The chairman of Coca-Cola announced in 2007 that the guiding principle of the firm’s activities in the future has to be: ‘We should not cause more water to be removed from a watershed than we can replenish.’28 The company has entered into a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund to pursue the cause of water conservation. The partnership has come about because both Coca-Cola and the WWF have recognized that a change of tack is required. WWF’s chief operating officer, Marcia Marsh, observed: ‘The simple fact is that we are failing relative to our wider goals. Despite our successes in raising public awareness and funding, species are disappearing at historic rates. Habitat continues to be destroyed. Working alone, NGOs are simply unable to reverse the tide of global change.’29
Coca-Cola carried out an extensive project on world freshwater supplies in 2002, at a point when most governments had not yet appreciated the scale of the problem of looming world water shortages. However, the company was a long way from having analysed the impact of its entire supply-chain, and the firm later agreed that the WWF will be able to report publicly its findings about the environmental consequences of the company’s worldwide activities. The two organizations will work together to develop binding targets for improved water efficiency.
In Green Inc, Christine MacDonald takes the NGOs to task for the closeness of the ties they have forged with business, on the grounds that they are being corrupted.30 And, indeed, NGOs, businesses and governments to some degree have differences of interest that neither could nor should be eradicated. All are to some extent interest groups, with agendas that do not by any means always conform to the public interest; yet it is hard to see that much progress will be made unless they can form active and effective partnerships. NGOs not only have moral credibility, but have accumulated a fund of environmental knowledge and expertise that companies normally lack. The role of businesses, small and large, is going to be absolutely crucial in responding to climate change, not least because they will have to supply a good deal of the funding and also pioneer new technologies.
Coca-Cola and the WWF are not alone; many similar partnerships are developing around the world.31 Unilever is working with the Rainforest Alliance on the environmental effects of its Lipton tea business; IKEA is collaborating with Brazilian NGOs to work towards regulating logging in the Amazon rainforest. Alcoa, the aluminium-producing company, a target for attack by many NGOs in the past, is doing the same as part of a new-found commitment to reducing its environmental impact. A great deal of water is used in the production of aluminium. The production process is also a major source of greenhouse gas emissions, while also generating waste that has to go to land-fill. Since aluminium ore (bauxite) is found near to the land surface, it is often extracted by open-cast mining. In the smelting process, CO2 and perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are produced. PFCs are among the most harmful of greenhouse gases, more so even than methane. Alcoa has set itself targets of a 70 per cent reduction in water discharge from its plants by 2010 and zero discharge by 2020. It has introduced similarly radical programmes for recycling and emissions – its goals are to achieve 25 per cent recycled aluminium content by 2010 and 50 per cent by 2020.32 Recycling not only saves emissions directly but will help in another way too. Aluminium cans may use bauxite mined in Australia, be smelted in China, and pressed into cans and filled in the US or Europe. When cans are recycled, the whole process can be completed domestically, reducing emissions by as much as 75 per cent.
It is not only manufacturing companies that are undergoing such a change of attitudes, but those in other sectors too. In February 2007, Citigroup Bank issued a ‘Position Statement on Climate Change’ accepting that serious risks are posed by global warming.33 The key questions now, it says, concern the rapidity and severity of the changes and the practical implications that flow from them. During the Bush years, the company argued that the US government must shift its position quite dramatically and assume a world leadership role in countering climate change. Citigroup committed itself to a 10 per cent reduction in its own greenhouse gas emissions by 2011 and pledges investment in alternative energy technology.
In the same year the corporation announced that it will direct $50 billion over the next 10 years towards climate change projects, through investment to support the activities of its clients and through its own operations. To date, it has invested $10 billion. Citibank already has a substantial portfolio of equity investments in solar, wind and hydroelectric power, as well as in low-carbon building projects. According to its originators, the firm’s comprehensive programme ‘is not a wish-list, but a realistic, achievable plan’.34 How far that plan will survive the serious economic difficulties the bank got into during the recession remains to be seen.
States, businesses and NGOs are not the only agents involved in active policy to counter global warming. We must also recognize the importance of local and city-based initiatives. As emphasized earlier, ‘the state’ does not only refer to the national level, but to regional, city and local government too. In the global age, many influences come in below the level of the nation-state, impinging directly upon localities, which in turn can have an impact much greater than their size would suggest. Moreover, at all levels inspirational individuals can break the mould of conventional wisdom.
Sweden is the country furthest along the line towards overcoming its dependence on fossil fuels, and one man, Per Carstedt, can take a certain amount of the credit.35 Carstedt is a Ford car dealer who spent a number of years in Brazil, the first country to develop ethanol on a large scale as a motor fuel. He went to the Rio Summit in 1992, and came away clear in his mind that humanity couldn’t carry on for long on its current path. When he returned to Sweden, he started looking into how ethanol might be introduced into the country. Initially he made no headway at all. There was no technical know-how, no filling stations were interested in supplying ethanol and, it was said, the fuel wouldn’t work in Sweden’s cold climate anyway. Eventually, he located a small flexi-fuel programme at Ford in Detroit, and through this contact managed to import three ethanol cars into Sweden, showing that they could run perfectly well there. Later he imported some more, but neither Ford nor any other manufacturer he approached showed any interest, arguing that there was no market for them. Carstedt then spent several years travelling the country, building up support in a consortium of local governments, companies and individuals who would buy the vehicles.
