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January, 2017:

Hong Kong’s Cathay Pacific seeks 80pc emissions reductions on some long flights with big switch to biofuels

Airline among world’s first to adopt fuels made largely from landfill rubbish

Cathay Pacific Airways has pledged an 80 per cent cut in the amount of climate-changing gases some of its longest flights pump into the Earth’s atmosphere, by betting big on biofuels.

The Hong Kong carrier will be one of the first airlines in the world to switch to cleaner jet fuels on an industrial scale.

The city is slowly strengthening its push to lessen its contribution to climate change, and the government aims to cut annual carbon emissions per person almost in half by 2030.

The aviation sector had avoided regulation until last year, when its governing body, the International Civil Aviation Organisation, agreed a global deal to curb emissions growth by the end of the decade.

Cathay Pacific planes will use fuel made from landfill rubbish. Many of its flights from the United States, where the fuel is being produced, will be able to fly to Hong Kong using a half-half mix of biofuel and conventional fuel by 2019. It is on these trans-Pacific flights that the company expects the 80 per cent emissions reductions.

“Aviation biofuels will play a key role for Cathay and the aviation industry’s quest for lower emissions,” the airline’s biofuel manager, Jeff Ovens, said. “We are on the cusp of large-scale production of low-carbon jet fuel and are eager to use it.”

The high and notoriously unpredictable cost of fuel has forced the airline to control how much it uses. By – among other things – reducing aircraft weight, flying on more direct flight paths and only using one engine to taxi on runways, the company cut emissions and paved the way for the rethink of how it could further cut pollution.

“This is where biofuels come in,” Ovens said. “These fuels will have a lower carbon footprint than fossil fuels, and the pricing we have is competitive with traditional fuels.”

Aside from the carbon dioxide reduction, using the mixed fuel avoids emissions of other harmful gases, like methane, given off as rubbish – which will instead be used as fuel – naturally degrades in landfill.

Cathay Pacific passengers are unlikely to see a rise in fares, because the biofuel investments since 2014 have been absorbed into the company’s operating costs. But it is too early to tell whether the switch could lower ticket prices.

Christine Loh Kung-wai, undersecretary at the Environment Bureau – which spearheaded the government’s 2030 climate action report – said: “I think the world as a whole has come to embrace dealing with climate change, and you are seeing major industry sectors coming forward to say they need to do more.”

But she said the lack of global rules on the production, infrastructure and supply of biofuels made long-term policymaking harder. “I think that is further down the road than we are able to make policies on,” she said.

Roy Tam Hoi-pong, CEO of Green Sense, an environmental pressure group, said the airline’s climate effort was a “good start”.

He said: “As one of Asia’s biggest airlines, they can do much more.”

Airlines occasionally test biofuels, mainly with used cooking oil, but not landfill waste.

United Airlines has started running some domestic flights on biofuels regularly, but even then in small quantities.

The airline’s new batch of Airbus A350 planes – themselves 25 per cent more fuel efficient than their forerunners – flew from France to Hong Kong for delivery using a small amount of biofuel.

The airline’s partnership with a US-based renewable fuel producer is on track to help make its flights from the US to Hong Kong International Airport, starting from 2019, greener.

Fulcrum Bioenergy and Cathay Pacific signed an agreement in 2014, helping the airline meet its biofuel supply targets, with a purchase of 375 million gallons of biofuel over 10 years.

That fuel would be enough to supply Cathay Pacific’s 76 weekly US flights to Hong Kong for six months.

Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/2066549/hong-kongs-cathay-pacific-seeks-80pc-emissions

How Politics and Pollution Could Push China Into the Climate Leader Role the US Is Giving up

https://www.desmogblog.com/2017/01/30/how-politics-pollution-could-push-china-climate-leader-role-us-giving

Earlier this month China halted more than 100 coal-fired power projects. Scrapping these projects, with combined installed capacity of more than 100 gigawatts, may have more to do with China’s current overcapacity in coal production than its commitment to mitigating climate change. Nevertheless, Chinese leaders are likely happy that the move is framing their nation as a green energy leader, according to experts in Chinese and environmental policy.

That’s because, they say, the Chinese government is now eager to fill the vacuum in climate change leadership that is being left by the U.S. And, they say, China is poised to eat America’s lunch in the renewable energy sector.

Pollution Fuels China’s New Energy Priorities

Saying that China is doing nothing on climate change has long been a right wing talking point used to stop U.S. regulations such as carbon taxes. While that may have been true a decade ago, it certainly isn’t true now.

Already, China is both the world’s leading producer of renewable energy technologies and its biggest consumer.

A recent Bloomberg New Energy Finance report showed that China invested $287.5 billion in clean energy in 2016, while the U.S. spent $58.6 billion. And in January it announced plans to invest an additional $120 billion a year in renewable power before 2020.

China’s five-year plan on energy and climate is ambitious, calling for an 18 percent reduction in carbon intensity from 2015 levels. It aims to reduce coal to 55 percent of total power by 2020, down from 69 percent now.

But China’s most urgent need is not reducing greenhouse gases, or even cashing in on the burgeoning green tech market, but eliminating the smog choking its cities, which is caused by burning coal, oil, and biomass. Over the past decade, China’s degraded air quality has caused millions of premature deaths, hurt its economy, and has become a primary cause of social unrest.

John Chung-En Liu, a professor of sociology at Occidental College in Los Angeles, told DeSmog that, despite positive stories about scrapping coal plants, these actions don’t mean an imminent end to China’s use of fossil fuels. And they don’t mean China is doing this for the world’s benefit either.

“The media have been talking about closing down 100 coal powered plants, but the real reason is that China has overbuilt from a massive expansion of coal over the past 20 years,” he said. “The Chinese government is committed to green tech but can’t make the move quickly because of the infrastructure.”

Nevertheless, China’s ambitious plans are bound to help reduce emissions that lead to global warming in the long run. And scholars say the country is planning to use its investment in green tech to its advantage, and at the expense of the United States.

China Poised to Benefit From Investment in Renewables

China’s dominance in wind, solar, and hydro energy is growing as the U.S. is falling behind, experts have said.

A paper released in December by the Information Technology & Innovation Foundation (ITIF) made the case that, even before Donald Trump took office, the U.S. was forfeiting its chance to capitalize on the growing clean energy market.

“The United States is losing this race because Asian countries are out-investing the United States and dictating the terms of competition, often flooding the market with low-cost, unimaginative products,” the ITIF report concluded.

In 2016, China was by far the leader in producing solar energy. At the end of 2014, China made one out of every three wind turbines in the world and last year a Chinese wind energy company bested American companies in producing wind power. In fact the country is producing more wind power than it can use, at least until the central government finds a way to move energy from where it’s produced to where it’s needed.

Last year China led the world in sales and manufacture of electric vehicles.

America, too, could benefit from similar growth in green tech if the current administration weren’t so committed to fossil fuels, according to Angel Hsu, a professor of environmental studies at the Yale School of Forestry.

“The U.S. economy stands to suffer with Trump’s denial of clean energy,” said Hsu. “If Trump wants to create jobs like he says he does, ignoring the potential of green jobs would be a huge oversight.”

China’s Climate Change Asset: A Lack of Kochs

Scholars of Chinese energy policy say the country benefits from having no climate denying lobby or equivalent to the Koch brothers.

“A critical difference is that there is no private oil and gas lobby in China,” Liu said, adding that climate skeptics are a fringe group within the Communist Party and largely ignored.

Energy interests are state-owned in China, and while they are not puppets of the state, they have much less relative power on the state’s official policies. Right now, the official state policy is to reduce pollution and greenhouse gases as quickly as possible.

“When the central government says, ‘Set up the policy,’ the companies must follow,” Liu said. “Yes, they will try to exert their influence within the government but not to the extent as oil and gas companies do in the U.S. In the U.S., industry will try to block any carbon regulation that hurts their opportunities, so they fight vehemently to slow down any regulation.”

Will U.S. Cede Climate Leadership to China?

Unlike President Obama, who urged the U.S. to show leadership in curbing climate change, the Trump administration has made clear that it plans to double down on dirty energy. While China has promised to expand its climate commitments, the new U.S. president has threatened to pull out of the Paris Agreement. That could allow Bejing to fill the leadership void left by Washington.

State-run newspapers are already boasting of China’s potential to exploit its leadership on global warming.

In a speech at the most recent World Economic Forum, Chinese President Xi Jinping gave a vigorous defense of multilateral cooperation, the kind of speech that U.S. presidents used to give, observers noted.

“Countries should view their own interest in the broader context and refrain from pursuing their own interests at the expense of others,” Xi declared.

China still has issues of huge inequality and provincial needs that are often at odds with the edicts of the central government. And for all its ambitious goals, the central government still doesn’t have a plan to address how it will meet them without economic pain for some coal-dependent provinces in the short term.

