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Cyclist beware: don’t stray from the towpath

July 31, 2009

Stuart Jeffries learns a few things about cyclists and manners after a refreshing accidental dip in the canal on the way to work

Have you ever cycled into the canal while commuting to work? You really ought to try – it’s most refreshing. I did it earlier this week and, as I told the kind people who helped me out, I regret nothing. Or nothing very much.

This is what happened. I was cycling along the towpath of the Regent’s Canal near King’s Cross in London thinking happy thoughts. I’d just read a news story about how women are getting more and more beautiful while men remain as pathetically cavemanny as ever. How lovely to be a heterosexual man in this day and age, I thought. Then I saw ahead of me an oncoming cyclist, and between him and me a couple strolling towards him.

The woman stepped sharply to the left towards the canal to avoid the cyclist. I swerved sharply to the left to avoid her and suddenly my visual field was full of grey/brown water coming to me very fast.

Then time slowed down and a series of questions went through my mind. Could I fall in such a way that the bike stayed on the towpath? Could I get my watch out of my pocket and hurl it on to the path before I went under? Could I reach my mobile, film the event and produce a multimedia audiovisual package that would really show my bosses that I’m not just a dinosaur of print journalism? Disappointingly, the answer to all three questions was no.

I stood up in the canal, thinking that the water wasn’t as cold as I’d feared. I wondered how much swan poo was in the water and if it was toxic. I was quite pleased I hadn’t landed on a supermarket trolley or the remains of another cyclist. The water came up to my chest and I had quite a nice chat with Laura and Jamie as they leaned with concerned looks down on me from the towpath. They looked so well dressed and dry that I felt at a bit of a social disadvantage. We did that very British dance: They were incredibly apologetic and self-abasing, I poo-pooed their apologies, saying it was entirely my fault. I’m not sure what happened to the oncoming cyclist.

They helped me pull the bike out of the water. My saddlebag was soaked, but amazingly some of the contents wrapped in a plastic bag – including my book and sandwiches which I later ate and — were bone dry.

I climbed out of the canal smelling of my new fragrance, eau de Grand Union, and began wringing out my T-shirt when my colleague Hannah walked by pristine and stylish in a summer dress. In the circumstances, it was very kind of her to talk to me at all. She suggested I must be concussed and should walk the few yards to work and have a cup of tea. Instead I pulled on a reasonably dry cagoule (classy), cycled home, chucked my damp clothes in the washing machine, showered, dabbed my grazed shins with Dettol, and blow dried my Oyster Card, debit card, phone, and watch.

Then I cycled back to work: I had to get back on my saddle and face down my demons. I retraced my route along the towpath. There are tyre marks swerving across the grass verge of towpath at the point I went into the drink. I stood there for a few moments and whistled the guitar riff from the Good the Bad and the Ugly (where did that come from?).

The only downside of my accident was that my mobile phone doesn’t work any more. I’d wanted an upgrade anyway. My bike (fingers crossed) seems to be in good condition.

Of course it was all my fault. The British Waterways code of conduct gives priority to pedestrians over cyclists, which is something that some cyclists don’t take seriously enough. Hannah told me that a cyclist had shouted “Move!” at her the other day as they barrelled down the same towpath I cycle along every day. That sort of rudeness is contrary to the British Waterways cycling code which says: “considerate and courteous to all users. Carry a bell and use it, or say excuse me as you approach all other users.”

For the most part any friction between cyclists and pedestrians is the fault of a sizeable minority of the former. That said, for cyclists like me riding on the canal towpath is irresistible: it’s a rustic idyll away from the raging roads.

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Fish stocks recover as conservation measures take effect, analysis shows

July 30, 2009

Regions in Iceland, California and north-east US show signs of recovery but North Sea and Ireland still overfished

Global efforts to combat overfishing are starting to turn the tide to allow some fish stocks to recover, new analysis shows. Research from an international team of scientists shows that a handful of major fisheries across the world have managed to reduce the rate at which fish are exploited.

The experts say their study offers hope that overfishing can be brought under control, but they warn that fishermen in Ireland and the North Sea are still catching too many fish to allow stocks to recover. Some 63% of assessed fish stocks worldwide still require rebuilding, the scientists report.

“Across all regions we are still seeing a troubling trend of increasing stock collapse,” said Dr Boris Worm, an ecologist at Dalhousie University in Canada. “But this paper shows that our oceans are not a lost cause. The encouraging result is that exploitation rate, the ultimate driver of depletion and collapse, is decreasing in half the 10 systems we examined. This means that management in those areas is setting the stage for ecological and economic recovery. It’s only a start, but it gives me hope that we have the ability to bring overfishing under control.”

Fisheries winning the battle against overfishing include regions in the US, Iceland and Australia. But fishermen in Ireland and the North Sea are still catching too many fish to allow stocks to recover, the research says.

Pamela Mace of the New Zealand ministry of fisheries, who helped to write the new study, said: “Fisheries managers currently presiding over depleted fish stocks need to become fast followers of the successes revealed in this paper. We need to move much more rapidly towards rebuilding individual fish populations, and restoring the ecosystems of which they are a part, if there is to be any hope for the long-term viability of fisheries and fishing communities.”

The new analysis used catch data as well as stock assessments, scientific trawl surveys, small-scale fishery data and modelling results. It highlighted catch quotas, localised fishing closures and bans on selected fishing gear to allow smaller fish to escape as measures that help fish stocks to recover. Agencies in Alaska and New Zealand have led the world in the fight against overfishing by acting before the situation became critical, says the study, which is published in the journal Science. Fish abundance is increasing in previously overfished areas around Iceland, the north-east US shelf, the Newfoundland-Labrador shelf and California. This has benefitted species such as American plaice, pollock, haddock and Atlantic cod.

“Some of the most spectacular rebuilding efforts have involved bold experimentation with closed areas, gear and effort restrictions and new approaches to catch allocations and enforcement,” the scientists say. But they caution that the study covers less than a quarter of world fisheries, and lightly to moderately fished and rebuilding ecosystems comprise less than half of those.

The isolated success stories, they say, “may best be interpreted as large scale restoration experiments that demonstrate opportunities for successfully rebuilding marine resources elsewhere.” Many nations in Africa have sold the right to fish in their waters to wealthy developed countries that have exhausted their own stocks, the experts said. The move could undermine local efforts to tackle overfishing made by small scale fisheries such as those in Kenya, which are highlighted in the new study.

The North Sea, the Baltic and Celtic-Biscay shelf fisheries are all still declining. Here, Atlantic cod and herring as still declining, while globally populations of large predators such as sharks and rays are in rapid decline.

The new survey marks a public truce in a war of words between Worm, a conservationist, and fellow author Ray Hilborn, a fisheries expert at the University of Washington in Seattle. The spat followed a 2006 study by Worm that made some dire predictions about the state of the world’s fisheries, including the claim that most stocks could collapse by 2048 if present trends continued. Hilborn criticised the research as “sloppy” and said the 2048 claim had “zero credibility” because it used simple records of fish catches to say whether stocks had collapsed.

“I very much hope I will be alive in 2048 and I have given some thought to whether I will have a seafood party or not,” Worm joked at a press conference this week.

Dr Ana Parma, an author of the paper with the Centro Nacional Patagonico in Argentina, said: “This is the first exhaustive attempt to assemble the best available data on the status of marine fisheries and trends in exploitation rates, a major breakthrough that has allowed scientists from different backgrounds to reach a consensus about the status of fisheries and actions needed.”

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Compass bans 69 endangered fish species from its restaurants

July 30, 2009

The world’s largest contract caterer has added Atlantic cod to its banned list alongside bluefin tuna and swordfish

Sixty-nine species of fish have been banned from menus at thousands of restaurants across the UK and Ireland in a move hailed by campaigners fighting to protect threatened stocks.

The Compass Group, the world’s largest contract caterer, has decided to follow the advice of the Marine Conservation Society (MCS) on fish for consumers to avoid because of environmental concerns. These will not be used again in its canteens and restaurants, in its “grab-and-go” offerings or at hospitality events unless the society changes its advice.

The move covers 6,500 outlets from Chelsea football club to schools in Lewisham, London, Procter and Gamble sites, Oxford Brookes University and Bristol Zoo. The species are those the MCS considers most vulnerable to overfishing or fished using methods that are damaging to the environment or to non-target species. They include four varieties of skate, five tunas and two types of plaice.

Compass had already decided never to use bluefin tuna and swordfish among 13 vulnerable species, but its decision to bar all 69 on the MSC blacklist is a significant move. It comes as the government’s Food Standards Agency considers whether it should offer the first official advice to consumers on eating ethically as well as healthily, by encouraging them not to buy or eat endangered fish. If it goes ahead with the move, it will also probably point consumers towards organisations such as the MCS and the Marine Stewardship Council (MSC) which already advise on sustainability of stocks.

The move will mean that Atlantic cod from all but a few fisheries will be off the menu while Pacific cod certified by the MSC will stay on it. Alaskan pollock, Pacific salmon, also from Alaska, and Dover sole from the Hastings fishery are options that remain.

Neil Pitcairn, fish and seafood buyer for Compass, said: “There are many wonderful and delicious fish that can be caught without risk of over-fishing.”

Simon Brockington, head of conservation at the Marine Conservation Society, said Compass was leading the catering sector in addressing fisheries’ sustainability and helping to reduce demand for over-exploited fish. “This is a crucial step in ensuring the long-term survival of vulnerable fisheries.”

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Wikipedia-style website to record every species on Earth

July 30, 2009

Coming soon to a screen near you: The Encyclopedia of Life – a user-generated database of all living things

A complete list of all the species on the planet is, for many biologists and conservationists, the natural history equivalent of the Holy Grail. So the recently-launched EoL (it stands for ‘Encyclopedia of Life’), which aims to create not just a list, but an individual web-page, for every single one of the world’s plant and animal species, is bound to cause a buzz.

Make no mistake, this will be a truly Herculean task. There may only be about 5,000 species of mammals, 8,000 species of reptiles, and 10,000 or so species of birds. But once we get to groups like flowering plants (about 250,000 species, and that’s not including hybrids), insects (over 1m species described, with perhaps another 5m new ones waiting to be discovered), let alone micro-organisms such as viruses and bacteria, it’s easy to see why EoL might seem little optimistic.

So how does EoL work? Well, like its forerunner Wikipedia, EoL is a self-perpetuating encyclopedia, written by and refereed by anyone who wants to contribute. In practice, the contributors are likely to be mainly professional scientists or talented amateur naturalists – in some cases the leading experts on a species or group. Others can add text, images and even video clips to each entry, with the ultimate goal of making information about all the world’s organisms freely available.

Accuracy will be ensured (hopefully, at least) by an expert team of curators, who will weed out any inaccuracies and clarify any confusions. Like Wikipedia, there will be no charge for anyone wishing to access the information, so writers must be willing to share their knowledge with anyone else under a ‘creative commons licence‘. Original sources will also be credited where possible.

So far, so good. But anyone familiar with recent controversies in biological science – and in particular taxonomy, classification and nomenclature – will immediately be aware of problems beyond the sheer workload involved. Broadly, these break down into three areas of potential confusion:

• What is a species? Although we know that the African elephant and Indian elephant are different species, and likewise the house sparrow is a different species from the tree sparrow, many divisions between species are not so clear-cut. Scientists may lump two previously separate species together (like the Bullock’s and Baltimore orioles of the US), or split one apart (as in bean and pink-footed geese). And when it comes to the differences between closely related plants and their many hybrids, things can get really confusing.

• What is its name? Brits call divers “divers”, Americans call them loons; likewise “skua” (UK) and “jaeger” (US). In Africa things get even more confusing, while many species of insect and plant don’t have an English name at all. And what about the non English-speaking world? OK, we could use scientific names, but even these change, as has recently happened with the classification of such common and widespread species as the tits.

• How many species are there? I’ve already touched on this – but when you realise that the 2m species currently identified represent as little as 2% of all the species on Earth, it’s easy to see why EoL may turn out to be a bit like painting the Forth Bridge – just when you think it’s finished, up pops some other obscure organism begging for entry to the club.

Despite these caveats, though, I think the founders of EoL do deserve praise and support. And as one representative of our own species, the poet Robert Browning, wrote:

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
Or what’s a heaven for?

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Global poll finds 73% want higher priority for climate

July 30, 2009

Britons among the most enthusiastic about action to stop global warming, while Americans among least willing to put environment first, according to global public opinion poll

A majority of peoples around the world want their governments to put action on climate change at the top of the political agenda, a new global public opinion poll suggests.

Unfortunately for Barack Obama though, who has put energy reform at the top of his White House to-do list, Americans are not necessarily among them.

Only 44% of Americans thought climate change should be a major preoccupation for the Obama administration, the survey co-ordinated by the University of Maryland’s Programme on International Policy Attitudes said. The only other two countries unwilling to see their governments make climate change a top focus were Iraq and the Palestinian territories. In 15 other countries though there was strong support for governments to do more to deal with climate change.

Britons were among the most enthusiastic supporters for greater government intervention, with 77% urging officials to do more. Germans, however, think their government has already done enough. Some 83% think their government has already adopted climate change action as a top priority; 27% would like the government to turn its attention elsewhere.

“The public is pulling for more — a lot more, no, but a bit more, yes. There is definitely political capital there to move the ball forward and that is pretty much universal,” said Steven Kull, the director of the survey which drew on data gathered by academic and marketing polling organisations in the respective countries. Overall about 73% of those polled believe governments should make climate change a top priority.

The poll, which sampled the opinions of 18,578 people in 19 countries, found broad popular support for making climate change a top priority extended even to those countries whose governments have yet to commit to global action. In China there was overwhelming support — 94% — for the government to keep climate change on the front burner. And in India, which is also rapidly emerging as one of the world’s leading producers of global warming pollution, 59% of the public wanted their government to make climate change a top priority.

That defies the hard line taken by the country’s environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, earlier this month against putting any cap on its greenhouse gas emissions.

Around the globe, the public was unconvinced their governments were assigning high enough priority to climate change. The disconnect suggests that there is greater public support for action on public change than elected officials realise, Kull said. “There is a tendency among policy makers to underestimate people’s readiness for action.”

Only four countries — Germany, Britain, China, and Indonesia — considered that their governments were focused on climate change. But, that did not necessarily satisfy the demand for even greater action.

Although the majority of Britons, 58%, credit the government with making climate change a major priority, even greater numbers, 89%, believe there is room for the government to do even more.

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Cycling books for the summer holidays

July 30, 2009

Cycling beats commuting on many levels – except you can’t read a book while you’re doing it. So, here’s my summer-holiday cycling reading list

With the summer holidays upon us, it’s time to think about books to read en vacances. If you’re like me, it’s a chance to catch up on some novels, always better read with momentum than crawled through three pages at a time last thing after Newsnight. For cyclists, recent years have seen a renaissance of bike-writing, as well as bike-riding. So if you’re thinking of stowing a bit of bike-lit in your saddlebag, allow me to make a few recommendations – and list some cycling books still on my “must read” list.

Because the Tour de France has just come to an end, let’s start with sport. Richard Williams signed off his superb coverage of the event this year with this:

“With the end of the Tour de France,” the novelist Paul Fournel wrote, “the summer reaches its moment of sadness: long, hot afternoons and no longer anything to get your teeth into.”

More of Fournel in a moment, but there are plenty of books around to prolong the racing fan’s contentment. For starters, Mark Cavendish has produced an autobiography almost as quickly as he finished the stage on the Champs Elysées. I can’t tell you much about the quality of Boy Racer, other than to say I received an email from a former pro I know who was none too happy about Cav’s off-the-cuff comments about him in the book, but I have heard that, as these things go, it’s well-ghosted.

A better prospect might be Bradley Wiggins’s In Pursuit of Glory, famously frank about its author’s post-Olympic depression and fondness for a bevvy. Talking of pursuing glory, Michael Hutchinson’s account of his quixotic attempt on one of cycling’s great athletic challenges, The Hour, remains a cracking read.

The stars of yesteryear have reappeared too. For nostalgics, Cycling is My Life, the autobiography of erstwhile British hero Tommy Simpson, who died on Mont Ventoux in 1967 from the combined effects of dehydration, excessive effort, brandy and amphetamines, has been reissued. Of the competing accounts of the life of his great rival and five-times Tour winner of the 1960s, Jacques Anquetil, I would choose Fallen Angel by William Fotheringham (a Guardian cycling correspondent and author) over Paul Howard’s rather luridly titled Sex, Lies and Handlebar Tape.

