Subsidy Cut Deals Blow To UK Wind Farms

Carbon Tax Needs To Increase 15-Fold For Ireland To Meet Climate Targets

In this newsletter:

1) Subsidy Cut Deals Blow To UK Wind Farms
Emily Gosden, The Times, 21 November 2018 
 
2) You Did Say Your Costs Had Been “Slashed” Didn’t You?
Andrew Montford, GWPF, 21 November 2018

 
3) Green Madness: Carbon Tax Needs To Increase 15-Fold For Ireland To Meet Climate Targets – ESRI
The Irish Times, 21 November 2018 
 
4) UN Environment Chief Erik Solheim Quits Amid Expenses Row
BBC News, 20 November 2018
 
5) The Threat To The Environment That The Green Lobby Tries To Ignore
Andrew Montford, The Spectator, 20 November 2018
 
6) BBC Finally Reports Flawed Climate Paper: ‘Concerns Over Report On Ocean Heating’
BBC News, 20 November 2018 
 
7) Matt Ridley: Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?
The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2018

Full details:

1) Subsidy Cut Deals Blow To UK Wind Farms
Emily Gosden, The Times, 21 November 2018 

The UK government has slashed the financial support on offer for new offshore wind farms, forcing developers to find further cost savings if their projects are to proceed.

Claire Perry, the energy minister, said that the government aimed to “secure more energy from renewables for less” after announcing that it would award subsidy contracts worth up to £60 million a year to new projects through an auction in May.

The budget is barely a third of the value of subsidies awarded via the last auction in 2017, when wind farms with a capacity of 3.2 gigawatts got the go-ahead. The government said that it expected the reduced budget to be able to deliver more wind farm capacity than last time, of about four gigawatts.

The maximum price that new offshore wind farms will receive for the electricity they generate will be at least 40 per cent lower than the price for power from the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant.

Writing for The Times website, Ms Perry said the auctions would “make the UK a beacon for inward investment and provide the private sector with the certainty it needs to invest”.

Full story
 
2) You Did Say Your Costs Had Been “Slashed” Didn’t You?
Andrew Montford, GWPF, 21 November 2018

If costs really have gone down, windfarm operators will take subsidy cuts in their stride

In the Times this morning, energy correspondent Emily Gosden reports on the latest news from the UK’s capacity market (link £):

“The government has slashed the financial support on offer for new offshore wind farms, forcing developers to find further cost savings if their projects are to proceed.”

It’s odd that she should talk of “slashing” financial support though. Just over a year ago, she was celebrating claims that windfarm operators had already slashed costs, allowing them to make ultra-low bids in the last renewables capacity auction.

As she told everyone at the time, measures like using cheaper foundations and housing maintenance staff in floating “hotels” had brought this happy state of affairs to pass. The era of cheap renewables was upon us, readers will no doubt have concluded.

So the news that the government has adjusted their level of support to the new circumstances doesn’t really represent a “slashing”, surely? It’s what is supposed to happen, isn’t it? And the windfarm giants like Orsted should take it in their stride, shouldn’t they? After all, they have floating hotels now.

Of course, some people scoffed at the idea that windfarm costs were going down.  But what do they know?
 
3) Green Madness: Carbon Tax Needs To Increase 15-Fold For Ireland To Meet Climate Targets – ESRI
The Irish Times, 21 November 2018 
Kevin O'Sullivan Environment & Science Editor App

Carbon tax will have to increase substantially – from €100 per person a year to €1,500 a year – if Ireland is to meet legally-binding targets on reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 2030, according to ESRI projections.

A new computational model developed by the institute that factors in economic data, environmental trends and energy consumption, has found carbon tax on fossil fuels will need to increase to €300 per tonne of carbon dioxide emitted over the coming decade to avoid substantial fines in the form of compliance costs.

The current rate of €20 per tonne was not increased in the budget as had been widely anticipated, although Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Minister for Climate Action Richard Bruton have confirmed it is set to increase in coming years.

A rise to €30 a tonne as was envisaged would have added about €1 to a bag of coal and about 25 cent to a bale of briquettes, as well as increasing the price of oil and gas.
 
Full story
 
4) UN Environment Chief Erik Solheim Quits Amid Expenses Row
BBC News, 20 November 2018

UN environment chief Erik Solheim has resigned amid a row over his travel expenses.



