Om current approach to solving global warming will not work. It is flawed economically, because carbon taxes will cost a fortune and do little, and it is flawed politically because negotiations to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions will become even moie fraught and divisive. And even if you disagree on both counts, the current approach is also flawed technologically.
Many courttries are now setting ambitious-carbon cutting·goals ahead of global negotiations. Let us imagine that the world . ultimately agrees on an ambitious target. Say, we decide to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by three-quarters by the year 2100 while maintaining reasonable growth. Herein lies that the technological problem to meet this goal, non-carbon based sources of eriergy would have to be astounding 2.5 times greater in 2100 than that was in the year 2000.
These figures were calculated by economists of a foreign university . Their research shows that confronting global warming effectively requeies nothing short of a technological revolution. We are not taking"this challenge seriously. lf we continue on our current path, technological development will be nowhere near significant enough to make non-carbon based energy sources competitive with fossil fuels on price and effectiveness.
Sadly, during the international negotiations, the focus is on how much carbon to cut, rather than on how to do so. Little or no consideration will be given to whether the means of cutting eniissions are sufficient to achieve the goals.
Politicians wilt base their decisions on global warming models that simply assume that technological breakthroughs will happen by themselves. This faith is sadly and dangerously misplaced. Economists examine the state ofnon-carbon based energy today- nuclear, wind, solar and geothermal and find that, taken together, alternative energy sources would get us less than halfway toward a path of stable carbon emissions by 2050, and only a tiny fraction of the way toward stabilization by 2100. We need many times more non-carbon based energy than is currently produced. Yet the needed technology will not be ready in terms of scalability of stability. In many cases, there is stili a need for the most basic research and development. We are not even close to getting this revolution started. Current technology is so inefficient that to take just one example, if we were serious-about wind power, we would have to blanket most countries with wind turbines to generate enough energy for everybody, and we would still have the massive problem of storage: We don't kriow what to do when the wind does not blow.
Policy makers should abandon fraught carbon reduction negotiations and instead make agreements to invest in research and development to get this technology to the level where it needs to be.
MASSIVE

Options

A. light
B. large
C. significant
D. short

Answer

D