GWPF Newsletter: Angela Merkel Urges Dialogue Between Skeptics And Believers To Tackle Climate Change

Davos: US And Europe Clash Over Climate Change 

In this newsletter:

1) Angela Merkel Urges Dialogue Between Skeptics And Believers To Tackle Climate Change
Reuters, 23 January 2020
 
2) World Bank Chief's Davos Snub Dashes Hopes Of Climate Consensus
The Guardian 23 January 2020


3) US And Europe Clash Over Climate Change & Energy Policy On Last Davos Day
CNBC News, 24 January 2020
 
4) Benny Peiser On Donald Trump & Davos
TalkRadio, 23 January 2020
 
5) Oh Dear: France And Germany Miss EU Climate Plan Deadline
Dave Keating, Forbes, 23 January 2020
 
6) Green Vandalism: 13.9 Million Trees Felled In Scotland For Wind Farms
National Wind Watch, 21 January 2020
 
7) Rupert Darwall: Will Extreme Climate Obsession Kill US Democrats’ Election Chances?
The Hill, 23 January 2020
 
8) Stephen Moore: Democrats’ War on Fracking Will Cost Them in Battleground States
The Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2020
 
9) And Finally: Another Alarmist Hurricane Claim Blown Aside
Climate Discussion Nexus, 15 January 2020

Full details:

1) Angela Merkel Urges Dialogue Between Skeptics And Believers To Tackle Climate Change
Reuters, 23 January 2020

DAVOS, Switzerland (Reuters) – The world needs an open dialogue about climate change to heal the gap between sceptics and believers since time is running out to cut the emissions that drive global warming, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Thursday.


German Chancellor Angela Merkel delivers a special address at the 50th World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland January 23, 2020. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse

“Time is pressing, so we – the older ones, I am 65 years old – must make sure that we take the impatience of young people positively and constructively,” Merkel told the World Economic Forum in Switzerland.

The first two days of the annual Davos gathering were dominated by the back-and-forth between the 73-year-old former businessman Trump and 17-year-old campaigner Greta Thunberg, with corporate leaders caught in the middle, concerned that as well as words, there was a need for concrete decisions.

She drew applause from the Davos audience when she said opposing sides in polarised debates such as that on climate change had to learn how to talk with each other again.

Full story

2) World Bank Chief's Davos Snub Dashes Hopes Of Climate Consensus
The Guardian 23 January 2020

Hopes of using Davos to forge a new international consensus to tackle poverty and the climate crisis have been thwarted by the decision of the World Bank president, David Malpass, to boycott the event.

To the surprise of the other multilateral institutions, Malpass turned down his invitation to attend despite being in Europe this week for the UK government’s Africa investment summit in London.
 

In the past, World Bank presidents have played a prominent role at the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, taking the opportunity to make the case for concerted action to tackle global poverty.

The heads of other major international organisations, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the UN, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the World Trade Organization and the International Labour Organisation, attended the Davos event.

One source said Malpass’s decision not to attend the World Economic Forum reflected the Bank’s go-it-alone approach under his presidency. “He has effectively declared UDI [unilateral declaration of independence],” the source said. “We saw it at last year’s G7 summit in France. President [Emmanuel] Macron wanted a collective statement from the international organisations but Malpass vetoed it. He wouldn’t have the word multilateralism in the statement.”

A spokesman for the World Economic Forum said Malpass, who was Donald Trump’s nominee to head the World Bank, had been invited. The next two most senior officials at the Washington-based institution – Axel van Trotsenburg, the bank’s managing director, and Philippe Le Houérou, the head of the bank’s private sector arm, the International Finance Corporation – are also notable absentees from Davos.

Full story

3) US And Europe Clash Over Climate Change & Energy Policy On Last Davos Day
CNBC News, 24 January 2020

The president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde, and the U.S. Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin laid bare their stark differences over how the world should transition to cleaner energy sources.



The corporate world’s role in protecting the environment has been a central theme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

Speaking on a panel Friday as the event drew to a close, Lagarde told the audience that central banks needed to lead the economic modeling of how changes to the environment should be costed and mitigated.

Lagarde said banks, accountants, companies and ratings agencies would need to move away from quarterly and medium-term forecasts and start thinking in terms of thirty years out.

Responding to the new ECB president directly, Mnuchin said he didn’t think forecasting the cost of protecting the environment was possible.

“Christine, I think you can have a lot of people and model it, but I just don’t want to kid ourselves. I think there is no way we can possibly model what these risks are over the next 30 years with a level of certainty, given what I think is the changes in technology along the way,” he said.

