By rejecting all the means by which renewable electricity can be generated, such as wind farms, tidal barrages, hydro elcric dams etc, the UK has set a very dangerous courseThis article titled “Support wind farms? It would be less controversial to argue for blackouts” was written by George Monbiot, for The Guardian on Monday 30th May 2011 20.00 UTCWhy do those who oppose wind power insist on spoiling their case with gibberish? In his column on Friday, Simon Jenkins claimed that onshore windfarms were being planned “with no concern for cost”. But the only reason for building them is a concern for cost. If it weren’t for this issue, they would be the last option governments would choose – God knows they cause enough trouble.As the government’s Committee on Climate Change reports, large onshore windfarms are “already close to competitive” with burning natural gas, and are likely to get there by 2020. They are the cheapest renewable sources in this country by a long way. Offshore wind costs roughly twice as much, and its costs have been escalating. After attacking the high cost of wind power, Jenkins argued that we should instead invest in “sun and waves”. The committee shows that while the expected price of electricity from onshore wind in 2030 is between 7 and 8.5 pence per kilowatt hour, solar power is expected to come in at between 11 and 25p, and wave between 15 and 31p. Talk about no concern for cost!Incidentally, the cheapest low carbon option, the committee says, is nuclear power, at 5-10p. But, because of public objections, new plants are likely to be confined to existing sites, which means a maximum of about 20 gigawatts (a quarter of our current power capacity). Planning objections also restrict the spread of onshore wind. The only viable means of getting carbon off the grid, the committee suggests, is a mixture of sources: renewables, nuclear and carbon capture and storage.But those who oppose wind power can’t help themselves. In parliament earlier this month, Glyn Davies, the MP who is leading the fight against windfarms in mid-Wales, insisted that “Welsh windfarms have a load factor of just 19% – the lowest ever recorded” and that “the carbon impact of the development can never be compensated for by any possible carbon benefit”. Rubbish again. The capacity factor for Welsh wind (the amount the turbines produce as a proportion of their idealised output) is 26%.Professor Gareth Harrison of Edinburgh University estimates that the carbon payback time for the wind developments in mid-Wales will be roughly 12 months (all references on my website). Davies, like Jenkins, also claimed that “so much more” could have been done with the same money had it been spent on wave and tidal power, offshore wind and solar photovoltaics. Should MPs not be obliged to do some research before they open their mouths in parliament?Anti-wind campaigners are also highly selective. The Campaign for the Protection of Rural Wales, obsessed by windfarms, says nothing about the opencast coalmines ripping south Wales apart. Nor do you hear a word about the destruction of the ecosystems of upland Wales (and England and Scotland) by sheep grazing. These champions of the countryside want to save it from only one threat.For all that, it’s a real one. While the windfarms themselves divide communities, everyone hates the new power lines required to connect them to the grid. Here in mid-Wales, I have yet to meet anyone who will speak up in favour of them. Because they have to march across so much countryside, their visual impact is greater per pound of investment than that of any other technology.Though you could see this issue coming as clearly as the pylons themselves, the green movement is completely unprepared. Greenpeace tells me “we haven’t done any work on pylons”. Hardly anyone seems to be aware of how perilous this situation is: how easily renewable energy could be killed by the power lines issue.This is about to become a national struggle, in which opponents of the new pylons will be cast as heroes. Promising direct action, reminding us of the great battles against the reservoirs supplying England, those who marched against the new lines in Wales last week will put us, unless we act quickly, in a dangerous position. Green activists will be outflanked by green activism. The same battle will then be fought all over the United Kingdom, wherever a new power line is planned.Many of the areas affected by proposals for new lines are either Tory constituencies or Lib Dem seats the Tories will hope to take (all of which are now contestable). It is hard to believe that the Conservative commitment to low-carbon energy could withstand a major rebellion within the party: Tory environmentalism is easily uprooted.The greens need to decide where they stand. The only position that makes sense to me is unequivocally to support the campaign against overhead lines. Where new powerlines are built they must go underground. If they can’t go underground, they shouldn’t be built. If we are not against pylons marching over stunning countryside, what are we for?But here too there’s a problem. Like the windfarms, overhead lines are favoured by the government because of its concern for cost. According to the National Grid, burying the lines connecting the turbines in mid-Wales to the rest of the system would cost 3.2 times as much as putting them on pylons (£562m vs £178m). But how much does that add to the cost of electricity?Calculating this is easy (there’s an explanation on my website) – as long as you know the capital costs of the whole project. But neither the National Grid nor anyone else I’ve spoken to is prepared to hazard a guess about the cost of the rest of the infrastructure, so I can’t yet tell you whether burying the power lines makes onshore wind here more expensive than competing technologies.In fact my efforts to obtain relevant data of all kinds from the government, the National Grid and the wind industry reveal that, like the environment movement, they are completely unprepared for this backlash. Dismayed by the collective failure to address the pylons issue, the campaign against windfarms now confidently tells the same story about this technology as others do about nuclear: the turbines are erected by big, greedy corporations; they are unfairly subsidised by the government; they will cause untold damage to human health. In view of the flack you get for supporting any power technology, I’m beginning to think it would be less controversial to argue in favour of blackouts.So this is where the United Kingdom stands. We cannot keep burning fossil fuels without cooking the biosphere. We don’t like nuclear power. We don’t like onshore wind. We won’t like the costs of the other technologies. We reject all the means by which electricity is generated. Yet no one is volunteering to stop using it.• A fully referenced version of this article can be found on George Monbiot’s website guardian.co.uk © Guardian News & Media Limited 2010Published via the Guardian News Feed plugin for WordPress.Thanks for subscribing to Andy Roberts blogSupport wind farms? It would be less controversial to argue for blackoutsRelated posts:Architects worried by tower blocks and windPbwiki supportWild parakeets seen as a threat in the UK
