Amid the pressures of the global financial crisis, some ask how we can afford to tackle climate change. The better question is: Can we afford not to?
Put aside the familiar arguments - that the science is clear, that climate change represents an indisputable existential threat to the planet, and that every day we do not act the problem grows worse. Instead, let us make the case purely on bread-and-butter economics.
At a time when the global economy is sputtering, we need growth. At a time when unemployment in many nations is rising, we need new jobs. At a time when poverty threatens to overtake hundreds of millions of people, especially in the least developed world, we need the promise of prosperity. This possibility is at our fingertips.
Economists at the United Nations call for a Green New Deal - a deliberate echo of the energizing vision of President Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Thus the U.N. Environment Programme has launched a plan for reviving the global economy while dealing simultaneously with the defining challenge of our era - climate change. It urges world business and political leaders, including President-elect Barack Obama, to help redirect resources away from the speculative financial engineering at the root of today’s market crisis and into more productive, growth-generating and job-creating investments for the future.
This new “Green Economy Initiative,” backed by Germany, Norway and the European Commission, arises from the insight that the most pressing problems we face are interrelated. Rising energy and commodity prices helped create the global food crisis, which fed the financial crisis. This in turn reflects global economic and population growth, with resulting shortages of critical resources - fuel, food, clean air and water. The commingled problems of climate change, economic growth and the environment suggest their own solution. Only sustainable development - a global embrace of green growth - offers the world, rich nations as well as poor, an enduring prospect of long-term social well-being and prosperity.
The good news is that we are awakening to this reality. We have experienced great economic transformations throughout history: the industrial revolution, the technology revolution, the era of globalization. We’re now on the threshold of another - the age of green economics.
Visiting Silicon Valley last year, I saw how investment has been pouring into new renewable energy and fuel efficiency technologies. The venture capital firm that underwrote Google and Amazon, among other archetypal entrepreneurial successes, directed more than $100 million into new alternative energy companies in 2006 alone.
In China, green capital investment is expected to grow from $170 million in 2005 to more than $720 million in 2008. (In just a few short years, China has become a world leader in wind and solar power, employing more than a million people.) Globally, the U.N. Environment Programme estimates that investment in low-greenhouse energy will reach $1.9 trillion by 2020. The financial crisis may slow this trend. But capital will continue to flow into green ventures despite harder economic times. I think of it as seed money for a wholesale reconfiguration of global industry.
We can already see its practical expression. More than 2 million people in the advanced industrial nations today find work in renewable energy. Brazil’s biofuels sector has been creating nearly a million jobs annually. Economists say that India, Nigeria and Venezuela, among many others, could do much the same. In Germany, environmental technology is expected to quadruple over the coming years, reaching 16 percent of manufacturing output by 2030 and employing more people than the auto industry. Mexico already employs 1.5 million people to plant and manage the nation’s forests.
Governments have a huge role. With the right policies and a global framework, we can generate economic growth and steer it in a low-carbon direction, not unlike Roosevelt’s original New Deal. Handled properly, our efforts to cope with the financial crisis can reinforce our efforts to combat climate change. In today’s crisis lies tomorrow’s opportunity - economic opportunity, measured in jobs and growth. Most global CEOs know this. That’s one reason why businesspeople in so many parts of the world are demanding clear and consistent environmental policies from their leaders. It is also the reason that global companies like General Electric or Siemens are betting their future on green. But it is important that the global public recognizes this fact, perhaps nowhere more so than the United States. When Obama takes office, voters and elected officials alike should be reassured by studies showing the United States can fight climate change by cutting emissions - at low or even no cost, using only existing technologies.
As secretary-general of the United Nations, I have a special duty - shared by all - to give voice to the voiceless, and to defend the defenseless. We know that those most vulnerable to climate change are poorest of the world’s poor. They are also most vulnerable to the shocks of the financial crisis. As world leaders, we are morally bound to ensure that solutions to the global financial crisis protect the interests of all peoples, not just the citizens of wealthier nations.
Those left behind by the previous boom - the so-called “bottom billion,” living on less than $1 a day - must be brought into the next economic era. Again, a solution to poverty is also a solution for climate change: green growth. For the world’s poor, it is a key to sustainable development. For the wealthy, it is the way of the future.
Ban Ki Moon is the secretary-general of the United Nations.
This article appeared on page B - 9 of the San Francisco Chronicle
“People want to be religious, says scholar Karen Armstrong; we should act to help make religion a force for harmony. She asks the TED community to help her build a Charter for Compassion — to help restore the Golden Rule as the central global religious do”
Peace,
Bruce
Religious thinker Karen Armstrong has written more than 20 books on faith and the major religions, studying what Islam, Judaism and Christianity have in common, and how our faiths shaped world history and drive current events.
