Peter Nolan

Fossil fools

The Business published my dismissal of a recent BBC docu-drama on world oil running short: The BBC scrapes the bottom of the barrel

The main characters in this miniature drama-documentary are Americans. The unspoken message, unsubtly applied, appears to be that it’s the Yanks who are to blame. An overweight and badly-dressed couple, housewife Janie and her truck-driver husband, John, are shown trying to adapt as prices escalate from $85 to $160 dollars a barrel, and a society based on cheap oil comes under stress. First there are queues at petrol stations and then outright shortages. Food prices rise. John loses his job. With the SUV unaffordable, the couple eventually have to resort to wheeling their groceries home in a shopping trolley.

John is prone to all sorts of anti-social individualism. Besides driving a big, fuel-hungry 4x4, he is shown stealing from his employers, hoarding diesel, unwilling to offer lifts to neighbours and driving like a maniac. Eventually, he gets his comeuppance, being left bloodied and bruised after getting into a fist fight on a garage forecourt – an allegory for the Iraq war?

Their daughter, the pushy Jess, works as an oil company executive and lives in London, with her English husband Nick, who, presumably like Prime Minister Tony Blair, is bulldozed into submission by his American partner. Drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve, she despoils the Alaskan wilderness on behalf of her multinational employer. However, her search for “the world’s last giant oilfield” ultimately proves to be fruitless. The program also shows Venezuela’s governing left-wing and rabidly anti-US strongman Hugo Chavez still in power in 2016 – the one prediction in the program with which I feel comfortable.

 

Facts of the Earth #2

This looks like becoming a regular feature: This headline and the short summary, repeated in the FT on Saturday, caught my eye.  According to Friends of the Earth:

"The UK already languishes at the bottom of the EU renewable energy league table, with only Malta producing less renewable energy as a percentage of total energy consumption..."

They give Eurostat as the source for this claim, but no link or further details.  As far as I can tell, this seems to come from Eurostat's dataset for "Share of electricity from renewable energy to gross electricity consumption".  However, the data table, seems to show that for the last historic figures available, from 2004, seems to contradict this, showing that the UK had a higher share of renewables than Belgium, Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Luxembourg, Hungary, Malta and Poland, a total of nine other members of the EU25.  Shurely some mishtake?!?!?

The Eejitologist

I thought that the current Ecologist cover story on nuclear power was a bit funny.  Now some fact-checking comes in the unlikely form of a column by George Monbiot in today's Guardian. 

Last month's edition of The Ecologist magazine, for example, contends that 14m tonnes of concrete are required to build a nuclear power station, resulting in a massive release of carbon dioxide. Specifications are notoriously hard to come by, but I have managed to find the figures for Calder Hall A, opened in 1956. It used 72,500 cubic yards of concrete, which equates to 108,000 tonnes, or less than 1% of the Ecologist's estimate. 

Keep up the good work Zac.  You're obviously a great loss to the architectural profession.

The Facts of the Earth

Now, it's always possible that you can get a fact slightly wrong in print, but Oisin Coughlan seems to be presenting a somewhat less than accurate picture of the state of the Irish environment in his opinion piece in Thursday's Irish Times, reproduced here on the website of Friends of the Earth. 

He thinks that we need to have an environmentalist sitting at the negotiating table for the social partnership talks.  From being a friend of the earth, Oisin now seems to want to become the voice of the vegetation.

Unfortunately, the article exhibits a remarkable number of basic factual errors, making it apparent why the public should not trust either him or his organisation.  I think that it's high time we beef up the EPA to provide regular, comprehensive surveys of the state of the Irish environment and avoid this information pollution.  Oh, and I'm not impressed with the fact-checking at FoE, as I've written before. 

First, the claim that "Ireland is the most climate-polluting country in the world per person" is imprecise and is given without a source, which probably explains why it appears to be incorrect.  Data from the Millenium Indicators Database, published by the UN, show that for emissions of carbon dioxide emissions per head of population for 2002, Ireland is ranked 26th among reporting countries or fifth among the 25 current members of the EU[1].  Other sources, such as the Climate Analysis Indicators Tool, made available online by the World Resources Institute, a US NGO, show us emitting 11.1 tons of CO2 per person in 2002 [2].  This is the 20th highest in the world, but under the 11.4 tons averaged by the so-called Annex 1 countries that have made commitments to reduce emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.

