Decarbonisation is wrong

Will try to keep this short. 

Saw something recently that talked about "Carbon space" and "G20 countries must reach net zero by 20XX if we are to see any chance of global mean temperatures remaining below Y". I see this week that if nations meet their NDCs (narrator: nations did not meet their NDCs) we could restrict warming to 2.1 degrees by the end of the century. This would be fantastic. Today the UK published it's NDC pledging to cut emissions by 68% by 2030. 

I've been in the climate business a long, long time. I was in the room when the 2006 Climate Change Programme was cooked up. I led a team into action. I walked away from the bloodied battlefield of Copenhagen, scarred but undeterred. I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. 

Talking about decarbonisation, 10 years on from Copenhagen, is just wrong. NDCs are wrong. (If you don't know what an NDC is, you aren't missing anything. In 50 years "NDC" will stand for "Nothing Done for Climate", assuming we still have language in 50 years). Telling India to reduce emissions is wrong. 

Carbon pricing isn't wrong, per se, but the conditions have to exist for Carbon pricing to have an effect. Right now we haven't powered a major manufacturing economy without fossil fuels, we haven't produced a ton of zero carbon steel, and the UK has absolutely no idea how to heat >20 million homes without gas (they think it involves 'Heat Pumps' but they don't know how to power 20 million heat pumps, and it might involve hydrogen, but they don't know how to produce millions of cubic feet of zero carbon hydrogen).

This is not a call to pessimism. The UK has made massive steps towards decarbonising the entire electricity grid, and the next big technological breakthrough will be grid-scale energy storage, which will -- hopefully -- enable a zero carbon electricity network, 24/7, at least 340 days a year. Zero-carbon steel is do-able. And not only have we been building zero-carbon homes for decades, but the technological solution* for a zero-carbon retrofit exists, and will improve. The most exciting bit about building retrofit is that it will make your buildings more comfortable and just nicer to be in.

But how are we going to diffuse the technology we need, at the speed we need to diffuse it? This is not a call to pessimism, and this is also not a call for global socialist utopia. Making all patents free will not drive decarbonisation. Trying to impose a global carbon price will fail, because the USA will never sign up to it., and nor will India.

All countries need clean energy, for a multitude of non-climate reasons, particularly health reasons, and economic reasons. A global effort to share what works, pool resources to innovate at scale so that we are building megatonne scale projects and not pointless tiny pilot plant, and reward companies that provide zero-carbon solutions is what is needed.

"Mission Innovation" nearly gets there, but look at the membership trumpeted on the front page. 24 countries and 6 "collaborators", none of whom are companies. Energy innovation is done by Governments and it isn't driven by 'action plans' dreamed up in an intergovernmental brainstorming session. What Governments can do, however, is write some really big cheques. I worry that Mission Innovation exists precisely because Governments want to avoid writing those cheques, and MI is good displacement activity.

What I dream of seeing is the Governments getting the energy industry in a room, asking them what the real price of CCS is, and putting 50% of the money on the table. Those who can't play, or won't play, will soon be out of business.

What annoys me is that this has been evidentially needed since 2009 and still there's no sign of it happen. More than a decade of talking about CCS and "new nuclear power", while new coal plant are built weekly. And with every coal plant built, the pipe dream of a global carbon price recedes.

We will decarbonise eventually, but if Governments were really serious, we could move the dial massively within a few months. Stop talking, stop pledging, build some bloody megatonne-scale plant and work out which ones work best. It really is that simple.

And look -- I got to the end of my rant without drawing a tenuous analogy with covid-19. Well done me.

* To follow

Can you hear me?

2016 – 2017: Buildings (Innovation)

The main thing I learned, which is unsurprising, is that innovation projects are a lot harder to run than research projects. For a start, if a research project goes wrong, you can usually find a way to bring it back on track. That's a lot harder with innovation, where a lot of money can get spent before problems become obvious.

Then there's the commercialization problem. A technically successful project doesn't mean you've innovated. Without a route to market, new stuff just sits in the innovator's shed. To change the world, we need new things which sell.

So, building on my previous work, let's imagine that a couple of million people have used thin wall insulation, but more people can't be arsed, and nobody has a Heat-Pump because everyone has gas, and It. Just. Works. How do you get them off gas? Policy people, because they see everything in terms of policy levers, think you just need to find the right lever to pull. Maybe we can innovate to reduce the cost of Heat-Pumps (this doesn't work - nothing is simpler than a gas boiler, because as a Professor of Buildings once told me, a gas boiler is just a tube with a flame on the end. It's that simple). OK. So we can subsidise people to buy Heat-Pumps. Well, yes, but that's horrendously expensive and only rich people bother, so you are subsidising the heating bills of rich people. OK. Maybe we ban gas? Sure, I say, go ahead. Ban gas.

