efficiency in order to save public money and become greener.

Now, thanks to freedom of information requests, the Centre for Sustainable Energy has made it possible for us to see exactly how all these buildings are actually performing.

Alarmingly, some of the worst offenders are in the environment sector and some appear not to have submitted data at all: neither the Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) nor the Treasury are amongst the government offices included in the list of tens of thousands of buildings.

However, the Department of the Environment, Farming and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) is, and its offices at 3-8 Whitehall Place achieve a miserable G. Some of its properties are better, including one in Norfolk which manages to achieve B, but the vast majority are below average.

By law, all public buildings of over 1,000m2 must display Display Energy Certificates. These grade the performance of buildings' energy efficiency in terms of CO2 emissions from A - (below 25 tonnes of CO2 per year) the best, to G - the worst (over 150 tonnes).

Disappointingly, there are just 142 A-rated buildings out of a total of 40,147. They include Birmingham City Council, Crown Prosecution Service buildings in Bradford, Leeds and Derby, English Heritage, H M Customs & Excise building in Ipswich, Parcelforce Worldwide and a couple of Royal Mail buildings, Royal Holloway University of London, the Science Museum Swindon.

Compared to this there are 6,112 G-rated buildings. The worst offenders amongst national bodies here are, sadly, the Environment Agency (3 buildings) and Defra (9 buildings including incl. 3-8 Whitehall Place). In addition, the Royal Mail, NHS, MoD, Metropolitan Police, HSE, HPA, FCO, DWP, DoH, DfT, Department for National Savings, CPS and the Benefits Agency all feature prominently as poor performers.

Of the national government departments, there are only a few with a B as well. HMR&C comes out on top with 8 buildings (although it also has 141 G rated ones) and there are also a DSS building in Cheltenham, with 9 Job Centre Plus shops, a disability benefit centre in Bristol and a Defra building in Alnwick.

The Department of Health, which really needs to save money, achieved only F and two Gs on its London buildings while none of the 18 DSS buildings got better than C, with one exception, a B.

There are clearly plenty of opportunities to reduce the energy bills of the government estate and save carbon emissions.

When a building receives its certificate, the buildings facility manager or energy manager will receive at the same time, a report advising them on what measures they can take to improve the performance of the building. This comes complete with payback time estimates for different measures to make it easy for them.

Amongst the measures that can be taken include those at little or no cost such as installing low-energy lightbulbs and turning off equipment when not used, not to mention switching to a renewable energy electricity tariff. Advice on these and other measures are available from the government-funded Carbon Trust.

Anti-tar sands activist convicted in US

Guest post by Sarah Laskow

This post provides a glimpse of the huge struggle taking place in N. America between environmentalists and the oil industry-financed Republican right.

Environmental activist Tim DeChristopher was convicted yesterday of two felony counts. DeChristopher was on trial for bidding on more than 22,000 acres of public land that he could not pay for: his two crimes are making false representations to the government and interfering with the land auction.

DeChristopher made the $1.79 million bid in order to "do something to try to resist the climate crisis," he told Tina Gerhardt, in an interview published by AlterNet. But, as Kate Sheppard explains at Mother Jones, the judge threw out "the defense that his actions were necessary to prevent environmental damage on this land and, more broadly, the exacerbation of climate change."

"They're hoping to make an example out of me."

DeChristoper now faces the possibility of a $75,000 fine and 10 years in prison. In an interview with YES! Magazine's Brooke Jarvis, before the trial started, DeChristopher said he had faced the possibility that he would be found guilty.

"There is still the possibility of acquittal, but I think the most likely scenario is probably that I will be convicted," he told Jarvis. "The prosecution has been very clear that they're hoping to make an example out of me, to convince other people not to fight the status quo."

Wild lands

What is the status quo? Bureau of Land Management land, like the parcel DeChristopher bid on, is owned by the government, which often leases out the rights to develop the natural resources, like gas and oil, to private companies.

Up until 2003, the Department of the Interior had the option of setting aside some of its lands for preservation, pending final Congressional approval. But during the Bush administration, the DOI gave up that option and only considered uses like recreation or development for its holdings.

Back in December, the current Interior Secretary, Ken Salazar, reversed that policy, again putting on the table the option of using public lands for conservation purposes. But as I write at TAPPED, Republicans are throwing a hissy fit about the change.

Truth or consequence?

The Republicans' argument goes something like: Using public lands for conservation will deprive Americans of jobs and hurt the bottom lines of states with large tracts of public lands. What they don't discuss is the potential damage that drilling for, say, natural gas could cause. The Mulch has been writing about the dangers of hydrofracking for awhile now, but over the past week The New York Times began weighing in on the issue with a long series on the dangers of hydrofracking.

The Times' series brings even more evidence of hydrofracking's dangers to light—in particular, about the radioactive waste materials being dumped into rivers where water quality is rarely monitored. As Christopher Mims reports at Grist, the series has already prompted calls for new testing from people like John Hanger, the former head of Pennsylvania's environmental protection department, which has not been among the staunchest opponents of new drilling protects. According to Mims, Hanger has written that:

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection should order today all public water systems in Pennsylvania to test immediately for radium or radioactive pollutants and report as soon as good testing allows the results to the public. Only testing of the drinking water for these pollutants can resolve the issue raised by the NYT.

Or, as Mims puts it, "No one has any idea if the radioactive material in the wastewater from fracking is appearing downstream, in drinking water supplies, in quantities in excess of EPA recommendations."

Tar and feather 'em

Fracking is not the only environmentally destructive practice that the energy industry is increasingly relying on. Earth Island Journal has two pieces looking into the tar sands industry in Canada. Jason Mark's piece is a great introduction to the history of the tar sands and takes a sharp look into the impact development has had on the community and the environment.

And Ron Johnson details the U.S.'s connection to the destruction: The federal government is considering approving a pipeline that would allow the oil from the tar sands to travel to Texas refineries. Johnson writes:

Green groups warn that the pipelines will keep North America and emerging economies hooked on oil from the Alberta tar sands for years to come. By greasing the crude’s path to market, the projects will encourage further reckless expansion of the tar sands. That would delay the transition to a renewable energy economy, while further degrading Canada’s boreal forests and spewing even more CO₂ into the atmosphere.

A new regime

The decision to approve the pipeline lies with the executive branch. But all of Washington isn't a particularly friendly place to green groups and their causes these days.

