No one raindrop thinks it's responsible for the flood

Over the last couple of weeks there have been some worrying headlines in the environmental ghettos sections of the various newspapers. For those of us paying attention it has been fascinating. Most of these are appearing now because Durban and the climate change talks are coming up. I’ll link to these shortly but first I want to talk about attitudes and ways of thinking.

The headline that had me thinking was not about ‘the end of the world as we know it’, as so many seem to be, but on a much more prosaic topic, local air quality. The headline in the Guardian is ‘UK government puts thousands of lives at risk over air pollution failures’. It’s an interesting article, one in a long line of news items I’ve seen over the years that have warned that lives are being shortened due to local air pollution, mainly caused by traffic congestion.

What this highlights is a problem of perception and power. It isn’t members of the government who are causing the pollution, although each will play their part, but all of us. It is all of us who drive, particularly in busy cities, who are putting thousands of lives at risk. None of us would intentionally harm anyone but our cumulative actions are doing this. There is a disconnect between our day to day decisions and the effects these have and it is difficult to see how the government, in our democratic country, can make us change. In fact, one of the interesting things to come out of this article is that under the localism bill central government will be passing the responsibility for paying the fines imposed by the EU to the local authorities. In effect our council taxes will pay the fines imposed in an effort to stop air pollution harming us. This doesn’t seem to be the best way of protecting us. The suggestions made by the environmental audit committee are ‘a new national framework of low-emissions zones and a public awareness campaign.’ Both of these are, of course, good suggestions but I’m fairly sure that most of us are aware that we contribute to air pollution by our driving and don’t change our behaviour despite that knowledge.

If we can’t deal with local air pollution where the evidence is obvious and the damage happening to people here and now the effect of trying to get people to take responsibility for their contribution for climate change is even more difficult. There have been concerted ‘marketing’ efforts to discredit the science behind climate change and it has become a divisive and polarised debate. To see this just look in the comments section following any environmental story. It tends to the level of playground ‘debate’. We continue to bicker about whether it is happening, who is to blame and who should deal with it.

The following stories have appeared in the last couple of weeks:

The small island states, whose land will be inundated by the sea, watch with a mixture of despair and anger as countries with higher land seek to put off coming to an agreement on what to do until 2018 or later. Perhaps Norway and Australia can take the refugees when it comes time.

Recent readings of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere have jumped by a record amount. ‘The figures for 2010 mean that levels of greenhouse gases are higher than the worst case scenario outlined by climate experts just four years ago.’

The International Energy Agency (IEA) warns that the world is likely to build so many fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years that it will become impossible to hold global warming to safe levels, and the last chance of combating dangerous climate change will be ‘lost forever’. What gives this further power is that the IEA has always been a very conservative organization.

I am not totally despairing. I spend a lot of time speaking to companies and organisations that are working very hard to minimise their energy use and their waste production, not because of a green sensibility, although they have that too, but because cutting energy use and waste cuts costs and makes them more competitive. With the advent of BS EN 16001 and ISO50001, the energy management standards, the BSi did a survey and discovered that almost a quarter of businesses they asked did not know what their energy costs were as a proportion of their total costs. The government has recently consulted on a proposed requirement for more organisations to report on their energy use/carbon emissions. I hope that this will play a small part in improving our energy efficiency. As it is small repeated thoughtless actions that are causing the problems I am hopeful that many small positive actions will start to make a difference.

In the meantime, my personal actions are the only ones I can fully control and I do my utmost to minimise my carbon footprint, not least because it saves me money too. 

Climate change again

Climate change has been in the news again recently.  The Express notes that La Nina is in force in the Pacific and will gradually strengthen as the year ends leading to another potentially bitterly cold winter. The Telegraph reported in June that there may be a “little ice age’ in store based on astronomers’ belief that the next sun spot cycle will be less intensive than normal or fail to happen.

I remember reading about this in the New Scientist quite some time ago now. One of their conclusions seemed to be that this would give us some breathing space to sort out our carbon emissions. Reading comments on any climate related story however, causes me to despair for that scientific and logical hope. The main sentiment seems to be that warming is a government plot but, if not, this gives us more opportunity to ignore the issue.

Joanna Haigh professor of atmospheric physics at Imperial College London, cautions that "Even if the predictions are correct, the effect of global warming will outstrip the sun’s ability to cool even in the coldest scenario. And in any case, the cooling effect is only ever temporary. When the sun’s activity returns to normal, the greenhouse gases won't have gone away."

