Breaking Views: GWPF Newsletter: 30 Years Of UN Climate Policy Failure

China Adds Coal Plants and Cuts Support For Renewable Energy

Japan Tells UN Summit: We Will Keep Using Coal Power Plants

In this newsletter:

1) 30 Years Of UN Climate Policy Failure As China Adds Coal Plants and Cuts Support For Renewable Energy
The Associated Press, 2 December 2019

2) Japan Tells UN Summit: We Will Keep Using Coal-Fired Power Plants
NHK World News, 3 December 2019

3) China Slams U.S. For Not Doing Enough For Environment Ahead Of U.N. Climate Summit

China burns about half the coal used globally each year. Between 2000 and 2018, its annual carbon emissions nearly tripled, and it now accounts for about 30% of the world’s total. Yet it’s also the leading market for solar panels, wind turbines and electric vehicles, and it manufactures about two-thirds of solar cells installed worldwide.

“We are witnessing many contradictions in China’s energy development,” said Kevin Tu, a Beijing-based fellow with the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “It’s the largest coal market and the largest clean energy market in the world.”

That apparent paradox is possible because of the sheer scale of China’s energy demands.

But as China’s economy slows to the lowest level in a quarter century — around 6% growth, according to government statistics — policymakers are doubling down on support for coal and other heavy industries, the traditional backbones of China’s energy system and economy. At the same time, the country is reducing subsidies for renewable energy.

At the annual United Nations climate summit, this year in Madrid, government representatives will put the finishing touches on implementing the 2015 Paris Agreement, which set a goal to limit future warming to 1.5 to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Nations may decide for themselves how to achieve it.

China had previously committed to shifting its energy mix to 20% renewables, including nuclear and hydroelectric energy. Climate experts generally agree that the initial targets pledged in Paris will not be enough to reach the goal, and next year nations are required to articulate more ambitious targets.
Hopes that China would offer to do much more are fading.

Recent media reports and satellite images suggest that China is building or planning to complete new coal power plants with total capacity of 148 gigawatts — nearly equal to the entire coal-power capacity of the European Union within the next few years, according to an analysis by Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.

Separately, investment in China’s renewable energy dropped almost 40 percent in the first half of 2019 compared with the same period last year, according to Bloomberg New Energy Finance, a research organization. The government slashed subsidies for solar energy.

Last week in Beijing, China’s vice minister of ecology and environment told reporters that non-fossil-fuel sources already account for 14.3% of the country’s energy mix. He did not indicate that China would embrace more stringent targets soon.

“We are still faced with challenges of developing our economy, improving people’s livelihood,” Zhao Yingmin said. […]

Annual levels of PM 2.5 — a tiny but dangerous pollutant — dropped by roughly a third across China between 2013 and 2017, from 61.8 to 42 micrograms per cubic meter, according to scientists at Beijing’s Tsinghua University and other institutions. They made the report in November in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, a peer-reviewed journal.

“That’s a big improvement, although in terms of safe air quality, we’re still not there yet,” Lin said. China’s pollution levels are still well above standards set by the World Health Organization.

While these retrofitted coal plants emit fewer pollutants that harm human health, the scrubbers do not reduce greenhouse gases. “The new plants are good for air quality, but you still have all that carbon dioxide that goes into the atmosphere,” Lin said.

In the past three years, China’s carbon emissions have begun to rise again, according to Global Carbon Budget.

That trend was evident in the first half of 2019, when China’s carbon emissions from fossil fuels and concrete production rose 4%, compared with the same period last year, according to Myllyvirta’s preliminary analysis of Chinese government data.

The coming winter in Beijing may see a return of prolonged smog, as authorities loosen environmental controls on heavy industry — in part to compensate for other slowing sectors in the economy. Cement and steel production remain both energy intensive and heavily polluting.

Permits for new coal plants proliferated after regulatory authority was briefly devolved from Beijing to provincial governments, which see construction projects and coal operations as boosts to local economies and tax bases, said Ted Nace, executive director of Global Energy Monitor.

“It’s as though a boa constructor swallowed a giraffe, and now we’re watching that bulge move through the system,” said Nace. In China, it takes about three years to build a coal plant.

