Today is Energy Day at COP26, and ECO is expecting to see that the ‘fossil fuels’ elephant in the climate room will be eclipsed by renewables all day long.
For ECO, ‘Energy Day’ means one thing: a full transition to sustainable renewables. This means not only increasing the renewable energy supply but also thinking about energy efficiency, reducing overconsumption, sustainable use of renewable resources, a socially just transition, and ensuring energy access for all.
What is often overlooked is that the richer parts of the world use far more energy than they actually need, and so emit the majority of global greenhouse emissions. In richer countries, we need to power down our energy consumption, but ‘powering down’ is more than energy efficiency. It means re-thinking what we actually need to use, and how we go about using it. ECO is not convinced that using a lot more energy makes anyone a lot happier.
Renewable energy is far more equitably distributed than fossil fuels. For example, we can use the sun to heat buildings, to heat our water and to make electricity. Renewable energy is out there and with a good spread of technologies and the right infrastructure we can make renewable energy the norm, not the exception, and we can even overcome the problem of variable energy from the sun and the wind.
This means that we should focus on a fast transition to renewable energy and not spend the COP26 Energy Day on non-renewable ‘false’ solutions such as nuclear – that have proven to be too slow, too risky and of course too expensive. Who wants to pay tens of billions to address the radioactive pollution of water aquifers from uranium mining or the highly CO2 intensive digging of giant tunnels to try and store decommissioned nuclear power plants and waste underground?
Wind and solar already provide huge amounts of sustainable energy for us, and have the potential to provide far more. They are often cheaper than fossil fuels, and are much better for our health and that of our planet.