September 23, 2016
September 23, 2016 President Obama signed a directive on Wednesday asking 20 federal offices to develop a “federal climate and national security working group” to “identify the US national security priorities related to climate change and national security, and develop methods to share climate science and intelligence information to inform national security policies and plans”, according to a statement from the White House. In other words, Obama has now officially made climate change a national security issue. The justification for this move was a National Intelligence Council report released the same day, which said that climate change will impact military installations, hurt emergency response efforts and increase refugee crises and conflicts over land and water. Hillary Clinton, if elected, will no doubt follow in Obama’s footsteps. She has stated that “climate change is an urgent threat and a defining challenge of our time”. Donald Trump, however, has a very different view. “There is still much that needs to be investigated in the field of ‘climate change’,”Trump has said – and that’s one of his milder statements. He has also tweeted, for example, in January 2014, that “this very expensive global warming bullshit has go to stop.” There can be little doubt, then, that the upcoming US presidential elections will be crucial for future US climate and energy policy. Referring to the Paris Climate Agreement, Michael T. Klare, Professor of Peace Studies at Hampshire College and prolific energy author, calls the possible election of Donald Trump “the deal-breaker of history”. Trump has promised he will cancel the agreement, complaining that it “gives foreign bureaucrats control over how much energy we use on our land, in our country. No way.” According to Klare, Trump’s view is typical of a new breed of right-wing, nationalistic politicans, in the US, Europe, and elsewhere. Their increasing popularity leads him to the conclusion that the future pace of climate change will be determined as much by geopolitical factors as by technological developments in the energy sector. While immense progress is being made in bringing down the price of wind and solar power, says Klare, the political will to turn such developments into meaningful global change seems to be diminishing. Those who want to stop climate change, “will have to devote at least as much of their energy and attention to the international political arena as to the technology sector”. But the differences between Trump and Clinton go beyond climate change policy as such. The energy policies they advocate are also miles apart. Allan Hoffman, former Senior Analyst at the US Department of Energy turned blogger, has written an excellent overview of the two candidates’ energy and climate proposals. Donald Trump, he notes, is an advocate of energy independence for the US or at least North America. “It should be the goal of the American people and their government to achieve energy independence as soon as possible”, Trump has written. “Energy independence means exploring and developing every possible energy source including wind, solar, nuclear and bio-fuels. A thriving market system will allow consumers to determine the best sources of energy for future consumption. Further, with the United States, Canada and Mexico as the key energy producers in the world, we will live in a safer, more productive and more prosperous world.” He has also said he wants to rescind Obama’s Clean Power Plan, “save the coal industry”, revive the Keystone XL oil pipeline, drill for oil and gas in the Outer Continental Shelf and exploit America’s shale oil and gas reserves to the maximum extent. He is also in favour of nuclear power. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has said she would put a lot of conditions on allowing fracking, adding that “by the time we get through all of my conditions, I do not think there will be many places where fracking will continue to take place”. She has also stated that “there are some tough questions you’d have to answer with respect to nuclear” power. She fully backs the Clean Power Plan, having said that “We need to implement the president’s executive actions and quickly move to make a bridge from coal to natural gas to clean energy.” Full articles on Energy Post, both highly recommended: Michael T. Klare’s article, Will Trumpism, Brexit, and Geopolitical Exceptionalism Sink the Planet? Allan Hoffman, Energy policies of the U.S. presidential candidates September 23, 2016 The Paris Climate Agreement is a strange animal in the sense that it does not put binding targets on nations, as its predecessor, the Kyoto protocol, did (for developed countries). It is based instead on obligations – nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – that nations have imposed upon themselves. One commentator has written that as a result “the fate of the planet rests on the questionable willingness of countries to abide by those obligations”. So how then will countries’ emissions be measured and verified? And if international carbon trading emerges on the basis of the Paris Treaty, how will this be accounted? David Hone, Chief Climate Change Advisor with Shell, who writes a blog, has written a very instructive article explaining how this can be expected to work in practice. He notes that the Agreement contains a number of provisions which provide for the