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Wind turbines generating 4.5% of US electricity Updated for 2026

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The wind turbines are turning across America, and a major report by the US Department of Energy (DOE) says the wind energy sector now supplies 4.5% of the nation’s electricity.

Given the right energy policies and investment in infrastructure, that figure could increase to 10% by 2020 and to 35% by 2050, the DOE predicts.

That will benefit tens of thousands of workers who will be employed in one of the US’s fastest-growing industries. It’s also excellent news for those who suffer the toxic impacts of coal mining, and power station fumes – and for the climate.

It will moreover, will help preserve supplies of increasingly precious water, used in huge volumes by thermal power plants. Many parts of the western US, notably California, are in the grip of a severe long term drought.

“Deployment of wind technology for US electricity generation provides a domestic, sustainable and essentially zero carbon, zero pollution and zero water-use US electricity resource”, the DOE says.

Impressive growth

The rate of growth of wind power in the US has been impressive. In 2011 alone, nearly 3,500 turbines went up across the country. And the Natural Resources Defence Council says that a typical 250 MW (megawatt) wind farm – around 100 turbines – will create 1,073 jobs over the lifetime of the project.

The DOE says costs of wind power are dropping, while reliability and other issues are being sorted out. “Wind generation variability has a minimal and manageable impact on grid reliability and costs”, the report says.

Texas is the top wind power state, followed by Iowa, California and Oklahoma. At the end of 2013, the US had 61 GW (gigawatts = 1,000 MW) installed – up from 25 GW in 2009.

The aim is to increase those figures to 113 GW by 2020, to 224 GW by 2030, and to more than 400 GW by 2050.

The DOE says that if these plans are realised, the emission into the atmosphere of more than 12 gigatonnes of climate changing greenhouse gases (GHG) will be avoided.

“Wind deployment can provide US jobs, US manufacturing and lease and tax revenues in local communities to strengthen and support a transition towards a low-carbon US economy”, the report says.

The trouble is that there is considerable resistance to wind power in parts of the political establishment. The DOE report – while not directly accusing Washington of standing in the way of progress on wind – does say that “new tools, priorities and emphases” need to be set in place in order to achieve wind energy targets.

Driven by tax-breaks – now can it keep on growing without?

Policies to encourage wind development are also required. A special Wind Production Tax Credit (PTC), which effectively gave subsidies to the wind industry of about $13 billion a year, was introduced in 1992.

But when the tax credit came up for renewal in 2012, it was not retained in the tax code, and finally lapsed at the end of 2013, although the oil, gas, fracking and coal industries – all major GHG emitters – have continued to receive subsidies.

Political analysts say there is little likelihood that the PTC will be renewed by a legislature controlled by the Republican party – large parts of which are viscerally opposed to giving financial incentives to the renewable energy sector.

The elimination of tax breaks initially slowed growth in the construction of wind energy facilities, but the industry remains upbeat and says investors are still putting money into projects. Indeed the US wind industry may now have reached a level – in terms of scale, cost and proven performance – where it can keep on growing even without the tax breaks.

Rather more critical may be the urgent need to build new transmission lines to carry the power from wind farms to where it’s needed. The American Wind Energy Association (AWEA), which represents the industry, calculates that about 900 miles of transmission lines need to be put in place each year up to 2050 if the DOE is to achieve its wind power goals.

“The US is blessed with an abundant supply of wind energy”, the AWEA says. “Pairing this homegrown resource with continued technology innovation has made the US the home of the most productive wind turbines in the world.”

 

 

Kieran Cooke writes for Climate News Network.

 




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MPs’ GMO report is a scandalous cave-in to corporate demands Updated for 2026

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The House of Commons Science and Technology select committee has just this morning published the results of its inquiry into genetically modified crops and our attitude to them within the EU.

I was one of a number of contributors of evidence to the select committee. I felt compelled to do so, despite my fears (which I made clear at the time along with a number of colleagues), that the stated reasons for conducting the inquiry prejudged the result.

Today’s publication, which is making headline news across the entire press, has sadly shown that these fears were well founded.

The preamble to the terms of reference for the inquiry declares that “GM is one of several technologies necessary to foster a ‘vibrant sector’ in UK agriculture”, but is being held back by EU red tape.

What ought to have been at best a potential conclusion of the research was thus its guiding principle. Instead of an invitation to open and honest discussion of the merits of the EU’s precautious stance, what we got was a call to find ‘scientific’ reasons to prop up foregone and pre-judged economic logic.

Easy not to find what you’re not looking for!

The main bone of contention is the EU’s use of the ‘precautionary principle‘. According to this principle, where practices such as the growing of GM crops carry with them an unknown level of risk (which may be small, but is more than zero) of catastrophic harm, the burden of proof should lie in demonstrating that they are safe, rather than that they are harmful.

There are sound reasons, both ethical and practical, for adopting this stance. If we wait for evidence of harm, it follows that harm – potentially catastrophic – would already have been done before we can step in with legislation.

Given any potential for catastrophe, however small, we ought not to accept this on moral or on prudential grounds. From an economic perspective, the cost of funding research to prove the practice is safe is placed on the corporations who stand to gain from it. This lifts the burden from EU taxpayers who stand to suffer from harm.

The preamble to the select committee inquiry stated that “the ‘precautionary principle’ has been criticized for holding back development of the technology, despite European Commission reports finding no scientific evidence associating GM organisms with higher risks for the environment or food and feed safety.”

This was either a disingenuous misrepresentation of the very concept of the precautionary principle, or merely an expression of premature rejection of the principle before any evidence had been submitted.

