Climate Change

This events firm, “established in 2003 by a team of professional, environmentally aware event experts,” have held conferences with over 4,000 attendees from 76 countries.  You should check out their upcoming events and visit their “live” blog from the conference they’re holding now in London.  They’ve got interesting content, including some “vlogs.”  One post, “7 Tips on Eating Differently to Impact Climate Change,” is right up my alley.  (More on food and climate change from me a little further on.)

I continue to be fascinated by the burgeoning of all sorts of new approaches to generating energy and saving energy.  I mentioned in my post from May 16 on the Large Cities Summit that George David, the CEO of United Technologies, had some fascinating things to say about using energy and the potential for radically reducing the amount of power we consume.  I also talked about the solar boat that’s just crossed the Atlantic in the post here.  I’ve touched on renewables any number of times.  It’s truly a brave new world.  So here are just a few tidbits that I wanted to share.

Geothermal at NY Airports and Ports – The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey runs the three big New York airports:  JFK, LaGuardia, and Newark.  The PA Chairman announced an initiative on May 17 that promised to “reduce global warming impacts of airports, ports by 80 percent.”  Nice.  How?

geothermal heating and cooling of buildings;

on-site power generation through the use of fuel cells;

use of renewable energy from wind and solar projects;

having planes use docking stations to power up at airports rather than idling their engines;

using electrified tugs and other alternative fuel rampside equipment;

using planes like the A380 to carry more passengers on flights that also are more environmentally efficient, and;

offsetting greenhouse gas emissions by purchasing renewable energy credits.

Now I can tell you that when I was with the NY State Department of Environmental Conservation in New York City throughout most of the 1990’s, the Port Authority was one of our nightmares:  oil spills, leaking underground tanks, improper storage of hazardous material, etc.  They’ve come a long way, baby. 

Solar Flashlights – In a great “NY Times” article, we learn that “close to two billion people around the world go without affordable access to light.”  Along comes Mark Bent and he comes up with an idea and spends $250,000 to develop and manufacture a solar-powered flashlight.  Read all about it at his website, BoGo Light.  This couldn’t be a better story.  I guess it could if this program gets seriously funded.

Solar Cookers – There’s the even simpler technology of using the heat from the sun to cook food.  I talked about this in my post from May 12.  Sustainable development should mean deploying the best ideas that work easily and well and are cost-effective.  Solar cookers meet all those criteria.  This is a low-tech solution with enormous potential and should be funded commensurately. 

REEEP – On the policy front, check out the excellent work of the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership.  They’re in business to “accelerate and expand the development of renewable energy and energy efficiency systems” and they’re operating all over the world.  This is exactly the sort of partnership of governments, business and NGOs that is really changing the face of things. 

Wind Fins – Here’s a technology in development that promises to allow much smaller-scale deployment to exploit wind power.  To read more about this pilot, being developed in Montana, check out this article:  Wind Fins To Help Farmers Turn Breeze Into Cash. 

Not incidentally, the source for this story, CarbonFree, has a great news service.  Subscribe and don’t wait for me to give you the heads up on these stories.

See How Your Car is Doing for MPG… and if you can do better.  Check out this gadget at the Sierra Club’s website:  MPG calculator.

So, earlier this week I dropped in to the Carbon Finance & Investment Summit – “Where Carbon Players Come To Do Business.”  Okay.  I sat in on two sessions:  Carbon Funds’ Plans And Strategies In The Carbon Space and Private Equity And Hedge Funds’ Plans And Strategies In The Carbon Space.  Of the twelve worthy gents on these two panels, only one represented an organization that was not for profit:  the multilateral development bank known and loved (sometimes) as the World Bank.  Not incidentally, their FAQ on carbon finance is worth seeing.  They keep the official tab on carbon trading and estimate that last year $22 billion was traded.  That number has been rising quickly and will continue to curve upward as more regulatory regimes come on line:  California and her western partners, RGGI in the Northeast, and eventually, inevitably a market mandated by federal legislation.  (Most of one group of panelists picked 2009 for the advent of a U.S. cap-and-trade system and its being brought on-stream within a year or two after that.)  Most of these folks, like the USCAP folks, are leery of several different regulatory regimes and are hoping that a national system will happen sooner rather than later.  Beyond that, they hope for a well-integrated international regime that will allow transparency, and “fungibility,” as one person put it, and long time frames for the environments in which their investments will be made.  One handout, a policy brief from the Milken Institute, describes a program design for U.S. cap-and-trade.  (On-line registration is required to get the brief in pdf, but the process is quick and free.) 

