Book

I am not posting things to the blog at the moment because I am working on a book. Hopefully it will be finished soon and then I will carry on with the blog.

Side-events and the Burnley Summit

The negotiations at Bonn and Copenhagen are reflex actions distracting us from a more important problem; mere side-events to a set of negotiations which is not taking place: what to do now.

We have less than ten years to stabilise emissions. To limit warming to 2 degrees we can emit no more than one trillion tonnes of greenhouse gasses between 2000 and 2050. We have eaten almost a third of the way through that cake already. Therefore the burningly critical issue, with implications for life on earth, is what happens in the immediate future.

Despite this, everyone is talking about 2050 and 2020, 41 and 11 years ahead. 2050 and 2020 are an irrelevance. The folk scrabbling and babbling around the conference centres are chasing a mirage.

Why are we not focussed solely and ruthlessly on the next five years? Could it be because politicians, with few exceptions, find it comfortable making bold plans for a time when they will be dead? Could it be that academics, with some exceptions, prefer to amuse themselves with aesthetically pleasing long-term models instead of tackling the really tough gritty smelly messy bruising problem of what to do tomorrow? Dare not liberals admit that democracy has hit a brick wall? Does the authoritarian right want to squeeze that last bit of oil out of the ground before it has to concede it got that one wrong?

Nothing as sinister as all that. We are excited and comforted by a bold vision of 2050 and 2020, round numbers far enough away to retain mystery, close enough to feel that we are doing something. We cannot reconcile savage focus on the short term with the habit of rejecting short-term thinking as the problem.

Let's call the main event, to which Bonn and Copenhagen are side-shows, the Burnley Summit. It took place in a modest town in northern England with no mermaids.

The outcome of the Burnley Summit was:

- China agreed to zero emissions growth between 2008 to 2013.

- It agreed to an immediate ban on commissioning of new coal-fired capacity, steel plants, cement plants, or ammonia plants, unless replacing existing less efficient capacity.

- It agreed to no net increase in aeroplane fleets or kilometres flown.

- It agreed to install methane capture systems on all landfill sites, coal mines, water treatment plants, and farms.

China will keep to that agreement because it has a knack at getting things done.

- India agreed to very modest growth and in return provided 100,000 gurus who would travel the world and demonstrate to us a simple, practical and gentle lifestyle.

- Brasil and Indonesia agreed to an immediate enforced ban on deforestation in return for annual payments of ten billion USD each from the international community.

- The EU and the USA agreed to a ten percent cut in emissions between 2008 and 2013 including a phased closure of an agreed number of coal-fired power plants; temporary suspension of operations of a number of cement and steel plants; a cessation of all new airport and road construction; compulsory installation of methane capture systems in all landfill sites, water treatment plants, and coalmines; a ban on meat-eating except on Sundays and public holidays; minimum temperatures in buildings in the summer of 20 degrees C and maximum temperatures in winter of 19 degrees C, with limited health-based exceptions.

- The IMF and the banking community agreed to disburse no more funds to any country unless it agrees to similar commitments

It will hurt workers in heavy industry and butchers. But these are tough men who don’t cry easily, and we will help them generously. The demise of mining and steel communities in England led to hardship. But it did not lead to disease and death.

The Burnley Summit will do good to a lot of people - lentil farmers, sheep farmers, manufacturers of building control systems, suppliers of energy efficiency equipment; manufacturers of methane control systems; train drivers, boat builders, pullover manufacturers, and Italian restaurateurs.

The short-term commitments of the Burnley Summit mean that climate change will finally collide with the electoral cycle. These emergency measures will require a level of intervention and control unknown in peace time. But it is the way to avoid catastrophe.

Nature notes - low carbon symbiosis in action

This photograph shows a group of people waiting for a bus on an excessively sunny day in May in Budapest.

Note the two species: homo insapiens in a queue of cars going into town, hot and cross and frustrated; and homo moderately sapiens sheltering in the shade of a tree near the bus stop.

The low carbon symbiosis is elegant. Homo moderately sapiens plants a tree on the pavement and supports it by protecting and watering it. The tree provides shade for bus-users at a lower carbon intensity and with more effect than a metal and glass bus shelter. This is without intent, and the beneficiaries of the share are not even aware that the service is being provided by a tree.

There is a chance here for bus-shelter entrepreneur JC Decaux. To replace his metal and glass constructs with trees and bushes and ivy. Advertising executives will take lessons in topiary. Hieroglyphs of moss and lichen will sell perfumes and distant journeys. Tendrils of purple vetch will describe the curves of exotic women. Urchins with penknives will carve our favourite logos into the bark. Jingles will be birdsong.

