The Massachusetts Institute of Technology have issued some seriously educational material about the risks of Global Warming, by contrasting the range of outcomes with and without Policy :-
Tag: Climate Change
It sometimes seems that truth is not only stranger than fiction, it’s out there, somewhere, way beyond our active recall.
We all know from our early years education that Petroleum Oil is a finite resource, unless we were home-schooled by Creationists.
From now on, all road trips will get leaner, cleaner and greener.
That’s the astonishing and very welcome news from Team Obama in the United States :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/may/19/obama-carbon-emissions-auto-industry
Categories
Oil Change
We didn’t look for this oil change in the world’s economic motor, but it’s happening all the same, and the future will definitely run less smoothly than the past, sorry to say.
UPDATE : I have been advised to be more precise about what Beulah actually is. The update is bolded for your convenience.
The Weyburn Oil Field field in Saskatchewan, Canada has been the centre of attention for several good reasons over the last few years.
Some of the grease-brained petroleum engineers had a brilliant idea one day : how about trying to pump extra oil out of the field by injecting waste gas into it ?
The British political system is currently reeling from a scandal so far-reaching and so widely-spread that it seems hard to know what shape it will take in the future.
Government Ministers and their opposite numbers in the other Parties are being thrown from their ranks, and even their “safe seats”, back home in their Constituencies.
Everywhere I’ve gone for the last couple of weeks, I’ve taken Nick Stern with me. Or rather, his bright blue book with the “World Class” title “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet”.
Two members of the unelected camera of the United Kingdom have recently accused Greenpeace of being hijacked by political views on globalisation (“Green movement ‘hijacked’ by politics”, The Guardian, 13th May 2009) :-
https://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/may/13/green-movement-hijacked-politics
I remember the second time I saw this graph. It was shown to me by that enthusiastic young guy Guy Shrubsole, who waved a printed copy under my nose and asked me if I’d seen it and knew what it meant. I had and I did :-
https://climatechange.cbi.org.uk/uploaded/climatereport2007mckinseyapp.pdf
To answer Climate Change we must have strategies for new Low Carbon Energy investment.
The technologies we need to deploy are those that are already proven, and can be installed in the fastest possible time. What we can DO, and DO NOW.
This is DO-Tech, NOW-Tech : and it effectively rules out new rounds of Nuclear Energy, which is slow-to-grid. It also rules out the almost entirely hypothetical Carbon Capture and Storage.
I’m starting to read Nicholas Stern’s new book “A Blueprint for a Safer Planet : How to Manage Climate Change and Create a New Era of Progress and Prosperity.” No hint of megalomania, grandstanding or grandiosity, there, then.
Here’s a simple thought experiment.
If you can see a flaw in it, you’re welcome to contradict me.
Although December 2009 is more than six months away, in reality the World has seven weeks of further negotiations before the main details of a Global Climate Treaty must be agreed for delivery at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (COP) in December 2009 in Copenhagen Denmark.
At our best, we humans, when faced with crisis, we club together and act collectively. We invent new shared ways of doing, being and providing for ourselves. We pay attention to the needs of others. We give. We receive. We share. We eat together.
Last week’s announcement by the UK Government for up to 4 “demonstration” projects for Carbon Capture and Storage [CCS] at new coal-fired electricity generation plants raises some serious questions.
Not least amongst that basket of tricky and serious questions : is CCS being used to justify the use of coal fuel, when less Carbon-intensive fuels are available ?
It’s proving to be a bad year for Greenhouse Gas control and Polar Ice integrity.
Despite the drop in production of the Developed Economies, due to the downturn/recession, Carbon Dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere carried on rising :-
Creating a genuine and effective Carbon price differential will be awkward, perhaps impossible. Carbon Taxes will stop working after a few years, and Carbon Caps are already strongly resisted.
As for Carbon Trading, the incentive to cheat, the “leakage”, will mean that most exchanges will be measured in “hot air” – virtual Carbon emissions.
Ed Miliband wants a Climate Change social movement, and it is going to appear in force, but it won’t look the way he wants or expects.
In the interview article below notice that Ed Miliband is going to publish a Climate Change manifesto shortly, outlining the UK negotiating position for the December United Nations Climate Talks.
That means that the UK negotiating position for Copenhagen in December has already been decided.
What follows is part of an e-mail exchange frenzy that has been sparked by the UK Government’s decision to announce plans to invest in up to four Carbon Capture and Storage “demonstration” plants.
I couldn’t believe it : the New Scientist magazine in my hands didn’t have a car advertisement on the back cover, on the inside cover, or opposite the editorial !
The green “trade show” UK Aware was held at the exhibition centre Olympia 2, West London, England on 17th April.
I was talking with the lady from Good Energy. First of all we discussed their proposal to offer a dual fuel tariff, and the fact that there is still no green gas available to domestic customers.
I’m feeling a little “Carbon-resigned” tonight.
Nobody in the British Government has a handle on national Carbon Dioxide Emissions, and the announcement of up to four Carbon Capture and Storage “demonstration” projects doesn’t inspire me with confidence.
[ UPDATED : Someone kindly pointed out a typographical error. The correct expression is “Business as Usual”. My excuse : late night dyslexia. Thanks, o diligent reader. Keep up the good work. ]
The Old Lecture Theatre in the Old Building at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) tonight was filled with noise, as people, packed to the rafters, exchanged hot air like it was the End of the World.
And so it was, or will be. The End of the World, I mean, unless we sort out Climate Change. Nick Stern made that quite clear.
Towards the end of the Torah of Moses, in the last chapters of the book of Deuteronomy, we get a hymn to the Law of God, a kind of musical rendition of the Ten Commandments (see Deuteronomy 27 and compare to Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5).
The notion that the industrialised countries were somehow responsible for the awful drought which desiccated the Horn of Africa in 1984/1985, through Global Warming pollution, has been dealt a blow, and some support, all in the same week, from the same research paper, but through different media channels.