News & Views item - October 2007 |
Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future. -- with Fortitude It Can be Done. (October 24, 2007)
The 174-page the peer-reviewed report Lighting the Way: Toward a Sustainable Energy Future has been released by the InterAcademy Council. It is the product of the diverse viewpoints of 15 experts
Lighting the way toward a sustainable energy future |
nominated from more than 90 national academies working under the auspices of the 7-year-old InterAcademy Council headquartered in Amsterdam.
There were seven consultative workshops held during the course of this project in Durban, Beijing, Berkeley, Rio de Janeiro, New Delhi, Paris and Tokyo.
Overall the Council reached the nine conclusions listed below.
CONCLUSION 1. Meeting the basic energy needs of the poorest people on this
planet is a moral and social imperative that can and must be pursued in
concert with sustainability objectives.
CONCLUSION 2. Concerted efforts must be made to improve energy
efficiency and reduce the carbon intensity of the world economy.
CONCLUSION 3. Technologies for capturing and sequestering carbon from
fossil fuels, particularly coal, can play a major role in the
cost-effective management of global carbon dioxide emissions.
CONCLUSION 4. Competition for oil and natural gas supplies has the
potential to become a source of growing geopolitical tension and
economic vulnerability for many nations in the decades ahead.
CONCLUSION 5. As a low-carbon resource, nuclear power can continue to
make a significant contribution to the world’s energy portfolio in the
future, but only if major concerns related to capital cost, safety, and
weapons proliferation are addressed.
CONCLUSION 6. Renewable energy in its many forms offers immense
opportunities for technological progress and innovation.
CONCLUSION 7. Biofuels hold great promise for simultaneously addressing
climate-change and energy-security concerns.
CONCLUSION 8. The development of cost-effective energy storage
technologies, new energy carriers, and improved transmission
infrastructure could substantially reduce costs and expand the
contribution from a variety of energy supply options.
CONCLUSION 9. The S&T community—together with the general public—has a
critical role to play in advancing sustainable energy solutions and must
be effectively engaged.
And summarises:
While the current energy outlook is very sobering, the Study Panel
believes that there are sustainable solutions to the energy problem.
Aggressive support of energy science and technology must be coupled with
incentives that accelerate the concurrent development and deployment of
innovative solutions that can transform the entire landscape of energy
demand and supply. Opportunities to substitute superior supply-side and
end-use technologies exist throughout the world’s energy systems, but
current investment flows generally do not reflect these opportunities.
Science and engineering provide guiding principles for the
sustainability agenda. Science provides the basis for a rational
discourse about trade-offs and risks, for selecting research and
development priorities, and for identifying new opportunities—openness
is one of its dominant values. Engineering, through the relentless
optimization of the most promising technologies, can deliver
solutions—learning by doing is among its dominant values. Better results
will be achieved if many avenues are explored in parallel, if outcomes
are evaluated with actual performance measures, if results are reported
widely and fully, and if strategies are open to revision and adaptation.
Long-term energy research and development is thus an essential component
of the pursuit of sustainability. Significant progress can be achieved
with existing technology but the scale of the long-term challenge will
demand new solutions. The research community must have the means to
pursue promising technology pathways that are already in view and some
that may still be over the horizon. The transition to sustainable energy
systems also requires that market incentives be aligned with
sustainability objectives. In particular, robust price signals for
avoided carbon emissions are critical to spur the development and
deployment of low-carbon energy technologies. Such price signals can be
phased in gradually, but expectations about how they will change over
time must be established in advance and communicated clearly so that
businesses can plan with confidence and optimize their long-term capital
investments.
Critical to the success of all the tasks ahead are the abilities of
individuals and institutions to effect changes in energy resources and
usage. Capacity building, both in terms of investments in individual
expertise and institutional effectiveness, must become an urgent
priority of all principal actors: multi-national organizations,
governments, corporations, educational institutions, non-profit
organizations, and the media. Above all, the general public must be
provided with sound information about the choices ahead and the actions
required for achieving a sustainable energy future.
To read and download the full report click here.