The sun is the base energy source for the Earth. What it emits is either absorbed or reflected. Observations showed some “missing energy” in this balance. Two years ago, scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo., released a study claiming that inconsistencies between satellite observations of Earth’s heat and measurements of ocean heating amounted to evidence of missing energy in the planet’s system. Where was it going? Or, they wondered, was something wrong with the way researchers tracked energy as it was absorbed from the sun and emitted back into space? Well it was found. An international team of atmospheric scientists and oceanographers, led by Norman Loeb of NASA’s Langley Research Center in Hampton, Va., and including Graeme Stephens of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., set out to investigate the mystery.

The Earth’s climate is a solar powered system. Globally, over the course of the year, the Earth system—land surfaces, oceans, and atmosphere—absorbs an average of about 240 watts of solar power per square meter (one watt is one joule of energy every second). The absorbed sunlight drives photosynthesis, fuels evaporation, melts snow and ice, and warms the Earth system.

The Sun doesn’t heat the Earth evenly. Because the Earth is a sphere, the Sun heats equatorial regions more than polar regions. The atmosphere and ocean work non-stop to even out solar heating imbalances through evaporation of surface water, convection, rainfall, winds, and ocean circulation. This coupled atmosphere and ocean circulation is known as Earth’s heat engine.

The climate’s heat engine must not only redistribute solar heat from the equator toward the poles, but also from the Earth’s surface and lower atmosphere back to space. Otherwise, Earth would endlessly heat up. Earth’s temperature doesn’t infinitely rise because the surface and the atmosphere are simultaneously radiating heat to space. This net flow of energy into and out of the Earth system is Earth’s energy budget.

The researchers used 10 years of data – spanning 2001 to 2010 – from NASA Langley’s orbiting Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System Experiment (CERES) instruments to measure changes in the net radiation balance at the top of Earth’s atmosphere. The CERES data were then combined with estimates of the heat content of Earth’s ocean from three independent ocean-sensor sources.

Their analysis found that the satellite and ocean measurements are, in fact, in broad agreement once observational uncertainties are factored in.

“One of the things we wanted to do was a more rigorous analysis of the uncertainties,” Loeb said. “When we did that, we found the conclusion of missing energy in the system isn’t really supported by the data.”

“Our data show that Earth has been accumulating heat in the ocean at a rate of half a watt per square meter (10.8 square feet), with no sign of a decline,” Loeb said. “This extra energy will eventually find its way back into the atmosphere and increase temperatures on Earth.”

Scientists generally agree that 90 percent of the excess heat associated with increases in greenhouse gas concentrations gets stored in Earth’s ocean. If released back into the atmosphere, a half-watt per square meter accumulation of heat could increase global temperatures by 0.3 or more degrees centigrade (0.54 degree Fahrenheit).

Loeb said the findings demonstrate the importance of using multiple measuring systems over time, and illustrate the need for continuous improvement in the way Earth’s energy flows are measured.

Article by Andy Soos, appearing courtesy Environmental News Network.

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A series of pole-to-pole research flights conducted by U.S. researchers have provided the most comprehensive picture of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and confirmed some of climate scientists’ more dire concerns about human-caused global warming.

Using sophisticated instruments capable of detecting a wide range of atmospheric components, scientists from the National Center for Atmospheric Research found evidence that the melting of Arctic ice is leading to significant releases of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, into the atmosphere, and that the releases could have significant impact on the climate.

Data collected during the mission, known as HIPPO, also suggests that black carbon particles — released by diesel engines, industrial activities, and fires — are more widely distributed than previously known, particularly in large plumes that travel from Asia, over the central Pacific Ocean, and onto the U.S. West Coast.

“Levels were comparable with those measured in megacities such as Houston or Los Angeles,” said Ryan Spackman, a scientist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and a member of the research team.

photo: r.rosenberger

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New data released by NASA shows that the atmosphere above eastern Japan was flooded with electrons and heated dramatically in the days before the devastating March 11 earthquake.

According to scientists from the Goddard Space Flight Center, the total electron content in the ionosphere over the quake’s epicenter spiked significantly in the days before the earthquake, reaching a peak three days before the 9.0 quake.

Meanwhile, satellite measurements showed a steep increase in infrared emissions above the epicenter in the hours before the quake, possibly suggesting that large amounts of radon were released as a consequence of increased stresses in a geological fault.

