On Friday, an international panel representing more than 1,000 scientists pronounced as “unequivocal” the evidence that humans have contributed to global warming.
The odds are great that greenhouse pollution has caused much of the warming over the past 50 years, according to the scientists’ report, and temperature increases are very likely to accelerate in the future.
But what should be done? In a recent report, Greenwire highlights the work of Princeton professors Robert Socolow and Stephen Pacala. The duo, you may recall, played a supporting role in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, with Gore hailing their work as an important way to address climate change.
Socolow and Pacala first introduced their “wedges” concept — essentially a toolkit of energy technologies and lifestyle changes that can be mixed and matched to collectively reduce carbon emissions — in the journal Science back in 2004.
“Critics of the wedges warn they are an over-simplified academic exercise unconstrained by price tags or real-world politics,” writes Greenwire senior reporter Darren Samuelsohn. “But a growing number of politicians, teachers, lawyers, industry lobbyists and environmentalists consider the concept a great way to identify and articulate their climate strategies.”
You can add “energy executives” to Samuelsohn’s list of wedge admirers. David Crane, CEO of NRG Energy, applauded the wedge concept in a
recent talk.
Next week, Socolow and Pacala conduct a town hall meeting at the AAAS annual meeting in San Francisco. Teachers can download a “Stabilization Wedges Game” for their classrooms here.
