Monday, 26 October 2009
We have to focus on systems not individuals
Tuesday, 20 October 2009
German government advisor says leading economies have to cut carbon by 100% by 2020
The WBGU study says the United States must cut emissions 100 percent by 2020--i.e., quit carbon entirely within ten years. Germany, Italy and other industrial nations must do the same by 2025 to 2030. China only has until 2035, and the world as a whole must be carbon-free by 2050.
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20091026/hertsgaard
"I myself was terrified when I saw these numbers," Schellnhuber said. He urges governments to agree in Copenhagen to launch "a Green Apollo Project." Like John Kennedy's pledge to land a man on the moon in ten years, a global Green Apollo Project would aim to put leading economies on a trajectory of zero carbon emissions within ten years. Combined with carbon trading with low-emissions countries, Schellnhuber says, such a "wartime mobilization" might still save us from the worst impacts of climate change.
Interesting recommendations from German Govt climate advisory panel
- Each country ... to produce internationally and objectively verifiable decarbonization road maps, which provide information on the planned national emissions path up to the year 2050. These road maps should be based on the national CO2 budgets as well as on the national emissions reduction potential.
- ... establish a world climate bank, which will be responsible (1) for scrutinizing national decarbonization road maps as to their plausibility and feasibility, and (2) enabling the flexible mechanisms and transfers.
Monday, 19 October 2009
WWF Climate Solutions rpt out; gives us 5 yrs to shift low-carbon industries into high growth
The report models the global growth rates needed for low-carbon industries if we're to avoid climate tipping points. In particular it shows that we can't afford the current approach of starting with the least-cost mitigation solutions and working our way forward to higher cost solutions as a carbon price gets to a reasonable level.
The modelling suggest we are at a fork in the road: to be able to have a reasonable chance of avoiding tipping points we need the whole range of low-carbon industries to have shifted into high growth phases (25-30% p.a., averaged globally) by 2014. If we don't take this road we will be looking at run-away climate change and the severe economic (and other!) contraction that will come with that.
The timeframe to ramp up low-carbon industries is such that any carbon price improvement from and end-2010 signed Copenhagen agreement is not going to help; it will take some years for stronger price signals to have an appreciable impact on the growth of low-carbon industries, compounded by the fact that strong price signals are not likely to come out of the US for some time.
According to the modelling in the report, to move at scale and at speed to become a low-carbon economy will require investment inflows of roughly a trillion dollars a year, at least for the next decade.
The report provides the macro argument for speed and for scale of action that leads into discussions of the need for larger-scale, policy-engineered solutions than have been considered to date.
Friday, 9 October 2009
Three cheers for Norway! (But don't forget the elephant in the room)
Great move Norway! We need all rich countries to cut much much more than so far agreed, especially recalcitrants like the US, Canada and Australia.
But ... as Greenpeace points out, Norway itself has largely met its reduction targets to date through buying carbon credits from poor countries. Greenpeace is understandably concerned that Norway doesn't simply use its oil wealth to buy its way out of having to take local action; a fair critique we have yet to see answered.
Allowing the meeting of targets with carbon credits is an awkward sort of blessing. It does transfer capital to developing countries where the CO2 reductions are cheapest to achieve, which is great. But unfortunately it's still a wild west in carbon credit land, with too little supervision allowing too many doubtful investments. Of course Norway probably does more than anyone to make sure its credits are solid; and it also has a national carbon tax that is meant to drive
local effort, better than most countries.
But there's a bigger problem, a sort of "elephant in the room".
Norway is of course a big oil exporter; it is paying for its carbon credits by pumping out vast volumes of oil and gas that make global warming worse.
That is not the way out of our mess. Scientists point out that, from the sorry atmospheric state we're now in, there's a limited amount of tonnage of carbon we can inject into the atmosphere before we go one step too far and consign ourselves to run-away climate change and an
entirely different planet to try and live on. We have to wind down all fossil fuel emissions, and pronto.
