Climate War Splits German Government As Climate Law Is Postponed Indefinitely
In this newsletter:
1) Top German MP Warns Of ‘Dictatorship Of Climate Law’
Deutschlandfunk, 23 February 2019
2) Climate War Splits German Government As Climate Law Is Postponed Indefinitely
Andreas Mihm, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 February 2019
3) German Christian Democrats Reject New Climate Change Law
Deutschlandfunk, 16 February 2019
4) EU Commission Accused Of £5bn Miscalculation Over Renewable Energy Subsidies
Energy Voice, 22 February 2019
5) Disastrously Wrong: The BBC’s Disaster Scare Story
Paul Homewood, Conservative Woman, 22 February 2019
6) Peter Foster: Bill Gates, Defying The Climate Barons, Tells The Ugly Truth About Renewables
Financial Post, 22 February 2019
7) Opportunity to Reverse Disastrous Climate Policies at World Bank
The American Spectator, 20 February 2019
Full details:
1) Top German MP Warns Of ‘Dictatorship Of Climate Law’
Deutschlandfunk, 23 February 2019
Legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions for individual German ministries are a danger to democracy, says the Christian Democrat MP Andreas Lämmel. He is warning of a “dictatorship of climate law”.
Christian Democrat MP Andreas Lämmel is the CDU chairman of the Economics Committee in the German Bundestag
Sarah Zerback (Deutschlandfunk): The Environment Minister is responsible for climate protection, but not for traffic, industry, power plants and buildings that emit greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And so it is already clear why the planned Climate Protection Act is currently causing a spat in the coalition government. That’s because with her law Svenja Schulze, the environment minister, wants to call her ministerial colleagues to account, with strict guidelines. Strong criticism comes primarily from the Christian Democratic Party. We can now talk about it with Andreas Lämmel. He is the CDU chairman of the parliamentary Economics Committee. Are the climate protection plans of your party too ambitious?
Andreas Lämmel: The climate goals that we have set ourselves together with our coalition partners can be reached. The only question is how to get there.
Zerback: Yes, the Federal Environment Minister has now published the draft of a Climate Change Act.
Lämmel: Yes, she has come up with a bill that, in my view, is completely unsuitable for solving this problem. You know we have overcome the dictatorship of the proletariat here in East Germany, and now we are facing a dictatorship of the climate law. I do not consider this law to be compatible with a market economy.
Zerback: What exactly of Schulze’s bill reminds you of the former [socialist] Germany Democratic Republic?
Lämmel: If I just look at the fixed allocation of targets for the six sectors. The bill includes a plan and fixed annual numbers of what every sector has to deliver every year. I remember the current discussion about diesel cars. This problem we now have was caused five years ago because of certain targets that were set and written into law but which no one can actually explain. Likewise, no one can explain how to achieve these sector targets or where those annual numbers come from.
Zerback: As I understand the minister it’s not that she allocates any specific targets, but that each department will have to set its own targets. What speaks against the idea of holding ministers to account?
Lämmel: First of all, there’s nothing wrong with that, because the ministers are in any case already responsible for achieving their climate goals. But now we are slowly entering a Republic of Committees and Councils. A new council would be set up to monitor practically the entire economy. Secondly, I ask myself what basic democratic understanding Frau Schulze actually has. After all, if the annual targets are not reached, an emergency programme would be launched, so to speak, without the participation of Parliament, which should then be implemented by the respective ministries on their own accord. And the Federal Council would be completely excluded by law. So I really wonder what basic understanding the environment minister demonstrates here.
Zerback: But if the individual departments do not deliver, then what speaks against forcing them, it is clearly their responsibility, climate protection is expensive and is getting more expensive, if the agreed targets are not achieved?
Lämmel: If the goals are not achieved there must be reasons why they are not achieved. And to lead a discussion by simply writing prescriptions into a law that may not be achievable on a year-by-year basis, that’s a complete political nonsense from the outset, I have to say.
Full interview
See also German Industry Fears Eco-Dictatorship
2) Climate War Splits German Government As Climate Law Is Postponed Indefinitely
Andreas Mihm, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 19 February 2019
Climate policy is increasingly splitting German’s coalition government of Christian Democrats (CDU/CSU) and Social Democrats (SPD)
The commission agreed in the government contract for the energy-efficient renovation of buildings has been cancelled, the traffic commission argues not only over speed limits.
