Full version of the Annual Report 2023
News flash (as if needed!): the world has issues with power. Dictatorial power undermines human rights on all continents; emergency powers occasionally achieve the same in democracies. Air power kills innocent women, men, and children in more conflict zones than we dare count. Corporate power ravages ecosystems and livelihoods. People power (so far) unsuccessfully calls to end hostilities against civilians in Gaza. Flower power is, alternatively, a distant memory or a tongue-in-cheek reference to the pesticide-intense, export-oriented cut flower industry in Latin America and elsewhere.
Power is frequently associated with energy, but the link cannot quite put us at ease. To be sure, when electricity, an important form of energy, first appeared in non-technical writing in the 18th century, it was identified as a source of life. Popular science accounts, of male and female poles, for example, frequently veered into the sleazy.
A century later, electricity had become associated with death and evil. The installation of poles connecting networks of wires, necessitated by the introduction of the telegraph, drove widespread public fear of this invisible force. Serving from 1889 to 1893, US President Benjamin Harrison allegedly instructed White House staff to turn lights on and off because he was afraid of getting electrocuted. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein came to life after being hit by an electrical shock from lighting. As I write these lines, Russia is bombing Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure. Several US states still reserve the electric chair as an option for execution.
Electricity as a form of energy is now ubiquitous, but it retains its ambivalent character. Policymakers point to electrification as a corollary to ridding the planet of fossil fuel energy, conjuring up a world of electric cars, trucks, ships, and planes, electric heating, electric everything. Power up solar panels, wind turbines, hydroelectric generators; power down coal- or gas-fired power plants (but what to do with nuclear reactors?). The buzz of more powerful and less mineral-hungry batteries is as energizing as that of peak oil, large-scale carbon capture and storage, and the hydrogen economy.
Whether 2023 is regarded a good or bad year from an energy perspective is largely in the eye of the beholder. The International Energy Agency (IEA) sounds upbeat. According to its World Energy Investment Report 2023, recovery from the Covid-19 pandemic and measures to address the global energy crisis are showing positive results. The Report suggests that annual clean energy investment rose by 25 per cent since 2021. That’s impressive, but fossil fuel investments also increased by 15 per cent or USD 1 trillion. End use investment in energy efficiency should triple by 2030 to reach the 1.5-degree target. Sadly, it declined between 2022 and 2023. The term sufficiency does not appear once in the 181-page IEA report.
What to do? As a long-time follower or recent partisan of Zoï Environment Network’s work, you will be well aware of what’s at stake. You have come to discover new or tested solutions to environmental challenges suffused with shades of energy and power. The question must now be what not to do, individually and above all collectively. If power captures how fast energy is used or transmitted, powering down might be a good idea.
Jörg Balsiger,
President of the Zoï Board