Efforts to mitigate climate change must target energy efficiency

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.uea.ac.uk/mac/comm/media/press/2012/October/climate-end-use

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Efforts to mitigate climate change must target energy efficiency[/font]

Fri, 26 Oct 2012

[font size=3]Much more must be done to develop energy efficient cars, buildings and domestic appliances to address climate change – according to new research from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia.

A report published today in Nature Climate Change shows that twice as much effort is being spent on developing energy supply technologies - such as new power stations - than is spent on improving the efficiency with which energy is used.

The research shows that efficient end-use technologies have the potential to contribute large emission reductions and provide higher social returns on investment - so the imbalance in current innovation efforts must be redressed to mitigate climate change.

Dr Charlie Wilson, of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at UEA and an affiliated researcher with the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), led the study with an international team of scientists from Austria and the USA.

http://vimeo.com/52217151

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http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/nclimate1576

[Indydem]

1. Make energy efficiency upgrades 100% tax refundable.

Problem solved.

LED's, CFLs Insulation, windows and doors will fy off the shelves and millions of Americans will be kept busy doing the work.

[OKIsItJustMe]

2. Hmmm… Interesting idea, but…

Then, we would need to raise all of that money somewhere else…

[Indydem]

3. So wait?

We have no issues running a deficit to cause wars, to give to oil companies in subsidy, to pay for things no one needs or wants, to bail out car companies BUT we don't have 100 billion to throw at SAVING THE GOD DAMN PLANET?

[OKIsItJustMe]

5. Once again, an interesting response

Do you really think 100 Billion dollars will be sufficient to save the planet? Personally, I’m skeptical.

[Indydem]

6. It's a hell of a start.

Let's see what happens.

[AverageJoe90]

9. Exactly.

This problem may be a challenge, but it's not quite the Herculean task that it's been made out to be, either. (the .1% just wants us to think that it is!)

[OKIsItJustMe]

12. Not quite Herculean

Which challenge do you find sub-Herculean?

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/429690/why-we-cant-solve-big-problems/

[font face=Serif][font size=5]Why We Can’t Solve Big Problems[/font]

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[font size=3]Sometimes we fail to solve big problems because our institutions have failed. In 2010, less than 2 percent of the world's energy consumption was derived from advanced renewable sources such as wind, solar, and biofuels. (The most common renewable sources of energy are still hydroelectric power and the burning of biomass, which means wood and cow dung.) The reason is economic: coal and natural gas are cheaper than solar and wind, and petroleum is cheaper than biofuels. Because climate change is a real and urgent problem, and because the main cause of global warming is carbon dioxide released as a by-product of burning fossil fuels, we need renewable energy technologies that can compete on price with coal, natural gas, and petroleum. At the moment, they don't exist.

Happily, economists, technologists, and business leaders agree on what national policies and international treaties would spur the development and broad use of such alternatives. There should be a significant increase in public investment for energy research and development, which has fallen in the United States from a height of 10 percent in 1979 to 2 percent of total R&D spending, or just $5 billion a year. (Two years ago, Bill Gates, Xerox chief executive Ursula Burns, GE chief executive Jeff Immelt, and John Doerr, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist, called for a threefold increase in public investments in energy research.) There should be some kind of price on carbon, now a negative externality, whether it is a transparent tax or some more opaque market mechanism. There should be a regulatory framework that treats carbon dioxide emissions as pollution, setting upper limits on how much pollution companies and nations can release. Finally, and least concretely, energy experts agree that even if there were more investment in research, a price on carbon, and some kind of regulatory framework, we would still lack one vital thing: sufficient facilities to demonstrate and test new energy technologies. Such facilities are typically too expensive for private companies to build. But without a practical way to collectively test and optimize innovative energy technologies, and without some means to share the risks of development, alternative energy sources will continue to have little impact on energy use, given that any new technology will be more expensive at first than fossil fuels.

Less happily, there is no hope of any U.S. energy policy or international treaties that reflect this intellectual consensus, because one political party in the United States is reflexively opposed to industrial regulations and affects to doubt that human beings are causing climate change, and because the emerging markets of China and India will not reduce their emissions without offset benefits that the industrialized nations cannot provide. Without international treaties or U.S. policy, there will probably be no competitive alternative sources of energy in the near future, barring what is sometimes called an "energy miracle."

Sometimes big problems that had seemed technological turn out not to be so, or could more plausibly be solved through other means. Until recently, famines were understood to be caused by failures in food supply (and therefore seemed addressable by increasing the size and reliability of the supply, potentially through new agricultural or industrial technologies). But Amartya Sen, a Nobel laureate economist, has shown that famines are political crises that catastrophically affect food distribution. (Sen was influenced by his own experiences. As a child he witnessed the Bengali famine of 1943: three million displaced farmers and poor urban dwellers died unnecessarily when wartime hoarding, price gouging, and the colonial government's price–controlled acquisitions for the British army made food too expensive. Sen demonstrated that food production was actually higher in the famine years.) Technology can improve crop yields or systems for storing and transporting food; better responses by nations and nongovernmental organizations to emerging famines have reduced their number and severity. But famines will still occur because there will always be bad governments.

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[XemaSab]

10. So much word

n/t

[NoOneMan]

4. Still wrong IMO

"Developing" these cars, buildings and appliances still requires immediate energy investment to fuel the production, thereby increasing our short term energy expenditure until the car/building/appliance pays its self off (what, in 30 years)! And when I say "increasing" our short-term energy needs, I really mean that gap is going to be filled with an increase burning of coal and oil.

What if our problem of over-production can not simply be cured by producing more stuff?

Yes, I am all in favor of more efficient "stuff", but what are our immediate actions to deal with the immediate crisis that do not involve perpetuating the crisis further? Have we also considered simply producing less?

Walk to town, grow a garden, stop buying anything you don't need, stop accumulating wealth you don't need since you are no longer buying what you don't need, etc. Don't do more. Don't create more demand. Don't consume more.

[OKIsItJustMe]

7. You know… I feel guilty driving a car at this point…

Yet, my (reasonably intelligent, reasonably well informed) friends and acquaintances seem to think nothing of driving 100’s of miles on a whim.

That’s the reality we face.

[NoOneMan]

8. You probably still think the world can be saved then

At this point, we will either have a full-blown ecological collapse (leading to an economic disaster) or an economic collapse that throttles growth enough to heal the planet (meaning that only our civilization will decline). Im not sure what order this mess will come in, but you driving your car makes no difference

[OKIsItJustMe]

11. An interesting attitude

Heck, we’re already in the hole, and digging deeper, so let’s dig a little faster (eh?)