Stay tuned for the release tomorrow of an investigative piece by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
According to their website…
“Starting in July 2009, the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists fielded an eight-country team of reporters to uncover the special interests attempting to influence negotiations on a global climate change treaty. Relying on more than 200 interviews, lobbying and campaign contribution records in a half-dozen countries, and on-the-ground reporting from Beijing to Brussels, our team pieced together the story of a far-reaching, multinational backlash by fossil fuel industries and other heavy carbon emitters aimed at slowing progress on control of greenhouse gas emissions. Employing thousands of lobbyists, millions in political contributions, and widespread fear tactics, entrenched interests worldwide are thwarting the steps that scientists say are needed to stave off a looming environmental calamity, the investigation found.”
It is no surprise that this is going on. Guy Pearse, Clive Hamilton and others have been raising these issue for many years. But the more exposing of this kind of political influence the better, and it’ll be interesting to see what they have managed to pin down.
When I first became interested in the relationship between the big polluters and politicians, the first place I looked was at political donations. Interestingly, most of the really big polluters (Xstrata, BHP etc) don’t need to make big political donations – they have influence and access by virtue of royalty payments and their sheer size. It tends to be the smaller fry that need to pay for influence – property developers and the like. The NSW Greens do good work in this area through www.democracy4sale.org
Stay tuned for the story tomorrow – and check out the global climate change lobby.
3 Comments
Interesting John.
Conversely, those industries and companies that are contributing to the solution (ie with low-carbon solutions eg video conferencing, smart grids etc) are rather quiet on the lobbying front (from my perspective)…..
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Turlough
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At the risk of seeming churlish at the generosity of the gas industry supporting environmental events, may I suggest that to maintain support for their events, activists are under pressure to attack the enemies of gas, rather than the enemies of the greenhouse?
Check it out. The greenhouse is being overburdened with the permanent gas, CO2.
Thus the enemies of the greenhouse are: coal, oil and gas – and perhaps cement.
The enemies of the gas industry are its competitors: coal and nuclear – and and perhaps hydro.
Now, which enemies are our activists warning us not to sleep with ?
I’m not a gas industry lobbyist nor am I connected with the gas industry in any way.
But in light of Roger Clifton’s comment, I have to speak up.
Natural gas is not only a fossil fuel which is lower in carbon density than coal.
Fossil gas is mostly methane. Methane is produced by natural processes throughout the biosphere as well, not least by our own agricultural activity.
Renewable methane fuel (aka “Biogas”) is already a small but significant part of the energy economy of several countries. Its potential for growth is enormous.
Just for instance:
http://news.mongabay.com/bioenergy/2008/01/report-biogas-can-replace-all-eu.html
Methane is readily produced from any agricultural waste material and from forestry products. It is far cheaper to produce than ethanol and much easier to handle and more versatile in its uses than fuel wood.
Methane is pretty much the cleanest-burning combustible fuel available.
It is readily transported and, unlike electricity, readily stored.
Vehicles can readily be adapted to run on compressed gas (CNG) in place of petroleum.
Gas fuel is the enabling technology for a large array of energy efficiency improvements : where a traditional central thermal power station throws away as waste heat 60%-75% of the energy in its fuel, highly efficient cogeneration plant which makes good use of this extra heat is cheapest, cleanest and most versatile when its fuel is gas.
Even for central power generation, a combined-cycle gas-fired plant wastes less energy than even the cleanest coal-fired plant.
Gas-fired energy installations have lower capital costs per unit of capacity than nuclear power or coal. This is especially true for smaller-scale plant, but holds true even for combined-cycle central power plants.
Gas-fired power at any scale is readily adaptible to variations in electric demand (unlike coal or nuclear power, and second only to large-scale hydroelectric power which is very limited Australia), meaning that in countries such as Australia it is an essential complement to our efforts both to reduce electric consumption (eg. by reducing night-time demand for heating poorly-insulated homes and hot water tanks) and to adopt intermittent renewable energy supply.
Replacing coal with gas on the electric grid won’t just reduce carbon emissions and maintenance costs, and transmission costs too by putting generators closer to consumers, but it will also let us add more intermittent wind and solar generators to the grid at very low cost.
If we want to reduce coal consumption today, embracing gas today is the only practical way I can see to do it.
Nothing else is available that could actually let us shut down Hazelwood, for instance.