CAN A NEW KIND OF CONSUMERISM HELP FIGHT
CLIMATE CHANGE?
政四A 03114113 王思傑
ATT SIMON SCIENCE 06.04.1811:00 AM
內文:
JUSTIN SULLIVAN/GETTY IMAGES
BOY, IT’S HARD to stay optimistic these
days, what with the impending doom of our species at the hands of … our
species. Namely, human-caused climate change. Climbing temperatures are ripping
apart ecosystems, and rising seas are already forcing people from their homes.
If an asteroid was going to destroy our planet, now would be the time to just
get it over with.
But today lands an uplifting and
intriguing, if not counterintuitive, study in the journal Nature Energy. An
international team of scientists has developed a global scenario called Low
Energy Demand, arguing that humanity’s appetite for things like electric cars and
cellphones, as well as the development of better building standards, can drive
a revolution in efficiency that could help lower energy demand and encourage
the proliferation of renewable energy. The researchers claim that if several
trends fall into place, we’d be able to make the idealistic goal set by the
Paris Climate Agreement to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5
degrees C.
To be clear: This is a highly theoretical
scenario, not a certainty. It’s based on assumptions—technological adoption,
population growth, etc.—and it is necessarily imperfect, like any model. These
researchers aren’t saying, “Hooray, salvation!” They’re saying that given lots
of converging trends in sustainability and efficiency, humanity could yet make
big progress in tackling the problem of climate change.
“This seems to be a positive story,” says
the study’s lead author, Arnulf Grubler of Austria’s International Institute
for Applied Systems Analysis. “We can promote sustainable development. We can
stay below 1.5 degrees if we focus on energy end use, on the way people use
energy and promote sustainable development, and here the key aspect is
efficiency.”
This is how the researchers went about it.
They identified major drivers of change in energy use, for example cities
becoming test beds for innovations like the sharing economy. This is broken
down into more specific trends, like the rise of shared electric vehicle
fleets. “If everybody buys an electric car, well then you have to wait 12, 14
years for innovations to be rolled out into the marketplace, because people
will not prematurely sell their car or scrap it,” says Grubler. “But in a
car-sharing scheme, or shared mobility, we use these assets so much that it's
actually natural to replace these assets very regularly.”
This brings rapid innovation. And say
you've got solar panels at home to charge your electric car. Not only can you
send that energy into the grid when you're not at home, but the battery in your
electric car can store energy for someone else to tap into. You're no longer
just a consumer of energy, but an active participant in the dynamics of the
grid.
Or take mobile phones. Now in the hands of
billions people, users want their phones to do more, to replace more
energy-hungry devices, like TVs. They want them to be more energy efficient.
Those kinds of market forces—or consumerism, depending how you look at it—could
in a way drive down energy usage.
The researchers then reviewed studies that
showed what services humans would need to raise their living standards,
particularly in the global south. "At this stage, we look at given these
rising activity levels, how can we provide for those with dramatically less
energy?" says Charlie Wilson, a coauthor on the paper and climate change
scientist at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK.
"And part of the answer is technologies can become much more energy
efficient."
Using those inputs, they could calculate
energy demand in the coming decades. “Then," Wilson says, "we used a
global model of the energy system to work out well how can we meet that energy
demand in 2050," using strategies like renewables. "That gives us
then the emissions which we could work out and test whether they were
consistent with our 1.5 degree C target.”
They were—even with a population that could
grow to over 9 billion, a factor this scenario considered. “All other scenarios
predict ever increasing energy demand,” says Grubler. “This scenario actually
predicts a declining energy demand, despite having vast increases in
activities. People travel more, eat better, have more material well being and
wealth, but in a more efficient, organizational way.”
All well and good, but why would so many
other scenarios predict increased energy use? “A lot of these narratives that
are used to shape long-term scenarios, they've been focused on these really
narrow ideas of what technology will look like in the future,” says Justin Ritchie, an energy economist at the University of
British Columbia’s Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability, who
wasn’t involved in the study. Standard practice for modelers is taking
historical growth since WWII and extrapolating it forward. “Then this study is
kind of turning that on its head, and saying, let's take all of the kinds of discussions
that people are having on the frontiers of technology and imagining that as the
basis of climate impacts.”
This is important, so I’ll repeat it: We’re
talking about a scenario here, not a certainty. Take the smartphone
example—consolidating a slew of devices into one, thus cutting how much energy
you’re burning. “The question would be: Are you really prepared to watch TV on
your smartphone?” asks Swiss Federal Institute of Technology climate scientist
Reto Knutti, who also wasn’t involved in the study. “Of course you could, it's
technically OK, but the reality has been that whenever things get cheaper and
more energy efficient, you just buy a bigger TV.”
Beyond the behavior of consumers, scenarios
are also affected on a larger scale by the behavior of governments. So, ahem,
the United States isn’t exactly on a course to abandon coal and pour mountains
of money in renewables. But again, no model is perfect. Scientists can’t
predict the future, but they can make good judgements about it based on past
and current trends.
“Is it robust to possible political issues
going on today or into the future?” asks Wilson. “Well, no. We're not saying
this scenario will happen no matter what. There could be lots of reasons for
continued emphasis on, for example, fossil fuel burning, in which case the 1.5
degree warming target set in the Paris Agreement would not be met.”
But. This scenario teases apart not just
the future of technological innovation, but attitude innovation. The
abandonment of the let’s-all-own-cars-and-sit-in-them-in-traffic-alone model in
favor of car sharing. “It does require an enormous, if you like, openness to
innovation in our daily lives, as well as in the technological and
infrastructural systems which provide the useful services we consume in our
daily lives,” Wilson says.
Maybe this all won’t pan out. Maybe the
developing world won’t build as efficient buildings as they could. Maybe
electric cars won’t take over as soon as we’d like. And maybe Trump decides
America’s grid should run entirely on coal. Nothing is certain, but good
scenarios can go a long way in mapping out a stubbornly uncertain future.
心得:
多年以來，氣候問題一直與經濟問題產生摩擦，但試想氣候問題本身就是一個很好跨領域合作的經濟模式。因為它是勢在必行，且一定要去做的。在雙好的前提下，政府如何著手發展這兩個領域合作的產業，將會是有趣且利潤可觀的。
心得:
多年以來，氣候問題一直與經濟問題產生摩擦，但試想氣候問題本身就是一個很好跨領域合作的經濟模式。因為它是勢在必行，且一定要去做的。在雙好的前提下，政府如何著手發展這兩個領域合作的產業，將會是有趣且利潤可觀的。