In November, Premier Li Keqiang gave a speech to policymakers emphasizing the importance of domestic coal to energy security.

But because China’s coal-power expansion is growing faster than energy demand, overcapacity “is a serious concern now,” said Columbia University’s Tu.
And once new infrastructure is built, it’s hard to ignore.

“It will be politically difficult to tear down a brand-new coal plant that’s employing people and supporting a mining operation. It will make it more difficult for China to transition away from coal,” Nace said.

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2) Japan Tells UN Summit: We Will Keep Using Coal-Fired Power Plants
NHK World News, 3 December 2019

Japan's industry minister Hiroshi Kajiyama says the country will continue to use coal-fired power plants, but will work to cut emissions with new technologies.

Kajiyama told reporters on Tuesday that Japan wants to keep thermal power plants using coal and other fossil fuel as an option. He said it's very important to study every alternative to achieve the best energy mix for the future.

He added Japan will reduce its dependence on nuclear energy as much as possible, and increase renewable energy sources to cut carbon dioxide emissions. He explained this means that Japan will develop technology to reduce emissions in spite of difficult conditions.

Full story

3) China Slams U.S. For Not Doing Enough For Environment Ahead Of U.N. Climate Summit

Valerie Richardson, The Washington Times, 1 December 2019

China, the world’s largest greenhouse-gas emitter, doesn’t think the United States is doing enough to fight climate change.

With the annual U.N. climate conference starting Monday, a top Beijing official slammed the U.S. and other developed countries, accusing them of lacking the “political will” to fight climate change as demonstrated by their failure to provide adequate funding to developing nations — like China.

“The biggest problem in the current multilateral process to address climate change lies in the insufficient political will of developed countries to provide support to the process,” said Zhao Yingmin, vice president of environment and ecology, at last week’s press conference.

The United States has led the world in reducing net carbon emissions, dropping 13% from 2005 to 2017, while Chinese emissions have increased steadily even as the world’s second-largest economy touted a 45% decline in carbon intensity and “highest possible ambition” in updating its climate goals.

The issue of climate compensation is expected to emerge as a hot topic at the 2019 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, known as COP25, which runs through Dec. 13 in Madrid.

“We hope that developed countries will provide sufficient, continuous and timely support to developing countries in a transparent and predictable manner, use public-funds and honor their commitment to provide developing countries with an annual climate fund of $100 billion up to the year 2020,” said Mr. Yingmin in a translation posted on China’s government information page.

He referred to the non-binding pledge that accompanied the 2015 Paris Agreement for industrialized nations to sink $100 billion annually by 2020 into the Green Climate Fund to assist developing nations in mitigating and adapting to climate change.

That effort has fallen far short. The Obama administration kicked $1 billion, but President Trump ruled out any further U.S. funding as part of his decision to pull out of the Paris climate agreement, calling it “a total disaster.”

The White House is sending a diplomatic corps — but no senior administration officials — to the Madrid conference in order to “ensure a level playing field that protects U.S. interests,” said the State Department in a statement.

Meanwhile, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced Saturday she would lead a bicameral — but not bipartisan — delegation of 15 Democratic lawmakers to Madrid to elevate “the climate crisis to the forefront of the international conversation.”

Full story

4) Judy Curry: Lessons From Three Decades Of Failed Climate Policy
Climate Etc., 2 December 2019

The UN Climate Change Conference this week in Madrid provides an important opportunity to reflect on state of the public debate surrounding climate change.

Most of the world’s governments are prioritizing energy security, affordability and industrial competitiveness over commitments made for the Paris climate agreement. Even if these countries were on track to meet their commitments, a majority of the national pledges are totally insufficient to meet the Paris targets. At the same time, we are hearing increasingly shrill rhetoric from Extinction Rebellion and other activists about the ‘existential threat’ of the ‘climate crisis’, ‘runaway climate chaos’, etc.

There is a growing realization that Paris climate agreement is inadequate for making a meaningful dent in slowing down the anticipated warming. And the real societal consequences of climate change and extreme weather events remain largely unaddressed.

