Green Revolution needed

Stage lights have been switched off, the treaty has been signed and the last delegation has just left Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris. The agreement has been called historical. And now it’s time to wonder: what’s next? Whether governments will be willing to commit on this treaty or not, it will be clear in a few years.   

 

And now what?

 

According to the Financial Times, for instance, the British government doesn’t seem too concerned about the climate deal. Since this agreement has a really long time horizon, the current government dwells on the reliance on future technologies for meeting the goals, not changing its present environmental policies.

 

The state of technology will be the key factor that will decide whether this deal is really going to be historical or just another failure.  Huge investments in green technologies, renewable energies and more efficient production methods are quickly needed.

 

What Paris has done, is to set a consensus about the needing of more clean energies. The voluntary agreement of cutting down emissions, according to Yale professor Scott Barret, is the most diplomacy could do. This however will not be sufficient, if a technology revolution won’t take place in the next few years. 

 

Things are changing.

 

Common wisdom used to consider renewable energies attractive just for the already developed economies of the Western World. Big polluters, like India and China were believed not to have any specific interest into such resources. Nonetheless this trend is slowly changing. Driven by both internal and external factors (a more secure supply that wouldn’t depend on geopolitical trend on one hand, and stronger requests for cleaner air, made by citizens, on the other), these two countries have stronger incentives for switching to a green-energy led growth. China is already investing a lot into solar energy, and its productions skyrocketed from 50 megawatts of generation capacity in 2004 to 20,000 MW in 2012. It accounted for more than the 70% of the world supply. At the same time, European countries, in the wake of the 2007 financial crisis, cut back inventive s for investments into this field. This factor, with the low cost of Chinese production, drove out of the market many European and American industries, leading the US to introduce an anti-dumping strategy over these kind of products.

 

Another key topic, when it comes to reducing C02 emissions, is the role of nuclear energy.  It is a divisive issue in the political debate and among public opinions all over the world, but its possible contributions to the reaching of the Paris goals cannot be underestimated. And in this sense, some breakthrough developments are happening in these days.

 

The first news arrives from this country, Russia. In Saint Petersburg the government is about to launch its first floating nuclear power plant.  In a time of financial crisis and fear of nuclear disasters, that led the Germany’s government to scrap its nuclear plan, and the Japanese one to review his own, low prices and small dimensions are the keywords. And in fact this new technology would produce facilities that are two thirds smaller than the traditional ones, hence having smaller capital costs and a quicker return on investments.

 

Waste disposal has always been a problem, ever since the beginning of the nuclear era. How to safely store the U-238 uranium, material that is produced during the nuclear enrichment, useless for energetic purposes but not for this reason less dangerous, has been debated for a long time. Today, Terra Power, a startup financed by Bill Gates, may have found a solution. Employing a new Traveling Wave Reactor technology, it will be possible to re-use the U-238 for producing more energy and thus solving two problems at the same time.

 

Negative emission technologies

 

If it is not possible to cut more the actual emissions, it’s necessary to find a way in order to remove already present emissions from the air. From here the name Negative Emission Technologies (NET).

 

There is an interesting article, published on the American journal Nature that analyzes some of these techniques and draws a balance on each of them. 

 

Among them, there is the idea of making energy by burning trees, but at the same time re-planting them. In this way, in a few years, the new trees will grow up again, therefore taking out from the atmosphere the carbon dioxide that was created by burning woods, on the first step. As it is really well explicated by this Washington Post article, however, the magnitude of trees needed for this operation is going to be enormous. This because the scale of the global warming and the carbon emissions, is so big that it can’t be dealt with, using easy, conventional measures.

 

The solution lays on some real technology revolution, a massive use of renewable resources and huge investments aimed at pursuing a bigger energetic efficiency in every aspect of goods production and consumption.

 

It’s now up to the governments to create the economical and political conditions that would incentivize private business to make this proper kind of investments.