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Rishi Sunak could set out green taxes for imports to help UK hit net-zero target

Posted on July 13, 2021 by dishanth

Ministers are drawing up plans to impose carbon taxes on imports from abroad as part of efforts to hit Britain’s net-zero target by 2050, i understands.

The proposals emerged as a “civil war” broke out between ministers over the best way to ensure the public pays for the carbon emissions they produce.

Chancellor Rishi Sunak is expected to lay out new carbon taxes this autumn to help the country meet its obligations to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while also raising money to repair public finances damaged by Covid.

Among the proposals being looked at is a carbon border adjustment tax, which will slap levies on goods arriving from abroad. Such taxes aim to prevent wealthy countries such as the UK from outsourcing their carbon emissions to the developing world – known as “carbon leakage”.

One minister told i: “Carbon border adjustment tax is definitely in the mix. Eventually people will have to tackle the question of consumption – they are going to need to decide if they are willing to consume less stuff imported from China or not.”

For any domestic industry that has a carbon price placed on it, the same price would be placed on imports to prevent cheaper goods flooding the market.

Which products would be targeted has not been undecided, but the EU’s plans for carbon levies on imports will focus initially on the most carbon-intensive sectors, such oil refineries, steel and other metals, and cement.

The measures are under consideration ahead of the UK hosting the COP26 UN Climate Change Council in November. Experts have warned that the Government currently has an “alphabet soup” of carbon taxes and urgently needs to fill the policy vacuum ahead of the meeting in Glasgow.

With the UK welcoming world leaders to COP26, the Chancellor will have little choice but to spell out plans for environmental taxes in an autumn Budget and Comprehensive Spending Review.

Westminster sources said, however, that any move towards a carbon border tax would have to consider the implications it would have with major trading partners, such as the US, and how problematic it would be for post-Brexit Britain to go out and strike trade deals.

Ministers are increasingly at odds over the best way to ensure the public pays for the carbon emissions they produce, with the Treasury in a stand-off with the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and No 10.

One source said: “There is a civil war raging between departments as to how the Government can meet its commitments.”

i understands Mr Sunak is pushing for a simpler carbon pricing approach, which would set baseline prices according to which sectors carbon emissions are coming from, while Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng is eager to focus on regulation.

Boris Johnson is keenly aware he needs to lead the way on the issue, but “the PM likes to spend money more than he likes to tax people”, as one well-placed source put it.

What has become clear is that the burden of who will pay for carbon emissions is shifting from the corporate sector to consumers.

It is widely accepted that petrol and gas will become more expensive, and the idea of taxes on meat and dairy products have also been floated. At the same time, the Government’s attempts to persuade people to upgrade their homes to make them more energy-efficient have largely failed.

There is a growing recognition that ministers will have to do more to allow people to make greener decisions. One Whitehall source said that the Government was “looking at ways to help ‘fuel-poor’ families and incentivise a switch to low-carbon heating”.

A minister said that the Government may end up introducing new rules to speed up the retrofitting of old homes, if existing incentives do not prove enough. They told i: “Retrofitting is really hard. One option is that we could say that old houses have to be redone every time they go on the market, or every time they’re bought.

“But eventually, you’ll probably find that people just don’t want to live in draughty homes anyway.”

Experts have warned, however, that the Government can only hope to raise taxes to generate much-needed funds, while nudging people towards more environmentally friendly choices if there are “viable alternatives”.

Rachel Wolf, Founding Partner of policy institute Public First and co-author of the Conservatives’ 2019 election manifesto, said it suggests why a “meat tax” is a long way off.

“Agriculture and certainly meat will be the very last thing they price,” Ms Wolf said. “The problem the Government has is if they want to take people with them to reach net zero, they will have to make the costs bearable and there have to be viable alternatives right now, as there could be with electric cars. Telling people to just eat less meat is not viable.”

Source i News

Biden’s clean energy plan would cut emissions and save 317,000 lives

Posted on July 13, 2021July 13, 2021 by dishanth

A Biden administration plan to force the rapid uptake of renewable energy would swiftly cut planet-heating emissions and save hundreds of thousands of lives from deadly air pollution, a new report has found amid growing pressure on the White House to deliver a major blow against the climate crisis.

Of various climate policy options available to the new administration, a clean energy standard would provide the largest net benefits to the US, according to the report, in terms of costs as well as lives saved.

