Commentary: Why fossil fuels will remain a key stumbling point at COP26 climate conference
CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts: Equally world leaders get together at the United Nations Climatic change Briefing, or COP26, in Glasgow, there is tremendous ebullience most the potential of light-green energy sources.
Merely the hard fact is that fossil fuels still account for lxxx per cent of global energy, as they did when governments signed the Paris climate understanding to much fanfare at COP21 half-dozen years ago.
And even though many economies have not still returned to their pre-pandemic gdp level, the globe is on runway in 2022 to post its 2nd-largest almanac increase in carbon dioxide emissions on tape.
True, the International Energy Agency's (IEA) contempo flagship World Energy Outlook report, which remains the gilded standard of energy analysis, strikes an optimistic annotation by placing greater emphasis on what can be done to limit global warming.
But at the same time, "keeping the door to 1.5 degrees Celsius open up" seems to involve and then many moving parts, innovations, adaptations and sacrifices, that it is hard to run across how it will work without the global carbon price most economists regard every bit necessary.
POTENTIAL FOR GLOBAL CARBON Revenue enhancement?
In particular, a carbon tax simultaneously incentivises and coordinates emissions reduction efforts, and allocates resources accordingly, in ways that state planners simply cannot attain.
The idea of a carbon taxation remains political anathema in the Usa; it briefly came to the fore in the contempo budget negotiations simply was dropped like a hot spud.
Instead, US President Joe Biden will promote a melange of measures, such as a shift to electric cars and an end to fossil fuel development, that are mostly good ideas but together are vastly more expensive and less efficient than a carbon taxation.
The European Union, with its Emissions Trading System - a cap-and-trade alternative to a carbon revenue enhancement - has made more progress on carbon pricing. Even so, the scheme currently covers just about 50 per cent of the Eu'south greenhouse gas emissions and gives many allowances for gratis.
No wonder, so, that policymakers in emerging and low-income economies react and so cynically when they are asked to risk slowing down their countries' economic development in guild to assistance combat climate change. Many of them instead enquire why global climate accords practice non push button all countries to accomplish similar levels of per capita emissions.
CUTTING COAL REQUIRES DEVELOPING COUNTRIES BUY-IN
Fifty-fifty if a global carbon tax magically came to pass, the earth would still need a mechanism for transferring resources and know-how to developing economies to preclude them from condign the major emitters of the future.
I have promoted the idea of establishing a defended Earth Carbon Depository financial institution that would house technical expertise, facilitate the substitution of all-time practices and assistance channel hundreds of billions of dollars in grants and loans to lower-income countries.
Buy-in from developing countries is essential. Coal, which accounts for 30 per cent of global carbon emissions, is cheap and plentiful in countries such as Republic of india and China. Although 21 countries take pledged to phase out coal-fired power, about all of them are in Europe, and they account for merely virtually v per cent of the world's coal-fired power stations.
China's contempo pledge to stop building new coal plants abroad is a good start. But Cathay itself produces more than half of the earth's coal-fired power, and many other countries, such as Vietnam, will presumably now build more coal plants on their ain.
What can and must we expect at COP26? Listen to CNA'south The Climate Conversations to find out:
Green Energy SOURCES AMID Current Free energy CRISIS
Moreover, fifty-fifty with a carbon tax, regulators will notwithstanding accept to tackle myriad bug, such every bit deciding where current of air turbines tin can be built, how legacy coal-powered electricity plants can exist phased out and to what extent natural gas tin be used as a transitional free energy source.
Considering wind and solar are intermittent energy sources, there is a strong case for a renewed push button to ramp upwards nuclear power. This would involve using much safer modern technologies to build both big-scale power plants and the kind of small-scale generators used in nuclear submarines.
Green political parties may cringe at such an idea, just climate literacy needs to be married with free energy literacy. Achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2050, by which fourth dimension the world may have ii billion more people than it does now, requires some hard choices.
Convincing policymakers and the public to face up those choices is not like shooting fish in a barrel. A lack of air current this past summer has contributed to the current free energy crunch in Europe, where leaders are at present hoping that Russian President Vladimir Putin will provide the region with more natural gas.
Likewise, with energy prices prepare to soar this wintertime, Biden has implored the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) countries to produce more oil, even as his administration attempts to reduce domestic fossil fuel production.
Environmental, social and governance investing, whose proponents aim to choke off capital for fossil fuel investment, has been all the rage, and for a while even seemed to offering handsome returns.
Simply with energy prices surging again, that may no longer be the case. In any result, fifty-fifty if advanced economies – maybe including the US and recalcitrant Australia – ban fossil fuel exploration, less-developed economies will still have powerful incentives to aggrandize the exploitation of their own carbon-emitting resources.
Information technology is encouraging that the IEA still sees limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius as an attainable target, even if the path is formidable. Unfortunately, it remains very much in question whether political efforts to achieve this goal will heat upwardly as fast as scientists tell us the planet is.
When it comes to climate summits, therefore, one can only hope that the 26th fourth dimension is the amuse.
Kenneth Rogoff is a old chief economist of the International Monetary Fund and Professor of Economics and Public Policy at Harvard Academy. PROJECT SYNDICATE
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