Waking Up to Climate Change Action

Something extraordinary is happening.

After endless debate about whether climate change is occurring and whether we should think about doing something about it, the conversation has shifted.

After decades of refusal by the largest polluting countries to tackle their greenhouse gas emissions, the policy debate is moving forward.

After years in which climate change was relegated to a few pages in companies' CSR reports, businesses have changed their approach.

At every level of society, people are waking up to the fact that climate change is happening, and recognizing that doing nothing is a losing option for nations, businesses and communities.

The headlines tell the story, in no particular order:

• 19 June 2013 - Utility-scale PV costs in the U.S. drop to $3/Watt, and are expected to reach $0.36/Watt by 2017.  This compares to $2.20/Watt for onshore wind, $1.00 for combined-cycle natural gas, and $8/Watt for the coal-fired carbon capture and storage plant under construction in Mississippi.
• 19 September 2013 - Russia urges discussion of geoengineering in upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report.
• 11 September 2013 - UK Astronomer Royal calls for research into geoengineering options as worry grows about the pace of carbon reductions.
• 15 September 2013 - the UK's Liberal Democrat party makes a controversial vote in favor of nuclear power to fight climate change.
• 20 September 2013 - Many electric utilities have looked to carbon capture and storage as a reason to keep building fossil fueled power plants in a carbon-constrained world.  Now that the Obama Administration is rolling out rules limiting emissions, lobbyists are changing their tune.
• 12 September 2013 - Overall Scope 1 and 2 greenhouse emissions have fallen 14% since 2009 at the 500 largest listed companies, even as performance lags for the most energy-intensive firms, according to the CDP.  Importantly, more and more companies include a discussion of climate change risks and opportunities in their annual investor report, instead of in their less-read CSR reports.
• And then there's fracking.

A few themes jump out from these, and many other headlines in the news.

First, the economics of clean energy increasingly make for unlikely bedfellows.  Utilities are arguing against CCS while supposedly "green" political parties are voting in favor of nuclear power and hydraulic fracturing.

Second, serious and respected thinkers are beginning to advocate increasingly desperate measures to address climate change - up to and including radical geoengineering approaches.

Third, the business world is increasingly split on their approach, with one influential group racing ahead to capture the opportunities presented by a lower-carbon economy.

There is an influential, large and ever-growing group of people and organizations that "get it" - they know climate change is a fact of life and are thinking seriously about how to respond.  This is an extraordinary turn of events, and one that will lead to major shifts in how we do business in future.

The message from this steady drumbeat of news headlines is clear.  The need to reduce emissions and tackle climate change is a fact of life, now, not for some point in the hazy future.  Those businesses that have yet to build a robust climate change response into their corporate strategy are missing an opportunity to reduce risk and to build business value.

The Shale Gas Panacea (Part 2) - Does the UK have '43 Years of Gas'?

In a recent blog post, I provided a canned summary of the reasons shale gas has become such a burning issue.  That previous article covered issues surrounding potential environmental impacts, the relative attractiveness of shale gas compared to coal, and the potential for fugitive methane emissions.

In this post, I want to explore what exploitation of shale gas might imply for our efforts to transition to a low-carbon economy.

As a thought experiment, if we were to suddenly replace all the UK's coal consumption with natural gas, we would reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 42 million tonnes, a saving of nearly 10% from the national footprint total of 458 million tonnes CO2e.

Leaving aside the potential environmental impact of extracting this much shale gas, could we do it?  One would think so, judging from breathless headlines like this one in the UK from The Times:

Let's dig into that "43 years" statistic.

The Times article summarizes the findings from a British Geological Survey (BGS) report on the Bowland-Hodder Shale Formation in northern England.  According to the BGS, the mid-range estimate for the total gas in place in the Bowland Shale Formation is 1,329 trillion cubic feet (37.6 trillion cubic meters).  However, not all of that gas will be recoverable at a reasonable price using foreseeable technology.  A reasonable guess might be that 10% will be recoverable - call it 130 trillion cubic feet.

2012 gas consumption in the UK was approximately 3 trillion cubic feet - a figure that has actually declined slightly since 2000, as utilities burn more coal to produce power.

Divide the recoverable gas estimates (130 tcf) by current consumption (3 tcf/year) and you get 43 years. Not exactly cutting edge analysis, but easy to explain.

But is this number useful for anything besides headlines?

The first assumption we might question is that gas consumption will remain constant for the next four decades.  In the U.S., an influx of cheap gas has encouraged utilities to reduce coal consumption and shelve plans for new coal-fired generation; gas consumption increased by one-third in less than a decade.  If, as we expect, shale gas in the UK is cheaper than conventional gas supplies, gas consumption will rise to displace at least some of the UK's coal-fired power plants.  If gas were to completely replace coal and energy consumption otherwise stays flat, natural gas use could rise by nearly 50%, as indicated in the EIA chart below:

If, as expected, electric vehicles make significant gains over the next few decades, then natural gas use could rise still further as gas-fired electricity displaces petroleum.  Even this simple analysis shows that natural gas use could rise dramatically - even if overall UK energy demand does not increase.

However, the Office of National Statistics expects the country's population to rise 30% over the next four decades. Without significant efforts to improve reduce energy demand and shift to renewable energy sources, this projected population increase makes the assumption of constant gas demand even more untenable.

At this point in the analysis, we are piling guesses on top of guesses.  Coming back to our original question, yes, we could completely displace UK coal consumption and drive significant emission reductions, but not for as long as the headlines would have you believe.

And what happens once we've used up that shale gas bounty? Either we lurch back to a heavy dependence on coal, causing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution to skyrocket, or we switch to lower carbon sources of power like PV, wind, wave, and geothermal - or nuclear.

Interestingly, it would likely take 15-20 years to fully build out renewables on a truly massive scale, along with the electricity transmission and smart grid infrastructure required to make best use of decentralized and intermittent renewable resources. Likewise, it would probably take 20-30 years for nuclear power to stage a significant comeback in the United Kingdom. Whether we employ renewables, nuclear or both is an important debate, but on for another day.

The shale gas revolution, should we choose to exploit it, has the potential to buy us some time.  If we can resolve the far-from-trivial environmental and other challenges facing hydraulic fracturing, we can achieve significant greenhouse gas emission reductions today, even as we build a longer-term low-carbon energy infrastructure for tomorrow.

The Shale Gas Panacea (Part 1)

If you want start an argument, just ask a group of environmentalists what they think about shale gas.

Then pass the popcorn.

Conventional natural gas is pumped from vast underground pools like the deposits found under the North Sea, in Russia and in Saudi Arabia.  Geologists have long known that there was also a huge amount of gas and oil trapped in tiny bubbles in sedimentary rock called shale, spread across vast territories around the world.  However, traditional drilling techniques could not access this gas in a cost-effective manner; by comparison, it was far more cost effective to build and operate a drilling rig in the North Sea than drill for shale gas in Montana.