A clean energy standard would require utilities to ratchet up the amount of clean energy, such as solar and wind, they use, through a system of incentives and penalties. The Biden administration hoped to include the measure in its major infrastructure bill but it was dropped after compromise negotiations with Republicans.

But the new report, conducted by a consortium of researchers from Harvard University, Georgia Institute of Technology and Syracuse University, suggests it would be the most effective tool in reaching a White House goal of 80% renewable energy use by 2030. Joe Biden has said he wants all electricity to be renewable by 2035.

A clean energy standard to reach the 80% goal by the end of the decade would save an estimated 317,500 lives in the US over the next 30 years, due to a sharp reduction in air pollution from the burning of coal, oil and gas. In 2030 alone, 9,200 premature deaths would be avoided once the emissions cut is achieved. The number of lives saved would be “immediate, widespread and substantial”, the report states.

A total of $1.13tn in health savings due to cleaner air would be achieved between now and 2050, with air quality improvements most acutely felt by black people who currently face disproportionate harm from living near highways and power plants.

Every state in the US would gain better air quality, the report found, although the greatest benefits would go to Ohio, Texas, Pennsylvania and Illinois, all states with substantial fossil fuel infrastructure.

The rapid switch to renewables would cost around $342bn until 2050, via capital and maintenance costs, although fuel costs would dwindle as renewables are cheaper to run than fossil fuels. The study added, however, that the financial benefits from addressing the climate crisis would dwarf this figure, at nearly $637bn.

“The cost are much lower than we expected and the deaths avoided are much higher; there really is a huge opportunity here to address climate change and air quality,” said Kathy Fallon Lambert, a study co-author and an air quality expert at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health.

“This would be a huge leap in ambition and we’d see that in the health impacts, there would be millions of fewer asthma attacks, for example. And this doesn’t even consider the health impacts from heat and other climate-related causes.”

Lambert said a clean energy standard would be “extremely effective” at slashing emissions, far more so than other proposals such as a carbon tax.

Biden is facing pressure from environmentalists, as well as major companies such as Apple and Google, to implement the new standard after it was dropped from the infrastructure bill. The president has said the measure will be included in a new reconciliation bill that can pass along party lines, although that will require every single Democratic senator to vote for it, which will prove a challenge.

The White House is determined this will happen however, with Gina McCarthy, Biden’s top climate adviser, saying the measure is a “non-negotiable” in the next infrastructure package.

“We need to make sure that we’re sending a signal that we want renewable energy and that it’s going to win,” McCarthy told Punchbowl News last week.

‘No time for invention’: path to net-zero is there for the taking, Irena chief says

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by dishanth

“There is no time to reinvent the wheel.”

This is according to Francesco La Camera, director general of the International Renewable Energy Agency, based in Abu Dhabi.

Proven technology for net-zero energy production already largely exists today but it will take political will and nation-led action to reverse climate change, he told The National.

Mr La Camera took up his post in 2019 and is a little over halfway through his four-year term. He joined Irena at a decisive time for climate change and the achievement of the Paris Agreement. He is tasked by the agency to “redefine the structure and operations” to keep its 180 member countries actively engaged in the fight.

The inter-governmental body, now 12 years old, promotes renewable energy and technology and helps countries plan and carry out energy transitions.

“At the end of this decade, the world will know if the Paris Agreement will be reached or not,” said Mr La Camera. Political will around the climate change agenda “is much better” than when he took up his post two years ago, he said.

‘When we look at implementation, we notice it is very far from what is written down on paper”

Franceso La Camera, director general of Irena

Global renewable energy capacity rose by 10.3 per cent to 2,799 gigawatts in 2020, according to Irena. China and the US, the world’s two biggest economies, were the best-performing countries in terms of renewable energy growth.

Globally, more than 260 gigawatts of wind capacity were added, a 50 per cent increase compared with 2019. Solar energy made up more than 48 per cent of last year’s renewable capacity additions, accounting for 127 gigawatts.

“The reality is overcoming my expectations,” Mr La Camera said of the renewable energy capacity added in 2020.

Over time, countries are also increasing ownership of their climate agendas.

A key piece of the Paris Agreement are the “nationally determined contributions”, or NDCs. These are plans that outline climate actions and policies that each nation aims to enforce in response to climate change.

Central to the UN’s plan for the NDCs was the concept of national determination. But “a failure of the NDC was the big role of the consultants”, as well as the lack of real buy-in from governments, said Mr La Camera.

“When we look at implementation, we notice it is very far from what is written down on paper,” he said.

