Reuters
Sunday, December 28, 2008
SEOUL: South Korea plans to invest 37 trillion won (£19.3 billion) from 2009 to 2022 on new power plants, including 12 new nuclear plants, to boost fuel efficiency and cut emissions, Seoul's energy ministry said on Sunday.
South Korea, the world's fifth-largest crude importer, will also build seven new coal plants, 11 LNG plants and one heavy fuel plant by 2022, but it will get rid of three existing coal plants, six LNG plants and 13 heavy fuel units to boost efficiency, it said in a statement.
"The plan is to generate more low carbon power while decreasing the use of high-priced reserves such as LNG and coal. Under the plan, the fuel cost will be about 56 percent lower than this year," the ministry said.
The total number of nuclear power units will rise to 32, or 32.92 million kilowatts, by 2022 and account for 48 percent of the country's total power generation, from 34 percent this year.
LNG, which is the most expensive fuel, will account for just 6 percent of total power generation in 2022, down from the current 22 percent.
The overall electricity power capacity will increase to 100.89 million kilowatts by 2022, up from 71.36 million by end-2008.
Separately, the ministry said it would lend a combined 289.8 billion won to petroleum developers in 2009 to help the country secure stable energy supplies.
Of the finalised budget, 60 percent will go to existing projects both at home and abroad and the remainder to new exploration.
The ministry said the government would increase the ratio of lending support to non-government companies in 2009, while it would curtail lending to the state-run Korea National Oil Corporation.
(Reporting by Angela Moon and Kim Yeon-hee; Editing by Lincoln Feast)
2008년 12월 28일 일요일
2008년 12월 27일 토요일
Architecture deluxe and delusional: An era ends
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Thursday, December 25, 2008
NEW YORK: Who knew a year ago that we were nearing the end of one of the most delirious eras in modern architectural history? What's more, who would have predicted that this turnaround, brought about by the biggest economic crisis in a half-century, would be met in some corners with a guilty sense of relief?
Before the financial cataclysm, the profession seemed to be in the midst of a major renaissance. Architects like Rem Koolhaas, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry, and Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, once deemed too radical for the mainstream, were celebrated as major cultural figures. And not just by high-minded cultural institutions; they were courted by developers who once scorned those talents as pretentious airheads.
Firms like Forest City Ratner and the Related Companies, which once worked exclusively with corporations that were more adept at handling big budgets than at architectural innovation, seized on these innovators as part of a shrewd business strategy. The architect's prestige would not only win over discerning consumers but also persuade planning boards to accede to large-scale urban projects like, say, Gehry's Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn.
But somewhere along the way that fantasy took a wrong turn. As commissions multiplied for luxury residential high-rises, high-end boutiques and corporate offices in cities like London, Tokyo and Dubai, more socially conscious projects rarely materialized. Public housing, a staple of 20th-century Modernism, was nowhere on the agenda. Nor were schools, hospitals or public infrastructure. Serious architecture was beginning to look like a service for the rich.
Nowhere was that poisonous cocktail of vanity and self-delusion more visible than in Manhattan. Although some important cultural projects were commissioned, this era will probably be remembered as much for its vulgarity as its ambition.
Every major architect in the world, it seemed, was designing an exclusive residential building here. With its elaborate faux-graffiti barrier, Herzog & de Meuron's 40 Bond Street was among the most indulgent, but it had plenty of rivals, including projects by Daniel Libeskind, UNStudio, Koolhaas and Norman Foster.
Together these projects threatened to transform the city's skyline into a tapestry of individual greed.
Now that high-end bubble has popped, and it is unlikely to return anytime soon. Jean Nouvel's 75-story residential tower adjoining the Museum of Modern Art has been delayed indefinitely. And developers now seem loath to undertake similar projects. Even if the economy turns around, the public's tolerance for outsize architectural statements that serve the rich and self-absorbed has already been pretty much exhausted.
This is not all good news. A lot of wonderful architecture is being thrown out with the bad. Although most of Nouvel's MoMA tower would have been devoted to luxury apartments, for instance, it would have allowed the museum next door to expand its gallery space significantly. It would also have been one of the most spectacular additions to the Manhattan skyline since the Chrysler Building.
And it would be a shame if the recession derailed promising cultural projects like Renzo Piano's new Whitney Museum of American Art in the meatpacking district or Foster's interior renovation of the Beaux-Arts New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue.
Architecture firms, meanwhile, are suffering like everyone else. With so many projects postponed and so few new ones coming in, many are already laying off employees. Aspiring architects who are just emerging from graduate programs are likely to move on to more secure professions, which could spell a smaller talent pool in the future.
Still, if the recession doesn't kill the profession, it may have some long-term positive effects for our architecture. President-elect Barack Obama has promised to invest heavily in infrastructure, including schools, parks, bridges and public housing. A major redirection of our creative resources may thus be at hand. If a lot of first-rate architectural talent promises to be at loose ends, why not enlist it in designing the projects that matter most? That's my dream anyway.
2008년 12월 11일 목요일
Pei's Doha museum blends an Islamic past with modernity
By Nicolai Ouroussoff
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
DOHA, Qatar: Ican't seem to get the Museum of Islamic Art out of my mind. There's nothing revolutionary about the building. But its clean, chiseled forms have a tranquillity that distinguishes it in an age that often seems trapped somewhere between gimmickry and a cloying nostalgia.
Part of the allure may have to do with I.M. Pei, the museum's architect. Pei reached the height of his popularity decades ago with projects like the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Louvre pyramid in Paris. Since then he has been an enigmatic figure at the periphery of the profession. His best work has admirers, but it has largely been ignored within architecture's intellectual circles. Now, at 91, Pei seems to be enjoying the kind of revival accorded to most serious architects if they have the luck to live long enough.
But the museum is also notable for its place within a broader effort to reshape the region's cultural identity. The myriad large-scale civic projects, from a Guggenheim museum that is planned for Abu Dhabi to Education City in Doha, are often dismissed in Western circles as superficial fantasies. As the first to reach completion, the Museum of Islamic Art is proof that the boom is not a mirage. The building's austere, almost primitive forms and the dazzling collections it houses underscore the seriousness of the country's cultural ambition.
Perhaps even more compelling, the design is rooted in an optimistic worldview - one at odds with the schism between cosmopolitan modernity and backward fundamentalism that has come to define the last few decades in the Middle East. The ideals it embodies - that the past and the present can co-exist harmoniously - are a throwback to a time when U.S. overseas ambitions were still cloaked in a progressive agenda.
To Pei, all serious architecture is found somewhere between the extremes of an overly sentimental view of the past and a form of historical amnesia.
"Contemporary architects tend to impose modernity on something," he said in an interview. "There is a certain concern for history but it's not very deep. I understand that time has changed, we have evolved. But I don't want to forget the beginning. A lasting architecture has to have roots." This moderation should come as no surprise to those who have followed Pei's career closely. I recall first hearing his name during construction on his design for the Kennedy Library in Boston in the mid-1970s. The library, enclosed behind a towering glass atrium overlooking the water, was not one of Pei's most memorable early works, but the link to John F. Kennedy lent him instant glamour.
Completed 16 years after Kennedy's assassination, the library's construction seemed to be an act of hope, as if the values that Kennedy's generation embodied could be preserved in stone, steel and glass.
In many ways Pei's career followed the unraveling of that era, from the economic downturn of the 1970s through the hollow victories of the Reagan years. Yet his work never lost its aura of measured idealism. It reached its highest expression in the National Gallery of Art's East Building, completed in 1978.
Since that popular triumph, Pei has often seemed to take the kind of leisurely approach to design that other architects, no matter how well established, can only dream of. When first asked in 1983 to take part in a competition to design the addition to the Louvre, he refused, saying that he would not submit a preliminary design. President François Mitterrand nevertheless hired him outright. Pei then asked him if he could take several months to study French history, and spent months traveling across Europe and North Africa before earnestly beginning work on the final design.
In 1990, a year after the project's completion, he left his firm. More recently he has lived in semi-retirement, rarely taking on more than a single project at a time.
Such an attitude runs counter to the ever-accelerating pace of the global age. But Pei's methods also offer a gentle resistance to the short-sightedness of so many contemporary cultural undertakings. Many successful architects today are global nomads, who tend to be more interested in exposing cultural frictions than in offering visions of harmony.
Pei, by contrast, imagines history as a smooth continuous process, a view that is deftly embodied by the Islamic Museum, whose clean abstract surfaces are an echo of both high Modernism and ancient Islamic architecture. Conceived by the Qatari emir and his 26-year-old daughter, Sheikha al Mayassa, it is the centerpiece of a larger cultural project whose aim is to forge a cosmopolitan, urban society in a place that not so long ago was a collection of Bedouin encampments and fishing villages. The aim is to recall a time that extended from the birth of Islam through the height of the Ottoman Empire, when the Islamic world was a center of scientific experimentation and cultural tolerance.
"My father's vision was to build a cross-cultural institution," said Sheikha al Mayassa, who has been charged with overseeing the city's cultural development, during a recent interview here. "It is to reconnect the historical threads that have been broken, and finding peaceful ways to resolve conflict."
Pei's aim was to integrate the values of that earlier era into today's culture - to capture, as he put it, the "essence of Islamic architecture."
The museum's hard, chiseled forms take their inspiration from the ablution fountain of Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo, as well as from fortresses built in Tunisia in the eighth and ninth centuries. In order to create a similar sense of withdrawal from the world, Pei located his museum on a small man-made island. Seen from a distance, its blocklike forms are a powerful contrast to the half-finished towers and construction cranes that line the waterfront. Stepped on both sides, the apex of the main building is punctuated by a short tower with an eye-shaped opening that masks an interior dome.
From certain angles the structure has a flat, chimeric quality. From others it seems to be floating on the surface of the water. As one approaches the building, the full weight of the structure begins to bear down, and the forms become more imposing. Soon a few traditional details begin to appearlike the two small arched windows over the entry. These touches provide a sense of scale, so that the size of the building can be understood according to the size of the human body.
The blend of modern and Islamic themes continues inside, where Pei draws most directly from religious precedents. The hemispherical dome, an intricate pattern of stainless steel plates pierced by a single small oculus, brings to mind the geometric patterns used in Baroque churches as well as in ancient mosques.
Pei has created a temple of high art, placing culture on the same pedestal as religion. His aim is both to create a symbol of Islamic culture and to forge a common heritage for the citizens of Qatar and the region.
The grandeur of the atrium is only a prelude to the real climax: the galleries, which are as intimate as the atrium is soaring. Objects are encased in towering glass cabinets set on tables, giving them an accessibility rare in a major museum. And like the building itself, the collections are a reflection of the notion that Modernity and Islamic culture are not in opposition, but woven out of the same historical thread.
The most moving works are those that underscore the cosmopolitan values that are at the core of this museum: the notion that the free, open exchange of ideas is what builds great - and tolerant - civilizations. Pei's museum reminds us that building a culture, as much as a political or social agenda, can be an act of healing. Like all great art, it requires forging seemingly conflicting values into a common whole.
2008년 12월 10일 수요일
Rising emissions put pressure on Japan to set tougher limits
Reuters
Thursday, November 13, 2008
TOKYO: Japanese greenhouse gas emissions rose to a record high in the year to March, putting it at risk of an embarrassing failure to achieve its Kyoto target over the next four years.
The increase of 2.3 percent last year, largely due to the closure of the biggest nuclear power plant in Japan after an earthquake, will increase the pressure for it to give up its efforts to control emissions through voluntary measures and adopt tougher limits on industry like the European Union and Australia.
Japan is the world's fifth-largest carbon dioxide producer, behind the United States, China, Russia and India.
With developing countries already questioning Tokyo's political will to rein in emissions, Japanese actions will be seen as a milestone as governments struggle to agree on a successor to the protocol next year.
Emissions rose to 1.371 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in the Japanese fiscal year through March, after a 1.3 percent decline the previous year, data from the Japanese Ministry of the Environment showed Wednesday.
