First, the bad news: Nothing is free. Moving the world energy system away from fossil fuels and into renewable sources will generate carbon emissions by itself, as construction of wind turbines, solar panels and other new infrastructure consumes energy—some of it necessarily coming from the fossil fuels we are trying to get rid of.
First, the bad news: Nothing is free. Moving the world energy system away from fossil fuels and into renewable sources will generate carbon emissions by itself, as construction of wind turbines, solar panels and other new infrastructure consumes energy—some of it necessarily coming from the fossil fuels we are trying to get rid of. The good news: If this infrastructure can be put on line quickly, those emissions would dramatically decrease, because far more renewable energy early on will mean far less fossil fuel needed to power the changeover.
This is the conclusion of a study that for the first time estimates the cost of a green transition not in dollars, but in greenhouse gases. The study appears this week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
“The message is that it is going to take energy to rebuild the global energy system, and we need to account for that,” said lead author Corey Lesk, who did the research as a Ph.D. student at the Columbia Climate School’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “Any way you do it, it’s not negligible. But the more you can initially bring on renewables, the more you can power the transition with renewables.”
Read more at Columbia Climate School
Image: A new study suggests that building infrastructure for cleaner energy generation will by itself create carbon emissions, but the faster it happens, the fewer they will be. (Illustration by Julie Morvant-Mortreuil)
