Climate politics – Page 140

The answer, my friend…

Some encouraging facts and figures are provided in an interview with the CEO of the European Wind Energy Association, Christian Kjaer, by Yale Environment 360. For the past two years 40 per cent of all new electricity generating capacity in Europe came from wind turbines. (Add solar and other renewables and that rises to 63 per cent.) From Spain to Sweden so many new turbines are being erected that Europe is on target to produce 15 per cent of its electricity from wind by 2020 and 50 per cent by 2050.

Kjaer puts the emergence of wind as Europe’s leading form of green energy down to a combination of government policies, entrepreneurial vision, and public support. Carrots and sticks are involved. The European Union provides tax credits, financial incentives, and priority access for renewable energy to the electricity grid to encourage the growth of wind, solar and other forms or renewables. The stick is the requirement that member states set renewable energy targets or face the possibility of being sued.

The result is that increasingly as plants fired by coal and natural gas reach the end of their lives they are being replaced by wind and solar power. The economic benefits of the transition are clear, with nearly 200,000 people currently employed in European wind power, rising to an estimated 450,000 by 2020. Kjaer has no doubt that green energy is an engine of job creation.

He thinks the early start that Europe gained in wind power, particularly in Spain and Germany and Denmark, gives them an advantage in the new industry and means they are reaping commercial benefits in terms of wind turbine manufacturing and activity further down the supply line. The high quality manufacturing sector, strongly supported by governments, should see Europe retaining an edge over the intensifying competition from Asian countries. “The winners of tomorrow’s energy wars,” he says, “are going to be those who understand how to develop new technology, deploy new technology and get the benefits of exporting that technology to the rest of the world.”

He speaks of the need for Europe to make a serious effort in terms of changing the way they operate their grids, and to move more quickly to develop an offshore grid for utilizing the offshore wind energy. Politicians need to give attention to optimizing and expanding the grid infrastructure to accommodate a larger amount of variable wind power in the system, and also other renewables.

“One of the main reasons for the strong political support for a supergrid is also that we want to create an internal [European] market for electricity, which of course, in the end, should give consumers the most affordable electricity. That’s the whole idea about the internal market, is that it would create the free movement over borders of goods, services, and in this case electricity at the lowest cost. And in order to create an internal market for electricity you need the infrastructure, just as you need roads to move goods around the European Union.”

Concerning policies required for a robust industry Kjaer speaks first of stable long-term frameworks for investing in renewables. Stable frameworks help the European industry by contrast with the US where the framework is unable to be predicted more than one or two years ahead. This means the US is not reaping the job creation benefits of wind energy; a lot of manufacturing has to be imported since no one’s going to invest in a factory in the United States if they don’t know how the market looks beyond the next two years.

As an aside, a news item today reported US steelworkers complaining that in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels China is breaking WTO rules by an array of subsidies, tax credits, cut-rate loans, and other policies that give Chinese companies a strong competitive advantage over foreign firms. If Kjaer is right they might do better to complain of their own government’s failure to support green energy development ahead of the fossil fuel industry which is still favoured by extensive subsidies.

To return to Europe. Kjaer identifies three elements in the stable framework Europe is providing for renewable energy. Financial support such as tax credit is one. Access to the grid is another:

“And what European legislation does, it mandated all 27 member states to give priority access to wind energy, which means that if you have a wind farm and a gas plant, and they’re planned projects, the wind energy should be connected first. And also, if you have plants operating on the system, electricity from the renewables plant gets fed into the grid first.”

The third element is more straightforward administrative procedures. Kjaer spoke of hopes of streamlining what in some European countries are extremely tortuous permission processes.

Asked about public opposition to the expansion of wind turbines, he acknowledged it was an issue, more so in some countries than others. Onshore turbines in the UK are particularly difficult.

“But it’s my feeling that the concern from locals is biggest in the beginning of a new market taking off. So the first thousand megawatts are much more difficult to install than the next thousand megawatts. Because people get used to them, they understand that they don’t make noise anymore — the turbines twenty years ago made quite a lot of noise, today you can’t hear them, almost, if you’re more than two hundred meters away.”

