WASHINGTON: New industrial technologies and novel financial ideas can help the fight against global warming by cutting greenhouse gas emissions, according to scientists and climate experts gathered here by the World Bank.
Among new technologies, “carbon capture and sequestration” made more converts, and trading in carbon emissions rights on financial markets got an encouraging boost at the meeting.
Some scientists proposed a new concept of bringing together all the different methods of cutting greenhouse gases so that important progress made in each individual sector can contribute to worldwide climate stabilization.
The United States, which has refused to sign the Kyoto Protocol on global greenhouse gas emissions, put much stock in new technologies to cut heat-trapping pollution.
But the Kyoto signataries are skeptical that technology alone can do the trick as they go ahead with their commitment to slash total greenhouse gas emissions by 2012 to five per cent below the level they were in 1990.
“Countries that have decided to go down the road of technologies must have the responsability to tell the world if it is working or not,” Netherlands Minister for Development Cooperation Agnes Van Ardenne told the meeting.
Carbon capture and sequestration was showcased as a promising technology by Robert Socolow, a Princeton University energy and environment expert. Tests run in Norway and Algeria were promising, he said, and BP was about to announce a major carbon capture project in California.
The technique consists of capturing carbon gas emissions from power companies and injecting them in porous sediments beneath the ocean bottom where they can remain “sequestered” for thousands of years.
It is part of Socolow’s theory of “stabilization wedges,” which takes its name from the triangular-shaped metal used to break wood into smaller pieces. It defines sectors where the biggest efforts should be made to make a difference in the fight against global warming. Published in Science Magazine in August 2004, Socolow’s theory aims at solving global climate problems in 50 years by using existing technologies.—AFP
