The global energy crisis has brought climate to a crossroads
So much for the fight against the climate crisis — it’s the energy crisis that’s taking precedence. And it couldn’t have come at a more crucial time.
In just three weeks, leaders and negotiators will meet for the COP26 international climate talks in the Scottish city of Glasgow. Momentum was building for putting an end date on coal and speeding up the global transition from climate-altering fossil fuels to renewables before the crisis hit.
But a rush back to fossil fuels is worrying some experts that this moment in time could slow down that transition, particularly on the phaseout of coal, now in closer reach than at any other time in history.
“The worry with China’s power crunch is that it appears to be strengthening the argument of pro-coal interests there that the transition to renewables is happening too fast,” said Christine Shearer, Global Energy Monitor’s program director for coal, which tracks the use of fossil fuels around the world.
With winter fast approaching and the global economy rebounding from the Covid-19 pandemic faster than the world had prepared for, governments are being forced to reach for sources of energy that are readily available. The infrastructure that exists to harness energy from renewables like wind and solar simply isn’t enough to meet demand.
“A lot of decision-makers are sort of panicking in some ways about the social response,” said Lisa Fischer, program leader at the European climate think tank E3G.
Throwing more money at fossil fuels is not a solution, she said, and some short-term solutions are contradictory to longer-term sustainable goals.
A better response would be to “turbocharge” funding for deploying renewable and energy efficiency programs, including getting infrastructure projects that were hampered by the pandemic, off the ground.
And there entails the dichotomy of the crisis — the world can either “turbocharge” efforts in renewables, or slow it down, and lean more on fossil fuels, as is happening now.
A geopolitical mess
There are several reasons for the energy crunch, beyond the rebound from the pandemic. Power from renewables has been below expectations — in the UK and continental Europe, the summer was less windy than usual, so wind power under-delivered. In China, lower rainfall meant less energy from the country’s hydropower plants.
Chinese authorities have kept mountains of coal imported from Australia sitting at docks for months, refusing to show Australia it is willing to take its exports as the two countries remain cold over Canberra’s calls for an investigation into the origins of Covid-19. That has only added to…
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