Many of the measures being talked about today for GHGs reduction are concentric around technology initiatives and switch over to alternate energy source. I personally feel that information empowerment of process owners and thier contribution in this green drive is presently not getting the desired attention. Empathy at the grass root level would be iminent we step forward in our journey.
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Our colleagues from around the world have conducted a detailed bottom-up analysis of just what such a clean-energy revolution would entail and how much it would cost—country by country and industry sector by industry sector. Overall the shift to a low-carbon economy would require new global capital investment averaging $570 billion per year between 2010 and 2030.
This sounds like a lot, but it is only about 2 to 4 percent of expected capital expenditures during this period. And because the money would largely go into long-life assets (e.g., better buildings, cleaner power sources, low-emissions transport), most of it would be financed through borrowing over time. And many of these "costs" are actually long-term investments—new clean power and industry infrastructure—that have the potential to spur economic growth and create jobs, just as the "costs" of building the Internet ultimately led to new sources of growth.
The first step in the clean-energy revolution is to dramatically improve energy efficiency. Through a variety of measures ranging from better building efficiency to low-energy lighting, to more fuel-efficient vehicles, we have the potential to cut world energy-demand growth by more than 64 million barrels of oil a day—equivalent to one and a half times current annual U.S. energy consumption.
Best of all, improvements in energy efficiency more than pay for themselves. We estimate that dramatically increasing energy efficiency would require annual investments of $170 billion over the next 13 years. But these investments would generate a return of well over $900 billion annually by 2020 through lower energy costs.
Energy efficiency is the low-hanging fruit of the clean-energy revolution.
To radically increase carbon productivity we not only need to slow growth in energy demand, we also need to cut emissions while keeping economic output up. That means the power sector needs to decarbonize while still producing the megawatts, and the transportation sector needs to cut emissions while still getting us from point A to point B.
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