Analysts said immediate action was called for if Japan was to cut emissions by the estimated 13.5 percent needed to hit its 2012 target under Kyoto of just under 1.2 billion tons, down 6 percent from 1990 levels.
"We immediately need a set of effective policies to drive a change towards a more climate-friendly society," Tetsunari Iida, executive director of Tokyo's Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, an environment policy nongovernment organization.
Unlike the European Union, Japan has been reluctant to set a mandatory cap or a carbon tax on companies' emissions. Steel makers and other manufacturers resist such caps, saying they would hurt their products' worldwide competitiveness.
The task of cutting emissions may grow even harder with the world tilting toward what may be its worst recession in decades, one that may divert governments' focus away from climate change and the trillions of investment dollars required to stem it.
Although Japan is set to review next year its current measures, based on voluntary pledges on emission cuts across major industries, that could be too late, analysts said.
A rise was widely expected after the world's biggest nuclear plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power, had to suspend operations following a July 2007 earthquake, forcing utilities to meet demand by burning more coal, oil and natural gas, all of which emit far more greenhouse gases.
The plant is expected to remain shut until beyond next March.
While Japanese utilities have stepped up their buying of UN carbon offsets, the data released Wednesday suggests they may have to buy more if Japan is to meet its global pledge, potentially driving up global carbon credit prices.
While Tokyo has worked hard to drive utilities toward cleaner forms of energy, it has also struggled to convince power companies facing tough times to hasten investments in new nuclear power stations with low emissions.
The government also faces public distrust about the scandal-plagued Japanese nuclear industry, including safety fears over the numerous earthquakes the country suffers each year.
On Tuesday, J-Power said it had delayed the start of a major nuclear unit by two years, the latest in a string of delays to new projects.
Yet long term strategies are key to resolving the problem, analysts say.
"There will be no reduction in carbon emissions until there are viable ways of replacing energy supply and energy growth with large-scale renewables," said a climate change expert Barry Brook, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
"That is where the focus of international action should now be."
Iida said the fact that two new coal plants were being built in Japan underscored the need for sterner government action.
The world's efforts to carve out a pact to follow Kyoto should intensify ahead of a key meeting in Copenhagen next December that negotiators have set as a deadline for establishing a post-2012 framework.
But the debate comes at a difficult time, with developed nations heading into recession, which may help curb emissions by reducing power demand, but also risks distracting from the longer-term task and fostering a return to cheaper carbon energy.
The world needs to invest $26 trillion in energy infrastructure by 2030 just to maintain fossil-based energy supply, the International Energy Agency said last week.
Tokyo has set companies and households a private-sector emissions target, to be met by voluntary steps, of 1.254 billion tons, which will be offset by a further 68 million tons a year by government spending on domestic forest conservation and credits from investing in clean technology in poorer countries.
The key to Japan's voluntary program is the electric power industry, which has pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions to an average of 0.34 kg per kilowatt hour a year through to 2012.
But in the year to March that figure stood at 0.453 kg due to the closure of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant.
Even if the power industry met its voluntary target last year, Japnese emissions would still have exceeded its target, the Environment Ministry said.
Thursday, November 13, 2008
TOKYO: Japanese greenhouse gas emissions rose to a record high in the year to March, putting it at risk of an embarrassing failure to achieve its Kyoto target over the next four years.
The increase of 2.3 percent last year, largely due to the closure of the biggest nuclear power plant in Japan after an earthquake, will increase the pressure for it to give up its efforts to control emissions through voluntary measures and adopt tougher limits on industry like the European Union and Australia.
Japan is the world's fifth-largest carbon dioxide producer, behind the United States, China, Russia and India.
With developing countries already questioning Tokyo's political will to rein in emissions, Japanese actions will be seen as a milestone as governments struggle to agree on a successor to the protocol next year.
Emissions rose to 1.371 billion tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in the Japanese fiscal year through March, after a 1.3 percent decline the previous year, data from the Japanese Ministry of the Environment showed Wednesday.
Analysts said immediate action was called for if Japan was to cut emissions by the estimated 13.5 percent needed to hit its 2012 target under Kyoto of just under 1.2 billion tons, down 6 percent from 1990 levels.
"We immediately need a set of effective policies to drive a change towards a more climate-friendly society," Tetsunari Iida, executive director of Tokyo's Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies, an environment policy nongovernment organization.
Unlike the European Union, Japan has been reluctant to set a mandatory cap or a carbon tax on companies' emissions. Steel makers and other manufacturers resist such caps, saying they would hurt their products' worldwide competitiveness.
The task of cutting emissions may grow even harder with the world tilting toward what may be its worst recession in decades, one that may divert governments' focus away from climate change and the trillions of investment dollars required to stem it.
Although Japan is set to review next year its current measures, based on voluntary pledges on emission cuts across major industries, that could be too late, analysts said.
A rise was widely expected after the world's biggest nuclear plant, run by Tokyo Electric Power, had to suspend operations following a July 2007 earthquake, forcing utilities to meet demand by burning more coal, oil and natural gas, all of which emit far more greenhouse gases.
The plant is expected to remain shut until beyond next March.
While Japanese utilities have stepped up their buying of UN carbon offsets, the data released Wednesday suggests they may have to buy more if Japan is to meet its global pledge, potentially driving up global carbon credit prices.
While Tokyo has worked hard to drive utilities toward cleaner forms of energy, it has also struggled to convince power companies facing tough times to hasten investments in new nuclear power stations with low emissions.
The government also faces public distrust about the scandal-plagued Japanese nuclear industry, including safety fears over the numerous earthquakes the country suffers each year.
On Tuesday, J-Power said it had delayed the start of a major nuclear unit by two years, the latest in a string of delays to new projects.
Yet long term strategies are key to resolving the problem, analysts say.
"There will be no reduction in carbon emissions until there are viable ways of replacing energy supply and energy growth with large-scale renewables," said a climate change expert Barry Brook, of the University of Adelaide in Australia.
"That is where the focus of international action should now be."
Iida said the fact that two new coal plants were being built in Japan underscored the need for sterner government action.
The world's efforts to carve out a pact to follow Kyoto should intensify ahead of a key meeting in Copenhagen next December that negotiators have set as a deadline for establishing a post-2012 framework.
But the debate comes at a difficult time, with developed nations heading into recession, which may help curb emissions by reducing power demand, but also risks distracting from the longer-term task and fostering a return to cheaper carbon energy.
The world needs to invest $26 trillion in energy infrastructure by 2030 just to maintain fossil-based energy supply, the International Energy Agency said last week.
Tokyo has set companies and households a private-sector emissions target, to be met by voluntary steps, of 1.254 billion tons, which will be offset by a further 68 million tons a year by government spending on domestic forest conservation and credits from investing in clean technology in poorer countries.
The key to Japan's voluntary program is the electric power industry, which has pledged to cut carbon dioxide emissions to an average of 0.34 kg per kilowatt hour a year through to 2012.
But in the year to March that figure stood at 0.453 kg due to the closure of the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant.
Even if the power industry met its voluntary target last year, Japnese emissions would still have exceeded its target, the Environment Ministry said.
EU carbon trading system brings windfalls for some, with little benefit to climate
By James Kanter
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
An RWE power plant near Düsseldorf. The company was accused in 2006 of engaging in "abusive pricing" in charges to customers for the cost of emission credits. RWE is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe.(Frank Augstein/The Associated Press)
BRUSSELS: The European Union started with the most high-minded of ecological goals: to create a market that would encourage companies to reduce greenhouse gases by making them pay for each ton emitted into the atmosphere.
Four years later, the carbon trading system has created a multibillion-euro windfall for some of the continent's biggest polluters, with little or no noticeable benefit to the environment so far.
The lessons learned are coming under fresh scrutiny now, both in Europe and abroad. EU leaders will meet Thursday and Friday to work on the next phase of their system, seeking, they say, both to extend its scope and correct its flaws. And in the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to move quickly on a similar program.
As originally envisioned in Europe, companies would buy most if not all of the permits needed to cover their projected carbon dioxide emissions for a year, one permit good for each metric ton of CO2, the main greenhouse gas. If they produced more gases than expected, they would have to buy more permits; if they came in below target, they would be able to profit by selling their extra permits to companies that were polluting over their limit.
The initiative also included another, quieter goal: to raise the price of electricity by letting utilities pass along permit costs, thereby encouraging energy efficiency and innovation among customers as well.
But the system that emerged was far from that model.
After heavy lobbying by giant utilities and smokestack industries, who argued their competitiveness could be impaired, the EU all but scrapped the idea of selling permits. It gave them out for free, in such quantities that the market came close to collapsing because of a glut.
But in line with the original strategy, utilities in countries from Spain to Britain to Poland still put a "market value" on their books for the permits and added some of that putative cost to the prices they charged industrial customers for electricity. And they did not stop there. In one particularly contentious case, regulators in Germany accused utilities of charging customers for far more permits than they were entitled to.
Nowhere was this behavior more evident than at RWE, a major German power company, which has acknowledged that it is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe. Bank analysts and environmental advocates estimate RWE had received a windfall of roughly €5 billion, or $6.5 billion at current exchange rates, in the first three years of the system, concluding in 2007 - more than any other company in Europe.
In a confidential summary of its findings, obtained by the International Herald Tribune, the German cartel office in late 2006 accused RWE of engaging in "abusive pricing," piling on costs for industrial clients that were "completely out of proportion" with its own costs. It called for cuts of up to 75 percent.
RWE settled the case last year while denying any wrongdoing. It says price increases from 2005 to 2007 predominantly reflected higher costs for hard coal and natural gas.
Europe's overall experience with carbon trading has been a sobering one.
Its implementation has been marked by maneuvers and adjustments to the original framework that have yielded significant cost benefits to many of the continent's biggest polluting industries. Meanwhile, the amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose 0.4 percent in 2006 and an additional 0.7 percent in 2007.
The United States is now considering a system of its own, with Obama proposing to make industries buy all of their permits. He has said he would devote $150 billion from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects.
Many of the framers of the European plan, meanwhile, have thought hard about the way the legislation evolved as they prepare to take up the next phase. But they face the prospect of trying to close numerous lucrative loopholes while confronting the same tug of war between lofty environmental goals and their immediate economic costs - a challenge made even more difficult by the onset of recession.Lofty goals at the outset for curbing CO2 emissions
During long negotiations on the landmark Kyoto climate treaty more than a decade ago, the United States, through the administration of Bill Clinton, was the loudest in insisting on including a reference to "emissions trading" in the treaty.
Americans had pioneered such markets in the 1970s and used them on a broader scale during the 1990s to reduce emissions from power plants blamed for acid rain.
U.S. officials argued that markets were the most effective way of encouraging innovative, emission-reducing technologies.
The European Union initially opposed emissions trading in favor of direct taxes on polluting industries, but later agreed to trading as the price for ratification.
The United States, however, ended up failing to either ratify Kyoto or to require U.S. companies to enter a carbon trading market outside of the Kyoto accord. But the European Commission, the EU executive body, began working on plans to start such a system in Europe.
"We ourselves had invested so much in the Kyoto Protocol in choosing a global deal," Margot Wallstrom, who was the European Union environment commissioner at the time, said during a recent interview. "I was eager to put it in place as soon as possible."
Today, the EU system represents about 75 percent of global carbon trading - a market worth about €60 billion in 2008, according to Andreas Arvanitakis, an analyst with Point Carbon, a research company.
Yet from the start, Wallstrom, who is now a vice president of the European Commission, said she was lobbied heavily by governments and by companies, seeking to limit the financial burden. She would not comment on any specific contacts. But Eurelectric, the main electricity industry lobby group, and its German affiliate met often with EU environment officials to discuss the shape of the emissions trading system.
A decision was made to limit the initial scope to some of the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy: electricity, glass, steel, cement, and pulp and paper. They were chosen primarily because their stationary factories were easier to regulate quickly than moving targets like transport or aviation.
The original idea of charging for all or even most of the permits never gained traction.
Many politicians said they feared that burdening European industries would undercut their global competitiveness, since rivals in Asia or the United States would not have such extra costs imposed on them.
