Eduardo Gold is one of 26 people around the world to win the World Bank’s “100 Ideas to Save the Planet” contest and his dream is to bring back Peru’s glaciers from the effects of global warming. Mr. Gold is not a scientist — though some might think he’s a genius, others that he’s got a couple of screws loose — but he’s using the cash prize from the contest to whitewash three mountains just west of Ayacucho, Peru in hopes of bringing back melted glaciers that once hung there, high above the village of Licapa. In the past two weeks he and his team of four men have used a mixture of lime, egg whites and water to turn the Chalon Sombrero peak white. They’ve successfully whitewashed two hectares in the past two weeks and they’ve only got 68 more to go.

“Cold generates more cold, just as heat generates more heat,” Mr. Gold told the BBC, “I am hopeful that we could re-grow a glacier here because we would be recreating all the climatic conditions necessary for a glacier to form.” Before he entered the World Bank contest, Mr. Gold read up on glaciology and found that white surfaces actually reflect the sun’s rays back into the atmosphere instead of internalizing heat. He’s hoping that the whitewashed mountains will create a cold micro-climate which will entice snow to fall, causing glaciers to form. US Energy Secretary Steven Chu has given merit to a similar idea to counteract global warming — though on a much smaller scale — of whitewashed roofs. Mr. Gold hasn’t recieved his $200,000 prize from the World Bank yet, but he didn’t wait for the cash to get his project going and it seems he and his team will just power through until the money comes.

According to a World Bank report in 2009, Peru holds over 70% of the Earth’s glaciers and 22% of them have already melted due to climate change in the last 30 years. The glaciers that are left have a mere 20 year time line for disappearance if nothing is done to save them. Peruvian communities depend on the glaciers for fresh water and hydropower and without them would be in peril. Glaciologists who have heard about Mr. Gold’s plan say that it’s possible that it might work on a small scale, but making it work for a whole region — like the entire Andes range — would be near impossible. For now Mr. Gold is ignoring the world, trudging through the skeptics and it seems only time will tell if his egg white solution can help.

People often present two timeframes that we should have as goals for CO2 reduction - 30% (off of some baseline) by 2025 and 80% by 2050.

I believe the key one to achieve is 80% by 2050.

But we tend to focus on the first one since it is much more concrete.

We don't distinguish properly between things that put you on a path to making the 80% goal by 2050 and things that don't really help.

To make the 80% goal by 2050 we are going to have to reduce emissions from transportation and electrical production in participating countries down to zero.

You will still have emissions from other activities including domestic animals, making fertilizer, and decay processes.

There will still be countries that are too poor to participate.

If the goal is to get the transportation and electrical sectors down to zero emissions you clearly need innovation that leads to entirely new approaches to generating power.

Should society spend a lot of time trying to insulate houses and telling people to turn off lights or should it spend time on accelerating innovation?

If addressing climate change only requires us to get to the 2025 goal, then efficiency would be the key thing.

But you can never insulate your way to anything close to zero no matter what advocates of resource efficiency say. You can never reduce consumerism to anything close to zero.

Because 2025 is too soon for innovation to be completed and widely deployed, behavior change still matters.

Still, the amount of CO2 avoided by these kinds of modest reduction efforts will not be the key to what happens with climate change in the long run.

In fact it is doubtful that any such efforts in the rich countries will even offset the increase coming from richer lifestyles in places like China, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.

Innovation in transportation and electricity will be the key factor.

One of the reasons I bring this up is that I hear a lot of climate change experts focus totally on 2025 or talk about how great it is that there is so much low hanging fruit that will make a difference.

This mostly focuses on saving a little bit of energy, which by itself is simply not enough. The need to get to zero emissions in key sectors almost never gets mentioned. The danger is people will think they just need to do a little bit and things will be fine.

If CO2 reduction is important, we need to make it clear to people what really matters - getting to zero.

With that kind of clarity, people will understand the need to get to zero and begin to grasp the scope and scale of innovation that is needed.

However all the talk about renewable portfolios, efficiency, and cap and trade tends to obscure the specific things that need to be done.

To achieve the kinds of innovations that will be required I think a distributed system of R&D with economic rewards for innovators and strong government encouragement is the key. There just isn't enough work going on today to get us to where we need to go.

My point is not to denigrate efficiency. Slowing the growth of CO2 ppm is of course a good thing. And there are of course lots of cheap, and in many cases self-funding efficiency gains to be made.

We should at the least fix market barriers and dysfunctions that prevent these gains from being realized. That's just being smart.

But it's not enough to slow the growth of CO2 given the strength of demand driven by the poor who need to get access energy. And, we have to actually stop it at some point.

No amount of insulation will get us there, only innovating our way to essentially 0-carbon energy technology will do it. If we focus on just efficiency to the exclusion of innovation, or imagine that we can worry about efficiency first and worry about energy innovation later, we won't get there.

The world is distracted from what counts on this issue in a big way.

Originally published on The Gates Notes