Fossilised minds and climate change

Humankind needs a fair system of burden sharing. Renewables can play an important role – but issues of global governance such as strict emissions limits for advanced economies must stay on the agenda. The international community needs to provide systematic incentives for developing countries, or else they will keep following the destructive fossil example set by the rich world.

[ By Sunita Narain ]

Unless we come to grips with the obstacles I believe that renewable energy technologies confront, we will not succeed in making a green future work. I think the problem is two-fold. On the one hand, we know that – for all the wrong reasons – clean and “mature” technologies are not making it big in the grid-connected, industrialised world. But we seem unable to do anything about the vested interests in fossil fuels. On the other hand, it is hard to understand, why renewable technologies are not making a difference in the grid-unconnected world, where opportunities exist and established power interests are not standing in the way.

For the renewable future to become real we will need information, which can in turn become policy and then practice. A conference – like Renewables 2004 – is an important stepping-stone into this brave new world. But for it to make the fundamental change it will require political sagacity and leadership of a kind the world has never seen.

Let us be clear that the threat of climate change is real and reducing its impacts will be the biggest cooperative enterprise humans have ever embarked upon. Let us also be clear that climate change is not so much about the environment. It is about the world economy as we know it. This is why the leader of the USA, the world’s largest economy and largest polluter, has said that he rejects the Kyoto Protocol, the agreement to cut emissions in the industrialised world. He states it will hurt the US economy and “cost us jobs”. Nonetheless, we know that the answers will lie in reinventing or reforming the energy economy of the world – moving towards renewable energy systems.


The relevance of Kyoto

If I would dare to suggest the agenda for the Renewables 2004 conference, I would therefore begin as follows: First, the conference must not avoid the KP-word. It must accept that the Kyoto Protocol (KP) and its designs on combating climate change have to be part of the renewables agenda. Sidestepping the issue will not work. We know that the problem is that fossil fuels continue to be subsidised big time, particularly by the rich and powerful. We also know that the problem of global warming comes from the fact that the world continues to use fossil fuels, which produce carbon emissions. The answer, therefore, lies in an energy transition – from a carbon-based energy economy to a carbon-free energy economy. Only the rapid introduction of renewable energy technologies has the potential to reduce the threat of climate change to a problem of a few decades in the early part of the 21st century rather than let it become an issue for centuries to come.

It is clear that we are talking about sharing a global common – the atmosphere. Therefore, the world needs to negotiate, not global warming or cheap emissions reduction, but the principles on which the atmospheric space will be allocated and the modalities that will govern the global commons. The principle of entitlements sets emissions limits for all nations. The principle of convergence holds every nation responsible to make efforts to live within its entitlements. The world, therefore, needs an “ecologically effective” international mechanism that provides incentives to all nations to put this plan into action. Any delay puts the world, especially its poor people, at greater risk.

This approach would provide incentives for developing countries to trade their unused entitlements and to move towards a low-emissions development path. We cannot accept a world in which some countries have to freeze their carbon dioxide emissions at one level and other countries at another level. This would mean freezing global inequality. Therefore, the conference must promote the integration of renewable energy in the strategies to combat climate change. It should urge that trading of climate permits – under joint implementation or the clean development mechanism – must be based on renewable technologies and that the world should work towards a system of entitlements, which will provide developing countries with an incentive to protect their carbon-free quotas and to make a transition to renewables.

Secondly, I would argue, that the effort to promote renewables, must not be perceived as a new conditionality on the developing countries. In other words, there should not be any move to put pressure on the financing or promotion of fossil fuel energy. Not only would such negative pressure prove counter-productive, more importantly, it would be immoral and unjust.

