By Sherrica Thompson
Staff Writer
November 17, 2022 – The Special Adviser to the Secretary-General on Climate Action, Selwin Hart, advises that for countries to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and prevent the worst impacts of the climate crisis, fossil fuels must be abandoned as quickly as possible.
“There is no argument around science at all. But of course, developing countries, especially the poorest, will need assistance to make the transition to a renewable energy future,” the Barbadian and former negotiator for UN Climate Conferences (COPs) explained while speaking with UN News on Friday, November 11.
Hart said the focus should be on helping developing countries remove the barriers they face to accelerate their transition to renewables.
“For example, the cost of capital. Renewable energy investments by their nature are very capital intensive. Eighty per cent 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, noting that the running costs are zero because there is no need to buy any oil or diesel to power a renewable energy station.
In addition, the Secretary-General gave an 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 explained, referring to the return expected by those who provide capital for business.
He noted that the international community needs to “throw the kitchen sink” at solving this problem.
Hart believes that “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,” the UN News reported.
“Fossil fuels are a dead end, as a Secretary-General has said…We need to increase renewable energy deployment to around 60 per cent 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,” he 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.
Fossil fuel power plants are said to be one of the largest emitters of greenhouse gases, hence a major contributor to climate change.