Come Together on Climate Change

It was heart-warming to hear former China-human-rights-basher, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, express in Beijing in June 2009, high hopes of co-operation between the United States and China, the two biggest emitters of greenhouse gases, ahead of President Obama’s visit to China in November and of the 192-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Copenhagen in December 2009. “We believe China and the United States can and must confront the challenge of climate change together…We have a responsibility to ourselves, to our country, to our people and to the world to work together on this.” Her change of tone exemplified how the two chefs can cook together instead of throwing boiling water at each other. Hopefully, the U.S. and China can lead their respective global constituencies to cook up a cooling climate recipe to replace the Kyoto Protocol when it expires in 2012.

In her meeting with China’s President Hu Jintao, he told her the differences between the two countries could be handled through dialogue and consultation, and that mutual efforts should be based “on equality and mutual respect.”

“I think this climate crisis is game changing for the U.S.-China relationship. It is an opportunity we cannot miss,” Speaker Pelosi said at the U.S.-China Clean Energy Forum. “I am very optimistic about the cooperation…as a great deal of work between us has been done,” Pelosi added.

Her optimism in Beijing was shared by Congressman Ed Markey, who co-sponsored the draft U.S. Waxman-Markey climate bill and chairs the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. He was “encouraged because of movement that was being made in a significant way in China on energy intensity, energy efficiency and fuel economy standards.” Hopefully the U.S. and China will sign that treaty that will propel the U.S. and China to explore new green recipes to create and cook clean green energy together.

“We are in the process of working on a deal the U.S. president will sign when he visits China in November,” Stan Barer, co-chair of the forum said.

U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry, who was in Beijing at the same time as Pelosi and Markey to attend the forum, after high level meetings in Beijing on energy co-operation, including scientific research, investment and technology transfer said: “I have been involved in this issue for 20 years… This has been the most constructive and productive discussions I’ve ever had with Chinese officials.”

Todd Stern, U.S. climate change chief negotiator, confirmed Kerry’s opinion at the conclusion of the U.N. climate conference in Bonn: “I think what China has already done ─ the 20 percent energy efficiency target for the current five-year plan, renewable energy and nuclear power targets ─ is all very impressive.”

The U.S. bill aims to cut green house gas emissions by 17 percent from 2005 levels by 2020, falling short of a European Union pledge to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by an average of 20 percent from their 1990 levels by 2020 and boost renewable energy sources by 20 percent. In a position paper on the Copenhagen Conference, China urged developed countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels. Let’s hope America and China can come together to lead the world through the pending global abyss.

Dying Fossil Fuel

The end of oil reserves is a lot nearer than expected according to the International Energy Agency in Paris. The day we will see the end of the oil era can best be described as an oil-bomb implosion ─ more powerful than anything humanity has seen, and less than a few decades away. That is why it is imperative to pursue alternative energy options, something China recognizes and is addressing. It is a country shifting from a society built on oil looking at development beyond the “age of oil.” That is why it is so heavily invested in renewable energy.

On the other hand, Big Oil renewable divisions are being scaled back as the oil companies retreat to their core business in oil and gas. The sad reality is that Big Oil is not going to be in the forefront of new technologies. Their dinosaur fossilized corporate culture space that has evolved in spacious over-sized energy wasting venues is much too comfortable and familiar for them to seriously explore alternative renewable energy. Just thinking of the headaches they get about hearing the difficulties trucks carrying parts for wind turbines are confronted with because of government bureaucratic rules, regulations and inertia brings a smile to my face that quickly turns to anger when I think of the global taxpayer subsidized pipelines, refineries, tankers and politicians that their Big Oil Exec idiotic apathetic attitude and irresponsible dereliction of duties to their shareholders and public if they really had any sense of corporate responsibility and didn’t just think their expensive advertisement media spins will continue to blindside public citizens anywhere.

It doesn’t make sense to allow oil companies to make record profits from the public’s dependence on oil and then allow them to use those profits to find more oil with polluting technologies to continue the public’s oil-addiction as they are now doing with tar sand, coal to liquid and carbon capture and storage. That is why I renewed my 1979 horseback ride ─ protesting oil profits and urging alternatives to oil be developed ─ in 2006 and 2008.