The radioactivity of the radon apparently ionized the atmosphere on a massive scale, triggering increased condensation of water. In turn, that condensation released heat that caused a spike in infrared emissions.

These observations support a long-held theory that suggests that in the days and hours before large earthquakes, radon being released from underground activity can unleash detectable changes in the Earth’s atmosphere.

Article appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

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The Asilomar conference on geoengineering had been touted as a potentially historic event. What emerged, however, were some unexpected lessons about the possibilities and pitfalls of manipulating the Earth’s climate to offset global warming.

In the beginning, I had my doubts. The Asilomar International Conference on Climate Intervention Technologies, held last week at the Asilomar conference grounds near Monterey, Calif., was touted as an “unprecedented” gathering of 175 scientists, environmental groups, philosophers, and public policy wonks to discuss the governance of geoengineering — that is, large-scale, intentional manipulation of the Earth’s climate to offset rising temperatures.

The meeting was obviously set up to channel the spirit of the first Asilomar conference in 1975, during which biologists drew up voluntary guidelines to help reassure the public that genetically modified organisms would not be released into the world. Asilomar 1.0 is remembered as a landmark event in the evolution of scientific ethics and a turning point in the public acceptance of biotechnology.

Asilomar 2.0 seemed to pale in comparison. For one thing, geoengineering may be a scary idea, but the dangers were nowhere near as immediate as the unintentional release of genetically modified organisms. As David Keith, head of the Energy and Environmental Systems Group at the University of Calgary and one of the pioneers of geoengineering research, put it, “There is no threat of genetically altered clouds replicating virally in the atmosphere.” For another, no one seemed exactly sure what the goal of Asilomar 2.0 was, other than to convince the rest of the world that geoengineers are not mad scientists bent on destroying whatever is left of the Earth’s “natural” climate system. A few days before the conference began, questions were raised about whether the conference was in fact a quiet way for the organizer of the conference, The Climate Response Fund, to raise money to fund geoengineering experiments (a last-minute statement from the CRF’s board put an end to that controversy).

The first few days of the conference were chaotic and disorganized, occupied with the familiar discussions about how the term “geoengineering” lumps together two very different ideas about how to cool the planet — technologies that reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the planet, as well as technologies that reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. From a governance point of view, nobody is worried about technologies that suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. It’s the technologies that reduce the amount of sunlight that hits the planet — such as brightening clouds and injecting sulfur particles in the stratosphere — that freak people out, mostly because they can be deployed quickly and cheaply, and they have an immediate effect.

None of this was news to anyone who had spent any time thinking about geoengineering. And for a while, it seemed like Asilomar 2.0 was going to devolve into five days of infighting over the wisdom of attempting to rebrand geoengineering as “climate restoration.” But then a strange thing happened. Amidst the chaos, new ideas – and some lessons — emerged.

Lesson one: Geoengineering is a tabula rasa in the public mind. Like most of the attendees, I was well aware of the fact that geoengineering is an unfamiliar idea to many people. But I had not seen any actual data on this. Nor had I really grasped the implications of it.

One of the most enlightening presentations of the week was from Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the Yale Project on Climate Change, who presented the results of a long-running study on the public perception of global warming. In his most recent survey, he had thrown in a few questions about geoengineering. When asked, “How much, if anything, have you heard about geoengineering as a possible response to climate change,” 74 percent of respondents said “nothing.” The 26 percent that had heard about geoengineering turned out to be wildly misinformed — more than half thought it referred to geothermal energy. Only 3 percent of the people who had heard about geoengineering were correctly informed about it. “The public basically knows nothing about this,” Leiserowitz told the attendees. “That is both a great challenge, and a great opportunity.”

Lesson two: Nobody has any clear idea how to resolve the inequalities inherent in geoengineering. One of the most quoted remarks at the conference came from Pablo Suarez, the associate director of programs with the Red Cross/Red Crescent Climate Centre, who asked during one plenary session, “Who eats the risk?” In Suarez’s view, geoengineering is all about shifting the risk of global warming from rich nations — i.e., those who can afford the technologies to manipulate the climate — to poor nations. Suarez admitted that one way to resolve this might be for rich nations to pay poor nations for the damage caused by, say, shifting precipitation patterns. But that conjured up visions of Bangladeshi farmers suing Chinese geoengineers for ruining their rice crop — a legalistic can of worms that nobody was willing to openly explore.

