I spoke at a transportation conference in Vancouver, Canada, not long ago, and one of the things I said was that some people were still skeptical that climate change was happening. Afterwards, the conference organizer came up to me and told me that the only skeptics were in the south, the temperate zones. Everyone in the Arctic knows that climate change is happening, because it has already dramatically changed their climate. Indeed, last Autumn, I attended an open house at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, part of Columbia University, and one of the leading oceanographic and geophysical research institutes in the world (and where I grew up, by the way). While there, I heard an oceanographer who specialized in the arctic regions say that they had observed changes in the past year that they hadn’t expected to happen for 30 years. And yet, I still get people who tell me, often quite aggressively, that all this climate change stuff is left-wing crap.
I was a climate change skeptic for decades, partly because my father is a scientist, and I prefer evidence to opinion. There were earlier scares that didn’t pan out, usually from a small group of people. There was the “Population Time-bomb”, from a Malthusian group who claimed there were going to be billions of deaths by the end of the 20th Century because population growth would outstrip our ability to grow food. Then there was the advancing ice age when average global temperatures seemed to be declining in the 1970s. Then there was global warming – and the evidence seemed equivocal.
But as far as I can tell, the evidence that some kind of climate change is happening is no longer equivocal, and I, and most other unbiased thinkers, accept it as likely, and humanity as being at the very least a contributing factor. Moreover, whether you believe in climate change or not, the general public does, and is now expecting governments and businesses to do something about it. When companies like Wal-Mart, GE, and Citicorp jump on the green bandwagon, you know it’s not just hype anymore, especially given the amounts of money they are devoting to “going green.”
In 2008 we will see four key aspects of this emerge. First, fighting the rising tide of social consciousness on green issues is going to get very expensive. Anyone, whether a corporation, government, or political party, that swims against that tide is likely to pay a steep price. In particular, politicians who fight against it are generally going to lose elections, especially in North America, unless they represent regions whose industries (like some parts of the oil industry) demand allegiance to the anti-climate change party line.
Next, there will be a backlash against those who attempt to “greenwash” – that is, pretend to be green without actually doing anything. This has already started, but will get ever stronger as time goes on. Companies that try to pretend to be green are going to become pariahs.
Then, as change comes because of higher oil prices and public conviction about climate change, public policies will change. Carbon taxes will start to appear, even though they seemed like a pie-in-the-sky idea even two years ago. Products that offer conservation will prosper, such as low energy light sources, and light switches that turn lights off altogether when people leave the room. And new technologies and techniques that squeeze more miles to a gallon of gas, or produce more results with less waste, will receive – are receiving – more backing from venture capitalists and markets, and initiate significant changes in consumption patterns.
And companies will discover that going green is actually more profitable than wasting resources and ticking off customers. Profit is a powerful motive – and waste is the enemy of profit. Waste is also another word for pollution, so reducing pollution will finally be seen as increasing profitability. And that’s when the real green revolution will start. A few companies have “got it,” but 2008 will see the beginning of a gold rush to green.
Meanwhile, on the development front, the rise of hybrids will continue, as will new propulsion systems for vehicles, but the real news to watch will be improved battery systems. Producing power isn’t really that much of a problem. Producing it where and when you want it is. Breakthroughs on storing power (especially electricity) is, in my mind, where the cutting edge is, with companies like Eestor, of Cedar Park, Texas doing the cutting. Their energy storage devices (described as a capacitor for electric storage by Wikipedia) are already used by ZENN Cars (with “ZENN” standing for “Zero Emissions No Noise”) for urban transportation.
Finally, a countertrend: 2008 may well witness a major setback for ethanol from grain, typically corn or barley. For the last two or three years, there has been a gold rush to build ethanol distilling plants. This has produced two results: there’s too much capacity coming on-stream in too short a period of time, and the use of grain for fuel is pushing up the price of food. The latter could well produce a political backlash, which could knock some of the political props out from the support for ethanol. That, plus overcapacity, could give ethanol from grain a black eye, and set alternative fuels overall back by several years. It could also lose a lot of money for a lot of farmers who are trying to get in on the ground floor by financing the ethanol distilleries.
