GLOBAL SUSTAINABILITY REQUIRES DECREASED DEPENDENCE ON FOSSIL CARBON.

Pincas Jawetz

Former International Consultant, Editor-in-Chief of The Sustainable Development Media Think Tank.
ABSTRACT

The Industrial Revolution was started – man having learned to use heat from renewable sources, such as wood, and transform it into mechanical work with a steam engine. Using liquid biofuel in a motor vehicle was Ford’s original method that started modern transportation. Those were, as a matter of speech, the days of life-in-paradise. We lived in a state of heat and carbon balance with nature.

What the proverbial snake did – it taught us something that it called knowledge. It said – use oil and coal that you find underground. Later snakes also pointed at energy stored in the atom – that is nuclear power.
Those three sources of stored energy have in common that they release to the atmosphere heat stored a long time ago, and thus is not part of an ongoing radiation and carbon recycling balance.

The recently awarded 2007 Nobel Peace Prizes are in further recognition that dependence on above sources of energy is also a global and local security problem.

The “1st Brazilian Workshop on Green Chemistry” fights that original sin of dipping into the hidden stash of stored energy one step further. We are called to live also by replacing fossil fuels at a higher economic level, beyond their use in direct combustion. We ought to be able to decrease use of fossil carbon also when making chemicals and other higher value products.

This presentation was about the “why” and the main part of the workshop dealt with the “how.”

1. INTRODUCTION: THE WHY OF THE NEED TO SLOW DOWN THE RATE OF GLOBAL WARMING.

1.1 Increased Rainfalls or Alternatively Increased Rate Of Desertification.

Numerous long-term changes in local climate have been observed, including extreme weather such as droughts, heavy precipitation, heat waves, and the intensity of tropical cyclones. Trends towards more powerful storms and hotter, longer dry periods have been observed and are reviewed in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Warmer temperatures mean greater evaporation, and a warmer atmosphere is able to hold more moisture — hence there is more water aloft that can fall as precipitation. Similarly, dry regions are apt to lose still more moisture if the weather is hotter; this exacerbates droughts and desertification. What above means is that Global Warming makes for more intense precipitation in those places that normally are blessed with rain, and increase desertification in those areas that normally get less rain. All this while there is actually a rise in the temperature across the board. In the case of an increase in rainfall, floods from swelling rivers have already caused high damages.

1.2 Ice Melting, Floods And Inundation.

Average Arctic temperatures increased at almost twice the global rate in the past 100 years. Temperatures at the top of the permafrost layer have generally increased since the 1980s by up to 3 °C. In the Russian Arctic, buildings are collapsing because permafrost under their foundations has melted.

Snow cover has declined by some 10 per cent in the mid- and high- latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere since the late 1960s. Mountain glaciers and snow cover have declined in both hemispheres and widespread decreases in glaciers and ice caps have contributed to sea level rise. New data evaluated by the IPCC shows that losses from the ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica have very likely contributed to sea level rise from 1993 to 2003. The average global sea level rose at an average rate of 1.8 mm per year between 1961 and 2003, but between 1993 and 2003 it rose by 3.1 mm per year. The rise of sea level, because of the melting of the ice, and the normal thermal expansion of sea water, are already causing, all-over, inundation of low lying shore regions, complete disappearance of some small islands in the delta of Bangladesh, and the start of disappearance of Pacific Islands. This obviously worries to the extreme the Small Island Independent States (SIDs) that number one fifth of the UN Member States. But large coastal states are not immune either. The predictable losses in Florida and Louisiana in the US are enormous. The lower part of Manhattan in New York City is exposed as well.

Almost all mountain glaciers in non-polar regions retreated during the 20th century. The overall volume of glaciers in Switzerland decreased by two-thirds. The amounts of snow covering the mountains in Africa have decreased drastically. The pride of Mt. Kilimanjaro will be gone in a few years. Skiing areas in Switzerland and Austria are suffering economic losses. The melting glaciers and the melting snow cause temporary floods in valleys downstream that were not ready to such events. But what is even worse areas like the valleys bellow the Himalayas will eventually dry out and lose their productivity because they are dependent on the melting glaciers and snow higher up in the mountains. With the glaciers gone and less snow, the water table will get lower and lower – desertification will move in.

1.3 Increased Frequency And Intensity Of Storms, Hurricanes, Monsoons, Cyclones …

It is logical that the increased temperature of the sea surface provides more energy to otherwise natural phenomena. These enhanced catastrophes – like the KatRita events in the USA (the Katrina and the Rita Hurricanes) have caused such tremendous damage to property and life that the insurance companies find it now difficult to insure buildings in those parts of the country.

Further,the Rhine floods of 1996 and 1997, the Chinese floods of 1998, the East European floods of 1998 and 2002, the Mozambique and European floods of 2000, and the monsoon-based flooding of 2004 in Bangladesh (which left 60 per cent of the country under water), are examples of more powerful storms – are all examples that might point at outcomes caused by global warming.

1.4 Increased Earthquakes and tsunamis.

Here I knowingly step out on thin ice. But there is an opinion that the melting of land based ice like in the Antarctica or Greenland causes a release of pressure on the earth’s tectonic plates – this may then cause slippage that causes a series of earthquakes that may give birth to a tsunami. I do not know yet of evidence that this was the reason for the big tsunami offshore Indonesia, but when one looks at the location of the plates the above suspicion is not to be disregarded.

2. SECTION – WHAT CAUSES GLOBAL WARMING.

A neat understanding of climate and climate change leads us to the conclusion that Climate is an energy issue and energy is an infrastructure issue – thus climate is an infrastructure issue. We have to change the way we think about energy, understand what causes Global Warming – then we can decide on the steps that must be taken to help us avoid the calamities we described in the Introduction.

2.1 The Balance Between Sunlight and Earthlight.

There is heat (energy) stored in the core of the earth, but somehow we usually think only of the large amount of energy that reaches the earth from the sun – that is what we call sunlight. But in effect there is also energy that radiates outwards into space that originates with the earth. The incoming sunlight helps replenish the outgoing earthlight. Life on earth, and all activities on earth, are based on an exact equilibrium between the sunlight and the earthlight. But there are two processes that can disturb this equilibrium. Usually the climatologists dealing with climate change stress only the human caused fossil CO2 emissions as the cause for partially blocking the outgoing earthlight, explained only as that portion of the incoming sunlight that is reemitted into the outer space. The part of the incoming sunlight that stays with us, is what makes vegetation grow, and provides the energy that moves the circle of life via all those chemical reactions that create the carbohydrates, the DNA’s and all the rest of what our scientists figured out is the process of life, the evaporation of water, the rain-making, the soil formation …etc. Most of these processes happen in the atmosphere that in eons of years has allowed humankind to develop within a rather constant mixture of gases we call air. Now comes man, and within less that 300 years, manages to bring out from inside the earth those fossil carbons that nature stored there during millions of years, and releases that CO2 to the atmosphere without realizing that those added CO2 quantities disturb the balance of the natural recycling process of the CO2, leading to a more then needed portion of the sunlight to remain on earth and causing global warming.

2.2 The Issue of Nuclear Power.
The reason for our going through above story in #2.1 was in order to be able to say that by using nuclear power, man may think that he avoids CO2 emissions, so it is all right – but this is not correct – he nevertheless breaches the global heat (energy) balance because when he releases nuclear energy, this is also energy stored that comes now into the open and contributes to global warming – just as if he were to release fossil CO2. Nuclear power is sort of a fossil fuel (granted not of the carbon compound kind) as it releases energy to the atmosphere that was stored underground. Our conclusion is thus – while the Green-House Gasses Effect is caused by burning coal, oil and natural gas, nuclear energy is thus the fourth store of energy that causes global warming.

3. SECTION – WHY CHASING ENERGY IS A MISLEADING ACTIVITY.

When we think of energy, the energy companies taught us to think of oil, coal, natural gas, electricity. Please don’t use this language – it’s not just wrong – it’s actively misleading. If we can’t even describe the issue correctly, we will not be able to talk of options, and we will never get the policy right – and my topic here is really to give the reasons for creating a policy that can help us out from the dilemmas that the energy interests stuck us with.

Professors even, talk of “energy production” and “energy consumption” – but the First Law of Thermodynamics, in their first class they teach, the law of conservation of energy – says clearly that no one produces or consumes energy. Actually the amount of energy in the whole universe remains constant – period. What we should talk about are energy carriers – fuels and electricity. We should not have Ministries of Energy but Ministries of Fuel and Power (power being used as a synonym for electricity). Above change in name is more then semantics, even that we understand that people actually are aware indeed of what we said above. This change in language is needed so we can now concentrate why we were thinking of energy in the first place. In reality – what we wanted was to satisfy some need by using an energy technology. Our ancestors used clothing and shelter as energy technologies. They made homes and clothes so they kept warm in winter and cool in the summer. They did not go for the heating valve, or the air conditioning buttons, in order to satisfy those needs. To start changes in today’s world we must get the notion of the service we want to satisfy before screaming energy – we may actually find plenty of safe alternatives at lower costs to the environment and to our pockets, then reaching out for fossil or nuclear fuels.

3.1 Ambient Energy.

This takes us back to the needs – clothing and shelter. Humans learned to select materials best fitted to use ambient energy of sunlight, of moving air, and human bodies to deliver comfort, light and ventilation – first plainly human power and animal power – then sails, windmills, watermills – to use the ambient energy of wind and water for our purposes – to answer our needs. Ambient energy is free. Fuel by contrast is a material that can release energy on demand when we want it. Fuel is a store of energy. This is a material that we can burn to release heat that we needed for cooking or smelting a metal. 300 years ago we learned to use the fuel for operating a steam engine, and we started the industrial revolution. Ambient energy cannot be bought and sold – fuel energy can be bought and sold – so now we start losing our freedom by making ourselves dependent on a fuel dealer.

3.2 Fuel Energy.

A fuel is a physical substance that is owned – it will always be measured as a quantity and sold as such. Fuels are the likes of wood, ethanol, biodiesel, hydrogen, and coal, natural gas, oil, uranium. As we see the latter group of fuels – coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium are those fuels we marked in SECTION 2 as when used they cause global warming. The first group of fuels – wood, ethanol, biodiesel, and hydrogen could be part of environmentally benign inputs as they could be harvested by industries that belong to the renewable sources of energy – that is those industries that recycle the CO2 emissions – this for the wood, ethanol and biodiesel fuels, or, like in the case of hydrogen, can be produced without emitting CO2.

3.3 Electricity.

By itself it is useless. It is just a carrier of energy and needs a converter such as a lamp, a computer, a motor… and strangely it starts getting closer to the old ambient energy when it will eventually be paid for not by the quantity of electricity used, but by the fact that it becomes a service, and you pay for the access – the connection. The problem of paying according to the quantity of electricity used has caused a waste promoted by the electric company. The correct electricity (or power) policy of the future will correct this according to above suggestion that was clearly developed by Walt Patterson in his his volume “Keeping The Lights On: Towards Sustainable Electricity.” (2007 Chatham House/Earthscan, London.) Electricity has a bright future, and it might replace a large part of the market held now by direct combustion. Transportation is an upcoming client of the power company as plug-in electricity run motor-vehicles are in our cards. Public transportation is also going to switch to various forms of electric power. In some cases this will be via fuel cells supplied by hydrogen that was obtained with electricity input. Plug-in electric cars were already available some 20 years ago, but oil and auto-motive interests, after using them experimentally on a basis of a lease program, decided not to put them on the market. Now, having seen the many proposed concept cars shown at the New York International 2008 Auto Show, I am confident that electric plug-ins, hydrogen Fuel Cells, or a combination of both, sometimes starting out also in joint systems within hybrid cars that still use a liquid or gas (other then hydrogen) fuel. All of this promotes electricity as an enhanced future carrier for energy.

3.4 Sources of Electricity.

Without any consideration of the harm to air quality, the major kind of fuel used in power plants was coal, then it was thought that the answer will be nuclear power. As both those types of fuel have their problems, the industry turned to burn oil and eventually the much cleaner natural gas. In many places hydropower was the clean and cheapest answer. Today it is difficult to build additional large dams, but mini-facilities in a decentralized way are taking a significant share of the total market. The oldest fuel was wood, and now there is a return to the use of saw dust and wood chips – as renewable source of fuel. But the future is with alternative electricity – all renewables based on wind power, solar power, geothermal, and eventually power from the sea. Today most production of electricity is connected to the grid – but there is an attempt to favor more decentralized systems. In the State of Ceara, Brazil, there is tremendous potential for wind and solar power. Eventually there will be also ocean-based electricity here, and there is some biomass fuel potential from discarded byproducts in a potential oil-trees industry.

