GWPF Newsletter: Climate Sceptical Party Is Biggest Winner In Dutch Elections

Summit Leak Reveals EU Rift On Climate Change As Germany Joins East Block

In this newsletter:

1) Climate Sceptical Party Is The Big Winner In Dutch Elections
Dutch News, 21 March 2019

2) Summit Leak Reveals EU Rift On Climate Change As Germany Joins East Block
EurActiv, 21 March 2019


3) Green Energy Transition Is Destroying Germany's Competitiveness, CEO Warns
ICIS News, 19 March 2019

4) U.S. Sceptics See New Chance For Climate Science Review Team
Nick Sobczyk, E&E News, 20 March 2019
 
5) A New Book With Unexpected Good News About Polar Bears
Fabius Maximus, 21 March 2019

6) Glenn Beck Podcast With Susan Crockford Talking About Polar Bear Numbers
Polar Bear Science, 20 March 2019

7) The Rise Of Unfreedom In The West
Andrew A. Michta, The American Interest, 20 March 2019

Full details:

1) Climate Sceptical Party Is The Big Winner In Dutch Elections
Dutch News, 21 March 2019

With most of the votes counted in Wednesday’s provincial elections, Thierry Baudet’s right-wing nationalist and climate sceptical Forum voor Democratie (FvD) appears to have won most votes, is the biggest party and will take 13 seats in the senate in May.

Forum, which is pro Nexit and does not believe in climate change, campaigned on national issues and did not draw up policies for any of the 12 provinces it will now be represented in.

‘Arrogance and stupidity has been punished,’ Baudet said in his victory speech. ‘We are being ruined by the people who should be protecting us,’ he said.

‘We are being undermined by universities and journalists, by the people who design our buildings.’

The four coalition parties will now control 31 of the 75 seats in the senate and will need the support of a fifth party to pass controversial legislation. Forum, Labour and Groenlinks, which almost doubled its support, could all fulfill that role.

Big losers of the night were Geert Wilders’ anti-immigration PVV which is on target to lose four of its nine senate seats, and the Socialists which will sink from nine to four.

Turnout was up sharply on the last provincial vote, with some 56% of people casting their vote. It was highest (60%) in Zeeland and Utrecht.

Preliminary results

VVD from 13 to12 seats
Forum voor Democratie from 0 to 13 seats
CDA from 12 to 9 seats
GroenLinks from 4 to 9 seats
PvdA from 8 to 7 seats
D66 from 10 to 6 seats
PVV from 9 to 5 seats
ChristenUnie from 3 to 4 seats
SP from 9 to 4 seats
Partij voor de Dieren from 2 to 3 seats
50PLUS unchanged at 2
SGP from 2 to 1
DENK none
OSF (independent, local parties) none

Read more at DutchNews.nl

see also GWPF coverage of Dutch climate policy developments

2) Summit Leak Reveals EU Rift On Climate Change As Germany Joins East Block
EurActiv, 21 March 2019

Confidential documents prepared in advance of a two-day EU summit in Brussels have exposed an East-West divide in Europe on climate change, with Germany siding with Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in their refusal to commit to climate neutrality by 2050.

The leaked documents, seen by EURACTIV, show the amendments proposed by each country in preparation for the final statement of the leaders summit that opens in Brussels on Thursday (21 March).

And when it comes to climate action, the papers reveal a growing rift between two distinct groups of countries.

On the one hand, France, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Spain, Portugal, Finland, Sweden and Denmark have all backed a European Commission plan to decarbonise the EU by 2050, linking it specifically to the Paris Agreement objective of keeping global warming below 1.5°C.

A French proposal, for instance, underlines that Europe should strive for climate neutrality “by 2050, in line with the 1.5 degree objective of the Paris Agreement”.

It then calls on EU member states “to prepare a discussion in the European Council in June to define the announcements of the EU at the September Climate Summit in New York”. Both amendments were rejected in the final draft.

On the other hand, Germany, Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic have refused to specifically link EU climate action with the 1.5°C objective. They also oppose any time-bound commitment to the EU’s climate neutrality objective, deleting any reference to 2050 for reaching that goal.

