Technology will win the climate change battle, says Blair report

Published Date: 06 July 2009
By Andrew Woodcock

THE technological solutions to global warming are "well within our grasp", former prime minister Tony Blair said in a report due to be released today.
He said crunch meetings – including this week's Major Economies Forum in Italy and December's Copenhagen climate change summit – should see the global warming fight move from the campaigning stage to "practical policy making".The report, published with the Climate Group for Thursday's MEF meeting, sets out seven "tried and tested" policies which could achieve the goal of peak carbon emissions by 2020.It calls on governments to act now on achievable short-term measures – energy efficiency, halting deforestation and lower-carbon power sources – while investing in the future technologies needed to reduce CO2 emissions by 50-85 per cent by 2050.Compared to previous summits, such as Kyoto in 1997 and Gleneagles in 2005, this year's meetings will benefit from "almost universal" acceptance of scientific evidence on climate change and a willingness by politicians worldwide to adopt ambitious emission reduction targets if they can be shown to be practical, said Mr Blair.The report estimated additional resources required to hold global temperature increases below 2C at £193 billion a year from 2015, rising to £494bn in 2030, but stressed that rising oil prices could make the switch to low-carbon energy a cheaper option. And it noted that low-carbon technologies offered the prospect of "substantial job creation and growth" to countries. "Now is the moment," said Mr Blair. "Up to now, climate change has been an issue around which there has been an immensely important and successful campaign, but this is the moment when we take this out of the position of a great campaign and into the position of practical policy. Today's report, Technology for a Low Carbon Future, states the technologies required to meet the 2020 goal of reducing global CO2 emissions by 19 gigatonnes "are already proven, available now and the policies needed to implement them known".