Every story looks different from the end

Coal made Britain strong, shaped our psyche and set us on a journey towards global warming

Ian Jack
The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009
Next week on cinema screens in London and Sheffield the British Film Institute opens the first of three seasons devoted to British industry in the 20th century. The title for this ambitious project is This Working Life, and under its rubric steelmaking will be tackled in 2011 and shipbuilding in 2010. But the BFI's first subject is coal – King Coal as the programme has it, not without reason because it was Britain's numerous and easily exploited seams that made the industrial revolution possible, which in turn gave Britain its unexpected role as the world's supreme nation. The BFI programme has an epigraph from a now little-known American writer, William Jasper Nicolls: "With coal we have light, strength, power, and civilisation; without coal we have darkness, weakness, poverty and barbarism."
That was how it seemed in 1906, and not much had changed in British school classrooms in the 1950s. Coal had a benevolence that oil, which did the same job, never acquired. Partly this was because it was so solid and visible. Unlike oil, making its secret, liquid journey into buses and cars, there it lay sparking and glowing in the hearth having been brought in sacks by coalmen. Also, we knew the price of its extraction. Men had dug it out – hard and horrible work – and in most parts of Britain it would be hard to travel for an hour or two and not come across a colliery; at nationalisation in 1947 there were 958 of them employing 718,000 miners (60 years later only nine survived, with a workforce totalling 3,000) and their triangular spoil heaps and winding gear could loom up in the most surprising places, in the fields of Kent, the coast of north Wales and the lonely Scottish peninsula of Kintyre.
In these ways, unlike oil, it was ours. Orwell in a famous sentence wrote that "you and I and the Nancy poets and the archbishop of Canterbury … all of us really owe the comparative decency of our lives to poor drudges underground, blackened to the eyes." Oil couldn't provoke such moral fury – try substituting "BP engineers" or "Middle Eastern kingdoms" for Orwell's poor drudges. The moral feelings that coal aroused were, for the non-miner, part of its charm. Parents told their children of the brave men whose work down below had started the lump's journey to the grate. In novels and films, miners appeared as heroic, comradely, uncomplicated and above all essential. Their industry was patriotic. In a 1952 documentary, Plan for Coal, the narrator reminds us that in 1900 Britain supplied a quarter of the world's production and "to coal we must return again for all the strength that we will need in the years to come."
The film is one of about 1,000 documentaries commissioned by the National Coal Board during its 40-year existence and the BFI has made a fine anthology of them on a new DVD, Portrait of a Miner. Coalmining appealed to filmmakers. As the BFI curator Patrick Russell writes, its danger, light contrasts, social insularity and mythic position in national history made it "deeply cinematic". But to see these films is to understand social attitudes as much as what miners actually did, and to marvel that such attitudes existed within the lifetime of anyone much over 50.
Seriousness is one of them. In 1953, the coal board decided it wanted a training film that showed young miners how to shovel. The result, The Shovel, begins with a short history of shovels – beginning in pre-Roman times – before it moves on to modern shovelling techniques: "Stand with the leading shoulder well forward like a good batsman, though you don't have to be Len Hutton." In fact, it's a lovely little film, clear and direct, and at the end of its 17-minute instruction on perfecting "the Pioneer Throw" you know much more about the physical skill behind the back-breaking task on which the British economy then depended. With this earnest clarity, however, comes the condescension of the jolly spiffing commentary. In another film, designed to encourage miners from Lanarkshire's exhausted pits to migrate east to Fife, the voice says there will be other industries there too: "We do want miners to get the chance to mix with other folk" – words from a higher layer in the old geology of accent and social class.
I watched nearly two hours of these films and remembered my grandfather, who rather unwisely gave up a job as sewing machine salesman to go into the pit. Greyhounds, racing pigeons, chest x-rays, singing miners, dancing miners, miners on holiday at Filey: all these images came and went. The constant was coal: a black seam on diagrams, exploded by shot-blasting and sheared by machines, bouncing down conveyor belts and into tubs and eventually reaching the daylight it had last seen as plant life 350m years ago. The sight of so much extraction brought home a different point, which the makers of the films and the people in them could never have understood because they lived too early. Until the 1990s the history of the British coal industry could be seen in different ways – socially (greyhounds, comradeship), sentimentally (granddad), politically (struggle and strikes), geologically, economically, even aesthetically. But from a far higher elevation, perhaps that of eternity, all these interpretations will seem like whisperings in Lilliput. The coal industry's most enduring claim to fame, should history endure, is its vanguard position among the causes of global warming.
Some statistics. In the early 1800s, Britain dug about 15m tonnes of coal a year. By 1913, the peak year of production, the figure was 292m tonnes. No other country approached that rate of exploitation, which began to take off in the 18th century. Among historians, 1750 is the pivotal year, when twice as much Newcastle coal reached the market as 50 years earlier. What had been mainly a domestic fuel in the first half of the 18th century now smelted iron and heated the steam for thousands of mill and mine engines. In 1750, carbon dioxide in the atmosphere still stood at around 280 parts per million, now known as the "pre-industrial level". Today the level is estimated at 389 parts per million. The rise began slowly. Even when scientists in the late 19th century identified a firm link between CO2 and atmospheric temperatures, its relevance to the future seemed inconsequential. But in 1750, unknowable to the men who dug the coal and fed the fires, Britain had started the world on the journey.
According to Myles Allen, an Oxford physicist writing in the Guardian this week, dangerous climate change can be averted only if 50 to 80% of the carbon in known fossil fuel reserves is kept out of the atmosphere, which means leaving most of it in the ground. How strange that would have seemed to William Jasper Nicolls, who believed coal prevented barbarism. All stories look different from the end, when the moral and the mechanics of cause and effect become clearer. Nothing looks the same when viewed from the door of a terminal ward; victims of lung disease throw their minds back to their first cigarette. History gets turned on its head.
Ian Jack's The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain: Writings 1989-2009 was published by Jonathan Cape this week. To order a copy for £17.99 with free UK p&p go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

