Transition to Green Economy Could Yield up to 60 Million Jobs

GENEVA, 29 May 2012 - The transformation to a greener economy could generate 15 to 60 million additional jobs globally over the next two decades and lift tens of millions of workers out of poverty, according to a new report led by the Green Jobs Initiative.

The study "Working towards sustainable development: Opportunities for decent work and social inclusion in a green economy " says that these gains will depend on whether the right set of policies are put in place.

"The current development model has proven to be inefficient and unsustainable, not only for the environment, but for economies and societies as well", said ILO Director-General Juan Somavia. "We urgently need to move to a sustainable development path with a coherent set of policies with people and the planet at the centre".

"The forthcoming "Rio+20" United Nations conference will be a crucial moment to make sure decent work and social inclusion are integral parts of any future development strategy", he added.

Achim Steiner, Executive Director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP), said: "This report comes on the eve of World Environment Day on 5 June under the theme Green Economy: Does it Include You?".

"The findings underline that it can include millions more people in terms of overcoming poverty and delivering improved livelihoods for this and future generations. It is a positive message of opportunity in a troubled world of challenges that we are relaying to capital cities across the globe as leaders prepare and plan for the Rio+20 Summit," he added. More

 

G8 Deaf to Climate Change Warnings by International

When the chief economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA) issues a dire warning, you'd think the world's leaders would sit up and take notice. If this statement by Fatih Birol last week wasn't a dire warning, then I don't know what is: "What I see now with existing investments for plants under construction... we are seeing the door for a 2 degree Celsius target about to be closed and closed forever."

 

A global rise in temperature of 2°C is widely considered to be a threshold beyond which catastrophic climate change is likely to occur; many scientists and governments consider 1.5° a safer bet. And we're talking here about catastrophic with a capital C -- for many communities around the world, climate change has already proved catastrophic.

So how did the leaders of the G8 richest countries respond to this warning at their summit in Camp David last week?

By speaking in platitudes, at best: "Different energy sources have different inherent risks and must be developed in a safe, efficient, and environmentally sustainable manner."

And by missing the point, at worst.

To keep that door to 2°C open, three things need to happen:

More renewables: We need to invest in renewable energy services like there's no tomorrow. (Literally!)

Displace Fossil Fuels: Simply adding more renewables to the mix isn't enough, they need to displace fossil fuels. Global investment in clean energy reached a record-breaking high of $260 billion in 2011. According to the IEA, however, energy demand is expected to rise by a third by 2035. While the share of fossil fuels in the total energy mix will shrink, without a dramatic change of direction our use of these climate-deadly fuels will grow in absolute terms.

Conservation and Efficiency: In addition to adopting policies which create incentives to invest in renewables, and disincentives to invest in fossil fuels (phasing out fossil fuel subsidies to start with), we need to conserve energy wherever possible, and to use energy more efficiently. More

 

FINANCE-RE 2: Finance report and workshop

In 2011, the IEA-RETD commissioned and published the report‘Strategies To Finance Large-Scale Deployment Of Renewable Energy Projects: An Economic Development And Infrastructure Approach’.

The report concludes that In 2011, the IEA-RETD commissioned and published the report‘Strategies To Finance Large-Scale Deployment Of Renewable Energy Projects: An Economic Development And Infrastructure Approach’. The report concludes thatnew policy approaches are key to attracting massive flows of capital needed to scale up renewable energy. On April 17^th 2012, a group of nearly 30 representatives from the banking and finance sector and government gathered in London to discuss the report’s findings as well as existing and possible new finance policy instruments, and their respective roles in mobilising new capital to the renewable energy sector. The study and workshop primarily addressed the role for governments in financing the large-scale deployment of renewable energy.

Policy brief

The main workshop findings are summarized in a policy brief. At this website you can download a short (one page) and longer (three pages) version of the policy brief.

