Guest essay by Eric Worrall
David Attenborough and a group of other prominent people, have called for a publicly funded $15 billion / year research programme over 10 years, an international “Apollo” project, to make renewables economically viable.
The letter;
We, the undersigned, believe that global warming can be addressed without adding significant economic costs or burdening taxpayers with more debt. A sensible approach to tackling climate change will not only pay for itself but provide economic benefits to the nations of the world.
The aspiration of the Global Apollo Programme is to make renewable energy cheaper than coal within 10 years. We urge the leading nations of the world to commit to this positive, practical initiative by the Paris climate conference in December.
The plan requires leading governments to invest a total of $15bn a year in research, development and demonstration of clean energy. That compares to the $100bn currently invested in defence research and development globally each year.
Public investment now will save governments huge sums in the future. What is more, a coordinated R&D plan can help bring energy bills down for billions of consumers. Renewable energy gets less than 2% of publicly funded R&D. The private sector spends relatively small sums on clean energy research and development.
Just as with the Apollo space missions of the 1960s, great scientific minds must now be assembled to find a solution to one of the biggest challenges we face.
Please support the Global Apollo Programme – the world’s 10-year plan for cheaper, cleaner energy.
David Attenborough
Professor Brian Cox
Paul Polman CEO, Unilever
Arunabha Ghosh CEO, Council on Energy Environment and Water
Ed Davey Former UK energy secretary
Nicholas Stern IG Patel professor of economics and government, LSE
Bill Hare Founder and CEO, Climate Analytics
Nilesh Y Jadhav Programme director, Energy Research Institute @NTU, Singapore
Niall Dunne Chief sustainability officer, BT
Carlo Carraro Director, International Centre for Climate Governance
Professor Brian Hoskins Chair, Grantham Institute
Mark Kenber CEO, The Climate Group
Ben Goldsmith Founder, Menhaden Capital
Sabina Ratti Executive director, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)
John Browne Chairman, L1 Energy
Zac Goldsmith MP
Professor Martin Siegert Co-director, Grantham Institute
Professor Joanna Haigh Co-director, Grantham Institute, and vice-president of Royal Meteorological Society
Peter Bakker President, World Business Council for Sustainable Development
Dr Fatima Denton African Climate Policy Centre
Denys Shortt CEO, DCS Group
Adair Turner Former chairman, Financial Services Authority
Gus O’Donnell Former cabinet secretary
Richard Layard London School of Economics
Professor John Shepherd
Martin Rees Astronomer royal
I wish someone had thought of making renewables viable, before the world’s politicians wasted countless billions of public money, building renewable systems which are not fit for purpose.
Having said that, $150 billion seems an awfully high price to pay for speculative research, given there are already other options.
If CO2 is an urgent issue, we should be building nuclear reactors, not delaying action by 10 years in the slim hope of a major breakthrough in renewables technology. A few years ago, former NASA GISS Director James Hansen published an open letter demanding that greens embrace nuclear power.
If nuclear fission is unacceptable for whatever reason, what about nuclear fusion? The ITER project is a serious international effort to explore the viability of nuclear fusion. $150 billion would dramatically accelerate the pace of Nuclear Fusion research. If the ITER project succeeds, it could open the way to limitless non-polluting energy. Unlike Attenborough’s renewables dream, hopes for an ITER breakthrough are based on known physics. Fusion plasmas are not self sustaining because they lose heat too quickly. The rationale behind the ITER project is based on simple geometry. The hope that by building a really big plasma, they can take advantage of the improved volume to surface area ratio, to slow heat loss enough that the fusion reaction becomes self sustaining.
And of course, we would have to think about what opportunities we would miss, personal and public, by spending so much tax money on energy research. For example, a mere fraction of $150 billion could buy an awful lot of clean water and medical care for the world’s poor people – but somehow poor people always seem to end up down the bottom of the list of priorities.
