An online article from the BBC News reports that the world is headed for a long-term temperature increase unless countries change their priorities. The International Energy Agency (IEA) announced the findings and said that emissions would double from 2009 to 2050 if current trends hold. The report Tracking Clean Energy Progress says: “The current trend of increasing emissions is unbroken with no stabilisation of GHG concentrations in sight.” It projects that if this continues, energy use will almost double in 2050, compared with 2009, and total GHG emissions will rise even more. Long-term temperature rise is likely to be at least 6 degrees Celsius.
In addition to presenting the report findings at the Clean Energy Ministerial, a forum for 23 major countries, the deputy director of the IEA, Richard Jones, gave an assessment of the use of 11 technologies to reduce emissions. Only renewable energy, especially from wind and solar, was on track. Fuel conservation, electric cars and industry were only partially on track. Other technologies, such as biofuels for transport, building efficiency, nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) in industry and power generation, and cleaner conventional coal were not on track.
Carbon capture and storage (CCS), the technology in which carbon dioxide emissions are captured and stored where they will not enter the atmosphere, is described as “woefully off pace”. Under the IEA’s scenario for stabilising global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius, CCS is projected as providing 19% of global emissions cuts. Mr Jones said that 65 CCS plants are on the drawing board, but not one is operating at scale. Only four small projects carry out sufficient monitoring to demonstrate permanent storage of carbon dioxide.
Mr Jones said that one bright spot had been the emergence of wind and solar photovoltaics. In both technologies, costs are plummeting as firms scale up production prompted by government policy. Globally, more than $1 trillion has been invested in clean energy, and in Europe investment in renewables now surpasses that for fossil fuels. But the meeting’s chairman, the U.K. Energy Secretary Ed Davey, warned that renewables investment fell significantly in the first quarter of 2012, and added: “The risk is that recession delays low-carbon investment, leaving us a high-carbon legacy even when the global economy recovers, making meaningful action on climate change more expensive.”
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