4. SECTION – WHO BEARS THE ENVIRONMENTAL COSTS.

As described in SECTION 1, the use of fossil fuels causes tremendous losses to the economy at large. Those fuels are priced overly cheap, this because the price does not include the so called externalities – that is the cost of the damages. Unless there will be a way to tax in some form the fossil fuel users, or the producers, it was found difficult to commercialize alternate technologies. Further, there was also a political interference with the starting of the needed decrease of humanity’s addiction to the use of the fossil fuels. It took years to inform the public about the impending disasters, and eventually things started to surface more clearly – not just because of more frequent occurrence of major so called natural disasters, but in major part because even without taxation, the price of oil, and now also natural gas and coal, has started to move up.

5. SECTION – PEAK OIL THEORY.

This is about oil depletion. Peak oil is the point in time when the maximum rate of global oil production is reached. Geophysicist M. King Hubert predicted correctly in 1956, when he was still with Shell Oil Co. in the US, that the US will peak between 1965 and 1970. The idea is that from that point on availability of crude will drop, and prices increase. If not mitigated by changes in consumption this will lead to an economic crisis. OK, we saw the energy crisis of 1972-73 and now, on a global scale, prices of oil are high – reached $111/barrel and some say that we may have reached that peak, or are close to it. In 2008, the budding global recession is made worse by this increase in the price of oil. The economics are muddy because there is also a parallel decrease in the value of the dollar, but nevertheless, the increased demand for fuel from the major developing countries in Asia and now also from Russia, may have shifted the timing of the Hubert Curve Peak forward. Mitigation would mean fuel conservation, use of alternative energy sources, and the development of non-conventional oil resources such as oil shales and bituminous oil. By doing this the hope is to change the shape of the Hubert curve so that the timing of the peak is pushed back into the future.

5.1 Peak Oil and Climate Change.

The Peak Oil proponents look on oil use only as economists worried about oil supply and price, environmentalists will see eye to eye with them when conservation, energy efficiency, and renewable energy are mentioned – the idea about unconventional oil does not appeal to them. Nevertheless, when it comes to people like Republican U.S. Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, the insecurity of the availability of oil becomes a driving force that unites right and left. It really does not matter the reason, but those that are worried about the future will unite to back US legislation that moves renewable energy, and here we come also to a bright future for Green Chemistry and Sustainability.

5.2 Many Different Kind of Security Issues Unite to Help The Diversification From Oil.

The Security of Supply is a specially critical issue in US Congress because of the present situation that the highest petroleum and gas reserves are in countries in the Middle East and Russia that are regarded as unsure future friends or business partners. The fact that large unconventional oil resources are found in Venezuela and Canada is also not very encouraging. The first because of politics, the latter case because of potential future interference with exports from Alberta for environmental reasons. Thinking of climate change, following a report by Sir Nicholas Stern, the UK government arranged for a special meeting of the UN Security Council on the security implications of warfare and migration because of the impact of climate change on Africa. The Association of Small Island Independent States (AOSIS) talks of plain security in the sense that whole islands could be lost to the rising sea level. So again the need to look for alternatives to oil in order to decrease the impact that the Greenhouse Gasses Effect has on geopolitical factors.

5.3 Increase of Cost of Coal.

With the growing economies of China and India, the availability of coal is also shrinking. Even though there is still plenty of coal, but mining does not keep up with the increase in demand – so prices also doubled in the last few months and the cost of electricity is up. This is driving now power companies to seek the economic safety of renewable energy.

6. SECTION – THE CONCEPT OF SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THE RIO SUMMIT – AGENDA 21.

The deliberations in the UN were about keeping the peace in the world, but also about development and growth in the less developed countries. Economic growth was seen as the way out of poverty and in all fairness very little consideration was given to the environmental impacts of growth or development. But not everyone was blind to the negatives in this inconsiderate push for riches. The UN started to look into this at the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and gave birth to UNEP (The UN Environment Programme). This was only a necessary first step. It was clear that energy inputs are needed for development. The UN tried at the Nairobi 1981 Conference on New and Renewable Sources of Energy to see how to make less expensive energy available for the development process. It really did not work because of the oil interests that did not want any change in what was a great money making situation so far as they were concerned. The words Sustainable development were first introduced in a 1980 International Union for the Conservation of Nature World Conservation Strategy. The term “sustainable development’ was explained as “meeting today’s needs of development without compromising future generations’ ability to develop.” Eventually, the Brundtland Commission (1987) introduced this all-important concept of Sustainable Development (SD) as about the harnessing of the development process so that the newly industrializing countries do not just retrace all the mistakes that were committed by the old industrialized countries. Agriculture policy becomes a very important ingredient of SD and agriculture policy can be used as the vehicle to create also fuels for energy needs in the developing countries that usually are very short of fuels or other ways of inputs needed for their development.

6.1 Sustainabilty Will be King.
With the recommendations from the Brundtland Commission in their hands, the UN called for the 1992 Rio de Janeiro UN Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED). The resultant outcomes included an Agenda for the 21-st Century, Conventions on Biodiversity and on Desertification issues, and a Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The sequence of events shows clearly that it is understood the world cannot continue by withdrawing fuels from the earth the way a drunkard takes out money from his capital in the bank. The fossil deposits are finite, the development needs are huge, the damage via global warming is immense. One can only develop by living from his own work and interest not from spending the capital. Renewable energy fueling the local economy is a much sounder way for development then mining and extracting natural resources. The dangers for the planet and human-kind from pushing fossil CO2 into the air became a UN issue and the UNFCCC got the task to follow this trail. The 1992 definition is: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.” Sustainable development implies economic growth together with the protection of environmental quality, each reinforcing the other. The essence of this form of development is a stable relationship between human activities and the natural world, which does not diminish the prospects for future generations to enjoy a quality of life at least as good as our own. Many observers believe that participatory democracy, undominated by vested interests, is a prerequisite for achieving sustainable development”.

The word SUSTAINABILITY entered now the dictionary of all UN Member States. It is used everywhere – Sustainable Agriculture, Sustainable Forests, Sustainable Communities …

Take for instance the case of Africa: Africa will demand their own place under the sun by moving to the production of biomaterials not just for their own use, but also for export to a world that does not allow easy movement of food commodities. Their agriculture did not take off because of the infusion of cheap food from the outside, they will find that they are needed to help now with an agriculture for industrial products. Bringing in also Africa will further help towards global sustainability. Sustainability in Africa is thus the effort to get real development based on employment in production in a renewable way, that helps build for the long term, and integrates Africa with the global economy.

6.2 The UN tracks: The UNFCCC and the UN Commission for Sustainable Development.

Moving on from Rio, the newly created UNFCCC started a fast ratification process and managed together with the Agenda 21 to spin off a new UN institution – the UN Commission for Sustainable Development (UNCSD) that on a yearly basis – since 1994 meets to discuss issues important to developing countries. The truth is that it did not get very far beyond those public clarification events, but on the other hand, this institution must be kept alive because it will become immensely important if the UNFCCC track manages indeed to come up with world agreements on how to go about decreasing globally CO2 emissions to the atmosphere.

7. SECTION – THE KYOTO PROTOCOL TO THE UN FRAMEWORK CONVENTION ON CLIMATE CHANGE.

At the third Session of the Conference Of The Parties to the UNFCCC COP3 in Kyoto in 1997, an agreement was reached wherein the 33 countries of the Developed World (which includes a great majority that are the EU members, and all OECD countries except the US) committed to a total reduction of their Greenhouse Gasses emissions (that is CO2, methane, and other four gasses) up to the year 2012. This is the Kyoto Protocol to the UNFCCC (KP). In 2009 a renewed accord has to be reached that will then kick in starting 2013. The KP was clearly an in-comprehensive document. It included commitments from the old polluters, except the biggest of them all – the US, but did not include also the major newly industrializing countries – the likes of China, India or Brazil. This temporary seeming inattention was obviously clear from start, but it had to be accepted as a way of international life in order to start a process – that is any process – even if it is not all inclusive. Above will now have to be dealt differently at the meeting in December 2009 at Copenhagen – at the COP 15 of the UNFCCC. The process to reach some agreement in Copenhagen was started in Bali, Indonesia, this past December – that is at COP 13, in December 2007. Obviously, there will be a lot of talks in the 2008-2009 years, but because of the November 2008 US Presidential elections, it will be hard to have the all important US position readied by December 2008. Nevertheless, the US present Ambassador to the UN, Mr. Zalmay Khalilzad, told me personally that he is aware of the need to have a US position, and from his personal experience in setting up transition committees as he has done when there was the change from the Bill Clinton Presidency to the George W. Bush Presidency, he will establish at the UN such a committee with the representative of the new incoming US Administration – this to make sure that there is indeed a US position that will be the position of the new US Presidency that kicks in on January 20, 2009.

Whatever the small print of the new futuristic Copenhagen document, one thing is crystal clear. There will be a new international agreement to decrease globally the dependence on fossil fuels. So all what we said up to now is simply to point out that in the post 2012 energy map of the world, Brazil and its great potential to move into the field of biofuels and renewable sources of fuel in general, will by the nature of the situation be in the front row of development.

8. SECTION – BRAZIL AND THE POTENTIAL FOR A GROWING BIOMASS BASED ECONOMY – THE GREEN CHEMISTRY CONCEPT.

Brazil was the first country in the seventies to set up ethanol production for motor-vehicle fuel. Now Brazil is also producing large quantities of biodiesel. Brazil has the agricultural potential to turn this also as an industry for export. As in all cases when agriculture is used for fuel production farm policy must be monitored in accordance with the national interest to avoid a food versus fuel conflict. I trust that Brazil’s own NGOs will keep a watchful eye so the national interest is not forgotten. But then, why export just a fuel commodity? The idea of Green Chemistry is the manufacture of higher value products starting with the biomass based materials. But further – Green Chemistry is tied to Sustainability in general. It must thus incorporate also clean chemistry as part of the Green concept because aspects like creating energy systems that conserve energy or decrease the need for energy by increasing efficiency, are environmentally desirable or “green” even if not involving green plant matter. After all, as Professor Ami Ben-Amotz has presented at the Fortaleza conference, even some of his algae are not always green.

8.1 – The Biorefinery Concept.

The Biorefinery concept, for example, was a process that commercialized corn by selling every component except the “squealing of the pig.” A bio-refinery is definitely not a petroleum refinery that uses bioethanol and biodiesel – something that I seemed to have heard in some quarters. It is rather the anti-thesis of the petroleum refinery. The biorefinery, like the concept of the petroleum refinery, starts with one basic energy storing primary material and provides a large number of streams of intermediate products that can then be fashioned into final products. Some such biorefineries will be processing carbohydrates in a conceptually similar way the petroleum refinery processes hydrocarbons. We may end up with plastics made from carbohydrates like the petroleum industry got us used to have plastic materials made from fossil based hydrocarbons. Further, the valorization of the co-products of a biorefinery decreases also the food versus fuel dilemma in using agriculture for industrial products. Like in the case of soy-beans, the material left after the extraction of the oil for biodiesel, is a high protein valuable food supplement – that in many cases is just what is needed – so the fuel was obtained in a process that produced also the food we wanted – and this negates much of a sometimes contrived food versus fuel issue.

8.2 – The Farm Policy and the so called Energy Policy Nexus.

Agricultural commodity production used to be a highly subsidized enterprise. In many cases the hidden subsidy comes from taking land out of production in order to increase the price of the commodity. Thus there is a potential here to make the connection between farm policy and energy, while finding both the farmland and the money needed to create new fuel. This is specially important in cases like the highly subsidized French agriculture, and the problem the EU has when integrating in its economy the huge agricultural potential of the Polish agriculture.

8.3 – Some Policy Notions At The Green Chemistry Conference at Fortaleza.
Some policy angles, in above direction, I picked up at the Fortaleza meeting included Dr. Norbert Keutgen from the University of Bonn, Germany, Institute of Crop science and Resource Conservation (INRES) presentation who spoke about Photosynthesis and Bio-productivity on Bio-energy Yields, and Dr. Flavio do Couto Cavalcanti from OXITENO of Sao Paulo on Oil Chemistry. Their presentations included farm policy aspects.

Professor Nei Pereira from UFRJ spoke on Lignocellulosics Biorefinery Context and Professors Cesar Abreu and Henrique Baudel from the Federal University of Pernambuco at Recife, spoke on Chemical and Biofuels from Lignocellulosics.

Professor Claudio Mota from UFRJ spoke on New Products and Processes from Glycerol – A Renewable Feedstock for The Chemical Industry.

