Rob Edwards

Ministers ‘botch’ red tape rules for home renewables

from Sunday Herald, 31 January 2010

Botched attempts by Scottish ministers to cut the red tape that is preventing people from fitting clean, green technologies in their homes have descended into chaos.

The Scottish government will this week complete consultations on plans that put barriers in the way of energy-saving heat pumps and small wind turbines. But - amidst a welter of bureaucratic confusion - it will then launch contradictory proposals to remove the barriers.

Ministers have been accused of making a “shambles” out of a crucial initiative to cut climate pollution and heating bills. According to opposition politicians, they have managed to make a U-turn within a matter of days.

Heat pumps which work like fridges in reverse, extract heat from the outside air and use it to warm buildings. Though they cost more to install than gas boilers, they are cheaper to run and cause less pollution.

Climate myth debunked: it’s been colder in the UK, but warmer elsewhere

from Sunday Herald, 17 January 2010

It’s the talk of the pub, the folklore of the taxi driver and the unremitting theme of thousands of bloggers and right-wing columnists. “See all this snow,” they say. “Where’s your global warming now?”

But, according to those who actually know, they are completely wrong. New data released by the Met Office shows that although Scotland, Scandinavia, northern Russia and the US have been much colder than usual, most of the rest of the world has been much warmer.

Alaska, the bulk of Canada, North Africa, southern European and central Asia have all been up to ten degrees hotter than normal for the time of year. Experts say that this firmly knocks on the head the idea that the UK cold spell somehow disproves global warming.

“Global warming is just that - a global long term phenomenon,” said Alex Hill, a senior Met Office adviser for Scotland. “The instance of one cold snap in one part of the world bears no relation to the longer term trend.”

Long-term, large-scale trends, combined with the overall statistics of extreme weather events, are all part of the evidence that scientists use, he pointed out. “However, individual weather events, from heat waves to big freezes, cannot be used either to prove or disprove climate change.”

Disturbing split within green groups over power line

from Sunday Herald, 10 January 2010

The bitter five-year battle over whether or not to string giant pylons 137 miles down Scotland’s spine has ended with a split in the environmental movement like no other.

On one side are those who care passionately about wild land and protecting the country’s stunningly beautiful landscapes. They include Ramblers Scotland, the John Muir Trust and the Association for the Protection of Rural Scotland.

On the other are those who strongly believe the sacrifice is essential to give the nation a clean, safe and climate-friendly energy future. They include Friends of the Earth Scotland, WWF Scotland and the Scottish Green Party.

The fractures between these groups have been visible for some time, particularly in the sometimes heated arguments over wind farms. But the intense dispute over the new power line from Beauly, west of Inverness, to Denny, west of Falkirk, has blown the cracks wide open, with disturbing implications.

The environmental movement in Scotland may never be quite the same again. These are, after all, groups that in the past have formed powerful joint alliances, successfully opposing the proposed superquarry on the isle of Harris and highlighting the fatal flaws of the Cairngorm mountain railway.

Copenhagen failure puts hundreds of millions at risk

from Sunday Herald, 20 December 2009

The failure of world leaders to agree targets to cut climate pollution at the Copenhagen summit will lead to a global catastrophe and threaten the lives of hundreds of millions, leading scientists are warning.

As the fraught negotiations in the Danish capital ended in chaos, acrimony and recriminations yesterday, experts agreed that there was now little hope of keeping the average rise in global temperatures below two degrees centigrade.

They predicted instead that temperatures would increase by three degrees or more, bringing widespread flooding, major droughts and mass migrations, along with serious food and water shortages.

“It really couldn’t be any more serious,” said James Curran, the director of science at the Scottish Environment Protection Agency and one of the Scottish government’s top climate advisors.

“It’s staggeringly frightening and deeply disappointing that Copenhagen has failed. This is extremely dangerous for Scotland and the world.”

Copenhagen: the climate climb down that will bring catastrophe

from Sunday Herald, 20 December 2009

For the last two weeks, three tall, thin, cloaked statues have stood, their carved faces staring towards the Bella conference centre in Copenhagen in a silent plea. Today, if they could, they would be weeping.

After two years of fraught international negotiations, a week of organisational chaos and three long sleepless nights, the Copenhagen climate summit has failed to deliver an agreement that will save the world from the ravages of global warming.

As a result, hundreds of millions of people across the globe are now condemned to floods, droughts, exile, famine and worse as sea levels rise, the climate destabilises and food production breaks down. 

“This is a tragedy that will harm the many millions of people in developing countries who are already suffering the effects of climate change,” said Nelson Muffah from the charity, Christian Aid. 

“Powerful nations didn't come to negotiate. They came to play hardball. Lives will be lost as a result. Already more than 300,000 people a year die as a result of climate change. That number will go up.”

