While the economic news dominates the editorial pages, delegates at the climate summit in Durban face their own failures. At last year’s summit in Cancun they agreed on a maximum global heating of 2ºC. Now + 3.5°C by 2100 seems a more accurate estimate.
Plus 2°C is considered as the edge of safe climate change. Heat up further and self-reinforcing mechanisms will kick in: dried out and dying forests will absorb less and emit more CO2. Snowless tundra’s will absorb more solar radiation, thaw and emit lots of methane – a very potent greenhouse gas. These and many other factors will amplify global warming.
But the climate measures (not to mention the realisations) announced by delegates at the Durban summit fall short of reducing greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global warming to 2°C (associated with 450 ppm of CO2). This failing has been dubbed the ‘ambition gap’. Chairwoman of the International Energy Agency (IEA), Maria van der Hoeven, warned: “The door to achieving our objectives is rapidly closing.”
At DRI Energy’s offices, her warning mainly caused hilarity. This was the same lady who, as the Netherlands’ Minister of Economic Affairs, licensed three additional coal-fired power plants. “She adapts well to her new role at the IEA,” says Professor Hester Bijl, chairman of DRI Energy, with understatement. Bijl (Aerospace Engineering) is not surprised by the shortfall in ambitions: “Take the Netherlands, for example: what have we done except for two small offshore windparks? Nothing.” Since the reference year 1990, Dutch CO2 emissions have risen by 13 percent. The new coals plants and the increased speed limit will only add to this. Germany, by contrast, has reduced its emissions by 20 percent. “I hope we’ll end up as the world’s laughing stock of climate policy,” Bijl says.
“Climate summits don’t change a thing,” adds Professor Ad van Wijk, of Future Energy Systems (Applied Sciences). “The Netherlands will never attain the European goal of 20 percent emission reductions by 2020. But that doesn’t interest me much.” Van Wijk prefers to concentrate on large-scale changes that could achieve more than climate conferences. Look at the widespread ascent of LED-lighting, for example, or the progression of electric cars. Popular not because of their energy-efficiency per se but because of the added value they offer. Increasingly more people install their own PV-cells. Solar power has become so cheap that many consumers no longer wait for subsidies but rather push ahead on their own. A ‘cap & trade’ system to limit the emission of greenhouse gases should make carbon polluters pay and thus shift the balance towards renewable energy sources.
“The EU should take the lead in climate policy,” says Ewoud de Kok, an MSc student in sustainable energy technology and chairman of the Energy Club. No matter if China, the US and Canada do not want to follow. De Kok proposes that the EU should maintain a tight cap & trade system and tax all incoming goods and services with 150 percent of the related carbon costs. Why 150 percent? “To make them interested in joining the cap & trade system,” De Kok explains. He is passionately convinced that energy and climate is mankind’s most important issue since the atomic bomb. He finds it hard to understand that politicians are reluctant to spend 2 to 3 percent of their budgets on energy transition. “We’re the last generation that can limit global warming,” De Kok says. “We have the knowledge, the technology and the welfare. Yet we don’t do a thing.”