Another by a Guardian and Observer scribe, Richard Moore’s In Search of Robert Millar, is well regarded and very much on my shopping list. Interestingly, his subject, the enigmatic Scottish climber Millar, whose feat of 4th place in the 1984 Tour de France as best-ever British finisher was only this year matched by Wiggins, has recently emerged from semi-recluse to write, rather brilliantly, about his racing experience in a recent issue of the upmarket cycling periodical Rouleur. Rouleur also interviewed and excerpted a book by Jean Bobet, brother and fellow professional of the great Breton champion Louison. The extracts read beautifully and left me wanting more of Tomorrow, We Ride: the pick of the bunch, possibly.

I’m not a big fan of travel writing generally, and of cycling travel writing especially, as it only makes me envious that I’m not out doing it myself. But I might bring myself to re-read Tim Moore’s French Revolutions, as he is such a funny and charming writer. More off the beaten track but a great companion would be Ken Worpole, in his quiet way one of our great public intellectuals and a beautiful writer; so try his Staying Close to the River, and you will not go far wrong. And there is always the indomitable Dervla Murphy to fall back on. Her Full Tilt: From Dunkirk to Delhi by Bicycle stayed with me for its account of sleeping with a pistol under her pillow each night as she pedalled her way through Turkey.

Another classic, making the transition from travelogue now to fiction, is HG Wells’s obscure novel The Wheels of Chance: A Bicycling Idyll. Admittedly, it’s more memorable for sociological reasons – its portrait of a “New Woman” – than for great literary merit. But I couldn’t end without two literary cycling favourites. Tim Krabbé might be better-known for his noirish thrillers, The Vanishing and The Cave, but in his native Netherlands, it is The Rider that has outsold the lot. A novella-cum-memoir, superlatively translated by Sam Garrett, The Rider is an account of a one-day race that takes its reader on an extraordinary existentialist journey.

Rather like Krabbé, who is also a chess expert, the French diplomat and author Paul Fournel delights in intellectual puzzles – hence his membership of the avant-garde writing group Oulipo, which has counted Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec among its number. But his short book of pensées, Need for the Bike, is not a test but a delight: a more articulate testament to the pleasures of cycling is hard to imagine.

I’ve barely got going, but please tell us what cycling read you’ll be packing in your pannier this year.

• Matt Seaton is the author of the book Two Wheels, a revised and updated collection of his Two Wheels column for the Guardian

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Patio heaters might impress Dragons, but green credentials are hot air

July 30, 2009

Eddie Middleton told the Dragons’ Den his electric heaters produce less CO2 than the gas version. But can it be true?

Anybody watching the BBC’s Dragons’ Den a couple of weeks ago may have sat up straight when Eddie Middleton walked in and pitched for money to invest in making his eco-friendly patio heating.

Eddie claims that his heaters, which have names such as Zeus and Neptune, produce 50% less carbon dioxide than regular patio heaters because they run on electricity rather than burning LPG gas.

This matters. Demand for his products is good. His company website says that “due to very high demand”, Neptune is out of stock.

Also, according to the Energy Saving Trust, a non-profit adviser on low-energy living, there is a “patio pandemic” going on, with more than 1m of these backyard Humvees polluting the skies above British suburbia during summer evenings.

Eddie told me he is not quite saying it is climate friendly to heat the air over your back garden. More that, if you are going to heat the atmosphere, then you should buy one of his heaters to do it.

But is it true? According to the Carbon Trust, another government-backed advisory body, grid electricity produces more than twice as much carbon dioxide to deliver a unit of energy than LPG.

So how can Eddie make his electric heaters produce less CO2 than their gas rivals? His number crunching is carried out by Andy Lowe at Carbon Clear, a private “carbon management” company. Eddie sent me Andy’s calculations.

They start with an estimate provided by the Energy Saving Trust that a typical British gas patio heater produces 50kg of carbon dioxide during a typical year’s use.

Andy reckons that, given how much gas an average patio heater consumes, this means it burns for 21 hours in a typical summer. He then says that if you run Eddie’s Neptune heater for 21 hours, it produces just 26kg of CO2. Only half as much.

