Kristoff on Climate Change.

You might be slightly surprised to hear someone like me, usually so sceptical of the climate change hullaballoo, praising a liberal lefty enclave like Portland for its reduction of emissions to below 1990 levels as Kyoto demands. You shouldn’t be for they have done exactly what someone like me would recommend. Ignored emissions entirely and simply done was what was a good idea for other reasons, emissions falling as a by product.

"Portland's efforts refute the thesis that you can't make progress without huge economic harm," says Erik Sten, a city commissioner. "It actually goes all the other way - to the extent Portland has been successful, the things that we were doing that happened to reduce emissions were the things that made our city livable and hence desirable."

Mr. Sten added that Portland's officials were able to curb carbon emissions only because the steps they took were intrinsically popular and cheap, serving other purposes like reducing traffic congestion or saving on electrical costs. "I haven't seen that much willingness even among our environmentalists," he said, "to do huge masochistic things to save the planet."

One specific example:

Portland also replaced the bulbs in the city's traffic lights with light-emitting diodes, which reduce electricity use by 80 percent and save the city almost $500,000 a year.

These are half remembered figures so apologies if they’re a little out. Lighting takes up 16% of the US electricity supply. At present those LED lights are really only available in certain colours. There are, in production but not widely adopted as yet, pure white such LEDs. A bit more ramping up of production and we’ll see the incandescent bulb being replaced by these LEDs....leading to a possible drop in US consumption of eceltricity of what, 10-12% of the total? (Note that LEDs are more efficient than flourescents as well, which are themselves more efficient than incandescent, so it won’t be a straight 80% saving.)

There is even a possible technology involving scandium (Yay! A gratuitous mention of scandium!). ScN films can be used to make tunable LEDs. Yup, just like a dimmer switch, one will be able to alter the spectrum of light in your living room.

This is one of the things that people like me have been banging on about for years. Yes, really, technology really will save us.