Saudi Arabia Scales Back Renewable Energy Goal To Favor Natural Gas
In this newsletter:
1) India Denies It Will Ratify Paris Climate Deal This Year
The Hindu, 8 June 2016
2) India Links Ratification Of Paris Agreement To Climate Finance
DNA India, 7 June 2016
3) India Refuses To Commit To Paris Ratification This Year
The Voice of America, 7 June 2016
4) Modi Dashes Obama’s Hopes For Paris Breakthrough
Voice of America, 8 June 2016
5) Saudi Arabia Scales Back Renewable Energy Goal To Favor Natural Gas
Bloomberg, 7 June 2016
6) John Constable: Climate Policies Based On Renewables Are Counterproductive
Global Warming Policy Forum, 8 June 2016
7) Global Temperature Plummets As El Nino Fades
The Daily Caller, 6 June 2016
8) The ‘Social Cost Of Carbon’ May Have Just Gone Negative
Watts Up With That, 7 June 2016
The Hindu, 8 June 2016
2) India Links Ratification Of Paris Agreement To Climate Finance
DNA India, 7 June 2016
3) India Refuses To Commit To Paris Ratification This Year
The Voice of America, 7 June 2016
4) Modi Dashes Obama’s Hopes For Paris Breakthrough
Voice of America, 8 June 2016
5) Saudi Arabia Scales Back Renewable Energy Goal To Favor Natural Gas
Bloomberg, 7 June 2016
6) John Constable: Climate Policies Based On Renewables Are Counterproductive
Global Warming Policy Forum, 8 June 2016
7) Global Temperature Plummets As El Nino Fades
The Daily Caller, 6 June 2016
8) The ‘Social Cost Of Carbon’ May Have Just Gone Negative
Watts Up With That, 7 June 2016
Full details:
1) India Denies It Will Ratify Paris Climate Deal This Year
The Hindu, 8 June 2016
Varghese K George
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama during their joint press briefing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Tuesday.
WASHINGTON — A big climate announcement could come this week in Washington.
Experts are watching to see if Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi commits to ratifying the Paris climate agreement before the end of the year. If India ratifies the deal, that will put it on the brink of going into force well ahead of the original 2020 target.
Advocates say it would be a strong signal that developing countries are serious about fighting climate change. But critics note that India has committed to very little under the Paris agreement. They say much more will be needed from India and the rest of the world to keep the planet below the 2-degree threshold that scientists consider critical to the well-being of the planet.
Modi is on a state visit to the United States, including a special address to a joint meeting of Congress and his seventh meeting with President Obama.
The two leaders "really have a meeting of the minds" on climate change and clean energy, says World Resources Institute senior fellow Andrew Light, a former State Department adviser on India and climate issues. Both consider it a moral issue and an obligation to future generations, Light says, and both want progress to be part of their legacies.
That's translated into constructive cooperation, he notes. Over the past two years, Light says the two have expanded or created 15 joint climate and energy programs.
And in December's climate negotiations, he says, "the U.S. and India really did work very well in Paris to come up with compromises on the text that created an agreement that both of them could take home."
The Paris agreement goes into effect when 55 countries representing 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions ratify it. The world's two largest emitters, the United States and China, have announced they will do so by the end of the year.
Several other emitters have as well. If India joins, that would push the total over the 55 percent threshold.
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has praised the Paris agreement, but presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says he would cancel it.
If India does ratify this year, Light adds, it would show that "this message that big developing countries in the world are not serious about Paris, are not serious about doing something on climate change, is just simply false."
Full story
5) Saudi Arabia Scales Back Renewable Energy Goal To Favor Natural Gas
Bloomberg, 7 June 2016
Wael Mahdi and Vivian Nereim
Saudi Arabia is curtailing renewable-power targets as the world’s biggest oil exporter plans to use more natural gas, backing away from goals set when crude prices were about triple their current level, according to Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih.
