As the Copenhagen conference progresses, I thought it might be worthwhile to take a brief look what’s the various different countries have offered, and reasons why there is some room for optimism about a decent deal being done…
1. The US seems prepared to act, if necessary by bypassing Congress and the Senate. The formal declaration by the US EPA that CO2 (along with other greenhouse gases) is an ‘endangering pollutant‘ means that the EPA can now use it’s powers under the existing Clean Air Act to regulate CO2 as failure to act would “threaten the public health and welfare of the American people”. It appears that if the Senate doesn’t pass the legislation currently before it the EPA will simply regulate greenhouse gases under existing laws instead. The current proposed cut from the US is approximately 17% by 2020 on 2005 levels. Although not ideal, this proposed cut is a dramatic improvement on earlier obstructionism from the US. (more…)
While the mud flies to the left and to the right, now, with just 12 days to the opening of the COP15 climate conference in Copenhagen, looks like it’s all hands on deck, women and children first, etc. etc. as the good ship Hubris stokes up its coal-fired turbines and steams us towards, well, you know…
Heartiest congratulations to all the merry crew of climate deniers and assorted smart alecs and know-alls. We’d never have come so far, so quickly, and been in it quite so deep were it not for your Trojan efforts. Don’t be so modest, you’re the real stars of this Tragedy.
Had been planning to write about the power of the multiples for some time, but what finally pushed me over the edge was a report in The Ticket in last Friday’s Irish Times, to the effect that the DVD cover of the horror/comedy flick ‘Lesbian Vampire Killers’ had been censored at the direction of Tesco, among others.
Not wanting to depend wholly on heresay, I picked up a copy of the film in Tesco in Dun Laoghaire this week, and sure enough, the offending word was discreetly covered with a warning label. The phrase that so offended them was not ‘killers’, rather, it was ‘Lesbian’. Such bizarre prurience, but we’ve seen lots of this from Wal-Mart in the US, bucking to the demands of the Right by actively censoring books, magazines, even newspapers. The threat to the film’s producers, Momentum, was simple enough: either comply, or the all-powerful multiples won’t stock your movie. Resistance is futile. (more…)
Last week, something pretty unusual showed up in a number of national newspapers. This was a full-page advert under the title ‘Spirit of Ireland‘. This tied in with the launch of a website and a big PR push through the national media. You can see the video clip below:
This media programme got a major shot in the arm yesterday with a favourable article in the Irish Times from Prof Ray Kinsella of UCD. “This is the public good as a vital force in transforming, not just our energy supplies and our economic trajectory, but the whole manner in which Ireland, as a community, can function. That, surely, is transformational”, wrote Kinsella, who is especially lavish in his praise for entrepreneur, Graham O’Donnell, the main driver behind the project (with Prof Igor Svets of TCD leading the scientific team).
In a nutshell, Spirit of Ireland is about energy independence. The plan is to replace €30 billion in energy imports over a 10-year period by investing heavily in wind power, backed up by pumped storage (the ESB’s Turlough Hill station in Wicklow has been providing pumped storage since the 1960s, using off-peak electricity to pump the water uphill).
I’ve written at length about the potential – and some of the limitations – of wind energy in the Irish Times. What Spirit of Ireland does is take the positive story and run with it. For that, they are to be commended. In a time of unprecedented economic gloom and low national morale, it’s heartening to see a substantial infrastructural project that isn’t covered with the gombeen fingerprints of Martin Cullen or some of the other intellectual pygmies who have collectively run the ship of state onto the rocks in the last decade and more.
Wind energy is one natural resource Ireland has in abundance. The fact that it’s zero-carbon makes it worth more than oil or gas – if we can figure out how to turn it into a large-scale reliable form of energy. There’s the rub. The winds blow one day, and drop the next. Sometimes, we can be almost totally becalmed for a week at a time. What happens then? Can we really afford to decommission all those carbon-spewing power stations and still expect the lights to stay on?
The Spirit of Ireland proposal harnesses wind with another natural advantage of Ireland: plenty of glacial valleys suitable for conversion to hydro-storage reservoirs (costing around €800 m each to construct).