Fair enough. I have no problem with any of those numbers. But there is an obvious question. Does the Neptune produce as much heat as a regular gas heater? If it doesn’t, then surely the comparison is invalid.

Here comes a bit of maths, so bear with me. If the average gas-powered heater emits 50 kilograms of CO2 during 21 hours of operation, then it must emit 2.38 kilograms for every hour it is switched on. Now, according to the Carbon Trust’s Greenhouse Gas Conversion tables, a kilowatt hour of energy from burning LPG produces 0.214 kilograms of CO2. So to emit 2.38 kilograms of CO2 in an hour, the “average” heater in Andy’s calculation must have a heat output of 11.1 kilowatts.

But Eddie’s Neptune – which is advertised, I notice, as “the baby of the range” – is a 2.3 kilowatt heater. It has not much more than a fifth of the heat-generating power of the “average” gas-fired patio heater. It is no wonder it kicks out less CO2, because it kicks out a very great deal less heat as well.

When I put this to Andy, he insisted that the Neptune heater is “a direct replacement” for bigger gas heaters. “Advances in technology have made it possible to deliver a comparable heater which uses only a fraction of the energy.”

How’s that? He said that “70% of the heat generated from a gas patio heater is lost”. It heats the air and not people sitting close by, he said, whereas his infra-red electric heater heated only the people.

Well, he has a point here. Physicists among you will know that radiant heat from an electric heater is more efficient at warming objects, like people. But I am still hoping for the documentation to back up that claim that there is a 70% difference in heat delivery.

Even assuming he is correct though, Eddie’s Neptune heater is still producing substantially less heat than its rival. So his claim to produce 50% fewer emissions is not justified.

I don’t think Eddie is trying to pull a fast one. He is an enthusiast. But if you make such claims about a product selling out after TV exposure, you need to be able to back them up. He may be a straight guy, but his claim is greenwash.

Actually, though, isn’t this all nuts? Isn’t the truth that the world does not need patio heaters? Back in the real world, they are a disgraceful waste of energy, however they are powered. And calling them environmentally friendly is an insult. What’s wrong with a pullover?

• Do you know of any green claims that deserve closer examination? Email your examples to greenwash@guardian.co.uk or add your comments below

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Engineers accused of taking ‘tidal reef’ idea in Severn estuary competition

July 29, 2009

Decc rejects proposal from Rupert Armstrong-Evans but accepts very similar project from Rolls-Royce and WS Atkins

The government and two of Britain’s biggest engineering companies have been accused of taking the idea of a leading marine engineer who came up with a novel plan to harness vast amounts of tidal energy from the Severn estuary while causing only minimal ecological damage.

Rupert Armstrong-Evans, who pioneered renewable energy in Britain and now runs a marine engineering firm in Cornwall, spent 18 months researching the idea of a 12-mile long “tidal reef” for the estuary. His construction, planned to run between Minehead in Somerset and Aberthaw in the Vale of Glamorgan, would be cheaper to build and could generate as much electricity as several nuclear power stations without destroying tens of thousands of hectares of internationally protected wetlands, he claimed.

The idea was last year picked up by the RSPB which commissioned engineering consultant WS Atkins to assess its technical and economic feasibility. The 23-page Atkins report published in November 2008, confirmed that the idea was workable and could be as much as £2bn cheaper than a giant barrage. Professor Rod Rainey of Atkins, one of the world’s leading marine engineers, who did the assessment said at the time: “We believe this scheme could be more powerful but less costly than other plans being put forward, particularly the barrage.”

Armstrong-Evans’s idea was then entered in a Department of Energy and Climate Change competition to find the best way to harness the Severn’s tidal power and was shortlisted into the last five one month ago. But last week it was rejected in favour of a fundamentally similar design put forward by Rolls-Royce and WS Atkins.

The disputed design, which relies on a very low head of water rather than the Severn’s enormous tidal range, is now considered to be a surprise frontrunner for what would be Europe’s largest single green energy project. It is also politically attractive because it is more likely to appeal to the powerful consortium of green groups including the National Trust, the WWF and the RSPB, who have condemned the idea of a massive barrage.

