INFOGRAPHIC: How investment in efficiency has reduced fuel consumption & GHG emissions since 1990

 Here is proof of how energy efficiency is the first fuel. Investment is cost-effective and reduces energy demand, therefore the need for investment in generation plant, and reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

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We're heading for 6 degrees rise says IEA. Here's a way to stop it.

I've got good news and bad news. Which would you like first?

OK, here's the bad news, and it's really bad. According to the latest figures from the International Energy Agency, greenhouse gas emissions reached a record high last year of 31.6 gigatonnes, an increase of 1Gt, or 3.2%, on 2010.

IEA’s energy pathway, that seeks to limit the average global temperature increase to a still-risky 2°C, requires CO2 emissions to peak at 32.6 Gt no later than 2017, i.e. just 1.0 Gt above 2011 levels.

Clearly this is no longer possible.

"When I look at this data, the trend is perfectly in line with a temperature increase of 6 degrees Celsius (by 2050), which would have devastating consequences for the planet," Fatih Birol, IEA's chief economist, commented.

This constitutes nothing short of a global emergency. Panic stations. Hit the red button. Call International Rescue. Something must urgently be done, right?

Yet negotiators from over 180 nations, meeting in Bonn last week to try to get a new legally binding global climate pact signed by 2015, failed abysmally in their efforts. Tragically, reports coming out suggest that they became bogged down in procedural wrangling and got lost on the road to nowhere. Any deal reached ideally needs to be ratified at the annual climate talks in Qatar in December.

That’s all bad enough. But then there's the economic paralysis gripping Europe that is stifling both investment confidence and the setting of ambitious climate-protecting legislation.

So in the face of this perfect storm, how could there possibly be any good news?

What we need is money. Lots of it. And we need the conditions necessary for it to be invested in low carbon infrastructure. Everywhere.

We are told there isn't any. But there is.

In 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available, $16.8 trillion in total was held in pension fund assets around the world, according to the OECD.

$1.589 trillion of capital is held in UK pension funds alone (just over 10% of that total), with $9.58 million held by US pension funds.

What is more, $399.6 billion is also written in insurance premiums in the UK.

Let's confine our considerations of the potential of this pot of money to the UK, although clearly a bigger sum could be unlocked on a global level.

In 2008, the rate of return on pension fund investments in the UK was negative, by a large amount, reflecting falls in the stock market. The figure represented a drop in value of around 14%. I don't have corresponding figures for the insurance industry, but I would imagine they are not too different.

Both industries are known to be conservative with their investments. Mostly, they don't invest in low carbon and environmental infrastructure. But last week's official figures show that this is one sector of the economy that is actually defying the recession and the growing, not just in the UK, but globally.

Wouldn't it make sense for these industries to invest in this sector?

Faced with a stagnant economy, all governments seem to be able to think of doing in a vain attempt to stimulate it, is to inject more cash into it. But, according to Charles Cowling, managing director of JLT Pension Capital Strategies, this is exactly the wrong thing to do, because it forces up costs (by forcing up liability values) for the very funds that could be invested in infrastructure.

Joanne Segars, Chief Executive of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), protested against the prospect of another round of quantitative easing only last week.

Furthermore, the UK's pension system is threatened with having its tax income drained by ballooning retirement costs as we all get older.

Actually, this should provide it with a further incentive to obtain a higher rate of return from its investments. But investment conditions are not yet right. And, surprisingly, nor are the attitudes of the fund managers.

According to Christopher Greenwald, head of sustainability application and operations at Swiss-based Sustainable Asset Management (SAM), which provides the data for the Dow Jones Sustainability Indexes, while companies are taking on board the sustainability agenda, investors are lagging 15 to 20 years behind.

They do not yet fully understand the impact of sustainability on their business performance and financial returns, and this is why they are experiencing losses from their investments. "Investors are about where companies were in 1995 when sustainability reporting was just getting off the ground," he says.

Clearly, they need some training in the importance of sustainability issues in evaluating company performance.