So much for the Guardian’s habitual green hype
Saudi Arabia, which holds the world’s second-largest crude reserves, will double natural gas production, according to Al-Falih, and the government will expand the distribution network to the western part of the nation. Generating more power from gas and renewables should make more crude available for export, which would otherwise be burned for electricity for domestic use.
Burning Crude
“Our energy mix has shifted more toward gas, so the need for high targets from renewable sources isn’t there any more,” Al-Falih said. “The previous target of 50 percent from renewable sources was an initial target and it was built on high oil prices” near $150 a barrel, he said.
The kingdom aims to have power generation from renewable resources like the sun make up 10 percent of the energy mix, a reduction from an earlier target of 50 percent, Al-Falih said in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al-Falih provided new details of the country’s solar power program as he joined other ministers to announce parts of a plan adopted by the cabinet on Monday to overhaul the country’s economy.
Full story
6) John Constable: Climate Policies Based On Renewables Are Counterproductive
Global Warming Policy Forum, 8 June 2016
In an article published today in the Financial Times, Mr Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, has observed that natural gas is not expanding within the world energy mix as the IEA had predicted.
Mr Birol cites two reasons:
1. Subdued global economic activity.
2. Political support for renewable energy technologies, as confirmed by the Paris climate change agreement, which makes it, in Mr Birol’s words “difficult for gas to compete”.
Unsurprisingly, this is driving many countries to cheap coal which will actually increase rather than decrease global CO2 emissions: “Particularly in Asia, people are still going for coal fired power stations as they are cheaper,” Mr Birol acknowledged.
As the GWPF has repeatedly pointed out, current climate and green energy policies are not only burdening economies and lowering economic growth, they also hold back a move to an attainable cleaner energy mix, with a larger element of natural gas — despite falling gas prices.
7) Global Temperature Plummets As El Nino Fades
The Daily Caller, 6 June 2016
Global average temperature is plummeting as the naturally-occurring El Niño warming event gives way to what’s likely to be a La Niña cooling event later this year.
“Cooling from the weakening El Niño is now rapidly occurring as we transition toward likely La Niña conditions by mid-summer or early fall,” according to the latest satellite data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville.
Global temperature spiked in early 2016 thanks to an incredibly strong El Niño. It drove the average global temperature up to 0.83 degrees above the 30-year average in February — the warmest month ever recorded in the satellite record.
Tmperatures have come down 0.28 degrees since February, and Columbia University’s Earth Institute recently said there’s a more than 70 percent chance of a La Niña forming this year. Government forecasters say such an event would likely occur by late-summer or early fall.
The current El Nino formed late in 2015 and sent temperatures skyward, causing torrential rain in Texas and unseasonably warm weather New Yorkers saw on Christmas Day. The warm streak persisted into this year, and it created tons of media attention as climate scientists freaked out about the record heat.
“We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, told The Sydney Morning Herald in February. “This is really quite stunning” and “it’s completely unprecedented.”
El Niño is a naturally occurring warming phase across the span of the Pacific Ocean along the equator. It occurs fairly regularly, about every two to seven years, and is often followed by a La Niña cooling phase.
While some scientists were freaking out, others noted El Niño can cause huge temperature spikes, and that a strong La Niña could follow, meaning global temperatures could be driven downward — resuming the so-called “pause” in global warming.
It’s unclear exactly how far temperatures will fall, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is keeping an eye on the rapid cooling.
Full story
8) The ‘Social Cost Of Carbon’ May Have Just Gone Negative
Watts Up With That, 7 June 2016
Anthony Watts
Ross McKittrick writes on his personal web page:
I have just released a working paper with Kevin Dayaratna and David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC which recomputes standard Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimates using updated empirical estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS).
Dayaratna, Kevin, Ross McKitrick and David Kreutzer (2016) Empirically-Constrained Climate Sensitivity and the Social Cost of Carbon. SSRN Discussion Paper 2759505.