Whilst on the subject of skeptics, the results from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project are out. This was set up by climate skeptic, physicist Richard Muller following the email hacking scandal. As Real Climate reports the intention was to, ‘create a new, independent compilation and assessment of global land surface temperature trends using new statistical methods and a wider range of source data. Expectations that the work would put teeth in accusations against CRU and GISTEMP led to a lot of early press, and an invitation to Muller to testify before Congress.’ The BBC reports that, ‘The project received funds from sources that back organisations lobbying against action on climate change.’

The big news from this study is that actually the earth is getting warmer or, as Mother Jones reports, ‘But Muller's congressional testimony last March didn't go according to plan. He told them a preliminary analysis suggested that the three main climate models in use today—each of which uses a different estimating technique, and each of which has potential flaws—are all pretty accurate: Global temperatures have gone up considerably over the past century, and the increase has accelerated over the past few decades. Yesterday, BEST confirmed these results and others in its first set of published papers about land temperatures.’ The graph below shows how well the figures match:

And yet, the comments don't change. There's a lot I might blame the government for but imagining climate change is not one of them. Sigh.

More on carbon

I do not apologise for being a little obsessive about carbon. I tend to think of myself as being a little ahead of a trend that everyone will, sooner or later, have to accept.

I use the word ‘carbon’ as shorthand for two linked issues. When we look at environmental issues there are usually linked problems, resource and pollution. Resource is to do with the tendency to take so much of a commodity that it is driven into scarcity. Pollution is the effect on the wider environment caused by the waste products of this overuse. When we look at ‘carbon’ the resource issue centres on the fact that we are using astonishing amounts of a finite resource, fossil fuel, to maintain our lifestyles. The pollution issue is the vast amount of greenhouse gases we are releasing into the atmosphere as a result of this.

In my job I talk to lots of people about environmental concerns. Everyone is aware of climate change but awareness of the fossil fuel depletion is almost non-existent. Last week I spoke to a group of a dozen young men in the construction industry, a sector that must be fundamentally involved in the movement towards a lower carbon society. They were bright and focused on doing the right thing environmentally but both completely unaware of the fossil fuel issue and suspicious of the reality of climate change. This week, unprompted, fossil fuel depletion was nominated by a delegate as the single most important sustainability issue at a workshop I was involved in and I was more than a little surprised. I’ve spent quite a lot of time wondering why people seem to be unaware of our predicament. People are naturally aware of the high petrol prices at the pump and increasing energy prices and yet seem not to connect this to a fundamental supply difficulty. George Monbiot recently pointed out that despite being very aware of the issue the last government was not publicizing it at all. The original document is also well worth a look bearing in mind that the IEA have since suggested that peak oil occurred in 2006. I haven’t seen a major change in emphasis with the coalition.

I wonder whether the government is also grouping the two issues as ‘carbon’. There is, potentially, a major resource crisis looming. Our energy security in the UK is falling. Last year we imported over 40% of our natural gas having been very comfortably self-sufficient until recently. This information can be found on the DECC website but is certainly not ‘in your face.’ In addition, making money from commodities has increased over recent years as the financial industry has pushed for and obtained (dangerous) levels of deregulation, so any increase in public awareness could escalate the problem – fossil fuels taken out of circulation to be used as money substitutes resulting in higher prices resulting in even more fuel taken out of circulation.

The results of the reluctance to talk about ‘peak oil’ and the public’s perception that climate change is a government scam perpetrated to justify taxing us at higher rates is that these linked emergencies don’t seem to be being addressed openly. Conspiracy theories abound on the internet but I do suspect that the government is trying to do the right thing (tackle the linked carbon issues) by introducing seemingly random pieces of a jigsaw of legislation. The reason conspiracy theories are so popular is that we all hope that there is someone somewhere who is competent and knows what they are doing. This is what I am hoping for here.

I recently wrote about the government’s Green Deal, which is a glimmer of hope, and this week I would like to mention the Defra consultation on measuring and reporting GHG emissions by UK companies, closing on 5^th July. In the report, ‘The contribution that reporting of greenhouse gas emissions makes to the UK meeting its climate change objectives: A review of the current evidence’ the authors note that the ‘reporting of GHG emissions is considered an important part of the GHG management cycle and a tool for embedding sustainability into a company’. I think that the hope is that a clear awareness of their emissions will remind organizations that, in a time of escalating prices, they are throwing away money on inefficiencies in their energy use and that should translate into a desire to minimize those costs with the desirable knock-on effect of a conservation of resource and a minimization of pollution.

