If current trends continue, coastal cities on the eastern seaboard face increasing risk of sea level rising and flooding. Inland areas such as the southwest face drought. And breadbasket states face heat waves and heavier rains that can destroy crops. The consequences offer a grim future if global temperature escalate the critical 2-3 degrees Celsius that scientists predict.

Heat waves and human health – A warmer climate means heat waves will occur more often and they will last longer. Under the business-as-usual scenario, Chicago will see 25 percent more heat waves per year and, in Los Angeles, the number of heat wave days each year is expected to surge from 12 to 44 (best-case scenario) or 95 (worst-case scenario). The elderly are always the most at risk, and with the Baby Boomers rapidly joining their ranks, the vulnerable population is rising. Meanwhile increased ozone in the air could damage lung tissue and pose a threat to people with asthma. And the tick that carries Lyme disease – vulnerable to colder temperatures – will see lots of new real estate with a territory expanding 125 miles north by the 2020s and about 600 miles by the 2080s.

Shrinking the Great Lakes? – Groundwater levels that replenish well water supplies are expected to drop, especially in the Southwest, where water is already a precious commodity. Agriculture will suffer as governments allocate more water for cities and industries to use. The fate of the Great Lakes remains uncertain. Less runoff should cut off their supply. Some models suggest they could fall more than 4 feet, although one model has levels rising 1 foot. Drying up the Great Lakes would be felt all across the board as channels become impassable, docks and harbors become inaccessible, species lose their habitats and hydropower and industry lose one of their key resources. Almost half the water supply to southern California could be threatened as runoff from the Sierra Nevada and Colorado River basin decreases.

Floods and droughts – The already-dry Southwest is expected to get even drier, but rainfall will increase everywhere else. The bigger change, though, is in precipitation extremes – how many floods and droughts the nation will face in the coming decades. And the figures suggest they’re going to get more frequent and more intense. Floods that now occur every 100 years could occur every three to four years, and floods that occur every 500 years could occur every 50. Iowa experienced two such severe floods within a few years, in 1993 and 2008.

The high cost of plant growth – Climate change will lengthen the growing season – and forest cover – which should be a good thing, as forests act as carbon sinks sucking up CO2 from the atmosphere. But the warmer months and flourishing vegetation also increase the risk of forest fires. Estimates predict the fire-risk window will widen 10 to 30 percent during the warmer summer months. One of the key beneficiaries – agriculture – will have a hard time taking advantage of the longer growing season as water supplies dwindle and get shifted to the cities. And the migration of forests upward and northward will also drastically alter ecosystems. Scientists predict by 2050, 15 to 37 percent of the global plant and animal species will be on the path to extinction.

If it acts quickly, the U.S. has the technological know-how to prevent these problems by developing energy efficiency and clean energy sources. The ideas and innovations are out there, but before demand will take off, the nation as a whole must realize its stake in the game and garner the willpower to link its future to the rest of the world.

Source: The International Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report (2007)

There isn’t a developed nation on the planet that hasn’t trampled the environment to some degree to get ahead. With 1.3 billion people, China plans to jumpstart more developing than most, and it still has a long way to go. As it tries to decrease its carbon footprint as well, here are a few of the other challenges on its environmental checklist:

Water shortages – The global water crisis is a bigger problem than climate change, at least in the minds of the public, and China is suffering the brunt of it. With 20 percent of the world’s population and 7 percent of its water resources, demand far outstrips supply. A January 2009 World Bank report found approximately 400 of its 667 cities don’t have enough water. In the North China Plain, which produces nearly one-third of the nation’s grain, the water table is falling 3 feet per year. Farmers account for most of the water use (at least 65 percent), but only 45 percent of that actually makes it to the crops. That means at least one-fifth of the country’s total water use is wasted during irrigation.

Water pollution – Just as bad as the dwindling supply of water is the sordid state of the water available. More than 70 percent of China’s lakes and rivers are polluted. 63 billion tons of waste water flow into its rivers each year. Nine-tenths of the aquifers in its cities are contaminated with arsenic and other forms of pollution, and more than three-fourths of the river water in urban areas is unsuitable for drinking due to industrial and municipal waste. The toll on its population is chilling: 320 million people lack access to clean drinking water, and nearly 100,000 die every year from water pollution-related illnesses. Equally chilling: Negotiators struck water supply issues from the Copenhagen agenda in order to simplify the discussion.

Air pollution – China holds top rank for spewing out more carbon dioxide than any other nation on the globe, though the amount is far less per person than in the U.S. But its towering smokestacks also emit sulfur dioxide and nitrogen dioxide, key contributors to acid rain and the bane of crop production. The country is home to seven of the ten filthiest cities on the planet. According to one of its own surveys, two-thirds of the 338 cities with data available were considered polluted by the hazardous chemicals. The U.S. State Department reports that China’s air quality is so bad that respiratory and heart-related diseases associated with it outrank any other single cause of death in the country.

