People love photovoltaic energy. Studies show that worldwide, 70 to 90% of people favour solar PV energy over any other energy source. A poll conducted in the United States showed that nearly 80% of Americans want their government to invest in renewables as a way to regain the manufacturing jobs it has lost to Asia over the past 20 years. Climate Spectator has the story. Read More.

Dan Cass in Climate Spectator (30 March 2012):

People love photovoltaic energy. Studies show that worldwide, 70 to 90% of people favour solar PV energy over any other energy source. A poll conducted in the United States showed that nearly 80% of Americans want their government to invest in renewables as a way to regain the manufacturing jobs it has lost to Asia over the past 20 years.

There is also strong support for solar because it is a technology that is constantly innovating and closely tied to other ‘sunrise industries’ such as electric vehicles and the smart grid.

The technology is doing its part; advances in efficiency and dropping panel prices mean that solar energy has become cheaper than conventional electricity in many markets around the world. Solar has become the only viable electricity source for billions of people living in severe energy poverty, and in parts of the developed world it has become cheaper than coal, gas and nuclear power.

Many countries have set bold goals; President Obama has set 2020 as the year that solar must become cost competitive with conventional electricity. India plans to reach this goal by 2022, and certain markets in Australia have already attained this ‘grid parity’ price point.

You might assume this all means PV will soon start to take over a large swathe of electricity generation. Reality is a bit more complicated.

In most countries, electricity networks are owned or operated in close association with conventional electricity. Transmission and distribution companies tend to be captive to an old-school attitude – the engineering equivalent of group-think – that is biased against adopting photovoltaic and other renewables as a primary energy source.

That has to change. If PV is to deliver its full economic and environmental benefits, the solar industry needs to learn how to take on some powerful vested interests. The drive to reform competition in the electricity market needs to come from the solar power producers themselves, even if it means coming up against coal and gas companies.

For solar PV to become a major, global energy industry, it must organise itself like one. It must build soft alliances with advocates and make hard decisions about formal industry representation. It also needs to make hard decisions about how to structure its industry advocacy.

In the US, the solar sector is beginning to do this work, which is leading to mergers of old industry organisations as well as the initiation of new community-based organisations. In January 2012, the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), the national solar trade association, merged with the Solar Alliance, the leading solar advocacy organisation. SEIA was founded in 1974 and had 1100 member companies, which it represented to the federal government in Washington DC. Solar Alliance had a more activist bent and was focused on the regulatory environment in the states.

This merger gives the new SEIA a stronger power base. It will continue to work the corridors of Congress but will now be more active in the states, which is where the electricity market is regulated, through the Public Utilities Commissions. Solar companies in the US believe that the merger will deliver the best of both approaches.

In Australia, we have a similar situation to America. While the federal Labor Government has legislated a good carbon price package, in negotiation with the Greens in the Senate, the states are actually the battle ground for grid parity.

As solar becomes price competitive with conventional electricity, the challenge is how to liberate the full market potential this creates. Solar has to break open the electricity industry to competition.

The intention is to gain increased political influence at all levels of government – local, state and federal – in order to accelerate growth in domestic and commercial markets.

Some companies have already begun this ‘campaigning’. For example, Suntech has installed solar on the Sydney Theatre Company building on beautiful Sydney Harbour, at the invitation of the Company’s Artistic Directors, Andrew Upton and Cate Blanchett. It is these kinds of soft alliances with cultural figures that allow influential people to play an advocacy role for PV technology.

More recently in England, Sir David Attenborough was joined by actors and artists at the launch of a wind facility at Glyndebourne opera, south of London. Glyndebourne is one of the world’s leading opera companies and it decided that the best way to offset its greenhouse emissions was to generate electricity.

Indeed, the good news is that PV is not just a brilliant technology that cuts the cost of electricity in a carbon constrained world, it is the key to addressing the threat of global warming. This gives PV companies a great, untapped reservoir of social power to draw on. It is an easy cause around which to organise.

Dan Cass started Dan Cass & Co in 2010 to provide lobbying and campaign services to renewable energy firms. He is a Director of Hepburn Wind, Australia’s first community-owned wind farm.

Source: www.climatespectator.com.au

Some recent rankings of countries seem to be making a fair point: Singapore consumes far more than it can offer ecologically. But for an urban island or city state which has to import practically everything it consumes, it has remained remarkably green. Jessica Cheam in the Straits Times thinks Singapore agencies should also accept unfavourable ratings in the right spirit. There is much room for improvement. For example, it is slow on adopting electric vehicles, it does have high levels of energy consumption and buildings still waste too much energy on air-conditioning. Read More

Jessica Cheam in the Straits Times (5 April 2012):

Singapore’s reputation as a ‘clean and green’ city has taken a few hard knocks recently.

