Tech or policy?

Talk clean energy and one of the major difference of opinion comes when you talk of technology - is it already there? Again, is technology the silver bullet, or policy?

Current energy technologies are not enough to reduce carbon emissions to a level needed to lower the risks associated with climate change, New York University physicist Martin Hoffert concludes in an essay in the latest issue of the journal Science.

In order to avoid the risks brought about by climate change, steps must be taken to prevent the mean global temperature from rising by more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Current climate models indicate that achieving this goal will require limiting atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations to less than 450 parts per million (ppm), a level that implies substantial reductions in emissions from burning fossil fuels.

Current energy technologies are not sufficient to reduce carbon emissions to a level advocated by scientists. Energy sources, such as solar and wind electricity, are not adequate to achieve "massive market penetration," which requires utility-scale systems that can store intermittent supplies of power until they are needed. Two, reliance on carbon-emitting fuels is once again growing.

Broad investment will be crucial to enabling basic research findings to develop into applied commercial technologies. Carbon taxes and ramped-up government research budgets could help spur investments. But developing carbon-neutral technologies also requires, at the very least, reversing perverse incentives, such as existing global subsidies to fossil fuels that are estimated to be 12 times higher than those to renewable energy. That is something we have also been saying for some time now, as also most experts. Are there no listeners?