Energy-as-a-service (bear with my here) completely re-imagines (yeah, I said "re-imagines", so what?) energy retail. Or, put another way. Imagine I can put a small box in your house that controls heating, individually, in every room in your house, and you can programme it with you iPhone. For a fixed monthly cost (just like your mobile contract) you get whatever heating pattern you specify (just like your phone contract, the more minutes you buy -- in this case, warm hours -- the more it costs). If the boiler breaks that isn't your problem. Your provider has to fix it.

Now maybe you are tech-head. You want PV on your roof, a Tesla PowerWall in your cellar, a zero-carbon heating system and a complex low-carbon energy tariff which turns of your freezer for 15 minutes when the power price spikes. Maybe. But most people don't, and don't want to live with that level of complexity. I mean, I live and breath this stuff and I don't want that level of complexity.

In an energy-as-a-service world all those problems go away. Insulation? The service provider installs it if it saves them money (because they pay for the heating, you are paying a fixed price). Complex energy tariffs, batteries and PV? If they make commercial sense, your service provider gives them to you for free. (But they take a cut of the profit they make, of course). When you finally buy that Tesla, the box automatically charges it for you when power price is low. It's a win-win.

And if the builder who fits the insulation, the heat-pump, the batter, messes it up? Not your problem. Your service provider has to fix it, and they fit the bill. So they only employ people who do a good job.

So, we can build the box. The box can even measure how leaky your home is, so the service provider knows what monthly price to quote you. The tech to insulate your house and make it zero carbon exists (Those good builders who do a great job? Yeah, I'm afraid they don't exist yet. But they can learn).

Oh, we tested this stuff. We gave people a free iPad and 24/7 emergency support in case any of it went wrong. People love it. I think we did 25, and 23 of those 25 never wanted it taken out when the trial finished. 94% success rate? New stuff never does that well.

The problem? No idea how to roll out the first 1 million boxes. When people have got the box they won't want to go back. But how do you sell a new product to people when nobody has it, and you can't explain why it's so great?

So there we are. Great tech exists. People will love it, once they get it. It can change the world. But how do we get it to market?

Fascination

2014 – 2016: Buildings (Research)

The UK has a very heterogeneous building stock (i.e. lots of different sorts of building, designed and built in many different ways, and altered in many different ways since originally built), and it’s a very old building stock at that. Over 7 million homes without a cavity wall! We have a very high penetration of one sort of heating system (gas). This makes elimination of fossil fuels extraordinarily difficult in buildings because electric heating is expensive and impractical (we’d need about 10x more power stations to heat our buildings in the winter, but most of these power stations would only need to generate power for 5 – 10 days a year, which makes them a little … uneconomical.)

But there are solutions. Some research I kicked off (yep, I done a thing) showed that a ‘thin’ layer of insulation delivers most of the benefits of traditional solid-wall insulation (i.e. 4-5 inches of battens, insulation and plasterboard) at a fraction of the price.

So there you have it. Insulate those 7 million old buildings, plus any poorly performing more modern buildings, with a couple of centimetres of insulation, and you've already massively reduced heat-demand across the UK housing stock. The costs of installing a zero-carbon heating system (e.g. a heat-pump) are massively reduced. Result!

Who can I be now?

So, a conversation got me thinking. My new role is hardly the pivot Bowie made when he abandoned Glam Rock (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane, Diamond Dogs) for Plastic Soul (Young Americans). 

As Alexis Petridis put it, “just how influential Young Americans was didn’t become fully apparent for another decade… And Bowie made the transition seem effortless”. 

(Though personally I find the transition from that to “Station to Station” to be an even more remarkable evolution)

I don’t imagine a stint as on climate science will have quite the impact that either of those albums had (and we haven’t even got to Low yet…) On the other hand, I’m ingesting significantly less cocaine than Bowie was during this period. Which is good, as we need to save up for a new kitchen.

Yeah. So, 6 years, 3-and-a-half jobs, a lot learned. I’m not going to talk about what I did (who cares?) but what I learned, which is relevant to anyone interested in climate change, particularly from a UK perspective (though doubtless some of this applies elsewhere, too). I'm going to send a version of this article as an email to my mother and she'll have to pretend to be interested...

Well, he did ask

Colin wondered (by text message).

My response to his wondering is as follows :

There are a number of things one could do to impact on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere.

