EnergyWorld economy unlikely to stop relying on fossil fuels: Study

Published 11 February 2016

On the heels of last year’s historic climate agreement in Paris, a new study concludes that fossil fuel consumption is likely to grow without clear and decisive global action to put an adequate price on carbon dioxide emissions and increased clean energy technology.

 

On the heels of last year’s historic climate agreement in Paris, a new study concludes that fossil fuel consumption is likely to grow without clear and decisive global action to put an adequate price on carbon dioxide emissions and increased clean energy technology.

“The Paris agreement laid out a dramatic new vision, but there is still much work to be done to turn that broad outline into the concrete climate policy changes around the globe that are needed to reduce fossil fuel consumption and the odds of disruptive climate change,” said Prof. Michael Greenstone, a study co-author and director of the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago. “But one thing is clear: Counting on the fickle finger of fate to point the way to cheaper low-carbon energy sources, without market and policy forces pushing us there, mistakes hope for a strategy.”

UoC reports that Greenstone and coauthors Thomas Covert of the University of Chicago and Christopher Knittel of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, writing in the Journal of Economic Perspectives, found that the continued use of fossil fuels would lead to dramatic changes in the planet. In measuring their impacts on warming, the study finds that burning the fossil fuels known to us today would increase global temperatures by 10 to 15 degrees Fahrenheit. Those numbers do not account for advances in fossil fuel extraction techniques that could make resources we cannot even extract today economically accessible, such as oil shale and methane hydrates, potentially adding another 1.5 to 6.2 degrees Fahrenheit of warming.

The economists explored whether market forces alone would cause a reduction in fossil fuel supply or demand. By studying the history of fossil fuel exploration and technological progress for both clean and dirty technologies, they concluded that it is unlikely that the world will stop primarily relying on fossil fuels soon. As one piece of evidence, the economists studied the amount of reserves in the ground over the last three decades compared to world consumption. For the last 30 years, reserves of oil and natural gas have grown at least as fast as consumption. As a result, the world has always had 50 years of future consumption stored as reserves in the ground. This was equally true in boom years (when prices were high) and bust years.