Monday, September 12, 2011
China to cap energy use in national low-carbon plan
A cap on energy
consumption is expected to be at the heart of a Chinese low-carbon plan
to be issued this year, experts believe, amid reports that officials
have now agreed its level.
China is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, making up a quarter of the global total. Experts say setting an energy limit would add certainty to the country's attempts to rein in emissions and should make it easier for emissions trading schemes to get off the ground.
The cap has been anticipated for some time but is now thought likely to emerge in the low-carbon plan understood to have been broadly approved by a panel set up by the state council, China's cabinet, and chaired by the premier, Wen Jiabao. It should be formally passed later this year.
Reuters reported that officials have settled on a total energy cap of 4.1bn tonnes of coal equivalent (TCE) by 2015 – a level more than 25% higher than last year.
Analysts warn that the plan has yet to be nailed down and that a cap could still be delayed by disagreements, to re-emerge in a later policy document.
The government in March unveiled its five year-plan for 2011-2015. Setting out the economic course for the nation, it aims for a more sustainable pace of growth and includes a new carbon intensity target – trying to slow emissions growth relative to GDP by 17% – as well as a goal of improving energy intensity by 16%. Officials are fleshing it out.
A cap "is significant, because it makes it much clearer to provinces what they have to do regardless of what GDP growth rate is", said Deborah Seligsohn, a climate policy expert working for the World Resources Institute in Beijing.
"The cap they have been talking about is essentially based on the growth rate they expect overall; it doesn't mean cutting further, but it does add certainty."
She said it would also make pilot emissions trading systems in six provinces and cities more effective. Although people have been looking at ways to base systems on carbon intensity, a cap would make matters much more straightforward.
A level of 4.1bn TCE would be higher than many had expected. Zhang Guobao, formerly China's top energy official, told the state news agency Xinhua in April that there would be a cap of 4bn TCE.
"There were some very aggressive suggestions from scholars. Some have suggested [4.1bn TCE] would be rather conservative, but from where I stand I think it is very positive," said Changhua Wu, the Climate Group's China representative.
"When you set a cap you obviously are going to set an attitude towards shifting the structure ... Part of the big lesson we learned in the last five years is that you could grow wind and solar and nuclear energy aggressively but keep consuming more."
Another key issue will be whether the plan spells out targets for individual provinces on energy and carbon intensity.
China's commitment to meeting environmental targets was underlined when provinces abruptly shut down plants last year to try to meet the goals of the last five-year plan.
With the central government keeping a closer eye on the progress of provinces, the National Development and Reform Commission – the country's top economic planning body – recently published the names of those struggling to meet targets.
"The Chinese government has made it pretty clear they expect these targets to be met. This time the provinces know that now, so they will be working from the beginning," said Seligsohn.
China is the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, making up a quarter of the global total. Experts say setting an energy limit would add certainty to the country's attempts to rein in emissions and should make it easier for emissions trading schemes to get off the ground.
The cap has been anticipated for some time but is now thought likely to emerge in the low-carbon plan understood to have been broadly approved by a panel set up by the state council, China's cabinet, and chaired by the premier, Wen Jiabao. It should be formally passed later this year.
Reuters reported that officials have settled on a total energy cap of 4.1bn tonnes of coal equivalent (TCE) by 2015 – a level more than 25% higher than last year.
Analysts warn that the plan has yet to be nailed down and that a cap could still be delayed by disagreements, to re-emerge in a later policy document.
The government in March unveiled its five year-plan for 2011-2015. Setting out the economic course for the nation, it aims for a more sustainable pace of growth and includes a new carbon intensity target – trying to slow emissions growth relative to GDP by 17% – as well as a goal of improving energy intensity by 16%. Officials are fleshing it out.
A cap "is significant, because it makes it much clearer to provinces what they have to do regardless of what GDP growth rate is", said Deborah Seligsohn, a climate policy expert working for the World Resources Institute in Beijing.
"The cap they have been talking about is essentially based on the growth rate they expect overall; it doesn't mean cutting further, but it does add certainty."
She said it would also make pilot emissions trading systems in six provinces and cities more effective. Although people have been looking at ways to base systems on carbon intensity, a cap would make matters much more straightforward.
A level of 4.1bn TCE would be higher than many had expected. Zhang Guobao, formerly China's top energy official, told the state news agency Xinhua in April that there would be a cap of 4bn TCE.
"There were some very aggressive suggestions from scholars. Some have suggested [4.1bn TCE] would be rather conservative, but from where I stand I think it is very positive," said Changhua Wu, the Climate Group's China representative.
