Skip to content
  • About us

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Like us on Facebook

Like us on Facebook

Contact us

Energy Institute
61 New Cavendish Street
London W1G 7AR
United Kingdom
+44 (0)20 7467 7100

Categories

Instagram

Today marks Earth Day 🌍, a day dedicated to increasing awareness of taking care of our planet's natural assets for generations to come. This year's theme is #investinourplanet.
This International Women’s Day, Hannah Mary Goodlad AMEI, Head of Baltic Sea Area Development at Equinor and the driving force behind the film 'The Challenge of our Time', which was premiered by the EI’s young professionals at #COP26, explains why the environment, energy and diversity matter.
Today at the Energy Institute we cross our arms and show solidarity to help #BreakTheBias this International Women's Day.
David or Goliath? Does size of company matter when it comes to tackling the #climatecrisis, and which offers the best #careeropportunities for young people entering #energy careers today?

Follow us on Twitter

My Tweets
  • About us

Energy Institute blog

Creating a better energy future

Menu
Widgets
Social Links
Search

michael bloomberg

Climate Action in the US

Professor Jim Skea CBE EI President

Professor Jim Skea CBE
EI President

I had the good fortune to be invited to the Climate Action 2016 Summit in Washington DC in early May. This was a truly stellar event hosted by the UN Secretary General, the World Bank, the Rockefeller Foundation and the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. The broad aim was to galvanise bottom-up climate change action as implied by the Paris agreement reached at the end of last year.

Apart from keynote talks from the great and good – Ban Ki-moon, Al Gore, Ségolène Royal, Jeffrey Sachs – what was fascinating was a) the degree of enthusiasm behind the climate agenda and b) the particular groups that were strongly represented at the meeting. The energy sector, notably, was not which I’ll come back to later.

There was particularly strong participation from city administrations, the finance sector and consumer-facing businesses. On the city side, Michael Bloomberg, businessman and former Republican Mayor of New York, made a strong case for the power of city administrations to effect real change through their influence on transport and planning. This message was endorsed by mayors from Washington DC, Atlanta, Montreal, Paris, Belo Horizonte in Brazil and Pristina in Kosovo. Prospective mayors of Sheffield and Manchester take note.  As the event took place on the same day that London elected its new mayor, I did feel there was one important city in need of representation.

The finance community, both the multilateral developments banks (like the Asian Development Bank) and private sector investors and insurers, were out in numbers. Here the call was for carbon pricing to underpin low carbon investments and considerable celebration of the falling cost of renewable energy and energy storage. The one voice flagging up the limitations of carbon pricing was development economist Jeffrey Sachs from Columbia University’s Earth Institute. He warned that the ambition in the Paris agreement implied that planning and regulation were needed as well.

Business was represented by companies like Unilever (CEO Paul Polman) and Kelloggs.  Message: they’re getting on with it especially in terms of greening the supply chains. But no real input from the energy sector! This point was explicitly addressed by Peter Bakker from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. He was explicit that energy companies, including oil and gas companies, needed to be part of the agenda. Any transition away from fossil fuels would take decades and would need to be actively managed by all concerned. The hostility towards fossil fuels – and certain fossil fuel companies – expressed by some of the activists at the summit was not constructive and could certainly have discouraged attendance. A role for the Energy Institute in fostering dialogue and debate on these issues?

Finally, a word on how strongly the UK was represented at the meeting, both in terms of the number of participants from private companies and international organisations, and in terms of the quality of the input. Unfair to single out any one person, but Rachel Kyte, leader of the UN Secretary General’s Sustainable Energy for All initiative and former Vice-President of the World Bank, stood out in terms of commitment, grasp of her brief and quality of advocacy. Proof that climate action and energy access can go hand in hand.

Share this:

  • Click to share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
  • Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
  • Click to email this to a friend (Opens in new window)
  • Click to print (Opens in new window)

Like this:

Like Loading...
May 16, 2016nickturton al gore, city planning, climate action, climate change, cop21, EI, energy, energy efficiency, energy institute, energy knowledge, energy management, energy policy, energy systems, london mayor, low carbon, michael bloomberg, oil and gas, prof jim skea, public engagement, renewables, sustainable energy, united nations, world bank Leave a comment
Blog at WordPress.com.
  • Follow Following
    • Energy Institute blog
    • Join 10,844 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • Energy Institute blog
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar
 

Loading Comments...
 

    loading Cancel
    Post was not sent - check your email addresses!
    Email check failed, please try again
    Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.
    %d bloggers like this: