Today's Congress Party victory on the No-Confidence motion in New Dehli got scant coverage in U.S. media, reported more in the business press for its likely trade benefits to the American nuclear industry than for its profound social implications and probable beneficial impact with respect to Global Warming. The Indian decision to greatly expand its use of Carbon-free sources to meet its rapidly growing energy demand is the single greatest victory to date on Climate Change.
Running neck and neck for that title, however, is the epiphany of veteran oilman T. Boone Pickens, now an evangelist for a greatly expanded U.S. Wind Power sector, who recently dug into his very deep pockets to risk $4 Billion of his own cash on the world's largest wind energy project. His plan to convert 20% of American electric generating capacity to Renewable Energy represents greater progress on Climate Change and Energy Independence than all of the policies of the last eight administrations - of both parties - put together.
These are cause for Hope... (more...)
The billions of tons of Coal exhaust that will be kept out of our atmosphere by Singh's nukes and Pickens' windmills represent the first truly significant movement against GHG production in history. But, their impacts will be even farther reaching than direct CO2 reductions alone.
Whether you like nuclear power or not, its hard to argue that, right now, Coal and Oil [through Climate Change, Mountaintop Removal, Strip Mining, Offshore Drilling, Petroterrorism, and Gulf Wars] pose the far greater threat to the planet and its inhabitants. In their race for economic supremacy (and to lift a third of humanity out of poverty and squalor), China and India will inevitably require vast new sources of energy.
At last count, China had commited to construct 953 new Coal-fired powerplants over the next decade. This so wildly outpaces any conservation benefits from Americans 'turning down their thermostats', that the Bush Administration has been - rightly - skeptical of the prospects for Kyoto to succeed, unless China and India were to go along. Since these Asian giants represent the great preponderance of all new future generating capacity (and additional automobiles) that will be brought online over the next two decades, their refusal to participate in Kyoto pretty much rendered our decision on the treaty as moot.
But, to his credit President Bush did make progress on Global Warming, despite Kyoto. In March, the 88-nation Ministerial Summit on environmental energy which the administration convened, known as the Washington International Renewable Energy Conference, or 'WIREC08' sought Carbon emission reduction targets from countries which would not commit to Kyoto. The atomic energy treaty that Bush negotiated with India, however, will have a greater net effect on CO2 than the efforts of the other 87 countries combined.
As Al Gore has recently highlighted, the problem of Global Warming is inextricably linked to issues of National Security and Economic Development - and, that currently, all three are pointing to solutions in the same direction. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh chose to divert his nation's precious development resources from Coal to Nuclear in a bold gamble, which has more to do with its competition with China than with Climate Change. India, already a net Coal importer (despite massive domestic reserves), has realized that whichever of the two has the most abundant and cheapest energy 20 years from now will emerge the more powerful and secure. While India is also making great strides in its deployment of Solar and other renewables, those wont deliver the massive baseload power requirements demanded to lift a billion rural Indian peasants out of poverty. Whatever its other drawbacks, Nuclear can.
China's leadership no longer rules in a vacuum from behind the walls of a Forbidden City. They are keenly aware of Singh's strategic calculation on long term energy. Even now, tonight, in the wake of the parliamentary vote in Dehli, the Plutocrats in Beijing must be considering the implications of an India in 2028 with inexhaustible reserves of Carbon-neutral (if not "clean") energy, as contrasted with a China of 2028 rapidly consuming its available Coal in a thousand smog-emitting powerplants that will each be obsolete the day they begin operation. A hundred Indian nuclear powerplants on the drawing board (whatever their own relative merits) is the surest - and, perhaps Only - way to persuade China to rethink its thousand Coal projects before they are too far commited to choose an alternative energy source.
In neither India nor China will development "wait" for cleaner, better, cheaper energy technologies. In each country, you already have a rising middle class of 300 Million people, the size of the United States, who will build homes and drive cars, and each also has a billion rural peasants, who deserve lives of better than the toil and squalor of generations past. We have no moral right to question their desire for bountiful food, recreational leisure, and the affluence we ourselves enjoy. The best we can hope for is that they get here by better, more sustainable technologies than we in the west have used; to fuel cars, power homes and businesses, and dispose of solid and liquid wastes. A nuclear-powered India is a giant step in that direction, any way you look at it. Its biggest impact may be to force China to reexamine its own strategic energy future.
The Pickens' Plan envisions shifting U.S. domestic Natural Gas production from its current use (primarily in power generation) to transportation fuels, since there are no technical or economic obstacles to LNG/CNG fueling of today's existing motor vehicles. While its debatable how competitive Natural Gas will actually be in the coming decade, against feedstock-free Algal Biofuels made from nothing but Air, Sunshine, and Seawater, that's hardly the point. Pickens is leading a movement on Wall Street to replace that Gas-fired electric generation capacity with Wind and other renewables. Those Gigawatts of Wind and Solar projects will get financed and built whether his Natural Gas from the retired powerplants has anywhere else to go, or not. Perhaps, in the end, in all practicality, his renewables projects will end up displacing Coal power rather than Gas. Or, perhaps his initiatve will leave Gas obsolete, and his Mesa Petroleum's large Gas holdings a burst bubble when he passes on. It hardly matters. Those Gigawatts of clean energy he builds will keep flowing, regardless.
I was in the audience last Thursday at Constitution Hall in D.C., as Al Gore unveiled the Climate Challenge of the We Campaign. In the packed auditorium, he set us on a course as momentus as John F. Kennedy's "Moon Speech". Its not important that he does so as a statesman outside the doors of official power. He wields a moral authority on this issue, by virture of having now been proven right in his 30 years of advocacy on Global Warming. The Nobel Committee recognized that moral authority with the same badge it conferred on Nelson Mandela, Michail Gorbachev, Mother Teresa, Lech Wałęsa, Andrei Sakharov, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dalai Lama.
It is unlikely in the extreme that either the Indian nuclear power initiative or Pickens' massive wind energy commitment would have happend without Al Gore, and the world's attention focused as it now is through his efforts on our environmental energy future. Gore has thus already kept billions of tons of Carbon out of Earth's atmosphere in the 2020 timeframe. In a sense, we are arguably now already 40% of the way toward a future of Carbon neutral energy. Pickens is not the only billionaire committed to wrangling a Renewable Energy sector into the mainstream. Vinod Khosla, cofounder of Sun Microsystems, has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in next-generation Biofuels, to make Ethanol and Biodiesel from waste instead of Corn and Soybeans.
If the Gore organization can elicit the commitment of three more billionaire world-class investors at the level of Pickens and Khosla, who will focus on the Photovoltaic, Solar Thermal, and Geothermal energy sectors, the ultimate battle will effectively be won, because the technologies will each proliferate independently with a 'champion' of that caliber on Wall Street. It wont matter what the next President or Congress do. It wont matter whether people buy Hybrids or SUVs, or where they set their thermostats. A future of clean energy will come about because the changing climate in business is as strong a motivator as the changing climate in the atmosphere. The Gore Challenge will be met because it will be cheaper, more economical, and more profitable for the electric power industry to buy advanced renewable technologies than to buy obsolete, fossil-fuel-dependent relics of legacy '20th Century thinking'.
Vice President Gore has already triggered the Green Revolution, and done more as a true Statesman than anyone since Winston Churchill. Join the We Campaign, and lets all pitch in and give him a hand...