Tahir Cagin, a professor at Texas A&M, along with researchers at University of Houston, have developed a new nanomaterial that converts sounds waves to energy. These materials, called piezoelectrics, have been around since the late 1800's, but the new tech increases their effectiveness by 100%. Generally, they are made of ceramics and produce voltage when a stress is applied.

The results were published in the journal Physical Review B (a/k/a, the 2nd most boring physical review journal).

The hope is that these materials will allow portable laptops, phones, and other devices to be completely free of the weight and hassle of batteries. Motion-based piezos are already being used in applications ranging from quartz watches to nightclub dancefloors.

In an age where your laptop's lithium ion batttery doesn't last through the second drink service on the flight from L.A. to NY, advances of this kind are sorely needed. By my calculations, the sound emissions of Bill O'Reilly could power the entire city of Mumbai, India all by himself.

Like most unbelievably cool, this'll-change-everything advances, it may be tens of years before this one can be ported to consumer electronics. I suppose the most I can hope for in the near future is a piezoelectric Tom Ford jacket in the next Bond movie.

Photo by Flickr user {dpade1337}.

At a December 5th briefing, Justin Rattner, Intel's Chief Technology Officer, discussed the company's energy-efficiency initiatives, which in this reporter's opinion are starting to make the company look like an energy innovation company as well as a processor manufacturer.

One Intel research project uses real-world sensing technology to provide real-ime information about the state of the environment, especially air quality. The company's silicon lasers and sensor chips measure air pollutants like methane, carbon monoxide, nitrous oxide and even ozone. The sensors can provide an “instantaneous near global picture of the environmental state of the planet,” according to Rattner. They can be tacked onto cell phones, inside walls, and even onto San Francisco street sweepers that collect air quality measurements as they sweep.

The data obtained from these sensors can help citizens, regulatory agencies, and businesses manage emission levels. For instance, it can be used by air quality managers to manage pollutant sources geographically, or to detect dangerous conditions before they wreak havoc on the public.

And, in an almost science fiction innovation, Intel’s research teams have been experimenting with harnessing the free-floating energy available in the ambient environment. In this scenario, sensors will scour the surroundings for free, unused energy. This could come from radio waves or solar power, or even, eventually, from the movement generated by a passerby. This energy would be used to power computers and transmit data wirelessly. According to Ratner, there may even come a day when the energy used to scroll on a Blackberry may be able to power the device.

It's an almost science fiction innovation—the sort of thing that makes one want to say, "Get real." We're not quite there yet, but the research is really here now.

 

David Plouffe, one of Barack Obama's top advisers, sent me an e-mail today. Not that I'm claiming special status here: he sent it to about five million other people, too. In it he announced something that struck this particular observer as seminal and extraordinary.

"On December 13th and 14th," he wrote, "supporters are coming together in every part of the country to reflect on what we've accomplished and plan the future of this movement. Your ideas and feedback will be collected and used to guide this movement in the months and years ahead."

In essence, Plouffe was announcing that the collective energy that fueled the Obama campaign's success would continue to be nurtured by the new Administration. He was inviting direct ongoing input from Obama's supporters and, more broadly, the American people.

This is new and big, nothing short of a 21st Century, Internet-friendly form of government. The Obama Administration is plainly envisioning a much more participatory form of democracy, driven by a "clicks and mortar" combination of online organization and in-person connecting.

I read Plouffe's e-mail while taking a break from an article I've been working on about a smart-grid project in Texas. What's a smart grid, you ask? Good question—because the term means different things to different people. For many, it means net metering: if I put solar photovoltaics on my roof and generate electricity, I can sell energy back to the grid.

But "smart grid" can also mean more than that. Imagine thousands upon thousands of people doing net metering in a mid-sized urban area. At this level, a different picture starts to emerge, of a grid where energy is generated at lots and lots of local nodes, like the proverbial "thousand points of light." In this expanded definition of a smart grid, the energy transmission system largely or wholly leaves behind the old downstream model and effectively transforms consumers into producers.