Asked whether 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050 was possible Kjaer explained why he thinks it is:

“Almost two-thirds of our new capacity is from renewables. That figure was about 20 per cent in the year 2000. So in nine years we’ve gone from 20 per cent to 62 — by 2020 of course we can get to 100 per cent of new capacity. And if we can get in 2020 to a situation where all new capacity is renewables, then we will, by definition almost, have 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050 because all the other power plants will be taken off [line].”

Infrastructure is the absolute key:

“ – we need to build an infrastructure that is different. But, again, our infrastructure in Europe is aging – we haven’t been building power lines since the ‘60s or ‘70s. It needs to be replaced anyway. So we need to make sure that the infrastructure is changed in a way that it accommodates 100 per cent renewable electricity by 2050.”

While I was preparing this post a newsletter coincidentally arrived from the New Zealand Wind Energy Association, welcoming the Government’s continued commitment to its target of 90 per cent renewable electricity by 2025 in the draft New Zealand Energy Strategy and affirming the part that wind generation is able to play.

“In New Zealand, wind generation has increased 10-fold since 2003, helping lift total renewable generation to recent highs of over 70%. With four wind farms currently under construction, together with other new and planned renewable projects, New Zealand is making progress towards the 90% target and the rewards that it brings to the economy and the environment.”

It points to the economic advantage of globally competitive electricity prices that will accrue to New Zealand in the development of its ample renewable energy resources.

“Electricity prices have increased significantly in recent years on the back of rising natural gas prices. Increasing use of renewables such as wind energy, which has no fuel or carbon emissions costs, is helping to check these rising prices.”

There’s a note of understandable exasperation in a section of the newsletter addressing the misinformation barrier which it says is bizarrely making it easier to obtain resource consent for new thermal generation than for renewable generation.

Such misinformation as this:

“In the last few months we’ve seen claims that a proposed wind farm won’t generate the amount of electricity that the developer estimates because wind generation varies with the wind. Such claims overlook that developers’ calculations already take the variable nature of wind generation into account. Developers usually identify both the installed generating capacity of the project in megawatts (or MW) and the total amount of electricity that they expect the project to generate in a year in gigawatt-hours (GWh). This estimate of generation takes into account the wind conditions at the site and that varying wind conditions affect generation.”

The newsletter points out that wind is proving itself in New Zealand on its own merits. (I would add, in spite of the unfair advantages enjoyed by fossil fuels which are only just beginning to have a modest price put on them.) Unlike other countries, New Zealand wind farms are not subsidised. A wind farm will be built here only when it can generate electricity at a cost that is competitive with other forms of generation.

The NZ wind resource is very strong by comparison with other parts of the world where wind farms are being installed. Our wind farms generate almost twice as much electricity per installed megawatt of capacity as the international average.

In response to the claim that new thermal generation is required as back up for new wind farms the newsletter responds that our existing hydro base is sufficient to balance about 2000MW of wind capacity without adding significantly to the price of electricity. Current wind energy capacity sits just under 500MW, so there’s obviously some distance to go before back up becomes a serious concern.

It’s the view of the newsletter that the considerable range of research and practical experience available regarding wind energy after more than 10 years operation in NZ and more than 20 years overseas reveals that many of the claims commonly heard in denigration of wind energy do not stand up to scrutiny.

So, this evidence from Europe and New Zealand, along with that from the US and from China among others, demonstrates that in spite of all its detractors wind generation is advancing rapidly. It’s heartening to see that there are governments prepared to offer the financial and policy support that it needs. Some point sneeringly to that and utter the dirty word ‘subsidies’. In a market place which doesn’t price the environmental costs of fossil fuels there is currently no other way of putting renewables on an equal footing. In any case the imperative to phase out emissions means that we must pay what it costs to do so, just as, for example, we are preparing to pay the costs of repairing the earthquake damage in Canterbury. There are some expenditures which can’t be avoided. Would that our Draft Energy Strategy would recognise that.

Paint it bleak

I paint about what life will be like when climate change gets worse¦

That’s just what I do. That’s my message to the world.

Those words were written by a young man whose exhibition of paintings is currently showing at a gallery in my home city Hamilton. I was impressed by both the paintings and the brief words which accompanied them and thought them well worth sharing with Hot Topic readers.

Yaniv Janson is only 18 but his painting has already received considerable recognition. Born with Asperger’s syndrome he has certainly found communication through his art. And he makes it very clear that he wants it to serve a social purpose. His website carries the heading Raising Awareness About Climate Change Through Art.

