Sunday, 16 August 2009
Wind turbines are safe. That is the conclusion of every reputable scientific study conducted into the impact of wind turbines on human health, based on a range of international research.
In 2004, a World Health Organisation report categorically showed that wind power was one of the most benign forms of electrical generation in terms of direct and indirect health effects. However, despite this wealth of scientific evidence, the myth persists that wind energy is harmful. The latest claims come from Dr Nina Pierpont, who alleges that wind turbines cause ailments ranging from sleeplessness to tinnitus.
Despite a veneer of scientific respectability, Dr Pierpont's findings, contained in her self-published book, are not endorsed by academics who specialise in low-frequency sound. The work flies in the face of decades of established medical research. It cites Manchester University's recent research into the workings of the human ear. However, the author of that research, Dr Neil Todd, wrote in this paper last week: "Our work does not provide the direct evidence suggested .... I do not believe that there is any direct evidence to show that any of the above acoustico-physiological mechanisms are activated by the radiations from wind turbines."
Given the lack of robust evidence to support Dr Pierpont's work, it is surprising that her assertions have received coverage in the UK's media, not least in the pages of The Independent on Sunday. Bad science is not just misleading; it can be damaging and disruptive, as the MMR and autism débâcle has clearly shown.
The recent report on Dr Pierpont's new book aired her familiar argument that a new condition "wind turbine syndrome" is causing a rash of local illnesses. In response, the main NHS website stated: "This study provides no conclusive evidence that wind turbines have an effect on health or are causing the set of symptoms described here as 'wind turbine syndrome'" – explaining that "the study design was weak, the study was small and there was no comparison group".
Dr Pierpont's findings are based on a sample of only 38 self-selected people in 10 families based at wind energy projects. Furthermore, her findings have not been through any process of independent peer review by recognised experts in the field.
Dr Pierpont is a known campaigner against wind energy in North America. Until her work is published in a reputable medical journal and is reviewed by independent qualified experts it will be hard to view her allegations as anything other than yet another scare story peddled by the opponents of wind power.
Unsupported health scares are not the only myths which are used to undermine the case for wind energy. The opponents of wind energy continually promote a series of inaccuracies, half-truths and lies.
If the UK is to meet its commitment to reducing our carbon emissions and tackling climate change, then we have to transform the way we produce and use our energy. That means we need to expand our use of renewables, especially wind energy.
No form of energy is perfect; wind power, like any other technology, must overcome its own obstacles and objections. The energy debate, including that surrounding the expansion of wind energy must be based on facts, not myths. Opponents of wind energy must not be allowed to continue to cloud the debate with such egregious misinformation and distortions.
Maria McCaffery is chief executive of the British Wind Energy Association
Monday, 17 August 2009
Retailers want a scrappage scheme for fridges
Marcus Leroux, Retail Correspondent
Retailers are seeking a scrappage project for domestic appliances such as fridges. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said that a plan similar to the “cash for bangers” scheme for the car trade would protect jobs and help Britain to hit carbon emission targets by encouraging people to switch to more energy-efficient white goods. It is also calling for tax relief on energyefficient items.
Sales of big-ticket electrical items have fallen during the recession. DSG, the owner of Currys, the electrical goods chain, lost £140 million in its latest year, after a 9 per cent fall in like-for-like sales.
Stephen Robertson, the director-general of the BRC, said: “The Government is working against its own objectives when it sets targets for reducing carbon emisssions while charging full VAT on the efficient products that will move us towards those targets ... Removing VAT and exploring the possibility of a scrappage scheme would do a lot to get old energy and water-squandering appliances out of people’s homes.”
The BRC says that its idea would cost £507 million a year in forgone VAT, equivalent to two weeks of the bill for cutting VAT from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent last year. Removing VAT from the most energy-efficient goods would cut domestic emissions by 1 per cent, according to work done by the Centre for Economic and Business Research for the BRC.
Britain has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions by 34 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Retailers are seeking a scrappage project for domestic appliances such as fridges. The British Retail Consortium (BRC) said that a plan similar to the “cash for bangers” scheme for the car trade would protect jobs and help Britain to hit carbon emission targets by encouraging people to switch to more energy-efficient white goods. It is also calling for tax relief on energyefficient items.
Sales of big-ticket electrical items have fallen during the recession. DSG, the owner of Currys, the electrical goods chain, lost £140 million in its latest year, after a 9 per cent fall in like-for-like sales.
Stephen Robertson, the director-general of the BRC, said: “The Government is working against its own objectives when it sets targets for reducing carbon emisssions while charging full VAT on the efficient products that will move us towards those targets ... Removing VAT and exploring the possibility of a scrappage scheme would do a lot to get old energy and water-squandering appliances out of people’s homes.”
The BRC says that its idea would cost £507 million a year in forgone VAT, equivalent to two weeks of the bill for cutting VAT from 17.5 per cent to 15 per cent last year. Removing VAT from the most energy-efficient goods would cut domestic emissions by 1 per cent, according to work done by the Centre for Economic and Business Research for the BRC.
Britain has pledged to reduce its carbon emissions by 34 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020.
Green and confused: How can I convince my family to save water?
Why you need to tap into conserving water now
Kieran Cooke
Living in a rural area, we don’t have our water metered but I’m always telling my menfolk not to leave taps on. They say there’s plenty of rain and I shouldn’t badger them. Do you have some ammuntioon to convince them?
Next time they’re making you wash their clothes, throw this fact at them: to manufacture just one T-shirt — that’s growing the cotton, producing and dyeing the material and transporting it — involves using a whole pond of water, about 2,500 litres or 660 gallons. The idea of including all water-related processes along the supply chain, called “virtual water”, is to shock people such as the men in your home into understanding how profligate is our use of this vital resource.
We are composed mostly of water and in the absence of liquids, we quickly die. Yet we waste water — flushing needlessly large amounts down the toilet, leaving taps running, literally throwing it away. We should all visit a village in northern India or Central Asia where people have to walk miles for just one container of precious water.
While water shortages might be seen as problems of the developing world, as climate change begins to bite in Britain taps will run dry and water restrictions will be increasingly frequent. Climate modellers predict that the high temperatures experienced in the summer of 2003 could be the norm by 2040.
Rainfall patterns will alter: while little change is likely in the North of Scotland, the South of England could experience a 40 per cent decline in summer precipitation, meaning aquifers would dry up, rivers become a trickle and crops and gardens wither. By navigating round the UK Climate Impacts Programme website (ukcip.org.uk) you can look at predictions for your area and how dry it’s likely to be.
Even if you’re in a part of the country likely to undergo only marginal change, it’s a fallacy to think that you’re going to escape the impact. The average consumption of water a person in the UK is 150 litres a day. But add in the “virtual water” content used to produce and transport food, clothing, computer chips and other items in the UK and that figure comes to a 4,600 litres a person a day.
We live in an interdependent world in which water resources are under severe strain. So tell your family to keep quiet — and shut off that tap.
Send your eco-dilemmas togreenandconfused@thetimes.co.uk
Kieran Cooke
Living in a rural area, we don’t have our water metered but I’m always telling my menfolk not to leave taps on. They say there’s plenty of rain and I shouldn’t badger them. Do you have some ammuntioon to convince them?
Next time they’re making you wash their clothes, throw this fact at them: to manufacture just one T-shirt — that’s growing the cotton, producing and dyeing the material and transporting it — involves using a whole pond of water, about 2,500 litres or 660 gallons. The idea of including all water-related processes along the supply chain, called “virtual water”, is to shock people such as the men in your home into understanding how profligate is our use of this vital resource.
We are composed mostly of water and in the absence of liquids, we quickly die. Yet we waste water — flushing needlessly large amounts down the toilet, leaving taps running, literally throwing it away. We should all visit a village in northern India or Central Asia where people have to walk miles for just one container of precious water.
While water shortages might be seen as problems of the developing world, as climate change begins to bite in Britain taps will run dry and water restrictions will be increasingly frequent. Climate modellers predict that the high temperatures experienced in the summer of 2003 could be the norm by 2040.
Rainfall patterns will alter: while little change is likely in the North of Scotland, the South of England could experience a 40 per cent decline in summer precipitation, meaning aquifers would dry up, rivers become a trickle and crops and gardens wither. By navigating round the UK Climate Impacts Programme website (ukcip.org.uk) you can look at predictions for your area and how dry it’s likely to be.
Even if you’re in a part of the country likely to undergo only marginal change, it’s a fallacy to think that you’re going to escape the impact. The average consumption of water a person in the UK is 150 litres a day. But add in the “virtual water” content used to produce and transport food, clothing, computer chips and other items in the UK and that figure comes to a 4,600 litres a person a day.
We live in an interdependent world in which water resources are under severe strain. So tell your family to keep quiet — and shut off that tap.
Send your eco-dilemmas togreenandconfused@thetimes.co.uk
Sunken steel cages could save coral reefs
• Low-level electric current attracts coral to structure• Maldives resort reports encouraging growth
Gaia Vince
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 16 August 2009 22.58 BST
Scientists are reporting encouragingly rapid coral growth on giant underwater steel cages – structures that they hope will help to regenerate battered reefs and improve protection of some vulnerable coastlines from rising sea levels.
Coral reefs support a quarter of life on Earth and last month David Attenborough warned that carbon dioxide is already above the levels that will condemn corals to extinction.
And while the metal cages, fed with electric current, are not a solution to the global problem of dramatically contracting reefs, they do appear to be providing promising results in small, local projects, and – in some cases – rescuing resorts where coral was vanishing fast.
A team of researchers on Vabbinfaru island in the Maldives submerged a huge steel cage called the Lotus on the sea floor. The 12-metre structure, which weighs 2 tonnes is connected to long cable which supplies a low-level electric current. The electricity triggers a chemical reaction, which leads to calcium carbonate coming out of solution in the water and being deposited on the structure.
Corals seem to find that irresistible, perhaps because they use the same material to grow their protective skeletons, and the Lotus has been so thoroughly colonised by coral that it is difficult now to make out the steel shape beneath all the elaborate shapes and colour.
