Category: Climate business

The electric Kim Hill

X1-front-34-high.jpg Kim Hill’s Saturday Morning show on Radio NZ National is required listening in our house, and this morning she had a most interesting discussion with Ian Wright, a New Zealander who was involved in the early days of Tesla Motors, and who is now running his own EV start up – Wrightspeed. Here’s what he’s up to:

The X1 prototype is just the beginning. It meets its design specs of 0-60 in 3 seconds, 170 mpg equivalent; and at 1536 lbs, is only 36 lbs over the design target of 1500. It really does raise the performance driving experience to a new level, even for racing drivers. No clutch, no shifting, precise and immediate control of torque in drive and braking, perfect traction control…first gear takes you to 112mph…

If you want a glimpse of the future of transport, go get the podcast.

The midweek omnibus: #37 (Putney to Peckham)

There’s been some good news, and not too much bad news. Let’s start with some good NZ news.

  • The Hillary Institute of International Leadership, launched in Antarctica a year ago with Sir Ed in attendance, has announced that “Leadership in….Climate Change Solutions will be the topic for the Institute’s first four year work-cycle, 2008-2012.” The Institute will appoint annual Hillary Laureates who will give public lectures in the US and NZ (the first in Christchurch in June), and a major award, to be called the Hillary Step, in 2012. There will be substantial cash awards – they’re aiming for $1 million by 2012. Good interview on Radio Nz National earlier this week (scroll to 18:46) with an Institute spokesman. Meanwhile Helen Clark won an United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) Champions of the Earth award, which recognises individuals from each region of the world who have shown “extraordinary” leadership on environmental issues. The cynic in me comments that if wishes (and good words) were horses, she’d be riding a virtual Melbourne Cup winner. Unfortunately, in the real world she’s stuck on My Little Pony.
  • Christchurch Airport has achieved carbon neutrality through Landcare Research’s CarbonZero programme, making it the second in the world to do so (behind one in Sweden). Good marketing, at the very least, though it would be better if the international tourists arriving were as well offset.
  • Mass market electric vehicles take a step closer with announcement of a deal between Project Better Place, Renault-Nissan and the Israeli government. “The Israeli government would provide tax incentives to customers, Renault would supply the electric vehicles, and Project Better Place would construct and operate an Electric Recharge Grid across the entire country. Electric vehicles will be available for customers in 2011.” According to the launch press release, the scheme will use an “innovative business model” where drivers will not have own a battery, but will subscribe to the service on the basis of kilometers driven. This (and the tax incentives) will presumably keep the cost of the cars down. Over to Meridian… (Hat-tip: Joe Romm at Climate Progress). Meanwhile, Tesla are promising to (finally) deliver the first of their electric sportscars in March.
  • The EU has announced its climate plan, designed to reduce European emissions by 20% by 2020 [Economist, New Scientist, Guardian], and there will undoubtedly be a lot of fighting over how individual countries targets have been allocated. Meanwhile, the US has warned the EU not to use climate policy as a trade barrier, and the EU has warned the US that if it has no climate policy its products will face tariffs.
  • Technology Review has more on the Australian hybrid battery being successfully tested, and the BBC had a reporter on the Beluga as it began its transatlantic voyage to test the SkySail kite system.
  • Gar Lipow has made the full text of his book No Hair Shirt Solutions to Global Warming available as a free download [PDF]. I’m looking forward to reading it.
  • The BBC has done a couple of good pieces on king tides in Tuvalu and sea level rise, and The Economist finds encouraging signs of the success of eco-labelling (especially of sustainably harvested fish).
  • More wind farms on the way: Meridian has announced it intends to proceed with a 31 turbine installation in Wellington’s Ohariu valley – the $420 million Makara development. Meanwhile the Herald prints poet Brian Turner’s thoughts on the impact of wind farms on the NZ landscape. I don’t necessarily agree with his take on wind energy, but it’s hard to disagree with his conclusion: “Our oft-warbled claims to be ahead of the game and clean and green are no more than self-congratulatory chitter. Sort out what you think our legacy ought to be, people, and stand up for it before it’s too late.”
  • Finally, Weather Channel senior meteorologist Stu Ostro continues his analysis of weather developments in the northern hemisphere, and how they could be (or already are) are sign of the impact of rapid climate change. Well worth a read if you are in the slightest weather literate, and worrying for those who are. And lest we relax, scientists at the University of Colorado at Boulder report that the ice cap on Baffin Island in the far north of Canada has reduced in size by at least half over the last 50 years.

Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.

There’s another Hot Topic on the bookshelves – not in NZ, but in the UK. Sir David King, the sometimes controversial scientific adviser to Tony Blair has (with Gabrielle Walker) penned The Hot Topic: How to Tackle Global Warming and Still Keep the Lights On. Reviews in The Times and The Guardian. It will no doubt make its way over here eventually.

[Much more below the fold]

Continue reading “Another Hot Topic, skiing’s future, batteries, kites, u.s.w.”

