The EU Ecolabel

As some major Asian economies settle comfortably in their polluted air and water and argue why their industries cannot be so eco-friendly, Europe has pulled ahead with initiative after initiative.

Few in Malaysia would have heard of the EU Eco-label, the flower logo above that is affixed to products that have been verified by independent bodies as complying with strict ecological and performance criteria.

Their website lists 11 product categories under this system - Bedding, Gardening, Electronic equipment, Footwear, Household Appliances, Textiles, DIY, Cleaning, Paper, Services and Lubricants.

For example, the compliance requirements for bedding manufacturers look like this:


This is not just a commercial branding stunt but a carefully administered plan by the European Eco-labelling Board (EUEB) and receives the support of the European Commission, all Member States of the European Union and the European Economic Area (EEA).

According to their website, the Eco-labelling Board includes representatives such as industry, environment protection groups and consumer organisations.

Read their FAQ here about the whats and whys of the EU eco-label. The EUROPA website also has a good backgrounder on this.

My question is with Asia's notoriously booming population, will their governments have the will to adopt anything like this soon? How about anytime this century?

Formula One: Green quotes

...any research to improve that racing engine would have to be directly relevant to research to improve fuel efficiency in road cars... actually contribute something to society rather than yearly sterile research for another 200-300rpm from a fixed-capacity engine.

FIA President Max Mosley on the motor sport's brand new focus on fuel economy


The entire fuel bill and the carbon burn for the entire formula one world championship season is less than one 747 taking off for one flight.

Steve Slater
Formula One commentator


Jenson Button's Earth Car (the green Honda) will emit 50 tonnes of carbon this formula one season, five times higher than the average Briton produces in 12 months.

Guardian sport

Although the messages may be a little confusing for now, something green is brewing in F1. Great news indeed for conservation.

Autobahn putting on the brakes?

Will the Autboahn, Germany's famous no-speed-limit highway, finally give up its fame by imposing a 120kmh speed limit?

That's what the German Federal Environment Agency is mulling. The reason? To help Germany meet its promise to cut Co2 emissions.

A CNN spot last night did an interesting test to see what effect slowing down would have on feul burn. They took a BMW 5-series to the speedway, sped it past 240kmh and then reduced the speed down to half. The feul consumption was then compared. True enough, at 120 kmh consumption was cut down to half.

But Germany's speed demons were not amused though, some even angry.

Read the full news here.

World public opinion on global warming

WorldPublicOpinion.org recently conducted a poll to split hairs over what people thought about global warming.

The poll was conducted in 17 countries—China, India, USA, Indonesia, Russia, Thailand, Ukraine, Poland, Iran, Mexico, South Korea, the Philippines, Australia, Argentina, Peru, Israel and Armenia. These represent more than 55 percent of the world population.


The results were not unexpected. About 12-13% of people in the US and China think global warming is not an important threat compared to only 4-5% of South Koreans and Australians who felt the same way. Surprisingly 70% of Mexicans believe the problem is critical compared to the USA's 46%.

On the need to take action, Indians were the least supportive with 24% feeling that unless we are sure that global warming is really a problem, we should not do anything that would cost money. On the other hand, Australians seems the most concerned with 69% saying something should be done now even if the costs are significant.

The study does affirm that although there are dissenters, an overwhelming majority in the countries polled believe global warming is a problem that needs to be addressed. But the data also shows that the protection of economic interests may prove to be a wet blanket with developing countries like the Philippines (49%), Thailand (41%), Poland (39%), Ukraine (37%) and India (30%) leading the way on "going slow".

Graphic source: here.
Read the detailed srticle here.

Beating global warming: An Australian perspective

FIRST

We must accept the reality that information on environmental issues and global warming issues are being manipulated by skilful public relation gurus to maintain the sales of fossil carbon based fuels and products.

SECOND

We remove the excess carbon dioxide from our atmosphere. We do this by modifying our agricultural practices to enhance the buildup of soil organic matter.

THIRD

For large-scale industrial power generation, we switch from a system primarily based on fossil fuels, to a system primarily based on nuclear fuels. It is both the only feasible option, and the safest.

FOURTH

For our mobile transport fuels we switch totally to ethanol and biodiesel produced from sugarcane and grains, and oil palms and oil seeds. That’s for cars, trucks, busses, ships and aeroplanes. Source.

The article is a long read but if you can put aside some of its diatribes, you might find some practical suggestions on what an agro-commercial society can do.

And since Malaysia wants to go big into that space with our palm oil and stuff, an alternative view into the practice of large-scale organic farming could be insightful.
.

Britons fight for road tax increase

What would you say to a 10-fold increase in road tax on the biggest gas-guzzling cars as part of an aggressive pledge to cut greenhouse gas emissions, especially when you realize that road transport accounts for a fifth of the country's Co2 emissions?

