Secretary Chu: Climate Debate May Have "Over-Obssession" With Emissions Targets
U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu said Tuesday that the long-standing focus of climate policy on setting precise emissions reductions targets and timetables has led to an "over-obsession" with numbers, according to Reuters.
Reuters reports:
Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. makes this argument in a forthcoming paper that has been provisionally accepted for publication in the journal, Environmental Research Letters. The article critically examines the targets and timetables in the UK's Climate Change Act and finds it too focused on targets without a corresponding, aggressive focus on the mechanisms necessary to effectively drive unprecedented rates of decarbonization. You can download a pre-publication version of Dr. Pielke's paper here.
Reuters reports:
While the Secretary's exact meaning is hard to discern from this brief quote, it seems that Dr. Chu's comments echo the Breakthrough Institute's long-standing argument that a focus on long-term emissions reduction targets and timetables is far less critical than a proactive focus on the mechanisms that will actually drive technology transformation, energy modernization and the resulting deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions we need -- including major public investments to spur the development and deployment of clean, cheap energy technologies, sectoral innovation-oriented efficiency efforts, global technology transfer partnerships, clean development economic efforts, deforestation prevention, etc.The comment came less than a week after a congressional panel approved President Barack Obama's landmark draft bill on climate change [see Breakthrough's analysis of the bill here], bringing it closer to debate in Congress.
"There was a great deal of discussion on the Kyoto targets, and I'm not really sure which fraction of the countries that took part in that actually met their targets," Chu, a Nobel laureate for physics, said at a conference in London. "In terms of the targets, whether it's 17 percent or 20 or 25 percent, I think there's perhaps ... an over-obsession on these percentages."
Breakthrough Institute Senior Fellow Roger Pielke Jr. makes this argument in a forthcoming paper that has been provisionally accepted for publication in the journal, Environmental Research Letters. The article critically examines the targets and timetables in the UK's Climate Change Act and finds it too focused on targets without a corresponding, aggressive focus on the mechanisms necessary to effectively drive unprecedented rates of decarbonization. You can download a pre-publication version of Dr. Pielke's paper here.