NUSA DUA, Indonesia—The world has tools to cut emissions
massively but is not using them or investing enough in technology needed to
avert dangerous climate change, the head of the International Energy Agency said
on Tuesday.
Nobuo Tanaka said little time should be spent on celebrating
the tenth anniversary of the Kyoto Protocol to tackle global warming, because
rapid emissions growth was making its targets less relevant and governments were
moving too slowly.
"The most scarce resource on earth is not natural resources,
nor the capital investment or money, but time. And now is the time for action,"
he told a news conference on the sidelines of U.N. climate talks in the
Indonesian island of Bali.
"The new technologies need research and development,
but...our efforts are not so promising," he said.
The IEA is the energy policy advisor to 26 industrialized
countries.
The December 3-14 meeting is seeking to agree guidelines to
launch formal negotiations on a new deal for all nations to curb greenhouse
gases beyond 2012, widening Kyoto which only sets targets for 36 industrialized
nations.
Tanaka said targets and prices, while helpful, were not
enough. Governments need to have systems ready to convince investors to channel
an estimated $22 trillion required to reform the energy sector by 2030. And they
need to act.
"The important thing in energy efficiency is we know what to do, and
governments know what to do, but to implement this is very difficult, because we
need to change the lifestyle of people," Tanaka told a news conference.
