By Lauren Otis, Business Editor
HIGHTSTOWN — It is imperative that local, regional and global efforts be made to reduce greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, and begin to reverse the global warming trend, despite a host of scientific, economic, societal and political hurdles, said Ralph Izzo, chief executive officer of Public Service Enterprise Group (PSEG), the Newark-based energy utility.
Current technologies do not appear to be enough to stem global warming sufficiently, Mr. Izzo said, but individuals, companies, societies, and nations collectively, have an obligation to start somewhere, doing what they can with the means available.
”If we don’t do the things I am going to talk about, your grandchildren are going to be in trouble,” said Mr. Izzo addressing an audience of students and faculty at the Peddie School on Friday evening.
”Even if we do a lot, in some respects it is too late,” said Mr. Izzo, a former research scientist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory who joined PSEG in 1992 and became CEO in April.
Mr. Izzo offered utilities such as PSEG as a means for “efficient deployment of policy” to counteract global warming when the marketplace was not providing solutions rapidly enough. Because utilities have societal mandates — providing every home with electricity regardless of cost — that other businesses do not, they are the perfect places to initiate greenhouse gas reduction mandates which society deems necessary but which are not happening in the private market, he said.
Noting that “climate change is real,” Mr. Izzo said that even if no new greenhouse emissions were released, starting immediately, the average global temperature would still increase two degrees over several generations. This may not sound like a significant change, but “if five degrees took us from an ice age to today,” Mr. Izzo said, a two degree change would also have devastating consequences, including the loss of the Greenland ice sheet, a seven meter rise in the ocean level, destruction of global coral reefs and the collapse of the Amazon rainforest.
”So this will have a material effect on us for the next 100 years,” he said.
Mr. Izzo said progress will not be made by any one means, but through pushing initiatives large and small, from developing technologies for cleaner coal-burning power generation, making alternative power generation means such as solar and wind power cost effective, to changing wasteful consumer habits such as continuing to purchase incandescent light bulbs instead of more efficient fluorescent ones — a bunch of which Mr. Izzo had brought to his talk to distribute free to the audience.
Mr. Izzo described a landscape of tough, incremental solutions. Because China, India, and the United States generate so much power by burning coal, the cheapest most readily available fuel, attempting to curtail coal burning is futile, he said. Instead, technology must be developed to burn coal better. And although natural gas as a fuel produces fewer greenhouse gases, Russia has the world’s largest reserves and is the largest exporter of natural gas to the U.S., Mr. Izzo said. Emphasizing natural gas-fired power generation would then subject the U.S. to the vicissitudes of “a Russian-led cartel, and we’ve gone through that already in the Middle East” with oil, he said.
Increased nuclear power generation is one fairly straightforward solution Mr. Izzo said.
Even in the U.S. “huge regional differences in fuel production of electricity around the country create a very interesting dynamic when Congress tries to figure out what to do,” he said. New Jersey is part of a nine state compact to reduce greenhouse gases, Mr. Izzo said, but its neighbor Pennsylvania is not, so although New Jersey may produce power with fewer greenhouse gases, power purchasers may gravitate to the cheaper, more polluting power of Pennsylvania.
Even on an individual level, Mr. Izzo said it is unrealistic to think poor consumers will embrace green, and costlier power generating measures when they have difficulty meeting their current PSEG payments. He said PSEG just announced a $5 million program where it will help poor inner city consumers to insulate and otherwise reduce their energy costs at no charge, because the power savings will benefit everyone — lowering poor consumers’ energy costs and lowering the incidence of other consumers having to subsidize them when poor consumers default on their power bills.
He noted that in big ways and small, PSEG is changing its practices — among them proposing to invest $100 million in solar power and instituting a new fleet of hybrid boom trucks that don’t need to idle while PSE&G workers use their cherry pickers — to lower its energy use and emissions.
Mr. Izzo said that he was hopeful current climate talks in Bali would be more productive than in Kyoto in 1997, which led to the Kyoto Protocol that the U.S. did not ratify. “Hopefully the president wakes up and realizes there is a problem. I hope Congress realizes there is a problem” he said, predicting “sometime in the next Congress there will be a bill. I don’t believe it will happen in this Congress.”
Among the states, Mr. Izzo lauded California, where “the per capita consumption of electricity has been flat over the past 10 years” as a result of policy mandates for efficient power generation and usage.
He also praised New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine for his commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions, noting Gov. Corzine has set a goal for New Jersey to reduce emissions 80 percent below its 2006 level by the year 2060.
But if residents cut their electricity usage drastically, no longer driving, not watching TV or any other elective electricity usage, the state still wouldn’t reach this goal, Mr. Izzo said.
”How the heck are we going to do this? You can either be paralyzed by that or you can start at it anyway,” he said. “I don’t have an answer, I don’t know how to get to 80 percent, but we’ve got 43 years to figure it out.”

