Stopping Climate Change: Policies for Real Zero
About this ebook
This will require innovation in socio-technical systems, and in human behaviour, on an unprecedented scale. Stopping Climate Change describes the changes required to meet this goal: in technologies, social institutions and individual activities. Paul Ekins examines in detail issues around the supply and demand of energy and materials, and the efficiency of their use. It also analyses greenhouse gas removal technologies, offsetting and geoengineering, and plots the reduction of the non- CO2 greenhouse gas-emitting activities. Having set out the changes required, Ekins considers the economic implications, in terms of both the innovation and investments that are necessary to bring them about, and the effects that these are likely to have on national economies. The evidence presented points clearly to the economic impacts of decarbonisation being positive for the majority of countries, and for the world as a whole, even before considering the benefits of avoided climate change. When the health benefits of stopping the burning of fossil fuels are factored in, the global net benefits of decarbonisation are unequivocal.
Drawing on examples from the UK and Europe, but with wider relevance at a global scale, Stopping Climate Change clearly shows how determined policy action at different levels could stop climate change. It will be of great interest to students, scholars and policymakers researching and working in the field of climate change and energy policy.
About the author
Paul Ekins is Professor of Resources and Environmental Policy at the Institute for Sustainable Resources, University College London (UCL). For 14 years he was a Co- Director of the UK Energy Research Centre. He was also the special adviser to the joint Houses of Parliament on the UK Climate Change Bill. At the EU level he was a member of the High- Level Panel of the European Commission’s European Decarbonisation Pathways Initiative and was Vice Chair in 2012– 13 of the then Environment Commissioner’s Expert Economists’ Group on Resource Efficiency. He is a member of the International Resource Panel of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP), and was a Co- Chair of UNEP’s flagship publication, the sixth Global Environment Outlook, published in 2019. In 1994 he received UNEP’s Global 500 Award ‘for outstanding environmental achievement’. In 2015 he received an OBE from the UK Government ‘for services to environmental policy’.
