It's Rip off Britain Even When it Comes to Climate Change (23-Oct-07)
From Lauraibm
Contents |
MI Summary
Full story: It's Rip off Britain Even When it Comes to Climate Change (23-Oct-07)
Text of Article
Gordon Brown's reluctance to embrace the economic and environmental potential of renewable energy technology is costing us time, money and could eventually cost us the climate, writes John Sauven, the director of Greenpeace UK.
At the centre of Britain's efforts to tackle climate change are targets for renewable energy, energy efficiency and ultra-efficient combined heat and power (CHP) plants.
Yet as warnings about the impact of global warming grow more severe, every single one of those targets is projected to be missed or has already been abandoned.
With the agreement in March of a vital new European deal to generate 20% of our energy use (not just electricity, but heat and transport as well) from renewable sources by 2020, signed in a final flourish by Tony Blair, the UK's shortfall is even more acute.
But instead of urgently correcting these failures, Brown wants to work in an unholy alliance with the nuclear-obsessed French and climate-change denying Polish presidents to do to this agreement what Bush tried to do to Kyoto. Meanwhile, here at home the government is pouring huge resources into pursuing a nuclear 'solution' that can only address around 4% of the CO2 problem and will take at least 20 years to deliver.
The gulf between the UK's poor achievements and deteriorating international climate credibility on the one hand, and Germany's performance on the other, is stark. A simple, but fundamental difference in policy approach helps explain the situation. Labour's market ideology for stopping climate change has brought the UK to the point of actively undermining EU efforts to cut emissions and support renewables, while UK CO2 emissions rise.
The renewables obligation (RO) sets targets for electricity suppliers that are met by trading the certificates granted to generators of renewable electricity. So far the annual targets for the obligation have all been missed and the government's own projections show that the final target of just 15% in 2015 will also be missed.
It is an uncertain and short-term system, which has been found by European commission research to be one of the least effective, least efficient, and most expensive renewable energy support mechanisms in Europe. Because of it, the same technologies cost more to build in the UK than they do on the continent. "Rip-off Britain" applies even when fighting climate change.
Even the government's own electricity regulator, Ofgem, has called for the RO to be scrapped and replaced with a German-style "feed-in tariff", which would guarantee fixed prices for renewable energy.
Decried by the UK as being too interventionist and costly, in fact the German system has proved much cheaper, and enormously more effective, than the UK's renewables obligation. Its sustained and long-term support has delivered market certainty, innovation, a wide range of renewable technologies and a vibrant industrial base in manufacturing, supply and servicing for the sector.
As a result, Germany leads the way in renewable energy technologies. In 2006 it had 10 times the UK's wind capacity, was using 20 times as much biomass fuel and had installed 300 times as much solar power.
If the UK had achieved Germany's level of renewable development then today we would already have 18% of our electricity coming from renewables (as much as we currently have from all our nuclear power stations combined) and around 7% of our heat as well.
Across the board, renewables alone are saving over 100m tons of CO2 a year in Germany. That's nearly three times as much CO2 as we have managed to cut compared with 1990 levels using all our measures combined. Instead, renewables in the UK supply just 4.5% of our electricity today despite the fact that we have by far the richest resources of wind, wave and tidal energy in Europe.
It's not just leadership on climate change that we've lost. In 2006, turnover for the construction and operation of renewable energy plants in Germany was €23bn. The German renewables industry now sustains nearly a quarter of a million jobs - more than the total number of jobs across all the UK's energy industries combined, including coal, nuclear and gas.
Prospects on the continent are even better, with Germany capturing a large slice of the export market for many of the technologies that the rest of the world is now scrambling to adopt. But Britain is still in a position to catch up; even to lead the world in wave and tidal power. The majority of renewables growth in Germany has happened in just the last decade and Britain has better renewable resources by far.
For Germany, embracing the EU renewables target is a driver for greater renewables industry growth so it's no surprise that they are committed to tougher CO2 reduction targets and tougher renewable energy targets too. Meanwhile Brown's government privately accepts Britain can meet the ambitious EU renewable energy target, but regards it as a threat to plans for new nuclear power stations and to the growth of a carbon trading market in London's financial quarter.
Instead he should see what we are missing and welcome the huge boost that embracing this challenge could give to UK industry.
The government's own analysis is that the longer we wait to shift over to low carbon technologies, the more it will cost us to do so. Brown's dogmatism over market ideology is costing us time, it's costing us money - and if it continues to drive him to wreck international efforts, it could cost us the climate.
- Source: Guardian Unlimited
Text of Article
- Source: [ ]
Text of Article
- Source: [ ]
For an overview on the topic(s), see also
- [[]]
