Tag: emissions

From Paris to Parliament: Is there a climate for action?

Posted on by janet.crompton

The Paris Agreement reached at the COP21 late last year was a big success, and the UK played an important, constructive role in that. But the UK is going backwards in policy terms with respect to greenhouse gas emissions.

That was the general message I took away from an event I attended last week in Parliament on behalf of the University of Bristol’s Cabot Institute. In truth, this wasn’t a big surprise to me. But what did strike me was the unanimity of the panellists who spoke: an MP, a scientist, an economist, a financial advisor, and an activist.* They were all more or less in agreement about the following:

  1. Paris was a big deal. There are certainly all kinds of things to be worried and dissatisfied about, and it would have been better to have had an agreement like this 20 years ago. (If you add up all the commitments national governments have made, we’re nowhere near keeping climate change under 2˚.) But it really does give us a much better shot than we had beforehand. In an important sense, to quote the scientist, December 2015 was when humanity really decided that climate change was “a problem we agreed to do something about”.
  2. Above all, Paris did two crucial things. First, it established a mechanism for making countries accountable to each other, and for making governments more accountable domestically. Second, it provided firms and investors with a clear steer: the world economy is going to decarbonise in this century. The private sector will appreciate the implications: some power stations will have to be decommissioned early; governments will sooner or later have to introduce policies favourable to renewables and unfavourable to fossil fuels; “climate risk” is going to be a huge issue for the financial services sector.
  3. And the private sector is not the problem. In a lot of ways, big companies are ahead of the government, and many are looking to governments to get with the programme and establish sensible, long-term targets and regulations. I found it striking that even an activist from Friends of the Earth and the former leader of the UK Green Party seemed to feel this way.
  4. Cutting carbon isn’t bad for the economy. Again, I wouldn’t have been surprised by a couple of the panellists saying this. But for all five to agree was impressive. They made the point in different ways. The scientist for example talked about employment growth in the clean energy sector, while the activist noted that greenhouse gas emissions have come way down in the UK in the last 25 years even as total economic activity has grown.
  5. Both of the UK’s major political parties–i.e., the Conservative Party included–have been positive forces shaping the global climate regime, and UK governments led by both parties have advised other countries on how to get their emissions down. This message too was striking to me.

All of the above just confirmed things I’ve thought for a while: That decarbonising is completely economically doable, and the reasons we’re not doing it fast enough are just political. And that at this point (in some contrast perhaps to 10 or 20 years ago) the private sector isn’t much of a problem politically.

What remains perplexing to me then is why the current government is not just doing so little, but actually going backwards–another more-or-less consensus view among the panellists. For example, revenues from environmental taxes have been flat or declining for years as a proportion of all tax revenues–directly contrary to what mainstream economics recommends. In the housing sector, the government has weakened energy-efficiency standards and killed off its flagship scheme to encourage better insulation. Subsidies for renewables have been cut (though the economic case for such subsidies is more equivocal). And this year’s Energy Bill is strangely silent on climate change.

So… What’s with the current government? I’m sure some of them are climate sceptics, but I wouldn’t expect a majority are (and I don’t think David Cameron is). Are they overestimating the economic costs of taking action on climate change? Maybe. But my best guess is that green issues just aren’t a big concern for them personally, and they don’t see the British public as too interested or supportive. As such, climate change is just constantly slipping down the agenda.

We may soon know more. The panellists noted that a number of big decisions are coming up in the UK within the next year, and in a sense this country will provide the first test of the Paris Agreement. Notably, there are questions about the climate implications of the Energy Bill, next month we will find out about funding for renewables post-2020, and we will see a new Carbon Plan by the end of the year. Let’s hope for some more positive news on those fronts.

* The panellists were Caroline Lucas (MP, former leader of the Green Party); Sir David King (formerly the Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, and now Special Representative for Climate Change); Prof Michael Jacobs (various think tank and academic affiliations); Kirsty Hamilton (various finance affiliations); and Simon Bullock (Friends of the Earth). The event was a seminar of the All Party Climate Change Group (APPCCG) and Parliamentary Renewable and Sustainable Energy Group (PRASEG).

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Malcolm Fairbrother, from the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. 

What happens when you cross a venture capitalist with a major national scientific research organisation?

Posted on by janet.crompton
CSIRO Corporate Headquarters, Campbell. Image credit: Bidgee – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0

I’m not sure if there’s a punchline, instead just a rather alarming answer. A couple of days ago, over on the other side of the world, Larry Marshall, the chief executive of Australia’s government agency for scientific research, made a disturbing announcement. Australia’s national science agency, CSIRO (the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation) is to face a further 350 job losses (over 5% of its workforce) over the next two years. Primarily these losses look to be from the Oceans and Atmosphere division, affecting ongoing work on monitoring and predicting the Earth’s climate.

The job losses themselves are a huge blow for Australian and global climate research, and give the impression that the current Australian regime are perhaps not totally committed to upholding their end of the Paris agreement. This doesn’t say much, given that the Australian commitments were widely derided for being pretty weak in the first place.

So why is CSIRO’s current work important? Taking just one example, CSIRO plays a key role in monitoring the current state of the atmosphere, positioned as it is in one of the few countries in the Southern Hemisphere with well-developed scientific infrastructure. The Cape Grim atmospheric monitoring station in Tasmania, has been recording levels of southern hemisphere greenhouse gases for the last 40 years. The station mostly receives air that has travelled over the southern ocean free from pollution sources, thus providing a key record of southern hemisphere background levels of various atmospheric constituents. It’s basically the southern hemisphere equivalent of the Mauna Loa station in Hawaii which is regularly used as the key yardstick for northern hemisphere background levels.

Long term records like this are kind of pretty important, not just for scientific investigation, but also as an aid to public outreach. Anyone could look at these graphs of Cape Grim data for the three most abundant greenhouse gases, and pick up the take home message: they’ve all been increasing since the 1970s.

The point is that the Cape Grim measurements have played a key role in our understanding of the changes in the atmosphere over last 40 years, and should continue to do so into the future. Except maybe they won’t. If reports are to be believed it’s exactly this type of infrastructure that is under threat. Reportedly 100 people are to be unceremoniously thrown out to pasture from the Oceans and Atmosphere division, leaving just 30 left. Such a remarkably high turnover will have an inevitable effect on the quality of continuing work, not to mention quantity.

Perhaps that is what the current government in Australia want though. Less data might create more uncertainty, giving them a justification to do even less about it. But, even that view has previously been countered by the Cabot Institute’s Richard Pancost and Stephan Lewandowsky who explained why more uncertainty is no excuse for doing nothing.

Alternatively, you could take the opinion that maybe it’s not the Australian government’s responsibility to directly fund this sort of research. But, these sort of long-term records require secure long-term funding, the like of which are not found in the competitive world of academia. It’s no good chopping and changing grants every 3 years, funding different universities for different stations. There would be no consistency in the record, and suddenly any increases you see might be more attributable to a change in location than a real-world signal.

Perhaps the most alarming aspect of this is the misleading justification for the cuts, by saying that the question of global climate change has been answered. Sure, there is a consensus that human activities are affecting our climate, but that’s like saying there’s a consensus that it will rain tomorrow. It leaves questions unanswered, such as where and when?

Actually, to make matters worse the CEO added that “after Paris” the question of global climate change had been answered. Hold on, since when was it a group of politicians who were to decide whether large-scale global environmental change was happening or not? And haven’t we known about this for a good deal longer than the last three months?

Ignoring these inaccurate attempts to justify the decision, a better explanation is found in Marshall’s stated goal to make CSIRO more focused on innovation and commercialisation. The problem is, that monitoring the current state of the oceans and atmosphere or predicting its long-term future just isn’t a great commercial venture. It’s the sort of research that takes in a fair bit of funding, but doesn’t seem to offer any immediate financial return. Telling Joe Banker the world will be 2 °C warmer in 100 years isn’t going to cause the stock market to rise or fall.

That seems to contrast with weather prediction, which seems to be a profitable business. A quick look at the UK Met Office financial statements reveals over £220m in revenue in the last financial year. Admittedly most of this is from government contracts (a case of moving money round departments), but over 10% is from commercial revenue, whether that be aviation, or maybe supermarkets wanting to know whether to stock barbecues at the weekend or not. Losing the BBC contract may have been a PR disaster, but financially it was clearly not the worst thing that could have happened.

The point is that weather prediction pays. It’s a short-term prediction that is easily evaluated, allowing people to judge the value for money it gives.

Is there some way we can put a similar value on climate monitoring and prediction? I suspect not, given it would run against scientific principles of openness and be much harder to judge its worth. I imagine Larry Marshall came to the same conclusion, but then that really calls into question whether he’s really pulling his weight at CSIRO. You can’t expect all responsibility to make CSIRO profitable to fall on employees who have no entrepreneurial experience.

If more recent reports are to be believed, this move has come as a shock to even the Australian Prime Minister, and so perhaps there is hope that the news of CSIRO’s climate science death are premature. Even so, funding issues are hardly peculiar to Australia, and the question of whether climate science can fit into modern commercial ideals will inevitably keep cropping up across the globe.

It remains to be seen what exactly will happen but severe cuts to CSIRO’s infrastructure and staff will affect not just Australian science, but have global implications as well. The name Cape Grim has always struck me as being slightly ominous, and aptly (or cruelly) its 40th anniversary celebrations were due to take place later this year. Somehow I can’t imagine there will be too many people in the mood for celebrating right now though.

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This blog has been written by Cabot Institute member Mark Lunt, from the University of Bristol’s Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group.  Mark’s main area of research is in the estimation of greenhouse gas emissions from atmospheric measurements.

COP21 daily report: Will we trust governments on climate?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Cabot Institute Director Professor Rich Pancost will be attending COP21 in Paris as part of the Bristol city-wide team, including the Mayor of Bristol, representatives from Bristol City Council and the Bristol Green Capital Partnership. He and other Cabot Institute members will be writing blogs during COP21, reflecting on what is happening in Paris, especially in the Paris and Bristol co-hosted Cities and Regions Pavilion, and also on the conclusion to Bristol’s year as the European Green Capital.  Follow #UoBGreen and #COP21 for live updates from the University of Bristol.  All blogs in the series are linked to at the bottom of this blog.
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Whatever comes of the climate summit that kicked off Monday in Paris, the negotiations will be intense. Signatories of the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change meet every year, but this year is exceptional. The stakes are high, with governments and their negotiators seeking to finalize a landmark treaty that will guide the world’s actions for many years to come with respect to greenhouse gas emissions and the climate change they cause.

Despite the heat that the negotiations in Paris will surely generate, though, in a sense dealing with climate change could actually be… surprisingly easy. The world’s leading climate economist thinks it would cost only about 2% of GDP to get the world on track to avoid the worst effects. That’s not a lot to pay to solve perhaps the most serious challenge confronting humanity.

Why then is it proving so hard for us to buy a climate-friendly economy?

Part of the problem is that public opinion is pretty hostile to the number one thing that could get us there: making polluters pay taxes if they want to pollute.

The logic is simple. People buy less of something when it gets more expensive. Raising the price of polluting activities is therefore the most effective, direct, and time-tested way of getting people to live–produce and consume–in ways that cause less damage to the environment.

“Raising the price of polluting activities is therefore the most effective, direct, and
time-tested way of getting people to live–produce and consume–in
ways that cause less damage to the environment” ~ Malcolm Fairbrother.

In principle, there should be no reason for people not to like the idea. Governments can lower taxes on things that do no harm (income and labour) while raising them on things that do (emitting greenhouse gases, leaching waste into groundwater, driving a car on congested streets at rush hour). Tax shifts of this kind have no net effect on public finance, and at most a very small one on household budgets–but they can make a big dent in environmental degradation.

Take the case of Canada. In 2008, a right-of-centre government in the western province of British Columbia (BC) introduced a C$30/ton tax on carbon emissions. The rest of Canada did not. Over the course of the next several years, consumption of fossil fuels in British Columbia dropped significantly, while consumption elsewhere didn’t. Meanwhile, BC enjoyed faster economic growth than the average across the other provinces.

But cases like British Columbia’s are exceptional. In most places, public opinion has been too hostile to new taxes of any kind for governments to raise taxes even on pollution and the use of scarce resources. In 2013, for example, Australians voted out a government that had brought in a carbon tax much like British Columbia’s, and they voted in a government that repealed the tax. Earlier this year, the Swiss voted down new carbon taxes in a referendum.

Perhaps the biggest reason why people around the world don’t want green taxes is political distrust. Even though such taxes have a great track record, people simply don’t trust governments to make good use of taxes–of any kind. They worry that tax revenues disappear into the pockets of politicians and bureaucrats, never to be seen again. Some think it’s unfair to tax people for behaviours that are hard to avoid–like heating your home or catching a flight for the occasional family holiday. So they don’t like green taxes, and that’s true even though most people say they believe in the seriousness of climate change, and of environmental problems generally.

To illustrate the point, in an experiment I conducted in Britain last year, I randomly assigned survey respondents to different versions of a question about their willingness to pay higher taxes to protect the environment. People were much more open to the idea if they were told that other taxes they pay would be reduced to compensate. So it seems that revenue neutrality can win over a lot of people. But telling respondents that the offsetting cuts to other taxes were only a government “promise” reduced much of the positive impact of revenue-neutrality. Clearly, government promises don’t cut much weight, at least with Britons. (Experiments with other populations elsewhere are ongoing.)

Advocates for better environmental policy have typically focussed on getting the word out about the seriousness of the problems the policies are meant to address. But, in another recent study, I conducted a head-to-head test of the scope for expanding public acceptance of environmental taxes if only one of (a) concerns about environmental problems or (b) political trust were to increase. Because there is already a lot of concern about environmental problems, but not a lot of political trust, it turns out that the potential impact of the latter looks much greater in most countries.

For that reason, along with alerting people to all the ways in which people are doing serious harm to the environment globally and locally, it would also be good to get the word out about the many environmental policies that have been tremendously successful. Globally, we’ve built a regime to stop depleting the ozone layer; many countries have reduced acid rain dramatically; some formerly endangered species are no longer endangered. If more people thought about how much good past environmental policies have done, they might be more inclined to support efforts to do more.

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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Malcolm Fairbrother, from the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol.  This blog has been reposted with kind permission from Policy Trajectories, the blog of the American Sociological Association’s Section on Comparative and Historical Sociology.
This blog is part of a COP21 daily report series. View other blogs in the series below:
Monday 30 November: COP21 daily report
Tuesday 1 December: Setting a more ambitious agenda – Bristol’s Transformative Action Plans
Wednesday 2 December: Reflecting on the science of climate change
Thursday 3 December: The politics and culture of climate change
Friday 4 December: Be brave, work together and involve the next generation
Monday 7 December: While the politicians negotiate, the science does not stop

The end of the road for diesel?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Smoggy day in Bristol
The Volkswagen (VW) emissions scandal is now into its second week, and with each day the enormity of the deception seems to increase. What started off as a few hundred thousand cars in the US has now become an astonishing 11 million cars worldwide that VW says may have to be recalled. In addition to the VW brand, diesel models of Audi, Skoda and SEAT cars have all been affected, with 1.2 million in the UK alone.
 
At the heart of this deception is the use of software, designed to be able to detect when a car was under test conditions, in order to reduce the emissions of a group of nitrogen and oxygen compounds, commonly referred to as NOx.  However, these emissions controls would not be switched on during normal driving.
 
Given that the cars were clearly built with the potential to emit less NOx, it’s not immediately clear why the emissions controls were applied only under test conditions.  Although VW have admitted they “screwed up”, they don’t seem to have said why. However, it’s a fair assumption that the emissions controls would affect the performance of the car, both in terms of drive and fuel economy. Since fuel economy is probably the main selling point of a diesel car, anything detrimentally affecting it, could easily lead to a decline in sales.
 
In addition to the flouting of the rules by VW, the wider issue is the NOx emissions themselves, which are a seemingly inevitable product of diesel powered vehicles.
 
The use of diesel as a fuel in cars has been on the up (in Europe at least) over the last couple of decades, with a supposedly superior fuel economy and hence lower CO2 emissions, meaning they have been incentivised in Britain with lower tax. However, this policy failed to take into account other pollutant emissions such as NOx and particulate matter that have been linked with thousands of premature deaths. Indeed, this push to diesel was labelled in a Channel 4 documentary earlier this year “the great car con” and just this week former science minister Lord Drayson called this policy a mistake.
 
Due in part to this push for more diesel vehicles on the roads in the UK and Europe, Bristol is just one of many cities which fail to meet the 40 μg/m3 annual mean WHO guideline level for NO2 (one of the collection of NOx gases). NOx levels in the UK have seen only a very small decline over the last decade or so, despite vehicle manufacturers telling us they make the cleanest cars yet. This contrasts with petrol vehicles, which have seen a dramatic decrease in NOx emissions over this time.
 

Why is NOx bad?

 
The presence of NOx in the lowermost part of our atmosphere, along with other pollutants such as volatile organic compounds (VOCs) promotes the formation of ozone. Not to be confused with the protective ozone layer which is much higher up in the atmosphere, ozone near the surface has detrimental health effects, mostly involving the respiratory system, in addition to being a greenhouse gas. Furthermore, NO2 has itself been linked with certain respiratory health problems
 

Is there a simple solution?

 
Well, technologies exist to reduce NOx emissions from diesel vehicles, such as urea injection, only it seems that the VW group chose to cheat the system rather than use it, since it would add cost and weight to the car. If these technologies are implemented manufacturers claim to be able to filter out particulate emissions and greatly reduce NOx emissions. But, given the current furore, why on earth should we believe them?
 
In addition, a recent report from the International Council of Clean Transportation (ICCT) said that the real-world CO2 emissions of diesel (and petrol) cars are well above those in tests. There go the supposed CO2 savings of diesel then. Again you can’t help but question why diesel cars continue to enjoy a tax break in this country.
 

The death knell tolls for diesel…

 
…Ok, maybe not. Given the massive investment that the automobile industry has put into diesel over the last 20 years or so, they’re unlikely to suddenly jack it all in. What will probably follow is a splurge of marketing diarrhoea about how each new car is the ‘greenest yet’, all the while completely ignoring the fact that the simplest way to cut emissions would be to have fewer cars not more. Nevertheless, the current news story highlights how frivolously pollutant regulations, and the health implications, are taken when set against generating a profit. It also serves to impress the need for independent verification of emissions, such as those that uncovered VW’s fraudulent behaviour. The Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group here at Bristol, performs similar verification at the national level for greenhouse gases. It has been said that not taking the time to verify emissions statistics is like dieting without weighing oneself. Well, in this case I guess they did make it to the scales, but no one bothered to check they’d been calibrated properly. 
 
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This blog has been written by Cabot Institute member Mark Lunt, from the University of Bristol’s Atmospheric Chemistry Research Group.

The Alps and the atmosphere

Posted on by janet.crompton
Grenoble.  Image credit Rebecca Brownlow.

In it’s 23rd year, the European Research Course on Atmospheres (ERCA) is notorious amongst atmospheric scientists. PhD and Masters students made their way to Grenoble, France from as far afield as Australia, Bolivia, Russia and India to spend five intensive weeks learning about everything to do with the atmosphere. Grenoble seemed to be the perfect place to hold this kind of course; an alpine city surrounded by mountains we felt very close to the physical interactions of the earth system.

The first four weeks were packed full of lectures with topics ranging from city air pollution to the changing climate mechanisms, from the formation of clouds to the environmental impacts of hydropower. Every day brought a new perspective or entirely different subject to focus on. My own PhD research is about estimating the greenhouse gas emissions of the UK so I really got a great sense of how my work fits in with the wider field of atmospheric science. Luckily all of these hours of lectures were interspersed with copious amounts of food from the university canteen and delicious pastries at break-time. We were in France, we were never going to go hungry!

Getting the bigger picture

One of the most interesting aspects of these first four weeks was the emphasis on the social science side of the work that we do. It is really impossible to separate atmospheric science from an understanding of the politics of climate change and the attitude of the general public towards ecological behaviour. The opening speech of ERCA was by Michel Colombier, from the IDDRI. Michel has taken part in many international climate negotiations and he summarised the current situation leading up to the Paris climate debates in December 2015. He had a warning for us scientists: we were likely to be very disappointed with the seemingly unambitious climate targets of international governments. However, Michel was adamant that we should still see the outcome of the Paris Conference of Parties (COP 21) as a very important step in the right direction.

A couple of weeks later we tried to simulate our own version of the Paris 2015 debates, each person on the course chose a country to represent, and it was a complete disaster! We definitely didn’t come to any agreement and a lot of the time allocated was taken up with Chile suggesting it wouldn’t matter if Tuvalu ended up under water – so, not a very serious discussion! However, this exercise was designed to put us in the shoes of politicians, to recreate their dilemmas, and in fact we weren’t far off. We realised that it is impossible to focus the discussion when every government has its own agenda. We realised that the concerns of the most and least developed countries are worlds apart. And most importantly, we realised that any global climate agreement will be enormously difficult to obtain.

My role in the debate was the UK and it was very interesting researching the UK’s position for Paris 2015. The government has produced a great document that outlines all aspects of their expectations from a climate deal. I have to say, I was fairly impressed with what they are proposing. For example, the UK is prepared to push for an existing EU emissions reduction target to increase from 40% to 50% reduction by 2030 (from 1990 base levels). The UK is also proposing an agreement that really understands the needs of the least developed countries and is creating projects such as BRACED to improve the resilience of developing countries against climate change.

Snow, stars and science

The final week of the course was a weeklong visit to the Observatoire d’Haute Provence. This is really a magical place, a haven for scientists with dozens of little astronomical observatories poking out of a forest of oak trees, made even more magical when the whole place was covered in snow a few days after we arrived. As well as making space observations here they also have a tall tower for making greenhouse gas measurements, several LiDARs (giant green laser beams) that measure various geophysical properties of the atmosphere and an ecological research centre that looks at the impact of climatic changes on oak trees. We were able to catch the comet Lovejoy on an 80cm telescope while we were there, a once in a lifetime opportunity, as this blurry ball of light won’t be seen for another 8,000 years.

 

Observatoire d’Haute Provence. Image credit: Rebecca Brownlow

Having just started my PhD in September 2014, this winter school experience has been a wonderful introduction to the ins and outs of the field of science that I now work in. It’s given me an international network of friends and fellow atmospheric PhD students, as well as having been a fantastic opportunity to learn from some leading researchers. It’s left me with lots to think about and lots of ideas about science in general, ready to get stuck back in to my project.
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This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Emily White, a PhD student in the School of Chemistry at the University of Bristol.

Public opinion: What is it really worth?

Posted on by janet.crompton
I recently attended a session at the House of Commons co-hosted by the All-Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group (APPCCG) and the Centre on Innovation and Energy Demand (CIED). The session tackled the topic of the UK’s “energy efficiency revolution”, and whether the UK is living up to the high standards expected by successive governments.
 
Energy efficiency is what is known as a demand-side measure in the language of energy policymakers. Making devices that use energy more efficient is one way of reducing demand for energy overall, and thus bringing the UK closer to its carbon reduction goals. Indeed, increasing energy efficiency is often regarded as one of the most cost-effective methods of carbon reduction.
 
An area of great interest to researchers in this field is human behaviour; how can people be induced to behave in a way that reduces their carbon emissions?
 
The ‘default’ reaction of governments when attempting to change the behaviour of their citizens is to provide financial incentives to encourage adoption of the desired behaviour. This is based on simple economic theory, and depends on the assumption that the average rational citizen will immediately drop undesirable habits as soon as it becomes financially worthwhile to do so.
 
An alternative view is that people are not swayed as heavily by financial motives as they are by their fundamental beliefs; if somebody is a firm believer in the cause of tackling climate change, they can be relied upon to adopt energy-saving behaviours sooner or later.
 
There is a fundamental tension between these two views of how humans behave. Energy policymakers often find themselves caught between these viewpoints, and this can cause delays and poor policy decisions. This is a question that clearly needs to be addressed by researchers.

Let’s take a closer look at this problem by using a simple mathematical model. Imagine that there is a new behaviour, perhaps a form of recycling, that the government is keen for people to adopt. Since it is brand new, almost nobody has heard of it, and even fewer people have actually adopted it.

In order to make this behaviour the norm, the government allocates some of its limited resources to the problem. These resources can either be spent on advertising, to win people over to the behaviour on ideological grounds, or can be spent on direct financial incentives. The government has to choose what proportion of the resources go towards advertising and incentives, based on the objective of full adoption of the behaviour as quickly as possible.

In our model, a certain proportion of the population choose to adopt the new behaviour each day. That proportion is a function of the number of ideological believers (which I will henceforth refer to as ‘public opinion’) and the financial incentive available. Money spent on incentives therefore provides an immediate boost to the adoption of the new behaviour, whereas advertising has an indirect effect. The effect of advertising is to convert a certain number of people each day into ideological believers, making them far more likely to adopt the new behaviour.

 

 

 

 

So what are the results of this simple model? It’s clear that using financial incentives causes the time needed to reach full adoption to become shorter. Therefore, should the government should always use financial incentives in order to reach its stated objectives as quickly as possible?
 
Unfortunately it isn’t that simple. While it is true that the objective of full adoption is met quicker by using mostly financial incentives, the gap between ‘economic’ and ‘ideological’ adopters is large; it’s possible that many of the people who have adopted the behaviour will return to their old ways as soon as the incentives are taken away. It’s also worth considering the possibility that ideological adopters might also be easier to convince when it comes time to introduce the next energy-saving behaviour, whereas economic adopters would need to be paid off from scratch.
 
I should say at this point that this model is meant as a means of communicating a concept, and is an oversimplification of the way technology and belief adoption actually works. I’ve also chosen parameters for the model arbitrarily – choosing a different set of parameters or tweaking the model could result in radically different outcomes.

Nonetheless, the underlying tension remains; should we invest in changing people’s opinions, even if it’s a longer, costlier process? What is public opinion really worth?

It’s my sincere hope that researchers, be it from CIED, Cabot Institute or elsewhere, will be able to answer these questions in the years to come.
 
This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Neeraj Oak, the Chief Analyst and Energy Practice Lead at Shift Thought.

 
Neeraj Oak
 

Your planet needs you!

Posted on by janet.crompton

We are under attack. Our assailants threaten to kill millions of people, destroy our homes and wipe out our crops. Who are these fiends?

Us.

The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) focusses on how we can stop runaway climate change before it’s too late.  Despite our “best efforts”, anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have continued to increase at an alarming rate. The IPCC estimates that without any additional effort to reduce emissions, we’re looking at a rise in temperature of between 3.7 and 4.8°C by 2100, although variability in the effects of climate change mean the rise could be as high as 7.8°C. Anything over 2°C means we risk runaway climate change with catastrophic effects felt around the world.

A call to action

The UK energy secretary Ed Davey responded to yesterday’s IPCC press conference by stating,

“we need a worldwide, large-scale change to our energy system if we are to limit the effects of climate change”

and called for an international effort to reduce carbon emissions by 2015.

The question is, are politicians willing to put in the effort needed to reduce emissions by 40-70% in the next couple of decades? It’s hard to put a price on the cost of mitigation, but as Professor Ottmar Edenhofer, co-chair of the IPCC team, stated “Climate policy is not a free lunch”. His colleague Professor Jim Skea was more optimistic, saying that,

“it is actually affordable to do it and people are not going to have to sacrifice their aspirations about improved standards of living”.

That’s the kind of thing that politicians like to hear.

Change doesn’t happen unless something dramatic happens to force us to act. The increasing frequency of extreme weather events doesn’t seem to be working, so what would? As the IPCC brief states, “Emissions by any agent (e.g. Individual, community, company, country) affect other agents”. We need to invoke some Blitz mentality; we ARE facing a deadly enemy and we ALL need to do our part to stop it.

How to mitigate climate change

The IPCC used 10,000 scientific references to ensure that their models are properly founded in science and all the uncertainty that entails. The IPCC defined mitigation as “a human intervention to reduce the sources or enhance the sinks of greenhouse gases”, and look at a range of scenarios to find the most effective and efficient methods.

The report particularly favoured low carbon energy sources as a major way to reduce emissions, using natural gas as a transition fuel into renewable energies. Encouragingly, renewable energy comprised over half of all new electricity-generating developments globally, with wind, hydro- and solar power leading the way. The costs of renewable energies are falling, making them viable for large scale deployment in many areas, and Professor Skea enthused that

“Renewables are going to be ubiquitous no matter which part of the world you look at”.

Cities will play a big part in reducing CO2 emissions too; a combination of better urban planning to incorporate public transport and compact walkable city centres will be vital. The report also recommended high speed rail networks between cities to reduce short haul air travel and its associated high emissions.

Replanting forests will be an important way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere. Plants take in CO2 for use in photosynthesis, but can also be used to remove pollutants from the air and soil, as well as preventing soil erosion and providing important habitats for other plants and animals.

It is important for all nations that mitigation does not mean a halt to economic development. Dr. Youba Sokona, IPCC team co-chair, said, “The core task of climate change mitigation is decoupling greenhouse gas emissions from the growth of economics and population”. This will be the main challenge for governments around the world, but the overwhelming message from the IPCC is that mitigation is affordable, whilst doing nothing is not.

Social justice

There has been an undercurrent of unease alongside the IPCC report; the sticky question of who, exactly, is going to pay for this mitigation? A few days before its release, pressure from unspecified developed nations led to the removal of a section in the IPCC report stating that developing countries should receive billions of dollars a year in aid to ensure that they grow their economies in a sustainable way.

The argument centres on whether developing nations should have the right to exploit fossil fuels to expand their economies, as developed countries were able to do. Dr. Chukwumerije Okereke, one of the lead authors of the report, said that this “is holding them down from developing”, believing that “this is reinforcing historical patterns of injustice and domination”. I would argue that with the impacts of climate change predicted to affect those in developing countries most drastically, perhaps we should adopt the mentality that we are all in this together and help each other to overcome the problem.

Act now

The take home message from the IPCC is that if we act now, we can probably prevent hitting the 2°C temperature increase that would have disastrous consequences for us all. The mitigation strategies suggested are affordable and certainly cheaper than dealing with the consequences of climate change. Will politicians and all the rest of us do our parts to drastically reduce carbon emissions? Only time will tell. A lot of hope rests on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference, which is hoped to yield a global agreement on climate to avoid passing the 2°C safety threshold.

Cross your fingers and turn off your lights.

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This blog is written by Sarah Jose, Cabot Institute, Biological Sciences, University of Bristol

 

You can follow Sarah on Twitter @JoseSci 
Sarah Jose

2nd Generation biofuels: a transdisciplinary dialogue

Posted on by janet.crompton
“Globally, there are politically important evidence gaps, but nationally, those evidence gaps are just not important enough for policy-makers to take account of them”.  
 
This was one comment summing up the discussion I had at a workshop on the development of 2nd generation, or cellulosic, biofuels (biofuels produced from crops or waste, that is not otherwise used as food).  The workshop’s aim was to produce ‘A transdisciplinary dialogue on the opportunities and challenges of cellulosic ethanol in the UK’, and was run by Dr. Kate Millar, the Director of the Centre for Applied Bioethics.  It was part of a number of events convened for the EU Framework 7 project, “Integrated EST-Framework” (EST-Frame).  Bringing together 12 scientists, engineers, environmental scientists and social scientists is not an easy feat, but the 24 hours’ of the workshop produced some extremely interesting discussions.
My own research considers endeavours to overcome some of the sustainability problems commonly associated with 1st generation biofuels (e.g. sugarcane and wheat), and so I was particularly interested in how the development of 2nd generation biofuels might change the sustainability landscape. Would many of the problems associated with biofuels in general – increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions when compared with fossil fuels, land grabbing, food insecurity and biodiversity loss – disappear if we were to start producing 2nd generation biofuels? 

Policy problems 

Oilseed rape grown for  1st
generation biofuel has limitations.
Image credit: Richard Webb
Much of the first day of the workshop was spent discussing ‘policy problems’ that would need to be overcome for the successful production of cellulosic biofuel for consumption in the UK. 2nd generation biofuels have not been viably commercialised to date largely because of the cost of production.  But this is not the only policy problem to be overcome.  2nd generation biofuel will not only come from ‘waste’, but also from crops, such as miscanthus, which are specifically grown as biofuel feedstock.  But policies to encourage the use of crop residues for biofuels, depend, first, upon the categorisation of the cellulose left behind in the farming of particular crops as ‘waste’ and, second, upon a decision that the ‘best’ use of that waste is its conversion to energy.  This decision may, in turn, depend upon an assumption relating to national energy security.
 
When discussing the problems that would need to be overcome for the production of 2nd generation biofuel, it soon became clear that our own understanding of the problems depended upon the frames through which they were envisioned, and/or the assumptions that might be made in even categorising them as problems in the first place. Such frames and assumptions need to be unpicked when making policy decisions relating to, for example, the ‘best’ use of land, the ‘best’ conversion processes, displacement effects resulting from the adoption of those policies, and the valuations made in assessing ‘costs’ resulting from the production of such biofuels.
 

Indirect land use change (ILUC)

 
One thorny issue relating to biofuels production has been that of ILUC.  ILUC has been a huge spoke in the wheel of policy-makers’ development of policy in relation to the development of biofuels, not only in the UK, but in the EU, and further afield.  Endeavouring to tackle this issue involves identifying potential knock-on effects resulting from direct land use change to biofuels feedstocks (whether 1st or 2nd generation). These might include increased GHG emissions, erosion, biodiversity loss, or increased insecurity in relation to land rights or food supply of local people.  
 
While the focus of policy-makers’ concerns in relation to ILUC has to date been GHG emissions, views in relation to all of these issues also depend upon one’s assumptions/framing.  Furthermore, such issues are by their very definition uncertain (because they involve future potential scenarios) and, in tackling each of them, require policy-makers to give value (either positive or negative value) to those potential scenarios.  Some of the values endowed by policy-makers in assessing indirect or direct land use change may be quantifiable.  Others, such as the values given by local people to their landscape before it is transformed for biofuel feedstocks, may not be.  Moreover, land use change resulting from policies made in the UK, may be taking place in countries as far afield as Africa or South East Asia, for example.  
While some participants thought that this demonstrated that even endeavouring to tackle an issue such as ILUC was purely altruistic, and therefore usually not important enough for national policy-makers to be swayed by, others argued that it was not altruism that demanded its recognition, but an appreciation of the integrated nature of our world, its people and environment, and markets for feedstocks.  Without actively sympathising with policy-makers, many participants recognised that there are no right answers when it comes to ILUC.
 

