Israel needs to prepare today for the post-Kyoto era

In the agreement they signed in 2009 and will enter into force at the end of 2012, Israel will be obliged to reduce emissions. Dr. Danny Rabinovitch of Uni' Tel Aviv suggests starting with canceling the plan to build a new coal station in Ashkelon, and with projects to reduce energy waste and transition to alternative energy * He also has criticism of Shai Agassi's electric car project

By Avi Blizovsky. The article was published in the Energy News newsletter

All those involved in the field - the government, the transportation bodies, the energy companies - must organize for the post-Kyoto era, in which Israel will also be required to cut carbon emissions. Why wait until 2009, when they will force us to organize? asks Dr. Dani Rabinovitch, a senior lecturer in the department of sociology and anthropology at Tel Aviv University and a member of the board of the Porter School of Environmental Studies at the university, who also serves as the chairman of the executive committee of "Life and Environment" - the umbrella organization of environmental organizations in Israel.

Dr. Rabinovitch, who is currently lecturing as part of a course of the IDF Broadcasting University (on Mondays) on global warming, participated about two weeks ago in the climate conference held on the island of Bali in Indonesia, aware of the global ecological crisis. According to him, the culprits are not the Chinese and Indians who seek to improve their standard of living, and currently consume enormous amounts of energy, but the Americans - if the whole world lived at the American standard of living, it would take six Earths to satisfy their needs, on the other hand, if the whole world lived at the Chinese standard of living Today, after years of growth, there was still enough half a globe. 1986 was the last year in which humans consumed less resources than could be grown, mined or extracted. In doing so, Rabinovitch cites a model developed by two Canadian researchers, Wackernagel and Rees, who began talking about the ecological footprint model in the late XNUMXs.

"Since the industrial revolution we have unknowingly burned coal, then oil and now also natural gas, and we have released huge amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, beyond the atmosphere's capacity to absorb. Rabinovitch calls this the sink effect - the atmosphere is, among other things, a sink for the Earth's gaseous waste and the first place where the Earth's dwindling chain of resources is about to collapse and is already showing signs of collapse. Before the industrial revolution, the rate of emission was the same as the rate at which these molecules were assimilated into plants.

The burning of mineral fuel creates amounts of C02 that the atmosphere cannot neutralize and the gas accumulates and then the sink begins to clog. "

According to Rabinovitch, the conference ended with an agreement regarding the continuation of the process to find a formula for an international agreement on carbon emissions, a process that should end in Copenhagen in 2009. Unfortunately, the goals of the process were loosely defined due to the opposition of countries such as the USA, Russia and Saudi Arabia, and this shows that difficult negotiations are expected, since for the oil and coal producers the continuation of the sale is part of their marketing plan. But following the research of the IPCC forum, which includes 2,500 scientists from around the world, everyone knows that something must be done. The report published by the forum at the beginning of 2007 stated unequivocally that in order to limit the increase in the average temperature below 2 degrees during the 21st century, the emissions of greenhouse gases must be reduced by 2050% by the year 50 compared to the emissions of the year 2000, which is a revolution. This can be achieved by reducing the tremendous waste in the process of creating and transporting energy, changing the way houses are built, changing behavior, changing the modes of transportation, all of these will provide us with a 20% reduction in carbon emissions and another 30% can be achieved by switching to alternative energies.

Intermediate: stop with the Israeli recovery

Apparently we are in heaven, little Israel is not required according to the Kyoto Protocol, which expires as stated only at the end of 2012, to reduce carbon emissions, but only to report the emission amounts. However, it is clear that in the new protocol to be signed in Copenhagen, many more countries, including Israel, will be required to reduce emissions. The summer camp will end and Israel will receive the exact sentence - how much to reduce in 2009, and it will have three years to organize itself. "Why not start now?" Rabinovitch asks?

"You have to stop arguing and arguing and wasting time. The government and large sectors of the economy such as the infrastructure sector and electricity generation and the transportation sector know that they are facing an abyss but prefer to play politics and try to postpone the end. They should treat it as a decree from heaven, literally and start working hard on the technologies and the solutions and the legislation and the enforcement and stop avoiding. If they do it Israel will benefit from several aspects, first the money that will be invested in the search for alternatives will give a serious boost to technologies and R&D in the country and we will even be able to make money from exporting the technologies. In addition, we will also benefit from a decrease in morbidity and an increase in the quality of the environment at the local level as well."

Are you referring to projects such as the coal-fired power plant in Ashkelon?

Rabinovitch: "Ashkelon D is an example of a country that runs in a system frenzy. This is something that needs to be read again to understand that this is happening in the second decade of the 21st century - a country is building a coal-fired power plant when it has no coal at all. Instead of investing the money in solar power generation capabilities that we have in abundance. My colleagues abroad hear this and ask where the pioneering, entrepreneurial, agile and above all smart Israel has gone."

What do you think of the electric vehicle offered by Shi Agassi?

"Shay Agassi's vehicle is a nice idea, but it should be understood that it does not completely prevent the emission of greenhouse gases because it will transfer the emission from the car to the power plant that will generate the electricity to charge the batteries. But that doesn't make this idea a bad idea. At best it will allow some reduction of the total emissions due to the greater efficiency of a power plant compared to the efficiency of a car engine, but it is clearly not a magic solution. And besides, even if we assume that we have succeeded in solving the overall emission problem, cars have other environmental consequences: they gobble up a lot of space, create congestion, and if the car is as cheap as Agassi plans, we may enter further into a syndrome of addiction to private cars that we are already deep in it What would have made the car perfect would have been the possibility to charge it by collecting solar energy, but this is still impossible because it would require solar collectors with an area larger than the surface of the car itself, of course it is possible to fill the charging stations with solar energy, but an area of ​​a quarter of a neighborhood would be required in order for one such station to be efficient.”

Is there no chance that producing energy from the sun will be efficient enough?

"What I said about the car is also true about the power plants. To produce energy identical to that of the planned coal power plant in Ashkelon on an area of ​​one hundred dunams, we will need 10 thousand dunams that will be used to set up collector farms. This is where developments such as in the field of nanotechnology come in, for example, which will make it possible to reduce the area of ​​the receptors needed to produce a given amount of energy. The government would do well if it directed the funds to research and development instead of investing them in the construction of a polluting power plant."

In conclusion, Dr. Rabinovitch states that our dealing with the climate crisis and global warming is the key to the survival of the human race in the 21st century. "Even if humans may not be in danger, the way of life we ​​maintain and would like to pass on to our descendants is in acute danger. The climate crisis will also affect Israel in other ways due to the destabilization of financial stability, geopolitical instability and security problems that will be caused as a result of the climate crisis."