Molten salt nuclear reactors are not far off – 10 years perhaps, less if more money and effort expended. They will provide power cheaper than coal and are intrinsically safe. Don’t these jerks pay any attention to power technologies?
There isn’t as much money to be made in any kinds of conventional power plants. Wind and solar projects can be used to create lucrative secondary trading markets such as trading yieldcos.
Light water reactors have been around for more than 50 years and have a perfect safety record. No one has been hurt by radiation from a LWR.
There is no problem providing the electric power that society needs other than the one people make up.
+1000
Retired Kit P
“No one has been hurt by radiation from a LWR”
Begging to differ: no member of the public in the USA has been killed/injured by radiation from a reactor. Lots of people in the nuke management business in the US have been injured, just not the public.
As the the rest of the world lots of people have been directly harmed by pressurised light water reactors. The problem is they are inherently unsafe – they require the presence of power, pressure and control under disaster conditions – think Fukushima. Heavy water reactors, on the other hand, are inherently safe. The method of controlling the reaction in an emergency is not to add something (graphite rods) but to remove the heavy water which is done by depressurisation. If a saboteur blew up the core of a heavy water reactor it would immediately depressurise and shut off because the reaction cannot be sustained.
We have options. One is to use common sense and a five function calculator before making expensive decisions.
Renewables are NOT more expensive than coal, just as long as you keep subsidizing them.
You mean they are NOT more expensive than coal, so long as the parasites can live off taxpayer subsidies. If everyone had to work for a living and if they wanted renewables they could pay for them our of their own pocket, from the sweat of their own faces. Then coal might be prettier than unicorns.and $150 billion would look like a lot of money.
I’m in favor of research, but totally against the approach used thus far. We should not be subsidizing subpar technology to make it “commercially viable”. If anything, and simply allows people to stop pushing for new technology that is actually better, and cash in now.
A good analogy is the March of Dimes. It was the first grass roots movement to fund research into curing Polio. They brought in a lot of money, and funded some science into developing a vaccine. But if you look at the total spending, 98% of the money went toward palliative non-curative care at Polio camps and only 2% went toward actual research. FDR’s family was heavily invested in these “treatment facilities”, and benefited financially from the influx of money. And I think it’s easy to say that money spent to ease the suffering of someone with Polio is something worth supporting.
BUT, what if they had spent 10% of the money on research? 50% of the money? Even after the March of Dimes can into being, it took 10+ years to develop a vaccine. Over that time span, millions contracted polio. What if they could have sped up the discovery of a vaccine by 6 months? One year, two years? How many tens of thousands more people contracted Polio unnecessarily during the interim, because 98% of the money went into palliative care rather than finding a cure as soon as possible?
We don’t need feel-good spending on current technology that won’t change how we use power. We should spend money on research for the energy “cure”, not just spread money around to enrich those invested in non-curative technologies.
World War 2 which lasted for 6 years diverted almost all medical research into the war effort at that time.
Then it was later discovered,after the vaccine was developed, that polio is sewage borne.
Well, it is progress. At least they are not calling for the 10,000th proposed Marshall Plan.
With odd exceptions a motley crew, people who have founded companies with their own money and paid their staff for years have enough common sense not to put their names to fantasy projects of this kind.
Seems like this is the pattern: Demand ungodly amounts from govts to accomplish a useless goal, idiot govts give them a comparatively small amount compared to what they ask for, but they still get more than enough to keep the charade going from year to year as they keep demanding more and more. Rinse and repeat.
Let’s remind ourselves what the REAL Apollo scientists say… http://wattsupwiththat.com/2014/03/08/the-group-the-right-climate-stuff-team-says-there-no-need-to-worry-about-catastrophic-global-warming/
Anyone who promotes the Apollo model as a way to advance our engineering or technology capabilities is both ignorant and dangerous!
