The End of Climate Change – Potentially

Yesterday was perhaps one of the happier days of my life. Since high school I have been running around worrying about climate change (global warming back then). At that point it was already becoming quite clear that this was potentially the largest threat to our environment we have yet faced and that we needed to begin to act immediately to address this issues (that was in 1990). Since then I have been amazed at our inability to in any meaningful way make a dent in our greenhouse gas production. What I have come to realize is that despite the massive amount of moral imperative to address climate change – the power of economics has been too significant to over come. Basically if the economic incentive is to continue to produce greenhouse gases people will. If those economic incentives are changed so that people have to pay for their emissions, people will find ways to reduce their emissions.

The one way of addressing this is by changing the nature of our energy market so that there is an economic incentive to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. This can take the form of a cap and trade system or a carbon tax. These are clearly the smart way of addressing climate change. In effect they use our market mechanism to direct human creativity and energy towards addressing climate change. Despite the fact that this is the smartest way of addressing the problem there are few political jurisdictions that have implemented this.

The other option is to reduce the cost of alternatives to the point where they become the smart economic choice on their own. This is what made me so happy. Yesterday I heard about a company called Nanosolar (www.nanosolar.com). If their claims are correct they can produce solar systems at the price of $1-2 per watt of generation capacity. What is so significant about this is that coal cost on average $2.1 per watt of generation capacity. That’s right solar power that is cheaper then coal. Suddenly, almost everything that has changed.

I say almost because some of the same hurdles are still their. Solar still suffers from its intermittent nature (it works when the sun shines), which means that it needs to be matched with energy storage or other forms of generation. The biggest problem will be having the political will to implement policies that will insure the movement from carbon based power generation to non-carbon sources. Nanosolar’s technology makes the most sense is municipal scale products – so start talking to you city councils and local power generating companies. We still also need to convert our cars so that they run primarily not on gasoline (ie. plug-in-able hybrids). So there is still work to be done. With affordable solar now here a major step has been taken.

Its not yet time to break out the Champaign, but it may be time break out the glasses and fill them with water so that we can get to work and get this thing done.