Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 3: Forecasts of future energy investments
Source: “Summary for Policymakers,” Climate Change 2014: Mitigation of Climate Change. Contribution of Working
Group III to the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2014), 28.
The highly improbable conjecture is that between 2009 and 2029 $550 billion a year
extra will be invested in energy efficiency and $540 billion less invested in fossil fuel
extraction and fossil fuel plants without CCS. The estimates also suggest over $100 billion
a year will be spent on the totally unproven technology of CCS fuel plants with a further
$180 billion a year on renewables, which forecasts by the IPCC and official government
sources acknowledge will remain three times the cost of coal based electricity generation.
It seems that, having been forced to acknowledge that the much feared global warming
has only a trivial effect on real levels of human welfare, the IPCC has to ensure that the
estimated costs of its pursuit of the New Jerusalem are not too great. Forcing a radical
transformation of society by banning the use of oil and coal and demanding that we
reduce energy consumption and shift to horrendously expensive renewables and mythical
technology like carbon capture and storage is depicted as a cake walk. Seemingly, only
politicians' myopia is standing in the way of a near costless conversion of the global
economy away from energy involving high emissions of carbon dioxide.
