Save The Climate : solutions for the future, action now
HOW TO (REALLY) REDUCE GREENHOUSE GAS (GHG) EMISSIONS

What we want :

unrestricted consumption of fossil fuels is inducing, via GHG emissions, a global climate change whose foreseeable consequences are daunting. Save The Climate (SLC) seeks to bring a neutral, scientific, Cartesian contribution to the debate. SLC considers that a powerful popular movement is urgently needed that, far from ideological stands, would express the real facts and the consequences that they imply.

France “ON Track” to Meet its CO2 Target.

Really?

French CO2e emissions (so-called CO2 equivalent, which includes all greenhouse gases (GHGs), of which CO2 itself accounts for 3/4) have decreased by 19 Mt, or 4.8% between 2022 (404 Mt) and 2023 (385 Mt). This result prompted a statement from the French Minister for Ecological Transition and Territories, who declared on last March 20 that this corresponds to "almost the entire reduction between 2012 and 2017” and added that it was "proof that ecological planning is beginning to deliver results".
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The European Union's climate/energy policy: myth or reality?

Five years into the European green policy, Green Deal oblige, it is necessary, using the opportunity of the upcoming elections, to take a break... and ask the right questions. Some of the Union's Heads of State mentioned a pause... let’s do it.

Firstly, in terms of decarbonization targets, extending from a 55% reduction by 2030 to a 90% reduction by 2040, as proposed by the Commission in its February 6 Communication. Today, we're at around 30%, taking account of the Covid and the gas crises we've experienced. If the mandatory 55% target in six years' time already seems hard to reach (remember that it was initially 40% before the Green Deal boost), what about the 90% target by 2040?
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Agnès Pannier-Runacher

At last, a Minister of Energy to whom we can say Thank You!



   In May 2022, Madame Agnès Pannier-Runacher was appointed Minister for Energy Transition in Madame Borne's government. For the first time in many years, energy and its long-term challenges were under the responsibility of a full-fledged Ministry, with no direct reporting to the Ministry of Ecological Transition, the Ministry of Industry or the Ministry of Economy.

      This appointment and positioning came a few months after the Belfort speech in which the French President, by reaffirming the place that nuclear power should hold in an electricity production that will have to be carbon-free, seemed to be putting an end to the 100% renewable energy myth and initiating a return to reason in France’s energy and climate policy regarding electric power, the main forthcoming energy vector.Negatep
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COP 28: Let's Talk Numbers

The Equivalent of Some 25 Years of CO₂ Emissions Avoided in France
Thanks to Its Opting for Nuclear Power

Credit photo : WANG DONGZHEN,
XINHUA/MAXPPP

An urgent task for COP 28 is to identify every possible means of reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Here we can learn from the real-life experience of over 40 years’ operation of France's nuclear power plants.

For more than three decades, these have generated 70 to 75% of the country's electricity, thus avoiding a considerable amount of CO₂ emissions, an amount that can be evaluated.
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Germany Has Completed Its Nuclear Power Phase Out

For some, this is a victory, but it is not one for the climate

It is all done; after a long journey that began in the early 2000s and was accelerated following the Fukushima accident, Germany has just shut down its last nuclear reactors[1]. It has thus achieved its ambition to move away from nuclear power. For some, this is welcome, for others much less so.

The real issue is the consequences. Let's examine the status of Germany’s electricity production: we will ignore the cost issues, about which there is much to be said, and the grid stability issue, about which there is also much to be said. We will focus here on the climate and the CO₂ emissions.

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The Updated Save the Climate Manifesto

Link to the updated Save The Climate Manifesto

The founders of Save the Climate had, from the very beginning in 2005, drawn up a manifesto presenting the vision they wished to share with all members of the organization. In order to take into account the evolutions observed since that date, an updated version has been drafted with the participation of the Scientific Council and some members of the French Academy of Sciences and of the French Academy of Technologies. The updated manifesto was ratified at the organization’s General Assembly held on January 21, 2023.

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Carbon Neutrality - What Are We Talking About?

The IPCC has determined that carbon neutrality will have to be reached in the second half of the 21st century if the climate objectives of the Paris Agreement are to be met. A variety of countries, cities, companies... have announced that they are going to achieve carbon neutrality, some of them well before the critical date. But are their "carbon neutrality" and that of the IPCC the same thing? Nothing is less certain.

