More Australian and international businesses are reporting their carbon emissions under the Carbon Disclosure Project, with National Australia Bank ranked No. 1 globally for the quality of its emissions data.  Of the 383 companies in the Global 500 that completed the sixth annual Carbon Disclosure Project survey, 72% are reporting their scope 1 and scope 2 emissions, or their direct emissions, compared with 58% last year.
Of those that responded, 74% say they have an emissions reduction target in place, although only 56% disclosed it. (The question wasn’t asked in last year’s survey).

Australian banks performed well against their international counterparts in the Carbon Disclosure Leadership Index, which judges companies on the quality and comprehensiveness of their emissions data.  Out of a possible score of 100, NAB tied with Barclays, Merrill Lynch and Munich Re on 98. ANZ was a point behind on 97, Westpac on 95 and Commonwealth Bank well off the pace on 64.

BHP Billiton scored the highest in the global mining, raw materials, paper and packaging sector, on 77 points. Alcoa received a score of 74, Rio Tinto 71, Xstrata 70 and Newmont Mining 66.

Andrew Petersen, a partner at PricewaterhouseCoopers, said 103 companies out of the ASX 200 produced information on their emissions, compared with 76 companies last year  He said that the result showed a significant shift in the attitude of business to compiling emissions data but only 39% are getting that information independently verified.

Rosemary Bissett, NAB’s Sustainable Business Practices Manager, said businesses that were yet to pull together their emissions data should get assistance right down the supply chain.  This is the flow on effect that will also put reporting pressure on some small and even micro businesses.  I feel this can be quite scary for the small end of town!

An international expert, Harvard University Professor Paul Hoffman, on climate change is calling for an urgent 10-fold increase in funding for clean energy from $60 billion to $600 billion.

This is not merely to help reduce emissions and climate change but also to provide the energy we are using because of looming shortfalls in oil and other fossil fuels and climate change.

“We need to determine ways of creating cleaner energy, of developing alternative sources of energy, of learning how better to sequester carbon dioxide if that’s necessary and possibly even take steps to blunt the climate problem,” he said.

The Global Carbon Project posted the most recent figures for the worlds’ carbon budget but in spite of the increasing international sense of urgency, the growth rate of emissions continued to speed up, bringing the atmospheric CO2 concentration to 383 parts per million (ppm) in 2007.

CO2 emissions caused by human activity have been growing about four times faster since 2000 than during the previous decade, despite efforts to curb emissions in a number of Kyoto Protocol signatory countries. Emissions from the combustion of fossil fuel and land use change reached 10 billion tones of carbon in 2007.
Dr. Pep Canadell, executive director of the Global Carbon Project said “This new update of the carbon budget shows the acceleration of both CO2 emissions and atmospheric accumulation are unprecedented and most astonishing during a decade of intense international developments to address climate change.”  Emissions growth for 2000-2007 was above even the most fossil fuel intensive scenario of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Although China and India continue to increase emissions, China has improved the carbon intensity of their economy since 2005, based on data from the National Energy Administration in China.   They are also investing heavily in manufacturing alternative energy equipment and are the largest global manufacturer of solar panels.

There was an estimated 1.5 billion tons deficit from forest cover, with the deforestation in tropical countries far outweighing what was gained through new plantings.

Although carbon uptake by oceans was expected to rise with the higher atmospheric concentration of CO2, in 2007 it was reduced by a net 10 million tons.

The natural land and ocean CO2 sinks, which have removed 54% (or 4.8 billion tons per year) of all CO2 emitted from human activities during the period 2000-2007, are now becoming less efficient as feedbacks between the carbon cycle and climate increase.

Yea gods!  The Australian parliament has actually agreed on some sensible changes to the new luxury car tax.  They exempted fuel efficient cars and also for famers and tourism operators who genuinely need the large 4 wheel drive vehicles to run their business.

It is a sad thought that the majority, if not all, the fuel efficient cars come in over the “luxury” car threshold.  No wonder so few of us drive them!