There was still no ethanol in filling stations, but Carstedt finally managed to persuade one close to his home and another in Stockholm to put in an ethanol pump. He and his colleagues then toured other stations, trying to persuade them one by one to do the same, offering finance if necessary. By 2002 there were 40 stations offering ethanol, and from then on they rapidly multiplied. About 1,000 such stations had come into existence four years later, constituting 25 per cent of the overall number in the country. Some 15 per cent of vehicles in Sweden today run on biofuels.
Carstedt anticipated early on the backlash that has occurred against biofuels. What is needed, he argues, is investment to develop fuels that do not compete with food production. The research group with which he is currently involved is producing biofuels from cellulose, coming from wood chips or industrial waste, which will meet that requirement. A new bio-energy refinery using this technology has been built, and a far larger one is planned. The refinery produces a total energy efficiency of over 70 per cent, which is much higher than the level produced by orthodox forms of ethanol.
Why not go the whole hog and argue, as some environmentalists do, that climate change issues should be dealt with piecemeal and primarily from the bottom up? The reason why not, in fact, is easy to see. Unregulated markets have no long-term perspective, and, insofar as they create externalities, may actively undermine such a perspective. Much the same is true of the thousands of local initiatives that exist, even if many of them on their own are worthy or necessary.
6
TECHNOLOGIES AND
TAXES
Am
bitious attempts have been made to anticipate how the spread of renewable technologies will transform modern economies. Some speak of the coming of a new industrial revolution, which will be initiated by such technologies. The American political thinker Jeremy Rifkin argues that the great changes in world history have taken place when new sources of energy have emerged in tandem with developments in communications. Thus the convergence of coal-based power and the printing press gave rise to the first industrial revolution. Previous forms of communication would not have been able to handle the social and economic complexities introduced by the new forms of technology. The ‘second industrial revolution’ started in the late nineteenth century. It was marked by the invention of electric communication, beginning with the telegraph and branching out into the telephone, radio and television. These developments converged with the emergence of oil as a major form of power generation and as the dominant source of energy for transport.
We now stand on the verge of a ‘third industrial revolution’, Rifkin says, which will have as its backdrop the development of networked communication, represented by personal computers and the internet. The potential of these technologies lies in their convergence with renewable energy. We can envisage a global energy economy where millions of people produce renewable energy and share it with others through national and international power grids – as happens today with information. Just as personal computers have vastly more power than the early machines, which took up several rooms, so intelligent energy networks will become more powerful and ubiquitous than anything we know at the moment.
Rifkin has his favourite renewable energy source to help point the way ahead: hydrogen.1 Hydrogen, he says, is the ‘forever fuel’, since it is the most ubiquitous element in the universe – and it produces no greenhouse gas emissions. Fuel cells using hydrogen are already being introduced into the market for home and industrial use. The top-down energy regime that exists today with big oil and gas will be replaced by decentralized energy production and use. It will be ‘the first truly democratic energy regime in history’.2
Such ideas aren’t particularly compelling. In the first place, they reflect a view in which history is driven in large part by technology, a partial notion at best. The dating and nature of the supposed second industrial revolution are vague – as can be seen by the fact that other authors who propose similar ideas come up with quite different versions of when it happened and what its content was. Some, for example, date it 40 or 50 years later than Rifkin does. No one knows as yet what role a specific energy source such as hydrogen might play. Moreover, technologies never operate on their own – they are always embedded in wider political, economic and social frameworks, which are likely to govern both how they develop and what their consequences are.
In addition, the ‘next industrial revolution’ hasn’t as yet actually happened. The original industrial revolution did not occur in a conscious way. The next one, however, has to be created as a deliberate project to protect us against future dangers – a very different situation. We don’t know how things will turn out. It could be, as Rifkin hopes, that energy and politics will march in line – decentralized network systems, rooted in local communities, will replace current forms of political and economic power. It is the vision that many in the green movement would like to see realized. I’m not sure such an outcome is either likely or desirable. Certainly, it is very possible that most households will help create energy, rather than just consume it – as is already the case, for example, with feed-in tariffs. However, we will also need coordinated energy management on a national as well as an international level.
Technological innovation has to be a core part of any successful climate change strategy and the same is true of energy policy. The state and government must have a significant role in making such innovation possible, since a regulatory framework, including incentives and other tax mechanisms, will be involved. What role should this be exactly? The issue overlaps with that of planning. For a while, it became conventional wisdom that markets cannot be second-guessed; nor can we predict with any precision where innovation will happen. Today the pendulum is swinging back again. Various technologies or non-fossil-fuel energy sources are touted as the answer to our need to reduce emissions; large amounts of investment are flowing into them. People are again placing bets on the future.
