Britain scuppering EU's renewable energy plan

Britain is now trying to wreck planned EU legislation to enforce a binding target of using renewable power to produce 20% of Europe's energy by 2020.

This target was agreed by Tony Blair last spring - Britain still produces only 2% of its power from non-fossil fuel sources such as wind and solar. However British officials yesterday in Brussels supported a system of mandatory trading permits between countries so that member countries that did not meet the renewables target would be able to buy in permits from other countries that had surpassed it. This would enable Britain to get to, say, 10% of its energy from renewables by 2020 and buy in permits from countries, perhaps outside the EU, to cover the rest.

This is outrageous and another example of this Government's total failure to understand climate change - and what of the need for energy security?? As Friends of the Earth commented: "The can't-do attitude to renewable energy is deeply worrying and a self-fulfilling prophecy."

It was some two months ago when we heard that officials had advised ministers that the UK had no chance of achieving the 20% renewables target and should work to undermine it at a European level or try to use "statistical interpretations" to get round it. Now we see them doing just that.

Basically an EU trading system would destroy the successful "feed-in tariff" schemes operating in countries including Germany and Spain. Such schemes, which are rapidly being adopted by other EU countries, involve paying micro generators above-market prices for electricity they feed into the grid.
Sweden - good news

Meanwhile it was good to hear of more news from Sweden - a country with a plan to be free of oil dependence by 2020 - The Green Party favored a Stockholm congestion charge for decades there - it was conservatives who blocked it. We now see the congestion charge being imposed under the country’s present conservative-oriented coalition government. Sweden’s Commission on Oil Independence, a government panel, also was a longtime Green Party initiative that is now embraced across the Swedish political spectrum. “The Social Democrats stole it from us,” Bolund says. He then grins, saying that the Greens must be prepared to be mimicked across the political mainstream to succeed.

The Swedish government also recently adopted another Green Party idea: a vehicle tax based on carbon dioxide emissions rather than weight. Bolund pointed out that some cars (such as hybrids) are heavy, but relatively low in fossil-fuel emissions. This is the latest wrinkle in a sixteen-year-old Swedish movement toward carbon-based taxation. The country was the first in the world to adopt a carbon tax, in 1991. Today, nearly half of the Swedish income tax burden has been phased out and replaced by levies based in some manner on fossil-fuel consumption.

Tecno solutions - not the answer

These are the ways to tackle climate change - not wriggling out of commitments - it is extraordinary how our Government seems to have no real plan - meanwhile there continue to be an extraordinary collection of absurd and often dangerous ideas being put forward: putting thousands of mirrors into orbit or launching up to 30,000 ships to pump salt spray or sulphate-based aerosols into the atmosphere in order to try to deflect the sun; deliberately polluting the seas with vast amounts of iron nanoparticles that stimulate CO2-storing plankton; and covering entire deserts with reflective film to reflect sunlight back into space.

Worse still Governments are taking some of this seriously - the US government is busy lobbying the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to allow stratospheric weather modification - something at least a dozen other countries are involved in (see blog on chemtrails). At least nine other nations and the EU have supported iron filing 'ocean fertilisation' experiments, usually by corporate commercial carbon 'traders'. Indeed Tory Parliamentary candidate for Stroud, Neil Carmichael said at the recent cafe discussion that technological solutions were the answer.

Here is one comment: "Politicians predictably misinterpret theoretical hypotheses to push quick-fix solutions but the fact is that systems as complicated and chaotic as the vast nexus of cause and effect we laughably term 'the environment' aren't gonna be amenable to a giant planetary elasto-plast."

Even boffin Dr Ken Caldeira, who a few years ago was punting the idea of putting a giant mirror on the moon to reflect the sun's rays back into the cold empty vacuum of space - has now acknowledged that there are inevitable weaknesses in the kind of modelling used to promote these ideas. He now rejects geoengineering as a tempting but illusory quick fix - and has instead realised it would be far easier to just er, change our lifestyles to reduce energy consumption and CO2 emissions.

"I think the Earth's system is so complicated that our interfering with it is very likely to screw things up and very unlikely to improve things... And this is the only planet we have."
Ken Caldeira, Carnegie Institution Department of Global Ecology

Ken hasn't convinced all his colleagues, and politicians who are still pushing ahead with crazy schemes to keep the ecosystem and the economy running in conflict a bit longer. Very recently the Californian company Planktos Inc conducted their latest 'experiment' by dumping tens of tonnes of tiny iron particles over 10,000 square km of ocean around the Galapagos Islands - a real exercise in irony when you consider this is where Charles Darwin originally made his observations of a pristine eco-system that led to the theory of evolution.

See instead this inspiring letter from President Evo Morales of Bolivia to the member representatives of the United Nations on the issue of the environment:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=13879