Lagarde responded directly, suggesting that long-term modeling would help press firms to understand the cost and process of switching to new, and less carbon-intensive, energy sources.

“If we can push companies into the direction of actually anticipating the transition, pricing it, and making sure that they move to cleaner and cleaner energy uses, then it helps,” she said.

Interpreting that as a direct cost to a business, Mnuchin responded sharply.

“I don’t think we know how to price these things,” he said, adding that the current pricing of future greener energy sources was being inflated.

“So, I think we are overestimating the cost. So, if you want to put a tax on people, go ahead and put a carbon tax. That is a tax on hard working people. I personally think the costs are going to be much lower 10 years from now — because of technology — than we think they are today,” he said.

Earlier, Mnuchin argued that the U.S. had become much more efficient through carbon technology and the use of energy, but named China and India as countries which needed to offer “significant improvement in terms of environmental issues.”

4) Benny Peiser On Donald Trump & Davos
TalkRadio, 23 January 2020

Benny Peiser speaks to TalkRadio's Mike Graham about US President Donald Trump's confrontation with the climate alarmists at Davos. Listen here or click on the image below.



 5) Oh Dear: France And Germany Miss EU Climate Plan Deadline
Dave Keating, Forbes, 23 January 2020

The leaders of France and Germany have had a lot to say lately about the importance of European Union efforts to fight climate change. But when it comes to their own countries action plans, it would seem they are approaching the matter with less urgency.

Only 18 of the 28 EU countries have submitted final national energy and climate plans, which detail how they will meet 2030 emission reduction targets, to the European Commission by the January 1st deadline. Among the laggards are the EU’s largest countries: Germany, France, Spain, and the UK. Poland, the most reticent EU country when it comes to climate action, did submit its plans on time.

The Commission can launch legal infringement procedures against the countries that have not met the deadline, which could involve hefty fines. A Commission source indicated however that the EU executive will take a softer approach, encouraging the countries to file as quickly as possible.

In the case of Britain, it is perhaps not surprising a plan wasn’t submitted given the country is nominally leaving the EU in one week. But the deadline was still legally binding for the UK as well. EU law will continue to apply in the UK during a Brexit transition period that will last at least until the end of this year, and possibly for much longer.

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6) Green Vandalism: 13.9 Million Trees Felled In Scotland For Wind Farms
National Wind Watch, 21 January 2020

National Wind Watch has received this staggering information in response to their FOI request

Author:  Scottish Forestry

Thank you for your request dated 26 November and received on the 5 December and the clarification dated 19 December 2019 under the Environmental Information (Scotland) Regulations 2004 (EIRs).

You asked for:

a) the number of trees felled for all onshore wind farm development in Scotland to date.

b) the area of felled trees, in hectares, for all onshore wind farm development in Scotland to date.

I enclose some of the information you requested.

Specifically data covering renewable developments on Scotland’s national forests and lands, which is managed on behalf of Scottish Ministers by Forestry and Land Scotland.

The area of felled trees in hectares, from 2000 (the date when the first scheme was developed, is 6,994 hectares [70 km², 17,283 acres]. Based on the average number of trees per hectare, of 2000, this gives an estimated total of 13.9M.

Full post

7) Rupert Darwall: Will Extreme Climate Obsession Kill US Democrats’ Election Chances?
The Hill, 23 January 2020

In selling their party’s soul to the modern environmental movement, Democrats are putting much of their voter base up for grabs.



It is not hard to see why Democrats are desperate to use any means to prevent President Trump from standing for reelection. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Trump defined the battle lines between himself and the eventual Democratic nominee. The president has a compelling story to tell on what he calls America’s blue-collar boom: 7 million jobs gained; record-low 3.5 percent unemployment; more women in employment than men; record low unemployment of African Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and veterans; the return of U.S. manufacturing jobs; accelerating wage growth for the bottom 10 percent of wage-earners and for millennials.

It’s not only the numbers that should turn Democrats’ blood cold. Trump is going after the core voting blocs that make up the Democratic coalition — middle-class Americans, African-Americans and Hispanics. His priority is their priority: The wellbeing of the American worker. Democrats can’t say the same. Trump talks about living standards, while Democrats are obsessed with climate emergencies and saving the planet.
Cutting taxes and deregulation might sound like standard Republican fare. But no previous Republican president has tackled America’s perverse, uncompetitive corporate tax rates. After eight years of Barack Obama, the Trump administration’s record of one new regulation enacted for every eight rescinded marks a major reversal in the growth of the administrative state.