"When you set a cap you obviously are going to set an attitude towards shifting the structure ... Part of the big lesson we learned in the last five years is that you could grow wind and solar and nuclear energy aggressively but keep consuming more."
Another key issue will be whether the plan spells out targets for individual provinces on energy and carbon intensity.
China's commitment to meeting environmental targets was underlined when provinces abruptly shut down plants last year to try to meet the goals of the last five-year plan.
With the central government keeping a closer eye on the progress of provinces, the National Development and Reform Commission – the country's top economic planning body – recently published the names of those struggling to meet targets.
"The Chinese government has made it pretty clear they expect these targets to be met. This time the provinces know that now, so they will be working from the beginning," said Seligsohn.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Arctic sea ice is melting at its fastest pace in almost 40 years
The Northwest Passage was, again, free of ice this summer and the polar region could be unfrozen in just 30 years.
Aerial view of the Petermann glacier, Greenland’s north-west coast – a
100 square-mile block of ice broke off it in August last year; by July
this year it had melted.
Photograph: Nick Cobbing/AFP/Getty Images
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists.
Daily satellite sea-ice maps released by Bremen university physicists
show that with a week's more melt expected this year, the floating ice
in the Arctic covered an area of 4.24 million square kilometres on 8
September. The previous one-day minimum was 4.27m sq km on 17 September
2007.
The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which also tracks the extent of sea ice, has not posted data for a week but is expected to announce similar results in the next few days.
The German researchers said the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming. "The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence," said Georg Heygster, head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen.
"It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic," he said. The albedo effect is related to a surface's reflecting power – whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun's heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun's heat and gets warmer.
Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually, but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists – it is now twice as great as it was in 1972, according to the NSIDC, with a decline of about 10% per decade.
Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century.
Separate, less reliable, research suggests that Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area but also thinning. Using records of air, wind and sea temperature, scientists from the Polar Science Centre of the University of Washington, Seattle, announced last week that the Arctic sea-ice volume reached its lowest ever level in 2010 and was on course to set more records this year.
The new data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month appeared to be about 2,135 cubic miles – just half the average volume and 62% lower than the maximum volume of ice that covered the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
"Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set," said Axel Schweiger.
If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years –that is up to 40 years earlier than was anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report.
The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian.
"This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world," Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco told journalists.
Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale.
This year, both the North-west and North-east passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008.
Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the North-east Passage with the assistance of ice breakers in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand.
The north-east sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a commercial ship operator's favourite, saving thousands of miles and avoiding tolls on the Suez Canal tolls.
Further evidence of dramatic change in the Arctic came last week from Alan Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist at Aberystwyth University, who has been studying the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland for several years.
The glacier, which covers about 6% of the icecap, is 186 miles (300km) long and up to 3,280ft (1km) high. In August last year, a 100 square-mile (260 sq km) block of ice calved from the glacier. Photographs show that by July this year it had melted and disappeared.
"I was gobsmacked. It [was] like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water," said Hubbard.
Last year (2010) tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record.
Photograph: Nick Cobbing/AFP/Getty Images
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/
Arctic sea ice has melted to a level not recorded since satellite observations started in 1972 – and almost certainly not experienced for at least 8,000 years, say polar scientists.
The US National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado, which also tracks the extent of sea ice, has not posted data for a week but is expected to announce similar results in the next few days.
The German researchers said the record melt was undoubtedly because of human-induced global warming. "The sea-ice retreat can no more be explained with the natural variability from one year to the next, caused by weather influence," said Georg Heygster, head of the Institute of Environmental Physics at Bremen.
"It seems to be clear that this is a further consequence of the man-made global warming with global consequences. Climate models show that the reduction is related to the man-made global warming, which, due to the albedo effect, is particularly pronounced in the Arctic," he said. The albedo effect is related to a surface's reflecting power – whiter sea ice reflects more of the sun's heat back into space than darker seawater, which absorbs the sun's heat and gets warmer.
Floating Arctic sea ice naturally melts and re-freezes annually, but the speed of change in a generation has shocked scientists – it is now twice as great as it was in 1972, according to the NSIDC, with a decline of about 10% per decade.
Arctic temperatures have risen more than twice as fast as the global average over the past half century.
Separate, less reliable, research suggests that Arctic ice is in a downward spiral, declining in area but also thinning. Using records of air, wind and sea temperature, scientists from the Polar Science Centre of the University of Washington, Seattle, announced last week that the Arctic sea-ice volume reached its lowest ever level in 2010 and was on course to set more records this year.
