Technofixes To Climate Change Arent Living Up To The Hype
- weather /
- environment /
- Sciences
Technological solutions to climate change fall short of expectations
Technological solutions to climate change fall short of expectations
/The major climate report update provides a reality check on unproven hydrogen and carbon sequestration technologies.
Share this story
:format(webp)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/24533931/STK438_carbon_capture.jpg)
The updated climate change roadmap challenges the idea that unproven technologies can play a decisive role in avoiding disasters.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) today updated its roadmap for the energy sector to achieve its goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
The International Energy Agency, originally created to protect global oil supplies, released its historic roadmap in 2021 with a bleak outlook for fossil fuels: it calls for freezing investments in new oil, gas and coal projects. It sets out the steps every country on Earth must take to achieve the goals of the Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to limit global warming to around 1.5 degrees Celsius while achieving net-zero emissions. But the planet is still warming by 1.2 degrees Celsius, causing more and more extreme weather disasters and prompting the International Energy Agency to revise its global roadmap to reflect the new realities.
The biggest difference in this new report is that the new technologies that have attracted so much attention as high-tech solutions to climate change now play a much smaller role than expected in 2021. These technologies, including hydrogen fuel cells used in vehicles heavy and devices that energy By purifying carbon dioxide emissions from cigarettes or ambient air, emissions were reduced by 35%, compared to about 50%.
Because? The report says quite frankly that they did not live up to expectations.
"I think there's some realism to that, and I'm interested to see how the realism of this report translates into these areas," said Dave Jones, head of global analysis at the Amber Energy Research Center.
"Today, hydrogen production represents more of a climate problem than a climate solution," the report says. Hydrogen as a fuel is not new, but most of it is still produced using gas. Some countries, including the United States, are investing in ways to make hydrogen more sustainable by using renewable energy or fossil fuels while sequestering carbon. If transported by air, it could produce cleaner fuel for planes, ships or trucks.
But building the infrastructure to transport hydrogen presents a bigger hurdle than expected, Jones says. On the other hand, charging infrastructure for electric vehicles, although limited, is developing much faster. The IEA's updated roadmap reduces the proportion of heavy fuel cell vehicles on the road by around 40% in 2050 compared to the original forecast for 2021.
Additionally, the roadmap reduces the role that carbon sequestration technologies play in reducing emissions from electricity generation by approximately 40%. “Until now, the story [of carbon sequestration] has been a story of largely unfulfilled expectations,” says a new IEA report. According to a 2021 Government Accountability Office report, the U.S. Department of Energy spent hundreds of millions of dollars on failed carbon capture projects, largely due to “factors affecting their economic viability.”
"Removing carbon from the atmosphere is very expensive. We have to do everything possible to prevent it from being released," Fatih Birol, executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in a press release. When the planet's temperature rises above 1.5 degrees, countries can try to use "expensive and not widely tested" carbon capture technologies to try to reverse this global warming, he said in a press release, but the use of these technologies carry greater climate risks.
The report says renewable energy capacity worldwide must triple by 2030 to stop creating the pollution that is warming the planet. Clean energy spending is expected to double, from $1.8 trillion this year to $4.5 trillion by the beginning of the next decade. Energy efficiency is also expected to double over the same period, with the world's richest countries reaching net-zero emissions, several years ahead of the 2050 global target.
The timing of this updated roadmap is critical. It follows the UN's first global report on how countries are tackling climate change. In short, they are falling behind as emissions continue to rise despite pressures to limit temperature rise to 1.5 degrees.
Last week, the United Nations held a climate summit in New York to urge countries to increase their commitments to clean energy, but the leaders of the world's biggest carbon emitters, China and the United States, did not attend. They will get another chance at the broader U.N. climate conference, which begins in November in Dubai.
