I believe we will need to tax our use of energy or emitting carbon to help, particularly the more developed countries, to adjust our habits.  Energy efficiency or using energy more sparingly is essential to mitigate climate change.  But as we are not going to make these lifestyle changes easily or fast enough so we need to incentivise people and businesses, through taxation, to help reduce our dependency on energy.  Also we cannot expect the developing world to make the same reductions as are required in the developed nations.  We all know the inequality in energy use in different parts of the world.

A report by the UK Green Fiscal Commission (GFC) was publicly launched in November 2009 (http://www.greenfiscalcommission.org.uk/) which looked in detail at the whole range of issues surrounding green taxes and environmental tax reform (ETR). The Commission’s work covered:
• How green taxes/ETR works
• The environmental, economic and social implications of ETR
• Attitudes to green taxes and ETR

The focus of the Commission’s work was the greening the UK tax system to make an important contribution to the cost-effective resolution of environmental problems.  For example, this could mean a levy of £3,300 for a new car for individuals and British business would expect a bill of £370 billion to help the UK Government mitigate climate change by 2020.

Will UK citizens and businesses see the long-term benefit of this taxation?  This is a prime example of the ‘Sustainability Dilemma’ – why should I pay £3,300 extra for a new car when it does not happen in other countries? and why should my business pay to fund the UK’s commitment to climate change as it could make UK companies internationally uncompetitive?

Can we get the world’s major economies to agree to adopt a green tax to try and help re-train consumerism without making their businesses uncompetitive?  It will be a brave government to be first to implement such a strategy.

So we are starting to see the first assessments of the failure to reach any significant agreement at Copenhagen at the end of 2009.  A study by the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany has been published in Nature and it reports that a rise of at least 3°C by 2100 is likely.

The report states that the current national emissions targets could lock the world into exceeding 3 °C warming.  A summary of the report states:
• Nations will probably meet only the lower ends of their emissions pledges in the absence of a binding international agreement
• Nations can bank an estimated 12 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalents surplus allowances for use after 2012
• Land-use rules are likely to result in further allowance increases of 0.5 GtCO2-eq per year
• Global emissions in 2020 could thus be up to 20% higher than today
• Current pledges mean a greater than 50% chance that warming will exceed 3°C by 2100
• If nations agree to halve emissions by 2050, there is still a 50% chance that warming will exceed 2°C and will almost certainly exceed 1.5°C

In the Nature article, the Potsdam team describing the COP15 pledges as “paltry”.  “The prospects for limiting global warming to 2°C – or even to 1.5°C, as more than 100 nations demand – are in dire peril,” they conclude.

From the BBC Website: Chances of a 3°C rise are higher than evens, the team calculates (simplified from Potsdam Institute’s Nature paper)

Personally I think they are being optimistic.  I believe we will see 3°C much sooner than suggested in this report. 

So if these figures are correct then the most serious impact of climate change is over 90 years away, then why worry and let’s find a great big sand pit to bury our heads in, as most of us will be dead and it is someone else’s problem!  Oh but wait a minute if we have 3°C rise which results in one or more of the tipping points being reached then desertification will increase around the planet and we will all be up to our necks in sand.  So we have two options: get used to sand or reduce our carbon emissions dramatically.

WalMart has dropped to the third largest company in the world in terms of revenue.  Only Shell and Exxon have greater turnover.  It is interesting that whilst there is a strong anti-WalMart sentiment there is a far greater amount of people benefit from WalMart’s business otherwise it would not be so successful.

However, it appears that all of us are starting to benefit from WalMart as it should be recognised as a true leader in sustainable design.  I know that WalMart is making a significant difference in the energy consumption of its new and existing stores.  However it is using its considerable commercial muscle to make its supply chain improve their sustainability. You can read their sustainability policies here…

WalMart recently announces that it plans to cut 20 million metric tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions from its supply chain by 2015.  That will be more than some countries will achieve.  WalMart are getting their supplier to examine the carbon lifecycle of their products from raw materials all the way through to recycling packaging.  They will not make suppliers participate in this initiative but they have made it clear that they only wanted to do business with suppliers that shared its goals.

As usual there are critics of anything that WalMart does, but WalMart continues to improve the energy efficiency of their stores, has improved the efficiency of its transportation and it has created a global index to measure the environmental impact of its products amongst other initiatives.

Whilst you cannot please all of the people all of the time, through its sustainability initiatives, WalMart is clearly demonstrating leadership in significantly reducing carbon emissions that we all benefit – whether we like WalMart or not.

Luxury toilet paper might be soft and gentle but it is bad for the environment as reported in the New Scientist (24 April 2010, Issue 2757).

Some facts:
• 60 million rolls of toilet paper are flushed away in Europe every day
• The average American gets though 57 sheets a day, six times the global average.

That second fact is seriously weird.  If that is the ‘average’ what are the biggest users doing?  Literally!

The Worldwatch Institute in Washington DC highlighted the wastage of paper in rich and rapidly developing nations.  In the US, 14.5 million tonnes of office paper and newspaper will be dumped this decade, despite being ideal for recycling as toilet paper – which is probably a better way to ‘dump’ the waste.

The potential savings are huge: recycled paper uses 64 per cent less energy and 50 per cent less water, and creates 74 per cent less air pollution, compared with paper made from virgin wood pulp.

The biggest obstacle to recycling, says Worldwatch, is a preference for luxury, multi-ply tissues.  We are such softies.

Whilst western nations are the biggest users of toilet paper, the problem is increasing as its use is increasing in China and Africa.

So here I am, marooned on an island called Australia due to a volcano, I have put this message into a bottle in the hope that it is found; then ask British Airways to send some nice people to come and rescue me – although it will be my luck that they will be on strike when they get this message. 

But as I sit in my home from home i.e. another hotel room, one thing that always annoys me is the waste in hotels.

Sustainability tokens are creeping into hotels, particularly in Australia where water is scarce due to drought in some regions.  So there are messages such as put towels on the floor where you are finished with them; don’t run water whilst brushing your teeth; we will only change your sheets when asked. 

These prompts are good and it is starting the road to being more sustainable but there is still a lot of waste:
• Few hotels provide recycling facilities so everything goes into a bin and not separated;
• Soaps and bath gels etc are all thrown away after one or two uses;
• When I enter a room it is usually lit up like a Vegas Casino and I spend half my time running around putting most of the lights out, and when I return in the evening housekeeping has kindly put them all back on again;
• The air conditioning is normally set to Arctic and the only other setting is Tropics.  I spend most of my time with the AC off – you seldom need AC in a hotel room.  But when the room is freshened up housekeeping see the AC is off put it on again and it is on for hours until I come back.
• The lighting throughout the hotel is always on and bright and I bet you there are not many high efficiency lamps used.

Just think how easy it would be to make changes to sort these issues which would result in all hotels consuming significantly less energy and be more sustainable.

So whoever reads this message, after you contact British Airways, please copy this message to Paris and all the other hotel owners.

At the moment I am in Sydney, Australia waiting of details of when I can get a flight back to the UK.  My flight was cancelled and it is going to be a week before I can get a flight home, although I am trying every option to get back sooner.  Nevertheless I can think of a lot worse places to be stuck than Sydney: the temperatures are in the high 20’s, sunny and not humid.  It looks lovely from my hotel room as I try and catch up with work.

However, consider our fragility: a little volcano activity and the impact on the world is massive.  But it doesn’t stop there; look at the tragic impact of the recent earthquakes in Haiti, Chile and China; remember the destruction on new Orleans caused by hurricane Katrina; and what about the long-term droughts in various countries?

In planetary terms these are minor events yet they have enormous consequences to us.  The cost of recovery is substantial.  In most of these cases we can use technology to mitigate the worse of the consequences of these events but we cannot stop them and wait relatively helpless, not even able to accurately predict when these events will occur and not able to avoid them.

The implications of climate change to humanity and most other species on the planet make these events look insignificant.  It is unlikely we will be able to meet the cost of ‘clean-up’ if we get runaway global warming if one or more of the ‘tipping’ points are reached. 

Unlike volcanoes, hurricanes and earthquakes we can control climate change through very aggressive reduction of our carbon emissions.  How much? How soon? and what are safe levels of carbon emission and atmospheric CO2?  I don’t know but why should we take such a risk when we can actually control the situation.

I don’t mind a few days in Sydney under these circumstances but I do mind our planet reverting to ‘dust to dust’!

In an earlier blog I introduced the concept of the Sustainability Dilemma.  Put simply we need full cooperation throughout the world to reduce carbon emissions to a level where we mitigate climate change.  This requires a level of trust that would be unprecedented at any time in our species.  We would all have to operate as a common society rather than different countries, regions or religions. 

To mitigate climate change we know we need to change and that we need to make a commitment to change and that we need to co-operate with others and trust that they will also co-operate and also commit to change.  The three key words to a sustainable future are cooperate, commit and trust.  However, although we know it is best to cooperate with one another, we still fail to fully commit to change as we know there is more short-term advantage in not cooperating.  Therefore knowing the short-term advantages in reneging we do not trust others to cooperate and hence we fail to cooperate. This is one of the three fundamental problems in trying to get agreement at a climate summit such as COP15 in Copenhagen.  The other two problems are “greenwash” and fairness but I will be deal with these subsequent blogs.

