Articles include: A climate-change-inspired video road-trip across the U.S.; Key readings on IEA’s ‘Net Zero by 2050’ report; Tips: How to weatherize your home; Talking climate with those holding different worldviews; New Mexico imposes strict rule to prevent venting, flaring of natural gas; Can fossil-fuel-dependent Wyoming build a more diverse economy?; Swiss utilities used a simple tactic to get customers to buy renewable energy; Foresters use fire and goats to care for Missouri’s Mark Twain National Forest; Youth-led Sunrise Movement calls for national job guarantee
Tag: International Energy Agency (IEA)
Reports: Electric vehicles – 3 articles
BBC: Electric cars: What will happen to all the dead batteries? While electric vehicles (EVs) may not emit any carbon dioxide during their working lives, he’s concerned about what happens when they run out of road – in particular what happens to the batteries. “In 10 to 15 years when there are large numbers coming to the end of their life, it’s going to be very important that we have a recycling industry,” he points out.
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists: Electric vehicles to go from 11 million to 145 million in nine years, says IEA. And there could be even more electric vehicles on the road by 2030 if policymakers were to give them a jumpstart; a newly released report by the International Energy Agency (IEA) has found that there could be as many as 230 million electric vehicles worldwide by 2030 if governments agreed to accelerate their efforts to encourage production of the low-carbon vehicles—vital to staying within the global climate target.
Axios: To combat climate change, electric cars have to be cheaper. Teslas, which make up more than 70% of the electric-car market, have even wealthier drivers, with average incomes of more than $300,000, Hardman’s research has found. (Multiple requests for comment to Tesla were not returned.)
DeSmogBlog, March 6, 2021
Articles include: PA Families Exposed to High Levels of O&G Chemicals, Report Finds; UN Condemn Expanding Petrochemical Industry in Louisiana; Fracking Companies Admit Shale Was a Bad Bet; New IEA Data World on Path to Resume Business-as-Usual’; Climate Disinformation Database: Steven Goddard.
Report: Getting Building Height Right for the Climate
GreenTechMedia discusses Getting Building Height Right for the Climate. Skyscrapers use and lose more energy than low-rise buildings, research shows. Can smarter design and technology change that?
It may seem obvious that cities filled with big buildings use energy more efficiently than dispersed suburban landscapes, and that newer, taller buildings are more energy-efficient than older, squatter structures.
People widely understand that New York City, for example, ranks well on energy use per person, where housing tends toward the vertical, one boiler room can serve many units, and heat rises into the units above, rather than being lost to the sky.
But now some climate-minded architects and engineers are questioning that orthodoxy. It’s starting to look like there might even be a sweet spot for building height: the four-story courtyard.
The question the study asked was how efficient are ultra-tall versus low-rise residential buildings. According to their analysis, the four-story courtyard used the least energy per household.
The question matters, because buildings are directly or indirectly responsible for nearly 40 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency.
“We wanted to look at 2,000 units and whether they are sustainable in as unbiased a way as possible,” said Christopher Drew, the firm’s director of sustainability. The architects published their research in a paper in the International Journal of High-Rise Buildings, and later in the book Residensity, which expanded on the paper to account for land use and underground utilities.
Report: Renewable Power Grows Strongly, Despite the Pandemic
The New York Times discusses how Renewable Power Grows Strongly, Despite the Pandemic. Sources of renewable energy are expected together to be the main generators of electricity by 2025, eclipsing coal, the International Energy Agency said.
The energy industry has experienced its worst year in decades because of the pandemic, but clean sources for generating electricity have still managed to grow, the International Energy Agency said Tuesday.
Consumption of electricity generated by wind, solar and hydroelectric sources will grow nearly 7 percent in 2020, a remarkable jump because overall energy demand will slump by 5 percent, the steepest drop since World War II, the Paris-based forecasting group said in a new report.
Study: We have to accelerate clean energy innovation to curb the climate crisis. Here’s how.
Vox discusses why We have to accelerate clean energy innovation to curb the climate crisis. Here’s how. A detailed road map for building a US energy innovation ecosystem.
“Innovation” is a fraught concept in climate politics. For years, it was used as a kind of fig leaf to cover for delaying tactics, as though climate progress must wait on some kind of technological breakthrough or miracle. That left climate advocates with an enduring suspicion toward the notion, and hostility toward those championing it.
Lately, though, that has changed. Arguably, some Republicans in Congress are still using innovation as a way to create the illusion of climate concern (without any conflict with fossil fuel companies). But among people serious about the climate crisis, it is now widely acknowledged that hitting the world’s ambitious emissions targets will require decreasing resource consumption, aggressively deploying existing technologies, and an equally aggressive push to improve those technologies and develop nascent ones.
