Fresh updates from the world of emissions trading:
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* GetUp has a new petition: Climate Need Not Corporate Greed. The premise is simple: call a spade a spade and make emissions trading actually impact emissions rather than just transfer $$$ to polluting industries. Also worth signing because it may be leverage against a tendency to overallocate that has been a consistent problem that previous cap and trade schemes such as US Markets in SO2, BP’s internal scheme and the EU ETS have had to come to terms with.
* The BBC Reports that a plan for national Personal Carbon Trading for the UK, arguably one of the most ambitious, complex and comprehensive Neoliberal projects in recent times, has been shelved. DEFRA research into the proposals to give every adult in the UK a personal ‘allowance’ included interviews with 92 people. The money quote is one for all the national psycho-social historians, “Just straight away it reminds me of going back to the war and rationing.”
* NSW Govt has announced it plans to join HSBC, NAB, Coldplay et al by becoming carbon neutral by 2020. The plan will include state-run operations like police, hospitals, schools, and power-stations. It looks like most of the emissions reductions will be made by eating koala buying carbon offsets rather than making significant changes to BAU.
* PhD Comics has some sustainability tips
Miliband’s Personal Carbon Trading sounds like TEQs (Tradeable Energy Quotas) which the likes of Monbiot and David Strahan have been pushing. Its an idea that’s grown on me over the years, and the longer we sit on our hands the more likely draconian measures like this will be necessary. Its even more pressing in the UK where North Sea oil and gas production is crashing. The price of crude will soon be rationing people’s lifestyles around the world, like it or not.
My message to the dill who said it reminded them of war rationing:
“Deal With Reality or Reality Will Deal With You” — Matt Savinar
A nice quote, but I like this one better…
“The invisible hand of the market is about bitch slap us back to the stone age” — Matt Savinar
I’m utterly unconvinced that personal carbon trading will be necessary, per se. Is it not striking that the UK is the only country that has floated the idea seriously? Nowhere in the world has taken the idea anywhere nearly as far as the UK. There’s a complicated history of science/society relations there involving BSE, Nuclear Issues and most recently GM food that needs to be considered when evaluating what form of climate policies will be politically palatable.
The key question for DTQs is whether they achieve reduction that upstream emissions trading wouldn’t or just apply massive, onerous deadweight losses to the economy by internalising carbon costs more explicitly in the minds of consumers. Fwiw, whether that kind of internalisation is a good thing or not is certainly up for debate - and one we’re more or less avoiding here.
Personal carbon trading is another example of what I like to call affectionately a “f*****g stupid idea”.
It’s the kind of thing that appeals to well-intentioned middle-class do-gooders who want people to feel “ownership” of the climate change issue.
One nice thing about carbon trading as generally proposed is that, generally, the transaction costs will be pretty low, and the players in the market will be large and able to afford expert advice and analysis. Big companies - either mining companies, or oil companies - will buy permits worth hundreds of millions of dollars at a time. About the only small traders will be farmers, who are at least businesspeople and have the benefits of a specialist press and professional organizations (not to mention bank managers and accountants) keeping them informed.
By contrast, personal carbon trading means everyone and their non-English-speaking Grandma would have to manage their carbon accounts. Aside from the ridiculously large extra administration costs, such a system would represent an enormous opportunity for the naive or desperate to be exploited by the unprincipled. It would probably be the system that spawns a thousand David Tweeds.
The only advantage I can see to personal carbon trading is that it’s inherently egalitarian. But it’s an awfully complicated way of redistributing income. If you want to transfer money from the rich to the poor, rejigging income taxes is a hell of a lot easier way to do so.
Hey Robert,
have you decided between 1kW or 2kW rooftop solar photovoltaic set-up? I checked my power bill: 23 kWhr daily average total indicates to me that fridge + freezer must draw well below 1 kW during the day.
The surprise was that about 60% of our consumption was off peak (costing about 6 cents per kWhr) against peak power costing about 14 cents per kWhr); I think the off peak use is water heating primarily. But at that lower price, I think there’s now [in Victoria] more incentive to go for solar photovoltaics with a feed-in tariff at 60 cents, than solar hot water.
Not that it’s “either/or”.
Based on our use of electricity, I estimate for 1 kW solar PV, 6.5 years payback time; for 2 kW, about 11 years payback time. Close to estimates given on the “feed-in” thread recently. If electricity costs shoot up, then there’d be different estimates, naturally.
While we’re talking of home water tanks (!!) we have a 11,000 litre tank on the shed, and it allowed us to keep the precious summer vegies going, and fruit trees, through the hottest days [ignoring restrictions by using tankwater]. So it’s not purely a matter of cost, for us.
Besides, we received the Stae Govt and local govt subsidies for the water tank, with due gratitude (August 2005).
cheerio
It would be pretty sad if the subsidies encourage the situation of people using solar PV to produce electricity to heat water! Perhaps people should not qualify for any solar PV rebates until they have installed a solar hot water system.
Not yet.
The company whom I contacted to provide the quote haven’t gotten back to me after their site visit.
I’m also trying to find out whether the feed-in tariff is going to apply to instantaneous excess power or overall. If it’s overall, it’s completely useless, if it’s instantaneous, the 2Kw system will probably make financial sense.