The idea was initially developed by an American architect, Wolf Hilbertz, who sold the concept to various resorts around the world. The Lotus is the largest and most successful of those, and has helped researchers to test the technique.
The El Nino Pacific-warming phenomenon of 1998 killed 98% of the reef around Vabbinfaru, so the researchers there have been able to compare the growth rates for corals grafted on to concrete structures on "desert" patches of seafloor, and those stuck on to the Lotus. Abdul Azeez, who is leading the Vabbinfaru project, said coral growth on the structure is up to five times as fast as that elsewhere.
The electric reef may also make the corals fitter and better able to withstand warming events, perhaps because the creatures waste less energy on making their skeletons. A smaller prototype device was in place during the 1998 warming event and more than 80% of its corals survived, compared to just 2% elsewhere on the reef.
Hilbertz, who died in 2007, believed that his structures could be multiplied across the world to repopulate reefs and protect shorelines. But many experts think the cost and effort involved make it impossible to do except on a small scale.
"I would like to be able to carry out genetic analysis of the algae in the coral to find out whether we can transplant heat-tolerant ones to parts of the reef where it is more exposed and so build coverage there," says Robert Tomasetti, a marine biologist also based at Banyan Tree resort in Vabbinfaru. "We don't have that level of equipment so we're really just growing pretty reefs for the tourists but not in a construction way to protect the island."
While welcoming the positive impact that the project has had on Vabbinfaru, Shiham Adam, the director general of the Maldivian government's Marine Research Centre in Male warned that the wider picture for his country remained bleak. "Sprucing up small bits of reef can add value to a tourist resort but it certainly won't help protect the Maldives from sea level rise," he said.
Gaia Vince
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 16 August 2009 22.58 BST
Scientists are reporting encouragingly rapid coral growth on giant underwater steel cages – structures that they hope will help to regenerate battered reefs and improve protection of some vulnerable coastlines from rising sea levels.
Coral reefs support a quarter of life on Earth and last month David Attenborough warned that carbon dioxide is already above the levels that will condemn corals to extinction.
And while the metal cages, fed with electric current, are not a solution to the global problem of dramatically contracting reefs, they do appear to be providing promising results in small, local projects, and – in some cases – rescuing resorts where coral was vanishing fast.
A team of researchers on Vabbinfaru island in the Maldives submerged a huge steel cage called the Lotus on the sea floor. The 12-metre structure, which weighs 2 tonnes is connected to long cable which supplies a low-level electric current. The electricity triggers a chemical reaction, which leads to calcium carbonate coming out of solution in the water and being deposited on the structure.
Corals seem to find that irresistible, perhaps because they use the same material to grow their protective skeletons, and the Lotus has been so thoroughly colonised by coral that it is difficult now to make out the steel shape beneath all the elaborate shapes and colour.
The idea was initially developed by an American architect, Wolf Hilbertz, who sold the concept to various resorts around the world. The Lotus is the largest and most successful of those, and has helped researchers to test the technique.
The El Nino Pacific-warming phenomenon of 1998 killed 98% of the reef around Vabbinfaru, so the researchers there have been able to compare the growth rates for corals grafted on to concrete structures on "desert" patches of seafloor, and those stuck on to the Lotus. Abdul Azeez, who is leading the Vabbinfaru project, said coral growth on the structure is up to five times as fast as that elsewhere.
The electric reef may also make the corals fitter and better able to withstand warming events, perhaps because the creatures waste less energy on making their skeletons. A smaller prototype device was in place during the 1998 warming event and more than 80% of its corals survived, compared to just 2% elsewhere on the reef.
Hilbertz, who died in 2007, believed that his structures could be multiplied across the world to repopulate reefs and protect shorelines. But many experts think the cost and effort involved make it impossible to do except on a small scale.
"I would like to be able to carry out genetic analysis of the algae in the coral to find out whether we can transplant heat-tolerant ones to parts of the reef where it is more exposed and so build coverage there," says Robert Tomasetti, a marine biologist also based at Banyan Tree resort in Vabbinfaru. "We don't have that level of equipment so we're really just growing pretty reefs for the tourists but not in a construction way to protect the island."
While welcoming the positive impact that the project has had on Vabbinfaru, Shiham Adam, the director general of the Maldivian government's Marine Research Centre in Male warned that the wider picture for his country remained bleak. "Sprucing up small bits of reef can add value to a tourist resort but it certainly won't help protect the Maldives from sea level rise," he said.
Sunday, 16 August 2009
Teesside dreams of a green revival
From The Sunday Times
August 16, 2009
Danny Fortson
Walk into the Redcar working men’s club on a Tuesday night and you might feel as though you had been transported back in time. As 8.30 approaches, the room fills as more than 200 people take their seats, marker pen in one hand, a pint of Theakston’s bitter or John Smith’s Magnet in the other.
It’s bingo night and, after several weeks without a winner, the jackpot, at £2,700, is the biggest it has been in a long while. The atmosphere is jovial but Jeanette Harper, 72, said such a turnout was rare these days. “People are out tonight because the jackpot is big,” she said. “In a desert like this, everyone comes out for the bingo hoping they can change their dreams.” Sitting next to her, Christine Hill, 42, nodded in agreement: “We’re suffering. It’s a disgrace.”
Redcar, at the mouth of the River Tees, is on its knees. The high street is full of boarded-up stores but it was once a bustling company town, built in the shadow of British Steel’s imposing blastfurnace.
Like other cities in the northeast, its fortunes rose and fell with the “smokestack” industries — steel, coal, shipbuilding and chemicals. Today it is at the hard edge of the recession. Recent figures show unemployment in Redcar is already at 10.5%, well above the national average. But there is also hope of a rebirth. The government claims that new industries, many of them in the low-carbon green sector, will rise to replace Britain’s withering industrial legacy and drag the country out of recession. It is here that the Great Green Experiment will be truly tested.
Three months ago Corus, the owner of Teesside Cast Products, said it was going to mothball the plant. The closure would put 2,000 steelworkers out of a job, not to mention several thousand more who work in companies dependent on the site, which once employed more than 30,000 people.
The pain did not end there. Nearby is Wilton, the site originally built by ICI to process oil piped from the North Sea. In the past two months three companies — Dow, Croda and Artenius — have announced plant closures. Before the year is out, another 1,000 jobs, plus several thousand support workers, will go.
After years of steady decline they are blows Redcar cannot afford to take. “Save our Steel” posters hang in the windows of pubs and living rooms. The once vibrant seafront is dotted with empty pubs and a handful of arcades. “It’s a ghost town,” said Andy, a 45-year-old steelworker.
Some local business leaders caution against writing off the area. “Twenty-five years ago we had coal, we had shipbuilding. And we recovered. We’re pretty good at dusting ourselves off and coming back fighting,” said Ian Williams, head of business and industry at One North East, the regional development agency. “If Corus goes, we’re going to have to replace 4,500 jobs. Are we going to do that overnight? Of course not. But over time? Absolutely.”
In Redcar, however, few hold out much hope that the green revolution will come to their rescue. “Wind turbines? Bollocks. They won’t replace the jobs lost here,” said Andy. “The government has stabbed the working man in the back."
Standing on the south bank of the Tees, David Robinson watches a pair of cargo ships passing each other through the channel. “We have to reinvent ourselves,” he said. “Otherwise, this river will die.”
As chief executive of PD Ports, owner of the docks at Teesport and Hartlepool, few know better the damage caused by the recession. In the past year, cargo traffic has dropped by a fifth. If Corus closes, another quarter of his business will disappear.
Robinson is preparing for the worst but he is not without hope. With the industrial infrastructure, the port and a skilled workforce, northeast England would seem the natural home for the government’s green industries. An impressive number of projects are in the works
In the next few months Ensus, a local start-up, will fire up a £300m bioethanol plant at the Wilton complex. It will convert wheat into fuel, animal feed and carbon dioxide for the soft-drinks industry, and will be the largest of its kind in Europe.
MGT Power received planning approval last month to build Europe’s largest biomass plant on a vacant riverside plot. Gaia Power, a year-old start-up, hopes to hear by October whether a £200m waste wood burning plant will be built across the river at Billingham. At the Centre for Process Innovation, located at the old ICI laboratories, workers have a spring in their step after the government last month gave a £17m grant to expand its activities into new processes, such as turning algae into fuel.
Redcar residents will soon be able to see another sign of the promised future. EDF Energy plans to start construction of a 30-turbine wind farm a few miles offshore this year. Robinson hopes others will follow. “The offshore wind market is a huge opportunity,” he said. “There is going to be an entire new industry to build and support these big farms.” Indeed, local companies such as JDR Cables and CTC Marine are looking at gearing up to provide the cables and pilings that will be needed.
Nobody believes that turning Teesside green will be easy — retraining redundant workers, for one, remains a huge challenge. The business community here, though, is tight-knit and has swung behind the effort to reinvent the region.
Vera Baird, the local MP, said: “It was only a year ago when I was giving speeches about the new green revolution and how it will be led from Teesside, just like the iron and steel revolution was led by Teesside.” She added: “There are a lot of projects but they all have question marks over them.”
Two years after the credit crunch began, the good times are back for the City of London. In recent weeks banks have announced a return to profits and huge bonuses. For them, the worst seems to be over. On Teesside the effects of the financial meltdown continue to reverberate.
At the Wilton petrochemicals complex 54 projects worth more than £6.4 billion are in the works, according to Stan Higgins, chief executive of Nepic, the regional chemicals industry group. Most are still searching for financial backers. It is not easy. “Why is it that a company building a plant for 400 people to stitch handbags gets more help than a plant employing 100 highly skilled workers?” said Higgins. “It doesn’t make sense.”
And that is the problem. The jobs crunch is biting hard. Plans that take years to materialise will do little for the residents of Redcar, Cleveland, Stockton and Middlesbrough who are suffering now. After the bailout of flagship industries such as cars, or “too-big-to-fail” sectors such as banking, the government has nothing left to give. Many here feel deserted.
