EIA Projects Climate Catastrophe?

The US Energy Information Agency (EIA) published an early release of the 2011 Annual Energy Outlook (here). In the report, the EIA projects that energy-related CO2 emissions will grow by 16% from 2009 to 2035 to a level of 6.3 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (1.7 GtC0). The non-skeptic climate blogs (here and here) are calling the projections a "catastrophe," except that the EIA projections are usually wrong (the EIA's own evaluations of their forecasts are here): (1) they assume the future will be like the past, (2) they don't model policy changes, (3) they underestimate the role of technology (reductions in emission intensity), and (4) have ignored the possible effects of peak oil.

To this list, I would add that the EIA published no confidence intervals with the projection (see my forecast with confidence intervals here). In a well-constructed model, the confidence intervals account for the probabilistic effects of unanticipated changes in the future. The factors that might avert catastrophe and can be anticipated, should be built into models (a brief and completely inadequate discussion of the IEO2010 models can be found here).

Even with anticipated future changes that might reduce carbon emissions, solutions based on policy wedges (here) require a "...staggering amount of effort by both private and public sectors" if we are to keep the economy growing while at the same time reducing carbon emissions. Reducing economic growth rates, which clearly in both the EIA and my own projections did happen as a result of the global financial crisis, would provide the breathing room to implement policy wedges.

Unfortunately, our only thought right now is to get out of the global financial crisis and return to a level of "robust economic growth" and, as a result, robust CO2 emissions.