Influencing the policy process

A key objective of IEA-RETD is to enhance the policy framework for accelerated deployment of renewable energy. One of the routes we use is empowering energy policy makers through the provision of information. As an example, the findings of the Finance workshop were directly plugged into Clean Energy Ministerial which was held in London on 25^th and 26^th April 2012. IEA-RETD continuously looks at suitable occasions to share policy recommendation with high level decision makers. More

 

Energy security is worth paying for

The challenge confronting ministers as they plan our future energy strategy is simply put. A fifth of the UK’s electricity generating capacity will be lost over the next decade as elderly nuclear plants are decommissioned and dirty coal-fired power stations closed.

Yet demand for electricity is forecast to double between now and 2050. The draft Energy Bill published yesterday is an important step towards plugging the gap. The task is proving that much harder because of the last government’s unwillingness – until its dying days – to commit to a new generation of nuclear reactors. That lost decade means we face a real threat of power shortages within the next few years. In 2009, official figures were published showing that by 2015, unmet electricity demand would amount to 3,000 megawatt hours a year, roughly the equivalent of blacking out a medium–sized city for a day. The economic downturn may have pushed that worrying prospect back, though not by much.

Ed Davey, the Energy Secretary, has rightly given nuclear generation the central role in our future energy mix. It is clean and reliable. The draft Bill proposes long-term contracts to incentivise energy suppliers by guaranteeing a profit if they invest in nuclear, as well as in renewables. Such certainty is crucial. The withdrawal of the German energy companies E.ON and RWE from the British nuclear programme was prompted by Germany’s panicky decision to turn its back on nuclear power following the Fukushima meltdown. Nevertheless, it was hardly a vote of confidence in our nuclear industry. The new legislation should help instil such confidence. More

 

Fukushima Meltdown Hastens Decline of Nuclear Power

On May 5, 2012, Japan shut down its Tomari 3 nuclear reactor on the northern island of Hokkaido for inspection, marking the first time in over 40 years that the country had not a single nuclear power plant generating electricity.

The March 2011 earthquake, tsunami, and subsequent Fukushima Daiichi nuclear meltdown shattered public confidence in atomic energy, thus far making it politically impossible to restart any of the reactors taken offline. And the disaster’s legacy has spread far beyond Japan. Some European countries have decided to phase out their nuclear programs entirely. In other countries, nuclear plans are proceeding with caution. But with the world’s fleet of reactors aging, and with new plants suffering construction delays and cost increases, it is possible that world nuclear electricity generation has peaked and begun a long-term decline.

Prior to the Fukushima crisis, Japan had 54 reactors providing close to 30 percent of its electricity, with plans to increase this share to more than 50 percent by 2030. But nuclear power dropped to just 18 percent of Japan’s electricity over the course of 2011. When the quake and tsunami hit, 16 reactors had already been temporarily shut down for inspections or maintenance; another 13 underwent emergency shutoffs, including the four Fukushima Daiichi reactors now permanently shut down. Others were subsequently closed due to earthquake vulnerability or for regular inspection. Now that Tomari 3 is offline, all 44,200 megawatts of Japan’s nuclear capacity that are listed as “operational” by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) are in fact idle with no set date for restart.

Next to Japan, the most dramatic shift in nuclear energy policy following Fukushima occurred in Germany. Within days of the disaster, Chancellor Angela Merkel announced that Germany’s seven oldest reactors, all built before 1980, would shut down immediately. And in May 2011, the government declared that Germany would phase out nuclear entirely by 2022. Nuclear power generated 18 percent of the country’s electricity in 2011, down from 24 percent in recent years and well below the peak in 1997 of 31 percent.

Just before Germany’s phaseout decision, Switzerland abandoned plans for three new reactors that were going through the approval process. The government also announced that all five of the country’s reactors—which for years had provided some 40 percent of its electricity—will close permanently as their operating licenses expire over the next 22 years. Italy, which had discontinued its nuclear program after the infamous 1986 nuclear disaster in Chernobyl, Ukraine, had in 2010 decided to restart it. But in a June 2011 referendum, more than 90 percent of Italian voters chose to ban nuclear power. Later in 2011, Belgium announced plans to phase out the seven reactors that provide more than half of the country’s electricity. Even in France, with a world-leading 77 percent of its electricity coming from nuclear power, newly elected President François Hollande has said he intends to reduce this share to roughly 50 percent by 2025.

