Category Archives: Environmental Policy

Fracking Threatens to Fracture the Coalition

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Following increasing public disquiet about fracking, including the recent protests and direct action around the Sussex village of Balcombe, which saw the arrest of Green Party MP and former leader Caroline Lucas, cracks have started to appear in the coalition Government over energy policy.

Chancellor George Osborne has stated that he wants to “put Britain at the forefront of exploiting shale gas” and Prime Minister David Cameron, in an article for Lord Lawson’s climate-sceptic think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, wrote: “we cannot afford to miss out on fracking”
But this enthusiasm for shale gas demonstrated by the holders of the two top jobs is not shared by all members of the government.

Mark Durkan, Environment Minister for Northern Ireland, criticised this headlong rush to exploit shale gas reserves and made his position more cautious position clear: “The scientific evidence is far from being established. No fracking for Fermanagh, no fracking for Northern Ireland, as things stand.”
Meanwhile, a policy paper produced by the Liberal Democrats in advance of their forthcoming conference puts clear daylight between the party and their coalition partners on a range of energy-related issues, including shale, where the paper’s authors flatly contradict the Chancellor’s views, stating: “There is no realistic prospect of a ‘shale gas revolution’ in the UK.”

In a more measured assessment of the potential role of shale gas in the energy mix that is in marked contrast to the wild enthusiasm shown by senior Conservatives, the paper goes on to conclude: “There is value in promoting domestic production rather than imports, so Liberal Democrats would permit measured shale gas extraction, ensuring that regulations protecting water and land pollution and local environmental quality are strictly enforced at a national level. Planning permission decisions should remain with local authorities however, and local communities should be fully consulted over local extraction, and fully compensated for all damage to the local landscape.”

The debate about fracking, as with that over wind farms, has tended to focus on the local environmental impacts, real or perceived, rather than the big picture issues such as climate change and the effect these technologies will have on efforts to mitigate future rises in global temperatures.

Given that wind energy generation causes no carbon emissions and shale gas is a fossil fuel that emits over 500 kgs of CO2 for each megawatt-hour of electricity generated, a rational approach to policy-making in the light of the Government’s own decarbonisation targets would seem to be that there should be a presumption in favour of the former and against the latter before the local factors are considered. However, in marked contrast to the rushing out of Planning Practice Guidance that stresses that Local Authorities have a duty to make an assessment of all oil and gas resources in their areas the planning regime for onshore wind energy has recently been tightened

Here again, the Liberal Democrats paper on energy policy shows a clear difference in approach to the Conservatives: “Onshore wind, currently the cheapest renewable technology, could provide up to a fifth of UK electricity consumption. In public opinion surveys wind farms consistently attract support from around two-thirds of the public, but the 10 per cent or so who are consistently opposed are usually more vocal. Liberal Democrats would require onshore wind farms to help fund local energy efficiency measures, thus reducing householders’ energy bills. Liberal Democrats would support developers who seek punitive damages against councils who do not follow National Policy Guidelines in determining consents, for example, many (particularly Conservative) councils have adopted criteria (such as minimum separation distances from dwellings), in contravention of government planning policy.”

This claim of two-thirds public support reflects the findings of a poll conducted for The Guardian in 2012, which found that 66% of Britons were in favour of wind power and only 8% against. Indeed, a similar poll found that 60% of people would support a wind farm development within 5 miles of their home compared to 20% support for a new coal-fired power station and 14% for a nuclear power station.

Conversely, only 40% of the public support fracking in their local area with 40% saying they would oppose it.

Given that the scientific evidence on the negative impact of shale gas exploitation on efforts to curb climate change is clear, the industry’s record on localised environmental damage is far from blameless and the lack of support from the public despite efforts by the tabloid press to cast the Balcombe anti-fracking protestors as benefit scroungers and extremists who do not represent the views of the local community, it is not difficult to see why elements of the coalition government are rushing to distance themselves from their leader’s wholehearted support for the technology as a potential answer to Britain’s energy worries. We wait to see whether this will lead to a permanent split or another policy U-turn.

