Almost three years after Tesla Inc. Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk unveiled solar roof shingles as part of his push to buy SolarCity, the automaker says it finally has a version of the tiles that it can mass produce.

“It’s been quite hard,” Musk said on a conference call late Friday. “Roofs need to last a long time. When you add electrification to the roof, it’s a fair bit of complexity.”

The sleek roof is a key part of Tesla’s push to revive its struggling solar business. Musk unveiled the product in 2016, but the company hasn’t been able to bring production up to full scale. The photovoltaic tiles are designed to resemble regular shingles, unlike solar panels atop a roof.

The latest version of the shingles was introduced after Tesla lost its status as the biggest U.S. rooftop solar company. It’s also been sued by Walmart Inc. over fires at a half-dozen of the big-box stores that had Tesla solar systems, and the company still faces litigation from shareholders over the controversial SolarCity acquisition.

The world needs to spend $50 trillion on five areas of technology by 2050 to slash emissions and meet the Paris Agreement’s goal of halting global warming, Morgan Stanley analysts wrote in a report.

To reduce net emissions of carbon to zero, the world would have to eradicate the equivalent of 53.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide a year, according to the report, which identified renewable energy, electric vehicles, hydrogen, carbon capture and storage, and biofuels as the key technologies that could help meet the target.

Carbon emissions from fossil fuels hit a record last year, but estimates vary of how much it would cost to meet the Paris target of keeping the global temperature rise to within 2 degrees. The International Renewable Energy Agency says $750 billion a year is needed in renewables over a decade. United Nations scientists say $300 billion spent on reclaiming degraded land could offset emissions to buy time to deploy zero-carbon technologies.

Here are Morgan Stanley’s estimates for the five key technology areas and some of the companies leading the drive.

Renewables

• Renewable power generation will require $14 trillion by 2050, including investments in energy storage.
• Renewables would need to deliver about 80% of global power by then, up from 37% today, meaning an additional 11 000 gigawatts of capacity, excluding hydro-power.
• Solar energy’s rapidly falling cost will make it the fastest-growing renewable technology over the coming decade with a 13% compound annual growth rate.
• Stocks that could benefit include: CGN New Energy Holdings Co., China Resources Power Holdings Co. and China Suntien Green Energy Co.

Electric vehicles

• With passenger cars currently pumping out about 7% of greenhouse gas emissions, some $11 trillion will be needed to build factories, expand power capacity and develop the batteries and infrastructure needed to switch to electric vehicles.
• With increased investment, annual EV sales could grow from 1.3 million units in 2018 to 23.2 million in 2030, lifting the total number of electric vehicles to 113 million by 2030 and 924 million by 2050.
• Some of the companies to watch: Beijing Easpring Material Technology Co., Rohm Co. and Panasonic Corp.

Carbon capture and storage

• Almost $2.5 trillion would be needed for technologies that capture carbon and store it.
• While it currently costs about $700 million to capture a million tons of carbon a year, the cost of building CCS plants is expected to drop 30% by 2050.
• With more than 200 000 megawatts of new coal-fired generation capacity under construction, CCS is the only option to offset the emissions of these plants, Morgan Stanley says.
• The bank’s top picks include Air Liquide SA and Bloom Energy Corp.

Hydrogen

• About $5.4 trillion is needed for electrolyzers to make the gas, which can help provide clean fuel for power generation, industrial processes, vehicles and heating.
• In addition, $13 trillion would be required to increase renewable energy capacity to power the plants.
• Another $1 trillion would be needed for storage, with additional investment for transportation and distribution.
• Leading players include: Johnson Matthey and Air Liquide.

Biofuels

• Almost $2.7 trillion should go into biofuels like ethanol, which are currently mixed with petroleum products but will spread eventually to areas such as aviation.
• About 4% of global transportation fuel will be biofuel in 2030.
• Ethanol, the most-used biofuel at the moment will grow at about 3% a year, while a type of biodiesel called hydro treated vegetable oil will achieve must faster growth, quadrupling production by 2030.
• Companies invloved include Neste Corporation and Sao Martinho SA.

Qatar has urged energy consumers across the globe to increasingly switch towards liquefied natural gas (LNG), which alone has four key characteristics to tackle environmental challenges.

Drawing attention to unprecedented recurrent climatic conditions, including mean temperatures, turbulent seasonal cycles and extreme events, HE the Minister of State for Energy Affairs, Saad biSherida al-Kaabi said it is time to take another look at natural gas and the number of advantages it has to make it a pivotal element in any strategy to tackle environmental challenges.

