Craig Venter

“Rely on the sun and the other eco-friendly things that Mother Earth has given us. We need to stop being dependent on the corrupting effect that is oil now!”

– HuffPost Super User “ProgressivePicon86″

The next energy revolution is coming – and promises the biggest disruption since the industrial revolution.

Today we assume that oil is a finite resource. The “Peak Oil” argument, for example, is not that it runs out, but that conventional sources run down, and it becomes prohibitively expensive. This obliges us to think about re-ordering society. The other assumption is that the exploitation of fossil fuels creates the rapid release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, changing the climate. Along with this, too, are arguments for re-ordering society. But with the next generations of fuels, these assumptions go out of the window. Policies based on these assumptions lose their relevance and appeal.

This promises a fundamental change in how we think about man, industry and nature. Just as Karl Marx anticipated a future of machines, where manual labour had been replaced by automation, we need new political thinking.

Replacing oil, however, isn’t so simple. The problem is that oil is a terrifically energy-dense material, and useful in many other ways. Entire industries are founded on the byproducts alone, such as fertilisers and plastics. We tend to take this for granted.

But what if oil could be created in your backyard? Or by your children as a school project? What if we thought of oil as a renewable energy? What if it was a low-carbon renewable? With cheap hydrocarbons it becomes just that, and within 15 years much of our oil will be produced this way: it’s simply an open bet on who’ll get there first.

Algae: the new bio-engineering workhorse

“We can engineer, humbly, like we have been domesticating plants for a long time,” one scientist told me. “We engineer the algae to do biochemically something quite different to what they’d be doing in the wild: they still take photons from the sun, and via biology, turn it into a useful captured molecule. We have them doing something similar but with stunning efficiency: it’s 40 to 100 times more efficient,” says Elbert Branscomb, chief scientist to the US Department of Energy.

There are (at least) around 60 startups hoping to produce oil and diesel biologically, with accelerated fermentation or photosynthesis techniques to produce an end product that is 100 per cent compatible with the existing infrastructure. Some, for example, tweak the algae to make them do photosynthesis anything from 40 to 100 times more efficiently. LS9 received $30m in funding and has a one-step process to convert sugar to create renewable petrol. It expects production within five years. If oil prices remain high, say over $40 or $50 a barrel, then it’s viable.

Craig Venter is proposing an even more radical way of creating biofuels. He’s genetically modifying algae to take CO2 and convert it to renewable, compatible fuels. The algae can’t survive in normal conditions, but need around 20 times the concentrations of the trace gas to start work. The idea is that CO2 will be pumped out from power stations directly into his plants.

After years of watching synthetic hydrocarbons with suspicion, Exxon has put substantial funding behind Venter to the tune of $600m. Venter doesn’t see a return within 10 years, but it has obvious appeal to those still concerned with climate change, and who realise it’s a low priority for BRIC countries (including China and India) that are determined to industrialise as quickly as possible. Venter’s renewable oil kills two birds with one stone: removing CO2 and creating a low-carbon renewable alternative to excavating the stuff.

The quote you see at the top of the article could have been picked from any of the thousands of comments left on message boards and in comments sections every day, urging us to “wean ourselves off our oil addiction”. It’s a potent substance that creates quite a passion, and some strange alliances. You’ll find people who’d normally cross the road to avoid each other suddenly breaking out into agreement. Tree-huggers who hate our technological consumer culture find themselves allying with red-blooded free market capitalists who want economic independence from the Middle East.

What the synthetics revolution means

There are several fascinating consequences of a world in which oil is created in tanks, rather than shipped around the world, which are quite dramatic.

Firstly, one of the key reasons of conflict is resource contention, and conflicts over oil in particular. The consequences of these conflicts include famine and migrations. A lot of human misery can be attributed to the desire for oil. But renewable oil is local, and so there’s no need to ship it around the world. And since it’s no longer “finite”, there’s no reason to squabble over it.

So we’re looking at major consequences for foreign policy and defence policy. The palette of nations we feel comfortable with changes; and the nature of what we feel we have to defend changes, too. Anyone who has made the call for “energy independence” will be thrilled, since two-thirds of the energy we use comes from oil and gas. Shale gas, too, is a local resource for many countries, and is already changing geopolitical dynamics.

Secondly, it has major consequences for business – and not just in nations who today bank on excavated hydrocarbons. The 10 largest companies in the world are all oil companies – and all are privately owned.

Thirdly, it will bring about a fairly profound change in the political debate. Synthetic hydrocarbons are not some magic bullet that suddenly catapults society into a future of boundless prosperity, although they don’t half help. Everything has costs and consequences, and the sheer value of oil doesn’t change. In the short term, oil companies will be faced with large cleanup costs from conventional extraction.

