President of UK's Royal Society calls for international initiative on energy
Martin Rees, the President of the UK's Royal Society, has called for an urgent international initiative on new energy technologies. Writing in the journal Science, Lord Rees argues that such an initiative is necessary if we are to meet global energy demands while reducing the impact of greenhouse gas emissions on climate change. At their meeting last month, the leaders of the G8 countries adopted a communiqué on energy security which included many important pledges but did not commit the G8 countries to increasing governmental investments into R&D for energy technologies. 'The omission of energy R&D by the G8 reflects a worrisome lack of determination to accelerate the development of new energy technologies,' Lord Rees writes. He points out that in most industrialised countries public R&D investments in energy have fallen in real terms since the early 1980s. At the same time, the International Energy Agency is predicting that based on current policies, 80 per cent of the world's primary energy demand will be met by fossil fuels by 2030. 'Without unfeasibly dramatic breakthroughs in carbon sequestration and energy efficiency, this will lead to proportionate increases in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations,' he notes. To solve the problem, he says more has to be done to develop new energy technologies, and governments need to take the lead on this by investing more in R&D. 'These R&D expenditures could be funded through carbon taxes or similar economic instruments, levied initially on the countries with the largest emissions,' he suggests. Lord Rees argues that the energy challenge 'demands a high-profile response analogous to the Manhattan or Apollo project, but on a global, rather than national, scale.' The Manhattan and Apollo projects led to the first nuclear weapons and the moon landings respectively. He notes that as well as achieving their goals, these projects stimulated education and enrolments in science and technology.
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