The world needs a massive, concerted effort to develop the technology needed to successfully fight climate change, says a Canadian economist.
But right now, the world is seriously underestimating the nature of the challenge, Christopher Green of Montreal's McGill University and two American colleagues argue in a commentary to be published Thursday in the journal Nature.
Green, Tom Wigley and Roger Pilke Jr., the lead author, point their fingers at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's reports of last year.
"The IPCC implicitly assumes that the bulk of the challenge of reducing future emissions will occur in the absence of climate policies," they wrote.
"We believe that these assumptions are optimistic at best and unachievable at worst, potentially seriously underestimating the scale of the technological challenge associated with stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations."
Green said the models underestimate the problem, because they have built in an assumption that the technology will get better.
They calculate that the IPCC assumes the majority of the challenge -- between 57 per cent and 96 per cent -- of stabilizing carbon dioxide-equivalent levels at 500 parts per million can be met that way.
Developing world is key
But while energy efficiency has been improving in developed economies (even though total emissions have continued to rise in Canada and the U.S.), carbon energy use has been exploding in developing ones like China and India.
For example, China is estimated to be building almost one coal-fired power plant per week to meet the energy demand created by its rapidly industrializing economy. Some studies have suggested that 25 per cent of China's surging greenhouse gas emissions can be attributed to producing products for export.
"Because of these dramatic changes in the global economy it is likely that we have only just begun to experience the surge in global energy use associated with ongoing rapid development," they wrote.
"Such trends are in stark contrast to the optimism of the near-future IPCC projections and seem unlikely to alter course soon. The world is on a development and energy path that will bring with it a surge in carbon-dioxide emissions -- a surge that can only end with a transformation of global energy systems."
From a policy standpoint, "we should be emphasizing the development of energy technologies ... that both greatly raise energy efficiency and those which provide vast resources of emission-free energy," Green told CTV.ca.
"These issues have been raised before, but they really haven't gotten enough airing," he said.
British author George Monbiot argued in a May 1, 2007 commentary in the Guardian newspaper about the effort required.
""We must open immediate negotiations with China, which threatens to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases by November this year, partly because it manufactures many of the products we use. We must work out how much it would cost to decarbonize its growing economy, and help to pay," Monbiot said.
"We need a major diplomatic offensive -- far more pressing than it has been so far -- to persuade the United States to do what it did in 1941, and turn the economy around on a dime. But above all we need to show that we remain serious about fighting climate change, by setting the targets the science demands."
Green supported that view, but admitted the technological problem of finding clean energy is a huge one.
"Can it be solved? Yes ... There are lots of brains in the world, and they've got to be mobilized to do it."
In Canada, Green thought the Conservative government was off to a good start with its recent $240-million announcement to fund a carbon storage project.
"Showing it can be done ... will be an enormous demonstration project," and one that's important to the world, he said.