At the moment, just 1% of pension funds' assets around the world are invested in infrastructure. Regulation is one of the major drivers of pension funds investment strategies.

So what is the Treasury doing to improve the confidence of fund managers that any money they might put into investing in infrastructure in the UK will have a good ROI, and will not fall into a black hole due to the usual British disease of cost overruns and missed schedules?

Last November, the National Association of Pension Funds signed a memorandum of understanding with the Treasury to support the establishment of a new Pension Infrastructure Platform owned by pension funds, to bring as much as £2bn of investment by early 2013. Its representatives have been meeting regularly with officials in the Treasury ever since.

£2bn is not much nowadays, but it's a good start. If just 2% of that $1.5 trillion or £1 trillion in assets were invested in infrastructure, that would represent £200 billion, or the amount required for investment in low carbon infrastructure up to 2020. No one is suggesting that all of this money should be invested in low carbon infrastructure. And we haven't even considered investment companies' assets.

This gives an indication of the opportunity that the Chancellor and the Treasury has, to create the right conditions for these companies to feel confident to invest in this area.

At the moment, the cost of government debt is so low, because George Osborne wanted to lock in current low borrowing costs by issuing perpetual bonds, that there is scant reason for fund managers to be interested in the potentially much more costly mechanism to fund infrastructure projects.

But the NAPF says it is working with a core of 10-12 pension funds and the Pension Protection Fund on the details of the Pension Infrastructure Platform. “The Platform, which will be owned by pension funds for pension funds, will seek to invest in a wide range of infrastructure assets," said Joanne Segars. "It aims to raise £2 billion which could be leveraged up to £4 billion of new money for investment in infrastructure and be open for business in early 2013.”

I hope this happens. It should be just the start. There is precious little light in the gloom, but this is some of it. Let's not let this chance pass us by.

Goldman Sachs, while being investment bankers rather than pension funds, are leading the way with a $40 billion clean energy investment plan announced last week. They clearly see a good bet. Let others follow.

Oh yes, and someone should also educate pension fund managers about the advantages of looking at the sustainability performance of companies.

IEA chief says scrap fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe

As academics warn the world could exceed "safe" temperature levels in our lifetimes, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged the world to slash hundreds of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe.

Fatih Birol, speaking in an interview with EurActiv, says that the "$409 billion equivalent of fossil fuels subsidies in place around the world "encourage developing countries - where the bulk of the energy demand and CO2 emissions come from – [towards a] wasteful use of energy” and calls for their abolition.

He says that cutting these subsidies in major non-OECD countries is “the one single policy item” which could help decrease the rate of increase of global warming, so that it stays within "safe" limits.

These limits are estimated to be around 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The likelihood of dangerous warming

Two papers, to be published in the latest edition of the journal Nature are warning that emissions could reach much higher temperatures during the lifetimes of many people alive today.

This could mean that "large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada could potentially experience individual five-year average temperatures that exceed the 2 degree Celsius threshold by 2030 -- a timescale that is not so distant," one paper says.

Two degrees was the maximum limit set at the Copenhagen COP15 UNFCCC summit in 2009, and was reckoned to equate to a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of 450 parts per million (ppm).

It is considered just about bearable, but with considerable costs.

Many consider this level itself to be dangerously risky and would prefer the limit to be 1.5 degrees Celsius, which equates to 350ppm.

The papers find that "most of the world's land surface is very likely to experience five-year average temperatures that exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2060" at the current rate of increase.

A 3.5 degree increase would cause “irreversible impacts”, such as the mass extinction of an estimated 40%-70% of the world’s species and rendering the equatorial belt largely uninhabitable, according to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

The New Zealand scientists say that only if emissions are "substantially lowered", will the two degree threshold possibly be delayed by "up to several decades".

The second paper, by Zurich's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Hadley Centre of the Meteorological Office, calculates that to achieve a greater than 66% chance of limiting temperature rise by this amount, global emissions will probably need to peak before 2020 and fall to about 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020.

Reducing fossil fuel subsidies

This puts Birol's call into perspective.

