The cords of energy demand and water supply are tightening around the world’s two largest economies.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue

The coal mines of Inner Mongolia, China and the oil and gas fields of the northern Great Plains in the United States are separated by 11,200 kilometers (7,000 miles) of ocean and 5,600 kilometers (3,500 miles) of land.

But, in form and function, the two fossil fuel development zones — the newest and largest in both nations — are illustrations of the escalating clash between energy demand and freshwater supplies that confront the stability of the world’s two biggest economies. How each nation responds could have profound implications for their domestic energy and food markets, and for economic stability across the globe.

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Business as usual, the old economy, single bottom line capitalism - these are terms, practices and policies Ceres would like to put behind us. But how?

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

At the Ceres Conference 2011, my eyes were opened to a slew of different approaches to combat the world’s most pressing challenges. From securing efficient energy systems to promoting electrified vehicles to raising awareness on conflict minerals and compliance issues, Ceres assembled a remarkable cast of thought leaders and corporate innovators to address the strengths and opportunities associated with each.

Peter Graf said at the opening of the conference, “sustainability is an opportunity” - and education and communication will lead more opportunity. Actions supporting smart grid development, Millennium Development Goal advancement and a clean energy revolution are waiting to be unleashed. But the power of this “green” revolution is met by a fascinating and fierce barrier: public policy.

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How China’s capital got in over its head, and what the city is doing to get its water crisis under control.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By Nadya Ivanova, Circle of Blue

Perennial drought, overuse and pollution have left Beijing struggling to meet the growing water demands of its soaring economy, which is expanding by more than 11 percent per year on average. Its drying rivers and lakes, along with falling water tables, are enduring water deficits that force the city to suck millions of cubic meters (billions of gallons) in emergency transfers from neighboring provinces - which, in turn, depletes their water supplies - thereby draining agricultural and economic opportunities.

In essence, Beijing is at the bull’s-eye of a potentially ruinous collision between accelerating growth and scarce freshwater reserves that is unfolding in China’s dry and resource-rich northern provinces. Beijing’s municipal government, though, is acting with authority and some speed to avoid a water crisis. The city is relocating thirsty industries to the coast, regulating water prices and cutting back on irrigated farmland. Beijing also is setting nationally significant standards for retrofitting sewage treatment systems to recycle wastewater for use in flushing toilets, washing cars, greening urban parks, cooling thermal power plants and other gray-water applications.

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The U.S. could follow Ford’s example into a new energy future.

By John Elkington

Well done, Ford! The company that once said it could only make real profits on gas-guzzling SUVs has announced its smaller and fuel-efficient cars are helping it make money at a time of skyrocketing gas prices. But, if you believe Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute, the sustainability journey has only just started for Ford, Detroit and the global auto industry.

Brown is optimistic we can achieve a sustainable global economy, but his optimism flows from a pretty dark place. He maintains his optimism by rereading “the economic history of U.S. involvement in World War II because it is such an inspiring study in rapid mobilization.”

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Bringing affordable solar power to the masses is a critical piece of protecting the planet.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

When I take a walk through the woods from my house in the Hamptons, I pass several homes along the path with large solar arrays on their roofs or installed in their yards. I had to laugh, therefore, when I watched a video of Van Jones’ speech to some 10,000 youth climate activists at the recent Power Shift conference in Washington, D.C.

Jones was making the point that the high cost of solar power means “wealthy people have the solar panels while the poor people pay the big energy bills” when he added that the rich live under trees in the shade, while poor people live in neighborhoods where the sun beats down on their houses.

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Efficiency is the greenest path for the built environment.

By Martin Brown

Sustainability: it’s good for the planet, good for business and should be good for the built environment. Yet, known as the 40% sector, the latter continues to be responsible for 40% of material production and use, of waste, of transportation, of energy use and for 40% of global CO2 emissions. 

We have many stunning green and sustainable buildings, but we also have a legacy of buildings that use and leak energy in frightening proportions, homes that keep families in fuel poverty and a wasteful industry struggling with, even ignoring, sustainability concepts.

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Circle of Blue and the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum present at 17 events in four cities over 16 days.

Originally posted on the CSRwire website.

