Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. tips us to this interesting yet inconvenient graph.
The graph below shows data from the BP Statistical Review of World Energy 2014, which was released yesterday. It shows the proportion of global energy consumption that comes from carbon-free sources. Guess what? It isn’t growing.
Pielke writes:
The proportion of carbon-free energy consumption is a far more important metric of progress with respect to the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere than looking at carbon dioxide emissions.
…
What you should take from this however is that there remains no evidence of an increase in the proportion of carbon-free energy consumption even remotely consistent with the challenge of atmospheric stabilization of atmospheric carbon dioxide. Those who claim that the world has turned a corner, soon will, or that they know what steps will get us around that corner are dreamers or fools. We don’t know. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can design policies more compatible with policy learning and muddling through.
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It reminds me of “the pause”…
Oh, Jimmy, Jimmy YOU freaking GENIUS – it IS THE PAUSE!!!! It must be its the right shape!!! I’m at least 97% dead sure of it.
Just the handle of a hockey stick.
Looks like natural economic variability, driven by the price of oil, but no doubt the planet savers will see their influence in it somewhere.
There should be a chart of the number of permanent jobs carbon-free energy has created compared to fossil fuel jobs.
Fossil fuels are a finite resource, sooner or later all the oil, coal and gas will be used up, renewable energy is the only hope for our long term energy needs. This report is in no way “good news”.
Someone want to correlate Carbon Free energy with Temperatures? Looks like a close fit! And of course to alarmists, correlation is causation. 😉
More a cricket-bat than a hockey stick…..
What?what?….
“The proportion of carbon-free energy consumption is a far more important metric of progress with respect to the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere than looking at carbon dioxide emissions.”
The chart tells me that cutting emissions is the ONLY way. Twenty years of heavily subsidized development has produced no change.
walker808 says:
June 17, 2014 at 4:07 am
Fossil fuels are a finite resource, sooner or later all the oil, coal and gas will be used up, renewable energy is the only hope for our long term energy needs. This report is in no way “good news”.
===========
Our long term energy needs are covered. Easily. Fretting over what they are going to do in 2214, long after we are all dead, is silly.
Kind of ironic ….. the growth in the percentage of carbon free energy sources seems to be perfectly inversely correlated with the amount of green propaganda on global warming.
Yes, there seems to be an excellent correlation. It even peaks at the time of the 1998 el nino. Ironically, this correlation looks far better than the correlation between temperature and CO2.
The conclusion is obvious: to ‘solve’ global warming, we need to build huge numbers of coal-fired power stations. The Chinese may be on the right track…
But we should be careful. If we build too many coal-fired stations, we may trigger global cooling, which, as we well know, is far worse than global warming….
Chris
Maybe someone can look at the relationship between the creation of “carbon free” jobs and the losses of ordinary jobs due to high energy costs.
Spain might be a good place to look.
We will start making progress as soon as we abandon the inane “All of the Above” mantra, and substitute “All of the Sensible.”
Briefly, the definition of “Sensible” would be those sources that have scientific proof that they are a net societal benefit.
Reblogged this on gottadobetterthanthis and commented:
The graph shows that despite billions in tax incentives, and billions more in direct incentives, energy source that don’t directly produce carbon dioxide cannot compete. Cannot, that is the important point.
“It shows the proportion of global energy consumption that comes from carbon-free sources. Guess what? It isn’t growing.”
This doesn’t seem consistent with what the report actually says under “Renewable Power” (electricity):
“The share of renewable power in global power generation reached 5.3% in 2013, almost doubling in five years from 2.7% in 2008. Renewables accounted for 8% of OECD power generation in 2013, compared to 3% in the non-OECD. While the aggregate shares remain low, for some individual countries renewables now contribute a significant share of power. Eighteen countries now have a renewables share of more than 10%, up from just eight countries in 2010.”
and
“The rapid growth of renewable power generation continued in 2013. Global growth was 16.3%, slower than in 2012 but above the ten year trend rate of growth, and the tenth successive year of double-digit growth. Renewables contributed 34.6% of the growth in global power generation in 2013, representing 15.7% of world energy growth.”
Dr Helen Czerski of the BBC (recent Horizon edition) apparently thinks that battery-powered cars and aircraft are ‘carbon-free’ transport. Either she gets the fairies to charge her batteries up for her, or she’s playing dumb to keep her job with the BBC.
BBC science programmes dumbing down? As if!
I wonder if “carbon-free” includes nuclear. It’s offering has dropped in the last few years. I don’t have time to make sense of the units, scales (e.g. electricity vs all energy), but this link has a bar graph showing the recent decline of nukes.
http://www.world-nuclear.org/info/Current-and-Future-Generation/Nuclear-Power-in-the-World-Today/
Carbon-free might be stable, but carbon content is going down with the increased use of natural gas, which has lower carbon content.
Nick
Yes, it is consistent. The graph is about global energy consumption. You’re quote is about renewable electricity generation. Doubling renewable electricity generation from 2.7 to 5.3% will not make a noticeable blip in global energy consumption. Besides which, carbon free and renewable are not synonyms. How do they take wood pellet generation into account, for example? Renewable but not carbon free.
Jknapp says: June 17, 2014 at 5:05 am
“Doubling renewable electricity generation from 2.7 to 5.3% will not make a noticeable blip in global energy consumption.”
Well, it does. They say:
“Renewables contributed 34.6% of the growth in global power generation in 2013, representing 15.7% of world energy growth.”
If you look at the details you’ll see that since about 2002 there has been a very substantial decline in nuclear’s share of global energy consumption. Nuclear power production/consumption FELL by 7.7% from 2002 to 2013, while global primary energy consumption rose by an astonishing 32.5% over the same period. As a result, nuclear’s share fell from 6.38% in 2002 to 4.42% in 2013.
At the same time, the production of electricity from other carbon-free energy forms rose by 72%, growing faster than global consumption (over half the additional capacity coming from hydro and most of the rest from wind) and their combined share of global consumption rose from 6.68% to 8.92%.
The two changes (nuclear down, renewables up) almost exactly balance each other out.
Indeed the figures shown on the chart are for nuclear, hydro and “other renewables”, the latter including wind, geothermal, solar, biomass and waste.
Nick Stokes. Comprehension fail.
Th e discrepancy between the ‘rise in renewables’ and the ‘pause in carbon neutral generating fractions’ is easily explained.
The windmills and solar panels take a lot of coal produced electricity to make.
Once deployed, they do not result in any overall reduction of fossil fuel usage either. Since it is burnt more inefficiently to balance them.