Energy ministers from around the world met in London this week and got a scolding. The International Energy Agency warned the ministers that they are falling way behind in their efforts to wean the world from dirty sources of energy. Nations are nowhere near being on track to avert significant climate change in the coming decades.
It turns out that right now, just about everything is conspiring to make it harder to clean up the world’s energy supply.
Nuclear power produces very little carbon dioxide, but it is on the ropes after the Fukushima meltdowns in Japan. New methods for extracting natural gas from underground make that fossil fuel much cheaper than low-carbon fuels.
And don’t forget the economy.
“What’s happened across the industrialized world is the governments are feeling poor these days,” says David Victor at the University of California, San Diego. “So they are a lot less willing to put money into loan guarantees, production tax credits and feed-in tariffs and other policies that have historically been the big drivers of very low-emission technologies like nuclear and wind.”
Wind subsidies are on the chopping block here in the United States. And clean energy subsidies have already been scaled way back in Europe, where wind and solar had been riding high, thanks to generous government support.
Michael Grubb, an economist at Cambridge University, says those subsidies proved to be too successful.
“People scrambled to put solar panels on their roofs a lot faster than governments had anticipated,” Grubb says, “which meant the volume of subsidy that was going to be required for a much bigger volume of demand was going to get much more expensive. And they scaled back those programs.”
That’s good in that solar panels went up much faster than anticipated. But now it means that rapid growth is likely to stall. And as for other technologies, Grubb says it’s tough to get the British public behind big, low-carbon energy projects these days.”
“Nobody actually likes energy-production sources,” Grubb says. “They object to nuclear. There’s quite a strong push-back on onshore wind energy on the grounds of impact on the countryside. There’s push-back on offshore wind energy, which is significantly more expensive than onshore.”
And the British government is also stirring controversy by pushing ahead with plans to allow companies to use the new hydraulic fracturing technologies to prospect for natural gas in the English countryside. Britain is supposed to be phasing out fossil fuels, not exploiting new sources, the critics say.
People should remember solar PV systems have a lifetime of about 20 years. After that period, the output is diminished and they are shut down. So the subsidy vanishes in thin air.
My wife’s aunt was a lifetime primary school teacher and she once commented: “All of my career education has been, grab a fad and run full force with it, then drop it and grab another fad and run with it.” The same is true of science. During the 30′s and early 40′s it was eugenics, “create the perfect human race”. That finally went up in the smoke of Brucktesgarten, but we are still paying reparations to those who were sterilized against their will.
Next we were going to control the weather, make rain and end all droughts, prevent hail, floods and tornados. That failed and we learned they can’t even consistently predict tomorrow’s weather.
Then it was global cooling, the next ice age. “Use nuclear weapons to melt the advancing ice sheets”.
Then it was global warming and they are about to drop that and pick up the next fad, mass genocide to “save the planet!”
One has to wonder ‘just who’ are these people that have the power to drag ministers from all over the planet – sit them in a room and then tick them off for not doing………………. It amazes me that sovereign countries would even waste their time listening to so many who’s predictions have been so far away from reality. Allen Brooks makes the very obvious (to anyone who stops to think) point that we, over the years have lurched from one seeming world disaster to another – The Y2K bug was a major wake up for me when I found that even some of my employees were going against company directions and were in fact encouraging departments to be aware of this terrible bogey man. I know the world revolves on BS ‘but’ surely there must be some in charge who have a modicum of common sense?
Actually, the global cooling thingy of the 70s was just a “what if.” But, in reality, they were right. The ice age will emerge. No one knows for sure when. More 70s global warming articles occurred than cooling ones. A major climate meeting was held in Britain concerning CO2 warming as the major issue. However, I believe that over water, CO2′s net effect is one of cooling, but is opposite over land. The present errors occur in ignoring the cooling of the atmospheric- oceanic interface, below the ocean’s Knudson layer.