It was irrelevant that the Commission thus far had no evidence of harm, because they were not looking for evidence of harm but evidence of safety.

Clear scientific evidence of ‘no more risk’, claims report

Distressingly, deeply-worryingly, the published report now claims that “The scientific evidence is clear that crops developed using genetic modification pose no more risk to humans, animals or the environment than equivalent crops developed using more ‘conventional’ techniques.”

Despite the now much stronger claim, the grounds for this conclusion do not move beyond the lack of evidence of harm already referred to in the preamble.

This was precisely the logical mistake that I warned against in my submitted evidence, in which I brought to the attention of the committee my work on GM and precaution co-authored with Nassim Taleb, author of ‘The Black Swan‘.

The bottom line of that work was that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Merely that we arguably haven’t yet seen significant evidence of harm from GM food does nothing to support the claim that the potential for ruinous harm is not there.

And as reported on The Ecologist earlier this week, there is no scientific concensus that GM crops and food are safe, indeed: “The totality of research outcomes in the field of GM crop safety is nuanced; complex; often contradictory or inconclusive; confounded by researchers’ choices, assumptions, and funding sources; and, in general, has raised more questions than it has answered.”

A lack of conclusive evidence that GM poses a risk to us does not mean that we should give the big agro-tech firms free rein, turning Britain or Europe into a giant experiment from which there may be no going back.

A smoking gun?

A useful analogy here is the case of smoking. For years governments were prevented from instituting measures to curtail the sale of cigarettes, because the powerful tobacco companies blocked them at every turn by demanding incontrovertible evidence that cigarettes caused harm.

It took years before the medical profession had collected enough evidence to face up to the highly paid lawyers of the cigarette firms.

Challenges to advertising restrictions and proposals for plain packaging are being mounted even to this day, on the basis of a lack of evidence. Think how many lives could have been saved if we had adopted precautionary reasoning in this case, and required tobacco companies to prove their products were safe before we allowed them onto the market.

Did it ever make much sense to fill one’s lungs repeatedly with a cocktail of smoke and chemicals? Did we really have to wait for proof beyond reasonable doubt that smoking causes lung cancer to justify action to rein in the cigarette companies, their advertising, etc.?

The stakes in the case of GM are even higher. Smoking caused an ‘epidemic’ of mortality and morbidity, but it never threatened to ruin us altogether. Where there is a threat of ruin – where there is a risk to our entire ecosystems and food-systems – then we should not have to wait for the ‘evidence’ to come in before we act. For, by the time it comes in, it would be too late.

This is when precautionary reasoning is decisive: in cases where there is a risk of ruin. This is what Taleb and I have shown. This is what the Select Committee have palpably refused to think about, and set their face against: thus putting us all at risk.

EU pen-pushers standing in the way of British enterprise?

Sadly, the government will now no-doubt use the results of this ‘inquiry’ as a stick with which to beat the EU, and to bolster the Tory narrative of the EU as nothing more than a gang of small-minded foreign pen-pushers standing in the way of the proud British spirit of free enterprise.

Their report’s conclusion that “decisions about access to and use of safe products should be made by national governments on behalf of the populations that elected them, not by the EU”, and their call on the EU “not to unjustifiably restrict the choices available to other elected governments and the citizens whom they represent” are a demand to let GMOs rip without further ado.

We should be glad that for the moment this report has no power actually to influence EU procedure. It is a worrying glimpse of what this country would look like without the modest protection EU legislation currently provides from some of the worst excesses of corporate domination.

 

 

The report: ‘EU regulation on GMOs not ‘fit for purpose‘.

Dr. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, Chair of Green House, and a regular contributor to The Ecologist and to Resurgence. He is also the Green Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 general election.

More information: ‘The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)‘ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam.

 




390789

MPs’ GMO report is a scandalous cave-in to corporate demands Updated for 2026

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The House of Commons Science and Technology select committee has just this morning published the results of its inquiry into genetically modified crops and our attitude to them within the EU.

I was one of a number of contributors of evidence to the select committee. I felt compelled to do so, despite my fears (which I made clear at the time along with a number of colleagues), that the stated reasons for conducting the inquiry prejudged the result.

Today’s publication, which is making headline news across the entire press, has sadly shown that these fears were well founded.

The preamble to the terms of reference for the inquiry declares that “GM is one of several technologies necessary to foster a ‘vibrant sector’ in UK agriculture”, but is being held back by EU red tape.

What ought to have been at best a potential conclusion of the research was thus its guiding principle. Instead of an invitation to open and honest discussion of the merits of the EU’s precautious stance, what we got was a call to find ‘scientific’ reasons to prop up foregone and pre-judged economic logic.

Easy not to find what you’re not looking for!

The main bone of contention is the EU’s use of the ‘precautionary principle‘. According to this principle, where practices such as the growing of GM crops carry with them an unknown level of risk (which may be small, but is more than zero) of catastrophic harm, the burden of proof should lie in demonstrating that they are safe, rather than that they are harmful.

There are sound reasons, both ethical and practical, for adopting this stance. If we wait for evidence of harm, it follows that harm – potentially catastrophic – would already have been done before we can step in with legislation.

Given any potential for catastrophe, however small, we ought not to accept this on moral or on prudential grounds. From an economic perspective, the cost of funding research to prove the practice is safe is placed on the corporations who stand to gain from it. This lifts the burden from EU taxpayers who stand to suffer from harm.

