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No.73 July 2009
First light Is China poised to clean up?
The car in front is electric Mass transit gets sexy and Jonathon Porritt swims upstream www.greenfutures.org.uk
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Register FREE at www.energy-expo.info Ene rgy Follow Solu t twitt Twit ions Ex po o er.co ter a t n m/e nerg y_ex po
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Contents
rgy Follow Solu t Twit ions Ex po o er.co ter a t n m/e nerg y_ex po
Contents
ober 2009 , Olympia
Number 73 July 2009
26 28 34 20
efficient, ssionals from compliant.
ace of the Future wards
g Services Event, e Management, xhibitors and
8 or visit
AMPS POWER EXPO
Photos: Ian Mckinnell/Getty; MIT senseable city lab; Sedgway Project P.U.M.A. Prototype; Fergus O'Brien/Getty; Sarah Butler Sloss
2009!
44
Features
Regulars
Partner viewpoints
20 Crouching tiger
4
Briefings – the cutting edge of news and green innovation.
19
24 37
A thousand words – The thin green line.
Happy cows, healthy kids: the blessings of clean water Ecover
33
Greening the food industry: from soil to supermarket WWF
46
The Knowledge – “Make sure it works first – then make it green,” Mick Bremans, CEO Ecover.
36
Rooftop renaissance opens up public space Groundwork
48
Jonathon Porritt – Taking environmental issues back to their roots.
41
47
Letters – Readers respond to Green Futures online and in print.
Boosting broadband for a prosperous countryside Commission for Rural Communities
43
Water’s hidden carbon costs EST
44
From Ethiopia to Edinburgh, renewable energy is breaking new ground Ashden Awards
As China pours billions into a green recovery, Sam Geall asks whether the world’s dirtiest economy is poised to clean up.
26 Rites of passage Intelligent buses, driverless pods and brief encounters at the skytrain interchange… Anna Simpson rides into tomorrow.
28 Spark plug Electric cars are the flavour of the year. But can they really save both the motor industry and the climate? April Streeter peers under the bonnet.
Forum update – From 21st-century cider to smart, sustainable retail, Forum’s latest interventions come under the spotlight.
34 More than mere beauty England’s Lake District could become a hub of green industry, reports Rebecca Willis.
Front cover: Grant Faint/Getty
Briefings: Fair trade boosts sales, widens horizons p16
IN ASSOCIATION WITH IP&EE
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Green Futures April 2009 1
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Partners Partners
About us Green Futures is the flagship publication of Forum for the Future. It aims to be a leading source of information, opinion and debate on progress towards sustainable development. Its focus is on communicating solutions and best practice in business, central and local government, universities, the voluntary sector and society as a whole. The magazine is financed by subscribers, advertisers and charitable trusts, and by contributions from Green Futures Partners and the Forum’s Foundation Corporate Partners.
Partners are selected on the basis of their demonstrable commitment to the pursuit of sustainable development. They take an active part in the debate through Partner Viewpoint pages, where they share their views and experiences. Green Futures works with its partners on ideas for, and editorial scrutiny of, these pages, to ensure that they are consistent with the overall aims of the magazine. If you’d like to join us as a partner, please contact Anna Simpson: 020 7324 3660; anna@greenfutures.org.uk
Our Partners Entec Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128 www.entecuk.com
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716 www.RWEnpower.com
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023 www.ashdenawards.org
Food and Drink Federation Julian Hunt, 020 7420 7125 www.fdf.org.uk
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Caroline Miller, 020 7695 3078 www.sainsburys.co.uk
Groundwork Fiona Taylor, 0121 237 5815 www.groundwork.org.uk
Skanska Tanya Barnes, 01923 423906 Greg Chant-Hall, 01923 423614 www.skanska.com
Naomi Kordew, 020 3057 2524 www.bp.com Commission for Rural Communities Graham Russell, 01242 534072 www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111 www.ecotricity.co.uk Ecover Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500 www.ecover.com Energy Saving Trust Paula Owen, 020 7654 2411 www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
Managing Editor HANNAH BULLOCK Publishing Coordinator ANNA SIMPSON Consulting Editor ROGER EAST Contributing Editor BEN TUXWORTH Magazine Design JENNY SEARLE ASSOCIATES/ ANDY BONE Founder JONATHON PORRITT
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695 www.akzonobel.com
BP
Editor in Chief MARTIN WRIGHT
GSH Group Robert Greenfield, 01782 200400 www.gshgroup.com Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) James Simpson, 020 7811 3315 www.msc.org The Natural Step International Louise Bielenstein, +46 8 789 29 00 www.thenaturalstep.org Pureprint Group Yvie Dear, 01825 768811 www.pureprint.com Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528 681 www.royalmail.com
Triodos Bank James Niven, 0117 980 9721 www.triodos.co.uk TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 www.fcenvironmentandpeople.com Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 www.unilever.com Vodafone Group plc Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 www.vodafone.com WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 www.wwf.org.uk
Green Futures would like to thank: Nick Chan and Katie Shaw (interns) Melanie Thompson (proofreading) Shelley Hannan (web)
Editorial Overseas House, 19-23 Ironmonger Row, London EC1V 3QN Tel: 020 7324 3660 Email: post@greenfutures.org.uk Subscriptions Circa, 13-17 Sturton Street, Cambridge CB1 2SN Tel: 01223 564334 Email: greenfutures@circaworld.com Green Futures is published by Forum for the Future Registered Charity Number: 1040519 ISSN No: 1366-4417 The opinions expressed in the magazine are not necessarily those of Forum for the Future, nor any of its associates. © Forum for the Future. 2009
Environmental Policy Forum for the Future is certified to ISO14001 standards. Green Futures is printed by Beacon Press, using their environmental print technology and vegetable-based inks.
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Editorial
Contributors to this issue include:
I
magine for a moment that you’re an entrepreneur,
on the cusp of the 20th century. You’re sharp at spotting coming trends, and so you’re investing heavily in the bright new future that is the horseless carriage. You step into a time bubble, and emerge blinking in the halogens of the New York City Auto Show, 2009. Amazed at what you see around you? Absolutely – but enough about the dress code of the sales girls. That aside, it’s pretty much as you would have predicted back in 1900: electric horseless carriages, wherever you look. You knew all that excitement about petrol would just be a flash in the pan… ‘Cyberpunk’ William Gibson’s famous quote – “the future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed” – could have been coined for electric cars. After a century marking time, this seems to be their hour. You can’t turn on a business channel without seeing some Detroit CEO or other, eyes shining with all the fervour of the new convert, laying out plans for mass electrification. The near deathbed conversion of the motor industry is, of course, as much to do with the heavy hand of government on its shoulder as it is with genuine business enthusiasm. As April Streeter points out in ‘Spark Plug’ [pp28-32], there are a host of pitfalls to be crossed before all our avenues are electric. But ‘EVs’ are far from being, in the words of one critic, “a government-sponsored mass guilt trip”. Take China: a country that, by and large, doesn’t do guilt. (A Chinese company is even negotiating to buy up GM’s ridiculous Hummer.) China is pouring R&D cash into EVs, as well as investing on a truly staggering scale in renewables [‘Crouching Tiger’, pp20-23]. This isn’t fluffy altruism: China’s pollution is a chokingly obvious problem for the country now, and Beijing is increasingly aware that climate change could wreak havoc on its ability to feed itself. So it’s ratcheting up environmental standards, to the extent that (pause to savour the irony), it could soon be illegal to drive a Hummer on Chinese roads. And it knows its export markets. The West may be wounded by recession, but it still wants clean, not dirty, tech. Even shiny new electric cars leave a hefty footprint, though. So perhaps we shouldn’t get over-excited at the prospect of China and the West abandoning their differences and living in a harmonious balance of endless supply and insatiable demand. As Susan Neiman acidly comments in her new book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists: “Few things command more consensus than the idea that the path to global peace lies in abandoning strongly held beliefs… in favour of increasing consumption”. In his regular column [p48], Jonathon Porritt echoes these concerns, arguing passionately that we need to return to a “deep analysis” of our obsession with growth, and pays tribute to the relentlessly radical Ecologist magazine, which after 40 years in print is now becoming an online-only publication. Green Futures will be staying physical, but we certainly don’t underestimate the power of the web to bring us to readers around the world who we could never reach by print alone. So we are delighted that, in addition to our own website, our content is increasingly syndicated online through other outlets. Among them, China, where, thanks to the British Council, Green Futures articles in translation will now be available to the 40 million readers of China News Daily and Sohu.com.
Martin Wright Editor in Chief martin@greenfutures.org.uk
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Veteran of Sustainable Industries and Tomorrow magazines, and tireless blogger on transport futures, who better than April Streeter to give the juice on electric cars [pp28-32]? She’s also working on a book about the rise of pedal power and how to get more women on their bikes.
He studied at Leeds, Harvard and Tianjin before coming to London to help edit the bilingual environmental portal, chinadialogue.net. Now Sam Geall is back in China [pp20-23], asking which colour the recession has painted economic agendas.
As someone who’s made her home in the Lake District, Rebecca Willis is well placed to chart its prospects for a ‘green industrial revolution’ [pp34-35]. Vice-Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission, and a former director of Green Alliance, Rebecca has written widely on energy, technology and public policy.
Anna Simpson wrote for India’s leading environment magazine Down to Earth and edited WENnews for Women’s Environmental Network before joining Green Futures in January. As both a violinist and marathon runner she should be used to keeping one beat ahead of the pack – so we’ve sent her off to spy out the future of the daily commute [pp26-27].
Green Futures July 2009 3
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Briefings At home in a warming world Floating mosques, houses and hotels are among a raft of flood-friendly new designs from Dutch architects Waterstudio. page 11 >
“
We waited perhaps a decade to get $5 billion to accelerate development of renewable energy. We now see $20 billion paid [to] a car company simply to keep it alive. Achim Steiner, Executive Director, UNEP
New federal rules look set to drive a fresh surge in wind power, on- and offshore. page 8 > Riversimple’s ‘open source’ runabout, launched in London, promises CO2 emissions of just 30g/km as part of its drive to be the world’s first wholly “sustainable car”. page 13 >
4 Green Futures July 2009
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Photos: Waterstudio.NL and Dutch Docklands; Thomas Jackson/Getty; Riversimple
Wind power “could provide total US electricity needs”
”
Hydrogen city car hits 300mpg
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33TW The energy, in terawatt-hours, wasted each year by the 63 trillion spam email messages that invade our inboxes. If harnessed, this would be enough to power 2.4 million homes.
The Welsh go it alone A commitment to become energy self-sufficient within a generation is at the heart of an ambitious new sustainability strategy announced by the Welsh government. page 6 >
“
When you are at the checkout, each ‘bleep’ of the barcode sends a signal down the supply chain. Give consumers more information, and they will buy greener products… And when that happens, the supply chain will turn green.
Photos: Henning Dalhoff/BonnIer Publications/Science Photo Library; Sean Gladwell/Shutterstock; Abengoa
Capturing the rays Over one thousand mirrors focus the sun onto Seville’s 161-metre solar tower – the largest in the world. With a capacity of 20MW, it will generate enough electricity to power 10,000 homes.
Terry Leahy, CEO, Tesco
”
Dream solution A cornucopia of climate solutions, or a tangle of unproven techno-fixes? This issue’s ‘Weak signals’ tunes in to the debate over geo-engineering. page 7 >
£12.6 billion The UK’s potential annual savings on fossil fuel imports – if it maximises the use of ‘home-grown’ renewables and energy efficiency. page 9 >
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Eden Project plans to tap ‘hot rock’ technology UK’s first geothermal electricity plant chalked for Cornwall The Eden Project, Cornwall’s acclaimed ecocentre, has teamed up with EGS Energy to create the country’s first geothermal power plant. Planned for the vast former clay pit near St Austell, the plant would draw heat from the granite rock strata, via deep boreholes. “It’s a pioneering scheme that will give Eden and the national grid as much as 3MWe a year of independent power without burning fossil fuels,” says an enthusiastic Tim Smit, Eden’s Chief Executive. The scheme will work by drilling two boreholes up to four kilometres deep into the rock, where heat is generated by the natural decomposition of the radioactive metals
uranium, thorium and potassium. Water would be pumped down one of the holes and passed through fractures in the rock, heating the liquid to temperatures of between 150ºC and 200ºC. The resulting vapour would then drive an electric turbine on the surface, at the top of the second borehole. Any waste heat from the electricity generation will be tapped to heat Eden’s ‘biomes’ – the huge futuristic greenhouses which have made it famous. “The great thing is the small footprint,” emphasises Smit. “All the reactions happen underground, with the plant on the surface taking up an area the size of a few huts.” Eden’s last large-scale energy proposal, a 127-metre wind turbine, was scuppered by angry locals protesting about the potential noise and visual impact.
If plans for this less intrusive form of renewable energy generation get planning approval from the new unitary Cornwall Council, a fully operational system is expected to come on-stream by March 2012. Eden is looking for investment of around £16 million to make it happen. Geothermal technology is already in use in Southampton, at a plant opened by the City Council and French company Utilicom in 1986. But the shallower boreholes (extending to about 1.5km) don’t heat the water to the extent that it becomes a gas that can drive an electric turbine. Instead, it is channelled (at 76ºC) to heat and cool local businesses and homes, and also feeds into a district-wide combined heat and power system that is mainly powered by fossil fuels. – Alex Johnson
Wales to be “self-sustaining” in energy Wales has launched an ambitious sustainable development strategy to be “self-sustaining in renewable energy” by 2025, and to produce zero waste by 2050. The far-reaching targets in One Wales: One Planet place the nation streets ahead of England and Scotland, and make it one of only three countries globally with a legal obligation to develop sustainably. If actions match ambition, “Wales will set an example for the rest of the world to follow,” says Jonathan Porritt, Founding Director of Forum for the Future and Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission. The new scheme, set out by the Welsh Assembly Government (WAG) at the May 2009 Hay Festival, includes both 2025 targets and ‘visions’: • TARGET: reducing reliance on carbon-based energy by 80-90% VISION: “the energy intensity of society has decreased significantly” • TARGET: producing as much electricity from renewable sources as Wales consumes VISION: “a major increase in renewable energy generation, offshore and onshore” • TARGET: boosting recycling rates from 36% today to 70% VISION: “waste – whether of energy or other resources – is taboo” • TARGET: sourcing more local and seasonal food VISION: “a huge expansion in allotments and community gardening”
6 Green Futures July 2009
• TARGET: providing safer walking and cycling routes VISION: “the ‘school run’ has been replaced by organised school transport or group walking/cycling” • TARGET: investing £190 million in public health VISION: “a much greater emphasis on preventative health care” • TARGET: insulating and installing microgen in 40,000 new social housing homes VISION: “creating Europe’s first ‘low carbon region’”. Overall, the strategy aims to transform Wales into “a One Planet nation within the lifetime of a generation”, using only its fair share of resources to sustain its population. Forum for the Future’s Anna Birney, who is working with WAG, praised its “can-do” attitude, and its ability to link policies with implementation: “Although they have a long way to go, they are real leaders on this agenda.” – Sophie Blakemore
The Welsh Assembly building: a model of sustainable architecture
Wales watching Forum for the Future is producing a special report exploring how other public sector organisations could emulate the Welsh to become sustainability leaders. It draws on new research to pick out ten key actions for transformation. For more information, contact Anne-Marie Brouder a.brouder@forumforthefuture.org
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Photos: Ben Foster; Darryl Sleath/Shutterstock
Government sets out roadmap for ‘One Planet’ nation by 2050
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Paint it white Peter Madden asks how much we should manipulate our future. Might we be living in ‘white cities’ in future decades? Will our quest to cool the planet see us constructing large-scale modern versions of the traditional Greek and Spanish villages, whose pale colour reflects back the sun’s rays? It may sound far-fetched, but that’s the vision of Steven Chu, the US Energy Secretary, who recently suggested painting all of the world’s roofs white. He’s not the only one looking to geoengineering as a way to tackle climate change. Two years ago, Richard Branson launched a $25 million prize for technology to remove at least one billion tonnes of carbon a year from the atmosphere – which is still looking for a winner. And, as new data shows emissions reaching a dangerous tipping point, governments around the globe are paying much more attention to the potential of such ‘techno-fixes’. If we see some of these proposed geoengineering solutions taking off, our world could look very different. Our coastlines could be dominated by huge carbon dioxide capture towers, which pump CO2 down into saline aquifers or into greenhouses to encourage the growth of fruit and vegetables. Solar powered robot ships might traverse our oceans,
spraying a fine mist of seawater into the air to create clouds, which reflect back sunlight, so shielding the oceans from the sun. Behind these ‘sci-fi’ technologies lie two approaches to tackling climate change: • removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere on a large scale (eg seeding the ocean with chemicals that absorb CO2 in reaction) • reducing global warming (eg by growing specially bred, light coloured crops). The methods don’t all involve high-tech manipulation. Biochar, for example, is a simple way of making charcoal to sequester carbon in soil – and interest and investment are proceeding apace [see GF72, pp26-29]. But it’s no surprise that the appropriateness of geo-engineering is hotly contested. Advocates believe we should intervene forcefully to control our already destabilised climate, whatever it takes. Opponents argue that tinkering with natural systems could backfire – and worry that endorsing the concept might scupper international climate negotiations. I’m sure we will see geo-engineering happen in some form. Technologies to sequester carbon will no doubt be deployed if the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere overshoots a critical point. These techniques could buy us critical time in the face of feedback cycles, where increased heat in the atmosphere further increases greenhouse gas emissions from natural sources, such as methane from melting permafrost.
Techno-fixes of the future A composite picture of potential geoengineering techniques, depicting [top to bottom]: Space mirrors to reflect solar heat; cloud-seeding balloon; cloud-seeding catamaran [with chimneys]; solar reflectors for land and sea; fertilising the ocean to encourage kelp [left] and phytoplankton [right] which can absorb CO2.
We just need to make sure these enticing new technologies don’t divert attention and resources from existing, if less exciting, approaches that are already proven to work. White carrots, anyone? Peter Madden is Chief Executive of Forum for the Future.
Photos: Henning Dalhoff/BonnIer Publications/Science Photo Library
Weak signals from the future On the pulse
Solar soak
In the fast lane
Digital devices to monitor your body and its surroundings could be the next must-have gadgets. Among them is the Body Check Ball that picks up data – about body fat, bone density and muscle ratios – via electric currents as it lies in your palm. Others include a blood-pressure cuff that plugs into your iPhone, and a wireless Bluetooth sensor you can clip onto your clothes to keep a check on local air quality and noise pollution. All that remains is to integrate this sensor into a GPS system for cyclists and you could soon be choosing your route for maximum fresh air.
