Climate deal in jeopardy at Madrid talks
Shifting motorists into electric vehicles is pointless if coal remains the fuel of choice for many countries, writes Colm McCarthy
▪ Chilean officials presiding over this year’s UN climate talks being held in Madrid said yesterday that they will propose a compromise to bridge yawning differences among countries deadlocked on key issues.
With the meeting already into extra time, draft documents presented overnight failed to achieve consensus. Observers and environmental groups warned that they risked undoing or stalling on commitments made in the 2015 Paris climate accord.
Chilean diplomats insisted that there would have to be trade-offs if there was to be a deal supported by all countries.
But observers said there were still huge obstacles to overcome. Alden Meyer, a climate policy specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, pointed out: “I’ve been attending these climate negotiations since they first started in 1991, but never have I seen the almost total disconnection we’ve seen here between what the science requires and the people of the world demand — and what the climate negotiators are delivering.”
Meyer said the current drafts didn’t reflect urgent warnings from scientists that greenhouse gas emissions need to fall sharply, and soon.
“The planet is on fire and our window of escape is getting harder and harder to reach the longer we fail to act,” Meyer said.
Senior European officials, including the EU’s top climate official, Frans Timmermans, were engaged in lastminute negotiations to prevent the talks from collapsing.
But among the countries pushing back against agreeing new measures to help poor countries and set new emissions cutting targets was the United States, which under President Donald Trump announced it was pulling out of the Paris accord.
Small island nations, which fear disappearing beneath the waves over the coming decades as global warming leads to sea level rise, bristled at the US position.
“Decisions should be made by countries that are going to be bound by those decisions and not by parties who are not going to be bound by the Paris agreement,” said the representative of the Pacific state of Tuvalu.
Among the main issues at stake are rules for international carbon markets and a system for channelling money to help poor countries cope with the economic impact of climate change.
‘France relies on nuclear energy for three-quarters of its power generation without drama’
LAST Thursday’s election in the UK changed nothing about the likely course of Brexit — the future relationship with the EU barely featured in the dismal campaign. There will be no second referendum, the parties favouring a re-think failed to mobilise and lost the election, as predicted. The Article 50 resignation tendered in March 2017 finally takes effect at the end of January, the UK becomes an ex-member and the next several years will be occupied with a protracted and costly battle over Britain’s terms of trade with Europe.
More clarity emerged about Europe’s Green New Deal, the next phase of the EU’s climate strategy, presented to the European Parliament last week by Commission president Ursula von der Leyen. Accoutred inevitably in (biodegradable) political packaging, like all such documents, it is largely aspirational. The annex of 47 ‘actions’ includes some counted twice (to ensure that the number of actions is impressively large), numerous commitments to ‘review’ current policies and the following gem: ‘Initiatives to screen and benchmark green budgeting practices of the Member States’. To those drafting election manifestos this Yuletide, can I recommend, for the difficult bits, deploying ‘initiatives to screen and benchmark’.
But there is some serious content, too, in the Green New Deal. European climate policy has been the most effective amongst the major world economic powers. However, it has been poorly designed, a reflection of the 1997 Kyoto accord which focussed on national emission targets rather than on the correct setting of policy instruments. The alternative, and the only policy likely to work if adopted widely enough, is to establish minimum prices for carbon-emitting activities, designed to depress world demand for the offending goods and services and to secure the needed emission reductions at least economic cost.
The headline commitment is to enshrine in European law a target, for 2050, of net zero emissions. The intention is that this positions the EU, responsible for only about a 10th of worldwide emissions, to demand reciprocal action from others, especially from China and the USA, which between them produce 44pc of the world total. Only when the EU, China and the (postTrump) USA combine, will there be a serious advance on the record of failure which is the legacy of Kyoto.
There are more specific commitments, to be fashioned into concrete EU policies over the next few years. The most important concern the decarbonisation of electricity generation and the extension of carbon taxation in transport to the aviation and marine sectors. There is not much point shifting motorists into electric vehicles in the decades ahead if coal remains the fuel of choice for power generation in so many European countries — the emissions just move from the tailpipe to the power station. Germany has taken the first steps towards phasing out coal, a painful decision particularly in the eastern regions where coal has been important. But Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic will oppose the move and Ireland, for once, is on the side of the angels. The ESB recently announced the closure of two turf stations (they have even worse per-unit emissions than coal) and the sole remaining station, which belongs to another state company, Bord na Mona, is likely to follow. These stations are less than half-way through their useful lives and should never have been built — all three are leftovers from the bubble mindset of the early 2000s.
The biggest emitter in Irish power generation has been the Moneypoint coal station in Co Clare, commissioned in 1985. It will close no later than 2025 according to ESB and becomes less economic every year as carbon charges rise. The Government should encourage ESB to close it sooner and I doubt they need much persuading. Ireland would then have no power generation based on the combustion of either coal or turf, the worst of the fossil fuels by some distance.
Electricity demand in Europe will rise through the energy transition as transport and home heating are shifted away from internal combustion engines and oil-fired central heating respectively. There is a limit to the practical possibilities for reliance on wind and solar technologies, since always-on base-load generation is needed to avoid black-outs. The currently available options are nuclear and gas-fired generation.
Europe’s green parties are two-faced about nuclear, conceding that it has low life-cycle emissions but playing to the gallery about waste disposal and other risks. Granted there are safety risks, but there are also 450 nuclear stations operating around the world without a high incidence of accidents or mishaps. Far more deaths are attributable, through the production cycle, to coal than have ever been attributed to nuclear power, but the nuclear technology has become associated in the public mind with nuclear bombs. France relies on nuclear energy for three-quarters of its power generation without political drama.
The commercial record of new-build nuclear has been atrocious in recent years with big cost over-runs in Finland and in France and capital costs with current technology look prohibitive for Ireland. But new designs for smaller, and hopefully less costly, units are being developed and it is foolish to preclude a nuclear option should these efforts come to fruition.
Gas-fired power stations produce about one-half the per-unit emissions coming from coal. Since some baseload units will have to be added to the Irish system as demand rises and Moneypoint closes, it is inevitable that some new gas units will have to be considered. People who want to electrify the car fleet, use more electricity for home heating and build more power-hungry data centres, while promoting a ‘green’ power system reliant entirely on weather-dependent renewables, are not being serious and will lose the support of the public for climate action.
Ireland is on the right side of another key component in the Commission’s proposals, the extension of carbon taxation to the aviation and marine transport sectors. The Taoiseach announced Ireland’s support, at a meeting in Zagreb two weeks ago, for the Commission’s plan to levy a carbon tax on jet fuel, hitherto exempt. There is no VAT on airline tickets either and I had the pleasure last year of flying back from Spain with Ryanair for €24.99, only to part with €30 for the taxi. Airline tickets are delightfully affordable, and we may all be flying a little too cheaply. The European Commission’s success, against determined opposition from legacy ‘national champion’ airlines, in liberalising air transport in Europe, has been a key ingredient in democratising air travel and creating a free market for Ryanair, easyJet and Wizz. These airlines have in turn put manners on the old monopolies, to the benefit of the travelling public.
Another key ingredient has been Michael O’Leary, the outstanding Irish businessman of his generation and a national champion in his own right, who displayed contempt for the Commission’s efforts in an undisciplined rant against the fuel tax proposal last week. There are ironies at another level — Ryanair’s claims that its young fleet is fuel efficient, emailed to loyal customers daily, are perfectly credible, and the company has less to fear from excise on jet fuel than competitors with ancient gas-guzzling fleets.
On climate action, as on Brexit, there is no percentage in preventing the future.