Bishop Hill Something rotten in the state of Denmark
May 1, 2010 Energy Robert Bryce's new book, Power Hungry, looks at green energy and concludes that it's rotten (H/T Matt Ridley). There's a summary of the main arguments here.
The article is very interesting, although a commenter a Matt's reckons the security of supply arguments may be wrong. But how about this for killing off the argument that Denmark has shown us the way?
Denmark, the poster child for wind energy boosters, more than doubled its production of wind energy between 1999 and 2007. Yet data from Energinet.dk, the operator of Denmark's natural gas and electricity grids, show that carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation in 2007 were at about the same level as they were back in 1990, before the country began its frenzied construction of turbines. Denmark has done a good job of keeping its overall carbon dioxide emissions flat, but that is in large part because of near-zero population growth and exorbitant energy taxes, not wind energy. And through 2017, the Danes foresee no decrease in carbon dioxide emissions from electricity generation.
[Updated to fix mistake with book title]
Reader Comments (36)
I think it is probably unhelpful to look at the Danish CO2 and wind energy systems in isolation.
The European integrated grid system is multinational and has many local and regional cross-feeds - as well as imbalances. The report for instance talks about net importing of energy in some regions of Denmark while there are net exports in others.
There are a wide variety of power sources, baseload nuclear and coal, together with on-demand sources such as hydro and gas turbine. Wind is a bit of a wild card as it can't be matched well by baseload supplies and needs market demand and on-demand sources to balance it.
What does seem to happen is that at times of high wind output the overall voltage on the system increases, and for resistive loads at least there is an increase in power consumption - your lights glow a bit brighter in Belgrade because the wind is blowing strongly in Denmark.
What would be more helpful - and objective - is to look at the entire European grid and see what efficiencies - or wastes - are being achieved.
In my view, wind and hydro are complimentary and a viable power source. Denmark doesn't have hydro (it's a bit flat?) but Norway and Sweden and a bunch of mainland Europe countries do.
So what should be done is look at how much power Denmark exports and imports and what percentage is thermal and what is 'renewable energy'. That will give a clearer picture than simply measuring CO2 production.
It's nice to see the Danes paying the danegeld this time round.
An excellent expose of wind power (and cheap!) is John Etherington's "The Wind Farm Scam".
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wind-Farm-Scam-Independent-Minds/dp/1905299834/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272702675&sr=1-1
From the Bish's publisher!
I'm afraid I just don't buy Tilde Guillemet's comment above. He is clearly looking at this through the most rosy tinted spectacles. How about the transmission losses between Denmark and Belgrade?
The fact is that Denmark's turbines are of very little use to the Danes, who have to virtually give away the generated power to adjacent Sweden and Norway (certainly not Serbia!) who have hydro power which can balance the fluctuations and frequent drops out in generation.
And this variability and lack of predictability is one of the real problems with wind. The total amount of electric power generated by the UK's 2,700 massively subsidised wind turbines (bird choppers) during the three Winter months (December - February) amounted to just 0.8% of total. And fossil fuel (mainly gas) generators have to be kept spinning in order to respond sufficiently quickly to drops in wind generation. Bearing in mind the fact that the turbines actually need power when they aren't generating (for brakes, yaw controls, the rectifiers etc.), there were periods last winter when Big Wind was using more power than the pitiful amount they generated. At enormous cost to electricity users and saving no CO2 emissions whatever.
And the solution according to all three major Political Parties in the UK? Why, build lots more!
£100 Billion for offshore farms in the next decade alone! Projected average domestic electricity bill in 2020 (Ofgem's prediction)? £5,000 p.a.! Try paying that from your old age pension.
An excellent expose of wind power (and cheap!) is John Etherington's "The Wind Farm Scam".
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Wind-Farm-Scam-Independent-Minds/dp/1905299834/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1272702675&sr=1-1
From the Bish's publisher!
I'm afraid I just don't buy Tilde Guillemet's comment above. He is clearly looking at this through the most rosy tinted spectacles. How about the transmission losses between Denmark and Belgrade?
The fact is that Denmark's turbines are of very little use to the Danes, who have to virtually give away the generated power to adjacent Sweden and Norway (certainly not Serbia!) who have hydro power which can balance the fluctuations and frequent drops out in generation.