Two technological breakthroughs changed all that.  The introduction of horizontal drilling meant resource extraction companies could drill a network of wells covering a huge area from a single drilling site, without displacing overlying farms, fields and even towns.  Hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking", meanwhile, provided a means of crushing  shale rock using high-pressure fluid, without strip mining the area.  Once the rock is crushed, any pockets of gas or oil trapped in the rock would flow out along the path of least resistance - typically back along the tunnel created by the drill.

Suddenly, it became possible to extract tremendous quantities of shale gas and shale oil, overturning common assumptions about the availability of fossil fuels.  As a result of the shale  gas boom, natural gas prices in the United States are a fraction of the international gas price.

By 2015, the U.S. is expected to overtake Saudi Arabia as the world's biggest gas producer as  energy companies tap the Marcellus, Bakken and other shale basins.  In the UK, meanwhile, analysts are reporting breathlessly about the potential of the Bowland Basin, which some claim can supply the  country with gas for the next 43 years. I'll be taking a closer look at that number next time, but for now let's agree that there's a lot of gas down there.

Why might this be good news for environmentalists? Per unit of energy, natural gas has a much lower greenhouse gas emissions intensity than coal or oil.  In the United States, an abundance of cheap shale gas is ruining the economics of coal-fired power plants. In 2005, gas accounted for 19% of the country's electricity production; in 2012 this figure was 30%.  Largely as a result, America's greenhouse gas emissions are falling rapidly - even before President Obama's proposed regulation of power station emissions comes into effect.  Here in the UK, low prices for EU ETS permits reduce the incentive for power station operators to reduce emissions; it's cheaper to burn coal and buy a permit than use expensive gas. In addition to its CO2 emissions, coal combustion also releases mercury into the environment and contributes more to ambient air pollution than does burning gas.  A massive influx of cheap gas could reduce output at the UK's coal-fired power plants, and force operators to shelve plans for new coal-fired generation. A cleaner environment and  lower greenhouse gas emissions would be the result.

Why might the fracking revolution be bad news for environmentalists? For one thing, we need to be clear about what fuel shale gas is displacing.  Not all that American coal is staying in the ground: as demand for coal falls in the U.S., its price has plummeted.  As a result, it has been cost effective for some European utilities to buy (relatively) cheap American coal instead of  more expensive European and Middle Eastern gas.  Coal imports from the U.S. were up 23% in 2012.  Seen at a global level, shale gas production may be displacing...gas, not coal.

In addition, hydraulic fracturing is not a tidy process.  The hydraulic fluid is a potent  chemical brew and has the potential to contaminate local groundwater supplies.  Changes to  underlying rock formations have led to a spate of earthquakes in some areas after the  introduction of fracking.  And many environmentalists are concerned that the gas may not always  flow as intended - unplanned releases of inflammable gas can pose a safety hazard, and with a 100-year global warming potential 21 times greater than CO2, natural gas releases from fracking could undo some of the benefit that comes from displacing coal. Other studies argue that this fear is overblown, and energy companies have both the capability and financial incentive to minimise leaks.

While this debate will rage on, I predict that there will be some fracking in the UK, and it will continue to grow in the U.S. The question, then, is whether we can mitigate potential harmful environmental impacts, and use this resource boon as wisely as possible.

We'll return to this issue in a subsequent article.

The New Normal

David Kadlubowski/The Arizona Republic, via Associated Press

I think we have had more than enough "teachable moments" around climate change.  On Sunday, June 30th, 19 firefighters died fighting a wildfire in Arizona, the greatest number of firefighters lost in a single incident since September 11th, 2001.

Fires are a fact of life in the arid American southwest, but they are growing more frequent, hotter, and more severe.  The reason: a warming planet.

As Climate Central reports, Arizona's average temperature has been rising by 0.72 degrees per decade since 1970. When winters are cold, precipitation falls as snow, which seeps into the soil as it melts.  When winters are warmer, more precipitation falls as rain and runs off into streams and rivers.  Less water seeps into the soil, leading to the drier conditions that help fires spread.  The warmer winters also give the growing season a head start, leading to thicker undergrowth that can serve as kindling.

The New York Times notes that wildfires in the first decade of the twenty-first century covered on average twice as much U.S. acreage than in the 1990s.  This figure is expected to increase as hotter, drier weather becomes commonplace with rising global temperatures.

As I've said before, this is what climate change looks like.  Welcome to the new "normal".

It is too late at this point to completely avoid damaging climate change.  However, we still have an opportunity to reduce emissions and forestall the most catastrophic impacts.  We don't need any more "teachable moments" - now is the time to take action to control our carbon impact.

The 'Critical Decade' and Unburnable Carbon

There has been a massive disconnect between the concerns about catastrophic, multi-billion dollar climate change impacts and the types of measures that most governments propose for tackling the challenge.

In the U.S., for example, the Environmental Protection Agency's climate change impacts website features a photo of a town submerged by floodwaters:

and yet the agency summarizes its approach to fighting climate change as a collection of  "common sense measures to reduce greenhouse gas pollution", and encourages people to take steps "such as walking or biking to work".  The message seems to be, yes we are facing a catastrophic, life-changing threat, but everything will be fine if we make a few small changes here and there.  One gets the feeling they're not telling us something.

Australians have a reputation for speaking plainly. Even so, the language in a recent report from the Australian Government's Climate Commission was unusually bracing:

"[M]any consequences of climate change are already evident, and the risks of further climate change are better understood. It is clear that global society must virtually decarbonise in the next 30-35 years. This means that most of the fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground." [emphasis mine]

Such frank language on climate change is rare from a government agency. It represents what one former U.S. politician called "an inconvenient truth". It is even more extraordinary coming from the world's leading coal exporting nation.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Fortunately, a number of organizations have already done the math.

Our atmosphere is finite - if the entire atmosphere were a sphere at standard air pressure, it would be just 2,000 km across.  The illustration below gives a good sense of the limited volume of the Earth's atmosphere.  When we change atmospheric chemistry by releasing billions of tonnes of greenhouse gases, we change how it absorbs and re-radiates heat.

Climate scientists agree that if we are to have fighting odds of keeping temperature increases this century below 2 degrees C (meaning climate change will be bad but not totally catastrophic), total greenhouse gas emissions between 2000-2050 cannot exceed 1,000 gigatonnes CO2e.

1,000 gigatonnes (1 trillion tonnes) seems like a lot - until one recognizes that 13 years in, we have already used 40% of that allocation.  That means we can only emit another 600 gigatonnes over the next 37 years.  At the current rate (which is increasing, not decreasing), we will surpass the 1,000 gigatonne threshold in 2028. This is, as the Australians put it, the "critical decade" for slowing growth and embarking on the path to zero emissions.

