Block’s Indicator of Sustainable Growth

By Ray Block

 

It’s good to see that President Obama and other world leaders are working towards the goal of developed countries reducing CO2 emissions 80 per cent by 2050, with developing countries being nudged to reduce emissions by 50 per cent over the same timeline.

 

Bloomberg(July 9 2009) reporting on the 17 member Major Economies Forum in Italy, quoted Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim, saying: “while today’s climate agreement isn’t “ideal,” it marks a “positive evolution.” Brazil is one of the four BRIC countries- Brazil, Russia, India, China.

 

With China and India refusing to accept the suggested 50 per cent cut in emissions by 2050 for developing countries, the final document issued at the meeting was watered down to a point  that the participating countries only agreed to “work between now and Copenhagen,” to “identify a global goal for substantially reducing global emissions by 2050.”

 

However, for the first time, the 17 member major economies forum and the G-8 countries both agreed to limit global warming since industrialisation began to no more than two degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit). 

 

Cambridge and Oxford universities are keen rivals, with their annual boat race on the Thames. But they are also rival centres of learning in other respects.

 

The issue of rivalry here is over the issue whether “real progress on reducing greenhouse gas emissions will take place, if the world focuses less on headline-grabbing targets and more on ………steadily decarbonizing the energy system by using cleaner forms of energy, more efficient industrial processes, and the like.”

Keith Johnson of the Wall Street Journal’s environmental capital blog (July 9) showcases the argument for the Oxford and London School of Economics(LSE) team led by climate sceptics Professor Gwyn Prins of the Mackinder programme for the study of long wave events, LSE and Professor Roger Pielke Jnr of the centre for science and technology policy research, university of Colorado.

China demonstrates an economy, which over the last few years has closed small inefficient power stations and steel works, as the country has moved to larger more efficient plant and equipment, greatly increasing energy efficiency. This hasn’t slowed down China from becoming the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases.

 Alok Jha, the green technology correspondent of the Guardian newspaper (May 14 2009) introduces the Cambridge case by saying that using energy more efficiently, might not be as effective in tackling climate change, as some people think.

 

He refers to the rebound effect first proposed by William Stanley Jevons in 1865, who  argued that increasing the efficiency of steam turbines would increase, rather than decrease, the overall consumption of coal. “As the cost of energy goes down, people would be more likely to use steam turbines more often.”

 

Jevons’s prediction came true- increasingly efficient steam turbines powered the next phase of the industrial revolution.” The Jevons Paradox continues to be true today, with the reality that greater efficiency normally leads to greater consumption.

 

Terry Barker, director of the Cambridge Centre for Climate Mitigation Research showed that if the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) recommendations for efficient measures are followed in full in the next few decades, the total rebound effect- the proportion of potential energy savings offset by changes in consumer and industry behaviour- could be 31 per cent by 2020 and about 52 per cent by 2030.

 

Barker predicted that by 2030, half the carbon emission savings gained from more fuel efficient transport, buildings and industry will be cancelled out by a corresponding rise in consumption of fossil fuels.

 

This is a case where the Cambridge economists are well ahead of their Oxford counterparts. The rebound effect has to be seriously taken into account all the time.

 

Two posts on this blog in May 2009 emphasise just how critical are the timelines:

 

On May 18, I referred to two studies published in the April 29 2009 issue of the influential magazine Nature. One of these involved a team at Oxford led by Myles Allen, who found that a total of half a trillion tonnes of carbon dioxide has been emitted into the atmosphere between the beginnings of industrialisation and 2008. “It took 250 years to burn the first half trillion tonnes. On current predictions, we’ll burn the next half trillion in less than 40 years.

 

The second study by Malt Meinshausen at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research showed from computer models that to avoid warming of more than two degrees Celsius by 2100, cumulative carbon emissions must not exceed 0.9 trillion tonnes.

 

The researchers found that only about a third of economically recoverable oil, gas and coal reserves can be burned, if global warming of more than two degrees Celsius is to be avoided by 2100. This is an amount of fossil fuel that would be burned by 2029, if carbon consumption remains at current levels. Meinshausen says: “We have already emitted a third of a trillion tonnes in the past nine years.”

 

On May 20, I mentioned a MIT study led by Professor Ronald Primm, which suggested that the climate roulette odds are now much worse than previously thought. The research published in the American Meteorological Society’s Journal of Climate for May 2009 is said to be the most comprehensive modelling yet carried out on the likelihood of how much hotter the Earth’s climate will get this century.

 

The bottom line from the MIT computer models is that there is a (median) average probability of global warming by 2100 of 5.2 degrees Celsius, with a 90 per cent probability range of 3.5 to 7.4 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100.

 

You can see just how difficult it is going to be in coming years to ensure CO2 in the atmosphere does not rise beyond 450 parts per million. It is now 390ppm and rising.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

by Ray Block 

 

 

 

Posted under Carbon Abatement Scheme, Climate Change, Economies, Renewable Energies