The 13th international meeting on climate change opened today in Cancun, Mexico. No one is expecting much to happen. The first such gathering, in Kyoto, Japan, in 1997, produced the Kyoto Protocol. No follow-up treaty will be produced in Mexico.
A great deal is happening, however, at the state, city, and private level to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and expand the production and use of clean energy.
Climate scientists continue to insist that climate change is real and are making more and more converts. But given the short-term perspective that is the dominate characteristic of politicians in all non-totalitarian governments, it isn’t realistic to expect the world’s 190 countries to negotiate, let alone ratify, an emissions agreement that would affect their economies broadly and immediately in order to make the world a better place for generations not yet born.
So as clean-energy activist Bruce Usher advocates, it’s best to start at the bottom and work up. And that’s a reasonable tact to take. Usher points out that Texas alone produces more electricity through wind power than all but five countries. In California and Arizona, he says, solar energy will soon provide electricity for 3 million homes. Geothermal energy plants are being built in Nevada. Michigan is building electric cars.
And that’s just a start on the list. Wind farms also are being built or are in operation in Kansas, Iowa, Oregon and Illinois and plans for large scale wind generation from off-shore turbines along the Atlantic coast are well along.
Last year, Usher reports in a New York Times article, renewable energy accounted for more than half of all the new power generation plants built or on the drawing board in the United States. Another 40 percent of the new plants will be powered by natural gas, which emits only half as much carbon dioxide as coal.
A worldwide agreement to move toward clean energy and thus mitigate the effect of global warming on the globe’s climate is not going to happen in Cancun. What can happen is that the decision-makers who gather there will exchange clean energy ideas that can be put in effect at the city and regional levels and take them back home.
The tipping point will come when the politicians wake up and see that building new clean energy industries will create jobs and wealth in the here and now as well as a better world for their grandkids. Maybe that’s not as far in the future as it now seems to be.
— Emerson Lynn, jr.