“It is versatile, flexible, economic, and clean. No other energy source can boast the combination of all these four qualities,” he told the 8th LNG Producer-Consumer Conference in Tokyo.

Al-Kaabi, who is also the president and chief executive of Qatar Petroleum, highlighted the country’s efforts to reinforce its position as the world’s leading LNG producer, which include the North Field expansion to increase the LNG production capacity to 110mn tonnes per year by 2024, and a major ship-building campaign to build up to 100 LNG carriers over the next decade.

The LNG industry is very dynamic and invigorated, and it connects all corners of the world through hundreds of trade routes, and LNG receiving and regasification terminals, he said, adding, “we, in Qatar, are doing our part to keep this momentum moving forward for the benefit of our partner countries and their peoples.”

Stressing that Qatar was collaborating with many countries around the world to ensure the security of their energy supplies and the sustainability of their economic growth, he said Doha is also working with customers, industry players, and stakeholders for a sustainable, affordable and secure energy supply for all.

“Most importantly, we are providing a sustainable energy solution to environmental and climate change concerns, and responding to widespread global moves towards cleaner and more cost effective fuels,” he said.

Al-Kaabi pointed out that while Japan was celebrating 50 years since the arrival of its first ever LNG cargo, Qatargas has successfully delivered the 3,000th LNG cargo to JERA’s Kawagoe Terminal.

The LNG Producer-Consumer Conference is a global annual dialogue, launched in 2012, and organised by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry, and the Asia Pacific Energy Research Centre.

It provides ministers, heads of international organisations, corporate executives, and other stakeholders with a venue to share the latest trends in the global LNG market and discussing opportunities and challenges with a view to its development.

Millions of people in 170 countries took to the streets to protest. World leaders lined up at the UN to pledge action. A 16-year-old girl, close to tears, shamed them for robbing her of a future.
The pressure to act on climate change is mounting. Titans of global business and politics gathered in New York this week for a series of events, including an unprecedented UN summit and the Bloomberg Global Business Forum, to acknowledge that more must be done – but fell short of saying exactly what will be done.
“Time is running out in the court of public opinion, because time is running out to address climate change,” New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told heads of state and business chiefs at the Global Business Forum on Wednesday. “It’s right for them to hold our feet to the fire.”
The stakes have indeed never been higher. Temperatures have already risen 1 degree Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since the 1880s. The world must limit that warming to no more than 2 degrees above Industrial Revolution levels, the UN has warned, to avoid the most catastrophic of droughts, floods, mass migrations and conflicts. “You can just feel the groundswell of popular sentiment, that the urgency of this is elevated,” Goldman Sachs Group Inc chief executive David Solomon said during the forum.
When asked whether there’s enough information out there to determine his own bank’s exposure to climate change, Solomon said, “We’re working on it. The answer is we’re working on it.” It was a response that underscored both the heightened awareness among leaders that they will be held responsible for global warming and the work that still lays ahead of them.
The meetings were still “far too much a chance for people to beat their chests and say they’re making change,” said Brad Cornell, a business professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. “But who is making real change?”
The UN pointed to some change that came from its Monday summit: 77 countries committed to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions to net zero by 2050; 70 countries pledged to bolster climate action plans by 2020; more than 100 business leaders aligned themselves with the goals of the international Paris climate agreement; and 12 countries vowed to contribute to a fund to help developing countries adapt to climate change.
Nobody says that’s enough. UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, who organised the summit and called on world leaders to announce real plans at it, said as presentations concluded, “We need more concrete plans.”
The UN-backed Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a report Wednesday with alarming findings on fast-accelerating and potentially irreversible deterioration of oceans and glaciers.
While some of the world’s most powerful leaders sounded off on climate in New York, a UN panel convened almost 400 miles (600 kilometres) away in Montreal to continue a years-long debate over curbing emissions from airplanes. The group may decide on what kind of system to use to regulate them – a laborious and highly political process that went largely unmentioned in Manhattan. And yet there were signs in New York that the tide is turning in favor of real action.
At the conclusion of Monday’s annual meeting of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative, an industry-supported group that also met in New York, the majority of the member CEOs stuck around for a discussion on climate change. In all, nine were present at the talk, including the bosses of Exxon Mobil Corp and Chevron Corp who faced questions from students and activists as well as reporters.
“And they were listening,” according to Felipe Bayon, CEO of Colombia’s state-run oil giant Ecopetrol. “I’m very encouraged. As a citizen of the world, I think that a lot of things are possible.”
Credited for inspiring the millions of young people who’ve rallied around climate change in recent days is Greta Thunberg. The teenage activist sailed to New York on a zero-emissions boat, climbed the stage at the UN summit and told the crowd of more than 300 presidents, prime ministers, CEOs, bankers and delegates that they’ve let down her entire generation by not acting on climate change. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said on Monday. “How dare you!”
Anand Mahindra, chairman of India’s Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd, said Thunberg gives him hope, as do all of the young people calling for change. It took the youth of the 1960s protesting the Vietnam War to wake everyone up to the fact that the war needed to end, Mahindra said. He’s hopeful, he said, that they can do it again to win the fight against climate change.
The movement grew so big that even US President Donald Trump, who has called climate change a myth and vowed to pull America out of the Paris pact, made an unexpected appearance at the UN summit. He stayed for 15 minutes and didn’t speak. China President Xi Jinping didn’t attend the summit at all – leaving the leaders of the world’s two largest polluters visibly absent from the presenters’ list.
During the Global Business Forum on Wednesday, business leaders repeatedly pointed the finger at government to step up and dictate what should be done. “The more there’s a clear policy framework,” Solomon said, “the more you’ll get a reaction and response.”
Samir Assaf, CEO of global banking and markets at HSBC Holdings Plc, had one idea: “The private sector can provide debt, and national development banks can provide guarantees.” To which moderator Christine Lagarde, the incoming president of the European Central Bank, responded: “So, the public takes the risk and the private takes the profits.”
Green investments are proving to be less of a risk and more of a moneymaker. Solar and wind power costs have plunged so deeply that they’re now the cheapest and most profitable form of new electricity in two-thirds of the world. CEOs of corporations worldwide are saving billions by cutting their plastic waste, using less, cleaner and cheaper energy and recycling.
The world will face a serious test next year. Under the Paris agreement, countries are expected to submit new, and ideally more ambitious, climate action plans every five years. The next presentations are due in 2020.
“There’s an enormous gulf right now,’’ said Kelly Levin, a senior associate at the World Resources Institute in Washington, “between current momentum and where we need to be.”