For example, as Care2's Beth Buczynski reports, the newly empowered House Republicans have done away with one of the smallest green programs the Democrats put into place, an initiative to compost waste from House cafeterias. They've justified the cut by saying it was "too expensive," but as Buczynski writes, "Spending must be dramatically reduced, yes, but also strategically. It's interesting (and disheartening) to see which programs the new GOP House has targeted first."

It's a small thing, but it shows how committed Republicans are to the status quo: They're not even willing to mulch their leftover salad.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about the environment by members of The Media Consortium.

DECC minister Barker attacked over retrofit financing

DECC Minister Greg Barker came under attack yesterday for the confusion at the heart of Government attempts to improve energy efficiency in the domestic sector. He was being quizzed at the Ecobuild exhibition in the ExCel Centre, London.

The method of financing the Green Deal programme to retrofit the country's 28 million homes is still unclear and there are reports that potential backers are unsure about jumping on board.

In this context Kevin McCloud, presenter of TV's Grand Designs, and Robert Peto, president of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, suggested that another way to stimulate interest would be to reduce VAT on energy efficient products for refurbishment.

“The government should be focused on VAT if they want to engage with the public," said Mr Peto. "The knock-on effect of increasing work in the building industry would be £2.50 into the economy for every £1 spent on retrofit but all the conversations I have had with ministers are them saying we can't afford it.”

UKGBC chief executive Paul King said that the Energy Bill should be used to force people in the owner-occupier sector to retrofit.

Barker rejected both approaches, saying that the financial deficit couldn't support a VAT cut and that home owners would be "pissed off" if they were forced to improve their properties to a certain standard before they could be sold.

Peto therefore accused the government of an absence of long-term thinking when it came to green building policy, echoing the CBI, which warned recently that the scheme risked becoming a "lame duck" unless the Coalition improved the incentives.

The Green Deal is to be bolstered by two others policies in the Energy Bill. The first will compel landlords to use the Green Deal to improve their domestic and commercial properties.

Secondly, an Energy Company Obligation (ECO), to replace the current Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (CERT) from 2013-20, will compel gas and electricity suppliers to deliver set levels of CO2 savings and home energy efficiency improvements through grants to fuel poor households funded, like Feed-in-Tariffs, by a levy on all customers' bills.

Richard Baines, environmental consultant for the Black Country Housing Association, questioned Greg Barker over how much of the £1.3 billion which Baines expects to be raised from ECO (the Government hasn't admitted a figure yet) will be in addition to or included in the money accessible under the Green Deal.

Barker said that DECC was still working this out, but tentatively mentioned that it was at least above the 20% mark.

Baines, speaking at a later seminar on retrofitting for energy efficiency, expressed further concern that there won't be sufficient finance available for 'The Great British Refurb'.

He said that the social housing sector and local authorities were in a double bind. "They fear that if they accept Green Deal cash, they will not be able to access other sources of funding under state aid rules. Secondly, as the value of their properties is already used as guarantees for other loans, they cannot raise further cash for these improvements themselves."

He continued, "The Green Deal, worth perhaps £6,000, will take care of the 'low hanging fruit' - efficient boilers, cavity wall and loft insulation. The ECO scheme should be used to tackle those jobs with a longer payback that won't result in the quick returns on investment expected under the Green Deal, such as external wall insulation, airtightness and window or door replacement.

"However, I have calculated that to raise homes to the necessary 80% CO2-saving standard, which may be £20,000-£50,000 per home, using a cut of everyone's energy bills, the bills would have to rise by over 40%. Clearly this wouldn't be popular!"

The Government still envisages a wide range of companies and public bodies being involved in the Green Deal & DIY chains such as B&Q, retailers like Marks & Spencer, gas and electricity suppliers, banks, local councils, housing associations and builders, plumbers and gas installers.

DECC's own impact assessment forecasts that up to six million home packages could be installed by 2020 at a cost of £21bn. Benefits are put at £33bn from energy savings, reduced CO2 emissions, improved air quality and more comfort inside homes. The accumulated CO2 savings for 2013-20 are put at 5.9 million tonnes.

European action for energy efficiency

Meanwhile, at the European level yesterday, EU diplomats said that 20 states have so far submitted their energy efficiency National Reform Programmes ahead of an April deadline.

The chair of the European Parliament's Environment Committee also told the EU executive that the Committee will fight to make enforceable the 20% energy-efficiency improvement target by 2020. This is the only one of the EU's three 2020 targets that is not currently compulsory, and the only one not on track to be met. Instead, savings of just 9-11% are forecast based on the current levels. Even with the submitted national plans this rises only to 14% savings.

A published draft of the Commission's Energy Efficiency Action Plan says that for the next two years, the Commission will only monitor the implementation of voluntary national efficiency targets.

"If, nevertheless, the 2013 review shows that the overall EU target is unlikely to be achieved," the document states, "then as a second stage the Commission will consider whether to propose legally binding national targets".

UK earns Euros 1bn from emissions trading as prices rise - & the Treasury won't spend it on green tech

The United Kingdom is making huge profits from its emissions trading under the ETS, but not ploughing the revenue back into green investment.

It has earned more than one billion euros from the auction of EU Allowances since its first auction in Phase II of the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (EU ETS) in November 2008, according to a report by carbon offsetting company Carbon Retirement.

Only Germany earns more from these auctions.

The revenue goes straight into the Treasury's general pool, and despite European Commission proposals that at least half of auction revenues should be used to help reduce greenhouse gases, develop renewable energies and clean technologies, and shift to low-emission forms of transport, the UK has so far refused to do so.

An attempt by the European Parliament to force EU member states to comply when passing the Aviation EU ETS directive was rejected by the EU Council of Ministers.

Revenues raised through allowance auctioning are set to rise dramatically in Phase III, with aviation joining the scheme in 2012 and additional greenhouse gases and manufacturing processes being covered from 2013.

At a carbon price of €15 per tonne, the UK stands to generate €328.5 million this year. Using Carbon Trust estimates of a price of €28 per tonne in 2013 and €39 per tonne in 2020, the UK would earn €32-64 billion over the eight years of Phase III.

Earmarking this revenue for green projects works well elsewhere in the EU. Germany currently earmarks €400 million of auction revenues annually, with €280 million set aside for national projects and €120 million for international projects. The report says other EU countries also earmark environmental taxes for various related initiatives.