First was a University of British Columbia study in February that ranked the Republic bottom of 150 countries in its Eco2 Index. That index looked at ‘ecological deficits’ – how much of the Earth’s resources it uses compared with how much resources it can supply. Media reports described “ecologically bankrupt” Singapore as the “world’s unhealthiest country”.

Then came an Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency report quoting conservation group WWF president Yolanda Kakabadse saying that Singapore topped the list for the largest carbon footprint in Asia-Pacific in 2010. She reportedly described Singapore as perhaps “one of the best examples of what we should not do”.

These recent claims have ruffled a few feathers on this Little Red Dot, which prides itself on its clean and green reputation built over the decades.

The government has strongly rebutted these rankings, saying they are biased against “import-dependent, land-scarce, densely populated countries such as Singapore”. Some netizens, however, have gleefully used it to validate why they think everything is wrong in this country.

So what’s the truth? Is Singapore ecologically bankrupt or a green haven?

To be sure, these recent rankings seem to be making a fair point: Singapore consumes far more than it can offer ecologically. But dig further, and other points emerge.

A close look at the methodologies of the two rankings above show that both based their findings on data compiled by the Global Footprint Network (GFN), an alliance of scientists which calculates how many ‘planet earths’ we need to sustain our current growth rates. The GFN uses a complicated method that measures a country’s ‘ecological footprint’ by defining how much resources – expressed in land area – is needed by a country for its consumption and waste generated.

This explains why the Eco2 Index put Singapore right at the bottom. As a built-up city with virtually no agriculture industry or natural resources, it has no ecological assets to speak of.

But ranking Singapore with land-rich and agriculturally endowed countries such as Bolivia, Argentina and Paraguay which emerged top of the Eco2 Index is not only pointless, it is unfair.

It essentially penalises Singapore for its nature as an urban city-state with little natural resources.

In order to get a high ecological rating, Singapore would have to live within its means ecologically: That is, consume no more than its land can produce. The fishing village that was Singapore before 1819 might then have scored high on the Eco2 Index. In that sense, the Eco2 Index penalises small countries which refuse to be constrained by their natural resource shortage, and manage to outgrow their limits.

Then there is the matter of carbon footprints. WWF’s Living Planet Report 2010 ranks Singapore with the highest carbon footprint in the Asia-Pacific. But this conflicts with that of other rankings.

The International Energy Agency, for example, uses a method adopted by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change for all countries. This calculates a nation’s emissions based on the country’s production – any activity that takes place within the country’s borders. Aviation and bunker fuel – which are tricky to attribute to any one country due to their transboundary nature – are excluded.

Using this method, Singapore was ranked below other Asia-Pacific countries like Brunei, Australia and South Korea in per capita emissions. By contrast, the GFN method, which WWF’s report is built on, uses a method that accords more weight to where an item is consumed than produced. So a car manufactured in Japan but sold and used in India will contribute to India’s, rather than Japan’s, consumption footprint.

This is an interesting, alternative way of looking at footprints – but there is no accurate or consistent way of calculating this globally at the moment. GFN’s method takes into account differing ways of producing exports – for example, what type of energy is used – but does not apply the same to imports.

Emissions from aviation are also attributed to individual countries – which means an air hub like Singapore ends up with a high tally. Media reports like the one from AFP did not make all these different accounting methods clear.

In fact, there are other methods to rank green cities. Last year, the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) developed an Asian Green City Index which scored 22 cities across eight categories, including energy and carbon emissions, land use, transport and waste.

It used 29 quantitative and qualitative indicators from how a city performs in say, waste production, to assessment of its policies, such as on energy efficiency. Singapore was ranked Asia’s greenest city on this index. It was also the most energy efficient – using three megajoules of energy to generate a US dollar of gross domestic product (GDP), compared with the index average of six megajoules.

Consultancy firm Solidiance around that time also issued a green ranking of Asia-Pacific cities that put Singapore fourth, with Tokyo, Seoul and Melbourne ahead – but it did not publish its quantitative and qualitative indicators so there is no way to tell how it derived its results.

So which ranking is right?

The fact of the matter is, the Singapore authorities and citizens shouldn’t get too hot and bothered over any particular rating as each has its methodology.

