cloud-seeding

By chance I noticed an article in the Guardian newspaper on Thursday and managed to attend an interesting conference at Manchester Town Hall this weekend 4-5 July. It was chaired by Lord Bingham, formerly Britain's top judge, and part sponsored by the Guardian, who will be running a feedback on the conference in a special supplement next Monday 13 July.

Advocates for 20 proposals to mitigate climate change were invited to speak. They covered scientific and engineering solutions to economic and social solutions. A couple of interesting solutions came from Australia. One of the delegates, Kirk Sorenson, has an interesting site on thorium reactors.

There was no pre-agenda and I went along expecting to lobby for why population was not included as a key solution. Climate and Energy Secretary, Ed Milliband, would be speaking at the Saturday session.

Population Sustainability Network

In the event, I found on the day that a talk on renewing commitments to reproductive health policies was included for the final Sunday afternoon session. This was given by Louise Carver of the Population Sustainability Network. It turned out to be fairly low key and was cautious on really highlighting the issues, but at least it was there. One interesting point was that she said family planning funding was at an all time low and had dropped by 30% in real terms since the mid-1990s.

Milliband waffling, out of touch on population problems in developed countries

I did question Milliband at the Saturday Q&A on how politicians and the media were neglecting and ignoring population as a key driver on Climate change and other key issues. Predictably he waffled, saying that he heard this issue raised quite often in relation to climate change, but really we were doing all that can be done and the key was to make reproductive health care easily available and improve the education of girls in developing countries in particular.

I replied that both politicians and many green groups were in denial on population as a key issue. The UK Government had no policy on population and we would not solve the critical problems ahead without going further and incentivising a move to smaller families through the tax system, instead of raising perverse incentives to increase our numbers as is happening in several developed countries like Germany and Australia.

He responded by saying that Australia was a big country well able to absorb a bigger population. Due to question time pressures, I did not have the chance to point out that in fact Australia was a very fragile country ecologically, much of it desert and unable to withstand further big population pressures, but his reply demonstrated how out of touch influential and supposedly well-briefed people can be on ecological and population pressures.

Even so, there were some very interesting presentations.

The aim of the Report is to narrow the best solutions (in the opinion of the panel) down to ten from the original twenty. These will be covered in more detail in the Guardian next Monday, but all will be mentioned.

Thorium and fission

As a nuclear skeptic, I found the presentation on the Thorium alternative to Uranium energy fission by Kirk Sorensen, an aerospace and nuclear engineer from Alabama USA, quite compelling. I spoke to him later and he is basically an advocate for developing the Thorium fission process as a far more effective energy performer than the uranium fission path. He said Thorium was ignored because the US Government wanted to make weapons grade material via Uranium and consequently went down the nuclear/uranium development path. His blogsite, he says, has all the details: www.energyfromthorium.com or www.thoriumenergy.blogspot.com

Improving grass to capture more Carbon gases

Another presentation of interest was by Tony Lovell on soil carbon and redefining grazing habits in arid areas to improve grass quality and consequently carbon capture. A further interesting presentation was by UK scientist, Mike Mason, who looked at an Australian company domestic ceramic fuel cell appliance called BlueGen. This seemed to promise a lot.

Cloud-seeding

A Professor Salter has also been trying to get £25m funding for 6 years to complete development for around 50 cloud seeding ships to reflect more solar energy back into space. Again, this was compelling in its simplicity. To find out more go to www.see.ed.ac.uk/-shs then browse to climate change.

Leggett on Solar

Jeremy Leggett of SolarCentury photovoltaic company made a good presentation on increasing solar power cells, claiming that 116% of UK power needs could potentially be provided by solar power, if north and south facing roofs of all UK properties were adapted to use solar voltaic cells. He also mentioned a WWF UK report coming out in late 2009 "Pathways to a one planet economy".

Economics

Andrew Simms of the (UK) New Economics Foundation gave a very assured presentation on Do Good Lives have to cost the Earth? It seems they are all following the UK Sustainable Development Commission's groundbreaking Prosperity Without Growth report published April 30, 2009. I hope to get in touch with him on several related issues.

Lifeboats and overpopulation

Andrew gave a good analogy on the thinking of many modern growth economists, quoting a now deceased economist Mesham. "A man falls from a 100 floor building. As he heads down the 99 floors they say look he's still fine. Then he suddenly smashes into the ground. Too late! Another one was on lifeboats - from another delegate. "We need to plug the hole in the lifeboat and bale it out." The hole in this case being population. Most green groups are busy concentrating on bailing it out!

Brian McGavin