New global approaches needed to tackle climate change

FT 29th Oct 2018, For the past 20 years the orthodox response to the threat of climate change
has been focused on the search for a global agreement to reduce emissions.
Such an approach is entirely logical and rational. Climate change is a
global risk and so everyone should be involved in the response. The only
problem is that the approach has failed.

The Paris conference in 2015 brought people together and collected a range of loose promises from almost
every country in the world. Those promises in aggregate were inadequate, and some have already been forgotten as regimes have changed, not least in the US.

Many countries are taking action to mitigate climate change, but these actions don’t add up to an answer. Potential global solutions such as a universal carbon tax remain off the agenda. What is the alternative? The
best hope for limiting emissions comes from the application of science to
the energy market. That means finding sources of energy that can be made
available to all the world’s citizens, at a price they can afford, enabling
them to switch away from the carbon-intensive fuels such as coal that are
the main source of the problem. If politics cannot solve climate change,
perhaps science and economics can do better.

New techniques to store renewable electricity would be a great advance making sustainable power
available worldwide. Dramatic gains in the efficiency of energy consumption
may also be within reach. And there could be other answers to be found if
we looked.
https://www.ft.com/content/217fff44-d2d6-11e8-a9f2-7574db66bcd5

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Energy efficiency – theme for July 2019

Energy efficiency represents the single largest potential contributor to global emissions reduction, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA 2017). It should be a key part of the global energy strategy, for several reasons:

It could reduce global electric demand by more than 20 per cent, based on current rates in the U.S. power sector, while maintaining high levels of services such as heating and lighting.
It avoids the need for increased energy, capacity and grid services, making it the least expensive way to decarbonise at scale.
It can reduce carbon dioxide emissions by billions of tonnes.

A dramatic example of the power of energy efficiency is lighting. In 2017 the United States passed the milestone of 1 billion LED and CFL lights installed, avoiding 142 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide emissions, at a cost of about $7 per ton of avoided carbon dioxide. In contrast, the cumulative installed capacity of rooftop solar reached 8,000 MW in 2017, saving 8 million tonnes a year of carbon dioxide, at a cost of $360 per ton. Lighting efficiency thus yielded almost 18 times the avoided carbon dioxide, at about 2 per cent the cost per ton of rooftop solar.

Google provides another example of the power of energy efficiency. Its data centers now use 50 per cent less energy than the average data center, according to the company. Google also developed an improved chip, the TPU, which performs 83 times better than standard CPUs. The new chip allowed Google to reduce power consumption at its data centers by a factor of 30—far exceeding the effect on Google’s carbon footprint of all of the company’s renewable energy purchases. ” – John Woolard, Eco Business, 10 June 2019

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