Renewable outrage

By O.M.

THE release of the full text of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Special Report on Renewable Energy this week has led to a new set of questions about the panel's attitudes, probity and reliabilty: is it simply a sounding board for green activists? The answer is no—but that doesn't mean it's without serious problems. For what's worst about the affair, and for comments by IPCC chair Rajendra Pachauri, scroll down to the lower bits of the post. For the context and specifics of what happened, read on.

When the summary of the report was released last month (IPCC summaries, agreed line by line by governments at often quite fractious plenary meetings, come out before the report they are summarising, in part because the report may need a little tweaking to reflect the plenary's summary judgements) it came with a press release proclaiming that the world could get 80% of its energy from renewables by 2050 if it just had the right policies and paid the right amount. This figure was subsequently trumpeted by those parts of the world's press paying attention, which tended to be the parts that have readers keen on more environmental action.

The full report shows where the number came from, and that's why its publication sparked a fuss. One of the report's 11 chapters is an analysis of 164 previously published scenarios looking at the energy mix over the next four decades under various assumptions. The scenario which had the highest penetration of renewables put the total at 77% by 2050. The research involved was done by the German space-research institute, which has long worked on energy analysis, too; its experts were commissioned to do the work by Greenpeace, and a Greenpeace staff member with an engineering background, Sven Teske, was the scenario's lead author when it was published in a couple of different forms in peer-reviewed journals. It has also been published, in bigger, glossier format, by Greenpeace itself under the grating and uncharacteristically fence-sitting title Energy [R]evolution.

Mr Teske was also one of the authors of the chapter of the IPCC report that looked at those 164 scenarios, and that chose Energy [R]evolution as one of four scenarios to explore in more detail. That, say critics, looks like a fix. And one with big consequences. That one scenario's claim that the world could get call-it-80% of its energy from renewables managed, thanks to the press release, to shape perceptions of the report when it was originally released, making it look like a piece of renewables boosterism. Worse: who wrote the foreword to Greenpeace's glossy publication of its scenario? Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the IPCC. (Disclosure: at the request of IPCC authors, this avatar of Babbage chaired a debate on the summary of the special report when it was launched in May, and his brother is a “co-ordinating lead author” on the panel's forthcoming “fifth assessment report”, though not in an area associated with renewable energy.)

Steve McIntyre, who runs a blog on which he tries to hold climate science to higher standards than he sees it holding itself, picked up all these IPCC/Greenpeace connections and posted on them angrily, calling for all involved to be sacked. “As a citizen,” he says, “I would like to know how much weight we can put on renewables as a big-footprint solution. Prior to the IPCC report, I was aware that Greenpeace—and WWF—had promoted high renewable scenarios. However, before placing any weight on them, the realism of these scenarios needs to be closely examined. IPCC has a mandate to provide hard information but did no critical evaluation of the Greenpeace scenario."

His desire for solid, honest answers is plainly one to be shared. But the authors of the IPCC chapter involved declined to evaluate the scenarios they looked at in terms of whether they thought they were plausible, let alone likely. Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist who was one of those in overall charge of the report, gives the impression that he would have welcomed a more critical approach from his colleagues; but there is no mechanism by which the people in charge can force an author team to do more, or other, than it wants to. (The same goes for authors on the team, Mr Teske says; he was one of twelve authors on the relevant chapter, and over 120 authors overall, and had no peculiar Greenpeace lantern with which to bend them all to his will.)

What's more, evaluating the scenarios in a quantitative way would be extremely hard for any number of reasons. Asked at an IPCC event in Brussels yesterday what the most important thing to come out of the report was, Dr Edenhofer said nothing about the prospects of an 80%-renewable world (indeed, in his presentation he didn't mention it). Instead he points to his discovery of a striking dearth in reliable peer-reviewed data on what it costs to generate renewable electricity and what determines those costs. The report put a lot of effort into developing such numbers (there are huge appendices devoted to the data) but Dr Edenhofer considers what they came up with little more than a start on what needs to be done. Without really understanding costs, how can one go forward to assess the merits and believability of scenarios.

