The energy transition tipping point is here

In late February, Bloomberg finally addressed the most problematic issue in shale gas and tight oil wells: their incredible decline rates and diminishing prospects for drilling in the most-profitable "sweet spots" of the shale plays. I have documented that issue at length (for example, "Oil and gas price forecast for 2014," "Energy independence, or impending oil shocks?," "The murky future of U.S. shale gas," and my Financial Times critique of Leonardo Maugeri's widely heralded 2012 report).

The sources for the Bloomberg article are shockingly candid about the difficulties facing the shale sector, considering that their firms have been at the forefront of shale hype.

The vice president of integration at oil services giant Schlumberger notes that four out of every 10 frack clusters are duds. Geologist Pete Stark, a vice president of industry relations at IHS—yes, that IHS, where famous peak oil pooh-pooher Daniel Yergin is the spokesman for its CERA unit—actually said what we in the peak oil camp have been saying for years: "The decline rate is a potential show stopper after a while…You just can’t keep up with it."

The CEO of Superior Energy Services was particularly pithy: "We've drilled all the good stuff…These are very poor quality formations that I don't believe God intended for us to produce from the source rock." Source rocks, as I wrote last month, are an oil and gas "retirement party," not a revolution.

The toxic combination of rising production costs, the rapid decline rates of the wells, diminishing prospects for drilling new wells, and a drilling program so out of control that it caused a glut and destroyed profitability, have finally taken their toll.

Numerous operators are taking major write-downs against reserves. WPX Energy, an operator in the Marcellus shale gas play, and Pioneer Natural Resources, an operator in the Barnett shale gas play, each have announced balance sheet “impairments” of more than $1 billion due to low gas prices. Chesapeake Energy, Encana, Apache, Anadarko Petroleum, BP, and BHP Billiton have disclosed similar substantial reserves reductions. Occidental Petroleum, which has made the most significant attempts to frack California’s Monterey Shale, announced that it will spin off that unit to focus on its core operations—something it would not do if the Monterey prospects were good. EOG Resources, one of the top tight oil operators in the United States, recently said that it no longer expects U.S. production to rise by 1 million barrels per day (mb/d) each year, in accordance with my 2014 oil and gas price forecast.

Coal and nuclear

When I wrote “Why baseload power is doomed” and "Regulation and the decline of coal power" in 2012, the suggestion that renewables might displace baseload power sources like coal and nuclear plants was generally received with ridicule. How could "intermittent" power sources with just a few percentage points of market share possibly hurt the deeply entrenched, reliable, fully amortized infrastructure of power generation?

But look where we are today. Coal plants are being retired much faster than most observers expected. The latest projection from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) is for 60 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired power capacity to be taken offline by 2016, more than double the retirements the agency predicted in 2012. The vast majority of the coal plants that were planned for the United States in 2007 have since been cancelled, abandoned, or put on hold, according to SourceWatch.

Nuclear power plants were also given the kibosh at an unprecedented rate last year. More nuclear plant retirements appear to be on the way. Earlier this month, utility giant Exelon, the nation’s largest owner of nuclear plants, warned that it will shut down nuclear plants if the prospects for their profitable operation don’t improve this year.

Japan has just announced a draft plan that would restart its nuclear reactors, but the plan is "vague" and, to my expert nose, stinks of political machinations. What we do know is that the country has abandoned its plans to build a next-generation "fast breeder" reactor due to mounting technical challenges and skyrocketing costs.

Grid competition

Nuclear and coal plant retirements are being driven primarily by competition from lower-cost wind, solar, and natural gas generators, and by rising operational and maintenance costs. As more renewable power is added to the grid, the economics continue to worsen for utilities clinging to old fossil-fuel generating assets (a topic I have covered at length; for example, "Designing the grid for renewables," "The next big utility transformation," "Can the utility industry survive the energy transition?" "Adapt or die - private utilities and the distributed energy juggernaut" and "The unstoppable renewable grid").

Nowhere is this more evident than in Germany, which now obtains about 25 percent of its grid power from renewables and which has the most solar power per capita in the world. I have long viewed Germany’s transition to renewables (see "Myth-busting Germany's energy transition") as a harbinger of what is to come for the rest of the developed world as we progress down the path of energy transition.

