Energy, carbon: Not good enough yet
If sustainability efforts in 2010 can be summed up in one sentence, it’s this: “Some of us are trying — really hard in some cases — but it’s still not good enough.”
Consider the threat of peak global oil production. After years of all but ignoring the risk of peak oil, the International Energy Agency (IEA) in this year’s World Energy Outlook actually acknowledged that we probably reached maximum production of the easy stuff (versus petroleum from, say, Canada’s oil shales) in 2006. Yet in the UK, where some of the country’s top business leaders have been issuing dire warnings about near-future energy security, neither the old government nor the new coalition has acted with any sense of urgency yet.
But isn’t the world going gangbusters with development of clean energy sources like sun and wind? Certainly, the proportion of global energy from renewables continues to show healthy growth, with countries from Germany to China demonstrating real determination. From a big-picture perspective, though, it’s still not good enough. And it certainly doesn’t help when it appears Britain will miss its 2010 renewable energy target, the New York Times Magazine declares the ideal of sustainability DOA and the right wing in the US asserts the agency in charge of environmental and energy policies should be branded an “albatross.”
Yes, a new round of international climate talks is under way this week in Mexico, and folks like Tim Yeo — chairman of the UK House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee — are gunning for a global effort to decouple ebconomic growth from carbon emissions. And there’s hope the Cancun conference will yield some promising results, though that hope is built on the much-lowered expectations bred by the disappointments of Copenhagen.
While it’s only Day Two of the 12-day Mexico gathering, here’s what’s emerged so far:
- Officials have expressed hope that governments meeting in Cancun will be able to find ways to act on climate adaptation, technology transfers and carbon emissions caused by deforestation, and to create a new fund for long-term climate finance.
- Mexico, which is making progress in reducing its own carbon emissions, will provide some 1.5 megawatts of clean energy a day to the conference via a wind turbine in Cancun. Mexican President Felipe Calderón Hinojosa says his administration expects to increase the country’s production of renewable energy from two megawatts to 2,160 megawatts.
- Upon the opening of the Cancun conference, the UK’s Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research released a series of papers reporting, among other conclusions, that “there is now little to no chance of maintaining the global mean surface temperature at or below 2◦C.” That level of warming, researchers warned, “represents the threshold between ‘dangerous’ and ‘extremely dangerous’ climate change.”
