Conserve existing energy avoid generating
more electricity
By William
Doyle-Marshall
A distinguished three-member panel of experts
discussed for more than an hour earlier this month the existing situation
regarding the need to find alternative clean energy. “The Carbon Conversations:
Charting A Sustainable Future” was aimed at addressing the carbon crisis with a
view to finding the opportunity for solutions. They concluded there is urgent
need for political commitment for vital action to be taken.
Dr. Suresh Narine, a Trent
alumnus, director of the Trent Center for Biomaterials Research, moderator, noted that carbon
has become one of the single most important threats “to our way of life,
because of its proliferation due to our activities, anthropogenic activities
and it touches on very many facets of our lives.”
While one of most readily examples that come
to mind would be carbon emissions from petroleum, Dr. Narine said carbon is
also very important to food supply. “Our bodies are made up of almost entirely
carbon and our world is regulated by the exchange of carbon,” he added.
Steven Franklin, president of Trent
University told the gathering that The Center for Biomaterials Research which
sponsored the conversation is unique in North America and it’s on the cutting
edge of research and technology development that is changing the world. The
Center’s Research aims to create a more sustainable future and it brings
together the sciences with humanities and social sciences to examine
biomaterials within an ethical framework, Franklin explained. “The research
touches on agricultural utilization and the geographical, environmental and
commercial impacts,” the President added.
Ms. Annette Verschuren, Chief Executive
Officer and Chair of NRStor Incorporated, a new venture accelerating the
commercialization of energy storage technology, disclosed that her passion for
sustainability started at a very young age when she observed her father using liquid
manure which no one had proven useful before him. “All my young life I always
understood that profitability and sustainability really went hand in hand,” she
stressed.
Listening attentively to Carbon footprints panelists
Her passion was further fuelled upon
retirement from Home Depot. MsVerschuren went around the world with her husband
and visited 16 countries -- a lot of them developing countries. “It was very
clear that there were three things that really had to be addressed, really need
solutions. One is food, one is water and one is energy and so I wanted to do
something in that area and also recognized the critical importance of managing
greenhouse gases,” the CEO emphasized.
In the last two weeks she disclosed: “we passed 400 parts per
million CO2” and that number is quite frightening. We are way over extracting
these resources and not replacing them and things are getting worse. Our goal
in Canada is to reduce emissions 17% below the 2005 level by 2020. Government
projections show that we will likely miss our goal by a wide margin,” Verschuren
continued.
She predicted that improving
grid efficiency and enabling more clean energy will lead to fossil fuel consumption
falling significantly. Ontario has more than enough generation capacity and it
is imperative that those resources currently at the disposal of the province
are used more effectively. “It’s more sustainable to conserve the energy that
we already produce through efficiency than to generate more electricity,” the
corporate leader advised.
David Patterson, a serial entrepreneur whose
company North Water developed the largest Canadian entry in the hedge funds of
funds business
has a little bit of a problem looking at the world from the point of view of
the carbon account in opposition to looking at it from the point of view of the
economy or from the point of view of business. Patterson is deeply involved in
both. However, it’s very clear to
him that the profit motive has created “our modern world” and it’s not going away anytime soon. “It is
also very clear that the 400 parts per million is also not going away anytime
soon. That’s an issue,” the entrepreneur added.
The
gathering was reminded that both nature and human life are organized in systems of balancing loops and
re-enforcing loops where feedback comes back and either balances the system or
re-enforces the direction of the system. Those feedback loops are in place to
keep systems in existence. This is one of the reasons why things are
so hard to change in this world, Patterson emphasized. Those feedback loops are
there for the purpose of protecting systems’
existence, he said.
The former President of Guyana Dr. Bharrat
Jagdeo appealed for governments of the world to signal their intention to act on
recommendations of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate
Change) where the negotiations are taking place.
