$45 Trillion Needed To Save The World
At the World Future Energy Summit in Abu Dhabi, Kevin Parker, Global Head of Deutsche Bank’s Asset Management division stated that up to $45 trillion in new alternative energy investment will be needed to replace the world’s dependency on carbon-based fuels.
Mr. Parker $45 trillion price tag is based on an estimated provided by the International Energy Agency (IEA). In addition, he believes it will take several decades to transition to a more sustainable energy model. His belief is that unless the money is spent to create some form of tax system or a cap-and-trade system, the world will hurl itself headlong into a continued rise in temperatures thanks to global warming.
In his address, he points to the “Evidence from Antarctic cores has clearly shown that the concentration of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere has reached an 800,000-year high, with most of that increase having taken place in the last two or three hundred years,”.
“We’re close to the tipping point where average global temperatures will rise more than two degrees Celsius, potentially leading to catastrophic and certainly very expensive, macro-climactic shifts.”
Where are the biggest challenges confronting us? It the countries that have shown little international cooperation, which are also the largest carbon-emitting such as the U.S., China, Russia and India. These countries have done very little to introduce regulation, and the U.S. has not even signed up to the Kyoto protocol.
The Kyoto Protocol is a protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, an international environmental treaty produced at the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), informally known as the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in June 1992. The treaty is intended to achieve “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.
However, attitudes and actions on global warming may be turning around. U.S. President Barack Obama is making alternative energy the cornerstone of his policies to revive the US economy - pledging to create millions of jobs in the process. The president has created a new White House position to coordinate climate and energy policy and to look at alternative fuels and promotinghybrid cars. The “energy czar” is Carol Browner, who headed the EPA under former president Bill Clinton.
And if Obama is true to his word, it could cause a chain reaction to countries like India and China to invest in alternative energies or face economic consequences. Obama could place significant tariffs or even refuse to do business with countries who refuse to face the reality about global warming.
$45 Trillion is an amount of money that most of us cannot comprehend. But the bottom line it must start somewhere. It seems the global economic crisis could provide the catalyst for this immense effort and bring back the world economy at the same time.
source: xpress.com
