Pic (cc) Final Gather

Ireland you messed up. You got greedy and now you owe big banks in Germany lots and lots and lots of money.*

Payback is tough, but maybe today’s Irish Times leader points to a solution. A post-Fukishima Germany is rethinking its energy mix. Ireland, you haven’t even fully thought out yours in the first place, but look west and you’ll see an answer both yourselves and Frau Merkel may find to your liking. What’s more, the interconnectors running energy off the island of Ireland and into mainland Europe are close to coming online which means you get to enter a market formally reserved for big boys and girls only.

Supply and demand, debt for wind. Easy no? Oh, and as an upside, you get to turn your desolate western ports into green jobs incubators. Sorta like Dong Energy is doing in Belfast. Double win, all across the Atlantic coast.

And here’s a bit of advice Ireland. Get this done quick. Because if you don’t, the smart German electricity companies are going to buy up your waters and do this anyway. Who do you think electrified Ireland in the first place?

* Let’s ignore for the sake of simplicity the complicit and profit making motives of German banks in lending money to greedy Irish developers in the first place.

-EDIT-

Irish ministers were in London this week discussing renewable energy sales. Very neighbourly of Britain to offer to subsidise (I’m guessing) cap-ex projects. Thanks chaps.

Between email lists, several columns in Tweetdeck and a constantly moving Facebook news feed I probably have anywhere between 25 and 50 campaigns fly by me on a given day. Keeping up to speed is as good it gets, it’s next to impossible to engage in any meaningful way. Here’s one of those occasions where it’s worth taking a timeout and wading in; the continued investment by the World Bank in large scale fossil energy projects.

There is great background on the South African Eskom deal here, exhibit A when it comes to investigating the misdemeanours of the World Bank. The bottom line:

• Promotion of fossil fuels: Despite its pro-poor, pro-climate rhetoric, the World Bank’s fossil fuel lending has increased 400% since 20060% of these projects were funded specifically to provide energy access to the poor.
• The International Energy Agency (IEA) predicts that continuing to pursue centralised coal powered electricity will only lower the un-electrified population from 1.4 billion today to 1.2 billion in 2030.
• The IEA’s 2010 World Energy Outlook states that in order to achieve universal energy access 70% of today’s un-electrified population will rely on decentralized renewable energy systems.

It’s time for the World Bank to update it’s energy policies. To incorporate strategies that will have much greater impact in fighting poverty, reducing global warming, and environmental impacts.

The public campaign calling for that update starts today. The Sierra Club (remember them) and World Development Movement lead the charge. Bring it on.

Both the New York Times and Nature carried stories on the Montreal Protocol being used for some climate change mitigation action. Not breaking news admittedly but Nature in particular covered some of the deficiencies of the CDM well in their report. Check them out.

That got me thinking some more about Montreal. Which in turn made me reread some of Karen Litfin’s Ozone Discourses. Litfin comes from the political science school, something I hadn’t quite appreciated until this week. OD was written in 1994 but even then Litfin had the prescience to understand how Montreal could and indeed would be used as a template for future global governance agreements. Hello climate change and hello Kyoto. ‘Cept, and Litfin gets this even before these mistakes were made, the wrong lessons were taken from Montreal. Science as an independent and objective epistemological community was not what won the day in Montreal. No, Litfin paints a much more interesting picture of the interplay between power and knowledge.

1. Power in this case was not reducible to material resources (think weath, gold, beer).
2. Nation’s longterm interests were unclear regarding the big hole in the Antarctic. This meant knowledge becomes a significant source of power.
3. Therefore the determination of state interest invoked all sorts of subnational processes in which science wove a complex patchwork quilt of knowledge/power.

Here’s what we did yesterday. A very amazing day. Very amazing people.

I thought it time I’d better start getting on with this 10:10 thing. So here’s my first step this year. Bottling my own water. At source.

Cian’s 10:10 Summer Tip: Source your water from Cian O’Donovan on Vimeo.

Every day on planet Earth we burn a whole gulf load of oil up to make plastic bottles so firstworlders like myself can drink water just about anywhere we fancy. No longer!

Cross-posted from 1010uk.org.
10:10's Lighter Later campaign held a day of high-profile activity on Monday, the summer solstice, including a specially organised conference for MPs, peers and policy makers in Portcullis House, Westminster.

The event, on the lightest evening of the year, saw energy academics, road safety campaigners, representatives from the tourism industry and experts on crime and other social research areas come together to press the case for a change to the UK's clocks to GMT+2 in summer and GMT+1 in winter.