Which makes another Norwegian anomaly all the more striking: their state-owned oil company, Statoil, is an investor in Canada's highly polluting tar sands. Perhaps they're just waiting for Copenhagen to announce that divestment?
Friday, 2 October 2009
The need for 2050 by 2020 is now official
By Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 25, 2009
Climate researchers now predict the planet will warm by 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century even if the world's leaders fulfill their most ambitious climate pledges, a much faster and broader scale of change than forecast just two years ago, according to a report released Thursday by the United Nations Environment Program.
The new overview of global warming research, aimed at marshaling political support for a new international climate pact by the end of the year, highlights the extent to which recent scientific assessments have outstripped the predictions issued by the Nobel Prize-winning U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2007.
Robert Corell, who chairs the Climate Action Initiative and reviewed the UNEP report's scientific findings, said the significant global temperature rise is likely to occur even if industrialized and developed countries enact every climate policy they have proposed at this point. The increase is nearly double what scientists and world policymakers have identified as the upper limit of warming the world can afford in order to avert catastrophic climate change.
"We don't want to go there," said Corell, who collaborated with climate researchers at the Vermont-based Sustainability Institute, Massachusetts-based Ventana Systems and the Massachusetts Institute of technology to do the analysis. The team has revised its estimates since the U.N. report went to press and has posted the most recent figures at ClimateInteractive.org.
The group took the upper-range targets of nearly 200 nations' climate policies -- including U.S. cuts that would reduce domestic emissions 73 percent from 2005 levels by 2050, along with the European Union's pledge to reduce its emissions 80 percent from 1990 levels by 2050 --and found that even under that optimistic scenario, the average global temperature is likely to warm by 6.3 degrees.
World leaders at the July Group of 20 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, pledged in a joint statement that they would adopt policies to prevent global temperature from climbing more than 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit: "We recognize the broad scientific view that the increase in
global average temperature above pre-industrial levels ought not to exceed two degrees C."
Corell, who has shared these findings with the Obama administration as well as climate policymakers in China, noted that global carbon emissions are still rising. "It's accelerating," he said. "We're not going in the right direction."
Achim Steiner, UNEP's executive director, told reporters at the National Press Club on Thursday that the report aims to update the IPCC's 2007 findings to reflect both new physical evidence and a more sophisticated understanding of how Earth systems work.
"With every day that passes, the underlying trends that science has provided is . . . of such a dramatic nature that shying away from a major agreement in Copenhagen will probably be unforgivable if you look back in history at this moment," Steiner said. He noted that since 2000
alone, the average rate of melting at 30 glaciers in nine mountain ranges has doubled compared with the rate during the previous two decades.
"These are not things that are in dispute in terms of data," he said. "They are actually physically measurable."
Other findings include the fact that sea level might rise by as much as six feet by 2100 instead of 1.5 feet, as the IPCC had projected, and the Arctic may experience a sea-ice summer by 2030, rather than by the end of the century.
While the administration is pressing this week for an end to fossil-fuel subsidies as part of the current G-20 summit in Pittsburgh -- and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told reporters Thursday that world leaders appear open to such a proposal -- activists such as 350.org director Bill McKibben said politicians worldwide are not taking aggressive enough steps to address climate change.
"Here's where we are: The political system is not producing at the moment a result which has anything to do with what the science is telling us," said McKibben, whose group aims to reduce the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, well below
the 450 ppm target that leaders of the Group of 20 major nations have embraced.
Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), co-sponsor of the House-passed climate bill that researchers included as part of their new temperature analysis, said, "As sobering as this report is, it is not the worst-case scenario. That would be if the world does nothing and allows heat-trapping pollution to continue to spew unchecked into the atmosphere."
Michael MacCracken, one of the scientific reviewers for the IPCC and a contributor to the UNEP report, said that if developed nations cut their emissions by half and the developing countries continued on their current path, or vice versa, the world would still experience a temperature increase of about 2 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050.
"We face a situation where basically everybody has to do everything they can," MacCracken said.
Saturday, 12 September 2009
Hopeful research says wind could replace all coal in China
This is useful piece of research, holding out a path to closing down all of China's coal plants. Even if you discount the wind potential you can make up the difference with geothermal and solar - especially large scale solar.