In addition, Europe's energy market for industrial customers was opening to cross-border competition almost simultaneously.
Wallstrom and others at the commission describe the decision to give away the vast majority of permits as having been a necessary concession to get all the players in Europe on board - especially at a time when the Kyoto climate treaty was under attack from the administration of President George W. Bush.
Still, lawmakers at the European Parliament initially sought to require industry to pay for at least 30 percent of its permits, then 15 percent. (The actual trading price on the futures market at the time ranged from €5 to €13.)
But after long negotiations with EU governments, the Parliament enacted a law on July 2, 2003, allowing up to 100 percent of permits to be given away until 2013. Governments could sell some of the permits, up to 5 percent, but only Denmark, Ireland, Lithuania and Hungary did.
Denmark sold the full 5 percent, earning 226 million Danish kroner, or more than €30 million at current exchange rates. Had all the Danish permits been sold at the same price, the government could have reaped more than €600 million for the national budget.Debate turns to arguments of jobs vs. the environment
The EU system is highly decentralized, reflecting the political reality of a bloc that now numbers 27 countries. Thus, the lobbying did not stop in Brussels, but moved on to national capitals, where governments were left in charge of setting emissions levels and distributing the permits to companies within their borders, often with deep political connections.
Germany provided a stark example of what happened next. The cross-fire between environmental advocates and politicians who expressed concern about German competitiveness - and jobs - only intensified. The Greens, a political party, was in the federal government for the first time, as junior partner with the Social Democrats of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But the issues were resolved in an arena where energy companies have long wielded enormous political clout, and here they benefited greatly.
After World War II, German energy companies were largely state-controlled. Today, following years of privatization and consolidation, the four energy giants, E.ON, RWE, Energie Baden-Württemberg and Vattenfall, own 70 percent of German capacity and produce an even greater share of the electricity.
Jürgen Trittin, a former Greens leader who was environment minister from 1998 to 2005, recalled being heavily lobbied by executives from power companies, and by politicians from eastern Germany seeking special treatment for burning lignite, a soft brown coal that is common around central Europe and which is highly polluting.
The EU system put the government in the position of behaving like "a grandfather with a large family deciding what to give his favorite grandchildren for Christmas," Trittin said by telephone.
RWE was a special case, he said. The company was "perfectly integrated into the Ministry of Economy, with no clear border," Trittin said.
Wolfgang Clement, the economics minister from 2002 to 2005, had, since 1998, been premier of North Rhine-Westphalia state, where RWE is based. He joined the supervisory board of RWE Power in 2006.
His deputy, Georg Wilhelm Adamowitsch, was, from 1996 to 1999, the representative for federal and European affairs at another energy company, VEW, which in 2000 merged with RWE. At least three other top government officials, including Schröder himself, went to work for energy companies after leaving office.
Trittin recalled a five-hour "showdown" with Clement on the night of March 29, 2004, in which he lost a battle to lower the overall limit on emissions from plants and factories to 488 million tons of CO2 each year, from the level then in force of 501 million tons. Trittin said he was overruled by Clement, who, with Schröder's backing, secured a reduction of just two million tons, to 499 million.
Trittin said Clement accused him of "wanting to de-industrialize Germany."
Environmental groups were disappointed, but industry leaders were relieved. "With this compromise, steel makers can apparently now continue to sustainably produce steel in Germany," Dieter Ameling, the president of the German steel makers' association WV Stahl, was quoted at the time as saying. "The steel industry thanks minister Clement for his input."
The Federation of German Electricity Companies, representing utilities like RWE, expressed its "relief"' as well. "Good sense triumphed in the end," the federation chief, Eberhard Meller, was quoted as saying.
In a recent e-mail message, Clement did not challenge Trittin's account of the meeting, but called his claims of industry influence on the ministry "just nonsense."
Clement said that, during his time in government, he had "many very serious and complicated discussions" with Trittin and other Greens politicians about climate change and the economic costs of fighting it. "I reproached them - and I'm doing this still today - that at the end of their policy there is the de-industrialization of Germany," Clement reiterated. "That's our conflict."
Adamowitsch said by phone that he was not an "ambassador for the German energy industry" while in government or at VEW.
Now an independent consultant working with the Austrian government and the European Commission, Adamowitsch said that the EU emissions system had meant much greater burden for industrial companies making products like cement, where up to one-fifth of the final cost is for energy.
"We are in an industrial battle in the middle of a period of globalization and high energy prices mean we have a real problem in Germany," he said.
Schröder declined to comment for this article.Big winners emerge in ranks of German power companies
The benefits won by German industry were substantial. Under the German national plan, electricity companies were supposed to receive 3 percent fewer permits than they needed to cover their total emissions from 2005 to 2007. The aim was to encourage them to make technical improvements that would reduce emissions and help the country meet its commitment under the Kyoto treaty.
Instead, the companies got about 103 percent of their annual needs, according to the German Emissions Trading Authority, which oversees the system in Germany. That surplus could have been sold for about €290 million at the peak of the market.
German lawmakers also approved scores of combinations of exemptions and bonuses allowing companies to gain additional free permits for things they had done years earlier, or that might only be done in the future. Among them:
Utilities could base their claim for permits at coal and gas-fired plants on emissions levels from as far back as 1994, even if improvements had been made to the plants since then.
Utilities were guaranteed free permits for 18 years to cover any newly built coal or gas plants (a perk that provoked such a reproach from Brussels that it was later revoked).
Utilities could forecast how many permits they needed for each of their plants, despite a history of conflict with regulators over projections used to set tariffs.
"It was lobbying by industry, including the electricity companies, that was to blame for all these exceptional rules," said Hans-Jürgen Nantke, the director of the German trading authority, which is part of the Federal Environment Agency. The exemptions "enabled companies to get allowances that did not reflect the real situation of their emissions."
Jürgen Frech, chief spokesman for RWE, said that policy makers had sought input from all parties affected in creating what was an unprecedented system, and that all the national plans had to be subsequently approved by the European Commission in Brussels. "For industries like electricity production with long investment cycles, it is crucial to have a stable regulatory environment," he added.
RWE received 30 percent of all the permits given out, more than any other company in Germany.
The company said it transferred some of them among its plants - including those in other EU countries - but still found itself running short, and thus did not sell any.
But there was even greater revenue to be found elsewhere.Outrage from customers as electrical bills shot up
Major power consumers in Germany began receiving bigger electricity bills shortly after the system officially started in 2005, amounting to increases of about 5 percent each year. The biggest effect was on heavy users of power in industries like steel that - unlike households - buy power wholesale at prices that are less regulated.
Those customers were enraged, and they asked the German cartel office to investigate.
RWE justified its prices to the cartel office by saying the permits, although received for free, had a value in the marketplace. By not selling them and producing electricity instead, the argument went, it was losing an opportunity for revenue that should be charged to its customers.
In a summary of its preliminary findings, sent to RWE lawyers in December 2006, the cartel office agreed that the company was justified in passing through genuine "opportunity costs." But it accused RWE of charging for more permits than it should have - and suggested that this had been done at a third of all power plants in Germany.
This was what led the cartel office to accuse RWE of "abusive pricing." Investigators said RWE lacked any real opportunity to sell many of its permits because it already had committed to providing substantial amounts of electricity. And they said RWE admitted as much at a closed-door hearing.
Frech, at RWE, said that putting a price on the carbon permits - thereby encouraging everyone to be more efficient - was "beyond reproach."
The company said it was "unable to quantitatively estimate what proportion of the end customer price" was attributable to the carbon permits, mainly because the final price was determined in part by supply and demand.
But the cartel office said RWE should reduce the amount it charged for the permits by 75 percent. At this point the case could have moved toward litigation. The company, however, agreed to a settlement involving auctions that should provide industrial customers in Germany with lower electricity costs from 2009 through 2012.
"Customers will have the CO2 allowances RWE receives for the auctioned product credited to them free of charge," the company said, referring to its permits. "This newfound understanding is preferable to protracted legal battles through several courts."
Selling power without the cost of the CO2 permits also has a downside, however. It undermines the EU goal of curbing emissions and encouraging conservation by raising the cost of electricity to consumers.No smooth path for overhaul as EU economies deteriorate
RWE's net profit jumped 73 percent, to €3.85 billion, in 2005, the first year of the system. RWE does not detail in its financial statements what percentage of net profits is attributable to the carbon system, and the company said it was not able to do so.
Seb Walhain, the global head of environmental markets at Fortis, said that RWE earned up to €5 billion from 2005 to 2007 from the EU system. Felix Matthes at the Institute for Applied Ecology, a German environmental research group, estimated that RWE benefited from windfall profits of €2.2 billion to €3.3 billion annually in 2005 and 2006. Matthes and Walhain said very little, or no, windfall profits occurred in 2007 as a result of the EU system because the price of CO2 permits had fallen virtually to zero.
But emissions have risen steadily at the German operations of RWE since the trading system began. RWE was responsible for nearly 158 million tons of CO2 in 2007, compared with about 147 million tons in 2006 and 120 million tons in 2005, according to its annual reports.
Frech said emissions rose "slightly" in 2007 in part because one of its nuclear power stations "was off line for quite a while." Nuclear-fueled power plants emit no carbon dioxide.
The company also said it was investing €32 billion over the next five years in projects including renewable energy and developing cleaner techniques for generating electricity from hard coal and lignite, which RWE mines in Germany.
"Every investment we make is linked to climate protection," Frech said.
Yet so far there are few signs the system is cutting emissions. The amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose marginally in 2006 and 2007, according to the European Environment Agency. (Neither it nor the European Commission made any forecast before the system started about how it would perform.)
Even so, the EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said in May that emissions would "most likely have been significantly higher" without the carbon trading system.
He called the 2005 to 2007 period a "learning by doing" phase, and noted that limits on emissions have been tightened for the 2008 to 2012 trading period, and the glut of free permits lessened, meaning the price should rise.
But negotiations on how to meet even more ambitious targets after 2012 are in danger of coming undone as the economy worsens.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has led the assault on the package, saying that he was not in office last year when it was agreed on. "We don't think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote," he said at a summit meeting in October. "We have time."
Poland - which depends on coal-fired plants for 95 percent of its electricity - has threatened to block the package at another summit meeting Thursday and Friday if a compromise is not found to lessen the burden on its energy sector.
RWE, meanwhile, insists that having to pay for all its permits, starting in 2013, with no phase-in period, would distort competition across Europe, which has recently opened up to cross-border energy sales. "Companies such as ours that are giving coal a future and rely on coal-powered generation will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis companies like Électricité de France, which rely solely on nuclear and have virtually no CO2 to deal with," Frech said.
Industrial customers in Germany are issuing dire warnings of ballooning electricity prices they say are sure to come if utilities try to maintain their profit margins while complying with costly new rules.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is leading the political horse trading, continues to push for an agreement. "Europe must be an example for others," he was quoted as saying Saturday in Poznan, Poland.
Nicholas Stern, one of the world's foremost authorities on the economics of climate change since presenting a report for the British government in 2006, said during a recent interview that the United States should draw lessons from Europe's example. He recommended that Obama move quickly toward charging industry for the permits, to avoid such repeated, drawn-out battles.
"Everybody will fight their own corner," he said. "That's why it's so important to have a clear conception from the start."
Tuesday, December 9, 2008
An RWE power plant near Düsseldorf. The company was accused in 2006 of engaging in "abusive pricing" in charges to customers for the cost of emission credits. RWE is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe.
BRUSSELS: The European Union started with the most high-minded of ecological goals: to create a market that would encourage companies to reduce greenhouse gases by making them pay for each ton emitted into the atmosphere.
Four years later, the carbon trading system has created a multibillion-euro windfall for some of the continent's biggest polluters, with little or no noticeable benefit to the environment so far.
The lessons learned are coming under fresh scrutiny now, both in Europe and abroad. EU leaders will meet Thursday and Friday to work on the next phase of their system, seeking, they say, both to extend its scope and correct its flaws. And in the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to move quickly on a similar program.
