Gore's Nobel win should boost alternative energy
Sat Oct 13, 2007 2:51am IST
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1 of 1Full SizeBy Timothy Gardner
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The winning of the Nobel Peace Prize by Al Gore and the U.N. climate panel on Friday should give a push to alternative energy technologies that are already enjoying their best year ever, experts said.
The prize could spur change in the energy industry that coal, oil, natural gas and nuclear power dominate.
"It's a quiet revolution," said Sarah Emerson, the managing director of Boston-Based Energy Security Analysis Inc, which has advised clients about fossil fuels for decades. "Gore's winning makes it a little louder."
Gore's Oscar-winning movie "An Inconvenient Truth" and book of the same name, and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's report this year outlined global warming's threat and blamed it on gases emerging from the smokestacks and tailpipes of the world's hydrocarbon economy.
They also highlighted that the comparatively tiny industries of biofuels, wind and solar power, and energy-sipping compact florescent lightbulbs, could over the coming decades help limit output of heat-trapping gases belched out by fossil fuels.
The technologies have a long road ahead of them before they would help slow and then reverse output of greenhouse gases. The two largest emitters of heat-trapping gases, the United States and China, have plans to build hundreds of power plants that run on coal, the heaviest emitter of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
BUILDING THE NEW ENERGY ECONOMY Continued...
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