How Can We Encourage Behavioural Change?

I speak to Arne Hulstein at Web 2.0 Expo

Notes from Bioenergy 2008

Obama or McCain - Who is the best candidate to lead us out of climate catastrophe?

Why we must move to a low carbon economy

LondonAware ’08 Event Review and Competition Winner

Last weekend at the Barbican Centre, the inaugural LondonAware’08 event took place in Hall 1, organised by the team at UK Aware.

The Low Carbon Economy Ltd were proud to be main sponsors of the event, and to exhibit for both days.

We were impressed by a number of things at the event: the diversity of visitors, the quality of organisation and the feeling that this was the start of a new community as well as a new event.

There was a really healthy mixture of exhibitors, from high street brands through to green specialists and very small organisations just starting out or working not for profit. Importantly, there was something to learn from each stand, and we really felt that embodied the spirit of a low carbon economy. In many ways, it’s really an ideas economy, an analytical thinking economy that we need. One in which we improve our lives through efficiency and living sustainably.

Although I didn’t attend any of the speaking sessions (too busy just walking around meeting everyone), they were well-attended and lively.

And so, what you’ve all been waiting for: the results of our ‘Win a model fuel cell car competition’! And the winner is: Noelia Barquero S., Sales Manager, Alara Wholefoods Ltd

Well done Noelia, we hope you enjoy the fuel cell kit!

We’ll definitely be supporting UK Aware’s future events, and recommend them if you’re interested in green ideas for everyday living.

Come and visit our stand at LondonAware '08 this weekend

The inaugural LondonAware event (www.ukaware.com) is on at the Barbican Centre Hall 1 this weekend (10th and 11th May). The Low Carbon Economy stand is all set up and ready to receive visitors, we've got our business cards at the ready and we're keen to show people what we do and how we think it can help you.

We're on stand number 42, so if you're around central London this weekend and want to find some green ideas for everyday living (the show's slogan), then drop in. We had a sneak peak at some of the stands yesterday afternoon whilst we were setting up, and they look fantastic. It's going to be a great event, and a really solid foundation for future events, both in London and around the country.

If you need any more good reasons to come along, I've got two right here. First, by dropping your contact details or business card in our bowl, we'll enter you into a competition to win a fuel cell car kit. The second reason is that we've got a limited number of free credit vouchers worth £50 when you spend £250 or more on advertising credit for use on www.lowcarboneconomy.com. "A competition for a fuel cell car and free credit, all on one stand?" I hear you ask: Yes - that's right, so come on down and visit us at the Barbican centre this weekend.

We'll add a post-event review here next week for those of you who can't make it along this time. As a very special offer, we've decided to extend our voucher goodwill to people who read our blog. We're going to save 5 vouchers (worth £50 when you spend £250) to give away to the first five people to leave comments on this post asking for one. They need to be used by the end of May, so write now!

Free Tickets for LondonAware '08

Please join us at LondonAware '08 - "Green Ideas for Everyday Living" - with these free tickets courtesy of the organizers and LowCarbonEconomy.com.

This promises to be one of the most exciting events of the year, with thousands of people and businesses under one roof in the Barbican centre, London on the 10th-11th May.

LowCarbonEconomy.com are proud to be main sponsors of the event, we hope that you will be able to attend and to meet us there if we haven't met before.

Please leave comments on this post, or email us for your free tickets. There aren't many though, so don't delay - when they're gone, they're gone.

Jeremy Leggett’s 22 reasons why Peak Oil is real

Last night, I attended “Energy & Resources for the Transition to a Sustainable Future”, a talk in Brighton organized by www.transitionbrightonandhove.org.uk (on 18/04/08).

One of the speakers was Jeremy Leggett. Below is my transcript of his talk, the presentation for which will be made available as soon as possible.

I believe that the peak oil theory is likely to be proven over time, simply because anything (however plentiful) in or on our planet is a finite resource. At 20 million barrels of oil per day, we’re consuming this particular resource really quickly and so far the only known natural mechanisms for the creation of oil occur over geological timescales. However, I believe that peak oil, climate change, resource/environmental management and energy security are all good enough reasons on their own to transition to a low carbon economy, so the purpose of this post isn’t to persuade but to publicise the issues at stake and help empower people to make up their own mind.

The Coming Energy Famine – why we must act ahead of peak oil”

by Jeremy Legget – Chief Executive of Solar Century

Jeremy said that he has recently returned from Malawi where he was visiting with SolarAid – a charity supported by SolarCentury. When he was there, he saw a wind turbine that was made by a twelve year-old boy from a bicycle frame and a wooden tower because his dream was to supply his home village with electricity. The point is that renewable energy is not rocket science, it’s something well within our means.

He predicted that the issue of Peak Oil will be a massive in the press in 2008, like climate change has been in 2007.