As originally envisioned in Europe, companies would buy most if not all of the permits needed to cover their projected carbon dioxide emissions for a year, one permit good for each metric ton of CO2, the main greenhouse gas. If they produced more gases than expected, they would have to buy more permits; if they came in below target, they would be able to profit by selling their extra permits to companies that were polluting over their limit.
The initiative also included another, quieter goal: to raise the price of electricity by letting utilities pass along permit costs, thereby encouraging energy efficiency and innovation among customers as well.
But the system that emerged was far from that model.
After heavy lobbying by giant utilities and smokestack industries, who argued their competitiveness could be impaired, the EU all but scrapped the idea of selling permits. It gave them out for free, in such quantities that the market came close to collapsing because of a glut.
But in line with the original strategy, utilities in countries from Spain to Britain to Poland still put a "market value" on their books for the permits and added some of that putative cost to the prices they charged industrial customers for electricity. And they did not stop there. In one particularly contentious case, regulators in Germany accused utilities of charging customers for far more permits than they were entitled to.
Nowhere was this behavior more evident than at RWE, a major German power company, which has acknowledged that it is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe. Bank analysts and environmental advocates estimate RWE had received a windfall of roughly €5 billion, or $6.5 billion at current exchange rates, in the first three years of the system, concluding in 2007 - more than any other company in Europe.
In a confidential summary of its findings, obtained by the International Herald Tribune, the German cartel office in late 2006 accused RWE of engaging in "abusive pricing," piling on costs for industrial clients that were "completely out of proportion" with its own costs. It called for cuts of up to 75 percent.
RWE settled the case last year while denying any wrongdoing. It says price increases from 2005 to 2007 predominantly reflected higher costs for hard coal and natural gas.
Europe's overall experience with carbon trading has been a sobering one.
Its implementation has been marked by maneuvers and adjustments to the original framework that have yielded significant cost benefits to many of the continent's biggest polluting industries. Meanwhile, the amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose 0.4 percent in 2006 and an additional 0.7 percent in 2007.
The United States is now considering a system of its own, with Obama proposing to make industries buy all of their permits. He has said he would devote $150 billion from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects.
Many of the framers of the European plan, meanwhile, have thought hard about the way the legislation evolved as they prepare to take up the next phase. But they face the prospect of trying to close numerous lucrative loopholes while confronting the same tug of war between lofty environmental goals and their immediate economic costs - a challenge made even more difficult by the onset of recession.Lofty goals at the outset for curbing CO2 emissions
During long negotiations on the landmark Kyoto climate treaty more than a decade ago, the United States, through the administration of Bill Clinton, was the loudest in insisting on including a reference to "emissions trading" in the treaty.
Americans had pioneered such markets in the 1970s and used them on a broader scale during the 1990s to reduce emissions from power plants blamed for acid rain.
U.S. officials argued that markets were the most effective way of encouraging innovative, emission-reducing technologies.
The European Union initially opposed emissions trading in favor of direct taxes on polluting industries, but later agreed to trading as the price for ratification.
The United States, however, ended up failing to either ratify Kyoto or to require U.S. companies to enter a carbon trading market outside of the Kyoto accord. But the European Commission, the EU executive body, began working on plans to start such a system in Europe.
"We ourselves had invested so much in the Kyoto Protocol in choosing a global deal," Margot Wallstrom, who was the European Union environment commissioner at the time, said during a recent interview. "I was eager to put it in place as soon as possible."
Today, the EU system represents about 75 percent of global carbon trading - a market worth about €60 billion in 2008, according to Andreas Arvanitakis, an analyst with Point Carbon, a research company.
Yet from the start, Wallstrom, who is now a vice president of the European Commission, said she was lobbied heavily by governments and by companies, seeking to limit the financial burden. She would not comment on any specific contacts. But Eurelectric, the main electricity industry lobby group, and its German affiliate met often with EU environment officials to discuss the shape of the emissions trading system.
A decision was made to limit the initial scope to some of the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy: electricity, glass, steel, cement, and pulp and paper. They were chosen primarily because their stationary factories were easier to regulate quickly than moving targets like transport or aviation.
The original idea of charging for all or even most of the permits never gained traction.
Many politicians said they feared that burdening European industries would undercut their global competitiveness, since rivals in Asia or the United States would not have such extra costs imposed on them.
In addition, Europe's energy market for industrial customers was opening to cross-border competition almost simultaneously.
Wallstrom and others at the commission describe the decision to give away the vast majority of permits as having been a necessary concession to get all the players in Europe on board - especially at a time when the Kyoto climate treaty was under attack from the administration of President George W. Bush.
Still, lawmakers at the European Parliament initially sought to require industry to pay for at least 30 percent of its permits, then 15 percent. (The actual trading price on the futures market at the time ranged from €5 to €13.)
But after long negotiations with EU governments, the Parliament enacted a law on July 2, 2003, allowing up to 100 percent of permits to be given away until 2013. Governments could sell some of the permits, up to 5 percent, but only Denmark, Ireland, Lithuania and Hungary did.
Denmark sold the full 5 percent, earning 226 million Danish kroner, or more than €30 million at current exchange rates. Had all the Danish permits been sold at the same price, the government could have reaped more than €600 million for the national budget.Debate turns to arguments of jobs vs. the environment
The EU system is highly decentralized, reflecting the political reality of a bloc that now numbers 27 countries. Thus, the lobbying did not stop in Brussels, but moved on to national capitals, where governments were left in charge of setting emissions levels and distributing the permits to companies within their borders, often with deep political connections.
Germany provided a stark example of what happened next. The cross-fire between environmental advocates and politicians who expressed concern about German competitiveness - and jobs - only intensified. The Greens, a political party, was in the federal government for the first time, as junior partner with the Social Democrats of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. But the issues were resolved in an arena where energy companies have long wielded enormous political clout, and here they benefited greatly.
After World War II, German energy companies were largely state-controlled. Today, following years of privatization and consolidation, the four energy giants, E.ON, RWE, Energie Baden-Württemberg and Vattenfall, own 70 percent of German capacity and produce an even greater share of the electricity.
Jürgen Trittin, a former Greens leader who was environment minister from 1998 to 2005, recalled being heavily lobbied by executives from power companies, and by politicians from eastern Germany seeking special treatment for burning lignite, a soft brown coal that is common around central Europe and which is highly polluting.
The EU system put the government in the position of behaving like "a grandfather with a large family deciding what to give his favorite grandchildren for Christmas," Trittin said by telephone.
RWE was a special case, he said. The company was "perfectly integrated into the Ministry of Economy, with no clear border," Trittin said.
Wolfgang Clement, the economics minister from 2002 to 2005, had, since 1998, been premier of North Rhine-Westphalia state, where RWE is based. He joined the supervisory board of RWE Power in 2006.
His deputy, Georg Wilhelm Adamowitsch, was, from 1996 to 1999, the representative for federal and European affairs at another energy company, VEW, which in 2000 merged with RWE. At least three other top government officials, including Schröder himself, went to work for energy companies after leaving office.
Trittin recalled a five-hour "showdown" with Clement on the night of March 29, 2004, in which he lost a battle to lower the overall limit on emissions from plants and factories to 488 million tons of CO2 each year, from the level then in force of 501 million tons. Trittin said he was overruled by Clement, who, with Schröder's backing, secured a reduction of just two million tons, to 499 million.
Trittin said Clement accused him of "wanting to de-industrialize Germany."
Environmental groups were disappointed, but industry leaders were relieved. "With this compromise, steel makers can apparently now continue to sustainably produce steel in Germany," Dieter Ameling, the president of the German steel makers' association WV Stahl, was quoted at the time as saying. "The steel industry thanks minister Clement for his input."
The Federation of German Electricity Companies, representing utilities like RWE, expressed its "relief"' as well. "Good sense triumphed in the end," the federation chief, Eberhard Meller, was quoted as saying.
In a recent e-mail message, Clement did not challenge Trittin's account of the meeting, but called his claims of industry influence on the ministry "just nonsense."
Clement said that, during his time in government, he had "many very serious and complicated discussions" with Trittin and other Greens politicians about climate change and the economic costs of fighting it. "I reproached them - and I'm doing this still today - that at the end of their policy there is the de-industrialization of Germany," Clement reiterated. "That's our conflict."
Adamowitsch said by phone that he was not an "ambassador for the German energy industry" while in government or at VEW.
Now an independent consultant working with the Austrian government and the European Commission, Adamowitsch said that the EU emissions system had meant much greater burden for industrial companies making products like cement, where up to one-fifth of the final cost is for energy.
"We are in an industrial battle in the middle of a period of globalization and high energy prices mean we have a real problem in Germany," he said.
Schröder declined to comment for this article.Big winners emerge in ranks of German power companies
The benefits won by German industry were substantial. Under the German national plan, electricity companies were supposed to receive 3 percent fewer permits than they needed to cover their total emissions from 2005 to 2007. The aim was to encourage them to make technical improvements that would reduce emissions and help the country meet its commitment under the Kyoto treaty.
Instead, the companies got about 103 percent of their annual needs, according to the German Emissions Trading Authority, which oversees the system in Germany. That surplus could have been sold for about €290 million at the peak of the market.
German lawmakers also approved scores of combinations of exemptions and bonuses allowing companies to gain additional free permits for things they had done years earlier, or that might only be done in the future. Among them:
Utilities could base their claim for permits at coal and gas-fired plants on emissions levels from as far back as 1994, even if improvements had been made to the plants since then.
Utilities were guaranteed free permits for 18 years to cover any newly built coal or gas plants (a perk that provoked such a reproach from Brussels that it was later revoked).
Utilities could forecast how many permits they needed for each of their plants, despite a history of conflict with regulators over projections used to set tariffs.
"It was lobbying by industry, including the electricity companies, that was to blame for all these exceptional rules," said Hans-Jürgen Nantke, the director of the German trading authority, which is part of the Federal Environment Agency. The exemptions "enabled companies to get allowances that did not reflect the real situation of their emissions."
Jürgen Frech, chief spokesman for RWE, said that policy makers had sought input from all parties affected in creating what was an unprecedented system, and that all the national plans had to be subsequently approved by the European Commission in Brussels. "For industries like electricity production with long investment cycles, it is crucial to have a stable regulatory environment," he added.
RWE received 30 percent of all the permits given out, more than any other company in Germany.
The company said it transferred some of them among its plants - including those in other EU countries - but still found itself running short, and thus did not sell any.
But there was even greater revenue to be found elsewhere.Outrage from customers as electrical bills shot up
Major power consumers in Germany began receiving bigger electricity bills shortly after the system officially started in 2005, amounting to increases of about 5 percent each year. The biggest effect was on heavy users of power in industries like steel that - unlike households - buy power wholesale at prices that are less regulated.
Those customers were enraged, and they asked the German cartel office to investigate.
RWE justified its prices to the cartel office by saying the permits, although received for free, had a value in the marketplace. By not selling them and producing electricity instead, the argument went, it was losing an opportunity for revenue that should be charged to its customers.
In a summary of its preliminary findings, sent to RWE lawyers in December 2006, the cartel office agreed that the company was justified in passing through genuine "opportunity costs." But it accused RWE of charging for more permits than it should have - and suggested that this had been done at a third of all power plants in Germany.
This was what led the cartel office to accuse RWE of "abusive pricing." Investigators said RWE lacked any real opportunity to sell many of its permits because it already had committed to providing substantial amounts of electricity. And they said RWE admitted as much at a closed-door hearing.
Frech, at RWE, said that putting a price on the carbon permits - thereby encouraging everyone to be more efficient - was "beyond reproach."
The company said it was "unable to quantitatively estimate what proportion of the end customer price" was attributable to the carbon permits, mainly because the final price was determined in part by supply and demand.
But the cartel office said RWE should reduce the amount it charged for the permits by 75 percent. At this point the case could have moved toward litigation. The company, however, agreed to a settlement involving auctions that should provide industrial customers in Germany with lower electricity costs from 2009 through 2012.
"Customers will have the CO2 allowances RWE receives for the auctioned product credited to them free of charge," the company said, referring to its permits. "This newfound understanding is preferable to protracted legal battles through several courts."
