Credit: AleSpa / Wikimedia Commons
Despite all the renewable energy investments and installations, actual global greenhouse gas emissions keep increasing. That’s largely due to economic growth: While renewable energy supplies have expanded in recent years, world energy usage has ballooned even more—with the difference being supplied by fossil fuels. The more the world economy grows, the harder it is for additions of renewable energy to turn the tide by actually replacing energy from fossil fuels, rather than just adding to it.
The notion of voluntarily reining in economic growth in order to minimize climate change and make it easier to replace fossil fuels is political anathema not just in the rich countries, whose people have gotten used to consuming at extraordinarily high rates, but even more so in poorer countries, which have been promised the opportunity to “develop.”
After all, it is the rich countries that have been responsible for the great majority of past emissions (which are driving climate change […]
I could not believe it when I heard our local TV channel mention Climate Change and that we had to pay attention to it and do something about it. It was the first time they have ever mentioned it.
This is to be expected. As we have seen over past “Climate Summits” the rich and powerful want the poor and third world to absorbed the costs of remediation. As the wealthy and technologically sophisticated phase in alternate forms of energy the fossil fuel resources made available will be consumed by those poorer populations wanting a higher standard of life. Until the a “bottom up” strategy is implemented we should expect no change in trajectory.