05 Jul 2010 10:54:32 GMT
Source: Reuters
FINAL WORD -- OR NOT
There were other eyebrow-raising incidents. Those following the biofuels debate had long awaited a report commissioned by the Commission's trade unit. Researchers at the Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) had fine-tuned a powerful global economic database called GTAP to help in their work, and promised the deepest exploration yet into the complex global ramifications of biofuels. This, several EU officials predicted, would be the final word in the debate.
Needless to say, it wasn't. The report, which appeared on March 24, concluded that Europe's biofuels strategy would do little of the damage it had been charged with. But when experts began to look at the data that had been fed into the study by the Commission's energy officials, they were surprised by what they found.
For example, key assumptions played down the contribution traditional biofuels would make towards the EU's 10 percent goal, while simultaneously pushing up the role of other types of less-damaging renewable energies, such as electric cars and advanced biofuels made from waste.
Most striking was the assumption that by 2020, 20 percent of all new cars sold would be electric -- a figure which massively exceeds most reliable forecasts.
The European Automobile Manufacturers' Association predicts 3 to 10 percent of European cars will be electric in 10 years. The Commission itself launched its electric vehicle strategy in April with a forecast of a 1 to 2 percent share for electric cars and a similar figure for hybrids. When it comes to assessing the environmental damage of biofuels, the Commission had apparently asked its researchers to use a five-fold exaggeration of its own electric car forecasts.
Other problems emerged. The Washington researchers based their modelling on the assumption that about 15 percent of biofuels used in Europe in 2020 would be less-damaging "second generation" fuels brewed from straw and crop residues rather than grain. But numerous European Commission forecasts, most notably its Strategic Energy Technology plan of Oct. 2009, predicted that the technology needed for second-generation biofuels production would only begin to come on stream "around 2015-20."
"A public authority is always obliged to be factually correct," says Bernhard Wegener, professor of law at Germany's University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. "It is always a breach of that obligation if somebody willingly and deliberately feeds wrong information into the decision-making process."
Last week, as Brussels baked under the hottest temperatures this year, the author of the IFPRI report, David Laborde, attempted to explain his methods to a fractious crowd of commission officials and critics, among them T&E's Urbancic and Grabiel of ClientEarth.
Standing before his slideshow in a Commission meeting room, Laborde navigated a delicate line as Grabiel drilled into his research. No, said Laborde, he didn't think European officials had fed him biased assumptions, or at least he wasn't in a position to judge. And yes, he was "relatively optimistic" the policy would have a "slightly positive" effect on climate change.
But in one area, he clearly disowned the assumptions the Commission had given him -- that almost half the EU's new thirst for biofuels would be quenched with bioethanol, which has much better climate credentials than biodiesel. The Commission predicts a 55/45 split between biodiesel and bioethanol in 2020 but "if you look at the trends, we're not going to reach this target," Laborde said. "It would be more like 80/20."
Some officials looked uncomfortably around them, or at the floor, apparently eager to move on.
POLICY CHANGE?
Rumours have now begun to emerge of a deliberate campaign. Two EU sources say Commission officials coached lobbyists on how best to attack the emerging science of indirect land use change.
The biofuels industry continues to argue that the science is so poorly understood that it would be premature for Europe to change its goal.
Environmentalists counter that amid such uncertainty it would be foolish to continue. "I was never happy with this 10 percent target, and I'm still not happy," says Bas Eickhout, a Dutch Green group politician who previously worked as a renewable energy analyst. "We'll have to consider how to deal with the factor of indirect land use change, and let's put in place a review clause, acknowledging that the science will become more and more clear."
The European Biodiesel Board says it is ready for a debate as long as the oil extraction industry comes under the same intense scrutiny as biofuels. "Let's have that debate, but let it be fair," says secretary general Raffaello Garofalo. "Nobody is talking about the indirect effects of oil. Look at what's happening in the Gulf of Mexico with BP. Or we could talk about impacts in the Niger Delta."
If a proper public debate does ever happen, even more difficult questions may emerge. What gives Europe the right to lecture developing countries on how they should use their land? After all, Europe has spent millennia deforesting its lands and is one of the major historical culprits behind climate change. Why impose tighter standards for the vegetable oils that are burned in cars than those that are used in the kitchen? How do we account for waste animal fats that are as likely to end up in cosmetics and beauty products as they are in the fuel tank of a car?
Biofuels have become the first real test-case for a post-oil era in which food, animal feed, fuel and chemicals compete for land in a new bio-economy. Whatever conclusion Europe reaches "may set the agenda for sustainable land use for the future", says Eickhout. "It touches on social issues, environment issues, trade issues, energy issues and more."
Even without a debate, the likelihood of a policy shift in Brussels has grown. After 20 years in German politics, Guenther Oettinger is the kind of man who loathes controversy and policy dysfunction. Many of the architects of the biofuels policy were replaced in an overhaul in January.
"We promote only sustainable biofuels and take the phenomenon of indirect land use very seriously," he said in a written response to Reuters. "This is why we have launched several studies on this. If it is confirmed that indeed that there is a serious problem related to indirect land use, we may adapt our legislation."
(Reporting by Peter Harrison; Editing by Simon Robinson and Sara Ledwith)
Tuesday, 6 July 2010
£15m funding boost for 150 'green' buses
By Peter Woodman, Press Association
Monday, 5 July 2010
More than 150 "green" buses are to come into service following £15 million of additional Government funding announced today.
The low-carbon vehicles will emit 50,000 fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide than conventional buses over a 15-year period.
An initial £30 million of Government money announced last year is currently supporting the introduction of around 350 new low-carbon buses.
The £15 million announced today will be available for bus operators and local authorities in England.
Transport Minister Norman Baker said today: "We want to support new transport technologies to help make our transport system greener and more sustainable.
"This investment will stimulate the market for low-carbon buses by reducing some of the initial costs for operators and councils.
"It will deliver significant benefits, in particular reducing the impact of road transport on climate change and improving air quality."
Monday, 5 July 2010
More than 150 "green" buses are to come into service following £15 million of additional Government funding announced today.
The low-carbon vehicles will emit 50,000 fewer tonnes of carbon dioxide than conventional buses over a 15-year period.
An initial £30 million of Government money announced last year is currently supporting the introduction of around 350 new low-carbon buses.
The £15 million announced today will be available for bus operators and local authorities in England.
Transport Minister Norman Baker said today: "We want to support new transport technologies to help make our transport system greener and more sustainable.
"This investment will stimulate the market for low-carbon buses by reducing some of the initial costs for operators and councils.
"It will deliver significant benefits, in particular reducing the impact of road transport on climate change and improving air quality."
Is this the sustainable city of the future?
According to a New York design group, this is how tomorrow's metropolis may look – just don't ask how it will work
Rowan Moore The Observer, Sunday 4 July 2010
Bring out the blimp: design group Terreform One's impression of a city in which people hop on and off blimps fitted with hanging seats.
Terreform One, a New York non-profit design group led by 38-year-old architect Mitchell Joachim, offers answers to almost everything to do with cities and sustainability. Its prolific output of ideas includes blimps creeping nose-to-tail around cities, with seats hanging off them just above the ground so that people can jump on and off at will.
The company has designed soft cars, so no one is killed in a car accident ever again, and proposed a way of training trees so that they can be grown to form houses – a theoretically zero-carbon technique. It also wants to put houses on to big trucks, and rebuild America's roads so that they are packed with "intelligent renewable infrastructure", into which the mobile houses can be plugged. This idea is less obviously zero carbon, but the company claims it will "create a truly breathing, interconnected metabolic urbanism".
Terreform One's projects are presented with the imagery long-beloved of futuristic visionaries, with steep perspectives of frictionless cities, super-shiny and super-clean. The language is fervent, breeding neologisms and repeating the word "will" in the manner of preachers foreseeing the rapture.
Terreform One, incidentally, is not to be confused with the company's earlier incarnation, Terreform, which was created by Joachim and his former mentor Michael Sorkin. Sorkin is now bitterly denounced by Joachim for failing to show a co-operative spirit and for selling out by designing a seven-star hotel in China.
Terreform One, which has a 32-strong "advisory board", has been endorsed by the likes of Wired magazine, which in 2008 named Joachim one of "the 15 people the next president should listen to", but for now it leaves many questions unanswered. Its plans seem light on details such as cost and emissions calculations. It's not clear what would happen to its blimps in a high wind, or to the views from upper-floor windows as they passed by in an unending chain, or how easily the old or disabled could hop on and off. Nor how trees could be trained to grow kitchens and sanitary appliances. Joachim says it will take a century or more to shift the way cities are built, which is all well and good – but perhaps the future should also start here.
Founder Elon Musk is way ahead after Tesla electric cars do 0-$2bn in a day
• Tesla Motors shares rocket 40% from Nasdaq opening price
• PayPal founder Elon Musk makes £16m on Tesla flotation
Andrew Clark New York guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 July 2010 16.10
Fortunes can turn on a dime. Barely four months ago, the Silicon Valley tycoon Elon Musk told a judge presiding over an acrimonious divorce from his novelist wife that he was out of cash and living on emergency loans from friends. But his bank balance was replenished to the tune of $24m (£16m) last week, thanks to a spectacularly successful flotation of his electric cars company, Tesla Motors.