Technologies: where we stand
Hydrogen is only one of many fuel sources and technologies that figure on most people’s lists as relevant to mitigating climate change. At the moment it is impossible to say which are likely to be most important. Nuclear and hydroelectric power are the most tried and tested technologies. The first has vociferous critics, and is not (currently) a renewable resource, while the second has intrinsic limitations depending upon the flow of water within a given country or region. The following technologies or proposed energy sources are also in play: purified coal (carbon capture and sequestration, or CCS), wind power, tidal or wave power, biofuels, solar power, geothermal energy, smart electricity grids, geo-engineering technologies – such as heat shields that would turn back a proportion of the sun’s rays – and ‘scrubbers’ – devices that would suck CO2 and other greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.
Each of these, at least in principle, could overlap with the others in specific contexts; and most could contain or link up with sub-technologies, or with gadgets (such as plug-in cars running off electricity supplied from one or other clean energy source).
The literature on low-carbon technologies is a minefield of claims and counter-claims. All the technologies on offer have their enthusiasts, who like to assert that their chosen one is more advanced than most think. Each has its detractors and, to use a familiar term, its sceptics. Take hydrogen as a starting-point. Rifkin sees it as the ubiquitous energy source of the future. Others take quite an opposite view. Hydrogen, they point out, cannot be drawn upon from natural resources; it has to be made, either from other fuels, or from water by means of electricity. It is far more complicated to deal with as a source of energy supply than other gaseous fuels because it has to be stored at very high pressures. Even small leaks can be dangerous.3 Of course, as in every other area, these and other problems presented by hydrogen could at some point be solved. At this stage, we don’t know.
Nuclear power remains mired in controversy, but, as mentioned in chapter 4, it is difficult to see how it will not figure in a prominent way – not for all industrial countries, but certainly for some of them. In Britain, nuclear power generated 19 per cent of the country’s electricity in 2006, compared to 36 per cent from gas and 38 per cent from coal. In 2007 this proportion dropped to 15 per cent and it will decline more as the ageing plants lose capacity. The differential was partly made up in 2007 by the import of 3 per cent of electricity demand from nuclear plants in France. Since the proportion of electricity generated from renewable sources is so small, it is difficult to see how the UK could possibly meet its EU 2020 target of 16 per cent from renewables if nuclear were allowed to lapse.
Many in the green movement remain opposed to the use of nuclear power, but some environmentalists who were previously hostile have since revised their views. One is Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalogue in the 1970s. He says he is now pro-nuclear ‘because coal is so awful’.4 Brand calls for the rapid deployment of a new generation of nuclear power plants, in the US and elsewhere.
Risks and problems there are plenty. Yet, as I have stressed throughout this book, it is the balance of risks we have to consider and there are no risk-free options. A nuclear reactor emits virtually no CO2, although emissions are involved in the building of nuclear power stations. The IPCC calculates that the total life-cycle level of emissions per unit of energy is some 40g CO2 equivalent per kilowatt-hour, the same as that for renewable energy sources.5 Supplies of uranium are plentiful and not concentrated in unstable countries. The biggest difficulties concern the connection between nuclear power and the building of nuclear weapons, the possibili
ty of nuclear terrorism and the difficulty of disposing of the nuclear waste. No one could possibly be sanguine about how serious these questions are. The first is arguably more dangerous than the second or the third. Many countries that have nuclear power do not possess nuclear weapons. Yet some states, at the moment most notably Iran, almost certainly want to develop nuclear power in order to build a nuclear arsenal.
I do not want in any sense to downplay such risks; like many others, I am a reluctant convert to nuclear power, at least insofar as some of the industrial and developing countries are concerned. There simply is no substitute on the horizon at the moment and the risks of taking nuclear out of the mix are too great. Nuclear power stations can be engineered to be almost impervious to terrorist attack, at least in terms of such an episode causing a release of radiation. The reactors currently being built in Finland incorporate such safeguards. It is at least possible that the waste-disposal issue could be resolved at some point in the future. Some have argued that fourth-generation nuclear technology could burn almost all the energy available in the uranium ore, and also run on the depleted uranium left behind by conventional reactors. Pie in the sky? It may be, but almost all renewable sources of energy need comparable technological breakthroughs if they are to serve to replace oil, gas and coal.
In March 2011, in the wake of a massive earthquake, an explosion occurred at the Fukushima Daiichi No. 1 nuclear plant in Japan. The reactors at the station were subsequently flooded with water and boric acid to try to prevent a meltdown and a large-scale release of radiation. These efforts were not successful and a significant radiation leak did occur. The plant in question was over 40 years old and of antiquated design. Critics had long warned that plants of this design constructed anywhere near geological fault-lines should be closed down. At the time of writing, it is not clear what either the short-or the longer-term consequences will be for human health. In April 2011, the Japanese government raised the level of risk to the same as that experienced at Chernobyl in the Ukraine, in 1986. However, the radiation released at the Japanese plant was less than one-tenth of that at Chernobyl.
The Politics of Climate Change Page 15
