Anatomy Of A Food Price Spike

Sustainablog has a look at the latest spike in food prices - Anatomy Of A Food Price Spike.

I have been posting updates on the most recent, global food price spike since February 2011 – most recently in June. Yesterday, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) released its most recent data on the prices of food in international trade. As seen in the graph above, the overall index and its various components have declined slightly, but remain at very high levels.

People living in the developed world have seen some food price increases, but because we grow so much of our own food and spend a small part of our income on feeding ourselves, the impact is minor. This has the greatest effect on the lives of poor people in import-dependent countries.

What is actually most unsettling about this phenomenon is that nothing like it has occurred for decades, and yet we are in a second such spike. The first was in 2007/8, and the current spike has been in 2010/11.
Source: sustainablog (http://s.tt/13sjc)

Read More

10 Extraordinary Photographs of the Starry Night Sky

TreeHugger has an interesting collection of photos of the night sky - 10 Extraordinary Photographs of the Starry Night Sky.

Read More

Smart meters given a fail

Smart meters continue to get bad press everywhere - partly from bad communication (no one seems to understand what benefits they could offer), partly from bad products (which don't do enough to be really useful) and partly from the absence of dynamic, realtime power pricing to make a decent implementation useful. The Age has an example of the lack of enthusiasm in the Australian market today - Smart meters given a fail.

VICTORIA'S experiment in rolling out so-called ''smart electricity meters'' is unlikely to be seen in New South Wales soon, with the head of one of the largest electricity distributors casting doubt on their merit. Last year in Victoria, the cost of the program blew out to $2 billion from initial estimates of $800 million.

''Is the business case in place? I'd have to say it's not,'' George Maltabarow, the managing director of Ausgrid, told a forum recently. ''Victoria is a very good example of that. ...

NSW has been slower to move, and the merging of information technology and electricity grids coupled with the large price declines of the necessary equipment means that there was no advantage in being the first to act.

Smart meters allow households to monitor their power consumption and reduce use during peak price periods, which can help reduce electricity networks investing in equipment otherwise used only a few hours a year. ...

In NSW, Ausgrid has more than 400,000 first-generation smart meters installed, with 250,000 customers on ''time-of-use'' contracts. Mr Maltabarow estimated that these households reduced their electricity bills by as much as $270 a year, on average, with time-of-use contracts, while the median saving is about $70 a year. Other NSW electricity distributors have been on the back foot in adopting the technology as well, due to the cost of rolling out the meters and limited benefit. ...

Under the federal government's ''smart cities smart grid'' program, Ausgrid is rolling out smart meters that have communication capabilities, which will enable it, with TruEnergy which bought the company's retailing operations earlier this year, to test differing pricing products combined with feedback technology, Mr Maltabarow said.

Read More

From brown coal to solar thermal

The Climate Spectator has a report on some positive thinking in South Australia, where Alinta is considering converting an old coal fired power station to a solar thermal power generator - From brown coal to solar thermal.

The owners of Australia’s most polluting coal-fired power station, the Playford plant in South Australia, are considering converting it to a solar thermal facility if it is closed as part of the government’s proposed buyout of brown-coal generators.

Jeff Dimery, the head of the now privately owned Alinta, said solar thermal technology was one of two options being considered after the closure of the 240MW Playford, and may be an easier option than trying to source gas for a gas-fired peaking generator, as there is no gas pipeline to Port Augusta.

“We’re exploring the idea of building a renewable facility and integrate that with baseload (from the remaining northern station) and solar thermal would be ideal, as there a good sun resource in the region,” Dimery told Climate Spectator in an interview. “The technology requires funding, and it’s a case of needing to convince government that it is one of better projects. We intend to explore it.”

Playford is one of four brown coal generators eligible to make a tender for the government’s proposed buyout, which intends to remove 2000MW of brown coal generation from the grid by 2020 in order to reduce emissions, and create room for gas-fired generation or renewables to be built in their place.

The solar thermal idea will not form part of Playford’s submission – apparently it matters not what the owners of the retiring generation plant intend to do with the funds (and some may be expected to expatriate those funds overseas), but Dimery is confident that Playford would be an attractive option in any case. For a start, it’s the most polluting, at 1.7t of Co2e/MWh, the early closure of 240MW would have little impact on the National Energy Market, and the workforce could be absorbed at the neighbouring 520MW Northern Power Station without any forced redundancies. That could save on government funds.

The other attraction of solar thermal is that it could be integrated into the Northern Power Station, pre-heating boilers in the same way that a solar booster plant will be designed to do at the Kogan Creek power station in Queensland, and/or putting electricity directly into the grid.

Read More

GPS Data on Beijing Cabs Reveals the Cause of Traffic Jams

Technology Review has an article on using data from taxi GPS units to try to optimise road design to reduce traffic jams - GPS Data on Beijing Cabs Reveals the Cause of Traffic Jams.

Beijing is a city famous for traffic jams. In 2006, rush hour reportedly lasted 11 hours a day, and the city has been called a "virtual car park" during daylight hours. As in most major cities, urban planners have been trying for years to relieve the pressure by adding new roads or public transit lines, or providing better enforcement for traffic laws.

Now a group working at Microsoft Research Asia has shown that tracking the location of taxicabs could be a better way to identify the underlying problems with a city's transportation network, helping officials determine how to best ease congestion.

