Posts Tagged ‘Greenhouse Gas Abatement’
The Environmental Institute of Australia and New Zealand (EIANZ) are running a climate change leadership forum on November 23rd, on tools, techniques and leadership lessons on climate change adaptation and mitigation. Greensense Managing Director, Derek Gerrard, will be presenting on smart technologies and behavioural change, reviewing the Subiaco Oval case study, as well as our carbon emission’s reporting solution for Local Government in partnership with WALGA.
If you haven’t registered and would like to you can find out more information here.
Hans Rosling is a Swedish professor of health who is interested in the links between economic development, agriculture, poverty and health. He is also the director of the Gapminder institute which promotes sustainable global development.
As we’ve discussed before, we think that having the capability to see and understand your business’ carbon inventory is the key to enabling meaningful actions to be taken and new strategies to be developed. The Gapminder institute takes a similar view in relation to sustainable development.
They developed software they called Trendalyzer to translate freely available international statistics into interactive data visualizations to improve understanding and help motivate action. In the following video Hans Rosling discusses carbon emissions and the relationship with economic development using this software.
There is also a high-resolution quicktime version of the video available for download from Gapminder.
This video demonstrates how the right data presented in a compelling way can tell a powerful story.
Google has acquired the Trendalyzer software and makes it available as a hosted service to interact with and explore relationships in data. For example, we’ve created a graph using the software following the graph Hans Rosling demonstates above for you to play with (click on image below to launch):
Greensense provides a range of services but we’re particularly passionate about data capture and data visualization. Please feel free to contact us to discuss your climate change strategy.
The Vulcan Project is inspiring climate science with important lessons for business.
This project has mapped carbon dioxide emissions in the United States in 2002 at the level of individual factories, power plants and roads. As well as making the research data available online the project has developed some amazing visualizations such as those shown in the following video.
The same team is now building on these results with the Hestia Project, which aims to provide “detailed space-time information on fossil/industrial CO2 emissions via an intuitive, interactive, photorealistic, three-dimensional visualization of the Earth.”
This work is inspiring and clearly demonstrates the value in having detailed and verified data and having the ability to visualize the data to aid in education, planning and decision making.
At Greensense we think data capture and data visualization should be part of all businesses climate change strategy. We think having the capability to see and understand your business’s carbon inventory — at a sufficient level of detail — is the key to enabling meaningful actions to be taken and new strategies to be developed. This detail should extend across your supply chain and down into individual business areas and business activities.
Many businesses are already developing carbon inventories but are doing so only to meet regulatory requirements, such as those under the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting System in Australia.
While initiatives to develop corporate carbon inventories are important, without the capability to capture data at the right level of detail and visualize that data these inventories won’t be the strategic tools they could be.
BP has been telling us about climate change for some time and saying that talk stopped long ago. They have now started a new billboard campaign to tell us that they have helped offset Australian greenhouse gasses by two million tonnes. But what does it mean to offset emissions? Is two million tonnes of carbon offsets a lot? How does the average person evaluate a claim a like this?
Carbon offsets
A carbon offset is an investment in a project that reduces greenhouse gas emissions (e.g. an energy efficiency project) or sequesters carbon in the ground (e.g. reforestation).
Offsetting projects are assessed following the protocols established under the Greenhouse Gas Protocol Initiative. They can then be accredited under a variety of national and International schemes. For example, in Australia they can be reported and certified under the the Australian Government’s Greenhouse Friendly program, as BP has done.
Sometimes carbon offsets are referred to as carbon credits (credit for offsetting 1 tonne of greenhouse gasses). A carbon credit in the context of voluntary offsetting is not the same thing as a credit under an emissions trading scheme and the two are not exchangeable. We’ll talk more about Australia’s planned emission trading scheme (or carbon pollution reduction scheme as the government has started calling it) in a later post.
BP conducts a range offsetting projects under their Global Choice Brand. In Australia this primarily means offsetting the emissions associated with their staff vehicles.
Taking cars off the road
How much of current sea levels will be preserved by offsetting two million tonnes; how many endangered species will avoid extinction; how many violent storms will be stopped?
The Australian government publishes information on the impacts of climate change. However we can’t really relate individual offsetting back to these kinds of real-world impacts.
To help people evaluate the the benefit of offsetting two million tonnes BP have related their offsetting back to cars. They say:
Seven years after launch, our BP Global Choice™ programme had made a reduction in greenhouse gas equivalent to taking over 400,000 cars off the road.
This is an analogy, BP haven’t necessarily taken any cars off the road. Instead they have invested in projects that have offset an amount of emissions equivalent to the emissions produced by a certain amount of car travel.
An average car traveling 25,000Km in a year will produce about five tonnes of greenhouse gasses. This gives us the figure of 400,000 cars (two million divided by five). Having done this calculation we do need to modify BP’s claim a little: “Seven years after launch, our BP Global Choice programme had made a reduction in greenhouse gas equivalent to taking over 400,000 cars off the road [for one year, or 60,000 cars a year for seven years].”
While the concept of a car is more concrete than a tonne of carbon emissions it is still difficult to evaluate a number like 400,000 without some perspective. According to Australian Bureau of Statistics there are about 14 million registered cars and light passenger vehicles in Australia.
Australia’s overall emissions
Another way to assess two million tonnes of offsetting is to put it in the context of Australia’s overall emissions. In the Kyoto Period of 2008 to 2012, Australia’s emissions are forecast to be about 600 million tonnes per year.
That’s about 70,000 tonnes an hour. So two million tonnes of offsetting is equivalent to about 28 hours of Australia’s overall emissions.