If this is to be an effective measure the best of the four reporting options on the table would be the one that captures the largest number of organizations. For this reason alone I will be ‘voting’ for Option 3: Mandate under Companies Act for all large companies, as it will capture information on between 17,000 and 31,000 public and private companies. Option 2, Mandate under Companies Act for all Quoted companies, would pick up around 1,100 companies but not large private companies and Option 4: Mandate under Companies Act for all companies whose UK electricity consumption exceeds a threshold, would capture 4,000 or up to 15,000 with a lowered threshold. Option 1, Enhanced Voluntary Reporting, would have the disadvantage of all voluntary schemes; there is no level playing field and those who need to do it most will be most reluctant. In addition, if we appear to be taking the softly, softly approach to the issue there will be no apparent urgency to reporting.

My preference, when discussing anything at all, is to get as close to reality as possible. Philosophically, we cannot ever know what reality is. We attempt to understand what is actually real by building models, telling stories or, as they say these days, framing. Given that absolute reality is unknowable I still prefer not to have the ‘facts’ obscured. I don’t want anyone to reassure me that everything will be fine when it won’t. I want to be treated like an adult, someone who will recognise her responsibilities and act on these. Trying to make decisions based on incomplete information is part of life but having information ‘hidden’ from me does not reassure me at all and makes me distrust those who are supposed to be representing me. It would work far better for me to have our government say something along the lines of, ‘We have put too much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, we are having to use more and more expensive (in terms of money, pollution and energy input) fuel which is in increasingly short supply and we must cut back on our use of fossil fuels hard and urgently.’ Of course this would probably be political suicide and so I suppose I support what any government will be prepared to do, the slow piecing together of the carbon control jigsaw. If only it were more comprehensive and quicker coming into force.

The good news, the bad news...

Yet again, sorry for the hiatus in publishing. There seems to have been an awful lot going on here, mostly training, mostly about waste. This is great. Waste is one of our biggest issues as a society. It costs a lot of money to waste as much as we do.

But, what I want to write about today, whilst related to waste, comes at it from a different angle. I want to look at carbon in construction and, in particular, the influence the government’s proposed Green Deal might have to help both the construction industry and society’s need to transition to a lower carbon economy.

This is not new stuff, but I have been presenting at the EcoShowcase events for the last couple of weeks instead of Alison, and had to read up about them. Having done that I thought I’d take the opportunity to blog about them before they leak out of my brain again.

First of all a brief reiteration. Climate change is happening and we all contribute to it in our daily activities. At the same time, fossil fuel is depleting. There is only so much oil, natural gas and coal in the world and we’ve used the easy to extract stuff already. The rest of it is in deep water (Deep Water Horizon wasn’t drilling at the very edge of technical expertise for fun), countries that don’t like us much (and need their resources for their own burgeoning populations) or accessible only using hugely polluting and/or dangerous methods (gas fracking, tar sands etc). The UK, having been energy self-sufficient for years, now has to import gas. Over 40%. That’s a big fall from maximum production as recently as 2004.

So we have two predicaments. We are contributing to climate change and we consider our right to pollute non-negotiable. We are moving into an era where energy will be costly and prices will be increasingly volatile. The strategy the government seems to be pursuing is to try to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, which should also cut our emissions of greenhouse gases. This does not seem to be a wholehearted policy or to be terribly effective at the moment but it’s better than nothing.*

On the positive side there are a lot of competent people working on the Government’s behalf. They keep coming up with great ideas. A lot of these focus on the construction industry. Why?

Construction, as the government’s Innovation & Growth Team (IGT) point out, is a large and complex industry, ranging from huge construction groups undertaking design and highly technical operations to more than a million individual tradesmen working alone. Together the industry contributes around 9% to UK GDP and employs 2.6 million people. More importantly it influenced almost half of our total carbon dioxide equivalents in 2007 and around 10% of our national energy consumption is used in the production and transport of construction products.

Two major strategies that have been influential in promoting sustainable construction are the 2008 Strategy for Sustainable Construction and The UK Low Carbon Transition Plan, produced in 2009 by the last government. Paul Morrell of the IGT comments that, ‘Over the next 40 years the Low Carbon Transition Plan is virtually a business plan for the construction industry’. It’s an opportunity, just as long as the industry looks at it that way and doesn’t lobby (again) to have the requirements watered down.