“When it comes to climate change, there is clearly a growing rift between Germany and Poland on one side, and France and other governments on the other,” said Sebastian Mang, EU climate policy adviser at Greenpeace, the environmental organisation.

“Germany is attempting to hold back efforts by France and several European governments for the EU to achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050,” Mang told EURACTIV.

The European Commission tabled 2050 scenarios for climate action last year, urging EU member states to back proposals to bring carbon emissions down to net-zero by 2050.

“I will without a doubt maintain that the aim of the EU should be to achieve climate neutrality by 2050. There is no way around it,” said Miguel Arias Cañete, the EU Commissioner for climate action and energy.

Full post & leaked EU summit statement

3) Green Energy Transition Is Destroying Germany's Competitiveness, CEO Warns
ICIS News, 19 March 2019

MUNICH, Germany (ICIS)–The increasing operational costs arising from Germany’s transition away from nuclear and coal energy could lead to upheavals in German industry “that no one can or want to imagine”, according to Wacker Chemie CEO Rudolf Staudigl said on Tuesday.

The Germany-headquartered specialty chemicals producer reported a year-on-year fall in net income for 2018 and projected significantly weaker profits in 2019, driven in part by higher domestic energy costs.

“The electricity costs borne by energy-intensive industries in this country must not climb any further,” he said, speaking at the company’s headquarters in Munich, Germany.

“Otherwise it will be impossible to produce anything in Germany at an internationally-competitive level,” he added.

Germany has been a vocal advocate for improved environmental standards and a focus on clean energy and emissions-reduction in Europe as part of a bid to limit the impact of climate change.

Staudigl described the measures taken as part of the country’s Energiewende strategy as “over-zealous”, claiming that Germany’s desire to be a global emblem for responsible energy policy, coupled with the move to phase out nuclear power in the wake of the Fukushima tragedy, is weighing on industry.

“A false notion of being a trailblazer will lead us astray,” he said.

“In Germany we had a committee for switching off nuclear power and for shutting down coal-fired plants but no committee on how this lack of energy can be replaced,” he added.

Not as much attention has been paid for how the energy loss from the shutdowns will be managed and energy saving measures are continually eroded by the increases in costs, he added, noting that energy and raw materials costs rose €160m in 2018.

“We have done so much already to save energy – the chemicals industry produces 70% more with 14% less energy … We will save ourselves to death if we are not able to make up for this [shortfall] of energy,” he added.

If industry does decline in Germany, the resources for climate change mitigation and energy reduction will also fall, he added.

“Germany’s strong industrial base is the key to ensuring our prosperity and jobs, and without prosperity and jobs, we cannot finance energy transition and climate protection,” Staudigl said.

Full story

4) U.S. Sceptics See New Chance For Climate Science Review Team
Nick Sobczyk, E&E News, 20 March 2019

Skeptics of man-made climate change hope the Trump administration’s “adversarial” science review revives the “red-team, blue-team” debate once embraced by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.



Pruitt’s effort, which proposed a military-style debate of research showing greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, was scuttled by former presidential chief of staff John Kelly.

But with a catalog of new faces in the White House, skeptics might have better luck with the “adversarial” review, to be led by Princeton University physics professor William Happer, who is not trained in climate science but questions the mainstream consensus.

Mick Mulvaney has replaced Kelly. Mike Pompeo has replaced Rex Tillerson — formerly one of the administration’s few climate science believers — as secretary of State. John Bolton has stepped in for H.R. McMaster as national security adviser.

All of that churn has made for “a much more favorable environment” for skeptics, said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute and the former head of President Trump’s EPA transition team.

Their position is also bolstered by a series of Trump tweets in recent weeks advocating false and skeptical views of climate science.

“The committee that Will Happer is putting together will provide an analysis and a critical review — an adversarial review — but that won’t be the end of it,” Ebell said. “Obviously, that will be the beginning of a dialogue between the adversarial reviewers and the climate consensus, or the official science body.”

