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World Energy Outlook 2008 ArchivesIEA Report Confirms Clean and Cheap Energy Needed to Power Global Development
Without clean, affordable and massively scalable energy sources, the world will be stuck in the Development Trap: we'll be forced to either sacrifice our climate and ecological security in the name of global development or condemn billions of global citizens to poverty in the name of climate protection.
The stark tone of the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2008 is a dramatic departure from their normally staid and frequently rosy projections about the world's energy future (I presented highlights from the piece in this proceeding post). The report's opening statement that current world energy trends are "patently unsustainable" will no doubt receive the most attention in headlines across the blogosphere and mainstream news. But in this post, I want to delve deeper into the key statement that follows it: "It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply." While the environmental community focuses primarily on the latter of those two concerns, the IEA appropriately recognizes that the future of human prosperity depends on our ability to tackle both challenges: decarbonizing the energy supply and providing ample and affordable energy supplies to power global development. In short, the IEA confirms what is perhaps the central challenge of the 21st century: developing clean and affordable energy sources to power the globe. Continue reading "IEA Report Confirms Clean and Cheap Energy Needed to Power Global Development" » World's Energy Watchdog Warns Current Energy Trends are "Patently Unsustainable"
Highlights from the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook 2008
The world's energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency, released their annual World Energy Outlook report today, and it starts out with a bang. The first paragraph of the IEA report reads: "The world's energy system is at a crossroads. Current global trends in energy supply and consumption are patently unsustainable - environmentally, economically, socially. But that can - and must - be altered; there's still time to change the road we're on. It is not an exaggeration to claim that the future of human prosperity depends on how successfully we tackle the two central energy challenges facing us today: securing the supply of reliable and affordable energy; and effecting a rapid transformation to low-carbon, efficient and environmentally benign system of energy supply. What is needed is nothing short of an energy revolution." IEA World Energy Outlook: Understating the Mitigation Challenge
Breakthrough Senior Fellow and Climate Science Expert Roger Pielke, jr., published an article in Nature explaining how the Nobel Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change consistently and significantly underestimate greenhouse gas emission predictions. Here he explains how the same inaccuracies show up in the International Energy Agency's World Energy Outlook, released yesterday.
Cross posted by Prometheus Last spring along with Tom Wigley and Chris Green we published an article in Nature (PDF) arguing that the IPCC had underestimated the magnitude of the mitigation challenge. Today I'd like to illustrate how the IEA's World Energy Outlook, published yesterday, also dramatically underestimates the magnitude of the mitigation challenge. The figure below is taken from the IEA's publicly-available packet of key graphs (here in PDF). I have annotated it as follows to illustrate how the IEA has significantly underestimated the mitigation challenge. Continue reading "IEA World Energy Outlook: Understating the Mitigation Challenge" » IEA World Energy Outlook: Focus on Climate Stabilization
Cross posted from Prometheus
Today the IEA released its World Energy Outlook 2008. Here are some interesting excerpts from the Executive Summary here in PDF: First, the IEA comes down clearly on the debate over whether stabilization at 450 ppm can be achieved with existing technologies. They say no way: Continue reading "IEA World Energy Outlook: Focus on Climate Stabilization" » |
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