Predicting future demand is as hard if not harder. This is one of the reasons why Vaclav Smil, doyen of energy analysts, devoted a magisterial chapter in his book “Energy at the Crossroads” to the manifest failure of more or less all predictions about the future of energy markets. Closer to home, Dr Pachauri wrote a book premised on the imminent arrival of higher oil prices in the mid-1980s; it didn't happen. This newspaper has similar skeletons in its cupboard.

It is exactly because assessing scenarios is so hard, says Dr Edenhofer, that the IPCC authors instead chose to simply expand on the details of four particularly striking ones. The Greenpeace one was chosen for this spotlight because it had the highest renewable penetration; the median penetration in 2050 across all 164 scenarios was just 27%. That is much lower in part because it includes baseline, or “business as usual”, scenarios that made no pro-renewables policy assumptions. It's worth noting that even in these the share of renewables tends to go up.

In the case of Energy [R]evolution there are, unsurprisingly, a fair few pro-renewable assumptions, not to mention optimistic assumptions about technology and a fixed ambitious target for carbon-dioxide emissions in 2050. Most striking of all, though, is the premise that there will be a huge gain in energy efficiency which will bring with it no rebound in terms of greater energy use.

As a result the scenario features more than 9 billion people enjoying a much higher GDP than today's 7 billion in 2050 while using less energy not just per capita, but overall. It is because so little energy is being used, and because alternatives are ruled out ab initio (the model contains no nuclear power, and no technology for storing away carbon emissions from fossil fuels; natural gas prices rise strongly and coal plants are retired well before they are clapped out) that the model ends up with such a high percentage of renewables; indeed given the premise it's slightly surprising it doesn't end up with even more. Other scenarios festoon the planet with a lot more windmills and solar panels, but also imagine a lot more energy use; some of their creators claim that the low-carbon-dioxide atmosphere seen in Energy [R]evolution is impossible without carbon-caching technologies attached to fossil fuel plants.

The bigger picture
To look at unlikely scenarios seems reasonable when scoping out extremes. But to hang the key message of the press release that framed media coverage of the report on something so far-fetched, and thus to seem to endorse it, was undoubtedly a grave error. It is the sort of error one often expects in organisations, like the IPCC, that are not very well run, especially when, like the IPCC, they have lacked a head of communications for some time. The drafting of the press release was, according to some who witnessed it, chaotic and poorly supervised; it went out over the name of the spokesperson for the UN Environmental Programme, one of the IPCC's parent organisations. He says that Greenpeace had no input into the release at all. Quite who did what to shape its message and approve it within the IPCC is not yet clear; various bloggers, including this one, would like to hear more.

But the press release which focuses on an outlier, not on the range of options, is also and more worryingly the sort of mistake you get in organisations that assume everyone wants to hear the party line. The world of renewable energy has a very strong party line, based on a belief in its moral superiority and ultimately inevitable triumph. In this world Greenpeace doesn't look fantastical, shrill and occasionally criminal, as it does to many in business; it seems a “stakeholder” among others. And it is in this world that most of those who study and profit from renewables, not to mention a lot of those who set relevant policies, are likely to spend their days. Academic and scholarly work on renewables tends to get done by people who like them and for people who like them. Mr Teske was nominated to the panel by the German government, ever more deeply committed to a renewables-heavy policy; when the summary of the report was launched in Berlin two German cabinet ministers spoke approvingly. The real problem for the IPCC is not that Greenpeace infiltrated it; it is that when it comes to the world of renewables Greenpeace didn't really need to.

Whether or not the IPCC's detailed work shows signs of “groupthink taking over”, as one lead author puts it, its framing of the report through the press release does. So do the attitudes of those it sits down with. The three stakeholders invited to respond to the report at the IPCC's event in Brussels this Thursday were: an MEP from Germany's SPD, delighted that Italy's referendum on nuclear power means that there is now nuclear-free core to Europe running from the Baltic to the Mediterranean; an executive from Scottish and Southern Energy, a utility very keen on renewables and the subsidies they bring with them; and someone from Greenpeace. While Dr Edenhofer is keen to stress that the IPCC report didn't in any way endorse the Energy [R]evolution scenario, Greenpeace, understandably, has been keen to suggest that it did, both as a stakeholder on stage and in press comments.