Dear Humanity, your account appears to be overdrawn…

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Yesterday, 20th August 2013, was Earth Overshoot Day, also known as Ecological Debt Day, the approximate point in the year when humanity’s resource use for the year exceeded the Earth’s capacity to regenerate those resources.

The date is an approximation but it has been moving steadily forward in the calendar since the phenomenon was first identified in the mid-1970s.

The financial analogy employed by many commentators is an apt one, particularly given the state of the gobal economy, even though world leaders are directing infinitely more time and resources at that than they are at the more pressing environmental credit crunch. Just as individuals and families were able to happily carry on increasing their consumption during the boom years, fuelled by a plentiful supply of readily available credit, so the economies of the developed world have continued to grow at an ever-inceasing rate, thanks to the ready availability of resources whose full cost we never stopped to calculate, let alone consider paying.

Eventually, however, the debt must be repaid and with interest.. The choice that we face is whether we will tighten our belts and find ways to live within our means or carry on regardless until the day that the bank, or the planet, calls in the loan.

Unfortunately, the UK’s government’s enthusiasm for technologies such as fracking to unlock the supposed shale gas boom, suggests that the lure of a short-term fix of shiny new stuff may onceagain triumph over sober restraint and delayed gratification.

Shale Gas Tax Breaks – Another Victory for Short-Term Thinking

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This article was first published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in July 2013

Last month Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne, has announced plans to give generous tax breaks to companies involved in exploiting the UK’s shale gas reserves .

The proposals, which the Government are now consulting on until 13th September 2013 include a reduction in the tax paid on shale gas revenues from 62% to 30%. These reductions are planned as part of “This new tax regime, which I want to make the most generous for shale in the world” said the Chancellor.

Osborne revealed his priorities and the thinking that lay behind the announcement when he added “I want Britain to be a leader of the shale gas revolution – because it has the potential to create thousands of jobs and keep energy bills low for millions of people.”

Now for a Government facing the task of getting itself re-elected following years of ‘austerity’ budgets and cuts to public services, you can see why a technology that offers the prospect of both higher employment and lower energy bills is appealing, which only serves to underline the difficulty that politicians face in dealing with issues such as climate change and resource depletion: to tackle these problems requires a dramatic shift in the ‘business as usual’ model that will undoubtedly cause short-term pain and only deliver benefits in the longer term. This is a proposition that is of no use at all if you operate on a 4-5 year electoral cycle, which means that the short-term pain will see you ejected from office long before the long-term gains are realised, even if these gains include avoiding catastrophic climate change that threatens the very continuation of civilisation as we know it.

It is interesting that most of the media coverage and the debate around shale gas exploitation has centred on the localised environmental concerns surrounding the ‘fracking’ process such as groundwater contamination and the potential of these operations to cause earth tremors. Matthew Roberts’ SBT article of 28th June 2013 addresses the US experience of these issues.

In the UK, the British Geological Survey has a programme of research into the possible groundwater and seismic implications of hydraulic fracturing, as ‘fracking’ is properly known. Of far more widespread, indeed global, concern are the effects of the shale gas boom on efforts to reduce CO2 emissions in order to tackle climate change.

Much has been made of the US experience that this new ‘dash for gas’ has led to a reduction in carbon emissions. A recent report by the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says that this may be an over-simplistic interpretation of what has happened. According to the report, US CO2 emissions from domestic energy have declined by 8.6% since their peak in 2005 – equivalent to an annual reduction of 1.4% per year, which still falls far short of the rate of decarbonisation required to keep global temperature increase below the generally accepted ‘safe-ish’ limit of 2 Degrees. Not all of this reduction can be attributed to shale gas but the part that any switch plays in reducing CO2 emissions is due to the fact that burning natural gas in a power stations emits around 44% less Co2 per Megawatt-hour of electricity generation than using coal, which is the main fuel displaced. What tends to be overlooked in celebrating this reduction is the fact that using gas to generate electricity still emits around 300kg of CO2 per Megawatt-hour as opposed to 500kg for coal or less than 10kg for wind and nuclear.