And what's to come for the utilities isn't good. Earlier this month, Reuters reported that Germany’s three largest utilities, E.ON, RWE, and EnBW are struggling with what the CEO of RWE called “the worst structural crisis in the history of energy supply.” Falling consumption and growing renewable power have cut the wholesale price of electricity by 60 percent since 2008, making it unprofitable to continue operating coal, gas and oil-fired plants. E.ON and RWE have announced intentions to close or mothball 15 GW of gas and coal-fired plants. Additionally, the three major utilities still have a combined 12 GW of nuclear plants scheduled to retire by 2020 under Germany’s nuclear phase-out program.

RWE said it will write down nearly $4 billion on those assets, but the pain doesn’t end there. Returns on invested capital at the three utilities are expected to fall from an average of 7.7 percent in 2013 to 6.5 percent in 2015, which will only increase the likelihood that pension funds and other fixed-income investors will look to exchange traditional utility company holdings for “green bonds” invested in renewable energy. The green bond sector is growing rapidly, and there's no reason to think it will slow down. Bond issuance jumped from $2 billion in 2012 to $11 billion in 2013, and the now-$15 billion market is expected to nearly double again this year.

A new report from the Rocky Mountain Institute and CohnReznick about consumers "defecting" from the grid using solar and storage systems concludes that the combination is a "real, near and present" threat to utilities. By 2025, according to the authors, millions of residential users could find it economically advantageous to give up the grid. In his excellent article on the report, Stephen Lacey notes that lithium-ion battery costs have fallen by half since 2008. With technology wunderkind Elon Musk's new announcement that his car company Tesla will raise up to $5 billion to build the world's biggest "Gigafactory" for the batteries, their costs fall even farther. At the same time, the average price of an installed solar system has fallen by 61 percent since the first quarter of 2010.

At least some people in the utility sector agree that the threat is real. Speaking in late February at the ARPA-E Energy Summit, CEO David Crane of NRG Energy suggested that the grid will be obsolete and used only for backup within a generation, calling the current system "shockingly stupid."

Non-hydro renewables are outpacing nuclear and fossil fuel capacity additions in much of the world, wreaking havoc with the incumbent utilities' business models. The value of Europe's top 20 utilities has been halved since 2008, and their credit ratings have been downgraded. According to The Economist, utilities have been the worst-performing sector in the Morgan Stanley index of global share prices. Only utilities nimble enough to adopt new revenue models providing a range of services and service levels, including efficiency and self-generation, will survive.

In addition to distributed solar systems, utility-scale renewable power plants are popping up around the world like spring daisies. Ivanpah, the world's largest solar "power tower" at 392 megawatts (MW), just went online in Nevada. Aura Solar I, the largest solar farm in Latin America at 30 MW, is under construction in Mexico and will replace an old oil-fired power plant. India just opened its largest solar power plant to date, the 130 MW Welspun Solar MP project. Solar is increasingly seen as the best way to provide electricity to power-impoverished parts of the world, and growth is expected to be stunning in Latin America, India and Africa.

Renewable energy now supplies 23 percent of global electricity generation, according to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, with capacity having doubled from 2000 to 2012. If that growth rate continues, it could become the dominant source of electricity by the next decade.

Environmental disasters

Faltering productivity, falling profits, poor economics and increasing competition from power plants running on free fuel aren't the only problems facing the fossil-fuels complex. It has also been the locus of increasingly frequent environmental disasters.

On Feb. 22, a barge hauling oil collided with a towboat and spilled an estimated31,500 gallons of light crude into the Mississippi River, closing 65 miles of the waterway for two days.

More waterborne spills are to be expected along with more exploding trains as crude oil from sources like the Bakken shale seeks alternative routes to market while the Keystone XL pipeline continues to fight an uphill political battle. According to the Association of American Railroads, the number of tank cars shipping oil jumped from about 10,000 in 2009 to more than 230,000 in 2012, and more oil spilled from trains in 2013 than in the previous four decades combined.

Federal regulators issued emergency rules on Feb. 25 requiring Bakken crude to undergo testing to see if it is too flammable to be moved safely by rail, but I am not confident this measure will eliminate the risk. Light, tight oil from U.S. shales tends to contain more light molecules such as natural gas liquids than conventional U.S. crude grades, and is more volatile.