In picking up above very few examples, it is not that I imply by any means that those were the main presentations of the meeting – what I mean to say is that these presentations addressed also some of the kind of policy angles, that will
move the subject of green chemistry to the front burners of a future economy that is less dependent on oil. The technologies will become available from the work of all those that found their way to this meeting in Fortaleza, Ceara, Brazil.

9. SUMMARY.

The Industrial Revolution was started by using energy inputs that were of a renewable nature. Hydro-power, solar energy, wind energy, ocean wave technologies, geothermal energy were some of the basic sources of energy input that helped the industrialization process, but biomass was the main source of energy. Plants grown thanks to intake of solar energy, were the main source for heat needed as an energy input. Combustion of wood was the initial way used in this process. Then, having learned to use heat in order to transform it into mechanical energy with the help of a steam engine, was the first step towards industrialization. Using this mechanical energy in a motor vehicle with a liquid biofuel input (fermentation-ethanol) was Ford’s original method to fuel its initial motor-vehicles. At this initial stage of industrialization, all our cards were on the table – so to say – we let botany absorb carbon from the air, turn it into hydrocarbon matter which we then used to attain our goals. We fed then the biomass to work-animals, or we used it via combustion. We retrieved the solar energy input in a way that helped us extend our power to do work. Those were the days of life-in-paradise.

What the proverbial snake did – was it taught us something that it called knowledge – it said, why do you work so hard to reap with your own hand the solar energy matter. God or nature were hiding from you the true source of energy, easy to use sources of energy, which they stored underground in form of oil and coal. Later snakes also pointed at energy stored in the atom – that is the nuclear power. What those three sources of energy have in common is that they are not part of a carbon recycling process that nature has created in order to convert solar energy into usable energy in very – very long stretches of time. By using those three mentioned sources of stored energy, heat stored long ago is released into the atmosphere, and that causes global warming. In the case of coal and oil, also carbon is released to the atmosphere that does not come from the mentioned present carbon recycling process with the infamous Green-house Gasses Effect on Further Global Warming. These things were extremely well described in the new book by Walt Patterson – “Keeping The Lights On.” I specially relished his inclusion of nuclear power into this coherent view, this without having to resort to the discussion about how much carbon is released in the extraction of Uranium.

Having said the above, we must also point out that it is not just the release during a couple of hundred years, of energy and carbon that were stored underground for zillions of years that has mislead us to a path of self-destruction, but also the simple fact that coal, oil, and nuclear fission, being based on a finite amount of matter, that got stored by god or nature, the fact that we might, and will, run out of these materials, gives us the insecurity that led some of us to wars in places like Iraq. It is thus also the “Peak-Oil” evidence, and not just the global warming/climate change syndrome, that forces our hand to throw out that proverbial snake from our midst – and go back, so to say, to the days of life-in-paradise. Here is what the meeting in Fortaleza is all about. Green Chemistry is just the creation of higher value products from the agricultural system that a live-by-your-energy-budget accounting system tells us that is not just possible, but actually imperative.

The continuing addiction to fossil carbon is thus economically not possible – neither because of the increasing price of those commodities due to looming shortages – nor because of the looming economic losses caused by climate change induced from the global warming/climate change syndrome. The bottom line being that we must return to renewable sources of energy, the carbon recycling via the use of biofuels and green chemistry being just part of this return-to-paradise.

Efforts are made by some to create the global political awareness that these changes in technology will have to become part of every nation’s planning. There will be a Culture Change in our way of looking at nature, and the leadership will indeed come from ethical and economic considerations. Corporations will move to the forefront of this re-introduction of recyclable carbon technologies based on the full understanding of the laws of thermodynamics. The rise of huge nations with added billions of consumers that will be asking for their right to their share of sun-light increases the demand for energy and energy materials. Eventually, the enlargement of the number of industrialized countries to include the BRIC countries – Brazil, Russia, China, and India, will by itself become the catalyst for the changes we foresee.

Jean-Marcel Bouguereau – Climate Changes; Hypocrisy Continues.
 http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020107…

While climate change dominates the news, Jean-Marcel Bouguereau suggests that it’s not just business leaders at Davos, but also French citizens who are not yet prepared to do anything concrete about it. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, although “Conservative” Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper has begun to make green noises, a recently publicized letter he wrote in 2002 describing Kyoto as a “Socialist plot” undermines his environmental credibility.

“We Can’t Say We Weren’t Warned”
By Jean-Marcel Bouguereau
Le Nouvel Observateur

Wednesday 31 January 2007

What’s happened? Why this sudden keen interest in climatic phenomena? I have to say that each of us has had an opportunity to become aware of the seriousness of the situation with the mood swings of a climate that’s become erratic. But the 500 delegates meeting in Paris under the aegis of the United Nations, the same ones whose first work had served as the foundation for the famous Kyoto Protocol, will – between now and Friday – give new bases for this recent anguish. “Indefinite growth is impossible, we only have one Earth, but a civilization of happiness is possible.

Solutions exist, but public opinion ignores them, since the present power structures and those who wield economic and political power oppose those solutions.” That’s what René Dumont, the first ecologist candidate for French president, said as early as 1974. While he was preaching in the desert then and only garnered a weak 1.3 percent of votes, thirty years later all the candidates are pushing one another to sign Nicolas Hulot’s “ecological pact.”

Suddenly, people are sounding the alarm everywhere. Not without some hypocrisy. Even George Bush mentions, thanks to new technologies, a “post-Kyoto strategy” – while he’s refused to sign that protocol.

And in Davos, the heads of companies have just salved their collective conscience by increasing the numbers of debates and roundtables on climate change. But only 20 percent of them consider protection of the environment to be a priority.

These company bosses know that the break with growth that the Rome Club advocated as far back as 1972 is a death sentence for a capitalism that can’t allow itself a drastic reduction in production and material consumption. It’s a whole different economy that must be put into effect, based on other values. And unless we confront that unknown, we are in the process of compromising the life of future generations.

The problem is that when they are questioned, the ardor of the French to act against global warming is as hypocritical as that of company bosses: 93 percent are ready to systematically sort their garbage or to decrease their electricity and water consumption, but that proportion falls to 61 percent when it comes to using the car less often. We are running into a wall. But no one can say we weren’t warned.

Jean-Marcel Bouguereau is Editor in Chief at the Nouvel Observateur and editorialist for the Rèpublique des Pyrènèes, for which this article was written.

————————————

Harper Has Already Described Kyoto as a “Socialist Plot”
By PC (just initials) for Le Devoir  ledevoir.com in french), Wednesday January 31, 2007

Ottawa – The prime minister who now promises to fight against climate change once wrote that the Kyoto Treaty was nothing but a Socialist plot to siphon off funds, which he meant to combat. In 2002, in a letter sent to members of his now-defunct party, the Canadian Alliance, appealing for funds, Stephen Harper ridicules the agreement and casts doubt on the science that underlies climate change.

The letter, which could plunge Mr. Harper into an awkward situation now, that the environment heads the concerns of Canadian voters, was made public yesterday by the Liberals, who deem that it illustrates the prime minister’s true attitude toward the problem.

“Kyoto is essentially a Socialist plot that aims to siphon funds off from the richest countries,” one reads in the letter that is signed by Mr. Harper. “The implementation [of the treaty] would seriously harm the hydrocarbon industry, which is essential to the economies of Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Colombia. Workers and consumers everywhere in Canada would lose from it. THE KYOTO AGREEMENT CREATES NO WINNERS IN CANADA [editor's note: capitalized in the text].”

He also denounces the fact that the treaty attacks carbon dioxide – which, he says, “is essential to life” – and asserts that the scientific proof of climatic change is “scanty and contradictory.”

Mr. Harper then promises a “Kyoto battle” to prevent Jean Chrétien’s Liberal government from having the treaty adopted by the House of Commons.

“But we can’t do it alone. We need an army of Canadians to beat Kyoto, just as we had for beating Charlottetown [the Constitutional agreement],” he wrote.

These days, Mr. Harper avoids condemning Kyoto, contenting himself with saying that the planned objectives are “unachievable.” He has also promised to present a more muscular version of his law against atmospheric pollution.

The Liberals deem that the letter proves that the prime minister is not interested in seriously fighting climate change.

“It’s not surprising that Mr. Harper’s new attitude leaves Canadians skeptical,” declared Liberal MP Mark Holland. “Now, with the polls, he realizes the political relevance of turning ‘green.’ The prime minister has launched a new campaign, one to convince Canadians that he really cares about the environment. Well, nobody believes it.”

Prof. Hooshang Amirahmadi, is the head of the Iranian-American Association. He is a Professor At Rutgers University.
and very activ in efforts to create some sort of link between the US and Iran.

He will speak in Farsi on: “Can Iran Become a Democracy in the Absence of Relations with the US?”

Speaker: Professor Hooshang Amirahmadi, Rutgers University; www.amirahmadi.com

Location: Falls Church High School- Room 107 – 109, Entrance # 10

Address:7521 Jaguar Trail, Falls Church, VA 22042

Date: Monday, August 14, 2006

Time: 7:30 – 9:30 p.m.

Direction: 495 South, Exit 50 – Arlington Blvd. East (Road 50), right at first light onto Jaguar Trail. The school is on the right, about 2 blocks. Entrance # 10 is next to the main entrance of the school.

Organizer: Iranian Cultural Association (ICA) of Washington Metropolitan Area

Hooshang Amirahmadi | 20 Nassau Street, Suite 111 | Princeton | NJ | 08542

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) and posted by USA Today – Iran’s president on Sunday, July 30, 2006, said the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah guerrillas in Lebanon has forced Tehran to re-evaluate a Western nuclear incentives package, but his country still plans to respond to the offer next month.

“Events in Lebanon affected our evaluations about … (the) package of incentives. We should review it carefully. I have asked my colleagues to review it more carefully,” President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said during a news conference. Earlier in the day, Iran’s Foreign Ministry warned that Tehran would abandon the package if the U.N. Security Council approves a resolution against it on Monday:

“If any resolution is issued against Iran tomorrow, the package would be left off the agenda by Iran,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters.
“We will definitely revise our nuclear policy.”

Asefi’s comments were the first official Iranian response to a draft resolution giving it until the end of August to suspend uranium enrichment or face the threat of international sanctions.

The draft was formally circulated to the full 15-member U.N. Security Council late Friday and observers said it would likely be adopted in the next week – The Draft was indeed adopted on Monday July 31, 2006.

Referring to the crisis in Lebanon, Asefi said on Sunday that any Security Council action against Iran “will confront the region with more tension.”

Tehran said last week it would reply by Aug. 22 to a Western incentives package, but the council decided to go ahead with its draft resolution anyway. The package includes economic incentives and a provision for the United States to offer Iran some nuclear technology, lift some sanctions and join direct negotiations.

The proposal also calls for Iran to impose a long-term moratorium on uranium enrichment, which can produce reactor fuel or bomb material.

The U.S. and some of its allies accuse Iran of seeking nuclear weapons. Tehran maintains its program is purely peaceful and aimed at generating electricity.

Iran has said in the past it will never give up its right under the Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty to enrich uranium and produce nuclear fuel but has indicated it may
temporarily suspend large-scale activities to ease tensions.

The 15-member Security Council adopted the resolution on Iran – by 14 votes to 1 – threatening possible diplomatic and economic sanctions against Iran unless Tehran agrees to suspend uranium enrichment by the end of next month. Qatar’s UN ambassador, Abdulaziz Al-Nasser, said he had voted against the UN resolution because of the Lebanon conflict.
“We do not agree with the resolution at a time when our region is in flames,” he said. President Bush urged Iran to “end its financial support and supply of weapons to terrorist groups like Hizbollah”.

Tension Over Iran – Other articles on Iran as posted by USA Today:
Deadline: U.N. gives Iran until the end of August
Iran to re-evaluate nuke incentive package
Firms suspected of WMD ties penalized
Korea resolution could help U.N. face Iran
‘Acceptable basis’ seen for talks
Deal: Western incentives revealed | Rice disappointed by Iran’s initial response
Iranian negotiator expects ‘long process’
Ahmadinejad: Israeli attack will foster backlash

The Security Council Resolution as adopted on July 31, 2006, the last day of the French Presidency of the Security Council:

The Following is the US reaction to the Security Council Resolution:

based on information from www.EUobserver.com

An international conference on the latest Middle East crisis begins in Rome today. It is organized by the Europeans as a “Lebanon Contact Group.” The UN Secretary-General participates but is not one of the organizers.

The meeting of representatives of 18 countries and international organizations, includes US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana and Lebanon’s prime minister Fouad Siniora.

Syria and Iran have not been invited to the talks and divisions between some EU countries pushing for an immediate ceasefire and US will emerge. It is clear that without Syria and Iran it is not possible to find a solution to the Lebanon crisis (PJ).

