Calls by politicians, activists, and journalists to double down ring increasingly hollow in the face of overwhelming evidence that 2024 will be the first year in which average global surface temperature is likely to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the preindustrial period before 1900. The long-term average increase since that period will pass 1.5 degrees in 2030. Even staying significantly below 2 degrees Celsius—the target that the climate policy community used until 2015 before lowering it in order to galvanize lawmakers—now looks unlikely.
Missing the 1.5 degree target does not mean that we’re all going to boil, bake, and die. Global emissions growth has slowed down enough that the extreme warming scenarios brandished so carelessly in the public debate have become all but impossible. Deaths due to natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, have also declined radically as countries have become richer and more resilient. And economic losses due to climate shocks have decreased fivefold between the 1980s and mid 2000s.
Sticking to an unrealistic temperature target has severe economic and geopolitical effects. Panic over not reaching the target has led to a radical push for an immediate phaseout of fossil fuels, ignoring the fact that they still make up 80 percent of the world’s primary energy supply. That call is being led by rich countries that have become wealthy using fossil fuels and continue to gobble up oil and gas—and which now want to restrict less-developed countries from using these fuels to lift themselves out of energy poverty, a primary reason for their destitution. Development advocates are rightly calling out these unfair policies, enforced through institutions such as the World Bank, as eco-colonialism.
Unrealistic temperature targets combined with continued high consumption of fossil fuels has meant that there is little to no carbon budget available for the poorest countries to grow their energy use. Sticking to the goal of freezing emissions—or even targeting negative emissions to compensate for any overshoot—turns global economic activity into a zero-sum game.
Room for one country to develop, which may require increased use of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, means that another must shrink its economy. The distribution conflict over emissions rights will be epic and bitter, not just between rich and poor countries but also among poor countries themselves, making any new agreements to reduce emissions even more difficult.
Enter Russia and China, which have made it clear that they will not play by Western rules, including those on climate policy. Since launching the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has sought to strengthen its ties to OPEC and secure its role in oil and gas markets. China is investingeverywhere in resource extraction, including fossil fuels in Africa and the Middle East. The three main Chinese energy companies—CNPC, CNOOC, and Sinopec—have emerged as major investors in Africa’s oil and gas sectors.
Despite these concerns, Western governments refuse to support investments in poor countries’ energy sectors in hopes that starving the developing world of energy will help meet the 1.5-degree target. This has created a huge opening for Russia and China, which they will likely leverage to strengthen autocracy across these regions.
Paradoxically, acknowledging the demise of the 1.5-degree target in 2024 could reduce tensions between rich and poor countries—provided that governments seize the opportunity to reset climate goals. This could be the year when unrealistic temperature goals and endless theoretical fights over a phase-down versus a phaseout of fossil fuels are replaced by a focus on the three positive ideas that came out of the most recent U.N. climate conference, COP28, which concluded in Dubai in December.
In the conference’s outcome statement, nearly 200 signatory countries agreed on the need for transition fuels in poor countries—in other words, their use of fossil fuels will grow faster than their ability to transition away from them. Second, the signatories agreed that countries have different resource endowments and will therefore follow very different trajectories to decarbonize. Third, there was a strong commitment that nuclear energy can be an important source of clean and reliable power.
For the first time, COP28 officially recognized that transition fuels—a euphemism for fossil fuels tolerated to prevent economic collapse and allow development if abundant green energy is not yet available—“can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” COP signatories finally acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that poor countries consumeonly a tiny fraction of the energy gobbled up by rich countries and desperately need more electricity to power homes, schools, hospitals, and factories.
Indeed, the gap between rich and poor is enormous: The average American consumes about 12,000 kilowatt-hours of electric power per year, whereas the average sub-Saharan African consumes only 130 kilowatt-hours. In other words, an African consumes about as much electricity in an entire year as an American consumes in four days. Or, as Todd Moss of the Energy for Growth Hub illustrated in a chart that went viral, many sub-Saharan Africans consume less electricity per person than the average U.S. refrigerator.