I couldn't miss the parallel. With his announcement, Plouffe was announcing that the Obama administration would be doing for democracy what smart grids do for electricity. With apologies for the bad pun ... they both enable participatory power generation.

In area after area, old patterns of control are being stood on their head. Once upon a time (like, roughly, yesterday), decisions traveled in a top-down direction. Corporate CEOs determined corporate policy. Media gatekeepers decided what people would read or see. All the king's men decided on government policy.

Utilities operated in a similarly top-down manner. They were the producers; they generated the electricity and drove it downstream to their customers.

Plouffe's announcement was one more indication that technological advances are sweeping this old model away. The open source movement has undermined much of Microsoft's top-down hegemony. Blogs are stripping the media gatekeepers of much of their power and transforming people from journalism and commentary consumers into producers. Websites like YouTube and Flickr are doing much the same for consumers of visual media.

In their way, smart grids are working the same magic as they empower energy consumers to become energy producers.

And now, pulling up alongside the smart grid, we're getting smart democracy.

Just ask David Letterman: everyone loves a list.

Its juiciness as an attention-getter has not escaped the environmental non-profit Greenpeace, which regularly issues a list rating the greenness of electronics companies.

The latest edition of its ratings, issued in late November, comes across like Simon Cowell in a cranky mood. "(V)ery few firms are showing true climate leadership," states a press release accompanying the report. "Despite many green claims, major companies like Dell, Microsoft, Lenovo, LG, Samsung and Apple are failing to support the necessary levels of global cuts in emissions and make the absolute cuts in their own emissions that are required to tackle climate change."

The report, which graded eighteen electronics companies, ranked Nokia number one, followed by Sony Ericsson and Toshiba. Special notice of the negative sort went to bottom-dwelling Nintendo ("zero on most criteria except chemicals management and energy") and Philips, despite the company's scoring well in some areas ("the biggest obstacle in the electronics industry to tackling the growing problem of e-waste").

A strict taskmaster, Greenpeace is plainly unhappy with the overall eco-performance of the electronics industry. It notes that "many electronics firms have put a great deal of emphasis on green claims," but "no company has yet achieved clear leadership across the board."

Hmm ... remember what I wrote above about "everybody loves a list?" Maybe not. Given how much companies prize their reputation, the electronics industry probably isn't enamored of the Greenpeace list.

American Electric Power Company, Inc. (AEP), generator of 38,000 megawatts of electricity across 39,000 miles of transmission lines across the eastern and central US, is considering heading down the wind energy highway.

Not only that, but they're looking to build their own clean energy superhighway. AEP is exploring construction of a wind power transmission system that would run from North Dakota to Chicago, supplying 765 kilovolts of power throughout the Midwest. Implementation of the project would require in excess of 1,000 miles of super-high voltage transmission lines that would carry electricity from the Hartland Wind Farm, LLC in North Dakota. The infrastructure cost would be between $5 and 10 billion.

The high voltage transmission lines would be engineered to reduce energy loss, which is the inevitable outcome when electricity is transported over transmission lines. Less than one percent will be lost with these lines, compared to the 10 percent typically lost with traditional transmission lines. That will produce multiple benefits, including improved margins for AEP, more economical pricing for customers, and greater energy efficiency for the country.

According to AEP’s CEO, Michael G. Morris, “The Dakotas, Minnesota and Iowa have some of the very best wind generation resources in the United States, but the wind potential in this region cannot be developed unless we build a very efficient transmission superhighway to bring this clean, renewable generation to population and electricity load centers.”

AEP's step is an important one for the country as well as the company. We have a "Saudi Arabia of wind" in the U.S. What's been lacking has been transmission capacity. AEP's move would take us down the right highway.

(Photo by Flickr user eurodana)

For the 60 men and three women aboard the Peace of Africa, diamonds aren't a luxury, they're a career choice. Finding the gems requires  the latest technology and creates a Jacques Cousteau-like adventure.

