Move would cost less than $5bn and cut toll of deaths from power outages and lack of supply, Cop28 delegates will hear
All healthcare facilities in poorer countries could be electrified using solar energy within five years for less than $5bn, putting an end to the risk of life from power outages, experts will argue at Cop28 this month.
“I would like the international community to commit to a deadline and funding to electrify all healthcare facilities,” said Salvatore Vinci, an adviser on sustainable energy at the World Health Organization and a member of its Cop28 delegation. “We have solutions now that were not available 10 years ago – there is no reason why babies should be dying today because there is not electricity to power their incubators.
“It’s a low-hanging fruit. There is nothing stopping us,” he said.
About 1 billion people around the world do not have access to a healthcare facility with a stable electricity connection, including 433 million in low-income countries who rely on facilities with no electricity at all, according to the WHO’s Energising Health: Accelerating Electricity Access in Healthcare Facilities report, which was published in January, and co-authored by Vinci.
Electricity is the lifeblood of a functioning healthcare facility, not only powering devices such as ventilators and cardiac monitors, but providing basics amenities such as lighting. Without these basic facilities, even routine conditions can be deadly or lead to complications. Healthcare facilities in countries vulnerable to the impact of extreme weather events will often experience outages because of storms and flooding.
The energy giant BP has been accused of prioritising its profits over people and the planet after making £2.7 billion in profit over the last quarter, while investing £2 billion in fossil fuels.
Leading think tank IPPR said now was a time when energy companies should be urgently responding to climate change, but instead BP has “doubled down on its oil and gas business to reap enormous profits.”
For every £1 BP spent on low carbon investments in the last quarter, they invested £11 in fossil fuels it was revealed. And since the energy price shock began two years ago, BP has put nine times more into fossil fuels as renewables.
BP also completed more than £14.8 billion of buybacks from surplus cash flow whilst announcing a new round of share buybacks, which will transfer £1.2 billion to shareholders.
“It’s clear that oil and gas companies are prioritising their shareholders at the expense of the transition to clean energy, so the UK government must now take the reins by investing in renewables,” said Joseph Evans, IPPR researcher.
Although BP’s profits have actually fallen on last year, when the oil company saw mega earnings following the rise in oil prices after the Russian invasion of Ukraine, £2.7 billion profit between July and September remains extremely high as organisations ask why ordinary people are still facing high energy bills.
“The government has had countless opportunities to bring down our bills and emissions. Instead, all we’ve had are weakened green policies and massive tax breaks for oil and gas giants,” Friends of the Earth responded.
Timing, they say, is everything. Yesterday, the world’s energy watchdog, the International Energy Agency (IEA), published its latest report, the 2023 Net Zero Roadmap.
The IEA categorically stated that the time for no new oil and gas was over. If we are to keep temperatures to 1.5 degrees, then world leaders must not develop new oil, gas, or coal beyond existing fields.
If we want a liveable planet, we must shift from fossil fuels to renewables.
This is not the first time, either, that the IEA has confirmed that no new oil, gas, or coal fields are compatible with limiting global temperature rise to 1.5ºC.
“Keeping alive the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5 °C requires the world to come together quickly. The good news is we know what we need to do – and how to do it,” said IEA Executive Director, Fatih Birol at the launch of the report. The IEA reiterated the way to do it is not to approve new oil and gas fields.
Greenpeace activists display a billboard during a protest outside Shell headquarters on July 27, 2023 in London. (Photo: Handout/Chris J. Ratcliffe for Greenpeace via Getty Images)
In February this year, the UK’s Climate Change Committee (CCC) wrote a letter to government in which it claimed that more domestic oil and gas extraction would have “at most, a marginal effect on prices”, recommending instead that the best way of reducing exposure to volatile energy markets is “cut[ting] fossil fuel consumption, improving energy efficiency, [and] shifting to a renewables-based power system”.
Meanwhile, research from campaign group Uplift reveals that gas from undeveloped UK oil and gas fields in the North Sea, including Rosebank, will deliver at most three weeks of energy to the UK per year, while oil would provide up to five years of oil demand, even if none of it were exported. In reality, most production from North Sea fields, along with Rosebank, which is joint-owned by Norwegian state oil major Equinor (40%), Canadian Suncor Energy (20%) and Israeli-owned Ithaca Energy (20%), is likely to be exported abroad, as is currently the case with 60% and 80% of North Sea gas and oil, respectively.
Further analysis of data from GlobalData reveals just how far burning oil and gas from Rosebank would threaten the UK’s climate targets. According to GlobalData, Rosebank contains the largest untapped oil and gas reserves of all proposed North Sea fields, with 370 million barrels of oil equivalent.
Using US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conversion figures – according to which one barrel of oil emits 0.43 tonnes (t) of CO₂ when burnt and 1,000 cubic feet of gas emit 0.0551t of CO₂ when burnt – Rosebank is likely to release 155 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (mtCO₂) into the atmosphere over its lifetime.
However, in a “balanced” net-zero pathway, as per the CCC’s sixth carbon budget, emissions from fossil fuels fall 75% by 2035 from 2018 levels. In total, emissions from “fuel supply” – predominantly made up of fossil fuels – amount to 298mtCO₂-equivalent (mtCO₂e) between 2023 and 2050, meaning lifetime emissions from Rosebank are equivalent to more than half of the UK’s remaining carbon budget for total fuel supply.