A key debate will be calls from the UN and some EU countries for an international peace-keeping force to police the southern Lebanon.

UN deaths raise tensions at Middle East crisis summit:

The international conference on the Middle East crisis begins in Rome today and will be overshadowed by Israel’s killing of four UN peacekeepers yesterday.

The Unifil observer mission casualties – including one Austrian and one Finnish citizen – have been described by the UN Secretary General as deliberate.

Finnish president Tarja Halonen, Helsinki is currently holding the EU presidency, has demanded an explanation of how the deaths occurred.

US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice will propose a 10,000 strong international peacekeeping force to police the Israeli-Lebanese border at the crisis summit.

“I cannot imagine the force without any Europeans. It is fundamental that some European countries will participate,” EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana said.

France and Turkey are emerging as the lead nations for a potentially risky peace-keeping operation, under UN auspices.

“Our citizens simply do not understand why the EU does not react on a political level taking into consideration the drama which is unfolding. I therefore ask you to stage a European initiative,” French president Jacques Chirac wrote in a letter to a Solana.

In Germany, a debate has emerged on possible German participation in any new international force, with social democrat and Green politicians arguing their country’s WW2 past would make a military role in the Middle East a bad idea.

NATO secretary general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer told FT Europe in an interview, “This is definitely not the moment to start any form of speculation about any NATO role in a stabilization force.”

But Turkish leader Recep Tayyip Erdogan is pushing for a NATO role. “Just as NATO is involved in the fight against terrorism in Afghanistan, it must do the same here.”

Former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer publicly backed Israel in a comment in Sueddeutsche Zeitung, saying Hezbollah rockets on Haifa had made the conflict “existential” for the Jewish state.

But aid commissioner Louis Michel accused Israel of breaking international humanitarian law, saying “the right of self-defence does not allow Israel to level Beirut and its critical infrastructure to the ground in the name of fighting Hezbollah.”

The Telegraph reports that Britain has been used as a staging post for shipments of bombs from the US to Israel.

The Israelis have asked for smart bombs from Washington to attack bunkers and two chartered Airbus A310 cargo planes filled with GBU 28 laser-guided bombs refuelled in Prestwick airport.

US NGO Human Rights Watch is also accusing Israel of using prohibited cluster bombs in its assault on the Lebanon.

From: Laurie David ( laurie at stopglobalwarming.org)
Subject: What one marcher is doing

I found $75 in my living room last week! I used $20 of it to buy 2 Sylvania compact fluorescent light bulbs that will save me $75 in energy costs over the next 8,000 hours. So instead of looking under the seat cushion for change – I stood on the cushion and changed – two light bulbs. My wife and I spent the $55 in savings on a steak dinner.

Now this is getting weird. After finding $75 yesterday, I started hunting around my house and found $750! I used $175 of it to buy the 20 bulbs that will save me $750. I bought a new Yahama keyboard for $250, my wife went on a $250 shopping spree, and we went out for a sushi dinner with the $75 left over.

Things keep getting crazier! I think I may have seen $4000 in our driveway! My dedicated wife drives from Ann Arbor to Detroit and back each day and logs a total of 100 miles a day – 500 a week – 25,000 a year. Our 2 year old Ford Escape – 30 mpg highway – already has some 60,000 miles on it.

Yesterday, I saw a Honda Civic hybrid drive by our house. The car gets a whopping 51 mpg and is priced competitively. When I’m ready to buy a new car, all I have to do is walk into a Honda showroom and buy a Civic to begin saving us about 33% on our monthly auto gas bill – an additional $66 per month – $800 per year – $4000 over 5 years! Paris vacation here we come!

This past April, five graduate students at UC Santa Barbara worked with campus professionals and students, with help from the National Association of Environmental Law Societies, to find a potential $5 million in energy savings by 2010! This model project Campus Climate Neutral will be replicated at the top graduate programs in the country next year, and may uncover close to $1 billion in potential national collegiate energy savings over the next couple of decades.

The Santa Barbara students then raised another half million dollars in undergraduate and graduate student fees without a single fundraiser to get things started. That’s $5.5 million in savings and funding over the next 15 years! If the school taps into these savings, I wonder where they will spend all that money!

Last Fall, Forbes Magazine ran a story on Chinese photovoltaics vendor Zhengrong Shi. According to the article, Mr. Shi “…is worth only $2.2 billion. If he could just make solar power cost-effective, he could be really rich.” Forbes, March 27, 2006.

The article noted that Mr. Shi was one of the happiest people on the planet on the night that President Bush declared that the US was addicted to oil and would have to wean itself off of it. Shi – who may well go down in history as the first solar Rockefeller, Morgan, Edison, or Carnegie of the Modern Industrial Revolution – has realized how to capture the billions of dollars in energy falling from the sun every day.

So, even with the Dow closer to 11,000 than 12,000 and threats of inflation rising, there is still easy $ out there! Everywhere! I urge you all reading this to take a look in your living room, around your house, out on your driveway, in the show room, at the store, and when you invest. The next great gold – I mean green – rush is on, and as a consumer, entrepreneur, investor, and parent you don’t want to be left behind!

Dan Worth
Executive Director of the National Association of Environmental Law Societies (“NAELS”), a coalition of environmental law student groups that seeks to mobilize the university community in support of public interest environmental solutions.

Dan Worth currently serves on the Steering Committee for the Energy Action Network, a coalition of student and youth groups working on climate and energy issues.

Stop Global Warming,
Buzztone, 15260 Ventura Blvd. Suite 2100 Sherman Oaks, CA 91403

While some in the US propose former Presidents Clinton and Bush the father as special US envoys to the Middle East, in Europe, it seems, the Greens in the European Parliament suggest former German foreign minister Joschka Fischer – himself a Green politician – should become special EU peace envoy. The European approach seems much more reasonable because you do not want to bring these negotiations up to the level of former Presidents.

“As a proven international politician, respected both in Israel and Palestine, Joschka Fischer would be ideally placed to play a mediating role, as an EU envoy, aimed at negotiating a ceasefire,” leading Green MEPs Daniel Cohn-Bendit from Germany and Italian Monica Frassoni said in a statement.

“Following this, an international initiative based on the ‘roadmap’ for peace in the Middle East should be re-launched and an international conference should be prepared with a view to achieving peace in the region,” they added.

In an interview with Spiegel Online, Mr Cohn-Bendit also said the UN should task NATO to set up a peace force in the area, as the alliance is “currently the only military force which could do something like that.” His remarks follow calls by UN secretary general Kofi Annan for a stronger UN force to be stationed between Israel and Lebanon.

All of the above follows the EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana has arrival in the Middle East for fresh talks with Israeli, Palestinian and Egyptian politicians.

At SustainabiliTank we like those suggestions because all those mentioned understand also energy policy.

“IS IT WARM ENOUGH FOR YOU?” This has become a normal greeting here.

“The Independent” reports: “For most of the 20th century, British temperatures did not exceed the record of 98F (36.7C) set at Raunds in Northamptonshire on 9 August 1911. But on 3 August 1990, this was smashed when 98.8 F (37.1C) was recorded in Cheltenham, then broken again at Brogdale in 2003. Now it may be broken yet again.” But temperatures are expected to peak today. In some parts of southern England, in particular the London area, they may reach the high 30s, nearing or even exceeding 38C – that is exceeding 100F.

The UK’s air temperature record was set on 10 August 2003, when 100F was breached for the first time, with a reading of 101.3F (38.5C) at Brogdale, near Faversham in Kent. The Met Office says there is a 30 per cent chance that this all-time record will be beaten today. Even if it is not, it certainly seems likely that the record for the hottest July day will be beaten, a record nearly a century old. It was set on 22 July 1911 in Epsom, Surrey, with a temperature of 36C (96.8F).

The New York Times reports from London that the Tuesday July 18, 2006, temperature in the London Underground system (the subway) reached 117 degrees.

According to the Washington Post – The fiercest summer heat to hit the Washington region in four years led officials yesterday to throw open cooling shelters and caution moderation and sent tourists in the nation’s capital scurrying to their hotel swimming pools for relief. It hit 98 degrees in the shade — with a high approaching 100 expected today.

For the first time since summer 2004, a Code Red day for the region — when air quality is expected to be unhealthy — was declared for today by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments. The health advisory urges children, older adults and individuals with heart or breathing ailments to limit outdoor activities. In an effort to reduce air pollution, residents are also asked not to worsen conditions by driving unnecessarily or using gasoline-powered mowers. Fares will be waived today on Metrobus routes in Maryland and Northern Virginia.

Further, the New York Times reports on death cases, from the heat on the European Continent, in France and the Netherlands and reminds us of the specter of the 2003 heat wave that killed 30,000 people in Europe, half of them in France.

Now let us think about direct and indirect fights because of oil – Middle East and otherwise – is it really worth it? Can we not do with less oil and less heat?

Tammy Klein ( conferences at hartenergy.com) announces: Petrobras and Hart Energy Conferences at Rio de Janeiro’s Sheraton Barra for two days of discussion and debate at Hart’s World Refining & Fuels Conference: Americas.

This year’s program will be held August 1-3, 2006, and includes a special focus on The Evolution of Refining, Fuel Quality and Vehicle Technology and the Growing Role of Renewables in the Americas Region.

Presenters will include:
Tracy Boval, Aviation Fuels Technical Manager, Chevron With a broad career path including expertise in refinery operations, corporate leadership development and strategic business intelligence, Tracy Boval is a recognized leader in the aviation industry. She is responsible for all aviation fuel technical issues where Chevron Global Aviation operates under the Chevron, Texaco and Caltex brands.

Henry Joseph Jr., Manager of Emission and Engine Test Department of Power-Train Development Engineering,Volkswagen Brazil
An expert in biofuels and in ethylic alcohol application, Henry Joseph Jr. has been often invited by the Brazilian Government and alcohol producers to join official and commercial missions to foreign countries to discuss ethanol utilization and biofuels application. He is a chemical engineer and native Brazilian.

Pete Devlin, Hydrogen Technology Development Manager for Distributed Production Systems, US DOE Office of Hydrogen, Fuel Cells and Infrastructure Technologies
Pete Devlin directs all activities related to developing and managing budgets, technical plans, schedules, and research projects for distributed natural gas reforming systems. He has been responsible for research and development in alternative fuel technologies including hydrogen and liquid fuels for advanced compression ignition engines.

Please view the agenda to see our lineup of international speakers and presentations. Register online or call Linda Carter +1-703-891-4804 for personal service.

We look forward to seeing you in Rio! In addition to a complimentary IFQC Technology Briefing immediately preceding this conference, Petrobras will hold an evening partido for all conference delegates on August 2. Please visit our website:  www.hartenergyconferences.com for regular updates.

Hart Energy Publishing
1616 S. Voss, Ste. 1000
Houston, Texas 77057
USA

+1 (713) 993-9320

Environmental News Service reports from MOSCOW, Russia, July 7, 2006 (ENS): A ban on further development of nuclear power, and strict controls on greenhouse gas emissions linked to global warming were among the recommendations of some of the world’s largest nongovernmental organizations in advance of the Group of Eight summit, which Russia will host July 15 to 17 in St. Petersburg. Russian President Vladimir Putin met with the NGOs and promised to bring their resolutions up for discussion at the G8 Summit.

The leaders of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the European Union, will be joining President Putin for Russia’s debut G8 summit.

More than 100 nongovernmental organizations from around the world, some representing hundreds of other groups, held a two day forum in Moscow Monday and Tuesday, July 3-4, 2006, by means of a process called “the Civil Eight” 2006 that is new this year to the G8 cycle of meetings.

The initiators of the Civil G8 2006 project were over 40 Russian nongovernmental organizations, and NGO communities from every continent were involved in its work.

Over 500 people, representing rights and advocacy organizations and civil society, including the International Socio-ecological Union, the United Nations, the Ford Foundation, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Amnesty International, Climate Action Network, Charities Aid Foundation, the Natural Resources Defense Council, the World Wildlife Fund, the International Council of Women and many others, participated in the NGO forum. Global energy security, prevention of global pandemics, efforts to curb HIV/AIDS, human rights, African trade and development, education, and intellectual property took center stage at the meeting.

The Civil G8 statement on global energy security began with the declaration that human combustion of fossil fuels is directly responsible for global warming and all its environmental consequences !!!

“Non-controlled growth of production, transportation and burning of fossil fuels has negative, oppressive impact to the environment, and results in negative anthropogenic climate change, growth of the related negative phenomena – hurricanes, droughts, floods, avalanching, ablation of permafrost, etc., and thereby raises danger to stability of the global economics, life and health of humans,” according to the statement.

