Credit: Denis Doyle
Fifteen years ago, Ken Caldeira, a senior scientist at the Carnegie Institution, calculated that the world would need to add about a nuclear power plant’s worth of clean-energy capacity every day between 2000 and 2050 to avoid catastrophic climate change. Recently, he did a quick calculation to see how we’re doing.
Not well. Instead of the roughly 1,100 megawatts of carbon-free energy per day likely needed to prevent temperatures from rising more than 2 ˚C, as the 2003 Science paper by Caldeira and his colleagues found, we are adding around 151 megawatts. That’s only enough to power roughly 125,000 homes.
At that rate, substantially transforming the energy system would take, not the next three decades, but nearly the next four centuries. In the meantime, temperatures would soar, melting ice caps, sinking cities, and unleashing devastating heat waves around the globe (see “The year climate change began to spin out of control”).
Caldeira stresses that other factors are likely to significantly shorten that time frame (in particular, electrifying heat production, which accounts for a […]
Stephan, I don’t think the emergence of the Internet is so much an anomaly as a totally new sort of infrastructure that didn’t have to supplant/replace an already well-established one. In those cases where it did have to retro-fit (e.g., replacing hone lines, etc.) conditions were such that the replacement was relatively easy in infrastructure terms.That’s not the case so much with our energy infrastructure, which is made up of massive, expensive installations the rapid replacement of which would create many headaches and potentially massive economic upheaval. I agree with you (startling, I know!), though, that centralized power generation based on fossil fuels is no longer a good thing, and current Republican insistence on preserving the status quo on energy is one of the things where I and the Party differ. But they’re not listening to me. 🙂
I agree, it is new infrastructure, that’s why it is an anomaly. And I agree with the rest of your comment.