House of Lords on climate change

It's a long time since I watched proceedings in the House of Lords and having sat through ten minutes of the third Baron Grantchester (Lab) I remembered why I had found better things to do for the last few years. That said, while there was a lot about Tuesday's debate about climate change and energy policy to get depressed about, there were also some points of interest.

The debate was entitled "That this House takes note of the future of energy policy in the light of the climate change challenge." (Hansard here - note that there are two separate pages of text to access).

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McKitrick on coal and wind

Ross McKitrick has a new presentation up, looking at the arguments that are made against coal-fired power stations - pollution, health, greenhouse gases and so on.

These arguments don't seem to be grounded in facts. (3Mb download)

Load factors

Rob Schneider has been looking at published figures for the amount of electricity generated by windfarms in the UK. He has then compared this to the installed capacity to get a feel for the true average load factor for wind power in the UK.

The figures are...well...take a look yourself.

Josh 52

Josh 51

More workers sacrificed to green god

Chris Huhne's extrarodinary mishandling of the UK's energy policy continues apace. It appears that users of virgin wood are being priced out of the market for their raw materials because of subsidies to bioenergy companies who compete for supply.

Mike McKenna, director of Kronospan's Chirk factory, said the subsidies for electricity generators which use biomass encouraged them to take "the easy option" of burning freshly felled timber.

He told BBC Radio Wales: "The easy option for them is cutting down trees and burning them for electricity generation.

"That's because the subsidies are worth more than twice the value of the wood.

Quite, quite mad.

Ministerial meetings

The government now publishes details of meetings between ministers and outside bodies. They are published separately on each department's website. I thought I'd take a look at the DECC one and see who has been bending Howlin' Mad Huhne's ear.

In essence it's simple: with very few exceptions, Huhne gets to meet only:

• energy companies asking for subsidies
• environmentalists.

I think this could explain a lot about government energy policy, don't you?

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Science cuts

There is dismay across the science community at the prospect of 20% cuts in funding. Martin Rees has been holding forth on the subject:

20 per cent cuts are the "game over" scenario, which would cause irreversible destruction and be "very tragic", said Rees.

10 per cent is the "slash and burn" option with "serious consequences".

Constant cash, a reduction in real terms, "could be accommodated".

If only we weren't spending all that money on subsidising the windfarms that scientists say we need.

Big oil day out

Many thanks to the Scottish Oil Club who invited me to attend the talk given by former BP boss, Lord Browne, at the Edinburgh Book Festival. Browne has a book to push, with the self-effacing title: Beyond Business: An Inspirational Memoir From a Visionary Leader. The title of the talk itself was equally understated: The Story of a Corporate Superstar.

I can't help feeling I haven't quite got a handle on the self-promotion angle to being a writer yet.

Pielke Jnr on the Climate Fix

RP Jnr's talk on climate policy is well worth a look, if nothing else for the perspective it gives on UK energy policy. One can't help but be mightily embarrassed by the 'solutions' put in place by our political leaders and mightily concerned that our energy policy is now being dictated by 'Howlin mad' Huhne.

Spain suspends solar subsidy

Andrew Orlowski reports that the Spanish government is reining back hard on the payments it makes to solar power companies - who are in essence subsidy farmers.

Spanish economist Professor Gabriel Calzada, at the University of Madrid estimated that each green job had cost the country $774,000.

Worse, a "green" job costs 2.2 jobs that might otherwise have been created - a figure Calzada derived by dividing the average subsidy per worker by the average productivity per worker. Industry, which can't afford to pay the higher fuel bills, simply moves elsewhere.

Our disingenuous man in San José

From Nacion.com, a newspaper in Costa Rica:

Here is some good news for the citizens of San José: in the future you are going to find your city a little quieter and the air less polluted and cleaner. Why? Because the Swiss and British ambassadors have just bought electric cars to use for routine trips in the city.

...[the cars], being electric, don't generate emissions.

That last bit ain't true, electric cars merely displacing emissions from the exhaust to the power station.

Huhne out?

A report on the Spectator website suggests that David Laws has resigned as chief secretary to the Treasury.

His successor is understood to be a Lib Dem, probably Chris Huhne or Jeremy Browne. ...getting Huhne out of the environment office may prove a blessing.

Yes indeed.

Update on May 29, 2010 by Bishop Hill

BBC confirms that Laws has gone but says that his replacement will be Danny Alexander. We're stuck with Huhne.

Climate disinterest

The Guardian is reporting a continuing decline in all sorts of indicators of public concern over global warming:

...interest in climate change fell from 80% of respondents in 2006, to 71% last year and now stands at only 62%. Only 80% say they are interested in where electrical power is made, down from 82% the previous year.

Other recent polls have recorded a similar drop in public alarm about the imminence of climate-triggered disaster. The number of climate change agnostics – those unsure whether human activity is warming the planet – has risen from 25% in 2007 to 33% now.

I must say a bit more interest in where electrical power is made is probably warranted, particularly now we have Chris Huhne in charge of energy policy in the UK.

David Mackay at Oxford

This is another guest post by DR. David Mackay is Professor of Physics at Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.

Another talk from Oxford. This is my report of David MacKay’s talk on Sustainable Energy – without the Hot Air in the Department of Engineering Science on 13 May 2010.

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