Renew Extra Weekly

Some have seen the drastic action taken in response to Covid 19 as a small-scale ‘dress rehearsal’ for what we will have to do to limit the potentially much larger impacts from climate change issues: we will have to cut back fully on activities leading to carbon emissions while ramping up ‘green’ approaches. With that in mind, there have been pressures on Governments to ensure that their post-C19 corporate restart/rescue funding programmes stimulate ‘green’ technology options. The UK government’s advisory Climate Change Committee Chair , Lord Deben, said: ‘The steps that the UK takes to rebuild from the COVID-19 pandemic can accelerate the transition to a successful and low-carbon economy and improve our climate resilience. Choices that lock in emissions or climate risks are unacceptable.’ Renewable energy will obviously be one major focus. As I noted in a recent Blog on my new renewables book , the International Energy Agency’s Executive Director Dr Fatih Birol, said that...

As we begin to see off Covid 19 in some locations, thoughts return to the larger battle- slowing climate change. The use of renewable energy is usually seen as a key to that. It is spreading rapidly and some claim that wind, solar and other renewables can and will become the dominant global energy sources within a few decades, thus avoiding major climate change problems.   Certainly concerns about climate change have been a key driver, leading to growing government support. However, the falling cost of renewable energy has also become a major driver. Some renewable energy technologies are now competitive across the board and costs continue to fall, with a new commercial dynamic adding impetus to their uptake. My new book asks will that trend be sufficient to ensure that renewables expand fast enough globally to limit climate change to survivable levels without imposing high costs? There are certainly many who doubt that this is possible. Some critics argue that renewable ene...

A powerful new US film from Michael Moore has been doing the rounds. Directed by Jeff Gibbs, this full length documentary challenges just about all aspects of environmentalism as currently practiced in the USA, and by implication elsewhere. Paralleling some other deep green critiques , and drawing on Ozzie Zehner’s work , it claims that we have been misled into believing that renewables like wind and PV can save the day, whereas the reality is that their construction (and in some cases operation) requires fossil fuel, as well as other dangerous materials. And despite the widespread deployment of renewables, emissions have not fallen, and coal use continues. Biomass is if anything even worse: it’s seen as basically being about burning trees for profit, with a net rise in emissions, loss of biodiversity and destruction of carbon sinks. The film attacks the Sierra Club and other major US environmental groups and individuals for their alleged complicity in all this and in what it de...