How to invest in tackling climate change

Guardian Money looks at where to put your cash if you plan to make an ethical investment
The Guardian, Saturday 5 September 2009
Isas and investment trusts
All the funds below tend to have minimum lump sum investments of around £1,000, but check with each provider for details.
Schroder's Global Climate Change fund (schroders.com) invests in companies involved in reducing carbon dependency or adapting to the impact of climate change. One of the first in this field, it's down around 10% since its launch in June 2007, but in the last six months it is up around 30%. Top investments include Honda (hybrid vehicles) and Gamesa (Spanish wind turbine makers).
Henderson Industries of the Future (henderson.com) promises to invest in "positive sustainability themes", with stocks such as Nalco (water treatment), Roper Industries (industrial controls to comply with regulatory standards), and Schneider Electric (energy efficiency). It has fallen by 11.5% over the past year, but is up 38% over the past five years.
BlackRock New Energy investment trust (blackrock.co.uk) has bounced around wildly. If you bought five years ago you'd have made 105%. But if you bought a year ago you're down 36.5%. Since March it is back up 30%. Major holdings include American Superconductor (smart grids), Archer Daniels Midland (ethanol, biodiesel), Vestas and Iberdrola (Spanish utility).
F&C Global Climate Opportunities (fandc.com) invests in companies at the heart of the climate change issue, including alternative energy, sustainable mobility, waste, advanced materials, forestry and agriculture, and water. Down 12.4% over one year, up around 25% in the past six months. Stocks include EAGA (UK insulation provider) and ITT Corporation (big in water management).
WHEB Sustainability (whebam.com), run by some of the UK's most experienced green/ethical fund managers. Focuses on climate change, water issues and demographics. Major holdings include EnerNOC (US energy efficiency) and Epure (Singapore/China water treatment).
Tiburon Green (tiburon.co.uk) launches next month. Focus will be on renewable energy in Asia. Starting portfolio will include China High Speed Transmission (wind equipment developer) and Silex Systems (Australian uranium enrichment and solar energy tech company).
Virgin Climate Change (Virginmoney.com/funds) invests in UK/European firms with a lighter carbon footprint. Down 28.2% over the past 12 months but up around 30% since March.
HSBC GIF Climate Change fund (assetmanagement.hsbc.com) hopes to capitalise on what it calls "one of the defining investment opportunities of the years ahead". Invests in 50-70 stocks from the HSBC Global Climate Change benchmark index. Down 23.6% over the past year but up 40% over the past six months.
Venture Capital Trusts and Enterprise Investment Schemes
Higher-risk funds with higher minimum investments, often putting your money into start-ups where some will succeed and make lots of money – and others will fail. They have a number of tax advantages for higher rate taxpayers.
Ventus (ventusvct.com) runs three VCTs which have invested £50m in wind farms such as Craig Wind Farm in Dumfriesshire and Fenpower in Cambridgeshire. Its first VCT, Ventus 1, is the fourth best-performing VCT of 111 this year, up 46%. None available for investment right now, but they are examining options for new share issues. The funds are managed by climatechangecapital.com.
Climate Exchange VCT invests in an emissions exchange operator, a role targeted by climate camp protestors this week as carbon gamblers. Shares in Climate Exchange plc are currently trading at half the levels of a year ago.
Oxford Capital (oxcp.com) is typical of many seedcorn-style business that match investors with high-tech projects, many in the sustainability field and some connected to the university. Its fifth Oxford Gateway EIS fund is open to investment – but the minimum is £25,000.

