3E Intelligence

A few pointers to some must-read reports or articles which I discovered in the last ten days:

• Nicholas Stern’s latest report “Key elements of a global deal on climate change“: not much different from his 2006 Stern review for the UK government but rings the alarm bell a bit harder as very little has really changed since then; mentions the 80-90% reduction target again without being concrete about the implications on our way of life (see my earlier: “Welcome to brave new world“);
• Herman Daly’s recent “Steady-State Economy” presentation to the UK’s Sustainable Development Commission: I do not like the term “steady-state” (it will be hard to convince decision-makers to back a concept which reminds them of immobility and state control, although it has nothing to do with both), but Daly still remains one of the greatest thinkers about how to put humanity back on a sustainability path. When will the Commission have the courage to invite him to one of its Green Week or Sustainable Energy week sessions?
• For all of us who think about offsetting their air travel, the Stockholm Environment Institute has done an excellent job reviewing different emissions calculators and offsetting schemes and concluded that they still need a lot of improvement. Read their report “Carbon offsetting and air travel“.
• Greenpeace published a new report questioning the latest “silver bullet”: carbon capture and storage. The report “False hope” is a must-read contribution to a difficult debate which will be in the spotlight during some conferences in Brussels in the next few months. So, if you want to contribute, make sure you get your ammunition
• Last but not least,  another hot topic on the current climate/energy agenda: the sustainability criteria for biofuels. This debate on how best to implement bio-energy standards should be broadened and develop into an “international standard-setting scheme for a sustainable use of natural resources” according to a brilliant paper by Ecologic’s Timo Kaphengst and Stephanie Schlegel.

It does not happen often that I agree with the American Enterprise Institute but Steven Hayward’s analysis of the “real cost of tackling climate change” in the Wall Street Journal of 28 April is spot on: an 80% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 will have dramatic implications for our way of life.

Hayward has at least the courage (which cannot be said for our politicians) to tell the public what this 80% cut will mean for citizens’ daily lives. In not one political document have I ever seen a serious impact assessment of the 80% target. The fear of being the bearer of bad news is one which characterises all policymakers (even the ones who know that the climate crisis will hit hard).

Here are a few extracts from Hayward’s article:

“Begin with the current inventory of carbon dioxide emissions – CO2 being the principal greenhouse gas generated almost entirely by energy use. According to the Department of Energy’s most recent data on greenhouse gas emissions, in 2006 the U.S. emitted 5.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide, or just under 20 tons per capita. An 80% reduction in these emissions from 1990 levels means that the U.S. cannot emit more than about one billion metric tons of CO2 in 2050.

Were man-made carbon dioxide emissions in this country ever that low? The answer is probably yes – from historical energy data it is possible to estimate that the U.S. last emitted one billion metric tons around 1910. But in 1910, the U.S. had 92 million people, and per capita income, in current dollars, was about $6,000.

By the year 2050, the Census Bureau projects that our population will be around 420 million. This means per capita emissions will have to fall to about 2.5 tons in order to meet the goal of 80% reduction.

It is likely that U.S. per capita emissions were never that low – even back in colonial days when the only fuel we burned was wood. The only nations in the world today that emit at this low level are all poor developing nations, such as Belize, Mauritius, Jordan, Haiti and Somalia.”

…

“Consider the residential sector. At the present time, American households emit 1.2 billion tons of CO2 – 20% higher than the entire nation’s emissions must be in 2050. If households are to emit no more than their present share of CO2, emissions will have to be reduced to 204 million tons by 2050. But in 2050, there will be another 40 million residential households in the U.S.

Today, the average residence in the U.S. uses about 10,500 kilowatt hours of electricity and emits 11.4 tons of CO2 per year (much more if you are Al Gore or John Edwards and live in a mansion). To stay within the magic number, average household emissions will have to fall to no more than 1.5 tons per year. In our current electricity infrastructure, this would mean using no more than about 2,500 KwH per year. This is not enough juice to run the average hot water heater.

You can forget refrigerators, microwaves, clothes dryers and flat screen TVs. Even a house tricked out with all the latest high-efficiency EnergyStar appliances and compact fluorescent lights won’t come close. The same daunting energy math applies to the industrial, commercial and transportation sectors as well. The clear implication is that we shall have to replace virtually the entire fossil fuel electricity infrastructure over the next four decades with CO2-free sources – a multitrillion dollar proposition, if it can be done at all.”