How have we arrived at this point? For the past three decades, the climate policy ‘cart’ has been way out in front of the scientific ‘horse’. The 1992 Climate Change treaty was signed by 190 countries before the balance of scientific evidence suggested even a discernible observed human influence on global climate. The 1997 Kyoto Protocol was implemented before we had any confidence that most of the recent warming was caused by humans. There has been tremendous political pressure on the scientists to present findings that would support these treaties, which has resulted in a drive to manufacture a scientific consensus on the dangers of manmade climate change.

Fossil fuel emissions as the climate ‘control knob’ is a simple and seductive idea. However this is a misleading oversimplification, since climate can shift naturally in unexpected ways. Apart from uncertainties in future emissions, we are still facing a factor of 3 or more uncertainty in the sensitivity of the Earth’s temperature to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. We have no idea how natural climate variability (solar, volcanoes, ocean circulations) will play out in the 21st century, and whether or not natural variability will dominate over manmade warming.

We still don’t have a realistic assessment of how a warmer climate will impact us and whether it is ‘dangerous.’ We don’t have a good understanding of how warming will influence extreme weather events. Land use and exploitation by humans is a far bigger issue than climate change for species extinction and ecosystem health. Local sea level rise has many causes, and is dominated by sinking from land use in many of the most vulnerable locations.

We have been told that the science of climate change is ‘settled’. However, in climate science there has been a tension between the drive towards a scientific ‘consensus’ to support policy making, versus exploratory research that pushes forward the knowledge frontier. Climate science is characterized by a rapidly evolving knowledge base and disagreement among experts. Predictions of 21^st century climate change are characterized by deep uncertainty.

Nevertheless, activist scientists and the media seize upon each extreme weather event as having the fingerprints of manmade climate change — ignoring the analyses of more sober scientists showing periods of even more extreme weather in the first half of the 20^th century, when fossil fuel emissions were much smaller.

Alarming press releases are issued about each new climate model prediction of future catastrophes from famine, mass migrations, catastrophic fires, etc. Yet, these press releases don’t mention that these predicted catastrophes are associated with highly implausible assumptions about how much we might actually emit over the course of the 21^st century.

Further, issues such as famine, mass migrations and wildfires are caused primarily by government policies and ineptitude, lack of wealth and land use policies. Climate change matters, but it’s outweighed by other factors in terms of influencing human well being.

We have been told that climate change is an ‘existential crisis.’ However, based upon our current assessment of the science, the climate threat is not an existential one, even in its most alarming hypothetical incarnations. However, the perception of manmade climate change as a near-term apocalypse and has narrowed the policy options that we’re willing to consider.

We have not only oversimplified the problem of climate change, but we have also oversimplified its ‘solution’. Even if you accept the climate model projections and that warming is dangerous, there is disagreement among experts regarding whether a rapid acceleration away from fossil fuels is the appropriate policy response. In any event, rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuels and ameliorating the adverse impacts of extreme weather events in the near term increasingly looks like magical thinking.

Climate change – both manmade and natural – is a chronic problem that will require centuries of management.

The extreme rhetoric of the Extinction Rebellion and other activists is making political agreement on climate change policies more difficult. Exaggerating the dangers beyond credibility makes it difficult to take climate change seriously. The monomaniacal focus on elimination of fossil fuel emissions distracts our attention from the primary causes of many of our problems and effective solutions.

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5) Sherelle Jacobs: The UN’s ‘Woke’ Climate Propaganda Is An Insult To Science
The Daily Telegraph, 3 December 2019

I was always a ‘middle-grounder’, rather than a ‘denier’ – until I discovered the extent of the dishonesty

The climate change “emergency” is fake news. Many will roll their eyes in exasperation at the conspiratorial bombastry of yet another “denier”. But for years I have been a plastic recycling, polar bear cooing middle-grounder. In fact, Aristotle would probably turn in his grave at the logical fallaciousness of my long-held presumption that the truth must lie somewhere between those two mutually loathing opposites – Scepticism and Armageddon.

But as the doom-mongering acquires the rubber-stamped smell of instutionalised illness, it is impossible to ignore that the “woke” are the new “slept” – too deep in their sugar coma of confected hysteria to realise they are being duped by disinformation.
Before I explain why the climate “emergency” is the most electrifyingly effective propaganda exercise of the 21st century, two clarifications. I have no fight to pick with glaring evidential realities: surface records clearly show the planet is getting warmer. Nor do I have a culture war-bloodied axe to grind with the fundamental chemistry: carbon dioxide indisputably contributes to the greenhouse effect. But I do take issue with how the mainstream debate has become an insult to both the public’s intelligence and basic science.

