Cold Cash, Cool Climate by Jonathan Garo Koomey

Author:Jonathan Garo Koomey [Koomey, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-9706019-4-0
Publisher: Analytics Press
Published: 2012-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Assess mitigation options

There have been dozens of different assessments of ways to reduce greenhouse gases in the past two decades, and many of them still hold important lessons. The best non-technical introduction I’ve found is Al Gore’s book Our Choice, which is also available in a wonderful e-book for the iPad.45 It gives accurate high-level information about solutions in an easy-to-read format, full of photos and illustrations. If you are just getting started, that’s the place to begin your reading.

Next, you should look at the work done on climate solutions in the past few years by the management-consulting firm McKinsey & Company. McKinsey is clearly betting that reason will prevail and that companies will need to take aggressive climate action in the near term. They’ve created public analyses of costs and potentials of mitigation options for many different countries and for the world as a whole.46 They use these studies to market their services to companies within each country, for whom they create proprietary greenhouse gas reduction plans.

Not all of the assumptions of the McKinsey studies are transparent to the user (as they would be in an academic or government study), so you should use care in citing their results. I prefer to use the studies as a jumping-off point for further research, in which I can then accurately verify and reproduce their claims. In fact, all of the resources listed in this section will require you to do your own due diligence, because your particular business context may be quite different from the ones explored in these sources. And of course, all the limitations of modeling studies I explored in Chapter 4 also apply.

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) has been a hotbed of activity on climate mitigation for many years. They have groups devoted to China, energy efficiency standards, energy forecasting, electricity markets, windows, lighting, batteries, and other important topics.47 The most important study on climate in which LBNL has been involved in the past couple of decades is colloquially known as the Clean Energy Futures study.48 This report and supporting appendices are all freely downloadable, and are a treasure trove of data and results on ways to reduce carbon emissions in buildings, industry, transportation, and the electricity sector. I was in charge of the building sector analysis, the integrating modeling (where we combined the results from all sectors), and the economic calculations, so I know the work was done well. Even though the analysis is more than a decade old, the extensive documentation (on which I insisted for all sectors) still makes this study useful for serious students of greenhouse gas emissions reductions.

The International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) has an interactive scenario calculator posted online.49 This tool allows you to choose from many different scenarios and download greenhouse gas emissions and warming results. You’ll need to get some background on what’s contained in the different scenarios to really understand the results, but it’s a terrific resource, and one on which I rely heavily when I’m doing scoping calculations for global and regional scenarios.

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