FT opinion: ‘Fossilist’ finance blocks ‘clean trillion’

The FT has an interesting piece from David Pitt-Watson (executive fellow of finance at London Business School and chair of the UN Environment Program Finance Initiative)  claiming that "Capital markets have unintended bias to unsustainable investment."

FT: BoE Chief warns of risk of stranded assets from unburnable fossil fuels.

Related to earlier discussions featured on this blog [here, here and here], the FT writes that Mark Carney, the chief of the Bank of England, warns of the potentially massive downside risk in the UK if binding climate change policy would left the majority of proven reserves unburnable (in the near future). He noted that 19% of the companies on the FTSE100 are related to extractive industries, and that if the world would decide on the 2 degrees limit, and without massive involvement of carbon capture, 'carbon budgetting' would imply that around two thirds of currently proven reserves should not be extracted.

FT: European energy groups seek UN backing for carbon pricing system

The FT [FT.com] writes: 

Six of Europe’s largest oil and gas companies have banded together for the first time to ask the UN to let them help devise a plan to stop global warming.

These are Royal Dutch Shell (Dutch-UK), BP (UK), Total (France), Statoil (Norway), Eni (Italy) and BG Group (UK).

The chief executives of ExxonMobil and Chevron, the two largest US oil producers, said last week they would not be joining any European company initiative to forge a common position on global warming.

Further analysis about the issue, and how these companies try to address the potential risk that their assets under ground become worthless, is given here [FT.com]. 

The Guardian's "Keep it in the ground" campaign

As part of his final months as editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger [guardian.co.uk] has started a climate campaign called "keep it in the ground" [guardian.co.uk]. In short, if we take the 2 degree Celsius limit seriously, we can still burn 575 Gigatons of carbon while the currently proven reserves of oil gas and coal contain 2795 Gigatons (see opening letter of him).

This relates to the idea of unburnable assets which we posted about last year, here  [oxcarre.blogspot.com], and of which also a related paper exist from Paul Collier and Tony Venables (Closing Coal: Economic and Moral Incentives [oxcarre.ox.ac.uk], and blog [oxcarre.blogspot.com]).

Today's Guardian frontpage has the UK Energy Secretary Ed Davies supporting [guardian.co.uk] the campaign, but this we already knew [oxcarre.blogspot.com].

Denmark's 100% renewable energy push

The New York Times, in its series on solutions to climate change, reports on the policy of Denmark to "to end the burning of fossil fuels in any form by 2050 — not just in electricity production, as some other countries hope to do, but in transportation as well."

they keys to success: 

• plenty of wind power,
• good electricity connections to Sweden's nuclear power, and Norway's hydroelectric plants (without competition from neighbouring countries),
• hopefully new technology that can bring a transformation in the transport sector. 35 years to go, why not?