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Choosing your energy sources, choosing your future

Jürgen Maier
NGO F.U.E.

Cédric Philibert
IEA

What should our priorities be in terms of our energy choices?

First, we must improve energy efficiency by reforming environmental taxes and eliminating public subsidiaries for coal and nuclear power. We need to overhaul our energy system and make more extensive use of renewable energies.
Technologies that are already cost-effective, such as wind, biomass and hydraulic power, must be given priority through political measures that create incentives. Solar power is a future technology that is still relatively expensive, but could become marketable if we allocated to it even a small percentage of the subsidies now enjoyed by coal and nuclear power.

The international community has set a goal to stabilize atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations—at a level and by a deadline as yet unspecified—to limit climate changes. This will require halving the world's fossil fuel-associated CO2 emissions, at a time when most of the world's population has development aspirations.
There are four ways to do this: optimizing energy use; using more natural gas and less coal; using more coal-free, nuclear and renewable energies; and developing CO2 capture and storage techniques for major combustion plants.