It was only a few months ago that scientists were predicting that the North Pole may have an ice-free summer in the next five to ten years. If that wasn't scary enough, an article just published in National Geographic reports that these predictions have been revised forward to this summer.

It's official. There was speculation that China would pass the US as the world's number 1 emitter of greenhouse gases some time last year, but now the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has confirmed this is, indeed, the case -- in absolute terms at least. Per capita, the US still leads the way; the average American being responsible for 19.4 tons, followed by Russia at 11.8 tons, Western Europe at 8.6 tons, China at 5.1 tons and India at 1.8 tons per person. The worrying thing is that the average Chinese aspires to an American lifestyle.

The Cost of Climate Change: What We’ll Pay if Global Warming Continues Unchecked is a study of the costs of inaction for the US economy by Frank Ackerman and Elizabeth A. Stanton, commissioned by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The report presents a detailed analysis of four major categories of climate costs, and a comprehensive modelling of the impacts of climate change on the economy as a whole.

Under business-as-usual conditions, with no new climate policies, the four cost categories – increased hurricane damages, residential real estate losses due to sea-level rise, increased energy costs, and water supply costs – will add up to $1.9 trillion (in today’s dollars), or 1.8 percent of U.S. output per year by 2100.

The modeling employs the PAGE model used in the Stern Report, a revised version of which forecasts even greater impacts of as much as 3.6 percent of U.S. GDP, or $3.8 trillion in today’s dollars, by 2100.

The Rockefeller family are taking on Rex Tillerson the Chair and Chief Executive of Exxon-Mobil. It was John D. Rockefeller who started it all with Standard Oil, and now his descendants are campaigning for a new strategic focus on renewable energy. Exxon has the reputation for being unapologetically ungreen, and has only recently acknowledged the existence of the threat of global warming. There are a number of resolutions coming up at the next shareholders' meeting proposed by members of the Rockefeller family, the most significant of which is the separation of the roles of Chair and Chief Executive. Tillerson currently occupies both positions. With their separation, there is the prospect of greater accountability. Whether this will be sufficient to appease shareholders disgruntled by Exxon's intransigence on climate change remains to be seen.

Having grown increasingly pessimistic of late that our political leaders have the capacity to bring about change sufficiently quickly to avoid ecological catastrophe, I'm now of the view that scientific interventions constitute our best hope. The question is: will it be too little, too late. The latest breakthrough (reported in today's Guardian) is the plan by a physicist at Columbia University to build and demonstrate a prototype within two years that can economically capture a tonne of CO2 a day from the air. This is about the same per passenger as a flight from London to New York. We'll need a few billion of these to stop us going beyond 450ppm and the initial cost is GBP100,000 per unit!

The big news occupying the headlines at the moment is that -- shock, horror -- food prices are rising because of short supplies. With burgeoning population growth (a doubling in the last half century!), climate change affecting harvests (e.g. Australia), an increasingly wealthy Asian population demanding a high protein diet (i.e. meat), and a declining area of arable land due to ecological degradation, you don't have to be a brilliant economist to calculate the effects of these market dynamics. It doesn't help, of course, that the price of oil continues to rise adding to farmers' costs. To address this problem some governments, in their infinite wisdom, have encouraged the production of biofuels, increasing the competition for land, and causing the price of foodstuffs to rise further.

Most at risk are the world's poor and there have been riots in the streets in places like Egypt, Cameroon, Ivory Coast, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Ethiopia, Indonesia, Madagascar, the Philippines and Haiti in the past month. How much air time has been given to this unrest in the media? Very little when there are much more important issues to focus upon like the US Democratic Party primaries. In a globalised world, however, this is something from which the West cannot insulate itself. Famine in developed countries? As inconceivable as this sounds, without strong political leadership to address the sources of the current agricultural crisis, things can only get worse.

In the IHT this week, there is an interesting piece (together with the gruesome images) on the Top 25 Dirtiest Cities in the World. There are also slide shows on the world's densest cities and the world's most polluted places. These are not league tables that one would want to be part of and the sad thing is, to clean up the worst of the mess doesn't really cost that much vis-a-vis the benefits. According to WaterAid, for every $1 spent on improved sanitation, the benefit equals $9 resulting from decreased cost of health care and increased productivity. Seems like a good business proposition to me.