Biodiversity – China shelters some of the greatest variety of species on Earth. But the numbers are decreasing at an alarming rate. In 2002 China and almost 200 other countries signed the Convention on Biological Diversity, agreeing to “significantly reduce” biodiversity loss by 2010. But that same decade saw the loss of the Yangtze River dolphin (baiji tun), declared “functionally extinct” in 2006. Despite numerous initiatives to put species loss in check – including marking out 15 percent of its territory for nature reserves – almost half of China’s mammals, reptiles and amphibians are endangered, and more than seven-tenths of its plant species are threatened, according to scientists. By September 2009 experts expressed skepticism that the world could meet the target outlined in 2002, which is not surprising considering it was not quite clear what the target was to begin with.

Kristen Minogue/MEDILL

The email leak from the Climate Research Unit at Britain’s University of East Anglia ranks among the major gaffes in science, if only because it’s rare for so many researchers in a single institution to be thrown under scrutiny at once.

But calling it a scientific scandal or implying that it tarnishes the credible evidence for global warming is simply inaccurate.

A collection of emails set against thousands of databases of scientific research does not throw the vast scientific consensus on global warming into disarray. First of all, the Climate Research Unit isn’t the only institution in the world analyzing global warming trends, and they have all come to the same conclusion. And the emails have been widely and selectively misinterpreted. The idea of trying to “contain” the Medieval Warming Period means to pin down when it happened, not cover up its existence. The “trick” one researcher mentioned to “hide the decline” doesn’t have to do with a decline in temperature at all, but rather a decline in the reliability of data from tree rings. (The trick was to insert good data.)

It’s worth noting that the one scientist who expressed a wish in the emails to redefine the peer-review process, another scientific cornerstone smeared by the email fallout, and requested that colleagues delete files has resigned. So far there is no evidence of actual wrongdoing. It’s also worth noting that even if the CRU data was thrown out, the estimate of how fast the Earth is warming would only move into a shorter time period – the CRU has some of the most conservative figures.

“In terms of public perceptions, in terms of press release, the implications are clearly very, very big,” said Richard Alley, a renowned climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University. “But the scientific impact, if you were simply to throw out the CRU, that does not change the evidence for global warming.”

In other words, it’s not really a big deal. So when multiple publications label it “the worst scientific scandal of our generation,” it’s a discredit to science.

To put the idea in context, here are seven genuine scientific scandals in no particular order, in which the scientific community proved the researchers in question screwed up and (usually) condemned them.

Chinese computer chip hoax (2006)– In 2003 computer scientist Chen Jin created a computer chip that could process data for cameras, mobile phones and other electronic devices. Its key selling point – “Made in China” – promised to launch the country into a technological market largely dominated by the West. The whistle-blowers arrived in late 2005. They stated Chen had migrant workers scratch the brand name off foreign chips, inserted his own brand name and then sent the specifications to manufacturers. The government found him guilty of fraud in May 2006. China’s Ministry of Science and Technology pulled the plug on all his projects and politely requested that he return his research funds.

First cloned human stem cells fake (2006)– South Korean researcher Hwang Woo-suk rose to national hero status in May 2005 when he published a paper claiming to have successfully cloned human embryos. The celebrity frenzy lasted for months, when it seemed that therapeutic cloning had reached a much-needed breakthrough and scientists could finally get down to the miracle business of making the lame walk. Then half a year later, Hwang’s own countrymen led the way in revealing that the evidence was fake. The fall was hard, but not without warning. A few months earlier it had come out that he had also committed some serious breaches in medical ethics by using stem cells from his own research team or paid donors.

Miracle cure for aging (2008) – Kim Tae Kook once told reporters he hoped to be Korea’s next Hwang Woo-suk. To his credit, that was before Hwang’s fall from grace. But three years later his wish came true. After developing a technology that promised to destroy cancer and reset cell aging, the medical researcher was found guilty of falsifying data on two papers when one of his own doctoral students could not replicate his results.

The great pretender (1977-80) – If con men can infiltrate medical research, Elias Alsabti certainly deserves the title. Over the course of three years, the 23-year-old Iraqi hopeful plagiarized dozens of papers by erasing the lead author’s name, inserting his own and sending them to obscure journals. Since there are thousands of journals for medicine alone, his thefts usually went undetected. And the lengthy curriculum vitae, coupled with fake credentials, allowed him to charm his way into multiple U.S. universities. However, a few irate victims – and his utter lack of aptitude for genuine research – got him dismissed from most of them in a matter of months. When the press got hold of the story in the summer of 1980, it spelled the end of his colorful career. Alsabti left Carney Hospital in Boston and escaped legal action. He has not been heard from since.

The obedience experiments (1961-1974) – Stanley Milgram wanted to know how far people would take the “just following orders” pretext. In a series of experiments called “obedience to authority” – now a staple of psychology classes everywhere – he told participants to deliver electric shocks to an unseen student in punishment for wrong answers. When the unharmed actor pretended to complain, scream or fall silent, many participants protested and were told they had to continue. Technically Milgram wasn’t doing anything wrong because ethics were not as tightly regulated then, but something such as that would warrant severe censure today. It’s debatable whether the greater scandal was his methodology or his results: Almost two-thirds of the participants went ahead and pressed the switch for the whole 450 volts, thinking they were delivering very real pain.

