"Food for thought"

Comments:
I have previously referred to the book by the American social entrepreneur and technology guru Stewart Brand - "Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto". It examines four "tools that environmentalists have distrusted and now need to embrace". Below I have added some more comments on some of his suggestions:

• Urbanization: In China we now see the biggest movement of people seen in human history (more than 300 million people moving to the cities in the next 15-20 years). This is a positive thing for the climate because the footprint per person is less in densely populated areas. 

• You do not have to drive your car as much (or even have a car at all). Look to Curtiba in Brazil to find city planning at its best (picture). 

• You don't have to use as much energy to heat your appartment (compared to a house in the suburbs) because you get heat from the appartments next to yours, the one above you and the one underneath yours
• Requires less resources for utility services (water, garbage collection etc.)
• According to Steward Brand women tend to get other priorities when they move to a city. They want to work, and one result is that they give birth to fewer children. Fewer people means less pressure on the resources of our planet (both the challenge of feeding everybody, the energy needed to support all these people and of course the CO2 footprint of every individual that walks this planet)    
• Link to my previous blog post  

• Nuclear power: This is energy without greenhouse gases and this is why Steward Brand argues that even environmentalists must embrace this technology. This is also the reason why the Department of Energy in USA recently proposed $36 billion in new federal loan guarantees on top of $18.5 billion already budgeted – for a total of $54.5 billion. That's enough to help fund six or seven new power plants. Link to my previous blog post  

• Geo-engineering: scientists search for ways to manipulate the climate to avoid some of the global warming effects that they say will come as a result of too much GHG in the atmosphere. This is a very controversial idea - but maybe we will find it neccessary if all else fails    
• Biotechnology: grow more on less space and with less resources sounds like a "no brainer" when you read Steward Brands book. He even talks of "smart houses" in the cities where they grow vegetables very efficiently. If genetically modified food means growing more food on less space and with less energy (and CO2 emissions during the production process) - it can have a positive effect on our climate. This free farmland can again become forests which work as CO2 sinks.  

I have also included other issues and measures associated with the theme of energy and climate crisis:

• More effective power generation: A chunk of ceramic can efficiently combine everyday fossil-fuel natural gas with oxygen from the air – without burning – to generate electricity on a small scale. That offers a way to meet a building's demand for power without losing energy to heat and friction in a conventional power plant or to transmission losses in a national grid. Earlier this month I included a piece on Bloom boxes - Bloom claims its boxes can halve a building's carbon footprint, a figure backed up by many familiar with such fuel cells.
  
  
  
  NewScientist have now published more on this technology. Bloom boxes must operate at minimum 900 °C, they claim, but solid-oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) can get even cooler. Those from Ceres Power in Crawley, UK, operate below 600 °C, because they use an electrolyte that works at lower temperatures than those used by Bloom and Topsoe. That's low enough for the device to be held together with steel welds. "That was a real 'Aha!' moment," says Peter Bance of Ceres. "We don't rely on the ceramics for support – we can use steel." A porous steel sheet at the cell's heart is printed with ultra-thin layers of ceramic anode, electrolyte, and cathode.
  
  
  Home boilers powered by the cells are cheap enough to begin rolling them out in their thousands this year, the start of a four-year programme to install 37,500 in the homes of customers of the UK's biggest energy supplier, British Gas. The technology could, says Bance, "almost make your electricity bill disappear".
  
  
  As this quick survey of the fuel-cell market shows, the interest and excitement around Bloom's technology is understandable, but more thanks to the underlying technology's potential than to a single, PR-savvy company.
  
  
• More effective car fuel: SOFCs are much more practical than the hydrogen fuel cells used in some prototype vehicles. They eschew expensive platinum catalysts by operating at high temperature, and because they can use a variety of small-chain hydrocarbon fuels, they can use today's fuel (does not require tomorrow's fuel).

• Some people point out that the rainforests are extremely valuable to humanity - but where can you see this value in the marketplace? We saw signs of money transfer from the developed- to the developing countries at COP15 in Copenhagen. When the countries with rainforests get credit for the CO2 their forests "suck up" - hopefully more money will be transferred from countries with "dirty" coal powerplants.
  
  Countries may also decide, like Norway and France, to take some of the comitted CO2 cuts abroad by investing money in rainforest-friendly projects in Brazil etc.  

• Not only will this money be used by the developing countries to protect the rain-forests, but they will use it to grow in a sustainable way. In India villages have received some money and invested in solarcells and batteries at a local power-loading station. The villagers come once a day to pay for- and take home a fully recharged lamp. This project replaces the old oil-fired lamps which resulted in local pollution (sick children and CO2 emissions). Better light in the evenings also allow children to do more homework and improve their skills.

• Why does the Norwegian government want to tax (VAT) e-books while their printed counterparts are not taxed? It must be better for everybody if we could produce and distribute content electronically (paper comes from trees and the process recuires a lot of physical packaging and transportation before the book reaches the consumer).

• IPCC say that more than 50% of the CO2 cuts must come from reduced energy demand. Are we spending too much money and direct too much attention to the generation of more new (sustainable) energy and too little on saving energy where we can? There are low-hangig fruit in abundance out there and most people agree that "the cleanest energy - is the energy you don't use".
  
  Some of the obvious measures include improved public transportation system (more frequent and cheaper trains/buses - ref comments above on Curtiba in Brazil), more expensive fuel for fossil-fueled cars, higher tax on electricity combined with incentives to improve energy efficiency of businesses and ordinary private homes ("Jahus" projects) etc.
  
  The Norwegian Climate and Pollution Control Directorate (Klima- og forurensingsdirektoratet) recently presented their report "Klimakur 2020". This report adresses how Norway can achieve cuts of 12 million tonnes of CO2 by 2020. It was a big surprise to find that cuts in energy used in buildings were hardly mentioned. The reason was that the energy used today is dominated by clean hydroelectrical power (almost no CO2 footprint). I would argue that it should have been given much more attention. 1 TWh of reduced energy demand from buildings will be just as important to the climate as 1 TWh of energy from a new windpowered powerplant - assuming there is a demand for this energy (or else the prices will drop and we go in the opposite direction).

The added demand for this high quality energy (low CO2 footprint) will come from electrifying both the transport sector and the offshore oilproduction, providing electricity to the industry with high-energy demand (Aluminum produced with clean electricity in Norway rather than with coal in Qatar) and export to EU via the expanded power grid  (to replace coal-powered powerplants).       

Event: International meeting on climate change
Bolivia and other developing nations refused to sign the Copenhagen accord and this is why Bolivia is hosting an international meeting on climate change next month. In the words of the Tuvalu negotiator, "we were not prepared to betray our people for 30 pieces of silver".

Link to The Guardian (on this conference)