Eco notes from the Guardian

* Some novelist I haven't heard of goes for a drive in a new model Prius and makes some funny comments. Such as:

The car gently forces you to drive in an environmentally responsible way, and that means you don't have to feel so guilty about the fact you are transporting yourself to buy a pack of decaf tea from Tesco's in three tonnes of hi-tech metal.

* There's an anti-wind power column that makes a good start:

How would you imagine an environmentalist would react when presented with the following proposition? A power company plans to build a new development on a stretch of wild moorland. It will be nearly seven miles long, and consist of 150 structures, each made of steel and mounted on hundreds of tons of concrete. They will be almost 500 feet high, and will be accompanied by 73 miles of road. The development will require the quarrying of 1.5m cubic metres of rock and the cutting out and dumping of up to a million cubic metres of peat.

The answer is that if you are like many modern environmentalists you will support this project without question. You will dismiss anyone who opposes it as a nimby who is probably in the pay of the coal or nuclear lobby, and you will campaign for thousands more like it to be built all over the country.

The project is, of course, a wind farm – or, if we want to be less Orwellian in our terminology, a wind power station.

but then goes off the rails by arguing that technology is never, ever the real answer. Just how far back towards the campfire he wants us to live is not made clear.

* Roger A Pielke Jr has a good column on how CO2 response is still all in the realm of symbolism politics, so realistic goals are subject to somewhat silly criticisms:

Evidence for this claim can be found in the global reaction to the commitment made by the Japanese government last month to reduce emissions by 15 percent below 2005 levels by 2020. The announcement was met with derision. For instance, Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, expressed shock at Japan's lack of ambition, stating, "I think for the first time in two-and-a-half years in this job, I don't know what to say."

Yet, Pielke notes, it is not as if the Japanese targets will be easy to reach:

To meet its 2020 target, Japan expects to do the following: construct nine new nuclear power plant plants and improve utilized capacity to 80 percent (from 60 percent); build about 34 new wind-power plants producing around 5 million kilowatts; install solar panels on 2.9 million homes (an increase of 2,000 percent over current levels); increase the share of newly built houses satisfying stringent insulation standards from 40 percent today to 80 percent; and increase sales of next-generation vehicles from 4 percent (2005) to 50 percent (2020).

And furthermore, the British target is virtually impossible:

The U.K. targets are a perfect example of what happens when symbols become disconnected from reality. To achieve a 34 percent reduction from 1990 emissions by 2022 while maintaining modest economic growth would require that the U.K. decarbonize its economy to the level of France by about 2016. In more concrete terms, Britain would have to achieve the equivalent of deploying about 30 new nuclear power plants in the next six years, just to get part way to its target. One does not need a degree in nuclear physics to conclude that is just not going to happen.

Towards the end, Pielke makes this point, which I find quite convincing:

...policies focused on targets and timetables for emissions reductions avoid questions about the realism and costs of the steps actually needed to reduce emissions. As Stanford's David Victor explains, "setting binding emission targets through treaties is wrongheaded because it 'forces' governments to do things they don't know how to do. And that puts them in a box, from which they escape using accounting tricks (e.g., offsets) rather than real effort." Until policies focus more directly on improving efficiency and decarbonizing supply, accounting tricks will dominate the policy response, just as occurred in budget policy.