Filed under : Scitizen >> Earth & Environment >> Climate Change >> $10.5 Trillion by 2030: the Number that Should be at the Heart of Copenhagen Climate Talks
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$10.5 Trillion by 2030: the Number that Should be at the Heart of Copenhagen Climate Talks
9 Dec, 2009 02:08 pm
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Reduce text sizeForget 80% by 2050 and 17% by 2020. Time to stop fixating on 450 ppm vs 350 ppm. As UN climate talks kick off today in Copenhagen, Denmark, there's only one number really worth the world's attention: $10.5 trillion. That's the additional investment required between now and 2030 to put the world's energy system on a lower-carbon path, according to the world energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency.
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So for those following the progress in Copenhagen, keep one number -- $10.5 trillion - and just one phrase on your mind: Show Me the Money!
Enough With the Targets and Timetables
In the days leading up to the UN climate summit beginning today in Copenhagen, the focus has been on pronouncements from world leaders establishing various national targets to reduce or curb the growth of the carbon dioxide emissions principally driving global warming.
In July of this year, the world's 17 largest economies declared support for "an aspirational global goal" to reduce emissions by 50% by 2050. Then, the world watched in recent weeks as first the United States, then China and most recently Brazil and India put their emissions pledges on the table. Each would cut their emissions some amount by some date, with the developed countries outlining targets for absolute cuts to CO2 emissions and most developing countries, including China and India, announcing reductions in the carbon intensity of their economies (aka CO2 per GDP).
The withering array of different baselines and methods for counting cuts has left plenty confused as to where the world now stands as we enter the global climate talks this week.
But where do all these targets and timetables get us?
Whether you think the world should aim for 450 ppm or 350 ppm, 80% by 2050 or 50% by 2050, upshot is pretty much the same: the world must drive net global greenhouse gas emissions as rapidly as possible towards zero. The real question then, is how to get there. And that is a question that tireless debate over emissions targets, timetables and ppm gets us no closer to answering.
The obsession with targets and timetables, both at the national and global level, obscures and diverts attention from the critical and fundamental reality underlying any successful global effort to reduce carbon dioxide emissions. A revolutionary transformation of the global energy system requiring trillions of dollars of shared investment in clean energy technology will be necessary to meet the global climate objectives being discussed in Copenhagen.
As Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Christopher Green and co-author Isabel Galiana recently wrote in Nature,
"The fixation on near-term targets for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions at the climate meeting in Copenhagen has resulted in insufficient attention towards the technological means of achieving them."
10.5 Trillion Dollars by 2030: The only number that matters
In November, the International Energy Agency (IEA) released its 2009 World Energy Outlook in an effort to provide a boost to international climate negotiations by "detailing the practical steps needed for a sustainable energy future as part of a global climate deal."
The IEA predicts what the world energy mix will look like in 2030 under business-as-usual (what they call their "Reference Scenario"). Under the Reference Scenario, global energy demand increases by 40% from now until 2030. Absent significant global efforts to increase the utilization of clean energy technologies, fossil fuels will account for more than three quarters of the additional global demand. Significantly, the large majority of additional global energy demand--over 90 percent of the increase--will come from developing countries, with China and India alone accounting for half.
There is little doubt that such a scenario would be insufficient to keep the cumulative global carbon dioxide emissions under 450 parts per million. A business-as-usual energy future would also propagate a "persistently high level of spending on oil and gas imports"; the United States would still be dependent on imported oil, with the attendant negative implications for U.S. energy independence and national security.
The IEA also outlines a "450 Scenario", a future energy path that would limit the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gas emissions to 450 parts per million. In the 450 Scenario, 60% of global electricity production comes from clean energy sources; 37% renewable, 18% nuclear, and 5% from plants fitted with carbon capture and storage.
Achieving this scenario will require a revolutionary transformation of the global energy system. Investment and innovation will be required across a wide range of technologies, almost all of which must be improved to become cheaper and more reliable in order to accelerate the pace of global clean tech adoption and emissions cuts.
This worldwide energy technology transformation, according to the IEA, will require additional investments in energy efficiency and low-carbon energy technologies on the order of $10.5 trillion from now until 2030, above and beyond investments in energy infrastructure already included in their business-as-usual scenario.
This level of additional clean energy investment, at roughly $500 billion per year over the next two decades, is far more than the world spends today on clean technology. And until we have cheaper and better clean energy technologies, the costs of meeting our climate objectives will continue to be excessively high, creating real, ongoing political hurdles and slowing the pace of clean energy adoption.
Indeed, the costs of climate mitigation are one of the major barriers constraining efforts to successfully address climate change. That is why the Breakthrough Institute has consistently advocated for a proactive clean energy technology strategy to make clean energy sources cheap, thereby cutting the costs of their widespread adoption. As the IEA has made clear, clean and cheap energy is needed to power sustainable global development, particularly to meet the massive demand for new, affordable energy sources in the developing world, where the bulk of new energy infrastructure investments will be made in coming decades.
