Solutions Spotlight: A Q&A with the Business Council for Sustainable Energy | Article

Dedicated to securing a clean energy future, the Business Council for Sustainable Energy, a sponsor of EESI’s 2021 Congressional Clean Energy EXPO and Policy Forum, works to diversify energy resources and implement market-based solutions to pollution reduction. The Council is engaged at the state, national, and international levels to advance climate action on behalf of the coalition of stakeholders they represent.

Each year, one of their top international initiatives represents U.S. clean energy businesses at the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP). The annual COP hosts government officials, organizations, businesses, and citizens from nearly every country in the world to collaborate on tackling climate change. This year, stakeholders are set to discuss goals of climate mitigation, adaptation, finance, and collaboration, making the conference an exceptionally important event for environmental efforts.

EESI sat down with BCSE President Lisa Jacobson to learn more about the organization’s plans preparing for the COP26, which will be held this fall in Glasgow, Scotland.

EESI: BCSE has historically been very involved with the UN Climate Change Conferences. This year, what are the BCSE’s top priorities for COP26? Are there key messages you will bring to the conference for the international community from the U.S. clean energy business community?

Jacobson: BCSE was founded around the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, almost 30 years ago. The board sent a delegation of clean energy industry executives to the Earth Summit to show that the business community was ready to participate, and, in this case, BCSE’s members had commercially available technologies—like energy efficiency, renewable energy, and other services—that could make significant emissions reductions affordably and quickly. That is still very much what we try to do when we go to this conference.

For this COP, it is really all about increasing ambition—and that is increasing ambition in the private sector and the corporate community in partnership with governments. Governments set the rules of the road in terms of how they intend to incentivize clean energy investment, and we are there to break it down and explain what works and what is most impactful.

As part of raising U.S. ambition on climate change, we see an opportunity to position U.S. clean energy companies as leaders in a world committed to climate action, and to increase the competitiveness of our economy. It is equally important to talk about resilience and adaptation and the need to make sure that, in the United States and in other countries, underinvested and vulnerable communities are not left behind.

We are also there to share the U.S. policy and market experience. That is not to say that the United States' approaches are appropriate for all other countries, but we certainly have experimented with different policies and can share what has worked and what has not been as effective.

EESI: Why is BCSE’s work key for implementing the U.S. Nationally Determined Contribution (the national climate targets and strategies agreed upon under the Paris Agreement), and what is the role of public-private partnerships in reducing greenhouse gas emissions to reach the NDC’s goal of 50-52 percent emissions reductions by 2030?

Jacobson: At the end of the day, it is going to be a combination of public policies and private sector investments that deliver the scale of emissions reductions that are needed to meet our NDC goals. Those policies can be designed to incentivize private sector investments and leverage public funds, which are always limited. For example, if the federal government expends funds in pre-disaster resilience or a mitigation effort, that amount of public spending could spur ten times that in private sector investment.

A lot of times, with technology deployment, funding from the federal government is covering risk. There are a lot of reasons why targeted government spending can be really impactful and can encourage and leverage private sector investment. We want to make sure that we are doing that with every public dollar we are spending if we can.

EESI: How has the United States been a leader in sustainable energy at the international level and what work is left to be done?

Jacobson: We have been leaders in technology and the U.S. government has helped to elevate that. The U.S. government has also provided a lot of technical expertise to the UNFCCC process. I think about the work that the Environmental Protection Agency does to develop emissions accounting and internal emissions inventory infrastructure for other countries. We have a lot of knowledge and experience with tracking emissions throughout our economy, and we can share that information with other countries that do not have the capacity, so there is a big capacity-building component.

The United States also conducts diplomatic efforts to encourage other countries to take on bigger commitments. In some cases, we can help them financially or with technical expertise. Being at the COP and sharing all the things that the U.S. government does certainly brings more people along.

EESI: From the perspective of the business community, why is it important for the United States to be a leader in addressing the global climate crisis?

Jacobson: This is a global crisis. We need the U.S. government in a leadership position globally. And it is not just our country—we have done a lot, and we need to do more—but if other countries do not meet us with that commitment and action, we will not be successful. It is an economic and moral imperative that we take action and that the U.S. government is a part of that.

EESI: What can people do to be involved with COP26?

Jacobson: This is a really critical moment, and what people can do if they are not participating in the conference is talk to their policymakers at the local, state, and federal levels about climate change—that they care and that they want the U.S. government, and governments around the world, to implement very strong policies that are consistent with science.

This interview was edited and condensed for clarity.

Author: Irina Costache