The Sustainability Dilemma runs through all aspects of our life.  If we consider some of the national, business and personal dilemma’s we face trying to mitigate climate change:
• If a Government makes the bold step of setting stringent targets for reducing CO2 emissions to ‘lead the way’ and others don’t follow then they fear they could make their economies uncompetitive compared with others whose economies are unencumbered by the additional costs to meet the stringent targets.  How many of the Climate Change protesters would be happy with long-term unemployment?  
• Other than for moral and marketing reasons there is little short-term advanced for a company to voluntarily invest heavily in CO2 emission reduction.
• What is the incentive for a company to invest in energy efficiency when they may be allowed to Carbon Trade at much lower short-term cost? 
• If energy costs are included in a tenant’s rent, or the energy costs are subsidised then what incentive is there for the tenant to minimise their energy consumption?
• What incentive is there for a developer to incur higher capital costs to produce a genuinely sustainable building when others will produce a pale imitation and market their building as a ‘green’ building at a much lower price?
• Building designers will promote their sustainability credentials to win projects without really knowing how to do so and then find excuses why it is difficult to achieve good sustainability for the building. 
• As an individual why should I limit my family’s energy consumption to the bare essentials for cooking food and warmth whilst others drive their two SUV’s, have air conditioning, have baths every night, washer/driers, etc.

But where do we start? Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few months there have been a number of highly publicised ‘gates’ relating to climate change e.g. ‘Climategate’ relating to the leaking of emails and issues to do with the freedom of information act at the University of East Anglia and the ‘himalayangate’ where it appears the glaciers will not melt as quickly as predicted by the IPCC. In addition it appears that the Netherlands has less area below sea level than the IPCC reported and that rain-fed North African crop production may not be cut by over 50% by 2020 due to climate change.

Isn’t this shocking! Does this not prove that the sceptics have been right all along? No.

It is sensational press coverage that have helped shock public opinion such that in a recent UK poll 25% of those polled (circa 1000 people) say they do not believe in Global Warming which is up dramatically from 15% polled prior to Climategate. Wow! What a change in opinion. This is sensational.

Now call me a sceptic if you wish but with a slightly different perspective I believe this information is saying something fundamentally different.

Firstly, nowhere in any of these ‘shocking’ revelations the issue is not IF there is a problem but WHEN it will occur. This is a very important distinction. However, by exposing the error of “when” the media are making the public automatically assume that the “if” is also an error. For clarity: the Himalayan glaciers will melt; with sea rise large, parts of Netherlands will flood; and if the rains to North Africa do shift as the science indicates then crops will be substantially reduced.

Secondly, whilst the sceptics are picking at the silly errors/poor science in the IPCC report it is detracting from all the other correct facts and good science in the report. Also there are probably more climatologists that believe that the IPCC report is underplaying the seriousness of the problem and we will see the impact of climate change much sooner than the IPCC suggest. These prophets of doom don’t seem to get the same press as the climate sceptics. I wonder why? Read the rest of this entry »

Many of you will have heard or read about the Earth’s Geological Clock.  The Geological Clock may be expressed in terms of a year, a day or a 12 hour clock.  Below is the 12 hour clock version.

 

So as we read this 12 hour clock first life appears at about 2 o’clock and multicelular life does not appear until about 8 o’clock.  The first dinosaurs appear at about 11 o’clock and the time span for the human race is so small it does not register on this graphical representation.

Just think when we sent probes to the moon and other planets in our solar system looking for life we are hoping to find single or multi-cell creatures.  It is clear it takes a long time for complex life to evolve on a planet and of all the millions of species that have existed on Earth we are the only species that has been able to write, print and allow others to read a blog. 

For all we know we are the only species in the Universe that has this ability.  It would be both ironic and tragic that we could destroy our species because we cannot live in equilibrium with our special Blue Planet!

I believe that COP15 conference in Copenhagen failed to live up to many peoples expectations was due to something I call the Sustainability Dilemma. This is one of the fundamental problems in mankind cooperating to mitigate climate change, and is more likely to be the cause of our failure to overcome the problem rather than lack of technology.

So what is the Sustainability Dilemma?

The Sustainability Dilemma is about trust: Why should I aggressively cut carbon emissions be it in my economy, business or home when others do not make the same commitment and whilst I sacrifice others get all the advantage – except for the impact of climate change which we both suffer equally.

The Sustainability Dilemma is my variation of a ‘gaming strategy’ called the Prisoner’s Dilemma which was developed in the 1950’s by Flood and Dresher and was adapted by a Princeton mathematician called Albert Tucker.

The Prisoners’ Dilemma concept addresses situations in which there is a fundamental conflict between cooperation and competition within a group when there can be short-term competitive advantage for an individual to not cooperate with the group as a whole. Consequently, the Prisoners’ Dilemma has proven to be extremely useful in helping understand the delicate balance between cooperation and competition and has been used in a wide range of applications from politics to biology and social sciences. Read the rest of this entry »