Photo of Nobel Prize Winning Scientist, Mario Molina

By Elona Malterre

           Creating a North American energy strategy makes “a lot of sense” says a Nobel Prize winner and U.S. presidential advisor who also warns that not addressing climate change is like “playing Russian roulette.”
           While Canada’s political leaders continue to disagree over the merits of establishing a national energy strategy, the United States and Mexico are keenly interested in creating a North American energy strategy, says Mexican-born Nobel laureate Mario Molina, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of California, San Diego.
           “It would make a lot of sense,” said Molina, who has served President Barack Obama and former president Bill Clinton on the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and also worked extensively with Mexico’s energy and environment ministries.
           Molina is also director of the Mario Molina Center for Energy and Environment in Mexico City.
           “We have the support (for a North American energy strategy), and – I have not yet communicated to our Canadian colleagues – but certainly at very high levels in Mexico and the United States,” Molina told a meeting in Calgary of the Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s Joint Public Advisory Committee (JPAC) established under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
           JPAC is a 15-member, independent volunteer body that provides advice and public input to the NAFTA environmental commission’s council (www.cec.org/council), which comprises the environment ministers from the three NAFTA countries.
           Molina, who shared the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1995 for his work on compounds such as chlorofluorocarbons adversely affecting the ozone layer, was a keynote speaker at JPAC’s “Greening North America’s Energy Economy” two-day public consultation meeting in Calgary in late April.
           Molina said that creating a North American energy strategy was one of four recommendations that members of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology made in two recent meetings with Obama. The other recommendations included:
          •    putting a price on carbon emissions so the marketplace can work to find the cheapest emissions reductions through a new international agreement in the post-Kyoto period;
          •    increasing investments in energy-technology research, development and demonstration; and
          •    expanding international cooperation on deploying advanced energy technologies. 
          Molina also told his Calgary audience that “the world is playing Russian roulette by not addressing climate change.” 
          Referring to data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he noted that in the absence of an international policy to stabilize carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, global mean surface temperatures could rise from a minimum 3 to 4 °C up to 7°C. (See http://www.cec.org/2013JPAC/Mario_Molina.pptx).
           Molina, quoting an opinion piece written by climate scientists Robert Corell, Jeff Masters and Kevin Trenberth that was published in Politico in November 2012, said that “a warming climate puts more energy into storms, including hurricanes, loading them with more rainfall and the stronger winds pushing more of a storm surge.” (See http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1112/83335.html).
           The three climate scientists – each at different organizations – concluded that climate change is worsening some recent extreme weather events such as super storm Sandy.    
          “If experts and scientists are right about climate change, it is just a matter of time before society will naturally agree to put a price on carbon internationally,” Molina said. “As this has a high probability of happening, why not get started right away and get ahead of the curve?”
          Molina also told his Calgary audience that recent data from the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) revealed a global system of fossil fuel subsidies and taxes that is “horribly overcomplicated and illogical.”
          The total value of fossil fuel subsidies in 2011 for OECD countries amounted to more than US$80 billion, with three-quarters of it going to the petroleum industry, he said.
          The OECD’s principal conclusion was that government support for oil, coal and natural gas development is still increasing across the developed world, Molina said.
          Attendees at the JPAC meeting also heard from Kent Klitgaard, co-author with Charles A.S. Hall of the new book Energy and the Wealth of Nations, which presents an economic theory for the “second half of the age of oil.”  (Klitgaard show below)

