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Taxing buildings on their energy output

Monday, 17 December 2007 13:31 By Chris Innis

Like transport, construction is in the firing line of the debate on emissions. The Stern Report and more recently Gordon Brown's policy statement on climate change and the Climate Change Bill highlighted that buildings, of all kinds, needs to become more energy efficient as part of a response to reduce emissions. The efficiency required to reduce emissions comes, experts say, in small pieces. So it might be the insulation of buildings, a reconfigruation of its heating and cooling systems or the installation of equipmemt that p...

Global warming, Bali and alternative views explained

Friday, 14 December 2007 05:57 By Chris Innis

It seems everyone in the world believes that cutting back, or eliminating, the use of carbon based fuels will stop global warming, or global climate change. Every single Environmental group believes this, and so does the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the National Academy of Sciences, every news source, and the 170 signatories to the Kyoto Protocols.

The reason for this is because the theory of the greenhouse effect, considering the blanketing effect of CO2 in the atmosphere, has become the popular knowledge of the day. This theory has,...

Ending the right to pollute

Wednesday, 12 December 2007 03:17 By Chris Innis

There is a troubling assumption behind much of the discussion at the UN Bali Conference that needs to be modified if the world is to move swiftly to a low carbon economy. That assumption is the right to pollute. Behind all the emissions targets there is an assumption that there are quotas that every country is entitled to, and that if you have not filled your quota, you can still use it, or pollute. In this way developing countries can pollute so that they can catch up to living standards in the developed world and developed co...

Is population a word we should more often use in the context of caps and sustainability?

Monday, 03 December 2007 07:44 By Chris Innis

The UN gathering in Bali today prompted another look at the IPCC's fourth report which forms the basis of the discussions about emissions and climate in the next two weeks. The report's findings can be easily gleaned from the website by going to www.ipcc.ch but there is one conclusion from the report which is not often debated publically, and that is the link between emissions and population. The population growth of the last 30 years and the growing energy demands of that population ha...

Funding clean technologies

Thursday, 29 November 2007 22:29 By Chris Innis

Clean technology is probably man's best answer to climate change and perhaps investment in it should be made a special case. This will both attract new investment to the sector and create a large pool of funds that can be deployed. At the moment in most parts of the world, investment in clean technology attracts no special tax incentives. We have seen incentives for biofuels in the United States which haven't been well thought through but little beyond that.

Any investment in...

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