Although the “coal commission” has presented a plan for a coal exit by 2038, the devil is in the detail with which the Bundestag has yet to deal. The coal exit was supposed to be part of a comprehensive climate law. But if and when that comes no one knows.
That’s because the coalition committee has actually stopped the far advanced legislative project of Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze (SPD), according to the government. In the meantime, environmental State Secretary Jochen Flasbarth (SPD) is tweeting motivational slogans: “Of course, we will implement the coalition agreement on climate change exactly. This includes a climate protection law that will ensure that we achieve the 2030 climate protection goals. “
There is significant displeasure among Christian Democrats about Schulze’s plan for a “Climate Protection Act” according to which all ministries would be responsible for achieving legally binding reduction targets. The deputy chairman of the parliamentary Union faction Georg Nüßlein (CSU) accused Schulze of violating the coalition agreement.
At the same time Nüßlein expressed concern that the Social Democratic Pary (SPD) wanted to “create a breaking point for the coalition”. But not only environmental politicians like Nüßlein are contradictory. […]
At the annual reception of the German Renewable Energy Association, the new State Secretary for Energy Andreas Feicht finished the brouhaha with one sentence: “There will be no decision of the Federal Government on this issue in this legislative period.”
Full story (in German)
3) German Christian Democrats Reject New Climate Change Law
Deutschlandfunk, 16 February 2019
Germany’s Christian Democrats are moving away from the climate change bill agreed by the coalition government, at least for the time being. The reason: “The exit from coal is ambitious enough.” CDU and CSU reject any additional CO2 reductions, as demanded by the left-wing Social Democrats (SPD).
Basic pension, asylum, tax policy – these are the issues flying like ping pong balls through the Berlin government district these days. But what about climate change? The leaders of the Christian Democratic Union and the Social Democratic Party (SPD) also discussed this issue during the coalition committee meeting this week. On Wednesday evening, however, clear resistance formed about the proposed new climate protection law, especially among CDU and CSU members of parliament.
Step on the brake
This is all too fast for us, explains Georg Nüßlein, the vice-chairman of the Christian Democrat’s parliamentary party. First, the federal government should now focus on the coal exit as there is hardly any money left for further climate protection measures, according to the CSU politician.
Full story (in German)
4) EU Commission Accused Of £5bn Miscalculation Over Renewable Energy Subsidies
Energy Voice, 22 February 2019
The EU Commission has been accused of a gross miscalculation over its final renewable energy subsidies bill.
John Constable of the Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) claims the EU Commission climate policy report contains a “substantive error”, miscalculating the cost of annual levies on UK consumers by £4.8 billion.
He said the initial bill claimed subsidies would be £1.3bn, when the correct figure is closer to £6.1bn.
Mr Constable also received a confirmation from the commission that the error would be rectified.
A spokesman for the EU Commission said: “You are correct that the largest part of the other subsidies was from the Renewables Obligation and that these were not allocated to ‘financed by end users’ as they should have been.
“Thank you for spotting this error, we are correcting the figures and expect a revised report to be online soon.”
Mr Constable said the miscalculation will have “consequences for all sections” of the report’s overall findings and estimates.
He said: “The study is an important and major statement on the economic consequences of the EU’s energy and climate policies, and it is crucial that such work is as accurate as possible.”
Full post
GWPF Finds Major Error In EU Energy Study
5) Disastrously Wrong: The BBC’s Disaster Scare Story
Paul Homewood, Conservative Woman, 22 February 2019
Will the BBC rule against Roger Harrabin’s fatally flawed report?
The BBC gave prominent coverage last week to a propaganda report from the Left-wing think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR). It was called ‘This is a crisis: Facing up to the age of environmental breakdown’.
Although the report covered the full range of environmental issues, such as deforestation and loss of species, the BBC made great play of one particular claim made by the IPPR:
‘Since 2005, the number of floods across the world has increased by 15 times, extreme temperature events by 20 times, and wildfires seven-fold.’