Supervisors hide fraud from NIH(1983) – John Darsee, a medical researcher at Harvard, was supposed to be testing dogs to study heart attack treatment. When his data came out, it looked too good to be true – and it was. It turned out Darsee had taken data from animals that had never been tested and inexplicably managed to collect two weeks of data in a few hours. Almost as embarrassing were his supervisors’ compassionate instincts to overlook his first offense as a peccadillo. Instead of reporting his initial deception to the NIH, which was funding the research, they conducted their own survey and missed even more of his frauds. When the full truth came out a few months later, Harvard had to refund the NIH more than $120,000.

David Dwyer's home and first green project. Close to $1 million renovation, but utilities are only $80/month. Kristen Minogue/MEDILL

Nine months after Congress passed the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act, investments in energy efficiency haven’t quite gripped the American public the way legislators hoped they would – and part of it might be because they focused too much on renewables.

“We consider the renewables to be the high-hanging fruit,” said Scott Dwire, who directs the green building firm PRC Construction and Remodeling in Utah.

In other words, renewable systems cost more and don’t always give as much payback as simpler changes like improving wall insulation so houses don’t leak as much heat, changes Dwire considers the “meat and potatoes” of energy efficiency.

Lawmakers have good reason to focus on buildings. Heating, cooling and operating them takes up roughly 40 percent of the energy use in the U.S, more than the energy needed for public and private transportation.

“When people talk about making the country more energy efficient and the country needing to get around that, the front line really is building new homes,” said Brad Peacock, owner of Summit Home Energy Solutions, also in Utah.

Peacock said most existing houses he visits could save on average 30 or 35 percent of their energy just by investing in more of the “low-hanging fruit.”

Improvements like that also cost significantly less – by a factor of ten, according to Dwire. Dwire added that while renewables can help, if a house isn’t well-insulated to begin with, a solar panel doesn’t do much good.

“Let’s say I put on a brand new shiny solar panel, but I didn’t work on any insulation,” he said. “Not only am I paying for the solar panel, but because I’m inefficiently using that energy, I’m almost like paying for it twice, because I’m having to pay the utility for it because I’m inefficient.”

Every house is different, so cost estimates vary. But insulation for a typical family home usually falls between $2,500 and $5,500 and pays for itself in five to six years. By contrast, a typical photovoltaic system can cost as much as $20,000 and take 10 to 15 years for the savings to pay off. The only solar system close to being competitive right now is solar water heating.

The federal government has passed more than a dozen incentives in the last decade to encourage builders, homeowners and businesses to make their buildings more efficient. In February, the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act enhanced several of them by injecting a few more billion dollars or removing restrictions.

But lawmakers tipped the improvements in favor of renewables, while often neglecting some of the cheaper improvements people like Dwire specialize in doing.

Example: The Residential Energy Efficiency Tax Credit offers a 30 percent tax return for projects that help a home save energy – structural changes such as insulation, improving walls, windows and heating systems, the “low-hanging fruit.” But it caps the maximum amount at $1,500 for all projects placed in service in 2009 and 2010. And it doesn’t cover the labor cost of building envelope improvements.

Meanwhile the Residential Renewable Energy Tax Credit offers the same 30 percent deal without the cap. It includes geothermal pumps, wind turbines, solar electric or solar thermal – although not for heating pools or hot tubs.

There are a few exceptions to the rule, including a $2,000 or $1,000 new homes tax credit that rewards flat reductions in energy consumption regardless of the means. But most of the emphasis remains on renewables.

As for customers, interest in improving energy efficiency has shot up in recent months, although that hasn’t necessarily translated into financial investment yet, according to Chicago renewable energy project developer David Dwyer.

Since the stimulus bill passed, he said more customers are calling and instead of asking how much a solar system or geothermal system costs, they’re asking what kind of system would be right for their homes or if the direction of their roofs matters. In other words, they’re more informed.

And because the stimulus bill is driving down the high upfront costs of renewables with subsidies, they aren’t as concerned about price.

“It’s not that they don’t care, but they understand that price is not an absolute limiting factor,” Dwyer said.

Dwyer, who founded American Renewable Energy in 2002, has a different theory about why customers may not be as inclined to buy into green energy. For him, the key barrier is the general public’s lack of understanding of what energy is and how it relates to economics. One of the biggest challenges is persuading people that while the upfront costs are high, the return (cheaper electricity for 20 years or more) more than makes up for the initial investment.

“I’ve read more misinformation about energy and economics from people with advanced degrees and leadership jobs than from PV installers and solar thermal installers,” he said. “So that’s going to be the limiting factor.”

That lack of understanding seeps through to the politicians and corporate executives who decide how the United States manages energy, and who tend to think on timescales of quarters and elections instead of decades. While many of them made choices with the best intentions, Dwyer said the time when that is good enough is running out.

