The Guardian

Oil industry faces black future

July 28, 2009

Environmental activist network argues that the oil industry might be approaching a tipping point from fall in the price, advances in technology and policies on climate change

A long-term decline in the demand for oil could undermine the huge investments in Canadian tar sands, which have been heavily opposed by environmentalists, according to a report published today.

The report, by Greenpeace, will make uncomfortable reading for the companies that are investing tens of billions of pounds to exploit the hard-to-extract oil in the belief that demand and the price would climb inexorably as countries such as China and India industrialise.

Citing projections from the oil producers’ cartel Opec and the International Energy Agency, as well as various oil experts, the report casts doubt on the conventional assumption that consumption and prices will begin gathering pace once the world pulls itself out of recession.

It argues that alongside the cyclical fall in the oil price there are more fundamental structural changes taking place. These are driven by advances in energy efficiency and alternative energy, cleaner vehicles, government policies on climate change and concerns over energy security. Greenpeace has posted the report to 200 shareholders in Shell and BP, including pension funds, in an effort to put pressure on the companies to think again. BP reports quarterly results tomorrow and Shell on Thursday.

Lorne Stockman, the author of the report, said: “A peak in oil demand was barely discussed even a year ago, but now it is a viable idea. When it happens, I wouldn’t want to guess, but it will happen sooner than we thought. There has been lots of talk about a supply peak, but it is good to start talking about a demand peak, and that has huge implications for these companies.

“All of the international oil companies as you look beyond 2020 need a high oil price to be profitable, because they are increasingly being pushed to develop expensive resources in not just the tar sands, but in deep water and offshore Arctic sites.

“But there is something more structural going on,” he added. “Governments are beginning to act, and not just the Obama administration. In the EU, the policy driver is climate change, and in China and the US, it is about energy security and the vulnerability of the economy to volatility in the oil price.”

The rush to exploit the tar sands in Canada has been described as a modern day gold rush that has led to a huge boom in once sleepy towns in the province of Alberta. The oil was once considered too difficult and expensive to extract as it is a mixture of clay, water and bitumen.

Many of the projects have been mothballed until the oil price recovers. It has fallen from a peak of $147 a barrel and is currently at about $68. Merrill Lynch estimates that the price would need to settle at about $80 to make further investment viable. Critics argue that tar sands extraction is disastrous to the environment, causing deforestation, requiring huge amounts of water and greenhouse emissions three to five times greater than conventional crude.

The report notes that Opec and the IEA have been revising projections for oil demand downwards since 2006, with by far the sharpest revision this year. Opec has revised its 2025 oil forecast down by 12% within the past four years.

Peter Hughes, who spent much of his career at BP and BG, and is now director for global energy at consultancy firm Arthur D Little, recently wrote a report titled ‘The Beginning of the End for Oil?’ He supports the Greenpeace view and said the correlation between oil demand and GDP growth has been weakened. “It is widely accepted that demand in OECD countries has plateaued and is going into decline but it has also been thought that would be massively outweighed by growth in China. But the Chinese think long-term and identified some time ago that the biggest threat to their economic growth was an increasing dependency on imported energy, which is anathema to them. The conclusion is clear – to reduce the reliance on hydrocarbons through energy efficiency and fundamental technology change. I think we will reach peak oil demand in the middle of the next decade.”

About 50% of oil demand in the US fuels cars and the report takes hope from the Obama administration having tied recent bailouts for the industry to the development of cleaner vehicles. But it notes the US is far behind China, where government mandates mean new Chinese cars are 56% more fuel-efficient than those built in Detroit. Fuel-efficient cars in China attract 1% sales tax and sports utility vehicles, 40%.

Greenpeace also contends that a high oil price is simply unsustainable. It cites research from Cambridge Energy Research Associates, which suggests that economies become constrained when the price moves into a band between $100 and $120 a barrel, causing the price to fall back. Another report from energy business analysts Douglas Westwood puts the “recession threshold” even lower, at $80 a barrel.

Shell, which has delayed a number of tar sands projects, argues that energy supply will struggle to keep up with the demands of a growing global population and that in the long term there will be upward pressures on energy prices that justify investing in the Canadian tar sands. “Our first oil sands operation, the Athabasca Oil Sands Project (60% Shell share) was built between 1999 and 2003, when the oil price was considerably lower,” a spokeswoman said. Shell has the highest exposure of the majors to the tar sands and is most at risk from a decline in demand.

There are contrary views. The Saudi oil minister warned in May that the world could be facing another oil shock, with prices above $150 within two to three years through a lack of investment in new capacity. The International Monetary Fund has expressed similar concerns. Even Greenpeace does not suggest that there will not be temporary squeezes on demand and price spikes. But it believes that the world might fast be approaching a tipping pointthat could have profound implications.

