Category Archives: Fossil fuels

Clean energy, Fossil fuels, Public utilities, Renewable energy, Solar energy

Utilities using “divide and conquer” to turn back the clean-energy revolution

Repost from EarthTalk

The Making of an Energy Ghetto

Utilities efforts to turn back the clean-energy revolution would block low-income communities from realizing the benefits
By Denise Fairchild, 07/01/2015

The clean-energy revolution is underway, and so is the war against it. As with every other major economic transition, this battle will have winners and losers. For low-income communities of color, the stakes are especially high: Will they reap the benefits of the emerging clean-energy economy or will they be locked into energy ghettos?

smoke stackHere’s the context. Renewable energy — solar and wind — is quickly replacing fossil fuels as the preferred energy source. It is now cheaper than coal and most other fossil fuels. Innovative financing mechanisms have eliminated out-of-pocket costs for installing these technologies, enabling homeowners to save and even earn money from energy production. For example, “net metering” lets solar-powered households sell their surplus energy back to the grid for a profit — sending their electric meters spinning counterclockwise.

The utility sector is not happy with these developments, and it is fighting back. A recent Washington Post article cites utilities’ efforts to influence legislators, state public service commissions and — of particular concern — minority organizations. They want to eliminate net metering and assess households with solar-power systems a monthly surcharge to offset the utilities’ sunk capital investments and maintenance costs. And they have convinced some minority organizations that, without the surcharge, the poor will pay more through rate hikes as clean-energy and net-metering schemes benefit only well-to-do families.

This is a specious argument with potentially dangerous and unfortunate consequences, particularly for low-income residents. Eliminating net metering or placing a surcharge on households that migrate off the grid would foster a two-tiered energy society. These steps would render solar power unaffordable for low-income households, locking in historical racial and class hierarchies. The problems are analogous to the forces that created and sustained central-city ghettos.

Specifically, the surcharges are a form of redlining that limits or otherwise makes community infrastructure investments prohibitively expensive and fosters infrastructure obsolescence. This is similar to the benign neglect and the discriminatory practices that created urban ghettos of the mid-20th century.

The deterioration and blight that afflicts ghettos results principally from the lack of public and private investments needed to maintain, modernize and develop basic infrastructure, such as houses, roads, water and sewer lines. Our energy infrastructure — the “grid” — remains similarly neglected. National investments in local distribution peaked in 2006 and have declined to levels not seen since1991, according to a 2013 report by the American Association of Civil Engineers.

While the utility industry suggests that the surcharge it is seeking would prevent grid disinvestment, the reality is that revenue from such a fee would amount to but a trickle of what’s needed to build a modern, resilient energy infrastructure. Public-housing residents in New York City know about resilient energy infrastructure — or, rather, the lack of it. After Superstorm Sandy, some of the city’s most vulnerable people were off the grid for weeks with no alternative source of power.

Net metering surcharges are also akin to restrictive covenants, which legally prohibited certain races from the benefits of living in American suburbs, locking African-Americans and other ethnic groups into urban ghettos. Surcharges similarly lock the poor and people of color out of the emerging clean-energy future, including not only cleaner, cheaper and newer energy options but also the “green” jobs that these new industries are creating.

Finally, imposing surcharges or eliminating net metering would solidify and accelerate wealth disparities. Net-metering policies generate wealth by turning property owners and communities into energy producers, offering a rare opportunity for residents of low-income communities to build personal wealth. Surcharges will only block poor families from owning their own energy assets.

We need to rethink grid investments, but not at the expense of a clean-energy future. The clean-energy transition is as profound and disruptive to the status quo as the changes in the music and telecommunications industries. And it’s exciting: It can strengthen our energy, economic and health security. That’s a vision that minority communities fully support — and our leaders should too.

Air Quality, Climate Change, Climate change denial, Fossil fuels, Greenhouse gas emissions, Religious communities

Pope Francis joins other religious leaders in challenging world to clean up its filth

Repost from KSL.com
[Editor: Although welcome, the Pope’s encyclical is not new in religious circles.  He joins with previous popes and a substantial number of protestant Christian communities who have been calling for action on climate change over the past 20 years or more.  See Interfaith Power and Light, Interfaith Moral Action on Climate, World Council of Churches,  and Climate Change: Who Speaks for Christianity?  – RS]

Pope urges revolution to save earth, fix ‘perverse’ economy

By Nicole Winfield, Rachel Zoll and Seth Borenstein, Associated Press, June 18th, 2015 @ 9:36am

PopeFrancisEncyclical2015-06VATICAN CITY (AP) — In a sweeping environmental manifesto aimed at spurring concrete action, Pope Francis called Thursday for a bold cultural revolution to correct what he described as a “structurally perverse” economic system where the rich exploit the poor, turning Earth into an “immense pile of filth.”

