Club of Rome Global Assembly

Last Monday and Tuesday, I was at the Club of Rome Global Assembly in Amsterdam. It was organized by IMSA. An impressive programme was composed and organised very well. The Club of Rome appears to be a very strong brand still. We all hope that it can be a decisive factor in addressing the limits to growth where business and politics seem to fail. Why couldn't it? Much hope on the stage, like Bill McDonough and Christine Loh. The Assembly produced the Amsterdam Declaration, as a message to Copenhagen. Find it here. And you might want to keep an eye on the Assembly website for the presentation files: http://www.clubofrome.at/2009/amsterdam/

Mocha mourning

Washingron-Dulles airport. Cooling down from the horrible security checks over a gold-priced comfort mocha in the terminal’s coffee bar. Sipping down the college money of my yet to be born kids and my grandma’s sweat. Well, once in college, my kids would probably spend the money on beer anyway, the price of which will likely have doubled by then. And the quality of the beer will of course have eroded by the same process that has made flying the humiliating experience and climate disaster it is now. So better spend it now on this lovingly prepared indulgence. And wasn’t the purpose of my grandma’s sweating precisely that: to give her children lives of mocha’s instead of mud? In eight hours I’ll be in on the other side of the ocean in Amsterdam. Amazing. It’s a crossing that in the times of Leif Erikson took months, maybe even years, or forever for too many. On the other hand, I doubt if the cultural differences between origin and destination of an eight-hour trip were any less in the Europe of a millennium ago than they are for my flight of today. I’d better go get another mocha for as long as it lasts.

Brave Nobel Comité

The World seemed flabbergasted when it heard who was awarded with this year's Nobel Peace Prize. Barack Obama? Hasn't he just started? Aren't his achievements limited to rhetoric? How can he be compared to laureates like Mandela and Martin Luther King, who were honored only after having fought for the sake of peace their whole lives? Etc.
In his acceptance speech this morning, Obama looked a bit discomforted to me. He was quick and clever to put the honor in perspective and drew attention to the peace challenges the world is facing: nuclear disarmament, climate change, interreligious dialogue.
I think the Nobel comité took a brave decision. By linking it to a President who still can fail, it took the chance to use its standing to make difference for the common good at the risk of losing that standing. In fact, it did so too in 2007, when the IPCC and Al Gore got the honor, helping bringing the debate on climate change one step further, bringing the final blow to the climate skeptics and making clear that climate change is more than an ecological issue. Isn't an institution like the Nobel Peace Prize far more worthwhile when it has a real role to play?
The decision of the 5 man Nobel Comité may not be democratic, the value we assign to the prize is.

Energy Sprawl - Forum with Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander.

Attended a forum with Tennessee senator Lamar Alexander at Resources For the Future (RFF) today. The subject was "energy sprawl" (nice concise term), or how the growth of renewable energy is a risk to the Great American Outdoors. The senator, a good speaker, addressed (read the speech here) some 50 to 100 audience, warning those who used to fight for conservation of America's natural beauty for the perils of their advocating solar, wind and biomass to that same beauty. He might have a point there, but I guess that NGOs are very well aware of that dilemma. The senator's call on the NGOs to work on a common, constructive voice in the debate is a good advise. But my impression is that for the senator the energy sprawl - put on the agenda by a recent scientific paper of the Nature Conservancy - is a new foothold to champion nuclear power, which he mentioned as hist "last point," but on which he spent most of his talking time, clearly being his major point.

The senator had four recommendations: energy conservation is first, second is generating electricity on already developed sites (e.g. solar panels on rooftops as opposed to large scale CSP plants in nature), sufficiently flexible carbon regulation is third, allowing for coal plants that recapture carbon, nuclear plants of international offsets, and fourth is careful site selection. Energy conservation means "fuel efficiency standards," no word about life style and dietary changes. I didn't came to ask if "hands off of the American way of life" is the paradigm here. Wind power is 50 stories high bird shredders along the Appalachian Trail and too little scale to make a difference. Nuclear, however, to the senator is area-efficient, clean, affordable and secure power for the American people. America is lagging the rest of the World. Everywhere nuclear power plants are being built, except in the United States. Senator Alexanders calls for 100 new nuclear plants, and quotes energy secretary Chu, who has said he wouldn't mind living near a nuclear plant, leaning on his reputation, to say that the technology is safe. Senator Alexander concludes to suggest that nuclear is the inconvenient solution to his fellow Tennessean Al Gore's inconvenient truth.

