Blog – Page 13 – Citizens' Climate Lobby UK

Is technology constraint the main reason we have been unable to drive carbon out of the economy? Is there a stark choice between on the one hand cutting back on our high carbon burning lifestyles in the West and on the other hand allowing global warming to damage the most vulnerable? Or are there viable technology solutions that allow our lifestyles to continue?

The answers to these questions, when widely known, will change the way the public responds to climate change. If people think that it is a choice between their lifestyle and the environment, then it is human nature that they will do all they can to resist the message of man-made climate change. They don’t want to give up so much that is precious to them just because some ‘experts’ they don’t understand say they must.

So what is the answer regarding technology? Imagine a single solar panel array laid out in the desert and of sufficient size to provide all the global energy needs. That is the energy needs for all factories, homes, transport, agriculture and all. All the energy for heating, power and other uses that produce our full lifestyles . Using a single solar panel in one place would be ridiculous, but it is interesting to imagine to get the scale of the problem. How big would it need to be? As you guessed the image above shows that panel in the northern Sahara desert. The panels needed to serve the EU and the MENA (Middle East and North Africa region) are also shown. These seem pretty modest in terms of how much land surface is needed, if solar panels are viable on price.

Solar panels are now competitive with fossil fuels on price. Supplying the worlds energy needs without burning fossil fuels is now technically possible. Certainly there are challenges in storing and distributing the power, but it is not a simple choice between lifestyle and the planet. There is even a city, Georgetown, in that bosom of climate change denial – Texas – that as far back as 2014 opted to use 100% renewable energy in the form of wind and solar power. It was to save cash, not the planet. It was not a decision about going green, a city official said:

I’m probably the furthest thing from an Al Gore clone you could find

What all this implies is that the economy is ready to transfer away from burning fossil fuels if it can be induced to do so. Policies to induce that will not end in hitting a brick wall of technical impossibility and neither will they be certain to prompt popular backlash as people’s lifestyles are interrupted. But this cannot happen by itself because our energy subsidy, distribution and storage is currently set up around fossil fuels. Policy intervention is required and further technical innovations will contribute.

The Citizens’ Climate Lobby proposes a simple policy intervention that will enable lifestyles to be retained by those willing to pay while driving carbon out of the economy. It will drive investment in further technical innovation and will cause people and businesses to change technologies to save money not because the ‘experts’ say they must.

It is a win for the planet and the economy.

MP letter — Scottish MP Stephen Gethins reply to CCLUKer Charlie Webb

Our campaign to galvanize Parliament in advance of the recent UN climate negotiations (COP 23) in Bonn – which has just ended – has resulted in a surge of action and some splendid results.

The numbers tell just a small part of the story. CCLUK members have been talking up our policy up and down the country, sharing it with friends and family, posting it (in many imaginative ways) on Facebook, generally spreading the word.

How many conversations did you find yourself taking part in? One volunteer signed up 21 letter-writers. Only seven of them actually produced the letters…But that was 21 conversations that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Experience has shown what a difference that can make. ( I’ve had people come back to me after a year to say, “Ah! Now I get it!”) (more…)

There’s a budget tomorrow, and as we reported recently, some energy companies have been putting pressure on the chancellor to increase the carbon price floor, the UK’s carbon tax, currently set at £18 per tonne, which has helped us reduce the proportion of our electricity we get from burning coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel of them all, though if we want to completely phase out coal burning by 2025, something the government has pledged to do, then, according to analysis from Aurora Energy Research, we’re going to need to be putting a higher price on our carbon.

Maintaining the UK carbon price at the current level risks a revival of coal generation in the early 2020s. The competitiveness of coal generation is expected to improve post 2020 relative to gas – as recent restrictions on coal production in China are eased, and the current global glut of LNG gas clears.

If we’re to hit our 2025 coal phase out target, we’re going to need to raise the carbon price to around £40 per tonne, more than double what it is now. As well as driving down coal burning, this higher price would drive investment into our low carbon energy sector.

However, the report suggests increasing the carbon tax to £40 would not result in increased tax revenue for the government, since the higher tax take would be offset by the loss of tax revenue from coal generation.

But what if Hammond decides to scrap the floor price altogether?

That’s what some in our more energy-intensive industries would like to see. According to Aurora’s analysis, this would lead to a surge in coal generation and would make the already tough job of hitting our decarbonisation targets even tougher.

The way to have a carbon tax set at a meaningful rate without harming our own energy-intensive industries would be to apply border adjustments, or tariffs effectively, so imports would be taxed based on their carbon content and on whether that carbon content has already been taxed and exports going from the UK to regions with low or no carbon tax would receive a rebate, thus allowing UK businesses to compete on a level playing field. Such environmental tariffs are allowed by WTO rules, and they may also be allowed by EU rules since they would not be discriminatory but would be applying the same tax equally to domestic and foreign businesses.

