The UK’s chief environment scientist has called for a delay to a policy demanding inclusion of biofuels into fuel at pumps across the UK. Professor Robert Watson said ministers should await the results of their inquiry into biofuels’ sustainability. Some scientists think biofuels’ carbon benefits may be currently outweighed by negative effects from their production.
The Renewable Transport Fuels Obligation (RTFO) is to introduce 2.5% biofuels at the pumps from 1 April. Professor Robert Watson warned that it would be insane if the RTFO had the opposite effects of the ones intended. He said biofuels policy in the EU and the UK may have run ahead of the science.
His comments in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today programme appear on the day when a coalition of pressure groups from Oxfam to Greenpeace writes to the Department for Transport (DfT) demanding that the policy be delayed until after the review. More
As reported in The Guardian, the UK Government’s new Chief Scientific Advisor , Professor John Beddington gave his first major speech at the Govnet Sustainable Development UK Conference in Westminster:
“There is progress on climate change. But out there is another major problem. It is very hard to imagine how we can see a world growing enough crops to produce renewable energy and at the same time meet the enormous increase in the demand for food which is quite properly going to happen as we alleviate poverty.”
He predicted that price rises in staples such as rice, maize and wheat would continue because of increased demand caused by population growth and increasing wealth in developing nations. He also said that climate change would lead to pressure on food supplies because of decreased rainfall in many areas and crop failures related to climate. “The agriculture industry needs to double its food production, using less water than today,” he said. The food crisis would bite more quickly than climate change, he added.
But he reserved some of his most scathing comments for the biofuel industry, which he said had delivered a “major shock” to world food prices. “In terms of biofuels there has been, quite properly, a reaction against it,” he said. “There are real problems with unsustainability.”
Some of the biofuels are hopeless. The idea that you cut down rainforest to actually grow biofuels seems profoundly stupid.
Hiliary Benn, the environment secretary commented that the relative wealth of people in developing countries is increasing, but this leads initially to an increase in demand for meat and dairy products, and ultimately processed and packaged foods - all of which are detrimental the the environment.
Moving forward with minimal impact
As unappealing as this may sound to some people, the message from Benn and others is that to help everyone around us, including the earth as a whole, humans should adopt a low or no meat diet, low or no dairy, avoidance of processed and over-packed foods and quickly remove our reliance on fossil fuels. What I’m describing will be a complete lifestyle change for many westerners, but there will be no alternative - things like biofuels only serve to give the green light for people to ‘carry on as before’, but with perhaps less guilt, whereas what is needed is a total re-think - it is no longer OK to carry on as we have been doing - that old way has clearly not worked.
In the UK, a new movement has been growing at grass roots level called ‘Transition Towns’. Started by Rob Hopkins, the purpose is to create a plan or framework to move a town or city towards oil independance by looking at the likely implications of ‘peak oil’ on the services and products a town uses. Doing this, creates resilience within the town to drastic change.
I have just bought Rob’s book ‘The Transition Handbook‘ and will be penning my thoughts on it in due course.
An article in today’s Independent shed interesting light on the good/bad biofuels debate. A scientific study looked at the carbon dioxide released when land was converted to biofuel production and came to some shocking conclusions.
A cornfield in South Africa
“All the biofuels we use now cause habitat destruction, either directly or indirectly. Global agriculture is already producing food for six billion people. Producing food-based biofuel, too, will require that still more land be converted to agriculture,” said Joe Fargioine of the US Nature Conservancy who was the lead scientist in one of the studies.
The study found that when peat-lands in Indonesia are converted to palm-oil plantations, it would take 423 years to pay off the carbon debt. Cutting down amazonian trees to grow soya beans immediately creates a carbon debt of 319 years. Some production has more indirect effects such as in the US where farmers used to rotate between soyabean and corn crops and now just grow corn for biofuel - the has led to increased production of Soya (to meet the supply deficit) in the Amazon and hence even more trees are lost.
