For years, dirty hippies have been insisting that renewable energy is, along with love, all you need. For years, they were dismissed as hopeless dreamers. A study showing 100% renewables by 2030 received very little attention, as did a study showing 100% renewables by 2050.
Today, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its special report on renewable energy, concluding that renewables - especially solar energy - could provide 80% of the world's energy by 2050. Yes, it's the same IPCC long derided as conservative, cautious, and stodgy, now agreeing with the hippies. We can run the world on renewable energy, and we'll keep carbon below 450 parts per million to boot.
Of course, there's a catch: political will. Renewables won't power the world unless governments adopt policies favoring renewables. And the IPCC report doesn't spell out the policies that must be adapted. Andrew Revkin of the New York Times notes the catch in the report: "very little (at least if the summary reflects what’s coming in the full 900-page report at the end of the month) on how the more aggressive scenarios for cleaning up the global energy supply might actually be achieved in the real world of competing and conflicting national, corporate and personal interests."
Or, in graphic form:
2011: world dependent on fossil fuels, carbon ppm rising, dire news everywhere
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(crickets)
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2050: world running on renewable energy, carbon ppm stabilizied, happy days
Fortunately, Climate Progress fills in half the void in the IPCC report by explaining why clean energy can scale: it took oil and natural gas about 50 years each from introduction to 10% of the market, and another 30-40 years to 25% of the market. Rather than one miracle breakthrough, the solar industry needs - and has been having - steady, incremental improvements to technology that drive the price per watt down.
The other half of the missing part in the IPCC report is of political will. In the United States, the GOP-controlled Congress is too busy pushing bills ensuring that we stay addicted to fossil fuels. But at least the IPCC report confirms what the hippies have known all along: it's theoretically possible to power the world on sunlight.