Fossil
Fuel Train Heads Into Overdrive
By Stephen Leahy
10 November, 2007
Inter
Press Service
BROOKLIN, Canada,
Nov 9 (IPS) - Today's skyrocketing fossil fuel use will accelerate
far faster in the coming decades, driving oil prices higher and virtually
guaranteeing catastrophic climate change in the decades to come, energy
experts say.
Emissions of greenhouse gases
could increase a staggering 57 percent by 2030 if current trends continue,
and with the strong growth of coal and oil energy use in India and China,
the International Energy Agency (IEA) reported this week.
"If we get that kind
of increase it will be societal suicide," says Gavin Schmidt, a
climate researcher at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies at Columbia
University.
"It really is a huge
increase," Schmidt told IPS.
Even the normally sanguine
IEA -- an independent energy advisor to rich countries -- is worried.
It calls these findings "alarming" in its World Energy Outlook
2007 report both in terms of climate change and energy security.
"If governments don't
change their policies, oil and gas imports, coal use and greenhouse
gas emission are set to grow exponentially through 2030 ... these trends
could threaten energy security and accelerate climate change,"
said Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the IEA, in a statement.
To put the IEA projection
in context, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
recommended global reductions in emissions of 70 percent from 1990 levels
by 2050 to lessen the risks of dangerous climate change. It bears repeating:
the IPCC recommendation is to push global emission levels 70 percent
lower than they were in 1990.
The gap between where we
should be going and where we may end up threatens to become so large
that Nobuo calls the IPCC target "scientific fiction".
The IPCC's "stabilisation
target" is between 450 to 500 parts per million of carbon dioxide
(CO2) in the atmosphere, which is likely to keep the global average
temperature increase to around 2 degrees C.
"That target is a basically
a best guess," says Schmidt.
There are many factors at
play that make such predictions difficult. Among these are both negative
and positive feedbacks, where 450 ppm could translate into a 4.0 degree
C rise -- or maybe only 1.5 degrees, he said.
The IEA report calculates
that the current trend of skyrocketing growth in fossil fuel use, coal
in particular, will drive the global average temperature up 3.0 degrees
by 2030 and ultimately climb to 6.0 degrees C in the following decades.
A number of scientific and
economic reports predict that any increase over 2.0 degrees C will create
a chaotic world of constant crisis. Floods and droughts will affect
more than a billion people, hundreds of millions will starve and as
many more will become environmental refugees banging on the doors of
Europe, the United States, Australia and other rich nations. At the
same time, the global economy will suffer tens of billions of dollars
in losses.
Even in the IEA's most optimistic
scenario, where governments accomplish current promised carbon reductions,
emissions would rise by 27 percent by 2030.
Achieving the IPCC stabilisation
target will require "exceptionally vigorous policy action",
the IEA report concludes.
"Urgent action is needed
if greenhouse gas concentrations are to be stabilised at a level that
would prevent dangerous interference with the climate system,"
it says.
The reason for the bleak
outlook is that emerging giants China and India, which account for most
of the increase in energy demand, will likely use CO2-laden coal as
their primary energy source.
The report warns: "...coal
sees the biggest increase in demand in absolute terms, jumping by 73
percent between 2005 and 2030" with China and India accounting
for 80 percent of that increase.
In just the past year alone,
China has built enough new coal power plants to meet India's and Britain's
energy needs combined, says Joanna Lewis, a senior international fellow
and energy expert at the U.S.-based Pew Centre on Global Climate Change.
Such is the scale of China's
huge energy demands that "despite meeting aggressive renewable
energy targets, the coal power sector has become even more dominant,"
Lewis told IPS. "The IEA paints a very scary picture."
However, Lewis notes that
IEA projections have been wrong in the past, most notably underestimating
energy use by China and India. In addition, many other factors such
as political instability or economic recessions could change the details
of these projections -- but not the overall trends.
Moreover, technologies are
currently available to achieve the stabilisation target, Lewis said.
The IEA's World Energy Outlook
fails to incorporate substantial expansion of renewable energy and energy
efficiency improvements in its scenarios, says the international environmental
group Greenpeace.
Making wide-ranging investments
in renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies could stabilise
carbon dioxide emissions from China's and India's burgeoning economies
and return carbon dioxide emissions to current levels by 2050, says
Greenpeace energy consultant Sven Teske.
China and India already produce
nearly a quarter of the world's renewable electricity, Teske said in
a statement.
Industrialised countries
have to do their part and rapidly reduce their CO2 emissions 30 percent
below 1990 levels by 2020, instead of the 15 percent emissions increase
shown in the IEA projections, he said.
It is important to remember
that energy use is not the real problem, it is carbon emissions. Carbon
sequestration technologies -- removing carbon and storing it -- do exist,
but they are very expensive, says Schmidt. However, with the higher
oil and energy prices forecast by the IEA, investments in using and
developing sequestration technologies could decouple carbon emissions
from the use of fossil fuels by 2030.
Recognising the urgency,
the IEA report says that if the world is to avoid dangerous climate
change, it will require immediate policy and technological transformation
"on an unprecedented scale".
Copyright © 2007 IPS-Inter
Press Service
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