To that end, Irena is increasing its efforts to tailor recommendations and projects for regions and nations. In addition to its work with net-zero scenario planning, “there is support for national planning. Doing it in a way that we don’t do consultancy, we work together. It is really important that the planning is owned”.

As an agency that works among governments and the private sector, not as a political organisation, he said the rigour and objectivity of Irena’s analysis is what sets it apart from a crowded field of players aiming to set the agenda.

The “future of the agency”, Mr La Camera said, is on an online platform Irena unveiled in 2019 to connect renewable energy project owners, potential financiers or investors, services providers and technology suppliers.

Mr La Camera said the marketplace has fielded more than 200 ideas for projects since its start.

He likened it to zooming in a camera – from the global analysis done by the agency’s number crunchers, primarily based in Bonn, Germany, down to the planning and financing of a renewable energy project on the ground and monitoring its output once operational.

He pointed to the recent inauguration of one of the largest solar projects in West Africa and the first renewable energy complex in Togo, which became fully operational earlier this month.

The Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed solar photovoltaic power plant in Togo, one of the largest in West Africa, has the capacity to provide electricity to about 160,000 homes and small businesses. Courtesy: Abu Dhabi Fund for Development

The 50-megawatt Sheikh Mohamed Bin Zayed solar power plant, financed under the Irena-ADFD Project Facility, has the capacity to provide electricity to about 160,000 homes and small businesses, significantly reducing the country’s dependence on firewood, charcoal and fuel imports for energy consumption.

“This project is showing that in Africa this [energy transition] is possible,” said Mr La Camera.

Abu Dhabi financed the project and is a climate leader in the region, placing itself “in the middle” of the climate conversation, he said.

Over the past six years, the UAE has led the way in driving down the price of solar energy through some of the most competitive bids on utility-scale projects. Mr La Camera said he believes the region can help lead again in lowering the cost of hydrogen as well.

Record low tariffs for solar power projects among oil-exporting states of the Middle East could allow for the development of low-cost green hydrogen, which refers to the clean fuel produced entirely from renewable sources.

“Renewables are the cheapest source of power,” he said.

Declining costs for renewables are a challenge to coal’s dominance as a cheap source of fuel, particularly in developing economies.

Irena is also engaging with the world’s biggest economies. India, Indonesia, the US and China are of particular interest because they are “countries that are more like continents”.

This month, Irena and China announced that they will prepare a comprehensive energy transition road map to help China achieve its medium- and long-term national renewable and decarbonisation goals.

China, currently the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases and biggest oil importer, pledged to hit its carbon dioxide emissions peak by 2030 and has vowed to become carbon-neutral before 2060.

Mr La Camera said the agency is “quite confident” in China’s ability to hit its goals.

Globally, Irena forecasts that the transition to net-zero carbon emissions will be dominated by renewable power from wind and solar, green hydrogen and bioenergy.

A combination of different technology is needed to keep the planet on a 1.5°C climate pathway – nothing entirely new is needed, but incremental improvements to efficiency and the will of markets and governments can go a long way in this “decade of action”.

Mr La Camera is also a firm believer that the market will not turn back. Investors and the private sector are anticipating the energy transition and are actively looking for investment, allocating capital away from fossil fuels and towards energy transition technology and sources such as renewables.

An analysis of the S&P Clean Energy Index in 2020 by Irena found that clean energy stocks were up by 138 per cent, as compared to the fossil fuel-heavy S&P Energy Index which was down by 37 per cent.

“Will climate change? The process is unstoppable,” said Mr La Camera.

But he said one questions lingers: “will we be in time to win the fight?

Source The National News

Compostable plastic cutlery can be recycled into home-insulating foam

Posted on July 6, 2021 by dishanth

Compostable plastic can be turned into a foam that functions as building insulation, creating a potential solution to difficulties in recycling the material.

Polylactic acid (PLA) is a plastic made of fermented starch from corn or sugar cane. It is designed to break down into harmless material once used and disposed of, but doing so requires industrial composting, which isn’t available in all locations.

If PLA makes its way into the environment, it often won’t break down. Because of this, it is classed as compostable rather than biodegradable by the European Union.

Now, Heon Park at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand and his colleagues have developed a method to convert plastic knives, spoons and forks made from PLA into a foam that can be turned into insulation for walls or flotation devices.

