Richard Cowart, Distinguished Energy Scholar,Addresses Global Energy Demand
July 18, 2008
As director of the Regulatory Assistance Project (RAP), Richard Cowart travels the world advising government officials on energy and environmental policy. He and his colleagues at RAP, a nonprofit organization founded by former utility regulators, work in 45 states and more than a dozen counties.
As the 2008 Distinguished Visiting Energy Scholar, Cowart spent a portion of his summer at VLS, and on July 18 he delivered the keynote address at the Energy Summer Conference, Powering the 21st Century: Resource Choices in a Carbon-Constrained World.
Opening his remarks against the backdrop of a photo he took in China, Cowart quickly brought the world’s energy needs into focus: the villagers in the photo were just a few of the two billion people who live without access to electricity.
With the pressures brought on by booming development in China, India and other nations, Cowart said more generation and “reforms that make things worse” won’t be the answer. The most effective way to meet the soaring demand is to break the cycle, focusing on greater efficiencies and less consumption, said Cowart, one of the most experienced regulatory experts in the U.S.
As models, Cowart pointed to the Efficiency Vermont program and the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, a cooperative effort by 10 states in the Northeast and mid-Atlantic to regulate and reduce carbon emissions by implementing a cap-and-trade system and allocating money for carbon credits to efficiency, thereby passing the incentives right back to consumers. Energy efficiency, Cowart concluded, is the planet’s “low-cost carbon scrubber.”
Michael Dworkin, director of the VLS Institute for Energy and the Environment, opened the conference by spelling out the challenge in the simplest of terms: one-quarter of humanity lives without electricity, while another one-quarter of humanity gobbles up one-half of the world’s energy supply.
It is a reality, Dworkin said, that is not sustainable.
“We know how to get through the next five years. We know how to get through the next 10 years. We do not know how to get through the next century,” Dworkin told the audience, which included more than 50 regulators, energy experts and scholars from around the New England region.
SHARE