All of this exposes an ironic truth: we will never reduce global carbon emissions on the scale necessary if the world continues to obsess about targets for reducing carbon emissions To succeed, the world must instead focus a healthy obsession on the massive shared global investments in clean technology needed to get the world running on low-carbon energy.
How to Judge the Outcome of Copenhagen
The important question in international climate negotiations should not be which countries are promising to reduce their emissions by which level. As similar commitments under the Kyoto Protocol reveal, these emissions pledges can easily become empty promises, and creative accounting offers plenty of ways to "comply" with these targets while avoiding the real task of fundamentally transforming the way the world makes and uses energy.
The only truly important metric is the impact Copenhagen has on the shared sums the global community will invest to build a new clean energy economy, how and where the funds are allocated, and where the investment will come from.
Without real, concrete strategies to drive over half a trillion dollars in new global annual investment in clean technology over the coming decades, our critical climate objective will remain far out of reach. And we will no doubt see world leaders continue to make empty promises that may provide a brief moment of catharsis for many climate advocates, while doing little to solve climate change.
$10.5 trillion dollars by 2030. If Copenhagen doesn't get us closer to closing this massive clean energy technology investment gap, it will have failed the global community, plain and simple.
By Jesse Jenkins and Devon Swezey
Originally published at the Breakthrough Institute and Watthead
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Although apparently brief, the suspension of the Copenhagen climate conference after a walkout by the Group of 77 developing countries confirms that the talks are as much about money as about healing the world's climate. It's not just that the G77 wants the Kyoto limits on the emissions of developed countries enforced, while leaving their own emissions uncapped; it also wants the developed world to kick in sizable sums--much bigger than the 2.4 billion Euros per year offered by the EU--to cover the improvements in energy efficiency and renewable energy that would enable them to tackle the growth of their own emissions. There's a solid argument there, though it is not the guilt-based logic of "carbon debt" that I explored a few weeks ago.
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I'll discuss the willingness of developing countries to undertake significant emissions reductions on their own that tangibly reduce the growth of their emissions in the near-term (e.g., to 2020) and lay the foundation for even deeper cuts in the medium-term.
Have you heard that we're getting new neighbors? Demographers expect that the number of people living on earth - now about 6.8 billion - will grow to between 8 and 11 billion by 2050. Whether population tops out at the high or the low end of those projections will have a huge impact on climate change. So population control is again claiming a place on the environmental agenda.
Last Thursday, an editorial in the Wall St. Journal referred to a paper in the latest issue of Science entitled, "Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error", which concludes that the manner in which the greenhouse gas impacts of biofuels are currently assessed fails to account for significant emissions that occur outside the envelope normally drawn around an ethanol or biodiesel plant and the farms that supply it with feedstock. And if that omission weren't glaring enough, I ran across another instance in which regulators appear to be turning a blind eye to the full impact of another popular option for addressing climate change, electric vehicles.
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Even "moderate" cuts in greenhouse gas emissions may be sufficient to avoid the most catastrophic consequences of climate change, says new MIT study. But only if those moderate cuts start now, not in 2020, where many emissions targets take initial aim. Without swift action, even more aggressive cuts may not be enough to stop extreme climate disruption.
I feel like an idiot for not seeing this one coming from either China or India. It's so painfully obvious, in hindsight, that I have to wonder how anyone who follows energy and environmental issues closely could have failed to predict it. What am I babbling about? China is now saying that the endlessly discussed target of keeping global warming below 2°C is not such a big deal.
Yvo de Boer closes Bonn talks with stark warning that the current pace of the Copenhagen negotiations remains far too slow.
A recent survey found that there was a significant interest in reducing greenhouse gas emissions, but that investment decisions were made without close attention in the emissions trading scheme market. Rather, investment decisions were guided by expectations about the long term development of overall energy costs.
The Sydney Morning Herald reported late last week that research by Australian National University scientist Andrew Macintosh indicates that, based on most industrialized nations' stated mid-term commitments, limiting warming to 2 degrees Celsius simply "won't work."
Researchers working on a joint World Agroforestry Centre-United Nations Environment Programme project suggest that integrating agroforestry in farming systems on a massive scale would create a vital reservoir for carbon storage. No less than a billion hectares of developing country farmland is suitable for conversion to carbon agroforestry projects, according to Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates.
An important recent paper looked at the links between economic prosperity and carbon footprint.[1] It compared the average emissions per head in 73 different countries at all different stages in development. Unsurprisingly, it showed that richer countries have much higher greenhouse gas outputs. The interesting and somewhat depressing finding is that a country with 10% higher GDP per head than another will generally have emissions about 8% higher. The correlation is strong - very few countries diverge much from the norm for their level of income.
Proposals to reduce global warming through giant engineering projects or so-called geoengineering abound. Almost all are in the idea stage. But even if they were ready to deploy today, they would be dangerous for the planet, counterproductive for our energy future and unfair to the public.
Yesterday the International Energy Agency (IEA) released their much anticipated (and previously leaked) World Energy Outlook 2008.
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