World Makes Haste Too Slowly on Cutting Energy Use

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The annual report card on the global energy industry says progress towards lower energy use must be much faster.

By Kieran Cooke, Climate News Network (CC BY-ND 4.0).

A rich source of methane: Gas hydrate beneath a rock in the Gulf of Mexico. Image: By US Geological Survey (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons
A rich source of methane: Gas hydrate beneath a rock in the Gulf of Mexico. Image: By US Geological Survey (public domain), via Wikimedia Commons

The world is dragging its feet on efforts to tackle the climate crisis by reducing its energy use, according to a global watchdog.

In its World Energy Outlook 2020, the lnternational Energy Agency (IEA) says that while emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2, the main climate-changing greenhouse gas), are falling, the reduction needs to be far steeper to make any meaningful impact.

“Despite a record drop in global emissions this year, the world is far from doing enough to put them into decisive decline”, says Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director.

The Agency says energy demand is set to drop by 5% in 2020, with an overall decline of 7% in emissions of CO2 from the global energy sector. This means that annual emissions of CO2 are back to where they were a decade ago, the report says.

Oil demand this year is likely to be down by 8%, while coal use will fall by 7%.

Solar projects now offer some of the lowest-cost electricity ever seen.”

That’s the headline good news: the bad news is that emissions of methane – among the most potent of greenhouse gases – are rising, says the report.

Total global investment in the energy sector is also falling dramatically, and is set to be down 18% year on year.

That means that despite the rise of renewable energy, particularly of solar power, governments, utilities and corporations around the world are still not spending enough to bring about a major transition in energy use – and to meet the challenge of catastrophic climate change.

“Only an acceleration in structural changes to the way the world produces and consumes energy can break the emissions trend for good”, says the IEA.

Problem grids

While hydropower is still the leading source of renewable power, solar is described as the new king of electricity.

“With sharp cost reductions over the past decade, solar PV [solar photovoltaic energy] is consistently cheaper than new coal- or gas-fired power plants in most countries, and solar projects now offer some of the lowest-cost electricity ever seen.”

A major problem is that as solar and wind projects are installed and expanded, other parts of the energy sector also need to be developed, particularly infrastructure associated with electricity grids.

In many parts of the world energy utilities are in severe financial straits and have little or no money to maintain or invest in achieving more efficiencies and in infrastructure.

“Electricity grids could prove to be the weak link in the transformation of the power sector, with implications for the reliability and security of electricity supply”, says the IEA.

Covid-19’s effects

The report says it’s not just the energy industry that has to change. “To reach net-zero emissions, governments, energy companies, investors and citizens all need to be on board – and will all have unprecedented contributions to make.”

The Covid crisis is a major factor in assessing the global energy outlook.

The pandemic, says the IEA, has caused more disruption in the energy sector than any other event in recent history, with impacts for years to come.

“It is too soon to say whether today’s crisis represents a setback for efforts to bring about a more secure and sustainable energy system, or a catalyst that accelerates the pace of change”, the report says. —Climate News Network, LONDON, 16 October, 2020

Climate Heat Melts Arctic Snows and Dries Forests

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Fires now blaze under Arctic snows, where once even the wettest rainforests burned. Climate change delivers unlikely outcomes.

Boggy tundra in the western Arctic lets peat layers build up in the soil. Image: By Western Arctic National Parklands, via Wikimedia Commons
Boggy tundra in the western Arctic lets peat layers build up in the soil. Image: By Western Arctic National Parklands, via Wikimedia Commons

October 12, 2020 by Tim Radford, Climate News Network (CC BY-ND 4.0)

LONDON, 12 October, 2020 − The northern polar region isn’t just warming: it’s also smoking, as the rising heat thaws the Arctic snows. Researchers have identified a new class of fire hazard.

High above the Arctic Circle, fires that flared a year ago continued to smoulder under the snow through the winter to flare up again − two months earlier than usual, and on a scale not seen before.

And if the notion of fire and ice seems a surprise, prepare for the idea of a blazing rainforest. In a second and separate study, researchers exploring the climate lessons from the deep past 90 million years ago have found that, if the atmosphere is rich enough in oxygen, then even the wettest foliage can ignite and burn, to consume perhaps up to 40% of the world’s forest.

Scientists from the US report in Nature Geoscience that they have identified an unexpected threat from “zombie fires” which, despite heavy snowmelt, they say “can smoulder in carbon-rich peat below the surface for months or years, often only detectable through smoke released at the surface, and can even occur through cold winter months.”

The climate change we are causing now, it’s not something where if we don’t fix it, only our grandkids will have to deal with it. The impacts are really long-lasting”

—Garrett Boudinot, then at the University of Boulder Colorado and now with the Colorado Wildlife Council

They warn that in the fast-changing climate of the highest northern latitudes, the evidence from last year and this suggest that extreme temperatures and drier conditions mean there is a lot more surface fuel in the Arctic to catch fire and melt the Arctic snows.

