The two men strongly disagree. But their actual approach to eco issues is nevertheless complementary. The key idea to Lomborg´s  theory is that it is simply not a global warming thesis. It is a list of world problems ranked in order of their priority as perceived by this Scaninavian maverick statistician. With a bit of tweaking Lomborg´s ideas could be framework for a workable solution to global warming too.

Lomborg, who says that the climate is not priority number one in terms of an economic cost/benefit analysis of solutions to world problems (ranging from Aids, malaria, potable water provision), cannot help it but litter his argument with blanks when it comes to thinking constructively about climate change.

He gets a lot of press attention because he does exactly the opposite of constructive thinking – he points out the costs of what he believes is ‘exaggerating’ the problem of climate change.  In making climate secondary to issues such as Aids, and claiming the payback is way better that way, he only gives us half the picture but makes everybody who pays attention think of the whole problem nevertheless.

Lomborg puts into plain English what we’ve failed to recognize as the weak link in our approach to development and life on the planet for the past decennia. It takes a person like Pawlyn, who departs from the assumption that sustainable economics can be virtually cost free, to take apart Bjorn’s destructive reasoning.

Check out the video in which Pawlyn cleans out the Lomborg rationale by presenting evidence the Scandinavian environmental skeptic almost tangibly chooses to ignore. A few powerful Pawlyn examples show how sustainable methods embody the less is more conondrum in ways that clasical economics just will not comprehend.

Armed with around 20 slides, Pawlyn efficiently fills in the blanks in Lomborg’s argument and points out where he’s biased by consulting a particular breed of scientists. The result? You’ll be able to see how the two complement each other. Lomborg’s framework to address global warming, putting it in a list of problems that need prioritizing, is essentially quite workable. If only because it’s a holistic approach to  problems that the Planet and the People on it as a whole (whether we manage to get our head around this or not). And Pawlyn simply corrects Lomborg’s idea of ‘Profit’.

The Planet People Profit theory is of course nothing new, but Pawlyn´s comments happen to be well-timed and they put flesh on the bones as he speaks from experiences which are pretty astonishing. These days, the ecosystem is more and more connected with the global recession, as is the concept of a freebie lunch that mother nature supposedly provides us with. World leaders preparing for Copenhagen recently were notified of the advantages of eco systems in the light of expensive carbon capturing options being reviewed as the UNEP released its report on this issue.

The incorporatation of natural systems into economic thinking is exactly what Pawlyn says Lomborg´s argument lacks.  Lomborg’s calculations of the cost of carbon are a clear example of this.

The Scandinavian statistician estimates the cost/benefit of carbon dioxide at $20/$2 per ton in his most recent book Cool It. (Since the publication he more than doubled the benefits part of the equation to around GBP 5 a ton). Pawlyn asserts that Lomborg’s calculations are essentially very basic. “There are some things that cost that, but there is a hell of a lot that doesn’t”, he said, citing a 2007 MacKinsey study looking at all the different carbon abatement options with wildly varying costs and applicability. For instance, a simple and cheap carbon abatement option like energy saving light bulbs cannot be calculated in the same way as an expensive technology such as carbon capturing and storage.

The brilliant thing about the MacKinsey study is that it divides the technologies into stuff that saves money and applications that would cost money.  That, for starters, is what Lomborg’s crude assessment totally bypasses.

The main reason no doubt is that Lomborg also completely ignores to put a monetary value on natural resources in general. Most often alluded to as ecosystem services, these are estimated at around $33 billion annually by mature, selfrespecting economists. “Call me picky but that seems like a big number to miss out on in your [carbon price] calculations. […]” said Pawlyn. The phrase was coined over decade ago already, so it can’t really have escaped Lomborg´s attention. You can argue that the rest of the world is only now waking up to eco economics, but hey, if you write a book about why global warming is not economically the number one biggest problem we´re faced with, you´re missing out on something essential.