The forum emphasized that nuclear power, while it does not emit the greenhouse gases, is not a climate change solution they can support. “In spite of different points of view, worded by participants of the round table,” the Civil G8 said, “most of them consider that nuclear energy is not a stable way of the energy development, and insist on abandoning of nuclear energy use.” The forum expressed concern about radiation hazards, and possible releases of radiation during the transport, storage and processing of nuclear waste, and reactor dismantling.

They also fear the “possible interrelation of nuclear energy and distribution of nuclear weapons” especially in Third World countries. They recommend banning all trans-border transport of nuclear wastes, including spent nuclear fuels.

Meeting with the NGO forum participants July 4, Russian President Vladimir Putin was confronted with a group holding a banner reading, “No to nuclear power! No to nuclear power!”

Putin tolerated the demonstration, saying, “Let the people do their thing. We won’t get in their way. They came here to make themselves heard, and we must give them that opportunity.”

“I should also say immediately, and honestly, that some of your recommendations, and the documents that I have been able to review, will cause disputes within the G8. Of course,” Putin said. “I am not sure that a hundred percent of everyone here would agree, say, that it is necessary to halt development of atomic energy, but I see that your documents do contain such a recommendation.”

“It seems to me,” said Putin, “that first we need to develop an alternative for the world, we need first to propose solutions, and then will be the time to cease development of atomic energy. Although it is certainly true that not everyone shares this opinion.”

The Civil G8 say in their statement that there is a “crying need to change the prevailing energy paradigm, transfer to stable energy development in order to ensure global energy safety on the basis of energy saving and efficient use of new and renewable sources of fuel and power.” They would like to see power generation by biomass, coal gasification, wind, solar, tidal, geothermal power plants, dam-free hydroelectric power stations, and hydrogen energy.

Evgeny Shvarts, who chairs the Biodiversity Conservation Center of the Socio-Ecological Union, told the Civil G8 forum, “Energy security must necessarily include climate security. Based on this principle, we believe that the G8 countries must take the necessary measures to keep growth in average global temperature to a maximum of two degrees in comparison to pre-industrial levels.”

“To do so, by 2050 we will need to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 50 percent in comparison with 1990 levels. And we absolutely believe that the G8 must accelerate implementation of the action plan approved at Gleneagles in order to ensure heightened energy efficiency, rapid development of renewable energy, and lowering of greenhouse gas emissions.”

Putin responded, “Energy security must include environmental security, there are no disputes of problems in this regard.”

Shvarts expressed the belief of forum participants that “in the year of the 20th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster we have an obligation to demand that other G8 countries wind up their programs for construction of new active nuclear units, as atomic energy represents a non-sustainable path for development of energy.” Putin said that the G8 leaders have agreed to discuss nuclear energy at the Summit.

“The subject under discussion in Saint Petersburg in relation to atomic energy will not be development of atomic energy worldwide, but rather issues of ensuring the security of atomic energy,” said Putin.

Because the Civil G8 forum recommends an end to nuclear power development, Putin said he would bring it up in St. Petersburg. “But I should tell you now,” he said at the forum, “several of my colleagues have even been reluctant to discuss this topic on principle. Not because they are against security in nuclear energy, but owing to the rather harsh positions of non-governmental organizations in their countries with regard to this issue, they have not wanted even to touch on this matter. But I believe that this is wrong.”

“While in France today 80 percent of generated electric power comes from nuclear energy, security of nuclear energy affects us all, even those countries that do not intend to develop nuclear energy – like Germany, which has adopted a resolution not to build any new nuclear plants,” Putin said. “But security is something that affects everyone.

“We know this better than anyone else following the Chernobyl tragedy,” he said. “Therefore, in the end everyone agreed that we should discuss problems of atomic energy security in Saint Petersburg.”

The Civil G8 forum proposes the creation of a global monitoring system covering nuclear power plants, transportation and production of hydrocarbons, and space based equipment in order to prevent damage to the environment.

They recommend that an international system of mandatory insurance for environmental risks be developed and submitted to the United Nations for discussion by 2010.

They envision an insurance system that would provide financial compensation for damage to the health of the population as a result of “production, transportation and processing of hydrocarbon and nuclear materials, burial and processing of the wastes.”

Putin promised that their recommendations would be considered by the G8 leaders. “Where in previous years these meetings with the leaders of nongovernmental organizations were limited in terms of participation,” he said, “today, as you see, we have invited you for discussion as part of a far wider representative forum.”

“I want to assure you that everything that you expound will, in essence, reach the G8 countries’ heads, and that not only will we study them attentively, but we will also analyze them most critically, and will take them into account in making ultimate decisions,” Putin pledged.

Host: Law Seminars International

Conference brings together federal and state policy makers, developers, and financial players to address current issues in renewables and energy efficiency.

For further information please click here.

Location: Geneva, Switzerland
Reporting to: President & CEO

Closing date: 1st August 2006

Required experience and skills:
i. Strong affiliation and understanding of the climate change and GHG market mechanisms and its political sensitivities
ii. University education with at least 7 years works experience of which 3 years within the GHG Market in either the CDM Mechanism and/or EU ETS.
iii. Good inter-personal skills, team player
iv. Ability to prioritize and work under tight deadlines
v. Good communication & presentational skills
vi. Flexible and service minded
vii. Ability to work in parallel with issues of substance and management
viii. Research and analytical skills
ix. Knowledge of computer software, including PowerPoint, Word, Excel, Lotus Notes, etc.
x. Excellent command of the English

Additional information

Although starting date is negotiable candidates should be available preferably as of the 01st of October 2006 with the aim to be able to have a minimum hand over period of 3 month. The deadline for submission be the 1st of August 2006 and only those applicants that are invited for an interview will be contacted after the 15th of August 2006.

IETA offers its employees a comprehensive salary package subject to Swiss Taxation, which includes contributions to social security and pension fund and Accidental Insurance cover.

About IETA:
IETA currently has 130 members and 7 staff working from offices in Geneva (Switzerland), Toronto & Ottawa (Canada).

IETA is dedicated to:
§ the objectives of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and ultimately climate protection;
§ the establishment of effective market-based trading systems for greenhouse gas emissions by businesses that are demonstrably fair, open, efficient, accountable and consistent across national boundaries; and
§ maintaining societal equity and environmental integrity while establishing these systems.

Further Information:
In case you have questions in relation to the posting please contact
Edwin Aalders ( aalders at ieta.org – tel: +41 22 8393192)
(See also attached file: IETA Office Manager – July 2006.pdf)

Edwin Aalders
Manager, International Emissions Trading Association IETA 4, ch. de Conches, CH-1231 Conches Geneva, Switzerland

e-mail:  aalders at ieta.org
Phone: +41 (0)22 839 31 92
Fax: +41 (0)22 839 31 81
website:  http://www.ieta.org

From  pressoffice at greenparty.org. Green Party in England & Wales – US Supreme Court to Make First Statement On Climate Change.

“More than a dozen states and environmental groups are taking the US’s Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to court in a bid to ensure it treats CO2 from automobiles as a pollutant harmful to health, under the federal Clean Air Act.” Green Party Principal Speaker Keith Taylor commented: “The ruling could be one of the court’s most important ever on the environment, heralding a new era in the way the US addresses global warming.

“The Bush administration insists that voluntary measures and new technologies can provide a solution to climate change, but we urgently need a regulatory framework, backed by legal measures, to really bring carbon emissions down.

“It is encouraging that the Supreme Court recognise the weight of compelling evidence around carbon emissions, and are prepared to consider doing something about it.”

The states involved, which together account for more than a third of the car market in the US, say the Clean Air Act makes clear carbon dioxide is a pollutant that should be regulated if it poses a danger to public health and welfare. They argue it does so by causing a warming of the earth. The administration maintains that unlike other chemicals that must be controlled to ensure healthy air, carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels is not a dangerous pollutant under the federal law. And, officials argue, even if it is, the EPA has discretion over whether to regulate it, considering the economic costs involved. The agency should not be required to “embark on the extraordinarily complex and scientifically uncertain task of addressing the global issue of greenhouse gas emissions” when voluntary ways to address climate change are available, the administration argued in its filing with the high court.

Plaintiffs in the lawsuit were California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. They were joined by a number of cities including Baltimore, New York City and Washington D.C., the Pacific island of America Samoa, the Union of Concerned Scientists, Greenpeace, and Friends of the Earth.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5118792.stm

Green Party Press Office
020 7561 0282
 http://www.greenparty.org.uk

Published and promoted by Jim Killock for the Green Party, both at 1a Waterlow Road, London N19 5NJ.

New York City, February 7, 2006.

 

Eventually a rectangular area appears: ENERGY INDEPENDENCE?

“The answer maybe growing in our own
backyard – live green – go yellow.”

I love it!
Then the inevitable: “Click to hear more” and “GM”.
The picture that opens up is a beer glass with a gas pump in it and
material that looks like a cross between chipped corn or grass chips,
perhaps broken up wood – quite nondescript.. When you open further
it says GM has more cars that go over 30 miles/gallon.

We certainly commend aol.com for them being on their toes – but GM is
really not such an exemplary company. In effect they are going
bankrupt because other car makers did better and more gas saving
cars. 30m/gal is nothing to crow about. Good they recognize ethanol
now!

I hope they do not want to keep us back until we have a cellulose
based ethanol production industry (from wood and switch grass as
suggested by the the president). I would have preferred to see real
corn grains in that beer glass.

The Brazilians have perfected the ethanol vehicles 25 years ago and
GM has rejected backing these ideas for over 25 years by now.

So, I am glad, very glad now, that yellow corn greets me when I open  

This was sent to the editor of the “New York Press” weekly that printed a review article written by Mr. Causwell of the Petrocollapse Conference, then the following week had several follow up letters.
Dear Editor, the New York Press, Dear Mr. Causwell
Regarding your Halloween issue cover reporting on the petrocollapse, and the following week’s “Soapboxing”, I would like to contribute notes regarding what Mr.Causwell missed (New York Press, October 26 – November 1, and November 2-8, 2005).
The Conference was not a monolith, while recognizing something that your reporter also recognized — fossil fuels are finite and that this dooms our suburban life-styles — there were differences in the views of speakers regarding further implications.
I am writing for www.SustainabiliTank.info and I have there three pieces relating to the October 5, 2005, Petrocollapse Conference:

• September 29, 2005 – I announced “The Petrocollapse Conference”
• October 4, 2005 – My own presentation at the Conference titled – “Sustainability Implies The Use Of Renewables”
• October 11, 2005 – My evaluation/reporting after the Conference – “Will Petrocollapse Incur Because of Peak-Oil?”

I approached the subject from its environmental side – something your reporter missed altogether (please see the October 4 piece). I argue that THE REAL COST OF FUEL IS CLIMATE CHANGE. I was speaking of the Katrita effect – our understanding that the Katrina and Rita Hurricanes tell us we must start decreasing CO2 emissions. My argument is thus that eventually we will understand that we must start using less oil even before we are forced to do so because of decreased supply. I spoke of changes of life-style and our learning to live less energy demanding existences. I mentioned my recent trip to Bhutan in order to learn what the King of Bhutan means by “Gross National Happiness”. I advocated that a major part of the reduced energy needs should come from renewable sources of energy.
My reporting from the meeting includes my disagreement of 25 years with Professor David Pimentel, who also spoke at this Conference. He does not believe in biofuels and in renewables while I, and most scientists who try to soften our addiction to oil, see in them the way to provide the residual energy needs after we have brought ourselves to our senses and reduced our needs for energy. There are no sound technological answers that will allow us to continue to waste energy – we are speaking about ways to keep us “happy” by answering for the reasonable needs. By doing the right things we can avoid the predicted effects of petrocollapse and the fate of being a Katritastan, but we can not avoid change.
Again, please look at www.SustainabiliTank.info and let us avoid empty exchanges in favor of practical positive new ways. The above web-site was established in order to provide for a media think tank on Sustainable Development – the concept that was officially placed on the international negotiation table in 1992 at the UN Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Jan Lundberg, after leaving the oil industry, also joined the advocates of Sustainable Development and was with me in Kyoto in 1997 – we even shared a room – present at the birth of the Kyoto Protocol. If his actions now may seem extreme to Causwell, this may simply be a result of the slowness of our leadership in grasping the seriousness of the problem. This is no laughing matter; I would say it deserves further serious analysis and coverage in the Press. People must understand that drilling for oil in Alaska is a fake answer, believing that this is not so will indeed bring us to petrocollapse.
Sincerely yours, Pincas Jawetz New York City www.SustainabiliTank.info

Independent Website and walking a tightrope.
New York City, October 25, 2005

Our website, in its analysis of what is needed in order to enable life
on
earth for future generations, found itself lately, more and more,
involved in
pointing at the political leadership in Washington, and we honestly do
not enjoy
doing so; simply we found ourselves in forced need to react at the
behavior of
others and we prefer to spend our time at thinking rather positive
thoughts.
We set out to be an independent media think-tank and not political
pundits.

