Sathaye Contributes to Governors’ Global Climate Summit
Jayant Sathaye, who heads the International Energy Group in Berkeley Lab’s Environmental Energy Technologies Division and who shared in the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize as a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a leading participant in the Governors’ Global Climate Summit taking place Tuesday and Wednesday, Nov 18 and 19, in Beverly Hills, CA.
Jayant Sathaye
The Summit brings together the governors of California, Florida, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Kansas with representatives from China, Mexico, Canada, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Australia, and Poland, plus the European Commission, to examine new programs for combating climate change. At the two-day meeting Sathaye joins other leading scientists, administrators like Linda Adams, California’s Secretary of Environmental Protection, and politicians including Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta, and former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Sathaye is an expert on regional programs for reducing energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions, the focus of the high-level meeting. The attendees plan to create alliances of states, provinces, and regional governments to put these programs into action, programs which are intended to serve as models for a world-wide agreement the United Nations hopes to reach next year as a successor to the Kyoto Protocol.
At a session on “Sectoral Cooperation to Combat Global Warming,” Sathaye will describe progress made since a landmark Memorandum of Understanding among energy regulators in the U.S. and India was signed last December. Initiated by Sathaye and his colleagues, the parties to the MOU were Berkeley Lab, the California Energy Commission, the California Public Utilities Commission, and the Maharashtra Electricity Regulatory Commission; Maharashtra, whose capital is Mumbai, consumes more electricity than any other Indian state.
Sathaye reports that after technical analysis of consumption patterns, “the Maharashtra Regulatory Commission mandated that power companies allocate $20 million to demand-side programs, in lieu of new generating capacity.” Demand-side programs fund consumers’ rebates on energy-efficient appliances and subsidize manufacturers of energy-efficient lighting, reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases and pollutants and forestalling blackouts while saving on capital expenditure.
“Part of the year’s work consisted of training sessions for government regulators and for members of utility company staff in India,” says Sathaye. “PG&E’s Roland Risser was a terrific help in peer-to-peer talks with the utility people who were actually going to have to make these recommendations work.”
At the Global Climate Summit, Sathaye is also on the “Climate Action – Energy” panel, which will dig deeper into demand-side management and other regional cooperative activities for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions.
For more than 20 of Sathaye’s 35 years at Berkeley Lab he and his colleagues have devoted themselves to the policy aspects of climate change. Regional and sectoral agreements like those that are the focus of the Governors’ Global Climate Summit, says Sathaye, can further international cooperation even where countries haven’t formally agreed, as is the case with the Kyoto Protocol, in which the United States and developing nations have declined to accept emissions targets.
One example featured at the Governors’ Global Climate Summit, in an area to which Sathaye has devoted much of his attention, is a commitment to Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) to be signed Wednesday by the Republic of Indonesia, various states from the Federative Republic of Brazil (with Congo, the largest tropically forested states in the world), and several American states. It’s the kind of agreement among regions of different nations that gives Sathaye hope.
“Somewhat to my surprise, I’m very optimistic,” says Sathaye. “This Summit is just one indication that countries are moving very quickly in the right direction, that they recognize the incentives and huge potential for conservation and energy efficiency.”
