GWPF Newsletter: Europe Split Over Its Own Green Deal As Germany Urges Prudence

2019 Global Temps Prediction: The Entries Are In

In this newsletter:

1) Europe Split Over Its Own Green Deal As Germany Urges Prudence
Bloomberg, 4 March 2019 
 
2) The Green New Deal Isn’t Going Anywhere Soon
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 5 March 2019 

 
3) 2019 Global Temps Prediction: The Entries Are In
Global Warming Policy Forum, 6 March 2019 
 
4) Global Coal Production Set To Grow To 2022, Despite Major Players Scaling Down Capacities
Green Car Congress, 6 March 2019 
 
5) Climate Science’s Myth-Buster
Guy Sorman, City Journal, Winter 2019
 
6) And Finally: Is This The End Of Recycling?
The Atlantic, 5 March 2019

Full details:

1) Europe Split Over Its Own Green Deal As Germany Urges Prudence
Bloomberg, 4 March 2019 

EU member states are split about how to cut greenhouse gases by 2050


Transport, Telecommunications and Energy Council, Press conference, 4 March 2019 Brussels
 
The opening round of talks over the next green deal in Europe highlighted differences between governments over the means and pace of transforming the continent’s economies to avoid catastrophic climate change.

Germany sounded caution as energy ministers from member states debated a proposal to aim for net-zero emissions from the bloc by the middle of the century.

Governments differed on issues including the pace of emissions cuts and the energy sources and technologies to rely upon, while many stressed the importance of preserving jobs and competitiveness.

“Germany wants to ensure that Europe remains a pioneer in the future and that we see climate strategy as a major opportunity for all countries,” Thomas Bareiss, a deputy economy and energy minister, told his counterparts at their meeting Monday in Brussels.

“Nonetheless, I think it’s important that we acknowledge the major challenges that we face and be responsible in that regard,” he added. “We must ensure growth and well-being for our citizens at the same time as an environmental transition.”

The 28-nation EU, responsible for 10 percent of global greenhouse-gas emissions, is planning ahead to give direction to national governments, companies and citizens in fighting global temperature increases. In the next step, EU environment ministers will discuss the blueprint for a transition to an emissions-neutral economy on Tuesday.

The strategy, drafted by the European Commission in November, is aimed at showing how determined the bloc is to honor the Paris climate accord’s targets, even in the face of President Donald Trump’s decision to take the U.S. out of the 2015 agreement signed by almost all other countries.

In his latest comments on climate, Trump said on Saturday that the so-called Green New Deal to phase out fossil fuels, championed by first-term Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, would “destroy American energy” and boost his 2020 campaign.

Even though Europe has been traditionally a more committed advocate of environmental protection than the U.S., Monday’s meeting in Brussels showed that governments don’t take the costs of transition lightly. The bloc must ensure that it also provides prosperity in order to be able to convince other partners in the world to follow suit, Bareiss said.

Full story
 
European Climate Seminar in Amsterdam -- 7 March

More information available here


 
2) The Green New Deal Isn’t Going Anywhere Soon
Michael Bastasch, The Daily Caller, 5 March 2019 

Senate Democrats are trying to shield themselves from voting on the Green New Deal. However, Republicans and environmentalists will make sure the Green New Deal sticks around through 2020.

“Both the GOP and Democrats will love to denounce and praise it,” said one political observer.

Democrats are trying to shake off the specter of the Green New Deal, but the sweeping climate change manifesto is unlikely to disappear from the public discourse anytime soon.

Environmental activists and Republicans will make sure of that.

“Get ready for the Green New Deal to be one of the biggest buzzwords in electoral politics in decades,” said Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot. “Both the GOP and Democrats will love to denounce and praise it.”

House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi dismissed the Green New Deal as the “green dream,”and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer laid out his plan to The New York Times to distract from the Green New Deal going on the “offensive” on climate change.

Schumer’s plan includes having Democratic Senators vote “present” on the Green New Deal, promoting a watered-down alternative resolution and weekly floor speeches on climate change.

“This is the first time Democrats have decided to go on offense on climate change,” Schumer told The Times in an interview published Monday.

Schumer’s ultimate goal is to make climate change a top issue in 2020, but will he be able to do it on his terms and avoid being tied to Democratic New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s radical plan? Not everyone thinks so.

“Once you issue a manifesto, and that is irreducibly what the Green New Deal is, it becomes a measuring stick for advocates, allies and opponents,” McKenna said. “You can’t negotiate over it, and you can’t abandon it. It is a burn the boats moment.”

