A Sea of Wind Turbines

On Sunday John Hutton, the business secretary, announced that the UK government was planning a major expansion of offshore wind electricity generation. The irony that on that day the UK is being battered by high wind was not lost on me. I was also pleased to see that it was not the environment minister that was making the announcement. I was going to write about it on the day, but as I started looking at the details I realised that it looked less a definite plan than an aspiration.

First, to have this policy announced by someone other than the environment minister shows that the UK government is starting to take the issues of climate change seriously and that environmental considerations are permeating all aspects of government policy. There are other aspects of policy that are far from environmental, but this does sound as if in part at least the UK government appears to be taking the issues of climate change seriously. I say appears as while this policy and plan has been announced, the government expects private investment to create this massive engineering project.

What has been announced is that all around the UK coasts around seven hundred new turbines will be constructed, expanding our generating capacity to 38 giga watts. Unlike the positioning of wind turbines on the land these will be in positions where the turbines will fully benefit from the wind.

One of the problems of the current situation is where turbines are placed on the land; they are frequently sited near the infrastructure, to connect to the grid, rather than placed where they will benefit from the wind. All this is purely because of government grants and tax breaks, which subsidise the manufacturing and installation of these turbines, hence the companies positioning them are not basing their positioning decisions upon the need the need to generate the maximum electricity to make the turbines pay as they would if this were a purely commercial decision. Therefore creating opposition to wind power.

The difficulty with pensioning wind turbines off shore is quite a technical problem because of the difficulties of servicing the modules once installed, as well as the difficulties of building them. But one thing our off shore oil industry gave us was the skills to work in this hostile environment. The plans to involve building enough capacity to generate enough to power for every home in the UK, and that will mean about 7000 of these windmills. This will have the potential to either damage or enhance the marine environment.

As with any construction in the sea, there is the potential to damage the delicate marine habitats, be it reefs or sand banks or the spawning grounds of a multitude of species that inhabit our waters. Therefore the exact positioning of each structure needs to be carefully planed. After all destroying one environment to try and save another would leave a bitter taste in the mouth of many. However, the towers that have been installed thus far have produced mini reefs allowing many marine creatures a safe and expanded habitat.

All this could dramatically reduce the carbon impact of electricity generation, while it is true that manufacturing and installation will generate a carbon footprint, at least the positioning of these turbines offshore will ensure the turbines will be placed where they will operate most efficiently. The will also be the need for other forms of generation as turbines only generate power when the wind is blowing. Also these windmills cannot generate power in very high winds.

However, on the whole all this could reduce the climatic impact and carbon footprint for future generations.

While I have reservations about the environmental impact of this on the marine environment, on the whole I am in favour of this plan if it ever becomes a reality.

Further Reading

A Changing Climate around the World

I know that most of the people that read the mouse’s Blog think that I must be a fruitcake and a doom seer, with my predictions of the coming climate change catastrophe. But my predictions are not the visions of a crazed lunatic; they are based soundly on the scientific data available to all. The real problem is that far to many people choose to ignore what is really happening to our climate and our environment, further they assume that as nothing disastrous has happened yet, a climate change disaster must just be a myth.

This attitude is not helped by all the vested interests. People who stand to loose out financially when we are all finally forced to take action to cope with this changed and changing climate.

Even with streets and roads choked with fumes and clogged with traffic, people refuse to give up their cars. But what’s worse, people insist on buying and driving a vehicle that’s much larger than they need and consequently costs more to run. The attitude seems to be that if they can afford to run an inefficient vehicle they will. All this leads to cars that emit more CO2 than is needed.

But its not just cars, I have lost count of the people that I have meet who on the surface are very committed environmentalists, but given the chance of a cheap flight or holiday overseas, principals evaporate as quickly as a jet produces Nitrous oxide and water vapour, both potent and long lasting greenhouse gases.

I keep on looking around me and around the world and wonder if its me? Am I the only one that can see the very real effects of Climate change going on? That question is a rhetorical one, as I know that I am not alone but I do feel like a lone voice in the wilderness.

To give you all a round up: In Australia there has been a drought going on for ten years. While large areas of Australia are deserts, it is the impact of a changing climate that has caused this drought.

In Georgia and other neighbouring states in the south east US there is a drought that has affected towns and cities like Atlanta and Birmingham, Alabama where all their water is coming from the same source.

In the Great Lakes region, the water level in Lake Superior is two feet lower than it should be. As each inch represents five hundred billion gallons of water, that’s one point two trillion gallons of water lost as vapour into the atmosphere, with all that water vapour adding to the greenhouse effect.

The forest fires that raged in California were as a direct result of a climate change induced drought. The list could go on, but it’s in the real wilderness places that the effect is most dramatic. The loss of the summer ice at the North Pole has been well reported. But what is less well known is that this level of melting of the sea ice was not expected until 2050. While all the computer models for the climate were predicting this to happen, it has occurred forty years earlier than expected.

While the global average increase in temperatures has only been just over one degree Celsius in two places its four and five degrees. In Japan temperatures are now five degrees higher than they were ten years ago and that has been constant for the past five years. In Southern Spain temperatures are four degrees higher and droughts there have exhausted the aquifers (underground water stored in rocks) to such an extent that salts are now leaching out and poisoning the land.

While each of these impacts are happening in local regions the effect has a global implication. The problem is that because these effects of climate change are occurring locally, they are all parts off a much larger image of global warming.

We already have gone past the point of no return and while governments argue about setting limits to how much we can be allowed to pollute our nest, none of the decisions made in Bali will stop what is already happening. It is in fact down to all of us to take action. Each little action will help.

Firstly we need to stop wasting energy; turning off lights, appliances and turning down the heating.

Further, we need to stop travelling, there are some journeys that are essential, going to work etc but there will be someone you can share your car with on at least some of your trips. However, the most important action must be to stop flying. While aircraft produce only four percent of the global CO2, the Nitrous Oxide and the water vapour generated are magnifying the greenhouse effect as the gasses are released in the upper atmosphere, just where it needs to be to warm the planet.

Water is the key to life on this planet. The human animal cannot survive more than three days without it, yet we are failing to take the global water crisis seriously. We all need to save water, act as though we all are living in an arid region and that water costs more than gold. In a few years it may well become that precious.

Our climate has gone into a feedback system; our climate is and will change. We can’t stop it now, but we can work on reducing the way it impacts the lives of our kith and kin.

I hope to be able to bring you news and information of what people are actually doing to help themselves, and to help the planet. At times I have felt that I am utterly alone in trying to live in an environmentally responsible way, so I hope that here we can all share ideas and information about the way we can all help heal the scars inflicted upon our home planet.

Business as usual for Bush on Climate Change

One of the greatest difficulties for all of us in our attempts to tackle climate change is the lack of political leadership, especially from the largest polluters. While not the largest population the change of leadership in Australia will be good news in tackling climate pollution.

However while US president Bush has finally been acknowledging that climate change is a problem, events this week shows that the Bush Government intends to do nothing to reduce the Carbon-dioxide emissions from the US. Here in the UK, in the Financial Times, the leading business and financial publication, a conglomerate of international businesses, in a two-page advert, called for leadership in dealing with climate change. The response from the white house was simple, the US will not do anything to cap CO2 emissions and it, the bush government, can not even say when the US will be able to start reducing its carbon footprint.

The science and the evidence is so compelling now that, international business people realise that real action has to be taken. The difficulty is that unless the US, the largest economy in the world, takes political action and tackles climate change then business can’t plan for the investment in a low carbon future.

While there are some businesses that are making the effort, if we have a large economy like the US that refuses to impose regulation, then those businesses will loose money and or profits. Put simply the people that make the effort will always be undercut by the most polluting countries. In some ways this problem is similar to the way that manufacturing has chased the low wages in china. However, unlike this chasing of low wages, governments like the US allowing carbon pollution to occur will kill all industry.

The greatest problem is that oil men like Bush see climate change as an advantage as it is allowing access to the vast oil and gas deposits that are untapped in the artic circle. Further, the US Japan China and the EU are all looking to the probability of mining helium three on the moon, as a new wonder fuel. That is why there is a new moon race and why so many countries are rushing to land men on the moon again. The carbon footprint from these enterprises are vast and will mean that we will seriously damage our climate in trying to obtain this new fuel for an unproven technology.

Further, the US bush government; in particular, assume that the loss of the sea ice will not be that serious for the climate. However that is based upon a false assumption and reliant upon out of date science. In the last five years the unexpected acceleration in the melting of the sea ice has allowed the Greenland Ice cap to start melting. It is loosing up to 150 cubic kilometres of melt water per year. Further this is increasing and this water is flowing into the sea.

Also the Greenland Ice Cap is suffering from cracks and crevices opening up on the suffice of this vast glacier. This means that lakes of melt water that form in the summer are draining down to the bedrock where it is lubricating the flow of the Ice. But this melt water doesn’t re-freeze during the winter as just as happens in a pond or lake the ice on top insulates the water and stops it from freezing. All this is making the three kilometre thick glacier that is the Greenland Ice Cap very unstable.

It will not take a lot for this ice to break up. Scientists are monitoring the Ice and recording the vibrations of the cracking up of this glacier, known as Ice quakes, they occur every twenty minutes. There is an inevitability that sooner rather than later there will be a large area of this glacier will calf and slip into the sea. This will raise sea levels.

Further, any sizeable earthquake nearby could provide the trigger to allow very sizeable chunks of the Ice cap to slide into the sea. This could trigger Tidal waves as well as a sudden and substantial rise in sea levels. What makes this scenario even more disturbing is that the trigger is already in place. Mount St Helens in the US, an active volcano has a bulging plug in its calderas, and when that blows, the quakes and vibrations from that could well be all that it takes to see the glacier slip into the sea.

This is not something that will happen in some mythical time years hence, but within the next four to five years. I just hope that when it happens it finally shocks the US government into taking action on climate change.

I make a clear distinction here between the American people who want action taken on climate change and the Government who have their head in the sand.

What a waste

In previous Blogs I have talked about the problem of rubbish. In the UK we send more of our waste to landfill than any other country in Europe.

Personally, I work hard to avoid collecting packaging in the first place. No plastic bags, nor packaging or anything that can’t be reused or recycled. Thus in any normal month I will normally only need to put my own bin out, a normal sized wheelie Bin, once a month. I say normally as I do also add to my own rubbish the detritus that I collect from my local wood. It’s frustrating that so many people do leave their rubbish in the wood. I always bring my rubbish back with me. I also take the equivalent of a bin bag full of beer and drinks cans to the recycling point. These I should point out are collected from the wood not that I am drinking gallons of beer myself. While I would love to be drinking that much, I could never afford to become a real dipsomaniac, so I just practice.

However, the real point is that it is not difficult to ensure that I reduce the impact I have on the level of waste that goes into landfill. There is a real green benefit in reducing our waste as if our rubbish was only collected once a fortnight instead of once a week would halve the carbon-dioxide pollution emitted in one fail swoop.

Also we need to reuse and recycle much more. When I was a child everyone had their milk delivered in glass bottles that were reused time and time again. While the added weight would have added to the amount of carbon it took to deliver and collect them, it was and still is greener than buying from the supermarket, the way that milk is bought today.

The problem is that milk is now predominantly sold in plastic cartons. This means that the cartons are single use and as very little plastic is recycled, the saving in reduced carbon outputs from the lighter weight packaging, is more than lost by the carbon footprint from the manufacture and disposal of all this plastic. Further, as the supermarkets use centralised distribution, your milk will have travelled hundreds if not thousands of miles.

The problem of waste is a serious problem, while many people do recycle; locally there is a real problem, as our local council doesn’t recycle any cardboard or plastic. So I am pleased to see that three of the local authorities in the region are looking at ways of dealing with our waste.

Personally, I have always disagreed with many environmentalists, as I have always been an advocate for waste to energy solutions. While burning rubbish will produce pollution not just CO2 but all sorts of other harmful chemicals, but some waste has to be incinerated, therefore it must be better to use the energy this creates. Not only will waste to energy projects replace fossil fuels, but also as the waste is not shipped the great distances that fossil fuels are transported. Thus further reducing the carbon footprint.

In the past when trying to get people to take waste to energy seriously, opponents have always said that if we reduced the rubbish we produce then any facility producing energy would run out of fuel. Well if that ever happened then we would really have all turned green.

The BBC News Report

Consumer electronics and the carbon footprint

I have had to finally spend some money and replace the screen/monitor for my old computer. While the central processing unit is younger, the monitor was well over ten years old. Unlike many people I kept it when I had to change the CPU, as it was a very energy efficient model. Part of my rational about keeping green is to not waste the resources that are used in manufacturing any product that I use.

While that may mean that I don’t have the latest wiz bang gadget or product, often by making careful choices in the first place, I don’t waste money constantly updating something that is still working well. But in the case of the monitor, it was starting to play up. Then finally the tube went so that the screen image collapsed to a third of the screen area. I did try turning it back on to take a picture of what I was seeing but when I did it blew, smoke out the back type of failure that told me it had committed suicide.

However I need the computer so I had to buy a new monitor. While I did look at obtaining a new one, I decided to buy second hand. As often when people buy their new even faster and more powerful computer, they get new keyboard and the rest of the kit, so that there are thousands of tonnes of perfectly good consumer electronic goods thrown away. Therefore, I bought a flat screen monitor for about a third of the cost of a new one. Further, by doing so I have stopped something else going into landfill and it will also reduce my energy costs and help reduce my already small carbon footprint.

I know that some people think that I am being smug by telling you folks in “Blogland” about what I am doing to be greener, when all I am trying to do is lead by example. People seem to think that they can’t do much to help save the environment, when there are many things they can do. Also people feel that there is no point as if they are doing it they will be doing it alone. You will not be doing your bit for the planet on your own, this mouse and many others are already doing as much, and many much more.

It has been amusing for me to observe the way that people have gone out and spent a small fortune on new televisions over the past few years. The screens have got bigger, incidentally at the same time as homes have got smaller, yet with digital switchover coming most of these will be useless unless people invest in the box to receive the digital signal. Will this lead to more consumer goods being dumped as rubbish? Even now with the shut off of the analogue signal less than five years away, in the UK, most of the sets for sale are still analogue and not digital, a complete waste of energy and the earth’s resources.

I am not against consumer goods or luxuries; it is just that we all need to think carefully about only buying what we need and not just changing something just because it’s the latest fashion.

We have gorged ourselves on consumer goods, and just seem to never be satisfied with having a mobile telephone, but it must be the latest model. All these items eat energy and add to climate change, not just in their use but manufacture, shipping and then in the disposal of them.

Even if you don’t give a dam about the environment, not falling into the trap of consumerism will save you a small fortune.