A South African-born entrepreneur, Musk made his name by co-founding the internet transactions service PayPal, which was bought for $1.5bn in 2002 by the auctions firm eBay. Since then, he has pumped his time and money into the potentially lucrative dream of creating a speedy, silent, zero-emission battery-powered electric vehicle.
In seven years, Tesla has lost $290m and produced only one model – the speedy, sporty Roadster, priced at a hefty $109,000. Its 12 showrooms around the world have sold only 1,063 cars. Yet satisfied customers include eco-savvy Hollywood names such as Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon, plus the hipster mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom.
Seduced by celebrity and Silicon Valley talent, Wall Street is willing to take a punt. Tesla's shares rocketed 40% from a placing price of $17 to $23.83 on their opening day, valuing the company at an eye-watering $2bn. Musk's share of the proceeds should solve his personal cashflow crunch – although his wife, Justine, is pressing for $6m, a 10% stake in Tesla and a car. "Based on our life and history together, is that reasonable? I think so," she said on her blog, pointing out that the couple had five children together.
Tesla's strategy is to start with a high-cost, low-volume premium car, which is presently assembled in Hethel, Norfolk, at Lotus's UK factory. By 2012, the firm intends to build a middle-ranking car, the Model S sedan, provisionally priced at $49,900, which is intended to go as far as 300 miles on a single plug-in charge.
Musk is nothing if not ambitious – he hopes to sell 20,000 of these a year.
"When you've got a company that's in fast growth mode, you've got to look forward," Musk said last week, standing in Times Square in front of two of his firm's Roadster cars. "You can't be looking in the rear-view mirror, because if you look in the rear-view mirror, it doesn't really make sense."
Tesla has hit on a formula that it believes is a winner. Powered by lithium ion batteries, the Roadster has zero emissions and can go from zero to 60mph in 3.7 seconds. The car is so quiet that the US National Federation of the Blind is worried about people getting run over and wants a mandatory minimum engine noise.
Experts, however, say competition will be fierce. Most of the major global motor manufacturers already have hybrid petrol/electric cars on the market, and pure electric plug-ins are the next step. Nissan is soon to introduce a mass-market electric car, the Nissan Leaf, while General Motors will unveil its Chevrolet Volt, an enhanced hybrid that can generate electricity on the go, in November.
"The overall valuation of Tesla isn't really justified based on the production line – which is one car – and the financial situation, which is several hundred million dollars of losses since inception," says Mike Omotoso, an analyst at JD Power.
Still, Omotoso gives credit to Musk, who recently performed a cameo role (as himself) in the movie Iron Man 2, for building hype and star power around the business: "He's done a very good job of selling himself and selling the company, which is one of the reasons the IPO was so successful. He's tried to position it as a technology company rather than an auto company."
Tesla's showrooms include an outlet in Monaco and a swanky Knightsbridge location round the corner from Harrods. The firm has had a $465m loan from the US department of energy and has pleased politicians in northern California with plans to re-tool a moribund car factory idled by Toyota and GM.
Toyota has taken a small stake in Tesla under a technical co-operation deal. But even with help from Japan's biggest carmaker, there are doubts whether Tesla can ever make the crucial jump from rich boys' toys to mass market runarounds.
Jacob Grose of Lux Research, a specialist in emerging technologies, says lithium ion batteries, produced in relative small numbers, remain very expensive – and consumers' attitudes towards electric vehicles are untested: "Electric vehicles require a big change in consumer behaviour. People have to get used to charging their cars overnight and to the idea that they have limited range."
These concerns are echoed by John O'Dell, an environmental commentator at the cars website Edmunds.com, who says Tesla's Roadster is "principally bought by very wealthy people who use it for periodic cruising around" rather than as a practical mode of transport.
Still, Tesla's flotation, which was the first public offering of an American carmaker for more than half a century, shows a willingness in the financial community to fund environmentally friendly vehicles. It marked a refreshing change for the automotive industry from gloomy tales of Detroit bankruptcies.
And even Musk's wife, for all the couple's financial differences, is a fan. In between online barbs at her soon-to-be-ex-husband, she declared that she approves "very much" of Tesla's role in helping ease society's dependance on oil, adding: "The car itself is quite awesome."