As someone who grew up believing in Apollo and have worked in the space industry for more that 30 years, it gives me no pleasure to say that Apollo as one of the worst things that ever happened with respect to enabling human space exploration.
Apollo was never intended to enable human space exploration – it was a national security programme simply aimed at demonstrating that capitalism beats communism – and the evidence for this is obvious: it was cancelled after the first lunar landing, we can no longer put people on the Moon and are still using essentially the same type of rocket that first put a human into space.
Follow the Apollo route and you will end up spending vast amounts of money producing nothing more than a big government-industrial complex that will stifle innovation for the next half century… at least!
But, it did make it to the Moon, and it was known to be a feasible goal before we ever embarked on it.
Maybe if we had found something there worth going back for, we would have continued it.
Navigating your way to the Moon, and controlling a craft weighing 3,000 tonnes, with the computing power of my wristwatch, was no mean feat. Do you think, in your wildest dreams, that our self-obsessed, bubble-wrapped society, could do the equivalent in just one short decade??
R
“Apollo was never intended to enable human space exploration – it was a national security programme simply aimed at demonstrating that capitalism beats communism.”
Von Braun told Kennedy that the Apollo project was a dead end, and Kennedy told him to get with the program.
In light of how truly magnificent the moon landings were in scientific, engineering and technical terms, as well as being arguably THE epochal achievement in human history, it is unutterably sad that they came to be as a result of what was, in the bottom line analysis, an obscenely expensive geopolitical dick-size contest which, once won, left those who made them happen yesterday’s news, at best. Those who believe, as I do, that establishing a permanent, self-supporting human presence off the Earth is not only worthwhile in and of itself, but also essential for the long term survival of humanity, have got to come to terms with the reality Dave Salt so eloquently outlined – that the Apollo Program, in the long run, did much more to impede that goal than to advance it.
“Unlike Attenborough’s renewables dream, hopes for an ITER breakthrough are based on known physics.”
Apollo also was based on known physics. Calls for a “Manhattan Project” or an “Apollo Project” often evince this fallacy. Neither of those projects was even remotely speculative. The physics were known. The only challenges were technological.
Not so with “renewable energy”. There, fundamental limits on efficiency are known which make it a pipe dream. It would only be similar if we had known, prior to Apollo, that rockets would not function in space, and nevertheless had committed the same funding we did, knowing we would never make it to the Moon.
Bart
Study the physics and economic further. The current efficiency and cost “limits” are not fundamental limits. Most of the discussion evidences lack of engineering understanding or creativity.
The efficiency is not the problem. It is the dilute source and storage that are the problems.
They are. Perhaps a better analogy would have been if no rocket fuel with an adequate specific impulse existed to reach the moon, but it was nevertheless proposed to use a 5,000ft-high 40-stage rocket in the hope that it might just manage to get there. Most people would have argued that a more sensible approach would be to search for a better fuel. Even if no such fuel were known, the odds of finding one would be substantially better than having none of the 40 stages of the 5,000ft rocket malfunction.
Interestingly, the Manhattan project was an attempt to do something (create a nuclear fission chain reaction) which existed only as theory and had never been demonstrated in practice. That shows that in the right circumstances we are prepared to place a bet on what seems like worthwhile odds rather than simply pouring the money into a known but limited result.
Tim
Those are the challenges. Now what is needed to provide solutions. Both can be overcome cost effectively with focused development and insight.
Ian –
Leó Szilárd and Enrico Fermi created the first neutron chain reaction in 1939. It was pretty much a foregone conclusion after that. The success of the experiment prompted Einstein’s famous letter to FDR urging an atomic bomb project.
David –
Yes, that’s all fine and good. But, it isn’t existing technology, and hence still speculative. People have been trying to leapfrog existing technology for decades now. Many promising avenues have been investigated but, for one reason or another, have generally failed to produce significant return beyond niche applications.
I personally see no urgency. Sure, fund alternative energy at some level. But, not Apollo level. And, not as a neurotic aversion to perfectly good, existing fossil fuel technology and infrastructure.
