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The Mission: To build a world where individuals, companies, and governments work together in an atmosphere of transparency and accountability to make a positive impact on global energy and environmental security.
According to Greek legend, after Prometheus created man, Zeus gave him the task of determining the means by which men should give sacrifice to the gods. Prometheus killed an ox and put its parts into two piles. In the first pile he had all the best pieces of meat hidden in the skin and stomach of the ox. It looked meager. In the second, he placed the bones and less desirable parts under a covering of rich fat. It was clearly the more attractive pile, holding promise of a better future for the gods. Zeus, of course, chose the second. As a result, until the end of time the gods must be content with a sacrifice of bones and fat—or so the story goes.
Of course, if Zeus had been a little more circumspect and taken the time to investigate his choices, he would have easily avoided Prometheus’ trap. The obvious lesson is that we should’t judge our options based on their surface appearance. Rather, we should take the time to thoroughly analyze the choices before us.
In response to the upcoming energy crisis and the threat of global warming, governments, corporations, and other non-governmental actors are developing policies and technologies that promise to provide clean and affordable energy while reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Indeed, there are already hundreds of international treaties, dozens of partnership agreements, scores of pledges found in political resolutions, and many other commitments all promising to advance sustainable energy technologies and policies.
While these commitments appear to be promising, we need to discern how effectively they have been implemented and to what degree they actually achieve progress towards sustainable energy goals. We need, in short, to ensure we don’t fall into the same trap that Zeus did of accepting things at face value, and suffering adverse consequences as a result.
With generous support from the Argosy Foundation, CEES has launched a project that will help mere mortals look past the veil of rhetoric to see just what, if anything, is happening as a result of the international sustainable energy commitments entered into by governments, industry and NGOs.
Entitled the International Project on Energy Commitments and Compliance (IPECC), the project will build what might best be called an online controlled-access wiki-system to track and monitor the implementation of international sustainable energy commitments. The concept of using a controlled and collaborative online system in this way is without real precedent. Projects like the well-known Wikipedia—a free online, collaboratively authored encyclopedia—have harnessed the power of collaborative authoring in a way that is truly groundbreaking, but they have received extensive criticism regarding the quality and accuracy of the information they present. They are truly "open" in the sense that they allow literally anyone to contribute and edit data with few or no restrictions.
Within the context of international energy security and climate change, IPECC is meant to take the idea of collaborative authoring to the next level. It will circumvent the quality and accuracy problems that plague the fully “open” model by only allowing approved experts to submit information into the system. Additionally, these submissions will enter into the public website only after they are reviewed and accepted by a project editor. “It is extremely difficult to obtain reliable facts and information pertaining to the implementation and impact of the agreements in our database,” explained Dr. Lakshman Guruswamy, CEES Director and CU Law’s Nicholas Doman Professor of International Environmental Law. “Our distributed online system will enable experts including academics, government personnel, international institutions, and civil society representatives to provide us with that information for both hard and soft law instruments."
Despite the “closed” nature of the system, the public will still play a critical role in providing information. Each commitment being tracked by the system will have a public page in which registered members of the public (registration being free) can add their own information and perspectives regarding the commitment.
IPECC information will be made easily accessible to everyone. Among other things, the public will be able to search for particular instruments, read the full text of any instrument, compare instruments, track changes in the database, and even contribute to an open discussion forum.
By making this information freely available to the public, IPECC will help to establish an environment of transparency and accountability with respect to these commitments. It will enable governments, corporations, and decision-makers of all stripes to see what is and is not working, and to glean lessons from past failures and successes that can be used to strategically improve other sustainable energy-related efforts. It will ensure that we end up with more than just fat and bones.
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