I fear these figures are hard but pretty much correct. I would like to see someone do the same maths for Europe based on our own CO2 targets for 2050. Who of the policymakers dares to do the exercise?

The point Hayward misses, of course, is that we really have NO CHOICE. Either we decide on a global scale (with which governance structures?) to bring our economic activities back to a sustainable scale or several calamities will force us back to live within the planet’s ecological limits. The costs of that last possibility are surely going to be immense (also in terms of human lives). The choice is still ours, but for how long?

This blog was very silent last week because I was in Washington DC participating in a fascinating two-day climate and energy conference organised by the Transatlantic Platform for Action on the Global Environment (T-PAGE). This dialogue forum was created to facilitate debate among members of EU and US civil society on climate and energy policies on both sides of the Atlantic.

The conference focused in a first-day expert workshop on the question how to reduce emissions from the transport sector and on the controversial US and EU biofuels policies. On the second day, a public event highlighted the lessons drawn from the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) and US Congress plans for a similar cap-and-trade system and looked at public perceptions in the US and the EU about the global warming challenge.

Overall, the European participants painted a less rosy picture than EU institutions want to make believe. Not only was there the growing disappointment with the global effects of biofuels policies (one of the EU’s own environmental institutions now pleads for suspending the 10% target), but the evaluation of Europe’s climate flagship, the emissions trading scheme or ETS, was also rather bleak. It is obvious that up to now the ETS has not lived up to its expectations. Very few real technological investments as a result of pricing CO2 have taken place and the only ones who seem to have won from ETS are the financial traders (who therefore write very positive reports about ETS). It is doubtful whether the Commission’s new proposals will turn things around. Not only has the energy-intensive industry hijacked the debate with its “carbon leakage” panic but even the better parts of the Commission’s ETS review drew heavy fire at the conference. “When Europe’s power producers (who have made big windfall profits in the first phase of ETS) applaud the auctioning proposals of the new Commission package, you have to smell a rat” was the justified and smart observation of an ex-Commission official.

The US participants (mainly from environmental groups, academics and one representative of the Californian lawmakers) were quite optimistic that the wind in the US is changing and that a future administration will endorse stricter global warming targets. One of the doubts raised was whether this will happen fast enough so as to influence the outcome of the Copenhagen climate top of 2009. I also have my own personal doubts in case of a surprise win of John McCain in November. Will the US senator, when President, be able to turn his climate-sceptical party around or will he water down his own positions?

US as well as EU particpants agreed that we need to move to more sustainable transport modes but there was a lot of confusion in the debate on what would be the right approach (some went for CNG, others underlined the need for a breakthrough in electrification technologies, others again highlighted the need for serious transport demand reduction).

On biofuels, the general feeling was that it is time to “take the foot of the accelerator” and “rethink” our biofuels policies in view of rising food prices as well as negative effects on land use and the direct and indirect repercussions for the environment and global warming.

That said, the conference confirmed to me once more that our exclusive focus on climate change makes us lose sight of the bigger sustainability challenge. Climate change is just one symptom of a bigger system crisis with lots of other dimensions (peak oil, gas and coal, high commodity prices, water shortages, biodiversity loss, population growth). Policymakers’ overemphasis on one dimension of this sustainability crisis might lead to effects which aggravate the other crises (see the link between biofuels, population and high oil prices on the one hand and the new hunger issue on the other). If policymakers do not connect the dots and see climate change as part of this huge overarching sustainability challenge, chances are that we will just sink deeper and deeper into the mud as exemplified by the flight into coal and tar sands as a result of the growing energy crunch. It is time to develop a transatlantic and global agenda on sustainability and create the governance structures needed for this system transformation.

Social Europe can deal with the challenges posed by globalisation according to a new report written for a European Commission conference on 16 April. But the report fails to mention most of the social impacts of climate change, the looming energy crunch (including high energy and food prices and their social consequences) or growing water scarcity.

The expensive (220,000 euro) report “Is Social Europe Fit for Globalisation?” written by the Brussels Centre for European Policy Studies under the leadership of UK professor Iain Begg was clearly produced “à la tête du client” as it confirms all the policies already put on the EU rails in terms of dealing with the effects of globalisation.

The report does an excellent job at summarising most of the existing “globalisation is good” literature but has extremely little eye for the arguments developed by critics of globalisation. In the press conference on Friday, Iain Begg’s weak defence to journalists’ questions on this was a weak “We listened to the Attac arguments”.

