IEA Says World Needs Sweeping Energy-Technology Revolution

Building the Green Economy, Crisis Policy Forum, Quipu Economic Forum, Zero-combustion paradigm ::

The International Energy Agency has called for a major increase in the price at which carbon emissions are traded in carbon-offsetting schemes designed to reduce emissions. The IEA, as reported by the Financial Times, has called for carbon offsets to be priced closer to $200 per ton, in order to bring carbon-trading schemes in line with the costs of reducing emissions. EU carbon offsets are currently priced at roughly $43 per ton.

The call for a major energy-technology revolution is not the first, but it is one of the most urgent, top-level pleas by an agency government-linked international agency, for a major global initiative in this area. The problem of combustible fuels is not merely their adverse environmental impact, nor is it their massive significance for the economic vitality of the places they are found or refined in abundance: it is, at bottom, a problem of history, and scientific progress.

Burning carbon-based fuels is an ancient energy production technique, whose standardization and mechanization helped drive the industrial revolution in western Europe and North America, now more than two centuries ago. Allowing ourselves, as a species, to so intimately link the fate of our civilization —its economic performance, political liberty and the scope of its policy-making capabilities— to such an ancient method for something as basic as energy production —heat, light, electricity and locomotion—, is threatening the stability of what we have come to expect as the economic and political norm.

Achieving a zero-combustion standard for energy production —we should include in this new paradigm the need to surpass “collision energy”, i.e. nuclear—, means changing two things about our energy production model: 1. invest in new technologies that produce clean energy from renewable resources; 2. implement a standard operating procedure whereby energy production does not destroy the energy resource, but harnesses it.

The International Energy Agency now views achieving a post-carbon energy economy as fundamental to international peace and security and the stability of the global economy. Failure to innovate, at this point in history, will lead us more steadily toward the most serious potential effects of carbon-based global climate change. The UN has scheduled its next major climate conference for September, to plan for the Bali protocol negotiations in December.

J.E. Robertson @ June 18, 2008