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Clean Air in A Breeze By Christopher Flavin,Time Magazine Over the past five years, a new crop has sprouted across the broad, fertile plains of northern Germany. Sprinkled among the barns and silos are thousands of 100-foot-tall towers topped by sleek, fiber-glass blades that whirl slowly in the breeze. Functioning as clean, trim powerhouses, these modern windmills turn even gentle currents of air into strong currents of electricity, energizing the region's businesses and homes without hurting the environment. Half a world away, on the Indonesian island of Java, hundreds of rural families have mounted small, silvery panels on poles near their homes. Made of silicon semiconductor chips similar to the microprocessors found in computers, the solar cells convert the energy of sunshine into electricity. These almost magical devices make it possible for people living a day's walk from the nearest power lines to turn on light bulbs, radios, and TV sets for the first time. In Europe, Southeast Asia, and all sorts of places in between, something remarkable is happening. New, carbon-free energy technologies that do not rely on fossil fuels are moving from experimental curiosity to commercial reality, economically turning sunlight, wind, and other renewable resources into useful forms of energy. Although the new devices still provide less than 1 percent of the world's energy, they are advancing rapidly. Countries looking for ways to meet the emissions limits laid down in the Kyoto protocol will find that these technologies offer highly economical solutions to the problem of climate change. It's been nearly a century since the world has had a comparable opportunity to change its energy system. Much of the system now in place was created in an explosion of invention that began around 1890 and was largely finished by 1910. Cities all over the world were transformed as automobiles and electric lights replaced horse-drawn carriages and gas lamps. Old technologies that had prevailed for centuries became obsolete in a matter of years, and the 20th century emerged as the age of fossil fuels. We may be at a similar turning point today. Thanks to a potent combination of government incentives and private investment, technologies
Energizing a nation: wind turbines
in the Montezuma |
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Learn the Facts Energy Futures exists as a resource to help people begin this learning process. The following declaration by a diverse group of political, industry, and environmental leaders reveals their strong collective concern about the consequences of climate change, and urges people the world over to inform themselves, seek solutions, and begin to take control of their energy futures.
Argeo Paul Cellucci, Larry Codey, Mikhail Gorbachev, Denis Hayes, Laurance Rockefeller, Jan Schori, Daniel Tishman, | |
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The Challenge Issued at Kyoto By Dan Lashof, Natural Resources Defense Council In the early morning hours of December 11, 1997, the delegates from 150 nations who gathered in Kyoto, Japan, for the environmental summit on global warming reached an historic accord to limit greenhouse gases. The United States committed to reach a 7 percent reduction below 1990 levels of its emission of these gases by the year 2010. Europe agreed to an 8 percent reduction, and Japan to 6 percent. This agreement is not as strong as some participants and observers had wanted, but it is far stronger than many had feared. The Kyoto accord will not "solve" the global warming problem, but it is a vital first step toward the much deeper reductions that will eventually be needed. The Kyoto accord will
not "solve" International efforts to reach an agreement on limiting greenhouse gas emissions have been underway for about a decade, but until Kyoto, progress had been extremely slow. During this period, the vast majority of climate scientists reached a growing consensus about global warming: the influential 1995 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concluded that if the situation remained unchecked, the average global temperature would rise between 2 and 6 degrees Fahrenheit, with potentially disastrous results including increased flooding, disease, and severe weather disturbances. This remarkable scientific consensus fueled the concern of countries worldwide, including the United States. If the situation remained Against this backdrop, the Kyoto conference-the official name of which was The Third Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change-provided a critical forum for delegates and scientific experts from throughout the world to grapple with this global problem. At the start of the summit, the distance between the positions of many nations still seemed unbridgeable and the fossil fuel lobby-mainly the coal and oil industries-mounted a multimillion dollar campaign to undermine efforts to deal with global warming. | |
GLOBAL WARMING GETS A SECOND LOOK | |
Man-made changes to the world's climate
are potentially the largest environmental problem facing the globe over
the next century. There is an effective scientific consensus that the earth's
temperature is going up, that fossil fuel combustion plays a discernible
role in this warming, and that climate change could have profound effects
throughout the world.
Index PERSPECTIVE - Page 28 by Timothy Worth
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