“Such conversions of land to grow corn (maize) and sugarcane for biodiesel, or palm oil and soybean for bioethanol, release between 17 and 420 times more carbon than the annual savings from replacing fossil fuels, the scientists calculated.
One of the choice paragraphs in the report is; “In finding solutions to climate change, we must ensure that the cure is not worse than the disease”.
There are some people who would argue that a company that generally plants it’s massive stores on retail parks and such like, can never be truly ‘green’. They would question their motives - are they real or is it just greenwash? Good question.
I reckon though, that DIY retailer B&Q does deserve some credit - I can remember being asked to take part in survey on environmental issues as I left a B&Q store, and that was over 15 years ago. Since then, they have become one of the founders of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) - the most widely recognised assurance that wood has come from sustainable sources, one of the first DIY stores to offer and promote low VOC paints and the first to offer domestic solar water heating panels and wind turbines. OK, the wind turbine has turned into a bit of a white elephant for them, but they did try!
Their latest catalogue that dropped through my door (yes, junk mail) is focussed on energy efficiency and has some interesting items.
In amongst all the insulation products, they have ‘Eco-Wool’ - made from 85% recycled plastic bottles and totally itch-free. As a top-up for existing loft insulation, this is a great way to re-use a throw-away product.
ThermaHelp hemp wrap insulation - made from 40% sustainable hemp (and growing hemp is really, really sustainable). The wrap insulation is quite thin but very efficient. Expensive, but are offering ‘buy one get one free’.
Hemp loft board panels - a great alternative to ‘chipboard’ panels and about half the weight too.
Breathe - natural hemp insulation made from British-grown hemp. An ideal top-up to existing loft insulation.
They are still ‘plugging’ the Windsave domestic wind turbine, despite the many media reports that some customers are not experiencing anywhere near the electricity savings claimed by the company (due in part to the fact that wind turbines affixed to a dwelling generally don’t perform well in the turbulent air around a building).
There are several types of solar water heating systems, which generally make much more sense for people than wind-turbines and can achieve real savings.
So there you have it - B&Q may not be perfect, but they are bringing these products to a much wider audience than smaller, specialist companies are able to and even if they don’t sell that well, at least Joe Public is being exposed to all this each time he/she walks into a B&Q store.
I say, well done B&Q, but don’t stop there - this is just the beginning.
Thanks to YouTube, you can now see and hear all about the various parts of my Solar PV Experiment. If you have any questions, please use the comment box for this post.
In a previous post, I mentioned that bio-diesel may not be the great saviour of our oil-dependant habits, in fact it will gave many the excuse to continue with their current way of life without having to change too much.
Personally, I think bio-diesel should be considered in the same vein as hybrid cars - that it is a transitional technology which should be used appropriately was we change our ways to using cars and oil products less and less. The problem with bio-diesel is that already, great swaths of land have been allocated to producing palm-oil (one of the cheapest ways of producing bio-diesel) in countries such as Borneo that can ill-afford the loss of forest.
Even if the UK were to turn farmland over to crops for fuel, there would not be enough land for fuel and food production, hence my conclusion that ultimately, we need to change our habits.
The latest thing in the US is Ethanol or E85 (a blend of 85% ethanol and 15% gasoline/petrol) which again is giving vehicle manufacturers an excuse to continue to promote gas-guzzlers which trying to give their drivers a clear conscience. Again the problem is the amount of land required to actually produce the ethanol, and then there’s the hidden oil usage.
This post in the ‘Alternative Energy’ blog gives you a lot more background, facts and figures to back all this up. Please read it and realise that we need a big shift in our lifestyles. Ethanol / E85 is actually part of the problem and not part of the solution.