I am quite comfortable that those huge 4 wheel drives will be taxed higher for non commercial use so maybe there is an incentive for the urban cowgirls on the school run in our affluent suburbs, to start to drive something more fuel efficient and less view blocking.  I find them totally view blocking when I am looking to see if it is safe to enter a road, or turn.  It is like being next to a truck!

I particularly wonder about bull-bars in the city.  I don’t actually see a lot of wild bulls wandering our streets.  The bars really damage pedestrians and in a city where there are few pedestrian crossings, jaywalking in Adelaide is the norm and pedestrian safety is vital.

This is very variable.  Real life audits by Best Foot Forward have found IT emissions to vary from 5% to 25% of a business’s emissions.  It needs to be carefully calculated and not just go along with “industry averages”..

The real difficulty in calculating the real price is the unknown contribution of the embodied carbon in IT equipment. The sheer number of components in a server for instance makes it impractical and extremely difficult to calculate embodied carbon once the device is on the market. Clearly device manufacturers carry the sole responsibility to accurately calculate and report on the relative embodied carbon in their various offerings.

At present the auditing industry does not have the data at hand it will continue to be difficult to say with absolute certainty that there is benefit to be had in replacing existing kit with the latest and more energy efficient model now or later, or perhaps never at all.

The carbon offset market is growing fast and is very unregulated.  A year ago there were about 20 Australian companies offering carbon offsets; now there’s close to 60. When you buy carbon offset, you pay to support projects that remove greenhouse gases (GHGs) like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or stop them getting there in the first place.

The Carbon offsets are sold to consumers and businesses to allow them to reduce their environmental impact. By buying an offset, you pay to support projects that remove greenhouse gases (GHGs) like carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, or stop them getting there in the first place. When too many GHGs build up in the atmosphere, the result is climate change.

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) have raised concerns that, “Consumers may be facing misleading and deceptive conduct associated with this emerging market.” And a 2007 report by the University of Sydney found that the term ‘carbon neutral’ is being exploited for PR and financial purposes.

The concern is that well intentioned consumers, trying to do the right thing, are being taken for a ride.  A company might say it’ll offset emissions you’re responsible for and gladly take

The obvious place to start is to check that the offsets the company is selling have been accredited by an independent standards scheme. The problem is there are many schemes in the market. Some are government schemes; others are from for-profit companies, non-profit NGOs and organisations with charitable status, both from Australia and overseas.

All very confusing!

My belief is that we shoul reduce our emissions first, buy green power and only use offsets as a last resort.

Personally, I donate to Trees For Life who have a large number of volunteers growing seedling native trees from locally collected seed to give to farmers and community groups who want to revegetate with local native trees.  I don’t count the offsets but do contribute to helping encourage and retain the biodiversity in ourrural areas.  I have been a memberof Trees for Life for many years and have persoannly planted many thousdand of tress, shrubs and understorey plants.  I used to propagate local ground covers when I lived in a rural area.

It sounded unbelievable, and it was. The fuel-guzzling V8 Supercars racing series has been forced to withdraw claims it was holding “carbon neutral” events.   the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission  have investigated and must have any future green marketing checked by lawyers

Race organisers had said that the greenhouse gas emissions from hundreds of engines were neutralised by the planting 15,000 trees last year, but this may have been misleading and deceptive, and may have breached the Trade Practices Act.

The ACCC’s chairman, Graeme Samuel, said .”If businesses want to make claims that plantingtrees will offset carbon emissions, they must explain that this will only occur over the full life of the trees, When seedlings are first planted, the amount of carbon that they absorb is likely to be very small. It is not until the trees are fully grown that they can maximise carbon absorption.”   The whole carbon accounting using trees is very hard to quantify and the carbon auditing procedures are still confused.

The V8 website has now been altered to say a “significant proportion” of direct carbon dioxide emissions will be offset.

It is still unclear yesterday whether the Sydney leg of the V8 series would go ahead next year, and the NSW Government have not yet given approval. The organisers want to have the race  at Homebush, cutting down 140 trees in the process but replacing those lost with 350 saplings.

