Five major global financial institutions - ABN Amro, Citibank, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan Chase and UBS have committed a pool of US$5 billion (Bt166 billion) in loans to finance the effort, former US President Bill Clinton announced yesterday while attending the Large Cities Climate Summit in New York on Wednesday..

"More than half of the energy consumption in cities is in buildings where light bulbs generate more heat than light, and air conditioners are run for hours without anyone using them," Clinton said. "Building retrofits will reduce energy use in existing building by 25 to 50 percent."

Other cities joining the programme are London, Berlin, Chicago, Johannesburg, Tokyo, Karachi, Melbourne, Toronto, Houston, New York, Seoul, Mexico City, Rome and Sao Paulo.

The Clinton Foundation will coordinate auditing of municipal and large buildings in these cities and identifying structures or systems that need to be replaced to make them consume less energy.

"Bangkok will probably start with the Bangkok Metropolitan Administration (BMA)'s headquarters and district offices in the capital," said Deputy Bangkok Governor Bannasopit Mekvichai, currently in New York to participate in the summit.

"Electricity bills for the BMA building alone now costs several million a month. We are interested in the transfer of retrofit technology from where it has been successfully done."

Despite the seemingly positive initiative, some critics have noted that those who will benefit most from the programme are the multinational financial institutions and participating giant energy service companies including Siemens, Trane, Honeywell, and Johnson Controls.

"Energy saving is always good, but the programme is also about creating markets for banks and those energy service corporations," said Pincas Jawetz, secretary general of the New York-based Sustainable Development Media Think Tank.

 "I say there is nothing wrong with that. But of course, if there were any NGOs invited to the meeting, they would probably criticise the way the corporate sector always know how to make money from global crises."

Mayors and leaders of some 40 of the world's largest cities have been in New York since Monday to participate in the fourday city climate summit joint hosted by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, the Clinton Foundation and civic and urban environment groups.

"Cities consume 75 per cent of the world's energy, and produce 80 per cent of the greenhouse gases," said Bloomberg. "So while global warming clearly requires action at the national and international levels, those of us in city government can  and must  also take a leading role."

But many leaders of the participating cities are those from developing countries who stated that if they are to take action to reduce carbon emissions, funding and technology must be made available to them.

"We're interested in renewable energy, but have to find a way of linking technology to life on the ground," said Birhane Deressa, mayor of Addis Ababa.

"In Ethiopia, we claimed to have 13 month of sunshine, but it is expensive to have even a small solar cell unit to heat water, I'm curious as to what you can do to help us get cheaper technology."

by Nantiya Tangwisutijit

The Nation