A dispatch from the Denmark conference
If you listened to my friends over at Fox news and the Heritage Foundation, you might be forgiven for thinking that the polyglot conference going on this week in Denmark was a conspiracy of commie sympathizers and faceless bureaucrats hell bent on taking down the global economy – or at least that part of it located in the continental USA. Well, I’m sorry to report that the view from street level is a little bit different.
Here in no particular order are just a few of the conversations that I had the privilege of witnessing today in some of the quieter corners of the cavernous Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark where COP 15 is unfolding in real time. These economic prognostications are not my own, but they came from some of the most reliable people on the planet for navigating a path to a low carbon economy.
A senior executive from a global automobile manufacturer (BMW) opined about the need to include automobile emissions when regulating carbon emission. He wanted this so his company could have a clear shot at navigating the path from oil dependence to a future of cruising in electric cars. Incidentally, on this point, the European conceded that his American cousins had gotten it right by proposing to fold transportation fuels into an economy wide cap. Further, he saw fuel economy standards as well as the bold step taken by California and the US EPA to count the carbon coming out of tail pipes equally with power plants, as being useful tools for keeping the beleaguered auto industry on a path of innovation.
Just on the other side of that same room, a senior executive from northern Europe’s largest utility flippantly mentioned that his firm (Vattenfall AB) was working from a business plan that had them producing 100% zero-carbon energy by 2050. Was he worried he wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on for the 4.7 million retail customers he supplies in Denmark, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Sweden, and the UK? Not a chance. The combination of an aggressive push on renewable energy – particularly wind – and a long term play on advanced carbon capture for coal plants has helped him sleep well at night. On regulating carbon emissions though, he did concede that European utilities were nervous at first, but in the end he shrugged, you get used to it and you get on with business – only with more confidence in your product.
At a later point in the day, a member of the leadership team from the largest utility company in the USA (American Electric Power), mentioned almost as a badge of honor that his Ohio based power provider – with fully 40 thousand Mega Watts of mostly coal based electric power under management – supported the bipartisan Waxman-Markey climate and clean energy bill in the US House of Representatives. This was an aside however, in a round table discussion focused chiefly on how the United States could take a page from the energy sector in other nations, and pull ahead in the global race for renewable energy — a race that has produced 30 to 50% growth rates in the solar market, and over 28% growth for heavy manufacturing in the wind industry, as noted by the CEO’s of some of these very same global competitors. Not bad for an economic downturn!
So it is with some trepidation that I must disappoint those nay-sayers who assert that American ingenuity isn’t quite up to the challenge of beating back global warming with a mix of strategic investment and old-fashioned roll-up-your-sleeves-and-get-to-work American optimism. Copenhagen is turning out to be the temporary capital of market-correcting capitalists, dynamic new economy entrepreneurs, and innovation seeking industrialists, but so far there’s not a commie in sight. And, incidentally all the bureaucrats I met have faces. But then again, there’s always tomorrow – by then who knows how big the renewable energy industry will have gotten.
– Bracken Hendricks
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I’ll echo the above from what we’ve seen here in Copenhagen.
From the enlightened discussions at the conference, to the many climate-related art exhibits around the city, to the conversations with Danes over dinner, it’s actually hard to believe that there is still so much misinformation, apathy and denial back home in the States.
Unless Obama is strong enough to rise above the wrong-headed views of most Americans, and put humanity first, we Americans risk falling into the sad role of leading civilized man to his own self-inflicted downfall.
Now is the time for our brave president to go on national, prime-time TV to clear up the misinformation in American heads. He needs to tell Joe the Plumber and all Joe’s friends that climate change is real, it is serious, and that we must deal with it now if America is to have any chance of maintaining any economic, moral and technological leadership.
By analogy, we are on the Titanic, heading for a nearby iceberg, with the passengers and crew mostly asleep. A watchman has clearly seen the iceberg and it’s time for the captain to sound the alarm.
Do it Obama, Sir! There are not hundreds, but billions of lives at stake!
And, sadly, here in Copenhagen, I have looked into the eyes of, then, without being able to stop myself, hugged, some of the people from the undeveloped countries who have already lost farm animals and crops due to climate change-induced disruption of rainfall patterns.
Looking into`Christamas future´ with a dreaming Scrooge-like eye, I could see these innocent people and there families at huge risk, if not doomed, because of the careless or misinformed actions of millions of my countrymen. It was not a pleasant feeling, to say the least.
Only one person can turn this situation around fast enough. President Obama, it is up to you to sound the alarm. For those who don’t hear your message, you must find the money to run prime-time ads that carry the same message in a format and language that can be clearly understood.
This will either be America’s finest hour–if we can help to solve a huge and immediate global problem, or it will be a very sad, black swan song.
I truly hope that it is the former. Otherwise, God help us!
Roger, # 1: “Otherwise, God help us!” It would seem to me that if God were going to help us He/She would be speaking thru the “Creation Care” folks first but they have been very slow to take up the banner. I admit that there has been some rumblings out there on that front but one of it’s loudest voices, Richard Cizik, was recently pushed “under the bus” by the big boys. The negligence of almost all the Churches regarding global warming and the impending disaster has always appalled me.
Looks like it is up to ,folks…
Thanks for the encouraging article. Vattenfall have (according to their website) 7.4 M electricity customers, and produce about 164 TWh of electricity per year (enough for about 21 M people for all electricity uses).
“God” is not the same thing as “churches”, Leif. God does try to help; most of us, unfortunately, are too dense to hear!
Cynthia, #4: Being an atheist, it is difficult for me to articulate how the non-secular relate to their world view.
The point that I was trying to make is that by in large the religions and particularly the fundamentalists of the world have been either slow to take up the banner of AGW or down right obstructionists. A very curious state because if man is not responsible for the state of, to me obvious, affairs, that would leave only God as the culprit. If I were in the shoes of a fundamentalist, I would think man would be the first choice in an instant. However the Church seems to have picked the third choice of disbelieving the evidence. A very dangerous strategy in my book. If God in fact cared for his “Chosen” people I would think imparting awareness would be a simple task.