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  Business Times 18 Apr 07
Waking up to 'An Inconvenient Truth'
Even if the world agrees with the findings on climate change, it disagrees on the remedies By G Panicker

GLOBAL warming is shaping up as a momentous issue this year. Doubt has given way to certainty and widespread awareness. The topic has drawn an unusual media interest. Sceptical politicians are forced to embrace science.

US President George W Bush mentioned it in his budget; Australia is changing light bulbs - although both countries had repudiated the Kyoto Protocol, the controversial global blueprint for greenhouse gases reduction. The EU has set a target to cut emissions by 20 per cent by 2020 and by 30 per cent if other nations follow.

But big changes are taking place in the US. States and American businesses, including insurers and oil companies, are clamouring for action.

More important, the US Supreme Court has weighed in, ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency has the power to set emission standards. Thus, the US auto industry may make more energy efficient cars in the future.

At least 10 states have taken a cue from California, which has set a target of reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by 25 per cent by 2020 and by an ambitious 80 per cent by 2050. Auto companies argue such moves will require doubling the fuel economy of their vehicles.

Will slipping sales and market reality make them eventually see the need?

Private industrialists like Richard Branson and Vinod Khosala are betting big on renewable energy technologies and alternatives like ethanol. Madonna and the Red Hot Chili Peppers are among the 150 musicians who will hit some big cities with the green message in July.

The world indeed is waking up to the 'Inconvenient Truth' which former US vice-president Al Gore portrayed in that Oscar-winning documentary.

Environmentalism is shifting beyond tree huggers.

Global views have been converging in a series of studies, most importantly the one from the UN commission, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The panel, composed of the world's top 60 scientists, has issued a stark message: the effects of climate change are broad and too serious to ignore.

Its February report said the earth is 'incontrovertibly' getting warm and it is 90 per cent certain that humans have caused that warming. Early this month, the IPCC said the world must adapt to global warming since it cannot reverse the trend.

Last October, a study by former World Bank economist and UK treasury official Nicholas Stern underscored the economic cost of inaction. By devoting one per cent of global wealth annually to check global warming now, the world could offset 20 per cent loss of gross domestic product by 2050.

The reports set the world brooding over how it would cope with increased drought in some areas and flooding in others as well as death and disease due to heat waves and storms of the future.

Fewer deaths due to cold in temperate areas and higher crop productivity at mid to high latitudes are among the positives but are outweighed by the negatives. Up to a billion people will be affected.

While some still maintain that the threat is overblown, some others contend that the politically charged process by the IPCC is understating the danger.

Indeed, it is difficult to escape the latter impression when the big polluters and countries with vested interests like China, the US, Saudi Arabia and Russia ganged up to tone down the panel's February findings.

So 'hundreds of millions of potential flood victims' was watered down to 'many' in the final text. A reference that up to 120 million people will be at risk of hunger because of global warming was axed.

The panel's next report in May will deal with mitigation of global warming. But it warns that even the most stringent mitigation will not turn the clock back.

Adaptation is essential to reduce the near term impact. 'Unmitigated climate change would, in the long term, be likely to exceed the capacity of natural, managed and human systems to adapt,' the latest report warns.

Even if we agree with the findings, we will disagree on the remedies.

Already, the efficacy of the measures proposed under the Kyoto Protocol is being challenged. The cap and trade system, which forms the central plank of the Protocol, is found wanting in practice and can be subject to cheating. Industry limits are placed on emissions, and companies exceeding the limits buy 'unused' carbon credits from less polluting companies.

Planting trees by the rich polluters in their countries and in less polluting nations also buy carbon credits. But apart from the occasional cheating involved, it will create more heat by trapping sunshine unless it is in tropical areas, a new study says. Carbon tax may be more effective but it has not gained sufficient support with business or politicians.

The Kyoto Protocol's successor will have to deal with this, come 2013. The Group of Eight will engage the issue in June.

But tangible results will flow only from the wholesome support of the US, the principal polluter, and China. Mr Bush has moved from the denial stage, but he is not prepared to shed the economic-cost argument and deflect from the demand of equal participation by major developing countries.

A groundswell of grassroots-level support has influenced the political thinking elsewhere. Presidential candidates, Republicans and Democrats alike, are concerned about global warming. Newt Gingrich, a potential Republican candidate, has now authored a book: Contract with Nature.

The corporate world is gearing up too. General Electric, Alcoa, Lehman Brothers, Royal Dutch Shell, AIG and ConocoPhilips are among the companies giving a concerted push to the cap and trade system and want the US to take the lead role.

The world may have to find an approach between British evangelism and official American tepidity.

How to power our plants with clean fuel and how to end the addiction to crude oil for transportation are the conundrums.

Mr Stern noted both China and India, though not bound by Kyoto, are moving. One of the goals of the Chinese presidential visit to Japan was to obtain Japan's expertise in achieving energy efficiency. Such moves will give the US one argument less against Kyoto.

While solutions take time, erratic monsoons and melting glaciers will perennially haunt us.

California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who gives star power to the environmental movement in the US, says it should be made 'hip and sexy'. Positive marketing will put passion into the movement - just as bodybuilding got a boost from his movie Pumping Iron. He uses alternative fuel and hydrogen in his Hummers. He is working on promoting carbon trading and has sought British expertise with a goal of creating a cap and trade system for greenhouse emissions.

When mitigation becomes a shared value, the Hummers will become more affordable and acceptable in the ecosystem.

Meanwhile, governments will face the question how much they should spend to reduce or delay the impact of climate change and to improve our adaptive capacity.

Washington has advocated technological solutions, but none of them - like ethanol - is energy efficient. GM says Europe's clean diesel proposal will violate US regulations and plug-in cars lack batteries; hydrogen is still far off.

But hope rises when Germany and Singapore showed off the first zero-emission hydrogen jet soaring to the sky. German Air and Space Centre (DLR) and Singapore-based Horizon Fuel Cell Technologies and others collaborated on the ultra-light aircraft Hyfish.

Immense possibilities are on the horizon.
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