Lazy Sunday carbon updates!

Last night's Chinese New Year party at Stanley's apartment was great. Tried out my Taiwanese fried chicken....first couple were not entirely convincing but the rest was good enough for most
; p. Thanx to everyone for being my guinea pigs! Also met some nice ppl including a HK girl who seemed really interested in climate change issues, which resulted in me blabbering on quite a bit. Occupational hazard...oops. The Frenchies were lovely as usual, and really enjoyed the card game "heart attack". Host of regulars were there Torsten, Kathy, Xi Lian, Chet, Sze Chern. I also met Stanley's friend Cynthia and Ray from MSc economics who I hadn't seen since orientation last year!



Woke up today, checked the news and a couple of intersting articles to share:

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/AP/story/869100.html

I knew deforestation was a problem, but the stats are truly mind boggling. At BAU, we're talking about one and a half American football field being cut down per minute???!!! How do you even cut that fast...at 400 million tonnes of CO2 per year released it is the biggest carbon issue for Brazil to tackle. Appears that economic activity, more than law enforcement, is the main factor influencing deforestation rates and it's understandable. No matter how much law enforcement is put into place, where there is demand and money to be made officials will be corrupt and forests cut down. The real challenge is to create new profitable activities that do not require land-use. And that is a seriously hard question to answer.

http://www.smh.com.au/news/environment/its-big-expanding-and-has-a-carbon-footprint-to-match/2009/01/23/1232471590774.html

OK so it's no longer a secret. The IT and computing industry is a huge emitter of CO2, on par with aviation in fact (2-3% of world emissions). Recently there were also reports that a google search emits as much CO2 as boiling a cup of tea. Electricity use will also rise with the switch to the digital age, with TVs nowadays consuming at least 3 times the energy of its predecessor analogs.

In saying though Internet does save us time and also from travel. Instead of driving to my local shop to buy goods I can simply order online over the Internet. Studies need to be down on the CO2 savings from Internet use, and how significant that is in the overall picture. My guess is that the CO2 savings are not significant.

The only way out of this problem is....again to consume electricity from renewable sources to run the huge servers at Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft's data centres.

http://www.ajc.com/biz/content/shared-gen/nyt/business/c9b24aaf-8ae8-445c-8c96-8bef358d43d7.html

The Europeans want the US to join in carbon trading, presumably under a compliance system where credits are "fungible" between the different markets. And hopefully this would incorporate the Australian, NZ and Canadian cap and trade regimes when they come into force as well.

2 things. Caps have to be stringent enough across the different regimes to ensure a high enough carbon price over the long term to incentivise switching to cleaner energy. Secondly permits have to be auctioned, or a reasonable price floor across the board be implemented, for this to work.

However the scheme does look awfully complicated and it's safe to say no one knows how it could possibly turn out, and whether the US will accept credits from the third world since they've been so critical of the CDM.

http://www.climatechangecorp.com/content.asp?contentid=5911

Finally this nice article outlines what we should realistically expect from Obama in terms of CC policy over the next 12 months. I guess the mood can be summarised as cautiously optimistic.