Australian readers should also look at former Qld Premier Peter Beattie's interesting piece in The Australian (http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26027626-7583,00.html) - perhaps it's time for places like Australia to plan a shift away from their economic reliance on coal exports.
Sean
blog.seankidney.com
------------------------------
Powerful Ideas: Reducing China's Carbon Emissions a Breeze
LiveScience Sept 09
China is now the world's largest producer of carbon dioxide, the most important global warming pollutant. However, new findings suggest wind farms could potentially eliminate much if not all of China's carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector for the foreseeable future.
Demand for electricity in China is increasing at a rate of about 10 percent per year. At the same time, coal accounts for roughly 80 percent of total electricity production. This suggests that China's emissions of carbon dioxide could grow accordingly.
For example, the equivalent of 800 gigawatts of coal-fired power plants are needed to meet the rising Chinese demand for electricity anticipated by 2030. This could add as much as 3.5 billion tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year, compared to current annual Chinese emissions of 6.6 billion tons.
Wind is currently only a minor contributor to China's energy needs, with an installed capacity of 12.2 gigawatts at the end of 2008, or just 0.4 percent of its total electricity supply. However, China is now the world's fastest growing market for wind power, with an annual growth rate of more than 50 percent over the past decade.
"The world is struggling with the question of how do you make the switch from carbon-rich fuels to something carbon-free," said researcher Michael McElroy at Harvard University. "The real question for the globe is - what alternatives does China have?"
To see how much energy wind farms could generate for China, scientists at Harvard University and Tsinghua University analyzed wind data from a state-of-the-art NASA global weather and climate model that incorporated measurements worldwide from surface observations, aircraft, balloons, ships, buoys and satellites. They also looked at the Chinese government's energy bidding practices and financial restrictions to figure out regional costs for delivering wind power.
They found that onshore wind farms could profitably generate enough power to accommodate all of China's electricity demand projected for 2030, about twice its current consumption. The researchers assumed the wind energy would be produced from a set of land-based 1.5-megawatt turbines operating over non-forested, ice-free, rural areas with a slope no more than 20 percent. They also accounted for the fact that turbines often operate at as little as a fifth of their rated capacity in China, due to a combination of factors, such as lower quality of Chinese turbines, limitations of the power grid, and less-than-optimal placement of turbines to take advantage of wind resources.
"Wind farms would only need to take up land areas of 0.5 million square kilometers, or regions about three quarters of the size of Texas," said researcher Xi Lu at Harvard University. "The physical footprints of wind turbines would be even smaller, allowing the areas to remain agricultural."
A switch to wind power could prove invaluable to curbing any impact China would have on global climate, the researchers noted - as much as 1.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide could be saved per year if just 30 percent of the additional electricity China required by 2030 were produced from wind rather than coal.
"China is bringing on several coal fire power plants a week," McElroy said. "By publicizing the opportunity for a different way to go we will hope to have a positive influence."
This switch to wind power would demand a major financial investment up-front and require careful long-range planning on China's part. Still, the benefits for the Chinese economy could be substantial, as the value of damages linked with air pollution is estimated at up to $167.7 billion, or 4.3 percent of the nation's roughly $3.9 trillion gross domestic product.
"China has become a leader in the wind power industry, not just because of issues surrounding environmental protection and climate change mitigation, but potentially because of all the potential jobs it could create, the potential economic benefits it might have if China becomes a leader," said renewable energy industry researcher Joanna Lewis at Georgetown University, who did not participate in this study. "There are security benefits as well that they're thinking seriously and strategically about, from relying on renewable sources of energy and not requiring imports."
"This study really illustrates how wind can be an important part of China's climate change mitigation strategies, how it can play a much larger role in China than today," Lewis added. "But realistically, it can't be the only part, because it won't be feasible to replace all of coal power with wind power in the time scale we would need to address climate change."