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Support wind farms? It would be less controversial to argue for blackouts
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May 30 2011, 5:41pm | Comments »
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Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds
Public anger grows over proposed seasonal water tariffs, as utility companies look for ways to save the UK’s supply
This article titled “Seasonal water metering is seen as a con by consumers, study finds” was written by Jamie Doward and Mario Ledwith, for The Observer on Saturday 23rd April 2011 23.06 UTC The race to provide Britain with a sustainable water supply is already generating the first of what is likely to be a long list of controversies. As the UK basks in temperatures that put Athens in the shade and with rivers already running low, utility companies are under increasing pressure to preserve water. But the most comprehensive study of its kind suggests the leading option for ensuring the UK enjoys a sustainable water supply – metering – is hitting the poorest hardest and is viewed with suspicion by consumers who believe it is a ruse by utility companies to increase their profits. The study by Wessex Water, which supplies water to more than one million households in the west country, found the introduction of meters reduced customer demand by 17%, higher than previous estimates. The reduction was even greater if the meters were tied to a tariff system that saw the price of water rise in the summer, an increasingly popular option being considered by the utility companies, but one which has caused widespread anger among consumers. The Wessex study, the largest since metering was introduced 20 years ago, found 15% of customers saw their annual bills rise by more than £100 after flat-rate metered systems were installed. A quarter of the poorest customers saw their bills increase by more than £50. Phil Wickens, tariffs manager at Wessex Water, acknowledged his company had one of the highest water rates in the UK, but said that it was vital the industry introduced a new charging system if the UK was to have a sustainable supply. “We want a charging system that gives us the ability to meet future challenges in the long term,” Wickens said. “Climate change and population growth are going to place pressure on the need for increased investment. In order for us to secure that investment we really need all of our customers to be willing and able to pay their bills. There is a commercial incentive for raising these issues now.” Household water bills have increased by more than 50% in real terms since 1989, partly due to investment costs. But the financial burden on customers is becoming a key issue, with an increasing number refusing to pay their bills. Wessex estimates its underlying bad debt has doubled over the past decade, with the figure expected to rise further given economic conditions. It is estimated that the average customer now pays an extra £12 a year to cover unpaid water bills. Experts suggest establishing a fair charging system is vital if more schemes, such as the new £270m Thames Water desalination plant that filters salt from water in the Thames estuary, are to get the go-ahead. A failure to address water sustainability could have serious repercussions for the UK. The current spell of hot weather has already triggered warnings that farmers in some regions will have to limit their use of water. Several rivers in England and Wales are reportedly at “exceptionally low” levels, raising fears there will be a need for hosepipe bans. The Environment Agency said two months of unusually dry weather has left 11 rivers at extremely low levels of the kind seen only once every 20 years. The government is currently consulting on water sustainability, and environment minister Caroline Spelman is reportedly in favour of metering as a key part of its response. All new homes built since 1989 have had to be fitted with water meters, and an increasing number of people opt for them. Just under half of all UK customers now have a water meter, and it is predicted that all households will have one fitted in the future. But the shift to metering has prompted concern among charities. The Fairness on Tap (FoT) coalition – made up of 12 leading environmental organisations, including the WWF and the National Trust – is calling for a national switch to water metering. The coalition claims the current system of water charging is outdated, unfair and encourages wastage, with many households paying a flat “all you can use” charge, giving them no incentive to be water-efficient. However, the previous charging system, with water bills linked to the rateable values of homes, protected the poorest in society from excessively high bills. “The industry has been moving from a system based on rateable values that were set as part of local authority charging back in the late 80s,” Wickens said. “Lower income customers were paying less than higher income customers, but as we are gradually moving towards metered charging that social protection is winding out.” Creating a fairer charging system has seen some water companies experiment with higher charges in the summer. The option, being tested in more than 1,000 homes by Wessex, has resulted in a “step change” in consumer behaviour, says the company. Wickens said: “Higher income customers with bigger gardens end up paying a fairer chunk than lower income customers.” The new form of charging is likely to trigger animosity among households in the “squeezed middle”, who may fear they will be hit disproportionately. However, the Wessex study found almost all customers opposed to seasonal tariffs. “Customers are cynical about companies changing the way they are charged; they assume it’s about making money, like travel companies charging more on holidays, but in our case it isn’t,” Wickens said. “Even if we had a dry summer and generated more income, the regulator takes that money off us.”
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April 26 2011, 11:01am | Comments »
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Defra delays: why are so many key environment policies overdue?
From protecting the natural environment to badger culling to water bills, key policies are being postponed. Have cuts bitten too deep?
