Only renewables will live to tell the tale

by Lionel Wijesiri

A decade ago, I was sceptical about climate change. Yet I was cautious about crying wolf because I wasn’t a climatologist or a meteorologist. Just because few of my stories on environment appeared in a National Daily it didn’t mean I was an expert on meteorology. It wasn’t for me to suddenly stand up and say I have decided the climate is changing.

But today I’m no longer skeptical. I do not have any doubt at all.Climate change is with us now. Maybe, a decade ago, it was conjecture.

I have waited until the proof was conclusive that it was humanity changing the climate.

The thing that really convinced me was the graphs connecting the increase of carbon dioxide in the environment and the rise in temperature, with the growth of human population and industrialization. Now the future is unfolding before our eyes. Canadians see it in disappearing Arctic ice and permafrost.

Southern Asians like us see it in lethal storms and floods. Europeans see it in disappearing glaciers, forest fires and fatal heat waves. Scientists see it in tree rings, ancient coral and bubbles trapped in ice cores.

These reveal that the world has not been as warm as it is now for a millennium or more.

The three warmest years on record have all occurred since 1998; 19 of the warmest 20 since 1980. And Earth has probably never warmed as fast as in the past 30 years. Studies of the thermal inertia of the oceans suggest that there is more warming in the pipeline.

Talking of climate change, whether we like it or not, we have to agree on two basic facts. \

First, there is climate change and that it is human-induced. Second, there are a number of things that we can do to forestall the worst.

Solution

So, what could be done? Aggressive renewable energy programs are the best solution, says Dr. Frank Kreith, Professor Emeritus at the University of Colorado. “We have the technological capabilities to produce our energy from solar, wind and bio-fuels, but there must be more political will and economic incentives. We must encourage utilities and consumers to invest in alternative energy.”

He points out 18 American states have enacted programs that will collectively produce 29,000 MW of electricity from renewable sources by 2017. And although the U.S. is still very much addicted to fossil fuels, he says that USA could go 20% renewable by 2020.

Dr. Donald Aitken, a Senior Consulting Scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists believes that an aggressive strategy is necessary now. “We can really pull this off. We can slow or even stop climate change if we face the social, technical and economic factors that drive the problem,” he says.

Aitken emphasises the need for developing countries to integrate renewable resources into their energy portfolios. He also confirms that the technology is available and there just need to be incentives such as emissions trading credits and the removal of “procedural, institutional, and economic barriers to renewable energy.”

The developing nations have the opportunity to move directly into the renewable energy transition, skipping many of the large scale centralized power systems that are now becoming obsolete and dangerously unr eliable in the developed countries,” he adds..

Major Shift

Dennis Dimick, is senior a reporter for National Geographic. He writes extensively on climate change. “Action needs to happen before it is too late,” he says. The CO2 levels in the atmosphere are far higher than at any point in the last 450,000 years, causing temperatures to rise and glaciers to melt rapidly. Dimick is right.

Professor Peter F. Smith, Special Professor in Sustainable Energy, Nottingham University, UK. who wrote Architecture in a Climate of Change has this much to say: “If we reach a figure of carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere of 440 parts per million, we reach what’s called “the tipping point” then. After that we’re into totally unknown territory.

There is a step-change in the way climate change will work... now at the moment we’re up to 382 ppm pushing on 383.

The concentration is increasing by about 2 to 3 ppm a year, so we’re going get to that 440 relatively soon. We’ve got perhaps 20 years before we really do start to face potentially catastrophic consequences.” “Things that normally happen in a geologic time frame are happening during the span of a human lifetime,” Dimick says.

According to him, and many other leading scientists, humans are disrupting the carbon cycle, which is spurring climate change affecting plant and animal life all over the world. And some of the problems we have yet to see or understand.

To combat global climate change, then, there needs to be a major shift in the way we produce and consume energy. It will just take a lot of creative thinking and aggressive tactics from the renewable energy industry.

Today, most of the educated people have become firm believers in a renewable-powered future.

These believers span a wide spectrum, including right across the business world. These are good signs. Globally known Wal-Mart, for example, has a plan to power all its stores, worldwide, with renewables.

It is pressuring its suppliers to follow suit. Wal-Mart is not alone in this view. Renault-Nissan is now focusing on electric battery vehicles: It’s CEO says, “We must have zero-emission vehicles. Nothing else will prevent the world from exploding.”

All this raise one big question. Can the clean energy revolution unfold in time to save us from the worst impacts of the current energy-crisis/climate-crisis double crunch?

The answer is “just maybe”. Provided we mobilise as though for war, accelerate the trends already underway in clean energy, we could succeed if we truly believe that climate meltdown and/or energy supply threats could torpedo our economies.

Like any senior citizen, I firmly believe that change is essential. I recognize that the world has always changed

But the point is, it’s changing more extremely and swiftly than at any time in the past several million years. And one of the things I don’t want to do is to look at my grandchildren one day and hear them say: “Grandfather, you knew it was happening but you didn’t do anything.”