For starters, Environmental activists, mainly with the Sunrise Movement, have been pressing Democratic lawmakers for months to support the Green New Deal. That mobilization is unlikely to disappear overnight.

“The environmental left has for decades been pushing central planning, wealth redistribution and limits to sovereignty as the ‘solution’ to a host of real and perceived environmental issues,” Morano told TheDCNF.

The Green New Deal resolution, introduced by Ocasio-Cortez and Democratic Massachusetts Senator Ed Markey in February, is only the latest iteration of that, Morano said.

Green New Deal supporters see it as the only real way to tackle climate change, dramatically shifting the U.S. economy to “net-zero” greenhouse gas emissions, organized around “social justice” concerns.

On top of that, a number of 2020 presidential hopefuls have embraced the Green New Deal, including Democratic Senators Cory Booker of New Jersey and Kamala Harris of California as well as Independent Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

That means, at the very least, the Green New Deal will likely be used as a talking point for Democrats in 2020, though they will likely keep it vague. Expect Republicans to constantly bring it up as well.

Full story
 
3) 2019 Global Temps Prediction: The Entries Are In
Global Warming Policy Forum, 6 March 2019 

The Met Office says it’s going to get warmer this year. GWPF readers reckon not.

Back in early February, we invited readers to submit their entries for our 2019 global temperature prediction competition. The GWPF posse had soundly beaten the Met Office in last year’s competition, and you certainly seemed encouraged by your success, as there were 250 entries this time round, more than double last year’s entry.

For 2019, the Met Office have once again pushed the boat out on their predictions, suggesting that we might see a temperature rise of 0.19°C by the year end.

As you can see from the graph below, GWPF readers are a lot more cautious. The graph is a histogram of the entries, so the height of each blue bar is the number of readers making a particular prediction, the temperatures being given in terms of anomalies from the 1961-1990 average. The most common prediction was therefore for a slight decline in temperature over the course of the year, down to to 0.55°C from last year’s 0.6°C. The Met Office prediction is the grey band – they have given a single value this time round, rather than the range given in previous years.

Interestingly, after a warm January the value of HadCRUT4 is 0.74°C after one month, so the Met Office’s 0.79°C prediction is currently looking pretty good. But will they have won back their position of preeminence by the end of the year? There’s a long way to go. It will be fun to see how the full year turns out.

Thank you for all your entries. And may the temperatures be ever in your favour.
 
4) Global Coal Production Set To Grow To 2022, Despite Major Players Scaling Down Capacities
Green Car Congress, 6 March 2019 

Although Germany, the UK, US, Canada and Ukraine are phasing out domestic coal production capacity, expansion of production capacity in countries such as India and Indonesia is predicted to generate modest annual growth of 1.3% in coal production over the next four years, with output reaching 7.6 billion tonnes in 2022, according to GlobalData, a leading data and analytics company.

Coal production in India, Indonesia and Australia is forecast to grow at respective compound annual growth rates (CAGRs) of 10.9%, 3.9%, and 2.3% between 2018 and 2022, with the high growth in India helping to reduce the country’s reliance on imports to feed its expanding coal-fired power generation.

After declining consecutively for three years, global coal production increased by 2.8% to 7,188.8 Mt in 2017 and then rose again by a marginal 0.1% to 7,194.1 Mt in 2018. Growth has been driven by India, Indonesia and Russia, where production increased by 3.1%, 1.2%, and 3.7% CAGR between 2014 and 2018, respectively.

Full story
 
5) Climate Science’s Myth-Buster
Guy Sorman, City Journal, Winter 2019

It’s time to be scientific about global warming, says climatologist Judith Curry.

We’ve all come across the images of polar bears drifting on ice floes: emblematic victims of the global warming that’s melting the polar ice caps, symbols of the threat to the earth posed by our ceaseless energy production—above all, the carbon dioxide that factories and automobiles emit. We hear louder and louder demands to impose limits, to change our wasteful ways, so as to save not only the bears but also the planet and ourselves.

In political discourse and in the media, major storms and floods typically get presented as signs of impending doom, accompanied by invocations to the environment and calls to respect Mother Nature. Only catastrophes seem to grab our attention, though, and it’s rarely mentioned that warming would also bring some benefits, such as expanded production of grains in previously frozen regions of Canada and Russia. Nor do we hear that people die more often of cold weather than of hot weather. Isolated voices criticize the alarm over global warming, considering it a pseudoscientific thesis, the true aim of which is to thwart economic modernization and free-market growth and to extend the power of states over individual choices.