“We can’t accept that anymore,” Dwyer said. “We don’t have the margin for error that our leaders even up to the recent past have had. The world is super competitive, and we’re not the big bully on the block anymore. So we’ve got to get with it.”

With some investors skeptical of the long-term returns, many hopeful green companies have to look for capital in unlikely places. Kristen Minogue/MEDILL

The founders of Natcore Technology had a vision. They wanted to create a thin film for solar cells that would decrease the amount of silicon manufacturers would need to assemble them, cutting the cost of solar panels in half and making the technology more competitive.

But they had trouble winning over potential investors, especially since at the time they did not even know how long the technology would take to develop, much less how much revenue it would generate.

“They didn’t understand that the R&D takes time,” said Charles Provini, president, CEO and director of the company. “They didn’t understand that prototypes have to be developed. They didn’t get that concept.”

Instead of relying on banks or venture capitalists, Provini’s company found a third option: the Toronto Stock Exchange Venture Exchange, an exchange group that provides capital for early stage companies. Provini found that when he approached them about needing time for R&D, he wasn’t “talking to deaf ears.”

Provini is hardly alone. When it comes to bringing green technology to the market, many entrepreneurs have discovered developing it is only half the battle. The second and sometimes more difficult challenge entails convincing people it’s worth the investment.

“A lot of companies get out there with a good product and then die on the vine because they just don’t have a way to efficiently reach the customer,” said Ed Erickson, one of more than a dozen business leaders who spoke with Provini at the Midwest Clean Tech 2009 conference in Chicago Monday.

Erickson, who advises entrepreneurs and venture capital firms at Erickson Consulting, said entrepreneurs looking to launch their product often face a two-front war. First they have to convince banks or venture capitalists to invest in it. Then they have to convince consumers to buy it.

Deborah Ifrah of J.P. Morgan said that for energy companies looking for financing, having solid revenues can make or break the deal.

“If you can come out and actually say, we just secured this really large deal with X utility, or we are providing solar distribution or energy to X, that sort of establishes credibility.”

Bernice Valantinas said her corporation, ProMark Associates, is still searching for a way to expand its air purification technology, Total Spectrum.

Unlike conventional methods, which rely on often-polluted outside air, Total Spectrum makes it easier to breathe by filtering much healthier indoor air. The product made its debut in 2006 cleaning out cigarette smoke at a casino in Iowa and won an innovation award from the American Society of Heating, Refrigeration and Air-Conditioning Engineers, which gave it more credibility among those in the know. Now they have plans to expand their product into New Delhi and Dubai.

 “I see us being an over-billion dollar company, because of the breadth of the application, the direction the market is going,” said Valantinas. She added the fact that the product is green doesn’t hurt either.

But in order to reach the next stage, they need to grow their infrastructure. The company has been partnering with Chase Bank in Skokie. But while Chase has been able to help with smaller enterprises, ProMark has reached the bottom rung of the middle tier with no immediately apparent source of financing to help them go higher. Although they are expanding, Valantinas said they are still a far cry away from the hundred-million dollar companies Ifrah works with at J.P. Morgan.

Linda Lin, senior vice president of the China/Pacific Rim branch of Fuel Tech, told conference attendees her company faced entirely new adaptations when her company started to market its product in China.

The central and provincial governments in China have much more control over the private industries than in the States. But perhaps an even greater challenge is the country’s fast pace of change, which can leave some hopeful investors in the dust.

“We have to be correspondingly fast and be flexible,” Lin said. “Too often, we see we’re not fast enough, we’re not flexible enough. Therefore we don’t win those projects.”

In the free market, green technologies have to play by the same rules as everyone else. The supply of ideas is burgeoning. Now they have to convince the rest of the world the demand is high enough to pay off.

This sheet of phosphorescent microparticles could power photovoltaic cells 24/7 for up to 12 years. Steve Stark/MPK, CO.

From emissions-eating biofuels to metals-scavenging chemicals, the Midwest Clean Tech 2009 conference this week showcased a tidal wave of green ideas. Here are six expo show stoppers. Still in the developing stages, most won’t emerge on the market for at least another year. But they prove that the green movement is moving on innovation.

Photovoltaics that work in the dark – Solar power has one major drawback. It turns off once the sun disappears. Most researchers are searching for ways to store it for future use, technologies often involving batteries. But Michael Kohnen II and Steve Stark of MPK CO. took a completely different approach. They developed tiny micro particles of gas and crystals that can power photovoltaic cells 24/7, sidestepping the storage problem entirely. The two main components, tritium gas and phosphor crystals, work together to produce light. The tritium emits electrons. The electrons make the phosphor send out photons (light particles). When sandwiched as a sheet between two photovoltaic cells, the photons hit the cells and produce electricity.
MPK CO, Clayton, Wis., www.glowpaint.com

