LONDON -- ereguly@globeandmail.com
Everything about carbon reduction is painfully complicated.
The Copenhagen climate change talks in December are supposed to be our last chance to set things right and prevent the planet from turning into a giant Sahara, except for the dead bits of acidic water in between. Earth can be saved only if carbon emissions are reduced by 40 per cent by 2020, and 80 per cent by 2050, the climate change scientists say.
But the average human, even the ones with high brain-to-weight ratios, doesn't understand the first thing about Copenhagen's goals, methods, negotiating strategies, implications, definitions of failure or success, politics, enforcement or morality.
More Stories
How much carbon reduction should come from market forces, from technology, from regulation? How does cap-and-trade work? How can Saudi Arabia, Canada and the other big oil exporters ever agree to a new climate-change treaty? If devising a new agreement in Copenhagen is actually less complicated that it looks, why does the Waxman-Markey bill to establish a U.S. carbon market cover 1,201 thumping pages? What can the poor schmuck with two cars, air conditioning and a teenager who takes 30-minute showers do to help?
Carbon reduction is in sore need of demystification. It is in sore need of a way to make it relevant to our cities and our homes, to make the consumer feel empowered.
The cash-for-clunkers scheme, ubiquitous in North America and Western Europe, came close. The average geek understands that old cars emit far more pollutants and carbon dioxide than new ones. A new Honda Civic is said to be 99 per cent less polluting than its 30-year-old ancestor. The average geek also understands that using government subsidies to buy a new car is good for the economy - it keeps an auto worker employed and frees up enough family loot to buy new windows or kitchen appliances.
Sergio Marchionne, the boss of Fiat and Chrysler, says Italy's cash-for-clunkers scheme worked wonders to advance the country's previously lame carbon-reduction effort. "We took more tonnes of CO2 from the air as a result of these incentives than we will ever do by the time the 2015 Brussels [carbon reduction] initiatives get implemented," he said in a recent interview.
Someone should do the calculations. What if incentives were used to eliminate cars over 10 years old everywhere? Wouldn't that alone go a long way to meeting Copenhagen's goals without all the fuss of Copenhagen?
Toronto's own climate change guru, Ron Dembo, the founder of Zerofootprint, has an equally simple idea: A carbon sticker for every building.
Mr. Dembo is a finance whiz who designs carbon output measurement and management software for cities, businesses and individuals. The carbon sticker idea was inspired by the fuel consumption labels that are slapped on the window of every new car sold in the United States and Canada (in Canada, the EnerGuide label is used). The label reveals the car's average fuel economy. However imperfect - the labels tend to underestimate how much fuel a car slurps - it is a useful measure of identifying cars' relative fuel efficiencies.
The labels allow the U.S. and Canadian governments to set benchmarks. The fuel-economy standards are gradually being tightened. In the spring, U.S. President Barack Obama raised the average standard for cars and light trucks to 35 miles per gallon from 25 mpg between 2012 and 2016. This alone, notes Zerofootprint, is projected to save 900 million tonnes of carbon over the four years, the equivalent of shutting down almost 200 coal-fired electricity plants. Not bad.
Now imagine if buildings were given the same treatment. Buildings account for 40 per cent of total North American carbon emissions. That's significantly more than auto emissions.
Measuring the carbon footprint of every commercial building, apartment tower and school (and, ultimately, house) need not be horrendously expensive and labour intensive, because any building's electricity, heating and water bills are known. "Smart" electricity meters, which are blanketing North America, will soon make this job even easier.
The consumption bills might indicate that, say, the Royal Bank of Canada's tower in downtown Toronto emits 50 kilos of carbon per square metre of office space a year. An emissions sticker, perhaps in the form of an electronic billboard, might be mounted in RBC's lobby for everyone to see.
The average emissions of the four other bank towers nearby might be 40 kilos per square metre. At this point, some policy decisions would have to be made. The carbon-reduction authority might order RBC to match its peers, or get a voluntary commitment to do so. Or it might say that all the banks have to reduce their output to 30 kilos a year by 2020. This is the beauty of a like-for-like measurement.
The sticker would allow the authority to identify the very worst buildings, and devise ways to fix them. Recladding the buildings so they lose less heat, or installing more efficient heating and air conditioning systems, would be options. In all cases, peer pressure would help. Any building whose carbon-output reading is perennially in the red might be an embarrassment for its owners and tenants.
But how to pay for all this? Governments are almost broke. Companies suffering from the recession would resist spending small fortunes on carbon reduction, even if the lower energy bills would ultimately pay for the fix-it costs. Mr. Dembo has an idea for this, too.
The energy services companies doing the building retrofits could borrow money to fund the projects. The loans could be serviced by the buildings' energy savings - the difference between the old (high) energy bill and the new (low) bill. That cash flow could in theory be securitized. If the government were to insure the cash flows, the retrofit securities market might take off, allowing more and more retrofits to be done.
Copenhagen will produce some sort of result that will be impossible to understand. Simpler efforts like labelling buildings could launch a grassroots carbon-reduction effort. Everyone would understand that.