By Keith Schneider, Circle of Blue

Since mid-February, in probing weekly reports from our Choke Point: China series, Circle of Blue and the China Environment Forum of the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars have for the first time revealed the increasingly fierce competition between energy and water that threatens to upend China’s progress.

In late March, the two organizations arrived in Beijing for the start of a 16-day trip that took three reporters from Circle of Blue and two researchers from the China Environment Forum to Beijing and Shanghai in eastern China and then to Chengdu and Yinchuan, in the nation’s south and west. The tour, supported by the Energy Foundation and Vermont Law School, also included Adam Moser, the China Environment Fellow at Vermont Law School, who joined us at events in Beijing and Shanghai.

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Low interest loans for solar could break the country’s dependency on coal.

By Ezra Drissman

Getting off coal won’t be easy. Many states are dependent on coal-produced electricity, which means real problems in moving away from this dependency. Identifying the problems will clarify the solutions.

This is not meant to be an attack on carbon taxing, or a defense of the use of coal. But the question remains, how do we transition away from coal without severely crippling our economy?

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It will take a coordinated effort of responsible innovation, smart policy and living well with less to fight the war against climate chaos.

Part Three of a three-part series from CSRwire, “Health Hazards of Climate Change.”

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

Climate change has been called the biggest global health threat of the 21st century. Part One of this series covered some of the greatest hazards, including death and injury from extreme weather, hunger, spread of disease carrying pests, water-borne and heat-related illnesses, asthma and lack of medicines due to species loss.

Part Two added the unintended consequences of the rush to replace fossil fuels with technologies that carry high risks to health and safety, like nuclear power and corn ethanol. At the end of that post I asked, “So, what’s a climate hawk to do? We need to consider a sobering truth: there is no ‘free’ energy.”

Even after the disaster at Fukushima-Daiichi, many clean energy advocates are saying we need to continue to build nuclear power capacity. Marc Gunther bemoaned in a recent column:

The fires, explosions, radiation leaks at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant will lead to greater scrutiny - and higher costs - for new nuclear plants. That will make it harder to develop low carbon energy to replace fossil fuels and avert potentially catastrophic climate change… Over the past few years…I’ve grown more…inclined to support nuclear power as a low-carbon solution, particularly given that all forms of energy production create risks and require tradeoffs. But the nuclear options look a whole lot less attractive today than it did a week ago. And that’s a problem.

But do we really need to make a Faustian bargain with nuclear energy? Do we need to accept almost any tradeoffs to tackle climate change - nuclear disasters, mass starvation (ethanol), widespread contamination of our water supplies with deadly chemicals (hydrofracking for gas) and even such potentially catastrophic “solutions” like geoengineering?

Only if we lack imagination, courage and the willingness to pull together for the common good. The more dangerous alternatives have, tragically, been the first we’ve turned to, because they have powerful private players behind them that think they will make big profits out of the climate emergency we all face. (Caveat Tepco.) The problem is how the emerging energy technologies market is structured, subordinating long-term common need to short-term private greed. But in the long-term, simple survival means the common interest is the salient one, whether you are the CEO of Archer Daniels Midland or a farmer in Bangladesh.

We don’t need to make Faustian bargains for our future. There are safer, more responsible strategies. Here are seven possibilities:

1. Smart Subsidies: The free market doesn’t reign in energy, nor should it. It can’t price carbon correctly because it leaves out the costs we all bear collectively, like environmental destruction and damage to our health. Since the free market can’t price carbon correctly by itself, government policies need to help the market by rewarding technologies that lessen the cost to society and our environment and punishing those that increase it: R&D subsidies to responsible new technology; clean energy and efficiency rebates to consumers; heavy taxes on profits of fossil fuel companies; and an end to subsidies and loan guarantees to dicey modalities like nuclear, ethanol and gas.

2. Smart Standards: We need to develop common sense standards for new technology so we don’t go halfway down the road to hell paved by our good intentions. The precautionary principle has been adopted by the EU to ensure new chemicals don’t get introduced into industrial processes before they are proven safe. It wouldn’t have taken all that much time for scientists and eco-economists to figure out that corn ethanol violates the precautionary principle. All the billions of dollars wasted on that dead end could have given us a jumpstart on safer forms of biofuels, from algae to switchgrass - and ones yet discovered.

