Renewable Energy Strategy

There is a lot (mostly justifiable) cynicism out there regarding the use of targets to drive environmental improvements. In May, the think-tank Policy Exchange brought out an analysis of all the different targets set by the Government on environmental issues since 1997, and gave them a real pasting on just how far short they have fallen on so many of them.

But the implication behind the Report that any target-setting process in the field of environmental policy is largely a waste of time is entirely misplaced. Targets can drive both policy reform and improved outcomes.

And there is no bigger target out there at the moment than the EU’s target of providing 20% of all the energy it needs (not just electricity) from renewable resources by 2020. After some lively horse-trading, it was decided earlier on in the year that the UK share of that EU-wide target should be 15% - which means at least 30% (and probably close to 40%) of our electricity will need to come from renewables – it’s just so much tougher doing transport or heating by renewables.

Acceptance of this target led to months of the deepest angst inside BERR. On Thursday last week, it eventually delivered itself of a draft Renewable Energy Strategy. And it’s not half bad. Indeed, after a decade of incredibly damaging dithering, BERR Officials have at last begun to think through the reality of meeting energy security and low-carbon objectives through renewables.

Part of that new-found purpose is based on the development and deployment of the technologies themselves – particularly offshore wind, which is where we can get the biggest bang for our renewable buck. But the most encouraging thing about this draft Strategy is the recognition that making renewables work depends not so much on the technology bit as on other key aspects of energy policy, namely: energy efficiency (properly accounted for in the Strategy, for the first time since the 2003 Energy White Paper, though even now without a clear plan of action); planning (with really encouraging new emphasis on community and local benefits); grid connections (at long last, BERR is getting tough with Ofgem to get its own act sorted out on low-carbon measures); and even behaviour change – rumour has it that BERR won’t be too upset if their Lordships force the Government to give way on accepting the need for the accelerated introduction of feed-in tariffs – the single most important factor in driving the astonishing renewables success story in Germany and elsewhere.

Real breakthroughs – as Greenpeace and others have acknowledged. Still some blindingly obvious blind-spots (doing this in a way that further hammers the fuel-poor in the UK is really not smart), but without doubt the best thing to emerge from BERR over the last five years.

Posted on June 30, 2008 1:52 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Greenpeace versus Unilever (Round Two)

“Gratuitously stirring a pot that absolutely didn’t need to be stirred just to make a phoney effect” – I guess that was one of the more polite comments I received from colleagues about my piece (posted 1st May) regarding Greenpeace’s direct action against Unilever as part of its palm oil campaign. I certainly plead guilty to the pot-stirring, but there was nothing phoney about it: the interface between business and NGOs is one that I spend a lot of time reflecting on, and this provides a particularly interesting case study.

To say that these things “all come out in the wash” would not just be a cliché, but a rather insulting cliché. However, there is something of a coming-out-in-the-wash effect going on in terms of the ‘working relationship’ between Greenpeace and Unilever.

The prize for Greenpeace in taking on Unilever was not just to be sure that the company was doubling and re-doubling its efforts on securing “sustainable palm oil”, but that Unilever would undertake to spearhead a business-led call for an immediate moratorium on further deforestation in Indonesia linked to palm oil cultivation.

That’s exactly what Unilever is now doing – with the only bone of contention between them the question as to whether Unilever would have done that without its headquarters being invaded by troops of orang-utan lookalikes. Unilever said it would; Greenpeace says is wouldn’t. Whatever, as some would say.

But things move fast these days. A couple of days after Unilever made its announcement (at The Prince of Wales’s May Day Summit on Climate Change) Greenpeace issued its latest report, The Hidden Carbon Liability of Indonesian Palm Oil – the front cover of which has a big tick against Unilever on “support a halt to deforestation”, and a big cross against Nestle, P&G and Kraft.

