by Jeff McIntire-Strasburg

So what can you do with an old shipping container? Start an indoor farm? Build a mobile strip mall? These are just a couple of the more unique ideas I’ve come across; there are many others.

This weekend, while reading Fast Company‘s interview with Jason Aramburu, the CEO of re:char, I was struck by (among other things) the company’s design for a shipping container-based factory for its “Climate Kilns” (“a small pyrolysis system capable of generating biochar or fuel charcoal”). The idea’s ultimately very practical: according to Aramburu, “In places like rural Africa, it’s really hard to import and transport finished goods efficiently,” so the social enterprise start-up decided to create a mobile production space for its signature product that could be moved to the places where re:char would sell its kilns.

So. how do you turn a shipping container into a factory? re:char’s CTO Luke Iseman did a presentation at Austin’s Dorkbot in December, and shared it on the company blog (where you can also just look at his slides if you prefer):

The company is still working at getting one of these up and running in Kenya, but it’s a really intriguing model of reuse (which makes sense: everything this company does seems based on reusing “waste”). If you’re so intrigued by the biochar concept that you’d like to try making you’re own, re:char sells both complete Climate Kilns, or DIY basics (plans plus the pyrolyzer) on its website.

Reprinted with permission from Sustainablog

by William Laurance

From Brazil to Borneo, new roads are being built into tropical forests at a dizzying pace, putting previously intact wilderness at risk. If we hope to preserve rainforests, a leading researcher says, new strategies must be adopted to limit the number of roads and reduce their impacts.

by william laurance

We live in an era of unprecedented road and highway expansion — an era in which many of the world’s last tropical wildernesses, from the Amazon to Borneo to the Congo Basin, have been penetrated by roads. This surge in road building is being driven not only by national plans for infrastructure expansion, but by industrial timber, oil, gas, and mineral projects in the tropics.

Few areas are unaffected. Brazil is currently building 7,500 kilometers of new paved highways that crisscross the Amazon basin. Three major new highways are cutting across the towering Andes mountains, providing a direct link for timber and agricultural exports from the Amazon to resource-hungry Pacific Rim nations, such as China. And in the Congo basin, a recent satellite study found a burgeoning network of more than 50,000 kilometers of new logging roads. These are but a small sample of the vast number of new tropical roads, which inevitably open up previously intact tropical forests to a host of extractive and economic activities.

“Roads,” said the eminent ecologist Thomas Lovejoy, “are the seeds of tropical forest destruction.”

Despite their environmental costs, the economic incentives to drive roads into tropical wilderness are strong. Governments view roads as a cost-effective means to promote economic development and access natural resources. Local communities in remote areas often demand new roads to improve access to markets and medical services. And geopolitically, new roads can be used to help secure resource-rich frontier regions. India, for instance, is currently constructing and upgrading roads to tighten its hold on Arunachal Pradesh state, over which it and China formerly fought a war.

Of course, roads are not just an environmental worry in the tropics. In forested areas of western North America, one of the best predictors of wildfire frequency is the density of roads. In Siberia, road expansion is promoting a sharp increase in logging and forest fires. And new roads in the Arctic could potentially alter epic mammal migrations.

But no other region can match the tropics for the sheer scale and pace of road expansion and the degree of environmental change roads bring. Road building has a range of direct impacts on rainforest ecology. In wet tropical environments, the cut-and-fill operations associated with road construction can impede streams, increase forest flooding, and drastically increase soil erosion. Roads also discharge chemical and nutrient pollutants into local waterways and provide avenues of invasion for many disturbance-loving exotic species.

Roads that cut through rainforests can also create barriers for sensitive wildlife, many of which are ecological specialists. Studies have shown that even narrow (30 meter-wide), unpaved roads drastically reduce or halt local movements for scores of forest bird species. Many of these species prefer deep, dark forest interiors; they have large, light-sensitive eyes and avoid the vicinity of road verges, where conditions are much brighter, hotter, and drier. A variety of other tropical species — including certain insects, amphibians, reptiles, bats, and small and large mammals — have been shown to be similarly leery of roads and other clearings.

