The uniform view was that it was basically too late to avoid climate change – it’s already here and happening at a frighteningly accelerating pace – and that it was getting close to being too late to avoid catastrophic planetary damage. The best we can hope for is containing future impact to modest levels, and even this would require a massive and rapid shift to much lower carbon energy. To prevent widespread loss of species and coastal areas, it is suggested that the U.S. will need to reduce the absolute quantity of annual CO2 emissions by 60-80% from today’s levels by 2050 – which frankly seems beyond reach. Failing that, all we can do is become more adaptable as a species to the sweeping global climatic changes that are inevitably forthcoming.
All of which was terribly depressing, seemingly hopeless. Fortunately, the last two days of the conference were a little more inspiring.
The Chair of the conference, NREL’s Chuck Kutscher, asked experts from each of the segments of renewable energy and energy efficiency to quantify the economically/technically plausible deployments of these technologies in the U.S. by 2030, to see if we could get onto a path of 60-80% CO2 reduction by 2050. When each of these independent analyses was added together, the overall conclusion at the closing session was that it was indeed viable for the U.S. to achieve the dramatic emission reductions that are estimated to be necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change.