We Could Do It: 77% Renewables World-Wide by 2050
by James Kanter, NEW YORK TIMES, May 9, 2011
Renewable sources could provide a majority of the world’s energy supplies by 2050, but only if governments dramatically increase financial and political support for technologies like wind and solar power, experts from a United Nations panel said Monday.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said in a report that the availability of renewable sources like the wind and sun was virtually unlimited, and could provide up to 77 percent of the world’s energy needs by mid-century, but governments needed to adopt policies to take advantage of them.
“The report shows that it is not the availability of the resource, but the public policies that will either expand or constrain renewable energy development over the coming decades,” said Ramón Pichs Madruga, a member of the I.P.C.C. and the director of an economics research center in Cuba.
The report said renewable sources — bioenergy, wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower and ocean energy — currently accounted for about 13 percent of global energy supply.
To reach the goal of generating nearly 80 percent of the world’s energy from those same sources would require investments by governments and the private sector amounting to $5.1 trillion through 2020, and nearly $7.2 trillion between 2021 and 2030, according to the report.
The benefits would include better public health from cleaner air, as well as fewer greenhouse gas emissions, which would help hold an increase in global temperature to below 2 degrees Celsius. [Read rest of story]