The biggest problem I have with this report is that it completely overlooks the “dark side” of globalisation: the mounting sustainability pressures related to population growth, natural resource use and the rise of the new middle classes in the BRIC countries and its social effects. One wonders whether the Directorate General (DG Employment) which defined the scope and mandate for this study has ever heard of the EU’s Sustainable Development strategy or read the recent Solana paper on the security aspects of the climate crisis.

I agree with the authors of the study that globalisation can be an opportunity (also in terms of a more equal world) rather than a menace but in order to create a sustainable and fair globalisation the world will need a new “one-planet-economy” vision and new global governance structures (not a world government, please) to transform this vision into concrete policies. The CEPS report and the Commission conference is certainly no contribution to that sustainable globalisation debate.

Let’s just hope the Commission’s services will spend the same amount of money to look at this “other side” of the globalisation phenomenon.

Jeremy Bentham and Jeroen Van de Veer presented Shell’s latest scenarios Scramble and Blueprints to Brussels policymakers on 7 April. Their visions for the future look pretty grim although they were not very upfront about it and their plea for big government hand-outs for carbon capture and storage raises a lot of questions.

The scenarios had already been presented during the last annual World Economic Forum and therefore I can refer back to other coverage (NY Times) summarising the main findings of the report. But there are a few issues in the report which have not really been picked up by the traditional press media and therefore I would like to draw attention to them here.

It is commendable that Shell recognises most of the “hard truths” about energy supply and demand. “By 2015, growth in the production of easily accessible oil and gas will not match the projected rate of demand growth. While abundant coal exists in many parts of the world, transportation difficulties and environmental degradation ultimately pose limits to growth“. Admittedly “limits to growth” is not a phrase we hear often from industry circles. Nevertheless, Shell also keeps believing in the myth of “abundant coal” although several reports in the last 15 months have clearly demonstrated that coal reserves have been seriously overestimated (see for outstanding coverage of this “peak coal”, David Strahan’s “The Great Coal Hole“).

Shell makes a clear choice for the “optimistic” “blueprints” scenario which presupposes a level of international cooperation at a level not really seen in the past, so it is questionable whether the “scramble” (each nation for itself) future is not much more probable. By the way, the scramble world could easily become a resource-wars-world when some of the big players would get in real supply problems. The current war in Iraq, the debate about the future role of NATO (which is getting a keen interest in natural resources), and the ongoing militarisation of China are signs on the wall.

Moreover, a closer look at some of the figures in the so-called positive “blueprints” scenario makes me wonder whether the other scenario Sell endorses is really so desirable. The CO2 emissions under this preferable blueprints scenario would still be around 25 gigatonnes per year by 2050 (graph on page 37 of the report), basically still at the same level as we have now, whereas everyone knows that the IPCC has recommended reductions of between 60 and 80% before 2050.

Does this mean Shell believes climate change is inescapable? It surely looks this way and its political message from the report seems to underline this. According to Shell the world will still be addicted to fossil fuels for the next forty years. Coal (for power generation and coal-to-liquids for transport) and non-conventional fossil fuels (tar sands in Canada) are Shell’s solutions for this fossil future. Shell’s “joker”: carbon capture and storage, a technological solution which according to experts will not be full commercially available before 2020 (some think even 5 years later). O, yes, and please Mr Government and dear tax payers, could you subsidise the demonstration plants which will be needed to bring this technology to its maturity? This was the main message of Jeroen van de Veer to the Brussels crowd.

My questions to the Shell speakers about the 25 gigatonnes emissions by 2050 and the possible financial burden for the taxpayers in case of big subsidies for carbon sequestration demonstration plants remained, of course, unanswered.

In conclusion: the two scenarios in Shell’s new report are in reality scenarios of doom and gloom. It might hurt Shell’s business prospects but we need to kick off from our fossil addiction much faster if we want to give our future generations any chance to have a lifestyle comparable to ours. And in this analysis, carbon capture and storage is no more and no less than what methadone is for regular drug addicts. Should we taxpayers really pay big-time for this?

“EU can’t cut emissions. Greenhouse gases are mounting despite antipollution policy” is the triumphant title and subtitle in today’s (3 April) Wall Street Journal (print version). Things might not be as bad as the US neo-liberal journalist of the WSJ pretends, but the last report on the emissions from EU installations which are subject to the famous EU cap-and-trade system (ETS), are surely something to look at more carefully.

Of course, even the ETS lovers now admit that there were teething problems with over-allocation of allowances in the first phase, but the stricter draft rules for the second phase should put the ETS back on the rails to Low-Carbon Land.