Energy companies pass on the cost of carbon to their customers in the form of price rises, as their own profits soar. Carbon Retirement comments that as a result the most vulnerable members of society are being tipped into fuel poverty, and the trend is likely to continue.

“Earmarking revenues from EU Allowance auctions for subsidised community energy generation or energy efficiency in social housing would be a very sensible way of balancing out the potential adverse effect of the EU ETS on this group.”

The money could also be used to help finance the Government's proposed Green Investment Bank.

Unsexy renewable energy technology is turned on... and will one day beat solar and wind in the UK

It's not as sexy as solar power or controversial and high profile like wind power. But a 'new' form of renewable technology is going to take off this year – the first of a series of plants was commissioned this week – and eventually it will be better value for money, more reliable and even contribute more energy to the UK's needs.

Its developers are now urging the Government to match the level of support offered to other renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar, through Feed-in Tariffs.

What is it? Well, unpleasant as it sounds, it's anaerobic digestion (AD) and it is a multiple-win technology that is set to revolutionise waste processing and energy generation.

AD also helps to divert waste from landfill, and reduce air and water pollution. Byproducts include transport fuel and renewable sources of soil nutrients and manures. These processes will all additionally create new employment.

The Coalition Government also believes AD can help the UK meet its climate change objectives by reducing greenhouse gases from waste and producing energy - including renewable heat - without significant land use changes.

AD makes power from the methane generated by composting organic food, sewage and crop waste without oxygen being present. As these materials are in abundant and continuous supply, it is more reliable than wind and solar power.

The National Grid has said that it believes that within 20 years, half the gas in the grid could come from this source. The gas can be burnt to make electricity and used to power vehicles too.

Pioneer plant opens

One of the first anaerobic digestion projects funded through the Government’s Environmental Transformation Fund was officially opened on Thursday.

The plant, at Staples Vegetables in Boston, Lincolnshire, one of the biggest producers of vegetables in the UK, will produce 11 million kilowatt hours of electricity per year by processing 40,000 tonnes of unusable vegetables and waste.

The digestate (what's left over after the composting) from the Staples plant will replace artificial inorganic fertiliser (which creates emissions) and be better for the soil (because of the organic matter it contains), the heat will be captured for office heating, innovative heat absorption coolers will chill the processing areas, and the electricity generated will power the plant.

Vernon Read, Managing Director at Staples says there is an additional benefit: “The project is giving us control not only over future pricing of power, but also over power security.”

There are three more Government-supported AD facilities opening this spring and over 30 in the planning stage. Some examples are highlighted towards the end of this article.

The National Grid has talked of the biogas from AD eventually replacing a significant proportion of fossil fuel gas in the mains in the future.

But before this can happen markets need to be created for the fertiliser, and for the gas as a fuel in transport. Different sectors, such as the water sector, need to be encouraged to process sewage this way. This was the subject of a Defra consultation last December, whose results have not yet been published.

AD is also subsidised through Feed-in Tariffs (FITs). In order to increase uptake, there is a study into the take-up of FITs for farm-based AD plants going on now at DECC, parallel to the review of Feed-in Tariffs and "solar farms".

Climate change minister Greg Barker believes there is "a huge opportunity" for farm-based AD but had been disappointed by the take-up so far. Developers agree and hope it will become eligible for FIT subsidies soon.

Pioneering AD plants

Because it is not yet cheap to set up. Gary Jones is the owner of a plant at Langage Farm, near Plymouth in Devon. He says that the project couldn't have happened without support from the ETF. "Due to the new concept involved with anaerobic digestion in the UK, the start up costs are very prohibitive.

″Hopefully when there are a few more established sites around the UK, the authorities concerned in the build and running of the sites have a better understanding, and good technology providers can be found locally the cost will reduce and the plants will become profitable without grant funding."

Several other exciting projects are nearing completion, funded by the Environmental Transformation Fund.

United Utilities and National Grid are expanding the already existing anaerobic digestion plant at United Utilities' Davyhulme Waste Water Treatment Works in Greater Manchester. Work is almost complete on converting 250 cubic metres per hour of biogas to grid quality biomethane. Half will be used to fuel a fleet of tankers and half injected into National Grid’s gas distribution network - sufficient to provide heating and cooking needs for around 500 homes.

In Driffield, East Yorkshire, anaerobic digestion company GWE Biogas Limited is constructing a plant to convert up to 50,000 tonnes of organic waste each year sourced from local authorities, food manufacturers and supermarkets, to generate approximately 2MW of electricity for export to the grid. The long term objective is to upgrade gas to bio-methane to supply a private heat and wire network for new housing.

Like Langage Farm, BV Dairy (pictured) in Dorset, which processes around 35 million litres of milk per year, is building an anaerobic digestion plant to process liquid waste and provide renewable electricity and heat for its site.

WRAP, with support from the Carbon Trust, is delivering the Anaerobic Digestion Demonstration Programme under the Environmental Transformation Fund particularly because of its role in cutting waste in the food chain. It's also supporting a Staffordshire-based AD project through its Advantage West Midlands (AWM) Programme, with an animal rendering and food waste collection business.

There is every reason to believe the claim of the Anaerobic Digestion and Biogas Association (ADBA) in ten years' time the UK will have a mature anaerobic digestion industry.

[PS - let's see how popular this post is - with words like sexy and turned on in the heading! - I noticed my post about naked supporters of Amen Awel Tawe windfarm making a calendar is my most popular so far!]

Blueprints for saving the world and producing green growth

Two new United Nations-sponsored reports offer hope that the world will be able to reduce the severity of climate change – and bring other benefits to its people.

One report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) argues that there are plenty of opportunities for creating wealth, jobs, a more pleasant environment and improved social equality by transferring subsidies that support polluting activities to those supporting low carbon ones, up to a value equivalent to about 2% of global GDP.

Another, Integrated Assessment of Black Carbon and Tropospheric Ozone, also argues that by imposing strict limits on emissions of "black carbon" soot, methane and tropospheric ozone - a greenhouse gas that is also a significant component of smog - would clear the air, reduce human deaths and improve crop yields.

It would also reduce the impacts of climate change in the short term by 0.5 degrees Celsius (0.9 Fahrenheit) to the equivalent of a carbon dioxide presence in the atmosphere of 450 ppm.

