Like many who have an interest in climate change, I have been seduced by the technology and promise of alternative energy. After all, it can relieve our dependence on fossil fuels and provide clean, renewable energy. What’s not to like? Nothing, except it is not the most critical change we need to make right now. Becoming more efficient is the most immediate action we need to address while we build our alternative infrastructure.

As this article in the NY Times describes, the lack of capability to store energy provided by alternative sources like wind and solar is a major technological problem. This factor alone means that the costs of this energy will always be high and the environmental impact must still factor in the need for carbon-based fuel sources (to fill in when the sun isn’t shining) until we solve the storage problem. The market has a lot of headroom pricewise before these technologies become viable.

The Political Will To Change Won’t Embrace Energy Efficiency

Politicians are becoming big advocates of alternative sources, but not because they are wonderful technology. They like them because they allow the politician to embrace the populist energy issues while not having to confront actual change while they are still in office. Announcing that 20% of our energy needs will be provided by alternatives by 2020 is a wonderful sound bite for an elected official- especially since they will not have to account for that promise 23 years from now.

Energy efficiency is a different political animal. The President and Congress could mandate significantly higher gas mileage in a very short timeframe and send a huge message to oil producers and energy companies that they were leveling the playing field. They won’t however, because the entire auto industry would take a short term hit and these are major political influencers. Even a five percent mandatory improvement in three years would take a huge load off of our economy as a whole and the environment. Instead, this obvious step is being sold out for short term gain by industry. The Japanese, particularly Toyota, have a longer strategic view. They understand that, by including efficiency in their strategy, they’ll eventually own the market worldwide. In fact, they will own the US market sometime in 2007. As a capitalist, I have no problem with fighting regulation to protect shareholder profits, however I do have a problem with sticking to an outdated model and using political power to level the playing field for short term gain.

Efficiency Pays both the Consumer and The Environment

What will change this attitude? We will. You see, buying efficient products actually saves us money. A car that is 5% more efficient saves more and more money as fuel prices rise. Likewise with home heating and energy efficiency, electric bills and new low power lighting, etc. The point here is that you are the voter. You mandated change in Iraq last November. You can and should mandate immediate change on energy efficiency. You can tell your elected officials, local and national, that this is critical now. And you can vote with your pocketbook, choosing efficiency over short term savings. The market is still good at listening to that kind of input.

I use Google Alerts to keep up on news stories about climate change and global warming. While I have no intention of posting these reports regularly (its a cheesy way to build blog content, IMHO. Hear me, Fast Company?), today’s list struck me as interesting. See if you notice a pattern (sorry, I can’t figure out how to get them to wrap but the links do work):

Global warming could wreak havoc in China
China Daily - China
Global warming could have a major effect on the health of the Chinese … the country’s agriculture, according to a National Assessment Report on Climate Change. …

Court must conclude that global warming gases are a real danger
Arizona Daily Star - Tucson,AZ,USA
… welfare to include harmful effects on the Earth’s climate. … that it "disagrees" with their use to combat global warming. … Act, it can ask Congress to change it. …
See all stories on this topic

Lock ‘em up — ignitions, that is
Anchorage Daily News - Anchorage,AK,USA
… global warming went from controversial to conventional for much of the corporate world. … A growing list of blue chips are formally including climate change …

Interview: Christian Scientist on Global Warming
Christian Post - USA
… CP: What are some suggestions you have for reducing global warming? … now coming to recognize that this is probably the biggest factor governing climate change. …

‘Wales could be plunged into another ice age,’ claims glacier …
ic Wales - United Kingdom
… wander around, mankind is accelerating the process of climate change and it … a major upheaval and we do something about our carbon emissions and global warming. …

Climate change at crisis level
San Jose Mercury News - CA, USA
… all of us — government, business, individuals — to aggressively attack global warming. … trading scheme, the structure is in place for positive change. …

Greening of the Earth (Observations - Asia
CO2 Science Magazine - Tempe,AZ,USA
… headline-grabbing predictions of catastrophic CO2-induced global warming and the … estimates of the economic impact of predicted climate change on agriculture in …

Time to act on climate change
The Daily Yomiuri - Osaka,Japan
… At present, both global warming and the emission of greenhouse gases are … Europe, the United States and many other countries, climate change has become one of …

Yes, the pattern I see is the international range of very real local problems outlined. As Paul Hawken notes in his Worldchanging post, we’re in a period of intense acceleration with the next decade bringing rapid and cascading change worldwide. I like his idea of somehow building an action network although my experience with not for profits makes me think it would be like hearding a bunch of very deliberate and contentious cats…

VC Mike has the transcript of a brief talk VC Bob Metcalfe did on cleantech or as he dubs it, ‘Enertech’. The talk was five minutes long so the transcript is annotated with additional notes on each statement.

Here’s a snippet on how we can change things (annotations in Bold):

‘First, as it evolves to enhance its email, search, blogs, social networking, audio, and video capabilities, the Internet can increasingly be used to reduce energy consumption by massively substituting COMMUNICATION for TRANSPORTATION. Just think of all the automobile and airplane miles and attendant carbon emissions that will be saved by transmitting our BITS to meetings instead of lugging our ATOMS. Let’s try hard to attend these Massachusetts Enertech Cluster meetings in the future without actually going anywhere. Down with pressing the flesh!

Second, starting with today’s base of a billion users and Google, the Internet is becoming an unprecedented medium for COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE. More and more people are getting better and better information and communication tools that will be applied to the development of cheap and clean energy and to solve Global Warming. The Internet is helping accelerate intellectual progress exponentially, and as Ray Kurzweil ‘70 writes, the singularity is near.

And third, the people, processes, and institutions that built the Internet will themselves help bring the world cheap and clean energy. I’m talking here about the Internet’s teams of scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and venture capitalists. And I’m talking about actual Internet techies and FOCACA. Of course, like the Internet, solving the world’s energy problems will take about 30 years. By meeting here today, I hope we are aiming to help techies deliver cheap and clean energy faster than we delivered the Internet.’

Thanks to Paul Kedrosky.

Worldchanging is a website dedicated to personal action and it is now a comprehensive book on the subject. As the effects of climate change and global warming accelerate, it is easy to wonder how any of us as individuals can do anything about it that really makes a difference. Worldchanging is about personal action and how small actions, when aggregated across millions of people, can change things.

This may very well be a handbook for our future.