Fiona Harvey in the Guardian (UK): Governments are falling
badly behind on low-carbon energy, putting carbon reduction targets out of
reach and pushing the world to the brink of catastrophic climate change, the
world's leading independent energy authority will warn on Wednesday.
The stark judgment is being given at a key meeting of energy
ministers from the world's biggest economies and emitters taking place in
London on Wednesday – a meeting already overshadowed by David Cameron's
last-minute withdrawal from a keynote speech planned for Thursday.
"The world's energy system is being pushed to breaking
point," Maria van der Hoeven, executive director of the International
Energy Agency, writes in today's Guardian. "Our addiction to fossil fuels
grows stronger each year. Many clean energy technologies are available but they
are not being deployed quickly enough to avert potentially disastrous
consequences."
On current form, she warns, the world is on track for
warming of 6C by the end of the century – a level that would create
catastrophe, wiping out agriculture in many areas and rendering swathes of the
globe uninhabitable, as well as raising sea levels and causing mass migration,
according to scientists.
Van der Hoeven, whose deputy will present the IEA's findings
to the Third Clean Energy Ministerial, put the blame squarely on policymakers,
and challenged ministers to step up. She said: "The current state of
affairs is unacceptable precisely because we have a responsibility and a golden
opportunity to act. Energy-related CO2 emissions are at historic highs, and
under current policies, we estimate that energy use and CO2 emissions would
increase by a third by 2020, and almost double by 2050. This would be likely to
send global temperatures at least 6C higher within this century."...
A chart of world energy usage created by Omegatron, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported
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