Feb. 11 will go down in history as a marquee bad day for fossil fuels, on which 100,000 gallons of coal slurry spilled into a creek in West Virginia; a natural gas well in Dilliner, Pa., exploded (and burned for two weeks before it was put out); and a natural gas pipeline ruptured and exploded in Tioga, ND. Two days later, another natural gas line exploded in the town of Knifely, Ky., igniting multiple fires and destroying several homes, barns, and cars. The same day, another train carrying crude oil derailed near Pittsburgh, spilling between 3,000 and 7,500 gallons of crude oil.

And don't forget the spill of 10,000 gallons of toxic chemicals used in coal processing from a leaking tank in West Virginia in early January, which sickened residents of Charleston and rendered its water supply unusable.

No return

At this point you may think, "Well, this is all very interesting, Chris, but why should we believe we've reached some sort of tipping point in energy transition?"

To which I would say, ask yourself: Is any of this reversible?

Is there any reason to think the world will turn its back on plummeting costs for solar systems, batteries, and wind turbines, and revert back to nuclear and coal?

Is there any reason to think we won't see more ruptures and spills from oil and gas pipelines?

What about the more than 1,300 coal-ash waste sites scattered across the United States, of which about half are no longer used and some are lacking adequate liners? How confident are we that authorities will suddenly find the will, after decades of neglect, to ensure that they'll not cause further contamination after damaging drinking water supplies in at least 67 instances so far, such that we feel confident about continuing to rely on coal power?

Like the disastrous natural gas pipeline that exploded in 2010 and turned an entire neighborhood in San Bruno, Calif., into a raging inferno, coal-ash waste sites are but one part of a deep and growing problem shot through the entire fabric of America: aging infrastructure and deferred maintenance. President Obama just outlined his vision for a $302 billion, four-year program of investment in transportation, but that's just a drop in the bucket, and it's only for transportation.

Is there any reason to think citizens will brush off the death, destruction, environmental contamination of these disasters—many of them happening in the backyards of rural, red-state voters—and not take a second look at clean power?

Is there any reason to believe utilities will swallow several trillion dollars worth of stranded assets and embrace new business models en masse? Or is it more likely that those that can will simply adopt solar, storage systems, and other measures that ultimately give them cheaper and more reliable power, particularly in the face of increasingly frequent climate-related disasters that take out their grid power for days or weeks?

Is there any reason to think the billions of people in the world who still lack reliable electric power will continue to rely on filthy diesel generators and kerosene lanterns as the price of oil continues to rise? Or are they more likely to adopt alternatives like the SolarAid solar lanterns, of which half a million have been sold across Africa in the past six months alone? (Here's a hint: Nobody who has one wants to go back to their kerosene lantern.) Founder Jeremy Leggett of SunnyMoney, who created the SolarAid lanterns, intends to sell 50 million of them across Africa by 2020.

Is there any reason to believe solar and wind will not continue to be the preferred way to bring power to the developing world, when their fuel is free and conventional alternatives are getting scarcer and more expensive?

Is there any reason a homeowner might not think about putting a solar system on his or her roof, without taking a single dollar out of his or her pocket, and using it to charge up an electric vehicle instead of buying gasoline?

Is there any reason to think that drilling for shale gas and tight oil in the United States will suddenly resume its former rapid growth rates, when new well locations are getting harder to find, investment by the oil and gas companies is being slashed, share prices are falling, reserves are getting taken off balance sheets and investors are getting nervous?

I don't think so. All of these trends have been developing for decades, and new data surfacing daily only reinforces them. More

 

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World Energy Outlook hides the real potential of renewables

The IEA’s annual World Energy Outlook (WEO) is seen as the most authoritative set of energy scenarios in the world. Yet when we test the forecasts for the growth of renewable energies in the WEO’s main scenario against reality, we find that the WEO consistently comes out too low. Each year from 2006 on the WEO has had to increase its forecast for wind and solar power. Yet each year the WEO predicts the growth of renewables to level off by 2020, for no clear reason. This sends a wrong message to policy makers about the real potential of renewable energy. It is time for the IEA to acknowledge that its assumptions need correcting.