The Western World created the Global Warming problem so there is no point in pointing our fingers at India and China because they have huge populations who aspire to the western lifestyle. While the west squirms and blames, we also do very little.

The irony is that most of the west agreed in 1997 to make a small cut in their huge emissions, in the interest of us all. Nobody agreed to cut as much as we need to but most of these countries have done nothing to contain emissions. Between 1990 and 2005, when they agreed to cut emissions, rich country emissions have gone up by 11 per cent; emissions from the growth-related energy sector increased by 15 per cent.

It is the world’s need for energy that is the cause of climate pain. The fact also is that after years of talk, no country has been able to de-link its growth with the growth of carbon dioxide emissions. No country has shown how to build a low-carbon economy.

A low carbon economy is the challenge. At present the proportion of new renewable energy wind, solar, geothermal, biofuels comprises just about 1 per cent of the world’s primary energy supply. It is old renewable hydroelectric power which makes the world light up.

The rich world must reduce emissions drastically and we can do that by reducing waste energy and not drastically changing our lives.  There is a stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, built up over centuries in the process of creating nations wealth. It is a natural debt that has already made climate unstable. The developing nations are adding to this with a serious bid for economic growth. In fact the rich must cut back and allow the developing world to develop but we all need to uses carbon efficient energy.

Environmentalists have been saying for years that we need to prevent climate change but the emphasis is changing to adapting to it because of the mounting evidence that global warming is happening faster than expected and that it’s already too late to avert the most dangerous consequences.

Al Gore is one of those who has made this change.

For many years green groups have said that adaptation, or coping with climate change, rather than stopping it, was a bit like putting out a fire on the Titanic: desirable, no doubt, but the main thing was to change course.

Two things have changed attitudes:

• Evidence that global warming is happening faster than expected. Manish Bapna of the World Resources Institute, a think-tank in Washington, DC, believes “it is already too late to avert dangerous consequences, so we must learn to adapt.”

• Evidence is growing that climate change hits two specific groups of people disproportionately and unfairly. They are the poorest of the poor and those living in island states.  That is 1 billion people in 100 countries.

Tony Nyong, a climate-change scientist in Nairobi, argues that people in poor countries used to see global warming as a Western matter: the rich had caused it and would with luck solve it. But the first impact of global warming has been on the very things the poorest depend on most.

The victims share two characteristics. They are too poor to defend themselves by expensive flood controls or sophisticated public-health programmes. And (unlike China or Brazil) their own carbon footprints are tiny. Kirk Smith, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, calls climate change the world’s biggest regressive tax: the poorest pay for the behaviour of the rich.

If sea levels go up, do you build sea walls or rehouse people? If infectious diseases are rising, do you spend money trying to eradicate the worst ones, like malaria, or on health and nutrition in general? The latter makes sense but most donors concentrate on single-disease efforts. George Soros, a financier who runs a chain of philanthropic organisations, says that in their experience, few people in poor countries have a clear idea about climate change and how to cope with it.

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The latest Newspoll showed that 88% of Australians wanted to see a carbon reduction scheme, with 61% saying it should happen regardless of what other countries did, while a survey of the largest 300 listed companies found that only 28% provided any information on “policies or practices that have been undertaken to reduce greenhouse gases”.

A clear majority, 58 per cent, said they would be prepared to pay more for energy as a result of a carbon trading scheme, although 50 per cent of Coalition voters were against paying more for petrol, electricity and gas.

Reserve Bank governor Glenn Stevens said an emissions trading scheme would not result in higher interest rates, provided the costs, beyond the initial start-up, were relatively small.  He said the initial suggestion had been that a $20-a-tonne price on carbon would lift the consumer price index by 0.9 per cent.

Half of Australia’s biggest companies are failing to provide public information about their environmental or greenhouse policies, according to research on company disclosure.

The lack of disclosure is denying shareholders information that will become vital when an emissions trading scheme is introduced, and is also limiting the commercial opportunities available to companies among today’s environmentally aware public.  A survey (by Grant Thornton) of the largest 300 companies listed on the ASX found that only 28% provided any information on “policies or practices that have been undertaken to reduce greenhouse gases”.

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