Current economic growth model is 'immoral', says Prescott

With the world's population growing to nine million by 2050, the Britain's former deputy PM predicts far more crucial and complex talks in Copenhagen than in Kyoto
Jonathan Watts, Asia Environment Correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 September 2009 17.57 BST
John Prescott, the former UK climate negotiator, called on developed nations today to accept a new model of economic growth that would create a more equitable spread of carbon emissions in the world. Speaking to the Guardian in Beijing, Prescott said talks at Copenhagen would probably not be decided until an 11th-hour crisis, but that no global consensus could be reached without a fairer spread of emissions.
Since helping to bang heads together to set the first targets on carbon in Kyoto in 1997, Prescott said the world had started to develop a new model of restraint.
"The reality is that the world has found a rationing process. It is not ... get growth as fast as you can and get the jobs and sod the rest," he said. "The world will have 9 billion people by 2050. If you still want growth and prosperity, do you keep on the model you have now? It's immoral."
Prescott has no say in the final decision this time but will attend the talks in Copenhagen as a rapporteur for the Council of Europe, allowing him to be a vocal observer. His remarks address a core issue: how to allow developing nations such as China and India to grow their economies and lift billions from poverty without generating enormous greenhouse gas emissions, as past growth in the developed world did.
But his experience as a former deputy prime minister and key figure in the Kyoto talks sheds light on some of the problems that are likely to lie ahead of negotiators in Denmark in December.
He said Kyoto was about setting a framework, whereas Copenhagen is an attempt to get every country involved. Although the US and China are now far more involved and the science is more widely accepted this time, he believed negotiations will be "10 times harder" than those of 1997 because more countries are taking part and the issues are more complex.
A deal will depend on a last minute display of political will, he predicted.
"The deal at Kyoto came when politicians sat down and faced the reality that we were we going to have a breakdown (of talks)," recalled Prescott. He said he and the Japanese, European and American negotiators huddled in the early hours to achieve a breakthrough. "We got together in a room. I rang Al Gore (the then US vice president) and said we were closing the hall soon because they are going to have a wedding. The Japanese said, 'We will go one point more, so long as it is less than America. And the Americans said we will go for one point more providing it is lower than Europe. At which point I said if we have to take the moral stand then we will."
Prescott has since been accused of giving too much ground at Kyoto, but he said compromise would probably be necessary again if a deal is to be secured. He also emphasised that any deal must be seen to be equitable.
"If we are deciding a global formula not to suffer consequences of climate change, we had better make it fair to achieve a consensus because that is the key at the end of day. "
Although, he said, none of the nations are showing their hands yet, he predicted politicians would have to find an agreement.
"The science is so clear. For policymakers to just walk away from that would be disastrous. I can't believe they will do it."
In line with many developing nations, Prescott says targets should be set according to emissions per person rather than percentage cuts from past levels, as was the case in Kyoto. If wealthy citizens try to maintain their high-polluting nations, he predicted a political crisis.
Although his time as UK transport secretary saw a massive expansion of car ownership, Prescott said he had called on China to do more to promote public transport and limit traffic congestion.
Tomorrow, Prescott will travel to the southern Chinese city of Xiamen, where he will receive an honour that runs against his UK reputation as a mangler of language. " I am a little bit embarrassed. I am going to Xiamen university, where they will make me an honorary professor, which will create a lot of comment in Britain."