The IGT, on the behalf of the government, looked at the readiness of the construction industry to deliver a low carbon future and produced their final report last year. There are three overarching actions identified:

• Decarbonise the business throughout the supply chain
• Provide new and refurbished buildings allowing energy efficiency
• Provide infrastructure to enable the supply of clean energy

They also identified a number of barriers:

• Information overload
• Industry structure
• The need for up-skilling
• The gap between the design spec and the actual performance of buildings
• The continued focus on initial capital costs rather than lower operational costs
• The need for workable methodologies for carbon accounting**
• Providing drivers to increase customer demand
• A need to address the current old and draughty building stock

The report is fascinating (and long) and is well worth a look, if only at the excellent Executive Summary.

So one of the clever ideas that has emerged is the government’s Green Deal. Work on energy efficiency for new builds is pretty much covered by increasingly tight Building Regulations, planning and, often, funding requirements through Code for Sustainable Homes and BREEAM, but in the UK we have large quantities of older properties. How do we encourage homeowners, landlords and business owners to improve their properties? Given that no-one has huge quantities of available cash at the moment, the upfront costs can constitute a major barrier together with long payback periods. The government has also identified lack of awareness, information overload and lack of confidence in information and a fear of being taken for a ride. There is an abiding fear of small contractors who will ride into town, bodge a job and disappear without trace.

The Green Deal, which is only available in proposal form at the moment, will be designed to deal with this. It is defined as ‘a framework to enable private firms to offer consumers energy efficiency improvements to their homes …and businesses at no up-front cost and recoup payments through a charge in instalments on the energy bill.’

The Deal is based on eight key principles. The first is the Golden Rule; the expected financial savings must be equal to or greater than the costs attached to the energy bill – i.e. it has to be at least financially neutral to the consumer. Then, the measures must be approved, advisors and installers must both be accredited, the provider must give appropriate advice within the terms of the consumer credit act and take account of the individual circumstances of the applicant, and the consent of all parties, particularly the bill payer, must be obtained. The debt generated by the work stays with the property so that the person benefiting from the work, if the property changes hands, is the person who pays the instalments but this must be disclosed to the new owner/leaser. Finally there will be a requirement to protect vulnerable consumers.

Further work will be needed before this idea is put into practice and potential shortcomings addressed. For example, those living in energy poverty at the moment are unlikely to be able to benefit from the clever funding method. Also, those (like me and one in four homes) living in properties with solid walls are unlikely to be able to pay off the high insulation costs (up to £15,000) using savings from their energy bills. Other options through new Energy Company Obligations are being considered.

The first Green Deals should hit the market in autumn 2012, all being well. That’s great although we might want to speed that along a bit. Just before presenting this at Reading I Googled the current concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. You may know that the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change was based on the assumption that at 450 parts per million (ppm) we’d probably be uncomfortable but alright. James Hansen of NASA has since presented the opinion that 350ppm is the maximum that we should allow without long-term detrimental effects. The historical level, before the industrial revolution, seems to have been 280ppm. I was really shocked to see that the figure for May 2011 was 394.35ppm. I’ve since come across an article in the Guardian about this but it was in the environment section. Surely this sort of thing should be front page news.

*One of the major problems the gvt have with tackling climate change and resource depletion is that the economic model they (we all) use requires growth to provide us with prosperity. This means that the treasury and the environmental sections of the government are psychotically permanently at odds. They need to see a psychiatrist or, at the very least, a marriage guidance counsellor. And this is even before we look at the other issues embedded in the very idea of coalition.

** There is a consultation out at present looking at how to best report carbon for UK businesses. It can be found on the Defra pages here.

An atlas of pollution.

There is a fascinating datablog from the Guardian showing who is producing what carbon and whether the emissions are increasing or decreasing. The UK is the 10th largest emitter which is rather interesting, especially given our huge contribution to the historic build up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The close up picture is here. The worst information is that even the global economic slow down has not reversed the increase in carbon emissions.

Climate & weather - and not losing our balance

One of the joys of working in environment is the comments we get when it snows. Lower than average temperatures anywhere in the UK at any time are taken as proof positive that climate change isn't real. I can understand why people would like to dismiss the whole concept. If climate change is real and the effects on our children and grandchildren are as predicted then we all ought to do something about it. To make a real difference we are going to have to make large changes. It's so much easier if we can deny it. Unfortunately the science points to climate change being real and mostly our responsibility.