And by bringing naive rainforest wildlife into close proximity with fast-moving vehicles, roads can also promote heavy animal mortality. For some creatures, especially those with low reproductive rates, roads could potentially become death zones that help propel the species toward local extinction.

Although the direct effects of roads are serious, they pale in comparison to the indirect impacts. In tropical frontier regions, new roads often open up a Pandora’s box of unplanned environmental maladies, including illegal land colonization, fires, hunting, gold mining, and forest clearing. “The best thing you could do for the Amazon,” said the respected Brazilian scientist Eneas Salati, “is to bomb all the roads.”

In Brazilian Amazonia, my colleagues and I have done studies showing that around 95 percent of all deforestation occurs within 50 kilometers of highways or roads. Human-lit fires increase dramatically near Amazonian roads, even within many protected areas. In Suriname, most illegal gold mining occurs near roads, whereas in tropical Africa we have found hunting to be so intense near roads that it strongly affects the abundance and behavior of forest elephants, buffalo, duikers, primates, and other exploited species. Roads can sharply increase trade in bushmeat and wildlife products; one study found that eight killed mammals were transported per hour along a single road in Sulawesi, Indonesia.

Paved highways are especially dangerous to forests. They provide year-round access to forest resources and reduce transportation costs, causing larger-scale impacts on forests and wildlife than do unpaved roads, which tend to become impassable in the wet season. The proposed routes of new highways often attract swarms of land speculators who rush in to buy up cheap forest land, which they then sell to the highest bidder.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of paved highways is that they spawn networks of secondary roads, which spread further environmental destruction. For instance, the 2,000-kilometer-long Belem-Brasilia highway, completed in the early 1970s, has today evolved into a spider web of secondary roads and a 400-kilometer-wide swath of forest destruction across the eastern Brazilian Amazon. As my colleagues and I showed in a 2001 study published in Science, large expanses of the Amazonian forest could be fragmented by the advance of new highways and roads in Brazil. According to our models, by the year 2020, rates of forest destruction would rise by up to 500,000 hectares per year, and the area of forest that remained in large, unfragmented tracts — exceeding 100,000 square kilometers — would decline by 36 percent.

Can the environmental impacts of tropical roads be minimized? In theory, the answer is “Yes, partially.” Frequent culverts can reduce the effects on streams and hydrology. Impacts on animal movements can be reduced by keeping road clearings narrow enough so that canopy cover is maintained overhead, providing a way for arboreal species to cross. In high-priority areas, such as certain national parks, rope-bridges are being used to facilitate road crossings of monkeys and possums. For small ground-dwelling species, culverts beneath roads can allow road-crossing movements, and even large animals such as Asian elephants will use highway underpasses that are designed to be wildlife-friendly.

Measures also exist to limit the devastating indirect impacts of roads, such as illegal land colonization and forest clearing. One of the most vital steps is to legally establish parks or reserves along road routes in advance of road construction. Such reserves often substantially reduce forest incursions, though they rarely halt them entirely. Another promising idea is to promote railroads rather than highways in tropical wilderness regions. Because railroads stop only at fixed locations, the spatial patterns of forest exploitation and movement of forest products can be more easily controlled and monitored than with roads.

In practice, however, limiting the environmental impacts of roads in developing nations is expensive and risky. Tropical nations rarely have the institutional capacity, human capital, or financial resources to adequately manage development in their remote frontier regions, frequently leading to a “resource grab” revolving around illegal trade and outright theft of natural resources, which is greatly facilitated by road expansion.

When it comes to tropical roads, I believe three conclusions are inescapable. First, highways and roads are the single biggest factor determining the pattern and pace of tropical forest destruction. New roads that slice deep into intact forest tracts are especially devastating.

Second, among the many human drivers of environmental change, road building is one of the most readily amenable to policy modification. In practical terms, it is far easier to cancel or relocate a road project than it is to, say, reduce human overpopulation or halt harmful climate change.

