The “tepid” results of the Lima climate change conference underscore the need for a mix of political and technological solutions in 2015, The Energy Mix curator Mitchell Beer argues in this post on The Energy Collective.
“Many of the year-end assessments from climate and energy organizations chronicled the growing momentum toward a coherent global response to climate change,” Beer writes. “But the disconnect between words and action is still too deep, the scale of the action far too modest and scattered, to fully confront the challenges ahead.”
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Beyond the “mild joys and deeper sorrows of the Lima conference, 2014 closed with growing investment in clean technology that still fell far short of the $1 trillion per year—1.4% of global GDP—that will be needed through 2050 to finance the low-carbon transition,” he says. “By contrast, five years after G20 governments agreed to eliminate fossil fuel subsidies, the latest available data still showed the world’s government shovelling $775 billion per year into the wildly profitable industries that brought us the lion’s share of the climate crisis.”
Entering a year when “we’re past the point where ‘just doing something’ will get the job done,” Beer calls for practical, comprehensive low-carbon scenarios, national policies to price carbon and reinvest the proceeds, local transition plans that build on cities’ climate leadership, and broader understanding of fossil fuel investment risk across the financial sector.
