Gas Panic!

Back in February 2009 the United Kingdom was ravaged by a light dusting of snow that lasted for almost a week. Coming right at the end of winter this stretched Britain's supplies of natural gas to breaking point. Although the exact details will probably never be publicly known the consensus of rumour is that Britain came within four days of having to ration gas and electricity by cutting off the supply to millions of homes in order to re-direct it to key installations such as Army barracks, police stations and hospitals. As this breach of the social contract would have been as humiliating as it would have been lethal the British state made it a high level priority to secure gas supplies for this winter. Aided by some genuine luck from flaws in the Russian economic model Britain went into this winter so confident of their ability to maintain gas supplies no matter what the weather they felt comfortable enough to play on the issue.

As soon as the snow began to fall in the final week of the Copenhagen summit around half a dozen locations throughout the UK began reporting problems with their gas supply. The most high profile of these incidents and the one I'm most familiar with occurred in London. Here water somehow managed to get into the gas pipes meaning that the gas supply to around a thousand homes had to be cut off while the water was drained out. This is the sort of thing that would make a conspiratorially minded person think that Britain was discreetly trying to ration dwindling gas reserves. Over the next nine days Britain's various mouthpieces gave us daily updates on the poor families left without heating and the brave workmen battling hard to reconnect their supply. Fortunately all the homes affected had their gas supply reconnected on Christmas Eve leaving them able to cook their traditional Christmas Day lunch in the warm. Then just as most people in the UK returned to work after the Christmas holiday on January 4th the National power Grid issued a warning that Britain only had eight days supply of gas left. They went on to urge power stations to switch from gas-fired generators to coal-fired generators in order to help avert a crisis.

The purpose of running this gas panic strategy during the final week of the Copenhagen summit and starting it up again when even the most ardent delegates were sick and tired of the discussion was to discourage other countries from taking any action on climate change. Apart from making the discussion process as tedious as possible Britain was hoping to send the message that due to dwindling supplies of fossil fuels such as gas the only way that countries could tackle climate change is by denying their populations heat and light. While it is truly idiotic to try and use peak oil as an argument for not adopting a sustainable energy policy this position is the product of Britain's equally stupid response to the Kyoto protocol.

Back in 1998 Britain signed up to a legally binding target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 8% of 1990 levels. This presented Britain with a big problem because as I've previously mentioned Britain will not accept the idea of man-made global warming regardless of any scientific evidence. However internationally Britain likes to portray itself as a beacon of fairness, democracy that respects the integrity of the rule of law (no giggling at the back!) Therefore they had to find a way to meet their Kyoto targets without it impacting on any other aspect of their operations in any way. They did this by retro-fitting their existing power stations with gas-fired generators that burn cleaner then coal-fired generators. Crucially though they did build any new power stations and only paid lip service to energy saving strategies. This meant that while Britain was able to meet and exceed their emissions targets in the process they become very dependent on imported supplies of gas.

Although Britain's problems are Britain's problems and mainly due to its interesting relationship with reality its plight does highlight a couple of discussion points about the UN framework for tackling climate change;

Firstly it calls into question the need for legally binding targets. When it comes to targets and statistics governments are liars. If the crime rate is too high they simply start recording rapes as sexual assaults and not bother record the sexual assaults. If not enough people are passing exams they'll just make the exams easier and if they need sales figures that exceed predictions they simply make really low predictions. Therefore rather then setting fixed, quantitative targets for emissions cuts it might be a better idea to concentrate on more fluid, qualitative targets. That would mean that rather then being fixated on cutting the emissions from chimneys by a certain amount by a set date people would have more freedom to implement technologies and strategies that stop those emissions being absorbed into the atmosphere and bring about long term cuts. The Chinese are already beginning to think in this direction with their carbon density measure.

Secondly it highlights the need for a joined up, national strategy to cut emissions. It is simply not good enough to concentrate on cutting the emissions produced by energy production. It is also important to minimise the amount of energy that is used. This involves making sure that the power grid is up to a high as possible standard to cut the amount of electricity that is lost between producer and consumer. It involves making sure that new buildings are built to the highest standard of energy efficiency and old buildings are retro-fitted to that same standard. It can also involve making sure that local planning and zoning is done to minimise the distance people need to travel in order to get around and incorporates things like carbon sinks. It is on this last point that a carbon trading scheme would really come into its own.

Beyond those two large discussion topics I suppose Britain's failings also highlight the need to make sure that your country isn't being run by a bunch of mentals who believe in fairies. Also, while I'm on the subject I should point out that yes the special prisons that the Danish police set up to house summit protesters did look exactly like something out of Bagram airbase. This was done on purpose in order to put the American delegation off their game. I would have mentioned it at the time but I was unable to work how it had anything whatsoever to do with climate change.