Early last year, the British Labour government announced -- with much fanfare -- that it planned to build five new carbon-neutral eco-towns. A classic win-win scenario, these new settlements would be built on 'brownfield' sites and, besides being eco-friendly, would provide affordable housing. Now things may not be as rosy as they first appeared, as it seems greenfield sites are being targeted. Let's hope there is a sufficient political backlash for the Brown government not to roll over for the developers.

This article was first published in XL Magazine, volume 4, issue 2, February 2008.

If there is one issue that splits the green movement right down the middle it is nuclear power. At the risk of over-generalising, the two camps might be labelled the ‘idealists’ and the ‘realists’. Among the latter is a sub-group that might be described as ‘recently converted grudging realists’; a faction to which I was dragged kicking and screaming over the Christmas holiday when I read The Revenge of Gaia by James Lovelock. Lovelock is a boffin, brilliant-genius type, who New Scientist describes as ‘one of the great thinkers of our time’. Now in is eighties, his writing is as sharp and lucid as ever, and few books have so fundamentally challenged my beliefs as this one.

Pre-Christmas, I was very much in what I now recognise to be the idealist camp. While certainly not a tree-hugging, doctrinaire environmentalist, I was a little scornful of the increasing number of ‘born-again greens’ who think nuclear power is the escape route from global warming. My reasoning, simply, has been that aside from the dangers associated with nuclear power generation – especially in the wrong hands – it simply doesn’t make economic sense. As renowned physicist and environmentalist Amory Lovins recently commented, nuclear power has ‘died of an incurable attack of market forces’. The only reason it still exists today is that governments subsidise it to such a large extent. Then there is the question of the amount of greenhouse gas that is produced in the mining and milling of uranium, the construction and decommissioning of nuclear power stations, and the transportation and management of waste.

When in the idealist camp I have also publicly dumped on the Australian Labor Party (ALP) when, at its last party conference, a resolution was passed to allow new uranium mines. As Australian scientist Tim Flannery argues in his best-seller, The Weather Makers, given the widely acknowledged problems with nuclear power, it makes an inordinate amount of sense to explore this option only as a last resort. It is far better, says Flannery, to go as far as you can to reduce emissions by increasing the efficiency of energy use and exploring clean and safe renewable energy options. If future demand for energy can be met through these means, the taxpayer can save a whole lot of money, the environment will experience less damage, and the community will be a safer place to live in.

So what’s behind my change of heart on the question of nuclear energy? The short answer is that Lovelock is a very clever man, and he puts forward some very compelling arguments. The most persuasive of all is the issue of waste. I now recognise that I have been a little one-eyed in this regard, by not considering the dangers of nuclear waste relative to the dangers of carbon dioxide waste. Nuclear waste is buried in pits and only dangerous to those foolish enough to expose themselves to it. Carbon dioxide waste, on the other hand, is invisible to the naked eye, freely-released, and so deadly that if emissions go unchecked it threatens the whole planet. Furthermore, as Lovelock points out, burning fossil fuels produces 27,000 tons of carbon dioxide each year which, if solidified, would create a mountain nearly a mile high, with a twelve mile circumference. To produce the same amount of energy from nuclear fission reactions would produce two million times less waste, occupying only a sixteen metre cube.

Statistics such as these would appear to cast doubt on the long term viability of burying carbon dioxide waste in the ground (carbon sequestration). Nuclear waste, on the other hand, rather than threaten the environment might even be harnessed to protect it. Lovelock, referring to the Chernobyl disaster, points out that one of the most striking things about the area around the accident site is richness of the wildlife. Plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any reduction in their lifespan is far less likely than would be the case in the presence of people and their pets. Lovelock then goes on to suggest that tropical rainforests might be ideal sites for nuclear waste storage because it would protect them from farmers and developers, and allow them to continue to function as carbon dioxide sinks.

On the economics of nuclear power, Lovelock is a little vague, but what is now becoming abundantly clear following the pronouncements of the scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that there is little choice but to use nuclear power because renewable sources of energy (e.g. wind, solar) will not be sufficient to meet our needs quickly enough, to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. At the very least, therefore, it is not a good idea to decommission existing nuclear power stations, or defer plans to build nuclear power stations. They may be expensive, but not nearly as expensive as the dramatic climate change that will be forthcoming unless something is done to reduce emissions. In summary, nuclear power is not the answer, but it is certainly part of the solution.