Finally, if we hope to maintain intact tropical forests and their vital ecosystem services and biodiversity, then we simply must get serious about tropical roads. And there is only one real solution: carefully plan and limit frontier road expansion.

How can this be achieved? First, we need to sensitize political decision-makers, economists, infrastructure planners, and the general public about the myriad environmental costs of road expansion, especially into intact forests. The biggest road projects are often being supported by international lenders — such as the Asian, African, and Inter-American development banks — and by foreign aid doled out by China, the U.S., and the European Union. Educating such decision-makers needs to be done both generally and on a project-by-project basis.

When I was president of the Association for Tropical Biology and Conservation, one of my key goals was to use the organization’s scientific expertise and credibility to combat some of the most environmentally risky plans for frontier road expansion. We were especially active in critiquing plans to punch new roads into the cores of national parks, such as Yasuni in Ecuador, Kerinci Seblat in Indonesia, and the Serengeti in Tanzania.

Another key priority should be better frontier law enforcement and forest monitoring, given that much road building in tropical nations is illegal or unplanned. Special attention should be focused on the more-aggressive timber, oil, gas, and mineral corporations, many of which are known to engage in bribery and collusion in their efforts to gain unbridled access to forest resources.

There is also a dire need to improve environmental impact assessments (EIAs) for planned roads. In Brazil, for instance, EIAs for several major Amazonian highways focused only on a narrow strip along the road route itself, while completely ignoring the devastating indirect effects of roads. Similarly, EIAs for major development projects, such as large mines and hydroelectric dams, often ignore the impacts of road proliferation that such projects inevitably promote.

Finally, given that tropical deforestation is a massive source of greenhouse gas emissions, international carbon-trading funds should be used to better plan and mitigate road projects, to establish new protected areas in advance of road construction, and to halt the most ill-advised road projects altogether. In the end, the easiest and most cost-effective way to limit the manifold pressures from roads may be simply not to open Pandora’s box in the first place.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The Chinese government has ordered five cities and two provinces to set caps on greenhouse gas emissions in preparation for a series of regional carbon markets. Last week, China’s National Development and Reform Commission urged Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai, Chongqing and Shenzhen, as well as the provinces of Hubei and Guangdong, to set “overall emissions control targets” and submit strategy proposals on how to achieve them. A plan developed by Guangdong — which commits the province to achieving 20 percent of its total energy consumption from non-fossil fuels by 2015 — has already been approved by the central government. The province must also cut its “carbon intensity,” or the CO2 emissions per unit of economic growth, by 19.5 percent. China as a whole, which has already passed the U.S. as the world’s biggest greenhouse gas emitter, has committed to reducing its carbon intensity by 40 to 45 percent by 2020. According to a new government report, China’s urban population surpassed its rural population for the first time ever in 2011.

Photo by New Scientist

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released long-awaited climate change emissions data today on an interactive website that clearly shows who the nation's biggest polluters are where they're located.

For the first time, the public can see where these industrial sources are emitting pollution in their communities. The website provides data on about 6700 industrial plants based on 2010 pollution discharges. Plants include those that produce cement, iron and steel, petroleum refiners, and pulp and paper manufacturers.

The program covers major industrial sources that emit 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent or more a year.

You can sort by geographic area and industry sector, and compare emissions among facilities. And you can share the information using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter.

The information will strengthen corporate governance and sustainability by providing rigorous, facility-based pollution data that tracks pollution levels for comparison with other facilities. It will likewise provide investors with transparent information, helping them to put their money in leaders, not laggards.

The release of the data is part of a program, called for under the FY 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Act signed into law by President George W. Bush in December 2007 (H.R. 2764; Public Law 110-161).

Since 1995, fossil-fuel fired power plants over 25 megawatts have been required to report carbon emissions under the Clean Air Act, but this new website also includes other greenhouse gases: methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, sulfur hexafluoride and other fluorinated gases.

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

As of January 1, the world's airline industry will have to participate in Europe's carbon trading program, because the law was just upheld by Europe's highest court.

The Court of Justice of the European Union affirmed the EU Aviation Directive is fully compliant with international law.

