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2 Reshaping the World’s Energy Matrix The first climate accords The scientific findings regarding climate change have alarmed people around the world, unleashing a wide-ranging debate that has had the effect of gaining an increasing number of supporters for policy measures aimed at curbing CO2 emissions through a reshaping of the world’s energy matrix. This chapter gives an overview of the amount and kind of energy countries produce and discusses the options for carbon-free energy alternatives as well as the actual policy measures chosen for the purpose of moving toward more carbon-friendly energy sources. It does not yet focus on bioenergy and resource-conservation issues; those are treated in later chapters. Though the climate debate is old, a worldwide breakthrough in public awareness of the global warming problem was made by former US vicepresident Al Gore, who reached a huge audience with his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth and who was (with the IPCC) a recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And the Stern Review, published in 2007, exerted a major impact on both science and politics. Because the Stern Commission had been appointed by Prime Minister Tony Blair, the British government accorded the report a great deal of publicity and managed to make climate change a dominant theme in Europe’s capitals. At the G8 Summit in 2007 at Heiligendamm, Germany, wide-ranging proposals to battle the greenhouse effect were put forth, and those proposals were adopted in principle a year later at the G8 Summit in Toyako, Japan. Essentially, the G8 countries subscribed to the goal of halving their CO2 emissions by 2050.1 The hope that this goal would find support among a much wider range of countries had then been pinned on the UN Climate Conference , to be held in Copenhagen in 2009, but that conference was a Let us try to pack the air in sacks. 34 Chapter 2 failure.2 Although the next conference, held in Mexico in 2010, achieved such a proclamation,3 no concrete measures were agreed to and no burden-sharing plan was adopted that would help attain this goal. Public awareness of the climate problem was preceded by more than 30 years of intensive scientific discussion, in which climate researchers raised many warnings. Scientific discussion of the greenhouse effect had already started in the nineteenth century with the works of Fourier, Tyndall, and Arrhenius. The first mention of the potential perils resulting from a man-made reinforcement of this effect is found in a study by Revelle and Suess dating from 1957,4 but it wasn’t until the first global climate conference, held by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in Geneva in 1978, that scientific warnings rose in a chorus. The Geneva conference is considered to have initiated the current wave of climate research, leading eventually to insights and findings such as those addressed in chapter 1 of this book. Since 1972, experts from various UN sub-agencies had devoted their efforts to the relationship between climate anomalies and the influence of human activities on climate evolution .They pointed out that CO2 concentration in the atmosphere deserved the greatest attention of the international community because it could provoke grave changes in global climate. Political voices first addressed the issue during the Toronto conference of 1988, calling for a 20 percent reduction in global CO2 emissions by 2005, as well as for the formulation of an international convention on the matter. Around 300 natural science scholars, economists, sociologists, and environmentalists from 48 countries took part in the conference. In that same year, the United Nations, in conjunction with the World Meteorological Organization, established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The word “panel” understates the true magnitude of the globe-spanning research network that has been put together. The IPCC presented its first report at the second World Climate Conference , held in Geneva in 1990. At that conference it was agreed to start negotiations for an internationally binding agreement on climate change. In 1992, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), held in Rio de Janeiro, with the participation of 178 countries, established the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC). Under this convention, the by then 189 signatories committed to reducing their carbon dioxide emissions in order to slow down climate change. The first and thus far the only commitment to concrete actions was achieved during the Kyoto conference. That was a step forward, but it was no real solution...

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