Blues from an airplane

Two Otago University physicists, Inga Smith and Craig Rodger, have calculated the CO2 equivalent emissions generated by international tourist visits to NZ, and find that in 2005 the return flights accounted for almost 8 million tonnes of CO2e – about the same as emissions by the country’s entire power sector – around 10 percent of total NZ emissions. They then calculated what it would take to offset those emissions in NZ, and found that most approaches were either not feasible or too expensive. Not suprisingly, this has got quite a few people in a tizzy (Herald & Herald, NBR, Stuff, NZ News UK), because if international travellers begin to worry about their carbon footprints, then 20 percent of our export earnings are at risk.

This is not news. I drew attention to this vulnerability in Hot Topic. Air New Zealand has been very keen to establish its green credentials by working with Boeing on biofuels for avation, and looking at offset schemes in the conservation estate with DOC. In fact the whole tourism sector has seen this coming for some time. What’s interesting is the numbers, and I won’t be commenting on those until I’ve had a chance to see the paper. There are a lot of open questions, too, about how to approach offsetting our tourism business. The authors appear to assume that this should all be done in NZ, and therefore make Helen Clark’s “carbon neutral country” ambition harder to achieve – in fact the NBR (and David Farrar) seem keen to spin this as a government policy problem. The NBR’s intro (above an otherwise fine story) is particularly egregious:

New Zealand’s adoption of a carbon neutrality policy, and the world’s toughest emission reduction targets, will have a disastrous effect on its biggest foreign exchange earner, tourism, and there are no solutions in sight, university experts say.

Now I don’t think that’s what Smith & Rodger were saying at all, but I’ll wait until I see the paper…

There are lots of things to consider. First, the global aviation industry is working on its own emissions regulation framework in part to try and forestall the sort of mandatory scheme threatened by Europe, and as a PR exercise to keep valuable long distance travellers flying. So airlines are likely to be looking at an international offset scheme. Within that, there will have to be some rules about where the emissions generated by travelling are accounted for. All incoming flights in the destination nation, perhaps? Not good news for NZ because of the length of our flights, but there’s nothing to say that the offsets have to be created in that country. Officials looking at ways of achieving Helen Clark’s carbon neutral ambition are already considering that it might be achieved by buying reductions in other countries. And if that’s the cheapest way to do it, why not?

But the fact remains that tourism in NZ is exquisitely vulnerable to consumer perceptions in our prime markets. If long distance flights become uncool, business here will suffer. Like the food miles issue, this is not something we can dodge – it has to be confronted head on. It’s not a problem of the government’s making, but it is one this government (and the next one) will have to help with.

Clearing the decks #2

Time to catch up with some climate stuff that I’ve accumulated over the last couple of weeks.

  • Auckland lawyers Lowndes Associates have become the first legal firm in NZ to achieve CarbonZero certification – which means that they’ve taken steps to measure their carbon emissions, actively reduce them, and then have bought credible offsets to cover the rest.
  • The first hints of NIWA’s new regional climate projections are beginning to emerge. By the end of the century, Southland could be as warm as today’s Bay Of Plenty. And Jim Salinger, who first noticed that we were warming up, was given a good profile by the Herald.
  • A belated mention for the Be The Change campaign, a climate change awareness campaign that trundled up the country in a bus in the last couple of months of the year. As the SST reported: “From Bluff to Kerikeri, the Be The Change bus tour is a Greenpeace, Oxfam, and Forest and Bird campaign to get ordinary New Zealanders working to stop climate change.”
  • The NZ Stock Exchange’s carbon trading market, TZ1, is aiming for a mid-year launch, and has appointed former Vector CEO Mark Franklin to head up the operation.
  • The German developed SkySail system for sail-assisted shipping (as featured in HT) is about to get an extended sea trial on a voyage from Europe to Venezuela, Boston and back: “Under favorable wind conditions, the 160-square meter kite shaped like a paraglider is expected to reduce fuel costs by up to 20 percent or more ($1,600 per day) and cut, by a similarly significant amount, its carbon dioxide emissions.” [Yahoo News, Guardian [UK]] There’s lively discussion of the pros and cons over at Frogblog.
  • Some new science: another study confirms that IPCC sea level rise projections are conservative – pointing out that in the last interglacial levels rose by up to 1.6m per century. Work on the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum 55 million years ago, considered the best historical analogue for the present situation, confirms that initial warming caused massive carbon cycle feedbacks that boosted temperatures even further. In the Arctic, warming peaked at about +24C.
  • Some turn of the year roundups: Technology Review covers the year in energy and nanotech (good news for batteries), The Independent [UK] rounds up the climate news, New Scientist brings an earth science perspective, while NOAA presents a nice graphic of the year’s extreme weather events.
  • At Gristmill, Tom Athanasiou takes a perceptive look at the post-Bali world, and Joe Romm explores some of the latest thinking on what sort of target we should be aiming for. Bottom line: we may already be overshooting. And at the New York Times, Jared Diamond explains the collision between population growth and consumption growth. There’s a crunch coming.
  • Finally, NZine reviewed Hot Topic, and liked it: “I strongly recommend everyone to read this book, but especially recommend it to those who make decisions on action to counter the impact of global warming and those who are able to influence the thinking of others on this issue.”