Liu points out that China is stuck with dirty industries, in addition to dirty means of powering them, and any tightening of regulations could come at the expense of much-needed jobs that may support an entire region.

Hsu told DeSmog that Chinese colleagues she spoke with at the Marrakech climate conference in November 2016 were optimistic about their country’s prospects in seizing not only economic opportunities in green tech, but the nation’s ability to claim the moral high ground on climate change.

“They said worldwide pressure would be put on the U.S. because they’re the second largest emitter of carbon and they’re not doing anything,” Hsu said. “So it deflects attention away from China and allows them to consider how to decarbonize to 2050 and put a long-term strategy in place. They don’t necessarily seek this role on climate change but they’re willing to take it in the absence of U.S. leadership.”

It’s been little more than a week under the new Trump administration, but all signs so far point to the U.S. government trumpeting discredited views on climate science and getting left behind in the burgeoning clean energy sector.

Towards a new European mindset on waste-to-energy?

The European Commission released on 26 January the Communication on the Role of Waste-to-Energy in a Circular Economy. Although non-binding, the communication analyses the current role of waste-to-energy and gives guidance on Member States on how to cope with the problems this generates.

https://www.zerowasteeurope.eu/2017/01/towards-a-new-european-mindset-on-waste-to-energy/

From Zero Waste Europe’s point of view, the Commission has positively changed its position from promoting incineration to acknowledging the problems related to overcapacities, distortive economic incentives and the risk that a very quick phasing out of landfills shifts waste from these to incinerators and not to prevention, reuse and recycling.

In this regard, the Commission advises those Member States heavily relying on landfills to focus on separate collection, on increasing recycling capacity and on diverting bio-waste from landfills. It insists that in case these Member States want to obtain energy from waste, they are recommended to recycle bio-waste through anaerobic digestion. In addition, they are called on taking into account the commitments and objectives for next 20-30 years (separate collection and recycling targets) and carefully assess the evolution expected for mixed waste when planning infrastructures, so as to avoid regrettable investments (i.e. redundant incinerators).

When it comes to those Member States heavily relying on incineration, the Commission calls on them to raise taxes on waste-to-energy, phase out public support schemes, decommission old facilities and establish a moratorium on new ones. The case on defunding waste-to-energy has been extended to all Member States, so as not to distort the waste hierarchy. In this sense, the Commission acknowledges that the waste operations delivering the highest reduction of GHG emissions are prevention, reuse and recycling and are the ones to be promoted, something Eunomia’s report for Zero Waste Europe of 2015 already showed.

Zero Waste Europe welcomes this call, but would have expected the Commission to show this ambition when last November proposed a revision of the Renewable Energy Directive that is the one opening the door for renewable energy subsidies for incineration. ZWE expects MEPs and national governments to take note of this communication when reviewing the Directive and bring coherence between EU legislation.

ZWE notes, however, that the text still considers that waste incineration has a role within a circular economy, which is a conceptual contradiction because if material loops are effectively closed there is nothing left to burn. A more accurate approach would be to say that the capacity of waste to energy incineration is to be used in the transition period to a circular economy but once proper material and value preservation policies are successfully implemented burning waste will be redundant.

Finally ZWE’s warns about the Commission current double standards with its approach to waste to energy (WtE) in Europe and its support to WtE in the rest of the world, particularly in the Global South where we have seen successful recycling programs having been dismantled to feed the European funded incineration plants.

Nevertheless, this communication seems a change in the mindset of the European Commission and a positive step to phase out environmentally harmful subsidies and move towards zero waste.

Theresa May must challenge Trump’s ‘contempt’ for climate change, say MPs

CTA says: Misogynist arrogant silver spooned Republican bully wants to make the USA the ‘Ultimate’ instead of ‘Great Satan’.

http://www.britishslang.co.uk/slang/trump

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2017/jan/27/theresa-may-must-challenge-trumps-contempt-for-climate-change-say-mps

MPs from across the political spectrum say the UK prime minister must urge the US president to remain in the global Paris agreement

Prime minister Theresa May must challenge President Donald Trump’s “contempt” for environmental protection and urge him to remain in the global agreement to fight climate change, according to MPs from across the UK’s political parties.

May will meet Trump on Friday in Washington DC and has been warned by MPs that the US president’s approach to global warming could determine whether or not people around the world suffer the worst impacts of climate change, such as severe floods, storms and heatwaves.

In his first few days as president, Trump has already replaced the climate change page on the White House website with a fossil-fuel-based energy policy, resurrected two controversial oil pipelines and attempted to gag the Environmental Protection Agency, the Agriculture Department and the National Parks Service.

Trump, who has called climate change a “hoax” and “bullshit”, has packed his administration with climate-change deniers and his pick for secretary of state is former ExxonMobil boss Rex Tillerson.

“We have grave concerns about the new president’s views on climate change and his reported plans to abandon the Paris agreement,” said the cross-party Environmental Audit Committee (EAC) of MPs in a letter to May. “Climate change is one of the greatest challenges of all time. The scientific evidence is unequivocal.”

The US is the second largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions and the MPs said Trump’s “approach to reducing emissions could determine whether we, in the UK and people around the world, experience or avoid the worst impacts of climate change.”

Mary Creagh MP, EAC chair, said: “The prime minister should start by telling him climate change is not ‘a hoax’. We’re urging her to impress upon President Trump the importance of global action to tackle this global problem and to continue the US commitment to the Paris agreement.”

Caroline Lucas, a Green Party MP, said: “Donald Trump’s first few days as president have revealed his contempt for environmental protection. Failing to bring up climate change with him would be a dereliction of duty from Theresa May.”

Ed Miliband MP, a former leader of the Labour Party challenged May in the House of Commons on Wednesday: “As the first foreign leader to meet President Trump, the prime minister carries a huge responsibility on behalf of, not just of this country, but the whole international community in the tone that she sets. Can I ask her to reassure us that she will say to the president that he must abide by, and not withdraw from, the Paris climate change treaty?”

May replied: “The Obama administration signed up to the Paris climate change agreement, and we have now done so. I would hope that all parties would continue to ensure that that climate change agreement is put into practice.”

A government spokeswoman added: “The future direction of US climate policy is a matter for the US. But we face shared challenges on energy and have worked closely together on climate change issues. And we hope to see this continue under the new administration.”

May also told MPs she is “not afraid to speak frankly” to President Trump, thanks to the special relationship between the UK and America. But after the release of extracts from a speech May was giving in the US, she was accused of “grovelling” by former business secretary Vince Cable in order to win a trade deal.

One the eve of Trump’s inauguration, when 2016 was declared as the hottest year ever recorded, leading climate change figures urged the president to “make America great again” – and the world safer – by embracing the trillion-dollar green tech revolution. Over 100 UK climate experts also wrote to May earlier in January warning that Trump’s suggestion that he would cut US climate science would leave the world “flying blind” in tackling global warming.

Craig Bennett, chief executive of Friends of the Earth, said: “Trump’s war on our environment has already begun. Silence [from May] is not acceptable – it will simply legitimise the new president’s climate denial.”

Greenpeace UK executive director John Sauven said: “The relationship is only special if the prime minister is prepared to say what Trump wants to ignore. And what May should make absolutely clear is that the UK won’t wind back the clock on progress but will keep striving for a more peaceful and prosperous future.”

On 11 January, before President Trump’s inauguration, Tillerson said the US should remain part of the global climate change agreement, signed in Paris in December 2015.

“It’s important that the US maintain its seat at the table,” he said. The danger of climate change is real and “requires a global response”, he said. “No one country is going to solve this on its own.”

But on Thursday, a draft executive order leaked to the media suggested the Trump administration is preparing to order sweeping cuts in funding to the UN and other international organisations, while potentially walking away from some treaties.

Brussels urges countries to stop funding incineration

The European Commission has urged member states to gradually phase out public funding for energy recovery from mixed waste in new non-binding guidelines on waste-to-energy.

Mixed waste used as feedstock in waste-to-energy processes is expected to fall due to higher recycling targets, currently being discussed by the EU institutions, as well as separate collection obligations, the document says. This type of waste accounts for just over half of all waste converted into energy in the EU.

The Commission notes that experience in some member states has indicated a real risk of stranded assets, particularly in incineration. Member states with little incineration capacity and high reliance on landfilling should prioritise new recycling capacity and develop anaerobic digestion to treat biodegradable waste, it says.

Countries with high incineration capacity should ban new facilities while decommissioning old, less efficient ones, the document states. They are also advised to introduce higher incineration taxes for inefficient processes and phase out support schemes.

Presenting the guidelines on Thursday, Commission vice president Frans Timmermans said that creating a market for incineration should be avoided “as much as possible”. “It’s unavoidable for a small part, but only at a stage where recycling is no longer possible – and certainly should not be done before that,” he argued.

