World Bank's Clean Energy Czar calls for "spectrum" of technologies

Last week the World Bank announced the appointment of Daniel Kammen (left) as its ‘clean energy czar’. Kammen is currently the head of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory at University of California, Berkeley.

This week Kammen gave an interview to the New York Times in which he stressed the importance of a spectrum of technologies that “fit lots and lots of different local situations”.

One big hurdle, he says, is getting economists to recognise the value of externalities.

Our economy is fixated on one metric, money ... we need to put a value on the quality of our energy systems, the ability to preserve nature, to preserve the oceans and the rivers.

In the interview he also praises the large-scale use of distributed energy in parts of East Africa.

Kenya, for example, has more solar installed per capita than any other country. That’s a remarkable thing for a poor nation.


pic: ScienceWatch

Click here to read the rest of this post.

Planting Ideas

Wangari Maathai will be presenting this year's International Ashden Awards. Robert Butler describes her extraordinary life in this article, published in Resurgence Magazine

IN 1981, WANGARI Maathai, a forty-one-year-old divorcee living in Nairobi, had so little money that she drove her three children over to her ex-husband’s house and deposited them with him. With no job, no pension and no home, her prospects, as she puts it in her new autobiography Unbowed, amounted to “zero”. All she had left was an idea.

Twenty-three years later, when she had turned the Green Belt Movement into a worldwide cause, had faced down the corrupt and authoritarian government of Daniel Arap Moi, and had brought women into the heart of the Kenyan political process, Wangari Maathai became the first African woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

The idea that transformed her life and the lives of so many others was based on a simple premise: “Anyone can dig a hole, put a tree in it, water it, and nurture it.” This one gesture could combat soil erosion and desertification, retain rainwater, provide firewood and restore biodiversity. Maathai’s dream was to plant 15 million indigenous trees: one for every Kenyan. She more than exceeded her own target. So far, 30 million trees have been planted in Kenya alone.

Read the full story here.

Click here to read the rest of this post.