Francis framed climate change as an urgent moral issue in his eagerly anticipated encyclical, blaming global warming on an unfair, fossil fuel-based industrial model that harms the poor most.

Citing Scripture, his predecessors and bishops from around the world, the pope urged people of every faith and even no faith to undergo an awakening to save God’s creation for future generations.

The document released Thursday was a stinging indictment of big business and climate doubters alike, meant to encourage courageous changes at U.N. climate negotiations later this year, in domestic politics and in everyday life.

“It is not enough to balance, in the medium term, the protection of nature with financial gain, or the preservation of the environment with progress,” he writes. “Halfway measures simply delay the inevitable disaster. Put simply, it is a matter of redefining our notion of progress.”

Environmental scientists said the first-ever encyclical, or teaching document, on the environment could have a dramatic effect on the climate debate, lending the moral authority of the immensely popular Francis to an issue that has long been cast in purely political, economic or scientific terms.

“This clarion call should guide the world toward a strong and durable universal climate agreement in Paris at the end of this year,” said Christiana Figueres, the U.N.’s top climate official. “Coupled with the economic imperative, the moral imperative leaves no doubt that we must act on climate change now.”

Veerabhadran Ramanathan, a Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist, said the encyclical is a “game-changer in making people think about this.”

“It’s not politics anymore,” he said, adding that science is often difficult to understand but that people respond to arguments framed by morality and ethics.

The energy lobby was quick to criticize the encyclical’s anti-fossil fuel message.

“The simple reality is that energy is the essential building block of the modern world,” said Thomas Pyle of the Institute of Energy Research, a conservative free-market group. “The application of affordable energy makes everything we do – food production, manufacturing, health care, transportation, heating and air conditioning – better.”

Francis said he hoped his effort would lead ordinary people in their daily lives and decision-makers at the Paris U.N. climate meetings to a wholesale change of mind and heart, saying “both the cry of the Earth and the cry of the poor” must now be heard.

“This vision of `might is right’ has engendered immense inequality, injustice and acts of violence against the majority of humanity, since resources end up in the hands of the first comer or the most powerful: the winner takes all,” he writes. “Completely at odds with this model are the ideals of harmony, justice, fraternity and peace as proposed by Jesus.”

The encyclical “Laudato Si,” (Praise Be) is 191 pages of pure Francis.

It’s a blunt, readable booklet full of zingers that will make many conservatives and climate doubters squirm, including in the U.S. Congress, where Francis will deliver the first-ever papal address in September. It has already put several U.S. presidential candidates on the hot seat since some Republicans, Catholics among them, doubt the science behind global warming and have said the pope should stay out of the debate.

“I don’t think we should politicize our faith,” U.S. Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush, a Catholic convert, said on the eve of the encyclical’s release. “I think religion ought to be about making us better as people and less about things that end up getting into the political realm.”

Yet one of Francis’ core points is that there really is no distinction between human beings, their faith and the environment.

“Everything is related, and we human beings are united as brothers and sisters on a wonderful pilgrimage, woven together by the love God has for each of his creatures and which also unites us in fond affection with brother sun, sister moon, brother river and mother earth,” he writes.

Cardinal Peter Turkson, whose office wrote the first draft of the encyclical, acknowledged that the pope was no expert in science, although he did work as a chemist before entering the seminary. But he said Francis was fully justified in speaking out about an important issue and had consulted widely. He asked if politicians would refrain from talking about science just because they’re not scientific experts.

Francis accepts as fact that the world is getting warmer and that human activity is mostly to blame.

“The earth, our home, is beginning to look more and more like an immense pile of filth,” he writes.

Citing the deforestation of the Amazon, the melting of Arctic glaciers and the deaths of coral reefs, he rebukes “obstructionist” climate doubters who “seem mostly to be concerned with masking the problems or concealing their symptoms.” And he blames politicians for listening more to oil industry interests than Scripture or common sense.

He praises a “less is more” lifestyle, one that shuns air conditioners and gated communities in favor of car pools, recycling and being in close touch with the poor and marginalized. He calls for courageous, radical and farsighted policies to transition the world’s energy supply from fossil fuels to renewable sources, saying mitigation schemes like the buying and selling of carbon credits won’t solve the problem and are just a “ploy which permits maintaining the excessive consumption of some countries and sectors.”

What is needed, he says, is a “bold cultural revolution.”

“Nobody is suggesting a return to the Stone Age, but we do need to slow down and look at reality in a different way, to appropriate the positive and sustainable progress which has been made, but also to recover the values and the great goals swept away by our unrestrained delusions of grandeur,” Francis writes.