Continue reading “Paint it bleak”

McKibben’s long and winding road

“We will keep fighting” vowed Bill McKibben at the end of his book Eaarth. Today in an article on Yale Environment 360 he gives a promising account of what that might involve. He writes from a road trip to Washington, D.C., towing a solar hot water heating panel from the roof of the Carter White House. Jimmy Carter put it there in 1979, declaring it would still be heating water in 2000. It wasn’t, because Ronald Reagan promptly took the panels down, an action symbolic, McKibben comments, “of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits.”

The panels were salvaged by Unity College in Maine and put up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. McKibben and his associates are headed for the White House with one of the Maine panels, and with a promise from the U.S. company Sungevity that it will supply all the brand-new panels the president could ever want – as long as he puts them up on his roof where everyone can see them.

Continue reading “McKibben’s long and winding road”

The “inconsistencies” of Chris de Freitas

Auckland University associate professor Chris de Freitas (yes, that one) is a favourite of the NZ Herald opinion editor, regularly popping up in the paper to argue a sceptic line on climate change or, as has happened a couple of times recently, to talk about responses to earthquake disasters. Quite why the paper would go to CdF for the latter when there are many other better-qualified academics who could address the issue remains to be seen, but his article in response to the Canterbury quake in yesterday’s Herald was interesting. Compare and contrast CdF, 6/9/2010:

The focus on earthquake-disaster planning and crisis management is on risk reduction, readiness, response and recovery. In this context, government and local authorities have the responsibility to minimise social vulnerability and have a duty to promote community resilience through enlightened planning.

… with CdF, 1/5/09:

No one knows for sure what the future holds, but there are some good clues as to what’s going on. It hinges on growing evidence that natural influences on climate are in fact stronger than any man-made greenhouse effect. It may be premature to discard our anxiety over the threat of possible human-caused global warming, but this anxiety should not be based on ignorance of what science can tell us.

So for earthquake hazards, de Freitas is happy to argue for risk minimisation despite imperfect knowledge of the size of the risk (his piece looks into failed attempts to predict quakes), but when it comes to climate issues his argument is we shouldn’t do much because we don’t know enough!

Another example of the remarkable intellectual flexibility we have come to expect from the scientific advisor to NZ’s Climate “Science” Coalition. Or perhaps it’s simple hypocrisy. You decide…

The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice

Addressing climate change will require citizens of wealthy consumer societies to sacrifice. But that’s never going to happen. We’ve all heard statements like that, indeed we’ve probably muttered them to ourselves. Michael Maniates and John Meyer place the words at the beginning of their book The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice. They and their ten fellow-contributors examine exhaustively what they describe as “the political stickiness of sacrifice-talk” to see if there are more hopeful options than the stark contradiction of that opening statement.

In fact, as several of the writers point out, there is a normalcy to sacrifice which is part of many people’s lives. It may be mingled with self-interest, but the sacrifices we make for children, for causes we care about, perhaps for our careers, are essential to making our lives meaningful and pleasurable, and for the most part are recognised and welcomed as such. That kind of sacrifice becomes ingrained in who we are and doesn’t feel like sacrifice. It is not heroic, but sacrifice needn’t be restricted to the exceptional undertaking that cannot be expected of ordinary people. The book doesn’t argue for sacrifice on a superhuman scale for the sake of the environment. Its discussions of the word are nuanced and show a preference for the normalisation of environmental sacrifice whereby it becomes part of the price we willingly pay for the welfare of future generations and the Earth they will inhabit.

Paul Wapner examines the upbeat notion that tackling climate change is a call to embrace new green opportunities rather than be concerned about sacrifice. “Promethean” environmentalism he calls it. But he prefers to keep the sacrifice word in environmental discourse and points to writers like McKibben who see environmental sacrifice not as a matter of reduction but rather enlargement. Environmentalism takes Others into consideration by realising that we are not the centre of the universe, and in doing so it is not a politics of less but one of inestimable more. Sacrifice is not a deprivation, but a provision – it involves feeding our moral selves. Karen Liftin in her chapter on the sacred and profane, as she argues for an affirmative politics of sacrifice in an ecologically full world quotes the Indian nationalist and mystic Sri Aurobindo:

“The acceptance of the law of sacrifice is a practical recognition by the ego that it is neither alone in the world nor chief in the world…The true essence of sacrifice is not self-immolation, it is self-giving; its object is not self-effacement, not self-fulfilment; its method not self-mortification, but a greater life.”

