Prince Charles loves Canopy Capital

Prince Charles has been talking on BBC radio 4 this morning about his desire to reinvigorate the drive to conserve the world’s pristine rainforests. He has said to friends that he wants to make significant progress by the time his 60th birthday arrives on Nov 14th 2008.

The Prince announced the creation of The Prince’s Rainforests Project in Oct 2007, which aims to work with the private sector, governments and environmental experts to find solutions which could be put in place.

“These solutions need to provide credible incentives to rainforest nations, down to the farmers on the ground, and must ‘out-compete’ the drivers of rainforest destruction,” he said.

In his interview this morning he mentioned Canopy Capital. The UK private equity company has recently purchased the rights to environmental services generated by a 371,000-hectare rainforest reserve in Guyana. There is an enlightening article on this by Mongabay.com which also talks about Merrill Lynch’s investment in a rainforest conservation project in the Indonesian province of Aceh, which is worth $9 million over four years (detail here).

In a follow up interview with Canopy Capital and a rainforest charity on radio 4 there was some discussion on how venture capital companies expect to make a profit from their investment. It appears that one way could be via carbon markets, which are still a new market instrument. The rainforest charity representative had his doubts as he believed factoring in the huge value of rainforests as carbon sinks (and therefore carbon credits) would devalue the price of carbon credits on the market overnight, therefore threatening pollution abatement and renewable energy projects.

Meanwhile “Merrill is betting that money it puts in to the Aceh project now will be a source of cheap credits that will become more valuable if forestry becomes part of the post-Kyoto landscape,” writes Wright of The Wall Street Journal. “The success of the deal could also influence how much more money Merrill puts in to forestry. The bank is debating internally about raising a fund of up to $3 billion to protect global forests. A war chest like that could start to make a real impact on deforestation rates.”

Canopy Capital, in exchange for funding a “significant” part of Iwokrama’s $1.2 million research and conservation program on an ongoing basis, have secured the right to develop value for environmental services provided by the reserve. Essentially the financial firm has bet that the services generated by a living rainforest — including rainfall generation, climate regulation, biodiversity maintenance and carbon storage — will eventually be valuable in international markets.

Hylton Murray-Philipson, director of Canopy Capital, says the agreement — which returns 80 percent of the proceeds to the people of Guyana — could set the stage for an era where forest conservation is driven by the pursuit of profit rather than overt altruistic concerns.

This is the new frontier in forest conservation and the Prince of Wales has just decided to put his backing to it. Lets hope he’s right. There is certainly an urgent need to ratchet up the pressure worldwide for huge conservation schemes that work and work in the longer term.

Ghana: food or biofuels

The world is in the grip of a food crisis with prices of various staples sky-rocketing. In Ghana, prices have more than doubled since the crisis.

But in the midst of the challenges posed by the rise in world food prices, the government of Ghana has decided to use part of its agriculture land to grow crops for biofuel.

Recently, Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva arrived in Ghana for the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD XII), and while in Ghana he signed an agreement with the Ghana government to grow sugarcane for bio-ethanol in Ghana.

During the signing ceremony, da Silva said, “in Ghana we are developing a project that will result in growing 27,000 hectares (of sugarcane) for the production of 150 million litres of ethanol per year that are destined for the Swedish market.”

According to an International Food Policy Research Institute report; “Problems such as corruption, collusion and nepotism can significantly inhibit the capacity of governments to promote development efforts.”

Ghana’s case falls within this category where more than US$400 million is currently spent annually on the importation of rice alone, when the crop could be cultivated in almost all the regions of the country. In the same way, the local poultry industry has suffered due to excessive importation of poultry products from Brazil and other countries.

African countries, under pressure from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), have removed subsidies on agricultural inputs while unbridled trade liberalisation have opened the valves widely for foreign products to enter these countries to the detriment of local production which cannot compete evenly with these cheaper and yet sometimes questionable quality imports.

Some argue that with good governance and ambitious planning both food and biofuels can be grown in countries such as Ghana. As Kofia Korda says in this article, The greatest weapon to fight hunger is good governance. Most African leaders lack the courage to embark on ambitious agricultural programmes. There are too many contradictions in the system which must be addressed. There is no use declaring support for local production when those who control political power are themselves importers or are in alliance with food importers.

Meanwhile biofuel companies move into Ghana regardless of issues surrounding food politics. Lion Bridge Ventures for example, a UK registered limited company based in Croydon, London has set up Jatropha Africa which seeks to build a leading position amongst the Jatropha growers of Africa and become a provider of high quality Jatropha Seeds and Oil to customers around the world.

These are interesting times for Ghana. There are opportunities to expand food production and create other income sources via biofuel crops. Getting the balance right will be crucial and this will need strong and intelligent leadership.

