1 January 2010 Happy New Year! Four and half months I have been in Denmark. I have seen summer turn to fall and now that the winter solstice has passed, we have entered the winter season. The month of December was a busy month for Copenhagen and for me. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP15) took place this month and the world’s attention was focused on the environment as 192 heads of state converged in Denmark with the hopes of striking a common agreement with regard to our one and only planet—Earth. Before I discuss my experiences at the COP15, I want to start this blog out by asking a question: What do you appreciate the most about what electricity has brought to our world? (I just want to note that Thomas Alva Edison installed the first electrical system in the 1880’s.) My answer is electricity has helped bring about revolutions in the arts, in particular, music. Caroline and I kicked off the month of December by going to a show of one of the best, modern, progressive rock bands this planet has ever seen: The Mars Volta. Without electricity, a spectacle of this caliber would not exist. Please see below:
The Mars Volta Live at Vega, KPH: Opening and closing songs
The first day of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Fifteenth Conference of Parties (COP15) was on Monday (7 December 2009) at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. I was able to attend the COP15 because I was one of the many who were nominated by the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) to participate in the conference as an observer. I arrived to the Bella Center around 1:00PM after I accompanied Caroline to the airport as she was heading back to the States. There was a daunting line of media people, intergovernmental organization delegates, and non-governmental organization (NGO, also known as non-profit groups in the US) delegates trying to enter the conference center to get their ID badges—luckily, I picked-up my ID badge over the weekend when there was no line. Immediately, I met my colleague and friend from DTU, Simon Henriksen, and we wandered around observing masses of people from all over the world putting together their booths dealing with a cornucopia of environmental issues (groups of people putting on demonstrations and handing out informational packets, people giving interviews, etc.). Eventually, we went to the US Center in Copenhagen and attended a presentation called the Extreme Ice Survey. Below is a summary of the information I gathered from Extreme Ice Survey:
Photo of COP15 in main hall of the Bella Center
In 2006, National Geographic asked James Balog to shoot a story on retreating glaciers. This is important work because you can see first-hand that the glaciers are melting rapidly. It is almost universally accepted that the vast amount of glaciers around the world are retreating. Basically, glaciers are formed by accumulating more snow in the winter than is melted in the summer. Year after year, layers of snow and ice make up glaciers and in each of those layers bubbles of air are trapped that are inherent to each particular year. From those air bubbles trapped in the glacier’s layers, scientists are able to determine what the atmospheric conditions were for each layer for that corresponding year. Glacial ice cores have shown that the peak of CO2 in the atmosphere over the last 400,000 years is 280 ppm (part per million) except during the last 150 years (or since the beginning of the industrial revolution). Today, CO2 in the atmosphere is at a level of 387 ppm.
In Mr. Balog’s presentation he stated that the Alaska Columbia Glacier’s calving-face has receded 16 kilometers over the last 30 years. Calving is a normal, natural process, but what is being observed is that the ice is not being replenished as quickly as the ice is being hemorrhaged into the ocean. He showed some photos of a Greenland glacier that had some black particulate in the crevasses of the glacier, however, there is no exposed soil in the vicinity. This debris is known as Black Carbon, which is blown in from around the world and reduces albedo, the ability to reflect sunlight. He also showed a video that captured some moulins, which are tubular holes in glaciers that allow water to flow into and sometimes below the glaciers, which decreases the friction between the glacier and the earth.
Mr. Balog and his team have installed a number of time-lapse cameras on glaciers across the Northern Hemisphere powered by solar energy, which take a picture every half-hour. This is the largest photographic study of the cryosphere ever. Below is a video I took of the presentation:
Video of the Extreme Ice Survey
The following day (Tuesday, 8 December 2009) I went back to the COP15 and saw that the line was even longer and there were more demonstrators and protesters outside the Bella Center. The first presentation I attended was called Most Recent Climate Research sponsored by The Bellona Foundation. Leading scientists mostly from Europe presented a number of papers with the latest climate research. The next two presentations I attended were both in the EU Pavilion.
