| CLIMATE OF HOPE How Cities, Businesses, and Citizens Can Save the Planet Michael Bloomberg Carl Pope New York: St. Martin's Press, April 2017 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| 978-1-250-14207-8 | ||||
| ISBN 1-250-14207-5 | 264pp. | HC/FCI | $26.99 | |
How, you ask? These are some of the ways the authors explain.
Much is made of the number of people living without electricity in less developed countries like India. Fossil-fuel proponents advocate the conventional solution: Build big central power plants fueled by natural gas and string wires along towers to distribute the power to end-users. They hope no one remembers that, in addition to paying off the cost of building the plant and the towers, the power customers will need to keep paying for the fuel to keep the power flowing.
As a Peace Corps member, Carl Pope lived for two years in eastern India. Though that was fifty years ago, he tells us, the rural area where he lived had electricity. The reason was that the Damodar Valley Corporation, similar to our Tennessee Valley Authority, had electrified the area. Pope points out that, along with the TVA, Franklin Roosevelt established the Rural Electrification Administration, which gave low-interest loans to farmers who formed rural co-ops. Within ten years, rural America was electrified, and the REA made money for the government.
But the Damovar Valley was done with conventional plants, which proved too expensive for India to expand further. As a result one-third of the country still has no electricity. Many villagers get by with kerosene lamps, and the government subsidizes 2 gigalitres of kerosene annually, at a cost of $1 billion. That amount is enough, over three years, to give an electric lantern ($40) to each of the 75 million households without electricity. But as a purchase, that $40 still blocks villagers from getting on board with the lanterns and the village with a solar panel to charge them. And, until recently, lenders like the World Bank stayed away from such small projects. This is where creative financing comes in. NGOs like Oxfam and the Sierra Club kept lobbying these lenders to finance the solar electrification projects. At the same time, cellular tellephone companies in Africa and India sought cheaper ways to power their towers and more reliable charging systems for their customers' phones. Eventually the synergistic incentives resulted in the creation of a clean-energy-financing facility for Africa that, with only $40 million in government funds, showed it could leverage $1 billion in clean-energy investment from the private sector.
Another success was in Bangladesh. A spinoff of Muhammad Yunus's Grameen Bank called Grameen Shakti pioneered rooftop solar, and the Bangladeshi government joined in. By 2014, Bangladesh had three million home solar systems. Only Germany has more. Narendra Modi has pledged that every household in India will have electricity by 2019.1
New York City's long history gives it a unique set of technical and political problems, and makes the task of enabling it to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century a complicated one. The political renovations needed may well be more challenging than the technical ones. It is easy to convince a building owner of the merit of retrofits like double-pane windows, a gray-water system, or a "cool roof." The venerable Empire State Building is a prime example. Its owner Tony Malkin realized in 2008 that its iconic status was not enough to keep it fully tenanted. He assembled a team to bring it up to "Gold" certification. All told, the renovations to building systems cost $20 million — but it now saves $4 million less to operate every year.
For most buildings with more than a few years of life left, such a payoff makes retrofitting an easy sell. But some owners may not want to sacrifice the floor space involved in adding insulation to exterior walls. Also, building codes may get in the way, as when the legal height limit prevents the owner from putting in a rooftop garden. In all cases, privately owned buildings present the same barrier of up-front costs as the Indian villagers face.
Michael Bloomberg attacked these problems in two ways. For public buildings, he ordered up greater energy efficiency and other improvements, demonstrating proof-of-concept cases. He worked with the private owners and their organizations, letting them help shape the code changes and retrofitting methods. In some cases they found less expensive ways of meeting the city's objectives. The team approach minimized the possibility of protracted legal battles. Financing obstacles are being addressed by the Property Assessed Clean Energy (PACE) program, which lets building owners pay off their improvements through an assessment on their property taxes — effectively insuring the loans for private lenders. PACE is taking off in cities like Houston.2
Saving energy and water is one thing. Dealing with rising sea levels is a thornier problem entirely. Bloomberg understands that sea walls have a very limited efficacy. Instead, for New York City he promotes working with nature instead of against it. This means restoring wetlands where possible, as in Jamaica Bay, as buffers against storm surge. It means keeping the water that runs off the city as clean as possible, so that oyster populations return. They too act as a buffer. It means increasing the area devoted to parks, which soak up rainfall (unlike pavement which can channel it into low-lying areas, flooding them.) And it means keeping storm drains apart from sewage systems, to avoid overwhelming sewage-treatment plants with storm runoff; that can lead to release of untreated sewage.
Fixing this aspect of the problem starts with diet. Pope observes that "a pound of feed-lot beef has many times the climate impact of a pound of equally nutritious beans, legumes, grains, or vegetables." He cites a study by Oceana which found that eating beef produces 4.5 times as much CO2 as eating wild-caught fish. (Here, Pope verges on the "third rail" of climate action: human population size. We are already overfishing most wild fish stocks; converting to them from beef would make things worse. I'm not sure mariculture can take up the slack.)
Agriculture is a problem too. Among other things, it is a major producer of CO2 through driving tractors, harvesters and other farm equipment, making and spraying pesticides, shipping the food to market, and other activities. Industrial agriculture often destroys the ability of soils to retain carbon, and may lead to loss of topsoil through erosion. Overuse of fertilizers results in "dead zones" depleted of oxygen, and can cause deadly algae blooms. Finally, cooking food with biomass, as in LDCs, produces not only CO2 but black soot, which is estimated to cause 4 million deaths per year.
But when it comes to agriculture, things look more promising. Cleaner stoves can be made and distributed in LDCs (though according to Pope they still need design work.) They can run on propane, LNG, methanol3 or ethanol (all of which would probably have to be subsidized.) The massive wastage of food can be reduced, and the use of composting can be expanded. There is a host of changes that will improve farming without lowering yields; a system pioneered by the Rodale Institute used less water and pesticides and produced yields equal to conventional methods. In addition, an acre farmed by Rodale methods converted 3.5 tons of CO2 into soil carbon.
It's noteworthy that much of the innovation in agriculture is taking place in other countries. The Brazilian Agricultural Research Corporation, Embrapa, is a powerhouse of innovation. Its achievements include: finding that limestone is needed in the country's cerrado (savannah) soils; developing a fast-growing tropical grass which boosted Brazil's output of grass-fed beef without destroying more of its rain forest; breeding a soybean variety that grows well in the tropics. And everything it produces is open source, freely shared with the world.
Obviously there is much more to say about each of these topics, as well as about manufacturing, transportation, and other areas.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.