The bottom line after cutting through all the hype is that shale gas may be ‘less bad’ than the coal that it displaces but it is not ‘good’. Furthermore, it is still a finite resource so its exploitation is only putting back the day when the lights go out, not offering a long-term sustainable way to keep them on.

Where shale gas could fit into a future energy mix, as with nuclear power, is as a short- to medium-term stop-gap until zero-emissions technologies such as renewables or nuclear fusion, are developed to a point where they are both technically feasible and economically viable sources of power. A clear long-term road map to a sustainable energy model could credibly include shale gas as an interim technology on the path to a low carbon future. In this context, offering tax incentives to companies to develop this embryonic industry would be justified and a perfectly proper thing to do as part of a taxation and regulatory framework that also incentivised work on developing the long-term solution and penalised the old, highly polluting technologies to increase the speed of the switch of investment away from them. Such a move would also address issues of energy security and the risk of relying on imports of vital energy sources from politically volatile parts of the world.

The problem appears to be that, almost inevitably, we are seeing a government pursue short-term advantage without appearing to consider the future. The problem is that the future, like the gas, is in danger of running out.

Climate Milestone Passes Un-noticed

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in May 2013

To be fair to the Prime Minister, he did have a lot on his mind on 10th May 2013. The Conservative party was embarking on one of its periodic spasms of self-destruction, this time following the strong showing by UKIP at the Tories’ expense in the local elections the previous week. With a Euro-Sceptic backbench rebellion to add to the ongoing unrest about “Gay Marriage” among his MPs, David Cameron could perhaps be excused for allowing the latest news from Hawaii to sink below the surface of the Downing Street In-Tray.

Except this was no ordinary run-of-the-mill bulletin from the Pacific Island paradise; not a weather report of another gloriously sunny day and not the latest breaking news of spectacular surfing exploits. This time the news from Hawaii, and in particular from the Mauna Loa Observatory, was that the levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere had risen to levels not seen since the Pliocene period over 3 million years ago.

Four hundred parts per million does not seem any more momentous than when it is written in its usual, abbreviated form of 400ppm but it is an important landmark , remarkable both for its absolute magnitude and the speed at which it has come about. At the dawn of the industrial age, less than three centuries ago, the level was around 280ppm. When the Mauna Loa observatory was established in 1958, the level had climbed slowly to 315ppm. The Keeling curve that plots the level of CO2 in the atmosphere, named after scientist Dr Charles Keeling who started the Hawaiian observations, has climbed steadily upwards at an increasing rate ever since.

Analysis of bubbles of ancient air trapped in Antarctic ice sheets suggests that, for the 800,000 years preceding the Industrial Revolution, global atmospheric CO2 levels had remained between 200 and 300ppm. To jump from this long term stable average to the present 400ppm level in a mere 250 years represents a rate of increase – some 75 times faster than the pre-industrial average – that has no precedent in the geological record. What the evidence does suggest is that, the last time that the 400ppm threshold was crossed, global average temperatures were 3 or 4 degrees Centigrade warmer than today and around 8 degrees warmer at the poles. Reef corals suffered major extinction and areas around the Arctic Circle that are today a frozen wilderness were covered in lush forest growth. There is always a lag between the level of CO2 in the atmosphere increasing and the manifestation of its warming effects on the climate so, even if levels were to miraculously stabilise at their current magnitude tomorrow, there would still be a certain amount of warming to come. And CO2 levels show no signs of stabilising; in fact, anything but.

