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EU Members Clash Over Nuclear Energy’s Role In Climate Policy

March 29, 2023

EU Members Clash Over Nuclear Energy’s Role In Climate Policy

  • The EU is in the process of expanding its renewable energy targets to reduce CO2 emissions.
  • Countries are divided over whether nuclear energy should be considered a part of renewable energy targets.
  • France leads the campaign to recognize nuclear energy as a CO2-free contributor, while Germany, Portugal, and others oppose it.

The European Union needs to work on a divide among its member countries regarding the role of nuclear energy in achieving their renewable energy goals. This disagreement may delay the progress of one of the EU’s primary climate policies.

On Wednesday, negotiators from EU countries and the European Parliament will engage in their final round of discussions to establish more ambitious EU objectives to expand renewable energy throughout the next decade. These goals are crucial for Europe’s commitment to reduce CO2 emissions by 2030 and to become independent of Russian fossil fuels. However, the negotiations have become bogged down by a dispute over whether fossil fuels produced using nuclear power should be considered part of the renewable energy targets.

France is spearheading a push to classify “low-carbon hydrogen” – hydrogen produced from nuclear energy – as equal to hydrogen created from renewable electricity. France is joined by countries such as Romania, Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, all of which seek greater acknowledgment of nuclear energy’s CO2-free contribution to climate objectives.

On the other hand, Germany, Spain, Denmark, Portugal, and Luxembourg oppose this view, arguing that including nuclear power in renewable energy targets would divert attention from the urgent need to expand solar and wind energy across Europe significantly.

…click on the above link to read the rest…

 

UK climate emergency is official policy

May 5, 2019

UK climate emergency is official policy

Heathrow’s expansion is now in question. Image: By J Patrick Fischer, via Wikimedia Commons

Major changes in the government’s policy on fossil fuels will be vital to tackling the UK climate emergency that Parliament has recognised.

LONDON, 3 May, 2019 − The United Kingdom has taken a potentially momentous policy decision: it says there is a UK climate emergency.

On 1 May British members of Parliament (MPs) became the world’s first national legislature to declare a formal climate and environment emergency, saying they hoped they could work with like-minded countries across the world to take action to avoid more than 1.5°C of global warming.

No-one yet knows what will be the practical result of the resolution proposed by Jeremy Corbyn, the Opposition Labour leader, but UK politicians were under pressure to act following a series of high-profile strikes by school students in recent months and demonstrations by a new climate protest organisation, Extinction Rebellion (XR),  whose supporters closed roads in the centre of London for a week.

The Conservative government ordered its MPs not to oppose the Labour resolution, and it was passed without a vote.

Zero carbon by 2050

Hours after the MPs’ decision, a long-awaited detailed report by the government’s official advisors, the Committee on Climate Change, was published. It recommends cutting the UK’s greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050. The current target is 80%.

The report says the government should accept the new target immediately, pass it into law in the next few months and begin to implement policies to achieve it. The committee says that will mean the end of petrol and diesel cars on British roads, a cut in meat consumption, an end to gas boilers for heating buildings, planting 1.5 billion trees to store carbon, a vast increase in renewable energy, and many other measures.

 …click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Fossil Fuel Companies Dominate EU Meetings on Climate and Energy Policy, Report Shows

November 10, 2015

Fossil Fuel Companies Dominate EU Meetings on Climate and Energy Policy, Report Shows

Big energy and fossil fuel companies are enjoying privileged access to the EU’s top climate policy decision makers in the run-up to December’s Paris climate conference a new report reveals.

The report by transparency research and campaign group Corporate Europe Observatory (CEO) looks at all meetings held by Commissioners Miguel Arias Cañete and Maros Šefčovič during their first year in office. In total, energy companies make up 30 per cent of all lobby encounters with the commissioners and their cabinets.

When it comes to discussing climate and energy policy, three-quarters of the European Commission’s encounters with the energy industry were with fossil fuel companies including BP, Statoil, and Shell.

Renewables vs Fossil Fuels

At the same time, specialist renewable energy companies have not enjoyed a single one-to-one meeting with the Commissioners. Meanwhile, only six renewable energy associations had meeting.

In fact, for every meeting with the renewables sector, Cañete – a former director of two oil companies now responsible for energy and climate action – had 22 meetings with the fossil fuel industry. Šefčovič, who is in charge of the Energy Union, had just one meeting with renewables compared to 29 with the fossil fuel industry.
Graphs via CEO report

CEO researcher and campaigner Belén Balanyá said: “This data is extremely worrying given the sensitive topics these Commissioners have been in charge of over the past year. Industry-friendly policies on car emissions, Energy Union, the Emissions Trading Scheme, and the upcoming COP21 UN climate negotiations clearly reflect the disturbing level of access to decision-makers enjoyed by dirty energy.

“While the science says we must urgently and drastically cut greenhouse gas emissions, boost renewables, and dramatically increase energy efficiency, the Commission is sadly moving in the opposite direction.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Renewable Energy: Why Emissions and the Economy Don’t Tell the Whole Story

August 13, 2015

Renewable Energy: Why Emissions and the Economy Don’t Tell the Whole Story 

Last week, President Obama announced the Clean Power Plan, the United States’ strongest climate policy to date. The plan aims to reduce coal-fired power plant emissions by allowing states to devise their own plans to reach federally-mandated emissions reduction targets. This choose-your-own-adventure policy could send states down very different paths, some worse for the environment and community resilience than others.

