Blog
31.March 2009 - 00:00
The Long and Winding Road
Published in the 10-year anniversary book of the Brussels based Women Energy Club 31st March 2009
The Long and Winding Road.
By Eija-Riitta Korhola MEP. Finland.
Many of us can sing the first verse of this great Paul McCartney song but I was struck recently by the suitability of the second verse to so many recent disasters probably resulting from Climate Change. It goes like this:
The wild and windy night
That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears
Crying for the day
Why leave me standing here
Let me know the way
Battling Climate Change is the most challenging task of the human race. It is a good example of why EU-wide and all other types of international cooperation are needed. Even though Kyoto is stumbling, the work must continue. We must re-double our search for all technical, market based and political initiatives to stop climate change. Somehow we must convince the most significant emitters, USA, China and India to join us along with all the others.
My own ‘Long and Winding Road’ towards the topic of Energy began with my inquisitive childhood and continued into my formal education. No, I am neither an engineer nor a scientist; my academic specialisation was in the field of Philosophy with a bent towards the Philosophy of Technology. Later, as a writer and broadcaster and then as a politician, I have continued down this road with my passion for Human Rights and then a deep concern for Environmental Protection leading me to several places including that one we call Energy.
According to The World Bank, 1.6 billion people do not have access to basic modern energy services – particularly in Africa where only 25 percent of households have access to electricity. More than 2.5 billion people still rely on wood and biomass for cooking and heating. This part of my journey tells me we simply must do something to improve the lives and expectations of the poorest members of our human family. But increasing their access to energy is most likely to mean burning more wood, unsustained biomass or fossil fuels. With one hand we can help them but our other hand is increasing the emissions that contribute to global warming. Recent history tells us that the same poor people are the most likely to suffer from the extreme weather conditions and flooding associated with global climate change. This conundrum is my motivation to continue to play my part in finding solutions to provide adequate energy without further damage to our planet. I have a third concern that we must also keep an eye on the economic consequences associated with incentivising industry and the public towards reducing harmful emissions. I’ll return to that later.
So what can we do? Well, although the ‘Greens’ have done much to publicise the problems facing our planet and I applaud them for that, I am sorry to say that they have also done even more to prevent workable solutions and have assigned to themselves a label as experts when, quite simply, they are not. To quote James Lovelock, the great earth scientist and Green Icon of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s:
"I can envisage somewhere about 2050, when the greenhouse really begins to bite, when people will start looking back and saying: whose fault was all this? And they will settle on the Greens and say: 'if those damn people hadn't stopped us building nuclear power stations we wouldn't be in this mess'. And I think it is true…..”
This argument surely illustrates the essential connection between Philosophy and Technology. Philosophers (or thinkers) must not close their minds on any technology otherwise they are simply no longer capable of philosophical argument as they sink into a dogma that also prevents a change of mind. I’ll suggest another example. Green organisations have opposed the inclusion of carbon dioxide sinks, such as tropical forests, and reforestation to the Kyoto Protocol as a form of carbon offset. They justify their opposition by the fact that, for them, decreasing emissions is the primary target. As an unfortunate result of that decision, the developing countries were left without proper economical incentives to protect their forests – which has accelerated the global warming. It was only in the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali last year that controlling deforestation and increasing forest restoration were finally accepted as means of controlling climate change, mainly thanks to developing countries.
Actually, I believe we need to develop every clean technology that can reduce the emissions from the energy sector. We are not in some kind of competition between wind and nuclear or solar and carbon capture from fossil fuel burning. Energy efficiency improvements and innovations such as getting energy from waste are also vital in this context. Moreover, we need to use every kind of mechanism to achieve it. Fiscal measures, market based instruments and even penalty-bearing legislation all have a part to play. However, as we incentivise industry to reduce its harmful emissions or penalise those who don’t, we also need to predict what some people, especially verbose politicians, call the law of unintended consequences. I am a great fan of the Emission Trading System aimed at putting a cost on environmental pollution. The idea is that industry has to buy permits to pollute so that if they reduce their emissions, they can sell permits in a market and, step by step, clean technologies replace dirty ones. Fine theory, but if the EU remains the only place where this applies, industry will leave and re-establish where there is no cost on emissions and almost certainly much lower environmental standards. This is called carbon leakage and, when it occurs, such a system benefits no-one, nor does it help the environment PLUS it creates unemployment as industry leaves.
That is the third and last part of this conundrum: How can we raise the living standards of the world’s poorest people, safeguard the environment and not damage the world’s economies most capable of addressing the problem?
The winding road remains ever longer!
Eija-Riitta Korhola is a Member of the European Parliament and is Vice-Chairwoman of The Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee as well as serving on the Committees for: Environment, Public Health and Food Safety; Climate Change; Industry, Research and Energy
Published in the 10-year anniversary book of the Brussels based Women Energy Club 31st March 2009
The Long and Winding Road.