For many, carbon neutrality means that they will not emit more carbon than what nature will remove. The IPCC's definition is quite different: carbon neutrality means that humanity will remove as much carbon from the atmosphere as it emits.

Regardless of where it is injected into the atmosphere, CO₂ mixes quickly with the atmosphere as a whole and affects the entire surface of the planet. Carbon neutrality as defined by the IPCC is thus a global property.
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Air pollution and climate
The unexpected testimony of methane

For years, it has been known that air pollution can affect the climate. The slow rate at which global warming started in the second half of the 20th century has been attributed to the shielding role played by aerosols emitted by industry: a fraction of the solar radiation was reflected back to space. The shielding effect is one way to modulate warming. Another is to modulate the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases.

The atmospheric concentration of methane increased unusually sharply in 2020. This is all the more surprising that 2020 was marked by reduced human activity on Earth due to the lockdown measures put in place to limit the spread of covid-19.
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Nuclear Power is a Very Good Solution for the Climate

Should France Do Without It, Considering it an Energy of the Past?

The peremptory assertion that nuclear power is an "energy of the past" is at best an ill-informed and at worst a malicious interpretation of the history of nuclear power worldwide, and particularly in France.
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Energy & Climate - France and Europe have made many mistakes

These must be corrected as soon as possible

The crises we are experiencing (climate crisis, geopolitical crisis, economic crisis,...) remind those who had forgotten them the stakes of the energy field. The fundamental role of energy in our society is reasserted:

Energy is essential to the functioning of our society: the availability of the energy we need at all times is not a given.

Energy is a fundamental issue of national sovereignty: dependence on external supplies can generate certain forms of submission.

Fossil fuels are a major source of greenhouse gas emissions and consequently of climate change: we will have to do without them. The climate crisis is such that the effective reduction of emissions on a global scale must be an absolute priority.

The economic impacts of energy are fundamental: the sustainability of household spending and the competitivity of our economy are at stake.
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The European alliance weCARE, of which “Save the Climate” is a member, has, on September 5, 2022, sent this letter to representatives
of the 27 Member States, urging them to take strong and urgent measures during the 9 September Energy Council Meeting.

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Summer of 2022: the standard for 2050?

The summer of 2022 saw extreme weather in many parts of the world: for Europe, it was the hottest summer on record, combined with catastrophic drought; in France, high temperatures caused the premature death of more than 10,000 persons, according to INSEE[1]; heat and drought combined to breed devastating forest wildfires; destructive thunderstorms and violent Mediterranean events hit several “départements”. Forest wildfires affected many countries in Europe and elsewhere, with California once again heavily stricken by these fires. Catastrophic drought also occurred elsewhere, such as in China. In Pakistan, heavy rains and associated flooding killed over 1,000 persons.

Such a violent situation on a global scale would have been extremely unlikely without global warming. Indeed, global warming increases the probability, and therefore the occurrence, of such situations. And if global warming increases, summers like the one we just experienced could become the norm in a few decades.

[1] Institut National de la Statistique et des Études Économiques – National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies which collects, analyses and disseminates information on the French economy and society.
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The European Energy Policy: an Absolute Failure for the Climate

Faced with the massive reduction of Russian gas deliveries, Europe finds itself in a situation of energy insecurity as of now: gas storage facilities must be filled at all costs before November 1. This is a legal obligation, whose purpose is to ensure that winter peak demand can be coped with. In France, these storage facilities represent a little over a fourth of the annual consumption so that even if they are filled, imports will have to continue at a significant rate during next winter and beyond.

The reaction of several European countries has just been released: they are turning to... coal, and are about to reopen electricity production capacities using this fuel, which is by far the biggest CO₂ emitter and the most polluting of all. Such is the case in Germany, Austria, Denmark, the Netherlands and soon in other countries; Italy too is in a very precarious situation and will have to increase its electricity production from coal and fuel oil. As for France, the likelihood is that its last two coal-fired power plants are not about to shutdown.
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Nuclear Power is a Very Good Solution for the Climate

Should France Do Without It Because of the Waste Issue?

“What is to be done with the most dangerous nuclear waste, given they will remain dangerous over several thousands of years? Despite sixty years of nuclear energy operation, there is still no lasting and safe solution for nuclear waste management.” These are the recurring statements of nuclear power opponents.