The document stresses the importance of the priority order set in the waste hierarchy in ensuring that waste-to-energy capacity does not generate stranded assets.

The Commission seeks to clarify how the hierarchy applies to various waste-to-energy processes, noting that they rank differently in terms of their sustainability.

Anaerobic digestion counts as recycling in the waste hierarchy, which is half-way up the ranking just behind prevention and preparing for reuse, according to the guidelines. Just below, they place waste incineration and co-incineration operators with a high level of energy recovery under ‘other recovery’, together with reprocessed waste used as fuel.

Only waste incineration and co-incineration with limited energy recovery are classed as disposal, the bottom category of the hierarchy, along with gas from landfills. Incineration, co-incineration in kilns and anaerobic digestion provide around 1.5% of the EU’s total final energy consumption.

However, the guidance leaves member states the opportunity to depart from the priority order if they can justify why this achieves “the best environmental outcome”. Potential reasons outlined include technical feasibility, economic viability and environmental protection.

Green group Zero Waste Europe said the recommendations provide clarity on how to implement the waste hierarchy. But it regretted that the Commission had not included its call to phase out subsidies for waste-to-energy in its proposal for a revised Renewable Energy Directive from last November, calling on MEPs and member states to do so during the legislative process.

Additional reporting by José Rojo

susanna.ala-kurikka@haymarket.com

The role of waste-to-energy in the circular economy

Download (PDF, 458KB)

CLP Power to tap methane from Tuen Mun landfill for electricity

The company is awaiting an environmental approval for its plan to build generators on the site; project will cost “more than HK$100 million”

http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/2065471/clp-power-tap-methane-tuen-mun-landfill

The larger of the city’s two electricity providers will seek approval for the installation of 14-megawatt electricity generating units powered by gas at a Tuen Mun landfill to expand its portfolio of “renewable” energy projects.

CLP Power managing director Paul Poon Wai-yin said the large amounts of flammable gases such as methane, produced from the decomposition of municipal waste, could be tapped for power.

About 7,300 tonnes of such waste is dumped in the landfill at the tip of Nim Wan daily.

Poon said the waste-to-energy conversion was a better source of renewable energy than solar or wind, which required massive amounts of land and investment, adding:

“On one hand it will help reduce [greenhouse gas] ¬emissions from landfills, and on the other, help replace the burning of fossil fuels to generate electricity.”

Quince Chong Wai-yan, head of corporate development, said the new facility – estimated to cost “more than HK$100 million” – would have a minimal impact on tariffs due to its limited scale.

The project’s first phase comprises five units capable of generating enough electricity to power 17,000 four-person households for one year. A second phase will add two more units to the site.

A new climate change action plan released by the government last week set new emissions reduction targets for 2030. Authorities hope to achieve this by moving away from coal-fired power generation to natural gas and non-fossil fuels.

While the plan stopped short of a target for renewables, it highlighted a “3 to 4 per cent” capacity, to be realised between now till 2030. Poon said CLP was already on the way to help meet 1 per cent of this mark.

He stressed that the phasing out of CLP’s coal-fired units over the next decade would also be discussed with the government in negotiations for a post-2018 regulatory framework, expected to be completed by the end of the administration’s term.

Greenpeace senior campaigner Frances Yeung Hoi-shan said the facility would help reduce methane emissions, a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. But she said most green groups did not consider processed waste a “renewable energy” source. Yeung urged the government to require power companies to incentivise investments in sources such as solar and wind energy in the new regulatory framework.

The new action plan stated that tariffs and renewable energy certificates will be introduced as incentives in negotiations with CLP Power and HK Electric. But Poon did not provide details at a media briefing on Wednesday.

Impact assessments for CLP’s proposed units at the landfill have been completed and the company will apply for an environmental permit shortly. It hopes to begin operations of the first phase in the third quarter next year.

The Environmental Protection Department welcomed the project and said it would facilitate implementation.

Hong Kong government aims to slash carbon emissions with 2030 action plan

While government hopes to reduce total emissions by 26-36 per cent, some critics say the plans lack conviction

Annual carbon emissions could be slashed from around six tonnes per person to between 3.3 and 3.8 tonnes by 2030, according to the government’s latest climate change action plan.

But a think tank and green group believe the plan lacks hard targets for renewables and the ambition to phase out coal in the fuel mix.

The target, which will translate to an absolute carbon emission reduction of 26 to 36 per cent and reduction of 65 to 70 per cent in carbon emissions per GDP from 2005, will use a cleaner, less coal-intensive fuel mix and more energy efficient buildings and transport.