Bart – look at the magnitude of the problem. 4-5% depletion/year on existing wells at 94 million bbl/day requires ~ 4.2 million bbl/day replacement production each year just to stay even. Adding 1%/yr for population and 1.5% for economic growth needs ~ 7%/year or 6.6 million bbl/day replacement & new growth fuel each year. That is close to Saudi Arabia’s total oil exports ( which are declining because increasing domestic consumption.)
So where do you go to find a new Saudi Arabia’s worth of replacement and new production EACH YEAR?
Why is Shell seeking to drill in the Arctic?
For context see Robert L. Hirsch on the PEAKING OF OIL PRODUCTION: IMPACTS, MITIGATION, & RISK MANAGEMENT addressing the structural engineering and construction requirements to address such peak oil demands.
Actual Saudi Arabian production and exports (August 19, 2015).
i.e., only 69.7% exported – 30.3% consumed and rising.
Yeah, David, I’ve been hearing this for about 40 years now. Always, new sources are found, and always, the day of reckoning is delayed.
So, what if I’m wrong? What if we’re really, truly going to run out this time?
Nuclear, then, is the way to go, IMHO. I do not want bird chompers or fryers. I do not want the toxic runoff of solar cell production. I do not want the damn things carpeting the landscape from sea to shining sea. There is no reason to destroy our natural habitat when there is a clean, renewable, compact, alternative energy source available.
If these people genuinely understood the Apollo space program they’d stop referring to it. The basics to get to the moon were already well in existence by the time President Kennedy elicited his challenge in the early 1960s to the U.S. to send a man to the Moon in the next 10 years and return him safely to Earth. In fact it could rightfully be argued that the moon program began a quarter century earlier in Germany when the N..t..zi government provided substantial funding for missile research. The head of that missile program was Werner Von Braun who, 30 years later, would be responsible for the design of the Apollo rocket that took our Astronauts to the moon. Von Braun’s first successful rocket, the V2, would be acquired as war booty by Russia and the U.S. at the close of WWII, and would pave the way for the space race between the superpowers. The V2, with a solid fueled WAC Corporal rocket strapped to its nose, would give the U.S. its first experience with a two stage rocket before the 1940s had even ended. The problems with re-entry were already understood back then as well. By the middle 1950s Russia had successfully launched the first orbiting satellite, and later that year the second satellite, Sputnik II, would demonstrate that a living organism, a dog, could survive in space. Shortly afterwards the first Russian astronaut would orbit the Earth, and shortly before Kennedy’s announcement we had already sent up our own astronaut. Clearly, Kennedy’s challenge had not come out of fantasyland. Sure, there were huge technical hurdles to still be overcome, but the groundwork had already been laid long before, and the actions necessary through which to achieve it were well known.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing at all even remotely comparable exists today in regards to comparing renewable energy to Apollo. There is no known renewable energy source waiting under tarps at a research facility the way the V2s were. And, with nothing waiting, there’s nothing available to scale up to the energy levels modern society exists on (excepting nuclear). A replacement for current energy sources cannot possibly exist if it does not yet even exist in the imagination. Everything for Apollo not only existed in the imagination most of it existed in reality.
Asking current society to perform an Apollo like mission for renewable energy is as silly as asking for a society in the 1800s to launch a moon program. Our successors may do it but we can’t. We don’t live in their world, a world we do not know, nor visit, nor imagine anymore than an inhabitant of the 1800s could’ve imagined ours. Can’t we have faith in ourselves, and the future generations of our species, and leave them alone to pursue their own solutions, and betterment, and be left prosperous enough to do so.
The only common denominator is U.S. taxpayer resources, but the growth rate of the tax base is much reduced from what it was in the 1960s. This is due to……progress and sophistication in leveraging more and more resources from a slowing demographic and competitive base. The new tactic is to pre-spend the money and raise the taxes later to “responsibly” patch the budget or rate of annual deficit.