According to The Guardian this week, (Global meltdown: scientists isolate areas most at risk of climate change), nine tipping points (points of no return) have been identified by scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and the time expected for the transitions. These are:

*Melting of Arctic sea-ice (approx 10 years)
*Decay of the Greenland ice sheet (more than 300 years)
*Collapse of the West Antarctic ice sheet (more than 300 years)
*Collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation (approx 100 years)
*Increase in the El Nino Southern Oscillation (approx 100 years)
*Collapse of the Indian summer monsoon (approx 1 year)
*Greening of the Sahara/Sahel and disruption of the West African monsoon (approx 10 years)
*Dieback of the Amazon rainforest (approx 50 years)
*Dieback of the Boreal Forest (approx 50 years)

Also see here for the graphic. I used to worry for my grandchildren. Now there is a fairly high probability that I will experience the more severe effects of climate change at first hand.

An article appearing in The Economist last week, Don't drink the water and don't breathe the air (reproduced below), provides a commentary on the largely impotent State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA) in China. The Deputy Director, Pan Yue, is one of the most outspoken Chinese bureaucrats you are ever likely to come across, but his dire warnings go unheeded, largely because SEPA does not carry much weight alongside the big Ministries.

Despite its best efforts, SEPA has been unable to secure support from the government to publish a green GDP because it was "not internationally accepted". Interestingly, the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) did publish one figure; namely, that environmental damage in 2004 cost 3.05% of that year's GDP. Maybe this kind of statistic will resonate more deeply with the Chinese government than the number of deaths each year as a result of pollution. According to Pan Yue, 70% of China's more than 2 million annual deaths from cancer are pollution-related.

For all its green promises in recent years, the Communist Party has done little to build a bureaucracy with the clout to enforce environmental edicts and monitor pollution effectively. As long as they deliver economic growth without too much public protest, officials can still expect promotion, however polluted their areas.

Optimists see changes afoot. The State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), the government's largely toothless watchdog, could soon be renamed and upgraded to a ministry. Some observers expect the rubber-stamp legislature, the National People's Congress, to endorse the change at its annual session in March.

In an article last year two scholars argued that if SEPA were a ministry it might hold its own better in bureaucratic turf wars in which it is at present “marginalised”. SEPA's weakness was evident last year during one of the country's biggest recent environmental disasters, the choking of the country's third-largest freshwater lake, Taihu, by toxic algae. The contaminants included emissions from small factories and crab farms along the shore. SEPA officials say they could do little: the crab farms fall under the Ministry of Agriculture, waste-water treatment plants under local governments and the lake itself under the Ministry of Water Resources.

SEPA is so weak that its officials admit it has little grasp of the impact of agriculture on water and soil pollution. The Ministry of Agriculture has discouraged it from gathering data even though, as one SEPA official sees it, Chinese agriculture pollutes as much as its industries. The country's first national census of pollution sources is due to begin in February. The ministry is taking part in the two-month effort. But, famously secretive and protective of its bureaucratic territory, it is likely to drag its feet. Health officials would sympathise with SEPA. Their efforts to persuade the agriculture ministry to co-operate over livestock-related threats to public health, such as bird flu, have encountered stubborn resistance. And health already has a full-fledged ministry.

To impress its bureaucratic rivals, SEPA also needs a bigger budget. Officials have said that between 2006 and 2010 China will spend 1.3 trillion yuan ($180 billion) on environmental protection, an increase of more than 85% over the previous five years. But much of this is expected to be given to other agencies (the State Forestry Administration, for example, deals with stemming the spread of deserts) or to the local environmental-protection bureaus, which, being answerable to local governments, are crippled by conflicts of interest.

Little of the money, complains a SEPA official, is used to curb pollution. SEPA itself is so strapped that to finance one of its recent high-profile projects, an effort to calculate a measure of “green GDP” (GDP minus the cost of environmental damage), it begged for money from companies. The government, says an official, gave nothing. After three years of effort, including struggles with a highly sceptical National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), the project was abandoned last year. It did publish one figure: environmental damage in 2004 cost 3.05% of that year's GDP. Last July the head of the NBS said the government had stopped using the term “green GDP” because it was not internationally accepted.

A shortage of money has similarly hobbled SEPA's latest efforts to encourage greener corporate behaviour. These include last year's “green credit” policy whereby state-owned banks are supposed to suspend lending to egregious polluters (SEPA circulated a list of 30 such companies in July). There is also a “green trade ” initiative, announced last October, that threatens polluting companies with suspension of their exports. Also being considered are environmental requirements for companies planning to list their shares publicly, and a tax on polluters. Resistance from local governments and powerful state-owned companies will make it hard to implement such measures.

