Environment

Environment
Why UKIP can’t get its facts straight on climate change

17th May 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

Climate change? It’s so last century! Defra, the environment department, is planning to cut the number of civil servants working on how we adapt to climate change from over 30 officials to just six. Today, the government publishes a fire and rescue services review with a reported £200m budget cut. Meanwhile, out there in the real world, firefighters across the UK attended nearly twice as many flooding incidents in 2012 than in 2011. New figures obtained by the Fire Brigades Union under the Freedom of Information Act show UK fire and rescue services were called to 22,518 flooding incidents last year compared with 13,042 the year before. But it all makes perfect sense on Planet UKIP, where “climate change is so last century.”

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Environment
400 reasons per million to challenge UKIP’s energy policy

14th May 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

But Will (Straw, in the Times), if we’ll talk about fracking gas, will climate sceptics talk about climate science? UKIP is dragging climate denial along the coattails of its get-out-of-Europe campaign. In a rational world, you can readily negotiate between equivalents: different forms of energy needed in our energy mix, for instance: the benefits of wind power vs fracking shale gas, as Will Straw rightly argues. But would climate sceptics really trade ideology for science? They’re not equivalents. Last Thursday, global atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, as measured at Hawaii’s Mauna Loa volcano, reached 400 parts per million. Is that debatable with UKIP that says, “climate change is so last century”?

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Environment
Coal – make an opportunity out of a crisis

13th May 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

That every crisis brings an opportunity applies in spades to the dire situation of UK Coal, our biggest coal producer. UK Coal has been in acute financial difficulty following the disastrous fire at Daw Mill. Collapse of UK Coal would wipe a reported £360m off the value of retirement savings for 6,800 pension scheme members. The government’s Pension Protection Fund would have to meet the estimated £540m bill. Renationalisation of Daw Mill may be a way forward – technically, this means returning Daw Mill to the Coal Authority, a DECC quango. The authority owns and licences, on behalf of the nation, the vast majority of the coal in Great Britain, as well as former coal mines. It’s a NDPB (non-departmental public body) sponsored by DECC.

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Environment
Coal May Day

1st May 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

2,000 coal mining jobs are at risk as UK Coal, Britain’s largest coal producer, is reported to be seeking voluntary liquidation after the devastating fire that closed its Daw Mill colliery. The company was hit by the loss of £100m of equipment, £160m of coal and incurred £35m in costs. Yet the government position appears to focus on “managing short term challenges.” Is this managed collapse? There’s no strategy for a UK domestic coal industry with carbon capture and storage technology. Its absence reinforces insecurity felt first and foremost by the 6,000-strong workforce directly or indirectly employed in the coal industry, including transport and supply chains. Letting go of UK coal will also boost our dependence on energy imports. Does that make sense?

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Environment
Bring industry back home

24th April 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

In the UK, we import more carbon than we produce, due to the energy embedded in imports of everything from food and smart phones to wind turbines. It has boosted the UK’s carbon footprint by 10% since 1993, as UK manufacturing ”hollowed out”. Government support for energy-intensive industries like steel and ceramics should underpin their UK operations and competitiveness risks up to 2020, according to the Committee on Climate Change’s (CCC) study: Reducing the UK’s carbon footprint and managing competitiveness risks. Yet these two sides of the UK’s carbon footprint – imported and home produced carbon emissions - point to a new climate-aware industrial policy, that both targets high carbon import substitutes, and builds a long term framework for our energy intensive industries so they stay, and grow, here.

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Economics
Carbon asset bubbles set to burst?

22nd April 2013 — Filed under: Economics, Environment

Philip Pearson

There is a rapidly approaching moment of truth for the world’s stock markets.

According to Unburnable Carbon, their $4trillion evaluation of the oil, coal and gas energy reserves of the world’s top 200 energy companies can never be safely realised.

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Environment
Can we make green cars here?

15th April 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

Britain may be the fifth best exporter of cars in the world, but we’re 15^th in Europe in the uptake of electric cars and hybrids like the Prius. The driveaway message from the new ippr report on Low Emission Vehicles is that if we don’t move with the times, the manufacturing advantage we have built up over the past couple of decades in car assembly is under threat. Two warnings: only a third of the value of components needed to support UK manufacture are purchased in the UK. And, as ippr points out, “car companies based in the UK are predominantly foreign-owned, [they] have choices about where to invest and could choose to move their production to other countries.”

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Environment
Dash for gas?

26th March 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

Whilst the Chancellor (not pictured here) may foresee gas as our energy future, Britain is grappling with a gas supply crisis, with the extremely cold weather depleting gas reserves and spiking gas prices.

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Environment
CO2 capture: this is what new infrastructure means

23rd March 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Judith Shapiro

It is great news that the UK has decided to select two carbon capture & storage (CCS) projects in the government’s CCS Competition – the White Rose project based at Drax linked to a coal fired power station and the Peterhead project capturing CO2 emissions from gas power. Both these projects are tremendous proposals and will offer the UK significant benefits in major infrastructure investment, cost-competitive low-carbon electricity and much needed skilled jobs.

Crucially, the infrastructure provided by these projects will also enable industrial sectors such as steel, cement, chemicals and ammonia to fit CCS at low-cost. Considering many of these sectors have no other means of reducing emissions aside from CCS, the CCS infrastructure will be vital for them.

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Environment
Shale gas isn’t low carbon, Mr Chancellor

21st March 2013 — Filed under: Environment

Philip Pearson

If yesterday’s Budget contained some solid good news for energy industries and the energy sector, why did it seem so last century? High energy users like steel and ceramics gained important new support, reflecting the concerted and evidence-based arguments that industry and trade unions have presented to government over the past three years. Two carbon capture pilot projects – one each for coal and gas – made it to the next stage. The answer lies in the new shale gas subsidy - and the Chancellor’s irresistable green dig: “Creating a low carbon economy should be done in a way that creates jobs rather than costing them.”

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