Alwyn Hughes, head of Ensus, can count himself lucky. “There are a lot of plans but we are the only ones that have raised the funds,” he said. “We did it three years ago when credit markets were much friendlier. With the credit crunch, the hurdles to raising money are much, much higher.”
Meanwhile, Wilton is bleeding jobs. Invista shut its nylon plant in January. In June, Dow announced plans to close its ethylene oxide plant, no longer able to compete with the Middle East. Croda, whose plant received its feedstock from Dow, soon followed. Then came Artenius, though there is talk that a new buyer may take over its plant. At Corus, the day of reckoning has been put off until the end of September thanks to a modest recovery in the steel price and a few short-term orders. The fight for survival goes on.
Kevin Ball, who was recently laid off from Artenius, said: “One of the young guys with us has an £800 mortgage and £400 car payment. Now he is on £65 a week. That’s why we are fighting. Because once the jobs go, they won’t come back.”
Back at the working men’s club, nobody shouted “house” as the caller read out the last of the numbers. Another week without a winner. They will surely come again next Tuesday, hoping for better luck.
August 16, 2009
Danny Fortson
Walk into the Redcar working men’s club on a Tuesday night and you might feel as though you had been transported back in time. As 8.30 approaches, the room fills as more than 200 people take their seats, marker pen in one hand, a pint of Theakston’s bitter or John Smith’s Magnet in the other.
It’s bingo night and, after several weeks without a winner, the jackpot, at £2,700, is the biggest it has been in a long while. The atmosphere is jovial but Jeanette Harper, 72, said such a turnout was rare these days. “People are out tonight because the jackpot is big,” she said. “In a desert like this, everyone comes out for the bingo hoping they can change their dreams.” Sitting next to her, Christine Hill, 42, nodded in agreement: “We’re suffering. It’s a disgrace.”
Redcar, at the mouth of the River Tees, is on its knees. The high street is full of boarded-up stores but it was once a bustling company town, built in the shadow of British Steel’s imposing blastfurnace.
Like other cities in the northeast, its fortunes rose and fell with the “smokestack” industries — steel, coal, shipbuilding and chemicals. Today it is at the hard edge of the recession. Recent figures show unemployment in Redcar is already at 10.5%, well above the national average. But there is also hope of a rebirth. The government claims that new industries, many of them in the low-carbon green sector, will rise to replace Britain’s withering industrial legacy and drag the country out of recession. It is here that the Great Green Experiment will be truly tested.
Three months ago Corus, the owner of Teesside Cast Products, said it was going to mothball the plant. The closure would put 2,000 steelworkers out of a job, not to mention several thousand more who work in companies dependent on the site, which once employed more than 30,000 people.
The pain did not end there. Nearby is Wilton, the site originally built by ICI to process oil piped from the North Sea. In the past two months three companies — Dow, Croda and Artenius — have announced plant closures. Before the year is out, another 1,000 jobs, plus several thousand support workers, will go.
After years of steady decline they are blows Redcar cannot afford to take. “Save our Steel” posters hang in the windows of pubs and living rooms. The once vibrant seafront is dotted with empty pubs and a handful of arcades. “It’s a ghost town,” said Andy, a 45-year-old steelworker.
Some local business leaders caution against writing off the area. “Twenty-five years ago we had coal, we had shipbuilding. And we recovered. We’re pretty good at dusting ourselves off and coming back fighting,” said Ian Williams, head of business and industry at One North East, the regional development agency. “If Corus goes, we’re going to have to replace 4,500 jobs. Are we going to do that overnight? Of course not. But over time? Absolutely.”
In Redcar, however, few hold out much hope that the green revolution will come to their rescue. “Wind turbines? Bollocks. They won’t replace the jobs lost here,” said Andy. “The government has stabbed the working man in the back."
Standing on the south bank of the Tees, David Robinson watches a pair of cargo ships passing each other through the channel. “We have to reinvent ourselves,” he said. “Otherwise, this river will die.”
As chief executive of PD Ports, owner of the docks at Teesport and Hartlepool, few know better the damage caused by the recession. In the past year, cargo traffic has dropped by a fifth. If Corus closes, another quarter of his business will disappear.
Robinson is preparing for the worst but he is not without hope. With the industrial infrastructure, the port and a skilled workforce, northeast England would seem the natural home for the government’s green industries. An impressive number of projects are in the works
In the next few months Ensus, a local start-up, will fire up a £300m bioethanol plant at the Wilton complex. It will convert wheat into fuel, animal feed and carbon dioxide for the soft-drinks industry, and will be the largest of its kind in Europe.
MGT Power received planning approval last month to build Europe’s largest biomass plant on a vacant riverside plot. Gaia Power, a year-old start-up, hopes to hear by October whether a £200m waste wood burning plant will be built across the river at Billingham. At the Centre for Process Innovation, located at the old ICI laboratories, workers have a spring in their step after the government last month gave a £17m grant to expand its activities into new processes, such as turning algae into fuel.
Redcar residents will soon be able to see another sign of the promised future. EDF Energy plans to start construction of a 30-turbine wind farm a few miles offshore this year. Robinson hopes others will follow. “The offshore wind market is a huge opportunity,” he said. “There is going to be an entire new industry to build and support these big farms.” Indeed, local companies such as JDR Cables and CTC Marine are looking at gearing up to provide the cables and pilings that will be needed.
Nobody believes that turning Teesside green will be easy — retraining redundant workers, for one, remains a huge challenge. The business community here, though, is tight-knit and has swung behind the effort to reinvent the region.
Vera Baird, the local MP, said: “It was only a year ago when I was giving speeches about the new green revolution and how it will be led from Teesside, just like the iron and steel revolution was led by Teesside.” She added: “There are a lot of projects but they all have question marks over them.”
Two years after the credit crunch began, the good times are back for the City of London. In recent weeks banks have announced a return to profits and huge bonuses. For them, the worst seems to be over. On Teesside the effects of the financial meltdown continue to reverberate.
At the Wilton petrochemicals complex 54 projects worth more than £6.4 billion are in the works, according to Stan Higgins, chief executive of Nepic, the regional chemicals industry group. Most are still searching for financial backers. It is not easy. “Why is it that a company building a plant for 400 people to stitch handbags gets more help than a plant employing 100 highly skilled workers?” said Higgins. “It doesn’t make sense.”
And that is the problem. The jobs crunch is biting hard. Plans that take years to materialise will do little for the residents of Redcar, Cleveland, Stockton and Middlesbrough who are suffering now. After the bailout of flagship industries such as cars, or “too-big-to-fail” sectors such as banking, the government has nothing left to give. Many here feel deserted.
Alwyn Hughes, head of Ensus, can count himself lucky. “There are a lot of plans but we are the only ones that have raised the funds,” he said. “We did it three years ago when credit markets were much friendlier. With the credit crunch, the hurdles to raising money are much, much higher.”
Meanwhile, Wilton is bleeding jobs. Invista shut its nylon plant in January. In June, Dow announced plans to close its ethylene oxide plant, no longer able to compete with the Middle East. Croda, whose plant received its feedstock from Dow, soon followed. Then came Artenius, though there is talk that a new buyer may take over its plant. At Corus, the day of reckoning has been put off until the end of September thanks to a modest recovery in the steel price and a few short-term orders. The fight for survival goes on.
Kevin Ball, who was recently laid off from Artenius, said: “One of the young guys with us has an £800 mortgage and £400 car payment. Now he is on £65 a week. That’s why we are fighting. Because once the jobs go, they won’t come back.”
Back at the working men’s club, nobody shouted “house” as the caller read out the last of the numbers. Another week without a winner. They will surely come again next Tuesday, hoping for better luck.
Coal protesters create bonanza for security firms
Danny Fortson
A group of men was caught trying to break in at Drax power station in Yorkshire last month. Running across open fields toward the perimeter fence in the middle of the night, they were picked up by infrared cameras and motion sensors long before they got near the boilers and other heavy machinery.
The would-be attackers were not prosecuted — they were Drax staff who had volunteered to stage a break-in to test elaborate new security at the plant, western Europe’s largest coal-fired power station.
The security shake-up was ordered after hundreds of environmental protesters descended on the site, near Selby, in August 2006. More than 500 police were called in to contain the “climate camp” they set up and 39 people were arrested after trying to enter the power station and shut it down.
“2006 was the watershed,” said Peter Emery, production director at Drax. “We had to take a serious look at security because of the strong likelihood that we would be targeted again.”
As a result, a new interior perimeter fence was erected and CCTV cameras and motion sensors were installed. Emery, an engineer by training, regularly trades “intelligence” with the police about possible threats.
It wasn’t always like this. Just a few years ago power station security, except at nuclear sites, amounted to a chain link fence and, as Emery put it, “a couple of fat blokes in a kiosk”.
In the past few years, climate change has moved from a fringe cause to a hot topic for lawmakers and the public around the world. A by-product of that shift is that campaigners who for decades had largely ignored the fossil-fuel electricity industry, the biggest source of pollution in the world, have made it a primary target.
Power companies have been forced to pump tens of millions of pounds into new high-tech security to keep the protesters out and the plants running.
David Porter, chief executive of the Association of Electricity Producers, said: “Not long ago, people protested against pit closures and wanted to keep coal-fired power stations going. Now they march on coal-fired power stations and try to shut them down.”
It is a trend that is being replicated around the world. In the next two months big protests are planned at power stations in Italy, Australia and America. In June, protesters from Greenpeace attempted to stop a ship on the Humber carrying a cargo of coal for Eon’s power station at Kingsnorth, Kent.
Barrie Millett, head of business resilience at Eon, said the company had spent “several million pounds” on upgrading security at its sites in the past few years.
“It’s a different world now,” he said. “We have to ensure the safety not just of our staff, but of the protesters as well. These are big, dangerous industrial sites.”
Climate campaigners often resort to extreme tactics, such as chaining themselves to coal elevators or other vital equipment, to bring plants to a halt. Their actions can have unintended consequences. Shutting down a big plant would probably mean that even dirtier oil-fired stations, which lie dormant much of the time, would have to be put to use to take up the slack.
