Page 82 - Managing Global Warming

Greenhouse gas removal and zero emissions energy production 53

Fig. 2.5 Plausibility range for years to stabilize emissions.

Unrestrained market forces routinely translate improved efficiency into lower
prices that encourage increased demand. This is evident in the long-term exponential
growth of energy consumption despite consistent deep gains in energy efficiency. Pol-
icy intervention is needed to prevent increased energy efficiency translating into
higher absolute energy demand. However, if policymakers intervene in this way, inno-
vators could only profit from their energy-efficiency innovations if policymakers
arranged for them to be remunerated in relation to the energy consumption saved. This
would run counter to the neoliberal Zeitgeist and it is difficult to envisage such a novel
change being implemented at global scale quickly enough to have a climatically sig-
nificant impact on energy consumption. Without such a mechanism for remunerating
the innovators, they would have little incentive to innovate. I suggest that significant
efficiency gains, beyond those already accounted for in the long-term trend, are
implausible, and the rebound effect might even make them negative. I shall therefore
ignore the possibility of policy-driven efficiency gains beyond the continuation of the
1% p.a. subsumed in the data.
Only apocalyptic visions of the future contemplate any significant reduction in
population. In such a future, implementing long-term policies to combat global
warming is likely to be low on policymakers’ to-do lists and may even be unnecessary.
A population collapse to say, 1 billion, would probably reduce emissions dispropor-
tionately as the means of production implode through lack of labor. Supporters of
Lovelock’s Gaia Theory might find such an outcome unsurprising [15]. However,