But beware! As this article says (they have become) concerned about the level of deforestation caused by biofuel. It’s one thing for biofuel to exist because of a competitive market, but quite another to allow subsidies and credit offets finance deforestation for biofuel. If you farm biofuel, beware, these subsidies and offset credits will go away the moment the Europeans realize they are financing destruction of forests. They claim, Carbon offset credits are fuelling the rainforest burning.

Development is a precarious business.

TNT boss suggests globalisation is too costly

TNT announced last year that it will invest in electric vehicles for its urban fleets as part of its environment plans for the business. Bizarrely Peter Bakker, CEO of TNT went much further yesterday in a BBC TV interview suggesting that globalisation wasn’t good for climate change and that the answer was to encourage the return of more local business, rather than shipping everything in from China.

According is this article, Rising fuel prices are having an impact right across the spectrum of transport activity. Companies ranging from road freight operators to airlines are being driven out of business in all major markets throughout the world.

Bakker claims that the emissions from its two planes flying constantly between Europe and China are equivalent to all TNT’s European truck fleet emissions. He sees this as wrong and wonders why TNT couldn’t do more local journeys if local business was to thrive again. The price of oil would appear to be driving this green perspective. However TNT topped the Dow Jones Sustainability Index (DJSI) for the first time ever last year, influenced largely, it is claimed by its UK office.

Home made biodiesel is latest fashion craze.

Whilst out today enjoying the fabulous weather here in London and strolling through a local farmer’s market noting the extraordinarily high prices, I came across a stall with little to show except a few small jars of deep yellow liquid. Perfume maybe. I then noticed the sign advertising ‘biodiesel’. Strange name for a perfume I thought!

Intrigued, I wandered over to enquire further. Turns out a small local company has taken the entrepreneurial approach of selling biodiesel fuel to customers as they shop for their organic food treats. You buy your biodiesel at 90p a litre at the stall, in the virtual sense, then fill up at their mobile pump in the carpark! They have regular custom apparently.

This provides an interesting angle to a cottage industry which has been around for quite some time now, although with prices at the forecourt being sky high it is increasingly becoming a more serious business.

The Guardian reports companies making biodiesel “reactors” report booming sales and demand for cheaper diesel is outstripping anything they can produce. “Our business has doubled in size in just the last six months,” said David Taylor of Ecotec Resources, the Lancashire company which sells the machines and which also makes 100,000 litres a year of recycled fuel.

People in the industry suggest there are 35 companies refining recycled oil commercially and perhaps 20,000 individuals making private arrangements to collect and process oil from local restaurants, chip shops and food manufacturers.

Since the law was relaxed to allow people to make 2,500 litres a year for their own use, most are working legally, but as the price of fuel rises inexorably, so criminal elements are moving in.

“There are wars going on in London to get the oil,” said Tom Lasica, who runs Pure Fuels, London’s largest refiner of vegetable oil. “Spanish and German companies are moving in to buy up British used vegetable oil. People are stealing it from each other and selling it abroad. We heard that one fish and chip shop in Southend was broken into just to steal the waste oil.”

Don’t buy from the big boys; join the revolution. It’s environmentally good for you.

Read more

London food scraps used to power homes.

Ealing has become the first London borough to recycle all its residents’ food waste into electricity.

The council, which has been collecting leftovers for the past two years, uses tiny bugs to break down the food into fertiliser. The process, called anaerobic digestion, creates gas which is converted into electricity. This is, in turn, used to power the processing plant. Any excess is sold to the National Grid.

Learn more here.

Electric black cabs planned for London’s streets.

News: Electric black cabs: prototypes planned for 2008.

Americans smell the high price of gasoline with a surge in small car sales.

Americans are dumping SUVs faster than you can say ‘jack rabbit’. For the first time ever more 4 cylinder cars are being bought than 6 cylinder vehicles. The industry itself sees this as a significant turning point.

As Dave Strom of South Boston, Virginia says,

“I had to smile the other day when I filled my tank for $18 and the guy next to me had a Ford Explorer and the pump was clicking past $80,” said Strom, a 66-year-old retired manager of a Chevrolet dealership.

Highlights from the IHT article;

* In what industry analysts are calling a first, about one in five vehicles sold in the United States was a compact or subcompact car during April, based on monthly sales data released Thursday. Almost a decade ago, when sport utility vehicles were at their peak of popularity, only one in every eight vehicles sold was a small car.

* “The era of the truck-based large SUVs is over,” said Michael Jackson, chief executive of AutoNation, the largest auto retailer in the United States.

* In another first, fuel-sipping four-cylinder engines surpassed six-cylinder models in popularity in April. “It’s easily the most dramatic segment shift I have witnessed in the market in my 31 years here,” said George Pipas, chief sales analyst for Ford Motor.

* Sales of Toyota’s subcompact Yaris increased 46 percent, and Honda’s tiny Fit had a record month. Ford’s compact Focus model jumped 32 percent in April from a year earlier. All those models are rated at more than 30 miles per gallon for highway driving.

* There are some indications that the trend toward smaller vehicles will reduce fuel use. In California, motorists bought 4 percent less gasoline in January than they did the year before, a drop of more than 58 million gallons, according to the Oil Price Information Service in Wall, New Jersey. “That is an incredible year-over-year drop,” said Tom Kloza, the organization’s chief oil analyst. “Some of it clearly has to do with changes in the vehicle fleet.”

* “This shift appears to be a permanent situation,” said Jesse Toprak, chief industry analyst for Edmunds.com, an auto information Web site. “These new products have become more fashionable, just like small, fuel-efficient cars are in Europe.” The low prices on small cars are also luring consumers who are tightening their belts in an economic downturn.

* “If you look at where the automakers are putting their resources into now, just about everything is going into small cars,” said Tom Libby, senior market analyst for J.D. Power.

The Americans have finally realised that burning heaps of gasoline just ain’t smart or cool. Amen!

 

Selfish Shell?

image: proposed area for London Array scheme within Thames Estuary

Shell, who prides itself on its progressive green initiatives, has reneged on its commitments to the London Array Scheme - a project to build the world’s biggest off-shore wind farm.  The company, who recently announced profits of £4bn, said that the decision was an economical one and claims that it is still fully committed to wind power.

Apparently, they prefer to focus on US wind power because the government incentives promised better returns.  Of course there’s nothing new about the company looking for better returns. We know that all large corporations are motivated by greed but maybe they ought to read this article.  Maybe we’ll see them scurrying back to the UK, cap-in-hand.

Anyway, although BWEA are said to be playing down the pull-out, it remains to be seen as to whether it will put the project in jeopardy.  It certainly must be a huge blow.  What a shame.

Source

Source

The US has ‘no energy strategy’.

image: play the game of Bonkers; the game your politicians will undoubtably win.

Article

Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: Americans borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through their gas tanks. What a way to build the country.

When the summer is over, they will have increased their debt to China, increased its transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased their contribution to global warming for their kids to inherit.

The author of the article in the International Herald Tribune, Thomas L. Friedman says;

But here’s what’s scary: America’s problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you would want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage - gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars - and you would want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage - new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite.

Are you sitting down?

Few people know it, but for almost a year now, Congress has been bickering over whether and how to renew the investment tax credit to stimulate investment in solar energy and the production tax credit to encourage investment in wind energy. The bickering has been so poisonous that when Congress passed the 2007 energy bill last December, it failed to extend any stimulus for wind and solar energy production. Oil and gas kept all their credits, but those for wind and solar have been left to expire this December. I am not making this up.

The Democrats wanted the wind and solar credits to be paid for by taking away tax credits from the oil industry. President George W. Bush said he would veto that. Neither side would back down, and Bush - showing not one iota of leadership - refused to get all the adults together in a room and work out a compromise. Stalemate. Meanwhile, Germany has a 20-year solar incentive program; Japan 12 years. The US, at best, run two years.

“It’s a disaster,” says Michael Polsky, founder of Invenergy, one of the biggest wind-power developers in America. “Wind is a very capital-intensive industry, and financial institutions are not ready to take ‘congressional risk.’ They say if you don’t get the [production tax credit] we will not lend you the money to buy more turbines and build projects.”

Rhone Resch, the president of the Solar Energy Industries Association says, the impact in just 2009 would be more than 100,000 jobs either lost or not created in these industries, and $20-billion worth of investments that won’t be made.

While all the presidential candidates were railing about lost manufacturing jobs in Ohio, no one noticed that America’s premier solar company, First Solar, from Toledo, Ohio, was opening its newest factory in the former East Germany - 540 high-paying engineering jobs - because Germany has created a booming solar market and America has not.

Continue reading.

Heathrow protest: more planes, more pain.

image: Heathrow plane stacking; so many planes they could be stacking all the way up into space?!

The following flew into my inbox;

Come and Make a Noise against Heathrow expansion.

Saturday 31 May 2008, 12 noon, Hatton Cross

The Carnival starts at Hatton Cross tube station (Piccadilly Line) and will make its way round the boundaries of the proposed 3rd runway, to Sipson – the village that will be destroyed if it goes ahead.

At Sipson we will spell out a giant human “NO” to expansion at Heathrow that will be seen from the air. Help us create the biggest and loudest NO the world has ever seen!

Expansion at Heathrow Airport means:

• More noise and traffic for local residents
  
• More pollution across London
  
• The destruction of Sipson village
  
• More climate change
  

Despite this, the Government and the aviation industry are pursuing expansion at any cost. They want a third runway and a sixth terminal. They want to increase the number of planes using existing runways. They want a constant stream of planes flying over people’s homes every single day. They want to destroy local communities. They want to ignore the science on climate change.

Be part of the carnival. Say NO to expansion at Heathrow.

Bring your family, bring your friends, and even your MP!

Together we can make NO mean NO

www.make-a-noise.org

http://www.greenpeace.org.uk/blog/climate/make-a-noise-20080408