Editors Note: This is a running series documenting four UNC student's experience at the COP 23 in Bonn, Germany. See the previous entry here.
By Mark Ortiz
The 2015 Paris Agreement was viewed by many as the dawn of a new chapter in energy history, a definitive sign that the "fossil fuel era" was drawing to a close.
While framing the Paris Agreement as an epochal shift is certainly savvy sloganeering, it risks simplifying our contemporary energy reality and implies that the decarbonization of the energy grid is a seamless, market-driven progression.
It is true that renewables are ascendant in large part due to technological change and the evolving economics of energy. Last year, two-thirds of newly installed energy capacity worldwide came from renewable sources according to an analysis by the International Energy Agency. And the forecast for renewable development looks even brighter as China’s continued investment and innovation in solar technology moves the source closer to becoming cost-competitive with gas and coal.
But as Pacific leaders and environmental advocates pointed out this afternoon at COP 23, the world’s transition to renewable energies will not move quickly enough to realize the Paris Agreement temperature goals without additional policy measures. A report released today by the NGO Oil Change International underscores this, explaining that the emissions that would result from burning all of the oil, coal and gas in already-producing mines and fields would exceed the limits set in Paris (to say nothing of new reserves continuously being identified by exploration).
The report shows that a large share of existing coal mines and oil and gas fields will have to be decommissioned before they are depleted in order to have any chance of keeping global temperatures within safe parameters. This is less of a political appeal than a matter of physical fact - what author Bill McKibben has called the “climate math” - which, it is worth noting, is less amenable to negotiation than your typical politician.
Given this reality, a growing coalition of NGOs, government officials, and economists are advocating to “keep fossil fuels in the ground.” This call to action is most succinctly articulated in the Lofoten Declaration — published earlier this year by a group of academics, analysts and activists — which puts forward the case for a managed decline of fossil fuel production. What this would involve, according to the declaration, is an immediate halt to the expansion of fossil fuel production and a carefully planned, decades-long decline of existing output coinciding a large-scale increase in renewable energy deployment.
Drawing on the declaration, panelists at COP 23 today emphasized the importance of considerations of justice in the transition away from fossil fuels. Under the managed decline of fossil fuel production that the Lofoten document envisions, workers in the fossil fuel industry at risk of unemployment would be compensated, retrained and retooled to find work in the renewables sector. On the other hand, an unmanaged decline of fossil fuels, which many analysts agree is already underway and ultimately inevitable, could leave fossil fuel workers behind entirely as we are already seeing in coal communities in the United States.