And this variability and lack of predictability is one of the real problems with wind. The total amount of electric power generated by the UK's 2,700 massively subsidised wind turbines (bird choppers) during the three Winter months (December - February) amounted to just 0.8% of total. And fossil fuel (mainly gas) generators have to be kept spinning in order to respond sufficiently quickly to drops in wind generation. Bearing in mind the fact that the turbines actually need power when they aren't generating (for brakes, yaw controls, the rectifiers etc.), there were periods last winter when Big Wind was using more power than the pitiful amount they generated. At enormous cost to electricity users and saving no CO2 emissions whatever.
And the solution according to all three major Political Parties in the UK? Why, build lots more!
£100 Billion for offshore farms in the next decade alone! Projected average domestic electricity bill in 2020 (Ofgem's prediction)? £5,000 p.a.! Try paying that from your old age pension.
Re Tilde Guillemet
I have produced this from the excellent Master Resource web site. It comprehensively destroys the case for wind power and in particular Danish windpower.
To wave away all the objections to windpower in the way you do defies what actually happens. In Britain, the first acts of a new government must be to repeal the Climate Change Act and to stop the potentially disastrous and unrealistic offshore wind programme.
Offshore wind is even worse than onshore. All the supposed benefits of more regular wind are lost in massive infrastructure and maintenance costs plus the power loss in bringing electricity onshore in places where we don't need it.
Regards
Paul
http://www.masterresource.org/2010/04/case-study-on-methods-of-industrial-scale-wind-power-analysis-part-i/#more-8609
To Martin Brumby:
http://spectrum.ieee.org/feb08/5943
Power in Europe is a very integrated issue.
I simply point out that you can't look at a small country like Denmark in isolation.
I agree wind power has problems, but I think that by designing system that accommodate the vagaries of wind is viable - especially by use of hydro and gas turbine.
Overall I don't think wind power will ever exceed 10% (less?) of European consumption.
In the end it will come down to how much it costs to build and run wind power sites and the then backup sites to keep an even power flow.
As someone who has studied the wind power industry for several years and acts as an expert witness at wind power station public inquiries (it is a mis-nomer to call them wind farms), it is patently obvious that they are expensive white elephants whose sole purpose is to enrich developers and land owners (and other vested interests). The BWEA (now RenewablesUK) is one of the biggest peddlars of lies that I am aware of and yet it has the government's ear. Everybody else apart from developers and landownerssuffers financial loss, loss of amenity and destruction of the countryside. Industry will die or leave the country to places where there are reliable suppplies of competitively priced electricity. Money is being diverted to wind that should be spent on proper electricity generating stations. It is likely that we will have electricity supply shortages in the next 5 years or so due to the dash for wind.
One of the reasons the government wants to install smart meters in every home is so that they can restrict our energy use and avoid brown or blackouts as the result of nulabour's energy policy (or lack thereof - about a dozen energy ministers in 13 years results in lack of coordinated policy; and putting energy with climate change in DECC under Ed Miliband was the final straw).
I was fortunate enough on one occasion to obtain a confession from an E-ON executive that his company would "almost certainly" not be building wind power stations (thank you, Philip, for introducing that concept - I'm sure the original choice of the word 'farm' was quite deliberate!) were it not for the government subsidy.
At the time he was keen to put 25 of the things on a local moorland and I was someone whose support he felt he needed.
The figures he quoted were quite frightening and many had nothing to do with energy saving. The concrete bases would have needed (if I recall the figure correctly) about 25 lorry-loads a day non-stop for three months passing through the middle of our small town and I forget how much further disruption for the pylons and blades and other ancillary equipment. He was offering close to £1m over 25 years to the local community which he objected strongly to my referring to as a bribe and almost as strongly when I suggested the word 'compensation'.
When I asked where his company would get this money from he got very coy but at least had the good grace to look a bit guilty when I opined that my electricity bill was a likely starting point!
Apart from the rabid greenies I have never yet many anyone who has thought about the subject who even agrees with the argument that wind "has a part to play". Water, yes, because hydro, tide and wave are all reasonably consistent or at least predictable. The trouble is, surely, that wave and tide are not visible and therefore not "sexy" enough. With this government especially, appearances are all regardless of how much the cost and how futile the outcome.
