Cutting Carbon Emissions Best Way to Combat Global Warming, Study Says

Green technology and sustainability efforts are all well and good, but a new UCLA report says that the best way to combat global warming is to cut carbon emissions, coinciding with the Obama administration's new proposal to reduce such emissions.

"We found that climate engineering doesn't offer a perfect option," study leader Daniela Cusack said in a UCLA news release. "The perfect option is reducing emissions. We have to cut down the amount of emissions we're putting into the atmosphere if, in the future, we want to have anything like the Earth we have now."

According to the NOAA, human activity adds roughly 7 billion metric tons of carbon to the environment every year, mostly from the burning of fossil fuels. Fifty percent of the carbon we release ends up in the atmosphere, and Earth's carbon sinks, including our forests and oceans, absorb the rest.

Researchers from UCLA and five other universities evaluated various approaches to climate change mitigation - focusing on reducing emissions, sequestering carbon through biological means on land and in the ocean, storing carbon dioxide in a liquefied form in underground geological formations and wells, and increasing the Earth's cloud cover and solar reflection.

None came close to reducing emissions as much as limiting the amount of carbon being pumped into the atmosphere.

"We have the technology, and we know how to do it," Cusack said. "It's just that there doesn't seem to be political support for reducing emissions."

Researchers took into account the feasibility, cost-effectiveness and risk of each of these alternatives, and still found that reducing carbon emissions is the best option.

However, study authors also recognized the role that other green strategies could play in the global warming battle.

"While abatement remains the most desirable policy, certain climate engineering strategies, including forest and soil management for carbon sequestration, merit broad-scale application," researchers wrote in their report, published in the journal Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. "Other proposed strategies, such as biochar production and geological carbon capture and storage, are rated somewhat lower, but deserve further research and development."

On Monday, the Obama administration announced plans for reducing carbon emissions produced by power plants 30 percent by 2030.