Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

The oil companies are not daft. They know oil supply is peaking. Hence building more refineries makes no sense. They are utilising existing capacity at full stretch, but dont need more - because there wont be the crude to refine, despite increased demand.

Even so. these price increases fall considerably short of the implications of doom being put forward by some.

Sure they will, because we have an easy solution to balancing domestic costs with foreign ones, one so fundamental that I don't even have to explain it to you.

Of course airlines are looking for more fuel-efficient airplanes. Unlike most industries, fuel expenses are a huge component of airline operating costs. Shave a few points from there, and you save billions.

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Sure they will, because we have an easy solution to balancing domestic costs with foreign ones, one so fundamental that I don't even have to explain it to you.

Uh. I actually have no idea. Not only do I not know what you're talking about, I have no idea what you're even trying to address with this statement. Care to explain?

This helps balance the costs between the cheaper good produced in inefficient and environmentally wasteful factories abroad, and the efficient and environmentally friendly ones at home.

16 May 2007 14:33 Home > News > Environment
Carbon-free living: China's green leap forward
The world's largest building project is a revolutionary eco-city of electric cars and zero emissions near Shanghai
By Clifford Coonan
Published: 06 February 2007
Wang Enming pauses as he emerges from the subway in Dongtan to listen to the sound of flocks of birds settling on the wetlands near the metro station, undisturbed by man as they prepare for a winter migration. Cycling the remaining three minutes home to his apartment, he marvels again at the fresh breeze coming off the mighty Yangtze river, which is never cleaner than at this point at the world's first eco-city near Shanghai.

The power that opens the door to his apartment comes from a solar cell on the roof, while the water he uses for his evening shower is recycled, as is all waste in this city of half a million residents. His dinner of boiled rice, spinach and spicy chicken has all been locally produced using organic methods. Later, he'll stroll down to the car club and rent a battery-powered sports car and whizz through the tunnel back to Shanghai to cruise the Bund. This is one possible vision of China in 25 years' time, low carbon-footprint living in the eco-city of the future.

Grim apocalyptic nightmares tend to characterise the usual environmental reports from China, but that is about to change as British engineers prepare to turn this vision of Dongtan into a reality. By 2030, 60 per cent of the world's population will be urban dwellers, and environmentalists insist that a radical programme of making our cities greener places to live is the only sustainable way to allow us to keep living in cities.

The good news is that in Dongtan, on Chongming island near Shanghai, half a million people will live in a car-free, zero-emission, recycling city with an ecological footprint one-third that of people in Shanghai. Environmentally sustainable city living is possible, its planners say, and is within our grasp. The Dongtan project could be the solution to the demands of city-living - combining the need to be environmentally sustainable with being extremely cool. The Mayor of London Ken Livingstone is reportedly interested in Dongtan as a possible blueprint for development in London.

This is the biggest single building project in the world, and it's taking place in a country many see as the biggest risk to the planet's green future. The urbanisation process in China is astonishing - there are already 90 cities with more than a million residents, and 400 million people are expected to move from the countryside to cities in the next 30 years.

The project has been given initial approval by the central government in Beijing and the remaining permissions are expected after Chinese new year later this month.

The initial phase will be finished by 2010, when the Expo fair comes to Shanghai, and it is forecast that by 2030 there will be more than 500,000 people living here. The project won't be cheap. The initial phase will cost around £1.5bn, but the figures are expected to rise into the double-digit billions. But it's an optimistic signal from China that the world's factory is serious about doing something on global warming and sustainability.

The British engineering group Arup, which built the Sydney Opera House, the Pompidou Centre in Paris and the Tate Modern in London, is working as a strategic partner with Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation (SIIC) on the integrated master-planning for Dongtan. The planners describe Dongtan as a "holistic, systemic view of a city", a view of the world they say is vital to the survival of cities.

Three-quarters of the size of Manhattan and located on China's third largest island, Dongtan will be developed on 630 hectares of land to attract a range of commercial and leisure investments, mostly the kind of companies that can benefit from an ecologically positive environment, such as bio-tech companies. All the buildings in Dongtan will be self-sufficient in their energy use, with power coming from a combination of wind power, solar power and other renewable sources. All the apartments and houses will be within seven minutes' walk of public transport. Most of the citizens of Dongtan will work within the city and all buildings, made of local materials, will use a combination of traditional and new construction technologies.

Farmers on the island will be encouraged to use organic methods to grow the crops that will make the city self-sufficient in food. Battery and fuel cell-powered cars will whirr silently through its precincts.

The Arup engineers working on the project speak with real passion of the prospects for Dongtan. Many of them point out that it is their own children's future that is being secured with this kind of project. Dongtan will look like a science fiction movie, but the principles are tried and tested, said Peter Head, who is managing the project for Arup. Where Dongtan scores particularly highly is in its clever use of existing ideas. There is little to see on Chongming island yet, but given the dramatic changes on the Pudong district of Shanghai, which was transformed from being a sleepy, mosquito-infested wetland into a sleek, urbanised area of skyscrapers and monorails within a few decades, you know that anything is possible when urban planners have their minds set on something.