The Union of Concerned Scientists has developed these “Bioenergy Principles” to guide R&D and investment in alternative fuels. A national renewable energy standard would also be smart, enabling innovative technologies to be developed with a national market in mind and improved predictability for investors.

3. Smart Efficiency: Some criticize efficiency efforts, pointing out that while vehicle efficiency has increased, overall vehicle emissions have stayed the same, because people are driving more. Increasing use as efficiency goes up is called the Jevons effect; it’s real, but doesn’t apply everywhere and can be minimized. For example, making buildings more energy efficient will decrease total emissions because people won’t jack up the heat or AC beyond the level of comfort. Engineering solutions like smart lighting that goes off when no one is in a room makes efficiency easy, as does architecture that increases available daylight.

Even transportation can sidestep the Jevons effect - if mass transit is made more attractive than driving, as it is in many European cities or the older, dense cities of the US Northeast. Make trains affordable, available, with good connections and clear and frequent scheduling and many will give up driving with relief. Smart traffic lights can decrease fuel use and ease driving for those who must use cars. Discouraging sprawl and encouraging urban density will help too.

4. Smart Transition: We need to get serious about shortening the transition time away from fossil fuels to clean, responsible renewables. But we can also lighten the impact of fossil fuel production by adopting more stringent standards for pollution control and efficiency. Cars - even gasoline engines - can be much more fuel-efficient than current standards mandate. Coal plants can scrub their emissions better than they do now. Companies will scream and moan about costs, but, as the case of vinyl chloride shows, when they finally have to knuckle down and do the right thing, they will probably find a healthier bottom line. And a government mandate would level the playing field between companies and encourage a smart approach. As the Union of Concerned Scientists has pointed out, “Addressing all four major pollutants (sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury and CO2) at once allows utilities to take an integrated approach to pollution control, reducing industry costs and greatly increasing the public health benefits.”

The war against climate chaos isn’t just about technology and efficiency. It’s also about hearts and minds.

5. Smart Patriotism: The war metaphor is apt: just like the Allies did during World War II, citizens need to pitch in together so our children will have a chance. We need to make it unpatriotic to waste energy; we need to engage communities with Clean Energy Challenges, tree planting and climate resilience projects, and community wind developments; the list is endless. We need to redefine security to conform more to the real threats - wars over climate and dwindling resources - so we can take money from bloated defense budgets and use it to change the climate calculus to lessen the threat.

6. Smart Engagement: Many European cities use their trash to generate energy, but I heard a radio report on WNYC in New York that discounted that possibility for the city - a city which is now burning tons of carbon (and cash) to truck its mountains of trash away. The report said residents would never accept trash-to-energy installations. Well, maybe community education and engagement, along with incentives in the form of lower energy costs - and disincentives to continue business as usual - might change some hearts and minds. It’s worth a try. We need to educate and engage citizens in being part of the solution, not the problem.

7. Smart Consumption: And that bring us to the final strategy. Let’s redefine the good life to value quality over quantity; the commons we share over the stuff we hoard (or heedlessly discard); the things that are free and priceless, like health, community, compassion, conviviality and a shared investment in our human future.

It’s up to us.

About Francesca Rheannon

Francesca is CSRwire’s Talkback Managing Editor. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast, The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.

Talkback Readers: Can we fix the planet? What suggestions do you have on how to become more energy efficient? Share on Talkback!

Business and government need to make sure alternatives to fossil fuels do not add to human and environmental health hazards.

Part Two of a three-part series from CSRwire.

By CSRwire Talkback Managing Editor Francesca Rheannon

My last post in these pages, written a week ago, tackled seven top health hazards of climate change. I promised readers my next post would explore remedies governments, businesses and individuals can use to protect human health from the “the biggest global health threat of the 21st Century.”

What a difference a week makes. A devastating earthquake in Japan set off a tsunami that has likely claimed tens of thousands of lives and is also threatening a full-scale nuclear catastrophe.

