Renewable energies: climate-change mitigation and international climate policy

Abstract

Global climate change, its present control and even its future reduction have been considered. Energy has been proposed as the main feed of comprehensive development. The way for meeting energy needs which certainly affects the existing energy resources will have forceful climate consequences. The purpose of this study is to explore how, in practice, the energy requirements of sustainable development can be afforded without any climate-change aggravation. Two fundamental approaches were proposed and completely discussed: the first long-term developing approach is the use of advanced energy-productive technologies instead of the existing ones and/or implementation of hybrid processes, a combination of conventional systems with a newly low energy-consumptive and emission-reductive technology in a newly installed system. The second most sustainable scheme is the development of alternative renewable energy (RE) resources. In this case, available internationally legal documents discovering the RE policies were explored and their commitment strategies were taken into original and deliberate challenges. It was concluded that the best solution to afford energy requirements is the expansion of RE sources, excluding or rarely without any sanctions reflected on the main documents of international climate policy. Since the dominant conditions of international investments have more tendencies to the short-time cost-efficient methods, the documents have only provided a limited situation for the expansion of REs. As a result, the present weak status of REs in the documents comprises their attitude towards the long-term developing scheme (the first approach) and not to the most sustainable scheme of altering the energy resources (the second approach).