Latin America: When climate change ruins renewables
Tobias Käufer

Climate change has been disrupting Latin American efforts to make its energy more renewable. Countries are now searching for new solutions and everything from nuclear power to green hydrogen is being debated.

In Ecuador and Cuba, power cuts for hours at a time, sometimes even days. In Brazil, energy bottlenecks. Although Latin America is seen as a global forerunner in renewable energies, the impact of climate change is starting to cause problems. Droughts lasting weeks mean less water flowing through rivers and water reservoirs that power hydroelectric plants. And the less water, the less electricity.

Now countries in the region are beginning to squabble over distribution too. 

Colombia has halted electricity exports to Ecuador, citing concerns for its own power supply. Colombia has also been suffering a severe drought.

Even though the causes for the power problems are unique to each country, the consequences are the same: energy rationing and power blackouts. This is why many countries are now debating how best to stablize their energy supplies.

El Salvador, for example, plans a return to nuclear energy. "We want to have the first research reactor by 2030," Daniel Alvarez, head of the country's General Directorate of Energy, Hydrocarbons and Mines, announced at a forum organized by the Latin American Energy Organization in October.

Other countries are also showing renewed interest in nuclear energy, with a new generation of small modular reactors seen as particularly promising. The general opinion is that nuclear energy is free of emissions and can therefore be classified as green.  

Lithium also belongs to the energy debate in Latin America. Lithium is an indispensable part of electric vehicle (EV) batteries and it is hoped that carbon-neutral EVs will one day replace fossil-fuel powered engines on the street. At least, that's the plan. But resistance is growing in many Latin American countries.

As droughts become more frequent, they are increasingly wary of an extraction process that requires large volumes of water. In Peru, a mining project high in the Andes is drawing criticism. There, the Macusani Yellowcake mining company, a subsidiary of the Canada-based American Lithium Corp., is looking to mine 9.5 million tons of lithium on the Quelccaya glacier in the Carabaya region.

Environmental activist Vito Calderon has criticized the way the project affects the water supply for local communities. "The freshwater from the region flows into the Inambari, Urubamba and Azangaro basins, which feed Lake Titicaca," he told Radio France Internationale. Calderon fears the freshwater could be contaminated or removed from the natural cycle.

The initial excitement over what is known as green hydrogen has also become more muted. "Worldwide doubts about the strategic industry for Chile's future" Chilean online news outlet Emol wrote a few days ago, summing the general mood up. The high cost of investing in green hydrogen is also causing hesitation.

Instead, Alex Godoy-Faundez, director of the sustainability research center at Chile's University of Desarrollo has called for more realism and for taking small, manageable steps. 

"Timelines should outline short-term goals that ensure that investment projects are profitable and eco-friendly,” Godoy-Faundez said.

However in Latin America's largest country, Brazil, enthusiasm over green hydrogen has continued unabated. There's almost nowhere in the world like Brazil's undeveloped northeast, where electricity and therefore green hydrogen can be produced from renewable sources so cheaply, the country's media enthuse. Brazil could become a new global energy hub, they suggest. Foreign investors have already done deals with Brazilian states like Ceara and Pernambuco.

"Unfortunately, German investors are not among them," Ansgar Pinkowski, founder of the Brazil-based agency Neue Wege ("new paths" in English), told DW. His business specializes in providing information on the green energy transition and contacts between Europe and Brazil.

"With the recently passed laws for sustainable hydrogen, the risks for investors have also become much lower and more calculable," he said. As a result he predicts that, "we will see very strong economic growth in the region in the next few years, from which all sections of the population will hopefully benefit."

This article was originally published in German.

https://www.dw.com/en/latin-america-when-climate-change-ruins-renewables/a-70740024

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This year more than ever, the UN climate conference is about how much support developing countries can expect to receive to combat the increasingly dramatic consequences of climate change.

The UN climate conference is all about money. Who will pay developing countries for the consequences of climate change? In a year that saw millions of people hit by extreme weather disasters, the annual UN climate summit is taking place in Azerbaijan, a petrostate with little interest in leaving its climate-damaging fossil fuels in the ground. 

Azerbaijan has huge untapped renewable energy potential, but around 60% of state revenue comes from fossil fuels and it plans to "markedly increase" oil and gas production in the coming years.

"As the head of a country rich in fossil fuels, of course, we will defend the right of these countries to continue investments and production," said Azerbaijan's President Ilham Aliyev in April at a preparatory meeting for COP29. 

Ilham's words hinted at the agenda the nation might set as host of the conference that will bring lawmakers from nearly 200 countries to the capital Baku to negotiate climate action. 

Alongside drastically cutting emissions, countries face another major negotiating challenge — that of agreeing how much financial support developing countries should get to help deal with the consequences of a warming world and to decarbonize their economies. 

