Citizens' Climate Lobby UK

Category: Decarbonisation

  • How international trade makes saints out of sinners.

    A common refrain among those who oppose action on climate change is something along the lines of “Why should we take action? It won’t matter what we do, if China doesn’t do anything.”

    There is a superficial logic to this statement, but it lacks a proper understanding of the root causes of many global emissions and how they are allocated to players on the international stage.

    First, it’s right to acknowledge that China is the world’s leading carbon emitter, a mantle that it took over from the USA in 2005 as it went through a huge expansion of its coal-fired power sector.

    During that period of rapid increase in China, countries like the U.K. congratulated themselves as they wound down their coal-fired power sectors and reduced emissions. Today, the U.K. government continuously touts its achievement of bringing down emissions down 44% since 1990.

    Sinners into saints

    However that is really only a conclusion that you can arrive at if you use very incomplete accounting.

    According to CarbonBrief,

    Even though domestic emissions have fallen 27% in the UK between 1990 and 2014, once CO2 imports from trade are considered this drops to only an 11% reduction. Similarly, a 9% increase in domestic US emissions since 1990 turns out to be a 17% increase when trade is included.

    This puts the performance of the US into even sharper contradiction with its political protestations about China’s emissions.

    While the US has seen tiny incremental reductions in its officially accounted emissions between 2014 and 2017, it exported 352 million tonnes of carbon emissions in just the year 2014. And even the most apparently virtuous stewards of nature are not immune to shaming when their trade in carbon emissions is evaluated.

    In one extreme case, Switzerland’s emissions are 209% higher (more than three times as large) once CO2 imports are taken into account, due to large imports and exports containing little in the way of embedded carbon.

    So if the U.K. and the US are effectively exporting their carbon emissions to other countries, then where are they being exported to?

    China acts like the advanced world’s Picture of Dorian Gray

    Well, no prizes for guessing, they are being exported to low-cost, highly carbon intensive manufacturing economies with China at the head of the list for pretty much every advanced country that is currently crowing about its progress on reducing emissions.

    In 2014, China imported 1.37 billion tonnes of carbon emissions from trading partners, equivalent to 13% of its total emissions. With a growing economy, growing connection to new markets with the One Belt One Road strategy and growing share of global trade, that number is likely to be rising.

    None of this is to say that China is anything but a grave threat to the climate and that it does not need to radically and rapidly reform its energy system. But when opponents of domestic action on climate change bleat about China being to blame for everything, remind them that China is in fact just doing our dirty work (literally) and that the true picture of responsibility for emissions shows that we lack a lot of the moral authority that we think we have.

    Border Adjustment Taxes protect domestic industry and lay bare true responsibility for emissions

    The Carbon Fee and Dividend model of carbon pricing includes a border adjustment tax that applies tariffs on imports from countries that do not sufficiently price carbon themselves. This restores proper responsibility for the emissions to the importer of the goods.

    It also has the effect of levelling the playing field for domestic producers bearing the downstream effects of carbon fees from unfair competition from overseas producers using cheap but dirty energy. Indeed as the domestic energy supply decarbonises and the carbon fees applied diminish, the domestic producer gains a bigger and bigger differential advantage against dirty imports as its carbon costs fall while border adjustment taxes continue to apply to carbon-intensive imports.

    Given the current trajectory of the energy system in the U.K. in contrast to that in China, Carbon Fee and Dividend provides a strong, fair and effective protection of the U.K. manufacturing sector against unfairly cheap competition from China, which has been exploiting its unsustainable practices for years to systematically erode U.K. manufacturing.

    CF&D is therefore a jobs- and economy-friendly measure for U.K. industry.

  • 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!

    (more…)

  • 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

  • Zero carbon London plans unveiled

    Zero carbon London plans unveiled

    An ambitious plan for London was unveiled today by Sadiq Khan – ‘Zero carbon London – a 1.5 degree compatible plan’.

    Stating the UK was in a climate emergency, the plan aims to bring down carbon dioxide emissions by 40 percent by 2022, and to zero from transport and buildings by 2050.

    But London can’t do it alone – national government is called upon to give more power and funding to London to make it happen.

    The plan rests on the energy efficiency of home and business buildings, decarbonisation of power from the national grid as well as more support for clean energy within the community, and converting Londoners to zero carbon public transport, walking and cycling.

    The plan includes actions points for all level, from government, GLA, business, London boroughs and Londoners themselves.

    Thanks to climateaction.org for the tip off.