Kosovo Is a Test for the World Bank’s Support of Clean Energy

In April, World Bank president Jim Yong Kim said in a panel discussion in Washington, D.C., “I don’t think it’s fair to tell the people in Kosovo, ‘While the rich countries continue to burn coal, you’re going to have to freeze to death because it’s against our political ideology to support you.’”

Kim added, “I can’t do that."

Kim’s statement puts the World Bank somewhat at odds with itself. The World Bank has been a majorproponent of investment in renewable energy. Yet, it says it must choose between a coal-fired plant in Kosovo and people freezing to death.

But based on the solutions available today (some created by the World Bank itself under Dan Kammen), and where the world is heading on CO2 emissions, the choice between development and combating climate change is a false choice.

Here’s the false choice argument.

On the one hand, we are already deeply in the red in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, meaning that even if we could go carbon-free tomorrow, we are still going to subject ourselves to human-induced climate change beyond our goal of a maximum of 2° Celsius temperature rise. As a result, we must curtail any future emissions wherever and whenever possible.

On the other hand, what is one more coal-fired power plant in a nation such as Kosovo where energy shortages impact industry and economic development? This is a bright red line for the World Bank President. Are his previous words about the dangers of climate change sincere or hollow?

Development agencies such as the World Bank have generally argued that their poverty mission includes bringing energy access to those without energy. So despite the World Bank’s support of renewable energy in most cases, every once in a while, a coal plant needed to save those who are freezing trumps the environment.

But they have to dance around the central question: can Kosovo’s energy needs be met without coal?

This is the ultimate question facing not only the World Bank, but also India, China, South Africa, and all others that seek to provide power to the powerless.

It’s now 2013, and we are deploying advanced energy technologies at the billion-dollar scale -- $279 billion alone in 2012. Finance and business model innovation have made this choice of coal or freezing to death (in the Kosovo case) obsolete.

From no-money-down solar to the use of “big data” to reduce electricity theft, entrepreneurs have come up with clever ways to solve real-world problems while accommodating the power structures currently in place.

Those of us in the energy industry need to step in to help the World Bank -- not only with words, but also with action. We can make climate-friendly development a top priority, as it goes hand-in-hand with human needs.

In fact, World Bank President Kim commissioned a report last year that found “the Earth system's responses to climate change appear to be non-linear. […] If we venture far beyond the 2° guardrail, toward the 4° line, the risk of crossing tipping points rises sharply. The only way to avoid this is to break the business-as-usual pattern of production and consumption."

What is important -- and deserves repeating to all agencies involved in international development and the financing of health, education, infrastructure and other drivers of economic growth -- appears in the preface of the report written by Kim himself: "Most importantly, a 4°C world is so different from the current one that it comes with high uncertainty and new risks that threaten our ability to anticipate and plan for future adaptation needs."

So this is the World Bank president’s moment of truth.

Christiana Figueres, the United Nations' top climate change official, said last week the time has come for the World Bank to get out of coal.

Speaking in Washington, D.C. after attending the World Bank spring meetings, Figueres praised Kim for making global warming a top priority. Figueres said that nations, along with the World Bank, no longer need to invest in coal as an energy source.

However, in defiance of international pressure after the Tata Mundra coal project in India and Eskom’s project in South Africa, the World Bank is currently considering an investment in a 600-megawatt coal-fired power plant for Kosovo.

Yet Kosovo does not have a great experience with coal. The country suffers from regular power outages and from the worst coal-driven air pollution in Europe. Investing in coal when European nations are working to clean their energy economies and to set region-wide standards to push out coal would be handing Kosovo a discriminatory, backward-looking investment package.

Instead, this should be an easy decision for investors and the World Bank. The World Bank’s own studyfound that Kosovo has wind, biomass, solar, hydro, and energy efficiency resources available that are more than sufficient to meet the 600-megawatt supply needs. Further, European investors have already proposed over 200 megawatts of privately funded wind energy investments in Kosovo. This shows that industry is ready to move at the scale needed to put clean energy to work in Kosovo today. More

 

The Peak Oil Crisis: Perspective

While waiting to see how the Iranian nuclear confrontation and the various Eurozone crises sort themselves out, there is time to step back and look at the interaction of the major forces that will shape our future. While the problems of oil depletion are already upon us, shrinking resources are only a part of global dynamics currently.

There are at least six major forces moving civilization in the world today: 1) population growth: 2) economic growth; 3) political stability; 4) technological innovation; and more recently 5) resource depletion and 6.) climate change. There are, of course, other less obvious change-producing forces at work in the world – theology, geology, and culture to name a few--but these six look like a good place to start thinking about the interaction of change. Our six forces are intertwined so that significant movement in one will eventually result in feedbacks affecting some or all of the others.



In the last 200 years a combination of better health technology and services, more productive agriculture, and improved transportation has allowed the world population to grow seven-fold. Although in some areas societal and even political measures are keeping population growth in check, as a whole the world's population is on course to increase markedly before the century is out. In a finite world this has, and will continue to have, serious implications for our other major engines of change. First is simply the need to grow and distribute food for the 78 million people that we are adding to our population each year. If one includes clothing, shelter, education, medical care, and a better-than-subsistence life style for the new arrivals, you can see that that the global economy needs to do some growing or at least rearrange the way resources are distributed.



This steadily growing population will add to resource depletion – fossil fuels, vegetation, and minerals -- for at a minimum all those additional people must eat and drink. If they are going to eat warm food or stay warm in the colder climates, they are likely to be adding to the atmosphere's growing concentration of greenhouse gases and the pace of global warming. The search for a better life is already resulting in mass migrations from poorer to richer regions which in turn is already contributing to political volatility. More

 

UN climate chief Christiana Figueres calls for an “energy revolution”

New technologies and the involvement of the private sector are needed to tackle climate change emissions and power the world said Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, in a lecture today. “Don’t depend on governments,” she said, “because they can’t deliver 100%.”

“We are moving in the direction of a low carbon society – but not fast enough,” she said. The worldpassing the (US) $1 trillion mark in clean energy investments in technologies such as solar and wind power plants and bioenergy production since 2004, shows that we’re on the way, she said.

“We can all see the evidence of climate change,” Figueres said, warning that rises in greenhouse gases had the potential to undo international development gains made. Rio+20, the upcoming UN conference on Sustainable Development, will be a “very powerful force of wind in the sail” to help the economies of developing countries grow, but this growth needed to happen with a lower carbon footprint than developed countries.

In response to a question posed by Antigua’s High Commissioner on how the country could move off the “path” of fossil fuel dependence she said it could produce lots of solar and wind energy if the technologies weren’t so prohibitively expensive. Co-operation between the public and private sector to develop cheaper renewable technologies and technology transfer to southern countries are critical to making this happen, Figueres said.

Whether America led on the development of renewable energy technologies was a pressing question. Was “the US electorate …willing to let history ..progress in such as way that …China or Europe will benefit from the competitive edge [of developing renewable technologies], or would they prefer to be the leaders of technology?” Referring to the current Republican presidential primary candidates she said: “If they have anything in common it is that they say they don’t believe in climate change.” More