Every year in November, the International Energy Agency publishes its annual World Energy Outlook (WEO). It intends to show the possible directions for our global energy system, with the goal of guiding policy makers in designing their policies and measures. The World Energy Outlook is the most authoritative scenario exercise in the world, and is seen as such by policy and decision makers. It’s not a prediction of the future, but a sketch of possible pathways. The fact that the WEO appears every year makes it possible to assess how well it forecasts the development of renewables in the various scenarios. Looking back is not a favourite activity of scenario builders – they prefer to look forward. But it is instructive if you want to evaluate how well the scenarios hold up against reality. As it happens, the IEA has a sub-programme for Renewable Energy Technology Deployment, IEA-RETD, supported by eight IEA country members, which carried out a limited assessment of the WEO-2013 and earlier editions. The results are very interesting. First the good news. In general, the scenarios are of high quality. That is to say, they generally pass the recommendations made in the IEA-RETD’s scenario guidelines (called “RE-Assume”), which were published last summer and which show policy makers how they should understand energy scenarios and transpose their conclusions into policies. The WEO does well by most criteria, e.g. on transparency. This implies that policy makers should take to heart the WEO’s main conclusion regarding climate change policies: We need to take action that goes much beyond current policies to get anywhere near a safe pathway with respect to energy security and climate change. But the next question for policy makers is: What actions should that be? Here the bad news emerges. The WEO does provide clues about how renewable energy could contribute to the reduction of CO2 emissions, but these clues are absent in the WEO’s main scenario (the “New Policies” scenario). The assumptions about renewable energies used in this scenario and the modelling are based on misconceptions.

Mis-interpreting actual developments

We constructed some graphs showing the cumulative installed capacity of both solar and wind power forecast by the WEO from 2006 to 2013. As shown in the graphs below, every year the WEO adjusted its assumptions upwards. In each year from 2006, the reference scenario in the WEO shows higher cumulative capacity than the year before.

What is more, in all the WEOs the growth is expected to slow down from about the year 2020, but for no obvious reason. Our findings confirm what Terje Osmundsen recently wrote in Energy Post about how solar power is portrayed in the WEO. In wind energy the WEO’s adjustments are quite large as well. Hence, it’s not a wild guess that — unless something fundamentally changes — the 2014 WEO reference scenario will again show an upward adjustment of the growth in renewables towards 2035.

The alternative

WEO’s New Policies Scenario describes the mainstream developments in global energy. These developments put us on a track for a disastrous global warming of more than 3.5°C, according to the WEO. The globally agreed (but not yet operational) target is an upper limit of 2°C. Hence, the IEA also publishes an ‘alternative’ scenario, which shows what actions should be taken to stay within the 2°C limit. This so-called 450 scenario, named after the upper limit of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere (450 ppm) that still provides a reasonable chance of staying under a 2°C average temperature increase, is regarded as possible but not very likely to happen. According to our retrospective, especially from 2010 onwards, the alternative, 450 scenarios have been much more representative than the reference scenarios when it comes to the actual development of wind energy (and to a lesser extent, of solar power). As can be seen in the graphs below, the projected growth lines quite accurately follow the actual developments. More

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Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States

2014 - International Year Of Small Island Developing States

The Third International Conference on Small Island Developing States will be held from 1 to 4 September 2014 in Apia, Samoa, to be preceded by activities related to the conference from 28 to 30 August 2014, also in Apia, Samoa. It will focus the world’s attention on a group of countries that remain a special case for sustainable development in view of their unique and particular vulnerabilities.

The Conference will seek to achieve the following objectives:

1. assess the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation;
2. seek a renewed political commitment by focusing on practical and pragmatic actions for further implementation;
3. identify new and emerging challenges and opportunities for the sustainable development of SIDS and means of addressing them; and
4. identify priorities for the sustainable development of SIDS to be considered in the elaboration of the post-2015 UN development agenda.

The United Nations General Assembly resolution called for "a concise, focused, forward-looking and action-oriented political document." The small island developing States have also expressed their desire to highlight successful partnerships and areas of innovation.

Preparatory Process

The preparations for this important Conference are currently underway, starting with a robust, SIDS-directed, multi-stakeholder national preparatory process. The national preparations feed into regional meetings in July of 2013, followed by an inter-regional preparatory meeting.

More information on the Preparatory Process

Secretariat

A dedicated Secretariat is responsible for coordinating and facilitating inputs to the preparatory process from all UN bodies. In November 2012, the UN Secretary-General nominated Wu Hongbo, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs, as the Secretary-General for the Third International Conference on SIDS. [Read more]

The Conference Secretariat is housed in the UN DESA, supported by the Prime Minister of the Independent State of Samoa. As the host country, Samoa is leading the logistical preparations on the ground.

