by Alex Evans | Jul 4, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Conflict and security
David and I are both out in Japan to speak at a conference on climate change organised by the United Nations University .
Highlight of the day so far: sitting next to the engineering director at Nissan’s technology planning department over lunch, who (it transpired) knew everything there is to know about electric cars. Back at the end of May, I wrote that electric cars were miles away from commercial roll-out. Well, turns out that they’re much closer to reality than I’d thought. Nissan will be rolling out electric cars in Japan in 2010, followed by the US and (in Europe) Denmark in 2011, and then the rest of Europe in 2012.
Think that’s interesting? Try this: on current electricity prices in Japan, a full charge for the car (enough for about 100 miles of driving) might cost as little as 50 cents . Meanwhile, the cars themselves won’t be much more expensive than conventional combustion engine equivalents either.
All in all, a pretty compelling proposition for consumers with oil prices as high as they are. Which left me wondering two things.
The first is simply: will electric power systems be able to cope with the additional demand if take-up of electric cars is rapid? The UK, like many countries, has seen its capacity margin (the gap between peak electricity demand and the amount of power that can be generated with all power stations running at full tilt ) diminish in recent years. People whose job it is to worry about resilience fret about whether the lights would stay on if there were big outages in generating capacity at the same time as spikes in demand – we came close to such a scenario a few weeks back. If cars that used to run on petrol start running on electric power instead, then that problem gets much tougher.
Second, it will be interesting to see what the carbon savings involved look like. Electric cars are only as green as the kind of generating capacity used to charge them up. If the power’s from wind or nuclear, then they’re fabulously clean; if it’s from coal, then they might be even dirtier than petrol cars. So if electric cars do end up adding lots more demand on power grids, governments and power companies had better get a move on with installing low carbon generating capacity if they want them to be a blessing rather than a curse.
All in all, it’s exciting that electric cars are so close – but the power sector must be biting its fingernails.
Update: Sam Roggeveen has more on both of these issues.
by Alex Evans | Jun 30, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, East Asia and Pacific, Economics and development, Global system
So, with a week to go until Japan’s G8 in Hokkaido, how are things looking? If you want the comprehensive answer, you should head straight for Jenilee Geubert’s excellent dossier on the website of the University of Toronto’s G8 research group – but here are a few highlights.
First, climate change. A draft communique seen by Dow Jones suggests there are four options on the table: a 50% emissions reduction by 2050 [from what year’s level isn’t specified]; an unspecified percentage cut by 2050; a 50% cut by 2051 or later; or a more than 50% cut by 2051 or later.
If you’re wondering where the magical figure of 50% comes from, it’s from the IPCC estimate of what it’ll take to limit average temperature rises to between 2.0 and 2.4 Celsius – though note that (a) the IPCC says 50 to 85%, and (b) that this is before the [rapid] rate of sink failure is taken into account. So 50% by 2050 is already too low.
Fukuda has said that the G8 will not aim to set medium term targets. Tony Blair’s big new report says it must. So does Avaaz. The US says a 25-40% cut by 2020 is “frankly not do-able“. The US is meanwhile extolling the benefits of its Major Economies Meeting, but last week’s MEM in South Korea didn’t go so great.
Next: energy. Oil’s just flown past $143 on the back of geopolitical tensions, so all the signs are that the issue will be charged when leaders gather next week. Fukuda wants to see more oil production, but after Saudi Arabia’s pledge of only 200,000 more barrels a day last week, it’s hard to see much sign of it – and even harder to detect any sign of join-up between Fukuda’s calls for OPEC to open the tap up a bit more, and Japan’s stated goal of something called a “Cool Earth“.
Meanwhile, biofuels might conceivably also come up, as Fukuda’s not a fan (“it is a fact that the production of bioethanol in some cases compete with food production”) – though Japan will want to avoid putting its American buddies on the spot. For its part, the US will point to IEA data that shows that biofuels have become crucial for meeting marginal oil demand (want to know how much non-OPEC oil supply growth is from biofuels this year? 63 per cent.)
And then there’s food. Sir John Holmes’s UN task force will be presenting its final report at the Summit. Leaders will probably pledge to do everything they can to increase food production and increase investment in agriculture – which is a good idea, though it does still leave the small fact that enough food is produced for everyone to eat today, but there are still 850-950 million undernourished people. Increasing yields isn’t the whole story.
One thing the G8 leaders could do is issue a strong statement of intent on the Doha trade round – and perhaps, if they want to be really relevant, taking security of supply issues into account at the same time. More generally, World Bank President Bob Zoellick’s ten point plan on food prices will doubtless be referred back to as a good and brief overview of the challenges – worth having another look at that ahead of the summit.
