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Green energy subsidies spiral out of control

06.07.15

News

The Carbon Brief Interview: Jennifer
Morgan

Carbon
Brief

We interview the global director of the climate programme at
the World Resources Institute, Jennifer Morgan. We discuss
everything from anticipated obstacles to a climate deal in Paris in
December to whether a 1.5 degree target is politically
possible.

Climate and energy news

Green energy subsidies spiral out of
control

The
Telegraph

Subsidies for renewable energy schemes will reach £9 billion
a year by 2020, says the front page of Saturday’s Telegraph – £1.5
billion more than the former coalition government had originally
planned. The projected cost is a result of high volumes of rooftop
solar panels, falling wholesale energy prices, and offshore wind
farms proving more productive than anticipated. In Wednesday’s
Budget, Chancellor George Osborne the coalition’s target to
increase the proportion of taxation raised from key environmental
taxes, the Telegraph says. Meanwhile, BusinessGreenreports that George
Osborne has been urged by 42 green businesses to fight to protect
tax breaks for energy-saving goods in this week’s Budget
announcement, after an EU court ruled the discounted rates were
illegal.

National Trust to spend £30m on green schemes |
The Times

The Times

The National Trust is to invest £30 million in renewable
energy schemes at dozens of its properties as part of efforts to
reduce fuel bills. More than 40 castles, stately homes and country
properties have been identified as suitable sites for sources of
renewable energy, says The Times. The projects will save 2,586
tonnes of carbon dioxide a year and will cut its energy usage by
20%, reports. The charity – UK’s largest private landowner – hopes
to save £4m a year in energy costs, says Bloomberg.

UK energy sector must decarbonise by 2030, says
UN-backed report

BusinessGreen

In order to meet 2050 climate change targets, the UK’s power
sector must decarbonise by 85 to 90 per cent by 2030, a United
Nations-backed report says. The UK portion of the ‘The Deep
Decarbonisation Pathway Project’ analyses possible pathways the UK
could take to decarbonise its energy system. Carbon capture and
storage technology will need to play a central role in both power
generation and industrial sectors in order to meet the mid-century
targets, the report also says.

Tory MP for crucial shale gas area calls for
fracking ‘buffer zones’

The Telegraph

Fracking sites should be separated by six mile “buffer
zones” to prevent the industrialisation of the countryside, the
Conservative MP for a crucial shale gas constituency has said.
Kevin Hollinrake is the newly-elected MP for Thirsk and Malton in
North Yorkshire, where gas company Third Energy is applying for
planning permission to carry out fracking. “The beauty of our
countryside is North Yorkshire’s main asset and we must protect
this at all costs,” he said.

New coal plants ‘most urgent’ threat to the
planet, warns OECD head

The
Guardian

Governments must rethink plans for new coal-fired power
plants around the world, as these are now the “most urgent” threat
to the future of the planet, the head of the OECD has warned.
Secretary-general Angel Gurria told governments to think “twice, or
three, or four times” before allowing new coal-fired plants to go
ahead. “They will still be emitting years from now,” he warned, and
many could turn into “stranded assets”, having to be mothballed
decades before their economic lifetime had expired. RTCCalso has the
story.

If Lancashire won’t frack we will, insist
Yorkshire residents

The
Times

The campaign to start a British fracking industry is to
shift across the Pennines, with an application yesterday in North
Yorkshire for the first of up to 50 wells, The Times reports. Third
Energy applied to North Yorkshire county council to frack a well at
an existing conventional gas extraction site at Kirby Misperton
near the Flamingo Land theme park. It hopes that the application
will be considered by the council’s planning committee in October
and, if approved, fracking could start before Christmas, says The
Times.

UN climate change chief tells charities to stop
complaining about global
warming

The
Independent

Environmental charities should spend less time complaining
about global warming and more time coming up with workable
solutions to the problem, says Janos Pasztor, Ban Ki-moon’s
assistant secretary-general on climate change. “There is a role for
opposition and saying ‘no’ but there is a big difference being
saying ‘no’ and saying ‘how we can make this work?’,” Pasztor told
The Independent. Carbon Briefalso recently
interviewed Mr Pasztor.

Shell Arctic oil drilling to commence within
weeks

BBC
News

Oil and gas giant Shell is expected to begin drilling for
oil in the Arctic within the next two weeks. Thirty ships left
Dutch Harbor in Alaska on Thursday for the Arctic to support two
initial exploratory wells. The company has already committed about
$7bn (£4.5bn) to the controversial project, and is confident it
will find huge quantities of oil in the region, says the
BBC. The Financial Timesalso has the
story.

India’s climate pledge ‘critically important’,
says UN climate chief

The Guardian

A strong pledge to curb carbon emissions by India, the
world’s third largest polluter, will be “critically important” to a
meaningful deal at the crucial UN climate summit in Paris in
December, says the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change. Of India’s “vital pledge”, Christiana
Figueres said: “It is one of the very large developing countries
and it will be very important to see what their trajectory on
energy is going to be and, in particular, how they are planning to
provide energy to 400 million un-electrified people in
india.”

Climate and energy comment

Fracking’s ‘Waterloo’ shatters power
plans

Danny
Fortson, The Sunday Times

The recent decisions to refuse fracking permits in
Lancashire has brought a renewed focus on Britain’s troubled energy
industry, says Danny Fortson in The Sunday Times. With the industry
facing mass closure of old power stations, a dearth of new ones
being built, and rocketing imports of foreign fuels, “there will be
a huge gap to fill,” he says. Fortson takes a look at the prospects
for coal, gas, nuclear and renewables, which “all face serious
challenges,” he warns.

China’s steel dragon has lost its appetite for
American coal

John Dizard, The Financial Times

While the US coal industry “scored a win at the Supreme
Court” it may still be too late to save it from looming financial
disaster, says John Dizard in the FT. This week, the Supreme Court
ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency must take into
account a business’ financial losses before forcing it to regulate
its pollution. But the coal-mining industry’s “death march” will
have been driven by two forces that have nothing to do with
environmental activism, says Dizard: the lowering of natural gas
prices and the deflation of the China steel production
bubble.

New climate science

Pathways to deep decarbonization in the United
Kingdon

Deep
Decarbonization Pathway Project

A new report led by UCL scientists analyses possible
pathways the UK could take to decarbonise its energy system and
help keep global temperature rise under the internationally agreed
2C target by 2050. The power sector must decarbonise by 85-90% by
2030 and the use of fossil fuels must decrease by more than 70% by
2050, the report finds. Carbon capture and storage will play an
important role, if and when the technology is “cost effective and
available at scale.”

Assessment of the upper-ocean observing system in
the equatorial Pacific: The role of Argo in resolving intraseasonal
to interannual variability

Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic
Technology

A new paper examines the utility of free floating buoys,
called Argo floats, for monitoring temperature variability in the
Pacific. It finds that the high spatial resolution of Argo’s makes
them better suited for studying spatial patterns of variability on
seasonal timescales than fixed moorings, but less well suited for
studying variability over periods shorter than 20 days.