Another comparison is with Australia’s per capita emissions, which is about 28 tonnes per person per year. Based on this figure two million tonnes of offsetting is equivalent to the emissions for 70,000 people for a year: somewhere between the population of Bunbury and Ballarat.
The cost of offsetting
Finally we might assess an offsetting initiative in cost terms. Depending on the cost of the offsetting project and the quality of the outcome and the accreditation, offsets typically cost between AU$10 and AU$30 per tonne.
On this basis offsetting two million tonnes might cost between AU$200M and AU$600M: now that’s definitely a big number.
So the Australian Greenhouse Office Green Paper has been released describing the Rudd Government’s first attempt at doing something meaningful in the fight against climate change.
The paper is there to generate discussion ahead of the white paper and draft legislation due for release in December 08. So let’s do just that – generate some discussion:
At Greensense we care about the environment and the impact that any change has on not only our quality of life but our ability to sustain life. We exist primarily to make a difference and secondly to do business. Surely any battle against climate change needs to take the same approach – environment and life first, economics second.
Ross Garnaut summed it up well in his report stating that:
“Without that action, it is probable that Australians, over the 21st century and beyond, will experience disruption in their prosperity and enjoyment of life, and to longstanding patterns in their lives.”
It seems though, that the government can only speak of economic fear right now, worried of the impact of petrol prices, how low income households will cope, will high emission producing businesses be protected well enough to not take their operations offshore and the list goes on. They can get away withit becausethere is still enough ignorance among the general public on what an increase in global temperatures really means. The thing is – no one will care too much about the economics if there starts becoming a tangible difference in constraining life.
The Green Paper from the outset has a focus solely on the economics of any decision and protection of the very organisations, that since the industrial revolution, are the cause of the problem. So fear is driven around economic impact, with the government’s paper bowing to the green lip service driven by the corporate dollar, rather than tackling the real issue – let’s reduce carbon emissions on every level as quickly as possible for the sake of generations to come.
To solve climate change it requires a massive cultural shift not only at a economics level but at individual household and business level with all tactics being applied to have any chance of making a difference, from carbon trading, green oriented technology and power, offset programs and beyond. By making The Green Paper the first attempt at legislation changes we have made climate change an economic issue rather than a life issue.
So lets get to some specifics to prove the point:
Free permits are being offered to the Emission Intensive Trade Exposed (EITEs) organisations. When a carbon trading scheme should be there to drive down carbon pollution why would we protect the highest carbon producers – economic fear. Where is the investment in innovative solutions to the problem that raises awareness to the real issue and drives a cultural shift in dealing with it. The whole concept of carbon leakage illustrates that the real heart of the issue is not understood by business.
The legislation only targets companies that produce more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon in a year which is 1,000 of the 7.6 million companies within Australia. Now on the one hand it makes sense to focus on the highest carbon producers but here are the issues (even forgetting the free permits to the EITEs). Of the highest producers the agricultural industry will not be included because, “the Government does not consider that it is practical at this stage to include agriculture emissions in the trading scheme at commencement”, yet they are the second highest carbon producing industry. By only targeting 1000 of the 7.6 million companies in Australia we will not create the required cultural shift if we can’t find a way to make it relevant for everyone.
To apply a national carbon limit it assumes a foundation of accurate measurement. This will predominantly occur under the reporting standards generated by the NGER Act 2007. The problem is this only brings companies who produce over 87,500 tonnes of carbon per year reporting by 2010 and those producing more than 50,000 tonnes in 2011. That seems to give a lot of inconsistencies on the governments own plans to address this is a sensible fashion if they want the carbon trading scheme running by 2010.
The government cannot articulate the real impact to the individual household or business with comments in the report such as: “such a concentration of carbon dioxide is expected to have severe impact on our environment” and “the IPCC concluded that Australia’s water resources, coastal communities, natural ecosystems, energy security, health, agriculture and tourism would all be vulnerable to climate change impacts if global temperatures rise by 3 degrees or more.”. The fact that we are vulnerable and the impact is severe doesn’t seem to present a well structured case as to why we need to do something. Cultural shift will drive the change and perhaps investment needsto be made into providing that compelling case (which happens to be something that Greensense is very good at).
So by all means fear the economics of any carbon trading scheme and be sure to join the discussion to make sure there is an effective solution, but lets not forget that the fear should lie in the very issue that the we are trying to fix.
The chances are, if your company doesn’t burn it’s own fuel, have a large fleet of company owned vehicles or generate emissions via industrial processing, then the bulk of it’s carbon emissions can be attributed to the electricity it consumes from the grid. For many organisations their office space will be the largest consumer of this power and therefore source of emissions.
Just a reminder for those of you who miss the link between electricity consumption and carbon emissions - around 50% of electricity in Australia is generated from coal powered power stations and coal is the worst fossil fuel in terms of emissions produced.
In Australia the average office consumers around 250 kWh of electricity per square meter (sqm) per year. If you work in an office that’s 1000sqm it will consume around 250,000 kWh per year — this equates to around 250 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions. Just to put that in context the average family car produces around 4 tonnes of emissions per year. If you decided to offset those emissions you’d need around 1200 mature trees.
If you scale those numbers up to an entire office building the figures become scary. Applying the same calculations to an office tower like Central Park in Perth — an impressive 66,000sqm — and you’ll see it’s pushing out over 16,000 tonnes of emissions per year!
Of course some newer buildings maybe be a little more frugal than this while many older buildings may be generating considerably higher emissions per square meter of floor space.
If you’re interested in seeing how your building rates it may be worth checking to see if it’s accredited under the NABERS rating system. This is a performance-based rating scheme for existing commercial buildings to see how they manage their environmental impact.