Tony J.
Logically invalid as you know little of “if it does not yet even exist in the imagination”.
It should also be remembered that Apollo was a symbolic gesture more than a scientific programme; the program was curtailed once it had been proven that lunar landings were possible, the last few Saturn V vehicles being transferred to space station work, or retired to museums.
Well before Apollo 11 (1966 IIRC) the Surveyor probes had shown that it was possible to land a robot on the moon, and that a robot could do more exploring, for longer, and at less cost, than could a human. Thus it was already understood that the future of solar system exploration would likely involve robots, not humans.
Though, the Apollo program still fascinates us, partly because the near-impossible was achieved with such basic technology. In many ways this is not unlike the building of the Pyramids in an age with only copper tools. In both cases we ask ourselves, “How the hell did they do that?” and in both the answer emerges that there were some mighty clever people involved.
Attenborough is old and tired, I can’t blame him for being taken in. It’s Cox that disappoints me enormously. Clearly an extremely academic chap and always putting down religion and promoting the scientific process over everything. Yet I suppose to get BBC licence fee cash he’s more than happy to trot out AGW bs which is religious nonsense that utterly fails the scientific process. Shame on you Cox, you’ll pay the price mate when your potentially long and prosperous career is cut short by the discovery of the fraud
Andydaines,
“Clearly an extremely academic chap and always putting down religion and promoting the scientific process over everything.”
The concept that religion is magically preventing the “scientific process” from doing much of anything is utterly unfounded, as far as I can tell. The concept has been “religiously” presumed to be valid by many, with no sign of any “scientific process” involved, it seems to me. . as in, the making of a “new” religion I sometimes call Siants.
And it’s that view of science as a virtual God sort of religiosity, which allows things like the CAWG sect to flourish, I say, and undermine actual science itself, as well as freedom of the mind in general . . as is being demonstrated on virtually a daily basis. The scientific method is clearly a great approach to many problems, but it’s really just a tool, not a beneficent Saviour because when used by people bent on dominating and/or destroying, it works just as well.
Let me tell you about stupid. If I had had an employee come to me and pitch a project for $150B that would “make renewables economically viable,” I would expect him to tell me how he was going to do it. If he said, “Just give me the money, and I’ll get it done,” I would have kicked him out of my office.
Attenborough has project management bassackwards. Come up with an idea, then request funding for it. He only requests funding. “Attenborough, you’re fired!”
BUT… This plan is an engineering project. The money should not go to climate scientists of TV documentary makers, it must go to someone who can make renewable energy cheaper than coal within 10 years. This is a job for real scientists in the real world. Machines do not work simply because a consensus of their designers agree that the design is good.
Green energy is good – I’m all for it, and of course so is our host! However, it is strictly limited by scale problems and this is what always has to be remembered. For example, upscaling wind turbines from small domestic systems to large MW types is never going to work because instead of having a single household struggling when there is no wind – you have thousands. Hence, you simply have to have the grid system as backup. (Just imagine being somewhere that relies on constant energy, such as hospitals?)
The renewable efficiency argument is rather moot when compared to the energy storage argument. For example, the greens will not allow hundreds if not thousands of hydroelectric temporary dams/turbines to use any excess of renewable production (not sure even if it would be possible, but you get the idea) – in essence excess production ‘storage’ is the only other alternative to nuclear or fossil if we want to go to renewables ‘en masse’. Even then, the daily demand far exceeds that can be achieved with current renewables. Investment in better renewables or perhaps more accurately, better renewable efficiency, will still only help the small scale ‘user’ without massive storage schemes. Ultimately, as most people will know (even the greens if they were honest enough to admit it) we would have achieved far more investiment return by investing in nuclear research rather than renewables/green energy. Similarly, in the UK, we have many regulations to improve energy conservation (house insulation, energy saving bulbs, and suchlike) and investment in these things provides a much better return in terms of a direct energy ‘demand’ benefit.
