New National Model Energy Code Boosts New Home and Commercial Building Energy Efficiency by Historic 30% Levels | |||
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Young people are being urged to join the debate on renewable energy after new findings showed older generations are blocking the building of wind farms.
- 75 per cent of people would support having a wind farm built near their home
- Only one third of wind farm applications are approved by councils
- Older generations are far more likely to oppose developments than young people
Following news that councils are rejecting two thirds of wind farms applications, independent research has highlighted a huge divide in opinions between old and young on the developments – with concerns over spoiled views so far winning over planning committees rather than protecting the environment for future generations.
More than 75 per cent of people polled said they would be in favour of plans to build a wind farm producing green energy close to where they live, with 86 per cent of 16 to 34 year olds surveyed saying they would back the proposals. Nobody under the age of 24 said they would oppose a wind farm in their area.
However, only one third of wind farm planning applications are actually getting approved.
The research showed that just 61 per cent of over 55s were in favour of building a wind farm near their home. Twice as many retired people opposed wind farms than those who are working.
Spoilt views and increases in noise were the main concerns of those who said they oppose wind farms.
Those in favour said protecting the environment for children, and renewable energy being the only way forward were the main reasons for supporting developments.
Manchester-based public consultation firm IPB Communications –which commissioned the research – presented its findings at the 2010 Renewable UK Conference in Glasgow.
John Quinton-Barber from IPB Communications and speaking at the conference said: "Younger people are clearly in favour of building wind farms for green energy – but they are not getting their message across.
"It is these generations, and their children, who are going to have to live with the long-term consequences of climate changes, so it is vital they stand up and have their say now.
"At the moment the statistics don't add up. The opinions of older people seem to be taking priority when it comes to decision making. The silent majority need to find their voice and take their views to councillors when it comes to renewable energy."
| China suffers diesel shortage, disrupting industry | |||
| Nov 8, 2010 | Associated Press Online | ||
| By JOE McDONALD
BEIJING, Nov. 8, 2010 (AP Online delivered by Newstex) -- Aggravated Chinese truck drivers parked for hours to buy rationed diesel Monday as shortages blamed on a government conservation campaign and possible hoarding by state oil companies disrupted industry and trade.
Supplies ran low after thousands of factories bought diesel generators to cope with power cuts imposed by authorities to meet energy-saving goals. That boosted already strong fuel demand amid rapid economic growth and complaints that major suppliers are withholding diesel to pressure Beijing to raise government-set retail prices.
In the southwestern city of Chongqing, truck driver Peng Yun was just back from what should have been a three-day trip to neighboring Yunnan province. He said it stretched to five days after he had to stop six times for a partial tank of fuel.
"In one place the filling station ran out, so I had to wait overnight until they had diesel again the next day," said Peng, 24. "Now I dare not drive that far because I can't get diesel."
The shortages are symptomatic of the costly side effects of the communist government's crude tools for regulating a complex, fast-changing economy.
Local authorities imposed rolling blackouts on factories in August after Beijing called for efforts to curb surging energy demand, pollution and emissions of climate-changing greenhouse gases. That came after a campaign to make China's energy-guzzling economy more efficient suffered setbacks early this year due to due to a stimulus-fueled boom in steel, cement and other heavy industry.
Diesel supplies already were tighter than usual after refineries shut down in August and September for maintenance and demand from farmers and fishermen rose, said Tom Reed, London-based Asia energy editor at Argus Media, an energy news agency.
"It's kind of a perfect storm" that caused "a significant squeeze on the wholesale market," Reed said.
Fuel shortages were reported in areas from Dalian, a northeastern port, to Hangzhou on the east coast and Kunming in the southwest.
Some Chinese media and industry analysts blamed the shortages on China's major state-owned oil companies, PetroChina and Sinopec. (NYSE:SNP) They said the companies are withholding supplies while they wait for Beijing to boost retail prices that were left unchanged while global crude costs climbed from $70 a barrel at the start of the summer to nearly $90 now.
PetroChina and Sinopec are "stockpiling diesel in an attempt to blackmail the NDRC (China's main planning agency) into announcing another price rise," said Zhao Jingmin, an oil analyst for the industry website Chinachemnet.com.
Phone calls to the press offices of PetroChina and Sinopec were not answered.
The NDRC, or National Development and Reform Commission, and its energy agency did not immediately respond to questions about what the government was doing to restore normal diesel supplies.
China's economy regularly is disrupted by government intervention in energy industries.
In 2007, the country suffered gasoline shortages after refiners cut production in response to price controls. The next year, parts of China shivered through blackouts in bitter winter cold after the government froze power prices, prompting utilities to cut expenses by letting coal stockpiles run low.
The refinery shutdown was prompted in part by government orders to upgrade facilities after a July pipeline explosion in Dalian dumped crude into the sea, said Liao Kaishun, an oil analyst for the firm C 1 Energy.
The overhaul "reduced the monthly transport of diesel fuel from northern to southern China by at least hundreds of thousands of tons," Liao said.
The shortages will ease if refiners make good on promises to raise output, said Argus Media's Reed. He said China is likely to fill the gap temporarily with imports, which would benefit refiners elsewhere in Asia.
In Shanghai, China's business center and busiest port, deliveries by Tianbang Logistics Co., a trucking company, have been delayed by two days while its drivers wait in line to buy fuel, according to a dispatcher there.
"Our clients are not happy at all," said the dispatcher, who would give her name only as Miss Xun. "We don't have any way to solve it so far."
In environmental terms, the power cuts have backfired by prompting factory managers to buy dirtier, more expensive diesel generators.
"The only solution is to begin supplying more power," said Citigroup (NYSE:C) economist Ken Peng.