Pawlyn also argues that the way we manage carbon emissions should not necessarily be seen as competing with other world problems. Carbon management is the one exception in that it can be an income earner rather than a cost post. Lomborg on the other hand believes that if we spend more on climate change, there is less available for other world problems. The money a country like the UK spends on Third World poverty is around 0.3% of its gross domestic product (GDP). In Lomborg’s argument, that would theoretically leave 99.7% for problems including climate change. What Lomborg simply ignores (and that is exactly how the majority of people in the past decennia have been thinking) is how we manage carbon emissions with this 99.7%.
“It is not necessarily about cutting things. It’s about doing things differently”, says Pawlyn.  The London architect has himself developed technology which incorporates biomimicry. This often provides not only cost saving projects but turns the earth´s resources into cash spinners that are hard to ignore even if you are the kind of economist Lomborg is.

CSP, concentrated solar power, for instance, works by mimicking the behavior of beetles. A project Pawlyn ran in the Sahara desert that runs on this technology focuses the sun’s heat in mirrors to create steam which in turn drives turbines. It is twice as powerful as conventional photovoltaics and works very well in what you could consider as adverse circumstances. CSP needs a supply of demineralised water to keep the mirrors clean. Incidentally, that is where seawater greenhouse technology, another biomimicry-based solution develped by Pawlyn and his colleagues comes in. It creates distilled freshwater from seawater. The dual technology when combined in a project has a payback period of between six to twelve years. In one go, it generates energy, fresh water and combats desertification in areas where resources are scarce by cleverly using sunlight. All for free after a certain period!

”When we think about nature, we are inclined to think that it’s all about competition. But if you look at mature ecosystems you’re just as likely to find remarkable examples of symbiotic relationships; organisms that have evolved to hook up for mutual benefit,” says Pawlyn. Perhaps he should  apply that to his own ideas too.

Another major point Pawlyn addressed at his speech during the BCO conference is Lomborg’s assertion that climate change is exaggerated. Cool It cites IPCC figures indicating a rise in sea levels of 18 to 59 cms (something that has recently been analysed as a gross underestimation by various reputable institutions). But the book omits to include the accompanying comment by the IPCC researchers that this will be an 18-53 cm rise plus an unknown extra rise from various other factors. Sadly, Pawlyn does not specify the factors either. “It’s surprising that Bjorn ignores that, but I guess it is rather inconvenient”, he says. I would rather have had the specifics than an over-used accusation.

Pawlyn also showed the sources Lomborg consulted, which revealed a tremendous climate sceptic bias. Well known skeptics such as Indur Goklany, Richard Linzen and Patrick Michaels and Roger Pielke were quoted 21 times in the book, whereas well known climate scientists such as James Hansen, John Holdren, John Houghton, James McCarthy, Stephen Schneider and Kerry Emanuel were not quoted once.

All in all, the debate between the two environmentalists was a microcosm of what is happening elsewhere in the world. International climate negotiators will no doubt be involved in very similar issues. Let´s hope they don´t get bogged down in, what in less revolutionary fields would be termed semantics and which at the end of the day is just political bickering.

image by Jurvetson

Green living is more of an adventurous thing than a social thing. That’s why I was surprised that it has taken so long for green organizations to cluster together on a map. But hey ho, turns out that I was wrong; environmentalist mapmakers have been at it since 1992, putting green initiatives on maps.

But to give me my dues, GreenMaps.org, a New York headquartered global organization has only grown phenomenally since Google Earth released its API to the public.

Green Maps enables communities, groups, schools, companies and even individuals to map the green world around them. At the moment some 300 completed maps are listed covering all the major spots on the globe and many more are in the making.

You can look up a map by theme or location. Themes include bike lanes, green shops, gardens, energy resources, green public initiatives.

Each individual map itself is listed by means of an icon on the mainframe’s larger map. All maps use a shared visual language in the form of self explanatory icons which reveal what you are exploring. There are also icons which indicate wheelchair accessibility, child friendliness and public transport options. Mapmakers can even include video material on their map. All the data is stored on a carbon neutral server.

Greenmaps.org is a great example of how thinking globally by acting locally works in practice.  I tried looking up something for the area I live in and found all that I need in one single map. More than 100 green activities and facilities in my neighborhood are listed  (i.e.  recycling spots, second hand shops, charities, green bike shops, cycling paths, walking trails, historic spots, forests, restaurants, carpets and even wood), I have instant access to comprehensive information that makes life a lot easier.