Basically, what I’m saying is that paying big bucks into renewables is like putting a sticky plaster on a severed limb – i.e.pointless – we should be looking at the tourniquet solution (restricting the flow!) – and to take my analogy a little further, perhaps to providing a base of higher quality higher density oxygenated blood (e.g. nuclear power). Nuclear will be the final choice – of that I have no doubt – but the wasted time and billions will of course already have been wasted.
If a research program did find a way to make renewables economically viable, environmentalists would find a way to oppose it, just as they do with nuclear and hydropower. Cheap, abundant energy would, in their minds, allow the world’s population to grow unchecked, and that would be a disaster to the planet. So, while they support expensive renewables, they will oppose any source of cheap energy, whether it is renewable or not.
Yes and no. First there is reason for environmentalists to oppose wind and solar. There is environmental impact. A few wind and solar projects are just an interesting novelty. When the amount of power generated is the same as a large coal plant, the reality is that maybe coal was better. Things often look better on paper.
Liberals love new ideas. If they work, conservative like them. JFK was pronuclear. Now that LWRs are proven technology, liberals are against them. There is a certain segment of parasites in society who are against every thing that keeps them warm and fed. There is drama in being against something. If you spend your workday being useful to society, you get enough drama dealing with the problems of the day. Then you come home to deal with your teenage children who have been how terrible the world is.
I concur
Question given that the availability issue with renewable energy is related to the rotation of the planet , is 150 billion really enough to solve this problem ?
I would support an ‘Apollo Project’, with substantial but not absurd funding, to finance practical research into all aspects of future energy needs and climate change. ‘Renewables’ would be part of that, but so would energy conservation, improvements in other energy sources (oil, gas, nuclear [including the crucial issue of decommissioning and waste disposal, which at present hugely inflate the cost of nuclear] ) , and geoengineering. I know that a lot of folks here have a kneejerk reaction against geoengineering, but I don’t see any serious objection to *research* on (e.g.) cloud seeding, carbon sequestration, ocean fertilization, or ‘sun-screening’. Some of the comments above imply that all useful research will be adequately funded by the profit motive. I have great respect for the profit motive, but it has its limitations. On purely commercial grounds, no-one will finance research if the potential returns are more than about 15 years in the future, or if there is no way under IP law of securing a fair share of the benefits to the financers of the research. The normal maximum term of a patent is 20 years, someone who invents something which only reaches a break-even point after 20 years gets nothing from it.
How about opening up Panama from South America like it was 3 million years ago so we don’t have another glaciation? Does that count as geo-engineering or is it only the reduce warming side that counts?
Wrong. We have no need to do anything. We have known energy sources with existing technology to last many generations, far beyond any living persons lifetime.
Apollo Project is absurd on several levels. It’s the wrong approach to projects, there is no need for it, even if it could work, which it can’t, and the approach is positively ripe for corruption.
Do they count an element as common as lead to be “renewable”? If so I have their answer … thorium! Way more abundant than the rare earth elements used in current “renewable” energy machines.
Now where do I collect my money?
You’ll have to wait 400 years til thorium becomes practical.
Yes, if no one works on it. My father was a steam locomotive engineer and these locos were retired not too long before Sputnik went up! The lefty elitists on the “list” don’t even include an engineer. It is why linear thinking social scientists and biologists, who do most of the projections on mean nasty futures, like Malthus’s death to civilization by burial in horse manure before the 19th century was over, completely lack an imagination and leave out the principal component- technology- from their consideration. Why would a biologist be considered an expert on the future. They study the unchanging habits of creatures and plants who don’t have this dimension. The future IS technology! No prognostication of mankind’s damage to the planet has ever come true. The reason is, it is axiomatic (Pearse’s Axiom) that we can’t do the planet any significant or lasting harm.