The next generation of solar cells – dubbed ‘organic’ because of their carbon compound base – will be more affordable thanks to a low-cost manufacturing process that avoids metals such as lead and mercury. Made using solutions like inks and paints, they can be ‘washed’ onto flexible films and fabrics over large surfaces, turning anything from your television screen to your t-shirt into a PV cell. Until recently, this ‘flexibility’ had also been their flaw – with weakly linked molecules prone to drift apart – but a team from France’s national scientific research centre (CNRS) has found a way to restructure the cells, making them less vulnerable to daily wear and tear.
The US is leading the way with a high voltage superhighway to bring electricity from energy rich backwaters to buzzing metropolises. The 765 kilovolt (kV) Green Power Express will bring up to 12,000MW of power from wind farms in North Dakota to load centres like Chicago. The project’s costs top $10 billion, but if it succeeds it could be a model for other long distance, high capacity connections – of the sort that would be needed, for example, to bring power to northern Europe from vast desert solar stations in the Sahara. Such developments could even challenge the cherished pursuit of ‘energy independence’.
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Wind power “could provide total US electricity needs”
Bird-spotters convert to wind power
Federal renewables rules look set to drive fresh surge in wind power on- and offshore
The new wind turbine at Rainham Marshes could have special significance in the story of UK renewables. It’s nothing unusual in technical terms, nor in scale – it’s only a little 15kW job, just enough to help power a visitor centre. The point is that it’s a flagship visitor centre of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. As such, it’s symbolically signalling that bird protection and wind power don’t belong in opposing camps. Anti-turbine campaigners tend to make great play of the ‘bird kill’ card, citing the RSPB’s all-too-frequent objections to wind farms in the past. The Rainham turbine could do more to put this in perspective than any number of carefully weighed RSPB statements about case-by-case evaluation. What we’re really witnessing is a change in emphasis – birders will still argue for sensitive siting, but they’re swinging their weight behind the common cause of combating climate change. Hence the RSPB’s April study of the case for wind power, which urges the Government to press ahead with more land-based wind farms while proposing a wildlife sensitivity map to point developers in the right direction. Reinforcing the point, RSPB’s John Clare cries “hooray for the [London] Array”, now that the 175-turbine wind scheme in the Thames Estuary is back on track, thanks to funding from DONG Energy, Masdar and E.ON. Far from denouncing it as a threat to a colony of redthroated divers, he praises the agreement to phase the development in order to minimise disruption for the birds. “We badly need schemes like the London Array,” he says. “Above all, we need them to show how we can have clean power and wildlife. There has to be a world left worth saving, after all.” – Roger East
US Interior Secretary Ken Salazar is decidedly bullish about the potential for wind power. His department’s latest assessment of the scope for oil, gas and renewables on the outer continental shelf reckons the potential in the wind off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts is more than enough to meet the whole country’s current electricity demand. Granted, that would involve installing turbines in some of the more expensive and problematic deeper water sites. But even just exploiting relatively shallow waters would enable most coastal states to satisfy a fifth of their total power needs from turbines, the study says. The US leapfrogged Germany to the top of the world wind league table last year, when it added 50% to its installed wind power capacity. Early 2009 has maintained that phenomenal growth, but with credit in short supply and depressed prices for gas making it harder to compete on costs, the rest of this year is set to be a lot quieter on the US wind front. The American Wind Energy Association is hinging its hopes on the Government to help it achieve this enormous potential – partly through stimulus spending, but more crucially through the sort of federal action that would send investors a long-term signal about rising demand. The association is looking for rapid progress on President Obama’s campaign pledge to get 25% of US energy from renewables by 2025. Obama envisaged this target as a new federal Renewable Energy Standard (RES), including interim requirements for the utilities to source a rising percentage of power year on year from renewables. It would replace the piecemeal green power procurement rules already set in 28 of the 50 states. The Administration has welcomed the proposals for wider carbon-cutting legislation, including a federal RES, that have now narrowly been passed by the House of Representatives as the draft American Clean Energy and Security Act. Its passage through Congress will be keenly watched – not least by offshore wind developers. The front-runner in this young sector is the locally controversial 420MW Cape Wind scheme off Massachusetts, near Martha’s Vineyard. Despite opponents objecting to visual and other impacts, it received its ‘super permit’ from the state authorities in May, and could be operational by 2012-2013 if construction begins early next year. – Roger East
“
Turbine turned on at RSPB showcase wildlife centre
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Sir David Attenborough throws his weight behind the Optimum Population Trust
Flock meets turbine, flies around it
8 Green Futures July 2009
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Photo: Borislav Borisov/Shutterstock
I’ve never seen a problem that wouldn’t be easier to solve with fewer people, or harder – and ultimately impossible – with more.
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Calm Afghan waters ‘Bacteria
batteries’ for energy storage Methane technology mimics chemical process found in marshes
Glistening sapphire pools are among the treasures of Afghanistan’s first national park, Band-e-Amir. Shaped by a series of natural dams, the park is home to wolves, wild sheep and the Afghan snow finch.
“
Climate change is the issue on which our generation of business leaders will be judged.
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Mark Bromley, Head of Business Performance, EDF Energy
Renewables “could save UK £12.6 billion a year”
Photo: Massoud Hossaini/Stringer/AFP/Getty
Investment in green power and energy efficiency to reduce spend on imported fossil fuels The UK could save itself up to £12.6 billion each year by 2020 if it invests heavily now in energy efficiency and renewable sources of power, according to a new study from the Renewable Energy Association. To make the savings, claims the report, the Government would need to increase its target of sourcing 32% of its electricity from renewable technologies by 2020, to 48% by that date. In addition, the nation would need to demonstrate 13% efficiency savings on electricity – achievable by taking simple measures such as turning off lights and appliances – and 14% on heat, mainly through better insulation. Together, these would reduce the UK’s huge spend on imported fossil fuels such as gas, on which the country is likely to rely for 80% of its energy needs by 2020. The study, carried out by Edinburghbased consultants Delta Energy and Environment, didn’t investigate the kind of
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financial investment needed to achieve the savings, but has been welcomed as a useful attempt to measure the economic benefits of spending on renewables. This has not been “given enough weight” until now, says Paul Ekins, Professor of Energy and Environment Policy at King’s College London and Co-director of the UK Energy Research Centre. “[Investment in renewables is] not just about increased security of indigenous fuel, but the economic benefits of not relying on imports,” he adds. Ekins, along with other experts, warns that the Government is not doing enough to support renewable energy industries, despite a commitment to source 15% of its total energy needs from renewable sources by 2020. “We need announcements on an almost weekly basis to bring investment forward, if we are going to get renewables – especially offshore wind – in place,” he warns. The UK currently generates more than 5% of its electricity, and just over 2% of its total energy, through renewable technologies. – Sophie Blakemore
A breakthrough in battery technology, which combines waste carbon dioxide with tiny microbes, could help provide an answer to intermittent wind power. Scientists at Pennsylvania State University are pioneering a method whereby electrical energy is stored as methane, which can then be burned to release power when it’s needed. The system’s active ‘ingredients’ are a combination of tiny microbes and CO2. Placed under an electrical current – for example from an off-grid renewable power source such as wind or solar – the microbes convert the CO2 into methane. Professor Bruce Logan, head of the research team, explains that they work in a similar way to the natural process found in marshes. He suggests that the initial carbon dioxide needed for the chemical reaction could even come from industrial sources: “CO2 is soluble in water, so the gas stream could be bubbled or transferred” in pipes from factories, for example. The ‘battery’ is designed to work as a closed loop, capturing and reusing the CO2 that’s released when the methane is burned. The energy conversion is about 80%, Logan claims, but admits that “a lot more research into scaling up these systems is needed” before commercial viability could be assessed. Gaynor Hartnell, Director of Policy at the Renewable Energy Association, agrees that it’s early days, but adds that “if it were costeffective and could be used on CO2 from power generation, then it would appear to be a dream come true”. The most advanced trial of renewable energy storage is under way at a Minnesota wind farm. The batteries use sodium sulphur chemistry and operate at temperatures of more than 430ºC. In May, General Electric announced the opening of a factory in New York to develop sodium-based batteries, which will help power the company’s hybrid rail locomotives, and could also be used as storage for intermittent types of renewable energy such as wind power. – Ed Gould
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Airlines “want global cap and trade” Aviation industry proposes worldwide carbon emissions trading system The approach of 2013, when aviation is to be included in the EU Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), is concentrating minds in the industry. Seven airlines have joined with airport operator BAA and NGO The Climate Group to float an alternative scheme, which they shared at June’s ‘pre-Copenhagen’ climate talks in Bonn. Putting their motivation in a nutshell, Climate Group Policy Director Mark Kenber told Reuters: “If airlines don’t propose something [which is] credible environmentally, but also that works well for them economically, then they will get saddled with some other option”. In an effort to avoid the confusion of having one EU-only scheme, plus potentially various other overlapping initiatives, the Aviation Global Deal Group is advocating a new global cap and trade scheme, integrated within an overall UN post-Kyoto agreement. All airlines would have to buy enough permits at auction to cover the carbon content of the fuel they use. Part of the proceeds would go to the Adaptation Fund, set up under the Kyoto agreement to help the poorest countries cope with climate change; some would also go to fund aviation biofuel
development, and some, possibly, to schemes which pay developing countries to preserve their forests. So far, Air France/KLM, British Airways, Cathay Pacific, Finnair, Qatar Airways, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Blue Airlines Group have signed up to the group. The EU’s current plan is to bring aviation into its ETS pretty gently, giving airlines free Can planes save the forest?
permits at the outset to correspond to 97% of their average emissions in the base period 2004-2006. They would only have to buy permits for any excess – though that could be substantial, with forecasts that the industry will double in size by 2020. Meanwhile, the least developed countries (LDCs) have tabled proposals to beef up the Adaptation Fund by means of a simple-to-
understand levy on every international plane ticket sold worldwide. Modelled on France’s ‘solidarity levy’ initiative to fight HIV/AIDS and other pandemics, the proposed International Air Passenger Adaptation Levy would be charged at a flat rate of $6 per trip in economy and $62 in business class. It would be compulsory, but is pitched at an individually affordable level, partly to avoid discouraging people from flying to tourismreliant LDCs. The ticketing company would pass the money directly to the Adaptation Fund (not to national treasuries, as is the case with the UK Government’s air passenger duty), financing projects such as sea walls, extreme weather warning systems, or mangrove conservation for storm protection. This is not carbon offsetting, but straight victim compensation – recycling money from everyone who chooses to fly, to help the poorest and most vulnerable. According to the Oxford-based European Capacity Building Initiative, whose Director, Benito Müller, worked up the proposal for the LDC group, it would provide a predictable revenue stream of $8-$10 billion. It remains to be seen which ideas make it through the crowded negotiating agenda into any Copenhagen climate deal at the end of this year. – Roger East
Iconic skyscraper to slash energy use by 40% New York’s most iconic landmark, the Empire State Building, is set to become one of the city’s greenest buildings, thanks to a $20 million retrofit that will slash energy use by nearly 40% over the next 15 years. Forming part of a wider $500 million rebuilding programme for the 381 metre high skyscraper, the refurb will save an estimated $4.4 million each year in energy costs and has a payback of under five years. “We’re putting our money where our mouth is and showing how this is not just good for the environment, but also good for people’s pockets,” says Dana Schneider of Jones Lang LaSalle, one of the key project partners working with the building’s owner, Tony Malkin. Measures include: • Insulation: trapping radiator heat, and triple-glazing the tower’s 6,500 windows (manufactured on-site to reduce transportation) • Low-energy air con: refurbishing the existing system, and sending waste metals for recycling • Educating tenants: a model ‘green’ office suite on display
10 Green Futures July 2009
• Incentivising tenants: an energy metering system displaying their real-time usage; sub-metered billing to replace flat-rate charges. Aiming for LEED Gold accreditation (the second highest category in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design green building rating system developed by the US Green Building Council), Schneider wants the project to be an exemplar for building retrofits worldwide. “Existing buildings currently create 40% of the world’s carbon emissions, rising to 70% in cities like New York and London,” he says, “so we have to act.” They’re also hoping to get the message out to the four million or so tourists who visit the Art Deco skyscraper every year: “It’s part of our mission that every single visitor will know about our retrofit.” The team plans to install an interactive energy display wall in the lobby to keep visitors amused as they queue to board the lifts for the nail-biting ride up to the viewing platform on the 102nd floor. – Rebecca Schischa
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: Getty/Photodisc; R.Berenholtz
Empire State Building gets eco-makeover
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Students, prisoners flush with pride Rooftop harvesting systems save money at a London jail and an art college Students at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design and inmates at Brixton Prison will be flushing their toilets using rainwater, thanks to massive new rooftop harvesting systems. Provided by Newarkbased Stormsaver Ltd, the installations should provide water for six to eight of every ten flushes, with top ups from the mains where necessary. The six rainwater systems on the new student campus, part of a major brownfield redevelopment project at Kings Cross, represent Stormsaver’s largest individual commercial contract, worth £140,000. Water from the roof will be stored in underground tanks, which range in size from 10,000 to 90,000 litres, from which it will be piped to flush the college’s WCs and urinals. Brixton Prison’s 1,200-litre storage tank (retrofitted
above ground, in this case) will collect some 118m3 of water from the jail’s 197m2 roof area, for use in both the cells and public toilets. The prison says its mains water bill is expected to go down “significantly”. This is the twentieth prison contract for Stormsaver, which has also fitted rainwater harvesting systems in schools and for B&Q, Asda and Sainsbury’s – suggesting that the practice is fast moving beyond rainwater butts in the garden to a much larger scale. Rainwater harvesting remains a small industry in the UK – worth just £5.6 million according to the Rainwater Harvesting Association. However, recently announced changes to building regulations, which aim to increase the water efficiency standard in new homes from 150 to 125 litres per person per day, give guidance on using grey- and rainwater harvesting. One trial of installed domestic rainwater harvesting systems, carried out by Severn Trent Water, showed that they provided the households’ total non-potable water needs for the year. – Howard Sharman
Catching the rain • Small-scale rainwater collection, from the eaves of roofs into jars and pots, has been practised in Asia and Africa for thousands of years. • Early examples of centralised systems include a 13th-century Sri Lankan irrigation reservoir and a municipal cistern in Istanbul, dating back about 1,500 years. • The world’s largest rainwater harvesting project is in China’s Gansu province, where several million storage tanks have been installed over the last 20 years. • Rainwater harvesting is mandatory on new build in some areas, including Bermuda, the Caribbean Turks and Caicos Islands, the Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and parts of Australia and New Zealand.
2 in 3 …told the research group TNS that they would prefer to drink tap water than buy a bottle when dining out. Last year, UK sales of still and sparkling dropped by 9%, with awareness of the benefits of tap on the rise. Not only is tap water 1,000 times cheaper, but it doesn’t consume energy involved in bottling and trucking it around the globe. Catch it before it gets this far
Photos: Dome of a Home, Waterstudio.NL; Nikolay Mikhalchenko/Shutterstock
Homes for a warming world
With sea levels now expected to rise twice as fast as previously forecast, the race is on among architects for the most future-proof homes. These clever designs mean your home would stay standing, whatever the weather.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Waterstudio’s floating villas [left] offer a stylish throwback to the Ark, while Dome of a Home’s elegant monolith [right] – built to withstand winds of up to 300mph – has survived Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina.
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Slimming good for the environment, says study
Staying slim is as important for the planet’s health as for our own, a new report reveals. Countries with normal rates of obesity (3.5%) consume almost 20% less food and produce up to one gigatonne fewer greenhouse gases than a population with a 40% obesity rate, concluded the article published in the International Journal of Epidemiology (IJE). Its authors suggest that a higher rate of obesity would mean both an increase in emissions from food production, which today accounts for around a fifth of
manmade greenhouse gases, and from transport. They conclude that leaner populations are more likely to walk and cycle, and that cars and planes use less fuel when transporting lighter people. Forty per cent of adults in the US are already obese (defined as a body mass of more than 30kg/m2). The UK rate is currently 25%, and according to a recent article published in the journal of the Royal Statistical Society, this will rise to 30% next year. The London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine’s Dr Phil Edwards, co-author of the IJE report, called on governments and policy makers to recognise the link between “fat populations and climate change”.