The Peace of Africa is a $1 billion South African rand ($110 million U.S.) piece of high-tech engineering designed to maximize the yield of precious gems from the ocean floor at a minimal cost and impact. The process may seem simplistic -- find diamond "hot spots," scrape along the floor to loosen the gravel and minerals, vacuum up the mess, and sort through what you got. The mining operation has been fully automated so that no human hands touch or even see the diamonds until they reach a secure facility on shore.

The system processes about 10,000 cubic meters of water and minerals per day. First the minerals are washed and then dried, and sorted to identify the materials most likely to be diamonds. The pieces are then x-rayed to illuminate the diamonds so that they can be identified, and then immediately spit out of the system and canned and sealed without a finger being laid on them.

One of the biggest challenges is figuring out what to keep and what to throw away, according to Elizly Steyn, the ship's metallurgist. Steyn works for the De Beers Group, the diamond business that own and operates the ship. She's part of a team that monitors a steady stream of data to optimize the diamond yields. The company's target is 1000 carats of diamonds per day, or 200,000 carats per year, which includes down time for maintenance, technical glitches, and bad weather. Based on the information collected from the sonar scanning, automated underwater vessels, and real-time analysis, the filtering system is set up to only extract pieces between 2 and 19 millimeters in size, Steyn says. This results in the largest diamonds automatically being tossed overboard -- not what you would expect. "It would cost more to process the additional material than you'd get back from the one large diamond you might find every six months," says Steyn.

The diamonds were formed about 2.2 million years ago, and then thrust to the surface by volcanoes around 700 million years later, according to Tom Tweedy of De Beers. He says that while diamond mining started in South Africa about 100 years ago, no one bothered to look under the ocean until a Texas oil man suggested doing so in the 1960s after diamonds were found on the shore. The diamonds are harvested by "the crawler," a remote controlled bulldozer-like vehicle that rests on the ocean floor and scrapes the bottom until the clay is reached. Steyn says only the occasional fish gets caught up in the vacuum. Most of the sea floor at around 125 meters is barren of vegetation. The crawler costs about $1 million U.S., so it is too expensive to keep a spare on board. When it stops working, as happened during our visit, so does the mining operation.

The crawler takes about 1 1/2 hours to retrieve and return atop the Peace of Africa, which is anchored about 10 miles off the coast. The waste water and minerals are automatically pumped to the side of the ship and eventually resettles on the bottom. The dolphins don't seem to mind the brown cloud this creates, as a group of about half a dozen was hanging out by the side of the vessel during this reporter's visit.

Another impediment to mining is the stormy weather off the coast near the South Africa-Zimbabwe border. Swells sometimes reach 27 meters in height, which shuts down operations as it is too strong for the flexible hoses that connect with the crawler below. Only when waves surpass 14 meters does the mining operation shut down. All of the equipment -- the engines, the winches that maneuver the crawler and position the ship over the crawling area, and the machines that pump and sort the materials -- run on electricity. The engines run on a fuel oil that is slightly thicker than diesel, and burn through between 18 and 30 tons of fuel each day. That's the equivalent of filling up the gas tanks of about 600 cars per day. De Beers has an environmental officer dedicated to studying the ship's impact on the ocean and air. The engines were tested to meet the government's requirements for NOx and SOx emissions. While the air quality within the working areas of the ship is not monitored for emissions, an air filtration system cleans the air in the living quarters, according to Steyn. The ship's crew stays on board the ship for 28 days and then gets 28 days off.

That schedule is just fine with Steyn, who plans to stay on for another two years. She grew up with three older brothers and is used to hanging out with the guys.

During the Presidential campaign, Barack Obama said: "I've put forward a plan to make sure that, in 10 years' time, we have freed ourselves from dependence on Middle Eastern oil." Whether that decidedly aggressive timeline includes the use of nuclear power remains to be seen.

