Climate Home News – Informed Comment https://www.juancole.com Thoughts on the Middle East, History and Religion Mon, 10 Jun 2019 05:13:55 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=5.8.10 Europe’s largest solar plant unveiled amid Spanish renewable rebirth https://www.juancole.com/2019/06/europes-unveiled-renewable.html Sun, 09 Jun 2019 09:13:53 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=184555 €300 million [$340mn] investment plan comes amid buoyant optimism for Spain’s long suffering solar sector

Spanish utility giant Ibedrola has laid out a plan to build Europe’s largest solar power plant in the country.

The company is currently consulting the environment ministry over building a 590-megawatt solar farm in the Western region of Extramadurra, it said in a statement on Thursday.

With a €300 million investment planned, the so-called Francisco Pizzarro plant will supply energy to 375,000 people every year and employ up to 1000 people in the process of construction, the company said.

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The announcement comes amid increasingly competitive renewables prices and a favourable political atmosphere.

Since becoming minister for the ecological transition almost exactly one year ago Teresa Ribera has introduced climate legislation aiming to achieve 100% renewables by 2050.

In early October, Ribera scrapped the so-called “sun tax” – an unpopular levy on solar power affecting individuals and small businesses. The government has also pledged to install between 6,000 and 7,000MW of renewable power every year until 2030.

“It’s clear that policies led by Teresa Ribera have given investors more confidence to throw themselves into projects like the one that Ibedrola has announced,” Sergio de Otto, head of the Renewables Foundation told Climate Home News. De Otto said costs for building renewable energy were falling “spectacularly”.

“From our perspective, it is necessary that we – citizens and small businesses – lead the energy transition to 100% renewables by 2050, but we also understand the need for large solar plants produced by companies. We believe that in future these great installations will coexist with an extraordinary growth in small-scale renewables production. These are therefore two complementary models”

Via Climate Home News

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All Cars in Los Angeles to be Electric by 2050– but is that too Late? https://www.juancole.com/2019/05/cars-angeles-electric.html Sat, 11 May 2019 04:19:22 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=183956 By Natalie Sauer | –

Los Angeles’ car-choked arteries will run clean within decades, according to a green reform package unveiled by mayor Eric Garcetti in late April.

Speaking only a week after New York City mayor Bill de Blasio announced his own framework climate legislation, Garcetti presented plans to revolutionise local car culture and green the city’s buildings, which together account for three-quarters of LA’s emissions.

“Los Angeles needs to lead, but the whole world needs to act. This plan gives us a fighting chance,” Garcetti told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s sort of a ‘greenprint’ for every other city in the country and the world, hopefully.”

The legislation, which builds upon a previous 2015 sustainability plan, calls on the city to hike its percentage of zero emission vehicles from 1.4% in 2018 to 25% by 2025, 80% by 2035 and 100% by 2050. To do this, the City Town Hall intends to raise its number of publicly available electric-vehicle chargers from 2,100 to 28,000.

Mass transit expansion will also lower the number of miles spent in cars, 2000 less per year for the average driver by the mid-2030s.

Garcetti proposes to launch a regional advocacy campaign in 2021 to encourage car-sharing and inspire residents to walk as much as possible by making pathways more safe and promoting pedestrian-friendly design. The plan also calls to expand subway and light-rail, a year after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority gave the go ahead to a line snaking through the East Valley. By 2028, every resident ought to be able to access “high-quality mobility options within a 10-minute walk from home”. All buses will be electric by 2030, the plan claims.

Garcetti said he was aware that the plan was bound to face opposition, quipping that Angelinos “like the way they suffer in their single-passenger, stuck-in-traffic, gas-guzzling cars.”

The mayor also pledged to equip the entire building stock with zero-emission technologies by 2050, achieving carbon neutrality by 2030.

The package, which Garcetti calls LA’s Green New Deal, also takes aim at social inequality the plan. Committing to create 300,000 green jobs by 2035, and 400,000 green jobs by 2050. The City Town Hall said it would attract $750 million of private investment by 2025, and $2 billion by 2030.

Popularized by congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, the term Green New Deal is rapidly catching on in American politics.

But climate activists from the Sunrise Movement Los Angeles said that the “plan for net-zero emissions by 2050” was “not a Green New Deal”.

“By the year 2030, we will reach a “point of no return” – wherein planetary feedback loops driven by carbon emissions will propel beyond our control,” the group wrote on Medium on Monday. “Our city is on the brink of destruction, and it seems as if no one is listening. Our generation’s future, as well as the future of Los Angeles and of the world, depends on us reaching net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. This is not a goal – it is a deadline.”

The plan meant that Los Angeles was “on track to be twenty years too late”, the group said.

Instead, the group urged Garcetti to “stay true” to the Green New Deal resolution submitted by councilmember Nury Martinez in April, which urges the city to “create a Green New Deal that mirrors the principles and priorities of the national resolution”.

