http://www.commondreams.org/views03/1221-06.htm
Ross Gelbspan
Also Has His Own Web Site:
http://www.heatisonline.org/
Published on Sunday, December 21, 2003 by the Boston Globe
'Rewiring' The World's Energy
by Ross Gelbspan
CLIMATE CHANGE isn't just another issue in this complicated
world of proliferating issues. It's the issue that -- unchecked
-- will swamp all others. Unfortunately, the urgency of the
climate crisis is overwhelmed by competition from other major
problems. We are under attack from terrorists. We are
apprehensive about the aftermath of the Iraq war. Our
trick-or-treat economy is as unnerving to investors as
it is cruel to workers. These diverse challenges may be
susceptible to a common solution -- a rapid worldwide
transition to clean energy.
A clean energy revolution
would reduce our dependence on oil
and our exposure to the political volatility in the Middle East.
Conversely, since it generates a quarter of the world's carbon
emissions, America's continuing indifference will likely guarantee
more attacks from people whose crops are destroyed by weather
extremes, whose homelands are going under from rising seas and
whose borders are overrun by environmental refugees, according
to the head of the UN's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate
Change, Rajendra Pachauri.
Any meaningful deterrent
to anti-US terrorism requires
a major change in our posture toward developing countries.
Energy investments in poor countries generate far more wealth
and jobs than equivalent investments in other sectors.
Transferring clean energy to poor countries would begin
to address the economic desperation that fuels most anti-US
sentiment. A public works program to rewire the globe with
clean energy would accelerate economic development around
the world.
Our coal and oil burning
attack the systems that have made
this planet hospitable for 10,000 years. We are heating the
deep oceans, melting ice caps, triggering a wave of chaotic
weather, and changing the timing of the seasons. We are
living on an increasingly narrow margin of stability.
Nature's non-negotiable demand requires humanity cut
its use of carbon fuels by 70 percent in a very short
time, according to more than 2,000 scientists reporting
to the UN panel.
One approach involves
three interactive policies which,
while cutting emissions, would simultaneously create
millions of jobs around the world:
Redirect energy subsidies
in industrial nations.
The United States spends $20 billion a year to subsidize
coal and oil; industrial countries overall spend about
$200 billion. If those subsidies were phased out and
equivalent subsidies created for renewable energy sources,
oil companies would use them to retool and retrain their
workers to become aggressive developers of fuel cells,
wind farms, and solar systems.
Create a fund of $300
billion a year to transfer clean
energy to poor countries. Virtually all developing countries
would love to go solar; virtually none can afford it.
The fund could come from a small tax on international
currency transactions, which total $1.5 trillion every
day. A tax of a quarter-penny-per-dollar on those
transactions would yield about $300 billion a year
for windfarms in India, solar assemblies in El Salvador,
fuel cell factories in South Africa, and vast solar-powered
hydrogen farms in the Middle East.
Alternatively, financing
could involve a carbon tax
in industrial countries or a tax on airline travel.
Establish a binding
fossil fuel efficiency standard
that rises 5 percent per year. Starting at its current
baseline, each country would raise its carbon efficiency
5 percent -- producing the same amount next year with
5 percent less carbon fuel or 5 percent more with the
same amount of carbon fuel -- until the 70 percent
reduction was attained.
Because no economy
grows at 5 percent for long, emissions
reductions would outpace economic growth. Domestic emissions
trading could help countries meet the progressively more
stringent goal. Nations would initially meet the goal
through low-cost efficiency measures. When those cheap
efficiencies become exhausted, countries would meet the
rising efficiency goal by drawing progressively more
energy from non-carbon sources. That, in turn, would
create mass markets for renewables that would lower
their costs and make them economically competitive
with fossil fuels.
A plan of this type
would propel the metamorphosis
of oil companies into energy companies. The progressive
efficiency standard would make renewable energy a central
engine of global economic growth. Competition for the
new $300 billion a year market in clean energy would
power the process.
A real solution to
climate change has the potential
to begin to mend a fractured world.
Ross Gelbspan is author
of "The Heat Is on: The Climate
Crisis, the Cover-Up, the Prescription" and the forthcoming
"Fevered Planet."
© Copyright 2003
Globe Newspaper Company
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