Will Obama lead the world to greener pastures?
November 3, 2008
Posted in Green News
Tomorrow Americans will vote for someone to replace George Bush as their president and whoever wins will be an improvement on the incumbent – there can’t be much doubt about that.
For the past eight years, the Texas oilman’s administration has been an obstacle in the way of a global climate change deal. Despite scientific consensus that human activity is causing the global average temperature to rise, Mr Bush has folded his arms and told the world: “I’m not going to tidy up my mess until China does”.
The leader of the last superpower – whose country has only recently been knocked off the top spot as world greenhouse gas emitter number one by China, according to some accounts, but whose per capita emissions are far higher than China’s – was only prepared to do things on his own terms in a case of “we look after our own interests first and to hell with the rest of you”. Not the best example to set if you want to persuade developing countries, such as China, India and even South Africa, not to follow your own easier, cheaper, carbon-intensive path to economic development.
But things appear to be looking up. The belligerent Mr Bush will be replaced in the White House very shortly by someone who actually accepts the scientific evidence that climate change is caused by human activity.
Both Barack Obama, the Democrat, and John McCain, the Republican, have said they want a cap-and-trade system to cut US emissions. Obama’s ambitions are greater. He has said he wants US greenhouse gas emissions to be cut by 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050. McCain is looking at cuts of 60 percent. Obama has said he would auction off all the available emissions credits, McCain would be more generous to polluters, giving away many emissions credits at first and phasing in auctions.
Renewable energy will play a significant role in Obama’s climate change plans. He has said he will invest R150-billion dollars over the next 10 years in renewable energy sources – which will create 5-million green jobs. And has set a target that 25 percent of US electricity needs will be met by renewable sources by 2025.
McCain’s preference is for the building of new nuclear power stations and “clean coal”. The US apparently hasn’t built a new nuclear power station since 1978 – although nuclear apparently still accounts for 20 percent of US electricity output – but, according to reports, McCain wants 45 new nuclear power stations by 2030. He also proposes spending $2-billion a year on research into clean coal technologies.
Obama is said to have expressed reservations about nuclear safety and on how to deal with radioactive waste – but he’s not entirely opposed to nuclear power. Neither is he opposed to “clean coal” technologies, which may be a bit of a disappointment for environmentalists. But as an article in Grist points out, if he wants to win the election he’ll need more than the green vote – which he apparently has in the bag anyway, regardless of his position on coal.
What the new man in the White Houses decides to do about climate change will more than likely determine whether the target of keeping the global average temperature increase to below 2 degrees Celcius can be met or not.
For Africa, US climate change policy could influence whether tens of millions of people suffer water shortages as rainfall patterns change and drops in food yields put millions at risk of famine. Africa is responsible for a tiny fraction of the emissions that are causing the Earth’s climate the change, yet it will bear a disproportionate amount of the impacts, say scientists – and it is the continent least able to afford to deal with them.
But it’s not just Africa that will suffer, half the world still lives on less than $2 a day and does so only by subsisting on natural resources provided by the environment, the WWF says in a Greenprint it has drawn up for a new US administration.
Climate change, natural resource exhaustion and ecosystem collapse are “among the most profound and long-term threats to peace and security in the 21st century. The conflict imperiling the planet in the coming millennium is less likely to be between nations than between man and nature,” the WWF report says.
“And the United States is still the only nation capable of exerting the leadership needed to mobilise the globe into confronting these challenges.” But it needs to drop its old-fashioned Cold War approach to foreign policy and look more closely at issues such as climate change, global food and water security and natural resource conservation, says the WWF.
Experts say that there is no way to keep the global average temperature increase under 2 degrees Celcius unless the big emitters, like the US, start taking action immediately. The industrialised nations have an obligation to lead the way to a low carbon economy because they are responsible for the build-up of greenhouses gases in the atmosphere to date and they have the technological and economic capacity to move the world to a low-carbon economy.
John P Holdren, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard University and director of the Woods Hole Research Centre, wrote in Scientific American recently that it was now time for the US to start to lead the world. “That is the best remaining hope for averting global climate catastrophe.”
Holdren added that if the US finally stepped up to the plate, the rest of the world would follow. “In my judgment, if the US finally takes the lead, the EU will quickly adopt an economy-wide approach. So will Japan, and probably Russia,” he wrote. And, he added, that there’s a good chance that the Chinese, Indians, Brazilians and Indonesians will follow.