We need to look at the methods used, and examine their robustness and logic, before making up our minds on how much credence to give them. Those reporting on such ratings should also do some homework and not dismiss an entire country based on one survey.

Singapore agencies should also accept unfavourable ratings in the right spirit. There is much room for improvement on Singapore’s green credentials. For example, it is slow on adopting electric vehicles, it does have high levels of energy consumption and buildings still waste too much energy on air-conditioning.

As for the WWF reportedly citing Singapore as what societies “should not do”: It made that comment at the same time it moved its global headquarters for Earth Hour, a well-known global environmental campaign, to Singapore from Sydney.

Bottom line? When it comes to green surveys, it’s not all black and white.

Source: www.asianewsnet.net

Each time we network, we emit CO2 through the fossil fuels which are burned to power our computers and the servers and databanks that store or relay our message. In emails alone, the typical office worker is responsible for 13.6 tonnes of CO2 or its equivalent per year, a French government agency for energy efficiency, ADEME, calculated last year. Facebook and Twitter say they are striving to keep their carbon footprint as small as possible. Read More

AFP reports (30 March 2012):

Green groups around the world are turning to social networking to drive their campaign for Earth Hour on Saturday, when lights are turned off for an hour to signal concern about global warming.

But here’s the irony.

With every email, every tweet, every appeal watched on YouTube or “liked” on Facebook, environmentalists are stoking the very problem they want to resolve.

Each time we network, we emit carbon dioxide (CO2) through the fossil fuels which are burned to power our computers and the servers and databanks that store or relay our message.

That poses a small dilemma for the Australian-led campaign for Saturday’s switchoff.

In 130 countries around the world, people are being urged to turn off the lights for one hour at 8.30 pm local time as a show of concern about climate change.

In emails alone, the typical officeworker is responsible for 13.6 tonnes of CO2 or its equivalent per year, a French government agency for energy efficiency, ADEME, calculated last year.

That figure is based on a French company of 100 people who work 220 days a year and each receive 58 mails a day and send 33 per day, with an average mail size of one megabyte.

By comparison, 13.6 tonnes is more than twice the annual CO2 emissions per capita in France and almost two-thirds of the average annual emissions per capita in the US.

The more people you cc and the bigger the mail, the greater the carbon emissions, ADEME said.

“Just a 10-percent reduction in the number of mails that are sent which include the boss and one of his colleagues leads to a gain of one tonne, the equivalent of a round-trip flight from Paris to New York,” it said.

Facebook and Twitter say they are striving to keep their carbon footprint as small as possible.

Facebook, which claims 800 million users worldwide, is building a massive data centre — its third globally and first in Europe — in the Swedish town of Luleaa, near the Arctic Circle.

The local chill helps cool servers, rather than using air conditioning to do so, and the town gets clean energy from hydro.

Greenpeace had mustered a 700,000-signature demand for a “greener” Facebook under its so-called Unfriend Coal campaign.

At a talk last year that he posted on the Internet, Raffi Krikorian, a director for infrastructure at Twitter, said the company contributed around 0.02 grammes of CO2 to the atmosphere with each 140-character tweet.

“But at 50 million tweets, that’s one metric tonne of CO2 a day,” he observed. “We can do better. We are making our stuff a lot more efficient, and that will get (our carbon emissions) a lot further down.”

Just how climate-damaging is the Internet?

By comparison with other sectors, not very — and it can be argued that the Internet saves carbon which would otherwise be emitted in snail mail, phone calls or travel to face-to-face meetings.

A 2007 estimate by Gartner Inc., an international consulting firm, found the information and communications technology industry was sharply increasing its CO2 emissions in absolute terms but still accounted for only around two percent of the global total.

This is less than a sixth of emissions from either transport, industry or agriculture.

Andy Ridley, Earth Hour’s executive director, said his organisation invested in offsets — projects that mitigate carbon emissions — to compensate for its own fossil-fuel pollution.

It was also using an intranet social platform called Yammer to cut down on internal emails.

“It has revolutionised how we communicate and very significantly cut the amount of electronic traffic,” Ridley told AFP.

“Overall, we think that our ability to build a campaign digitally, and to engage with people across the planet in a way that minimises travel, is one of the great advantages of technology.”

Source: www.au.news.yahoo.com

Traffic on the road, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors.

“Health and safety” can be given as a reason for stopping children playing conkers or climbing trees.