Transition fuels are not only critical for development in poor countries, but also for their adaptation to climate change. Natural gas is the best and cheapest feedstock to produce ammonia-based fertilizers, which in turn improves agricultural yields. Gas-fired power plants provide electricity for homes, schools, hospitals, emergency warning systems, air conditioning, and cold storage systems that prevent food losses. Africa’s vast reserves of natural gas can be harnessed for industrial production as well. Clean cooking fuels such as liquid petroleum gas improve the lives of millions of people who suffer from indoor air pollution as the result of cooking with animal dung or biomass. Gas as a backup fuel source allows countries to add unstable wind and solar to their energy systems.
Demonizing gas—as part of a rushed fossil fuel phaseout in service of an unreachable temperature target—is equal to demonizing development, and that will be true for a very long time. For industrial uses, in particular, the technologies to replace gas aren’t even visible on the horizon.
The COP28 statement also acknowledged that countries have “different national circumstances, pathways and approaches,” building on discussions at last year’s G-7 summit in Hiroshima and G-20 summit in New Delhi. In other words, countries lucky enough to have abundant, cheap, nonintermittent renewable energy sources such as geothermal and hydropower can achieve a lower carbon footprint quickly and cheaply. But for those that rely on coal, oil, or gas, the process of decarbonizing is much harder. The “all of the above” approach endorsed at COP suggests that technologies such as carbon capture and storage have a role in lowering emissions.
This is both pragmatic and inclusive: Countries such as India, China, South Africa, and those in Southeast Asia are heavily dependent on coal for electricity, and they will now have options to address emissions in the near term while shifting toward renewable energy sources in the long term. Carbon capture in heavy industry, for example, could abate continued emissions from sectors indispensable for development, including steel, cement, and chemicals.
COP28 made history by treating nuclear power as equal to other renewable energy sources. A declaration to triple nuclear energy by 2050, signed by more than 20 countries, underscores the importance of nuclear power in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rich countries with significant civilian nuclear sectors, such as France, Japan, and the United States, appear on the list of signatories, but so do Ghana, Jamaica, Mongolia, and Morocco, all of which are eager for reliable sources of clean energy to power their growing economies.
New, smaller reactors, the signatories agreed, “could occupy a small land footprint and can be sited where needed, partner well with renewable energy sources, and have additional flexibilities that support decarbonization beyond the power sector, including hard-to-abate industrial sectors.”
Of course, words by themselves don’t mean much. But the declaration includes a call on the shareholders of the World Bank to include nuclear energy in the portfolio of financed projects. If the bank can overcome the objections of a tiny group of rich countries (centered on Germany) that are ideologically opposed to nuclear power, the bank can play an important role by bringing down the cost for poor countries.
Safety is paramount when it comes to nuclear reactors, and the bank’s richest shareholders can help with newer, safer, and more efficient technologies. The United States is at the forefront of building advanced reactors that use better fuels, require less substantial containment, and need fewer redundant safety systems. These smaller, cheaper reactors function better than their larger, more complex predecessors and suffer fewer construction delays.
Japan, too, is an innovator. Tokyo’s so-called green transformation strategy calls for the development of next-generation innovative reactors, including next-generation light-water reactors, small modular reactors, fast reactors, high-temperature gas reactors, and nuclear fusion, all of which could be at the core of a new, more effective global climate policy that looks far beyond wind and solar to decarbonize.
The catastrophism surrounding the impending failure to reach the 1.5-degree target has generated both panic and distrust of climate science. Governments and civil society should abandon today’s ritualized, performative, and highly politicized discourse—and instead concentrate on the full spectrum of technologies to lower carbon emissions while helping poor countries to develop and become more resilient to climate change.
Investments to improve energy access, expand the roster of low-carbon technologies, and generate abundant, clean, and reliable power are a good starting point.
Kazuhiko Hombu, a special advisor at Tokyo University’s Graduate School of Public Policy and a former director-general for energy and environmental policy at the Japanese Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, contributed to this article.
This article was republished from the Foreign Policy Magazine and can be viewed HERE.
Jun Arima is a professor at Tokyo University’s Graduate School of Public Policy, a former deputy director-general of global environmental affairs at the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and a former Japanese negotiator at 12 U.N. climate conferences.
Vijaya Ramachandran is the director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute. Twitter: @vijramachandran
Sticking to an unrealistic temperature target has severe economic and geopolitical effects. Panic over not reaching the target has led to a radical push for an immediate phaseout of fossil fuels, ignoring the fact that they still make up 80 percent of the world’s primary energy supply. That call is being led by rich countries that have become wealthy using fossil fuels and continue to gobble up oil and gas—and which now want to restrict less-developed countries from using these fuels to lift themselves out of energy poverty, a primary reason for their destitution. Development advocates are rightly calling out these unfair policies, enforced through institutions such as the World Bank, as eco-colonialism.