The preamble to the select committee inquiry stated that “the ‘precautionary principle’ has been criticized for holding back development of the technology, despite European Commission reports finding no scientific evidence associating GM organisms with higher risks for the environment or food and feed safety.”

This was either a disingenuous misrepresentation of the very concept of the precautionary principle, or merely an expression of premature rejection of the principle before any evidence had been submitted.

It was irrelevant that the Commission thus far had no evidence of harm, because they were not looking for evidence of harm but evidence of safety.

Clear scientific evidence of ‘no more risk’, claims report

Distressingly, deeply-worryingly, the published report now claims that “The scientific evidence is clear that crops developed using genetic modification pose no more risk to humans, animals or the environment than equivalent crops developed using more ‘conventional’ techniques.”

Despite the now much stronger claim, the grounds for this conclusion do not move beyond the lack of evidence of harm already referred to in the preamble.

This was precisely the logical mistake that I warned against in my submitted evidence, in which I brought to the attention of the committee my work on GM and precaution co-authored with Nassim Taleb, author of ‘The Black Swan‘.

The bottom line of that work was that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Merely that we arguably haven’t yet seen significant evidence of harm from GM food does nothing to support the claim that the potential for ruinous harm is not there.

And as reported on The Ecologist earlier this week, there is no scientific concensus that GM crops and food are safe, indeed: “The totality of research outcomes in the field of GM crop safety is nuanced; complex; often contradictory or inconclusive; confounded by researchers’ choices, assumptions, and funding sources; and, in general, has raised more questions than it has answered.”

A lack of conclusive evidence that GM poses a risk to us does not mean that we should give the big agro-tech firms free rein, turning Britain or Europe into a giant experiment from which there may be no going back.

A smoking gun?

A useful analogy here is the case of smoking. For years governments were prevented from instituting measures to curtail the sale of cigarettes, because the powerful tobacco companies blocked them at every turn by demanding incontrovertible evidence that cigarettes caused harm.

It took years before the medical profession had collected enough evidence to face up to the highly paid lawyers of the cigarette firms.

Challenges to advertising restrictions and proposals for plain packaging are being mounted even to this day, on the basis of a lack of evidence. Think how many lives could have been saved if we had adopted precautionary reasoning in this case, and required tobacco companies to prove their products were safe before we allowed them onto the market.

Did it ever make much sense to fill one’s lungs repeatedly with a cocktail of smoke and chemicals? Did we really have to wait for proof beyond reasonable doubt that smoking causes lung cancer to justify action to rein in the cigarette companies, their advertising, etc.?

The stakes in the case of GM are even higher. Smoking caused an ‘epidemic’ of mortality and morbidity, but it never threatened to ruin us altogether. Where there is a threat of ruin – where there is a risk to our entire ecosystems and food-systems – then we should not have to wait for the ‘evidence’ to come in before we act. For, by the time it comes in, it would be too late.

This is when precautionary reasoning is decisive: in cases where there is a risk of ruin. This is what Taleb and I have shown. This is what the Select Committee have palpably refused to think about, and set their face against: thus putting us all at risk.

EU pen-pushers standing in the way of British enterprise?

Sadly, the government will now no-doubt use the results of this ‘inquiry’ as a stick with which to beat the EU, and to bolster the Tory narrative of the EU as nothing more than a gang of small-minded foreign pen-pushers standing in the way of the proud British spirit of free enterprise.

Their report’s conclusion that “decisions about access to and use of safe products should be made by national governments on behalf of the populations that elected them, not by the EU”, and their call on the EU “not to unjustifiably restrict the choices available to other elected governments and the citizens whom they represent” are a demand to let GMOs rip without further ado.

We should be glad that for the moment this report has no power actually to influence EU procedure. It is a worrying glimpse of what this country would look like without the modest protection EU legislation currently provides from some of the worst excesses of corporate domination.

 

 

The report: ‘EU regulation on GMOs not ‘fit for purpose‘.

Dr. Rupert Read is Reader in Philosophy at the University of East Anglia, Chair of Green House, and a regular contributor to The Ecologist and to Resurgence. He is also the Green Party’s prospective parliamentary candidate for Cambridge in the 2015 general election.

More information: ‘The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms)‘ by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman, Yaneer Bar-Yam.

 




390789

Geoengineering – the case is not made Updated for 2026

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The publication of a hefty two-volume report on geoengineering by the US National Research Council represents a marked shift in the global debate over how to respond to global warming.

To date, the debate has been about mitigation, with the need for some adaption because of the failure to reduce emissions adequately. The new report, backed by the prestige of the National Academy of Sciences of which the NRC is the working arm, now argues that we should develop a “portfolio of activities” including mitigation, adaptation and climate engineering.

In other words, rather than presenting climate engineering, and especially solar radiation management (rebranded albedo modification), as an extreme response to be avoided if at all possible, the report normalises climate engineering as one approach among others.

To be sure, the committee writing the report points to the serious risks likely in albedo modification, but it recommends the US set in train what would be a major research program into various forms of geoengineering – including field experiments in a technique to cool the planet by spraying sulphate aerosols into the upper atmosphere.

And it endorses the deployment of various carbon dioxide removal methods as relatively benign ways to counter human emissions, arguing that the decision on mitigation versus carbon dioxide removal is largely a question of cost. This approach is riddled with political dangers.

The hole at the heart of the argument

By mainstreaming geoengineering as a response to global warming the committee has left behind the argument put by Dutch Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen, in his famous 2006 article that opened the floodgates for geoengineering research, that desperate times will require desperate measures.

With no talk of ‘climate emergencies’ in the report, we look in vain for any clear rationale for the possible deployment of albedo modification.