With three reactors in “partial meltdown,” another with its spent fuel rods on fire and radiation levels spiking as I write these words, the unfolding nuclear emergency at Fukushima will end up — in the best case scenario — having caused acute injury or death to some plant workers and almost certainly an eventual rise in cancer in those living near the plant (especially children), or — worst case scenario — spewing radioactive clouds that will circle the globe for months, potentially causing many cancers and birth defects for a long time to come.

So, rather than continue on my promised path, I decided to take a short detour into a now more pressing question. After Fukushima, do we face a Hobbesian choice between illness, death and environmental disaster from fossil fuels — or illness, death and environmental disaster from the technologies we hope to replace them?

Nuclear energy was supposed to help get us off our fossil fuel addiction — it was supposed to be “clean” and provide a bridge to less mature technologies like wind and solar. Proponents of nuclear, including one of my heroes, climatologist Jim Hansen, have said that without a renaissance in nuclear energy, the world will not be able to get off coal in time to avert catastrophic climate change. As of March 11, however, the nuclear renaissance is in doubt, both in the US and abroad.

In fact there have been doubts all along. Critics have charged nuclear is anything but “clean:” nuclear waste is (practically) forever, transporting it to far-flung permanent waste storage facilities (that have yet to exist and probably never will) puts communities at risk of contaminating accidents, nuclear plants are terrorist magnets, and they are prodigious water hogs in a world that climate change is making water-poor. (The hotter and drier the earth gets, the more water nuclear power plants will commandeer to supply the increased demand by people running more air conditioners more often.) Moreover, nuclear plants carry a heavy carbon footprint from construction; mining, processing and transporting uranium; storing waste and decommissioning.

Claims of the safety of present nukes are Panglossian at best and disingenuous at worse: the Japanese have the highest nuclear plant safety standards in the world, yet they built their reactors to withstand earthquakes, not tsunamis — despite the fact the two go together, as any Japanese kindergartner can tell you. And don’t believe claims that low levels of radiation pose no danger. They do: there is no safe exposure level to ionizing radiation (although the risk does go up with more exposure).

If you think nuclear operators on American soil are any better than the Japanese on safety, I’ve got a nuclear plant in Vermont I can sell you. Vermont Yankee is the same design as the failed reactors at Fukushima and it has been leaking for years. Thanks to a courageous governor — probably encouraged by a long-battling group of activists — that plant will be shut down, in spite of the NRC’s approval extending the plant’s license for another 12 years. But he is the exception among politicians, not the rule. Perhaps nuclear plants can be made safer, but we’d have to have a different political climate — one not beholden to corporate interests — to insure that.

How about other energy alternatives to fossil fuels? As we’ve learned from the case of biofuels, the cure may be no better than the disease. Consider this:

• Corn ethanol uses more energy from fossil fuels than it supplies, leads to carbon-emitting deforestation and causes hunger to rise world-wide;
• Biomass also cuts down forests (that protect from climate change) and emits highly toxic particulates (especially when burning construction waste) — and it also may well use more energy from fossil fuels than it supplies;
• Geothermal causes earthquakes — something you might not want to happen near a nuclear power plant (or anywhere else);
• Hydrofracking for natural gas is contaminating aquifers with toxic chemicals;
• “Clean coal” is an oxymoron and enormously expensive to boot.

Even wind and solar — certainly our best bets for clean electric power — come with some environmental concerns, from rare earth mining to harm to migratory birds.

So, what’s a climate hawk to do? We need to consider a sobering truth: there is no “free” energy. We are going to have to put responsible innovation at the core of our search for clean, renewable energy; we are going to have to put efficiency first; and we are all — consumers, producers and investors alike — going to have to learn to live better with less.

How we can do that will be the subject of my third and final post in this series. Stay tuned.

About Francesca Rheannon

Francesca is CSRwire’s Talkback Managing Editor. An award-winning journalist, Francesca is co-founder of Sea Change Media. She produces the Sea Change Radio’s series, Back to The Future, and co-produces the Interfaith Center of Corporate Responsibility’s podcast, The Arc of Change. Francesca’s work has appeared at SocialFunds.com, The CRO and E Magazine, and she is a contributing writer for CSRwire. Francesca hosts the nationally syndicated radio show, Writers Voice with Francesca Rheannon.

Talkback Readers: What is a climate hawk to do? Which alternative energies pose minimal health risks? Tell us on Talkback!