One is to couple carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology with biomass. This enables you to remove CO2 from the air (using a plant) and capture CO2 (by burning the plant in a CCS ... er ... plant). This has been discussed. It requires you to be able to produce, in a sustainable manner, a lot of biomass.

Cquestrate have a rather novel method, which doesn't act on the atmosphere directly, but rather on the ocean. You can contribute to the development of this idea, since it is open source.

Air Fuel Synthesis have a rather different idea.

Cquestrate and AFS both require one to be able to generate a very large amount of energy in a way that does not emit large amounts of CO2.

Brilliant article

One characterisation of the theory of man-made climate change is that scientists observed some warming, and decided to blame CO2 (probably because said scientists were Commies, or Nazis, or both or something)

This is balls.

What happened.

• Long before any significant warming was observed, some scientists suggested that we would observe warming, and that this would be driven by CO2.
• We saw warming, just like they predicted

I would suggest that if a scientist tells you you've got a problem, and then the data validates his claims, you should probably do something about it.

This excellent article sets out how warming was predicted back in 1975 (and 1965).

Incidentally

BPL has some very good articles on the science of Climate Change.

Climate Change

Hello

I'm doing some thinking on how to present the outcome of last year's Copenhagen Conference. Particularly timely, given news.

If you are interested in this, let me know and I'll send you an email.

Promises, promises

I did promise, back in Copenhagen, that I'd share my thoughts on what actually happened, once I'd moved job. It has taken longer than expected, but I have moved job.

I'll try to post something concise, novel and interesting later this week.

Please note

"January was rather cold in the UK. But across the whole of the world, January was warmer than usual"

Wrap-up

Hello

I have a cold. Yuk. I couldn't taste a thing at dinner.

I would like to do a wrap up of Copenhagen. I think it was a very important event, and one which both Kate & I, in our own small way, played a part. However, I am still employed by the UK Government as a negotiator, and therefore feel a little restrained in what I can say.

On 31st Jan two things happen. First, the deadline for submission of mitigation actions to be registered under the 'Copenhagen Accord' passes. Second, I finish my current job and move on to something new.

I would beg your indulgence for another month, then.

In the meantime I will take Sudafed and I encourage you to do so, too.

Bang!

Everyone was in plenary. Turned out I was allowed in too (the first time I had been in the main hall). I wander in, and the Chairman read out, very quickly, the decision and banged his gavel.

Huge round of applause, driven, I think, by the desire for sleep rather than any satisfaction on the actual outcome. So far as I understand it, the Copenhagen 'Accord' is not agreed, merely noted. This is significant. If my understanding is correct, the accord has no legal status.

Ghost town

Hi

Well, said Sam, I'm back.

I left the Bella Centre at around 1800 last night, content that negotiations would go long into the night, but that I wouldn't be needed in the slightest. Technology is hardly going to be the deal breaker. And so it proved.

I'll give you an overview of what, if anything, this conference has achieved when it has actually finished. And when a bit of time has allowed me to put things in perspective.

Right now I'm sitting in a virtually abandoned conference centre that looks a bit like the day after Glastonbury, but with less mud and more weirdos. The UK delegation room is locked. Where is everyone?

Locked in a plenary hall, the decision makers are unable to make a decision. I can't get in there, so I'm going to wander around like a tramp and see if I can find some colleagues, or slouch back to my hotel and check out.

Thanks to Kate, for writing a blog that actually looked like a blog. Normal service resumed next week.

Hi, Kate here, this will be my final guest blog post. Hopefully James will step in in a day or two with an analysis of whatever on earth comes out of this process.

I'm back in Copenhagen, with helicopters circling the Bella Center and security people of all description everywhere. (And may I just say that providing outside security for a building in a Danish snowstorm is not a great job, I hope these people get paid enough.) My colleague on the inside had a great time yesterday seeing some of the head-of-state speeches, but all the real work was going on behind the scenes where no observers may enter.

There is now no pretence of anyone getting any sleep, talks have been constant. Apparently more progress has been made in the last 12 hours than in many days preceding, but there are many issues unresolved and right now it is not clear how this conference will end. There is a widespread feeling of amazement and incomprehension that things could have come to this pass after so many days, weeks, months of preparation. Those of you who try to make social arrangements with James will be aware how often he has been away this year at EU or international meetings, adding up in total to somewhere between two and three entire months out of 2009. The same goes for every one of hundreds of international negotiators at these talks. Yet heads of state who are here to sign a document are finding that the text has massive gaps in it and that positions on some issues are still miles away from each other.

