Can we avert a future ice age by venting CO2 into atmosphere (I'm not being serious)?

November, it seems, is the month for energy meetings in London (or perhaps it is only now that I'm starting to get invited). Over the last two weeks I have attended the final meeting on the UK Carbon Capture and Storage Consortium, a Policy Exchange seminar on Combined Heat and Power, a Deutsche Bank meeting on Low Carbon Cities and finally the Royal Society discussion meeting – Towards a Low Carbon Future.

I could go on to write an essay about each, as there were a number of thought provoking presentations, but instead I'm going to crudely sum up what I thought were the overarching common lessons to be learned.

1) It is an absolutely critical time for low carbon research and despite the financial crisis (see below) we must double our efforts (see caveat in point 3 below).
2) Unfortunately it appears to be the case that the credit crunch has set back progress in low carbon technologies because credit is harder to come by and more expensive. However, it is anticipated that the sector will emerge leaner and fitter and will, because of a positive and (hopefully) long term policy framework, be a sound long term investment for the future. In other words, when cash is available again, the low carbon sector will look like a safe bet.
3) The need for speedy deployment of low carbon measures is no excuse for doing things sloppily or making elementary mistakes because projects were ill thought through. An excellent example was cited by Tadj Oreszczyn at the Royal Society meeting. In a domestic retrofit project a team was dispatched to improve the insulation of dwellings, and they did a good job reducing heat loss resulting in a 14% improvement. Once the dwelling was well insulated, a second team was brought in to upgrade to a more efficient central heating system. Measurements of the building heat loss after this operation showed that now the building was actually 1% worse than before any measures were applied. Why? Because the central heating team had drilled holes throughout the building allowing heat loss.

There's going to a cold snap this weekend, however, unlike previous years, there don't appear to be the fears over gas supplies to the UK. There are several reasons, but a key fact is that the recession is driving down energy demand (people are making less stuff). Coupled with this is the fact that gas prices, whilst falling, are doing so at a slower rate than coal and thus it is expected that power companies will switch to coal over winter. Obviously this will have knock on effects to carbon emissions.

Whilst gas supplies do not seem to be a danger this year, it has been argued that an electricity shortage is just around the corner and could be a real problem by 2015. The BBC surveyed a number of energy experts and the majority expressed concerns that the closure of coal fired power plants due the to the EU Large Combustion Plants Directive. The directive aims to reduce acidification, ground level ozone and particles throughout Europe by controlling emissions of sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) and dust (particulate matter (PM)) from large combustion plants (LCPs) in power stations. The result of the directive is that a number of coal and oil fired power plants will close around 2015 and there is uncertainty about replacement capacity to fill the gap. Curiously, when I was working at the Royal Society of Chemistry, we were more worried about the period around 2023, where all but one of the UK nuclear power plants is due to close. Perhaps we were thinking too far ahead!

The ambition for a significant EU demonstration programme of coal fired power plants designed to capture, transport and store carbon dioxide is in danger of being curtailed. France has proposed to scale back the programme budget, which aims to demonstrate 10-12 CCS plants in Europe by 2015, from €10 billion to between €2 and 4 billion.

Finally, amidst all the fears and efforts on global warming, it appears that we are heading, in 10,000 years or so, for an ice age. However, don't panic, as the event will probably be averted because of the global warming we are committed to. Even if global warming has been completely negated, then we will have accrued rather large reserves of CO2 trapped underground that could be released to warm things up a bit (I'm joking here, although perhaps I may be being foolish to assume someone wouldn't consider this).