| 17 June 2010
The Climate Policy Network – Published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation
Britons Are ‘Inherently Sceptical’ Of Climate Science And Politics, UK Climate Minister
I think the British are inherently quite sceptical about theoretical politics and science and maybe a little more cautious than some countries in Europe. –British Climate Change Minister Greg Barker, Metro 17 June 2010
Spain’s government will cut the revenue of most existing solar-power plants by 30 percent, a move that may bankrupt hundreds of companies that produce electricity using photovoltaic panels, a local trade group said. “It’s incomprehensible that the government is doing this. We feel cheated,” said Tomas Diaz. –Ben Sills, Bloomberg, 17 June 2010
The government is reportedly poised to axe a planned £80m loan to nuclear engineering firm Sheffield Forgemasters, in a move that is bound to spark questions over its support for low carbon industries. –BusinessGreen, 17 June 2010
1 ) Britons Are ‘Inherently Sceptical’ Of Climate Science And Politics, UK Climate Minister
Hayden Smith, Metro, 17 June 2010
2) Spain’s Solar Industry Faces Bankruptcy
Ben Sills, Bloomberg, 17 June 2010
3) UK Government Starts Cutting Low Carbon Loans
BusinessGreen.com, 17 June 2010
4) Obama’s Deadly Silence On Carbon Caps
Darren Samuelsohn, Politico 16 June 2010
5) European Carbon Market: A Haven For Tax Fraud
Mark Shapiro, Center for Investigative Reporting, 16 June 2010
6) Scan Of Arctic Ice Dispels Melting Gloom: Researcher
Margaret Munro, Canwest News Service, 15 June 2010
7) Matt Ridley: Threat From Ocean Acidification Is Greatly Exaggerated
The Rational Optimist, 15 June 2010
1 ) Britons Are ‘Inherently Sceptical’ Of Climate Science And Politics, UK Climate Minister
Hayden Smith, Metro, 17 June 2010
High levels of scepticism and indifference among Britons continue to dog efforts to get the country to go greener, a Europe-wide study has concluded.
We continue to lag behind other major nations in our attitude to and appetite for tackling climate change. Less than a third of Britons believe the issue is ‘serious and urgent’ and requires ‘radical steps’.
A similar number of people doubt whether climate change is happening at all, according to the study.
This scepticism has contributed to the 2.1 tonnes of CO2 generated per house each year from electricity use – the highest of all ten countries examined by researchers at Imperial College London.
A little more than half of Britons are ‘quite’ or ‘very concerned’ about climate change. In contrast in Spain, which topped the poll, three-quarters said they were at least quite concerned. [Climate Change Minister] Greg Barker said he was encouraged by nine in ten Britons saying they would make changes if given financial support.
‘I think the British are inherently quite sceptical about theoretical politics and science and maybe a little more cautious than some countries in Europe,’ he said.
‘But I am convinced British people want to do something about it.’
Prof Nigel Brandon of ICL said the study, commissioned by EDF Energy for Green Britain Day, said: ‘It all helps to build a more complete picture of how habits follow attitudes when it comes to the environment.’
Britain came sixth in the poll of 5,700 people across Europe.
Metro, 17 June 2010
2) Spain’s Solar Industry Faces Bankruptcy
Ben Sills, Bloomberg, 17 June 2010
Spain’s government will cut the revenue of most existing solar-power plants by 30 percent, a move that may bankrupt hundreds of companies that produce electricity using photovoltaic panels, a local trade group said.
The industry ministry, after negotiating with trade groups for weeks, plans to reduce the number of hours a day during which they may earn subsidized prices for clean energy, said Tomas Diaz, director of external relations at the Photovoltaic Industry Association in Madrid.
“It’s incomprehensible that the government is doing this,” Diaz said in a telephone interview after solar industry representatives met today with Deputy Industry Minister Pedro Marin. “We feel cheated.”
Solar executives, whose companies have invested more than 18 billion euros ($22 billion) in the last three years in Spain, have pressed the government for weeks to maintain prices guaranteed for 25 years under a 2007 law. The decision, which hasn’t been approved by the cabinet, would mean bankruptcy for most of Spain’s 600 photovoltaic operators, Diaz said.
Full story
3) UK Government Starts Cutting Low Carbon Loans
BusinessGreen.com, 17 June 2010
The government is reportedly poised to axe a planned £80m loan to nuclear engineering firm Sheffield Forgemasters, in a move that is bound to spark questions over its support for low carbon industries.
The Financial Times reported this morning that the loan to finance the installation for a forging press to make components for nuclear reactor will be withdrawn as part of the coalition government’s review of spending commitments made since the turn of the year.
The previous government had approved the loan in March, hailing it as evidence of its support for low carbon industries. It also argued that the loan would help ensure that the new fleet nuclear reactors that is expected to be built over the next decade would deliver economic benefits and jobs for the UK.
