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CARBON WORLDS
Britain axes 1 billion pound carbon capture scheme
by Staff Writers
London (AFP) Nov 27, 2015


What's the carbon footprint of an email?
Paris (AFP) Nov 26, 2015 - A long list of seemingly harmless everyday actions contribute to emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other climate-altering greenhouse gases.

Driving a car and flipping a light switch have a clear "carbon footprint" -- much less obvious is the harm caused by sending a simple text message or opening a bottle of water.

Here is the environmental impact of some common activities:

Digital footprint

Sending even a short email is estimated to add about four grammes (0.14 ounces) of CO2 equivalent (gCO2e) to the atmosphere.

To put this into perspective, the carbon output of hitting "send" on 65 mails is on par with driving an average-sized car a kilometre (0.6 of a mile).

The culprits are greenhouse gases produced in running the computer, server and routers but also those emitted when the equipment was manufactured.

It gets worse when you send an email with a large attachment, which puts about 50 gCO2e into the air. Five such messages are like burning about 120 grammes (0.27 pounds) of coal.

Receiving a spam message -- even if you do not open it -- has an environmental impact of 0.3 gCO2e.

The global carbon footprint from spam annually is equivalent to the greenhouse gases pumped out by 3.1 million passenger cars using 7.6 billion litres (two billion gallons) of gasoline in a year.

Here is something to keep in mind the next time you type in a non-essential Google enquiry: A web search on an energy-efficient laptop leaves a footprint of 0.2 gCO2e. On an old desktop computer, it is 4.5 gCO2e.

And that text message? It comes at a cost of about 0.014 gCO2e.

Paper or plastic?

Plastic grocery bags each have a carbon footprint of 10 gCO2e, but the paper ones are even worse at 40 gCO2e each.

Store-bought bottled water has nearly 1,150 times the emissions attached to it than a glass poured from the tap.

A 500-millilitre (one-pint) bottle is responsible for 160 gCO2e compared to 0.14 gCO2e for tap water.

A large cappuccino comes with a footprint of 235 gCO2e, partly because of the emissions from raising the cow which produced the milk. For a cup of home-made black tea or coffee for which just enough water was boiled, the figure is 21 gCO2e.

Leisure time

The bigger the TV, the bigger the cost in greenhouse-gas emissions.

Watching two hours of tube on a 24-inch (61-centimetre) plasma screen pumps out 440 gCO2e -- about the same as driving a car for 1.6 km.

The footprint is 68 gCO2e and 176 gCO2e respectively for two hours watched on a 15- or a 32-inch LCD screen.

A mile of cycling fuelled by a meal of bananas would be responsible for 65 gCO2e, compared to 260 gCO2e for a mile powered by cheeseburgers.

SOURCES:

"How Bad Are Bananas?" by Mike Berners-Lee; Fifth Assessment Report of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); McAfee study, "Carbon Footprint of Spam".

Britain has quietly cancelled a competition to develop carbon capture and storage technology, reversing support for a tool intended to help combat global warming ahead of a climate summit in Paris next week.

The change was announced to the London Stock Exchange on Wednesday as finance minister George Osborne revealed a much-awaited budget update to parliament that vowed to increase investment in energy research.

Proponents of CCS technology -- which aims to capture emissions of carbon dioxide from power plants and prevent it entering the atmosphere and causing the planet to warm -- reacted with dismay to the announcement that funding was no longer available for the �1.0 billion (1.4 billion euros, $1.5 billion) scheme.

"Moving the goalposts just at the time when a four-year competition is about to conclude is an appalling way to do business," said Luke Warren, chief executive of the Carbon Capture and Storage Association.

He warned that Britain would lose the opportunity to develop cost effective methods of reducing carbon emissions, calling the announcement "devastating", while industry group EEF said the decision would cost much more than it would save in the long term.

It comes days ahead of a major UN climate summit in Paris which aims to forge an international deal to stop global warming exceeding two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels -- a level scientists hope would avoid the most drastic effects of rising seas and extreme weather.

The government of Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron, who was re-elected for a second term in May on promises of balancing Britain's budget, has previously been criticised for cutting support for solar and wind energy.

Jim Watson, director of the UK Energy Research Centre, said the decision would make Britain's plan to cut carbon emissions by switching from coal to gas power plans less effective.

"Without CCS available, the Government's plans to use gas as a 'bridge' to a low carbon future will have much more limited mileage in the medium term," Watson said.

The carbon capture competition had two bidders: the White Rose project to capture 90 percent of emissions from a coal power plant in Yorkshire in northern England and store it under the North Sea, and a scheme to capture carbon from gas power in Scotland.

Energy company SSE, operator of the Scottish power plant, called the decision a "missed opportunity" as their partner on the project Royal Dutch Shell said the decision meant the project would no longer go ahead.

"We have worked tirelessly over the last two years to progress our plans for this project," a spokesman for Shell said.

"Government funding to support this world-first demonstration project, through the competition, was important to achieving the aim of making the technology commercially viable in the shortest possible time."

A crunch UN summit on climate change with more than 150 heads of state and government opens in Paris on Monday in an attempt to negotiate a world pact on global warming.

nol/dt/jh

ROYAL DUTCH SHELL PLC

SSE

LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE GROUP PLC


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CARBON WORLDS
Carbon Capture: key green technology shackled by costs
Paris (AFP) Nov 24, 2015
Every credible plan to save humanity from global warming reserves a key role for a green energy technology called carbon capture and storage. But there's a problem: no one has figured out a viable way to pay for it. Usually just called CCS, the technology can take carbon dioxide - the dominant greenhouse gas - from major pollution sources like power plants or steel mills and pump it ... read more


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