The world is heading towards rapidly changing and irreversible climatic changes, and immediate measures should be undertaken to prevent disastrous effects, warns the International Energy Agency.
In the agency’s annual World Energy Outlook, some of the most pressing issues faced by the energy world have been analyzed.
The outlook mentions key issues of concern like the rebound of CO2 emissions to a record high, record spending on oil imports and worsening of the energy efficiency of global economy for the second straight year.
The analysis also states that with the addition of new fossil-fuelled power stations, energy-guzzling factories and inefficient buildings in the next five years, it will be almost impossible to control the level of global warming to safe levels and avoid “catastrophic” changes in the global climate.
Emissions of carbon dioxide, the principal greenhouse gas, jumped by 5.3 percent in 2010 to a record 30.4 gigatonnes. The report also predicts an increase of 20 percent in emissions until 2035.
To prevent such drastic levels of emissions, it is important to use only a limited budget for business for the next five years.
“We can still act in time to preserve a plausible path to a sustainable energy future. Each year the necessary measures get progressively tougher and viciously more expensive,” the National Geographic quoted IEA Executive Director Maria van der Hoeven as saying.
The IEA also forecasts in its report that all further projects and infrastructures should make use of renewable sources of energy like solar and wind energy.
The National Geographic mentions that to ramp up renewables that quickly would require large subsidies, rising on a fast pace to reach $250 billion a year by 2035-four times today’s level. Even at that level, those subsidies would be less than half as much as the world spends now on fossil fuel subsidies.
Apart from this, to meet such targets, increasing nuclear power will also be required besides usage of natural gas in place of coal.
