Jeffrey D. Sachs is Professor of Economics and Director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University. He is also a Special Adviser to United Nations Secretary-General on the Millennium Development Goals.
By Jeffrey D Sachs
NEW YORK – The key to climate change control lies in improved technology. We need to find new ways to produce and use energy, meet our food needs, transport ourselves, and heat and cool our homes that will allow us to cut back on oil, gas, coal, nitrogen-based fertilizer, and other sources of the climate-changing greenhouse gases.
There are enough good options available to suggest that the world can accomplish the goal of controlling climate change at a reasonable cost (perhaps 1% of global income per year) while enabling the world economy to continue to grow and raise living standards. One of the most exciting developments on the horizon is the new generation of electric automobiles.
In the earliest days of the automobile in the late nineteenth century, many kinds of cars competed with each other – steam, battery, and internal combustion engine (ICE). The gasoline and diesel-powered internal combustion engines won the competition with the success of the Model T, which first rolled off of the assembly line in 1908. One hundred years later, competition is again stirring.
The age of electric vehicles is upon us. The Toyota Prius, a hybrid-electric vehicle first introduced in Japan in 1997, marked an initial breakthrough. By connecting a small generator and rechargeable battery to the braking system of a standard car, the hybrid augments the normal engine with a battery-powered motor. Gasoline mileage is sufficiently enhanced to make the hybrid commercially viable, and gasoline-saving vehicles will become even more commercially viable when consumers are taxed for the carbon dioxide they emit from their vehicles.
Much more innovation is on the way, led by General Motors’ plug-in hybrid vehicle, the Chevy Volt, at the end of 2010. While the Prius is a normal ICE automobile with a small motor, the Volt will be an electric vehicle with an engine alongside.
The Volt’s battery will be a cutting-edge, high-performance lithium-ion battery, which promises a range of 40 miles per charge and a six-hour recharge time drawing from a normal wall socket. Based on typical driving patterns, the Volt will get so many miles on the battery that it will achieve around 230 miles per gallon of gasoline!
Larry Burns, the visionary head of GM’s research and development until his recent retirement, sees the electric vehicle as much more than an opportunity to save gasoline, important as that is. According to Burns, the electric-vehicle age will reshape the energy grid, redefine driving patterns, and generally improve the quality of life in urban areas, where most of the world’s population will live and drive.
First, there will be many types of electric vehicles, including the plug-in hybrid, the all-battery vehicle, and vehicles powered by the hydrogen fuel cell, essentially a battery fed by an external source of hydrogen. These different vehicles will be able to tap into countless energy sources.
Solar, wind, or nuclear power – all free of CO2 emissions – can feed the power grid that will recharge the batteries. Similarly, these renewable energy sources can be used to split water into hydrogen and hydroxyl ion, and then use the hydrogen to power the hydrogen fuel cell.
Second, the storage capacity of the vehicle fleet will play an important role in stabilizing the power grid. Not only will battery-powered vehicles draw power from the electricity grid during recharging, but, when parked, they can also feed additional power back into the grid during periods of peak demand. The automobile fleet will become part of the overall power grid, and will be managed efficiently (and remotely) to optimize the timing of recharging from, and returning power to, the grid.
Third, electric-powered vehicles will open up a new world of “smart” vehicles, in which sensor systems and vehicle-to-vehicle communications will enable collision protection, traffic routing, and remote management of the vehicle. The integration of information technology and the vehicle’s propulsion system will thereby introduce new standards of safety, convenience, and maintenance.
These are visionary ideas, yet they are within technological reach. But implementing these concepts will require new forms of public-private partnership.
Automakers, utility companies, broadband providers, and government road builders will each have to contribute to an integrated system. All of these sectors will require new ways of competing and cooperating with the others. The public sector will have to put forward funding to enable the new generation of vehicles to reach commercialization – through R&D outlays, consumer subsidies, and support for complementary infrastructure (for example, outlets for recharging in public places).
The new age of the electric vehicle exemplifies the powerful opportunities that we can grasp as we make our way from the unsustainable fossil-fuel age to a new age of sustainable technologies. Our climate negotiators today bicker with each other because they view the climate challenge only in negative terms: who will pay to reduce fossil-fuel use?
Yet Burns’ vision for the automobile reminds us that the transition to sustainability can bring real breakthroughs in the quality of life. This is true not only in automobiles, but also in the choice of energy systems, building designs, urban planning, and food systems (remembering that food production and transport account for around one-sixth of total greenhouse gas emissions).
We need to rethink the climate challenge as an opportunity for global brainstorming and cooperation on a series of technological breakthroughs to achieve sustainable development. By harnessing cutting-edge engineering and new kinds of public-private partnerships, we can hasten the worldwide transition to sustainable technologies, with benefits for rich and poor countries alike – and thereby find the basis for global agreements on climate change that have so far proven elusive.
The key to climate change control does not lie in new technology alone and it is disturbing that this article would begin that way. Learning from our past approaches to problems we should realize that public engagement is a key to making any steps towards a sustainable future and that engagement should not come at the end of the pipeline after technologies and decisions have been made – in many cases pushed by the companies like big oil and cars. Urban redesign and redevelopment, consumer patterns, community empowerment to make informed decisions etc. are just as strong and important for combating climate change.
As an engineer I am all for the development of new technology that is more efficient and does better on life cycle analysis, but I am also very aware of the problem our field has caused/faced/will cause/will face if we fail to reach across disciplines and outside research labs to really come up with innovative solutions that have people as a main ingredient.
Great that we are developing more efficient vehicles, but what if there was no urban sprawl and we never had to drive an hour to get to work anyway? Why would we even need them? How much lithium does the world have and how will that be mined in poor countries like Bolivia which has one of the largest reserves?
Maya Trotz, I am glad that more and more folks are beginning to see the problems from a broader perspective rather than from the confines that are often times limited by their respective proffessions.
Every modern convenience we enjoy today relates right back to the utilization of stored solar energy. Oil is one of the most abundant, efficient and cheapest source of that stored energy, but soon we are going to use it all up, then what?
Putting a premium value added global tax on the use of this energy will only create more suffering to the masses. It is this same kind of approach that created the global financial crisis. They monitized debt and created tremendous profit for themselves, while trasferring that debt to the public.
Here again they are attempting to monetize the waste by- product of world energy use for profit,transfer the debt to the public and convince us that it is rational, concerned, green, good for the planet, thinking. Remember what is fun for schoolboy, is death for Crappo.
Many months ago I had written a blog on SN which I had entitled E=MC2. I mentioned that whenever I saw pictures of flooded streets in Guyana, my attention is always drawn not to the water but the luscious tall green grass that clogs the drains.
Only recently I read the article where the Guyana fire chief was lamenting about the problem of dry grass catching afire. They are not looking at the problem as the natural law of E=MC2 coming around full circle. They failed to intervene at the right moment and convert this stored energy into productive use.
The earth is a living, breathing, intelligent organism. It is capable of self healing and repair and since all of the waste we produce comes from resources that existed in raw form in the earth, all those resources will be reprocessed by mother earth. There is only one big problem. Mother earth will not discriminate between humans and their garbage when she begins the reprocessing phase.
Joe.