The new climate challenges

The binary battle between those who warned of the dangers of climate change and those who denied it looks to be largely over, as public opinion solidifies. A new global survey by the Pew Research Centre shows a majority in all 40 nations polled recognise it is a serious problem.

However, with the war won, battles remain when it comes to policy. As governments look to meet emissions targets and try to restrict global warming to two degrees or below, the solutions pursued face challenges from historical allies in the environmental sector.

Now one-time climate change sceptics have entered this new battleground, targeting the methods rather than the theory. The Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) was set up by former Chancellor Nigel Lawson and others to do just that.

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High profile sceptic Andrew Montford, a Scots-based scientific blogger who led criticism of climate science, reported to the GWPF earlier this year: “As rainforests are cleared to make way for biofuels, their inhabitants evicted from their ancestral lands, as land is diverted from food to energy production, as hunger grips the poorest and most vulnerable people of the world, as havoc is wrought on the countryside and its wildlife, as money is handed to big business, as the old and less well-off worry about their ability to pay their energy bills, those whose work has been behind the change in approach to climate change must surely have pause for thought.”

While many may read his thoughts as a bitter afterthought from someone who lost an argument, the question of the impact of trying to meet climate-change targets is relevant.

Many countries have looked to nuclear as a quick solution to maintain current energy use yet cut emissions, but environmentalists point to the long-term hazard caused by waste.

The 2008 commitment to 10 new nuclear power stations in the UK was heralded as a way of keeping emissions down, but the required cost proved prohibitive. That list is now reduced to one, at Hinkley Point, which is to be built by the Chinese Government and run by France’s national energy supplier EDF, locking in high energy costs.

“One of the greatest and most cost-effective contributions we can make to emission reductions in electricity is by replacing coal-fired power stations with gas,” Energy and Climate Change Secretary Amber Rudd announced recently, but Simon Bullock, senior energy campaigner at Friends of the Earth, said switching from coal to gas “is like an alcoholic switching from two bottles of whisky a day to two bottles of port.”

Proposed expansion of unconventional gas has proved to be a contentious issue. 

Speaking to Holyrood, Dame Anne Glover, former chief scientific adviser to the Scottish Government and the European Commission, said gas exploration would not sit well with climate commitments.  “My worry is that if we are to maintain an average global temperature rise of just two degrees or below – but I don’t think we’d ever get below two degrees – we need to keep about 80 per cent of all fossil fuel in the ground. That includes unconventional gas,” she said.

Biofuel, seen as a potential solution, increasingly uses palm oil which has seen the deforestation of an estimated 10 million hectares of rainforest in Sumatra and Borneo. And renewable energy, often cited as the ethical alternative, is not without its own conflicts.

Cheaper solar panels contain a rare mineral, tellurium, one of a range of minerals which global markets fear may run out, but it is estimated an increase of 40-100 times the amount currently recovered is needed to meet growing global energy demands.

New technology means solar panels can be made with silicone, but costs currently tend to prove prohibitive.

Wind is the renewable technology most obviously exploited in Scotland, but it is thought around 60 square miles of forest has been cleared to make way for wind farms. Another potential issue is the impact on wildlife, although Aedán Smith, RSPB Scotland’s head of planning, says Scotland’s approach has been largely positive. 

“Although RSPB has been involved in a few high profile conflicts with individual projects, the vast majority of onshore wind farms in Scotland have been uncontentious and haven’t posed any major threats to wildlife,” he says. 

A recent UK-wide survey commissioned by the Energy and Climate Intelligence Unit revealed wildlife was a top concern when it came to the impacts of climate change. 

The poll showed 79 per cent of people in Britain are worried about climate impacts on UK wildlife, making it a greater concern than flooding at 72 per cent, volatility of prices and availability of food at 60 per cent or heat waves at 50 per cent.

This means the RSPB are often contacted by members of the public during planning proposals for wind farms, Smith says. “There are some sites where there have been problems, no doubt about that, and not operating in ideal circumstances, but in Scotland we don’t have any wind farms killing huge numbers of birds, which is not the case in other parts of the world, unfortunately.”

Offshore wind is a different story when it comes to protecting wildlife, however, with about a third of the EU’s breeding seabirds congregating on the shores of Scotland. The RSPB would challenge any proposal to put wind turbines with “vast numbers of birds moving around”. Smith says the seabird colonies are “pretty much all around Scotland’s coast”.

Smith hopes the development of floating wind, which can sit in deeper waters and have less of an impact on wildlife, will be embraced. “Seabirds feed in shallow areas of sea, typically, and shallow areas of sea of course are where it’s easiest to install fixed-base turbines, so if offshore wind is no longer tied to the shallow feeding areas where birds and other wildlife tend to go then the flexibility of siting is much greater,” he says.

But with governments having to prioritise limited budgets between affordable energy and climate targets, can we expect wildlife protection to fall down the list?

“What does society want from this?” asks Smith. “Climate change, when you look at it very basically, is a symptom of our unsustainable living and we’re trying to reduce the effects of it, trying to reduce the environmental impacts, and those impacts are going to be on people and wildlife. If we try and come up with a solution which in itself is damaging wildlife, then that seems to be a bit of a perverse way of trying to solve the problem, which is an environmental problem in the first place. Especially when there are opportunities to do things like demand reduction and energy efficiency which would have minimal impacts on wildlife. They also have the other multiple benefits like helping reduce fuel poverty and improving people’s quality of life directly as well.”

While it is easier for governments to encourage energy companies to deploy big developments with the use of incentives, changing the way the population lives and their use of energy efficiency would give greater benefits, argues Smith, suggesting the focus has been on “the wrong end of the hierarchy”.

Heat and transport are two areas where emissions could be tackled in less contentious ways than energy generation, he suggests. 

“If we can reduce demand and improve efficiency then we need to build fewer energy-generating plants, whether it’s renewables, nuclear or gas. Whatever. We’d need less of that and that’s only going to be easier and reduce conflict at the energy-generation end.”