We applied the 2015 Lewis and Curry ECS distribution to the widely-used DICE and FUND Integrated Assessment Models. Previously the developers of these models (and others) have relied on model-simulated distribution of ECS values, especially from a 2007 paper by Roe and Baker. The Roe-Baker distribution underpins the US government’s current SCC values used for regulatory purposes. We critique this aspect of SCC computation, explaining why the Roe-Baker distribution is unsuitable. A major reason is that simulated ECS distributions have been superseded by a suite of empirically-estimated distributions. Using a recent, well-constrained empirical ECS distribution we find the estimated SCC drops substantially in both the DICE and FUND models, and in the latter there is a large probability it is no longer even positive.
Full post
The Hindu, 8 June 2016
Varghese K George
Prime Minister Narendra Modi and US President Barack Obama during their joint press briefing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on Tuesday.
[...] While the U.S. side insisted that Mr. Modi and the President agreed that both countries would ratify the climate treaty within the current year — 2016 — Indian officials said this was not the case.
The joint statement leaves enough room to accommodate both interpretations. “India and the United States recognise the urgency of climate change and share the goal of enabling entry into force of the Paris Agreement as early as possible. The United States reaffirms its commitment to join the Agreement as soon as possible this year. India similarly has begun its processes to work toward this shared objective,” the statement said.
Full story
2) India Links Ratification Of Paris Agreement To Climate Finance
DNA India, 7 June 2016
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to ratify the Paris Agreement, but called for climate justice and help from the US and other countries in green energy funding.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who held two-hour long bilateral talks with the US President Barrack Obama, the seventh since he assumed office, called for a regime of “climate justice” where India will have access to clean energy, an oblique reference asking the West to get its act together to help it in nuclear trading and to fund non-conventional energy programmes, to allow India to switch from fossil fuel to clean energy and thereby adhere to Paris Climate Change agenda.
Soon after the meeting, Obama while welcoming Modi talked about the necessity of implementing the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Modi pledged to ratify the Agreement, but called for climate justice and help from the US and other countries to help India in clean energy. “Discussed with Modi how to bring Paris climate agreement into force as quickly as possible,” said Obama.
Full story
3) India Refuses To Commit To Paris Ratification This Year
The Voice of America, 7 June 2016
Steve Baragona
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed support for the enactment of the Paris climate agreement this year in a meeting Tuesday at the White House. Support for the agreement falls short of a commitment to ratify that U.S. President Barack Obama had been hoping for.
“We discussed how we can as quickly as possible bring the Paris agreement into place, [and] how we can make sure that climate financing that’s necessary for India to be able to embark on its bold vision for solar energy and clean energy … can be accomplished,” Obama said afterward.
If India had ratified the deal, it would have gone into force well ahead of the original 2020 target and sent a strong signal that developing countries are serious about fighting climate change — arguments the president likely impressed on his Indian counterpart in talks. But the response fell short of expectations.
Full story
4) Modi Dashes Obama’s Hopes For Paris Breakthrough
Voice of America, 8 June 2016
The joint statement leaves enough room to accommodate both interpretations. “India and the United States recognise the urgency of climate change and share the goal of enabling entry into force of the Paris Agreement as early as possible. The United States reaffirms its commitment to join the Agreement as soon as possible this year. India similarly has begun its processes to work toward this shared objective,” the statement said.
Full story
2) India Links Ratification Of Paris Agreement To Climate Finance
DNA India, 7 June 2016
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has pledged to ratify the Paris Agreement, but called for climate justice and help from the US and other countries in green energy funding.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who held two-hour long bilateral talks with the US President Barrack Obama, the seventh since he assumed office, called for a regime of “climate justice” where India will have access to clean energy, an oblique reference asking the West to get its act together to help it in nuclear trading and to fund non-conventional energy programmes, to allow India to switch from fossil fuel to clean energy and thereby adhere to Paris Climate Change agenda.
Soon after the meeting, Obama while welcoming Modi talked about the necessity of implementing the Paris Climate Change Agreement. Modi pledged to ratify the Agreement, but called for climate justice and help from the US and other countries to help India in clean energy. “Discussed with Modi how to bring Paris climate agreement into force as quickly as possible,” said Obama.