In the coming months, the scientists plan to conduct a more intensive wind study in China, taking advantage of 25-year data with significantly more detailed information for north Asian regions to investigate the geographical year-to-year variations of wind. The model used for analyzing China could also be applied for assessing wind potential anywhere in the world, onshore and offshore, and could be extended to solar generated electricity, they noted.
They are also investigating how wind can be integrated into the power grid in Texas, for example, Lu told LiveScience.
Lewis added that more research needed to be done "on why wind farms have been producing less power than they should in China, and how the power structure currently supporting wind power can be modified to make sure it gets developed properly. If you're building all these farms, you want to get as much from them as you can."
McElroy, Lu and their colleagues detailed their findings in the Sept. 11 issue of the journal Science.
Monday, 7 September 2009
Ontario shutting 4 coal power station next year and the rest by 2014 - that's the way to do it!
close four of its 15 coal-fueled power units by October 2010 and study
whether it can convert the 11 remaining units to other fuels, such as
renewable biomass.
The provincial government, which has pledged to eliminate coal-fired
power generation by the end of 2014, said the four plants slated for
closure represent about 2,000 MW of generation capacity.
Ontario is on track to be one of the first jurisdictions in the world to
eliminate coal-fired electricity generation.
They're apparently shifting to gas as a bridging fuel to clean energy.
http://communities.thomsonreuters.com/Carbon/414530?utm_source=20090907&utm_medium=email
and
http://www.thestar.com/news/ontario/article/690868
Tuesday, 1 September 2009
Monday, 31 August 2009
Fwd: How the lessons Graham Greene outlined in ' A Quiet American' are still being avoided in the US
Bacevich is a former US Army Colonel who served in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. He is now professor of history and international relations at Boston University. His most recent book is The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism.
Summer 2009Best Intentions: An Appreciation of Graham Greene
Graham Greene, The Quiet American. London: Heinemann, 1955.
In Washington, where the honorific "historic" ornaments every speech, appointment, conclave, and legislative initiative however trivial, those who earn their living purporting to explain "what it all means" have a limitless supply of material. Small wonder that the senatorial defection of an unprincipled hack from one party to the other qualifies as Big News, while the nomination of an associate justice to a seat on the Supreme Court becomes equivalent in significance to the Normandy invasion.
To suggest that this rampant narcissism induces a distorted, not to say warped, view of reality is to understate the case. Rebutting this presumption of Washington's supreme importance requires a constant effort. Students of U.S. foreign policy might feel some obligation to sample the cascade of pretentiously titled tomes produced by movers and shakers situated In the Stream of History or At the Center of the Storm who claim to have engineered or participated in or at least witnessed events of enduring significance.
Yet a steady diet of such excretions results in the need to cleanse the palate and flush the mind of accumulated toxins. To assist in that effort, Americans are fortunate in being able to draw on a rich homegrown tradition of observers who have devoted themselves to puncturing Washington's conceit and delighting in its folly, a tradition running from Mark Twain all the way down to Garry Trudeau and Jon Stewart.
For a less comic approach that stands beyond the confines of the American tradition, there is Graham Greene's prophetic novel The Quiet American. Appearing in 1955, Greene's fictional narrative became within a decade must-reading for those seeking to understand how the United States blundered so badly in Vietnam. For those today seeking to understand how the United States blundered so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, The Quiet American remains an essential text.
Greene has little interest in Washington or in those who genuflect before the White House as the cathedral of supreme power. To locate the nub of the matter he looks elsewhere, to the grimy world where functionaries labor to translate Washington's high-sounding clichés into actual policy, with the consequences borne by ordinary people who never fly on Air Force One or appear on the Sunday morning talk shows.
In this case, the setting is Saigon, near the end of the first Indochina War. French efforts to suppress the Viet Minh insurgency and retain their empire in the Far East are failing. The United States, although nominally supporting France, is actually positioning itself to supplant its ally as the region's dominant outside power. Within a decade, of course, this effort will yield a second Indochina War and ultimately a second Western defeat.