Contact the Secretariat: http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/about.html

 

 

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Europe 24 Air Traffic

Europe 24 from NATS on Vimeo.

This data visualization of Air Traffic in Europe was created from real flight data. It shows the air traffic which flies on a typical summer day and highlights the intensity of the operation in Europe - an operation which runs 24x7x365.

NATS and the UK are at the heart of the operation. With Heathrow as the busiest international airport in Europe, and Gatwick as the busiest single runway airport in the world, the UK plays a key role in ensuring air traffic under our control in European airspace is as safe and efficient as it can be.

The question and the elephant in the skies is of course how much fossil fuel is burned and converted into carbon dioxide by aviation globally on a daily basis? For those of us that live on small low lying islands (SIDS) the outcome will be disasterous as our homes will eventually be submerged by rising sea level. Editor

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Seychelles Grid Connected Rooftop Photovoltaic Systems

The Seychelles, like many Small Island Developing States (SIDS) is almost 100% reliant on imported oil for energy needs, which is a significant economic and budgetary cost, and is the single largest contributor of greenhouse gases in the country (based on emissions during the shipping process and in the burning of fuel to produce electricity).

Given that Seychelles is a tropical country receiving large amounts of sunshine, with an average 6.9 hours of sunshine per day, there is great potential to replace at least some of the current oil-generated (and polluting) electricity with solar energy systems. One opportunity with high economic, financial and environmental viability is the implementation of rooftop grid-connected PV systems. Current barriers to a more widespread utilization of PV systems in the Seychelles include market barriers, institutional and regulartory barriers, and technical barriers.

The objective of the project is to increase the use of PV systems as a sustainable means of generating electricity, thereby significantly reducing reliance on fossil fuel, through pilot projects for rooftop PV systems on all of the main and selected smaller islands, of the Seychelles. The identified barriers to the deployment, diffusion and transfer of solar PV systems will be addressed through the following project components: a) establishing a strategic policy and legal framework, b) strengthening technology support and delivery systems, and c) creating pilot PV projects.

More: FTP PDF document

Access the Project Documents through the Global Environment Facility Site

 

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Capacity-building workshop for Small Island Developing States to achieve Aichi Biodiversity Target 9

 

This capacity-building workshop is designed to assist small island developing states (SIDS) countries to assess the importance of the negative impacts of invasive alien species on biodiversity and island communities and to access external funding for undertaking projects targeting prevention, control and eradication of invasive species on small islands such as Life Web and GEF. It is a particularly good timing considering that a new four year GEF cycle will start on July 01, 2014 that is likely to be constituted of not only the GEF-6 STAR allocation available to GEF eligible countries, but also of a specific program allocation (Program 4) dedicated to address the impacts of invasive alien species. It is open also for other islands but funding is not available to support attendance.

GLISPA and Island Conservation have both been working closely with the CBD Secretariat in relation to this workshop. More

Notification: Capacity-building workshop for Small Island Developing States to achieve Aichi Biodiversity Target 9 on Invasive Alien Species, 14-15 June 2014- Montreal, Canada

Questionaire.Doc Please complete this questionnaire and submit by fax to +1 (514) 288-6588 or e-mail to secretariat@cbd.int no later than 30 April 2014.

 

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SIDS PrepCom Commences Negotiations for September 2014 Conference

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26 February 2014: The Preparatory Committee (PrepCom) for the third International Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) elected the Bureau and discussed the objectives and substantive theme of the Conference, as well as organizational and procedural matters, during its first meeting. The session took place from 24-26 February 2014, at UN Headquarters in New York, US.

The Committee elected to the Bureau: from the Group of African States, Milan Jaya Meetarbhan, Permanent Representative of Mauritius, Ronald Jean Jumeau, Ambassador for Climate Change and SIDS Issues, Seychelles; from the Group of Asia-Pacific States, Katsuhiko Takahashi, Japan, and Karen Tan, Permanent Representative of Singapore; from the Group of Eastern European States, Elena Anca Jurcan, Deputy Permanent Representative of Romania, and Dmytro Kushneruk, Ukraine; from the Group of Latin American and Caribbean States (GRULAC), Kereeta Whyte, Barbados, and Yanerit Morgan, Deputy Permanent Representative of Mexico; and from the Group of Western European and Other States (WEOG), Phillip Taula, Deputy Permanent Representative of New Zealand, and Juan Manuel González de Linares Palou, Deputy Permanent Representative of Spain. Ali'ioaiga Feturi Elisaia, Permanent Representative of Samoa, was elected as an ex officio member. The Co-Chairs of the Bureau are: Karen Tan (Singapore) and Phillip Taula (New Zealand).

