Power politics

Given that Ed Miliband has been whoring himself to the CBI's energy wishlist over the weekend, should we pretend surprise when the government's new white paper comes out giving the CBI exactly what it demanded?

Poopy power

Whilst our local councils are trying to get 'value' from our waste stream, Treehugger has reported on this research for the National Grid which proposes harnessing sewage, animal and food wastes to produce biogas.

Biogas is nothing new. I've got a book from the 1970's by self sufficiency guru John Seymour where he described a design for a home anaerobic digester to produce your own biogas, and he tells of farmers using such simple designs since the Second World War. As well as producing the gas, the digesters also leave solid and semi-solid materials which can be used as fertiliser.

Much of our natural gas comes from foreign lands so such an initiative would be ideal to reduce our reliance on gas imports; a win in political, sustainability and economic terms.

Given the billions budgeted for ID cards, foreign wars and nuclear weapons, not to mention the welfare payments given to the feckless banking and car industries, £10bn seems like a small price to pay and with a tangible return.

Energy: Techno-Fixes

Over at corporatewatch, they've produced an overview report on energy technologies which could see us through a low carbon future called Techno-Fixes. It makes interesting reading, and oddly many of the conclusions match the government's first energy white paper in 2003 which questioned the sustainability of nukes. Here's what Techno-Fixes had to say:

The nuclear industry has jumped on climate change as a last ditch attempt to survive in the face of long-term public opposition, cost escalation and the intractable issue of what to do with nuclear waste. The industry has orchestrated a well-executed spin campaign and has succeeded in putting ‘the nuclear option’ back on the table. However, nuclear power is not carbon neutral, would not be on-stream in time to plug the energy gap or avoid dangerous climate change, and has huge environmental impacts - not least from the huge quantities of radioactive waste created, which no country has yet developed an effective way of dealing with.

On Carbon Capture & Storage, their conclusions are close to mine: too much wishful thinking and corporate (and union) interests driving a technology which would be too late.

You can download the report here.

Nuclear featherbedding

If any further evidence were needed that our government is a corporate whore, then the get out of jail card provided for the consortium running Sellafield is it.

A private company will run the site and make a hefty profit. If they make a mistake, irradiate Cumbria or the Irish Sea, or kill someone, then the tax payer foots the bill. If the taxpayer wants to find out what's going on, tough, as the government has ruled that as a private company the consortium is exempt from Freedom if Information requests. This is despite the fact they will be carrying out a function of the state.

To hide this public liability this Malcolm Wicks broke parliamentary procedures.

There is no UK plc, just a minor and pliant subsidiary.

We don't need no stinking coal or nukes

Word to punkscience.

Fucking A!

Green gold

The algal biofuels story sounds too good to be true, so it probably is.

I have an alarm in my head which goes off whenever I hear the phrase "carbon neutral". My right eyebrow involuntarily raises in a Spock-like fashion and I look for the catch. The term itself sits uncomfortably with me, along with 'carbon offset'. Anyhow, the concept goes like this: when the fuel is burned it releases only the amount of CO2 the biological fuel source absorbed during growth. So far so green. The cynical devil on my shoulder argues that under the same rules fossil fuels could be classified as carbon neutral as they only emit the amount of CO2 that was sequestered millions of years ago by dead vegetation.

To be truly carbon neutral, the process of growing, gathering, processing and transportation should not result in a net increase in emissions. That means that before the fuel gets to the tank in your car each step in the process must either be powered by renewable energy and/or more carbon neutral energy sources.

In an economic culture where growth rules, successful carbon neutral fuels would ensure that we become a victim of that success. The algae fuel would be subject to usual market forces (assuming we avoid daft minimum biofuel use rules like the EU is trying to push), so as demand raises, so will production. Whilst the algae sucks up CO2, when it burns it will put it back. There is no growth, but there also is no net reduction in emissions. The most that can be hoped for is that the rate of CO2 emissions growth may be reduced.

Whilst such initiatives may sound impressive, they don't meet the key challenge - we need to reduce our carbon emissions. Even if every car in the world could sustainably run on biofuels, we would still need to make drastic cuts in the carbon budget if we want a hope of staving off runaway climate change.

With this post I'm afraid I'm calling shenanigans somewhat on many greens who see a future in algal biofuels and a way of weaning our economy off fossil fuel. Don't get me wrong, I can see a limited opportunity for such a product, but only one which fits into a diverse energy source model, with the focus on net reductions in CO2 rather than mere neutrality.

So I'm not so cynical that I can't see the investment possibilities, and I'd much prefer to see more investment in such initiatives than drilling for more oil, but a lot of people will get rich on what is essentially a status quo technology, a 'less worse' solution.

To see these biofuels as some great rescue from growing emissions could be dangerous wishful thinking.

Easy now

A 50mph speed limit? Sensible, rational and forward thinking? (well, apart from the biofuels thing that is)

The road fundamentalists will hate it. The libertarians will fume against a reduction in their right to fuck up the planet.

The sooner some brave PM brings lower road speeds here the better.