“Policymakers can promote [a slimmer populace] by making active transports like walking and cycling safer, as well as making healthy food options available at schools and workplaces,” he says. One European city has already risen to the challenge. Ghent council, in Belgium, has declared every Thursday vegetarian day, to encourage its inhabitants to eat less meat and so take a step to more sustainable living. To date, 94 restaurants have agreed to guarantee at least one vegetarian dish on Thursdays, the council claims, with some going completely meat-free. From September the main dish at all primary schools on that day will be vegetarian. Other cities,
All UK homes to get smart meters by 2020 Nationwide rollout expected to cut energy use by 2-3% How best to replace the nation’s 48 million electricity and gas meters currently lurking in hallways and dusty cupboards with something more prominent in our daily lives? That’s what the Government’s smart metering consultation is looking to answer, fulfilling a promise it made back in October 2008. Timetabled to be completed by 2020, the nationwide overhaul across 26 million homes, and several million SMEs, would be the world’s largest such scheme. And, if it prompted the estimated 2-3% reduction in energy consumption, it would take Britain 1% down the road towards its target
12 Green Futures July 2009
including São Paolo in Brazil and Genoa in Italy, have expressed an interest in replicating the move. In the UK, former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney and his daughters Stella and Mary have launched a ‘Meat Free Monday’ campaign, to raise awareness of vegetarianism and highlight the impact of food choices on the environment. Researchers at the Institute for Environmental Studies in Amsterdam have come up with figures claiming that if every UK citizen took up the idea, the associated reduction in carbon emissions would be equal to taking five million cars off the road. – Sophie Blakemore
Counting the cost of the evening meal
of a 34% cut in emissions by the same date. Ed Miliband’s Department of Energy and Climate Change has suggested that it will be down to the supply companies to implement – and pay up front for – the actual fitting of the £15-a-year devices, with an independent agency handling the data communications aspects. But receiving real-time usage information could save them around £10 a year per household, in labour and time. Even if utilities choose to pass on the £5 cost balance to customers (with the exception, presumably, of those in fuel poverty), households are still expected to save at least three times that. Trials in countries ranging from Sweden to the US have shown that smart
meters can reduce household energy bills by 5-10%. By ramming home which appliances are using what power at any given moment, the more informative displays point the finger at the most energy-guzzling among them. Utilities npower and British Gas already have their toes in the water on smart metering – and a variety of innovative pieces of kit aimed at ‘early adopter’ homes and schools have been on sale for some time. But the really big prize, perhaps, could come from linking smart metering and dynamic demand management at the household level – so your fridge knows to shut down for a few minutes when everyone’s boiling kettles at the end of Strictly Come Dancing. – Roger East
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Photos: eyetrigger Pty Ltd/Corbis; npower
Countries with low body mass index emit fewer greenhouse gases
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Hydrogen city car hits 300mpg and 30g/km CO2 ‘Open source’, locally manufactured fuel cell car designed for sharing With politicians and carmakers waxing lyrical about electric vehicles, the squat hydrogen fuel cell car with a top speed of 50mph introduced by start-up Riversimple in June is definitely bucking prevailing trends. But what the Urban lacks in pzazz, it makes up in green credentials. Thanks to its super-light carbon composite body (just 350kg), fuel efficiency reaches an impressive 300mpg. It gives off no exhaust pipe emissions, and, says Riversimple, it’s also a ‘lower carbon’ car than the all-electric G-Wiz. The carbon emissions resulting from generating the electricity used to produce its hydrogen fuel work out, per kilometre, as half as much as those emitted in producing the power for the G-Wiz (30g/km as opposed to over 60g/km). Riversimple’s lead engineer, former racing car driver Hugo Spowers, describes it as a first attempt at a “sustainable car” in the widest sense. That’s why Urban’s whole design and manufacturing process looks very different to your average car. Firstly, it’s ‘open source’, which means design blueprints will be freely available for others to improve on. Secondly, the Urban won’t be sold outright, but leased to car sharing companies, local councils and individuals. ‘Sharing’ features, such as card-key door locks, are central to the design. And Spowers hopes to add a swappable dashboard so that different drivers can customise the same car with their own settings and driving stats. He reckons each car will have a 16-year life span, four times the average ‘leasing expectancy’. Manufacturing will also be local and fairly small-scale. If Spowers is successful in finding the next $32 million in investment, he hopes to establish a site producing around 5,000 cars a year – possibly in Oxford. Why hydrogen, you might ask. The fuel is not yet produced on a large scale without electricity from fossil fuels, nor is there existing infrastructure. “Hydrogen, in my opinion, is a massively better option [than electric batteries] for a city car,” responds Spowers. He explains
Dam good news
It won’t win Le Mans, it might save the planet
that the Urban is not a fuel cell car in the same way as Honda’s Clarity FCX, which replaces a powerful internal combustion engine with a large (and expensive) fuel cell. Instead, it uses a small, 6kW fuel cell – perfectly adequate for the modest flow of power to the four wheelbased electric motors – and a bank of ultracapacitors, charged by a combination of the fuel cell and regenerative braking, to deliver brief bursts of high power for acceleration. Spowers said Urban’s efficiency and range (200 miles compared with G-Wiz’s 75) mean drivers need refuel only once a week – so one hydrogen station could service scores of cars. But will drivers be interested in sharing cars? Spowers thinks the idea of individually owned vehicles may be on its way out, especially if fun-to-drive cars like Urban can provide better city mobility. “We’re definitely taking the long view on this one,” he says. – April Streeter
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Photos: Riversimple; De Meester/ARCO/NPL; Deutsche Bank
trillion Beavers are back The re-introduction of wild beavers to Scotland after 400 years of extinction has been called a “historic moment” in British conservation. Hopes are high that the rodents – due to be flown in from Norway in the autumn – will be a major pull for tourists.
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The metric tonnes of persistent greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, according to Deutsche Bank’s ‘real-time’ Carbon Counter. Set on a 70-foot tall digital billboard by Penn Station in New York, the Counter is intended to be an eye-catching reminder of emissions that are ‘out of sight, out of mind’. It remains to be seen whether the string of 13 digits in the sky will translate into behavioural change on the ground.
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Wind, woodchip and farm waste to power universities Higher education switches on to renewable power Motorists on the M6 might catch a couple of giant wind turbines out of the corner of their eye, if plans go ahead to construct two 2.3MW machines at Lancaster University’s Hazelrigg site early next year. The wind power project is one of three initiatives this year to receive a slice of the Revolving Green Fund, which was set up by the Higher Education Funding Council of England. Run in partnership with Salix Finance, the scheme is awarding £10 million to the trio, and another £20 million to smaller projects at around 40 other higher education institutes – which will need to provide match funding. Others benefitting this year are the University of East Anglia (UEA) and Harper Adams University College. In Norwich, where a conventional combined heat and power (CHP) plant has been running since 1998, UEA is introducing a woodchip-fuelled biomass gasification CHP plant – one of the first in the country – to provide a third of the university’s power. While Harper Adams – the agricultural
college in Shropshire – is hoping to convert its own farm and catering waste into renewable energy in an on-site anaerobic digester. Lancaster’s turbines, which are expected to provide about one-third of all electricity for the 7,000-bed campus, would be the first large-scale devices installed at a British university. Essex University introduced a smaller ‘urban’ turbine – the Quiet Revolution – at its Colchester Campus last year; the University of Reading has erected a mast to monitor the potential of one of its sites, and windy St Andrews in Scotland is in consultation with the community about a possible ‘wind cluster’ on university-owned land. The cash-strapped higher education sector seems to be embracing the energysaving agenda with open arms [see p37, and GF71, pp26-29]. “As well as the obvious environmental and financial benefits, this initiative will help universities innovate – and show the citizens of the future just how they can live more sustainably,” comments Jane Wilkinson, Director of Forum for the Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development. – Hannah Bullock
MA in Leadership for Sustainability at Lancaster University
“ ”
We cannot have capitalism without capital – as in nature’s capital. And once we’ve spent this, we can’t replenish it.
Prince Charles addresses the annual presentation ceremony of the Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy [see pp44-45]
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Photo: Pool Photograph/Corbis
MA in Leadership for Sustainability Commences: 16 November 2009
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German Army mounts offensive on carbon emissions
The war on climate change…
Biomass to power barracks The latest phase of the German military’s carbon-cutting campaign is a biomasspowered barracks featuring a state-of-the-art combined heat and power (CHP) plant. Baumholder officers’ barracks in the southwest of the country – which house 300 personnel and can hold up to 2,500 soldiers in training – are to get their entire heat and electricity from wood grown in forests at the base. Just 10% of the standing trees will be enough to power the 250kW ‘Enercarb’ plant, and they will be replanted each year, so reabsorbing the carbon generated by the system. Due to be up and running by the end of 2009, the technology will capture the heat given off by the burning wood chips, as well as the gas, which will then drive a generator and create electricity. Simple biomass boilers will also be installed at the barracks to supplement the generator at peak times in energy and heat demand. The plant is being developed by Alfagy, whose Managing Director, Peter Kindt, claims it will operate at 80% efficiency: “the highest of any plant of its kind”. Green initiatives have already cut carbon emissions by over a third between 1990 and 2007, according to the German Ministry of Defence’s figures. – Rebecca Schischa
“This carbon, Sarge – what does it look like?”
The German Army is also introducing: • ‘Mission E’ – a project to reduce electricity consumption in military buildings, by turning off computers and introducing energy-saving light bulbs and appliances • a plan for all new buildings to include low-energy features such as insulation, photovoltaic panels and modern heating controls. The British Ministry of Defence (MoD) launched its own three-year Climate Change Strategy in 2008, aiming to hard-wire sustainable principles into all areas of defence. Top-line plans are: • procuring more energy-efficient equipment, buildings and services • reducing aviation emissions and developing alternative aircraft fuels
• reducing emissions from the MoD estate and cutting down on business travel through more efficient ICT.
The US Army, meanwhile, is developing a range of green technologies to cut fuel bills (which came to some $150 million a month in Iraq alone last year) and reduce the security risk of transporting the stuff through hostile territory. These include: • organic waste from landfill sites to be turned into aircraft fuel • lighter, hybrid-electric armoured vehicles, which use a third less fuel than the current stock • solar PV rucksacks that power surveillance cameras on rooftops • wave-powered intelligence-gathering ‘PowerBuoys’.
Robotic fish to detect shipping pollution
Photos: Lukasz Janicki/Shutterstock; UPPA
Carp-like machines analyse chemicals in harbour waters Shoals of robotic fish, armed with sensors, navigation and communications technology, could soon be helping to rid harbours of chemical pollution. A total of u2.8 million of EU funding has been awarded to a research consortium of scientists and engineers from UK universities to produce five prototype ‘fish’ for a trial in the Spanish port of Gijon. Released into the water from March 2012, the autonomous robots will be fitted with chemical analysis tools, allowing them collectively to build up a detailed map of shipping pollutants and leaks from local pipelines, and relay this information to the shore. Sonar sensors implanted on the seabed and coastal walls will transmit signals
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Scares kids, sniffs out pollutants
to and from the fish – while a GPS system in their fins will orientate the shoal’s position. “Working together, they should be able to pinpoint precisely the sources of leaks, detecting the degraded components of fuels used in shipping, such as phenols and
naphthol,” explains Dr Damien Arrigan, who is leading the sensors development research at the Tyndall National Institute, Cork. The robots are designed to mimic both the appearance and the rippling movement of a carp. Constructed of aluminium, resins and rubber, they each contain eight computer-controlled DC motors, allowing them to travel at about 1 metre a second. Static sensor technology is already used in European harbours and waterways to monitor factors such as pH levels and the amounts of dissolved oxygen, but has never before combined the latest chemical analysis tools with underwater robotics. If the project is successful, the team hope to apply the same principles to detect biological pathogens, such as toxic bacteria in rivers. – Alex Johnson
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First UK power station captures carbon emissions ScottishPower plant to trial ‘clean coal’ technology The UK’s second biggest coal-fired power station made headlines in May as the first in the country to start capturing its carbon dioxide emissions. The project at Longannet, the 40-year-old plant on the Firth of Forth, puts ScottishPower at the forefront of a technology widely seen as crucial for the future of coal – and the climate. A ‘small-scale replica’ of a full-scale post-combustion carbon capture plant is now running until the end of the year, recovering CO2 from flue gases. The aim is to test the chemistry of how different amine solutions absorb the CO2, the amount of energy needed to heat the gas-saturated solution to drive off the CO2 and capture it, and how many times the amines can be recycled around this process. Operating on just 1MW of Longannet’s total net capacity of 2.3GW, the technology is processing 1,000 cubic metres of exhaust gas per hour. While this is carbon capture, it is not quite the much-vaunted ‘carbon capture and storage’ (CCS), as there’s no long-term storage arrangement in place. But ScottishPower hopes to scale the plant up to 300MW and link it with potential North Sea storage sites, if it’s chosen next year for the Government’s commercial-scale CCS demonstration competition.
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Britain finds itself at what you might call a ‘burning platform moment’. We can either take the bold steps necessary to take us forward to a prosperous but different kind of future. Or we can pretend to ignore the need for change, and risk going down with the ship. Richard Lambert, CBI Director-General
C
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£40m
The cashflow through London’s carbon trading exchange each day, since its opening in 2005. London is Europe’s leading carbon trading centre.
Fair trade boosts sales, widens horizons Since taking charge of the Department of Energy and Climate Change, Ed Miliband has pinned a lot on the UK’s chances of getting CCS to work – both to keep coal (which accounts for around a third of electricity delivered to the national grid) in the energy mix, and to develop a new green industry with massive export potential. According to the AEA Group, this could be worth £2-£4 billion a year by 2030, supporting 30,000-60,000 jobs. A second round of demonstration competitions, which would include trials of pre-combustion methods of carbon capture, were announced in April’s budget. And a consultation is under way (until September) on new legislation. Options include making all new coalfired power stations “carbon capture ready”, or requiring them to implement CCS on at least 300MW of net power capacity from day one. They would also have to commit to full-scale retrofit of CCS within five years of it being “technically and commercially viable”. Also on the cards is a proposal to set emissions performance standards to improve the efficiency of all (including existing) coal-fired power stations. Critics, including Greenpeace, fear the outcome could be a fudge that gives coal a long-term future, even though CCS remains just an uncertain promise. – Roger East
16 Green Futures July 2009
Rubber gloves and face cream among new wave of ethical products Fair trade sales have long been dominated by tea, coffee and bananas. But the latest wave of products to win ethical status includes everything from cosmetics to charcoal to… rubber gloves. In April Traidcraft released rubber gloves made from 100% natural latex, sourced in Sri Lanka, and in May it launched fair trade barbecue charcoal that has also been approved by the Forest Stewardship Council. “The brilliant thing about the Namibian charcoal,” says Anne Witton, spokesperson for Traidcraft, “is that it makes use of acacia trees which are [seen as] a weed [by local people]. So by clearing them the land can be used [for food and other agricultural produce].” Then in June, the Fairtrade Foundation announced its first certified beauty products using ingredients like shea butter handground from sun-dried nuts in Burkina Faso.
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Photos: David Gowans/Alamy
Longannet: shedding light on CCS
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Solar into space California buys energy generated in space
Photos: Markus Gann/Shutterstock; Traidcraft
Californians could be catching the rays come rain or shine if the world’s first spacebased solar power project gets off the ground. Plans to send a solar farm into orbit are awaiting final approval after a major power provider signed an agreement to buy solar energy generated in space. The satellite power station, intended for launch in 2016, will have a total capacity of 1,000MW. It will supply up to 200MW energy to major Californian power provider Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E), with the aim of delivering 1,700GWh per year over a 15-year term. The power generated will be converted into radio frequencies and collected by an Earth-based receiving station. This in turn will convert the waves back into electricity for use on the grid. The concept of space-based solar farms has drawn interest since the 1960s, with
A glint of possibility
researchers at NASA pursuing the obvious advantage of more or less continuously available sunlight. One of the major obstacles to space solar power has been cost. But Solaren – a company founded in 2001 to make the concept a reality – claims
The potential for fairly traded goods is enormous, as all raw materials are subject to harvesting processes that impact on the local environment and community. But with the recession tugging on the purse strings, are consumers still willing to pay the higher price for the ethical product? Vince Mitchell, Professor of Consumer Marketing at Cass Business School, is optimistic: “The global recession will hit the poorest countries the hardest, and so those who believe in the concept will feel it’s even more important to buy fair trade products… You might even see an uplift in sales as a sympathy vote”. Indeed, an independent study by the Ethical Corporation Institute found that 46% of UK consumers agree it is worth paying more for products that are ethically produced or environmentally friendly. And sentiment seems to translate into spending, with Tesco recording double-digit growth in fair trade stock in the last financial year, and the Fairtrade Foundation declaring sales up by £200 million in the year to March 2008. As Mitchell sees it, the “fair weather friends of fair trade” are more likely to be businesses driven by pressure on budgets to renegotiate deals with their suppliers. This could potentially lead to a monopoly of fair trade produce amongst larger corporations, with smaller companies struggling to meet the costs. Earlier this year the chocolate bar giants hit the headlines, as Cadbury set out to gain Fairtrade certification for all Dairy Milk bars sold in the UK and Ireland, and Mars pledged to source all its cocoa sustainably by 2020. – Anna Simpson
www.greenfutures.org.uk
to have come up with a design that will minimise the size and weight of the power station, making it both easier and cheaper to launch. Instead of being held together by heavy cables and struts, the station’s freefloating components will be aligned through remote control software, and a giant inflatable mirror will concentrate light onto highly efficient cells. If the plan – to be approved by state regulators by the end of October – goes ahead, PG&E will enter a 15-year contract with Solaren. According to PG&E’s Brian Cherry, the new technology “would represent a breakthrough in the renewable power industry”. Professor Philip Eames from the Centre for Renewable Energy Systems Technology calls it “an exciting and feasible idea, with nice new ways of making the reflectors lighter”. He adds that the cost remains “quite high, compared with competing technologies such as wind – but it’s the first attempt, and the price may come down in the future”. Meanwhile, Solaren will be looking for investment of $5 billion to fund the manufacture and launch. – Anna Simpson
Pedalling the wares Is the old-fashioned delivery bike back? Almost. Waitrose has launched a fleet of electric bicycles to carry online shopping to customers in the Poole, Droitwich and Lichfield area. The bikes, which can travel 30 miles on each charge, tow a chilled trailer with space for 20 bags – although staff can turn off the electric boost button and pedal them further. The supermarket, which scrapped delivery charges to encourage online shopping, wanted to avoid increasing lorry miles, and is extending the scheme to Bath and Brighton in July.
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Lean and Green: How Environmental Practitioners Can Help Business Survive and Thrive. Tuesday 22nd September 2009 Central Hall,Westminster For more information or to book online simply visit www.iema.net/conferences
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Partner viewpoint
Liquid gold Happy cows, empowered women, kids who eat their greens... just three of the vast array of benefits which flow from clean water. Sadie Ramm reports from Ethiopia.
K
uleytu Girmay is 38,
with five children. Thanks to a new water point in the village, which she’s been appointed to watch over as a local guard, she’s managed to pay off her old loans and send her children to school. Her ‘salary’ for this new role is any run off water from the taps and troughs, which she collects in a reservoir to irrigate her Swiss chard, papayas and guavas. Because the productivity of her thirsty crops has increased threefold, she now has enough vegetables to sell at the market. “Before I started this garden I was one of the poorest. Now I can return my bank loan, so I am free.” Girmay is just one of the individuals whose life has been turned around by a new WaterAid project in northern Ethiopia, where Ecover has forged a three-year partnership with the international NGO to bring clean water and sanitation to some 14,750 people. Ethiopia is one of the poorest countries on Earth, where only a fifth of the population have access to clean water, and little more than a tenth to sanitation. It’s not unusual for women to walk up to five kilometres to collect (unclean) water and carry it home in 25-litre jerry cans on their backs. The health problems from this dirty
water are rife, including skin diseases and severe stomach problems – with knock-on effects such as school absences and heavy medical expenses. Despite this immense daily effort, water is scarce: ten litres per person per day is the norm. Drinking and cooking are prioritised, so washing bodies and clothes or watering plants are pushed further down the list. And because vegetable growing is dependent on rainfall – sporadic in recent years – people are teetering on the edge of a food crisis, too. WaterAid has partnered with the highly influential Ethiopian Orthodox Church to tackle these problems through its 40,000 parishes across the country, which help to involve the community in building and maintaining facilities such as pipes and latrines. In the mountainous Tigray region where the project is based, the NGO has opted mostly for gravity flow systems. The water is tapped at the spring to protect it from things like animal dung, parasites and local flooding in the rainy season, and is piped into the villages using nothing other than gravity. As well as taps, some villages have adjacent cattle drinking troughs, washing points and rudimentary showers.
WaterAid is also trialling biogas latrines, using both human and animal waste to produce methane by a process of anaerobic digestion. Piped into homes, the gas is used in cookstoves and lamps, so saving scarce firewood, and giving clean, bright light for children to study by. The residue makes excellent fertiliser for household vegetable gardens. Thanks to local water committees, villagers get a sense of ownership right from the start – which bodes well for their continued success. Individuals are trained to undertake simple maintenance jobs, using readily available materials like clay or cement. And others are taking on the role of community health educators. The solutions are simple and effective; the benefits dramatic. As Kuleytu Girmay says: “I want my children to be educated and self reliant... My children are now used to eating vegetables and it has helped their health... The main difference is that we are drinking clean water – even the cattle can tell [it’s clean]... And healthy cows are important”. Sadie Ramm is Ecover’s UK Brand Manager.
