Our Green Streets Blog

A world turning with low carbon energy is no small feat, even if everybody wants such a clean place. Poised before the open of the the summit at Copenhagen, there is no better time than now to equip oneself with the correct information in setting goals to switch to low-carbon energies. Implementing change for world climate issues, no matter how good it might be for all, is an action requiring an extraordinary amount of time, infrastructure, and will.

In the December 3 issue of Nature, Gert Jan Kramer and Martin Haigh point to this reality in their article, “No quick switch to low-carbon energy.”

In the first of two pieces on reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, the two writers analyze historic growth in energy systems in explaining why deploying alternative technologies will be a long haul that could span multiple decades.

Below is a summary of their content, plus highlights of facts all should consider.

* There are physical limits to the rate at which new technologies can be deployed * Governments need to design policies targeted at specific technologies to accelerate deployment
* More action is required on demand side to increase efficiency and curtail consumption.”
“To combat climate change, the world’s entire energy system needs a major overhaul before the middle of the century. But can we build new energy supplies that quickly? …… Because the scale of the energy system is so huge, it takes time to build the human and industrial capacity to achieve substantial deployment.”

Source: Nature.com

As Jan Kramer and Haigh clearly show, time is not our ally in this case.

“There have been high-profile proposals to ‘repower’ the world in a decade, loosely based on the way innovative consumer goods such as mobile phones or iPods conquer their markets. Unlike with consumer goods, we believe that there are robust empirical ‘laws’ that limit the build rate of new and existing energy technologies and thereby the potential to deliver much of the hoped-for transformation by 2050. To accelerate deployment, policy-makers need to tailor their policies to specific technologies in ways that recognize the stage of development.”

The two writers then produce an eye-opening historical perspective concerning how long it actually takes for changes of this magnitude to occur.

“In the twentieth century, it took 30 years for energy technologies that were available in principle to grow exponentially and become widely available. This reaching ‘materiality’ can be defined as delivering about 1% of the world’s energy mix. After that, the growth becomes linear until the technology captures its final market share. This pattern is remarkably consistent across energy technologies and the two growth phases can be seen as the ‘laws of energy deployment.’ Policy-makers concerned about carbon dioxide emissions will want to accelerate the first phase, making energy technologies ‘material’ within one decade instead of three. But we see two fundamental reasons why the exponential growth in the early, pre-material phase will be hard to beat.”

This article is worth reading, especially when seeing how ill-understood is the reality of emitting too much carbon dioxide. We hope the negotiating table has been well-sprinkled with some of these reality salts. Worldwide commitments by those attending, including President Obama, need to be taking place now, not two or three decades from this time.