But where is the guarantee that the revised scheme will not know the same flaws and when are the “polluting” installations  starting to make hard investments in new technologies instead of just buying the extra allowances on the market? Is it possible that, contrary to the emissions system for SO2, this ETS will not reach its objectives and will have to be abandoned at some point?

What is certainly clear is that the only winners from the scheme up to now are the companies that have made big windfall profits as a result of the over-allocations and the carbon traders who have made millions from these new markets.

Further reading:

• EurActiv: European CO2 emissions up in 2007
• Commission: Emission Trading Scheme: Community Independent Transaction Log
• Fridtjof Nansen Institute: Understanding the Fascinating Development of the EU ETS

Eberhard Rhein’s proposals for an new international climate regime (see his guest blog post from yesterday) has the merit of being more concrete than what I have seen from the EU up to now in terms of efforts to put a global agreement on the rails. Nevertheless, I have two fundamental problems with it (like I have with the EU’s climate policy in general BTW).

First, Eberhard looks only at the climate change challenge. This might be appropriate if you focus on the current international talks but it is not enough when you take as a starting point the global crisis we are facing. Indeed, the climate crisis is just one symptom of a much broader “problematique” which is the unsustainability of our industrial development model. There are other symptoms which show that we are reaching the limits of this model: peak oil or even peak energy (also gas, coal, uranium), the new commodities price boom, our global water and biodiversity threats. All these symptoms demonstrate that the natural capital, which the Earth had built up over the course of millions of years, has been exhausted in less than 150 years to feed our (mostly Western) “growth and consumption hunger”.

Anyone who thinks (like the EU and the whole international community) that by tackling the climate crisis, we are out of the woods, is fundamentally mistaken. We will have to do much more than move to a low-carbon economy; we will have to build a one-planet economy and learn to produce and consume within the Earth’s resource constraints. The transition to such a new development model will not be easy and the ride will be even rougher if we keep postponing the structural reforms needed.

Secondly, while I agree with Eberhard’s analysis that we will not have binding CO2 targets and we should concentrate on the big sector solutions, I miss in his proposal a frank reflection on what these sector proposals will mean for prices of electricity, driving, food etc. Politicians will need to have the courage to tell their citizens that the era of cheap electricity, cheap car petrol, cheap flights and holidays is over and finished. Will our political systems be resilient and visionary enough to deliver such messages and the required political action? Or will we have to wait until economic and ecological collapse will force sustainability upon us? And what will be the cost of such a forced transition to sustainable development which respects the one-planet limits of our future lifestyles?

The following article is a long guest post by Eberhard Rhein, Senior Analyst at the European Policy Centre. Eberhard looks at the challenges for the EU in the area of international cooperation on climate change. I will publish my own reaction to Eberhard’s interesting contribution tomorrow.

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1. By 2020 the EU will account for only 10 percent of global greenhouse emissions. Whatever efforts it may undertake internally to reduce emissions, their impact on the global climate will be next to negligible.

2. It is naïve to believe that the EU may have an exemplary function for the rest of the world when it comes to concrete policy actions. The EU approach is too complex for the vast majority of countries, few of which have the political, legal and above all administrative means to adopt the EU toolbox.

3. Of course, it is politically essential for the EU to play a leading role in international climate policy. Without its drive the Kyoto Protocol would never have seen the day. But the Kyoto Protocol also shows the limits of EU action: its reductions of C02 emissions have been more than compensated by the ultra-rapid rise of emissions from emerging countries, in particular China, which did not have to take any commitments under Kyoto.

4. It is therefore vital for the EU to pursue a dual-track strategy:

· Approve its domestic framework for climate action, for which the corner stones have been laid out in March 2007 and January 2008.

· Prepare the outline of an effective global climate strategy.

The Commission should urgently form a task force for the second mission. It is strategically by far the more important one, on which the EU clearly needs much further thought. Of course, it is not up to the EU to play the saviour of humanity, but without a crystal-clear concept of where humanity should go in the coming 10-20 years, the EU runs the risk of ending in the maelstrom of UN bureaucracy and powerful forces trying to thwart necessary global action.

It is with a strategic global concept in mind that the EU should intensify its consultations with the major players during 2008 and 2009, even before the details of its own policy will be formally agreed in early 2009.

5. Time is terribly short for concluding the Bali talks. We are only 19 months away from early December 2009, when the international community is supposed to approve the main elements of the global climate policy for 2013-2020 and beyond.

