[NGW Magazine] Heat is on for COP24
Energy policies will be driven for decades by the Paris climate agreement, with profound implications for gas. But negotiators and governments have yet to complete the work begun in Paris; 2018’s COP24 will be the big test.
As the latest session of United Nations climate talks drew to a close in the German city of Bonn May 10, there was no disguising the disappointment felt by many of the participants at the slow and uneven progress of the negotiations.
Indeed, the president of the talks – the Fijian prime minister Frank Bainimarama – decided to schedule an additional session of talks to be held in Bangkok in September.
It was a decision “well received,” says Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change, also known as UNFCCC. “I am satisfied that some progress was made here in Bonn. But many voices are underlining the urgency of advancing more rapidly.”
The Paris Agreement reached in December 2015 at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was unquestionably a triumph of multilateral diplomacy – and widely celebrated as such at the time.
It entered into force less than a year later, in record time for an agreement of such scope, and to date 176 of the 197 parties to the UNFCCC have ratified it. It will shape energy policies around the world for the rest of this century. The agreement was strongly supported by the natural gas industry – in particular by the International Gas Union – because demand for natural gas over coming decades will be determined to a very significant extent by global efforts to address climate change. For better or for worse, the industry’s future is inextricably linked with the progress of international negotiations to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) that cause anthropogenic warming.
Agreeing the ‘operating manual’
But the Paris Agreement was the start of a process rather than a conclusion. The agreement itself, and the decision adopting it, are high-level documents, setting out broad targets and principles. A major focus of the current negotiations is what Espinosa describes as the “operating manual” – the detailed rules and guidelines that will make implementation possible.
The deadline for adoption of this rulebook is the COP24 session at Katowice in Poland, in December. “We need to accept that not all the nitty-gritty details can be agreed by Katowice,” says Elina Bardarm, from the European Commission delegation, “but what we do need to have is an operational and balanced set of governance rules that concerns, equally, mitigation, adaptation and finance. That’s key for us to advance.
“It has to have a sufficient level of detail to allow parties to start preparing their necessary national monitoring, reporting and verification structures already before 2020 – because, as of 2020, we will need to start implementing the new regime.”
Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change Patricia Espinosa speaking at the UN Climate Change conference in Bonn on May 10 (Credit: UNFCCC)
Urging greater ambition
In parallel with the Paris Agreement Work Programme (PAWP) to draw up the rulebook, are strenuous efforts to encourage individual countries to ramp up the ambition in the climate pledges that underpin the agreement – their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). It is these pledges, rather than the Paris Agreement itself, that will determine the trajectory of natural gas demand in individual countries.
China, for example, has committed to “by 2020 achieving more than 10% share of natural gas in the primary energy consumption” from around 6% in 2016. As a result, and because of efforts to address appalling air pollution in many of its cities, its LNG imports have been soaring and are expected to continue rising rapidly for the foreseeable future. One well-known consultancy estimates that LNG imports into China will reach 62mn metric tons in 2020.
International Energy Agency (IEA) analysis shows more ambitious climate policy action leading to greater gas imports and trade in the NPS and SDS projections to 2040. The reverse is true for coal. (From page 629 of the 2017 World Energy Outlook)
In countries that depend very heavily on coal for power generation – notably China and India – greater ambition is expected to lead to higher demand for natural gas over the coming two decades.
In its latest Outlook, the IEA projects that in its central New Policies Scenario (which takes account of NDCs) China’s gas demand rises from 172bn m³ in 2016 to 469bn m³ in 2040. In the more ambitious Sustainable Development Scenario, demand in 2040 reaches 516bn m³ – 10% more.
Why finance is crucial
The Paris Agreement stipulates that global warming should be limited to “well-below 2°C above pre-industrial levels”. However, as the NDCs currently stand, their cumulative impact gets nowhere close. The 2017 Emissions Gap Report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) concludes that “full implementation of the unconditional NDCs and comparable action afterwards is consistent with a temperature increase of about 3.2°C”.
