Energy Crisis Vs Climate Crisis - BP Chief Scientist's view

His view on emissions reduction strategy: It really makes lot of sense, but it also really needs more tweaking to see, how much are the effects on transport as a compensation to reduce the emissions.

"What problems are we trying to solve? If it's carbon dioxide emissions, there are cheaper ways to do it than improving transportation. If you improve the efficiency of a vehicle to reduce fuel use and carbon dioxide emissions, for many vehicle technologies it will take several hundred dollars per ton of carbon dioxide. But transport is only 20 percent of energy-related emissions. Heat and power from stationary sources are most of it. At $50 a ton, there's a lot of carbon that can be wrung out of stationary sources. When you start cranking the price up to $100 to $200, that's when you start to affect transport, whereas we can shift to lower-emissions heat and power at $50 a ton."

The following views of him are highly true:
It is nice to see that such big people talk about this more frequently in public.

"I'm optimistic about security of supply. I see many sources for liquid hydrocarbons. I see great potential for efficiency improvements in U.S. transportation fleets. I am less optimistic about carbon dioxide emissions reductions. The world should give it its best shot, but there are so many forces aligned against it that I think it's going to be very difficult for the world to stabilize emissions, let alone stabilize concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Carbon dioxide lives in the atmosphere for a very long time--a thousand years or so. What that means is that the atmosphere is accumulating emissions, and emissions right now are on an exponential growth path--2 or 3 percent a year. If we manage to make modest reductions in emissions, it will only be in the rate at which the concentration grows, but it won't stop the growth. So the usual societal response of dealing with a problem partially is not good enough to deal with the CO2 problem. We really need major changes in the ways we produce and use energy if we're going to prevent concentrations from rising. I don't think people understand that."


NB: These are the some of the views of BP's chief scientist - Steven Koonin published today..