Vox Polis

Work is to start on what will be the UKs largest windfarm at Eaglesham Moor in Scotland.  Once finished the 140 turbines will output 322MW - enough to power 200000 homes.  There were objections on the usual grounds (PDF) from Eaglesham Community Council but these were not supported by local authorities in the area (given that the area south of Glasgow isn’t particularly known for its natural beauty there seems to be very little to object to).  So good news then, it’s a shame that more wind farm schemes can’t be carried through without a chorus of nimbyish objections.

Via the BBC.

Sainsbury’s have announced that they will be introducing new carrier bags made with 30% recycled material. The change of material will apparently result in them consuming 6500 tonnes less plastic per year.

In light of Tesco’s recent attempts to buff up their green credentials Sainsbury’s announcement does smack a little of bandwagon jumping but it’s a change for the better either way. It should however be pointed out that recycling material does have energy costs of it’s own and the environmental damage caused by discarded plastic bags remains a problem. I would have preferred to see a two pronged approach of using biodegradable material and strong incentives encouraging customers to reuse their bags. Tesco have adopted this policy (biodegradable bags will be introduced at their stores this month) although it’s unclear at this time how effective their use of reward points to encourage reuse has been.

Via Hippyshopper. More at the BBC.

An interesting coincidence that Richard Branson has decided to announce his intention to donate all the profits from his Virgin Atlantic airline to help tackle climate change on the day that the state of California decides to sue car manufacturers. Clearly Branson knows that airlines, the fastest growing cause of climate change, would be next to receive attention from the expanding “let states sue the ass off big business” culture (well everyone else is suing why not states too).

Don’t forget that you can fly non-stop from Heathrow-LA on Virgin airlines.- think of the damage he’s causing to California.

Its also interesting that Branson has alot to gain from this move against car manufacturers. Branson owns Virgin fuels, that turns corn into biofuels - an alternative to petrol for cars, and has just invested in a Californian based company Cilion. Clearly a success for this law suit (although highly unlikely) would be a boost for his company, as car manufacturers look for alternatives to oil. To top it all off, Branson happens to be a friend of cigar chomping Arnie, the Governor of California.

Clearly Virgin is now doing its bit for the PR campaign on climate change. But we’ll have to wait and see how successful his pledges really are.

Ruth Lea covers the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) in today’s Telegraph. Like a few of her past articles, she steals covers some research from Open Europe (who she does not always reference). -Well it must be hard to produce a weekly column!

Although I agree with her (that’s a first for me) and Open Europe that the scheme in its present form is failing, it looks like Ruth and Open Europe have got some of the details wrong.

Ruth Lea begins by seemingly welcoming climate change- she implies that because climate change helped humans move from being farmers and herders to the present “civilised” people that the current climate change threat- that will see forests destroyed, animal species wiped out and many places turned into deserts- will present a number of opportunities for humanity. Really! The only opportunities i can think of is opening some new hotels on the soon to be Blackpool Rivieria.
On the ETS Ruth Lea argues that:

“some British firms, especially electricity generating companies, reduced their emissions and hence output because they were short of permits. Inevitably this led to higher electricity prices.”

This is incorrect. As the National Allocation Plan shows, most power plants increased their emissions, but because of the elasticities of demand and supply, they, unlike alot of companies, can pass the whole cost of the scheme onto the consumer, in this case us, and this caused the electrictiy prices to rise. (and I thought Lea was an economist).

She cites Open Europe’s briefing that tells how public institutions (such as the NHS and armed forces) have had to fork out millions to buy extra allocations, whereas oil companies have made millions by selling them - this is slightly misrepresented. This is the potential cost not the actual cost, because we do not know how much the companies bought and sold the allocations at, and therefore do not know how much they paid (the scheme works like the share market, where prices can go up as well as down). Also not everyone had to buy/ sell in the first year, and may decide to settle up at the end of the first phase which runs for 4 years. The Open Europe paper only looks at the first year, and does not take account of changes over the whole period- such as weather, new technology etc. We may find that in 2008, overall oil firms end up paying more and the NHS makes a profit. Although this is unlikely, we should not be mislead.

Oh dear it looks likes Milliband’s recent attempt to “get down with the nerds kids” has backfired. Guido and co-conspirators have been playing around with Defra’s attempt at a Wiki on an environmental contract - see the results here and here
Although I appreciate Defra’s idea, the execution is wide of the mark. I think it is important that people realise their responsibilities. However the Defra submission is (inevitably) in Government speak (Does anyone else hate the word “stakeholders”!), and outlines no new ideas, listing a number of things the Government has to provide by law anyway (e.g. disposal of waste, recycling etc). This of course raises the question if the Government has to do these things, how do you enforce these responsibilities.

The Mail on Sunday had an interesting article showing that local councils are “bugging” our wheelie bins to determine how much non-recycled waste we are producing. To be fair the information they are collecting is minimal - it calculates how full the bin is, and is the equivalent of someone with a pen and paper marking how full/empty it is (but much more efficient).

The real ‘concern’ is how this information is going to be used. Clearly it is a precursor to a “pay as you throw” scheme where households are charged for not recycling. Although I believe this is inevitable, I’m not convinced it will work (people will just dump their waste elsewhere) and should only be implemented with an equal policy to get producers to reduce packaging - perhaps the “one layer” scheme I blogged here.

Councils’ first policy should be to introduce the fortnightly pick up that Canterbury City Council has implemented - discussed here. The stench of 2 week old rubbish is enough to convince anyone to recycle.

Oh and finally if the Tories are going to criticise the scheme can they come up with something better than:

“Conservative MP Andrew Pelling said burglars could hack into the computer system to see if sudden reductions in waste at individual households meant the owners were on holiday and the property empty.”