Black carbon, caused by incomplete burning mainly of fossil fuels and wood, is blamed for accelerating global warming by soaking up heat from the sun. Soot can darken snow and ice when it lands, hastening a thaw such as in the Arctic or Himalayas.

Ozone is not directly emitted but is produced from precursors including methane and carbon monoxide. The troposphere is the lower atmosphere; higher up, ozone is beneficial as un ultra-violet sunshield.

Many studies show that existing pledges made at Cancun for cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are insufficient to reach the 2 degree limit, widely viewed as a threshold to dangerous change from floods, heatwaves, desertification and rising sea levels. But the measures outlined in the report could buy the world more time to implement the measures in the other report, outlined below.

"This is not an alternative to carbon dioxide reductions, it's complementary," commented Johan Kuylenstierna, of the Stockholm Environment Institute, scientific coordinator of the report, produced also with help from the World Meteorological Organization and NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

Proposed measures include cuts in flaring of natural gas, curbing gas leaks from pipelines and reducing methane emissions from livestock. Poor countries should make wider use of cleaner-burning stoves, and open-field burning of farm waste should be banned.

The scientists say that achieving widespread implementation of the measures they recommend would be most effective if it were done at a country or region level.

Transition to the green economy

The other report, Towards a Green Economy: Pathways to Sustainable Development and Poverty Eradication, makes a number of positive suggestions, again with multiple spin-off benefits.

It argues that investing just 2% of global GDP into ten key sectors can kick-start a transition towards a low-carbon, resource-efficient economy. These include agriculture, buildings, energy, fisheries, forests, manufacturing, tourism, transport, water and waste management.

The sum, currently amounting to an average of around $1.3 trillion a year , backed by forward-looking national and international policies, would grow the global economy at around the same rate if not higher than those forecast under current economic models.

The report comprehensively debunks the myth of a trade-off between environmental investments and economic growth and instead points to a current "gross misallocation of capital".

Removing existing and harmful subsidies in energy, water, fisheries and agriculture sectors, alone, would save 1-2% of global GDP a year, which could be used for the transition to the green economy.

The figure of 2% of global GDP assumed is a fraction of total gross capital formation; about 22% of global GDP in 2009.

The report says that greening the economy generates growth - in particular gains in natural capital (biodiversity and resources) - and in fact a higher growth in GDP and GDP per capita than business-as-usual. "It is expected to generate as much growth and employment – or more – compared to the current business as usual scenario, and it outperforms economic projections in the medium and long term, while yielding significantly more environmental and social benefits," the authors say.

The report contains many case studies to illustrate this, for example in India, where over 80% of the $8 billion National Rural Employment Guarantee Act, which underwrites at least 100 days of paid work for rural households, invests in water conservation, irrigation and land development. This has generated three billion working days-worth of employment benefiting close to 60 million households.

Such measures can therefore contribute to poverty alleviation because there "is an inextricable link between poverty alleviation and the wise management of natural resources and ecosystems, due to the benefit flows from natural capital that are received directly by the poor".

New jobs will be created, which over time exceed the losses in “brown economy” jobs.

The transition towards a green economy is already happening on a scale and at a speed never seen before.

Therefore, the report concludes: “world leaders, civil society and leading businesses must engage collaboratively to rethink and redefine traditional measures of wealth, prosperity and well-being. What is clear is that the biggest risk of all would be to continue with the status quo."

Tory MEP leader kowtows to heavy industry at cost to the environment

Martin Callanan MEP is using his position as leader of the UK Conservative MEPs to water down environmental legislation in favour of heavy industry, to the expense of small businesses and others.

Last week he pushed through new emissions targets for light commercial vans in the European Parliament that were severely watered down compared to what was originally proposed because of lobbying by auto manufacturers.

70% of new light commercial vans on the market will have to reach a carbon dioxide emissions target of 175g per kilometre from 2014. This will rise to 100% of the fleet by 2017. This represents a cut of just 14% on current emissions standards for these vehicles.

The cautious level of this cut was attacked in view of the fact that several models already on sale already exceed this standard - with Renault's Master van and Mercedes' Sprinter van (right) having made efficiency gains of 15% and 13% respectively.

Under the vans Regulation if manufacturers fail to reach a target of 147g of emissions per kilometre by 2020 they will be fined up to Euros 95 per vehicle per gram over the limit.

The target originally proposed was 135g per kilometre by 2020.

The European Automobile Manufacturers Association applauded the new law - they would, wouldn't they because it's what they lobbied for.

The bill was sponsored by Callanan who called it a "difficult balancing act" between the needs of the environment and car manufacturers. In fact, he threw his weight firmly on the manufacturer's side.

This is not the first time Callanan, who really doesn't like Europe anyway, has bowed to industry lobbying.

In November 2009 he attacked Liberal Democrat MEPs for "rabid environmentalism with little thought of the consequences (to jobs)" over the issue of giving free carbon emission permits to heavy industry under the European Emissions Trading Scheme after 2012.

He supported the move to give away 40% of all the permits issued, worth a total of €40 billion, to the cement, steel, aluminium and chemical sectors, who argued that making them pay for permits would cause “leakage" of CO2 emissions to countries outside Europe with no environmental benefits.

The Greens/European Free Alliance group in the European Parliament has condemned the legislation on vans. "An already weak Commission proposal on CO2 emissions limits was further weakened by the Parliament and Council, with the full implementation of the initial binding limits delayed until 2017," said German MEP Rebecca Harms, a Greens/EFA group co-president.

She said it was now too weak to stimulate innovation among manufacturers and fell short of the necessary steps to tackle climate change.

Kerstin Meyer, senior campaigner at T&E, a campaign group on transport and the environment, said the legislation was bad news for fleet owners.

"The [auto] industry used a short dip in sales to justify weakening a 10-year strategy to improve fuel efficiency, that would have saved van operators money for many years to come. When vehicle manufacturers cry wolf yet again, policymakers should take a long term view."

She said companies which use this class of vehicles should always look for the most fuel efficient models. "Because CO2 emissions and fuel efficiency are directly linked, weaker emissions standards mean vans will use more fuel. Fuel is a major cost to small businesses who depend on vans to run their operations."

Did Spelman invite GM firm to join Green Economy Council?

