By Gerard Wynn and Peter Henderson
Humble, established technologies including natural gas and energy efficiency are top picks to lead a clean energy race through 2020, policymakers and senior executives told Reuters this week.
But a longer fight to avoid dangerous climate change including droughts, floods and rising seas may require multiple breakthroughs in nuclear power, farming, biofuels, as well as today’s top renewables — solar and wind energy.
Industry and banks are placing bets on the climate-friendly energy of the future in a contest that may have many winners, business and policy leaders told Reuters Global Climate and Alternative Energy Summit.
“If one wins and others lose, we’ve all lost,” said Google Inc Green Energy Czar Bill Weihl. Coal, maligned for its emissions of greenhouse gases that stoke global warming, won’t give up its dominance in electricity generation easily.
Competing priorities such as U.S. healthcare and global recession threaten fast movement and decisive action at a major U.N.-led climate meeting in Copenhagen in December.
Both Californian and British officials saw energy efficiency as top priority. Efficiency actually makes money, by cutting fuel bills, unlike expensive solar power, for example.
Britain’s minister for energy and climate change, Joan Ruddock, said efficiency “is the most critical thing” to meet Britain’s 2020 goal to cut greenhouse gases by more than a third.
California’s chief climate official, Mary Nichols, said efficiency would contribute most carbon cuts from electricity generation — not renewable energy.
The United Nations’ top climate official, Yvo de Boer, said energy efficiency was a no-brainer. “We’re rather stupid not to be driving that revolution more forcefully than we are anyway,” he said. “The odd thing for me to say is that you don’t need Copenhagen to drive a revolution in energy efficiency.”
But not enough people are actually buying efficiency. “It’s a failure of economics,” rued Richard Kauffman, chief executive of green venture investment firm Good Energies.
Source Reuters