Citizens' Climate Lobby UK

Author: Dave Waltham

  • Getting Paid to Save the Planet

    Photo: Alexander Mills.

    This week’s title is not a description of my dream-job.  It’s actually a way forward for all of us.  Too good to be true?   Stick with me and I’ll try to persuade you that I haven’t lost my marbles.

    I’ll start where I left-off in my previous column–carbon-taxes are an effective way to encourage millions of people to find cunning ways to cut back on greenhouse gas emissions but new taxation is generally about as popular as Boris Johnson at a Remain rally. 

    New taxes are particularly resented when they are perceived as unfair.  This is a problem for climate-related taxes as they can have a disproportionate impact on those least able to pay.  If we make gas more expensive, struggling pensioners turn their heating off whilst the rest of us complain bitterly but carry on with our long, hot showers.  The least significant producers of emissions cut-back and the worst polluters don’t change their behaviour at all!  That doesn’t sound promising.

    So, should we forget taxes on carbon emissions?  That’s what our political parties have tended to do until now.  Economists may like the taxation approach but politicians run a mile because it’s a great way to reduce the number of people who vote for you.  To be fair they tried—when the “fuel-price escalator” was introduced in the 1990s—but a few blockades by haulage companies were enough to push the emergency red-button on that particular moving staircase.

    Somehow we need to retain the benefits of carbon taxation—economy-wide, economically-efficient emission reductions driven by the shared brainwaves of millions of people—without imposing new burdens on those least able to bear them. 

    The solution to this conundrum turns out to be remarkably simple.  The revenue from the tax should be redistributed back to the population as an equal dividend.  So for example, if we taxed emissions at the rate of £25 for each tonne of carbon dioxide, this would bring in enough money to give every adult in the country an annual cheque of about £250.

    But how does that help?  The consequence of the tax is that prices go up but, for the least well-off third of society, their costs go up by less than £250 and they are better off.  The most affluent third of society, on the other hand, spend more money and the total increase in prices they see is more than £250.  They are a bit worse off.  At a stroke the burden is on the rich rather than the poor. Economic modelling suggests that the remaining third of the population see their costs going up by about the same as the dividend and they are unaffected. 

    This approach is called “carbon-fee and dividend” and it is already being used in Canada. There’s also a Bill before the US Senate which, remarkably, has support from both Republicans and Democrats.  The Left like it because it redistributes wealth.  The Right like it because it’s a market solution to global warming that allows massive deregulation (e.g. you don’t need to ban petrol cars if taxation has made them substantially more expensive to run than electric cars).

    So why aren’t we looking at this in the UK?  Quite simply, because no-one here has ever heard of it.  Had you before you read this column?  To find out more, check out https://test.citizensclimatelobby.uk/.  Spread the word, please.

    First published in Marlborough.news

  • The Changing Climate of Climate Change

    The Gillet Jaune protests in France started as protests against climate-related taxes on petrol. Photo: Koshu Kunii

    It’s been a dramatic few weeks.  Climate Emergencies were declared by the Scottish, Welsh and UK parliaments last week (and the Irish Parliament this week) whilst, last Thursday, the government’s own Committee on Climate Change (CCC) published a report recommending the UK have a target of net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.

    The last few weeks have also seen climate protests on the streets of London, whilst the visit from Greta Thunberg—the Swedish girl who sparked off global school-strikes—stimulated, at the very least, some warm words and commitments from our politicians.  I also loved David Attenborough’s programme which really described well what we are facing.

    All this activity is raising my spirits.  The CCC report, for example, is surprisingly upbeat and positive.  You get a strong impression of a well-thought through plan that really can deliver.  And net-zero by 2050 is just about good enough to avoid the worst consequences of climate change (as long as everyone else does the same).  I’ve not been this optimistic about global warming in years. 

    Hopefully our government will accept the CCC recommendations before the end of this year.  If they do, the UK really will be an international leader in tackling climate change.  Perhaps my fellow columnist at Marlborough News—MP Claire Perry, the Minister for Clean Energy!–could say a few cautious words about this in her June column although I appreciate that even the pages of Marlborough News are not the right place to announce government policy.

    Last week also saw publication of a less widely publicised Government document—a consultation on how the UK will replace the European Union’s Emission Trading System (ETS) when (if?) we leave the EU.  You’re probably unaware of the ETS but it’s been operating since 2005 and it places a cap on the greenhouse gas emissions of our biggest polluters (e.g. electricity generating companies, steel makers and so on).  Importantly, this cap is reduced over time so that these large organisations are forced to reduce their emissions.