Foam structures of various sizes made from recycled PLA plastic. Source: Heon Park

The researchers placed the PLA cutlery into a chamber filled with carbon dioxide. As they increased the pressure inside the chamber, the gas dissolved into the plastic. When they released the pressure, the gas expanded rapidly and turned the plastic into a foam. The process is entirely mechanical and involves no chemical reaction.

“Tweaking temperature and pressure, there is a window where we can make good foams,” says Park. “We found what temperature or what pressure is the best to make those non-foamable plastics into foams.”

Each time plastic is recycled it loses strength, but turning plastic into foam avoids any problems with strength as it is an inherently soft material.

Making PLA plastics directly recyclable in this way could be a better way to alleviate plastic pollution than industrial composting. PLA requires up to 12 weeks of composting at 57°C to break down, and must be carefully separated from other plastic waste, so this may not be the best option.

“If you’ve taken all of the energy and resources to make something, any product or packaging, then the very best thing that you can do with that is to try and keep those resources and turn them back into another item of product or packaging,” says Helen Bird at UK waste and recycling charity WRAP. “From an environmental perspective, if you look at the hierarchy of what’s preferable for the environment, composting actually is a little bit below recycling.”

Journal reference: Physics of Fluids, DOI: 10.1063/5.0050649

Source New Scientist

European Union enshrines net zero and emissions targets into law

Posted on July 5, 2021 by dishanth

The European Council adopted a climate change law Monday that legally obliges its 27 nations to collectively slash greenhouse emissions by 55% by 2030 — from 1990 levels — and to become a net-zero-emissions economy by 2050.

The European Union and several other nations increased pledges to cut greenhouse gases and reach carbon neutrality at a virtual climate change summit hosted by US President Joe Biden in April. But there have been concerns over whether world leaders would win the backings of their parliaments to actually enshrine the pledges into law.

Until Monday, only five countries had actually made their pledges legally binding, according to Climate Watch Data: The United Kingdom and New Zealand, as well as EU members Hungary, Luxembourg and France.

Monday’s approval of the package of policies is the final seal on the climate law, which the EU’s parliament passed last week. The EU has been working toward this law since it launched its vision, under the European Green Deal, in 2019.

“I warmly welcome this final step of the adoption of the EU’s very first climate law which enshrines into legislation the 2050 climate neutrality objective,” said Portuguese Minister of Environment and Climate Action João Pedro Matos Fernandes in a statement. Portugal is currently holding the presidency of the EU.

“An agreement on the European climate law has been a priority for the Portuguese Presidency and I am glad that we have successfully brought it over the finishing line.”

Net zero is a scenario where the number of greenhouse gases emitted are no greater than the amount removed from the atmosphere, largely through a method known as carbon capture. Some scientists and environmentalists criticize net zero plans for relying too heavily on technology that isn’t fully developed, arguing the world should be aiming to cut the use of fossil fuels entirely and aim for low- or zero-carbon economies.

The new law seeks to limit its reliance on carbon capture by capping the amount to 225 megatons of carbon. It will also seek to become a negative carbon economy — where it removes more carbon from the atmosphere than it emits — after 2050.

The European Commission also agreed to propose an intermediate climate target for 2040, “if appropriate,” within six months after a first “global stocktake” of emissions carried out under the Paris Agreement. The law states that a scientific board on climate change will be established to advise the EU on its policies.

The current increase in pledges from the EU — as well as other countries, including the US and UK — are aimed at keeping average global temperature rises within 1.5 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial levels and well below 2 degrees. The International Panel of Climate Change paints a catastrophic picture in a 2-degree-rise scenario, where 1.7 billion more people experience severe heatwaves at least once every five years, sea levels rise by another 10 centimeters and coral reefs are all but wiped out, among other impacts.

But some environmentalists have warned that even the more ambitious pledges do not go far enough, and are not enough to keep temperature rise to 1.5C.

Source CNN

Maersk eyes ‘leapfrog’ to carbon neutral fuels in shipping

Posted on July 5, 2021 by dishanth

The Danish shipping giant is looking at ways of cutting emissions this decade, saying the industry needs to act with a “crisis mindset” in order to respond to the climate emergency.

For Maersk, this means ditching transition fuels such as liquified natural gas (LNG), which are cleaner than the heavy oil traditionally used in large vessels but are still harmful to the environment because they are made from fossil gas.

“From our perspective as a company, we believe we have to leapfrog to carbon neutral fuels for our vessels and for transportation in general,” said Morten Bo Christiansen, head of decarbonisation at Maersk.

“Any talk about so-called transition fossil fuels is simply not relevant from our perspective, it’s simply not solving the problem,” he told an online press briefing last month. “The last thing we need is another cycle of fossil fuel assets,” he added, pointing out that ships built today have an average lifetime of about 20 to 30 years and will therefore still be around in 2050.

International shipping accounts for 2.2% of global carbon dioxide emissions, according to the International Maritime Organisation (IMO), more than aviation’s 2% share. The IMO, a United Nations agency, has said it aims to halve greenhouse gas emissions from 2008 levels by 2050.

Methanol: ‘The here and now’

Because of the urgency to cut emissions already this decade, Christiansen said the first solution Maersk can turn to is methanol, which he described as a mature technology. “And we see later also ammonia,” he added.

The problem is that methanol today is mostly made from coal or natural gas, which are both polluting, Christiansen continued. This is why Maersk is looking at green methanol made from biomass gasification, or so-called “Power-to-X” where biogenic CO2 is added to hydrogen. “And same with ammonia, made from hydrogen and then just adding nitrogen.”

The hope is that these alternative shipping fuels will gradually become greener as biomass, ammonia and hydrogen are produced in growing quantities using sustainable production methods.

“But again, the ‘here and now’ perspective is that there is actually only one solution and that’s methanol,” Christiansen said, adding there are safety aspects to ammonia that need to be solved before it can be used on a commercial scale.

Maersk is seen as a trailblazer in the shipping industry when it comes to decarbonisation. On 2 June, the Danish firm called for a carbon tax on ship fuel to encourage the transition to cleaner alternatives. The Danish firm proposed a tax of at least $450 per tonne of fuel, which works out to $150 per tonne of carbon.

Maersk CEO Soren Skou called the tax proposal “a levy to bridge the gap between the fossil fuels consumed by vessels today and greener alternatives that are currently more expensive.”

Bottleneck

The main obstacle to green shipping fuels is scale. Production is still tiny and a massive increase in volume would be needed to decarbonise the shipping industry.

That requires quickly ramping up production of renewable electricity to produce green hydrogen “because that will very soon become the bottleneck here,” said Ulrik Stridbæk, head of regulatory affairs at Ørsted, the Danish energy firm.

“So we’re trying to match this with the electrons that will hopefully start to flow from the Baltic Sea,” said Stridbæk, who cited Danish government plans to build an “energy island” off Bornholm in the Baltic Sea to harness production of offshore wind to serve the Danish and German markets.

“This is the vision,” Stridbæk said. “Producing very large scale renewable electricity, and converting it” into green hydrogen and eFuels that can be used in the maritime and aviation sector.

Last year, Danish companies – including Ørsted, Scandinavian Airlines, and Maersk – launched the Green Fuels for Denmark initiative, with the aim of ramping up the production of renewable hydrogen in the country.

The first phase, targeted for 2023, would see the construction of a 10MW electrolyser to produce renewable hydrogen to be used as fuel for buses and trucks. By 2030, the capacity would reach 1.3GW, enough to supply the creation of more than 250,000 tonnes of sustainable fuel.

Access to renewable electricity

“Clearly the constraining factor here will be the production of these fuels and the access to the renewable energy that is needed,” said Maersk’s Christiansen.

However, the cost of producing green fuels – whether methanol, ammonia, or hydrogen – is prohibitively expensive at the moment. And while demand is expected to boom in the coming years, eFuels are expected to remain more expensive than oil until the end of this decade, Christiansen said.

“A market based system, some kind of carbon price would surely level the playing field and incentivise investments into this. That is clearly something that would help and would be needed in the long term,” he said.

At EU level, the European Commission is preparing proposals to mandate a gradual incorporation of green jet fuel in aviation, with percentages increasing over the years. A certification scheme for renewable and low-carbon fuels is also under consideration as part of the revision of the EU’s renewable energy directive.

The proposal “will come with an updated set of incentives to promote the use of these fuels in various sectors,” the EU’s Energy Commissioner Kadri Simson announced in February.

The EU executive is also preparing a green fuel law for shipping – FuelEU Maritime – which is due to be published on 14 July.

A draft of that law, seen by The Guardian, has opted for a goal-based approach that would set increasingly stringent “greenhouse gas intensity targets” to be met for the energy used on board.

The result is that LNG would be eligible to power EU ships until around 2040, a prospect environmental groups described as “a disaster.”

Source EURACTIV