"Today's decision, from the highest court in the European Union, makes clear Europe's innovative law to reduce emissions from international flights is fully consistent with international law, and does not infringe on the sovereignty of other nations," says a transAtlantic coalition of environmental groups who were defenders in the lawsuit.

The law requires airlines to buy emissions permits when they fly into or out of Europe's airports, and was challenged by US airlines in court.

The lawsuit was filed by United/Continental and American, and trade association, Air Transport Association of America (now Airlines for America). They say they are reviewing further legal options, but meanwhile will "comply under protest."

Airlines initially would be required to pay for only 15 percent of the carbon they emit and would be allocated free allowances to cover the other 85 percent. If they exceed their allotted limits, they will pay penalties.

Those that reduce emissions below the cap can sell permits to more polluting companies. Proceeds are distributed to EU member states, which use the revenues to address climate change.

The cap-and-trade program, which has been operating for six years, covers many industries. The airline industry is the latest to be included - the largest industry after power plants - and is expected to raise ticket prices by $11-57 round-trip, depending on how far they exceed pollution limits.

The fee is about the same amount US airlines currently charge to carry luggage that exceed weight limits.

US airlines want to be exempt from the rules, and the Obama Administration has negotiated on their behalf, saying it should only apply to European airlines. Chinese airlines have also expressed opposition.

In October, the US House passed a bill that would make it illegal for US airlines to comply with the law.

The industry is one of the fastest-growing sources of greenhouse gases - having doubled emissions over the past 20 years.

In the U.S., the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is proposing new air pollution standards for large aircraft engines, and greenhouse gas regulations could be on the way.

Airlines say they'd prefer a global approach to regulating emissions, and the International Civil Aviation Organization plans to create a global carbon market for the airline industry, which would supercede the EU program in 2014-2015.

The EU says it fully agrees with that approach, but is tired of waiting for a worldwide solution.

"We hope the focus will now shift away from obstructing its progress on the eve of its introduction and examine how such regional initiatives can form the building blocks of a global agreement," says Tim Johnson, Director of the Aviation Environment Federation.

"US aircraft emissions account for nearly half of worldwide carbon dioxide from aircraft; that amount is expected to triple by mid-century. But the US airline industry has fought to avoid playing its part in preventing runaway climate change. With US airlines shirking their duty, Europe has had to take the lead. The airline industry should now pressure the US government to level the playing field by imposing equivalent restrictions on aircraft pollution in the United States," says Martin Wagner, Managing Attorney at Earthjustice.

US airlines have been preparing to comply with the EU system, calculating flight emissions to establish a baseline, for example. They've been buying more efficient planes and testing biofuels. In August, President Obama announced a $510 million public-private partnership to produce advanced drop-in aviation and marine biofuels.

Photo by Luis Argerich/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from SustainableBusiness.com

by Fred Pearce

One idea promoted at the Durban talks was “climate-smart agriculture," which could make crops less vulnerable to heat and drought and turn depleted soils into carbon sinks. The World Bank and African leaders are backing this new approach, but some critics are skeptical that it will benefit small-scale African farmers.

The glacial pace of international efforts to curb climate change continued at the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa last week. Governments concluded that by 2015 they should agree on legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions that involve all major nations — including China, India and the United States. But they also agreed that those targets would probably not come into force until 2020.

The climate isn’t waiting for the diplomats. Most experts agree that by 2020 it will likely be too late to halt dangerous warming above two degrees Celsius. So the race is now on to find new, unconventional initiatives to fill the gap. One possibility that came to the fore in Durban is fixing some of that carbon dioxide in the soils of Africa. And that is why the continent’s political leaders met in Durban to launch an initiative known, somewhat cryptically, as “climate-smart” agriculture.

The new buzz phrase went down well. Host president Jacob Zuma extolled it. Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian former UN secretary-general, praised it as a panacea to Africa’s problems. “Till now agriculture has been sidelined from climate change discussions,” he said. “But Africa has a huge potential to mitigate climate change.” Beside him sat the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the chair of the African Union Commission. They were all on hand as the World Bank announced plans to turn climate-smart agriculture into the next big thing for the world market in carbon offsets.