This article titled “Defra delays: why are so many key environment policies overdue?” was written by Damian Carrington, for guardian.co.uk on Wednesday 13th April 2011 10.49 UTC Cutting a 30% of an organisation’s budget before working out how that organisation will actually run on the reduced funds isn’t very clever. But that’s what appears to have happened under Caroline Spelman’s stewardship of the department of the environment, food and rural affairs. How else can we explain the long list of delays which span right across the work of the department, from water bills to badger culls? Not forgetting the humiliating U-turn on the forestry sell-off, the deep cuts to flood defences across the nation and a feeble sustainability vision, here’s a list: Natural environment white paperDue: April 2011Expected: Officially, later this year – before the summer, I’m toldThis flagship policy will, Defra says, protect and enhance the natural environment that “underpins our economic prosperity, our health and our wellbeing” and will be the department’s first environment white paper for 20 years. It is eagerly anticipated by greens across the spectrum – but it will miss its April deadline, as set out in Defra’s business plan. Badger cull consultation: government’s responseDue: Feb 2011Expected: Possibly late MayBovine tuberculosis takes a terrible toll on cattle farmers, but effective culling of badgers in complex and costly and many animal lovers oppose any cull. The proposals – that farmers do the culling themselves – has many flaws, not least being dismissed as “among the worst options” by scientists and likely to cost more than doing nothing. In February, announcing a delay, agriculture minister Jim Paice said: “we need to make sure we get it right.” With emotions running high on both sides, it’s a tough one, but how many more months must we wait? Waste policy reviewReview announced: June 2010Expected: May 2011The government announced their review of waste policies in June 2010 to “ensure we are taking the right steps towards creating a ‘zero waste’ economy.” But, according to stakeholders, its results have been repeatedly delayed. In its absence, the government has said it will ban fines for misuse of dustbins, but is unable to say how refuse will be better dealt with than now, especially ending the UK’s addiction to landfill. Water white paperDue: June 2011Expected: Autumn 2011The white paper will “reform the water industry to ensure more efficient use of water and the protection of poorer households”. It follows the Cave review of competition in the water industry and Walker review of water charging, published in April 2009 and June 2009 respectively. Food policyDue: UnknownThis is not strictly late as there’s no such policy being developed, despite criticism of the government’s plans for feeding a growing population sustainably and healthily being ‘insubstantial”. Banning wild animals from circuses consultation: government’s responseConsultation ended: March 2010Due: UnknownThis issue raise huge passion among animal rights campaigners, but a year on, there’s still no response, though the first moves were made by Labour in 2006, who must share some of the blame for the delay. Dangerous dogs consultation: government’s responseConsultation ended: June 2010Expected: “Later in the year”, I’m toldThis consultation on increasing the protection of the public was launched by the last government after a campaign by post men and women. Parliamentary answers:Thanks to work by Thomas Docherty MP, we can see that Defra has failed to answer 42% of written questions from MPs on time, making them the third worst of the 13 departments Docherty challenged. By contrast, the department of energy and climate change answered 77% of questions on time. Defra refutes my suggestion that the deep budget cuts are taking their toll. “Defra is playing its part in reducing the deficit, but this has no impact on policy development,” said a spokesman. “It is important to address all likely practical issues and ensure the department has properly consulted stakeholders before final decisions are made – which will mean less red tape and more opportunities for business and communities.” Unsurprisingly, Mary Creagh, Labour’s shadow secretary of state for environment, has a different view: “This is a department in special measures. The government’s ideologically driven belief in the small state is sending environmental policy into reverse. Defra’s stop-go approach to policy is creating uncertainty for businesses and communities that want to invest in green jobs and improve the environment.” Perhaps the Defra delays stem from the forestry sell-off fiasco, meaning every policy now has to be examined over and over in order to avoid another disaster. I’d be interested to hear more about that. Whatever the reason for the delays, while we wait, biodiversity continues to decline, cattle continue to contract TB and rubbish continues to be dumped.
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April 13 2011, 6:06am | Comments »
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Nuclear’s green cheerleaders forget Chernobyl at our peril
Pundits who downplay the risks of nuclear radiation are ignoring the casualties of the past such as Chernobyl. Fukushima‘s core meltdown may be worse due to the plutonium in the mixed oxide fuel rods.
This article titled “Nuclear’s green cheerleaders forget Chernobyl at our peril” was written by John Vidal, for The Guardian on Friday 1st April 2011 19.00 UTC Every day there are more setbacks to solving the Japanese nuclear crisis and it’s pretty clear that the industry and governments are telling us little; have no idea how long it will take to control; or what the real risk of cumulative contamination may be. The authorities reassure us by saying there is no immediate danger and a few absolutist environmentalists obsessed with nuclear power because of the urgency to limit emissions repeat the industry mantra that only a few people died at Chernobyl – the worst nuclear accident in history. Those who disagree are smeared and put in the same camp as climate change deniers. I prefer the words of Alexey Yablokov, member of the Russian academy of sciences, and adviser to President Gorbachev at the time of Chernobyl: “When you hear ‘no immediate danger’ [from nuclear radiation] then you should run away as far and as fast as you can.” Five years ago I visited the still highly contaminated areas of Ukraine and the Belarus border where much of the radioactive plume from Chernobyl descended on 26 April 1986. I challenge chief scientist John Beddington and environmentalists like George Monbiot or any of the pundits now downplaying the risks of radiation to talk to the doctors, the scientists, the mothers, children and villagers who have been left with the consequences of a major nuclear accident. It was grim. We went from hospital to hospital and from one contaminated village to another. We found deformed and genetically mutated babies in the wards; pitifully sick children in the homes; adolescents with stunted growth and dwarf torsos; foetuses without thighs or fingers and villagers who told us every member of their family was sick. This was 20 years after the accident but we heard of many unusual clusters of people with rare bone cancers. One doctor, in tears, told us that one in three pregnancies in some places was malformed and that she was overwhelmed by people with immune and endocrine system disorders. Others said they still saw caesium and strontium in the breast milk of mothers living far from the areas thought to be most affected, and significant radiation still in the food chain. Villages testified that “the Chernobyl necklace” – thyroid cancer – was so common as to be unremarkable; many showed signs of accelerated ageing. The doctors and scientists who have dealt directly with the catastrophe said that the UN International Atomic Energy Agency’s “official” toll, through its Chernobyl Forum, of 50 dead and perhaps 4,000 eventual fatalities was insulting and grossly simplistic. The Ukrainian Scientific Centre for Radiation, which estimated that infant mortality increased 20 to 30% after the accident, said their data had not been accepted by the UN because it had not been published in a major scientific journal. Konstantin Tatuyan, one of the “liquidators” who had helped clean up the plant, told us that nearly all his colleagues had died or had cancers of one sort or another, but that no one had ever asked him for evidence. There was burning resentment at the way the UN, the industry and ill-informed pundits had played down the catastrophe. While there have been thousands of east European studies into the health effects of radiation from Chernobyl, only a very few have been accepted by the UN, and there have been just a handful of international studies trying to gauge an overall figure. They range from the UN’s Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation study (57 direct deaths and 4,000 cancers expected) to the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War (IPPNW), who estimated that more than 10,000 people had been affected by thyroid cancer alone and a further 50,000 cases could be expected. Moving up the scale, a 2006 report for Green MEPs suggested up to 60,000 possible deaths; Greenpeace took the evidence of 52 scientists and estimated the deaths and illnesses to be 93,000 terminal cancers already and perhaps 140,000 more in time. Using other data, the Russian Academy of Medical Sciences declared in 2006 that 212,000 people had died as a direct consequence of Chernobyl. At the end of 2006, Yablokov and two colleagues, factoring in the worldwide drop in births and increase in cancers seen after the accident, estimated in a study published in the annals of the New York Academy of Sciences that 985,000 people had so far died and the environment had been devastated. Their findings were met with almost complete silence by the World Health Organisation and the industry. So who can we trust when the estimates swing so wildly? Should we believe the empirical evidence of the doctors; or governments and industrialists backed by their PR companies? So politicised has nuclear energy become, that you can now pick and choose your data, rubbish your opponents, and ignore anything you do not like. The fact is we may never know the truth about Chernobyl because the records are lost, thousands of people from 24 countries who cleaned up the site have dispersed across the vast former Soviet Union, and many people have died. Fukushima is not Chernobyl, but it is potentially worse. It is a multiple reactor catastrophe happening within 150 miles of a metropolis of 30 million people. If it happened at Sellafield, there would be panic in every major city in Britain. We still don’t know the final outcome but to hear experts claiming that nuclear radiation is not that serious, or that this accident proves the need for nuclear power, is nothing short of disgraceful.