As global warming has become a more pressing issue, the profile of nukes has risen and become more contentious. Proponents call it safe, domestic, and carbon-free while opponents brand it as expensive, dangerous, and unnecessary. Here are some of the major pro and con arguments in the debate:

Pros:

• None of the 104 operating commercial plants in the United States has suffered a radioactive leak.
• Plans for 26 modern reactors are awaiting approval.
• Tons of regulatory requirements have made nuclear energy safer.
• We can put the nuclear waste in Yucca Mountain.
• No CO2.

Cons:

• Nuclear disasters are still possible and plants are relatively easy targets for terrorists.
• The public is still scared of nukes. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island are still anxiety triggers.
• Regulatory red tape makes building a plant a long, expensive undertaking.
• Obama campaigned against Yucca and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (of Nevada) hates the idea.
• Nuclear weapons.

Obama has hedged his bets, saying that "It is unlikely that we can meet our aggressive climate goals if we eliminate nuclear power as an option," while conceding that "what we've got to figure out is can we store the material properly. Can we make sure that they're secure? Can we deal with the expense?"

In a recent blog, The Huffington Post maligned nuclear, arguing that studies confirm America can pursue clean energy without splitting atoms, concluding that "nuclear propagandists have and will continue to attempt to spin the climate crisis."

It's a great notion to think of an America buzzing with windmills, solar panels, and electric cars. The truth, I believe, is that these advances are going to take longer than 10 years to bloom and boom, but might it take equally long to churn up nuclear plants, even on a fast track?

As usual, politics will determine how this situation plays out. The nuclear lobby knows this is its last chance to get back in the game, the President-elect has shown some support, and highly-scalable renewables are still on the cusp. This vista tells me that nuke-tech will play at least some role in our zero carbon future.

Photo by Flickr user Marshall Astor

It's something new for the American consumer to worry about this holiday season, as if they didn't have enough already: buying safe, toxin-free toys.

After a tumultuous year of public outcries denouncing China’s failure to regulate harmful chemicals in toys, many consumers are keeping a wary eye out when they shop for children. To aid them in their search for safe toys, they have the option of perusing the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based Ecology Center's 2008 inspection study of more than 1,500 toys.

The Ecology Center's report, which is available at www.healthtoys.org, provides a list of chemicals commonly found in plastic and other materials. Lead, cadmium, arsenic, and bromine crop up frequently. So do plastics full of chemicals that are less than safe because kids can be tough on toys, degrading them so that the toxins are available to be ingested.

The Ecology Center tested toys for toxins and ranked the results by safest toy. Toys are ranked as containing low, medium or high levels of chemicals. The results of each toxin test were then averaged to create a single product rating.

The organization also coordinated with manufacturers who are increasingly faced with consumer demands for safer, toxin-free toys. "With consumers paying more attention, toy manufacturers are being forced to respond," said Jeff Gearhart of the Ecology Center.

The organization's web site also provides a handy search feature where consumers can do safety checks on the season's must-have toys. In a search for Dora the Explorer toys, MatterNetwork found more than 15 related items, none of which were toxin-free. Another popular item, the Nintendo Wii, ranked less than safe, but that is to be expected since it is packed with computer components that contain all sorts of chemicals like bromine and chlorine.

In an ideal world, toys would come from natural, chemical-free products. This isn't an ideal world, though, and in the meantime the Ecology Center's resource can provide valuable  guidance to worried shoppers.

With its high gas prices and recurring smog problem, California has for years been a nationwide leader in pressing for meaningful fuel economy and emissions standards. However, the nation's largest state—by population, anyway—was famously denied permission to impose higher global warming emissions standards by the EPA. This led to a massive lawsuit brought by 18 states to force the EPA to allow California to impose its stricter standards.

You may very soon see Florida's name added to that list. The Sunshine State has voted to adopt stricter tailpipe emissions standards, with the goal of cutting the carbon emissions across all new cars sold in 2016 to a third of current levels. The proposal, initiated by Republican Governor Charlie Crist, must still pass the state legislature to become law, but appears to have broad bipartisan support.

