Denmark holds this half-year’s rotating EU Council presidency. As you might expect from a Nordic country which is a leader in wind turbine manufacture and deployment, it favours tough emissions controls. Currently, the bloc is committed to a 20% cut in carbon dioxide emissions (from a 1990 baseline) by 2020. On offer is a 30% cut if other countries follow suit. It will have surprised very few people that there have been no takers.
Now, however, it seems that the Danish presidency wants to get member states to agree a firm target of a 40% reduction by 2030 at the environment ministers’ meeting in early March (see Denmark puts 2030 emissions targets on the agenda, on the Euractiv website). This had always been pencilled in as the likely goal en route to an 80-95% decarbonisation by 2050, but the Danes now want to get an EU commitment to it.
All this is, of course, happening at a time when the predicted rise in average temperatures has stalled for more than a decade. There is much obfuscating and talk of it not being possible to discern a trend for less than a 30-year period. There are even those in the climate change industry who claim that the trend is still upwards; it just depends what starting point you take. Whatever turns out to happen, those committed to the view that climate change is man-made and dangerous see that more momentum needs to be added to the emissions reduction programme to make it unstoppable even if (as seems quite likely) temperatures remain steady or even fall over the coming years.
Part of the momentum comes from industry. A spokesman from the Dutch energy company Eneco is quoted as saying that a decision on targets by the EU “would contribute to a healthy and market-driven EU investment climate for renewable energy. It would put Europe back in the driving seat in the worldwide transition to a future-proof, independent energy supply for our companies and citizens.”
This may look like blind idealism, but he then says that the target would "imply increased carbon prices and thus provide the required incentives." To translate, this actually means that the industry needs guaranteed taxpayer and consumer subsidy to be able to operate and expand.
The problem is that the carbon price has collapsed. There seem to be two main reasons for this. The first is that the European Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) is an artificial market, which relies on there being a shortage of tradable certificates, with competition pushing prices up. But member states have, it turns out, issued too many certificates and, in particular, allowed too many of them to be allocated to energy companies, so almost fatally weakening the market from the outset. The second reason for the price collapse is that European economic growth has stalled, halting the projected rise in emissions and so reducing demand for carbon credits.
The European Environment Agency publishes information on greenhouse gas emission trends and predictions, and it is interesting to compare the situation in Denmark and the UK. Denmark, we should remember, has for some time taken the lead in building wind farms. It already generates 20% or more of its electricity in this way (although remember that about half of this has to be exported at low prices because it is generated when Danes don’t need it) and is set to continue installing many more offshore turbines. The UK is a long way behind but also has ambitious targets for wind energy.
The published figures show that Danish emissions totalled 61.4 Mt CO2eq in 2010, up slightly from the previous year. This translates to 11.1 t CO2eq per capita. For 2008-2010, emissions were 10.6% lower than the 1990 base year, but were a long way from the country’s Kyoto protocol target of a 21% reduction.
There had been a decrease from 2008 to 2009 which, according to the EEA “... is mainly related to decreased fuel use in industry and declining process-related emissions from cement production (cement production itself dropped by 34 %)”. It seems that, even in a country forging ahead with renewable energy and having high standards of house insulation, cutting back on carbon dioxide emissions is not easy and is affected to a large extent by economic conditions and loss of some industries.
In the UK, for comparison, total greenhouse gas emissions in 2010 were 584.5 Mt CO2eq (up from 566.2 a year earlier). For the much larger population of the UK, this is equivalent to only 9.4 t CO2eq per capita. Emissions were 24% lower than in 1990, more than double the Kyoto target, but the decrease was driven by a combination of a move from coal to gas for power and heating and a loss of heavy industry.
This comparison is surprising, given the priority which the Danes have given to wind energy over the years, their expected greater energy efficiency and the greater use of bicycles and public transport. The message seems to be that the road to decarbonisation is a very hard one and that heavy reliance on renewable energy appears to do relatively little to speed things up. Even in France, whose heavy reliance on nuclear power makes French electricity particularly low carbon, emissions per capita are 8.1 t CO2eq per capita.
And yet, despite the evidence that something much more radical than current policy would be needed to achieve the deep cuts being proposed for the EU, targets continue to be set which seem very unlikely to be met. Even if European citizens can be persuaded to pay for whatever policies might work, this is surely a futile exercise unless the rapidly-growing emissions from China and other emerging economies can be stemmed and the trend reversed.
Whatever climatic changes may be in store, investment in adaptation and resilience is needed and this, at least, will benefit society. Throwing taxpayers’ money at unachievable targets will do nothing positive, but simply accelerate Europe’s seemingly inevitable deindustrialisation and decline.
The Scientific Alliance
St John's Innovation Centre
Cowley Road
Cambridge
CB4 0WS