Renewable energy would also be applied on a “wider and larger scale”, it said.

Measures to incentivise private investment in renewables could be introduced in the post-2018 regulatory framework with power companies, which is being negotiated, the plan says.

Government departments are looking at installing floating photovoltaic systems on reservoirs, with two expected to be completed at Shek Pik and Plover Cove this year, and on slopes, such as at the old Anderson Quarry.

The Environment Bureau however stressed that the city did not have favourable conditions for large-scale commercial use and as such, did not set any concrete targets for 2030.

Also missing were hard targets for reducing energy use in the private buildings sector. Secretary for the Environment Wong Kam-sing said a consensus had been reached for the building sector to voluntarily reduce electricity consumption on an “ongoing” basis, with details still to be finalised.

“Overall we would like to make it a kind of pattern similar to the Paris agreement,” he said, referring to the land climate accord, which requires each individual country to work toward its own nationally-determined contributions to curb global warming and report back every five years.

Maura Wong, CEO of think tank Civic Exchange believed the plan lacked commitment. “We still don’t know by 2030 whether we will be coal-free and what the mix will be between natural gas and nuclear,” she said. “They need to be ambitious enough to set a clear date of when they will completely phase out coal.”

WWF-Hong Kong’s conservation director Gavin Edwards said: “We welcome the government’s openness to 3 to 4 per cent renewable energy, but believe that it should be a formal target and … more ambitious with at least 5 per cent renewables by 2030.
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Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/health-environment/article/2064045/hong-kong-government-aims-slash-carbon-emissions

Big Oil Moves In With New Administration

Deal-making used to be done in smoke-filled rooms. Now it will be done in a cabinet room filled with the smell of big oil.

http://www.courant.com/opinion/op-ed/hc-op-thorson-big-oil-in-white-house-0119-20170118-column.html

The parallels between the war on tobacco half a century ago and the current war on fossil fuel consumption are astonishingly close.

During the 1960s, my brief flirtation with smoking was typical teenage behavior. The adults we modeled ourselves after were seldom seen without something burning in their hands. Little did I know then that the tobacco companies were actively promoting a habit they knew to be dangerous, and were fraudulently hiding the truth about medical and societal costs. Eventually they were identified, tried, convicted and punished.

Something eerily similar appears to be taking place with petroleum. Last week, the attorneys general of Massachusetts and New York won a ruling against Exxon Mobil Corp. Suffolk County Judge Heidi Brieger ruled that the company must release 40 years worth of internal records related to climate change as part of a fraud investigation. On that very day, Exxon Mobil’s CEO, Rex Tillerson, was refusing to answer questions about climate change being put to him by the U.S. Senate, which was grilling him as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for secretary of state. As with the tobacco trials of yore, state attorneys general are investigating a deliberate cover-up, and the target corporation is responding with aggressive countersuits.

This is actually very old news. Seven years ago, Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes highlighted the historic parallels between big tobacco and big oil in their powerful book “Merchants of Doubt.” The alleged common thread between these industries is the use of corporate power to actively promulgate disinformation. Another common thread is the claim by both that they’re merely meeting a market demand, rather than creating one.

Though the oil companies did not push us into oil addiction the way the tobacco companies did, they were certainly complicit in the process. Within a half-century, American culture was hopelessly addicted to petroleum for space heating, electrical generation, military applications and most important, the personal automobile. Car culture gradually became part of our national infrastructure in the form of personal garages, interstate highways, vast suburbs, multi-lane bridges, drive-in movies, shopping malls, urban parking garages, drive-through fast food restaurants and many others.

Winning the war on tobacco required that lawsuits name individual corporations as defendants. This is beginning to be the case for carbon-polluters, according to Carroll Muffett, president of the Center for International Environmental Law in Washington, D.C. His recent article in the “Bulletin of Atomic Scientists” credits the work of Richard Heede, which now allows us to identify “a discrete class of defendants.”

Heede is an independent “carbon accountant” whose office is a rented houseboat in Sausalito, Calif., in San Francisco Bay. His accounting is a remarkable, unprecedented story of dogged perseverance and number crunching that’s detailed in the Aug. 25, 2016, “Science.” It covers Heede’s 2013 report that nearly two-thirds of our cumulative global carbon emissions came from just 90 companies, eight of which are responsible for 20 percent of the total.