Just how high could emissions go if we do nothing? According to the International Energy Agency, world fossil fuel reserves are approximately five times greater than our 2 degrees emissions allocation, not counting further emissions from deforestation, land use change, and chemical processes.  That would mean temperatures that are five degrees or even higher than today's.  Think an ice-free Arctic, dust bowls across the American midwest, methane releases from the permafrost and potentially runaway climate change.  In other words, business as usual will take us far into uncharted territory.  As the Australian Climate Commission notes with characteristic bluntness: "It is clear that most fossil fuels must be left in the ground and cannot be burned."

With international climate change negotiations once again at an impasse, it is time for more frank language. Barring a technological miracle in the next few years, expect other governments to begin echoing the Australians' clear messages.

However, there is no need for businesses and communities to wait. Carbon Clear has found that organizations that take action beyond or in advance of government compliance schemes can gain first mover advantage in the race to decarbonize.  It is clearer than ever that a low-carbon transition is upon us.  How will you spend the rest of the "critical decade"?

World Bank President: "End Fossil Fuel Subsidies"

Last June I commented on the lack of joined-up thinking when it comes to fossil fuel subsidies.  World Bank President Jim Yong Kim seems to share this sentiment.

According to the Thompson Reuters news agency, Kim spoke out against fossil fuel subsidies during a U.N. meeting of climate and environment ministers in Bonn, Germany.  As he rightly noted, “They are regressive, negatively impact the environment and act as a barrier to progress on clean technology."

The World Bank has long been a champion of free markets, so perhaps it should not be a surprise when the World Bank's President calls for an end to government subsidies.

What is even more noteworthy, then, about Kim's speech, is that he followed up his criticism of subsidies with a call for more government involvement to price greenhouse gas emissions.  Carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane and other GHGs are atmospheric pollutants whose uncontrolled release is causing the planet's average temperature to rise. This in turn is affecting the frequency and intensity of storms, floods, droughts, glacier retreat, the spread of pests and disease and species loss.  For 90% of the planet's population, governments have given a free pass on emissions, by failing to force companies and individuals to incorporate the price of pollution into their everyday decisions.

Kim advocates a change of direction, encouraging governments to adopt one or more carbon pricing mechanisms, "whether this is through a tax on carbon, indirect taxation, regulation or the creation of a carbon market."

President Kim's comments are noteworthy because they come from an institution not known for encouraging governments to meddle in the market.  They bring to mind an observation I and my colleagues at Carbon Clear have made many times before: climate change is that rare global problem that humanity actually has the power to tackle.  We know what causes it, we know what it will take to address it, and we have at our disposal the technological and policy tools to make the transition to a low-carbon future.  We even know how to turn climate change from a challenge to an opportunity.  What we need now is the courage and conviction to act.

An End to Magical Thinking on Climate Change?

Mickey Mouse (c) Disney

Quick quiz: What's the link between the recent measles outbreak in the UK, fiscal austerity as a way to restart economic growth, and the news that global CO2 emissions are about to surpass the 400 parts per million mark for the first time in millennia?

Answer: All three reflect the dominance of magical thinking - or rather, the willingness of citizens and policy makers to make decisions based on supposition and gut feel rather than an understanding of cause and effect or relying on data.

Humans are notoriously bad at math.  It is extremely challenging for most people to identify more than five items in a group without counting them out.  We can rarely perform more than the most basic calculations in our heads.  Statistics, percentages, data analysis - these concepts do not come naturally.

This is a problem because society needs to base its important decisions on sound information.  When we make major decisions using bad information, the results can be catastrophic. As a result, we need to be very careful when we make decisions that affect the rest of society. Science and data are the order of the day, checking and double-checking, not gut feel or wishful thinking.  Unfortunately, that does not always happen.

In 1998, news outlets in the UK reported the results of a study that claimed a link between the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) triple vaccination and autism.  Other researchers immediately questioned the study, and no one demonstrated a verifiable cause-and-effect relationship between the vaccine and the condition. It didn't matter.  Thousands of parents, responding to screaming headlines, refused to have their children immunised, believing that somehow avoiding vaccinations would make them safer.

Fast forward to 2013.  The original report has been thoroughly repudiated, and the doctor who published the research has been struck off the General Medical Council register. Meanwhile, over 1,000 children have contracted measles, a dangerous and easily preventable illness and many more are at risk.  The British government is now spending vast sums on a massive vaccination "catch up" campaign to halt the spread of measles, as well as mumps and rubella. These are diseases that were nearly wiped out in Western countries a generation ago.  They have made a comeback  thanks to over-reliance on shoddy data, and now all of us are paying to clean up the mess, not least the families of children who have contracted this horrible disease.

In 2010, Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff published a research paper claiming a link between countries' national debt levels and economic growth. In particular, they argued that growth falls dramatically when debt levels exceed 90%.  No matter that the paper had not undergone peer review, that other economists questioned the report and that other researchers were unable to replicate the results.  And no matter that it was hard to work out a cause-and-effect mechanism that would kick in only above a certain threshold.  The report was seized upon by fiscal hawks at think tanks and in governments across Europe and in the United States to justify massive government spending cuts.  The resulting "age of austerity" has seen a change of  government in Italy, riots on the streets of Athens, cuts to public services and benefits in the United Kingdom, and across-the-board budget cuts in everything from air traffic control to national parks in the United States.  One might argue that politicians would have embarked on these measures in any event, but the fact remains that this paper provided intellectual cover and was cited far and wide to justify fiscal cutbacks.

Fast forward to 2013. The original report claiming a link between debt levels and economic growth has been debunked due to questionable methodological techniques and a particularly glaring Excel formula error.  Even the International Monetary Fund, which championed "structural adjustment" and similar austerity measures for developing countries in the  1980s and 1990s, has begun to rethink its initial support of fiscal austerity.  In the meantime, economic output remains anaemic, unemployment has skyrocketed across southern Europe, and in the UK slow growth means that government debt has risen not fallen.

Whether it's in social sciences like economics and sociology, or in the physical sciences like biology and physics, we can make the most confident predictions when there is a logical link between cause and effect, when the research is subject to peer review, and when other resaerchers using the same data reach similar conclusions. To quote the late astronomer Carl Sagan,

"What counts is not what sounds plausible, not what we would like to believe, not what one or two witnesses claim, but only what is supported by hard evidence rigorously and skeptically examined. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

And so to climate change.

Scientists have for decades been researching the link between human-induced greenhouse gas emissions, rising global temperatures, and changes to the global and regional climate. Every ten years, the UN-mandated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) publishes a summary of these research findings, along with recommendations for government action.  The IPCC is comprised of thousands of the world's best climate scientists - physicists, meteorologists, chemists, computer modelers.  Their research is published and subject to international peer review.  They flag past errors and describe how they have subsequently updated their findings.  The findings and recommendations represent the consensus view of  over 120 governments, are cautiously worded and full of caveats regarding potential uncertainties.