    It’s not a bad way to do things but it does have one major flaw.  It only controls about 30% of the greenhouse gasses we put out.  The remaining emissions come from lots of small things (e.g. heating your home) and these cannot easily be controlled by an approach like ETS.  The government’s current answer to this problem is to introduce lots of regulations (e.g. a ban on petrol cars from 2040) but that has flaws too.  Apart from the fact that it generates lots of red-tape, it also relies upon a few (admittedly very clever) people in Whitehall to come up with all the necessary regulations, and they can’t think of everything.

    There is another way.  We can tax all emissions.  It’s simple and it applies to the entire economy.  But taxes are not generally popular even for good causes like combating climate change.  We can see that just by looking at the continuing Gillet Jaune protests in France (which started as a protest against climate-related taxes on petrol) or the problems the UK government had with the “fuel price escalator” in the 1990’s and early 2000’s.  Any such taxes have to be applied intelligently and I’ll talk about one possible solution in my next column.

    First published in Marlborough.news

  • Skylarks and Wind Turbines

    Jo Waltham at Westmill wind and solar farm

    Last Sunday I stood beneath an 80m tall wind turbine—its blade tips rushing past at 100 mph. It was a dramatic sight but the loudest sound I could hear was the singing of skylarks. This was quite striking as, a few days before, I’d been reading objections placed in 2015 against placing of a wind turbine at Chapmanslade (near Westbury) and one of the concerns had been about noise.

    I’m not suggesting that noise was the deciding factor in the rejection of the Chapmanside proposal but the wind farm I was visiting, Westmill wind and solar farm a few miles north-east of Swindon, has 5 turbines generating 6.5 MW of electricity and their soothing whisper was far less disturbing than that from cars on the minor road running past the farm. Noise really wasn’t an issue.

    Westmill is well worth a visit (details at http://www.weset.org). Free tours are run by the Westmill Sustainable Energy Trust once a month through the Spring, Summer and Autumn whilst special visits can be laid on for larger groups. Our volunteer guides for the two-hour walk around the site—Sarah James and Mim Norvell—were extraordinarily knowledgeable. I don’t think there was a single question, the seven of us on the tour asked, that they couldn’t answer:

    How much electricity does the site generate?—the wind and solar farms combined generate enough electricity for 4100 homes.

    How long did it take for the site to prevent more carbon dioxide emissions than produced by building it?—about 8 months for the wind farm and 2.5 years for the solar farm.

    How did the locals react to the wind-farm proposal?—there were many objectors but there were even more supporters.

    How long did it take to get planning permission?—16 years for the wind farm but the solar farm was approved very quickly.

    How has it affected farming?—the wind turbines have a very small footprint and crops are grown around them whilst sheep graze beneath the solar panels and benefit from the shelter that gives them.

    What’s the effect on birds?—there’s been no problem at Westmill although siting of wind farms should avoid bird migration routes.

    How about bats?—bats do seem to be attracted to wind turbines and this has caused problems at other sites.

    I’m sure you can guess where I’m going with this. To prevent dangerous climate change we need more wind farms and many of the objections don’t add up. They’re not noisy, it doesn’t take 40 years to get the energy back and, with sensible siting, they are not a problem for birds or bats. Of course we do need to be sensitive about exactly where we place them—even I wouldn’t put a turbine in the centre of Stonehenge—but we also need to relax the harsh anti-wind planning rules introduced by the government in 2015.

    For a start, Wiltshire Council needs to designate areas where wind-farms will be allowed, this is a step they haven’t yet taken with the result that new wind farms are banned across our county. As I said in a previous column, onshore wind farms are the cheapest form of electricity and they have to be an important component of preventing excessive global warming at an affordable price.

    First published in Marlborough.news

  • Natural Climate Solutions

    Natural Climate Solutions

    Over the past two centuries we’ve added as much carbon dioxide to the atmosphere as it already contained, and the amount should have doubled. However, the concentration has gone from just below 0.03% to just over 0.04%—about half the increase expected!

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  • Cutting Wiltshire Emissions

    Should more Solar Energy be part of Wiltshire’s plan? Photo: Karsten Würth.

    It’s all very well demanding that Wiltshire Council declares a Climate Emergency but what can it actually do? The reaction of several councillors was a request that we set out concrete, practical steps. That seems reasonable to me and here are some ideas.

    To start with, we need a target. How many tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions should be avoided each year? Setting targets ensures we concentrate on approaches that make a significant difference rather than on small-scale measures of purely symbolic importance. It also gives us a way to hold the Council to account—have they actually achieved the targets?

