Nutshell
Excerpts from Time to Derail Fossil Fuel Train, Energy Agency Warns, Stephen Leahy, IPS (with links added by ecoSanity)
Countries have chained themselves to a fossil fuel train that is headed straight off a cliff, warns the International Energy Agency (IEA).
Without a bold change of policy direction, the world will lock itself into an insecure, inefficient and high-carbon energy system, the IEA said Wednesday in London on the release of the 2011 World Energy Outlook.
...the conservative IEA called for urgent action by governments to massively shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy and boost energy efficiency. Without a major shift in priorities in the next five years, there will be enough fossil fuel infrastructure in place to guarantee a two-degree C rise in temperatures, it warned...
..."Delaying action is a false economy," the World Energy Outlook report emphasises. Every dollar of investment in cleaner technology before 2020 avoids the need to spend an additional 4.30 dollars after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions, it said.
No climate scientist considers a two-degree C temperature increase "safe". In fact, many experts, along with more than 100 countries, want overall global warming to be limited to less than 1.5 degrees C.
The burning of fossil fuels has already pushed the global average temp 0.8 C higher, triggering a number of documented large- scale changes, including record numbers of extreme weather events, record melt of Arctic sea ice, spring arriving two to four weeks earlier, and much more.
The IEA's urgent recommendations come on the heels of a U.S. Department of Energy announcement last week that global carbon emissions jumped six percent in 2010, the biggest increase ever. That puts the world on the road to a worst case scenario of six degrees C of global warming by 2100.