Biofuels that stopper CO2 before it forms – Biofuels can emit carbon and still decrease the Earth’s carbon footprint. It works because users are burning fuel from biomass that, if left on its own to rot, would emit much more CO2. The U.S. produces more than 1.3 billion tons of solid biological waste every year from forestry, agriculture and other industries. All this unused mass sucked CO2 out of the atmosphere during its organic life and will spew it back out when it decomposes, unless something stops it. Paul Wever and Paul Anderson of Chip Energy developed a strategy to burn it for energy and also produce charcoal. If done correctly, almost half the carbon atoms that would have escaped into the air to form CO2 get locked in the charcoal, which then gets buried in the soil. It’s a bit like the clean coal strategy, except it’s more effective.
Chip Energy, Goodfield, Ill., www.chipenergy.com

Software that gets buildings a paycheck for their electricity – This efficiency strategy is 10 percent science and 90 percent economics. Vincent Cushing and Andrew Whiting of Clean Urban Energy knew, as all energy developers do, that the real price of electricity isn’t fixed. It fluctuates literally every minute of the day. But utility companies have to set a fixed price for customers, and when the real price goes above that, they take a loss. At such times they try to pay some of their customers not to use power – which often means turning down the air conditioning and enduring sweltering heat. Clean Urban Energy’s software can run the air conditioning in large buildings during the night, when the price is low. The walls, ceiling and floor absorb the cool air and, in effect, store it. During the grueling afternoon when the price shoots up, the software automatically turns down the air conditioning and lets the building release the cool air it stored in its mass during the night. The buildings make money from the utilities without a drop of sweat and cut energy use.
Clean Urban Energy, Inc., Chicago, Ill., www.cleanurbanenergy.com

Smart box that stores renewable energy – This Intelligent Generation invention follows the same philosophy as the Clean Urban Energy software, only in a slightly more tangible form. Called the “optimizer box,” it works like a virtual power plant and sounds like something out of the Transformers movies. The box first estimates how much electricity a building will use every given hour of a day. Then it figures out the most cost-effective way to buy it, storing the low-cost electricity in lithium-ion batteries for use during peak high-cost times. CEO Jay Marhoefer predicts the box will sell for $500 and be ready for the market in 14 months. The optimizer box took first prize at the conference’s Innovation Competition.
Intelligent Generation LLC, Chicago, Ill., www.intelgen.com

Chemical process that pulls valuable metals from water – The copper market is booming. Mines in the U.S. alone scrape up more than 1 billion pounds a year according to Patrick James of Blue Planet Strategies. And with prices soaring, watching their profits escape into streams is bad for the environment and bad for business. Enter DEMET, a solution that adds electrons into the water and turns the drifting copper ions into solid metal. Blue Planet Strategies is developing the solution. Company President Patrick James said, although their processes have focused so far on copper, they should work for cobalt, silver and even gold.
Blue Planet Strategies, Madison, Wis.

Algae that de-scummify lakes (and save fish) – The green algae pools that encrust the surfaces of lakes and oceans are unpleasant to look at, but they can be lethal as well. When the algae die, they sink to the bottom and suck up waterborne oxygen as they decompose. That can mean death for fish that normally thrive in the colder, deeper waters. Geoff Horst said his company, Algal Scientific, decided to nip the problem in the bud by using algae to filter out the culprits – nitrogen and phosphorous – before wastewater enters the ecosystem. The algae in their system absorb the nutrients they need to grow, ensuring that new algae will not form elsewhere.
Algal Scientific Corp., Plymouth, Mich., http://algalscientific.com

“It’s a little bit too early to be too pessimistic,” said Dali Yang, a professor of Chinese politics at the University of Chicago.

Historically China and the U.S. have fallen on opposite sides of the industrialized-developing country dichotomy in the climate change debate. But as Obama prepares to visit Beijing this weekend, a tone of compromise is starting to infuse the discussion.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Wednesday that the U.S. would support a global fund to help developing countries adapt to the cutbacks required to avert climate change – something the developing world has been advocating for years. President Obama announced two days earlier that he would attend the Copenhagen summit if he thought there was a good chance of reaching a deal, and if he thought his presence could make a difference.

Chinese President Hu Jintao has not yet said if he will attend the conference.  And China hasn’t budged on its insistence upon “common but differentiated responsibilities,” the idea that the industrialized world, as the more capable and culpable partner, should bear the brunt of emissions cutbacks.

China’s refusal to accept mandatory emissions reductions has irritated the U.S. But although the country has shied away from legally-binding commitments, it has had great success meeting its renewable energy targets. At 9 percent of total energy right now, the country is well on its way to meeting its target of 10 percent by 2010.

“The Chinese have shown some leadership in this case, because they came out saying they are going to make meaningful and substantial reductions,” Yang said. “The issue is, how much?”

For the U.S., he said, it’s a question of ramping up the process. It doesn’t help the United States’ credibility that its key piece of climate change legislation, the American Clean Energy Act, remains held up in the Senate.

And a new survey from WorldPublicOpinion.org, released Wednesday, revealed that the wider international community is fed up with both countries.

The 20-nation poll, which included developed and developing countries, found only 39 percent on average approved of the United States’ climate policy and 34 percent approved of China’s. Both countries received high marks from Africa. But China had more critics in Western Europe and more supporters in Southeast Asia. The U.S. also came under fire from Western Europe while one of its largest supporters was one of China’s largest critics: South Korea.

