Last week here at LP we had the extraordinary performance of the Queensland Land and Resources Tribunal knocking back a Queensland Conservation Council challenge to a new coal mine on the basis that the IPCC had quite the wrong idea about this climate change stuff and then Senator Nick Minchin enunciating climate change scepticism as a core Australian value.
Over in the UK Greenpeace showed how to do it with a successful High Court challenge on Blair’s nuclear plans. The BBC tells us that:
Greenpeace brought the case after accusing the government of reneging on its promise to carry out “the fullest consultation” before deciding about whether to build new power stations.
Now that’s a good idea. If the government reneges on its promises take them to court!
The court found the decision to back a new generation of power stations was unlawful, because of a “seriously flawed” public consultation process.
But not to worry. Blair says it won’t change policy, though it might slow things down.
On the other side of the pond at a Washington summit on climate change delegates from the G8 plus Brazil, China, India, Mexico and South Africa (Australia wasn’t required) decided that:
developing countries had to face targets on greenhouse gas emissions, in the same way rich countries do.
They also agreed that:
a global market should be formed to cap and trade carbon dioxide emissions.
Please note that the people deciding these things were only delegates, not the leaders. Those leaders will meet at Heiligendamm on the German Baltic coast in June behind a 13 million euro fence under the banner “Growth and Responsibility�. But it is safe to assume that the meeting was one of those official preliminaries to get items worked into shape for the meeting of leaders.
Under Germany’s presidency Angela Merkel wants to refocus the G8 on what it was set up to do – fix the world economy.
I mention this because I often wonder how anything at all gets done on these issues. I understand that Merkel doesn’t want the G8 to make yet another set of grand announcements and then go home and forget the meeting ever happened.
Like the Canadians did after Kyoto. But there is hope. In Canada the parliament rather than the High Court is trying to force the government to do what it is supposed to do, namely honour international commitments. But from the article it looks as though the minority government won’t be impressed by this outbreak of democracy and will simply ignore the 161 to 113 vote. Because no-one wants an election they will probably get away with it.
In Europe there’s always Brussels and the EU which, I understand has a clear head of power in two areas – trade and regulations. They had been trying to decide how much CO2 cars should be allowed to emit. Predictably, the EU car industry was warning about the demise of the EU car industry, already the world leader in this regard.
But a week later they made a decision. Emissions are to average 130g/km by 2012, down from the current 163.
Not only that, the EU environment ministers have now decided to cut emissions to 20% below the 1990 baseline by 2020. This decision now goes to a meeting of heads of governments in early March, but their bosses would certainly have known and endorsed what they were up to. Special provisions will be made for lesser developed economies and Germany has offered to go to 40% to get the average down.
Perhaps they were galvanised by the recent IPCC document. But when they were dithering Merkel, who chairs the EU as well as the G8, told the German upper house that Germany must do two things – it must be a front runner and it must seek international agreements that draw in the US and the larger developing countries.
Onya Angela!
I’ve lost the link, but the German environment minister Sigmar Gabriel said recently that when you are faced with such a huge and daunting task it is important to take the first step. I think there might be a pattern emerging. Angela Merkel doesn’t have the flair of Blair but she seems to know where she’s going and just gets on with it.
Brian, is there any context you can give us about how Merkel’s initiative sits within the German political scene? How (if at all) is it related to the Grand Coalition? Are the Greens putting pressure on in parliament? Does the SDP have a different position from the CDP?
Still, good stuff! Go, Angela!
Is it just me being biased because of my support for nuclear power (or at least opposition to ruling it out) or is that British court decision a little strange on its surface?
On the limited reports I’ve read, the ruling seems to imply that the courts have the right to decide how a government consults the public. In principle, shouldn’t a government be able to take advice on issues from anybody it chooses, using any method it chooses, and it be up to the political process to decide whether it’s taking advice in the appropriate manner?
On the CDP/SDP relations in the German parliament, apparently the CDP aren’t over the moon about the plan to phase out nuclear power in Germany. There’s been a few reports that they can’t figure out (even with Germany’s extensive renewables programs) how Germany is going to a) meet greenhouse targets, b) produce enough energy at a reasonable price, and c) avoid complete dependence on Russian gas supplies, if they shut down Germany’s existing nuclear plants. How mainstream a view that is I couldn’t say.
Kim, Robert, I’m late and I’ve got to fly. Robert that’s roughly what I know too. There has been talk about revisiting the decision to phase out nuclear, a legacy of the coalition with the Greens.
Other than that, Merkel seems to have the Grand Coalition working as well as these things ever can. They seem to talk things through, establish a pragmatic compromise and then go from there. No-one thought Merkel could pull it off, I think, and she has particularly surprised at the international level, where she had no experience.