According to IAEA data, 13 reactors with a combined 11,400 megawatts were permanently shut down in Japan, Germany, and the United Kingdom in 2011. Seven new reactors totaling 4,000 megawatts were connected to the grid—three in China and one each in India, Iran, Pakistan, and Russia—with less than 1,000 megawatts added through increasing, or “uprating,” existing nuclear plant capacities. As of May 2012, after two new reactor connections in South Korea and two permanent U.K. shutdowns, the world’s 435 operational nuclear reactors total 370,000 megawatts of capacity. Actual nuclear electricity generation in 2011 fell to 2,520 terawatt-hours, 5 percent below the 2006 peak. More

 

Wind, Solar, Coconuts: SIDS and Climate Change

Renewable energy is having a hard enough time becoming mainstream on the mainland, but when small island developing states, or SIDS, decide to take energy matters into their own hands – by even adding coconuts to their portfolio – one has to wonder: what’s the hang up for larger countries?

Besides some of the obvious factors, the primary factor being islands have relatively small populations and therefore demand less energy, islands states, particularly tropical islands, come ripe with plenty of sunshine, ocean wind and, of course, coconuts. What do coconuts and coconut palms have to do with renewable energy? Well, coconut palms not only supply coconuts, which are a renewable food source, but are a “naturally recyclable source of a wide range of products, including transportation fuel, oil … and fiber.”

Kokonut Pacific, an Australian company, has tapped into this iconic island market and has been relatively successful at getting island nation states to make use of coconuts and coconut palms in a sustainable, low-impact way. SIDS are beginning to see a self-sufficient economy developing, one that combines a renewable energy portfolio with economic and environmental sustainability.

Bold action and creativity, while commendable, nevertheless fails to account for the fact that climate change does not operate in isolation, but impacts the globe aggregately. The carbon released in the Canadian tar sands, for example, will inevitably influence sea level rise in the Pacific Ocean and there’s not much a small island can do to abate that.

Dire predictions in mind, island nation states are serious when it comes to climate change and they should be; islands like the Maldives are predicted to experience devastating effects of global warming, including the shocking realization that their islands could soon disappear entirely under rising sea levels. The lowest country on Earth, the Maldives, are comprised of 1,200 islands, the highest reaching merely 5 feet above sea level. With a population of 320,000, President Mohammed Nasheed has been very vocal in expressing his concern over climate model predictions on his nation. More

 

Apple to use only green power for main data center

Apple Inc plans to power its main U.S. data center entirely with renewable energy by the end of this year, taking steps to address longstanding environmental concerns about the rapid expansion of high-consuming computer server farms.

The maker of the iPhone and iPad said on Thursday it was buying equipment from SunPower Corp and startup Bloom Energy to build two solar array installations in and around Maiden, North Carolina, near its core data center.

Once up, the solar farm will supply 84 million kWh of energy annually.

The sites will employ high-efficiency solar cells and an advanced solar tracking system.

Later in 2012, Apple also intends to build a third, smaller, bio-gas fuel-cell plant.

The two solar farms will cover 250 acres, among the largest in the industry, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer told Reuters. Apple plans on using coal-free electricity in all three of its data centers, with the Maiden facility coal-free by the end of 2012.

“I’m not aware of any other company producing energy onsite at this scale,” Oppenheimer said in a telephone interview. “The plan we are releasing today includes two solar farms and together they will be twice as big as we previously announced, thanks to the purchase of some land very near to the data center in Maiden, which will help us meet this goal.”

Concerns about the ever-expanding power consumption of computer data centers have mounted in recent years, as technology giants build enormous facilities housing servers to cater to an explosion in Internet traffic, multimedia use and enterprise services hosting, via cloud computing. More

 

Vermont becomes first state to ban fracking

Vermont has become the first U.S. state to ban the natural gas drilling practice of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. On Wednesday, Vermont Gov. Peter Shumlin signed the measure into law at a ceremony attended by environmentalists and a group of high school students who pushed for the ban.

