Environmental groups call for global support of renewables
LONDON, England, 2004-10-27
(Refocus Weekly)
A coalition of 17 environmental groups warns that global warming threatens to reverse human progress, and calls on the international community to take “urgent action” to introduce small-scale renewable energy projects.
The impacts of climate change will fall disproportionately upon developing
countries and the poor, says ‘Up In Smoke’ produced Friends of the Earth,
Greenpeace, Oxfam, WWF and other groups. Industrialized nations must reduce
their emissions of carbon fuels massively by the middle of this century, and
must help developing nations to adapt to climate change or the goals of the
Millennium Development Goals to halve world poverty by 2015 will be
unattainable.
“Small-scale renewable energy projects promoted by governments and community
groups ... can help to both tackle poverty and reduce climate change if they are
replicated and scaled-up,” it explains. “This will require political
commitment and new funds from governments in all countries, and a major shift in
priorities by the World Bank and other development bodies.”
“For years, the superpower politics of the Cold War blocked efforts to end
global
poverty,” it adds. “Today, the hot war of energy economics and global
warming presents an enormous obstacle.”
It is a mistake to think that declining oil reserves will solve climate change
as fossil fuels run out because “unfortunately, there are more than enough
fossil fuels left – especially coal – to trigger catastrophic warming.”
Fossil fuels collectively account for four-fifths of the world’s primary
energy supply and the International Energy Agency predicts that, without
intervention, fossil fuels will continue to dominate the energy mix.
“The dominance of dirty energy is not a natural state or a rational economic
choice,” it says. “It’s largely the consequence of massive, perverse
subsidies poured into coal, oil, and gas, and the failure to internalise the
cost of their environmental damages.”
Global subsidies for energy are at least US$235 billion per year, with the share
of research going into renewables at 7%.
“The situation is absurd because renewable energy is super-abundant,” the
report notes. “It provides a triple win for human development and an exit
strategy from the multiple problems of fossil fuel addiction.”
Globally, renewables account for 13% of global energy, although solar, wind,
geothermal and tidal account for less than one-quarter of that.
“They have the potential, however, to meet all human energy needs,” with
small-scale applications particularly well-placed to improve the lives of 1.6
billion people who have no access to electricity. The theoretical potential of
renewables is two million times greater than current use, and research presented
at the Bonn conference on renewables said the world could increase its use of
renewables by a factor of 120.
The major obstacle to the mainstream uptake of renewables in the developing
world are the “plentiful and cheap” polluting fuels such as brown coal, and
a “global framework with major incentives is needed to encourage the shift,
and forego growing dependence on oil and coal.”
“For this revolution to happen, there has to be a managed withdrawal from
fossil fuels towards the uptake of cleaner low-carbon technologies,” and it
warns that “any framework that builds on the current Kyoto Protocol will have
to deal with the sense of historical injustice about rich countries’
ecological debts, or the dawn of renewables will be derailed.”
Click
here for more info...
Visit http://www.sparksdata.co.uk/refocus/ for your international energy focus!!
|