The IPCC assessments reports are a triumph of science and data over gut feel.  The process is slow, methodical and cautious.  After all, climate change is a global problem that affects almost every aspect of how we live, work and play.  It is important to make sound decisions based on good information.

So what to make of the news that global CO2 concentrations are about to exceed 400 parts per million for the first time since the Pliocene Era, 3.5 to 5 million years ago?

More magical thinking, I'm sorry to say.  Politicians worry that setting ambitious targets to tackle climate change will cause economic hardship and continue to subsidise fossil fuels, ignoring the costs of climate related disasters like heatwaves and drought, floods and storms, and irreparable damage to our forests and other ecosystems.  Journalists looking for balance have given equal voice to a handful of climate skeptics and recognised scientists who quote the peer reviewed IPCC data.  And the general population, unable to see directly the link between their lifestyles and rising global temperatures and lacking any direct incentives to take action, refuses to change its behaviour.

But all is not lost.  The sudden push to vaccinate children in the United Kingdom shows that we can overcome magical thinking to make rational decisions.  The rapid shift in opinion against a once ubiquitous study on debt and economic growth shows that people can change their minds and consider alternatives when new data becomes available.

The IPCC 5th Assessment Report will be released in late October 2013.  As the impacts of climate change become more apparent to people around the world, I'm hopeful that governments, businesses, communities and individuals will review the IPCC findings, abandon gut feel, and seize this latest opportunity to tackle climate change and embrace a lower-carbon future.

Previously: Science- It Works on Mars and on Earth
Previously: Welcome to the Reality-Based Majority

A Plague of Giant Mosquitoes

Florida is bracing itself for an onslaught of "monster-sized" mosquitoes this summer.

Psorophora ciliata, often referred to as gallinippers, are the largest and one of the most aggressive species of biting mosquito in the United States. They are nearly 20 times larger than typical mosquitoes, hunt both day and night, can bite through clothing and leave painful wounds.

Last year's hurricane season led to large flooded areas across the state, the perfect habitat for gallinippers to lay their eggs.  Entomologists expect a bumper crop of gallinippers as a result, which is bad news for everyone.

What does this have to do with climate change and carbon reduction? Well, the IPCC and Environmental Protection Agency expect climate change to bring more frequent storms and heavier downpours in that part of the country. And Psorophora ciliata requires flooded, low-lying areas for its eggs to hatch.  A plague of gallinippers should therefore not be a surprise to anyone who follows the EPA predictions.

I can't say with perfect confidence that climate change is behind the rise of the monster mosquitoes. But as I've said before, this is what climate change looks like.

The Day After Tomorrow

The latest issue of Scientific American provides an excellent summary of the state of the Arctic polar ice cap, or what's left of it.

For those of us concerned about climate change, and everyone else, the ice caps are of tremendous importance. Those vast white expanses reflect most of the sunlight that strikes their surface back into space, whereas the surrounding seawater absorbs most of the solar energy and re-radiates it as heat. The logic is straightforward: more ice = less warming; less ice = more warming.

According to Mark Fischetti's SciAm article, the amount of sea ice that remained after the annual Arctic summer thaw (aka "minimum ice cover") fluctuated around six million square kilometers for the two decades before 2000. Then it began to shrink -due,  presumably to global warming.  When the IPCC published its last assessment report in 2006, the scientific consensus was that the shrinking ice would mean ice-free summers towards the end of the century.

Then something happened. In 2007, the summer melt began to accelerate, and the ice that reformed in the winter was not as thick. Since then the ice has continued to retreat. In 2012 the minimum ice cover hit a record low of 3.4 million sq. km - barely 50% of the average a few decades ago. A few years ago the IPCC thought we'd have an ice free Arctic summer by the end of the century. Now climate scientists think we could see it as early as 2020-2030.

2020-2030!  That's no time at all - practically the day after tomorrow. We don't have much time left if we want to avoid that outcome.

And I do think we should do everything we can to slow the arctic ice melt.  Another article, by Charles H. Greene in the same issue of Scientific American points to more links between climate and weather. In particular, Greene describes how a warming Arctic affects the jet stream and allows it to fluctuate more widely in response to seasonal oscillations like El Nino and the North Atlantic Oscillation. When the jet stream dips further south than normal we get unforgiving wintery weather. When it surges northward we get record heatwaves in March. Given the oscillations currently in place, Greene argues that "the deck may be stacked for harsh outbreaks during the 2012–2013 winter in North America and Europe."

What does a "harsh outbreak" look like? Here's how it looked in Eastern Europe earlier this year, under 10-15 feet of snow:

Not fun. 35 people died in that part of Romania in two days.  Images like that remind me of the 2006 Hollywood disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow". While that was a movie, and not a prediction, warnings about the near term impacts of Arctic warming are getting worryingly specific.  The lesson- the faster the ice melts, the more things look like a disaster movie.

But catastrophic climate change is not inevitable - not even now, after yet another global climate summit where progress is measured in half-steps. Individuals, businesses, communities and nations can take action now to slow the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Simple no-cost actions to change behaviour, money saving investments in energy efficiency, resilience-boosting renewable energy investments and use of the carbon markets to spur similar measures around the world - all of these make a difference. There is no need to wait for a global treaty in order to set ambitious targets and embrace a lower-carbon future.

We can start today. Or, if you prefer to get things started on New Year's Day, we can start the day after tomorrow.

The Missing 95%

Earlier this month, the consulting company PwC released an analysis showing that current efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are not sufficiently ambitious to keep us within the two degrees warming target agreed at the 2009 United Nations climate change conference in Copenhagen.

This news, while distressing for those of us committed to combating climate change, is not surprising.  As Carbon Clear's FTSE 100 analysis shows, many leading companies have not even measured their carbon footprint, let alone put in place measures to drive emission reductions.  And those companies that do work to reduce their carbon footprint are often not making enough progress.

Let's face it: decarbonising an economy - or a business - is hard work. Greenhouse gas-emitting activities are embedded in our daily business lives.  Our vehicle fleets, logistics networks, energy infrastructure, built environment and even food production systems all release vast quantities of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.  Each of these systems has been developed and optimised over several decades, and represents billions of dollars of cumulative investment.  We have trained generations of engineers, architects and farmers to design and use this infrastructure, and by and large, it works. It would be unrealistic to drop all of this and change overnight to a transportation, logistics, energy, built environment and food production system that releases 80% less carbon.

Seen in this light, the 3-5% annual reduction targets set by the most ambitious companies appear quite reasonable.  Coming at a time of reduced government spending and economic hardship, the 1% or even smaller reductions that developed nations are actually achieving likewise appear understandable.  These are often the "easy" reductions, the ones that save companies money and energise staff and stakeholders. These reductions should by rights be happening anyway.

