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« Responding to Climate Change
Excerpt from In Search of Environmental Excellence:
Moving Beyond Blame
by Bruce Piasecki and Peter Asmus
CHAPTER 3
A Global Greenhouse: Framing the Debate
Page 13 of 14
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If Texas is any indication, we have reason for deep concern. Texas represents the ultimate in Big Oil mentality. It is the only state in the lower forty-eight that restricts sales of excess energy to its neighboring states, and instead blindly plans for more and more generation and consumption. In fact, utilities actively market excessive consumption from unneeded new nuclear power units. Texas's energy use is projected to rise for the next ten years, while most states strive for gains in efficiency.23
Congress can help, by dragging reluctant states into the age of efficiency. Already leaders from both parties have announced new federal initiatives on energy policy. Senator Tim Wirth of Colorado and Congresswoman Claudine Schneider of Rhode Island have both introduced bills calling for three-year increases of research and development funding in the area of energy efficiency and renewable energy. The Wirth bill would also establish a "Least-Cost National Energy Plan" which would mandate a twenty-percent carbon dioxide reduction by the year 2000. The legislation stipulates that the top two R&D priorities of the federal Department of Energy should be a reduction in greenhouse gases and greater energy efficiency. Additionally, it calls for the establishment of regional centers for industrial efficiency, important links in revitalizing American manufacturing.
But government does not have all the resources to do the job. Therefore, partnerships between business and government will be necessary. The government's response to global warming has to move toward policies that encourage such partnerships to improve American industry. Marc Ross, a University of Michigan physicist who serves as a consultant to the Department of Energy, highlights the challenge: "It will take government intervention because there are so many players here. You have over 80 million households using appliances. You have 100,000 to 200,000 contractors who have to learn how to better insulate houses."
Ross has identified five areas where government initiative can help ease global warming over the next two decades: conservation; process changes; fuel switching to natural gas; greater reliance on electricity and biomass; and recycling. The good news is that these goals can be achieved without much government money.
Efforts to reverse deforestation and improve efficiency, as well as manufacturing reforms, are just a few links in a long list of new measures that have to be adopted and reinforced on a worldwide basis to combat global warming. The critical player in securing environmental excellence is government. Luckily, joint ventures between governments, private industry, and utilities are financing ways to discover energy answers. The chief challenge before us now is how to shorten the time it takes to discover an answer, and then make it readily available in the marketplace. This lesson applies not only to efficiency innovations, but to the next step as well: new technologies.
In the development of new power-generation hardware such as a better gas turbine, a site-specific demonstration is typically co-funded by a governmental financing authority and perhaps another utility or entrepreneur. If the product demonstration is a success and generates sufficient interest, it is followed by the dispersal of the product within an industrial group.
The typical time for the completion of this cycle in the United States is fifteen years: roughly five years of design, five of development, and five of dissemination. (In Japan, due to the long-term focus of government-industry R&D efforts, this time frame has been shortened on the average to a total of five years.) In light of the current environmental crisis and increasing foreign competition, America needs to speed up this cycle by linking energy goals with environmental needs and economy savings from the start.
According to Robert Williams of Princeton's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, developing countries could benefit from extensive military R&D on jet turbines with a series of added innovations to adapt such engines for power generation. From a global warming perspective, these turbines are particularly beneficial if they are wedded to biomass energy supplies.24
The use of organic matter such as trees and plants — referred to as "biomass fuel" — combats the greenhouse effect. This is achieved in three important ways: by replacing fossil fuel with biofuels; by sequestering carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere in tree plantations; and by reducing deforestation and the resulting release of carbon dioxide by giving nations reasons to recognize the value of properly managed tree plantations.
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Footnotes
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There is a ray of hope from Texas in the form of an ambitious $100 million building retrofit program, most of it earmarked for state-owned institutions. This program is funded, appropriately enough, by Exxon funds obtained by way of a settlement regarding petroleum price-control violations between 1973 and 1981. Texas owns more state buildings than any other state, and therefore is the perfect testing ground for such new conservation technologies. The most promising aspect of the program, however, is that the program will institutionalize a series of incentives — in the form of savings and bonuses — for new energy-audit managers to exceed efficiency targets. The eight-year program began in July 1988. It will provide a critical data base from which the nation can shape a national strategy. [« back]
- Much of the information from Robert Williams is included in a paper entitled: "Biomass Gasifier/Gas Turbine Power and the Greenhouse Warming," and was presented at the International Energy Administration/Organization for Economic Competition and Development Seminar on Energy Technologies for Reducing Emissions of Greenhouse Gases in April 1989 in Paris. For more information, contact Director, Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544. [« back]
