Watching the colossal destruction of Typhoon Haiyan over the past month, Columbia University Professor Graciela Chichilnisky knows one thing for sure: climate change will likely result in more of these massive storms, threatening the very existence of humanity.

As one of the world’s foremost experts on climate change and creator of the carbon market enshrined in the Kyoto Protocol emissions treaty, Chichilnisky also knows this is nothing new.“What we need is to close the carbon cycle, which means whatever we put up, we bring it down.” -- Graciela Chichilnisky

“What the world needs now is solutions,” she told IPS. “If we can create the right institutions now we can solve energy and climate issues. For the first time, with the release of the official IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] report, there is one very important paragraph: there are potential solutions, and the IPCC report talks about carbon negative technology.”

Chichilnisky, a world-class economist and mathematician, has also searched for the answers, published in much of her academic work that consists of 14 books and 250 articles in leading academic journals.

Despite overwhelming evidence detailing the costs of inaction, the outlook is increasingly dire: a recent U.N. climate change report forecasts a profound decline in the world’s food supply, increases in violent conflicts, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, and disease.

Courtesy of Graciela Chichilnisky.

Three of the diplomats who led the U.N. global warming talks have said that future climate treaties will not prevent the world from overheating. Two weeks of climate talks in Warsaw last month produced dismal progress.

Despite these obstacles, Chichilnisky remains tenacious. Jigar Shah, former CEO of Richard Branson’s Carbon War Room, notes her lifelong efforts. “Graciela is a tour de force,” he told IPS. “She has been working on climate change for the better part of her life and has figured out how to inspire people with her messages. She can include that in her legacy.”

Indeed, Chichilnisky helped put the issue on the map from the very beginning, something recognised by the international community. She is seen as a key player in creating an international climate change framework as the Argentine-born U.S. lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which received the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.

Today, Chichilnisky is most concerned with finding ways to avoid, or at least ameliorate, the catastrophic impact climate change will have on humanity and the planet. She believes there is a way forward.

The goal of recent U.N. negotiations has been to keep warming below two degrees C by the year 2020. This may be possible using markets and technology, Chichilnisky says.

One compelling instrument uses a carbon neutral technology, which became the cornerstone of a company called Global Thermostat, which she founded with Dr. Peter Eisenberger, who also founded the Earth Institute at Columbia University.

The company got a loan from Goldman Sachs, and six years ago, the technology caught the eye of Edgar Bronfman Jr., former CEO of Warner Music and Seagram. He is the lead investor in Global Thermostat, and later became executive chairman.

Bronfman told IPS that Chichilnisky brings a combination of vision, intelligence, determination and gravitas to the table.

“She is prepared to see things that not everyone can. I think the fact that she is a woman that has succeeded in her career means she is more determined and resourceful than most people,” he said.

“The work in the Kyoto Protocol lends credibility to Global Thermostat, which may seem to be too good to be true at first,” he added.

The company’s technology, which is targeted at power plants, refineries and other industries, captures and stores carbon dioxide emissions. Bronfman likens it to a “giant dehumidifier”.

“What we need is to take carbon down from air to close the carbon cycle, which means whatever we put up, we bring it down,” Chichilnisky said.

In short, the catastrophic risks of climate change require a fundamental transformation in the production and use of energy. The challenge is to increase the world’s energy supplies while also reducing greenhouse gases in the atmosphere, she said.

The company has commercial deals with several of the biggest players in the market, including Corning. Some of its products feed CO2 to algae that turn it into clean fuel. There are two plants in Silicon Valley, California and one in the U.S. state of Alabama.

Chichilnisky insists the receding goal of staving off a two-degree C increase in temperature remains possible, especially with the use of proper technology. Most importantly, by showing the effectiveness of technology in combating the problem, she hopes to raise the political stakes.

“Right now, most politicians do not understand what is at stake. Few people understand that you can reduce carbon in a way that helps the economy. If you can reduce carbon and create jobs, then politically it would become possible. It will happen,” she said.

What is really needed is a war on all fronts, with everyone participating, she said. “It is an effort like going to the moon – it’s a global effort. Can we do it yes? Do people know how to do it – no,” she said, adding that: “We are in this all together. For the first time in history we are facing a problem that is sink or swim.”

The carbon market is 250 billion dollars a year in the European Union and has gone live on four continents. The market changes the numerical value of all energy, and with it clean energy becomes more profitable, which causes a shift in global energy markets.

“If you make money out of cleaning the atmosphere, improvements will happen. The carbon market provides for an improvement to happen. The market values a clean atmosphere at one trillion dollars a year,” she said.

Environmentalists protesting Monday morning outside Polish Ministry of Economy as the coal summit kicks off inside. Credit: Claudia Ciobanu/IPS

By Claudia Ciobanu
WARSAW, Nov 18 2013 (IPS)

An International Coal and Climate summit organised by the Polish Ministry of Economy and the World Coal Association kicked off Monday in the Polish capital Warsaw in parallel to the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP19, amid outcry from environmentalists who accused COP host Poland of bias in favor of the coal industry.

The presence of United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres at the coal summit was also broadly criticised.

