Greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction incentives are largely insulating low-carbon energy from a 40% drop in fossil fuel prices since June, Bloomberg News reports.
“While OPEC is helping drive down global prices for crude, it’s having less success squeezing the $250 billion clean power industry,” Landberg writes from Lima, Peru. With major powers pushing hard to limit GHG emissions, “green energy will receive almost 60% of the $5 trillion expected to be invested in new power plants over the next decade, according to the International Energy Agency.”
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In China, “if oil stays at current prices or weakens through the first half of next year, the impact on new energy would be massive,” said Lin Boqiang of the Energy Economics Research Center. But UN Climate Secretary Christina Figueres distinguished between short-term market shifts and the longer-term goal of decarbonizing the economy to avert runaway climate change.
“We’re all old enough to know that oil prices go up and down,” she said. “The fact that oil is so unpredictable is one of the reasons why we must move to renewable energy, which has a completely predictable cost of zero for fuel.”