A spokeswoman for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills declined to comment on the report, but confirmed Chief Secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander would make an announcement later today on the progress of the government’s spending reviews.
Former energy and climate change secretary and Labour leadership candidate Ed Miliband posted on his twitter account that he was worried by reports that the loan would be axed.
He added that the move was “bad for jobs, bad for economy and not serious about green industrial revolution”.
4) Obama’s Deadly Silence On Carbon Caps
Darren Samuelsohn, Politico 16 June 2010
President Barack Obama pleaded Tuesday night for Congress to pass comprehensive energy and climate legislation, but he may have put the dagger into his long-sought plans for a cap on greenhouse gas emissions by opening the door for alternatives.
In the first Oval Office speech of his presidency, Obama connected the Gulf of Mexico oil spill to his longer-term vision to wean the country off of fossil fuels. Still, when he turned to the policies he’d like lawmakers to consider, the president stopped well short of calling for carbon caps of any kind.
Obama never even uttered the words “carbon,” “greenhouse gases,” “global warming” or “cap and trade.” He used the word “climate” only once — and then only to acknowledge that the House last year passed a “a strong and comprehensive energy and climate bill.”
He didn’t call on the Senate to adopt a similar cap-and-trade plan; instead, he gave primetime props to Senate proposals along the lines of a bill from Energy and Natural Resources Committee Chairman Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) that sets up a nationwide renewable electricity standard and a more recent measure crafted by Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) that promotes energy efficiency in buildings and new cars and trucks.
“I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party – as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels,” Obama said. “Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development – and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development.”
“All of these approaches have merit and deserve a fear hearing in the months ahead,” Obama added. “But the one approach I will not accept is inaction. The one answer I will not settle for is the idea that this challenge is too big and too difficult to meet.”
A former Senate aide said there was much to be read into Obama’s silence on carbon caps.
“The fact he had a phrase or sentence for each of the alternatives and clearly didn’t have the sentence that would have been a carbon cap made it clear he’s not making a push this summer for a Senate climate bill,” the former aide said.
Full story
5) European Carbon Market: A Haven For Tax Fraud
Mark Shapiro, Center for Investigative Reporting, 16 June 2010
Flying below the American radar, a tax scandal has been rocking the global carbon markets. Ironically, it is emanating from Copenhagen, the city that six months ago hosted the world’s largest climate summit. But back in 2007, long before COP 15 arrived, the Danes began working behind the scenes to host a growing cadre of carbon brokerage firms, which have become central to trading the world’s fastest growing commodity.
To make it easier for these financial firms to set up shop in the Danish capital, the Ministry of Finance decided to skip background checks on companies being vetted to trade on the country’s national carbon exchange. According to a string of reports in the Danish newspaperEkstra Bladet, all the government asked companies to provide was an email address. This laissez-faire attitude succeeded in channeling close to a third of all EU carbon trades through Denmark, and has since backfired badly.
The paper reported that one firm after another was little more than a front company for transacting complicated financial scams. In fact, more than 80 percent of the carbon trading firms registered on the Danish exchange closed down after the media probe began,according to a statement (pdf) by the country’s Environment Minister, Lykke Friis.
The fraud is known as a “tax carousel.” Danish-registered companies buy carbon credits from brokers in other European countries. This intra-European trading of credits to meet EU emissions standards (and the trades made by speculators betting on the price of these credits) are not taxed. But when the buyer and seller are trading in the same country, in this case Denmark, a value added tax, or VAT, is imposed.
In Denmark, VAT is a hefty 25 percent on each transaction — one of the highest rates in Europe. But rather than turn the tax monies over to the Danish treasury, the traders packed up and disappeared. Three-quarters of the carbon traders registered in Denmark during the past year have either been dismantled by their owners or were shut down by the authorities.
According to a Reuters report, EuroPol estimates the scheme has so far cost treasuries in Denmark and other European countries some 5 billion euros (about US$7 billion) in lost revenues, while throwing into question the veracity of thousands of carbon trades.
Bo Elkjaer, the Danish reporter who broke the story, explained over email that his further investigations suggest the scandal is by no means confined to Denmark. Many of the same firms are suspected of running similar schemes in the Netherlands, Germany, Norway and the UK. EuroPol reports that after the governments of France, the UK, the Netherlands and Spain changed their tax codes to close the loophole, the volume of carbon trading in those countries collapsed by 90 percent.
Meanwhile, the media blitz has raised questions about the EU’s new commissioner for climate action, Connie Hedegaard, who was Denmark’s climate minister when many of the fraudulent deals were set in motion. Hedegaard said publicly that she knew nothing about the fraud before Mr. Elkjaer and his newspaper began reporting on the case last December.
