An Inconvenient Thought

Propensity to fight losing battles

Tag: renewable-energy

  • Renewables for energy security

    Anika Patel, outlining key takeaways from Chatham House’s climate and energy summit for Carbon Brief:

    A key benefit of the UK’s “climate leadership”, [Rachel] Kyte argued, is that the energy transition will “make British people more secure”.

    [Ben] Parsons said the argument – recently deployed by Conservative leader Badenoch – that the energy transition replaced reliance on Russian fossil fuels with reliance on Chinese technology was incorrect.

    “Fossil fuels are fuel – they require constant replenishment. Renewables are infrastructure,” he said, adding that arguably the UK should be accelerating its deployment of clean-energy technology.

    When you hear people arguing for fossil fuel in the name of “energy security”, please interrupt and correct them.

  • Transition carbon credits are an unwise distraction

    Patrick McCully in an opinion piece for Eco-Business:

    The two largest offset standard-setting bodies are currently developing protocols to enable the creation of a market in carbon offsets from the emissions avoided by shutting down coal plants and replacing them with renewables.

    Like other voluntary carbon market methodologies, these protocols will suffer from the tendency to overestimate emission reductions. They also fail to recognise that offsets are a zero-sum game: the emissions benefit from closing coal and building renewables will be lost if polluters elsewhere are able to buy offsets from these retirements in order to avoid cutting their own emissions. Large scale coal retirements will require governments and financial institutions to accept that they will not be able to recoup all of their investments in coal plants, and will require large-scale support for the rapid deployment of sustainable power.

    Spot on. Like all avoidance-type carbon credits, the so-called “transition credits” let polluters “offset” their very real emissions (and harms) with imaginary reductions (and benefits). The seemingly robust and rigorous modeling to calculate the amount of potential emission reduction is based on two assumption-riddled speculations about the future. That’s some serious sleight of hand.

    In Southeast Asia, the key barriers to shutting down coal power plants are often political. Project developers (coal interests with significant political influence) and investors (mostly commercial banks and multilateral development banks) who built new coal plants in the late 2010s are now holding energy transition hostage to protect their financial interests. Instead of undermining their coercive power, transition credits represent capitulation.

    McCully also pointed out that carbon credits are particularly attractive to fossil fuel companies like Shell (world’s largest purchaser of carbon credits in 2024 by far). They use all forms of carbon credits to avoid reputational and regulatory pressure, but transition credits can be particularly beneficial to oil and gas interests. By paying a small price for these credits, oil and gas companies (with the help of governments, banks, and philanthropies) can get rid of the incumbent coal power in these fast-growing economies and make room for their “cleanest form of fossil fuel” gas solutions.

    My simple rule-of-thumb: if something is welcomed by fossil fuel interests, it’s bad for the climate.