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Something Will Not Turn Up
It has taken the United Nations many years to reach the conclusion that I reached ten years ago: the people of the world must move away from fuels which when burnt emit large volumes of carbon dioxide. It seems odd to me that this simple and obvious statement has taken the UN many years to conclude, but obvious and universal truth can be hard to recognise, especially when the obvious conclusion of such truth requires people to change their behaviour.
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), reports that we have got to move from using fossil fuel quickly. There is no other choice. It has also agreed with another one of my conclusions, that carbon capture and storage will not provide sufficient emission reductions.
So in essence this means we should look to clean renewable technology (that is technology that does not require burning) such as solar water heating, photo voltaics and wind farms before we look to using fossil fuel. It is not rocket science, merely inconvenient and in some case marginally more expensive than fossil fuel, and in other cases less expensive than fossil fuel or nuclear energy, when the whole emission costs are taken into account.
The trouble with clean renewable energy is that if offers exactly the same product as dirty renewable energy but a cleaner version. There are changeover costs and the benefits to most are so long term that they are considered not worth having. Our great grandchildren may thank us for changing to clean renewable energy but we will probably not be around to receive their thanks and we will fool ourselves into believing either that the science is wrong or if it is proven to be right something will be invented to remedy the climate change that will otherwise happen. Something will not turn up. It is up to us to keep the environment in which we live safe and benign, no one else will do it.
Filed under: carbon dioxide, carbon emissions, climate change, energy, global warming, solar, solar energy, solar panels Tagged: clean renewable energy, climate mitigation, IPCC, renewable energy 
Source: http://robertkyriakides.wordpress.com/2014/04/16/something-will-not-turn-up/