Camp for Climate Action is part of the small but uncompromising minority of protesters prepared to use illegal means. It organised the climate camp at Kingsnorth last year, during which there were attempts to invade the plant. It wants all fossil-fuel power stations to be closed, and is unapologetic about the extra security costs for power firms.
David Lewis of Camp for Climate Action said: “These companies are only interested in profits and producing energy, so it is good we are costing them money. If it is more expensive, maybe they will be less likely to invest in them. We won’t try to shut down renewables.”
Industry executives say they do not want to stop climate campaigners mounting protests at their sites, provided they are safe. “We share the same objectives of reducing emissions and we are working within the system to do that,” said Emery.
“Some people are very impatient for that change and the way they go about it is not constructive.”
Camp for Climate Action is planning the Great Climate Swoop, a mass protest in October at Eon’s power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, or at Drax. An online poll is being held to choose. Lewis said: “We will let the people decide which they want to see shut down.”
A group of men was caught trying to break in at Drax power station in Yorkshire last month. Running across open fields toward the perimeter fence in the middle of the night, they were picked up by infrared cameras and motion sensors long before they got near the boilers and other heavy machinery.
The would-be attackers were not prosecuted — they were Drax staff who had volunteered to stage a break-in to test elaborate new security at the plant, western Europe’s largest coal-fired power station.
The security shake-up was ordered after hundreds of environmental protesters descended on the site, near Selby, in August 2006. More than 500 police were called in to contain the “climate camp” they set up and 39 people were arrested after trying to enter the power station and shut it down.
“2006 was the watershed,” said Peter Emery, production director at Drax. “We had to take a serious look at security because of the strong likelihood that we would be targeted again.”
As a result, a new interior perimeter fence was erected and CCTV cameras and motion sensors were installed. Emery, an engineer by training, regularly trades “intelligence” with the police about possible threats.
It wasn’t always like this. Just a few years ago power station security, except at nuclear sites, amounted to a chain link fence and, as Emery put it, “a couple of fat blokes in a kiosk”.
In the past few years, climate change has moved from a fringe cause to a hot topic for lawmakers and the public around the world. A by-product of that shift is that campaigners who for decades had largely ignored the fossil-fuel electricity industry, the biggest source of pollution in the world, have made it a primary target.
Power companies have been forced to pump tens of millions of pounds into new high-tech security to keep the protesters out and the plants running.
David Porter, chief executive of the Association of Electricity Producers, said: “Not long ago, people protested against pit closures and wanted to keep coal-fired power stations going. Now they march on coal-fired power stations and try to shut them down.”
It is a trend that is being replicated around the world. In the next two months big protests are planned at power stations in Italy, Australia and America. In June, protesters from Greenpeace attempted to stop a ship on the Humber carrying a cargo of coal for Eon’s power station at Kingsnorth, Kent.
Barrie Millett, head of business resilience at Eon, said the company had spent “several million pounds” on upgrading security at its sites in the past few years.
“It’s a different world now,” he said. “We have to ensure the safety not just of our staff, but of the protesters as well. These are big, dangerous industrial sites.”
Climate campaigners often resort to extreme tactics, such as chaining themselves to coal elevators or other vital equipment, to bring plants to a halt. Their actions can have unintended consequences. Shutting down a big plant would probably mean that even dirtier oil-fired stations, which lie dormant much of the time, would have to be put to use to take up the slack.
Camp for Climate Action is part of the small but uncompromising minority of protesters prepared to use illegal means. It organised the climate camp at Kingsnorth last year, during which there were attempts to invade the plant. It wants all fossil-fuel power stations to be closed, and is unapologetic about the extra security costs for power firms.
David Lewis of Camp for Climate Action said: “These companies are only interested in profits and producing energy, so it is good we are costing them money. If it is more expensive, maybe they will be less likely to invest in them. We won’t try to shut down renewables.”
Industry executives say they do not want to stop climate campaigners mounting protests at their sites, provided they are safe. “We share the same objectives of reducing emissions and we are working within the system to do that,” said Emery.
“Some people are very impatient for that change and the way they go about it is not constructive.”
Camp for Climate Action is planning the Great Climate Swoop, a mass protest in October at Eon’s power station at Ratcliffe-on-Soar, Nottinghamshire, or at Drax. An online poll is being held to choose. Lewis said: “We will let the people decide which they want to see shut down.”
Bubblebath baron funds greens’ fight
Kevin Dowling
THE founder of a £150m cosmetics empire has established himself as a radical successor to Dame Anita Roddick, the Body Shop tycoon, by devoting large parts of his fortune to green and humanitarian causes.
Mark Constantine controls the Lush brand, which hand-makes soaps, bubblebath and fragrances using mainly vegetable ingredients.
Constantine, 57, has spent £500,000 in the past year backing dozens of enterprises ranging from Plane Stupid - which campaigns against airport expansion - to anti-capitalist magazines and the guerrilla gardening movement, whose members descend on derelict urban spaces to improve and cultivate them.
Lush, founded by Constantine in 1995, is expected to double its funding for the causes next month.
“Mark is deeply passionate about direct action,” said Sophie Pritchard, Constantine’s charitable giving manager. “He feels that the people who get involved in direct action put themselves at risk to look after others and he really wants to help people like that. He feels that someone needs to look after those people who seek to look after us.”
Constantine owed much of his early success to Roddick, who died in 2007 of a brain haemorrhage. The two met when he was 22 after he read about The Body Shop in a newspaper and sent her some soap samples. She had just opened her second shop and placed an order with him for £1,200.
Constantine became her biggest supplier as she established her chain founded on environmental, ethical and human rights values. In the early 1990s Roddick bought him out for £6m. He put the money into Cosmetics to Go, a mail order sideline that the Constantines had already started. Within two years, however, the money was gone. He started again and Lush was launched.
The company, which won a Sunday Times Best Company to Work For award last year, is still based close to the family home in Poole, Dorset.
The entrepreneur, who does not have a driving licence and has never owned a car, cycles to work each morning.
Lush, which sells a range of natural cosmetics and soaps, has more than 600 outlets worldwide with sales of £153m last year and almost £20m in pretax profits.
The groups Constantine supports are often unpopular with the public. In December 2008 Plane Stupid protesters broke into Stansted airport and delayed thousands of passengers by chaining themselves to a barrier close to the runway. He paid the legal fees of 56 protesters who were arrested and is in discussions with them to provide permanent funding.
He has also helped anti-road groups and campaigners fighting expansion at Heathrow, Luton and Bristol airports.
Specific products are used in Lush shops to publicise charities as well as to raise funds.
This year Sea Shepherd, a group which has scuttled eight whaling ships in port and attacked a Japanese whaling vessel at sea, received £22,000 through the sale of a shark-fin soap in Constantine’s shops.
Another product, Guantanamo Garden, an orange foaming bath ball, raised a similar amount for Reprieve, the human rights charity, which has helped Binyam Mohamed, a British resident formerly held at Guantanamo Bay.
Other beneficiaries include Shift Magazine, which advocates a “noncapitalist way out”, and Undercurrents, a group of film makers who video direct action events.
THE founder of a £150m cosmetics empire has established himself as a radical successor to Dame Anita Roddick, the Body Shop tycoon, by devoting large parts of his fortune to green and humanitarian causes.
Mark Constantine controls the Lush brand, which hand-makes soaps, bubblebath and fragrances using mainly vegetable ingredients.
Constantine, 57, has spent £500,000 in the past year backing dozens of enterprises ranging from Plane Stupid - which campaigns against airport expansion - to anti-capitalist magazines and the guerrilla gardening movement, whose members descend on derelict urban spaces to improve and cultivate them.
Lush, founded by Constantine in 1995, is expected to double its funding for the causes next month.
“Mark is deeply passionate about direct action,” said Sophie Pritchard, Constantine’s charitable giving manager. “He feels that the people who get involved in direct action put themselves at risk to look after others and he really wants to help people like that. He feels that someone needs to look after those people who seek to look after us.”
Constantine owed much of his early success to Roddick, who died in 2007 of a brain haemorrhage. The two met when he was 22 after he read about The Body Shop in a newspaper and sent her some soap samples. She had just opened her second shop and placed an order with him for £1,200.
Constantine became her biggest supplier as she established her chain founded on environmental, ethical and human rights values. In the early 1990s Roddick bought him out for £6m. He put the money into Cosmetics to Go, a mail order sideline that the Constantines had already started. Within two years, however, the money was gone. He started again and Lush was launched.
The company, which won a Sunday Times Best Company to Work For award last year, is still based close to the family home in Poole, Dorset.
The entrepreneur, who does not have a driving licence and has never owned a car, cycles to work each morning.
Lush, which sells a range of natural cosmetics and soaps, has more than 600 outlets worldwide with sales of £153m last year and almost £20m in pretax profits.
The groups Constantine supports are often unpopular with the public. In December 2008 Plane Stupid protesters broke into Stansted airport and delayed thousands of passengers by chaining themselves to a barrier close to the runway. He paid the legal fees of 56 protesters who were arrested and is in discussions with them to provide permanent funding.
He has also helped anti-road groups and campaigners fighting expansion at Heathrow, Luton and Bristol airports.
Specific products are used in Lush shops to publicise charities as well as to raise funds.
This year Sea Shepherd, a group which has scuttled eight whaling ships in port and attacked a Japanese whaling vessel at sea, received £22,000 through the sale of a shark-fin soap in Constantine’s shops.
Another product, Guantanamo Garden, an orange foaming bath ball, raised a similar amount for Reprieve, the human rights charity, which has helped Binyam Mohamed, a British resident formerly held at Guantanamo Bay.
Other beneficiaries include Shift Magazine, which advocates a “noncapitalist way out”, and Undercurrents, a group of film makers who video direct action events.
