Author Archives: hmcadmin

PLEA Network

4 November 2015, Renew Economy, Graph of the Day: Watch US electricity grid evolve before your eyes. We talk a lot about the changing shape of the electricity grid, but what does it look like? We first came across this rather hypnotic GIF via the Union of Concerned Scientists blog, The Equation, who borrowed it from Pat Knight at Synapse Energy Economics. It shows, in animated graph form, how the electricity mix has changed in each state of America over the past 15 years. And as UCS senior energy analyst John Rogers notes, the only constant in the “mesmerising” GIF is change. 

The really interesting changes come from about 2009 onwards. But Rogers sees five trends in the graph’s “undulating bars” and outlines what’s behind them:

  1. Coal waning – The most visible change in recent years, says Rogers, is shown in the shrinkage of the dark section on the left of the GIF. “Coal provided fully half of (the US’s) electricity as recently as 2006. Now it’s down to below 40 percent, as the eroding economics of coal have asserted themselves,” he writes.
  2. Natural gas growing – For the US, a big part of the decline of coal (and the rise of concerns about natural gas overreliance).
  3. Renewables surging – Another reason King Coal is falling, says Rogers: “the result of smart policies in a lot of forward-thinking states, and great cost reductions. Synapse’s Knight offers this great statistic: ‘In 2014, 11 states produced 10 percent or more generation from renewables (compared to zero states in 2005)’.”
  4. Renewables surging (wind) – Wind, the technology to beat in many US locations, now accounts for more than 10 per cent of generation in nine states, says Rogers, and more than 25 percent in two (Iowa and South Dakota).
  5. Renewables surging (solar) – At the end of the GIF’s journey, solar starts to make its presence felt, says Rogers – and it’s only just beginning to claim its share of the spotlight, with rapidly increasing scale and rapidly dropping costs. See Hawaii. Read More here
PLEA Network

4 November 2015, New York Times, The Tough Realities of the Paris Climate Talks. In less than a month, delegates from more than 190 countries will convene in Paris to finalize a sweeping agreement intended to constrain human influence on the climate. But any post-meeting celebration will be tempered by two sobering scientific realities that will weaken the effectiveness of even the most ambitious emissions reduction plans that are being discussed. The first reality is that emissions of carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas of greatest concern, accumulate in the atmosphere and remain there for centuries as they are slowly absorbed by plants and the oceans. This means modest reductions in emissions will only delay the rise in atmospheric concentration but will not prevent it. Thus, even if global emissions could be reduced by a heroic average 20 percent from their “business as usual” course over the next 50 years, we would be delaying the projected doubling of the concentration by only 10 years, from 2065 to 2075. This is why drastic reductions would be needed to stabilize human influences on the climate at supposed “safe” levels. According to scenarios used by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, global annual per capita emissions would need to fall from today’s five metric tons to less than one ton by 2075, a level well below what any major country emits today and comparable to the emissions from such countries as Haiti, Yemen and Malawi. For comparison, current annual per capita emissions from the United States, Europe and China are, respectively, about 17, 7 and 6 tons. The second scientific reality, arising from peculiarities of the carbon dioxide molecule, is that the warming influence of the gas in the atmosphere changes less than proportionately as the concentration changes. As a result, small reductions will have progressively less influence on the climate as the atmospheric concentration increases. The practical implication of this slow logarithmic dependence is that eliminating a ton of emissions in the middle of the 21st century will exert only half of the cooling influence that it would have had in the middle of the 20th century. Read More here

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3 November 2015, ITV, What you need to know about the Paris climate change summit. A meeting later this month will see 190 nations convene in Paris to try and work out a way to tackle climate change. Here is what you need to know about it: What is the Paris meeting? On November 30, 190 nations will gather for two weeks to try and work out a deal to tackle climate change. The aim will be to find a way to reduce the global emissions of greenhouse gases – such as carbon dioxide and methane – over the coming decades to avoid the world’s average temperature increasing by no more than 2C by the end of this century. That’s compared to the world’s temperature before the industrial revolution around 150 years ago, when parts of the world began the mass burning of fossil fuels. Go above that rise in temperature, say scientists, and we tip over into “dangerous climate change” where there will be drastic increases in floods, storms, heatwaves and other catastrophic and irreversible environmental changes around the world. These will disproportionately affect the poorest parts of the world, those least able to adapt. At the moment, if the world does nothing, it is on course for a 5C temperature rise by 2100. This might not seem like much, but bear in mind that the average difference between now and the Earth’s previous Ice Age was around 5C. Read More here

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3 November 2015, Bloomberg View, What Economists Don’t Get About Climate Change. Economists tend to see climate change as a big optimization problem: Weigh the potential costs of future disasters against the benefits of fossil-fueled economic growth, and find a price of carbon that will balance the two. Unfortunately, it’s an illusory goal. The Cost of Carbon Consider, for example, a recent study by Yale University’s Kenneth Gillingham and colleagues. Using a collection of so-called “integrated” models of climate and the economy, they seek to get a better handle on how various uncertainties — in weather, population growth and technological development — might affect the price that policy makers should put on carbon. Their conclusion: No matter what happens, the optimal price in 2020 would probably be no more than about $50 per ton. The paper’s appearance may be timed to influence policy makers at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, which begins at the end of this month. It really shouldn’t, because it feigns certainty in areas where none is to be had. Granted, such integrated models include some realistic climate physics and economics. Yet their builders inevitably face crucial questions about which we know very little. For example, just how sensitive are global temperatures to the addition of further carbon dioxide? And how much economic damage can we expect from a temperature rise of, say, 2 degrees or 5 degrees? Read More here