SHARM EL SHEIKH, Egypt, Nov 11, The Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action, Selwyn Hart, Friday said that to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, the world must abandon fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
“There is no argument around the science at all. But of course, developing countries, especially the poorest, will need assistance to make the transition to a renewable energy future,” said Hart, who is from Barbados and has acted as a negotiator in the past during several UN Climate Conferences (COPs).
He said that the focus should be on helping remove the barriers that developing countries face accelerating their transition to renewables.
“For example, the cost of capital. Renewable energy investments, by their nature, are very capital-intensive. Eighty percent of the investment must be upfront because you have to buy the solar panels and the battery storage and the installation, and that’s costly”, Hart said, adding, however, that the running costs are zero because there is no need to buy any oil or diesel to power a renewable energy station.
Hart has served in several climate change leadership positions, including as a climate adviser for the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), chief climate change negotiator for Barbados as well as the coordinator and lead negotiator on finance for the Alliance of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS), gave a striking example of the unfair conditions countries in the developing world face when it comes to the energy transition.
“I’ll compare Algeria and Denmark. Denmark has some of the worst potentials for renewable energy [while] Algeria’s potential for renewable energy is probably 70 times higher. But Denmark has seven times more solar panels than Algeria. The reason is the cost of capital,” Hart said, referring to the return expected by those who provide capital for business.
He said the international community needs to “throw the kitchen sink” at solving this problem, he stated.
For Hart, mobilizing the trillions of dollars needed to make the transition should be the focus instead of pouring capital into new fossil fuel projects, which he sees as a real risk that could lead to investing in stranded assets or passing debts onto future generations.
“Fossil fuels are a dead end, as a Secretary-General has said…We need to increase renewable energy deployment to around 60 percent of total energy capacity over the course of the next eight years, which means roughly a tripling of install capacity over the course of this decade,” Hart said, noting that this is more than possible because the world has tripled its renewable energy capacity over the last decade.
“We just need to do it again this decade. The technologies are there; the finance is there. It just needs to be deployed in the right place, where the emissions are and where the population growth and energy demand is”, he urged.
Meanwhile, decarbonization is being viewed as a shorthand for finding alternative ways of living and working that reduce emissions and capture and store carbon in our soil and vegetation. It requires a radical change in our current economic model, which is focused on growth at all costs.
As ‘Decarbonization Day’ got underway here, a new report from the United Nations underscored the importance of rapid and large-scale action to tackle greenhouse gas emissions from the energy-intensive countries, which account for about 25 percent of the total CO2 emissions globally and 66 percent in the industrial sector.
The study singles out the cement, iron, steel, and chemicals and petrochemical industries as the most significant emitters and identifies key practical measures for them to transition to a carbon-neutral economy.
“Adopting circular economy approaches to help reduce the need for new materials will be crucial in this respect. Solutions must be implemented without delay,” the Executive Secretary of the UN European Economic Commission, Olga Algayerova, said in a statement.
The key recommendation is true “a circular carbon economy” based on carbon reduction, capture reuse, and removal, as well as a push for innovation and research to tackle the challenge presented by the need for high temperatures and chemical processes required that are currently most efficiently reached by burning fossil fuels.
Another key recommendation is the creation of industrial clusters to “share emissions” and reduce costs, creating green and sustainable jobs. You can learn more about this here.
A so-called master plan to accelerate the decarbonization of five major sectors – power, road transport, steel, hydrogen, and agriculture – was also presented on Friday by the COP27 Presidency.
Governments representing over half of the global GDP, including the United States and the United Kingdom, set out a 12-month action plan with 25 collaborative actions to be delivered by COP28 to help make clean technologies cheaper and more accessible everywhere.
The plan has emerged as part of the so-named Breakthrough Agenda; an initiative launched last year during COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland.
Through the plan, actions target sectors accounting for more than 50 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and are also designed to reduce energy costs and enhance food security, with the building and cement sectors to be added to next year.
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