Selling power without the cost of the CO2 permits also has a downside, however. It undermines the EU goal of curbing emissions and encouraging conservation by raising the cost of electricity to consumers.No smooth path for overhaul as EU economies deteriorate
RWE's net profit jumped 73 percent, to €3.85 billion, in 2005, the first year of the system. RWE does not detail in its financial statements what percentage of net profits is attributable to the carbon system, and the company said it was not able to do so.
Seb Walhain, the global head of environmental markets at Fortis, said that RWE earned up to €5 billion from 2005 to 2007 from the EU system. Felix Matthes at the Institute for Applied Ecology, a German environmental research group, estimated that RWE benefited from windfall profits of €2.2 billion to €3.3 billion annually in 2005 and 2006. Matthes and Walhain said very little, or no, windfall profits occurred in 2007 as a result of the EU system because the price of CO2 permits had fallen virtually to zero.
But emissions have risen steadily at the German operations of RWE since the trading system began. RWE was responsible for nearly 158 million tons of CO2 in 2007, compared with about 147 million tons in 2006 and 120 million tons in 2005, according to its annual reports.
Frech said emissions rose "slightly" in 2007 in part because one of its nuclear power stations "was off line for quite a while." Nuclear-fueled power plants emit no carbon dioxide.
The company also said it was investing €32 billion over the next five years in projects including renewable energy and developing cleaner techniques for generating electricity from hard coal and lignite, which RWE mines in Germany.
"Every investment we make is linked to climate protection," Frech said.
Yet so far there are few signs the system is cutting emissions. The amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose marginally in 2006 and 2007, according to the European Environment Agency. (Neither it nor the European Commission made any forecast before the system started about how it would perform.)
Even so, the EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said in May that emissions would "most likely have been significantly higher" without the carbon trading system.
He called the 2005 to 2007 period a "learning by doing" phase, and noted that limits on emissions have been tightened for the 2008 to 2012 trading period, and the glut of free permits lessened, meaning the price should rise.
But negotiations on how to meet even more ambitious targets after 2012 are in danger of coming undone as the economy worsens.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has led the assault on the package, saying that he was not in office last year when it was agreed on. "We don't think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote," he said at a summit meeting in October. "We have time."
Poland - which depends on coal-fired plants for 95 percent of its electricity - has threatened to block the package at another summit meeting Thursday and Friday if a compromise is not found to lessen the burden on its energy sector.
RWE, meanwhile, insists that having to pay for all its permits, starting in 2013, with no phase-in period, would distort competition across Europe, which has recently opened up to cross-border energy sales. "Companies such as ours that are giving coal a future and rely on coal-powered generation will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis companies like Électricité de France, which rely solely on nuclear and have virtually no CO2 to deal with," Frech said.
Industrial customers in Germany are issuing dire warnings of ballooning electricity prices they say are sure to come if utilities try to maintain their profit margins while complying with costly new rules.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is leading the political horse trading, continues to push for an agreement. "Europe must be an example for others," he was quoted as saying Saturday in Poznan, Poland.
Nicholas Stern, one of the world's foremost authorities on the economics of climate change since presenting a report for the British government in 2006, said during a recent interview that the United States should draw lessons from Europe's example. He recommended that Obama move quickly toward charging industry for the permits, to avoid such repeated, drawn-out battles.
"Everybody will fight their own corner," he said. "That's why it's so important to have a clear conception from the start."
Polluters' windfall: Carbon into gold
By James Kanter
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
BRUSSELS: The European Union started with the most high-minded of ecological goals: to create a market that would encourage companies to reduce greenhouse gases by making them pay for each ton emitted into the atmosphere.
Four years later, the carbon trading system has created a multibillion-euro windfall for some of the Continent's biggest polluters, with little or no noticeable benefit to the environment so far.
The lessons learned are coming under fresh scrutiny now, both in Europe and abroad. EU leaders will meet Thursday and Friday to work on the next phase of their system, seeking, they say, both to extend its scope and correct its flaws. And in the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to move quickly on a similar program.
As originally envisioned in Europe, companies would buy most if not all of the permits needed to cover their projected carbon dioxide emissions for a year, one permit good for each metric ton of CO2, the main greenhouse gas. If they produced more gases than expected, they would have to buy more permits; if they came in below target, they would be able to profit by selling their extra permits to companies that were polluting over their limit.
The initiative also included another, quieter goal: to raise the price of electricity by letting utilities pass along permit costs, thereby encouraging energy efficiency and innovation among customers as well.
But the system that emerged was far from that model.
After heavy lobbying by giant utilities and smokestack industries, which argued that their competitiveness could be impaired, the EU all but scrapped the idea of selling permits. It gave them out for free, in such quantities that the market came close to collapsing because of a glut.
But in line with the original strategy, utilities in countries from Spain to Britain to Poland still put a "market value" on their books for the permits and added some of that putative cost to the prices they charged industrial customers for electricity. And they did not stop there. In one particularly contentious case, regulators in Germany accused utilities of charging customers for far more permits than they were entitled to.
Nowhere was this behavior more evident than at RWE, a major German power company, which has acknowledged that it is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe. Bank analysts and environmental advocates estimate RWE had received a windfall of roughly €5 billion, or $6.5 billion at current exchange rates, in the first three years of the system, ending in 2007 - more than any other company in Europe.
In a confidential summary of its findings, obtained by the International Herald Tribune, the German cartel office in late 2006 accused RWE of engaging in "abusive pricing," piling on costs for industrial clients that were "completely out of proportion" with its own costs. It called for cuts of up to 75 percent.
RWE settled the case last year while denying any wrongdoing. It says price increases from 2005 to 2007 predominantly reflected higher costs for hard coal and natural gas.
Europe's overall experience with carbon trading has been a sobering one.
Its implementation has been marked by maneuvers and adjustments to the original framework that have yielded significant cost benefits to many of the Continent's biggest polluting industries. Meanwhile, the amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose 0.4 percent in 2006 and an additional 0.7 percent in 2007.
The United States is now considering a system of its own, with Obama proposing to make industries buy all of their permits. He has said he would devote $150 billion from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects.
Many of the framers of the European plan, meanwhile, have thought hard about the way the legislation evolved as they prepare to take up the next phase. But they face the prospect of trying to close numerous lucrative loopholes while confronting the same tug of war between lofty environmental goals and their immediate economic costs - a challenge made even more difficult by the onset of recession.
During long negotiations on the landmark Kyoto climate treaty more than a decade ago, the United States, through the administration of Bill Clinton, was the loudest in insisting on including a reference to "emissions trading" in the treaty. Americans had pioneered such markets in the 1970s and used them on a broader scale during the 1990s to reduce emissions from power plants blamed for acid rain.
U.S. officials argued that markets were the most effective way of encouraging innovative, emission-reducing technologies.
The European Union initially opposed emissions trading in favor of direct taxes on polluting industries, but later agreed to trading as the price for ratification.
The United States, however, ended up failing to either ratify Kyoto or to require U.S. companies to enter a carbon trading market outside of the Kyoto accord. But the European Commission, the EU executive body, began working on plans to start such a system in Europe.
"We ourselves had invested so much in the Kyoto Protocol in choosing a global deal," Margot Wallstrom, who was the EU environment commissioner at the time, said during a recent interview. "I was eager to put it in place as soon as possible."
Today, the EU system represents about 75 percent of global carbon trading - a market worth about €60 billion in 2008, according to Andreas Arvanitakis, an analyst with Point Carbon, a research company.
Yet from the start, Wallstrom, who is now a vice president of the European Commission, said she was lobbied heavily by governments and by companies, seeking to limit the financial burden. She would not comment on any specific contacts. But Eurelectric, the main electricity industry lobby group, and its German affiliate met often with EU environment officials to discuss the shape of the emissions trading system.
A decision was made to limit the initial scope to some of the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy: electricity, glass, steel, cement, and pulp and paper. They were chosen primarily because their stationary factories were easier to regulate quickly than moving targets like transport or aviation.
The original idea of charging for all or even most of the permits never gained traction.
Many politicians said they feared that burdening European industries would undercut their global competitiveness, since rivals in Asia or the United States would not have such extra costs imposed on them.
In addition, Europe's energy market for industrial customers was opening to cross-border competition almost simultaneously.
Wallstrom and others at the commission describe the decision to give away the vast majority of permits as having been a necessary concession to get all the players in Europe on board - especially at a time when the Kyoto climate treaty was under attack from the administration of President George W. Bush.
Still, lawmakers at the European Parliament initially sought to require industry to pay for at least 30 percent of its permits, then 15 percent. (The actual trading price on the futures market at the time ranged from €5 to €13.)
But after long negotiations with EU governments, the Parliament enacted a law on July 2, 2003, allowing up to 100 percent of permits to be given away until 2013. Governments could sell some of the permits, up to 5 percent, but only Denmark, Ireland, Lithuania and Hungary did.
Denmark sold the full 5 percent, earning 226 million Danish kroner, or more than €30 million at current exchange rates. Had all the Danish permits been sold at the same price, the government could have reaped more than €600 million for the national budget.
The EU system is highly decentralized, reflecting the political reality of a bloc that now numbers 27 countries. Thus, the lobbying did not stop in Brussels, but moved on to national capitals, where governments were left in charge of setting emissions levels and distributing the permits to companies within their borders, often with deep political connections.
The EU system already is having an effect on business opportunities in parts of Asia, where companies from rich, developed parts of the world can invest in carbon-reducing projects in countries like India to earn additional permits.
Because companies like RWE are obliged to buy larger numbers of permits to meet stricter EU pollution targets, they are increasingly attracted by these so-called CO2 offset projects, which are regulated by United Nations officials in Bonn.
Through these projects, RWE could obtain a substantial number of its required permits and do so at substantially less cost than buying permits on carbon markets in Europe.
As part of these efforts, RWE has said it is distributing low-energy light bulbs in India in exchange for UN-approved permits India and has said it bought similar permits that were generated by a composting project in China.
These carbon offsets are quickly becoming a major plank of European Union climate policy.
Proponents of these projects say they have succeeded in channeling billions of euros toward low-carbon investments in developing countries.
But the trade has also has raised questions about whether it represents genuine emissions cuts and about whether it is holding back a transition to greener power within Europe.
So far there are few signs that the carbon-trading system is cutting emissions. The amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose marginally in 2006 and 2007, according to the European Environment Agency. (Neither it nor the European Commission made any forecast before the system started about how it would perform.)
Even so, the EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said in May that emissions would "most likely have been significantly higher" without the carbon trading system.
He called the 2005 to 2007 period a "learning by doing" phase, and noted that limits on emissions have been tightened for the 2008 to 2012 trading period and the glut of free permits lessened, meaning the price should rise.
But negotiations on how to meet even more ambitious targets after 2012 are in danger of coming undone as the economy worsens.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has led the assault on the package, saying that he was not in office last year when it was agreed on.
"We don't think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote," he said at a summit meeting in October. "We have time."
Poland - which depends on coal-fired plants for 95 percent of its electricity - has threatened to block the package at another summit meeting Thursday and Friday if a compromise is not found to lessen the burden on its energy sector.
RWE, meanwhile, insists that having to pay for all its permits, starting in 2013, with no phase-in period, would distort competition across Europe, which has recently opened up to cross-border energy sales.
"Companies such as ours that are giving coal a future and rely on coal-powered generation will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis companies like Électricité de France, which rely solely on nuclear and have virtually no CO2 to deal with," said Jürgen Frech, chief spokesman for RWE.
Industrial customers in Germany are issuing dire warnings of ballooning electricity prices they say are sure to come if utilities try to maintain their profit margins while complying with costly new rules.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is leading the political horse trading, continues to push for an agreement. "Europe must be an example for others," he was quoted as saying Saturday in Poznan, Poland.
Nicholas Stern, one of the world's foremost authorities on the economics of climate change since presenting a report for the British government in 2006, said during a recent interview that the United States should draw lessons from Europe's example. He recommended that Obama move quickly toward charging industry for the permits, to avoid such repeated, drawn-out battles.