    So what should the target be? Well, if everybody in the world started to reduce now—and reduced steadily—we could aim for net-zero emissions as late as 2050 and still hit a 1.5 °C target. Wiltshire’s share should therefore be at least 3% of current emissions rising by 3% year on year. And perhaps we should be a little more ambitious than that. How about a 5-year plan aiming for a 20% drop?

    Wiltshire’s total emissions in 2016 were equivalent to 2.8 million tonnes of carbon dioxide, so that translates into required savings of 560 thousand tonnes. Here are my top five suggestions of how to get reductions on that sort of scale:

    1. Replacing mixed-source electricity by renewables prevents approximately 2.6 tonnes per year of emissions for each kW of generating capacity. Let’s aim to increase capacity by 50 MW (preventing 130 thousand tonnes of emissions per year). That’s only a 10% increase on the Solar Energy we already produce in the county. Wiltshire Council could encourage this by guaranteeing to buy electricity from a supplier who sets up new renewable energy generation capacity. If the Council also offered land to the supplier, the resulting deal would probably save the council money on its current bills!
    2. Space and water heating of a typical house produces five tonnes of carbon dioxide per year. Hence, Wiltshire’s target of 40 thousand new homes would avoid 200 thousand tonnes of emissions per year if they were required to be carbon-neutral.
    3. Improved insulation of existing houses could aim to save, say, half of their consumption and if this was offered to ten thousand low-income households the savings would be 25 thousand tonnes. The council can borrow the money required at much lower rates of interest than the general public and this could be recovered by requiring beneficiaries to repay a proportion of the savings, on their bills, for several years. Better insulation would also result in warmer homes for our most vulnerable neighbours.
    4. A combination of investment in public transport, further encouragement of car-sharing and installation of charging-points could reduce use of ICE (internal combustion engine) powered vehicles. Road transport was the biggest contribution to Wiltshire emissions in 2016 and produced 1.3 million tonnes of carbon dioxide. Hence, a 10% reduction in ICE journeys within Wiltshire would save 130 thousand tonnes. Fewer cars on the road would also reduce congestion.
    5. Restoration of forests can sequester up to 3 tonnes per year per hectare of CO2. Hence, a programme of tree planting could have a significant impact (e.g. 30 thousand tonnes per year from 100 km2). If these habitats were created in the form of wildlife-corridors they would also improve biodiversity.

    Total avoided emissions, from all of these suggestions, is 515 thousand tonnes of CO2.  That’s 18% of Wiltshire’s total emissions.  A good start, I’d say.

    First published in Marlborough.news

  • A Stone Circle for the 21st Century

    A Stone Circle for the 21st Century

    Wiltshire produces more solar-electricity than any other county in the UK but we’re joint 190th for wind energy. In fact, we produce about 6000 times more energy from the Sun than we do from the wind. That’s quite a contrast and we could do better.

    Of course, many people find wind farms ugly and don’t want them spoiling the view. That’s a valid opinion but, personally, I think wind turbines are rather beautiful and I’d love to see some on the Wiltshire Downs—a stone circle for the 21st century in the county of Stonehenge and Avebury!

    There are good reasons for expanding onshore wind farms. According to the UK government’s Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, the cheapest gas-generated energy is a third more expensive than onshore wind. Alternate low-carbon options such as offshore wind or nuclear power are even more expensive. Solar energy is the only technology that comes close to being as cheap as the wind!

    Increasing the amount of clean energy we generate would make a big difference to climate change. Most activities that produce greenhouse gasses could be run on electricity so that, at a stroke, emissions would be drastically cut. There’d still be some troublesome gasses generated by flying and by agriculture but there are solutions to those too (as I’ll discuss in a later column). So, problem solved? Not quite!

    There’s also the issue of intermittency—the facts that there’s no daylight at night and the wind doesn’t always blow. Solving this requires effective, large-scale storage of electricity and the world simply doesn’t produce enough batteries for this. We need another way forward.

    One possibility is pumped-water storage in which water is pumped from a low reservoir to a higher one, when electricity is plentiful, and is then allowed to run down from the high reservoir to the low—generating electricity as it does so—when demand exceeds supply. In effect, it’s a giant rechargeable battery.

    This is a well-tested solution which wastes little energy and has been used, on a small scale, for a hundred years. We just need to scale it up. That’s now happening. One scheme, at Coire Glas in the Scottish Highlands, will be able to store 30 GWh of electricity if approved. That’s about the same as a small nuclear power station generates in a day but this is dwarfed by the Fengning-2 plant in China which will have the capacity to store 4.6 TWh—enough to supply the entire UK continuously for 5 days.

    That’s the kind of storage capacity we need to think about building in the UK too. It simply can’t be done using batteries because matching the Fengning-2 capacity would require 21 years-worth of the world’s entire rechargeable-battery manufacturing output.