The island has grown over the past century because of silt deposited by the Yangtze, and further silt dumped in the river delta will be used to increase the available natural habitat for the millions of migrating birds that use the island as a stopping-off point. This adds an additional challenge to developing the island as much of it has been designated as a nature reserve. Mr Head said: "Because of the nearby wetlands and bird sanctuary, there will be no petrol or diesel cars, only fuel-cell or battery-powered cars. This means quiet vehicles, which means people can open their windows again and don't need to use air-conditioning."

President Hu Jintao gave his backing to the project during a visit to the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition in China's financial capital. The SIIC, which is controlled by the municipal government of Shanghai, is a powerful voice in urban renewal. Its brief has been to create a development with low-energy consumption that is as close to being carbon neutral as possible.

At the moment, you have to take a ferry to get to the island, but tunnels and bridges will join the island to Shanghai and then it will be 20 minutes away from the centre of Shanghai.

All cities are major energy users and you can't live in the city without electricity. It's hard to get by without a car. At the same time, the only way to deal with climate change is to address the rapid growth of cities. Mr Head said: "We're unravelling a whole series of self-inflicted problems which just seem to disappear. This gives people choices about how to live a low ecological-footprint lifestyle. Dongtan is not about a physical solution that can be copied, it's about a process that delivers, and a methodology we can apply in London or anywhere else."

Initially, some of Dongtan's residents will commute to Shanghai for work, but the goal is to provide employment for most of the island's residents. The planners hope that ultimately companies will choose Dongtan as a place to live and work.

Chris Luebkeman, who heads Arup's global foresight and innovation initiative, clearly sees the project as a potential saviour for our way of life on this planet. "Yes, we can save the world. If we want to," he said. "This project is a search for a way forward, a wish not to repeat what's happened in other cities." He is no naïve planner - he points out how China is building a coal power station a week - but he recognises how China, like every other country, will run out of fossil fuels if something is not done.

Urban areas will make up about 40 per cent of the land area of Dongtan, and one of the key aspects of the city's design will be preventing light and noise pollution, as well as emissions and water discharge reaching adjacent wetland areas. Canals, lakes and marinas will run through the city, with solar-powered water taxis. Visitors will park their cars outside the city and use public transport to get around inside the city. "This is about China trying to curb inappropriate demand, to modify demand into a more efficient utilisation of the resource," said Mr Luebkeman.

Mr Head added: "This is about reducing the footprint of life, about why we buy and why we consume. I can see a fashion developing in improving energy use, in having a higher quality of life with walking and cycling."

Good points HBG; so how about we put a tariff/tax on items, not depending on their country of origin, but depending on how clean the process of their creation is?

Not a terrible idea, if you were going to institute carbon emission caps locally. However, it'd be -hellishly- difficult to actually administrate, because a significant amount of the emissions related to an industrial process is involved in the energy generation phase, which is a step removed from the actual manufacturing process. And how would you audit it, with all the parties concerned out of your jurisdiction? "Hyuk hyuk, yeah, we use only 100% green energy to produce our widgets!" "Yeah, we wash each piece of coal before we burn it." "Specifically, we wash it with oil..."

And, of course, any effort of ours to institute a "green tariff" would doubtless be matched by foreign tariffs on our goods, on the grounds of reciprocity. Even if we punch out current WTO rules, how do you get other countries to accept your tariff on them without them placing a tariff on you? (Well, if you're the US, you do have all the carrier groups and nukes... but that's not -good- diplomacy! ;p)

Not to say that a tariff is automatically bad, but it's hard to institute one without reducing the total amount of trade.

Authoritarian solutions like those proposed don't work in practice. Real people, motivated by greed and self-interest are generally smarter than the bureaucrats , auditors and rule-makers. Moreover technology, the economy, and the world are all very adaptable things -- the rules and tariffs will be coopted by change before they have a chance of becoming effective. Freedom works better.

In addition those of us who find ourselves asking, "Why can't they just ........ (fill in the blanks for your pet idea), should recall Aesops story about the mice who decided that the solution to their cat problem was to put a bell around the cat's neck.

Don't many countries already charge tarriffs on our goods?

Good points HBG; so how about we put a tariff/tax on items, not depending on their country of origin, but depending on how clean the process of their creation is?

International coalition to make buildings energy-efficient
By Andrew C. Revkin and Patrick Healy

Thursday, May 17, 2007
A coalition of 16 of the world's biggest cities, five banks, one former U.S. president and companies and groups that modernize aging buildings has pledged to invest billions of dollars to cut urban energy use and releases of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.

Under a plan developed through the William J. Clinton Foundation, participating banks would provide up to $1 billion each in loans that cities or private landlords would use to upgrade energy-hungry heating, cooling and lighting systems in older buildings.