But the greatest challenge cheap hydrocarbons poses is for people whose outlook is founded on what I call “End Times logic”. The most successful political movement in recent years is environmentalism, which expanded from specific concerns about pollution and conservation into an all-encompassing worldview, complete with very preachy appeals to changing parts of our lifestyles.

These ranged from “Don’t flush the loo too often”, to “Don’t fly for a weekend break”, to “Eat less red meat”. Very few politicians have felt courageous enough to contradict this. And the movement has achieved its ascendancy through urgent, apocalyptic appeals, rather than using calmer methods of rational persuasion which involve costs and benefits to be totted up. These new energy sources pose a profound problem: they saves the planet, and we carry on with minimum disruption.

I expect that one effect will be that environmentalism will become much more about everyday concerns such as pollution, and conservations again, back to where it started. But it grew into a vacuum, after the end of the Cold War, when great political ideas seemed to lose credibility. As a way of driving the political agenda, it will become currency without value. Buzzwords such as “sustainability”, founded on a resource-constrained view, will no longer be credible. People will simply laugh at them.

So, then. Oil as a low-carbon renewable energy source, one your children can grow. And planet saved.

What’s not to like?

The article finds the minister on the defensive about shale gas: it’s why he’s taking his argument into print. Huhne doesn’t like this exciting new development, but he doesn’t have the power to kill it. He welcomes it through gritted teeth before explaining how many handicaps could be put in its place: the ownership of the land, the regulatory framework, the planning hurdles, and so on.

(France has bowed to its powerful nuclear lobby by imposing a moratorium on unconventional gas exploration, but since France’s electricity is already so cheap – the cheapest in Europe, in fact – it doesn’t need shale anything like as much as the rest of Europe does.)

Huhne writes that the Coalition’s energy policy is “technology neutral” – a claim guaranteed to invite widespread public ridicule. The UK’s energy policy is anything but “technology neutral”. It’s full of measures created by lobby groups for their respective energy sectors.

There are several of these. The most recent is a “carbon floor price”, which was pushed heavily by a nervous nuclear industry, and introduced by the Conservatives this last year. This handicaps fossil fuels. Another is FITs, or feed-in tariffs, which legally oblige energy buyers to acquire energy at a vastly inflated price over market rates.

The largest, and oldest, is the Renewables Obligation scheme, which legally mandates electricity buyers acquire energy from a list of environmentally-correct sources such as wind, solar and Anaerobic Digestion, with an annual quota set each year by central government. The RO scheme also creates a big bureaucracy to ensure suppliers comply, and an additional complex money-recycling scheme in which suppliers who fail to conform buy their way out. And if that isn’t enough, on top of that, an insurance pool (called a “price mutualisation ceiling”) for buy-outs who fail to cough up. Clearly, there are a lot of vested interests to be appeased in keeping all these expensive and complicated shows on the road.

And they all have something in common: they’re the beneficiaries of the minister picking winners (or more accurately, given the meagre operational efficiency and cost per watt of wind power) picking losers. It’s anything but technology neutral. New, unconventional gas doesn’t require any subsidies at all. It makes a positive fiscal contribution to the Exchequer, and, all things being equal, means public spending can increase, or taxes elsewhere can be cut.

And a vast price-mutualisationation ceiling currently standing at £233m.

The former Guardian journalist twice resorts to a straw man argument – the sure sign of a weak case.

“Some therefore argue,” claims Huhne, “that we should abandon everything else and devote ourselves wholly to shale.” [our emphasis]

We’d very much like DECC to substantiate that claim, for to our knowledge, nobody has ever made it. Gas is simply part of an energy mix: a “diverse and balanced” portfolio that Huhne himself says he wants. “We should not bet the farm on shale,” he concludes.

Source: Household Energy Price Index (HEPI) E-Control and VaasaETT (Prices as of June 2009)

Recently European ministers have also committed themselves to meeting CO2 targets. The way they’ve gone about this, by favouring technologically backward energy sources, greatly compromises the primary two objectives of cheap and reliable energy. Cheap power is no longer feasible, ministers reason, and electricity supply may become irregular, or intermittent, because we must meet the targets. But this is simply mistaking means and ends. There are other ways of addressing this than by handicapping the entire economy.

It’s now very much a live political issue. Shale gas presents an existential crisis for many of the most dogmatic Greens, because it brings these issues to the fore. The problem for Huhne is that his “cure” looks worse than the disease.

It’s not online so you’ll have to buy a copy: £4.25 from all good newsagents.

Is it time to decouple “Climate Change” from the Department of Energy and Climate Change? If it was the plain old “Department of Energy” again, it might spend more time researching new fuel sources. Two peers last week took aim at the department because its latest energy blueprints are ignoring the potential impact of shale gas.