Of course the real wind power experts tell a different story:
"Denmark generates 21% of its gross electricity demand from the wind, Spain almost 12%, Portugal 9%, Ireland 8% and Germany 7%. In the western half of Denmark, more than 100% of demand is sometimes met by wind power."
http://www.windpowerworks.net/wind_facts/wind_power_capacity.html
"The Danish wind industry had a 5.7 billion Euros export in 2008"
http://www.talentfactory.dk/en/core.htm
Two sides to every story. No doubt the truth is somewhere in between. I'm certain anyone who talks about enormous expenses of infrastructure and maintenance of offshore wind projects knows dick all about current offshore infrastructure and maintenance requirements for oil platforms. The big profit-making engineering utility companies like Siemens, Norske Hydro, etc. think it's a good idea so I think I'll believe them instead. At least they have the honesty to say there are some unknowns to firm up by actually trying it out. Engineering offshore was ever thus but we have a habit of solving any problems that arise. We should be wary of anyone who pretends he knows it all.
I've now seen some of Phillip Bratby's submissions. There is something of an evangelical zeal there. If only there was someone like that attacking the spurious claims of the nuclear lobby too - just for balance. Or maybe some opposition to the utterly pointless and costly military operations, or the very costly replacement of Trident.
Yet often it seems the opposition to wind is as simple as just not liking the way they look. I get a laugh when people on TV point to the horizon, avoid looking at all the intensely ugly pylons and focus on the rather sleek, modern, and to my mind beautiful, wind energy structures. Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder sure, but to ignore the pylons and associated wires that are already there - precisely because you know they are a necessary evil - is the comical bit.
JamesG: These things are only a good idea to utilities because of the enormous subsidies and the penalties if they fail to meet targets. I suggest you go to the REF website for some facts and stop believing the propaganda from governments, developers and vested interests.
http://www.ref.org.uk/
"Denmark generates 21% of its gross electricity demand from the wind, Spain almost 12%, Portugal 9%, Ireland 8% and Germany 7%. In the western half of Denmark, more than 100% of demand is sometimes met by wind power."
Roughly 20% of total energy consumption is electricity. So 21% of this is about 4% of total energy, even if the 21% for Denmark is the mean and not just the peak production.
What is to be done about the other 96%?
Do the Danes still dredge up sand eels and burn them to supply energy thus imbalancing the ecosystem?
all climate craziness is included in this chart:
http://de.ichart.yahoo.com/z?s=SWV.F&t=my&q=l&l=on&z=m&c=VWS.F,CEZ.F&a=v&p=s
the danish wind power company vestas (red curve) had a nice increase in the last couple of years, but the real winner was solarworld (blue curve). This way, every rational aspect of energy production has been put upside down, and now the most subsidized form of energy is now by far the most inefficient and expensive and contributes very close to nothing.
Interesting side note is CEZ from the Czeck republic (green curve). They built a giant nuclear power plant (of course, close to the border of nuclear free Austria) and made massive profits by exporting energy to the western (anti nuclear) countries with their massively increasing electricity costs. At least they produced real energy and helped to avoid the European grid break down.
Phillip.
I don't believe any of the propaganda. I am open-minded, perhaps a rare beast. I've worked in the nuclear industry and the oil industry but it didn't dim my enthusiasm for alternative energies. What i did find is that too many people in engineering assume that the little they know, or care to find out, is all that needs to be known and that hence they tend to easily disbelieve in alternatives. Engineers are by nature conservative - perhaps too much. I warmly remember the frustration in Babcock that governments couldn't decide on coal or nuclear. We didn't care because we could do either but the dithering forced the closure of much of the heavy industry. Funnily nobody around me saw the rise of natural gas power. Though looking back it should have been obvious. That's why i distrust predictions and narrow viewpoints.
Some of those vested interests include the nuclear lobby and companies like E.On. I did visit the Ref website. Facts seem to be quite malleable though on this issue. That is, there is never seemingly a middle ground; it is either disastrous or wonderful. That to me says a great deal. The companies I mention are just as likely to be pro fossil fuel as pro wind. German subsidies for coal are currently quite large - as would UK subsidies be if we actually still had a coal industry. Subsidies for nuclear are uniformly utterly enormous yet nobody seems to realise that.