Even if the latest news on the global CO2 front passed the Prime Minister by, he cannot have failed to notice the report by the Government’s own Committee on Climate Change that highlighted the fact that, although domestic production of CO2 is down by 20% over the past two decades, the UK’s carbon footprint has actually increased by 10% as “embodied emissions” in imported goods have increased at a faster rate than UK-based production emissions.

This trend is cause for concern from both environmental and economic policy standpoints. If the UK is effectively “offshoring” its CO2 emissions by replacing domestic manufacturing production with imports, this is bad news for the British manufacturing sector and bad news for UK workers as jobs go to companies based overseas. It also suggests a weak base for any Green Recovery from the ongoing economic downturn. Gaining market share and decarbonising production would be significant challenges individually for the manufacturing sector to face. To ask firms to adopt low carbon technologies whilst at the same time competing to regain market share previously lost to imports is a big ask indeed.

Chancellor George Osborne has attracted a lot of criticism (not least from me) for his assertion that: “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”. The latest evidence suggests that we are currently failing to save the economy and, if governments do not start according the reduction of CO2 levels the priority it desperately requires, we are in very real danger of putting the planet out of business.

Margaret Thatcher – Unsung Environmentalist?

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in April 2013

Since the announcement of the death on Monday 8th April of former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (latterly Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven), the British media has been awash with tributes to, and retrospective critiques of, her record as the longest serving United Kingdom Prime Minister of the 20th Century

Whilst most of the coverage has focussed on the legacy of her economic and industrial policies including such milestones as the privatisation of many State-owned companies such as British Telecom and the long-running and bitterly divisive strikes in the mining and printing industries, little consideration has been given to Thatcher the Environmentalist.

As a trained scientist – she studied Chemistry at Oxford University and worked as an industrial chemist before entering politics – Mrs Thatcher was probably better equipped intellectually than any subsequent Prime Minister to fully grasp the fundamental science behind climate change and other contemporary environmental issues.

Although such issues did not start to be widely discussed and debated outside academic circles until the 1990s, Margaret Thatcher delivered a speech to the Royal Society in 1988 that touched on the dangers of greenhouse gas emissions, the hole in the ozone layer that had recently been discovered over the Antarctic and acid deposition from power stations and industry.

This address to a British learned society, which could possibly have been dismissed as the Prime Minister, as a Fellow of the Royal Society, seeking to demonstrate her scientific credentials to her peers, was followed in 1989 by a speech to the United Nations General Assembly that contained the lines:
“The result [of human impacts on the environment] is that change in future is likely to be more fundamental and more widespread than anything we have known hitherto. Change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most fundamental way of all.”

The fact that we may be surprised to hear such sentiments being articulated by a politician who is viewed as a champion of the Right demonstrates the extent to which the issue of climate change has become dominated by political, as opposed to scientific, considerations. Ultimately, it would seem that Thatcher could not bring herself to embrace the type of trans-national policies that are required to tackle global environmental challenges, especially when these involved challenging the hegemony of free market economics.

In her 2003 book Statecraft, Thatcher criticised the “alarmist” pronouncements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and warned that “the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes.”

A further statement appears to foreshadow the approach of the current UK Government that action on the environment must not be allowed to derail economic growth. “Whatever international action we agree upon to deal with environmental problems, we must enable our economies to grow and develop, because without growth you cannot generate the wealth required to pay for the protection of the environment.” One can almost imagine current Chancellor George Osborne uttering these words in support of his assertion that “We’re not going to save the planet by putting our country out of business”.

At the end of the day it seems that the concerns of Margaret Thatcher the scientist were over-ruled by Prime Minister Thatcher the free market ideologue. With all the current debate surrounding her legacy, it is salutary to speculate what it might have been had those late 1980s speeches been translated into concrete policy prescriptions. Mrs Thatcher Saves the Planet?

The State of Nature Affects Us All

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This article was originally published on the Sustainable Business Toolkit website in June 2013

Published last week amid as much of a blaze of publicity that the media ever grants to environmental issues, the State of Nature report was launched by veteran documentary maker and national treasure Sir David Attenborough at the Natural History museum. The report represents a groundbreaking collaboration between 25 of the UK’s leading wildlife and conservation organisations led by big-hitters such as the Wildlife Trusts and the RSPB.