• PayPal founder Elon Musk makes £16m on Tesla flotation
Andrew Clark New York guardian.co.uk, Monday 5 July 2010 16.10
Fortunes can turn on a dime. Barely four months ago, the Silicon Valley tycoon Elon Musk told a judge presiding over an acrimonious divorce from his novelist wife that he was out of cash and living on emergency loans from friends. But his bank balance was replenished to the tune of $24m (£16m) last week, thanks to a spectacularly successful flotation of his electric cars company, Tesla Motors.
A South African-born entrepreneur, Musk made his name by co-founding the internet transactions service PayPal, which was bought for $1.5bn in 2002 by the auctions firm eBay. Since then, he has pumped his time and money into the potentially lucrative dream of creating a speedy, silent, zero-emission battery-powered electric vehicle.
In seven years, Tesla has lost $290m and produced only one model – the speedy, sporty Roadster, priced at a hefty $109,000. Its 12 showrooms around the world have sold only 1,063 cars. Yet satisfied customers include eco-savvy Hollywood names such as Brad Pitt, George Clooney and Matt Damon, plus the hipster mayor of San Francisco, Gavin Newsom.
Seduced by celebrity and Silicon Valley talent, Wall Street is willing to take a punt. Tesla's shares rocketed 40% from a placing price of $17 to $23.83 on their opening day, valuing the company at an eye-watering $2bn. Musk's share of the proceeds should solve his personal cashflow crunch – although his wife, Justine, is pressing for $6m, a 10% stake in Tesla and a car. "Based on our life and history together, is that reasonable? I think so," she said on her blog, pointing out that the couple had five children together.
Tesla's strategy is to start with a high-cost, low-volume premium car, which is presently assembled in Hethel, Norfolk, at Lotus's UK factory. By 2012, the firm intends to build a middle-ranking car, the Model S sedan, provisionally priced at $49,900, which is intended to go as far as 300 miles on a single plug-in charge.
Musk is nothing if not ambitious – he hopes to sell 20,000 of these a year.
"When you've got a company that's in fast growth mode, you've got to look forward," Musk said last week, standing in Times Square in front of two of his firm's Roadster cars. "You can't be looking in the rear-view mirror, because if you look in the rear-view mirror, it doesn't really make sense."
Tesla has hit on a formula that it believes is a winner. Powered by lithium ion batteries, the Roadster has zero emissions and can go from zero to 60mph in 3.7 seconds. The car is so quiet that the US National Federation of the Blind is worried about people getting run over and wants a mandatory minimum engine noise.
Experts, however, say competition will be fierce. Most of the major global motor manufacturers already have hybrid petrol/electric cars on the market, and pure electric plug-ins are the next step. Nissan is soon to introduce a mass-market electric car, the Nissan Leaf, while General Motors will unveil its Chevrolet Volt, an enhanced hybrid that can generate electricity on the go, in November.
"The overall valuation of Tesla isn't really justified based on the production line – which is one car – and the financial situation, which is several hundred million dollars of losses since inception," says Mike Omotoso, an analyst at JD Power.
Still, Omotoso gives credit to Musk, who recently performed a cameo role (as himself) in the movie Iron Man 2, for building hype and star power around the business: "He's done a very good job of selling himself and selling the company, which is one of the reasons the IPO was so successful. He's tried to position it as a technology company rather than an auto company."
Tesla's showrooms include an outlet in Monaco and a swanky Knightsbridge location round the corner from Harrods. The firm has had a $465m loan from the US department of energy and has pleased politicians in northern California with plans to re-tool a moribund car factory idled by Toyota and GM.
Toyota has taken a small stake in Tesla under a technical co-operation deal. But even with help from Japan's biggest carmaker, there are doubts whether Tesla can ever make the crucial jump from rich boys' toys to mass market runarounds.
Jacob Grose of Lux Research, a specialist in emerging technologies, says lithium ion batteries, produced in relative small numbers, remain very expensive – and consumers' attitudes towards electric vehicles are untested: "Electric vehicles require a big change in consumer behaviour. People have to get used to charging their cars overnight and to the idea that they have limited range."
These concerns are echoed by John O'Dell, an environmental commentator at the cars website Edmunds.com, who says Tesla's Roadster is "principally bought by very wealthy people who use it for periodic cruising around" rather than as a practical mode of transport.
Still, Tesla's flotation, which was the first public offering of an American carmaker for more than half a century, shows a willingness in the financial community to fund environmentally friendly vehicles. It marked a refreshing change for the automotive industry from gloomy tales of Detroit bankruptcies.
And even Musk's wife, for all the couple's financial differences, is a fan. In between online barbs at her soon-to-be-ex-husband, she declared that she approves "very much" of Tesla's role in helping ease society's dependance on oil, adding: "The car itself is quite awesome."