Suzanne Waldman opines that in the press recently covering the IPCC latest report of AR5, they have claimed that climate change is set to inflict severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts on people and the natural world unless carbon emissions are cut sharply and rapidly. Yet as many of us know well, this sharp and rapid cutting has not yet begun yet, instead every year the globe is adding 2 per cent more CO2 emissions to the atmosphere than the previous year. She claims the trend is going backwards. The question she is addressing - as so many others are these days - is why the trend seems to be backwards, and what we can do about it.
The obvious reason is because fossil fuels reflect 87 per cent of global energy consumption and we are still burning 2-3 per cent more of each of the major fossil fuels every year - coal and natural gas. If there is a global energy transition underway, the results have not begun, she claims. That is not to say that countries are not developing policies to try to manage this situation. About 59 countries currently have voluntary commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, though some countries have been backtracking on those targets - Japan Australia- and at least half a dozen others are showing indications of not meeting them - Canada, Mexico, US, Korea. Finally, it has been proposed that even if all the emissions reductions at present were met we would still be on track for a 3.7 degree world by 2100.
A vice chair of the IPCC said that even the EU, which has among the strongest emissions reductions targets, are setting targets by what appears to be politically achievable rather than what is necessary to transform the way we use energy as the century unfolds. She concludes, in essence, that nuclear power has a built-in climate mitigation approach, and that nuclear power should play a major role as a mainstream energy source to replace coal and most of the natural gas currently being burned into the atmosphere.
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