The Low-Carbon Technology Challenge | Nature

From the Nature article, "Let the global technology race begin," by Isabel Galiana and Christopher Green, of McGill University:

Stabilizing the climate is a huge technological challenge and the solution of ready-to-deploy, scalable low-carbon technologies is far from being a reality. We calculate that if global emissions are to be reduced by at least 80% by 2100 — a suggested goal if the rise in global temperature is to be limited to 2 °C — while maintaining global economic growth at 2.2% per year, two things are required. First, the energy intensity of the economy will need to be reduced to one-third of its 2000 level and, second, consumption of carbon-free energy will need to be almost three times greater than the total energy consumed globally in 2000, 85% of which was supplied by fossil fuels. To achieve this goal by 2100, energy-technology research and development (R&D) will be essential to decarbonize the global economy, through huge scale-ups of existing low-carbon technologies as well as breakthroughs. ...

In recent decades, although global GDP has grown at about 3% per year and global carbon intensity has declined by about 1.4% per year, emissions have grown well in excess of 1% per year. In view of this, the proposal by the Group of 8 rich nations (G8) to cut global emissions in half by 2050, consistent with limiting global long-term temperature increase to 2 °C — and to do this without slowing economic development — would require a tripling of the average annual rate of decline in carbon intensity for the next 40 years. This accelerated decline in carbon intensity requires a revolution in energy technology that has not yet started.

Galiana and Green are featured in a recent Time article, "Copenhagen's Real Challenge: Technology to Meet the Targets."

The strategy of putting a price on carbon, through a tax or cap and trade, is not mutually exclusive from the types of technology investments advocated by Galiana and Green. The U.S. House Waxman-Markey bill (ACES) would do both.