In praise of insulation and thermostats

A DELUGE of information, computer modelling, policy suggestions and rhetoric is swamping the mind—and desk—of your correspondent in the run-up to the climate-change talks taking place in Copenhagen in December. But the simple message contained in one report is so stark that it caught his attention. On October 7th the International Energy Agency released an excerpt of its “World Energy Outlook 2009” that highlights the difference individuals can make.

The excerpt addresses the agency’s “450 scenario”—its view on the stable atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide (450 parts per million) that will halt climate change—and looks at a range of potential contributions to cuts in emissions that could be made by producing power differently and using energy more efficiently. The effects of these different technologies and strategies are popularly called “wedges”, because a graph showing how they effect carbon emissions over time is invariably wedge-shaped.

Stack up a lot of these wedges and out comes a chart showing the best- and worst-case scenarios: a stack of different coloured wedges showing where emissions would end up if people did nothing, sitting on a mountain shape at the bottom that shows what would happen if the potential cuts in emissions— currently figments of the hopeful imaginations of renewable-energy engineers and climate-change-policy campaigners—actually materialised. The new report provides just such a chart, and it presents a striking finding.

Read more . . .

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Tags: carbon dioxide, carbon emissions, climate change policy, climate change talks, copenhagen, energy engineers, international energy agency, renewable energy, thermostats, world energy outlook, worst case scenarios

This entry was posted on Friday, October 16th, 2009 at 6:50 pm and is filed under Consider This, Economist, Innovation Needed, Need to Know, Project Energy, Shape of Things to Come?, environment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.