Speaking in advance of the release of the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2011 report on 9 November, he said that it will say that cutting fossil fuel subsidies would "help renewable energies such as solar and wind power to get a bigger market share".

The IEA's analysis finds that “the door for a 2 degrees trajectory may be closing if we do not act urgently and boldly,” Birol said.

The report examines seven scenarios. "“In our central scenario, seven countries introduce some form of carbon pricing which brings us to a 3.5 degree trajectory,” he explained.

“But if we want to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees, many more countries need to do so. The most important condition is that there’s coordinated international action in place.”

The world in 2008-10 was subsidising fossil fuels by almost 13 times more than renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and biofuels, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Fossil fuels received $557 billion compared to $43-46 billion for renewables.

Rather than going down, fossil fuel subsidies are increasing. The IEA expects them to reach $660 billion, or 0.7% of global GDP by 2020.

Reducing the subsidy would cut energy demand by 4.1% and CO2 emissions by 1.7 gigatonnes, with consequent increases in energy efficiency and more investment available for renewables.

Most of the subsidies are actually in the less developed countries, trying to compete with the developed ones.

Green Climate Fund

The United Nation's committee responsible for designing the £100bn fund which developing countries will use to help them tackle climate change before 2020, has produced its draft proposals, but not to unanimous agreement.

This fund was agreed at the COP15 and COP16 summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancun, Mexico (2010) and discussion of the draft will be a highlight of this year's summit in Durban, South Africa, beginning in six weeks.

However, the United States and Saudi Arabia have reduced their support for the overall design of the fund.

The draft was welcomed by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The Committee ended its work by submitting for consideration and approval in Durban both a draft instrument for the Green Climate Fund and recommendations on transitional arrangements to get it launched quickly," she said.

Developing countries are generally satisfied with most of the wording, especially that the fund should have its own legal status and independent secretariat, but disagreement remains over access to the funds, including the need to minimise the involvement of the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank.

Pa Ousman Jarju, chair of the Least Developed Countries negotiating block at the UN climate change talks says: “Enhanced direct access would allow more devolved decision-making to reflect local and national concerns and it would enable countries to integrate the funding into their national plans and strategies for dealing with climate change.”

For these reasons, Trevor Manuel the former finance minister of South Africa, who co-chaired the meeting on administering the fund with Kjetil Lund of Norway, called the outcome "sub-optimal".

Germany said that the committee’s failure to formally agree a design “will likely result in not having the Green Climate Fund this year or the next”.

Former chief of the UN climate change convention Yves de Boer has also criticised the fund.

He told the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative event in Washington, DC last Wednesday, that the GCF “is going to be governed by a bunch of climate change negotiators, rather than by a lot of people that understand economics.

“The whole debate is around grant-based finance, instead of about how you catalyse significant funding, and basically the approach is to keep the private sector out - to the extent that you can - rather than to make this a consortia of public and private financing.”

The U.S. negotiators agree with him. They want developing countries as well as developed countries to contribute to the fund and for the private sector to be able to engage more. They also questioned the section on the fund having its own juridical personality.

But developing countries are suspicious. They believe the engagement of the private sector would open the potential for funds to be diverted away from developing countries towards developed countries’ companies and financial institutions, bypassing their governments.

If finally agreed, the fund will be used only for mitigation and adaptation initially, while many developing countries also want to use it for technology and capacity building, the very tactic which the IEA's Birol is calling for.

IEA chief says scrap fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe

As academics warn the world could exceed "safe" levels in our lifetimes, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency (IEA) has urged the world to slash hundreds of billions of dollars of fossil fuel subsidies or face catastrophe.

Fatih Birol, speaking in an interview with EurActiv, says that the "$409 billion equivalent of fossil fuels subsidies in place around the world "encourage developing countries - where the bulk of the energy demand and CO2 emissions come from – [towards a] wasteful use of energy” and calls for the abolition.

He says that cutting these subsidies in major non-OECD countries is “the one single policy item” which could help decrease the rate of increase of global warming, so that it stays within "safe" limits.

