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Sir David King recieves major French honour

Professor Sir David King has been awarded one of the highest decorations in France.Medal_Dave3

He has been made an Officer of the Order of the French Legion and received his medal last night at a special reception at the French Ambassor’s Residence in London.

The Ambassador, Maurice Gourdault-Montagne, invited Sir David to accept the award on the instruction of President Sarkozy.

Sir David has been recognised for his contribution to the science of climate change, his promotion of nuclear technology for energy generation and his role in improving Anglo-French relations.

The Légion d’honneur or Ordre national de la Légion d’honneur was established by Napoleon in 1802. Sir David will receive the Officer medal, one of five categories.

Technically the award is restricted to French nationals but those from elsewhere can receive it for outstanding civil or military merit.

Previous recipients include actor Laurence Olivier, US President Dwight Eisenhower, Yugoslav President Tito, the playwright Harold Pinter and the sailor Dame Ellen McArthurMedal_on_cusion_small.

Sir David said: “I am delighted with this recognition by President Sarkozy of the importance of climate change, the role nuclear fusion power stations could play in defossilising our economies and the importance of British-French collaborations in managing these complex transitions.

“I am very pleased that the role I have played over the past nine years is being recognised.”

Breathing life into low-carbon cars

Being less bad is no good according to Hugo Spowers, the founder of Riversimple and designer of a prototype low-carbon car being built to run on hydrogen from natural gas.

At a Smith School seminar last night, Spowers stressed that the idea behind the car was not simply to reduce emissions but to eliminate them altogether.

“We are not going toSpowers_car_Picture1 get there overnight but we must make sure every step takes us closer to that goal,” he said.

The first model, known at the time as the Morgan LIFEcar, was no more than a “research exercise” but produced well-to-wheel emissions of only 51 grams of carbon per kilometre, compared to 122g for the Polo Blue Motion, the most efficient car available.

The design of the second model changed, matching the size of the smart car. This updated prototype, working name Riverside Mk1, is still a demonstration vehicle but can cruise at 50mph, emitting 31g carbon/km, against the smart car’s 127g/km.

“The big choices have been made with production in mind,” Spowers said. But he warned that fuel-cell vehicles were by no means the only way to cut emissions from transport.

“I am absolutely sure we need multiple solutions as a much more effective way of getting maximum utility from the minimum amount of energy available. That’s as essential for a stable technosphere as biodiversity is for a stable biosphere.

“Unfortunately that’s a very difficult message to get across to politicians and the media because, even though they say they want to be technologically neutral, they are all after the magic bullet.”

Spowers, a former motorsport engineer and racing driver, expects the first Mk 1 cars to be tested in 2011.

Batches of 50 will be trialled in 2012 and a production plant should open the following year.

The Riverside car will be leased rather than sold, costing around £200/month and 15p/mile. “We’re keen to see others doing it. We’ve had approaches from other countries and other manufacturers,” Spowers said. More producers would improve the availability, and reduce the cost, of parts and improve repair networks.

Boffins meet business to plan a green future

Powerful agencies that felt threatened by the need to switch to low-carbon, paid people to publicly doubt Sir David King’s authority to speak on climate change.

Sir David reveals, on a leading Australian radio programme, how he turned the tables on those questioners by exposing their backers which included Exxon Mobil and the US Enterprise Institute.

Robyn Williams, presenter of The Science Show, interviewed the School’s Director and four Smith School academics in a feature on the School, broadcast at the weekend.

Sir David explains how the School went global within a year of its launch with its highly successful World Forum on Enterprise and the Environment. He explains why we must defossilise our economies and says we have to recover from the compaceny of the 20th century. Businesses switching to low-carbon operations will “make a packet,” he says.

Dr Oliver Inderwildi claims we can keep on flying without hastening climate change. Singapore Airlines has cut emissions by 30 per cent on flights between London and Singapore, by using more efficient aircraft. Cleaner fuels and better air traffic management could allow the aviation sector to develop even further yet still cut its pollution.

Dr Mick Blowfield says we must engage with companies and industries regarded as ‘bad guys’, such as the palm oil industry, to bring about change. Many of them realise they must become more sustainable and that ignoring demands for greener practices will harm their credibility.

Businesses do want to act in this way but need to be assured they can do it without harming their profitability, Dr Bettina Wittneben says.

Developing countries, where people are living on just $1 a day, don’t have the ‘financial muscle’ to make environmental protection a high priority, Dr Chuks Okereke explains, which is why richer nations must fund the development and use of renewables and other low-carbon innovations.