Even though I have only just arrived in this town, I am guessing that a lot of the information is new to locals too. That’s because a lot of the initiatives have only started out recently. But mapping information also makes you look at the world in a totally different way.  The local organization that made the map benefits too because it raises its profile and is accessed by people from all over the globe.

But perhaps the greatest value of the map is that similar information about locations around the globe is listed quite lavishly. So when you’re traveling to another city, you’ll still be able to sustain a green lifestyle without too much trouble. A few years ago that was simply not possible. The instant accessibility of the maps will be hard to beat by a social network.

After completing the mapping process, a participating community or organization can have their map printed.  GreenMaps.org is one of the few green viral marketing ploys I’ve come across that is really contageous. You can buy T-shirts with slogans like “I’m a mapmaker”. They will be incredibly viral no doubt.

The only downside to the project is that there’s no map that actually outlines the effects of global warming. All the 584 maps that are currently being built by communities in 54 countries have the aim to reduce global warming. But because most projects are generated by people living and acting locally, few overview maps exist. One reason no doubt is that it is anticipated that the effects of global warmign will re-draw the world map significantly. If the IPCC’s worst case scenario comes true, vast parts of Europe and Scandinavia and coastal areas of all continents will submerge and up to 85% of the amazon could shrink.

Nevertheless, this is a future based scenario and already various effects of global warming are visible locally. So if anyone’s up for it, perhaps we can start out an initiative.  There are a few maps out there that do map potential global warming effects, the most notable of which is Google’s joint effort with the MET office, which is a pretty astounding thing. NationalGeographic’s Shell sponsored map is also rather good.

Incidentally, Nasa’s first attempt  to map carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere by using space technology ended in disaster a few weeks ago when the rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) crashed into the Pacific Ocean.

The Bonn climate negotiations which went underway this weekend for a two week period are probably the most important of all the rounds that have taken place thus far. The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) meeting is tackling issues like commitment to CO2 levels and the creation of a worldwide carbon trading platform.

Perhaps more interesting than the very first days of the talks, the participants have been issued with a rather informative 16-page document,  entitled Information Note,  in which the UNFCCC makes careful guesses as to what the practicalities will boil down to of climate change policies globally.

The document is by dint of its nature geared toward the future.  Despite being rather vague on the real impact of climate change policies by national governments around the globe, the document is shocking in places. Predicting the biggest overhaul of the global economy ever,  the UNFCCC says world citizens ought to brace themselves for a new economic order which will see millions of people lose jobs and others gain jobs. The biggest ripples in the water will be made by industry and companies relocating to areas with more beneficial tariff regulations and/or taxes, the Information Note says.

The impact of environment related tariffs will not be all that different than the impact of any other tariff, but the Information Note points out that the effect of millions of job relocations will be rather tangible.  On top of that, we’ll see the introduction of “border carbon adjustments”. This means that some countries will impose a levy on imported goods equal to that which would have been imposed had they been produced domestically under more strict environmental regimes.

Alternatively, exporters might be forced to buy [carbon] offsets at the border. These are going to be massively drastic measures for a rather big number of people involved, but whether the world will be any fairer for it is very very unlikely. At the end of the day, the Information Note reveals, the impact of future environment tariffs will lead to ‘decreased market share for covered foreign producers’.  And “such schemes would leave trade and investment patterns unchanged,” the Note adds. Why the bother, you might ask.  Why not do a really good job and simply make the world a bit better whilst we’re at it??

It’s issues like these that will have a big impact on the developing nations’ commitment to the environment. As I wrote in a comment (which has yet to be published) on GlobalWarmingIsReal it’s hardly a question whether a 25 percent reduction from 2000 levels by developing countries would be enough (it won’t be). But, the negotiators for the Third World are struggling with how, with these tools, they can achieve reductions at all.

Let’s hope that the richer nations realise this. Let’s hope that people understand that since polluting industries are a historic legacy of the industrialised world, the main responsibility toward the environment falls on the developed nations. In order to persuade developing countries to act, the richer countries have to show they’re completely serious about deep and rapid cuts in their own emissions.

image courtesy Phylevn

The trend began with deals between energy companies and various large companies and local municipalities to install solar panels on large premises in return for a fee. One example is ProLogis, a large distributor in California, getting solar energy from systems installed and run by outside energy companies. The first such deal was when General Motors got solar panels installed on the roofs of its Spain production facilities.