There was much discussion about the role the UN Security Council might play in governing the eventual deployment of geoengineering technologies, as well whether a new protocol should be developed to govern geoengineering under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. A few people even brought up a new idea: How about a World Geoengineering Council? The concept conjured up visions of black helicopters and Dr. Evil, and was quickly dropped — even though, in private, some policy experts admitted that was the direction we might be headed.

In public, everyone agreed that climate is something that happens to everyone and, therefore, everyone should have a say in any decisions that are made to deliberately change it. But the simple truth is nobody has any very good ideas about how you accomplish that, especially among people in the developing world, where the impact, presumably, would be greatest. Leiserowitz put it best: “What does informed consent mean in a world where more than two billion people are unaware that climate change is a problem?”

Lesson three: The biggest question on the horizon is, “Should field experiments be banned?” Virtually everyone at the conference agreed that further research into geoengineering is a good idea. “We need to figure out what works and what doesn’t,” David Keith argued. Not surprisingly, conflict arose when the discussion moved on to whether or not it was time to run some field experiments in the real world. Everyone agreed that small-scale “process” experiments, such as testing devices to spray aerosols in the stratosphere, should be allowed, since there is no expectation that such experiments would have any impact on the climate. But what about modest field experiments, such as attempting to spray particles over one region of the Arctic, or brighten clouds over one part of the ocean? Alan Robock, an atmospheric scientist at Rutgers University who has long pointed out the risks of geoengineering field experiments, predictably argued against it: “You can’t wall off the Arctic from the rest of the world.”

But how do you define the difference between “sub-scale” experiments, likely to have little if any impact, with “large” experiments, which could indeed have an impact? This is a perennial problem among prospective geoengineers. Keith argued for the importance of field experiments as a way of testing our knowledge — as well as the accuracy of climate models. “We only found out about the hole in the ozone because we went out and did some experiments,” he argued. “If we would have relied entirely on models, we might never have found it.” In the view of others, it was also a question of urgency: “We don’t want to do modeling for the next 20 years while the Arctic melts,” one scientist told me.

The question of field testing also played into the larger governance issue. David Victor, a law professor at the University of California, San Diego, argued that you can’t set up a workable governance structure until you know which technologies might be deployed and what the risks are. “And to find that out, you might have to do some experiments,” he said.

Lesson four: It’s all about the money. Is anyone going to get rich geoengineering the planet? Nobody likes to ask that question explicitly, but it’s unavoidable. After all, if geoengineering ever gets taken seriously, it’s going to be the mother of all engineering projects. Who should be in charge — and what role should private investment play? Should entrepreneurs be able to profit off technology designed to cool the planet?

It was generally agreed that for CO2-sucking technologies, private investment was not a problem. Sunlight-reduction technologies, however, are another issue. if some company (or entrepreneur) is able to develop a new way of injecting particles into the stratosphere that becomes indispensible to the survival of the human race, well, that gives that company or person a lot of leverage. “I’m not interested in selling my soul to some company who is going to control how much sunlight hits the planet,” said Phil Rasch, a climate modeler at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Washington state. (As one audience member quipped, “Gives new meaning to company town.”) Granger Morgan, the head of the department of engineering and public policy at Carnegie Mellon University, argued that the creation of a profit motive would inevitably lead to a geoengineering lobby: “Lobbying is the last thing we need on this.”

Does that mean government funding, in the U.S. initially through the National Science Foundation or an agency like the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, is the answer? Many attendees pointed out that government funding has its own troubles, not least of which is that the bureaucracy and regulatory hurdles will slow down research and deployment. As for the U.S. Department of Defense — forget about it. To this group, such involvement prompts nightmares of a new military-industrial-geoengineering complex. One novel solution: demand that all technology used for sunlight reduction technologies remain in the public domain. “The issue is not private investment,” argued Keith. “It’s is open intellectual property.” Open-source climate engineering, anyone?

Lesson five: Trust is everything. The media loves to play up the angle of hubristic geoengineers hell-bent on messing with a system they don’t understand, but there was very little bold or reckless talk at Asilomar. The entire mood of the meeting was somber and hyper-alert to the dangers that lay ahead. “The whole game,” David Victor pointed out, “is about establishing credibility.” In other words, if the public comes to see geoengineering as, as one attendee put it, “a crazy idea cooked up by rich Anglo Saxons to dominate the climate,” then they will all be rightfully tarred and feathered.