Full story
3) India Refuses To Commit To Paris Ratification This Year
The Voice of America, 7 June 2016
Steve Baragona
Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi expressed support for the enactment of the Paris climate agreement this year in a meeting Tuesday at the White House. Support for the agreement falls short of a commitment to ratify that U.S. President Barack Obama had been hoping for.
“We discussed how we can as quickly as possible bring the Paris agreement into place, [and] how we can make sure that climate financing that’s necessary for India to be able to embark on its bold vision for solar energy and clean energy … can be accomplished,” Obama said afterward.
If India had ratified the deal, it would have gone into force well ahead of the original 2020 target and sent a strong signal that developing countries are serious about fighting climate change — arguments the president likely impressed on his Indian counterpart in talks. But the response fell short of expectations.
Full story
4) Modi Dashes Obama’s Hopes For Paris Breakthrough
Voice of America, 8 June 2016
WASHINGTON — A big climate announcement could come this week in Washington.
Experts are watching to see if Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi commits to ratifying the Paris climate agreement before the end of the year. If India ratifies the deal, that will put it on the brink of going into force well ahead of the original 2020 target.
Advocates say it would be a strong signal that developing countries are serious about fighting climate change. But critics note that India has committed to very little under the Paris agreement. They say much more will be needed from India and the rest of the world to keep the planet below the 2-degree threshold that scientists consider critical to the well-being of the planet.
Modi is on a state visit to the United States, including a special address to a joint meeting of Congress and his seventh meeting with President Obama.
The two leaders "really have a meeting of the minds" on climate change and clean energy, says World Resources Institute senior fellow Andrew Light, a former State Department adviser on India and climate issues. Both consider it a moral issue and an obligation to future generations, Light says, and both want progress to be part of their legacies.
That's translated into constructive cooperation, he notes. Over the past two years, Light says the two have expanded or created 15 joint climate and energy programs.
And in December's climate negotiations, he says, "the U.S. and India really did work very well in Paris to come up with compromises on the text that created an agreement that both of them could take home."
The Paris agreement goes into effect when 55 countries representing 55 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions ratify it. The world's two largest emitters, the United States and China, have announced they will do so by the end of the year.
Several other emitters have as well. If India joins, that would push the total over the 55 percent threshold.
Democratic presidential frontrunner Hillary Clinton has praised the Paris agreement, but presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump says he would cancel it.
If India does ratify this year, Light adds, it would show that "this message that big developing countries in the world are not serious about Paris, are not serious about doing something on climate change, is just simply false."
Full story
5) Saudi Arabia Scales Back Renewable Energy Goal To Favor Natural Gas
Bloomberg, 7 June 2016
Wael Mahdi and Vivian Nereim
Saudi Arabia is curtailing renewable-power targets as the world’s biggest oil exporter plans to use more natural gas, backing away from goals set when crude prices were about triple their current level, according to Energy Minister Khalid Al-Falih.
So much for the Guardian’s habitual green hype
Saudi Arabia, which holds the world’s second-largest crude reserves, will double natural gas production, according to Al-Falih, and the government will expand the distribution network to the western part of the nation. Generating more power from gas and renewables should make more crude available for export, which would otherwise be burned for electricity for domestic use.
Burning Crude
“Our energy mix has shifted more toward gas, so the need for high targets from renewable sources isn’t there any more,” Al-Falih said. “The previous target of 50 percent from renewable sources was an initial target and it was built on high oil prices” near $150 a barrel, he said.
The kingdom aims to have power generation from renewable resources like the sun make up 10 percent of the energy mix, a reduction from an earlier target of 50 percent, Al-Falih said in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al-Falih provided new details of the country’s solar power program as he joined other ministers to announce parts of a plan adopted by the cabinet on Monday to overhaul the country’s economy.
Full story
Global Warming Policy Forum, 8 June 2016
In an article published today in the Financial Times, Mr Fatih Birol, the Executive Director of the International Energy Agency, has observed that natural gas is not expanding within the world energy mix as the IEA had predicted.
