Technology to meet Paris COP promise falls short … – UOL

• Joel Saget / AFP

  

The promises that signaled countries that will be in Paris, in the next two weeks, to reduce emissions inevitably fall short of the need to solve the problem of climate change.

But many political leaders gathered here-including governors, mayors and provinciais- secretaries are pushing for more aggressive cuts. The dozen, they are subscribing to voluntary agreements committing their jurisdictions to faster and deeper reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases than promised by their national governments.

“We are not acting fast enough,” He said in an interview the governor of California, Jerry Brown, who is helping to lead the effort. . “We need to do more”

All of this raises a provocative question: how would a really ambitious plan to deal with climate change

Despite the intensity of the debate about global warming the question has long been considered theoretical and few people took the time to study the potential steps for a “deep decarbonization” -surely not with the level of detail required for a concrete plan.

Recently, it began change. But recent studies make clear how difficult it will probably be a worldwide transition to a clean energy system.

“The arithmetic is really brutal,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, a prominent economist at Columbia University. “We are in a situation so terrible that every country needs to accomplish this transformation, otherwise not work.”

Sachs helped start what is perhaps the most serious effort to draw up a detailed roadmap for energy transition: the Pathways Project for Decarbonization Deep, based in Paris and New York. Over the past two years, the effort enlisted teams of 16 countries, responsible for much of global emissions, to develop these plans.

Analysts have used conservative assumptions regarding current technologies and costs. They also assumed that developed countries would be reluctant to make big changes in their lifestyles -that people would continue insisting on transportation, refrigerators, electric light and so forth- and that poor countries would continue seeking higher standards of living, requiring more energy.

Experts also ruled energy miracles, as technologies such as nuclear fusion, which can ultimately help greatly if they become available, but largely remain on the drawing board. “If we could not put a helmet and visit the field in technology, at least in a pilot stage, then would not be included in our analysis,” said Ben Haley, a senior consultant at Energy and Environmental Economics, a consulting company involved in the work .

With these assumptions, the experts focused on a specific issue: the emissions can be reduced enough between now and 2050 to meet the international target set to avoid the worst effects of climate change

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“can still be done -but can spend shaving,” said Guido Schmidt-Traub, CEO of Solutions Network for Sustainable Development, who helped organize the effort.

The technologies fall short

Perhaps the most crucial individual completion of the project is that the currently available technologies, despite good enough to start the transition probably are not good enough to complete it.

This means that the experts who have long championed a more intensive program of clean energy research are right. The analysis by the 16 countries suggests that many technologies such as electric cars and wind turbines at sea, became better and cheaper.

Solar energy provides a great example, with the price of panels falling 80% to Over the past decade, a direct result of subsidies and other policies to create a larger market. In many places, solar energy is still more expensive than energy produced from fossil fuels, but the difference has dropped considerably.

In recent years wind turbines also proved big winners. They provide almost 5% of the electricity in the United States, and a handful of states and some smaller countries, this number rose to double digits. Wind energy is so abundant in Texas that a company there is giving away electricity at night.

The good news about the wind and solar energy have inspired claims that could afford all the transition charge energy. Mark Z. Jacobson, an engineer at Stanford University, drew attention to a conclusion that the whole world could operate with 100% renewable energy by 2050.

But these scenarios involve an extraordinary effort. The Jacobson plans would require, among many other things, that 156 000 wind turbines to be built beyond American shores in the next 35 years, and twice that on land. In 20 years of efforts, European countries have managed to build about 3,000 turbines at sea.

Jacobson cites often the mobilization of the United States during World War II as an example of what can be done by a company determined. But other experts, this same argument points to the political and economic impracticality of his plans.

“I just do not see a mobilization like the Second World War going for something other than a world war” said Jesse Jenkins, an energy analyst MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). “We will not. So the question is, what do we do?”

The scenarios presented by the Pathways Project for Deep Decarbonization follow in part the Jacobson plans to ask for substantial amounts of renewable energy. But these scenarios also suggest that the energy transition would be easier and cheaper with further technology options, including some that are not of the environmental movement liking.

For example, in some countries with growing demand energy, such as China, the survey indicated that nuclear energy was essential to be held within a rigid target emissions. Jenkins said that new nuclear power plants would also be required in some states.

And many experts believe that the United States, while not building many new nuclear power plants would be foolish to shut the existing, already providing 19% of electricity in the country with minimal emissions. But lately some of them were closed occasionally for security fears, but mainly due to low energy prices caused by the abundance of natural gas.

The research also suggests that to meet strict targets, some countries would have to continue burning natural charcoal or gas to generate power by capturing the carbon dioxide emitted by smokestacks, compressing it and injecting it deep underground.

Governments argue for decades the need for this technology, known as capture and carbon storage. But devoted little effort to develop it, so that has not progressed beyond the demonstration scale, although a few projects are starting to come on stream. Environmental groups are wary of the technology and Germany, one of the most determined countries fight global warming, largely decided not to use it.

Perhaps the conclusion that draws more attention in the Paths Project for Decarbonization Deep is the governments could ruin the energy transition by not plan long-term enough. Most countries are establishing 10 and 15 years of goals that can be met with incremental changes.

But this almost guarantees that the most difficult problems, how to improve the carbon capture technology will be other treaties later to meet the long-term goal of zero emissions, the researchers point out.

“When we get the difficult things we have lost too much time,” said Schmidt-Traub. Instead, governments need to establish where they want to be in 2050, he said, and then work backwards to trace the necessary technological way, while remaining open to new inventions.

Translator: George El Khouri Andolfato