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April 2 2011, 8:30am | Comments »
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Japan’s horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/18/japans-horror-reveals-how-thin-is-the-edge-we-live-on
Climate change may not be responsible for the tsunami, but it is shrinking our margin of safety. It is time to shrink back ourselves
This article titled “Japan’s horror reveals how thin is the edge we live on” was written by Bill McKibben, for The Guardian on Friday 18th March 2011 21.00 UTC It’s scary to watch the video from Japan, and not just because of the frightening explosions at the Fukushima plant or the unstoppable surge of tsunami-wash through the streets. It’s almost as unnerving to see the aftermath – the square miles of rubble, with boats piled on cars; the completely bare supermarket shelves. Because the one thing we’ve never really imagined is going to the supermarket and finding it empty. What the events reveal is the thinness of the margin on which modernity lives. There’s not a country in the world more modern and civilised than Japan; its building codes and engineering prowess kept its great buildings from collapsing when the much milder quake in Haiti last year flattened everything. But clearly it’s not enough. That thin edge on which we live, and which at most moments we barely notice, provided nowhere near enough buffer against the power of the natural world. We’re steadily narrowing the margin. Global warming didn’t cause the earthquake and tsunami that devastated the Miyagi coast, but global warming daily is shrinking the leeway on which civilisation everywhere depends. Consider: sea levels have begun to rise. We’re seeing record temperatures that depress harvests – the amount of grain per capita on the planet has been falling for years. Because warm air holds more water vapour than cold, the chance of severe flooding keeps going up and in the last year countries from Pakistan to Australia have recently ended up on the wrong side of those odds. Those changes steadily eat away at that safety margin. With less food stored in our warehouses, each harvest becomes critical. With each massive flood, we have to spend more money rebuilding what was there before: there are still as many as 4 million homeless from Pakistan’s floods, which means “development” has given way to “getting a tarp over your head”. Even rich countries face this trouble: Australia cut much of its budget for renewable energy to help pay the recovery bill for soggy Queensland. Warmer temperatures are helping dengue fever spread; treating one case can use up the annual health budget for a dozen people in some Asian nation, meaning that much less for immunisations or nutrition. Just the increasing cost of insurance can be a big drag on economies: a study by Harvard and Swiss Re found that even in rich nations such as the US, larger and more frequent storms could “overwhelm adaptive capacities”, rendering “large areas and sectors uninsurable”. The bottom line was that, “in effect, parts of developed countries would experience developing nation conditions for prolonged periods”. There have always been natural disasters, and there always will be. For 10,000 years the planet has been by and large benign; you could tell where the safe margin for civilisation was because that’s, by definition, where civilisation was built. But if the sea level rises a metre, that margin shrinks considerably: on a beach that slopes in at 1 degree, the sea is now nearly 90 metres nearer. And it’s not just a literal shrinkage – the insecurity that comes with smaller food stocks or more frequent floods also takes a psychological toll: the world seems more cramped because it is more cramped. We can try to deal with this in two ways. One is to attempt to widen it with more technology. If the Earth’s temperature is rising, maybe we could “geoengineer” the planet, tossing sulphur into the atmosphere in an effort to block incoming sunlight. It’s theoretically possible. But researchers warn it could do more harm than good, and maybe this isn’t the week to trust the grandest promises of engineers, not when they’ve all but lost control of the highest technology we’ve ever built, there on the bluff at Fukushima. The other possibility is to try to build down a little: to focus on resilience, on safety. And to do that – here’s the controversial part – instead of focusing on growth. We might decide that the human enterprise (at least in the west) has got big enough, that our appetites need not to grow, but to shrink a little, in order to provide us more margin. What would that mean? Buses and bikes and trains, not SUVs. Local food, with more people on the farm so that muscles replace some of the oil. Having learned that banks are “too big to fail”, we might guess that our food and energy systems fall into that same category. Imagine, for instance, a nation that got most of its power from rooftop solar panels knitted together in a vast distributed grid. It would take investment to get there – we’d have to divert money from other tasks, slowing some kinds of growth, because solar power is currently more expensive than coal power. We might not have constant access to unlimited power at every second of every day. In the end, though, you’d have not only less carbon in the atmosphere, but also a country far less failure-prone. The solar panels on my roof could break tonight – and I’d have a problem if they did – but it wouldn’t ramify into rolling blackouts across the continent (and no one would need to stand in my driveway with a Geiger counter). Such changes wouldn’t make the world safe: climatologists promise us we’ve already put enough carbon out there to raise our planet’s temperature two degrees in the decades to come, which will make for a miserably difficult century. But they also promise that if we don’t stop burning coal and oil, that number will double, and miserable will become impossible. With Japan’s horror still unfolding, there’s nothing to do for the moment except watch, pray, and try to find some small ways to help people caught up in forces beyond their control. But the lesson we should learn, perhaps, is that it’s time to back off a little. Suddenly squat and plain words – “durable”, “stable”, “robust” – sound sweeter to the ear.
