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Climate Change

The North Pole is melting!

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AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central Santa’s choice of home may not have been the safest. He and the elves are worried about their future.

Climate Change: the supply-side approach

This is a guest post by Chris Vernon, who is based in the UK where he edits the European edition of The Oil Drum, a popular weblog hosting discussions about energy and our future. This post is based on an article first published at The Oil Drum.

The key objective in the face of climate change is to reduce the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide from the combustion of fossil fuel. Certainly there are other aspects, it would be useful not to cut down forests for example and there are other greenhouse gasses but for this analysis we’ll focus on fossil fuels and CO2.

The entire debate when it comes to fossil fuels and climate change is focused on demand, the consumption of fossil fuels and the resultant emissions. This is not the only approach. Here I propose a supply-side approach that totally ignores emissions but instead focuses on the extraction of fossil fuels from the ground.

Last month I was at an event where George Monbiot (www.monbiot.com), the environmentalist writer for The Guardian newspaper and energetic campaigner on climate change gave a speech. The speeches and Q&A sessions were interesting enough but as the event wore on I grew more and more uneasy as it dawned on me that the
speakers and several hundred people in the room were missing what seemed to me to be the key issue.

People were only talking about demand. About aviation expansion, food miles, road construction, China’s coal power stations etc.. This created an unwieldy monster with 6.5 billion individuals and millions of corporate and government stakeholders. The way forward seemed impossible.

This observation characterises the whole climate change debate – it only considers demand. The solution is identified as behavioural and technological change delivering reduced demand and resulting emissions. The Kyoto Protocol, whilst its objective is:

“stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

…attempts to achieve this by signatories all reducing their emissions by agreed percentages. The language of the climate change debate is emissions, national and per person. Carbon trading and offsetting is presented as a way of using the market to achieve cost effective emission reductions.

I think there are problems with such a demand focused approach.

Let’s go back to first principles. Climate change is largely caused by increased CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. This comes about from the combustion of carbon rich fossil fuels pumped or mined from the Earth. To be successful, any action that hopes to reduce the atmospheric CO2 concentration from what it would otherwise have been must result in reduced fossil fuel extraction from the Earth (one exception to this rule is post-combustion sequestration). When considering action the following simple test should always be applied:

Will considered action leave fossil fuels in the ground that would otherwise be extracted?

This seems blindingly obvious however I don’t see anyone asking or evaluating this question, certainly nobody did in the meeting last month. When I started looking at this I realised it was not at all obvious that the current approaches to climate change would pass that test. The difficulty is that the relationship between demand and supply is anything but absolute.

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Trees and climate change

Last year we told you about Treeflights.com, a tree planting project in Wales. In this video Ru Hartwell, project director, explains the link between trees and climate change.

A 6 year old’s take on climate change

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A load of dead important people from all over the world are flying to a place called Bali.

They are going to talk for ages about if we should do enough to save the climate. They will decide if loads and loads of people in Africa and other places might die, lose their homes, animals, plants and stuff. And this is all bicause of how many trees are chopped down, and how much stuff we dig out of the ground and burn, to make dirty enregy from. This makes bad gas escape which traps the heat of the sun, making the planet hotter. I don’t think people, animals and plants should be dying bicause of that.

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The 2007 Energy Bill – Can the U.S. Ever Green Its Energy Policy?

This is a guest post by Lorna Li, of Lorna Li : Green 2.0 Marketing.

35by2020sm.gifAs oil prices skyrocket and the climate heats up, the debate around the 2007 Energy Bill, currently being debated in U.S. Congress behind closed doors, is getting hotter. Environmentalists, students, rock stars, and even auto industry workers in the United States are clamoring for a strong, clean 2007 Energy Bill that includes high fuel efficiency standards, more renewable electricity and no nukes. The U.S. auto industry is contentiously divided, as American students rally across the nation, and everyone launches YouTube video campaigns.

Can the U.S. Ever Reach 35 mpg by 2020?

The United States Congress is hard-pressed to choose between 2 fuel efficiency standards – the 35 mpg Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) Standard, which was approved by the Senate in June, and the U.S. Auto Industry counter-proposal of 32 mpg by 2022.

A large group of auto workers and dealers have broken from the industry in order to support the 35 mpg by 2020 fuel efficiency standard. As oil prices continue to rise, what is at stake in the debate over fuel efficiency is the future of the American auto industry and the livelihood of U.S. autoworkers, not to mention the wallets of American drivers in the years to come.

Adam Lee, a third generation auto dealer, makes this personal plea in his 3-minute video clip.

“My family has been selling American made cars since 1936. My livelihood and the livelihood of over 350 employees who work for us depend upon the success of the automobile industry. Today that strength is severely compromised by the lack of fuel-efficient cars and trucks customers want to buy. …

Without a 35 mile-per-gallon mandate, I’m afraid, global warming and our dependence on foreign oil will continue to get much worse in the long run. And, in the short run, I’m afraid I’ll be stuck with a lot full of cars that no one wants to buy or even worse: This country will no longer have an American auto industry.”

To emphasize the difference between the 2 fuel efficiency proposals, the Pew Campaign for Fuel Efficiency delivered Trick or Treat bags to members of Congress, illustrating the Spooky Truth about the32 mpg by 2022 Auto Lobby proposal.
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