Hiroshima radioactivity fell back to background within a year of the bomb. They rebuilt it and it is a thriving big city. The Chernobyl exclusion zone has become a remarkable game park with essentially the whole range of animals, large and small, many of which were thought to have been extirpated if not gone extinct. In 40 years (not 400) we will have a population likely under 9B and it may even be declining with growth in prosperity and abundant food supply. We will have ample energy and we will be healthy in an environmment ever improving. This just doesn’t make good copy for the media.
My father, Dr. Aden Meinel, was the one in charge of going to the secret rocket caves in Germany and collect the scientists and bring home some rockets. But when he got there, the Soviets were already bombing the area and the Nazis blew up the electrical system while he was looking at the rockets inside plunging him into darkness and he had to flee, pretty much empty handed but with valuable documentation and a large number of German rocket experts including some very starved mostly French slaves who were viciously abused by the Nazis.
This is the beginning of the US rocket program. Before that, my dad and his friends were all members of a rocket club that played around with stuff but had virtually no money. After WWII, these same people had a lot of money, of course and NASA was finally born much later than WWII. I grew up inside all this stuff going on and whenever a President gave us money, my dad and his buddies would celebrate. But all too often, money was strangled but the public wasn’t told about this.
It was all very much hit and miss with the Vietnam war being a huge hit, for example. After the moon mission, it was hit hard, too, the politicians got their pictures and praise and then belly flopped everything.
Space shuttle: it was from day one a compromise that pleased none of the scientists I knew.
One wonders why Attenbourough et. al. seem to be oblivious to the fact that the US is currently wasting almost $50 billion/year on the goal he wants to achieve,
It will never work if we have a bunch of leaders from the White House successfully picking losers that happen to bundle $$$ in support of the Democratic.
Wasting $$$ on wind and Solar will never repeat NEVER achieve the goal of being competitive with fossil fuels, it is fundamental physics.
check the following references:
DOE Budget: $28 billion/yr
http://energy.gov/sites/prod/files/2014/04/f14/15Highlights%20%281%29.pdf
Climate Change: 21.4 Billion/yr
https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/assets/legislative_reports/fcce-report-to-congress.pdf
How did such a detail observer on nature show productions turn into this? I guess good script writing makes the performer look like a genius.
disappointing, but not surprising, to see BBC’s Attenborough heir apparent Brian Cox amongst the signatories.
the MSM loves to portray CAGW as a left/right issue, & uses US/Canada & Australia up until this week’s COUP, as the holdouts on ideological grounds.
however, EU is CAGW central and, at last count, 20 of 8 member States were rightwing. this is never mentioned in the MSM.
11 Sept: Bruegel Institute: European climate finance: securing the best return
There is a European interest in getting a global climate deal in Paris that entails high mitigation ambitions and involves the EU in shaping the global climate-finance architecture
By: Guntram B. Wolff and Georg Zachmann
An extended version of this paper was presented at the ECOFIN meeting in Luxembourg on 11 September 2015. Click here to download it (LINK)…
Climate finance is the most important tool the EU has to make a (Paris) deal likely.
***A strong and unified EU position backed by common resources would increase the EU’s ability to shape the emerging international climate institutions and their governance, to ensure that climate finance is used to reduce mitigation costs and to ensure that European industry benefits from the opportunities related to climate finance…
http://bruegel.org/2015/09/european-climate-finance-securing-the-best-return/
[20 of 28 member states? .mod]
It is a race against the sun. When demand of fossil fuel goes down, so does the price, I belive you can never win, until the last fossil fuel is burnt. If the effort is succesfull you only draw out the pain.
Lack of common sense from all of the above proponents appears to be the major problem.
Irrespective of global warming and the CO2 scare, it does make sense to work on nuclear and solar energy. Our planet has limited resources no matter how we slice and dice it and reliable energy supply should be a common good. Not sure however that governments have to spend all that money.