International Energy Agency Calls for Action to Avert Climate Change

Despite controversy, climate change becoming a serious issue

Climate change continues to grab attention as a number of conferences that will bring together world leaders grow closer. The more attention that is drawn to the subject, the more controversy it creates. Those opposing the concept of climate change are quick to denounce its supporters as “alarmists” because of their focus on the potential disastrous implications of the phenomenon. Though the concept is widely disputed, more governments and organizations are beginning to take it seriously, with many believing that work must be done quickly to avert catastrophe.

 

Agency calls for the rapid adoption of alternative energy systems

The International Energy Agency (IEA), a France-based intergovernmental organization that acts as a policy adviser for its associated states, suggests that the adoption of alternative energy systems is too slow. The IEA has issued a call for countries to hasten their efforts to make use of alternative energy in the hopes of mitigating the effects of climate change. The agency suggests that country’s need to increase the money there are pouring into renewable fuels and their associated infrastructures significantly if they want to avoid the more calamitous aspects of the climate change phenomenon.

Economics may stand in the way of alternative energy

Alternative energy is often the subject of criticism from some countries who argue clean technology is not yet at a point where it can be considered a viable replacement for fossil-fuels. The IEA argues that viable clean energy systems already exist and that world leaders need only to learn how to use them effectively in order to sidestep the supposed financial problems that could be associated with these systems.

 

Controversy could be pushing climate change down the political agenda

Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the IEA, has expressed concern with the priorities of some countries. She notes that the issue of climate change has become an unpopular topic. As such, the subject has diminished in importance for some governments.

By Alicia Moore@HydrogenFuelNews.com 

International Energy Agency: Double Current Pace of Clean Energy Development

Climate-change skeptics like to call environmentalists “alarmists” because of their call for urgent action to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The skeptics say the science is too uncertain, that there’s no rush to act, and those who argue otherwise are sanctimonious lefties out of touch with reality.

For them it’s drill baby, drill.

It’s a convenient way of dismissing bad news, which is why it’s important when traditionally conservative organizations like the International Energy Agency weigh in on the issue with their own call for accelerated action.

This week, the Paris-based agency with an oil-soaked history said the world, if it has any hope of keeping the average rise in global temperatures to below 2 degrees C, needs to double its rate of spending on clean-energy infrastructure between now and 2020.

It goes on to say that if controlling carbon emissions is truly a priority, the world needs to spend $36 trillion (U.S.) between now and 2050 on low-carbon technologies, on top of the $100 trillion or so needed under a business-as-usual scenario.

“This is the equivalent of $130 per person every year,” said the agency, pointing out that the spending should be considered an investment rather than an expense. “Every additional dollar invested can generate three dollars in future fuel savings by 2050.”

The clean energy technologies we require already exist, the agency’s executive director, Maria van der Hoeven, pointed out. Offshore wind power, concentrated solar power and carbon capture and storage were cited by the agency as the technologies with the most potential but the least traction.

“It’s there and we’re not using it,” she lamented, at the same time urging governments to wake up to the “dangers” of complacency. “The evidence of climate change, if anything, has gotten stronger. At the same time, it has fallen further down the political agenda.”

The fact investment is nowhere near what’s needed is reason for concern, she added. On our current investment path, global carbon dioxide emissions are likely to nearly double by 2050.

“Are we on track to reach out 2-degree goal? No, we aren’t,” she said bluntly. “Our ongoing failure to realize the full potential of clean energy technology and tapping energy efficiency is alarming.”

It bears emphasizing: these are not the words of Greenpeace or Al Gore or David Suzuki; these are the words of a 38-year-old international organization whose original mandate, and the reason for its creation, was to monitor and manage global oil markets in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.

The International Energy Agency has until the past few years placed energy security and economic development well ahead of environmental protection, and it has been repeatedly accused of having a fossil-fuel bias while underestimating the potential of renewable energy.

But these days it’s singing a different tune. Fatih Birol, the agency’s chief economist, has been quite frank over the past three years about what lies ahead. Commenting on global CO2 emissions data last month, Birol said the trend is “perfectly in line” with a temperature increase of 6 degrees C by 2050. That, he added, “would have devastating consequences for the planet.”

Alarmist, granola-munching tree hugger!

Perhaps this puts into perspective why so many environmental groups and members of the general public are concerned about projects such as the Keystone XL and Northern Gateway oil pipeline projects.

The companies behind them aren’t investing billions of dollars for infrastructure that will only be needed temporarily. They expect a payback, and that means keeping the infrastructure flowing with oil at high capacity for at least the next half century. The same thinking applies to coal-fired power plants built today.

“Fossil fuels remain dominant and demand continues to grow, locking in high-carbon infrastructure,” according to the energy agency. “The investments made today will determine the energy system that is in place in 2050.”

That’s what many people are worried about, and not just environmentalists. They know that the decisions we make today will have a profound impact on the quality of life of our children and their children tomorrow.

Some, including certain federal cabinet ministers, may deem that radical. Most common sense folk would call it risk management.

By Tyler Hamilton@theenergycollective.com

Solar Desalination System for Arid Land Agriculture

Experimental farm irrigated with solar-powered desalination system. (Credit: Image courtesy of American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (BGU) researchers have created a human-made oasis in the desert with the successful application of a solar-powered desalination system that provides water for irrigation in arid regions. The project was made possible with support from American Associates, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (AABGU).

The solar-powered system uses nanofiltration membranes to treat the local brackish (saline) water, resulting in high-quality desalinated irrigation water. The results of the Josefowitz Oasis Project indicate that irrigation with desalinated water yields higher productivity from water and inorganic fertilizers compared with current practices. Crops grown with desalinated water required 25 percent less irrigation and fertilizer than brackish water irrigation. In some cases, the yield of crops increased.