Working with water
Photo: WaterAid/Marco Betti
Water is fundamental to Ecover, both on a global and local scale. Cleaning products have the most impact after you’ve pulled the plug, as phosphates and persistent chemicals enter our water systems. Legislation requires only the detergent element of cleaning products (as little as 3%) to degrade, meaning that the rest is left to pollute our waterways. Ecover only uses ingredients that biodegrade completely, leaving no unnecessary traces.
Ecover is a Forum for the Future Partner. www.ecover.com/wateraid Tigray: where clean water means smart kids
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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Feature
Crouching Tiger? Will the recession derail China’s slow train to sustainability? Or could it spur a surge in green innovation which will see the country become the world’s leading cleantech hub? Sam Geall investigates.
O
ver the last year, something
strange has been happening on the mainline platforms of China’s vast eastern cities. In normal times, they’re the site of mass seasonal migrations, as millions of migrant workers catch the train back home for the holidays, returning in equal numbers when work resumes. Since 2008, though, the stations have also seen a steady trickle heading west in more ways than one: they’ve lost their jobs and, for the moment at least,
20 Green Futures July 2009
they’re not coming back. As global recession squeezes the life out of China’s export-led boom, around 20 million rural migrants have returned to their villages – fuelling Beijing’s age-old anxieties about a countryside seething with discontent. Among those hardest hit have been some of China’s green entrepreneurs – often held up as a spark of light amidst all the gloom surrounding the massive expansion of dirty coal and smokestack factories. Take Shi Zhengrong [right], founder of Suntech Power Holdings, and something of a
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Feature
poster boy for sustainable innovation in China. Born into a poor farming family on an island in the Yangtze River, and given up for adoption by his destitute parents, he excelled in school and took a doctorate in solar technology in Sydney. There, he pioneered a breakthrough in photovoltaic (PV) cell design which cut the use of expensive silicon. Returning to China in 2001, he set up Suntech to exploit its potential. The launch coincided with a global solar boom, and within four years Suntech was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Dubbed, inevitably, “the Sun King of China”, Shi found himself, on paper at least, to be the country’s richest man. Then came the downturn, and Shi’s order books looked worryingly empty. Heavily dependent on European customers – particularly from Germany, where generous government subsidy had boosted solar takeup on new housing – Suntech was hit hard by the collapse in construction. Its share price tumbled too. For a while, it looked as if it might go bust – a fate shared over the last year by one in five of China’s solar firms. And it’s not just green industry that has been hit by recession, say insiders, but green regulations, too. A leading Chinese specialist on climate change policy, who asked to remain anonymous, says that, under pressure to keep the economy going, environmental concerns are falling by the wayside: “Many projects which have not passed [environmental impact assessments] have been given the go-ahead in an attempt to create jobs”. Faced with the slump, China has joined many Western governments in trying to spend its way out of recession. But in doing so it faces a critical choice. Will it stimulate the devil it knows – the traditional, energyintensive industries, such as steel and cement? Or will it seize the opportunity to reinvigorate its green sector and so become an engine of low-carbon development and innovation?
Shi Zhengrong: still holding on
“ ”
The sheer amounts of money involved suggest China is serious about cleantech
Within China itself, there are fiercely contrasting views, but initial signs suggest grounds for cautious optimism. Take Suntech again. It’s survived – and its shares are rebounding – thanks to two interventions. First, the local government and banks in Jiangsu Province, where the company is headquartered, have stepped in with vital support. Second, it’s set to benefit from the introduction of a domestic solar subsidy, which is paying builders US$3 per watt of installed capacity on each rooftop PV array (up to a total of 60% of the cost). Interventions like these are part of a larger picture. China’s US$585 billion fiscal stimulus includes $31 billion earmarked specifically for “environmental protection and energy conservation” – including a threefold increase in railway investment. It’s the largest single chunk of environmental spend in any of the stimulus packages announced over the last year. Analysts are more excited, however, by reports of another, much larger stimulus, around the corner. Aimed exclusively at boosting the country’s renewable energy sector, it is variously said to be worth between $440 billion and $660 billion. The sheer amounts involved, say analysts, suggest that Beijing is thinking seriously about how to make the switch from being the world’s all-purpose (and rather dirty) factory, to becoming a global hub for clean technologies. It’s also inspiring growing confidence that China will comfortably exceed its target to increase the contribution of renewables in the energy mix from 8% in 2006 to 15% by 2020. On a recent visit to London, Zhang Xiaoqiang, Vice Chairman of China’s top economic planners, the National Development and Reform Commission, was bullish: “We will at least reach 18%. Personally I think we could [achieve] 20%”. That would put it on a par with European targets.
Shanghai sunrise: early action to invest in clean technologies could give China a towering advantage
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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Greening the dragon f the Chinese Government gets serious about lack of local consultation, its unaffordable housing, and boosting green innovation, then the country’s a host of deviations from its original model – none of nascent motor industry could be one of the first the houses faced south, as planned, for example, and beneficiaries. Li Hujun, a Beijing-based only one was built with solar panels. environmental journalist, reports plans to give More recently, controversy has flared around rebates of up to $7,330 to buyers of cars powered Dongtan, the giant ‘zero-emissions’ city designed by by biofuels, electricity or hybrid engines. These British engineering consultants Arup for Chongming should “stimulate both domestic consumption Island, Shanghai, which was supposed to house and the development of 50,000 people. A year before the proposed completion new-energy cars”, says Li. of its first phase, when half of its eventual population Electric export: BYD’s plug-in hybrid breaks new ground Emblematic of that should have moved in, the project has barely broken industry is BYD Auto. It’s ground and construction permits have expired. For based in Shenzhen, site of some, the relative modesty of the Tianjin project’s first the country’s first Special phase is a welcome change. “Dongtan inspired me,” Economic Zone, and the says Goh Chye Boon, chief of the venture running the city that jump-started business park, “but I think when you reach too high, China’s economic you may forget that the ultimate beneficiary must be ascendance. BYD, which the resident.” started life as a battery While projects like the Tianjin Eco-City and BYD supplier, has now become Auto eye a green future for the cities, some innovators the world’s first company look to the residents of China’s rural areas for to mass-produce a plug-in hybrid car. The BYD F3DM inspiration. Here innovation proceeds more quietly, if no [right], as it’s unimaginatively known, can be charged less dramatically. The vast majority of Chinese with a normal household electrical supply. But it does households are still not come cheap: at $22,000, it’s around six times dependent on coal as China’s average annual wage. Not surprisingly, BYD’s cooking fuel. It’s relatively set its sights on the export market, and is targeting the cheap, but it’s dirty, Copenhagen climate talks in December as a showcase inefficient and, of course, for the F3DM, setting up a network of recharging polluting. There is an stations in the Danish capital. Meanwhile, it has alternative in the form of already impressed legendary US investor Warren crop waste: the maize and Buffett, who bought a 10% share. wheat stalks which litter Government backing for big green ambitions is also the fields after the harvest, in evidence at Tianjin. This industrial port east of Beijing and which are usually just Stacking potential: simple clean is to be the site of a hugely ambitious new ‘eco-city’, a burned off in situ. burning stoves sell well abroad joint Chinese-Singaporean venture which will shortly Daxu, a specialist enter its first phase with the construction of a 1.5km2stove company based in Yanqing County, on the northern outskirts of the ‘eco-business park’. When complete, the city’s 350,000 capital, has developed a new type of cookstove which residents will live in super-efficient buildings clustered in can burn briquettes made from the crop waste. It’s hubs designed to clean burning and reaches cooking temperature much minimise commuting Unlikely prospect – can Tianjin succeed where Dongtan failed? faster than coal. And it supports a growing local needs, and travel to work briquetting industry, too. The design won Daxu an by light railway. It’s a lot Ashden Award for Sustainable Energy in 2006. Daxu’s less ambitious when it late director Pan Shijiao, born into a farming family comes to energy, however, himself, said that government support for climatewith only 20% to be friendly energy sources was key to his company’s sourced from renewables. success. Shortly before the receipt of his award, Pan In a country which told me: “Renewable energy has been a priority on builds two Manhattan the agenda of the Chinese Government. Perhaps islands’ worth of new floor my company is only a part of the practical expression space every year, there’s of this agenda”. an urgent need for such China’s expertise in fuel-efficient cookstoves exemplar developments. has huge export potential, too. Shengzhou Stove But Tianjin’s experiment will be watched closely, Manufacturing is shifting around 300,000 units of because such projects in China have often not lived up its simple clean-burning woodstove [above] each to expectations. Its first eco-village project, year, mainly to India – an achievement which led it Huangbaiyu, led by American green guru architect to share one of this year’s Ashden Awards William McDonough, was widely criticised [see GF [see pp44-45]. special publication, Greening the Dragon (2006)] for its
22 Green Futures July 2009
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Photos: Surbana International Consultants; Martin Wright; BYD Auto
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Photo: Martin Wright
Feature
There’s an important caveat, though: the figure includes energy from China’s huge and controversial hydropower projects, such as the Three Gorges Dam, which has already displaced millions of residents and increased the risk of severe landslides. But interestingly, the company behind the scheme has recently announced plans to invest heavily in wind power, citing concerns about the social and environmental impacts of large-scale hydro. Wind at present accounts for just 1.5% of the country’s energy, but it’s growing fast: installed capacity has more than doubled each year for the past four, taking China to fourth place in the world wind power league (behind the United States, France and Spain). Homegrown companies have jumped into a market that was previously dominated by international firms, thanks to government policies that encourage the use of domestically manufactured turbines. Goldwind – based in Urumqi, near the wind-swept deserts of China’s far northwest – has become the country’s largest turbine manufacturer after it succeeded in licensing advanced technology from a number of specialist companies in Europe. In another encouraging development for the domestic renewables market, China has become the world’s largest consumer of solar water heaters: nearly one in ten households now own one. In Dezhou, a city of 5.5 million people in the eastern Shandong Province, every house in the new town uses solar heating, along with 90% of homes in the older quarters. Solar PV powers the city’s streetlights and traffic signals. It’s all part of an aggressive investment programme led by the municipality, which sees renewables as a source of future prosperity for the region. Already around 800,000 people – one-third of Dezhou’s workforce – are employed by the solar industry, and another 150,000 jobs are expected to be created in the next decade. This huge employment potential has been seized on by Chinese advocates of a ‘green new deal’, among them Jiang Gaoming, an environmental scientist and columnist for chinadialogue.net. He’s researched the possibility of using locally generated renewable electricity to power rural vehicles, such as farm tractors and flatbed trucks. Most of the trips made by such vehicles are short, so well within the limits of battery ranges. Jiang calculates that making the switch would not only save carbon and reduce the country’s pervasive air pollution, but could create literally millions of jobs. Julian Wong, a Senior Policy Analyst at the Center for American Progress, based in Beijing, is an expert on China’s cleantech industry. He sees the green new deal as key to overcoming one of the country’s crunch dilemmas for the 21st century: how to reconcile the aspirations of the Beijing leadership with those of local officials. The former increasingly see the long-term competitive advantages of low-carbon development, and view climate change as a serious threat to China’s social stability, and its food and water security. Local leaders, on the other hand, still tend to chase short-term GDP growth at all costs – especially environmental ones. If the government invests decisively to boost the market for domestic renewables, Wong believes, then these two goals “can become aligned. Central government can do a good job communicating to local governments that not only are they going green, but also they are boosting local GDP – and that’s going to look great on their records”.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
“ ”
Whatever central government says, local leaders chase GDP growth at all costs
“ ”
A green recovery could overcome one of China’s most pressing 21st-century dilemmas
Leading Chinese experts agree: Pan Jiahua directs the Institute for Urban and Environmental Studies at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, the country’s top think-tank. He says that, “China needs to deal with the current crisis, but also to make long-term plans for economic recovery and ongoing development. [And that means] choosing a low-carbon path with improved energy efficiency and a better energy infrastructure”. Doing so could reap dividends in terms of foreign relations, too, according to Professor Jing Xuecheng of the Chinese Centre for Financial Research. The low carbon route, he says, “will strengthen mutual understanding and trust, and decrease international pressure on China – a new focus for the country’s international economic strategy”. Soldering solar: green jobs could help cement recovery
Chinese labour is still relatively cheap: another reason, says Charles McElwee, a Shanghai-based lawyer and environmental policy expert, why it stands a better than even chance of becoming a cleantech manufacturing hub. But can it move up the value chain and take the helm in green innovation? “It’s clearly making great strides,” he says. “But as yet it has no coordinated development goals for this sector.” There may be strategic reasons behind this lack, he adds. “As part of its climate change negotiation strategy, China has presented itself to the world as technologically backward and lacking the resources to develop [sustainably].” But this is starting to change, as Beijing prepares to play a more active, if sometimes awkward, role in the climate talks at Copenhagen later this year. What is needed now, concludes McElwee, is for the US and other developed countries to get behind China’s cleantech ambitions, and so convince it that “green innovation and development can pay for itself – and boost the Chinese economy”. Sam Geall is Deputy Editor of chinadialogue.net
Emissions statement Despite the downturn, China also continues to improve its energy efficiency: the country is on target to reduce its energy use per unit of GDP by 20% from 2005 levels by 2010. This reduction has not however, been matched with a decrease in carbon emissions – it is now the world’s largest single source of greenhouse gases, and accounts for 57% of the global increase in emissions this decade. It’s increasingly recognised, though, that a significant proportion of this has been, in effect, ‘exported’ from other countries, principally Europe and the US, for whom Chinese factories churn out vast quantities of consumer goods.
Green Futures July 2009 23
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A thousand words
The thin green line The shifting sands of the Barkhan dune come up against “a moving grove”. Expanding by six million hectares a year, China’s ‘Green Wall’ is the world’s largest manmade forest. The first saplings, mainly fast-growing poplar, eucalyptus and larch, were planted in 1978 to quell storms of dust, but are now increasingly valued as a carbon sink, too. Photo: Georg Gerster/Panos
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Feature
Rites of passage T
he number 57 glides to a halt
by the skytrain interchange and a modern Celia Johnson steps in. Reaching into her purse for a BlackBerry she flips it open and studies it for a minute, then turning round with a smile taps a gentleman on the shoulder. He gets up to offer his seat but she holds out her hand: “Mr Rose, so glad to meet you. According to the transit network you work with an old friend of mine – time for a chat?” This vision of mass transit as a future LinkedIn-onwheels is a favourite of Professor Glenn Lyons, from the Centre for Transport and Society. It’s about making it fit with people’s lifestyles, he argues, when asked how lowcarbon transport can realise its potential. Innovators are already coming up with designs to bring such visions to the streets. In May, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology unveiled a solarpowered digital bus stop. Dubbed The EyeStop [right], it allows passengers to check their emails, browse community message boards and track the location of all the buses in the area, turning the tedium of waiting into time well spent. The slick glass frame of the EyeStop is also designed to glow brighter as the bus nears, so signalling how close it is. But however slick the stop, futurologist Ian Pearson dismisses buses as a clumsy way to get around. “You see buses with nobody on them, still using a lot of fuel to get where they have to be.” He envisages a fleet of publicly owned computer-driven electric cars – or pods: “You’d just pick up a phone and say ‘I want a car please’, and the pod turns up outside your house, picks you up and drops you at your destination, then heads off to answer someone else’s call.” The pod would have a sensory system, Pearson explains, capable of reacting in milliseconds to other vehicles and pedestrians by braking or accelerating. It would react so quickly, in fact, that colliding with another pod would be impossible, and this means that there’d be no reason why one pod shouldn’t drive a fraction of an inch behind another, improving the capacity of the roads by a factor of three or four. Pearson isn’t the only one convinced that computerdriven pods are the way forward for urban transport. “It’s the biggest and most radical thing that could happen,” says Brian Souter, CEO of transport giant Stagecoach, who believes it could be a big cost saving, too. “People think the cost of public transport is going up because of fuel – but fuel is still only 10% of the service cost… 60% of it is labour. Without drivers you could run more vehicles at much higher frequencies – and save money.”
26 Green Futures July 2009
It sounds good, but will it ever move from science fiction into reality? “I remember as a kid futurologists saying ‘We’ll all be driving around in computer-driven cars’,” says a disenchanted Richard Brown, CEO of Eurostar, “and now I’m 56 and it hasn’t happened.” Yet prototypes on show at the Future Mobility Solutions Conference in Helsinki suggest that driverless cars are indeed just around the corner. Developed by the EU CyberCar project, these intelligent machines have high-tech lasers under the hood to avoid crashes and follow paths mapped out by GPS. They even have an Bus stop with a view: a source of information as well as shelter
“ ”
Speed will always be associated with pleasure
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Images: MIT senseable city lab
Interactive bus stops, driverless cars and brief encounters… Could tomorrow’s transport be even sexier than a soft-top convertible? Anna Simpson takes a ride into the future.