In the end, I didn’t leave Asilomar feeling like I’d attended a historic event. But I did feel like I may have witnessed the birth of something new — call it the conscience of a geoengineer.

Article by Jeff Goodell appearing courtesy Yale Environment 360.

photo: NASA Visible Earth

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Biofuels – made from algae and non-food plants – are emerging as a potentially viable alternative to conventional jet fuels. Although big challenges remain, the reductions in greenhouse gas emissions could be major.

Earlier this year, a Continental jet accelerated down the runway at George Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Nothing out of the ordinary for Capt. Rich Jankowski, who countless times in his 38-year career had eased such two-engine Boeing 737-800s into the sky. Except on this experimental flight, one of the engines Jankowski relied on was burning fuel derived from microscopic algae to push the 45-ton aircraft into the air and keep it aloft — a first in aviation history.

Last year, Virgin Atlantic flew the first commercial jet on biofuels, a 40-minute jaunt between London and Amsterdam in which one engine burned a mix of 80 percent conventional jet fuel and 20 percent biofuel derived from coconuts and babassu nuts. Other test flights have followed, culminating in a 90-minute Japan Airlines flight with one engine burning a blend of biofuel from camelina — a weedy flower native to Europe — and regular jet fuel at the end of January.

As global economies strive to wean themselves off fossil fuels, one of the most daunting challenges is to find a replacement for the liquid fuels that power the world’s aircraft. Biofuels made from algae and non-food plants are now the leading contenders. While homes, cars, and offices can be powered by electricity produced from such renewable sources as solar, wind, and hydropower, there is little likelihood in the near future that battery power will be lifting a jumbo jet into the sky. And the global aviation industry uses an enormous amount of jet fuel — energy-dense kerosene — frequently referred to as Jet A or JP-8: The U.S. commercial airlines alone burn about 50 million gallons of jet fuel every day, at a cost of roughly $150 million.

That’s a lot of greenhouse gases, released right where they can do the most damage — high in the atmosphere. The warming properties of jet fuel exhaust are intensified at high altitude, where nitrogen oxides from the jet’s turbines react with other molecules in the upper atmosphere to increase levels of ozone, which traps heat, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The water vapor that forms contrails and other chemically active gases emitted during flight also contributes to climate change. Although the amount of emissions from aircraft compared with other vehicles is relatively small — roughly 3 percent of total worldwide greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel burning — the mix of compounds in jet emissions and their release in the upper troposphere intensifies their heat-trapping power.

The environmental appeal of biofuels — especially if they are produced from algae or other non-food sources — is strong. Preliminary results from an Air New Zealand test flight in December show that burning biofuels — in this case jet fuel refined from jatropha oil — can cut greenhouse gas emissions by at least 60 percent compared to conventional fuel. And, as a bonus, about 1.4 metric tons of fuel could be saved on a 12-hour flight using a biofuel blend.

This month, the International Air Transport Association set a goal of achieving “carbon neutral growth” — meaning an increase in air travel would not emit any more CO2 than the present fleet and flight schedule — by 2020. The keys will be increasing fuel efficiency by 1.5 percent per year and using biofuel blends, according to IATA.

The overwhelming challenge is how to produce enough biofuel to supply even a fraction of the more than 60 billion gallons of jet fuel burned every year by the world’s aircraft. Relying heavily on biofuels made from food crops — such as soybeans, sugar cane, or canola — would not only affect food supplies and increase food prices, but would produce significant greenhouse gases during the planting and harvesting of these crops, as well as from forest clearing for more agricultural land. Non-food plant sources, such as jatropha and camelina, are promising, but difficult to produce in large quantities and can end up displacing food crops or lead to deforestation if the price of fuel rises high enough. Finally, making large amounts of jet fuel from algae represents a major hurdle, from perfecting the algae’s growth to extracting the oil cost-effectively.

Nevertheless, industry and government interest is driving research and testing into the development of biofuel-based jet fuels. Boeing has been conducting tests with various plant sources, including camelina. And the U.S. Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the U.S. Air Force are working on the development of alternative fuel sources to free the military from its reliance on fossil fuels.

