“If we could harness 1/5000th of the energy the sun sprays upon the earth every 24 hours we could provide all the energy requirements of the entire human race,” David Attenborough told the BBC’s Newsnight as the COP21 Climate Change Conference began in Paris this week.
The summit is another in a long line of opportunities for humans to save the planet. These meetings date back 20 years and move at a snail’s pace. The ambition for Paris is to get every country in the world to legally bind themselves to reducing carbon emissions.
Of all the countries or regions that have ratified the 1997 Kyoto agreement only the EU and Russia have managed to reduce total emissions from their 1990 levels. China’s emissions are still growing.
America’s are higher than they were 25 years ago. So are India’s, whose PM Narendra Modi opened up COP21 showing two faces – a kind of good cop, bad cop shtick.
Climate change is not India’s fault, Modi pointed out, and they and other developing nations should not be punished because Britain, America and Russia spent two centuries destroying the planet with carbon-guzzling industrialisation projects.
Modi effectively committed to not committing to the carbon targets (honest and also realistic given that the Indian population will be the largest of any country in the world by 2030, with 1.5 billion people) but at the same time he announced a “solar alliance” of 120 countries; demonstrating the sub-continent superpower’s interest in being at the heart of a global solar industry, if not necessarily putting much of its cash on the line. India has invested an initial US$30m to initiate the headquarters in its own backyard, while expecting international agencies and nations to bump up investment funds to US$400m.
There is one continent that will be kicking itself when it realises the implications of India’s move to corner the burgeoning solar market: Africa, where most of the planet’s sun shines.
Africa has recently realised its potential and begun to harness the power of the sun. There are start-ups making solar-powered phone chargers, solar products pumping water out of the ground and government-backed solar-fields in places like Burundi adding significant energy to national grids. A gynaecologist-obstetrician from New York has developed a “solar suitcase” to bring light to midwives delivering babies in the dark because of power cuts. And there are large-scale programmes like the US$9m Moroccan mega-plant being built in the desert at Ouarzazate that will power 1m homes and help ensure that 50 per cent of Morocco’s energy production will be renewable by 2020.
There is even the potential for Africa to export solar-generated energy through pipelines under the Mediterranean to Europe – transforming Africa into a global energy hub.
But Modi’s move could divert African hopes eastwards adding the earth’s natural resources to India’s list of heavily developed industries like petrochemicals, steel, engineering, textiles and tourism. If any place could use a viable industry and global investment to make it a world leader it’s Africa but it may have been too late and too disjointed to capitalise.
Perhaps it has a big enough job helping 600m off-grid Africans to replace kerosene, candles and firewood with solar to think about a joined-up industrial-scale continent-wide energy strategy.
The world is standing at a junction in Paris. Scientists and environmentalists are holding their breath, but they may do so until they are blue in the face and the earth’s thermometer is into the red.
The chances of reducing global warming to two degrees above pre-industrial levels—the target agreed and ratified after Kyoto—seem slim when India and China are looking at America to take the strain and America is looking right back at them and continuing to, metaphorically and literally, oil the wheels of industry.
Caribbean targets for renewable energy are surprisingly unambitious considering the region has sun, wind and sea power at its disposal.
Trinidad’s target is just 10 per cent of all energy output by 2021. In contrast, the UK’s is 15 per cent by 2020. Yet Caribbean leaders support developing nations in pushing for a 1.5 degrees goal rather than two degrees.
Dizzanne Billy of the Caribbean Youth Environment Network (CYEN) is here in Paris. She writes articles about the impact of climate change, particularly on islands within the hurricane zone. Two days into COP21 she is in cautious mood.
“From Obama to Jinping the leaders appear to be committed to the delivery of a quality climate agreement.
However, meetings show that each country still continues to hold on to their own national interests instead of looking at the bigger picture. Particularly the largest emitters,” she told me.
Attenborough is backing the Apollo programme which is exploring ways of making renewable energy cheaper than coal and keeping 80 per cent of fossil fuel reserves in the ground in order to reach the two-degree target.
To do this, experts estimate that world governments will need to invest a total of US$15bn a year in research and development (R&D). In comparative terms, the total spent on defence R&D budgets globally each year is US$100bn. Which, some might say, throws world leaders’ priorities directly into the sunlight.