Within a few hours, the BBC, and interestingly the IPPR, altered the statement to ‘since 1950’, blaming it on a typo! Nevertheless, independent observers realised straightaway that the claim was simply absurd either way. So on what had the IPPR based their claim?
A quick check of their paper showed that they had used the EM-DAT, the international disasters database maintained by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED). According to CRED, they have been publishing statistics on disasters annually only since 1998. Before that, many disasters went unrecorded by them, as they themselves admit:
They now register even very small disasters, for instance where ten people are killed, or 100 affected. Those logged this week include a fire on two boats and a crash between a truck and a bus!
For the years preceding the systematic collection of data in 1998, CRED have had to rely on archives to build up their database.
It is plainly absurd to think that they would have identified every tiny event which had happened in earlier decades. Indeed, CRED warned against looking for long-term trends in their data in 2004…
All of this information is readily available on the CRED website, so why did the IPPR not bother to check it out?
It turns out that their information came from a report by a certain Jeremy Grantham, who made exactly the same claim, eagerly parroted by the BBC. And, as you might have guessed, this is the same Jeremy Grantham, the billionaire hedge fund manager who bankrolls the Grantham Institute, set up to promote global warming alarmism.
It puts the Grantham Institute in a very poor light, that such a shoddy piece of work was ever published by their founder. I await the vexatious Bob Ward complaining to the BBC about their repeating such an obviously fake claim. But I suspect I will be waiting a long time, given that he works for the aforementioned Jeremy!
As for the IPPR, one would expect little more from a Leftie political think tank.
The real culprit here is Roger Harrabin, who wrote the original news story. The claim was so obviously false that he, at the very least, should have challenged the IPPR on it.
After all, even the IPCC have never managed to find any evidence that extreme weather events such as these described have got any worse.
Is he so wrapped up in his climate change agenda that he believed the claims were credible? Or was he just too lazy to check, happy that it gave him a good story?
Full post
6) Peter Foster: Bill Gates, Defying The Climate Barons, Tells The Ugly Truth About Renewables
Financial Post, 22 February 2019
Forcing the adoption of expensive and unreliable energy destroys jobs (see Alberta) and exacerbates poverty in poor countries
Market advocates have always claimed that policy advice from business should be treated with suspicion. The road to economic and political hell is paved with corporate welfare and national champions (SNC-Lavalin anyone?). Communists and the “progressive” left were much more harsh, claiming that since big business sought only monopoly and plutocracy, the state at least required “countervailing” power, if not absolute power. Since command of economic resources was deemed synonymous with political power, some of the greatest businessmen and philanthropists all time — such as John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie and Cornelius Vanderbilt — were reflexively dubbed “Robber Barons.”
A remarkable change has come over the view of the left in recent decades. With the collapse of socialism (in fact, if not in theory), big business was no longer an automatic enemy. Indeed it was to be co-opted as a partner in “social responsibility” and “sustainable development.” Some of the world’s wealthiest business people eagerly sought to start knitting the rope of Global Salvationism.
The bizarro modern counterparts of the Robber Barons might be called the Climate Barons, those billionaires and capitalist foundations that seek to kill the fossil-fuelled industrial age in order to save mankind from manmade environmental catastrophe.
While America’s Koch brothers are ritually condemned as funding “denialism,” a far more substantial group is supporting NGO thuggery and misinformation, promoting lawsuits and other pressure tactics to euthanize fossil fuels. They also seek to hide the huge economic and social costs of the allegedly essential “transition to a low-carbon economy.”
This group includes U.S. billionaires Tom Steyer and Michael Bloomberg and the British hedge-fund billionaires Jeremy Grantham and Chris Hohn. It includes a raft of multi-billion-dollar foundations bearing names such as Rockefeller, Hewlett and Packard.
The Climate Barons present themselves as promoters of “Climate Philanthropy,” but insofar as their promised low-carbon transition involves forcing the adoption of expensive and unreliable energy, they are both responsible for destroying jobs (Alberta being perhaps the most prominent victim), and exacerbating poverty in poor countries. Their activities might more accurately be described as Climate Malanthropy.
Here’s the good news: Bill Gates, the world’s most prominent philanthropist, has broken ranks. Although the Microsoft co-founder still outsources his thinking on catastrophist science, he has acknowledged that intermittent renewables are the last thing to be forced on poor countries. He has also castigated the Climate Barons’ strategy of killing fossil fuels via financial pressure.