What kind of reform? Here, as in other areas of climate policy, there is increasing alignment across the left-of-center spectrum. Two recent reports illustrate this.
The first — a report so long they’re calling it a book — is from a group of scholars at the Columbia University Center on Global Energy Policy (CGEP), led by energy scholar Varun Sivaram; it is the first in what will be three volumes on what CGEP is calling a “National Energy Innovation Mission.” The second is from the progressive think tank Data for Progress, on “A Progressive Climate Innovation Agenda,” accompanied by a policy brief and some polling.
Both reports accept the International Energy Agency (IEA) conclusion that “roughly half of the reductions that the world needs to swiftly achieve net-zero emissions in the coming decades must come from technologies that have not yet reached the market today.” There are reasons to think this might be an overly gloomy assessment, but whether it’s 20 percent or 50 percent, aggressive innovation will be required to pull it off.
Report: In shift to green energy, a matter of when, not if
The Christian Science Monitor discusses In shift to green energy, a matter of when, not if. A major geopolitical shift could slowly be taking shape as the world’s 20th-century focus on access to oil gives way to competition for the technologies and resources needed to power a cleaner-energy economy.
It was a moment of high drama in the final debate of the American presidential campaign: the accusation by President Donald Trump that Democratic candidate Joe Biden’s climate change proposals would “destroy the oil industry” in the United States.
And while Mr. Biden is actually proposing only to cut federal subsidies for oil, and “transition” to cleaner energy sources, President Trump clearly hopes the issue will resonate with industry-dependent voters in key states like Pennsylvania, Texas, and Ohio.
The picture is made strikingly clear in the latest annual report by the International Energy Agency, called World Energy Outlook 2020 and published this month. It sets out four alternative scenarios, tracing not just the implications of various climate policy choices, but the huge economic effects of the pandemic.
The Most Important Global Forecast That You’ve Never Heard Of
Bill McKibben writes for The New Yorker about The Most Important Global Forecast That You’ve Never Heard Of. Every year at this time, the International Energy Agency publishes its annual World Energy Outlook, which is the equivalent of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue for oil executives. That is, it incarnates their fantasies, especially the one about how this is an unchanging world, where attitudes and habits need not shift. Each year, the document forecasts a world in which fossil fuel continues to dominate for decades to come, and, because investors and governments often base their actions on those predictions, it’s almost literally the definition of a self-fulfilling prophecy.
We’re at a climate turning point. COVID-19 recovery plans could tip the scales.
Fast Company discusses why We’re at a climate turning point. COVID-19 recovery plans could tip the scales. What sort of future do we want? The pandemic recovery plans lawmakers are creating now will decide.
It’s 2030. You live in a 15-minute city and bike to work on a network of bike paths; most of the vehicles that are still on the road, from delivery trucks to school buses, are electric, running on wind and solar power from a revamped power grid. Formerly redlined neighborhoods have been planted with trees, equipped with electric carsharing, and covered in solar panels. When you want to take a quick trip to another city, you ride on an electric high-speed train.
Or none of those changes happen, and carbon emissions continue on a path toward an unlivable future.
The world is at a turning point in terms of climate math: By roughly 2030, as outlined in a landmark UN climate report, carbon emissions need to drop by about half for the world to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. By 2050, net emissions need to drop to zero. Whether that massive systems change happens, climate policy experts say, will depend on the choices we make now—including how governments choose to spend money on the recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic.
“As they design economic recovery plans, policymakers are having to make enormously consequential decisions in a very short space of time,” the International Energy Agency wrote in a recent report arguing for a green recovery.
Report: How SUVs conquered the world – at the expense of its climate
The Guardian discusses how SUVs conquered the world – at the expense of its climate. Exclusive new emissions analysis shows how much more dangerous for the climate SUVs are than smaller vehicles, and how embedded they have become in our lives.
hey are the hulking cars that have conquered the world. Spreading from the heartlands of the US to a new generation of eager buyers in China to dominate even the twisting, narrow streets of Europe, the sports utility vehicle, or SUV, has bludgeoned its way to automobile supremacy with a heady mix of convenience and marketing muscle.
The rise of the SUV as the world’s pre-eminent car has been so rapid that the consequences of this new status – the altered patterns of urban life, air quality, pedestrian safety, where to park the things – are still coming into focus.
But it’s increasingly clear that SUVs’ most profound impact is playing out within the climate crisis, where their surging popularity is producing a vast new source of planet-cooking emissions.
Last year, the International Energy Agency made a finding that stunned even its own researchers. SUVs were the second largest cause of the global rise in carbon dioxide emissions over the past decade, eclipsing all shipping, aviation, heavy industry and even trucks, usually the only vehicles to loom larger than them on the road.