Late last year, a study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) looked into exactly how much it will take to meet the climate change
goals set by the Paris Agreement. The
report, composed by the United Nations consortium of hundreds of climate
scientists from around the world, found that if the world has any hope of
reaching the climate change cutoff set by the Paris Agreement, the
international community will have to transition to 100 percent clean energy
by the middle of the century.
In the Paris Agreement (which
polls show that most U.S. citizens still support, even after President
Donald Trump backed out of the agreement in 2017) 186 countries agreed to cap
still-rising global temperatures to less than 2° Celsius by 2100, with a goal
of limiting warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
This is a serious challenge, the grand dimensions of which are made all the
more clear by the IPCC’s findings.
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As Vox reports in its article tellingly titled “The climate change
policy with the most potential is the most neglected“, the transition toward
clean energy “is underway — but getting all the way there is a daunting goal
that will require researching and developing new products and services,
especially in fossil fuel-intensive industries like concrete- and
steel-making that have largely been neglected.”
The opinion piece from Vox goes on to argue that what the clean
energy industry really needs in order to grow--and grow to a great enough
extent to contend with the demands of the Paris Agreement--is a heavier focus
on innovation, with much greater investment in research and development of
new clean energy production methods. Related:
Commodities Are Having A Stellar Year
Roberts is not the only person who thinks that innovation is the greatest
hope for the future of clean energy. Effective altruism group Let’s Fund
studied the issue of where climate change activism dollars are best spent,
and they also found that, using a metric based on importance, neglectedness,
and tractability, public spending on clean energy R&D is the most
effective way to combat climate change.
Let’s Fund supports its “case for public clean energy R&D spending”
with four main points:
- “Emission reduction in emerging economies matters most.”
- “Thus, ‘the best climate policies are those that
stimulate clean energy innovation.’”
- “Public R&D creates the most spillover.”
- “Public R&D is woefully neglected but politically
tractable.”
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Currently, the charts for per capita carbon emissions are dominated by
first world, developed economies including the United States, Canada, and
Australia, whose emissions per person are more than double that of the
average Chinese citizen. However, as energy demand continues to grow around
the world, paired with rapidly growing populations and an ever-expanding
middle class, developing nations like India and China will account for 75
percent of global emissions by 2040.
(Click to enlarge)
This means that in order to meet climate change goals, we need to stop
focusing only on the first world and start asking how we can make clean
energy accessible for every nation at every economic stage of development. As
Roberts writes for Vox, “Advanced economies could flatline their emissions
tomorrow and all would still be lost[...] The only thing that might work is
making clean energy cheap and then sharing it with those economies (technology “spillover”).
Cheaper clean energy technology is a global public good, and advanced
economies are both morally obliged and economically well-positioned to
provide it.”
While for some experts the need for and the viability of dramatically
increasing investment in clean energy research and development, almost no one
is actually doing it in practice. While 24 countries and the European
Commission have all promised to double their own clean energy R&D
spending, very few
of those countries are following through with their pledge, with the
majority on track to increase spending by just 50 percent.
By Haley Zaremba for Oilprice.com
