UK Cap and Trade Tirades go on - by Peter Judge

Views and Opinions on Green IT (Feb 8 2010) Cap and Trade

1. 

   This week has been another turbulent one for the green tech agenda. The backlash against fair UK's CRC carbon trading scheme got underway, and the overall global warming science got another kicking in the press too. . 

   Firstly, the climate researchers whose emails were stolen got told off by the UK's information commissioner for not obeying Freedom of Information legislation. The group, at the  University of East Anglia denies the charge, and has its own inquiry underway. But even if they did stonewall requests for data - which may well have been vexatious and excessive - that doesn't undermine the data itself. The scientists are coming out of their shell, and the deniers are eventually going to have to accept there is no smoking gun here. Climate change is - to the best of our current knowledge - real. 

   The cap and trade tirades have the benefit that they are saying something that, on one level, is more or less true. 

   "Oh no!" people are saying. "Carbon trading will make things more expensive." Well yes, that's sort of the point of the thing. It makes polluting more expensive, so we don't do it. And it should make it comparatively cheaper to take an efficiency decision you might not take either. 

   But people are also complaining about the strange effects at the edges of the Carbon Reduction Commitment, where things may not work so smoothly. Last week we heard from a data center provider how his customers (outside the CRC scheme) would have to pay extra to use his data center resources which - because his company is a large one - are inside the scheme and subject to charges. It turns out, I should say, that the extra charge on them would be a few percent, and far less than the efficiency savings he promises.

   This week we heard from IT services company Morse, who said the CRC rules are full of loopholes, saying for instance that it would pay people to export their data centres elsewhere outside the measurement within the CRC. The UK's Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) defended robustly against this. The flaw in Morse's argumentl says DECC,  is that the CRC only adds an increment onto one part of the cost of a data centre. It's never going to be enough to drive a major decision like offshoring. And there is something strange and self-defeating about the idea that companies will export a data centre just to get it into a regime where inefficient money-wasting energy is not penalised. Apart from anything else, even without CRC, the cost of the energy would still be some penalty in itself.

   And of course, there's a growing argument that data centres could be exported for the opposite reason - to get them into more energy-efficient facilities. The climate in Ireland, or Finland or Norway, may be better for servers, so less air-conditioning is required.  

   But to the people who are surprised and shocked that cap-and-trade may cost them money, I say, well sure. It is a bit like the recycling schemes for batteries announced in the UK this week. They are going to put up the cost of batteries we are told. Well yes - part of the reason batteries are cheap is that people who use them don't pay to dispose of them. And part of the reason for making it more expensive is to change your habits, and get you to think before you waste any more resources. 

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