Global warming has reversed 2,000 years of cooling in the Arctic

The Arctic is at it warmest for 2,000 years despite the fact natural cycles mean the area should be cooling, according to research which scientists say proves climate change is man-made.

By Louise Gray, Environment CorrespondentPublished: 7:00AM BST 04 Sep 2009

The wide ranging study used computer simulations to reconstruct summer temperatures across the Arctic over the last 2,000 years.
It found that the area has been warming in the last one hundred years and reached its hottest years in the last decade.

However, the Arctic should be in a cooling period caused by a "cyclical wobble" in Earth's orbit around the Sun, that means the Earth has been getting less sun on the North Pole in the summertime.
Scientist say the fact that temperatures are increasing despite a natural trend of cooling is the strongest evidence yet that man-made carbon emissions are causing the area to warm up at a dangerous rate.
The melting of the Arctic has been used by scientists to prove man-made climate change, especially as they fear it will cause the rest of the world to warm up faster because of the loss of ice that reflects the sun. However, some scientists have argued that the recent loss of sea ice is just part of a natural warming period.
David Schneider, from the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, who carried out the research, said the Arctic should now be in a natural cooling phase but temperatures were not dropping.
"This result is particularly important because the Arctic, perhaps more than any other region on Earth, is facing dramatic impacts from climate change," he said.
"This study provides us with a long-term record that reveals how greenhouse gases from human activities are overwhelming the Arctic's natural climate system.
"Greenhouse gases are overtaking a natural cycle."
Over the last 7,000 years the timing of Earth's closest pass by the Sun has shifted from September to January. This has gradually reduced the intensity of sunlight reaching the Arctic in summertime and meant that average summer temperatures cooled at an average rate of about 0.36 degrees F (0.2 degrees Celsius) per thousand years.
However, the orbital cycle that produced the cooling was overwhelmed in the 20th century by human-induced warming.
The result was summer temperatures in the Arctic by the year 2000 were about 2.5 degrees F (1.4 degrees C) higher than would have been expected from the continued cyclical cooling alone.
Gifford Miller, from the University of Colorado, said the warming period is set to continue with catastrophic consequences.
"Because we know that the processes responsible for past Arctic amplification are still operating, we can anticipate that it will continue into the next century," he said.
"Consequently, Arctic warming will continue to exceed temperature increases in the rest of the Northern Hemisphere, resulting in accelerated loss of land ice and an increased rate of sea level rise, with global consequences."

Renewable Energy, Meet the New Nimbys

Solar and Wind-Power Proposals Draw Opposition From Residents Fearing Visual Blight; a Dilemma for Some Environmentalists
By JEFFREY BALL
Technology changes, but human nature doesn't. Environmentally friendly energy projects are running into the same cries of "not in my backyard" that stymied a previous generation of alternative-power efforts.

Proposed renewable-energy projects have been drawing opposition from people who worry about marring landscapes. Above, a solar-power facility in the Mojave Desert.

Even as Americans tell pollsters they are eager for alternatives to fossil fuel, some are fighting proposals for solar and wind projects and for the thousands of miles of transmission lines that would be needed to carry the cleaner energy to market. The protests echo grass-roots opposition that has blocked nuclear plants and energy-producing trash incinerators for decades.
The new backlash is fueled by worries that renewable-energy projects would occupy vast amounts of land to produce significant amounts of power. Either renewable projects would have to be centralized and sprawling, covering many square miles apiece, or they would need to be distributed in pieces across millions of rooftops and lawns.
Renewable-energy projects would reduce pollution and combat climate change. The trade-off is that many more people would have to see wind turbines, solar panels and other energy infrastructure near their homes in order to diminish the need for coal mines and other fossil-fuel facilities.
"Anywhere I walked on this property, we'd be able to view them and we'd be able to hear them," says Tina FitzGerald, who lives with her family on a 12-acre Vermont farm near where a developer has proposed erecting five wind turbines, each about 400 feet tall. "There should be a place for these -- someplace that isn't going to impact families quite so much."
In California, which is considering a goal of producing a third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, some residents are fighting proposals to build vast solar-energy plants in the Mojave Desert, one of the most remote and reliably sunny spots in the U.S. Up and down the East Coast, meanwhile, residents are opposing plans for wind farms, fearing they will mar views and lower property values.