The trouble is that they're not enough.

Achieving a 5% annual emission reduction target over ten years translates into a 40% reduction below the baseline by the end of that period.  A company that had been emitting a million tonnes CO2e a year would now be emitting only 600,000 tonnes.  Such an achievement would mark any business as a low-carbon leader.

But it isn't enough.

The problem is clear: a five percent carbon reduction target means not taking responsibility for the other 95% of the company's footprint that remains unabated.  And even though the footprint is shrinking year on year and may eventually reach zero, that residual 95% is causing a lot of damage along the way.

At the end of that ten year period, a company that had been releasing a million tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere will have saved a cumulative total of 2.4 million tonnes, but will still have a cumulative carbon footprint of 7.6 million tonnes.  In other words, more than 3/4 of all the emissions they would have released without an ambitious reduction plan got released anyway.  And all else being equal, once that carbon is in the atmosphere it will contribute to a warming climate for hundreds or even thousands of years. Is that really the legacy of a leader?

As I said earlier, it is challenging for a company to radically alter its internal operations and reduce its carbon footprint immediately. No doubt about it. But the fact of the matter is they don't need to do it alone.  There is a tool that businesses all over the world employ when they don't have the time or local resources to achieve their objectives.

It's called outsourcing.

Companies outsource critical business services all the time: legal representation, website design, accounting and payroll, deliveries, building cleaning and maintenance, cafeteria food service, travel management, and annual report preparation.  They do this because it is faster, more efficient and, importantly, cheaper than trying to achieve an equivalent result in-house.

Outsourcing works for a host of important business activities, so why not carbon footprint reduction? We have already established that it is time consuming, difficult and costly to achieve in-house emission reductions on the the scale needed to avert disastrous climate change. In a situation like this, it makes sense to outsource the rest of the emission reduction effort to people who can do it faster, more efficiently, and cheaper. There are a host of companies (including ours) that can help companies deal with the "missing 95%" of their footprint.

(c) Copyright Carbon Clear Limited

What's surprising is that more companies are not doing this already.  According to our research, while the vast majority of the FTSE 100 have set an emission reduction target, less than 10% of these companies currently have a carbon offset programme of any kind.  Part of the reason is ideological. Google the phrase "carbon offset last resort" and you will find page after page of advice from organisations as varied as Friends of the Earth UK and IEMA (of which Carbon Clear is a corporate member) exhorting companies to treat carbon offsets as a fallback option. A sign of failure.  That same internet search will turn up scores of companies that offset meekly, offering up this "last resort" language as an apology for not doing more on their internal footprint.

This is a "through the looking glass" mentality.  While climate scientists tell us that global greenhouse gas emissions must peak in the next five years, some advisers are reassuring companies that they can demonstrate their leadership by deferring action on the vast majority of their carbon footprint, so long as they prioritise internal reductions.  In reality, the companies that show the strongest commitment to avoiding climate change impacts will reduce what they can, while simultaneously outsourcing the rest of their footprint reduction through carbon offsets.

Clear evidence of the link between environmental leadership and carbon offsetting comes from our analysis of the FTSE 100.  If companies saw offsetting as an "easy" way to relieve their green guilt or make up for a lack of effort in other areas, we would expect to see companies grouped into two clusters: those with a robust internal carbon management programme but no offsetting, and those with a weak internal carbon management programme who use offsets to make up for their lack of effort.

The results are quite different. Companies that are offsetting their emissions also cluster near the top ranks for reporting their footprint, developing an internal climate change strategy, internal emission reduction activities and engaging their stakeholders.  None of the bottom ranked companies on these other criteria offset their emissions.

This result shouldn't be surprising.  After all, carbon offset credits cost money, and the business benefits of a voluntary (or "beyond compliance") carbon offsetting programme, while real, are indirect.  Investors, finance managers and senior executives will face competing demands for scarce capital. A company that scores at the bottom of the league table and isn't serious about tackling the climate change challenge doesn't need to be discouraged from purchasing carbon offsets.  The "last resort" language, then, serves mainly to discourage people who might otherwise consider integrating carbon offsets into their broader carbon management programme. This is a wasted opportunity.

Our review of the FTSE 100 shows that using carbon offsets is not a sign of failure.  For companies that take climate change seriously, offsets are seen as part of their overall carbon reduction toolkit, a way to outsource those emission reductions they cannot readily achieve with internal resources.  Offsets help companies tackle the "missing 95%" of their footprint reductions, achieve business benefits and contribute to the fight against climate change.

"This Is What Climate Change Looks Like"

Even as America's East Coast continues to recover from the impact of Hurricane/"Superstorm" Sandy, pundits are using it as a teachable moment to talk about climate change. Perhaps the most in-your-face comment along these lines appeared on the cover of Businessweek:

My preference for precision makes me wince a little when I see statements like this.  As I noted in an earlier post, there is a difference between weather and climate. A hurricane - even one as big and destructive as Sandy - is weather.  Weather is what you see when you look out the window on any particular day. Is it sunny? Is it snowing? Are there 70 mph winds and driving rain?  That's weather.

"Climate" is a description of the conditions you can reasonably expect given the location and time of year.  If it's autumn on the U.S. East Coast, you can reasonably expect a handful of hurricanes to strike.  Warmer ocean temperatures provide even more energy to power hurricanes, and we know that the planet is warming as a result of fossil fuel use, deforestation and other practices. As a result of global warming, then, we expect a changing climate with more and stronger hurricanes. But it's very challenging to point to any one storm and say, "Aha! Climate change made that happen!"

Meteorologists believe that increased freshwater as a result of Arctic melting may have contributed to the cold front that steered Sandy onshore. Those who are looking for a teachable moment are saying that all of this proves we are suffering from climate change impacts.  But as with hurricanes in autumn, cold fronts are not unknown in the north Atlantic.  It's an amazing coincidence, and matches very closely what we would expect in a warming world.  But again, if we want to be as accurate as possible, when describing any particular incident we are talking about weather. Our models are not sufficiently fine-grained to allow us to draw the causal link more directly than that.  At least not yet.

The danger with definitively attributing a bad weather event to climate change is that it can cut both ways.  When campaigners claim that a warm, snow-free winter is evidence of climate change, climate deniers can claim that a cold snap and blizzard the following year make the opposite case. Trends and statistics allow a more nuanced debate.

Businessweek quotes Eric Pooley of the Environmental Defense Fund, who uses a sports analogy: “We can’t say that steroids caused any one home run by Barry Bonds, but steroids sure helped him hit more and hit them farther. Now we have weather on steroids.” Steroids and other performance enhancing drugs increase the likelihood that a world class athlete will win games and break records, just as climate change increases the likelihood that we will experience monster hurricanes and other impacts.

This does not mean we can't use Sandy to have a serious conversation about global warming.  Rather than saying, "This is climate change," I might say, "This is what climate change looks like. We'll have to get used to much more of this if we don't drastically cut emissions."