The government is “re-consulting” (in its own words) on national energy blueprints, also known as the Revised Draft National Policy Statements, up to 2050. But one of the Lords expressed surprise during the gathering that the latest didn’t mention shale at all.

“There is the possibility that potentially abundant supplies of unconventional gas will result in considerably lower gas prices,” said Lord Reay, continuing:

“The Government apparently cannot find space in several hundred pages of their energy national policy statements to acknowledge the existence of this potentially game-changing development. Gas is now cheap, the price having decoupled from the oil price, and it is going to be accessible in many countries worldwide, not least in Europe. “It emits 50 per cent to 70 per cent less carbon than coal, with the result that when the previous ‘dash for gas’ took place in the 1990s and gas to some extent took over from coal, our power station carbon emissions fell overall by some 30 per cent.”

Indeed, and what’s not to like?

“What is the point of persisting with ever-rising subsidies for wind power in order to meet renewable energy targets when abundant, cheap and relatively CO²-clean gas is available?” asked the Scottish peer.

According to Lord Reay, the problem is that any substantial new gas power station now needs to demonstrate “readiness”. CCS will require a national grid of pipelines to take the carbon dioxide out to sea… or wherever else they decide to send it.

Lord Jenkin echoed Reay’s comments, and wondered why it was omitted from the 2050 blueprints when it was “mentioned in a briefing sent to a number of us last November by the department”. This stated, he pointed out that “Additional supplies in the US may now have a limited impact on international gas markets (since it [the US] is now largely self-sufficient), unless the US were able to export some of this gas”.

So the department knows it is there. It just doesn’t want to investigate it.

In response, Lord Jonathan Marland, the Parliamentary Under Secretary of State at DECC, said: “We welcome shale gas, of course; if it reduces the price of gas, that will be fantastic. There are no signs as yet that the Americans are going to supply it to the outside world, as they are intending at the moment to keep it within their own country, but anything that reduces the price of gas will be of great benefit.”

But the US does need not export gas for the UK to benefit, however, since we may be sitting on a substantial shale gas reservoir. Asset management giant The Carlyle Group is backing a planning application to explore shale in Blackpool. There’s more on that on the shale blog No Hot Air, here.

Today, pubicly-funded academics at the Tyndall Centre at the University of Manchester called for a pre-emtive moratorium on shale fuel investment, citing unspecified health concerns and saying the new fuel sources will “increase the risk of entering a period of ‘dangerous climate change’”… as well as local issues such as “high levels of truck movements”.

Back to the Lords – where the debates’s fruitiest remarks came from Lord Deben, the peer formerly known as John Selwyn Gummer.

Deben began by acknowledging that he had fingers in several pies. His chairmanships include greenwashing outfit Sancroft; Veolia, which is big in recycling; offshore wind company Forewind; and Corlan Hafren, the Severn barrage company. There are more directorships.

Perhaps having so many bets on the table explained his position, which is an unusual one.

“The argument is over. There is no point in arguing,” he insisted. “If you do not believe in climate change, you must just accept the population argument and the changes that will be needed to reserve and conserve the resources that we have,” he said.

So heads he wins, tails you lose. He accepted that the consumer would pay the price, but said they’d be grateful in the long run.

“It would be foolish to tell people that because they do not like the rise in the cost of electricity we should not allow it happen. They will be much angrier if we allow the world to be endangered because we have not taken these steps.”

The Ex-Gummer is President of GLOBE International, the international club that flies eco-aware politicians around the world. ®

Related links

Consultation on revised draft National Policy Statements for energy infrastructure

Can Shale Gas transform UK energy policy? – No Hot Air

In a utopian report, the Institution of Civil Engineers (ICE) says the UK needs £20bn additional spending on recycling infrastructure over the next decade. The recommendation is made in a report today that proposes “unlocking value locked up in the UK’s current waste” – which sounds great – but the report fails to tell us whether the value unlocked will exceed £20bn. Alas, no attempt at all is made to quantity the costs and benefits of the recommendations – which are grand indeed.

No new public money is likely for waste infrastructure once the current PFI-funded projects are complete, which worries the engineering trade group. It has expressed concerns that current technologies are immature and unreliable, which can only deter investors. But, in a splendid bit of utopian speculation, the State of the Nation report proposes that by 2050, “the circular economy is a reality and the waste industry has fully converted into a materials supply sector”.

This is a lofty ambition: only 9 per cent of British waste comes from households to begin with. And, the ICE notes ominously, China may stop taking our recycling as it advances economically. The engineers also advocate new tiers of administration to co-ordinate waste management.

These are, specifically:

• a sub-national body taking the role of identifying sites for strategic facilities;
• an aggregation of local authorities determining the quantities of waste required to trigger the creation of new facilities – and then planning their delivery; and
• a national waste management council made up of representatives of national and local government creating a waste infrastructure plan by consensus.

