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Special Edition - 2008

ISSN 1727-155X

Science-Policy Dialogues 2008 Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change

www.ihdp.org

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

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Table of Contents IHDP Extra

Introduction

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Science-Policy Dialogues: Energy Sustainability and Societal Change

Sarah Mekjian and Falk Schmidt

Governmental and Economic Frameworks

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Reflections on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change

Oran R. Young

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A New Direction for Technological Progress Ernst Ulrich von Weizs채cker

Biofuels

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Jean-Marc, Y. M., Salmon

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Sustainable Energy from Renewable Biological Resources:The Case of Sugarcane Bagasse

Shyam Nath

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ESSP Research on Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability: Tapping GEC programme-Wide Expertise for the Benefit for Science and Society

Gernot Klepper, Pep Canadell, Rik Leemans, Jean Pierre Ometto, Anand Patwardhan, and Martin Rice

Multi-risk Strategy Challenges: The Biofuel Case

The Public Perception

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Energy in the Spotlight: The Role of the Media Mireya Navarro

Concluding Remarks and the Path Ahead

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What is Asked of Us: Reflections on the Science-Policy Dialogue on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change

Susanne C. Moser

Behavioural Change Versus Tech Options

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Technological Solutions to the Energy Problem: Prospects and Limitations Bernd Siebenh체ner

The Ethics of the New Environmentalism Paul Wapner

p. 31

p.11

p. 22

Imprint This is an extra edition of the IHDP Update.

IHDP Update is published by the Secretariat of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change, United Nations Campus, Hermann-Ehlers-Str. 10, D-53113 Bonn, Germany The IHDP Update magazine features the activities of the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change and its research community.

ISSN 1727-155X

Editor-in-Chief: Andreas Rechkemmer (V.i.s.d.P.) Editor: Sarah Mekjian Layout: Carolyn Louise Smith Cover Photo copyright Thomas Merton IHDP Update is published triannually. Sections of the Update may be reproduced with acknowledgement to IHDP. Please send a copy of any reproduced material to the IHDP Secretariat. This magazine is published using funds by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and the United States National Science Foundation.

The views and opinions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the position of IHDP nor those of its sponsoring organizations.

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IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

Introduction: Science-Policy Dialogues: Energy Sustainability and Societal Change

Introduction

Science-Policy Dialogues: Energy Sustainability and Societal Change Sarah Mekjian and Falk Schmidt

The interaction between science and policy is as complex as it is vital. Where policymakers, the media and the public demand hard and fast answers, many of the difficult questions faced by science, and thus, the resulting findings, are inherently rife with uncertainty. Additionally, scientific conclusions are often poorly communicated to policymakers, who then fail to incorporate these conclusions. A mutually beneficial dialogue between science and policy requires that research objectives be framed and carried out with policy considerations in mind. At the same time, policymakers should be aware of the science available and encouraged to take policy relevant research into account. Getting science and policy on the same page is essential, yet the challenges surrounding the science-policy interaction abound.

Few issues bring these challenges to the fore as poignantly as that of energy. In recent years, talk of curbing global energy demand has intensified just as dramatically as actual energy use. Despite an awareness of the crisis at hand, unsustainable behavioural patterns continue. Energy is both essential for development and a cause for some of the most daunting problems we are facing today. From developing nations struggling for growth to wealthy, industrialised nations yearning to maintain and improve upon already high stan-

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

dards of living, no country is immune to a mounting hunger not only for energy, but for a secure, stable and affordable flow of it. For many countries, the current barriers to cleaner and more efficient energy production mean that the energy fulfilling these requirements is that which causes the most environmental damage. Caught between an increasing need for energy and a growing awareness that this vary need may be our undoing, policymakers, scientists, NGOs and businesses around the world are starting to look for solutions to the energy challenge. The time is ripe to break away from business as usual and explore options that would provide a more sustainable supply of energy for all.

Action is needed now if we hope to mitigate irrevocable consequences in the future. This action can be facilitated through an open dialogue between the scientific and political communities, necessary not only for the development of well-guided policies but also for the formation of pertinent research agendas. Continuous research is needed to support the development of new technologies, however findings from the social sciences are increasingly important both in addressing existing implementation gaps and understanding what drives people’s behaviours. While it is clear that we must aim for nothing less than a large-scale change in

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Introduction: Science-Policy Dialogues: Energy Sustainability and Societal Change

Photos: Scenes from the Science-Policy Dialogues; copyright IHDP, taken by Sarah Mekjian

both policies and behaviour, our understanding of the right path to take in this regard is still insufficient to meaningfully guide our action.

The largest global network of its kind, the International Human Dimensions Programme on Global Environmental Change (IHDP) has recognised these challenges and the importance of placing the science-policy interaction high on the research agenda. IHDP focuses on the human dimensions of global change, inspired by the reality that human actions lie at the heart of global environmental changes and that the impacts of global environmental changes depend upon human responses. Research conducted under the auspices of IHDP is predicated on the premise that global change research should address social and economic concerns. In following its mandate to frame, develop and integrate social science research on global environmental change, IHDP strives to promote the production, communication and application of key research findings across disciplines in addressing the major environmental challenges currently facing societies.

As identified by the IHDP Strategic Plan 2007-2015, the science-policy interaction has recently become a fundamental pillar of IHDP’s activities and in order to address the increasing demand for policy relevant research, IHDP has established a series of Science Policy Dialogues.

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In an effort to enhance the communication amongst key players in the field of energy, IHDP held its second Science Policy Dialogue, Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change, which has provided the inspiration for this publication. From 19-20 June, 2008, a truly international group of approximately 30 high-level representatives from the worlds of science, policy and the media convened to engage in a collaborative exploration of some of the key issues related to energy. The majority of these representatives, which included leading researchers, contributors to key assessment reports and advisors on high-level boards, brought vast experience in the realm of science policy to this Dialogue. Held at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management, Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change was hosted by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Dean of the Bren School and member of the IHDP Scientific Committee, and co-organised by Oran R. Young, Co-Director of the Bren School’s Programme on Governance for Sustainable Development and IHDP Chair.

Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change aimed to shed a different light on well-known phenomena, paving the way for new understandings and innovative solutions.

Energy efficiency, resource management and technological options as well as institutional frameworks, policies and drivers of behavioural change served as two main areas of concentration. Throughout the two-day conference, keynote speeches and working group deliberations highlighted a diverse set of energy related themes, inspiring discussions that focussed on the societal changes needed to shift the energy system towards sustainability.

The Dialogue highlighted that fact that meeting rising energy demand , projected to double in the next 40 to 50 years, will require the implementation of large scale changes should we hope to do so without overstepping critical thresholds of an already fragile socio-ecological Earth system. Incremental change and small gains in efficiency within the current energy system will not be enough. If we want to avoid dangerous concentrations of greenhouse gases that will lead to climatic change, if we want to achieve greater global fairness and avoid social conflicts at all levels and if we want to remain capable to act without giving up crucial democratic processes, the challenge is upon us to respond swiftly with changes of a much wider nature.

Achieving the needed change was addressed during the Dialogue from governance perspectives, emphasising institutional set-ups, actor networks, existing incentive structures as well as the right level and timing for intervention. The issues were also discussed from an economic perspective which called for swift action in, for example, leaving

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

Introduction: Science-Policy Dialogues: Energy Sustainability and Societal Change

the current low energy price paradigm behind. Discussion during the Dialogue with a view to technological innovation made it clear that “system changes” instead of incremental improvements are only possible if the narrow focus on classic energy questions such as efficiency gains, or single solutions such as individual sources of renewable energy, is embedded in a wider landscape of socio-technological systems. Within such socio-technological systems, prices and preferences are as important as lifestyles, perceptions and learning or lack there of. In this light, the role of knowledge and learning for societal change, critical in order to complement technological innovation with behavioural change at a large scale, was a topic underlying the entire Dialogue.

Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change thus put several major discourses of the IHDP network at its centre.

Through its more that 15 research projects and initiatives, IHDP is continuously working to address crucial elements of the energy challenge. IHDP initiatives such as Governance and Institutions, Vulnerability, Resilience, and Adaptation, Thresholds and Transitions, as well as Knowledge, Learning and Societal Change, known as cross-cutting themes and comprising the essence of IHDP’s broad scientific scope, are proving to be crucial building blocks for the energy debate.

With great potential to shape this discourse in the future, these themes comprise major contributions of IHDP science to the 2008 Science Policy Dialogue on energy, as well as to other topics relevant to addressing sustainability challenges in the face of global environmental change. IHDP’s Open Meetings constitute IHDP’s most well-known contribution to addressing such challenges.

The upcoming 7th Open Meeting on The Social Challenges of Global Change, to be held from 26-30 April, 2009 in Bonn, Germany, will respond to many of the most pressing questions of global environmental change that we are currently facing, including that of energy. The articles contained in this publication are also important contributions to keeping sustainability and energy themes in focus and shaping future discourse on these matters. As reflections of the themes communicated at this Science Policy Dialogue, they focus on moving society towards more sustainable patterns of producing and using energy. Their different tones and perspectives are indicative of the multi-stakeholder and multi-level approach necessary to achieving a more sustainable energy future.

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

We begin with exposés on the political and economic frameworks within which our current energy production and consumption are couched. Oran Young’s “Reflections on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change”, provides us with a general structure from which to view the impending energy crisis. In his exploration of the scale of behavioural change needed, government’s role in being part of the solution and the difficult yet essential cooperation needed internationally on the matter, Young discusses the current energy landscape as well as the social and institutional factors at play in striving to transition to sustainability. We then move on the Ernst Urlich von Weizsäcker’s article, “A New Direction for Technological Progress”, which gives the essential economic perspective of the current energy situation. His analysis stresses the urgency of the problem, traces its roots in historically low resource prices, and proffers a clear cut yet effective price-based solution for achieving both energy efficiency and sufficiency.

Political and economic frameworks must be shaped with the public in mind, and this publication thus turns to the public perception of energy themes with Mia Navarro’s “Energy in the Spotlight: The Role of the Media”. A New York Times journalist, Navarro provides specialists with an essential reminder of the average person’s struggles, not only to understand the energy crisis we are facing, but also to understand which of the myriad of lifestyle choices are the most

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Introduction: Science-Policy Dialogues: Energy Sustainability and Societal Change

sustainable. Through her examination of green weddings, she highlights the often contradictory information on offer and emphasises the media’s role in striving to give the public clear direction.

Encouraging large-scale behavioural change towards a sustainable energy future can only be part of the answer, however, as technological innovation has a critical role to play with regard to the development of sustainable energy systems. In trying to understand the current energy situation, develop solutions and anticipate difficulties, Bernd Siebenhüner warns us of the technology’s limitations. In his article, “Technological Solutions to the Energy Problem: Prospects and Limitations”, he calls for a well-integrated energy policy that spans multiple fields and addresses both technological innovation and behavioural change, simultaneously. Viewing our tendency to dismiss lifestyle changes and our readiness to believe in technological answers though a moral lens, Paul Wapner’s “The Ethics of the New Environmentalism” cautions unbridled enthusiasm for technical solutions and encourages us to think carefully about the consequences of the paths we choose. Wapner begs the question of whether an energy future that is the product of our own attempts at mastery, is really the future in which we want to live.

The articles then turn to the biofuel conundrum with Jean-Marc Salmon’s perspectives on biofuels in his examination of biofuel policies in temperate climates entitled, “Multi-Risk Strategy Challenges: The Biofuel Case”. In his article, Salmon delves into the risks that biofuel policies have been developed to mitigate, as well as the unintended crises in which they have currently been implicated, prompting questions as to their effectiveness and the way forward. Nath Syham’s then provides a more concrete biofuels example, exploring the sugarcane success story of his native Mauritius and its applicability to other sugarcane producing countries on the African continent. Syham’s investigation of sugarcane production in the Mauritian context shows how sugarcane bagasse, a resource previously characterised by inefficient usage, has, with the government’s help and proper price mechanisms, become not only an important source of energy for the island state, but also an important source of income. Finally, indicative of cutting-edge research needed in the realm of biofuels, Gernot Klepper, Pep Canadell, Rik Leemans, Jean Pierre Ometto, Anand Patwardhan, and Martin Rice’s contribution acknowledges both the limitations and opportunities presented by biofuel production and use. Entitled, “ESSP Research on Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability: Tapping GEC Programme-Wide Expertise for the Benefit of Science and Society”, this article introduces the proposed steps of a new research initiative that will build a bridge from science

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to policy, striving to bring some of the numerous points of contention surrounding the biofuel debate to light within the framework of Earth system sustainability.

This publication concludes with Susanne Moser’s critical look at the science policy interaction and the path that lies ahead. In her piece, “What is Asked of Us: A Clarion Call to Scientists at an Urgent Time”, she delivers an eyeopening commentary of the difficulties scientists and academics face in reaching out to other stakeholders as well as in working together and learning from one another. Inspired by the challenges faced by IHDP’s second Science Policy Dialogue on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change, Moser urges a stronger, more effective and perhaps even more turbulent dialogue not only with concern to energy themes, but to sustainability at large by prompting us to question, “What is asked of us?”

So just what is asked of us? The need for increased sustainability in the realm of energy is clear and it has become increasingly apparent that such sustainability goals cannot be achieved without a concerted effort from both science and policy actors. Such an effort must have its basis in an open, mutually beneficial dialogue about stakeholders’ varying needs and expectations, as well as the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead. IHDP’s second Science Policy Dialogue on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change served to encourage just such a dialogue. The contributions it has inspired continue in this vain. While this compilation can only begin to hint at the complexity of the energy problems we currently face, the perspectives and pathways explored herein are illustrative of the integrated way in which we must proceed if we are to shift society towards sustainability. IHDP is thus deeply indebted to the dedication of those who participated in Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change, and especially to the authors who contributed to this publication. May it serve both to maintain and further promote this important dialogue.

Authors: Falk Schmidt, IHDP Scientific Officer Sarah Mekjian, IHDP Programme Associate

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

Reflections on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change Oran R. Young

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

What messages should we take away from the recent Science Policy Dialogue on the theme of energy, sustainability and societal change? Many have written with insight about ways to reduce the dependence of modern societies on fossil fuels via various forms of conservation and the development of alternative sources of energy. The same is true of efforts to identify and develop policy instruments such as cap-andtrade systems, carbon taxes and command-and-control regulations that could prove useful in curbing our dependence on fossil fuels or at least in giving emitters of greenhouse gases (GHGs) strong incentives to reduce their emissions through measures involving carbon capture and storage.