Wealthy countries including the USA and Japan as well as European Union member states previously pledged to mobilize $100 billion (€93.3 billion) a year by 2020 to support developing nations. The target was first reached in 2022. But so far, a significant proportion of the funding has come in the form of high-interest loans, resulting harsh criticism and accusations of broken promises. 

Niklas Höhne, a climate policy expert with the New Climate Institute, a German NGO, believes states might agree to a figure of between $200 billion and $700 billion in Azerbaijan. 

"That would be a fair financial deal between the wealthier countries responsible for climate change and poorer countries suffering most from climate change," said Höhne. 

Developing nations, including India and many African countries, have repeatedly called for annual financing of up to a trillion dollars — a tenfold increase on the current pledge. Industrialized nations have dismissed those figures as unrealistic and want China and oil-rich Gulf states to share the financial burden. 

Since the industrial revolution, which started in 18th-century Great Britain and was when people started burning fossil fuels in large quantities, rich countries have historically contributed the most to global warming. But China, for instance, has recently become a major emitter of climate-damaging greenhouse gases.

Still, in official documents, China is labeled a developing country, meaning it is theoretically a recipient of climate financing alongside poorer states that have barely contributed to the climate crisis. 

United Arab Emirates (UAE), which hosted the 2023 climate conference, is also officially considered a developing country. Observers saw the petrostate's 2023 pledge to provide climate funding to poorer countries as a glimmer of hope that wealthier developing nations might be willing to share financial responsibility.

During the UAE summit, the global community for the first time agreed to tackle the cause of the climate crisis by "transitioning away" from fossil fuels in the energy system.

Still, the planet continues to warm. Humanity is on track to radically overshoot the 2015 Paris Agreementto keep warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) compared to pre-industrial times unless fossil fuel use is cut rapidly and drastically.

Current policies would see planetary heating of about 3.2 C by the end of the century. 

"There's a huge disconnect between the rhetoric and the reality when it comes to claiming you'll be 1.5 C aligned and then not meeting one of the central tasks," said Alden Meyer, a senior US and international climate policy analyst at E3G, a Europe-based climate think tank. 

The EU, in particular, is pushing for increased funding to developing countries to be linked to more climate protection. At the same time, UAE, Azerbaijan and next year's climate summit host Brazil all have plans to expand fossil fuel production, continued Meyer. Similar trends can be seen in the USA, Canada, Norway, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Paris Agreement signatories also must present new climate targets next year, but most have not yet produced a draft, according to Höhne.

Meyer expects that the COP agenda will include calls for industrialized nations to double funding for adaptation to climate change. Adaptation measures could include early warning systems for storms or flooding, coastal protection, green spaces to combat heat in cities or improved protection for power plants in storm or flood areas. An increase to about $40 billion annually is on the table. 

The talks are set to address further developing and implementing the new loss and damage fund, with negotiations expected on upping financing from the initial pledge of around $800 million. 

In 2023, the nine worst climate disasters in developing countries caused around $37 billion in damagealone, according to the Heinrich Böll Foundation, a think tank linked to the German Green Party. The debate as to whether China or wealthy oil states should participate in the loss and damage fund will gain traction at again this year, say observers.

This year's tug-of-war over money is being exacerbated by the continuing economic difficulties faced by households because of the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic as well as economic instability and Russia's war in Ukraine, which has led to huge increases in global military spending.

Donald Trump's reelection as president of the US, the world's largest economy and second-largest producer of climate-damaging emissions, will also have an impact on negotiations and is cause for concern among climate action advocates. 

During his first tenure in office, Trump cast doubt on climate science, quashed a number of environmental laws and withdrew from the Paris Agreement. During his election campaiging, he made it clear that if elected for a second term, he would remain an anti-climate action president and that the extraction of coal, oil and gas would be a priority under his leadership. 

"His push to ramp up fossil fuel production, disregard for international agreements, and refusal to provide climate finance will deepen the crisis, endangering lives and livelihoods" said Harjeet Singh of the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty Initiative, a global campaign which aims to stop expansion of fossil fuel exploitation.

Trump's rollback on the USA's climate commitments threatens to undermine trust in an already crisis-laden international political system, Singh said. 

If the world is to limit warming to under 1.5 C as agreed in Paris, global emissions must peak before 2025. The target still could be achieved in time, according to analysts. 

This article was originally written in German.

https://www.dw.com/en/cop29-who-will-pay-climate-funding-for-developing-countries/a-70724069

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YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT.

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SEE ALSO: https://www.dw.com/en/azerbaijan-intensifies-repression-ahead-of-cop29-host-role/a-70726763

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