World is Green

Environmental Management could be a simple thing in terms of concepts however, implementing it is a different beast.

During my MBA I worked part-time at the Department for Families and Communities (DFC) in Adelaide, Australia creating a ‘data management system’ to support the Greening program. Overtime I have moved into other roles in Greening. From April of this year I have moved into a full time role there.

The first thing we (my manager and myself) created was a “greening plan” which showed the business case for greening activities. It was designed to serve two purposes. One, why greening is important for DFC and two, how our role is useful for the organization (survival!).

This was important because strangely, even though the South Australian Government is working towards a Climate Change and Sustainability plan for the state; it has moved away from what I consider a good plan to improve the environmental performance of the government’s operations.

The Greening of Government Operations (GoGo) program created many years ago provided the right framework to operationalize the sustainability issues for government operations. It covers the entire gamut of sustainability including; energy, water, waste, human resource development, procurement, green buildings, etc.

Since this much helpful framework and its focus has been abandoned; there was a need to convince the DFC management on the usefulness of Greening initiatives. Interestingly, this opportunity provided us with a chance to think creatively about our role in the organization and what is possible in Greening DFC.

This meant that we needed to move away from a mandated role in Greening with its specific roles and activities to a new ‘business model’ where we provide something valuable for DFC.

Our focus now is on two things. One, integrate sustainability into the strategic planning of DFC and two, create a strong business case for institutionalizing Sustainability across the 6000 employee, 300 buildings+ organization.

This is not an easy task in any measure because it is a combination of large scale behaviour change, new ideas and projects, managing funding, strategic planning and improving actual environmental performance.

As I have been trying to understand this I came across a great program development in America called the Harvard Green Campus Initiative (HGCI). HGCI is a campus wide sustainability services unit developed by Leith Sharp from Australia. Sharp previously developed the environmental management program at the University of New South Wales in Sydney.

The HGCI website describes their program as a “A Mission Driven, Business Based Model for Campus Sustainability”:

Environmental sustainability is a moving target that requires a rapid and wide reaching escalation in the pace of organizational change across every university. At its heart, the challenge posed by the environmental imperative is an organizational change challenge…The limits of time, money, politics and complexity must be thoroughly understood and skillfully worked with. This is why it is essential have a service organization within the university that can provide the kind of services that the Harvard Green Campus Initiative has developed.

There are two learnings. One, the time taken to implement this program and and two, the creation of a ‘business model’ service driven initiative which is accessed by individual schools in Harvard to reap the financial benefits offered by the program. Sharp explains the growth of the program in the latest newsletter. This program has now become the leading beacon for all campuses which want to develop their own Green Campus program.

I see that there is a great deal of commonality between her Green campus program and what we are doing at DFC. Of course; they are light years ahead in their thinking and implementation. However, this means that we have a set of principles, ideas and programs which can be learned from to implement our plan at DFC. [There is even a course based on HGCI's learnings]

The new role for the Greening DFC team will be a business model driven “service provider” to help improve the environmental performance of DFC.

My understanding of the potential of environmental management has grown over the years and now I see how this can become a part of a organization’s strategic objectives.

This echoes with what I have been writing on this weblog on integrating sustainability into the business strategy of an organization.

The best part is that a large part of the learning in the MBA will be actually useful in implementing the program in DFC.

As Leith Sharp suggests:

the “Sustainability Coordinator” needs to be, more than anything else, a “Business Developer.” That is, if the typical sustainability coordinator were running the programs directly, it would bury that person in a set of repeating tasks, leaving them no time to build capacity and continue the development and growth of sustainability services. The individual needs to be a generalist and cannot spend too much time on any one implementation project.

Instead, the early position should be a business development position,– this person has to have some expertise in every single area in order to understand the training requirements, and to convince people that campus greening initiatives are not only economically viable, but that there is potential to save millions and millions of dollars over the life of the fund. That person’s main responsibility needs to be capacity building so that the whole institution can learn to be more sustainable and can be self-organizing in its transformation.

