Incremental gains are no longer good enough if the goal is to get carbon dioxide emissions to zero, a researcher argues.
For decades, some of the most effective ways of cutting carbon dioxide emissions have been to find ways to burn less fuel. Think of the Honda Civic in your garage that can go for more than 40 miles per gallon of gasoline on the highway, or the natural gas furnace in your basement that is more than 90 percent efficient.
But now it’s time to focus less on eking out gains in efficiency from burning fossil fuels, and more on getting people and businesses to cut fossil fuels out of their lives, according to Jan Rosenow, director of European programs for the Regulatory Assistance Project.
“You could try to squeeze out more efficiency out of a petrol or diesel car,” Rosenow, who is based in Belgium, told me. “Or you could simply make the switch to fully electric.”
The larger point is that the idea of energy efficiency needs to be reinvented for an era in which incremental improvements are no longer good enough.
He made his case in a recent essay in the journal Energy Research & Social Science, co-written with Nick Eyre of the Oxford University Centre for the Environment.
It is a sweeping argument that would reshape the government offices that oversee energy incentive programs, and the companies and individuals for whom the burning of fossil fuels is interwoven into daily life.
For example, the U.S. electricity sector has made progress in reducing emissions by building highly efficient natural gas power plants that can out-compete coal-fired power plants and older natural gas plants that are much less efficient.
Rosenow says the benefits of making fossil fuel plants more efficient are not large enough if the goal is to get to zero emissions as soon as possible. And that goal is not some lark. Getting to near-zero emissions is essential for protecting human life from the effects of climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and many others.
I need to step back here to note that we are talking about energy efficiency, which means using less energy to accomplish the same or greater output. Often, when I’m writing about energy efficiency, it has to do with insulating buildings or installing highly efficient lightning. But those are just two aspects of the much larger push to conserve energy.
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