Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
much emphasis on consumers using energy more efficiently. Efficiency is
upfront money -
our
upfront money. We are increasingly bombarded with
messages to buy hybrid cars, air-source heat pumps, condensing boilers
and energy-saving fluorescent light bulbs. These currently all cost more to
buy than the item they replace. Yes, there is a pay-back over the lifespan of
these products because they use less energy. But it is likely to take several
years. So while people still have a choice (with the exception of light bulbs,
as old-style incandescents come off the market) they will dither about
hybrid cars and condensing boilers.
Granted, governments go about their ponderous business of proposing
new efficiency standards, putting them out to consultation with the public
and industry, and eventually legislating. But there is no outside force to
impart any urgency to energy efficiency. Greenpeace, for instance, is an
environmental NGO whose members' stock-in-trade is direct action. But
short of breaking into people's houses and forcibly insulating wall-cavities
and lofts, there is not much direct action they could take.
Governments
So what are governments doing to counter this inertia and accelerate the
pace of low-carbon energy change? Their one big thing has been the green
part of the fiscal stimulus to counter the 2009 recession. HSBC Bank
estimates that the climate-change-related part of the stimulus (including
water and waste treatment, as well as low-carbon energy and energy effi-
ciency) totals $512bn. That's hardly peanuts. Although by November 2009
only a little over ten percent of this promised cash injection had actually
been spent (and most of that by China), the green stimulus may help the
major economies come out of recession better adapted to, and skilled in,
low-carbon energy than when they crashed into it. That is the aim. Every
recession alters a country's economic structure, and the goal of the green
stimulus is to steer it in a green direction.
But we should have no illusion that it was only the shock of impending
financial collapse in autumn 2008 that set governments on this course.
Governments needed that shock to act. And the shock is wearing off.
The question now is what will jolt, and keep jolting, governments into
sustained low carbon action.
Here we should be careful what we wish for. The veteran US envi-
ronmentalist Lester Brown has discussed different scenarios that might
mobilize climate action in terms of what has jolted the US into action in
the past. He suggests that ecological equivalent of the Japanese attack on