    The message here is that we know how to make (and store) enough affordable, clean energy to satisfy our needs and it could be done within 10-20 years. This change—in combination with electric vehicles, heat pumps and other ways of switching from fossil-fuels to electricity—could reduce emissions by 90%. We just need to get on with it.

    First published in Marlborough.news

    Photo credit: Karsten Würth

  • Climate Canary


    Reef in American Soma. Top: Dec 2014. Bottom: Same location 3 months later.
    Credit: The Ocean Agency / XL Catlin Seaview Survey.

    We are about to lose all our shallow water tropical reefs. From Australia’s Great Barrier to the shifting shoals of the Bahamas, the world’s warm-water ecosystems are facing total destruction—possibly within ten to twenty years. The only way to avoid this catastrophe is to keep global temperature rise below 1.5 centigrade.

    There are many reasons why climate scientists are coming to the view that even a 2 °C rise is too much. From increasing incidence of extreme weather events—such as the still unfolding disaster in southern Africa—to the likely impact on world crops and the complete disappearance of island nations, there is much that could be said on this topic. And the change, from believing that 2 degrees is “safe” to now looking for no more than a 1.5 centigrade increase, is the main reason why we are suddenly seeing headlines such as “only 12 years to save the planet”.

    In a short column I can’t properly discuss all the potential problems. So, I’m going to concentrate on coral reef destruction. There are several reasons for this. For a start, it’s a subject I can claim expertise in as, 30 years ago, I was one of the first people to build computer models of how coral reefs grow. Furthermore, large-scale extinctions are going to be the longest lasting effect of global-warming. The fossil record shows us that, following big losses of biodiversity, it take 5-10 million years for Earth to recover. The final reason for looking at tropical reefs is that they are a “climate canary”. Canaries were taken down mines to give early-warning of dangerous gas build-up and, if increasing loss of our reefs does not provide a wake-up call to the world that greenhouse gas build-up is serious, I suspect nothing will.

    Total destruction of all tropical coral reefs sounds like an exaggeration but there are good reasons for making such a dramatic statement. The issue is coral-bleaching—the fact that excessively warm water turns corals white. This happens because corals are not one organism but two. The coral polyp itself is an animal but it hosts a plant in what’s called a symbiotic relationship—a partnership that provides benefits to both participants. In this case, the plant feeds the coral and the coral shelters the plant. Bleaching happens if water becomes a few degrees too warm, for more than a few weeks, since the warmth kills the symbiotic plant and the coral then loses its colour and eventually dies.

    Bleaching is a natural process that happens now and again and has done so for millions of years. Normally it’s not a problem because new corals grow back after about ten years and the frequency with which coral reefs find themselves in hot water is much less than once a decade. The problem is that global warming is increasing this frequency. Today, with one degree of warming, bleaching occurs about once a decade and our reefs are struggling. By fifteen years’ time or so—when warming will probably get to 1.5 degrees if we don’t do anything—the frequency will have risen to about once every two and half years and most reefs will be dying. If we get to a two centigrade rise, reefs will bleach every year and they are doomed.

    First published in Marlborough.news

  • The Hundred Tonne Diet

    Graph showing total carbon dioxide emissions since 1880 and change in temperature since 1880. The curves are very similar.
    Blue curve: Total emissions of carbon dioxide since 1880 (source, Oak Ridge Laboratory)
    Red curve: Temperature change since 1880 (source, NASA)

    Don’t take my word—or anyone else’s—for anything. You don’t need to. The data is so clear that you can see, for yourself, the reality of human-induced climate change.

    The graph above has two curves. The first, in blue, shows the cumulative amount of carbon dioxide that we’ve put into the atmosphere since 1880 whilst, in red, you can see how temperatures have risen since that same year. Temperatures fluctuate a bit, as you’d expect, but the two curves are remarkably similar. They rise together, in lockstep, and certainly seem to be strongly linked. However, this doesn’t necessarily mean that human carbon dioxide emissions are causing temperature change. There are four other ways the similarity could be explained:

    Perhaps climate science has got things back to front so that, in reality, temperature rises are causing increased emissions. I hope you can see how ridiculous that is! It implies that the rapid improvements in standards of living (and hence emissions) since the industrial revolution were driven by warming rather than by human innovation. Another possibility is that emissions and temperature are both pushed by some third factor. Personally, I can’t think of anything that could do that. Can you?

    A third alternative is that it’s just a coincidence. Perhaps the two curves will start to look different if we just wait a little longer. Well, this isn’t the place for a statistics lesson but it’s quite easy to work out that two curves will look this similar, by chance, less than 0.1% of the time. So it could be a coincidence but it’s not very likely. Would you bet the future of your grand-children on odds of a thousand to one against?