Greene's protagonist is Thomas Fowler, a God-haunted, burned-out British journalist, who in late middle age has fled to the East in the wake of a failed love affair that had wrecked his marriage. From Saigon, he half-heartedly covers the war, mostly by passing along press releases issued by French military spokesmen. Steadfastly refusing to take sides, he stands apart and simply reports.
In Saigon, he has taken up with the beautiful and much younger Phuong. Whether Fowler loves Phuong—whether he is capable of love—is difficult to say. Yet he needs Phuong desperately, for sex and companionship, to prepare his opium pipes each evening, above all as someone whose presence keeps at bay Fowler's fear of facing alone the terrors of old age. In return Phuong wants only one thing: a guarantee of security, which implies marriage. Yet this Fowler cannot deliver: he remains formally wed and his wife, back in England, is a Catholic whose conscience will not permit her to dissolve their union.
Into this relationship comes Alden Pyle, a young American newly assigned as an economic attaché with the U.S. mission. Pyle is polite, modest, and boyish. "With his gangly legs and his crew-cut and his wide campus gaze," Greene writes, "he seemed incapable of harm."
Yet appearance and manner are deceiving. Pyle's nominal assignment is a tissue-thin cover; he is actually a CIA agent (although the agency is never identified as such). To stem the Communist tide threatening to inundate Southeast Asia, the agency wants to conjure up an indigenous democratic alternative to French colonialism. Pyle's job is to devise this Third Way. As he undertakes this task, Pyle draws inspiration from a journalist named York Harding, a sort of proto–Thomas Friedman who parachutes into various trouble spots and then in best-selling books serves up glib recipes for advancing the cause of liberty. In Pyle's estimation, the challenge he faces does not appear all that difficult. York Harding provides the answer: "you only had to find a leader and keep him safe from the old colonial powers."
"Impregnably armored by his good intentions and his ignorance," Pyle embodies all that Fowler (and Greene) can't stand about Americans: too much money, too much confidence, and too little self-awareness. Cruising the streets of Saigon in oversized Buicks, air conditioning everything in sight (to Fowler's dismay, even the U.S. legation's lavatories), passing out cigarettes as if they exist in infinite supply, and quoting York Harding, zealots like Pyle proceed on the assumption that American know-how backed by American values can make short work of even the most perplexing difficulties. Born and raised a Unitarian, Pyle takes God's existence as a given, his faith reinforcing his conviction that America's purposes necessarily reflect God's will.
As eager and as earnest as he is naive, Pyle first cultivates Fowler as a source of information, but soon falls in love with Phuong. Professing his intention to do the right thing by everyone, Pyle promises Phuong that which Fowler cannot: he will make her his bride, taking her back home to New England to live happily ever after. When Phuong accepts, Pyle compensates Fowler with apologies and assurances of his own everlasting friendship and respect.
When not conspiring to steal Fowler's girl, Pyle is conspiring to devise the Third Way, his efforts to find the right leader centering on a shadowy figure known as General Thé. As with the U.S. officials who in our own day fell under the spell of Ahmed Chalabi, Pyle has persuaded himself that General Thé's aims and America's aims align neatly. As was the case with Chalabi, this turns out to be a massive misjudgment.
Positioning General Thé as the anointed successor to the French requires first demonstrating the powerlessness of the colonial regime. This effort finds expression in a campaign of terror orchestrated by Thé, using plastic explosives covertly provided by Pyle, but to be blamed on the Communists. Pyle purports to believe that the campaign will concentrate on military targets. In fact, Thé organizes a savage attack on civilians in the center of Saigon, which Fowler and Pyle witness.
Momentarily taken aback by the bloody consequences of his handiwork—his shoes are spattered with human remains—Pyle quickly recovers and assures Fowler that the victims of the bombing had "died for democracy." Their deaths were a "pity," he tells Fowler, "but you can't always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause." Pyle's own sense of righteousness survives the incident intact. He knows he meant well. That knowledge obviates any need to take responsibility or to make amends. In his own mind, he remains blameless.
