IEA recommends fifty percent cut in carbon emissions by 2050

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A new report by the International Energy Agency is rejecting the business-as-usual approach and telling countries to slash carbon use, BusinessGreen writes.

The IEA is urging countries to adopt their "Blue Map" scenario, in which global carbon dioxide emissions would be sliced in half. The plan would require a much greater investment in clean technology, rising from the current $165 billion per year to $1.6 trillion per year in 2050. The money, the study reports, would come from both government and private sectors.

To achieve a 50-percent cut in emissions, the IEA report says that government funding for low-carbon technologies would have to increase by two to five times its current level. Additionally, the government would be responsible for helping to create a marketplace where green technologies would be competitive, using interventionist methods such as emissions trading schemes, tax credits, loan guarantees and green certificates.

The current business-as-usual model would result in fossil fuels supplying more than two-thirds of the world’s energy and projects that overall energy demand will increase by 84 percent in the next 40 years. However, the IEA scenario would require energy demand to grow by only 32 percent.

Robert Bell, chief technical officer at AEA and an advisor for the IEA report team, reflected on the differences between the two to BusinessGreen, saying that "governments, investors, and consumers around the world need to take bold steps."

If carbon emissions are not halved by 2050, the IEA offers a dire warning, saying that combating climate change would be even more expensive, if not impossible, in the future.

This week the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency has found that industrial carbon emissions have remained unchanged since last year. As a result of the recession, production slowed in the leading industrial nations, shrinking emissions by 7 percent or 800 million tons, the Associated Press reports. However, China and India more than made up the difference, increasing emissions by 9 percent 6 percent, respectively.

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