Britain's ice man ready for a second space shot with rebuilt CryoSat probe
High hopes for global warming satellite after first probe plunged into the Arctic Ocean
Robin McKie, science editor
The Observer, Sunday 16 August 2009
It was rated one of the most damaging setbacks to hit the study of global warming: on 8 October, 2005, a £100m probe designed to measure ice thickness at the poles plunged into the Arctic ocean minutes after launch on an old Soviet SS-19 missile from Plesetsk, northern Russia.
The blow seemed irreparable but, as a result of a remarkable technological comeback, the satellite's UK creator, Duncan Wingham, will soon watch as a rebuilt version of his CryoSat probe, funded by the European Space Agency (Esa), makes its attempt to reach orbit.
"It is one thing to get the chance to build a satellite, but to get a second chance when things have gone wrong is remarkable," said Wingham, professor of Climate Physics at University College London.
Dignitaries and scientists, including Wingham, gathered at Europe's Esrin space centre in Frascati, Italy, to watch the original launch and cheered as television monitors showed the rocket rising into the atmosphere. Minutes after lift-off, however, transmissions from the probe stopped. A celebratory cocktail party was halted and anxious scientists huddled round monitors.
Then the truth emerged. The SS-19's second stage had failed to separate from the third stage, because of a computer programming error, and the whole assembly, including the satellite, had plunged into the Arctic ocean, the sea whose icy secrets CryoSat had been designed to study.
"This is a tragedy for all the scientists who have spent years putting together this mission," said an Esa official.
Wingham was the worst affected: he had worked on CryoSat since 1999 and his grey, shoulder-length hair and increasingly dejected demeanour made him the most distinctive figure at the launch gathering.
"I was stunned," he admitted last week. "Statistically there is an 8% chance things will go pop, that you will lose a satellite at launch – I hadn't worried about that. But it soon became clear that something had gone very wrong. I remember texting a friend, 'I think we've lost her'."
The main problem for Wingham was that, in order to keep down construction costs, Esa had not built a back-up probe. The project looked dead and buried, or – more precisely – drowned. But only a couple of hours after the failed launch, Wingham had started lobbying senior Esa executives to build a replacement.
"I told them, this satellite is too important to lose." Remarkably they agreed within 24 hours, and a few weeks later this decision was backed by Esa.
It was a testament to Wingham's persuasive powers and the design and importance of his satellite that this replacement was supported by the agency – though he is also quick to praise "scientific committees, delegates and organisations across Europe" for their campaigning as well. Thanks to them, CryoSat 2 will now rise like a phoenix, it is hoped, when it is launched in November, this time from Kazakhstan on a Dnieper rocket.
Like its predecessor, CryoSat 2 will be fitted with a device known as an interferometric radar altimeter. This will be used to measure the height of ice as it floats on the sea, which in turn will reveal the overall thickness of ice covering the Arctic ocean.
This latter measurement is crucial for scientists. Satellites have already shown that the geographical area of the Arctic covered by ice is dwindling significantly. However, other research suggests that this ice may also have been thinning markedly. If so, polar caps could shrink far more quickly than is predicted at present. Less solar radiation would then be reflected back into space from Earth's white ice caps, and the rate of global warming would jump. In addition, land ice sheets would no longer be propped by sea ice and would crumble into the oceans, raising sea levels round the planet.
"We are altering the Arctic climate far faster than anywhere else on Earth," said Wingham. "We're changing the whole structure of the Arctic ocean, but we still don't know what the consequences will be. We have to find out what is going on up there. CryoSat will do that."
However, it will take some time to achieve this goal. Once CryoSat2 is in orbit, it will take at least a year to return enough data to make reasonable estimates of the rate of ice thinning.
After three years, the satellite's expected lifetime, that data should be compelling, said Wingham. "And after that, you never know – we might even get CryoSat 3 and a whole series of follow-up satellites."
Robin McKie, science editor
The Observer, Sunday 16 August 2009
It was rated one of the most damaging setbacks to hit the study of global warming: on 8 October, 2005, a £100m probe designed to measure ice thickness at the poles plunged into the Arctic ocean minutes after launch on an old Soviet SS-19 missile from Plesetsk, northern Russia.
The blow seemed irreparable but, as a result of a remarkable technological comeback, the satellite's UK creator, Duncan Wingham, will soon watch as a rebuilt version of his CryoSat probe, funded by the European Space Agency (Esa), makes its attempt to reach orbit.
"It is one thing to get the chance to build a satellite, but to get a second chance when things have gone wrong is remarkable," said Wingham, professor of Climate Physics at University College London.
Dignitaries and scientists, including Wingham, gathered at Europe's Esrin space centre in Frascati, Italy, to watch the original launch and cheered as television monitors showed the rocket rising into the atmosphere. Minutes after lift-off, however, transmissions from the probe stopped. A celebratory cocktail party was halted and anxious scientists huddled round monitors.
Then the truth emerged. The SS-19's second stage had failed to separate from the third stage, because of a computer programming error, and the whole assembly, including the satellite, had plunged into the Arctic ocean, the sea whose icy secrets CryoSat had been designed to study.
"This is a tragedy for all the scientists who have spent years putting together this mission," said an Esa official.
Wingham was the worst affected: he had worked on CryoSat since 1999 and his grey, shoulder-length hair and increasingly dejected demeanour made him the most distinctive figure at the launch gathering.
"I was stunned," he admitted last week. "Statistically there is an 8% chance things will go pop, that you will lose a satellite at launch – I hadn't worried about that. But it soon became clear that something had gone very wrong. I remember texting a friend, 'I think we've lost her'."
The main problem for Wingham was that, in order to keep down construction costs, Esa had not built a back-up probe. The project looked dead and buried, or – more precisely – drowned. But only a couple of hours after the failed launch, Wingham had started lobbying senior Esa executives to build a replacement.
"I told them, this satellite is too important to lose." Remarkably they agreed within 24 hours, and a few weeks later this decision was backed by Esa.
It was a testament to Wingham's persuasive powers and the design and importance of his satellite that this replacement was supported by the agency – though he is also quick to praise "scientific committees, delegates and organisations across Europe" for their campaigning as well. Thanks to them, CryoSat 2 will now rise like a phoenix, it is hoped, when it is launched in November, this time from Kazakhstan on a Dnieper rocket.
Like its predecessor, CryoSat 2 will be fitted with a device known as an interferometric radar altimeter. This will be used to measure the height of ice as it floats on the sea, which in turn will reveal the overall thickness of ice covering the Arctic ocean.
This latter measurement is crucial for scientists. Satellites have already shown that the geographical area of the Arctic covered by ice is dwindling significantly. However, other research suggests that this ice may also have been thinning markedly. If so, polar caps could shrink far more quickly than is predicted at present. Less solar radiation would then be reflected back into space from Earth's white ice caps, and the rate of global warming would jump. In addition, land ice sheets would no longer be propped by sea ice and would crumble into the oceans, raising sea levels round the planet.
"We are altering the Arctic climate far faster than anywhere else on Earth," said Wingham. "We're changing the whole structure of the Arctic ocean, but we still don't know what the consequences will be. We have to find out what is going on up there. CryoSat will do that."
However, it will take some time to achieve this goal. Once CryoSat2 is in orbit, it will take at least a year to return enough data to make reasonable estimates of the rate of ice thinning.
After three years, the satellite's expected lifetime, that data should be compelling, said Wingham. "And after that, you never know – we might even get CryoSat 3 and a whole series of follow-up satellites."
Wind turbines stopped by power fault
A power fault has shut down nearly a quarter of the turbines at Little Cheyne Court on Romney Marsh - the biggest onshore wind farm in the south of England - just a month after it was officially opened.
By Andy BloxhamPublished: 8:00AM BST 15 Aug 2009
Transformers at the base of the turbines have been removed and returned to Belgium
Seven out of the 26 wind turbines on the isolated land on the Kent-East Sussex border have been hit by technical problems.
Transformers at the base of the turbines have been removed and returned to Belgium, RWE npower renewables, which constructed the site, said in a statement.
It said: ''All major work has been completed at Little Cheyne Court wind farm. However, there have been technical problems with some of the transformers.
''The problems with the transformers are not pertinent to wind turbine technology but associated with the high-voltage circuit.''
The firm added that replacement transformers would be delivered in mid-September and the site fully operational by mid-October.
The remaining 19 turbines were said to be running normally at the site, which was opened by Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband on July 13.
He said Britain needed to harness all technologies such as wind, fuel and clean coal to help meet challenging targets and counter the threat of climate change.
Permission was granted by the Government for RWE npower renewables to construct the £60 million wind farm in 2005 following a public inquiry.
Each of the 26 wind turbines at the site is 377ft (115m) high and weighs more than 275 tonnes.
It will eventually generate enough clean electricity to meet the average annual needs of some 33,000 homes.
By Andy BloxhamPublished: 8:00AM BST 15 Aug 2009
Transformers at the base of the turbines have been removed and returned to Belgium
Seven out of the 26 wind turbines on the isolated land on the Kent-East Sussex border have been hit by technical problems.
Transformers at the base of the turbines have been removed and returned to Belgium, RWE npower renewables, which constructed the site, said in a statement.
It said: ''All major work has been completed at Little Cheyne Court wind farm. However, there have been technical problems with some of the transformers.
''The problems with the transformers are not pertinent to wind turbine technology but associated with the high-voltage circuit.''
The firm added that replacement transformers would be delivered in mid-September and the site fully operational by mid-October.
The remaining 19 turbines were said to be running normally at the site, which was opened by Energy and Climate Change Secretary Ed Miliband on July 13.
He said Britain needed to harness all technologies such as wind, fuel and clean coal to help meet challenging targets and counter the threat of climate change.
Permission was granted by the Government for RWE npower renewables to construct the £60 million wind farm in 2005 following a public inquiry.
Each of the 26 wind turbines at the site is 377ft (115m) high and weighs more than 275 tonnes.
It will eventually generate enough clean electricity to meet the average annual needs of some 33,000 homes.
Saturday, 15 August 2009
Obama's science adviser urges leadership on climate
John Holdren, the president's top science adviser, is playing a key role in shaping the Obama administration's strategy to combat global warming. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Holdren discusses the prospects for achieving breakthroughs on climate change, both in Congress and at upcoming talks in Copenhagen.
From Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
Six weeks after he was elected, President Obama nominated John Holdren to be his chief science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Many scientists hailed the timing of the nomination — George W. Bush waited almost a year before naming Holdren's predecessor — and the choice of Holdren, too, was seen as encouraging: He was trained in plasma physics, is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard, is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, served as director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and is a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award.
The New York Times called Holdren's nomination an affirmation of "Mr. Obama's commitment to aggressively address the challenges of energy independence and global warming." Now, Holdren is one of several high-ranking Obama administration officials moving aggressively to combat global warming and to wean the country off fossil fuels. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, Holdren talked about the cap-and-trade bill that recently passed the House, the crucial role America and China will play in the upcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and how the administration plans to convert the U.S. "from the laggard that it has been in this domain" into "the leader that the world needs" on global warming.
Yale Environment 360: The issues that are on your plate right now — energy consumption, the environmental consequences of energy consumption — you've been thinking about them your whole career. I'm wondering if you could just talk about what you think is the most important thing that the administration could do — on its own — about energy use.
John Holdren: Clearly in the energy domain, both the use side and the supply side are very important. They're important from the standpoint of environment, from the standpoint of economy, from the standpoint of national/international security. Clearly we have to provide the energy goods and services that people need and that the economy needs.
We need to do that while reducing our dependence on imported oil, which is both expensive and potentially disruptive. We need to do it while sharply reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and that's from a starting point in which — in the United States — about 88 percent of our primary energy is coming from fossil fuels, whose combustion is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the biggest driver of global climate change.
And so we've got all these criteria that we have to meet at once. When you look at the options for doing that, the cleanest, fastest, cheapest, safest, surest energy supply option continues to be increasing the efficiency of energy end use — more efficient cars, more efficient buildings, more efficient industrial processes, more efficient airplanes. We have gotten more new energy out of energy efficiency improvements in the last 35 years than we've gotten out of all supply side expansion put together in the United States. That's even without trying all that hard. For most of that period, we haven't had anything that you could call a really coherent set of energy policies supporting increasing energy efficiency. We need... a more coherent set of policies.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, sometimes just called the [economic] stimulus, got huge amounts of investment, not only in R&D,but in actual on-the-ground activities to insulate people's homes and other aspects of improving end use efficiency. We've already had the biggest boost in federal support for innovation in energy supply-and-demand in the history of the country. We have also made permanent research and experimentation tax credits, which adds to the incentive in the private sector to invest in innovation in these domains.
In the comprehensive energy and climate legislation that's now working its way through the Congress, we have the potential there to get a lot more done, including all the incentives that would come from having a cap-and-trade approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
e360: You've said many times that we have basically three options with regard to climate change: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering, and that what's at issue is what the mix among those three things is going to be. Now we do have finally a piece of legislation that has passed the House at least. I'm wondering if you can just talk about how it does, in terms of that mix.
Holdren: Well, first of all, I want to emphasize that it has long been my position, and it's the President's position, that we're going to have to do a lot of both mitigation and adaptation in order to reduce the amount of suffering that results from climate change in the United States and around the world. I just testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about the work that we're doing to increase research and application in the domain of adaptation, because adaptation has been, I think, understudied and underinvested in comparison to mitigation.
e360: One of the concerns has always been that too much emphasis on adaptation is going to give people the impression that we can just adapt to climate change. Is that something that concerns you?
Holdren: I don't really think that's a danger anymore. People were quite worried about that five years ago, 10 years ago. It's plausible that one of the reasons that there wasn't more discussion about adaptation was some people's worry that that would lead to complacency about the need to mitigate. I think the current view of the vast majority of people who've looked carefully at this is that we need a lot of mitigation and a lot of adaptation. The point being that adaptation gets more difficult, more costly, and less effective the larger the changes in climate to which you're trying to adapt.
Therefore, we need a lot of mitigation in order to hold the changes in climate to the level that adaptation will be able to cope reasonably effectively with. At the same time, we can't rely on mitigation alone without adaptation because nothing that we could manage in the mitigation domain can stop and reverse climate change overnight. The timeline in the system — both the climate system itself and the energy system — means that there simply isn't any possibility of stopping it overnight. So you need both.
e360: One of things that you mentioned in your testimony [before Congress] is that we are in fact seeing a lot of climate impacts that are running ahead of projections. Do you think that that message is getting out?
Holdren: We all talk about the acceleration of climate change in its impacts that we're observing. One sees the incidence of wildfires going up more rapidly than people expected, the incidence of heat waves and droughts going up more rapidly, sea level is rising more rapidly.
The impacts on the ecological side with pest outbreaks, particularly the forest pests, the loss of huge acreages of spruce and pine across the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, Colorado, definitely linked to climate change because the longer warm season has enabled the pest to get in more generations in a single season than they could before. That, combined with drought and heat stress on the trees, is having effects that no one would have predicted a decade ago.
All of these indicators are moving more rapidly. I think that message is getting through. I don't hear very much in Washington these days any serious people saying we don't believe this is a problem. The argument is really about exactly what we should be doing about it, how much we should be investing, what kinds of measures we should put in place.
e360: There's been a lot of talk that the bill in its current form cannot pass the Senate, that there is going to have to be watering down of the provisions. Does that concern you?
Holdren: Obviously I would like to see, and the President would like to see, a strong bill get through the Senate. I think it's understood that the Senate is bound to make some modifications, and then those will have to be worked out in conference between the Senate and the House. I'm not sure all the modifications that will get made in the Senate will be in the direction of making it weaker. Some folks in the Senate would like to see it made stronger.
So I think we have to watch how this process unfolds before we judge what the bill is going to look like. I'm very hopeful that we will get a bill, and that it will be, at the very least, a strong start on getting the United States converted from the laggard that it has been in this domain into being the leader that the world needs.
e360: You were recently in China with Todd Stern [Special Envoy for the Secretary of State on Climate Change], and other administration officials. Can you speak a bit about what you heard from the Chinese, and what you think the U.S. can do to persuade countries like China and India to agree to some action that will be politically palatable [at the climate talks] in Copenhagen this fall?
Holdren: In these conversations, a couple of things came through very clearly. One is that the Chinese understand that climate changes is real, they understand it's already harming China, and they understand that it cannot be solved without China's participation. There's absolutely no disagreement on that from the Chinese leadership.
I think it's particularly significant that the Chinese have understood that climate change is already harming them, that this not a problem just for the future. The monsoons have been changing in China in a pattern that the Chinese climate models themselves attribute to global climate change. That change in monsoon has been accentuating flooding in the south, and drought in the north to the detriment of Chinese food production, with considerable property losses.
So the Chinese are starting from a place now which is quite different than they were, say, five years ago. Which is, that this is a problem that China has to participate in solving, for reasons of China's own self interest. This isn't a matter of being an altruist, or being a good citizen globally. Their self interest is in solving this problem. That's a big change.
The second thing is that I would say the Chinese are already doing far more to try to contribute to the solution than they generally get credit for in the West. The Chinese have made enormous advances in energy end use efficiency in recent years. They are the world leaders, both in the pace of improvement in energy efficiency and the pace of deployment of renewable energy technologies.
In their five-year plan that will end in 2010, they had a target of reducing the energy intensity of the Chinese economy by 20 percent. They're going to make it, which is an extraordinary rate of improvement in energy efficiency.
The real question is whether the Chinese will agree in Copenhagen to commitments that are seen as sufficiently rigorous and that the U.S. Senate will then agree to consent to ratification of whatever global agreement gets reached in Copenhagen. If the Chinese are not willing to make a formal commitment to continuation of the sort of progress that they've been making, then the Senate is likely to say, "Look, the United States is not going to take on these binding commitments if the Chinese are not going to follow."
e360: Right.
Holdren: And there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem there, because the Chinese position, I think quite understandably, is that the United States and the other industrialized nations — having contributed the most to this problem up until now — need to lead. The developing countries then can be expected to follow. The Chinese and other developing countries are also saying, "And by the way, you shouldn't just lead, but you need to help us follow, because you have more technological resources, more capability, a much higher per capita income. So we want both your leadership, and we want your help."
I think that it's going to be very important that the United States make clear, between now and Copenhagen, that we are, in fact, willing to lead and to help.
[Department of Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu, on his more recent visit to China, reached agreement with the Chinese on joint energy research centers between the two countries, which will be a start on ramping up the cooperation on the ground on improving energy efficiency, and deploying clean energy technologies that I think have the potential to persuade the Chinese that we're serious about helping, as well as serious about leading.
I think to persuade them we're serious about leading, the best thing that could happen between now and Copenhagen is that the Senate votes out the energy and climate legislation. The most important thing in terms of showing our willingness to help would be getting some substantial clean energy projects going on the ground that are jointly supported by the two countries. I think both of those things are possible, and then we could have the outcome that I think everybody sensible is hoping for out of Copenhagen.
e360: You said that the U.S. has to move from being a laggard to being a leader, and sooner rather than later, if we're going to act in time. Where would you put us on that curve right now?
Holdren: I think it's the classic case, where the glass is simultaneously half full and half empty. We've got a bill that's a good start out of the House. It's not perfect, but no legislation ever is, from any one party's point of view. If we can get something similar, or maybe even stronger, out of the Senate, that would be fabulous.
We also have a very good start on boosting our investments in energy innovation in the United States. This is demonstrating leadership already, and is being widely applauded around the world. What we need in the next step is more on-the-ground successes in joint projects, particularly with developing countries, starting with China. Again, I think the prospects of getting that are quite good.
e360: How important is it that something come out of Copenhagen in December that can get through the U.S. Senate?
Holdren: Well, I think it's important that the world move ahead with an agreed approach to addressing this problem. Because I think what the science is telling us is that if we want a good chance of avoiding the worst possible outcomes from climate change, we need the global emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants to level off by about 2020 and be declining sharply after that.