The first of the two presentations was called European Cities and the Global Climate Change. The Deputy Mayor of Malmö, Sweden spoke about how Malmö went from being an industrialized city (for about a century) to a city that basically collapsed in 1980’s and early 1990’s with no industry and a city with “nothing on the table”. Today, Malmö is a green, thriving city that attracts young people and green industry. A few things did fall in place to make this happen, such as, a bridge connecting Copenhagen to Malmö and the involvement of Sweden in the EU. Also, the city invested in itself by building a university, cleaning up brown-field areas and polluted sea areas, and creating bike lanes. Now the people of the city are much happier and much more positive than they were just a decade ago. Another speaker representing Tangshan, China spoke about how Tangshan is an old, industrial city with the first coalmine and locomotive in China and how the city is transitioning into an eco-city with a new type of industrialization and urbanization based on a green economy and a green, sustainable way of life—they are following the lead of Malmö. The final speaker was a representative of the World Bank who gave a presentation on the World Bank’s Urban Strategy. He based his presentation on a paradigm shift in the idea of urbanization. The old paradigm being that urbanization is too rapid and primary cities are too large. The new paradigm is that density is needed and the drivers of urbanization should be land-use efficiency, labor mobility, improved institutional and infrastructure efficiency, and good housing for the urban poor.
Snapshot of a graph that shows how different country's policies
effect behavior in society, such as the per capita amount of CO2 emissions
The last presentation of the day was called the International Feed-In Cooperation. A feed-in tariff is a policy mechanism that encourages the development of renewable energy sources. Basically, feed-in tariffs give incentive to develop renewable energy because there is a guaranteed, fixed rate that will be paid for the renewable energy produced, which gives a long-term guarantee and is independent of the energy market. There are advantages and disadvantages to being independent of the market. One of the advantages is if the market price is less than that the feed-in tariff price then it is good for the project and one of the disadvantages is vice versa. The panel of speakers was advocating the benefits feed-in tariff have brought to countries. For example, in Germany, 4400 MW of wind energy was installed between 1991 and 1999 due to incentives that feed-in tariffs gave to developers.
Snapshot of urban footprint of two cities
(Atlanta and Barcelona) with roughly the same population
The next day I attended the COP15 was on Thursday (10 December 2009) and I saw three presentations all held at the US Center. I caught the tail end of a presentation called US-India Energy Partnership: India’s Demand-Side Management. India is country where electrical blackouts are not uncommon. The demand for electricity is sometimes much greater than the supply during peak electricity consumption periods. A way to mitigate this is by decreasing the demand-side of the equation. India is working with the United States’ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) on establishing efficiency programs and programs to reduce electricity shortages. The following presentation was called The Development Agenda for Clean Energy and Transfer of Technologies and it included a panel of speakers representing business, government, and international organizations. The panel led a discussion on “how U.S. clean energy companies, in tandem with government policy and program initiatives, are working with developing countries to help achieve their economic, environmental, and energy objectives” (1). An example of a transfer of technologies project was in the Philippines on the island of Mindanao, which was mainly sponsored by United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Solar energy units were installed on the island where a majority of the population is below the poverty line. One point that was emphasized was “capacity building” within the community, so they would be able to maintain and take care of their solar units. A couple of important benefits the solar units brought to this fishing community were their ability to refrigerate the fish and the electrification of schools. The final presentation of the day I attended was called Mitigating Climate Change – Capturing Carbon Underground, In Soil, and In Plants. Carbon Capture and Storage or Sequestration (CCS) is a natural and unnatural strategy of removing CO2 from the atmosphere both biologically (naturally) and geologically (unnaturally). Naturally, trees, plants, wetlands, microbes in the soil, etc. are biological life that fed on CO2, which reduces the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere—understanding this gives more encouragement to save and/or restore habitats of all these biological species. What is meant by geological storage is that CO2 would actually be pumped into deep underground caverns. Coal-fired power plants could therefore offset their CO2 emissions by removing the CO2 they produce by pumping it underground. This is not a new technology and has been used by oil companies that want to extract more oil from oil deposits. In fact, places that would be suitable to store CO2 are in emptied underground oil caverns. The world is very serious about this approach because most of the energy consumed in the world comes from coal-fired power plants. The United States Federal Government is investing 8 billion dollars and private US companies are investing 7 billion dollars in CCS technology.
