World fossil fuel energy use growing: study

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: Renewable energy is not replacing fossil fuels as quickly as scientists have been forecasting, leading to a serious underestimation of what still needs to be done to stabilise the world’s climate, according to a new analysis.

“Enormous advances in energy technology will be needed to stabilise atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations at acceptable levels,” wrote Roger Pielke Jr, a University of Colorado Boulder political scientists and his co-authors in an article in a recent edition of Nature magazine.

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, expected that people around the world would begin using more renewable energy, reducing global dependence on the fossil fuels generating greenhouse gases.

Those greenhouse gases trap the sun’s heat in the atmosphere and have been linked to rising global temperatures.

Instead, people are using more oil, gas and coal than ever before, pumping more carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, said Tom Wigley, a scientist with the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, and co-author of the Nature article.

“The US government is putting some money into renewable energy, but it is a drop in the bucket compared to what’s necessary,” Wigley said.

Pielke, Wigley and Christopher Green, an economist at McGill University in Montreal, calculated how much energy was used and how many carbon emissions were generated in economic activities across the world between 2000 and 2006.

For nearly three decades leading to year 2000, Wigley said, the world’s energy consumption was becoming more efficient, with less energy required per unit of gross domestic product, called energy intensity.

The UN’s IPCC assumed that trend would continue, Wigley said, when the scientists on the panel calculated various future scenarios of energy use.

Even the UN panel’s most conservative projection assumed that energy intensity would continue to drop.

“It was a reasonable assumption in that it was validated historically, but they didn’t consider carefully what might happen in places like India and China,” Wigley said.

“In India, they’re building these $2,000 cars now. If just 5% of the population in India gets a cheap car, just think about what that’s going to do to carbon dioxide emissions,” he said.

Tom Henley, spokesman for Xcel Energy in Colorado, said people in the state are also consuming more energy per year.