#iea

My horse:

"The prospects of the world staying within the 1.5C limit on global heating have brightened owing to the “staggering” growth of renewable energy and green investment in the past two years, the chief of the world’s energy watchdog has said.

Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, and the world’s foremost energy economist, said much more needed to be done but that the rapid uptake of solar power and electric vehicles were encouraging.

“Despite the scale of the challenges, I feel more optimistic than I felt two years ago,” he said in an interview. “Solar photovoltaic installations and electric vehicle sales are perfectly in line with what we said they should be, to be on track to reach net zero by 2050, and thus stay within 1.5C. Clean energy investments in the last two years have seen a staggering 40% increase.” ...

The IEA, in a report entitled Net Zero Roadmap, published on Tuesday morning, also called on developed countries with 2050 net zero targets, including the UK, to bring them forward by several years.

The report found “almost all countries must move forward their targeted net zero dates”, which for most developed countries are 2050. Some developed countries have earlier dates, such as Germany with 2045 and Austria and Iceland with 2040 and for many developing countries they are much later, 2060 in the case of China and 2070 for India.

Cop28, the UN climate summit to be held in Dubai this November and December, offered a key opportunity for countries to set out tougher emissions-cutting plans, Birol said.

He wants to see Cop28 agree a tripling of renewable energy by 2030, and a 75% cut in methane from the energy sector by the same date. The latter could be achieved at little cost, because high gas prices mean that plugging leaks from oil and gas wells can be profitable...

He also called for Cop28 to agree a doubling of energy efficiency. “To reduce fossil fuel emissions, we need to reduce demand for fossil fuels. This is a golden condition, if we are to reach our climate goals,” he said.

Birol stopped short of endorsing the call that some countries have made for a full phase-out of fossil fuels by 2050 to be agreed at Cop28, but he said all countries must work on reducing their fossil fuel use."

Excerpt from this story from Treehugger:

Clean energy is not growing fast enough to cut greenhouse gas emissions to the level needed to avert catastrophic climate change, according to a bleak report by the International Energy Agency (IEA).

“Public spending on sustainable energy in economic recovery packages has only mobilized around one-third of the investment required to jolt the energy system onto a new set of rails, with the largest shortfall in developing economies,” says the World Energy Outlook 2021.

The report was released before world leaders, including U.S. President Joe Biden, meet for COP26, a United Nations (U.N.) climate change conference that will take place in Glasgow, Scotland, between Oct. 31 and Nov. 12.

The IEA analysis celebrates the rapid growth of renewable energy and electric vehicles in 2020 but notes that fossil fuels are experiencing a rebound this year amid strong economic growth. The world’s four largest carbon dioxide emitters, China, the U.S., the European Union, and India are increasingly burning more coal and natural gas to produce electricity due to the ongoing energy crunch.

The IEA predicts global carbon dioxide emissions will grow by almost 5% this year, the largest increase in a decade.

“The IEA was specifically created to counter the post-war social democratic consensus through a re-direction of the narrative. Their tactics from the outset have concentrated on an avoidance of scrutiny. Fisher was advised by his ally, Major Oliver Smedley, to give no indication as to their real agenda and to draft the aims of the IEA in “rather cagey terms”.