Friday (11 December 2009) was the last day of the first week of negotiations at the COP15. The first of the two presentations I attended this day was called Clean Energy Jobs in a Global Marketplace held at the US Center. US Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke highlighted how the Obama Administration’s $80 billion dollar investment in clean energy from the American Recovery and Investment Act is already stimulating the development and deployment of clean energy technologies. Secretary Locke also spoke about how President Obama has proposed the removal of subsides for the production and consumption of fossil fuels. The Obama Administration is seeking to create incentives that make it safe and profitable for long-term investments in clean energy technologies. One point that stood out to me was that the world energy demand is forecasted to increase by 50% by 2030. To put that in perspective, to generate that kind of energy would be like building one coal-fired power plant everyday for the next 27 years. The next presentation I attended was held in a larger conference room in the main NGO hall of the Bella Center; the presentation was called Developing carbon markets post-2012: New approaches and institutional options. This presentation touched on Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) reform such as Measuring, Recording, and Verification (MRV). (Sorry for all the acronyms) CDMs were developed under the Kyoto Protocol to allow for developed countries (called Annex I countries) to offset greenhouse gas emissions produced in their own country by investing in ventures that reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries. This is an alternative given to Annex I countries that would allow them to save money by not cutting emissions in their own countries. MRV was a hot topic during the conference because this was one of the main contentions between the US and China. The US wanted to measure, record, and verify the emissions of China to make sure that everyone was following the rules, but China felt this was a attack on their sovereignty and wanted the world to trust their measurements without a third party verification.
Simon and myself at the Bright Green trade show
Over the weekend (Saturday—Sunday, 12—13 December 2009) I went to the Bright Green trade fair held at the FORUM in Central Copenhagen. This was a platform where the cleantech industry of the world could showcase the solutions they have for solving the world’s environmental problems. There were a number of wind turbine manufacturers at the event including Vestas, Siemens, and General Electric. The US Department of Commerce had a booth for US companies to exhibit their innovative, environmentally sound ideas. A US company who had an exhibit was NewEarth Renewable Energy Inc. based in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, WA who has developed 100% biomass flex fuel alternatives to coal. Another US company in the US booth was Secured Environment based in Palo Alto, CA who developed a technology to measure, track, and evaluate emissions from mobile and stationary sources of pollutants. They are also interested in measuring and tracking all the plastics that are floating in the oceans, and are trying to develop a market for removing the plastics from the oceans. The Pacific Ocean itself has a couple of huge patches of plastic floating around that are each estimated to be size of Texas. A team from Secured Environment did a sample survey to see how much plastic was out there and in every single sample they found plastics—very small traces of plastics to items you can find on a store shelf. They also found plastics at depths of over 100 feet! We always thought that the plastics just floated on the surface, unfortunately, we were wrong. Fish eat those plastics and eventually we will probably eat that fish in one way or another.
The Bright Green trade fair also had a presentation series that included the Chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Dr. Rajendra Kumar Pachauri and the US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997. Below is a video of Secretary Chu’s speech, but first I want to highlight a few points from it—1) the US is considering developing nuclear energy again and 2) the US is investing heavily in CCS technology.
US Secretary of Energy Steven Chu speaking at Bright Green trade show in KPH
Monday (14 December 2009) was the last day I was able to observe and participate in the COP15 at the Bella Center as my pass was issued to me through an NGO. The Bella Center was built to accommodate about 15000 guests, but the UNFCCC issued about 45,000 passes to people in NGOs alone. Needless to say, this upset many people who came to Bella Center and were turned away. The feeling in Copenhagen and COP15 was getting more and more climactic everyday—there were protests in the city and at the Bella Center, more people from around the world were flooding into the city, and the climate negotiations were in full swing.
When I arrived on my bus to Nørreport Station in downtown Copenhagen on Monday morning, I saw flashing police lights and protestors playing tribal rhythms in the streets. After I witnessed this thrilling event, I took the metro to the Bella Center where it was just as electrifying. Below is a video of my adventure to the Bella Center—enjoy:
Video of my trip to the COP15
A presentation I attended on Monday was called Clean Energy RD&D Through Technology Action Plans in the US Center. Most issues from this panel of speakers were covered in Secretary Steven Chu’s speech.