A former nun, Armstrong has written two books about this experience: Through the Narrow Gate, about her seven years in the convent, and The Spiral Staircase, about her subsequent spiritual awakening, when she developed her iconoclastic take on the major monotheistic religions — and on the strains of fundamentalism common to all. She is a powerful voice for ecumenical understanding.
Armstrong’s TED Prize wish asks us to help her assemble a Council on Compassion, where religious leaders can work together for peace.
“I say that religion isn’t about believing things. It’s ethical alchemy. It’s about behaving in a way that changes you, that gives you intimations of holiness and sacredness.”
-Karen Armstrong on Powells.com
The way I choose to perceive life makes all the difference. When i choose to see life as a gift - it is. When I am grateful, I am alive. Gratitude opens the door to freedom. And being grateful is simple.
By Douglas Fischer, Daily Climate
Posted: 11/21/2008 10:47:55 AM PST
There is energy to be harvested in deserts of Southern California, Arizona, Spain and Africa: Sunlight focused so intensely it can melt salt, vaporize water and run air conditioners from Phoenix to Seville long after the sun has set.
This is concentrating solar power, and it represents the best hope for utility-scale power from renewable energy and the surest way to get energy-sucking Sun Belt cities off carbon.
It’s also a technology you’ve likely never heard of, given the attention and credits lavished on rooftop photovoltaic kits.
Concentrating solar power, or solar thermal, is a world apart from photovoltaic solar, the world’s fastest-growing energy technology. Rather than use silicon-based panels to chemically convert sunlight to electricity, solar thermal uses mirrors to focus the sun’s rays on pipes carrying oil or other heat-absorbing fluid. Sunlight heats the oil to 500° C or more; hot oil flashes water to steam; steam spins a turbine; the turbine makes juice.
Simple? That’s the attraction.
“We’re going to see a lot more of these,” said Hanis, the solar association spokeswoman.
###
Tom Siebel, who made a big pile of money in the ’90s by founding Siebel Systems, is trying to squeeze into green.
Siebel is trying to put together a contest that will encourage companies to come up with HVAC systems and other technologies for relatively affordable, zero-energy homes. “They will be grid connected, but after 365 days the meter should read zero,” he said during the Global Technology Leadership Conference taking place at UC Berkeley today.
The contest, which is still under construction, will come with a few rules. For one thing, the homes have to be something the average American would want to live in. “You can’t solve the problem by sitting in the dark and freezing to death,” he said.
Second, they have to be cheap. Green homes now are generally bought by rich people in communities like Woodside, California. “They cost $1,000 a square foot” and are generally huge, he argued. Builders have also been reluctant to get into the market although that has been changing. (In a conference earlier this month, for instance, I learned that Webcor, the largest builder in California, earned more revenue from LEED buildings in its most recent quarter than traditional construction. Imagine that.)
The competition and fight for the strategic control of oil vs. the cooperative and independence inherent in renewable energy is an interesting comparison.
With this in mind… Anne Korin is a conservative worth listening too. She is the Co-Director of the Institute for the Analysis of Global Security. She points out a few key questions that are missing from many discussions about climate change, oil, coal, nukes, drilling, etc.
-Does America have the time to wait for the market to provide to solutions for energy independence?
-Are there times when government should intervene, like cap and trade?
-Why are we fighting wars that we are supporting both sides of?
-What real solutions can we do right now?
–Here is part one of seven…
And so…
-Will coal become less attractive because the Supreme Court has agreed CO2 is a pollutant and must be regulated by the EPA to mitigate climate change? Cick Here
-Will government step in with Cap and Trade to give renewable more advantage over fossil fuels?
As Obama has mentioned. Click Here
-Or will new innovations come forward that are more competitive than fossil fuels?
Like this study from Ausra about how Solar thermal power could supply over 90 percent of US Grid Plus new electric vehile auto fleet.
Three initiatives to dramatically decrease reliance on oil at Automotive News Green Car Conference in Detroit
Rocky Mountain Institute to convene a summit to bring together high-profile “off-oil” plans, launch “Project Get Ready” a 20-city initiative created at RMI’s Smart Garage Summit, and establish a clean mobility project in India.
Rocky Mountain Institute announced three initiatives today, including a summit to find common ground among the best features of several plans and foster consensus on national policy recommendations. Other initiatives will help lead the automotive industry’s transition towards lightweighting and electrification.
In his keynote address to the Automotive News Green Car Conference in Detroit, RMI Vice President and Practice Leader of RMI’s MOVE team, Michael Brylawski described the automotive industry as being on the verge of its fourth major shift—a shift toward lightweighting, electrification, and advanced digital technology that will fundamentally change the industry.
