Global Warming Time To Wake Up To The Reality Of The Situation Pro: Something Needs To Be Done…Fast
Europeans are alarmed by the Clinton administration’s proposals for reducing carbon dioxide emissions. The entire scheme seems inspired by a misplaced optimism that “something will surely turn up,” as if global warming were a bad dream.
Yet as Margaret Thatcher so aptly observed, “Why do people always think that surprises will be pleasant ones?”
The examples of many countries, including the United Kingdom, show what resourcefulness can accomplish. Moreover, history is littered with examples of missed opportunities, as well as the inspiration of opportunities that were seized.
Following the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, the United States did almost nothing to curtail its emissions of greenhouse gases, while Britain took action that will put our emissions about 6 percent below 1990 levels by 2000. If we had not acted, our emissions would be 18 percent above 1990 levels by the end of the decade. Instead, we took a number of measures simultaneously, some of which carried political risks, but these were more than offset by permanent gains.
Privatizing our domestic coal industry sent angry miners into the streets of Kensington, but it helped us to liberalize the UK electricity market, which cut our carbon emissions almost in half. Another 30 percent of the reduction came from across-theboard improvements in energy efficiency. The remaining 20 percent of the UK’s accomplishment derived from heavier reliance on renewable energy and nuclear power.
None of these measures precipitated economic hardship. To the contrary, industry welcomed them, and manufacturing today in the UK is up 25 percent.
History has shown time and again that people on the cutting edge take the prizes. Look at the U.S. steel industry, which fell behind its overseas competitors by failing to adopt new technology. The same could well happen with the global energy movement. In a peculiar way, American business is behaving like oldfashioned socialists by trying to protect itself from innovation.
The present situation with electric utilities presents abundant “noregrets” opportunities to reduce greenhouse gases, improve air quality, lower prices and achieve unparalleled efficiencies. According to a recent report from your own Department of Energy, the United States consumes 32 quadrillion BTU of primary energy from coal and other fossil fuels to make 11 quadrillion BTU of electricity for end users. With two-thirds of potential energy squandered, it is abundantly clear that millions of tons of greenhouse gas could be eliminated from the atmosphere with improved efficiency.
Any company with aspirations to win and retain global markets will need to plan for the economic realities of a new approach to global energy. For instance, RTZ, one of the world’s leading “clean coal” producers, plans to build a plant in Indonesia to provide inexpensive energy. Indonesia might have settled for cheap coal with higher carbon emissions, but RTZ itself insisted on the highest standards to maintain its competitive position in other parts of the world.
American companies may soon find themselves squeezed out of markets in developing countries if their products and services do not offer energy efficiency and lower carbon emissions.
This is why we in the UK are baffled by your government’s apparent reluctance to join other industrialized nations in promoting substantive reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. It is rank hypocrisy to argue that a nation responsible for one-fifth of world emissions should not have to do anything until all the developing nations have agreed to binding limits. As these countries develop their energy capacity, there will be abundant technology for high-efficiency, lowemissions energy. They will achieve an embarrassingly good environmental performance, well beyond current U.S. standards.
Britain, along with the rest of the world, is beginning to wonder why the United States - a nation that uses twice as much energy as all of Europe with only one-third our population - continues to deny reality. Businesses in the UK, Europe and Japan recognize that we must act to curb the effects of climate change and that, far from imposing costs on industry, this challenge actually provides new business opportunities and new markets. The present situation has all of us wondering what happens if America’s system of energy use, one that has been abandoned by the rest of the developed world, finally collapses.
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John Gummer, the Conservative member of Parliament for coastal Suffolk, was secretary of state for the environment in the United Kingdom from 1993 to 1997 under Prime Minister John Major.