The following day, Tuesday (15 December 2009), I had an opportunity to take a boat tour to Middelgrunden Offshore Wind Farm, which can be seen from Copenhagen. The wind farm has a total capacity of 40 MW and consists of 20-2 MW Bonus wind turbines that supply approximately 3% of the energy consumption of Copenhagen. Below is a video of this experience:
Video of Middelgrunden Offshore Wind Farm boat tour
After the offshore wind farm boat tour, I went to the KlimaForum, which was held at a community center called DGI-BYEN near the Central Station in Copenhagen. The KlimaForum, also called the People’s Climate Summit, was more of a grassroots, do-it-yourself type of conference. The KlimaForum was much different than the COP15—the booths of the various NGOs were setup in a gymnasium, there were people sitting and sleeping on the floor, and there was an eclectic mix of people from all over the place. It was very inspiring to me and kind of brought me back to the “real world.” I attended a talk this day called The Future of Climate Policy for Indigenous Peoples’ of North America. It was a moving talk that was felt by the entire audience. Two women from the Navajo Nation and one woman from a coalition of three tribes from North Dakota spoke about how their people and their lands have been exploited for many years by companies extracting coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. Something I learned was that in order to transport coal in a pipeline, you have to make slurry by combining the coal with water. The water usually comes from an aquifer, which is clean, potable water. This is very problematic because this groundwater is the drinking water for many people in the dry southwest, especially for the people of the Navajo Nation. Additionally, they are seeing that their people are having unusually high rates of cancers in their communities. They are looking for ways to transition their societies from being dependent on these “dirty” industries by becoming a society with green jobs and trade (basket weaving, local goods production, etc.) jobs. They understand that if they take one industry away they have to replace those jobs with another industry. The theme of the KlimaForum was Climate Justice—the meaning of Climate Justice is “ensuring that people everywhere are safe from danger and free from suffering due to climate change” (2). At the end day I went to a fancy hotel called the Odd Fellow Palæet near Kongens Nytorv for the Wind Power Works Cocktail Party. This was a very enjoyable event with people from the wind industry including the CEO of Suzlon, the largest Indian wind turbine manufacturer. However, when arriving to venue I heard some shouting and protesting and sure enough there was a protest right outside the hotel. The people were protesting the closure of a Vestas blade facility on the Isle of Wight. When walking into the venue, I was asked if I was a protestor or here to attend the event—that was funny. During the rest of the night, Simon and I spent the evening meeting new people from all over the world and learning from each other.
The last day of the COP15 was on Friday (18 December 2009), my birthday, and this is when President Obama landed in Copenhagen to attend the climate negotiations. Even though I was not able to enter the Bella Center, I decided to check it out to see the excitement. When I arrived, there were some people there, but not as many people as there were in previous days. I decided to go the KlimaForum to get out of the cold and to watch a presentation called The Next Steps for US Leadership. The panel of speakers included Bill McKibben who founded 350.org. This organization is raising awareness of the target of 350 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere the world needs to get to in order to maintain our global balance. Another panelist was Mike Eckhart from the American Council on Renewable Energy (ACORE) and this organization is working to bring renewable energy into the mainstream of America’s economy and lifestyle. All the panelists had many insightful points and the presentation was a proper way to end my COP15 experience.
The rest of my time during the month of December was spent finishing my coursework and working on my special project. On Christmas Eve, my landlords graciously invited me to have dinner with them and we had a very pleasant evening. For New Years, I went to Barcelona, Spain to get some sunshine and to visit a friend; we had a great time. Today, I live in Copenhagen with a friend of mine and said goodbye to Vedbæk. Denmark is freezing cold, but I am enduring the weather by staying busy, playing games, and eating lots of snacks. I will leave you with one final point dealing with electricity consumption: phantom load. This is electricity consumed by electrical appliances (like televisions and microwaves) while they are switched-off or on stand-by mode. One way to mitigate this is by plugging these electronics into a power strip and switching the power switch off. In Denmark, they have outlets where you can cut the circuit off entirely. I hope everyone is well. Until next time….
Most Sincerely,
Hiram
(2) www.timeforclimatejustice.org/
