Climate: Britain seizes the reins

A weekly UPI series examining the possible human impact of global climate change.

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BOULDER, Colo., Mar. 1 (UPI) -- The British government has announced an ambitious program to cut that nation's CO2 emissions by 60 percent by the year 2050. The immediate question should be, "Why?"

With the collapse of the Kyoto accords, and with them the promise of broad international cooperation, unilateral action by the United Kingdom will not have a significant impact on global climate.

There also are the costs. Estimates of how expensive addressing global climate change can be vary wildly, depending upon who is doing the estimating. The U.S. Department of Energy said meeting the Kyoto agreements between 2008 and 2012 would cause about a 4.2 percent loss in the country's gross domestic product.

"It's not a reduction (strategy) that we plan to (quit) until some years into the future," said Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government. "We plan to be on an approximately straight line between 1990 and 2050.

"One of the promises to the country from the chief science adviser is that if we get into this early, we start playing the economic game in the sense that we get into the technologies that we can export to other countries that undoubtedly will need alternatives to fossil fuel energy sources," King said. "So we are investing in research, development and demonstration."

In other words, the British government is characterizing its climate policy as an opportunity to invest in new energy efficiency technologies, rather than as merely a cost to its economy.

"Why are they doing this?" asked Dan Schrag, a Harvard University professor of geochemistry. "They hope to achieve a strategic position in world energy markets. They believe that this path puts them at a strategic advantage in advanced energy technology."

Schrag said he considers the approach a sound one. "There are enormous economic opportunities in energy technology," he said, "but the time for investment is now."

Royal Dutch Shell is famous is for its long-term approach to strategic planning. The company recently prepared a projection of economic growth and energy consumption through 2060. It shows most traditional energy sources exhibiting flat growth or declining rates after about 2020, while total energy consumption nearly doubles worldwide.

Oil and gas reserves are expected to begin to decline in about 2020. Colin Campbell, founder of the Oil Depletion Analysis Center in London, said peak oil production -- the point at which one-half of all the world's oil has been produced and therefore production will begin to decline inexorably -- will occur in 2010.

"The inevitable conclusion from a realistic assessment of the situation is that world oil production, which provides about 40 percent of global energy needs and about 90 percent of transport fuel, will to start to decline within about 10 years," Campbell wrote in a submission to the British government on energy policy.

In the Shell scenario, nearly all new energy after 2020 will be provided by renewable resources. Though conventional energy sources will decline, wind, new biomass, solar power, geothermal energy and surprise, or unknown, sources will increase dramatically, with the majority of the growth coming from solar energy.

The British government, by its self-imposed plan, clearly hopes to position itself to be in the forefront of these emerging energy technologies.

One important factor making the U.K. initiative acceptable is most of its citizens -- as well as most Europeans -- think they already are suffering from the effects of climate change.

"In the United Kingdom, the growing season for plants in central England has lengthened by about a month since 1900," according to the U.K. Climate Impacts Program. "Heat waves have become more frequent in summer, while there are now fewer frosts and cold spells in winter. Winters have become wetter and rain heavier. Adjusting for natural land movements, average sea level around the United Kingdom is now about (4 inches) higher than in 1900."

David Warrilow, head of science policy for England's Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, cited heat wave deaths in France in August of 2003, which cost 26,000 lives. There also have been severe floods in Europe, with the expectation there will be more frequent and more severe drought and flood years -- the extremes will be more pronounced.

King offered the example of the Thames flood barrier, which was erected in 1982 to reduce flooding in London. The barrier was expected to be activated about once every three to five years, which proved to be the case until 2000 and 2001 -- when it was needed 24 times.

"One of those floods breaking through the Thames barrier today -- just one of those floods -- would cause an estimated $56.7 billion of damage," he said. "That's 2 percent of our GDP (gross domestic product) and that would lead to a massive destabilization of our country and the economy."

John Schellnhuber, director of research for the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research, argued that cost estimates for carbon dioxide mitigation efforts are exaggerated.

An "equilibrium model," by J. Edmonds, for instance, showed stabilizing CO2 at 450 parts per million would result in economic losses of 5 percent of GDP. But non-equilibrium (mathematically non-linear) models showed only a 1 percent GDP cost.

The economic experience so far, however, is even more optimistic. Between 1990 and 2002, the United Kingdom reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 8.3 percent. At the same time, the nation's economy grew by 49 percent.

"We've shown that you can reduce emissions and have economic growth," Warrilow said.

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Dan Whipple covers the environment for UPI Science News. E-mail sciencemail@upi.com