The world can be 100 percent renewable by 2050

“A must-read for saving the climate”

ISIS Report 30/09/09

Announcing ISIS/TWN Special Report
Green Energies 100% Renewables by 2050
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By Mae-Wan Ho, Brett Cherry, Sam Burcher & Peter Saunders

What Green Energies says; The world can be 100 percent renewable by 2050

• A variety of truly green and affordable options alreadyexist, and more innovations are on the way

• Policies that promote innovations and stimulate internal market for decentralized distributed generation are key

In 2008, for the first time, more renewable energies capacity was added globally than conventional energies, and the trend continues

Wind energy alone can supply 40 times the world’s electricity or 5 times its total energy consumption. PV technologies are improving by leaps and bounds, and electricity from solar panels is already as cheap as electricity from the grid. Biogas from wastes has transformed rural China, and waste-incinerating community cookers poised to do the same in Africa. Air condition and energy from deep water, saline agriculture for food and
fuel, and estuarine reef for tapping tidal energy are further options in addition to well established micro-hydroelectric and geothermal energies.

Promising developments on the horizon include thermoelectrics for recycling waste heat into electricity, artificial photosynthesis for harvesting and storing solar energy, and the potential for solving our nuclear waste problem by low temperature transmutation.

These are exciting times. All we need to save the planet is for our leaders to follow the way of nature and the will and wisdom of the people.

PREFACE

350 PPM THE NEW TARGET

Global warming is happening much faster than the IPPC (Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change) predicted in its latest 2007 report. For one thing, its climate models failed to account for the rapid summer melting of the polar ice caps that’s been making headlines several years in a row.

The IPCC helped set the target of 450 ppm maximum of atmospheric CO2, which they thought would limit the global temperature rise to below 2 °C, and prevent “dangerous
anthropogenic interference with the climate system.”

But top climate scientists Jim Hansen and colleagues, using more realistic climate models and key data from the remote history of the earth, showed that 450 ppm is well beyond the danger zone, and we must even reduce the current 385 ppm atmospheric CO2 down to 350 ppm, or else face “irreversible catastrophic effects”. And the head of IPCC Rajendra Pachauri now agrees.

The good news is that we can still do it. It is not too late. All it takes is to stop burning fossil fuels in order to bring 385 ppm back down to 350 ppm within the next decades. But we must act now, because 385 ppm is already within the danger zone, and we cannot afford to let it remain there for too long, or we push the planet past the point of no return.

That is why we need to commit ourselves to truly green energies as a matter of urgency

Read the rest of this announcement for the full executive summary and contents
http://www.i-sis.org.uk/GreenEnergies.php