Copenhagen: the side shows

from Sunday Herald, 20 December 2009

Like great festivals have their fringes, so Copenhagen had its side shows. Beneath the gently falling snow and between the endless queues of bikes, the Danish capital fizzed with impassioned and sometimes offbeat arguments last week.

Away from the Bella conference centre where the climate negotiations stuttered like a badly tuned engine, the world’s environmental movement swarmed. They filled the hotels, meeting halls, cafes and bars, constantly on the hunt for the latest news, and any rays of hope. 

And, inevitably, the rock stars of the environmental world rolled into town to take the stage. With so little of substance being achieved at the summit itself, they often attracted more attention.

One of the least likely of green heroes, the California governor and Terminator film star, Arnold Schwarzenegger, talked about how the world was “beginning one of history’s great transitions,” You could almost hear the world’s media panting as they waited for him to add: “I’ll be back”.

Copenhagen's emotional plea: “The fate of my country rests in your hands”

from Sunday Herald, 13 December 2009

A powerful and emotional appeal from the tiny Pacific island state of Tuvalu silenced the world climate summit in Copenhagen yesterday, as countries struggled to agree on how much to cut pollution.

Ian Fry, the Tuvalu government’s leading negotiator at the summit, pointed out that his country’s entire population lived less than two metres above sea level. If water levels rose because of global warming, everyone would lose their homes.

“As a humble servant of the government of Tuvalu, I have to make a strong plea to you,” he told 2,000 delegates from over 190 countries gathered in the cavernous Bella conference centre on the outskirts of the Danish capital.

“I woke up this morning and I was crying. That’s not an easy thing for a grown man to admit,” he said, choking back tears. “The fate of my country rests in your hands.”

Copenhagen: pop stars in private jets struggle to combat climate change

from Sunday Herald, 13 December 2009

The stage was all blinding light, the bass made your guts vibrate and the shouts set your teeth on edge. “Are you having a good time tonight?,” yelled one of the prancing performers. “Let’s hear you all say it - climate control!”

The ageing US boy band, the Backstreet Boys, were in Copenhagen to try and help save the planet in the only way they know how. If it sounds surreal, it was. And some.

But in the bizarre maelstrom that is the world climate summit, anything is possible. John Lennon-style bed-ins, painted aliens and cut-price prostitution have all featured so far, with even the film-star-turned-right-wing-blogger, Chuck Norris, sticking in his demented oar.

As the Danish capital became the centre of global attention last week so it attracted almost anyone desperate for the limelight. Like moths to a flame, came they all - corporate PR people, climate deniers, con artists and celebrities.

The Backstreet Boys, who clearly ceased being boys many years ago, were there at the behest of the European Commission. They recorded a short programme for MTV in front of a room full of adoring fans while trying to get across some sort of message on climate change.

Copenhagen: the country fossils and corporate lobbyists

from Sunday Herald, 13 December 2009

The Climate Action Network, a coalition of over 450 campaign groups worldwide, presented a 'Fossil of The Day' award to the countries which had done the most to damage the climate negotiations.

Monday: All industrialised countries, for arriving at the talks with a “profound deficit of ambition” for cutting carbon emissions.

Tuesday: Ukraine, for having the worst carbon emissions reduction target in the world, enabling a 75% increase on current levels.

Wednesday: Canada and Croatia, for trying to rewrite the rules by changing the base year from which emission cuts are counted.

Thursday: Poland, for trying to prevent the European Union from increasing its target for cutting emission from 20% to 30%.

Friday: Canada, for breaking its climate promises and wanting to replace the Kyoto Protocol, on which the talks are founded.

Saturday: Japan, for trying to block the extension of the Kyoto Protocol.

Copenhagen tactics: to argue inside or to protest outside

from Sunday Herald, 13 December 2009

It’s the age-old dilemma of anyone wanting change. Do you argue your case within the existing power structure, or do you agitate outside for its downfall?

Like much else, this argument is bubbling away in the cauldron that is Copenhagen, threatening to spill out this week as the climate negotiations come to a head.

While hundreds of established pressure groups lobby away furiously within the vast confines of the Bella centre to try and get a better deal, hundreds more protesters will be on the streets trying to close down parts of the city.

Scottish activists from the direct action group, Plane Stupid, will be joining radical groups from all over Europe in trying to close Copenhagen harbour today. This is likely to be followed by other disruptive actions around the city later in the week.

“Political talking has and will achieve nothing in Copenhagen,” said Johnny Agnew from Plane Stupid. “We know that we will be let down by far off targets and false solutions such as carbon trading, so we’re going all the way to Copenhagen to make ourselves heard.”

