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1 out of 11: The IEA’s New Report Card on Climate Change and Clean Energy
From The IEA:
While progress is being made on renewable energy, most clean energy technologies are not being deployed quickly enough, the International Energy Agency (IEA) said today in an annual progress report presented to ministers and representatives of nations that together account for four-fifths of global energy demand.
The report, Tracking Clean Energy Progress, highlighted the rapid progress made in some renewable technologies, notably the solar panels easily installed by households and businesses (solar PV) and in onshore wind technologies. In fact, onshore wind has seen 27% average annual growth over the past decade, and solar PV has grown at 42%, albeit from a small base. Even more impressive is the 75% reduction in system costs for solar PV in as little as three years in some countries. This serves as evidence that rapid technology change is possible. Unfortunately, however, the report concludes that most clean energy technologies are not on track to make their required contribution to reducing carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions and thereby provide a more secure energy system.
“We have a responsibility and a golden opportunity to act,” said IEA Deputy Executive Director Ambassador Richard H Jones. “Energy-related CO2 emissions are at historic highs; under current policies, we estimate that energy use and CO2 emissions would increase by a third by 2020, and almost double by 2050. This would likely send global temperatures at least 6°C higher. Such an outcome would confront future generations with significant economic, environmental and energy security hardships – a legacy that I know none of us wishes to leave behind.”…
The report offers three over-arching policy recommendations for changing this status quo and moving clean-energy technologies to the mainstream market:
- First, level the playing field for clean energy technologies. This means ensuring that energy prices reflect the “true cost” of energy – accounting for the positive and negative impacts of energy production and consumption;
- Second, unlock the potential of energy efficiency, the “hidden fuel” of the future. Making sure that energy is not wasted and that it is used in the best possible way is the most cost-effective action and must be the first step of any policy aimed at building a sustainable energy mix’
- Finally, accelerate energy innovation and public support for research, development and demonstration. This will help lay the groundwork for private sector innovation, and speed technologies to market.
Check out the rest of the article here.
Related:
Infographic source: IEA via The Guardian
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A prophetic ad from 1962: “Each Day Humble Supplies Enough Energy to Melt 7 Million Tons of Glacier!”
The ad, which appeared in Life Magazine, reads:
“This giant glacier has remained unmelted for centuries. Yet, the petroleum energy Humble supplies — if converted into heat — could melt it at the rate of 80 tons each second! To meet the nation’s growing needs for energy, Humble has supplied science to nature’s resources to become America’s Leading Energy Company. Working wonders with oil through research, Humble provides energy in many forms — to help heat our homes, power our transportation, and to furnish industry with a great variety of versatile chemicals. Stop at a Humble station for new Enco Extra gasoline, and see why the “Happy Motoring” Sign is the World’s First Choice!”
Source: Huffington Post
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Notes"The vast majority of the green advice you’ll read? It’s irrelevant. There are four primary activities that dump carbon into the atmosphere: traveling from place to place, keeping buildings at pleasant temperatures, creating electricity, and raising animals for meat.
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The rest of the green living pantheon—bamboo utensils, composting, eating local, reclaimed wood tables, organic cotton sheets—are nice gestures. And they often have other benefits: they might keep chemicals out of the water or provide a livelihood for local farmers. Many are also better than the alternatives they’re replacing.
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But when it comes to tackling climate change—not only the most dangerous environmental issue the world faces, but also a looming human rights problem—choosing these green products can only make a tiny difference."
A quote from the GOOD Magazine article, ‘Debunking ‘Green Living’: Combatting Climate Change Requires Lifestyle Changes, Not Organic Products’.
Related:
- ‘Cooler Smarter book provides practical steps for low carbon living’ (Sustainable Guernsey)
- ‘Going Green But Getting Nowhere’ (New York Times)
(Photo source: GOOD)
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Notes"New data highlight that bicyclists in the United States save at least $4.6 billion a year by riding instead of driving…
The average annual operating cost of a bicycle is $308, compared to $8,220 for the average car, and if American drivers replaced just one four-mile car trip with a bike each week for the entire year, it would save more than two billion gallons of gas, for a total savings of $7.3 billion a year, based on $4 a gallon for gas.
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A quote from the Forbes article, ‘Pedaling to Prosperity: Biking Saves U.S. Riders Billions A Year’.
Related:
~ Bicycling Magazine’s new ranking of ‘America’s Top 50 Bike-Friendly Cities’.
(Photo credit: Bicycling Magazine)
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Notes"As Hermann Scheer, the father of Germany’s feed-in tariff, often said, the intent of his disruptive law was to fundamentally restructure the German energy industry. Energy technologies, Scheer understood, came with their own “techno-logic.” Coal and gas and nukes and hydro were top-down and centralized, their profits earned by securing and exploiting scarce, expensive fuels.
Shifting to renewables isn’t a megawatt-for-megawatt swap between energy sources but a paradigm shift from one techno-logic to another. Renewables encourage smaller scale and decentralization; they reward efficiency over consumption; and they centralize the value at the level of technological development and implementation, thus to exploit free fuels.