We found it difficult to choose between the US presidential candidates,
though we wrote that Teresa Heinz Kerry would be an excellent first
lady and Mr.
Holbrook a very good Secretary of State; we believe the UN must undergo
complete
reformation rather then just reform, and we welcomed Ambassador
Bolton’s
arrival at the UN – in short we allow ourselves to take a completely
independent
position and follow what we think best by looking on how these folks
see their
role in steering with long range views.

I am writing this piece now as two articles in the Epoch Times of
October 24,
2005, caused me to reflect on life’s realities. The first piece may
seem to
be far fetched, but, obviously, I do not think so. The piece is about
Harold
Pinter getting the Nobel Prize.
He is obviously a wordsmith and some may think of his work as
“conversational
barbarism.” That is known, yet the Swedish Academy claimed that he
“restored
theatre to its basic elements” with “unpredictable dialogue, where
people are
at the mercy of each other and pretense crumbles.” The ET Arts Editor
sees in
this that the Academy believes that the truth lying behind the pretense
of
social relationships is that we are at the mercy of each other. That
our basic
human truth, the truth that Pinter captures, the truth that we should
acknowledge, is that we devour one another. Where is the truth in which
people are enno
bled by sacrifice and enriched by vision? She feels betrayed by an
Academy that
helps shape this global culture without taking responsibility for it.

Is it far fetched to see in above the spirit of the corporate reality
and the
way Washington backs these corporations? Is there really no better way?

ET has a second piece written by a stuff member who is a newcomer to
the
United States. He says that the US, while one of the youngest countries
in the
world, and admittedly, one which is disliked by many not living in its
borders,
“It has from the start been a country that protects freedom of speech
and
belief, as long as it does not harm others.” He continues “What the US
lacks in a
rich culture and heritage, it makes up for in a basic moral foundation
that has
for the most part been taught and bequeathed for generations … if the
US
had not been involved in World War II, our world today might be one run
by
Fascists and Nazis. If the US had not opposed the Soviet Union in the
Cold War, the
world today would be in a tragic state, with communism bringing misery
to all
humanity. If the US was not the watchguard for human rights and
democracy
around the world, more terrorist regimes bent on harming mankind would
have
spread unchecked …
“The United States and its leaders may be flawed; its system may not be
perfect, but I for one, think the US is the greatest country in the
world.”

Yes, these words teach us something we may have forgotten for a moment,
even
so we have pointed out that at the Yalta Conference in 1945, President
Roosevelt practically turned over parts of Europe to Stalin in exchange
for having
him withdraw from the oil fields in Iran, and for not trying to
interfere with
the US taking over the oil interests of the Middle East. Yes, there was
an Iron
Curtain. Yes, we pointed out, in a nonpartisan way, how deeply flowed
is the
energy base of the US economic development, yet, nevertheless, had the
leadership been in the hands of another nation things probably could
have been worse.
Luckily, from time to time, a newcomer to the US is able to tell us why
he
came here, and make us feel that not everything is lost yet, even
though we must
point out needed change. Thank you for reading this.

New York City, October 22, 2005

These last few days I attended and participated at so many valuable
meetings
that I really did not get to report on them; I will try to integrate
them in
a couple of articles.

Monday, October 17, 2005, morning and early afternoon, at Columbia
University, a conference on “New Perspectives on Reforming the United
Nations” (two panels – “Reflecting on Successes and Obstacles”, and
“Opportunities for Achieving Real Reform at the UN”).

Monday, October 17, 2005, late afternoon, at Columbia University,
“Refining
and Fuels.”

Wednesday, October 19, 2005, morning, at the Citigroup Corporate
Headquarters Building, award s breakfast and meeting on “Beyond Grey
Pinstripes 2005 – preparing MBAs for social and environmental
stewardship”,
organized by The Aspen Institute Business and Society Program.

Wednesday, October 19, 2005, evening, organized by Nation Books at the
New
York Society for Ethical Culture, a meeting with authors Scott Ritter
and
Seymour Hersh on intelligence, the UN, and the start up of the war in
Iraq.
Going there I had to miss the meeting of the Regional Rail Working
Group of
the Consortium of Transit Advocacy Organizations.

Thursday, October 20, 2005, all morning, a meeting with Scientific
American
Magazine, organized by the Columbia University Earth Institute,
“Crossroads
for Planet Earth”.

Thursday, October 20 2005, late afternoon, Columbia University Earth
Institute Seminars on Sustainable Development, “Natural Hazards:
Barriers to
Human Development?”.

Friday, October 21, 2005, meeting of the American Branch of the
international Law Association, two sessions dealing with legal issues
related to climate change: ” Legal Issues in Carbon Finance and
Emissions
Trading’, and “Adjudicative approaches to Climate Change.”

Further, I would like to mention here also a previous seminar I did not
cover yet, of Tuesday, October 4, 2005, at the Center for Energy,
Marine
Transportation and Public Policy of Columbia University School of
International and Public Affairs (SIPA), that brought in Michael Grubb,
Chief Economist, UK Carbon Trust, and Professor at The Imperial College
Energy Studies Department, who spoke on the Economics of Greenhouse Gas
Mitigation. His presentation here was a warm-up for his testifying the
following day in Washington, DC, on the subject before a US
Congressional
Committee.

—————————

Having Introduced all these various events, I will proceed now to
report
only on one corner of these subjects, the business related aspect, and
the
other topics will be dealt with later. I will start with the October 19
“Business and Society Program”.

James A. Harmon, Chairman of the Board of the World Resources
Institute,
said in 1988 the WRI started to evaluate course work at business
schools and
in 1999 the Aspen Institute came on board and they created jointly the
Business and Society Program. First WRI was trying to help prospective
MBA
students to find schools that have social and environmental classes,
then
the new program came into existence in order to help business school
come up
with such coursework. Today, the thirty schools that are part of the
program
have 25% of their coursework that qualify under the program’s intent,
compared to only 8% in the schools that are not part of the program.
The
growing success regarding the increase in such courses comes because of
social and environmental consciousness among the prospective students,
but
also because of increased awareness on the part of an increasing number
of
corporations that work with governments, NGOs, and communities, in
order to
solve arising, or endemic, problems. Solving problems such as declining
ecosystems, climate change, water scarcity, endemic poverty, social
iniquities…, through innovation, are seen increasingly as business
growth
opportunities.

The Executive Director of the program told us that they looked at 91
business schools on six continents: 54% require a course in ethics,
corporate social responsibility, sustainability, or business and
society, up
from 45% in 2003 and 34% in 2001. “Beyond the Grey Pinstripes” is a
biennial
ranking of these business schools, spotlighting the schools that lead
the
way in integrating issues of social and environmental stewardship into
their
curricula. We got the list of the30 top ranking schools, and then the
top
ten schools got awards and the Deans had a chance to give a small
presentation.

This was followed by special awards to five young people who are
already
faculty members and who distinguished themselves as innovators in
various
areas, and this was followed by life-award giving to University of
Michigan
Distinguished Professor C.K. Prahalad who was one of the main
ideologues
pushing these programs.

From the presentations I marked myself courses such as Corporate
Transparency and Pollution Prevention at Stanford University. (Stanford
was
at the head of the list and young Assistant Professor of Operation,
Information, and Technology, Erica Plambeck got the “Rising Star”
award).
Research on Sustainability was mentioned by Dean Dezso Horwath of York
University in Toronto, Canada. U. of California at Berkeley is working
with
corporations such as Nike, Microsoft, HP, and one of the awardees was
Kellie
McElhaney who came across as a very enthusiastic Executive Director of
their
Center for Responsible Business.

Of the first five Schools, two are from the US, and one each from
Spain,
Canada, and Mexico. Looking at the complete list of 30 top ranking
schools -
four are from Canada, two from Spain, and one each from Mexico, UK,
Netherlands, Philippines, France, Finland, and the remaining 18 are
from the
USA. NYU, or Columbia, did not make it to be included, I am specially
curious about Columbia which is so prominent thanks to the Earth
Institute,
but seemingly the School of Business does not run its own courses;
I will eventually check into this. A young Professor of Management from
Rio
Grande do Sul, Brazil, was an awardee, but his school did not make it
to the
list; same thing regarding MIT – is this perhaps an attempt to
influence
those schools? Prof. Prahalad said that the biggest accomplishment
would
come if ten years from now there will be no need for these awards -
read
that every school will be doing the right thing.

Following the awards part, there was a panel discussion. My title for
this
article – GREEN IS GREEN – comes from a statement by Todd S. Thomson,
Chairman and CEO, global wealth management division of Citigroup, the
meeting’s host. Plainly this mean that if you do the right thing (you
are
green) you will also make a lot of dollars (that are green). Profits
and
social responsibility are connected he said. “Toyota succeeds but GM
and
Ford are disasters.” Social means that the individual will buy Toyota
and
here goes shareholder value. You also have the best people because you
want
to have a social standing. Profits and social responsibility are
connected.

Professor C.K. Prahalad put it even clearer: “The Social responsibility
of
business is always profits” the “means” are changing – we are used to
think
that they are maximizing shareholders equity, but the new starting
point is
“the opportunity for value creation” so the “means” are changing, we
still
want profits. So what does all this new reeducation do? We simply learn
better to recognize opportunities. Philanthropy has an agenda, the NGOs
have
an agenda, and now the corporations have their point of view for
looking up
an agenda – it is an opportunity.

Geoff Calvin, Senior editor-at-Large, Fortune Magazine, says that when
students enroll they are motivated towards the public, but schools
eventually were switching them from the public to the private and
delivering
them as 90% mercenaries and 10% missionaries.

A student remarked that there is an alternative for electricity
generation,
“we have to make this kind of work legitimate as an academic work.”

The discussion got more and more interesting, eventually we heard about
revenues and Prahalad started to ask for whom, and pointed out you must
maximize for the community and you gain for being part of the
community.
The company that serves a long range of shareholders will in the long
range
increase shareholder value. the employees and suppliers, among others,
are
also shareholders. Thompson wants to teach leadership – he chaired
leadership boards at Wharton – and knows that a managerial job requires
leadership.

———————————–

Now to the October 20-22 International Law Weekend, for which there
were on
Friday, October 21, two business legal panels. In some way, it is
possible
to see in the panel looking at legal issues in carbon finance and
emission
trading, a panel that believes that the Kyoto protocol mechanisms start
up
in 2005 could lead to a world of legal problems tat have to be dealt
with in
an organized fashion. on the other hand, the second panel on
adjudicative
approaches to climate change, because it seems that climate change may
have
dire implications for human institutions and ecosystems throughout the
world, while the UNFCCC is only moving at what the panel sees as a
“glacial
pace”,they prefer to look at alternative legal setups for the eventual
damages. This is an answer outside the Kyoto protocol negotiations.

The first panel was chaired by Laura Campbell, President of the Climate
Change Legal Foundation. Her panel consisted of Sabine Begg from IFC,
James
Cameron from Climate Change Capital- London, and Ed Zabrocki from
Morgan
Stanley Dean and Witter dealing with Emission Trading Contracts and
Markets.
It was a clearly technical panel.

The second panel was chaired by Wil Burns from Monterey Institute of
International Studies. His panel consisted of Donald Goldberg from the
Center for International Law, Prof. Andrew Strauss from Widener School
of
Law, and Prof. Hari Osofsky from U of Oregon. They tried to figure out
alternative international fora to deal with serious CO2 emitters. The
question is how to get the arm of the law to reach to transboundary
emitters. The problems are clear on solutions things are not so clear
yet
but , after watching the outcome of this year’s Montreal COP11/MOP1 I
may
find compelled to get back to the presenters and fish for possible
alternatives indeed. I regard the topic of high potential interest,
perhaps
even in the case that the KP shows some degree of success.

In the afternoon there was another panel of interest: “Is International
Law
a Threat to Democracy?” chaired by Prof. Andrew Strauss. His panel
included
Professors Richard Falk from U of California at Santa Barbara (the
left
extreme), Carol Gould, George Mason University(the right extreme),
Jeremy
Rabkin (right in Center), and Peter Spiro from U of Georgia.

