Hosting in a hotter world

What can the world’s major cities do to mitigate the effects of climate change and how can major events help? Host City speaks to Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London and Terry Tamminen, climate advisor to Obama and Schwarzenegger

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first. Ken Livingstone, former mayor of London, tells the IMServ carbon & energy summit in June 2009: “It is going to be so much worse than anybody anticipates.” At the beginning of this millennium, the broad scientific consensus was that the tipping point of irreversible climate change, characterised by catastrophic feedback loops, would arrive by the end of the century. This prognosis has changed. “Every single study or analysis has brought that tipping point forward. About 18 months ago I met Dr Pachauri, the head of the intergovernmental panel on climate change, who said we have already passed the tipping point. We are really up against it.”

Obama’s nomination ceremony, during which he vowed
to end the nation’s dependence on oil, was also
a showcase of green technologies

There is now no way of stabilising the global temperature rise to within two degrees Celsius, Livingstone says. “There is a 50/50 chance of stabilising at four degrees – maybe lower if we are lucky.” The worst eventuality is as bad as could be imagined. “If governments and businesses don’t make the right decisions then we stick to the really gloomy scenario, which is a six degree increase by the end of the century. The obvious precedent to that was the great Permian extinction 278 million years where global temperature went up 6 degrees, all the great methane sinks at the bottom of the ocean were released and 95 per cent of all life died out – this we want to avoid!”

As if to illustrate the urgency of the situation, the lights go out at this point in the presentation. This is not a planned operation in energy saving but an electrical fault in the Georgian building, which also provides the perfect opportunity for improvisation. “This is it – the crisis has just happened,” Livingstone says.

Financial centres in flood
With more than half of the world’s population now living in cities, which consume 75 per cent of the world’s energy, global warming is very much an urban issue. But while the world’s temperature is rising overall, the change is not uniform across the globe and will affect cities in different ways. “The ideal place to be living throughout the rest of this century is on islands in temperate zones. New Zealand, Britain and Japan are physically placed to be the ‘least bad’,” says Livingstone.

A big continent like the US on the other hand faces dramatic changes in the weather, including an increase in hurricane activity. “New York is not like London; you can’t have a barrier across the mouth of the Hudson River. It’s too deep, it’s too big, so they can’t protect New York from the sort of surges that will come when global warming in the North Atlantic tips over from the sort of hurricanes that used to happen.

“If the mayor of New York was here, he’d be able to present wonderful slides of the new command centre for when a third of the population of New York has to be relocated when they get their first force-three or force-four hurricane. Now they have a huge room with every modern technology from which they can run New York through the hurricane crisis.” Despite its advantages, London is already feeling the heat. “When we opened the Thames Barrier in 1982 we raised it twice a year – now it’s two or three times a month. If we hadn’t put up the Thames Barrier in London, most of us wouldn’t be here today. A catastrophe would have completed obliterated tube lines. Canary Wharf would be flooded. So changes will have to come to cope with the scale of the crisis we are facing.”

Leaders showing the way
The good news is that, although governments have been very slow to react, the situation is changing quite quickly. “We have come to the end of this period America wouldn’t lead, because it was lead by a person who doesn’t – and still doesn’t believe – that climate change is man-made. We now have a president who not only accepts that climate change is man-made, but can read and write, which is a huge advantage in taking America forward.”

Economics is at last driving, rather than obstructing, change. “You can structure your economy in a way that doesn’t damage the environment or the business community. This isn’t a choice between doing what is right for the climate and being competitive. The two go hand in hand, as we have shown with London’s fire stations and police stations: a 25 per cent save in energy cost, business by business, is an amazing addition to the bottom line that is very worth having.”

Slashing carbon by 60 per percent
When he took over as Mayor of London, Ken Livingstone commissioned a detailed analysis of the city’s carbon emissions and work out what was the biggest improvement they could achieve. “They came back with a really detailed report that showed that we could reduce our carbon emissions by 60 per cent in 20 years with existing technology – it’s relatively easy.”

At the time of this report, London’s carbon emissions broke down like this. The biggest emitters were buildings, with domestic and commercial buildings each accounting for 38 per cent of emissions. “Within that buildings sector the key big breakthrough is proper insulation: cavity walls and making sure windows are double glazed.”

A further 22 per cent of London’s carbon emissions came from transport. “This is the relatively easy one. You can transform it with more congestion charging, more bicycles, more public transport and more electric cars.”

Half of this 60 per cent reduction target can be achieved by using efficient ways of generating and distributing electricity. “Irrespective of the fuel source, power stations waste 65 per cent of the energy they produce through the cooling process. You can reduce this to 15 per cent using existing technologies. We could close 50 percent of our power capacity in this country if we switched from remote, huge, power stations to locally generated sources.”

The other half of the 60 per cent reduction comes from the various other ways of reducing energy use. “We could reduce London’s carbon emissions by five percent in the next 24 hours if every business in London switched off all its lighting overnight.”

Major events mentoring the world
The world’s cities clearly have the capacity to do what must be done to avoid meltdown. But how can this potential be converted into action and what role can major events play? Host City asked Terry Tamminen, who as secretary of the California Environmental Protection Agency became chief policy advisor in 2004 to Arnold Schwarzenegger – the governor of the US state that has drastically cut its carbon footprint. As director of the Climate Policy Program of the New America Foundation, he now advises Barack Obama on climate issues.

Tamminen describes major events as “great teaching moments”. He cites the example of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, at which Obama was nominated as presidential candidate in front of a stadium crowd of more than 80,000 people. During the event, a demonstration programme took place using vehicles with meters that showed greenhouse gas emissions during driving.

“They measured these drivers against other drivers that didn’t have that feedback. Not surprisingly, the people with the feedback meters drove more efficiently and reduced their greenhouse gas emissions. Now that company has submitted that information to the regulators, saying, what if this meter was fitted on all new cars? Its also know as the ‘Prius effect’ – people that have that feedback always want to maximise that little meter that shows their fuel consumption.

“So I think major events do have an opportunity to teach and to demonstrate technology,” Tamminen told Host City.