quantification of emissions. In addition, on the basis of this type of “full accounting”, it is possible for countries to engage in carbon trading, but this will also be subject to strict accounting rules – stricter, in fact, than under the Kyoto Protocol. With the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) under Kyoto, many projects of questionable added value were underaken, which delivered “carbon credits”, but no real carbon reductions. This will become more difficult under the Paris Agreement. Moreover, for developing countries it will become much harder to fulfill their obligations. If they sell carbon credits, it means they will have reduce their own greenhouse gas emissions by the same amount. Hone gives the following example of what an international carbon transaction will look like under the Paris Agreement: Full article on Energy Post: How Paris will change global emissions accounting September 23, 2016 What is nice about Elon Musk is that he doesn’t only talk, but also gets things done. I also find it admirable that someone is willing to stake all he has on some of the greatest ventures currently taking place in the energy world. This does not mean that Musk’s success is guaranteed. There are no doubt many who are waiting for the man’s downfall and would greet it with glee. But failure too can be a form of success: if Tesla’s electric cars, for example, lose out to the Chevy Bolt or other competitors, the electric car will still have won. Similarly, the success or failure of Musk’s Gigafactory which opened in Nevada in July, will probably not be decisive for the success of the global low-carbon transition. After all, there are other Gigafactories in operation and being built, notably in China. Nevertheless, it would be a considerable setback if the Tesla Gigafactory were to fail. Not the least because for Tesla this is just Gigafactory 1 – there are more to follow. No one can predict the future of course but author Stephen Veneruso attended the opening of the factory and deliberately set out to try and come to a reasonable assessment of the chances of success of the Gigafactory. In particular, what he looked for was the attitude of the staff. The way they approached the business. Do they believe in their mission – or do they just have a job? Veneruso came to the conclusion that the employees of Tesla are “utterly dedicated to its success and are delighted to be a part of it”. They’re also “thinking globally”, he notes, about the factories that are to follow. He could see the commitment of the staff by a number of concrete examples in the way the factory was built and is being operated: He concludes that the people at Tesla really believe they can change the world – and they may well succeed. Let’s hope he is right. Full article on Energy Post: Tesla Gigafactory 1 – Will it Succeed or Fail? September 23, 2016 It is one of the standard reassuring utterances that you hear from people in the fossil fuel energy sector: sure, low-carbon is very important and all that, but it’s going to take a long long time before we can say goodbye to what we got. For example, BP’s Group Chief Economist Spencer Dale emphasized, when he presented the BP’s Statistical Review of Energy in June, that “history” tells us it takes an awful long time for new energies to gain market share. Specifically he said it took more than 40 years for oil’s share in the global energy mix to rise from 1% to 10%. Gas, after 50 years, still didn’t provide 10%, he noted. That is no doubt true. Yet sometimes energy transition can happen a lot faster than that, certainly on a national scale, and even more so in emerging economies. South Africa is a case in point. South African based science writer Leonie Joubert has written a delightful article describing how the rapid growth of renewables in that country completely derailed existing large conventional power projects. For example, two coal power plants on which construction started in 2007 are still not completed today and their costs have ballooned, putting their future in doubt. Even more tellingly, until recently South Africa was planning a gigantic expansion of nuclear power. It wanted to order 9.6 GW of nuclear capacity from Russia’s Rosatom. Cost estimates for this mega-venture ranged from $50 billion to $93 billion. However, these plans have now been put on hold and look unlikely to ever materialise. A major reason for the problems these projects are encountering is the explosive growth of cheaper, faster and cleaner renewable energy sources. Thanks to the success of the Department of Energy’s Renewable Energy Independent Power Producer Procurement Programme (REIPPPP), which started in 2011, 47 renewable energy projects have been built in South Africa in a few years’ time (some 2.5 GW in total) and more than 50 others have been commissioned. So, the lesson is that, even though on a global scale it may take decades to replace an established source of energy, that does not mean that transition can’t come quickly to a town near you. Full article on Energy Post: South Africa’s rapid energy transition derails its giant nuclear and coal projects.EXPRESS #1
Trump and Clinton clash over fracking, drilling, nuclear, coal and climate
EXPRESS #2
How greenhouse gas emissions will be checked post-Paris
EXPRESS #3
Why Tesla will succeed
EXPRESS #4
South Africa shows: energy transition can happen faster than you think