The rather dramatic stepping-up of the helicopter presence is doubtless something to do with the fact that Obama is here. The poor man is expected to step in like Superman and resolve all the issues. I wish him well.

Back in the domestic sphere I pootled around at some climate change events in the morning. In the afternoon, after realising that it would cost £900 to fly out of Malmo at this notice, I mounted Escape from Sweden for myself, my luggage and James' luggage before they really did close the bridge. Unlike Escape from New York or LA this simply meant spending a lot of time in snowstorms, and trying to avert wrath on overstuffed delayed trains for being the annoying person travelling with two giant suitcases. The sniffer dogs that are now active on the trains showed no interest in our bags. James managed to effect a brief exit from the Bella Center to pick his up, then dived back in to continue talks. Both of us will be coming home tomorrow, hurrah.

Thank you very much for reading (if you are) and I hereby hand you back to this blog's owner.

Well, where do I start today? Two full days to go and things just get weirder. First up - negotiation progress. My first text of the morning from my dearly beloved c.9.30am, says: "No news here. Feels bad...". Negotiation sessions were running all through the night, as they were also on Tuesday night. Did I mention that one of the main sessions on Tuesday started at 4.50am?

I haven't actually seen the man for quite some time. Just as my train was pulling into Malmo last night he called to say that the bridge to Denmark was going to be shut for security reasons so he had been posted back to the hotel in Copenhagen (and would anyway be in the conference centre for the foreseeable future). This left me trapped in Sweden! Luckily for me the other hotel booking still stands so here I am.

Meanwhile, intense negotiations between NGOs and the conference organisers finally came to a conclusion at midnight last night. 300 named NGO observers would be allowed into the conference centre on Thursay and Friday. My organisation was allocated 1 non-transferable place and I had to submit the name by 5am (see above, these people are simply not sleeping.) I decided to allocate this to one of my delegation who had expressed a strong interest in getting a place. She got the pass, and also got one of the very few plenary passes which means that she'll be able to watch Obama et al in the flesh. Many thousands of other registered NGO observers are totally out in the cold so we have been very lucky indeed.

This morning I am delighted that we are in, but sad not to be there myself especially as it turns out that the bridge to Denmark is open today (although it really will be shutting tomorrow) so I could have taken the place myself which is a bit gutting. However I am glad my colleague is getting the opportunity. I am trying to decide what to do myself, I think I will go into Copenhagen today as there are various events on and a few colleagues still around, but might leave tomorrow. So this is probably a near-final post.

Finally I would just say that reading the online news about yesterday's demo, arrests, violence etc was very strange when I had been right there and not seen a thing beyond a few shouty people inside the conference centre. It really illustrates how hard it is to do a direct action that is actually visible/audible to the Heads of State. Perhaps online petitions etc are more effective since at least they'll (presumably) at least register on the radar when they are considering their public mandate for negotiating positions. Suspect James would be able to say more on this.

Hello, still Kate. Everything is confusing today. Heads of state are here and security has gone up ten notches. Most of my delegation who are here this week never got to use the secondary pass system as they could not get their primary passes due to long queues. NGO delegates are not allowed to enter the area where heads of state are speaking and even governments are allowed a small number of passes. And now there is a tertiary pass system for tomorrow which will only allow a tiny minority of NGO delegates into any part of the conference venue as observers. My organisation ran its final two events yesterday so those of us who managed to get in are now pretty much giving up and going home. Our exhibit stand is already boxed up and sent to the couriers since I doubt we'll get back in until late Saturday or Sunday (when I plan to be gone, gone, gone).

So what I hear you cry, we want to know about the negotiations. Well as I said in one of my earlier posts you will get better news from the BBC than from us in this rather chaotic heart-of storm. All we know is what the person next in line in the lunch queue tells us. One minute it's failing, the next there will definitely be an agreement, the next it has gone all wobbly again. I was privileged to spend enough time to have a conversation with my husband last night (as he was negotiating until small hours for several nights previously), he tells me that from where he is sitting everything is completely opaque. The deal-making is now at such a high level that although he knows where the issues have got to in his area, he has no idea how this is being played and bargained with by the top negotiators. He was meant to text me hours ago to say whether he'd be asked to stay to the end of the talks or not, I have received nothing which I suspect means that this is still not clear. So perhaps we will both come home early.

There was a massive demonstration outside today which meant we were sealed into the Bella Center for quite some time. Again, my main news on this was from the BBC and Guardian websites, in fact you would never know from here that there was anything going on out there. There has been a small amount of sympathetic demonstration on the inside, in particular some effective heckling from outside the high-level plenary which is audible in the film footage from the inside. And by the way, if you are truly interested there is pretty good coverage on the UNFCCC website including live streaming from the head-of-state plenary that we are not allowed into!