I’m actually a bit slack in putting this entry on as I’ve had light in the shed for over two weeks now! The kit came with two bulb holders and two 12 volt, 9 watt CF (compact fluorescent) lamps which have a light output equivalent to a 45 watt incandescent light bulb. Although I’m familiar with CF bulbs as I use them in the house anyway, I wasn’t sure how good the light would be via this 12 volt system, especially as my campervan has a couple of 12 volt fluorescent tubes that are OK, but not brilliant.
Anyway, I wired everything up - fairly straightforward as all you have to do is connect the wiring to the correct terminals on the charge controller. The positive cable has an inline fuse which then goes to the switch and in turn onto the bulb. Being 12 volt DC, correct polarity is essential and the bulb holder was bereft of any indication (as it is originally made for 240v AC systems). As the bulb was an ES (Edison Screw) fitting, my common sense (don’t laugh) told me the centre was the positive (which it was) and later on re-reading the instructions, they made a small note about this fact. I won’t go on too much about the instructions, but suffice to say they are somewhat lacking in real detail and a novice would certainly run into problems. More
The charge controller arrived this morning so with a spare 30 minutes or so over lunchtime, I wired it in to the panel and the battery.
The unit is deceptively simple, yet actually feeds back a lot of information and does much more than I expected. Reading through the instructions, it’s also apparent that trying to create a PV system without one could seriously reduce the life of the battery (more on that below).
Wiring is simple - the unit has three sets of connectors with input from the panel on the left, to the battery in the centre and output to the right. The green LED on the top left indicates input from the PV panel - as the light levels reduce, so does the intensity of this LED. The LED on the right shows the state of battery charge and changes from red to yellow to green (in 10 steps) to reflect empty to full charge. More
I got my Solar PV panel mounted on the shed a couple of days ago, but it’s not actually connected to anything yet! I wanted to give myself enough time to complete all the wiring for the lights etc and make sure everything was neat and tidy, but a two of days of glorious sunshine made me think about all the potential energy I was wasting (just having a PV panel is making me think more about electricity usage!).
I decided to temporarily wire the panel to the 85 Ah leisure battery so that could be charging in readiness for installation of the 12volt lighting system. Connection is very simply a matter of wiring from the + and - terminals of the panel to the relevant battery terminal using the clips supplied with my kit. In addition, an inline fuse is fitted on the + wire by the battery (supplied with the kit). More
For a long time, I’ve had a great interest in alternative energy systems - Solar PV, Wind etc and have really wanted to ‘get my hands dirty’ and try something out. Currently, there is nowhere I could locate a wind turbine, so Solar PV was the obvious choice.
I know there are people who would argue that PV has a very long payback period and that the energy and raw materials used in the manufacture could counteract the good of free electricity, but you have to take a balanced viewpoint. Here in the UK, to be self-sufficent on electricity (assuming that’s what you want), you’d have to look a combination of reducing your personal electricity requirements, together with implementing wind and solar generation (and water turbine if you are lucky enough to have suitable land).
Anyway, after drooling over lovely Kyocera 40w and 80w panels I thought I’d just dabble a bit first to get experience - after all, I don’t currently ‘need’ solar and my budget is limited, so I bought a £100 complete shed lighting kit from the Organic Gardening Catalog. The kit comprises a 10w panel, two 9 watt CF (Compact Flourescent) bulbs (45w equivalent) together with all wires, switches and ancilliary bits. I know you can get cheaper panels, but with everything together, I thought it was an OK deal and it’s a starting point for me. The manufacturers claim that under ‘ideal’ conditions, the system would power both bulbs for up to 7 hours. More
I reckon though, that DIY retailer B&Q does deserve some credit - I can remember being asked to take part in survey on environmental issues as I left a B&Q store, and that was over 15 years ago. Since then, they have become one of the founders of the FSC (Forest Stewardship Council) - the most widely recognised assurance that wood has come from sustainable sources, one of the first DIY stores to offer and promote low VOC paints and the first to offer domestic solar water heating panels and wind turbines. OK, the wind turbine has turned into a bit of a white elephant for them, but they did try!