Third on that list of global polluters is Exxon Mobil. Fifth is Russia’s state-controlled Gazprom. It’s no wonder that Rex Tillerson and Vladimir Putin are close comrades. For all practical purposes, they are in the process of becoming co-defendants in the largest class action suit ever: a case of 7 billion world citizens vs. 20 powerful companies.

The direct link between petroleum and political power has never been more clear to me. The source of that power is an addiction to fossil fuels that’s been promulgated by the energy companies and the states that support them.

Under the Obama administration we made great progress kicking the fossil fuel habit. This trend must continue, not because climate change is bad in and of itself, but because the human-created disruptions are already wreaking havoc.

With tobacco, the harm was breathed inward to our lungs. With fossil fuels, the harm is being breathed outward into Earth’s lung, our atmosphere.

Robert M. Thorson is a professor at the University of Connecticut’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. His column appears every other Thursday. He can be reached at profthorson@yahoo.com.

How China has embraced renewable energy and Hong Kong hasn’t, and what’s behind city’s green power inertia

Summer 2016 saw record heat, and health problems from air pollution are rising, yet green energy projects have been shelved or denied funding; electricity firms lack incentives to go green, WWF says

Professor Johnny Chan Chun-leung is one of Hong Kong’s most eminent climate and energy scientists, and he is a very frustrated man. This month Beijing announced it would invest 2.5 trillion yuan (HK$2.8 trillion) in renewable energy technology by 2020 to establish the nation as world leader in sustainable and clean energy, and create 13 million jobs. Meanwhile, Chan and other respected scientists in Hong Kong are struggling to obtain financial support for their green energy projects.

Whereas China embraces wind, tide, solar and wave energy as essential tools to tackle climate change and its acute air pollution, attitudes in Hong Kong appear as fossilised as the fuel that provides 78 per cent of its energy needs.

Chan, chair professor of atmospheric science at the City University of Hong Kong’s School of Energy and Environment, outlined details of an innovative tidal turbine project at a conference on renewable energy last week, organised by the city’s Business Environment Council. Chan’s team has developed a system that can generate electricity even in low tidal streams, typical of the seas around Hong Kong. Though it is early days, trials staged at the Gold Coast Marina in the city’s Tuen Mun district produced encouraging results.

He now needs funding to scale it up, with a view to offering the city a viable green energy alternative, but his application to the Environment and Conservation Fund for HK$2 million was rejected. “The ECF told me today that I ‘did not demonstrate the merits and contributions of the proposed study to environmental protection’,” he says. “How ridiculous.”

It is not an isolated incident. Others complain privately that Hong Kong funding bodies are “overly risk averse” and are rarely enthusiastic about funding green energy research and development.

“I believe more can be done to promote local funding for R&D for all renewable energy components,” says Dr Walid Daoud, a solar energy expert from City University and another speaker at the council’s conference. Many believe these difficulties are just one symptom of a wider malaise when it comes to supporting green energy in Hong Kong.

“Hong Kong performs badly in overall carbon emissions and renewable energy,” says Cheung Chi-wah, senior head of climate and footprint programmes at environmental campaign group WWF-Hong Kong. He notes that the city’s emissions of greenhouse gases responsible for global warming have been rising steadily and are 23 per cent above their level in 2002. That was the same year the Hong Kong government published its first study of renewable energy, compiled by the Electrical and Mechanical Services Department. The report estimated that 17 per cent of Hong Kong’s energy needs could be supplied by solar power alone.

It also made a key primary recommendation that the government should set targets for renewable energy’s contribution to demand of 1 per cent, 2 per cent and 3 per cent for 2012, 2017 and 2022, respectively. Nearly 15 years later, with electricity consumption rising about 5 per cent a year, the city recording record-breaking temperatures last summer, and health problems due to worsening air pollution growing, very little has been achieved. Instead of the proposed 2 per cent target for 2017, the latest data shows that the proportion of energy used in the city that is produced by renewable means is still less than 1 per cent – far from the 17 per cent potential – and the targets have not even been implemented.

Indeed, by 2012 only 2.2 megawatts of solar photovoltaic panels, capable of meeting 0.01 per cent of Hong Kong’s energy needs, had been installed.

Hong Kong is also one of the few advanced cities in the world with no feed-in tariff scheme, or “net metering system”, in place. This means that, rather than small-scale green energy producers being paid for contributing any excess energy to the grid, they can only donate it.