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How to be a green school

July 28, 2009

Teachers and students want to do good things for the environment, but sometimes they can’t see the wood for the trees. Zac Goldsmith sets out five things all schools can do

It’s a worrying fact that around 400,000 British children are on behavioural drugs such as Ritalin. Some, no doubt, need the treatment, but the sheer number of children taking these drugs suggests that in our society, childhood itself has come to be seen as a disease.

Children spend an average of 13.9 hours a week in front of their televisions, and six hours in front of their computers. It can’t be healthy. According to Unicef, British children are the unhappiest in Europe, despite unprecedented material wealth.

There are many reasons for this, but one, surely, is the fact that children have become increasingly insulated from the natural world. We’ve all heard of the surveys revealing that teenagers think cows lay eggs, and others where children can identify more brand logos than trees, by a staggering margin.

My view is that children will form a significant part of the green fightback. They instinctively understand the value of the environment. Ask any 10-year-old if Google – at its height – was really worth more than the Amazon rainforest, and they’d laugh.

But if the current crop of children is to emerge as a generation that cherishes the environment, they need to understand it, connect with it and love it. That goal must form part of the school experience. Schools collectively are huge energy consumers, producers of waste, and consumers of resources. What can they do?

1 Good food

One thing we all do is eat and so of all the levers for change, food is the most far reaching. Even a small change in the way we eat has huge implications – in schools, that is particularly so. The government spends approximately £2bn each year on food for schools, hospitals and prisons. Imagine the impact if instead of buying the cheapest junk on the world’s markets, that money was invested in local, sustainable produce?

The benefits would be huge. We’d see money flowing into our collapsing rural economy. We’d see a significant reduction in the amount of oil used to ship and fly food around the world. We’d actively reduce our dependence on a global food system that is ravaging the world’s breadbaskets. And of course, we’d see the market flooded with good quality sustainable food. With levels of obesity, diabetes and coronary heart disease increasing, and with growing evidence linking diet with mental health, crime and antisocial behaviour, that’s no bad thing.

We’re failing nationally. But there are some exciting local examples, for instance, in Merton, south London, where parents set themselves key goals: to win funding for a working kitchen in every school and to improve the quality of ingredients and cooking standards. It was ambitious, and no one knew if it would work. But it did. Led by the formidable Jackie Schneider, they pressurised the council to put aside £450,000 to refurbish primary school kitchens and allow them to produce fresh food on site. They also set up a twinning scheme with a nearby farm. Inspired by their success, I helped set up a similar campaign for Richmond and Kingston, called School Food Matters. The group is already making huge progress.

2 Cooking and growing

It’s not just the quality of the food. Children should also know about preparing it, and growing it. Growing food – as a process – has a clear value. Catherine Sneed, a counsellor in San Francisco’s county jail, noticed early on in her career that the same people kept returning to prison. Inspired by The Grapes of Wrath, a novel in which connectedness to the land binds families together, she set up a small prison garden. Inmates loved it, and the project flourished. The food they grow feeds hundreds of low-income families in the area, and inmates who take part in the project are a staggering 25% less likely to return to jail than those who don’t.

If growing food is therapeutic for California’s prisoners, there is every reason to believe it will be good for all of us. All schools should teach children basic cooking skills. Every school should be able to buy sustainable, good quality food wherever possible from local sources. Every school should include food growing in the curriculum. For some, that will mean twinning with willing farms. For others, it will mean literally building their own small farms.

3 The school run

Anyone driving through London after the school term ends will notice immediately how much easier it is to get around. The school run contributes massively to congestion. There are various schemes set up to combat this, not least the walk to school movement, whose annual walk-to-school month has inspired children and parents to promote healthier living and conserve the environment. But we need more, and parents should add their own pressure to calls for a dedicated school bus scheme.

In the US, yellow school buses represent the largest mass transit system in the country. About 450,000 of them take more than 25 million children to and from school. Each school bus takes between 30 to 60 cars off of the road during rush hour times. The leading US school bus manufacturer, IC Bus, is now producing the nation’s only line of hybrid school buses, which improve fuel efficiency by up to 70%. Each hybrid school bus is estimated to save $3,000 (£1,820) and 800 gallons of fuel annually. Our roads and our environment – not to mention commuters – are crying out for such a scheme to be introduced across the UK.

4 Energy savings

If schools successfully implement energy reduction measures, most can save as much as 10% on utility bills – water and heating – which, even for a small primary school, can run to £30,000 a year. With decreasing budgets and increasing costs, this is money they need: UK schools spend approximately £450m on energy each year, three times as much as they do on books, about 3.5% of their budgets.

It’s a challenge that needs to be met, and it can be incorporated into the classroom. In many schools, children are already taught about the smaller measures, like turning off the lights at the end of lessons. Beyond that, children can help calculate the school’s energy usage, and identify ways to cut it. They can use a school neutral carbon calculator (www.earthteam.net/GWCampaign/calculate.html) to help calculate their “carbon footprint” and understand how their school can reduce its emissions.