Carbon campaign

A 10 minute film by Ecologist Films documenting how the government and its corporate whoremasters use propaganda, dirty tricks and rallies a police force with carte blanche powers against climate change protestors. The chilling use of anti terrorism laws by the police, and made up ones to stop people filming their actions suggest that the government is using the police in a secret war against protest.

In August there will be a demonstration at Kingsnorth power station in Kent against the plans to allow a new coal fired station. It will be interesting to see how the government, police and a willing right wing media will spin it.

Desert power

An Early Day Motion has been raised to urge the government to support the DESERTEC concept. A low carbon technology that is here and now, not like the imagined fancies of nuclear and carbon capture. What TREC needs is investment, not just in power generation technology, but in a new super-grid, which we will need anyway if we want a balanced and diverse power supply system.

The government has been banging on about disconnecting from fossil fuels, and here is one of the renewable energies that can form a valuable part of a diverse renewable energy solution.

The details of the EDM are here. Go on, bang off a quick email or letter to your MP.

Less well off language

An issue which almost slipped under the radar on David Miliband's 'keep the poor making the rich richer' Gazette article was his use of language.

Poverty is bad news, and the Labour spinners know it. So discussions of poverty have become clouded by obscurantist language. The phrase "less well off" is a classic example of an Orwellian euphemism, recognising that terms like "poor" or "low income" are taboo words which don't score enough happy voter points on the spin-o-meter. Grinding poverty gets a kind of 'glass half full' re-branding exercise.

It's all very doubleplusungood.

Renewables nuked

Micheal Meacher provides a calm and sober assessment for the future of nuclear energy policy. Nuke fails on several criteria - fuel supply, energy security, economics, waste management and sustainability.

Despite all this, the Labour government is pushing it's nuke dreams (blessed by the Tories), whilst at the same time quietly planning to water down our EU renewables obligations, nicely removing a low carbon competitor for nuclear.

It makes you wonder who is running our energy policy. At the moment it looks like the nuclear industry.

The dirty truth

I was thinking about coal a while back, sparked by an article in the Shields Gazette (one of several over the last year) where local geologist Paul Younger was trying to sex up coal energy extraction. I never posted my blog on it, but was reminded about it today when I read George Mobiot's article. So here it is...

In carbon emissions terms, energy from coal is about as bad as you can get. It's dirty and kicks up a lot of other nasty things you wouldn't want your kids to breathe. Environmentally, extracting it is mostly disastrous. Despite efficiency improvements, even the new proposed coal energy plants will spew more CO2 than their predecessors.

I admit that I used to be warm to the concept of replacing 'King Coal' with 'Clean Coal', the latter being the burning of coal using a technological fix to extract the CO2 from the coal, either before or during burning, and bury the CO2 in exhausted oil or coal seams.

Commonly known as 'carbon capture and storage', it promises an opportunity for the UK to use it's hundreds of years worth of coal resources without a carbon hit. It seemed like a sensible way to bridge any coming 'energy gap' whilst renewable energy technologies matured, and guarantee a level of national energy security that gas or nuclear can't provide. A true energy magic bullet.

I've changed my mind. Carbon capture is industry-government groupthink bollocks.

Sequestration technology is still very much in it's infancy, and unproven as a mass commercial solution. Viable large scale capture technology may not be about for decades, and probably too late to have any benign effect on emissions. In May last year Alistair Darling conceded that commercial carbon capture technologies “might never become available”. Even if such technology does become available, there is no guarantee that such storage will be safe and wouldn't just place an unfair burden of responsibility on future generations. In these terms, carbon capture and storage fits a similar risk and sustainability space as nuclear power.

Essentially, the process will require digging up the carbon, burning it to release energy and create CO2, and then capture the CO2 and bury the carbon again - whilst ensuring that the capture and storage process uses considerably less energy than you produced from the burning.

Another more immediate problem with carbon capture is that government and energy companies will throw shit loads of money into research. Money which could be used to develop renewable power.

Instead of creating an environment to encourage the growth in renewable infrastructure that we need, through tools such as carbon price controls to make renewable energy more attractive, our government is hell-bent on coal extraction and burning.

In my past preference for capture, I had assumed that any coal dug up would be used in British power stations. However, in the cold cash reality of a globalised market the coal would go to the highest bidder - wherever they may be in the world. The economic powerhouse that China is becoming could buy all the coal it could afford, pushing up coal prices which would no doubt impact on domestic UK energy supply. We can already see China's hunger for uranium accelerating uranium prices. So much for the energy security argument.

Meanwhile the British countryside is scarred with opencast mines.

The carbon locked the rocks has already been captured and stored. It seems that the best way to reduce fossil fuel emissions is by leaving the fossil fuels in the ground in the first place.

The way to go forward is zero carbon. Large scale investment in any fossil based generation is a waste and a danger.

Back to the drawing board

An interesting and thought-provoking article at the excellent The Lazy Environmentalist - AC or DC for our future renewable electricity distribution? This kind of infrastructure needs governments to get talking to each other and some serious investment applied. Given government's political cowardice over combating climate change I'm not confident that our lot are up to the challenge.