The findings were presented in a paper at the Conference on Desalination for the Environment in Barcelona late last month by Dr. Andrea Ghermandi of BGU's Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research (ZIWR) on behalf of his colleagues Drs. Rami Messalem (ZIWR), Rivka Offenbach, and Shabtai Cohen of the Central Arava Research and Development Station. The Josefowitz Oasis Project was funded by Samuel Josefowitz, of Lausanne, Switzerland with additional support from The Alliance for Global Good, Greensboro, North Carolina through AABGU.

"The growing global demand for food and competition for resources between economic sectors compel future agricultural systems to be more efficient in the use of natural resources, such as land and water," says Dr. Ghermandi. "In the Middle East, the lack of fresh water promotes the exploitation of marginal quality sources such as brackish aquifers, but the sustainability of the current management practices is questionable."

The research was conducted in the Arava Valley of Israel, south of the Dead Sea at a facility that produces environmentally sustainable crops in arid environments. The Arava basin is extremely dry and its agricultural activities rely extensively on brackish groundwater from local aquifers.

Agricultural experiments with variable irrigation water quality, application rate and four different staple crops were conducted over two growing seasons between September 2010 and June 2011. Nanofiltration membranes allowed for less pumping of energy. The desalination plant operated at low pressure, low energy consumption and with little maintenance required during the period.

The researchers also used red beet, a salt-tolerant crop, to successfully consume the liquid wastes of the pilot facility over two growing seasons. This demonstrates that the moderately saline concentrate waste from brackish water desalination can be a useable byproduct.

 ScienceDaily

Can Cleaner Cookstoves Help Save the World?

Did the slick animations in the Girl Effect video that’s been viewed 3.6 million times compel you to buy soccer cleats for a South African girl? Maybe Matt Damon persuaded you to invest in Water.org so you can supply clean water and toilets to the world’s poor. Perhaps you’ve bought something (RED) to fight AIDS?

If you haven’t, you’ve missed out on a big trend. Overseas development assistance is going private. More and more, private charities, foundations and nongovernment organizations are joining or displacing government organizations such as the U.S. Agency for 

International Development and multilateral groups like those of the United Nations to help the poorest of the poor. Celebrities vouch for various projects, and the Internet makes giving simple. From 2005 to 2010, overseas aid from U.S. private groups jumped by 164 percent, while official development assistance grew by only 8 percent, according to figures tracked by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Apart from making Americans feel good, does the money they donate to global causes ($22.8 billion in 2010) actually do good? The results of a study published last month highlight how surprisingly hard it is to answer that question. It involved measuring the effects of installing innovative cookstoves in 2,600 households in 44 villages in India’s Orissa state.

The clean-cookstove movement has considerable momentum. Championed by Hillary Clinton and Julia Roberts, the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves has raised $135 million to reduce smoke exposure from cooking indoors with primitive stoves or open fires: The World Health Organization estimates that such exposure causes 2 million premature deaths a year. The alliance hopes to distribute 100 million smoke-reducing stoves, which come in endless varieties, by 2020.

The researchers behind the study, Rema Hanna of Harvard, and Esther Duflo and Michael Greenstone of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, expected to confirm the health benefits of the $12.50 mud-based, chimneyed cookstoves installed in Orissa. In laboratory experiments, clean cookstoves have been shown to release fewer pollutants and burn more efficiently than traditional cooking methods. However, such tests can’t predict what will happen in the real world. That’s where a well-designed randomized trial is irreplaceable.

In Orissa, households were randomly assigned to three waves of stove construction, and researchers measured a meaningful reduction in smoke inhalation in the first year after a stove was installed. Over a longer period, however, they saw no health benefits and no reduction in fuel use. That’s because once the stoves and chimneys developed cracks, the villagers generally chose not to fix or maintain their new devices but instead went back to their old, smoky ways of cooking.

This doesn’t suggest the clean-cookstove campaign should be abandoned so much as slowed down. It would be wise to test various designs in real-life settings, and, where necessary, take more time to human-proof models. Clean-cookstove advocates need to develop incentives for families to stick with the stoves, and they need to study why many villagers in the India trial embraced the devices yet continued using their conventional cooking fires as well. Otherwise, the innovative stoves of today could wind up in the same junk piles as models from efforts decades ago.

Those castoffs are a reminder that, however well- intentioned, many assistance programs for the developing world can prove fruitless. One obvious area for similar rigorous evaluation is microcredit, the fastest growing field in global poverty reduction. According to the Microcredit Summit Campaign, the number of families receiving microloans grew from 7.6 million in 1997 to 137.5 million in 2010. A handful of studies on whether these programs ultimately reduce poverty have come up with ambiguous findings, pointing to a need for more, and longer-term, trials. A related initiative that needs field- testing is insurance for the poor against sickness or economic calamity -- for example, insufficient rainfall for farmers.

The purpose is not to debunk the idea of helping poor countries. On the contrary, such work bolsters the case for aid by ensuring that dollars are well spent. Generally, such trials point out the need to alter, not ditch, assistance programs. Frequently, they shine a light on programs that have proved successful beyond expectation. A series of trials in Kenya, for instance, showed that young adults who had been dewormed as children were more productive and earned more than peers who didn’t get the treatment.

Groups such as Duflo’s Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Lab and Innovations for Poverty Action are dedicated to such studies. Their work deserves support, and their conclusions demand attention. Long the standard for medical programs, randomized trials can help sort promising projects in foreign aid from truly effective ones, and speed our way toward a better world. 

Bloomberg