On Not Reaching Carbon Goals

Reducing carbon dioxide emissions by enough to prevent global temperatures from rising more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) is “still within reach,’’ the International Energy Agency reported on Monday, but at the moment, trends in energy use are running in the wrong direction.

In the latest version of Energy Technology Perspectives, a report issued biennially by the agency, it said the technology to achieve that goal is available. But as Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the agency, put it, “we’re not using it.’’ Since the agency published its first Energy Technology Perspectives in 2006, the evidence of climate change has only grown stronger, she said, but “if anything, it has fallen further down the political agenda.’’

Coal consumption, for example, is still rising around the world, and that is “the single most problematic trend in the relationship between energy and climate change,” the report said. Building more efficient coal-fired plants operating at higher temperatures could cut emissions by 30 percent per kilowatt-hour. But to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by 2050, coal use would have to fall by 45 percent from 2009 levels, the report said.

Natural gas is not the answer to this problem, the report points out. Gas-fired plants may emit only half as much carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour generated than coal-fired plants, but by 2025 the amount emitted will be higher than the average for the entire electric system, it said.

The United States and some other countries are feverishly building new natural-gas-fired generating equipment, the report adds, but the level of emissions from gas raises “questions around the long-term viability of some gas infrastructure investment if climate objectives are to be met.” Such plants may eventually have to install carbon capture equipment if the world is to meet carbon goals, the report said.

The International Energy Agency, comprising 28 countries, is a branch of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Energy, especially oil, is a major focus of the group.

The agency’s analysts say that progress is being made in lowering the costs of two carbon-free energy sources, photovoltaic cells and onshore wind generators, but it called the lack of progress in offshore wind and in solar thermal power, in which the sun’s energy is captured as heat, “particularly worrisome.” It put carbon capture and storage in the same troubling category, along with the slow adoption of energy efficiency.

The report recommended policies that would build “confidence in the long-term potential of clean energy technologies.” Those technologies cost more, it said, but will provide returns that more than pay for the additional investment, partly by lowering fuel bills. The level of added investment between now and 2050 comes to $36 trillion, or about $130 a person a year, the agency calculated, but it would result in savings of $5 trillion from lower fuel bills. Whether the agency has correctly projected price for fossil fuels for the next four decades is not so clear.

Bo Diczfalusy, the agency’s director of sustainable policy and technology, acknowledged that all of the policy recommendations in this year’s report could just as easily have been made years ago. But he said the progress of solar photovoltaic power, which he said had posted a 42 percent annual growth rate for 10 years, and wind power, which he said grew at a 27 percent annual rate, showed that government policy could help nurture the technologies that would be needed to solve the problem.

One of the technologies described as lagging behind was nuclear power, which could play a role in eliminating coal and – if electric cars were to become popular — oil as well. The report said global electricity use would double by 2050 and that nuclear power should meet 20 percent of demand. But at the moment, the future of nuclear power in Japan and Germany is cloudy because of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear accident of March 2011, it noted.

“Let’s be honest,” Ms. van der Hoeven said. “If governments want to phase out nuclear power, they have to replace it with something else. If they’re going to replace it with renewables, that’s fine. If they are replacing it with coal, that’s not fine.”