And if that is going to happen, and if you allow for the inevitability that the developing countries are not going to be able to level off and start to decline as quickly as the industrialized countries, you really need the industrialized countries to peak and begin to decline no later than about 2015. That would allow the possibility that the developing countries, as a group, could peak as late as 2025 before they have to start to decline.
And if that is so — and I believe that's what the science is telling us — then we really have to have in place across the industrialized world the agreements and the measures that are going to enable us to peak no later than 2015 and start to decline. We need those things in place no later than about 2012. And if you want those things to be in place no later than 2012, we really should get it done in Copenhagen. That's the schedule.
I'm not saying it's the end of the world if we don't get it done in Copenhagen, but it becomes harder and harder to get on the sort of trajectory we need to be on to reduce the chance of the worst happening in climate change the longer we delay.
e360: The American Meteorological Society recently called for more research into what's become known as geoengineering. I know that you felt that some comments you made about this at the beginning of your tenure were misconstrued. Is that a reasonable position that we need to do more research on this?
Holdren: The way that I feel I was misrepresented in an interview I gave early in the administration was the proposition that I was saying the White House is considering geoengineering as a part of our national strategy for dealing with climate change. This was made the centerpiece of an article based on a statement I made in which I said as I scientist, I think we need to look at everything. We need to understand what geoengineering might be — what its costs would be, what its effectiveness would be, what its side effects would be, what its shortcomings would be — because as a scientist, we need to know what the options are.
And I said it is certainly possible that if mitigation measures are not sufficiently successful, that increasingly people will become interested in whether there's anything we can do to compensate for that by trying to intervene in the earth's system in a way that offsets the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping pollutants.
And as a scientific position, I think that remains true, and that is the position that the American Meteorological Society has taken. We've got to study this. The National Academy of Sciences has had some symposia on this subject in which people say we have to study it.
The other thing is one needs to understand that, in a sense, we've been practicing geoengineering for centuries, inadvertently. I mean that's why we have this problem. We have engineered the composition of the atmosphere into a state that is overheating the planet.
And the other thing people need to understand is that there's a very wide variety of approaches. You know the approach called "white roofs" is a geoengineering approach. Make everybody's roof white instead of black, and then all of our urban areas will reflect a lot of sunlight that would otherwise be absorbed.
And you know we ought to be doing more of that. Some of the other kinds of approaches that were mentioned in some of the articles that appeared following my interview are clearly nuts — you know — putting giant mirrors in space at the point where the sun's and the earth's gravity balance in order to deflect sunlight away from the earth. You look at the numbers on that one and it's nuts.
e360: It's nuts because it's impossible, or because it's inadvisable?
Holdren: Well, I would say number one, it is impossibly expensive. There was an estimate a few years ago presented at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences that said that offsetting a doubling of atmospheric CO2 in this way would cost $1,400 trillion. I think after that number you don't even have to ask anymore whether it would have unintended side effects, which it well might. Because nobody's going to do it.
But again, to say that we need to understand what might be proposed in the way of geoengineering is not to say that we're going to embrace any of these schemes. And indeed, the administration's position is that our policies on mitigation through reducing emissions and increasing [CO2] uptake by better management of forests and agricultural soil and the measures that we will be taking in terms of adaptation are going to do the job.
But, that doesn't say on the research side you shouldn't look at the options that likely will be considered if the things you expect to do the job fall short.
e360: There was a lot of discussion about how the last administration misrepresented and even suppressed a lot of government scientists in the service of a political agenda. And now, we have a new administration and a new science advisor, i.e. you, and we also have a new political agenda. And it seems that the public can take the impression from this, if they want to, that science is inevitably a politicized activity. How do you avoid that sense that the science can be used by whoever wants to?
Holdren: I am charged by the President in my role as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy with coming up with guidelines for scientific integrity in government. And the intent of having those guidelines — which we're quite far along on and will be releasing soon — is to provide both the reality and the perception that science is not being misused in pursuit of political agendas in this government. Presumably, if such guidelines can be made a fixture over time, this would carry over to the next administration and other administrations thereafter.
There are a variety of ways to do that, having to do with the freedom that scientists have to discuss their findings without interference from the public relations office. It has to do with the extensive use of peer review to assure that the science that is being put at the service of policy makers is the best science available. And it has to do with the public perception that they are being dealt with honestly by the scientists in this administration, that people are prepared to tell it like it is even when it might be inconvenient.
One of the things that is both important and subtle about this particular matter is that no one should expect that science will determine policy outcomes by itself. Science is often germane and we would not want our policy makers to be making decisions about issues based on faulty science. But at the same time having the best science still doesn't necessarily specify a particular outcome because economics is going to matter, values are going to matter, preferences are going to matter.
What one wants from science advice to policy makers is that the science is right, that policy makers aren't making choices on the basis of misconception about science. But people shouldn't imagine that good science advice is going to take the politics out of policy. It can't. And that's a good thing.
• This article was shared by our content partner Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
From Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
Six weeks after he was elected, President Obama nominated John Holdren to be his chief science adviser and director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Many scientists hailed the timing of the nomination — George W. Bush waited almost a year before naming Holdren's predecessor — and the choice of Holdren, too, was seen as encouraging: He was trained in plasma physics, is the Teresa and John Heinz Professor of Environmental Policy at Harvard, is a past president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, served as director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and is a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" award.
The New York Times called Holdren's nomination an affirmation of "Mr. Obama's commitment to aggressively address the challenges of energy independence and global warming." Now, Holdren is one of several high-ranking Obama administration officials moving aggressively to combat global warming and to wean the country off fossil fuels. In an interview with Yale Environment 360, conducted by New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert, Holdren talked about the cap-and-trade bill that recently passed the House, the crucial role America and China will play in the upcoming climate negotiations in Copenhagen, and how the administration plans to convert the U.S. "from the laggard that it has been in this domain" into "the leader that the world needs" on global warming.
Yale Environment 360: The issues that are on your plate right now — energy consumption, the environmental consequences of energy consumption — you've been thinking about them your whole career. I'm wondering if you could just talk about what you think is the most important thing that the administration could do — on its own — about energy use.
John Holdren: Clearly in the energy domain, both the use side and the supply side are very important. They're important from the standpoint of environment, from the standpoint of economy, from the standpoint of national/international security. Clearly we have to provide the energy goods and services that people need and that the economy needs.
We need to do that while reducing our dependence on imported oil, which is both expensive and potentially disruptive. We need to do it while sharply reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and that's from a starting point in which — in the United States — about 88 percent of our primary energy is coming from fossil fuels, whose combustion is putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the biggest driver of global climate change.
And so we've got all these criteria that we have to meet at once. When you look at the options for doing that, the cleanest, fastest, cheapest, safest, surest energy supply option continues to be increasing the efficiency of energy end use — more efficient cars, more efficient buildings, more efficient industrial processes, more efficient airplanes. We have gotten more new energy out of energy efficiency improvements in the last 35 years than we've gotten out of all supply side expansion put together in the United States. That's even without trying all that hard. For most of that period, we haven't had anything that you could call a really coherent set of energy policies supporting increasing energy efficiency. We need... a more coherent set of policies.
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, sometimes just called the [economic] stimulus, got huge amounts of investment, not only in R&D,but in actual on-the-ground activities to insulate people's homes and other aspects of improving end use efficiency. We've already had the biggest boost in federal support for innovation in energy supply-and-demand in the history of the country. We have also made permanent research and experimentation tax credits, which adds to the incentive in the private sector to invest in innovation in these domains.
In the comprehensive energy and climate legislation that's now working its way through the Congress, we have the potential there to get a lot more done, including all the incentives that would come from having a cap-and-trade approach to reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
e360: You've said many times that we have basically three options with regard to climate change: mitigation, adaptation, and suffering, and that what's at issue is what the mix among those three things is going to be. Now we do have finally a piece of legislation that has passed the House at least. I'm wondering if you can just talk about how it does, in terms of that mix.
Holdren: Well, first of all, I want to emphasize that it has long been my position, and it's the President's position, that we're going to have to do a lot of both mitigation and adaptation in order to reduce the amount of suffering that results from climate change in the United States and around the world. I just testified before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation about the work that we're doing to increase research and application in the domain of adaptation, because adaptation has been, I think, understudied and underinvested in comparison to mitigation.
e360: One of the concerns has always been that too much emphasis on adaptation is going to give people the impression that we can just adapt to climate change. Is that something that concerns you?
Holdren: I don't really think that's a danger anymore. People were quite worried about that five years ago, 10 years ago. It's plausible that one of the reasons that there wasn't more discussion about adaptation was some people's worry that that would lead to complacency about the need to mitigate. I think the current view of the vast majority of people who've looked carefully at this is that we need a lot of mitigation and a lot of adaptation. The point being that adaptation gets more difficult, more costly, and less effective the larger the changes in climate to which you're trying to adapt.
Therefore, we need a lot of mitigation in order to hold the changes in climate to the level that adaptation will be able to cope reasonably effectively with. At the same time, we can't rely on mitigation alone without adaptation because nothing that we could manage in the mitigation domain can stop and reverse climate change overnight. The timeline in the system — both the climate system itself and the energy system — means that there simply isn't any possibility of stopping it overnight. So you need both.
e360: One of things that you mentioned in your testimony [before Congress] is that we are in fact seeing a lot of climate impacts that are running ahead of projections. Do you think that that message is getting out?
Holdren: We all talk about the acceleration of climate change in its impacts that we're observing. One sees the incidence of wildfires going up more rapidly than people expected, the incidence of heat waves and droughts going up more rapidly, sea level is rising more rapidly.
The impacts on the ecological side with pest outbreaks, particularly the forest pests, the loss of huge acreages of spruce and pine across the Kenai Peninsula in Alaska, Colorado, definitely linked to climate change because the longer warm season has enabled the pest to get in more generations in a single season than they could before. That, combined with drought and heat stress on the trees, is having effects that no one would have predicted a decade ago.
