What if there’s no way to cut greenhouse emissions enough to make a real difference?

That’s the question raised by a commentary in Nature arguing that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been too optimistic in its projections for the technological possibilities of reducing greenhouse emissions. Their calculations are called “a bombshell” in a separate news article in Nature about the paper. My colleague Andy Revkin analyzes it at DotEarth. The commentary was written by the political scientist Roger Pielke Jr., the climatologist Tom Wigley, and the economist Christopher Green.

I asked the lead author, Dr. Pielke, what implications he draws from his work:

It becomes a bit more clear that we may have set ourselves down the wrong path when we framed the challenge of mitigating greenhouse gases in terms of “reducing emissions”. Characterizing the policy challenge in this way leads people in rich countries to focus on things like changing light bulbs and driving less thirsty cars – all good things, to be sure – but which can hardly make a dent in the overall challenge of stabilizing atmospheric concentrations. And it leads people in developing countries shaking their head – how can they “reduce emissions” when they hardly have any to begin with?
We must acknowledge up front that the world needs more energy – vast amounts more. The International Energy Agency projects that global energy demand will increase by 60% by 2030 and recent trends in China and elsewhere suggest that this may even be an underestimate. Consider also that published estimates suggest that 2 billion people or more currently lack access to electricity. Their energy needs have only one direction to go.

If the world needs more energy, and this fact seems inescapable, then the first question to ask is not “how do we reduce emissions?” but instead, “In a world that needs vast amounts of more energy, how can we provide that energy in ways that do not lead to the accumulation of carbon in the atmosphere?”

There can be only two answers to this question. One is to develop new technologies of energy supply that are carbon neutral or, to take carbon dioxide out of the air in some manner. Both types of actions require significant technological innovation. It is hard to square the I.P.C.C.’s conclusion that we have all the technology that we need with the results presented in our Nature paper.

So how do we develop these new technologies? Dr. Pielke doesn’t put much faith in the usual incentives:

The conventional view is that putting a price on carbon will create incentives that motivate such innovation. “Incentives” mean (in the short term at least) creating economic discomfort and/or pain leading people to search for new technologies that cost less than those that emit carbon. But here is where the conventional approach founders on the realities of politics. Policy makers cannot be expected to impose upon their constituents discomfort and/or pain and expect to stay in office. So we see a lot of hand waving, talk of long term targets and timetables, emphasis on personal actions, while emissions continue to increase.

My view is that efforts to put a price on carbon cannot succeed, even though I’d admit that a global carbon tax imposed everywhere at once has a theoretical attraction. But in practice, it just doesn’t seem possible. Current efforts to price carbon may contribute in some small way to innovation, but they just as likely may lead to games/shenanigans (as we have seen in the Kyoto CDM with HFC-23) or just expensive energy.

Instead we should skip all of the middle steps in trying to create incentives that stimulate innovation and focus on policies, and investments, that stimulate such innovation directly. We need far more R&D into carbon-neutral technologies and those that might remove carbon from the air. I don’t know how much is the right amount, but good models for what we might think about are the long-term investments in health research and defense research, both of which have required enormous investments and led to a range of benefits. Investment and innovation is no magic bullet, let’s be clear, but the task of providing the vast amounts of energy that the world needs and doing so while stabilizing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere seems impossible without such an approach. When new technologies are in hand, we will find the politics to be far simpler than what we see today.

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