This week has seen an avalanche of clean energy in the House. Tuesday, the Prime Minister of Sweden, Fredrik Reinfeldt, appeared before our global warming committee and briefed us on the amazing work his country has done in developing a clean energy economy. He showed what an industrialized country can do with a bit of leadership. His first bit of good news was that Sweden has reduced its CO2 emissions by 7% since 1990 while its economy has grown. So much for the doomsayers’ prediction that moving on energy will wreck an economy.
The Prime Minister told us that Sweden has done this without any sort of rocket science breakthrough, but rather through a series of energy efficiency moves and increase in renewables. It was personally a delight to listen to him since I went to Stockholm in 1972 to study Sweden’s energy use policies and learned they were way ahead of us then and had paved a way forward on how to grow an economy while increasing energy efficiency. That is still the case in 2007 since Sweden has national goal of increasing its efficiency another 20% in the next decade. We ought to be able to match Sweden.
Wednesday at breakfast, the President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. John Holdren joined us in the Capitol to spread the word about global warming and energy to some of my colleagues who are still deniers of the science. He is a spectacularly eloquent scientist who impressed the group with the news that solar deviations were one thirtieth as powerful as the CO2 increase and that the models fit exquisitely with the data in that temperatures are rising more at night rather than consistently across the day, exactly what the CO2 "fingerprint" would suggest. I was impressed with the news that the Department of Energy Information Service analysis had shown that adoption of the National Energy Commission's suggestions would result in a diminutive GDP reduction of .14%. He also agreed that we tend to undervalue the scale of technological improvement over the long term. He was optimistic, even in the face of this disturbing science.
The day was capped when I passed my amendment to the Defense Authorization bill that called for the Department of Defense to study the use of software programs that can manage large computer networks and save up to 20% of their energy - a small step forward. We are on our way.
