On Radio 4’s Today programme yesterday, Ed Davey was highly critical of the G7’s pledge to phase out fossil fuels by the end of the century.
He said:
It is so symbolic for the G7, the largest, richest countries in the world who have built their economies on fossil fuels, to say they’ve got to get rid of them. It’s definitely historic and symbolic.
But I have two concerns though. They are talking about the end of the century, and I don’t think climate science says we have got that long. I think we have to move further and faster.
And I also worry that if you set targets that are so long – 85 years away – I’m not sure how meaningful they are. I think it would give some countries an excuse for inaction, when they’ve got to be acting now, in this current decade.
At the end of this year we’ve got the very important Climate Change Summit in Paris. I hope we are not going to end up at that summit talking about targets at the end of the century. We need to be talking about targets at the end of the next decade.
Talking about a possible deal in Paris he said:
It’s not just any old deal, it has to be a good deal that links our economies and our actions to the scientific evidence.
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10 Comments
Whilst I share Ed’s concerns, at least they have agreed on the need to phase out fossil fuels and set a date by which they will achieve it.
Whilst the date seems a long way into the future, it isn’t really all that far into the future, given many technologies are still in their infancy and the timescales involved with deployment. So the challenge now is to create a favourable R&D investment environment so that we can see rapid development of these technologies into something fit for large-scale deployment.
So the real question is whether the current UK government is able to seize the day and make the UK a leader, or to do as previous governments and stand on the sidelines and leave it to the markets, with the result that we buy in skills and products…
Ed Davey is right — setting a targeinks far away as 85 years from now is like kicking it into the very, very long grass.
At PMQs yesterday Mr Cameron could not have sounded more complacent. He seems to think that because we have a million homes with solar panels on the roof we are making fast progress. When you consider that solar panels for domestic use have been available for decades, have improved dramatically over time and have come down in price the rate of progress has been hopeless.
We should campaign for a switch of investment away from nuclear and put solar panels on every roof, domestics and commercial.
If we carry on using fossil fuels throughout the coming century, will the planet actually be habitable when they are due to be phased out?
@ John Tilley
The cost of the panels is probably no more than 25%of the installation cost. While covering all more or less south facing roofs in the southern part of the UK is probably worth doing, so far it would still need subsidies to make it economic. Over a year for a typical household, a 2 kWpeak solar array would generate about 25 – 35 % of the total household electricity demand. Say 1 MWh per year. Typical household energy demand is between 4 & 5 MWh per year for electricity and 16-20 MWh for space and water heating. And then you need to add on transport and the energy contained in things.
While we in the UK do have good potential for wind power, it’s clearly not going to be anything like enough to drive the whole of the UK. Nuclear is an essential transition technology to replace base load coal. ( I remember arguing with Chris Huhne about that – Brighton 2006 I think). But longer term we need enough electricity generation and storage to provide all our heat and power requirements, including probably manufacturing diesel fuel for HGVs and kerosene for aircraft. I think the best way to get that is either concentrated solar, or solar panels, in hot, sunny places with low populations. Saudi Arabia? Libya? Yes, there might be a political problem…
I think the planet would not yet be uninhabitable, but it would only be able to support a much smaller human population than it does today. Civilisation would have collapsed after mass migration with wars over food , water and other resouces.
Jenny Barnes 11th Jun ’15 – 2:48pm
Thanks, Jenny, your grip on the details is better than mine and I do not disagree with much of what you say.
However the idea that nuclear is necessary as a transition is spoiled by the extremely long time it will take for new nuclear to come on line, the extremely high cost to build and the even higher costs when it goes wrong.
When the technicians in Chernobyl and Fukushima can come back to us with their final invoice to say that everything is cleaned up now, then we might start to believe the costs associated with new nuclear. That might be a very long wait.
New nuclear is just not economic — which is why Ed Davey and Chris Huhne had to break their election pledges and jump through all sorts of presentational hoops to provide what will in practice be massive public subsidies.
The improvements (coupled with reductions in costs) in solar and tidal technologies over the last fifteen years have been significant. Tidal promises to be even more so in the very near future.
By the time electricity from the hugely expensive new nuclear trickles through the system we could have increased solar production (from the domestic roof and from concentrated sources such as those you refer to) many times over without the intrinsic risks and inevitable costs of nuclear.
“New nuclear is just not economic”
The trouble is John, that whilst nuclear may not in itself be economic, we have a slight problem of satisfying our still growing appetite for electricity. Currently there doesn’t seem to be any non-fossil/non-carbon fuel power source (other than uranium-based nuclear) that can give us the amounts of energy our current economy demands and is relatively ready for ‘primetime’. So the issue isn’t so much whether nuclear is economic or not, but do we have a recognisable economy or not, which in turn leads us to the question as to whether we see a future based on a civil society or not.
Yes there is thorium-based nuclear, which seems to be cleaner etc. but globally we’ve yet to have any real experience of running a commercial scale thorium reactor. Which being optimistic (!), could be in 20~30 years time, if we start the today…
Obviously, the current controversy and uncertainty around Hinkley Point C (ie. whether the steelwork will need to be recase and whether the Chinese will continue to back the investment).
Roland
The German government is making steady progress towards 80%of electricity being produced from renewables.
By coincidence this was covered in a programme on BBC Radio 4 just after noon today.
Germany has a larger population than the UK and a bigger industrial demand for electricity and they are confident that they can phase out nuclear completely in a fe years from now.
I think the only problem we have in the UK is poverty of ambition when it comes to renewable energy sources and also in the potential for developing technology to reduce the need for electricity. Not so long ago a simple switch of light-bulbs massively reduced our national demand for electricity. Simple changes in housing design and standards could achieve similar reductions in the demand for electricity. Of course none of these things will be achieved by the attitude of “leave it to the free market” or the attitude of “let’s stick with the old dinosaur nuclear, these tiny little mammals will never catch on”.
What is missing in this country is the political will and the gumption to stand up to vested interests such as the nuclear power industry and it’s obbyists.
John,
Firstly, I see I omitted the final part of my final sentence, namely unexpected forces seem to be massing against new nuclear, so the probability of us being left with some rather difficult decisions (ie. of the form politicians would rather avoid making) in the coming few years does seem to be increasing…
Otherwise I don’t disagree with you about the the “poverty of ambition”. Although, at least the government has given the go ahead for the Swansea Bay tidal lagoon – hence my question – will the UK government seize the day?
Roland,
Yes, I agree about the Swansea Bay tidal lagoo.