USA, Iceland:

President of Iceland Stresses Importance of Sustainability (The Cornell Daily Sun)

Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, (right).
(Courtesy Kelly Yang / Sun News Photography Editor)

The President of Iceland, Ólafur Ragnar Grímsson, told an audience at Cornell University in upstate New York about Icelandic sustainability practices and the effects of global climate change on Friday as part of the Einaudi Center’s Foreign Policy Distinguished Speaker Series.

Grímsson encouraged individual countries to take advantage of clean energy resources. Though he said he supported the use of solar and wind power, his speech focused on the use of geothermal energy — power derived from the heat found beneath the earth’s crust.

“[One tenth of a] percent of the stored heat inside our planet would satisfy the global energy consumption for 10,000 years,” he said.

Grímsson added that he believes Iceland is an international model for sustainability, with its low levels of carbon emissions per capita. According to Grímsson, while Iceland used to suffer under untenable pollution, the use of sustainable resources like geothermal energy has enabled Iceland to dramatically reduce its use of fossil fuels.

“The end result is an extraordinary transformation,” he said. “But, it started in a country where the capital, Reykjavik, at the time I was born, closed every day under a black cloud of smoke from the coal fires and the fossil fuels.”

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