By Eija-Riitta Korhola MEP. Finland.
Many of us can sing the first verse of this great Paul McCartney song but I was struck recently by the suitability of the second verse to so many recent disasters probably resulting from Climate Change. It goes like this:
The wild and windy night
That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears
Crying for the day
Why leave me standing here
Let me know the way
Battling Climate Change is the most challenging task of the human race. It is a good example of why EU-wide and all other types of international cooperation are needed. Even though Kyoto is stumbling, the work must continue. We must re-double our search for all technical, market based and political initiatives to stop climate change. Somehow we must convince the most significant emitters, USA, China and India to join us along with all the others.
My own ‘Long and Winding Road’ towards the topic of Energy began with my inquisitive childhood and continued into my formal education. No, I am neither an engineer nor a scientist; my academic specialisation was in the field of Philosophy with a bent towards the Philosophy of Technology. Later, as a writer and broadcaster and then as a politician, I have continued down this road with my passion for Human Rights and then a deep concern for Environmental Protection leading me to several places including that one we call Energy.
According to The World Bank, 1.6 billion people do not have access to basic modern energy services – particularly in Africa where only 25 percent of households have access to electricity. More than 2.5 billion people still rely on wood and biomass for cooking and heating. This part of my journey tells me we simply must do something to improve the lives and expectations of the poorest members of our human family. But increasing their access to energy is most likely to mean burning more wood, unsustained biomass or fossil fuels. With one hand we can help them but our other hand is increasing the emissions that contribute to global warming. Recent history tells us that the same poor people are the most likely to suffer from the extreme weather conditions and flooding associated with global climate change. This conundrum is my motivation to continue to play my part in finding solutions to provide adequate energy without further damage to our planet. I have a third concern that we must also keep an eye on the economic consequences associated with incentivising industry and the public towards reducing harmful emissions. I’ll return to that later.
So what can we do? Well, although the ‘Greens’ have done much to publicise the problems facing our planet and I applaud them for that, I am sorry to say that they have also done even more to prevent workable solutions and have assigned to themselves a label as experts when, quite simply, they are not. To quote James Lovelock, the great earth scientist and Green Icon of the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s:
"I can envisage somewhere about 2050, when the greenhouse really begins to bite, when people will start looking back and saying: whose fault was all this? And they will settle on the Greens and say: 'if those damn people hadn't stopped us building nuclear power stations we wouldn't be in this mess'. And I think it is true…..”
This argument surely illustrates the essential connection between Philosophy and Technology. Philosophers (or thinkers) must not close their minds on any technology otherwise they are simply no longer capable of philosophical argument as they sink into a dogma that also prevents a change of mind. I’ll suggest another example. Green organisations have opposed the inclusion of carbon dioxide sinks, such as tropical forests, and reforestation to the Kyoto Protocol as a form of carbon offset. They justify their opposition by the fact that, for them, decreasing emissions is the primary target. As an unfortunate result of that decision, the developing countries were left without proper economical incentives to protect their forests – which has accelerated the global warming. It was only in the UN Climate Change Conference in Bali last year that controlling deforestation and increasing forest restoration were finally accepted as means of controlling climate change, mainly thanks to developing countries.
Actually, I believe we need to develop every clean technology that can reduce the emissions from the energy sector. We are not in some kind of competition between wind and nuclear or solar and carbon capture from fossil fuel burning. Energy efficiency improvements and innovations such as getting energy from waste are also vital in this context. Moreover, we need to use every kind of mechanism to achieve it. Fiscal measures, market based instruments and even penalty-bearing legislation all have a part to play. However, as we incentivise industry to reduce its harmful emissions or penalise those who don’t, we also need to predict what some people, especially verbose politicians, call the law of unintended consequences. I am a great fan of the Emission Trading System aimed at putting a cost on environmental pollution. The idea is that industry has to buy permits to pollute so that if they reduce their emissions, they can sell permits in a market and, step by step, clean technologies replace dirty ones. Fine theory, but if the EU remains the only place where this applies, industry will leave and re-establish where there is no cost on emissions and almost certainly much lower environmental standards. This is called carbon leakage and, when it occurs, such a system benefits no-one, nor does it help the environment PLUS it creates unemployment as industry leaves.
That is the third and last part of this conundrum: How can we raise the living standards of the world’s poorest people, safeguard the environment and not damage the world’s economies most capable of addressing the problem?
The winding road remains ever longer!
Eija-Riitta Korhola is a Member of the European Parliament and is Vice-Chairwoman of The Internal Market and Consumer Protection Committee as well as serving on the Committees for: Environment, Public Health and Food Safety; Climate Change; Industry, Research and Energy