People tend to forget that there is a difference between weather and climate. Weather is what we get day to day. It is variable and difficult to predict accurately. Will it rain on 3rd July? We don't know in January. Climate is the big picture and is more predictable. We can be fairly sure that it will be warmer on 3rd July than it is today. In the UK our climate is temperate maritime which means it is generally mild and damp and subject to a lot of weather. Oscar Wilde said, 'Conversation about the weather is the last refuge of the unimaginative.' In the UK it is one of the safest conversational subjects, suitable for all, especially at the moment when it is the second winter to be unusually cold following a prolonged run of mild winters. During last year's winter a taxi driver in Sheffield (font of all knowledge) commented that there was a whole generation of drivers who had little experience of driving on ice.

What we should remember is that weather is local and climate change is global. As you can see in NASA's temperature map below whilst November was unusually cold in the UK and northern Europe there are whole areas surrounding us that are very much warmer then normal. The other thing we might consider is that climate destabilisation can have a marked effect on our local weather.

I have been saying for quite some time now, in my entirely unscientific way, that continuing arctic ice melt can only result in strange weather. That huge amount of ice at the top of the world, covering the sea and reflecting sunlight must have a large effect on the weather we experience in the UK. The gardening book I am reading at the moment, 'The Resilient Gardener' puts it very nicely:

'Climatic changes cause irregularities in the patterns of ocean currents and winds. The local effects of those changes are huge compared with the few degrees cited as likely increases in average global climate in the next few decades. A change in wind patterns that brings Arctic inland air masses to you instead of mild ocean air will matter much more than a few degrees higher average global temperature.'

This may be what is happening at the moment. Arctic sea ice is lower than usual, as can be seen on the Arctic Sea Ice News website. Scientists are already at work looking at the potential effects of lower sea-ice. The Oslo Science Conference website, reporting Dr James Overland's comments summarised, 'a warmer Arctic climate is influencing the air pressure at the North Pole and shifting wind patterns on our planet. We can expect more cold and snowy winters in Europe, eastern Asia and eastern North America'. Recently Vladimir Petoukhov and Vladimir Semenov have issued a press release based on a paper in the Journal of Geophysical Research (JGR) arguing that Global Warming could cool down winter temperatures over Europe, and a reduced sea-ice extent could increase the chance of getting cold winters.

Whenever I come across any climate related news I head straight for Real Climate, a blog about 'Climate science from climate scientists'. I have to concentrate really hard to remember my physics and occasionally do background reading to fully understand what they are talking about but it's worth the effort. They didn't let me down with these stories which are discussed in a recent blog posting. They critique the JGR paper and suggest that further work needs to be done before the link they describe is confirmed but conclude, 'It is nevertheless no contradiction between a global warming and cold winters in regions like Europe. Rather, recent analysis suggest that the global mean temperature is marching towards higher values, and Petoukhov and Semenov argue that the cold winter should be an expected consequence of a global warming.'

NB The temperature anomaly map is for November 2010, the most up-to-date at the time of writing.

Refurbishing our tired & leaky old houses

A new post from Alison:

Yvonne and I went on a very interesting training course at the Building Research Establishment (BRE) the other day on Sustainable Refurbishment. It really made us think not just about the implications on the clients that we work with (particularly those that do refurbishment of social housing), but also about the refurbishment of our own houses.

We both live in houses that are at least 100 years old and as such they are pretty energy inefficient however tight we both are with the use of our heating! They are basically like sieves in terms of the heat and carbon emissions that leak from them! There were 3 main things that I took away with me from the course that we thought may be useful to share:

1. the Building Regulations apply to ALL properties undergoing refurbishment - the implications of this are potentially huge, although it became apparent that local authority building control teams do not always have the resources and understanding to police this. That is a real shame - the regulations are changing again next month and the requirements for energy efficiency (i.e. air tightness and use of A-rated equipment) are increasing - it is only through encouragement (e.g. grants and incentives) and policing that we can actually help implement the new requirements which will ultimately reduce real carbon emissions from the significant older housing stock we have in the UK

2. it costs money - refurbishing housing to meet Decent Homes standards costs money. Refurbishing them to Decent Homes standard + getting them to a point where they are energy efficient costs lots more.