All of these indicators are moving more rapidly. I think that message is getting through. I don't hear very much in Washington these days any serious people saying we don't believe this is a problem. The argument is really about exactly what we should be doing about it, how much we should be investing, what kinds of measures we should put in place.
e360: There's been a lot of talk that the bill in its current form cannot pass the Senate, that there is going to have to be watering down of the provisions. Does that concern you?
Holdren: Obviously I would like to see, and the President would like to see, a strong bill get through the Senate. I think it's understood that the Senate is bound to make some modifications, and then those will have to be worked out in conference between the Senate and the House. I'm not sure all the modifications that will get made in the Senate will be in the direction of making it weaker. Some folks in the Senate would like to see it made stronger.
So I think we have to watch how this process unfolds before we judge what the bill is going to look like. I'm very hopeful that we will get a bill, and that it will be, at the very least, a strong start on getting the United States converted from the laggard that it has been in this domain into being the leader that the world needs.
e360: You were recently in China with Todd Stern [Special Envoy for the Secretary of State on Climate Change], and other administration officials. Can you speak a bit about what you heard from the Chinese, and what you think the U.S. can do to persuade countries like China and India to agree to some action that will be politically palatable [at the climate talks] in Copenhagen this fall?
Holdren: In these conversations, a couple of things came through very clearly. One is that the Chinese understand that climate changes is real, they understand it's already harming China, and they understand that it cannot be solved without China's participation. There's absolutely no disagreement on that from the Chinese leadership.
I think it's particularly significant that the Chinese have understood that climate change is already harming them, that this not a problem just for the future. The monsoons have been changing in China in a pattern that the Chinese climate models themselves attribute to global climate change. That change in monsoon has been accentuating flooding in the south, and drought in the north to the detriment of Chinese food production, with considerable property losses.
So the Chinese are starting from a place now which is quite different than they were, say, five years ago. Which is, that this is a problem that China has to participate in solving, for reasons of China's own self interest. This isn't a matter of being an altruist, or being a good citizen globally. Their self interest is in solving this problem. That's a big change.
The second thing is that I would say the Chinese are already doing far more to try to contribute to the solution than they generally get credit for in the West. The Chinese have made enormous advances in energy end use efficiency in recent years. They are the world leaders, both in the pace of improvement in energy efficiency and the pace of deployment of renewable energy technologies.
In their five-year plan that will end in 2010, they had a target of reducing the energy intensity of the Chinese economy by 20 percent. They're going to make it, which is an extraordinary rate of improvement in energy efficiency.
The real question is whether the Chinese will agree in Copenhagen to commitments that are seen as sufficiently rigorous and that the U.S. Senate will then agree to consent to ratification of whatever global agreement gets reached in Copenhagen. If the Chinese are not willing to make a formal commitment to continuation of the sort of progress that they've been making, then the Senate is likely to say, "Look, the United States is not going to take on these binding commitments if the Chinese are not going to follow."
e360: Right.
Holdren: And there is a bit of a chicken and egg problem there, because the Chinese position, I think quite understandably, is that the United States and the other industrialized nations — having contributed the most to this problem up until now — need to lead. The developing countries then can be expected to follow. The Chinese and other developing countries are also saying, "And by the way, you shouldn't just lead, but you need to help us follow, because you have more technological resources, more capability, a much higher per capita income. So we want both your leadership, and we want your help."
I think that it's going to be very important that the United States make clear, between now and Copenhagen, that we are, in fact, willing to lead and to help.
[Department of Energy] Secretary [Steven] Chu, on his more recent visit to China, reached agreement with the Chinese on joint energy research centers between the two countries, which will be a start on ramping up the cooperation on the ground on improving energy efficiency, and deploying clean energy technologies that I think have the potential to persuade the Chinese that we're serious about helping, as well as serious about leading.
I think to persuade them we're serious about leading, the best thing that could happen between now and Copenhagen is that the Senate votes out the energy and climate legislation. The most important thing in terms of showing our willingness to help would be getting some substantial clean energy projects going on the ground that are jointly supported by the two countries. I think both of those things are possible, and then we could have the outcome that I think everybody sensible is hoping for out of Copenhagen.
e360: You said that the U.S. has to move from being a laggard to being a leader, and sooner rather than later, if we're going to act in time. Where would you put us on that curve right now?
Holdren: I think it's the classic case, where the glass is simultaneously half full and half empty. We've got a bill that's a good start out of the House. It's not perfect, but no legislation ever is, from any one party's point of view. If we can get something similar, or maybe even stronger, out of the Senate, that would be fabulous.
We also have a very good start on boosting our investments in energy innovation in the United States. This is demonstrating leadership already, and is being widely applauded around the world. What we need in the next step is more on-the-ground successes in joint projects, particularly with developing countries, starting with China. Again, I think the prospects of getting that are quite good.
e360: How important is it that something come out of Copenhagen in December that can get through the U.S. Senate?
Holdren: Well, I think it's important that the world move ahead with an agreed approach to addressing this problem. Because I think what the science is telling us is that if we want a good chance of avoiding the worst possible outcomes from climate change, we need the global emissions of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping pollutants to level off by about 2020 and be declining sharply after that.
And if that is going to happen, and if you allow for the inevitability that the developing countries are not going to be able to level off and start to decline as quickly as the industrialized countries, you really need the industrialized countries to peak and begin to decline no later than about 2015. That would allow the possibility that the developing countries, as a group, could peak as late as 2025 before they have to start to decline.
And if that is so — and I believe that's what the science is telling us — then we really have to have in place across the industrialized world the agreements and the measures that are going to enable us to peak no later than 2015 and start to decline. We need those things in place no later than about 2012. And if you want those things to be in place no later than 2012, we really should get it done in Copenhagen. That's the schedule.
I'm not saying it's the end of the world if we don't get it done in Copenhagen, but it becomes harder and harder to get on the sort of trajectory we need to be on to reduce the chance of the worst happening in climate change the longer we delay.
e360: The American Meteorological Society recently called for more research into what's become known as geoengineering. I know that you felt that some comments you made about this at the beginning of your tenure were misconstrued. Is that a reasonable position that we need to do more research on this?
Holdren: The way that I feel I was misrepresented in an interview I gave early in the administration was the proposition that I was saying the White House is considering geoengineering as a part of our national strategy for dealing with climate change. This was made the centerpiece of an article based on a statement I made in which I said as I scientist, I think we need to look at everything. We need to understand what geoengineering might be — what its costs would be, what its effectiveness would be, what its side effects would be, what its shortcomings would be — because as a scientist, we need to know what the options are.
And I said it is certainly possible that if mitigation measures are not sufficiently successful, that increasingly people will become interested in whether there's anything we can do to compensate for that by trying to intervene in the earth's system in a way that offsets the buildup of carbon dioxide and other heat trapping pollutants.
And as a scientific position, I think that remains true, and that is the position that the American Meteorological Society has taken. We've got to study this. The National Academy of Sciences has had some symposia on this subject in which people say we have to study it.
The other thing is one needs to understand that, in a sense, we've been practicing geoengineering for centuries, inadvertently. I mean that's why we have this problem. We have engineered the composition of the atmosphere into a state that is overheating the planet.
And the other thing people need to understand is that there's a very wide variety of approaches. You know the approach called "white roofs" is a geoengineering approach. Make everybody's roof white instead of black, and then all of our urban areas will reflect a lot of sunlight that would otherwise be absorbed.
And you know we ought to be doing more of that. Some of the other kinds of approaches that were mentioned in some of the articles that appeared following my interview are clearly nuts — you know — putting giant mirrors in space at the point where the sun's and the earth's gravity balance in order to deflect sunlight away from the earth. You look at the numbers on that one and it's nuts.
e360: It's nuts because it's impossible, or because it's inadvisable?
Holdren: Well, I would say number one, it is impossibly expensive. There was an estimate a few years ago presented at the annual meeting of the National Academy of Sciences that said that offsetting a doubling of atmospheric CO2 in this way would cost $1,400 trillion. I think after that number you don't even have to ask anymore whether it would have unintended side effects, which it well might. Because nobody's going to do it.
But again, to say that we need to understand what might be proposed in the way of geoengineering is not to say that we're going to embrace any of these schemes. And indeed, the administration's position is that our policies on mitigation through reducing emissions and increasing [CO2] uptake by better management of forests and agricultural soil and the measures that we will be taking in terms of adaptation are going to do the job.
But, that doesn't say on the research side you shouldn't look at the options that likely will be considered if the things you expect to do the job fall short.
e360: There was a lot of discussion about how the last administration misrepresented and even suppressed a lot of government scientists in the service of a political agenda. And now, we have a new administration and a new science advisor, i.e. you, and we also have a new political agenda. And it seems that the public can take the impression from this, if they want to, that science is inevitably a politicized activity. How do you avoid that sense that the science can be used by whoever wants to?
Holdren: I am charged by the President in my role as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy with coming up with guidelines for scientific integrity in government. And the intent of having those guidelines — which we're quite far along on and will be releasing soon — is to provide both the reality and the perception that science is not being misused in pursuit of political agendas in this government. Presumably, if such guidelines can be made a fixture over time, this would carry over to the next administration and other administrations thereafter.
There are a variety of ways to do that, having to do with the freedom that scientists have to discuss their findings without interference from the public relations office. It has to do with the extensive use of peer review to assure that the science that is being put at the service of policy makers is the best science available. And it has to do with the public perception that they are being dealt with honestly by the scientists in this administration, that people are prepared to tell it like it is even when it might be inconvenient.
One of the things that is both important and subtle about this particular matter is that no one should expect that science will determine policy outcomes by itself. Science is often germane and we would not want our policy makers to be making decisions about issues based on faulty science. But at the same time having the best science still doesn't necessarily specify a particular outcome because economics is going to matter, values are going to matter, preferences are going to matter.
What one wants from science advice to policy makers is that the science is right, that policy makers aren't making choices on the basis of misconception about science. But people shouldn't imagine that good science advice is going to take the politics out of policy. It can't. And that's a good thing.
• This article was shared by our content partner Yale Environment 360, part of the Guardian Environment Network
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