Seven steps to combat climate change

Letter from Dr Richard Pike, Chief Executive of the RSC, sent to The Times on Friday 4 May.

The reality of the looming climate-change threat is not lost on chemical scientists who, in the UK at least, are deeply concerned and ready to use their skills to combat carbon dioxide's effects on our world.

The RSC has its own seven-point creed, that addresses the ways that climate change can be mitigated through a balance of energy efficiency and technology development, but for the sake of brevity I would urge readers to look at our website to read them.

All are vital but I would pull out one in particular that will require the involvement of scientists and will demand complete commitment by governments worldwide: the need to capture and store carbon dioxide. 

There is a massive challenge here, and in order for carbon dioxide to be sequestered, we in the UK need the freedom to think and to act in a radical way and to mobilise the political, industrial and scientific communities on a novel, pioneering scale.   

Yours truly,

Dr Richard Pike

The seven steps to combat climate change

In their 4th assessment report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change paints a stark picture of how in the worst case, unperturbed climate change could all but wipe out life on Earth.  We are not fighting to save the Earth - the Earth will go on whether life exists or not - we are fighting to save life on Earth and particularly humanity. With this sobering thought in mind the RSC here outlines 7 key objectives that must be fulfilled in order to massively reduce manmade greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions:

1. A need for strong and joined-up national and international leadership and policy that aims to massively reduce GHG. 
2. A need to for everyone to save energy through both lifestyle changes and minimising heat loss from buildings.   
3. A need for energy efficient products and processes that minimise energy use in both manufacture and product use. 
4. A need to decarbonise transport by developing highly efficient biofuels, lightweight construction materials, hybrid and electric vehicles, battery technology and hydrogen as a fuel.  Additionally there is a need to maximise the efficiency of conventional vehicles and fuels.   
5. A need to harness renewable energy more efficiently and particularly to improve the efficiency of photovoltaic cells. 
6. A need to develop carbon capture and storage technology so that the vast coal reserves of the Earth that will be exploited are done so with minimal GHG emissions. 
7. A need to invest in skilled people and research and development so that future sustainable energy technologies will be developed.  

It is clear that without this titanic effort we will commit ourselves to a significantly warmer planet with increasingly understood and catastrophic consequences.