Not being a climatologist myself, I’ve always had trouble deciding between these arguments. And then I met Judith Curry at her home in Reno, Nevada. Curry is a true climatologist. She once headed the department of earth and atmospheric sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, until she gave up on the academy so that she could express herself independently.

“Independence of mind and climatology have become incompatible,” she says. Do you mean that global warming isn’t real? I ask. “There is warming, but we don’t really understand its causes,” she says. “The human factor and carbon dioxide, in particular, contribute to warming, but how much is the subject of intense scientific debate.”

Curry is a scholar, not a pundit. Unlike many political and journalistic oracles, she never opines without proof. And she has data at her command. She tells me, for example, that between 1910 and 1940, the planet warmed during a climatic episode that resembles our own, down to the degree. The warming can’t be blamed on industry, she argues, because back then, most of the carbon-dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels were small. In fact, Curry says, “almost half of the warming observed in the twentieth century came about in the first half of the century, before carbon-dioxide emissions became large.”

Natural factors thus had to be the cause. None of the climate models used by scientists now working for the United Nations can explain this older trend. Nor can these models explain why the climate suddenly cooled between 1950 and 1970, giving rise to widespread warnings about the onset of a new ice age. I recall magazine covers of the late 1960s or early 1970s depicting the planet in the grip of an annihilating deep freeze. According to a group of scientists, we faced an apocalyptic environmental scenario—but the opposite of the current one.

But aren’t oceans rising today, I counter, eroding shorelines and threatening to flood lower-lying population centers and entire inhabited islands? “Yes,” Curry replies. “Sea level is rising, but this has been gradually happening since the 1860s; we don’t yet observe any significant acceleration of this process in our time.” Here again, one must consider the possibility that the causes for rising sea levels are partly or mostly natural, which isn’t surprising, says Curry, for “climate change is a complex and poorly understood phenomenon, with so many processes involved.” To blame human-emitted carbon dioxide entirely may not be scientific, she continues, but “some find it reassuring to believe that we have mastered the subject.” She says that “nothing upsets many scientists like uncertainty.”

Full post
 
6) And Finally: Is This The End Of Recycling?
The Atlantic, 5 March 2019

Americans are consuming more and more stuff. Now that other countries won’t take our papers and plastics, they’re ending up in the trash.

 

After decades of earnest public-information campaigns, Americans are finally recycling. Airports, malls, schools, and office buildings across the country have bins for plastic bottles and aluminum cans and newspapers. In some cities, you can be fined if inspectors discover that you haven’t recycled appropriately.

But now much of that carefully sorted recycling is ending up in the trash.

For decades, we were sending the bulk of our recycling to China—tons and tons of it, sent over on ships to be made into goods such as shoes and bags and new plastic products. But last year, the country restricted imports of certain recyclables, including mixed paper—magazines, office paper, junk mail—and most plastics. Waste-management companies across the country are telling towns, cities, and counties that there is no longer a market for their recycling. These municipalities have two choices: pay much higher rates to get rid of recycling, or throw it all away.

Most are choosing the latter. “We are doing our best to be environmentally responsible, but we can’t afford it,” said Judie Milner, the city manager of Franklin, New Hampshire.

Since 2010, Franklin has offered curbside recycling and encouraged residents to put paper, metal, and plastic in their green bins. When the program launched, Franklin could break even on recycling by selling it for $6 a ton.

Now, Milner told me, the transfer station is charging the town $125 a ton to recycle, or $68 a ton to incinerate. One-fifth of Franklin’s residents live below the poverty line, and the city government didn’t want to ask them to pay more to recycle, so all those carefully sorted bottles and cans are being burned. Milner hates knowing that Franklin is releasing toxins into the environment, but there’s not much she can do. “Plastic is just not one of the things we have a market for,” she said.

The same thing is happening across the country. Broadway, Virginia, had a recycling program for 22 years, but recently suspended it after Waste Management told the town that prices would increase by 63 percent, and then stopped offering recycling pickup as a service. “It almost feels illegal, to throw plastic bottles away,” the town manager, Kyle O’Brien, told me.

Without a market for mixed paper, bales of the stuff started to pile up in Blaine County, Idaho; the county eventually stopped collecting it and took the 35 bales it had hoped to recycle to a landfill. The town of Fort Edward, New York, suspended its recycling program in July and admitted it had actually been taking recycling to an incinerator for months. Determined to hold out until the market turns around, the nonprofit Keep Northern Illinois Beautiful has collected 400,000 tons of plastic. But for now, it is piling the bales behind the facility where it collects plastic.

This end of recycling comes at a time when the United States is creating more waste than ever.

Full story

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.