Plane Stupid…

Dozens of flights at Stansted airport have been delayed or cancelled after more than 50 protesters occupied a secure area near the runway.

Climate action group Plane Stupid said it started the protest at 0315 GMT by breaching security. The runway was closed for about two hours, but reopened at 0810 GMT.

One protester, whose full name was not given, said: “We’re here because our parents’ generation has failed us and it’s now down to young people to stop climate change by whatever peaceful means we have left.”

As you can imagine those who had their flights disrupted were quite unsympathetic to the protesters cause, But you’d expect that from people who are going on cheap flights.

The question is: Does direct protest work?

It seems to have been quite effective in this instance, although the downside is the disruption to ordinary peoples lives.

But why has it come to this?

It’s simple, any other form of protest is simply being ignored by those in power. Successive Governments have curtailed the right to protest to such a point that UK citizens can no longer inform the Authorities that a protest will take place in let’s say Parliament square, they now have to ask permission from the Police.

The right to Protest is a sacrosanct  in a Democracy, not a privilege to be dispensed by the Authorities as they see fit. Successive Governments have increasingly curtailed our Liberties, most recently using Anti-terror laws.

In the case of the Protest group Plane Stupid, I can understand why they did it, One the one hand, the Government wants us all to reduce our Carbon footprint, yet on the other when Mr Businessman comes bleating that if you don’t build more runways it will affect business, the Government rolls over.

It now appears that Direct action is now the only way to get your point across.

Cleaning up it’s act?

The Schwarze pump power station in Northern Germany will soon making a little piece of industrial history. This mini power plant is a pilot project for carbon capture and storage (CCS), the first coal-fired plant in the world ready to capture and store its own CO2 emissions.

This is how it works:

A cloud of pure oxygen will be breathed into the boiler. The flame will be lit. Then a cloud of powdered lignite will be injected. The outcome will be heat, water vapour, impurities, nine tonnes of CO2 an hour, and a landmark in clean technology.

Because the CO2 will then be separated, squashed to one 500th of its original volume and squeezed into a cylinder ready to be transported to a gas field and forced 1,000m below the surface into porous rock where it should stay until long after mankind has stopped worrying about climate change.

Big questions however hang still need to be answered regarding the technology overall, but particularly over where the CO2 will be stored and who will pay the high costs of building and running the CCS plants. Greenpeace is among the environmental groups expressing reservations.

“Our concern is that this technology is used to justify the construction of more coal power plants,” says Tobias Munchmeyer. “It’s too expensive, it will come too late and it will divert money from the real solutions, renewable energies and energy efficiency.”

The EU wants to see 10-12 full-scale power plants demonstrating CO2 capture within the next few years. But although a number of other firms will soon join the race with pilot projects, no full-scale CCS coal plant has yet been commissioned. The British government has promised a decision in October on how it will fund a full-scale CCS in the UK.

“We need CCS urgently because the world is building a whole new generation of coal power plants and unless we find out whether this technology operates at scale and we can make these plants zero-carbon in the future, those will be a liability,” says Nick Mabey of the think-tank e3g.

Whether the politicians and the citizens of “western” countries are prepared to use this technology which will inevitably mean paying a higher price for it remains to be seen,  we in the west do have a habit of abandoning our “principles” such as our commitment to reducing Co2 when we realise that the price of such a commitment is higher fuel bills.

The real test of CCS, though, is not in Europe. It’s in developing countries such as China who are building power stations, firstly to share this technology and secondly whether countries like China will accept this technology and the associated costs that go with it.

Breaking up is so hard to do…

Clemenceau anchored off Brest

The decomissioned French aircraft carrier Clemenceau is to be towed to Hartlepool in the UK where she is to be dismantled. The ship like most other naval vessels of its age contains a large amount of asbestos. Initially, the ship was to be broken up in India, But opposition in France prevented this from happening and rightly so.

Having seen the ship graveyards in India, lack of safety measures would certainly expose its workforce to asbestos and the French socialist opposition at the time also denounced Mr Chirac for “lecturing the world on the environment while having other countries deal with our toxic ships.” I’m sure there will be some that ask why the French can’t clean up their own mess, but the Answer is they do not currently have the know how and as I have already stated, Its not only old French warships that contain asbestos.

The company that will dismantle the ship are Able Uk, the British Environment Agency issued a waste management licence that allows the firm to dismantle ships and oil rigs at its TERRC facility at Graythorp. Environmental campaigners were initially opposed the break-up of the Clemenceau in Britain, but Able has convinced them that its methods for decontaminating 700 tonnes of asbestos are reliable.

Turning Up The Output…

The UK has been living under a delusion over its claim to be cutting greenhouse gases, according to two reports.

Here’s a link to what I’ve spoken about previously on this issue.

The reports show that instead of falling since the 1990s, UK greenhouse emissions have been growing in line with the economy. Both reports are from the respected Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI) based at the University of York. The report will suggest that the UK’s total greenhouse gas emissions are 49% higher than reported emissions. And a recent little-noticed report for the government department Defra showed that rather than going down 5% as ministers claimed, CO2 emissions have gone up 18% between 1992 and 2004.

It can be said that emissions in the UK are dropping, only because we are letting countries like China, do our “dirty work”, in other words they manufacture goods for the UK. Some would say this allows them to be blamed for increasing their CO2 emissions on our behalf.

The Defra-SEI report shows that as manufacturing in the UK has closed down, some of the production has shifted to countries where manufacturing is more carbon intensive than it would be here – in other words, more CO2 is emitted per unit of production.

At the same time, the long consumer boom has led to an increase in the volume and diversity of products being imported. This in turn leads to increased emissions from cargo shipping. Meanwhile, the cheap flights bonanza has pushed up emissions still higher.

But here’s the main issue: Under internationally agreed methodology, emissions from international aviation, shipping and imports are not included in a country’s greenhouse gas statistics, so this has allowed the UK government to calculate that its greenhouse gases have been falling.

The SEI report includes emissions from aviation, shipping and imported goods.  John Barrett, author of the SEI reports to both Defra and WWF, said “It’s at the very least misleading for the UK government to claim reductions while we export our emissions. This is a problem no government wants to face. In emissions terms, we are constantly battling against increases of wealth. Every year, we don’t even manage to improve our energy efficiency to keep up with wealth increases, let alone to cut emissions.

“There’s a very fundamental problem here that no-one really wants to talk about.”