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UN Panel looks to renewables as the key to stabilizing climate

By Fred Pearce - posted Wednesday, 30 April 2014


While it says electricity generation will lead the way in cutting emissions, the report flags other actions, including maintaining forests and soils as natural carbon stores; raising energy efficiency in heating homes and industry; cutting food waste; rolling out electric cars and mass transit; and designing cities that are friendly for walkers and cyclists.

Even with all that, it says, most scenarios predict CO2 concentrations will overshoot 450 ppm. The excess CO2 will have to be soaked up, somehow.

Most likely that will mean massive reforestation plus a combination of energy crops with carbon capture and storage. Under the latter proposal, cited in an IPCC report for the first time, crops would suck up CO2 from the air as they grow and then be burned in power stations to generate energy, after which the resulting CO2 emissions would be captured and buried. So CO2 is moved from the air to the earth, while generating energy - essentially the reverse of burning fossil fuels. The first pilot project, mainly funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, is operating in Illinois.

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There are other methods of removing CO2 from the air that were discussed at an IPCC expert meeting on geoengineering in 2011, chaired by Edenhofer. They include seeding the ocean with micronutrients such as iron to encourage it to take up more CO2, and biochar - the burial of biomass in soils. The report recognizes that these technologies are largely untried and carry risks; but it says they may be the only way of keeping global warming below dangerous levels.

The report is a wake-up call for UN climate negotiators trying to assemble a road map for cutting emissions. They failed in Copenhagen in 2009 and now hope for a deal in Paris next year, to come into force in 2020. Meantime, some 60 countries have made unilateral commitments on reducing carbon emissions. The IPCC report says these efforts are "consistent" with curtailing warming at three degrees, but fall short of what we need to stay below two degrees. In any case, says Edenhofer, "climate change is a global commons problem. International cooperation is key."

The good news is that the transformation of the global energy system the IPCC seeks is already partly under way. The bad news is that progress is fragile, and might be reversed.

The UNEP report, compiled by Ulf Moslener of the Frankfurt School of Finance & Management in Germany, found that 44 percent of added electricity generating capacity went into renewables in 2013 - a figure that exceeded 50 percent if direct replacement for existing power stations is excluded. But the dollar investment in renewables fell by 14 percent from 2012, matching a decline in investment for all types of new electricity generating plants, perhaps as a result of slowing economic growth in some major economies.

Maybe more worrying still, Germany - the early leader in the race to run industrial economies on renewables - showed a dramatic 56 percent year-on-year decline in renewables investment in 2013. This coincided with the government responding to fears about high energy prices by paring back the price guarantee system know as feed-in tariffs.

If even Germany can falter, then there can be no certainty that the shift to renewables is unstoppable.

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Replacing Germany as the new leader in renewables is China. In 2013, it invested $56 billion in green power - from the wind-swept steppes of Inner Mongolia to the sun-soaked Gobi Desert. Chinese manufacture of photovoltaic panels has driven down costs by 25 percent since 2009. But this may be partly illusory. Industry insiders say there is huge overcapacity in the Chinese solar energy business, leading to dumping at low prices.

Second place on the list of renewables investors went to the U.S. Third came Japan, which upped investment 80 percent as it raced to install solar panels to replace nuclear plants shut after the 2011 Fukushima disaster. Fourth was the U.K. where, despite a Conservative government often seen as hostile to green energy, investment in renewables rose 14 percent, much of it on offshore wind farms.

Investment in biofuels - once the poster child of renewables - fell 26 percent in 2013, to its lowest level since before George W. Bush kick-started the corn-to-ethanol race in the U.S. almost a decade ago.

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This article was first published on Yale360.



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About the Author

Fred Pearce is a freelance author and journalist based in the UK. He is environment consultant for New Scientist magazine and author of the recent books When The Rivers Run Dry and With Speed and Violence. His latest book is Confessions of an Eco-Sinner: Tracking Down the Sources of My Stuff (Beacon Press, 2008). Pearce has also written for Yale e360 on world population trends and green innovation in China.

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