3. but the technology is readily available to help improve the energy efficiency of older homes. What is missing are the skills and information to use and know about the new technology. Aerogel, external and internal insulation, photovoltaic panels, phase-changing materials....the list goes on. The new technology is really exciting. But we do not yet have a construction industry that has the knowledge and skills to implement it. This will of course change over time.

Maybe this is a classic case of demand and supply. Until the demand for new technologies is there on a large scale then the supply of them will remain expensive. It may be that the private sector moves quickly on this itself, or it may require Government intervention to help things happen more quickly. Either way it's exciting (if not challenging) times ahead.

Cool tech

I'm always interested in advances in technology which minimise environmental impact. There is an interesting new piece of air conditioning technology reported at engadget. Not only is it 90% more efficient but doesn't use f-gases with their high global warming potential, instead using a salt solution as a refrigerant. I tend to think that much of the UK could do without aircon but there are places in the world that are almost unliveable without cooling. Speaking of uninhabitable areas, there is another story that Nevada is set to become the Saudi Arabia of geothermal power. These two technologies are made for each other. Las Vegas, one of the least sustainable cities on earth, can now be a little bit greener! Finally, in the realms of greentech, a potato powered battery has been developed. This technology s being made freely available to the developing world.

Generating the Future

There is a new report out from The Royal Academy of Engineering which aims to identify 'UK energy systems fit for 2050'. 2050 is, of course, the date by which the government wants us to have achieved an 80% reduction in carbon dioxide generated by the UK. It is also expected to be well past peak oil and heading quickly towards peaks for the various other types of fossil fuels worldwide. The UK is already past peak for our own oil and gas, as we have become aware over the last couple of years of bad winters when there has been increased concern over whether we have sufficient gas storage. Last July the Department of Energy and Climate Change produced the UK Low Carbon Transition Plan which can be downloaded from a link at the bottom of the page here. That was big picture, looking at why we needed to change our behaviour and outlining what different energy using sectors would have to do. This new paper looks a little deeper at possible energy generation systems necessary to achieve the targets set by the Climate Change Act.

It is no surprise that they comment that demand reduction will be essential and that all low carbon energy supply technologies will need to be used including nuclear, renewables and carbon capture and storage. It is also unsurprising that as a fundamental restructuring of the whole of the UK's energy infrastructure will be unavoidable, that the scale of the engineering challenge is massive. They note though, that as the last major investment in our electricity infrastructure was in the 70's and is reaching the end of its service life, investment in renewal would be required anyway which gives us the opportunity to develop an energy system that is 'state of the art'.

The paper concludes that this will require 'nothing short of the biggest peacetime programme of change ever seen in the UK'. They state that this transcends political ideology and call for a strategy informed by a high degree of whole systems thinking and be underpinned by critical evaluation of the economic, engineering and business realities of delivery across a system.

I would recommend having a look at the paper, it is very accessible. These are things we should be thinking and talking about now.

More on methane...

There have been a number of blogs picking up the methane release story I referred to last week. Real Climate has a useful article which puts it into a scientific context. If you do not know about Real Climate you should. It is a website run by real climate scientists. They provide a great service by making the scientific research accessible to the layperson. Whenever there is an overhyped climate story, in either direction of hype, I check this site out to gain a better and more realistic understanding. In the meantime, have a look at their piece on the accelerating methane release.

Methane time bomb?

Some rather worrying news in the newspapers a week or so ago. Sorry for the delay in posting. This is reports following the significant rise in methane in the atmosphere for the third year in a row. Details can be found in the Daily Telegraph.

Why is it a worry? The theory is that large quantities of methane, a greenhouse gas approximately 23 time more powerful than carbon dioxide, are trapped in the permafrost in the arctic circle. As the world warms and permafrost melts there is the potential for this gas to be released in ever increasing quantities, maybe leading to a positive feedback loop. The scientists are reluctant to confirm the causes for this increase at present but it is something to keep an eye on.

Practical EMS issues or The Thermostat Wars!

In the world of Carbon Reduction Commitments and huge energy spends our little organisation might seem to have insignificant issues. The impact of our carbon footprint is as nothing compared to that of the metals industry in Sheffield or the power generation facilities in Yorkshire or even Sheffield City Council. However, our energy use is a significant aspect under our 14001 system, our energy spend is a significant part of our outgoings, we are an environmental consultancy and, as noted in an internet funny that eased its way though the firewall, no single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood. We spend a lot of time helping clients focus on their environmental impacts and, as a point of principle, we make the time to focus on our own.