Gov. Peter Shumlin: "This bill will ensure we do not inject chemicals into groundwater in a desperate pursuit for energy. It is a big moment. I hope other states will follow us. The science on fracking is uncertain at best. Let the other states be the guinea pigs. Let the Green Mountain State preserve its clean water, its lakes, its rivers and its quality of life."
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Portugal is meeting its astonishing renewable energy target goal of 60 % by 2020

 

Portugal is meeting its astonishing renewable energy target goal of 60 % by 2020. with Wind. Solar. Hydro. Bio-fuels And WAVE.

Scroll down page to LISTEN to audio interview to Portugal Minister Manuel Pinho, about how Portugal is achieving its high targets for renewable energy. http://beyondzeroemissions.org/category/keywords/climate-change-policy/renewable-energy-target

Pelamis wave energy converter generating electricity into the Portuguese grid off the coast of Aguçadoura, Portugal, in October 2008. This footage was captured for the documentary 'Home' by Yann Arthus-Bertrand.

'Emptiness' sound track courtesy of Alexander Blu.
http://www.pelamiswave.com

 

New IMF Working Paper Models Impact Of Oil Limits On The Economy

Our Finite World

11 May, 2012


The International Monetary Fund (IMF) recently issued a new working paper called “The Future of Oil: Geology versus Technology” (free PDF), which should be of interest to people who are following “peak oil” issues. This is a research paper that is being published to elicit comments and debate; it does not necessarily represent IMF views or policy.

The paper considers two different approaches for modeling future oil supply:

1. The economic/technological approach, used by the US Energy Information Administration (EIA) and others, and

2. The geological view, used in peak oil forecasts, such as forecasts made by Colin Campbell and forecasts made using Hubbert Linearization.

The analysis in the IMF Working Paper shows that neither approach has worked perfectly, but in recent years, forecasts of oil supply using the geological view have tended to be closer than those using the economic/technological approach. Since neither model works perfectly, the new paper takes a middle ground: it sets up a model of oil supply where the amount of oil produced is influenced by a combination of (1) geological depletion and (2) price levels.

This blended model fits recent production amounts and recent price trends far better than traditional models. The forecasts it gives are concerning though. The new model indicates that (1) oil supply in the future will not rise nearly as rapidly as in the pre-2005 period and (2) oil prices are likely to nearly double in “real” (inflation-adjusted) terms by 2020. The world economy will be in uncharted territory if this happens.

It seems to me that this new model is a real step forward in looking at oil supply and the economy. The model, as it is today, points out a definite problem area (namely, the likelihood of oil high prices, if growth in oil production continues to be constrained below pre-2005 rates of increase). The researchers also raise good questions for further analysis.

At the same time, I am doubtful that the world GDP forecast of the new model is really right–it seems too high. The questions the authors raise point in this direction as well. Below the fold, I discuss the model, its indications, and some shortcomings I see. More

 

Can Geoengineering Solve Global Warming? : The New Yorker

Late in the afternoon on April 2, 1991, Mt. Pinatubo, a volcano on the Philippine island of Luzon, began to rumble with a series of the powerful steam explosions that typically precede an eruption. Pinatubo had been dormant for more than four centuries, and in the volcanological world the mountain had become little more than a footnote. The tremors continued in a steady crescendo for the next two months, until June 15th, when the mountain exploded with enough force to expel molten lava at the speed of six hundred miles an hour. The lava flooded a two-hundred-and-fifty-square-mile area, requiring the evacuation of two hundred thousand people.

Within hours, the plume of gas and ash had penetrated the stratosphere, eventually reaching an altitude of twenty-one miles. Three weeks later, an aerosol cloud had encircled the earth, and it remained for nearly two years. Twenty million metric tons of sulfur dioxide mixed with droplets of water, creating a kind of gaseous mirror, which reflected solar rays back into the sky. Throughout 1992 and 1993, the amount of sunlight that reached the surface of the earth was reduced by more than ten per cent.

