greenhouse gas emissions

In a June speech at Georgetown University, President Barack Obama outlined his strategy for both mitigating climate change and responding to its repercussions. The plan’s three pillars involve reducing the amount of carbon released into the atmosphere, increasing readiness for the impacts of climate change, and serving as a global leader to address the issue. In the following article, VerdeXchange News has reprinted the beginning of the plan’s introduction. To provide an overview, VerdeXchange News has also reprinted a summary of the text that first appeared in The Washington Post.

Nate Lewis is the George L. Argyros Professor of Chemistry and Scientific Director of the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis (JCAP) at Caltech. JCAP is one of several federally funded Energy Innovation Hubs, with a specific focus on deriving fuel from sunlight. In a recent talk given at the LAEDC Mid Year Economic Forecast, republished here in VerdeXchange News and TPR, Professor Lewis puts the earth’s current greenhouse gas levels in historic perspective, noting that no energy source has the power to both clean our atmosphere and meet civilization’s growing energy demands except the sun. Yet harnessing the sun’s energy with current solar panel technology presents problems of space and storage. Lewis outlines how artificial photosynthesis might solve these problems, as well as the steps Caltech is taking to make this hypothetical technology a game-changing reality.

The City of Lancaster aims to become the first net-zero city in the world, and took strides toward that goal by mandating solar energy for every new single-family home constructed in the municipality at the start of this year. R. Rex Parris, the Mayor of Lancaster, described his vision to VerdeXchange News: that the city will serve as an example others follow, so that the nation can reduce greenhouse gas emissions and help prevent the worst potential outcomes of climate change. With a clear goal, Mayor Parris has united his constituents around the frank reality of climate change.

VerdeXchange News presents the following remarks by Amy Myers Jaffe, Executive Director for Energy and Sustainability at UC Davis, delivered this summer at the biannual Asilomar Conference on Transportation and Energy. Her thesis: Many incorrectly imagined that the globe and the Industrial West were running dry of oil and thus alternative energy and fuels could depend on high oil prices shifting us to lower carbon emissions. Jaffe suggests that environmental policy advocates shift away from arguing scarcity and instead prepare for possible fossil fuel surpluses, and what that might mean for the economy and for climate change initiatives.

Newly reelected President Barack Obama and California Governor Jerry Brown both began 2013 - the former in his Inaugural Address and the latter in his State of the State speech - by emphasizing the need for lawmakers to address the issue of climate change. And both also cite the need for critical infrastructure investment and mitigation efforts to act as part of a solution to control the symptoms of climate change. Project funding, ranging from high-speed rail to flood control, they assert, are key to reducing the amount of energy consumed from non-renewable sources of energy, limiting carbon footprints, and protecting posterity from future disasters; thereby creating newer, innovative green jobs and protecting jobs that already exist from being threatened by climate change.

Tom Rand is a well-known investor and entrepreneur and is the Cleantech Practice Lead Advisor at theMaRS Discovery District in Toronto, Canada. Ahead of an LAEDC trade mission to Toronto, VX asks Rand how markets are beginning to reflect the realities of climate change and what parallels exist between cleantech investment in California and Canada. Rand notes that as the pressures of climate change emerge, industries across all sectors, from mining to forestry to manufacture, will have to plan carefully to reduce carbon emissions as part of staying flexible with a changing economy. <See: http://vxcanada.ca/>