I’ve blogged on the image of bioenergy in the past.  Recently I came across this Lego(ish) toy in Hong Kong. What does it tell us about the image of solar energy? Solar = Cool!

The market for lego district heating is pretty slim, I guess…

Yesterday I had a feature article on print in the local newspaper Adresseavisen, dealing with NIMBYism. Warning: local content! You can read the article online here.

I’ve just arrived in Linköping, Sweden,  where I will stay for a month to investigate what separates the Swedish bioenergy experience from the Norwegian. I haven’t really had a chance to do anything yet (been here for less than a day), but while jogging today I noticed something really interesting which I think might be  related to Sweden’s high consumption of bioenergy[1].

At first during this jog I was quite cautious – after all, I wouldn’t want to get lost, would I? So, Isimply  followed the sidewalk next to the highway leading in and out of Linköping. On both sides of the road there was dense, dark forrest. Typically Swedish, eh? After about five kilometres I was quite bored with the scenary, and when I discovered a path leading into this forrest I figured checking it out  couldn’t do much damage.

To my suprise, however, when entering the forrest I found it to be more of a shell than anything else. The forrest was extremely dense wherever it faced a road or any other point where it could easily be seen by many humans, but on the inside what appeared to be a traditional  forrest was in reality as much a site for heavy industry as it was “nature”. (Pardon the somewhat crappy quality of the pictures, only had my cellphone cam).

The image above is taken from what appared to be some kind of central where different types of biomass are sorted in piles and containers. This particular site of the forest exaggerates the point slightly, but the rest of the forest displayed similar characteristics.

This image is perahps more representative. It is taken from just behind the dense “wall of trees” facing the road, but shows the difference between the wall or facade, and the “interior” of the forrest. I’m obviously speculating wildly and won’t draw any conlusions based on a small jog through the forest. The trip, however, reminded me of the claims of a Norwegian policymaker I have previously interviewed, who said that Norwegians would never tollerate the types of interventions into “nature” that the Swedish have had to endure  to achieve their high levels of bioenergy production. Perhaps this was the type of thing he was talking about?

Perhaps out of sight, out of mind shold be the next large policy-slogan for renewables also in Norway?

[1] This is the second time I collect data through jogging. I should write a methods-article on it..

Last week I attended the 15th annual sustainable development research conference in Utrecht, Holland. The delegates at the conference seemed to be a nice blend of various types of social scientists, (ranging from hardcore economic modellers to very qualitatively oriented anthropologists), as well as a few technically minded researchers and some consultants and others in the miscellaneous category. All had in common that their work and/or research in some way or another was related to the concept of sustainable development, and the conference motto: “Taking up the Global Challenge: Analysing the implementation of innovations and governance for sustainable development“.

The conference had an impressive lineup when it came to plenary speakers. Most notably, I guess, Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, head of the IPCC addressed the audience via satellite from India. His main points where not very different from those he made when I saw him speak in Copenhagen a few months ago. In addition to giving a general overview on the current state of climate science (as the IPCC sees it) and what we as individuals and societies should change (hint: meat is murder…), he announced that the IPCC would have it’s 5th assessment report ready by 2014 (..so don’t hold your breath). He also spoke a bit in general about TERI, a research institute he is heavily involved in, and played a video (as he did in Copenhagen) on their “lighting a billion lives project” (good project, pretty cheesy video, though).

Other plenary speakers included Dutch minister of the environment, Jacqueline Cramer, who interestingly discussed the relationship between humans and nature. Her main point was that we needed to find the right balance between “People, planet and profit”. This balance we would find, she suspected, if we take a “third way”, crafting a society where we both regulate and harvest the powers of the markets. Not very controversial, but good talk.

Another interesting keynote was given by Tariq Banuri from the UN division for sustainable development. One of his points was that if we looked at the world today as one nation – “Earthland” – it would actually be the one nation in the world where different types of wealth is most unevenly distributed. Earthland, he claimed, would in fact be a less fair place than for example South-Africa under apartheid. He had the numbers to back this up, too..