Now these “players” are not all in carbon trading alone.  In fact, many of them are in renewable energy finance and other less risky ventures.  “Technological risk” was a recurring theme in the two hours of discussion I heard.  They’re looking at all sorts of things like sequestration and storage projects; all manner of power plants, including nukes and coal, as well as hydro; methane recovery; and work in the steel and cement sectors.  (Go to the event brochure above and find the scores of companies that have interests in all this activity and what they’re doing.) 

So the good news is that there’s all these billions of dollars chasing good projects.  Now far be it for me to impugn the profit motive.  Seriously, I come at Adam Smith from the view that he held the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow previously held by his teacher, Francis Hutcheson, a seminal force in the Scottish Enlightenment.  (For a really great read, try How the Scots Invented the Modern World.)  Adam Smith is the father of modern political economy, and I wholly endorse his guiding principles.  However, it has to be remembered that these included a generous wariness for the potential rapaciousness of human economic activity.  So, when a room of 500 Western capitalists, controlling a truckload of money, are told that their common goal is “return on capital,” that legislators need to be “educated,” and that government never invented anything useful (offered as a perfectly gratuitous response to an innocent question about the influence of government R&D on technology), then I start to get a little nervous.  I get nervous about the implications for public policy if the financial industry forgets that it’s actually not all about “return on capital” but about building sustainable, fair and prosperous societies where acute income inequality is something devoutly to be avoided.

’Nuff said.

My colleague, Derek Catsam, has been doing some great work on Africa. One of his latest posts is on Africa and Climate Change. See some of the important themes he’s developing, including Capetown as a “green” city. While you’re visiting, read up on some of the many important issues associated with Africa and Derek’s astute take on them.

Carbon Offsetting – I’ve touched on offsets a few times along the way since March:  in “The Business of Green” and in Markets, and of course, in the last post below from Kate Hamilton on Carbon Expo.

Here’s a succinct description of offsets from a “NY Times” article from May 8, Sale of Carbon Credits Helping Land-Rich, but Cash-Poor, Tribes:  “Carbon is a constituent of heat-trapping gases like carbon dioxide. Trees can pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon in their tissue. Companies may be able to offset the carbon dioxide they send into the atmosphere by paying for projects that pull carbon out of the atmosphere.”  Also, here’s a great article from “USA Today” that talks specifically about offsets for travel.  There’s an awful lot of back and forth on what constitutes an offset and how much one should charge for it.

Now comes a cautionary article from the venerable “Financial Times” - Beware the carbon offsetting cowboys, the risk of fraud being a real danger.  (This article comes courtesy of the estimable World Business Council for Sustainable Development.) 

There is a considerable concern, understandably, about standards - in evaluating projects, in pricing, in how to trade and charge commissions, etc.  There is work afoot on a Voluntary Carbon Offset Standard.  The Climate Group, among others, has been assiduously working on this.

Fear and Loathing in Coal Country – An opinion piece came across the transom that I thought should be shared:  Coal Man, from the “Wall St. Journal.”  Robert Murray is a coal-mine owner with $800 million in sales and 3,000 employees.  His case is that “The science of global warming is speculative,” and that cap-and-trade or some other constraint on coal production and use will bankrupt his industry and the American economy.  He’s outraged at the “collaborationists” in the corporate leadership community, such as those in the United States Climate Action Partnership (USCAP).  He accuses them of being more concerned with their bottom lines than about jobs and the economy.

Mr. Murray and the member of the WSJ editorial board who wrote this piece, Kimberly Strassel, seem to leave virtually no stone unthrown.  The headline writer is even in on the action, talking about global warming “hysteria.”  Mr. Murray refers to the “elitists” and “fear-mongers.”  Ms. Strassel gave us “collaborationist” here, the USCAP CEO’s are “polished titans,” in contrast to Mr. Murray who is “straight-talking,” and a “no-nonsense guy.”  Mr. Murray is like “… most honest participants in this debate.”  As Jack Benny might’ve said:  “Well!”

But the presumably dishonest folks at the IPCC have done precisely what Mr. Murray says they have not:  looked at the costs as well as the benefits of various mitigation strategies, and one of the guiding principles of USCAP is to “Be fair to sectors disproportionately impacted” and they discuss this in their “Call for Action.”  What Mr. Murray and Ms. Strassel seem to ignore, however, are the economic costs to the U.S. and world economies of not acting.  The IPCC discusses this at some length, as does the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, and the report from Lehman Brothers, The Business of Climate Change. 