Americans aren't alone in their skittishness. In the U.K., which also aims to generate about one-third of its electricity from renewable sources by 2020, local opposition is holding up proposed wind projects. Resistance in Ontario led the Canadian province to pass legislation in May establishing a framework for locating renewable-energy sites; local opponents will be able to challenge projects on environmental or safety grounds, but not for aesthetic reasons.
In a report last year, the Paris-based International Energy Agency cited "not in my backyard" sentiment as among the top five threats to the growth of renewable energy world-wide.
The U.S. has to make a tough choice, says Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank that supports giving the federal government more authority to push renewable-energy projects forward. That will be necessary, he says, to curb the country's dependence on foreign oil and its greenhouse-gas emissions. "You have to ask yourself: At what point do priority national interests need to override local goals?"
The clash over whether it is more important to produce nonpolluting domestic energy or to protect environmentally valuable places poses a dilemma for some longtime activists.
Calvin French, a 72-year-old retired high school English teacher, has belonged to the Sierra Club all his adult life. Leaders of the environmental group are working with California officials to help pick sites for big renewable-energy transmission lines as a way to combat climate change. But many club members, including Mr. French, want to protect their favorite places.

Antelope-like pronghorn grazed on California's Carrizo Plain. Proposals for three large solar-energy projects there have drawn local opposition.

His battlefield is the Carrizo Plain, a 460-square-mile swath of grassland about 115 miles north of Los Angeles that is traversed by the San Andreas Fault.
The parched, rugged expanse is home to species including the endangered kit fox and the antelope-like pronghorn. It also is one of the most alluring spots for solar panels in the nation's most populous state. There is prolific sunlight. Much of the land has been subdivided into farms, meaning that acreage no longer can be defended as untouched. And there is a high-voltage line nearby, with capacity to carry solar power to the public.
Amid local opposition, county and state officials for months have been mulling three big solar-energy projects that together would amount to some of the biggest solar arrays in the world.
"Big things like global warming" are difficult to understand, says Mr. French. "But you can go out into a beautiful place and say, 'This needs to be protected.' That's easy to understand."
Around the world, countries that have rolled out fossil-fuel alternatives most aggressively have used heavy-handed government action to address such sentiment. France, for example, now produces about 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. But France's national government manages the country's nuclear-construction program, and it has pushed ahead for decades despite sometimes-heated public protests.
Lawmakers in the U.S. Congress now are fighting over how much power the federal government should have in getting energy projects built. Many renewable-energy proponents say a massive network of new transmission wires would have to be built to bring large supplies of renewable power to population centers. A Senate committee passed a bill in June that would give the federal government authority to decide where to put new power lines if states, which now make those decisions, move too slowly.
The drive for more federal control has the support of many executives in the electric industry, who say the new transmission lines should be available for energy from all sources, including fossil fuel. But there is plenty of opposition to giving Washington that power. Some lawmakers from densely populated states don't want big new transmission lines running through their land. Many state utility regulators also object to an increased federal push.
Caught in the middle are states where renewable energy suddenly is big business. Wyoming Gov. Dave Freudenthal likens his state's wind boom to the coal rush that hit Wyoming three decades ago in the wake of an energy shock.
At a wind-energy conference in Wyoming last month, Gov. Freudenthal, a Democrat, delivered a stern warning to wind-turbine developers, telling them to make sure their projects don't harm a small bird called the sage grouse.
"What I have is an obsession with making sure that the economy of this state continues to function, and it won't if that bird gets listed," according to his office's transcript of his remarks.
Anything that nudges the sage grouse toward the federal government's list of endangered species, he explained, would trigger land-use restrictions that would jeopardize Wyoming's main economic engine: the production of coal, oil and natural gas. "Generally in this state, we support economic development," he told the wind developers. But "when all of a sudden it ends up in our backyard, our view changes a lot."
Jeffrey Ball responds to reader questions at WSJ.com/Currents. Email him at powershift@wsj.com

