The environment was prominent on the program of The Economist’s World in 2010 conference this week. Some particularly interesting points:
Joe Lockhart, Founding Partner and Managing Director, The Glover Park Group:
- The rest of world is going ahead on climate change. If the United States steps away from leading on climate change again, it will continue our slide away from global leadership in general.
Gary Lawrence, Urban Strategies Leader, Arup:
- People at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are telling him that “we’re using your debt” to create a green system “that will run the world.”
- Fifty-two percent of the US economy is located in coastal zones that would be affected by a one-meter rise in sea level.
Gawain Kripke, Director of Policy and Research, Oxfam America:
- Climate change is the single greatest threat to global poverty reduction.
Vijay Vaitheeswaram, Healthcare Editor, The Economist:
- New nuclear power will not be viable in Western, liberalized energy markets; only places like China where the cost of investment does not matter will be able to use it.
Twitter: @Geofutures
(Image courtesy Rob Brewer, Flickr)
China has plans to create a 25-square-mile photovoltaic solar farm. The array would have a two-gigawatt capacity; this could power three million homes, ABC News reports.
Of course, China has announced a lot of sustainability projects that haven’t quite panned out. Still, ABC notes that China is the world’s largest producer of solar panels, and is about to be the world’s largest wind turbine maker.
The first marker for this solar project will be whether the 30 megawatt demo is completed in the next couple of years. The full-scale project’s target for completion is 2019.
Twenty-five square miles is ambitious at the moment, but may come to be seen as just a start. The current National Geographic asserts that the entire US electricity supply could be powered by a solar farm occupying a 100-mile-by-100-mile square (10,000 sq miles). (George Johnson, “Plugging into the Sun,” National Geographic, September 2009, 39) This might seem like a lot, but, by comparison, it is less than a tenth of the acreage planted in corn alone each year.
(PV panel image copyright FutureAtlas.com — usable with attribution and link)
The head of Royal Dutch Shell appears to be saying that peak oil — when demand for oil keeps rising while supply starts to fall — could come in only 7 years.
He reportedly wrote in an email that “Shell estimates that after 2015 supplies of easy-to-access oil and gas will no longer keep up with demand.”
The email also included two scenarios for the future of energy:
The first scenario, “Scramble”, envisages a mad dash by nations to secure resources. With policymakers viewing energy as “a zero-sum game,” use of domestic coal and biofuels accelerates. It is a world, said the Shell chief, where “policymakers pay little attention to energy consumption – until supplies run short.” The alternative scenario, “Blue-prints”, envisages a world of political cooperation between governments on efficiency standards and taxes, a convergence of policies on emissions trading and local initiatives to improve environmental performance of buildings.
Peak oil, or something close to it, would be a severe shock to the global economic and geopolitical system. It could drastically raise prices, including the price of food, and set off a desperate competition to secure energy supplies.