The researchers used GPS data from more than 33,000 Beijing taxicabs. That data was collected in 2009 and 2010. The researchers were not just looking for bottlenecks—trouble spots that regular commuters may know only too well. "[Congested] road segments are only the appearance—they're not the problem," says Yu Zheng, who led the research. "We try to identify the true source of the problem in our work."

The researchers presented their work last week at the 13th International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing, which took place in Beijing.

To get at underlying causes of traffic problems, the researchers needed to get information about the trips people are taking—where journeys start, finish, and how a commuter travels in between. The researchers divided Beijing into regions and analyzed the taxi data to find places where two regions weren't properly connected.

Read More

Digging up old fossils

The Climate Spectator has a look at the immense subsidies directed to fossil fuels - Digging up old fossils.

Of all the riveting topics that will be brought up at this week's tax summit in Canberra, one that is likely to feature little, if at all, are subsidies for fossil fuels. And that’s a pity.

The International Energy Agency and the OECD last night delivered another broadside against the extent of fossil fuel subsidies around the globe, estimating that they amounted to $409 billion in 2010 – a rise of $110 billion over 2009 – and will likely exceed $600 billion by 2010.
Moreover, the agencies argue, they do nothing to alleviate fuel poverty, because they are poorly directed. While many of them reduce the price of oil and fuel below their cost, they favour only the rich and middle class that can afford them in the first place. Only eight per cent of the subsidies reach the poorest population.

“Making energy cheap means we use fuel in a wasteful manner, says Fatih Birol, the chief economist at the IEA. Without these subsidies, he says, global energy use would decline 4 per cent by 2020 – a significant reduction in the current context – around 1.7 gigatonnes of greenhouse emissions would be avoided, and more money could be directed towards renewable energy and energy efficiency schemes.

The IEA has been raging against fossil fuels for several years, arguing that artificially lowering prices below their costs distorts the market for energy products, and impedes the task of reducing emissions and ensuring energy security, which it sees as its remit. It also has other unwanted impacts, such as encouraging energy smuggling.

The OECD notes that removing fossil fuel subsidies – which outrank renewable energy subsidies by a factor of around eight to one – are one of the few structural reforms and policy levers available to address one of the worst economic crises of our lifetime and to stimulate growth and employment. The World Bank has recently argued that ending fossil fuel subsidies in developed countries could allow funds to be directed towards climate change financing in emerging economies, one of the key sticking points at international climate negotiations.

Most of the subsidies accounted for in the IEA/OECD survey come from nations such as Iran, Saudi Arabia and Russia, and half of the subsidies are directed towards petroleum products. China, India and Russia have been credited with taking measures to reduce their subsidies.
However, for the first time, the IEA and the OECD countries have combined to produce an inventory of fossil fuel subsidies in these nations, most of them among the G20, who in 2009 promised to eliminate these subsidies by 2020.

This is potentially embarrassing for Australia, which has used definition arguments and accounting gymnastics to try and argue that it doesn’t have any. The OECD is not having a bar of it. Its inventory estimates that 24 OECD nations together hand out around $45-$75 billion a year in fossil fuel subsidies, and Australia has more than its fair share, with annual subsidies – even within the narrow construct of the OECD definition – of more than $7 billion.

According to the OECD, the big ticket items are fuel tax credits, which have amounted to around $5 billion a year in each of the last three years. There was a further $1 billion in fuel tax credits for aviation, and another $563 million in exemptions for “alternative fuels.”

While Australia has moved to end some of its most notorious subsidies, such as the fringe benefits tax, which encouraged people to drive their cars more than was needed, the OECD says its assessment also does not include subsidies to the making of motor vehicles designed to run on petroleum fuels, or to electricity producers.

That means that some of the subsidies that exist in NSW, for instance, where the cost of coal-fired electricity is subsidised by contracts that are dramatically below market prices, are not included. Nor does it take into account the carbon pricing mechanism currently before parliament.

Australia would argue that its carbon pricing regime finally addresses part of what many would describe as the biggest subsidy in the world today – the lack of accountability on the external costs of fossil fuel production, as outlined in this article on Monday.

However, it seems likely that the OECD would take a dim view of some of the compensation measures included in the Clean Energy Future package, as others already have. In particular, the $5.5 billion in compensation that will be handed out to coal-fired generators, apparently to ensure that they don’t close suddenly, and the further billion or two billion dollars that will be spent on the brown coal buyout scheme to ensure that some of the worst polluting generators do in fact close.
The IEA/OECD, and most independent think tanks would argue that these handouts are not needed, and the money would be better directed at support for R&D and the commercial rollout of clean technologies.

Read More

North Sea gas production falls 25%

The Guardian has an article on declining UK natural gas production - North Sea gas production falls 25%.

North Sea gas production has slumped by 25% in the second quarter of the year, an alarming increase in the rate of decline that will cut tax revenues and could put more pressure on government to agree controversial shale gas developments.

Figures from the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) also show a 36% rise in coal imports, but a leap from 6.3% to 9.6% for the amount of electricity generated by wind and other renewables.

The department records that the output of oil and associated gas liquids fell by 16% in the three months to the end of June, compared with a year earlier – the biggest decline since records began 16 years ago.

This left Britain importing 3.6m tonnes of oil in the second quarter, compared with 2.8m tonnes in the same period of 2010, even though total oil demand fell by 1.7%.

Read More