In context of the trading in CO2 credits, I include here the October 4
presentation by Michael Grubb who worked on IPCCC reports addressing
the
economic, technological and social aspects of limiting GHG emissions
and has
advised a number of governments, companies on climate change. He is
editor-in-chief of the journal Climate Policy and is on the editorial
Board
of Energy Policy. He seems to think that trading in CO2 credits will
not be
sufficient and that eventually storing underground CO2 from new coal
fired
plants will be another option.

This article is prompted by the October 5th 2005 New York conference we announced on www.SustainabiliTank.info in the article of September 29, 2005. Because of the multitude of information that was made available that day, we delayed our reporting in order to be able to analyze the subject further.

——————————-

“Is the World Running Out of Oil?” is a question that also the Wall Street Journal has asked in its October 8-9, 2005 issue. Actually everyone is now asking this question, and everyone understands that this is a loaded question, in the sense that the answer suggested by the various interests seems to be always misleading – our problem is that everyone tries to mislead us in a different direction and we are thus obligated to look through the dust in search of the truth. www.SustainabiliTank.info feels that there is indeed a truth hidden in all of this.

Lauren Etter writes in the WSJ: “The big question is whether the current imbalance is a temporary disruption or an indication that oil output has peaked and is no longer sufficient to meet global demand. Pessimists argue there’s simply not enough oil to meet the booming demands coming from developing countries like China and India and still satisfy the voracious appetites of US consumers. Optimists point out that some experts have been predicting a scarcity of oil for nearly a century – and yet the oil keeps coming.” Then Etter shows signs of remorse for what was just said: ” To be sure, oil is a finite resource. The US Geological Society estimates there is only enough oil from traditional sources to last between 30 and 40 years, based on current rates of consumption and world reserves estimates. But that doesn’t take into account the wealth of nonconventional resources, such as oil shale or sand oil, which lie largely untapped because of cost”. Etter, among a listing of “Points of View Over the Years” also mentions – “World oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s. You can’t pump what you haven’t found. Where will additional oil production come from and at what price?” quoted from Republican House Member from Maryland – Rep. Roscoe Bartlett. Then Etter mentions among her “facts” that the Alaska Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWAR) contains 10.4 billion barrels of oil which could meet US energy demand for 1.4 years – is that a good reason for all this noise? – Astonishing! Etter then recognizes the possibility of consumers becoming cost conscious and moving to conservation of energy, i.e., sport-utility vehicles sales have fallen off sharply last year; but the problem with her “optimistic” view when she mentions the shale oil and sand oil is that her half page article does not mention even once costs to the environment.

Etter’s article is just the prelude, or excuse if you wish, to the WSJ editorial of the same day – “The Oil Bubble”: “We keep hearing the word ‘bubble’ to describe industries with rapid and unsustainable rising prices. Hence, the Internet bubble, the telecom bubble, stock market bubble, housing bubble, yet for some mysterious reason no one speaks of the oil bubble – though prices have tripled in two years to as high as $70 a barrel”. The WSJ believes that we are now in such a bubble and prices will fall dramatically. The WSJ, as expected, believes that the free-market mechanism will keep the pumps running forever – technology will be the savior. The point the WSJ wants to make is that the constraints on our ability to find and extract new oil are not geologic or scientific but the barriers created by government. WSJ quotes the Competitive Enterprise Institute as saying that “roughly 90% of the oil on the planet rests under government-owned land and these resources are abysmally managed” – in the US the enemy are environmentalists (finally I found here the first reference to environment – and it was all negative!). The editorial ends by warning that it is not through with us, and another time they will assess the ideas of price controls and “windfall profit” taxes.

We wrote rather at length about the WSJ position because we seemed to learn from these articles several important points.

a. Those that purport to speak for the free-enterprise through channels like the Wall Street Journal are untrustworthy because they are devoid of any consideration for the environment. They advocate the rape of the land for profit of the few.

b. Even drilling in environmentally fragile parts of the globe will not provide us substantial quantities of petroleum (the ANWAR case).

c. Without dipping into shale oil and sand oil, and perhaps liquids and gases from coal, we have indeed no additional oil-like alternatives to petroleum to allow the extension of the “oil age”.

d. Those speaking for free enterprise want actually big government that favors them. We know that the price of oil is not the figure quoted because we know that the government is spending more then that in safeguarding the availability of this oil. What about the additional losses caused by environmental destruction?

e. Creating the feel that there is a shortage of supplies increases the price of the commodity, and knowing that the actual figures of availability of oil are the secret of the produces, how can we actually know where we stand? Talking of shortages increases the profits of the oil companies.

—————————–

The New York Sun of October 11, 2005 in “What’s Next for Bush?” by Cal Thomas, writes: “Nothing would fire up the country more (short of winning the war in Iraq and finding Osama bin Laden) than a crusade to liberate us from the grip of those oil-producing nations that hate us and use our money to spread terrorism.

Surely we have the technology to find alternative energy sources. The President should provide leadership. It is not only about conservation; it’s about a new path toward energy independence. If President Kennedy could put astronauts on the moon in less than a decade, President Bush could at least begin the process of freeing us from a dependency on Saudi Arabian and other foreign oil. His brother, Florida Governor Jeb Bush, has reversed himself and now favors offshore drilling near the Florida coastline. That may help ease our dependence on foreign oil in the short term, but as Kennedy said we can do better.” We bring this here not because we believe in drilling of Florida but because of the WE CAN DO BETTER!. These last words show the real direction of an Apollo project. We can move to establish an infrastructure for allowing us supplies of energy that are not dependent on drilling for oil – how about this for an introductory remark to the real topic of our paper?

——————————-

The October 5th, 2005, Petrocollapse Conference in New York City was called for by Jenna Orkin and Jan Lundberg – both environmentalists of long standing.

Jan is a son to the founder of the Lundberg Newsletter, the morning reading of oil industry personnel, a firm that predicted the Second Oil Shock in 1979 from data revealing that a nine percent shortfall of gasoline would hit in March of that year.

Jan was an active petroleum analyst till 1988 and became an active environmentalist since. He is the founder of Auto-Free Times and the Culture Change Network that includes Culture Change Media (www.CultureChange.org).

Jenna, is a co-Founder of the World Trade Center Environmental Organization. She opened by explaining what is meant and what is not meant by peak oil.

Peak Oil is the theory developed by geologist M. King Hubbert in 1956, based on his observation of individual oil fields, that oil discovery and production follow a bell-shaped curve. Extrapolating from this he predicted that the US sum total oil production will peak around 1971, and the world in the 1990’s. He was right in his first prediction and we saw the 1972 production peak in US oil production. Jenna thinks that events in the Middle East extended the life of worldwide oil production by about ten years, so we start seeing now Hubbert’s second prediction coming true.

Peak Oil does not mean we’ve run out of oil completely and suddenly, but that we are using up more oil then is being discovered! Jenna points out that understanding this we should start to take seriously the transition to alternate sources of energy – specifically renewables!

Furthermore, it is not just enough to look for alternate supplies but we must start to learn to use less energy – i.e., grow vegetables locally, use bikes, and use our brains.

She continued with questions: “What are we really talking about when we talk about Peak Oil? Long gas lines? A bad depression? Or some third thing, the likes of which have never been seen except perhaps in the wake of Hurricane Katrina?”

Not just cars eat oil. Oil is also used for pesticides and fertilizer we need to feed a world population of 6.5 billion people.

Jan followed explaining that about 12 oil-exporting nations have reported to be in decline and past their peak. The US, for decades the top exporter, peaked in extraction in 1970 about 40 years after its peak of discoveries. Now the world uses about four barrels of oil per each barrel of new discovery. There is a lower and lower production rate of new wells, and more dry holes per successful drilling. This shows that we have rather thoroughly exploited the fields and we get increased costs of production. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq had their petroleum considerations. The government did not show any other leadership besides the military actions. With the US gobbling now up one fourth of the world’s 80-plus million barrels a day oil demand, and no sensible policy-change in sight, the Conference is thus an attempt to explore the post-peak options for individuals and communities.

Jan Lundberg picks a bone with peak-oil researchers Matthew Simmons and Robert Hirsch who want to see the present industrial society continue by using alternate resources. Jan wants rather to see a transformation of society because he looks at petrocollapse as an outcome of the peak-oil situation. He contends that without cheap oil, fossil fuel intensive societies may be ten times beyond their ecological carrying capacity as per William Catton in “Overshoot”. The way out would be a return to nature and abdication of Western Civilization ways of life. He continued: “individually, all of us are suffering the same fate as nature. We hope, in our immersion in high-tech plastic convenience and pesticide residues, that the epidemics of, for example, breast cancer and prostate cancer don’t get us… chemicals such as plastics – petroleum – and their additives amount to the unlearned lesson of “Silent Spring” by Rachel Carson”.

Rather than just a geological phenomenon, peak oil and its effects will bring also petrocollapse which is a socio-economic phenomenon. As he thinks real alternatives to petroleum do not quite exist, there will be nowhere for petrosociety to go but down and out. There will be hoarding of fuel – but the trucks will not be rolling into Safeway and Walmart. The real question is thus – will there be social isolation or society solidarity?

Civilization is the threat. Civilization is what brought about nuclear bombs and the commodification of nature. There is no such thing as biodegrability of petroleum plastic – plastic, like diamonds, are for ever. Culture change is the cure. The meeting will provide models of sustainability such as urban gardens and farms and more. Cuba has gone through its own petrocollapse, when the Russians stopped supplying oil, like Cuba, we need Citizen Petroleum Councils, to survey the problems and possible solutions — to develop a common sense approach to energy and land use. The idea of our country may be redefined back to love of the land.

——————————-

John Darnell, Energy and Environment Coordinator for Maryland Republican Congressman Roscoe Bartlett, spoke on “Challenges of Transition to Sustainability – parallels with Apollo 13,” (www.bartlett.house.gov).

He also started by showing the oil depletion curve covering the time span 1940 to 2060 with the Bell shaped curve having peeked at 2000, then he proposed a Republican track in time for action: It starts with Voluntary Conservation, then moves to Organized Voluntary Conservation and further Monetary Incentives/Policies for Voluntary Conservation; Next step is Efficient Technology Retrofits and eventually Monetary Incentives/Policies for Efficient Technologies.

Further he suggested talking of Short Term Private Interest and Long Term Public Interest. Basically all policies should be viewed in progressive stages like, as an example dealing with light energy conservation: first moving from the incandescent lamps to fluorescent lamps and eventually to light emitting diodes that reduce energy use to nearly zero.

He wants to promote the introduction of vehicles like the VW with a fuel efficiency of the equivalent of 300 mpg. He suggests to go backwards – to set a goal for the introduction of renewables and to work backwards to obtain sustainable systems.

He suggested design competition for sustainable efficient housing with PV using solar energy breeding. In short, his presentation was all about how to change policies with the help of eventual government organizing help. Answering to a question he added that he wants to see focus moved away from profit to service. Then we will, like the utilities today, want just to recoup the expenses, and for organization, we will have to move the industries to where the wind is. To my surprise, this republican does not seem to buy the WSJ.

———————

James Howard Kunstler, author “The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of the Oil Age, Climate Change, and other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century”, sees that we have a permanent world wide energy crisis that leads to a financial crisis.

The infrastructure of suburbia will become expensive to run – unusable. The creation of suburbia was our greatest mistake in reallocation of wealth and we cannot imagine now getting away from it. We turned citizens into consumers that have the duty to eat more cheese-doodles and drink beer. We managed a “Las Vegasization” of American life by teaching that if you wish on a star your dreams come true. There is a general belief that you can get something for nothing with a casino in every corner of our life. We got a psychology of dubious investments and we must safeguard ourselves now from the illusion that renewables, solar, etc., will solve our problems. We will have a lot of losers in the middle class and we must be careful they do not turn into political maniacs in order to maintain their privileges.

He is not all prediction of doom. He rather wants us to start with some doable project and even makes suggestions. His suggestion is to start by rebuilding the railroad system. The fact that we do not talk about this shows we are not yet serious — where are the Democrats on this issue while grandstanding on Katrina? Rebuild the public transportation in the city — where are we going to take the fuel for the yellow bus?

He sees food production moving back to the center of our life and people moving back to the countryside. He suggests forgetting the word “growth” and substitute for it “activity.”

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A panel, in two stages, dealt with Government response to Peak Oil: “How they have responded to disasters in the past; how they should respond in the future, and how they actually will respond,” included Jason Meggs, Jenna Orkin, and Michael Ruppert.

A second panel on Local Solutions, included Jan Lundberg, Aresh Javadi, Dan Miner, Aaron Naparstek and David Room.

Michael Ruppert, author – “Crossing the Rubicon: the Decline of the American Empire and the Age of Oil” and founder of www.FromtheWilderness.com, dealt with “Government/Financial awareness of and Response to Peak Oil”.