These are important topics worthy of continuing consideration in discussions among scientists and policymakers. Yet a major conclusion of the dialogue is that any effective effort to come to grips with the issues surrounding society’s dependence on fossil fuels must be able to stimulate behavioural change on the part of energy users from the individual level to the societal level. How much behavioural change will be needed to address this issue? What does it take to move beyond changes at the margin in this realm?

Are we approaching a threshold or tipping point regarding behavioural changes that will affect the use of fossil fuels?

What can we do now to plan for a major transition in energy use during the short to medium term future?

In this article, I explore these issues by commenting briefly on four specific topics: (i) the scale or magnitude of the behavioural changes needed, (ii) the sources of human behaviour relating to energy use, (iii) the actual and potential role of

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Reflections on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change

government regarding patterns of energy use, and (iv) problems and prospects of international cooperation in this realm.

Scale or magnitude of change What is the scale of the behavioural changes that will be needed to reduce our current dependence on fossil fuels and, in the process, to bring about major reductions in greenhouse gas emissions? Consensus is emerging in the scientific community that to avoid dangerous interference in the Earth’s climate system, we must stabilise concentrations of GHGs in the atmosphere at no more than 450ppmv (and perhaps as low as 350ppmv), reduce current emissions by 70-80% by 2050, and get started on this ambitious project promptly during the course of the next decade. We are currently at 385ppmv with concentrations rising at a rate of 2-3ppmv per year. There is growing evidence that current sinks, especially in the oceans, are becoming saturated. This means that we must expect the rate of increase in GHG concentration in the Earth’s atmosphere to rise during the near future, unless we act now to reduce emissions.

What does this mean for modern or post-modern societies seeking to participate responsibly in efforts to address the problem of climate change? The German experience suggests that these societies may be able to reduce emissions by as much as 35-40% without resorting to basic or transformative changes in prevailing economic and social arrangements. The essential idea here is to squeeze every possible ounce of reductions out of existing systems, while leaving the systems themselves intact. This means increasing the fuel efficiency of automobiles, improving public transit systems, developing energy efficient appliances and lighting systems, improving insulation in houses, mixing ethanol with fossil fuels, installing wind systems, and so forth. Such a programme would require a concerted national effort led by governmental initiatives and implemented in a vigorous and persistent manner. If everything were to work exactly as planned, indeed a huge assumption, such a programme might just produce a 35-40% reduction in emissions by 2025 or 2030.

What if the scientists are right and we need to reduce emissions by 80% no later than 2050? We might then be looking at more drastic changes. If we view modern societies as complex and dynamic systems, this would entail experiencing or even deliberately initiating what systems analysts refer to as a state change, a regime shift, or a system flip. Should this occur, people would have to adjust to drastic changes in their current lifestyles affecting the location, size

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and energy efficiency of their homes, their means of transportation, the nature of their jobs and work patterns, and so forth. What might trigger such changes? Could they occur in a planned and orderly fashion? What would or could be the role of government in the process? There is a good deal of experience with situations in which societies have collapsed or experienced transformative changes in the aftermath of losing wars. Cases like Germany and Japan in the aftermath of World War II are actually encouraging in this regard, yet it is hard to find successful examples of societal state changes carried out in a planned and orderly fashion. We may already be engaged in a grand experiment involving such state changes. If so, however, it is clear that this is not a planned experiment that we are conducting in a controlled fashion.

Weaning modern energy intensive societies off fossil fuels in a non-disruptive fashion is an unprecedented challenge in the realm of human-environment interactions.

Sources of human behaviour What do we know about the sources of human behaviour, and how can we put this knowledge to use in efforts to make radical shifts in our current sources and uses of energy. It is tempting to follow the lead of the economists in assuming that individual and collective actors behave rationally, weighing up the benefits and costs of available options and selecting those options that have the most favorable ratio of benefits to costs. Even if we stick to this paradigm, though, major problems arise. It is difficult to compare the relatively wellknown costs associated with changing course today to the anticipated costs attributable to climate change in the future.

There is no obvious formula for selecting a proper or correct rate of discount for future occurrences in this connection.

By manipulating cost calculations, relying on subjective estimates of probabilities and selecting certain discount rates, it is possible to arrive at almost any conclusion regarding the relative merits of different responses to the problem of climate change.

As environmental psychology and behavioural economics have revealed, there is little basis for assuming that individual or collective actors behave in a fully rational manner in addressing issues like the problem of climate change.

Path dependence or inertia is a major force to be reckoned with regarding such matters. There is a pronounced tendency to put off major changes as long as possible, hoping that some external or technological solutions will come along to save the day before drastic changes in current practices become inescapable. Some ways of thinking about costs have

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

Reflections on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change

a greater impact on behaviour than others. Anticipated impacts on human health, for example, typically evoke stronger responses than expected impacts on ecosystems. There are significant cultural differences among populations when it comes to contemplating the lifestyle changes needed to address a problem of the scale and scope of climate change. At the same time, it is worth noting that patterns of economic and social change are sometimes non-linear in character.

Once a tipping point is reached, cascades of change may occur. It seems clear that something like this occurred in the 18th and 19th centuries in conjunction with the industrial revolution. Something similar may be occurring today with people streaming from the countryside into larger and larger urban areas that lack the infrastructure to provide a decent standard of living for millions of additional residents. With regard to climate change, the question is whether we are approaching a tipping point that will produce a watershed change with regard to emissions of greenhouse gases. If so, are there ways in which we can not only accelerate the onset of such a transition but also guide it in such a way as to protect or even enhance the welfare of the Earth’s 6-7 billion human inhabitants? It is hard to know when such concerns will come into focus, but processes of this sort may prove critical in weaning energy intensive societies off their current dependence on fossil fuels. It is certainly worth devoting some thought to these matters now.

The role of government.

There is surely no basis for expecting the invisible hand of market forces to solve the problem of climate change in the absence of intervention on the part of existing governments or prevailing governance systems. The difficulties of dealing with GHG emissions, including the lack of full-cost accounting for the use of the atmosphere as a repository for wastes and the fact that solving the problem of climate change will amount to supplying a public good, are precisely those that produce classic forms of market failure. This does not mean that there is a need to nationalise industries in the name of achieving the common good. What we do need are changes in the prevailing rules of the game that would force emitters of GHGs to internalise the costs of depositing wastes in the atmosphere and establish some cost-sharing mechanism to generate the funds needed for the supply of atmospheric public goods. Making choices regarding the rules of the game and seeing to it that they are implemented systematically and effectively are among the classic functions we think of as appropriate for governments or governance systems to perform.

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

Just how much can we rely on governance systems to perform these functions in the case of climate change? We know that governance failures are just as ubiquitous as market failures, and this is not just a problem at the international level where there is no well-developed public authority to make firm decisions about such matters and implement them effectively. At all levels, governance systems are frequently afflicted with the influence of special interests, the vagaries of legislative politics, institutional arthritis that makes the implementation of policies sluggish and an inability to raise the funds needed to make policies successful. We must also recognise that policy agendas are always crowded and that other issues such as stimulating economic development, enhancing social welfare and combating terrorism, can and often do take precedence over environmental issues in the competition for the attention of governance systems. A particular challenge in the case of climate change is the need to coordinate actions across multiple levels of governance. We need an effective international climate regime, but we also need to allow members of this regime the freedom to make good on their commitments in ways that work best for them.

We also need to allow for interactions among levels of governance in this setting, so that regional (e.g. state, provincial) governments and even municipal governments can implement international and national policies relating to climate change in an effective manner. The recent flurry of sub-national initiatives relating to climate change is certainly good news. However, we are still a long way from the development of the coordinated system of multi-level governance needed to tackle the problem of climate change successfully.

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Reflections on Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change

Global cooperation It is generally understood that climate change is a global problem. GHGs emitted anywhere will have similar effects on the Earth’s climate system and removal of these gases from anywhere in the Earth’s atmosphere will be helpful in coming to terms with the overall problem. Still, there are massive asymmetries in this realm that we cannot avoid. Per capita emissions in the United States are five to six times those of China. Most of the GHGs currently in the atmosphere that are anthropogenic in origin are attributable to the activities of the advanced industrial societies of the northern hemisphere. By contrast, those expected to suffer the most from climate change are located in the developing countries of the mid-latitudes and southern hemisphere. These are the countries that are least well-off in terms of their capacity to adapt to the impacts of climate change. One fundamental consequence of these features of the problem is that there are profound ethical or normative questions that permeate every effort to devise effective measures both to mitigate climate change and to adapt to its consequences.

There is surely no basis for expecting the

invisible hand of market forces to solve the

problem of climate change in the absence of intervention on the part of existing governments or prevailing governance systems

Under the circumstances, we need to build a governance system to deal with climate change that is comprehensive in the sense that its membership is universal and that it is adapted to the different circumstances of the various members of the regime. There is a real danger that this situation will degenerate into a dialogue of the deaf with UNFCCC Annex 1 countries, and United States in particular, arguing that it is pointless to make serious commitments to reducing GHG emissions until large developing countries like China, India, and Brazil accept comparable obligations, while nonAnnex 1 countries argue they will not accept any obligations regarding GHG emissions until major developed countries like the US make appropriate and credible commitments.

There is a real danger that we will end up doing the equivalent of “fiddling while Rome burns.” We must move forward on the basis of a comprehensive climate regime that engages everyone but also differentiates among members regarding both their responsibility for causing climate change and their vulnerability to its impacts. This is the challenge facing the

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efforts of negotiators to reach an agreement on the terms of a successor to the Kyoto Protocol to be adopted at COP 15 in December 2009 and take effect following the expiration of the protocol in 2012. This challenge is nothing less than daunting. If we were aiming for a 20% reduction in GHG emissions, we might be cautiously optimistic about the prospects of agreeing on a progressive replacement for the Kyoto Protocol. If the real target is a 70-80% reduction in emissions to stabilise GHG concentrations in the atmosphere at 450 ppmv or less, we will need to engineer a state change or system flip in the way we do business at the international level in efforts to address large-scale environmental problems.

Opportunities for policy-relevant research What do these reflections tell us about opportunities for fostering a constructive and productive relationship between the research community and the policy community regarding matters of energy, sustainability, and societal change? In my judgment, there is a large role for science and research more generally, but it needs to be framed in a proper manner.

Science can produce useful assessments about the likely impacts of climate change on modern societies, but it cannot prescribe an appropriate rate of discount regarding costs expected to occur in the future. Science can explore sources of behavioural change on the scale that is likely to be needed to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference in the Earth’s climate system, but it cannot tell us what actions are ethically acceptable in efforts to promote such changes.

Science can explore why institutional arrangements or governance systems are often sticky or resistant to change even when the need for change is widely understood and accepted, but it cannot tell us what strategy to adopt to bring about desired changes in institutions, especially in the typical case in which such changes produce benefits and costs affecting individual members of the social system(s) differently.

The bottom line seems clear. Science and research more generally can make important contributions to sound policymaking regarding energy and climate change cannot provide answers for a number of the questions that policymakers must address and seek to answer. So long as this distinction is kept clearly in mind, we can look forward to mutually beneficial relations between the two communities.

Oran R. Young, Chair, IHDP SC

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

Photo: copyright Rachel Knickmeyer

A New Direction for Technological Progress Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker

The problem and insufficient answers Existing attempts to combat global warming fall short of answering the challenge. Take the Kyoto Protocol. It was absolutely necessary and was a great diplomatic achievement at its time, yet with its lack of inclusion of the rapidly developing countries it, can not even stabilise global GHG emissions at 1990 levels. If that is all the world can do, GHG concentrations will continue to increase for at least another 150 years.

We need a post-Kyoto regime that includes both the major emitters from developing countries as well as countries such as the USA and Australia, but in negotiations, it is exactly these countries that demand and are likely to get away with a regime allowing and thereby endorsing further increasing emissions for some time to come.

Then comes Al Gore asking for a 90% emissions reduction from developed countries. Is there any chance of these countries agreeing? Not if they remain in their present mindset of fears that drastic reductions will badly hurt their economies.

Then comes the biofuels lobby, suggesting that bioethanol from Brazil, biodiesel from Iowa and second generation biofuels derived from lignocellulose will step in for petrol.

Yet as soon as biofuels begin to make a difference with regard to global warming, their sheer volume spells disaster for biodiversity, food prices, land-ownership and social equity1.

Other answers from all directions have also come.

Wind, small scale hydro, geothermal and solar energies seem much more benign but come at a price and are not without

IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

their own ecological costs. In places where windmills dominate the landscape, it is environmentalists who fight against further expansion. Carbon capture and storage, on the other hand, may be feasible for smokestack emissions, but so far, this technology has a price nobody is really willing to pay.

Similarly, nuclear energy comes with a series of risks associated with radioactive wastes, terrorism and vulnerability to war that no private insurance company would be willing to underwrite. The risks notwithstanding, nuclear energy, in amounts relevant to curbing global warming under conditions of growing world energy demand, will be facing serious uranium scarcity problems, as foretold by the fact that uranium prices have risen nearly twenty-fold in recent years.

A time window of ten years According to the IPCC and Sir Nicholas Stern2, we have a time window as small as ten years left to address global warming in an economically tolerable fashion. Waiting will only drive costs up horrendously. We should act now, for economic reasons if nothing else.

We ought to pursue most of the options mentioned above but have to realise that under the assumption of steeply rising energy demand, all the options combined will fail to “solve� the global warming problem. The core of the answer should not come from the supply side of energy but from curbing demand, meaning drastically reducing the wasteful use of energy. In other words, energy productivity, known

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A New Direction for Technological Progress

Photo: copyright Rachel Knickmeyer

as California’s Assembly Bill 32, we are almost certain to let those ten years pass by without any decisive turnaround, and thus without taking responsible action for future generations.

Theoretically, huge efficiency increases are available

more simply though less accurately as “energy efficiency”, will have to be increased dramatically.

The message has finally reached the top political levels. The G8 countries, in their 2007 Heiligendamm declaration, said, “According to the International Energy Agency, successfully implemented energy efficiency policies could contribute up to 80% of avoided greenhouse gases while substantially increasing security of supply”3.