Unrealistic temperature targets combined with continued high consumption of fossil fuels has meant that there is little to no carbon budget available for the poorest countries to grow their energy use. Sticking to the goal of freezing emissions—or even targeting negative emissions to compensate for any overshoot—turns global economic activity into a zero-sum game.
Room for one country to develop, which may require increased use of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, means that another must shrink its economy. The distribution conflict over emissions rights will be epic and bitter, not just between rich and poor countries but also among poor countries themselves, making any new agreements to reduce emissions even more difficult.
Enter Russia and China, which have made it clear that they will not play by Western rules, including those on climate policy. Since launching the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has sought to strengthen its ties to OPEC and secure its role in oil and gas markets. China is investingeverywhere in resource extraction, including fossil fuels in Africa and the Middle East. The three main Chinese energy companies—CNPC, CNOOC, and Sinopec—have emerged as major investors in Africa’s oil and gas sectors.
Despite these concerns, Western governments refuse to support investments in poor countries’ energy sectors in hopes that starving the developing world of energy will help meet the 1.5-degree target. This has created a huge opening for Russia and China, which they will likely leverage to strengthen autocracy across these regions.
Paradoxically, acknowledging the demise of the 1.5-degree target in 2024 could reduce tensions between rich and poor countries—provided that governments seize the opportunity to reset climate goals. This could be the year when unrealistic temperature goals and endless theoretical fights over a phase-down versus a phaseout of fossil fuels are replaced by a focus on the three positive ideas that came out of the most recent U.N. climate conference, COP28, which concluded in Dubai in December.
In the conference’s outcome statement, nearly 200 signatory countries agreed on the need for transition fuels in poor countries—in other words, their use of fossil fuels will grow faster than their ability to transition away from them. Second, the signatories agreed that countries have different resource endowments and will therefore follow very different trajectories to decarbonize. Third, there was a strong commitment that nuclear energy can be an important source of clean and reliable power.
For the first time, COP28 officially recognized that transition fuels—a euphemism for fossil fuels tolerated to prevent economic collapse and allow development if abundant green energy is not yet available—“can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” COP signatories finally acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that poor countries consumeonly a tiny fraction of the energy gobbled up by rich countries and desperately need more electricity to power homes, schools, hospitals, and factories.
Indeed, the gap between rich and poor is enormous: The average American consumes about 12,000 kilowatt-hours of electric power per year, whereas the average sub-Saharan African consumes only 130 kilowatt-hours. In other words, an African consumes about as much electricity in an entire year as an American consumes in four days. Or, as Todd Moss of the Energy for Growth Hub illustrated in a chart that went viral, many sub-Saharan Africans consume less electricity per person than the average U.S. refrigerator.
Transition fuels are not only critical for development in poor countries, but also for their adaptation to climate change. Natural gas is the best and cheapest feedstock to produce ammonia-based fertilizers, which in turn improves agricultural yields. Gas-fired power plants provide electricity for homes, schools, hospitals, emergency warning systems, air conditioning, and cold storage systems that prevent food losses. Africa’s vast reserves of natural gas can be harnessed for industrial production as well. Clean cooking fuels such as liquid petroleum gas improve the lives of millions of people who suffer from indoor air pollution as the result of cooking with animal dung or biomass. Gas as a backup fuel source allows countries to add unstable wind and solar to their energy systems.
Demonizing gas—as part of a rushed fossil fuel phaseout in service of an unreachable temperature target—is equal to demonizing development, and that will be true for a very long time. For industrial uses, in particular, the technologies to replace gas aren’t even visible on the horizon.
The COP28 statement also acknowledged that countries have “different national circumstances, pathways and approaches,” building on discussions at last year’s G-7 summit in Hiroshima and G-20 summit in New Delhi. In other words, countries lucky enough to have abundant, cheap, nonintermittent renewable energy sources such as geothermal and hydropower can achieve a lower carbon footprint quickly and cheaply. But for those that rely on coal, oil, or gas, the process of decarbonizing is much harder. The “all of the above” approach endorsed at COP suggests that technologies such as carbon capture and storage have a role in lowering emissions.