It’s an excellent report (adding a lot more context and specific detail to the earlier report, Burning up Borneo), and key reading for anyone interested in this debate. I’m sure it won’t make Unilever colleagues feel any less uncomfortable about the pressure they’re now under, but they will at least see it as a more ‘level playing field’ in terms of the share of the clod of earth that Greenpeace is now hurling at all the big palm oil players.

One really interesting divide emerges. Some time ago, Unilever decided to direct (almost) all its efforts through the RSPO – the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil. “It is essential that all those involved sign up to agreed criteria to make sustainability work on the ground – but this is not an easy process, and is taking longer than we would all like. That is why we chair the Round Table on Sustainable Palm Oil”.

Greenpeace thinks the RSPO is a total waste of space: “the organisation’s impact on the ground in terms of halting industry expansion into rainforests and peatlands has been negligible. At present, the RSPO scheme does not prohibit palm oil producers from being involved in forest conversion, and has no assessment of, or limits on, GHG emissions from the development of palm oil plantations.

Again, you’ll have to judge for yourself on this one. At the risk of being accused yet again of grotesque bias, I have to say that Unilever really didn’t have much choice here. Unilateral action on its part would have counted for very little – even if it is the world’s biggest consumer of palm oil .

And it’s simply not true to say that nothing has happened, In just three years, producers responsible for 40% of total palm oil production have joined the RSPO, have agreed on a Certification Programme for sustainable palm oil (which is more than can be said for most other agricultural commodities in the world today), which includes sanctions against companies that flout the certification standards – and those companies do include expansion onto land of high conservation value.

Here’s the fit between Greenpeace’s demands and the RSPO:
(1) No new plantings within mapped forest areas
(2) No plantations resulting in the degradation of peatlands
(3) No plantations post-November 2005 resulting in degradations of High Conservation Value forests
(4) No plantations established on indigenous people’s land without Free, Prior and Informed Consent
(5) Establish full supply chain traceability.

Unilever has pointed out that the first four of these are included in the new standards, and Unilever itself (though not other RSPO members) has committed to (5). As it has to be if it is to achieve its goal of ensuing that all the palm oil it uses is sourced from sustainable producers by 2015.

Too slow? Probably. RSPO still pretty dodgy in terms of its membership? Couldn’t agree more. Best way to go in an imperfect world? I think so.

Posted on June 20, 2008 2:12 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Protecting the rainforests

I long ago swore that I would avoid all big UN Conferences on environment or climate change issues, and have pretty much stuck to that sanity-protecting rule. Indeed, John Prescott got very grumpy with me when I declined the opportunity to be part of the UK delegation at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg. But he was almost always grumpy with me, so it didn’t matter too much.

The only downside to this self-imposed embargo on all such jamborees is that one undoubtedly misses out on those rare moments of drama that almost (but not quite!) compensate for the hours spent in such soul-crushing misery.

One such moment occurred right at the end of the Bali Conference on Climate Change last year. By general agreement, Bali was even more of a soul-crusher than most of these Conferences, in part because of the deplorable behaviour of the US delegation that played an out-and-out spoiler from Day One right through into extra time.

With delegates in despair, and some in tears, the country representative from Papua New Guinea (a guy called Kevin Conrad) stood up and told the US delegation either to recognise the overwhelming will of the Conference (and agree to the Bali Declaration) or get out of the Conference Chamber and scuttle back to Washington cloaked in contempt and ignominy. Very high drama! And fortunately, the US did sign up.

So it was quite a treat to meet up with Kevin Conrad at the Cheltenham Science Festival last week. He was talking about some of the really exciting new ideas around the incentivisation for rainforest countries to keep their rainforests intact rather than cutting them down. A simple but powerful idea: the world needs to protect its remaining rainforests (deforestation contributes up to 20% of total CO2 emissions every year), but they are not “our” rainforests – they are part of the resource base of a number of countries that desperately need the income from their forest to help them develop. So we need them in place; they need them logged and sold on.

