GWPF Newsletter: Climate Alarm May Help German Communists To Power

Radicalised By Climate Hysteria, Germany's Youth Wake Up To Their Political Power

In this newsletter:

1) Climate Alarm May Help German Communists To Power, CDU Leader Warns
Associated Press, 9 June 2019 
 
2) Germany's Greens Oust Merkel's Christian Democrats As Most Popular Party
The Daily Telegraph, 9 June 2019 

 
3) Radicalised By Climate Hysteria, Germany's Youth Wake Up To Their Political Power
Deutsche Welle, 8 June 2019

4) Climate Change Policies Threaten Millions Of Car Workers Worldwide
The New York Times, 6 June 2019
 
5) UK Households Conned About ‘Green Energy’
The Times, 10 June 2019 
 
6) Ross Mckitrick: This Scientist Proved Climate Change Isn’t Causing Extreme Weather — So Politicians Attacked
Financial Post, 7 June 2019
 
7) And Finally: Climate Change -- What Can’t It Do?
John Hinderacker, PowerLine, 8 June 2019

Full details:

1) Climate Alarm May Help German Communists To Power, CDU Leader Warns
Associated Press, 9 June 2019 

The leader of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s center-right party warned Sunday that Germans risk ending up with a very left-wing government if they vote for the Greens, who surged in last month’s European Parliament election and are now level with or ahead of Merkel’s Union bloc in several polls.

The Greens traditionally leaned left but in recent years have formed regional coalitions with Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union in several states. Last week, however, they rejected the chance to do so in Germany’s smallest state, Bremen, and opted for a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats and the hard-left Left Party [which is the descendant of the SED party that ruled East Germany’s communist dictatorship for 40 years].

CDU leader Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer told the Bild am Sonntag newspaper that events in Bremen show that “people who dream of a new government and vote Green must know that they could wake up with the Left Party.”

Merkel’s Union bloc currently runs Germany in a “grand coalition” of what were traditionally Germany’s biggest parties with the Social Democrats. But in the May 26 European vote, both partners had their worst showing in a nationwide election since World War II, and the Greens overtook the Social Democrats to finish second behind the Union — fueled by concern that other parties aren’t doing enough about climate change.

The election battering triggered the resignation of the Social Democrats’ leader and reignited speculation that the governing coalition could collapse within months, likely resulting in an early national election. It’s unclear what coalitions would then be possible, but likely that the Greens might be needed to form one.

Merkel has said she won’t seek another term, and Kramp-Karrenbauer has had a bumpy start since succeeding her as party leader in December. Polls since the European election have shown the Greens surging further and party co-leader Robert Habeck’s popularity rising.

Asked about the Greens’ climate policy, Kramp-Karrenbauer replied that “excessively radical measures could divide the country” and called for “determined but acceptable steps.”

Full story
 
2) Germany's Greens Oust Merkel's Christian Democrats As Most Popular Party
The Daily Telegraph, 9 June 2019

Angela Merkel's successor as leader of Germany's ruling Christian Democrats (CDU) party is under growing pressure after polls showed the Green party has forced it into second place in the polls.

Three polls published in three days this week showed the Greens pulling ahead of the CDU, making them Germany's most popular party for the first time since they were founded.

The last poll, published on Saturday, put the Greens four points ahead of the CDU on 27 percent, marking a historical low for the traditional governing party of German politics.

Germany's Greens have been enjoying a surge in popularity recently and overtook the Social Democrats, their main left-wing rivals, earlier this year.

The environmentalist party's success has came as concern about climate change, biodiversity and plastic waste surged to the forefront of political debate over the last year.

 But critics within the CDU have blamed Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, who took over from Mrs Merkel as leader in December, for a string of tactical errors.

Particular criticism has been leveled at the party's chaotic performance during the campaign for the European elections last month, when a Youtube video attacking the party’s record on climate change and income inequality went viral.

The CDU were accused of panicking after they shot their own video in response, only to axe it before publication.

Talk is already growing of whether Ms Kramp-Karrenbauer is the best person to lead the CDU into the next election.

The 56-year-old came out fighting on Sunday, warning that the Greens are too ideologically close to the radical left Die Linke party.

“People who dream of a new Green-led government need to know that they could wake up with Die Linke in power,” she told Bild am Sonntag newspaper.