Let me take a bit from an earlier post (If You Don’t Like Al Gore, Then …):  “Lord Peter Levene, chairman of Lloyd’s of London:  ‘We cannot risk being in denial on catastrophe trends,’ Levene said January 12 in a speech to the World Affairs Council at the National Press Club. ‘We urgently need a radical rethink of public policy, and to build the facts into future planning.’ See Lloyd’s webpage on climate change here.”

The War on Rachel Carson – Elizabeth Kolbert, the superb writer for “The New Yorker,” has another great piece this week:  Human Nature about Rachel Carson and her legacy.  “As much as any book can, ‘Silent Spring’ changed the world by describing it. An immediate best-seller, the book launched the modern environmental movement…”

So do we honor this extraordinary woman at the centenary of her birth?  No, a Senator from Oklahoma, Tom Coburn, has decided that she reported “junk science” and that he’ll hold up a bill honoring her.  See this article from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.  What’s Coburn’s main contention?  That Carson’s work in eradicating the indiscriminate use of DDT caused millions of deaths from malaria.  Only thing is, folks, that DDT was never banned as an anti-malarial pesticide, but for agricultural use.  See this from Wikipedia or this from the blogosphere.  What it comes down to is that Carson’s work, coming when it did, probably saved millions of lives.

Nota Bene -   I put Betsy Kolbert in a class with Rachel Carson.  Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is a stunning picture of what we’re up against in confronting the specter of global warming.  About 20 years ago, I was helping run a workshop on acid rain for some Sierra Club activists and we’d invited some press, not thinking anyone would show up, but lo and behold, a young reporter for the “NY Times” did:  Betsy Kolbert.  We thought that was cool and so was she.

Biofuels – “All that glisters is not gold” – In this item from Nature.Com’s excellent new blog, Climate Feedback, we read:  “Warnings that switching to biofuels as a ‘clean’ energy source could threaten food security and increase deforestation have become increasingly stark this week.”  Referencing a report from the U.N. on sustainable bioenergy, the good folks at Nature say that there are real concerns.  This is certainly echoed in what we’ve recently seen in Mexico regarding spiking prices for corn.  Here’s a blockbuster, How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor, from “Foreign Affairs.”  See also this thoughtful piece from two agricultural policy experts:  Don’t use corn for ethanol.

*********

Comments – Remember, we are here for you.  Please feel free to jump in and tell us what’s on your mind.

Yesterday morning, they had a press conference to wind the summit up.  As I sat waiting for Ken Livingstone to start the proceedings, I thought about how long it had taken to get here.  Finally, there’s enormous momentum from governments at all levels, as well as from industry and finance, and all working with the environmental community who’ve been calling for precisely this sort of action for years.  I guess I feel proud to have been thinking and caring about this for pretty much my whole adult life.  I’ve been frustrated, often, over the years, that more progress hasn’t been made, not only on climate change, but on renewable energy and conservation, and on providing intelligent, safe, sustainable approaches to economic development, on environmental protection and resource conservation.  It is gratifying, though, to see the intensity and the focus now.  Let’s hear from David Miller, the Mayor of Toronto, about the importance of the private sector in all this.

I’ve seen and talked to some far-seeing and remarkable folks this week, like Mayors Miller and Anderson, Kevin Hydes from the World Green Building Council, and others.  I have to say that among a group of imposing figures, I’m really impressed by Ken Livingstone.  His heart and his brain are clearly in this fight.  He seems a warm, poised, really smart and well-spoken man, and he appears to have a fine, dry British sense of humor.

He’s also a straight shooter.  The C40 will be bringing pressure to bear on the G-8 group in advance of their meetings next month.  He cited one (unnamed) member of the G-8 as “in denial” on climate change.  The presidential administration will change on January 20, 2009, and we will see action on climate change from the White House then.  You can get very heavy odds in favor of that.  In the meantime, jurisdictions like these major international cities, and other cities throughout the U.S. and the rest of the world; the states of California and New York, among others; regional groupings of states out West and in the Northeast; other countries like the United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan, as well as the European Union and critical agencies within the U.N. are not waiting.  In Congress, in spite of roadblocks being put up, momentum is also building. (Bill McKibben noted that, up until this year, Congress had produced “twenty years of inactivity—a remarkably successful bipartisan effort to accomplish nothing.”)

Here’s a release from the Greater London Authority summing up the summit.  Let me let Ken Livingstone get the last word in here about the importance of the work of dealing with the climate change crisis.  Good on ‘ya, Ken!

