No national leader has acted as imaginatively to rivet international attention on the need for decisive action on climate change as President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives. On October 17, he and his Cabinet donned scuba gear and dove to seats at an underwater table on the sea floor where they conducted a Cabinet meeting, using hand signals. The President, Vice President, Cabinet Secretary and eleven of his Ministers then signed a document calling on all countries to cut their greenhouse emissions. Soon after surfacing for air, President Nasheed flew to India to keynote the Delhi Conference on Climate Change: Technology Development and Transfer, a meeting attended by delegations from 58 nations.
Noting that the highest point in the Maldives is 1.5 meters above sea level, President Nasheed states that decisive international action to limit the pollutants driving climate change is a matter of life and death for his nation and a number of other small island states. Despite the slow progress in the negotiations leading up to this December’s Copenhagen climate conference, on many fronts there have been promising signs suggesting the world might act soon enough for the Maldives to survive this century.
A dramatic drop in greenhouse emissions, nine percent between 2007 and 2009, occurred in the US – the source of nearly a quarter of global emissions- and, although much of this was likely due to the recession and a rise in gasoline prices, some of this reduction may be due to increased efficiency and a shift to lower carbon fuels. This US shift began even before the impact of the green energy aspects of the Obama stimulus package. A decisive shift toward wind in new power generation seems likely to intensify. In addition, the perfection of horizontal drilling and fracturing of shale has greatly expanded the supply of recoverable natural gas, lowering its price and causing gas to replace coal in much of U.S. power generation. Although China has just passed the US in overall greenhouse emissions, its recent massive investments in renewables seem poised to establish China as the world leader in both wind and solar power generation. In hosting the Delhi Conference, India has signaled its intention to vie for leadership in the rapidly emerging clean energy field.
Just as the global financial crisis and recession gripping much of the planet seem to have dampened prospects for energy taxes or other charges on other greenhouse related pollution, some very encouraging studies have been issued suggesting that large greenhouse reductions are available at relatively low cost - and many come with a net savings.
The United Nations Foundation and the Center for American Progress on October 6 published an analysis indicating that achievable gains in renewable energy, energy efficiency, forest conservation and sustainable land use worldwide could achieve up to 75% of the emissions reductions needed by 2020 to place the earth on a path toward climate stabilization - and with a net savings of $14 billion in 2020.
A far more ambitious study by Stanford University Professor Mark Jacobson and University of California Davis researcher Mark Delucchi was just published in Scientific American mapping out a course to convert the electric power and vehicular sectors across the planet to renewable energy as early as 2030. Jacobson and Delucchi envision this occurring largely through wind, concentrated solar, geothermal, tidal, solar photovoltaic, wave and hydropower. By shifting vehicular systems from liquid fuels to electricity and slashing energy conversion losses they contend it would be possible to achieve a 30% reduction in global energy demand. At first glance this seems mind blowing and daunting but how many of us in 1990 would have believed a visionary who told us that we would be spending much of our lives glued to the Internet?
One of the things left out of Jacobson and Delucchi’s provocative analysis is the potential to harvest electricity from the waste heat in industrial processes. Tom Casten, a Chicago area industrialist and Chairman of Recycled Energy Development, has fought a long battle to get regulators in the US and Canada to remove barriers to such generation. In Denmark, Netherlands, Finland, and Latvia, between roughly half and a third of power generation comes from harvesting of industrial waste heat or some other form of cogeneration. In the US, due largely to anticompetitive rules lobbied into law at the state level by power companies, only about 7% of electricity comes from energy recycling. Having sparked articles in major business and opinion journals, Casten has now gotten the attention of senior state regulators. A further barrier to cogeneration in the US, a mechanistic interpretation of the US Clean Air Act that penalizes energy efficiency improvements at old facilities, appears to be changing as Environmental Protection Agency officials seem to have bought into Casten’s logic. The beauty of the removal of the anticompetitive restrictions and irrational transmission pricing that discriminates against local power generation is that US industry and consumers could realize savings of tens of billions of dollars annually. At the same time US carbon dioxide emissions could be slashed by as much as 20%.
Another win-win strategy that would give the people of the Maldives and other endangered island nations a fighting chance of survival would be aggressive implementation worldwide of efforts to slash emissions of soot that causes great damage to human health and contains black carbon, a powerful driver of climate change. Micronesia, sensing this, has fought to get black carbon into the climate negotiations agenda. Indoor air pollution from inefficient cook stoves causes nearly two million deaths worldwide each year. Transformation of cook stoves around the world to emit little or no black carbon would save many lives and have a powerful and near term effect in reducing the radiative forcing that is melting Arctic sea ice and glaciers in Greenland. Here industrialized countries could provide much of the financing to accelerate these efforts. Many of their own remaining black carbon emissions are in industrial processes where enhanced use of energy recycling would yield benefits threefold- savings to industry and consumers, reduction of carbon dioxide and at the same time slashing of black carbon emissions.
Perhaps this can be a lifeline for the Maldives as well.
John Topping Jr. is a regular contributor to Cleantech Asia Online. He is the President of the Washington, D.C. based Climate Institute