The loans and interest would be paid back with savings accrued through reduced energy costs, organizers of the initiative said at a news conference in New York on Wednesday. Typically, such upgrades can cut energy use and costs from 20 percent to 50 percent, they said.

Making more efficient use of energy is considered by many scientists to be the best starting point for addressing global warming, particularly because there is a potential immediate financial payoff in addition to the long-term environmental benefit.

At the news conference, Michael Bloomberg, mayor of New York, said that investing in retrofitting existing buildings was vital because they would make up 85 percent of all buildings in the city in 2030.

He said banks and corporations appeared to be grasping the importance of considering long-term environmental risks when making investments. "Major business and financial institutions increasingly understand that shrinking the world's carbon footprint is a pro-growth strategy, indeed the only pro-growth strategy for the long term," Bloomberg said.

Energy use in buildings accounts for about a third of global releases of heat-trapping greenhouse gases. In densely populated older cities like New York and London, buildings are the dominant source of greenhouse gases.

The first targets under the initiative, organizers said, would be municipal buildings in the participating cities, which are: Bangkok; Berlin; Chicago; Houston; Johannesburg; Karachi, Pakistan; London; Melbourne; Mexico City; Mumbai; New York; Rome; São Paulo; Seoul; Tokyo and Toronto.

The project is aimed at propelling energy-saving investments that otherwise tend not to happen even when long-term financial benefits are clear - because cities or property owners lack access to capital, organizers said.

Also on Wednesday, the scientific academies of 13 countries issued a joint statement calling on world leaders to address global warming by boosting energy efficiency, promoting a shift to less-polluting energy sources, and intensifying research into new energy technologies that produce no emissions.

"Increasing energy efficiency is a first crucial step toward solving the climate-energy problem," the statement said. It stressed the importance of developing financial mechanisms for encouraging such investments and on sharing technology and information that could spur such changes.

The plan was announced at the end of a three-day meeting of mayors, business leaders and environmental experts organized by the foundation of former President Bill Clinton and other partners as part of a two-year-old initiative aimed at advancing local actions that could blunt global warming.

"Climate change is a global problem that requires local action," Clinton said.

"The businesses, banks and cities partnering with my foundation are addressing the issue of global warming because it's the right thing to do, but also because it's good for their bottom line. They're going to save money, make money, create jobs and have a tremendous collective impact on climate change all at once."

Clinton's remarks on climate change have been a talking point this spring for his wife, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, as she pursues the Democratic nomination for president.

Because Hillary Clinton has yet to give a major speech on climate change, Bill Clinton's highly visible work on the matter is seen as a political plus in her campaign.

As president, Bill Clinton drew some criticism for not seeking Senate ratification of the Kyoto Protocol, the climate treaty that requires industrialized countries to cut emissions.

The Bush administration has rejected the treaty.

On Wednesday, Bill Clinton said the strength of the new initiative was that it would quickly produce concrete change on the ground, demonstrating that a transition away from fossil fuels need not be a burden on economies of rich or developing countries.

"We all know that this is a global problem that requires a successor to Kyoto and national legislation, but we also know that as you reduce greenhouse gas emissions you must do it place by place, specifically company by company, building by building," he said.

"The mayors are in a remarkable position to do this."

Several experts not involved with the new Clinton Foundation project said it appeared to be a valuable initial step in limiting the human impact on climate.

But one challenge, said Thomas Wilbanks, an expert on energy and climate at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, is that the accelerating building boom in fast-growing developing countries means that investing in making new buildings energy efficient will be far more important in the long run than tightening up old ones.

"Potentials for energy-saving retrofits are significant in industrialized countries," Wilbanks said, "but the real challenge in rapidly growing developing countries is increasing the efficiency of new building construction."

Wilbanks, who is also a co-author of one of the recent climate reports released by the United Nations, said that the greatest value of this initiative was "that it jump-starts an inevitable global process of making buildings more energy-efficient."

The first step under the foundation's retrofitting project will be energy audits of older municipal buildings, identifying systems or structures that could be replaced, organizers said.

The financial instruments for paying for the upgrades are being designed by the Clinton Climate Initiative, set up by the foundation and Hannon Armstrong, a company specializing in arranging such investments, along with the participating banks: Citigroup, UBS, Deutsche Bank, ABN AMRO and JPMorgan Chase.

The upgrades would be done by four international energy-services companies that are already seeing strong growth in these types of conversions. They would guarantee a certain level of energy and monetary savings for particular projects under the plan.

The influx of capital from the new project could potentially double global business in such energy upgrades, which is now several billion dollars a year, bankers and business representatives said.

"I've been involved in a couple billion dollars worth of projects in the last several years," said Bob Dixon, senior vice president of Siemens Building Technologies, one of the energy-services companies.

"They've all paid for themselves in energy savings."