Is there still a debate over climate change? Yes and no. As a scientific matter, the issues of whether it’s happening and who’s to blame are long settled. But there’s no end to debates about what to do about it. Arguments about the need for and costs of action are playing out against a nonstop, live-on-TV drama of the massive storms, record wildfires and deadly heat waves already fueled by global warming.

1. What’s new in the climate debate?

For one thing, there’s been a revolution in renewable energy. The price of wind and solar has plunged in a way even its most ardent backers wouldn’t have dared dream 20 years ago. Bloomberg NEF projects that by 2050, renewable power will produce two-thirds of the world’s electricity, the same fraction that fossil fuel produces today. The world’s biggest polluter, China, is taking far more aggressive action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions than was expected even a decade ago. A combination of slower economic growth and a drive for cleaner air have put China ahead of schedule for its emissions to peak by 2030.

2. How has the debate shifted?

There’s robust argument over how to balance the effort put into mitigation versus adaptation. Mitigation gets most of the attention — the headline news from the 2015 Paris climate accord, for instance, was about the pledges different countries made to limit the release of greenhouse gases. But adaptation is becoming a pressing need as temperatures rise. Some communities are already trying to relocate away from rising waters. Storm-surge barriers and flood gates geared to climate change have gone up in Rotterdam and Venice. New York installed gates after parts of the city were inundated by the surge driven by super storm Sandy in 2012, and Houston, flooded by Hurricane Harvey’s torrential rains in 2017, is considering new defenses. Even steps as small as providing air conditioners for the poor can play an important role in making cities livable in a hotter future.

3. What’s the status of the Paris agreement?

Even though President Donald Trump intends to pull the world’s biggest economy out of the accord, the U.S. is still participating in nuts and bolts discussions on implementing the voluntary pledges made by almost 200 countries. Coalitions of cities, states, businesses and universities in groups such as We Are Still In and America’s Pledge have organized to keep progress going in the U.S. even if the country formally leaves the pact. (America’s Pledge was co-founded by Michael R. Bloomberg, the founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News. He has told the New York Times that he is considering a campaign for president.) The U.S. is currently seen as on track for its climate goals for 2020 but falling short of its longer-term pledges, as are the European Union and Japan, according to Climate Action Tracker, a research project.