These are exciting times and I will continue to blog my experiences.

The energy industry is going through an exciting phase. The “energy issue” is a big one and there are many different solutions to the issue. In the environmental field there is a growing call to move towards renewable energy however, some of them have been advocating for conservation for a long time. Traditionally conservation has a negative annotation to it. It may mean “sacrifice” or decreasing our standard of living.

However, a more interesting and sexier concept is Negawatts and its associated technologies and systems.

From the Rocky Mountain Insitutte :

[Amory] Lovins invented the concept of “negawatts”, so that utilities and governments could compare the cost of conservation measures against the cost of increasing power production. Negawatts represent power saved from one application that is made available to another application. For example, a compact fluorescent light bulb uses about a fourth as much energy as a standard incandescent bulb to put out a similar amount of light. Replacing one 100 watt bulb with one 25 watt compact fluorescent therefore “generates” 75 negawatts of saved energy to use somewhere else.

In a Keynote address in 1989 to the Green Energy Conference titled “The Negawatt Revolution” Amory Lovins suggested the importance of energy efficiency and the importance of creating a negawatt solution.

He suggested a “soft energy path” which is a combination of energy efficiency and renewable energy as a way forward to solve the energy issue.

Robert Wilder, CEO of WilderShares which manages two clean energy devices suggests that “Energy efficiency is a sleeping giant,”. He says, “It doesn’t have the sexy allure of solar power or huge wind. But we have Saudi Arabia-sized oil reserves under our feet in America through energy efficiency.”.

The Economist in a recent May 31st article suggests that energy efficiency measures will have a negative abatement cost and will increase economic growth.

The result is a testament to economic irrationality. The measures below the horizontal line have a negative abatement cost—in other words, by carrying them out, people and companies could both cut emissions and save money. At a macroeconomic level they would boost,rather than reduce, economic growth.

The Economist provides an explanation on why there is less interest and investment in the energy efficiency measures.

Economists trying to explain this apparent irrationality suggest that the savings are too small and the effort involved in change too large. People find their electricity bills too boring to think about; within companies, those responsible for keeping bills down may not have the
authority to spend the necessary capital. Another explanation is the agency problem: that the developer who would have to pay higher capital costs up front will not be forking out for the electricity bills. Besides, people buy houses not because they have good insulation but because they have pretty views.

However, that is changing. As suggested a previous article; constant feedback mechanisms can make a difference in increasing conservation.

The importance of Negawatts comes thorough when there is a great increase in demand (peak demand) in some periods across the country. For example, due to the hot summer months in South Australia combined with one of the highest per-capita uses of residential air-conditioners in Australia; some 20% of South Australia’s energy production capacity is utilized only on 4 days of the year. This increases costs for the utilities as well as consumers. In fact, South Australia has the “most peaky demand profile of any of the Australian states – driving high energy wholesale and network costs.”

The question for the utilities is this? Is it better to create a ‘negative watt’ of energy or create a ‘mega watt’ of energy by buying power at the time of peak demand or in the long run; build a whole new power plant. If the financial benefits for negawatts beat megawatts then demand-response, energy efficiency and other methods will gain prominence.

What this all means is that there is a financial benefit to supply demand management technology. New technologies and companies funded by VCs are coming up to create energy efficiency solutions to the market (atleast in the US).

Red Herring has been reporting on a lot of them:

Consumer Powerline: Starting next week, Consumer Powerline will begin handing out checks to its customers for the energy they saved this year. The amount will reach $8 million this year, up 60 percent from last year, with $2 million to $3 million reaching customers next week and the remainder being distributed in the fall, the company said Friday.

The payouts stem from “demand response,” a process in which utilities avoid blackouts by paying customers to use less power when the electric grid is squeezed. The utilities can buy negative watts, or “negawatts,” at the same rate of electricity at those peak hours, avoiding the far higher cost of outages.

