seventeen/ten

The current media, political and public obsession with climate change has helped to move it to edge it towards the top of the agenda, however in my opinion we are making a lot of fuss, without doing anything other than create unnecessary guilt-mongering, and allow the creation of a lot of useless laws which only makes a bad situation worse.

In a series of three 'Commentary' articles I am going to outline why this is a problem and show that there are solutions out there, that with some joined-up thinking by governments, could be used to stop our carbon dioxide emissions and limit the impact of global warming without major social and financial upheaval. In this first article I will outline some facts and figures defining the problem.

It seems that you can't listen to or read anything in the press that does not make at least some mention to climate change. Unfortunately, whilst a lot of noise is being made, very little practical action is being taken. A few years ago, when corporate America was still in blind denial of global warming the head of Chrysler famously remarked that Europe was caught up in "Chicken Little" politics on the matter. Chicken Little (for those that don't know, which included me until I looked it up!) is a story which involves the chicken running around in circles shouting "the sky is falling". Whilst his sceptical view of global warming may now be considered invalid, his view of the politics around it was (and still is) quite true. This kind of dithering is a great disappointment because a solution needs to be put into place quickly, and this can be achieved with some joined-up thinking.

The Problem

To find a solution you must first identify the problem, and its scope, however this is difficult when it comes to climate change. In the UK media much is made about the possible implications of each different research paper which is released, taking the worst possible case to create a better story. The reality is, of course, a lot less certain. Actual scientific results often include wide brackets of certainty, and the interactions between the different effects are complicated. To define our problem we will work with the conclusions of the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), who have made some basic conclusions:

• The average world temperature is rising
• This rise is due to carbon dioxide emissions accelerated by human activities
• Over the next 50 years the temperature will rise by approximately 2ºC

In addition it is reasonable to state that continued emissions will increase the risk of adverse reactions further accelerating warming (such as methane emission as the permafrost of Siberia warms up) and therefore we should react soon (within the next 10 years) to avert these risks.

Of course this is not the real problem, only the symptoms. The cause is the fossil fuels we use, and so it is worth providing some data here showing how much energy we currently use, what it is used for, and what sources it comes from. For this we will use data from the "UK Energy in Brief July 2007" publication, produced by the government Department for Business, Enterprise and Regulatory Reform.

Overall in the UK in 2006 the energy consumed was 158 million tonnes of oil equivalent, which equates to an average consumption of 210 GW. This breaks down across the different sources as shown below:

UK Energy Consumption in 2006

The electricity itself obviously takes additional sources in its generation (around 2% of the UKs energy demand is also imported). The fuels for electricity generation break down as follows:

UK Electricity Production Sources 2006

A final set of figures, showing how the different energy sources are used by different sectors is also revealing:

Energy Usage by Sector 2006