Desertec Takes Another Giant Leap – I’ve written a few times about this project, bursting with promise to provide clean energy, build bridges and make the desert bloom, most recently here. The “FT” said today that Desertec has been embraced by several major European financial, utility and industrial concerns. “A dozen companies are today set to launch a renewable energy initiative that its backers claim could within a decade provide Europeans with electricity generated from the Sahara – at a cost of €400bn ($557bn). Munich Re, the German insurer, Deutsche Bank, utilities RWE and Eon and industrial conglomerate Siemens are among the bluechip names that will form a company to explore the technical and geopolitical challenges of peppering the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East with solar mirrors.”
The press release from Siemens talks about several of the technologies for this project that Siemens has already mastered, such as high-voltage direct current (HVDC) transmission where line loss is minimal compared to traditional AC lines. Munich Re’s release has a raft of quotes, including this one from HRH Prince Hassan bin Talal of Jordan: “The partnerships that will be formed across the regions as a result of the Desertec project will open a new chapter in relations between the people of the European Union, West Asia and North Africa.”
Today’s announcement launches Desertec off the drawing board into the real world.
Buses in Bogota – Libby Rosenthal is the veteran “NY Times/International Herald Tribune” reporter who has been writing a series of stories over the past several months on low-tech – and relatively low-cost – approaches to sustainability and the climate crisis. I had a chance to talk with her briefly in February at an event at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs (where I’ve been teaching) and we discussed the importance of low-tech. Her story from last week on Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) was another in this refreshing series. Bogota’s system not only has radically reduced air pollution from the thousands of private buses that added to traffic and pollution, eliminated hours of the day stuck in traffic for commuters who choose it, but it has also reaped over $100 million in payments through the Kyoto Protocol’s Clean Development Mechanism. This is a critical model for the future for other developing nation cities seeking to capitalize on smarter and leaner approaches to transportation. See the video on this story too.
The Global Food Crisis in NGM – “National Geographic Magazine” has been producing really solid stories on the climate crisis and sustainability for some time now. Their special report from June zeroes in on some critical issues, one of the most important being how the “green revolution” in agriculture may have, at the end of the day, created more problems than it solved. What problems? Here are a few: costly inputs like fertilizers and pesticides, the attendant pollution that includes not only toxic runoff in the water supply and estuaries but greenhouse gases as well, an over-reliance on irrigation and the inevitable stress that puts on water, and the devastation by monoculture to the soil and the biota that creates the conditions for growing. Biofuel production and the raising of much more meat worldwide than was ever consumed before have added extraordinary pressures to agricultural production – and they have driven up prices, often beyond the reach of hundred of millions of the world’s poorest. “Such agflation hits the poorest billion people on the planet the hardest, since they typically spend 50 to 70 percent of their income on food.”
I want to comment on one of the recurring themes in discussions of world food production and consumption: meat. The assumption always seems to be that meat consumption is going to continue to expand and intensify as developing nations become more affluent. That certainly has been the trend, but why shouldn’t we be looking at ways to avoid the extraordinary proven health and resource burdens of meat production by looking for ways to reduce consumption? I wrote about Galloping Consumption a while ago and the idea that we need, globally, to find a way to reduce our essentially insane levels of resource use in the developed world while helping the developing world to avoid the pitfalls of pollution, ill health and expense that accompany these practices. If we know that renewable energy and energy efficiency are key pathways to sustainability, then why shouldn’t we equally recognize the ills of some of the food and drink we continue to use and the manifest benefits of doing things differently, at the level of both production and consumption?
