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A group of Cambridge university students descended on the capital last Saturday (October 27^th) to encourage people to lobby for stronger legislation to save the planet. The Cambridge Zero Carbon Society (www.zerocarbonnow.org) wants Parliament to toughen up its planned legislation on greenhouse gases.

The Parliament Square protest was organised to increase the targets set out in the forthcoming Climate Change Bill, due to be discussed by MPs in the next parliamentary session. The legislation will make Britain the first country in the world to pass laws to restrict greenhouse gas emissions.

“This Bill gives us the opportunity to lead the way in setting meaningful targets,” says organiser Stephen Stretton. “If we get this right we can set an example for other countries to follow and create a real possibility of creating a sustainable future”.

Current calculations suggest that a sustainable level of carbon dioxide emissions would be about one tonne CO2 per person per year, averaged across the total world population. The current global average is about 4 tonnes per person and growing, while in Britain each person is already responsible for ten.
This means Britain needs to reduce emissions by 90% to reach the sustainable target. In addition, it is important that these reductions are achieved in the next twenty years. This way we could limit any global temperature increase to no more than two degrees celsius above the pre-industrial, which is the point at which dangerous feedback mechanisms could cause more serious damage to the climate.

The students, who were dressed in their academic gowns, want the Climate Change Bill strengthened to increase the proposed target of 60% reduction by 2050 to 90% by 2030.

Ends.

Note for Editors:
The protest happened from 11am-1pm in Parliament Square, Westminster. The protest was organised by the Cambridge Zero Carbon Society and supported by the Cambridge Climate Change Coalition.

Find our response to the UK Climate bill here: www.zerocarbonnow.org/?p=394

Full document (pdf) here: http://www.zerocarbonnow.org/wordpress/uploads/full-response-climate-bill.pdf

Poster: http://www.zerocarbonsociety.org/wordpresszcs/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/protest27thnew1.pdf

For further information please contact:

Marc Kaufmann: 0789 184 9630

Following a recent Cambridge Energy Forum meeting on carbon offsetting and a subsequent email dialogue between myself and Philip Sargent, I would like to clarify some terms and describe a critical problem with carbon offsetting.

The Gold Standard and other sets of rules for carbon offset projects rely on a test of “additionality”. This test basically states that, for a carbon offset project to meet the standard, it must be demonstrable that the reductions in carbon emissions would not have happened anyway. Examples of projects that would pass the additionality test are a wind farm in China that would not otherwise have been funded; energy saving light-bulbs in South America that would not otherwise have been provided; and projects to filter HFC23 from factory emissions that would not have happened otherwise. Critically, the test of additionality is only made within the scope of the carbon offset project.

The are various problems with the concept of additionality – such as the virtual certainty of moral hazard coming into play (e.g. wind farms might not be funded another way simply because China knows carbon offset money is available) – but I believe the most significant flaw is that the test is incomplete. The problem is that we are dealing with an open system – global energy production and consumption – and not a series of closed systems. The easyJet flight you offset, VAT free, for £1.77, and the Chinese windfarm are not the end of the story.

We need another test, which I term “subtractability”. That is, there needs to be an onus on the carbon offset provider to prove that the carbon emissions saved really are subtracted from total global carbon emissions. Several types of carbon offset project fail this test and must be consigned to the fig-leaf category.

Of the 3 examples I gave earlier, the first two both fail the “subtractability” test. They run into what I have previously termed “the displacement fallacy“. For example, China is using energy as fast as it can produce it. The wind-farm may simply mean they produce and use more energy than they would have done otherwise. Similarly, people given energy-saving lightbulbs may simply be able to afford more electricity for something else, or power cuts may become a little less frequent in their country. [Note that I am not arguing that such projects themselves are not worthwhile – I’m merely pointing out that they most likely will not successfully offset your carbon emissions].

Projects that directly remove or destroy GHGs, such as those to capture HFC23 from factory flues, pass the subtractability test, but may run into other problems, as we heard at last week’s Cambridge Energy Forum. In fact, since the types of project that pass the subtractability test – such as tree-planting – tend to fail in other ways, it’s difficult to see how carbon offsetting can do more than salve peoples’ consciences.

An upstream solution to global warming

By Ray Galvin

The only way we can save the planet from catastrophic climate change is to drastically reduce the amount of oil, coal and natural gas we are taking out of the ground. Any strategy for mitigating global warming that does not have this as its lynch-pin is bound to fail. Yet strangely, this is the one approach that no-one is talking about.

Full Article: An_Upstream_Solution by Ray Galvin

By Stephen Stretton 

Christopher Monckton gave a talk at the Cambridge on Monday 8th October. The following sets out some comments on his presentation

Monckton Response In Full Continue reading A Response to Monckton

众所周知，通过燃烧 化石燃料(比如煤)，石 油和天然气所释放到 大气层中去的二氧化 碳会导致全球范围内 的升温。

这个效应被 称为“温室效应”。 科学家们预测气候只 要比工业革命之前升 高两度（就可称为气 候的危险变化）将导 致大面积的沙漠化和 生态系统（比如亚马 逊热带雨林）的崩溃
。从而更多存储在树 木中的碳将以二氧化 碳的形式释放到大气 层中去。按我们目前 的发展趋势，在未来 几年内这种变化就会 发生。

要避免危险气候的发生，我们必须马上行动起来，向零二氧化碳排放的经济转型（2003年之前排放量必须减低90％）。如果英国能够率先行动，这种做法将会被广泛的普及到比如欧洲其它地方，北美，中国和印度。这种做法将会被广泛的普及到欧洲其地方，北美，中国和印度。向零二氧化碳排放的经济转型是可行的，对这个领域的经济投入将会得到经济收益。

Translation by Jiawen Chen & Helen Li

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown asks the committee on climate change to investigate the UK’s long term target.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7010664.stm

ENVIRONMENT

Perhaps the biggest challenge for the new politics is to show how we as a community can join together to safeguard the environment, to turn the silent, rising tide of global warming.

