During this past winter climate change skeptics in Europe and the US had the time of their life as temperatures dropped deep and the general public started to ask themselves where global warming was. When global data for the winter has been compiled and analyzed, it turned out however that the rest of the world wasn’t really freezing as much as we did. Below are data on temperature anomalies during the winter from NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
No one really knows, but judging from history it’s safe to assume it’ll be cheaper than we believe. Below are the cost estimates before implementation of two environmental control schemes and the actual costs measured after the implementation.
Why is this the case? Well, we tend to analyze costs in a fairly static manner and not take into account the cost reductions produced by technological innovation and substitution. If you ask someone, or a company, how much it’ll cost and how painful it’ll be to change habits, the response will often be exaggerated. But when the change is forced through we generally find cheap and simple ways to adapt.
The Earth Awards 2010 is now calling for submissions and the grand prize total is $50,000. I was one of the finalists last year and spent an amazing weekend in New York for the awarding ceremony event at the Four Seasons. If you have a good idea, don’t hesitate to submit it!
From the organizers:
We seek sustainable innovations that offer solutions to the ecological and social challenges of the 21st century.
We would like to invite you to submit your innovations in one of the following six categories: Product, Future, Built Environment, Social Justice, Fashion, Systems.
Apart from a monetary prize, all finalists of The Earth Awards 2010 will have the unique opportunity to pitch their ideas and innovations to world business leaders, helping them to transform their designs into market-ready solutions.
Please see our website www.theearthawards.org and the attached call for entries for more information. Feel free to contact me with any questions, or if you require additional information. We look forward to your submission.
These technologies [disruptive zero-carbon tech] still have to prove that they are reliable, durable and scalable — and if you Google both, you will find studies saying they are and studies that are skeptical. All I know is this: If we put a simple price on carbon, these new technologies would have a chance to blossom and thousands more would come out of innovators’ garages. America still has the best innovation culture in the world. But we need better policies to nurture it, better infrastructure to enable it and more open doors to bring others here to try it.
In a TED speech that I really like Bill Gates offers a sober and rational approach to the climate challenge, kind of what you would expect a businessman of his caliber to do. In his presentation Bill first paints a picture of the challenge with a global perspective at it’s core; where are we? where are we going? where should we be going? and what do we have to do to change direction?
The population of our planet will increase, the services provided will increase (a small part of the earth’s population can reduce their consumption but population growth and poverty alleviation will lead to a big net increase), the amount of energy used to deliver each unit of service might go down a bit, but not enough to really turn the tide. What’s left is reducing to almost zero the greenhouse gases needed to produce each unit of energy, be it fuel for transportation or electricity for homes. In Bill’s words we need “Energy miracles”.
To create these energy miracles we need technological breakthroughs of historical proportions. It can definitely be done, but the question is if we can do it fast enough. We need to, and this is something I’ve been advocating for a long time, focus perhaps a bit less on limits and more on possibilities. More on how to enable the changes that’s needed than trying to force them through in the current framework. The truth is that making the transition to a zero-carbon global economy will be impossible without the technological breakthroughs that can alleviate poverty and sustain comfortable livelihoods in developed countries without emissions of greenhouse gases. We need to put the inventor, innovator and entrepreneur at center stage and put in place policies that propel them forward.
Funding RD&D is obviously important here, catalyzing private investments as well and not least making sure that the economical framework supports low-emission innovation, e.g. by introducing cap™ programs. Our approach must be based on the politics of possibilities rather than the politics of limits.
Today the international negotiations under the IPCC perhaps has a bit too much of the European “limits” perspective and too less of the American “possibilities” perspective, and absolutely too little of the global perspective which is rarely found anywhere.
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One energy miracle that’s been in the pipe for a looong time and which might finally be edging towards getting realized is fusion power. Read more (eng), (swe)
I wasn’t “in the room”, but I was in the building and can very strongly confirm this statement by Lynas:
… this further strengthened China’s negotiating hand, as did the complete lack of civil society political pressure on either China or India. Campaign groups never blame developing countries for failure; this is an iron rule that is never broken. The Indians, in particular, have become past masters at co-opting the language of equity (”equal rights to the atmosphere”) in the service of planetary suicide – and leftish campaigners and commentators are hoist with their own petard.
This is a huge problem! Virtually all civil society movements and activists are so eager to be perceived as pro equity and pro the rights of developing countries that they sometimes fail to see the issues soberly. The global climate negotiations is not all a neo-colonialist game, western leaders aren’t totally failing to take responsibility for historical emissions and China isn’t trumping the developed world in leadership on climate change. The sooner we realize this and start to be less ideologically colored by the history of our movements the better. Rich countries have a tremendous responsibility to chair, but so do others and the rich people in eastern China and urban India has no right to use poor people on the countryside as alibis for not taking action to stop climate change.
When the negotiations boils down to a situation where U.S. politicians refuse to take action that they perceive will deteriorate an already weakening competitiveness against Chinese (and other developing countries) industries, and where the Chinese elite refuse to take any action that they fear will weaken their grip on power and limit the growth that deliver social stability - social movements have to realize that the solution can’t be to lay the blame only on governments in the developed world. Of course many countries aren’t doing nearly good enough and especially so the U.S., but we have to put pressure on all governments and not least so in countries lacking free social movements of their own!
Who, Where, Why?
I'm a 28 years old swede political economist and entrepreneur trying to make things more sustainable. Here I write about things I do and think.