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automated voice to keep passengers informed on the journey – a definite plus for Knight Rider fans. And when David Hasselhoff decides he needs to take the wheel, all he has to do is enter a password to switch to manual, or navigate from his mobile phone. But why stick to the road, asks Pearson. The car he envisions wouldn’t wait idly in the car park at the city interchange, but drive straight onto the electric rail tracks, racing off at 360km/h. Its batteries would get a quick recharge en route, ready to turn down the A-roads when it hits Edinburgh. To Richard Brown, this is madness. However quickly the computer responds to a danger ahead, he explains, the stopping distance for a high-speed train is at least three miles, and putting more ‘pods’ on the tracks would be giving people a license to kill themselves. But if cars are never going to be more like trains, the humble bus might, he says: “Buses will look very different in 20 years’ time. You’ll see longer, articulated buses which look like trams, if not small trains, on trunk routes – and there’ll be smaller ones going around estates.” He even shares Pearson’s dream of tapping into your BlackBerry to dial a bus – “or taxi, it’ll be the same thing”. But what’s really going to change isn’t the bus, he says – it’s fashion. “Travel behaviour is like other consumer behaviour in that there’s a lot of habit – a lot of ritual – in it. If people have a car parked outside their house, instinctively
“ ”
Buses aren’t a very fashionable way to travel, but they’ll look very different in 20 years’ time
they’re going to get in that car. And buses aren’t a very fashionable way to travel. I would see that all changing very fundamentally in 20 years’ time.” The London-based Campaign for Better Transport is looking at how the places we live and work can influence these habits. “The Americans call it transit-oriented development – or TOD,” says Executive Director Stephen Joseph. Instead of making transport adapt to rigid urban layouts, the idea is to shape the city around effective transit. Each region is designed to have the right blend of residential, work, retail, civic and green spaces so that you never have far to go, and no destination is further away than a stroll along a pedestrianised avenue to a rapid transit pick-up-point. One of the first cities to try out TOD was Curitiba, the capital of Paraná in southern Brazil – which has become something of a case study in innovative transport. In 1968, a master plan designed to minimise traffic pedestrianised a major street, and installed a oneway system that gives priority to exclusive bus lanes. The city’s ‘speedy bus’ system is designed so that they only ever stop to let passengers on and off at specially designed stations. Each bus carries up to 270 people and no matter how far you go, the price of a single journey stays the same. Following in Curitiba’s footsteps is Hong Kong’s LOHAS (Lifestyle of Health and Sustainability) Park. There, walkways are designed so that pedestrians never have to cross a road, and all pathways lead towards the public transport interchange. “It isn’t about mass transit on its own,” explains Joseph. “It’s about the land use patterns that make mass transit worth having.” Personally, I’d say a transit system is ‘worth having’ when using it stops being a bore (“I’ll have to take the f***ing tube”) and becomes a pleasure. In transport terms, speed will always be associated with pleasure, and short journeys give the impression of having travelled quickly. And so those of us who can’t move to newly built eco-towns might find ourselves relocating so that our social, domestic and professional lives can play out in close proximity. Indeed, Brown is convinced this is already happening: “People are coming back to live in the inner city. Little more than 20 years ago politicians waxed lyrical about solving inner city problems – now they talk about sink estates or edge of town.” Interestingly, the most attractive town centres in Britain – those where a fine cathedral drew interest and industry in the past – are also those where transport behaviour is really on the move. “They have the greatest interest in preserving their environment,” explains Souter, “and they’ve also got the most successful park and ride systems, so big numbers of people are shifting from cars to buses.” For Souter, the natural next step for towns like these is to make them car-free, and implement a high frequency, computer-driven pod service. Ambitious thinking is certainly happening at a high level, and technology is at the ready. Whether it will be changing habits that drive transport into the future, or slick and stylish buses that spark new trends, we don’t know. But it’s just possible that 2050 could see us stepping from our transit-oriented apartments onto the platform of a solar-powered skytrain, and tapping directly into the online community network: the perfect set-up for a brief encounter.
In the pink: the healthy glow of an approaching bus
Anna Simpson is Green Futures Publishing Coordinator.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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Feature
Spark plug
I
…the feisty Tesla...
f you wanted to see a snapshot
of an industry in quick-fire transition, there was no better place to be than the 2009 New York Auto Show. Gone were the heavy duty Hummers and the lumbering SUVs. In their place, the sexy Tesla Model S, the funky MINI E, and the friendly bug of the Mitsubishi i MiEV: all of them spanking new – all of them electric. For the moment at least, it’s something of a gold rush, with shades of the dotcom boom as brash startups like Fiskar, Tesla and Aptera challenge the struggling industry giants. But if all the hype around ‘EVs’, as electric vehicles are known, sounds a touch familiar, it should. Back in the mid-90s, electric cars popped up from major manufacturers such as General Motors and Toyota, partly in response to California’s ambitious zero emissions standards. However, a federal court challenge and subsequent weakening of those standards helped dampen EV development, and when GM scrapped its EV-1 project – an electric vehicle designed to be leased, rather than owned – it seemed to sound the death-knell for EVs. Carmakers blamed weak consumer demand;
28 Green Futures July 2009
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It’s a gold rush – with shades of the dotcom boom
environmentalists smelled conspiracy. In the film Who Killed the Electric Car? Chris Paine concluded that the culprit was a mixture of cheap oil, industry resistance to change, and behind-the-scenes lobbying and deal making. This time, though, it could be different. Shocked by last year’s soaring oil prices, and humbled by a recession which has wiped out the market for their gas-guzzling staples, the world’s major car companies are desperate for a new idea. And now they’re at the mercy of governments keen to concoct a ‘green recovery’, which have made clear that they expect significant environmental progress in return for state aid to the struggling industry. Policy makers from Barack Obama to London Mayor Boris Johnson and Chinese Premier Wen Jaibao have jumped on the zero emissions bandwagon, introducing subsidies to help people scrap petrol cars and buy hybrid or all-electric, as well as pledging infrastructure and grid improvements. One difference between the EV fever of a decade ago and today’s excitement is its global reach. It spreads from US billionaire Warren Buffet, who is investing in Chinese battery maker BYD [see p22], to China’s huge
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photos: BMW Group, Tesla Motors Model S
Coming to a street near you: the nifty MINI E…
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A hundred years after the petrol revolution swamped the first fragile wave of electric cars, they’re back. But are they back for good? And can they really save both the motor industry and the climate? April Streeter peers under the bonnet.
…and the cute i MiEV
Photo: Mitsubishi i MiEV
A cautionary tale The history of Norwegian car maker TH!NK is sobering reading for anyone suffering an excess of electrical hype. TH!NK was founded in 1991, learning its craft through many EV prototypes. As it neared introduction of a viable product in 1999, it was snapped up by Ford – spurred by Chairman Bill Ford’s fleeting enthusiasm for shifting the US auto giant onto a more sustainable footing [see GF24, pp22-26]. Ford trumpeted EVs as the future of the car, yet abandoned both that stance and TH!NK just four years later, in the face of weak sales and shareholder scepticism. Bereft of its Detroit backer, TH!INK went into bankruptcy, only to be revived in 2006 by one of its original developers. Then, just as it was on the cusp of large-scale production, the credit crunch sent it spinning perilously close to bankruptcy again at the end of 2008. TH!NK’s City car is one of the few crash tested, highway approved all-electric automobiles ready to roll. Yet Norway, when asked to bail out TH!NK as part of its economic recovery plan, demurred. It was unwilling, one Norwegian EV advocacy group speculates, to bolster a fledgling car industry in a country that has never had one. Richard Canny, TH!NK CEO, says in spite of this 17-year roller coaster ride, he remains optimistic. “This time governments are being very active and jumping in with both feet. I really think that we’ve reached the tipping point.”
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domestic subsidies for EV buyers, to Bolivia’s fast growing lithium industry, supplying the essential component of EV batteries. Active involvement by both governments and power utilities is key, however. The cars won’t roll out of the showrooms in vast numbers unless there’s an infrastructure to support them. There are several visions of what that might look like. America’s Natural Renewable Energy Laboratory imagines small, nimble electric or hybrid vehicles at the core of neighbourhood mobility by 2030. Power for these plug-ins would come from local grids producing renewable energy from solar, small wind and perhaps fuel cells. The cars, acting as mini power stations [see box, p31], would plug in from users’ homes and download electricity when they needed a boost, sending power back when the grid required it. In another scenario, a vast network of kerb and roadside charging posts will riddle cities and suburbs alike – with power utilities acting as middlemen, ready to give your EV its juice. In London, the first few kerbside rechargers – looking a little like enlarged parking meters, sporting a signature blue light – are sprouting up on the kerbsides. Mayor Boris Johnson is promising that there
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Feature
Six sparks
TH!NK City
Electric Car Company EViE
Mitsubishi’s cute i MiEV is already available in Japan, and 50 i MiEVs are headed to the UK this November, with another 150 following by the first half of 2010, according to AutoBlogGreen. Top speed: 80mph Range: 60-100 miles Price: £20,000-£25,000
Despite the roller coaster ride of its parent, the TH!NK City refuses to die. It recently received its EU clearance for roadworthiness, and is piling up municipal orders in places as diverse as the Netherlands and Spain. Let’s hope there’s a group discount. Top speed: 62mph Range: 110 miles Price: £35,000 (single order retail price in the Netherlands)
This may end up being the first sleeper EV. It was introduced with little fanfare, but EViE has some of the features mainstream drivers crave if they’re to go electric without losing too many creature comforts. It has a Citroën C1 body and can seat four roomily, along with front air bags. There’s regenerative braking to boost power, and the company claims up to 75 miles between charges (just enough to quell range anxiety for city/suburb driving). Top speed: 62mph Range: 75 miles Price: £16,850
Bee.One
Daimler Smartfortwo
Renault Kangoo be bop
Homegrown British start-up Bee Automobiles is promising a four door all-electric vehicle called the Bee.One by 2011, with a tempting target price of £12,000. That’s ambitious to say the least, and there are equally stretching claims for speed and range. So Bee.One may be the iffiest of our choices – but it might also be British motoring’s most surprising success since the Morgan. Bee.One won’t have a sound system, just an iPod dock. Top speed: 80mph Range: 100 miles Price: £12,000
The Smartfortwo ed (electric drive) is slated to be in limited production by the end of this year, and should be available in Europe in 2010. Smartfortwo is already being tested around the streets of London. Top speed: 70mph Range: 70 miles Price: TBC
Renault has gone EV partner crazy, signalling a real commitment to electric vehicles. However, Renault hasn’t been too eager to detail exactly which EVs will come out first, and what they’ll be like, except to say that a family sedan will appear in Israel (a country of relatively short motoring distances) in 2011; followed by the electric version of the Kangoo utility vehicle in 2012. Top speed: 80mph Range: 62 miles Price: TBC
30 Green Futures July 2009
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Photos: Bee Automobiles Bee.One, Smart, Renault UK Limited
Mitsubishi i MiEV
Photos: Mitsubishi i MiEV, TH!NK City, Electric Car Company EViE
The EV news is coming thick and fast, making it difficult to sift true contenders from the hype. So here are six EVs we think have a future, and not too far into the future, either. They’re not exactly cheap – but prices can be expected to fall dramatically as economies of scale kick in. And they cost much less to power up than their petrol or diesel equivalents.
Photos: Nancy Honey/cultura/Corbis, Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images
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will be 25,000 of them in place by 2015. And a new government initiative, the Low Carbon Demonstrator Competition, is launching a real-life trial of over 300 vehicles – mostly EVs – in eight locations around the UK within the next 6-18 months. As with household home electrification, though, any power network gets prohibitively more expensive as it spreads away from cities and densely populated areas. Then there is Better Place, Shai Agassi’s unique view of an EV future, in which drivers nearing the end of their battery’s range simply pull in to a ‘swapping station’ to have it switched for a fully-charged one. Operated by robots, the swap should only take seconds. The flat battery is then recharged at the station, ready for use in another car. With the batteries leased, rather than forming a fixed part of the vehicle, the EVs should cost less to buy. The prospect of lots of roadside swapping points similar to petrol stations may also help quell EV users’ ‘range anxiety’ (see below). One imaginative way of extending that range is to electrify major roads. That’s the approach favoured by Rupert Fausset, Sustainability Adviser at Forum for the Future. In this vision, highways would have some sort of electrified track on which cars could travel either individually or in convoy, recharging as they go. “Highway electrification has been left out of the vision,” says Fausset, “but building something like that is entirely plausible – we already do it with our train and tram systems.” It’s easy to see how governments and carmakers around the world are seizing on electrification as the ultimate magic wand: one that will both save an industry and force it down the road of sustainable innovation, while ensuring that consumers addicted to personal mobility don’t have to sacrifice their rides to save the climate. But these are still early days. Global Insight analyst Philip Gott likens the current state of the electric car industry to the dawn of the railway boom. “All of the things people worried about then – funds for start up, who would do the infrastructure etc – we worry about with electric. Creating an industry is not the problem. The full cast of characters – scallywags and entrepreneurs, and of course the government – are all here now.” But to move from this frenzied entrepreneurial phase to being a viable – even dominant – part of the global car market is harder, Gott says. He sees that happening somewhere between 2012 and 2030 – but he’s not willing to predict exactly when the tipping point might be. Developers need to solve a lot of problems before making the big push for mass electrification, he says. Batteries are the biggest barrier. On the business side, the industry is booming. In the US state of Michigan alone, tax credits of over $543.5 million have lured four companies to invest $1.7 billion in battery factories. Even so, demand for the lithium ion (Li-ion) batteries used in EVs is outstripping production. Take Mitsubishi. Its i MiEV is ready for sale in the UK in November, after which the company hopes to roll it out across the US. But a lack of batteries means its first year of so-called ‘full production’ (sometime after 2012) will be limited to around 10,000 vehicles. Eventually, new capacity will catch up with demand. But the next challenge to tackle is ‘range anxiety’. Drivers used to travelling 400 miles on a single tank won’t be impressed by something which struggles to take you a quarter of that distance. Brighton-based Calvey TaylorHaw of Elektrobay, a company making many of the
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Park and charge: powering up on a London street
charging posts being installed in London and across Europe, is an early EV adopter. He owns a Mercedes Smart EV – but says that even for fans like him, range anxiety is all too real. Until batteries have far longer ranges, the only cure is more recharging points. “In Brighton there’s no [charging] infrastructure, and the car has a 60-70 mile range,” he says. “So will I take it on a 26-mile journey to Gatwick Airport? No, not yet. I’m in the business, but I’m still getting up the confidence. The government is waking up with grants and incentives [for recharging points] but, outside London, councils are still sitting on the fence. If we put these in now it’s 12 months to two years before the cars are available – they think. So they don’t do anything. I believe the government is going to have to mandate that councils put in the infrastructure.”
Hot air equation
“
Creating an industry is not the problem. The full cast of characters – scallywags and entrepreneurs, and of course the government – are all here now
” Plug 'n' go in Westminster
One of the reasons for EVs’ recent ascendancy is their grasp of the holy grail of green transport: zero emissions. But it’s only zero at the exhaust: in most places, the ‘clean’ electricity which powers the car is produced by ‘dirty’ fossil fuel plants. Only Norway, with its heavy dependence on hydropower, could realistically claim that the vast majority of its electric cars are truly emissions free. Estimates vary quite significantly on how much impact the cars will have on the electricity grid. Professor Julia King of Aston University calculated that if Britain’s 27 million cars went electric overnight, it would need a 16% increase in UK electricity capacity. The Campaign for Better Transport, which wants to see people shift from private to public transport, says that figure is far too conservative. In any case, a major upswing in EVs on the roads would require some new generation – either more coal-fired stations, more nuclear, or an unprecedented surge in wind, wave and other renewables. In Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air, Physics Professor David MacKay agrees that the amount of renewables needed is quite daunting. But, he adds, because electric motors are already two to four times more efficient than internal combustion engines, they are well worth pursuing. And it’s not just efficiency gains that give them the edge. Plugged into the mains, their batteries can act as energy storage devices, helping the UK grid to cope with fluctuations of supply and demand. This will be a particularly important role if Britain expands the use of plentiful, but intermittent, renewable sources such as wind. In effect, the electric car fleet will function as millions of mini power plants, which both consume and produce electricity. In all five separate low-carbon clean energy plans McKay put forth last year, an electrified transport infrastructure is key. It means of course, that the future grid will have to be quite a bit smarter than it is now, able to debit and credit accurately all these mini plants as they suck power away and add it back.
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Feature
Meanwhile, do more with less…
The solar roof provides the juice: British Gas hopes to roll out PowerPark to supermarkets and offices across the UK
The holy grail of the electric car is a battery that, in range terms, rivals a petrol tank, and recharges in minutes, not hours. Recent years have seen a surge of R&D efforts in these areas, notably at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Researchers there have discovered a way to recharge Li-ion batteries much more quickly by reshaping the surfaces of the ions to make them move faster. They’re also hoping to reduce battery cost significantly and improve storage capacity over the next few years. Researchers also have high hopes that lithium-sulphur (Li-S) batteries could eventually be developed with a battery range five times that of Li-ion equivalents – more than a match for a tank of petrol. Sources of easily extractable lithium are, however, finite. As energy writer Jim Motavelli explains, “lithium itself is abundant, but, like hydrogen, it does not occur naturally: it needs to be obtained and processed”. Estimates on reserves vary wildly from 4 million to 28 million tons; the best estimate, from the US Geological Survey, is around 11 million. Roughly 40-50% of these reserves are in Bolivia, with smaller amounts in Russia, Argentina, Australia, China and Chile. Security of supply is by no means assured – Bolivia’s leader Evo Morales is doing his best to build a domestic industry, but threats of nationalisation have dampened multinational prospecting. Mitsubishi has estimated EV production may outstrip lithium supply as early as 2015, adding substantially to the cost of electric cars. Others are more sanguine, suggesting that ‘easy lithium’ will last into the 2020s, by which time new cost-effective extraction methods – including from seawater – will be on stream.
32 Green Futures July 2009
“ ”
The holy grail of the electric car is a battery that rivals a petrol tank’s capacity and recharges in minutes
So there don’t seem to be any insurmountable barriers to EVs’ eventual dominance. But that doesn’t mean they are poised to sweep the internal combustion engine into oblivion just yet. According to Boston Consulting, there could be as many as 1.5 million EVs rolling off assembly lines by 2020 – but that would only represent 3% of the global car market. Electric cars may take market share in the mid-range bracket, but even the most optimistic EV enthusiast wouldn’t claim they could be priced to rival the cheapest petrol versions – like the Tata Nano, selling in India at under £1,500 [see ‘And another thing’, GF68, pp16-20]. To have an all-electric paradigm shift within the next decade, says Richard Gott, we’ll need some sort of major disruption to petroleum supplies – like a war, or some other huge economic or climatic disaster. Otherwise, the transition will be much slower and longer than enthusiasts hope. Rupert Fausset, by contrast, suggests a surge in petrol prices might speed the process, providing “the right stick at the right time” to catapult EVs to market share of 20 or 30% in a few years’ time. So where does this leave us? By the middle of this century, it seems likely that EVs will occupy a substantial – perhaps a dominant – place in the world transport market. Hydrogen and biofuels will be there too, along perhaps with a small slice of highly efficient internal combustion cars. But it will be a very different kind of market. If present trends continue, the number of cars on the road will rise from 800 million today to three billion by 2050. Will we really choose to live in a world with three billion cars clogging the streets, however clean they are? It seems unlikely. Most mobility experts predict that, instead, we’ll get better at sharing cars, whether informally or through car clubs, better at developing smart public transit to cut out the need for individual car ownership – and maybe even better at planning our cities and our working lives, so as not to rely so much on a frenzy of constant rushing around. April Streeter is a freelance writer with Upstart Publishing, based in Sweden.
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Photo: PowerPark Canopy/Romag
Swept up in electric hype, we must not lose sight of the need to improve fuel economy on existing cars. That’s the view of Nick Nuttall of the UN’s ‘50 by 50’ Global Fuel Economy Initiative. It aims to cut consumption per mile by 50% in the next 40 years. “A lot of the efficiency technology out there is not being deployed,” he says. “Look at the motor shows with all those EV concept cars representing the ‘green future’. These are [made by] the same companies resisting emissions reductions and continuing to sell SUVs. With encouragement, a lot of companies can go further, faster and bring along the laggards. We have the technologies, we just need to accelerate.”
