GWPF Newsletter: Revolt Brewing Against EU’s ‘Unrealistic’ Climate Goals

German Car Industry Makes Stand Against New EU Commission's Climate Goals

In this newsletter:

1) Revolt Brewing Against EU’s ‘Unrealistic’ Climate Goals
EurActiv, 5 December 2019
 
2) EU Deeply Split About Net Zero Climate Goals
EURACTIV.com, 4 December 2019

 
3) German Car Industry Makes Stand Against New EU Commission's Climate Goals
Clean Energy Wire, 5 December 2019
 
4) Germany’s Green Suicide: Car Industry Faces 50,000 Job Cuts In ‘Biggest Crisis Since Invention Of Car’
Daily Express, 3 December 2019
 
5) Green Germany Sinking Fast
Financial Times, 6 December 2019
 
6) ‘Last Decade Was The Warmest’ – Yes, But…
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor, 5 December 2019
 
7) A Brilliant Lesson For Greta Thunberg By Fellow Teenager Lauren Jeffrey
Lauren Jeffrey, October 2019
 
8) And Finally: Mad Eco-Grinch - School Bans Children From Sending Christmas Cards To Protect The Climate
Sky News,4 December 2019

Full details:

1) Revolt Brewing Against EU’s ‘Unrealistic’ Climate Goals
EurActiv, 5 December 2019

Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babiš has threatened to veto Europe’s goal of becoming the first climate-neutral continent in the world by 2050, adding his voice to a growing chorus of discontent as EU leaders prepare for heated climate discussions at a summit in Brussels next week.

In a letter to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, Babiš said, however, he could still change his mind in exchange for higher financial support from the EU and better investment conditions for nuclear energy.

Private investors are reluctant to pour money into new nuclear power plants, which face escalating costs and growing competition from cheap renewables. New plants are dependent on state support, which require prior approval by the European Commission’s powerful competition department.

“Nuclear plants construction may require changes in the state aid rules,” Babiš wrote in the letter, according to Czech daily Hospodářské noviny, a media partner of EURACTIV.cz.

Funding for new nuclear plants is also an issue for Poland, one of the last remaining EU countries opposed to the bloc’s proposed climate neutrality objective for 2050. At the last EU summit in October, Warsaw called for “significantly larger” amounts of funding under the EU’s next long-term budget before signing up to the 2050 goal.

Achieving climate neutrality requires “significantly larger” amounts of funding than what is currently on offer in the EU’s long-term budget proposal for 2021-2027, Warsaw said in a memo circulated ahead of an EU leaders’ summit opening today.

There is resistance at regional level too. During an exchange of views on Thursday (5 December) with Frans Timmermans, the EU Commission vice-president in charge of the European Green Deal, local representatives warned against adopting “unrealistic” climate objectives for 2030.

The 50-55% cut in greenhouse gases envisaged by the new European Commission risked hurting local businesses, said Cor Lamers, the Mayor of the Dutch city of Schiedam.

Full story
 
2) EU Deeply Split About Net Zero Climate Goals
EURACTIV.com, 4 December 2019

European Union leaders meeting in Brussels next week will push to agree to put the bloc on net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, their draft joint statement showed on Monday (2 December), heralding a bitter fight looming at their gathering.

The Dec. 12-13 summit of the bloc’s national leaders will aim to endorse “the objective of achieving a climate-neutral EU by 2050,” according to the document seen by Reuters.

European Council president Charles Michel said he will work to “convince” all member states to agree on achieving climate neutrality by 2050 in next week’s summit. He also vowed to pay attention to the “sensitivities” and “interests” of the most economically affected countries.

“Europe could become a green economy leader by investing in research, technology and innovation to guarantee jobs creation and social wellbeing while reducing the climate threat,” Michel told EFE in an interview during the COP25 UN climate summit in Madrid.

Previous attempts, however, were blocked by Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic, who rely on highly polluting coal. They have previously said they oppose climate neutrality by 2050 for fear cutting greenhouse emissions will stifle their economies.

To convince the reluctant camp, the draft summit conclusions refer to “just and socially balanced transition”, the European Investment Bank’s announcement to unlock 1 trillion euros worth of green investment until 2030, the need to ensure energy security and competitiveness vis-à-vis foreign powers not pursuing such climate goals.

Achieving climate neutrality requires “significantly larger” amounts of funding than what is currently on offer in the EU’s long-term budget proposal for 2021-2027, Warsaw said in a memo circulated ahead of an EU leaders’ summit opening today.