“The automobile industry dramatically shifted to mass production in Henry Ford’s day and then dramatically shifted again to manufacture tanks, planes, and other materiel during World War II,” Brylawski noted. “Later, in response to oil shocks and global competition, the industry shifted toward smaller cars—despite a brief SUV respite in the 1990s. The auto industry is about to witness another dramatic shift—to lightweighting and electrification. This shift, though, is fundamentally different for the industry because it will involve other large industrial sectors, notably our utilities and our buildings.”
Brylawski told conference attendees that this fourth shift is being driven by high oil prices and carbon dioxide emissions—two looming challenges that he said are pushing harder on the auto industry than any other sector. The outcome, he suggested, will include lighter products (for greater fuel efficiency) and electrified or partially electrified vehicles that will connect to the grid via homes and offices.
At the conference, Brylawski also announced three Rocky Mountain Institute projects aimed at reducing U.S. dependence on oil: The RMI/Brookings Oil Solutions Initiative, Project Get Ready, and RMI’s India Initiative.
The RMI/Brookings Oil Solutions Initiative is an effort to find common ground among the best features of several plans and foster consensus on national policy recommendations. “Project Get Ready” will work with a number of cities to break the barriers and build the alliances necessary to accelerate the adoption of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEV), and create an electrified, grid-tied infrastructure. RMI’s India Initiative is an effort to work with stakeholders in India to address the next generation of mobility problems with innovative design-based solutions—which would be ultimately applicable in the United States.
“The important thing to remember about this fourth shift in the U.S. auto industry is that it’s going to have some truly positive outcomes—reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, reducing dependence on foreign oil, and creating an entirely new American industry: green cars,” Brylawski added. “Americans are watching Detroit go downhill at the moment, but there could be a very bright lining to this economic crisis if the American auto industry can make the fourth shift.”
This is a must see video if you are at all interested in electric cars, climate change, the economy and solutions.
It is a conversation with Shai Agassi and Tim O’Reilly at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.
We live in amazing times.
Peace,
Bruce
Better Place is working to build an electric car network. using technology available today. The goals? Sustainable transportation, global energy independence and freedom from oil.
There is a solar energy movement happening that must be shared.
It is in fact much more than solar energy but an empowering paradigm shift in education… allowing individuals to shine as they are. Regardless of poverty, illiteracy, race, language, nationality or gender. Talk about a level playing field. This program is doing such good works.
Please take a moment to review the video. It will inspire you to know that even in the poorest of villages, illiterate barefoot women are studying and becoming solar engineers and then empowering their village with their new skills. Amazing.
Peace,
Bruce
The Barefoot College, in Tilonia, Rajasthan, India, is empowering women to make a difference in their communities that would never have happened by themselves. The Barefoot College is a place of learning and unlearning. It’s a place where the teacher is the learner and the learner is the teacher. It’s a place where NO degrees and certificates are given because in development there are no experts-only resource persons. It’s a place where people are encouraged to make mistakes so that they can learn humility, curiosity, the courage to take risks, to innovate, to improvise and to constantly experiment. It’s a place where all are treated as equals and there is no hierarchy.
“So long as the process leads to the good and welfare of all; so long as problems of discrimination, injustice, exploitation and inequalities are addressed directly or indirectly; so long as the poor, the deprived and the dispossessed feel its a place they can talk, be heard with dignity and respect, be trained and be given the tools and the skills to improve their own lives the immediate relevance of the Barefoot College to the global poor will always be there.”
Here’s the video…
“The rural poor must satisfy basic minimum needs like drinking water health educational employment etc. to improve their quality of life. Billions of dollars are spent every year in the name of the poor to provide these services. Colleges, research institutes, and funding organizations employ urban-trained, paper-qualified professionals to provide these services at tremendous costs. But there will always be a vested interest to keep the rural poor because thousands of jobs are at stake and poverty is big business.
The belief of the Barefoot College is that development programs do NOT need urban-based professionals because para-professionals already exist in the villages whose wisdom, knowledge and skills are neither identified, mobilized nor applied just because they do not have an educational qualification.
This belief was put into practice 33 years ago in all the development program dealing with improving the quality of life.”
Here is the founder of Barefoot College, Bunker Roy…
Skoll Foundation Visit to Barefoot College Tilonia
SolarEnurgy.net is powered completely by solar, wind and renewable energy to the tune of 130% of the data center power consumption, so we're not only neutralizing our carbon footprint, but also pumping an extra 30% of green energy back into the power grid! A light footprint.
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