climate change

Alex Steffen of Worldchanging recently wrote an excellent piece called Who Will Tell the People? And How? about the yawning chasm between the reality of climate change and the failure of government to bring in the massive changes needed. Talking about US emissions cuts, he writes:

We're running into a situation here where the acceptable political action is to move from A to C, but where realism demands that - if we want to dodge a catastrophic collision with ecological reality - we move from A to say Q. And that gap, between C and Q, is large enough to lose a future in.

As you're reading this blog, you probably don't need reminding about the catastrophic collision with ecological reality Steffen mentions. With stakes this high, the changes needed (Steffen's A to Q) are profound, fundamental and cross all facets of human existence - from our energy and transport systems to, dare I say it, our social and economic systems.

You'd think being slammed for bad science, government collusion and involvement in reverse engineering a consultation in the space of a fortnight would be enough to give a company pause for thought.

Not BAA, who have just submitted an application to build a second runway at Stansted. The runway would add the equivalent of 11 million tonnes of CO2 to the UK's annual carbon footprint, bulldoze a thousand acres of countryside and make Stansted bigger than Heathrow is today.

John Hutton, the man responsible for Britain's energy policy, gave his explicit support this morning for a new generation of coal-fired power stations.

Choosing the stormiest day of the year so far to deliver a speech to members of the right-wing think-tank the Adam Smith Institute, the Secretary of State for Business flew a dangerous kite when he insisted that coal has a "key role" to play in energy provision, and accused anyone who disagreed with him (that's us, folks, along with Prince Charles, Al Gore, the head of NASA, opposition parties and thousands of others) of playing "gesture politics".

The ROCA 3 CHP plant in Rotterdam provides electricty and heat to 400,000 homes

Due to popular demand (well, demand anyway), The Weekly Geek now has its very own RSS feed.

Back in 1882, Thomas Edison built the United States' first electric power plant. Pearl Street Station, which supplied the good folks of Lower Manhattan with electricity for lighting and steam for manufacturing, was around 50 per cent efficient.

125 years on, the typical UK power plant is just 38 per cent efficient. But those modern power plants that have been built on the same principles as Edison's are reaching efficiency levels of up to 95 per cent.

So how did Edison do it? And where are we going so wrong?

In this week's slightly tardy Weekly Geek, we're looking at combined heat and power (CHP): the system Edison was using, and the heart of any truly clean and efficient decentralised energy system. (Those who read the first Weekly Geek on decentralised energy may notice a fair bit of crossover.)

One of the world's premier economic forums, the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), has openly identified environmental degradation as the greatest threat we face. While this is hardly news to those of us who've long been aware of the grave damage we've been inflicting on the planet in recent decades, for a mainstream economic organisation such as OECD it represents a fairly seismic change in thinking.

The key theme of its new report, 'Environmental Outlook to 2030', is that tackling climate change, pollution and other environmental hazards is urgently necessary to avoid irreversible damage.

Following last week's direct action maelstrom at Heathrow and the Houses of Parliament, the media has been courting the people involved with features popping up all over the place about the so-called new generation of eco-activists.

A particularly interesting piece went out last night on Radio 4: Graham Thompson (described by the Evening Standard as the "daddy" of the parliament protest group) appeared on The Moral Maze to argue the case that civil disobedience is an acceptable part of protest in the democratic process. Listen again for the inevitable seven days.

Meanwhile on the Guardian's Environment Weekly podcast, our own climate campaigner Joss Garman was in the studio to talk about the 'new breed' of activist. Listen again for... well, forever probably.

But if I come across one more reference to Swampy...

Kingsnorth in Kent is to be the main focus of this year's Camp for Climate Action. From 4th to 11th of August climate activists will gather at the site of E.On's proposed new coal-fired power station, the first to be built in the UK for 30 years.