Are there any signs of practical politics taking this message seriously and aggressively pursuing the efficiency agenda? Australia is phasing out incandescent light bulbs and yet falls far short of living up to the Kyoto protocol. Japan has an admirable top runner programme for efficiency in a widening range of appliances, vehicles and office equipment, and yet also struggles with the Kyoto commitments. The EU has a very laudable energy efficiency directive and a carbon emissions trading system, but nothing remotely enough to fulfil Al Gore’s demand. China has made a commitment in its 11th Five Year Plan to increase energy efficiency by 20% within five years, but insiders know that it doesn’t work. Even if it did, a 20% efficiency increase achieved during a period displaying a demand increase of 40% will just not be good enough. Other countries such as India, Russia, the USA and Brazil, though, have much less to offer in terms of efficiency measures to curb global warming.

In short, despite the diplomatic efforts from Bali to Copenhagen and some laudable initiatives in US States such

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What the world needs is a new boldness regarding the size of the gains in energy productivity that are available. In Factor Four, a book I published in 1997 with Amory and Hunter Lovins4, it was shown that in most sectors of the economy, a quadrupling of energy and material productivity is achievable. An updated version, co-authored by Charlie Hargroves, is under preparation, in which we aim at a factor of five. Eventually, I believe, even a factor of twenty is feasible, which would solve most of the climate, local environment and social equity problems we are currently facing.

To be sure, increasing the efficiency of certain specific functions will not be enough, as increased consumption can always overcompensate such gains. If, for example, the world car fleet becomes four times as fuel efficient but the number of kilometres driven rises six-fold, the absolute effect will be negative for our climate.

Let prices speak; but history shows diminishing resource prices This brings us to the question of appropriate prices. Many of the Factor Four examples are simply not economically viable under present conditions. To make drastic increases of resource productivity profitable, resource prices must rise.

Markets would hardly produce that signal, implying that much will have to be done by the State. Artificial price tags on emissions, too, can do much to curb climate change. If releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is not associated with a price, today’s competitive environments make it exceedingly difficult for companies to spend money on reducing such emissions and, in turn, for a country to demand drastic emissions cuts.

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A New Direction for Technological Progress

There are different instruments available for putting a price tag on carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions. There is, of course, the cap and trade regime, there are feebates, which are combinations between fees and charges, and there are various command and control instruments that steer technologies directly while exerting indirect effects on prices. The tax system, too, can influence prices. So far though, economists and politicians have found it extremely difficult to promote ecologically motivated taxes.

Compounding these difficulties is the century long tendency of our societies to keep resource prices as low as possible. The combined efforts of politicians, entrepreneurs and mining engineers have established a long term trend of continuously decreasing resource prices, as shown in Fig 1 for “raw industrials”, including natural resources of industrial importance, such as energy. As a result, the share of expenses paid directly and indirectly for natural resources fell continuously during the time to which we typically refer as the “Industrial Revolution”.

A few points in history have actually been characterised by soaring resource prices. This was the case during the two World Wars, as well as during the more oil price shocks of the 1970s, also reflected in Fig. 1. In 1973, the Arab oil exporting countries managed to quadruple oil prices overnight, and prices rose yet again in 1978. The rest of the world, however, reacted by stepping up prospecting and mining until, by 1982, oil prices had come down to pre1973 levels.

Since the turn of the millennium, many people have been under the impression that resource prices have been irrevocably increasing. The new surge in oil, gas and other mineral resource prices has been triggered by steeply rising demand from the rapidly developing Asian economies, led

by China. Both China and mining companies, however, have responded by throwing a lot of money into new prospecting and mining, which has brought the price surge to a halt and there are indications that commodity prices may come down again, at least in constant dollars. Only for oil, gas and a few rare metals is there a certain likelihood of lasting high prices, as annual discovery rates are falling behind annual consumption rates.

Typically, it is the geological limits and extraction and refinery cost that ultimately determine prices. In earlier decades, access and transport limitations also played a major role, but the share of the transport cost has been falling systematically over time. When fossil fuels finally near exhaustion, prices may begin telling a new story of scarcity. By then, however, it will definitely be much too late to avoid a global warming disaster.

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This trend in falling resource prices is the main reason why it will not suffice to increase technical efficiency.

Price signals present the single most strategic way of addressing over-consumption.

Let prices increase with efficiency The central idea proposed here is to politically establish a trajectory of steadily progressing energy and commodity prices. The speed of annual price increases should be determined by the statistically measured efficiency increases of the previous year.

Then, by definition, there would be no additional suffering, and yet, there would be a permanent and, in all likelihood, increasing incentive for all actors to increase their productivity in the use of fossil fuels and other ecologically scarce resources.

Such a trajectory would have to be kept stable for many decades in order to be effective. Investors want assurance of the trajectory’s stability for a time span equivalent to the payback time of their investments. Perhaps the most important investments are those relating to long lasting infrastructure, for which payback times are counted by decades.

Low or unpredictable energy prices scare investors into modern and more energy efficient infrastructures. Under the conditions of low US-type petrol prices, Japan’s pioneering role with the Shinkansen, a network of high speed rail lines, would not have been possible.

How can the price trajectory be established in practical terms? Theoretically, it is possible to achieve increasing resource prices through an ambitious cap and trade regime with gradually reduced cap levels. However, past experiences with cap and trade regimes show rather unpredictable fluctuations resulting, in part, from speculation. There is no way of linking resulting prices to previous efficiency gains.

Another major instrument influencing prices is the tax escalator regime, in which the idea is to add small annual price signals that are agreed upon many years in advance.

Such a regime has been carried out in Britain and Germany since the 1990s and these two historical examples of fuel tax escalators can be seen as proof of effectiveness. The British escalator on petrol taxes was introduced in 1993, while the German ecotax reform came six years later, in 1999. In both cases, the fiscal duty increased year after year by very small amounts, which by themselves would have hardly any steering effect. The certainty of future tax increases, however, had a major effect on consumer behaviour, with families buying more fuel efficient cars, railways and other public transport enjoying some form of renaissance, and unnecessary trips being reduced. Fig 2 shows the effects on fuel consumption

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A New Direction for Technological Progress

Fig 1 Industrial raw resource prices, adjusted for inflation over 200 years. Prospecting, mining and transport technologies have been the main drivers.

Fig. 2 Steering effect of fuel tax escalators (Picture: FÖS, 2006, Database: DIW, 2005)

and CO2 emissions per capita and year. As a side note, the fact that German petrol consumption fell before the ecotax escalator was put in place was also caused by fuel taxes, which had been raised three times by the previous government starting in 1991 for purely fiscal reasons so as to pay for costs of the German unification.

Fig 2 contrasts the British and German experiences with those of Canada and the US. In the absence of a price signal, the increasing efficiency of compact cars these two countries was more than compensated by the introduction of tax privileged sport utility vehicles (SUVs) and by rises in the miles driven. Additionally, no signs of recovery can currently be seen in the mostly outdated and inefficient North American railway systems.

Is there a problem for the poor or for industry?

Objections to a dynamic ecological tax reform can come from advocates of the poor and from industry alike.

Advocates of the poor will hint at the relative importance of energy costs in the poor man’s consumer basket.

Indeed, energy and water taxes tend to be regressive, hitting the poor harder than the rich. To answer this problem, it is possible to grant a tax free or tax reduced minimum of per-

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haps one gigajoule of energy per person and week. In this way, the poverty stricken would actually benefit, while the burden would shift towards middle income and rich strata of society.

Blue collar workers, too, have a tendency to fight energy taxes. They typically use the same lines of arguments used by the poor, having the additional apprehension that energy taxes would destroy industrial jobs. There is surely some truth to this fear for the classical model of heavy industry and mass manufacturing is part of the ecological problem of our days; a problem that should be overcome by resource saving techniques. To smooth this transition, it makes sense, as in the case of Germany, to grant certain temporary exemptions to the manufacturing sector, so as to avoid any rapid destruction of invested capital.

Investors, too, tendency to be tax adverse, yet they need not fear ecological components of taxation. What they should fear is unpredictability and unfair national rates that create competitive disadvantages. If it is politically possible to reach a consensus about a long term trajectory for green taxes, it would entail a sort of “heaven on earth” for investors, meaning that they could take on ambitious technological and infrastructural projects with very limited risks. This would eventually lead to major advantages over competitors that operate under conditions of substantially lower resource prices and therefore give too little attention to resource scarcity.

It would be desirable, for both ecological and economic reasons, to find international agreement on price trajectories. If price increases are linked to productivity gains, pioneering countries are unlikely to suffer and may even gain competitive advantages.

The paradigm of a twenty-fold increase of labour productivity The history of technological progress to date is the history of the increases in labour productivity, otherwise known as the Industrial Revolution. Labour productivity has easily grown twenty-fold since the beginnings of the Industrial Revolution. During the 19th century, the increase in what came to be the industrialised countries was some one percent per year, which is not all that spectacular. The rate increased to one and a half percent during the first half of the 20th century and to two percent thereafter. Interspersed throughout these trends, phases like Germany during the late 1950s, Japan during the 1960s and China after 2000 have displayed productivity increases of more than seven percent per year, largely by copying what had been achieved elsewhere before.

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A New Direction for Technological Progress

One fact, well-known by organised labour and by employers, is that negotiations for higher wages and other benefits have used advances in labour productivity as their yardstick. Only during the recent neo-liberal and neo-conservative phases starting in the early 1980s, have wages begun to lag behind productivity gains, due mostly, as the employers see it, to competition from low wage countries. What is not so well-known, however, is that productivity gains also went up in parallel with gross labour cost. Empirically, it is not easy to distinguish this effect from the former, for the end result is that simply that wages and productivity increase in parallel (Fig 3).

However, employers can tell you that the race for competitiveness and for increasing labour productivity is always spurred by wage increases. The wave of acquisitions and mergers and the rise of the business consultancy industry over the last 20 years was essentially built on that race to stay competitive through labour rationalisation (which is another word for productivity gains).

This latter trend of labour costs spurring labour productivity is an exciting indication for the potential of increasing energy and resource productivity using price signals. As a matter of fact, the “oil crisis� of the 1970s served as an (unplanned) experiment for this hypothesis. As energy prices went up across the board, a new mentality set in that focused on energy efficiency. Fig 4 shows the effect.

Fig 3 Rise of wages and of labour productivity mostly in parallel. The picture shows this for a time span of fifty years in the USA.

Fig 4. The oil price shocks of 1973 and 1978 triggered a steady increase in energy productivity in the USA. This new mindset of energy efficiency survived even through a period of declining energy prices from 1981 – 2000.

A revenue neutral ecological tax reform The paradigm of labour productivity seems to support the idea of a steady increase in energy prices and as said before, if energy prices increase in line with average energy productivity gains, there would be no added financial suffering on average. The situation can become even more attractive if the fiscal income from energy taxes is re-channelled into the economy by reducing the fiscal or parafiscal load on human labour, thus giving an additional push to overcome unemployment.

A new idea is to make the trajectory of energy prices very predictable by compensating world market fluctuations.

Downward fluctuations would be compensated upwards and upward fluctuations downwards, so as to bring prices back to a previously agreed upon price corridor. The steepness of the corridor would be determined annually or every five years by average efficiency gains in the previous year or years. Adjustments could then be allowed on a quarterly basis, so as to make prices even more predictable. The system could also be differentiated for vehicle fuels, electricity, carbon content and other criteria. This system of increase would work best if

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Fig 5 Even for petrol consumption which is often referred to as nearly price inelastic, we observe a near perfect price elasticity if we ask the right question. The question asked for this graph was, how much petrol is consumed per capita and year in different OECD countries that have nearly equal levels of wealth and mobility? Countries had more or less stable policies on domestic fuel prices for many years preceding the year (1988) in which the data were collected. The picture reflects long-term price elasticity.

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A New Direction for Technological Progress

transposed into long-term legislation, valid for some twenty or fifty or more years, with fairly strict clauses for exemptions or deviations from the rule. In the end, however, this will be a matter of political priority setting weighed against simplicity.

A similar system for materials and water is also conceivable. If the prices of primary raw materials and water steadily increase, the incentives for the reuse of materials and for water purification also increase. Simultaneously, the profitability of mining operations would decline, which is exactly what we want.

Externalities can justify increasing energy prices Long-term scarcity and limits in the absorptive capacity of the environment are strong motivators for artificially raising resource prices. In the economist’s language, “external” costs should be internalised. The user of resources should pay the full costs, including costs to society, to the environment and to future generations. Determining external costs, however, is not an easy affair.

In the absence of rigorous calculations of externalities, at least some common sense truisms can be provided.

Fig 1 should be seen as shocking to everybody who is concerned with the environment. Avalanches of solid mater shipped around the globe have a very negative effect on the environment. Steadily increasing energy consumption is a danger for our climate. It is surely justifiable to put a price tag on material and energy resources, which would helps revert the trend shown in Fig. 1.

Moreover, if fiscal proceeds are used to reduce other taxes with negative effects on employment and on the economy, of which payroll taxes are a notable example, it can be assumed that the tax shift towards resource taxes has benign macro-economic effects. Remaining problems such as unfair increases of monthly heating or cooling costs can be taken care of by tax exemptions that will be phased out as the respective efficiency increases reach the target populations.

Long term price elasticity is high

Figure 5 below shows a striking negative correlation between fuel prices and per capita fuel consumption. Ten years after the introduction of the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards in the US, the country, although admirably catching up on per mile fuel consumption, still had by far the highest per capita fuel consumption. In other words, under low fuel price conditions, CAFE conveyed a simple message to drivers: “Now you can drive more miles for your bucks”. Which they did.

This experience is very valuable for determining a price trajectory overcoming the dilemma of short term instruments. We can safely rely on small signals if we assure society of a long-term, upward trend for energy and other resource prices.

Conclusion The idea of a long term Ecological Tax Reform can serve as an idealised model for moving technology, infrastructure and consumer behaviour towards the goal of climate stabilisation. Such an instrument has the advantage of addressing both efficiency and sufficiency and countries going ahead with the scheme are very likely to earn technological advantages over their competitors. The only “losing” partners in the game are mining companies and commodity exporting countries. While this may be unavoidable in all ecologically successful strategies, such countries should be able to anticipate and adjust to such trends well in advance, becoming pioneers in the new game.

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, Dean, University of California, Santa Barbara Donald Bren School of Environmental Science, California, USA References 1. Agrofuels: Towards a reality check in nine key areas. By Biofuelwatch et al, June 2007. www.biofuelwatch.org.uk 2. IPCC. 2007. Climate Change 2007. 4th Assessment Report”. Geneva: WMO; Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change. London, HM Treasury.