"Everybody will fight their own corner," he said. "That's why it's so important to have a clear conception from the start."
Paul Geitner contributed reporting from Paris.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
BRUSSELS: The European Union started with the most high-minded of ecological goals: to create a market that would encourage companies to reduce greenhouse gases by making them pay for each ton emitted into the atmosphere.
Four years later, the carbon trading system has created a multibillion-euro windfall for some of the Continent's biggest polluters, with little or no noticeable benefit to the environment so far.
The lessons learned are coming under fresh scrutiny now, both in Europe and abroad. EU leaders will meet Thursday and Friday to work on the next phase of their system, seeking, they say, both to extend its scope and correct its flaws. And in the United States, President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to move quickly on a similar program.
As originally envisioned in Europe, companies would buy most if not all of the permits needed to cover their projected carbon dioxide emissions for a year, one permit good for each metric ton of CO2, the main greenhouse gas. If they produced more gases than expected, they would have to buy more permits; if they came in below target, they would be able to profit by selling their extra permits to companies that were polluting over their limit.
The initiative also included another, quieter goal: to raise the price of electricity by letting utilities pass along permit costs, thereby encouraging energy efficiency and innovation among customers as well.
But the system that emerged was far from that model.
After heavy lobbying by giant utilities and smokestack industries, which argued that their competitiveness could be impaired, the EU all but scrapped the idea of selling permits. It gave them out for free, in such quantities that the market came close to collapsing because of a glut.
But in line with the original strategy, utilities in countries from Spain to Britain to Poland still put a "market value" on their books for the permits and added some of that putative cost to the prices they charged industrial customers for electricity. And they did not stop there. In one particularly contentious case, regulators in Germany accused utilities of charging customers for far more permits than they were entitled to.
Nowhere was this behavior more evident than at RWE, a major German power company, which has acknowledged that it is the biggest carbon dioxide emitter in Europe. Bank analysts and environmental advocates estimate RWE had received a windfall of roughly €5 billion, or $6.5 billion at current exchange rates, in the first three years of the system, ending in 2007 - more than any other company in Europe.
In a confidential summary of its findings, obtained by the International Herald Tribune, the German cartel office in late 2006 accused RWE of engaging in "abusive pricing," piling on costs for industrial clients that were "completely out of proportion" with its own costs. It called for cuts of up to 75 percent.
RWE settled the case last year while denying any wrongdoing. It says price increases from 2005 to 2007 predominantly reflected higher costs for hard coal and natural gas.
Europe's overall experience with carbon trading has been a sobering one.
Its implementation has been marked by maneuvers and adjustments to the original framework that have yielded significant cost benefits to many of the Continent's biggest polluting industries. Meanwhile, the amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose 0.4 percent in 2006 and an additional 0.7 percent in 2007.
The United States is now considering a system of its own, with Obama proposing to make industries buy all of their permits. He has said he would devote $150 billion from the sale of those permits over 10 years to energy efficiency and alternative energy projects.
Many of the framers of the European plan, meanwhile, have thought hard about the way the legislation evolved as they prepare to take up the next phase. But they face the prospect of trying to close numerous lucrative loopholes while confronting the same tug of war between lofty environmental goals and their immediate economic costs - a challenge made even more difficult by the onset of recession.
During long negotiations on the landmark Kyoto climate treaty more than a decade ago, the United States, through the administration of Bill Clinton, was the loudest in insisting on including a reference to "emissions trading" in the treaty. Americans had pioneered such markets in the 1970s and used them on a broader scale during the 1990s to reduce emissions from power plants blamed for acid rain.
U.S. officials argued that markets were the most effective way of encouraging innovative, emission-reducing technologies.
The European Union initially opposed emissions trading in favor of direct taxes on polluting industries, but later agreed to trading as the price for ratification.
The United States, however, ended up failing to either ratify Kyoto or to require U.S. companies to enter a carbon trading market outside of the Kyoto accord. But the European Commission, the EU executive body, began working on plans to start such a system in Europe.
"We ourselves had invested so much in the Kyoto Protocol in choosing a global deal," Margot Wallstrom, who was the EU environment commissioner at the time, said during a recent interview. "I was eager to put it in place as soon as possible."
Today, the EU system represents about 75 percent of global carbon trading - a market worth about €60 billion in 2008, according to Andreas Arvanitakis, an analyst with Point Carbon, a research company.
Yet from the start, Wallstrom, who is now a vice president of the European Commission, said she was lobbied heavily by governments and by companies, seeking to limit the financial burden. She would not comment on any specific contacts. But Eurelectric, the main electricity industry lobby group, and its German affiliate met often with EU environment officials to discuss the shape of the emissions trading system.
A decision was made to limit the initial scope to some of the most energy-intensive sectors of the economy: electricity, glass, steel, cement, and pulp and paper. They were chosen primarily because their stationary factories were easier to regulate quickly than moving targets like transport or aviation.
The original idea of charging for all or even most of the permits never gained traction.
Many politicians said they feared that burdening European industries would undercut their global competitiveness, since rivals in Asia or the United States would not have such extra costs imposed on them.
In addition, Europe's energy market for industrial customers was opening to cross-border competition almost simultaneously.
Wallstrom and others at the commission describe the decision to give away the vast majority of permits as having been a necessary concession to get all the players in Europe on board - especially at a time when the Kyoto climate treaty was under attack from the administration of President George W. Bush.
Still, lawmakers at the European Parliament initially sought to require industry to pay for at least 30 percent of its permits, then 15 percent. (The actual trading price on the futures market at the time ranged from €5 to €13.)
But after long negotiations with EU governments, the Parliament enacted a law on July 2, 2003, allowing up to 100 percent of permits to be given away until 2013. Governments could sell some of the permits, up to 5 percent, but only Denmark, Ireland, Lithuania and Hungary did.
Denmark sold the full 5 percent, earning 226 million Danish kroner, or more than €30 million at current exchange rates. Had all the Danish permits been sold at the same price, the government could have reaped more than €600 million for the national budget.
The EU system is highly decentralized, reflecting the political reality of a bloc that now numbers 27 countries. Thus, the lobbying did not stop in Brussels, but moved on to national capitals, where governments were left in charge of setting emissions levels and distributing the permits to companies within their borders, often with deep political connections.
The EU system already is having an effect on business opportunities in parts of Asia, where companies from rich, developed parts of the world can invest in carbon-reducing projects in countries like India to earn additional permits.
Because companies like RWE are obliged to buy larger numbers of permits to meet stricter EU pollution targets, they are increasingly attracted by these so-called CO2 offset projects, which are regulated by United Nations officials in Bonn.
Through these projects, RWE could obtain a substantial number of its required permits and do so at substantially less cost than buying permits on carbon markets in Europe.
As part of these efforts, RWE has said it is distributing low-energy light bulbs in India in exchange for UN-approved permits India and has said it bought similar permits that were generated by a composting project in China.
These carbon offsets are quickly becoming a major plank of European Union climate policy.
Proponents of these projects say they have succeeded in channeling billions of euros toward low-carbon investments in developing countries.
But the trade has also has raised questions about whether it represents genuine emissions cuts and about whether it is holding back a transition to greener power within Europe.
So far there are few signs that the carbon-trading system is cutting emissions. The amount of CO2 emitted by plants and factories participating in the system rose marginally in 2006 and 2007, according to the European Environment Agency. (Neither it nor the European Commission made any forecast before the system started about how it would perform.)
Even so, the EU environment commissioner, Stavros Dimas, said in May that emissions would "most likely have been significantly higher" without the carbon trading system.
He called the 2005 to 2007 period a "learning by doing" phase, and noted that limits on emissions have been tightened for the 2008 to 2012 trading period and the glut of free permits lessened, meaning the price should rise.
But negotiations on how to meet even more ambitious targets after 2012 are in danger of coming undone as the economy worsens.
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi of Italy has led the assault on the package, saying that he was not in office last year when it was agreed on.
"We don't think this is the moment to push forward on our own like Don Quixote," he said at a summit meeting in October. "We have time."
Poland - which depends on coal-fired plants for 95 percent of its electricity - has threatened to block the package at another summit meeting Thursday and Friday if a compromise is not found to lessen the burden on its energy sector.
RWE, meanwhile, insists that having to pay for all its permits, starting in 2013, with no phase-in period, would distort competition across Europe, which has recently opened up to cross-border energy sales.
"Companies such as ours that are giving coal a future and rely on coal-powered generation will find themselves at a distinct disadvantage vis-à-vis companies like Électricité de France, which rely solely on nuclear and have virtually no CO2 to deal with," said Jürgen Frech, chief spokesman for RWE.
Industrial customers in Germany are issuing dire warnings of ballooning electricity prices they say are sure to come if utilities try to maintain their profit margins while complying with costly new rules.
The French president, Nicolas Sarkozy, who is leading the political horse trading, continues to push for an agreement. "Europe must be an example for others," he was quoted as saying Saturday in Poznan, Poland.
Nicholas Stern, one of the world's foremost authorities on the economics of climate change since presenting a report for the British government in 2006, said during a recent interview that the United States should draw lessons from Europe's example. He recommended that Obama move quickly toward charging industry for the permits, to avoid such repeated, drawn-out battles.
"Everybody will fight their own corner," he said. "That's why it's so important to have a clear conception from the start."
Paul Geitner contributed reporting from Paris.
Climate-change conference hampered by U.S. political change
By Elisabeth Rosenthal
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
POZNAN, Poland: As ministers from 189 countries gather here to hammer out a new climate change treaty, progress is sorely hampered by the absence of one delegation: the team that will forge Barack Obama's climate policy.
The U.S. president-elect has called climate change "a matter of urgency," but his administration-in-waiting has not sent representatives to Poznan, where the United States is represented by the Bush administration. That has left this critical meeting in a bit of limbo, with many delegates saying they were waiting to size up the next administration's environmental commitment before making bold moves of their own.
"It has affected the meeting in a fairly significant way," said Gus Silva-Chavez, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, who has been observing the closed negotiations. "A lot of people think: 'this is not the time to put our cards on the table. Let's wait for the new administration. Why agree to anything now?"'
This problem is exaggerated by the fact that the European Union is struggling to finalize its own climate package - hampered by the global economic downturn - and so its delegates have been unusually quiet. In practice, that has meant little progress on anything except the basic decisions needed to keep the dream of a climate treaty alive.
"We have a sense of urgency but you don't see any strong decisions being taking here," said Elenita Dano, a member of the delegation from the Philippines. "Political developments in the U.S. and the EU are holding us hostage, and we have no choice but to wait."
The negotiations are meant to culminate in a treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009, which will take effect in 2013 and replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.
So far, Obama has outlined broad policies but provided few specifics or a timetable for implementing them. His team is hashing out various options.
His administration could propose a climate bill designed to quickly pass though the U.S. Congress with concrete short-term goals like improving energy efficiency and creating "green" jobs, or it could hold off a bit to craft a more comprehensive policy proposal with long-term emissions reductions charting a course decades into the future.
"The fear is this could become a Clinton health plan, trying to do too much too soon, and ending up with nothing," said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House staffer, now with the National Commission on Energy Policy.
Even at the highest levels, officials in Poznan are awaiting results: "Another climate treaty without the U.S. doesn't make a lot of sense," said Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the sponsor of the meeting.
Still, the conference has achieved some important goals.
The delegates have agreed on a method for essentially paying countries and communities to preserve forests, through a system of carbon credits.
The delegates also are nearing agreement on a fund, conceptualized a year ago, to help developing countries adapt to climate change.
Talk of a climate-change unheaval was muted, since the meeting in Poznan was meant to be a midpoint in talks that would lead to a new treaty next year.
"Expectations for this meeting were pretty low, but we're on track for a work plan covering the next year," said Angela Anderson, director of the International Global Warming Campaign of the Pew Environment Group. "If the pace picks up we could get an agreement by Copenhagen."
Delegates have been hammering out proposals for the past 10 days. On Thursday, various ministers arrive for two days of meetings to approve them.