These limits are estimated to be around 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

The likelihood of dangerous warming

But two papers, to be published in the latest edition of the journal Nature are warning that emissions could reach much higher temperatures during the lifetimes of many people alive today.

This could mean that "large parts of Eurasia, North Africa and Canada could potentially experience individual five-year average temperatures that exceed the 2 degree Celsius threshold by 2030 -- a timescale that is not so distant," one paper says.

Two degrees was the maximum limit set at the Copenhagen COP15 UNFCCC summit in 2009, and was reckoned to equate to a concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere of 450 parts per million (ppm).

It is considered just about bearable, but with considerable costs.

Many consider this level itself to be dangerously risky and would prefer the limit to be 1.5 degrees Celsius, which equates to 350ppm.

The papers find that "most of the world's land surface is very likely to experience five-year average temperatures that exceed 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels by 2060" at the current rate of increase.

A 3.5 degree increase would cause “irreversible impacts”, such as the mass extinction of an estimated 40%-70% of the world’s species and rendering the equatorial belt largely uninhabitable, according to the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change.

The New Zealand scientists say that only if emissions are "substantially lowered", will the two degree threshold possibly be delayed by "up to several decades".

The second paper, by Zurich's Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and the Hadley Centre of the Meteorological Office, calculates that to achieve a greater than 66% chance of limiting temperature rise by this amount, global emissions will probably need to peak before 2020 and fall to about 44 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2020.

Reducing fossil fuel subsidies

This puts Birol's call into perspective.

Speaking in advance of the release of the IEA's World Energy Outlook 2011 report on 9 November, he said that it will say that cutting fossil fuel subsidies would "help renewable energies such as solar and wind power to get a bigger market share".

The IEA's analysis finds that “the door for a 2 degrees trajectory may be closing if we do not act urgently and boldly,” Birol said.

The report examines seven scenarios. "“In our central scenario, seven countries introduce some form of carbon pricing which brings us to a 3.5 degree trajectory,” he explained.

“But if we want to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees, many more countries need to do so. The most important condition is that there’s coordinated international action in place.”

The world in 2008-10 was subsidising fossil fuels by almost 13 times more than renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power and biofuels, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

Fossil fuels received $557 billion compared to $43-46 billion for renewables.

Rather than going down, fossil fuel subsidies are increasing. The IEA expects them to reach $660 billion, or 0.7% of global GDP by 2020.

Reducing the subsidy would cut energy demand by 4.1% and CO2 emissions by 1.7 gigatonnes, with consequent increases in energy efficiency and more investment available for renewables.

Most of the subsidies are actually in the less developed countries, trying to compete with the developed ones.

Green Climate Fund

The United Nation's committee responsible for designing the £100bn fund which developing countries will use to help them tackle climate change before 2020 has produced its draft proposals, but not to unanimous agreement.

This fund was agreed at the COP15 and COP16 summits in Copenhagen (2009) and Cancun, Mexico (2010) and the draft will be discussed at this year's summit in Durban, South Africa, beginning in six weeks.

However, the United States and Saudi Arabia have reduced their support for the overall design of the fund.

The committee tasked with the design work has met four times, and completed its work last week.

Examination of the draft will be a highlight of the Durban talks.

The draft was welcomed by Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change.

"The Committee ended its work by submitting for consideration and approval in Durban both a draft instrument for the Green Climate Fund and recommendations on transitional arrangements to get it launched quickly," she said.

Developing countries are generally satisfied with most of the wording, especially that the fund should have its own legal status and independent secretariat, but disagreement remains over access to the funds, including the need to minimise the involvement of the Global Environment Facility and the World Bank.

Pa Ousman Jarju, chair of the Least Developed Countries negotiating block at the UN climate change talks says: “Enhanced direct access would allow more devolved decision-making to reflect local and national concerns and it would enable countries to integrate the funding into their national plans and strategies for dealing with climate change.”