Speaking at the opening of the summit on the morning of Nov. 18, Figueres said the coal industry must clean up if it wants to have a future.

“I am here to say that coal must change rapidly and dramatically for everyone’s sake,” Figueres said to a room full of industry representatives. “By now it should be abundantly clear that further capital expenditures on coal can go ahead only if they are compatible with the two degrees Celsius limit.”

Coal is the dirtiest of fossil fuels, accounting for over 40 percent of global CO2 emissions coming from fuel combustion, according to the International Energy Agency.

During the coal meeting on Monday morning, the Polish Ministry of Environment and the World Coal Association collected endorsements and formally presented to Figueres a document called The Warsaw Communiqué.

It contains three main calls: “for the use of high-efficiency, low-emission coal combustion technologies wherever it is economically and technically feasible at existing and new coal plants”; for governments to push for moving the industry towards state of the art technology and support research and development in that direction; and for “development banks to support developing countries in accessing clean coal technologies.”

The document adds up to a call for public support for an industry that is feeling the heat from climate policies adopted around the world.

While the fate of the coal industry varies globally, in Europe and the U.S. coal producers are certainly under pressure. In the EU, revenues from coal have been plummeting over the past years, on account of diminished demand during the crisis and rising supply of electricity from wind and solar as the block is moving ahead on its target to have 20 percent of its energy needs met from renewables by 2020.

At a global coal industry conference that IPS attended in October in Berlin, Germany, the mood was gloomy: coal plant operators in Europe were complaining of severe losses, while utilities in the continent spoke of plans to shut down coal units and move increasingly towards gas and renewables.

During 2013, the two biggest international financial institutions, the World Bank and the European Investment Bank, have significantly tightened their lending to coal, and the U.S. administration and Nordic countries in Europe decided to put an end to financial support for coal plants abroad.

Poland is one of the few countries in Europe to maintain a bombastic pro-coal rhetoric. Less than two months before COP, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk infamously declared, “The future of Polish energy is in brown and black coal, as well as shale gas. Some wanted coal to be dispensed with, but energy independence requires not only the diversification of energy resources, but also the maximum use of one’s own resources.” Almost 90 percent of the country’s electricity comes from coal.

Yet, even in Poland, the reality is shakier than the rhetoric. Speaking in November to news agency Bloomberg, Krzysztof Kilian, head of the Polish state power company PGE which plans to add two 900 MW units to its existing 1,500 MW Opole coal plant in the southwest of the country, said there was one way for PGE to avoid making losses from the new units: if it secures state-backed guarantees for prices of the type nuclear producers in the UK are obtaining – in practice, that would mean that the state would guarantee as much as twice the market rate.

The coal industry, at least in Europe, has of late engaged in an offensive for drumming up public support and for diminishing the amount of public resources going to renewables. But given the ascension of climate policies around the world, for public support for coal to continue one crucial argument needs to be made: that coal can be clean. And this is the focus of the Warsaw coal summit.

“This summit is not an attempt to distract from the important work done during the COP negotiations,” said Milton Catelin, World Coal Association chief executive, during the opening of the conference. “We want to figure out ways in which the world can retain the benefits of coal but at the same time reduce and even eliminate the costs in terms of CO2 emissions.”

On the agenda of the coal summit were three main ways put forward so far for “cleaning up coal”: carbon capture and storage, underground gasification, and efficiency improvements at plants.

Carbon capture and storage (CCS) – the biggest hope of the industry and mentioned by Figueres herself in the coal summit speech as a way forward for coal – would involve capturing CO2 from coal units before it is emitted into the atmosphere, and storing it underground.

Yet despite significant investments being made in the development of CCS, its deployment on a commercial scale has to date not been proven feasible. This September, Norway gave up a large-scale CCS project at Mongstad deeming it too risky; the country’s auditor general had criticised Norway’s spending over one billion dollars on CCS projects between 2005 and 2012.

Another “clean coal” scenario involves what is called underground coal gasification. The technology is based on partially burning coal underground instead of extracting it. Yet the combustion process used in this method results in high carbon emissions, not only of CO2, but also of methane, which has 23 times the warming potential of CO2. As a consequence, underground gasification would still need CCS deployment.

Another idea for cleaning up coal involves improving the efficiency of plants. Yet existing coal plants are generally less efficient than gas ones, and making them more efficient (46 percent efficiency for a coal plant is considered the best possible, compared to 60 percent for gas) is costly – given the current energy price context in Europe, this does not yet make business sense.

Co-generation – that is, using the heat released when burning coal for electricity to produce heat – would be another way to improve efficiency. In this scenario, however, units would have to be smaller and closer to communities – which raises the dilemma of social acceptability.

“The fact that the industry is here right now handing in a plea for subsidies to COP in a way shows that they are not as strong as we may have thought, that without subsidies there may not be any future for coal,” Mona Bricke from the German NGO Klimalianz commented in Warsaw. “The Warsaw Communiqué is in a sense the coal industry’s last big plea: they know that if they want to have a future they have to say that coal is clean – which is a lie – and they have to ask for money to build new expensive plants.”