The draft, prepared in advance of the leaders’ discussions, may still change. But it will eventually need unanimous backing of all EU national leaders for there to be agreement at the summit.

Full story
 
3) German Car Industry Makes Stand Against New EU Commission's Climate Goals
Clean Energy Wire, 5 December 2019

The German auto industry association VDA has warned against the new European Commission's push for stricter emissions regulation and climate targets. 

At the lobby group's annual conference in Berlin, parting VDA head Bernhard Mattes said carmakers need planning security and no one would benefit from "superimposed burdens" resulting from ramped-up climate ambitions.

"The key phrase here is the 'European Green Deal'," Mattes said. He pointed out that many companies are already struggling to minimise job losses and manage the impact of several simultaneous challenges, ranging from dropping sales to the shift to electric vehicles.

"Brussels must not jeopardize the competitiveness of the industrial location of Europe by formulating even stricter climate goals," Matthes said.

Germany’s car industry is struggling with weaker foreign demand, tariff disputes driven by the US and stricter regulation following the dieselgate emissions fraud scandal as well as with managing the broader shift from combustion engines to e-cars.

"We have to expect a decrease in the size of the core workforce" of currently roughly 830,00 employees, Matthes said, adding that the current trend towards job cuts will be "more pronounced" in 2020.

Full story
 
4) Germany’s Green Suicide: Car Industry Faces 50,000 Job Cuts In ‘Biggest Crisis Since Invention Of Car’
Daily Express, 3 December 2019

THE GERMAN car industry is facing disaster with up to 50,000 jobs under threat or expected to be lost before the end of the year in what has been described as the “biggest crisis since the invention of the automobile”.

Last week the owner of Mercedes-Benz announced plans to axe at least 10,000 employees globally, taking the number of jobs losses by German carmakers to almost 40,000 this year as the industry sinks under a massive sales slump. Daimler wants to save £1.2billion in staff costs as it prepares to invest billions in the electric cars boom. Audi, which is owned by Volkswagen, has also said it would be shedding almost 10,000 people - around around 10 percent of its global workforce.

Volkswagen chief executive Herbert Diess warned “the auto industry is in the middle of a far-reaching upheaval”, and followed another announcement from VW in the spring, where it said 7,000 jobs would be axed with the savings to be pumped back into electric cars.

US car giant Ford is planning to axe 5,000 positions in Germany as part of wider restructuring plans, while parts suppliers Continental and Bosch are aiming to cut more than 7,000 roles between them.

It is estimated the German car industry, which directly employs more than 830,000 people and supports a further two million in the wider economy, will be forced to pump around £34billion into battery-powered technologies over the next three years.

Ralf Kalmbach at consultancy Bain & Co, who has spent 32 years advising German carmakers, told the Financial Times: “No one will survive in the form they exist today.”

He said the huge expense of the current transformation from within some of Germany's biggest carmakers has left the engine of the country’s post-war Wirtschaftswunder, or economic miracle, facing the “biggest crisis since the invention of the automobile” by Karl Benz more than a century ago.

Full story
 
5) Green Germany Sinking Fast
Financial Times, 6 December 2019

Germany’s sprawling industrial sector is suffering its steepest downturn for a decade, underlining how the engine of the eurozone’s biggest economy is sputtering.

Industrial output, which includes Germany’s dominant factory sector, dropped 5.3 per cent in October from the same month in 2018, according to the Federal Statistics Office. The figures
suggest that the German industrial slowdown is likely to weigh on overall eurozone growth in the fourth quarter.

Combined with data published this week showing industrial orders fell sharply in October, and with most manufacturers expecting a further shrinkage in November, the figures suggest that the
two-year downturn in German manufacturing is nowhere near close to ending.

“Far from bottoming out, Germany’s industrial recession may be getting worse,” said Andrew Kenningham at Capital Economics. “The latest data support our view that a recession is still more
likely than not in the coming quarters.”

Germany’s export-focused economy has been hit by the US-China trade war, uncertainty over Brexit and a sharp decline in car industry output, which has been disrupted by new emissions rules and the shift to electric vehicles.

Full story (£)
 
6) ‘Last Decade Was The Warmest’ – Yes, But…
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor, 5 December 2019

As predictable as Christmas, every year meteorological agencies issue assessments of annual global temperature data in early December – primarily in order to influence the annual UN climate summits.