For these reasons, Trevor Manuel the former finance minister of South Africa, who co-chaired the meeting on administering the fund with Kjetil Lund of Norway, called the outcome "sub-optimal".

Germany said that the committee’s failure to formally agree a design “will likely result in not having the Green Climate Fund this year or the next”.

Former chief of the UN climate change convention Yves de Boer has also criticised the fund.

He told the UN Environment Programme Finance Initiative event in Washington, DC last Wednesday, that the GCF “is going to be governed by a bunch of climate change negotiators, rather than by a lot of people that understand economics.

“The whole debate is around grant-based finance, instead of about how you catalyse significant funding, and basically the approach is to keep the private sector out - to the extent that you can - rather than to make this a consortia of public and private financing.”

The U.S. negotiators agree with him. They want developing countries as well as developed countries to contribute to the fund and for the private sector to be able to engage more. They also questioned the section on the fund having its own juridical personality.

But developing countries are suspicious. They believe the engagement of the private sector would open the potential for funds to be diverted away from developing countries towards developed countries’ companies and financial institutions, bypassing their governments.

If finally agreed, the fund will be used only for mitigation and adaptation initially, while many developing countries also want to use it for technology and capacity building, the very tactic which the IEA's Birol is calling for.

David Cameron, you must go to Durban this December & end subsidies for fossil fuels

This week David Cameron appeared to play down his party's commitment to tackling climate change by not even mentioning the topic in his keynote speech to the Tory Party conference.

It is unlikely that the shift in rhetorical emphasis will impact on the many commitments and measures in the legislative pipeline, but it may have an impact in two important areas: on investment decisions and on the vital UNFCCC Durban Climate Summit which is fast approaching.

The need for international action has never been more paramount, and it is tremendously important that Cameron is unwavering on the international stage for drastic measures to curb emissions.

The evidence for this is overwhelming. I will discuss some of it, and the single most simple policy that could be implemented to achieve the level of cuts required.

It was announced this week that global carbon dioxide emissions have increased by a staggering 45% since 1990, according to the Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) and other sources.

This puts the world in the region of the high emissions scenarios discussed in the last IPCC report (see below).

At the same time, the International Energy Agency (IEA) and Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) said on Tuesday that subsidies for fossil fuel consumption are actually rising - they totalled $409 billion in 2010, compared to $312 billion in 2009, with oil products having the largest share at $193 billion in 2010 with natural gas getting $91 billion.

Iran and Saudi Arabia were the countries with the biggest subsidies.

The IEA's Chief Economist Fatih Birol said that "without further reform, spending on fossil fuel consumption subsidies is set to reach $660 billion in 2020, or 0.7 percent of global gross domestic product".

Yet leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) countries committed in Pittsburgh in 2009 to phase out these subsidies.

OECD Secretary General Angel Gurria said doing so is an obvious way to save money. "As they (nations) look for policy responses to the worst economic crisis of our lifetimes, phasing out subsidies is an obvious way to help governments meet their economic, environmental and social goals".

It would also cut global energy demand by 4% and considerably reduce carbon emissions growth, the IEA said.

If David Cameron can't find it easy to support a call to phase out the subsidies, and do so himself, then he should tell us why.

(By the way, if you think renewables get too much in the way of subsidies, research published this week in the States shows that nuclear subsidies there at least accounted for more than one percent of the federal budget over the first 15 years of each subsidies’ life; oil and gas subsidies made up half a percent of the total budget, but renewables have amounted to only about a tenth of a percent.)

Using market measures alone is not working as a way of limiting emissions. The 3.5 million EU carbon emissions permits which the UK sold on the market last Thursday went for a price of 10.38 euros each.

This is the lowest price since it started auctions in November 2008, and will not encourage anything like the level of investment needed in greenhouse gas emission abatement technology.

It does strengthen the case for the introduction of a robust carbon price floor, but it also shows other types of action are required.

In a sign of its desperation that the message is not getting through to politicians, the Tyndall Centre this week attempted once more to draw attention to a paper it had first published in a Royal Society journal in 2009, saying that the world could very possibly reach an average global temperature of 4oC higher than pre-industrial levels as early as 2060, with catastrophic consequences for all life on earth.

