Prospects for renewable energy to end-2017

Subject Prospects for renewable energy to end-2017. Significance On June 1, US President Donald Trump's administration announced its intent to pull out of the Paris Agreement on climate change. Later that week, the US Energy Information Administration revealed in a report that renewables set a record of generating 10% of the country’s electric power in the month of March, highlighting that renewable energy has strong momentum that should carry it through shorter term policy fluctuations.

Subject Prospects for renewable energy in 2017. Significance The United States and China, the world’s two largest economies as well as the largest carbon emitters, announced their ratification of the Paris Agreement in September. Earlier this year, prices for renewable energy in select regions set historic lows below fossil-fired plants. Renewable energy seems to have passed the tipping point towards gradual adoption as the primary source of electric power while also hopefully preventing catastrophic climate change.


Subject The Paris Agreement and US withdrawal. Significance President Donald Trump announced his intention to withdraw from the Paris Agreement on climate change on June 1, prompting criticism from around the world. While current pledges are unlikely to change and the agreement will not see flight or withdrawal by other countries, US withdrawal imperils the ability of the agreement’s structure to accelerate climate action to a scale necessary to meet its objective of limiting global warming to below 2 degrees centigrade by 2100. Impacts The US private sector and sub-national polities will increase their climate action, though the loss of federal support will still be felt. A future US administration could re-enter the agreement, but substantial momentum will be lost diplomatically in the intervening years. Calls for greater adaptation -- rather than mitigation -- funds from climate-vulnerable states will grow more strident.


Subject China's climate change policy after US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. Significance Beijing is seen as a potential global leader on climate change following US President Donald Trump’s June 2 announcement that Washington will pull out from Paris Agreement. China, the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, has already won applause simply by promising to honour existing commitment to the international climate accord. Impacts China prefers to aid developing countries through its South-South fund, so it is unlikely to contribute to the Green Climate Fund. Concerns over competitiveness, especially in export industries, will weaken the national carbon trading scheme due to launch this year. China will negotiate energy sector deals with the United States on economic criteria rather than environmental or climate impacts.


Subject Climate diplomacy. Significance Amid frustration at the limited outcomes of last year’s COP25 conference in Madrid, hopes had been building that new commitments on climate action would be made in 2020. The global COVID-19 crisis has broken momentum towards such goals, seeing several international climate conferences postponed, including COP26, which was to take place in Glasgow in November. With political energy now focused completely on COVID-19, hopes that COP26 would increase ambitions to meet Paris Agreement temperature goals have been dashed. Impacts Trends of increasing renewable energy will remain consistent, given policy support. Climate ‘emergency’ rhetoric will run into public fatigue after the health emergency. The US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement on November 4 will be a flashpoint in presidential elections.


Significance Kim's departure creates unforeseen turbulence at the institution, whose corporate commitments around climate change, gender and renewable energy are anathema to the current US administration. Impacts If the US nominee is an ideological conservative, World Bank relations with either the United States or other shareholders will be damaged. Short-term impacts on Bank operations will be minimal. Kim’s belief that he can affect “global issues” more in the private sector emphasises the importance of the Bank reviving its global role.


Kybernetes ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob A. Miller

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explain the US society’s insignificant mitigation of climate change using Niklas Luhmann’s (1989) autopoietic social systems theory in ecological communication. Specifically, the author’s analysis falls within the context of Luhmann re-moralized while focusing on particular function systems’ binary codes and their repellence of substantive US climate change mitigation policy across systems. Design/methodology/approach The author achieves this purpose by resituating Luhmann’s conception of evolution to forgo systems teleology and better contextualize the spatial-temporal scale of climate change; reinforcing complexity reduction and differentiation by integrating communication and media scholar John D. Peters’s (1999) “communication chasm” concept as one mechanism through which codes sustain over time; and applying these integrated concepts to prominent the US climate change mitigation attempts. Findings The author concludes that climate change mitigation efforts are the amalgamation of the systems’ moral communications. Mitigation efforts have relegated themselves to subsystems of the ten major systems given the polarizing nature of their predominant care/harm moral binary. Communication chasms persist because these moral communications cannot both adhere to the systems’ binary codes and communicate the climate crisis’s urgency. The more time that passes, the more codes force mitigation organizations, activist efforts and their moral communications to adapt and sacrifice their actions to align with the encircling systems’ code. Social implications In addition to the conceptual contribution, the social implication is that by identifying how and why climate change mitigation efforts are subsumed by the larger systems and their codes, climate change activists and practitioners can better tool their tactics to change the codes at the heart of the systems if serious and substantive climate change mitigation is to prevail. Originality/value To the author’s knowledge, there has not been an integration of a historical communication concept into, and sociological application of, ecological communication in the context of climate change mitigation.


Significance Washington, Delhi and Islamabad all view cybersecurity as a critical challenge, and the US administration wants to work multilaterally to address shared global threats. However, the lack of precedent for trilateral cooperation, deep US-Pakistan and India-Pakistan mistrust, and US preference for cyber cooperation only with top allies impede collaboration. Impacts US-India-Pakistan cyber cooperation may offer a new template for three-way collaboration on other threats such as climate change. Any India-Pakistan cooperation on cybersecurity could spur additional bilateral collaboration in other areas. Such cooperation would boost efforts to develop global norms to tackle cybersecurity.


Author(s):  
Cem Bagdatlioglu ◽  
Robert Flanagan ◽  
Erich Schneider

The used fuel inventory of the United States commercial nuclear fleet has been accumulating since the inception of nuclear reactors. In order to understand the mass and composition of the used fuel inventory, a nuclear fuel cycle simulation package (Cyclus) is used with a reactor modeling tool (Bright-lite). The parameters for the simulation are obtained as historical operation and burnup data for every reactor in the US fleet, taken from the U.S. Energy Information Administration. The historical burnup data is used to calculate the fuel enrichment of every reactor at every refueling. Discharged uranium inventories calculated by the software are shown to closely match the reference data. The total mass of three major actinide groups are presented as they build up over time. In addition, the evolution of the plutonium composition in discharged fuel is also presented, illustrating Cyclus’ ability to track the composition of material flowing through a large, evolving reactor fleet over decades.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (6) ◽  
pp. 1255-1274
Author(s):  
Shin Kinoshita

Purpose Saving energy is an essential issue in the world to attenuate climate change. To achieve the goal, energy-saving appliances such as refrigerators should be promoted. This study aims to analyze the conditions enabling Japanese households to purchase such appliances, focusing on the relation with preferences for renewable energy as one of the non-monetary incentives. Design/methodology/approach A conjoint analysis is used. A random parameter logit model and nested logit model are used for estimation. Data were collected through an online questionnaire of the Rakuten Insight service. Findings Households will purchase energy-saving appliances when renewable energy is used for electricity generation. This implies that households will purchase energy-saving appliances with electric power generators by renewable energy such as solar panels and home micro-wind generators. Research limitations/implications The response rate and attributes of respondents and non-respondents are not shown to researchers in the web-questionnaire service. Social implications Promoting energy-saving appliances and renewable energy is essential in Japan (as in other countries) to save energy and to attenuate climate change. Based on the results, both energy-saving appliances and renewable energy will be widely used. Originality/value Although many studies have analyzed households’ preferences for energy-saving appliances and the effects of non-monetary incentives, studies that mentioned the relation with preferences for renewable energy are few. This study analyzes the relation and proposes policy recommendations to promote both energy-saving appliances and renewable energy.


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