3. Growth and Responsibility in the World Economy. June 7. Heiligendamm Summit Declaration, para 62.

4. Von Weizsäcker, Ernst Ulrich, Amory Lovins, Huner Lovins. Factor Four. Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. London. Earthscan, 1997; also available in 12 other languages including Japanese.

5. Ernst von Weizsäcker and Jochen Jesinghaus. 1992. Ecological Tax Reform. London, Zed Books.

Generally, it can be said that energy and resource consumption have a rather low price elasticity in the short-term. This is illustrated, for example, by the upward curve in Fig. 4, which did not begin until 1977, long after the initial 1973 oil price shock. In the long run, however, price elasticity is astonishingly high, as can be seen from an observation made

by Jochen Jesinghaus5.

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IHDP Update Science-Policy Dialogues Extra 2008

Energy in the Spotlight: The Role of the Media

Photo: copyright Tom Taylor

Energy in the Spotlight: The Role of the Media Mireya Navarro

Environmental reporting has usually centered around broad policy issues and increasingly, on the issue of global warming, which is strongly linked to our energy use.

Now, we in the media face an unprecedented hunger for information as the public recognizes the need for more sustainable lifestyles.

With the press conveying a greater sense of urgency about climate change, people are increasingly demanding that they be told what to do. Once they adopt green values, once they accept responsibility and are willing to do their part, people want to know how they can align their lives with these new green values and what they can do to make a difference.

Giving them answers to these questions is still a work in progress

For Americans, 2007 was a turning point. Suddenly, carbon offsets, sustainable flowers and ecotourism were in the news. Before “An Inconvenient Truth” won an Oscar and Al Gore won a joint Nobel Peace Prize with the International Panel on Climate Change, these concerns floated somewhere on the fringe for many people. Last year, however, awareness of all things green exploded. There was a sudden need to engage. People were rushing to get compact fluorescent light bulbs and to find the organic foods in the supermarkets.

Green efforts came from all directions. More than 100 artists staged Live Earth concerts around the world last summer to

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inspire a mass green movement. San Francisco banned the common plastic shopping bag at grocery stores in favor of a compostable plastic counterpart. Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that New York City’s yellow cab fleet would be replaced with hybrids. In Hollywood, Priuses seemed to become as common as Botox injections.

Of course, it often takes the actions of governments and policymakers to cause dramatic, large-scale change, yet there is a growing conviction among many Americans that individuals have their own role to play, that they can do their part and that doing nothing is no longer acceptable.

These newfound convictions come with requests for information, however, and we’ve run into some trouble trying to satisfy this need. Recently, the New York Times lifestyle section, Sunday Styles, ran a piece on “green noise”, which it described as “static caused by urgent, sometimes vexing or even contradictory information played at too high a volume for too long.” The noise, the article said, leaves consumers in a state of confusion. Which salad is more earth-friendly, the one made with organic greens trucked in from thousands of miles away or the one with lettuce raised on a nearby energyintensive industrial farm? Is milk in reusable glass bottles better than milk in disposable paper cartons, because glass bottles save trees and reduce waste? Or are paper cartons better because they are compostable and save on the energy and water needed to clean and transport the glass bottles? Is it better to buy a new hybrid or a used car with a standard engine, which would save on the energy it takes to make a

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Energy in the Spotlight: The Role of the Media

new vehicle? These are all complex questions that consumers with good intentions are starting ask to ask themselves. The answers are hard to come by.

Having just finished writing a book on eco-friendly weddings called, Green Wedding, to be published in January 2009

by Stewart, Tabori & Chang, I had the chance to talk to many young couples who wanted their weddings to reflect environmental values- values they planned to implement as they set out to start new families. There was much frustration about what could be done, what was available and what was within the budget, since “green” usually comes with a hefty markup.

Nothing, for example, causes as much confusion for the average consumer as the issue of local versus imported.

We often hear that buying local is best, but we also hear that this may not always be the case. Produce from a local farm result in less travel-related energy consumption and emissions, but some studies suggest that when the energy use and emissions associated with production are also considered, a product coming from afar may not necessarily be worse than the local alternative.

A common nail-biting issue for environmentally conscious brides is that of flowers. Flowers from Ecuador, for instance, require no energy-intensive climate controls because of the ideal growing conditions there. Sustainably-grown flowers carrying labels like “Veriflora” and “Fair Trade” are now on the market. The “Veriflora” stamp of approval is one among several eco-labels that have sprung up in the United States to vouch for more sustainable flower growing methods, which impose strict environmental and labor standards on growers including the minimization or complete phase-out of pesticide use. “USDA Organic”, a label from the United States Department of Agriculture, bans the use of any synthetic pesticides and fertilizers altogether. A third common label, “Fair Trade Certified”, is similar to “Veriflora” but also pays a premium to farmers so they will invest in community programs like day care centers.

Yet those beautiful flowers from Ecuador, even when certified by one of the labels, need to be shipped long distances. Flowers from a local farm will not travel as far but may have consumed a large amount of energy if they need to grow in a heated greenhouse, which counters the benefits reaped due to their close proximity to the buyer. Which one is better or worse for the environment? And what about the other dimensions of sustainability? Should the environment or the health and treatment of workers be given priority? If it is the environment, should you worry about emissions or waste first? Add this to the green noise.

While no flowers may be the greenest choice, should we really be asked to forgo flowers altogether? In fact, some

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couples are doing just that by getting married in gardens or by coming up with paper decorations or potted plants. Often, people make due with the baffling amounts of seemingly contradictory information available by making their decisions based on what’s important to them, not necessarily to the environment. In the case of flowers, if they care about the Ecuadorian women working on flower farms, they will go with something like Veriflora. If they can’t stand the thought of spending thousands of dollars on something with so little re-use value as cut flowers, they may go with potted orchids they can replant. If they worry about fossil-fuel related greenhouse gas emissions first, they may go local and seasonal even if this means wildflowers instead of roses. Even so, shouldn’t there be some clear priorities or at least, a guiding consensus to which people can look?

In addition to green noise, people also face the clear danger of misplaced focus, shifting their concentration and energy to actions that actually prove inconsequential as vendors appeal to the new green consciousness through the aggressive marketing of green products. Do shirts, for example, made with 5 percent organic cotton and 95 percent conventional cotton qualify as a baby step toward a better way or little more than a marketing ploy?

With a simple Google search of “green weddings”, it becomes apparent that there is a thriving and growing green wedding sub-industry. There are enough web links and vendors to make your head spin, many of them true believers, others just opportunists. It can be a confusing marketplace, especially as the field is still relatively young. Some environmental activists have pointed out that true green means actually consuming less, and yes, sometimes even doing without, not just buying more eco-friendly products. Do we need raspberries shipped from Chile off season, even if they are organic? Their advice goes along the lines of, “Don’t be tempted by eco labels. If you don’t need it, don’t buy it just because it’s green.” Those are clear messages that people can follow, and we need more of them.

Americans increasingly want to go beyond the empty gestures as the warning signs of global warming become more apparent. They need clear-cut answers from the government and the scientific community. People want to feel that they are making a positive contribution. By translating research into lifestyle choices and by helping people implement changes in their daily lives, the environmentally-conscious grassroots movement can help not only to shape individuals’ lifestyles, but to encourage more progressive policies that call for more drastic changes.

But how much is too much? Some environmental groups are more eager to promote lifestyle changes than oth-

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Energy in the Spotlight: The Role of the Media

ers. How much green are we really ready for? There is a certain hesitation on the part of some environmental groups, apparently out of concern that they would come across as too ambitious in what they asked of the public. The last thing you want, one of them said, is for people to tune out green messages because they seem to require too many lifestyle sacrifices.

So the question becomes: how much can people handle?

There is a willingness to do more. One of the couples in my book was building a green home from scratch, using building guidelines from the city of Austin, Texas, which encourages residents to go green by offering rebates for steps that save energy. Their planning started out with the solar orientation of the house, which in their location meant having most windows facing south and north to avoid some of the scorching Texas heat in the summer. They planned to invest in a 25,000-gallon (94,635 liter) rain water cistern for all their water, drinking water included. For their electricity needs, they were planning to get photovoltaic panels. They installed a solar water heater to warm water for their showers and to meet other domestic warm water needs. They wanted hydronic and radiant floor heating to complete their solar thermal system.

I talked to couples who, instead of gifts, asked guests to contribute to environmental groups and charities. Clearly, many people are past the point of just changing their light bulbs, but are they willing to consider more drastic steps, such as not having children or adopting, since, according to the Energy Information Administration, the US uses more than 4.5 times as much energy per capita as the global average? Would they ditch the wedding for 100 people and elope instead? What is a happy medium? What is the point at which people will engage in making meaningful change before they throw up their hands and say, “Why bother?”, “What difference will it make?” and “I can’t do this.”

There is a growing public awareness about environmental issues, but the truth is that we don’t really know how far people are willing to go. The United States Environmental Protection Agency reported a slight drop in 2006, a drop partly attributed to increased use of renewables and reduced fuel consumption.

But are people, as we see now, consuming less fuel and switching to smaller cars because they are paying almost $5 a gallon, or because they are true converts to a more environmentally-friendly lifestyle? Frankly, from my interviews with drivers in Los Angeles, many of whom are switching to van pooling and to mass transit, I have no doubt that many, if

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not most, would go back to their SUVs the minute gas prices fell. One real estate broker I met had done everything, from taking the bus to carefully plotting routes so that he, his wife and teenage daughter could pack into one car to run errands in one direction at a time, except sell his SUV. “It’s the first SUV I’ve ever had. I only got it two years ago,” he told me.

Another commuter told me she had tried van pooling once and only lasted two weeks because she didn’t like “the characters” she had to ride with. Now she was giving vanpooling another chance because she was paying more than $300 a month in gas. She undoubtedly missed commuting alone.

We “are in our own little worlds in our cars,” she said.

These are the issues everyday people deal with on an everyday basis, and their attitudes about these issues are deeply ingrained. Changing them will require journalists to help public understanding rise above the green noise instead of allowing the public to become weary from it. In short, we have our work cut out for us.

As a journalist, if the message is, stop eating meat because of the cost to the environment or drastically reduce your meat intake, the stories to be written would range from how to do it to features on someone growing their own food. There’s a need to translate scientific work and findings into messages people can implement in their daily lives so as to reduce their energy consumption and accompanying carbon footprint.

What the press can do best is articulate the priorities and educate the public so that people realize there is no time to waste, thereby helping to connect the dots among the news stories.

Travel, for example, is one energy intensive activity that consumers have discretion over, and is thus a potential priority, yet people are still trying to figure this out. They may be driving the SUV 15 miles (24 km) to their local farm for organic produce, but wouldn’t it be more beneficial to the environment to just drive 2 miles (3 km) to the nearest grocery store for whatever produce they have, be it from Mexico or California, organic or not?

Until these issues are clear to consumers, our job is to help people navigate these transitional times. In Green Wedding, I try to help readers carry their interest in having a green wedding, for example, into greening their first home.

If that interest is nurtured, perhaps it can lead to larger-scale concerted action, which, in turn, would influence government to take significant green steps as well.

Mireya Navarro, New York Times correspondent, Author of Green Weddings, to be published in January 2009 by Stewart, Tabori and Chang.

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"Few new technologies work on their own, without changes in people’s daily lives. Energy efficient light bulbs, for instance, are similar to conventional light sources but, despite this similarity, still require consumers that are willing to accept slightly different colours of light or different light bulb shapes."

Technological Solutions to the Energy Problem: Prospects and Limitations Bernd Siebenhüner

The growing realisation of the need for a safe and environmentally sound energy supply has spurred the growing availability of technological solutions. Be it renewable energy, energy efficiency technologies, alternative engines, or options to recover energy from heat, these solutions consitute necessary contributions to addressing climate and energy problems. However, these technological options will not do the job alone for they must be complemented by both behavioural and policy changes. In the following, I will highlight four general hypotheses about this connection.

First, technological paths need to be varied. In the face of the magnitude of the climate problem and the necessary reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, most calculations show that no single technology will be sufficient.

Neither wind energy nor solar power will be able to provide enough electricity and heat to completely replace fossil energy technologies. Each can provide a valuable contribution, albeit within certain limitations that result from the very nature of these particular energy sources. Wind, for example, is only available in specific areas on or offshore and solar power is most feasible in areas with significantly intense periods of sunshine of lasting duration. Both require storage technologies to provide energy to households or industries when they

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need it most. In this respect, a single solution, as envisioned in the 1970s when nuclear power was seen as the ultimate solution to the energy problem, does not exist.

No single technology will be sufficient

The energy debate has also revolved around the question of whether centralised or decentralised solutions are best. In particular, the electricity sector was long dominated by the centralised solutions paradigm, with large-scale power plants providing electricity for different purposes in households and industry. Based on the growing awareness of climate change and of the risks associated with nuclear energy, decentralised solutions have gained significant ground in this debate over the past two decades. There is a much larger acceptance for these solutions in the form of local wind parks, photovoltaic devices that provide solar heating on individual roof tops and biogas plants in villages. The current challenge is to combine both paradigms in an intelligent manner. This requires a significant conceptual effort to build grids adapted to both centralised and decentralised solutions, with many households simultaneously acting as consumers and producers, a role that has been labelled as “prosumers” in recent

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Technological Solutions to the Energy Problem: Prospects and Limitations

discussions.

Secondly, technological solutions will hardly work without related behavioural changes. Few new technologies work on their own, without changes in people’s daily lives.

Energy efficient light bulbs, for instance, are similar to conventional light sources but, despite this similarity, still require consumers that are willing to accept slightly different colours of light or different light bulb shapes. Low-energy houses require some changes with regard to people’s window opening habits during the winter. Even more so, switching to public transportation as the more energy efficient means of transportation implies different transport use patterns and behaviours. The changes required by or arising from new behaviours are often multifaceted. While public transport does, for example, require people to wait for trains and buses, it also allows them to spend that time productively by reading or working. Electricity consumption might also change with new patterns of energy provision as a result of the increased use of unsteady renewable energy sources such as wind and solar. Power suppliers are thus currently considering varying electricity costs that mirror different production costs over time. At times with intense wind and/or sun, for example, prices might be lower, increasing when less energy is available so that supplementation with fossil fuels is needed. In general, it seems easier to sell and implement those technological solutions that require the least behavioural changes from individuals and households.

Most policy measures that address the energy problem focus on the supply side and neglect the demand side.