The ‘buying time’ argument – according to which we can temporarily increase the Earth’s albedo (surface reflectivity) while the world decides to put CO2 controls in place – has fallen out of favour because any warming suppressed by a solar shield will just come back to bite us once the shield is removed.

So there is a contradiction buried in the report: it recommends the initiation of a federal research program into albedo modification but does not give a plausible analysis of the circumstances in which the solar shield might be deployed.

The recommendation that “Albedo modification at scales sufficient to alter climate should not be deployed at this time“ (my emphasis) is hardly reassuring.

Scientists call for … more science

In the absence of a rationale, the report reverts to the standard scientists’ trope: we need more information. Deploying a fleet of planes to coat the Earth with a layer of sulfate particles “should only be contemplated” when we have enough data to know what effect it would have, and for this we need a lot of research.

But who should do it? Who should oversee it? Who should own the results? Who would deploy the technologies? How can we ensure research is not misused? These questions, which ought to come before a decision is made to proceed with research, are either not considered or are shunted off to some vague ‘governance’ space.

Research does not take place in a social vacuum. When scientists propose to investigate technologies that would allow someone to take control of the Earth’s climate, and the research is proposed only because powerful interests have prevented a much better solution, then the research is intensely and inevitably political.

So we should not let the genie out of the bottle unless we are pretty sure we can put it back. And that means no research before governance. The committee stresses its desire for public engagement but then undoes it by seeming to endorse a proposal for an “allowed zone” in which scientists alone would decide which experiments could take place.

In this zone, experiments “should not be subject to any formal … vetting and approval”, so the report’s fine words about civil society engagement begin to ring hollow.

Science meets the real world

An essential mistake of the report is the unwillingness to recognise (even though it has been pointed out repeatedly) that field experiments that do not change the physical environment can radically change the social and political environment.

To maintain the physical-social separation the report must play down or dismiss the problem of ‘moral hazard’, that is, the likelihood that a substantial research program, let alone any deployment, would almost certainly reduce the political incentives to rein in carbon emissions.

The committee’s answer is, as always: we need more information to make good decisions. Of course, this does not answer the concern at all but merely asserts that more information will always trump the flaws of politicians – as if the information deficit model has proven itself so effective in the past.

The committee has a touching faith in the power of reason and holds it up as a kind of crucifix, declaring that “it considers it to be irrational and irresponsible to implement sustained albedo modification without also pursuing emissions mitigation, carbon removal, or both.”

And yet this report has been written precisely because we live in an irrational and irresponsible world. And one has to ask how rational and responsible it is to include solar radiation management in a ‘portfolio of responses’ to global warming, as this report does.

Wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad!

The mandatory declaration that albedo modification “does not constitute a licence for unbounded CO2 emissions” becomes a kind of incantation to ward off the irrationalities of the actual world.

One strategy for creating a rational world where climate engineering would never be misused is canvassed in the report. Social anxieties over deployment of climate engineering could be mitigated by “further research”. Negative perceptions of programs to modify the Earth’s albedo should be “extensively studied” so that they can be countered.

Sadly, the social world does not behave like the Earth system. It cannot be reduced to theorems and principles to be uncovered by further research.

If we knew how to fix society through scientific study we would not be in such a mess that we are now considering an idea that Ray Pierrehumbert, climate science professor and a rogue member of the committee, describes as “wildly, utterly, howlingly barking mad”.

 

 

Clive Hamilton is Professor of Public Ethics, Centre For Applied Philosophy & Public Ethics (CAPPE) at Charles Sturt University.

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

http://theconversation.com/geoengineering-might-work-in-a-rational-world-sadly-we-dont-live-in-one-37550

The Conversation

 




390261

Breach of promise: G20 spending $88 bn a year on fossil fuel subsidies Updated for 2026

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Leaders of the G20 group of industrialised countries agreed in 2009 to phase out subsidies to fossil fuels “in the medium term”, and repeated that promise in 2013.

Yet a new report says that the UK is still giving close to £1.2 billion ($1.9bn) annually to support oil, coal and gas.

The Overseas Development Institute thinktank (ODI) and the Oil Change International (OCI) campaign group say in their joint report, ‘The Fossil Fuel Bailout‘, that G20 governments are estimated to be spending $88bn every year subsidising exploration for fossil fuels:

“Their exploration subsidies marry bad economics with potentially disastrous consequences for climate change. In effect, governments are propping up the development of oil, gas and coal reserves that cannot be exploited if the world is to avoid dangerous climate change.”

Triple-lose scenario – billions spent to develop ‘unburnable’ carbon

“By providing subsidies for fossil fuel exploration, the G20 countries are creating a ‘triple-lose’ scenario”, the authors continue. “They are directing large volumes of finance into high-carbon assets that cannot be exploited without catastrophic climate effects.

“They are diverting investment from economic low-carbon alternatives, such as solar, wind and hydro-power. And they are undermining the prospects for an ambitious climate deal in 2015.”

The report says the UK government is pouring £750m ($1.19bn) a year in national subsidies into the declining North Sea oil and gas industry – and £414m ($650m) into overseas exploration.

The report – published just before the G20 Leaders’ Summit in Brisbane, Australia, on 15 and 16 November – contains the first detailed breakdown of fossil fuel exploration subsidies by the UK and G20 countries.

The authors say that, despite the 2009 pledge, the UK “has dramatically expanded the scope of its oil and gas exploration subsidies, in particular for shale gas and offshore resources.”