Past experience in the EU and UN underscores the extreme difficulty of arriving at effective solutions without careful preparation among the main players. There is no hope for an effective outcome on global policy without the EU, US, China, Russia and Japan having reached a prior consensus on the main elements of a comprehensive solution.

6. So far, the substantive issues of the future global climate deal have hardly been discussed. The Bali Road map and action plan are nothing but a procedural note, in typical UN style.

There is no serious comprehensive issue paper on the table; everybody seems afraid of openly addressing the issues and their optimal solutions. The world can hardly wait until a few weeks before Copenhagen to address them.

7. The annex (hereunder) sets out a few unconventional ideas of how to arrive at a successful conclusion in Copenhagen. They have no other purpose but to stimulate thinking on alternative paths.

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A five –point global climate strategy 2013-30

It will be next to impossible to agree on binding C02 emissions targets for the major emitter countries.

There is no point either losing much time on global climate targets for 2050, however useful they may be as political objectives.

In order to make practical advances the international community has to focus on concrete measures that can produce rapid and verifiable results.

To that end the international community should concentrate its efforts on the main sources of emissions and agree on five-point programme concerning:

• Power generation
• Automobile transport
• Deforestation
• Fossil subsidies
• Gasoline/fuel taxes

1. Phase out C02 emissions from electricity generation by 2030

The main emitter countries should commit themselves to phasing out C02 emissions from power generation by 2030.

They should negotiate an appropriate protocol, which would become an integral part of the Legal Acts of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

Participating countries would have to require new power plants to respect zero C02 emissions, say as of 2012, and set deadlines for retrofitting existing ones, latest by 2030.

It is possible to achieve C02-emission free power generation with presently available technologies, though at higher electricity rates than a present. Assuming electricity rates to rise by another 100 percent during the next 20 years, because of rising oil, gas and coal prices, the investments should still pay off.

Participants should be free to choose the most appropriate technologies and policy tools for phasing out their C02 emissions: hydro, geothermal, wind, solar, nuclear, carbon sequestration, waves or tides.

Emerging countries like China and India with huge capacities of coal-fired power plants might obtain an extension until 2035 for phasing out.

The impact of such a deal would be huge, essentially through anticipation.

• Power producers will have to revise their long-term planning;
• Research activity will get a big boost, everybody groping for the most efficient ways to generate C02-free power;
• Rising power prices will induce an investment wave into more energy-efficient appliances, machinery, cooling and heating equipment;
• The automobile industry will accelerate the development of electric engines that are bound to replace the combustion engine. This will pave the way to a “green” global automobile park.

Compliance will be easy to monitor.

Financing should not be a problem. There is plenty of international capital around to invest in cross-border power ventures.

The approach does not raise the issue of international competitiveness.

Electricity is not traded internationally, and all major power companies, being subject to identical constraints, will easily be able to pass their rising power costs on to manufacturing industries, services and households.

Higher power prices are not an argument for emerging countries to refuse participation in such an agreement. Power accounts only for a small percentage of manufacturing costs and everybody will gain from the higher energy- efficiency resulting from of higher power rates.

2. Set Stricter global fuel – efficiency standards for 2025

For the automobile industry a similar approach is conceivable.

The major countries with a sizeable automobile industry should undertake a concerted effort to adopt increasingly stricter C02 emission/fuel-efficiency standards.

All major producer countries are involved in such an effort. Some like the USA and China have passed appropriate legislation. What is required is to make these standards progressively more stringent. Thus the recent US legislation provides for mild standards compared to current EU proposals, and which would only be applicable as of 2018 (EU 2012).

The participating countries should negotiate a binding protocol that sets ambitious standards at the horizon of 2025, say of 80 g C02 emission/km, in view of providing the industry with energy - efficiency objective that would guide its R&D efforts.

The impact of fuel efficiency standards is bound to be slow, as it only affects new cars. It will take at least 10 years before new standards will become universally applicable.

That is why long term guidance to the industry is necessary. Companies need a long adjustment time.

Such a Protocol should also become an integral part of the Legal Acts of the Copenhagen Climate Conference.

3. Stop Deforestation by 2012

Deforestation of tropical forests accounts for about 25 percent of C02 emissions. It is therefore essential to stop deforestation at the earliest date possible.

In the past, national efforts to contain illegal logging and clearing of forest areas have failed for a series of reasons: lack of monitoring and effective policing, corruption, and criminal forest fires etc.

It is therefore essential to tackle the causes for deforestation and provide strong incentives to abstain from additional clearing of tropical forest areas.