Parents, teachers and children can also lobby their local authority to champion the purchase of renewable power through their joint buying consortia. If it refuses, they can opt out of the contract and buy their power independently.

5 Waste

In the UK we generate enough waste every hour to fill the Albert Hall. At a time when pressure on the world’s resources has never been greater, we have to find a way to be more efficient. There’s a lot that schools can do.

As a start, they can better understand the issue, and following that, they can incorporate waste reduction in the school, and hopefully in their own homes.

Of all the waste we generate, plastic bags are perhaps the greatest symbol of our throwaway society. They are used, then forgotten, and they leave a terrible legacy. The figures are shocking. Each year 13bn bags are used and thrown away in the UK. Each bag will be used for an average of 20 minutes, and, once discarded, will take up to 1,000 years to decompose. About 200m will litter the countryside. Others find their way into the seas, where they are mistaken for food and kill up to 100,000 marine mammals each year, as well as countless birds.

Many countries have taken the initiative to ban or phase out bags, including China, South Africa, India and Kenya. In the UK, we’re miles behind, but there are some good local examples. The campaign in Richmond borough is being spearheaded by the schools themselves.

I had the huge pleasure of walking with a class of bright, 11-year-old children – unannounced – to a Tesco store in Kew. The children demanded to see the manager, and despite initial reluctance, were able to pose a series of hard-hitting and brilliant questions about packaging and plastic bags. They now fully intend to take the same questions to the chairman, Sir Terry Leahy, in Tesco headquarters.

None of these ideas is revolutionary, but all will make a difference – and together they will make a real difference. They are just a few ideas on what children and parents can do to green our schools, and help ensure that the next generation has the appetite, understanding and knowledge to deal with the environmental crisis we face.

Zac Goldsmith, former editor of the Ecologist magazine, is the Conservative parliamentary candidate for Richmond and North Kingston. His book, The Constant Economy, will be published in September by Atlantic Books

www.eco-schools.org.uk

www.schoolfoodmatters.com

www.mertonparents.co.uk

www.greeneruponthames.org

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World will warm faster than predicted in next five years, study warns

July 28, 2009

New estimate based on the forthcoming upturn in solar activity and El Niño southern oscillation cycles is expected to silence global warming sceptics

The world faces record-breaking temperatures as the sun’s activity increases, leading the planet to heat up significantly faster than scientists had predicted for the next five years, according to a study.

The hottest year on record was 1998, and the relatively cool years since have led to some global warming sceptics claiming that temperatures have levelled off or started to decline. But new research firmly rejects that argument.

The research, to be published in Geophysical Research Letters, was carried out by Judith Lean, of the US Naval Research Laboratory, and David Rind, of Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

The work is the first to assess the combined impact on global temperature of four factors: human influences such as CO₂ and aerosol emissions; heating from the sun; volcanic activity and the El Niño southern oscillation, the phenomenon by which the Pacific Ocean flips between warmer and cooler states every few years.

The analysis shows the relative stability in global temperatures in the last seven years is explained primarily by the decline in incoming sunlight associated with the downward phase of the 11-year solar cycle, together with a lack of strong El Niño events. These trends have masked the warming caused by CO₂ and other greenhouse gases.

As solar activity picks up again in the coming years, the research suggests, temperatures will shoot up at 150% of the rate predicted by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Lean and Rind’s research also sheds light on the extreme average temperature in 1998. The paper confirms that the temperature spike that year was caused primarily by a very strong El Niño episode. A future episode could be expected to create a spike of equivalent magnitude on top of an even higher baseline, thus shattering the 1998 record.

The study comes within days of announcements from climatologists that the world is entering a new El Niño warm spell. This suggests that temperature rises in the next year could be even more marked than Lean and Rind’s paper suggests. A particularly hot autumn and winter could add to the pressure on policy makers to reach a meaningful deal at December’s climate-change negotiations in Copenhagen.

Bob Henson, of the National Centre for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, said: “To claim that global temperatures have cooled since 1998 and therefore that man-made climate change isn’t happening is a bit like saying spring has gone away when you have a mild week after a scorching Easter.” Temperature highs and lows

1998

Hottest year of the millennium

Caused by a major El Niño event. The climate phenomenon results from warming of the tropical Pacific and causes heatwaves, droughts and flooding around the world. The 1998 event caused 16% of the world’s coral reefs to die.

1957

Most sunspots in a year since 1778

The sun’s activity waxes and wanes on an 11-year cycle. The late 1950s saw a peak in activity and were relatively warm years for the period.

1601

Coldest year of the millennium

Ash from the huge eruption the previous year of a Peruvian volcano called Huaynaputina blocked out the sun. The volcanic winter caused Russia’s worst famine, with a third of the population dying, and disrupted agriculture from China to France.

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The low-carbon wine baa

July 23, 2009

Winemaker deploys miniature sheep to cut fuel costs and keep grass short

A New Zealand winemaker believes he has struck upon the solution to reducing the carbon footprint of wine – and the answer, which may come as no great surprise, lies in sheep. Miniature sheep, that is.

There are only 300 of them in the world and they were originally bred as cute miniature pets, but Peter Yealands believes that babydoll sheep could help him to reduce the environmental footprint of his wine.

By allowing the rare breed to graze on the grass between his vines, Yealands says he can dramatically reduce the energy his wine takes to make and ultimately enable the process to be more sustainable.

Wine producers often use sheep to keep grass short, but flocks must be removed when the vines bud because the animals will eat them too. So, to prevent the grass using up precious nutrients and water, and to prevent the spread of disease and fungus, growers normally use tractors to do the job.

With 1,000 hectares in Yealands’ vineyard that means driving 3,500km for each of the 12 times a year the grass has to be mowed. As a result, for Yealands, diesel makes up about 60% of his energy costs. To avoid using a tractor, last year he experimented by letting loose giant guinea pigs. That worked initially, he said. “But once the hawks had a taste for them they were sitting prey. We were losing them by the hour. Besides, we would have needed 11 million of them to make it work.”

Now Yealands has turned his attention to babydolls, a rare breed of sheep which only reach about 60cm tall when fully grown, pictured left in a Californian vineyard. Because the grapes tend only to start growing from about 110cm off the ground the sheep can’t reach them. Yealands has tested 10 of the sheep on a 125-hectare patch of vines.

By selectively breeding them with another more common sheep, the Merino Saxon, which is favoured for its meat, Yealands now hopes to get his stock up to the 10,000 he needs within the next five years. If successful, the flock should save him NZ$1.5m (£600,000) a year in diesel alone, and he hopes to sell the sheep for meat too.

Marleen Stumpel, co-director of AdVintage Wines, a London-based supplier of carbon-neutral wines, said the babydolls are an unusual approach. She said most wine makers reduce their carbon footprint by paying to offset their emissions. “There is a growing market for it, but the wine does tend to be a little bit more expensive,” she said. Photograph: Kathryn Cohen

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Wind turbine factory sit-in workers accuse Ed Miliband of green failure

July 22, 2009

The government’s green credentials were called into question today by workers staging a sit-in at a wind turbine factory that is due to close this month.

Around 30 workers facing redundancy took over the management suite at the Vestas factory on the Isle of Wight. Police reinforcements were brought in but workers claimed they would not leave until the government stepped in to save the factory and more than 500 jobs.

One of those barricaded in with sleeping bags and enough food to last days, gave his name as Michael. He argued that it was “crazy” for energy and climate change secretary Ed Miliband to be making “statement after statement” about green energy but standing by as the factory closed down. “It would be a tiny step financially to keep this factory open, but it would be a huge statement about the government’s commitment to the green economy,” he said.

The Newport factory is due to close at the end of the month. The Danish company that owns it has refused to comment on the protest, but when the cuts were announced it cited a “lack of political initiatives” and an obstructive planning system.

The protest comes soon after Miliband claimed the green revolution will create 1.2 million jobs by 2020. A spokeswoman for the Department of Energy and Climate Change said: “The UK has a strong future in wind energy. In our renewable energy strategy we earmarked up to £120m to support investment in the development of the offshore wind industry.”

• This article was amended on Wednesday 22 July 2009. Ed Miliband is energy and climate change secretary, not environment secretary. This has been corrected.

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Patrick Barkham: The plight of Britain’s ancient trees

July 22, 2009

We are home to some 100,000 of the oldest trees in Europe. But is our neglect and ill-treatment in danger of killing them off?

Above crumpled grey roots like the enormous feet of a prehistoric elephant, leaves form a vaulted roof as grand as a cathedral. Huge limbs stretch out for 24 metres on each side. They smell damp. Stand beneath “the Tree”, as this magical old beech is known to anyone who walks this corner of the Chilterns, and you feel in the presence of something living and breathing. Its trunk is polished smooth from admirers who have scrambled into its embrace, and it has even brought its charisma and great girth to bear on films such as Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. This tree has lived for 400 years but now it is dying. Green summer weeds sprout on the ground below its huge canopy, sunlight now penetrating its thinning head of leafy hair. “The tree isn’t capturing all the light that it once did,” explains Bob Davis, head forester for the National Trust’s 5,000-acre estate at Ashridge. “It is slowly shutting down. We’ve decided not to do any surgery on it and allow it to decline naturally into senescence.”

In its dotage, this great tree is being carefully nurtured. Across the country, however, many of our estimated 100,000 ancient trees – which could represent 70% of all ancient trees in Europe – are neglected or at risk of being felled. This week, they get a new guardian: Brian Muelaner, a forester turned conservationist, is to count all the ancient trees on land belonging to the National Trust, which could turn out to be the largest private owner of ancient and notable trees in northern Europe. Muelaner’s new job as the Trust’s ancient tree officer will help push along the Ancient Tree Hunt, a five-year project led by the Woodland Trust, which for the first time is recording every ancient tree in Britain. “If we don’t know where they are, we can’t protect them,” says Muelaner. “If we can’t protect them, we don’t know if they can survive.”

A tree is defined as ancient if it is unusually old for its species. It is said that an oak spends 300 years growing, 300 years living and 300 years dying. Such a long-lived species would have to be 600 years old to be classified as ancient. Beeches are prone to fungal attack and are less long-lived: an ancient beech is anything over 300 years old. Birch trees have even shorter lives; one that has lived for two centuries is very old.

Ancient trees are ecological treasures because they provide unique habitats for rare plants, insects, birds and mammals. When they become ancient, trees such as oaks and sweet chestnuts “grow down”, dying at the top and forming a new crown of leaves below so the tree shrinks and hunches like a very old man. Ancient trees also hollow out: fungi feed on the deadwood in the heart of the tree and invertebrates such as rare beetles move into the hollows, followed by birds and bats. Three-quarters of our 17 species of bat are known to roost in trees. Some plant species can only survive on ancient trees: over time, the pH of bark changes and certain rare lichens only grow on ancient bark.

With a laughing Buddha around his neck, Muelaner looks like a hippie rock star, but he is not a tree-hugger. “That doesn’t do it for me, but I understand it,” he says. “The mood an ancient tree puts you in, it just takes your breath away; you know you are by something extremely important and significant. When you are under an ancient tree, it’s very good for your soul.” He compares a century-old beech nearby the 400-year-old tree. “It’s like the difference between an 80-year-old man who is full of knowledge and experience and a cocksure 15-year-old who thinks he knows everything. You can discard those people as doddery old folks or you could use them for their knowledge. You can learn so much from ancient trees about how a tree survives. How does an organism survive for 1,000 years in the same spot? It doesn’t get to move to a better position. So it adapts.”

Standing beneath the huge old beech, contemplating its warty imperfections and huge stretch-marks where its trunk has bent and twisted, it seems incredible that it has stood witness to four centuries of humans scurrying around it. While this example partly owes its long life to being pollarded by humans over the centuries (the traditional way of harvesting its branches at head height, pollarding mimics the natural retrenchment of trees such as oaks, and ensures species like beech don’t grow too tall and fragile), trees have their own clever ways of prolonging their life. They can eat themselves. When fungus attacks the dead heartwood, a tree might send aerial roots into the hollow and start drawing the nutrients out, recycling itself so it lives longer. Trees can also walk. Slowly. If a branch touches the ground, it can send out roots and grow up again.

Our wealth of long-lived trees is a happy accident: a legacy of our royal hunting forests, our domineering aristocracy and our lack of efficiency – compared with our north European neighbours – in harvesting our forests for timber. The last century, however, has not been kind to ancient trees. We have ploughed too close to them, grazed too intensively around them and used fertilisers and pesticides too wantonly, killing both trees and species of fungi that have a symbiotic relationship with them. Then there was the ripping out of native broad-leaved trees and planting of supposedly more productive non-native conifers after the second world war. “The Forestry Commission, the National Trust, private landowners, everyone was guilty in its day. There was a national drive for it,” says Muelaner. “Now we know the unique historical, cultural and biological importance of these trees, and there is a national movement to reverse the bad management of the past.”

Trees may be impressively long-lived but they are more fragile than we imagine. Too many livestock sheltering under a tree and defecating there can fatally damage it. Even a footpath under a tree can compress its roots and destroy it. One day, Davis discovered a group of druids worshipping the great beech at Ashridge with a small fire. The tree did not look as if it had been harmed but even a mild scorching – with no visible damage – can cause a tree’s sap to boil and kill it. Ancient trees are often hollow: the holes make fantastic dens but children often light small fires in them. “You lose your ancient tree just like that,” Muelaner snaps his fingers. “We do things inadvertently and it’s gone. We can’t put it back. We can’t recreate that habitat like we can with grassland. If we kill an ancient tree, we have to wait 500 years to restore that habitat.”

Trees can also die of sunburn. Close to the great beech at Ashridge, another beech is dying because a vast branch of another tree fell nearby, exposing this tree to the sun. Beech has thin bark and, just like a pale-skinned human, if it has grown up protected from the sun and is suddenly exposed, it burns horribly. Grey squirrels stripping bark is an increasing problem: holes in the bark allow fungal diseases in, which can weaken a tree and finally cause it to fall over. Fungal diseases introduced by squirrels also stain the quality beech wood that the Chilterns is renowned for, making it commercially worthless. “It’s a serious economic and ecological issue. It’s a total disaster,” says Muelaner.

Ancient trees are not merely great statues to biodiversity, they document human history; they have a social and cultural significance, as well as an ecological one. The ancient trunk pictured at the top of this article bears the scars of decades of graffiti. “It is vandalism but then it becomes historic,” he says. During the second world war, American soldiers shot deer, chased local women and prepared for war in the woods at Ashridge. On 4 May 1944, a few weeks before D-Day, when many young men would perish, a group of GIs carved a “V” for victory and the names of their home states – from Texas to South Dakota – into the trunk of another Chiltern beech nearby. It is still there, a memorial in bark, the carving slowly fattening as the tree grows so you can rest a finger in the V now.

Muelaner, whose post has been funded for three years by the Cadbury family, will accelerate the process of logging our ancient trees. So far, the Woodland Trust has logged 38,000 ancient trees through the work of ecologists and ordinary members of the public, who can record trees at ancient-tree-hunt.org.uk. Our great wealth of ancient trees may not remain unknown for much longer, but they are still relatively unprotected. Other countries preserve ancient trees by listing them like an old house or ancient monument. In Britain, the only protection is a tree preservation order, which can be circumvented by developers if it is proved trees are dead, dying or dangerous (and most ancient trees, by definition, are dying: it just takes them three centuries).

Muelaner points to the enormous beech at Ashridge. “If France, Germany or the Scandinavian countries had a tree like that, there would be plaques everywhere and it would be a national monument,” he says. As well as better protection, he believes we need to create ancient tree-like habitat by planting young trees such as birches that age quickly and provide dead wood or by deliberately maiming some trees to create hollows and dead areas so beloved of smaller living things.

“The speed of our societies nowadays mean that trees are that much more important to us as places where we are grounded and are at peace,” says Muelaner. “We need them now more than we ever needed them before”.

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Socially aware chocoholics rejoice as Cadbury’s Dairy Milk goes Fairtrade

July 22, 2009

The firm commits to buying cocoa at price which offers cash premium to farmers, in a deal expected to give huge boost to the campaign

Good news: eating bars of Dairy Milk is no longer greedy — it’s snacking with a social conscience.

Monday morning was just another shift for workers at Cadbury’s Dairy Milk factory at Bournville, in the West Midlands. They worked studiously — oblivious to the mouth-watering smell of molten chocolate — as bars whirred past on conveyor belts, 400 a minute, 24,000 an hour, more than 500,000 a day. But although it looked like business as usual, the company was quietly undergoing one of the biggest changes in its nearly 200-year history of chocolate-making, as the first Fairtrade bars rolled off the production line.

Quakers

Britain’s biggest-selling chocolate bar becoming a Fairtrade product is the equivalent of finding the golden ticket for a movement that has been at the fringes of the retail sector for the last 15 years. In one swoop, the distinctive black Fairtrade mark (albeit next to the Rorschachian 2012 Olympic logo) will be placed under the noses of consumers in 30,000 shops across the country in the coming days.

Sitting under stern portraits of the Cadbury family, whose Quaker values shaped the business, Trevor Bond, its UK managing director, said making Dairy Milk Fairtrade is a “first step”.

“This is 300m bars of chocolate a year — that’s massive change for everyone, and has taken time to organise. We will go as fast as we collectively can.”

The addition of Dairy Milk is expected to increase UK Fairtrade sales by 25%, after they reached £712.6m last year. Bond said it is a signal of Cadbury’s commitment that it has chosen one of its largest brands as a starting point. Other varieties such as Fruit & Nut and Wholenut will follow once Fairtrade sources for ingredients such as hazelnuts and raisins are established.

Barbara Crowther, director of policy and communication at the Fairtrade Foundation, said the move is a “milestone” for the charity.

“It is 15 years since we first put the Fairtrade mark on a bar of chocolate, and during that time we’ve seen the importance of the Fairtrade pricing mechanism, and the stability it brings in volatile markets.”

Other companies are making similar moves. For example, all Sainsbury’s bananas are now Fairtrade, while Tate & Lyle intends to have all its products certified Fairtrade by the end of this year.

Cadbury, as a private-sector company, is judged by investors on its ability to increase profits margins — not the size of its heart. The Fairtrade pledge has seen it agree a minimum price of $1,750 a tonne for cocoa — a figure based on the Fairtrade minimum of $1,600, plus a $150 “social premium”.

Cocoa is currently trading at $2,000 on the open market — well above the floor set by Fairtrade. This makes it an opportune time for Cadbury to switch — having little impact on its purchase prices. But it means the company is now locked in if prices fall. “We take the ‘if there is no beans there’s no bars’ approach,” said Bond. “This is therefore as much of a commercial decision as advertising on TV. It won’t decimate our profit margins. It is an investment.”

