EU Says Aviation Organization Recognizes European Carbon Market

| Sourced From Bloomberg |

The European Union claimed a diplomatic victory at an international aviation meeting, saying the participants accepted the EU’s plan to cap emissions by domestic and foreign airlines serving Europe as of 2012.
The European Commission, the 27-nation EU’s executive arm, also said the International Civil Aviation Organization reached a “breakthrough” agreement at its meeting that ended yesterday to curb global aircraft discharges of greenhouse gases beginning in 2020.
Such pollution is blamed for global climate change, which the EU is handling in part by adding airlines to its emissions trading system in less than 15 months.
“Critically, the deal is a good basis for proceeding swiftly with the inclusion of aviation in the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme,” EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in a statement published in Brussels today. “The goal is not as ambitious as Europe thinks it should be, but at the same time ICAO has recognised that some states may take more ambitious actions prior to 2020.”
The agreement, reached in Montreal after almost a decade of deadlock at ICAO, will cover more than 90 percent of worldwide air traffic, the EU said in the statement. Emissions from international aviation account now for 2 percent to 3 percent of global greenhouse gas discharges and their share is expected to rise in the coming decades as the industry grows, according to the EU.
EU Carbon Market
Participants of the meeting “refrained from language which would make the application of the EU’s ETS to their airlines dependent on the mutual agreement of other states,” the EU said in the statement. “It was this requirement that led to a stalemate at the last ICAO assembly in 2007.”
The EU carbon market, started in 2005, is the world’s largest. It covers about 12,000 installations that produce energy or goods ranging from paper to cement. Emitters must have an allowance for each ton of carbon dioxide they let off. Those producing more than their allowance have to buy more; those that emit less can sell their surplus.
The bloc is on track to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20 percent this decade from 1990s levels and said it’s ready to deepen the target to 30 percent if other countries follow suit.
The next round of international talks on climate are due to start toward the end of November in Cancun, Mexico.


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Formed for investors by investors; with over 11 years’ investment experience, ethical approach and unparalleled service both before during and after, we are now the fastest growing alternative investment house in the world. 360 Invest group are driven by our Investors, who wish to align their own principles of profit by investing in ethically-minded products. Ecological Impact We will not finance any business whose core activity contributes to: • global climate change, via the extraction or production of fossil fuels (oil, coal and gas), with an extension to the distribution of those fuels that have a higher global warming impact (eg tar sands and certain biofuels) • the manufacture of chemicals that are persistent in the environment, bioaccumulative in nature or linked to long term health concerns • the unsustainable harvest of natural resources, including timber and fish • the development of genetically modified organisms where there is evidence of uncontrolled release into the environment, negative impacts on developing countries, or patenting (eg of indigenous knowledge) • the development of nanotechnology in circumstances that risk damaging the environment or compromising human health.

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Todays Market News and Views

Market News and Views

The FTSE 100 is called to open lower this morning on profit-taking after closing at its highest level since late April on Thursday. Investors will await news from day 1 of the G20 meeting of financial leaders in South Korea which will keep the dollar in focus and the possibility of more quantitative easing in the US. There is no major economic data of note as we finish the week.

Today's Company announcements

BSkyB Q1 Results saw adjusted operating profit up 25% to £255m in the 3 months to end September on revenues ahead 15% at £1.53bn. There was net customer growth of 96,000 taking the reach of households to 9.956m with 2.3m customers now taking all three of TV, broadband and telephony packages with it adding that there was further good growth in HD with net additions of 215,00 to reach 3.2m customers.

African Barrick Gold Q3 Report notes EBITDA down 3% in the period to end September to $89m but up 58% to $286m year to date. There was a drop of 23% in gold production to 164,996 ounces in Q3 due to production setbacks although there was a 29% rise in achieved gold prices to $1,233/oz. The company reaffirmed guidance to produce 716,000 ounces in 2010, in line with last year's output after cutting its guidance twice recently.
Betfair IPO. The company has priced its IPO at £13 a share, which is at the top end of its indicated range to give it a market value on float of £1.39bn. Betfair shareholders are selling 15.2% of the stock raising gross proceeds of £211m with no new capital being raised. Conditional dealings are expected  to start today with unconditional dealings and admission to trading on the main market due to begin on 27 October 2010

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Source: Gaurdian newspaper.

