PARIS ACCORD WILL DEFEAT FOSSIL FUELS - EVENTUALLY

The transition to green energy is messy, contradictory and too slow.

- REUTERS

It’s roughly a decade since 195 countries struck the Paris Agreement at the United Nations’s 21st Conference of the Parties (COP) in France, pledging to hold the average global temperature to “well below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels”. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has effectively declared dead, the more stretching goal of limiting the increase to 1.5 C. The climate denialism of US President Donald Trump is indeed impeding the fight. Yet the future is brighter for renewables than it seems.

As delegates head to next week’s COP30 summit in the Brazilian city of Belém, two conflicting accounts of the energy transition are true. For the first time, solar, wind and other renewable power is now generating more electricity globally than coal, per research outfit Ember. Yet more of the carbon-heavy rock is being burned than at any point in history. It helps stoke the argument, popularised by Daniel Yergin, author and founder of Cambridge Energy Research Associates, that renewables are not replacing fossil fuels, but merely adding to the mix as energy use increases.