          “I think the world, especially North America, has got a problem . . . what I call the dilemma of economic growth,” said Klitgaard, professor of economics at Wells College in Aurora, New York. “We grow too rapidly in the sense of using resources and putting carbon into the air.”
           Almost all our current economic theory about energy has been developed “on the economic upswing” based on U.S. geologist M. King Hubbert’s peak oil curve, Klitgaard said, adding that he is interested in developing “an economic theory for the second half of the age of oil.”
           (For a primer on Hubbert’s peak oil theory, see http://www.resilience.org/primer).
           In Hubbert’s theory, “what rules the (economic) down sweep is not only peak oil, although conventional oil has probably peaked . . .,” he said. “But one must also consider the cost (of energy development) not just in dollars or pesos, but also in terms of energy invested in that (development).”
           In their book Energy and the Wealth of Nations, Klitgaard said that co-author Hall developed “the idea of energy return on investment, which is basically energy delivered to society divided by the energy invested in that (energy development).”
          Unfortunately, Klitgaard added, “the energy return on investment tends to be declining.”
          The average energy return on investment from the time of the first big oil find at the turn of the 20th century to the 1930s was about 100:1, he said.
           By 1979 and the year of North America’s second ‘oil shock,’ that return on investment had declined to 40:1, Klitgaard said. “It’s now fallen down to about 20:1.”
           The relationship between the Sun’s energy striking the Earth, the conversion to biomass, the exploitation of biomass by human activity, the carbon sinks, and the infrared ‘bounce’ back of energy into space inevitably leads to the question of “How big can the economy be relative to the ecosystem?” he said.  
          “‘Anyone who believes that an economy can grow exponentially in a finite ecosystem is either a madman or an economist,’” Klitgaard said, quoting Kenneth Boulding, a founder of the International Society of Ecological Economics.
          “Exponential growth in the economy results in exponential growth in carbon dioxide emissions when looked at absolutely,” Klitgaard said. (See http://www.cec.org/2013JPAC/Kent_Klitgaard.pptx).
            Recently, he said, there has been a relative decoupling in the economy, and the connection between energy consumption and real GDP has been declining.
           According to climate activists, he added, when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, “We’ve been going the right way too slow,” due to relying on increased energy efficiencies and other ways of “picking the low-hanging fruit.”
           Klitgaard also pointed to another indicator of reduced global economic growth.
          “If you look at the growth rate per decade . . . the growth rates in the ’70s were lower than they were in the ’60s, and they were lower in the ’80s than they were in the ’70s and they were about the same in the ’90s, and then even lower in the 2000’s and are hovering very low now.
          “And if you look, Europe is stagnant. China’s growth rates are falling (which) seem to lend some credibility to stagnationist’s theory.”
           Economic growth is powered by our ability to provide energy, so if you couple the global debt loads with increased oil prices, the question is whether the world has “a new normal of lower economic growth,” Klitgaard said.
          “We need far more analysis into what the feedback mechanisms between energy availability, the economy and the carbon balance of what society will be,” he added.
           Referring to the paper, “Beyond ‘dangerous’ climate change: emission scenarios for a new world,” by UK climate change scientists Kevin Anderson and Alice Bows and published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Klitgaard said: “‘It’s not possible to ensure with high likelihood that a temperature rise of more than 2 degrees Celsius can be avoided given the view that reduction in emissions of three to four per cent per year are not compatible with economic growth.’” (See http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/369/1934/20.full). 
          “As long as economic growth becomes the priority and anything else has to fit within that, the ability to come up with those (emissions-reduction) innovations will be highly unlikely,” Klitgaard said.
           For North America to realign its economies to more sustainable models, he said that society must consider:
           •    smaller scale development;
           •    more local production;
           •    limits on speculative financing;
           •    work sharing;
           •    more equality (internationally and intra-nationally);
           •    getting by on less energy.
            A sustainable North American economy can be neither Soviet-style heavy industry nor globalized monopoly finance capitalism, Klitgaard said.
          David Angus, chair of JPAC for 2013, told the Calgary audience that he was amazed at the level of research and cooperation achieved at NAFTA’s Commission for Environmental Cooperation.
          JPAC is “empowered to provide advice (to the commission’s environment council) to the highest levels of this kind of work,” Angus said.
           Following the public consultation meeting in Calgary, JPAC in May issued a series of practical recommendations to the top environment officials of Canada, Mexico and the United States to do more to move North America toward a truly sustainable energy economy.
          Key among the recommendations are that the three countries “should develop a comprehensive North American low-carbon energy strategy,” and eliminate government subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in North America and support “investments and market-based mechanisms that promote energy efficiency and renewable energy technologies.” (See http://www.cec.org/Storage/148/17443_JPAC_Advice_to_Council_13-02_en.pdf).
          Experts from industry, civil society and academia who participated in “Greening North America’s Energy Economy” recognized that North America is rich in fossil fuel resources, but they also acknowledged the long-term danger of continuing current patterns of energy development and consumption in the region, JPAC said.
          Three clear themes emerged from the discussion:
           •    The need to ensure long-term availability and security of energy throughout North America with an emphasis on energy self-sufficiency within the region;
           •    The need to address concerns regarding climate change and the increasing amount of energy invested per unit of energy returned that is required to obtain fossil fuel energy resources; and
           •    The need to leverage the development of North America’s wealth of hydrocarbon energy resources to help move to a prosperous, low-carbon economy. 
           “We went to Calgary to listen, consult and promote conversations,” Angus said after the meeting.
           “What we heard is that to address risks of climate change, the region must find ways to twin the development of those resources with a rapid transition to low-carbon ways to meet North America’s long-term energy needs.”
          JPAC called on the Commission for Environmental Cooperation’s (CEC) Council (Canada’s environment minister, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s administrator and Mexico’s secretary of environment and natural resources) to adopt JPAC’s key proposals as the council implements the CEC’s 2013-2014 operational plan and looks toward future priorities under the CEC’s 2015-2020 strategic plan.
          JPAC plans to host its next public meeting on transportation and the environment in Mexico on July 10-11, 2013. That meeting will be held jointly with the annual meeting of the CEC Council. EnviroLine