I’m sure the Germans expect to make money out of GW by being a front-runner, and no doubt they will.
Still 40% is a huge ask and it will be interesting to see what happens next.
I must say, with Canada and their recent resolution - the opposition Liberal party proposed it, after being in government almost the entire time since Kyoto was signed and having done nothing about it while in government. Indeed, carbon emissions rose 35% under the Liberals in Canada, instead of falling the 6% mandated. But since they don’t have to take responsibility for it now, they can make all the resolutions they wish, to try and embarrass the Conservatives with deadlines and grand statements, and hoping the segment of the electorate who cares about such things has a short or selective memory (which wouldn’t be hard - solidarity against the class enemies and all that).
“The End of the world is not nigh. The World is not about disappear; it’s not even going to change as we know it. So dry your eyes and prepare to spend the rest of your lives looking for something real to worry about!”
Were I to have written these words at any time in the last two thousand years, I would have been right and all the experts, Alchemists, Sooth-sayers, Court advisors, Astrologists, Witch Doctors, Think-tanks, symposia and Quacks would have all been wrong…
Fourty years ago, walking down Oxford Street in London, I was amazed at how many “Sandwich-board” men were still walking about proclaiming doom and gloom. ‘This is the Twentieth Century’, I thought, ‘How come there are still people who belive that the End of the world is close at hand? A friend explained that there is a human need for atonement for sin and in the absence of religion, the only way to express this need to atone is through fighting imagined perils. Made sense to me.
Now the sandwich-board men have gone, replaced by guys advertising golfing goods. But the old messages are still there! No, not on the sandwich-boards but on the television screens and magazine and post-boards. Now the cries are much louder proclaiming the the end of the world as we know it, unless we repent and change our ways.
It is the same old story but nowadays, naturally, quite alot of money is being made out of this very human need for atonement. The World was not about to end 40 years ago, not even in London. It was a dillusion based on self deception.
The climate today is changing a bit but no more or less than it has ever done. As always, the fortune tellers and prophets lie and cheat to get their message accross but in an age where the average person knows little about the fudamentals of science, the false prophets don’t need to say much to get believed.
For the record, 100’s of scientists and practical observers all over the World for the last 400 years (including Gallileo) have clearly documented and traced the effects Sun-Spots have had on the Earth’s weather systems. If you read any of the predictions written by Solar cosmologists 25 years ago or more, they would have all commented on the approach of unstable weather patterns developing towards the end of the millenia.
The Greenhouse Effect is totally unscientific and a lie.
The Earth can’t lose heat into empty space; The Earth travels in a vacuum so CO2 isn’t preventing the suns heat from “getting out” but our position in a vaccum. Its the physics of oue existance Less CO2 doesn’t mean the Sun’s heat can sort of leach back into space as if the World was some kind of radiator. Besides, any biologist will tell you; increase atmospheric CO2 and plants will respire more quickly and must therefore reduce the amount of CO2. That is why there is a balance. More CO2, more repiration.
Look at my blog to get an obvious view of the changing climate. This blog is quite interesting. http://www.new-model-democracy.blog.co.uk/
What kind of garbage is this?
If this was a parrot attacking a keyboard, I might understand. As this possibility of comprehensible English coming out of such a circumstance is very low, I can only assume that the author has a miswiring somewhere.
Thanks for the roundup, Brian. I saw something about the German plan on the news, and it’s good to get more info on it.
At first glance, yes, heat (as in vibrations of atoms/molecules) can’t be propgated directly in a vaccum as the atoms/molecules are very sparsely distributed and it would take a long time for heat to propagate through a vacuum that way.
However, heat can be turned into electromagnetic radiation, which quite happily moves through a vacuum.
Presumeably, if the Earth couldn’t lose heat into empty space, it would continue to warm up over the 5 billion years the sun has been shining onto it (unless there’s a giant heat sink in the earth somewhere), and who knows how hot the Earth would be now!
In the comment above, I should have been more clear that heat can be propagated by atoms/molecules hitting each other and that in a vacuum they are greatly dispersed, so it would take a long time for heat to be propagated by atoms/molecules directly hitting each other.
On pragmatic, perhaps Posnerian/Cravenerian grounds, is it really wise for minor administrative tribunals to make major policy decisions? Whether or not there should be new coal mines is a decision for governments. I doubt the courts are a productive terrain of conflict for ‘the left’, look at how the US left stormed out of the streets into the courts and the English departments. Beware the judicialisation of politics.
I think you’ll find the UK court found as it did because the legislation under which the power plants are to be built specifies that the Minister must do “meaningful consultation”, not because the court asserts there is any general right to meaningful consultation about government policy. Whether the legislation is wise or not is a separate issue, but far from the court inventing new law it was being literalist.