The ICE added “sustainability” to its mission statement in 2003.

Recycling is rubbish

The engineers’ report caused controversy on its launch day with the observation – rarely acknowledged by environmentalists – that the discovery of recycling by the Volvo-driving classes in recent years has actually er … made recycling more costly and difficult. There were mature markets for recovering aluminium, paper and glass from waste long before eco-campaigners adopted it as a cause, and turned it into a moral issue (and personal obligation). To cut a long story short, since local councils’ targets stress quantity over quality, very little recycled waste is worth very much, and some of it is dangerous. A paper recycling mill has had to stop taking British paper because it contains too many glass shards.

The story of how recycling mania was born 20 years ago is sweetly told in this landmark New York Times magazine feature from 1996, which describes how Americans erroneously came to believe the country had run out of landfill sites. As with many superstitions, it spread like a contagion through the college-educated middle classes.

Localism met gesture politics, and authorities rushed through mandatory recycling targets, even though these offered only “short-term benefits to a few groups – politicians, public relations consultants, environmental organisations, waste-handling corporations” and imposed a serious opportunity cost, “diverting money from genuine social and environmental problems”. It was more important to be seen to be doing something.

“Recycling may be the most wasteful activity in modern America: a waste of time and money, a waste of human and natural resources,” concluded the New York Times‘ John Tierney.

The EU is blamed for the current situation, after it ordered the UK to cut the amount of municipal waste it throws into landfill from 85 per cent in 1999 to 35 per cent by 2020. The Governments reponse was huge tax rises in the cost of using landfill sites. But recycling isn’t the only alternative, of course. A report prepared for the London Assembly in 2009 called “Where there’s Muck there’s Brass” [pdf] estimated that if London’s landfill was burned, it could heat 625,000 households and provide light for 2m more homes. Side benefits would include more compost, and even a net CO₂ reduction.

So why aren’t we burning our waste, safely, and helping the old and the poor get through a freezing winter?

The most compelling reason I can find comes via a US study which estimated that incinerating 10,000 tons of waste took up one full-time job. Disposing of the same amount into of landfill needed six full-time employees. But recycling 10,000 tons of waste created “work” for 36 people.

Which gravy train do you think you’d choose?

Perhaps it is. Even deep Greens are dropping long-standing objections [1] to nuclear power generation. I got in touch with Imperial’s Professor Robin Grimes, who recently co-authored a Science paper with William Nuttall indicating how the nuclear industry could re-emerge. Here’s an interview that encompasses the current state of play, and some ideas about how the next 40 years could take shape.

Professor Grimes disagrees that nuclear has been moribund – it just seems that way in the UK and the USA, he says.

“We’ve been in stasis. Only in the last five years has the amount of power generated by nuclear started to decline. It’s not as catastrophic as has been described. While we’ve not been building new reactors here, in Asia, they have been, and the [North] Koreans and Japanese, and China and India, are ramping up. There’s been a shift of activity from the west to the east. The number of reactors has increased.”

Ten new nukes are planned for the UK, with the first becoming operational in eight years. The problem here is one a skills shortage, caused by an ageing skills base. You need “Squep” people (suitably qualified and experienced) to monitor the safety of the facilities. The Nuclear Installations Inspectorate, the enforcement arm of HSE’s Nuclear Directorate, recently acknowledged this by raising pay rates, hoping it could hold back the ageing experts from early retirement, or even lure them out of retirement.

Top 10 Nuclear Nations (2009) by operational output – Source:IAEA

“I’m not sure if we can call it a Lost Generation, but it almost feels like one,” says Grimes. “We are in significant danger of losing the real experience as the skills base is built up again,” he says. “The amount of activity has started to increase dramatically, but they’re inexperienced.”

A look at the third-generation nuclear technology on offer shows incremental improvements, and bears out a clutch of new ideas. The latest reactors are smaller and more modular. The design focus is on passive safety features, and using materials that are radiation resistant.

Examples include the AP1000 [2] from Westinghouse, Areva’s EPR [3] (Areva design).

Unlike today’s thermal reactors, the Generation IV designs currently on the drawing board, take in the whole fuel cycle as part of the design concept. The reactor burns get rid of the highly radioactive nasties – including plutonium and the minor actinides [4]. In their Science paper, Grimes and co-author William Nuttall write that “some of these options could sustain power production for more than 1000 years”.

Surprisingly, the current vogue over the past five years has swung towards smaller reactors – below 1GWe (Gigawatt-electric) output. Why, I wondered, go for smaller plants when the planning process is so long and site acquisition is so expensive? Why not just build a big one?