Costing the Earth

Climate change is the war, President Nasheed of the Maldives says while Sir David King fears any agreement in Copenhagen could lack teeth. He adds that nations agreeing bi and trilateral agreements would be preferable to non-compliance with an over-ambitious new treaty. The President, Sir David and others were interviewed at the Smith School World Forum. A clip from Al Gore also features.

Costing the Earth BBC Radio 4

Delaying tough decisions

Policymakers are relying too heavily on predictions of the impacts of climate change, and claiming they need more research to delay making decisions and taking action.

Research by Dr Mark Charlesworth of Keele University and Dr Chuks Okereke of the Smith School also warns that decisionmakers are assuming impacts will take effect gradually without sufficient evidence.

Dr Charlesworth and Dr Okereke talk about their research. Smith School podcast

A 21st century cultural Renaissance

We are consuming too much too quickly, Sir David says in a speech to the Science Council. Listen here while following Sir David’s presentation.

The Science Show

Sir David King reveals how he exposed the powerful agencies behind unsettling questions, in a special programme on the Smith School broadcast by ABC Radio in Australia. The School has an international team explaining how we cope with climate change, sustainability and other challenges. Presenter Robyn Williams, interviews Sir David and four of the School’s academics.

The Science Show

India should agree new climate deal

India should agree to a new climate treaty despite richer countries’ responsibility for rising emissions, a new study says.

It is in India’s interests to help reach a new settlement if it is fair and rich countries agree to significant emissions cuts of their own, Dr Vijay Joshi and Dr Urjit Patel say in research published today by Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.

India’s co-operation could prompt China and the US to follow suit and win “first-mover advantage” in carbon permit allocations, the economists add.

Additional benefits could include a seat on the UN Security Council but failure to sign could leave India saddled with high-carbon assets and trade sanctions.

“It is not inconceivable that India could be isolated, and eventually be forced to accept an inferior ‘done’ deal,” the authors say. “India should regard the issue of climate change mitigation as a diplomatic challenge of getting the right terms, not as a bugbear to be feared and shunned.”

Talks to find a successor to the 1997 Kyoto treaty to stabilise greenhouse gases reach a climax in Copenhagen in December.

Dr Joshi and Dr Patel say the new treaty will only be successful if developing countries sign up because they will soon be contributing two-thirds of global emissions.

Granting India generous emission allowances within the new treaty would be the best way of drawing India in. Permits could then be sold to fund the installation of clean coal technology to existing and new coal-fired power plants. In this way, India would be compensated for the cost of cutting future emissions for several decades.

“It is obvious that coal will continue to be the dominant fuel for power generation in India,” the researchers warn. “But CCS is expensive and will almost double the cost of electricity from coal-fired stations, which consumers in poor countries will simply not be able to pay.”

India has pledged to stop per capita emissions rising above those of developed nations but has so far refused to accept binding emissions cuts.

This promise is not credible because of India’s unwillingness to join a treaty, Dr Joshi and Dr Patel believe.

They say: “India has a strong national interest in helping to secure a climate deal and should reconsider its stance and negotiate to join a mitigation treaty, say in 2020, if it can negotiate a fair deal.”

  • India and climate change mitigation, Joshi, V and Patel, UR, Working Paper 003 in Climates of Change: Sustainability Challenges for Enterprise, the Smith School’s Working Paper series launched in September 2009.
  • Dr Vijay Joshi is based at St John’s College, University of Oxford. Dr Urjit Patel is based at Reliance Industries Ltd., Mumbai and Brookings Institution.
  • The Smith School will publish around 12 working papers annually, showcasing the very best environmental and sustainability research and focussing on the challenges and opportunities for business in tackling climate change and related issues.
  • India and climate change mitigation is also being published in The Economics and Politics of Climate Change, edited by Dieter Helm and Cameron Hepburn and due to be published by Oxford University Press in October 2009. It will include contributions from leading climate change policy experts, discussions of the Stern Review on the economics of climate change, emissions reduction targets and the contrasting interests of developing and industrialised countries.
  • The Kyoto treaty was not signed by the US and other large emitters including Australia. India joined in 2002 and Australia signed up when Kevin Rudd won power in 2007.
  • Excluding Africa, India is more vulnerable than most other countries to climate change, which could disrupt the monsoons essential for agriculture and dry up major rivers.
  • Developing countries say industrialised nations caused climate change so must cut emissions themselves and fund adaptation elsewhere.
  • About 44 per cent of Indians are without electricity. Electricity use is about a third of that in China. Energy taxes are already relatively high in India.
  • Electricity from coal-fired power stations with CCS is between 66 and 100 per cent more expensive than coal from plants without CCS.
  • Russia won western help in joining the WTO when she signed up to Kyoto.
  • The Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment works with governments, the private and public sectors to find ways of tackling major environmental change. The School was founded in 2008 by a benefaction from the Smith Family Educational Foundation. Its work covers many areas and involves experts from across Oxford University and elsewhere. Professor Sir David King is the Smith School’s first director. Sir David was the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor from 2000 to 2007.

