Al Gore giving keynote speech at World Resources Institute’s 25th Anniversary Dinner. Photo by World Resources Institute on flickr.

This month Al Gore addressed the gala dinner at the India Today Conclave, a three day conference on “Leadership for the 21st Century” held in New Delhi.

At the Conclave, Al Gore very passionately described climate change as a planetary emergency and said advanced developing countries like India can be the leaders of the 21st century by taking actions towards combating the climate crisis.

During his talk, Gore acknowledged that his own country was a big part of the problem. Asking why other countries are not doing enough to address the climate crisis, he said “India has a big role to play, India is not doing it because the U.S. is not doing it. We share each other’s excuses for not safeguarding our planet”.

The diverse audience, consisting of leaders from government, the private sector, and even Bollywood, applauded his recommendations for solving this crisis, which included implementing carbon taxes and changing people’s mindset on the issue.

During his trip to India, Gore also met with India’s Prime Minister and addressed the members of the Indian Parliament. In addition, he led a training program of 100 men and women from all over India who will now conduct climate change awareness campaigns across the country.

I hope his earnest message to India makes a real difference and that the same independent drive and spirit that has contributed to India’s vibrant economy will now help India take the lead in protecting the future of the planet.

Watch Gore’s talk at the Conclave

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Photo By EMBARQ-WRI.

For the second year in a row, Mexico City has shown that being green can pay. Last week the city was awarded 200,000 Euros from the Spanish Carbon Fund for reducing carbon emissions as part of MetroBus, a bus rapid transit system that has reduced the number of polluting cars on the road.

Metrobús was Launched on June 19, 2005, and carries an average of 260,000 passengers a day. After more than two years in operation, it has carried more than 200 million passengers.

Via Treehugger

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Via Dot Earth.

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In this great ad from MTV a donkey named Lolo takes the bus. The caption says “If Lolo can save the planet, why can’t you? Leave the car and take public transit. Let’s stop global warming.”

The car industry’s total annual advertising expenditures for the US alone were $16.3 billion in 2006 according to media research firm TNS Media Intelligence. In the face of this barrage of automobile advertising, it’s nice to see some time, money, and creativity invested in well done TV spots promoting public transportation. I’d love to see more of this. If anybody has any more examples of this kind of messaging please post them here or send them to me at rthom[at]wri[dot]org.

Way to go MTV! Check out the campaign at mtvswitch.org.

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Photo by mocodragon.

While the fuel economy standards in the latest energy bill are a welcome first step, giving us some relief from stagnation in fuel economy from vehicle fleet, the California approach, which treats greenhouse gases as pollutants, and sets performance standards, is the right way to go for the longer term.

In order to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from vehicles, we need to get to a full systems approach, looking at fuels and vehicles as a system, and set up a regulatory approach that can keep steady downward pressure on allowable emissions from the fleet of vehicles on American roads.

The EPA’s decision to deny California the waiver to regulate greenhouse gas emissions from tailpipes of passenger cars and trucks doesn’t bode well for the EPA’s own proposed rule making on the same issue.

Since the US EPA won’t lead, California - and the 17 other states that want to join it - will. And with past as prologue, the courts are likely to support California. Then the EPA will follow and we’ll have a national emissions standard for greenhouse gas emissions, eventually.

It’s just too bad that the Bush Administration is going to force everything into the courts, before the inevitable occurs.

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Photo by mj*laflaca

In 2002 the National Academy of Sciences wrote a report suggesting a modest raise in new car fuel efficiency - from 28 miles per gallon to around 32 - was justified. The Bush Administration ignored this finding. A few years later it thumbed its nose at the environmental community by dissolving the “Partnership for a new Generation of Vehicles,” a joint government-auto industry initiative to put a super fuel-efficient, low-emissions diesel car on the road by the end of this decade. As if that weren’t enough, the Bush Administration has constantly opposed higher fuel taxes, ruling out an important step for reducing what the president calls our ‘addiction’ to oil. I must say that it’s strange that after repeatedly acknowledging the current energy problem he has so passively ignored or actively obstructed almost every effort to find a solution.