What it lacks in resources SEPA tries valiantly to regain by appealing to public sentiment. Its deputy director, Pan Yue, is an outspoken green campaigner who happens to be a son-in-law of a famous former general, Liu Huaqing (such connections can be a big help in Chinese politics).

Last year officials reportedly asked the World Bank to remove estimates of pollution-related deaths in China from a report published jointly with SEPA. But SEPA's website still shows a little-reported speech by Mr Pan in 2006 in which he said cancer experts believed that 70% of China's more than 2m annual deaths from the disease were pollution-related. The World Bank had been planning to blame pollution for just 750,000 deaths from various causes.

Chinese officials were worried that the World Bank's figures would cause unrest. But environmental awareness—and anger—is mounting anyway. Of complaints submitted to government departments, 13% relate to pollution, up from fewer than 6% three years ago. And SEPA officials say pollution-related disturbances are also becoming more common—51,000 in 2005 and more than 60,000 in 2006. Such protests are more likely than SEPA's efforts to goad reluctant officials into action.

This article was first published in XL Magazine, volume 3, issue 12, December 2007.

The economist, Kenneth Boulding, in his famous 1966 essay, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth, wrote: ‘I am tempted to call the open economy the “cowboy” economy, the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behaviour, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the “spaceman” economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy.’ Forty years ago, these two sentences did not have the same resonance as they do today. Clearing forest land, pumping water, or drilling for oil went ahead without a second thought because in an ‘empty’ cowboy economy, there was plenty more where that came from. The challenge then was to develop sufficient man-made capital (chain saws, water pumps and oil rigs) to tap into the natural capital (the timber, water and oil). The challenge now, in a ‘full’ spaceman economy, is not the availability of man-made capital, but the increasing scarcity of natural capital.

In northern China, for example, water shortages have become so severe, it has been suggested that water be diverted hundreds of kilometres from Tibet. This has been pooh-poohed by the Chinese water minister, who is more comfortable with the two less ambitious [sic] projects currently in progress to divert water from the Yangtze River basin, where water is more abundant. The so-called South-to-North Water Transfer Project is to funnel 45 billion cubic meters, or 12 trillion gallons, northward every year. The project, if fully built, would be completed in 2050 at a cost of $62 billion.

Putting the disastrous ecological consequences of diverting rivers to one side for a moment, mega-projects like this do not address the nub of the problem which is management of water stocks. Supply simply creates demand, and while this might have been acceptable in the cowboy economy, it is no longer the case in the spaceman economy. Indeed, unless the Chinese focus more of their efforts on examining the current uses and abuses of their water stocks, these grandiose engineering projects will almost certainly come to nought.

The rapid growth of the economy has put enormous pressure on water resources on both the demand and the supply side. Industry demands increasing quantities for production, but it is also contaminating precious supplies through the irresponsible discharge of effluents and other pollutants. For example, it is estimated that the underground water supplies of around 90% of China’s cities have been polluted by rapid economic growth. To put this into context, China’s official media has stated that underground water supplies provide drinking water for nearly 70% of China’s population and 40% of agricultural irrigation. Furthermore, demand is intensifying. Over-pumping groundwater in China’s Hebei province has lowered the water table to such an extent that 969 of the province’s 1,052 lakes have disappeared. Meanwhile, Madoi County in northwest China’s Qinhai province, which had 4,077 lakes 20 years ago, now has less than half this number.

One of the great virtues of an authoritarian state is that once it makes up its mind to do something, execution of the plan is straightforward (in contrast to democracies where the gestation period for environmental policy can be painstakingly long). However, despite the ‘environmental authoritarianism’ being exercised (increasingly) by the Chinese central government, it is not being policed by local governments. Thus, waste water treatment plants may be in place, but these facilities are not being turned on because they are deemed ‘too costly’. Cost, however, does not include the cancers, low IQs and miscarriages being attributed to the high level of pollutants in China’s waterways, 50% of which are running black (i.e. they are completely dead and cannot be used for anything, even for industrial purposes), and the 700 million people who now lack access to safe water (the people living in the Huai River basin being amongst the worst affected).

While there have been some signs of improvement, environmental policy is not keeping up with the pace of environmental degradation. If the Chinese government were to use just a fraction of the funds devoted to mega-projects to increase the chances of success of smaller scale projects to improve efficiency of water supplies (e.g. water conservation, sewage treatment), the prospects for water security and ecological sustainability more broadly would be much brighter. In the meantime, so long as the economic disincentives to sustainable production remain, national laws will continue to be flouted at the local level, and the spaceship will be heading for a crash landing.

