The call for cleaner energy isn’t just coming from environmentalists anymore.
Ever-higher fuel prices are forcing power producers to look for ways to conserve and become more efficient. Swedish energy giant, Vattenfall, argues that no one company can go it alone. Its CEO is visiting the U.N. later this year to lobby for global pollution caps — a strategy that the Bush administration has rejected in the past.

Other debates remain unsettled as well. Vattenfall is pro-nuclear energy as a policy point, but it isn’t pushing the technology because its home markets of Sweden and Germany are emphatically anti-nuclear. Wind power requires enormous investment — a government commitment, even — as does hydropower. So-called “clean coal” plants that would liquefy pollutants are expensive, too.

Asap met with Vattenfall spokesman Martin May, in New York ahead of his CEO’s visit, to find out what is to be done.

asap: What will it take to get big energy firms to shift out of fossil fuels?

May: We believe the world midterm cannot phase out fossil fuels. But, we say the problem is not coal, the problem is not fossil fuels, it’s emissions that occur in the combustion process. We believe in order to not lose pace in the development in countries like China and India, they should be given a chance to use coal and use fossil fuels.

But at the same time, we have to ... make it possible to use those fuels without emitting CO2.

This is no longer rocket science. These technologies are already available in the laboratory but nobody has tried to deploy them on an industrial scale.

asap:  As you say, it’s not rocket science. Why aren’t more clean-burning plants being built?

May:  The simple answer: It wouldn’t compete. It wouldn’t be compatible out there in the marketplace. ...

We believe there has to be a pricetag for emitting CO2. And why’s that? Well, if you take technologies like the one that we will soon be testing, they will never be able to compete against technologies that don’t use extra energy to avoid the emission of CO2.

But if there’s a pricetag for CO2, say it costs $20 per ton to make CO2, then of course this gives an incentive to have new technology to avoid those costs.

asap:  What about countries that are still developing, like Bangladesh? Should they have to pay when they weren’t doing the polluting in the first place, and now they’re struggling to develop their economies?

May: We have to come up with a scheme that is a real fair burden sharing. ...
The scheme that we are proposing is to give developing countries the chance to develop until they reach a certain level of gross domestic product per capita. This is the benchmark to say: Now you’ve reached a level of wealth where the world can demand from you that you take action. ...

Western Europe or the U.S. are already today in a privileged situation to be able to do that.

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