The trouble is, we need an energy policy of some kind. I lean towards coal to gas technology as it seems to get to seams - like in the firth of forth - that were previously impossible and use drilling tech that is well established. However i'd like to see us at least try offshore wind. It does have undeniable potential. The wind is there almost constantly and we know a lot about offshore engineering. I'm not so keen on relying on Russian gas and less keen on PWR's, despite having designed parts of Sizewell B and crawled all over Torness during construction. Candu and Thorium I'm keen on but they have big issues too.
Gordon
A good question - especially for Britain. but nobody ever suggested wind was the one solution, or even the best one. If the UK discovered more gas then that would be best. Alas...one has to work with what one has. France has nothing so they opted for nuclear. The UK has dithered since the 70's. It was obvious the gas would run out at some point though.
Bryce's summary is a bit dishonest. Yes, CO2 emissions from Danish electricity and CHP generation are at about 1990 levels but emissions were still rising then and today's generation emissions are about half what they were at their peak in 1996.
This 2005 analysis offers better arguments against Denmark showing Britain the way (Hugh Sharman, 'Why wind power works for Denmark', _Civil Engineering_ 158):
www.hm-treasury.gov.uk/d/cien.158.2.66.pdf
JamesG: Perhaps we have met, since I too worked on Sizewell B. I'm not sure what aspect makes you not keen on PWRs. Perhaps you can enlighten us? Torness, well yes - that's the result of government interference in chosing the wrong technology (the French knew what they were doing when they dropped gas reactors in favour of PWRs).
Full analysis of wind power here - http://www.cps.org.uk/cps_catalog/Catalogue_Wind_Chill_738.html#a7
Free pdf download.
Phillip
On pwr's I was always naturally suspicious of having water as the moderator and the coolant. I've seen experimental simulations of a loss of coolant accident and I knew we couldn't replicate the stress effects of that on our computers. Torness wasn't actually a failure though - it works fine. Generally though, like it or not, we haven't solved the waste issue. The nimby problem for wind power is as nothing compared to the nimby problem for nuclear waste. Lastly, the cost, which is more general: Due to safety issues everything costs more but these costs were all buried by the nuclear industry. When Thatcher opened up the books nobody wanted to invest. That's the reality and it remains so. The sell off was done by underwriting the decomissioning, ie push it forward to the next government. Well we know the decommissioning costs now are huge and spiraling at Sellafield (is it 70 billion now or more? - on just one site). Lastly, I'm not comfortable with proliferation, I'd like to see the banning of the enrichment of Uranium. Face it, we only went down that road to produce nuclear bombs, so it's logical to assume all the rest think the same way. Sure you can make a bomb with heavy water reactors but it is very difficult.
Well, there is an old saying that "They do it first in California", which is true of wind turbines. We start it all in 1982, I believe. Now if you want to see and hear -- and you can certainly hear the damn things -- come to California and go through the Altamont Pass. You take Interstate 580 from Livermore (home of the Lawernce Livermore Labs where they invented the H-bomb) to Sacramento. You go through the pass and get to see mile after mile of this.
http://www.nowpublic.com/world/altamont-pass-wind-energy-farm-1
Then stop and listen to the roar of the blades as they chop up the birds flying through the pass. (KQED is the San Francisco Public Service TV station much like the BBC and RTE but no longer on the public teat -- they live on contributions and some commercials)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtgBWNKwBkE&feature=related
These are now being taken down because they are uneconomical -- that is the tax break that put them up has expired. So the 8,000 that were there in the late 1980s have been reduced to about 5200 today. And unlike almost all other wind farm proposals, this one is located very close to San Francisco. There is very little in terms of transmission loss. In fact, they are closer than many of the more traditional power generation plants that supply power to San Francisco.
However, if you want to hear the noise, do check your weather report and plan on seeing them in daylight. The wind often fails throughout the year, and almost always after 7 PM at night.
May 1, 2010 | Unregistered CommenterJamesG
The UK may not have much of a Coal Industry, but we do ahve a lot of Coal. For a slice of that £100Billion I am sure we could revive the coal indistry to easily meet the output from those proposed wind .
JamesG: If the UK discovered more gas then that would be best.
Now I'm far from being knowledgeable about any of this, but doesn't the South Permian Basin, which is said to contain a large amount of unconventional gas, extend as far west as England? They're prospecting already in Poland; could this be something the UK could start to benefit from in a few years' time?