A recent draft internal audit, obtained by Britain's Guardian newspaper and seen by the BBC, said he had incurred costs of $488,518 (£382,111) while travelling for 529 out of 668 days.

It said this harmed the reputation of UN Environment - a body that highlights green issues and sustainability.

There was "no oversight or accountability" to monitor this travel.

Mr Solheim, a Norwegian former environment minister, says he has paid back the money where "instances of oversight" occurred.

On Tuesday, Mr Solheim himself confirmed his resignation, Norway's NRK broadcaster reported.

A formal UN announcement is expected shortly.

Full post 
 
5) The Threat To The Environment That The Green Lobby Tries To Ignore
Andrew Montford, The Spectator, 20 November 2018

It’s not like the green blob to keep quiet when there’s a threat to the environment in the offing. Even the smallest hint of a problem is usually enough to work a tree-hugger into a frenzy. So it’s worth taking a look at their decision to keep shtum over the recent appearance of what may be one of the greatest threats to the natural world we have seen.

Over the last few weeks, scientists and campaigners alike have been turning their attention to the question of how land can be used to tackle global warming.

Their interest was prompted by the appearance of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on how the increase in global temperatures might be kept below 1.5°C. One of the panel’s ideas was to propose a massive expansion of forestry, allowing excess carbon dioxide to be converted into wood. This wood could then be burnt to generate electricity, with the resulting carbon dioxide emissions captured and stored deep underground. The alternative is to use all this extra wood as building materials. This would, the theory goes, keep the carbon locked in. The IPCC paper was followed up by twin reports from the committee on climate change (CCC), the government’s advisers on climate policy.

One of these papers was on the subject of biofuels; the other one was on land use. Like the IPCC, the CCC sees lots more forests and energy crops as the way forward.

But there is a problem with all these ideas, namely that if they ever came to fruition, they would do great harm to the natural world.

The use of afforestation for carbon capture will necessarily involve chopping forests down on a regular basis and replanting with the fastest growing species; it’s fairly clear that few woods would be spared. The CCC talks obliquely about all the broadleaved woodlands in England that are not “actively managed” and appears to suggest that these could be sacrificed to Gaia. So forget beautiful, leafy oaks in Sherwood Forest and start thinking sitka spruce and willow monocultures.

It’s also worth remembering that, as well as wanting something like a quarter of the UK’s land area devoted to biofuels of one kind or another, the CCC makes the case for more wind turbines. They have apparently tried to obscure this inconvenient fact in their report by lumping windfarms and urban areas in a land category called ‘settlements’. But the worry is that up to 10,000 square kilometres of land – twice the area of the Cairngorms National Park – is potentially being earmarked as part of a wider rollout of wind industrialisation.

It’s fair to say that all this amounts to an ecological catastrophe in the planning. Yet there has not been a squeak from environmentalists in response.

Full post
 
6) BBC Finally Reports Flawed Climate Paper: ‘Concerns Over Report On Ocean Heating’
BBC News, 20 November 2018 
Matt McGrath

Errors have been found in a recent study suggesting the oceans were soaking up more heat than previously estimated.

The initial report suggested that the seas have absorbed 60% more than previously thought.

But a re-examination by a mathematician showed that the margin of error was larger than in the published study.

The authors have acknowledged the problem and have submitted a correction to the journal.

Full story
 
7) Matt Ridley: Why Is It So Cool To Be Gloomy?
The Wall Street Journal, 17 November 2018

The world is in better shape than most people think, but we’re more inclined to focus on bad news than good. Psychology can help explain why.

Has the percentage of the world population that lives in extreme poverty almost doubled, almost halved or stayed the same over the past 20 years? When the Swedish statistician and public health expert Hans Rosling began asking people that question in 2013, he was astounded by their responses. Only 5% of 1,005 Americans got the right answer: Extreme poverty has been cut almost in half. A chimpanzee would do much better, he pointed out mischievously, by picking an answer at random. So people are worse than ignorant: They believe they know many dire things about the world that are, in fact, untrue.

Before his untimely death last year, Rosling (with his son and daughter-in-law as co-authors) published a magnificent book arguing against such reflexive pessimism. Its title says it all: “Factfulness: Ten Reasons We’re Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think.” As the author of a book called “The Rational Optimist,” I’m happy to include myself in their platoon, which also includes writers such as Steven Pinker, Bjorn Lomborg, Michael Shermer and Gregg Easterbrook.