His 22 arguments of why peak oil is real:

1. More whistleblowers from within/around fossil fuel industry emerging every week – IEA say three countries vital to global fossil fuel supplies: Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran. Peak oil believers include James Schlesinger - former US Energy Secretary and former head of CIA. Nigeria could lose 30% of production in the very near future without immediate action.
2. Old oil fields show production can collapse. T. Boone Pickens (Texan oil billionaire) is now investing $10bn in wind to avoid the declining returns that are the nature of oil wells – i.e. production is highest right at the start and after that returns always diminish – just at different rates. North Sea Oil (last oil province ever discovered in 1980s) now collapsing at 8-9% /yr.
3. Dearth of giants – global discovery is crashing. Just over 500 giant oil fields have been found (500 million barrels+), most before the peak of discovery (1950s-60s). Since England won the world cup, discovery has crashed. We’re using 85 million barrels per day. Average discovery size of oil fields is now only 20mb.
4. Important to remember that lead time on frontier fields is 10 years and beyond to bring on stream. Average is six years but big ones are more than 10. Also, frontier fields present bigger challenges in exploitation – BP’s Thunderhorse field in Gulf of Mexico has been out of action for 3 years after being crippled in 2005 by Hurricane Dennis.
5. The capacity pipeline drops fast from 2011.
6. A third of global reserves may not even exist: phantom reserves because of founding of OPEC and introduction of quotas. Oil companies use OPEC data rather than their own, so the OPEC reserves could well be inflated, and thus ‘known’ oil reserves could be much smaller than reported by oil companies. He gave the example of Shell’s dishonesty about its proven reserves recently.
7. The big hope of Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) hasn’t helped the USA, the country where most of the techniques were developed and put into place first. At the start of oil drilling, only about 30% of a well could be exploited. Now, EOR techniques can raise that by 60-70%, but oil production is declining in the US, so although EOR may slow production decline, it won’t stop it.
8. Melting tar sands. It’s too slow and too dirty to do. Oil companies have invested $25bn in rebranding as tar industries. Still, current capacity is only 1mbd. Oil industry estimate says that this will only rise to around 2.5mbd, not enough to counter the 4-5mbd decline in conventional supplies. It takes two tons of sand to produce just one barrel of oil.
9. Coal-to-liquids will be too slow, too dirty. Canadian government has said that CTL will be illegal in Canada unless carbon sequestration is in place. So either the law will stick or the oil companies will bully their way through it. FTL / CTL very dirty and also too little too late. Chinese target is 20mbd by 2020.
10. Gas will not be able to close the easy-oil gap because the decline will be too fast. 2011 now best bet for start of descent from plateau. Gas lasts longer, but cannot prop up overall production.
11. The producer-economy risk to imports. E.g. Dubai, Saudi, Russia are all producing oil through the roof (even Iran has the highest domestic growth in the world in terms of oil: 8-10% growth per year). So at the current rate of domestic use, Iran won’t be exporting by 2015. Developers aren’t doing any planning for utilities in these fast-expanding regions so there is a great risk of energy insecurity.
12. The infrastructure legacy problem is huge. E.g. BP’s leaky oil pipelines and exploding refinery in Houston. Most of the infrastructure was put in place in the late 70s/early 80s and not much has been built since. BP’s approach was to do a risk analysis on either updating infrastructure or paying out compensation. They put a price on workers’ lives of $20 million, and when 15 workers died in the refinery explosion, they just want to pay $500 million and move on.
13. The industry faces a runaway skills shortage. Average age in oil industry is 49 (retire at 55).
14. The industry isn’t investing enough. Goldman Sachs say $240bn investment per year is needed for the next 10 years. The IEA said that any investment increase is “illusory” – due to inflation. Exploration budgets were actually cut between 1998 and 2006 according to Baker Institute.
15. CO2 will increasingly focus energy options. Best chance of hitting 2oC target is to emit no more than 340 billion tonnes of carbon, but according to industry estimates there are 10 times that much carbon in coal remaining, and 3 times that in oil. Even if those figures are massively inflated (see point 6 above)…
16. There is enough coal to trigger climate ruin. The UK govt has recently given 6 licenses for open cast coal mining. We must rally against Kingsnorth Coal Power Plant. Biggest coal reserves are in the US, then Russia, China, India and Australia.
17. Carbon capture won’t be ready in time to reduce emissions, UK is only scheduling trials now, when what we need is widespread implementation. Beware the promise of CCS-ready power stations!
18. Nuclear would be too late and be a vampire. It will be 10 years minimum to build new plants, and even then it will only provide around 8% of UK electricity.
19. Renewables have been held back too long. More than 10% of investment funding has gone into renewables now for the first time – good news but is it too little too late?
20. We might face ‘no energy for energy’. The third global energy crisis is coming. The danger is that we might end up with no energy to fabricate technologies we know will work.
21. Culture: quasi-institutionalised denial in around the carbon business. It’s like an act of treason to admit there may be problems if you work in oil!
22. The ‘extremes and extremists’ problem. However bad this all is, we’re going to have more than just this to deal with. E.g. Citicorp (global investment bank) Chief Executive: “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance. We’re still dancing”. National Front loves peak oil because they think they can resurrect themselves during the economic dislocation.