Top 10 Nuclear nations (2009): number of reactors – Source: IAEA

Grimes says: “It depends on how much you need. There’s little point producing 1GWe when you only need a 10th of that, 100MWe.” Westinghouse’s AP1000 is, as the name suggests, a 1GWe station, but it started off as a 600MWe design.

Costs

Nuclear is unchallenged when it comes to producing baseload electricity, but controversy rages over the true long-term cost. Grimes acknowledges that CO2 reduction targets help enormously.

“I don’t see nuclear as something that produces all your electricity, it’s a mix, and getting the balance right is crucial,” he says. “It’s going to be different for different countries; I imagine we’d want to build a lot of wind turbines, but we’re going to need nuclear as a our baseload capacity – and a lot of it.”

Disposal costs will fall by the time the Generation IV reactors come online.
Nuclear energy facilities under construction, measured by output (MW). China has 24 underway and Russia 11.

Source: IAEA

“My personal opinion is that a complete recycle, with complete reuse of uranium and plutonium and the minor actinides is feasible, but it leaves us with a 300-year problem.”

Which is a major improvement, of course. Currently some of the isotopes in the actinides have a half-life of 100,000 years. We should remember where we left stuff 300 years ago, particularly if it’s radioactive.

Readers regular raised a couple of fascinating developments in nuclear research. What did Grimes make of them?

One is using the thorium fuel cycle. Thorium is four times more abundant than uranium. India is the biggest backer of thorium reactors. Grimes took a visit a year ago to have a look [pdf [5]].

Thorium: There’s a lot of it about

Thorium, however, doesn’t have a fissile isotope, which complicates things a bit: you have to breed the artificial isotope uranium-233. Grimes points to another advantage.

“Because you’ve started with a lower mass isotope number, you produce less of the higher atomic number isotopes – plutonium and minor actinides – than you do with a uranium-plutonium cycle.”.

“It will happen, because India wants it to be so. It has a lot of thorium, and not a lot of uranium. So that will allow us to get over the technology barrier; it could well be that it’s a sensible and viable option.”

Another factor comes from a quite unlikely source. Norway has one of the highest per-capita GDPs in the world, thanks to North Sea oil, and has reaped the benefits of hydroelectric power. But Norway discovered it may also be sitting on one of the world’s largest supplies of thorium oxide.

Pebbles: The ‘politically correct’ reactor

Eco-friendly? Koeberg’s PBMR project never got off the ground.

Another remarkable innovation in nuclear energy is the pebble-bed reactor [6], variously described as the ” politically correct atomic reactor [7]” [pdf], or the nuclear power plant you could leave in the hands of Homer Simpson.

The idea isn’t new, it was first demonstrated in 1967. But with traditional concerns about nuclear plants (such as meltdown) made moot by the inherently safe design, it’s curious that pebble-bed designs are not common. It seems they should be as common as neighbourhood transformer stations. (Reactors used in nuclear-powered icebreakers are as small as 35MWe.)

South Africa last month signalled it would end its 11-year PBMR [8] (Pebble Bed Modular Reactor) project, shedding most of the 800 staff working on the project.

China and Germany continue to develop designs similar to the PBMR.

“It’s always the bridesmaid,” says Grimes. “I’d like to see it developed. As scientists, we need that flexibility of technologies going forward. PBMR is inherently safe and it’s modular. But the small LWR reactor designs are also modular in the same way, and in terms of safety, the AP1000 has equivalent safety features such as passive cooling. The advantages of PBMR are definitely starting to be clear in the LWR design. That’s taken the wind out of its sails.”

“In a traditional reactor design, the decay heat – once fission has been turned off – is enough to destroy the reactor core. There are two things you can do – even if you lose your water, you can have a passive water volume that flows through the reactor from big tanks on the roof. You don’t have to do anything – it’s a passive process. Even though water’s running out, it’s removing the decay heat. It is exponential decay – so the residual amount of heat is no longer a threat. However there are additional features – natural convective processes that keep water moving around outside and keep the vessel cool. It’s really simple.”

Nuclear still leaves proliferation problems, but as Grimes points out, “nothing is proliferation-resistant, there are just degrees of it.”

And fusion?

“Sure it’s possible. JET [9] has been a great success, there’s no question. But JET is a long way from a commercial reactor; even ITER [10] is a long way from a commercial reactor. We need an entire generation of fission reactors with 60-year lifetimes.”

You can peruse the policy here (pdf).

That’s what one Reg reader discovered, after enquiring about the Trust’s calculations on the effectiveness of new low-energy bulbs.

“A reduction in electricity consumption will be essential over the coming decade as a large number of power stations are being withdrawn from service, and as a result there is a gap looming between supply and demand,” Graham Crocker was told. “More efficient lighting (which accounts for nearly 20 per cent of domestic electricity consumption) will go some way to alleviating these demand pressures.” The answer came from Alex Stuart, assistant manager of services of development at the quango.