Local governments keep Chinese public in the dark about pollution

China's environment ministry says polluters are protected by a 'black box' of secrecy as local governments withhold information
Jonathan Watts, Asia environment correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Friday 4 September 2009 11.54 BST
Polluters in China are operating in a "black box" of secrecy, the Ministry of Environmental Protection has warned amid a rash of violent protests related to industrial poisoning.
Offenders are protected by the vast majority of local authorities defying Beijing and violating state law by refusing to disclose information about pollution, with a study showing just 4 out of 113 local governments complied.
The ministry said this lack of transparency was partly to blame for recent riots over lead and manganese poisoning in Shaanxi, Hunan and Fujian, which has affected thousands of children.
"Environmental impact assessment was meant to prevent these kinds of harm, but EIA has repeatedly failed to carry out its duties," the ministry noted on its website after the riots. "In the battle between illegal polluters and their opponents, the disparity in power is too great for the public interest to be effectively protected."
An information transparency law introduced in May 2008 was supposed to ease public concerns about the environment and to hold polluters to account.
But more than a year after it came into effect, a survey by leading NGOs and academics found that only four local governments provided comprehensive details about pollution violations as they were obliged to do.
Eighty-six failed to respond beyond claiming the information was secret or an inappropriate subject to raise in an economic downturn. Others simply ignored the request.
Ma Jun, who founded the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs which carried out the survey with support from the US-based National Resources Defence Council, said local government transparency was at a very basic level. But he emphasised the success of the four who met the targets first year around – Ningbo, Hefei, Fuzhou and Wuhan – and claimed progress should be put in a historical perspective.
"China has never had a tradition of opening up government information before," said Ma, a winner earlier this week of the coveted Ramon Magsaysay Award for integrity in government. "The conclusion from our survey is that this is doable. If the local governments share best practice they can easily improve."
The environment ministry was less guarded in its criticism of local governments. Citing the results of the survey and the recent pollution disturbances, it said more information was vital.
"The absence of comprehensive, timely environmental data has given polluting companies and local authorities the chance to operate in a 'black box'. To break this practice, we need to bring everything out into the sunlight," it said.

African farmers encouraged to plant trees to boost agriculture

Farmers in Africa are being encouraged to plant a particular species of acacia tree that boasts a wide array of useful traits - including helping to stave off climate change. Around 800 scientists meeting in Nairobi for the second World Congress of Agroforestry this week said that the tree, known as a Mgunga in Swahili, had beneficial properties that made it almost unique. As a nitrogen fixer the tree provides a free, organic source of fertiliser while offering fodder for livestock, wood for construction and fuel and windbreaks and erosion control. The Mgunga is also unusually well adapted to thrive in soils across a wide range of African climates, from sub-Saharan to the humid tropics. Persuading farmers of the advantage of tree planting would also go some way towards offsetting the damage being done through deforestation elsewhere on the continent. "The future of trees is on farms," said Dennis Garrity, director general of the World Agroforestry Centre, or ICRAF. "Growing the right tree in the right place on farms in sub-Saharan Africa--and worldwide-- has the potential to slow climate change, feed more people, and protect the environment. "This tree, as a source of free, organic nitrogen, is an example of that. There are many other examples of solutions to African farming that exist here already." The tree is already widely used by farmers in many parts of Africa, where its properties are already widely recognised. "Knowledge of this tree is farmer-driven," said Mr Garrity. "We are now combining the scientific knowledge base with the farmer knowledge base. There is sufficient research on both sides to warrant dramatically scaling-up the planting of this tree on farms across Africa through extension programs. "The risks to farmers are low; it requires very little labor, and delivers many benefits." "Thus far we have failed to do enough to refine, adapt and extend the unique properties of these trees to the more than 50 million food crop farmers who desperately need home-grown solutions to their food production problems," he continued. David Gibbs

Government moves to fast track power plant grid connection

Over 60GW of power is going to waste in the UK due to red tape blocking projects from connecting to the grid. Some 200 energy projects are currently backed up awaiting grid connection. Around a quarter of the power in the queue would comes from renewable sources. Energy and Climate secretary Ed Miliband has recognised the problem and proposed new rules to fast-track connection, with particular emphasis on renewables. The previous system gave power generators a connection date on a first come, first served basis, meaning projects that take a long time to deliver such as large scale coal or nuclear plants are effectively 'bed blocking' those that are far quicker to install, such as wind farms. Some renewable energy projects were facing a wait of several years for connection once complete, destroying investor confidence. Ed Miliband said: "Access to the electricity grid has been one of the key barriers to the generation of renewable energy in this country. We are determined to resolve this issue. That is why we took powers to do so in the Energy Act and today we are setting out our proposals. "We need these new projects to get hooked up to the grid as soon as they are ready - both to help tackle climate change and secure our future energy supplies. "The government will do whatever is necessary to bring about the transition to a low carbon economy and to give investors the certainty they need so that new renewable energy generation is built." The Minister's proposals have been outlined in a consultation document which asks industry which of three queue-busting options would be most appropriate. The choices effectively come down to who should pay for connection - those being connected, or all users of the grid. The consultation can be found at http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/consultations/open/open.aspx. Sam Bond