The new data suggests that the volume of sea ice last month appeared to be about 2,135 cubic miles – just half the average volume and 62% lower than the maximum volume of ice that covered the Arctic in 1979. The research will be published in a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Geophysical Research.
"Ice volume is now plunging faster than it did at the same time last year when the record was set," said Axel Schweiger.
If current trends continue, a largely ice-free Arctic in the summer months is likely within 30 years –that is up to 40 years earlier than was anticipated in the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment report.
The last time the Arctic was uncontestably free of summertime ice was 125,000 years ago, at the height of the last major interglacial period, known as the Eemian.
"This stunning loss of Arctic sea ice is yet another wake-up call that climate change is here now and is having devastating effects around the world," Shaye Wolf, climate science director at the Centre for Biological Diversity in San Francisco told journalists.
Arctic ice plays a critical role in regulating Earth's climate by reflecting sunlight and keeping the polar region cool. Retreating summer sea ice is widely described by scientists as both a measure and a driver of global warming, with negative impacts on a local and planetary scale.
This year, both the North-west and North-east passages were mostly ice free, as they have been twice since 2008.
Last month, the 74,000-tonne STI Heritage tanker passed through the North-east Passage with the assistance of ice breakers in just eight days on its way from Houston, Texas, to Thailand.
The north-east sea route, which links the Atlantic to the Pacific, is likely to become a commercial ship operator's favourite, saving thousands of miles and avoiding tolls on the Suez Canal tolls.
Further evidence of dramatic change in the Arctic came last week from Alan Hubbard, a Welsh glaciologist at Aberystwyth University, who has been studying the Petermann glacier in northern Greenland for several years.
The glacier, which covers about 6% of the icecap, is 186 miles (300km) long and up to 3,280ft (1km) high. In August last year, a 100 square-mile (260 sq km) block of ice calved from the glacier. Photographs show that by July this year it had melted and disappeared.
"I was gobsmacked. It [was] like looking into the Grand Canyon full of ice and coming back two years later to find it full of water," said Hubbard.
Last year (2010) tied with 2005 as the warmest year on record.
Tuesday, September 6, 2011
Carbon offsets near record low !!!
Carbon offsets neared all-time lows Friday, confirming their status as the world's worst performing commodity, as slumping demand meets rising supply of the U.N. instrument traded under the Kyoto Protocol.
A worsening global economic outlook has dented prices for emissions permits which depend on a robust economy belching greenhouse gases into the air, and has also impacted oil, grains, coal and natural gas.
Carbon
offsets have fared uniquely badly because a U.N. climate panel
continues to print new offsets, regardless of a widening glut in
emissions permits in the main demand market, the European Union's carbon
market.
Countries and companies in
the developed world can buy offsets as a way to meet emissions caps
agreed under Kyoto, paying for cuts in developing country projects
instead, but the financial crisis has left a global oversupply.
"If
the European economy goes through a double dip (recession) it could be a
lethal threat for the carbon market," said Marius-Cristian Frunza,
analyst at Schwarzthal Kapital.
The
U.N. scheme for generating certified emissions reductions (CERs),
called the clean development mechanism (CDM), faces additional problems
besides the economy.
Failure by
countries to agree a new round of carbon caps after 2012 under drifting
U.N. climate talks, has further curbed prospective demand.
The financial crisis has blown off course talks to agree a global climate deal,
which now seems years off. The CER market had a traded value of $18.3
billion last year, down from $26.3 billion in its peak year 2008.
Adding to CER woes, the EU has banned from 2013 imports of the most common type of offset, from refrigerant plants in China, prompting investors to dump these.
Benchmark
CERs fell as low as 7.4 euros Friday, down more than 7 percent on the
day, fractionally above an all-time low of 7.15 euros.
Prices
are now at around cost price in developing countries, squeezing margins
for project developers such as London-listed Camco, whose shares were
down more than 10 percent at midday, and by nearly 40 percent over the
past month.
Rival developer
Trading Emissions PLC last week pulled a proposed sale of its assets
because of falling carbon prices. Its average CER costs are 7.5 euros
per tonne.
European carbon prices also continued falls on Friday, to as low as 10.65 euros or by 5 percent.
See below for a performance ranking of various commodities
as of 1245 GMT Friday, compared with December 19 2008 when U.S. crude
hit a financial crisis low of $32. Change is also shown over the past
month.
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