In the question round someone form the audience mentioned that the support for new nuclear power plants is increasing in the United States. It seems like the debate about nuclear power in the US has many similarities to the debate in The Netherlands. The Netherlands, too, hasn't built any new power plants for decades and plans to build new ones are highly controversial, triggering fierce reactions from those who fought against it in the early eighties. However, support for nuclear energy seems to be growing slowly in The Netherlands, too. The next parliamentary elections in 2011 could well be the tipping point. To me nuclear is not a good choice at first sight, requiring storing the waste over unimaginably long times and endlessly controlling an ever-present risk. It doesn't feel fit in a free, sustainable world. However, when nuclear can help to fight climate change, what trade-off would I make? As there are many studies suggesting that global warming can be limited without nuclear, there must be more fundamental trade-offs, like for example do we prefer to make changes to our lifestyles or to accept the risks of nuclear power? I think that the fact that nuclear is on the agenda again could indicate that NGOs are struggling with the dilemma, too, and have trouble finding the arguments now climate change, energy security and - the new one - energy sprawl, together with improvements in reactor design, are weakening conclusions drawn over two decades ago. It also shows again that the single issue approach to environmental protection is not effective anymore and more complex, integrated thinking is required from both environmental and nuclear advocates.

Lester Brown's Plan B 4.0

I was lucky to be invited for the launch of Lester Brown's new book: Plan B 4.0. Lester Brown is a world famous environmentalist, the man behind the State of the World reports, still published yearly by the WorldWatch Institute. "If the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize had been extended to third recipient (next to the IPCC and Al Gore, red.), the logical candidate would have been Lester Brown," is a quote in praise of the author on the back cover of the book. In the building of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace friends and colleagues of the author and his Earth Policy Institute team gathered to celebrate the result of an intense research and writing effort. I had the impression that the audience at this reception was either young or old. Where are the middle-aged? Keeping the economy going, not wasting time on environmental preaching, or busy working on the changes we're talking about here?

As you might have guessed, Plan B 4.0 is the fourth edition of the book originally published as Plan B in 2003, in which Brown tours around the trends of the vital services nature provides our civilization with and sketches how the worsening ones can be reversed. Previous editions have been published in almost any language, except in Dutch. But guess what: chances are serious that with 4.0 this is going to change.

In his address at the party Brown stressed the differences in this new edition. He said he is now convinced that food is the weak link. Past collapses of civilization have all been caused by failing food supplies, caused by various underlying trends, like soil erosion or salinization. Brown observes that the surges in food prices in 2007 and 2008 and the sustained higher-than-usual level since, are not event-driven, like the price peaks we've seen in the past, but trend-driven. Rising population, melting glaciers, falling water tables, rising sea levels, oil prices, they are all impacting food security. That's not a comforting observation. The second major revision in 4.0 offers some compensation: the growth in installed capacity of renewable energies is amazing, much faster than imaginable only two years ago. Brown referred to China's plan to develop four mega wind farms with a combined capacity of 105,000 MW (equal to 100 coal-fired power plants) and the recent launch of consortium Desertec, in which several of the most powerful German technology companies and investors will cooperate to harness the sun in Northern Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to supply 15% of Europe's electricity demand in 2050. So "Mobilizing to Save Civilization" - the book's subtitle - seems to be happening indeed. And what is great about it, too, is that bottom-up and private initiatives are passing by the political process of depressing negotiations for a post-Kyoto climate deal, saying: "We can't wait any longer". Is it proof that the awareness or sense of urgency is reaching middle-aged people on key positions?

Brown explained the deeply serious topics with a calm appearance, soft voice and good humor. Authoritative, making the doom and gloom digestible, also if it wouldn't have been a home game. From what I've seen so far here in the States, his work and this book are still much needed. With a copy signed by the author we walked out into the nightlife around Dupont Circle. It rained lightly, so the crops would be safe, no worries here tonight.