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May 6, 2010

WITH the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf, talk has once again turned to clean energy. What few people appreciate is that the demand for everything from solar panels to energy-efficient light bulbs is already booming. Worldwide, $162 billion was spent in new clean-tech investments in 2009 alone.

The United States, with its expertise, capital and entrepreneurial spirit, is well positioned to dominate what could easily be the biggest market of the 21st century. But as the most recent delay over the Senate energy bill shows, the country is missing a key ingredient in shaping an effective clean-tech policy: the political will to encourage the innovation, manufacturing and investment necessary to bring these new technologies to market. And the longer America drags its feet, the more it cedes this enormous potential source of national wealth to the only other country able to capture it — China.

True, China has a long way to go before it can claim the mantle of global market leadership in clean technology. Unlike the United States, however, it has spent the last few years shaping its industrial policy to achieve precisely that goal.

China’s determination to become the global leader in clean tech has little to do with concerns for the environment and everything to do with jobs. For the foreseeable future, the greatest challenge for Beijing is to ensure full employment and rising income levels. The rapidly growing clean-technology sector is one of the few that can provide a sufficient number of new jobs. (Disclosure: I invest in clean energy in America and abroad.)

This wouldn’t be the first time China has taken economic advantage of opportunities resulting from climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, which caps greenhouse-gas emissions in Europe and Japan up to 2012, includes market-based mechanisms to promote the reduction of emissions at the lowest cost. The largest of these is the Clean Development Mechanism, which allows developing countries like China to generate credits from cuts in their greenhouse-gas emissions that are then sold to developed countries.

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Wednesday 28 April 2010

by: Renee Schoof  |  McClatchy Newspapers

Washington - Interior Secretary Ken Salazar on Wednesday approved the nation's first offshore wind farm, the 130-turbine Cape Wind project off Cape Cod, Mass., and said that the power of strong winds over the Atlantic Ocean would be an important part of the U.S. drive to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

European countries have been building offshore wind farms for 20 years, and China is building its first, off Shanghai. Other U.S. states along the Atlantic Coast and the Great Lakes also are looking into building wind farms to produce large amounts of electricity.

The Cape Wind project, however, has been hung up for nine years as opponents — landowners, two Native American tribes and the Advisory Council on Historic Preservation — objected to its cost and its impact on views.

Although Cape Wind's fate is not related to other proposed U.S. offshore wind farms, many wind energy supporters hailed the decision as a good sign for the future of renewable energy development. The Interior Department set new rules for offshore wind last year and said it was working to streamline the permit process.

The decision on Cape Wind comes a month after the Obama administration approved more offshore oil and gas drilling. At a press conference, Salazar was asked about an oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico from a deepwater rig that exploded last week.

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April 16th, 2010

Written by Zachary Shahan | Cleantechnica.com

It isn’t technically feasible to have renewable energy supply us with 100% of our electricity needs, right? Wrong. Renewable energy is prohibitively expensive, right? Wrong.

A new report just put out this week, Roadmap 2050: a practical guide to a prosperous, low-carbon Europe, gets into technical and economic details surrounding these important issues. The report includes contributions from world leading economists and renewable energy experts, including people from McKinsey, KEMA, Imperial College London and Oxford Economics.

The report claims to be the most comprehensive assessment of the viability of zero carbon power supplies available today (focused on Europe).

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European Climate Foundation (ECF) developed this report. Though the organization probably hoped for positive results, it apparently did not expect things to be nearly as positive as they are.

“When the Roadmap 2050 project began it was assumed that high-renewable energy scenarios would be too unstable to provide sufficient reliability, that high-renewable scenarios would be uneconomic and more costly, and that technology breakthroughs would be required to move Europe to a zero-carbon power sector,” senior associate with ECF Matt Phillips said. “Roadmap 2050 has found all of these assertions to be untrue.”

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Tuesday 30 March 2010

by: Leslie Thatcher, t r u t h o u t | Report

On Monday, March 22, Van Jones and Billy Parish appeared together for a presentation entitled "Challenging America: Achieving Sustainability and Justice Through the Green Collar Economy" at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. The former Obama administration Green Jobs Adviser, Center for American Progress Senior Fellow and author of "The Green Collar Economy: How One Solution Can Fix Our Two Biggest Problems" and the Yale drop-out founder of the Energy Action Coalition and Clean Energy Corps provided a demonstration of the signature mix of inspirational vision and practical rigor that characterizes both men's work in support of environmental responsibility, diversity, social justice and democracy.

Billy Parish began his presentation by asking whether Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair Jr., Joseph McNeil and David Richmond were present in the hall. No one stood up.

"Brother Billy" - as Van Jones occasionally referred to him - proceeded to provide a rough sketch of his own trajectory from the safety and predictability of a privileged background to the decision to come "off the tracks" and plunge into committed organizing. He compared being alive now to coming of age at the cusp of the agrarian or industrial revolutions - or in the late 1950's, as the civil rights struggle was poised to take off. He described the green economy revolution as the only way to reconcile the crisis in resource availability and the social justice requirement to provide jobs for all the billion people poised to enter the global job market over the next three years. A steady-state economy will exhaust global resources of every kind and provide only 300 million jobs for those billion people, while transforming every system on which our economy depends "from how food is grown and processed, to how energy is delivered, to how we do the laundry" could create jobs for all.

Parish cited specific initiatives in Northern Arizona - the creation of green affordable housing for Navajo elders and a local burger restaurant that serves sustainably raised local food only - as examples of what needs to happen and can happen. He closed his prepared remarks with the reinvocation of the four young African-American freshmen at the Agricultural and Technical College of North Carolina who entered the Greensboro Woolworth's and sat down on stools previously reserved exclusively for whites and pointed out that, "Acts of courage inspire courage," that we have a very small window only to reverse climate change, and, finally, that "every single one of us is part of the problem. Every single one of us can be part of the solution."