The activists have taken heart from the analysis of some prominent experts, like Dr James Hansen, a world-leading climate scientist from the Nasa Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. 

He has argued that it would be better if the Copenhagen talks failed, and the world started again from scratch. “It’s a disaster track,” he said. "The whole approach is so fundamentally wrong that it is better to reassess the situation.”

Copenhagen: the world holds its breath

from Sunday Herald, 06 December 2009

She sits, naked, small and vulnerable, on a rock in Copenhagen harbour, the sea lapping ever higher around her. Until now, she has been the urbane Danish city’s most famous symbol.

But over the next two weeks, the Little Mermaid will have her limelight stolen, as Copenhagen becomes synonymous with the world’s increasingly fraught struggle to find harmony with the earth’s elemental forces.

The 15th United Nations climate change conference opens on Monday in the Bella Centre, where 15,000 delegates from 192 countries - watched by 5,000 journalists - try and agree how to cut the pollution that is warming the globe. It has been billed as the world’s most important summit, at least since the Second World War.

But as the long-awaited event has drawn closer, so passions have risen, and conflicts erupted. None more savagely than the row over the emails hacked by persons unknown from scientists at the world-leading Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Extracts have been seized on by climate change doubters to suggest that the whole basis of climate science - that human pollution is causing global warming - was flawed. The British National Party leader, Nick Griffin, even claimed that climate change was a leftist conspiracy “as deadly as any conceived by Stalin or Mao”.

But all this has been firmly rebutted by armies of experts, who point out that a few badly-worded emails don’t undermine a well-established global scientific consensus. Yesterday, the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, weighed in, saying that the Copenhagen summit should not be distracted by “behind the times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics.”

Tens of thousands march for action on climate change

from Sunday Herald, 06 December 2009

They came in their thousands, from every walk of life, from every faith and from every sector of Scottish society. And they came because they were worried about planet earth.

Some 8,000 people marched through Glasgow yesterday in by far the biggest climate protest Scotland has ever seen. A further 20,000 took to the streets of London to demand action to cut the pollution that is warming the globe, on the eve of the crucial world summit in Copenhagen.

Political and religious leaders, trade unions, students, church groups, community organisations and environmentalists came together in an unprecedented coalition to demand “climate justice” for the world’s poor, who are already suffering from changing weather patterns.

The only group notable by its absence was the Scottish Nationalist government, most of whom were attending the party’s national council in Perth. The SNP leader, Alex Salmond, had earlier turned down an invitation to address the protest.

The long road to Copenhagen: by bike, foot, bus, boat, car, train and plane

from Sunday Herald, 06 December 2009

For 61-year-old Rosalind Jarvis, it will be an act of love. When she mounts her bike at 7am on Wednesday morning to cycle 140 miles to the climate summit in Copenhagen, it will be for her four children, her three grandchildren and her husband, Geoffrey, who died in February.

The veteran churchgoer from the small rural parish of Baldernock in East Dunbartonshire is worried about the kind of world that her offspring will inherit. If countries don’t commit to cut the pollution that is wrecking the climate at Copenhagen, she fears the future could be bleak.

But people don’t seem to care, she said. “There is still a huge denial about climate change. Apparently it is people of my age who are most in denial. They don’t seem to be concerned about future generations. It’s very worrying.”

Jarvis is just one of many thousands of people who will be making their way to Copenhagen over the next few days because they do care. Campaigners, activists, academics, scientists, students, professionals, public officials and politicians are all heading east by every available means of transport.

One man is walking, a women is hitching, groups have hired coaches, many are using ferries, and there are lots of long-distance train journeys booked via Eurostar and the Channel Tunnel. Most government officials, a Scottish minister and the Scottish Environment Protection Agency are flying to Copenhagen to save time.

The Copenhagen primer: science, major players, victims, key questions

from Sunday Herald, 06 December 2009

1. The science

Most scientists now agree that pollution from homes, factories, farms and vehicles is causing global warming. Greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide and methane rise up into the atmosphere and trap the sun’s heat, causing temperatures to rise.

About 26 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide are released every year by the burning of coal, oil and gas in power stations and cars, and it’s rising fast. Before the industrial revolution the gas was present in the atmosphere at a level of below 280 parts per million. It is now around 386 parts per million, and increasing by 2-3 parts per million every year.

MSPs awarded in honour of Shackleton

Exclusive, 06 December 2009

MSPs on the Scottish Parliament’s climate change committee have been awarded a prestigious new medal in honour of the famous early 20th century explorer, Sir Ernest Shackleton.

The politicians are being rewarded for their success in giving Scotland strong legislation to cut the pollution that is changing the climate. The country’s target - to cut greenhouse gas emissions 42% by 2020 - is one of the toughest in the world.