“This is the first time anybody has acknowledged that new power capacity will not be delivered on time to replace existing capacity,” Peter Lilley MP told us.

There’s no doubt that Britain faces a looming energy crisis. CapGemini estimates that a quarter of the UK’s energy plant capacity will close by 2015. The nation will also see declining oil and gas output from the North Sea. But new, replacement power generation will not arrive in time.

The capacity crisis is largely a consequence of EU environmental directives. The Large Combustion Plant Directive (LCPD), which affects coal and oil power stations generating 50MW or more, obliges plant operators to adapt their stations by the end of 2015, or close them down. E.ON has decided that three of its four stations which fall under the directive will shut.

But the directive was introduced in 2001, leaving the state plenty of time to plan ahead.

“There is a gap looming because of New Labour’s incompetence,” James Woudhuysen, Professor of Forecasting at De Montfort University, and co-author of Energise! told us.

In 2003, then PM Tony Blair had blocked plans for new nuclear power stations, he pointed out. “Today’s government is now planning nuclear operations to resume in 2018, but more likely 2025,” says Woudhuysen.

But should the public turn out the lights because of years because of the failure of political leadership?

“If people are being asked to use electricity as efficiently as possible, they should do that because it’s a cost-efficient thing to do, rather than because the government created a crisis through bad planning,” says Lilley.

Complicating things is an additional dilemma, of the government’s own making.

The Whitehall department responsible for keeping Britain’s lights on now has additional duties of “tackling climate change” and “moving towards a low-carbon economy” – it’s the new “Department of Energy and Climate Change” (DECC). This means it is obliged to oppose exactly the kind of fossil-fuel power generation capacity that will save Britain from blackouts. So which will it choose?

On the department’s own website, under the heading “What We Do” – Climate Change is a higher priority than maintaining the UK energy supply.

The Energy Savings Trust has a budget of £43m a year. Around 150 staff are on secondment from BERR, the former Department of Trade and Industry. Much of its work is duplicated by two other quangos – the £250m a year Carbon Trust, and Envirowise.

The remit is explicitly to change people’s consumption patterns. The umbrella project “Act on CO2″, intended to co-ordinate the output of different government departments, was described as “the premier government-backed behaviour change brand” according to tender documents seen by The Register.

“The Energy Saving Trust is about making you feel guilty about ‘your impact on climate change’. It is about how you can generate your own energy – no doubt as efficiently as a normal power station,” says Woudhuysen.

“With rights, Tony Blair enlightened us, come responsibilities. This clearly means that New Labour has the right to screw up on energy supply – while hectoring us about how we should take responsibility for its failures.”

The Trust was named as the 9th most useless quango in 2005 – along with the Potato Council.

Footnote

For a quango that puts communications as priority, the Trust doesn’t half drag its feet on responding to enquiries – reader Graham Crocker spent a fruitless three months trying to get answers. Eventually, the Trust admitted, the low energy bulbs make little difference to the householder because the lower heat output in cool climates – like ours – means people spend more on heating. “The Trust do not seem to have fully formed policies or a coherent strategy to deliver them,” Graham concludes.

“It is indisputable that polar ice caps are melting – we can see that with our own eyes,” Lord Hunt, Minister of State of the Department of Energy, told the house. Hunt described himself as a climate “agnostic” – but he was swiftly corrected by Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor.

“My Lords, that is not true of the past year; The noble Lord’s predecessors were seriously misinformed by his officials, and I suspect that he will be too,” Lawson replied. Twisting the knife he continued: “That is a real problem for him, and I feel for him.

“The fact is that in the Antarctic, where most of the ice is, the ice is thickening and has been for some time. In the Arctic this year there has been a greater extension of ice than ever before.”

The Lords were debating the Climate Change Bill once again – which the Commons voted through on an unusually snowy October evening recently. That Bill was passed by our elected representatives by 463 votes to 3. Would the unelected upper chamber – which has a reputation for rejecting and amendment hasty legislation – be show greater scrutiny?

You can guess the answer to that one. The Amendments were passed by around 190 to 10. But the Lordships’ debate was at least broader and deeper than the six hours of greener-than-thou pledges relayed in the Commons last month. A significant speech by Nigel Lawson, now Lord Lawson, made the difference. Lawson described it as the first and last speech he would make on the Bill – but more of that in a moment.

The debate gave the Government and its supporters the chance to say something they hadn’t in the Commons. That hand on heart, that they don’t know what they’re talking about. Quite literally. Take this exchange between The Earl of Onslow and Lord Hunt. Onslow asked:

“The world’s climate has got colder over the past 10 years, just, while world emissions have risen by quite a lot. Can the Minister explain that?”

“My Lords, I am not a scientist,” the Minister replied, “and it is not my role to debate the intricacies of scientific arguments”.