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March 18 2011, 5:29pm | Comments »
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Japan battles to stave off possible nuclear meltdown
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2011/03/12/japan-battles-to-stave-off-possible-nuclear-meltdown
The Earthquake yesterday has knocked out the cooling system and atomic material is seeping out. White smoke is rising.
As the world gears up to build many more nuclear power stations in response to peak oil and climate change, the biggest earthquake in Japanese history should make us think twice.
This article titled “Japan battles to stave off possible nuclear meltdown” was written by Tania Branigan in Beijing, for guardian.co.uk on Saturday 12th March 2011 07.11 UTC Workers are battling to stave off a possible nuclear meltdown at a plant in north-eastern Japan as the country struggles with the aftermath of Friday’s enormous earthquake and tsunami. Japanese media said officials had detected caesium, one of the elements released when overheating causes core damage, around the reactor at Fukushima No 1 plant in Futuba, 150 miles north of Tokyo. The Tokyo Electric Power Company said it did not believe a meltdown was underway but Ryohei Shiomi, an official with Japan’s nuclear safety commission, said that it was possible. Experts and authorities played down the dangers of a Chernobyl-style disaster, saying they believed a partial meltdown was controllable. The government urged people to remain calm. Officials had earlier evacuated 20,000 residents living within 10km on the plant on the orders of the prime minister, Naoto Kan, who had inspected it via helicopter. Experts told Associated Press that the risk area was 6km. The crisis began when the 8.9 magnitude shock cut out power, turning off the water supply needed to cool the system. The tsunami is thought to have cut off the backup diesel generator an hour later, leading to pressure rising rapidly within the reactor. Broadcaster NHK said that attempts to vent radioactive gas to lower pressure had been suspended because the radiation level on one valve was higher than expected, heightening the risk of exposing workers to radiation. Earlier in the day a Japanese nuclear safety panel said radiation levels were 1,000 times higher than normal in a control room and eight times normal just outside the plant. Workers were frequently changing shifts. The Tokyo Electric Power Company has also reported problems with a second reactor at the plant and declared an emergency at the Fukushima No 2 plant. The chief cabinet secretary, Yukio Edano, said the pressure control system was not functioning at the plant’s three reactors. Officials were evacuating residents within a 3km radius and had ordered those with 10km to stay indoors, NHK said. Naoto Sekimura, a professor at the University of Tokyo, told AP a major radioactive disaster was unlikely. “No Chernobyl is possible at a light water reactor. Loss of coolant means a temperature rise, but it also will stop the reaction,” he said. “Even in the worst-case scenario, that would mean some radioactive leakage and equipment damage, but not an explosion. If venting is done carefully, there will be little leakage. Certainly not beyond the 3km radius.” A partial meltdown in one of the light water reactors at Three Mile Island in 1979 resulted in the release of radioactive gases in the most serious incident in the history of the US nuclear power industry. The reactor was eventually brought under control despite a series of errors. Across the worst hit north-east Tohoku region of Japan at least 630 people are dead and a similar number missing, according to police sources, with 1,128 injured. The country has mobilised 50,000 rescuers but they have yet to reach the most severely affected areas. Residents woke up after a freezing night on rooftops and in emergency shelters to a sea of mud, water and debris. Earthquakes continued to rock the north-east coast overnight, although some said the worst tremors appeared to be subsiding. Japan downgraded tsunami warnings in most areas but the Tohoku remained on high alert for waves up to 10m high. The tsunami has reached countries across the Pacific region but there were no reports of major damage outside Japan. Images shot from helicopters showed many people still crowding the rooftops of buildings surrounded by water and mud. Some, including small children, were winched to safety by rescuers. Other footage showed the letters SOS spelled out on the roof of a hospital in Iwanuma, Miyagi prefecture. Photographs from Sendai – one of the worst hit cities – showed families crammed into schools. “The flood came in from behind the store and swept around both sides. Cars were flowing right by,” said Wakio Fushima, who owns a convenience store in Sendai, which has around 1 million inhabitants and is 80 miles from the quake’s epicenter. Witnesses said the tsunami had swept inland about six miles. “The tsunami was unbelievably fast. Smaller cars were being swept around me and all I could do was sit in my truck,” said truck driver Koichi Takairin, 34, who was trapped in his four-ton vehicle by the torrent. Hundreds queued outside supermarkets for basic supplies and petrol stations were swamped with cars. Authorities warned citizens in northern Japan to be prepared for severe power cuts due to the shut down of nuclear plants, which provide about 30% of the country’s electricity. More than 1 million households are without water. Phone voice services are also down across much of the north east, although data services seemed to be working sporadically.
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March 12 2011, 3:10am | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?
A plan to publish ‘the definite truth about Climate Change‘ using open sourced data and workings.