What's the carbon footprint of ... email?

The sending, sorting and filtering of spam email alone accounts for 33bn units of electricity each year

Spam

The carbon footprint of spam:
0.3g CO2e: A spam email
4g CO2e: A proper email
50g CO2e: An email with long and tiresome attachment

Sending and receiving electronic message is never going to constitute the largest part of our carbon footprints. But the energy required to support our increasingly heaving and numerous inboxes does add up.

Very roughly speaking (remember that all complex carbon footprints are really best guesses), a typical year of incoming mail for a business user – including sending, filtering and reading – creates a carbon footprint of around 135kg. That's over 1% of of a relatively green 10-tonne lifestyle and equivalent to driving 200 miles in an average car.

According to research by McAfee, a remarkable 78% of all incoming emails are spam. Around 62 trillion spam messages are sent every year, requiring the use of 33bn kilowatt hours (KWh) of electricity and causing around 20 million tonnes of CO2e per year.

McAfee estimated that around 80% of this electricity is consumed by the reading and deleting of spam and the searching through spam folders to dig out genuine emails that ended up there by accident. Spam filters themselves account for 16%. The actual generation and sending of the spam is a very small proportion of the footprint.

Although 78% of incoming emails sent are spam, these messages account for just 22% of the total footprint of a typical email account because, although they are a pain, you deal with them quickly. Most of them you never even see. A genuine email has a bigger carbon footprint, simply because it takes time to deal with.

The average email has just one-sixtieth the footprint of a letter, according to a back-of-the-envelope comparison. That looks like a carbon saving unless you end up sending 60 times more emails than the number of letters you would have posted in days gone by. Lots of people do. This is a good example of the rebound effect – a low-carbon technology resulting in higher-carbon living simply because we use it more.

If the great quest is for ways in which we can improve our lives while cutting carbon, surely spam and unnecessary email have to be very high on the hitlist along with old-fashioned junk paper post. But what can be done?
Here's one radical idea: a tax of a penny or cent per message sent. Obviously this wouldn't be ideal from the perspective of digital access, and it might be impossible to implement. And no-one likes an extra tax. But it would surely kill all spam instantly. The funds could go to tackling world poverty, say, or to help unlock a global emissions deal by supporting adaptation and technology transfer payments. The world's carbon footprint would go down by a substantial 20 million tonnes even if genuine users didn't change their habits at all. The average user would be saved a couple of minutes of their time every day and an annual fund of up to £170bn would be made available.

Source of article: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/green-living-blog/2010/oct/21/carbon-footprint-email

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What’s the carbon footprint of building a house

What's the carbon footprint of ... building a house

New homes require far less energy to run than older properties, but building them generates plenty of CO2

•

New houses such as these ones in south Derbyshire take lots of energy and resources to produce. Photograph: Rui Vieira/PA

The carbon footprint of a house:
80 tonnes CO2e: A newbuild two-bed cottage

The carbon footprint of building a house depends on all kinds of things – including, of course, the size of the house and the types of materials chosen.

The estimate of 80 tonnes given above is for the construction of a brand-new cottage with two bedrooms upstairs and two reception rooms and a kitchen downstairs. It's based on a study that I was involved in for Historic Scotland. The study looked at the climate change implications of various options for a traditional cottage in Dumfries: leave it as it is, refurbish, or knock it down and build a new one to various different building codes. We looked at the climate change impact over a 100-year period, taking into account the embodied emissions in the construction and maintenance as well as the energy used and generated by those living in the building.

Unsurprisingly, the worst option by far was to do nothing and leave the old house leaking energy like a sieve. Knocking down and starting again worked out at about 80 tonnes CO2e whether the house was built to 2008 Scottish building regulations or to the much more stringent and expensive Code for Sustainable Homes Level 5 that demanded 'carbon neutrality'.

Here's how that total broke down for the carbon-neutral option:

• Walls 60%
• Timber 14%
• Pipework and drainage 9%
• Floors 5%
• Slate roof 5%
• Photovoltaic panels 3%
• Other 4%

Eighty tonnes is a lot – equivalent to five brand-new family cars, about six years of living for the average Brit or 24 economy-class trips to Hong Kong from London. But a house may last for a century or more, so the annual carbon cost is much less – and for all the new-build options, the up-front emissions from construction work were paid back by savings from better energy efficiency in 15–20 years.