And some good news:

1. The ‘seeing is believing’ effect. Importance of ‘tipping points’ in changing behaviours.
2. The Green New Deal / Transition – like the new deal for infrastructure projects after the great depression, the Green New Deal will involve the same widespread reskilling and redeployment of resources, but it is achievable.

Some recommended further reading:

“Collapse” by Jared Diamond – a scary book about how human civilizations can collapse.

“The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell – a positive book about the power we have to change.

“Transition towns” by Rob Hopkins – the founder of the transition towns movement, another positive book.

“The Carbon War” and “Half Gone” by Jeremy Leggett.

Questions

1. Q: What do you think about the idea of big solar power plants in the desert?
   JL: you don’t need to be in the desert to use solar power. If all the roof space in the UK had solar panels installed, we would have more electricity than we need anyway! Obviously, this isn’t something I recommend, because we need a diverse energy mix to provide maximum efficiency and energy security. But, sunny countries are picking up on the idea of solar power plants. Look at the MASDAR project in Middle East.
2. Q: What about the intermittency of renewable energy sources, how can we service the electricity baseload?
   JL: An experiment by the German Economics Ministry was run last year looking at powering Germany’s electricity grid, including baseload from renewable sources only. They found that they could do it all without nuclear or fossils, with renewables only.
3. Q: What about the embedded carbon in different renewable energy technologies? How much energy does it take to make a wind turbine or a solar panel, and how much energy do you get back during the lifecycle?
   JL: That’s too complex a question to answer quickly, but “Energy Return on Investment” is a term that you should watch out for, it will become ever more important.

Biofuels 101 – the good, the bad & the ugly

15th April 2008 saw the launch of the UK Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO), meaning that effective immediately, all fuel sold at UK pumps must contain 2.5% biofuel (either bioethanol in petrol or biodiesel in diesel).

Why? Because the world needs to wean itself off its addiction to high carbon fossil fuels

Sounds like a good idea, what’s the issue? Because if we use the wrong types of biofuels, rather than reducing our carbon emissions, we may in fact be increasing them and damaging the food chain in the process.

How could that happen? In essence - good intentions gone wrong, primarily caused by a lack of joined up thinking in government – incentivising the use of biofuels, without thinking through the implications... As an example, at the roots of the problem certain governments namely the US have championed the proliferation of corn-based bioethanol as a means of offsetting imported oil. On the surface a good idea, however when it comes to the detail, corn requires fossil-fuel derived fertilisers to produce, fossil fuels to transport, and perhaps the biggest problem of all – what was previously grown to feed humans and animals, is now grown to feed our vehicles (burning our food!). The obvious problem being that whilst we now have more fuel, we have substantially less food. As it is possible to make biofuel from a variety of cereal crops, this has had a direct effect on the price or rice for example which in Bangladesh has doubled in the last year – another clear sign that along with climate change, the poorest people are the ones who feel the effects most.

Another example of a lack of joined-up-thinking has resulted in vast rainforests (which actually store carbon), being destroyed to make room for Palm oil plantations. Palm oil is an edible vegetable oil, used in numerous products, and grown in a number of places in particular Malaysia and Indonesia. The increase in demand for biofuels (caused by mechanisms like the RTFO!) has resulted in a substantial increase in rainforest destruction, thereby increasing global carbon emissions!

So what is the solution? As we only have limited reserves of fossil fuels which are being rapidly depleted (and contribute to climate change in the process), doing nothing is not an option, so if we are to continue to use our existing vehicles designed to run on liquid fuels, we must use fuels which in their production and use have minimal impact on both the environment, and the food chain. Fortunately such options do exist. Currently the closest to-market most favourable option is to use the Jatropha plant, an inedible common weed, which grows in extremely harsh conditions where other plants can often not survive. Jatropha trees grow for 40 years and have seeds which when crushed release their oil.

So in summary: For as long as we have vehicles that run on liquid fuels we will need alternatives to high carbon fossil fuels. A viable alternative (but not the only solution!) is to use biofuels. However whilst some biofuels are very good, others are very bad, and it is vital that governments start to connect the dots, think through the options and possible outcomes, and ensure that mechanisms designed to increase the use of biofuels incentivise those which offer benefits, and prohibit those with potentially disastrous consequences.