On Wednesday, L.A.’s mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa, announced his city’s Green LA plan, which incorporates a commitment to 35% use of renewables by 2020.  The Green LA plan is not unlike “PLANYC” in emphasizing energy efficiency, renewables, mass transit and alternative fuels for surface transport, etc.

The afternoon session, “Cities Can Thrive in a Low-Carbon Economy,” was led by Steve Howard from The Climate Group.  They launched a new publication, Public Private Partnership: Local Initiatives 2007, that day and it was highlighted in the session.  Two panelists, the mayors from Berlin and Mexico City, both had initiatives in the publication:  Berlin’s partnership with Johnson Controls on energy efficiency in buildings, and Mexico City’s partnership with the World Resources Institute on transportation.  (For other case studies, see Climate Group’s publication above and the website of the Summit.  Some really, really innovative projects.) 

The big news of the day, of course, was the announcement of the Clinton Climate Initiative putting together a group of banks and industrial corporations to underwrite and perform a $5 billion program of retrofitting buildings to maximize energy efficiency.  Here’s a clip of Bill Clinton talking about the program.  Ken Livingstone said later, that when this is further funded and all up and running, the energy efficiency program could reduce carbon emissions by 10% globally.   Meanwhile, also on Wednesday, the heads of thirteen national Academies of Science, issued a statement, in advance particularly of the forthcoming G-8 Summit (see my post on “Meetings”), calling for an intensified focus on energy efficiency.  Beyond that, the 13 national leaders of their academies of science called for further efforts on reducing deforestation and also increasing technology transfer to the developing world, particularly of “leapfrog” technologies. You heard this expression often at the conference, from Ken Livingstone and others.

In a similar vein, IBM last week announced their $1 billion plan to upgrade their data centers and radically reduce energy use.  “Project Big Green” will address IBM’s needs at more than eight million square feet of data centers in six continents.  See this video for more. 

 ***********

On another note, I had the pleasure of talking with Mayor Rocky Anderson of Salt Lake City about his city’s approach to solid waste management.  Here’s their webpage on “Salt Lake City Green.”   I got a moment to discuss with him my thoughts about solid waste management and how productive a holistic approach can be.  I articulated my ideas, gleaned from the best concepts and practices in urban sustainable development, in a comprehensive proposal for New York City’s modest 25,000 tons a day of municipal solid waste a few years ago and called the plan, Urban Gold.  The heart of the strategy is to co-locate a materials recovery facility (MRF) and other waste disposal facilities, such as pyrolysis or gasification plants (mentioned by London Deputy Mayor Nicky Gavron at several points this week, I might add), with industries that would use the recycled materials as feedstock for their manufacturing.  Mayor Anderson was good enough to say that he’d look at the strategy.  

The Summit started in earnest yesterday.  Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London, and Chair of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group, had some opening remarks, including these which are very direct indeed.  (The C40 is in partnership with the Clinton Climate Initiative.  I’ll have more to say about President Clinton and the CCI in a later post.)

In a separate panel later in the day, Livingstone gave considerable heart to NYC Mayor Bloomberg and other supporters of congestion pricing.  (I wrote about congestion pricing and New York’s big plans last month in Mike Bloomberg’s Earth Day.)  Livingstone cited the considerable success of the program in London and the acceptance by the public. 

It should be noted that in one year, the congestion charge has brought about a 38% drop in private cars entering London—twice the anticipated figure. There has also been a more than 80% increase in cyclists and a rise in bus passengers from four million to six million. This modal shift has been accompanied by substantial emissions reductions, including a 20% reduction in carbon emissions.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, the Vice-Chair of IPCC Working Group on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability,” reported on the state of the science and the good news and the bad news:  we are in very rough waters already with climate change and it’s going to get worse before it gets better, but we have the tools at hand to deal with the threat, if we apply the will and the energy.  I said it was up to political leadership and the publics they represent to address the problem.  He quoted Montaigne:  “Politics is the art of making possible what is necessary.”

George David, the CEO of United Technologies, had some fascinating things to say about using energy and the potential for radically reducing the amount of power that New York City consumes.  One chord that he struck that I heard later in the day is that the overall efficiency of power generation is 30% for central power stations and 70% for distributed generation.  You simply get much more energy output per Btu input when you locate the consumer close to the source of the power.  On the same panel, Chicago’s Mayor Richard Daley noted they have three million square feet of green roofs and they have a “green technology permit system” to help expedite new and retrofitted smart green buildings.  (See my last post and the discussion of green building.)  Both Daley and Toronto Mayor David Miller emphasized the message that there is economic opportunity – I do love that word –  in green tech, and also that there are tremendous savings to be made by government, commercial interests and consumers in all of this. George David again came back to the idea of opening up power generation to small suppliers and suggesting that the federal government needs to promote net metering.

