Tag: climate change

In search of missing text

June 17, 2009

At the end of last week I was in Bonn, where another round of UNFCCC negotiations was taking place in the lead-up to Copenhagen. I happened to catch the Greenpeace show, which involved the sounding of an incredibly loud air-raid type siren from within a locked steel cage on the back of a truck. The German police didn’t take kindly to this and proceeded to cut them out.

   

But the point made by Greenpeace isn’t without merit. My own “alarm moment” comes from looking at the text which the negotiators are deliberating over. Although much was apparently added during the Bonn talks, the starting point (the AWG-LCA text) says little about how to actually address this problem, but rather presents fifty three pages of arcane language about process. It talks of “appropriate action”, but doesen’t define what this might actually entail, other than in the loosest terms. Take a technology such as carbon capture and geological storage – it doesn’t even get a mention. The word “renewable” appears once, “nuclear” doesn’t appear at all and “energy efficiency” twice. Even the notion of a carbon market to drive large scale deployment is barely touched upon.

Short of a document which clearly spells out a forward emissons profile for every country, perhaps it is time to replace abstraction with clarity and focus. There are five, and only five things we can do to address the mitigation side of climate change. We have to do all of them, we have to do them at huge scale and we have to do them very quickly. They are;

  • Using energy much more efficiently;
  • Increasing the use of renewable and nuclear sources of energy;
  • Rapidly commercialising and deploying carbon dioxide capture and geological storage in tandem with the use of fossil fuels [or with the chemical conversion of fossil derived materials for the provision of various manufactured products];
  • Containment, destruction and reduced usage of greenhouse gases other than carbon dioxide;
  • Reducing emissions through land use, land use change and forestry, including reducing emissions from deforestation and degradation.

At the very least, the text should be driving these specific solutions forward, for example through properly funded large scale demonstration programmes and targeted mechanisms to hasten deployment. Carbon capture and storage provides a good example. Three policy initiatives are required to support this technology;

  • An underlying price for CO2 must be in place;
  • A clear recognition of the demonstration nature of the technology, which means funding, objectives, timelines and focus on delivery of projects;
  • A robust approach to CO2 storage certification (and MRV) based on 2006 IPCC GHG Inventory Guidelines.

The EU has nearly reached this point, but it has taken eight years to do so. Whilst this represents a landmark in policy creation, the rate at which it has happened is hardly commensurate with the gravity of the issue that we are trying to address. We need to focus our efforts on bringing this technology to developing countries, particulalry those with large coal reserves. A policy framework similar to that in place now in the EU is needed, but on an international scale. First and foremost, this means recognising CCS within the an international project mechanism. We will also need to underpin this with an internationally recognised CO2 storage certification, again based on the 2006 IPCC GHG Inventory Guidelines. Finally, we need a mechanism within which large clusters of projects can be identified, funded and implemented against defined deadlines. Most importantly, we need all this now, in Copehagen, with a view to starting implementation in 2010.

Drake’s Passage

March 19, 2009

We departed Ushuaia on Monday evening for the Drakes Passage crossing to Antarctica. The Akademik Ioffe sailed east through the Beagle Channel amidst a blaze of evening sun streaming through the clouds, highlighting the last of civilization that we would see for 10 days.

Navigating the channel took us through to about midnight from when we were in open sea. Apparently it was calm; at least that is how the experienced expedition leaders describe a two to three metre swell. Still, the Akademik Ioffe took this in its stride and provided a relatively stable crossing. It has a sophisticated stabilization system which shifts the fresh water supply rapidly between tanks to counter the roll induced by the movement of the sea. The end result is a gentle but nevertheless noticeable rocking which has been fine for me but left some of the expedition members feeling somewhat less than ideal. However the turnout for meals has been pretty high so I guess most are OK.

During our passage through the Beagle Channel we all sat through the first instalment of our expedition leader’s story. Robert Swan is the founder of 2041 and can be best described as a courageous modern day explorer. He has trekked to both the North and South Poles on foot and uses his experiences to help people understand the principles and practices of leadership. It turns out that his first expedition to the South Pole in the mid 80’s was in part sponsored by Shell – we supplied the fuel for the ship and oil for the burners used on the walk. But extracting this had been a challenge in itself – Shell had initially declined but was eventually persuaded of the merit of such a gesture by evidence that the company had done the same for Captain Scott, the famous Antarctic explorer, when he first attempted the journey some 70 years earlier. Robert hadn’t taken “no” for an answer and instead had hunted through Scott’s papers in the British Library until he turned up proof of the connection in the form of a picture showing Scott sitting in his Antarctic hut on a drum of “Shell Spirit”.

Apart from good conversations with many of the expedition members and some excellent meals, the highlight of Tuesday was taking endless photographs of the various sea birds following the ship. It was pretty much that or nothing as there is little formal programme during the crossing itself.  Most spectacular are the huge albatross, which seem to effortlessly glide around the ship for hours on end with hardly a flap of their wings.

My “climate change team” met for the first time in the afternoon. This is a group of very knowledgeable people from within the expedition who have been drafted by the 2041 team to help me lead a series of discussions on climate change over the coming ten days. As I mentioned before, this is an issue that is high on almost every participant’s agenda and it simply isn’t going to be possible for me to sit in on every team discussion – so now I have a group of ambassadors to help do that – and very passionate ones at that.

We passed over the Antarctic Convergence at about midnight on Tuesday. This is the point at which the warmer waters – i.e. 10⁰C – of the Southern Ocean give way to the much colder waters of the Antarctic – it also means we are in the Antarctic region – finally.