Meet us at ecobuild

This week Todd and myself will be going to ecobuild (www.ecobuild.co.uk/) at Earl's Court. We'll be there Tuesday, Wednesday and probably Thursday too.

We're hoping to learn more about building and converting buildings with reduced carbon footprints, keep abreast of the latest thinking and technology, and meet lots of like-minded organisations and people. Oh, and we'll probably try to spread the word about www.LowCarbonEconomy.com whilst we're at it too!

If you're going to be at ecobuild and would like to meet us, we want to hear from you. Please email me on dl (at) LowCarbonEconomy.com, or go to the website and use the contact form.

See you there ecobuilders!

We're sponsoring London Aware '08...

...are you going?

LowCarbonEconomy.com is very proud to announce its sponsorship of London Aware '08 at the Barbican, London, May 10th and 11th.

Billed as "The most comprehensive green consumer event the UK has ever seen", the event features speakers from Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Forum for the Future and many more.

We'll be exhibiting, so please put the date in your diary and come and participate in this exciting event - and pop by our stand to have a chat.

www.ukaware.com

Improved menu navigation, look and feel

After some unanimous initial feedback from our kind beta testers that the previous menu navigation was a huge headache and distracted from the rest of the site, we've come up with a far more manageable and user-friendly design. It'll be improved as we progress of course, but if you didn't like the menus before, check again now and let us know what you think.

Thanks!

Site Now Live as a Public Beta

We're very pleased to announce the first public version of www.lowcarboneconomy.com.

The site is still in a public beta mode: i.e. it's still in development, but we feel it's ready for user testing. We're going to be building up the site's content and adding functionality very quickly over the next month or so, but we'd really appreciate your comments on the site.

So, please visit the site and add some beta comments. Register, add some content, and get in touch if you want - we'll be pleased to hear from you!

Good News for UK Renewables

John Hutton's announcement over the weekend that the UK will invest massively in offshore wind power is great news for that industry, and for the UK renewables market in general.

http://environment.independent.co.uk/green_living/article3236132.ece

It was really the only option for hitting the UK's carbon targets for 2020 - nuclear would just take too long to come online.

It will be very interesting to watch the effect this major decision has on the rest of the UK energy market. Will investors now feel more confident backing renewable technologies?

Charles Anglin, Director of Communications for BWEA, said on Channel 4 news last night that the current national grid is not fit for such a large dependency on wind power (renewable electricity sources are not so predictable or controllable as conventional gas or nuclear power stations).

So, a large investment will be needed to enable the national grid connections and infrastructure. Will these improvements make the national grid more suitable for distributed generation from other renewables?

It will also be interesting to look at the supply/demand paradigm that this new infrastructure will support. When wind energy supply is high and demand is low will energy companies reduce the cost of electricity to help match supply and demand? In countries like Ireland which will be even more dependent on wind than the UK, there is talk of energy companies even paying users to use electricity when supply outstrips demand. What in turn will these users do with the surplus electricity?

I'd like to see it used to electrolyse hydrogen that can be used as fuel for transport and for fuelling stationary power generation when wind supply is low and demand is high.

Whatever the precise mechanics will be, I for one look forward to seeing how it develops.

Some Motivation

I've found two great pieces of motivation today to remind me why what we're doing is so important:

www.storyofstuff.com - a great video about consumption and the way that the developed world lives

and

poodwaddle.com/clocks3.htm - an earth clock that reminds us of the scale of the problem and its constancy

Enjoy!

First post!

Welcome to our blog! The first post - how exciting!

The website for lowcarboneconomy.com is still in beta testing, but it's working really well and starting to look great too. In the meantime, if you add your email address on this page: www.lowcarboneconomy.com we'll keep you updated via our mailing list.

Whilst we get the website ready for general release, we've been busy creating some social sites to start helping to spread the word.

So far, we have:

Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lowcarboneconomy/
Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=7008982165
Facebook group: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5768564643
Delicious: http://del.icio.us/lowcarboneconomy.com

And some public pages from our Google Reader:

Starred: http://www.google.com/reader/starred
All: http://www.google.com/reader/All
More: we have separated the feeds into categories like: Buildings, Climate Change, Companies, Environment, Ethical, Green and Eco, Low Carbon, Oil and fossil fuels, Renewables, Transport, Waste and Recycling, etc. If you would like me to post the public pages for these, just let me know and I'll put the URL's up.

A lot of these pages have RSS feeds too, so please add them to your RSS aggregator (like Google Reader etc) to keep track of what we see from day to day. Delicious is particularly useful as we post things we think are important and want to be able to find again later.

If you use del.icio.us (and you should - it's great), please add us to your network and post any links to us that you think we should look at: just add the 'for:lowcarboneconomy.com' tag.

OK - that's it for now, hopefully I'll be able to post again soon to say our site is available.