Give the money to the people

Another issue with increasing the carbon tax is that it would raise gas and electricity bills, and since just about everything requires energy in its production or delivery, it would result in prices going up. At the levels we’ve talking about at the moment, these price rises would be minimal, but if we’re serious about hitting our 2050 decarbonisation target, as required by the Climate Change Act, then we’re going to need a steadily rising price on carbon and people are going to need help bearing the costs of the transition to a low carbon economy.

The solution then is to rebate the revenue from the tax back to the public. All of it. The whole bloody lot. Every single penny. 100%. A carbon tax should not be a revenue raising tax, and it doesn’t need to be. We have plenty of other taxes for raising revenue, and it’s because it’s not revenue raising that we in CCL tend to refer to it as a fee rather than a tax.

The purpose of a carbon tax is to correct a flaw in the market, known as a negative externality, that means the costs of the damage caused by burning fossil fuels are not borne by the producer or the consumer but instead are passed onto third parties, who, in this case, are those having to deal with the impacts of climate change and for the most part they are the people with the smallest carbon footprints.

illustrious company — President Barack Obama, right, Leonardo DiCaprio, left, and Dr. Katharine Hayhoe (AP Photo/Carolyn Kaster)

When evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe is asked ‘do you believe in climate change?’, she answers, ‘no’.

You’d be forgiven for thinking she’s just another religious climate denier. But you’d be wrong.

Canadian-born Katharine is a professor of atmospheric science, number 15 on this year’s Fortune World Greatest Leaders list and scientific adviser to Citizens Climate Lobby US. Speaking at All Souls Church, London, last night, she told us the reason she said ‘no’.

As in many times throughout her talk fusing Christianity and science, she begins with a bible passage, Hebrews 11:1, ‘Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’. She adds to it: ‘science is the evidence of things you can see’.

Climate change is not something to believe in: the evidence is there for all to see. It’s provable fact; faith is irrelevant. (more…)

In my last post, I wrote about how we would be more inclined to fight climate change if we focused on an immediate threat we could see: pollution. However, acting to reduce consumption only on obviously polluted days is just not enough to make a meaningful dent in UK emissions. In reality, the air in all but the most densely populated urban areas of the country is mostly clean. Given this, we need to be more proactive than reactive, working to lessen our energy usage on a daily basis. But, as usual, each time we read an article on climate change and turn off a lightbulb somewhere in our home, we’ll have forgotten the whole thing an hour later.

This is where motivational science comes back in – to answer the question of how we can keep ourselves focused day-to-day. An obvious response might be “money.” If we show people how much money they are saving per month when they reduce their usage, they will change their behaviours to meet those goals. Unfortunately, energy is so cheap that any change is really inconsequential to our budgets. However, research from a number of behavioural psychologists such as Inside the Nudge Unit author David Halpern leads us to another potential answer: feedback, and lots of it.

Imagine this: instead of using a speedometer in your car, you get a monthly printout of your average speed for the past four or so weeks. You would only have a vague sense of when you were speeding, and would probably end up going faster a lot more frequently. It’s hard not to, with no immediate feedback on the dashboard. This is how we use electricity in our homes – blindly. We have very little sense of how much electricity our devices use. Sometimes, we even forget that certain things use electricity; according to the American energy.gov site, disconnected phone chargers require 0.26 watts while chargers connected to fully-charged phones use 2.24 watts.

So, what should we do? Luckily, energy companies are rolling out smart meters that show live displays of energy usage. Even better, every home in the UK will be offered one (for free!) by 2020. All you need to do is to display it prominently. Then, you can begin challenging yourself in real time to reduce consumption.

How can we make people care about climate change? Do we show them polar bears perched atop wobbly icebergs? Do we warn them about melting glaciers in Greenland? This seems to work, at least while we’re having the discussion. But then, they forget. They go back to their old ways. Ultimately, humans simply don’t have the mental energy to deal with this abstract, future threat.

American conservation scientist M. Sanjayan has taken a keen interest in studying these issues. What can we do in the face of this well-meaning, but ultimately useless approach? Fortunately, he has an idea that has worked before.

“We’ve faced enormous, scary climate issues before. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? As insurmountable as that seemed in the 1970’s and 80’s, we were able to wrap our heads around that and take action. People got this very simple, easy to understand, concrete image of this protective layer around the earth, kind of like a roof protecting us in this case from ultraviolet light (which, by the way, has the direct health consequence of potentially giving you skin cancer). Then, they came up with this fabulous term, “the ozone hole.” Terrible problem, great term.” People also got a concrete image of how we ended up with this problem; for decades chlorofluorocarbons (or CFCs) were a main ingredient in a lot of products like aerosol spray cans. Then, when scientists discovered that CFCs were actually destroying the atmospheric ozone, people could look at their own hairspray and say “do I want to destroy the planet because of my hairspray?” So, what’s interesting is that sales of hairspray and those kinds of products started dropping quite dramatically. People listened to scientists and took action, and now scientists predict that the hole in the ozone layer will be healed by around 2050.” – M. Sanjayan, VOX

Sanjayan then goes on to discuss climate change, saying that if we had a concrete image – if we could see climate change – then we’d do something.