The state has some serious motivation for combatting climate change. It has been hammered in recent years by hurricanes some blame on the progress of global warming, is the US's most low-lying state by average elevation, and could suffer immensely from rising sea levels. Some of the Florida's most expensive real estate lies at or just above water level, and the state's economy relies heavily on its healthy tourism industry.

Clean cars are again in the news, as major US automakers head to Washington for a second attempt at securing financial assistance. But what the Big 3 are promising, other automakers like Mini are already delivering.

Or are they? Much like the EV1 before it, Mini's highly anticipated plug-in electric vehicle is available only for lease at a steep $850 a month. The cost is comparable to my modest apartment (including heat and hot water) in an overpriced Boston market. The BMW-owned company has also saddled would-be EV drivers with restrictions on garages, electrical wiring, driving history, effectively releasing the car to a very limited and fairly affluent market.

With its poor gas mileage, the Mini definitely needed a sustainability bump. However, a more exclusive product niche won't help sustainable car sales. For years, automakers channeled hybrids as higher-end vehicles, forcing eco-conscious buyers to pay for extras like navigation systems, tire-pressure monitors, and power door locks.

In a year when low-income Americans have been badly in need of gasoline-free vehicles, releasing another high-end showpiece for the streets of New York and LA is no help at all.

 

Photo courtesy of Flickr user Olsenweb.

Critics of the notion that clean, sustainable industries can fuel an economic recovery have always relied on one potent argument: nice idea, but when? After all, wind, solar, hydro, and a variety of other reliable, renewable energy sources have been around for years. Why haven't they created any "green collar  jobs yet?

Well, the fact of the matter is, they have. And now, a new web feature from the Union of Concerned Scientists has driven the point home with a variety of real-life renewable energy success stories. Faces of Renewable Energy profiles people across America who are simultaneously driving the shift to sustainable energy sources, as well as helping to rouse the economy out of one of its deepest slumps ever.

By providing a human face to the successes engineered by clean energy sources, the feature severely undermines the dismissive "pie in the sky" treatment clean technology has gotten, and makes expanded domestic coal and oil drilling operations seem far less "common sense" by comparison.

This is certainly needed, as crude oil prices have slumped to near-record lows, reducing dramatically the short-term economic value of expanding clean energy sources.

In many parts of the world, the winds of change may be blowing towards renewables, but don't expect the South African government to participate.

That's the assessment of Herman Oelsner, president of the African Wind Energy Association. Standing in front of four wind turbines in Darling in the Western Cape province, Oelsner told our group of bloggers that private industry and regional governments would have to lead the way. He explained that South Africa is rich in coal, and that the federal government owns Eskom, which provides 90 percent of the energy to the country. Because coal is cheap and abundant and the mining industry provides a lot of jobs, the country has little incentive to change. "The utility (Eskom) is against renewables, and that's why we don't have any in this country," said Oelsner. South Africa currently produces 93 percent of its energy from coal.

The wind farm is selling electricity to the Capetown City Council through a power purchase agreement. "We are 'pulling a Schwarzenegger' by working directly with provinces which have their own policies," said Oelsner, refering to the California governor's penchant for enacting envirornmental regulations that far exceed federal standards.

The federal government did provide some money for the wind farm project, which is led by Danish investors, according to Oelsner. He envisions expanding the wind farm from 4 to 20 turbines, each with 1.3 megawatt generating capacity, and has designs on adding a 770 megawatt wave power project off the nearby western shoreline. Adding wave power would provide a "hybrid power source" as the waves are more powerful in summer while wind power is stronger in the winter.

Financing for the projects has not been lined up yet, but Oelsner does not anticipate problems. A pilot wave energy project of 5 megawatts would cost about 200 millon rand.

The wave project won't go forward until a feed-in tariff from the province, which would guarantee an incentive for renewable power, is passed. Oelsner expects this to happen in March and hopes for an 85 cent (South African) tariff. This will give the project a big boost: feed-in tariffs in Germany and Spain have sparked the solar industry in those nations to lead the world. "We have to get a return on investment that is higher than the Eskom rate," he said.

