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cleaning up The current row over climate change

游客2024-01-09  12
问题                                 cleaning up
The current row over climate change sounds all too familiar. Germany, host of this year’s G8 summit, is trying to get the world to agree on what to do when the Kyoto protocol on curbing greenhouse gases runs out in 2012. America, which dislikes the tough targets that the Europeans want the world to sign up to, is proposing separate negotiations between the world’s big emitters. Environmentalists accuse it of trying to sidetrack the issue. The lineup is much like the one that led to America’s withdrawal from the Kyoto agreement in 2001. Yet to conclude from this that nothing has changed would be wrong, Attitudes have shifted sharply over the past six years, most importantly among businesspeople. Until recently business tended to take a dim view of the idea that the climate was changing.  The notion implied that industry had damaged the planet, and should therefore pay for the consequences. Since companies couldn’t see the damage they were supposed to have done, they preferred, by and large, to argue that it wasn’t happening.
  No longer. These days businesspeople are falling over each other to prove their greenness. That’s partly because the politics of climate change have moved so fast in America. Five bills in Congress would introduce federal controls. Most of the serious presidential candidates for 2008 favour them. California now has binding targets to cut CO2 emissions, and other states plan to follow. Many chief executives have come round to the view that federal controls would be better than a patchwork of state laws. And if federal regulations are coming, companies need to support them, in order to be involved in designing them. Hence the need to be seen to be green. However, companies are not driven purely by fear of regulation. Cleaner energy means new technologies, and new money to be made. Businesspeople concerned to position themselves well for a carbon-constrained future must do more than get themselves photographed with A1 Gore: they need to invest in technologies that will produce cleaner energy. There’s scope for new investment. In 2003, the most recent year for which figures are available, America’s power-generation business, arguably the world’s biggest single polluter, spent a rather smaller proportion of its revenues on R&D than did America’s pet-food business. But that’s beginning to change, as our survey this week makes clear. Global investment in renewable power-generation, biofuels and low-carbon technologies rose from $28 billion in 2004 to $71 billion in 2006, according to New Energy Finance, are search company. The stock prices of clean-energy companies have been rocketing up. Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists are piling into the business, convinced that they can design revolutionary technologies, bring down prices and turf out incumbents in the energy business just as they did in the software business. Oil firms, carmakers, power generators, nervous of being outmanoeuvred, are jacking UP their investments in renewables and biofuels.
  As the likes of General Electric and BP put money into cleaner technologies, costs will fall. The price of a watt of solar photovoltaic capacity dropped from around $20 in the 1970s to $2.70 in 2004 (though a silicon shortage, caused by rocketing demand as a result  of madly generous German subsidies, has pushed it up since). The price of wind power has fallen from $2 per kilowatt hour in the 1970s to 5-8 cents now, compared with 2-4 cents for coal-fired power. More investment will bring prices down further; and, as the gap shrinks, so the costs of switching from dirty energy to the clean sort will fall.
  Yet business’s new enthusiasm for dean energy is a fragile green shoot in a dark landscape. Much could happen to crush it. A sustained fall m the oil price, for instance, would undermine investment in costlier, cleaner technologies. But the bigger risk is political. Businesses are investing in alternatives to fossil fuels because they assume that carbon emissions will be constrained in the future. If governments do not act to curb emissions, those investments will eventually wither.
  The best way for governments to encourage investment in cleaner energy is to make the polluter pay by putting a price on CO2 emissions. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body set up under the auspices of the United Nations to establish a consensus on global warming, a price of somewhere between $20 and $50 per tonne of CO2 by 2020-30 should start to stabilise CO2 concentrations at around 550 parts per million (widely reckoned to be a safeish level) by the end of this century. A $50 price tag would raise petrol prices in America by around 1596 and electricity prices by around 35%—hardly draconian when set alongside recent fluctuations. The IPCC reckons that stabilising at 550ppm would knock around 0.1% off global economic growth annually.
  A carbon price can be established either through a tax or through a cap-and-trade system, such as the one Europe adopted after signing up to Kyoto. A carbon tax would be preferable, because companies would then be able to build a fixed price into their investment plans;  but businesspeople and politicians are both strangely averse to the word "tax". A cap-and-trade system can be made to work, but the price has to settle at a level that affects commercial decisions. Europe’s hasn’t: the price has been too volatile, and, for much of its existence, too low, to shift investment patterns much.
  Europe has tightened its system up, and the carbon price has risen to a level which could start to make a difference. But Europe, by itself, will not save the planet. It is America that matters, not just because it is the world’s biggest polluter, but also because without its participation, the biggest polluters of the future—China and India—will not do anything. The best news in the fight against climate change is that business is starting to invest in clean energy seriously.  But these investments will flourish only if governments are prepared to put a price on carbon. The costs of doing that are not huge. The costs of not doing so might be. [br] *
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