The terms of the Cadbury agreement will triple the volume of Fairtrade cocoa bought from Ghana to 15,000 tonnes, with the social premium ploughed into farming communities weakened by urbanisation and low crop yields. Poor incomes are discouraging young people from farming cocoa in the country, where the average age of cocoa farmers is 51. It is therefore seen as also in the interest of chocolate manufacturers such as Cadbury to increase farm incomes, securing sustainable supplies around the world.

Rival Mars has pledged to buy 100% of its cocoa from sustainable sources by 2020, and has chosen to work with the Rainforest Alliance, with the logo carried on its Galaxy bars. Nestlé, meanwhile, is working with the International and World Cocoa foundations.

Bananas

Buying Fairtrade has historically required consumers to pay more, for less known brands. But Cadbury is committed to maintain its price, at 50p for a 49g bar of Dairy Milk. Sainsbury’s adopted the same policy when switching to Fairtrade bananas in 2007. “The whole point of Fairtrade is, it is fair,” said Liz Jarman, head of Fairtrade and product development at Sainsbury’s. “But it has to be sustainable for our business and for theirs, that’s the only kind of supply model that works. Since we have made the conversion, we have seen our banana sales increase 10%.”

With Britain in recession, Bond concedes consumers might have preferred a discount: “People might say ‘this is the wrong time, why not give 2p off instead?’ But consumers want to buy more Fairtrade products.” As for the bigger picture, he says his “mum was worried” the chocolate might taste different but he reassured her “Dairy Milk still tastes the same”.

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London to Cardiff rail line will be electrified to cut carbon footprint

July 21, 2009

One of Britain’s busiest rail lines is to be electrified in a move that will introduce greener and more reliable services for millions of passengers.

The government is finalising plans to transform the Great Western mainline as part of a drive to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from transport. The programme will involve installing hundreds of miles of electric cables as well as alterations to tunnels, bridges and stations on one of Britain’s oldest rail routes.

An announcement could come as soon as Thursday, although the financing is still being put in place. The Department for Transport (DfT) and Network Rail, owner of Britain’s rail infrastructure, have discussed electrifying the route from London Paddington to Cardiff, taking in Reading and Bristol, as well as the popular commuter route from London to Oxford.

However, the programme is expected to be carried out in phases over the next decade in order to minimise disruption.

Britain lags behind many of its European counterparts in electrical coverage of its rail system, with only 40% of the 20,000-mile network electrified. Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, has pledged to electrify swaths of the network, led by Great Western and the Midland mainline from St Pancras to Sheffield, in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from transport by 14% by 2020.

Train operators said electrification would bring quicker and more reliable services for passengers, as well as giving rail a green edge over car and air travel. Michael Roberts, chief executive of the Association of Train Operating Companies, said: “Electrification brings with it the dual benefits of helping to make rail services more attractive to customers and drawing them away from cars and planes. It also relies on lower-carbon sources of energy.” First Great Western, the main operator on the Great Western network, carries 84 million passengers a year.

According to Network Rail, the diesel trains that travel on the Great Western route emit at least double the carbon dioxide output per mile of an electric train. The government-backed company has also calculated that it will cost £800,000 a track mile just to erect the cabling. Once work on tunnels, bridges and culverts is added in electrifying the 118-mile stretch from London to Bristol could cost £380m, according to Network Rail.

It is understood that the DfT and Network Rail have discussed funding the work through an increase in Network Rail’s borrowings. Network Rail’s debt is underwritten by the state and the government will pay off the interest over a number of decades, minimising the immediate impact on the taxpayer.

Stephen Glaister, professor of transport and infrastructure at Imperial College London, said the benefits of electrifying thousands of miles of railway track would be undermined if trains were not powered by energy produced from low-carbon sources such as nuclear plants or wind farms. Otherwise, electrification would simply increase demand for electricity from coal- and gas-powered plants, he added. “The government has to clarify where the electricity is coming from. In a world where nuclear power is declining and renewables cannot fill the gap, where else is it going to come from apart from burning more coal and gas?”

Lord Adonis, the transport secretary, said last week: “Transport accounts for a significant amount of our domestic emissions. Therefore decarbonising this sector has to be front and centre of efforts to meet our obligations and commitments to tackle climate change.”

The government is also encouraging greater production, and acquisition, of electric and hybrid cars as part of its low-carbon policy.

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One giant leap for a greener Britain

July 20, 2009

Only an Apollo-like effort of imagination and action will help us move to a low carbon economy

Forty years since the Eagle landed on the moon, the idea of a new Apollo project has become shorthand for how we should tackle climate change: politics forcing through the technological limits, a decade-long push, and a nation unified for a shared goal. The Guardian’s Manchester Report last week showed there are plenty of reasons for optimism about the technologies that can take us into the low-carbon future.