As for the Queensland decision, if the tribunal had taken Geoff R’s view and said that blocking the mine on greenhouse policy grounds was ultra vires then most people would have copped it without fuss. But instead it asserted that greenhouse grounds don’t exist - it’s all a conspiracy by greenies. This is a very different proposition that takes them much further into the judicialisation of politics.
Thanks, dd. That makes sense about the UK court decision. The fact that the court found that the government had acted illegally suggests what say.
Stuart, it’s true that the Liberals in Canada were slack when they were in power. They may be opportunistic and hypocritical now that they are in opposition, but it could also be that the climate of opinion has changed there too. I’m not close enough to Canadian politics to know.
Justin, consider that the difference between the temperature in pre-industrial times and the latter part of the last ice age was only 3C. Don’t you think that a rise of 0.6C in the last three decades is a bit unusual?
We are almost certainly committed to a temperature rise of 2C plus compared to pre-industrial times (1750-1850).
Take a look at Figure 2 on page 5 of the Executive summary of the Stern Review (pdf) and note what is likely to occur in the 2-3C band. It includes:
- Small mountain glaciers disappear worldwide - potential threat to water supplies in several regions.
- Greater than 30% decrease in runoff in Mediterranean and Southern Africa.
- Coral reefs ecosystems extensively and eventually irreversibly damaged.
- Many species facing extinction (20 - 50% in one study).
- Possible onset of collapse of all or part of the Amazonian rainforests.
- Risk of weakening of natural carbon absorption.
- Onset of irreversible melting of the Greenland ice sheet.
The last three of these are ‘tipping points’ that would in themselves cause further warming.
If you can credibly assure me that none of the above will occur, and I mean no risk whatsoever, then I might begin to relax.
(This argument based on Figure 2 of the Stern Report was derived from this article by Tol and Yohe .)
I tried to link to the following article when this thread was active, but hadn’t activated my on-line access to Economist articles. Now I have, and here is the entirety of an article that may be of interest.
A policy of denial
Feb 8th 2007 | BERLIN
From The Economist print edition
The nuclear lobby warms to a changing future in the energy world
STEPHAN KOHLER climbs mountains and used to assess the safety of nuclear power plants. Now he is chief executive of DENA, a government agency to promote energy efficiency. Nothing can persuade him that nuclear power is an acceptable risk—unlike mountain-climbing, which, he says, puts only his life in danger.
AFP Thought embargo?
Mr Kohler is not alone. Millions of Germans want to end their exposure to atomic power, hence the agreement back in June 2000 by the main political parties and the nuclear industry to shorten the life of the country’s 17 plants and shut them all down by around 2020. In November 2005 that timetable was confirmed by the new government’s coalition agreement.
But the world has changed. Amid the political games being played by Russia and its neighbours, Germany’s oil and gas supplies appear less secure. And as the current president of the European Union and the G8, Germany is trying to provide leadership in the new war against CO2 emissions. It wants to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions to 40% below 1990 levels by 2020. Key to the energy plan, besides more wind farms and solar panels, and less leaky buildings, is the development of clean coal-fired power plants. But the technology is in its infancy. Two pilot plants will not be ready before 2014.
One answer: stretch the average life of nuclear plants, which are emission-free, from the agreed 32 years to a scientifically acceptable 40 (in America their life is already being stretched to 60 years). Then there would be time to develop better clean and renewable technology. “The disadvantages are hard to see,â€? says Manuel Frondel at RWI, a research group. “Even if we shut down all our atom plants we would probably import nuclear power from France or central Europe: that would be pushing the problem to the west and east. We still haven’t found more than interim solutions for storing nuclear waste, but that quest is not insoluble, and it is not exacerbated by continuing to run plants.â€?
A timely piece of research by Deutsche Bank boldly states that phasing out nuclear power plants “is not a viable policy option.â€? Instead it recommends stretching their life to 60 years and taxing the windfall profits to subsidise clean coal plants, which could not otherwise compete with gas-fired alternatives. So confident is Deutsche Bank that this government, or the next, will have to revise its nuclear policy, that it assumes the change in its forecasts for the share prices of RWE and E.ON, Germany’s two biggest nuclear operators.
The power companies have started manoeuvring. In December, RWE and EnBW, another German nuclear operator, each made applications, under the terms of the 2000 agreement, to shift capacity from a younger nuclear plant to one that is older. Both argue that this will allow them to operate and phase out two side-by-side plants—one old, one newer—in harmony, and it will buy them time to develop alternative technologies. “This is not just cosmetic pre-election tactics,� says Utz Claassen, chief executive of EnBW.