We don't need 100% certainty before we take action.  People who live in relatively dangerous neighborhoods tend to have more locks on their doors than those who live on safer streets, even though the probability of a robbery is far below 100%.  The insurance industry in particular is very sensitive to the probability of a claim, and uses this information to decide who to insure and what premium to charge.  Even a slightly increased probability of devastating storms, droughts, floods, and the like is enough to spur insurers to change their policies.  When it comes to climate change, insurers are the canary in the coal mine.  They don't need to know that a particular storm or drought is due to climate change, just that those impacts match what we would expect in a warming world.

While I won't yet go as far as that Businessweek headline, I do think Sandy helps sound the alarm.

"This is what climate change looks like."

From the Archives: New Fossil Fuel Sources and Climate Change

Over the past few months the debate about new fossil fuel sources has gotten pretty...intense. In the U.S. environmentalists are campaigning in the courts and in farmers fields to halt the Keystone XL pipeline, which will provide easier market access for petroleum from Canada's tar sands.  Here in the U.K. campaigners are working to slow the spread of hydraulic fracturing, which enables drillers to access abundant but otherwise difficult to access shale gas.

This is an important debate, and one I discussed in a blog post over three years ago. Rather than rehash that discussion, I will reprint that March 2009 post below:

Peak Oil: Will We Freeze or Roast? Originally posted 18 March 2009

When I was in graduate school in the early 1990s, M. King Hubbert was a name known only to fellow energy nerds. Now, he's so popular you can get regular news alerts.

Hubbert developed a mathematical model describing how production from an oil well or entire oil producing region tends to increase at a predictable rate, until it hits a - predictable - peak and then declines. Hubbert used his model to predict the year of peak oil output for the United States, and it has been used more or less successfully for other oil producing regions since then.

In addition to forecasting output growth for particular regions, the Hubbert Curve and peak oil theory can be applied to oil production for the world as a whole. But as recently as 2005, the International Energy Agency (IEA) dismissed the concept. Mainstream energy agencies tended to assume that oil production could increase indefinitely as new investment and technology are brought to bear. If a peak exists, they argued, we are nowhere near it.

This matters because when the world's leading climate scientists prepared their 2007 report on global warming trends and impacts, they turned to the IEA for their best estimates of fossil fuel consumption. The IPCC works by consensus, and its reports tend to refer only to the most authoritative sources. The IEA estimates showed that conventional fossil fuel use would continue to grow without end, and this prediction is reflected in all the pessimistic warnings about global temperature increases and climate change.

Times have changed. The IEA is now predicting that we will reach global peak oil between 2020 and 2030 (more pessimistic scenarios argue that we reached the global peak last year). So oil production will top out much earlier than anticipated.

Less petroleum production means fewer petroleum-related greenhouse gas emissions. In fact, manyindependent models suggest that, once peak oil (and coal) is factored in, we simply can't burn enough traditional fossil fuels to reach the worst-case global warming levels.

Let me repeat that: Most climate models that incorporate peak oil theory predict a temperature rise of less than 2 degrees Centigrade. A major change to be sure, but far less than the IPCC's "business as usual" scenario for global warming.

So, this is good news, isn't it? Climate change is solved because fossil fuel production will decline sooner than predicted, right?

Not so fast. What are we going to use for our vehicles when the oil starts to run out? Shall we simply switch off the lights and freeze?

In 2006, Alex Farrell and Adam Brandt, researchers at the University of California at Berkeley's Energy and Resources Group, published a paper that examined the cost, availability and climate change implications of substitutes for conventional petroleum. These are liquid fuels derived from heavy, difficult to process resources like tar sands, oil shale, and coal.

The Berkeley team found that it would be commercially viable to produce synthetic petroleum from these heavy fuels at oil prices of less than US $50 per barrel. What's more these resources are so abundant that they would keep pump prices relatively low.

In other words, peak oil means less petroleum, but not an end to fossil fuels. For those who worry that peak oil means society will collapse into "Mad Max" - style anarchy, that's good news.

The bad news is that these fuels have a much greater climate change impact than conventional oil. Using tar sands and heavy oil results in about 50% more CO2 per unit of energy than regular petroleum. Synthetic fuels made from coal nearly doubles the greenhouse gas emissions, and using oil shale could result in up to 3X the emissions per unit of energy. To quote the authors:

"Overall...the oil transition is not a shift from abundance to scarcity: fossil fuel resources abound. Rather, the oil transition is a shift from high quality resources to lower quality resources that have increased risks of environmental damage, as well as other risks."

Sadly, peak oil is not the solution to climate change. If anything, a poorly planned response to peak oil could accelerate global greenhouse gas emissions growth.

There is an alternative. We have the technical know-how to produce energy from low- or zero-emission sources. Solar, hydropower, wave and tidal, wind, and geothermal energy are clean sources of hydrogen and electricity, and carefully chosen biofuels can provide high energy-density liquid fuels.

Scaling up these clean energy technologies at the rate required to compensate for peak oil and limite climate change is a challenge. But as discussed in an earlier article, the required investments by governments, corporations and communities are no larger than other causes on which we have spent billions. The need is arguably as great, if not greater, because poorly planned energy investments made today will have a huge impact for decades to come.

Carbon Clear's Autumn Breakfast Briefings: Telling the Story

There are only two days to go before the launch of Carbon Clear's autumn Breakfast Briefing series. A good deal of thought went into these sessions, and I like to think they come together to tell a compelling story.  Here's how they fit together.

The first session, on 20 September, will cover the UK Government's new Mandatory Carbon Reporting legislation, which I blogged about a few weeks ago.  I'll be joined at that session by my colleague Vincent Reulet and by Mardi McBrien, MD of the Carbon Disclosure Standards Board.

We'll be talking about why the Government is pushing for mandatory carbon reporting, how this new requirement fits in with other carbon reporting efforts like the EU ETS, the Carbon Disclosure Project and the Carbon Reduction Commitment Energy Efficiency Scheme (CRC), and how companies can both comply with this legislation and use it to gain competitive advantage.  Should be an informative and dynamic event.

A few weeks later, on 2 October, we will be talking about what I sometimes refer to as Carbon Offsetting 2.0.  After the first wave of carbon offsetting in the mid- to late-2000s, there was a lull.  Now, a new crop of companies, from Microsoft to Marks & Spencer, are announcing carbon neutrality programmes.  We'll be discussing how this new round of carbon offsetting differs from the first, and how other companies can benefit.

Then, on 17 October we will be unveiling our Carbon Maturity whitepaper.  Our crack team of consultants has pooled decades of accumulated experience working with over a hundred companies to develop a model of corporate carbon maturity.  We've found that companies at each stage of the maturity curve share certain characteristics and encounter similar obstacles before moving on to the next level.  This applies to both their internal carbon management activities and their carbon offsetting initiatives.  Delegates at this briefing will learn how the carbon maturity model works, and how to benchmark their companies' performance against other businesses.

