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China’s fossil fuel emissions fell 3% in 2014 Updated for 2026

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China’s coal consumption fell by 2.9% in 2014, according to newly released official Chinese energy data.

The data confirms earlier projections of a fall in coal use and 1% reduction in Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning according to calculations based on the data (excel spreadsheet).

An initial analysis by Glen Peters suggests that equates to a 0.7% drop in overall emissions.

This is the first fall in China’s emissions from oil, gas and coal burning since the Asian economic crisis more than 15 years ago. It’s also the biggest recorded fall in 30 years, and the first time on record that emission fell while total energy consumption grew.

Coal consumption growth in China has been slowing down since 2012 suggesting that China’s coal use is no longer rising in line with economic output – so-called ‘de-coupling’.

Based on China Statistical Yearbook 2014, coal consumption growth slowed from an average of 6.1% per year between 2007-2011, to 2.6% on average between 2012-2013, while GDP growth averaged 10.5% and 7.7% per year, respectively.

Has China’s coal burn peaked?

China’s coal consumption growth was responsible for more than half of global CO2 emission growth in the past 10 years.

The fall in China’s coal consumption comes as China has set new global records for wind and solar installations and seen an increase in both economy-wide and power plant efficiency.

Ambitious policies to control coal use, spurred by the air pollution crisis, along with policies to diversify the economy away from energy-intensive industries, are strongly constraining coal consumption.

The country also appears to be moving away from plans to reduce pollution in urban areas by gasifying coal in more remote locations due to concerns over economic viability.

Though China’s coal use is unlikely to continue falling year on year an analysis by Greenpeace suggests that full implementation of China’s existing energy targets, including targets for renewable energy and controlling total energy consumption, could see coal use peak by 2020.

China recently required four provinces in the key economic regions to set absolute coal consumption reduction targets, in addition to four others that already have ambitious targets, the provinces consume over 600 million metric tons of coal per year, almost as much as India.

Coal generation capacity increasing – a contradiction?

While China’s coal consumption fell in 2014, coal-fired power generating capacity continues to grow rapidly. This apparent contradiction has led some observers to conclude that China’s coal consumption growth is bound to resume.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. Instead the continued buildup of coal-fired power plants represents an investment bubble that will burst as overcapacity becomes too large to ignore.

If there is one factoid that every media consumer knows about energy in China, it must be that the country is ‘building one coal power plant per week’.

While coal-fired power generation capacity growth has slowed from the peak years – 2006 saw the equivalent of 1.5 large units added every week – the rate of coal-fired power plant additions and construction initiations in China is still breathtaking

In 2014 39 GW were added, or three 1,000MW units every four weeks, up from 36 GW in 2013.

Coal plants built – but not used 

At the same time, power generation from coal fell by approximately 1.6% in 2014, due to record increases in power generation from hydropower, wind, solar, nuclear and gas, along with slower power consumption growth – contributing to the 2.9% overall fall in coal burning.

In fact, coal-fired capacity growth has outstripped coal-fired generation growth since 2011, leading to dramatically reduced capacity utilization (see graph, above right) and financial pain to power plant operators. The headline making the rounds in China is that capacity utilization, at 54%, was at its lowest level since the reforms of 1978, when statistics began to be made available.

The Obama – Xi deal on peaking China’s CO2 emissions before 2030 has grabbed the headlines in English-speaking media, leaving many observers with the impression that China is planning to slack for another 15 years before starting to pull its weight in cutting CO2.

However, real action is in the implementation of China’s energy targets for 2020 and the air pollution action plans for 2017. For the power sector, the most significant target is the objective for non-fossil energy to make up 15% of all energy consumed in China.

Hitting the 15% target will require raising share of renewable energy and nuclear power in power generation from 22% in 2013 to 33-35% in 2020. Gas-fired power generation is also forecast by the IEA to grow to around 5% of total power generation, implying that the share of coal will shrink to about 60% in 2020, from 72% in 2013.

This will require almost doubling non-fossil power generation from 2014 to 2020, meaning that, on average, non-fossil power generation will have increased as much as it did in 2014, every year until 2020.

As in so many other respects, the radical changes in 2014 were not a one-off anomaly, but the ‘new normal’.

No room for new coal power plants – so why build them?

As a result of booming non-fossil power generation, even assuming GDP growth of 7% per year until 2020, growth in coal-fired power generation will be limited to around 1.5% per year on average, slowing down towards 2020 as non-fossil generation additions are ramped up.

Together with a targeted 0.7% per year reduction in coal use per unit of power generated, this means that coal use growth in the power sector will average less than 1% and will stabilize before 2020. If capacity utilization is to return to financially sustainable levels, there is room for little more capacity to be added until 2020.

To grasp why coal-fired power plants can still get built in the face of a worsening overcapacity problem, it is necessary to understand the basics of China’s economic model.

The country’s growth miracle has been based on an economic system designed to enable extremely high levels of investment spending, particularly by state-owned companies and local governments.

These actors have a very liberal access to near-zero interest loans from state-owned banks, and state-owned companies are generally not required to pay dividends to the state, enabling (or forcing) them to re-invest their profits.

Investments do not need to be wise or profitable

Banks exercise minimal due diligence on loans, which have implicit government backing. As a result, investment spending now amounts to over $4 trillion per year, making up a staggering 50% of China’s GDP, higher than any other major economy in history, and compared to around 20% in developed economies.

This model served China well for decades, enabling the growth miracle and lifting hundreds of millions from poverty. However, finding profitable and sensible investment projects worth trillions of dollars every year is bound to become harder and harder as the investment boom goes on.

Recently published research estimated that 67 trillion yuan ($11 trillion) has been spent on projects that generated no or almost no economic output – ghost cities being the most famous example.

In this context, it is not too hard to see how investment in coal-fired power plants can speed way ahead of demand growth.

A new coal-fired power plant will still generate power and revenue even if there is overcapacity, as the lower capacity utilization gets spread across the entire coal power fleet and across all power plant operators.

What does continued coal-fired power buildup mean for the climate?

The conventional assumption in power business is that once a coal-fired power plant or other capital-intensive generating asset gets built, it will run pretty much at full steam for 40 years or more. Even if there is overcapacity at the moment, demand growth will raise utilization and the existing capacity will crowd out future investment.

However, this is not how things work in China. The government is not going to scrap the internationally pledged 15% non-fossil energy target for 2020 because of excess coal-fired capacity. Rather the overcapacity will lead to losses for power generators and will be eliminated by closing down older plants, as has happened with coal mining, steel and cement already.

Therefore, continued investment in coal-fired power plants does not mean locking in more coal-burning. It does, however, mean massive economic waste, and a missed opportunity to channel the investment spending into renewable energy, enabling even faster growth.

Furthermore, the underutilized coal-fired capacity can exacerbate the conflict between coal and variable renewable energy in the grid, as grid operators are known to curtail renewable power in favor of coal.

Hence, investment in coal-fired power plants needs to be rapidly scaled back by restricting approvals and finance. The first step has already been taken with China banning new coal power plants in its three key economic regions, home to one third of currently operating coal-fired capacity.

 

 

Lauri Myllyvirta writes for Greenpeace EnergyDesk on energy and climate issues in China and elsewhere.