Since 2009, generous tax breaks for exploring in riskier, deep-water fields in the North Sea have benefited some of the largest oil and gas firms in the world. The report estimates that the biggest beneficiary was the French oil giant, Total, which received £524m, while Norway’s Statoil was given £253m and the US’s Chevron £45m between 2009 and 2014.

The government’s expenditure of £414m annually in public finance for fossil fuel exploration outside the UK included Azerbaijan, Brazil, Ghana, Guinea, India, Indonesia, Ireland, Nigeria, Poland, Qatar, Russia, Spain, Tunisia, Uganda, and the US.

G20 governments’ £55bn ($88bn) fossil subsidies undermine renewable transition

The report’s authors say that further exploration for new reserves is not only environmentally unsustainable but is also bad economics. With rising costs for hard-to-reach reserves, and falling coal and oil prices, public subsidies are propping up fossil fuel exploration that would otherwise be deemed uneconomic.

The top 20 private oil and gas companies invest £23bn ($37 bn) globally in exploration – less than half the £55bn ($88bn) being ploughed in by G20 governments. The report says this highlights the industry’s dependency on public subsidies to find new reserves.

Yet $88bn is almost double what the International Energy Agency estimates is needed annually to provide electricity and heat for all by 2030.

The report recommends that phasing out exploration subsidies should be the first step towards meeting the G20 governments’ existing commitments to eliminate inefficient fossil fuel subsidies and to avoid harmful climate change.

Shelagh Whitley, climate and environment research fellow at the ODI, comments: “Scrapping fossil fuel exploration subsidies would begin to create a level playing field between renewables and fossil fuel energy.”

 

 

Alex Kirby writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




386792

IPCC must speak out – we are creating a hell for future generations Updated for 2026

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The headline statements of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new Synthesis Report – unequivocal climate change, almost certainly driven largely by humans, and an urgent need to cut emissions – won’t come as any surprise to people who paid attention to the three larger reports the IPCC has released over the past 14 months.

But reading the full synthesis report, as opposed to the shorter Summary for Policymakers (SPM), shows that while the facts haven’t changed, the IPCC has subtly altered its approach to how it presents this information.

Instead of dealing largely in forecasts and responses, as in previous syntheses, it now frames the climate problem squarely in terms of risk management.

Not everything of importance in the full synthesis report made it into the SPM. The language in the SPM is also weaker, particularly about the nature of irreversible risks and about threats to food security. The full report contains valuable pointers for managing climate risks and the benefits of acting, so should be preferred for decision-making purposes.

The report is also great for debunking some of the persistent myths about climate change, both scientific and economic. But, unfortunately given the urgent need for new economic policy to cut carbon, it’s stronger on the former than the latter.

Combating climate myths

The report is useful in addressing some of the misinformation flying around in political commentary and the popular press. These include the following:

Myth 1: climate action is a barrier to development, especially for the poor.

The report says:

“Risks … are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development. Limiting the effects of climate change is necessary to achieve sustainable development and equity, including poverty eradication.

“Substantial emissions reductions over the next few decades can reduce climate risks in the 21st century and beyond, increase prospects for effective adaptation, reduce the costs and challenges of mitigation in the longer term, and contribute to climate-resilient pathways for sustainable development.”

Myth 2: The planet hasn’t warmed since 1998.

The report says:

“Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence), with only about 1% stored in the atmosphere. It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010.

“The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85C over the period 1880 to 2012. In addition to robust multi-decadal warming, the globally averaged surface temperature exhibits substantial decadal and interannual variability.

“As one example, the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998-2012; 0.05C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951-2012; 0.12C per decade).”

Myth 3: Coal will be the fuel of the future.

The report says:

“There are multiple mitigation pathways that are likely to limit warming to below 2C relative to pre-industrial levels. These pathways would require substantial emissions reductions over the next few decades and near zero emissions of CO2 and other long-lived greenhouse gases by the end of the century.””

IPCC should make a stronger economic case for climate action

The one major omission from this report (which, to be fair, is also poorly represented in the research literature) is how the economic case for taking action can be better addressed.

The report contains an incomplete and flawed cost-benefit structure. Cost-benefit analysis is the standard method for assessing whether a policy is merited. It is used for short-term decision making but is totally unsuited to decisions over century-long time scales.

The lack of clear cost-benefit outcomes in this and previous reports has been used as a deny-and-delay tactic for the past two decades. This argument is nothing more than a red herring, and it’s getting very smelly.

The report pretty much admits the shortcomings of cost-benefit analysis, in the following two sentences:

“Methods of valuation from economic, social and ethical analysis are available to assist decision making. But they cannot identify a single best balance between mitigation, adaptation and residual climate impacts.”

Yet the report is perfectly clear on the physical risks to global-scale systems and the potential for total disruption of regional, national and international economies. It states:

“Without additional mitigation efforts beyond those in place today, and even with adaptation, warming by the end of the 21st century will lead to high to very high risk of severe, widespread, and irreversible impacts globally.”

and:

“Climate change exacerbates other threats to social and natural systems, placing additional burdens particularly on the poor.”

What about the dystopian future we are creating?

There is no existing economic model that can assess the full costs of either of these outcomes adequately. When costing mitigation to keep likely warming below 2C, the report suggests an annual reduction of consumption growth by 0.04-0.14% over the century. This is against a backdrop of consumption growth of between 1.6% and 3% per year.

It’s ridiculous to suggest that severe, widespread, and irreversible climate impacts would cost us less than this. Much more likely is that these growth rates of 1.6% to 3%, if they were achievable and sustainable at all, would be severely disrupted by a changing climate.