4. What’s Trump’s argument?

Money. Trump said the Paris pact would hurt American workers and amounted to a “massive redistribution” of wealth from the U.S. to other countries. Meeting the Paris goals would conflict with his efforts to revive U.S. coal production. He’s also moved to water down fuel-efficiency standards and proposed rolling back Obama-era regulations meant to force utilities to reduce emissions. Officials in his administration insist that U.S. economic growth is a more urgent priority than climate change.

5. Who’s agreeing with him?

Influential groups of voters in countries where a shift away from dirty fuels has raised energy prices. In Australia, Malcolm Turnbull was pushed out as prime minister in August after conservatives in his party rebelled over his plan to write the country’s Paris targets into law. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2015 bowed to pressure to allow pipelines carrying carbon-heavy oil from tar sands to be expanded. Now his plan for a national carbon price to drive down emissions is under attack and is expected to be a focus for his opponents in 2019 elections.

6. How much would meaningful action cost?

It’s hard to know, and there’s a wide range of forecasts. The Deep Decarbonization Pathway Project, a research effort backed in part by a United Nations group, estimates that for 16 leading countries, meeting their Paris targets would require investments amounting to 0.8 percent of gross domestic product a year by 2020 and 1.3 percent by 2050. The International Finance Corporation has estimated that the Paris accord opened up $23 trillion in investment opportunities for government and private industry by 2030. BNEF projects that half that much will actually be spent. Developed nations have committed to boost climate-related aid to poorer countries to $100 billion a year by 2020, including money from both public and private sources.

7. What are the stakes?

Because the warming process is cumulative, if by some magic all greenhouse gas emissions stopped tomorrow, researchers predict we may still be in for 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) of warming this century — three times as much as we’ve seen since the mid-1990s. Climate Interactive, a research non-profit, calculates that even if the Paris pledges are met, we’d blow past the target of holding warming to 2 degrees above mid-19th century levels. If current emissions levels aren’t reduced, warming could gallop past 4 degrees. Studies have projected changes ranging from more kidney stones, smaller goats and less sex in the short run, to swamped cities and widespread extinction of species in the decades ahead.

ROME: Part of a massive glacier on the Italian side of the Mont Blanc mountain range is close to collapse after accelerated melting in the late summer heat, officials at a nearby town warned Wednesday.
This is the latest of a series of warnings about melting glaciers — in the Alps and elsewhere — as concern grows about the effects of climate change.
The mayor of the town of Courmayeur has ordered a local access road closed at night and limited access to the region below the glacier, which is popular with tourists, a town spokesman told AFP.
Town spokesman Moreno Vignolini dismissed “apocalyptic” reports in the media that it was threatening to smash down on the town itself. Below the glacier, he said, “there are no homes, only a few unoccupied chalets”.
Part of the Planpincieux glacier in the Aosta Valley is in danger of crashing into a valley running parallel to the Courmayeur valley, said Vignolini. “With the strong heat this summer, there has been between August and the first half of September, an acceleration of the melting of the glacier, at an average rate of 35 centimetres (14 inches) a day, up to highs of 50-60 centimetres on some days,”

The chunk of the glacier concerned, which makes up between a fifth and a sixth of the total and weighs around 250,000 tonnes, was threatening to break away and crash down into the valley, he added.
“There is a problem with a part of the Planpincieux glacier located at Val Ferret, which is thought to be falling due to a large fracture between the, say, stable part of the glacier and this part,” the mayor of Courmayeur, Stefano Miserocchi, told AFP.
Late on Tuesday Miserocchi ordered the night-time closure of the access road to Val Ferret, on the Italian side of Mont Blanc.
He has banned walkers from the area below the glacier, which is popular with visitors and has three mountain refuges. Experts at the Fondazione Montagna Sicura (Safe Mountain Foundation), who have been monitoring the glacier for the Val d’Aosta region since 2013, alerted local officials to the latest developments.
“This glacier is atypical because it’s temperate, and so is influenced by the temperature of the water flowing below, which particularly exposes it to the global warming in progress,” said the foundation’s secretary-general Jean Pierre Fosson.
But he cautioned against alarmism, stressing that the preventive measures taken so far were for an “unprecedented situation” for a glacier in the region.
While it might break off in a single block, it could just crumble away or not break away at all, he added.
The Foundation monitors 180 glaciers in the Val d’Aosta region and this kind of thing is unavoidable, said Fosson. “Every year we see two square kilometres (0.8 square miles) of ice disappear” he said. “And it is getting worse with the increasingly hot summers and autumns.”