In May, the Guardian reported that it had obtained a document from inside the Danish ministry drawing attention to the tax fraud problem, which Ms. Hedegaard had initialed back in August 2009. Since then, she has admitted she was aware of the problem but says that at the time she signed the report, she saw it as a tax issue and, therefore, not her responsibility.
EuroPol is in the middle of a full scale investigation into the scam, and hundreds of arrests have been made across Europe.
Elkjaer says the scandal highlights the vulnerability of a system based on trading an intangible asset. “It’s just a computer certificate, moved from account to account in endless loops,” he said. “A trade can be performed from a single laptop anywhere in the world. All it needs is an internet connection.”
6) Scan Of Arctic Ice Dispels Melting Gloom: Researcher
Margaret Munro, Canwest News Service, 15 June 2010
An electromagnetic “bird” dispatched to the Arctic for the most detailed look yet at the thickness of the ice has turned up a reassuring picture. The meltdown has not been as dire as some would suggest, said geophysicist Christian Haas of the University of Alberta. His international team flew across the top of the planet last year for the 2,412-kilometre survey. They found large expanses of ice four to five metres thick, despite the record retreat in 2007.
“This is a nice demonstration that there is still hope for the ice,” said Haas.
The survey, which demonstrated that the “bird” probe tethered to a plane can measure ice thickness over large areas, uncovered plenty of resilient “old” ice from Norway to the North Pole to Alaska in April 2009.
The thickness had “changed little since 2007, and remained within the expected range of natural variability,” the team reports in the Geophysical Research Letters.
There is already speculation about how the ice will fare this summer, with some scientists predicting a record melt. Haas said he doesn’t buy it.
He said the ice is in some ways in better shape going into the melt season than it has been for a couple of years. “We have more thick ice going into the summer than we did in 2009 and 2008,” he said.
Much will depend on the intensity of the winds, and how the ice fractures and is blown around, he said. “But any talk about tipping points, a sudden drop and no recovery…I don’t think it is going to happen.”
The more likely scenario is that the ice will continue a decline that has been underway for at least 30 years, he said. There is likely to be plenty of variability in that decline, he added, with “extreme” melts in some years, followed by “significant recoveries like we saw last year.”
Full story
7) Matt Ridley: Threat From Ocean Acidification Is Greatly Exaggerated
The Rational Optimist, 15 June 2010
As part of an `interview’ with me, New Scientist published a critique by five scientists of two pages of my book The Rational Optimist. Despite its tone, this critique only confirms the accuracy of each of the statements in this section of the book. After reading their critiques, I stand even more firmly behind my conclusion that the threats to coral reefs from both man-made warming and ocean acidification are unlikely to be severe, rapid or urgent. In the case of acidification, this is underlined by a recent paper, published since my book was written, summarising the results of 372 papers and concluding that ocean acidification `may not be the widespread problem conjured into the 21st century’. The burden of proof is on those who see an urgent threat to corals from warming and acidification. Here is what I wrote (in bold), interspersed with summaries of the scientists’ comments and my replies.
Take coral reefs, which are suffering horribly from pollution, silt, nutrient run-off and fishing – especially the harvesting of herbivorous fishes that otherwise keep reefs clean of algae. Yet environmentalists commonly talk as if climate change is a far greater threat than these, and they are cranking up the apocalyptic statements just as they did wrongly about forests and acid rain
Andy Ridgwell says `I agree that at least for some reef systems, other, and more local human factors such as fishing and pollution may be the greater danger’ and Jelle Bijma says `I do agree that, for example, pollution and overfishing are also important problems, some even more important than the current impact of ocean acidification’. It was not therefore accurate of Liz Else to say that the critics accuse me of failing `to recognize that there is more to the health of corals than the amount of bicarbonate in the sea’ They do not – she has misrepresented their views and mine.
Charlie Veron, an Australian marine biologist: ‘There is no hope of reefs surviving to even mid-century in any form that we now recognise.’ Alex Rogers of the Zoological Society of London pledges an ‘absolute guarantee of their annihilation’. No wriggle room there.
Chris Langdon agrees that such claims `may be extreme’. None of the others provides any evidence to support such extreme claims. Yet these remarks were widely reported in the media.
It is true that rapidly heating the water by a few degrees can devastate reefs by ‘bleaching’ out the corals’ symbiotic algae, as happened to many reefs in the especially warm El Niño year of 1998. But bleaching depends more on rate of change than absolute temperature. This must be true because nowhere on the planet, not even in the Persian Gulf where water temperatures reach 35°C, is there a sea too warm for coral reefs.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg says that `the observation that corals grow in the Persian Gulf today at temperatures of 35 °C does not mean that coral reefs will be able to adapt rapidly to the current upward shift in sea temperatures’ in other words, he concedes the point I was actually making: bleaching is caused by rate of change of temperature, not absolute level of warmth. This is not understood by many commentators on the subject in both the environmental movement and the media. I am glad to have it confirmed, because it corrects a widespread misunderstanding.
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