The mining and energy companies control government policy in South Africa, according to Oelsner. He said his organization was vying to become the first working wind farm in South Africa, but the permits were held up by the government until after a small test project from Eskom could be launched. In this sense, Oelsner's project is going against the, er, wind.

The Wall Street Journal reports today that the Big 3 automakers are promising greener cars as part of their bid to receive billions in government bailouts. Most aggressive is Ford, which plans to accelerate plans for a battery-electric van and sedan by 2011. The company, which says it may not even have to use the loan, expects a plug-in electric vehicle to come off the assembly line the following year.

Altogether, Chrysler, Ford, and GM are asking for a $34 billion line of credit, up from the $25 billion they requested last month. Ford and Chrysler are also asking for a combined $11 billion from the Department of Energy for the development of fuel-efficient vehicles.

In addition to the promise of each carmaker's CEO to work for $1 a year, Ford and GM will be driving to Washington in hybrids and E85 vehicles when they make another round of appeals later this week. This move is almost certainly a result of their getting scorched by Congressional leaders over their use of private jets in their previous meeting in DC.

It seems very unlikely that Congress will simply turn its back on the Big 3. The question is how many green strings Washington will attach to the funds. Detroit has resisted cleaner cars for decades and now government has the leverage to make dead certain that the next generation of vehicles is renewable, pluggable and electric. It's an opportunity that can't be missed.

Glendale, California has started using renewable energy to fuel their transportation fleet. The city has contracted with the Clean Energy Fuels Corporation to supply its vehicles with compressed natural gas (CNG) over the next 10 years.

Clean Energy, which was founded by the oil billionaire-turned-clean-energy-proponent T. Boone Pickens, will build and operate a CNG station at the Bob Hope Airport, less than 10 miles from Glendale. Glendale’s 30-plus transit buses as well as residential garbage collection trucks will fill up at this station and then be on their way, in the process emitting fewer greenhouse gases and air pollutants than if they ran on the usual diesel.

An added benefit of this location is that it allows taxis running on natural gas to refill while making rounds to and from the airport.

While the city's efforts are admirable, converting to natural gas is only a start when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions and air pollution. At this point, however, this is the best available technology for local governments like Glendale, which are constrained by a limited state budget and relatively small tax base -- the city has about 200,000 residents. Over the long term, more advanced solutions will be necessary. For now, though, hats off to Glendale for implementing positive changes!

The US Environmental Protection Agency, EPA, is closing in on a decision to regulate greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane under the Clean Air Act. The EPA was forced to the initiate the rulemaking procedure following the Supreme Court's decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA.

The decision, which could regulate greenhouse gas emissions and impose a tax on such emissions, is prompting a strong reaction from industries including agriculture, automotive and manufacturing that could have their cost of business rise substantially,

On July 30, a formal public comment opportunity on the subject began that closed last week. The EPA will consider the public comments before making a final ruling.

The agriculture industry is fearful of instituting a greenhouse gas tax as cattle, swine and hogs, are considerable emitters of the greenhouse gas methane. Taxing companies for their emissions could result in higher meat prices for consumers who are already financially distressed due to the deteriorating economy.

Ranchers, who have lobbied hard against a tax, are concerned that they could get hit with a double whammy. Will they have to base their emissions on both those emitted from livestock and for the travel required to transport the meat to markets?

These and many other protocols will be considered by the EPA over the coming weeks. New leadership in the EPA, which will like change with the incoming Obama administration, would be more likely to strongly regulate greenhouse gases.

In public comments to EPA, many consumers encouraged regulation of greenhouse gases, despite the potential price implications.

Companies would have incentive to develop greener products. For example, agriculture ranchers could capture methane generated by livestock and turn it into energy, all the while reducing atmospheric emissions, and generating a new source of income. This is the creative thinking Americans are demanding.

