Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Heat Waves Are Getting Longer
Andrew C. Revkin, New York Times
Researchers studying western European temperature records have found that the length of heat waves there has doubled since 1880, from 1.5 days to 3 days on average. They also say that the number of summer days that are far hotter than the average for a particular date has tripled. The team described its work in the current issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres. The scientists, led by Paul M. Della-Marta of the University of Bern in Switzerland, said the findings supported the idea that global warming from human activities could be making Europe more prone to extreme conditions. They recommended that health agencies in the region work on ways to limit human health risks from summer heat.
(7 August 2007)
Because it is illegal, the climate camp is now also a protest for democracy
George Monbiot, The Guardian
The ban on next week’s Heathrow demonstration will not deter us. It will only boost the profile and raise the stakes
—
All we are doing, says the airport operator BAA, is seeking to prevent unlawful protest. But under the act it used in the high court yesterday, all protest is arguably unlawful.
The 1997 Protection from Harassment Act, amended by the 2005 Serious Organised Crime and Police Act, creates an offence of trying “to persuade any person … not to do something that he is entitled or required to do” or “to do something that he is not under any obligation to do”, if in so doing you are deemed to be harassing him.
Harassment is defined as “alarming the person or causing the person distress”. No definition of alarm or distress is given. The purpose of the planned climate camp at Heathrow airport next week is to make people alarmed about climate change.
…So why, given the legal risks, have the climate campers vowed to go ahead with their protest? Because it is hard to see what else could possibly work. A leading article in the Guardian last week sniffed that “raising awareness is fine; causing disruption to no particular end is pointless”. But the point of causing disruption is to raise awareness.
…Direct action is a demonstration in two senses of the word: a protest and an exposition. It drags neglected issues out of obscurity and thrusts them into the political domain. Whatever journalists might think of the demonstrators, they cannot help giving them the oxygen of publicity. The storm of repugnance that disruptive protest at Heathrow will cause will keep the issue of flying and climate change high on the news agenda.
…How else do the critics of direct action propose that we should respond to this issue? The growth of air travel in the UK is being driven not only by the market but also by the government. It has demanded that the airports publish “master plans” to accommodate a doubling in the number of flights between now and 2030. It assists this process with tax breaks and subsidies for creating new routes from regional airports.
Now it has shut down one of the few formal means by which we could challenge its policy of airport expansion. Last month, in a paper scarcely anyone has noticed, the Treasury announced that it is closing England’s regional assemblies.
(7 August 2007)
Related from the Guardian:
Climate protesters banned from disrupting airport
Legal action backfires (comment by journalist John Vidal)
Same carbon credits sold twice
Gar Lipow, Grist
The ENDS Report — July 2007, issue 390 (sub. rqd):
ENDS has learned that chemical corporation Rhodia is using carbon credits from the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) to meet voluntary corporate targets — only to sell them at a profit to be counted again elsewhere. Cement company Lafarge has not ruled out the same practice.
Companies like Rhodia can use CDM credits to comply with mandatory targets under the EU Emissions Trading Scheme. But they can also use them to meet voluntary carbon reduction commitments or to make “carbon neutral” claims, or sell them on the market.
Rhodia and other companies are counting the credits they generate towards their own voluntary emissions reductions and then selling them, thereby enabling other organizations to claim the reductions as well.
This is not a problem of a “few bad apples,” or a flaw in the offset market that can be fixed. The fundamental problem with offset trading is that compliance is less transparent than a tax or auctioned permit system or even old-fashioned, non-market regulation. There is more room for deliberate gaming, and more room for honest error.
At the same time, a working offset market depends on fewer errors and more precision than other means. An offset that is a formal permit to pollute (like CDM) actually increases emissions if it is implemented less than perfectly. Offsets such as CDM don’t make allowances for human imperfection to the same extent other means of controlling carbon emissions do.
[Update] Stephan Singer Head of European Climate and Energy Policy Unit of the World Wildlife Fund claims that if LaFarge in fact does sell their voluntary credits on the CDM market they will be violating their agreement with WWF.
(27 Jul 2007)
