Tamar Hallerman
GHG Monitor
07/20/12
Two International Energy Agency officials this week emphasized the need for policymakers in the world’s largest economies to put a price on carbon emissions if leaders want to keep climate change in check. In a presentation this week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, Deputy Executive Director Richard Jones and Senior Energy Analyst Markus Wrake said that in addition to adopting widespread energy efficiency measures and drastically increasing public support for energy RD&D work, policymakers need to price carbon emissions in order to keep global temperature increases below 2° Celsius, the target agreed to by world leaders at the United Nation’s Copenhagen climate summit in 2009. Wrake said that one of the toughest challenges policymakers face is selling the idea of deep emissions reductions and hefty investments in clean energy technologies to electorates that often find it hard to support policies that may not see tangible benefits for decades. “The key is for policymakers to have the courage and the ability, to be frank, to explain to their voters and electorate why this is important. I don’t think just scaring people will work,” he said.
Wrake and Jones were here in Washington to present the findings of IEA’s biennial assessment of nearly a dozen clean energy technologies. Released earlier this spring ahead of the Clean Energy Ministerial meeting, a high-level gathering of energy ministers from nearly two dozen of the world’s largest economies, the report concluded that while reaching the 2° Celsius goal is possible, investment in clean energy technologies is lagging and the window for reaching that target is rapidly closing. Of 10 clean energy technologies that hold potential for energy and greenhouse gas emissions savings, nine are not on track to meet the benchmarks needed to achieve the 2° Celsius goal, the report said. In particular, it warned that CCS technology development is “woefully” off pace and “painfully slow.” “Clearly, a challenging road lies ahead for deploying CCS in the near term. … At minimum, an additional 110 planned projects must successfully be brought online by 2020 to get back on track to meet the [2° Celsius] objective. This is an incredibly ambitious target based on current deployment rates,” the report concluded.
In order to incentivize low-emissions technologies like CCS, though, governments must put in place a price on carbon emissions, Jones said this week. He added that while many see the political tides against that policy choice in the United States, the fact that countries like China are considering emissions trading schemes mean that some nations are moving in the right direction. “Admittedly, it is difficult to make these changes, but China is looking very seriously at an emissions trading system, the European Union already has one and even some U.S. states have them in place, so as difficult as it is from a U.S. domestic level, this notion [of pricing carbon] is gaining traction around the world,” he said. “I wouldn’t necessarily say that this is not happening.” Jones said, though, that if large economies like China ultimately do not dramatically limit carbon emissions through some sort of economy-wide policy, there will be little chance of maintaining the 2° Celsius goal.
Natural Gas to Shift from Solution to Problem
During their presentation, Jones and Wrake highlighted the unique role that natural gas will likely play in climate change mitigation over the next several decades. While IEA currently views the fuel as one that is helping bring down emissions in the power sector compared to coal, particularly in the U.S., IEA’s report predicts that in order to make the 2° Celsius ceiling, the average CO2 intensity of energy technologies in the 2025 to 2030 period will need to be below the average emissions of unmitigated natural gas plants. “So, at some point, natural gas, at least from this perspective, will go from being part of the solution to being part of the problem,” Wrake said. “This, of course, raises questions around how we invest in infrastructure for gas.” He added that if policymakers want to stick to the 2° Celsius goal, they must either deploy cleaner fuels, run gas plants for fewer hours per day or more quickly develop CCS technology that could later be widely installed on gas capacity. However, Wrake said that progress in the technology to date is “disappointing” so far. “We’re not making the progress as we hoped only a few years ago, and we’ve indeed decreased the rate at which we deploy carbon capture and storage in our scenarios,” he said. In order for CCS to be ramped up to the amounts needed, there must be a substantial effort by governments to demonstrate CCS for power generation and industry on a commercial scale, he said.