A bragging point for the Clean Power Plan is its flexibility; all currently identified low-carbon energy sources can play a role in state plans, including natural gas, nuclear, hydropower and other renewables. But despite the low-carbon nature these energy technologies share, they differ greatly in overall community and environmental benefit. Natural gas is abundantly available today due to controversial fracking technology (most of which occurs near rural communities); hydropower requires dam construction (sometimes on massive scales); and nuclear power comes with the risk of disastrous accidents, issues around extraction and long-term storage problems.

The final Clean Power Plan rule does emphasize renewable energy and energy efficiency over natural gas; a “Clean Energy Incentive Program” provides credits that can be traded later as part of emissions trading systems to states that expand wind, solar and energy efficiency efforts in the two years before state implementation plans take effect. However, shifting from coal to natural gas is one of the three building blocks EPA used in calculating state goals, so states are still permitted to emphasize natural gas in their implementation plans, even if it’s not incentivized. Shifting from one fossil fuel to another is not a sustainable energy future for any state, even if it slightly reduces greenhouse gas emissions.

– See more at: http://www.iatp.org/blog/201508/renewable-energy-why-emissions-and-the-economy-don’t-tell-the-whole-story#sthash.efdtxaKW.dpuf

 

Widely-Used Tool Can Lowball Methane Pollution Rates, Scientists Report, With Huge Implications for Climate Policy

May 11, 2015

Widely-Used Tool Can Lowball Methane Pollution Rates, Scientists Report, With Huge Implications for Climate Policy

An EPA-approved methane sampler widely used to measure gas leaks from oil and gas operations nationwide can dramatically under-report how much methane is leaking into the atmosphere, a team of researchers reported in a peer-reviewed paper published in March.

The researchers, one of whom first designed the underlying technology used by the sampler, warn that results from improperly calibrated machines could severely understate the amount of methane leaking from the country’s oil and gas wells, pipelines, and other infrastructure.

“It could be a big deal,” study co-author Amy Townsend-Small, a geology professor at the University of Cincinnati,told Inside Climate News, adding that it’s not yet clear how often the machine returned bad results, in part because figuring out whether there’s an error would have required using a different kind of device to independently test gas concentrations at the time levels were originally recorded.

Because of their climate-changing implications, methane leak rates are perhaps the single most consequential issue surrounding the shale gas rush and the push by the Obama administration for a shift from burning coal to burning natural gas for the nation’s electricity supply. Because natural gas is primarily made of methane, an unusually powerful greenhouse gas, if enough methane escapes into the atmosphere, these leaks could potentially make natural gas a worse fuel for the climate than burning coal.

And methane leaks are at their most powerful – 86 times stronger than the same amount of carbon dioxide – in the first two decades or so after they hit the atmosphere. Climate scientists warn that methane leaks risk pushing the climate over an irreversible tipping point where melting permafrost and other self-reinforcing cycles can cause global warming to spiral out of control.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

 

Sustainable Companies Are Using Trade Associations That Undermine EU Climate Policy

April 3, 2015

Sustainable Companies Are Using Trade Associations That Undermine EU Climate Policy

Many major multinational companies with strong sustainability policies, such as Facebook andMicrosoft, are also members of trade associations that are actively lobbying against European climate policy, a new study released this week finds.

According to the report by the Policy Studies Institute (PSI) at the University of Westminster, businesses use trade associations to lobby on climate policy more than any other approach, including direct contact with policymakers.

But as the report argues, member companies must assess if the position of these trade associations is undermining their own stance on climate change.

Ben Fagan-Watson, lead researcher and research fellow at PSI, said: “Companies which are making strong commitments to deal with climate change need to ensure that their trade associations are singing from the same hymn sheet.”

Climate Policy

“In the run-up to COP21 in Paris, [EU] leadership should not be undermined by trade associations lobbying to protect narrow, short-term industrial interests at the expense of theEU economy and the global climate in the long term,” he continued.

Data from the Carbon Disclosure Project cited in the report shows that 61 percent of all companies surveyed and 77 percent of the largest 500 companies in the world use trade associations to lobby on climate policy.

Other companies highlighted in the report for contradicting their stance on sustainability through membership to one of these trade associations include American consumer goods company Johnson & Johnson, British drinks brand Diageo, and major car companies such asBMW, Daimler and Volkswagen.

 

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

EU Energy Union May Be Biting Off More Than It Can Chew

February 10, 2015

EU Energy Union May Be Biting Off More Than It Can Chew

With oil and gas still flooding the scene it’s a buyer’s market. For some however, picking isn’t easy. For the European Union specifically, an abundance of choice comes with its own set of logistical and geopolitical problems.

February 4 marked the launch of the EU’s Energy Union – an ambitious project that will establish a long-term plan for European energy and climate policy and set the politico-economic union on the path towards decarbonization. The doubters are many, but EU Commissioner for Climate Action and Energy Miguel Arias Canete confirmed the plan “will contain concrete measures” as well as “full and proper enforcement.” The framework strategy – still very much under discussion – is due for adoption on February 25.

Among the goals of the Union are enhanced energy efficiency, diversification and flexibility, in addition to increased deployment of renewable energy. More specifically, the EU is targeting electricity interconnection of 10-15 percent, a renewable share of 50 percent, as well as emissions reductions of more than 30 percent by 2050 – initiatives that will cost approximately $3 trillion, or nearly 15 percent of the current EU GDP. Addressing these goals will require massive infrastructure overhauls and timely investment, not to mention cooperation among the 28 vastly different member nations. In the early goings, that last bit is proving tough.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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