The questionable appeal of efficiency

One frequently mentioned criterion for climate change policies is that they should help us achieve our goals “efficiently”. An advantage claimed for emissions trading or environmental markets is that they reduce emissions in an economically efficient way.

We need to be very careful with applying this criterion of efficiency, since it is easy in practice to confuse it with the minimisation of cost, something which may be undesirable.

First, consider a scenario in Jermyn Street, London. You have just bought a new cashmere jumper. Suddenly it clouds over. You step out of the shop and it starts bucketing it down with rain and you have an urgent need for an umbrella.

There are three shops along the street which sell umbrellas. Do you:

(a) Go to all three to check prices and, having ascertained which gives best value for money, return to the chosen shop and make your purchase
(b) Go to one and spend five minutes (in the rain) bargaining with the umbrella seller, on the grounds that you can always take your custom to the next shop along the road, or
(c) Buy the first umbrella you find and preserve your new cashmere jumper?

By conventional measure, the third approach is unlikely to bring the lowest cost of an umbrella. But think of the heavy rain, i.e. circumstances which are very likely to be catastrophic (for your jumper).

With climate change we might be already in the rain shower. We do not know how much time we have. We should be very careful being too clever about spending a lot of time figuring out the lowest cost approach. Let’s just do something which works.

Second, there is the question of redundancy, in many ways the opposite of efficiency. Redundancy (not the kind with which bankers have become recently familiar) is about deliberately building into your design back-up systems in case a main system does not work. You might have several redundant features, and never use any of them, but its good to know that they are there in case something goes wrong. In the pursuit of efficiency, redundancy is often ignored by people designing and operating systems and businesses.

With climate change policy there is little time to get it right and little space for experimentation or error. Therefore it makes sense to build redundancy into the policies. We should adopt plenty of different policies at the same time, some expensive, some cheap, all with the aim of cutting emissions. And to be safe we might want to overshoot rather than undershoot reductions. Building in redundancy is quite the opposite of efficiency. Despite its importance it is constantly overlooked by linear-minded policy makers.

Third, the cost of measures to combat climate change is thought of as the cost to the current economy as we know it and the notion assumes that the current economy is largely a constant. The low-costers are thinking: “We have a big economy with lots of factories and power plants and lorries and planes and things and we want to cause as little disturbance as possible to it.” So any policy measures must be as low cost as possible in order not to cause any disturbance.

The trouble with this approach is that we are not talking about some little scheme on the edge of the economy. This is not fine-tuning. We are talking about replacing big chunks of the economy – well over half the things we do in our economy are not sustainable. Once these chunks have gone, we will not have the same economy. Power generation, manufacture of cement, iron and steel, bricks, glass, aluminium, fertilisers, and chemicals, the oil and gas industry, the construction industry or transport all consume, or their products consume, stupendous quantities of fossil fuels. All this will have to go or be fundamentally changed in a low carbon economy. From the point of view of society, this technology is junk and has no value. Let’s not be afraid to impose costs on it which will hasten its demise.

The so-called costs of climate change policies are the costs of switching to a sustainable economy within which mankind and other species can survive. In fact, these costs are investments. Therefore they should be compared with the benefit of obtaining a new economy which works.

Things which seem to cost us money now in terms of today’s economy, are actually helping us move more quickly to a sustainable economy where we will create wealth, wellbeing, happiness, satisfaction, or contentment by other technologies and behaviour. We should spend lavishly and boldly on this goal.

Climate change policy makers need to be very careful in considering how they handle efficiency. The shortage of time and need for redundancy call for more attention to effectiveness than efficiency. And the denominator of efficiency should not be the costs imposed on industries of which our planet cannot afford.

The false choice of emissions trading

Anyone in the carbon market has probably had to explain the workings of the EU ETS to someone. There is a bit where you say glibly: “... and the guy can choose whether to buy more allowances or reduce his emissions ...”

There is a problem with this choice. It's like saying you can either buy Balzac in translation or learn French.

The economist gives us a choice between two totally different things which cannot be compared. To buy carbon credits is instant and relatively painless. When it is not your cash it really does not hurt. In fact, it can be quite fun buying carbon credits – bidding on an online exchange, negotiating prices and so forth can get the adrenalin running.

The alternative, to reduce emissions, is an awful hassle. Five years or more of stress and sleepless nights to make an emission reduction project happen. Dealing with managers and boards and employees and suppliers and engineers and authorities and "stakeholders" (wasn't Dracula a stakeholder?) and people wanting kickbacks and people offering kickbacks and changing regulations and lobbying and more kickbacks and what the hell you're dead by the time the new boiler is commissioned anyway.

Like who would take the abatement option seriously?