Wind energy (and wave) have two very severe disadvantages. The energy density of the primary energy source is very low, which means that very large structures are needed to provide a significant output, and its supply is intermittent.
Only in very favourable situations can a wind generator achieve an annual load factor of 30%, so that building a wind power station is like building a conventional station (coal, gas, nuclear or oil) but needing at least 2.5 times the installed capacity for the same annual output, only supplying the operator with fuel to run for 3 days a week and only giving two or three days advance notice of fuel availability.
The nett result is that in order to manage the grid with a significant wind component (say 15% or greater) a quickly available back-up must be provided. Denmark has access to Nordic hydro power, the UK would have to rely on gas turbines and a significantly increased spinning reserve.
The economics only work by very large subsidies provided by the electricity customer.
http://www.istockanalyst.com/article/viewiStockNews/articleid/4075658
"BEIJING, Apr. 30, 2010 (Xinhua News Agency) -- China and Japan finally nailed down the power coal price for long-term contract (LTC) at 115.5 US dollars per ton, after nearly one months negotiation."
With the long term contract price of steam coal now over $100/tonne on the global markets the world needs a bit of a rethink on where we plan on getting 'affordable' electricity.
In going-extinct-Europe demographics and very low birth rates are what is going to reduce CO2 emissions in the next 40 years. The rest is show.
I hope that turbine columns are now fitted with fire baffles. Otherwise they make very effective chimneys, as some saboteurs in the Departement of the Aude discovered back in 2006.
…. During the night of November 17, two of them were destroyed with incendiary material (according to the local press: propane cylinders and tyres)…..Someone says “Here, everyone knows who knows, it’s a small village, but nobody will say anything"…..The mayor explains that the turbines pay for one fifth of the commune’s budget, and there is no harm in receiving business rates from a wind farm….
http://www.limoux-aude.com/reportagetfun.htm
AC Osborn
Yes we do have a lot of coal but it's uneconomic to dig out conventionally. That's why i mentioned coal to gas conversion rather than opening up old dead collieries. The beaches on the Forth are black from the coal so there's plenty there all right.
Alex
That would be lucky.
Ronaldo
A lot of people don't seem to know that gas turbine back-up is needed just now. Coal and nuclear are designed for base load continuous operation so peak periods need extra help from gas turbines. There is an extra consideration here in that base load at night is seriously wasted so a more flexible grid would be sensible regardless of wind power. Wind power in Spain provides much of the base load though apparently - they seem to have a smart grid of some sort.
JamesG
"A lot of people don't seem to know that gas turbine back-up is needed just now. "
For some time now in Great Britian gas turbine power stations have been providing more than 50% of the demand. That is not back-up, that is the majority of the base load requirement. It will not be very long until gas turbine power stations are providing 70% of demand and in about ten years time, they will have to be providing more than 90% of demand.
"Coal and nuclear are designed for base load continuous operation so peak periods need extra help from gas turbines."
That may have been the case 30 years ago but times have changed:-
From 8:00pm (UK) last night (Fri) to 8:00pm tonight (Sat):
Gas turbine power stations provided 56.3% of the demand,
Coal fired power stations provided 16.9% of the demand,
Nuclear power stations provided 18.9% of the demand,
Wind power stations provided 0.5% of the demand.
" There is an extra consideration here in that base load at night is seriously wasted so a more flexible grid would be sensible regardless of wind power."
What are you talking about - "base load at night is seriously wasted"?
"Wind power in Spain provides much of the base load though apparently - they seem to have a smart grid of some sort."
Very smart grid indeed: in my area of Spain, until recently, the power used to go off when it rained.
Hey we should all calm down a bit and think about this rationally.
That means thinking in terms of engineering and finance -
What works most efficiently and reliabily, per unit of money invested.
Security of raw material supply and cost of long term safe waste disposal
also come into the equation.
Fortunately CO2 emissions are not a problem.
The answer will not be the same for all locations nor for all future times,
but massive investment in new technology is always the most risky option.
For the avoidance of doubt:-
(1) The idea that the electrical grid is "integrated" is incorrect so far as the UK is concerned. There are "interconnectors" with France and Ireland. Neither are used with much regularity. Just look at the statistics.
