I headed up to Columbia University this past week to check out the Earth Institute’s State of the Planet 08 conference. As usual, I couldn’t devote as much time as I would’ve liked to the conference sessions, but I came away with a few good insights nonetheless. Thursday, I attended a press briefing with Jeffrey Sachs, the director of the institute and a real force for fostering sustainable development; plus the very worthy Jan Egeland, former UN chief of humanitarian affairs; Carl-Henrik Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson, the cell phone makers; and Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran, a senior correspondent for “The Economist” and an expert on energy and automotives.
One of Ericsson’s emphases is on bringing mobile telephony to the developing world. This was characterized as the “singlemost transformative technology in the developing world.” See Ericsson’s CSR pages for a ton of information on how engaged they are.
The discussion came to climate change, not surprisingly, and Sachs emphasized the importance of an integrated approach that would create an “incentive” system (cap-and-trade) along with technology policy. Egeland said that mitigation is important, but that adaptation is critical at this point. There are extremely vulnerable populations that need to be buffered from the increasingly intense effects of storms and other climate-induced disasters. Drought, of course, is another looming specter. Vaitheeswaran, a compellingly intelligent speaker, has written a new book, ZOOM: The Global Race to Fuel the Car of the Future, and he said we’re looking at a billion cars on the planet soon, with two billion not so far in the future. That’s the bad news for global warming. The good news is that the renewable energy revolution could well be driven (pun intended) by a new generation of cars. (Sadly, I missed Vaitheeswaran moderating a formal debate , “Proposition: “The United States will solve the climate change problem.” It was, by all reports, lively and smart. You and I can see it here though.)
Well, at the press briefing, I was going to ask about biofuels but before I was called on, Sachs read my mind. (As you may recall, I’ve been writing about this a fair bit, including this post from last month: Are Biofuels A Bummer?) Responding to a question about energy, Sachs quickly segued into a blistering critique of present biofuels policy. He called US and EU policy in this area “misguided.” He said that biofuel production is driving up food prices worldwide. In his talk to the conference on Friday, he outlined a ten-point plan for the next President on sustainability and eliminating biofuel subsidies was one of the points. Sachs also has a new book: Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet.
I am forced to say that a talk given on Friday left me a little breathless. Lady Barbara Thomas Judge, an American it turns out, is the Chairman of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority. She gave a talk on the virtues of Nukes. She trotted out a number of the same canards I’ve been hearing, on and off, for over thirty years: Three Mile Island and Chernobyl weren’t so bad. People want nuclear power plants in their communities. You can’t rely on renewables because the power is intermittent and we haven’t learned how to store it. A new take on the theme of the acceptable risk of nuclear power was the somewhat blithe statement: “Life is about risk.”
Another assertion was that 90% of nuclear waste comes from weapons production, not power production. Sorry, Lady Judge, but that dog don’t hunt. Here’s just one quote from the US DOE website: “As of December 2005, the United States accumulated about 53,440 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from nuclear reactors. In addition, there will be about 22,000 canisters of solid defense-related radioactive waste for future disposal in a repository.”
You can see Lady Judge’s talk here. I had the opportunity to talk with her a little later. I ventured that her pooh-poohing of the role of renewables was not correct. I mentioned the recent analysis from Daniel Yergin’s Cambridge Energy Associates that there was $7 trillion in business looming just over the horizon. (See my post here.) She said that she very much supported renewables but that you needed nuclear power as well. I said that societies needed to choose and any emphasis on nuclear power would necessarily take a tremendous amount of wind out of the sails, or turbines, as it were, of the renewables industry. I pointed out that not a watt of electricity would be generated from nuclear power in this country were it not for the Price-Anderson Act that, for all intents and purposes, insulates the industry from liability. The private insurance industry wouldn’t touch nuclear power with a ten-foot control rod. Lady Judge was poised and gracious and I thanked her for entertaining my point of view.
The idea that nuclear power is something of a silver bullet for climate change certainly seems to be gaining traction, at least in the UK and in France. I think that the Earth Institute’s embrace is more-than-a-little off from their prevailing theme of sustainability. Part of the problem lies in the continuing overemphasis, in my opinion, on the central power generating paradigm. I think that the world will profit, in every way, from a shift not only to renewables but to the distributed generation model that renewables can empower.
I had time to catch a bit of the panel on “Identifying Energy Solutions for Sustainable Development.” Paula DiPerna of the Chicago Climate Exchange gave a lucid and illuminating talk on carbon finance. (I’ve written about that a number of times under Carbon Markets. This, of course, is a critical part of solving the climate change problem.)
The Earth Institute and many of the participants at this conference are doing groundbreaking work in sustainable development. It’s exciting to hear so many of these initiatives discussed. Check out the conference videos to catch some of the excitement.