The heavy industrial activity of the previous hundred years had caused the earth’s climate to warm by roughly three-quarters of a degree Celsius, helping to make the twentieth century the hottest in at least a thousand years. The eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, however, reduced global temperatures by nearly that much in a single year. It also disrupted patterns of precipitation throughout the planet. It is believed to have influenced events as varied as floods along the Mississippi River in 1993 and, later that year, the drought that devastated the African Sahel. Most people considered the eruption a calamity.

For geophysical scientists, though, Mt. Pinatubo provided the best model in at least a century to help us understand what might happen if humans attempted to ameliorate global warming by deliberately altering the climate of the earth.

Current levels of [fossil fuel] consumption “put the world perfectly on track for a six-degree Celsius rise in temperature. . . . Everybody, even schoolchildren, knows this will have catastrophic implications for all of us.” - Fatih Birol - Chief Economist - International Energy Agency. 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

 

Nuclear power is only solution to climate change, says Jeffrey Sachs

Earth Institute director says urgency of problem and immaturity of renewable energy industry leave little option but nuclear?

Combating climate change will require an expansion of nuclear power, respected economist Jeffrey Sachs said on Thursday, in remarks that are likely to dismay some sections of the environmental movement.

Prof Sachs said atomic energy was needed because it provided a low-carbon source of power, while renewable energy was not making up enough of the world's energy mix and new technologies such as carbon capture and storage were not progressing fast enough.

"We won't meet the carbon targets if nuclear is taken off the table," he said.

He said coal was likely to continue to be cheaper than renewables and other low-carbon forms of energy, unless the effects of the climate were taken into account.

"Fossil fuel prices will remain low enough to wreck [low-carbon energy] unless you have incentives and [carbon] pricing," he told the annual meeting of the Asian Development Bank in Manila.

A group of four prominent UK environmentalists, including Jonathon Porritt and former heads of Friends of the Earth UK Tony Juniper and Charles Secrett, have been campaigning against nuclear power in recent weeks, arguing that it is unnecessary, dangerous and too expensive. Porritt told the Guardian: "It [nuclear power] cannot possibly deliver – primarily for economic reasons. Nuclear reactors are massively expensive. They take a long time to build. And even when they're up and running, they're nothing like as reliable as the industry would have us believe."

But Sachs, director of the Earth Institute and professor of sustainable development at Columbia University in the US, said the world had no choice because the threat of climate change had grown so grave. He said greenhouse gas emissions, which have continued to rise despite the financial crisis and deep recession in the developed world, were "nowhere near" falling to the level that would be needed to avert dangerous climate change.

He said: "Emissions per unit of energy need to fall by a factor of six. That means electrifying everything that can be electrified and then making electricity largely carbon-free. It requires renewable energy, nuclear and carbon capture and storage – these are all very big challenges. We need to understand the scale of the challenge." More

 

Small Island States Take Steps to Become Energy Independent and End Poverty

High-level forum in Barbados to chart a new 'Sustainable Energy for All' roadmap ahead of "Rio+20" Conference, UNDP

The Government of Barbados, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States will host from 7 to 9 May 2012 the High-Level Conference of the Small Island Developing States (SIDS): Achieving Sustainable Energy for All in SIDS and the Rio+20 Informal Ministerial Meeting.


Prime Minister of Barbados Freundel Stuart and UNDP Resident Representative in Barbados Michelle Gyles-McDonnough will open the Conference which will discuss policy strategies leading to universal access to energy, increase in renewable energy production and energy efficiency.

Convened less than two months before world leaders gather in Brazil for the UN Conference on Sustainable Development "Rio+20", the Bridgetown Conference brings together high level representatives of 39 countries from the Caribbean, the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Africa, that belong to the Small Island Developing States group.

"Small island developing states can leap toward the goal of a poverty free and prosperous future by changing their energy sectors," said Prime Minister Stuart. "Just weeks before the Rio+20 Conference, our countries can rally the international community with a unified voice, sharing our aspiration to become fully sustainable, and to contribute to a meaningful outcome of the meeting in Rio de Janeiro." More