The 10- to 15-year time frames of most country contributions to the international Paris climate change agreement are not adequate to lead to a decarbonized world, Jeffrey Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, said Thursday. “If you plan only to 2025 or 2030 I guarantee you we will get this dreadfully wrong, even if we meet the targets, because if we do not have the sense of where we need to go realistically, and all of the public policy choices needed to get us to the real pathway, we’re gone,” Sachs said at the Climate Action 2016 summit in Washington, D.C.
The Paris Agreement, adopted in December and moving toward entry into force, provides a legal framework under which nations are to pursue climate actions laid out in Intended Nationally Determined Contributions (INDCs). Most INDCs include some sort of commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by a certain amount or to take other specific action by 2025 or 2030.
Setting such a short-term goal, Sachs said, pushes down the road the need to develop and take action on long-term solutions. “Go from coal to gas, improve mileage of internal combustion engines … those are locked-in technologies. Those are not solutions,” he said. “Those will get your 25 percent reduction by 2025, but they will not get you to decarbonization, they’re not even on the path to decarbonization. They’re a lock-in to another fossil fuel.”
The first step on the pathway to decarbonization is to set a long-term plan, Sachs said. “We really should plan seriously for decarbonization, and that’s a very different kind of exercise from the one that has been undertaken by almost all governments up until now,” he said.
Long-term plans toward decarbonization must include several actions, which all fall under three basic pillars: increasing energy efficiency, removing carbon from the power sector, and then electrifying everything possible, such as cars. “That’s the solution. Nobody has shown an alternative to this set of pathways,” Sachs asserted.
Sachs said long-term plans toward decarbonization must at least go out to 2050, consider energy alternatives, and be developed in a way that they will be acted on regardless of what government is in power. “We need institutions that take this out of the two- to four-year political cycle because this is a 40-year transformation if we care to succeed. This is not normal politics. This is a long-term systems transformation at the heart of the world economy,” he said.
He also noted the need to be inclusive in developing solutions. Any decarbonized energy sector will, of course, rely on low- and no-carbon technologies. This means not just renewables but also carbon capture and storage, nuclear power, and hydropower. “You’re not allowed to say none of the above. … You need to choose off the menu. I believe we need all of these, and when you take something off the menu, the others are much more expensive,” Sachs said.
A long-term plan for decarbonization must also use regulation as well as pricing, according to Sachs. Relying on carbon pricing and market-based solutions will not be enough, he said. “The market is not magic enough to make this transformation, no matter how many times you hear it. You need to make public policy choices,” he said, citing the Environmental Protection Agency’s New Source Performance Standards for new coal-fired power plants, which essentially require the use of CCS on any new coal plant, as a good public policy choice.
“We tell countries ‘privatize your power sector, then try to rein them in with pricing,’” Sachs said. “This is not sensible. Just don’t build more coal-fired power plants, please, because then we blow the [carbon] budget.”
