ABSTRACT
Climate change and fossil fuel dependency have firmly taken centre stage in international policy and industrial debates. The mainstream of climate research and policy analysis today agrees that developed countries need to reduce greenhouse gases (GHGs) per capita by 80–95 per cent by 2050 in order to limit global warming to 2°C. This target likely requires a stabilization of the level of atmospheric CO2 at 350–400 parts per million and that global emissions start to decrease in the coming decade. At the same time, the global competition for energy resources has put the energy security question on a par with climate change as a political challenge. In particular, fossil energy dependency is considered to imply significant geo-political and economic vulnerabilities for importing economies around the world. Questions of how long oil and gas resources will last are debated in parliaments and corporate board rooms. Policy makers on every continent are hard pressed to deal with increasing and sharply fluctuating energy and raw material prices, mitigating the threat of climate change and reversing natural resource degradation, all while inducing investment, jobs, growth and welfare in an increasingly fierce global economic competition. Many countries and regions, such as the European Union (EU), have shown that it is possible to reduce environmental stress and still maintain growth and quality of life. For example, energy-related GHG emissions fell by over 8 per cent between 1990 and 2008 in the EU-27 (CEC, 2010). Major improvements in emissions of other air pollutants have come from better abatement technologies within transport, energy and industry actors.