Why has a GM firm been invited to join a new body set up to liaise with three government departments on developing the 'green economy'?

At the Green Economy Council's first meeting, held yesterday, amongst the 23 representatives from the sector was one of the world's top companies developing genetically modified seeds - Syngenta - which, despite being Swiss, likes to think of itself as the "British Monsanto".

Its Chief Scientist, Mike Bushell, met with ministers including Caroline Spelman and Vince Cable from the Department for Business, Innovation & Skills (BIS), the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Syngenta, formed in 2000 from a takeover of Novartis, is one of the world's top four seed patent owners (with Dupont and Bayer), who between them control more than half of the world’s seed patents.

It is also one of the big three companies looking to commercialise GM crops in the UK in the near future. They have have carried out a small number of GM crop research trials in the UK including research into Genetic Use Restriction Technologies (GURTS/traitor technology) and GM wheat.

It has been called "perhaps the most successful GM crops company at co-opting the sustainable development agenda" (by Corporate Watch).

Bushell might have been co-opted onto the forum because of the company's backing of research into the causes of the epidemic facing honey bees.

However, Caroline Spelman, Defra's beleaguered minister, is a known supporter of GM. Until 2009 she was a director of the food and biotechnology lobbying company Spelman, Cormack and Associates, which she set with her husband, Mark Spelman, in 1989.

Spelman and Syngenta are not strangers. Last month, the Final Report of the Foresight Global Food and Farming Futures Project was published by BIS. Spelman co-wrote the foreword to it.

It highlights GM crops as one solution to the threat of food security, and in particular a "public-private partnership between Syngenta and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) [that] will focus on the development and advancement of technology in wheat through joint research and development in the areas of native and GM traits".

Most of the British public remains to be convinced what GM crops have to do with sustainable development, social equality or environmental caretaking - the only green thing about Syngenta's GM activities is that they grow seeds.

We need a state of war on climate change

Calling all climate sceptics. Listen here all you who think that climate change is a conspiracy of scientists who want to keep their well-paid jobs, or of left-wing governments who want to tax everybody to the hilt, or of liberal greenies who think they know better than everyone else.

Pay attention Senator James Inhofe, seen in the video in that link testifying last week against Environmental Protection legislation, and the likes of you Koch Brothers, oil billionaires who fund the climate denial machine.

Last month, members of the World Economic Forum, surely among your rich and powerful friends, and who belong to none of the above three sets, decided that climate change is the biggest threat facing the planet.

Never mind your vested interests who try to deny it, these elite businessmen and politicians are very spooked.

I say, it's about time they turned on their friends - people like you - who still make money out of polluting the atmosphere and shamed you into action. Shame, shame, shame you.

For there are few more powerful incentives to change behaviour than the disgust of your peers.

The UK government knows that insurance companies can put pressure on industry to behave.

But that's not strong enough. It's not shame.

The WEF at Davos endorsed the Economics of Climate Adaptation (ECA) Working Group's report Shaping Climate-Resilient Development, published by an insurance company, which shows that easily identifiable and cost-effective measures – such as improved drainage, sea barriers and improved building regulations, among many others – could reduce potential economic losses from climate change.

In making that judgment, the business elite also connected the dots between climate change and economic disparity (ranked 3), extreme weather events (ranked 5), extreme energy price volatility (ranked 6), geopolitical conflict (ranked 7), flooding, food and water security.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) last month reported that world food prices hit a "historic peak,' the highest in the 20 odd years since they first began the index. It was high food prices that were the last straw helping to trigger the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt.

All these things are connected. The consensus emerged at the WEF that the entire world is in deep and desperate trouble.

What should be our collective response?

It used to be fringe groups which called for climate change to be treated as if we were at war. Now it is the mainstream which is doing this.

Writing on a blog on the Foreign and Commonwealth Office website, Richard Burge, Chief Executive of Wilton Park - the "neutral and discreet environment for off the record discussions on the most pressing global problems" said last week that climate change should be "on the same footing as counter-proliferation of WMD".

He was writing after a high level discussion on nuclear non-proliferation. He continued:

"In the global debate on climate change, preparedness and adaptation for such change is often spoken of in whispers. To be more vocal results in being accused of defeatism or diverting attentions for the “real” task of emission reduction.

"The consequences of significant rises in global temperature are truly catastrophic, in terms of the loss of life, displacement of people, and the shortage of resources, it is on the same scale as the use of weapons of mass destruction (WMD). It will be a process of containing the damage, retreating to areas that can be secured, and making horrendous decisions on who lives and who dies. Large areas of our inhabited planet will be abandoned."

It can't be denied. We are at war with a horrific enemy: a future none of us wants.

In World War II anyone not helping with the war effort was heaped with opprobrium. Neighbours were ostracised if they left a light on during a blackout in an air raid.

From now on, the same degree of shame must be heaped upon you who needlessly use fossil fuel energy - and threaten the rest of life on earth - for a very different reason.

Treasury told carbon floor price would subsidise nuclear

Green groups have said Treasury plans to impose a floor price on carbon used in electricity generation amounts to giving billions of pounds to the nuclear industry – something the coalition government said it would not do.

They said that it was a secret way of subsidising the nuclear industry, which could benefit by up to £3.4 billion.

The Treasury's consultation on the “carbon price floor" closed at the end of last week.

Greenpeace and WWF said this would breach the coalition's agreement not to subsidise nuclear power.

The £3.4 billion figure is based on a minimum carbon price of £40 per tonne. However, sources suggest it is more likely to be lower, perhaps half that figure. Nevertheless the resultant amount going to the nuclear industry, of £1.7 billion, which would be over 13 years, is still a considerable amount.

These figures are based on the existing amount of nuclear capacity and do not take into account any new nuclear plants, which would increase the amount.

WWF and Greenpeace are calling for a windfall tax on existing nuclear generators alongside the carbon floor price mechanism, that would be used to support energy efficiency and emerging renewable technologies through the Green Investment Bank.

They have issued scenarios which describe how the world could power itself by up to 95% renewable energy by 2050, and regard nuclear power as unnecessarily risky and harmful.

Dr Douglas Parr, Chief Scientific Adviser and Policy Director, Greenpeace UK said: “This is yet another taxpayer handout to a failing nuclear industry. The economics of nuclear power have never added up and it has been continually propped up with money from hard-working families."

