Agency says energy as dirty as ever, warns of looming catastrophe

"Despite much talk by world leaders and despite a boom in renewable energy over the last decade, the average unit of energy produced today is basically as dirty as it was 20 years ago," International Energy Agency executive director Maria van der Hoeven said.

 

Van der Hoeven's comments were echoed by several other leaders and officials attending the New Delhi Clean Energy Ministerial meeting, including Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who described progress in negotiations to produce a global treaty to fight climate change as "painfully slow."   Van der Hoeven's Paris-based organisation, which is an independent intergovernmental group that works to mitigate climate change and ensure a stable energy supply, issued its annual report at the meeting, which gave a bleak assessment of global progress towards low-carbon energy.

 

The report introduced a new measurement, an index that shows how much carbon dioxide is emitted on average to provide a given unit of energy.

 

Emissions per tonne of oil had barely changed from 1990 to 2010, the report concluded.

 

It said that while coal-based energy generation grew by 45 per cent from 2000 to 2010, non-fossil-fuel energy generation in the same period grew a much lower 25 per cent.//DPA