This article titled “Can a group of scientists in California end the war on climate change?” was written by Ian Sample, for The Guardian on Sunday 27th February 2011 20.29 UTC In 1964, Richard Muller, a 20-year-old graduate student with neat-cropped hair, walked into Sproul Hall at the University of California, Berkeley, and joined a mass protest of unprecedented scale. The activists, a few thousand strong, demanded that the university lift a ban on free speech and ease restrictions on academic freedom, while outside on the steps a young folk-singer called Joan Baez led supporters in a chorus of We Shall Overcome. The sit-in ended two days later when police stormed the building in the early hours and arrested hundreds of students. Muller was thrown into Oakland jail. The heavy-handedness sparked further unrest and, a month later, the university administration backed down. The protest was a pivotal moment for the civil liberties movement and marked Berkeley as a haven of free thinking and fierce independence. Today, Muller is still on the Berkeley campus, probably the only member of the free speech movement arrested that night to end up with a faculty position there – as a professor of physics. His list of publications is testament to the free rein of tenure: he worked on the first light from the big bang, proposed a new theory of ice ages, and found evidence for an upturn in impact craters on the moon. His expertise is highly sought after. For more than 30 years, he was a member of the independent Jason group that advises the US government on defence; his college lecture series, Physics for Future Presidents was voted best class on campus, went stratospheric on YouTube and, in 2009, was turned into a bestseller. For the past year, Muller has kept a low profile, working quietly on a new project with a team of academics hand-picked for their skills. They meet on campus regularly, to check progress, thrash out problems and hunt for oversights that might undermine their work. And for good reason. When Muller and his team go public with their findings in a few weeks, they will be muscling in on the ugliest and most hard-fought debate of modern times. Muller calls his latest obsession the Berkeley Earth project. The aim is so simple that the complexity and magnitude of the undertaking is easy to miss. Starting from scratch, with new computer tools and more data than has ever been used, they will arrive at an independent assessment of global warming. The team will also make every piece of data it uses – 1.6bn data points – freely available on a website. It will post its workings alongside, including full information on how more than 100 years of data from thousands of instruments around the world are stitched together to give a historic record of the planet’s temperature. Muller is fed up with the politicised row that all too often engulfs climate science. By laying all its data and workings out in the open, where they can be checked and challenged by anyone, the Berkeley team hopes to achieve something remarkable: a broader consensus on global warming. In no other field would Muller’s dream seem so ambitious, or perhaps, so naive. “We are bringing the spirit of science back to a subject that has become too argumentative and too contentious,” Muller says, over a cup of tea. “We are an independent, non-political, non-partisan group. We will gather the data, do the analysis, present the results and make all of it available. There will be no spin, whatever we find.” Why does Muller feel compelled to shake up the world of climate change? “We are doing this because it is the most important project in the world today. Nothing else comes close,” he says. Muller is moving into crowded territory with sharp elbows. There are already three heavyweight groups that could be considered the official keepers of the world’s climate data. Each publishes its own figures that feed into the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City produces a rolling estimate of the world’s warming. A separate assessment comes from another US agency, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Noaa). The third group is based in the UK and led by the Met Office. They all take readings from instruments around the world to come up with a rolling record of the Earth’s mean surface temperature. The numbers differ because each group uses its own dataset and does its own analysis, but they show a similar trend. Since pre-industrial times, all point to a warming of around 0.75C. You might think three groups was enough, but Muller rolls out a list of shortcomings, some real, some perceived, that he suspects might undermine public confidence in global warming records. For a start, he says, warming trends are not based on all the available temperature records. The data that is used is filtered and might not be as representative as it could be. He also cites a poor history of transparency in climate science, though others argue many climate records and the tools to analyse them have been public for years. Then there is the fiasco of 2009 that saw roughly 1,000 emails from a server at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) find their way on to the internet. The fuss over the messages, inevitably dubbed Climategate, gave Muller’s nascent project added impetus. Climate sceptics had already attacked James Hansen, head of the Nasa group, for making political statements on climate change while maintaining his role as an objective scientist. The Climategate emails fuelled their protests. “With CRU’s credibility undergoing a severe test, it was all the more important to have a new team jump in, do the analysis fresh and address all of the legitimate issues raised by sceptics,” says Muller. This latest point is where Muller faces his most delicate challenge. To concede that climate sceptics raise fair criticisms means acknowledging that scientists and government agencies have got things wrong, or at least could do better. But the debate around global warming is so highly charged that open discussion, which science requires, can be difficult to hold in public. At worst, criticising poor climate science can be taken as an attack on science itself, a knee-jerk reaction that has unhealthy consequences. “Scientists will jump to the defence of alarmists because they don’t recognise that the alarmists are exaggerating,” Muller says. The Berkeley Earth project came together more than a year ago, when Muller rang David Brillinger, a statistics professor at Berkeley and the man Nasa called when it wanted someone to check its risk estimates of space debris smashing into the International Space Station. He wanted Brillinger to oversee every stage of the project. Brillinger accepted straight away. Since the first meeting he has advised the scientists on how best to analyse their data and what pitfalls to avoid. “You can think of statisticians as the keepers of the scientific method, ” Brillinger told me. “Can scientists and doctors reasonably draw the conclusions they are setting down? That’s what we’re here for.” For the rest of the team, Muller says he picked scientists known for original thinking. One is Saul Perlmutter, the Berkeley physicist who found evidence that the universe is expanding at an ever faster rate, courtesy of mysterious “dark energy” that pushes against gravity. Another is Art Rosenfeld, the last student of the legendary Manhattan Project physicist Enrico Fermi, and something of a legend himself in energy research. Then there is Robert Jacobsen, a Berkeley physicist who is an expert on giant datasets; and Judith Curry, a climatologist at Georgia Institute of Technology, who has raised concerns over tribalism and hubris in climate science. Robert Rohde, a young physicist who left Berkeley with a PhD last year, does most of the hard work. He has written software that trawls public databases, themselves the product of years of painstaking work, for global temperature records. These are compiled, de-duplicated and merged into one huge historical temperature record. The data, by all accounts, are a mess. There are 16 separate datasets in 14 different formats and they overlap, but not completely. Muller likens Rohde’s achievement to Hercules’s enormous task of cleaning the Augean stables. The wealth of data Rohde has collected so far – and some dates back to the 1700s – makes for what Muller believes is the most complete historical record of land temperatures ever compiled. It will, of itself, Muller claims, be a priceless resource for anyone who wishes to study climate change. So far, Rohde has gathered records from 39,340 individual stations worldwide. Publishing an extensive set of temperature records is the first goal of Muller’s project. The second is to turn this vast haul of data into an assessment on global warming. Here, the Berkeley team is going its own way again. The big three groups – Nasa, Noaa and the Met Office – work out global warming trends by placing an imaginary grid over the planet and averaging temperatures records in each square. So for a given month, all the records in England and Wales might be averaged out to give one number. Muller’s team will take temperature records from individual stations and weight them according