Technology available today can dramatically slow global warming, said scientists and policy-makers at a conference on global climate change Monday, but creating incentives for people to switch to alternative devices and energy sources is a roadblock still to be overcome.
"I am plagued by the example of the light bulb," said President Clinton, who led the daylong conference at Georgetown University, speaking about the one energy-efficient light bulb in the White House. "Why am I so irresponsible that I haven't installed this light bulb in every lamp in the White House? Why don't we all have these light bulbs?"
The problem, scientists and policy-makers told the president, is that there are few initiatives to developing new technologies and putting them to use in day-to-day life.
"We know that there are all kinds of new technologies that we aren't using because energy is so cheap," said Jessica T. Mathews, president of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. "The political science part of this is the most difficult."
On a day when the temperature hit an unseasonable 90 degrees in Washington, the president, his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Al Gore, Secretary of State Madeline Albright and other cabinet members, business leaders, and representatives from nongovernmental organizations discussed the dangers of global warming. This high-profile campaign is meant to garner public support for initiatives to be signed at a global conference on climate change in December in Kyoto, Japan. Panelists spoke to an audience of university students, utility commissioners, environmental advocates, and philanthropist-of-the-moment Ted Turner and wife Jane Fonda.
Sketching a gloomy future, scientists said that computer modeling suggests more droughts, more catastrophic flooding, more outbreaks of infectious diseases like malaria and cholera, and more kids with asthma in the next decade. The scientists said that humans - and especially Americans - must slow consumption of the fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gasses that cause global warming. They warned that a business-as-usual approach will lead to a tripling of greenhouse emissions by 2100, and temperatures in North America will rise by about 10 degrees.
Americans account for only 4 percent of the world's population, but are responsible for 25 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions. But the four-fifths of the world's population now putting out less than one-fourth of the greenhouse gasses - including China, India, and the nations of South America - has entered an era of development that requires the same kind of spiraling fossil-fuel consumption that drove the economies of the Western economic powers. Few incentives exist to push the great new economies toward alternative energy sources - especially given the example of the developed world.
If the trend of mass fossil-fuel consumption continues, said John Holdren, Earth and planetary sciences professor at Harvard University, developing nations will pass America's emissions by 2035.
"What we see in the future is a significant disruption of human health," Holdren said.
But others were optimistic that alternatives to fossil fuels are becoming more available in both industrialized and developing nations.
"Technological innovations are steadily reducing the world's carbon diet," said Kurt Yeager, president of the Electric Power Research Institute, a trade group.
Among the more experimental of the innovations are issues like ocean-grown algae, which can be harvested from the ocean and distilled into a power resource; lithium ion batteries, which capture the energy used to brake a car and use that energy to then accelerate; and agricultural waste products like walnut shells and wood chips, recycled as energy sources.
But computer technologies can also save far more energy than many realize. Programmable thermostats, software programs that manage energy consumption in office buildings and hotels, and boiler controls, all drastically reduce energy consumption over time, said Michael Bonsignore, chairman and CEO of Honeywell.
And one way the US government, which wastes about one-fourth of the energy it consumes (or about $1 billion a year), can promote new technology is to deregulate the US electric monopoly, some panelists told the president. Today, electric companies in the United States use three units of energy to produce only one unit of power.
"Electricity is about the only protected industry left as a monopoly," said Tom Casten, president and CEO of Trigen Energy Corporation. Casten said that his power plant in Colorado is selling leftover electric waste heat to Coors Brewing to use in beer production. "The potential for CO2 reduction is huge," he said.
While the administration has not said whether it will back the aggressive European Union plan to reduce emissions to 1990 levels by 2010, Clinton and Albright said they would expect developing nations to be held accountable in any agreement the United States signs.
"The consensus between developed and developing nations will be the most difficult to reach," Albright said at the conference Monday, "But we all have the same interests. Every nation contributes to the problem, and every nation will reap the benefits of a solution."
Gore said the United States would support an agreement that included a "credit" program in which nations earn financial credits for early volunteer actions to reduce emissions.
But whether developing nations, including those whose populations are among the 2 billion people who live off less than one dollar a day, will pay for global warming remains to be seen.
"The developing world is where climate change affects people most," said James Wolfensohn, president of the World Bank. "It is a world that has not created this problem."
