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| Fri, 11th Nov 2022 14:04:00 |
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‘Fossil fuels are a dead end’, says top UN climate adviser on ‘Decarbonization Day’ at COP27 |
Negotiations, sharing solutions aimed at curbing emissions by the world’s biggest-polluting industries, as well as continued calls for climate justice and finance for hard-hit developing countries were in the spotlight on Friday as the latest UN Climate Conference reached its midway point in Egypt.
To meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, the world must abandon fossil fuels as quickly as possible, Selwin Hart, Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action told UN News today.
“There is no argument around the science at all. But of course, developing countries, especially the poorest, will need assistance to make the transition to a renewable energy future,” he explained.
Mr. Hart, who is from the small island nation of Barbados and has acted as a negotiator in the past during several UN Climate Conferences (COPs), underscored that the focus should be on helping remove the barriers that developing countries face to accelerate their transition to renewables.
“For example, the cost of capital. Renewable energy investments by their nature are very capital intensive. Eighty per cent of the investment must be upfront, because you have to buy the solar panels and the battery storage and the installation, and that’s costly”, he highlighted, adding, however, that the running costs are zero because there is no need to buy any oil or diesel to power a renewable energy station.
A striking comparison
The expert gave us a striking example of the unfair conditions countries in the developing world face when it comes to the energy transition.
“I’ll compare Algeria and Denmark. Denmark has some of the worst potentials for renewable energy [while] Algeria’s potential for renewable energy is probably 70 times higher. But Denmark has seven times more solar panels than Algeria. The reason is the cost of capital,” he explained, referring to the return expected by those who provide capital for business.
The international community needs to “throw the kitchen sink” at solving this problem, he stated.
For Mr. Hart, mobilizing the trillions of dollars needed to make the transition should be the focus, instead of pouring capital into new fossil fuel projects, which he sees as a real risk that could lead to investing in stranded assets or passing debts onto future generations.
“Fossil fuels are a dead end, as a Secretary-General has said…We need to increase renewable energy deployment to around 60 per cent of total energy capacity over the course of the next eight years, which means roughly a tripling of install capacity over the course of this decade,” he added.
And for the expert, this is more than possible, because the world has tripled its renewable energy capacity over the last decade.
“We just need to do it again this decade. The technologies are there, the finance is there. It just needs to be deployed in the right place, where the emissions are and where the population growth and energy demand is”, he urged.
Decarbonizing the industry
Decarbonization is shorthand for finding alternative ways of living and working that reduce emissions and capture and store carbon in our soil and vegetation. It requires a radical change in our current economic model which is focused on growth at all costs.
As ‘Decarbonization Day’ got underway at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, a new report from the United Nations underscored the importance of rapid and large-scale action to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from the energy-intensive countries, which account for about 25 per cent of the total CO2 emissions globally and 66 per cent in the industrial sector.
The study singles out the cement, iron and steel, and chemicals and petrochemical industries as the most significant emitters and identifies key practical measures for them to transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
“Adopting circular economy approaches to help reduce needs for new materials will be crucial in this respect. Solutions must be implemented without delay” the Executive Secretary of the UN European Economic Comission, Olga Algayerova, said in a statement.
The key recommendation is indeed “a circular carbon economy”, based on carbon reduction, capture reuse and removal, as well as a push for innovation and research to tackle the challenge presented by the need for high temperatures and chemical processes required that are currently most efficiently reached by burning fossil fuels.
Another key recommendation is the creation of industrial clusters to “share emissions” and reduce costs, creating green and sustainable jobs. You can learn more about this here.
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