to how reliable they are. This is where the Berkeley group faces its toughest task by far and it will be judged on how well it deals with it. There are errors running through global warming data that arise from the simple fact that the global network of temperature stations was never designed or maintained to monitor climate change. The network grew in a piecemeal fashion, starting with temperature stations installed here and there, usually to record local weather. Among the trickiest errors to deal with are so-called systematic biases, which skew temperature measurements in fiendishly complex ways. Stations get moved around, replaced with newer models, or swapped for instruments that record in celsius instead of fahrenheit. The times measurements are taken varies, from say 6am to 9pm. The accuracy of individual stations drift over time and even changes in the surroundings, such as growing trees, can shield a station more from wind and sun one year to the next. Each of these interferes with a station’s temperature measurements, perhaps making it read too cold, or too hot. And these errors combine and build up. This is the real mess that will take a Herculean effort to clean up. The Berkeley Earth team is using algorithms that automatically correct for some of the errors, a strategy Muller favours because it doesn’t rely on human interference. When the team publishes its results, this is where the scrutiny will be most intense. Despite the scale of the task, and the fact that world-class scientific organisations have been wrestling with it for decades, Muller is convinced his approach will lead to a better assessment of how much the world is warming. “I’ve told the team I don’t know if global warming is more or less than we hear, but I do believe we can get a more precise number, and we can do it in a way that will cool the arguments over climate change, if nothing else,” says Muller. “Science has its weaknesses and it doesn’t have a stranglehold on the truth, but it has a way of approaching technical issues that is a closer approximation of truth than any other method we have.” He will find out soon enough if his hopes to forge a true consensus on climate change are misplaced. It might not be a good sign that one prominent climate sceptic contacted by the Guardian, Canadian economist Ross McKitrick, had never heard of the project. Another, Stephen McIntyre, whom Muller has defended on some issues, hasn’t followed the project either, but said “anything that [Muller] does will be well done”. Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia was unclear on the details of the Berkeley project and didn’t comment. Elsewhere, Muller has qualified support from some of the biggest names in the business. At Nasa, Hansen welcomed the project, but warned against over-emphasising what he expects to be the minor differences between Berkeley’s global warming assessment and those from the other groups. “We have enough trouble communicating with the public already,” Hansen says. At the Met Office, Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring and attribution, was in favour of the project if it was open and peer-reviewed. Peter Thorne, who left the Met Office’s Hadley Centre last year to join the Co-operative Institute for Climate and Satellites in North Carolina, is enthusiastic about the Berkeley project but raises an eyebrow at some of Muller’s claims. The Berkeley group will not be the first to put its data and tools online, he says. Teams at Nasa and Noaa have been doing this for many years. And while Muller may have more data, they add little real value, Thorne says. Most are records from stations installed from the 1950s onwards, and then only in a few regions, such as North America. “Do you really need 20 stations in one region to get a monthly temperature figure? The answer is no. Supersaturating your coverage doesn’t give you much more bang for your buck,” he says. They will, however, help researchers spot short-term regional variations in climate change, something that is likely to be valuable as climate change takes hold. Despite his reservations, Thorne says climate science stands to benefit from Muller’s project. “We need groups like Berkeley stepping up to the plate and taking this challenge on, because it’s the only way we’re going to move forwards. I wish there were 10 other groups doing this,” he says. For the time being, Muller’s project is organised under the auspices of Novim, a Santa Barbara-based non-profit organisation that uses science to find answers to the most pressing issues facing society and to publish them “without advocacy or agenda”. Funding has come from a variety of places, including the Fund for Innovative Climate and Energy Research (funded by Bill Gates), and the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley Lab. One donor has had some climate bloggers up in arms: the man behind the Charles G Koch Charitable Foundation owns, with his brother David, Koch Industries, a company Greenpeace called a “kingpin of climate science denial”. On this point, Muller says the project has taken money from right and left alike. No one who spoke to the Guardian about the Berkeley Earth project believed it would shake the faith of the minority who have set their minds against global warming. “As new kids on the block, I think they will be given a favourable view by people, but I don’t think it will fundamentally change people’s minds,” says Thorne. Brillinger has reservations too. “There are people you are never going to change. They have their beliefs and they’re not going to back away from them.” Waking across the Berkeley campus, Muller stops outside Sproul Hall, where he was arrested more than 40 years ago. Today, the adjoining plaza is a designated protest spot, where student activists gather to wave banners, set up tables and make speeches on any cause they choose. Does Muller think his latest project will make any difference? “Maybe we’ll find out that what the other groups do is absolutely right, but we’re doing this in a new way. If the only thing we do is allow a consensus to be reached as to what is going on with global warming, a true consensus, not one based on politics, then it will be an enormously valuable achievement.”
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February 27 2011, 2:41pm | Comments »
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I posted to distributedresearch.net
What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water
Fracking may also be responsible for setting off earthquakes.
This article titled “What the frack? US natural gas drilling method contaminates water” was written by Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, for guardian.co.uk on Sunday 27th February 2011 15.30 UTC A controversial new method of natural-gas drilling, embraced rapidly across the US, has contaminated water supplies with radioactive waste. An investigation by the New York Times said internal documents from the Environmental Protection Agency and state regulators showed that the dangers to the public from the drilling method – hydraulic fracturing – were greater than previously understood. Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, uses huge volumes of water, chemicals and sand injected into rock at high pressure to release natural gas. Its development has unleashed a natural gas boom in the US and around the world. But the NYT said the waste water contained dangerously high levels of radioactivity. It was being sent to treatment plants that were not designed to deal with or being discharged into rivers that supply drinking water. The NYT said its main findings included: • More than 1.3bn gallons of waste water was produced by Pennsylvania wells over the past three years, far more than has been previously disclosed. Most of this water — enough to cover Manhattan in three inches — was sent to treatment plants not equipped to remove many of the toxic materials in drilling waste. • At least 12 sewage treatment plants in three states accepted gas industry waste water and discharged waste that was only partly treated into rivers, lakes and streams. • Of more than 179 wells producing waste water with high levels of radiation, at least 116 reported levels of radium or other radioactive materials 100 times as high as the levels set by federal drinking-water standards. At least 15 wells produced waste water carrying more than 1,000 times the amount of radioactive elements considered acceptable. The investigation comes amid growing concern about the potential dangers of natural gas drilling as it spreads from western states to highly populated north-east. The investigative website, ProPublica, has published an extensive series on the threats to water supply from hydraulic fracturing. ProPublica has also raised doubts about whether natural gas can indeed offer a solution to climate change – noting that the mining process is extremely energy and water intensive. The dangers of natural gas drilling was also the subject of a gritty documentary, Gasland, which was nominated for an Academy Award. The film’s director , Josh Fox, told The Guardian: “All these things are starting to add up in a very clear picture of a massive failure to protect public health.”
