IEA: Six years to change energy, carbon course ... or else

We’re fast running out of time to steer away from business-as-usual energy and carbon policies that are not only unsustainable but threaten to destabilize the future with serious climate and security impacts.

That, in a nutshell, is the message delivered in the latest World Energy Outlook from the International Energy Agency (IEA). Released today, the 2011 edition of the annual publication offers stark warnings about the path that society is currently following. Foremost among those is the prediction that we have just six years to begin enacting drastic carbon emission cuts before we are “locked in” to a global temperature increase of more than 2 degrees C, considered the threshold for “catastrophic” climate change.

“If we do not change course, by 2015 over 90% of the permissible energy sector emissions to 2035 will already be locked in,” Maria van der Hoeven, the IEA’s executive director, writes in the Foreword to the new report. “By 2017, 100%. We can still act in time to preserve a plausible path to a sustainable energy future; but each year the necessary measures get progressively tougher and viciously more expensive.”

The report itself notes that, “Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment avoided in the power sector before 2020 an additional $4.3 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”

Other highlights of the World Energy Outlook 2011 include:

Energy trends aren’t moving in the right direction. Despite the still-shaky global economy, the world’s primary energy demand rose by 5% in 2010 while carbon dioxide emissions reached a new high. Energy intensity also increased, fossil fuel subsidies surpassed $400 billion and 1.3 billion people around the world don’t yet have access to electricity.

Emerging economies are having the greatest impact on demand trends, in particular for transport-related oil. By 2035, global oil demand is projected to rise to 99 million barrels per day (compared to 87 million barrels per day in 2010). At that point, there will be twice as many passenger cars — 1.7 billion in all — on the world’s roads as there are today.

The IEA sees the production of conventional crude oil keeping steady then dipping to 68 million barrels per day by 2035. That means natural gas liquids and unconventional sources like Canada’s tar sands will have to take up the slack to help meet the need for 47 million barrels per day of new gross capacity … about twice as much as that currently produced by Middle Eastern OPEC countries.

Non-hydro renewables will grow from 3 percent of the world’s power generation in 2009 to 15 percent in 2035, driven in part by a near-five-fold increase in subsidies reaching $180 billion a year. Without any serious efforts at reform, though, subsidies for fossil fuels will continue to rule, rising from $409 billion in 2010 to $660 billion by 2020.

The IEA concludes that it’s up to the world’s governments to take aggressive action soon if we hope to reverse current trends.

In “Buckaroo Banzai”-like fashion, the report’s executive summary sums it up like this: “If we don’t change direction soon, we’ll end up where we’re heading.”