Some have dismissed the Argentine pope as pushing what they call Latin American-style socialism, but he answered those critics just this week, saying it was not a sign of communism to care for the poor.

Within the church, many conservative Catholics have questioned the pope’s heavy emphasis on the environment and climate change over other issues such as abortion and marriage.

Francis does address abortion and population issues briefly in the encyclical, criticizing those in the environmental movement who show concern for preserving nature but not human lives. The Catholic Church has long been at odds with environmentalists over how much population growth degrades the environment.

John Schellnhuber, the scientist credited with coming up with the goal of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F), says it’s a “myth” that a growing population is responsible for environmental decay.

“It’s not poverty that destroys the environment,” he told the press conference launching the document. “It’s wealth, consumption and waste. And this is reflected in the encyclical.”

—

Zoll and Borenstein reported from New York. Associated Press writers Karl Ritter in Stockholm, Sweden, and Daniela Petroff in Vatican City contributed to this report.
Clean energy, Fossil fuels, Renewable energy

Study shows record year for renewable power

Repost from U.S. News & World Report

Renewable energy shows record growth in power sector

By KARL RITTER, Associated Press, June 17, 2015 | 6:07 p.m. EDT
The Associated Press
This May 6, 2013 file photo shows a wind turbine farm near Glenrock, Wyo. The growth of renewable energy outpaced that of fossil fuels in the electricity sector last year, with a record 135 gigawatts of capacity added from wind, solar, hydropower and other natural sources, a new study shows. The annual report released early Thursday, June 18, 2015 in Europe by Paris-based REN21, a non-profit group that promotes renewable energy, underscored how China, the world’s top consumer of coal, has become a global leader in clean energy, too. (AP Photo/Matt Young, File)

STOCKHOLM (AP) — The growth of renewable energy outpaced that of fossil fuels in the electricity sector last year, with a record 135 gigawatts of capacity added from wind, solar, hydropower and other natural sources, a new study shows.

That’s more than the generating capacity of all nuclear reactors in the United States and slightly less than Germany’s installed capacity from all power sources.

The annual report released early Thursday in Europe by Paris-based REN21, a nonprofit group that promotes renewable energy, underscored how China, the world’s top consumer of coal, has become a global leader in clean energy, too.

It also highlighted that while renewables now account for 28 percent of the world’s electricity-generating capacity, they still account for only a tiny share of how we heat and cool buildings and fuel our means of transportation.

“The share of renewables in the power sector will continue to grow. We see that already, especially in emerging economies,” said Christine Lins, executive secretary of REN21. “But we need attention to the heating-cooling sector and transport.”

Renewable energy’s share in all forms of energy consumption — currently about 10 percent — will have to increase dramatically to fulfill the vision that President Barack Obama and other leaders of the Group of Seven wealthy economies endorsed last week. To fight climate change, they called for deep cuts in heat-trapping carbon emissions and all but eliminating them by the end of the century.

Meanwhile, global energy production must surge to meet the demands of developing economies and a growing world population. The fossil fuel industry and many energy experts say that can’t happen without fossil fuels, even in the electricity sector, where coal remains the top fuel.

“Renewables will grow but that doesn’t mean coal is going away,” said Benjamin Sporton, head of the World Coal Association.

Sporton said India is commissioning 20GW of coal-fired power generation every year. “And they have a further 118GW under construction or approved,” he added.

Supporters of renewable energy say the world is already “decoupling” carbon emissions from economic growth, pointing to preliminary data from the International Energy Agency showing that carbon emissions from the energy sector didn’t rise last year even though the global economy grew by 3 percent.

However, earlier this week the IEA said that, among other measures, investments in renewables need to increase from $270 billion last year to $400 billion in 2030 to support a transition to a low-carbon economy.

Paolo Frankl, the head of IEA’s Renewable Energy Division, said REN21’s figures matched research by his own agency, confirming a clear upward trend in renewables.

The REN21 report said renewables accounted for almost 60 percent of the global power capacity added in 2014. Wind power made the biggest jump among the renewables in 2014, with 51GW of new capacity, almost half of it in China.

“This shows that countries are turning towards clean energy to meet their energy needs, rather than fossil fuels that are driving climate change,” said Jake Schmidt of the Natural Resource Defense Council, a U.S. environmental advocacy group.

Solar power also expanded, but from a low level; it accounts for only 1 percent of global electricity production.

Geothermal power added just 700MW of capacity, half of it in Kenya. Other renewable sources, such as ocean energy from tidal forces, are not yet having any significant impact.

In heating and cooling of buildings and industry, which accounts for about half of global energy consumption, there was little change from the year before, with renewables representing about 8 percent, mostly biomass.

