Environmental Engineering Reference
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for a premium tariff to support solar-energy deployment and solar-electrification pilot
projects funded by the World Bank and brokered by the Maldives' government.
In the Energy Experts blog at NationalJournal.com, Nasheed explained to an Amer-
ican audience why he put solar on the palace: “This is a beginning step on the road to
making the Maldives completely carbon-neutral by 2020.” He continued with a question
and a challenge: “What can the United States do to make similar progress to transition
away from dirty, increasingly expensive fossil fuels and toward wind, solar, energy effi-
ciency, and other clean, renewable technologies?”
You're most likely not the activist ex-president of an island nation, but like Nasheed
you can be a “mouse that roared” in the energy fight (novelist Leonard Wibberley's de-
scription of a small leader who dares take on a behemoth). You too can speak the truth
about the power in the world and challenge your representatives with the same kind of
question Nasheed asked: What can
you
do?
Jeremy Leggett: Making the Case for Business
WhenIwasintheMaldivesinOctober2010toinstallthesolarsystemonthepresidential
palace,wewereinvitedtoaccompanyNasheedtoaseminaronsustainability,onaresort
islandcalledSonevaFushi,whichisoneofthenicestplacesI'veevervisited.Yourhosts
take your shoes from you when your seaplane lands, so you immediately feel the soft
sand against your feet when you reach the island. (You get your shoes back when you
leave.) Sadly, this little strip of paradise is being threatened by climate change. The coral
reef around it is “bleaching”—showing the slow death of the tiny organisms that build
the reef, due to the slowly rising water temperature—and extreme weather events have
eroded some of its foreshore.
WhileonSonevaFushi,Ireconnectedwithoneofmyothersolarheroes,JeremyLeg-
gett, a phenomenal activist and entrepreneur. He was my first boss at Greenpeace in the
early 1990s and in many ways served as a role model for me. He should be a role model
for the whole world as well.
Jeremy is now the chairman of a company called Solarcentury, one of Europe's
largest solar developers. Before beginning Solarcentury, Jeremy was the chief scientist
for Greenpeace International and one of the key influencers of the Kyoto Protocol, an
international agreement under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that
bound 37 countries to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. He's written several fine topics
on the subject of climate change and carbon-based energy systems. Before he joined
Greenpeace, he was a professor at the Royal College of Mines in London while working
forthe petroleum industry onthe side. Nowhe'sset onbuilding bigbusiness toforgethe
solar economy.