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Partner viewpoint
Eat the change Greening the food industry means more than picking the low-hanging fruit, says WWF’s Dax Lovegrove.
Photo: Photo: Shutterstock/Worldpics
W
hat have plastic bags,
food miles and rooftop turbines got in common? They’re all issues that have tended to hog the headlines on sustainability in the food industry. Because quick wins grab consumers’ attention, retailers and manufacturers have tended to get distracted by these smaller operational changes, rather than looking at their overall ecological footprint. In fact, most of the greenhouse gas emissions created by the food system (almost a fifth of the UK’s total) are down to production rather than operations such as the running of stores and offices. For example, last year’s Cooking up a Storm report from the University of Surrey found that most of the impacts from meat and dairy products, which account for about half of the UK food sector’s total greenhouse emissions, come from rearing livestock. It’s clear to us at WWF that food retailers and processors have a crucial role to play here: they are the link between production and consumption. WWF has launched the One Planet Food Strategy to help progressive businesses get to the heart of these issues. Its premise is that we need to reduce emissions from Britain’s food economy by at least 70% within the next four decades. That’s a big ask – and we know that it will be a tough engagement process. However, there are signs that mindsets are shifting within the industry: where once reputation management drove change, more material issues are starting to spur action instead. Resource efficiency and climate safety are fast becoming business assets, thanks to penalties on emissions – under the forthcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment – and a growing awareness that changing rainfall patterns could have a devastating impact on vital water supplies. Water is only now beginning to receive serious attention, but crises in many parts of the world are already threatening business supply chains. Cotton, for example, is one of the thirstiest crops, but is often sourced from countries such as Pakistan where water availability is in rapid decline. Companies that are still not assessing the water volumes, impacts and risks in their supply chains will no doubt be vulnerable in future. WWF is helping big businesses to focus on these critical issues today. For example, we run
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Herd instinct: curbing consumers’ appetite for meat and dairy is the next carbon challenge
farmer field schools in India, Pakistan and other countries on which companies such as Marks & Spencer and Ikea are increasingly reliant for labour and products. We’ve shown farming students how to reduce their use of irrigated water, pesticides and fertilisers by up to a third or more. Retailers not only reduce their overall water footprint this way, but also their emissions – in the form of less nitrous oxide from agrichemicals, for example, and less carbon from the cleaning and transportation of water. Through the Water Footprint Network, which WWF helped set up, we’re working with major businesses such as SABMiller, Coca-Cola and Cadbury to develop water practices that benefit local communities, wildlife and industry. Meanwhile, pressure is also mounting on food retailers and processors to source commodities responsibly. There are a whole host of ethical and environmental decisions they must make on foodstuffs like palm oil, soy, fish, sugar, meat and dairy. We’re working with them on how to engage suppliers and local communities in improved farming practices, through forums such as the Roundtable for Sustainable Palm Oil and the Better Sugarcane Initiative. WWF is also engaging with some of the global food processing companies – so that they can leverage their purchasing power to drive best practice in the field. Early indications from a study carried out for us by Imperial College show that
greening farming practices, along with efficiencies and technological advancements in the supply chain, could take us a long way towards the UK’s mid-term carbon reduction target (34% by 2020). But hitting the 2050 target of an 80% reduction in overall carbon emissions will also require a change in diets. Cutting down on meat and dairy will be important in the long term, but encouraging consumers to do so won’t be straightforward. Here, again, retailers will be key. Supermarkets, the dominant players on the UK food scene, will have to extend their role beyond simply responding to consumer demand, to shaping it. Food businesses that are to survive in a resource-constrained future, and minimise their vulnerability to the ‘ecological crunch’, are going to need some well thought out sustainability strategies. We want to work with the pioneers to help shape a One Planet Food system. Dax Lovegrove is Head of Business and Industry Relations at WWF-UK.
WWF-UK is a Forum for the Future partner. www.wwf.org.uk
Green Futures July 2009 33
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Feature
More than mere
F
rom the summit of Skiddaw
your eye skims Derwent Water, climbs over the ruddy Maiden moors and across forested fells, then up to the peaks of Sca Fell. Scenic splendours like this attract over 12 million visitors a year to the region. But few who drink in its beauty realise they’re also admiring an industrial landscape. The Lakes have been mined and quarried for over 800 years. Coal was a source of energy and livelihood from the 13th century until the closure of Haig Pit in 1986. The valuable iron ore, haematite, was extracted from local limestone until the 1830s. But not all the riches are in the rocks: the infamously drenching Cumbrian rain was turned into hydropower by the early innovators of the industrial revolution. Water-powered bobbin mills became a feature of the landscape in the mid19th century, supplying Manchester’s booming textile factories. Now the Lake District National Park Authority (NPA) has set its sights on a new surge in innovation. It is refocusing its Sustainable Development Fund in favour of low-carbon enterprises and renewable energy technology. Specifically, it has put tackling climate change at the heart of a vision of “a prosperous economy, world class visitor experiences and vibrant communities… all sustaining the spectacular landscape”. And with good reason: global warming is likely to have profound effects on the famous fells, lakes and pikes. The process has already started: rain and snowfall are diminishing, and are expected to decline by as much as 15% by 2020. Falling water levels in the lakes threaten extinction for rare fish like the Arctic Charr, a salmon-like
34 Green Futures July 2009
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Cumbrian rain was turned into hydropower during the industrial revolution
What’s it worth? Nick Austin, an instructor at Ullswater’s Outward Bound Centre, awards ‘eco-points’ to students for collecting litter – but if they want to use the centre’s minibus, it costs them points. This fledgling emissions trading scheme helps young people think about the links between the environment and their own behaviour.
creature which has lived in Windermere since the last ice age. Warmer and drier summers will also accelerate peat decomposition in the Pennines, releasing more CO2 into the atmosphere – an example of the notorious ‘feedback loops’ expected to accelerate global warming. But this isn’t just a landscape under threat: it’s also one of opportunity. There are already 16 major wind farms in Cumbria – one offshore and 15 onshore – providing just over half of the county’s electricity. The completion of several more projects currently under way should see Cumbria become a net exporter of electricity. Moreover, its latest economic strategy includes a £2 billion proposal for an energy ‘hub’ in West Cumbria. It aims to create 16,000 jobs in the energy sector, including wind, tidal and – more controversially – nuclear, drawing on the region’s heritage as home to the world’s first commercial nuclear power station. The plan has won endorsement from Peter Mandelson, Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills. Speaking at the Cumbria Economic Summit earlier this year, he declared the county has a “powerful… role to play” in a “new industrial activism”, by drawing on both its natural resources and its industrial heritage. One such ‘industrial activist’ is Martin Cottrell, owner of renewable power systems provider Sundog Energy. Based in Matterdale, Sundog is one of a growing number of green businesses located in the Lakes. It recently finished installing a solar photovoltaic system for the London Transport Museum, and staff even managed to make most of their journeys by train. Cottrell points to the glorious location of his business as a major motivator for staff: “As a place to work, you can’t fault it”.
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Photo: Fergus O’Brien/Getty
As changing rain patterns threaten to dry out the Lake District, Rebecca Willis unveils an industrial renaissance which could just make scenic and sustainable synonymous.
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Feature
ere
“ Photo: Cumbria Woodlands
Off the grid In the remote Eskdale valley, villagers have got together to look at the potential for biomass heating. With no connection to the gas grid, oil has been the main source of heat – with a hefty price tag. But locally sourced wood could allow the community to become energyindependent, while creating employment, retaining forestry skills and adding value to the valley. With support from the NPA’s Sustainable Development Fund, the group has installed wood-fuelled boilers in the local school and youth hostel, saving over 12 tonnes of CO2 a year.
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A regional energy hub could provide 16,000 jobs in wind, tidal and – more controversially – nuclear
”
It might be a beautiful backdrop for business, but the Northwest Regional Development Agency also hopes to raise Cumbria’s profile amongst potential tourists as an ideal place to wind down. At the moment, UK residents travelling overseas take more money out of the economy than visitors bring in, driving the country’s tourism ‘balance of payments’ billions of pounds into the red. A study for the Campaign to Protect Rural England suggests that this equates to the loss of 165,000 jobs in the northwest region as a whole. In response, Cumbria Tourism and the Lake District NPA are working to make low-impact domestic tourism a strong competitor to international destinations. Reviving the economy won’t be plain sailing. In recent years, the Lake District has struggled with low wages and limited employment opportunities. And newcomers drawn to the beautiful scenery have also found themselves surrounded by poor housing and local congestion. But if these various plans come together, the revived Lake District economy could prosper because of, not in spite of, its spectacular location. Get this right, and the prize could be huge: vibrant communities, thriving businesses and lowcarbon innovations, which provide inspiration to both residents and visitors alike. Rebecca Willis is an independent researcher, Vice-Chair of the Sustainable Development Commission and author of ‘Low-carbon Lake District: Tackling climate change in the National Park’, which can be downloaded from www.rebeccawillis.co.uk
Green Futures July 2009 35
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Partner viewpoint
The only way is up
With urban green space at an absolute premium, Groundwork is taking it to the rooftops. frenetic high street sits an oasis of calm. Right there on the top of the Lyric Theatre is a living, breathing roof garden [above], where locals can enjoy a much needed retreat from the concrete jungle. It “offers a gentle idyll – such a contrast to everything else nearby”, explains Adam White, Principal Landscape Architect for Groundwork West London. Situated next to a social housing estate, the garden can be accessed by residents, weary shoppers and theatregoers via a street-level staircase. But the Hammersmith garden is for wildlife, too, he adds. “We’ve deliberately used elements that are good for encouraging biodiversity – for example, a big proportion of flowering plants, as well as timber and evergreen trees.” Creating inner city green space has been at the heart of Groundwork’s projects for the past 25 years. It’s clear that urban communities find such places invaluable, says the charity. People use parks, nature reserves and gardens to get fit, to get to know one another, or simply to escape the hustle and bustle of the city. As it gets harder to squeeze in any more of these places at street level, there’s no reason why people can’t enjoy the same benefits on rooftops. Green roofs aren’t only useful in maximising land; they’re a great way of adapting to, and helping mitigate, climate change. For example, they cool cities, which can be a staggering 7ºC hotter than the countryside, by reversing the
36 Green Futures July 2009
‘urban heat island effect’. And in doing so, they reduce the need for artificial cooling systems, such as air conditioning, in hot weather, thereby helping cut carbon emissions. They also retain rainwater, so reduce run-off and the risk of flooding. Cities desperately need more rooftop gardens, says Anna Cooper, Green Roof Development Officer at Groundwork Sheffield – for the sake of environmental justice. “Deprived urban areas are more likely to be vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, such as increased flood risks and temperatures,” she points out. “Communities in these areas will be most affected by its impact, yet less able to cope with its effects.” She’s heartened by recent recommendations from the UK Green Building Council urging the construction industry to recognise the benefits of green roofs and to have the confidence to fully embrace them. But she’d like to see more public acknowledgement of their role as a climate change solution. That’s one of the missions of the Green Roof Centre, which was set up in 2007 by Groundwork Sheffield, in collaboration with the university and several local authorities. “When people experience green roofs for the first time they instantly see the benefits they have to offer and how they fit into the UK’s green infrastructure agenda,” Cooper says. But the word still needs to spread. The construction industry also needs better technical guidance. “As every green roof is unique, it must be installed to a high
specification to reap maximum benefits,” Cooper explains. British builders currently have to rely on European standards, such as those designed for Germany, because there are none issued in the UK. This is problematic, because each country has different climatic conditions. But now, the Green Roof Centre is working to create a Code of Best Practice that will raise the standard of green roof design and installation. It’s a £640,000 EU-funded project run in partnership with Groundwork Sheffield and the University of Sheffield. The UK has a lot to learn from Germany, believes Cooper. There, it’s a legal requirement to include green roofs on new flat-roofed buildings – and, to help developers along, there’s a generous grant system that typically pays up to 50% of the installation cost. Fortunately for the Hammersmith garden, private sponsors and non-profit companies came forward, including Marks & Spencer and HammersmithLondon. Cooper hopes the Code will become the ultimate standard for these vital spaces and be a first step towards their wider recognition as a solution worth significant investment. “We want green roofs to become a national phenomenon.” Garry Campbell works for Groundwork UK.
Groundwork is a Forum for the Future partner. www.groundwork.org.uk
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: Lucy Millson-Watkins
H
igh above Hammersmith’s
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Forum update Bridging the energy gap: can Bristol lead England to a low-carbon future?
How low can you go?
Photo: David Noton Photography/Alamy
West of England pledges to cut carbon by 10% What have Capgemini, Bristol Zoo and the University of the West of England (UWE) got in common? Along with ten other pioneering organisations in the region, all three have publicly committed to slash their carbon emissions by at least 10% by 2012, as part of the West of England Carbon Challenge. Speaking at the launch at the Prince’s May Day Summit in Bristol, Jonathon Porritt, Founder Director of Forum for the Future, said: “Those that have the foresight and energy to start this process now will be future-proofing themselves against future regulation and volatile energy prices”. From next year, organisations that spend around £500,000 or more on annual electricity bills will have to buy permits for their carbon emissions, under the Carbon Reduction Commitment. “For some organisations it can seem very difficult to know where to start,” explains Forum for the Future’s Paul Rainger. But the strength of the scheme lies in what he calls “peer marketing”. Members of the Challenge are encouraged to share their learning, and “trailblazers” who’ve already measured their footprint can provide support to new joiners. These include global consultancy firm Capgemini, which has set itself a target of 20% reduction in carbon emissions by 2014 (35% by 2020) and the UWE, which is aiming for a 30% reduction by 2011/12, from a 2001/2 baseline. The university had already achieved a 25% cut by 2007/8 by installing features such as condensing boilers, heating system controls, draught proofing, PV panels and solar heating systems – as well as encouraging students to ‘switch off’ on campus. Future plans include: more onsite renewable technologies; a staff behaviour change campaign; voltage optimisation units on fridges; and an automatic ‘PC switch off’ programme. Forum for the Future and the Bristol-based Centre for Sustainable Energy will offer strategic thinking and practical guidance to help the members take similar steps over the next three years. Also onboard
www.greenfutures.org.uk
are infrastructure consultancy Halcrow Group, engineering consultancies Arup and Buro Happold, Sustain IT Solutions, The Natural Building Store, event management company In Any Event UK, law firm Burges Salmon, CODA Architects, the South West Regional Development Agency, and the area branch of the Homes and Communities Agency. The aim is for 100 signatories by the end of 2009. – Hannah Bullock The West of England Carbon Challenge is part of Forum for the Future’s Sustainable Bristol City-Region Programme which aims to help make the region the UK’s leading example of sustainable urban living. Other projects focus on: promoting home energy efficiency, local and healthy food, and public transport and walking. www.westofenglandcarbonchallenge.org www.forumforthefuture.org/sustainable-bristol-city-region
Forest destruction and degradation account for around 18% of greenhouse gas emissions. But many communities and businesses rely on clearing this land for their income. Our new report, the Forest Investment Review, presents the latest thinking on how new financial models could save this vital resource and help to combat climate change. Read it at:
www.forumforthefuture.org/forest-investment-review
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Tomorrow’s leaders Since 1996, Forum For The Future’s Masters in Leadership for Sustainable Development has been training the sustainability leaders of the future. Each issue, we track the career of a Forum alumnus.
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Guy Thompson Class of: 1997-8 Currently: Executive Director External Affairs, Natural England Why I chose the MProf I had a career in conservation, but at the back of my mind a voice was saying, “I’ve got a degree in politics; I want to see something of the bigger picture”. I’m not a great academic, but this programme brought in thought leaders who’d been there, done that, for us to plunder their intellectual capital. It took my career in a whole new direction. What I learnt It was a crash course in understanding the scale of the challenge. I’d had an idea of sustainable development as this
all-encompassing magical fix. By the end of the programme I was in no doubt how far we were from realising the vision. But I also saw how much progressive-minded folk have permeated sectors you wouldn’t expect. Career to date My dream job was Parliamentary Officer for the RSPB – and I got it. The Masters definitely gave me the edge. I then worked for Forum for the Future as a Policy Adviser, before going to Green Alliance as their Director, where I had the chance to engage with environmental NGOs and politicians at the highest level – even Tony Blair. When I was approached by Natural England to join their executive board, I threw my hat into the ring.
What I plan to do next This is a time of reflection for me. I’m struck by how far we’ve come and how little we’ve travelled. Here we are at the fag end of New Labour, which has failed to grasp the nettle despite understanding the imperatives around climate change – so my optimism has faded. On the plus side, I’m encouraged that evidence for global warming is focusing minds and bringing bigger actors to the table. Advice for future leaders Build your career around your own values rather than around your perception of what you should do, because that’s what drives you and will give you the energy to lead others. Interview by Anna Simpson.
Fit for the future? New tool puts business innovation under the microscope Faced with a tough and highly competitive economic climate, companies have to innovate to survive. Even as the economy recovers, they will face testing challenges, as issues like water scarcity and obesity – not to mention carbon – rise rapidly up the corporate agenda. Simply carrying on as normal is no longer an option: tomorrow’s successful companies will be those that have the smartest ideas today. But which ideas are good ones and which are red herrings? Which products and services are likely to be successful in 10 or 20 years, in a more populated world where climate change impacts are hitting home? And will these new offerings help solve those problems – or exacerbate them? Smart businesses, whether micro-entrepreneurs or major retailers, already recognise that this forward thinking is essential. At Forum for the Future, we’ve developed a tool that can help guide people through this process, using a series of questions which lead to a clearer picture of any business model’s key social, environmental and economic impacts. It might sound obvious, but even the ‘greenest’ of business concepts need to be scrutinised in depth to check that the sustainability benefits outweigh the disadvantages. For example, does the picture change when you tackle specific questions like: ‘Is there a reduction in ecological impacts and resource intensity?’ or ‘Does each link in the supply chain add economic value?’ We’ve tested the framework out on a range of existing businesses, from commercial car clubs to major supermarkets, and have come out with some interesting results. Take a car club such as Streetcar or Zipcar, for example. One club car is estimated to replace six private cars, so it definitely represents a tangible shift from a product to service. At first, our framework appears to show that the model not only reduces car numbers, but gives customers the freedom to travel at a relatively low cost. So far, so sustainable. But the tool drills down further, asking questions like, ‘What happens when it goes to scale?’ In urban areas – where the business
38 Green Futures July 2009
works best – a car club might compete with a highly efficient public transport system. So could it potentially dissuade people from using that system, with negative environmental impacts? If the business model were really sustainable, wouldn’t it take people beyond petrol-fuelled private transport, or help them to switch to buses, trains and bikes, instead of cars? To be fair, Streetcar is one step ahead on this. Recognising that petrol-fuelled cars aren’t the long-term solution, it has recently introduced its first plug-in electric-hybrid rental car. The tool shows that, while car clubs are not a flawless sustainable business idea, they are certainly a move in the right direction. It could also help weed out any really bad ideas early on. For example, we hope it would act as an important ‘sense check’ for an acquisitions team thinking of buying a bottled water company! What we want to do next is use the framework with any company that is developing a new venture or that wants to challenge its current business model. We believe it could not only help avoid future commercial headaches, but – more fundamentally – could identify which businesses are truly ‘fit for the future’. – Dan Crossley For more information, please contact Forum’s Head of Business Strategies: d.bent@forumforthefuture.org
The plug is just the start: Streetcar promises access without ownership
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Cider industry blooms again Ancient industry reinvents itself as green pioneer Cider making, one of Britain’s oldest professions, has set itself the challenge to become a low-carbon, climate-resilient, zero-waste sector for the 21st century. The National Association of Cider Makers (NACM) – representing everyone from major brands like Bulmers and Magners through to small local outfits – worked with Forum for the Future to identify the factors likely to affect them in the future, and develop a vision of a thriving, sustainable sector by 2023. “We’re facing major challenges from climate change, plus economic and social pressures, which are likely to come to the fore in the next decade or so,” says Richard Heathcote of the NACM’s Sustainable Development Committee. “We clearly had two choices: wait and see what happens and then take action, or do the thinking now.”
