Professional Groups
How do we reconcile growth, emissions and resources?
Simon Roberts
Organised by the Energy Management Group.
6:00pm for 6:30pm
Tuesday 9 October 2007
Institute of Physics, London
Climate change has brought to a head, like no other issue, the problem of CO2 emissions, economic growth and energy consumption. Use of energy continues to rise in all growing economies and the overwhelming majority is from fossil fuels. Quite separate from the climate change debate, concern is growing over the availability of fossil fuels with talk of a peak in the global production of oil ("peak oil").
The Stern Review is premised on economic growth of 3%/year, but surely this is at odds with the need for radical cuts in CO2 emissions. Even peak oil and climate change could be a bad mix: if a shortfall in oil is made up by coal-to-liquids, this highly carbon-intensive process could actually exacerbate overall CO2 emissions.
Various technological solutions have been proposed. Socolow & Pacala have coined the phrase "wedges" for a menu of options to stabilise emissions. Monbiot in his book "Heat" examines radical reductions of 90%, sector by sector. Hirsch, Bezdek & Wendling list feasible mitigation measures for peak oil. Scaling any of these options up to a level that actually makes an impact will entail huge diversions of industrial output. Quite apart from whether we can afford these options, are they physically feasible?
Economists have traditionally been wary of intervention by outsiders. Scientists, for their part, have tended to leave analysis of the economy to those trained in economic techniques. Economics and science rest on different paradigms. However co-ordination between the two can offer new insights in a situation where economic development is increasingly coming up against physical constraints whether in terms of limited resources or of the amounts of pollutants we exude.
This talk will review research showing fundamental links between economic activity and energy consumption. It will introduce useful metrics by which to compare technology options, such as EROEI (energy return on energy invested) and energy quality. It will discuss confounding behaviour of the rebound effect and Khazzoom-Brookes postulate. Finally it will describe a systems dynamic model known as ECCO that enables the physical envelope of possibilities for an economy to be explored. Example runs of the model will illustrate that tools such as this will be essential for a balanced approach to the uncharted waters of technological, economic and societal change that lie ahead.
Simon Roberts is a researcher in the Foresight Group at Arup (http://2006.driversofchange.com/).
Presentation slides (3MB)
Transcript (75KB)
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