Lethal Heating: 03/31/19

31/03/2019

5 Surprising Ways Major Cities Are Going Green

World Economic Forum - Douglas Broom

Eco-innovations involving cockroaches and cow dung have the potential to clean up urban life.

Image: REUTERS/Thomas Suen

What do cow dung, cockroaches, wood pellets and empty plastic bottles have in common? It’s not a trick question. The answer is that they could help us save the planet.
When the Pakistan port city of Karachi had to shut down its public transport authority, the 14.9 million people who live there were left without a formal bus service. An informal network of brightly decorated but often overcrowded private buses struggles to keep people moving.

Karachi could soon have the world's first biomethane bus fleet.
Image: REUTERS/Caren Firouz

Now the UN-backed Green Climate Fund and the Asian Development Bank have stepped in to fund a 30km zero-emission bus network that will be safe and accessible to all. Buses will be powered by methane from cow dung, making it the world’s first biomethane hybrid bus fleet.
A new plant is being built outside the city to generate methane from dung which would otherwise find its way into the Arabian Sea. The $584 million project includes 25 new bus stations, secure pedestrian crossings, cycle lanes and segregated bus lanes to speed buses past Karachi’s notoriously slow traffic.

Cockroaches to the rescue
If the idea of cow dung makes you hold your nose, how about a billion cockroaches? That’s how many they have at a plant in Jinan, capital of eastern Shandong province, China and they are eating their way through 50 tonnes of food waste every day.
The city, in common with many others, produces more food waste than can be accomodated in local landfill. So the Shandong Qiaobin Agricultural Technology Co came up with the idea of feeding it to cockroaches, which can in turn be fed to pigs.
China bans the feeding of food waste to pigs to prevent transmission of African swine fever. By next year, the Shandong Qiaobin Agricultural Technology plans to have three more plants operating that will be capable of handling a third of the kitchen waste produced by Jinan’s 7 million people.
As well as a protein-rich food for pigs, cockroaches are also believed to provide a cure for oral and peptic ulcers and heal skin wounds and other conditions. In Sichuan, a company called Gooddoctor is rearing 6 billion cockroaches for medicinal use.

Pay with plastic
In China’s capital, Beijing, and Surabaya, Indonesia’s second largest city, you can buy your ticket for the bus or metro with a bag of recycling plastic.
In Surabaya, a two-hour bus ticket costs 10 plastic cups or up to five plastic bottles, depending on their size. Each bus can collect up to 250kg of plastic bottles a day, helping the city towards its target of eliminating plastic waste by next year.
Plastic is a big issue for Indonesia. A study in the journal Science named the country’s archipelago of a thousand islands as a major source of plastic in the world’s oceans, second only to China.
In Beijing, ticket machines in the city’s subway system now take plastic bottles as well as more conventional payment methods. Passengers receive a credit of between five and 15 cents for each bottle and can top up their fare with cash. China’s rivers are among the 10 major sources of plastic pollution. Eight of the 10 are in Asia.

Image: Statista

World’s first carbon neutral city
As nations take action to reduce waste and their environmental footprints, one of the greenest cities in the world is on the verge of becoming fully carbon neutral. Copenhagen plans to be carbon neutral - meaning it will produce no more carbon emissions than it can offset elsewhere - by 2025, a quarter of a century ahead of the targets set in the Paris climate agreement.
It helps that the city owns its electricity generation, which is mostly wind powered. A happy legacy of the last century is that most buildings in the city are on a district heating system, where heat is supplied to homes from a single neighbourhood plant, instead of by each household having its own system.
Virtually all of Copenhagen’s 600,000 residents own a bicycle, and the city has 375km of cycle lanes. But what happens if the wind fails to blow? The city-owned energy company HOFOR is converting a coal-fired plant to burn renewable wood pellets. They will still emit some carbon but the city expects to be 95% carbon neutral even if it has to fall back on pellet power.

Links

Fed Official: Climate Change Is An ‘International Market Failure’

Grist - Eric Holthaus

U.S. Federal Reserve official: Global warming is an international market failure – “Climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole”

Floodwaters surround office buildings on September 5, 2017 in Houston, more than a week after Hurricane Harvey hit Southern Texas. Justin Sullivan / Getty Images

Climate change was already worrying enough — now a report from the U.S. central bank cautions that rising temperatures and extreme storms could eventually trigger a financial collapse.
A Federal Reserve researcher warned in a report on Monday that “climate-based risk could threaten the stability of the financial system as a whole.”
But possible fixes — using the Fed’s buying power to green the economy — are currently against the law.
Glenn Rudebusch, the San Francisco Fed’s executive vice president for research, ranks climate change as one of the three “key forces transforming the economy,” along with an aging population and rapid advances in technology.
Climate change could soon hit the banking system “by storms, droughts, wildfires, and other extreme events” making it harder for businesses to repay loans.