During a recent onstage Q&A at Stanford University, when interviewer Arun Majumdar, a “Google Scholar,” suggested breezily that people were “optimistic” that the costs of renewables and battery storage were coming down, Gates got visibly agitated. “That is so disappointing,” he said, tearing into the misplaced priorities of such feeble optimism. While he supported nuclear, he said battery technology was woefully deficient and renewables needed “a miracle.” They certainly weren’t the solution for India or Africa right now.
Gates revealed that he had recently been at a New York conference of financiers backing the fashionable demand of “climate disclosure,” whereby corporations are required to offer up highly unlikely climate-risk scenarios so as to unnecessarily worry investors and increase their cost of capital. Gates claimed that the idea that finance or investor pressure could provide a solution was “madness.” So was, he said, the demonization of electrical utilities. And in this low-carbon transition, he asked, where would steel and plastic come from? What would power the airplanes?
Most dramatically, he claimed that those who suggested that the climate problem was easy to solve were a bigger problem than the climate deniers are.
It is intriguing to compare the Gates interview with another video, made around the same time, in which Majumdar also appears. It was touted as a “Giving Pledge Learning Session” designed to boost “Climate Philanthropy.” One especially intriguing aspect was that Gates and his wife founded the Giving Pledge, in the vain hope of convincing people billionaires aren’t evil. This video suggests that some just might be.
The video features hedge-fund billionaire Jeremy Grantham, who has established several climate foundations that spread alarmism and seek to silence deniers. The chair of Grantham’s main climate foundation is Lord Nicholas Stern, author of 2006’s outrageously perverted Stern Review (officially titled: The Economics of Climate Change). Grantham also employs Bob Ward, perhaps the U.K.’s main attack dog when it comes to trying to silence media skepticism.
“Everybody needs to be in on this (transition)” said Grantham. Meaning everyone needs to agree with him.
Another Climate Baron making an appearance was Julie Packard, vice-chairman of the David and Lucile Packard Foundation, which has committed US$1 billion to climate over the past 10 years. And there was Larry Kramer, head of the Hewlett Foundation, which has also devoted massive amounts to the climate-alarm crusade.
Full post
7) Opportunity to Reverse Disastrous Climate Policies at World Bank
The American Spectator, 20 February 2019
Bonner R Cohen
With World Bank President Jim Yong Kim stepping down effective February 1, President Trump’s chosen successor, David Malpass, should waste no time in shifting the powerful multilateral lender’s focus from combating climate change to providing the world’s poorest countries with access to reliable and affordable energy.
Malpass, currently undersecretary of Treasury for international affairs, is a longtime critic of the World Bank.
It was under Kim’s leadership that the World Bank announced in 2013 that it would no longer finance coal-fired power plants in developing countries but instead would look favorably on electrification projects employing renewable energy. Appointed to head the bank by President Obama the previous year, Kim enthusiastically embraced Obama’s anti-fossil fuel policies and carried them into the sphere of international lending.
Supported by a nearly $400 billion balance sheet, the bank, by denying funds to energy projects it deems at odds with “acceptable” climate goals, is in a position to do great harm. And by pushing intermittent wind and solar power in underdeveloped countries, it is doing just that.
In a 2017 report for the London-based Global Warming Policy Foundation, international investment analyst Rupert Darwall wrote that the World Bank was guilty of “an inhumane and senseless attempt to try and save the planet on the backs of the world’s poor.” He called on the bank to abandon “its damaging advocacy of renewable energy for countries that can ill afford the costs and risks of flawed technologies that rich countries have yet to solve.”
This is where Trump and Malpass come in. Trump has already broken with the global green establishment by pulling the U.S. out of the Paris climate accord and pledged to marshal America’s abundant resources of oil, coal, and natural gas to achieve “global energy dominance.”
Now, it’s time to take that agenda to the World Bank, where, by tradition, its head is an American citizen chosen by the U.S. president, subject to the approval of the bank’s board of executive directors.
Conveniently, the bank’s posh headquarters is a couple of blocks from the White House.
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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.
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