Now the energy companies are beginning to tap the residential sector. The inherent logic of this development is obvious; once they’ve got local authority approval, energy companies can extend their ‘solar parks’ quickly and with relatively little hassle by fixing normal residents up with solar power. Home owners are interested because they get a fee for renting out their roofs to professionally managed solar panels. It’s hard to imagine a better way to reduce your footprint. Or is there?

Despite the compelling logic of the roof rental schemes, the cost/savings equation of the plans of Duke Energy in North Carolina aren’t immediately sky rocketing. Duke recently became the latest in a spate of energy companies to announce it would start renting the roofs of ordinary houses for solar power generation. The energy giant will rent 425 roofs across the state as early as next year.

You could argue that Duke, which aside from the Carolinas is also present in parts of the Midwest, found a vital niche because not everybody can afford decent solar panels and this offers people the chance to participate in the solar revolution. But critics doubt that residents are getting value. Megan Treacy at Ecogeek comments that the cost is pretty high for a fairly modest return in energy.

Duke will invest $50 million and expected generated energy will be enough to power 1,300 houses. Those numbers might not mean much at first glance, but the New York Times reckons it’s a lot of dosh given that this output represents less than one-tenth of one percent of Duke’s customer base in North Carolina. Also, the company is charging every residential customer in North Carolina eight cents a month for its investment in solar energy, whether they are consumers of green energy or not.

Duke had to tone down its plans earlier on because the North Carolina Utilities Commission, a consumer advocacy organization, blocked the company’s plans to extend its solar presence on the roofs of 800 houses.

Despite resistance it´s very likely that Duke´s project will be extended to thousands of sites throughout the state. That´s because the company´s plans fit in well with the overall strategy that the state of North Carolina adopted in recent years.The stage requires 12.5% of its energy mix to be made of renewables by 2021. Duke says it’s going to be playing a central role in this development. But the company´s plans to raise the funding for its investment by charging the customers for it might not make everybody happy.

Another company that is aggressively moving center stage is SoCal Edison. It is leasing roof space of ProLogis as the first step towards becoming the largest solar energy provider in the US. Panels placed on the 607,000 square feet of roof of ProLogis’ Kaiser Distribution Park in the Californian town of Fontana produce 2.2 megawatt of energy, enough for up to 1,426 households. Edison has plans for 50 megawatts (MW) worth of solar panel installations each year, ultimately generating 250 MW of solar energy.

Energy companies are also at the heart of very ambitious plans that politicians in Wisconsin are rolling out, stepping up the generation of home grown solar power. Wisconsin plans to embark on a state-wide solar power project within one year, which involves collaborative forms. The state has commissioned a study into the feasibility of large scale solar power generation.

Wisconsin’s future solar plans will likely will be a hyperized version of what’s going on already. A key solar energy project, Second Nature, already pays customers if they generate power contributing to the electric grid. In the next two years, home-brewn energy output is targeted to rise to over 680 kilowatts.

Wisconsin is investing around $5.5 million in investment in solar energy and the state’s government has strong backing of the Sierra Club, which itself initiated the idea of setting up a state-wide solar plan. Jennifer Feyerherm, of the Sierra Club said ‘we need to, as fast as we possibly can, be moving away from the dirtiest source of power, and that is coal.’

New, independent, companies are also getting in on the game of offering people the option of renting out their roofs. Outside renewable energy providers will pay for, install, own and operate the solar systems. All the home owners do is agree to pay a rental fee for the solar electricity generated – based on their historical usage at the previous year’s rate. Cost reductions of around 20% are feasible.

A case in point is the Delaware renewable energy company Citizenre which offers customers living in states that have a net metering law the option of renting panels for one, five or 25 years, also paying a per-kilowatt flat fee in stead of the utility bill. Excess power generated is sold back to the local utility by the Citizenre.

The advantage of these types of schemes is that energy prices might go through the roof, but that this won’t affect the solar panel renters.

Mesh WiFi firm Meraki started shipping its Meraki Solar December 4th, after a year long delay because it needed to improve its battery technology.

