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… and a Virtuous Energy Piece in the Guardian!
When I scanned the Grauniad sub-editor’s effort at the top of this article by one Pierre Noël, I scarcely bothered to read any further:
Decarbonisation of electricity must be delivered at any cost …
it read. Well of course there are those who believe exactly that, but we may diskard them uterly. We may diskard the sub-editor, too: read this extract from the article proper.
The government’s energy market reform … commits the country to decarbonising electricity generation to a very ambitious level and using a limited and predefined portfolio of technologies. Those conditions mean decarbonisation of electricity must be delivered at any cost, irrespective of what other countries do, and via central planning rather than decentralised choices led by competition in a market …
the real costs are ahead of us and will indeed be large. The government implicitly asks the public to trust that the international climate change negotiations will indeed deliver a meaningful agreement; that the cost of low-carbon technologies will fall significantly; and that fossil fuels, especially natural gas, will be expensive for decades to come. Under these conditions the cost of the policy strategy looks manageable. However the 2009 Copenhagen climate summit and its aftermath revealed that delivering an international climate agreement is an uphill battle and the unconventional hydrocarbon revolution – especially shale gas and liquids – dramatically changed the prospects for fossil fuels…
A politically sustainable approach has to acknowledge what we don’t know and cannot know: will there be a meaningful climate treaty and what the cost of clean energy from each technology will be?Several implications follow from this. The eventual level of national emissions reduction should not be legislated; costs have to be revealed and not assumed
Thoughtful stuff – I look forward to reading more from the good Pierre. Can’t see the Guardian hosting much more of it, somehow.
ND
2012-11-16 07:00:57
Source: http://www.cityunslicker.com/2012/11/and-virtuous-energy-piece-in-guardian.html
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