23kwh electricity a day? That seems an awful lot for household, is some of that electric cooking / hot water? My most recent bill covering a period with four adults in the house, and me working from home, was 3 kwh per day
Laura - 3kwh/day is very very low, especially for a four adult household. Your average family uses around 20-25 kwh/day. I’ve a friend who has done quite a bit of work to reduce his energy usage and he has his down to about 5kwh/day. Just a computer with a largish monitor on for say 12 hours is probably going to draw around 1-2kwh per day.
Laura, that’s exceptionally low. Just a reasonable-size fridge comes to over 1kwh per day.
I had another look at the bill, that’s what it says. It is for summer though. It went up to 5.7 over last winter. Our fridge IS very small. All energy-saving lightbulbs, no heating or cooling, no appliances on standby, no dishwasher, clothes only washed when they need to be washed.
No TV, no vacuum cleaner, no tumble dryer, no hair dryer, no extraction fans in bathroom or toilet, no halogens, no floodlights outside, no leafblower, no doughnut making machines, no microwave, no desktop computers, no cordless phone, no vcr or dvd player lol.
People actually wash clothes when they don’t need to? If people are that bored they’d be welcome to drop around to my place and wash mine instead
Seriously though its that sort of low energy which everyone should be striving for. And $70-80 quarterly electricity bills are a great reward.
Whats the point if China and India aspire to first class living standards? Adaption not attempting to hold back what is allready in play seems a bit more rational to me.
As usual the poor and elderly will cop it the most, that days labour you did will be worth far less in terms of what you get for it. The “eeevil oil companies” will become the “eeevil wind turbine companies” and provide you with power for more money.
If there was the remotest possibility of any government of any flavour bringing in emissions trading that actually bites –OR– a carbon tax for income tax trade-off –OR– personal carbon trading, I’d be a happy man.
We’re not going to do any of that, what will happen is the pollies will cut fuel taxes.
And one not-so-nice thing about carbon trading is the government (under enormous political pressure) will hand the big players billions of dollars worth of free emissions.
I’m willing to bet that Australia’s emissions five years after carbon trading is introduced will be higher not lower.
You want to take that bet Robert?
Carbonsink… likewise I’m willing to bet the Iemma Government (which won’t be around in 2020) will be very well short of being carbon neutral ( ie very carbon positive) despite offsets by…well any marker along the way toward 2020 that you care to choose. In fact why this amounted to a news story is beyond me, but watch for re-runs every year or so.
Mole @ 13 it’s not so much a problem that they aspire to our living standards but to our consumption patterns. The Chinese are eating more meat and fast food and choosing to drive luxury cars rather than ride bikes, catch crappy buses together or just plain ol’ walk. I read a good book a few years ago about the rising middle classes in India and China and how it poses one of the biggest problems in terms of environmental damage from carbon emissions, land clearing, water pollution as well as problems like food shortages (beef cattle fed grains) and competition for clean water.
Carbonsink: if they do hand masses of permits to emitters, I’ll bollock them long and loud.
For what it’s worth, my guess is that domestically we’ll basically stand still until 2020 on emissions, and our “cuts” will come from stopping deforestation in Indonesia and PNG.
Laura,
thanks: I didn’t want to bore people witless with details. It includes cooking, washing machine (we use clothes line not clothes dryer), computer, TV, occasional DVD player, hot water durting he night [off peak rates].
The only gas we have is for some room heating: all else is electric.
We live in a regional town: the only gas option initially was bottled gas - at least double the cost (per litre) of ‘natural gas/ town reticulated gas’) plus a hefty rental charge for the loan of the bottle.
Just shows there is a wide variety of useage patterns, set-ups of appliances etc., I suppose.
Robert, I hope it’s instantaneous excess: otherwise my assumption that the solar PV cells can earn us a few dollars a day while the sun hines Mon-Fri and we’re away working, goes out the window!
Chris (a different one): I wasn’t suggesting my solar PV should heat water: as I understand it, my water heating is off peak, only at night, when solar PV generation is notoriously woeful
Cheerio
Laura at [10]
You’ve done well: I dips me lid.
cheers
I’m sure Penny (minister-for-doing-nothing-about-climate-change) Wong is trembling in her boots
Broadly agree, although I think its probable that emissions will continue to grow between 2010 and 2020, but at a slower rate. Certainly the bulk of any “cuts” will come from prevention of deforestation overseas, and land use change in Australia. Anything, but anything but actual conservation in Australia.
The advent of electric cars presents a possible scenario that means electricity generation will climb massively by 2020 and beyond.
The driver of this change is cost to consumer. Basically the equivalent cost of electricity to drive a car as far as a litre of petrol would is about $0.20 which is near enough to an order of magnitude less than the cost of petrol at todays prices. Many pundits see petrol getting way more expensive, but electricity probably won’t get similarly expensive (for political reasons).
The maintenance on electric motors is also less costly than the maintenance of internal combustion engines.
Adoption of electric cars also threaten to derail (no pun intended) the effectiveness of the mooted push towards public transport.