South Africa has already expressed a willingness to rein in its emissions, but it wants the industrialised countries to show their willingness to take responsibility for leading the change and financing the solutions.
For the world’s environment and many of the people who depend on it for their livelihoods a lot is at stake in this US election. I’m hoping, along with many other people in Africa, that Barack Obama will win and that, if he does, he won’t let us down.
Sources: Grist, AFP, SciAm, WWF, Barack Obama’s website, John McCain’s website
Photo of Barack Obama by Marc Nozell used under a Creative Commons license
Animal-human diseases that may spread in a warming world
October 13, 2008
Posted in Green News
In the past week the effects of climate change on human health have come to the fore. The World Health Organisation made it a priority research area at its conference in Barcelona last week after acknowledging that the issue had up to now received little research attention, ENS reports.
Also in Barcelona, the World Conservation Society (WCS) released a report in which it listed 12 animal-human diseases, the so-called “Deadly Dozen”, that might spread to new regions as a result of projected temperature and rainfall changes. Read more
Climate change? Never heard of it.
October 4, 2008
Posted in Business, Green News
More than 40 percent of South Africans claimed to know nothing about climate change, according to the results of a survey by the Human Sciences Research Council. And 27 percent said they had never even heard of climate change before they were interviewed for the survey.
Only 18 percent of the respondents thought they knew a lot or a fair amount about it. Nevertheless half the respondents thought climate change was a serious problem. And even though concern seemed to have increased on the year before, levels of awareness of the seriousness of climate change are low in South Africa compared with other countries, even developing countries such as Nigeria, China, India and Brazil, the HSRC report said.
3,164 people were asked questions about climate change in the 2007 South African Social Attitudes Survey. It was the first time a module on climate change had been included in the survey.
Interestingly, people seemed reasonably well informed about the impacts of climate change, the report said.
The majority of respondents (48 percent) felt that the government, in its various forms, should take responsibility for action to prevent further climate change. Only 14 percent thought that large companies had a role to play. But nearly 40 percent of the respondents answered “didn’t know” or “cannot choose” when asked whether they thought the government was doing enough about climate change.
The report concluded that greater efforts were required to increase general awareness of climate change and to catch up with public opinion in other countries.
‘Clean coal is like healthy cigarettes’
October 4, 2008
Posted in Business
Al Gore, he who made climate change mainstream with his movie An Inconvenient Truth, has called for civil disobedience to stop the building of new coal plants that don’t have carbon capture and storage. He was speaking at the Clinton Gobal Initiative meeting in New York last month. Environment News Service reports him as saying: “The coal and oil companies have spent, in the United States alone, a half a billion dollars in the first eight months of this year promoting a lie that there is such a thing as clean coal. Clean coal is like healthy cigarettes. It does not exist. It could theoretically exist. The only demonstration plant [in the United States - FutureGen] was cancelled. How many such plants are there? Zero. How many blueprints? Zero.” Gore called for a new global energy infrastructure based on renewable energy: sun, wind and geothermal.
Corporates join forces to compile an SA carbon-storage map
October 2, 2008
Posted in Business
It’s one thing saying that all South Africa’s new coal-fired power stations will be built ready to capture their carbon emissions, but where to put this captured carbon is another matter. Commercialisation of the carbon capture and storage technology South Africa needs to keep the millions of tonnes of carbon dioxide produced by its coal plants from polluting the atmosphere could be as much as 15 years away. And doubts have been expressed about the suitability of South Africa’s geological make-up for carbon storage. Nonetheless, with such coal-intensive energy plans, so-called “clean coal” technologies will be an important part of the country’s future.
Carbon capture technology could make as much as 60 percent of the country’s carbon emissions storable, Dr Tony Surridge of the South African National Energy Research Institute (Saneri) told the Engineering News. But the big question is where then to put it. A group of South Africa’s big-carbon corporates have joined forces to find answers. Sasol, Eskom, PetroSA, Anglo American and Saneri plan to identify potential sites for the future storage of carbon dioxide and develop a carbon dioxide storage atlas, the Engineering News reports. An initial assessment of SA’s storage potential is scheduled to be published by early 2010. Read the full story on Engineering News
We passed Earth’s ecological limit on September 23
October 2, 2008
Posted in Conservation
Since September 23 we Earthlings have been living beyond our ecological means. In fact, by the end of the year we will have used 40 percent more of our planet’s resources than nature can replenish, says the Global Footprint Network, a non-profit organisation committed to a world where all people have the opportunity to live satisfying lives within the means of one planet.