“The government called on engineers for proposals to generate large amounts of electricity from the Severn. I spent 18 months full time devising and developing the idea, and had to raise a mortgage. This was a totally new concept in tidal power generation,” said Evans. The design requires more turbines than a large barrage but Evans said it saves greatly on weight of concrete in the foundations and installation costs.

Armstrong-Evans is one of the fathers of British marine energy and has developed hundreds of hydroelectric schemes around the world. He calculates that his idea would cut Britain’s carbon emissions by around 12m tonnes a year, create more than 30,000 jobs during construction and give a global lead for local manufacturing companies.

“The idea was entered in good faith into the government’s competition. The Atkins proposal is the same as the one I put in. It’s a dead crib. They call it a low head scheme and I call it a reef but it’s the same,” he said.

Armstrong-Evans yesterday accused the government of working for the two multinationals companies. “I smelled a rat when I did a presentation to the Department of Energy and Climate Change. They were fast asleep and had only two questions for me. I thought, at worst, that they would be a collaboration between me and Rolls-Royce. But I got a phone call saying I had not been selected.” He was further dismayed that Rolls-Royce refused to collaborate with him.

“The reef is a completely new idea for tidal energy. I took out 16 patents but they are only as good as you are prepared to fight for. The little man does not stand a chance. I would have to keep the patents up for 15 years at least and the law is stacked against me. I filed the patents purely to show that there was something in it the idea. I was quite happy to give the idea to the nation for free.”

Yesterday the government accepted that the Atkins idea developed directly out of Armstrong-Evans’s reef proposal. “The Atkins/Rolls-Royce design developed out of Atkins review of the reef proposal for the RSPB. This found fundamental engineering flaws in the reef design and came up with a different plan. We have tried very hard to provide opportunities for the tidal reef proposal to develop. But, sadly we don’t believe it can work or that it’s right to spend taxpayers money on it. This allegation that the government gave the idea to the consortium is groundless nonsense.”

A spokesperson for the RSPB said yesterday that the organisation regretted the government decision to exclude Armstrong-Evans. “It’s a shame that Atkins and Rolls-Royce could not get together with Evans. The engineering community all agree that a reef idea can work. Whereas conventional barrages generate electricity by taking advantage of large differences between high and low tides, both Evans’s reef and the Atkins model need only a few metres’ difference to drive the turbines. The extra power is gained by using more turbines which can work for much longer periods on both the incoming and outgoing tides.”

Adam Morton, head of low carbon technology at Atkins said yesterday: “I can understand how this might look. But Rupert is trying to patent the problem rather than the solution. The way in which water is used is not patentable.”

“We were introduced to Mr Evans by the department of energy and climate change as part of the process. We had a brief meeting and we decided we could not work together. No disclosure of intellectual property took place,” said a Rolls-Royce spokesman.

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India gets serious on climate change

July 29, 2009

India has resisted the external imposition of climate change law – and with good reason. But its about-turn is to be applauded

Here’s the best news I’ve seen all year: India is finally lumbering into action on climate change.

Though this country is likely to be hit harder than almost anywhere else by the climate crash, not least because its food production is largely dependent on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers, which are rapidly retreating, it has almost been a point of pride in India not to respond to the requests of richer nations to limit its emissions.

I think there are several reasons for this, not all of them discreditable. The first is that Indian people and governments have rightly perceived that when it comes to acting on climate change, most developed countries are all leaf and no plums. They make grand statements (remember the G8 meeting) about the need to cut emissions, but in most cases they haven’t been translating them into domestic policy (the UK is now an exception). With some justice, India has suspected that it is being urged to implement global policies that the rich nations have no intention of honouring.

Indians are also painfully aware that the rich nations in the past deliberately prevented their nation from developing. England, for example, banned the import of calico (cotton cloth) from India, in order to protect its own textile industries. It went on to smash Indian looms and cut off the thumbs of Indian weavers in order prevent them from making their superior products. As Ha Joon Chang shows in his book Kicking Away the Ladder, England’s industrial revolution was made possible by preventing India’s. Many people there suspect that attempts to limit India’s future greenhouse gas emissions have the same purpose.

Partly as a result, and partly because it’s the quickest and easiest route to mass electrification, India has been investing heavily in coal plants, while neglecting its great potential to produce renewable energy. But suddenly this seems to be changing. Draft documents released today show that the government intends to announce 20GW of solar power investments by 2020.