This article combines two articles by Lauri Myllyvirta originally published on Greenpeace EnergyDesk:

 

Sources: The energy data is from China Statistical Yearbook 2014 except 2014 growth rates from National Bureau of Statistics of China: STATISTICAL COMMUNIQUÉ OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ON THE 2014 NATIONAL ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT. February 26, 2015. CO2 emissions calculated using IPCC default emission factors. Oveall emissions data via @glenpeters. Graph of coal power plant utilization compiled from China Electricity Council statistical releases.

 

 




390825

China’s fossil fuel emissions fell 3% in 2014 Updated for 2026

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China’s coal consumption fell by 2.9% in 2014, according to newly released official Chinese energy data.

The data confirms earlier projections of a fall in coal use and 1% reduction in Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning according to calculations based on the data (excel spreadsheet).

An initial analysis by Glen Peters suggests that equates to a 0.7% drop in overall emissions.

This is the first fall in China’s emissions from oil, gas and coal burning since the Asian economic crisis more than 15 years ago. It’s also the biggest recorded fall in 30 years, and the first time on record that emission fell while total energy consumption grew.

Coal consumption growth in China has been slowing down since 2012 suggesting that China’s coal use is no longer rising in line with economic output – so-called ‘de-coupling’.

Based on China Statistical Yearbook 2014, coal consumption growth slowed from an average of 6.1% per year between 2007-2011, to 2.6% on average between 2012-2013, while GDP growth averaged 10.5% and 7.7% per year, respectively.

Has China’s coal burn peaked?

China’s coal consumption growth was responsible for more than half of global CO2 emission growth in the past 10 years.

The fall in China’s coal consumption comes as China has set new global records for wind and solar installations and seen an increase in both economy-wide and power plant efficiency.

Ambitious policies to control coal use, spurred by the air pollution crisis, along with policies to diversify the economy away from energy-intensive industries, are strongly constraining coal consumption.

The country also appears to be moving away from plans to reduce pollution in urban areas by gasifying coal in more remote locations due to concerns over economic viability.

Though China’s coal use is unlikely to continue falling year on year an analysis by Greenpeace suggests that full implementation of China’s existing energy targets, including targets for renewable energy and controlling total energy consumption, could see coal use peak by 2020.

China recently required four provinces in the key economic regions to set absolute coal consumption reduction targets, in addition to four others that already have ambitious targets, the provinces consume over 600 million metric tons of coal per year, almost as much as India.

Coal generation capacity increasing – a contradiction?

While China’s coal consumption fell in 2014, coal-fired power generating capacity continues to grow rapidly. This apparent contradiction has led some observers to conclude that China’s coal consumption growth is bound to resume.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. Instead the continued buildup of coal-fired power plants represents an investment bubble that will burst as overcapacity becomes too large to ignore.

If there is one factoid that every media consumer knows about energy in China, it must be that the country is ‘building one coal power plant per week’.

While coal-fired power generation capacity growth has slowed from the peak years – 2006 saw the equivalent of 1.5 large units added every week – the rate of coal-fired power plant additions and construction initiations in China is still breathtaking

In 2014 39 GW were added, or three 1,000MW units every four weeks, up from 36 GW in 2013.

Coal plants built – but not used 

At the same time, power generation from coal fell by approximately 1.6% in 2014, due to record increases in power generation from hydropower, wind, solar, nuclear and gas, along with slower power consumption growth – contributing to the 2.9% overall fall in coal burning.

In fact, coal-fired capacity growth has outstripped coal-fired generation growth since 2011, leading to dramatically reduced capacity utilization (see graph, above right) and financial pain to power plant operators. The headline making the rounds in China is that capacity utilization, at 54%, was at its lowest level since the reforms of 1978, when statistics began to be made available.

The Obama – Xi deal on peaking China’s CO2 emissions before 2030 has grabbed the headlines in English-speaking media, leaving many observers with the impression that China is planning to slack for another 15 years before starting to pull its weight in cutting CO2.

However, real action is in the implementation of China’s energy targets for 2020 and the air pollution action plans for 2017. For the power sector, the most significant target is the objective for non-fossil energy to make up 15% of all energy consumed in China.

Hitting the 15% target will require raising share of renewable energy and nuclear power in power generation from 22% in 2013 to 33-35% in 2020. Gas-fired power generation is also forecast by the IEA to grow to around 5% of total power generation, implying that the share of coal will shrink to about 60% in 2020, from 72% in 2013.

This will require almost doubling non-fossil power generation from 2014 to 2020, meaning that, on average, non-fossil power generation will have increased as much as it did in 2014, every year until 2020.

As in so many other respects, the radical changes in 2014 were not a one-off anomaly, but the ‘new normal’.

No room for new coal power plants – so why build them?

As a result of booming non-fossil power generation, even assuming GDP growth of 7% per year until 2020, growth in coal-fired power generation will be limited to around 1.5% per year on average, slowing down towards 2020 as non-fossil generation additions are ramped up.

Together with a targeted 0.7% per year reduction in coal use per unit of power generated, this means that coal use growth in the power sector will average less than 1% and will stabilize before 2020. If capacity utilization is to return to financially sustainable levels, there is room for little more capacity to be added until 2020.

To grasp why coal-fired power plants can still get built in the face of a worsening overcapacity problem, it is necessary to understand the basics of China’s economic model.

The country’s growth miracle has been based on an economic system designed to enable extremely high levels of investment spending, particularly by state-owned companies and local governments.

These actors have a very liberal access to near-zero interest loans from state-owned banks, and state-owned companies are generally not required to pay dividends to the state, enabling (or forcing) them to re-invest their profits.

Investments do not need to be wise or profitable

Banks exercise minimal due diligence on loans, which have implicit government backing. As a result, investment spending now amounts to over $4 trillion per year, making up a staggering 50% of China’s GDP, higher than any other major economy in history, and compared to around 20% in developed economies.

This model served China well for decades, enabling the growth miracle and lifting hundreds of millions from poverty. However, finding profitable and sensible investment projects worth trillions of dollars every year is bound to become harder and harder as the investment boom goes on.

Recently published research estimated that 67 trillion yuan ($11 trillion) has been spent on projects that generated no or almost no economic output – ghost cities being the most famous example.

In this context, it is not too hard to see how investment in coal-fired power plants can speed way ahead of demand growth.

A new coal-fired power plant will still generate power and revenue even if there is overcapacity, as the lower capacity utilization gets spread across the entire coal power fleet and across all power plant operators.

What does continued coal-fired power buildup mean for the climate?

The conventional assumption in power business is that once a coal-fired power plant or other capital-intensive generating asset gets built, it will run pretty much at full steam for 40 years or more. Even if there is overcapacity at the moment, demand growth will raise utilization and the existing capacity will crowd out future investment.

However, this is not how things work in China. The government is not going to scrap the internationally pledged 15% non-fossil energy target for 2020 because of excess coal-fired capacity. Rather the overcapacity will lead to losses for power generators and will be eliminated by closing down older plants, as has happened with coal mining, steel and cement already.

Therefore, continued investment in coal-fired power plants does not mean locking in more coal-burning. It does, however, mean massive economic waste, and a missed opportunity to channel the investment spending into renewable energy, enabling even faster growth.

Furthermore, the underutilized coal-fired capacity can exacerbate the conflict between coal and variable renewable energy in the grid, as grid operators are known to curtail renewable power in favor of coal.

Hence, investment in coal-fired power plants needs to be rapidly scaled back by restricting approvals and finance. The first step has already been taken with China banning new coal power plants in its three key economic regions, home to one third of currently operating coal-fired capacity.