And I am proud that Britain will now become the first country in the world to write into law binding limits on carbon emissions. But I am not satisfied: so I am asking the new independent climate change committee to report on whether the 60 per cent reduction in emissions by 2050, which is already bigger than most other countries, should be even stronger still.

And by investing in energy efficiency, renewables, carbon capture, clean fuels and new environmental technologies, I want Britain to lead in carbon-free vehicles, carbon-free homes and carbon-free industry. And I want the new green technologies of the future to be the source of British jobs in British businesses.

And I commit to work tirelessly for a new post-Kyoto UN climate change agreement with – yes – to help the poorest, binding targets for all the richest countries.

And let me say: we in Britain cannot be good stewards of the environment unless we are good internationalists and that means being good Europeans too.

From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7010664.stm

The Centre for Alternative Technology has just released a report, http://zerocarbonbritain.com

Response Below by Stephen Stretton
Cambridge Zero Carbon Society Continue reading Zero Carbon Britain by the Centre for Alternative Technology

China’s new appetite for milk forces price rise in Germany

=B7 Cost of dairy products expected to rise by 50%
=B7 EU rules stop farmers increasing production

Kate Connolly in Berlin
Thursday August 2, 2007
The Guardian

Demand for milk in China is soaring thanks to president’s ‘dream’ of
half a litre a day for all, especially children

They have been blamed for putting up the price of everything from
bicycles to garden fences.
Now the Chinese have been dubbed “milk snatchers” by German consumers
for buying so much milk that prices of dairy products in Germany are
expected to soar by 50%.
The Germans are being made to feel the effect of China’s new-found
taste for milk, sparked by a remark by China’s president Wen Jiabao:
“I have a dream – a dream to be able to provide all Chinese,
especially our children, with half a litre of milk a day.”
The result has been a huge increase in milk consumption in China and
demand is growing at a rate of around 25% a year.
Because China has no tradition of dairy farming, there is a shortage
of home-produced milk. A third of all the milk produced worldwide is
now being transported to China, much of it from the EU and a
significant amount from Germany, which produces 27bn litres a year.

EU dairy farmers would like to increase production to cope with a
current shortfall, but are prevented from doing so by EU milk quotas,
imposed in 1984 and in force until 2015. Instead German dairy farmers
have taken the obvious step of putting up their prices, which they
have long claimed were artificially low. Blaming the Chinese has
helped to deflect criticism from the farmers.
A litre of milk in Germany, currently around 64 cents (40p), is due to
go up by 50% in the next few weeks. Other products, such as butter,
quark and yoghurt, are expected to rise accordingly. Across Europe the
prices of dairy products are rising for the same reasons, but not so
dramatically as in Germany, where cheap groceries are seen as a basic
right.
Thanks to the lobbying power of Germany’s huge number of discount
supermarkets, groceries cost around 63% less than in Iceland and 15%
less than in Britain.
Now outraged consumer groups and politicians have called for the
government to raise unemployment benefit to cover the rise.
Yesterday supermarkets across the country reported that shoppers were
panic buying dairy products in an attempt to beat the price increase.
The only effective way to increase global milk yields without breaking
the milk quotas, according to experts, is to encourage the breeding of
cows outside the EU. German dairy farmers have duly been selling
their best high-performance milk cows to Chinese farmers, who are
receiving government subsidies if they switch to dairy farming.

UK Targets “Not Enough To Prevent World Extinction”

Stephen Stretton, Cambridge

1st August 2007

The current UK greenhouse gas targets are not enough to avoid a world
extinction on a scale last seen with the end of the dinosaurs.

Even if we hit the government’s target of reducing Carbon Dioxide
pollution, and most other countries adopt a similar approach – the
world could be committed to up to six degrees of climate change.

The impacts would include collapse of the Amazon rainforest and most
of the world’s fertile farmland turning to desert. Rising seas would
flood major cities such as London, New York, Shanghai and Calcutta. It
would lead to the extinction of most life on earth.

If the UK is to lead, it must lead much more strongly. Current targets
are simply not enough. We to avoid 2C of climate change based on
convergence to safe and fair equal per-capita emissions. This may mean
a 90% reduction in all greenhouse gases by 2030 in the UK.

Summary of Climate Bill Response: Not Enough

Full response to climate bill (pdf)

Continue reading UK Targets “Not Enough To Prevent World Extinction”

Power transmission: Where the wind blows

A grandiose plan to link Europe’s electricity grids may recast wind power from its current role as a walk-on extra to being the star of the show.

Stephen Jeffrey

Jul 26th 2007
From The Economist print edition

Continue reading Where the wind blows