Former US vice president and climate activist Al Gore was the main speaker at Marfin Popular Bank’s third Athens international conference yesterday, which focused on Commodities, Environment and Climate Change.
At the conference, attended by businessmen and bankers, Gore called for a price to be put on carbon emissions. “Everything on the marketplace is measured but it’s important to look at what we’re not measuring. Put a price on carbon so it can be measured, because it has a value,” said Gore. “We’ve got to get our act together. The longer we delay the more costly it’s going to be. This is a global problem so there has to be a global solution,” he added.
Gore repeated the doom and gloom claims made in his documentary and book An Inconvenient Truth about overpopulation, carbon emissions, rising sea levels and melting icecaps.
“If we don’t address the problems soon we will condemn future generations to steadily rising sea levels,” said Gore.” Choices have to be made and they have to be made now. What has guided us in the past is no longer relevant. Survival depends on clear thinking and bold decision making.”
Gore did backtrack on one of his earlier pet issues - biofuels. Ever since the US in particular has been granting subsidies to farmers to cultivate crops - mainly corn - for ethanol, cereal prices have spiked causing global food prices to increase dramatically.
Yesterday Gore said ethanol had been a mistake. He said the amount of fossil fuel used to carry out the conversion of grain to fuel meant that net gains had been “trivial”.
Another speaker at the conference, Gerard Wynn, Senior Environmental Markets Correspondent at Thompson Reuters, who also talked about biofuels, said rapidly increasing oil prices had prompted the demand for biofuels. “The US is now the biggest provider of subsidies to the biofuel market,” he said, adding that 41 per cent of all corn grown in the US goes to biofuels.
More subsidies are given to the biofuels’ sector than any other renewable energy source (RES), Wynn said. Wynn estimates that this sector would continue to receive the lion’s share of interest over the next 25 years. “Under the EU’s RES targets ten per cent of all road transport fuel will be from alternatives including biofuels, “ said Wynn. “Most states plan to meet that target from biofuels alone.”
However there was still some controversy over the ‘food versus fuel’ he said. “The connection was made that we have higher food prices and yet we are putting it in to cars,” said Wynn, adding that the UN Food Agency said only last week that the output of cereals would be down two per cent this year.
He maintained the biofuel industry was not sustainable in the long term however, given that more and more land would be needed to grow the necessary crops.
Marfin Chief Executive Efthimios Bouloutas, who opened the conference, told delegates the bank was the only one in Greece and Cyprus that was ahead of the game when it came to issues of climate change. The bank would be investing €620 million over the next three years in RES projects, he said.
2010 Cyprus mail Ltd.
