The world’s governments have agreed it is possible to meet 80% of energy needs with renewables by 2050:
The report by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) also said that a shift to cleaner energies would help cut greenhouse gas emissions, which it blamed for climate change including floods, droughts, heat waves and rising sea levels.
“Close to 80 percent of the world energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies,” it said in a statement after government delegates approved a special report at talks in Abu Dhabi. (Emphasis mine)
Those “enabling policies” are things like giving solar energy manufacturers even a fraction of what we freely give to oil companies, which do not need our help. Futurist Ray Kurzweil thinks the renewables transition can happen by 2030:
One of my primary theses is that information technologies grow exponentially in capability and power and bandwidth and so on. If you buy an iPhone today, it’s twice as good as two years ago for half the cost. That is happening with solar energy — it is doubling every two years. And it didn’t start two years ago, it started 20 years ago. Every two years, we have twice as much solar energy in the world.
Today, solar is still more expensive than fossil fuels, and in most situations it still needs subsidies or special circumstances, but the costs are coming down rapidly — we are only a few years away from parity. And then it’s going to keep coming down, and people will be gravitating towards solar, even if they don’t care at all about the environment, because of the economics.
So right now it’s at half a percent of the world’s energy. People tend to dismiss technologies when they are half a percent of the solution. But doubling every two years means it’s only eight more doublings before it meets a 100 percent of the world’s energy needs. So that’s 16 years. We will increase our use of electricity during that period, so add another couple of doublings: In 20 years we’ll be meeting all of our energy needs with solar, based on this trend which has already been underway for 20 years. (Emphasis mine)
Actually, given the way new energy efficiency has enabled America’s GDP to triple without needing to triple the power output, 2029 isn’t an altogether unreasonable target date — if we try. But we knew we needed to do that when I was a child in the 1970s, and in my lifetime we’ve had no national energy policy. Indeed, the Department of Energy, like the Department of Education, is one of the Cabinet agencies Grover Norquist and friends would disestablish.
But there’s an empirical reality setting in at the pump these days; it’s called peak oil, and it is behind us, not ahead of us. Basically, global oil supply will never actually rise, though demand certainly will. The discovery of so-called “elephant fields” — deposits of 100-500 million barrels or more — peaked in the 1970s. Most large fields are past peak oil. This means gasoline prices may fluctuate, but will in general never go down. It also means the cost of food will go up: pesticides are oil-based, tractors and trucks and ships use fuel, etc. America may decide to drill every last possible hole in the ground for oil, as the Obama administration seems willing to do, but it cannot make the downward slope change. How is this inevitability not translating into policy?
In part, it is because policy has become so paralyzed. Innovative ideas like Clean Energy Victory Bonds threaten the biggest lobby on Capitol Hill. Big Oil has been driving energy policy for decades, to its own benefit. The longer Americans rely on oil as the life-blood of transportation, the greater the pain will be tomorrow. To get Americans choosing new habits, new modes of transit, and cleaner energy, policy makers will have to start now. The future may see our cars charged from solar panels and wind turbines, or it may see us still struggling with inadequate transportation systems and $10 a gallon gas. The point is that we have a choice, and choosing not to decide is still a choice.
