FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
July 11, 2016
CONTACT:
Stephen Kretzmann, steve [at] priceofoil [dot] org
David Turnbull, david [at] priceofoil [dot] org
EIA Chief Urged To Address Climate Concerns
Letter from environmental organizations calls for a Climate Test scenario
Washington, DC – Today, environmentalists delivered a letter to Energy Information Administration (EIA) Administrator Adam Sieminski requesting that “the Energy Information Administration produce a safe climate scenario or scenarios that are consistent with our nation’s climate goals.” The letter comes as the EIA’s Annual Energy Conference begins in Washington, DC.
The EIA’s Reference Scenario, which is being used throughout the EIA Conference today, foresees fossil fuel use consistent with warming of at 4°C, which is more than twice as high as the Paris commitments agreed just last year. The letter calls for a new scenario to guide climate and energy policy decisions.
The letter, signed by ten organizations representing millions of individuals, says: “Energy policy must align with climate science. A safe climate scenario would use the latest climate science to model all proposed energy supply and demand policies and projects in light of the globally agreed goal of ‘holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels.’”
“The dissonance between climate goals and energy planning by EIA and most everyone else at this conference is breathtaking. It’s quite surreal to sit and listen to speaker after speaker present demand and supply scenarios that will result in climate disaster,” said Stephen Kretzmann, Executive Director of Oil Change International, who hand-delivered the letter to Administrator Sieminski at the conference this morning. “When it comes to energy modeling, there’s an elephant in the room that no one seems ready to address: the Paris goals and climate change.”
The letter highlights the need for a climate test, a policy that would see energy policy and infrastructure decisions be guided by analysis detailing the climate impacts of such decisions. Modeled after the test administered by President Obama in rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline, the Climate Test has been further refined and endorsed by a number of organizations in the U.S. and Canada. Details can be found at http://climatetest.org.
The letter delivered to Administrator Sieminski this morning can be found at https://priceofoil.org/content/uploads/2016/07/Sieminski-letter-Climate-Test.pdf
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