New study concludes that addressing climate change will require “fundamental and disruptive transformation of the global energy system.”

Wedges 101

Before Pacala and Socolow’s paper much of the debate about lowering greenhouse gas emissions to avoid dangerous climate change tended to focus on trying to find a “silver bullet”: a single, optimum technology (e.g., nuclear, renewables, carbon capture and storage, efficiency) that could be deployed to get us from today’s carbon-glutinous energy system to the carbon-free energy system of the future. (See related story: “Climate Scientist Fears His ‘Wedges’ Made It Seem Too Easy“)

Pacala and Socolow argued that we should be using buckshot instead of a bullet; that is, instead of finding any one single low-carbon technology to deploy, we should be taking a