Future pressures on the industry include a growing population, whose need for housing could see orchards ‘grubbed up’, and climate change. Somerset, one of the UK’s key cider making regions, is likely to suffer from lower rainfall in the future, according to projections from the United Kingdom Climate Impacts Programme. On top of this, changes in the way that society views alcohol are likely to affect business. Yet Cider Futures shows there are clearly opportunities to boost profitability and sustainability – for example by building on cider’s image as an authentic, natural drink, and by developing low-alcohol alternatives. The scenario building exercise also helped identify several key areas that NACM members will focus on: • Climate change: learning from Spanish orchards about drought and heat-tolerant varieties of apple • Carbon emissions: identifying the hot spots and aiming to reduce CO2 by 30% by 2023 • Pesticides: aiming to be “better than compliant” • Waste: moving towards zero-waste by reusing by-products, for example by turning spent yeast into cosmetics or apple pulp into biofuel • Biodiversity: working with food and drink companies and academics to define a “sustainable orchard” in its widest sense – environmentally, socially and economically. “The scenarios and vision are invaluable strategic tools for the cider industry,” comments Forum for the Future’s Vicky Murray, one of the authors of the report. “It is now crucial that the sector quickly turns its vision into action to set itself on a path towards a profitable and sustainable future.” – Hannah Bullock For a copy of ‘Cider Futures: A vision for a sustainable cider industry in 2023’, please contact v.murray@forumforthefuture.org
A recipe for sustainable retail
Sally Uren, Deputy Chief Executive of Forum for the Future
C Photo: Shutterstock/Alexei Novikov
arbon is most definitely
king. That’s the message coming loud and clear from European retailers. We interviewed the top names in the sector – including senior individuals from Sainsbury’s, Tesco, Carrefour and Dutch giant Albert Heijn – to find out about their priorities and where they think sustainability is heading. The good news is that the ‘S-word’ is high on the agenda of all 14 companies we spoke to as part of this research commissioned by Coca-Cola Enterprises. And the fact that carbon is at the top of the list is encouraging, because the radical decarbonisation of stores and supply chains certainly ought be a priority for all retailers. That doesn’t mean they all agree on how to tackle the issue...
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Take carbon labelling, for example. The ‘pro’ camp sees it as a way of promoting consumer awareness and exerting pressure on suppliers to drive down carbon intensity. There’s no doubt that companies such as Tesco and Pepsico – whose Walkers crisps were the first consumer brand in the world to display a carbon label – are doing great work in using the whole process to identify carbon hotspots in their supply chains. If they can now share their experiences through trade associations, they could play a key role in helping the sector deliver bold cuts in emissions. The ‘anti’ camp argues that an on-pack figure can’t meaningfully convey something as complex as a carbon footprint. I have to agree that just slapping on a number is not the best way of communicating these issues to consumers. It would make more sense to print a message about a brand’s commitment to cutting carbon, and reinforce this with in-store information on how to do your bit. But I fear this debate about numbers is distracting attention away from the more fundamental question of whether we should, in fact, be relying on consumer engagement to strip carbon out of retail operations. I think this ‘choice-route’ – pitting low-carbon products against high-carbon products –
will take too long and expects too much from the consumer. Retailers must simply take these carbon villains off the shelves. A few we spoke to said they were “actively promoting” product lines with sustainability credentials. Could this be ‘choice editing’ through the back door? Whatever they call this tactic, it’s definitely a good sign. As is many retailers’ recognition that water is becoming just as important an issue as carbon. Currently a ‘poor relation’, this will rapidly change as both water shortages and flooding cause disruption in supply chains. Now is the time for manufacturers like Coca-Cola Enterprises, which has been busy on water for years, to work with retailers to share their learning on ‘embedded water’ in products. Ultimately, it’s only if the two collaborate on common issues that we’ll see the stepchange we so need in the industry. Throw in a bit of futures thinking, to help them understand the risks they could soon face, and a mature approach to consumer engagement, and we could have a recipe for sustainable retail. To download a copy of ‘Sustainability trends in European retail’, please visit www.forumforthefuture.org
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Forum for the Future works in partnership with over 100 leading organisations, mainly from the public and private sectors, to find practical ways to deliver a sustainable future. For more information, visit www.forumforthefuture.org
Advantage West Midlands Tom Anderson, 0121 380 3500
Cornwall County Council Anthony Weight, 01872 322633
Kingfisher Christina Allen, 020 7644 1142
Severn Trent Kathryn Barker, 0121 722 4314
AkzoNobel Elizabeth Stokes, 01928 511695
Corus Stephen Blaylock, 01244 89 2713
Kraft Foods Jonathan Horrell, 01242 236101
Skanska Tanya Barnes, 01923 423906 Greg Chant-Hall, 01923 423614
Alliance Boots Andrew Jenkins, 0115 968 6766
Duchy Originals Tim Appelton, 020 8831 6800
Land Rover Jaguar Cars Julian Whitehead, 01926 649646
Arup Chris Trott, 020 7636 1531
Ecotricity Matt Thomas, 01453 756111
Leeds City Council Tom Knowland, 0113 395 0643
Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy Jane Howarth, 020 7410 7023
Ecover Belgium NV Mick Bremans, +32 3 309 2500
London Borough of Croydon Peter McDonald, 020 8726 6000
Atkins Helene Vergereau, 0113 205 1242
EDF Energy David Ferguson, 07875 119978
Middlesbrough Council Bob King, 01642 728233
Aviva Investors Zoe Collier, 020 7809 6000
Energy Saving Trust Paula Owen, 020 7654 2411
Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) info@msc.org
BAA Matthew Gorman, 020 7243 1264
Entec UK Ltd Francesco Corsi, 0191 272 6128
Marks & Spencer Rowland Hill, 020 8718 6885
Balfour Beatty Jonathan Garrett, 020 7216 6837
Eurostar Louisa Bell, 020 7922 2442
Merrill Lynch Matt Hale, 020 7996 2054
Benchmark Software Simon Harvey, 01458 444010
Fife Council Neil Gateley, 08451 555555
Minoan Group www.minoangroup.com
BCME Bill Duncan, bill.duncan@advizors.eu
Finlays Michael Pennant-Jones, 020 7802 3239
The Natural Step International Louise Bielenstein, +46 8 789 29 00
Birmingham City Council Sandy Taylor, 0121 303 1111
Firmenich SA Neil McFarlane, +41 227 802 435
Network Rail www.networkrail.co.uk
BP Naomi Korolew, 020 3057 2524
FirstGroup Terri Vogt, 07799 885171
O2 Simon Davis, Simon.Davis@O2.com
BT Environment Unit, 0800 731 2403
Food and Drink Federation Julian Hunt, 020 7420 7125
PepsiCo UK & Ireland Andrew Smith, 0207 734 0582
Cadbury Alison Ward, 01895 615568
Friends Provident Sandra Prida, 08452 683135
Powys County Council Heather Delonnette, 01597 827481
Cafédirect Whitney Kakos, 020 7490 9540
Groundwork Fiona Taylor, 0121 237 5815
Pret A Manger Nicki Fisher, 020 7827 8888
Calor Simon Maris, 01926 318810
GSH Group Robert Greenfield, 01782 200400
PRUPIM Siobhán Hewitt-Devine, 020 7548 6729
Capgemini James Robey, 0870 904 5761
Guardian News and Media Jo Confino, jo.confino@guardian.co.uk
Pureprint Group Yvette Dear, 01825 768811
Cargill Europe Fiona Cubitt, 01932 861916
Halcrow Group Andrew Kluth, 020 7602 7282
Rail Safety and Standards Board Joanna Gilligan, 020 7904 7655
Carillion Louise Rhydderch, 01902 316258
Highways Agency Lisa Scott, 020 7153 4749
Royal Dutch Shell Elfrida Hughes, +31610974798
Camarthenshire County Council www.carmarthenshire.gov.uk
IGD Dr James Northen, 01923 851919
RSA Paul Pritchard, 020 7337 5712
CDC Group Shonaid Jemmett-Page, 020 7963 4700
InterfaceFLOR Ramon Arratia, 020 7490 3960
Royal Mail Group Martin Blake, 01252 528 681
Cheltenham Borough Council Carol Rabbette, 01242 774928
John Laing plc David Micciche, 020 7901 3200
RWE npower Anita Longley, 01793 892716
City of London Emma Bara, 020 7332 1431
John Lewis Partnership Gemma Lacey, 020 7592 4412
Sainsbury’s Supermarkets Caroline Miller, 020 7695 3078
Commission for Rural Communities Graham Russell, 01242 534072
Johnson Matthey Sean Axon, 020 7269 8400
S.C Johnson Chris Lambert, 01784 484100
The Co-operative Group Chris Sherlock, www.co-operative.coop
JT Group John Pontin, 01275 373393
Scottish and Newcastle UK Richard Heathcote, 01432 345277
40 Green Futures July 2009
Skandia Jo Gilbey, 01703 334411 Sony Ericsson www.sonyericsson.com South West Tourism Neil Warren, 01392 353234 Tesco Ruth Girardet, 01992 644 053 The Tetley Group Sara Howe, 020 8338 4590 Tetra Pak Richard Hands 0870 442 6623 Thames Water Utilities Darren Towers, 0118 373 9063 TJX Europe Jo Murphy, 01923 473089 Time Warner Katherine McQuaid, www.timewarner.com/corp Transport for London Helen Woolston, 020 7126 3976 Triodos Bank James Niven, 0117 980 9721 TUI Travel Jane Ashton, 01293 645911 Unilever UK Helen Fenwick, 01372 945000 VisitEngland Jason Freezer, 0208 563 3180 Vodafone Group Chris Burgess, 01635 677932 Warburtons Sarah Miskell, 01204 556600 Welsh Assembly Government Simon Bilsborough, 029 2046 8669 Wessex Water Dan Green, 01225 526000 Willmott Dixon George Martin, 01932 584700 Wm Morrison Supermarkets Gillian Hall, gillian.hall@morrisonsplc.co.uk Wrexham County Council Michael Cantwell, 01978 292255 WWF-UK Dax Lovegrove, 01483 412395 Yorkshire Forward Debbie Rosen, 0113 394 9783
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Partner viewpoint
Green fields, digital divides Can’t live without email? For some rural areas broadband access is far from a given. So addressing this could boost business – and sustainability too. Slow pace at high speed: broadband lets the country shine
Photo: Shutterstock/olly
F
rom checking bank
balances to iPlaying last night’s Apprentice, many of us take fast home broadband access for granted, and rely on it for work too. But parts of the country are still starved of the service. According to a report by the Commission for Rural Communities (CRC), access to the world’s largest information portal is a postcode lottery where rural areas draw the short straw. Mind the Gap: Digital England – a rural perspective is the CRC’s response to the government’s Digital Britain report, which set out its commitment to provide universal broadband access at 2Mbps by 2012. While welcoming this as a first step, the CRC argues that it falls far short of what’s required – and risks perpetuating a ‘digital divide’, in which city dwellers enjoy fast, affordable and reliable connections, with the promise of super-fast NGA (‘next generation access’) around the corner, while rural communities languish behind. A broadband speed of 2Mbps may sound impressive, says the CRC, but in reality it’s a ‘first generation’ standard which will leave country users struggling to make full use of even basic internet services – let alone compete in the global market. Meanwhile, many rural areas still lack any access to broadband whatsoever. Such digital exclusion is damaging rural Britain’s prospects. Take service provision. Almost 90% of the UK’s public services are now available online – and some exclusively so. “Talk to most rural communities and they’ll tell you that conventional ways of providing public services are being withdrawn,” says Graham Russell, the CRC’s Executive Director. “The post office has closed, the job centre’s moving.”
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That means increasing isolation for the elderly in particular. Ironically, just as many senior citizens are starting to grapple with computers, they are frustrated by lack of broadband access. And they aren’t the only ones losing touch. “Most businesses have a web page or do online sales,” observes Liz Peel, author of the CRC report. “If [the technology to host these isn’t] available, they’re automatically disadvantaged.” Some companies have to relocate to stay in the game. “We wanted to access the types of broadband that were only available in urban areas,” says Angus Webb of Dipsticks Research, which recently moved from Northumbria’s rural seclusion to a business park in the market town of Hexham. “Out in the countryside, we simply could not reach our potential.” Poor broadband also hinders home working. Dr Ross-Gower from Kent, a chartered clinical psychologist, catches up with administrative tasks at home. “I need to access research [and other] resources... online, but [processing speeds are] slow to the point where work can be compromised.” The divide looks set to deepen as demand for faster connections grows, and NGA – which uses fibre optic cable – is geared to meet it. At present, says Russell, this is largely restricted to “deeply urban areas”. Nevertheless, he recognises that rolling out NGA would be “a colossal financial undertaking”: one that couldn’t be met just through the levy on fixed phone lines announced by the Government. What’s needed, Russell argues, is a new model for investment. “Broadband needs to be seen as an essential utility, with a payback period of 25 years, rather than spending to be recovered in the very short term.”
And public sector bodies could pool purchasing power, he suggests. “Let’s say the regional Health Authority looks at broadband’s potential to deliver services in rural areas, and sees there’s an efficiency dimension to that. Then [the] education [authority] has the same thoughts. They work together, aggregate demand for broadband, then take that to the private sector.” Major telcos will struggle to justify rolling out NGA on purely commercial grounds, admits Malcolm Corbett, CEO of the Community Broadband Network – but that opens the door to local initiatives to take their place. Take Cybermoor, which delivers broadband via a local fibre optic network to Alston Moor, Cumbria, paid for by a mix of local subscriptions and public funds. The benefits have been wide ranging: not only are the locals better connected, but the enterprise has created more than a dozen jobs and established an online community hub for everything from swapping goods to setting up lift shares. Whether it’s through initiatives like these, or more direct government action, Russell hopes that Mind the Gap will stimulate discussion on how best to move forward. So if you’re living in an idyllic landscape on the wrong side of the divide, watch this space – the blackbirds may not be the only ones twittering for long. – Claire Baylis
Commission for Rural Communities is a Forum for the Future partner. www.ruralcommunities.gov.uk
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Carbonated water New research reveals the hidden greenhouse gas emissions behind water use. Chris Alden dips his toe into the findings.
D
Photo: Photo: iStock/Arthur Carlo Franco
NED UP.
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RFUL.
CAL.
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ecisions, decisions…
dishwasher or washing up bowl? Bath or shower? Water-saving or carbon-saving? Yes, you know that, generally speaking, the dishwasher uses less water than washing up by hand, and that the shower uses less water than a bath – but how can you even begin to fathom their carbon emissions? These are the kinds of questions that the Energy Saving Trust is starting to answer, thanks to new research it has commissioned into the relationship between water-saving and energy. “There’s been quite a lot of information from water companies about how water is used in homes,” says Magda Styles, the organisation’s Waste and Water Strategy Manager. “A third goes on toilet flushing, 20% on bathing – these kinds of statistics – but we had no idea how it translates into carbon emissions.” One of the standout stats in the study, carried out in association with the Environment Agency, is that, in the typical home, water use is responsible for creating up to a third as many emissions as are produced by space heating. This includes sourcing and supplying the water and removing and treating the stuff after use. But by far the largest single source – accounting for 90% of these water-related CO2 emissions – comes from the heating of water in the home. The findings only reinforce the message that water-saving measures, particularly reducing hot water use, tend to save energy, money and carbon dioxide. Just taking shorter showers, for example, could save 200kg of CO2 per person per year – equivalent to a return short-haul flight. The dishwasher debate
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is a little more complicated. CO2 emissions from washing machines and dishwashers are “disproportionately high, despite the fact that they have low water use”, admits the study. It concludes that installing a water meter should certainly help residents cut overall water use and CO2 emissions. Even if homeowners aren’t on a water meter, Styles points out, saving on hot water can still save them money on energy bills. Armed with these results, the Energy Saving Trust has launched its first ever ‘water strategy’ as part of its vision of a low-carbon lifestyle. The organisation has already published water-saving tips on its website. But now, as part of an EU Life+ funded project in partnership with the water efficiency NGO, Waterwise, it is to launch a pilot advice service in London, Cardiff and Edinburgh. “That will be our opportunity to test the messages we develop, and see what the effect of them would be,” says Styles. She expects these to include encouraging people to install flow rate restrictors on taps, to turn them off when they are cleaning their teeth or rinsing things in a bowl, and to cut the time they spend in the shower. The amount of water we use showering is on the increase, explains Styles, because ‘power showers’ have particularly high flow rates and we’re more likely to luxuriate in them. “Better plumbing standards and power showers mean people treat showering differently to [how they did] 20 years ago.” Improving point-of-sale information on bathroom products could be another way of cutting water use in showers and sinks. “When you buy a new bathroom suite, you probably
decide the colour, the shape, or whether it’s a gold or silver tap, rather than its flow rate,” she says. So the Energy Saving Trust is working with Waterwise, government agencies, water companies and manufacturers on providing better information and product labelling that will encourage homeowners to buy low-water bathrooms, just as they might a low-energy fridge. The organisation is also hoping to use the findings to influence policy – specifically to bring about a better integration of water and energy regulations. For example, there are conflicts in the Code for Sustainable Buildings which should be resolved, says Styles: “[The scoring system] allows rainwater harvesting to offset a higher-power shower in a higherlevel code home. You may be using less mains water as a result – but you are using more energy”. Ironically, as new housing stock becomes more energy-efficient, the proportion of domestic carbon emissions from water use looks set to rise. In zero-carbon homes – the standard for all new houses by 2016 – water use could be responsible for two-and-half times as much CO2 as heating, predicts Styles. Could these striking findings be just the wake-up call that policy-makers need to put in place the country’s first national water efficiency strategy? – Chris Alden
The Energy Saving Trust is a Forum for the Future partner. www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
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Partner viewpoint
Pump primers I
t’s March in Bihar, in the
heart of the dry season. The last trickles of rain are many weeks past, and the monsoon is still months away. But the fields are full of green – a profusion of well-watered crops: wheat, tomatoes, onions, coriander, garlic, mustard and more besides. They’re green because they’ve been meticulously irrigated – an achievement that would have been unthinkable for poor farmers just a decade or so ago. Reliant on monsoon rains alone, most struggled to survive on just one harvest a year. Now, thanks to the development of a simple treadle pump attached to a tubewell, they’re able to grow crops almost all year round. That means more income – and more security too. “We used to have to go to the city and work as day labourers for months on end to make ends meet,” says treadle pump owner Pratap Singh. “Now we can stay here on our own land the whole time: we eat better, we earn twice as much money, and the children don’t miss out on school.” The treadle pump was developed by a local NGO, International Development Enterprises-India (IDEI). Working closely with the farmers, IDEI technicians designed the simple bamboo structure, which allows the user to work the pump with minimum effort by ‘walking’ on the treadles – a little like a gentle workout on a step machine [above].
44 Green Futures July 2009
The installed cost, including tubewell, is around $30-$40 – easily affordable via credit advanced against the next, pump-enabled, harvest. Although developed by an NGO, the technology is being rolled out on a largely commercial basis – creating thousands of jobs in the process for distributors, retailers, trainers and installers. Over three-quarters of a million have now been sold across 15 Indian states. IDEI are on track to reach two million in 2010, backed by an imaginative publicity campaign taking Bollywood-style films (featuring genuine Bollywood megastars) into remote villages.
Champion stove
Its extraordinary achievements were recognised at a ceremony in London in June, when the Prince of Wales presented IDEI’s founder, Amitabha Sadangi, with an Award for Outstanding Achievement. IDEI joined six other international winners, all of whom received cash prizes worth up to £40,000 each, along with a package of expert support on technology, business development
and communications. This year’s Energy Champion Award went to a groundbreaking joint project by Oregon-based Aprovecho, the world’s leading research group on fuel-efficient stoves, and family firm Shenzhou Stove Manufacturing (SSM) of China [left]. Together they have developed a simple, affordable and highly efficient cooking stove. Mass produced by SSM, this is being sold in large numbers in India and elsewhere, bringing clean, lowcarbon cooking within reach of tens of thousands of poor families. Other international winners included: • GERES, for its simple solar greenhouses which enable Ladakhi villagers high in the Himalayas to enjoy fresh vegetables throughout the winter • ECAMI, a Nicaraguan enterprise using solar power to provide vital services such as water pumping, vaccine refrigeration and mobile recharging to rural communities • Kampala Jellitone Supplies, for producing fuel briquettes from crop waste, providing a vital alternative to firewood, and so curbing deforestation • Saran Renewable Energy, for its innovative use of locally sourced biomass power to provide clean electricity to Indian businesses plagued by power outages • Solar Energy Foundation, for providing solar home systems to villagers for as little as 75 pence per month.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photos: Sarah Butler Sloss; Martin Wright
From greenhouses in Ladakh to green homes in England, the Ashden Awards celebrate the world’s leading breakthroughs in sustainable energy.
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Partner viewpoint
Scaling it up Low-carbon, community-scale generation could provide almost a fifth of UK energy demand – if it gets the right support. But it needs Government to commit to “a long-term strategy, offering predictable funding flows” if it is to come close to fulfilling its potential. That’s one of the main conclusions of a study commissioned by Ashden Awards from the Institute for Public Policy Research. Its report, From practice to policy, distils the experience and insights of some of the UK’s leading practitioners in the field – those who have won Ashden Awards for their work in renewables and energy efficiency. They identified a number of barriers to their work, and proposed specific solutions to overcome them. Here are some of the key issues highlighted:
Bringing green energy back home: Ashden winners in the UK
Photos: Ashden Awards
Three UK awards recognise sustainable energy’s potential to transform lives in developed countries. This year’s first prize in the Business Award went to Geothermal International of Coventry, for installing over 800 ground source heat pumps [below], providing both heating and cooling to commercial buildings with minimal use of fossil fuels – saving 25,000 tonnes of carbon per year. Sustainable architects Architype took second prize.
Driving down the carbon: Geothermal installs its groundbreaking energy pile
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Barrier: funding The ‘stop-start’ nature of policies like the Carbon Emissions Reduction Target (the obligation on energy suppliers to provide funding for carbon-saving measures in households) means there are periods of inactivity after utilities have hit targets Solutions: • Regionally allocated funding • Continuous funding mechanism rather than a ‘bidding’ process • A carefully calculated feed-in tariff for small-scale electricity generation, accompanied by capital grants and government-guaranteed loans Barrier: planning permission A significant problem for larger-scale sustainable electricity and heat projects Solutions: • National policy involving both large energy companies and local authorities, to help embed targets at the local level • Enhanced training on sustainable energy for planning officers
Kirklees Council in Huddersfield won first prize in the Local Authority Award for insulating over 115,000 homes in its ‘Warm Zone’ scheme – helping householders save money and make their homes more comfortable, while dramatically shrinking the council’s carbon footprint. Devon County Council took second prize for its success in persuading local enterprises to ‘go renewable’. Giving period houses an energy-saving makeover – and throwing them open to the public so the lessons can be dispersed across the community – won the Sustainable Energy Academy first prize in the Charity Award. Second prize went to the Marches Energy Agency, for helping galvanise communities in central England to take up low-carbon lifestyles. When a school decides to tackle its energy issues, it has the potential to green not just its buildings, but its pupils, their families and the surrounding community, too. The two institutions to win the 2009 Schools Award have made great strides towards reaching that potential. After Ashley Primary’s Headteacher Richard Dunne saw climate change at first hand on a visit to Antarctica, he was fired up with the need to make a difference back home. Pupils and teachers alike have responded with enthusiasm, helping monitor and reduce energy consumption, and
Barrier: skills Recruiting the technical skills for a project can be problematic Solution: Develop ‘local sustainable energy’ as a career Barrier: householder engagement Lack of interest makes it hard to reduce emissions in the housing sector Solution: regulation which compels action on energy efficiency and renewables, following the example of condensing boilers – compulsory in all new installations. The Ashden Awards will publish a larger research-based report in early 2010. It hopes to act as a vital “conduit” between Award winners and policymakers, to help close the gap between the Government’s aspirations on local sustainable energy – and its delivery. – Hannah Bullock
www.ashdenawards.org/reports
Catching the breeze in Currie
integrate climate change into lessons from Art to English to Maths. The school has also installed a biomass boiler along with solar electricity and water heating. Edinburgh’s Currie Community High School [above] is proof that, contrary to the views of some sceptics, teenagers can be motivated to take environmental action. Currie’s students take the lead in tracking energy use, and make pledges to cut consumption at home, too. Full details of all this year’s winners, including downloadable short films, are available at: www.ashdenawards.org. Applications are now open for the 2010 awards – see website for details. – Martin Wright
The Ashden Awards for Sustainable Energy is a Forum for the Future Partner. www.ashdenawards.org
Green Futures July 2009 45
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Comment
The Knowledge:
Mick Bremans CEO, Ecover
“Make sure it works first – then make it green”
C
lean first, then green
When we started [20 years ago], we were making green products that also happened to be cleaning products. We thought: “OK, there is a huge market out there for green stuff – so let’s make a green product”. And at first everything went fine: we were stocked by the major supermarkets, and our sales and income rose rapidly. Then we [hit recession] in the early ’90s, and the end of that first green wave – and that was when we realised we had to change our basic strategy. We had to focus on product quality above all – on performance and convenience. Which meant our products really had to do the job when it came to washing, cleaning and so on. So we changed the priority, if you like. First we made sure they worked; then we made them as green as possible.
Mick Bremans: “I learnt the hard way that you have to be resilient”
Green all over – the company, not just the product We’re asking our consumers to make a conscious choice for an ecological product – usually they’re paying a little bit more as a result of that choice. So why shouldn’t they expect us to make a conscious choice to be a more ecological company? That question started us off down the road on all our environmental initiatives – whether it’s our green factory [in Ecover’s specially built timber and grass-roofed headquarters near Antwerp] or our packaging policies. Effectively we’re saying: ‘We want you to have a more sustainable lifestyle; as a company we have to do the same. So together, maybe we can achieve something’.
Do the right thing – and you might be surprised
Don’t be a fashion victim Environmental issues are as much subject to fashion as anything else. At the moment it’s all about carbon. Of course that’s important, but we always try to look at the whole picture, which can be difficult if the media is obsessed with a single issue. Water will be next: water footprinting will be a huge issue. But you can’t just chase after the headlines. Otherwise you’ll think you’ve cracked carbon, or water, or whatever, and then someone will come along and say, ‘your palm oil is destroying rainforests and killing orangutans!’ and you think ‘uh-oh’… That’s why we’ve asked Best Foot Forward to measure our total ecological footprint, covering all our impacts.
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There’s a right way and a wrong way... ...to be a green entrepreneur. The wrong way is to say: ‘I have this fantastic product, and everybody is going to want it’. That’s how we started, and it can work initially. But ultimately it can just create a lot of enthusiasm that shouldn’t really be there! The right way involves looking very carefully at the market, listening to the market – and listening to consumers. After all, you’re trying to bring them convenience, with added value, so you have to be clear exactly what it is they want. It sounds straightforward in theory – it can be quite difficult in practice! At the same time, though, you still have to be brave. You can’t expect real innovation from consumers. They have their long-established habits, they’re used to particular products, and so on. The innovation has to come from you.
Don’t worry about the waves I joined Ecover in 1992, right at the moment when we were coming down off that wave [laughs]. So I learned the hard way that you have to be resilient. If you think you have got a good product, you have to stick with it – but you have to be absolutely certain it’s a good product in the first place! Mick Bremans was in conversation with Martin Wright.
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Photo: Ecover
We set up our packaging returns system [in which used transit packaging goes back to the suppliers] as part of our green drive, but soon realised it saved us an enormous amount of money. Now our suppliers are using it with their suppliers, too – as much for the economic as ecological benefits… But once you start trying to act sustainably, you find you’re on a road which never seems to end. And that can be frustrating! You can’t say, ‘on that day we’ll become a sustainable company’. What you do today, you need to improve tomorrow, basically. So you need to set priorities: decide what is really important, and act on it.
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Comment
Let water run its course ‘When floods become fun’ [GF72, p36] sounds fabulous. We live near a canal, a construction which essentially ‘tells water what to do’. But in recent years the water has decided not to pay much attention and has started flooding the surrounding pasture. This is not brilliant for the farmers, of course, but it has given rise to some interesting developments in local plant life. We may well have to learn to live with, and appreciate, what nature throws at us. Amanda Gallop
Peaking too early In ‘Peak time travel’ [GF72, pp20-23] you pose the question: “How prepared are the UK’s leading transport companies for a world of climate change and peak oil?” With a number of nuclear reactors scheduled to be decomissioned and indigenous supplies of oil and gas in terminal decline, this is a valid question. When it comes to energy issues, Britain is in the unenviable position of being the G8’s ‘canary in the coal mine’. Having squandered indigenous resources of oil and gas when prices were low, the country must now confront a future in which an increasingly large portion of its energy is imported from countries who may not count the UK as a close ally. As the charts at the Energy Export Databrowser (hosted by Mazama Science) show, the UK has switched rapidly from exporter to importer of oil and gas, and its production of energy from all sources (coal, oil, gas, nuclear) is dropping at a worrisome pace. Jonathan Callahan, Mazama Science
Burning question I’d like to believe that biochar is viable [Chris Goodall’s ‘Burn the trees to save the world?’, GF72, pp26-29]. But would it require us to use the very same crop waste that people talk of turning into second generation biofuels, or of burning in biomass power stations? Doesn’t decaying plant material already in the soil boost fertility in the same way as biochar? Could adding charcoal to soil, rather than returning the cellulosic material to the ground, result in dust bowl conditions? Robert Palgrave
www.greenfutures.org.uk
Chris Goodall responds:
letters@greenfutures.org.uk
Letters
You ask two very pertinent questions. 1) Is the making of biochar acting as competition for biomass that would otherwise have use as a fuel or as a source for second generation (‘cellulosic’) ethanol? The answer is yes. Material that will be charred could have been used differently – and the world does not have a superabundance of organic matter. We will need to carefully plan how we both retain biodiversity and allocate land to growing biological materials for char, power generation and liquid fuels. 2) Isn’t decaying biomass in the soil doing the same thing as biochar? Yes and no. Biochar is highly stable in most soils; it will be there for centuries. Most biomass rots within a small number of months, particularly in humid zones. Biochar also helps retain soil structure, meaning that ‘dust bowl’ conditions are far less likely to occur. Almost any biomass will help soil conditioning. But char provides a) better water storage and b) a more receptive environment for uptake of nutrients. Biochar-amended soil seems to significantly add to rates of new biomass growth, so helping tackle the first point, too. Since I wrote the article, there have been further excellent results from agricultural biochar experiments in the tropics and temperate zones. Readers might keep in touch with one major experiment in Cameroon at www.biocharfund.com
Solar winner cooks up a storm The Kyoto Box, the winner of the FT/Forum for the Future Climate Change Challenge [‘The cooker, the cow and the carbon capture’, GF72, pp30-32] sparked a lively debate. The solar cooker is an excellent, inexpensive and easy example of how to reduce emissions, while providing healthy meals for the world’s people.
Join the debate at www.greenfutures.org.uk Don’t keep your thoughts to yourself! Our website receives hundreds of thousands of hits from visitors around the world. Reach them by posting a comment on any article in Green Futures, or respond to points others have made. Or just email us at letters@greenfutures.org.uk (Letters may be edited for publication.)
The Boy Scouts of America have been training their members to ‘build’ portable ovens using nothing more than a cardboard box and tin or aluminium foil, for the last 90 years. The Scout Movement’s ‘Leave No Trace’ guidelines help encourage members to be responsible for and responsive to their environments. Ellen Pabst von Ohain, Scoutmaster, Munich, Germany I was amazed to see that a solar cooker has won the climate prize. Have any of the judges actually been to Africa? Do they know how people there live, let alone cook? Solar stoves might be all very well in theory, but, in reality, people like to cook indoors, and usually in the evening or the early morning – when in Africa the sun don’t shine! Solar cookers are great in refugee camps and suchlike when people don’t have a choice, but elsewhere they’re a lifestyle change too far – that’s why they haven’t taken off in huge numbers, as many people thought they would. Having said all that, I wish the Kyoto Box guys well – if they can succeed where others have struggled, then more power to them. Marcus Westwood Simple solar ovens are already commercially available – so this ‘innovation’ has already occurred. Alan Bigelow
Forum for the Future’s Shannon Carr-Shand responds: The point of the competition was not to reward a ‘eureka’ moment, but to help an innovative approach to climate change reach the market. As Bøhmer acknowledges in his company literature and on his application, the concept of solar cooking has been around since the 18th century. There are other versions of solar cookers available on the web, as well as detailed explanations of how to make a similar version. What distinguishes the Kyoto Box is that the cooker will be mass-produced in existing factories, flat-packed for bulk transportation to end users and sold for the small price of $6. The prize money is going to enable Kyoto Energy to test durable, plastic versions of the cooker with 10,000 people who are currently burning fossil fuels to clean water and heat food.
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JonathonPorritt “Far too much of the environmental debate churns over at a very superficial level – we have to take the issues back to their roots”
M
y life will be just
that little bit poorer from now on, as I finish reading the last print issue of The Ecologist. I know it will still be published online, but I don’t do online, so for me, this final issue (and I have a copy of each one from the very first) will be it. On the one hand, it’s a pleasant reminder of how fortunate it is that Green Futures is still going strong. But there is something about this particular moment in time which means that the shelf-presence of The Ecologist will be all the more missed. Firstly, there’s never been a greater need for deep analysis. Far too much of the environmental debate churns over at a very superficial level. Try taking some of the issues back to their roots – failed economic models, the obsession with economic growth, the dominance of tiny, very rich elites. Add to those the fact (dare I say it) that each year there are 70 million people sharing the Earth with us who weren’t there the year before – and most environmentalists lose the will to engage. But without engaging ‘upstream’, as it were, at this level, ‘downstream’ campaigning on specific issues will never achieve anything more than damage limitation. We simply have to redesign the basic model of progress on which our economies depend. So few publications are prepared to grapple with that ‘deep framing’ – and The Ecologist is one of them. Secondly, things are going to get a lot tougher for eco-activists over the next few years. A combination of political paralysis, corporate vested interest and our conservative, co-opted media, ensures mounting anger among campaigners. And many of the basic entitlements protecting the rights of
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dissenting voices have been eroded by one of the most authoritarian governments the UK has ever had. Finally, we are all now caught up in negotiating the way forward. There’s increasing consensus about the destination (an equitable, low-carbon, hyper-efficient economy), but the controversy is in how we get there. Do we go fast and furious, investing now in high-cost, high-risk rollouts of technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS) or concentrating solar power (CSP) – technologies which, in fact, are yet to be proven? Or do we go cautiously and slowly – as we have over the last, lost decade – and hope that technology will catch up in time? And this debate is going to get even more controversial. The writing’s on the wall about climate change, and it’s clear that many carbon-intensive assets, which have already received a huge amount of investment, will never pay back in a low-carbon world. Witness the corporate backlash in the US against President Obama’s dynamic efforts to address global warming. As soon as it became known that his election pledges were for real, all those big oil, coal and other CO2-intensive industries started putting aside tens of millions of dollars to fund a nationwide advertising campaign directly attacking the President’s proposals. Déjà-vu? After decades of redneck intransigence across the US, and eight years of George Bush in the White House, it’s unbelievable to think that yet more time will be wasted as a consequence of these malign, corporate interests. There are many, many great companies in the world today, playing their part in securing a more sustainable future. But there are also some shocking ones – and we need to keep speaking truth to that reality. The Ecologist has done that as well as any publication in the world – which is why I, for one, will miss it so much. Jonathon Porritt is Founder Director of Forum for the Future and Chairman of the UK Sustainable Development Commission. www.forumforthefuture.org www.jonathonporritt.com
www.greenfutures.org.uk
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