Carbon emissions target urged by business leaders

Carbon emissions target urged by business leaders

Continue reading the main storyA recent report by business group the CBI estimates that policy uncertainty over carbon emissions could prove to be costly for the UK's economy

The plea is made in an open letter to Chancellor George Osborne signed by 50 businesses and organisations.Ministers must set a specific target for restricting carbon emissions from power generation, businesses have said.

They want a target for how emissions should be curbed by 2030, arguing that a failure to show commitment to reducing carbon emissions may harm the economy and their commercial prospects.

Mr Osborne has outlined plans to get energy from gas beyond 2030.

Labour Leader Ed Miliband has backed a 2030 target for the power sector and the Liberal Democrats have supported a target under the Energy Bill, to be included in secondary legislation to allow flexibility.

The government's climate advisers have warned support for future gas plants without technology fitted to cut emissions is not compatible with climate change legislation and is harming investment in low-carbon power such as renewables and nuclear.

Companies and investors have joined with trade unions, environmental groups and industry bodies to warn the chancellor that support for gas power into the 2030s is undermining investment in UK electricity infrastructure.

The introduction of a carbon intensity target for the energy sector would, they say, provide investors with the long term confidence needed to transform the electricity market and promote wider economic growth.Such a target would also be in line with recent recommendations from the independent Committee on Climate Change

The letter was signed by 50 businesses and organisations, including Microsoft, Marks and Spencer, Alliance Boots and Asda.

In it, they warn the Mr Osborne that uncertainty over the government's commitment to low-carbon power generation is harming the development of green businesses.

The letter states: "The government's perceived commitment to the low carbon transition is being undermined by recent statements calling for unabated gas in the power sector beyond 2030 and the absence of a specific carbon intensity target."

It highlights a recent report by business group the CBI, which estimates that while a third of UK growth in 2011/2012 came from green businesses, policy uncertainty could lose the UK £400m in exports in 2014/2015 alone.

"It is essential for government to provide investors with the long-term confidence they need to transform our electricity market and make investments capable of driving wider economic growth," says the letter.

Peter Young, chairman of the Aldersgate Group which co-ordinated the move, called for an end to "any political uncertainty surrounding the UK's energy future".

And Andy Atkins, executive director at Friends of the Earth, which backed the letter, said Mr Osborne's support for gas power was looking "increasingly isolated".

Asda, Aviva, British American Tobacco, EDF, Microsoft, Marks & Spencer, PepsiCo, Philips, Sky and the Co-operative are among the businesses to have signed the letter.

substitute for fossil fuels.

Billions of dollars each year are poured into the development of solar, nuclear, biological, and other energies to substitute for fossil fuels. But so far, issues of cost, efficiency, and scalability call into question the arrival of the next era of energy. Can any alternative sources become viably competitive with fossil fuels? What can we -- as individuals, businesses, and governments -- do to accelerate the rise of clean energy?

Selected videos are available above and at right; the full day's recordings will be posted here as they become available.

In this video, Steve Coll talks with Craig Venter about acting on scientific discovery and dramatic changes to come.

low-carbon aviation fuel

Uploaded by ThisIsVirginAtlantic on 11 Oct 2011

We are announcing a world-first, low-carbon aviation fuel with half the carbon footprint of the standard, fossil-fuel alternative. The partnership represents a breakthrough in aviation fuel technology that will see waste gases from industrial steel production being captured, fermented and chemically converted for use as a jet fuel. The revolutionary fuel production process recycles waste gases that would otherwise be flared off into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide -- so is the next step forward from our previous biofuels work. We anticipate that within two to three years, Virgin Atlantic will use the new fuel on its routes from Shanghai and Delhi to London Heathrow, as LanzaTech develop facilities in China and India. We also hope that the technology will be retrofitted to UK facilities, as well as other facilities worldwide, enabling us to uplift a significant proportion of low-carbon fuel across the world.

The LanzaTech Process

The LanzaTech Process can convert carbon monoxide containing gases produced by industries such as steel manufacturing, oil refining and chemical production, as well as gases generated by gasification of forestry and agricultural residues,  municipal waste, and coal into valuable fuel and chemical products. The robust process is flexible to the hydrogen content in the input gas and tolerant of typical gas contaminants. 

