How to improve life for humanity — and not worsen global warming

BY: CAT CLIFFORD

Read this article and more of the latest on climate & tech at ciphernews.com.

Access to reliable energy dramatically improves the quality of people’s lives. And the world needs a lot more energy to bring billions of people out of poverty.

“Abundant and affordable energy — and particularly access to electricity — is what makes possible modern shelter, transportation, abundant food, physical comfort, health systems and increased longevity. This is a good thing,” Armond Cohen, executive director of the Clean Air Task Force (CATF), told Cipher.

Wealthy countries, like the United States, built their economies in large part with fossil fuel energy. Now, just as lower income countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America look to similarly develop their economic fortunes, many world leaders are trying to transition away from fossil fuels toward energy sources that do not release greenhouse gas emissions.

But embracing clean energy takes innovation, which requires money that low-income nations typically do not have.

This conflict is a central focus of the United Nations climate summit, the 29th Conference of the Parties, or COP29, underway in Baku, Azerbaijan.

The conference this year is being called the “Finance COP” because a primary goal is to step up the financial support from wealthy nations to lower income countries for climate development and adaptation, including expanding clean energy.

Read Cipher’s primer on what to know about COP29.

“Instead of focusing on reducing energy use, we need to do much more to mobilize capital to dramatically scale deployment of clean energy in emerging and developing economies,” Jason Bordoff, the founding director of the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, told Cipher.

GDP and energy

Wealthier countries with higher gross domestic product (GDP), a measure of a nation’s economic output, tend to consume more energy.

“It takes energy to produce things, so historically, as countries’ economies have grown, so too has their energy use,” Robbie Orvis, senior director of modeling and analysis at the non-partisan energy and climate policy think tank Energy Innovation, told Cipher.

Fossil fuels are the dominant form of energy around the globe and provided 81% of the total energy supply in 2022, according to an August report from the International Energy Agency (IEA), a figure that has stayed largely the same for more than 30 years.

But the greenhouse gases emitted by burning all those fossil fuels are primary drivers of global warming. Energy use is responsible for more than 75% of the greenhouse gases emitted globally, according to the IEA.

The European Union’s Earth observation agency Copernicus has said it is “virtually certain” the average global surface temperature for 2024, at least, will exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels threshold laid out as an aspirational goal in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement. As global warming increases, the consequences are becoming more deadly.

One way to limit global warming would be to decrease energy use. But reducing energy use on a global scale is not “a moral or politically practical option” because billions of people still don’t have access to modern sources of energy, Cohen told Cipher. And rich nations are not likely to intentionally lower their energy use and “purposefully decrease their wealth-per-capita,” Cohen said.

More efficient, more demand

As the global energy transition matures, it will allow further increases in GDP without contributing to global warming, according to Orvis, because new energy technologies use “dramatically less energy than their fossil fuel counterparts,” he said.

Clean energy technologies are more energy efficient, meaning they use less energy to do the same job and, if they are powered by renewables, more of the electricity generated is actually used rather than wasted as heat, as in the fossil-fuel combustion process. For example, a new electric vehicle is typically two to three or more times more energy efficient than a gas-powered car and a heat pump is three to four times more energy efficient than a conventional furnace, Orvis said.

“It will take a concerted effort across governments to ensure development proceeds in a sustainable way instead of relying on the inefficient fossil fuel technologies of the past,” Orvis told Cipher.

Even as efficiency improves, global energy demand is still likely to grow because many low-income countries have so much development in front of them. Moreover, for many low-income nations, meeting the basic humanitarian needs of their people is urgent.

“Socio-economic development is the main priority for many low-income countries, where food security, healthcare, education and livable wages often take precedence over climate action,” Brian Mukhaya, a manager of CATF’s Energy and Climate Innovation Africa program, told Cipher.

Unlocking that human development without exacerbating global warming will take intentional and increased support for low-income nations by wealthy nations.

This year’s COP will be successful if wealthy countries commit to providing much more money each year to lower-income nations so they can adopt clean energy and adapt to climate change, said Bordoff. As important, said Mukhaya, is helping low-income nations improve their general economic wellbeing so they have a better chance of getting financing on their own.

“This goes beyond only focusing on clean energy projects and includes collaborating with local companies and stakeholders to build large-scale infrastructure, enhance utility markets and local country actions that stabilize currency fluctuations and improve investment conditions,” Mukhaya said.

Donald Trump’s victory last week in the American presidential election injects significant uncertainty into all global affairs, including the UN climate meeting. He has vowed to withdraw from the Paris deal (again, since he also did in 2017), and the U.S. is also unlikely to follow through on any additional funding for global climate commitments under Trump.