With near to 900 pages released only recently, Babbage has not yet made a detailed assessment of the report's strengths, which is probably true for pretty much everyone else. Nor does one have to realise that the panel needs to get its communications house in order and also to be a lot more searching and open about the collision of fact and value that is unavoidable in much of the work that it does. Whether it should also, as some are now demanding, change various specific rules about its work is less clear.

It seems fair to believe that a team of authors can include some with specific interests and strong positions and nevertheless, as a body, find balance. And it's worth remembering that in some areas the IPCC sees itself criticised for relying on to narrow a body of expertise. To rule out activists and industrialists might make balance easier and more likely, but there could well be a cost in removing access to some pools of expertise and points of view.

Arthur Petersen of the Dutch environmental-assessment agency, PBL, played a leading role in an audit of IPCC claims which last year detected a distinct tendency to cut the caveats and accentuate the negative when summarising its own work, and takes a keen interest in the panel's workings (he was recently appointed to the Dutch government's delegation). He takes the position that the IPCC has procedures on author selection, author-team balance and newly reinvigorated procedures on conflict of interest which, if properly and transparently enforced, don't need further tightening. The panel's recently adopted guidance on dealing with uncertainty stresses the need to guard against groupthink. And, he says, he has seen authors being impressively restrained in the way IPCC reports deal with their own work, and insisting that results in which they believe, but which they know are not widely accepted, be played down, not up. “All the rules the IPCC needs are in place now,” says Dr Petersen. “It is up to the leadership and coordinating lead authors to implement them.” How well they did so in the body of the renewables report may be revealed when the comments from reviewers and responses from authors are made public.

Dr Petersen won't be drawn on the appropriateness or advisability of Dr Pachauri writing a foreword to a Greenpeace report, one which praised it as rigorous while not specifically endorsing its findings and noting that some experts would disagree with them. But at the Brussels meeting, Babbage put the question to Dr Pachauri himself. Here's the exchange:

B: Some people are saying the IPCC is too close to Greenpeace

RP: I think that has no basis at all. The IPCC has had industry, we've had authors from Exxon Mobil. We keep a balance, going by the level of expertise of people, whether they're in Timbuktu or this organisation or that organisation. One must also remember that author teams function as a team; an individual's views are certainly not going to overwhelm everyone else in the team.

B: You wrote a foreword to the Energy [R]evolution, and Greenpeace is on the stage at this event as a stakeholder.

RP: I didn't take any position over it. I think these reports serve a purpose in the sense that they stir up a debate, and to that extent if it leads to intellectual activity I think it's a worthwhile effort and I'd like to see all kinds of organisations get into subjects like this. I'm not endorsing what was written there, nor have I said so. But I certainly feel that such an effort deserves attention whether one agrees with it or not.

B: You don't think there's an implicit endorsement in having Greenpeace up here on stage with you?

RP: Not really. I don't see why. I can share the stage with the devil.

B: But it's clear that you have quite a lot in common with Greenpeace.

RP: But I also have a lot in common with industry.

B: What sort of thing would you point to?

RP: I talk to industry groups all the time, I advise industry groups, I don't think there's any imbalance there whatsoever. And I think being chair of the IPCC it's for me to reach out to every section of society and to encourage debate, to encourage discussion irrespective of where it takes place. And I'm not taking any positions.

B: Are you happy with the IPCC's new conflict-of-interest policy? [adopted at the panel's recent plenary]

RP: Absolutely. I must say that was a very heartening piece of work. People put in a lot of effort to come up with what I think is a very robust policy in terms of conflict of interest.

B: At what point should it start to apply?

RP: It's applicable right away. Of course if you look at conflict of interest with respect to authors who are there in the 5th Assessment Report we've already selected them and therefore it wouldn't be fair to impose anything that sort of applies retrospectively.

B: And that would be true for members of the Bureau [the IPCC's senior personnel, such as chairs, co-chairs and vice chairs] as well?

RP: No, I think as far as members of the Bureau are concerned there's really no such issue. I don't see any problem with applying it immediately.

B: So it would be OK to apply it retrospectively to you.

RP: Oh absolutely, yeah. Why not?