A new direction for the world’s energy system
From Ira Sohn, Montclair State University, NJ, US
As the dust settles over the latest United Nations annual climate
summit (COP24), whose major takeaway is a promise by China and other big developing countries to accept uniform guidelines for measuring emission levels, Arun Majumdar is on the right track towards solving the pollution problems caused by the world’s dependence on a carbon-based energy system (“ Earth needs a huge investment to solve energy’s pollution problem”, December 24). Almost half a century since the first Earth Day, this system still accounts for 80 to 85 per cent of global energy use.
It would be historically unprecedented — not to mention politically suicidal — for countries’ leaders to adopt voluntarily, during peacetime, an energy policy that reduces current living standards because of a potential threat of reduced living standards 50 years into the future.
Though he doesn’t explicitly spell this out, Mr Majumdar implies, by implementing carbon taxes, that the key to solving the world’s pollution problem is a combination of these well-targeted economic incentives with the ongoing technological advances in extracting and using carbon-based fuels, enhancing the substitution of these fuels with renewables and nuclear energy, and aggressively promoting the “fifth fuel” — Daniel Yergin’s catch-all term for conservation, energy efficiency and energy productivity (The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World, 2011).
With enhanced research budgets in both private and public laboratories along with the above mentioned targeted economic incentives, the world’s energy system — over the next 50 to 100 years — can be redirected on to a low- or no-polluting trajectory.
Ira Sohn
Professor of Economics and Finance,
Montclair State University, NJ, US