This is on top of other extra fees imposed if you drive through the city.

This is what Friends of the Earth is campaigning to the British government in this news report.

It poses an interesting question. What would our public reaction be if such a move if done here?

Bear in mind Malaysia is a signatory to the Kyoto protocol.

All talk no action

I've always stayed clear of the political aspect of the global warming debate, firstly because I don't care for politics and secondly because I don't believe science can be mixed with consensus (politics). If its science its not consensus. If its consensus its not science. I prefer to stick with science.

Be that as it may, I do keep a pulse on what world bodies are debating ...errr.. doing. One thing that keeps coming up since the days of Kyoto protocol is who - as in which nations - are to blame.

The rationale of the debate I suppose is to decide who should be doing the most of the cleaning up. We can read that as bearing the cost and possible economic slowdown as industry rules are altered. One of the reasons why the US didn't go with Kyoto was their claim that developing economies were not subject to the targets that the rich countries were.

The other side's defence is that most of the Co2 presently circulating in the atmosphere have been dumped there by indutrialized countries decades and centuries ago, hence it is they who should be leading the cleanup efforts.

It sounds reasonable until you realize where the argument is heading: that if America and Europe had polluted well and hard in the past, then why can't India and China do the same today?

Its like a youngster telling someone you can't stop me from dumping trash out to the street because you yourself did it when you were young.

Maybe I'm being a little simplistic and there's a lot more to the arguments but I think the basic principles are the same. Squabbling about history will not change the fact that we - as in the Americans, Asians and Europeans - are all stuck in the same sinking ship.

The irony is that while the Americans may not have signed Kyoto, they are doing something to change the situation as I blogged here, here, here and here, probably forced to by a more environmentally mature citizenry, while some nations that signed Kyoto could only give excuses why its hard to implement measures in their countries. Lets be honest. Which country would you rather live in - one where the rivers are clean and clear but didn't sign Kyoto or one who let its rivers be biologically poisoned but signed Kyoto.

This is why I prefer to stick to science. Action speaks louder than words. A lot louder.

Read this, this and this for perspectives of India and China on this issue.

Why our storms are getting fiercer

Storms and flooding are hitting us with a vengeance this year. For the first time in my life I was nearly blown off my feet by super strong winds and rain that was unleashed in PJ last Friday evening.

This freaky weather phenomena looks set to be a long term if not permanent feature of our weather system if this report is true. Scientists now say pollution from Asia is helping generate stronger storms. These come in the form of tiny particles generated from coal burning in China and India which had been going on for decades.

The terrible air pollution in China is no fairy tale as I found out recently when I went there.


Above was the sight that greeted me on the approach to Guangzhou airport. The clouds sit in a reddish brown soup caused by emissions from coal fired plants.


And this is the view of Guangzhou airport as we drove on the highway. The haze is a permanent feature that just hangs in the air day and night. Even rain won't clear it.

While Malaysia is quite far away from the North Pacific area mentioned in the report, I don't think we are ever free from the climactic effects of pollution from the greater Asian continent. We experience this first hand every August & September when haze from Indonesian forest fires envelop us.

Whether forest fire or dirty coal-fired plants, tons of carbon particles are ejected into the air where they stay suspended and add to the grim load already carried by the atmosphere.

"The Pacific storm track, they noted, plays a critical role in global atmospheric circulation, and altering this weather pattern could have a significant impact on the climate," says the report.

The bad news gets badder

Here's some cheerful highlights from a sneak preview of the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report:

- Within 20 years hundreds of millions of people won't have enough water.
- About 100 million will be made homeless due to flooding each year from rising sea levels
- Insect-borne diseases like malaria will spread. In 40 years, polar bears will mostly be found in zoos. Pests like fire ants will thrive.
- By 2080, half a billion people could face starvation.

So, still think its a good idea to have kids?

Link: here

Carbon-neutral bank

Is your bank carbon-neutral?

Mine isn't but its heartening to know that there are financial institutions out there who are putting money where their mouth is in the struggle against global warming. After all, banks are voracious consumers of materials such as paper and technology whose production involves the creation of megatons of greenhouse gases.

On 6th March '07, the largest retail bank in the US, Bank of America, announced a US$20 billion environmental initiative to encourage a greening of the environment. Some of the money goes to an internal drive to reduce consumables consumption, the rest to consumer programs and commercial lending and investment banking for "green" projects over the next decade.

It sounds like the start of a big corporate social responsibility campaign (CSR) for BA. CSR has gained ground in recent years as a new public relations weapon and it has worked very well in communities that puts high value on social well-being. By developing an image of a caring instituion, it puts itself in the same mindspace of the population mindful of the same concern. In other words, its a bit of smart marketing.

I wonder when our local institutions will start following suit.

Is nuclear power carbon-free?