Technology like the efficient, high energy density, cheap, fast charging EEStor ultracapacitor will fuel the paradigm shift towards electric cars.
If we want a properly reliable grid in 2020 (in light of the above) then our national strategy would really need to be advocating building grid capacity as fast as possible right now. Clearly we would want that additional capacity to be the non-emitting kind.
I suspect anyone who either projects or hopes for stable or falling electricity consumption are going to be badly disappointed at best.
Gilbert, electric cars will still get stuck in congested traffic, though. I don’t think the electric car is going to do anything but provide a short-term bypass of increased petrol prices for the rich. If carbon pricing ever gets the go-ahead, expect electricity prices, and thus the cost of running an electric car, to shoot through the roof. We can’t have a sustainable society in which the car is the primary method of transport.
With the greatest respect Sam, I think you’re 100% wrong on this point.
Either renewables will be cost-effective and environmentally sustainable, or they won’t. If they’re cost-effective to generate Australia’s current needs, they’ll be cost-effective and environmentally sustainable to generate twice Australia’s current needs. As I’ve had pointed out to me on numerous occasions in the past (when I’ve criticised renewables advocates for completely ignoring the costs of generation you can’t depend on), electric cars actually provide a way around the biggest problem with wind and solar, because most of the time people will be happy to charge them up when electricity is abundant and thus cheap. If battery tech improves just a little bit, people will also be happy to feed electricity back into the grid from them, providing reserve power far, far in excess of what’s required.
Or are you claiming that we’re going to run out of iron ore, aluminium, and plastic to make them out of?
Robert, I’ve never quite ‘got’ the V2G concept. Sure off-peak nighttime electricity is cheap now, but that’s only because we’ve gotta keep the coal-fired power stations running 24/7. Presumably in some utopian future we won’t be doing that, we’ll be relying chiefly on solar, plus wind, geothermal and other renewables.
Seems to me the logical time to plug in an EV is at home overnight, which is when the sun doesn’t shine. To smooth out the load EVs should really be charging during the day (when solar generation is peaking) and feeding back into the grid at night (when solar generation is zero), but unfortunately cars are typically out and about during the day (running down their batteries) and stationary at night.
If you do understand V2G, would you mind explaining it to me?
carbonsink - in many places (though maybe not the high density city areas) there is lots of unused roofspace at people’s workplaces that could be used to generate power. There’s also wind power at night which could be used and in other countries I imagine nuclear power would be used.
carbonsink, I did hear of a new method the CSIRO have developed for charging batteries in 3 minutes (sorry no link.) I’m not sure whether it can be commercialised easily.
Some comments on EVs - hopefully no-one here sees them as a magic bullet. Will electric cars of the future have the long range and short recharge (fuelling) time of internal combustion cars? Current EVs are no good for long-distance journeys greater than say 400 km per day. Building double the current grid capacity seems like an enormous cost, however it is generated. Perhaps quicker to resolve these problems with more use of rail for long-distance freight and travellers, and smarter urban commuting?
This is a question a little off-thread but I hope someone can provide some answers.
For the agricultural section of the economy it seems there is a problem with the large number of small businesses that need to be subject to compliance.
One proposal to deal with this is to apply taxes / fees /charges at the point of sale.I haven’t found an example of how this would work.
Is a fee worked out that is a surcharge applied to certain products ? For example a specific cut and quantity of beef would attract a GST type charge which the supermarket or store is then going to return to the Government each quarter ?
I’m guessing this is then supposed to discourage consumption and through this lead farmers away from beef production- but how likely is this mechanism to affect farming practice which may continue?
The alternative scheme I’ve read about would judge each enterprises Carbon output and require it to generate or purchase off setting Carbon credits.But with 130,000 ( a figure I got from The Land )separate primary producers to be regulated this seems to be a proposal which will require a vast regulatory beaurocracy .
The Point of Sale / charge method appeals to me as a small farmer but do other readers have better examples of how these proposals may work?
For many people a range of 400km/day is quite fine. For those who have second cars solely for commuting to work, 100 or 200km would probably be adequate. Petrol/Electric hybrid vehicles that have larger battery capacity and where you can charge the battery from external sources would suit even many more people.
Robert, re your comment: (# 18)
That’s a tricky one isn’t it? Globally, Australia’s emissions don’t amount to much, but shouldn’t we aim to lead by example and cut our own emissions ASAP?
Note this quote from Dr Pep Canadell of CSIRO’s Global Carbon Project:
I mentioned Amazonian forest expert Philip Fearnside in my comments on the “Rainforests and Emissions-shifting” blog and referred to a couple of his papers. Here’s a link to his website which is a very useful resource if you’re interested in deforestation: [link]
Fearnside has written a book chapter which is influenced by his earlier papers. It is currently in preprint, awaiting publication in a book called Climate Change Science and Policy. He’s got a link to the chapter on his website: Chapter 48, Tropical Forests in Mitigating Climate Change [link]
In this chapter he discusses the current negotiations for including tropical forests in the post-2012 agreement:
In an ideal world, I think Brazil’s proposal sounds the most honourable.
Fearnside also makes this rather ominous statement:
Also see the comment in his conclusion where he notes: