Lights out for traditional bulbs by 2012

• John Vidal, environment editor
• The Guardian
• Friday September 28 2007

The plug will be pulled on nearly all conventional lightbulbs after supermarkets and energy suppliers agreed to gradually phase out incandescent bulbs from next year, the government said yesterday.

The initiative, announced by environment secretary Hilary Benn in Bournemouth, is expected to save 5m tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and be completed by 2012.

The old lightbulbs are being rapidly replaced by low-energy bulbs, which cost more to buy but last up to 12 times as long and use nearly 80% less electricity.

But the government’s voluntary initiative was criticised by environmental groups and other political parties, who argued that it was weak compared with initiatives in other countries. Australia has banned conventional bulbs beyond 2009.

Yesterday many stores said they were in favour. Currys has agreed to stop selling the bulbs by the end of this year, Habitat by 2009, Woolworths, the Co-op, Asda, Morrison’s, and Sainsbury’s by 2010, and Tesco by 2011. Only Somerfield has declined to give a date for a complete phase-out.

Greenpeace director John Sauven said: “The government needs to go further and introduce tough mandatory efficiency standards rather than relying on weak voluntary initiatives. For every year of delay in getting rid of these bulbs, 5m tonnes of CO2 are emitted into the atmosphere unnecessarily.”

Opposition parties urged the government to go further. “New standards should also seek to phase out stand-by. Instead, the EU has just announced an anti-dumping tariff on imports of energy-saving bulbs from China which will make them more expensive,” said Chris Huhne, the Lib Dems’ environment spokesman.

From:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2007/sep/28/energyefficiency.ethicalliving

Dengue fever spreading in Texas

September 19, 2007 | Posted by John Balbus in News

The author of today’s post, John Balbus, M.D., M.P.H., is Chief Health Scientist at Environmental Defense.

In the past when I gave talks about dengue fever, I’d say it was a problem in Mexico, but relatively rare over the border in Texas. I need to update my slides. Following an outbreak of dengue fever in Brownsville, Texas, health investigators found that 38 percent of the town was at risk for the most dangerous form of the illness.

This is a big deal, and global warming may well play a role.

Dengue fever is a mosquito-borne viral illness found in tropical and subtropical regions. The most dangerous form is dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), which results from a second infection in someone previously infected. DHF involves low platelet counts and bleeding, and can lead to shock and death.

In 2005 there were 25 hospital cases of dengue fever in Brownsville, Texas, and 16 of these were DHF. The 16 people with DHF must have previously contracted dengue fever, possibly without realizing it.

Since people with good underlying health may not have symptoms with a first infection, health investigators from the Center for Disease Control screened residents’ blood for past infection. Disturbingly, they found that 38 percent of Brownsville residents had antibodies to dengue virus. All these people are at risk for DHF. This is not good news, to say the least.

Is the spread of dengue fever in Texas due to climate change? It’s impossible to say for sure, but right now dengue fever is partly kept in check by low winter temperatures in Texas that kill the mosquitoes. Unusually warm winters associated with changing climate could lead to more severe outbreaks in the future. And with few specific treatments available, people in Texas will need to remove breeding places for mosquitoes to keep the dengue at bay.

From: Enviromental Defense.

Grim outlook for poor countries in climate report

David Adam, Peter Walker and Alison Benjamin

Guardian Unlimited

Tuesday September 18 2007

The Arctic is again highlighted as being among areas most at risk. Photograph: Corbis

The effects of climate change will be felt sooner than scientists realised and the world must learn to live with the effects, experts said today.

Professor Martin Parry, a climate scientist with the Met Office, said destructive changes in temperature, rainfall and agriculture were now forecast to occur several decades earlier than thought.

He said vulnerable people such as the old and poor would be the worst affected, and that world leaders had not yet accepted their countries would have to adapt to the likely consequences.

The professor was speaking in London at a meeting to launch the full report on the impacts of global warming by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The report – which had its executive summary released earlier this year – says hundreds of millions of people in developing nations will face natural disasters, water shortages and hunger due to the effects of climate change.

Today Professor Parry, co-chair of the IPCC working group that wrote the report, said: “We are all used to talking about these impacts coming in the lifetimes of our children and grandchildren. Now we know that it’s us.”

He said the international response to the problem had failed to grasp that serious consequences such as reduced crop yields and coastal flooding were now inevitable. “Mitigation has got all the attention but we cannot mitigate out of this problem. We now have a choice between a future with a damaged world or a severely damaged world.”

Countries such as Britain need to focus on helping nations in the developing world cope with the predicted impacts, by helping them to introduce irrigation and water management technology, drought resistant crops and new building techniques.

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, said: “Wheat production in India is already in decline, for no other reason than climate change.”

The report says that “extreme weather events” are likely to become more intense and more frequent, while higher global temperatures could affect crops and water supplies and spread disease.

The effect on ecosystems could be equally severe, with up to 30% of plant and animal species at risk of extinction if the average rise in global temperatures exceeds 1.5-2.5C.

The 1,000-page document is part of the IPCC’s fourth overall assessment of climate change, to be published in full later this year. It was put together by the so-called Working Group II, which examines global warming’s impact on the environment and people.