“The committees and the expert groups that have looked into these matters and which have informed the government’s decision: it is on their conclusions that the 80 per cent target is now based.”

That’s a very odd reply, since Hunt didn’t need to offer a scientific argument, he’d been confronted with two assertions of fact. Either they were true or they were false. Hunt’s answer avoiding expressing his own judgement either way. Instead, the Minister of State preferred to pass – indicating that a) facts are irrelevant and b) saying he had total confidence in someone else’s judgement. In fact Hunt deferred several times in answers to the “committees and expert groups” to make his political judgements on his behalf.

When politicians defer to the “science” – that means that judgements are being made by their appointed committees and quangos. And the committees, it turns out, are highly political – they’ve got an axe to grind. They’re doing politics on our behalf. This is a kind of evisceration of democratic politics: if these quangos are so wise that we aren’t permitted to question the political judgements they produce – we may as well appoint wise quangos to do all of our politics for us.

And Guy Fawkes really could have saved himself the trouble of buying all that gunpowder: we’ve arrived at No Parliament by other means.

So to Lawson.

After Mrs Thatcher’s former Chancellor had written a book on policy responses to climate change, he discovered that no British publisher would take it. A US publisher brought it to market, and it’s since become a hit, translated into two languages.

Lawson’s main point was that this was a futile gesture. It didn’t require the UK to cut its own emissions by one gram. But the consequences of this gesture were costly. He began by explaining why he hadn’t spoken before in the House:

“I felt that it was unbecoming for an unbeliever to take part in a religious service, which is what all this is really about.

“The Bill will go down in history, and future generations will see it as the most absurd Bill that this House and Parliament as a whole as ever had to examine, and it has now become more absurd with the increase from 60 per cent to 80 per cent.”

A futile unilateral gesture?

Lawson invited the Lordships to “pretend the planet is warming” – and ignore the figures from the Met Office and Hadley Centre. (Lawson said he didn’t see the evidence supported the claim that the planet was cooling, but it certainly hadn’t done a lot of warming since the 1998 El Nino). “The majority of climate scientists do not think that if there were a warming, it would be a disaster.” So what then?

The point of the bill was symbolic – and only “makes sense” if other countries were to follow suit and make similarly symbolic gestures, he argued.

(The UK only contributes 2 per cent of man-made CO2 emissions worldwide, while worldwide human emissions are only 2 per cent of the planet’s CO2 output. And the planet’s CO2 is about one tenth of greenhouse gas. So the rhetoric is about “setting an example”.)

The problem, said Lawson, was that Europe had planned to isolate the US, a plan that had “backfired horribly”. This left the EU making symbolic pledges of its own – no one expects China, the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, or India to follow. Except that the Europeans are now backing off. The catchy 20 per cent by 2020 reduction has been abandoned. Germans need their coal, the new members like Poland need theirs – and are playing industrialisation catch-up – and the whole thing is falling apart.

“Nothing will happen. It can only be agreed unanimously and will be looked at again in December this year, after the Poznan meeting, which I hope the Minister will grace with his presence. It will be an educational event for him.”

Lawson highlighted a recent conference called “Cashing in on Carbon” in which an investment group featuring Lord Stern was prominently featured.

“So the people who gave you the glories and the joys of mortgage-backed securities are now offering the great business opportunity of carbon-backed securities.”

Meanwhile the emissions trading system was a “scam”: China made a lot of money selling these worthless indulgences. So much money, it had to tax them. Climate change had also proved to be a vote-loser for the Canadian Liberal opposition – its “green shift” cost it the election – and in New Zealand, said Lawson. He also warned the Tory party not to find itself “high and dry” with symbolic climate gestures.

It was almost a lone voice, as the House of Lords nodded through the Amendments.

Back in the Commons, the bill was hailed by climate change minister Joan Ruddock as a “triumph for the UK”.

The bill creates an enormous bureaucratic apparatus for monitoring and reporting, which was expanded at the last minute. Amendments by the Government threw emissions from shipping and aviation into the monitoring program, and also included a revision of the Companies Act (c. 46) “requiring the directors’ report of a company to contain such information as may be specified in the regulations about emissions of greenhouse gases from activities for which the company is responsible” by 2012.

Recently the American media has begun to notice the odd incongruity of saturation media coverage here which insists that global warming is both man-made and urgent, and a British public which increasingly doubts either to be true. 60 per cent of the British population now doubt the influence of humans on climate change, and more people than not think Global Warming won’t be as bad “as people say”.

Both figures are higher than a year ago – and the poll was taken before the non-summer of 2008, and the (latest) credit crisis.