Still, there were disturbing rumblings that industrialized nations were seeking to scale back emissions-reduction targets recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which suggested that rich countries should cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020 to avert disastrous warming. Countries like Italy have suggested that they might have a hard time meeting previous emissions-reduction goals in the current economic malaise.
In addition, a group of developing countries called the G-77 complained that their proposals for help fell on deaf ears. "We got no support from developed countries, whether in technology transfer or finances," said Tasneem Essop, of the WWF South Africa.
Such hopes and frustrations underscore the pressure the new U.S. administration is likely to feel. Jake Schmidt of the National Resources Defense Council said, "Clearly one of the major stumbling blocks has been a lack of leadership at the U.S. level, and that's about to change."
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
POZNAN, Poland: As ministers from 189 countries gather here to hammer out a new climate change treaty, progress is sorely hampered by the absence of one delegation: the team that will forge Barack Obama's climate policy.
The U.S. president-elect has called climate change "a matter of urgency," but his administration-in-waiting has not sent representatives to Poznan, where the United States is represented by the Bush administration. That has left this critical meeting in a bit of limbo, with many delegates saying they were waiting to size up the next administration's environmental commitment before making bold moves of their own.
"It has affected the meeting in a fairly significant way," said Gus Silva-Chavez, a policy expert at the Environmental Defense Fund in Washington, who has been observing the closed negotiations. "A lot of people think: 'this is not the time to put our cards on the table. Let's wait for the new administration. Why agree to anything now?"'
This problem is exaggerated by the fact that the European Union is struggling to finalize its own climate package - hampered by the global economic downturn - and so its delegates have been unusually quiet. In practice, that has meant little progress on anything except the basic decisions needed to keep the dream of a climate treaty alive.
"We have a sense of urgency but you don't see any strong decisions being taking here," said Elenita Dano, a member of the delegation from the Philippines. "Political developments in the U.S. and the EU are holding us hostage, and we have no choice but to wait."
The negotiations are meant to culminate in a treaty in Copenhagen in December 2009, which will take effect in 2013 and replace the expiring Kyoto Protocol.
So far, Obama has outlined broad policies but provided few specifics or a timetable for implementing them. His team is hashing out various options.
His administration could propose a climate bill designed to quickly pass though the U.S. Congress with concrete short-term goals like improving energy efficiency and creating "green" jobs, or it could hold off a bit to craft a more comprehensive policy proposal with long-term emissions reductions charting a course decades into the future.
"The fear is this could become a Clinton health plan, trying to do too much too soon, and ending up with nothing," said Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House staffer, now with the National Commission on Energy Policy.
Even at the highest levels, officials in Poznan are awaiting results: "Another climate treaty without the U.S. doesn't make a lot of sense," said Yvo de Boer, head of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, the sponsor of the meeting.
Still, the conference has achieved some important goals.
The delegates have agreed on a method for essentially paying countries and communities to preserve forests, through a system of carbon credits.
The delegates also are nearing agreement on a fund, conceptualized a year ago, to help developing countries adapt to climate change.
Talk of a climate-change unheaval was muted, since the meeting in Poznan was meant to be a midpoint in talks that would lead to a new treaty next year.
"Expectations for this meeting were pretty low, but we're on track for a work plan covering the next year," said Angela Anderson, director of the International Global Warming Campaign of the Pew Environment Group. "If the pace picks up we could get an agreement by Copenhagen."
Delegates have been hammering out proposals for the past 10 days. On Thursday, various ministers arrive for two days of meetings to approve them.
Still, there were disturbing rumblings that industrialized nations were seeking to scale back emissions-reduction targets recommended by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which suggested that rich countries should cut emissions by 25 to 40 percent by 2020 to avert disastrous warming. Countries like Italy have suggested that they might have a hard time meeting previous emissions-reduction goals in the current economic malaise.
In addition, a group of developing countries called the G-77 complained that their proposals for help fell on deaf ears. "We got no support from developed countries, whether in technology transfer or finances," said Tasneem Essop, of the WWF South Africa.
Such hopes and frustrations underscore the pressure the new U.S. administration is likely to feel. Jake Schmidt of the National Resources Defense Council said, "Clearly one of the major stumbling blocks has been a lack of leadership at the U.S. level, and that's about to change."
2008년 12월 7일 일요일
Book review: 'Le Corbusier: A Life' and 'Le Corbusier Le Grand'
By Witold Rybczynski
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Le Corbusier: A Life By Nicholas Fox Weber. Illustrated. 821 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $45.
Le Corbusier Le Grand Illustrated. 768 pages. Phaidon. $200.
Years ago, as an architecture student traveling in Europe, I sought out Le Corbusier's home in Paris. I had the address from his books, over which I had pored for hours in the university library. Some of his writings were more than 40 years old, but their rousing rhetoric still made architecture seem more like a noble crusade than a mundane profession. Perhaps that's why I imitated his spidery ink sketches and his military-looking stenciled lettering. I admired Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings, but the old man - he had recently died - with his capes and flowery pronouncements, was a figure from another era.
I had been taught that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a great architect, but his buildings left me unmoved - Mies is not for the young. "Corbu," on the other hand, though he was 76, continued to produce designs that surprised and inspired - an unusual, spread-out one-story hospital for Venice, for example, with skylights instead of windows so you could see the sky while lying in bed.
Le Corbusier lived in the 16th arrondissement not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in the penthouse of an apartment building that he had designed himself more than 30 years earlier. The facade of the small seven-story building was more restrained than I had expected, mainly glass and glass blocks. The location, facing a sports field, seemed just right for someone who preached the merits of sun, fresh air and exercise. The street - Rue Nungesser-et-Coli - was named after two famous French fliers who had died attempting a trans-Atlantic flight two weeks before Lindbergh. That was appropriate, too, for Le Corbusier was a devotee of all things modern, and more than once in his career he had crashed and burned.
Although I peered into the darkened lobby - round columns, curved walls, colors - I didn't dare to press the buzzer. Just as well, for as Nicholas Fox Weber writes in his new biography, "Le Corbusier: A Life," the architect devoted every morning to painting in the studio that took up the front half of the apartment. Still, I should have been bolder. The following year - 1965 - he was dead, drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean.
That fateful summer, Le Corbusier, who was starting to feel his age and had recently lost the two people who were in many ways his closest confidantes - his mother and his wife - ignored his doctor's advice to take only a short dip at noon. Instead, he plunged in at 8 a.m. and swam for an hour or more. He was an experienced swimmer, and Weber cites speculation that the drowning may have been an "elegantly orchestrated suicide." On the strength of flimsy evidence it seems a far-fetched claim, but by the end of this absorbing book the reader may be convinced that for this proud, solitary and down-to-earth man, such a decision would not have been out of character.
"He's an odd duck," is how the French architect Auguste Perret described Le Corbusier to a neighbor, "but he'll interest you." That was 1917. The 30-year-old Corbusier, who had earlier worked for Perret, a leading exponent of reinforced concrete, had just returned to Paris.
Largely self-taught, he had studied watch engraving, his father's profession, then turned to architecture and spent a decade designing houses in his native La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town in the Jura mountains of Switzerland. The chalet-like structures are unremarkable, except for the palatial house that he built for his parents; it ate up their life savings, and they were later obliged to sell it at a loss. The fledgling architect charged them a fee, albeit less than for his usual clients. One senses that it was the embarrassment of this misguided project, as much as a desire to leave his provincial surroundings, that encouraged him to try his luck in Paris.
Le Corbusier's given name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. In 1920, he and his painter friend Amédée Ozenfant founded an art magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau. The firebrands both adopted noms de plume, but Weber suggests that in Jeanneret's case, this was more than simply a fashionable gesture. "Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had long sought a means to counter the perpetual vagaries of his own mind," he writes. "With his new name, he invented a person who had a protective shell." Jeanneret was a romantic, a painter, a dreamer; Le Corbusier (he claimed that the name derived from an ancestor) was a realist: tough, obsessive, even unscrupulous, if the need arose.
"It so happens that today I exist, much more rapidly and more powerfully than I would ever have thought," he wrote a German friend. "I have created my identity on my own foundations, on my own terms." Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Of course, he could not keep the two identities separate.
The public man was always "Le Corbusier," but letters to his wife and mother are sometimes signed "Edouard," sometimes "Corbu." On the tomb that he designed for himself, he is "Charles-Edouard Jeanneret called Le Corbusier," although his wife is "Yvonne Le Corbusier."
There have been nearly 400 architectural monographs on Le Corbusier's work, by Weber's count, but this is the first full-length biography, and it's a good one. The author benefits from wide-ranging research. The German friend quoted above, for example, was William Ritter, a novelist and music critic with whom the young Le Corbusier had a long and intimate correspondence.
Weber also had unprecedented access to the architect's letters to his parents, especially his mother, to whom he wrote once a week for most of his adult life (she died at 99, only five years before him). Through these letters we meet a different Le Corbusier, not the hectoring, self-promoting missionary of modernism, but the concerned, dutiful son who describes his projects and achievements, clearly wanting his mother to be impressed - although she never is, quite. Le Corbusier's older brother, Albert, a musician, remained her favorite.
Le Corbusier's generation set out to remake architecture de novo. Most modernist architects were satisfied with following a simple formula: flat roofs, undecorated white walls, pipe railings. Le Corbusier always went further. His white-box villas sprouted voluptuous curves, colors appeared on walls and ceilings, and he introduced traditional materials like brick and fieldstone.
On my European tour in 1964 I saw as many of his buildings as I could. The earlier ones, like the Salvation Army headquarters in Paris and the Pavillon Suisse, a student dormitory, had the features associated with the International Style, but later works, like the chapel at Ronchamp and the vast Unité d'Habitation apartment block in Marseille, were different: cruder, more sculptural, almost primitive. An endearing rustic simplicity is a big part of Le Corbusier's appeal, whether he is building millionaires' residences or worker housing.
Weber's admiring biography brings Le Corbusier to life, unraveling many obscure aspects of a man who was famously secretive and, though he wrote some 50 books, divulged very little of himself.
The architect was a mass of contradictions: a hedonistic Calvinist, arrogant in public and often generous in private, elated and depressed by turns. We learn about the importance of music when he was a young man (his mother was a piano teacher), and his discovery of Louis Armstrong during a visit to Boston: "It was absolutely dazzling," the architect recounted, "strength and truth."
Le Corbusier traveled widely for his work, always alone, and while he was an attentive husband, he was not a faithful one. He had several affairs, briefly with Josephine Baker and for many years with Marguerite Tjader Harris, a Swedish-American heiress. His mistresses saw a different man than the pontificating visionary. To Baker he was a "simple man and gay." According to Tjader Harris, he "was not a complicated man, not even an intellectual, in the narrow meaning of the word. He lived by his faith and emotions."
Weber allows Le Corbusier to emerge as a fascinating if flawed human being. But Weber is not an architectural historian, and he sometimes has a narrow view of his subject's work. He devotes four chapters to Le Corbusier's masterpiece, Ronchamp, whose construction he describes as "impeccable engineering," seemingly unaware that the hidden and camouflaged structure, no less than the expressionistic form, actually represented a break with - if not a betrayal of - the modernist creed that Le Corbusier himself had proclaimed.
Weber's descriptions of buildings are sometimes over the top. The Villa Savoye is "a temple to the sun"; on the entrance ramp to the Mill-owners' Building in Ahmedabad, India, visitors arrive in "the sacred precincts of a modern temple." Weber calls L'Unité d'Habitation in Marseille "a turning point in the history of how human beings live," but fails to explain why, since, even if many similarly enormous apartment blocks were built, such innovations as very tiny apartments and an internal "commercial street" of shops never caught on.
