Some said the COP 21 Paris climate deal was
a great triumph, others were less sure. But most saw it as opening up the way
for renewables. It certainly should, despite the lack of binding national
targets. Pressure to divest from coal projects will grow. However, while the
COP 21 agreement acknowledges ‘the need to promote universal access to
sustainable energy in developing countries, in particular in Africa, through
the enhanced deployment of renewable energy’, as
the World Nuclear Association noted, it does not otherwise make reference to
any specific energy technology. So
on the supply side we may see a scrabble for slots between renewables and
nuclear, along with energy efficiency on the demand side, possibly within this
sort of Deep Decarbonisation framework: http://deepdecarbonization.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/07/DDPP-press-release-150915.pdf
Though there are other options. As the
Financial Times put it ‘The 1.5C upper limit is likely to be breached in the
coming decades but could possibly be regained later in the century through
large-scale net negative emissions achieved via biological and geological
carbon storage’. FT 14/12/15
Some look to biochar and new farming
practices to improve carbon retention in soil, and on the supply side,
Biomass Energy with Carbon Capture and Storage (BECCS), although the UK
governments decision to abandon the £1bn CCS competition will have put that
even further into the future. It was anyway an outsider option, not loved by
all greens. CCS is often seen as just an expensive way to keep using fossil
fuel, with a new set of risks (sudden CO2 release), but some felt that it might
be condoned as a step to BECCS. Or could we just go straight to BECCS? No to
both say Biofuelwatch! www.independentsciencenews.org/environment/climate-technofix-weaving-carbon-into-gold-and-other-myths-of-negative-emissions/
DECC says that, despite the cuts to support
for PV solar and on-shore wind, UK will meet its 2020 renewable electricity
target. We will see. But few are
confident about it meeting the overall 15% by 2020 renewable energy target-
progress on heat and transport has been slow. Moreover, after 2020 then what? The 2020 targets were imposed on the UK (and other EU
members) by the EU Renewables Directive, but the UK and others have managed to
resist any post-2020 national renewable targets being set. It’s simply left up
to each county to decide how to meet the EU 2030 emissions targets, as with the
new COP21 ‘aspirations’. DECC has said that it will continue to support
renewables beyond 2020, including up to 10GW of new offshore wind, if the price
falls, but DECC’s main focus seem to be to nuclear, apparently regardless of
the price. And that could be
copied elsewhere in the EU- Hungary and Romania want new nuclear plants! Judging by the disasters with the EPR
nuclear plant construction programme so far (long overdue and massively
over-budget) it could all come horribly unstuck. In which case global geo-engineering
will no doubt then be highlighted as an emergency measure, with all sorts of
risks associated with that. Surely rather than blocking out sunshine with
aerosols injected into the atmosphere or vast mirrors orbiting in space, we
should be using it!
The COP 21 agreement still has to be
ratified by a majority of countries (the 55 largest energy users/emitters) and
nothing much may happen until then. Indeed it seems that the EU will wait until
the first of the proposed 5 year reviews to see if it will adopt to 40%
emission reduction target it offered if other countries backed similar targets.
Some now have, but, with no mandatory national targets, just the loose National
plans and proposals submitted to COP21, there is some wriggle room.
Writing in the Financial Times (15 Dec),
Martin Wolf was hopeful that peer pressure would suffice: ‘With every body
committed to producing a plan (because everybody agrees the challenge is
important), it will be far more difficult for any country to argue that failure
to meet its promises does not matter.’ It will be interesting to see what the
UK comes up with.
Looking globally, this thoughtful follow-up
proposal seems sensible: www.postcarbon.org/renewable-energy-after-cop21/
Although it worries that, if we push ahead
rapidly with building the renewable system we may run out of fossil energy
fast, unless it’s rationed and prioitised for that purpose!
‘We may be entering a period of fossil
fuel triage. Rather than allocating fossil fuels simply on a market basis
(those who pay for them get them), it may be fairer, especially to lower-income
citizens, for government (with wartime powers) to allocate fuels purposefully
based on the strategic importance of the societal sectors that depend on them,
and on the relative ease and timeliness of transitioning those sectors to
renewable substitutes. Agriculture, for example, might be deemed the highest
priority for continued fossil fuel allocations, with commercial air travel
assuming a far lower priority. Perhaps we need not just a price on carbon, but
different prices for different uses’.
Well maybe, but perhaps a more urgent
problem is the attempt to slow down renewables by cutting back on support systems. Dr David Toke
says that the EU’s move away from Feed In Tariffs to competitive auctions may
not actually cuts cost, but might cut capacity growth. http://journals.aau.dk/index.php/sepm/article/view/1197/1098
And this excellent review of the EU Energy
Transition pulls no punches on what is blocking it: http://dx.doi.org/10.5278/ijsepm.2015.5.6
None of these issue really surfaced at COP
21, which was focused on setting the big picture, maybe rightly. Some said it did very well: www.businessgreen.com/bg/james-blog/2439032/cop21-a-beautiful-peaceful-french-revolution Though others didn’t agree: it allows
many countries to carry on expanding emissions and has no binding national
targets: https://globalclimatejobs.wordpress.com/2015/11/09/world-pledges-to-increase-emissions/
But it wasn’t as irrelevant as the dreaded ever-contrarian Lomborg claimed: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2015/11/09/3720613/lomborg-misleads-paris-climate-pledges/ and this tentatively hopeful view may
be about right: www.rebeccawillis.co.uk/is-the-paris-agreement-a-success-emphatically-yes-a-little-bit-no-and-a-dose-of-it-depends/
However, it all rather depends on what
happens next, in the EU, US, China and elsewhere …