How do things stand in fact?

Any human activity generates waste, whether tied to household, daily, economic, industrial, commercial, etc. activities.
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Nuclear Power is a Very Good Solution for the Climate

Should France Do Without It for Fear of an Accident?

Nuclear accidents often appear to the public as equally probable in all reactors, whatever the model, the host country or the operator. Only the terms "nuclear accident" seem to be retained, with no other consideration, as a sort of fatality. However, fortunately this vision does not correspond to reality: the nuclear reactor accidents that have occurred worldwide to date are deeply related to human behavior, at all stages whether it be their design, their construction, their operation, their monitoring by the safety authorities, or the global governance of the industry in the host country.

Indeed, the root causes of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979 in the United Sates are human errors. Those of the 1986 Chernobyl accident in Ukraine and of the 2011 Fukushima accident in Japan are irresponsible major human failings at different stages and different responsibility levels in violation of the basic nuclear safety rules. In Fukushima, the tsunami was only the trigger, not the root cause.
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Massive methane leaks that must be prevented

Crédit photo: Flickr Creative Commons – Ken Doerr

The climate warming that we are experiencing is due to the accumulation in the atmosphere of gases that hinder the escape to space of the heat we receive from the sun. Carbon dioxide (CO₂) is the main contributor to the additional greenhouse effect caused by man’s action, followed by methane. Methane is a powerful greenhouse gas. Although its concentration per unit volume in the atmosphere is over 200 times less than that of CO₂, its contribution to the global warming observed since the beginning of the industrial age is 2/3 that of CO₂. Methane is particularly noxious for the climate in the short term: its residence time in the atmosphere before it is oxidized into CO₂ is about 12 years. Its global warming potential is ≈30 times that of the same mass of CO₂ when considering the impact over a period of 100 years; but, in the shorter term, if we consider a period of 20 years, this warming potential of methane is no longer 30 times but 90 times that of CO₂. Given the climate urgency, it is very important to considerably reduce the emissions of various greenhouse gases without delay, especially those that have a strong short-term effect, such as methane.
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“Futurs énergétiques 2050” (Energy futures for 2050)

A reference study by RTE^[1]with constrained projections

Crédit photo: L'Express-AFP-Boris Horvat

The above-mentioned RTE study, published on October 25, 2021, has been rightfully praised for its high-quality analysis. Unfortunately, it disregarded certain hypotheses.

Among its accomplishments, an in-depth consultation of civil society (industrialists, institutions, various organizations, experts, etc.) was welcomed. This allowed for an analytical view and brought out numerous proposals concerning the hypotheses to be retained and discussed for this highly important study.

[1] RTE: Réseau de Transport de l’Électricité, France’s transmission system operator.
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Which Energies for the Near and Medium Term?

The energy issue will be predominant during this century for all of humanity. Indeed, humanity will have to face an unprecedented revolution which will differ greatly from those of the past. A short historical view sheds some light on the subject: after living for millennia with very little, solely renewable, energy, humanity has gone through several successive energy revolutions for a little over two centuries with the use of coal, and then of oil, and then of gas, all fossil fuels, and finally of electricity which can be produced from these fossil fuels and other primary energy sources, whether renewable or nuclear. The cumulative use of these sources has enabled a very high energy demand in developed countries.
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It Happens Only to Others

Credit: Rhein-ERFT-Kreis-AFP

It is well known, and the IPCC has said so, the countries that will suffer the most from global warming are the most poverty-stricken countries. Yet, precisely because they are poor, they are the ones that emit the least CO₂. This is all very unpleasant for them, but we make ourselves feel better by promising to help them via technical international mechanisms that will be discussed at length during the next COPs. Meanwhile, we think that in our rich countries, global warming cannot be so serious, at least for the time being.

However, nature has no feelings. Climate change is, indeed, impacting poor countries severely, with for example, increasing aridity in African countries such that agriculture is unable to feed the populations. But rich countries can also be hit hard. Recent disasters are a demonstration of this: the wildfires in Australia, Siberia and Sweden, to name only the most gigantic, the deadly heat hitting not only the West of the United States but also Canada, the floods with their dramatic consequences in Germany, Belgium, China, India...
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