So what exactly is climate-smart agriculture? It sounds as if it might involve making agriculture resilient to climate change, by making soils and crops less vulnerable to droughts and heat waves. And that is part of the plan. But only part. The real prize — the one that can lure private finance — is the potential for carbon offsetting. If farm soils can be used to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then they can generate carbon credits that can be sold to industrial polluters who want to offset their emissions.

The offer from the world of carbon finance to poor farmers in Africa and elsewhere is this: Let us use your soils to capture carbon from the atmosphere, and we will, in return, make those soils more productive and less vulnerable to the climate.

This is a big deal. Nurturing the organic matter in soils on the world’s farms has as much potential to absorb carbon dioxide emissions from industrialized countries as the much better-known plans to fund forest conservation, such as REDD. Rattan Lal of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Ohio State University suggests soils worldwide could capture as much as a billion tons of carbon a year — more than a tenth of man-made emissions.

Climate-smart agriculture neatly combines the twin goals of today’s climate negotiators, helping to prevent climate change while at the same time adapting farms to inevitable change.

Africa is the big prize. Its farmers are more vulnerable than any others to climate change. Some estimates suggest a hotter, more dire world could cut African farm yields by as much as 20 percent by mid-century. Without an African green revolution, that would spell disaster for a continent with a population that is expected to double to two billion people.

But the continent’s huge land area — greater than the U.S., China, India, Mexico and Japan combined — also holds huge potential as a planetary carbon sink that, many believe, could create the necessary green revolution.

Currently, African soils are leaking carbon as they erode and lose organic matter due to bad farming practices. An estimated 43 percent of Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions come from land clearance, including farming. But the same soils could be turned from a carbon source to a carbon sink, absorbing many tens of millions of tons of carbon a year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

If an agricultural carbon offset program were in place, carbon dollars from Western companies could pay for composting, mulching, recycling crop waste, planting farm trees, and much else on the world’s poorest farms. Those improved soils, richer in organic matter, would grow more crops, help soils withstand droughts and floods, and — vital to earning those carbon dollars — capture carbon from the atmosphere.

The World Bank is keen to mastermind a global effort to fix carbon in African soils. It brought agriculture ministers from across the continent to Johannesburg in September to promote the idea and continued to push it in Durban.

For the past year, the bank’s BioCarbon Fund, which sets up demonstration carbon-capturing projects in both forests and farms, has been running the first pilot African soil project among smallholder farmers near Kisumu in western Kenya. The bank’s climate envoy Andrew Steer said in Durban that the maize and bean farmers “are getting higher yields, improving the resilience of the soils to drought and getting stronger soils that sequester more carbon.”

If all goes according to plan, the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project, which covers 40,000 hectares of farmland in a densely population region of the country, should capture 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. It could also increase annual farm incomes by $200 to $400 per hectare.

That’s the plan. Will it work? The Stockholm Environment Institute, a think tank that looks at both climate and development issues, is supportive. The institute’s Olivia Taghioff, who has studied the Kenyan scheme, says, “Carbon finance even in modest amounts can make a big difference for smallholders.”

But there are concerns. In Durban, Annan warned: “These efforts must have at their heart smallholder farmers. Without their participation we will fail.” And many critics fear that climate-smart agriculture is in reality a Trojan horse for marginalizing smallholder farmers. They believe the arrival of carbon markets, brokers and traders in the fields of Africa can do nothing but harm.

“Soil carbon offsets will promote a spate of African land grabs and put farmers under the control of fickle carbon markets,” said Teresa Anderson of the UK-based Gaia Foundation, an NGO that promotes indigenous farming, speaking in Durban. “The [World] Bank’s agenda is more money for the bank and for carbon project developers, not development,” said Doreen Stabinsky of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The high costs of employing scientists, consultants, and field surveyors to assess and monitor the carbon uptake of farm soils will make it impossible for smallholder farmers to pocket any income from the sale of the carbon absorbed by their soils, these critics maintain. Only large landowners will be able to reduce these transactions costs sufficiently to profit from the carbon markets, they say, and the result will be a new phase of land grabbing. “Soil grabbing,” some are calling it.