The breakfast briefing series, then, tells a story.  We start with carbon footprinting and show how it can go from being a burden to a source of competitive advantage.  We then move on to carbon offsetting and show how it has evolved to become a source of real business value for the largest companies.  And then we describe how companies around the world are developing increasingly sophisticated carbon management programmes that deliver benefits for management, employees, investors and the wider community.

I think that's a story that every company should hear. Join us, and help tell the story.

Science: It Works on Mars and on Earth

On Sunday the NASA Mars Science Laboratory rover, nicknamed Curiosity, landed on the Red Planet and began beaming pictures home.  This isn't a space exploration blog, but I'll explain the relevance in a moment.

As you might imagine, landing a 900-kilogram, six-wheeled, plutonium powered robot car on another planet is not easy. In fact, this was the most difficult and complex Mars landing attempt to date. Let's run through the main challenges:

1. Build a plutonium-powered robot vehicle than can operate semi-autonomously for an entire year, tolerate sub-freezing temperatures, radiation, dust storms and the vacuum of space.

2. Fit that vehicle into the nose cone of a 58-meter rocket, fill that rocket with an explosive mix of kerosene and liquid oxygen, aim it at the point in space where you expect Mars to be in eight months' time and fire it off.

3. Eight months later, drop the space capsule into the Martian atmosphere at 20,000 kilometers per hour.  If it enters at too steep an angle it will burn up; too shallow and it will skip away and be lost in space.  It's now 154 million miles away - too far for mission controllers to steer it in real time, so you will have to have made the capsule smart enough to make its own high-speed course adjustments.

4. Once the capsule has slowed from to only a thousand miles and hour, jettison the heat shield and pop open a parachute. This will slow it even more.  Again, the capsule is too far away for humans to control directly, so this has to happen automatically.

5. Once the capsule is 1.1 miles off the ground, fire the eight retro-rockets on the descent vehicle. These will steer the lander and bring the whole SUV-sized assembly to a hover over the surface of Mars. Yes, this has to happen autonomously, too.

6. Once the assembly is hovering on its retro-rockets, lower the robot car gently to the surface on a 7.5 meter nylon cable.  When the car has touched down, cut the cord and fly the rocket assembly off to crash a safe distance away.

7. If the vehicle is okay, it will begin sending photographs to Earth.  The signals will go from the rover to a space observatory that has been orbiting Mars for the past six years.  That orbiter will then bounce the signal off another orbiter that has been circling Mars for ten years in order to reach Earth! The mission controllers on Earth will find out fourteen minutes later whether it all worked.

And amazingly, it all worked!  The Curiosity rover is sitting safely on the surface of Mars and Scientists and engineers are celebrating a trove of exciting photos and video footage.

The successful Curiosity landing was a triumph of science and engineering.  We can use these tools to make accurate predictions about a long chain of complex events. And we can use our knowledge and ability to achieve complex and ambitious goals.

Here on Earth, few goals are as complex and ambitious as tackling climate change.  But the science is unambiguous.  We know what is causing climate change and we know that greenhouse gas emissions need to drop.  We even know what emission sources to address and already have the tools to do it.  Reducing greenhouse gas emissions to safe levels doesn't require any new technological advances or scientific inventions.  Existing clean energy, energy efficiency, resource efficiency and forest management systems can do it.  Renewable energy use is soaring across the world, major carmakers are bringing high-efficiency hybrid cars to market, and ever-larger forest protection projects are being launched in Asia, Africa and Latin America.  We know what to do and how to do it, but we're not yet doing it fast enough.

It is clear that governments can't get us there on their own. Politicians' incentive structures make it difficult to make major changes to the built environment and to our energy, transportation and agricultural systems. Governments have an important role to play in promoting transparency, overcoming market distortions, and ensuring a level playing field, but when government is slow to act individuals, communities, civil society and businesses should not hesitate to get involved.

Around the world, companies are switching to renewable energy and improving efficiency, restructuring supply chains to reduce their carbon footprint and save money, and investing in innovative emission reduction projects that help people in the developing world make the transition to a low-carbon future.

Compared to landing a one-tonne rover on Mars, the scientific challenges preventing us from tackling climate change look almost easy.  And the Curiosity rover is there, showing us what we can accomplish when we have the determination.

U.S. Heatwaves: "Weather" versus "Climate"

It's summer, and that means it's time for another round of record-breaking heatwaves in the United States.

The heatwave of the past week has triggered forest fires across the western states. Washington, DC staggered under 104-degree (F) temperatures - the air conditioner load helped prolong a five-day blackout across the eastern states. Back in the 1990s aid agencies used photos of the earth at night to flag underdeveloped countries where people had to live without electricity.  I never thought I'd see those types of images for the suburbs of Baltimore and Washington DC:

Washington-Baltimore on June 28, 2012

A less brightly-lit Washington-Baltimore on June 30, 2012

This is not the first time large parts of the U.S. have faced a massive heat wave.  In fact, they are becoming so common that it might be safe to consider record-breaking temperatures the "new normal".  Which brings us once more to the topic of climate change.

We might define "weather" as the meteorological conditions when you look out the window.  Is it raining? Is it hot?  Weather varies day by day, and it's difficult to predict more than a week in advance.  "Climate" refers to the typical conditions we might expect at a given time of year.  San Francisco is normally foggy on summer afternoons, Montana is typically frigid in winter.  A freak storm or unexpected heat wave is bad weather.  Searing temperatures every summer, year in and year out - that sounds more like climate. If that's not the climate we used to have, then it would be fair to say that the climate is changing.

Climate scientists are generally careful not to attribute any particular weather event to climate change.  Their models of overall change are predictions of longer-term trends.  But the weather we're seeing is beginning to match those predictions.  How long before "longer term" becomes "now"?

Carbon Expo, the Facilities Show and Sustainability Live!

 Event season is well and truly upon us.  In mid-May the Carbon Clear team hits the road to appear at environmental and business conferences and exhibitions across Europe.  Three major events in three weeks and today is the halfway point.

Last week Shefali Modi, the head of our carbon reduction team, gave a talk at the Facilities Show at NEC Birmingham.  The Facilities Show is the biggest facilities management exhibition in the UK.  For a group of professionals who focus everyday on how businesses respond to climate change, this was a can't-miss opportunity.  Addressing the built environment may be our single greatest lever in our efforts to tackle climate change.  From concrete (carbon emissions from cement kilns) and timber (deforestation), to energy and refrigerant use, to the provision of parking and bike storage areas, the decisions we make about buildings and facilities will drive much of our response to climate change.

