As this blog and everybody else and her cousin have been saying for some time now, we can do so much, and faster and cheaper, by optimizing our energy use. The granddaddy of much of this eminently sensible, sober and smart thinking is Amory Lovins. I have directed you to his good works and the work of his Rocky Mountain Institute any number of times. Now here's an in-depth interview with him from the folks at McKinsey. (Free registration required.) Here's a quote: "Environmental strategy is about redesigning your company's processes and products so that regulation is relevant only to your competitor, not yourself. The real leaders are going to be smart companies that see the competitive advantage in leading energy transformation in their sectors."
In New York City, Mike Bloomberg has launched an ambitious ten-year, $2.3 billion program to slash GHG from municipal operations. I wrote about a major international initiative to boost efficiency in cities here over a year ago and I also wrote about the Big Apple's really big "PLANYC" at Mike Bloomberg's Earth Day. In the City's press release from yesterday, Hizzoner said: "Our long-term plan will cut City government's annual output of greenhouse gases by nearly 1.7 million metric tons, which also will greatly improve air quality, and take a 220-megawatt bite out of peak demand for electricity."
Meanwhile, in a national effort, the Natural Resources Defense Council and the American Public Power Association have announced a joint initiative designed "to help American households and businesses take advantage of all cost-effective opportunities to improve the efficiency of electricity use." The APPA has 1,300 member utilities. See the press release and this brief article from GreenBiz.
Finally, we looked at China a few posts back. (We'll continue, obviously, to look at China quite a bit, including in the context of today's G8 announcement. I'll discuss that tomorrow.) China has launched a massive energy efficiency drive which, hopefully, will curtail the explosive growth in power use – and GHG emissions – that threaten to wipe out any and all potential gains that the developed world might make in addressing global warming. See Can energy efficiency fuel an industrial evolution? from Greenwire, via the WBCSD. The gist of the story is that China has a new law that is fostering energy conservation and that old factories are being shut down and critical new devices for infrastructure, like industrial heat-recovery boilers, are being put into place at an increasing rate. NRDC is on the job in China too. Read the story. There's nothing more crucial for the poor old planet than that China get real traction on getting its GHG down, in a big way, and soon!
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To help in looking at the big picture, as we will be tomorrow in discussing the G8, here's a guest column from last week's "FT" special report on energy: Lord Browne, former head of British Petroleum, has a series of thoroughly reasonable things to recommend for us all on how to pursue the quest for climate sanity. See his guest column: Consensus on climate change goals. He quotes one of the most sensible of all Twentieth Century public figures, the economist and intellectual giant, John Maynard Keynes, speaking at the end of the critical Bretton Woods Conference: "We have shown that a concourse of nations is actually able to work together at a constructive task in amity and unbroken concord." Hear, hear.