Dwarf shrubs, sedges, mosses and grasses are invading the tundra, to join the surface peat, and even the bogs, fens and marches of the tundra are now burning. In all, 50% of the detected fires above 65° North − many in the Russian Arctic − happened on permafrost: that is, on ever-icy soils.

“It’s not just the amount of burned area that is alarming,” said Merritt Turetsky of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and one of the authors. “There are other trends we noticed in the satellite data that tell us how the Arctic fire regime is changing and what this spells for our climate future.”

Wildfires are on the increase now, in a world in which climate change has delivered hotter and drier conditions for many regions. Unexpectedly, according to a second study in Nature Geoscience, fossilized evidence in rocks in Utah has delivered evidence of massive and sustained forest fires, in the form of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons preserved in black shales laid down in the Cretaceous.

Huge absorption rate

Researchers pieced together a story of dramatic climate change 94 million years ago, when carbon dioxide built up in the atmosphere, and land and sea plants began to absorb it from the atmosphere on a massive scale. Microbial respiration stepped up too, and parts of the ocean became increasingly low in oxygen.

During 100,000 years of this, so much carbon had been buried in the ground or the oceans that – with the release of molecular oxygen, the O2 in CO2 − atmospheric oxygen levels began to increase. And with that, the scientists say, so did the probability of forest fires, even in wet forest ecosystems. Altogether, perhaps 30% to 40% of the planet’s forests were consumed by fire over 100 millennia.

“One of the consequences of having more oxygen in the atmosphere is that it’s easier to burn fires. It’s the same reason you blow on embers to stoke a fire,” said Garrett Boudinot, then at the University of Boulder Colorado and now with the Colorado Wildlife Council, who led the research.

“This finding highlights the prolonged impacts of climate change. The climate change we are causing now, it’s not something where if we don’t fix it, only our grandkids will have to deal with it. The history of climate change in Earth history tells us that the impacts are really long-lasting.” − Climate News Network

TED & Future Stewards Host Countdown Global Launch

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TED and Future Stewards Host Global Countdown Event Mobilizing Millions to Halve Greenhouse Gas Emissions by 2030 in the Race to a Zero-Carbon World

Countdown, a global initiative to champion and accelerate solutions to the climate crisis, launches today, Saturday, October 10, 2020 with a free five-hour live virtual event featuring leading thinkers and doers.

Countdown is one part of a broader series of actions and events this fall including the Bloomberg Green Festival, Climate Week NYC, and others, all with the collective objective of informing and activating millions in the lead-up to a successful UN Climate Change Conference in November 2021.

Speakers will touch on topics such as:

  • Climate science and the climate crisis: Where are we today?
  • Why climate justice matters
  • Putting climate back on the political and social agenda
  • What businesses can do—and are doing—to transform and transition
  • Rethinking our cities
  • Stepping up at work and at home
  • The path to a safer, cleaner, fairer future for people and the planet

A full agenda and speaker list can be found here.

The moment to act on climate change has been upon us for too long, and now is the time to unite all levels of society—business leaders, courageous political actors, scientists and individuals—to get to net-zero emissions before 2050.”

—Chris Anderson, Countdown founding partner and Head of TED

“Countdown brings together a powerful collaboration of partners from all sectors to act on climate change.”

—Lindsay Levin, Countdown founding partner and CEO of Leaders’
Quest

Countdown aims to answer five fundamental, interconnected questions that inform a blueprint for a better future:

  • ENERGY: How rapidly can we switch to 100% clean power?
  • TRANSPORT: How can we upgrade the way we move people and things?
  • MATERIALS: How can we re-imagine and re-make the stuff around us?
  • FOOD: How can we spark a worldwide shift to healthier food systems?
  • NATURE: How do we better protect and re-green the earth?

Countdown is asking companies and organizations to join the Race to Zero through Business Ambition for 1.5°C, which is a commitment to set science-based targets aligned with limiting global warming to 1.5°C, and through The Climate Pledge, which calls on signatories to be net zero carbon by 2040—a decade ahead of the Paris Agreement goal of 2050.

We can inspire others through action and example, because there is no hope without action.”

—17-year-old climate justice activist Xiye Bastida, a lead organizer of the Fridays for Future

Five years after the unanimous signing of the Paris Agreement, many countries, companies and citizens are doing what they can about the climate crisis. But this is not enough.”

—Christiana Figueres, former UN climate chief (2010-2016), now co-founder of Global
Optimism

About TED
TED is a nonprofit organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, often in the form of short talks delivered by leading thinkers and doers. Many of these talks are given at TED conferences, intimate TED Salons and thousands of independently organized TEDx events around the world. Videos of these talks are made available, free, on TED.com and other platforms. Audio versions of TED Talks are published to TED Talks Daily, available on all podcast platforms.

About Future Stewards
Future Stewards is a coalition of partners (Leaders’ Quest, Global Optimism, and We Mean Business) working together to build a regenerative future – where we meet the needs of all, within the means of the planet. Founded after the Paris Agreement, Future Stewards equips individuals, businesses and communities with the awareness and tools required to tackle systemic problems, scale what works, and build cross-sector collaboration.