Conventionally, the energy systems in most industrialised countries have been designed from the supply side, concentrating on the efficient provision of electricity or heat. Thus, most technological options to reduce energy intensity and greenhouse gas emissions are also related to the supply side, yet demand side changes are essential for effective transitions to a more sustainable energy system. It is even possible to invent profitable solutions for the demand side. Examples are evident in contracting solutions for residential heating that build on the efficiency gains from technologies such as combined heat and power generation, thus linking supply side-focused technological solutions with organisational innovations on the demand side.

Thirdly, there is a need for sufficiency-oriented behavioural change. Most technological innovations in the energy field focus on energy efficiency or renewable energy provision. However, the most significant source of energy savings follows from reductions in energy consumption as such. Such reductions often require new solutions and innovations that aid us in fulfilling our needs through other, less

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energy intensive means and products. These new technologies need to be substitutive for old and more energy intensive ones, not additional to conventional products. Sufficiency also entails the need to get rid of things and to “ex-novate”, or, to phase out products and technologies. This does not necessarily lead to reductions in utility or wealth, rather, to other ways of fulfilling human needs than with energy intensive products and services.

Fourth, climate and energy policies will hardly be successful without integration into other policy fields. As is already well-known in environmental policy, policy integration is extremely hard to achieve in highly diversified state bureaucracies with ministries that often focus on conflicting objectives, such as economic development and habitat protection. In the field of climate and energy policy, the problem is similar. If energy reduction targets and climate-protection are not also implemented within other policy arenas such as in construction, transport, and industrial policy, true success will not be achieved. To the contrary, perverse incentives and economic subsidies that promote fossil fuels or energy intensive production technologies often persist and counteract well-intended climate policies. It therefore seems necessary to foster interaction and integration between different bureaucracies, governmental departments and ministries, while promoting the integration of energy-saving and climate-protection policies.

What does this mean for political decision making?

The links between technological and behavioural solutions call for integrative approaches that address technological innovations and behavioural changes at the same time. Innovative energy technologies such as renewable energies or energy efficient solutions need to be accompanied by support schemes like subsidies, feed-in tariffs or information and education programmes. These different policy instruments address technological and behavioural change from various, not mutually exclusive angles. Tariff structures, price signals and subsidies create economic incentives, helping to create markets for new technologies and steering individuals towards economically rational choices. Information dissemination and clear communication, too, are essential to promoting new lifestyles and alternative ideas of what constitutes a good life. To be effective, however, these different instruments and approaches need to move in similar directions and be integrated in other policy fields.

Bernd Siebenhühner, University of Oldenberg

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The Ethics of the New Environmentalism

" From an environmental perspective, our exceptionalism calls on us not to harmonise ourselves with nature but to impose our will upon the natural world in the service of improving human well-being."

Photo: Jason Coleman

The Ethics of the New Environmentalism Paul Wapner

We are in the midst of a global energy crisis. Peak oil, climate change, increasing demand for fossil fuels and the distant prospect of transitioning to a post-carbon energy economy suggest that humanity is facing unprecedented challenges that threaten the quality and, in many instances, very viability of life. How do we move forward? What are the governance demands of our energy predicament? Is our governance system capable of directing global society toward a genuine sustainable energy future? If so, how can we fashion mechanisms of governance to respond in a meaningful and timely manner?

It is becoming increasingly clear that global governance involves more than governmental action. Economic, social and cultural institutions also shape widespread thought and behaviour. In the following, I focus on the impact of these non-governmental forces on our coming to terms with the energy crisis. Specifically, I concentrate on the role of ethical norms. Our ethical orientations set the direction and pulse of many of our governance choices and efforts. Thus, they must be central to our analyses, prognoses and our overall interpretation of global environmental governance, with regard to energy politics in particular.

Environmental disputes, at their most fundamental level, revolve around different interpretations of humanity’s place on Earth. Since time immemorial, many people have seen humans as part of nature. Homo sapiens are one species among many and thus subject to the same biophysical

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constraints as other creatures. From an environmental perspective, this means that we should strive to live in harmony with the other-than-human world, respecting ecological constraints and honouring ecological interdependence. In contrast to this sensibility is that which sees humans as the exceptional species. Yes, we are subject to nature’s laws but these laws are not absolute. We can outsmart, manipulate, work around or otherwise rise above them by employing our reason and technological abilities. From an environmental perspective, our exceptionalism calls on us not to harmonise ourselves with nature but to impose our will upon the natural world in the service of improving human well-being. The first view can be called the urge toward “naturalism” whereas the second can be called the urge toward “mastery.” Environmentalists and their critics often square-off along these lines.

For decades, environmentalism has been a counter-discourse in global affairs, to the degree that it has questioned the urge towards mastery, seeking to instill a sense of species-humility in the face of growing environmental challenges.

Things are changing within environmentalism. Subscribing to a naturalist orientation, conventional environmentalism has preached a message of personal and collective sacrifice. It has counselled shrinking humanity’s ecological footprint, living lightly on the Earth and otherwise diminishing our ecological impact. It assumes that our increasing numbers, economic might and technological prowess spell ecological harm and ultimately disaster and, thus, has long

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called for reducing all of these as the most fundamental of responsible environmental actions. Today, a new breed of environmentalists is emerging that questions conventional environmentalism. Instead of calling for people to hold back, restrict, reduce or otherwise diminish their ecological presence, this new wave celebrates that part of the human spirit that seeks innovation and enjoys extending humanity’s imprint across the Earth. We see this type of environmentalism being expressed in efforts to design our way out of ecological woes (McDonough and Braungart 2002), technologically surmount issues like climate change and peak oil (Inslee and Hendricks 2007) and leave the whole idea of nature behind as an anachronistic category of environmental analysis (Shellenberger and Nordhaus 2007). This type of environmentalism is not, of course, completely novel. It shares much with ecological modernisation and attempts to confront environmental challenges within contemporary, industrialised societal settings. What is new is the increasingly widespread appeal of this strain of the movement and its ability to generate activist, corporate and governmental action.

There is much promise to the “new environmentalism.” We are now in dire straights when it comes to addressing climate change, peak oil, the incessant demand for fossil fuels and our inability to move quickly to post-carbon economies. In this sense, there simply may not be enough time to embrace a romanticised notion of harmonising ourselves with the natural world and expect people around the planet to subscribe to such an orientation. Moreover, all indications suggest that societies are becoming more technologically advanced, commercially animated and committed to growth in almost all forms. A nostalgic environmentalism aimed at folding ourselves into nature’s ways rather than surmounting them thus may seem increasingly anachronistic. Finally, the new environmentalism promises that we can “have it all”, endless consumption, affluence, increasing human population and the like, as long as we figure out ways to implement systems that will enable us to sustain resources and sinks over time. Who could argue with that? In short, the new environmentalism holds out the hope of addressing the energy crisis without us having to really change our lifestyles or otherwise significantly adjust our societies.

For all its promise, however, the new environmentalism raises significant questions. Is it really forward-looking or will it simply tap into and accelerate the kinds of forces that got us into the energy crisis in the first place? That is, can it actually usher in a new energy paradigm that will shift us toward a genuinely clean energy future or does it represent window-dressing that will, at best, buy us time? Is it so compatible with current economic and social systems that it

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will merely diversify our energy choices without fashioning a genuinely different orientation to our energy lives? These questions arise as one ponders the overall philosophical ethos of the new environmentalism and the future it argues for the environmental movement itself. Where will the new environmentalism lead us? Will it take us into a more humanised, technocratic future animated by a type of design and technological optimism associated with the Promethean thought of environmental sceptics such as Julian Simon (Simon 1996), Simon Young (Young 2006) and Bjorn Lomborg (Lomborg 2001) or will it prefigure a more naturalised world, more in line with the precautionary sensibility that has long guided the environmental movement?

Can it actually usher in a new energy para-

digm that will shift us toward a genuinely

clean energy future or does it represent window-dressing that will, at best, buy us time?

I ask these questions in a sincere manner and fully aware that they have no definitive answers. We cannot evaluate the new environmentalism in either/or terms, as if it were either helpful or not at all so in heralding a sane energy future. Rather, the effects of the new environmentalism turn on how we translate it into practice. In an effort to shape this translation, let me post a few warnings about letting the new environmentalism continue to grow, especially as it relates to the energy crisis, without some caution.

Environmentalism is many things. It expresses itself differently in various locales and is inflected with power relations as power differentials course through environmental affairs and the movement itself. Indeed, these days we are probably better off referring to multiple environmentalisms rather than a single, unified movement. This makes all the more sense as the environmental movement, over the last decade or so, has spanned out to include extensive issues associated with social justice, indigenous peoples’ rights, peace, corporate responsibility and the like (Hawken 2008). At its core, however, environmentalism is an ethical expression. As Leslie Thiele suggests, environmentalism is about extending moral consideration across time, space and species. It involves caring about the well-being of future generations, other creatures and those who live downstream, whether across the neighbourhood, country or world (Thiele 1999). One sees this concern in efforts to protect against climate change, to move beyond peak oil and to usher in a post-carbon energy future. In many ways, the new environmentalism is signifi-

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The Ethics of the New Environmentalism

cantly about extending such moral concern. Its embrace of technological capability, economic growth and instrumental rationality could be seen as a commitment to addressing the energy crisis and thus making the world a better place for all living creatures, including future generations.

There is, nonetheless, something unsettling about the moral character of the new environmentalism. Its promise to deliver a world in which our appetites, desires and customary practices can have free reign if we only alter the material structures of society seems morally thin. It involves bringing in the experts, the technologists, economic advisers and other professional specialists who will design and build a world in which individual, environmental decision making will be rendered insignificant as we will be behaviourally directed to conduct ourselves in an environmentally sound fashion through architecturally designed systems of social life. This raises ethical concerns to the degree that it relieves individuals of having to clarify their moral commitments and take deliberate actions to limit themselves in the service of other’s well-being.

There is, nonetheless, something unsettling about the moral character of the new environmentalism. Its promise to deliver a

world in which our appetites, desires and

customary practices can have free reign if

we only alter the material structures of society seems morally thin

Ethical action, as I understand it, involves deliberation and the conscious choice to restrict acting on one’s desires in deference to the welfare of others. The new environmentalism promises gadgets and systems that will absolve us of such reflection and consideration. Additionally, ethical action entails a sense of humility about oneself and, by extension, the human species. Since at least Aristotle, ethicists have considered humility a virtue whose practice deepens the human character and heightens one’s moral sensitivity.

The new environmentalism dispenses with this to the degree that it calls on us, not necessarily to respect nature’s limits and adjust ourselves to them, but to unpack, understand, outsmart and plough through nature’s biophysical character with the aim of living sustainable lives. Humility is actually a casualty of the new environmentalism.

These concerns about the new environmentalism extend outward to the degree that it, as a principled form of

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thought and practice, offers little insight into the direction of our technological feats. Yes, the most articulate of the new breed talk in terms of resources, sinks and sites and, even if they have the view that these can be greatly expanded or utilised in new ways to ensure sustainability, they offer an environmentalist message many of us can appreciate. What happens, however, when promethean environmentalism confronts difficult questions about the reach of technology and our abilities to shape the Earth’s processes? For example, what does the new environmentalism have to say about geoengineering as a response to climate change? Where is the ethical component in such considerations?

Today, various people are proposing Earth-altering actions to protect ourselves from the dangerous build-up of greenhouse gases. These actions are not about restricting our release of greenhouse gases so much as altering the atmosphere itself to accept more carbon dioxide or at least deflect climate change dangers. For example, today people are proposing putting up orbiting sunshades to block sunlight, fertilising the oceans with iron to grow more phytoplankton to absorb carbon dioxide and pumping sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere to impede solar radiation. Such actions support our unwillingness to curb fossil fuel use and, as such, demand no sense of ecological sacrifice. Rather than call on us to restrict our desires and actions, they propose altering the Earth’s ecological infrastructure. Are these proposals worth undertaking? Should we pursue geo-engineering? Does it represent a viable and desirable response to the energy crisis?

From the perspective of the new environmentalism, we can evaluate geo-engineering in terms of risks and prudence. Will such measures actually work? If so, at what cost? Can we afford the financial burden? While important, these queries do not seem to be enough. Geo-engineering is not simply a matter of technological wizardry whose hazards we need to measure in terms of costs and benefits but it also involves questions about the kinds of human beings we want to be and how we see ourselves fitting into the Earth system. Do we want to impose ourselves yet deeper into and on top of the planet or do we want to find ways of living appropriately in place, as a species among others which has the ability but not necessarily the collective moral character to restrict our forays into the biophysical workings of the Earth? Do we want to cultivate the virtue of humility when it comes to responding to climate change or do we want to push full steam ahead with our acquisitive, mastering selves? As I see it, the new environmentalism offers little insight along these lines. If it has a critique of geoengineering it seems to be, at best, one of dismal prospects for success rather than moral failure.

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In truth, the conflict between the narratives of mastery versus naturalism is not so much a contemporary political dispute but a perennial tension that lives through our societies and even within our individual lives. All of us have the urge to master nature and the impulse to live within its bounds. We tend to accentuate one more than the other at various times and in different political settings but we know and continue to practice both. This is important to keep in mind so we do not demonise the mastery narrative or pretend one can rise above the political fray. Moreover, as mentioned, the mastery orientation must be part of the mix as we respond to the energy crisis. The only question is what part.

In evaluating this, it is imperative to keep in mind the weight of the balance between the mastery and naturalism at this point in history. Since the dawn of modernity, the balance has been increasingly shifting toward the impulse to mastery.

Our attempt to decipher nature’s ways and manipulate them in the service of human well-being has been accelerating for centuries and shows no signs of abatement. We seem committed to run roughshod over the nonhuman world. Given this imbalance and the ethical considerations associated with it, it is worthwhile to cast a critical eye toward the new environmentalism and reveal those parts of it stemming from a mastery tradition. As Oscar Wilde puts it, “In this world there are two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, the other is getting it. The last is the worst.” The mastery narrative promises the possibility of building a world of our own making, with the hope that it will be ecological sustainable.

Pursuing such a route may be profitable. The question becomes: will we want to be part of that world if it is indeed achievable? Will we be the type of people we long to be, in light of our ethical stirrings, in such a world?

We are at a defining moment in history. The energy crisis calls on us to understand and employ global governance in the most urgent and necessary way. This article is not a fundamental critique of technology or the new environmentalism per se, rather it is a cautionary reflection on the way these may shape the trajectory of global environmental governance. I have attempted to expose dangerous impulses that exist between the lines of our efforts to design our way out of the energy challenge. As Bill McDonough writes, “design is a signal of intention” (McDonough 2002, 9). Our pathway toward mastery has been largely un-designed. We barrel ahead with ambiguous intention. Seeing the new environmentalism as the latest manifestation of mastery is useful for clarifying our environmental trajectory and choosing routes to a sustainable energy future.

