IPCC report calls for $122 trillion for clean energy, build ‘one to two nuclear power plants every day,’ world hunger would rise
In the new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) special report, the United Nations’ call for governments and companies to shift trillions of dollars into “low-carbon energy” systems to limit future global warming is “not feasible.”
The IPCC projects between $1.6 trillion and $3.8 trillion in “energy system supply-side investments” is needed every year through 2050 to have any chance of keeping future global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
earth fireball destruction photo/ Bela Geletneky aka photoshopper24 via pixabay.com
That’s a price tag of between $51.2 trillion and $122 trillion by 2050 just for energy investments. Environmental economist Richard Tol said, given the high cost, the IPCC’s report is totally unrealistic.
“No, 1.5 degrees Celsius is not feasible,” Tol, an economics professor at the University of Sussex, told The Daily Caller.
“China and India have many brand new coal-fired power plants, and someone will need to buy out the owners to close them down decades before the end of their economic life,” Tol explained. “That alone will breach the target.”
This scenario calls for emissions cuts of 45 percent below 2010 levels by 2030, and then for emissions to reach zero by 2050.
In other words, the world would have to build the equivalent of one to two nuclear power plants every day to meet this goal, according to University of Colorado professor Roger Pielke, Jr.
Countries would also have to shutter thousands of coal, gas and oil-fired power plants as well.
“Negative emissions are another problem,” Tol said. “This would require subsidies on a massive scale. Any politician proposing that would be voted out of office.”
Even the IPCC’s report notes the amount of land that would need to be dedicated the reforestation and bioenergy crops “may have significant impacts on agricultural and food systems,” endangering progress on eliminating world hunger.
“There is a chance that the world could come pretty close to the target by 2100, if in fact the climate model sensitivity has been overestimated by close to a factor of two,” Cato Institute climate scientist Patrick Michaels told TheDCNF.
“This is approximately the result in the recent work Nic Lewis and Judy Curry, and John Christy and Dick McNider,” Michaels said.
Climate scientist Judith Curry co-authored a study published in April that found the IPCC models likely overestimated warming by 30 to 45 percent. In a recent blog post, Curry said the UN’s new report used “climate models that are running too hot and not fit for purpose of projecting 21st century climate change.”
“[T]he IPCC still has not made a strong case for this massive investment to prevent 1.5C warming,” Curry wrote in her blog.
[…] is pointing to the insane financial figures called for in the IPCC report: $122 trillion. Then there is the $240 per gallon tax: “In 2030, the report says a carbon tax would need to […]