Buildings, Electricity and Global Warming: While Senate Debates Energy Bill, Pew Center Releases Reports on Reducing Energy Consumption in Building, Electricity Sectors
Pew Center on Global Climate Change releases two new reports on how to address greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings and electrical power sectors in the U.S.
Washington, DC (PRWEB) June 16, 2005 -- Effective long-term policy in the
U.S. on global warming must address greenhouse gas emissions from the buildings and electricity
sectors. These sectors together account for the largest portion of our economy’s
physical wealth and enable almost every activity of our daily life, but also
account for approximately half of our nation’s CO2 emissions.
Two
new reports released today by the Pew Center on Global Climate
Change identify a number of technologies and policy options for GHG
reductions in both sectors. The first report is Towards a Climate-Friendly Built
Environment, written by Marilyn Brown, Frank Southworth and Therese Stovall of
Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The other is U.S. Electric Power Sector and
Climate Change Mitigation, written by Granger Morgan, Jay Apt, and Lester Lave
of Carnegie Mellon University.
Long capital stock turnover, regulatory
uncertainty and diverse and often competing interests all contribute to the
difficulty of reducing GHGs from these two sectors. These reports find that a
portfolio of affordable technology and policy options exist to completely
transform the high-emitting buildings and electricity sectors to low-GHG
emitting sectors over the next 50 years. However, the long lead time required to
develop new technologies, deploy available technologies, and turn over capital
stock, means that policies need to be launched now to create the impetus for
change. Efforts must be sustained over time to achieve the deep reductions
required.
"The importance of these two sectors to both the U.S. economy
and to the issue of climate change cannot be over-stated,” said Eileen Claussen,
President of the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, “This research shows that
we can achieve enormous reductions in the building and electric sectors, but
only if we craft a clear and comprehensive policy to guide them."
Some
insights that emerge from the reports are:
- Policies are needed to enable
meaningful GHG reductions from these sectors. The diverse and fragmented nature
of the buildings sector, and the current state of regulatory uncertainty in the
electricity sector prevent many available GHG reduction options from being
adopted in the market in the absence of policies.
- Significant increases
in R&D and deployment policies are essential if we hope to significantly
reduce GHGs from these sectors. A significantly expanded R&D program is
needed in the U.S. to develop new technologies, and deployment policies are
needed to push and pull available fuels and technologies into the market in the
near and long term.
- An elimination of most GHGs from these sectors is
possible over the next 50 years. If managed properly, the electricity sector
could undergo a complete capital stock turnover to low or non-GHG emitting
generation sources over the next 50 years; while buildings in the U.S. could
become net low-GHG energy exporters in the same time frame – but government
policies are essential to provide clear policy direction in order to drive the
massive public and private investments and choices necessary to enable such a
future.
Solutions Series
This report is part of the Solutions series,
which is aimed at providing individuals and organizations with tools to evaluate
and reduce their contributions to climate change. In 2003, the
Solutions series released the first of its sectoral reports, Reducing Greenhouse
Gas Emissions from U.S. Transportation, written by David L. Greene of Oak Ridge
National Laboratory and Andreas Schafer of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology. Other Pew Center series focus on domestic and international policy
issues, environmental impacts, and the economics of climate change.
A
complete copy of this report—and previous Pew Center reports—is available on the
Pew Center's web site, http://www.pewclimate.org/global-warming-in-depth/all_reports/.
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Source : http://www.prweb.com/releases/2005/6/prweb251798.htm