The bulk of the initial bio-jet fuel for test flights has come from jatropha — a poisonous shrub native to Central America — and camelina. Both plants produce oil-rich seeds. Terasol Energy — a company based in the U.S., India, and Brazil and the supplier of the oil for the Continental flight — can squeeze 242 gallons of jatropha oil per acre of farmland in India and Tanzania.

But jatropha and camelina have their own issues, such as the inevitable competition between crops grown for food and crops grown for fuel. The answer to that conundrum might be the microscopic plants known as algae. The tiny plants are not typically a food crop, are capable of producing 60 percent of body weight as oil under the right conditions, and can be grown in salt or wastewater, says David Daggett, Boeing’s technology leader for energy and emissions.

Algal oil can also be precisely tuned via genetic modification, or good old-fashioned breeding, to be the equivalent of crude oil. A host of companies, from San Diego-based Sapphire Energy to San Francisco-based Solazyme, are now experimenting with this potential fuel of the future.

Bio-jet fuels have delivered consistent high-quality results in ground tests and experimental flights. These fuels seem to have overcome the problems that their energy density might be too low (think ethanol versus gasoline) and that they could gel at the low temperatures found at high altitudes (think diesel on a cold day).

“All the characteristics are here to make it a very high quality fuel,” says Billy Glover, managing director of environmental strategy at Boeing. “The fuels we’re testing now have equal or better energy content than the Jet A requirements.”

Tim Zenk, vice president of corporate affairs at Sapphire Energy, said the company hopes to produce 300 barrels of oil from algae grown in brackish ponds at its test facility in New Mexico by 2011. In five years, the output should reach 10,000 barrels a day, costing between $60 and $80 dollars per barrel, he says, compared to more than $300 per barrel today for the algae industry as a whole.

Chemical engineers at the University of North Dakota’s Energy & Environmental Research Center have also successfully turned oil from canola, coconuts and soybeans into jet fuel that rivals the conventional liquid, U.S. government tests show. And facilities to refine such algal oil are already being built. UOP — a refinery business of Honeywell that processed the biofuels used in the Continental test flight — opened the first “ecofining” facility in Livorno, Italy, last year, with a capacity to eventually produce 100 million gallons of diesel fuel for ground vehicles. A Portuguese company, working with UOP, is building a second “ecofining” facility in Sines, Portugal.

“Going to biofuels doesn’t mean we have to make compromises,” says chemist Jennifer Holmgren, general manager of the renewable energy and chemicals business for UOP. “We are already making fuels that look exactly like the real thing, or better. The real limitation is going to be feedstock.”

Industry and the U.S. government are working on a solution to that problem, through a partnership dubbed the Commercial Aviation Alternative Fuels Initiative (CAAFI). As part of that group, the Federal Aviation Administration’s chief scientific and technical advisor, Lourdes Maurice, testified at a Congressional hearing in March that “we believe we have a path for achieving biofuel approvals at a 50 percent blend level over the next two years.”

She also argued that bio-jet fuels represent a unique opportunity within the transportation sector, because air travel relies completely on energy-dense liquid hydrocarbons distributed to a small number of locations. Supplying biofuel to just 35 major airports in the U.S. would cover 80 percent of all jet fuel use in this country, Maurice said.

Any of today’s biofuels produced in quantity would still have to be blended with jet fuel because they lack aromatics — the hydrocarbon rings common in petroleum-based jet fuel that interact with seals in engines, helping swell them shut. “We fully expect that the first fuels will be 50–50 blends or less,” Boeing’s Glover says.

But even such a blend would deliver significant climate benefits. According to Glover, camelina is a particularly promising biofuel source, with one camelina-jet fuel blend reducing carbon emissions by more than 80 percent. Such a blend would also not require any modifications to existing aircraft engines or infrastructure.

That was certainly the case for the FAA’s experimental flight of the Continental 737-800. Engine shutdowns at altitude did not phase the bio-jet fuel, nor did sudden accelerations and decelerations. By the time Jankowski brought the plane back down to Bush Intercontinental at 1:45 p.m., roughly two hours after takeoff, he had burned through some 3,600 pounds of the biofuel, slightly less than the 3,700 pounds of regular jet fuel in the other engine.

“The airplane performed perfectly,” he said at a press conference afterwards. “There were no problems. It was textbook.”