Across Africa, governments are already leasing wide areas of land traditionally used by smallholder farmers to foreign companies for industrial agriculture or for planting trees as carbon sinks in order to gain carbon credits. The fear is that the process will accelerate if the soil itself becomes a carbon commodity.

There is another reason why peasant farmers may lose out. Early evidence gathered by the World Bank in Kenya suggests that the cultivation of commercial crops of the kind that large agribusinesses specialize in have a much greater potential to soak up carbon than smallholder subsistence crops.

Data presented last year at the FAO in Rome by Rama Reddy of the World Bank’s carbon finance unit show that the carbon-capture potential for a hectare of smallholder maize in Kenya is around half a ton of carbon dioxide per year, whereas the potential for commercial biofuels is between 2.5 and 5 tons, and for a sugar cane plantation up to 8 tons per hectare.

The dream of enthusiasts for climate-smart agriculture is that investors will one day invest billions of dollars in the fields of Africa in order to purchase the resulting credits from capturing carbon, while at the same time improving the continent’s soils. In truth, any credible solution to climate change will probably involve finding ways to get the landscape to absorb more carbon, whether in trees or soils, probably financed from carbon markets. Can it be done in a way that helps smallholder farmers? Or will it drive them off their land? That remains far from clear.

Photo by McKay Savage/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

Russian scientists sampling the waters of the East Siberian Arctic Shelf have discovered enormous plumes of methane, some more than a kilometer wide, bubbling up from the thawing seabed. Igor Semiletov, an oceanographer from the Far Eastern branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said a research cruise late this summer detected more than 100 of these extensive methane “fountains” in an area of less than 10,000 square miles. Semiletov, who has been studying the region’s seabed for 20 years, said the scale and volume of the plumes far surpasses anything he had seen previously and could indicate that slushy methane hydrates on the seabed are thawing at an intensifying rate as Arctic Ocean ice disappears and sea temperatures rise. In 2010, Semiletov estimated that the emissions of methane — a powerful heat-trapping gas — bubbling from the seabed in this region were about 8 million tons a year, but he said the recent expedition has shown that methane releases could be far higher. “We carried out checks at about 115 stationary points and discovered methane fields of a fantastic scale,” Lemiletov told the UK’s Independent newspaper. Scientists fear that continued warming of the Arctic could release so much methane that the global climate could pass a tipping point and be pushed into an era of rapid warming.

Photo by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center/flickr/Creative Commons

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

by Richard Denniss

The Australian government will begin imposing a tax on carbon emissions in mid-2012. But large giveaways to industry mean Australia’s scheme doesn’t go nearly far enough in reducing the nation’s CO2 emissions or providing economic stimulus.

Another global climate conference has come and gone with little action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, which makes efforts to combat climate change at the national or local level all the more important. After years of bitter debate and haggling, we in Australia last month finally decided to follow Europe in putting a price on carbon. Unfortunately, Australia’s plan, like Europe’s, gave away far too much to major emitters of CO2 and does far too little to reduce emissions, aiming for a 5 percent cut in carbon by 2020, with uncertainty as to how deep the cuts may be beyond then.

Countries that wish to use market-based mechanisms to tackle climate change can learn much from Australia’s example. Unfortunately, most of the lessons relate to what not to do. The final incarnation of Australia’s scheme could have been both economically and environmentally superior had the politics not been so poorly handled. A review of the blunders and miscalculations is instructive.

While the Labor government was initially highly ambitious about the scope of its scheme and the depth of the emission reductions, the longer the debate dragged on, the more watered-down the scheme became. In the end, entire sectors of business, industry, or agriculture were either largely or entirely exempted from needing CO2 emissions permits in the coming eight years. The plan — a hybrid between a carbon tax and an emissions trading scheme — sets the price of CO2 emissions at a fixed level of $23 Australian per ton for the first three years, too low to drive substantial transformation of the way that Australia produces and consumes energy. Prime Minister Julia Gillard says CO2 emissions will be cut by 160 million tons over the next eight years, but that remains to be seen.

