Driving Climate Change

CHAPTER 3

Toward a Policy Agenda for

Climate Change: Changing

Technologies and Fuels and

the Changing Value of Energy

Duncan Eggar

The business as usual case for global affairs suggests that some very dis-

turbing trends are apparent today and could lead to significant changes by

2050. By then, the global population will grow by around 40 percent. The

number of megacities will grow considerably. The number of vehicles in the

world will increase from 700 million to 2 billion. The global demand for

energy will increase between two- and threefold, and energy security will

become an increasingly significant issue, with the cost of energy remaining

high. These trends will be particularly marked in the developing world.

One of the greatest challenges posed by the current trends is to address

the increasing buildup in the atmosphere of carbon dioxide (CO

2

) and other

greenhouse gases (GHGs) associated with increased use of fossil fuels as

the world’s primary energy source. CO

2

and other GHG emissions have

been implicated, almost without doubt, as a major factor in global climate

change.

In 2004, policy analysts proposed a “wedge and slices” approach to

addressing the need to reduce CO

2

emissions (Browne, 2004; Pacala and

Socolow, 2004). In essence, this approach involved reducing the seemingly

inexorable growth of emissions to retain emissions in 2050 at 2000 levels.

This would involve taking 7 gigatonnes (Gte) of carbon out of the atmos-

phere. Estimates showed that, by breaking this into seven or more slices of

up to 1Gte each, the problem becomes manageable. The good news is that

technologies available today are capable of making sizeable reductions in

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