Peak Oil is You
Donate Bitcoins ;-) or Paypal :-)
Page added on June 12, 2014
U.N.’s Energy Funding Falls Short of Target by Billions
When the United Nations inaugurated the first-ever global forum on renewable energy last week, it provided a laundry list of financial pledges aimed at achieving one of the world body’s most ambitious goals: sustainable energy for all (SE4ALL) by 2030.
The forum specifically focused on the developing world where one out of five people are without access to basic energy: electricity.
According to the United Nations, Norway is expected to spend about 330 million dollars for global renewable energy this year, while Bank of America’s Green Bond has pledged some 500 million dollars over three years as part of a 10-year 50-billion-dollar environmental business commitment.
The collective 50-billion-dollar pledge was made by big businesses at the Rio+20 conference in Brazil in June 2012.
Additionally, the Organisation for Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) has created a one-billion-dollar fund for energy access.
And the African Development Bank has approved sustainable energy projects totaling some two billion dollars and mobilised co-financing totaling about 4.5 billion dollars.
Brazil, meanwhile, has reached out to nearly 15 million people, once living in veritable darkness, with its ‘Light for All’ programme.
Still, the commitments and achievements fall far short of the overall target for SE4ALL.
World Bank President Jim Yong Kim said last year that financing was the key to resolving the energy crisis, with a staggering 600 to 800 billion dollars needed a year from now until 2030.
He said the three goals are: access to energy, energy efficiency and renewable energy.
“We are now starting in countries in which demand for action is most urgent,” he said, pointing out that “in some of these countries, only one in 10 people has access to electricity. It is time for that to change.”
But to make that change, the United Nations has been marshalling resources, mostly from the private sector, big business and international organisations.
At the just-concluded forum, some of the corporate participants included senior officials from Bank of America, Citigroup, Coca Cola, Deutsche Bank, Royal Dutch Shell, Philips Lighting, Statoil and Sumitomo Chemical.
The meeting was attended by nearly a thousand delegates, including government leaders, energy practitioners, representatives of international organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs).
But civil rights groups and activists in the energy sector are sceptical about the role of big business.
Dipti Bhatnagar, climate justice and energy coordinator at Friends of the Earth International (FoEI), told IPS the SE4ALL initiative “has been co-opted by dirty energy corporations” and the United Nations is therefore not in a position to realise its goal.
The funders are led by an unaccountable, handpicked group dominated by representatives of multinational corporations, including oil giants such as Shell, that are investing billions in fossil fuels exploitation around the world, she charged.
“We have warned [U.N. Secretary-General] Ban Ki-moon that the SE4ALL and other U.N. initiatives have been captured by dirty energy corporations which use them to greenwash their image,” said Bhatnagar.
These companies are obstructing “the rapid transformation needed to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and achieve a just and sustainable energy system.”
Meena Raman of the Malaysia-based Third World Network was equally apprehensive about the involvement of big business in SE4ALL.
“With the Sustainable Energy For All Initiative being dominated largely by big energy corporations, multilateral development banks (MDBs) and private capital who seek commercial returns, it is doubtful if the interests of the energy deprived will be met at all,” she told IPS.
The emphasis on centralised modern energy systems, which are expensive and not affordable to those who need them the most, undermines the very objective it is set to serve in term of ensuring universal access to modern energy services, Raman pointed out.
The objective of “ensuring universal access to modern energy services” must ensure that universal access needs to be prioritised.
She said a large percentage of the world’s poor in the developing countries get their survival energy needs from either collected or low-cost local-market-based traditional energy sources (which are under increasing threats from mining, expansion of urbanisation, industrialisation etc.).
“This is not necessarily because there are no modern energy services available in that society or locality, but largely because these poor people cannot afford those modern (and higher cost) energy services.”
Forcing the poor to the commercial energy market without foolproof systems to guarantee energy access for the poor will create more deprivations, more inequities, more distress, she argued.
Addressing the forum, Ban said,”Sustainable development is not possible without sustainable energy.”
Ban also launched the U.N. Decade of Sustainable Energy for All (2014-2024) focusing on energy for women and children’s health during the initial two years.
Bhatnagar told IPS the world’s current energy system is unsustainable and unjust.
“It is harming communities, workers, the environment and the climate.”
“To provide sustainable energy to those who are now excluded, we urgently need to transform our current, corporate-controlled energy system into one that empowers people to build clean, democratically controlled, renewable energy systems,” she warned.
Raman told IPS the first priority should be to drastically reduce the threats to the poor’s free access to free or low-cost energy services (while improving their quality of use with modern technological/technical & social inputs – and this has multiple benefits, including the health of women and small children).
She said the objective of providing “modern energy services” to those without such services at present, can thus be achieved only when the state plays a policy-determined role, and the market economy is strongly regulated to take cognizance of the widely differing capacities to buy energy services.
She said it cannot be done by de-regulating and privatising such services to big capital and markets.
“Too much emphasis on the private sector and market-economy is bound to concentrate more modern energy access to those who can afford to buy.”
Thus, the role of enlightened and inclusive state policies and actions will be paramount and should increase, rather than decrease, said Raman.
7 Comments on "U.N.’s Energy Funding Falls Short of Target by Billions"
Makati1 on Thu, 12th Jun 2014 9:03 pm
Without government (tax money) funding, few, if any, renewables would ever get built. But then, if it were not for your tax money, nuclear reactors would also not exist. They are so dangerous that no sane company would insure them. Ask TEPCO. Only your government can be so generous with your hard earned cash.