After the three-year fixed-price period ends in 2015, market forces will set the cost of pollution permits. However, price caps and ceilings will exist for an additional five years to provide some degree of ongoing price stability. Only about 500 big polluters — those responsible for releasing more than 25,000 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year — will be required to purchase pollution permits under the scheme. That sounds fair enough, until you realize that many major CO2 polluters were largely let off the hook for the near future.

For example, agricultural emissions were exempted entirely from the scheme. Big sectors like passenger transport were effectively removed. And Australian exporters were given a huge break, after fervently arguing that the introduction of a carbon price would make them uncompetitive and result in jobs being transferred offshore. Despite the evidence that these concerns were largely exaggerated, the so-called “emissions-intensive trade-exposed” industries succeeded in winning their demands that they be largely exempted from the carbon price. Indeed, these big polluters will not have to pay the carbon price on 94.5 percent of their emissions for the first three years. While the carbon price legislation includes provisions for future review of these generous entitlements to free permits, in practice it will take at least five years to make any real reductions.

This highlights a key lesson from the Australian debate. The giveaway of so many CO2 emissions permits should have been presented to the public for what it is: lost revenue and a gift to the biggest polluters. Instead, export industries framed the debate as an essential step to protect domestic industry. The tens of billions of dollars in lost revenue associated with the provision of large amounts of free permits is money that the government could have been spent on investing in renewable energy, giving tax cuts to employees, funding targeted cuts in corporate taxes, or providing investment allowances to targeted industries. Such use of carbon tax revenues would have helped create stronger support among segments of business.

As it was, most businesses that were not big polluters were relatively silent about both the desirability of introducing a carbon price and the enormous cost of providing the free emissions permits. Unfortunately, the consequences of providing so many free permits were not usually discussed in such terms — a major mistake.

While there is an economic argument for providing some compensation for some industries, there were no strong economic arguments for providing anything like the level of free permits given to the biggest polluters in Australia. The generosity of the assistance appears to be wildly out of step with the meager compromises made by the polluters. Put simply, if compensation is the price you are willing to pay to get what you want, the Australian taxpayer was willing to pay a lot to achieve very little.

Australia’s carbon scheme will also provide generous compensation to low- and middle- income households; the lowest income earners will receive more than 100 percent compensation for the likely impact of higher energy prices on their household budgets. That said, despite the enormous political outcry about putting a price on carbon, the price impact is likely to be less than one percent, or $9.00 per week, for an average household. Only the highest-income earners will miss out on compensation, but again the price impact is likely to be modest; a household earning $100,000 is likely to experience energy and other price rises of less than $1,000 per year.

Critics derided the idea of taking money away from Australian households with one hand, in the form of a price on carbon, and giving it back to them with another, labeling it a “great big money-go-round.” But this is one aspect of the carbon legislation that makes sense. With a price on carbon, those who can change their behavior and use fewer fossil fuels will be better off when they receive compensation from the government. Those who can't change their behavior need be no worse off.

Another valuable lesson from Australia is to never underestimate the ease with which opponents can attack the details of any scheme — the more complex, the harder it is to sell. When proponents start putting effort into explaining a specific scheme, then by definition they must put less energy into talking about the gravity of the problem it is designed to solve.

Both the Australian government and the Australian environmental movement spent nearly four years talking about the details of an incredibly complex piece of policy, and in so doing virtually stopped talking about the scientific and economic cases for tackling climate change. The abandonment of this terrain enabled the climate and economic skeptics to promote a wide range of entirely misleading — but highly effective — messages, many focused on overstated claims of economic disaster. (A similar tactic was used to kill climate legislation in the U.S. Senate.) Opponents also frequently shifted ground, at first denying there was evidence of global warming, then accepting that there might be warming but repudiating the link to human activity. Some finally accepted that humans might be causing the planet to heat up, but then maintained that Australia is too small to make a difference.