The report could certainly afford to address this point more forcefully. It says:

“Effective decision making to limit climate change and its effects can be informed by a wide range of analytical approaches for evaluating expected risks and benefits, recognizing the importance of governance, ethical dimensions, equity, value judgments, economic assessments and diverse perceptions and responses to risk and uncertainty.”

But acting on climate is ultimately an ethical, not an economic, consideration. Insufficient policy action is a declaration of self-interest, condemning our children, grandchildren and the planetary system that supports them, to a dystopian future. That’s what the report should say.

 

 

Roger Jones is a Professorial Research Fellow at Victoria University. He was also a coordinating lead author in the Fifth Assessment Report and received a travel grant from the former Department of Climate Change to take part.

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

The Conversation

 




386252

‘Political will is only barrier to 100% renewables’ Updated for 2026

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The new handbook shows how forward-looking communities around the world are already moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and generating their own power with 100% renewables – while also becoming more prosperous and creating jobs.

The report, ‘How to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy‘, is released ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York tomorrow (23rd September), when the UN Secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, will call on world leaders to make new commitments to cut fossil fuel use.

The World Future Council, based in Hamburg, Germany, has issued the report to show that it is only lack of political will that is preventing the world switching away from fossil fuels. It believes that the leaders at the UN summit need to set ambitious targets and timetables to achieve the switch to renewables.

We have the technologies!

Using case histories – from small islands in the Canaries to great commercial cities such as Frankfurt in Germany and Sydney in Australia – the report makes clear that the technologies to go 100% renewable exist already.

In many cases, the switch has the combined effect of saving money for the community concerned and creating jobs, making everyone more prosperous. In all cases, improvements in energy efficiency are essential to meeting targets.

Where the100% renewable target is adopted, it gives the clearest signal to business that investments in clean technologies will be secure. The report says:

“The benefits range from savings on fossil fuel imports, improved energy, and economic security, as well as reduced energy and electricity costs for governments, local residents and businesses.”

There is no case made for nuclear power. Indeed, the report says that the uranium needed for nuclear fuel is – like coal, oil and gas – a finite resource that will soon be running out.

Fukushima goes for 100% renewables by 2040

One of the case histories in the report is the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In March 2011,  it sustained the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and has now opted to go for 100% electricity from renewables by 2040.

Some of the 100% renewable targets detailed in the report are just for electricity production. The authors – Toby Couture, founder of the Berlin-based energy consultancy E3 Analytics, and Anna Leidreiter, climate and energy policy officer at the World Future Council – point out that heating and cooling, and particularly transport, without fossil fuels is far more challenging, but still equally possible. Some countries are already committed to it.

Denmark, a pioneer in the field, has a target of achieving all its electricity and heating needs from renewables by 2035, and all energy sectors – including transport – by 2050. This includes an expansion of wind and solar power, biogas, ground source heat pumps, and wood-based biomass. Because of its investments, the country expects to have saved €920 million on energy costs by 2020.

At the opposite end of the scale, El Hierro, a small island in the Canaries, has a 100% energy strategy, using a wind farm and a volcanic crater. When excess electricity is produced by the wind farm, water is pumped into the volcanic crater, which acts as a storage lake for a hydroelectric plant. This supplements the island’s electricity supply when the wind drops or when demand is very high.

A future component of El Hierro’s strategy is to replace the island’s entire stock of 4,500 cars with electric vehicles, so cutting the need to import fuel.

Rhein-Hunsruck, Germany producing 230% of its needs from renewables

Some places have already exceeded 100% electricity from renewables. The Rhein-Hunsruck district west of Frankfurt, Germany, managed this in 2012, and expects by the end of this year to be producing 230% of its needs, exporting the surplus to neighbouring areas through the national grid. It hopes to use the surplus in future for local transportation, hydrogen or methane production.

There are many other examples in the report, including from San Francisco in the US, Cape Verde island in West Africa, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu island in the Pacific.

These show that both rich and poor communities can share the benefits of the renewable revolution – and, in the case of the 3 billion people still without electric power in the world, bypass the need for fossil fuels altogether.

Jeremy Leggett, a pioneer of solar power and author of a foreword to the report, says: “We are on the verge of a profound and urgently necessary shift in the way we produce and use energy.

“This shift will move the world away from the consumption of fossil resources towards cleaner, renewable forms of power. Renewable energy technologies are blowing the whistle on oil dependency and will spark an economic and social renaissance.

“The question is: Do we make this transition from fossil resources to renewables on our own terms, in ways that maximise the benefits to us today and to future generations, or do we turn our heads away and suffer the economic and social shocks that rising prices and market volatility will create?”

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




381249

‘Political will is only barrier to 100% renewables’ Updated for 2026

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The new handbook shows how forward-looking communities around the world are already moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and generating their own power with 100% renewables – while also becoming more prosperous and creating jobs.

The report, ‘How to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy‘, is released ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York tomorrow (23rd September), when the UN Secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, will call on world leaders to make new commitments to cut fossil fuel use.

The World Future Council, based in Hamburg, Germany, has issued the report to show that it is only lack of political will that is preventing the world switching away from fossil fuels. It believes that the leaders at the UN summit need to set ambitious targets and timetables to achieve the switch to renewables.

We have the technologies!

Using case histories – from small islands in the Canaries to great commercial cities such as Frankfurt in Germany and Sydney in Australia – the report makes clear that the technologies to go 100% renewable exist already.

In many cases, the switch has the combined effect of saving money for the community concerned and creating jobs, making everyone more prosperous. In all cases, improvements in energy efficiency are essential to meeting targets.

