HFCs – hydrofluorocarbons – are the usual replacement for CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) as a refrigerant. CFCs were phased out because of their damage to the ozone layer – but the fact remains that HFCs may not hit the ozone, but their global warming contribution is many thousands of times greater than CO2 itself.

The problem is that refrigerants leak. And EIA research indicates that supermarkets are the biggest source of HFC released in Britain. In 2005, HFC emissions from refrigeration and aircon systems in supermarkets amounted to the equivalent of two million tonnes of CO2. EIA says that this is “equivalent to flying a plane from London to New York over 2.5 million times”.

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Yes, average global temperatures are rising steadily, as we all know - there is no scientific disagreement about that. But what is going on underneath the obvious is that there is a lot more energy in the climate system. That means that the weather is wilder and more unpredictable than before - and getting more so every year. It was a good decade or more ago that the IPCC warned us that one result of climate change was that extreme weather events would become as likely as smaller ones. More energy means more instability and unpredictability.

>>See also: What to Learn from Bad Weather

The strength of hurricanes, the length of droughts, the temperature of heatwaves, the frequency of floods: these are all going up. The insurance business noticed it first (of more or less any industry), and they were warning us at the UNFCCC meetings from early on (along with AOSIS members concerned about sea-level rise). But what is less well-recognised is that it is just as likely that we’ll have extreme blizzard or low temperatures because of changing weather patterns due to climate change.

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The administration is increasingly thought of as favouring large payments to the very bankers who got us into this mess, while being prepared to allow ordinary workers’ jobs to go en masse. Very likely the Left strongholds in the South will link up with disaffected urban youth across the country and particularly in Paris: a powerful combination. The people protesting this week have not been particularly encouraged by the opposition Socialist party, either, which they see as little different to Sarkozy’s centre-right administration, much as those on the traditional Left regard “New Labour” in Britain. Street protests have brought French governments down in the past: they will doubtless do so again.

That feeling – that bankers get enormous bailouts while ordinary people go to the wall – is not solely a working class concern. Jim Rogers (a former confederate of George Soros, one of the few people who in my view really knows what is going on) recently opined that it was wrong for the British government to be bailing out the banks and that instead they should be allowed to go bust. Only by doing so, he suggested, would the country be able to start with a clean slate; the present course, on the other hand, would lead to debts that could take a generation or more to pay off.

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>> Search Green Options for more on James Lovelock

In the interview, Lovelock, originator of the “Gaia Hypothesis”, which suggests that the Earth can be treated as a self-regulating system like a living organism, and whose work on chlorofluorocarbons led to the ban on CFCs, insists that there is no time to reduce carbon emissions through an international agreement as was the case with the CFC ban. “Most of the ‘green’ stuff is verging on a gigantic scam,” he believes. “Carbon trading, with its huge government subsidies, is just what finance and industry wanted. It’s not going to do a damn thing about climate change, but it’ll make a lot of money for a lot of people and postpone the moment of reckoning,” he says. He also regards CO2 sequestering as “crazy” and “dangerous”.

Having caused consternation in some circles for advocating nuclear power as a more practical low-carbon generation process than renewables as far as Britain was concerned, he now says that while nuclear “is a way for the UK to solve its energy problems… it is not a global cure for climate change. It is too late for emissions reduction measures.”

The only way, Lovelock claims, that the human race can be saved is by the large-scale burying of charcoal made from agricultural vegetable waste. This usually rots down and releases most of the CO2 fixed by the plants when they are growing, but if it were burned with low oxygen levels it would produce charcoal which could be ploughed back into the ground and would not be able to be broken down in the same way. The process would produce a biofuel which farmers could sell, and as a result a subsidy would not be necessary. “This is the one thing we can do that will make a difference,” Lovelock says, “but I bet they won’t do it.”

Lovelock is deeply pessimistic about the future of the human race. He believes there are already too many people on Earth to survive two degrees of warming, while with four degrees of warming, the planet would not be able to sustain more than a tenth of its current human population, because it would be impossible to grow enough food. “The number of people remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less,” he says. “I don’t think humans react fast enough or are clever enough to handle what’s coming up. Kyoto was 11 years ago. Virtually nothing’s been done except endless talk and meetings.”

You can read the entire interview with James Lovelock by Gaia Vince in New Scientist, January 23 issue.

Photo of James Lovelock from Wikimedia by Bruno Comby.

Meanwhile, working people across Europe are starting to rise up, and this is one of the reasons why. Unfortunately, labour’s goals have seldom been environmentally friendly. One of the reasons the Right was able to wreak such damage from the late 70s to the present was that the unions, particularly in Britain, were too closely wedded to the inevitably disappearing world of mid-20th century heavy industry and too unwilling to face the realities of the time. As a result they became an easy target for the Right and were largely wiped out, at least in the UK. Remaining union power is still located in the areas of heavy industry that are left, such as the auto industry.

The trouble is, the last thing we need now are loads of taxpayer-sponsored gas-guzzlers. The only justification for propping up the car industry should be on condition that it moves over now to focusing on emissions-free vehicles and other environmentally-sensible products like sorely-needed wind turbines. Neither do we need additional fossil-fuel extraction and processing – both, once again, former union strongholds. Nor do we need additional airport runways and motorways: instead we need more emphasis on rail transport (but for some reason British rail companies are laying people off. Why?).