Need for a holistic approach in policy-making

 
Image by Steve Jurvetson
When discussion moved on to consider the types of evidence required for policy-makers to tackle the policy problems, we soon realised that different forms of ‘evidence’ were often integrated.  Moreover, it was not lack of evidence that was the problem for policy-makers, or even ambiguity and uncertainty in the evidence, but the appraisal of that evidence.  This requires political decisions to be taken, something that policy-makers seem, ironically, to be distinctly uncomfortable with in relation to this area.
 
The workshop was a valuable exercise.  To paraphrase one participant: many of the technical or economic issues relating to the development of cellulosic biofuels in the UK could be resolved by taking a very narrow view of the problem.  However, such issues do encompass wider issues.  Countering the scientists’ and engineers’ ‘problem-solving’ approaches to policy issues, with social scientists’ more critical understanding of the social issues surrounding the problems is always going to be a challenge, but one that, I believe, is crucial if those problems are really going to be solved with any success.

This blog is written by Cabot Institute member Dr Elizabeth Fortin, University of Bristol Law School.

How the UK government is tackling climate change – a good plan or on course for disaster?

Posted on by janet.crompton
Steve Smith, a researcher working for the government’s independent advisors, the Committee on Climate Change (CCC), came to visit the Cabot Institute on 7 February 2014.  His talk was about whether the UK is on course for tackling climate change, or rather, the UK is on course for meeting its 2050 target of 80% reduction in carbon emissions.  It was a real eye opener.  Here I summarise the talk and the main points made by Steve.  All figures taken from Steve’s talk.
 
Background
 
The CCC consists of several high profile board members, including Lord Deben, Sir Brian Hoskins, and Lord Krebs amongst others.  As a group, their role on the mitigation side is to independently advise the government on UK emission targets.  The UK is legally bound to meet the 2050 target of 80% reduction of CO2 emissions below 1990 levels.  Being legally bound to this commitment means the government has to meet this target.  Steve wasn’t quite sure what the implications would be if the UK government broke the law by not meeting the emissions target by 2050. [Update: the EU has now agreed to a 40% reduction in emissions by 2030].
 
Extreme weather events will become
more common
The current risk of impacts from climate change are set out in the latest IPCC reports.  It is agreed that 2 degrees of warming will exacerbate current climate-related impacts such as increased risk of floods, drought, food insecurity, human displacement, plant and animal disease, etc but that technological advances and human resilience should be able to live with this. Beyond 4 degrees rise many systems will just not be able to adapt – a blunt warning if there ever was one.
 
The current 2050 target of 80% reduction of emissions keeps it in line with a 2 degree warming scenario. This equates to approximately 20 – 24 GT CO2 Kyoto emissions by 2050, which itself implies that each person living on the planet in 2050 will only contribute 2 tonnes of CO2 per year.  This is a similar figure to 6000 miles in your car (an easy annual commuting amount).  Steve pointed out that the total emissions from electricity in 2010 were almost the same amount as total emissions that will be allowed in 2050.  This is not a joke, we will have to meet these targets and we will have to severely cut our carbon emissions.  So what I want to know is what’s the plan?
 
What is the government doing?
 
It seems the government does have a plan and it has had a plan for a few years now.  A long and winding road sort of plan (it stretches 40 years and Steve also admitted that the plan is likely to change over that time period), but it’s a plan nonetheless with a hopeful outcome. Currently the government looks at reducing CO2 emissions by implementing cost effective measures across the economy.  Examples include increased implementation of electrification and Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) within industry, and district heating and air source heat pumps for buildings.
 
Nuclear power could
help decarbonise the UK
Looking at one of these key measures in more detail, electrification, it is vitally important to not only increase reliance on electricity as a power source (rather than gas or oil) but also to decarbonise electricity production, producing a win-win situation.  The government aims to do this in steps.  The first step is the decarbonisation of base load electricity production into the 2020s.  Base load electricity is the minimum amount of power made to meet minimum demands from users.  Increasing nuclear power could play a big part in this transition.  From the 2020s onwards, the government will aim to decarbonise peak electricity, the stuff that’s needed on-demand like when we switch on our kettles during an ad-break.  The timescales do seem quite long but it takes around 9 years to build a nuclear power station, so put it in perspective the timings aren’t actually that long.  However it is questionable whether we can actually wait until 2050 to become decarbonised for fear of hitting that 4 degree global temperature rise in the meantime. 
 
Decarbonising electricity is one of the most useful things the government can do especially as most fossil fuel driven machines can be electrified – including our cars.  Steve admitted there was one area that was proving difficult to decarbonise – the aviation and shipping sector.  The CCC are still working out how to make this area more efficient as it is a really difficult sector to change.
 
What are the costs to the UK economy?
 
The CCC estimates that the resource cost of reducing CO2 from all sectors would amount to 0.5% GDP.  If there was a scenario in the future of high fuel prices, this cost would drop to 0.1% GDP, but if fuel prices came down we would pay more – around 0.8% GDP. Rather interestingly, 0.6% of costs of reducing CO2 fall in the power sector. So should the government put up the cost of fuel to reduce the resource cost to the UK as a whole?  It’s not as clear cut as that.  Fuel poverty and economic competitiveness are huge issues which need to be carefully considered before any price hikes.
 
The CCC is confident that all government projections will be wrong by 2050. To counter this the CCC have come up with some bottom up scenarios – Max (decarbonise everything), Stretch (optimistic carbon reduction but not ideal), Barrier (the most likely scenario but the worst for CO2 savings).  By mixing and matching these scenarios across all sectors as appropriate, multiple scenarios have been created and it is from these multiple scenarios that the CCC can keep resource cost below 1% GDP for the UK.  
 
How are we doing so far?
 
We’re doing well to decarbonise our cars.
Image by Danrok, Wikimedia Commons
From the first period 2008 – 2012, the first carbon budget was met. Greenhouse gas emissions were reduced.  However, the main cause of this has been attributed to the recession and only 1% of emission reduction was from low carbon energy measures. 
 
