Toward Decarbonization
Dr. Nebojsa Nakicenovic (Naki) gave what might have been billed as the keynote presentation to launch the conference: “World in Transition: Towards Decarbonization.”
Naki was a member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) team that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore Jr. (See the short video interview with him—also available from the video section of the powermag.com home page.) He’s currently deputy director general of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) near Vienna, Austria, and director of the IIASA’s Global Energy Assessment project, among other positions.
He noted that energy sits at the confluence of a number of problems facing the world, including nonproliferation, economic development, and climate change. A two-degree Celsius increase in temperature puts society at the edge of its coping capacity, he said, and a mere 2 degree increase is looking like an unattainable best scenario.
That someone with Naki’s background would be fully aware of the climate change impacts that lie ahead is no surprise. What might surprise you is his realistic and pragmatic approach to mitigating climate change.
Like most of the other speakers I heard on the opening day, he emphasized that there’s no single, simple answer to the problem. For example, biomass and carbon capture are necessary, he said, but both require a price on carbon. As for regulating carbon emissions, he’s disappointed in cap-and-trade programs and favors carbon taxes instead.
Upfront investments in research and development (R&D) are critical, he insisted. We need radical energy efficiency gains and significant investment in end-use technology. However, energy R&D in International Energy Agency countries declined in most years since the last energy crisis. The U.S. spends orders of magnitude more on national security R&D than on energy security, even though energy security is tightly bound to national security in multiple ways. And even when money is available, it may not always be allocated in the most effective ways. For example, he noted that the National Science Foundation has energy R&D funds, but the money is not integrated; instead, it’s fragmented among several unrelated programs.
The Global Energy Assessment, which Naki leads, is focused on “a paradigm change on the energy side in the mode of the IPCC.” Though he didn’t offer any easy answers, two recommendations may be part of that paradigm change. Underdeveloped countries, he said, need to “leap frog” the high-carbon economy to avoid repeating the problems and emissions created in the developed world, and we need a longer-term investment strategy and markets that accommodate longer-term investments.
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