The delay lands both the firm and customers in a slightly awkward situation. The worldwide run on solar power equipment seemed overly justified when oil prices spiked. Now that the price of oil is in the 40 dollar bracket, what should solar be priced at? Meraki has found a creative way around this stumbling block. Customers can bring their own panels! They’re selling solar Wifi solutions for apartment blocks or businesses and small communities at $749 a piece for a bring-your-own-panel model up to $1,499 for areas with shorter days or less light which require a battery.

Company cofounder Sanjit Biswas told ArsTechnica that Meraki decided to change from sealed lead-acid to lithium iron-phosphate for greater capacity.

Biswas said this dropped the battery’s weight, which in turn reduces shipping costs for the many remote areas that the Solar unit is being deployed.

The solution garnered a lot of custom from unexpected quarters. Meraki, which set out to cater to people and businesses in far out, remote places with no power, attracts a lot of business from people looking to reduce ancillary costs.

And it makes terrific sense because employing a union electrician to install ordinary wifi easily runs up a bill of a few thousand dollars. Customers opting to install solar Wi-Fi instead don’t need to go to such expense because the solar solution is a relatively low-impact amenity. The higher initial price of Solar is easily canceled out by lower installation and recurring costs, says Biswas.

Meraki’s customer list includes doctors’ offices, shopping mall management companies and firms that outsource their information technology services. “That’s a surprise for us: it’s not just about public access, sometimes it’s just about plain Wi-Fi access, even internally,” Biswas was quoted as saying.

The company has developed centralized management console for this segment allowing customers to manage accounts and operations themselves or use an integrator for remote help. The system has also been scaled to manage thousands of devices on a single network.

And the good news is that there´s considerable interest from countries around the globe  in  a round-the-clock solar grid.  The logic being that because the sun consistently shines on some part of the planet, we might as well make the most of  this constant source of energy.

The ground tone at the recent European Science Foundation conference about Nanotechnology for Sustainable Energy left me with little to guess about; Europe is ready to accelerate development of nano technologies.

The conference focused on solar energy rather than on other sustainable energy sources such as wind. Solar is highly compatible with  nanotechnology not least because solar energy conversion holds the greatest promise as a durable replacement of fossil fuels.

The technologies European scientists say are going to dominate the sustainable energy sector include Dye Sensitized solar Cells (DSCs) and biomimetics. These two technologies are popular because they show great promise for capturing or storing solar energy. At the same time, nanocatalysis already has begun to churn out efficient methods for energy-saving industrial processes convincingly.

Solar energy can be harvested directly to generate electricity or to yield fuels such as hydrogen for use in engines. Such fuels can also in turn be used indirectly to generate electricity in conventional power stations. “The potential of solar power is much, much larger in absolute numbers than that of wind,” according to Professor Bengt Kasemo, who chaired the conference and who is attached to the Chalmers University of Technology.

A drawback of solar energy is that it -like wind energy- varies greatly across time and geography. That’s because it is confined to the daytime and less suitable for regions in higher latitudes, such as Scandinavia and Siberia. For this reason there is growing interest in the idea of a global electricity grid according to Kasemo.

“If solar energy is harvested where it is most abundant, and distributed on a global net (easy to say – and a hard but not impossible task to do) it will be enough to replace a large fraction of today’s fossil-based electricity generation,” said Kasemo. “It also would solve the day/night problem and therefore reduce storage needs because the sun always shines somewhere.”

Sources at the conference and independent organizations say that in the immediate future, solid state technologies based on silicon are likely to predominate the production (manufacture) of solar cells, but DSC and other “runners ups” are likely to lower costs in the long term, using cheaper semiconductor materials to produce robust flexible sheets strong enough to resist buffeting from hail for example.

Although less efficient than the very best silicon or thin film cells using current technology, their better price/performance has led the European Union to predict that DSCs will be a significant contributor to renewable energy production in Europe by 2020. The DSC was invented by a Swiss professor, Michael Grätzel, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology at Lausanne, who was one of the speakers and vice chair at the ESF conference.

One key point to emerge from the ESF conference is that there will be growing choice and competition between emerging nanotechnology-based solar conversion technologies. “I think the important fact is that there is strong competition and that installed solar power is growing very rapidly, albeit from a small base,” said Kasemo.”This will push prices down and make solar electricity more and more competitive.”