The carbon monoxide containing gas enters the process at the bottom of the bioreactor, and is dispersed into the liquid medium where it is consumed by LanzaTech's proprietary microbes as the reactor contents move upward in the reactor vessel.

The net product is withdrawn and sent to the product recovery section.

The product recovery section makes use of an advanced hybrid separation system to recover the valuable products and co-products from the fermentation broth. The water is recovered and returned to the reactor system, minimizing water discharge from the process.  The products and co-products are collected for downstream use.  

In some cases, these products can be used directly as fuel or chemical products.  In many cases it is also possible to convert products from the LanzaTech process in to common chemicals or ‘drop in’ fuels that are normally derived from petroleum. 

The LanzaTech process provides a route from waste gases and solids to valuable fuel and chemical products, reusing carbon along the way to minimize environmental impact. 

There is a gold rush going on

The state of Nebraska is almost the size of the entire UK, with a population smaller than 

Manchester's. It is classic "over-fly" country, ignored by the rest of the US - which, it turns out, is a big mistake.

The rest of America may be having a miserable time. But if you want to be rich, come to Nebraska and be a farmer. There is a gold rush going on, and it is because of corn.

The price of corn has tripled in the last decade. Why? Because places like India and China simply cannot get enough of the stuff.

'A really good time'

Brandon Hunnicutt, chairman of the Nebraska Corn Growers' Association, loves his new combine harvester - which is just as well because it cost three times the price of a large family house here.

Equipped with an on-board computer, an iPad, a satnav and an Android phone, this high-tech monster cuts the corn that feeds the pigs that fill the stomachs of Asia. It also makes the ethanol for American petrol.

There's been a lot of ebbs and flows, but nothing this good.Brandon Hunnicutt, corn farmer

Brandon Hunnicutt admits that he and farmers like him have never had it so good.

"The short time I've been around on this planet, the really good time was right when I was a baby," he says. "And now, 38 years later, this is another really good time.

"So there's been a lot of ebbs and flows, but nothing this good."

And Brandon is a post-modern farmer, which means he is on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. His finger is never off the racing pulse of commodity prices and land values - which keep going up in this part of America.

The price of land in the region has increased fourfold in five years. Land prices in the rural Midwest are doing the opposite to house prices in the rest of America. They continue to shoot up, even prompting whispers of a bubble.

'Phenomenal income year'

There is a ton of extra cash here, and not all of it from the grain shipped in freight trains. Astonishingly, the farming community of states like Nebraska and neighbouring Iowa is still receiving billions in indirect subsidies on products like corn for ethanol, as well as direct payments to each farming family.

It is a legacy of the depression, which in this part of the country now seems like a very distant era.

We have a pehomenal income year that is beyond record.Prof Bruce Johnson, Nebraska-Lincoln University

"No question about it, we have a phenomenal income year that is beyond record," says Professor Bruce Johnson of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

On the subject of farming subsidies, Professor Johnson admits that for local farmers to continue to receive them "gets to be a questionable call".

And Brandon Hunnicutt admits that he does not need the $60,000 annual subsidy he receives in direct payments. In fact, those direct payments could be scrapped by the end of the year.

But the fact is that the American dream is being kept alive nowadays not in an industrial powerhouse or in Silicone Valley, but here in a small-town America, back on the farm where it all started.

can industrialised farming make Africa feed the world?

British-owned Chayton Atlas manages a 25,000 acre farm in Mkushi

The vision unfolding across the Mkushi plain in Zambia is at odds with the doleful imagery of modern Africa to which we have become accustomed.
Three hours from the capital Lusaka the wheat crop glows under the tropical sun. A combine harvester moves methodically across one portion of a vast field. Nearby a giant sprinkler irrigates the soya bean crop.
One might as easily be standing on the plains of the American Mid-West or among the grain fields of the Ukraine.
These are fields of plenty, a productive Africa that challenges the narrative of conflict and hunger that so dominates our idea of the continent.
"If we just increased the yields to 80% of world averages, Africa would become a net exporter of food. We believe that Africa can feed itself and the rest of the world too," Dabney Tonelli of Chayton Atlas, the British-owned company that manages the 25,000 acre farm at Mkushi, says.

