Corporate DispatchPro
Renewables approaching a tipping point One of the executive orders signed by President Biden on his first day in office, was to revoke the permits for the construction of the Keystone XL pipeline connecting tar sands in Alberta, Canada to refineries in the Gulf Coast of Texas. Critics of the project, which was halted by Barack Obama in 2015 and revived by Donald Trump in 2017, praised the new President’s resolve before proceeding to demand the shutting down of another two pipelines, the Dakota Access and the Line 3. The White House National Climate Advisor, Gina McCarthy, assured alarmed oil companies of a common-sense approach to fossil fuels, but the Biden administration has set a clear goal of decarbonising the US energy sector by 2035. The shift to renewable sources such as wind and solar, is a global trend. Nine out of ten signatory countries of the Paris Agreement earmarked renewables as part of their strategies to arrest the rise in the planet’s temperature. More than 130 governments committed to quantified renewable energy targets in their Nationally Determined Contributions. A report by the International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that, if commitments were met by all countries, the capacity for power generation from renewables would jump by 42 percent within the decade, producing an estimated 3,564 gigawatts by 2030. Last year, the EU Commission announced that the share of renewable energy in the bloc more than doubled from 2004,
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