This year we have already overshot the Earth’s biological capacity and the result is that our supply of natural resources – trees and fish and such – will dwindle, while our waste, primarily carbon dioxide, accumulates. We are in ecological debt and we have been for about 20 years.
Every year the date on which the world begins to go into ecological deficit – or Earth Overshoot Day, as it is called – moves forward. The GFN calculated that the first Earth Overshoot day was on December 31 1986. By 1996 humanity was using 15 percent more resources in a year than the planet could supply and Earth Overshoot Day fell on November 21. By 2050 they estimate that it’ll fall in July.
Our ecological footprint has grown rapidly. As recently as 1961 humanity used just over half of the planet’s biocapacity, now we need 1.4 planet Earths to sustain us, says the GFN. If we carry on using the Earth’s resources the way we are we will need the equivalent of two planets by 2050. Read more
Eat less meat and take a load off the planet
October 1, 2008
Posted in Food, Green tips, Lifestyle
Want to do something to help combat global warming? Eat less meat. This is the sage advice of the head of the world’s top scientific body on climate change, the IPCC.
“Give up meat for one day [a week] initially, and decrease it from there,” Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was recently quoted in The Observer as saying.
This is one of the most effective lifestyle changes you could make to decrease your carbon footprint. Meat production is responsible for about a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions, says the Food and Agriculture Organisation. Read more
UN launches plan to save tropical forests
September 26, 2008
Posted in Conservation
The United Nations launched a programme this week to help nine developing countries – among them three African states, Zambia, Tanzania and the Democratic Republic of Congo – to establish systems to monitor, assess and report their forest cover. The programme could lay the foundation for a system whereby poor countries could earn tradable carbon credits for protecting their forests. Indonesia, for example, has the potential to be compensated $1-billion a year for reducing its rate of deforestation, the UN estimates.
Deforestation accounts for 20 percent of global carbon emissions, say scientists. If the Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation Programme, or UN-REDD, were to be incorporated into a post-Kyoto climate deal it would be a way rich countries would pay poor ones to slow climate change. Other countries in the programme are Bolivia, Indonesia, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Paraguay and Viet Nam.
Australia wants to be clean coal research hub
September 22, 2008
Posted in Green News
Australia plans to set itself up as the world hub for carbon capture research, Reuters reports. The country’s Prime Minister Kevin Rudd wants to get United Nations’ backing for an Australian research institute at the general assembly meeting in New York this week. Rudd says that although there’s a great deal of international effort going into carbon capture research, it’s haphazard and he wants to bring it together in one place.
Australia is the world’s top coal exporter and relies heavily on coal for power generation, so developing “clean coal” technologies such as carbon capture and storage make economic sense; they would allow the continued use of coal to generate electricity – but without the climate-harming carbon emissions.
The country is already making progress in a method of carbon capture known as post-combustion capture (PCC). In July, the CSIRO reported that carbon dioxide had been captured from power station flue gases in a PCC pilot plant at a power station in Victoria. The pilot plant is designed to capture up to 1,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year from the power station’s exhaust-gas flues. Read more
White roofs make cities cooler
September 17, 2008
Posted in Green News
Researchers at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California have calculated that 1.5 years of man-made carbon emissions could be offset simply by making roofs and roads in the world’s cities white, reports Science Daily News. The roofs would reflect some of the sun’s radiation back to space (albedo effect) and the inside of houses would be cooler, needing less air conditioning, and thus saving energy – the bulk of which is generated by burning fossil fuels.
The researchers estimate that, globally, roofs account for 25 percent of the surface of most cities, and roads accounts for about 35 percent. If all of these were replaced with reflective material – such as lighter-coloured concrete or white or more reflective paint – in 100 major urban areas, it would offset 44 gigatons of greenhouse gases, reports the LA Times. This is reportedly a bigger saving than you’d get from halting the deforestation of tropical forests. And it’s more than the 28 gigatons per year or so that the world currently emits from fossil fuels, ScienceNow Daily News reports.
Lighter surfaces would also help to lower the temperature in cities, making them cooler places to live.
For more information: Heat Island Group, Global Cooling: Increasing worldwide urban albedos to offset CO2
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