The changes in childhood in previous decades are now filtering through into adulthood, where levels of obesity are also rising.

Is nature part of the puzzle of a healthy mind?

Unknowingly, we’ve created a nature deficit disorder. The UK is looking into it. Read More

By Richard Black, Environment correspondent, BBC News (30 March 2012):

Children “learn by doing” in the natural environment, says the National Trust

UK children are losing contact with nature at a “dramatic” rate, and their health and education are suffering, a National Trust report says.

Traffic, the lure of video screens and parental anxieties are conspiring to keep children indoors, it says.

Evidence suggests the problem is worse in the UK than other parts of Europe, and may help explain poor UK rankings in childhood satisfaction surveys.

The trust is launching a consultation on tackling “nature deficit disorder”.

“This is about changing the way children grow up and see the world,” said Stephen Moss, the author, naturalist and former BBC Springwatch producer who wrote the Natural Childhood report for the National Trust.

“The natural world doesn’t come with an instruction leaflet, so it teaches you to use your creative imagination.

“When you build a den with your mates when you’re nine years old, you learn teamwork – you disagree with each other, you have arguments, you resolve them, you work together again – it’s like a team-building course, only you did it when you were nine.”

The trust argues, as have other bodies in previous years, that the growing dissociation of children from the natural world and internment in the “cotton wool culture” of indoor parental guidance impairs their capacity to learn through experience.

It cites evidence showing that:

• children learn more and behave better when lessons are conducted outdoors
• symptoms of children diagnosed with ADHD improve when they are exposed to nature
• children say their happiness depends more on having things to do outdoors more than owning technology.

Yet British parents feel more pressure to provide gadgets for their children than in other European countries.

The phrase nature deficit disorder was coined in 2005 by author Richard Louv, who argued that the human cost of “alienation from nature” was measured in “diminished use of the senses, attention difficulties and higher rates of physical and emotional illnesses”.

In the UK as in many other countries, rates of obesity, self-harm and mental health disorders diagnosed in children have climbed significantly since the 1970s.

But nature deficit disorder is not generally regarded as a medical condition.

“There’s undoubtedly a phenomenon that’s not good for health, which is about not giving access to outdoors or green space, safe risk-taking and so on,” said David Pencheon, a medical doctor who now heads the National Health Service’s sustainable development unit.

“But I wouldn’t say we’ve identified a medical condition.

“In fact we don’t want to ‘medicalise’ it, we should see it as part of everyday life – if you medicalise it, people say ‘you’d better go to your doctor and take a pill’.”

But despite growing recognition of nature deficit disorder, policies aiming to tackle it appear thin on the ground.

Mr Moss cites statistics showing that the area where children are allowed to range unsupervised around their homes has shrunk by 90% since the 1970s.

Whereas some reasons behind the parental “cotton wool culture” are not based in logic – most sexual molestation occurs in the home, for example, not in parks – the one “genuine massive danger” is traffic.

“I think the first step for any child is playing outdoors in the street; and in the 40 years since I grew up, traffic has increased hugely, and that’s the main reason why none of us let our kids out on their own,” Mr Moss told BBC News.

“The only solution would be to have pedestrian priority on every residential street in Britain; when you are driving along the street, if there are children playing, they have priority.”

The report advocates having teachers take children for lessons outdoors when possible, with urban schools using parks.

It also says that authorities who cite “health and safety” as a reason for stopping children playing conkers or climbing trees should be aware that successive Health and Safety Executive heads have advocated a measure of risk-taking in children’s lives.

Health warning

The changes in childhood in previous decades are now filtering through into adulthood, where levels of obesity are also rising.

Is nature part of the puzzle of a healthy mind?

Dr Pencheon observed that although doctors are beginning to prescribe exercise instead of drugs where it is indicated, much more could be done from a policy perspective.

“One of the problems here is that the NHS is not incentivised financially to do public health,” he said.

“The healthcare system is run on a rescue basis – people come to us when they’re ill, we patch them up and try to get them going again – that’s not the culture of a system designed to keep people healthy.”

The National Trust is now beginning a two-month consultation aimed at gathering views and examples of good and bad practice from the public and specialists.

These will eventually be turned into a set of policy recommendations.

“As a nation, we need to do everything we can to make it easy and safe for our children to get outdoors,” said National Trust director-general Fiona Reynolds.

“We want to move the debate on and encourage people and organisations to think about how we take practical steps to reconnect children with the natural world and inspire them to get outdoors.”

Source: www.bbc.co.uk