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Just Stop Oil protesting in London 6 December 2022.
Protest banner reads Stop Climate Crime. We are One.
Radical action is essential to stop the transition from global warming to global boiling
Extreme weather events have increased in frequency and intensity over the past decade, with the last month seeing a rare combination of problems across North America, the Mediterranean and Middle East, northern China and South Korea. For the British, there has been the separate added shock of seeing tourists fleeing wildfires, especially in Greece.
These events are all part of the early stages of climate breakdown, which will get progressively worse unless the world makes a revolutionary and rapid transition to a low carbon economy, yet there is little evidence that political leaderships are even remotely prepared for this. At least UN secretary general António Guterres is using different language, not least his use of “global boiling” rather than “global warming” for his warnings of what is to come.
United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres discusses climate change at U.N. headquarters in New York City on July 27, 2023.
He is an exception, and public opinion overall is still not aware of the huge changes required. All the warnings from climate scientists, coupled with the evidence of our own eyes, seems to count for little as we move towards an unstable, chaotic and overheating planet.
Why is this? More importantly, why is it that radical decarbonisation isn’t happening, even though we know it’s possible? And, most important of all, how can things be turned round in time?
Let’s start with the inaction. Here, three elements interact. First, we are talking about fundamental changes in how we live, not just in the UK or western Europe but across the whole world. The result would be a cleaner, safer and healthier world, but it would involve years of huge change – which is a lot for ordinary people to take in. We shouldn’t underestimate this. Poorer communities, in particular, will find it very difficult to cope with the changes, while richer elites everywhere in the world will likely maintain the naive belief that their wealth will keep them secure.
Second, what must be done runs directly counter to the way the economy currently works. The market fundamentalist system is rooted in competition and the false belief that the millions of people left behind will benefit from trickle-down from the rich and be content. It believes that while central government, in partnership with wealth, may hold the ultimate levers of control, it should have a minimal role in how the market works. Cooperation is anathema to this way of thinking, but cooperation is essential to prevent global boiling.
Neoliberals see this market fundamentalist approach as necessary for an ordered and stable society, and believe that if the millions of marginalised people do not upset the apple cart, all will be well. At root is a belief that the elite knows best.
In Britain, there was the unexpected risk of a seriously radical Labour government taking over in 2017. Fortunately for the neoliberals, that was narrowly avoided and since then the threat from the Labour left has been well and truly suppressed.
Despite this, the system still has wider concerns over potentially violent responses from the margins. In many countries, and especially Britain, new laws have been brought in and others strengthened, and police and security forces are much better equipped and trained to handle public dissent. Heavy prison sentences for even small acts of nonviolent direct action are now there to be used.
The problem is that a market economy system simply cannot act fast enough to handle climate breakdown. The system knows this, so finds it preferable to support the view of any “experts”– of whom there are plenty – who still deny there is a problem.
The anti-climate breakdown forces are exceptionally well entrenched in society and have the easy job of convincing people that no action is required
This brings us to the third point: the relentless propaganda from the fossil fuel industry and associated think tanks over half a century to deny the problem, even when their own scientists are saying otherwise. In a fairer world there would be an offence of global corporate manslaughter, but in the real world there isn’t.
Overall, the anti-climate breakdown forces are exceptionally well entrenched in society and have the easy job of convincing people that no action is required – just when they are being told that action will be personally costly. Politicians will play on this, especially when elections are in the offing. This can even reap electoral favour. The current behaviour of Britain’s Sunak government is a case in point, with Sunak declaring that climate policy must be “proportional and pragmatic”, following a by-election win in a constituency where the Tory candidate had opposed extension of the ULEZ low-emissions scheme.
So where do we go from here? One way to look at it is to view the current issue as two very broad global trends that are on course to converge, and when they finally meet there will be a chance of radical change because there will be no alternative.
One of these trends, as we have seen, is a system set in its ways and highly unlikely to change. Carbon emissions will continue rising, temperatures will head well above 1.5°C and those with the power will reap the rewards, at least in the short term.
The other trend is much more positive and has three elements.
Climate science has come on by leaps and bounds in the past half century. The science community is far more confident of its expectations of climate breakdown and is, at last, saying so bluntly. That welcome change also has greater force because of the manner in which the beginnings of climate breakdown are frequently exceeding the warnings of predictive models.
The second trend is, at last, a growing public awareness that things must change, and change quickly. The power of the movements in many countries is remarkable, so much so that far more people are willing to risk prison for the sake of the future.
Finally, numerous impressive developments in renewable energy technology have brought down the cost of electricity by huge margins, bringing it well below grid parity in price with fossil fuels.
That leaves just two huge questions, on which so many futures depend, particularly for our children and grandchildren. When will the convergence happen, and how quickly can changes then be made?
If it takes another 20 years to the early 2040s, then the task will be almost insurmountable, with action only happening after numerous appalling catastrophes, and bitter anger from the marginalised billions. If change comes before the mid-1930s then prospects will be brighter, but the later the convergence the greater the challenge.
It is therefore a matter of the sooner the better, so the rest of the 2020s has to be a time of intense activism whenever and wherever possible. Whether it is by persuasion, argument, nonviolent direct action or other means, it might then be possible to convince enough people that radical action is essential before the transition from global warming to global boiling risks becoming irreversible.
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