Bright Green Conference

I hope this year’s winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will continue the tradition of acting on climate change.

- Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri, Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2007 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize)

Parallel Conferences

COP15 is not operating in isolation these two weeks.  Multiple parallel conferences are operating at the same time. The BrightGreen conference was one such complementary conference, actually hosted in partnership with COP15.  As a registered COP15 participant, I was fortunate to have free access to this event, which gathered 165 of “the brightest and greenest companies” to talk about the work they are doing with respect to climate change and ecological sustainability.  Essentially, the difference between this event and the booths being hosted all over the Bella Center is that this was specifically business-focused (and had some really nice apples and sandwiches being handed out free all over).

Two speakers I watched at Bright Green were the US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu and the Chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri.  This post focuses on Secretary Chu, who delivered the bulk of the content that was discussed.

Beginning with Reducing Energy Demand

Secretary Chu began his talk focusing again on different ways first to reduce energy consumption, highlighting the decrease in energy consumption in refrigerators following the California regulations on appliance efficiency and the fact that refrigerator prices ultimately declined following these strict regulations rather than increased as many opponents feared.

He argued that buildings should follow the model of the Prius. Essentially, the Prius is no new technology-it simply couples existing technology such that the final unit is more efficient, and buildings he argued can do the same.  In the U.S., for example. 40% of energy is consumed in buildings, and reducing this by any fraction would have a large impact on the nation’s total energy consumption.

He then transitioned into the next stage-using zero-emissions fuels to supply the remaining demand for energy after the initial demand is met.  He foresaw the possible large-scale deployment of solar technology should it drop in cost to $1/watt installed.

Battery Technology Must Improve, Baseload Will Involve Nuclear

On the topic of baseload generation, he stated his belief that nuclear must be part of the energy portfolio, and that with current technology non-proliferation is actually a bigger issue than waste management. Furthermore, because the U.S., China, Russia, India, and Australia collectively have 75% of world’s coal, he believes that carbon capture and sequestration is something that will be absolutely necessary, as these nations are not likely to give up their resources.  With that, he described a new technique under research involving carbonic anhydrates modeled after enzymatic biological processes in the body for carbon sequestration.  After all, our bodies must effectively “sequester” carbon dioxide and then force it out of our bodies.  Presently, the enzymes involved in this activity have proved useless in the flue-gas environment.

Takeaway

As a political leader on the topic, it would have been nice had he offered more in the way of political suggestions rather than focusing mainly on the technology, but his talk was very appropriate for this conference, which of course focused on green business.  Nevertheless, his approach may have actually been more effective regardless of the venue, given that some leaders have argued that, faced with the possibility of low support for a price on carbon, leaders are more likely to succeed by focusing on funding research to lower the costs of clean energy rather than raising the costs of dirty energy.  Ideally then, the ultimate results would be lower costs all around as clean energy would simply naturally undercut conventional fuels.  On a similar note, Dr. Pachauri emphasized a similar argument, saying that in addition to the need for a price on carbon that universities must be our research hubs and that governments must provide incentives for this to occur, such as funding and a regulatory framework.