The latest study in terms of climate change and the extent to which we are able to fight it efficiently acted as a wake up call that the energy efficiency technology will not improve on its own over time, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) believes.

Roger Pielke Jr. from the University of Colorado at Boulder, Tom Wigley from the National Center for Atmosphere Research in Boulder and Christopher Green at the McGill University in Montreal concluded in their study that the IPCC assumes that reducing future emissions will happen in the absence of climate policies, which is wrong.

“We believe that these assumptions are optimistic at best and unachievable at worst, potentially seriously underestimating the scale of the technological challenge associated with stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations,” the authors said in their study.

IPCC’s predictions for future energy and carbon intensities are unrealistic in the eyes of the authors, giving as an example the 2000-2001 assumptions which are already inconsistent with the evolution of global economy in recent years. The decrease in energy intensity and carbon intensity is actually an increase, reversing the trends in previous years.

At the base of the current increase in energy and carbon intensities is the economic factor or the economic transformations in countries like China or India, which implies population shifting from rural areas to urban centers where they contribute even more to the energy and energy intensive materials’ consumption, a process that is likely to continue in this part of the world at least 50 years from now.

In other words, the global economic trends are inconsistent with IPCC projections: “The world is on a development and energy path that will bring with it a surge in carbon-dioxide-emissions – a surge that can only end with a transformation of global energy systems,” the authors of the study pointed out. “We believe such technological transformation will take many decades to complete, even if we start taking far more aggressive action on energy technology innovation today.”

In order to establish a much needed level of carbon-dioxide concentrations, it takes much more than what the IPCC predicts and it is a far more complicated and costly process, unless the technological advance will occur spontaneously, which is unlikely to happen.

“There is no question about whether technological innovation is necessary – it is. The question is, to what degree should policy focus directly on motivating such innovation? The IPCC plays a risky game in assuming that spontaneous advances in technological innovation will carry most of the burden of achieving future emissions reductions, rather than focusing on creating the conditions for such innovations to occur,” the study concluded.