Rudebusch warns that crops and inundated cities have already started to hurt the economy: “Economists view these losses as the result of a fundamental market failure: carbon fuel prices do not properly account for climate change costs,” he writes.
“Businesses and households that produce greenhouse gas emissions, say, by driving cars or generating electricity, do not pay for the losses and damage caused by that pollution.”
A hefty carbon tax alone wouldn’t be enough to fix the problem — what he calls an “intergenerational and international market failure.”
Since Congress has yet to take sufficient action, Rudebusch says that the Fed could, in theory, take matters into its own hands by encouraging a shift away from fossil fuels.
The problem is, the Fed’s only official job is to keep inflation tame and unemployment low. And its tools are limited to buying and selling government debt to tweak interest rates.
That means it can’t help companies make a shift to a low-carbon economy by, for instance, lending them money in the bond market.
By contrast, the European Central Bank has been buying “green” bonds since 2016. An ECB research note last July found that those purchases have helped boost the market for these kind of investments, helping spur environmental improvements.
Along with a report last week from the insurance industry saying that climate change could eventually make insurance unaffordable for most people, Rudebusch’s report is part of a growing body of evidence that climate change poses an existential threat to the world economy as it currently exists.
Last month, Fed chairman Jerome Powell told legislators that asking why the Fed doesn’t currently consider the risks of climate change was a “fair question.”

Links

Climate Change Denial Is Evil, Says Mary Robinson

The Guardian - Damian Carrington

Exclusive: chair of Elders group also says fossil fuel firms have lost their social licence

Mary Robinson: ‘I believe that climate change denial is not just ignorant, it is malign, it is evil.’

Photograph: Johnny Savage/The Guardian

The denial of climate change is not just ignorant, but “malign and evil”, according to Mary Robinson, because it denies the human rights of the most vulnerable people on the planet.
The former UN high commissioner for human rights and special envoy for climate change also says fossil fuel companies have lost their social licence to explore for more coal, oil and gas and must switch to become part of the transition to clean energy.
Robinson will make the outspoken attack on Tuesday, in a speech to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew in London, which has awarded her the Kew International Medal for her “integral work on climate justice”.
She also told the Guardian she supports climate protests, including the school strikes for climate founded by “superstar” Greta Thunberg, and that “there is room for civil disobedience as a way of communicating, though we also need hope”.
Robinson is chair of the Elders, an independent group of global leaders founded by Nelson Mandela that works for human rights. She will say in her speech: “I believe that climate change denial is not just ignorant, it is malign, it is evil, and it amounts to an attempt to deny human rights to some of the most vulnerable people on the planet.”
“The evidence about the effects of climate change is incontrovertible, and the moral case for urgent action indisputable,” she will say.
“Climate change undermines the enjoyment of the full range of human rights – from the right to life, to food, to shelter and to health. It is an injustice that the people who have contributed least to the causes of the problem suffer the worst impacts of climate change.”
Robinson, a former president of the Republic of Ireland, told the Guardian her angry words were the result of seeing the impact on people’s lives. “In Africa, I saw the devastating impacts on poor farmers, villagers and communities when they could not predict when the rainy season was going to come.”
She also attacks big oil, gas and coal companies in her speech. She is expected to say: “We have entered a new reality where fossil fuel companies have lost their legitimacy and social licence to operate.” She says exploration for new reserves must end, given that most of existing reserves must be kept in the ground if global warming is to be tackled.
Robinson condemns the UK government for the £4.8bn support given by its export f inance body for fossil fuels from 2010-16. “It stirs painful memories of past exploitative behaviour to see the UK and other rich, industrialised countries proclaim their good intentions and act in a progressive way at home, whilst effectively exporting their emissions to poorer foreign countries and leaving them to pay the price socially and environmentally.”
The US president, Donald Trump, is also criticised by Robinson for his “egregious act of climate irresponsibility” in withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement. “Bad leadership has consequences now that are really bad for the people in the poorest communities, including in the US,” she told the Guardian.
Robinson says as well as taking personal action – she has given up meat – people need to get angry with those who have more power and are not meeting their responsibilities, saying: “Just as the suffragettes needed to embrace militant tactics to win the fight for female emancipation, so today we need to be fiercely determined to challenge vested interests, especially in the fossil fuel sector.”
There have been several strong attacks on climate change denial in recent months, with critics saying that proposals in the US for a new national security council panel of climate change deniers are “Stalinist”.
In November, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman said: “Smoking kills people, and tobacco companies that tried to confuse the public about that reality were being evil. But climate change isn’t just killing people; it may well kill civilisation. Trying to confuse the public about that is evil on a whole different level. Don’t some of these people have children?”
The BBC accepted in September it gets coverage of climate change “wrong too often” and told staff: “You do not need a ‘denier’ to balance the debate.”

Links