World experts Friday sought an "energy revolution," one that might require a multi-trillion dollar financial .jpg)
commitment, to ward off global warming.
The call for action came even as the U.S. Senate failed to advance a massive climate change bill Friday.
The International Energy Agency concluded in a new report (available for a charge) that the price of reducing greenhouse gases by half by 2050 could be as much as $45 trillion and require the construction of tens of thousands of new wind turbines as well as many hundreds of new nuclear plants. While that might sound like a lot, the agency concluded that "the current path is not sustainable."
In Washington, backers of the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act, attempted to paint in optimistic terms the 48-36 vote in which the Senate failed to cut off a Republican filibuster of the bill. After the Senate fell 12 votes short of the 60 needed to move forward on the measure, U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer released a series of letters from six additional senators, including all three major presidential candidates, who said they would have voted to end the debate if they had been present. In a statement, Boxer said:
"We had 54 senators come down on the side of tackling this crucial issue now -- because it is one of the greatest challenges of our generation. This strong vote is up from 38 votes in 2005, and proves that our nation is ready to assume the mantle of leadership on global warming."
But opponents described the bill, which would set up a market-based cap-and-trade system for reducing emissions, as a gigantic tax increase on society at a time when it is already reeling from high energy prices.
Boxer (pictured), a California Democrat who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said she would "anxiously await" the inauguration of a new president more disposed to the issue. President Bush had threatened to veto the legislation as Climate Law Update had noted. The vote effectively killing the bill came after supporters hauled out retired military leaders who described climate change in national security terms (see individual statements from Adm. Joe Lopez and Gen. Gordon Sullivan).
The Washington Post reported that Senate leaders pulled back the bill after the vote.
Critics of the legislation, such as Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican on the committee, stressed what they described as the bill's huge costs. Inhofe issued a statement in which he referred to it as the "largest tax increase in American history." In his statement, Inhofe said:
"As I suspected, reality hit the U.S. Senate when the economic facts of this bill were exposed. When faced with the inconvenient truth of the bill’s impact on skyrocketing gas prices, very few Senators were willing to even debate this bill."
Inhofe also released another statement and a letter from 10 Democrats suggesting the legislation would have fallen well short of passage had it come to a final vote.
In a statement Friday, Nobuo Tanaka, executive director of the Paris-based agency, which advises 27 nations, mostly in Europe, put the situation in stark terms:
“There should be no doubt - meeting the target of a 50 percent cut in emissions represents a formidable challenge. We would require immediate policy action and technological transition on an unprecedented scale. It will essentially require a new global energy revolution which would completely transform the way we produce and use energy”
The agency also released a graphic presentation and a series of fact sheets laying out its case and what it believes needs to be done. The 50 percent reduction is a figure derived from estimates put forward by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change regarding reductions needed to keep the planet's average temperature from increasing more than 2.4 degrees Centigrade. The G8 organization of the world's richest nations also recently moved toward that goal.
According to the energy agency, increasing efficiency and virtually eliminating emissions of carbon dioxide, the chief heat-trapping gas, would stabilize emissions at current levels, while cutting them by half would also require other measures, such as carbon capture and storage. Meeting that goal could require the annual construction of 32 new nuclear plants, 17,500 large wind turbines and 215 million square meters of solar panels, as well as more than 50 coal- and gas-fired power plants fitted with carbon capture technology.
Continuing current policies unchanged would produce a 130 percent increase in carbon dioxide emissions and a 70 percent increase in oil demand. That latter figure would mean the equivalent of five times the current production from Saudi Arabia, Tanaka said.
(Picture: Sen. Barbara Boxer's office)