The bugs and birds that will suffer from global warming

from Sunday Herald, 06 December 2009

They live high in the mountains, love the cold and will be among the first to die as the globe warms. And there are millions of them.

Government scientists have discovered more than 200 different species of spiders and insects living over 1,000 metres in the Scottish highlands. Because they depend on icy conditions, they will suffer as temperatures rise.

This means, the scientists say, not only that the bugs could disappear, but that the mountain birds which feed on them could starve, and the environment could be disrupted.

“These species are like the canaries in the mines, and will warn us what is happening,” said Iain MacGowan, an expert from Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), the government’s wildlife conservation agency.

“They are in the front line of climate change and at the bottom of the food chain. If they go, there will be implications for the birds that feed on them, like dotterel and ptarmigan, and for the wider ecosystem.”

Extreme adventures: swimming through the ice to save the planet

from Sunday Herald, 29 November 2009

It was all fearsome Nanny Wigley’s fault. When he was just a toddler, she used to make him go out barefoot into the Perthshire winter wearing only shorts and a shirt.

Now, more than 40 years on, the world-renown polar explorer, Pen Hadow, attributes his famed endurance of extreme cold to his harsh Scottish upbringing. Without it, he says, he may not have survived some of his more dangerous encounters with the arctic ice.

This Friday he is coming back to the land of his birth to talk about his extraordinary adventures to the Royal Scottish Geographical Society in Glasgow. He will also be sounding some dire warnings about the irretrievable damage being done to the planet by human pollution.

Before minding the wee Hadow at the manse in Glen Devon near Auchterarder in the 1960s, Enid Wigley had been nanny to Scott of the Antarctic’s son, Peter. To try and make sure Peter wouldn’t befall the same fate as his father, she had developed a “polar conditioning programme” which she later inflicted on Pen.

This only ceased when frostnip, a form of frostbite, was found to be freezing his extremities. But Nanny Wigley, a faithful family retainer, carried on filling the young boy’s head with exciting stories about Scott and other great explorers.

Climate change, housing and revolution

a talk to the Scottish Government Housing Investment Division West Region, Glasgow, 24 November 2009.

Thank you for inviting me. I am particularly delighted to be talking to you today because you are employees of the Scottish Government and that  gives me an excuse to tell a story I’ve been dying to tell for years, many years.

Decades ago I worked for the housing campaign group, Shelter. After I left to become a freelance writer and journalist, I was commissioned to write an assessment of the Tenant Participation Advisory Service in Scotland from 1980 to 1986. This involved me in talking to tenants’ organisations, voluntary groups, housing experts and, crucially, relevant officials in the then Scottish Office. I remember conducting a major interview with a bright young civil servant, who made some frank, critical and interesting remarks about the advisory service, some of which I included in my final report.

Can we save the summit that is meant to save the world?

from Sunday Herald, 22 November 2009

It is a classic tactic in international diplomacy. If you’re worried about not succeeding, talk up your chances of failure in the hope that whatever you do end up achieving looks like a success.

That is exactly what has been happening in the run-up to the crucial world climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. Negotiators, led by the host country’s prime minister, Lars Lokke Rasmussen, have been deliberately lowering expectations so that whatever agreement is reached next month will seem like a breakthrough.

The resulting uncertainty has put all those who care about the future of the planet on a rollercoaster of hopes and fears over the last two weeks. At times the summit has looked doomed, but then have come signs that something worthwhile could be salvaged.

This weekend, the prevailing mood amongst the many experts and observers canvassed by the Sunday Herald is a kind of desperate optimism. This is often coupled with increasingly anxious pleas for world leaders to see sense and do the right thing.

Government clean coal plants ‘will bust climate targets’

from Sunday Herald, 15 November 2009

Attempts by Scottish ministers to clean up coal so that it can replace nuclear power will lead to massive amounts of pollution and wreck the government’s targets to combat climate change.

A new analysis reveals that the £2 billion “clean” coal plant proposed for Hunterston in North Ayrshire would end up belching over 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over its lifetime.

Last week, the UK government gave the go-ahead to ten new nuclear power stations across England and Wales. None were proposed in Scotland, though, because of opposition from the Scottish government.

Instead, Scottish ministers have made it clear that they want to build new coal-fired power stations, fitted with carbon capture and storage technology to curb their pollution. On Monday, the Scottish finance secretary, John Swinney, announced that any new coal station would have to capture carbon from 300 megawatts of its electricity generation from the first day of operation.

But the new coal plant planned at Hunterston by Clydeport’s owners, Peel Holdings, is going to generate 1,600 megawatts of electricity. That means that four-fifths of the plant will produce pollution as usual -  millions of tonnes of it every year for many years.