Don’t people have to put the bin out to be collected? Isn’t that be a pretty clear sign that they’re away on holiday?!

Tesco is moving in the right direction with this pledge (as Jonny reported) to bribe shoppers with loyalty card points to encourage them to either reuse or not use plastic bags. Although the loyalty card point system can be a powerful incentive for some people (I’ve seen people sign up to ridiculous credit card deals for a measly few hundred points), not everyone will be persuaded by the offer, especially those smart enough not to have a card in the first place.

An Irish style plastic bag tax may be a good place to start, but even that has its failures, namely how quickly the tax effect wears off. Perhaps linking the tax with inflation might help.

One step forward would be to return cardboard boxes to the check outs, a policy that most supermarkets seem to have dropped because hordes of cardboard boxes look untidy, and probably won’t be carrying the supermarkets logo. Its bad PR to see someone stumbling out of Tescos with a box marked “Kellogg’s cornflakes contains 20”. There are certainly legitimate reasons for removing the boxes; legislative pressure has led to most supermarkets replacing them with green reusable “environmental” plastic boxes that get returned to suppliers and refilled. However, many products, especially cereal, still arrive in cardboard boxes. These are squashed and compacted by the shelf stacking monkeys before you can say “recycle”.

But as Jane Barry points out in this article, in 2003 “Waitrose washed and reused 28 million plastic trays but it also recycled 14,000 tonnes of cardboard boxes”. According to the Waitrose site, they recycled 15,000 tonnes of cardboard and plastic last year. Although they don’t separate the two, we can still assume they’ve got a number of boxes they could give out to consumers, if they wished to.

Some supermarkets may still allow you to take boxes (mine doesn’t) but usually you have to ask and persist (even nag) with your request. In the end you’ll be lucky to get one. Returning cardboard boxes to the checkouts means it’s easier for people to pick them up and reuse. That’s got to be cheaper and better for the environment than just recycling them. It’s also clearly better than giving away (or charging for that matter for) plastic bags.

Currently British shoppers get through an astonishing 17 billion plastic bags a year (more numbers here) most of which are used once. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that this is, to put it mildly, a bit wasteful. Tesco (who hand out 4 billion of those bags) have announced a scheme where customers will be given loyalty card points if they reuse bags. This isn’t going to do any harm but I doubt it’ll be very successful either. Some of you might remember that Sainsbury’s used to give a penny back for each reused bag. If you don’t remember it’s because Sainsbury’s didn’t really bother to inform their staff or customers about the scheme. The Tesco plan is better than Sainsbury’s version in that you get desirable loyalty card points instead of undesirable pennies but I firmly believe that in this case sticks are better than carrots.

Irish consumers are have been charged 10p per bag since 2002 which has resulted in a 90% reduction in carrier bag usage. There are some caveats to the success of the Irish system - use of black plastic bags has significantly increased as these aren’t subject to the levy - but there’s no doubt that it has acheived it’s aims. In comparison, a voluntary system in place in Australia has resulted in a 45% reduction.

As for a compulsory schemes in the UK, the Scottish parliament are currently looking at a bill put forward by Liberal Democrat MSP Mike Pringle to introduce a levy on bags. The environment minister Ben Bradshaw would “prefer for this to be on a voluntary basis” but did not rule out a move to compulsory charging, saying that was a decision for the treasury.

Personally, I’m strongly in favour of a compulsory charge for bags along the Irish model. There’s no justification for the current level of waste and no downsides to a change. Normally, I’d be happy to see government keep it’s nose out but sadly the public, in general, have shown no sign of voluntarily changing their behaviour. If anyone reading this isn’t reusing bags already then I urge you to start doing so, it’s one of the easiest ways to reduce you environmental footprint.

Via The World at One.

I always thought that 8 Hummer, cigar chomping Arnie would have little in common with environmentalism. How wrong could I be?

Not only did Arnie sign the “historic” agreement with Tony yesterday, which may lead to California joining the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, but he’s also pledged to reduce emissions in California by 80% below 1990 levels by 2050 which in comparison leaves the UK lying in the dust.

A sceptical writer would say that at the end of the day, they’re only targets and mean very little- how many targets has New Labour missed during its time in Power?!

A cyncial mind would point to the critiscism Arnie’s received for his contradictory record on the environment. Or how Arnie is embracing the environment because it plays well with voters, who coincidentally will be voting in November. Such a writer might even suggest that by concentrating on environmentalism, he is turning his back on an unpopular President who cares very little for the environment.

Not this blogger. I think Arnie is clearly the man to save the world. According to this, Arnie got his hands on a green hummer…what more proof do you need?!
More seriously however:

It was no surprise that representatives of some of the companies who have / are likely to gain out of joining the EU ETS scheme, were present at the meeting yesterday. Lord Browne from BP was there - they’ve made profits in the first year of the scheme according to this. Richard Branson from Virgin flew over too- they would gain under the expansion of flights into the scheme. Of course they endorse this scheme.
The biggest question is, will Arnie really be willing to let the EU decide which Californian companies / public institutions can pollute and by how much (the EU Commission currently signs off each member state’s National Allocation Plan). I doubt it! If I was sceptic I would say that the Blair-Schwarzenegger agreement was nothing but electioneering!

Apparently Currys are planning to start selling solar panels at 3 of their high street stores (Croydon, Fulham and West Thurrock). The panels will sell for around £1000 each with approximately 9 required to provide 50% of a 3-bedroom house’s electricity needs. By my reckoning that means it’ll take 50 years for a 9 panel installation to pay for itself based on an electricity bill of £350/year. Having said that, there are grants available for microgeneration at the moment and in the current climate energy bills are only likely to go up.

All in all this can only be a good thing but adopters are going to remain concerned environmentalists unless the financials become more favourable.

Via The Register.