This weekend just gone, 10:10 launched quite possibly the most unique and inspirational climate change campaign the UK has seen for many many years; Lighter Later. Okay, I would say that, but think about it. By focusing solely on making life noticeably better for the vast majority of the UK’s citizens, 10:10 has taken the climate change debate to a whole new dimension. So pay close attention. The idea is ingenious in its simplicity. We shift our clocks to match better the hours we work. Wintertime in the UK would now run at BST, or GMT +1. And Summertime would be an hour ahead, GMT +2. So we would still change the clocks twice per year but it would mean that we’d spend more of our day in light, in evening sunshine in fact. Right now as you can see from these graphs we “waste” a lot of that light by sleeping right through it.

Here are the numbers and reasons just why this is such a good move (there are some more at LeftFootForward):

1. Cut at least 447,000 tonnes of CO2 pollution – equivalent to more than 50,000 cars driving all the way around the world – each year [1]
2. Save 100 lives each year and prevent hundreds of serious injuries by making the roads safer [2]
3. Lower our electricity bills by maximising the available daylight and reducing peak power demand [3]
4. Create 60,000–80,000 new jobs in leisure and tourism, bringing an extra £2.5–3.5 billion into the economy each year [4]
5. Reduce crime and the fear of crime [5]
6. Help make people healthier and tackle obesity by giving people more time to exercise and play sport outside in the evening [6]
7. Save the NHS around £138 million a year through reducing road casualties [7]
8. Improve quality of life for older people [8]
9. Make the nation happier – including reducing the effects of Seasonal Affective Disorder [9]
10. Demonstrate that dealing with climate change can be good for the economy, good for people and good for society as a whole

Full list of references for the above are here http://www.lighterlater.org/benefits.html.

In much of his work (certainly in World at Risk, 2007) Ulrich Beck discusses the the need for civil society organisations to start working together in a genuinely constructive manner in order to tackle some of the planet’s major risks, climate change paramount amongst the usual lineup of global terror, GM and nuclear. At Christmas I wrote of what I thought was the most exciting and progressive aspect of the 10:10 campaign, its intention to do just that. To work with already existing organisations in society, from the bastions of neo-liberal capital such as Sony and Microsoft, to traditional CSOs like Action Aid and People and Planet. Here then is the perfect example of that strategy in action. Incidentally, Beck writes also of the importance of the relations of definition. These relations play a crucial role in the ultimate success or failure of a campaign like Lighter Later, one could argue that the campaign is in fact solely about these relations, but that’s a much longer post, perhaps for a night with a little more light.

Amongst a host of partners, 10:10 is working with RoSPA, the royal society for the prevention of accidents. Has a climate change campaign ever before worked like this with what is primarily a road and society safety group in this manner? Unlikely. But why wouldn’t we work with as many different CSOs as possible, the co-benefits of the switch to a low carbon economy are simply too big to keep to a single climate change campaign.

I’m just back from a talk with Jonathon Porritt, at a BrighterFuture event in London.  Porritt gets it. The time for positive messages, for societal change that uses a carrot, not a stick, is now he stated. The time for the likes of 10:10 and Transitions Towns to get out on the ground, keep an eye on the big picture but all the time keeping two eyes on local, immediate, tangible action has come. Whether you agree with Porritt that all three mainstream parties in the UK are institutionally incapable now of adhering to that most basic of sustainability tenets, the notion of inter-generational equity, is irrelevant. If coalitions of societal groups like the one Lighter Later is building can be intelligently consolidated, around issues that are important, and importantly, tangible, then we have a chance.

So if you back one campaign this year, ask one request of your politician as she or he canvasses on the streets of the UK in the coming weeks, make it an ask for evenings that are Lighter, Later.

Oh, and join the facebook.com/lighterlater group right here. That would make me very happy.

Certainly the theme for Saturday in Copenhagen, if not Sunday as well, was mobilization. 100,000 marching from the city centre to the Bella Centre, location of the climate change conference, was impressive. More impressive was the diversity of the crowd. Both the international mix and range of organizations represented was phenomenal and in our experience unprecedented (we deal with this particular issue elsewhere).

While it led the mainstream news, to concentrate on the Copenhagen march is to miss the point of what is occuring around the world. According to the wonderful people at 350.org, over 3,000 actions took place globally. Take a couple of minutes to check out some of the media on their site. It’s easy for passionate NGO types to overplay these kinds of actions; 50,000 people marched in London last week for The Wave, In isolation that represents a medium sized UK demo. But add that to what’s going on in 100 or so countries within the past seven days though and a scale emerges. A scale that because of its distribution is easy to miss and easier still to ignore.