This is equivalent to one eighth of India’s installed capacity of all forms of electricity generation, or roughly a quarter of the UK’s (we have 80GW of plant, about 70% of which is powered by fossil fuel). China and Japan have similar targets, but because most of India is closer to the equator, the capacity factor (the amount of power you get from any given amount of plant) will be higher in India.

Well that’s the good news. The bad news is that India is also in the middle of a programme to increase coal capacity by 79GW – equivalent to the entire UK power sector – by 2012. The new solar plant will supplement, not substitute, its other forms of power generation. But at least the $19bn India is spending on it shows that the country is starting to get serious about climate change. Whether it makes any commitments at Copenhagen is another matter.

www.monbiot.com

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Not under our backyard, say Germans, in blow to CO2 plans

July 29, 2009

German carbon capture plan appears to be a victim of ‘numbyism’ – not under my backyard

It was meant to be the world’s first demonstration of a technology that could help save the planet from global warming – a project intended to capture emissions from a coal-fired power station and bury them safely underground.

But the German carbon capture plan has ended with CO₂ being pumped directly into the atmosphere, following local opposition at it being stored underground.

The scheme appears a victim of “numbyism” – not under my backyard.

Opposition to the carbon capture plan has contributed to a growing public backlash against renewable energy projects, raising fears that Europe will struggle to meet its low-carbon commitments. Last week, the Danish firm Vestas blamed British “nimbies” opposing wind farms for its decision to close its turbine factory on the Isle of Wight.

Many countries continue to use coal for generating power as it is the cheapest and most readily available fuel in the world. It will probably power the development of China and India. But coal is also seen as the dirtiest fuel. So, Vattenfall’s Schwarze Pumpe project in Spremberg, northern Germany, launched in a blaze of publicity last September, was a beacon of hope, the first scheme to link the three key stages of trapping, transporting and burying the greenhouse gases.

The Swedish company, however, surprised a recent conference when it admitted that the €70m (£60.3m) project was venting the CO₂ straight into the atmosphere. “It was supposed to begin injecting by March or April of this year but we don’t have a permit. This is a result of the local public having questions about the safety of the project,” said Staffan Gortz, head of carbon capture and storage communication at Vattenfall. He said he did not expect to get a permit before next spring: “People are very, very sceptical.”

The spread of localised resistance is a force that some fear could sink Europe’s attempts to build 10 to 12 demonstration projects for carbon capture and storage (CCS) by 2015. The plan had been to transport up to 100,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide from the power plant each year and inject it into depleted gas reservoirs at a giant gasfield near the Polish border.

Scientists maintain that public safety fears are groundless: the consequences of escaping CO₂ would be to the climate, not to public health. Many big environmental groups support CCS, both off and onshore, as a necessary evil in the battle against climate change.

But Jim Footner, a Greenpeace climate campaigner, said the German protests were “a stark warning to those that think CCS is an easy solution to the huge climate problems of coal-fired power stations”.

The first wake-up call came in March, when a Dutch council objected to Shell’s plans to store CO₂ in depleted gas fields under the town of Barendrecht, near Rotterdam.

This was despite a successful environmental impact assessment and the enthusiastic backing of the Dutch government, which, in September, must decide whether to give Shell the green light, despite the council’s opposition.

Wim van de Wiel, a Shell spokesman, said: “For Shell the only suitable location for the tender was, and still is, Barendrecht, because of the safety and the depleted status of the [gas] field.”

Jeff Chapman, chief executive of the the Carbon Capture & Storage Association, said Vattenfall should study the example of Total, which made great efforts to engage the local community when it launched its CCS pilot project in Lacq, southern France.

Stuart Haszeldine, a CCS expert at the University of Edinburgh, warned of the danger of opposition towards CCS snowballing into a “bandwagon of negativity” if too many early projects were rejected. “Once you’ve screwed up one or two of them, people are going to think ‘if they rejected this in Barendrecht, there must be a reason’,” he said.

In the UK, CCS is one of the four “pillars” of the government’s decarbonisation strategy. A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “We plan to store the CO₂ from CCS plants offshore, for example in depleted oil and gas fields in the North Sea. We are one of the first countries to have legislation … to regulate environmental and safety risks.”