Smith School off to a flying start

The next generation is teaching us to care about our planet, Smith School benefactor Martin Smith believes.

It was his children, Katie, and especially Jeremy, who persuaded him that the School, which launched exactly one year ago, was the big philanthropic project the Smith family had been seeking.

Martin and his wife Elise had already made significant contributions to science and the arts, as founding supporters of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and creators of the Smith Centre at the Science Museum, opened by the Queen in October 2006.

But those ventures, and others such as Martin’s chairmanship of the English National Opera, his involvement with the Royal Academy of Music and the Glyndebourne Opera Festival, and the formation by Elise of a period instrument collection at the Royal Academy of Music, were not enough.

“We always had the idea that we would like to do one major philanthropic project if we could find it,” Martin says.

“But to be perfectly honest, I don’t think we expected it would be in the environmental field. We were attuned to this whole idea by our children, but like all the best things in life, it actually happened by chance.

“I had the idea that the restructuring of Templeton College in Oxford three years ago might be an opportunity to create the first environmental college in Oxford and Cambridge.

“But what came out of my research was the realisation that the big opportunity was not simply to create an environmental college but to create an institution that linked the whole environmental issue to the people who were most likely to be able to do something about it – the public and private sectors, or in other words governments and NGOs, corporations and private individuals.”

And so two years later, with the strong support of Oxford’s then Vice-Chancellor, Dr John Hood, the Smith School opened for business as a new University department, headed by Professor Sir David King who had just completed a seven year term as the UK Government’s Chief Scientific Advisor.

Finance

Martin Smith completed a degree in physics at Oxford University in 1964, returning to education after a five-year stint with Guinness’s in Dublin to study business and economics at Stanford University in California.  It was there that he met his American wife Elise.

He then worked for the management consultancy McKinsey for two years before beginning his 25-year career in investment banking.

But with time, and particularly recently, he has become increasingly aware of how much man is taking from the environment without giving a great deal back.

“I was conscious of the fact we were living in a wasteful world and, having a scientific background, I was aware that the scientific community was becoming increasingly convinced that rising levels of manmade carbon dioxide in the atmosphere were going to lead to global warming.

“So I was on my way to being converted, but as soon as I started studying the subject seriously, I began to see that here was an opportunity to do our major project in an area that is perhaps the most important issue facing the human race today. I felt it was a chance not to be missed.”

America

At the outset, the location of the Smith School was up for grabs. “In theory it could have been any major university in Europe or America. We were strongly inclined to do it in the UK rather than the States not least because at that time, the US position on climate change under President Bush made it difficult for an American University to have the international credibility the project needed.

“And once we had decided it was the UK, it was really Oxford, Cambridge or London but there were still two more things we needed. First, we were sure the School had to be near to a first class business school (the Smith School is a stone’s throw from the university’s Saïd Business School).

“And secondly, we felt that as the environment is in effect the ultimate multi-disciplinary subject, it was very important to be in a university that was highly integrated and where it would be possible to pull together people from physics or law, economics or business, or any of the major academic disciplines to work on these problems. But I wouldn’t deny there was an element of sentiment in the decision as well!”

Martin Smith is sure his choice of Oxford was the right one because of its range of academic excellence, demonstrated by the extent to which Sir David King has been able to pull together those interests. Proof lies in the School’s impressive array of more than 60 associate academics in the environmental field, spread across the university.

“The associate programme is in my view the most convincing evidence that Oxford was the right choice,” Martin says. “That’s not to say the School couldn’t have been established elsewhere, but it certainly has worked incredibly well at Oxford.”

Research

The Saïd Business School was established more than 10 years ago and the university’s Environmental Change Institute is also located close to the Smith School in central Oxford, providing world class research and teaching to students of the environment and other areas of study. So why was the Smith School needed at all?