In contrast, the national resolution sets out to radically decarbonize the US economy through a series of 10-year goals. The nation would among others aim to get 100% of its power through renewable energy by 2030.

Reprinted by permission from Climate Home News under this Creative Commons license.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

KTLA 5: “L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti Unveils City’s “Green New Deal”

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Saudi Aramco Worried Electric Cars ‘Could Result in Substantial Costs’ https://www.juancole.com/2019/04/worried-electric-substantial.html Sun, 21 Apr 2019 04:36:36 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=183577 By Megan Darby | –

( Climate Home News ) = Climate lawsuits, clean energy and electric cars pose threats to Saudi Aramco’s mammoth profits, according to a historic public disclosure this winter.

The state oil producer netted $111 billion in 2018, more than tech giants Apple and Alphabet combined, it revealed in a bond prospectus.

It is aiming to raise funds to buy petrochemical company Sabic, as part of Saudi Arabia’s strategy to diversify its economy away from crude oil.

Saudi Aramco will continue to be “significantly impacted” by the international oil price, the document noted, warning: “Climate change concerns and impacts could reduce global demand for hydrocarbons and hydrocarbon-based products and could cause the company to incur costs or invest additional capital.”

Climate policies such as renewable energy mandates, carbon pricing and energy efficiency standards are expected to dampen demand for fossil fuels, it said. Trends in electrification of transport and clean energy prices will also be critical.

Meanwhile the company faces legal challenges over the role of its products in causing climate change. On 2 July 2018, US state Rhode Island sued oil and gas companies including Motiva, an Aramco subsidiary, for damages to coastal infrastructure. “Claims such as these could grow in number,” the note said, and “litigation could result in substantial costs”.

Peter Barnett, a climate lawyer with ClientEarth, agreed. “Climate litigation is gathering pace as citizens, cities, states and shareholders seek accountability for continued reliance on fossil fuels as the impacts of climate change are increasingly acutely felt,” he said. “As Saudi Aramco’s prospectus underscores, climate litigation is now of mainstream financial concern to fossil fuel-exposed companies and their investors.”

These caveats did not stop agencies Fitch and Moody’s giving the company a solid A+/A1 credit rating, judging it a fairly safe bet for investors.

Saudi Aramco’s relatively low cost oil production makes it better placed than many competitors to weather the global transition to clean energy.

To meet the goal of the Paris Agreement to hold global warming below 2C, oil will ultimately need to be phased out. In the short term, though, climate models allow a budget for its continued role in the energy mix.

Less than 10% of Saudi Aramco’s capital spending to 2025 falls outside that 2C budget, analysts at Carbon Tracker judged in a 2018 ranking of 72 oil companies. That compares to 20-30% for Exxon Mobil, Total and Petrobas, or up to 60% for US-based Energen.

Saudi Arabia also wastes less energy in the extraction process and through gas flaring than most oil-producing countries, a 2018 study in Science found.

For all these advantages, Saudi Aramco is not immune from pressure on the sector to shift investment into renewable energy. At a conference in February, its chief Amin Nasser described a “worrying and growing belief among policy makers… and many others that we are an industry with little or no future”.

Crown prince Mohammed bin Salman in 2016 proposed floating part of the company on the stock exchange. If that ever comes to pass, it will only bring more scrutiny on its carbon and financial accounting.

Shareholder resolutions on climate change have become a regular feature of AGM season for publicly listed companies. Several oil majors have bowed to calls to disclose what the 2C warming limit means for their business. The next ask is to set emissions reduction targets in line with the Paris Agreement goal – a proposal Exxon Mobil is trying to block.

Another focus for activists is the mismatch between companies’ climate-friendly rhetoric and covert support for lobbying against climate policies. Shell revealed on Tuesday it was quitting the American Fuel & Petrochemical Manufacturers over its climate stance – but staying in the controversial American Petroleum Institute.

This article originally appeared on Climate Home News

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

Future Lab: “Top 7 Electric Cars Will Challenge Tesla Model 3 in 2019/20”

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With Trump AWOL, Can Europe & China Lead Globe away from Climate Suicide? https://www.juancole.com/2019/01/europe-climate-suicide.html Tue, 08 Jan 2019 06:07:46 +0000 https://www.juancole.com/?p=181354 By Natalie Sauer | –

( Climate Home News ) –

As 2019 dawns, it is crunch time for the Paris Agreement on climate change.

Last month’s UN climate summit in Katowice, Poland set (most of) the technical rules of the Paris Agreement, but showed little sign of renewed ambition.

Responding to the latest scientific warnings, Fiji’s prime minister Frank Bainimarama said countries had to increase their current climate pledges fivefold if they wanted to avert climate catastrophe.

UN chief Antonio Guterres presented it as a choice between radical climate action or a “suicidal” path. He called on governments to ramp up their commitments – known in UN-speak as nationally determined contributions (NDCs) – to the Paris pact.

Only the tiny Marshall Islands has so far submitted an updated climate pledge to the UN. The coming months will see pressure on big emitters to follow, ahead of a conference to be convened by Guterres in September.