Full story 
 
3) Radicalised By Climate Hysteria, Germany's Youth Wake Up To Their Political Power
Deutsche Welle, 8 June 2019 

The European Parliament elections on May 26 made it clear that Germany's young generation is far more interested in politics than many had believed. Indeed, almost 20 million young Germans turned out to cast their ballot, causing a minor political earthquake. 


Young child supporters of the German Green Party in Berlin cheer exit poll results indicating 22% of the vote on 26 May. Photograph: Adam Berry/Getty Images

Germany's established centrist parties, the Social Democrats (SPD) and the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), which constitute the country's governing coalition, garnered far fewer votes than they had hoped for, while the environmentalist Greens triumphed, being by far the most popular party among German voters aged 18 to 30.

Many observers now wonder whether this electoral result signals the rise of a new political generation, comparable to Germany's counterculture movement of the late 1960s, which questioned many of the country's postwar values and customs. Today's environmentalist generation similarly appears to seek to revolutionize German politics and set a whole new policy agenda.

Politicized by climate change

More than 19 million Germans are below the age of 25. In western Germany, this cohort comprises about a quarter of the population and in eastern Germany, 19%.

Obviously, not all of Germany's young people have yet reached the age of 18 and are entitled to vote. Even so, many have become politicized by the Fridays for Future climate rallies, which kicked off in mid-March with a worldwide protest and were followed by a second global rally in late May.
More than 300,000 Germans — most of them students and schoolchildren — took to the streets. For many of them, this was their very first political protest: Berlin's Institute for Social Movement Studies (ipb) conducted a randomized survey among the protesters and found that it was the first-ever political rally for 31% of respondents.

The Fridays for Future climate movement was founded by 16-year-old Greta Thunberg from Sweden, who has become a role model for many environmentally minded young climate activists. Researcher Simon Schnetzer, who publishes the regular "Young Germans" study, says: "Greta Thunberg started a movement. She will go down in history as someone who changed the political discourse. The Fridays for Future rallies showed people under 18 who cannot yet vote that they can influence the global agenda."

Women, girls come to the fore

It currently feels as if Germany is only now waking up to the fact that it has millions of young citizens who have political opinions of their own. Students are suddenly being invited to political talk shows on television and adorn the cover of Germany's most reputable weekly news publication, Der Spiegel. The 2015 Shell Youth Study found that 41% of teens described themselves as politically minded, compared with only 30% in 2002.

What has changed, however, is that the majority of young protesters today are female. A study by the Chemnitz University of Technology found that 70% of protesters attending the Fridays for Future rallies in Amsterdam, Florence, Warsaw and Vienna were girls and women.

The recent climate protests, incidentally, came about independently of any affiliation with political parties or other major organizations. This development is also reflected in a 2016 study by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (a German political foundation associated with but independent of the SPD), which found that of all those who said they were politically engaged, just 16% reported being a member of a party or labor union….

YouTube stars turn to politics

The availability of social networks has made it easier for young people outside the establishment to make their views known. A few days before the EU parliamentary elections, a young German YouTube star named Rezo caused quite a stir when he uploaded a video railing against the CDU and SPD, accusing them of having failed to take decisive action on climate change. The clip was viewed some 14 million times and inspired a collaborative video message by over 70 famous German YouTubers urging the electorate not to vote for either party.

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4) Climate Change Policies Threaten Millions Of Car Workers Worldwide
The New York Times, 6 June 2019

Worldwide, eight million people work directly for auto manufacturers, and many times more work for companies that supply brakes, tires, sensors and other components. Those jobs are now threatened.

FRANKFURT — It’s a scary time to be in the car business.

The internal combustion engine is under attack from electric challengers. Car ownership is becoming optional in the age of Uber. Regulators around the world are fining companies that don’t do enough to cut carbon dioxide emissions, even as buyers demand gas-guzzling S.U.V.s. Global auto sales are slipping for the first time in a decade, disrupted by President Trump’s escalating trade war.

With so much bearing down on them simultaneously, it’s little wonder that companies like Fiat Chrysler and Renault were considering joining forces to survive. Fiat Chrysler’s decision Wednesday night to withdraw its offer to merge with Renault, citing government demands in France, was another reminder that change is complicated for traditional carmakers.