Trucks carrying silvery blades nearly 150 feet, or 45 meters, long have been trucking through mellow New England in the summers, backing up traffic as they slowly leave the main roadways. Huge, tubular chunks of tower also pass through. Tall pieces of machinery looking something like jet engines travel at night because they require special routing to avoid overpasses. As demand for clean energy grows, towns across America are finding their traffic patterns disrupted by convoys carrying pieces of tower that will reach more than 250 feet in height, as well as motors, blades and other parts. Escorted by police, patrol cars and gawked at by clueless citizens, the equipment must travel long distances from ports or factories to the remote, wind destinations where the turbines are erected. The reality is this fossilized thinking must be disposed for remade socially responsible attitude and approach that is relevant to all interlocal citizens. Even though Big Oil doesn’t get it, it’s a good thing other politically-connected U.S. corporate iconic cowboy-pioneers sort of do, but at least go with the flow. General Electric being is one such example in the “scandalous” corporate and personal culture of its corporate capitalist guru Jack Welch. It has decided to develop its water purification business, from a drop in the corporate bucket of earnings to a major growth driver within years, just as its wind unit did. “What GE tries to do is to align the company with some of the mega trends, the mega challenges of the world. Energy is one, healthcare is the other, and the third one is water,” said Heiner Markhoff president and chief executive of GE Water & Process Technologies.

Let’s not forget that GE corporate executives for the most part, granted not all, are made out of the same cookie cutter that their counterparts in Big Oil are. This is best exemplified by what GE Executive Jeff Immelt said in 2001 when wind turbine executives pitched him to get GE into the business. He dismissed the technology as a “hula hoop.” Immelt later changed his mind when Enron’s bankruptcy provided a cheaper way into the business, and wind turbines in 2008 generated almost $6.5 billion in revenue.

Pacific Plastic Patch

The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a marine plastic soup that may be twice the size of France, is contaminating the Pacific Ocean and its ecosystem. It is an environmental catastrophe that has received limited political or media attention because of the billions of dollars the plastic industry ─ and its petroleum based oil producing supporters ─ have spent in the form of political campaign contributions and media advertising.

The Pacific Plastic patch was first discovered in 1997 by California sailor, surfer and volunteer environmentalist Charles Moore who was heading home with his crew from a sailing race in Hawaii on his catamaran. For the hell of it, he decided to turn on the engine and take the short-cut across the edge of the North Pacific subtropical gyre, a region seafarers have long avoided. It is a perennial high pressure zone, an immense, slowly spiraling vortex of warm equatorial air that pulls in winds and turns them gently until they expire. Several major sea currents also converge in the gyre and bring with them most of the flotsam from the Pacific coast of Southeast Asia and North America. In the 1950s, nearly all that flotsam was biodegradable. Today it is 90 percent plastic.

Floating beneath the surface of the water, to a depth of 10 meters, was a multitude of small plastic flecks and particles, swirling like snow-flakes or fish food. The world’s navies and commercial fishing fleets make a significant contribution, throwing some 639,000 plastic containers overboard every day. Eighty percent of marine plastic was initially discarded on land according to a variety of studies. The wind blows plastic rubbish out of littered streets and dumps, trucks and trains on their way to landfills. It gets into rivers, streams and storm drains and then rides the tides and currents out to sea. Beaches are also a major source.

Plastic does not biodegrade. In other words, no microbe has yet evolved that can feed on it. But it does photodegrade. Prolonged exposure to sunlight causes polymer chains to break down into smaller and smaller pieces, a process accelerated by friction, such as being blown across a beach or rolled by waves. This accounts for most of the flecks and fragments in the enormous Pacific Plastic Patch and most beaches and seashores. On most beaches today, even Hawaii’s pristine beaches, there are now more plastic particles than sand particles until one digs at least a foot down. I experienced this first hand on the pristine beaches of Palau when a chemical engineer, working for a Taiwanese businessman trying to set up a plastic factory there, who was drunk and heartbroken and couldn’t bear the thought of how polluted Palau would become ─ and at the risk of getting fired ─ educated me in the basics of plastics and their long term devastation of the environment. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch has an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic per square kilometer of the world’s oceans according to a U.N. report.

Worldwide, plastic is killing one million seabirds a year and 100,000 marine mammals and turtles according to the United Nations Environment Program. Many chicks die every year from eating pieces of plastic their parents mistake for food and bring back for them.