The Emperor’s New Clothes

Uncovering or covering?

COP26 is over and what was achieved? After two weeks of intensive discussions, a few major agreements were made. The media coverage was huge, even though focus was more on revealing flaws than cover the event.

Were any agrements made?

Agreements were made. But not as far-reaching as required. We have for more than the last 150 years built our society on fossil fuels. And we can’t stop using them from tomorrow. The alternatives are not yet in place. We can – and must – have more wind turbines, more solar power and hydrogen power plants and many more sustainable solutions.

No doubt, we need more research, more subsidising for new technologies  and more companies developing new solutions.

In short, agreements made at the summit in Glasgow:

• The Paris agreement must be kept, each member country of UN must strengthen the climate goals.
• All member countries must work for keeping the rising global temperatures below 2 degrees celsius and as close as possible to 1.5 degrees celcius.
• Coal power plants should be phased out and replaced by clean energy.
• CO₂ discharge must be reduced by 45 procent (compared with 2010) by 2030 to reach the goal of a maximum rise in global temperatures of 1,5 degrees. The discharge must reach 0 % by 2050.
• The richest member countries must support climate adaption actively and must support poor countries financially with 100 billion USD per year in the years 2020-2025.
• CO₂ reductions – the so-called climate credits – by internal purchase and selling countries in between, must be minimised.

India and China – some of the worlds’ largest consumers of coal power – almost ruined the agreement, as they weren’t ready to agree to necessary far-reaching concessions on out phasing coal power.

It was considered as quite offensive, howeer, both India and China  see coal power as the only way to diminish poverty in their countries.

Solutions

The best solution – and the cheapest on the long run – would be to build more nuclear power stations. Denmark has never had any nuclear power, I still remember the protests back in the 70s.

We Danes have always been been taught that nuclear power is bad and wind energy is good. That’s why Denmark is world leading in wind power, both in installed gW and manufacturing the wind turbines. A decision to really want wind energy  has made this big business. But, for many years wind energy couldn’t compete with fossil fuels and had to be subsidised. Personally I’m so much opponent to subsidising, however here it had proven its worth. Today wind energy is competitive to fossil fuels.

The fear of radioactive fallout, has created such a hostile environment towards nuclear energy, that more or less all nuclear power plants in Europe will be phased out. At all nuclear power plants where accidents have happened, it has either been human errors or the plant has been built in the wrong place.  Safety is incredibly high at a modern nuclear power plant. the energy is clean, easy to make and can create enormous amounts of energy.

The disadvantages with nuclear energy are:

• where to store the used fuel cell bundles, as they will continue to be highly radioactive for decades, even centuries after use.
• nuclear power plants are obvious terror targets.
• if accidents happen, pollution from emission can not only be measured in surrounding areas, but will spread widely e.g. by air and water. Consequences are catastrophic for many years.

There is heavy research in other fuels like hydrogen where Denmark also is among the top countries. Something we can be nothing but proud of.

Norway is the world’s leading nation when it comes to driving electric cars, despite it’s earning billions on gas and oil from the North Sea. Money from the Norwegian state will be reinvested in renewable energy. This means “black money” from oil and gas will be invested in other other energies. This makes absolutely sense in means of out-phasing oil and gas, however some see it as “whitewashing”.

Greta – again

In the fairy tale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by  Hans Christian Andersen, the story ends with a small child exposes the emperor has no cloths on. In other words, deceit will be exposed sooner or later.

In the whole climate debate Greta Thunberg has many times been announced as the voice of truth – the child shouting out that our politicians and leaders words and promises were – and are – nothing but empty.

Greta went to Glasgow, sang a bit and shouted blah, blah, blah. No suggestions to solutions from her side, only empty speak about action now. Which we all already know has to happen.

The questions here will be; who is actually the emperor? The international community which Greta accuses of doing nothing – or is it Greta herself, who does not come up with anything constructive. When taking the blah, blah, blah away, there’s not much left of Greta.