Whilst the report makes a brave attempt at striking an optimistic note by highlighting some of the conservation success stories that have occurred in recent years such as the recovery of species such as Corncrakes, Red Kites and Otters from the brink of extinction, much of the content makes grim reading: 60% of species have declined in recent decades, 31% strongly so. Some bird species that used to be a byword for the British countryside have declined alarmingly – Nightjars down by nearly 50%, 73% fewer Nightingales and a shocking 90% of Turtle Doves gone.

The existence of comprehensive baseline data against which to measure progress is patchy and varies between different species but the partnership has developed a new ‘Watchlist’ indicator, which tracks overall trends in the populations of 155 species listed as conservation priorities in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan. Since 1977 the indicator has dropped by an alarming 77% and, despite strenuous conservation efforts and the higher profile of environmental issues generally in recent years, between 2000 and 2010 there was an 18% decline.

Given that over 80% of the UK population live in urban areas (Office for National Statistics figures), we can reasonably ask what difference it makes if some species, often known only to scientists specialising in a particular field, have become extinct. Many people have never heard a cuckoo call or watched a buzzard soar on a thermal, so why is important if it becomes less likely that they ever will in the future? It is even more understandable to question why the loss of less charismatic species such as invertebrates and fungi should excite public concern.

The answer depends on whether we view nature and the diversity of species it contains in purely functional, utilitarian terms or if we believe that having more species is by definition better than having fewer (greater biodiversity). This is where approaches that attempt to place an economic value on the natural world such as the State of Natural Capital report, published in April 2013 can fall short in their efforts.

Despite its shortcomings, this approach does represent a significant step forward in attempting to assign an economic value to elements of the natural world that deliver so-called ‘Ecosystem Services’. For example woodlands planted in river catchment areas slow down the rate at which rainwater runs off hillsides and into rivers. The value of this service is the cost of the flood defences that would otherwise have to be built to achieve the same mitigation.

In order to perform this service, and so be assigned this value, it does not much matter if the wood in question is an ancient oak wood teeming with a wide range of life and supporting a complex web of ecosystems or a plantation of non-native conifers that contains a fraction of the number of species as this has no effect on the ‘ecosystem service’ that it provides. In fact the conifer plantation, being faster growing, may well be better at mitigating flood risk than the ancient oak wood. So, in terms of the ecosystem services approach, the conifer plantation is of greater value. It also probably has a higher economic value as it will produce a higher yield of timber in a shorter time than the oak wood, although it would have to be felled in order to realise this value, which is exactly what the Valuing Natural Capital approach seeks to avoid. Ask any conservationist though, and they will tell you that the oak wood is of immeasurably greater value for wildlife than the conifer plantation and therein lies the problem: immeasurably greater value.
This overly simplistic approach to calculating the real value of nature is also the reason why the Governments proposals for ‘Biodiversity Off-setting’ have been criticised. When it comes to the natural world and its complex inter-relationships between species and their habitats, the whole is infinitely greater than the sum of the parts.

It is a management cliché much favoured by proponents of management by Key Performance Indicators that “what gets measured gets done” which leads to the inevitable problem that often what is of most importance cannot be measured and therefore does not get done. This has led to a well-documented cultural crisis in the National Health Service where things that cannot be measured – such as humanity and compassion – often did not get done as staff were so busy chasing after the things that could be measured and so had a KPI assigned to them.

So the true message of the State of Nature report is not that the decline in species is bad for economic growth, that the UK’s international competitiveness will be damaged or even that some vital ‘ecosystem service’ will not be delivered. The real underlying message is that a part of our national heritage has been lost, that some of the species with which human beings have shared these islands since the end of the last Ice Age have gone, never to return. And this loss diminishes us all.