“[Demand response] is absolutely growing because electricity markets are becoming more volatile,” said Mike Gordon, president of Consumer Powerline. “Throughout the U.S., regulators are saying, ‘We’ve got to expose people to the real volatility of energy prices. We’ve got no choice.’”

Negawatts for Positive Returns : The concept is one of a number of new ideas sparking a surge of new money into a once obscure niche of the clean energy market. Four so-called energy-management startups have announced venture capital funding since March, already surpassing last year’s total.

In May, energy-management startup Prenova raised $11 million, and Broadband Energy Network raised more than $2 million. Fat Spaniel raised $3.5 million in March. Comverge raised $5.5 million in April. “The technology, the business models, and the managers—the entrepreneurs—are all getting better,” says Nicholas Parker, chairman of the Cleantech Venture Network

And in a recent spate of funding,

Comverge: Comverge, an energy management company, soared 24 percent Friday in its Nasdaq trading debut. The company offered 5.3 million shares at $18 per share to raise $95.4 million in its initial public offering. Shares settled $4.31 higher at $22.31 by close of trading from the offering price. Comverge’s IPO marks the first public offering of a company focused on electricity grid management and comes after energy startup EnerNOC in February filed to go public.

Powerit Nabs: Powerit Holdings, which develops technology that automatically shuts off unnecessary energy use in industrial buildings, announced Thursday it received $7.1 million in funding from a group of VCs led by @Ventures and Expansion Capital Partners.

The funding reflects interest in energy-saving technology that curbs watts or generates “negawatts.” Companies such as EnerNOC and Comverge, which sell energy monitoring technology that signals when unnecessary usage can be shut off, recently enjoyed successful debuts on the public market.

The Negawatt revolution is a market driver conservation mechanism which will create a positive and sustainable solution in the long term.

It’s been raining Khosla for sometime now here. In a Gristmill article, Timothy E. Wirth, Vinod Khosla and John D. Podesta write about the economic rules that create new markets and how they can make a difference in the clean energy market.

Voters, investors, activists, business leaders, and policy experts are pushing for clean energy to create jobs, limit climate change, and reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. And yet, progress is slow: oil imports and carbon emissions continue to rise. Why?Because the rules of the game — the laws, regulations, subsidies, and tax credits that shape the energy market and the way it acts — continue to make fossil fuels a less expensive, more convenient choice for consumers.

These rules are both the heart of the problem, and the key to a solution.

…Change won’t come until the price is right. That price is set by the market, the market is shaped by rules, and the rules favor fossil fuels.

If we want to change the future, we have to change the rules…

The rules today give oil and gas companies — the most profitable industry in the history of the world — billions of dollars in tax breaks and research subsidies…The rules perpetuate our energy habits…We need new rules that will make the best choice for the country also the best choice for consumers.

…Today, we are on the cusp of a similar revolution in energy, but the old rules are still in place. There is a lot of money ready to invest, but too few good investment opportunities. To enable those emerging products and technologies to succeed, the most important thing we can do is change the rules…

The future of energy is not terribly complicated to envision:

• Clean energy: We’ll use new, renewable sources of energy: more biofuels and less oil, more wind and solar, and less coal and natural gas.
• Energy efficiency: Our homes, office buildings, cars, and appliances will require less energy, and we’ll have better ways to manage that use.
• Carbon capture: Emissions from coal-fired power plants will be captured and pumped underground.
• A “smarter” grid: Digital technology will finally come to the electric power grid, making it more efficient, more reliable, and better able to draw on renewable resources. It should become a national grid, like our highway system, so any renewable or non-renewable electricity generated in any part of the country can be transmitted to market.

Here are five more rule changes that would reduce emissions, give consumers new choices, launch new businesses, and accelerate the profitable transition to new energy technologies:

Put a price on carbon.

Putting a price on carbon dioxide — through a cap-and-trade system similar to the one that reduced acid-rain pollution at low cost — would end the use of the atmosphere as a free garbage dump and create a market for any technology that reduced global-warming emissions.

Set “carbon efficiency” standards for vehicles.