Nobody wants to go it alone, says David Waskow, senior climate policy expert at the World Resources Institute: “Countries like the EU, China and India, as well as others, will be looking to see how to join hands to take this leap together.”

China, the number one source of greenhouse gases, is non-committal on the world stage, but is mulling increased ambition in domestic policy circles.

The Asian giant is on track for its Paris goal to peak emissions around 2030. A study by the University of East Anglia suggested this milestone may even have been reached already, thanks to a shift away from coal and heavy industry to high-tech and service sectors.

Last June, government think-tank the National Centre for Climate Change Strategy and International Cooperation (NCSC) recommended China “evaluate and demonstrate the options for updating the 2030 nationally determined contributions in 2020”. This was an important signal, although it does not in itself represent a change of policy.

“Enhancing” an NDC, in the jargon, could include changes to the quality as well as the quantity of emissions cuts. For example, China could bring non-CO2 gases such as methane into its plan. That would be a meaningful improvement, according to Waskow, covering climate pollution equivalent to Indonesia’s entire emissions.

Politically, the question is how far China is willing to go in the absence of comparable action from the US, the second biggest emitter. President Donald Trump has vowed to quit the Paris deal, making any updated US contribution before 2020 vanishingly unlikely.

“The US-China relationship is also a strong variable,” says Greenpeace energy policy expert Li Shuo, referring to the ongoing tensions over trade. One thing to watch is whether President Xi Jinping will enter US soil for the UN secretary general’s summit in September.

“If he [President Xi] decides to show up in 2019, it is reasonable to expect him to say something that would fulfil the mission of the SG summit,” says Li.

Since the White House U-turn, the EU has sought to fill the climate diplomacy vacuum. It reconvened a “high ambition coalition” of European, island and poor countries – 79 total – in Katowice to commit to raising their NDCs by 2020.

One of the key actors behind that statement, EU climate chief Miguel Arias Cañete, is also pushing for bolder climate action at home. While there is some resistance from central and eastern European states, he argues legislation on renewable energy and efficiency introduced last year will allow the 28-state bloc to make deeper carbon cuts.

Embed from Getty Images
02 November 2018, Lower Saxony, Sehnde: Windmills turn in front of dark clouds (multiple exposure in camera). Photo: Julian Stratenschulte/dpa (Photo by Julian Stratenschulte/picture alliance via Getty Images).

“The new targets would de facto mean that the European Union would be in a position to raise the level of ambition of the NDC and increase its emissions reduction target from the current 40% to slightly over 45% by 2030,” Arias Cañete said in June. Before the end of his term, the commissioner told Climate Home News he hopes to convince member states to adopt a tougher target of net zero emissions by 2050.

Jahan Chowdury, director of NDC Partnership, told CHN that Vietnam, the Philippines, Jamaica, Honduras, the Seychelles, Marshall Islands, Rwanda, Guatemala, Mongolia and São Tomé and Príncipe have all expressed an intention to up their NDCs by 2020. Funded by Germany, France, UK, Australia, Denmark and the Netherlands, the organisation aims to help developing countries scale up their climate action.

Another 15 countries are in conversation with NDC Partnership, Chowdury said. These are Armenia, Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Panama, Ethiopia, Jamaica, Kyrgyzstan, Paraguay, Zimbabwe, Mexico, Nigeria, El Salvador, Ecuador, Indonesia and Uruguay.

The big unknown is how emerging economies will act.

Like neighbouring China, India was cagey about its intentions in Katowice. “This will depend on how collectively we are moving,” head of delegation A K Mehta told CHN.

Embed from Getty Images
A visitor speaks on a mobile phone standing in-between solar panels and reduced scale models of windmills on display at a stall during ‘Inter Solar 2018’, an international exhibition on solar technology and energy held in Bangalore on December 12, 2018. (Photo by MANJUNATH KIRAN / AFP) (Photo credit should read MANJUNATH KIRAN/AFP/Getty Images)

Analysts at New Climate Institute rate India as being on track to meet its existing targets, suggesting increased ambition is feasible. While Narendra Modi’s administration touts business opportunities in clean energy, it also stresses the historic responsibility of industrialised nations to act first and fastest.

Brazil, on the other hand, has veered off track after an uptick in deforestation last year. As far-right president Jair Bolsonaro takes office, a former general who has voiced admiration for Trump’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement, environmentalists fear further regression.

In October, Bolsonaro said Brazil would remain in the Paris deal so long as it didn’t affect Brazilian control over the Andes mountains, Amazon rainforest and Atlantic Ocean. However many of his policies threaten the world’s biggest rainforest and even before he was sworn in the country backed out of hosting 2019’s UN climate summit.

Securing strengthened climate commitments in 2019 will, in large part, depend on persuading authoritarian leaders it is in their national interest.

Via Climate Home News

Republished under a Creative Commons license.

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Bonus video added by Informed Comment:

France 24 English: “India: A leader in the global solar energy market”

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