Cool it: With a little help from non-Silicon Valley

Economist
Monday 1/1/2007 Page: 144

If you fancy walking to the North Pole, 2007 is not I going to be a very good year for it. That said, it might be your last chance. The sea-ice that tops off our planet like a gleaming case of male-pattern baldness is retreating at a rate Rogaine-users could only dream of, and is likely to go on doing so.The retreat of the sea-ice is one of the many reasons why doubts about the reality of anthropogenic climate change are in even steeper decline.

For all practical purposes 2007 will see those doubts laid to rest. Early in the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will release its fourth "Assessment Report", the third having been published in 2001. It will say that greenhouse gases are at their highest levels for at least 650,000 years, and possibly many millions of years more; that there is a high likelihood that the modest global warming of the past 50 years can be attributed to the industrial pumping out of those greenhouse gases; and that further warming is unavoidable.

The largest source of uncertainty about human effects on the climate no longer lies in science. It lies in what can be predicted about, or indeed what limits can be enforced on, the world's use of fossil fuels. In 2007 this question will sit in its rightful position at the centre of the debate.

The good news is that some industries and previously uninterested governments have already caught on to this. Environmental regulations in China are toughening up and there is hope for serious energy efficiency measures there (China's emission standards for cars and trucks are already, shamingly, more stringent than America's). Meanwhile, in America and Europe "Cleantech", including alternative energy technologies, is one of the fastest-growing categories in venture capital.

Of the new technologies seeking R&D, capital and markets, the one worth paying particular heed to in 2007 will be solar energy. Wind turbines will, from now until the end of time, be subject to only incremental improvements: they will become a bit more efficient, a hit cheaper to install, and a bit cheaper to build. Solar, on the other hand, is ripe for breakthroughs. The material which forms the basis of the vast majority of today's solar cells, silicon, is expensive and cumbersome. There is no compelling reason why new materials of a tenth or a twentieth the price of silicon could not be used-all that is needed is ingenuity, incentives private or public, and knowledge of the relevant subtleties of physics and chemistry. None of these factors is at present a limited resource; indeed they are all growing. In 2007 a Silicon Valley start-up, Nanosolar, will open the first really large non-silicon solar-cell factory. Many more will follow.

Even with sustained growth in energy efficiency and carbon-free generation, there is more warming in store. How fast we should move in cutting emissions will still be a source of vigorous debate in 2007. But the need to start will be clearer than ever.