Where the100% renewable target is adopted, it gives the clearest signal to business that investments in clean technologies will be secure. The report says:

“The benefits range from savings on fossil fuel imports, improved energy, and economic security, as well as reduced energy and electricity costs for governments, local residents and businesses.”

There is no case made for nuclear power. Indeed, the report says that the uranium needed for nuclear fuel is – like coal, oil and gas – a finite resource that will soon be running out.

Fukushima goes for 100% renewables by 2040

One of the case histories in the report is the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In March 2011,  it sustained the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and has now opted to go for 100% electricity from renewables by 2040.

Some of the 100% renewable targets detailed in the report are just for electricity production. The authors – Toby Couture, founder of the Berlin-based energy consultancy E3 Analytics, and Anna Leidreiter, climate and energy policy officer at the World Future Council – point out that heating and cooling, and particularly transport, without fossil fuels is far more challenging, but still equally possible. Some countries are already committed to it.

Denmark, a pioneer in the field, has a target of achieving all its electricity and heating needs from renewables by 2035, and all energy sectors – including transport – by 2050. This includes an expansion of wind and solar power, biogas, ground source heat pumps, and wood-based biomass. Because of its investments, the country expects to have saved €920 million on energy costs by 2020.

At the opposite end of the scale, El Hierro, a small island in the Canaries, has a 100% energy strategy, using a wind farm and a volcanic crater. When excess electricity is produced by the wind farm, water is pumped into the volcanic crater, which acts as a storage lake for a hydroelectric plant. This supplements the island’s electricity supply when the wind drops or when demand is very high.

A future component of El Hierro’s strategy is to replace the island’s entire stock of 4,500 cars with electric vehicles, so cutting the need to import fuel.

Rhein-Hunsruck, Germany producing 230% of its needs from renewables

Some places have already exceeded 100% electricity from renewables. The Rhein-Hunsruck district west of Frankfurt, Germany, managed this in 2012, and expects by the end of this year to be producing 230% of its needs, exporting the surplus to neighbouring areas through the national grid. It hopes to use the surplus in future for local transportation, hydrogen or methane production.

There are many other examples in the report, including from San Francisco in the US, Cape Verde island in West Africa, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu island in the Pacific.

These show that both rich and poor communities can share the benefits of the renewable revolution – and, in the case of the 3 billion people still without electric power in the world, bypass the need for fossil fuels altogether.

Jeremy Leggett, a pioneer of solar power and author of a foreword to the report, says: “We are on the verge of a profound and urgently necessary shift in the way we produce and use energy.

“This shift will move the world away from the consumption of fossil resources towards cleaner, renewable forms of power. Renewable energy technologies are blowing the whistle on oil dependency and will spark an economic and social renaissance.

“The question is: Do we make this transition from fossil resources to renewables on our own terms, in ways that maximise the benefits to us today and to future generations, or do we turn our heads away and suffer the economic and social shocks that rising prices and market volatility will create?”

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




381249

‘Political will is only barrier to 100% renewables’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




The new handbook shows how forward-looking communities around the world are already moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and generating their own power with 100% renewables – while also becoming more prosperous and creating jobs.

The report, ‘How to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy‘, is released ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York tomorrow (23rd September), when the UN Secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, will call on world leaders to make new commitments to cut fossil fuel use.

The World Future Council, based in Hamburg, Germany, has issued the report to show that it is only lack of political will that is preventing the world switching away from fossil fuels. It believes that the leaders at the UN summit need to set ambitious targets and timetables to achieve the switch to renewables.

We have the technologies!

Using case histories – from small islands in the Canaries to great commercial cities such as Frankfurt in Germany and Sydney in Australia – the report makes clear that the technologies to go 100% renewable exist already.

In many cases, the switch has the combined effect of saving money for the community concerned and creating jobs, making everyone more prosperous. In all cases, improvements in energy efficiency are essential to meeting targets.

Where the100% renewable target is adopted, it gives the clearest signal to business that investments in clean technologies will be secure. The report says:

“The benefits range from savings on fossil fuel imports, improved energy, and economic security, as well as reduced energy and electricity costs for governments, local residents and businesses.”

There is no case made for nuclear power. Indeed, the report says that the uranium needed for nuclear fuel is – like coal, oil and gas – a finite resource that will soon be running out.

Fukushima goes for 100% renewables by 2040

One of the case histories in the report is the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In March 2011,  it sustained the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and has now opted to go for 100% electricity from renewables by 2040.

Some of the 100% renewable targets detailed in the report are just for electricity production. The authors – Toby Couture, founder of the Berlin-based energy consultancy E3 Analytics, and Anna Leidreiter, climate and energy policy officer at the World Future Council – point out that heating and cooling, and particularly transport, without fossil fuels is far more challenging, but still equally possible. Some countries are already committed to it.

Denmark, a pioneer in the field, has a target of achieving all its electricity and heating needs from renewables by 2035, and all energy sectors – including transport – by 2050. This includes an expansion of wind and solar power, biogas, ground source heat pumps, and wood-based biomass. Because of its investments, the country expects to have saved €920 million on energy costs by 2020.

At the opposite end of the scale, El Hierro, a small island in the Canaries, has a 100% energy strategy, using a wind farm and a volcanic crater. When excess electricity is produced by the wind farm, water is pumped into the volcanic crater, which acts as a storage lake for a hydroelectric plant. This supplements the island’s electricity supply when the wind drops or when demand is very high.