Some of the most exciting of these alternatives are biomimetics, which involves mimicking processes that have been perfected in biological organisms through eons of evolution. Plants and a class of bacteria, cyanobacteria, have evolved photosynthesis, involving the harvesting of light and the splitting of water into electrons and protons to provide a stream of energy that in turn produces the key molecules of life.

Photosynthesis can potentially be harnessed either in genetically-engineered organisms, or completely artificial human-made systems that mimic the processes, to produce carbon-free fuels such as hydrogen. Alternatively, photosynthesis could be tweaked to produce fuels such as alcohol or even hydrocarbons that do contain carbon molecules but recycle them from the atmosphere and therefore make no net contribution to carbon dioxide levels above ground.

Biomimetics could also solve the longstanding problem of how to store large amounts of electricity efficiently. This could finally open the floodgates for electrically-powered vehicles by enabling them at last to match the performance and range of their petrol or diesel-based counterparts.

Because in spite of all the excitement, the commercial realisation of biomimetic and other emerging technologies is still quite far off. But meantime nanotechnology has an important contribution to make, improving the efficiency of existing energy-generating systems during the transition from fossil fuels.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented a virus based type of solar electricity. The presentation by Angela Belcher showed the details of a type of virus that infects E.coli bacteria (a bacteriophage) capable of coating itself in electrically-conducting materials like gold. This can be used to build compact high capacity batteries, with the added advantage that it can potentially assemble itself, exploiting the natural replicating ability of the virus. The key to the high capacity in small space lies in the microscopic size of the nanowires constructed by the viruses – this means that a greater surface area of charge carrying capacity can be packed into a given volume.

What Others Say About A Solar Grid:

clipped from news.softpedia.com Scientists from different countries and organizations are beginning to draw attention to the fact that a solar power grid, spanning throughout the globe, would have enormous benefits in store for all countries deciding to partake in the project. Because it stretches all over the world, the planned network will not need too much storing capacity, as the electrical current will be transmitted non-stop through a network of channels. Some would compare this type of structure to the Internet. A network of solar powered electrical plants will deliver energy to designated places throughout the globe. The main idea behind this concept is that the Sun always shines somewhere on Earth.

clipped from www.solarsbay.com Imagine the implications of such a grid – you get back from work at 08:00Pm. You park your electric car in the garage, plug it to the solar grid. Your car is pumped with solar energy traveling from someone’s rooftop solar panel. It’s now morning or noon for your solar energy supplier. He lives in an area of the world where solar energy availability always exceeds his own needs. Your car’s battery is now fully charged. You consume more solar energy from him to light your house, heat your water or charge batteries you will later use when you cook or watch T.V.

There’s no precedent for a carbon tax, but it’s definitely a viable alternative to carbon trading, it appears. Last week, even Exxon Mobil Corp.’s chief executive officer Rex Tillerson said he’s in favor of taxing carbon dioxide emissions. “[It’s] a more direct and transparent approach,” Tillerson said, comparing the tax to trading carbon.

Aside from Tillerson, proponents of a carbon tax include Al Gore and Ralph Nader. The magic words associated with the carbon tax debate are “revenue neutral.” That means the government lowers other taxes in order to generate the carbon tax. In addition to what seems to be consumer central thinking, the carbon tax is supposedly easy to implement on short notice. Proponents also say a new tax is efficient and relatively fraud proof.

What’s more, big countries like China will be reticent to implement carbon trading if current proposals move forward as planned. Any carbon trading platform that’s going to be successful urgently needs the support of major international polluters, according to consumer advocate Ralph Nader. He branded the Lieberman-Warner bill on climate change a ‘disguised effort at protectionism’ in an article in the Wall Street Journal.

Kenneth Green, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute recently explained how incorporating a carbon tax of $15 would be passed on to consumers. He said that revenue neutrality would be achieved by reducing income tax by 13%. Total revenues generated from the $15 levy would amount to $80 billion and would achieve net GHG reductions of 11%, Green explained. Consumers would end up paying 83% more for coal, 11% more for oil, 9% more for natural gas, and they’d pay 14 cents more per gallon of gasoline at the pump. Green added that a carbon tax eliminates the need to legislate all sorts of standards. Because pollution is taxed, the production of polluting products will be automatically reduced. That means there’s no need for green building standards, light bulb standards, or other appliance standards, Green said. That might be a bit naive.