 

 

Lauri Myllyvirta writes for Greenpeace EnergyDesk on energy and climate issues in China and elsewhere.

This article combines two articles by Lauri Myllyvirta originally published on Greenpeace EnergyDesk:

 

Sources: The energy data is from China Statistical Yearbook 2014 except 2014 growth rates from National Bureau of Statistics of China: STATISTICAL COMMUNIQUÉ OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ON THE 2014 NATIONAL ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT. February 26, 2015. CO2 emissions calculated using IPCC default emission factors. Oveall emissions data via @glenpeters. Graph of coal power plant utilization compiled from China Electricity Council statistical releases.

 

 




390825

China’s fossil fuel emissions fell 3% in 2014 Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




China’s coal consumption fell by 2.9% in 2014, according to newly released official Chinese energy data.

The data confirms earlier projections of a fall in coal use and 1% reduction in Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel burning according to calculations based on the data (excel spreadsheet).

An initial analysis by Glen Peters suggests that equates to a 0.7% drop in overall emissions.

This is the first fall in China’s emissions from oil, gas and coal burning since the Asian economic crisis more than 15 years ago. It’s also the biggest recorded fall in 30 years, and the first time on record that emission fell while total energy consumption grew.

Coal consumption growth in China has been slowing down since 2012 suggesting that China’s coal use is no longer rising in line with economic output – so-called ‘de-coupling’.

Based on China Statistical Yearbook 2014, coal consumption growth slowed from an average of 6.1% per year between 2007-2011, to 2.6% on average between 2012-2013, while GDP growth averaged 10.5% and 7.7% per year, respectively.

Has China’s coal burn peaked?

China’s coal consumption growth was responsible for more than half of global CO2 emission growth in the past 10 years.

The fall in China’s coal consumption comes as China has set new global records for wind and solar installations and seen an increase in both economy-wide and power plant efficiency.

Ambitious policies to control coal use, spurred by the air pollution crisis, along with policies to diversify the economy away from energy-intensive industries, are strongly constraining coal consumption.

The country also appears to be moving away from plans to reduce pollution in urban areas by gasifying coal in more remote locations due to concerns over economic viability.

Though China’s coal use is unlikely to continue falling year on year an analysis by Greenpeace suggests that full implementation of China’s existing energy targets, including targets for renewable energy and controlling total energy consumption, could see coal use peak by 2020.

China recently required four provinces in the key economic regions to set absolute coal consumption reduction targets, in addition to four others that already have ambitious targets, the provinces consume over 600 million metric tons of coal per year, almost as much as India.

Coal generation capacity increasing – a contradiction?

While China’s coal consumption fell in 2014, coal-fired power generating capacity continues to grow rapidly. This apparent contradiction has led some observers to conclude that China’s coal consumption growth is bound to resume.

But the evidence suggests otherwise. Instead the continued buildup of coal-fired power plants represents an investment bubble that will burst as overcapacity becomes too large to ignore.

If there is one factoid that every media consumer knows about energy in China, it must be that the country is ‘building one coal power plant per week’.

While coal-fired power generation capacity growth has slowed from the peak years – 2006 saw the equivalent of 1.5 large units added every week – the rate of coal-fired power plant additions and construction initiations in China is still breathtaking

In 2014 39 GW were added, or three 1,000MW units every four weeks, up from 36 GW in 2013.

Coal plants built – but not used 

At the same time, power generation from coal fell by approximately 1.6% in 2014, due to record increases in power generation from hydropower, wind, solar, nuclear and gas, along with slower power consumption growth – contributing to the 2.9% overall fall in coal burning.

In fact, coal-fired capacity growth has outstripped coal-fired generation growth since 2011, leading to dramatically reduced capacity utilization (see graph, above right) and financial pain to power plant operators. The headline making the rounds in China is that capacity utilization, at 54%, was at its lowest level since the reforms of 1978, when statistics began to be made available.

The Obama – Xi deal on peaking China’s CO2 emissions before 2030 has grabbed the headlines in English-speaking media, leaving many observers with the impression that China is planning to slack for another 15 years before starting to pull its weight in cutting CO2.

However, real action is in the implementation of China’s energy targets for 2020 and the air pollution action plans for 2017. For the power sector, the most significant target is the objective for non-fossil energy to make up 15% of all energy consumed in China.

Hitting the 15% target will require raising share of renewable energy and nuclear power in power generation from 22% in 2013 to 33-35% in 2020. Gas-fired power generation is also forecast by the IEA to grow to around 5% of total power generation, implying that the share of coal will shrink to about 60% in 2020, from 72% in 2013.

This will require almost doubling non-fossil power generation from 2014 to 2020, meaning that, on average, non-fossil power generation will have increased as much as it did in 2014, every year until 2020.

As in so many other respects, the radical changes in 2014 were not a one-off anomaly, but the ‘new normal’.

No room for new coal power plants – so why build them?

As a result of booming non-fossil power generation, even assuming GDP growth of 7% per year until 2020, growth in coal-fired power generation will be limited to around 1.5% per year on average, slowing down towards 2020 as non-fossil generation additions are ramped up.

Together with a targeted 0.7% per year reduction in coal use per unit of power generated, this means that coal use growth in the power sector will average less than 1% and will stabilize before 2020. If capacity utilization is to return to financially sustainable levels, there is room for little more capacity to be added until 2020.

To grasp why coal-fired power plants can still get built in the face of a worsening overcapacity problem, it is necessary to understand the basics of China’s economic model.

The country’s growth miracle has been based on an economic system designed to enable extremely high levels of investment spending, particularly by state-owned companies and local governments.

These actors have a very liberal access to near-zero interest loans from state-owned banks, and state-owned companies are generally not required to pay dividends to the state, enabling (or forcing) them to re-invest their profits.

Investments do not need to be wise or profitable

Banks exercise minimal due diligence on loans, which have implicit government backing. As a result, investment spending now amounts to over $4 trillion per year, making up a staggering 50% of China’s GDP, higher than any other major economy in history, and compared to around 20% in developed economies.

This model served China well for decades, enabling the growth miracle and lifting hundreds of millions from poverty. However, finding profitable and sensible investment projects worth trillions of dollars every year is bound to become harder and harder as the investment boom goes on.

Recently published research estimated that 67 trillion yuan ($11 trillion) has been spent on projects that generated no or almost no economic output – ghost cities being the most famous example.

In this context, it is not too hard to see how investment in coal-fired power plants can speed way ahead of demand growth.

A new coal-fired power plant will still generate power and revenue even if there is overcapacity, as the lower capacity utilization gets spread across the entire coal power fleet and across all power plant operators.

What does continued coal-fired power buildup mean for the climate?

The conventional assumption in power business is that once a coal-fired power plant or other capital-intensive generating asset gets built, it will run pretty much at full steam for 40 years or more. Even if there is overcapacity at the moment, demand growth will raise utilization and the existing capacity will crowd out future investment.

However, this is not how things work in China. The government is not going to scrap the internationally pledged 15% non-fossil energy target for 2020 because of excess coal-fired capacity. Rather the overcapacity will lead to losses for power generators and will be eliminated by closing down older plants, as has happened with coal mining, steel and cement already.

Therefore, continued investment in coal-fired power plants does not mean locking in more coal-burning. It does, however, mean massive economic waste, and a missed opportunity to channel the investment spending into renewable energy, enabling even faster growth.