The paper is peer-reviewed and written by Richard Betts at the Hadley Centre of the Met Office and uses the most accurate and authoritative climate modelling systems currently available.

The Tyndall Centre is based at the University of East Anglia, now famous for the hacked emails scandal, yet exonerated of any bias in its scientific reports by three separate investigations.

(The centre is named after John Tyndall, the man who first discovered the global warming effect 150 years ago - this year marks that anniversary.)

What the paper says

The paper looks at a particular set of scenarios that were considered in the (last) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), published in 2007. (The 5th is due in 2014.)

AR4's projections suggested that in the absence of mitigation high levels of warming were possible and the median of these was approximately 4?C.

The modelling used at the time did not include certain climate-warming carbon-cycle feedback features, plus more recent measurements that since became available; and the high-emissions scenario - which we now are confident we are within - was not examined with complex general circulation models (GCMs).

Betts' paper looks at this range of scenarios of future greenhouse-gas emissions without policies, including this information.

In other words, looking as best as we can at the world we live in now, in which, year after year, UNFCCC summits come and go and no legally binding agreements are reached.

The paper concludes: "Our best estimate is that a temperature rise of 4?C would be reached in the 2070s, and if carbon-cycle feedbacks are strong, then 4?C could be reached in the early 2060s."

When originally published, the journal did trigger an alarmist headline in the Daily Telegraph with graphic descriptions of how the world would change. It gave fuel to Ed Miliband's efforts to secure a legally bunding deal at Copenhagen. But it did not achieve sufficient global recognition.

I spoke to Asher Minns at the Tyndall Centre and he said he tweeted the paper in an attempt to give it more recognition.

I then spoke to its author, Richard Betts. I asked him whether he could put a figure on the probability of the world reaching this level of warming by that date, and he said "That entirely depends on the policies adopted by politicians".

I asked him about the current state of climate research, and he said that the Hadley Centre "is now working on a huge project coupled climate models with all modelling across the world being run through a commonly agreed protocol, so we know we are comparing like with like, which ones are more or less sensitive to emissions.

"It is mostly work in progress, and will be ready in next year. The deadline is July, and the papers will be accepted by March 2013 for publication in the 2014 report."

The slowness of this work is frustrating for everyone, but science cannot be hurried. I asked Richard if this frustrates him. "No, we have to get it right," he said.

DECC commissions reports from the Hadley Centre, including a paper for the Durban talks that is "more about drawing together information that is already out there into a tight context".

He said the global carbon project will release its annual update in a month, however.

Richard is typical of climate scientists in refusing to be drawn on policy or urgency, saying it is beyond his remit.

"I have no role in saying this is urgent or anything. We have no political objective whatsoever. We are just trying to find the science."

He says all they can do is lay this before politicians. It is up to them to decide how to act.

Does he think that journalists like myself convey the science well?

"In some cases the messages are too simple," he replied. "But our research can be misused either way. It depends on peoples' attitude to risk - people must be informed. But I do think that journalists should convey the science better."

If climate scientists are clear that it is up to politicians to show leadership on the basis of the science, and the science is as clear as it is, then it is incumbent on the consciences of politicians to give these humble toilers on the frontlines of understanding due weight in their deliberations, in comparison to the clamouring of vested interests or focus groups.

In simple language, Mr Cameron: go to Durban. Demonstrate leadership. Cut subsidies to fossil fuels.

The world must wean itself off coal or face catastrophe

News that climate-warming gas emissions are increasing faster than expected means that the world must put a stop to building new coal-fired power stations as soon as possible, in order to prevent future emissions being "locked in" for decades.

Greenhouse gas emissions reached a record high in 2010, said the International Energy Agency over the weekend, although their website provides few details at present.

The IEA's Dr Fatih Birol, Chief Economist at the IEA who oversees the annual World Energy Outlook, said that after a dip in 2009 caused by the global financial crisis, emissions are estimated to have climbed to a record 30.6 Gigatonnes (Gt), a 5% jump from the previous record year in 2008, when levels reached 29.3 Gt.

