Global warming speaker gets cool reception at energy summit
| Wednesday, Nov 16 2011 04:22 PM
Last Updated Wednesday, Nov 16 2011 04:25 PM
A professor who served on a panel that won a Nobel Peace Prize for its work on climate change got a polite but skeptical reception at the fifth annual Kern County Energy Summit Wednesday.
The summit put on by the Kern Economic Development Corp. featured a range of speakers from the energy sector, including oil and gas, wind, solar, utilities, investment banking and government.
The keynote speaker was Mark Jaccard, who teaches in the School of Resource and Environmental Management at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver.
Jaccard -- with former vice president Al Gore and colleagues on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for helping to raise awareness of global warming.
Jaccard continued to warn of the perils of a warming earth at Wednesday's speech to several hundred people at the Marriott Hotel, and addressed doubters head-on.
"We cannot wish away the climate risk," he said. "We must guard against the tendency in each of us to believe only what's in our self-interest.
"Right now, we're on a path to dramatically disrupt the climate, eco-system and oceans of the planet on which we depend. We need to take dramatic action."
Jurisdictions such as California are leading the effort to limit carbon emissions, Jaccard added, but "more can and must be done."
Although Jaccard is a relentless advocate for limiting greenhouse gases, he does not condemn the use of fossil fuels entirely, and in 2005 wrote a Donner Prize-winning policy book called "Sustainable Fossil Fuels."
"Say no to burning fossil fuels, but don't throw the CO2 fuels out with the fossil fuel bathwater," Jaccard said.
The professor favors cap and trade systems that make emitting CO2 expensive, and carbon capture and sequestration technology that captures emissions from power plants and other industrial facilities and injects it deep underground to isolate it from the atmosphere.
Still, at the end of his address, Jaccard faced questions from audience members who clearly were dubious.
One person asked what made Jaccard so sure that global warming was man-made and not a result of natural warming and cooling cycles.
"One hundred and fifty years ago, people were predicting that if we continued to dump these gases into the atmosphere, temperatures would rise, and the increase would be dramatically different from the natural 10,000-year cycles that you're talking about," Jaccard replied. "And that's exactly what's happening."
Another person, no doubt cognizant of the speaker's home base, asked how a warmer world would be bad for cold places such as Canada.
"It's actually not that hard a sell (in Canada)," Jaccard said. "You just have to think about the mountains that some of you like to hike in around here or the streams you like to fish in."
It's not that the earth will warm up, then flatten out and everyone will adapt to that new reality, Jaccard insisted. "The end-point of that path looks something like Venus. It's really hot. At some point, we're going to panic and say we need to do something about that."
Jaccard cautioned against "cherry picking" scientists who are far outside the mainstream of scientific thought on global warming and its causes.
Approach the issue as you would a business decision, he said. If you were drilling for oil and three scientists told you that you faced some serious risks but one said you had nothing to worry about, wouldn't you mitigate against risk based on the majority consensus?
The overwhelmingly conservative audience would have none of it, and even Jaccard conceded the issue is becoming more polarizing over time as Republicans, in particular, become increasingly skeptical.
After the summit, oil industry engineer Mike Familia said he found earlier presentations on wind industry potential in Kern County "interesting," but wasn't impressed by the keynote speaker.
"I guess he's one of those experts who speaks so matter-of-factly about things that I don't think are so matter-of-fact," he said. "I think there was another side of the discussion."