All in all, the three scarcity issues of climate, energy and food will dominate centre stage at Tokayo. It’s welcome that the G8 is focusing on them, but unclear that G8 leaders know what kinds of deal they should be agreeing on them – or how to get there. And G8 leaders also appear not to have figured out yet that scarcity issues are uniquely integrated, while the multilateral response to them is anything but. More on that over the course of this week…
by Alex Evans | Jun 26, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Global system, Influence and networks
A few weeks back, I wrote a post about Abengoa – a biofuels company which has been taking out full page ads in the FT and elsewhere, arguing that biofuels are nothing to do with rising food prices (an argument that calls to mind the image of Lt. Frank Drebbin in The Naked Gun, standing before an exploding fireworks factory and calling through a loudhailer “Move on! There is nothing to see here!”). As I said at the time, Abengoa’s ad campaign was pure cornwash.
So it’s with great satisfaction that I pass on news of the following letter in the Financial Times today:
Sir, in an advertisement in the FT on June 18, Abengoa Bioenergy stated that “Bioethanol is currently the only real alternative for eliminating our addiction to oil”, citing our report “Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Transport in the EU25 (2004)” as one of two sources to justify that claim.
It is impossible for a reader of our report to reach the conclusion Abengoa draws. It does not even mention biofuels or bioethanol. If the company is genuinely interested in “supported evidence”, as it claims, it must know that T&E’s view on biofuels bears no resemblance to its own. T&E has consistently warned against volume targets for biofuels at European Union level since at least 2004, when we published our report “Sense and Sustainability”. We believe Europe should set an environmental target to cut greenhouse gas emissions from the production of all transport fuels, not a biofuels quantity target that gives a boost to the fuels Abengoa produces regardless of their environmental performance.
Running Europe’s fleet of heavy, gas-guzzling cars on biofuels rather than petrol is no cure. If Europe truly wants to end its addiction to oil, it should start by making cars twice as fuel-efficient as they are today.
Abengoa has misused our name and research in an advertisement claiming to separate “manipulation” from “evidence”. That is reprehensible. As an environmental group, our main capital is our reputation and credibility, which we will defend.
Jos Dings,
Director,
European Federation for Transport and Environment (T&E),
B-1000 Brussels, Belgium
Wow. What a truly monumental PR cock-up by Abengoa. They probably retain the same PR firm as the PRC.
by Alex Evans | Jun 26, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Influence and networks
WEF has just published a statement on climate change ahead of the G8 from what appears more or less all of the world’s CEOs (A is for ABB, Abercrombie & Kent, Agility, AIG, Airbus, AkzoNobel, Alcoa, AMD, ANA, Anglo American, Arup; B is for Bain & Co., Bayer, BG Group, Booz & Co., BP, British Airways, BC Hydro, BT… oh, you get the idea). They say this:
Addressing climate change will require clear and honest communication as to the scale of the challenge we all face. Lord Stern describes the problem for us succinctly:
“Current annual global emission flows are around 40-45 Gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtC02-eq).
About 45% of current global emissions come from developing countries and this is set to grow.
A 50% reduction in global emissions by 2050 equates to an aggregate annual flow of around 22GtC02-eq.
As there will be around 9 billion people in 2050, this implies per capita emissions per year of about 2-2.5 tonnes CO2-eq.
Currently, US emissions are more than 20 tonnes of CO2-eq per person per year, Europe and Japan 10-15 tonnes, China 5 or more tonnes, India around 1.5 and most of Africa much less than 1 tonne CO2-eq per person per year.
The consequence is that rich countries will have to take the lead and demonstrate strong cuts.
Since around 8 billion people will be in currently developing countries, those countries will also have to be in the range of 2-2.5 tonnes CO2-eq by 2050, otherwise the world average for the total would be unachievable.
Refreshing to see some actual numbers rather than the usual guff about “developed countries taking the lead”, isn’t it?
by Alex Evans | Jun 17, 2008 | Climate and resource scarcity, Cooperation and coherence, Global system, Influence and networks
PIPA’s latest global opinion poll is a bit of a downer on world leaders: it finds that in 20 nations around the world, “none of the national leaders on the world stage inspire wide confidence”. Still, while it’s obviously a source of some amusement that more publics trust Ahmadinejad than Bush, the real story for me here is that
Only UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon received largely positive ratings in a worldwide poll that asked respondents whether they trusted international leaders “to do the right thing regarding world affairs.”
It just goes to prove the point about the nature of the ‘global interregnum’ in which we find ourselves. As David and I observed in our memo to Gordon Brown on fixing the UK’s foreign policy (over a year ago now), the leadership of an awfully big range of countries and institutions changes hands between mid-06 and the end of 08; in such a context, it’s easy for leaders to emerge rapidly to the forefront of global statesmanship.
And for all that UN watchers sometimes carp, Ban Ki-moon has actually been terrific in starting to set out a joined-up narrative on scarcity issues (a point also now spotted by The Economist). He deserves real personal credit for driving the UN’s food prices agenda, including setting up its High Level Task Force; he’s been emphatic about the importance of getting to grips with water scarcity; and on climate change (his stated number one priority), he teed up the Bali outcome with his High Level Event in September last year, and then used his personal authority to drive the deal through later in the year. Go Ban.
