Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
growing seasons will change, rainfall patterns will shift,
major storms will grow stronger, and the list goes on. It
would be wonderful if there were a single silver bullet that
could slay the climate change monster, but there isn
t.
We need to recognize that solving the problem will be
hard and the solution will have to start with approaches
on many fronts. A useful way to think about the problems
is in terms of what two Princeton University scientists
called
'
“
stabilization wedges
”
in an important paper pub-
lished in
]. In the business-as-usual scenario,
emissions are going to continue to go up as the world
uses more energy. What we need to do to stabilize green-
house gases in the atmosphere at some desired level is to
reduce what we emit. We can do that by a collection of
approaches
[
such as increased
miles per gallon for cars which reduces emissions from
gasoline, or substituting emission-free wind turbines or
nuclear power for coal-
-
the stabilization wedges
-
red power plants, or improving
insulation in buildings so they use less energy to cool
in summer and heat in winter. Wedges can be anything
that cuts the emissions of greenhouse gases. Some of
the wedges will be wide while others may be narrow,
but collectively they get us to where we want to go
as long as there are enough of them.
Figure
.
shows
the idea.
The job of the scientists, technologists, and industrialists is
to develop the things that can make up stabilization wedges.
We know what many of them can be today, but there can be
many more in the future with the proper support for devel-
opment and incentives for deployment. It is the job of
governments to provide that support and to create the