The eventual policy is to be determined in concert with the ongoing Electricity Market Reform (EMR) consultation.

Vital new tool sorts out the climate-friendly from climate-hostile materials

An important new tool that could help to drastically reduce buildings' climate impacts has been made freely available.

It is a revolutionary update of a “bible" on the embodied energy of hundreds of materials - anything from carpets and concrete to timber, insulation and plastics.

The widely used and authoritative ICE Database - 'Embodied Carbon: the Inventory of Carbon & Energy (ICE)' - is aimed at the manufacturing, construction and refurbishment industries, including designers, architects and policymakers.

It provides an invaluable means of telling specifiers what to avoid and what to use in the struggle to reduce the environmental impact of construction and other products.

What is embodied energy?

To reduce the level of climate change it is necessary to reduce emissions of global warming gases. These occur at every point in the life of a material or product, giving rise to the "life-cycle carbon footprint".

The “embodied energy" component of this overall figure is that used in the manufacturing process and is distinguished from the "operational energy" – that used in its lifetime. Then there is the environmental cost of its final disposal – whether it is landfilled or recycled etc.

If, for example, the product is concrete, it will take account of all the energy involved in quarrying, transportation and manufacture.

Usually, the impacts of other global warming gases like methane and HCFCs are converted into carbon-equivalent values for ease of comparison.

Why is it useful?

All products contain materials and in particular buildings can be with us for between 30 and 100 or more years. The building sector is responsible for 21% of global carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions: 8% through emissions from primary fuel types and 13% from the electricity demand for residential and commercial buildings.

As buildings become more energy efficient in operation, the embodied energy component of their overall footprint becomes proportionally more significant.

A recent report from the South West Regional Development Agency (SWRDA) on sustainable offices summarised that the embodied carbon impacts (construction, plus demolition) accounted for about a third of the whole life carbon impact.

Similarly, the RICS redefining zero report estimated the contribution of embodied carbon to be 20% for supermarkets, 30% for houses, 45% for offices and an incredible 60% for warehouses (usually unheated).

Last autumn the final report was published of the UK Low Carbon Construction Innovation and Growth Team (IGT), chaired by Paul Morrell (the UK Government Chief Construction Advisor). It had been asked by the government to consider how the construction sector could meet the low carbon agenda.

It made many recommendations, and on embodied carbon said that "as soon as a sufficiently rigorous assessment system is in place, the Treasury should introduce into the Green Book a requirement to conduct a whole-life (embodied + operational) carbon appraisal and that this is factored into feasibility studies on the basis of a realistic price for carbon".

Further, "that the industry should agree with Government a standard method of measuring embodied carbon for use as a design tool for the purposes of scheme appraisal".

A wealth of information

ICE is such a tool. It includes annexes on methodologies for metal recycling and explanations of how the values for carbon impacts have been calculated.

Summary sheets for each material expand into detailed fact sheets and graphs, giving a breakdown of the components of the impact, and how it has varied over the last 15 years.

For example, we learn that the impact of aggregates has been reduced by 1/5, because the UK energy mix has changed to include more natural gas.

In the important area of insulation, we learn that cellulose, typically made from recycled newsprint, has by far the lowest embodied energy (a maximum of 3.3MJ/Kg) even compared to other natural materials.

Rockwool is at 16.8, but polystyrene and other plastic insulation boards and foams, widely used in industry, are in the range of 99-109MJ/Kg. That is 30 times more than cellulose.

This means that cellulose should really be used universally by builders and refurbishment programmes in preference, despite the fact that it might take up more room.

It's important to realise that the global warming effects of the manufacture of products happens from the moment they are made, whereas the energy-saving benefit of insulation is only in the future.

Natural materials also contain carbon that has been locked up from the atmosphere during their growth (although ICE gives an average figure for the embodied energy of timber of 9.43 MJ/Kg).

So if there is a choice between timber and uPVC windows or doors, for example, uPVC has an embodied energy 10 times greater, of 94.7MJ/Kg.

The spreadsheets also include CIBSE data on material properties.

ICE is a major achievement, and is produced with the non-profit Building Services Research & Information Association (BSRIA). It is available to purchase and free to members.

The University of Bath, where project lead Craig Jones is employed, has charitably made a free Excel file version available.

Also for those with an interest in whole life carbon in buildings is this Sustain report on operational versus embodied energy.

Other sources of information

There are are other sources of comparable information:

• The Institute of Civil Engineers (ICE) Civil Engineering Standard Method of Measurement 3 (CESMM3) which includes carbon and prices for every material and unit of work, enabling users to calculate not just the economic, but also the embodied carbon of projects.
• The Hutchins 2010 UK Building Blackbook (The Capital Cost and Embodied CO2 Guide, Volume two: major works) which now includes both cost and embodied carbon for construction works.
• The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) working group examining embodied carbon.
• The Institution of Structural Engineers (IStructE) soon-to-be published short guide on embodied carbon.
• BS 8903:2010 Principles and Framework for Procuring Sustainably
• PAS 2060:2010 Specification for the Demonstration of Carbon Neutrality.

Feed-in Tariffs review: let’s subsidise what works

The Government has announced a review of the Feed-in Tariff subsidies (FITs) for solar photovoltaic installations.

Energy Minister Chris Huhne is worried that large PV 'farms' of over 50kWp will soak up most of the budget for FITs. The Government said it would cut the amount it would spend on FITs up to 2014-15 by 10% to £360 million in the November Spending Review.

The industry is crying 'foul'. It complains that other technologies are allowed up to 5MW per installation and that no solar farms greater than 1MW are in planning. It accuses the Government of attacking jobs in the very green tech sector it says is going to bring growth to the UK economy.

But it's worth asking: what are the subsidies for? Here are a few possible answers:

1. Huhne talks of making renewable technology seem normal by being visible on lots of roofs.

2. It's said that households with the modules become more conscious of green issues and energy efficiency.

3. By increasing demand, the price of modules is supposed to come down over time.

4. It creates jobs in an emerging sector.

5. It cuts carbon emissions.

But do these stand up to scrutiny and represent value for money?

FITs are a fantastic success, particularly for PV, in stimulating demand for renewable energy among the public. There are now over 21,000 schemes of all technologies registered.