The debate over fuel efficiency standards has bogged down in finger-pointing between Washington and Detroit. To break the impasse, Congress should pass tough standards for “carbon efficiency.” If companies had to reduce the average carbon emissions of their fleet, it
would encourage them not only to build lighter, more efficient vehicles, but also to build cars that can run on biofuels and on electricity — rather than simply updating the internal combustion engine.

Make energy efficiency the business of utilities.

Today, in almost every state, utilities make more money as their customers use more energy. We should flip those incentives. Utility companies in California are compensated for helping their customers reduce their energy use. They make money by helping customers install better insulation and use more energy-efficient products. When a utility can make more money helping people save energy rather than use energy, that’s a smart set of rules.

Modernize the electric power grid to be more efficient and better deliver clean energy.

Nearly every sector of the economy has been made more efficient with the introduction of information technology — but not the electric power grid, which still operates on 50-year-old technology. A modernized, digitally connected national electricity grid will be more secure, reliable, and resilient, allowing quicker restoration of power after outages and the ability to avert large-scale blackouts. Renewable electric power should be given priority access to such a grid.

Increase government support for clean energy.

No industry of any consequence to the country has grown and thrived without government support. According to the Government Accountability Office, the oil industry alone received more than $140 billion in subsidies and tax breaks between 1968 and 2000. In the 21st century, the U.S. government has just as much interest, if not more, in the success of clean energy.

These five rule changes will help build a market-based system in which companies and consumers can advance the national interest by acting in their own self-interest.

…We can try to scold people into embracing sacrifice — and change nothing — or we can offer the kind of choice that can change the world, which is choice that is cheaper, cleaner, better. Choice is what markets do best, but not if government is standing in the way with old rules that favor the industries of the past.

Climate change and oil dependence are pushing us toward a clean, renewable, efficient energy future. The profits to be made in making and selling these technologies are pulling us in the same direction. With one strategic leap, we can wipe out two of the biggest threats to our children’s well-being while creating the high-tech industries that will employ them in the future.

If we just change the rules.

Stoneleigh at The Oil Drum discusses the importance of feedback for conservation providing the example of a electricity utility in Canada.

In 1989, Woodstock Hydro instituted a voluntary program intended to reduce bad debt. For a small fee per month, it installed a pre-payment meter in the home of each customer choosing the option. Customers were given a smart card, which they would use to purchase an electricity credit of whatever amount they chose from any one of a number of local retailers. A new meter with a remote display offered real-time feedback in a form comprehensible to all and in a convenient location where the customer could easily check the information as to how quickly the card was being depleted. There was no opportunity to accumulate bad debts, and therefore no need for customers to be disconnected and then reconnected - for a substantial fee - as is common practice under other utilities.

…Customers typically save more per month from reduced consumption (15-20%) than they pay (as a small daily supplement to actual consumption) to be part of the program. Approximately a quarter of the customer base now participates in the pre-payment initiative.

…What Woodstock Hydro had inadvertently discovered was that they had managed to design a program which tapped into customers’ psychological drivers for conservation. With real-time feedback, consumers could immediately see the price consequences of any given act of consumption. By watching the display unit in their kitchen, they could see the balance on their card decrease at different rates depending on their own actions. As a result, they quickly learned for themselves how to keep that decrease as slow as possible. In short, they had been transformed from passive consumers into active consumers.

…There is no reason a Woodstock-type metering system should not be combined with TOU (Time-of-Use) pricing. If the original scheme resulted in savings of 15%, combining that with TOU pricing as well an extensive education campaign should be able to achieve both additional conservation and load-shifting. If also combined with incentive programs to encourage the replacement of incandescent lighting and aging appliances, consumption could potentially be reduced by far more, and in a relatively short space of time.

In South Australia currently Aurora Energy; a retail electricity provider has started a Pay-as-you-go system and from my understanding there is a good deal of demand from low-income households for this. The Aurora program also includes Time of Use pricing.

In our workplace where our Offices are spread over 300 buildings I have proposed the following.