Canadian regulation, Fossil fuels, G7, United Nations

Canada commits to G7 plan to end use of fossil fuels

Repost rom the Globe and Mail, Toronto

Canada commits to G7 plan to end use of fossil fuels

‎Steven Chase, KRÜN, Germany, Jun. 09, 2015 1:16AM EDT

Canada has joined other Group of Seven leaders in pledging to stop burning fossil fuels by the end of the century, but Canadian officials are playing down the promise as an “aspirational” target and Stephen Harper says it will only be reached through advances in technology.

In their end-of-meeting statement, G7 leaders called for an end to fossil-fuel use by the global economy by 2100 as well as cuts to greenhouse-gas emissions by 2050 that lower them as much as 70 per cent from 2010 levels.

The G7 statement represents a watered-down goal from what German Chancellor Angela Merkel as host of the‎ summit had sought. Ms. Merkel had been pushing for a commitment to a low-carbon economy, or relatively light use of fossil fuels, by 2050.

A Western diplomat said European countries in the G7 went into the meeting looking for stronger language about moving to a global low-carbon economy, and it was Canada, a net exporter of energy, along with Japan, who wanted to push back the stated timelines for that ambition. In the end, one diplomat noted, the G7’s final communiqué, which calls for decarbonisation of the global economy “over the course of this century,” allows each country to put a different interpretation on whether that would happen nearer to 2050 or 2100. But the notion of decarbonisation, at least, was agreed upon.

Lutz Weischer, the team leader for international climate policy at Germanwatch, a non-government organization that advocates sustainable development, said, ultimately, Canada didn’t want to be seen as “a one-country minority.”

The Prime Minister’s Office denied that Canada had been trying behind the scene to soften language and commitments on fighting climate change. “There was a consensus and Canada supported that outcome,” PMO spokesman Stephen Lecce said.

By having the G7 leaders present a united front on climate, Ms. Merkel did achieve her goal to lay the groundwork for an international agreement on climate, to be discussed in Paris in December.

“Mindful of this goal … we emphasize that deep cuts in global greenhouse-gas emissions are required with a decarbonisation of the global economy over the course of this century,” the leaders of the U.S., U.K., Germany, France, Japan, Italy and Canada said in a communiqué.

G7 member countries agreed to a goal of limiting the increase in global temperature to less than 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

For Mr. Harper, a politician from petroleum-rich Alberta, the pledge comes as a surprise, since it amounts to slapping to an expiry sticker on one of Canada’s major economic drivers, including the oil sands. But these commitments impose no firm obligations on Mr. Harper’s government in the short term and he said results will be achieved through technology, not economic sacrifice.

“I don’t think we should fool ourselves. Nobody is going to start to shutdown their industries or turn off the lights,” Mr. Harper told reporters after the G7 summit wrapped up in Germany’s Bavarian Alps. “To achieve these kinds of milestones over the decades to come will require serious technological transformation,” he said.

A senior Canadian government official tried to allay the impression that Mr. Harper had written off the oil patch, calling the G7 statement an “aspirational target” and repeating the Prime Minister’s comments that it’s up to technology to save the day.

In the oil sands, scores of companies have abandoned expansion projects in response to the sharp drop in commodity prices.

But others are pushing ahead with plans to substantially boost production for decades to come, confident that new technologies will offset more stringent environmental controls, should they be imposed on the sector.

They include Suncor Energy Inc., which is building a $13.5-billion oil sands mine it says will pump 180,000 barrels a day for 50 years, starting in 2017. Imperial Oil Ltd., a unit of U.S. oil giant Exxon Mobil Corp., plans to more than double output from an existing mine and says it could add some 4.7 billion barrels of new resource to its Alberta reserves by 2030.

“The challenge we all face is how to reduce [greenhouse-gas] emissions while global demand for energy is increasing and we transition to lower carbon energy over the next several decades,” Tim McMillan, president and chief executive of the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, said in a statement. “While it is impossible to tie technological breakthroughs to a timetable, our industry is focused on technological innovation and have already reduced our GHG emissions per barrel by about 30 per cent since 1990.”

Mr. Harper has long resisted ambitious action on climate change His government, for instance, promised to cut carbon emissions by 17 per cent from 2005 levels by 2020. But last fall, the federal government’s commissioner of the environment warned there’s growing evidence “the target will be missed.”

David Mc‎Laughlin, the former head of the National Round Table on the Environment and the Economy, a federal environmental agency, said ‎the commitment to phase out fossil fuels is so far off it imposes no burden of responsibility on the Harper government. The Conservatives have not made sufficient investment in technological research to generate the breakthroughs that will be needed to move beyond fossil fuels, he said.

With reports from Jeff Lewis in Calgary and Campbell Clark in Ottawa