So, in the panel discussion I attended later on decentralized energy, there were some interesting tidbits.  Nicky Gavron, a deputy mayor of London, led the panel. Rotterdam and Copenhagen’s mayors talked about their district heating systems that are hugely efficient and comprehensive.  New York’s electric utility, Consolidated Edison, was represented by its CEO, and he talked about the highly efficient steam heating system we have.  Not incidentally, steam systems can also be engineered to provide cooling and are used this way.  The CEO of Britain’s largest electric utility, EDF Energy, also spoke.  They’ve got a considerable investment in renewables and are working with London to promote distributed generation through its new Climate Change Agency (LCCA). There were several folks in the audience who also spoke at Gavron’s urging, one of whom, Allan Jones, is with the LCCA, which is developing a number of important pathways for low-carbon energy.  Jones pioneered Woking’s innovative energy project where they’ve had nothing but success in saving money and cutting carbon use.  Tom Casten, head of Primary Energy, spoke rather passionately and well about local generation of power.  George David of UTC had earlier cited a number of 70% efficiency for local power.  Casten said 80%.  Here’s a convincing slide show from Casten that backs up his assertions.  See also this from the BBC on microgrids.  Finally, a consultant to Mayor Bloomberg on energy, Doug Foy, said that the City could be doing much more on locally generated power, as much as 2,000 mw or more.  Foy has had a distinguished career with 25 years as the president of the Conservation Law Foundation, and then he brought a new level of environmental thinking to Massachusetts, but resigned last year.

Thinking outside the box - or outside the grid - is what’s going to get us to healthy, low-carbon economies. 

The C40 Large Cities Climate Summit kicked off on a gorgeous spring day today in the Big Apple.  Thirty-two mayors are here with their delegations.  There are 46 cities represented, from six continents. There’s been considerable press on this, a couple of hundred by Google’s count, including this from Reuters “London mayor says cities lead on climate change” and this from one of our local radio stations, WINS “Clinton, Bloomy to Host International Climate Summit.”

JPMorgan Chase is the lead sponsor for this event and they made some news of their own with the announcement that they would make their climate change research publicly available.  Check out their climate change investment page.  This is good, solid, serious research that they’re putting out. 

I enjoyed going out today on the Swiss catamaran “Sun21” which just made the first transAtlantic voyage of a solar-powered vessel.  For a land-locked country, these Swiss are pretty good sailors!  You can go to the sponsoring organization’s website to see, among other things, a great little video.

But wait, there’s more:  The same folks, Transatlantic21, have created the “World Clean Energy Awards.” The jury for these awards, to be given in seven categories with the winners to be announced at the tenth annual Sun21 Energy Forum in Basel on June 15, included such luminaries as Amory Lovins from the Rocky Mountain Institute and Nicky Gavron, a deputy mayor of London and one of the organizers for the C40 group.  London, as you know, has been going full-tilt boogie to avert a climate change crisis, along with the U.K. government, and the rest of Europe for that matter.  (See my post from March 14.)  For a further look at what the Swiss have been doing, see information at SwissEnergy, such as this on renewables, and, from a consortium of companies, Solar Impulse, an attempt to go around the world in a solar airplane!

On the boat ride, I had the distinct pleasure of talking with Kevin Hydes, the current chairman of the board of the World Green Building Council. Their mission, among others, is to help foster the creation of national councils all over the world.  Kevin is the past chair of the USGBC.  They are the parent of the LEED Green Building Rating System which is the national benchmark for high performance green buildings.  LEED stands for “Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design” and has become a critically important tool in the green building movement.  The American Institute of Architects also has a Committee on the Environment (COTE) that has done, and is doing, pathfinding work.  I mentioned Randy Croxton (who I interviewed many years ago about the NRDC building in New York) and Kevin talked about Bob Berkebile, founding chairman of the AIA Committee on the Environment and a driving force.

Here’s Kevin in front of the Solaire which bills itself as America’s first environmentally advanced residential tower.  Kevin, when he was president of the USGBC, presented the LEED plaque that adorns the entrance.     

We were taken on a tour of the building, including seeing the photovoltaic arrays, the water reuse system, the apartments with all Energy Star high-efficiency appliances and low-emissivity windows, and the green roof where water is captured and filtered and which also diminishes the ambient heat.

All in all, I had a hugely informative and enjoyable afternoon.  More to come tomorrow on the C40 Summit.