The experts involved warn that the consequences of rising temperatures are already being felt on every continent, and sooner than expected. It is “probably too late” to avoid some impacts in developing countries because about 1C of warming is already in the climate system, they warn. If it is not kept below 2C – which “currently looks very unlikely to be achieved” – up to 3.2 billion people will face water shortages and up to 600 million will face hunger, they have predicted.

The trade and development minister, Gareth Thomas, told the launch of the report at the Royal Geographical Society: “Failing to tackle it [climate change] will lead to floods, droughts and natural disasters which can destroy poor people’s lives as well as their livelihoods.”

Professor Parry said today that he was pessimistic about the chances of keeping the increase in global average temperatures below 2C. “And it’s evident from the work of the IPCC that even with a maximum of 2C we’re not going to avoid some major impacts at the regional level.”

In February the report of the IPCC’s first working group, which looks at the scientific background of climate change, concluded that global warming was “very likely” – a probability of 90% or greater – to have been caused by human activity.

A report in May by the IPCC’s Working Group III, which examines how climate change can be addressed, argued that devastating global warming can be avoided without excessive economic cost but only if the world begins acting immediately.

Today’s report concludes that while the impact of a warmer globe will have mixed effects – for example, it notes that crop yields could increase in northern Europe – the overall impact will be deeply negative, particularly in Africa, in the so-called “mega-deltas” of south and east Asia, and on small islands and in polar regions.

By 2020, the report warns, up to 250 million Africans may be left short of water, while access to sufficient food is “projected to be severely compromised by climate variability and change”.

“New studies confirm that Africa is one of the most vulnerable continents to climate variability and change because of multiple stresses and low adaptive capacity,” says the document.

From: The Guardian.

Global warming may cause world crop decline

By Deborah Zabarenko, Environment Correspondent

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Global warming could send world agriculture into serious decline by 2080 with productivity collapsing in some developing countries while it improves in a few rich nations, a study reported on Wednesday.

India, Pakistan, most of Africa and most of Latin America would be hit hardest, said economist William Cline, the study’s author. The United States, most of Europe, Russia and Canada would probably see agricultural gains if climate change continues on its current course, the study found.

Overall, the world’s agricultural productivity was forecast to decline by between 3 percent and 16 percent by 2080, according to the study published by the Washington-based Center for Global Development and the Peterson Institute for International Economics.

Among developed countries, Australia’s outlook was bleakest with predicted declines in crop yields ranging between 16 percent and 27 percent. In the developing world, fast-growing India’s declines were forecast between 29 percent and 38 percent while Sudan and Senegal both had predicted crop declines of more than 50 percent, essentially a collapse of agricultural productivity.

The wide range between the low and high end of the forecast depends on how much carbon dioxide emissions actually spur some crops, Cline said. Plants absorb carbon dioxide, a climate-warming greenhouse gas emitted by coal-fired power plants, petroleum-fueled vehicles and some natural processes.

Some analysts maintain that global warming could actually be a boon to crops, making the impact of human-caused climate change negligible. They cite laboratory studies that have shown potential gains in crop yields of up to 30 percent when carbon dioxide emissions were increased.

CARBON FERTILIZATION

Cline disputed these contentions, saying that similar tests performed in farm fields have shown gains to be around 15 percent. He said the boost from so-called carbon fertilization tends to flatten out.

For corn, there is already so much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that putting more of this gas in the air would not help increase yields, Cline said. Wheat, rice and soybeans are continuing to benefit from increased carbon dioxide emissions but that improvement is likely to taper off, he said. 

“It turns out that global yields for the major cereal (crops) have in fact slowed down, that the Green Revolution has slowed down,” Cline said, referring to the global technological transformation of agriculture between the 1940s and 1960s.

“There’s already a sign that there is fatigue in the Green Revolution,” he said, noting that the average annual growth in yields in the 1960s and 1970s was 2.6 percent per year, but by the 1980s and 1990s it had slowed to 1.8 percent.

“The problem is that you need the technical change to keep up with demand for food,” Cline said. “I estimate that the global demand for food after you take into account higher population, as well as higher incomes, would about triple from now to late in the century.”

Northern countries such as parts of the United States, Russia and Canada would have longer growing seasons due to global warming. But Cline said the world probably could not rely on increased crop yields in those areas.

“By the end of the century, they’re probably going to be earning so much money from their energy exports that their exchange rates are going to be very strong,” he said.

These strong currencies would make it prohibitively expensive for most other countries to buy Russian or Canadian agricultural goods.

Source: Reuters.

Can this really save the planet?

We are constantly told to switch the TV off standby, recycle our plastic bags and boil less water – but does focusing on the small, easy steps distract us from the bigger picture, asks George Marshall

• George Marshall
• The Guardian
• Thursday September 13 2007

Why is everyone so keen to believe that tiny actions can prevent climate change? We are given easy household tips by campaigners and the government that will help “save the climate”. You know the kind of thing – recycle your plastic bags, turn your telly off standby, bring your own cup to work. There is usually a little clutch of them attached to the latest grim news about climate change: it’s not all bad news, they plead, you can take these simple steps today and they really do “make a difference”.