Fowler's own determination to avoid taking sides does not survive this episode. In his innocence, Pyle has become like "a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm," even as he contaminates everything he touches. The ease with which Pyle rationalizes and then dismisses the results of his own recklessness persuades Fowler that detachment has become untenable. So the observer becomes a participant.
To prevent the American from committing further mayhem, Fowler initiates his own conspiracy, arranging for Pyle's assassination by the Viet Minh—an outcome by no means disagreeable to the French. Once Pyle has been dispatched, Phuong returns to Fowler's bed, this time to stay—in an unexpected act of generosity, Fowler's wife has decided after all to grant him a divorce. So the novel ends with a tormented Fowler reflecting that even though (or perhaps because) Pyle's death had put his own life right, "I wished there existed someone to whom I could say I was sorry."
In the twentieth-century English-speaking world, Greene ranks alongside Flannery O'Connor, Walker Percy, and Evelyn Waugh among the small number of writers addressing explicitly Catholic themes who might qualify for the accolade "great." Yet Greene's relationship with Catholicism—with God, for that matter—was profoundly ambivalent and riddled with contradictions. He cheated on his wife, cheated constantly on his several mistresses, and during his restless travels frequented prostitutes. Fealty and self-denial did not figure in his makeup. He was not a nice human being. Yet Greene's intimate familiarity with sin combined with considerable gifts as a writer to produce works of profound insight.
The Quiet American, deriving its energy from Greene's scabrous anti-Americanism, offers one example. The novel stands in relation to Cold War America as Uncle Tom's Cabin stands in relation to the antebellum South: it expresses its author's ill-disguised loathing for the subject he depicts. Yet one need not share Greene's animus toward the United States to appreciate his achievement. Indeed, Americans above all should be grateful to Greene since they—should they choose to do so—can benefit most directly from that achievement.
Is Pyle as naive as he appears? Are his professions of high ideals real or contrived? Does he take seriously the verities offered by York Harding in books like The Challenge to Democracy and The Role of the West? Or does he merely appropriate them to lend a veneer of respectability to a ruthless enterprise? When Pyle prattles on about freedom and democracy, does he mean what he says? Or is it just so much cant? Although Greene poses these questions—which by implication apply not only to Pyle but to the nation and the cause that Pyle serves—he refrains from offering explicit answers.
Indeed, Greene suggests that the answers may not really matter. "Innocence," he writes, "is a kind of insanity." When it comes to the exercise of power, the idealist intent on doing God's work is likely to wreak as much havoc as the cynic who rejects God's very existence. Those who credit themselves with acting at the behest of the purest motives are hardly less likely to perpetrate evil than those who dismiss ideals as sheer poppycock.
Only those who recognize the omnipresence of sin—recognizing first of all that they themselves number among the sinful—can possibly anticipate the moral snares inherent in the exercise of power. Righteousness induces blindness. The acknowledgment of guilt enables the blind to see. To press the point further, the statesman who assumes that "we" are good while "they" are evil—think George W. Bush in the wake of 9/11—will almost necessarily misinterpret the problem at hand and underestimate the complexity and costs entailed in trying to solve it. In this sense, an awareness of one's own failings and foibles not only contributes to moral clarity but can help guard against strategic folly.
Whether feigned or real, therefore, innocence poses a problem. Good intentions informed by the simplistic belief that the world can be fixed and things set right only succeed in killing people.
Back in Washington, those who dream up such policies somehow manage to evade accountability. Discredited policymakers depart with clear consciences, en route to a visiting chair at Georgetown or a cushy billet in some think tank. There is no blood on their hands, the dirty work having been contracted out to soldiers, whose compensation, writes Greene, "includes the guilt of murder in the pay-envelope" and who upon returning home from battle may find their sense of personal culpability more difficult to shake.
America means well: on this point the vast majority of Americans will permit no dissent. We differ from all other great powers in history. Our leaders differ as well. To those who formulate U.S. policy, ideals really do matter. As President Obama insisted in his Cairo speech, anyone depicting the United States as a "self-interested empire" is way off base.