The good news is that the UK is ahead of schedule on the decarbonisation of cars. However we are falling behind on non-traded emissions such as cavity insulation. We are looking like we will be on target for the second budget (2013 – 2017) but not budgets 3 (2018 – 2022) or 4 (2023 – 2027).  If the UK is to meet these targets then the government needs to improve future policies and speed up the rate of change to a decarbonised society.
 
Shale gas – a game changer?
 
The USA has kicked heavy emission coal off the system by investing heavily in shale gas (aka fracking) and in doing so has radically (and unwittingly) changed its climate policy.  Steve questioned whether shale gas could be a game changer in the UK.  Rather interestingly, it seems that not much extra gas will be produced in the UK by 2035 if shale gas was put into the mix.  UK gas demand turns out to be significantly higher than what the UK can actually produce (including that from shale). Questions then arise, for example, if you are offsetting imports of gas where are those imports coming from? How are they being transported?  What amount of CO2 is being released in the process of transportation? 
 
Methane leakage from shale gas is also a problem.  The CCC have found that methane leakage from shale gas would be more beneficial to decarbonisation due to the overall emissions from shale gas being less than the amount of emissions from current transportation of Liquified Natural Gas (which has a much smaller amount of methane leakage and larger amount of emissions overall). Any reduction is better than no reduction and the government thinks that a well regulated shale gas industry could help the UK reach those decarbonisation targets.
 
A healthy low carbon diet
 
Image by Richard Croft, Wikimedia Commons
Decarbonising the UK is going to be tough but there are net benefits from doing so.  One of these net benefits is health.  Although it is difficult to quantify the health impact of all CO2 emission reducing methods, we can quantify those such as reducing congestion, improving air quality, and getting people on their bikes doing more exercise.
 
A question was asked of Steve at the end of the talk…why are we not efficient in all of these sectors already?  Steve responded that people don’t act entirely rationally, that decarbonisation takes time to filter into people’s mindsets and that subsidies for the wrong sorts of fuels does not help.
 
So should the government do more to embed a low carbon mindset into its people and industry? Or should we be educating ourselves and personally reducing our own carbon emissions (the non-traded emissions)?  Should we just demand more of our government, put the pressure on the policy makers and inspire current and future generations to do more and be more in a low carbon world? The CCC and the government doesn’t have all the answers.  It’s up to research institutions, like the Cabot Institute, to put their collective heads together to develop solutions to help decarbonise society and to engineer new low carbon technologies, with support from government and industry.   
 
The UK has become a lot more efficient since the 2050 targets were introduced, the government is legally bound to meet these targets so it is serious about the job in hand, and as a result its policies have been changing to reduce emissions.  The government just has to ensure it continues to act on the CCC’s recommendations.   

 View the slides from Steve’s talk.
 
This blog was written by Amanda Woodman-Hardy, Cabot Institute Administrator, University of Bristol.

Follow @Enviro_Mand

Amanda Woodman-Hardy

 

The carbon mountain: Dealing with the EU allowance surplus

Posted on by janet.crompton

It’s not news that the EU emissions trading system (EU-ETS) is in trouble. A build-up of surplus emission allowances has caused dangerous instability in the carbon market and a plunge in prices since the economic slump in 2008 began (See Figure 1, courtesy of David Hone).

Figure 1, courtesy of David Hone

The discussion at the All Party Parliamentary Climate Change Group’s (APPCCG) meeting on the 28th of January centred on the causes and consequences of the EU-ETS allowance surplus. The majority of speakers at this session had a background in the discipline of economics, so inevitably the exchange of views was… frank.  The panel were in agreement that EU-ETS is in crisis; but can and should it be saved?

Emissions trading schemes, of which EU-ETS is a canonical example, are an attempt to allow market forces to correct the so-called ‘market failure’ that is carbon emission. From the point of view of a classical economist, the participants in carbon emitting industries do not naturally feel the negative effects their activities cause to the environment. Emissions trading forces carbon emitters to ‘purchase’ the right to pollute on a market. In effect, they pay to receive permits (or allowances) to emit a certain level of emissions. If they do not reach this level of emission, the excess can be sold back onto the market, allowing others to make use of it. The prices of permits are determined by market forces, so cannot be fixed by the EU. The quantity of permits is within the control of the EU, and this is where the problem lies.

In the aftermath of the 2008 slump, a surplus of allowances began to build up, leading to a crash in the price of allowances. Many commentators blame EU economic forecasting for this problem, as the recession and consequent reduction in economic activity was not factored in to the EU-ETS control mechanism. Criticism has been forthcoming for the economic models used, and some go as far as to liken the mismanagement of EU-ETS to the ‘wine-lake and butter-mountain’ days of the 1980s, where the Common Agricultural policy was allowed to consume over 70% of the EU’s budget. Perhaps the models are too simple – James Cameron, a speaker at the APPCCG event, spoke of the ‘premium on simplicity’ that exists in creating policy. Maybe that approach has extended itself into the mathematical models used to predict the performance of EU-ETS, rendering them over-simplistic?

Personally, I see things a little differently. It’s clear that economic models are often far from perfect; however, I’m not sure that’s where the problem lies. In the implementation of policy, decision makers have to draw on the implications of many separate models; for instance, they must consider the GDP growth of EU member states, their adoption rate of new energy efficiency standards and the relative industrialisation of their economies. To my mind, the greatest source of error is in the gaps and interfaces between these economic models. Policy makers must make decisions on how to interpret the way economic predictions will interact with one another, and these interpretations are always subject to value judgements. What we need is a more joined-up approach.

Climate science has long used ‘macro-models’ to incorporate a variety of physical processes into their predictions, an approach that could be adopted by economists as well. While the first economic macro-models may not achieve even a fraction of the accuracy of climate models, that is not to say they cannot be improved through collaboration and quantitative criticism. Perhaps now is the time to make a start?

This blog is written by Neeraj Oak, Cabot Institute.

 

 
Neeraj Oak
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