Dabney Tonelli says Africa can become a net exporter of food

Chayton acquired a 14-year lease on the land from the Zambian government with the promise of hugely increasing yields, providing jobs for locals and passing on skills to the small farmers who live on subsistence plots nearby.
After years of misrule and corruption Zambia, which recently elected a new government, is seen as a beacon of stability on the continent.
"The political environment is stable, excellent conditions for agriculture in terms of climate and the quality of soil. For the agricultural investor Zambia is where you want to be," says Ms Tonelli.
Zimbabwean expertise
White farmers who were driven off their land in Zimbabwe have been hired to run the Chayton operation, bringing with them the intensive farming skills they have honed over decades.
The farm manager at Mkushi, Stuart Kearns, became a full-time farmer as a teenager after his father was killed in the Bush War in what was then Rhodesia. Despite his experiences in Zimbabwe he is optimistic about the future of farming in Zambia:
"There is huge potential here and I think the thing with Africa is that you have to keep trying again and again. That is something you learn when you grow up here."
Chayton promises to "create jobs, introduce sustainable farming methods… provide support and training to small-scale farmers".

Zambia's vice-president Dr Guy Scott voiced concern about job losses

But there are considerable obstacles - poor infrastructure and bureaucracy stand in the way of Zambia becoming a major exporter of food to the continent. At the moment Chayton is only producing for the local market.
And in an interview with Newsnight, the country's new vice-president, Dr Guy Scott, a farmer himself, was sceptical of some of the claims made by the company:
"I am very sceptical because I've been around a lot and I know what proposals look like and what justifications look like in the investment game and I would say that 90% of what is promised turns out not to be true… not necessarily because of any venality or any deliberate fraud.
"I mean people hope for the best. They hope it is going to work. And the government hopes it is going to work. And we all get each others hopes up. And then you find 'oh dear we didn't actually succeed in having the social impact or economic impact we'd hoped for'."
Displacement fears
Dr Scott worries about the social impact of job losses due to more intensive farming where machines take the place of people:

Local small-scale farmers complain about problems securing capital

"I think the main problem is that the population for Zambia is that the population is about four times too big for the economy. And I think that is the danger with large scale intensive farming; it tends to be capital intensive, it tends not to create jobs and at the same time tends to displace people who are unemployed from their fallback position which is to be subsistence farmers."
Chayton acknowledge that their modernised farming methods have already led to job losses, but insist that as the business grows it will create employment in spin-off businesses:
"Yes, over time some of the less skilled work goes as a result of mechanisation, but we are building a large scale business so over time we are creating other jobs," Ms Tonelli says.
"What we are able to do is train people to do highly skilled jobs which they can continue to use in a career in agriculture of transfer to other sectors as well."
Local feeling
The local subsistence farmers I meet say they welcome the principle of commercial farming, but have yet to see it bring any benefit to them.
Chayton has only been operating in the area for a year but Brighton Marcokatebe, a farmer in the nearby village of Asa, says other commercial farmers have failed to help their smaller neighbours.

Most of Zambia's farmers are small-scale subsistence farmers

"If they come with help then I will accept it, but so far they don't help," he says.
The villagers also complain that they cannot access capital. Most land in Zambia is owned by the state and administered by village chiefs. Without any legal title to the land small farmers cannot get bank loans to buy machinery and expand their production.
But according to Dr Guy Scott, Zambia's small farmers can look forward to a better deal:
"We're elected by Zambians and their interests have to come first. If their interests can be made to coincide with those of the international markets or whatever then great, but at the end of the day we are responsible for their protection, their social protection."
Matching that commitment with the agreements already made with foreign investors will require considerable political skill.

biomass

Time to encourage biomass growth     

  VIEWPOINT
David Williams

Biomass energy is being touted as a key player in the push to green Europe's electricity supplies, says David Williams. In this week's Green Room, he argues that although there are promising signs, more needs to be done to encourage large-scale developments.   

