Today the UK Parliament’s Environmental Audit Committee (EAC), tasked with evaluating the Government’s environmental progress, published their report into Personal Carbon Trading, finding that “personal carbon trading could be essential in helping to reduce our national carbon footprint”.

They also state, in keeping with the conclusions of our own response to DEFRA’s pre-feasibility study: “We regret that…the Government is indicating that it will wind down its work on personal carbon trading…Although we commend the Government for its intention to maintain engagement in the academic debate, we urge it to do more…We would like to see the Government leading and shaping debate and co-ordinating activity and research.”

This report has led to a flurry of media interest. Read more »

As I mentioned in my earlier post, last week I met Polly Higgins, The Lazy Environmentalist. She specialises in CSP, and informed me that we may now be seeing serious political movement towards an EU-MENA supergrid bringing CSP-generated electricity to Europe from the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East.

For those not familiar with the concept, CSP is not about photovoltaic solar panels, but rather the simple use of mirrors to focus solar heat on pipes filled with water. This generates steam which turns turbines to generate electricity. It is a simple low-tech concept that has been operating a 165 MW power plant in California for over 20 years.

It has been calculated that, if it was covered with CSP plants, an area of hot desert of about 254 km x 254 km — less than 1% of the total area of such deserts — would produce as much electricity as is currently consumed by the whole world.

An area measuring 110 km x 110 km, a small fraction of the area of desert in North Africa and the Middle East, would produce the same amount of electricity as the European Union consumed in 2004. This is illustrated graphically below the cut.

So this political movement towards a CSP supergrid is a very significant development, and, I think, a positive one. Read more »

This is just a quick post to point people towards the DEFRA pre-feasibility study into TEQs that came out earlier this month, and in particular the critical responses to it posted by the Centre for Sustainable Energy and The Lean Economy Connection (pdf) (this one written by David Fleming and myself), in which we argue that a number of important misunderstandings are contained in the study, and that DEFRA’s consequent decision to delay a full feasibility study into the TEQs concept is ill-advised.

TEQs is the only realistic and effective way I see of enabling the necessary national emissions reductions at the same time as addressing the challenges of Peak Oil, so this could hardly be more important.

Vote for Ken Livingstone - the future of our world may depend on it.

Having worked with the Energy and Climate Change teams at City Hall it’s clear that they’re desperate for Ken to win another term, although for obvious reasons they won’t say it openly. Love him or loathe him, he’s one of very few politicians treating climate change with the ultimate seriousness it deserves. Read more »

Backdated post - I’ve been meaning to start a blog since before this event, and I wanted to include my write-up on it!

Last night was an exciting one for me, as an event that I dreamt up actually came to fruition. I have been feeling for a while that the public mood has moved on - virtually everyone is now aware of the challenge of climate change, but very few people actually feel like they know what they should do about it.

Indeed, I was in a similar position a couple of years ago, and it took me about a year’s research before I felt I had found the initiatives which could effectively deal with the nature of the challenges we face.

As a consequence, most people are just left with the nagging uncomfortable feeling of an unresolved - and seemingly irresolvable - issue, which probably only makes them less likely to want to learn more about the area. Read more »