Carbon lock-in

It has since gained popularity in climate change policy discussions, especially those focused on preventing the globalization of carbon lock-in to rapidly industrializing countries like China and India.

According to Unruh: …industrial economies have been locked into fossil fuel-based energy systems through a process of technological and institutional co-evolution driven by path-dependent increasing returns to scale.

The conjecture is that industrial economies have become locked into fossil fuel technologies by past investments and policy decisions, the effects of positive feedback on increasing returns, and the economic growth of energy infrastructure.

It is this co-evolutionary positive feedback development process that creates the lock-in condition and associated barriers to the diffusion of alternative technologies, even those with known superior environmental performance characteristics.

Recent studies by Steven J. Davis and co-authors have quantified the future CO2 emissions that can be expected to be produced by current energy infrastructure [3] and the magnitude of lock-in related to power plants being built each year in China and elsewhere.

According to an assessment proposed by Erickson et al. (2015), coal power plants, because of long lifetime, gas power, which may soon be overbuilt, and vehicles with internal combustion engines, because of strong techno-institutional effects, over-commit the highest amounts of carbon. [ 2 ]