Ironically, the same poll found that 47 percent of Americans disapproved of their own climate change policy and only 45 percent approved of it.

At this point most of the world has given up on a finalized treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol coming out of Copenhagen. Now they are hoping to create a “framework agreement” for a treaty to be finished later in 2010.

“I think there’s almost a need to save face, and so that’ll put pressure on having at least political agreement,” said Michele Betsill, a political scientist at Colorado State University.

Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, shares this hope and voiced it at the end of the Barcelona summit last week.

He said Copenhagen’s success hinges on accomplishing four things. Industrialized countries need to be absolutely clear on their 2020 emissions cutbacks. Developing countries need to be absolutely clear on how much they will limit their emissions growth. The developing countries need money, and they need a new system to manage that money.

De Boer maintained his optimistic tone in spite of the fact that 50 African nations walked out of the summit and the Group of 77, the voice of 130 developing nations, threatened a similar walkout at Copenhagen. The boycotters of Barcelona had demanded that developed nations cut back their emissions by 40 percent by 2020 from 1990 levels.

“The devil’s in the details, and we’re just not there yet,” said Betsill. “There have been some pretty clear lines in the sand drawn.”

Abigial Foerstner/MEDILL

But politics, economics and technical hurdles ensure the world will run on fossil fuels for the near future.

Sources of renewable energy abound, ranging from wind to hydro to biofuels. But only one can fuel the entire planet and allow everyone the same standard of living that Americans enjoy, said University of Chicago climate scientist Elisabeth Moyer. And that is the sun.

“Getting it straight from the sun is really the best way,” Moyer said.

Radiating the power of two light bulbs per square meter of land, the sun could provide enough energy in a minute to fuel the planet for a year. The trick is to harness and store that energy.

Moyer, who teaches climate and energy, broke down the realities of supply from most of the major alternative energies at a recent climate change conference in Chicago. Even with the most unrealistically optimistic assumptions about catching all the rainfall or harnessing wind at just the right speed, hydroelectric and wind power barely make a dent in world energy needs.

Biofuels pose the problem of using cropland on a hungry planet for energy production.

Moyer did not include nuclear energy in her discussion. She said after the conference that she believes the industry will take years to revamp after the halt in 1979 when the Three Mile Island nuclear plant accident melted half the fuel in a reactor. The incident ended plans for new U.S. plants even though no one was injured and only small amounts of radiation escaped. 

But the U.S. government recently launched a plan to add 100 new nuclear reactors, nearly doubling the current number. And nuclear continues to supply 20 percent of the nation’s electricity and 8 percent of its total energy, surpassing all the current energy obtained from renewable power sources. 

Nuclear doesn’t have as much of a stronghold in China – a mere fraction of a percent of the country’s total energy. But new nuclear projects are popping up fast enough to raise the eyebrows of some safety-concerned officials.

However, in the roaring energy market of the 21st century, fossil fuels are still drowning out the cleaner alternatives. 

China leads the world in renewable energy, a fact largely due to recent investments in hydroelectric power. Renewables in China account for 9 percent of the total energy supply, compared to 7.3 percent in the U.S. But China still relies on coal for almost 70 percent of its energy, and oil and natural gas for another 22 percent. Meanwhile fossil fuels provide 85 percent of the energy in the U.S.

Solar power in the United States is barely making a whimper. Of the 7 percent of the energy that came from renewable resources in 2008, a mere one-hundredth of it came from the sun. And while the solar business is booming in China, much of it is exported. Domestically, solar accounts for a mere fraction of a fraction of a percent of the country’s energy.

Two major obstacles stand between the sun and a less carbon-infested planet. Simple cost is the first and storage is the second.

Assuming a 40-year lifespan, the price of electricity from a solar thermal system costs double that of coal-generated electricity. The price more than quadruples if the system only lasts for 20 years and is even more expensive for power from photovoltaics.

Past experience and the laws of development indicate that as time passes, people get smarter and technology gets cheaper. But in the meantime, coal remains an incredibly inexpensive and reassuringly domestic energy source. And with the infrastructure that is in place, the cost of replacing it could amount to tens of trillions of dollars, estimates Jack Lewnard of the Gas Technology Institute.

Lewnard said he believes the same rules apply to developing countries, that stand little chance of bypassing the carbon phase if they want to enhance their economies.

“I can’t say that they’ll skip,” he said, speaking at an energy conference two days after the climate change symposium. “They may be able to make some dents in things, but right now the path for industrialization is still on the fossil path.” 

If the price of solar doesn’t go down, the government should step in and raise the price of fossil fuels to close the gap, said Northwestern economics professor Mark Witte.

“We just have to make CO2 production so expensive that we don’t do it,” he said. 

Witte said he prefers a carbon tax to a cap-and-trade strategy for its simplicity and transparency. But he said he would support whichever method gets the job done faster.

One need that will add to the cost is carbon sequestration, removing and storing carbon dioxide from fossil fuels to substantially reduce greenhouse gas production associated with global warming. 