A similar system of feedback and education should work in the workplace too however, due to the complexity of the budget system there needs to be a third area of incentives to motivate managers to take action.

One, provide a monthly report on the energy used comparing the best performers (on a per capita basis) to the worst performers. Two, provide incentives to managers to keep a percentage of the savings for the office.Three, educate on the importance of conservation in terms of financial and energy savings.

We should know in a year if this program will work.

Azobuild.com reports:

Mike Watson, Head of Construction at WRAP, explains:

“As a result of its appearance in public policy documents such as Defra’s Waste Strategy, the goal of ‘waste neutrality’ is gaining increasing recognition in the construction industry. This has generated a growing need for a clear definition and an industry standard. The Net Waste Method aims to provide this standard, and allow clients and contractors to demonstrate a committed approach to sustainability. It presents a real opportunity to lead by example.”

The Net Waste Method (Download: PDF) will measure progress towards waste neutrality on a construction project by considering both the value of reused and recycled materials going into the works, and the value of waste materials coming out. The focus on value helps contractors identify priorities for action and offers industry an opportunity to reduce costs and increase profits through waste reduction and improved site waste management. This approach will also enable clients to assess the business case for becoming waste neutral.

With the construction industry one of the biggest contributors to waste generation this tool should provide a ‘commercial and environmental’ understanding of the impact of recycled materials and cost of waste.

The World Clean Energy Awards will take place in a different country
each year, with the inaugural 2007 ceremony being held in Switzerland.
The winners of the World Clean Energy Awards set new standards for the
large-scale use of clean energy solutions.

The following individuals were honoured at the 2007 ceremony:

Construction (new buildings, urban development, renovation)
Josefin Wangel, Communications Officer, with Hammarby Sjöstad Sustainable City,
Sweden. Resource consumption in this new area of Stockholm, which is
home to 25,000 people, is at least 50% lower than the current standard
for comparable new developments.

Transport and Mobility
Bryan Willson, Chief Technical Advisor, with the Philippine Two-Stroke Engine Retrofit Project,
USA . The Envirofit company has developed a retrofitting kit for
two-stroke engines, which are found everywhere in the Philippines. The
kit improves fuel-efficiency and thus massively reduces greenhouse gas
and toxic emissions.

Products (agriculture, mining, industry, utilities)
Fredrick Ouko, Director, with the Simple Solar Assembling Project in Kibera Slum,
Kenya. The assembly of solar cells in one of Africa’s biggest slums has
provided inhabitants not only with work, but also with clean energy.
The project was also awarded with the “Faktor 4″ audiance award.

Services, Trade and Marketing
Srinivasan Padmanaban, Project Manager, with the Green Business Center and Water Energy Nexus Activity,
India. India’s leading centre for energy, the environment and climate
change supports “green” concepts for improving energy efficiency and
sustainable development.

Finance and Investment
Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, CEO Abu Dhabi Future Energy Company, with the Masdar Initiative,
United Arab Emirates. As a first among the world’s oil-producing
nations, the United Arab Emirates, launched the Abu Dhabi-based
billion-dollar Masdar Initiative to promote renewable energies.

Policy and Lawmaking
Li Zhaoqian, Mayor of Rizhao, with the project: Popularization of Clean Energy in Rizhao,
China. Home to more than three million, the city of Rizhao, north-east
of Beijing, is using a combination of incentives and legislative tools
to encourage the large-scale, efficient use of renewable energies. Over
500,000 people have already benefited directly from the scheme. In some
areas, solar thermal collectors are installed on almost every single
roof.

NGOs and Initiatives
Russell de Lucia, CEO The Small Scale Sustainable Infrastructure Development Fund, Inc. (S³IDF), with the project: “Social
Merchant Bank” – Approach to providing efficient lighting services to
poor households, communities and SMEs in southern India. S³IDF
provides around 5,500 people in southern India with light from a clean
energy source. More light means that people can work longer and thus
generate higher incomes. It also improves health and safety. The
project is being extended.