By David Biello, appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

[photo credit: Lee Jordon, Nguyen Dai, James Gagen, .jowo., jurvetson]

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“No doubts remain. Climate change is real and the build-up of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere is increasingly at an alarming rate.” With these words, Rafael Quiroga, General Manager of Accion RSE, initiated the seminar “Corporate Strategic Management of Climate Change and Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions.” This is not another “green business” seminar from a European or North American city, it took place here — in Santiago, Chile.

The event brought together speakers from the Chilean private sector that gave concrete examples of their companies’ climate change and GHG management initiatives. First, it showed how Essbio, a water purification company, has been dealing with the ever-prescient and escalating challenges of decreasing water reserves due to climate change.  Second, it illustrated the emissions and energy reductions Xstrata Copper, a mining company, has committed to and the steps it has taken to minimize the release of contaminants in its industrial processes. Third, it explained what Natura cosmetics has done since 2007 to become a “carbon neutral” business by calculating all GHG emissions in the company’s supply chain, transportation, and production of its various cosmetics products, and purchasing the equivalent amount of CO2 tonnage in carbon credits on the international carbon markets.

Although Chile is officially considered an Annex B, “developing” country under the dual classification of the Kyoto Protocol, the smaller country of 16 million inhabitants has been no stranger to addressing the climate change issue in recent years. In addition to private companies’ activities noted above, Chile has also completed some 40 projects via the Kyoto Protocol’s CDM market since 2004. These 40 projects have ranged from landfill methane gas capture, to a nationwide energy efficiency CFL lightbulbs installation project, to agricultural methane capture, and to a wind energy project – yielding a total of US$300 million in traded carbon credits for Chilean enterprises.

Moreover, in early December 2008, President Bachelet, alongside her Environment Minister, unveiled Chile’s official “National Climate Change Action Plan” for 2008-2012. The plan includes activities for

1) studying impacts and vulnerabilities,
2) funding adaptation measures, and
3) strong support for mitigation endeavors, including the creation of a Center for Renewable Energy, establishing an increase of funds for a national energy efficiency program, further studies into harvesting biofuels, and increasing bicycle lanes for transport.

Although, historically, Chile has not contributed much to the total build-up of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere – actually 0.2% of total global GHG emissions for the last year tallied, 2004 – the country would like to see itself as a Latin American forerunner on confronting the issue.  President Bachelet’s new Action Plan not only concretely addresses the country’s increasing climate change concerns, but also demonstrates to the international community that Chile, too, is progressive and environmentally conscientious.

However, even with the formidable growth in the renewable energy sector, and a bit less so in CSR and ‘green business strategy,’ in Chile over the past 3-4 years, there is still an internal conflict and complexity as to how the “green” the country is truly progressing. As Mr. Quiroga pointed out at the seminar, Chile’s growth rate of GHG emissions in the past 10 years has been among the highest on the planet, alongside that of China and India. The main culprits for this have been

1) the booming energy intensive mining sector,
2) an increase in automobile use with economic growth, and,
3) an increased reliance on coal in recent years with disruptions in imported gas supplies from Argentina.

One recent study from the University of Chile actually found that Chile’s national GHG footprint is projected to jump 4.2 times its current amount by 2030.  This conclusion assumes the country continues on its current pace and manner of economic development, and with the increased reliance on new coal plants that are currently in different stages of construction.

So, yes, not only are the effects of climate change real in Chile but so too is a growing movement and public consciousness to reduce people’s and companies’ carbon footprints. In addition to Essbio, Xstrata, and Natura, there are other enterprises in Chile making efforts to reduce GHG emissions in their industrial processes or take action in other local environmental issues.  Yet, it is safe to say that such “climate change conscious” companies are still a small minority here in Chile.  And, even though President Bachelet and the Minister of Energy are making genuine, good-faith efforts to bring the latest solar and geothermal energy technology to Chile such as with partnerships with California and the US Department of Energy, the situation of increasing national GHG emissions reveals a deeper complexity we all need to address:

How can a middle-income economy, such as Chile, afford the latest in clean and renewable energy technology to reduce its climate change footprint, while at the same time, continuing to address more pressing needs of economic and social development?

In other words, a country such as Chile still needs to put its food on the table by mining the copper, whether imported gas or a cheaper “clean” energy solution is currently available; and, if they are not available, a bunch of coal will certainly do.

[photo credit: Cheo!]

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