Shefali spoke about "Carbon Management in Practice" to a packed house as part of the show's 'Sustainable FM Academy'.  Later she participated in a panel debate called "The Great Energy Discussion".  It's always great to reach out to such an important sector, and we look forward to continuing the many conversations that begun during the event.

This week, a team of our best and brightest are exhibiting at Sustainability Live! (the exclamation point is part of the name, but we'd be excited anyway).  Sustainability Live! is the UK's leading water, energy, environmental, land and sustainable business exhibition and we started going years ago.  For us, this is a great opportunity to meet old and new business contacts, learn about the latest developments from other service and product providers in the industry, and of course get everyone excited about the benefits we provide to companies looking to transform their relationship to carbon.

If you're at Sustainability Live! this week you can find us on stand S15.

Next week, from 30th May - 1st June, I'll be in Koln (aka Cologne), Germany with some of my colleagues to attend Carbon Expo 2012.  Carbon Expo is the big daddy of business-focused climate change conferences.  This year it is taking place just down the road (figuratively speaking) and one week after the policy-focused (and controversy-filled) United Nations Bonn Climate Change Conference. The policy decisions resulting from the Bonn Conference will ultimately affect companies that participate in the EU ETS, the evolution of compliance markets in other countries, and the voluntary carbon market.  As a result, I expect some lively discussions at Koln in the wake of that event!

Carbon Clear is a major sponsor of the 2012 State of the Voluntary Carbon Market report, published annually by Ecosystem Marketplace. "The State of" report is the most widely read voluntary carbon market publication and the 2012 edition will be launched at Carbon Expo on May 31.  We'll be there for the side event marking the launch, and will have copies of this important report available on our stand immediately after the launch.

You can find us at Carbon Expo on stand B057.

If you're attending any of these events, be sure to come over and visit us.  If not, you can always contact our team via the Carbon Clear website.

40% of English Coastline Faces Erosion Risk

Simon Thurley, Chief Executive of English Heritage, wrote a fascinating feature article in the weekend Financial Times about the cost of climate change adaptation.  Noting that 1,800 km of the 4,500 km English coast is at risk of erosion, Thurley concedes that the government simply can't afford to save every home and village and that some "will succumb to natural processes and be swept away."

But not all of them.  In Walberswick, Suffolk, villagers have formed a trust and plan to raise money to invest in sea defences.  In Bawdsey, a charitable trust, local landowners and the council contributed to the development of new houses and used the resulting profits to build a sea barrier to save a historic 19th-century gun platform.  Meanwhile, in Dorset, the Landmark Trust spent £889,000 to move Clavell Tower 25 metres inland.  These are just a few of the inspiring cases of communities coming together in support of climate change adaptation.

To be fair, Dr. Thurley doesn't call it "climate change adaptation".  In fact, he doesn't use phrases like "climate change" or "adaptation" or "global warming" anywhere in his entire 800-word article. This is a surprising omission, when both the UK's Environment Agency and the English Heritage website acknowledge the impact of rising sea levels and more intense storms on the English coast.  While some coastal erosion is due to the fact that England is sinking as Scotland continues its post-Ice Age rebound, climate change deserves much of the blame for what is to come.

And while some degree of warming is now locked in - along with the inevitable impacts, it is still not too late to stave off the worst a changing climate holds in store.  The 2006 Stern Review and a host of other studies show that it is far more cost effective to mitigate climate change - reduce emissions - than it is to simply continue business as usual an then pay to cope with the consequences.

There is a tremendous amount we can accomplish when we have the will.  We can reduce energy consumption, switch to greener sources of energy and less carbon-intensive agricultural practices, and pursue a host of other opportunities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions where we live, work, and play.  As Dr. Thurley notes at the end of his article, "I see these measures as inspirational...This is a shift...to the welcome idea that individuals and communities can determine their own destiny."

Carbon Capture and Storage: What's the Big Deal?

The U.S. Department of Energy has released the North American Carbon Storage Atlas (NACAS).  The atlas is a compendium of geologic sites across Canada, the United States and Mexico where it is theoretically possible to store CO2 produced from stationary sources like power plants, cement factories and the like.

The idea is that this atlas would be used to find and evaluate carbon storage sites close to big greenhouse gas emitters across the continent.  This, in turn, would help to improve the economics of carbon capture and storage (CCS) by reducing the logistics costs associated with transporting millions or billions of tonnes of liquified CO2 long distances.

Carbon capture and storage is one of a number of potential tools we can wield in the fight against climate change.  The technology has many variants, but the basic approach is to use chemical or mechanical systems to capture CO2 from exhaust gase. Another approach is to chemically remove and capture the CO2 from the fuel before it is burned. In either case, the CO2 is then liquified under pressure, transported to a geologic storage site, and injected into underground basins, where it intended to remain for hundreds of years.  After all, CO2 from burning fossil fuels only contributes to global warming if the gas is released to the atmosphere.

NACAS researchers estimate a potential storage capacity of 136 billion tonnes of CO2 in oil and gas fields (where CO2 injection can also release the last remaining oil, which ironically will release more CO2 when burned); 65 billion tonnes in coal fields; and 1.7trillion tonnes in saline reservoirs.

How does that compare to current emissions?  In 2010 U.S. greenhouse gas emissions were approximately 6 billion tonnes CO2 equivalent, with 2.25 billion tonnes from electric power plants. So there is enough potential storage in oil, gas and coal fields to storage 88 years of CO2 from power plants, at today's rates of emissions.  If coal consumption increased as a result of population growth, economic activity or the lack of viable alternatives, this storage potential would not go as far.  And while saline reservoirs have the potential to hold several centuries' worth of CO2, appreciable injection rates can only be achieved at present with hydraulic fracturing (or "fracking"), a process that has caused tremendous concern when used to extract shale gas.

The North American Carbon Storage Atlas therefore serves a useful role in highlighting the theoretical potential of CCS in the fight against climate change.  However, it is still not clear whether CCS can play a practical role.  One rule of thumb is that commercial-scale CCS would consume approximately 20% of a power plant's output, which means that each unit of electricity sold to end users would be that much more expensive.  That figure does not include the cost to transport the liquid CO2 to the injection site and pump it into a storage reservoir 3 kilometers deep.  These cost considerations raise doubts about the potential of CCS at a time when wind and other clean energy technologies are falling rapidly in cost, and with governments unable or unwilling to invest billions in pilot schemes to perfect the technology.

The debate over CCS has now shifted to the U.N. Clean Development Mechanism, where proponents are exploring the use of carbon credits sales to help overcome the financial and technical barriers to implementation. Work continues on this front, with the CDM in its CMP 7 report in Durban agreeing to explore ways to develop acceptable rules governing long-term liability, site safety, permanence of the emission reductions, and a host of other issues.

I generally advocate a team approach to carbon reduction, where we pursue multiple emission reduction measures at the same time.  However, CCS is potentially so big that, despite its challenges it bears watching closely.  Stay tuned.