Second, his statement that "our emissions are overshooting our Kyoto limit by a factor of two" is also inaccurate.  Emissions of greenhouse gases in 2004 totalled some 68.46 million tonnes CO2
equivalent according to the most recent National Inventory Report produced by the EPA [3, at page 2, para 5].  This was a rise of 23.1% over the 1990 level, but no matter how you calculate it, this does not represent double our target of some 63 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year [3, at page 3, para 3].

Third, Ireland is not "one of the more car-dependent countries in the world".  According to the government agency Sustainable Energy Ireland, in 2004, there were 391 private cars per head of population in Ireland; the British figure was 447 and the 491 for the EU-15
states.  [4]

More careful assessments of the state of the Irish environment show a different picture.  For example, Professor Peter Clinch at UCD reproduced data from the World Bank showing that Ireland has, after Singapore and Japan, the world's third most sustainable economy.

The global surveys carried out annually by Yale and Columbia Universities together with the European Commission, show Ireland with the ninth highest measure of sustainability among 133 countries
surveyed in a broad assessment of environmental policies [5]; All of those coming at or above Ireland's level in the survey are other prosperous, industrialised democracies, highlighting the fact that economic growth goes hand in hand with environmental sustainability.

[1] Statistics are online at
http://unstats.un.org/UNSD/mi/mi_indicator_xrxx.asp?ind_code=28
Series # 30248

[2] The calculator is available online at
http://cait.wri.org/cait.php?page=compcoun

[3] EPA, National Inventory Report, 2006
http://coe.epa.ie/ghg/nirs/NIR_2006_IE.pdf

[4] Energy in Ireland 1990-2004, available online at
http://www.sei.ie/index.asp?locID=70&docID=-1

[5] Yale/Columbia - Environmental Sustainability Index Homepage
http://sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/es/esi/

Full data
http://beta.sedac.ciesin.columbia.edu/es/epi/downloads/2006EPI_onlyEPIcountries.xls

Plane Mad

Brussels is thinking of shoe-horning air travel into the existing emissions trading system.  The ETS has been quite disorderly, with prices for emissions credits rocketing to 30 Euros a tonne earlier this year on cold weather and low rainfall restricting hydro power.  Then, when the member states published their emissions reports, prices collapsed to 10 Euros, as everybody came in comfortably underneath their generous targets.  This chaos is proving a nightmare for anybody who has to make any decisions on investment in power generation or industrial plant.  The system could end up continuing in this fashion, with everybody effectively ignoring it, like the Stability Pact did.  Or, given the political will, we could end up with an unstopable political determination to implement it, regardless of the economic logic - like the Euro.  In the latter case, prices would be upwards of 30 to 40 Euros, enough to add that amount to the cost of a single ticket from Dublin to Brussels: The era of cheap air flights would be over, by command of Brussels.  Some, like the British activist, journalist, pie-thrower and all-round sado-environmentalist Mark Lynas, writing in the New Statesman this month, aim explicity for this:

We could close every factory, lock away every car and turn off every light in the country, but it won't halt global warming if we carry on taking planes as often as we do. A voluntary no-flying movement offers the only hope.

As I wrote in the Sunday Times recently, I can't see Ireland benefiting, given our peripheral location, reliance on tourism and light industry and huge overseas communities moving in both directions.  What are we supposed to do, walk on water?  The cuts in emissions are likely to come at much less cost in sectors where the substitute technologies already exist. 

It is no surprise then that when Michael O’Leary, the chief executive of Ryanair, was asked what people who were concerned about climate change should do, he said: “Sell your car and walk.”

O’Leary is right. Those who are concerned about the environment should focus on power generation and land transport rather than aircraft.

The good news is that reducing emissions is commercially viable already in electricity generation with wind turbines.

At the same time, car manufacturers are developing hybrid petrol-electric engines that can go up to 1,000km on a single tank of petrol as does the Toyota Prius.

For the foreseeable future, however, nobody believes we are likely to see an aeroplane that uses a fuel other than jet kerosene, even on the drawing board.