The thing is, we can see climate change. At least, in a way.

Throughout the UK and particularly in the Greater London Area, air pollution is a hot topic. Moreover, as capital-dwellers will tell you, we can both see and feel it, particularly on any high air-pollution alert day. As a recent resident of Beijing and Hong Kong, I can affirm that it only gets worse. More importantly, air pollution and climate change are intricately linked, as many compounds that are considered as pollution also count as greenhouse gases (CO2, nitrous oxide, ozone, and so on).

Pollution is not a future threat, like climate change. It is affecting you now. According to the Guardian, air pollution kills 9 million around the world annually (more than 5 times as many as car accidents), with that figure set to rise. So, why not focus first on fighting pollution? The actions necessary, such as limiting vehicular emissions and transitioning from fossil fuel power sources (which can be done through Carbon Fee & Dividend!) will do equal work in fighting climate change down the road.

(The following photos I took while hiking show a clear difference – a difference you can see, and act on!)

Hong Kong on a clear day:

Hong Kong on a smoggy day:

Target letter-send date: Friday 6 October 2017

Over the next few weeks, we’re mobilising supporters and CCL UK campaigners across the country to send messages advocating Carbon Fee & Dividend to the new Climate Minister, Claire Perry (in the Dept. of Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy – BEIS), via their MPs.

6 October is exactly one month before the UN Climate Change Conference in Bonn.

Sending it via your MP is important because:

It shows the number of constituencies involved
Spreads the message among MPs themselves
Supports your relationship with your MP
Only your MP is required to correspond with you.

If you ask your MP to discuss carbon fee and dividend with the Climate Minister and reply to you with the outcome, they are required to do this.

If you need to find out more about Carbon Fee & Dividend, read this. (more…)

Investment company, Goldman Sachs’ recent research forecasts renewable energy to be cheaper than other forms of power by 2020.

Alberto Gandolfi, from Goldman Sachs Research said,

What started as a decarbonisation process – thanks to better technology – is about to become a process driven by costs and the economics.

This sounds like more proof that Carbon Fee and Dividend will work. CF&D would drive up the price of fossil fuel and their products and speed up the consumer switch to clean – and now cheaper – alternatives.

It would also give investors confidence that divesting in fossil fuel and investing in the alternatives is the clever move.

The resulting fall in carbon dioxide levels would be a big win for the climate and our planet.

Which begs another question: why is the UK forging ahead with a new nuclear reactor when the cost of renewable power is falling and the technology is coming on in leaps and bounds?

Written by Louisa Davison, 29 August 2017
Views expressed here not necessarily shared by Citizens Climate Lobby.

The climate problem presents a profound challenge to the current economic paradigm. Markets have largely evolved as systems for rewarding those who externalise the most. Pricing in the environmental cost of burning fossil fuels will entail a system-level reworking of the global economy.

There’s also the problem of what kinds of policy are politically viable. Who is going to get elected by proposing to make our fossil fuel powered lifestyle more expensive?

This is where we can make a difference as an alliance of concerned citizens. It’s vital that we let our elected representatives know that we want them to take bold and decisive action on this issue. We want a price on carbon that reflects its environmental cost. And there are solutions to the impact this has on prices for consumers. The revenues from an upstream carbon price can be redistributed to citizens as a dividend, as in the Fee and Dividend policy proposal.

The Carbon Price Floor was introduced in 2013 in order to ensure that the price on carbon in the UK remained in line with our decarbonisation targets – the carbon price the EU Emissions Trading Scheme was delivering wasn’t (and still isn’t) high enough.

The original target was to achieve a price of £30 per tonne of carbon dioxide in 2020 with a starting price of about £16 per tonne.

However in the 2014 Budget the Government announced that prices would be capped at £18 per tonne from 2016 to 2020 to “limit the competitive disadvantage faced by business and reduce energy bills for consumers.”

This decision came after concerted lobbying by business and industry.

The Confederation of British Industry was a major player in this lobbying effort.

Rhian Kelly, the CBI’s director for business & environment explained in 2013 that “British business supports an ambitious but credible EU-wide emissions reduction target…” and that

“This must be underpinned by long-term reform of the EU ETS, creating a robust carbon price across Europe – thus making the UK’s Carbon Price Floor a redundant backstop – with improved provisions to protect vulnerable industries.”

This was – and still is – misleading equivocation.

We need policies that demonstrate the UK is taking a leadership role in the EU decarbonisation effort.

Without the cap on the CPF the UK would be in a stronger position to drive forward the long term reform of the EU ETS.

The cap on the CPF demonstrates the power that industry has to stall action on climate change at policy level.

What can be done to ensure UK climate policy is protected from lobbying by business and industry?

We need to challenge the business/industry lobby and ensure our voices are heard in support of decisive action on climate change by policymakers.