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UK energy bills rise 50% for low use
Ali Hussain and Steven Swinford, UK Sunday TImes
ENERGY companies have increased the bills of low power users, including second home owners and young professionals, by more than 50%, three times their headline increases.
… British Gas raised its charges for people using low amounts of power by an average of 44% for gas and 46% for electricity. Its worst-hit customers in Kent and the Midlands have suffered an increase of 70% for electricity.
Eon raised its bills for 30,000 households using only a low amount of energy, which is charged at a higher rate, by 41%.
Allan Asher, chief executive of Energywatch, the consumer watchdog, said: “They are effectively penalising people for conserving energy.”
Low energy users are charged more per unit because power companies apply a higher tariff to the first few thousands kilowatts. They justify it by saying that it reflects the fixed costs of providing a service.
(9 March 2008)
A win-win-win solution
David Keith and Thomas Homer-Dixon, Globe and Mail
What should we do with the carbon we produce when we burn fossil fuels? Some experts say we should fight climate change by putting the carbon back underground, whence it came.
In late January, a blue-ribbon panel recommended that Canadian governments spend $2-billion to begin deploying carbon capture and storage technology (CCS). This technology injects the carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels into exhausted oil and gas fields or salty aquifers deep underground.
As is true of any large-scale energy technology, CCS carries costs and risks. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the world’s leading expert body on these topics, has estimated that CCS’s costs are competitive with other leading ways to cut emissions and that its risks are small compared to those of related industries, such as underground storage of natural gas. CCS is not a magic bullet. But many climate and energy experts think that it’s among humanity’s best tools to control carbon emissions.
Yet almost all Canada’s environmental groups panned the panel’s recommendation.
… Environmental groups are wrong to argue that we shouldn’t use government funds to support promising technologies before the mess is straightened out. We don’t have the time to wait, because Earth’s climate is changing fast, now.
… for the foreseeable future, modern societies and their industries will depend on centralized sources of high-reliability power to supply a large fraction of their energy. Nuclear reactors and coal-fired plants with CCS are arguably the only two methods of generating massive quantities of reliable low-carbon power using today’s technologies.
… CCS will be a big-industry technology: major implementation will require huge outlays of capital and armies of scientists, engineers and construction workers. It will also generate huge profits.
… It’s time that Canada’s environmental groups freed themselves of this ideological straitjacket. They need to acknowledge that modern capitalism is the most dynamic, innovative and adaptive economic system human beings have ever invented. It’s true that capitalism has fuelled our climate problem, and that many big businesses have lobbied hard to block serious action
David Keith holds the Canada Research Chair in Energy and the Environment at the University of Calgary and served on a CCS task force.
Thomas Homer-Dixon holds the George Ignatieff Chair of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Toronto and is the author of “The Upside of Down.”
(9 March 2008)
When big money is involved, critical thinking goes out the window. The article makes it sound as if CCS is a sure-thing, ready to bolt onto our industrial civilization, when in fact CCS is not yet ready for prime time. Rushing ahead with subsidies on dubious schemes is how we got into the corn ethanol mess. On this, libertarians, taxpayers, environmentalists and leftists can agree.
The article brings to mind the quote from historian James O’Donnell:
Much of the worst damage to Rome was done by Roman emperors and armies thrashing about, thinking they were preserving what they were in fact destroying.
Conveniently, the Canadian government is suppressing the independent voices of scientists (see here and here), so schemes like this will be freed of the “straightjacket of rationality.” -BA
Science in retreat in Canada
Canada has been scientifically healthy. Not so its government.
Editorial, Nature
Comparisons of nations’ scientific outputs over the years have shown that Canada’s researchers have plenty to be proud of, consistently maintaining their country’s position among the world’s top ten (see, for example, Nature 430, 311-316; 2004). Alas, their government’s track record is dismal by comparison.
When the Canadian government announced earlier this year that it was closing the office of the national science adviser, few in the country’s science community were surprised. Science has long faced an uphill battle for recognition in Canada, but the slope became steeper when the Conservative government was elected in 2006.
The decision in 2004 by the then prime minister Paul Martin to appoint a scientist for independent, non-partisan advice on science and technology was a good one – in principle. Arthur Carty, the chemist who secured the position, duly relinquished his post as president of the National Research Council Canada, which he had revitalized.
But his new office was destined to fail. The budget was abysmal and the mandate was vague at best. After winning power from the Liberals, the Conservatives moved Carty’s office away from the prime minister’s offices to Industry Canada. In 2007, the government formed the 18-member Science, Technology and Innovation Council (STIC). Told that the government would no longer need a science adviser, Carty offered his resignation.
(21 February 2008)
Thanks to Nature for making this editorial available to the public.
Related from CanWest: Cutting science adviser position risks ‘tarnishing’ Canada’s reputation. -BA