There are strong currents in modern affluent society which make this kind of perception difficult. Thomas Princen looks closely at the beguiling concept of consumer sovereignty. There’s a grand entitlement to consumption. The good life centres on goods, not on relations, not on service, not on citizenship. It leads to a society supremely organised to absolve individuals of responsibility, whether as consumers, producers, investors, or rule makers. Sacrifice is depreciated and rejected. But in fact much is sacrificed to maintain such a society, in costs and trade-offs, social and environmental problems which are rendered covert and hidden.

“… the hedonistic, growth-manic, cost-displacing consumer economy must give way to a purposeful economy, an economy premised on principles of positive sacrifice, of giving (along with receiving), of sufficiency and good work and participatory citizenship. The sovereign consumer must be dethroned; sacrifice must be elevated, restored to its proper, ‘make sacred’ pedestal.”

Sometimes the built environment makes sacrifice for the environment difficult. Peter Cannavό looks at the development of suburbia in America and the way in which its original pastoral civic republicanism has been lost, especially in the closed, often gated, communities of the post World War II outer suburban expansion. The very form of sprawling suburbia mandates unrestrained consumption, privatism, and exclusivity. The automobile becomes what Lewis Mumford called “a compulsory and inescapable condition of suburban existence”. Zoning laws decree low-density development. Shopping is removed from neighbourhood and town. People are increasingly isolated in their cars and homes. Cannavό looks at ways in which suburbia could be reconstructed to become greener, more moderate and civic and sustainable, and expresses the hope that suburbanites will be willing to sacrifice what they have now in favour of what he sees as a return to suburbia’s republican roots.

Justin Williams provides an interesting essay on the difficulties placed in the way of bicycling as a contribution to environmental sustainability. He observes that there is little meaningful freedom, in America at least, to make choices about transport modes and hence it is difficult for sacrifice to enter the rhetorical field. Structural decisions, particularly those associated with suburban development, have placed cars at the centre and turned streets from social gathering places into means of transport between two distant places, home and work. The obstacles these developments place in the way of cyclists are formidable, paramount among them the distances that need to be travelled, the dearth of facilities such as adequate routes and parking, and the threats posed to personal safety by cycling among cars. Nevertheless a combination of carrots and sticks in cities such as Portland and Chicago in the US and in a country such as the Netherlands has made cycling a more genuine option. He argues that the promotion of cycling at automobility’s expense is democratic because automobility is not an expression of freedom but merely the structurally “obvious” choice, given the constraints placed on alternatives, and because the freedom to cycle is limited by current automobile infrastructure. I warmed to his advocacy. I have taken to cycling myself in my later years and often observe myself reduced to pathetic gratitude for very minor provisions for cyclists in my own city.

Can academics refining the concept of environmental sacrifice dent the prevailing perception, often vehemently expressed in the hurly burly of every day politics, that it’s almost an affront to expect wealthy consumer societies to make sacrifices? Sometimes it can seem an insuperable task. But I liked the idea of doggedness to which the editors give voice in their conclusion. They quote Frances Moore Lappé: “keep asking ‘why?’”. They urge students, activists, scholars and citizens to ask, and keep asking, why sacrifice should be pushed to the margins, why narrow assumptions about the capacity and willingness of humans to sacrifice should prevail, why leaders remain reluctant to call on our ability to sacrifice on behalf of public aims. That’s the first challenge. Four others follow: developing awareness of the many rich ways in which sacrifice infuses daily life; shaping environmental politics to cultivate the capacity for sacrifice or at least to make it part of the discussion; identifying and studying illustrative examples where sacrifice is made for distant benefits; engaging in a nuanced way with the rhetorical power of sacrifice, a word perilous in public debate but not therefore to be shunned.

The book is a thoughtful and lively contribution to an issue which gathers importance and urgency as the years of climate inaction continue to accumulate. There is still hope we will choose the democratic sacrifice which the book advances. If we spurn it we are likely to have sacrifice forced on us by the passage of events.

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