He sees in 9/11 a transformative event like Pearl Harbor – in order to get the support for the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Katrina is the start of a terrible collapse of our times, like 1929 was the beginning of the events of the 30s and 40s. Asked where he sees brighter future he said that in places that have water and wood like Panama and Costa Rica.

In the summer of 2003 there was the ASPO conference in Paris dealt with peak oil, the future of energy supply and Ruppert contends that the CIA has already sat up at the time a list of ten priorities which he thinks are being implemented now by proposed legislation. These include such items as suspending environmental restrictions for drilling for oil, developing further nuclear technology, and Fisher Tropsch Chemistry liquid fuels based on coal, up to relaxing labor/wage laws and suspending bankruptcy laws. In 2005 Michael Ruppert writes on the Torrance, California Oil Crisis Simulation on “Oil Shockwave” called for by Jane Harman, the Democratic Member of Congress that is on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and whose district has more then a third of all California refining capacity. Others there included James Woolsey, the former Director of the CIA, Robert E. Grady, Managing Partner of Carlyle Group, Rand Beers, President of the Coalition for American Leadership and Security and others.

Above group seems to be worried indeed and seemingly most of above named have already bought hybrid cars and some, even President Bush, Vice President Cheney, and Al Gore, have homes that are energy self sufficient and not dependent on the grid anymore. Ruppert asks if they know something the rest of us do not know?

From above level of comments, it was interesting to see comments that dealt with Ecovillages (Jan Room from Post Carbon Inst., Albert Bates), Urban Gardens (Aresh Javadi from www.moregardens.org), and Bike Carts (Aaron Naparstek from www.Naparstek.com).

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One further topic, which I left to the end because I feel it was not presented correctly, was the topic of Renewable sources of energy in general and biomass/biofuels in particular.

Despite the general favorable atmosphere to the subject, a main speaker was Professor David Pimentel, Professor of Ecology and Agricultural Sciences, Cornell University, who gave a very negative presentation under the topic on the program that said ETHANOL. A further Panel had the presentation title on the program as RENEWABLE ENERGY. The two speakers at the second session were myself, Pincas Jawetz, and Michael Kane, a reporter from www.FromtheWilderness.com

Professor Pimentel contributed to the media package of the Petrocollapse Conference an official Cornell University News Service two pages Press Release – “Biomass for biofuel isn’t worth it – Cornell ecologist’s study finds that producing ethanol and biodiesel from corn and other crops is not worth the energy”.

Professor Pimentel also included a 10 page paper co-authored with Tad W. Patzek from the Department of Civil and Environmental Enginering, University of California at Berkeley, but marked that correspondence should be addressed to  dp18 at cornell.edu. The paper was published in Natural Resources Research, Vol 14, No1, March 2005. The title is: “Ethanol production Using Corn, Switchgrass, and Wood; Biodiesel production Using Soybean and Sunflower”. The conclusion of the paper are for ethanol production using corn grain requires 29% more fossil energy than the ethanol fuel produced, for switchgrass the allegation is for a negative 50%, for wood biomass the allegation is for a negative 57%. For the production of biodiesel the allegations are similarly a negative 27% when using soybeans, and a negative 118% when using sunflowers.

Professor Pimentel, in the introduction to the article, writes that this work is based on two USDOE panel studies – ERAB 1980 and ERAB 1981 (ERAB stands for Energy Research Advisory Board to the US Department of Energy) and alleges that these reports were reviewed by 26 expert US scientists independent of the USDOE. He forgets to mention that back at that time, it was Professor Pimentel himself who was chairman of the group that developed the ERAB recommendations to the USDOE, and he was instrumental in making up the membership of the advisory board. That Board included, upon his recommendation, scientists from Mobil Oil – the greatest adversary at the time to the development of ethanol as an ingredient to be used in mixtures with gasoline. Further, Professor Pimentel also forgot to mention to DOE at that time that he himself was a paid consultant for Mobil Oil. Above facts are all in the public domain and come from a booklet called “ALCOHOL FUELS POLICY” – Hearings before the Subcommittee on Energy of the JOINT ECONOMIC COMMITTEE, CONGRESS OF THE UNITED STATES, Ninety-Sixth Congress, Second Session, Part 2 – Potential for Renewable Resource Alcohol Fuels, June 25, 1980.

Senator George McGovern and Representative Virginia Smith, have brought up at the time the subject of Professor Pimentel’s credibility, and I have no intention here to suggest anything that does not come right out from that official document from 1980, and I submit as an attachment to my paper the relevant scanned in pages from that document. I expect the reader to make up his own mind on the credibility of Professor Pimentel’s presentation at the Petrocollapse Conference of 2005. Even though there have passed 25 years since, I wonder if Professor Pimentel has indeed taken a fresh look at the subject of his paper.

The present paper has indeed more recent references, but they are mainly of a political and subsidy nature, not technical as his paper implies. The paper is mainly about ethanol and has very little in it about biodiesel which is a subject that is much more recent and thus was not covered under the ERAB in the 1980 period. Also, the Official document of the hearings contained a complete rewrite of the report submitted by Prof. Pimentel’s group and even an analysis of the make up of that group – none favorable to Professor Pimentel. I happen to have been involved with the issue at that time and was quite familiar with the subject.

My own planned presentation at the Petrocollapse conference appeared on October 4, 2005, on www.SustainabilyTank.info “SUSTAINABILITY IMPLIES THE USE OF RENEWABLES”. Because of Professor Pimentel’s presentation, I had to digress somewhat when I started mentioning my example of a very successful “niche” market for renewables that involves the use of small percentages of ethanol as an octane boosting additive to gasoline. Professor Pimentel, having left the place immediately after he dropped his anti-biofuel diatribe, could not benefit from my presentation. Other members of the audience, I expect from what they said to me afterwards, were quite happy to hear a different point of view of this all important subject if we want to be intent of distancing our future from the will of old time oil industry interests. The introduction of biofuels is a main component of our future energy systems and some members of the audience were quite taken back by what they heard from Professor Pimentel. For one very important up to date remark regarding the overruling effects of greenhouse gasses, Professor Pimentel did not have a single word on the fact that biomass recycles CO2. Energy inputs in the production of ethanol should come from biomass, and this changes much of what he presented as energy balances in the production of the ethanol.

The Epoch Times of October 10, 2005, yesterday, writes that a hybrid grass, Giant Miscanthus, as per a recent study at the University of Illinois, with very little need for water or fertilizer, if 10% of the land area of Illinois was dedicated to that plant, it could provide 50% of the state’s present electricity needs. I mention this here as an example of what positive intentions by agricultural scientists can do for renewable energy supplies from biomass.

Because I think highly of the rest of what went on that day at the conference, I am compelled therefore to say flatly that Professor Pimentel’s presentation was no less then misleading and a disgrace – seemingly perhaps intended this way.

Please find attached thirty-six pages of the relevant material from the Alcohol Fuels Policy Congressional hearings of June 25, 1980.

Pincas Jawetz, author of The Promptbook on Sustainability presented by the U.N. Reform Center to the Johannesburg Summit on Sustainable Development, founder of www.SustainabiliTank.info and U.N. Correspondent for Culture Change.

 

The Petrocollapse Conference, “Petrocollapse, Social Isolation or Solidarity?”, 40 East 35th Street, New York, NY 10016, October 5, 2005.

 

The use of renewable sources to answer our needs for energy implies the use of the energy available from the sun. The carriers are different and include mainly direct solar energy, wind energy, sea wave energy, and energy stored in biomass. Further related sources can be seen in hydropower and geothermal energy. Even though, initially, this energy is made available by the sun, its conversion does not come free and we must see to it that we reduce our total dependence on energy by changing our lifestyles to the point that we live healthier and happier lives while using less energy. The remaining need for energy is then supplied by our use of these renewable sources.

 

The recent Katrita events (the Katrina and Rita hurricanes and predictable future similar high intensity occurrences) should have finally opened our eyes to the danger of leading lifestyles that earth cannot sustain. But this was not yet the case. I would like thus to mention here recent statements by Professor David Begg, director of the Centre for Transport Policy at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen, Scotland, and former chairman (1998 until March 2004) of the Commission for Integrated Transport (CfIT) of the UK.

 

Professor Begg said, as reported by Jenifer Johnston in the Sunday Herald, September 18, 2005, “When I was advising the government I didn’t focus as much as I should have on climate change, and I regret that”. He said that the government failed to meet its objectives set in a 1998 White Paper on transport. He mentioned that while the Executive aimed at freezing car use it continued road-building plans — “We have to wean people off their cars, not supply them with more ways to use them. We are mobility junkies in the UK”.

 

“A key objective was to stop the need for car journeys – but instead we have seen the rise of centralized hospitals, centralized shopping, so people still need to travel by car”.

 

Looking at the fact that in the UK 67% of the total cost of fuel is tax, when in the wake of Katrina the prices rose, the government was pushed to reduce the tax, Professor Begg stated that he is concerned that relatively low-priced fuel is hastening global warming. “I feel like starting a protest because petrol is too cheap,” he said. “In real terms petrol has fallen in price. When things become expensive we start making more efficient use of them – that is not happening with car use”.

 

“My fear is that what we are seeing on TV is people grumping about the price of fuel, not that the hurricane and its repercussions are the result of global warming. Hurricane Katrina is a prime example – 14 of the most important cities in the world are on seaboards – they are disasters waiting to happen”.

 

“Fuel protesters need to learn that THE REAL COST OF FUEL IS CLIMATE CHANGE. Increasingly around the world lives and livelihoods are being lost BECAUSE OF OUR ADDICTION TO OIL”. We need to break this deadly addiction by demanding sustainable alternatives, not demanding cheaper oil”.

 

Following Professor Begg’s statements, a spokesman for the Scottish Executive said: “The Executive recognizes that climate change is the single most important long-term threat facing our planet and is committed to contributing to international efforts aimed at curbing harmful emissions of greenhouse gasses”. The Executive in Washington DC has yet to declare that it also recognizes this simple truth!

 

I decided to use Professor Begg’s statements as an introduction to this presentation in order to point out that PETROCOLLAPSE may start happening sooner then expected, and not because we will be short of oil – rather because we will finally understand that KATRITA and the melting ice-caps mean that we create the disasters, and that these disasters are not natural indeed. This is rather like smoking and the culprits will eventually end up in court. In this respect I feel paying homage to an unsuspecting personage – to Sheik Yamani – who already many years ago remarked that the stone age did not end because of the lack of stones and the oil age will not end because of the lack of oil.

 

Further, I just returned from a trip to Bhutan, a country whose King has coined years ago the term GROSS NATIONAL HAPPINESS in his effort to tell the world that this is a more desirable goal then chasing the figures of Gross National Product (GNP) which we in the west worship as lighthouses when sailing the economy through the straights of unsustainability. More on this will appear on www.SustainabiliTank.info — mentioned website is dedicated to the essence of the technologies to be used when answering our energy needs from renewable sources in a sustainable way. None of the renewable sources can be seen as a replacement to the foolish use of oil; rather, these sources can answer particular needs with well directed favored technologies. Here we will just give a few examples of such technologies.

 

My favored topic is the introduction of ethanol from biomass as an octane boosting additive to gasoline replacing the heavy metal compounds, such as tetraethyl lead, previously withdrawn for environmental reasons. In the late 70’s-early 80’s I testified about 20 times before US Congressional committees and other Washington fora. The US refiners wanted no part of this, but today ethanol is to be found in nearly every gas-tank. Now, this is a good example of a sustainable alternative. When mixing about 10% ethanol – 90% gasoline from the refinery, one enhances the octane number of the gasoline by 3 numbers. Ethanol was a winner, considering that all other potential additives, predictably, had negative side-effects, and the preferred way by the refiners – a secondary “reforming” process at the refinery – that would have changed the molecular structure to increase in marketed gasoline the percentage of carcinogenic aromatics, was also an energy intensive process that consumes further 6% crude. Ethanol has thus even a hidden financial advantage to the refiner, while at the same time, to the environmentalist reduces the need for oil.

 

A different example is the success of using wind-power as a source of electricity. The present offshore windmills are so successful that in the State of Ceara, in the Northeast of Brazil, they consider using the present incoming electrical lines in order to send back electricity to the interior of Brazil.

 

Considering global Greenhouse Gas emissions, according to Michael Grubb, the Chief Economist for UK Carbon Trust: Buildings, Appliances, the house amount to 36%; Industry, Manufacturing, Construction amount to 35%; and Transport amounts to 25%. Our reconsidering lifestyles will have thus to consider all those areas, not just transport, and the eventual application of Renewables will touch many further areas such as the use of natural materials in construction.