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February 27 2011, 9:48am | Comments »
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‘Water poverty’ to rise in the UK as scarcity pushes up bills
Somehow this report in the Guardian manages to completely avoid the use of the phrase “water meters” or “self disconnection” instead resorting to “new charging models” and “new pricing system”. The use of a banded system with only two points of increase implies that a meter is installed but distorts consumer behavior as the period end approaches if the next band is close. What is really needed is a massive investment in the water supply infrastucture so that top quality drinking water is no longer used to flush toilets, wash cars and water gardens. Drinking water supply could then remain unmetered as a basic human right.
This article titled “‘Water poverty’ to rise in the UK as scarcity pushes up bills” was written by Jamie Doward, for The Observer on Sunday 20th February 2011 00.06 UTC “Water poverty” will become the new fuel poverty for an increasing number of households as scarcity of supply pushes up bills, according to an influential thinktank that says Britain must deal urgently with climate change. A report by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, one of the largest social policy research-and-development charities, says that low-income households are at particular risk because of new methods being introduced to increase the efficient use and distribution of water. It defines “water poverty” as when households spend 3% or more of their income on water bills. The report, Vulnerability to Heat Waves and Drought: Adaptation to Climate Change, by the environmental consultancy AEA and a team from the University of Surrey, warns that water is becoming scarce as a result of climate change and increased consumer demand. An estimated four million households in the UK are already “water poor”, according to the report, and the situation is likely to worsen, with bills predicted to rise by 5% a year for some customers. Water companies are moving away from flat-rate fees to new charging models that bill customers with steadily higher prices according to how much water they use. The report warns that this could create affordability problems for some low-income households and lead to “water poverty”. “The issue of water poverty – just like fuel poverty – is extremely important, especially as we start to look into the future and consider how climate change is going to impact society,” said the report’s lead author, Magnus Benzie. The south-west of England, where bills are on average 43% higher than in the rest of the country, is set to be particularly affected as the UK becomes significantly drier in coming decades, according to the report. It suggests that any influx of people into the region, coupled with increases in tourism, will exacerbate the problem. The region has tried a new pricing system, using three tariffs that ratchet up with increased water use, but there are concerns that this may see some households hit disproportionately. “We currently waste a lot of water, so on one level it makes sense to encourage greater efficiency by charging people depending on how much water they use,” Benzie said. “But some tariffs can put unfair pressure on households that cannot reduce their water consumption, either because of household size, medical needs or an inability to invest in water-efficient appliances.” Water poverty is expected to be acute in “urban heat islands” – built-up environments that retain heat more than surrounding areas. Failures to anticipate the threat posed by climate change can be fatal. The authors point to the heatwave across Europe in 2003 that led to more than 30,000 premature deaths. “Climate change and how we adapt to it will impact upon disadvantaged groups in different ways,” said Josh Stott, research manager at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. “This report highlights the need for policy-makers and agencies to consider these social justice issues when preparing and building resilience to climate change, to improve the outcomes for vulnerable people.”
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February 20 2011, 3:43am | Comments »
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Blog Action Day : When The Waters Rise
http://distributedresearch.net/blog/2009/10/15/blog-action-day-when-the-waters-rise
When The Waters Rise – Blog Action Day My contribution to Blog Action Day, this year on the topic of climate change, is a song called “When The Waters Rise”.
When the Waters Rise Lyrics When the waters rise, when the waters rise, It’s started to rain, could go on forever The puddles grow then join together As the waters rise With energy a change of current The trickle soon becomes a torrent And the waters rise We’ll have to move abandon camp, where once was desert now is damp And the waters rise The balance kept by plants and sea has pushed beyond the boundary The gas surrounds us like a cloak a million years gone up in smoke With climate change, a world in motion, Then the ice caps melt and join the ocean And the waters rise In the short term we can head for the hills, In the longer run we’ll all grow gills and the waters rise The weather warnings made no mark, Now there’s no time left to build the Ark As the waters rise.. When The Waters Rise Blog Action Day #BAD09 Blog Action Day The aim of Blog Action Day is to raise awareness through concerted blogging about a single issue coordinated on one day.
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October 15 2009, 2:53am | Comments »
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When The Waters Rise - Blog Action Day
http://andyrobertsmusic.blogspot.com/2009/10/when-waters-rise-blog-action-day.html
October 15th is Blog Action Day so I performed my song "When The Waters Rise - blog action day" last night at Havering Folk Club When the waters riseWhen the waters rise, when the waters rise,It's started to rain, could go on foreverThe puddles grow then join together | As the waters riseWith energy a change of currentThe trickle soon becomes a torrent And the waters rise We'll have to move abandon camp, where once was desert now is damp And the waters riseThe balance kept by plants and sea has pushed beyond the boundary Now the gas surrounds us like a cloak a million years gone up in smoke The climate's changed, the world's in motion, Then the ice caps melt and join the ocean And the waters riseIn the short term we can head for the hills,In the longer run we'll all grow gills and the waters riseThe weather warnings made no mark,Now there's no time left to build the Ark As the waters rise..Here's another version of the same song recorded at the previous Tuesday Evening 7.00pm Live Webcast
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October 14 2009, 8:10am | Comments »
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