Why we need a brave new world to save our planet

By 2050 there could be a mirror in every desert, a windmill on every coastline and a soya cutlet on everybody’s plate - if world powers agree to fight global warming at United Nations talks in Copenhagen in December.
Researchers say that the only way to prevent catastrophic climate change will be to slash world greenhouse gas emissions drastically by 2050. That will only be possible through unprecedented changes to every sector of the economy, from energy generation to diet.
“We are going to change the fundamentals of industrial civilization,” said Anders Turesson, Sweden’s top climate change negotiator, in the run-up to the Copenhagen talks.
According to the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, world emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2, the main greenhouse gas) will have to fall by more than half by 2050 to prevent disastrous global warming, with developed countries slashing their emissions by up to 95 per cent.
That means that the average citizen of a developed country will have to reduce their total annual emissions - for heating, lighting, travel, computer use and everything else - to the level they would currently get by driving a mid-range BMW 35 kilometres a day.
Experts say that the key will be to reduce the emissions from energy generation, the source of a quarter of all man-made CO2, by breaking its current reliance on high-carbon fossil fuels.
The only realistic way to do so will be to invest enormously into renewable, zero-CO2 methods such as solar and wind power, say some.
“For power and electricity, we need to fully replace fossil fuels with renewables,” said Stephan Singer, director of global energy policy analysis at environmental group WWF.
That is an immense challenge. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency, an analytical group, 68 per cent of all the world’s electricity comes from fossil fuels. By contrast, just 18 per cent comes from renewable power, chiefly hydro-electric.
According to a recent IEA study, the world could cut emissions to the desired level by 2050 - but it would need to make renewable power its main supply source to do so.
In particular, it would have to boost the use of solar and wind power twenty-fold, building massive parabolic mirrors in the deserts and setting up forests of wind generators out to sea, and to develop ways of trapping underground the CO2 released from fossil fuel plants - so-called “carbon capture.” “Decarbonizing the power sector is technically feasible, but will require much higher build rates for renewable technologies and nuclear than in the past and substantial investments in new technologies, such as fossil power plants, with carbon capture,” IEA energy expert Uwe Remme told the German Press Agency dpa.
Cleaning up energy generation will not, however, be enough in itself to reach the climate target. Transport, too, will have to be “de-carbonized,” because it accounts for 13 per cent of all world emissions, a figure which is set to rise, according to the IPCC.
To achieve that, experts say that land and sea vehicles will have to be powered by electricity, rather than fossil fuels, with public transport replacing private vehicles, and trains replacing short-haul flights as much as possible.
“Even if all cars are fuelled by renewables or electricity, we still will need to produce that energy, so it will be important to make public transport acceptable instead ... We have to promote high- speed trains to replace short-range flights,” said Singer.
Those efforts will receive a further boost if the next generation of buildings, factories and machines can be made with new, low-CO2 technology to reduce emissions throughout their life cycle.
“Ten per cent of oil is used for non-energy purposes such as plastic production, so we need to move towards other materials based on renewable resources such as wood and paper,” Singer said.
But some experts say that the only way to make mankind guarantee the deep, deep emissions cuts which are needed will be to cut down not just on fossil fuels - but on eating meat.
That is because meat production, processing and transport produces vastly more CO2 than producing crops such as wheat or soy.
“It takes seven units of plant energy to create one unit of meat so there’s a huge amount of energy lost in the system. Eating much less meat is already a huge step forwards: it’s what people can do at once to reduce their emissions,” Singer said.
- DPA