Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
United States as the largest emitter of greenhouse gases in
. In the business-as-usual scenario, emissions go up
by the same amount as energy use increases, and CO
e
emissions in
gigatonnes, which
scares me as it should you. However, this huge scale-up
of present supplies assumed in the BAU picture is not
going to happen because the cost of fossil fuel will rise
strongly by the end of this century as the demand for it
greatly increases. We are unlikely to run out of fossil
fuels (over this time frame), but we are very likely to run
out of cheap oil, coal, and possibly gas, and high cost will
drive a shift to lower-cost alternatives. This is discussed
in
Chapter
would be about
.
This is part of the economic dimension I mentioned
in the introduction to the second edition. The cost of
alternatives to fossil fuels was not an important part of
the discussion in the
first edition, but it has to be now.
Since the demand for much more energy will be domin-
ated by the needs of the developing world to better the
lives of their people, they will choose low cost over emis-
sion reduction as their
first priority, unless a low-emitting
option also has relatively low cost. Sometimes health
effects also become important. This is the case in China
now where rapid development has rested on a huge
increase in electricity generated from coal with a
corresponding rapid increase in air pollution. The
health effects of this have caused China to make reduced
pollution part of
their
-
five-year plan for
energy.
In the industrialized world, thinking about the cost of
renewables has not been part of the discussion of what to
do. The rich can afford to spend more than the minimum
