Category: Opinion

April 24 2020

Cheung: Covid-19 and The Energy Transition: Our Greatest Decade Awaits

The 2020s may have started with a nasty shock, but they have only just started – and there is much work to do and much that can be achieved before the decade is out.

March 26 2020

Liebreich: Covid-19 – The Low-Carbon Crisis

"It now looks like emissions could easily drop by 5% or more this year alone as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic."

February 25 2020

Wu: When The Going Gets Tough For Asia’s Energy Transition

Much uncertainty and anxiety lingers over the impact of the coronavirus but, at some point, normality will resume and the world will have once again to think about a much more dire threat to human existence, climate change.

January 28 2020

The First Phase of the Transition is About Electricity, Not Primary Energy

Thinking about the world in terms of primary energy masks the important role of electricity where heat losses are highest at around 63%. It can also help to explain why many of the world’s most eminent energy experts have underestimated the growth to date of renewable energy, and its future potential.

December 17 2019

Liebreich: Peak Emissions Are Closer Than You Think – and Here’s Why

So here we are, standing on the threshold of a new decade. It will be, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, a decade of consequences. Play it right, and we have a chance of avoiding the worst impacts of climate change. Waste it, and we are in uncharted territory.

December 17 2019

Liebreich: Climate Wars Episode IV – a New Hope for the 2020s?

Looking back at the intervening decade since Copenhagen, it is not that climate diplomacy delivered no wins: the Paris Agreement, struck in December 2015, was a stupendous success. Over the past three years, the Paris targets have been progressively more deeply embedded into the political, social and business landscape in nations around the world.

November 8 2019

Bullard: We Really Can’t Live Without the Internet

Half the world uses the internet. It took almost the entirety of human existence for half the world’s people to live in cities. It took 27 years for the global population on the internet to grow from less than 1% to more than 50%.

October 30 2019

McCrone: Clean Energy’s Decade Nearly Gone, And Its Decade Ahead

Ten years ago, the planet was facing a climate change emergency – and now, yes, it is facing a climate change emergency. Therefore surely the 2010s, which end in two months’ time, have been a “wasted decade” from the point of view of climate and the decarbonization of energy?

October 14 2019

Bullard: How a Battery Can Lead a Quiet Revolution

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences concluded its announcement of this year’s chemistry prize rather poetically: “Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionized our lives since they first entered the market in 1991,” the academy said.

September 26 2019

Liebreich: Climate Lawsuits – An Existential Risk to Fossil Fuel Firms?

The big question is whether climate lawsuits represent an irritant to fossil fuel companies, a meaningful drag on their business, or an existential threat.