Stanford Researchers Have an Exciting Plan to Tackle The Climate Emergency Worldwide
TESSA KOUMOUNDOUROS | 27 DEC 2019 |
SCIENCE ALERT
Things are pretty dire right now. Giant swaths of my country are burning as I write this, at a scale
unlike anything we've ever seen. Countless animals,
including koalas, are perishing along with our life-supporting greenery. People are losing homes and loved ones.
These catastrophes are
being replicated around
the globe ever more frequently, and we know
exactly what is exacerbating them. We know we need to rapidly make some drastic changes - and Stanford researchers have come up with a plan.
Using the latest data available, they have outlined how 143 countries around the world can switch to 100 percent clean energy by the year 2050.
This plan could not only contribute towards stabilizing our dangerously increasing global temperatures, but also reduce the 7 million deaths caused by pollution every year and create millions more jobs than keeping our current systems.
The plan would require a hefty investment of around US$73 trillion. But the researchers' calculations show the jobs and savings it would earn would pay this back in as little as seven years.
"Based on previous calculations we have performed, we believe this will avoid 1.5 degree global warming," environmental engineer and lead author Mark Jacobson told ScienceAlert.
"The timeline is more aggressive than any IPCC scenario -
we concluded in 2009 that a 100 percent transition by 2030 was technically and economically possible - but for social and political reasons, a 2050 date is more practical."
Here's how it would work. The plan involves transitioning all our energy sectors, including electricity, transport, industry, agriculture, fishing, forestry and the military to work entirely with renewable energy.
Jacobson believes we have 95 percent of the technology we need already, with only solutions for long distance and ocean travel still to be commercialized.
"By electrifying everything with clean, renewable energy, we reduce power demand by about 57 percent,"
Jacobson explained.
He and colleagues show it is possible to meet demand and maintain stable electricity grids using only wind, water, solar and storage, across all 143 countries.
These technologies are already available, reliable and respond much faster than natural gas, so they are already cheaper. There's also no need for nuclear which takes 10-19 years between planning and operation, biofuels that cause more air pollution, or the invention of new technologies.
"'Clean coal' just doesn't exist and never will," Jacobson says, "because the technology does not work and only increases mining and emissions of air pollutants while reducing little carbon, and there is no guarantee at all the carbon that is captured will stay captured."
The team found that electrifying all energy sectors makes the demand for energy more flexible and the combination of renewable energy and storage is better suited to meet this flexibility than our current system.
