Sometimes we as individuals can feel very insignificant in terms of contributing to the solving of large, complex problems.  I have made the case in past blogs that solving our global energy challenge, and thereby getting our greenhouse gas emissions under control, is the greatest challenge facing humans today.  There have been many proposals made on how to tackle this global challenge; most of them involve a combination of international treaties, national carbon taxation and  trading, government involvement in regulating energy usage or prices, and heavy public and private sector investment in technology.

I believe the most effective thing we can do right now is this:  use available existing technology to focus on improving energy efficiency at the end user level.  To enable this approach, we need to objectively measure the improvement in energy performance when an individual or organization makes a change that saves energy, in order to demonstrate a positive Return on Investment.  And once we have provided objective measurement of success, make sure we keep this positive energy performance going by continuing to measure our success and use the savings to invest in more energy savings opportunities.  It is a virtuous circle of measure, change, save, invest.

But – based on our experience in the past couple of years with SHIFT Energy Inc., it won’t be Return on Investment alone that drives organizations to save.  Even with extremely attractive ROI proposals (less than 12 months to recoup an investment), organizations just aren’t that interested in spending capital or expense money to help curb energy use and carbon emissions.  There are always other more immediately pressing spending opportunities inside most organizations, and the effects of not spending on energy reduction won’t be noticed for years.  Basically it is easy to ignore spending money to reduce energy and carbon emissions, no matter how attractive the ROI.  There needs to be an additional “carrot and stick” mechanism – and this mechanism is carbon.

See the attached article for recent news from China about its approach to managing carbon emissions.

http://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/China-plans-carbon-trading-afp-1653149293.html

More about this topic in coming blogs…

Richard Jones has written 10 articles on this blog.

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Richard has over 27 years of experience in integrated petroleum, natural gas distribution, and Information & Communications Technology firms. SHIFT Energy has allowed Richard to combine his engineering, IT, and management experience into a single role that he is very passionate about. Richard is actively involved in several not-for-profit organizations. He enjoys golf, piano and guitar.