It is often argued that if industrialised countries were to reduce their emissions while developing countries are increasing their emissions, then the entire effort of the industrialised countries will get nullified. Therefore, the USA, in particular, has taken a strong position that all nations, including developing nations, must become part of the effort to reduce carbon dioxide and other gases that cause the heating up of the earth. Unfortunately, greenhouse gas emissions are strongly correlated with economic growth and since a large part of the world consists of countries that are very poor, they will inevitably increase their emissions as they grow economically. It would be churlish to imagine that leaders of developing countries will want to bear an extra economic burden at a time when they are aspiring for rapid economic growth. Neither can they accept global economic inequality of the kind that prevails today.

Thirdly, this conference must not become a parallel negotiating process to climate negotiations. This is exactly what the US strategy would be: build a bilateral process, which undermines the multilateralism of the climate change deliberations. I would argue that this conference instead must focus on what is needed and build the conditions for the rapid penetration of renewables in the world. It must provide the political leadership that helps nations understand the challenge of change. But to do this it must focus on the preconditions needed to promote the rapid expansion in the use of renewable energy technologies in the world.

There is clearly a need to create a level playing field for the penetration of renewables. The issue of the carbon tax must be on the agenda. The carbon tax will generate revenues for research in renewable technologies, it will provide the economic incentive for emerging technologies to compete. But we also need a framework, which would promote the use of technologies at a massive scale and help bring the cost of these technologies down.

This is where a system of emissions trading built on entitlements can play an important role. Developing countries like China and India are growing at a rapid rate. Any entitlement – carbon quota – they obtain would get used up rapidly. But as it is unlikely that they can use up their entire entitlement in the immediate future, they would have the potential to trade their unused entitlements. This provision would immediately give them the incentive to move towards a low emissions developmental path so that the benefits from trading emissions can stay with them for a long time.


South Asian perspectives

It is equally important to note that such an economic environment would help to create a global market for energy technologies (first in developing countries, and then later in industrialised countries) and help to kick-start the global transition towards zero emission technologies. Even today, these countries have millions of human settlements without grid-supplied electricity. There are more than two billion people who have no access to electricity. This is the opportunity that the world must leapfrog towards – energy access for all built on non-carbon-producing electric grid systems.

We must also understand that the developing world is already doing an enormous investment within its means to move the world towards a cleaner transition. The Indian government for instance, has an internal target to generate 10,000 mw power from renewable energy sources by 2012 – ten per cent of the additional power generation between now and 2012. The challenge is to understand why these plans do not always materialise. What are the technological and institutional obstacles in reaching these targets?

A review by our fortnightly magazine Down To Earth revealed that whereas renewable technologies promise access to a fundamental need – energy – to millions of rural people, currently unconnected to the power grid of our nation, numerous technological and policy obstacles confront renewable energy penetration in the country. In other words, the ten per cent target is feasible, but only with serious and deliberate policy correction.
One, there is a serious paucity of investment in renewable technologies. India has made an enormous increase in its plan outlay for renewable energy technologies but this is still inadequate. But the problem is more complicated than lack of funds. The institutional and legal infrastructure that would be supportive to decentralised technologies is weak.

Then take the case of small hydropower. It is widely recognised that electrifying remote areas through the grid will involve huge losses in transmission and distribution, so it is more sensible to introduce decentralised, small hydropower in these regions. In 1984, the Nepal government decided that setting up small hydels does not require permission as long as the local people do not object to it. No license, royalty or income tax is required for setting up hydropower plants up to one mw. The community or private sector project developers are allowed to fix the tariff for the plants that are not grid connected. Help is provided in acquiring land for hydel power plants, while loans with interest rates of 17 per cent is also available for micro hydel installations. The Nepalise-way has to become the way of the world.

The fact is that renewable energy is going to be the key source of energy for the rural marginalised in our countries. It is as neglected as the poor are neglected in planning. Renewable technology is seen as the energy of last resort for low end users. Instead what is needed is to plan for renewables keeping in mind that this is the fuel of the future and that what we need is to find the right framework so that high cost and ultra-modern technology can be disseminated in the poorest, most marginalised, remote areas of the developing world. This requires changes in the global and national frameworks. The great challenge is to convince “fossilised” politicians all over the world.