According to a landmark assessment approved by the 195-nation Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), accelerating melt-off from glaciers and Earth’s ice sheets atop Greenland and Antarctica are driving sea level rise. Since 2005, the ocean has risen 2.5 times faster than during the 20th century, threatening island nations and coastal cities. The rate at which the waterline rises will quadruple again by 2100 if carbon emissions continue unabated, the report found. On Sunday, dozens of people dressed in black attended a symbolic funeral march on a Swiss mountainside to mark the disappearance of an Alpine glacier on Pizol mountain. A study by Swiss researchers released earlier this month suggested that the Aletsch glacier — the largest in the Alps — could disappear completely by the end of the century if nothing was done to rein in climate change.

A group of 13 major oil companies charted out a plan yesterday to promote investments in carbon capture, use and storage (CCUS), ahead of a gathering in New York.
Oil chiefs grappling with growing demand for action to fight climate change have looked to invest in carbon-capture and sequestration techniques that some executives, including Occidental Petroleum Corp CEO Vicki Hollub, say could make drilling carbon neutral.
With fossil fuel development growing worldwide, the oil and gas industry faces growing criticism from activists concerned about accelerating climate impacts from melting ice caps to sea-level rise and extreme weather.
Scientists say the world needs to halve greenhouse gas emissions over the next decade to avoid catastrophic warming.
Carbon sequestration technology traps carbon in caverns or porous spaces underground.
A number of oil and gas CEOs say the technology will be crucial to meeting goals set in the 2016 Paris agreement on climate change to reduce global emissions.
“A lot of people don’t even know what CCUS is. I think the world is going to hear more and more and more about it,” BP plc CEO Bob Dudley said. “I don’t think we can meet the Paris goals without CCUS.”
The group, known as the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative (OGCI), said it aims to double the amount of carbon dioxide stored globally by 2030.
The group is also taking steps to reduce methane emissions.
The group formed in 2014 to support efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Its gathering will be held on the sidelines of a climate summit, where United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres says he is banking on new pledges from governments and businesses to abandon fossil fuels.
Last Friday, millions of young people flooded the streets of cities around the world to demand urgent steps to stop climate change.
Many, including 16-year-old Swedish activist Greta Thunberg, have criticised governments and industries for not doing enough.
The OGCI group said in a statement that carbon-capture technologies could be expanded to more efficiently trap large amounts of carbon released by facilities such as power plants, which could then be used in oil recovery and, ultimately stored — thus, removing it from the atmosphere.
The group plans to work with others to put carbon-capture techniques into operation in the US, UK, Norway, the Netherlands, and China.
Later yesterday, , it was set to sign a declaration of collaboration with certain energy ministers and other stakeholders, to commit to efforts to expand carbon storage.
The companies, which include Exxon Mobil Corp, Chevron Corp and BP, account for 32% of global oil and gas production.
They have agreed to cooperate to accelerate reduction of greenhouse gas emissions.
Separately, almost 90 big companies in sectors from food to cement to telecommunications are pledging to slash greenhouse gas emissions, organisers said.

Asia’s prolonged binge on coal is making the grids that transmit power to a third of the world’s people brittle and prone to failure.
That’s the conclusion of new research in the peer-reviewed journal Energy & Environmental Science.
More than 400 gigawatts of new coal-fired capacity in Asia are at risk as climate change dries out water sources necessary to cool those plants, according to the study.
“Coal power development can expect reduced reliability in many locations across Asia,” Edward Byers, one of the report’s authors, said by e-mail. “This is further evidence of coal power’s increasingly recognised incompatibility with current international and national climate and sustainable development policy.”
Summer heatwaves and reduced rainfall have been closing water-cooled power plants across the world as the impact of climate change exacerbates the nexus between water and energy supply. Asian utilities building coal plans could find themselves increasingly competing with industry and consumers for scarce water resources.
“This planned capacity adds 30% more to the existing coal-fired generation capacity, and will engender substantial water requirements and amounts of pollutants that can exacerbate global climate change and regional air pollution,” the researchers wrote.
Thermal power generation could fall as much as 16% globally in the next three decades because of water shortages, they concluded. Researchers used hydrological and climate models as well as data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker to reach their conclusions. Different warming scenarios ranging to as high as 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 Fahrenheit) were considered. The world is currently on a warming trajectory that may hit 5 degree Celsius by the end of the century.