One solution is therefore to compensate them financially for not cutting the forests down, and there is now a huge amount of effort going in to developing financial instruments to help “reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation” – or REDD, as it’s called. A new report published in the Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society shows just how much could be achieved here for just a few billion dollars every year. Very challenging stuff.

And that is what Kevin Conrad is now out there doing – building up a growing head of steam around REDD financing.

Unfortunately, there was one big black cloud hanging over Kevin’s presentation – namely, the ongoing destruction of Papua New Guinea’s own forest. Using the latest remote sensing techniques, a team of scientists based at Port Moresby University, has calculated that PNG is logging its forests even faster than Brazil is cutting down the Amazon rainforests. In 2007, an astonishing 1.7% of the entire forest base was cut down – if it continues at that rate, a full 50% will have disappeared by 2021.

To which there was only one response from his audience. Let’s get this REDD stuff up and running before it’s too late.


Posted on June 11, 2008 4:15 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Population

I was able to give the ‘population pot’ a pretty good stir on Friday in an event for the Cheltenham Science Festival.

For some time now, I have been reflecting on the way in which the world is responding to the twin crises of HIV/AIDS and continuing high levels of population growth. The UN body responsible for coordinating HIV/AIDS has called for funding to grow to around $22 billion per annum – and it seems probable that governments, donor agencies and big foundations will respond positively.

By contrast, funding for family planning peaked some time ago (as a percentage of total expenditures on population-related activities), and is still on a downward curve.

Donor Expenditures199419992004
Family Planning Services55%37%9%
Reproductive Health Services18%30%25%
HIV/AIDS Activities 9%23%54%
Research & Development18%11%12%
Millions in Current US $131416554907

HIV/AIDS kills about 8000 people a month, and there are 5 million new infections every year, so I have no problem about the scale of expenditure in addressing this. However, along with many others, I do have major reservations about the way in which the sums are being invested, especially in terms of the US-driven programmes which are much more ideology-based than evidence-based.

But the fact that this year in Kenya (where the rate of population growth is on the rise again) a sum of around 480 million will be spent on HIV/AIDS, compared to just 7.7 million on family planning and reproductive health, is just completely bonkers. What that means is instead of Kenya’s population stabilising at 44 million by 2050, which is what would have happened with the Total Fertility Rate continuing to decline, it could now go as high as 80 million – and god knows how many of that vastly expanded population will have died of HIV/AIDS between now and 2050.

The additional suffering that all this imposes on some of the world’s most poorest countries is literally incalculable. Continuing population growth is already having a marked impact on the efforts being made to meet the Millennium Development Goals. As the All Party Parliamentary Group on Population, Development & Reproductive Health put it in 2007:

“The evidence is overwhelming: the Millennium Development Goals are difficult or impossible to achieve with the current levels of population growth in the least developed countries and regions.”

It’s still the case that most “progressive” development experts think that “addressing poverty first” remains the best response, and that most environmentalists, in a reprehensibly politically-correct way, think it is exclusively about over-consumption in the rich world, than over-population in the poor world.

But exactly what kind of world are these people living in? Certainly not in a world where water consumption is doubling every 20 years, more than twice the rate of human population growth, where available arable land continues to decline year on year, where many of the world’s biodiversity hotspots are increasingly at risk specifically because of rapid population growth, where oil at $139 a barrel is already having a devastating effect on hundreds of millions of very poor people, and where accelerating climate change and rising sea levels are going to cause havoc over the next 20-30 years.

That’s our world – not some make believe cornucopian world that some still dream of, where the number of people on it is of no material significance.

Posted on June 9, 2008 2:25 PM | | Comments (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Fuel Tax Protests

PetrolPump_200.jpgThis all feels very much like one of those periodic crunch moments for the sustainability agenda. Fuel-tax protests. Rebellious backbenchers. The kind of febrile atmosphere we last saw in 2000. The Tory press on the war path. NGOs winding themselves up: “Stay green, Gordon, don’t be yellow”.