(2) There is plenty of coal in the UK and the problem with indigenous coal production isn't primarily one of production cost. At the time the Tories closed down most of the industry UK production costs were around a third of German costs and a fifth of Spanish costs. But European money was still used to develop new mines in Spain.
British coal is still cheaper delivered to power stations than imported. But the heady mix of dogma, incompetence and malice has largely destroyed what was once a proud industry that powered the country. For lack of investment, at least one productive mine stands mothballed. We are now incapable of producing the volumes of indigenous coal that we need. And this has been exacerbated by a mass of inappropriate regulation and planning restrictions which has hamstrung opencast coal production so we are having to import coal from Russia to help keep the lights on. ("Carbon footprint" of transporting coal from Russia? Anyone? Not to even mention the environmental and health and safety record of the Russian mines.)
The Government plans to "invest" £100 Billion over the next decade on offshore wind generation which wiill be even more ludicrously inefficient, ineffective and expensive than the Big Wind we already have. For less than £1 Billion we could re-open the Selby mines which, at their peak, sent 12.5 million tonnes of coal to the power stations, producing more energy in a year than wind generation will do produce in a lifetime. The coal is there, all we need is the political will.
Meanwhile, who is going to invest in coal mining or desperately needed new power stations when, thanks to the EU's Large Combustion Plant Directive, most of the existing plants will have to close within five years and when the major Political Parties are unanimous that new coal plants must be fitted with Carbon Capture & Storage (despite the clear evidence that, not only does this technology not presently exist on the scale that is needed but that it is extremely unlikely to work in the sense of being able to pump that quantity of CO2 underground. And if you could make it work, at mind boggling cost, the effect on the climate would be absolutely negligable.)
Within a few years we face major power shortages directly attributable to technically incompetent greenies (and I include virtually all the House of Commons here) failing to take the most basic steps to secure energy supply. We should have at least have ten new nuclear plants nearing completion - not just in the earliest stage of planning with little confidence that nthey will ever be built. Especially if the lunatic and aptly named Dims are allowed to have any influence on policy.
Those who try to present wind as a viable contribution to our energy needs are fooling themselves.
Quote of the day:
Simon Schama on Radio 4 this morning said the Dutch refer to speculative bubbles as 'windhandel' or trading in wind.
Dreadnought,
I think I would call' windhandel' speculative trading rather than speculative bubbles, probably short selling and the like are implied, but yes, the ethos is there.
Martin Brumby,
Well said sir, a very good overview, but next time don't be so restrained. The raw and unpalatable truth regarding the UK energy situation needs to be shouted from the rooftops. The Upper Creek Paddle Company is expecting a bumper sales year.
Martin Brumby,
I am a little surprised that you did not follow up on my post of yesterday. Perhaps I was too long winded -- perhaps a more succinct statement:
"We tried the bloody things in California and they f***ing didn't work!"
I believe that that point should be made in the UK. It's not like there isn't proof that wind farms didn't work, all you have to do is go to the Altamont pass.
We would welcome any such delegations as you may wish to send. Our tourism is way down and we need the business.
A fairly recent analysis of the German wind industry also shows it saves no CO2 at all, and may even be causing more CO2 release than if it didn't exist.
See: http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/hidden-fuel-costs-of-wind-generated-electricity/
The problem is not the wind turbines themselves but the need for base load power.
If you have to make coal fired power stations 'keep up' with the wild swings of wind-based power they run inefficiently. Same as your car uses more fuel in the stop-start city than on the highway. So the German coal and gas fired power stations are running so inefficiently that they now produce more CO2 than the wind turbines are saving.
So too in Denmark it seems. I feel sad about all the birds munched in the course of this experiment in futility, otherwise I'd love the law of unintended consequences.
Over on this side of the pond, unfortunately, at least two Provincial gov'ts (Ontario where I used to live and British Columbia where I now live) are moving full-tilt towards this unproven technology. Neither gov't appears to have conducted any due diligence on the matter. But one Ontario resident has:
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2010/03/21/the-answer-hes-shown-is-not-blowin-in-the-wind/
And while I'm here ... readers might be interested in a very damning (but unsurprising, IMHO) report on the UN's "contributions" to cleaning up the planet:
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2010/05/02/un-agencies-fail-to-practice-what-they-preach/
For graduation click here