In southern China, more than 2,000 privately owned filling stations China have run out of diesel, the government's Xinhua News Agency reported, citing the China Chamber of Commerce for the Petroleum Industry.
Others limited drivers to a half-tank or less or served only regular customers, according to drivers and news reports. Xinhua cited one driver who got extra fuel by slipping a filling station employee a 50 yuan ($7) tip.
Truckers from out of town were stuck Monday in Changsha, in Hunan province in southern China, because they cannot find fuel, according to Rednet.net, a news website run by the provincial government.
An employee of a Changsha filling station, who would give only his surname, Xie, said the station last obtained diesel on Oct. 26. He said it limited sales to 30 liters (eight gallons) per customer but quickly ran out.
In Kunming, "you are lucky if you can get fuel after lining up for five hours," said a report on 163.com, another news website.
"We all know the final result will be a price rise so why not do it directly?" said one unsigned note on 360che.com, an Internet bulletin board for truckers. "Why make us wait for a whole night at a gas station?"
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Associated Press writer Gillian Wong and researchers Henry Hou, Zhao Liang and Xi Yue in Beijing and Ji Chen in Shanghai contributed.
Newstex ID: AP-0001-50494205 | |||
| Heroes wanted in climate science story | |||
| Nov 8, 2010 | USA Today | ||
| Dan Vergano
In a house in the woods, somewhere far away, perhaps lives someone who doesn't love a good story.
"Deep in our nature" lurks a love of story-telling, wrote the Greek philosopher Aristotle around 350 B.C., the world's first literary critic.
And psychologists and neuroscientists have increasingly backed up ol' Aristotle, looking at story-telling as something fundamentally human. Brain scan studies, for example, show listening to stories lights up more and different areas as children age. Alzheimer's patients loss of the ability to follow stories may be the most debilitating aspect of their dementia.
But despite the narrative neuroscience, some groups of scientists, particularly climate researchers, might want to polish their story-telling skills. Where 97% of active climate scientists agree climate change is a reality and only 52% of the public say they agree, according to an Eos journal survey, something may have gone wrong in how scientists communicate to the public.
"There's a narrative vacuum that needs to be filled," wrote the science writer Keith Kloor last month. One catch is that scientists simply prize facts over stories, as climate scientist Gavin Schmidt of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, noted last week on the " RealClimate" blog.
So is that the problem?
"Scientists, academics, and politicians on the left, do not do stories very well," says Harvard political scientist Michael Jones, who earlier this year led a Policy Studies Journal report on the use and misuse of narrative in policymaking. "You have to tell a story, though, if you want people to retain information."
Work that Jones did as a graduate student published this year, involved experiments on 1,586 people to show how this plays out in the way people talk about climate science. Each person was randomly treated to one of four opinion articles and answered survey questions about their climate opinions before and after reading the article. Each article discussed a recent report on the U.S. effects of global warming.
One of the four was simply a list of the effects of climate change from Alaska to the Atlantic Ocean, and points in between, such as "It is 66% likely that the Great Plains area will experience more severe summer droughts."
The other three options were all identically-worded stories, with the same facts as the list, but with the good guys, bad guys and solution for global warming swapped out. The options they looked at:
"Individualist" story — presented "free competition" as the hero of the story, with "bureaucratic unions" and "the infamous Club of Rome" as the enemy, with a market system as the solution to global warming.
"Hierarchical" story — presented "scientific expertise" as the hero of the story, with " Ecodefense" and the "infamous Earthfirst!" as the enemy, with nuclear energy as the solution to global warming.
"Egalitarian" story — presented "equal participation" as the hero of the story, with "the radical Cato Institute" and "selfish politicians" as the enemy, with "community-owned renewable" energy as the solution to global warming.
People were more likely to agree with scientist's views about climate change after reading a story, rather than a list alone, regardless of which one they read.
"But what surprised us was how much the hero mattered," Jones said. People liked the villains less after reading the story, but that didn't affect their views much. Instead, having a hero they liked made them much more favorably disposed towards a solution. "Simple stories with likeable heroes are the most effective, they make people overlook incongruent things in the narrative," Jones says. "Obviously, this has implications across a lot of areas."
The findings don't mean that scientists suddenly need to invent parables to reach the public, he suggests, they just need to do more than just throw out the facts and hope that will do all the work. Instead of simply listing the evidence for climate change in reports, and then hoping people decide from hearing it that climate change is real, the findings suggest that scientists would be better off presenting their results in a narrative targeted to their audience's likes and dislikes. Libertarians, for example, might better listen to the facts about climate change if business is presented as the hero that can save the day from ill effects of increasing temperatures. Environmentalists want to hear about renewable energy. Normal folks (that's the hierarchical ones) will listen better if they hear that national security is threatened by a dependence on fossil fuels.
Of course, Jones acknowledges that some portion of people just won't accept the evidence for climate change no matter how it is presented, where about 12% of the population was "dismissive" of climate worries, according to a George Mason University survey released in June. "Some of the opposition to addressing climate change is completely rational," he adds, coming from regions of the country, such as West Virginia, where coal and oil interests would see prices in their industries rise with efforts to account for the environmental costs of the greenhouse gases created by burning fossil fuels.
The results aren't too surprising, says science writer Chris Mooney, who presented an American Academy of Arts & Sciences report, " Do Scientists Understand the Public?" this summer, looking at steps towards smarter public discussion of personal genomes, nuclear waste, energy and other new technologies. "Scientists have started taking steps in this direction," Mooney says, pointing to the National Academy of Sciences working with Hollywood writers. "They just need to take more."
Scientists don't like to hear the story about telling stories, Jones adds. "One of the first places I presented this research was to scientists with the National Weather Service. They hated the idea that you have to tell people a story instead of just giving them 'the facts'," he says. "But the real question is do you want people to hear you, or not?"
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