The Jury’s Special Award
Anandi Sharan, Project Manager, Women for Sustainable Development, with the Bagepalli CDM Biogas Project,
India. The project is introducing biogas cookers as a substitute for
India’s traditional cooking methods, which use non-renewable sources of
energy. Under the Kyoto Protocol, the greenhouse gas emissions that the
project saves can then be sold in the form of certificates.

The Jury’s Special Award for Courage
Patrick Spears (President) and Robert Gough (Secretary), Intertribal COUP, with the Intertribal COUP/Rosebud Sioux Environmental Justice Revitalization Project: Tribal Wind Power Demonstration Project Plan,
USA. The Sioux are investing in wind power. In doing so, they are
generating clean energy, creating jobs and earning income for the
tribe. This is happening in an environment which presents many
obstacles to the development of renewable energies.

London has celebrated its “switch off” campaign yesterday. Like the Sydney Earth Hour, the idea was to create awareness of the climate change issue.

The Houses of Parliament after the big switch-off (Courtesy: BBC)

Lights across the city were switched off for an hour on Thursday night to encourage London’s three million households to conserve energy.

The Lights Out London campaign aimed to have all non-essential lighting turned off between 2100 and 2200 BST. It followed similar campaigns in cities including Sydney, Paris and Rome.

At the time of Sydney’s Earth Hour I wrote that “It is important that the debate is concentrated on doing more important things than turning lights off. We should work towards cleaner base load energy, creating “cradle to cradle” industrial processes, building waste management systems and changing the culture in Australia. These are tougher and more important things to do.”

What kind of awareness does this lights off symbolism create? Energy is the problem, switching off is the solution, sacrificing is the way to go?

Josie Appleton on Spiked writes about the role of energy in the world and why this act amounts to nothing in the wider scheme of things.

The practical effect of the event will be negligible – perhaps a 10 per cent reduction, for an hour, for one city, for one night.

…Lights Out London is a symbolic gesture from a high-speed culture that is deeply uncomfortable with itself. We have so much at the flick of a switch, yet we are uneasy about the idea of using energy, and a light bulb is becoming a symbol of angst rather than a bright idea. We in some respects seem to find darkness more meaningful than light, inaction more meaningful than action.

What kind of awareness do we need to create? We need to change our industrial system, change our buying pattern, create better technology for energy generation, and increase energy efficiency. And yes, change our habits.

By switching off the city lights for a hour it can actually create the wrong impression.

On EBBF, a quote on the connection between CSR and the bottomline.

“The vast majority of CSR research is attempting to establish a
correlation between the bottom line and CSR. For an excellent overview
see a recent book by Vogel (2005): The market for virtue. His conclusion
BTW is that: there are indeed cases of companies that have gained a
competitive advantage from being responsible. However, that there are
also many companies with good records of corporate responsibility that
have done poorly financially, and that there are many companies who
have pretty irresponsible records of corporate responsibility that have
done very well.

He argues that corporate responsibility, purely from a
self-interest perspective, is like any other business strategy. It
makes sense for some of the companies some of the time. A strong
neo-liberal agenda does not only determine the research agenda but also
the focus of practical CSR efforts. As the CEO of GE remarked: “We are
investing in environmentally cleaner technology because we believe it
will increase our revenue, our value and our profits… Not because it is
trendy or moral, but because it will accelerate our growth and make us
more competitive.” (Economist, 2005).

Vinod Khosla has a large portfolio of energy investments which I had blogged about yesterday. Since the time I had known his interest in bio-fuels he has moved on. This intrigued me and I wanted to understand his thinking behind the “energy issue” and what could be the possible solutions.

Khosla on his website provides some resources to the issues close to his heart. In one of the essays titled Environmentalists vs Pragmatists (Download: Word Doc) he comes out with a strong case against the ideas of Dr. Hermann Scheer. Dr. Scheer is a Member of the German Parliament and he has introduced a novel solar scheme in Germany which has transformed the solar industry in Germany and makes it a world leader in this area.