When U.S. policy goes awry, therefore, the culprit might be bad luck, bad planning, or bad tactics, but American motives lie beyond reproach. Thus, the reassuring take on the Iraq War, now emerging as the conventional wisdom, is that—however mismanaged the war may have been early on—the "surge" engineered by General David Petraeus has redeemed the enterprise: a conclusion doubly welcome in that it obviates any need to revisit questions about the war's purpose and justification, while meshing nicely with the Obama administration's inclination simply to have done with Iraq and move on.
The implications of trivializing Iraq are already evident in the debate regarding "Af--Pak": the overriding concern becomes one of finding the general best able to apply to Obama's war the "lessons" taken from Bush's war. That such an approach should find favor in Washington would not have surprised Graham Greene. Those who conceived the Iraq War, the cheerleaders who promoted it from the sidelines, and critics of that war who have now succeeded to positions of power share a common interest in wiping the slate clean, refurbishing the claim that the United States meant well because the United States always means well. No doubt mistakes were made. Yet America's benign intentions expiate sins committed along the way—or allow those in authority to assign responsibility for any sins to soldiers who in doing Washington's bidding became sources of embarrassment.
Vietnam once laid waste to Washington's claim of innocence, until Ronald Reagan helped restore that claim. Every indication suggests that American innocence will survive Iraq as well, this time with Barack Obama as chief enabler helping to sanitize or erase all that we do not wish to remember. A people famous for their self-professed religiosity won't even bother to look for someone to whom they can express contrition.
Saturday, 29 August 2009
Use fake trees to cut carbon, experts say
The report itself is a little more substantial than the article would
suggest! See:
http://www.imeche.org/about/keythemes/environment/Climate+Change/Geoeng
Friday, 28 August 2009
Disappearing south Atlantic glaciers
the island of South Georgia are disappearing at remarkable speed. This
massive glacial retreat is part of an emerging climatic pattern. The
implications are momentous, says Øyvind Paasche.
http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/the-coming-of-a-new-climate
Thursday, 27 August 2009
China's low carbon economy plans - very interesting piece from China Daily
Friday, 21 August 2009
Some interesting points in this New Scientist article
How psychology can help the planet stay cool
- 19 August 2009 by Peter Aldhous
- New Scientist Magazine
"I'M NOT convinced it's as bad as the experts make out... It's everyone else's fault... Even if I turn down my thermostat, it will make no difference." The list of reasons for not acting to combat global warming goes on and on.
This month, an American Psychological Association (APA) task force released a report highlighting these and other psychological barriers standing in the way of action. But don't despair. The report also points to strategies that could be used to convince us to play our part. Sourced from psychological experiments, we review tricks that could be deployed by companies or organisations to encourage climate-friendly behaviour. Also, on page 40 of this issue, psychologist Mark van Vugt of the Free University of Amsterdam in the Netherlands describes the elements of human nature that push us to act altruistically.
As advertisers of consumer products well know, different groups of people may have quite distinct interests and motivations, and messages that seek to change behaviour need to be tailored to take these into account. "You have to target the marketing to the demographic," says Robert Gifford of the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada, another of the report's authors.
Messages that seek to change behaviour need to be tailored to the interests of individual groups
The affluent young, for instance, tend to be diet conscious, and this could be used to steer them away from foods like cheeseburgers - one of the most climate-unfriendly meals around because of the energy it takes to raise cattle. So when trying to convince them to forgo that carbon-intensive beef pattie, better to stress health benefits than harp on about the global climate.
Though conservative pundits have been known to attack such efforts, characterising them as psychological manipulation or "mind control", experiments indicate that people are willing to be persuaded. "From participants in our experiments, we've never heard a negative backlash," says Wesley Schultz of California State University in San Marcos. In fact, according to John Petersen of Oberlin College, Ohio, we are used to far worse. "Compared to the barrage of advertising, it seems milder than anything I experience in my daily life," he says.
Good neighbours
DEEP down, most of us want to fit in with the crowd, and psychologists are exploiting this urge to conform to encourage environmentally friendly behaviour.