But do they? Take the plastic bags, for example. We are pestered to re-use them or use designer “bags for life” instead. People get very worked up about this topic. There are eight online petitions on the No 10 website calling for them to be banned or taxed, Ireland has imposed a special bag tax, and a town in Devon has banned them outright.

Yes, they are ugly, wasteful and deadly to turtles. But their contribution to climate change is miniscule. The average Brit uses 134 plastic bags a year, resulting in just two kilos of the typical 11 tonnes of carbon dioxide he or she will emit in a year. That is one five thousandth of their overall climate impact.

And then there is the issue of electronics on standby. This is an attractive example of consumer waste culture and has been aggressively challenged by, among others, the Conservative’s Quality of Life Group, which publishes its environmental policy document today. But it is hardly a major source of emissions. The electricity to keep the average television on standby mode for a whole year leads to 25 kilograms of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere. It’s more than plastic bags, but still very marginal: 0.2% of average per capita emissions in the UK.

Here’s another tip that sounds more substantial: fill your kettle with the right amount of water. The government made this one of the core messages of its “Are You Doing Your Bit?” campaign in 1999. A very small bit as it turns out. According to the government’s own figures, even if you are constantly boiling full kettles this will save all of 100 kilos of carbon dioxide a year, less than 1% of average per capita emissions.

Please don’t misunderstand me. All of these actions are worth doing as part of a greener lifestyle. And I do all of them – I also turn off my tap when brushing my teeth, share my baths, and watch the telly in the dark – wearing three jumpers if need be. But it is a serious distortion to imply, as the top 10 lists of green living usually do, that there is any equivalence between these lifestyle preferences and the serious decisions that really reduce emissions – stopping flying, living close to work and living in a well-insulated house, for example.

Judging by the latest Mori poll data, people have already acquired a severely distorted sense of priorities. Forty per cent of people now believe that recycling domestic waste, which is a relatively small contributor to emissions, is the most important thing they can do to prevent climate change. Only 10% mention the far more important goals of using public transport or reducing foreign holidays.

The easy tips also undermine the wider message on the seriousness of climate change. In its report Warm Words, on climate-change messaging, the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR) argues that simple actions “easily lapse into ‘wallpaper’ – the domestic, the routine, the boring, the too-easily understood and ignorable”. The IPPR is especially critical of headlines such as “20 things you can do to save the planet from destruction” and said that putting trivial measures alongside alarmist warnings can lead people to “deflate, mock and reject the very notion of climate change”.

Lest you think I am being harsh, look at this from a different point of view. Imagine that someone came up with a brilliant new campaign against smoking. It would show graphic images of people dying of lung cancer followed by the punchline: “It’s easy to be healthy – smoke one less cigarette a month.”

We know without a moment’s reflection that this campaign would fail. The target is so ludicrous, and the disconnection between the images and the message is so great, that most smokers would just laugh it off.

So why then do well-intentioned schools, councils and green groups – and let’s face it, Live Earth was an eight-hour tip-fest – persist in promoting such ineffectual actions?

Their logic is as follows. Simple actions capture people’s attention and provide an entry-level activity. Present people with the daunting big-ticket solutions and they turn away. Give them something easy and you have them moving in the right direction and, in theory, ready to make the step up to the next level.

That is the theory, but, as plentiful social research confirms, it doesn’t work. For one thing, making the solutions easy is no guarantee that anyone will carry them out. The government spent £22m on the Do Your Bit campaign and has subsequently admitted that it produced no measurable change in personal behaviour.

And there is a greater danger that people might adopt the simple measures as a way to avoid making more challenging lifestyle changes. With recycling, Mori concluded that it was becoming an act of “totem behaviour” and that “individuals use recycling as a means of discharging their responsibility to undertake wider changes in lifestyle”. In other words, people can adopt the simplest solutions as a part of a deliberate denial strategy that enables them to feel virtuous without changing their real behaviour.

Governments and businesses are, if anything, even more prone to tokenistic behaviour than individuals. Encouraging small voluntary actions by the public, customers or staff looks good and is much safer than passing restrictive legislation or rethinking your entire business model.

So what we need is a sense of proportion. The great advantage that climate change has over other pressing issues is that the gases that cause it can be measured down to the last gram. People can make informed decisions in the knowledge that, say, a return flight to Australia will have the same climate-change impact as 730,000 plastic bags or 176,000 overfilled kettles.

We also need to rethink the way we talk about climate change. It is insulting to assume that people can only be energised with the pint-sized options. We need to present all lifestyle changes as part of a radical vision for a smart, healthy and just 21st century. And let’s be clear that voluntary action will never be enough – we will need radical political, economic and social change. So let’s start by doing away with that wretched phrase “you can save the planet”

· George Marshall is the founder and director of projects at the Climate Outreach and Information Network (coinet.org.uk). Read Bibi van der Zee’s response to this article at blogs.guardian.co.uk/ethicalliving

· Post questions and answers to Ask Leo The Guardian, 119 Farringdon Road, London EC1 3ER Fax: 020-7713 4366. Email: ethical.living@guardian.co.uk Please include your address and telephone number.