An economist at Tufts University, Gilbert Metcalf, might be a bit more rational, saying that slapping a tax on GHG emissions that raises the price of coal by over 80% will simply force power plant operators to go in search of cheaper and environmentally friendly alternatives for coal. What happens in other industries won’t magically create ‘green’ products. Many of these issues will no doubt feature in the next weeks as climate change becomes a central issue to be tackled in Congress.

The carbon tax bill issued last week by Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA) proposes to tax companies $10 per ton of fossil fuels used. The ultimate cost for the consumer is estimated to be 2 cents-per-gallon. The tax would be doubled in the second year and then raised by $10 per ton every year. Once the emissions are below 80% of their 1990 levels, the tax will be leveled out. The proposal is designed to prevent businesses from gaming the system, Stark said.

Democrat members of Congress as well as President Barack Obama are still mostly in favor of a cap-and-trade system. There are various discussions ongoing about proposals for new legislation to limit the CO2 emissions of large operations like power plants. For an overview of them all, check out this link. Cap-and-trade boils down to limiting pollution at the company level. Companies that emit more GHG than the amount they’re legally allowed can buy “permits to pollute” which fund the efforts of Third World companies to build new production facilities that are “green.” The permits are traded on a market based platform.

Opponents of a market-based carbon trading system say there are operational challenges which will never be overcome. They also warn that it will take years before the new market will run smoothly and before the right carbon price will have been determined. There are ways to achieve this quicker. For instance. governments can set a minimum price. But opponents warn any type of “surgery” will be controversial.

The Europeans, who have been trading carbon certificates since 2005, are perhaps a case in point. They still haven’t succeeded at getting the market to reflect the true cost/benefit picture of offsetting emissions. Another contentious issue is regulation. Who can punish companies for knowingly over-estimating their greenhouse gas emissions initially? Governments themselves are pushed for time to meet international targets. And there’s also a lot of uncertainty about how efficiency is calculated.

There are various proposed carbon trading platforms in the US, but every model has its drawbacks. By comparison, the only government in the world to have a carbon tax in place is the Canadian province of British Columbia. The British Columbian government taxes transportation and heating fuels but the tax is very umpopular with consumers because it was introduced at a time when gasoline prices were already skyrocketing.

In addition to Stark’s carbon tax bill, Rep. John Larson (D-Conn.) is working on similar legislation. Larson is advocating a carbon tax to offset payroll taxes, much like Green outlined. “We can have middle-income tax relief while serving the purpose of cleaning up the environment,” Larson said at a briefing last week sponsored by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, Carbon Tax Center, the Climate Crisis Coalition, Friends Committee on National Legislation and Friends of the Earth. Larson first issued a carbon tax proposal in 2007 but this initiative failed to muster enough support.

The researchers, in the Netherlands and Germany, have found scientific grounds for the commonly held opinion that high initial costs of eco-friendly solutions are rewarded in the long term by savings from lower energy usage.

Rather than focus on a CO2 emissions cap which is the common approach to climate solutions, the researchers modeled changes based on a cap for future temperature rises.

Working with a temperature cap makes sense in many ways, especially financially, says Michiel Schaeffer of Wageningen University in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. This is because the cost estimates associated with limiting a pre-determined level of carbon emissions often rise rapidly, even exponentially, as the scale of emission reductions to be reached increases.

Taking the maximum temperature approach circumvents this and is more relevant to real-life impacts which are strongly related to temperature rise. “Concentrations don’t tell you that much about what happens in terms of rainfall … or to society,” Schaeffer was quoted as saying by Reuters.

Nice words, but does this really make sense? At the decision maker level it certainly does, the scientists say. Changing your normative target to a limit of a global temperature and playing the game accordingly results in a lower chance that governments are faced with exponential costs, they add. The researchers established a functional relationship between the costs involved and actual success booked (i.e. reductions in temperatures). Their research shows that the mitigation costs rise proportionally to the likelihood of meeting a temperature target across a range of concentration levels.

In economic terms, investing in climate mitigation to increase the probability of achieving climate targets yields “constant returns to scale,” because of a counterbalancing rapid rise in the probabilities of meeting a temperature target as concentration is lowered.