Most of the other articles, today, are not worth my time to read or comment. Same old … same old.
bobinget on Fri, 13th Jun 2014 10:58 am
Early aircraft were also a crap-shoot.
When the post office subsidized beginning airlines with ‘airmail’, technology jumped on a promising new
enterprise. Today, most airlines are safer than most any other form of transport.
Northwest Resident on Fri, 13th Jun 2014 2:37 pm
Look at these numbers, and contemplate how “energy funding” might “fall short”:
12 Numbers From The Global Financial Ponzi Scheme (M. Snyder)
The truth is that our financial system is little more than a giant pyramid scheme that is based on debt and paper promises. It is literally a miracle that it has survived for so long without collapsing already. When Americans think about the financial crisis that we are facing, the largest number that they usually can think of is the size of the U.S. national debt. And at over $17 trillion, it truly is massive. But it is actually the 2nd-smallest number on the list below. The following are 12 numbers about the global financial Ponzi scheme that should be burned into your brain…
• $1,280,000,000,000 – Most people are really surprised when they hear this number. Right now, there is only $1.28 trillion worth of U.S. currency floating around out there.
• $17,555,165,805,212.27 – This is the size of the U.S. national debt. It has grown by more than $10 trillion over the past ten years.
• $32,000,000,000,000 – This is the total amount of money that the global elite have stashed in offshore banks (that we know about).
• $48,611,684,000,000 – This is the total exposure that Goldman Sachs has to derivatives contracts.
• $59,398,590,000,000 – This is the total amount of debt (government, corporate, consumer, etc.) in the U.S. financial system. 40 years ago, this number was just a little bit above $2 trillion.
• $70,088,625,000,000 – This is the total exposure that JPMorgan Chase has to derivatives contracts.
• $71,830,000,000,000 – This is the approximate size of the GDP of the entire world.
• $75,000,000,000,000 – This is approximately the total exposure that German banking giant Deutsche Bank has to derivatives contracts.
• $100,000,000,000,000 – This is the total amount of government debt in the entire world. This amount has grown by $30 trillion just since mid-2007.
• $223,300,000,000,000 – This is the approximate size of the total amount of debt in the entire world.
• $236,637,271,000,000 – According to the U.S. government, this is the total exposure that the top 25 banks in the United States have to derivatives contracts. But those banks only have total assets of about $9.4 trillion combined. In other words, the exposure of our largest banks to derivatives outweighs their total assets by a ratio of about 25 to 1.
• $710,000,000,000,000 to $1,500,000,000,000,000 – The estimates of the total notional value of all global derivatives contracts generally fall within this range. At the high end of the range, the ratio of derivatives exposure to global GDP is about 21 to 1.
Davey on Fri, 13th Jun 2014 3:17 pm
NR, throw in China’s numbers to spice that up….UGLY!
Northwest Resident on Fri, 13th Jun 2014 5:28 pm
Davey — I wonder if China’s debt numbers are wrapped up in the total amount of government debt?
And I wonder if in 10 – 20 years, I’ll be hobbling around on a cane, BAU will still be chugging along, they’ll be fracking 100 miles deep into planet earth to get oil, and the total global debt will be $100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. Of course, by then, the world’s population will be something like 30 billion, so all that debt divided up won’t be “too bad”… 🙂
Makati1 on Fri, 13th Jun 2014 9:20 pm
China’s National Debt as of December, 2013 = Three Trillion USD or 32% of GDP. ( Holding over a trillion USD in US toilet paper money.)
vs
US National debt of the same month at seventeen point three trillion USD or 100%+ of GDP. ( Owing more than 3 times it’s annual GDP to the world and it’s own citizens.)
Now, which country is in trouble?
Davy, Hermann, MO on Sat, 14th Jun 2014 5:53 am
Wow, Mak, back on your kool aid at the cheerleader party for the glorious east. You are off about 8 times on the actual “Real” outstanding China debt which dwarfs the rest of the world this is from David Stockman’s Contra Corner:
China is a case of bastardized socialism on credit steroids. At the turn of century it had $1 trillion of credit market debt outstanding—-a figure which has now soared to $25 trillion. The plain fact is that no economic system can remain stable and sustainable after undergoing a 25X debt expansion in a mere 14 years.
And Mak, toilet paper money. Last I heard people are still buying US treasuries and dollars are still in demand. Last I heard Chinese collateral has been hypothecated multiple meaningless times. This from Zero Hedge:
Starting back in May of 2013, we first predicted that China’s “Lehman event”, even more troubling than the recent advent of Chinese corporate bankruptcies and perhaps even its housing crisis, namely the “discovery” that behind China’s virtually-infinite rehypothecation machine – the backbone of its shadow funding markets – the amount of actual physical commodities is severely limited and misrepresented, meaning that for every paper claim on an underlying “funding” metal, there are pennies on the dollar, or renminbi as the case may be, of actual underlying collateral. Or, as MF Global’s Jon Corzine may say, “it evaporated.”
Mak, The US is the tip of the iceberg on the absurdity of the financial markets but China and the rest of her sidekicks in Asia are what lies beneath. Asia is the most blatant and apparent example of all the absurdities we see with the Global economy and human system namely limits of growth in a state of diminishing returns and with a colossal population overshoot in relation to carrying capacity. The environment of East Asia is destroyed both on land and in the Ocean. The developed West started the global suicide but Asia is finishing it and quickly. Asia is the reason the end is near. Asia is overshoot on steroids. Mak, I would appreciate it if you would quit getting drunk on the Kool Aid and coming on this board and spouting your dirty mouth off. It is embarrassing.