Yahoo News 9 Jul 08;
Oil prices are too high and threaten the global economy but also open the way to huge energy and pollution savings by spurring new technologies and policies, the IEA said on Wednesday.
"High energy prices provide an unforeseen opportunity to set a new course," the IEA said, estimating the cumulative cost of cutting carbon emissions by half by 2050 at 45 trillion dollars or about 1.1 percent of annual production in the global economy.
Oil prices were "too high and a threat to the global economy and social welfare of millions of people, particularly in developing countries."
The IEA published 25 recommendations on energy efficiency it had submitted to the G8 summit in Japan, what it said was "a win-win strategy" in providing clean and secure energy alongside adequate stimulus to economic growth.
Welcoming calls at the G8 summit for improved energy efficiency and development of technologies to reduce carbon emissions, IEA executive director Nobuo Tanaka said in a statement: "We are very pleased that G8 leaders are so engaged in finding and implementing these policies."
Tanaka said that if the proposals were put into effect globally and immediately, savings in carbon emissions by 2030 would be equivalent to twice the emissions by European members of the OECD in 2005.
The IEA, the energy monitoring arm of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, said that although nuclear energy was an important part of the solution, "radically new approaches are needed to the ways energy is produced, transformed, processed and consumed."
It pinpointed the storage of CO2, and wind, solar and tidal power. A big contribution could be made by replacing inefficient coal-fired power stations with plants using the latest technology.
In the transport sector, medium-term carbon efficiency savings of up to 50 percent were possible.
The document was the result of three years of work since a 2005 summit at Gleneagles in Scotland when G8 leaders asked the IEA to contribute to a Plan of Action on Climate Change.
A key passage stated: "It is urgent for industrialised countries to seize today's opportunities to develop a more sustainable energy path that can enable developing countries to leapfrog the polluting phase of economic growth."
Describing the energy challenge as "daunting," the IEA warned that if annual economic growth averaged 3.3 percent to 2050, and current policies did not change, "energy-related CO2 emissions could more than double" by that year.
"Radical action is crucial" and depended on international cooperation, particularly involving China and India, it said.
Available measures, if applied immediately, could save 18-26 percent of energy used by industry globally.
A 50-percent cut in emissions by 2050, as mooted by the G8 meeting, would depend on technologies still being developed and the most expensive of these would cost 200-500 dollars per tonne of CO2 saved.
The IEA calculated that the extra investment needed to 2050 was about 1.1 trillion dollars per year, equivalent to the annual output of Canada or about 1.1 percent of global production.
The cumulative figure needed was 45 trillion dollars "but these investment needs would be balanced by lower expenditure on fossil fuels ... (and) there will be significant fuel cost savings for importing countries."
The net outcome could even be that "savings exceed investment costs."