Evening all. This is still Kate guest-blogging by the way. You are not likely to hear from James for some time. In fact I will quote you a text exchange that we had a mere 30 minutes ago, at approx 11.30pm CET on Monday night:

James: " Will be here very very late"
Kate: "Hi, on train home"
James: "I love you. See you... Wednesday?"

So as you can see from the above the (remaining) negotiators are holed up in little rooms trying desperately to overcome the G77 walkout from talks, and to get something together before 100+ heads of state arrive in about 24 hours.

Meanwhile, in NGO world, I have run 3 side events in 4 days and have sleep deprivation. Also half my delegation went home over the weekend and another half arrived. This second half tried to register today, unfortunately the registration system collapsed causing a large crowd (including several of my poor little chicks) to spend 9 hours outside in freezing conditions, hemmed in by Danish police without food or water, and not even managing to get a pass at the end of it. This is before we even go into the NGO secondary pass system (the 'tickets' I mentioned in previous posts) which starts tomorrow and could hardly cause any more chaos than already exists.

Gordon Brown has decided to fly in early which is probably a good thing given the state things are in. A minor side effect is that due to the need to screen the UK delegation hotel for (bugs? bombs?) James has been shunted out to Malmo. Yes, that is in a different country. We dithered about whether to move into some of my organisation's accommodation in outer Copenhagen instead (there's a spare room this week) but in the end decided to go with Malmo since the commute is actually not that different. Oddly, Sweden is a lot cheaper than Denmark. We suspect that office workers take the train out here at lunchtime to buy their sandwiches.

Last night over drinks a government delegate (not UK) gave me an explanation of the row I mentioned in the last post that conspiracy theorists would love, roughly along the lines of Syriana crossed with The Business. I had gone to bed when James came in from his own negotiations at 1am. I asked him if he thought it was true. He said no. Then he said, "I have been talking to the Argentinians until midnight, I can't talk to you now" and went to sleep.

Sadly that was only 7 hours ago, I am back here in the Bella Center ridiculously early. It's going to be a busy day for me so thought I might as well post now. My NGO has quite a few delegates here now and we are hosting a number of events in quick succession between now and Tuesday, it's all getting a bit hectic.

It's all a bit quiet here, Connie Hedegaard (Danish Climate & Energy Minister) just had to shut down one of the main negotiating sessions because consensus was proving impossible. I saw her do this on the TV screens but had not been watching the entire session, however I think the cause was the same issue that shut down talks yesterday. Tuvalu + others and Saudi Arabia + others are having a bust-up over whether it is better to continue the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012 or write a new treaty. Usually the G77 (i.e. developing) countries negotiate in one bloc, this split is an interesting development with lots of pros and cons for the prospects of getting a deal.

The Bella Center is virtually at capacity now. The proposed access restrictions are likely to start soon, apparently each NGO is likely to each get tickets to cover 30% of its delegation. While this is not music to my ears I expect it is a bit of a relief to the government delegates, they will be tripping over a few less youth and polar bears on the way to their meetings. One of the UNFCCC Secretariat staff said to me on Tuesday as we walked through the NGO exhibit area, "it's getting like a street market in Bangkok".

The main debate among gossipers of all stripes last night and this morning was - who leaked the Danish paper, and why? You might have seen this story in the Guardian. Denmark has been leading a process of writing a parallel text for a Global Deal that can be whipped out at that last minute if things get sticky.

Seasoned observers here are pointing out that this is perfectly normal, and it's traditional for COP Presidents to have something up their sleeves, some have also said that the content doesn't deviate much from principles set out recently by the head of UNFCCC. But you wouldn't know that from the news coverage. A few people have mentioned that there is a precedent for a similar paper being leaked at such an early stage, that was in The Hague in 2000 and the talks failed partly (it is said) as a result. An alternative theory is that there is some devilishly clever media management strategy going on.

In other news, I have now seen people dressed up as trees, people dressed up as aliens and many people in colourful national dress of all kinds. Plus lots of "youth" (this is actually the official term, there are "youth delegations" here) wearing t-shirts saying 'How old will you be in 2050?', to which my answer is 'A lady never tells'. Despite the cold, the conference metro station is permanently surrounded by happy devotees of the Grand Master something or other who are promoting veganism and have a poster with a picture of a goat saying, "Don't eat them, they love you."

I would love to give you news of James, but I think I have seen him (awake) for about 1 hour in the last 48.