This was clearer than ever yesterday, as bureaucratic catastrophists kicked up dystopian dust-clouds on their way into the UN Madrid climate change summit. As Greta Thunberg arrived by yacht (after her British skipper likely clocked up 3 tonnes of carbon emissions flying to the US to pick her up), UN Secretary General António Guterres rumbled that, over the horizon, he could see “the point of no return”. Delegates waved the UN’s latest Emissions Gap Report as if it were both a millenarian death oracle and a methodologically indisputable text; in it, the recommendation to cut emissions by at least 7.6 per cent per year for the next decade.

One can’t help but feel that we have heard such curiously precise warnings before. Last year the UN warned that we had just 12 years to save the planet. Scientists have since revised this to approximately 18 months. Or perhaps it is already too late. The experts don’t seem quite sure.

Indeed, the distinction between present and future seems to be fading to discardable subtlety. Take the study which has gone viral in recent days for claiming that parts of the world have either already reached – or are inching towards –“tipping point”, whereby the planet becomes caught in destructive feedback loops. Are we already doomed, or nearly doomed, or nearly already doomed? More is the mystery.

Claims such as these are projections, but they are routinely presented to the public as unquestionable facts. This effectively reduces them to fake news. Even more so, given that the accuracy of the climate modelling upon which these figures and scenarios rely is contested, and the climate does not change in a straight line.

To take one example, the UN’s international climate change body, the IPCC, said in 2007 that temperatures had risen by 0.2C per decade between 1990-2005 and used that figure for its 20-year projection. Inconveniently, warming turned out to have been just 0.05C per decade over the 15 years to 2012.

The IPCC acknowledges the uncertainty of the computations it champions; hence the disclaimer squirreled away on its website stating that it does not guarantee the accuracy of the information it contains. A caveat lost in translation at the resplendently funereal press conferences.

This post-truth scam is having a chilling effect on science. Experts are locked in a race to the bottom to make detailed and disastrous premonitions. And despite the fact that disciplined debate is the motor of scientific discovery, eco-extremists are shutting down discussions that dissent from the Apocalypse narrative.

Full post

6) Europe’s Broken Climate Consensus
GWPF TV, 2 December 2019

MEPs in the European Parliament have passed a resolution declaring a ‘climate emergency’, but one third of MEPs voted against the motion – in a sign of increasing discontent with the EU’s green ambitions.

Click on image above to watch the video

7) And Finally: India’s Best Monsoon In 25 Years To Lift Wheat Harvest To New Record
Reuters, 1 December 2019

India’s wheat production could jump to a second consecutive annual record in 2020 as the wettest monsoon in 25 years is set to help farmers in expanding the area under the winter-sown crop while also boosting yields, industry officials told Reuters.

But that higher production would add to India’s already swelling inventories, potentially forcing the world’s second-biggest wheat producer to ramp up procurement of the grain from farmers and provide incentives for overseas sales to support local prices.

“The area under wheat and yields would rise due to good rainfall. We can certainly produce more than last year’s record production,” said Gyanendra Singh, director at the state-run Indian Institute of Wheat and Barley Research. India grew 102.19 million tonnes of wheat in 2019.

The country received monsoon rains during the June-September season that were 10 percent above average and the rainfall continued during October and November, increasing soil moisture levels required for crop sowing.

Rainfall also lifted the water level in India’s key reservoirs to 86 percent of capacity compared to 61 percent a year ago and a 10-year average of 64 percent, according to government data.

Only one wheat crop is grown in India each year, with planting starting in late October and harvesting in March.

Farmers are inclined to expand the area under wheat as its prices are more stable than any other crop due to government buying, said Harish Galipelli, head of commodities and currencies at Inditrade Derivatives & Commodities in Mumbai.

Full story

see also India’s 50-Year Dry Spell Ends As Monsoon Rains Strengthen

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Thursday, December 5, 2019

GWPF Newsletter: 30 Years Of UN Climate Policy Failure

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