Not everyone is convinced. I first met Prof Philip Walton, Emeritus professor of physics at UCG at a debate on whether wind or nuclear power offered the best way forward for Ireland. On the night in question, he and I spoke on the same side of the argument (pro-nuclear) in TCD while Minister Eamon Ryan and Frank McDonald of the Irish Times, among others, opposed.
Prof Walton wrote to me today querying the calculations underpinning Spirit of Ireland. He says, for instance, that if “the proposal is to install 6900MW of wind generators which, given a load factor of 35%, would provide an average of about 2400MW of electricity. Our requirement can easily be 5000MW so the proposal would provide less than half of this”.
Of more specific concern is the capacity of stored power: “Using first year college physics one can calculate that this would only provide 5000MW of electricity for less than 11 hours; not very useful if we have calm weather for a week or more”.
The whole idea, says Walton, “is obviously very simplistic and very impractical; to say that it could be achieved in 5 years is mind boggling. While we are right to consider sustainable sources, it is my opinion that renewables alone will not solve our energy problems and that we are on a dangerous road led largely by the Green Party”.
He concludes by warning that “our energy problems will become so serious we must urgently consider all options including renewables, strict conservation measures, nuclear power and the role of the dwindling fossil fuels (though they have CO2 emissions).
Another regular correspondent of mine, Denis Duff, a retired engineer, cautions that we would have to install 18,000 MW of wind energy capacity, at a cost of €35 bn, with an overall project cost of €50 bn, to make this – maybe – work.
I have repeatedly advocated a middle road – of course we should massively invest in wind energy, of course we should aim to sell our surplus power to Europe via an interconnector, but surely we should replace our ‘baseload’ power stations (like Moneypoint) with two or three 1gw nuclear stations? France powers 80% of its national grid on electricity, even the US uses a great deal of nuclear (which is dwarfed by its colossal overall consumption).
Once you get over the planning problems (and we’d better start on emergency legislation to prevent the Nimbys from blocking each and every significant project from here till Doomsday) we could probably have a couple of (very safe) mid-sized nuclear plants whirring away in well under 10 years.
I don’t believe we can afford to sit back and pick and choose which energy options we like and which we don’t. It’s got to be a belt-and-braces approach, i.e. belt on with both wind and nuclear energy projects now, while we still have the chance, and brace for climate and energy impacts that are coming our way a whole lot sooner than people seem to realise.
Politicians worry about the next election; business people worry about the next quarter. Who does that leave to worry about the longer term future? One top scientific expert believes the people who really do think ahead are parents, more specifically mothers. After all, they have to plan years, even decades ahead, when looking at schools and university – and also thinking about the kind of world their young children might inherit.
Dr Jim Hansen is director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, and is one of the world’s foremost authorities on climate. He is also a grandfather. Last December he wrote directly to Barack and Michelle Obama about the urgency of the planet’s climate crisis. (more…)
A cynic, according to Oscar Wilde, is a person who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. He could have easily been talking about economists. It’s hard to open a newspaper or turn on the radio these days without some economist or other telling us exactly what needs to be done to get ‘the economy moving’ or to achieve ‘more growth’.
And what, you might ask, is wrong with that? For as long as any of us can remember, we’ve been conditioned to believe that the solution to all Ireland’s ills lay in ‘growth’. As the last decade has shown, explosive growth brings damage and disruption as well as undoubted economic benefits to many. (more…)
Ireland, it appears, is at last starting to get serious about tackling our huge energy requirements, and the dagger that our massive dependence on imports of oil and gas in particular holds to our collective throat.
We are reckoned in the energy stakes to be among the OECD’s most import-dependent countries. This, with Peak Oil somewhere on the horizon and with ultra-volatile supply chains putting us totally at the mercy of the Middle East for oil and Russia for gas, is not where a modern economy or society wants to be. (more…)
You only have to look at a map of Ireland’s rugged western seaboard to get some idea of the power of wave and wind in shaping our coastline. In Connemara the sparse tree cover leans away from the sea at unlikely angles, such is the power of the prevailing winds that batter the coast.