The World Meteorological Organisation has done it again with a press release that serves very well the purpose of any climate-related press release – to be reported uncritically. The news media, even those that claim to have ‘analysts’ to look behind the habitual hype, did not disappoint and simply regurgitate the spin.

The WMO said:

“Global mean temperature for January to October 2019 was 1.1±0.1°C above pre-industrial levels. 2019 is likely to be the second or third warmest year on record. The past five years are now almost certain to be the five warmest years on record, and the past decade, 2010-2019, to be the warmest decade on record. Since the 1980s, each successive decade has been warmer than any preceding decade since 1850.”

The WMO showed a nice graph, which a journalist kindly retweeted.



But venture a little beyond the press release and take a closer look at the data.

It is more instructive to look at the past two decades and see why the most recent one is warmer than the other. It’s then obvious just what a big feature the 2016 El Niño is and how it has dominated the global temperature of the last decade. Its influence cannot, as so many press releases and cursory analysts of recent temperature data maintain,  be restricted to 2016 and then treated as though it has no effect on other years.

It is obvious from the temperature data that there is a multi-year effect. This makes stories like “2017 was the warmest year without an El Niño” nonsense. Although there was technically a minor El Niño that year it is clear that the influence of 2016 is still strong.

The WMO adds:

“The IPCC Special Report on 1.5°C (IPCC SR15) concluded that “Human-induced warming reached approximately 1°C (likely between 0.8°C and 1.2°C) above pre-industrial levels in 2017, increasing at 0.2°C (likely between 0.1°C and 0.3°C) per decade (high confidence)” . An update of the figures to 2019 is consistent with continued warming in the range 0.1-0.3°C/decade.”

So what is the decadal increase in temperature, 0.1° C or 0.3° C? It makes a big difference. In reality, the picture is a little more complex than the claim that ‘global warming continues to record levels….’

The global warming trend in the last 20 years has been about half of what most climate models predicted.

Go a little further into the WMO press release and you will find: The ocean absorbs over 90% of the heat trapped in the Earth system by rising concentrations of greenhouse gases. Ocean heat content, which is a measure of this heat accumulation, reached record levels again in 2019. The reference for increasing ocean heart content comes from Cheng et al (2019) who have based their conclusions heavily on the fatally flawed paper by Resplandy et al (2018) . The latter paper has been withdrawn, but the WMO seems unaware of this.

About sea level rise the WMO says:

“As the ocean warms, sea levels rise. This rise is further increased by melting of ice on land, which then flows into the sea. Short-term trends in sea level are modulated by transitions between La Niña and El Niño, a cooling and warming, respectively of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean surface temperature. Sea level has increased throughout the altimeter record, but recently sea level rose at a higher rate due partly to melting of ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica. In autumn 2019, the global mean sea level reached its highest value since the beginning of the high-precision altimetry record (January 1993).”

There is no observational evidence that the rate of sea level rise has been accelerating in recent decades

The WMO press release shows sea level measurements from only 1993 onwards. Including previous data would have given a different perspective as the current trend in rising seas can be seen to have begun around 1910.

Their press release does not mention that any purported acceleration in sea level change is controversial.

There is a lot of good data in the WMO press release, but also a lot of shallow analysis.

Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
 
7) A Brilliant Lesson For Greta Thunberg By Fellow Teenager Lauren Jeffrey
Lauren Jeffrey, October 2019

Climate change is real, and it may well become more problematic in the future, but misrepresenting the science and terrifying children and young people is not the way to face the issues.


Click on image to watch this brilliant video
8) And Finally: Mad Eco-Grinch - School Bans Children From Sending Christmas Cards To Protect The Climate
Sky News,4 December 2019

The headteacher of the primary school says the tradition is bad for the environment.



A primary school headteacher has been branded a “grinch” after banning pupils from sending Christmas cards.

Jonathan Mason, head of Belton Lane Primary School in Grantham, Lincolnshire, said the tradition was bad for the environment.

However, parents said the move is not in the Christmas spirit and accused Mr Mason of “rank hypocrisy” after he reportedly announced the ban in a letter to all parents.

In the letter he wrote: “I have been approached by a number of children recently who are concerned about the impact of sending Christmas cards on the environment.

“Throughout the world we send enough Christmas cards that if we placed them alongside each other, they’d cover the world’s circumference 500 times.

“The manufacture of Christmas cards is contributing to our ever-growing carbon emissions.”

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.