The White House is weighing a review of the science behind the National Climate Assessment, focused on security risks from climate change.

The report, which found climate change is already affecting the U.S. economy and national security, draws on the work of hundreds of scientists and went through an extensive peer review and public comment process.

‘Distinguished experts’

Dozens of military leaders have come out against the White House plans, calling them a political attempt to undermine science and a widespread consensus in the national security community that climate change multiplies threats around the world (E&E News PM, March 5).

But Ebell and a long list of administration backers sent a letter to the White House yesterday supporting the review.

They suggest a continued debate of climate science once Happer’s review is over, mirroring the proposed “red-team, blue-team” debate, much maligned by scientists and various Trump administration critics.

“Although an independent commission of distinguished scientists would have high credibility, we do not mean to imply that its report should be the end of the matter,” they wrote. “We therefore suggest that the National Academies of Science and Engineering would be appropriate bodies to conduct an initial review of the commission’s report.”

They also suggest that Happer’s panel would be populated by “distinguished experts” and subject to transparency requirements under the Federal Advisory Committees Act, but it’s not entirely clear yet how the group would be constituted.

Full story
5) A New Book With Unexpected Good News About Polar Bears
Fabius Maximus, 21 March 2019
Larry Kummer

Summary: This is a fascinating book about science, about the making of public policy, about climate change, and above all – about nature. They all intersect in the debate about the future of polar bears.

The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.
By Susan Crockford (2019).



Zoologist Crockford crispy tells the history of the rise and fall of polar bears as climate change icons. It is an engrossing story of a small niche group of dedicated biologists, the apex predator of the polar regions, and the American public.

“Researchers have learned a lot over the last two decades about bears’ ability to thrive in the Arctic and to take dramatic changes in that hostile environment in their stride – in particular changes in sea ice levels. Unfortunately, that understanding came too late to prevent the polar bear becoming listed as a species threatened with extinction because of future climate changes. …

“Stirling’s paper therefore came at just the right time. Apparently showing a link between manmade global warming and harm to a charismatic beast like the polar bear, it became the basis of a frenzy of global warming agitation. Soon the polar bear had been hoisted to the top of the climate change flagpole, making it the most easily-recognizable symbol of all that mankind was doing wrong in the world. …

“It is a story of scientific hubris and of scientific failure, of researchers staking their careers on untested computer simulations and the attempts to obfuscate inconvenient facts. Polar bear scientists were responsible for elevating the polar bear to climate change icon status in the first place, actively promoting the idea of a catastrophic future due to man-made global warming. The failure of their predictions has resulted in a loss of public trust that they entirely deserve.”

Crockford documents in this tiny scientific community the same behaviors that have become common in climate science, and helped catapult it to fame – and prominence in global public policy debates. Perhaps these dynamics form a contagion that is spreading through the sciences?

Natural and non-climate anthropogenic factors are downplayed or outright ignored. For example, polar bear papers ignore the slaughter of polar bears by whalers and other hunters in the 19th and early 20th century (much like Jared Diamond’s theory of eco-cide on Easter Island ignored disease and predication by slavers).

Effects are attributed to anthropogenic factors before natural variation is explained.

Key aspects of the new paradigm are often based on the expert judgement of activist scientists, but its results are presented to the public as equivalent to Newton’s Law of Gravity.

Bold confident predictions are presented as a basis for public policy action before their underlying models are validated.

Worst of all, the new paradigm is defended by unprofessional methods against new data and insights (e.g., see the largely bogus attack on her and her work in Harvey et al. (Bioscience, 2017).

Crockford tells a story of science’s weakness and strength. The weakness comes when a small community of scientists adopts a paradigm that boosts their careers. Replication and peer-review might not work well under these conditions. Especially when powerful political interests support the paradigm for their own gain. Under these conditions the paradigm can be defended despite large body of contrary evidence. This is example of the replication crisis gripping so many areas of science.

Full book review

6) Glenn Beck Podcast With Susan Crockford Talking About Polar Bear Numbers
Polar Bear Science, 20 March 2019

Yesterday (19 March 2019) I joined talk show host Glenn Beck to discuss polar bear numbers and my new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened.