To that end the international community should envisage the following measures, which should form part of a binding protocol to be negotiated between the interested parties:

• The main tropical forest countries – Brazil, Indonesia, Congo etc. – should commit themselves to put a ban on clearing of forest areas;
• The international community should fight illegal trade with tropical timber, as it has successfully done with ivory;
• The international community should compensate tropical forest countries for their preservation efforts. Compensation should be calculated in terms of “saved C02 emissions”. Depending on the future market prices of C02 emissions, the compensation is likely to run into several billion USD per year;
• The main importing countries – China, USA and EU - should suspend the import of all tropical timber, until the protocol will be fully effective.

This will be a hard nut to crack! The UN has tried to tackle it, but got lost in details and failed to establish the financial link with the “saved C02 emissions”.

It is essential to come up with courageous and effective measures.

4. Phase out consumer subsidies on fossil fuels by 2015

Subsidies on fossil fuels are still very common, especially in oil/gas producing countries. By keeping the domestic prices below world market prices governments encourage energy waste and boost C02 emissions. Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia have unduly high levels of per capita emissions, due to heavy consumer subsidies.

It is therefore urgent to put an end to this practice, which might account for up to 3 percent of global C02 emissions.

To that end, the UN should undertake the following actions:

• Establish a comprehensive list of all direct and indirect consumer subsidies of fossil energy;
• Estimate their impact on global C02 emissions;
• Propose a rapid time frame for phasing them out as part of the future climate policy framework;
• Negotiate an appropriate legal instrument with the countries concerned;Establish an effective monitoring mechanism.

5. Impose minimum excise taxes on fossil fuels

Per capita C02 emissions in the EU are less than half of those in the USA, essentially because the EU imposes high taxes on fossil fuels, in particular gasoline and diesel.

Excise taxes constitute an effective tool for fighting energy waste and high green house gas emissions. They should therefore be part of the Copenhagen agenda.

All countries should tax gasoline, diesel and kerosene by at least 25-30% of retail prices. In the EU the share of taxes is around 65%!

The EU should propose an international protocol –as part of the Copenhagen package – under which governments commit themselves to introduce appropriate legislation before 2015. The UN should monitor the implementation, publish an annual survey of these taxes and convene an annual meeting of “peer review”.

The inclusion of kerosene in this package would constitute a major contribution to reduction of C02 emissions by air traffic, without requiring the negotiation of a separate international protocol.

Conclusions

This 5-point climate action plan offers an optimal guarantee for a substantial reduction of global C02 emissions by 2030, say 40 percent compared to 2010, through its inclusion of the main emitter countries and its focus on the main sources of global C02 emissions.

It has the advantage of being easily to monitor.

Of course, this draft action plan will have to be fine-tuned to take into account objections from different corners.

A few interesting stories caught my eye over the Easter weekend (which was pretty Xmas-like here in Brussels with snow and winter-like temperatures):

• At the end of last week, the International Herald Tribune reported about a few older “young boys” on some exotic island “plotting to save the planet”, but only if they could make some big bucks out of the operation. Made me think of “Lord of the Flies”. Maybe these guys should be called “Lords of the Lies”?
• The Wall Street Journal is one of my favourite newspaper, not so much because I agree with their ideology, but because of the quality of their writing and reporting. To my great amazement its 24 March edition has two excellent pieces on limits to growth, Malthus and our natural resources and population explosion predicament. The first article is called “New Limits to Growth”Revive Malthusian Fears“; the second is a discussion between two eminent scientist under the title “Could Resources Become A Limit to Global Growth?“. Must-read stuff for anyone interested in the climate-energy debate.
• The last item for today is another thought-provoking scientific piece written by US climate expert James Hansen. In the article, Hansen questions the wisdom of the 450 ppm (2° celcius) target set by the scientific community and the European Union as the maximum acceptible level of global warming. “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [where we are now - WDB] to at most 350 ppm”, says Hansen.

• In the Guardian, George Monbiot calls carbon capture and storage “another great green scam”. “Like biofuels and micro wind turbines, carbon capture and storage turns out to be another great green scam. It will come too late to prevent runaway climate change; the government has no intention of enforcing it; and even if it had, the technique is likely to boost our carbon emissions“.
• The US now has its own Stern report. An analysis of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act (the leading climate proposal in the Congress)  indicates that the measures foreseen in the proposed legislation would not harm the US economy. But prices for gasoline and electricity would go up seriously. However, the Bush administration tried to keep the release of this report as silent as possible.