To other countries contemplating a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade scheme, I would offer the following advice: Be less ambitious at the beginning of the project and more determined at the end. Don’t try to take on all the polluters simultaneously, but approach different sectors in different ways at different times. They should be played off against each other on specific issues, rather than united in their hostility toward a general principle.

So where do things stand? The design of the legislation and the determination of the government to provide certainty to industry means it is highly unlikely that there will be any chance to broaden the scope of the scheme — and give it real teeth — before 2020. The debate about the scientific need to tackle climate change has been removed from the political agenda, replaced with economic arguments about whether the compensation is adequate or not.

Meanwhile, as Australia moves ahead with a watered-down plan that ignores scientific evidence about the depth of cuts required to help prevent global warming, the nation’s coal industry — the world’s largest exporter of coal — is experiencing a boom. Australia’s coal exports are expected to double in the coming decade, much of it heading to China, where the emissions will further foul the air of Beijing and Shanghai and add to the heat-trapping gases rapidly accumulating in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360

The German software company SAP is a leader in using computer analytics to help a company reduce its environmental footprint while also saving a few bucks. This week, SAP unveiled software that can establish how much CO2 and water it takes to make an individual product.

SAP's first partner on the technology is Groupe Danone, the French multinational foodmaker known in the U.S. as Dannon. By the end of the year, Danone expects to be using SAP's technology to evaluate 35,000 products, according to Peter Graf, SAP's chief sustainability officer.

Many firms are reluctant to look deeply into the supply chain, that web of outside manufacturers and suppliers that supply the components of an end product. The endeavor is expensive and doesn't at first seem to be of much use. But as customers demand greener goods and regulations begin to force industry to lower its carbon emissions, business are paying closer attention.

The exemplar in supply chain efficiency is the outdoor clothier Patagonia, which has made a crusade of working with its suppliers around the world to flush out waste at the factory, and then present the results on its website.

SAP software doesn't require that level of zeal or transparency. It takes the company's Business Objects software suite, which was created to analyze other business functions, and applies it to the "bill of materials" that is essentially a product's ingredient list. For a cup of yogurt, Graf said, it might comprise everything from the raw plastic used to make the lid to the crop of strawberries.

(Which also explains how Danone is applying the analytics to 35,000 products. No, there aren't 34,996 kinds of Dannon yogurt you've never heard of. That's the number of combinations of materials that make up the products in question.)

From there, product managers and suppliers can work together to plug in as much information as is known about the carbon emissions generated and the water used to make these component parts.

Along the way, Graf said, it may become clear that one supplier is using more resources than another. And in many cases that may nudge the supplier to change its wasteful ways in order to keep in its client company's good graces.

Photo by Dan4th Nicholas/flickr/Creative Commons

David Ferris is the managing editor of Matter Network.

Climate talks began in Durban, South Africa on Monday amid downplayed expectations for any meaningful agreements on cutting greenhouse gas emissions or progress on finding a successor to the Kyoto Protocol. With the Kyoto Protocol’s mandatory carbon targets now covering less than a third of the world’s carbon emissions, some observers say that a global, top-down approach may increasingly be replaced by local, incremental climate policies, from Australia’s new carbon tax to Colombian initiatives to replace polluting truck fleets and promote renewable energy.

“The situation has never been weaker for [a global] vision,” said James L. Connaughton, who chaired the Council on Environmental Quality under President George W. Bush. In 1997, nearly 200 industrialized nations agreed to the Kyoto Protocol, pledging a 5.2 percent reduction in carbon emissions compared with 1990 levels by 2012. But the U.S. never ratified the protocol, and the targets did not apply to emerging countries like China and India. The European Union is the only Kyoto signatory willing to sign on for a second five-year commitment period, but will only do so if other nations — including the U.S., China, and India — begin negotiations on a global deal that can be implemented by 2020. Negotiators hope to make some progress in Durban on establishing financing mechanisms to help developing nations deal with the impacts of global warming.

Photo by Oxfam

Reprinted with permission from Yale Environment 360