However, the winning option was to refurbish the old house, because the carbon investment of doing this was just eight tonnes CO2e, and even the highest-specification newbuild could not catch up this advantage over the 100-year period. Once cost was taken into account, refurbishment became dramatically the most practical and attractive option, too.

If this one study is representative, the message for the construction industry is clear. Investment in the very highest levels of energy-efficiency for new homes is, even at its best, an extremely costly way of saving carbon. Investing in improvements to existing homes is dramatically more cost-effective.

• This article draws on text from How Bad Are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything by Mike Berners-Lee

| Sourced From Guardian newspaper |

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Whaling worsens carbon release, scientists warn

By Victoria Gill Science reporter, BBC News, Portland Whales store carbon by the tonne A century of whaling may have released more than 100 million tonnes - or a large forest's worth - of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists say. Whales store carbon within their huge bodies and when they are killed, much of this carbon can be released. US scientists revealed their estimate of carbon released by whaling at a major ocean sciences meeting in the US. Dr Andrew Pershing from the University of Maine described whales as the "forests of the ocean". Dr Pershing and his colleagues from the Gulf of Maine Research Institute calculated the annual carbon-storing capacity of whales as they grew. "Whales, like any animal or plant on the planet, are made out of a lot of carbon," he said. "And when you kill and remove a whale from the ocean, that's removing carbon from this storage system and possibly sending it into the atmosphere." He pointed out that, particularly in the early days of whaling, the animals were a source of lamp oil, which was burned, releasing the carbon directly into the air. "And this marine system is unique because when whales die [naturally], their bodies sink, so they take that carbon down to the bottom of the ocean. "If they die where it's deep enough, it will be [stored] out of the atmosphere perhaps for hundreds of years." Ocean trees In their initial calculations, the team worked out that 100 years of whaling had released an amount of carbon equivalent to burning 130,000 sq km of temperate forests, or to driving 128,000 Humvees continuously for 100 years. The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales Dr Andrew Pershing, University of Maine Guide to the great whales Dr Pershing stressed that this was still a relatively tiny amount when compared to the billions of tonnes produced by human activity every year. But he said that whales played an important role in storing and transporting carbon in the marine ecosystem. Simply leaving large groups of whales to grow, he said, could "sequester" the greenhouse gas, in amounts that were comparable to some of the reforestation schemes that earn and sell carbon credits. He suggested that a similar system of carbon credits could be applied to whales in order to protect and rebuild their stocks. "The idea would be to do a full accounting of how much carbon you could store in a fully populated stock of fish or whales, and allow countries to sell their fish quota as carbon credits," he explained. "You could use those credits as an incentive to reduce the fishing pressure or to promote the conservation of some of these species." Is bigger better? Other scientists said that he had raised an exciting and interesting problem. Professor Daniel Costa, a marine animal researcher from the University of California, Santa Cruz, told BBC News: "So many more groups are looking at the importance of these large animals in the carbon cycle. "And it's one of those things that, when you look at it, you think: ' This is so obvious, why didn't we think of this before?'." Dr Pershing pointed out that whales, with their huge size, were more efficient than smaller animals at storing carbon. He used the analogy of a small dog compared to a large dog. "My wife's 6lb (2.7kg) toy poodle eats one cup of food per day and my dog - a 60lb standard poodle - eats five cups of food per day," he said. "That's only five times as much food but my dog weighs ten times as much." He said that the marine carbon credit idea could be applied to other very large marine animals, including endangered bluefin tuna and white sharks. Dr Pershing said: "These are huge and they are top predators, so unless they're fished they would be likely to take their biomass to the bottom of the ocean [when they die]." The American Geophysical Union's Ocean Sciences meeting has been taking place this week in Portland, Oregon

Original article can be viewed: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8538033.stm

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Some governments give "huge subsidies" to oil and gas production, said Mr Sukhdev

20 October 2010 Last updated at 16:05 GMT

India and Brazil head move to 'green' economic future

By Richard Black Environment correspondent, BBC News, Nagoya

A number of countries have systems in place to reward forest conservation

Governments are increasingly taking the economic value of nature into account in policy-making, with growing interest in results from a UN-backed analysis.