But Mr Claassen—not known for his political naivety—is aware that 2009 will bring new federal elections and the end of the coalition agreement. Unless the lives of his and RWE’s oldest plants are reprieved by a capacity shift, then that is about the time they will have to be shut down. A Deutsche Bank-style extension to 60 years would allow the veteran plants to purr on beyond 2030.
The nuclear lobby is being very careful, but “there should be no Denkverbot [thought embargo]�, says Bernd Arts of the Atomforum in Berlin. Chancellor Angela Merkel herself is displaying symptoms of schizophrenia on the subject: “I stick to the coalition agreement,� she told the Sunday Bild newspaper on February 4th. “But whoever wants to get out of nuclear energy must find some serious answers to meeting environmental targets. Renewable energy cannot be a complete answer by 2020.�
Regarding “A policy of denial” (posted 2007-03-01), there is absolutely no need for nuclear power in the Germany (or anywhere else in Europe or the USA) because there is a simple mature technology that can deliver huge amounts of clean energy without any of the headaches of nuclear power.
I refer to ‘concentrating solar power’ (CSP), the technique of concentrating sunlight using mirrors to create heat, and then using the heat to raise steam and drive turbines and generators, just like a conventional power station. It is possible to store solar heat in melted salts so that electricity generation may continue through the night or on cloudy days. This technology has been generating electricity successfully in California since 1985 and half a million Californians currently get their electricity from this source. CSP plants are now being planned or built in many parts of the world. A recent report from the American Solar Energy Society says that CSP plants in the south western states of the US “could provide nearly 7,000 GW of capacity, or ***about seven times the current total US electric capacity***” (emphasis added).
CSP works best in hot deserts and, of course, there are not many of these in Europe! But it is feasible and economic to transmit solar electricity over very long distances using highly-efficient ‘HVDC’ transmission lines. With transmission losses at about 3% per 1000 km, solar electricity may, for example, be transmitted from North Africa to Berlin with only about 10% loss of power. A large-scale HVDC transmission grid has also been proposed by the wind energy company Airtricity as a means of optimising the use of wind power throughout Europe.
In the recent ‘TRANS-CSP’ report commissioned by the German government, it is estimated that CSP electricity, imported from North Africa and the Middle East, could become one of the cheapest sources of electricity in Europe, including the cost of transmission. That report shows in great detail how Europe can meet all its needs for electricity, make deep cuts in CO2 emissions, and phase out nuclear power at the same time.
Further information about CSP may be found at http://www.trec-uk.org.uk and http://www.trecers.net . Copies of the TRANS-CSP report may be downloaded from http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/reports.htm . The many problems associated with nuclear power are summarised at http://www.mng.org.uk/green_house/no_nukes.htm .
Sacha, thanks for that article.
Gerry, that material on CSP is interesting, but it is difficult for we non-technical people to come to any conclusions. I clicked on your name and got the TREC UK site. Do you have a connection with the project?
I noticed that in one of the links two German scientists had worked out that covering 0.5% of the world’s deserts with concentrated solar panels would be equal to the world’s electricity. Yet there was said to be no more than 15% of Europe’s power from this source by 2050. Any reason?
The incident last year at a nuclear plant ot Forsmark in Sweden is a worry.
Thanks for the comment. Re your first question, I am the Coordinator of TREC-UK.
There is a non-technical overview of the ideas at http://www.trec-uk.org.uk/csp.htm . It should be clear without one needing much technical knowledge. Mirrors are used to concentrate sunlight to create heat and then the heat is used to raise steam which drives turbines and generators, just like any ordinary power station. This is quite different from photovoltaic ’solar panels’.
The main reasons why the TRANS-CSP report suggests that about 15% of Europe’s electricity might come from CSP imports by 2050 are:
1 They are keen that local people in sun belt countries should be supplied with electricity first.
2 It takes time to plan and build the necessary CSP power plants.
3 There are lots of other sources of renewable energy and it is good to have wide variety of different sources rather than relying on one source.
If people decided they wanted to do things faster or to build more CSP plants, I am sure it could be done. Now that the Secretary General of the UN has said that climate change is as much as a threat as war, perhaps everything should now be done as fast and as vigorously as it is in war time.
In principle, a small portion of the Sahara desert could generate all of Europe’s electricity.
I hope that helps.
Regards,
Gerry
Thanks, Gerry. It seems clear that Europe really does have genuine non-nuclear opyions.
That sounds very interesting, Gerry. It’d be great to adopt relatively technologically simple renewable energy sources that don’t have the potential for major problems. I’ll look at the TREC website with interest.
A great deal of Australia is desert…