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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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NotesThinking Globally: ‘Welcome to the Anthropocene’
From Planet Under Pressure via Vimeo:
A 3-minute journey through the last 250 years of our history, from the start of the Industrial Revolution to the Rio+20 Summit. The film charts the growth of humanity into a global force on an equivalent scale to major geological processes.
More here.
(Image credit: IGBP)
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NotesKids & Climate Change: The Legal Route
In an unprecedented legal filing, seven iMatter youth who sued the US government earlier this year, filed a “Preliminary Injunction” requiring the EPA to take immediate action to protect our nation’s youth who are in imminent danger because of climate change.
They are calling upon the Courts to to compel the U.S. government to put in place “Climate Recovery Plans” that will protect the atmosphere for their future. This video was submitted to the courts to tell the story of one of the plaintiffs, 17 year old Alec Loorz, who introduces himself and his fears about the effect climate change will have on his future. -
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Notes"A HUNDRED years from now, looking back, the only question that will appear important about the historical moment in which we now live is the question of whether or not we did anything to arrest climate change. Everything else—the financial crisis, the life or death of the euro, authoritarianism or democracy in China and Russia, the Great Stagnation or the innovation renaissance, democratisation and/or political Islam in the Arab world, Newt or Mitt or another four years of Barack—all this will fade into insignificance beside the question of whether we managed to do anything about human industrial civilisation changing the climate of Planet Earth. It’s extremely hard to focus on this, because environmentalism goes in and out of political fashion depending on the economy, war, and so forth. But from the perspective of our great-grandchildren, the only thing that’s going to seem important is whether we burned all the fossil fuel on the planet and sent global temperatures up by at least 4 degrees Celsius in the next century, or whether we took collective action, shifted our energy sources, and held the global temperature rise to 2 degrees or less."The opening paragraph from the article, ‘Climate change: Durban and everything that matters’, in The Economist. To get a sense of some of the modeled impacts of a 4 C (7 F) hotter Earth check out the map created by the United Kingdom’s national weather agency.
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Notes"Effectively addressing climate change will require over the coming decades a fundamental remaking of energy production, transportation and agriculture around the world — the sinews of modern life."
~ New York Times journalist John Broder, in his analysis of the recent international climate change negotiations in Durban, South Africa.
(Photo credit: Climate Literacy)
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Notes"There’s really only one label for the pathetic exercise we’ve just witnessed in South Africa: deceit. The whole climate-change negotiation process and the larger political discourse surrounding this horrible problem is a drawn-out and elaborate exercise in lying – to each other, to ourselves, and especially to our children. And the lies are starting to corrupt our civilization from inside out."Dr. Thomas Homer-Dixon, director of the Waterloo Institute for Complexity and Innovation and CIGI Chair of Global Systems at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Ontario, in his new article in the Globe & Mail, ‘Climate summit was a pathetic exercise in deceit’.
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Notes"We have an economy that tells us that it is cheaper to destroy earth in real time rather than renew, restore, and sustain it. You can print money to bail out a bank but you can’t print life to bail out a planet. At present we are stealing the future, selling it in the present, and calling it gross domestic product. We can just as easily have an economy that is based on healing the future instead of stealing it. We can either create assets for the future or take the assets of the future. One is called restoration and the other exploitation. And whenever we exploit the earth we exploit people and cause untold suffering. Working for the earth is not a way to get rich, it is a way to be rich."~ Author Paul Hawken (e.g. The Ecology of Commerce, Blessed Unrest) in his commencement talk to the University of Portland’s Class of 2009
(Image credit: Cradle to Cradle Portal)
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Notes"The global challenge of climate change poses a perfect moral storm — by failing to take action to rein in carbon emissions, the current generation is spreading the costs of its behavior far into the future."Professor and author Stephen Gardinier in his e360 article, ‘The Ethical Dimension of Tackling Climate Change’.
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‘NASA Scientist Hansen Arrested at Tar Sands Protest - A Grim Sign of the Times’
From Rolling Stone:
This photo of the world’s best known and most outspoken climate scientist, James Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, handcuffed and hauled off to jail yesterday may not achieve the iconic stature of the Blue Marble photo, but as a symbol of our times, it’s pretty potent.
Hansen’s arrest was no surprise – in fact, it was deliberate. Hansen was taking part in a civil disobedience action at the White House organized to halt the approval of the Keystone XL pipeline, which will bring dirty oil from the Canadian tar sands down to US refineries in the Gulf. Hansen is just one of more than nearly 1000 protesters who have been arrested since the action began on August 20 (it continues through September 3 – you can learn more about it at tarsandsaction.org).Check out the rest of the article here.
Also, for those interested, Hansen has posted a collection of remarks, notes and powerpoints explaining how greenhouse gas emissions associated with the pipeline and the development of unconventional fossil fuels risk breaching tipping points in the global climate system. The collection also includes Hansen’s “conservative climate plan” to avoid such a scenario.
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Notes"The problem is that the policy makers the world over are paying more attention to the fossil fuel lobbyists than they are to the well being of young people and nature, as my colleagues and I have described in the paper “The Case for Young People and Nature”.
Until the public demands otherwise, the policy makers will continue to serve their financiers.
That’s the point of the present action — to draw attention to the inter-generational injustice of current policies — our children and grandchildren are getting shafted by our well-oiled coal-fired politicians who do not look beyond their next election.
The tar sands verdict will show whether he really intends to move us to clean energy or whether he will instead support going after dirtier and dirtier fuels (tar sands, oil shale, mountaintop removal, long-wall coal mining, hydro-fracking, deep ocean and Arctic exploration, etc.).
"Top American climate scientist, James Hansen, in an interview on the Alberta tar sands pipeline protest, the Obama Administration and intergenerational justice. You can read his paper, ‘The Case for Young People and Nature’, here.
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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
