Launching a Technology Revolution

Despite the huge technological transformation of the global economy in the 20th Century, stabilization of greenhouse gas emissions will require a comparable revolutionary technological change in the 21st Century. While projections of future greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions show large increases in the coming century, the scenarios that underpin these projections already include major improvements in energy technology, including large penetration of renewable technology. However, the low cost and convenience of fossil fuels will lead to their continued use over the next century, unless there are significant changes in the nature of energy technology. These changes require both new technology and a method for fairly valuing society’s interest in stabilizing GHG concentrations. If the costs are appropriate, technologies like carbon capture and storage, hydrogen energy systems and biotechnology offer considerable hope for stabilizing concentrations near the end of this century. However, current global investments in energy R&D are modest in comparison to the challenge. Further, widespread deployment of these technologies, likely to be largely developed by a combination of public and private investment, must be demonstrated to be not only technologically feasible but also commercially feasible. The public–private energy R&D partnership must work to avoid the “muddle in the middle” which can arise when the two sectors cannot resolve their respective roles, leaving promising technologies stranded by the market. Considerations of the “end-game”, the actual stabilization of GHG concentrations, suggest that the products of the technological revolution may have to penetrate faster than planning would suggest, and that countries interested in stabilization may need to bring their own emissions of greenhouse gases close to zero by the end of this century or shortly thereafter. How Big a Technology Revolution? An amazing technological transformation of society took place in the twentieth century, a transformation very much driven by energy. The rise of the automobile, the global diffusion of electricity, and the development of massive energy-intensive industrial processes dominated this transformation. Given that history, it may appear presumptuous to suggest a technological revolution in the very next century, but there will be a revolution. That revolution will be fomented and shaped by large-scale trends in human history. One such trend is the inexorable growth in the scale of human activities, driven in turn by the expansion of the human population and, more importantly, the growing circle of economic development. This implies a concurrent expansion in the technological infrastructure in such key services as food, water, housing, transportation and energy. As a consequence, the global energy system as we know it cannot continue. It must evolve, because the limited resources of conventional oil and gas imply a transformation in the supply of energy either toward unconventional oil and gas, coal, and/or nuclear and renewable energy forms. At the same time income growth will lead to increased demands for environmental quality, while at the same time the unintended byproducts of that very same income growth will exert increasing pressure on that environment. That pressure will be acutely felt in the realm of climate change. Fossil fuels are the most important source of emissions of the most important greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide (CO2). And fossil fuels are the backbone of the global energy system, the engine driving the growth in global incomes. There is a wide and deep literature that has examined potential futures in the areas of economic development, energy production and use, and associated greenhouse gas emissions. That literature reflects the potential variety of economic and technical developments that could occur over the course of the twenty-first century. While there is enormous variety in potential futures, most foresee a twenty-first century that is at the same time richer and with an expanded scale of human activities. Underpinning this growth is an increasing energy demand, similar to that shown in Figure 1. This figure represents a scenario referred to 2 Climate Policy for the 21st Century