Global warming fight is affordable, says new report

Aggressively cutting carbon emissions would cost only 3 percent of world economic growth between now and 2030, says a UN-sponsored study endorsed by 105 countries.

By Peter N. Spotts | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

posted May 4, 2007 at 3:00 p.m. EDT

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Finally, good news about global warming: It's possible to virtually choke off emissions of greenhouse gases that scientists say are heating up the planet without also breaking the bank.

That's the key message in a report released May 4 by the UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The 38-page document, summarizing a larger tome of more than 1,000 pages, focuses on ways to curb greenhouse-gas emissions, mainly carbon dioxide, and on the economic effects that different approaches to cutting emissions could have.

Increased energy efficiency, wider use of renewable energy sources, shifts in land use and farming practices, and wider use of nuclear energy – among other measures – could substantially reduce the risk of feeling the worst effects of global warming outlined in two previous IPCC volumes released earlier this year.

To be sure, these mitigation efforts will come at a cost to economic growth. The biggest gains happen when the price of carbon hits $100 a ton, according to the authors, raising the cost of fossil fuels such as oil or coal. By some estimates, that would translate into US gasoline prices from $0.25 to $1 a gallon higher than today's.

But in the context of global economic activity, that cost is modest, according to the report. Under its most aggressive emissions-reduction scenario, still-robust economic growth rates would slow by an average of only 0.12 percent a year between now and 2030 – or by roughly 3 percent over the entire period.

This scenario would aim to hold the atmosphere's greenhouse-gas concentrations by year 2100 inside a range that would limit the long-term rise in global average temperatures to between 2 and 2.4 degrees Celsius (3.6 to 4.3 degrees Fahrenheit). Higher temperature ranges would generally come at a lower economic cost, but also could raise the risk of incurring some of the more dramatic effects of climate change, such as floods, droughts, heat waves, and sea-level rise. If greenhouse-gas concentrations are allowed to double their pre-industrial-era levels by the end of this century, that most likely would lead to an average temperature increase of 3 degrees C. (5.4 degrees F.).

To keep temperature increases at a minimum countries must begin to crack down on emissions quickly, the report says. Delays would lead to countries building "more emission-intensive" factories, power plants, and other infrastructure around the world, it says.

The report comes against a backdrop of greenhouse-gas emissions – mostly carbon dioxide – that have risen some 70 percent over the past 35 years, and could rise by up to 90 percent by 2030, according to Bert Metz, a senior researcher at the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency and one of the co-chairs for the group producing the new IPCC report.

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