Workshop
Energy and COVID-19
Governments’ responses to COVID-19 indicate a clear willingness to respond with funding at scale to counter immediate public health impacts. Control of conventional or priority pollutants (especially PM2.5, which is linked to higher risk of susceptibility to COVID-19) is attracting increased scale of investment which has not been forthcoming for carbon mitigation pathways envisioned under the Paris Agreement. As there is not sufficient time to address Covid19 and climate change independently, increased financial stimulus to support economic recovery from the pandemic should be crafted to include “no regrets” investments in conventional pollution control which also deliver quantifiable climate change benefits.
Recovering from Covid19 has implications for energy supply chains; industrial production; urban transport and energy services; and social infrastructure including retrofit and new designs for public buildings, schools, hospitals, etc.
The workshop will discuss how the Covid19 has impacted energy supply chains with a focus on Asia and the Pacific, with presentations from multiple stakeholders including public and private sector, multilateral development banks, and academia.
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Panel session
Accelerated climate change and the Food-Energy-Water-Nexus
The term ‘anthropocene’ refers to the epoch of global developments caused by the human impact on geology and the earth’s ecosystem. It is currently characterized by an accumulation of extreme weather events, including the hottest summer on record in the Northern Hemisphere causing the second lowest Arctic sea ice minimum on record, a very destructive wildfire season in California and a persistent severe drought in Central and Eastern Europe as measured by NASA. The food-energy-water nexus (FEW-Nexus) represents key sectors of the Anthropocene increasingly and centrally impacted by the accelerating climate change.
In this panel, the interlinkages between the FEW nexus sectors and their embeddedness in the socio-economic-ecological system (SEES) will be considered and elaborated against the context of the accelerated climate change.
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Keynote speech
Prof. Daniel M. Kammen
University of California, Berkeley
Have we reached ‘peak carbon’ emissions?
Abstract
Have we reached peak carbon emissions—that long hoped-for moment when the global emissions of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, such as carbon dioxide, stop increasing and start to decline? The answer is “quite possibly, yes.” Solar and wind power are now the cheapest forms of new energy technology across most of the United States. The costs of solar energy projects have fallen by close to 90 percent over the past decade, and wind by 70 percent. Batteries and other forms of energy storage are now falling in cost as fast as solar and wind energy ever have, due to a series of new innovations. Transition to clean energy, however, is no longer a function of technology costs and market forces, but of politics and the entrenched, massively-subsidized, fossil fuels legacies. The global costs of fossil fuel subsidies – estimated to be $0.5 – 5 trillion per year are on par with the total investments in clean energy over the past decade (Kammen, 2020). Fossil-fuel damages are global, but the most immediate impacts are on the poorest citizens in every nation through local air pollution, health damages from work in the fossil-fuel sector, and the impacts on the areas with the poorest infrastructure. Climate protection can only proceed if social justice is at the forefront.
Short bio
Dr. Daniel M. Kammen is a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, with parallel appointments in the Energy and Resources Group where he serves as Chair, the Goldman School of Public Policy where he directs the Center for Environmental Policy, and the department of Nuclear Engineering. Kammen is the founding director of the Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory (RAEL; http://rael.berkeley.edu), and was director of the Transportation Sustainability Research Center from 2007 – 2015. In 2020 Kammen was elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
To Be Updated
