Beating global warming needn't cost the earth: U.N.
BANGKOK (Reuters) - Humans must make sweeping cuts in greenhouse gas emissions in the next 50 years to keep global warming in check, but it need cost only a tiny fraction of world economic output, a major U.N. report said on Friday.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said keeping the temperature rise within 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 F) would cost only 0.12 percent of annual gross domestic product.
"It's a low premium to pay to reduce the risk of major climate damage," Bill Hare, a Greenpeace adviser who co-authored the report told Reuters after marathon talks that ran over their four-day schedule to finalize the document.
The report "shows that it's economically and technically feasible to make deep emission reductions sufficient to limit warming to 2 degrees," he said.
To keep within that limit, which scientists and the European Union say is needed to stave off disastrous climate changes, carbon dioxide emissions need to fall 50 to 85 percent by 2050, said the report, the third in a series.
However, technological advances, particularly in more efficient energy use and production, meant such targets were within reach, it said.
It stressed the use of nuclear, solar and wind power, more energy-efficient buildings and lighting, as well as capturing and storing carbon dioxide spewed from coal-fired power stations and oil and gas rigs.
But A U.S. environmental official rejected some options detailed in the report for cutting emissions as too costly.
"There are measures that come currently at an extremely high cost because of the lack of available technology," said James Connaughton, head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.
These scenarios, he said, would bring cuts in world gross domestic product of up to 3 percent. "That would of course cause global recession, so that is something that we probably want to avoid," Connaughton said in a telephone briefing.
China, expected to soon overtake the United States as the world's biggest greenhouse gas producer, said rich countries must not keep clean energy technologies to themselves.
"It is something the developing countries have been asking for many years, but up till now it has not happened," said Zhou Dadi, director of China's Energy Research Institute and a co-author of the report.
The panel also said for the first time that lifestyle changes could help fight global warming.
It gave no examples, but IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said these could include turning down the thermostat and eating less red meat, which could cut animal methane emissions.
'NO EXCUSE' Continued...