Finding a way to economically store the light from the sun after it gets dark is another challenge. Because unlike the market for energy, the Earth’s rotation away from the sun every night is a given.

The number has changed since then – only 1.3 Earths now, according to the Global Footprint Network, the environmental data center where National Geographic got its statistics. The figure would appear frightening if it did not also appear physically impossible. If we really are consuming 1.3 Earths a year, it is a bit odd that we have not yet consumed our planet out of existence.

Fortunately for humanity, the number does not refer to the entire Earth. It refers to Earth’s biocapacity – how much of what we consume the planet can regenerate in a year. At the moment we are using its resource supply faster than it can replenish it.

“We’re over budget, which is essentially that our expenditures are exceeding our income,” said Nicole Freeling of the Global Footprint Network.

This is not to say the Earth doesn’t have a savings account. But Freeling pointed out that the more we overspend, the deeper we have to delve into it.

“You can cut your hair faster than it re-grows and you still have hair, but eventually at some point you’ll go bald.”

The data center’s latest information says the human race is consuming 30 percent more resources each year than the Earth can regenerate, and carbon emissions account for nearly half of it. Carbon is also the one of the fastest-growing components: Between 1961 and now, the amount of land and sea needed to absorb all the carbon our species emits increased elevenfold.

But consumption isn’t evenly distributed across the globe. If everyone consumed like Americans, for example, we would need 4.6 Earths to sustain us. (National Geographic’s numbers say 5.4, but they are a bit out of date. This doesn’t mean Americans are getting any more environmentally conscious; Global Footprint just changed its methodology.)

The Chinese figure isn’t nearly as catastrophic – 1.02 Earths – which they have managed to maintain despite emitting more carbon dioxide than any other nation on the planet.

The key to China’s better score has more to do with its population than anything else. The country as a whole has higher emissions than America, but it also has more people. This means that the emissions per Chinese citizen – which is what the Earth figure looks at – is much lower than it is for American citizens. So if everyone lived like the Chinese, our planet would still be in danger, but not nearly as much as if everyone spontaneously turned into Americans.

As for the countries that have under-one Earth figures, many of them have large populations living in abject poverty. There aren’t any developed countries who consume less than one planet’s worth of resources, although a few come close, including Malaysia, Costa Rica and Saudi Arabia.

And the figures are going up. This is partly because the number of people on the planet is rising, and partly because we are consuming more per person than we used to. That leaves the big unanswered question of how much time we have before we eat up our savings and actually do consume our planet out of existence. And that’s a question the Global Footprint Network doesn’t have the staff or budget to answer.

Find out your own carbon imprint and see how you compare with the rest of the world with Global Footprint Network’s Personal Footprint Quiz.

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Wind Energy

How it works: Tall, imposing wind turbines stir into motion whenever a strong enough wind blows past them. Most turbines resemble thin windmills that can rise to the height of 20-story buildings with three 200-foot long blades, but some have a more egg-beater like structure. When the blades start moving, they turn the drive shaft inside, which then turns the electric generator and produces electricity.

Pros: They use a renewable resource, they don’t pollute, and they’re relatively inexpensive to maintain.

Cons: They only work when the wind is blowing faster than 8 miles per hour, and they don’t work during high storms with winds above 55 miles per hour. The cost to install them – with building permits, public notifications and hearings – can amount to several thousand dollars each, plus licensing agreements to build them in places such as a farmer’s land. And while they are less expensive than solar energy generation, they’re still more costly than nuclear energy and natural gas. Nearby residents sometimes complain of the noise and scenery obstruction as well. They can also pose a threat to avian life, but the number of birds killed every year by wind turbines is much smaller than the number killed by crashing into windshields.

In China: China is the world’s fourth largest generator of wind power, behind the U.S., Germany and Spain. It is also the most rapidly growing renewable energy in that nation. But the country relies on lower-quality turbines, some of which are only 20-30 percent as efficient as foreign ones.

In the United States: Wind power generated just over 1 percent of the electricity in the U.S. in 2008, and the amount nearly doubled between 2006 and 2008. Technological improvements are starting to lower the cost. Tax breaks and green pricing programs that allow consumers to pay utilities for more alternative energies are also spurring growth. A 2008 report from the Emerging Energy Research Group predicted the U.S. could fuel 10 percent of its energy from wind by 2020, and the Department of Energy thinks the country can raise it to 20 percent by 2030.

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Solar Energy

How it works: Two main forms of solar technology dominate the market. The most popular are photovoltaic devices, or “solar cells,” often seen in panels on the roofs of houses. These convert sunlight to electricity directly. Larger solar power plants use the sun to heat water and produce steam, which then powers the electricity generator.

Pros: The sun is a renewable resource, and the process releases very little pollution.

Cons: Like wind, solar energy technology is cheap to maintain but expensive install. This means that once installation costs are taken into account, photovoltaic systems can cost $0.35 per kilowatt hour – more than three times what conventional power sources cost. They can release some toxic emissions during their production. They don’t work very well in heavily polluted areas, and concentrated solar beams from power plants can also endanger animals that fly right through them.

