Bumpy road to a clean future – Climate Weekly

“The intended smooth glide path to retirement has become a bit bumpy, but that’s what happens when you hit turbulence.”

That was the the assessment of E3G’s Chris Littlecott after the G7 host Germany announced it was reactivating mothballed coal-fired power plants to conserve dwindling gas supplies for the winter after Russia cut off 60% of the gas supplies flowing through the country’s Nord Stream I pipeline.

The government insists that the destination and expected time of arrival will remain the same: Germany will leave coal by 2030.

The emergency measure is a reminder of what governments may not fully understand: planning for turbulence essentially relates to a phasedown of managed fossil fuels.

Littlecott’s colleague, Ysanne Choksey, put it bluntly: the short-term coal revival reflects “a failure to prepare for the transition”. That preparation needs to happen now in order to avoid “bitter and uncomfortable trade-offs later on,” she told a briefing ahead of the G7 leaders’ summit in Bavaria this weekend.

Gas is one of our biggest hurdles on the road to a cleaner future.

Germany has been warned by campaigners that increasing international gas funding and striking a deal with Senegal will mean it would abandon its Cop26 commitments. It would be going in the wrong way.

The Cop26 summit has seen a sharp increase in gas demand. Over the past seven months, Korean and Japanese companies have been lobbying the Vietnamese government for more gas investments in their next power plan. The industry promotes gas as a cleaner option to coal and a simpler route to energy transition. But it’s no short cut and may be a dead end.

Meanwhile, the EU has negotiated a “flexibility mechanism” which means it will no longer be sued for hampering profits of new fossil fuel investments. The protection will continue for a further 10 years for existing infrastructure.

In Colombia, Gustavo Petro, who was elected last Sunday as the country’s first left-wing president, could be putting his country on a road to a cleaner future. On the campaign trail, he committed to undertake “a gradual de-escalation of economic dependence on oil and coal”.

Under the country’s constitution, Petro only has one term to deliver and domestic politics are not in his favour. The question is: Will he embark on the journey?

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The Clean Development Mechanism, the UN’s offsetting scheme, was set-up in 2006 to allow rich countries to meet some of their climate obligations under the Kyoto Protocol by financing carbon-cutting projects in poorer ones.

The scheme has been widely criticised for its patchy human rights record and failure to deliver promised climate benefits. Cop26 in Glasgow agreed to allow countries to purchase some of these credits to help them meet their 2030 climate goals. Most carbon market analysts have so little faith in the environmental integrity of these credits that they refer to them as “junk” or “zombie” credits.

Climate Home conducted an exclusive data investigation and revealed the 804 projects with credits that countries can still use to meet their 2030 climate plans. We were able to report on a hydropower plant in a disputed area in northern Myanmar as well as large solar farms in India. For transparency, we’ve published the full dataset and methodology. Listen to our interview to learn more about how we reported the story. Twitter Space with Maribel Ángel-MorenoThe numbers were crunched by.