Manufacturing a Green Revolution (15-Oct-07)
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As the Nobel peace prize committee in Oslo signed the paperwork last week that would confirm Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as this year's winners, some of the world's leading "green" businessmen sat on a stage at the University of California at Berkeley and bemoaned the lack of public demand for change.
The Nobel committee rightly praised the scientists and Gore for bravely spreading the bad news, and chairman Ole Danbolt Mjoes declared: "I want this prize to have everyone ... every human being, asking what they should do". At Berkeley the message from the cutting edge of green business was that most humans are doing diddly-squat.
The Berkeley forum was a roundtable organized by Silicon Valley lobby group TechNet and hosted by PBS interviewer Charlie Rose. The panel was top drawer - leading Valley venture capitalist John Doerr; Dr Larry Brilliant, executive director of Google's philanthropic arm; Jonathan Schwartz, CEO and president of Sun Microsystems; and John Melo, CEO of biotech company Amyris. Just across campus is the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where BP has invested $500m to research biofuels, and down the road in Silicon Valley dozens of start-ups are struggling, like saplings for the sunlight, to be the Intel or Microsoft of the green economy. Here, in northern California, thousands of people have taken the warning from Gore and the IPCC to heart and are trying to build technologies that can stave off disaster. Here, consciousness is being turned into consumer products. Here, if you'll excuse the fossil fuel metaphor, the rubber hits the road.
Yet these business leaders were hardly optimistic. The demand for green goods and green policy just isn't there yet, the panel said. Not in America, anyway. And demand is what fledging greentech companies need more than anything.
Green start-ups need people willing to buy their new products, so that they can re-invest in R&D and scale-up their operations, and therefore bring the price of those products down to a more widely affordable level. The central question the panel discussed was just what it will take to build that demand. Role-models and sex appeal are always useful, the four men agreed, but they've been around for years now. Everybody from Leonardo di Caprio to Cameron Diaz has a story to tell about their trendy, green consumption. The cool factor, it seems, is having little impact.
The exception, all agreed, is the Toyota Prius, which is ubiquitous on California's clogged highways. One member of the audience told the story of her middle-aged friend who traded in his Ferrari for a Prius. His rationale? In a Ferrari he looked like a desperate man going through a mid-life crisis. In a Prius he looked like a confident, caring guy. He reckons, his friend reported, that his love-life has improved as a result.
Dr Brilliant said his people had looked into the Prius phenomenon and come back with some surprising findings. Only 2% of those who bought Priuses did so for purely environmental reasons. That's right, 2%. Around 10% bought them because "they did the math wrong"; that is, they thought the savings in petrol would more than pay off the cost of the car when they won't. The majority of Prius buyers confessed they had bought the car A) because it gave them access to the carpool lane and B) because the distinctive look and green reputation said something about the kind of person they were.
In other words, people need incentives other than saving their children and grandchildren from possible environmental devastation.
The panel did have some great ideas about how to grow green consumption. Brilliant spoke of energy star ratings not just for fridges, but for all electronic appliances (fridges have doubled in size and use half as much power since the star ratings were introduced, he claimed). Schwartz spoke of relocating data centres, which already make up 3%-4% of total US electricity usage, to places with cheaper, greener power. (The tech industry has to look at itself in the mirror, he argued.) Doerr asked why his phone company can give him a breakdown of all his daughter's text messages, but his power company can't tell him how much electricity each of his appliances uses. (That's the kind of information that could change behaviour, he said.)
But as their conversation continued, they made a surprising observation. They said the problem with green issues is that they haven't coalesced into a popular movement yet, and it's a movement that's needed. It's not what you usually hear from middle-aged millionaires in suits. Sure, they have a bottom-line vested interest in inciting this particular purchasing revolution, but, as it happens, they're also right. As Brilliant described it: "Covers of magazines is not a movement. Writing articles on the internet is not a movement. We have got to feel it in our guts. ... We will not change our circumstances without a change in human consciousness".
You can see what he means when you compare America with a country such as New Zealand. I wrote about New Zealand's new green policy agenda a couple of weeks ago, and this week the government there went even further. It announced it's considering outlawing big-screen televisions that fail to meet energy performance standards and offering "direct financial incentives" to encourage people to upgrade to more environmentally-friendly fridges. State-owned power companies have been told to build nothing but renewable power plants from now on.
In New Zealand, there's a popular will - a movement if you like - to protect the country's environment and "clean, green" reputation. America, however, is dragging its feet, largely because, as Doerr said: "Mainstreet USA still doesn't have a problem." It's easy when you're reading, writing and talking about the issue a lot to assume everyone shares your concerns. Even if there's debate about just how serious the issue is and just how accurate the models are, nigh-on everyone knows it's a threat, right? Haven't Gore and the IPCC have "created an ever-broader informed consensus about the connection between human activities and global warming", as the Nobel committee put it.
Doerr says not. Or at least, not enough. Even as Jan Egeland, a former UN undersecretary for humanitarian affairs and now director of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, has said the world's first "climate wars" were already being fought in parts of Africa where a lack of water has brought farmers, nomads and animal herders into conflict, Doerr points out that until climate refugees start knocking on the door or petrol hits $100 a barrel, ordinary Americans will have no sense of crisis and no motivation to change their consumption habits.
Which brought the panel - and which must bring us - to the only logical conclusion: governments have to lead. To combat climate change governments, in particular the US government, have to act to create demand change.
Every member of this impressive panel agreed the most important thing a new president could do was introduce a carbon trading scheme. Only when carbon has a price, and American consumers have to start paying it, will their behaviour change, they said. Only when carbon has a price will non-carbon products become affordable on Main Street. Charlie Rose asked the obvious question: if it's so widely agreed, why isn't it already being done? Doerr responded wryly: "Because of 800 votes in Florida."
More seriously, he said that US politicians aren't dumb. They won't move urgently on climate change until middle America tells them to. Schwartz added that companies are reluctant to act boldly because the metrics still aren't there. He quoted the old adage: "you can't manage what you can't measure," and said: "we have to start measuring things." As Brilliant said, "the holy grail" of making electricity from renewables cheaper than making electricity from coal still seems a long way off in this country.
So, let me say to you Mr Gore and all you climate scientists around the world: my heartiest congratulations. Hope you had a fabulous weekend celebrating your success. Now get back to work. There's much more to be done.
- Source: Guardian Unlimited
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