Miliband's new mayor poo-poos global warming 'scam'

Mayor Peter Davies has urged local residents to halt plans for wind farms 'blocking out sunlight' and encourages driving as we are 'in the age of the car'
Allegra Stratton, Political correspondent
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 September 2009 17.24 BST
The newly elected mayor of Doncaster has described global warming as a "scam", posing a direct challenge to the town's MP, climate change cabinet minister Ed Miliband.
While Miliband pursued international diplomacy in India, ahead of December's crucial climate change summit in Copenhagen, mayor Peter Davies urged local residents to use the law to halt the building of wind farms whose effects he said included "blocking of sunlight". On hearing of Davies's intervention, Miliband replied immediately on Twitter: "Disgrace given the science and the scale of the threat."
Davies's comments came in a statement issued earlier this week making clear to voters where he stood on forthcoming plans to erect wind farms in the Doncaster region. Davies, who represents the English democrat party, made clear neither he nor his council had a role in the decision-making process but said; "These [wind farm] developments have little or no benefit in terms of contributing to decreased energy consumption, nor do they have any beneficial effect on the planet's climate in response to the great global warming scam."
Davies went on: "I would certainly not want one of these monstrosities anywhere near my property, nor do I want to see them blotting the landscape of the English countryside and waterways and causing grief and concern to local people in terms of noise and the blocking of sunlight.
"I therefore urge the public to oppose these developments through legal means provided so that good old-fashioned English justice and common sense may prevail."
Davies was elected in June with 25,344 votes as mayor and his cabinet oversees the carbon intensive portfolio of transport. In a recent newspaper interview he suggested he wanted to encourage car use within Doncaster, saying it would boost business. "Like it or not," he told the Daily Mail, "we live in the age of the car".
Under his stewardship, Doncaster council has announced plans for more parking spaces and a review of bus-only routes. Doncaster's town centre is currently pedestrianised.
Since entering office he has cut his own salary by 60% from £73,000 to £30,000; given up the use of a chauffeured mayoral car and abolished the council's free newspaper.
In a full statement, Miliband said the greatest threat to Doncaster's natural environment was climate change not wind turbines. Miliband has previously said in March that opposing wind farms should become as socially unacceptable as failing to wear a seatbelt.

Himalayans needs climate change science to get its fingers dirty

Dipak Gyawali, research director of the Nepal Water Conservation Foundation, explains that an area as diverse as the Himalayas needs localised, 'toad's-eye' science if it is to learn how to adapt to climate change. Interview by Isabel Hilton
From ChinaDialogue, part of the Guardian Environment Network
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 3 September 2009 12.05 BST
Isabel Hilton (IH): How accurate are predictions of future climate impacts in the region?
Dipak Gyawali (DG): Here is a sense of confusion: the implications of what is happening seem more and more horrendous and some things are pretty certain. Beyond that, though, the models predict all kinds of things. The question of the Himalayas has not really begun to be addressed and the science has a very long way to go on precipitation and the social effects.
IH: How can science become more relevant to the region?
DG: The effects in different parts of the Himalaya and south Asia will be very different and it's not all about glaciers. The Maldives will be drowned; Sri Lanka may have more tsunamis and more intense storms; Bangladesh will have its own problems. They will not be impacted directly by the glaciers; the interest in the glaciers is that they are powerful indicators: they tell you clearly that something is wrong. It's like going to the doctor with a fever: you know you are sick. But we don't have the science to be able to make accurate predictions of impacts over a hugely diverse region. If you look at the last IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, for instance, the whole of the Himalayas was a blank. People are already suffering but whether we can take any one instance as directly related to climate change is not certain.
We did local consultations from every part of Nepal, bringing farmers together to ask what they are experiencing as a result of climate change. Many of them cannot relate what they are experiencing to carbon dioxide emissions, and one problem is that over a large part of the region there is no difference between the word for climate and the word for weather. But when we asked them what is happening to their agriculture, we discovered a whole series of impacts.
Some of them are predictable: spring is coming a week earlier, for instance; things begin to grow, but it is not "real" spring and it can be followed by a blast of terrible cold weather. It seems to be having an impact on cucumbers: they are getting a much higher volume of male flowers to female flowers, so the crop is smaller. The mangoes come into flower and start to grow, but then the fruits shrivel up and drop off, so the mango harvest is shrinking. Lowland pests have started moving up into the mountains and certain weeds from the lowlands are being found at higher altitudes.
We also looked at some major regional catastrophes, signature events like the failure of the Indian monsoon or the floods in the Terai, to see how people were affected. It's essential to find out what is happening, and we believe we need to rethink development in the light of climate change. That has not happened yet.
IH: Presumably it has not happened because the development agencies have not had this kind of detailed input?
DG: That's precisely the point. The remote sensing and the satellites give us the eagle-eye view, which is essential but not enough. In a country as diverse geographically and socially as Nepal – there are more than 90 languages and 103 caste and ethnic groups – the eagle-eye view needs to be complemented by the view from the ground, what I call "toad's-eye" science.
IH: Because high-level science can't be broken down into what is happening in any given local area?
DG: Yes. You are dealing with such diversity: ecological, geographical, cultural and ethnic diversity. The reason we focussed on this toad's-eye view is that we found people were not sitting around waiting for an agreement at the COP15 in Copenhagen. Millions are voting with their feet every day at the grass-roots level, reacting with civic science and traditional knowledge. This is what people are basing their everyday decisions on.
High science to come down off its high horse and meet up with civic science and traditional knowledge, in order to understand what is happening, so that national governments can also plan. The high science has to start looking at why there are more male flowers on the cucumbers, why berries are ripening at the wrong time.
Just to take one example: nobody has studied what is happening to soil fauna. Soil fauna are essential to everything and they are one of the first indicators that things are going wrong. They affect everything from plants to birds and nobody knows what is happening with them.
IH: Have you a better idea of who is vulnerable as a result of this work?
DG: Yes. The conventional wisdom is that the most vulnerable people are the poorest of the poor, but we have found that it is actually the lower middle classes. The reason is that the poorest of the poor have never had enough land to keep their families for the whole year, so they have always had to diversify their sources of income: they do seasonal labour and have those networks and connections already. They have a built-in resilience, so if their harvest is worse than usual, they just go and work longer.
The lower middle classes, though, have had enough land to be able to depend on their crops. They might survive one bad year, but two or three wipe them out, and then you get what you are seeing in India – farmers committing suicide. That is also happening in Nepal. The poorest are suffering, but it is not fatal. The people who are really being hit are the lower middle classes and upwards, which has implications for social stability.
IH: What adaptation is possible in these circumstances?
DG: The solutions have to come out of the watershed and out of the problem-shed. You can talk about big solutions – building high dams – which can take 40 years. We don't know in Nepal if a government will last 40 days. The solutions have to be what these millions of households can take. Can they be helped? How can they be helped? We just haven't done the science for that. We need civic science; ground-level truth.
We have some suggestions for how to do it. For instance, you put a weather monitoring station in every school in Nepal, and get the children to do the readings and get the schoolmaster to fax the readings back, your data points increase from around 450 to around 4,000. You are suddenly rich in data, and the local people are involved in understanding the dimensions of the problem.
It will be a long, drawn out process, but it is starting with rain gauges in the schools, linked up with the local FM radio stations. Suddenly the FM stations are very excited because they are talking about what is happening in their area instead of reading out a weather report from Kathmandu that might have no relevance to them.
We hope our report will point to some things that are essential and some things that local people are already doing to adaptat: building houses on stilts, for instance, so they can move upstairs during the flood season and the people will be safe – their rice will be safe and they can move back down again when the danger is past. Some villages have raised the level of their plinths, just a little bit, but enough to get above the floods.
IH: But won't future floods be much worse?
DG: Not all major floods are caused by high volumes: the Kosi breach, for instance, happened at a time when the flow was lower than usual. It was the failure of a poorly constructed dam and 3.5 million people were displaced in the state of Bihar, India, and 6,500 in Nepal. If tomorrow the floods get worse, expect more Kosi breaches. We expect that the intensity and frequency will be greater, but we don't know exactly what is going to happen.