Sweden has a "tremendous and unique" opportunity to reduce global carbon dioxide emissions by creating a green alliance with all major coal-burning countries during the Copenhagen summit this autumn, when it holds the E.U. presidency, said American economist Jeffrey Sachs Thursday at a climate conference in Stockholm.
Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and one of the world's most renowned economists, criticized world leaders for their universal failure to break ground on clean coal fire plants using carbon capture and storage, or CCS.
The technology picks up carbon dioxide after combustion and compress it into liquid form for transportation and permanent storage in bedrock, thus reducing the amount of CO2 released into the air.
"An acceptable analogue is the moonshot," Sachs told a discussion panel with Vattenfall Chief Executive Lars Josefsson and Richard Lagos, U.N. Special Envoy on Climate Change. "John Kennedy called on America to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth within a day. He said that in 1961 and in 1969 it happened."
"Now George Bush, a very different president, said in 2001 that we would have a carbon capture demonstration plant. Here we are in 2009 and we haven't even broken ground for a single coal fire power plant that captures its carbon and suppresses it. This is a disgrace for the U.S. certainly," Sachs said.
The fact is none of the world's largest producers of fossil fuels, including China, India, Russia, Australia and more, have yet to break ground on a single CCS demonstration plant - with one exception. In Germany, Swedish electricity and heat company, and host of this week's climate conference, Vattenfall AB opened the world's first pilot CCS plant earlier this year.
Vattenfall hopes to set up the first demonstration plant by 2015. The technology won't, however, see its commercial debut until 2020, as it must be scaled up and made less costly to be commercially viable.
Sachs urged a narrower timeframe, and Josefsson seemed eager to please.
"I would say with focused effort where everybody is participating - that is the public and the companies - the 2020 can be 2017 or 2016, but not shorter than that," Josefsson said. "That is simply because we have to erect large scale plants to be able to scope and cost calculate them."
U.N.'s Lagos suggested that government subsidies could offer stronger price signals and less volatility for renewable energy investors, providing incentive for the market.
Sachs agreed, saying "markets alone will not solve the problem" but that private-public partnerships could map out the right strategy.