Wu Hongbo, Under-Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs and Secretary-General of the Conference, said two sessions of the PrepCom and one intersessional “may not be a lot,” but by focusing on the issues identified in the regional meetings, much could be accomplished. These issues, he noted, are: climate change; natural disasters; crime and violence; high rates of unemployment; debt and health concerns; renewable energy; ocean-related issues and “blue economy”; need for special financing mechanisms and trade instruments for SIDS; and sustainable management of natural resources.

Gyan Chandra Acharya, Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for the Least Developed Countries, Landlocked Developing Countries and SIDS, said the “historic SIDS conference that took place in Barbados in 1994 is coming to Apia via Mauritius.” The Conference outcome will contribute both to shaping the post-2015 development agenda and to the success of the Climate Summit taking place in September 2014. He added, “the situation in islands should be an eye opener to all of us,” saying that concrete actions to support SIDS in pursuing sustainable development is in the enlightened self-interest of the international community.

During the discussion, participants highlighted the specific development, economic, and environmental challenges facing SIDS, in particular their small size, limited resources, isolation, vulnerability to disasters and climate change, and the impact that all of these issues have on national development. Progress for SIDS on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) has been uneven, participants noted.

There were continuous calls for countries to fulfill commitments made previously in the Barbados Programme of Action (BPOA) and the Mauritius Strategy of Implementation (MSI), which call for a joint, international response, in the view of many governments.

In relation to the theme of the conference – ‘Sustainable Development of SIDS through Genuine and Durable Partnerships' – many comments addressed concepts of partnership. Member States stressed that partnerships should, inter alia: be action-oriented; be differentiated by level; hold stakeholders accountable; be built on innovative financial and partnership models; allow SIDS to collaborate; and identify new opportunities for alliance. Samoa, host of the Conference, stressed that partnerships should be specific to SIDS, achievable, and based on the ownership and engagement of diverse stakeholders.

Proposals for Conference thematic issues included: management of oceans, climate change and disaster risk response; sustainable energy; data; private-led investment; non-communicable diseases (NCDs) and health; coastal areas; food security; sustained and inclusive economic growth; and gender equality. On financing, Member States called for fulfillment of development financing for SIDS while also emphasizing the need to mobilize other types of resources. On climate change, statements recognized the existential threat to islands posed by sea level rise and increased natural disasters, but also stressed the importance of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) parallel negotiations. Some delegates suggested that the SIDS Conference process can provide value for other ongoing processes, such as discussions on the post-2015 development agenda. Calls were made for civil society participation in negotiations going forward.

Most SIDS delegations called for the Barbados Inter-Regional meeting outcome document to serve as the basis for the intergovernmental zero draft for negotiation. One said the development priorities of SIDS “must take center stage” in the zero draft.

On the outcome document, statements resoundingly called for a final Conference product that is concise and action-oriented, with achievable and strategic objectives. Other proposals for the outcome document suggested: showcasing partnerships; and creating an institutional mechanism to facilitate inter- and intra-SIDS collaboration.

Concluding the PrepCom, Wu called it a “major milestone for SIDS.” The Bureau Co-Chairs added, “we have our work cut out for us.”

The Co-Chairs are expected to release the zero draft of the Conference outcome document by 14 March, and the Preparatory Committee will convene in an inter-sessional meeting from 21-25 April, at UN Headquarters in New York, US. More

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Extreme weather is 'silver lining' for climate action: Christiana Figueres

Devastating extreme weather including recent flooding in England, Australia's hottest year on record and the US being hit by a polar vortex have a "silver lining" of boosting climate change to the highest level of politics and reminding politicians that climate change is not a partisan issue, according to the UN's climate chief. Christiana Figueres said that it was amoral for people to look at climate change from a politically partisan perspective, because of its impact on future generations.

The "very strange" weather experienced across the world over the last two years was a sign "we are [already] experiencing climate change," the executive secretary of the UN climate secretariat told the Guardian.

The flooding of thousands of homes in England because of the wettest winter on record has brought climate change to the forefront of political debate in the UK. The pprime minister, David Cameron, when challenged by Labour leader, Ed Miliband, on his views on man-made climate change and having climate change sceptics in his cabinet, said last week: "I believe man-made climate change is one of the most serious threats that this country and this world faces."