Yet anyone looking for elected representatives to articulate these concerns will have been disappointed. Instead, representatives had a higher purpose – demonstrating their virtue. And for the first 90 minutes of the marathon debate, the new nobility outdid each other with calls for tougher pledges, or stricter monitoring. Gestures are easy, so no wonder MPs like making them so much.

It was all deeply sanctimonious, but no one pointed out that Europe’s appetite for setting targets that hurt the economy has evaporated in recent weeks – so it’s a gesture few countries will feel compelled to imitate.

The US Senate has Senator James Inhofe, but in the Commons, there wasn’t an out-and-out sceptic to be found. It was 90 minutes before anyone broke the liturgy of virtue. When Peter Lilley, in amazement, asked why there hadn’t been a cost/benefit analysis made of such a major change in policy, he was told to shut up by the Deputy Speaker.

(And even Lilley – one of only five out of 653 MPs to vote against the Climate Bill in its second reading – felt it necessary to pledge his allegiance to the Precautionary Principle.)

It fell to a paid-up member of Greenpeace, the Labour MP Rob Marris, to point out the Bill was a piece of political showboating that would fail. While professing himself a believer in the theory that human activity is primarily the cause of global warming, he left plenty of room for doubt – far more than most members. The legislation was doomed, Marris said.

Marris had previously supported the 60 per cent target but thought that 80 per cent, once it included shipping and aviation, wouldn’t work. We could have a higher target, or include shipping and aviation, but not both.

He compared it to asking someone to run 100m in 14 seconds – which they might consider something to train for. Asking someone to run it in ten seconds just meant people would dismiss the target:

“The public will ask ‘why should we bother doing anything at all?’”

Out of bounds

The closest thing to a British Inhofe is Ulsterman Sammy Wilson, Democratic Unionist Party, who’d wanted a “reasoned debate” on global warming, rather than bullying, and recently called environmentalism a “hysterical psuedo-religion”. Wilson described the Climate Bill as a disaster, but even colleagues who disagree with his views of environmentalism are wary of the latest amendments.

The Irish Republic is likely to reap big economic gains if it doesn’t penalise its own transport sector as fiercely as the UK pledges to penalise its own in the bill. Most Ulster MPs were keenly aware of the costs, and how quickly the ports and airports could close, when a cheaper alternative lies a few miles away over the border.

Tory barrister Christopher Chope professed himself baffled by the logic of including aviation and shipping. If transportation was made more expensive, how could there be more trade?

“As we destroy industry we’ll be more dependent on shipping and aviation for our imports!” he said.

“When the history books come to be written people will ask why were the only five MPs… who voted against this ludicrous bill,” he said. It would tie Britain up in knots for years, all for a futile gesture, Chope thought.

However, Tim Yeo, the perma-suntanned Tory backbencher who wants us to carry carbon rationing cards, said it would “improve Britain’s competitiveness”. He didn’t say how.

Lilley impertinently pointed out that no cost/benefit case had been made for handicapping shipping and aviation. It was the first mention in the chamber of the cost of the commitments being discussed. Estimates put the total cost of the Climate Change Bill at £210bn, or £10,000 per household – potentially twice the benefits.

Quoting Nordhaus, Lilley noted that Stern (“Lord Stern – he got his reward”) had only got his front-loaded benefits by using improbable discount rates – and then only half the benefits of making drastic carbon reductions will kick in by the year 2800. The government has said it wasn’t using Stern’s discount rates to calculate the cost of shipping and aviation restrictions, but a more sensible and traditional rate of 3.5 per cent instead – yet it refused to reveal the costs. Lilley asked:

“I ask the house – is it sensible to buy into an insurance policy where the premiums are twice the value of the house?”

Stop right there, heretic.

Liilley was “building a broad case on a narrow foundation”, the Deputy Speaker told him. “I really must direct him to the specific matter that’s included in these clauses and amendments.”

Earlier, the Tories had said they would be tougher on carbon than Labour, and the Lib Dems the toughest of the lot. Much more representative of the tone of the debate was Nia Griffith, the NuLab MP for Lanelli.

Her comments are worth repeating (Hansard link to follow today) because language tells us a lot – not only about the bureaucratic ambitions of the exercise, but how the modern politician thinks about governing.

Griffith told the House that the Bill was “a process not an end in itself”, and had great value as a “monitoring tool”.

MP Nia Griffith

“It’s the targets that make us think,” she said. She also used the phrase “raise consciousness” – as in, “it must raise consciousness amongst nations that follow suit.”

In other words, if you take a gesture, then pile on targets and penalties, you will change people’s behaviour. Maybe she hasn’t heard of Goodhart’s law.

Yesterday, however, it seemed that the only MPs exhibiting enough “consciousness” to actually think – and ask reasonable questions about cost and effectiveness of the gesture – got a good telling off.

The Bill finally passed its third reading by 463 votes to three.