Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
with the world consensus. I am quite sure that AR
sum-
mary, which has even stronger wording than that of AR
,
will also be agreed to by all of the nations.
Beginning with the
next chapter
, I am going to shift
gears to discuss the sources of the increase in greenhouse
gases (mainly fossil fuels) and the coupling of energy use
to economic growth. The BAU scenario is simply the
continued use of our present mix of fuels as the world
economy and population grow. I will then go on to discuss
what I think our target for the allowable greenhouse gas
concentration should be at the end of this century and
how we might get there.
While part of the increase in greenhouse gases comes
from changes in land use and from some industrial pro-
cesses, by far the most comes from the energy sector.
Energy use is usually divided into three categories: trans-
portation; residential and commercial; and industrial.
They all have different problems and decarbonizing each
sector requires different solutions. The early steps are
easy, but the problem gets harder the deeper the cuts have
to be. While we are implementing the easy things, we will
have time to improve the systems that can be used in the
more dif
cult parts of the problem. Threaded through
this part will be some discussion of policies that can help
and of some poor choices that have hurt.
By now it should be clear to the reader that I think we
should begin now to head off the worst effects of global
warming. As we will see, it is not possible to return to the
preindustrial level of greenhouse gases in this century. It
is not even possible to stabilize the atmosphere at today
s
levels of greenhouse gases in this century. The nations of
the world might
'
stabilize the level
at
twice the