For us New Optimists, however, it’s an uphill battle. No matter how persuasive our evidence, we routinely encounter disbelief and even hostility, as if accentuating the positive was callous. People cling to pessimism about the state of the world. John Stuart Mill neatly summarized this tendency as far back as 1828: “I have observed that not the man who hopes when others despair, but the man who despairs when others hope, is admired by a large class of persons as a sage.” It’s cool to be gloomy.

Studies consistently find that people in developed societies tend to be pessimistic about their country and the world but optimistic about their own lives. They expect to earn more and to stay married longer than they generally do. The Eurobarometer survey finds that Europeans are almost twice as likely to expect their own economic prospects to get better in the coming year as to get worse, while at the same time being more likely to expect their countries’ prospects to get worse than to improve. The psychologist Martin Seligman of the University of Pennsylvania suggests a reason for this: We think we are in control of our own fortunes but not those of the wider society.

There are certainly many causes for concern in the world today, from terrorism to obesity to environmental problems, but the persistence of pessimism about the planet requires some explanation beyond the facts themselves. Herewith a few suggestions:

Bad news is more sudden than good news, which is usually gradual. Therefore bad news is more newsworthy. Battles, bombings, accidents, murders, storms, floods, scandals and disasters of all kinds tend to dominate the news. “If it bleeds, it leads,” as they used to say in the newspaper business. By contrast, the gradual reduction in poverty in the world rarely makes a sudden splash. As Rosling put it, “In the media the ‘newsworthy’ events exaggerate the unusual and put the focus on swift changes.”

Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer, but each one now receives vastly more coverage.

This is part of what psychologists call the “availability bias,” a quirk of human cognition first noticed by Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman in the 1970s. People vastly overestimate the frequency of crime, because crime disproportionately dominates the news. But random violence makes the news because it is rare, whereas routine kindness doesn’t make the news because it is so common.

Bad news usually matters; good news may not. In the prehistoric past, it made more sense to worry about risks—it might help you avoid getting killed by a lion—than to celebrate success. Perhaps this is why people have a “negativity bias.” In a 2014 paper, researchers at McGill University examined which news stories their subjects chose to read for what they thought was an eye-tracking experiment. It turns out that even when people say they want more good news, they are more interested in bad news: “Regardless of what participants say, they exhibit a preference for negative news content,” concluded the authors Mark Trussler and Stuart Soroka.

People think in relative not absolute terms. What matters is how well you are doing relative to other people, because that’s what determined success in the competition for resources (and mates) in the stone age. Being told that others are doing well is therefore a form of bad news. When circumstances get better, people take those improvements for granted and reset their expectations.

Such relativizing behavior affects even our most intimate relationships. An ingenious 2016 study by David Buss and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin found that “participants lower in mate value than their partners were generally satisfied regardless of the pool of potential mates; participants higher in mate value than their partners became increasingly dissatisfied with their relationships as better alternative partners became available.” Ouch.

As the world improves, people expand their definition of bad news. This recent finding by the Harvard psychologists David Levari and Daniel Gilbert, known as “prevalence-induced concept change,” suggests that the rarer something gets, the more broadly we redefine the concept. They found in an experiment that the rarer they made blue dots, the more likely people were to call purple dots “blue,” and the rarer they made threatening faces, the more likely people were to describe a face as threatening. “From low-level perception of color to higher-level judgments of ethics,” they write, “there is a robust tendency for perceptual and judgmental standards to ‘creep’ when they ought not to.”

Consider air travel: Plane crashes have been getting steadily scarcer—2017 was the first year with no commercial passenger plane crashes at all, despite four billion people in the air—but each one now receives vastly more coverage. Many people still consider planes a risky mode of transport.

We’re even capable of fretting about the bounty of prosperity, as “Weird Al” Yankovic highlights in his clever song, “First World Problems”: “The thread count on these cotton sheets has got me itching/My house is so big, I can’t get Wi-Fi in the kitchen.” Sheena Iyengar of Columbia Business School became a TED star for her research on the debilitating modern illness known as the “choice overload problem”—that is, being paralyzed by having to choose from among, say, the dozens of types of olive oil or jam on offer at the grocery store. North Koreans, Syrians, Congolese and Haitians generally have more important things to worry about.

Full post & comments

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.