But like Apollo, the challenge of climate change is to combine political will with technological leapfrog – and, in fact, the political challenge is almost unparalleled in human history. We can’t all be rocket scientists (or climate scientists), but every one of us is needed for the political moonshot of today.

If the world agrees to act on climate change at the Copenhagen conference in December, countries will need to maintain their radicalism not just for a year or two but for decades. There must be a consensus from the richest country to the poorest and from democracies to autocracies. When we all depend on each other’s actions, the world can’t afford climate free-riders.

At home, our consensus already stretches from businesses to trade unions and from the Women’s Institute to MTV. But for the pace and breadth of change that is needed many more people must be won over to our cause – to make change themselves and to build a climate change consensus. Climate change denial is given short shrift, but we should not confuse widespread acquiescence for universal enthusiasm. Climate change champions face the classic test of take-off political movements: how to widen the circle of the committed without watering down the clarity of the message.

First, if we are in the persuasion business, all of us have to talk as much about the advantages of the low carbon choice as the disaster that awaits if we don’t act. We don’t do this enough.

Just look at energy. Two-thirds of the world’s gas is in Russia and the Middle East, but renewable energy is homegrown and can help us stem a rising dependence on imports. In manufacturing, there is a thriving set of new industries dependent on low carbon and on ways of cleaning up old sectors, and a chance to build a broader-based economy. Only by making the transition, with government support, can we reap the benefits.

And let’s use the moment and cause to think about how we design cities and towns to make it easier for people to enjoy greener space, use public transport and have a better quality of life.

Second, we need not just to appeal to people to change their lifestyles but make it easier for them to do so. Here government has a central role. What will make more people leave the car in the garage and take a bike to the train station? Not finger-wagging, but convenience. As Andrew Adonis, the transport secretary, pointed out last week, the Dutch town of Leiden has three times as much bike storage at its station as all the London terminals put together. In Holland a third of journeys to stations are by bike; in Britain it’s 2%. And from bike racks to loft lagging, the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan is designed to help make it possible for people to find a better way.

Third, we need to win some big and difficult arguments to create consensus. To do this we need to be candid about the pressures created by the transition to low carbon and show we will try to alleviate them where we can.

When I launched the plan, last week, I said energy prices were likely to rise by 2020. We need to convince people that despite the costs, the transition is right because the costs of not acting are much greater, and high-carbon fossil fuels offer an insecure future. We need to find ways of making the transition as fair as we can, insulating particularly the poorest people from these effects.

I believe the biggest threat to the countryside is not wind turbines but climate change. We do need to site new turbines in the most appropriate places, but we also need to persuade people that they have to go somewhere, and that the catastrophe wrought by climate change would indeed destroy many parts of our green and pleasant land.

However, building the resolve of a country, let alone a planet, is a big ask. Change happens not just because leaders want it, but because people demand it. Groups are springing up to persuade people to act on climate change. They ally the power of imagination – the rocket on the moon – with the power of example, action in their own lives.

They must also be the kernel of the movement, sustained and broad, that we need to exert pressure on governments up to Copenhagen and beyond. While this week we celebrate Apollo, it is persuasion, campaigning and political argument, not just technological advance, that will generate the giant leaps humankind needs on climate change.

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UK to spend £100m on supporting GM crops for world’s poor

July 20, 2009

White paper shows government plans major rise in investment in research, as report calls for moratorium and questions approach

Britain is planning to quietly spend up to £100m on support for genetically modified crops for the world’s poor despite not having allowed any of the controversial foods to be grown commercially at home.

A new white paper shows the government is committed to dramatically increasing spending on high-tech agriculture in the next five years, much of which will be on GM crop research. Biofortified crops, containing added vitamins, will receive £80m of development money, £60m will go on researching drought-resistant maize for Africa and a further £24m will be spent on pest resistance. In addition, support for an international network of GM crop research stations, in collaboration with GM companies, will be doubled. A further tranche of UK aid will go to a research initiative backed by the GM crop firm Syngenta, which is developing a strain of rice modified to increase vitamin A.

The white paper avoids the terms “genetically modified”. But scientists and development experts are clear that much of the money will be spent on GM. The government has in the past revealed its strong support of high-tech food for Africa as a way to reduce poverty and also gain acceptance for GM foods in Britain.

Last year the then science minister, Ian Pearson, said: “If GM can demonstrably provide benefits for sub-Saharan Africa … the public will want to support [it].”

However, the decision to increase aid spending on GM food for developing countries rather than to direct money to help farmers increase yields by conventional methods has dismayed environmentalists. In a paper to be published tomorrow, GM Freeze, set up by Friends of the Earth and others, calls for a moratorium on GM, arguing that Britain’s investment is sending African farming “down a blind alley”.