Here is their edited podcast of it that was posted on YouTube (about 4:30 minutes)
 
7) The Rise Of Unfreedom In The West
Andrew A. Michta, The American Interest, 20 March 2019

With freedom of speech under assault, the West, both as a polity and as a distinct cultural inheritance, is in the throes of a fundamental battle for the survival of its democratic traditions. It is time for all of us to stand up for liberty. And to do so out loud.

It’s time to call it: Democracies across the West are at an inflection point on free speech, and it’s not clear which way things will go on this issue in the next 20 or 30 years.

In some cases, ostensibly liberal governments have already made moves to police and suppress what they deem unacceptable speech; in others, rigid political binaries have threatened to crowd out traditions of free inquiry and debate. All too often, it seems not to matter what is said in an argument but rather who says it and how it was said.

Superseding this once-proud tradition of free speech, empiricism, and free inquiry is calculating, cautious, self-censoring phraseology. And when people do express unorthodox views, it is often in hushed tones, out of fear that an overheard comment could kill their career and get them ostracized from polite society.

A December 2018 Rasmussen Reports poll found that today only 26 percent of American adults believe they have true freedom of speech, while 68 percent think they have to be careful not to say something politically incorrect to avoid getting in trouble. In 1990 there were approximately 75 “hate speech” codes in place at U.S. colleges and universities; just one year later the number had swelled to more than 300 before spreading like a brushfire thereafter.

According to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) in 2018, 90 percent of American universities maintain at least one policy that either restricts protected speech or could easily be interpreted as doing so. Meanwhile in Europe, Germany unveiled in 2017 a new law, known locally as NetzDG, which included massive fines for social media networks that are insufficiently diligent in policing “hate speech” on their platforms.

In 2018 Paris followed Berlin’s lead by toughening its laws on “hate speech” on social media. The same year a YouGov poll in the United Kingdom found that significantly more British voters (48 percent vs. 35 percent) believed that there were “many important issues these days where people are not allowed to say what they think.”

Last but not least, a 2019 report to the Council of Europe concluded that European press freedom was more fragile today than at any time since the end of the Cold War, given the rise of attacks on and intimidation of journalists. In short, the abridgement of this most fundamental democratic freedom to speak one’s mind appears to have become the norm across the West, as though our elites and governments were rushing headlong down the road to a new dystopia. How did we get here?

For decades now, the freedom to speak and argue—the most fundamental right of a free people—has been under assault by neo-Marxist advocates of a “more just society.” But it is only recently that their efforts have succeeded in shutting down an ever-widening range of venues of public debate: first in academia, then in the media, and of late in politics. Today the fundamental right to free speech is under threat not just from speech codes—that is, from proscriptions on what cannot be said—but also increasingly from prescriptive rules about what one must say, as though perfunctory condemnations of Western history were the price of admission to public debate.

Why are societies in Europe and America seemingly intent on suppressing the fundamentally democratic impulses to speak freely, to err, to debate, and even to offend so that, through it all, we might come to learn what passes the common sense test and possibly arrive at a larger national consensus on policy?

When did ideological allegiance (liberal vs. illiberal) become a litmus test for what constitutes appropriate public discourse? And how did we get to the point where political expressions of concern for the economic and social welfare of the nation’s own is “xenophobia,” and where the only praiseworthy use of American power is to unconditionally embrace globalization or save the planet by signing onto high-minded but ultimately unenforceable declarations of virtuous intent?

Why is it that in Europe today the traditional generosity of its people is all but taken for granted, while that same citizenry’s desire to ensure its own welfare and security, and to transmit its cultural inheritance to the next generation, is often reviled as intolerance by the intelligentsia, politicians, and the media?

The roots of our growing unfreedom were planted in the late 1960s, but only today can we truly appreciate the extent to which the ideas of that era deconstructed our democratic culture. This latest neo-Marxist lurch toward unfreedom happened in the span of a single generation, the result of a cultural unmooring during which conservatives seem to have lost their sense of caution, and liberals their collective mind.

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.