“Firstly, we wanted an organisation dedicated to acting as a hub linking all academic disciplines. Prior to our arrival, many of the people involved in environmental studies at Oxford hadn’t met each other and didn’t know what each other was doing, so the hub role is already proving to be very valuable. And to ensure that the School itself is fully integrated, we established as a principle from the outset that every academic at the School be formally linked back to the department of their own underlying discipline.

“The second point was our commitment to linking the work of the university, in a very solutions-orientated way, to major players outside Oxford – corporations, government departments, NGOs and so on. In that sense what we wanted to do was to create a franchise of those external organisations supporting the School and, through the School, other parts of the university as well.

“And thirdly we wanted a School that was committed to teaching. We are still at a very early stage with this but it seems to me that it really is not acceptable for anyone to go through a major university these days and come out without at least a basic grounding in the facts of the science of climate change, the consequences of it and the broader environmental issues arising there from. That is an important part of the School’s commitment.”

The Smith School does not have its own students but does offer its teaching expertise to other university departments. Martin Smith believes that it is essential to instil an environmental consciousness in all of us if we are to successfully tackle climate change.

“But I suspect there’s a much greater awareness of green issues in the younger generation than there is in my own, and much greater acceptance of the problem. Part of the difficulty is that these are complex issues which are science based, and as a society we are not used to making cultural changes on the basis of what scientists say.

“Secondly, we are dealing with issues whose full impact will only be felt over quite a long time horizon. They don’t have the immediacy of a financial crisis or a war but over time they have the potential to be of much greater importance than either of those.”

Change

Things are changing, however, with media coverage of environmental issues spiralling and the interest of politicians increasing. “It has crept up on us and now there is almost an explosion in coverage.

“But perhaps most importantly we have leaders out there in major corporations and governments, people in positions of real authority, who have accepted that climate change is a problem and are beginning to take action, not just talking about it. That leadership is inevitably going to percolate down to the man in the street.”

Martin foresees the Smith School becoming one of many research and teaching institutions all over the world focused on environmental issues and influencing private and public sector decisions.

“I hope that in due course there will be a cadre of Oxford graduates around the world in leadership positions who will have been exposed to these subjects at our School. As the leaders of tomorrow they will begin to change the culture.

“It’s important we don’t think of the Smith School as being the only initiative of its kind. I hope and believe you will see more and more institutions like ours developing in the great American universities and in Europe and the Far East. We definitely want to lead the field but we don’t want to be out there by ourselves.”

Among Sir David King’s aims is to establish strong links with Harvard and Yale universities in the US and other major institutions across the globe. “America is rapidly developing a green consciousness. In one sense it is capitalism that has got us into this difficulty and so capitalism, supported by appropriate government intervention, is going to be the ultimate driver that gets us out of it,” Martin Smith says. “In effect we are looking at a whole new industrial revolution.

“More and more people can see that change is inevitable and will therefore start adapting their companies or creating new companies to take advantage of the opportunities this change is going to produce.

“The election of Obama is already beginning to release those energies in the US. The formation of new environmentally-orientated companies in Boston and Silicon Valley is accelerating at a phenomenal rate, encouraged in part by the fact that the administration is now taking a much more constructive view. I think we all feel that Obama is very sincere about this topic and that he’s a pretty determined figure, and so over time this will permeate through society as a whole.”

Martin Smith says he is “amazed” at the achievements of the Smith School in its first year. “Looking back at the research and publications in major journals, at the seminars and lectures, at the sheer quality and number of academics the School has attracted, all culminating in the World Forum in July, which itself was a stunning achievement, we really are off to a flying start.”

We are consuming too much too quickly

Smith School Director Sir David King will tonight call for a 21st century Renaissance in our approach to consumerism. Giving the Science Council’s second Gareth Roberts Science Policy Lecture, he will explore the role of science and scientists in seeking solutions to climate change and other challenges of this century.

Sir David will warn that we have been consuming too much too quickly leaving ecosystems – environments such as wetlands and forests which provide clean water, clean air and other resources – unable to replenish themselves.

Our growing population is causing terrorism to increase, hastening climate change and over-stretching energy supplies, Sir David will add. He will highlight the catastrophic impacts of deforestation, the need to agree a global deal to cut emissions and the cultural changes essential to rein in consumerism and bring about those emissions reductions.

The speech is at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London. Sir Gareth Roberts was the founding President of the Science Council, which provides a forum for 30 leading organisations.

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