One of the themes of the conference was “climate change and energy”, a theme with three track sessions, one of which I presented in (in the track “impacts of large scale implications of biomass for energy”). On the first day of the conference I followed a track entitled “strategies for mitigating climate change and emissions trading”. The temperature of the session was extremely high [1]. One of the presenters was Phillip Vergragt, a pretty experienced fellow, very much inspired by STS, it seemed. He gave a presentation on carbon capture and storage (CCS), arguing that it was basically a niche aimed at perpetuating the old carbon regime, and that it would probably lead to what he labeled “enhanced carbon lock-in”. In other words: not good. This approach seemed to take parts of the audience by surprise, and a number of them were extremely infuriated by his provocative “unscientific slander”. It was really an excellent presentation, though.

Another session I found very interesting was one dealing with “long term change towards sustainable societies: scenarios, forecasting and backcasting”. The session was dominated by quantitatively oriented economists in the business of making energy scenarios for the future. It was all very impressive, but they all had a common complaint; they did not know how to quantify things like policies, behavioral change and public perception of energy technologies in good ways. I guess that means there is still work for us  qualitative-heads, then..

In-between these sessions I managed to catch various snippets of other things. Talks on law, someone arguing for the precautionary principle, discussions on innovation.. most of it pretty interesting, although the quality was variable. On the third day my focus was directed towards my own session. The night before and the morning of my presentation I was extremely nervous, but I think I managed pretty ok. I got some useful feedback and some nice comments, so I’m fairly happy. The session was, however, perhaps not the most fitting for my presentation – although it was related to the use of biomass for energy. The other people in the session were all pretty quantitatively oriented, either doing life cycle analysis, or assessments of the “sustainability” of various types of bioenergy in different localities.

So is biomass for energy a sustainable approach you ask? The answer seems to be very dependent on the local context and the case in question, so there is no easy “yes” available to sell to the policy makers, and in quite a few cases the answer seems to be a definite “no”.

All in all I realy enjoyed the conference. Utrecht was a nice place, and there were many interesting sessions. I might return in more detail with something related to specific presentations later, but for now this will suffice.

[1] Literally, as well as academically. While the temperature in the room was close to 40 degrees Celsius, some of the debates were extremely heated.

The second day of the climate congress has come to an end (well at least almost, there is still a plenary session which I might attend, and a conference dinner later this evening). I’ll begin the sum-up of day two with a sum-up of the last half of day one. Basically I spent the entire afternoon yesterday “hanging around” in the poster area of the conference, talking to various people about the contents of a poster which is my contribution to the conference. The format of the session was simple – whoever was interested came to chat, and fortunately quite a few people cared about the topic (the medias dissemination of climate science). It was particularly interesting to meet actual natural scientists who could confirm our basic argument about journalistic dramatization about the material. I also encountered several other Scandinavians working with similar topics, some of whom were really interested in initiating a broader Nordic All in all a good experience.

Today has been really interesting as well. I’ve been following two sessions. The first focussed on the potential and limitations of biofuels, the second focussed more generally on renewable technologies asking the question; how far can they take us. The argument of the first session can be summed up pretty easily. In a carbon-perspective first generation biofuels are bad, second generation biofuels are not that bad, but really not that good either (it depends…). Production of heat and power, however, are great. The main argument in favor of bioenergy for most speakers is it’s storage capacity, and the fact that it can often be applied in cases when other renewables cannot (try running a jumbo-jet on steam or batteries – we’re not quite there yet). The main conclusion seemed to be; “we need more time” or “we need more research”.

The same conclusion was reached in the session dealing with renewables in general. Giving room to speakers researching a range of technologies, the one thing they all seemed to agree on was the fact that things were difficult and that neither of the technologies are potential panaceas to the problems of energy or the problems of the climate.

All in all a good day, I might go more in detail about some of the talks later, we’ll see