This is both pragmatic and inclusive: Countries such as India, China, South Africa, and those in Southeast Asia are heavily dependent on coal for electricity, and they will now have options to address emissions in the near term while shifting toward renewable energy sources in the long term. Carbon capture in heavy industry, for example, could abate continued emissions from sectors indispensable for development, including steel, cement, and chemicals.
COP28 made history by treating nuclear power as equal to other renewable energy sources. A declaration to triple nuclear energy by 2050, signed by more than 20 countries, underscores the importance of nuclear power in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Rich countries with significant civilian nuclear sectors, such as France, Japan, and the United States, appear on the list of signatories, but so do Ghana, Jamaica, Mongolia, and Morocco, all of which are eager for reliable sources of clean energy to power their growing economies.
New, smaller reactors, the signatories agreed, “could occupy a small land footprint and can be sited where needed, partner well with renewable energy sources, and have additional flexibilities that support decarbonization beyond the power sector, including hard-to-abate industrial sectors.”
Of course, words by themselves don’t mean much. But the declaration includes a call on the shareholders of the World Bank to include nuclear energy in the portfolio of financed projects. If the bank can overcome the objections of a tiny group of rich countries (centered on Germany) that are ideologically opposed to nuclear power, the bank can play an important role by bringing down the cost for poor countries.
Safety is paramount when it comes to nuclear reactors, and the bank’s richest shareholders can help with newer, safer, and more efficient technologies. The United States is at the forefront of building advanced reactors that use better fuels, require less substantial containment, and need fewer redundant safety systems. These smaller, cheaper reactors function better than their larger, more complex predecessors and suffer fewer construction delays.
Japan, too, is an innovator. Tokyo’s so-called green transformation strategy calls for the development of next-generation innovative reactors, including next-generation light-water reactors, small modular reactors, fast reactors, high-temperature gas reactors, and nuclear fusion, all of which could be at the core of a new, more effective global climate policy that looks far beyond wind and solar to decarbonize.
The catastrophism surrounding the impending failure to reach the 1.5-degree target has generated both panic and distrust of climate science. Governments and civil society should abandon today’s ritualized, performative, and highly politicized discourse—and instead concentrate on the full spectrum of technologies to lower carbon emissions while helping poor countries to develop and become more resilient to climate change.
Investments to improve energy access, expand the roster of low-carbon technologies, and generate abundant, clean, and reliable power are a good starting point.
Kazuhiko Hombu, a special advisor at Tokyo University’s Graduate School of Public Policy and a former director-general for energy and environmental policy at the Japanese Agency for Natural Resources and Energy, contributed to this article.
This article was republished from the Foreign Policy Magazine and can be viewed HERE.
Jun Arima is a professor at Tokyo University’s Graduate School of Public Policy, a former deputy director-general of global environmental affairs at the Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, and a former Japanese negotiator at 12 U.N. climate conferences.
Vijaya Ramachandran is the director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute. Twitter: @vijramachandran
3 comments:
I doubt if AGW is as big a problem as made out by alarmists. What I do object to is pollution and I do not mean CO2. Solar panels and wind turbines have a limited life Their disposal of them causes pollution.
The article is correct. Nuclear power is the answer. The Geens in NZ and Oz are just stupid unlike the Greens in the UK and Europe who support nuclear power as part of the solution.
Finally, a little commonsense. But shame they didn't declare that the next conference should be held by 'Zoom' or 'Teams' instead of (reputedly) more than 70,000 delegates needlessly travelling the planet to the last event and, no doubt, being accommodated in air-conditioned bliss while attending? How much energy did that exercise consume and one has to wonder how many centuries (perhaps millennia?) that would run the average American fridge? COP - Conference of Parties? It should be renamed COH - Conference of Hypocrites.
As Western governments pledged ever-more suicidal “climate” policies at the UN COP28 summit, the communist, socialist, and Islamic regimes of the world made oil deals...
The real issue: Anti-energy hysteria and fraudulent solutions such as solar panels and wind turbines are being peddled by the UN and the establishment media to Western populations. More importantly, the anti-energy propaganda and policies are a tool for undermining the economies of Western nations, namely those of Europe and the United States.
Communist China and other autocracies, whose emissions are all soaring with no end in sight, will continue increasing their CO2 emissions while absorbing the productive capacity being shut down in what used to be the Free World.
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