Not according to Dr Uwe Fritsche, a researcher at the Öko Institut in Darmstadt, Germany, who says there's no such thing as carbon-free power.

A big 1,250 megawatt plant produces the equivalent of 250,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year during its life, he says. Its does better than coal- and gas-fired turbines but in reality, a lot of Co2 is produced in setting up the plant, mining the uranium ore it requires and in operating it.

So it seems that when its life-cycle cost of reducing Co2 emissions is compared with other energy alternatives, nuclear power may not fare as well in the global warming equation. There are suggestions that improving a nation's energy efficiency would produce far less Co2 than a new nuclear plant.


Source: Öko Institut

Link: Here

Carbon footprint calculators

A carbon footprint calculator asks questions about your lifestyle and consumption habits and calculates how much carbon dioxide you produce annually.

Why bother knowing your carbon footprint?

Good question. The answer is if you really want to reduce global warming, start at home. Know how many tons of greenhouse gases you are personally dumping into the atmosphere. Then choose how you want to cancel those effects (to be covered in later articles).

Here's a few calculators I found on the net.

1. Carbonfootprint.com Calculator
2. WRI Calculator
3. An Inconvenient Truth Calculator
4. Junkscience Calculator
5. BP Calculator
6. Carboncalculator.co.uk

My only issue with carbon calculators is that many were written for western audiences and tend to categorize usage around American or European peculiarities. Some calculators for example only work if you provide a valid US zip code or they ask you to choose car models only found in that country.

We're seeing the same harebrainedness found during the baseball world series where the 'world' is defined as Florida, New York, California, etc.

Anyway given the seriousness of the situation, I hope someone will come up with a calculator that's more applicable to Asian audiences soon.

What is Carbon neutrality

What does it mean when someone goes carbon neutral?

It means the person emits no net carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

The principle is similar to a balanced budget. If you must spend X dollars, to keep your head above water you better make sure you recover that X dollars somewhere.

With this simple idea, if you're able to calulate the amount of carbon you produce from your lifestyle in a year, you can make up for what you used (called an offset) by doing a number of things.

The simplest is tree planting. A tree can soak up a ton of Co2 in its lifetime. Another way is to contribute money to energy conservation projects or to those that generate energy from renewable sources.

Lets do a quick example. Lets say using a carbon footprint calculator (one example here) I learn that I produce 10 tons of Co2 a year. I have 2 choices,

a) sponsor the planting of 10 trees to absorb that much Co2, or

b) donate money to a hospital for them to install energy devices like solar water heaters to prevent electricity usage that would have otherwise produced 10 tons of Co2.

Its not an exact science and hospitals in apathetic countries will laugh you out the door but you get the idea.

In countries that do take their carbon neutrality seriously, businesses are already offering people a way to live carbon neutral lives by offering "carbon credits" for sale. See examples here and here to understand how they work.

The main point is that if you must pollute, you should do something to allow that amount of pollution to be absorbed or better yet, prevent its production somewhere on this planet. If everybody does this, then in theory we will have a 'balanced carbon account' i.e. no net gain of Co2 produced by human activity.

Read this, this and this to get a better understanding of carbon neutrality.

Honda Formula 1 goes green

...and blue. Literally. F1 fans will see this car above instead of the usual red and white livery come 18th March when the new season flags off. Quite a turnabout for a team that used to carry the Lucky Strike cigarette brand decal.

And get this. For a pledge you can actually have your name incorporated in the artwork of the real F1 car! A brilliant opportunity at grandstanding if I may say so, never mind if you need a microscope to see your pixel-sized name on the car. I'm not sure what they do with the money you pledge though.

From their promotional website at www.myearthdream.com,


While this move may not actually change the sport in the short run, it will remind millions of TV viewers that a) the earth should look as green and blue as the livery, b) here's a team that puts the welfare of the planet above that of their team sponsors.

That bold statement, to me, is well worth the amount of sponsorships they forgo this season. I expect they will recoup some if not all of the cost of this from the increased sales of their hybrid street cars. Smart. Go Honda!

Links: Here and here.

Global warming FAQ

There are many excellent FAQs on global warming available on the Internet so I won't reinvent the wheel. At the bottom of this post I've presented a few FAQ links that I think are good.

But before that, here's my own piece on the fundamentals of global warming.

Since I started this blog, the first bunch of posts have dwelled on the topic of carbon dioxide or Co2 emissions. There's a reason for that.

Amongst the various types of heat-trapping greenhouse gases present in our atmostphere, Co2 is by far the largest in volume.

The rash of carbon-themed posts was to emphasize its role in this little mess we're in and to point out that we are as guilty as everyone else in producing carbon. Yes everyone pollutes but we should care enough to know what portion of the problem has our fingerprints on it so we can start thinking about how to neutralize it.

