Dr Kammen will visit Australia in September to give the keynote address at EcoGen 2011.

Part 1: The challenge of dealing with a problem for which we lack a suitable language

Over the past two years, we have seen remarkable swings of pessimism and guarded optimism, and then pessimism again, on our individual, national, and collective global ability to scale-up the sustainable energy agenda. COP15 in Copenhagen was a step backwards, while COP16 in Cancun was a guarded step forward. On the positive side, the United Kingdom has made a very significant step by establishing a floor price and an escalation schedule for carbon, while Mexico and Brazil have launched ambitious energy efficiency and clean energy development plans. China has launched an experimental regional carbon cap and trade schemes, and my own state, California, has upheld a greenhouse gas plan and on January 1 2012 will launch a carbon market.

On the negative side, several nations have examined significant advances in clean energy markets, and have retreated, or at least so far failed to act. This list – at the time of writing, unfortunately includes both Australia and my country, the United States. And, while we see several large-scale clean energy projects under design, costs and logistics are proving significant hurdles. This mixed story is unfortunate, for sure, but also not surprising given that we still lack metrics, methods and a currency that reflects a world based around sustainable energy.

The sad fact is that we as a global society have wasted many good years – decades actually – during which we could have launched an economy based on job creation and investments in human capacity and creativity. Instead, we have ignored the clearly changing signals that nature has been sending us about the status and stresses we are placing on our rivers, oceans, skies, mountains and of the health of every ecosystem. There are many metrics we might cite that consistently tell us that we are approaching, at, or beyond the carrying capacity of the planet in terms of flows of pollutants, and our need for resources1. That is not to say we do not have options, we do, and we need to both listen to the planet, and ourselves, and put our ideas into practice.

I am a physicist by training who wandered into the world of energy science and policy quite by accident. I did so because the most interesting people I met were consistently rebelling against disciplinary boundaries and I wanted to see what I could contribute in that exciting and challenging environment. It was and remains to me clear where to apply such tools – energy. The reason is simple: energy is the largest (legal) piece of the global economy, by a factor of two over the global food industry. Several of my advisors said that an easy way to pick problems to tackle is to start with issues that matter most, and this one does.

How big is the problem? Not only is energy the dominant part of our economy, but its impact on the planetary system can be seen in a few historical trends.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC – which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize – has been issuing reports on the state of climate science since 1990. Several thousand climate and energy experts participate in the IPCC assessment and reporting process during any one assessment report. I have been involved in several since my first ‘special report’ on technology transfer in 19992 .

In 1990 the first assessment report concluded that it would take another decade at least to see clear signs of climate change in the natural record. This is as far as the first report could go.

Successive reports – including the Second Assessment Report five years later, in 1995 – advanced the clarity with a consensus statement that, “the balance of evidence suggests discernible human influence”. This was clearer than the First Assessment Report, but still far from sealed.

The third and fourth assessment reports clarified things considerably, assigning an analytic confidence (66 per cent in the Third Assessment Report) to the likelihood that the environmental change is due to human activities (energy generation, agriculture, and forest disruption).

By the fourth report, most of the warming is very likely (90 per cent confidence) due to human activity. At this point the climate community branched out more strongly into social issues and arrived at the conclusion that the consequences of global warming will most strongly and most quickly affect the world’s poor. What this also – sadly – means is that because in general we ignore the poor, that we will then ignore climate change longer than we should.

This record of environmental change is already very significant, and has only just begun. What is needed in response is an ambitious set of individuals and networks of people and institutions committed to changing this status quo of our energy economy.

There are basic scientific breakthroughs needed, for example in energy storage and solar cells. There are business opportunities in smart-grid energy service sectors, and in electric vehicles, and there are tremendous political wins for the elected officials who truly champion the clean energy economy.

My challenge to you, then, is to find ways to work to change these trends. Collectively we need to put more of our good ideas into practice: as an academic community, as an entrepreneurial private sector, as a civil society, and as a community of public servants, we need to do better – not next year or next month, but right now. First, we need a sustained and vibrant research base to understand our energy options and their resulting climate impacts3.

We also need something that may sound very simple, in fact mundane4, for people in fields outside of energy such as agriculture and education where ‘extension services’ are common. Farmers rely on information networks to plan their activities. Universities, community colleges and night schools all focus on making continuing education an available extension service. We need a mechanism to bring these innovations from the laboratory to the market. In agriculture, every country essentially has a network of agricultural extension services. Perhaps because much of the ‘modern’ energy system has been managed by large, centralised utilities, energy does not have such an extension network. It is time to build one.