In 2000, the price of fuel was heading sharply upwards – not as sharply as today, but very uncomfortably. A motley consortium of some of the worst affected citizens (road haulage firms, farmers etc) took to their trucks and their tractors and blockaded key oil facilities in protest against the fuel tax escalator – a Conservative innovation which Labour was quite happily rolling on with. Within a few weeks, the Treasury caved in and agreed to decommission the escalator.

On the face of it, a minor blip. But a strong case has been made since then that it was this one setback that put paid to Treasury’s enthusiasm for the sustainability agenda. Ministers blamed both NGOs for not having come to their aid and the media for having hyped the whole thing into a massive crisis. The image of ‘Mondeo Man’, feral and unforgiving, was on display, virtually, the length and breadth of the Treasury’s corridors of impotence.

Roll forward eight years. It’s all stacking up again, with campaigns both to defer the projected increase in fuel taxes for the second time, and to reverse decisions announced in the budget on increases and vehicle excise duty. Ministers are ‘listening’; U-turns are widely anticipated.

And would that be so awful? Focussing for now on fuel taxes, just stand back for a moment. The essence of using fiscal instruments to change corporate and consumer behaviour relies on three things: transparency (so that people know what’s coming down the track at them); fiscal neutrality (so as not to piss everyone off by using green taxes primarily to increase revenues); and fairness (so that the less well-off in society are not further disadvantaged).

On those three counts, given the dramatic increases in the price of petrol and diesel over the last couple of years, everyone has been taken by surprise by the price hikes, apart from ‘Peak Oil’ campaigners (who have been telling us this was about to happen for years).

Moreover, the less well-off are being disproportionately hammered, and the hikes in fuel taxes are far from fiscally neutral and never have been.

So, economically, socially, ethically, what are the implications of all that?

Your thoughts really welcome. As the Government’s official advisers on such matters, what do you think the SDC’s advice should be?

Posted on May 30, 2008 9:38 AM | | Comments (20) | TrackBacks (0)

London Array

So, Shell International have decided to pull out of the London Array project, the largest offshore wind farm (at around 100MW) in the UK.

I’ve got a little file on my desk here of all the press releases that the London Array Consortium has put out over the last few years – not least to drum up support from people like me as it wrestled with a recalcitrant Local Authority and other issues in terms of securing planning permission for the facilities required for the London Array.

It’s a great scheme. It still is – with or without Shell, whose withdrawal strikes me as a terrible decision. It’s difficult to imagine how companies of this kind come to decisions of that sort.

So I was all the more grateful for a windy uplift the day after Shell announced this decision, when I went along to help celebrate the commissioning of the Westmill Wind Farm, just outside Swindon – 5 x 1.3MW turbines, which anyone now using the mainline services into or out of Paddington can observe out of the train window. If ever you need firm confirmation that wind turbines enhance certain landscapes, rather than destroy them, Westmill provides that in all its glory!

westmill_windfarm1.jpg But what makes Westmill even more special is the fact that it is a co-operative venture, with a large number of individuals (including myself) who bought into the project, and 50% of whom live within a 50 mile radius of the project.
This was a great day!

Unfortunately, there are only a handful of co-operative wind projects of this kind in the UK – in contrast, for instance, to Denmark. As far as I can discover, there are no more than 5 actually up and running, with a few more in the pipeline.

So why does that matter? Who cares whether it is small-scale, local co-operative ventures delivering the Megawatts, or vast great, overhead-heavy multi-nationals? In truth, I will settle for more and more MW of wind wherever it comes from, but I have to say that I would much rather that many more on-shore projects came from Westmill look-alikes, leaving the off-shore mega-projects to the big guys – even if Shell does seem to have lost its bottle.

And I can’t help but think that this would make a bigger difference in terms of overcoming the often utterly spurious objections of planning committees than any amount of wordy advisory notes from government.

Posted on May 13, 2008 11:34 AM | | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)