This means that it will now be extremely hard for the world to limit the projected future average global temperature rise to less than 2°C, the target agreed by global leaders at the UN climate change talks in Cancun in 2010.

For this target to be achieved, global energy-related emissions in 2020 must not be greater than 32 Gt. Therefore over the next ten years, emissions must rise less in total than they did between 2009 and 2010, a virtually impossible demand.

If true, this is very frightening. “Our latest estimates are another wake-up call,” said Dr Birol. “The world has edged incredibly close to the level of emissions that should not be reached until 2020 if the 2ºC target is to be attained. Given the shrinking room for manœuvre in 2020, unless bold and decisive decisions are made very soon, it will be extremely challenging to succeed in achieving this global goal agreed in Cancun.”

The IEA's report highlights current construction worldwide of fossil fuel burning plants as a major cause for concern, estimating that 80% of projected emissions from the power sector in 2020 are already locked in, as they will come from power plants that are currently in place or under construction today.

Coal is the biggest GHG emitter, globally; 44% of the estimated global CO2 emissions in 2010 came from coal, 36% from oil, and 20% from natural gas.

Paradoxically, with the German government now committed to abandoning nuclear power by 2021 - good news in one respect - there is a real danger that carbon emissions will increase in the short term.

Chancellor Merkel said on Monday that her country is still committed to its goal of reducing its carbon emissions by 20% of 1990 levels by 2020. But it has yet to set out how it can reconcile these two opposing policies.

It will be extremely demanding, involving substantial demand reductions through greater efficiency, while temporarily increasing emissions from fossil-fuel burning plants to make up the shortfall caused by the mothballed nuclear plants.

And unfortunately Germany is currently set to build 10 coal-fired power plants, which will lock in emissions for decades to come.

These new plants would emit 69.4Mt of C02 a year, over 25% of its electricity sector's 2008 total carbon dioxide emissions.

China, India, Poland and many other countries are also building new coal-fired power stations at an unprecedented rate.

If this trend continues, even a catastrophic three degree average global temperature rise may become inevitable.

It's imperative that the world agrees as soon as possible to leave coal in the ground, to stop burning it and oil for electricity, and to gradually wean itself off the most carbon-intensive forms of energy.

Intermittency of wind and solar not a problem - IEA

Intermittency of supply is a common criticism of some renewable sources of energy, specifically wind and solar.

But a new book from the International Energy Agency (IEA), Harnessing Variable Renewables: a Guide to the Balancing Challenge shows that there is a greater technical potential for balancing variable renewable energy output than is usually assumed.

It calculates the ability of eight regions to balance large shares of variable renewable energy:

• The British Isles (Great Britain and Ireland together): 31%
• Denmark: 63%
• the Nordic Power Market (Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden): 48%
• the Western Interconnection of the United States: 45%
• the New Brunswick System Operator in Eastern Canada: 37%
• Mexico, 29%
• the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal together): 27%
• Japan: 19%.

The book does this with a four-step Flexibility Assessment (FAST) method for assessing existing flexible resources, which can then be used to balance increasingly variable supply and demand:

1. assess the ability of the different flexible resources to change their production or consumption
2. examine the aspects of the power system that will constrain them from doing so
3. calculate the maximum requirement for flexibility of a given system resulting from fluctuating demand and output from wind plants and the like
4. identify how much more variability can be balanced with existing flexible resources.

“While some areas are clearly more flexible than others, all power areas assessed show that greater technical potential for balancing variable renewable energy output exists than is commonly supposed,” said Richard Jones, the IEA Deputy Executive Director, when launching the book at EREC 2011, Europe’s Renewable Energy Policy Conference, on 24 May in Brussels.

“The results from these case studies demonstrate that variability needs not be an impediment to deployment,” he continued. “As long as power systems and markets are properly configured so they can get the best use of their flexible resources, large shares of variable renewables are entirely feasible from the balancing perspective.”