One of the most important tools that we need to develop is an economy-wide ‘appreciation’ of the costs and benefits of our energy choices. That, in fact, is why I felt it was so critical for me to work at the World Bank at this time. Firstly, the World Bank is significantly increasing its commitment and investment in energy efficiency and in clean and sustainable energy.

Secondly, and of vital importance, banks are focused on the bottom line, pure and simple, and that is a virtue – a virtue of clarity. Our society, however, is so far only casually and vaguely interested in sustainability. Beyond specific technical and policy innovations there have been some important insights: such as the realisation that distributed networks of energy suppliers and consumers (some of whom may be one and the same) could not only complement large, traditional energy systems but in some ways they may be superior.

The old way was to view the energy grid as a one-way flow of energy to consumers. Instead, it could be more of an eBay: where anyone can buy and/or sell power, and the job of the utility – and the network regulator – to provide fair and transparent rules for these transactions.

People in government generally work very hard for the public good, and civil society and non-governmental groups put exceptional effort into innovating and giving voice to the watchdog role that every community, large or small, critically needs.

It is true that immediate gratification versus long-term quality of life (and thus we must also address the complicated issue of discounting and undervaluing the world in which we and our children will live5) remains a problem for most people to keep squarely in mind. This issue, however, relates to the clarity that honest banks – and in particular the value of having a clear and well understood currency – can bring to our planning for the future.

As a society we are only vaguely interested in sustainability in part because we collectively do not speak a language that permits us to value the world in which we live, except when we cut it down, spoil our waters with human and industrial effluent, or poison the skies with the waste of energy generation. In contemplating this situation, my friend and colleague George Lakoff has made a remarkable and chilling observation that it is vital I relate to you.

It is clear to the environmental science community that nature is being degraded6, in fact destroyed by the current course of human action and neglect. Yes, it is true that the so–called industrialised nations emitted the majority of the greenhouse gas emissions if we go back to the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. So, by one measure they should ’pay’. And yet, the so-called developing nations will emit the bulk of the greenhouse gases over the coming decades, so they should ’pay it forward’, if you will. What is more important, however, is that we will all live in the world of the future. So while we can argue about that all day, the solution must be a collective one.

We have established that anthropogenic climate change is the act of degrading our collective home, the planet. Yet the environment is a complex system that responds in ways that are not always predictable.

Professor Lakoff’s observation is that we actually lack a means to express and thus fully understand this situation. In other words, no language has a simple verb form that captures the effect of a system acting on the individual7.

Certainly, there are ways to express this idea – notably if we become anthropomorphic and refer to the planetary system as an entity: Mother Nature, for example. However, if we move beyond this view of the planet as a single, co-ordinated, entity to the complex system that it is, we are not equipped to understand the process of this collective causality in terms of how it relates to us as individuals.

So, we are in a difficult place. Firstly, we lack a language and, second, we lack something else vital to understand the planet. We lack a currency in which to value the planet, to value a clean energy economy, and to value our future.

Placing a price on greenhouse gas emissions to the atmosphere will not solve global climate change and environmental destruction by itself, but it gives us a language in which to express our values. Given that humans are social creatures that communicate constantly about every aspect of our individual and collective existence, to be without a means to communicate about our future is not only shortsighted, it is simply unacceptable.

Now, those who study economics and are interested in valuing the planet will correct me here and say“actually, things are worse than you say.” They, in fact, would be right.

The true story is not that we don’t value the environment in a positive way, but to the contrary – we reward damaging the environment, and hence ourselves. Rewarding waste is in fact, placing a negative value on the planet and saying financially that sustainability is a bad thing. This is not to say that we are intentionally damaging our ‘nest’, but that through our inactions, we are in fact sending the economic and political signal that individual profit is more important that our collective well-being and that of the natural ecosystem. We can, for example, choose to invest in local job creation by supporting people and companies that provide energy services without spoiling nature. We know the job creation benefits are real in terms of the higher numbers of jobs created in clean energy areas relative to polluting sectors8.

This is not because ‘clean energy’ is inherently superior; it is simply because when ramping up a new field, greater investments in infrastructure and in jobs is needed. This means that when our energy dollars are put to productive use, and not simply used to increase out debt to the environment, we gain an added benefit. When adding up these environmental advantages of ‘going green’, it is often hard to see why this transition is so hard, and yet it clearly has been.

To read the second part of this article, please click here.