There is a significant danger here – but also a significant opportunity. Obviously there needs to be an emphasis on limiting the rise of mass unemployment, and given the opportunity I would far rather bail out ordinary people than bankers – by all means let the latter go to the wall and nationalise the hell out of the remaining useful assets. But we cannot simply reduce mass unemployment by supporting old-fashioned industries whose products we can no longer environmentally justify. Instead they must be obliged to convert to environmentally-friendly products at once to qualify for support. And again, nationalise them if necessary.

The danger is support without change. The opportunity is to convert giant ancient industries to making environmentally-sound products – wind and ocean turbines, for example; or building railways and rolling stock instead of roads, cars and trucks.

Meanwhile, in mainland Europe at least, the Old Left is rising again. Governments must heed the warning that the wave of strikes in France represents, and make sure that the anger underlying them is channelled into support for environmentally-friendly infrastructure and industry investment. And then Governments must take the action required to bring environmentally-suitable projects about.

The building anger among ordinary people should not be underestimated, and it must be channelled in a positive direction to be dissipated. Because at the same time, there is something else to watch. There has been a wave of protest in the UK, too. But that protest has not exactly been from the Old Left – which was largely pulverised out of existence by Thatcher. Instead, it has started with anger against EU workers being (ill-advisedly) drafted in from elsewhere in the EU to work on a Lincolnshire refinery building project. Prime Minister Brown is being called upon to stand by his pledge of “British jobs for British workers”. But this seemingly reasonable concern should raise another potential warning flag: the spectre of right-wing extremism, aka Fascism, with hatred of immigrants at its heart. We must not forget what happened in Europe, specifically Germany, as a result of economic collapse last time – in the 1930s.

Image: French labour organisations take to the streets in 2006 to oppose a new work contract. Source: Wikimedia.

Concerns now being expressed do not relate to the issue of the tiny quantities of mercury in the bulbs that was raised a year or two ago (largely misguidedly - while in environmental terms far more mercury is released into the environment by the manufacture of traditional bulbs). Instead they focus on potential difficulties for partially-sighted people.

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“Roll back the specter of a warming planet”

“…restoring Science to its rightful place”.

I also noted the part about “harnessing the sun, the wind and the soil”. The BBC’s Washington correspondent, Richard Lister noted that he was “setting out his transformative agenda: creating a new energy infrastructure. The image of ‘harnessing’ the soil is a notable one…”

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Needless to say, I find it unlikely that in a recession and with tight CO2 emissions goals to meet we can justify expanding Heathrow.

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The occurrence of another battle between Russia and Ukraine over gas and the resulting restriction and even cutting off of supplies to some parts of Europe should give us cause for wider concern, even if the dispute, as seems likely, will be resolved in a matter of a week or so.

Britain currently derives only about 2% of its gas supplies from Russia, but as we all know, natural gas supplies from the North Sea are dwindling. Central Asia has gas supplies and pipelines are being built, but not only are we obviously talking about a fossil fuel here, we are also talking about our continuing reliance on energy supplies from other parts of the world, which may not be or remain friendly to us. At least one recent study, by Deloitte, indicates that even the oil industry is realising that things have to change to focus on renewables and it is becoming recognised that energy security is a serious concern.

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Car sales are down dramatically - in the UK, November sales were around 35% down on the same time last year - and it is hardly surprising. Big purchases like cars are not on most people’s shopping lists at the moment.  This leaves the industry in big trouble.

As readers will be aware, the auto industry is a major employer on both sides of the Atlantic, both with an enormous chain of suppliers employing a vast workforce, all of whom will be affected by the failure of the industry.

>>More about the auto industry bailout at Green Options

So what is to be done? There are obviously those on the Right whose view is that the industry (and other industries) should stand or fall in a free market - one presumes they were the people who formed the US Senate opposition to bail-out plans. Equally, there are plenty of environmentalists on the Left who are not conceptually very concerned about a reduction in production capacity for the quintessential fossil-fuel-guzzling consumable that is the automobile.

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I doubt many people on either side of the fence are surprised that the referendum on Manchester’s congestion charge resulted in a resounding “no” vote. Apart from the fact that the plan itself was a great deal more complicated than that in London, people will, simply, probably not vote for environmentally-sound measures – not now, and not at all, probably, until it’s too late. Why? Because we are basically selfish.

I have no doubt that the vast majority of Mancunians simply felt that a congestion charge was an added cost they couldn’t justify, an added inconvenience they couldn’t countenance, and perhaps even a restriction on going where they want, when they want that was too much to bear.

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[Editor's note: In a recent piece about the Poznan climate talks and their existence in the virtual world of 'Second Life' I ended with a plea for more information; a plea answered by journalist Richard Elen.]

Green Options readers are probably not the only people who will be struck by the irony of an intended attendee at the Poznan Climate Talks being unable to leave Stansted Airport on his decidedly anti-environmental RyanAir flight because of climate protestors closing the runway. In many ways, flying to an environmental conference makes you part of the problem, not part of the solution.

I was always very conscious, in attending the UN Climate Negotiations in the run-up to Kyoto (which were often held in Geneva) that flying to conferences was a bad idea. Even driving there, or best of all going by train where possible, was exacerbating a problem we were there to try to do something about.

In those days, some 15 years ago, however, there were few other options. Video conferencing existed but it required going to a specially-equipped location and cost a lot of money. You were limited to one small group making a presentation to another small group. And while the Internet made it much easier to get information out of a conference, it did not initially help you a great deal to get in.

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