Actors within the environmental movement must make some decisions about which strains of thought and

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practice to gravitate toward and feed, whether with regard to the energy crisis or other key issues. In doing so, the above reflections should be taken into consideration. Governance cannot simply be about governmental decree or economic incentive. It must also involve ethics. The ethical choices in front of us have enormous implications for the future of environmentalism and our hope to live sustainable, just and morally upstanding lives. The new wave of environmentalism offers much. Particularly in terms of moving energy consumption and production towards a more sustainable track, this new environmentalism should not be unreflectively embraced, but engaged and directed based on longstanding ethical concerns.

Paul Wapner, American University, pwapner@american.edu

Hawken, Paul, 2008. Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Social Movement in History is Restoring Grace, Justice and Beauty to the World. New York: Penguin.

Inslee, Jay, and Bracken Hendricks, 2007, Apollo’s Fire: Igniting American’s Clean Energy Economy. Washington DC: Island Press.

Lomborg, Bjorn, 2001, The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

McDonough, William, and Michael Braungart, 2002, Cradle to Cradle.

New York: North Point Press.

Shellenberger, Michael, and Ted Nordhaus, 2007, Break Through: From the Death of Environmentalism to the Politics of Possibility. New York: Houghton Mifflin.

Simon, Julian, 1996, The Ultimate Resource 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Thiele, Leslie, 1999, Environmentalism for a New Millennium. New York: Oxford University Press.

Young, Simon, 2006, Designer Evolution: A Transhumanist Manifesto.

New York: Prometheus Books.

Photo: Jason Coleman

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Multi-risk Strategy Challenges: The Biofuel Case

Multi-risk Strategy Challenges: The Biofuel Case Jean-Marc, Y. M., Salmon

Photo: Lee Jordan

Initiatives promoting the use of biofuels have been hailed as public policy at its best. Such policies, in the context of industrialised countries with temperate climates such as the US, Germany, France and Spain, have been developed so as to address three major risks: • Climate risk, through the reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions resulting from transport, a key sector with regard to globalisation; • Strategic risks, by decreasing dependence on OPEC countries and the volatile Middle East in general; • Social risks, by brightening the future of disgruntled American and European farmers worried by the WTO’s Doha cycle and by potential agricultural subsidy reductions in both the US and the EU.

Biofuel policies were thus designed as a multi-risk strategy and governments proved eager to embark on regulatory approaches, as, for example, with mandates requiring that a certain percentage of biofuels be blended with conventional fuels. The influence of biofuel policies lies at the intersection of three key economic sectors, the agricultural, the energy and the environmental, and cover ground that most liberal governments have traditionally left to the warped interplay of market forces.

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These policies, however, are increasingly being implicated in multiple crises, and the multi-risk strategy that they embody is quickly unravelling. The failure of the Doha cycle has reduced the pressure on farmers to deviate from food farming and food prices are rising. This rise in agricultural commodity prices is, in turn, leading to increased speculation, turning agricultural investment into what seems like the latest trend, with investment funds and hedge funds forming for potential markets in cities such as Chicago and Milwaukee.

The biofuel policies counter-pressure on OPEC has also bore no fruit. Crude barrel price volatility is very much related to supply and demand and the “seven sisters” marginalisation by oil rich states has not helped with the much needed supply expansion. Oil demand is largely driven by China and other Asian countries, whose needs are indexed on global trade.

Of the multiple risks addressed by biofuel policies, environmental risks are the only risks that such policies may potentially help mitigate. Could sophisticated multi-risk biofuel strategies turn into mere mono-risk strategies? Are biofuel policies so environmentally beneficial that their commitments should be extended?

The answers to such questions are anything but easy.

As with any expansion of agricultural activity, biofuels pol-

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lute the air, water and soil. Evaluations of the environmental impacts resulting from biofuel production, however, remain a research topic and the balance of the associated impacts on water, air and soil damages are, as of yet, controversial. It has been assumed, for example, that argofuels would so reduce GHG emissions as compared to conventional fuels that the other associated environmental impacts would be more than balanced out. Is this assumption valid? Research discussions are presently centred on additional land needed to expand biofuels production so as to satisfy ambitious mandates. In temperate countries, additional biofuels crops could grow on uncultivated agricultural lands or could replace other crops from cultivated lands. Substitution, however, implies that somewhere, either in the same country or far away, uncultivated lands must be cultivated so as to satisfy food demands.

In France, for example, the government has committed itself to a 10% incorporation target by 2015. The additional land needed to achieve this goal could be as much as 2 million hectares, including 1 million hectares of grassland.

Land use conversion is known to release carbon dioxide and to thus alter the GHG balance. Another point of contention is the indirect release of nitrogen dioxide, the determination of which has long been controversial.

In addition to these impacts, it is possible that wheat exports could shrink. Somewhere in the world, land would have to be diverted to compensate the space used for biofuels, but what kind of land-use change would take place and how much carbon dioxide would be released in the process?

Recent studies indicate that in the US, corn-ethanol production and use could negatively impact the transport-related GHG balance. How will rapeseed and wheat, the main components of French biofuels, fare?

A realistic evaluation of the additional land needed to fulfil biofuel targets is crucial if biofuel strategies are to be properly assessed. The competition for land between Biofuel, fibre and food crop production is inducing steep increases of cereal and oleaginous product prices. In recent years, half of the excess demand has been pinned on the rising production of biofuels. If the US and French governments stick to their targets, a return to lower prices could be conceivably blocked. Productivity increases would be insufficient to offset the diversion of food products towards biofuel. The situation will prove even bleaker if the EU joins the fray with a 10% incorporation target by 2020. Indeed, the European Environmental Agency’s scientific committee has recently warned against such a target.

Potential increases in food prices were not taken into consideration when drawing up biofuel strategies. It was therefore assumed that when gas prices rose, biofuels

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from temperate countries would someday become competitive with conventional fuels. Recent events suggest that food prices are impacted by oil price volatility, as fertilisers are produced mainly from oil and tractors use gas derived from oil, to name a few examples. While the oil crisis may have been anticipated, the food crisis was certainly not.

In an increasingly connected world, the connections and spill over effects between world crises must be expected.

Biofuel strategy evaluations in temperate countries suggest that national multi-risk strategies are not modern enough and that their initial objectives may well be defeated, should the connections between global risks not be taken into account.

Jean-Marc, Y. M., Salmon, TELECOM & Management SudParis, jmsalmon@gmail.com References Fargione F., Hill J., Tillman D. Polasky S. & Hawthorne P., 2008, Land-clearing and the biofuel debt, Science 319, pp. 1235-1238. www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1152747/DCI OECD-FAO, 2008, Agricultural Outlook 2007-2016, OECD Publishing, Paris. http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/6/10/38893266.pdf Poux, X., Chevillotte, G., 2008, Elaboration de scénarios contrastés d’usages des sols agricoles associés aux agrocarburants, AscA, Paris.

Searchinger T., Heimlich R., Houghton R.A., Dong F., Elobeid A., Fabiosa J., Tokgoz S., Hayes D., et Yu T., 2008, Use of US croplands for Biofuels Increases Greenhouses Gases through Emissions from Land-Use Change: Science volume 319, n° 5867, pp. 1238-1240 www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/1151861/DCI

Photo: Lee Jordan

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Sustainable Energy from Renewable Biological Resources: The case of sugarcane bagasse

Sustainable Energy from Renewable Biological Resources:The case of sugarcane bagasse Shyam Nath

Environmental sustainability is a precondition for sustainable economic development, yet negative the environmental externalities resulting from the electric power markets that so essential to the growth of GDP around the world, contribute extensively to the erosion of such sustainability. Acid rain, depletion of ozone, and climate change are attributable to the use of non-renewable resources such as fossil fuels, natural gas and coal for power generation. The need to find alternative sources of energy from renewable resources is thus fundamental to meeting the objective of environmental sustainability. Many sources of renewable energy exist and are being used today, including wind, solar radiation, ocean currents, water and nuclear. Agricultural crops such as maize and sugarcane bagasse are also increasing in importance

The use of sugarcane bagasse as an alternative energy source has assumed a special significance in sugarcane producing countries. Sugarcane is a major commercial agricultural crop in the vast majority of African countries. One of the plants with the highest bioconversion efficiency in terms of using solar energy for photosynthesis, this plant is able to fix 55 tonnes of dry matter per hectare of land on an annually renewable basis. Under current practices, about half of this dry matter is harvested in the form of cane stalk for sugar recovery with the fibrous fraction, known as bagasse, combusted to fulfil the energy requirements of the sugar recovery process. A number of countries, in particular those devoid of fossil fuels, have implemented bagasse based energy production so as to

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minimise the use of co-generated energy from steam and electricity during sugarcane processing. The excess electricity can then be exported to the power grid.

Energy status in Mauritius and the role of bagasse Mauritius is an island country with limited renewable energy resources and no known oil, gas or coal reserves. Its main, locally available energy resources include hydropower and sugarcane biomass consisting of bagasse as well as the cane tops and leaves. Hydropower and power exported to the grid from bagasse-based sugarcane factories amounts to 22 and 13% of the total power supply to the public grid of the Central Electricity Board, respectively. The remaining 65% of the demand is met by imports. While nine stations almost fully exploit the hydropower potential of the island, sugarcane bagasse was generally used inefficiently in the past, only meeting internal power requirements for the cane processing itself. This situation has changed in recent years, however, with 10 out of 11 factories currently exporting electricity to the grid during crop season. Of these, three factories supplement their energy needs with coal during the intercrop period when sugar cane bagasse is not in supply. Table 1 illustrates this increasing use of bagasse, showing how the amount of bagassebased electricity exported jumped from 84GWh in 1995 to 347GWh in 2007.

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Sustainable Energy from Renewable Biological Resources: The case of sugarcane bagasse

The demand for electricity in Mauritius has increased dramatically due to rapid economic growth in sectors such as export processing and international tourism.

Residential power demand has also risen with an increased demand for electrical appliances and increasing amounts of construction. These developments called for additional investment in the public electric utility and bagasse based electricity was one clear alternative for such investment. Emphasis was placed on private sector investment as a substitute for public sector investment in bagasse cum coal plants. In pursuing this alternative, the bagasse energy development project was designed, known as the Sugar Sector Action plan, wherein the government and the private sector helped restructure the sugar industry, with the increased use of by products such as bagasse for electricity production as one of the major objectives.

sought to remedy this through a number of incentives. Investors are now allowed to raise tax-free debentures for bagassebased electricity generation, as well as for sugar factory modernisation. Furthermore, the performance-linked rebate on export duties has been extended to electricity producers who use their own bagasse as well as to millers who sell bagasse to power stations. A proportion of the capital expenditure incurred by the installation of efficient equipment to enhance bagasse-based energy generation has been made entitled to a refund of export duties and finally, improvements in mill efficiency have been highlighted, with the aim to achieve surplus bagasse production that can then be provided to power plants. With such incentives, the bagasse energy development project in Mauritius has proved to be extremely successful, as evinced by the statistics on the growth of energy generation in bagasse cum plants reported in Table 1.

Constraints to and incentives of bagasse energy development

Replication opportunities and sustainability of bagasse energy

Price of Bagasse and Centralisation of Cane Milling Activities Sugarcane electric plants rely on huge amounts of bagasse from the satellite factories, which price their bagasse based on the price of coal and at the condensation mode of operation. This resulted in inflated costs, which therefore had a negative impact on the financial viability of the energy project, an issue that has since been resolved through consolidation of cane milling activities.

The success of bagasse based energy cogeneration in Mauritius can be replicated in almost all cane sugar producing countries of the African continent. In this regard, the sharing of experiences can offer various opportunities for training, especially given the variety of power plants and their different capacities, operating pressures and levels of efficiency.

Table 2 gives statistics on sugarcane production in African countries. The potential amount of electricity that can be exported to the grid using steam pressures of 44 and 82 bars, two commercially proven technologies, have also been determined on the basis of results obtained in Mauritius. It must be highlighted that such plants require a minimum cane crushing capacity of 200 to 300 tonnes of cane per hour. Many of the African countries have cane production well below these capacities, however, the cane industry in a number of these countries is currently undergoing modernisation. There is, therefore, merit in coupling these plants with cogeneration facilities.

Funding and the Fiscal Framework Energy projects such as the bagasse energy development project require a relatively large investment, which has made them generally unattractive. The government, therefore, has

Lessons learnt and suggestions The main lesson to be learnt from these experiences is that the development of bagasse-based electricity generation in Mauritius required a stronger linkage between developments in the sugar industry and those in the power sector, as well as a greater emphasis on multipurpose benefits of base-load power from bagasse/coal plants. Strong government sup-

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Sustainable Energy from Renewable Biological Resources: The case of sugarcane bagasse

port in clearly defining policy with respect to bagasse energy development is critical to the successful substitution of imported fossil fuels with bagasse. It is also imperative that conditions enabling all stakeholders to participate in the whole process while engendering a transparent flow of information be created. In the case of Mauritius, the World Bank played a key role in providing the necessary support for areas in which the local stakeholders had little or no experience, acting as an honest broker among them.

Prior to start of a bagasse power plant, it is of utmost importance that a detailed feasibility analysis, including a reliable cost estimate for a bagasse coal plant and an agreement on a financing plan from the private entrepreneur in question are made available, so that delays in project implementation may be prevented. In terms of the project conception stage, the Mauritian experience shows that centralised milling activities through the consolidation of operations are favourable to bagasse power plants located on a regional basis. Thus, the dual production of sugar and electricity in the most efficient plants was emphasised as opposed to individual plants using their own bagasse as well as that obtained from a cluster of other sugar factories.

Bagasse power development has multiple benefits.

It is associated with environmental advantages, offering a diversified alternative and a secure source of power from a locally available and renewable resource as compared to imported oil. It also brings additional revenue to the cane sugar industry and will become a revenue source of particular significance for Mauritius, which will be faced with a 39% cut in sugar price from EU as of 2009.

Countries like Mauritius may also consider sugarcane cultivation strictly for electricity and ethanol production. It must be said, however, that this shift from sugar to electricity and ethanol production will also have an impact on the sugarcane variety that countries choose to produce, signalling a new preference for sugarcane with more bagasse as opposed to varieties with higher sugar content.

Should sugarcane cultivation for electricity and ethanol production increase, the fact that coal is used as a substitute during the intercrop period when bagasse is not in supply is yet another important issue to consider. The negative externalities due to coal can and should be mitigated by finding alternative, non-fossil fuel based energy sources.

Environmentally friendly alternatives worth considering include the use of solar power, wind power and ocean currents.

Replacing coal with such energy sources would go a long way in meeting the objective of sustainable energy.

The majority of the countries in the African continent are endowed with agroclimatic conditions that are conductive to sugarcane production. With proper investment and management of this resource, high yields of usable electricity are potentially obtainable.

The sugarcane plant is a crop known for its high bioconversion efficiency, with the ability to fix large amounts of atmospheric carbon into its biomass. Recovery of the sugar from this biomass has been the main interest until recently, for now this biomass is starting to be valued as a major renewable energy resource in cane sugar producing countries as well.

In comparison with other energy carriers, electricity from bagasse has been shown to be the most commercially viable for island states such as Mauritius and RĂŠunion, which are devoid of any fossil fuel. The same may hold true for many countries on the African continent, where around 10,000GWh of electricity are potentially exportable to the grid.

Power sector reforms in African countries should thus take advantage of this cogeneration option through inclusion of independent power producers that undertake power generation. Opportunities for the replication of the success achieved in countries such as Mauritius should be looked into for others in the region as well.

The sugarcane bagasse cogeneration technology offers many benefits. An environmentally friendly technology, it also has the potential to attract funds from international agencies like the GEF, the Prototype Carbon Fund and Activities Implemented Jointly under the Kyoto Protocol. Exploitation of sugarcane bagasse as a renewable energy resource should thus carry a high priority in the context of global warming.

The option, successfully implemented in Mauritius, should especially be given serious consideration in other cane sugar producing countries on the African continent.

Some parts of this text are derived from a chapter entitled, “Energy from Renewable Natural Resources: Lessons from Sugarcane Bagasse Energy Cogeneration in Mauritius� by Kashyap Deepchand and Shyam Nath in Saving Small and Island States from Environmental and Natural Resource Challenges, Commonwealth Secretariat, London (Forthcoming, 2009).

Shyam Nath, Professor of Economics, University of Mauritius (snath@uom. ac.mu;snathg4@yahoo.co.uk)

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ESSP Research of Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability

Photo copyright Randy and Sharon Green

ESSP Research on Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability: Tapping GEC Programme-Wide Expertise for the Benefit of Science and Society Gernot Klepper, Pep Canadell, Rik Leemans, Jean Pierre Ometto, Anand Patwardhan, and Martin Rice

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The Earth System Science Partnership (ESSP), a partnership of four international global environmental change research programmes dedicated to the integrated study of various aspects of the changing Earth System and its implications for global and regional sustainability, provides a key example of work on the interface of science and policy. Its newest research initiative, Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability, sets a new benchmark for cooperation on biofuels research. The initiative will adopt a multi-stakeholder approach, tapping into expertise of numerous global environmental change programmes and projects as well as intergovernmental agencies and the policy making community.

There have been many earlier studies on bioenergy but this initiative is unique in that it develops an Earth System approach to bioenergy, its opportunities and constraints, its contribution to stabilizing atmospheric CO2 as well as its tradeoffs and synergies for engaging in sustainable development pathways. The study also provides ample opportunities to evaluate the effects of biomass energy production on food availability and prices, water availability, water pollution, and biodiversity, in addition to analysing the capacity of bioenergy in climate protection. The overarching goal is, therefore,

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to identify the major opportunities and constraints for bioenergy in the context of Earth system sustainability. Although in its infancy, such an initiative provides an apt example of just the type of policy relevant research needed. The following sections will capture highlights from the initiative’s scoping workshop, outlining its planned progression.

Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability: Research Questions and Issues There are now several important natural resources which cannot keep pace with the increasing demand for their services.

Productive land is one of these resources. Land is required for many crucial human activities such as the production of food and fibre, settlements, the production of bioenergy and the provision of many other services. At the same time, as the need for more land is growing, the availability of fertile land is threatened by the effects of desertification and climate change.

Human influence on resource needs and on the interplay between the different demands placed on land resources is determined by many factors. How land is used and which technologies are adopted is as important as the availability of these technologies, the ways in which land use is regulated by legal frameworks and political institutions, the

influence of cultural norms on land use practices as well as the distribution of land use rights.

A conflict between meeting the increasing demand for food from a growing and more prosperous world population and the desire to replace fossil fuels with bioenergy, among other renewable energy sources, has become apparent over the last few years. A long-term trend of falling food prices has ended and has been replaced by soaring world market prices for grains and oilseeds. In many countries, this has led to dramatic price increases for basic foodstuffs, which has induced social unrest and could also increase the number of people living in hunger. At the same time, the production of biofuels has been increasing at an astonishing rate, such that the increase in food prices has been attributed to the expansion of biofuel production.

Especially in the transport sector, biofuels are currently the only significant energy source that can partially replace gasoline and diesel refined from fossil oil. The socalled first generation biofueis require agricultural crops such as grain, sugar cane, sugar beet or oilseed as feedstock and thus directly compete with food production for scarce fertile land resources.

This political conflict between the attempts to eradicate hunger both through affordable food prices and rising incomes, and the desire to replace fossil energy sources with renewable bioenergy addresses only a fraction of the choices

Photo copyright Randy and Sharon Green

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that societies need to make in order to achieve a significant contribution of bioenergy while maintaining Earth sustainability. The Earth’s land area does not only provide food and bioenergy, it is also used and will be needed increasingly for providing living and recreational space for a growing world population as well as for preserving essential biodiversity services that are required to keep the Earth system stable.

This research initiative on bioenergy will, therefore, address several major research questions: 1. How much bioenergy can be grown in sustainable ways (in relation to opportunity cost, assessment of land availability, quality and optimality)?

2. What are plausible bioenergy scenarios?

3. How vulnerable are bioenergy systems to climate change?

4. How climate-protective are biofuels?

5. How can sustainability standards for bioenergy systems be defined?

These research questions will be further elaborated in the next sections.

How much bioenergy can be grown in sustainable ways?

There are several approaches, which are largely complementary, to addressing this research question. These include the establishment of opportunity costs (an economic approach), the establishment of resilient systems and pathways (a systems approach) or assessing land availability, land quality and optimal usage. Such assessments show what can we do with those lands, how one can overlay potentials and constraints and how tradeoffs and synergies can be determined.

The results will show that there are combinations that work better than others for any given region.

Opportunity costs It is important to note that, although opportunity cost approaches are traditionally associated with short-term economic profits, we use this approach as one that would be combined with principles to design long-term resilient systems. This allows for an exploration of the basic concepts and tools of economic opportunity cost in conjunction with resilience approaches in complex system science.

Task 1: Natural and economic potentials for additional food and bioenergy production: Exploring new modelling approaches

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There are serious uncertainties concerning the potential to convert additional land currently not used commercially, to produce additional biomass for meeting the increasing demand for food and bioenergy. Current estimates come from biogeochemical model analyses that try to determine the areas suitable for increased biomass production, as well as from economic models focussing on supply dynamics in agricultural markets. The two approaches, however, have not yet been connected. In addition, the agricultural market models, in general, do not consider the economy wide repercussions of large changes in agricultural markets, as observed recently. Different models that look at the repercussions from agricultural markets towards the rest of the economy and vice versa should, therefore, complement the analyses of agricultural markets.

In this light, one or more workshops will be planned with the aim of convening modellers from the natural sciences and economics in order to explore how the different aspects of land use change and land use potentials can be brought together. Only such an effort can produce a balanced and integrated view of the future of food and bioenergy potentials. An opportunity to interact on possible future developments of integrated land use potential assessments should be provided, taking both natural and socio-economic potentials and restrictions into consideration.

Assessment of land availability and quality From a biophysical perspective, there is an interest to assess how much land would be available for bioenergy production that would not compete with other land uses.This has brought the research community together to explore the availability of land that is currently not in use as a simple criterion to ensure sustainability. Abandoned land, marginal land, waste land or land under optimal productivity is emphasised. There is also a need to develop a functional definition of these types of lands. Once the availability of this type of land has been identified, it will be a combination of social and technical dimensions that will determine the actual potential of those lands to become productive (which links with task 1). This approach needs to include exploring lands with productivity under its realisable capacities, thereby allowing for additional cropping to take place.

Task 2: Top-down assessment of land availability Implementation of task 2 will involve the following steps: • Using existing global maps and datasets of land use and land cover to determine the extent of marginal, abandoned, degraded and waste lands

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and then synthesising the criteria, indicators and estimates underlying each category.

• Generating a biophsyical carbon map so as to determine the potential productivity on the available lands.

• Analysing to which extent these existing classifications are useful to understanding what new land is available for bioenergy crops as well as its potential.

• Identifying and developing sustainability filters that would exclude land such as conservation areas, areas with step topography, areas of high biodiversity areas and others from consideration for bioenergy production The resulting comprehensive syntheses products are urgently needed.

Task 3: Bottom-up assessment of land availability We propose to develop a number of regional case studies with a critical analysis of land use, land availability, productivity and opportunity costs based on the regional socioeconomic realities and governance capacity. The ways in which global forces impact these cases must also be evaluated. This would be done by gathering regional and national assessments and bringing a wide group of experts and stakeholders for validations, as well as to complement information on the possibilities and constraints with more detail. In so doing, we will also address the following questions: • Where is additional carbon/bioenergy potential?

• What types of assessment approaches have been used in each case?

• Evaluations of existing local and regional datasets, appraisals of the need to establish new databases and assessment of the different resources will be necessary.

• Why has this potential not been realised?

• The checking of yield gaps and an understanding of what biophysical and socioeconomic constraints are responsible for these gaps will be necessary.

• Where are the opportunity costs?

• If we want to achieve these targets, what is required and what is the cost? Tradeoffs will need to be built in.

Candidate regions for the bottom-up assessment of land availability include South America (Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay); Central America (Guatemala, Honduras and Southern Mexico); Others (China, India and Southern Africa).

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Task 4: Assimilation of top-down and bottom-up information to produce realistic estimates of bioenergy potential Tasks will include: • The creation of global maps of marginal land by iteration between the bottom-up and top-down estimates • The further development and use of biogeochemical and integrative assessment models to estimate the potential for bioenergy production • Outlining of the options for transition to bioenergy, taking into account the regional realities with emerging markets, financial incentives, etc.

• Identification of the sustainability criteria that should underpin any new land-use development • Scenario development of bioenergy production over time incorporating climate change, technological innovation and the testing of multiple tradeoffs, while constrained by sustainable criteria, etc.

Task 5: EBI Workshop on Bioenergy Crop Modelling and Land Use ( 9-10 October 2008 EBI, Calvin Lab, UC-Berkeley) A bioenergy cropland use and modeling workshop, was held in mid-October 2008. This workshop focused on further defining abandoned and marginal land distributions for current and developing bioenergy lignocellulosic crops, as well as designing a bioenergy crop modelling baseline benchmark for validation. This will lead to a well-planned strategy to understand bioenergy crop production potentials on marginal and abandoned lands.

Assessing for optimality A first approach is to test the resolution of tradeoffs and synergies of multiple bioenergy pathways in order to ensure regional and global sustainability of bioenergy expansion.

A key example of tradeoffs involves the water allocation for food, bioenergy, industry and human consumption. A second example is between carbon storage and energy production, whereby a synergy would take place if a biofuel crop could also contribute to long term soil carbon sequestration.

This begs the question, do we want to optimise a system to produce bioenergy so as to displace fossil fuel emissions or rather to sequester carbon so as to remove atmospheric CO2? This example is closely linked to the choice of plant functional types, including the choice between annuals versus perennials, in parallel with the environment and economics of an ongoing business as usual bioenergy production.

Both examples require the consideration of environmental,

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social and economic aspects and, hence, further emphasise the uniqueness of this bioenergy study from an Earth system analysis perspective.

What are plausible bioenergy scenarios?

Scenario development is important and can proceed in four steps. First, narrative land use storylines that focus on bioenergy development and that are consistent with global or regional energy scenarios must be developed. These narratives should consider resource competition and define clear environmental targets. However, for the final scenario, it is more important to focus on the pathways to reach a target rather than the targets themselves. Second, different dimensions of the choices to be made must be identified and the parameterisation based on global storylines, regional priorities as well as constraints must be provided. Third, feasible pathways to meet bioenergy targets should be identified that take technological availability, resource constraints and regional priorities into account. Finally, scenarios to determine and quantify interactions, tradeoffs and synergies in terms of a common set of system dimensions should be assessed.

Scenario development tasks include: • Establishing links to existing or ongoing scenario work.

• Defining dimensions and their contrasting endpoints of choices, which can be used in the scenario story lines.

•

•

• • •

Incorporating various bioenergy systems keeping technology issues related to feedstock types and productivity, biomass use and conversion, and agricultural technologies in mind.

Linking to all the other resources such as water, marginal land, intensification potential and biodiversity impacts.

Establishing a dialogue between the global and regional levels to achieve consistency.

Assessment of scenario and learning Communicating and capacity development.

How vulnerable are bioenergy systems to climate change?

Climate change is predicted to shift temperature and precipitation patterns as well as increase climate variability in the future and, therefore, pose an inherently greater risk to land based industries. As large scale land transformation is driven by socioeconomic changes at the farm and industrial levels, climate change and its climate variability component must be evaluated to avoid creating risks for new agricultural systems. Climate change and climate variability can also put the production of both food and energy at risk.

Examples of great success, such as Mauritius where 40% of all energy comes from biofuels, require further analysis to ensure the resilience of food and energy production systems. Target regions should, for example, include semi-arid

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regions and Sub-Saharan Africa. The integrated assessment tools and a series of comprehensive tasks have yet to be further elaborated.

How climate-protective are biofuels?

Concerning the full consequences on radiative forcing including changes in surface albedo and carbon sequestration of bioenergy pathways, the industrial, ecological environmental life cycles of land need to be considered. The first involves cultivation and harvesting aspects and should include a full greenhouse gas lifecycle, also considering, for example, fertiliser use and energy requirements for machinery. It is also important to assess all co-products, which is relatively simple in terms of electricity and heat co-generation but extremely difficult for others. The ecological life-cycle involves the shift from emissions per GigaJoule biofuel or per volume-km to emissions per ha y-1, as well as the required land use changes and the consequent carbon lost from ecosystems. An emerging concept here is the Ecosystem Carbon Repayment Time (ECRT). The environmental lifecycle involves all greenhouse gases, aerosols, sot and biophysical factors such as reflectivity (albedo), evaporation, and surface roughness. All factors influence the radiative forcing balance of the atmosphere.