Sometime back, Scheer and Khosla had a debate on “how” to solve the energy issue and the related pollution problems. Scheer backs renewable energy; especially solar cells, and wind; he is against the electric grid and prefers a government mandated, higher cost, distributed, solar generation for every home.

In this essay, apart from making a case against Scheer’s ideas; which he calls Scheer nonsense and he provides a good look into his understanding of “the energy issue”, what kinds of solutions will work, his investment philosophy, and thus, leading to his investment decision making.

Recently, I was on a panel with Dr. Herman Scheer, a member of the German parliament and the president of EUROSOLAR (The European Association for Renewable Energy) and a much honored “environmentalist”. Suffice it to say that there was great commonality of goals but significant disagreement about “how”……India, China, and other countries are rapidly industrializing and bringing basic electric power services to their peoples. Their development, like US electric power, follows least-cost options. Our least-cost electric power options – coal-fired power plants – are by far our most destructive and dangerous ones…

…As such, we must address some basic rules: For any energy scheme to be viable, it must be cost effective, and it must be scalable. If solutions don’t get adopted in India and China global warming control efforts are futile. To scale, they must make economic sense in China and India….If we allocate the same carbon emission per person worldwide (an equal right to pollute for every human) we are toast at anywhere near current levels of US emissions or even at levels of carbon emission in Europe…To achieve these goals, we must provide services that consumers want and prefer over their non-sustainable fossil competitors, while at the same time be profitable for business…

…Applications that meet the engineering needs but fail to meet the commercial ones are doomed to failure, which provides one of the key reasons for my disagreements with Dr. Scheer. …

Two things Khosla suggests are important to understand. First, it needs to be a low-cost option; commercially viable and acceptable in India and China; and second, an equal right to pollute for every human; which is the argument of per capita emissions that I have made several times.

Read the rest of this entry »

In his Sapientia, a daily newsletter, Keith Hudson tackles some of the toughest questions facing us with a depth and understanding generally un-common. This time he tackles the 4th strategic dialogue between China and the US.

Excerpts from today’s, DAILY QUOTE 471:

…what of global warming? This is already the major concern of Western European countries. But so far there isn’t the faintest scintilla of evidence that either America or China is yet persuaded that man-made carbon dioxide is the major cause of it. It may be that industrial growth is of such huge importance to both countries that they are in ostrich-like denial about any possibility of cramping their style.

It may also be the case that, because some very eminent climatologists still have doubts about the man-made cause of global warming, politicians and administrators are waiting for conclusive evidence. Contrariwise, it may also be that they are indeed already convinced, but that the likely higher sea levels, swamping of seacoast cities, ecological adjustments, human migrations and so forth are judged to be economically bearable while the era of cheap oil and gas reaches its peak during the next 40 years or so. After then it may be calculated that world-wide economic growth will be forced to decline as we move into much more expensive mined-coal or highly expensive solar technologies in order to generate electricity or make transportation fuels.

Some economists — and eminent ones, too — certainly believe that any money likely to be spent on reducing carbon dioxide emissions would be better spent — at least at present and the foreseeable future — on other matters, such as raising the educational standards of all countries.

My own view is that senior administrators in both America and China probably believe that anthropogenic carbon dioxide is making some contribution to global warming even if there are other more fundamental but as yet unknown climatological changes taking place. Furthermore, that there are insufficient energy and other resources in the world that will allow anything more than a fraction of the world population to even approximate to the way of life of, say, half of Americans, half of Western Europeans, most of the Japanese and the middle-class in the coastline provinces of China now enjoy.

All this is quite apart from global warming. Whether this continues or not, the world has already reached its maximum of food production due to freshwater constraints. Furthermore, as noted in a recent Sapientia posting, there is strong evidence from several research groups that there are sufficient minority metal resources of a crucial nature — such as uranium or germanium — to take all the countries of the world into the advanced technologies and the way of life that some in the West (and the coastline of China) already enjoy.