This question of conditionality is crucial. Many developing nations have made their NDCs conditional on support, especially financial support, from developed countries. UNEP concludes that full implementation of the conditional NDCs would lower its projection by 0.2°C.
That may not sound like much but those nations that have made their NDCs conditional will be looking for higher levels of support if they are to ramp up the ambition of their climate pledges. The deadline for the next round of – more ambitious – NDCs is 2020. It will be watched closely by suppliers of all types of energy.
“The issue of finance underpins so many parts of climate negotiations, because poor countries simply can’t cover the triple costs of loss and damage, adaptation and mitigation on their own,” says Harjeet Singh of ActionAid International, one of the 1,200 NGOs that make up the Climate Action Network. “But with developed countries refusing to move on finance, lots of pieces are still unfinished.… If we’re to see any progress on the so-called Paris rulebook, wealthy countries need to provide real money for climate action.”
Hot off the press – the IPCC’s 1.5°C report
As if the climate change negotiations were not already complex enough, no one has forgotten that the Paris Agreement also stipulates that humankind should be “pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.”
In terms of carbon budgets (the amount of GHGs humankind can still emit without missing the target) this is hugely more ambitious than “well below 2°C”. The UNEP report concludes that even if NDCs are implemented in full, “the available carbon budget for 1.5°C will already be well depleted by 2030.” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – the body responsible for assessing climate science – was tasked in the Paris Agreement with producing a special report “on the impacts of global warming of 1.5C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways.”
It is due out in October, a few weeks before COP24. There will be plenty of heated debate at Katowice, and within the gas industry, about that.
Alex Forbes
Plea for rational debate
The proper boundaries between industry, politics and science have become blurred, preventing a rational debate about energy policy and climate change, according to a scientist and former German member of parliament Philipp Lengsfeld. The public, whose interests they would normally serve, therefore instead finds itself caught in the middle, passive not active.
Addressing an audience at the Palace of Westminster, London, April 18, Lengsfeld, the former Christian Democrat Union MP for Central Berlin but now in industry, said that there was a “huge moral and political authority behind the scares: the prospects are bleak and surrender is not an option.” But he told the event, organised by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, that it was time to call the bluff of the prophets of doom.
It was an economist who came up with the 1.5% limit on acceptable global warming, which was intended as a target for a political discussion; but that has become now an accepted scientific law, he said. That acceptance is behind the Paris Agreement; behind the vast amounts of money spent on decarbonising – "although carbon dioxide means life" – and also behind the notion that oil companies will not be able to produce all their reserves without raising the temperature of the earth and causing irreparable damage.
His solution to the heavily polarised argument was for the three spheres of life to co-operate in an arms-length and mutually respectful relationship. Scientific data should be robust and reproducible but never treated as Gospel. It must be checked, challenged and criticised, he said, rather than a self-fulfilling prophecy: “We have policy-driven evidence-finding.”
Industry should support scientific research as the gatekeeper of data-driven, customer-driven decisions, and interact with the public; it should not hide or work against what is known about its products, nor should it fraternise with politicians. To allay fears that research is tainted by money, there should be rules, such as the need for peer reviews and transparency about where the money comes from.
And politicians for their part should support science and industry but not treat scientists as gurus or fraternise with the media or scientists. He cited the “worrying influence” that a sensationalist German book, Self-immolation (Selbstverbrennung), had on Germany's chancellor Angela Merkel, the architect of the very expensive energy transition (Energiewende) from fossil fuels to renewables. Proper processes need to be in place, he said, to prevent single people becoming too influential.
He cited his own case too: his report on the damage caused by windfarms was blocked by his colleagues in parliament for several years and even then the question was watered down. “It is hard to drag these questions into the open," he said, but the law on renewable energy has transferred €25bn-€30bn from customers into the renewables industry each year.
William Powell