So it shouldn’t have come as a surprise yesterday when the EPA announced that it opposes California’s 2002 initiative to regulate CO2, a move that will once again put off the reckoning this country has with oil and carbon. Since this initiative in its original form has been law in California since 2002, it’s goals are no surprise to the Administration or automobile manufacturers. They’ve had roughly five years and little to show; perhaps instead of hiring the engineers to make their cars comply with the law, the auto industry hired the lawyers to take the law down.

Read the rest of this entry »

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The entrance to the conference. Photo by Maria Cordeiro.

Bali, Indonesia

World leaders from 191 countries have convened in Bali, Indonesia for the United Nations Climate Change Conference, a two week event aimed at setting the agenda for a plan to combat global warming. In a move illustrating that global warming is increasingly recognized as an economic issue, not just a fringe environmental cause, the host country, Indonesia, invited the world’s trade and finance ministers as well as the environment ministers, the usual cast of characters at such a conference.

Around 10,000 people from a wide range of backgrounds - business groups, civil society, academia, etc. - have also flocked to the small island, participating in a variety of side events on topics like technology and governance and their link to fighting global warming.

The spotlight for Bali includes an agreement to launch negotiations for updating and extending the Kyoto Protocol, set to expire in 2012. Expectations are running high. Will the United States take a new stance now that the US Congress is shaping climate change legislation? Will the sudden political shakeup in Australia, a country now preparing to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, increase the pressure on the US to do so too? Will developing countries, including China, one of the largest contributors to global warming, agree to cut back their emissions? And above all, will there be a new treaty to provide a long term response to climate change?

Stay tuned: for the next week I will be in Bali, attending side events and talking with experts as I report the latest developments at the COP here on TheCityFix.

For more information on what’s going on at Bali, check out Joe Romm’s post at Climate Progress.

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In the United States, corn is widely sought as an alternative to oil. Photo by tlindenbaum from Flickr.

The agrarian arms race to turn larger swaths of farmland over for the production of biofuels recently reached rhetorical heights as Jean Ziegler, the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, argued that it would be a crime against humanity to use productive soil to produce fuel and not food when hundreds of millions of people go hungry each year. “It’s a crime against humanity to convert agriculturally productive soil into soil which is producing food stuff which will be burned into biofuel,” he said at a press conference last Friday.

Calling for a five year moratorium on bio-fuels, Mr. Ziegler’s comment came at a time when more and more politicians are looking to energy made by corn, sugarcane, and palm as an alternative to oil.

We’ve covered the environmental impacts of biofuels here, here, and here, but this is the first time that we’ve heard someone make the case against biofuels on the grounds of fighting hunger.

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A cut away shot of Lexus’ new hybrid. Photo by Mike Babcock of Flickr.

To date, much of the debate swirling around global warming has focused on how new and improved technologies will save us from the dire consequences of a warming planet. In the context of transportation, this means that a lot of our time, energy, and discussion centers on the idea of fuel efficiency, or alternative fuels and vehicles. Among politicians and talking heads, hybrids, fuel cells, and ethanol are all the rage. But are they right to place so much emphasis on these technologies? Or is it misguided to depend so heavily on new automotive developments to fight global warming?

In the last few days I’ve done some number crunching – back of the envelope type calculations – to see what effect past automotive innovations had on our carbon footprint. The results are quite interesting and provocative. The initial numbers need a lot of review and improvement but I still thought they would be interesting to share. Read the rest of this entry »

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Photo by Stephane Foulon. From Road and Track.

This week’s addition of BusinessWeek includes an article about Gordon Murray, a celebrated race car designer, who is switching gear and working to create “a compact, fuel-efficient urban vehicle for the masses,” priced around $10,000. One of the perks of Murrays new car, the designer claims, is that its designed to limit carbon emissions during the production process. Our very own Lee Shipper is quoted in the article, challenging the benefits of Murray’s new design, pointing out that much more carbon is emitted during the car’s lifetime on the road than it is during the production process. In short, Lee suggests that Murray’s new business venture is misguided if he is in fact trying to fight global warming.

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