Energy crisis looming as threat to humanity: experts

Posted October 23, 2007 11:14:00

Energy poses one of the greatest threats facing humanity this century, the world's leading academies of science warned, highlighting the peril of oil wars and climate change driven by addiction to fossil fuels.

Nations must provide power for the 1.6 billion people who live without electricity but still wean themselves off energy sources that stoke global warming and geopolitical conflict, the scientists demanded.

"Making the transition to a sustainable energy future is one of the central challenges humankind faces in this century," they said.

Their report, Lighting the Way: Toward A Sustainable Energy Future, is published by the InterAcademy Council, whose 15 members include the national science academies of the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Brazil, China and India.

It was authored by a 15-member panel whose co-chair was American 1997 Nobel Physics laureate Steven Chu.

"Overwhelming scientific evidence shows that current energy trends are unsustainable," the report said bluntly.

Its authors sounded a special alarm over the surge in the building of conventional coal-fired power plants in China and other developing countries, as such infrastructure will doubtless be entrenched for decades to come.

"The substantial expansion of coal capacity that is now under way around the world may pose the single greatest challenge to future efforts aimed at stabilising carbon dioxide (CO2) levels in the atmosphere," the report warned.

Varied alternatives

Nuclear power, as a low-carbon resource, "can continue to make a significant contribution to the world's energy portfolio in the future, but only if major concerns related to capital cost, safety and weapons proliferation are addressed," it cautioned.

Turning to biofuels, the scientist said that these sources hold "great promise", but only through a switch to second-generation sources.

Meanwhile an international study of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere has found that the earth's ability to absorb carbon emissions is on the decline.

This could mean carbon dioxide is accumulating faster than previous international projections.

Current predictions that rising carbon dioxide levels will cause global warming factor in the earth's natural ability to absorb more than half of what is emitted.

But the CSIRO's Michael Raupach says the earth's restorative capacity is declining.

"A smaller fraction of emissions are being taken up by land and oceans," he said.

"The sinks are losing the race with emissions, and so they are taking up a progressively smaller fraction of what is being emitted."

- ABC/AFP

Tags: environment, climate-change, science-and-technology, research, australia, united-states