After eleven and a half years of a Coalition government that has ignored critical issues like climate change, the plight of indigenous Australians, the popular support for a republic, and mass opposition to the Iraq war, there is now cause for optimism. The defeat of John Howard by Maxine McKew in his own electorate of Bennelong (after being the sitting member for 33 years) will be the icing on the cake.

This article was first published in XL Magazine, volume 3, issue 10, October 2007.

Now the Bush administration has woken up to the fact it has to reduce its dependence on oil – probably due to the geopolitical scene in the Middle East rather than a concern for climate change – it has become very gung ho about biofuel generated from corn. Unfortunately, however, this ‘solution’ creates new problems. While corn has been grown in the Midwest for generations, the farmers are currently rubbing their hands together with glee as corn prices have doubled over the last year or so on account of the heightened demand for ethanol. Naturally enough, they are planting more corn to take advantage of the new market conditions but this means less land to grow other crops. In short, switching to biofuels is likely to raise the price of agricultural produce. This is likely to be a challenge for local politicians as their constituents protest about food prices. More worrying is the impact the new enthusiasm for producing biofuels will have in countries outside of the US – particularly less developed countries – if the competition for land leads to more rapid deforestation and a greater strain on dwindling water supplies. This has been the chief concern of environmentalists who point to countries like Indonesia where rain forest is being felled for palm oil plantations to produce biodiesel.

The beauty of this arrangement is that biofuel production has a much smaller ‘ecological footprint’, and actually assists other industries in reducing theirs because waste that might otherwise have been dumped, can now be sold as input to the biofuel production process. This shifting of the industrial process from a linear (open loop) system, in which resources move through the system to become waste, to a closed loop system where wastes become inputs for new processes is referred to as ‘industrial ecology’ and it offers an abundance of business opportunities for environmentally-oriented entrepreneurs.

Take, for example, the Belgian biomass company Thenergo which partners with producers of fuel – be they farmers, forests or facilities producing large quantities organic waste – to ensure not just a steady supply of the fuel but also a reliable market for its products. Thenergo charges farmers a gate fee for unwanted manure (effectively being paid for its raw materials!) from which it extracts methane to produce power, before selling the residue back to the farmers as fertiliser. Meanwhile, scientists at Canadian biofuel company Dynamotive having already opened a commercial-scale plant in Ontario that produces 22,000 tonnes of bio-oil each year from waste wood chips, have now managed to turn human sewage into bio-oil using a different technique. The company is looking at ways to scale up the process to commercial quantities – a plentiful supply of raw material should not be a problem!

In the UK, Vegetable Oil Management Ltd provides a unique service in that it arranges supply of cooking oil from the processors to caterers anywhere in the country. It is also expanding rapidly on account of its ‘cradle-to-grave’ policy on cooking oils which ensures that the oil is collected after use for recycling. Like Thenergo, it receives payment for taking its own raw materials (10 pence per litre), before filtering the waste oil so it can be turned into biodiesel. The company also supplies kits to manufacture biodiesel and has a network of ‘oil refinery’ customers. In Singapore, a similar entrepreneurial spirit is displayed by Kom Mam Sun who set up Biofuel Research Ltd in June 2003. After running his truck on biodiesel fuel for two years to test his business idea of turning used cooking oil from restaurants into fuel for vehicles, he was successful in opening a biodiesel plant in 2006 with the helping hand of Spring Singapore. Mr Kom is doing okay but the challenge is a limited supply of waste cooking oil. Biofuel has the capacity to produce 1500 tonnes of biodiesel each month but produces only around one-third of this. There is a sense of resignation about the Biofuel website with comments like: “… the venture has proven more difficult than our expectation … Singapore is a pragmatic place which emphasises … bread and butter issues [rather] than the environment or health”. Kom would likely be more upbeat if he were operating in the UK where, from January 2006, changes to European food law affected all businesses in the UK such that waste cooking oil could no longer be disposed of down the drain. The law states that it must be collected and used for the production of biodiesel or electricity. In the absence of such incentives in Singapore, the competitive environment facing Biofuel is quite different to that enjoyed by Vegetable Oil Management. Indeed, Biofuel must pay for its waste oil, whereas Vegetable Oil Management is paid to take it away.

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