16 Ideas for the Planet

JOHN R. MCNEILL
Former Cinco Hermanos Chair Of Environmental and International Affairs, Georgetown University

The next 50 years are make-or-break
The way I look at it, global climate change and the environment have been important for quite some time. I hope they stay here in the forefront of the U.S. consciousness, but they may not. Something could relegate those issues to the margins tomorrow. Since 9/11, the situation has been fairly simple and straightforward: issues of terrorism and security have seized the public imagination to the extent that everything else has become a lesser priority. Anything that has a longer time horizon, like climate change, with a slower fuse to anticipate catastrophe, has to wait.

But clearly the salience of environmentalism has returned rather suddenly in the last 12 months, which is interesting because there hasn't been a real galvanizing event. Katrina for some people seems like a thing to come with a warmer world, but by no means is that clearly the case. But we certainly now have a shifting landscape in which almost nobody clings to the position that the science of climate change is bogus. Rather, the opposition has begun to say, "OK, it's happening, but there's nothing we can do about it." My guess is that this position will further weaken, because I think the gradual development of new technologies will show it is possible to make the leap. I am very confident that there will eventually be a post-fossil-fuel economy and that technology will extricate us from this awkward position we now find ourselves in. The way I see it, the next 50 years will be the eye of the needle through which we need to pass. That will not be easy.

ARTHUR H. ROSENFELD, PH.D.
Commissioner, California Energy Commission

Energy efficiency is the ultimate answer
If we're going to survive global warming, there are two things we must do. We have to move in the direction of renewable energy, such as wind and solar power, and we have to improve energy efficiency. You can measure it in different ways—passenger miles per gallon of gas, lumens per watt—but we need to think in terms of doubling efficiency. Not "conservation," which implies sacrifice. Efficiency doesn't involve sacrifice. If you compare a modern refrigerator with one from 1973, which was the year of the OPEC oil embargo, it's bigger, it's gotten rid of CFC refrigerants, its inflation-adjusted price is two thirds less—and it uses 75 percent less energy.

Have we picked all the low-hanging fruit already? There's no evidence for that at all. People wondered about that when refrigerators doubled their efficiency, and we went right on and doubled it again. There's virtually no end in sight. One area of interest right now is standby power. If I go to your house at 3 a.m. on a nice spring night, nothing but the refrigerator is actually "on," but you're probably consuming 80 watts in remote-controlled appliances such as televisions and garage-door openers and in cell-phone chargers. These devices used to draw around three watts each, but the California Energy Commission recently passed regulations that limit them to a half-watt. If you buy a cordless telephone in California in 2008, it will use one fifth the power it did a few years ago—and that will eventually be true everywhere in the world. Which brings me back to my main point: that while we do need to develop renewable-energy supplies, energy efficiency is the quickest and cheapest way to delay global warming.