A future component of El Hierro’s strategy is to replace the island’s entire stock of 4,500 cars with electric vehicles, so cutting the need to import fuel.

Rhein-Hunsruck, Germany producing 230% of its needs from renewables

Some places have already exceeded 100% electricity from renewables. The Rhein-Hunsruck district west of Frankfurt, Germany, managed this in 2012, and expects by the end of this year to be producing 230% of its needs, exporting the surplus to neighbouring areas through the national grid. It hopes to use the surplus in future for local transportation, hydrogen or methane production.

There are many other examples in the report, including from San Francisco in the US, Cape Verde island in West Africa, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu island in the Pacific.

These show that both rich and poor communities can share the benefits of the renewable revolution – and, in the case of the 3 billion people still without electric power in the world, bypass the need for fossil fuels altogether.

Jeremy Leggett, a pioneer of solar power and author of a foreword to the report, says: “We are on the verge of a profound and urgently necessary shift in the way we produce and use energy.

“This shift will move the world away from the consumption of fossil resources towards cleaner, renewable forms of power. Renewable energy technologies are blowing the whistle on oil dependency and will spark an economic and social renaissance.

“The question is: Do we make this transition from fossil resources to renewables on our own terms, in ways that maximise the benefits to us today and to future generations, or do we turn our heads away and suffer the economic and social shocks that rising prices and market volatility will create?”

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




381249

‘Political will is only barrier to 100% renewables’ Updated for 2026

Leave a reply




The new handbook shows how forward-looking communities around the world are already moving away from reliance on fossil fuels and generating their own power with 100% renewables – while also becoming more prosperous and creating jobs.

The report, ‘How to Achieve 100% Renewable Energy‘, is released ahead of the UN Climate Summit in New York tomorrow (23rd September), when the UN Secretary-general, Ban Ki-Moon, will call on world leaders to make new commitments to cut fossil fuel use.

The World Future Council, based in Hamburg, Germany, has issued the report to show that it is only lack of political will that is preventing the world switching away from fossil fuels. It believes that the leaders at the UN summit need to set ambitious targets and timetables to achieve the switch to renewables.

We have the technologies!

Using case histories – from small islands in the Canaries to great commercial cities such as Frankfurt in Germany and Sydney in Australia – the report makes clear that the technologies to go 100% renewable exist already.

In many cases, the switch has the combined effect of saving money for the community concerned and creating jobs, making everyone more prosperous. In all cases, improvements in energy efficiency are essential to meeting targets.

Where the100% renewable target is adopted, it gives the clearest signal to business that investments in clean technologies will be secure. The report says:

“The benefits range from savings on fossil fuel imports, improved energy, and economic security, as well as reduced energy and electricity costs for governments, local residents and businesses.”

There is no case made for nuclear power. Indeed, the report says that the uranium needed for nuclear fuel is – like coal, oil and gas – a finite resource that will soon be running out.

Fukushima goes for 100% renewables by 2040

One of the case histories in the report is the Fukushima Prefecture in Japan. In March 2011,  it sustained the world’s worst nuclear accident since the 1986 Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, and has now opted to go for 100% electricity from renewables by 2040.

Some of the 100% renewable targets detailed in the report are just for electricity production. The authors – Toby Couture, founder of the Berlin-based energy consultancy E3 Analytics, and Anna Leidreiter, climate and energy policy officer at the World Future Council – point out that heating and cooling, and particularly transport, without fossil fuels is far more challenging, but still equally possible. Some countries are already committed to it.

Denmark, a pioneer in the field, has a target of achieving all its electricity and heating needs from renewables by 2035, and all energy sectors – including transport – by 2050. This includes an expansion of wind and solar power, biogas, ground source heat pumps, and wood-based biomass. Because of its investments, the country expects to have saved €920 million on energy costs by 2020.

At the opposite end of the scale, El Hierro, a small island in the Canaries, has a 100% energy strategy, using a wind farm and a volcanic crater. When excess electricity is produced by the wind farm, water is pumped into the volcanic crater, which acts as a storage lake for a hydroelectric plant. This supplements the island’s electricity supply when the wind drops or when demand is very high.

A future component of El Hierro’s strategy is to replace the island’s entire stock of 4,500 cars with electric vehicles, so cutting the need to import fuel.

Rhein-Hunsruck, Germany producing 230% of its needs from renewables

Some places have already exceeded 100% electricity from renewables. The Rhein-Hunsruck district west of Frankfurt, Germany, managed this in 2012, and expects by the end of this year to be producing 230% of its needs, exporting the surplus to neighbouring areas through the national grid. It hopes to use the surplus in future for local transportation, hydrogen or methane production.

There are many other examples in the report, including from San Francisco in the US, Cape Verde island in West Africa, Bangladesh, Costa Rica, and Tuvalu island in the Pacific.

These show that both rich and poor communities can share the benefits of the renewable revolution – and, in the case of the 3 billion people still without electric power in the world, bypass the need for fossil fuels altogether.

Jeremy Leggett, a pioneer of solar power and author of a foreword to the report, says: “We are on the verge of a profound and urgently necessary shift in the way we produce and use energy.

“This shift will move the world away from the consumption of fossil resources towards cleaner, renewable forms of power. Renewable energy technologies are blowing the whistle on oil dependency and will spark an economic and social renaissance.

“The question is: Do we make this transition from fossil resources to renewables on our own terms, in ways that maximise the benefits to us today and to future generations, or do we turn our heads away and suffer the economic and social shocks that rising prices and market volatility will create?”

 

Paul Brown writes for Climate News Network.

 

 




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