When Jeanneret became Le Corbusier, he took on the persona not only of an astonishingly creative architect but also of an implacable, sometimes megalomaniacal city planner. Starting in 1925 with a hypothetical plan for rebuilding Paris that would have required demolishing 600 acres, or 24 hectares, of the city, Le Corbusier spent a large part of his working life traveling the world, imagining, proposing and promoting a new kind of urbanism in which tall buildings surrounded by landscaped open space replaced traditional blocks and streets. He made it sound scientific but the urban plans were no less fanciful than his building designs. Nevertheless, his planning ideas were influential. Unfortunately, as Lewis Mumford once pointed out, in practice, the Towers in a Park turned out to be Towers in a Parking Lot. On the whole, Weber gives his subject a pass on his failed social and urbanistic ideas. "For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence," he acknowledges. That is putting it mildly.
The wonderfully titled "Le Corbusier Le Grand," a 20-pound (roughly 10-kilogram) tome put together by the editors at Phaidon, is a giant scrapbook of the architect's life and work, including photographs, drawings, travel sketches and reproductions of Le Corbusier's paintings, as well as letters, newspaper clippings, travel documents, ID cards and other ephemera. It sounds confused and confusing, but it's a remarkably effective way to document the great man's life and work. Most architectural monographs include only carefully staged photographs of finished buildings. There are some of those here, but construction photos and impromptu views give a more rounded impression. The section on the Villa Savoye includes letters from the client, complaining about leaks and the architect, complaining about not being paid.
The generous format of "Le Corbusier Le Grand," 14 by 20 inches (about 35 by 50 centimeters), enables even well-known photographs to gain new meaning from being greatly enlarged. There are also many interesting portraits and informal snapshots of the architect, who peers out unblinkingly through his trademark circular glasses (he had monocular vision). The photos also reveal another contradiction: in public, the self-proclaimed bourgeois scourge was always attired in impeccably tailored suits.
The most carefree photographs of Le Corbusier are those taken in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d'Azur, where he and his wife spent a month every summer. On a site overlooking the Mediterranean, the most famous architect in the world built a cabanon, or cabin, about 12 feet square or 1 meter square, a rustic structure that was a cross between a monk's cell and a mountain hut of his native Jura. This was a home reduced, as Weber evocatively writes, "to diamond-hard truths." One senses that here, at least, Edouard could shed the protective shell of Le Corbusier, and be himself.
Thursday, December 4, 2008
Le Corbusier: A Life By Nicholas Fox Weber. Illustrated. 821 pages. Alfred A. Knopf. $45.
Le Corbusier Le Grand Illustrated. 768 pages. Phaidon. $200.
Years ago, as an architecture student traveling in Europe, I sought out Le Corbusier's home in Paris. I had the address from his books, over which I had pored for hours in the university library. Some of his writings were more than 40 years old, but their rousing rhetoric still made architecture seem more like a noble crusade than a mundane profession. Perhaps that's why I imitated his spidery ink sketches and his military-looking stenciled lettering. I admired Frank Lloyd Wright's buildings, but the old man - he had recently died - with his capes and flowery pronouncements, was a figure from another era.
I had been taught that Ludwig Mies van der Rohe was a great architect, but his buildings left me unmoved - Mies is not for the young. "Corbu," on the other hand, though he was 76, continued to produce designs that surprised and inspired - an unusual, spread-out one-story hospital for Venice, for example, with skylights instead of windows so you could see the sky while lying in bed.
Le Corbusier lived in the 16th arrondissement not far from the Bois de Boulogne, in the penthouse of an apartment building that he had designed himself more than 30 years earlier. The facade of the small seven-story building was more restrained than I had expected, mainly glass and glass blocks. The location, facing a sports field, seemed just right for someone who preached the merits of sun, fresh air and exercise. The street - Rue Nungesser-et-Coli - was named after two famous French fliers who had died attempting a trans-Atlantic flight two weeks before Lindbergh. That was appropriate, too, for Le Corbusier was a devotee of all things modern, and more than once in his career he had crashed and burned.
Although I peered into the darkened lobby - round columns, curved walls, colors - I didn't dare to press the buzzer. Just as well, for as Nicholas Fox Weber writes in his new biography, "Le Corbusier: A Life," the architect devoted every morning to painting in the studio that took up the front half of the apartment. Still, I should have been bolder. The following year - 1965 - he was dead, drowned while swimming in the Mediterranean.
That fateful summer, Le Corbusier, who was starting to feel his age and had recently lost the two people who were in many ways his closest confidantes - his mother and his wife - ignored his doctor's advice to take only a short dip at noon. Instead, he plunged in at 8 a.m. and swam for an hour or more. He was an experienced swimmer, and Weber cites speculation that the drowning may have been an "elegantly orchestrated suicide." On the strength of flimsy evidence it seems a far-fetched claim, but by the end of this absorbing book the reader may be convinced that for this proud, solitary and down-to-earth man, such a decision would not have been out of character.
"He's an odd duck," is how the French architect Auguste Perret described Le Corbusier to a neighbor, "but he'll interest you." That was 1917. The 30-year-old Corbusier, who had earlier worked for Perret, a leading exponent of reinforced concrete, had just returned to Paris.
Largely self-taught, he had studied watch engraving, his father's profession, then turned to architecture and spent a decade designing houses in his native La Chaux-de-Fonds, a town in the Jura mountains of Switzerland. The chalet-like structures are unremarkable, except for the palatial house that he built for his parents; it ate up their life savings, and they were later obliged to sell it at a loss. The fledgling architect charged them a fee, albeit less than for his usual clients. One senses that it was the embarrassment of this misguided project, as much as a desire to leave his provincial surroundings, that encouraged him to try his luck in Paris.
Le Corbusier's given name was Charles-Edouard Jeanneret. In 1920, he and his painter friend Amédée Ozenfant founded an art magazine, L'Esprit Nouveau. The firebrands both adopted noms de plume, but Weber suggests that in Jeanneret's case, this was more than simply a fashionable gesture. "Charles-Edouard Jeanneret had long sought a means to counter the perpetual vagaries of his own mind," he writes. "With his new name, he invented a person who had a protective shell." Jeanneret was a romantic, a painter, a dreamer; Le Corbusier (he claimed that the name derived from an ancestor) was a realist: tough, obsessive, even unscrupulous, if the need arose.
"It so happens that today I exist, much more rapidly and more powerfully than I would ever have thought," he wrote a German friend. "I have created my identity on my own foundations, on my own terms." Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde? Of course, he could not keep the two identities separate.
The public man was always "Le Corbusier," but letters to his wife and mother are sometimes signed "Edouard," sometimes "Corbu." On the tomb that he designed for himself, he is "Charles-Edouard Jeanneret called Le Corbusier," although his wife is "Yvonne Le Corbusier."
There have been nearly 400 architectural monographs on Le Corbusier's work, by Weber's count, but this is the first full-length biography, and it's a good one. The author benefits from wide-ranging research. The German friend quoted above, for example, was William Ritter, a novelist and music critic with whom the young Le Corbusier had a long and intimate correspondence.
Weber also had unprecedented access to the architect's letters to his parents, especially his mother, to whom he wrote once a week for most of his adult life (she died at 99, only five years before him). Through these letters we meet a different Le Corbusier, not the hectoring, self-promoting missionary of modernism, but the concerned, dutiful son who describes his projects and achievements, clearly wanting his mother to be impressed - although she never is, quite. Le Corbusier's older brother, Albert, a musician, remained her favorite.
Le Corbusier's generation set out to remake architecture de novo. Most modernist architects were satisfied with following a simple formula: flat roofs, undecorated white walls, pipe railings. Le Corbusier always went further. His white-box villas sprouted voluptuous curves, colors appeared on walls and ceilings, and he introduced traditional materials like brick and fieldstone.
On my European tour in 1964 I saw as many of his buildings as I could. The earlier ones, like the Salvation Army headquarters in Paris and the Pavillon Suisse, a student dormitory, had the features associated with the International Style, but later works, like the chapel at Ronchamp and the vast Unité d'Habitation apartment block in Marseille, were different: cruder, more sculptural, almost primitive. An endearing rustic simplicity is a big part of Le Corbusier's appeal, whether he is building millionaires' residences or worker housing.
Weber's admiring biography brings Le Corbusier to life, unraveling many obscure aspects of a man who was famously secretive and, though he wrote some 50 books, divulged very little of himself.
The architect was a mass of contradictions: a hedonistic Calvinist, arrogant in public and often generous in private, elated and depressed by turns. We learn about the importance of music when he was a young man (his mother was a piano teacher), and his discovery of Louis Armstrong during a visit to Boston: "It was absolutely dazzling," the architect recounted, "strength and truth."
Le Corbusier traveled widely for his work, always alone, and while he was an attentive husband, he was not a faithful one. He had several affairs, briefly with Josephine Baker and for many years with Marguerite Tjader Harris, a Swedish-American heiress. His mistresses saw a different man than the pontificating visionary. To Baker he was a "simple man and gay." According to Tjader Harris, he "was not a complicated man, not even an intellectual, in the narrow meaning of the word. He lived by his faith and emotions."
Weber allows Le Corbusier to emerge as a fascinating if flawed human being. But Weber is not an architectural historian, and he sometimes has a narrow view of his subject's work. He devotes four chapters to Le Corbusier's masterpiece, Ronchamp, whose construction he describes as "impeccable engineering," seemingly unaware that the hidden and camouflaged structure, no less than the expressionistic form, actually represented a break with - if not a betrayal of - the modernist creed that Le Corbusier himself had proclaimed.
Weber's descriptions of buildings are sometimes over the top. The Villa Savoye is "a temple to the sun"; on the entrance ramp to the Mill-owners' Building in Ahmedabad, India, visitors arrive in "the sacred precincts of a modern temple." Weber calls L'Unité d'Habitation in Marseille "a turning point in the history of how human beings live," but fails to explain why, since, even if many similarly enormous apartment blocks were built, such innovations as very tiny apartments and an internal "commercial street" of shops never caught on.
When Jeanneret became Le Corbusier, he took on the persona not only of an astonishingly creative architect but also of an implacable, sometimes megalomaniacal city planner. Starting in 1925 with a hypothetical plan for rebuilding Paris that would have required demolishing 600 acres, or 24 hectares, of the city, Le Corbusier spent a large part of his working life traveling the world, imagining, proposing and promoting a new kind of urbanism in which tall buildings surrounded by landscaped open space replaced traditional blocks and streets. He made it sound scientific but the urban plans were no less fanciful than his building designs. Nevertheless, his planning ideas were influential. Unfortunately, as Lewis Mumford once pointed out, in practice, the Towers in a Park turned out to be Towers in a Parking Lot. On the whole, Weber gives his subject a pass on his failed social and urbanistic ideas. "For all his genius, Le Corbusier remained completely insensitive to certain aspects of human existence," he acknowledges. That is putting it mildly.
The wonderfully titled "Le Corbusier Le Grand," a 20-pound (roughly 10-kilogram) tome put together by the editors at Phaidon, is a giant scrapbook of the architect's life and work, including photographs, drawings, travel sketches and reproductions of Le Corbusier's paintings, as well as letters, newspaper clippings, travel documents, ID cards and other ephemera. It sounds confused and confusing, but it's a remarkably effective way to document the great man's life and work. Most architectural monographs include only carefully staged photographs of finished buildings. There are some of those here, but construction photos and impromptu views give a more rounded impression. The section on the Villa Savoye includes letters from the client, complaining about leaks and the architect, complaining about not being paid.
The generous format of "Le Corbusier Le Grand," 14 by 20 inches (about 35 by 50 centimeters), enables even well-known photographs to gain new meaning from being greatly enlarged. There are also many interesting portraits and informal snapshots of the architect, who peers out unblinkingly through his trademark circular glasses (he had monocular vision). The photos also reveal another contradiction: in public, the self-proclaimed bourgeois scourge was always attired in impeccably tailored suits.
The most carefree photographs of Le Corbusier are those taken in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin on the Côte d'Azur, where he and his wife spent a month every summer. On a site overlooking the Mediterranean, the most famous architect in the world built a cabanon, or cabin, about 12 feet square or 1 meter square, a rustic structure that was a cross between a monk's cell and a mountain hut of his native Jura. This was a home reduced, as Weber evocatively writes, "to diamond-hard truths." One senses that here, at least, Edouard could shed the protective shell of Le Corbusier, and be himself.
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