In China: Mainland China produces 30 percent of the world’s solar panels. The country also manufactures half of the world’s solar water heaters and owns almost two-thirds of them. But the global recession hurt the photovoltaic industry, which exports 98 percent of its products.

In the United States: California dominates the solar industry in the U.S., with two-thirds of the country’s solar capacity concentrated in that state. A report from last year projected that solar power could provide more than 10 percent of the country’s electricity by 2025 – which would be quite a feat, considering that right now the figure is less than 1 percent. But given the industry’s growth rate (roughly 40 percent a year), it could happen.

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Nuclear Energy

How it works: Nuclear energy comes from splitting the nuclei of large, radioactive atoms, usually uranium. The heat released during the process generates steam to operate conventional power plants that produce electricity. The steam then cools into water to be used again.

Pros: It’s efficient. A uranium pellet the size of a fingertip can produce about as much energy as 150 gallons of oil. It doesn’t produce carbon dioxide. And unlike wind and solar energy, it won’t vary with time, place or weather.

Cons: Fission releases a lot of radiation, requiring nuclear power plants to have rigorous and redundant containment capacity. And no one has settled on a permanent disposal site for the radioactive spent fuel rods. Nor does the U.S. have a recycling facility to remove and reuse the nuclear fuel left in the rods. Researchers are trying to develop the much safer fusion process (which forces nuclei together instead of ripping them apart). But this requires a great deal of energy, and so far humans have not been able to make it into a reality. Furthermore, uranium is common enough, but the uranium needed for this energy – Uranium-235 – is not. It’s also nonrenewable.

In China: Nuclear energy accounts for a mere fraction of a percent of the nation’s total energy. But nuclear reactor projects are popping up all over the country, with eight scheduled to start in 2009 and 16 other regions and municipalities planning their own by 2015, according to the World Nuclear Association. But officials worried about safety are urging the country to proceed more slowly.

In the United States: Generating 30 percent of the planet’s nuclear-generated electricity, the U.S. is the largest nuclear power producer in the world. The country has 104 nuclear reactors that accounted for almost 20 percent of its electricity in 2008, according to the World Nuclear Association, and last June Congress revealed a plan to build 100 more – a plan that could cost $700 billion.

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Clean(er) Coal

How it works: Properly termed “carbon-capture sequestration.” It does not stop coal from emitting carbon dioxide. It just tries to capture and bury it before it can enter the atmosphere. Companies use two main methods for capture. The first, called “integrated gasification combined-cycle” involves burning the coal into a gaseous mixture of carbon monoxide and hydrogen. The gas then powers the machinery that generates electricity. The second method – oxyfuel combustion – burns the coal in oxygen instead of air, producing a gas of mostly carbon dioxide. The resulting fluid is pumped underground for storage.

Pros: Coal is cheap, and we don’t have to go the Middle East to get it – although we do use techniques such as strip mining that destroy the landscape.

Cons: Cleaning it is still too expensive to be competitive. According to a recent Harvard study, capturing 90 percent of coal’s carbon emissions could double the cost of electricity in kilowatt-hours for the first generation of clean coal plants. Burial could also pose a safety hazard if the carbon dioxide leaks up from the ground.

In China: China is working to reduce coal emissions much more quickly than the U.S. In the last two years, it rose as the global leader in building cleaner, more efficient coal-powered plants. But as the world’s largest coal producer (it relies on the resource for about 80 percent of its electricity), it needs to.

In the United States: The Obama administration decided in June to revive FutureGen, a Department of Energy project to build a clean coal plant in Illinois with near-zero emissions. The Bush administration launched the project in 2003 but abandoned it in 2008 when estimated costs skyrocketed to $1.8 billion. Current estimates are at $1.5 billion, with the Department of Energy contributing about $1 billion.

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Geothermal Energy

How it works: Geothermal reservoirs form wherever hot magma from beneath the Earth’s crust rises high enough to heat groundwater. Geothermal power plants drill wells 1 to 2 miles deep and pipe the hot water or steam directly to the surface to generate electricity. Geothermal heat pumps take advantage of the relatively constant temperature of the earth a few feet below the surface (roughly 50 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit) to heat buildings in winter and cool them in summer.

Pros: Low emissions. Most geothermal power plants emit very small amounts of carbon dioxide (less than one percent of what a traditional coal power plant emits), and binary geothermal plants emit essentially zero. Geothermal energy is renewable, it can run 24/7, it requires very little land and we don’t have to import it.

Cons: It’s somewhat limited by location, especially where power plants are concerned. Many geothermal features in the U.S., such as geysers, are in national parks and cannot be disturbed. Installation costs for geothermal heating systems are still higher than for conventional systems, although operating costs are lower.

In China: Geothermal heat pump sales in China are growing rapidly and could amount to a $1.1 billion dollar market by 2010. But the high installation costs still turn off more than a few real estate developers.

In the United States: The U.S. produces more geothermal energy than any other nation in the world, but it still accounts for less than half a percent of all the electricity produced in the country.