The Special Adviser to the Secretary General on Climate Action, Selwin Hart, says to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, the world must abandon fossil fuels as quickly as possible.
“There is no argument around the science at all. But of course, developing countries, especially the poorest, will need assistance to make the transition to a renewable energy future,” said, Hart, who is from Barbados and has acted as a negotiator in the past during several UN Climate Conferences (COPs).
He said the focus should be on helping remove the barriers that developing countries face to accelerate their transition to renewables.
“For example, the cost of capital, renewable energy investments by their nature are very intensive. Eighty percent of the investment must be upfront, because you have to buy the solar panels and the battery storage and the installation, and that’s costly”, Hart said, adding, however, that the running costs are zero because there is no need to buy any oil or diesel to power a renewable energy station.
Hart, who has served in several climate change leadership positions, including as a climate adviser for the Barbados-based Caribbean Development Bank (CDB), chief climate change negotiator for Barbados as well as the coordinator and lead negotiator on finance for the Alliance of Small Island Developing States (AOSIS), gave a striking example of the unfair conditions countries in the developing world face when it comes to the energy transition.
“I’ll compare Algeria and Denmark. Denmark has some of the worst potentials for renewable energy [while] Algeria’s potential for renewable energy is probably 70 times higher. But Denmark has seven times more solar panels than Algeria. The reason is the cost of capital,” Hart said, referring to the return expected by those who provide capital for business.
He said the international community needs to “throw the kitchen sink” at solving this problem.
For Hart, mobilizing the trillions of dollars needed to make the transition should be the focus, instead of pouring capital into new fossil fuel projects, which he sees as a real risk that could lead to investing in stranded assets or passing debts onto future generations.
“Fossil fuels are a dead end, as the secretary general has said…We need to increase renewable energy deployment to around 60 percent of total energy capacity over the course of the next eight years, which means roughly a tripling of install capacity over the course of this decade,” Hart said, noting that this is more than possible, because the world has tripled its renewable energy capacity over the last decade.
“We just need to do it again this decade. The technologies are there, the finance is there. It just needs to be deployed in the right place, where the emissions are and where the population growth and energy demand is”, he urged.
Governments representing over half of the global GDP, including the United States and the United Kingdom, set out a 12-month action plan with 25 collaborative actions to be delivered by COP28 to help make clean technologies cheaper and more accessible everywhere.
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