In a market where small-scale, decentralized renewables thrive, you’ll invariably find angry conventional energy companies. They mastered a game and rigged a market for themselves, and now it doesn’t work quite as favorably for them. (Notice that none of Germany’s big energy giants, even the ones paying those big tariffs, went bankrupt during the solar industry’s heyday.)"
Writer Chris Turner explains the differing “techno-logic” associated with renewable and non-renewable energy in his MNN article, ‘What have we learned about cheap energy?’. If you’re interested, you can read one of Herman Scheer’s quotes about the transition to clean energy and its connection with democracy here.
(Photo credit: MNN)
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The “false economy” of delaying action on climate change
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NotesPanel: Confronting the Climate Disinformation Campaign
from Sustainability Now Radio:
Here is the video for the free presentation given on April 30, 2012 on Penn State’s University Park Campus. Penn State professors Michael Mann, Donald Brown, Janet Swim and Rick Schuhmann, and graduate student Peter Buckland spoke Monday evening at “Changing the Moral Climate on Climate Change,” a talk that focused on climate change denial. Mann is director of Penn State’s Earth System Science Center and part of the 2007 Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Susannah Barsom, with the university’s Center for Sustainability, moderated the event, which included a question and answer session.
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Canada, Our Changing Climate & ‘The Winter That Wasn’t’
Canada’s environmental agency recently released a weather bulletin reporting that:
The national average temperature for the winter of 2011/2012 was 3.6°C above normal (1961-1990 average), based on preliminary data, which makes this the third warmest winter on record since nationwide records began in 1948.
It also noted that Canada’s:
winter temperatures have been at or above normal since 1997.
The infographic above summarizes some of regional impacts of the winter of 2011/2, a.k.a. ‘The Winter That Wasn’t’.
Related reading:
- ‘Last winter was third-warmest in decades: Environment Canada’ (Postmedia News)
- ‘Ottawa locks in emissions with delays in carbon rules, agency warns’ (Globe & Mail)
- ’Record high greenhouse gases to linger for decades’ (Reuters)
- ‘Extreme weather to worsen with climate change: IPCC’ (Reuters)
- ‘NASA says Canada in ‘hot spot’ of ecological change’ (CBC)
- ‘Great Lakes show massive ice loss, study says’ (CBC)
(Infographic source: The National Post)
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Notes"Well, of course it is! Every new technology is more expensive. What if we hadn’t started using computers because they were more expensive than typewriters? What if we hadn’t started using cell phones because they were more expensive than land lines? Where would we be?"/Topics/focus-clean-energy-wind-585-mfk013011.jpg)
US Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus’ no nonsense response to the argument that renewable energy sources (e.g. solar, wind, geothermal) are (currently) more expensive than non-renewable energy (e.g. oil, coal, natural gas). I found the quote in the recent Climate Progress article, ‘The U.S. Military Takes on Global Warming’.
(Photo credit: Pew Environment)
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Notes"The most important of these trends is a multi-decade shift from fossil fuels to carbon-free energy. The shift will accelerate as oil becomes harder to produce and climate change worsens. Once climate change really starts affecting people’s lives – when it cuts world grain production, for instance – people will demand action. The action will come in the form of regulations and taxes that raise the price of carbon fuels.
The shift to carbon-free energy will be akin to what economists call a “general purpose technology” transition. The modern world has seen half a dozen or so transitions in the past 200 years, including those following the introduction of railways, electricity, the internal combustion engine and the computer microchip. Each produced staggering economic upheaval: companies, jobs and whole industries vanished, while new ones exploded onto the scene. These were periods of startling innovation, rapid economic growth and enormous opportunity for entrepreneurial individuals and communities.
The coming energy shift will dwarf all these earlier transitions combined. It won’t arise from just one disruptive technology but from an integrated suite of many, such as advanced batteries, building reskinning, smart grids, cheap super-thin photovoltaic materials, ultra-deep geothermal power, and perhaps thorium nuclear power. It will spur the invention and delivery of a torrent of new technologies, goods and services in every sector of the global economy.
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Three paragraphs from Thomas Homer-Dixon’s recent article in the Globe & Mail, ‘All’s not lost, Ontario. The future is green, not black’. Homer-Dixon is the director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and the author of a number of books including, ‘Carbon Shift: How the Twin Crises of Oil Depletion and Climate Change Will Define the Future’, ‘The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization’, and ‘The Ingenuity Gap’. You can watch, listen and read about his work here.
(Photo credit: Eco-News)
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Under the right circumstances, solar cells from Semprius could produce power more cheaply than fossil fuels
via nextbigfuture
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Nature inspires more creative minds
The more you get away from the stresses of daily life and the more time you spend... -
The Spring of 2012 Is the Hottest in U.S. History
In case, you know, you haven’t been outside in the past three month, it’s...
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Walkable neighborhoods now more valuable than car-centric ones
If you can walk to the post office, library and eateries, your real estate could... -
Ride. a short film on bike commuting.
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Urbanized, a feature-length documentary by Gary Hustwit about the design of cities, which looks at the issues and strategies behind urban...
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“Income Inequality As Seen from Space,” Per Square Mile, May 24, 2012
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Cycles of Life by Grant Snider
