After participating in a three day American Renewable Energy Conference in Aspen, Colorado, I have come away feeling even more concerned by indications that climate change is feeding on itself. But I am also heartened by news of remarkable actions underway in the financial and industrial sector in the US and Asia.
The Aspen Conference drew together a wide selection of US opinion leaders and decision makers including from the movie industry, Mariel Hemingway and Val Kilmer; from industry and finance, Charles Johnston, President of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, and Sam Wyly, a computer billionaire and the driving force behind Green Mountain Energy, and Wyly’s investment banker daughter, Christiana; Colorado's Governor Bill Ritter, who first sold Barack Obama on the idea of a green energy economy; world renowned environmental visionaries such as Lester Brown and Amory Lovins; Retired General Wesley Clark, former NATO Supreme Commander and now an energy entrepreneur; and a host of energy entrepreneurs, inventors, scientists and environmental leaders.
The news we all heard was quite sobering- a rapid shrinking of glaciers and Arctic sea ice that is in turn reducing reflectivity of incoming solar radiation and adding to warming, reports of rapid increase in methane release from thawing Arctic permafrost, and disturbing news that the Amazon is near a tipping point that may dry out much of the forest canopy thus converting as much as 40% of the remaining tropical forest to savanna.
Amidst all this gloomy news were some bright signs: evidence that Colorado, a major fossil fuel producing state, is moving rapidly to become a leader in solar and other forms of renewable energy, indications that major financial firms are much more aggressively seeking to invest in clean energy, and perhaps most encouraging is that some green investment funds are significantly outpacing market indices in appreciation of shareholder value.
Most heartening were reports from China of a dramatic greening of this nation that recently passed the US in national greenhouse emissions. A seemingly well founded rumor swept this conference that the top leadership in China has already decided to announce a dramatic increase in renewable energy investment and possibly commit China to unilateral greenhouse emission limits and that China might announce this well before the opening of the December 2009 Copenhagen Climate Conference. Not only would this revitalize the seemingly stalled climate negotiations, it might greatly enhance the prospects of climate legislation in the US Senate. Such a Chinese announcement would refute arguments of opponents of climate legislation that US actions would be of little benefit if China did not take concurrent action. It would also enable Senators favoring climate action to win over wavering colleagues by arguing that US failure to act would amount to ceding the world's rapidly growing clean energy market to China. Although the possible Chinese clean energy announcement was still rumor, the Wall Street Journal reported in an article in its August 22-23 edition that BYD, a Chinese automaker part-owned by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway, would market an all electric battery car in the US in 2010, a year ahead of schedule. Coming on the wake of GM's promising report on its Volt and indications that California-based Tesla Motors will produce an electric sedan by 2011, this seemed to portend a spirited competition to bring the electric car to the mainstream.
Yet encouraging as these developments are in slowing the growth of carbon dioxide emissions, they are likely to do little in the near term to reduce the radiative forcing that is driving warming today and speeding glacial and sea ice melt and triggering methane release from the tundra. As discussion at this Aspen meeting made clear, reductions in black carbon, a principal component of soot, may be the closest thing there is to a magic bullet in our efforts to prevent runaway climate change. Black carbon particles have a powerful effect in absorbing solar radiation and it is estimated that from 2000-2003 black carbon had a radiative forcing effect roughly equal to 55% of the total forcing by carbon dioxide.[1] Even that may be an underestimate as it doesn't factor in likely changes in snow and ice albedo by the deposition of these particles in the Himalayas, Andes and other locations.
A win-win strategy in which Asia could play the decisive role is to target black carbon in a concerted effort that would simultaneously seek mass improvements in human health. The source of about 40% of global black carbon, Asia has about 80% of the residential sector black carbon emissions, likely the easiest and cheapest source for reductions. WHO estimates for 2004 indicated that global Indoor Air Pollution Deaths, essentially deaths from exposure to inefficient and poorly ventilated cookstoves, are just over 1.9 million roughly identical to those for HIV/AIDS, just below that of diarrhea, and about two and a half times of those who die of malaria. Outdoor Air Pollution Deaths, the great bulk from particulates that would be abated in a black carbon reduction effort, amount to about another 800,000 annually. It is estimated that most, perhaps as much as 85% of the roughly 1.9 million annual cook stove related deaths, occur among women and children.
Up until recently climate scientists and analysts have tended to give short shrift to black carbon because particles are in the air for short duration. Yet if practices don't change, these particles will constantly be replenished. The flip side of this is that reductions, if accompanied by systemic change such as a movement to much cleaner cookstoves, can produce dramatic reductions in radiative forcing. If we could accomplish a planet wide transformation of cook and heat stoves to be non-emitters or low emitters of black carbon, we would realize not only a huge reduction in mortality, but the beneficial effects to the climate will be enormous. Depending on the estimates of radiative forcing used, this might have a beneficial effect over the next 20 years roughly equivalent to converting every car now on Earth to zero greenhouse emissions.
Already vying to be a leader in low carbon technologies Asia can move us back from a climate precipice and save countless lives, by acting on such a doable transformation as stove efficiency. Rich industrial countries can reciprocate by co-financing such an effort and also move decisively to transform their own energy economies.
John Topping Jr, is the President of the Washington, D.C. based Climate Institute and a regular contributor to Cleantech Asia Online. He is a co-editor of Sudden and Disruptive Climate Change (UK: Earthscan, 2008)
[1] According to a clarificatory email sent by Climate Institute chief scientist Mike MacCracken, "this calculation was made for the period 2000-2003. Over time, the black carbon emissions change; because these particles only remain in the atmosphere for a week or so, the current emissions determine the concentration and the forcing. For CO2, the a decreasing percentage of the atmospheric perturbation persists in the atmosphere for hundreds to thousands of years, so the forcing for any given year depends mostly on earlier emissions. For example, current emissions are causing the CO2 concentration to increase about 2.2 parts per million (ppm) per year, whereas the total increase due to human activities is about 100 ppm, so four year's emissions (i.e., from 2000-2003) are only about 9% of of the total human influence to date on the CO2 concentration..
The 55% value is then that the current emissions of black carbon are causing an effect during this period that is just over half as large as all the emissions of CO2 during this period and earlier are causing during this period.
Over time, the CO2 effect will keep growing, so if black carbon emissions stay the same, over time their relative influence will slowly drop. What the proposed emissions cuts would do is to sharply cut them, for if emissions are cut in half, their relative influence will virtually immediately be cut in half."