We do have a number of problems when we look at minimising energy use. We lease our splendid old listed building. It is lovely in the summer when we can open the huge sash windows and let cooling breezes into the rooms. The ceilings are gracefully high, and the windows and doors provide astonishing amounts of ventilation. Even in the depths of winter. The boiler is not state of the art and none of the pipework has been relagged since the old asbestos lagging was removed. Oh yes, and the cellar is still contaminated with asbestos dust so we're not going to go down and put foam lagging around the pipes. Even worse for our measuring and monitoring, the meters are in the cellar. The leasor will be sorting out the asbestos issue when it's warm enough to turn the heating off for a few days. Not right now.

So working within this set of constraints there are still some things we can do to cut down on our energy use. We turn off the heating in the areas of the building not in use. The radiators in the meeting room are turned off at the end of each meeting. It's one of our little rituals. The corridors are not heated, except by the pipes between radiators. The radiator in the kitchen is turned off and the single thermostat for the building is kept low. The thermostat is in the building entrance hall which, given the drafts from the front door, means it will still keep the heating turned on even when set to ten degrees (C). It's supposed to be set at fifteen. I have been amused over the last few months to see what it is actually set at at various different times of day. Up to twenty five degrees on occasion. As I understand it you could set it to 100 and it would not heat the building up any better than when set to 15 which is why I don't particularly care that is being moved but it does give me some cause for thinking that we haven't got the energy minimisation message across.

There are always issues to consider when putting together an energy policy. You need your staff to understand and agree with what you are doing. Keeping the building uncomfortably cold means that people are going to sneak in electric heaters. This has health and safety implications because of the requirement to check the safety of equipment. It is also the least efficient way to heat a building, and expensive. If you need to 'police' your heating you are on to a loser; the policer is one person against many. We've seen this recently in the kitchen. As this tiny room is only used to make drinks and heat an occasional soup it has been designated an area where the radiator is kept off. We're in there for five minutes at most. Over the last couple of weeks it has been difficult to know whether to wrap up warm before going in or to strip off. I'm longing for the day when I go in and find one or other of the combatants under the worktop turning the valve on or off.

On the other hand, people who want to work in their shirt sleeves and want to heat a building to make it comfortable for that style of dress might be persuaded to consider a cardigan. I have an elusive memory that the National Trust had a 'Cardi' Policy, though I haven't been able to find reference to it on the internet, but I'm a firm believer in the 'don't turn up the thermostat, put on a jumper' message. I may be biased. Being a woman of a certain age and well padded to boot I often find it uncomfortably warm when my slender young colleagues are sitting huddled in their fleeces. As I have pointed out to them on occasion, they can put on a jumper but I can't respectably take any more clothes off.

So the moral of this story is that we need to reassess our approach and have a discussion where we all reach a consensus on our policy rather than just impose it. This may not be something that can work in a massive organisation but in our company, where we all know each other, it is something we can address. But in the meantime I'm also going to think about how to stop 20% of monitors being left on over the weekend. That's a waste from which no-one benefits.

But it's cold!

The BBC have been polling people about climate change and have come up with some interesting results. As they say, 'Climate scepticism is 'on the rise'.' Well there have certainly been some disappointing news stories about the science which seem to show, more than anything else, that scientists are human, make mistakes and don't always handle the resulting publicity well. Oh yes, and it's been cold. Really quite cold. In the UK. Despite this I have no doubts myself that the climate is changing, and the causes are predominantly our activities. I occasionally wander over and have a look at 'Climate Denial Crock of the Week' by Peter Sinclair. His recent video is, 'It's so Cold, there can't be Global Warming.' It's well worth a look.

Hunting for training images

I'm in Scotland at the moment. I came up to deliver a 'Know your Waste' course last week at the University of Edinburgh and I'm staying to deliver a CIWM Construction WAC course next week, which has left me with a free weekend here. What to do on a dull Saturday in North Lanarkshire? I'm just completing an Introduction to Renewable Energy course on behalf of EAUC and I wanted a few images to use so, after a visit to the local farmers market, we went looking for wind turbines. In much of England they are quite difficult to find but here there are a few elegant herds of them on the horizon. This lovely threesome appeared a little while ago alongside the M74. How convenient. We stood gazing in the chill breeze as they swept their blades almost silently through the air. So that's my first set of images. I'm thinking Scotland isn't the place to be looking for effective photovoltaic energy capture.