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From Kyoto to a Chicago Protocol? Presentation: Brice Lalonde, Chairman of the Round Table on Sustainable Development, OECD Discussant: Jonathan Pershing, Director of Climate, Energy and Pollution Program, World Resources Institute

Event Description:

Every week a coal-fired power plant is built in China. Soon the same will be true in India. "King Coal" is back. While oil and gas are becoming more expensive, coal reserves are abundant. They are found not only in India and China, but also in the United States, Australia and South Africa among others.

However, coal sends up a lot of carbon dioxide - exactly what the world is trying to avoid. And, once built, power plants stand for thirty years if not more, shaping our future. So while clean substitutes for coal should be pursued, at least we should have the cleanest possible coal-fired power plants. That is to say efficient, or even better, ready to capture and store carbon dioxide.

The best available or soon to be available technologies are more expensive than those that are business as usual. Already the energy investments needed by emerging and developed countries have been assessed at trillions of dollars. Who will pay the premium? In reality only private money can meet this challenge, but investors must be sure of their returns.

This balance will be only possible if a price is put on carbon sent into the atmosphere, making it more expensive to pollute and more profitable to be clean. It would be the purpose of an international framework linking cap and trade systems around the world - a lasting convention, including all countries, with common and differentiated responsibilities. Building that new convention could be the United States -contribution to the world.

Biographies:

Brice Lalonde, one of the longest serving French environment ministers (1988-1992), has devoted much of his career to environment and development issues. In addition to being a former director of the French offices of the Institute for European Environment Policy and Friends of the Earth, he has been a member of the Global Environmental Facility Senior Advisory Panel and the OECD’s High-Level Advisory Group on the Environment. For many years he has been a senior consultant on sustainable development to companies, governments and international organisations.

The Round Table on Sustainable Development brings together ministers, senior private sector executives, NGO leaders and academics to grapple with environmental and developmental issues at the global level. Established by the OECD Secretary-General in 1998 and chaired until this year by former New Zealand environment minister Simon Upton, it has emerged both as a catalyst for action and as a forum to generate and test new ideas and thinking at the highest political and commercial levels.

Jonathan Pershing joined the World Resources Institute in 2003 as director of the WRI Climate, Energy and Pollution Program. His focus is on both US and international climate change policy; he is active in work on emissions trading, energy technology and the evolving architecture of international climate agreements. He also supervises work on the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a joint project between WRI and the World Business Council on Sustainable Development, as well as WRI's global climate change data collection effort. His program provides technical and policy-relevant analysis for governments as well as intergovernmental and non-governmental groups, seeking to move the world to a more climate friendly future.

Prior to joining WRI, Dr. Pershing was head of the Energy and Environment Division of the International Energy Agency (IEA) in Paris. In this capacity, he oversaw the IEA's work on energy and the environment, including climate change and sustainable development, providing policy advice to senior government officials, industry representatives, and other environment experts. Among other responsibilities, he led the IEA delegation to meetings of the UN Climate Convention, and to the Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development, and participated actively in IEA Ministerial sessions on climate change and environment issues.