Future energy: in search of a scenario reflecting current and future pressures and trends

A new study by researchers at the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change and the Shell Scenarios Team projects that without a globally coordinated mitigation effort to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the planet’s average surface temperature will reach 2.8°C, much higher than the “well below 2°C” level to which the Paris Agreement aspires, but a lot lower than what many widely used “business-as-usual” scenarios project.

Recognizing the limitations of such scenarios, which generally assume that historical trends in energy technology choices and climate policy inaction will persist for decades to come, the researchers have designed a “Growing Pressures” scenario that accounts for mounting social, technological, business and political pressures that are driving a transition away from fossil-fuel use and toward a low-carbon future. Such pressures have already begun to expand low-carbon technology and policy options, which, in turn, have escalated demand to utilize those options—a trend that’s expected to self-reinforce. Under this scenario, an array of future actions and policies cause renewable energy and energy storage costs to decline; fossil fuels to be phased out; electrification to proliferate; and emissions from agriculture and industry to be sharply reduced.

Incorporating these growing pressures in the MIT Joint Program’s integrated model of Earth and human systems, the study’s co-authors project future energy use, greenhouse gas emissions and global average surface temperatures in a world that fails to implement coordinated, global climate mitigation policies, and instead pursues piecemeal actions at mostly local and national levels.

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