 Panel Alternative Energies: Getting the full picture SATURDAY 13 OCTOBER 2007
If anyone needed reminding, all three panelists stressed that when it comes to tackling climate change the one thing we don’t have a great deal of is time. The day after former US President Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his campaigning work to raise awareness about global warming, participants were repeatedly reminded that the time to act is now. “We have perhaps ten years left to turn this thing around,” argued Jeremy Legget, a former campaigner with environmental lobby Greenpeace, who now heads renewable energy company Solarcentury. Herman Mulder, a climate change expert and former international banker recently described as “one of the most influential people in global finance,” agreed. “We have to look at whether we can accelerate the future because we need action right now,” he argued. Mulder said a crucial turning point would come in December this year, when world leaders meet in Bali, Indonesia to decide how to move forward from the 1997 Kyoto climate change agreement, which for the first time set binding targets for reductions of global greenhouse gas emissions. Whatever deal is finally thrashed out in Bali, Mulder argued that businesses would have to be involved. He added that there now seemed an almost universal agreement that companies must be key players in the fight against climate change. When world leaders first sat down to discuss the problem of global warming at the 1992 ‘Earth Summit’ in Rio de Janiero, attitudes were very different, he remembered. “In 1992 in Rio business was seen as a problem. Now it’s seen as an essential part of the solution,” he said. The panelists agreed that many firms were now taking the issue of climate change seriously. “I used to work for Greenpeace, so I know ‘greenwash’ when I see it,” said Legget using a term now commonly employed to mean whitewashing environmental issues. “There is genuine business leadership out there today,” he added, citing US supermarket giant Wal-Mart as an example of a firm that was making serious efforts to deal with its carbon emissions. Store managers were awarded bonuses if they could show they had reduced CO2 emissions in the premises they were responsible for, he said. In the UK, one of the major supermarket chains now includes information on the carbon footprints of many of the products it sells. For example, fruit imported by aeroplane would have a higher rating than locally produced equivalents. On the specific issue of alternative and renewable energies, Legett reminded participants that the greenest energy of all is the energy you don’t use in the first place. “Energy efficiency is the most important thing of all,” he said. Legett argued that if we only used the energy we really needed in the world, instead of wasting resources on a massive scale, it would actually be relatively easy to move to a “low carbon or even no carbon world.” He added: “By combining energy efficiency and renewable, this is entirely possible,” he said. Mulder argued the only way to wean the human race off of its addiction to fossil fuels is to make carbon much more expensive. High oil prices are going some of the way to doing this, but more was needed, he said. Governments need to put in place rigorous ‘cap and trade’ schemes, like the European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme, that restrict the amount of CO2 firms can emit and turn carbon dioxide into a scarce, tradable commodity. At present a tonne of CO2 traded under the European scheme costs a little over €20. If the system is to achieve its objective of encouraging consumers to switch to renewables, that price will need to rise hugely, to between €40 and €200 a tonne, he suggested. Legett said that all the necessary technologies needed to help people make the switch to renewables on a major scale now existed. All that was missing now was the political will to make the changes happen. For her part Christine Chauvet, President of the Supervisory Board of the Compagnie Nationale du Rhône, which runs a number of hydro electric power stations in France, reminded participants that there was another form of low carbon energy that they should be considering: nuclear power. “For a long time in France, nuclear power was considered a renewable,” she said, adding that even today 80 percent of France’s electricity is produced in nuclear power stations. Her co-panelists were more sceptical however. They argued that nuclear power was potentially extremely dangerous and that the full costs of providing electricity with atomic power stations had never been clearly calculated. ___________________________ |