The Brazilian and Indian governments are among those keen to use findings from The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (Teeb) project.

“Start Quote

You cannot manage what you do not measure”

End Quote Pavan Sukhdev Deutsche Bank

• India and Brazil lead green race

Final results from the three-year study were unveiled here at the UN Convention on Biological Diversity meeting.

Nature's services must be counted if they are to be valued, its leader said.
Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank capital markets expert who leads Teeb on secondment to the UN Environment Programme (Unep), said that if society did not properly account for services that nature provides, they would be lost.
In an earlier analysis, Teeb calculated that the economic value of services being lost - including water purification, pollination of crops and climate regulation - amounts to $2-5 trillion dollars per year, with the poor hardest hit.

Continue reading the main story

Related stories

• Marine project tops green awards
• 'Key time' to solve nature crisis

Here, Mr Sukhdev and his team concentrated on ideas for implementation - how to turn the findings of the study into real politics.

And the first thing for governments to do, he said, was to carry out national equivalents of the global Teeb study - to analyse the real value of ecosystem services to their economies.
"Conventional methods of accounting such as GDP accounting will not capture them - so we need... to rapidly upgrade the system of national accounts," he said.
"You cannot manage what you do not measure."
Global uptake Mr Sukhdev said that so far, 27 governments from Africa and Latin America, and one from Asia, had approached the Unep team for help in "greening" their economies.
Many of these are looking to translate the global Teeb findings findings into their national context, with Brazil and India in the vanguard.
India's Minister for Environment and Forests, Jairam Ramesh, said his country was planning a national economic assessment along Teeb lines.
"We are committed to developing a framework for green national accounts that we can implement by 2015, and we are confident that the 'Teeb for India' study will be the key facilitator," he said.
And Braulio Dias, secretary for biodiversity and forests in Brazil's Environment Ministry, said his country was also looking to Teeb for a change of direction - in fact, without the pending election, it might be happening already.
"The tradition of many countries including Brazil has been one of utilising regulation - command and control instruments - and we need to work more on incentive measures and get the different sectors on board," he told BBC News.
"The Teeb approach is very useful to make them understand the implications of loss of biodiversity, and also the return on investment in terms of biodiversity conservation.
"We have several bills before the national congress to establish a national mechanism for payment for ecosystem services - if they're approved, I think we will have a better possibility of implement some of those economic measures."

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

Collectively, $650bn of subsidies for oil and gas?”

End Quote Pavan Sukhdev Deutsche Bank

But he echoed the concerns of many other developing countries by emphasising that some kind of international payment system, transferring money from the West to the rest for conserving resources, might be needed in the long run.

The European Union also supports the Teeb principles, with many countries and the EU itself set to examine the potential for greening their economies along Teeb lines.
"Teeb can have the same impact for biodiversity as the Stern Review had for climate change, and will be a useful tool to help reduce the loss of species and habitats," said UK Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman.
"The UK Government has been a major supporter of Teeb since it started and we will be funding the roll out of the report across the world to communicate the central message that, economically, we have to take action to reduce the loss of our natural environment before the cost becomes too high."
Politics of conservation While a number of countries including Brazil and India do have systems in place to reward forest conservation, implementing the full Teeb vision would amount to a root and branch overhaul of economic incentives and taxes.
But some moves could and should be quickly made, said Pavan Sukhdev.
The first thing was to "flatten the footbal field", which currently sees huge subsidies given to oil and gas production - largely in richer countries.
"Collectively, $650bn of subsidies for oil and gas?
"Surely, this is not a Mother Theresa business - it is not a charity - it doesn't need subsidy," he told BBC News.
"I would like governments to look at and start disclosing their subsidies, and gradually work to reduce them and indeed eliminate them; because if want businesses to arise which have a better footprint and a lower cost to society, the first thing you have to do is to stop favouring those that don't."
The draft agreement from this CBD meeting would see countries agreeing to incorporate biodiversity values into their national accounting by 2020, and eliminating by the same date subsidies that are detrimental to biodiversity.
But many nations are holding to the point, in negotiations, that "nothing is agreed until everything is agreed"; and although many developing countries support the Teeb concept, factional politics could yet prevent the endorsement of such a vision here.

original news source:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-11588020