The aborted proposal to create the world’s third-largest automaker was a response to the disruption threatening an industry that accounts for many of the world’s factory jobs and is crucial to the economic fortunes of the United States, Japan and Europe.

New technology has unraveled industries like entertainment, media, telecommunications and retailing, weakening the job security of millions of workers and helping to fuel populism. Carmakers, clearly, are next.

“It’s going to be the biggest change we’ve seen in the last 100 years, and it’s going to be really expensive even for the biggest companies,” said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan Ross School of Business.

The major auto companies will spend well over $400 billion during the next five years developing electric cars equipped with technology that automates much of the task of driving, according to AlixPartners, a consulting firm. They must retool factories, retrain workers, reorganize their supplier networks and rethink the whole idea of car ownership.

A Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg, Germany. Carmakers globally are among the last employers that operate vast, bustling plants.CreditSean Gallup/Getty Images

For the auto manufacturers, this upfront investment is a matter of survival. If they don’t adapt, they could become obsolete. Yet no one is even sure whether customers are really willing to pay for the technology and whether it will ever earn a profit.

Investors have already signaled who they think will come out ahead of this transformation. The electric carmaker Tesla, despite all its problems, is still worth more on the stock market than either Fiat Chrysler or Renault. Uber is worth much more than the two combined, even after reporting a $1 billion quarterly loss.

The stakes for society from this industrial realignment are high. Car companies like Volkswagen, General Motors or Toyota are among the last employers that operate vast factories where thousands of workers pour in and out of the gates at shift changes.
Worldwide, eight million people work directly for auto manufacturers, and many times more work for companies that supply brakes, tires, sensors and other components.

Those jobs are threatened. Last year global car sales declined for the first time since 2009. Though small, the decrease may signal the onset of a global recession because the auto industry is such an important economic catalyst, analysts at Fitch Ratings said in a recent report. […]

By some estimates, half of all auto industry jobs in Germany are at risk. Battery-powered cars have far fewer parts than cars reliant on gasoline or diesel, endangering suppliers of valves, pistons and other parts in conventional engines. The most important part of an electric car, the battery cells, usually comes from Asia.

Full story
 
5) UK Households Conned About ‘Green Energy’
The Times, 10 June 2019 

Households trying to “go green” with their energy supply are being let down by misleading tariffs, a report states.



An analysis of 54 dual-fuel deals with a green component has found that only one in five comes from 100 per cent renewable sources. More than half have no renewable gas component at all and most of the rest offer only carbon offset schemes that have been criticised as ineffective and open to exploitation.

Two out of three tariffs offered by one company with the word “green” in the title include no renewables at all.

About one in seven households is on such a tariff and one million homes are supplied with “green” gas, an increase of 150 per cent in a year.

The study says that recent events, such as the Extinction Rebellion protests and Sir David Attenborough’s programme Climate Change — The Facts have increased demand for green energy deals. It says, however, that consumers wanting to switch are being let down by an industry lacking transparency.

Peter Earl, of comparethemarket.com, which conducted the study, said:

“The energy market clearly has a way to go before it is able to offer all consumers a truly green option. We can see customer appetite is there but in the majority of cases what is currently on offer doesn’t quite meet the mark for consumers and the current labelling of ‘green’ can be confusing. We need more renewable energy, more price competition and a greater array of green tariffs that are properly and transparently labelled. People want to change and it’s time the industry delivered.”

Full story
 
6) Ross Mckitrick: This Scientist Proved Climate Change Isn’t Causing Extreme Weather — So Politicians Attacked
Financial Post, 7 June 2019

And so, many scientists who have the facts and know the truth remain silent

This week in Vancouver, Prime Minister Trudeau said the federal carbon tax, a key pillar in his government’s climate policy, will help protect Canadians from extreme weather. “Extreme weather events are extraordinarily expensive for Canadians, our communities and our economy,” he said, citing the recent tornadoes in Ottawa and wildfires in Western Canada. “That’s why we need to act.”

While members of the media may nod along to such claims, the evidence paints a different story. Roger Pielke Jr. is a scientist at University of Colorado in Boulder who, up until a few years ago, did world-leading research on climate change and extreme weather. He found convincing evidence that climate change was not leading to higher rates of weather-related damages worldwide, once you correct for increasing population and wealth. He also helped convene major academic panels to survey the evidence and communicate the near-unanimous scientific consensus on this topic to policymakers.