Energy consultant Mike Thomas, of the Lantau Group, another speaker at the council’s event, thinks it is unhelpful to compare China and Hong Kong in terms of being “behind or ahead” because of the vast differences in the two economies’ scale, resources and political systems. He also believes Hong Kong is taking the right steps by implementing the government’s new fuel mix for energy supply by 2020, which consists of about 50 per cent natural gas, around 25 per cent nuclear power and more use of renewable energy sources. Natural gas is still a fossil fuel, but 30 per cent to 50 per cent cleaner than coal in terms of emissions.

“It is true that there is very little renewable energy, strictly speaking, but given the rabid debate about the use of green space for housing, I’m not sure that converting the hillsides to solar panels would appeal either,” he says. The issue of “low energy density” (the relatively high land area needed to produce 1 kilowatt of renewable electricity) is often cited by opponents of renewable energy in Hong Kong, which, including its 263 islands, has a land area of just 1,104 sq km.

Douad calculates the city would need to cover 20 per cent of its surface area with 10 per cent efficient solar panels to meet its energy needs, yet he remains a firm advocate of solar power.

“The 20 per cent is for the actual lateral 2D land use. However, we could also consider the vertical 3D of the urban landscape, using building walls as well as rooftops, sun-exposed roads and highways, sound barriers and water reservoirs,” he says.

While delegates at the council’s conference earnestly discuss the possibilities of using renewable energy locally, most leading cities have already embraced renewables and the smart grid – the use of digital technology to improve reliability, resiliency, flexibility, and efficiency – and have coherent policies in place to foster them.

Singapore is ramping up the use of solar panels through initiatives such as SolarNova, a government-led programme, and investing in green energy research via The Energy Research Institute. The city state is already seeing positive results. Figures for 2014 show that green energy sources contributed 3.7 per cent of total energy consumption (up from 2.4 per cent in 2005) and analysts expect that figure to top 5 per cent by 2020.

Hong Kong does have small-scale solar schemes designed for local consumption, and some government buildings generate solar power, but its approach to solar energy is piecemeal.

CLP Power, one of the city’s two electricity suppliers, commissioned its award-winning renewable energy power plant on Town Island in Sai Kung in January 2010, comprising wind turbines and solar panels, to supply the needs of the island’s drug rehabilitation centre, and says it has connected about 250 small-scale local schemes.

The other supplier, Hongkong Electric, says about 70 local use renewable systems have been connected to its grid over the past 10 years. It also operates a 1MW solar plant and the only wind turbine connected to Hong Kong’s power grid.

It might be imagined that geographical restrictions and a scarcity of available land would make harnessing offshore wind, wave and tidal power – as Chan proposes – more attractive, but there is little sign of progress on any of these. Detailed proposals from the electricity companies to build offshore wind farms were awarded environmental permits, but both schemes were shelved in 2013 and mysteriously disappeared from the local energy agenda.

“We are in the process of collecting wind, wave and other environmental data, along with a review of the engineering design, to complete the feasibility study,” a CLP spokesman says of its plan.

Hongkong Electric’s proposed wind farm in waters off Lamma Island was to supply 1.5 per cent of its total output. Asked about the proposal, a company spokesman says “field wind measurement has been going on since 2012”.

Cheung says no one in the industry understands why the company needs to collect five years of wind data. He suspects the real reason for offshore wind power being dropped is that the schemes of control both power companies have negotiated with the government, which regulate their profits on operations and investment, do not offer enough financial sweeteners for either company to proceed.

The current schemes of control are due to expire by end of 2018, and the government is negotiating terms with the companies to renew them. Cheung thinks it’s “a perfect time for the government to show its determination by introducing significant targets and incentives for energy consumption reduction and [renewable energy] development”.

One of the thorny issues that will need to be ironed out is tariffs. Hong Kong has some of the cheapest and most reliable power in the world (electricity costs about half what it does in New York). Although it is widely believed that greater use of green energy is essential, there is less agreement on who will pay for the higher prices or pick up the bill for integration of an intermittent power source to the grid.

While energy costs account for only 1.6 per cent of the average Hong Kong household’s budget, there is little commercial incentive for change and little political appetite for heaping extra costs on hard-pressed families.

There is more hope than expectation that Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying will use his final policy address to announce Hong Kong will follow Beijing’s lead and reveal a bold new policy for renewable energy with defined targets, a credible strategy to achieve them, and support for home-grown innovations such as Chan’s.
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Source URL: http://www.scmp.com/lifestyle/article/2062467/how-china-has-embraced-renewable-energy-and-hong-kong-hasnt-and-whats