| EnerGaia MD participates in DAT Climate Change Panel commemorating Earth Day 2010 |
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About EnerGaia Co., Ltd.
EnerGaia Co., Ltd. (www.energaia.com) was founded in April 2009 as a social enterprise based in Bangkok, Thailand. EnerGaia specializes in using microalgae to recycle CO2 emissions and treat wastewater from industrial sources such as power plants, biomass facilities, breweries, and refineries. The microalgae that is harvested from EnerGaia’s closed-system photo-bioreactors are then sold as useful products such as animal feed and direct human consumable items.
About Earth Day Network Earth Day Network (www.earthday.org) was founded on the premise that all people, regardless of race, gender, income, or geography, have a moral right to a healthy, sustainable environment. Our mission is to broaden and diversify the environmental movement worldwide, and to mobilize it as the most effective vehicle for promoting a healthy, sustainable environment. We pursue our mission through a combination of education, public policy, and activism campaigns. Earth Day Network has a global reach with more than 20,000 partners and organizations in 190 countries. More than 1 billion people participate in Earth Day activities, making it the largest secular civic event in the world.
About Democrats Abroad Thailand (DAT) Democrats Abroad Thailand (www.democratsabroadthailand.blogspot.com/) is the recognized Thailand organization of Democrats Abroad. Democrats Abroad (www.democratsabroad.org) is the official Democratic Party organization for some seven million American citizens who live outside the United States. We work to support the aims and principles of the Democratic Party. There are 75 country committees throughout the world who are responsible for keeping Americans abroad informed of their rights and helping them to participate in the U.S. political process.
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Bangkok, Thailand April 21, 2010 -- As part of this year’s Earth Day celebration,Democrats Abroad Thailand (DAT) held a four-member panel on climate change. The panel was held at the Bangkok Club and consisted of Ken MacClune, a climate scientist working for the Institute for Social and Environmental Transition; Philip Napier-Moore, an engineer working for Matt MacDonald Ltd; Saumil Shah, Managing Director of EnerGaia, a carbon capture company; and Patrick D’Addario, an energy efficiency finance expert.
Several strong messages emerged during the night’s discussion. The most portentous came from Mr. MacClune who talked about the Earth’s warming and pointed out that the bulk of the evidence indicates that humans are the cause. If climate change goes unchecked, it could continue to progress at a slow rate, but rapid, highly disruptive, climate change cannot be ruled out.
Mr. Shah provided an overview of legislative and governmental efforts to address Climate Change.He started by comparing a 'Cap & Trade' system with a 'Carbon Tax'. As Mr. Shah stated, “both are commonly known terms but many of us don't really know what they mean, how they work or what the differences are”. He then reviewed two major UNFCCC international efforts: the history, goals and drawback of the Kyoto Protocol, and the Copenhagen Summit. He concluded by going over the USA’s current climate change legislation efforts.
Phillip Napier-Moore followed with a presentation on how renewable energy technologies can help combat climate change. During his opening, Mr. Napier-Moore stated that one must look at the overall “lifecycle emissions” of two power generation sources (like a coal power plant vs. a wind farm), which include all of the Green House Gases “released during the manufacturing of the power plant, transportation of materials to the power plant site, emission leakages, and emissions from fuel combustion”. Considering all of this, Mr. Napier-Moore said, one will find that the lifecycle emissions of a typical renewable source “are between 1 - 10% of the equivalent level from coal-fired power generation”.
A final important message came from Mr. D’Addario, who concluded that investment in energy efficiency could make up for all of the growth in energy use over the next 20 years, and that this could be done at a substantial savings. The logic behind this is simple: by getting more out of every watt of energy produced, we will not have to build expensive power plants and other infrastructure.