    The final possibility is fraud. That would require conspiracy on an enormous scale as the data used in these graphs has been collected by thousands of different people over a period of 130 years. There would need to have been collusion, from the beginning, between collectors of economic data (mostly tax collectors) and collectors of temperature data (Victorian vicars, 20th century sea captains and NASA). Seems implausible to me.

    So the only sensible conclusion is the scientifically conventional one—human greenhouse gas emissions are causing climate change.

    The graphs also show that 1500 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide have elevated temperatures by about a degree. So, naively, we can only emit another 750 billion tonnes if we want to keep the temperature rise below 1.5 °C. This simple-minded calculation is backed up by the much more sophisticated calculations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) whose report last October estimated that we can emit another 770 billion tonnes.

    That sounds a lot but, with seven and a half billion people on the planet, it’s only another 100 tonnes each. Unfortunately, a typical Brit produces about seven tonnes a year and so we’ll all use our remaining share within 15 years. We all need to go on a carbon diet and lose a few hundred kilograms a year each year. Two or three hundred kilograms a year is actually not that hard and I’ll talk about how in a future column. But, in my next one, I want to look at why we think a 1.5 °C rise is the maximum safe limit. It’s not a big temperature difference so why all the fuss?

    First published in Marlborough News Online

  • Wiltshire Declares a Climate Emergency

    Demonstrators outside County Hall.
    Demonstrators outside County Hall. Councillor Brian Mathew, who submitted the climate emergency motion to Wiltshre Council, is in the centre. The blog author is to his right.

    Economic activities have now pumped almost as much carbon dioxide into the air as the atmosphere contained, in total, at the start of the Industrial Revolution two centuries ago. Science has known for over 120 years that this should, in theory, cause warming by a few centigrade. Mankind is now testing that theory in the biggest, longest running and most idiotic accidental experiment of all time. Initial results are now in and they confirm the predictions spectacularly well. Detectable climate change is upon us and we have very little time—years not decades—in which to prevent warming from exceeding safe limits.

    This was the context for February 26th’s debate on whether Wiltshire Council should declare a climate emergency. Around 40 local councils across the UK (and approaching 400 world-wide) have now declared a climate emergency as a result of pressure from grass-root movements increasingly frustrated by the inadequate actions of national governments. A motion that Wiltshire should join this movement had been put forward by Liberal Democrats but several Conservative councillors had felt that “climate emergency” was an unnecessarily emotive exaggeration. They responded by putting forward their own motion which supported action but removed that particular phrase. Another area of debate concerned a pledge to become carbon-neutral by 2030; is that really realistic and is it really necessary?

    Let me share my own views. I’ve been a geophysicist for 35 years and I’ve looked carefully at the evidence for manmade climate change and at the counter-claims. In fact, I looked at the data first and only then became a climate activist. In my professional opinion, the evidence that we are heading for dangerous, manmade climate change is overwhelming and the counter-arguments are shockingly weak. The link between human-activities and climate change is to too tight for it to be a coincidence and it simply doesn’t make sense for the link to be backwards (i.e. warming temperatures stimulating economic activity rather than the other way around).

    But how urgent is the need for action? Most of the world’s nations have now pledged to control their emissions but the promises are insufficient even if they are kept. Even with these unenforceable commitments, global annual emissions will rise to about 50 billion tonnes per year of CO2 whilst, to keep temperature rises below 1.5°C, we must not produce more than about another 770 billion tonnes (source, IPCC report on “Global Warming of 1.5 °C”). So, it’s simple arithmetic, 15 years until we bust the budget. The best case scenario is that we start and maintain steady reductions immediately, in that case we could stretch things out and not need to get to zero emissions for another 30 years. Unfortunately, there is no sign whatsoever of national governments getting the ball rolling on that. So, there really is a climate emergency and it is irresponsible to pretend otherwise.

    To my delight, Wiltshire Councillors came to the same conclusion. After a well-informed debate, the Conservative-led Council voted by a narrow margin to accept the Liberal Democrat motion and then, unanimously, to accept the Conservative one. It was a remarkable example of democratic debate in action; one Conservative councillor even announced that he had changed his mind as a result of the debate. Changing your mind in response to arguments is a mark of good science but is not, often, associated with politics. It was a moving moment that gave me some hope for the future.

    And there is hope. There is much that can be done to reduce emissions. We can’t go zero yet but we can buy time; time that will allow us to find permanent solutions. I’ll talk about how we do that in future columns.

    First published in Marlborough News Online