The Supreme Court will soon hear a case that will likely have massive repercussions on the future of energy generation in the United States. At issue is whether or not older power plants are responsible for meeting standards set in the Clean Water Act, or whether regulating agencies should be allowed to give energy firms a pass if the cost of compliance is too high.

Entergy, Inc, owner of the Indian Point Nuclear Power Plant named in the suit, maintains that an updated cooling system would cost well over one billion dollars, and provide little environmental benefit to the Hudson River, which the plant relies on to cool its reactor. Hudson Riverkeeper, on the other hand, is arguing that the plant must be brought up to "the best technology available" to avoid excessive environmental impacts, as required by the Clean Water Act.

It'll be interesting to see which way the court decides on this issue, with some 550 power plants nationwide covered by the outcome. On the one hand, if cost-benefit analysis is allowed to determine the reach of the Clean Water Act and other environmental regulations, that will significantly, um, water down their effectiveness. On the other hand requiring companies to always use the best technology available may discourage investment in new energy projects, including hydrokinetic and traditional hydropower installations.

by Ben Block

As international leaders convene in Poland for two weeks of climate negotiations, recent surveys suggest a global consensus for governments to reduce their country's emissions.

Despite increased financial instability, residents of both the industrialized and developing worlds are in favor of cutting greenhouse gas emissions and investing in renewable energy, according to two public opinion polls released late last month.

More than three-quarters of respondents polled across 11 nations and Hong Kong in a survey released on Wednesday support emissions-reduction targets that are at least as ambitious as the promises of other countries, according to the HSBC Climate Partnership, a collaboration of business and environmental groups.

Asked whether their government should reduce emissions as much or more than other nations, on average 77 percent of respondents were in favor. Polls from Canada, Australia, and Brazil suggested above average support among residents there. Responses were also favorable in China (62 percent) and the United States (72 percent).

"This research demonstrates the need for decisive action on climate change," said Nicholas Stern, an HSBC adviser and former World Bank chief economist, in a prepared statement.

Leaders from the surveyed nations are meeting in Pozna, Poland, this week to negotiate a new climate treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. The conference serves as a midway point in the negotiation process. At last year's meeting in Bali, Indonesia, leaders agreed to finalize the treaty by next December's climate summit in Copenhagen, Denmark. 

In addition to supporting reduced emissions, on average 77 percent of respondents of a University of Maryland-managed survey said they support greater government emphasis on solar and wind energy, according to the 21-nation poll. The study found majority support for clean energy in 20 of the surveyed nations.

Asked whether their governments should require electric utilities to use more solar or wind energy, even if the transition increases energy costs, all nations were in favor except for Russia (36 percent support) and Azerbaijan (48 percent), two major oil producers. Support was highest in South Korea (96 percent), France (88 percent), and Kenya (87 percent).

The HSBC Climate Partnership survey also reflected growing international support for renewable energy. When asked how their government should address climate change, respondents rated clean energy investments as the highest priority in seven of the 12 regions surveyed. Respondents in all regions except for China said their governments were not currently doing enough to accelerate alternative energy sources.

The University of Maryland study, a collaborative research project of WorldPublicOpinion.org, noted that support for coal or oil-fired power plants also remains high. Germany is the only country where a majority of survey respondents, 62 percent, said their government should place less emphasis on these fossil fuel energy sources.

The 188 world leaders in attendance at Pozna are expected to debate several new policies to better transfer clean energy technologies to the developing world. Several funding options will also be discussed.  

The HSBC Climate Partnership, conducted in September, polled 6,000 people from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, and 6,000 online respondents from Brazil, China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, and Mexico.

The WorldPublicOpinion.org poll, conducted between July 15 and November 4, surveyed 20,790 people from Argentina, Azerbaijan, China, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Macau, Mexico, Nigeria, the Palestinian Territories, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Turkey, Ukraine, and the United States. It had a sampling error of plus or minus 2-4 percent.

Reprinted with permission from the Worldwatch Institute.

Photo courtesy of U.S. NREL.