The energy-environment puzzle – reconciling conflicting goals
Unpacking knotty performance issues. We are in the midst of profoundly significant, changing and challenging times. By now it should be clear that various technologies (such as geothermal, renewables, green hydrogen) to decarbonize energy generation and overcome our global warming issues don’t appear to have generated the much-needed global carbon emission reductions, despite heavy early investments in decarbonization to generate major savings in climate costs. Adding all up, the evidence strongly suggests that our progress doesn’t seem to add much. Could it be that we are running faster, only to stay in place — and in the end despite all the alleged efforts, our progress is bound to fall short of the agreed decarbonization and global warming goals? Clearly, developments so far, while helpful and promising, are just too limited to meet the mark. We need much faster or, better yet, more effective efforts to achieve tangible progress to meet the global demand at the pace the world is growing. To this end, we must become increasingly aware that we are seeking competing(if not conflicting) objectives between economic development, environmental improvement and affordability. This paper, which is aimed at explaining for skeptics and believers alike the need for a more “strategic” way of planning, to assess every step of the way the trade-offs we are making between the competing goals to archieve maximum impact with reasonably minimum or manageable input. To do so, we must ourselves wean out of the tendency to emphasize process over actions and results. International gatherings too often become vanity shows to celebrate the issuance of more rules and regulations that in the end make the investment processes more complex and expensive, which deflect us from focusing on substantive actions and results on the ground. For too long, international for a have pressed for combating symptoms, not causes, focusing o n processes, not results. A reorientation from words to deeds and closer attention on what we are achieving is now in order.