We saw Dieter Helm this November in London claim, perhaps correctly, that climate change had yet to produce a real political movement, that traditional politicians had yet to be given a mandate by their constituents. Reasons for this are legion, and it’s more than we have time for tonight to go into. However, around COP15 a light is being lit, and that light is illuminating individuals, communities and even whole nations (Tuvalu, the Maldives et al), who previous to now have not had a mainstream media cycle to jump onto. So a question for us in the NGO and media world is this: how do we turn this spotlight into that mandate Helm referred to? What do we do, and what to we tell Tuvalu to do between now the end of COP15 and Bonn, the next time we can reasonably expect international climate change negotiations to figure on front pages.

Another question then emerges. Yes we can keep shining the light, but sooner, not later, we have to throw the torch to our policy makers and let them run with the lamp. I’m recalling here a recent late night dicussion wiht @jamieandrews and @danielvockins. On whom, we asked ourselves, do we concentrate our efforts. Who are the tradionally invisible policy advisors to government and opposition we need to get to. And crucially, what do we give them for the win. For the language we need to communicate with is that of winning and losing in policy and media cycles. That’s what’s going to get the attention of the latter day Alastair Campbell’s, particularly in the UK and particularly five months from an election.

Back to COP15. 350.org and their like have done a huge job connecting the disparate dots all around the world. Using Copenhagen as the center of a web which brings in strands from all over. We all need to keep joining these. This isn’t about Copenhagen. It’s about giving all those who took part in actions over the past 48 hours the ability to mandate their leaders.

BTW, Keepfakingit will be moving on to the numbers beat Monday as the negotiations start to intensify.

[I'll link this up later, too much to do now]

Some consensus building and optimism from the editorial in today’s Financial Times [registration wall].
They go on to wade in on the carbon tax vs emissions trading debate. No surprise where our neo-liberal friends come out in that debate:

In theory, a global carbon tax could do this. In the actual world, a global scheme of tradeable emissions quotas is the best solution. To work, such a scheme, which must form the core of any Copenhagen deal, has to meet three conditions: it must lay down a time-path for emissions cuts over several decades (to let businesses and households predict the net costs of such long-term investments as houses and power plants); allow for adjustments if – but only if – the science changes; and impose binding limits on all countries.

There’s a bit about the fairness of developing countries catching a carbon break and then some big numbers:

Selling unused quotas would, moreover, be hugely lucrative for poorer countries. At today’s European carbon price, yearly carbon emissions have a market value of more than €500bn, a figure which could increase significantly as the global ceiling took effect. The potential transfers from rich countries resulting from quota trading could easily swamp the €100bn per year the European Commission has estimated poor countries will need to tackle climate change.

Most countries seem to grasp the gravity of the challenge. If they can also see what is in it for them, a deal may yet be within reach.

It’s a bit late this evening for me to jump into the Stern Report to see if these numbers stack up but it’s a lot of money either way. I also think that last paragraph is crucial. We have a lot of heavy hitting economists on these issues right now. I have my doubts as to whether runaway CO2 levels in the atmosphere can be halted, not to mind lowered within a traditional western capitalism framework but it sure looks like these guys are going to make an effort.

Frank McDonald writes in the Irish Times that as the EU has grown, its moral strength on environmental issues has weakened. Our friends in the east it seems want to retain their “hot air”. Seems like it’s not the Polish plumbers we should be worried about, but rather the Polish plumbing.

[Hot air] refers to the tradeable bank of credits built up by Poland and others as a result of the collapse of their Soviet-style economies in the early 1990s. Potentially, these assigned amount units (AAUs) – also held in abundance by Russia – are worth a fortune. But they could seriously undermine the international carbon market.

The compromise agreed by EU environment ministers at their meeting in Luxembourg on Wednesday said the unrestricted “banking” and use of AAUs at their full value to comply with commitments on emission reductions beyond 2012 would have to be “addressed appropriately” to ensure the environmental integrity of a Copenhagen deal.

Frankie Frankie also mentions poorer EU states’ unwillingness to pay for original members’ polluting past (that’s since ~1750 for those of you in the UK):

Poland, together with other former Soviet satellites, sees no reason why it should have to dig deeply into its own coffers to help other countries combat climate change. (It also wants to hang onto its carbon-intensive coal-fired power stations as long as possible).

Heads of state meet in Brussels to get this sorted. They then have some last minute talks in Barcelona in November. If they can’t find a solution by then it’s tough to see one coming in the pressure cooker that will be COP-15. And ff the EU can’t get their own yard into shape it’s hard to see what leverage they can assert over the US or China.