Up to the end of December, when there were 16,384 installations, PV had the vast majority with 15,236 - over 15 times more than wind in second place with 977 with hydro lagging at 154.

Are these large PV schemes? No. By the end of last year there was only one over the 50kW size, at 55kW. The vast majority were under 4kW with the average at 2.6kW. Most of these will be receiving the full tariff value of 41.3p per unit.

On the other hand almost all the hydro and wind installations were over 4kW, many over 10kW. Most of these will be receiving only 26.7p per unit.

By contrast, if PV farms were to register for the Renewables Obligation subsidy - an older, different subsidy for larger schemes - they would receive payments of around 8p/kWh plus export payments of 5p/kWh (though this is to be reviewed).

So PV receives almost twice as much under FITs as wind and other technologies. You can see why it is so popular. But is it value for money?

Let's remember that the installed capacity of PV doesn't equate to what will be generated: this depends on the location - the amount of sunshine.

Solar module manufacturers quote figures for the “peak power” of their products. These are what they would generate if one kilowatt per square metre of the sun’s energy were to fall on them.

But for most of England and Wales, the summer insolation is a fraction of that figure. London gets 198W and Edinburgh 172W in July. In December, the figures are 22 and 13 respectively - a lot less - and that’s when you need more power.

By contrast, wind and hydro ratings are significantly closer to what you actually get out of the plant.

So if you're looking for saving the most carbon per £, these technologies are a better choice for support.

But let's remember also who pays for the subsidies. The money comes off a levy on everyone's electricity bills. This means we all help pay the income of those who can afford to install the solar modules.

Since those on low incomes pay a disproportionate amount of their income on fuel, they are essentially subsidising the better-off.

On that basis the Government is right to prevent this subsidy going to large landowners and companies seeking to install solar farms.

Instead, it should support installations by such groups as housing associations like the Peabody Trust, who are putting PVs on the roofs of social housing.

(However it is cheaper to build larger installations than smaller ones – because savings on overheads and systems mean costs are reduced per kW. So these would make financial sense if the cash came instead from investors.)

In America this week, Energy Secretary Steven Chu announced that he wants to spend $27 million to cut the cost of installed solar power by 75 percent to about 6 cents per kilowatt hour in order to let the US compete with China's takeover of the solar market.

Fine for them - the southern states are where solar power works brilliantly. By contrast, even in the UK's southernmost counties, the financial paybacks are 30-50 years - all costs included.

What the UK is rich in are wind and ocean resources. If it wants to generate future jobs and save carbon, with renewable technologies that can work domestically and be exported throughout the world, it should focus its limited resources on these.

Latest data confirms the world is warming

Globally, 2010 tied with 2005 and 1998 as being the hottest year on record, despite ending in Britain with a cold spell, according to the World Meteorological Organization.

Last year, global average temperature was 0.53°C (0.95°F) above the 1961-90 mean.

“The 2010 data confirm the Earth’s significant long-term warming trend,” said WMO Secretary-General Michel Jarraud. “The ten warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998.”

The WMO's statistics are based on data sets maintained by the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit (HadCRU), the U.S. National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).

In addition, Arctic sea-ice cover in December 2010 was the lowest on record, with an average monthly extent of 12 million square kilometres - a staggering 1.35 million square kilometres below the 1979-2000 average for December.

This follows the third-lowest minimum ice extent recorded in September. It is this phenomenon that is paradoxically thought to be responsible for the cold weather in northern Europe in December.

The WMO said that over land, few parts of the world were significantly cooler than average in 2010, the most notable being parts of northern Europe and central and eastern Australia.

Another predicted feature of climate change is extreme weather and climate events, and 2010 experienced a high number of these, including the heatwave in Russia and the devastating monsoonal floods in Pakistan. These were described in WMO’s provisional statement on the status of the global climate issued December 2010.

Despite this scientific evidence, climate change denialism is still common, and even increasing in America. The Republican Study Committee last week released a list of proposed budget cuts totaling $2.5 trillion, including a recommendation to withdraw U.S. funding from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In the U.S., much anti-climate change rhetoric is funded by the oil industry. Chief amongst these is Koch Industries, as identified by Greenpeace.

Last month they were the target of a hoax by unknown perpetrators, who made a fake website and fake news release that falsely announced the company was discontinuing its funding for denialist organizations such as Americans for Prosperity. Last week, Koch Industries filed a federal lawsuit in Utah seeking the identities of the people behind it.

Co-op calls for moratorium on shale gas drilling near Blackpool

A new report, sponsored by the Co-op, has called for a moratorium on shale gas operations in the UK just a month before mining company Cuadrilla hopes to launch its first "flare".

The UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change has accepted assurances from Cuadrilla Resources, which is backed by former BP chief Lord Browne, that their operation in the Bowland shale, four miles from Blackpool, Lancashire, will cause no environmental damage.

The secretive company - which doesn't appear to have a website - is about to drill further into what it calls the first true shale gas find in Europe, near Grange Hill.

"We understand that [cases of water contamination] are only in a few cases and that, when carried out correctly, shale gas exploration and development does not pose a threat to aquifers or local communities," DECC said in a letter to the Co-op, which had called for a halt to the drilling.

It added: "Cuadrilla, currently operating near Blackpool, has made it clear that there is no likelihood of environmental damage resulting from its shale gas project, and that it is applying technical expertise and exercising the utmost care as it takes drilling and testing forward."

What is shale gas?

Shale gas is methane that is found within natural fissures and fractures underground. Shale is a type of rock laid down under lakes and seas millions of years ago. The methane was released by rotting vegetation and trapped in millions of small pockets.

Until recently, no method of safely transporting it to the surface existed.

Now, by pumping water, sand and chemicals into rock formations under high pressure using a technique known as "hydraulic fracturing" or "fracking", energy companies believe they have found part of the solution to Europe's energy security problems.

At the moment Europe depends on gas imported from Russia, and disputes between that country and Ukraine have disrupted winter supplies in the last decade.

In the US, shale gas already accounts for over 10% of natural gas production and some analysts predict that could rise to 50% within 20 years. BP's former chief executive Tony Hayward has described shale gas as a "game changer".

But in New York State, a temporary ban has been imposed on shale gas production after an incident of ground water contamination caused by the chemicals used in fracking. These can be foams, nitrogen or carbon dioxide, containing sand, resin-coated sand, man-made ceramics, and even radioactive sand is sometimes used so that the fracture trace along the wellbore can be measured.

