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Surrendering our future
Jeremy Leggett, The Guardian
While Germany races to deliver renewable energy, Britain’s sluggish policies will cost its citizens dear
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When Britain and Germany raced to scale up their aircraft industries for war in the 1930s, the British competed rather well. Recovering from a late start, we rapidly produced machines capable of winning the Battle of Britain.
Today, the two nations are on the same side in a different battle, but Germany alone is mobilising as fast as it did 70 years ago. Our common enemy is global warming, and it is already at our gates. But while our German allies are turning out the renewable energy equivalents of Messerschmitts by the factory-load, Britain is again slow to spring into action. Worse, as we learned yesterday, officials responsible for UK mobilisation have told the prime minister it is impossible for us to build modern-day Spitfires in any number. We should instead oppose European targets set recently for such mobilisation and join other laggards in order to persuade the Germans to scale back their own efforts.
On Tuesday one of the main architects of Germany’s renewable energy policy, Hans-Josef Fell, was in London to give a press conference on peak oil. In this issue lies another, related imperative for nations like Germany and Britain to be mobilising for renewable energy as if for war. A group of German scientists, the Energy Watch Group, has completed the latest in a crop of studies showing that oil is depleting far faster than previously estimated, and that a global energy crisis is imminent. Renewable energy and energy efficiency are the only technologies that offer any hope of staving this off in time.
… Consider the stakes here. If we fail to contain global warming, we put the economy at risk. If we continue to ignore peak-oil warnings, we will plunge into the chaos of a third global energy crisis. If we continue to allow investment to flow uncontested into countries with a renewables vision, UK plc loses out on any prospect of a serious share in the next global business revolution.
Jeremy Leggett is author of “Half Gone: Oil, Gas, Hot Air and the Global Energy Crisis.”
(25 October 2007)
Energy: the fundamental unseriousness of Gordon Brown
Jerome a Paris, The Oil Drum: Europe
The Guardian reports this morning on a private report to Gordon Brown that suggests that Britain should oppose binding target for renewable energies in Europe (20% of all energy by 2020, as agreed earlier this year at this spring’s EU Summit). The Guardian flags the juicy political bits (“work with Poland and other governments sceptical about climate change to “help persuade” German chancellor Angela Merkel and others to set lower renewable targets”, “a potentially significant cost in terms of reduced climate change leadership”), but also provides some of the apparent underlying reasons provided, which are worth commenting upon:
* it undermines the carbon-trading scheme which “allows wealthy governments to pay others to reduce emissions”;
* it costs too much money (£4 billion a year to get to 9% by 2020);
* it does not help push for new nuclear plants as it “reduces the incentives to invest in other carbon technologies like nuclear power”;
Let’s say it plainly: each of these arguments is stupid, short-sighted and, quite simply, false. Let me take you through them in turn
(23 October 2007)
Also at The Oil Drum: Europe .
Labour’s plan to abandon renewable energy targets
John Vidal, The Guardian
Leaked documents detail strategy for climate change U-turn
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Ministers are planning a U-turn on Britain’s pledges to combat climate change that “effectively abolishes” its targets to rapidly expand the use of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power.
Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show that Gordon Brown will be advised today that the target Tony Blair signed up to this year for 20% of all European energy to come from renewable sources by 2020 is expensive and faces “severe practical difficulties”.
According to the papers, John Hutton, the secretary of state for business, will tell Mr Brown that Britain should work with Poland and other governments sceptical about climate change to “help persuade” German chancellor Angela Merkel and others to set lower renewable targets, before binding commitments are framed in December.
It admits that allowing member states to fall short of their renewable targets will be “very hard to negotiate … and will be very controversial”. “The commission, some member states and the European parliament will not want the target to be diluted, though others may be allies for a change,” says a draft copy of Mr Hutton’s Energy Policy Presentation to the Prime Minister, marked “restricted – policy”.
(23 October 2007)
It’s rip-off Britain, even when it comes to climate change
John Sauven, Guardian
Gordon Brown’s reluctance to embrace the economic and environmental potential of renewable energy technology is costing us time, money and could eventually cost us the climate.
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At the centre of Britain’s efforts to tackle climate change are targets for renewable energy, energy efficiency and ultra-efficient combined heat and power (CHP) plants.
Yet as warnings about the impact of global warming grow more severe, every single one of those targets is projected to be missed or has already been abandoned.
With the agreement in March of a vital new European deal to generate 20% of our energy use (not just electricity, but heat and transport as well) from renewable sources by 2020, signed in a final flourish by Tony Blair, the UK’s shortfall is even more acute.
But instead of urgently correcting these failures, Brown wants to work in an unholy alliance with the nuclear-obsessed French and climate-change denying Polish presidents to do to this agreement what Bush tried to do to Kyoto. Meanwhile, here at home the government is pouring huge resources into pursuing a nuclear ‘solution’ that can only address around 4% of the CO2 problem and will take at least 20 years to deliver.
The gulf between the UK’s poor achievements and deteriorating international climate credibility on the one hand, and Germany’s performance on the other, is stark.
John Sauven is the director of Greenpeace UK
(23 October 2007)