Climate change was barely mentioned at all in the 2012 US election battle until superstorm Sandy struck New York, prompting the city's then mayor, Michael Bloomberg, to endorse Barack Obama's candidacy because he would "lead on climate change."

Figueres said: "There's no doubt that these events, that I call experiential evidence of climate change, does raise the issue to the highest political levels. It's unfortunate that we have to have these weather events, but there is a silver lining if you wish, that they remind us is solving climate change, addressing climate change in a timely way, is not a partisan issue."

She added: "We are reminded that climate change events are for everyone, they're affecting everyone, they have much, much longer effects than a political cycle. Frankly, they're intergenerational, so morally we cannot afford to look at climate change from a partisan perspective."

Figueres said that examples of recent extreme weather around the world were a sign climate change was here now. "If you take them individually you can say maybe it's a fluke. The problem is it's not a fluke and you can't take them individually. What it's doing is giving us a pattern of abnormality that's becoming the norm. These very strange extreme weather events are going to continue in their frequency and their severity … It's not that climate change is going to be here in the future, we are experiencing climate change."

Figueres was speaking in London before meeting businesses including Unilever, Lafarge and Royal Dutch Shell to urge them to put pressure on governments to take action on climate change, ahead of renewed international negotiations in Bonn next week to flesh out details of a draft climate treaty to be laid out in Lima this year and agreed in Paris at the end of 2015.

"2014 is a crucial year because of the timing of next year, [in 2015] there will be very little time work on the actual agreement. We have to frontload the work," she said.

Peru's foreign minister told the Guardian in January that the Lima meeting in December must produce a first draft of a deal to cut carbon emissions, which will be the first of its kind after efforts to get legally binding agreement for cuts from most of the world's countries failed at a blockbuster meeting in Copenhagen in 2009.

Asked if a bad deal was better than no deal next year, she said: "Paris has to reach a meaningful agreement because, frankly, we are running out of time."

But she dismissed parallels with the run-up to the Copenhagen summit, saying the frequency of extreme weather events, lower renewable energy costs and progress on climate legislation at a national level meant it was different this time round.

"I hope that we don't need too many more Sandys or Haiyans or fires in Australia or floods in the UK to wake us up. My sense is there is already much momentum.We have 66 governments that have climate legislation, we have a total of 500 laws around the world on climate, whereas before Copenhagen we only had 47."

But the grouping of the world's 47 "least developed" countries said this week that they would want far more money to adapt their economies to climate change than the $100bn a year that been so far proposed by rich countries.

"We will want more than the $100bn to agree to a new Paris protocol," said Quamrul Choudhury, a lead negotiator for the group which includes many African and Asian countries. "On top of that we will want a legal mechanism to compensate for 'loss and damage' [compensation for extreme climate change events]. There should definitely be some space in the [final] treaty for that," he said in London.

He called on rich countries to compromise. "The battle lines are drawn. Everyone wants to defend their country and nobody will give an inch, but everyone has to make some sacrifice or we won't have a deal. We need high-level political commitment to raise ambition."

Choudhury, who is also Bangladesh's climate envoy to the United Nations, met British climate negotiators ahead of the Bonn talks. "I am optimistic that the world can avoid another diplomatic disaster like Copenhagen in 2009. There have been major changes since then. In 2008-09 we knew it would be very expensive to reduce emissions. Now we know it does not cost very much. It's not expensive, not a Herculean task. Countries like the UK know they can reduce emissions by 65% without it costing very much at all.

"But even if we have an ambitious mitigation target [to cut emissions] adaptation must be the cornerstone of a new treaty. This is not a zero-sum game. If we treat it like that there will be no Paris protocol," he said.

Figueres later agreed that the $100m proposed in 2009 as compensation for poor countries would not be enough for them to build defences and adapt their economies. "It was a figure plucked from a hat … $100bn is not enough [to meet] the mitigation and not at all for the adaptation costs. The International Energy Agency has suggested it may cost $1 trillion over 25 years just for adaptation. $100bn is a freckle on the map of what needs to be invested."

A major UN climate science panel report to be published at the end of this month will spell out the impacts of climate change on humanity and the natural world.Leaked versions of the report say agricultural production will decline by up to 2% every decade for the rest of the 21st century. More

 

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