Water extracted for drinking can also flow through shale. A new film, 'Gaslands', shows homeowners in the state turning on their water taps and igniting the gas that comes out in areas where shale is being extracted.

Other reports from the US have depicted polluted water killing trees and contaminating land. But shale gas has transformed the American energy market and sent prices spiraling downward. European gas prices are currently much higher.

The Co-op takes a stand

The Tyndall Centre report, funded by the Co-operative, demonstrates how the extraction of shale gas risks seriously contaminating ground and surface waters and calls for a moratorium on shale gas development until there is a much more thorough understanding of the extraction process.

Paul Monaghan, head of social goals at the Co-operative, added there was no evidence the use of shale gas in the US was driving people away from using dirtier coal for energy.

Tim Yeo, who chairs the House of Commons’ energy and climate change committee, said drilling for shale gas raised ‘some new environmental and related questions’

Environmentalists expressed concern that calls for a ban were going unheeded. "It is absolutely dangerous because they are using technology which is not proven yet," said Darek Urbaniak, extractive industries campaign coordinator at Friends of the Earth Europe.

More fundamentally, the Tyndall centre report concludes that in an energy hungry world, any new fossil fuel resource will only lead to additional carbon emissions. In the case of shale gas there is also a significant risk its use will delay the introduction of renewable energy alternatives.

"Consequently, if we are serious in our commitment to avoid dangerous climate change, the only safe place for shale gas remains in the ground" said Professor Kevin Anderson at the Tyndall Centre and the University of Manchester, referring to the Copenhagen Accord’s commitment to limiting global warming at 2°C.

The report also says that the demand for water in shale gas extraction could put considerable pressure on water supplies at the local level in the UK.

These concerns were dismissed by Marlene Holzner, spokesperson for EU Energy Commissioner Günther Oettinger. "We believe that shale gas is an opportunity," she said. "We need gas and gas demand will increase over the years so if we're able to extract this gas, it will help us to rely less on imports," adding that this need had to be balanced against "environmental concerns".

Feed-in Tariffs budget to be slashed by 10%

The level of support for Feed-in Tariffs is to be reviewed, as the budget must be slashed in 2014/15 by at least £40m or 10 per cent.

Energy minister Chris Huhne has praised FITs for introducing renewables to individuals who would not have traditionally considered installing them, but said that there has to be a review because the recent Spending Review called for a reduction in the scheme's projected costs.

Huhne was responding to questions on the Financial Times' Energy Source blog last week on a wide range of questions covering feed-in tariffs, the Renewables Obligation, emissions targets and green jobs in the UK.

"These savings will be achieved through the planned first review of the scheme in 2012, to take effect in April 2013, unless higher than expected deployment requires an early review," he said.

Solar panel and other installers have expressed alarm over Government noises that there is to be a review. If the tarrif rates are to be changed this would affect decisions on whether to invest in micro-renewables by householders.

Huhne also said his department was keeping an eye on whether FITs were encouraging the development of "large, industrial-scale, greenfield based solar farms", which would "distort the available funding for domestic solar and other technologies".

"Whilst we won't act retrospectively, we stand ready to take measures to limit the access of such schemes to FITs if that is shown to be necessary", he said.

The Government is also to consult on the proposed support levels for the Renewables Obligation after 2013 in summer 2011, and give its response in autumn 2011, says Secretary of State Chris Huhne.

Attempting to assure investors, he said that changes to bands, if any, will come into effect from 1 April 2013 (2014 for offshore wind).

"The RO will remain in place until 2017, so developers can make decisions now, knowing what their support mechanism will be" he continued. "We are also consulting on whether to give developers the choice between the two mechanisms in advance of 2017, and would genuinely welcome views. From 2017, the whole RO mechanism will be grandfathered, so developers can know that investments made now will be protected."

Support levels for new projects between 2013 and 2017 are decided by last March's banding review, and the Government recently announced that it is speeding up that process.

Mark Kennedy: should the Met prosecute itself for crimes committed by its double agent?

News that the trial against climate change activists has collapsed because an undercover cop working with them for seven years decided to switch sides and give evidence in their favour has prompted widespread reactions - of glee, surprise and outrage.

It's being questioned whether he was more than an informer but an agent provocateur - he arranged meetings, provided cash, climbed fences and much more.

Such undercover work is nothing new, but the turning of an undercover operator is relatively uncommon.

Ever since Lord Monteagle was planted by Elizabeth I's Secretary of State Robert Cecil amongst the Gunpowder Plotters and helped them obtain the gunpowder they needed, not to mention the cellar under the Houses of Parliament when Cecil felt their tunnelling waas taking too long, the State has used this type of agent.

When I was part of a co-op producing a grassroots newspaper called Monochrome in Brixton during the '80s, an MI5 informant used to come to the open co-op meetings.

He stood out a mile, though, unlike PC Kennedy. He was older, dressed conservatively and shabbily, and his "street level" language was laughably out-of-date. We used to make fun of him.

He claimed to be a sympathetic lawyer offering legal advice, and also attended meetings at the anarchist centre at 121 Railton Road, Brixton.

He was exposed by the then Time Out / City Limits journalist Duncan Campbell and disappeared. He seemed a lonely, isolated chap.

We had our own undercover agent who infiltrated far right groups, such as National Front football supporters, to get stories for our paper. His technique was to say little, appear pliant, agree with everythng, and use personal contacts to gain trust.

A few years later the protest group London Greenpeace (nothing to do with the larger Greenpeace) imploded when it was found that there were more agents (seven) within the group than members! Several were private investigators employed by McDonalds, who were the target of their actions.

Each did not know the identity of the others, another innovation of Robert Cecil's to keep check on his own agents to ensure they could be trusted, one well used later by Stalin.

The subsequent McLibel trial established the argument that "those who employ agents are responsible or liable for any action they take within the scope of their employment".

Are we now to suppose then that the Metropolitan Police will prosecute itself for the offences committed by Mark Kennedy, aka Mark Stone, and his as yet unnamed female accomplice?

Join me for a free webcast on sustainable home renovation

Join me for a free Webcast presentation on sustainable home renovation, and ask any questions you like. It's Wed. 12th January at 5pm. Register here! http://www.earthscan.co.uk/tabid/101760/Default.aspx