What's More Important? Research, Policy or Deployment?

With the latest round of contentious international climate treaty negotiations getting under way in Durban, South Africa, it’s worth revisiting what would be required to meet ambitioustargets set for greenhouse gases in California, a state that already has pledged meaningful action.

There’s a new peer-reviewed study of California’s plans, published in the current issue of Science, that largely echoes points made in a study by the California Council on Science and Technology issued earlier this year showing the scope of what would have to happen and the limits of known technologies.

Some details on the new study are below. But first it’s worth checking in on realistic paths to climate progress with a reliable guide — Nate Lewis, the head of the federal energy innovation hub on fuels from sunlight and a chemist at the California Institute of Technology.

Lewis is not only involved with cutting-edge research on next-generation technology, but has contributed to various assessments of options for achieving targets in that state and the nation, including the California Council study.

A few weeks ago, we had a long Skype chat about California’s much discussed plan to cut its emissions of greenhouse gases 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050.

His conclusion, which I see as robustly supported by peer-reviewed work (including the new paper), is that California could get roughly halfway to that goal in a perfect world – one without impediments such as higher costs, nimby fights and resistance from consumers and industries wedded to fossil fuels.

But even in that perfect world, Lewis says, citing the reviewed literature, fundamental leaps in basic energy sciences would be required to get all the way – and the nation and world are not investing at anywhere the level that would be required in the related sciences and in development and demonstration of promising technologies.

Looking beyond California to the nation, Lewis cited a National Academy of Sciences report he co-authored with 40 experts in energy technology on a path to getting more than half of the country’s electricity from renewable sources by mid-century:

Everybody agreed that if we were going to get more than half of our electricity in our country from renewables by 2050 we were going to have to do things that we simply don’t know how to do today at all and fundamentally change the way we use, generate and consume energy [relevant section here]. That’s completely in agreement with the California report. And it’s different than people who would tell you that we have all the technology we need and we just need the political will and let’s be done with it. That’s not what any technically knowledgeable panel concludes.

Here’s a bit more from Lewis on this point, with more below:

Read more on the New York Times>>

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