Task 6: Develop Approaches to Assess a Full Radiative Forcing This task will extend the mandate of the Full Radiative Forcing activity of the Global Carbon Project, the general goal of which is to develop a complete picture of the global carbon

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cycle, to include biofuels. At present the group is focusing on plantations for carbon sequestration.

How should sustainability standards for bioenergy systems be defined?

Numerous countries are developing bioenergy plans, yet many have little experience or exposure to the larger issue of sustainability pathways, both at the regional and global levels. The development of sustainability guidelines with principles general enough to be useful to countries around the world that are beginning to develop their bioenergy plans, is envisioned.

One of the first steps in accomplishing this was a presentation and discussion of bioenergy at the Policy Dialogue, Energy, Sustainability and Societal Change, in Santa Barbara, California, USA. This dialogue strongly focussed on the opportunities to provide the world with sustainable and reliable energy as well as the role of science and policy in tackling key energy issues. The opportunities not only included alternative and renewable energy sources but also the required changes in institutional frameworks, behavioural patterns and lifestyles. The potentials for and constraints of bioenergy were presented discussed with an important outcome being to stress the importance of mutual learning. It became clear that with regard to bioenergy as will so many other energy themes, such learning must take place in an integrated way, involving natural scientists, engineers and social scientists on one hand, and policymakers and other stakeholders on the other.

In striving for such mutual learning, research questions must be addressed in a timely manner. The results of global and case studies on the world’s most pressing issues, such as bioenergy for the promotion of a sustainable energy future, must be both relevant to the needs of stakeholders and clearly communicated. It is with this in mind that ESSP will carry out its Bioenergy and Earth Sustainability initiative.

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What is Asked of Us

What is Asked of Us: A Clarion Call to Scientists at an Urgent Time Susanne C. Moser

In a recent contribution to this newsletter that introduced and discussed the revised IHDP strategic research plan,1 I applauded the organisation’s explicit call to better connect human dimensions science with the world of management and policy-making.2 Soon after, I had the opportunity to witness first hand one of the ways in which IHDP plans to implement this strategic goal: the science-policy dialogue in Santa Barbara, California on Energy, Sustainability and Societal change, thoughtfully organised by Ernst Urlich von Weizsäcker, Oran Young, Andreas Rechkemmer and their colleagues. After two days in the company of some of the smartest people in our field, I sensed once again the great urgency for action on our collective knowledge and caring, for carefully wetted wisdom about energy and climate change and for the magnitude of the policy and behavioral changes needed to address the interrelated climate-energy-sustainability challenges adequately. The irony of participating in a science-policy dialogue in which scientists talked almost exclusively amongst themselves, with only one representative of the policy world, Marty Blum, the Mayor of Santa Barbara and only one from the world of communication, Mia Navarro, New York Times reporter, both present for a couple of hours, only heightened that urgency.

To be fair, things didn’t pan out that way for want of trying. IHDP staff made valiant efforts to invite practitioners and accommodate their schedules, yet commitments remained tentative and in the end we had a great workshop on

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what could and should be done… without an audience. Maybe no other outcome could have made more apparent how difficult it actually is to forge not just a one-time science-policy dialogue but an ongoing relationship between researchers and practitioners. Maybe no other constellation could have put the question back to us more pressingly: What is asked of us?

What changes do we human dimensions researchers really need to make to connect our scientific understanding to the policy and decision makers with the power to act on it?

The Persistent Disconnect The juxtaposition of insights and action was stark and classic. On the one hand, the urgency emerging from the clearly established scientific trends in energy consumption, economic development and climate change (see the article in this newsletter by Ernst Urlich von Weizsäcker) well understood by the scientific intelligentia present in the room. On the other hand, two radically different sets of policy actors: those who are already deeply engaged, clearly in a hurry to develop policy responses and who need very specific, decision-relevant information from scientists and those who have yet to be mobilised to even begin thinking about the tremendous challenges ahead. A handful of engaged scientists is trying to help the impatient former, yet can’t always provide answers unambiguously or fast enough, as made

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apparent by excellent keynote presentations by Frans Berkhout and Carlo Jaeger. Most can’t be bothered to engage in efforts to reach out to the recalcitrant latter. Between those two extremes are the many, willing policymakers who, in 2008, still ask frighteningly fundamental questions such as, “is the sea level really rising?” yet can’t get that answer from the experts at their local universities. For reasons long and well understood including cultural norms, institutional policies and disincentives, linguistic disconnects, differences in working style, self-perception, time constraints, purpose and persistent misperceptions about the needs and capabilities of the other side, scientists and practitioners continue on their respective courses like ships in the night, never meeting to match potentially relevant science with pressing policy decisions.3 Unfortunately, providing effective scientific decision support is still not the modus operandi of most scientists.

The few that do, already struggle, and are likely to not keep pace with a rapidly increasing demand for answers.

The End of Business as Usual The question thus begs to be asked: If we took our own scientific findings about the state of the climate and biosphere really seriously, or maybe not just seriously, but personally, would we not have to act differently in our own work? In light of the urgency of accelerating global change processes, can we afford to continue to do our science as most of us have always done in distant isolation from policy and decision-makers? And if we were inclined to modify our own ingrained habits of working and willing to step outside our comfort zones of4 the walls of the ivory tower, then exactly how would we conduct our science differently? How would we need to change and tackle the obstacles that obstruct change, to work more effectively with decision-makers? What do we know from our own human dimensions research about how to affect change?

Similar questions could be asked for the needed changes in the world of policy and decision-making. I will not ask them here, important complements as they may be, because my goal is to critically probe our own professional conduct, or that of the world of science. Clearly, for science and decision-making to better connect, changes are needed within academia and the world of practice, leading ultimately to more frequent, longer-lasting, and more effective interactions at the science-policy interface.

Affecting Change in Our Midst Based on the insights gained from the social studies of science and the emerging science of decision support in addi-

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tion to years of working at and studying the science-practice interface myself, I offer seven challenges to us in academia.

Adopting a Learning Orientation As our own actions hurl us ever more quickly into a world that is, itself, changing rapidly, what we thought we already knew yesterday may no longer apply or work tomorrow.

That means we need to adopt, as the most basic stance in our work, a learning orientation as maybe the only guarantee against hubris in the face of the fundamental uncertainty about where we are headed. Definitions of professional achievement must not just reflect what we know and have accomplished, but our willingness and humility to not know and learn from and with others. Of course, scientists already prize themselves for being constitutionally learning-oriented, always interested in pushing back the frontiers of knowledge, always looking for the new. But are we really? In the world of information overload, many of us complain about the lack of space and time to “really” think and explore new areas of interest. Moreover, the truly difficult issues that need addressing, as many have recognised, are interdisciplinary, but how many of us spend time in the aisles of the library that hold the journals of other disciplines? Since the advent of Google Scholar and other web-based search engines, it seems “crossing the aisle” has become easier, but our attention span past the first few screens, it seems, has simultaneously diminished, leading us to call on a diminishing breadth of often only more recent intellectual insights.4 Understanding, Connecting, and Intervening at Multiple Scales We have important insights from a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary efforts that change in terms of the ecological, geophysical or social is multi-scalar, with so-called slow variables controlling large-scale features of a system and typically more difficult to change, faster, and more easily impacted variables controlling smaller-scale processes. Between them are cross-scale connections that work in both directions to affect the dynamics of the entire system.5 Federal laws such as a yet-to-be instituted national mechanism in the US to reduce carbon emissions tend to be slow to emerge, and once in place, hard to fundamentally change or remove. Yet their reach is broad, influencing state and local actions, businesses and entire sectors. Distributed experiments with legal or market mechanisms can be instrumental, in turn, in shaping which federal mechanism gets adopted nationally. To support societal change toward sustainable energy futures and climate-resilience, understanding the slow and fast variables as levers that can be moved to help accelerate and move us toward desirable change, and to understand the cross-scale

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What is Asked of Us

and cross-sector interactions between them is a daunting research challenge. Yet identifying the most policy-relevant and urgent research questions cannot be done by scientists alone, but should be done in collaboration with decision-makers. Focussing our research and outreach on just one scale is incommensurate with the problems that need solving.

Courage to Do Unusual Business Ending business as usual, does not mean ending business. It means doing unusual business. For scientists, this may entail stepping more often outside the ivory tower and approaching local, state or national decision-makers to jointly explore possible areas of decision support. Learning from colleagues already engaged in the world of practice or with the public on how to interact, communicate and engage most effectively would be a great first step. There are “best practices” in decision support and communication that most of us did not learn in graduate school. There is no need or time to reinvent the wheel! (See, for example, the forthcoming NRC report on Strategies and Methods for Climate-Related Decision Support).6

Unusual business may also imply doing even more difficult things than we already attempt, for example, slowing down in the face of great urgency. This may mean slowing down long enough to rethink curricula and educate students, the future researchers and decision-makers, in skills that may be highly sought after in an increasingly challenging world such as communication, facilitation, conflict resolution and creative problem solving systems as opposed to narrowly disciplinary or symptomatic thinking. Or slowing down enough to self-reflect and make the difficult changes in our own professional behaviour.

Opening Up Space for Difficult Dialogues In a rapidly changing world, we will face mounting challenges, some too difficult to even put on our mental, much less political agendas. Examples range from changes that may be needed in treasured pieces of legislation such as endangered species protection, flood insurance, refugee policies and even basic constitutional tenants, to various forms of self-regulation that we may need to accept (and at what price?) if we are to move to a low-carbon future, to the possible realignment of personal and public rights and responsibilities in the social contract we have with each other. And these are just the “peaceful” examples. To manage such difficult changes over long periods of time, for instance, multiple generations as opposed to issue attention cycles, a business quarter, the length of a campaign, an election term or even a career, we will need compelling, positive visions to sustain us. Thus, as one possible democratic stop-gap measure in a world quite

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possibly pressured into more technocratic, less democratic and faster decision-making, we need to create open fora for public dialogue. Some of these will be educational, others creative and constructive and yet others potentially controversial, full of conflict or even explosive. These will be, in short, difficult dialogues. Few of us are skilled in participating in such dialogues, much less facilitating them. Yet we need them, and urgently so. Universities are well positioned to open such fora, yet we must acquire the skills to facilitate them. Just providing knowledge, even if communicated well, without offering spaces to discuss the implications, will no longer suffice. If sustainability were something we could achieve by holding hands and singing “kumbaya” despite all our differences, we’d already be there!

Re-Designing Feedback into Our Systems Feedback is the essential element in any system that regulates its behaviour over time. Professional rewards and promotion criteria “regulate” our work life. It’s been said many times that the feedback system in place for academics, despite numerous calls for public engagement and interaction with the potential users of information, simply does not encourage such interaction, and in fact, can punish us for doing so, especially pre-tenure. Similarly, society has far too many incentives that encourage or allow the reckless use of energy, fossil fuels and natural resources, and far too few or only with much delay that tell us that such behaviour is ultimately life-threatening and self-defeating. It is a high priority for

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novation or put in place a new rule. Leadership in this sense is not limited to those at the top. It refers to being a leader wherever we are. Whether we are scientists, administrators in academia or whether we work in the world of practice, the dual imperative of leadership is to help increase the motivation and intention to change, while removing or reducing the barriers that keep us stuck where we are and doing “what we’ve always done”. Continuing what we’ve always done will get us exactly where we’re headed.

research to help identify, measure, and communicate new, more appropriate indicators of environmental and societal change that shorten the distance between what we do and what impact such behaviours have socially and environmentally. Since the lag times in human and climatic systems are naturally long, we need meaningful feedback more quickly and more often, to redirect our behaviour. We also need indicators of positive change, as it unfolds, especially because the global environment will not be giving us positive feedback for all our hard efforts any time soon. Thus, a critical role for human dimensions researchers, again, in collaboration with university administrators, decision-makers, and the public, is to identify what feedbacks are important in producing certain behaviours and then help reset, remove or replace them.

Not the least will be the feedbacks that will induce us to become researchers interested in working with practitioners and conducing use-inspired science.

__________________________.

Space for the unknown is what this header means. The seventh challenge is to make room for not knowing, for what is yet to emerge complete with more problems and unimagined solutions. It calls on us to expect surprise. It stands for the intention to make room for human ingenuity and creativity.

It returns us to a sense of humility that underlies the learning orientation mentioned above. It is also the space for the wisdom that is greater than that of any one of us alone. And it reflects the recognition that less is sometimes more. It is meant as a visible reminder of the need to make room for the voices missing from any discussion. As such, it is maybe the most uncomfortable of the challenges posed here. It is the space needed for listening into the silence when we ask ourselves, each of us individually: What is asked of me?

Susanne Moser, Susanne Moser Research & Consulting, Santa Cruz, CA, promundi@susannemoser.com and Research Associate, University of California-Santa Cruz, Institute for Marine Sciences.

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

IHDP (2007). Strategic Plan 2007-2015: Framing Worldwide Research on the Human Dimensions of Global Change. Bonn, Germany. Available at: http://www.ihdp.uni-bonn.de/Pdf_files/WebStratPlan.pdf.

Moser, Susanne C. (2008). A new charge: Engaging at the sciencepractice interface. IHDP Update 1: 18-21.

National Research Council (forthcoming). Strategies and Methods for Climate Relevant Decision Support. Panel on Strategies and Methods for Climate Relevant Decision Support, eds., Robert Correll and Paul Stern, in review, National Academies of Sciences, Washington, DC. Evans, J.A. (2008). Electronic Publication and the Narrowing of Science and Scholarship. Science 321(18 July): 395-399.

See, e.g., Cash, D.W. and S.C. Moser (2000). Linking local and global scales: Designing dynamic assessment and management processes.

Global Environmental Change 10: 109-120. Or: Urwin, K. and A. Jordan (2008) Does public policy support or undermine climate change adaptation? Exploring policy interplay across different scales of governance. Global Environmental Change 18: 180-191.

See Footnote 4.

Taking on Leadership Wherever We Are Theories of social change abound, ranging from individual behavioural change to deep cultural change. Accordingly, the internal and external factors that bring about change vary widely. Few changes come to be in which someone does not eventually step up to the plate and change the context in which we function or does not take a risky step, take advantage of an opportunity, model new behaviour, practice an in-

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