Researchers led by Wesley Schultz at California State University in San Marcos and Jessica Nolan, now at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania, have found that people will cut their electricity usage if told that their neighbours use less than they do.
In one experiment, the researchers left information with households in San Marcos asking them to use fans rather than air conditioners at night, turn off lights and take shorter showers. Some messages simply stressed energy conservation, some talked about future generations, while others emphasised the financial savings. But it was the flyers that implored residents to join with their neighbours in saving energy that were most effective in cutting electricity consumption (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, vol 34, p 913).
In another study, the researchers told households what others in their neighbourhood used on average. High users cut their consumption in response, but low users increased theirs. The problem disappeared if the messages were reinforced with sad or smiley faces. The smileys received by the residents who were already saving energy provided sufficient encouragement for them to keep doing so (Psychological Science, vol 18, p 429).
Information economy
MOST people seem to conserve energy if provided with real-time feedback on how much they are using. But feedback can be too immediate.
For instance, Janet Swim has a General Motors car that shows her mileage per gallon plummeting each time she accelerates. It's just not very useful, she argues, because it's hard to place that momentary piece of feedback in the context of her overall driving behaviour and fuel efficiency.
In contrast, the Toyota Prius display shows mileage per gallon over 5-minute intervals for the previous half-hour. With that contextual information, people can experiment with different driving styles to see how they affect mileage, and even compete with themselves to improve over time. The 2010 Honda Insight goes one better, flashing up an image of a trophy to reward thrifty driving.
The benefits of feedback are not restricted to car gadgets. Studies show that devices that display domestic energy usage produce savings of between 5 and 12 per cent.
Competitive instincts
EVERY spring, selected student dormitories at Oberlin College in Ohio compete to discover which one can cut energy use by the most. Computer screens give the students detailed feedback on electricity consumption, and in one study dorms cut their electricity use by 55 per cent (International Journal of Sustainability in Higher Education, vol 8, p 16).
The researchers running the study have not yet crunched their numbers to separate out the effects of competition from the feedback on electricity consumption, but the large savings compared to other studies that lack a competitive element suggest a strong effect. "The competition, at least in this environment, is critical," says John Petersen, Oberlin's head of environmental studies.
Petersen concedes that Oberlin may attract students with green sensibilities atypical of society at large. The project is about to extend into the real world. Equipment to provide detailed feedback on electricity use will be fitted into 53 apartments and six business units in a development now under construction in the city of Oberlin. "We hope to create volunteer groups that will compete with one another," says psychologist Cindy Frantz.
Here and now
PEOPLE have to be persuaded to act on climate change even though the benefit won't be felt for decades. Research by David Hardisty and Elke Weber of Columbia University in New York suggests ways to achieve this.
Hardisty and Weber have found that people respond in exactly the same way to decisions involving future environmental gains and losses as they do when making financial decisions (Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, vol 138, p 329). This allows psychologists' knowledge of how to manipulate financial decision-making to be brought into play.
For instance, schemes that give people an upfront cash payment for insulating their home will work better than those promising long-term savings, even if the people receiving cash end up paying a little more in the long run.
And because we are generally more worried about future losses than we are impressed by future gains, messages are more effective if framed to warn people that they will lose $500 over 10 years if they don't follow a particular course of action to limit climate change than if they are told they'll be $500 better off if they do take action.
Social networks
AS SOCIAL animals, we like to interact with others and take inspiration from their actions. Psychologists are working out how to exploit this to spread behaviours that will help limit climate change. "My sense is that social networks are going to be important," says Swim.
Allowing people to document successes in saving energy on their Facebook pages could drive change among their friends, and the Oberlin team is considering integrating this into its urban residence experiment.
Tawanna Dillahunt and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, think such opportunities presented by Facebook can be combined with our liking for furry animals. Inspired by the attachment that people can develop towards Tamagotchi virtual pets, the team is testing the persuasive power of a "virtual polar bear" standing on an ice floe that grows bigger as people adopt environmentally friendly behaviours such as taking shorter showers. Initial results suggests the polar bear has pull.