Newsletter #9

The Heartland Institute, a US free-market think tank, held a conference on climate change in New York in early March. It was a forum for some of the climate change sceptics to discuss their research. The conference got very little coverage in the media and was ignored by the science pages of the newspapers.

This seems a mistake. A large section of the population of the US and the UK, and smaller numbers elsewhere, believe that the apparent scientific consensus on global warming is a result of selective coverage by TV and press. The failure to cover presentations by some of the leading sceptics is support for the accusation that global media, and mainstream climate scientists, are refusing to engage with the dissenting views of reputable scientists who do not share the standard view.

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BT announced that it was bringing out a new range of home phones with much improved energy efficiency. The claim is that ‘the new handsets boast power units designed specifically to consume around half the power of previous units’. BT said that almost all its extensive home phone range would contain the new energy-saving technology by mid-2008. Its press release gave very precise figures for the amount of CO2 saved – comparing the savings if all home phones incorporated the new technology to taking ‘57,000 cars off the road for a year’.

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Sizewell B nuclear power station

In the past three months, John Hutton, the UK government minister in charge of industry, has publicly backed an expansion of both nuclear and of offshore wind. Is this good for the UK’s climate targets? Possibly not.

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Two pieces of news from Tuesday 26 February. A UK investment fund is trying to raise £330m to build two large biofuels plants on the eastern coast of England. And the price of wheat rises to a new high of over $12 per US bushel in Minneapolis (over £220 per tonne) as worldwide shortages force prices ever upwards.

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In most countries electricity use is rising. The increase is gradual in developed areas, averaging only 1 or 2% a year. In the UK, the pattern was similar but recent years have tended to show declining growth rates, partly perhaps as a result of increasing prices.

One of the most interesting features of recent UK trends has been the flattening in electricity use in the home. This change is somewhat surprising. Improvements in home energy efficiency, through such things as the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs and high quality white goods, have usually been thought to have been outweighed by increases in the number and power use of consumer electronics. Large LCD TVs are, for example, much heavier electricity users than the old-fashioned TVs that they replace. Today’s games consoles are much more powerful than ones of five years ago.

So the reasons are not clear, but monthly year-on-year growth in domestic consumption of electricity has fallen to below zero in the last year or so. Is this a temporary change brought about by the steep increases in prices over the period 2005-6, which will be unwound when people get habituated to higher costs? Or is this a real change in household behaviour?

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