Challenging the notion of an acceptable energy policy

Emissions need to fall by 80 percent by 2020 to secure the future of civilization, according to Lester Brown, President of the Earth Policy Institute in the US. With this dramatic statement, Brown opened discussions on the challenge of the acceptability of energy solutions on the third day of the World Energy Congress.

Brown framed the challenge as an issue of acceptability to nature: if our energy solutions are not acceptable to nature they are by definition unsustainable and will threaten life as we know it. The institute reached its emissions reduction target for the next 10 years by assessing the science rather than what may be politically acceptable, he said.

“When we begin looking at the changes we need to make and the limited amount of time we have to make the changes, what we’re looking at is something approaching a war-time mobilization to restructure the global economy,” Brown said.

He pointed to the very rapid deployment of wind power projects in Texas and in China as evidence that change can happen quickly where there’s a will. He suggested accelerating the transition by creating additional incentives to invest in clean technology by restructuring the tax system to raise taxes on carbon while reducing them by a corresponding amount on labor.

The weak link is probably going to be the food supply, according to Brown. Already about 20 countries are over-pumping aquifers to grow food, while global warming is threatening the glaciers that feed many of the world’s rivers on which so much irrigation depends. Early indicators of a breakdown include a rise in recent years in wheat prices, in the number of hungry people in the world and in the number of failing states, he said.

Speaking after Brown, Yvo de Boer, the former executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, said the targets agreed on at last year’s climate conference in Copenhagen would require a 50 percent reduction in emissions globally by 2050.

Although the parties at the conference failed to agree on binding global targets, more than 100 countries have since pledged to pursue national action plans to reduce emissions. The challenge now, De Boer said, is turning the political ambiguity of the outcome into business reality by developing common metrics for measuring success and reporting guidelines for businesses.

Only then, he said, will it be possible to hold companies and countries accountable for meeting the goals in the action plans.