Then the economist gets back to you and says that if it is in the shareholders’ interest then they will make an emission reduction project happen. Aha? The guys who make the projects happen are the management and they are hardly likely to be around when the crunch comes, so they are hardly likely to hassle themselves with the nightmare of a project. And in fact, the shareholders won’t be around either – they will have sold their stock well before the seventeenth stamp is applied to the permit from the Office of Rent Seeking.

A few brave shareholders who are committed to their business and the remaining managers who really believe in the company they work for are assembled at the opening ceremony of their revolutionary $1 billion renewable electrolytic ammonia plant (zero CO2). The local colliery brass band is just about to strike up the anthem of the European Fertiliser Manufacturers Association. A dozen bottles of Tarnów elderberry champagne have been cracked open, and a case of plum bimber has already been consumed. The mayor steps up, slightly wobbly, to the ribbon, which ripples in the fresh breeze. Suddenly a sound is heard in the distance. It was the crash of the carbon price collapsing. The project is dead.

RUUs - the challenge of sleeping on trains

Over Easter, in the cause of low-carbon travel we rejected a comfortable flight from Budapest to Geneva and took the overnight Wiener Waltzer train via Zurich.

There was something unpleasant about the accommodation. A sense of Rumsfeldian unknown unknowns (RUUs): of other peoples’ crumbs which you might find in the sheets, of the potential for pubic hairs on the wall next to your face, of smells still to be discovered, of the inevitability of a nocturnal visit to the very awful toilets.

When considering train travel as an alternative to flight, the calculation of the marginal abatement cost should include at least:

- The cost of acquiring tolerance of someone else’s long red hair near your face
- The cost some Ricky Gervais podcasts and a book sufficiently distracting to draw one’s attention away from the aforementioned Rumsfeldian elements
- The cost of procuring a patient, tolerant, and well-prepared wife who can make plenty of sandwiches and keep children content while cooped up
- The cost of acquiring tolerance of annoying pop music next door
- The cost of perfumes as a cover for the adventure to the loo
- The cost of a device to retain the smell of ripe Reblochon on the return journey
- An appropriate amortisation of the cost of a course in Buddhism

Some observations:

First, there is a dimension of tolerance with squeamishness at one end and stoicism at the other. In our daily lives we get used to cleanliness and comfort and gradually our tolerance of unknowns slides down towards the squeamish end. Unless you are an undertaker, sewage worker, doctor, or other brave soul, you don’t meet squeamish much. Some of the climate change challenge is about shifting out mindset back towards the stoicism end so that we can tolerate RUUs. Think of the earthquake in L’Aquila and you stop worrying about them.

Second, consider airlines. Why don’t reclining seats in airlines provoke thoughts about RUUs while couchettes on trains do? For some reason we believe that aeroplanes are cleaner than trains. There’s some psychology going on there which railway salesmen and makers of transport policy need to understand.

Finally, the outward leg had many more RUUs than the return journey. Was this because we had got used to them? Or was it because the brand of SBB, the Swiss railway company is much less prone to RUU association than the Hungarian equivalent? Or was it a matter of fact that the Swiss do a better job of cleaning the carriages than the Hungarians?

Whatever the answer to these questions, rail travel does not yet appear to be a viable low-carbon alternative to air travel for longer journeys. The rail operators have some way to go before they can compete with the airlines.

Fiddlers on the roof

At a recent trade fair I met with six providers of solar heating systems expressing an interest in purchasing a system for the villa in which we have a flat. I left them each my name card and they promised to follow up.

Over three weeks later I have received only one call from one of the suppliers. When I rang back, someone else picked up the phone and she said that it is no longer the number of the said gentleman and that she could not give me the new number.

They must be countercyclical businesses and have plenty of orders to deal with despite the worst recession ever to hit the country.

The idle salesmen (for they were all blokes) of the solar power industry do not bode well for a green future. If none out of six companies respond to demand from an enthusiastic customer with cash to spend, who will sell solar heating systems to those customers who need a bit of convincing or who need some help with the financing?

This corner of the renewable energy industry is poorly prepared for the revolution which is expected of it. Once carbon prices start to create solid demand for their services, let’s hope that the solar companies get their act together. There is no guarantee that this will happen.

The validation and verification companies famously failed to respond adequately to the opportunity presented to them by JI and CDM, leaving a trail of delays, frustration, losses, disappointment, and chaos. Academics may call it a market failure, others may call it strategic incompetence, but the result is a carbon market much less effective than it might have been.

It is important that policy makers, socialised as they are with the assumption that markets respond briskly to opportunity and price signals, do not just assume that a flourishing renewables supply business will leap into existence once CO2 emissions are priced into conventional heating fuels.