Furthermore, the underutilized coal-fired capacity can exacerbate the conflict between coal and variable renewable energy in the grid, as grid operators are known to curtail renewable power in favor of coal.

Hence, investment in coal-fired power plants needs to be rapidly scaled back by restricting approvals and finance. The first step has already been taken with China banning new coal power plants in its three key economic regions, home to one third of currently operating coal-fired capacity.

 

 

Lauri Myllyvirta writes for Greenpeace EnergyDesk on energy and climate issues in China and elsewhere.

This article combines two articles by Lauri Myllyvirta originally published on Greenpeace EnergyDesk:

 

Sources: The energy data is from China Statistical Yearbook 2014 except 2014 growth rates from National Bureau of Statistics of China: STATISTICAL COMMUNIQUÉ OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA ON THE 2014 NATIONAL ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT. February 26, 2015. CO2 emissions calculated using IPCC default emission factors. Oveall emissions data via @glenpeters. Graph of coal power plant utilization compiled from China Electricity Council statistical releases.

 

 




390825

Privatized energy has failed us – so why is UK ‘aid’ exporting it? Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

  • trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
  • a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

 

 

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

 




390482

Privatized energy has failed us – so why is UK ‘aid’ exporting it? Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

  • trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
  • a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

 

 

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

 




390482

Privatized energy has failed us – so why is UK ‘aid’ exporting it? Updated for 2026

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This week’s revelation that the Big Six energy companies are overcharging their most loyal and vulnerable customers by up to £234 a year is just the latest evidence of the failure energy privatisation has been in the UK.

Since 2010, our fuel bills have risen a staggering eight times faster than wages. Combined with falling incomes, the result is that a staggering seven million people in the UK are living in fuel poverty, and each winter an older person dies needlessly of cold every seven minutes.

Until recently, the claim that the big energy companies were simply passing on higher prices that they themselves were paying seemed to wash. But the pathetic price reductions they have offered in response to significant falls in wholesale gas and electricity prices have stretched this argument rather thin.

Neither cheap nor green

Then there’s the notion that we can either have cheap energy or go green – but with a pitiful 16% of our electricity being generated from renewable sources and the government desperately having to dangle juicy (and expensive) carrots in front of the energy companies to retain the necessary capacity of any sort, it seems the current system can’t deliver either.

Since pioneering privatisation in sectors such as energy and water during the Thatcher era, the UK has stayed firmly wedded to this particular course, with mainstream politicians of all stripes flailing and failing to come up with any plausible policy responses to the current energy crisis.

Their most radical suggestions so far are

  • trying to create more competition – apparently we should be switching suppliers every couple of months, never mind the fact that the bureaucracy involved would actually increase costs; and
  • a short-lived freeze on prices – itself an admission that privatisation has failed to lower prices.

That this is the best our political class can come up with only demonstrates the narrowness of their understanding, and the poverty of their imagination.

UK aid exporting a failed model – to the countries that can least afford it!

Even more scandalously, the UK is actually supporting further energy privatisation overseas. One of the main ways it does so is via the aid budget, which is currently funding energy privatisation projects in places like India and Sierra Leone.

The most extreme example is Nigeria, where around £100m of UK aid is being used to support a privatisation process the Department for International Development (DfID) itself describes as “far more ambitious than anything ever attempted in Africa”, and “seen by many as being so ambitious as to be unrealistic“.

The controversial DFID-funded programme, the Nigerian Infrastructure Advisory Facility, is even being implemented by Adam Smith International – the consultancy arm of the neoliberal ‘free market’ think tank the Adam Smith Institute.

With half of Nigerians lacking access to electricity despite the country’s enormous fossil fuel wealth, it was clear that change was needed. But so far privatisation only seems to have made things worse. It has led to major price rises in order to attract outside investors – but by last year the central bank had had to step in and bail out the newly privatised companies after investment flows dried up.

Rather than increasing the amount of electricity available, there has actually been a reduction in power generation due to the failure of the companies to keep their power stations running.

This is perhaps unsurprising when thousands of energy sector employees have been made redundant since the privatisation process started. As a result, blackouts have increased, and the federal government is spending around £2.5m a year on its own generators to keep its offices running.

It doesn’t work! So why do we keep on doing it?

It’s incredible that this failed approach to privatisation is still being rolled out when evidence from around the world shows that time and again, it fails to improve people’s access to energy, and leads to governments taking the risks while the companies pocket the profits.

Nigeria itself has been stung by energy privatisation in the past: since the late 1990s it has allowed power plants to be owned and operated by private companies, causing big losses for the state power company, Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN).

This is because PHCN had agreements to purchase the private power generators’ power, giving their electricity a higher priority than lower-cost state-owned power stations. Since then PHCN has been broken up into 17 successor companies and partially privatised.

On top of this, a deal between Enron and the Lagos government to set up a power plant and three diesel units on barges anchored off Lagos formed part of the fraud charges against Enron executives after they made a fake sale of their stake in the barges to Merrill Lynch, later making $12m from a side deal to repurchase them.

There is an alternative

The way in which the British government is wedded to this flawed privatisation model might make one think that there was no other way. But in fact this couldn’t be further from the truth.

Around the world, there’s an increasing number of examples of energy being managed democratically, and doing a far better job of meeting people’s energy needs without trashing the planet.

These include German citizens voting to buy back their energy grids in order to deliver the green transition where private companies have failed, and systems that integrate co-operatives and publicly-owned utilities in places like Costa Rica and Nebraska.

These examples demonstrate that there is no stark choice between centralized state-owned monopolies like Britain’s old Central Electricity Generating Board, and for-profit corporate oligopoly. The alternative is smaller, locally accountable energy providers that are cooperatively owned, or publicly owned through local government and municipalities.

In fact, we should be up in arms that this is not happening absolutely everywhere: with one in five people globally still lacking access to electricity and the climate crisis already claiming victims, we can’t afford not to ditch these corporate controlled energy systems – and put fairer, more sustainable and democratic alternatives in their place.

 

 

Join: Global Justice Now are holding an Energy Justice Assembly at their conference in London tomorrow – Saturday 21st February.

Find out more about the campaign for a democratic rather than corporate-controlled energy system.

Take action: Give corporate-controlled energy the boot!

Christine Haigh is an energy justice campaigner at Global Justice Now (formerly the World Development Movement). She has a degree in philosophy and physics, a master’s in food policy and has previously worked for Women’s Environmental Network and Sustain: the alliance for better food and farming. She is an activist who has worked on a range of economic justice issues, most recently housing in the UK.

 




390482

Live long, die green and recycle your discarded body Updated for 2026

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My mother died recently and at the funeral home I was asked if I had any ideas what kind of coffin she would like. For some reason I said something environmentally friendly.

These words came out of my mouth more out of nervousness than anything previously discussed with my mother. Duly the undertaker showed us a catalogue of wicker coffins and we chose one made of banana leaves.

I often think of my carbon footprint – I have not owned a car in more than 15 years, for example – but I had never thought about my ‘green obligations’ in death.

My mother may not have requested an environmentally friendly coffin, but she did state she wished to be cremated. Due to the lack of space in the UK around 80% of people request cremation – and if we think about green space being at a premium this makes ecological sense.

But cremation has its downsides

However the energy required to cremate a single person is equal to the energy they would use in a month if they were alive. In the UK this translates to a yearly energy consumption of a town of 16,000 people. In Asian countries where cremation is very popular there is considerable interest in using solar power to reduce such energy consumption.

Another problem with cremation is air pollution, which obviously depends on the filtering system being employed. Until recent times cremations were one of the major sources of mercury pollution in the UK due to the amalgam fillings in people’s teeth.

A group of environmental NGOs recently called on the EU to curb mercury emissions from human cremation. Furthermore, the clothes worn and use of embalming fluids may also increase air pollution.

Humans have buried their dead for at least 100,000 years. Therefore, not wishing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, I looked into different burial options. A woodland burial initially appealed to me. However, I would only really approve of this if it resulted in the maintenance of a high-quality conservation area and wildlife refuge.

And I wonder if it became popular enough if it could result in major reforestation of the UK. But bodies would still be rotting in the ground releasing globally warming methane gas.

Surely, there must be greener options than a standard burial or cremation? Coming from a family of fishermen I thought about burial at sea, as the fish could recycle my body quickly. But there are only three registered places in the UK and only around 50 such burials per year.

As a biologist, I find the idea of becoming fish food strangely appealing. This is not a new idea: I remember reading of man who macabrely wished the meat from his body fed to the residents at Battersea Dogs Home. Not surprisingly this strange offer was declined.

Sky burial – very green, but would it be allowed?

As a conservationist the idea of recycling my body after death appeals: some Asian cultures have what are called sky burials, where a dead human body is laid out on a mountain top for scavenging animals such as birds of prey to feed on.

From a biological point of view I cannot see anything wrong with this, providing deceased people do not have contagious diseases. Burials in the ground are more to do with people not wishing the body disturbed by animals than hygiene considerations – hence being buried six feet.

Unfortunately, as much as I like to imagine my deceased body on the top of Ben Nevis being recycled by golden eagles, I can never see it being allowed in the UK.

I suppose what really appeals to me is being fully recycled in a short time-frame. The problem is that cremation does not fully recycle the body and burials can take years for the recycling process to occur.

Thus, if my body could be fully recycled quickly into the nutrient cycles, thereby allowing the burial plot to be constantly reused then I may have found a biologically acceptable method to dispose of my body when the time comes.

Fast composting ticks all the boxes – but it’s not yet on offer

A company in Sweden has tested a concept of eco-burial on dead pigs (pigs are good models for the human body), whereby the animal is frozen in liquid nitrogen at -196℃, which makes the body become brittle and disintegrate.

In the case of a human, the disintegrated body would be filtered for metals (such as tooth fillings) and then buried in a shallow grave.

In tests with pigs the remains become rich compost in six to twelve months. Plus this sort of eco-burial does not release greenhouse gases such as methane (from traditional burials) or carbon (from cremations) into the atmosphere. The only problem being it is still in development.

 

 

Robert John Young is Professor of Wildlife Conservation at the University of Salford.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

The Conversation

 




389972

Energy market madness is the death spasm of the oil age – renewables now! Updated for 2026

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The market price of oil has dipped below $50 a barrel – an event that few anticipated. So low is this price collapse, that it is endangering the profitability of the entire oil industry.

The immediate cause of the price collapse is the US-Saudi strategy of interfering in the oil market. The duo is using oil prices to wage economic warfare by sustaining unusually high levels of production.

With the global economy still limping along in the context of weak demand and slow growth, the supply glut has tumbled the market price of oil with the precise aim of undercutting the state revenues of US-Saudi mutual geopolitical rivals, especially Russia, Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

Despite the apparent low price of oil on international markets, costs of production remain high. Since the peak of cheap, conventional oil around 2005, production has fluctuated on a plateau as the industry has turned increasingly to more expensive, dirtier and difficult-to-extract forms of unconventional oil and gas, especially shale.

That is why as levels of investment in production have dramatically increased in the last decade, the quantity of oil being produced has dramatically declined. As a result, oil companies are finding that the price is too low to cover their production costs, let alone maintain reasonable levels of profit.

Economy held hostage

The global economy, whose health is heavily tied to availability of cheap energy, is now caught between a rock and a hard place. With production costs approaching around $70 a barrel, the lower oil price makes the business models of the industry obsolete.

For this reason, majors like BP and Shell have been forced to cease new investments in production this year, simply to stave off the looming threat of bankruptcy.

But it would be a mistake to assume that the price collapse could continue indefinitely. As the industry cuts back production investments to avoid business failure, the scarcity of supply will eventually hit the forces of demand, pushing oil prices back up.

Higher oil prices might alleviate the strained business models of the industry, but they will also detrimentally impact the economy by ramping up cost of living and increasing the risk of debt defaults across housing, energy, retail and other sectors, as happened in 2008.

Though it has taken most observers by surprise, this new era of volatile, swinging oil prices was predicted – by Dr. Colin Campbell, a former long-time BP geologist who was one of the earliest to warn of the impact of peak conventional oil.

Decades ago he predicted that once cheap, conventional oil production peaks, the shift to dependence on more expensive unconventional energy forms would generate a new type of economy, featuring fluctuating production levels and, in turn, large oil price swings.

This can be quite easily understood: to satisfy demand for oil, supplies must be drawn from all producers, including those producing at $10 or less per barrel, and those producing at $100 or more per barrel. That means that according to the vagaries of supply and demand, the price at any moment can swing wildly between those extremes.

Post-peak era

Oil price volatility is, in other words, a direct consequence of the end of the age of cheap oil, and the transition to a new era where cheap oil is scarce, and expensive oil, though abundant, is more difficult and slower to extract, and too costly to permit the levels of economic growth we were used to seeing in the 1980s.

At some point, then, when the US-Saudi economic warfare engine runs out of steam or decides its objectives have been achieved, and as the dearth in investment slashes back supply, prices will have no choice to rebound.

In coming years, these factors could even generate a price spike – this might well provide temporary relief for the industry, but it would also encourage a reassertion of industry expansion into environmentally and politically problematic areas, and would act once again as a brake on economic growth.

There is, of course, a way out, and it lies in recognizing the growing efficacy and efficiency of renewable energy sources, especially solar, wind and geothermal, where combinations of these technologies combined with smart grids and battery storage innovation could meet our needs in more sustainable and less consumeristic communities.

But currently, the US and British governments are leading the way in attempting to use state power to interfere with the meteoric rise and potential of renewable energy markets, instead promoting legislation to defend the interests of traditional fossil fuel and nuclear sources.

Energy wars

The oil industry recognizes the imminent existential threat posed to its business model from renewables. By lobbying states to retain emphasis on fracking while curbing the capacity of communities to transition easily to renewable, the industry hopes that as the cycle of volatile oil prices continues along its swing trajectory, periodically and increasingly disrupting the global economy as it unfolds, it will come out on top.

Persistent slow growth, recession and austerity would accelerate poverty and widen inequality worldwide. But as oil prices creep higher in the long-term with renewable transition efforts dampened through state power, populations would be forced to rely on evermore expensive and volatile fossil fuel energy sources.

Meanwhile, continued flooding of credit into the economy through quantitative easing would keep the financial sector and industry afloat, at the expense of indebted consumers. In this scenario, the higher prices, the industry hopes, would sustain their profitability at the expense of the well-being and economic needs of the vast majority of indebted people on the planet.

The scenario of continued oil industry supremacy is nothing more than a tightening noose around the neck of Planet Earth.

New leadership

Now, more than ever, the world needs real leadership on our energy future. Unfortunately, that leadership is sorely lacking. Last week, the International Energy Agency (IEA) issued a new report calling for global nuclear energy capacity to be more than doubled by 2050, to meet the world’s projected energy needs, while keeping emissions reductions on target for 2 degree Celsius.

Yet this recommendation comes at a time when questions about the costs, competitiveness and safety of nuclear power compared to renewables are mounting. In fact, the pace of nuclear power development in recent years has been unable to keep up with the meteoric exponential growth, and cost reductions, in solar and wind power.

Last year’s World Nuclear Industry Status Report found that nuclear’s share of world power had fallen to its lowest in 30 years despite new plants coming online, and billion dollar government subsidies and loans.

It appears likely that nuclear power is now in terminal decline, having peaked around 1996 at 18% of global energy production, dropping steadily since then to 11%. Much of the reason is the massive costs of nuclear power, and the long lead-times for installations, compared to the diminishing costs of solar and wind.

Report lead author Mycle Schneider, a Paris-based nuclear energy consultant forecasted the inevitable decline of the nuclear industry in no uncertain terms:

“The nuclear industry, their product is basically a 1,000-megawatt plant, more or less, that takes 10 years to build. In 10 years, this energy world is going to be a radically different one. To propose today that model in a landscape which is small-scale, decentralized, super-efficient defies logic.”

So why is the IEA defying logic by proposing nuclear power as a viable solution for the world’s energy needs?

This is by no means the first time the IEA has appeared to remain beholden to the outmoded industry mindset of traditional energy utilities. For decades, according to IEA insiders, the agency has buckled under political and industry pressure to suppress conclusions confirming the peak of conventional oil, and its long-lasting economic fallout.

This year, the agency will appoint a new executive director replacing incumbent IEA chief Maria van der Hoeven. Who will fill that role may play a big role in determining the political direction of the global energy sector.

Stooge number one: tar sands emissions ‘extremely low’

Created in the 1970s, the IEA’s purpose was to provide global leadership and planning for energy contingencies, especially the risk of energy crisis. Yet it has largely failed in this task, as demonstrated by the 2008 economic crash, which was linked to a massive debt crisis, as well as the plateauing of cheap, conventional oil.

At a time of increasing energy volatility, a change in IEA leadership could have ripple effects across the energy world. We need a new director who understands the new energy landscape, and recognizes that clinging onto the outmoded utility model of the conventional fossil fuel and nuclear industries is a recipe for catastrophe.

One of the big names tipped to replace van der Hoeven is Fatih Birol, currently IEA chief economist. But while Birol’s candidacy is strong, questions remain about his connections to industry, given that he previously worked in various senior roles at the Organization for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

Late last year, under his watch, the IEA forecasted a rise in Canadian tar sands production of 3 million barrels over the next 25 years, but downplayed associated carbon emissions, which Birol described as “extremely low”. He went on to urge that policy decisions be made on the basis of “scientific analysis”.

Yet the IEA’s support for tar sands exploitation is thoroughly devoid of scientific integrity. The greenhouse gas emissions of mining and upgrading tar sands is about 79 kilograms per barrel of oil, but melting out the bitumen in place also requires large inputs of natural gas. This boosts emissions to over 116 kilograms per barrel.

Consequently, as Scientific American reports, “producing and processing tar sands oil results in 14 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than the average oil used in the US.”

And as tar sands production is increasingly deploying melting-in-place projects which have larger carbon footprints, emissions are now increasing. “Emissions have doubled since 1990 and will double again by 2020”, said Jennifer Grant, director of oil sands research at environmental group Pembina Institute in Canada.

Another potential candidate is Konstantinos Mathioudakis, who was Greece’s secretary-general for energy and climate change at the Ministry of Environment, Energy and Climate Change.

Yet while Greece has immense renewable energy potential, especially in solar, it has largely squandered this opportunity due to a combination of abiding by failed IMF-World Bank macro-economic reforms, and disarray in domestic renewable energy policies.

Although during Mathioudakis’ tenure, the Greek government did aim for 100% renewable energy by 2050, it failed to move toward this. His connection with a, literally, bankrupt government that paved the way for the rise of the Syriza party, does not evoke confidence.

Shilling for the corporate empire?

There is reportedly a third potential contender, Vicente Lopez Ibor Mayor, who is the former commissioner of Spain’s National Energy Commission. Although Mayor denied rumours linking him to the IEA candidacy, credible sources told me that he privately intends to contend, but has not yet formally declared this.

If the rumours transpire to be correct, his candidacy could be intriguing. Mayor is currently chairman Lightsource Renewables, Britain’s largest solar energy generator, as well as a founding partner of a global law firm, Estudio Juridico International, specialising in energy. Previously, he was a special advisor to UNESCO’s energy program, where he also sat on the Organizing Committee for UNESCO’s World Solar Summit.

He went on to serve various roles on energy and infrastructure in the European Commission. This unique combination of industry and government experience, along with his personal and professional support for renewables, stands him out from the competition.

The bad news is that Mayor still parrots the myth of shale gas as a ‘clean bridge fuel’, and goes so far as to promote the widely criticized TTIP proposal – the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership – as being a positive force for economies and the renewable energy sector.

The fundamental problem with TTIP, a so-called free trade agreement being negotiated in secret by US and European governments, is that by aiming to reduce regulatory barriers to trade for big business, the agreement aims to fundamentally erode the power of elected governments to enact legislation on food safety, environmental protection, banking and finance, that would in some way undermine corporations from rampaging across the US and EU without concern for people or planet.

One of the most obvious counter-democratic components of TTIP is its aim to introduce Investor-State Dispute Settlements (ISDS), which would effectively allow corporations to sue governments if their policies cause a loss of profits.

In his Atlantic Council paper, Mayor advocates the TTIP as a way of shifting “energy’s centre of gravity toward the Atlantic Basin” and away from “the traditional energy-exporting world of Central Asia, the Middle East and Russia.” He calls for efforts to produce “better public understanding” of the agreement’s benefits, when what is needed is more public accountability and transparency for the entire process.

The last thing the world needs is an IEA chief ideologically beholden to the US-UK centred broken economic and energy model, that has accelerated global instability over the last decade.

The poor prospects for the new leadership of the IEA reinforce the idea that solutions to our energy woes will not come from above, but must be pioneered from below, by ordinary people and communities around the world.

 

 

Dr. Nafeez Ahmed is an investigative journalist, bestselling author, and international security scholar. He is a regular contributor to The Ecologist where he writes about the geopolitics of interconnected environmental, energy and economic crises. He has also written for the Guardian, The Independent, Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Scotsman, Foreign Policy, Prospect, New Statesman, Le Monde diplomatique, among many others. His new novel of the near future is ZERO POINT.

Follow him on Twitter @nafeezahmed and Facebook.

Website: www.nafeezahmed.com

 

 

 




389825

Dash to frack is an insult to democracy Updated for 2026

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There is not one square inch of our beautiful land that is desolate. We are all entitled to love the place we live in, and our love for our home and our community is worth just as much whether we live in the north of our country or the south.

Shame on those who say, don’t spoil my back garden – but do whatever you like in places far away, where people count for less!

Now I have a confession to make. I’ve never spoken before at a public rally. I’ve never even been to a public rally, this is my very first time.

But I’m proud to stand with you today because whether we frack for oil and gas up and down our country really matters. Because those with the power to decide are on the verge of dragging us down the wrong path. Because only your voices, our voices, can stop them.

For six years, I was Britain’s diplomatic envoy for climate change. Believe me, you can’t be in favour of fracking in Britain and in favour of dealing with climate change at the same time. It’s an either / or choice. Those who say it’s not are being ignorant, or deceitful, or deceiving themselves. It’s that simple.

Sometimes in politics you come to a crossroads and you have to choose. If you pretend you don’t, that’s a choice too, and not an honourable one, it’s a covert choice to stick with the status quo. This is such a crossroad.

No community in Britain will ever benefit from fracking. If a few individuals or businesses do well, it will be at the expense of their communities. Fracking at scale is intrusive, disruptive, noisy, and unhealthy. It really does turn communities upside down. Look at what’s happened in the United States.

Gold-plated promises – worth their weight in hot air

We’re told we will have gold-plated regulation to protect our communities from all those harms. It’s a hollow promise. Actually it’s a lie. It’s a lie because our regulators just don’t have the budgets, the skills, or the people to enforce it properly. It relies entirely on self-policing by the companies concerned.

We tried self-policing with the banks over there in the City. What could possibly go wrong with that?

Sometimes the interests of a community have to come second to the national interest. But there is no national interest in fracking.

Germany is showing beyond doubt that you can have clean energy, you can have energy efficiency, and you can give control over energy back to communities all at the same time without wrecking the economy.

By getting ahead of us on clean energy, our main European competitor is actually widening its lead over us. It’s time for Britain to catch up.

Let’s hear it for Repower Balcombe, showing the way, and all the other pioneers of community energy up and down Britain.

Fracking on an industrial scale won’t build us a future worth having, it would take us backwards, it would lock us further into fossil dependency. It would also turn our country into a global climate pariah.

Democracy in free fall

And this isn’t just about our climate and our energy. It’s about our democracy. What’s been happening on fracking is not democracy in action. It’s democracy in free fall.

Take the Infrastructure Bill. This odious, antidemocratic Bill would trample on rights and protections, including the ancient law of trespass, woven carefully over centuries into the fabric of our Constitution.

It would put corporate interests above the public interest. Wherever you live it would make your voice the last one to be listened to in any decision about the land and the community around you.

99% of consultees don’t want trespass watered down? I know, let’s ignore them!

An unrestricted right to dump wastes of all kinds under people’s land and houses? That’s not going to be popular! Let’s try and sneak it in at the last minute when nobody’s looking, and if people still object, I know, let’s ignore them!

People say they don’t want profits for developers fracking companies to come before their health and their environment. I know, lets ignore them! Let’s make it a legal requirement to maximize the economic recovery of oil and gas!

When I joined the Civil Service 35 years ago, ministers and officials would have resigned rather than connive at such abuses of our democratic system

In Britain today we have the forms but not the substance of democracy, and what’s happening on fracking is a symptom of that sickness. So a victory in the struggle to stop fracking will also be a victory, a crucial victory in the longer struggle to renew our democracy in Britain.

Suddenly, the tectonic plates are shifting

Most of the time in politics things are stuck. The tectonic plates don’t move very much. You may gain a few inches here and there but progress is incremental. But every now and again the plates start to slip and anything is possible. This is such a moment. It may be the only such moment we get.

The plates are slipping on fracking. Suddenly it is dawning on our representatives that the political cost of forcing it through is going to be higher than they thought.

More and more of them are taking the trouble to listen to their constituents, and to get their heads round what’s involved. They are working out for themselves what a bad idea this really is.

That’s what the members of the Environmental Audit Committee have done with their ‘Environmental risks of fracking‘ report and their call for a fracking moratorium. They have shown real courage, defying their Party machines. Let’s now show them the thanks they deserve!

But too many MPs still think it’s more important to do the bidding of those Party machines and of their corporate friends than it is to listen to the people who put them in our Parliament.

The friends of fracking, in the Coalition parties and the Labour Party, including Tom Greatrex on Twitter, are trying a bit harder to look as if they are listening. But what they are really trying to do is lock the tectonic plates back in place before they slip too far, before they make it impossible for the drilling to start.

We must keep up our fight for a fracking maratorium

So now, just as we finally see some progress, now we must push even harder. And here’s what we should push for.

Let’s stop the headlong rush, with a full moratorium now, as demanded by the Environmental Audit Committee, followed by a proper national debate. No ifs not buts, and no more opportunistic spin from those who aspire to run our energy policy after May.

While we close the front door let’s stop the Bill from forcing open the back door, with its anti-democratic provisions on trespass and householder permission and so-called economic recovery.

And let’s take off the table right now, once and for all, any possibility of self-policing by companies whose main interest is in minimizing red tape not protecting the well being of communities.

David Cameron, Nick Clegg, Ed Miliband, Jenny Mein and the County Council you lead in Preston: please listen: moratorium now, stop the Bill, no more self-policing. Otherwise you will be betraying the people who put you where you are, and they will not easily forgive you.

Friends, over there, in Victoria Tower Gardens, is a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst. Every struggle that has made our country better has been a struggle to make Britain a country for all the people not just a privileged few.

We are struggling to give the people a voice on energy. Mrs Pankhurst struggled to give women a voice in politics. We are following in her footsteps. We can be so proud of that.

So far, those who want to frack our country into an even deeper political stupor have been able to make progress by bullying and stealth. But now at last, thanks to your courage and determination, our opponents have been forced into the open and there is a real democratic choice to be made.

Our representatives will only make the right choice if they can hear our voice. Are we today going to make our voice heard, not just here on the street but inside the thick walls of that Palace over there?

Let’s make the biggest noise, every one of us, let’s make the biggest noise we’ve ever made in our lives.

 

 

John Ashton is one of the world’s leading climate diplomats, an independent commentator and adviser on the politics of climate change, and a founder of 3EG. From 2006-12 he served as Special Representative for Climate Change to three successive UK Foreign Secretaries, spanning the current Coalition and the previous Labour Government.

This text is an edited version of a speech given by John Ashton, the UK’s Special Representative for Climate Change between 2006-2012, made on 26 January at a public rally outiside Parliament, Westminster, London. It is based on an edited transcript originally published by Responding to Climate Change.

 

 




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The EAC’s plan for a ‘fracking moratorium’ in Britain doesn’t go far enough Updated for 2026

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Today will be an interesting day for the future of the campaign against unconventional oil and gas in Britain. It could be the day wen we turn a corner – or, quite possibly, not, if the fossil fuel lobby within the government get their way.

Last week, Caroline Spelman let slip that the Environment Audit Committee’s (EAC) new report, the ‘Environmental risks of fracking’, would call for a moratorium.

Since then both the pro and anti side of the debate has been buzzing in anticipation of the report’s content, and whether today’s vote on the Infrastructure Bill would call a halt to fracking in Britain.

The day before that, news emerged that planners at Lancashire County Council were recommending refusal of planning permission for Cuadrilla’s two new shale exploration sites – on the grounds of noise and traffic generation.

Shortly thereafter the North West Energy Task Force, a local ‘astroturf‘ lobby group funded by Centrica and Cuadrilla (their information allegedly ghost-written by Centrica and Cuadrilla’s lobbyists, Westbourne Communications), were quoted as saying that traffic and noise were “not grounds for objections“.

In Scotland there’s an ongoing debate about a ban, fuelled by Dart Energy’s proposed coalbed methane (CBM) developments around Airth, as well as Cluff Natural Resources plans for underground coal gasification (UCG) at Kincardine in the Firth of Forth. It’s even causing spats within the SNP.

Both CBM and UCG have, like shale gas, the potential to cause pollution. Question is, would either of these be caught within the EAC’s proposals for a moratorium on ‘fracking’?

Good effort … but please try harder

The problem with the media-simplified debate over ‘extreme energy’ in Britain is that has focussed, to its detriment, upon shale gas and ‘fracking’.

While shale gas inevitably involves hydraulic fracturing, coalbed methane does not always require it; and underground coal gasification is a wholly different, and arguably worse, process altogether.

I wrote a lengthy submission to the EAC’s inquiry, outlining these differences. In a follow-up article for The Ecologist, I challenged them to ‘prove me wrong’ that they could hold an evidence-based, unbiased exploration of the issues.

While the EAC’s new report certainly excels above previous reports by the Energy and Climate or Economic Affairs committees, it still contains some serious errors and omissions. Top of my list of bullet points for consideration by the EAC’s inquiry (paragraph 46 of my submission):

“Decision-making must differentiate shale gas, from coalbed methane, from UCG, in order to recognise their unique ‘fingerprint’ upon the environment.”

They did not do that. Consequently amendments proposed for the Infrastructure Bill contain a significant flaw. Throughout the amendments to the bill the terms ‘shale gas’ and ‘hydraulic fracturing’ are used. The amendment tabled by the EAC states:

“leave out ‘the objective of maximising the economic recovery of UK petroleum, in particular through’ and insert ‘not the objective of maximising the economic recovery of UK petroleum but ensuring that fossil fuel emissions are limited to the carbon budgets advised by the Committee on Climate Change and introducing a moratorium on the hydraulic fracturing of shale gas deposits in order to reduce the risk of carbon budgets being breached’.”

If enacted, the terms of such a ‘moratorium’ would arguably not apply to coalbed methane – it could be developed (though less economically) without the use of high volume hydraulic fracturing. Coastal Oil and Gas in South Wales, or Dart (recently taken over by IGas) at Airth, or Shropshire and Cheshire, could still go ahead with their extraction plans.

And such a ban would arguably not affect, in any way, the proposed development of UCG by companies such as Cluff Natural Resources or Five Quarter Energy.

A failure to test the evidence

The purpose of the Environmental Audit Committee is to consider how government policy contribute to environmental protection and sustainable development, and to audit their performance. In my view the Committee haven’t done that.

They did not seek to quantify the full range of impacts of the various ‘unconventional’ oil and gas technologies currently planned for development across Britain. And it has to be said, the Committee have made some good recommendations in their – admittedly rushed – report. However, they also appeared to accept evidence which was highly questionable.

For example (paragraph 78 of their report) states: “Many of our witnesses acknowledged that the existing UK conventional onshore industry has a generally safe history, with over 200 producing wells and no pollution incidents from well design.”

In fact recent research, by a part-industry-sponsored group, shows that we have no detailed knowledge of at least half of the 2,000 or so deep wells drilled in Britain over the last century; there is no structured monitoring process to check their condition; and at least one well has failed – and none of those where subject to high volume hydraulic fracturing (HVHF).

The one well in Britain which has been subject to HVHF, at Preese Hall, has failed – and the Health and Safety Executive’s refusal to require the proper inspection of the well during construction is in part responsible for that failure.

The Committee also state (paragraph 36 of their report): “The Researching Fracking In Europe consortium informed us that their ‘research has found that even in the ‘worst case scenario’, flux in the radioactivity of flowback fluid would not exceed the annual exposure limit set by the UK Environment Agency.'”

I tackled that paper, and its flaws, in an article for The Ecologist last July.

It used a highly selective sample of some of the most radioactive natural mineral springs in order to state that the ‘naturally occurring’ radioactivity in flowback water is safe. It also makes some error in its assumptions about dose limits, and fails to show all the data required to validate it findings against the international standard procedures for dose calculation.

That is why we need a proper public inquiry, testing the evidence. All assumptions and data, whatever its source, must be objectively tested to establish how much weight can be applied to them.

Carbon is not the only critical issue

Perhaps my greatest difficulty with the EAC’s report is that it largely concentrates on climate change and carbon emissions. That completely misses the broad range of impacts unconventional fossil fuels create.

We could completely eradicate the fugitive emissions from unconventional oil and gas, making it some of the cleanest fossil fuel production in the world, and the problems it creates would still make it highly damaging.

‘Low carbon’ or ‘green completion‘ unconventional oil and gas production would still generate large quantities of toxic and hazardous materials – with as yet no identified treatment facility or disposal location.

These developments, in particular the pipelines and associated roads, would also damage large areas of the landscape and natural habitats – as outlined in recent US research.

And though it may create a short-term boom for certain vested interests – like the North West Energy Task Force – it would absolutely fail to tackle the greater imperative of addressing the ecological overshoot of our society.

What the media ignored this week

There were two other events in the last week which passed by, seemingly un-noticed.

Firstly, Egdon Resources applied for a permit from the Environment Agency to test drill their Laughton site. No fracking – yet – but it enlarges a new eastern development area in the Bowland shale.

More significantly, Third Energy applied to use two existing, uneconomic wells for the disposal of the waste from other oil and gas operations – one permit for their site at Ebberston (on the border of the North Yorks. Moors National Park) and another permit for their site near Pickering (just south of the national park area).

This represents a significant policy shift as, until now, Britain hasn’t favoured disposal via deep injection. In the US, it is deep injection which appears to give rise to the greatest risks from groundwater pollution and seismic activity.

Third Energy’s current gas wells are ‘conventional’ (free flowing) gas wells. What’s significant here is not the source of the wastewater – it’s that this application could set a precedent for deep disposal from unconventional oil and gas sites.

Again, that’s something the EAC’s moratorium doesn’t encompass.

This is significant because of what follows from it

What happens in Parliament today is significant, but it’s not as important as what comes next. If there’s a moratorium, then we have to make sure that any inquiry processes which follow properly consider all the available evidence.

Alternately, if the Government force a vote to quash the call for a moratorium, that escalates the nature of the debate. It will no longer be a reasoned debate over evidence. The Government will have abandoned any such pretence, and will instead impose their will purely because they can.

If the Government force their will upon Parliament, that’s as big a problem for the Environmental Audit Committee as it is for the public. It basically says that their evidence gathering was a waste of time, and that they are not going to be listened to.

For the public, and anti-fracking campaigners in particular, it’s a clear message. That democratic processes based upon evidence are no longer valid – and that in Britain, as in the USA, it is spin and lobbying which now provide the justification for policy.

If you wish to oppose the development of unconventional oil and gas, with all legal redress closed off by current law reforms, your only option for doing so will be through direct action.

 

 

Paul Mobbs is an independent environmental consultant, investigator, author and lecturer, and maintains the Free Range Activism Website (FRAW).

A fully referenced version of this article is located on FRAW.

Also on The Ecologist: ‘Fracking policy and the pollution of British democracy‘, ‘Parliament’s fracking examination must be inclusive and impartial‘ and other articles by Paul Mobbs.

 

 




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