Mr Birol cites two reasons:
1. Subdued global economic activity.
2. Political support for renewable energy technologies, as confirmed by the Paris climate change agreement, which makes it, in Mr Birol’s words “difficult for gas to compete”.
Unsurprisingly, this is driving many countries to cheap coal which will actually increase rather than decrease global CO2 emissions: “Particularly in Asia, people are still going for coal fired power stations as they are cheaper,” Mr Birol acknowledged.
As the GWPF has repeatedly pointed out, current climate and green energy policies are not only burdening economies and lowering economic growth, they also hold back a move to an attainable cleaner energy mix, with a larger element of natural gas — despite falling gas prices.
7) Global Temperature Plummets As El Nino Fades
The Daily Caller, 6 June 2016
Global average temperature is plummeting as the naturally-occurring El Niño warming event gives way to what’s likely to be a La Niña cooling event later this year.
“Cooling from the weakening El Niño is now rapidly occurring as we transition toward likely La Niña conditions by mid-summer or early fall,” according to the latest satellite data from the University of Alabama-Huntsville.
Global temperature spiked in early 2016 thanks to an incredibly strong El Niño. It drove the average global temperature up to 0.83 degrees above the 30-year average in February — the warmest month ever recorded in the satellite record.
Tmperatures have come down 0.28 degrees since February, and Columbia University’s Earth Institute recently said there’s a more than 70 percent chance of a La Niña forming this year. Government forecasters say such an event would likely occur by late-summer or early fall.
The current El Nino formed late in 2015 and sent temperatures skyward, causing torrential rain in Texas and unseasonably warm weather New Yorkers saw on Christmas Day. The warm streak persisted into this year, and it created tons of media attention as climate scientists freaked out about the record heat.
“We are in a kind of climate emergency now,” Stefan Rahmstorf, a climate scientist at the Potsdam Institute of Climate Impact Research, told The Sydney Morning Herald in February. “This is really quite stunning” and “it’s completely unprecedented.”
El Niño is a naturally occurring warming phase across the span of the Pacific Ocean along the equator. It occurs fairly regularly, about every two to seven years, and is often followed by a La Niña cooling phase.
While some scientists were freaking out, others noted El Niño can cause huge temperature spikes, and that a strong La Niña could follow, meaning global temperatures could be driven downward — resuming the so-called “pause” in global warming.
It’s unclear exactly how far temperatures will fall, but the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is keeping an eye on the rapid cooling.
Full story
8) The ‘Social Cost Of Carbon’ May Have Just Gone Negative
Watts Up With That, 7 June 2016
Anthony Watts
Ross McKittrick writes on his personal web page:
I have just released a working paper with Kevin Dayaratna and David Kreutzer of the Heritage Foundation in Washington DC which recomputes standard Social Cost of Carbon (SCC) estimates using updated empirical estimates of the equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS).
Dayaratna, Kevin, Ross McKitrick and David Kreutzer (2016) Empirically-Constrained Climate Sensitivity and the Social Cost of Carbon. SSRN Discussion Paper 2759505.
We applied the 2015 Lewis and Curry ECS distribution to the widely-used DICE and FUND Integrated Assessment Models. Previously the developers of these models (and others) have relied on model-simulated distribution of ECS values, especially from a 2007 paper by Roe and Baker. The Roe-Baker distribution underpins the US government’s current SCC values used for regulatory purposes. We critique this aspect of SCC computation, explaining why the Roe-Baker distribution is unsuitable. A major reason is that simulated ECS distributions have been superseded by a suite of empirically-estimated distributions. Using a recent, well-constrained empirical ECS distribution we find the estimated SCC drops substantially in both the DICE and FUND models, and in the latter there is a large probability it is no longer even positive.
Full post
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
1 comment:
I thank the team at GWPF for their work. I read that India and China have no requirement to reduce emissions, at this stage. Time to get real about Climate change. El Nino is not Anthropogenic Global Warming, its nature. Mostly climate is nature, some little may be man. Climate change and the Parisfest is about the New World Order a big fat bureaucracy within the UN.
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