Utilising straw for biomass represents one of the most efficient methods of its disposal and pre-empts the need for it to be ploughed back into the land

For some time, biomass has been seen as the emerging sibling of the renewable energy industry.
Despite much of the development behind the industry's technology worldwide, the UK's position at the front of the biomass revolution has been slipping.
Developers have naturally concentrated on cheaper forms of alternative energy, chiefly onshore wind, whilst other countries have stolen a march, with the Chinese particularly active by building hundreds of stations based on UK power plant models.
In recent months, however, we have seen something of a change in the UK, with a backlash against many more established alternative energy sources.
In the transport sector, biofuels have been attacked for their effect on food prices and actual carbon reductions, while wind has been criticised for its inability to produce a consistent stream of electricity and for its cost.
Many industry experts are now suggesting that biomass has to play the primary role in helping the EU to meet its challenging target of generating 20% of its energy from renewable sources by 2020

biofuel debate favourite arguments of climate-change deniers.

Natural mechanism for medieval warming discovered

Europe basked in unusually warm weather in medieval times, but why has been open to debate. Now the natural climate mechanism that caused the mild spell seems to have been pinpointed.
The finding is significant today because, according to Valerie Trouet at the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow, and Landscape Research in Birmensdorf, the mechanism that caused the warm spell in Europe – and meant wine could be produced in England as it is now – cannot explain current warming. It means the medieval warm period was mainly a regional phenomenon caused by altered heat distribution rather than a global phenomenon.
The finding scuppers one of the favourite arguments of climate-change deniers. If Europe had temperature increases before we started emitting large amounts of greenhouse gases, their argument goes, then maybe the current global warming isn't caused by humans, either.
To work out what the global climate was doing 1000 years ago during the so-called "Medieval Warm Period", Trouet and colleagues started by looking at the annual growth rings of Moroccan Atlas cedar trees and of a stalagmite that grew in a Scottish cave beneath a peat bog. This revealed how dry or wet it has been in those regions over the last 1000 years.
The weather in Scotland is highly influenced by a semi-permanent pressure system called the Icelandic Low, and that in Morocco by another called the Azores High. "So by combining our data, which showed a very wet medieval Scotland and very dry Morocco, we could work out how big the pressure difference between those areas was during that time," says Trouet.

Warm blast

This pressure difference in turn revealed that the medieval period must have experienced a strongly positive North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) – the ocean current that drives winds from the Atlantic over Europe. The more positive the NAO is, the more warm air is blown towards the continent.
The idea to use growth rings to work out past climate change is not new, but Trouet's team is the first to look back beyond 1400 in the European record. They found that the strongly positive NAO lasted for about 350 years from 1050 to 1400.
By combining their data with information from other regions of the world during medieval times and plugging it into different models, the researchers have also come up with a hypothesis of what made the warm winds so persistent.
"It turns out that in the tropical Pacific, the El Niño system was in a negative La Niña mode, meaning it was colder than normal," says Trouet.

Climate loop

El Niño and the NAO are connected by a process called thermohaline circulation, which drives the "ocean conveyor belt" that shuttles sea water of different density around the world's oceans.
According to Trouet, a Pacific La Niña mode and a positive NAO mode could have reinforced each other in a positive feedback loop – and this could explain the stability of the medieval climate anomaly.
Trouet thinks external forces like abrupt changes in solar output or volcanism must have started and stopped the cycle, and hopes to pinpoint the most likely candidates in a workshop with other climatologists in May.

'Profound implications'

Michael Mann at Pennsylvania State University says that based on the analyses and modelling that he has done, increased solar output and a reduction in volcanoes spouting cooling ash into the atmosphere could have not only kicked off the medieval warming, but might also have maintained it directly.
Mann is also concerned that the dominance of medieval La Niña conditions now indicated by Trouet's work might make it more likely that the current man-made warming could also put the El Niño system back into a La Niña mode, although most climate models so far had predicted the opposite.
"If this happens, then the implications are profound, because regions that are already suffering from increased droughts as a result of climate warming, like western North America, will become even drier if La Niña prevails in the future", he says.
Journal Reference: Science (DOI: 10.1126/science.1166349)