And they have the numbers to support the hypothesis. Governments around the world will need to fork out hefty initial investments in order to achieve an impact and slow temperature rises. But after a certain level of success has been acheived, the extra costs will have positive returns on warming, say the researchers.

So how much money are we talking about? Early investments must be seizable. We have a 90 percent chance of limiting global warming to 2 Celsius (3.6 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures by investing 2 percent of the global gross domestic product (GDP) in climate mitigation packages from 2005 until the year 2100.

By contrast, if globally only 0.5 percent of GDP is spent on the environment (approximately what the EU currently spends) there would only be a 10 percent chance that we actually bring temperatures down by 2 Celsius. This figure is one that many participants in the global climate negotiations agree on. Raising the initial investment in climate mitigation packages to one percent of GDP results in a 40 percent chance.

The ‘shock therapy’ the researchers suggest has an upside in that it really will work out for the best. The most common reason why most governments fail to invest in climate mitigation on a large scale is the fear that the expenditure might be low initially and will soar later on. But the opposite cost analysis trend is likely to be more accurate. “It gets easier once the world gets going,” according to Schaeffer. Read the article Schaeffer and his colleagues from Germany published about their findings in The Journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Science (PNAS) here.

Recent research by think tank and academic institutions shows that significant job increases in the green sector is expected. The reports provide helpful information for people interested in employment in a green job. Many of them offer detailed information of anticipated growth per sector and region, which is exactly what job seekers need.

A recent survey of the Academy for Educational Development (AED) advises green job seekers to consider a community college as their ‘dream school’.

The ideal jobseeker in the green workforce will have more than a high school diploma but less than a four year college degree.

“[The green jobs sector is the] greatest workforce development opportunity on the horizon for community colleges”, according to the survey, entitled “Going Green: The Vital Role of Community Colleges in Building a Sustainable Future and Green Workforce“.

AED’s advice to policy makers? Keep this level of skills in mind when decisions are made to combat the fledgling economy. In other words; it makes sense to send people back to college.

Another report, released by the American Solar Energy Society (ASES) provides very detailed information about job opportunities in renewable energy. ASES paints various scenarios for the green jobs sectors. Its most optimistic scenario anticipates the number of jobs in the renewables sector will increase to 37 million by 2030, up from the 9 billion in 2007.

The authors of the report, who collaborated with economists at the Management Information Services, Inc (MISI), also gave a worst case scenario, dubbed the ‘business as usual’ scenario. This ‘base case’ still forecasts a rise in the green job sector of 16 million jobs – around half the number in the optimistic scenario. An intermediary scenario (not too positive and not too gloomy) predicts that 19.5 million jobs will be created, which will generate around $2,248 billion in revenue by 2030.

These numbers don’t mean a thing without insight into more specific job details. And that is what ASES provides down to the sector, including solar thermal, photovoltaic, biodiesel, and ethanol.

Most of the jobs that have been generated in the renewables sector thus far have been in the private sector. The businesses that emerged and that are successful are mostly in the solar thermal, solar photovoltaics, biofuels, and fuel cells sectors, ASES reports. Each of these sectors have achieved 25%+ annual revenue growth, something that is hardly visible in their stock prices but which is translated in their direct funding levels.

But the organization warns of risks if things don’t move fast.

“Every year’s delay by policy-makers (2009, 2010) has a highly disproportionate and negative impact on long range growth”, ASES predicts.

Competition from abroad won’t only come from Asia but Germany is also singled out as a threat to American companies in the renewable energy sector.

“Unless quick action is taken, the U.S. risks losing millions of green jobs to other nations that offer a more serious and sustained commitment to growing its green economy. Consider the impressive results of Germany as an instructive example”, ASUS warns.

Germany has a population of less than 25% of the US but the country is generating new jobs faster than the US. For the moment, more than half the states in the country do not have the funds yet to create jobs in the renewable energy sectors. Yet insiders expect that things will move fastest at the state level.

“Instead of having a top-down, federal, one-size-fits-all program, you have states experimenting with success and failure,” says Lewis Milford, the president of the Clean Energy States Alliance in Washington, D.C. “The states that are succeeding then can simply be copied in other states. And this happens very quickly, very readily. States are sharing this information in real time.”