While Co2 has been around long before man appeared, its volume began to accelerate rapidly when he appeared. Man's appetite for energy compels him to burn fossil fuels like coal, natural gas and oil, as is his desire to clear land cheaply by burning forests and blanketing entire regions with thick haze. These just a couple of examples of actions that release carbon into the atmosphere.

The planet has natural carbon sinks like ocean and forests, places that absorb carbon and sometimes produce oxygen in return. However there's a problem. We are producing much more carbon than the carbon sinks can take. Indiscriminate deforestation only serves to shrink the remaining carbon sinks even further.

As the level of unabsorbed airborne carbon rises, more heat is trapped in the atmosphere and global temperatures begin to rise. Glaciers melt, sea water level rises, the climate shows unusual patterns, the food chain goes out of whack, food supply drops and man's existence eventually comes into question.

Great emotional debates have raged on whether global warming is natural or man-made and whether the recommendations of the scientific community will actually work. Regardless of who is right or wrong, responsible countries have started to act.

Since the ozone layer panic of the 80's, international accords like the UN-backed Kyoto protocol have been launched. These initiatives set county-level targets for greenhouse gas emissions and provide financial incentives for doing so.

To measure who's dirtiest and cleanest and who's doing the most and the least, these communities have adopted carbon weight and volume as the basic unit of measurement to define pollution severity in the global warming context. Carbon is a word we'll be hearing a lot of in the coming years, from carbon offsets to carbon footprints to carbon trading, so lets start getting used to it.

Below are just a few FAQS I found useful. You can google up a lot more.

Links:
A beginner's guide to understanding the issue of global warming
Goddard Space Flight Center's Global Warming FAQ
About.com's Global Warming FAQ
UCSUSA's Global Warming FAQ
NCDC's Global Warming FAQ


Image source: NASA

Just when we thought we had it all covered

... and we discover more holes.

This time, the climate change experts apparently overlooked one big polluter: ships. And get this, the carbon dioxide emissions are found to be double that of the entire aviation industry!

At 600 and 800m tonnes of carbon dioxide, ships' emissions are in fact "nearly double Britain's total emissions and more than all African countries combined."

Maritime emissions are not covered by the Kyoto accord. It is also absent from many discussions that pounce on lesser things like airline pollution.

It is estimated that the world now has 70,000 ships and there are apparently about 20,000 new ships on order.

Why so many ships? If you own anything that is imported, chances are it was brought in by a ship. The more we consume, the more cargo ships required for transport. The fuel they often use? Diesel.

Read the article here.

Image source: Freefoto.com

Environmentally friendly Malaysians?

The facilities are great.


But the mentality? Here's paper thrown in a bin marked 'plastic.'


And plastic stuffed in a bin marked 'paper.'


These pictures were taken on Friday noon at Ikano Power Center at Kota Damansara KL, a happening place frequented by the educated and the rich.


Apathy clearly cuts across social lines.

I commend Ikano and Ikea for encouraging public awareness of recycling by walking the talk. I think they deserve an award.

USD25 million for the best greenhouse sucker

Got an idea of how to suck one billion tonnes of Co2 a year from the atmosphere?

Al Gore and Virgin Group chairman Sir Richard Branson teamed up to launch the Virgin Earth Challenge on 9 Feb 2007, announcing the $25m cash reward that they hope will inspire innovations in the field of combating climate change.

"The earth cannot wait 60 years," said Branson at a news conference.

Read more here and here.

Top 20 Co2 emitters

Source: http://www.ucsusa.org/global_warming/science/each-countrys-share-of-co2-emissions.html


These are 1990-1996 figures. What mystified me was the fact that Saudi Arabia recorded the second highest growth of carbon emissions at +51.2%, led only by South Korea at +69.2%.

I can understand South Korea at the top, it being a major global manufacturer and all but Saudi Arabia?

Carbon stats: How do we fare with our neighbours?

Got these off the net. All stats are per capita up to 2001/2002.




Source: http://cdiac.esd.ornl.gov/trends/emis/tre_coun.htm

Of the three, it looks like we are the highest emitters of Co2 per head. However I feel the data should be compared with GDP or something to get a balanced picture as countries with different population & industry mixes may have different emission profiles.

I omitted Singapore precisely because of this.

Calculate your carbon footprint

This table is extracted from an article by George Barnwell about how much carbon dioxide you're dumping into the atmosphere, the main component of greenhouse gases. And that's from electrical appliances alone. Read his short article here. Note that 1 pound is equivalent to 0.453kg.

If you're interested in the bigger picture, try out BP's Carbon Footprint Calculator and see for yourself what your carbon footprint is.


Mine is 6 tonnes a year, lower than the Singapore average of 8.38. Woohoo!

And if you're wondering what a tonne of CO2 is like, read this, also from the BP site.



Aren't numbers painful :)