For his efforts, Pielke was subjected to a vicious, well-funded smear campaign backed by, among others, the Obama White House and leading Democratic congressmen, culminating in his decision in 2015 to quit the field.

A year ago, Pielke told the story to an audience at the University of Minnesota. His presentation was recently circulated on Twitter. With so much misinformation nowadays about supposed climate emergencies, it’s worth reviewing carefully.

Pielke’s public presentation begins with a recounting of his rise and fall in the field. As a young researcher in tropical storms and climate-related damages, he reached the pinnacle of the academic community and helped organize the so-called Hohenkammer Consensus Statement, named after the German town where 32 of the leading scientists in the field gathered in 2006 to sort out the evidence. They concluded that trends toward rising climate damages were mainly due to increased population and economic activity in the path of storms, that it was not currently possible to determine the portion of damages attributable to greenhouse gases, and that they didn’t expect that situation to change in the near future.

Shortly thereafter, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its 2007 report, largely agreeing with the Hohenkammer Consensus, while cherry-picking one unpublished study (and highlighting it in the Summary for Policymakers) that suggested a link between greenhouse gases and storm-related damages. But the author of that study — who just happened to be the same IPCC lead author who injected it into the report — later admitted his claim was incorrect, and when the study was finally published, denied the connection.

In 2012, the IPCC Special Report on Extreme Weather came out and echoed the Hohenkammer Consensus, concluding that once you adjust for population growth and economic changes, there is no statistical connection between climate change and measures of weather-related damages. In 2013 Pielke testified to the United States Congress and relayed the IPCC findings. Shortly thereafter, Obama’s science advisor John Holdren accused him of misleading Congress and launched a lengthy but ill-informed attack on Pielke, which prompted congressional Democrats to open an investigation into Pielke’s sources of funding (which quickly fizzled amid benign conclusions). Meanwhile heavily funded left-wing groups succeeded in getting him fired from a popular internet news platform. In 2015 Pielke quit the climate field.

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7) And Finally: Climate Change -- What Can’t It Do?
John Hinderacker, PowerLine, 8 June 2019

The nice thing about “climate change” as a dogma is that the weather is guaranteed to change, so whatever happens is consistent with the theory that continues to bring in the big bucks.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago about the fact that Lake Superior and other Great Lakes were nearing record high levels this year. Which was bad, of course – flooding and so on. Was it due to climate change?

Perhaps. But just a few years ago – in 2013 – the Great Lakes were low. That, too, was bad, and as the headlines linked in my prior post indicate, that definitely was due to climate change.

Now the Washington Post reports:

“The Great Lakes are overflowing with record amounts of water.”

The effects of this high water have been wide-reaching. Beaches have shrunk, while water has inundated docks and destroyed roads. *** A combination of major winter snowfalls…

Due to global warming?

…and excessive rainfall are primary drivers for this year’s high water.

The Post has a relatively long memory, for a newspaper, so it recalls that just a few years ago, climate change was causing the Great Lakes to dry up. Most of us, if our theory was so decisively refuted by nature, would preserve a discreet silence. But global warming obsessives are undeterred. Low water, high water, below average precipitation, above average precipitation–these seemingly disparate phenomena, which have existed forever and which most attribute to natural cycles, have a common cause: climate change!

While experts work to better understand effects of climate change on Great Lakes water levels, they are seeing increased evidence of a new normal characterized by rapid shifts between extreme high and low levels.

“We are undoubtedly observing the effects of a warming climate in the Great Lakes,” wrote Richard Rood, a University of Michigan climate scientist. “We are at the beginning of what’s going to be a number of decades where the climate is going to be changing very fast. During that time, we will have many unexpected weather events, and we need to learn from these events to better prepare for the future.”

Unexpected weather events, like rainfall and a lack of rainfall. First the “undoubted” effect of global warming on the Great Lakes was drought, now it is too much snow and rain. Whatever. The nice thing about “climate change” as a dogma is that the weather is guaranteed to change, so whatever happens is consistent with the theory that continues to bring in the big bucks. As I’ve said before: I will be more impressed with the global warming fanatics if they predict something before it happens.

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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.