The most interesting and significant passages of Trump’s talk concerned energy and the environment. It’s hard to believe that any other Republican would have made such a strong, uncompromising case as he did. To his wealthy, privileged audience in Davos who believe climate change and decarbonization are the existential issues of the age, Trump gave no quarter.

America was on the threshold of virtually unlimited reserves of energy, he reminded them — and he wasn’t going to give up America’s energy advantage. He berated European governments for their high energy prices, contrasting them with the average $2,500 reduction in electric bills of American households. He understands what European politicians and business leaders have forgotten in their rush to embrace climate alarmism: People will maintain faith in a market system only so long as their living standards improve.

The president rejected what he rightly called the “prophets of doom” and their failed predictions of apocalypse. “They are the heirs of yesterday’s foolish fortune-tellers,” he told the Davos crowd, which happens to believe in the prophecies of the current generation of fortune tellers. “They want to see us do badly. We won’t let that happen.” 

Indeed, earlier doomsayers predicted an overpopulation crisis in the 1960s, mass starvation in the 1970s and an end of oil in the 1990s. “These alarmists always demand the same thing,” Trump said. “Absolute power to dominate, transform and control every aspect of our lives.” Then came Trump’s payoff lines, which one can readily imagine him using against a future Democratic opponent: “We will never let radical socialism destroy our economy, wreck our country or eradicate our liberty. America will always be the proud, strong and unyielding bastion of freedom.”

The president understands that the planet doesn’t need saving. What needs conserving, as he put it, are the majesty of God’s creation and the natural beauty of our world. This philosophy of nature stewardship makes him the lineal descendant of Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan in prioritizing the preservation of rare habitats, of threatened landscapes and wildernesses. By contrast, an ideological environmentalism, with its belief in imminent planetary catastrophe, will wind up sacrificing the local for the global in a green replay of destroying the village to save it, littering hills and mountainsides with wildlife-killing wind turbines.

Doubtless the liberal media and Trump’s Democratic critics will be outraged at the president’s rejection of climate catastrophism. But he’s the reasonable one in this debate. Consider how the climate alarmists assume decarbonization involves only twisting a few knobs here and there. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meeting the goal of limiting warming to 1.5°C requires “large-scale transformations of the global energy-agriculture-land economy system, affecting the way in which energy is produced, agricultural systems are organized, and materials are consumed” — in other words, forcibly changing virtually every facet of the economy. These changes, the IPCC concedes, represent “unprecedented policy and geopolitical challenges.” In plain English, it’s not only going to be hard, it’s going to be painful and probably won’t even work.

Instead of honesty, Democrats will give voters flannel. Former New York City mayor and Democratic presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg offered a preview. Asked how America can persuade China and India to get to net-zero carbon emissions, Bloomberg told an incredulous Margaret Hoover that China, in an effort to mitigate the impact of emissions on its citizens, was building new coal-fired power stations away from cities. Treating voters as fools is always a loser’s strategy. Though Beijing has no intention of cutting its emissions, Bloomberg wants to throw away America’s energy advantage. So do the rest of the Democratic presidential candidates.

In selling their party’s soul to the modern environmental movement, Democrats are putting much of their voter base up for grabs. Alone among Republicans four years ago, Trump saw the opportunity and seized it. Now he’s moving in for the kill. Democrats could wake up on November 4 to a similar fate as befell the British Labour Party in last month’s election, and for a similar reason — they’re no longer the party of the workers.

8) Stephen Moore: Democrats’ War on Fracking Will Cost Them in Battleground States
The Wall Street Journal, 23 January 2020

Most presidential campaigns feature a familiar refrain: Each candidate promises to create millions of new jobs. The 2020 primaries are unusual in that nearly all the Democratic candidates, including Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and Michael Bloomberg, are solemnly pledging to destroy millions of jobs by ending the shale oil and gas revolution.

The Democrats’ war on fossil fuels was on full display at the debate in Los Angeles last month, where Joe Biden, the supposed moderate, was asked if he would rein in America’s shale oil and gas production even if it meant “thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands” would lose their jobs. He unhesitatingly responded “yes,” to cheers from the audience of college students and professors. He then recited the familiar liberal riff about how investment in wind and solar power will save the economy. (Soon afterward he told a New Hampshire audience that unemployed energy workers should “learn how to program.”)

The gaffe evokes the moment in 1984 when Walter Mondale pledged during a presidential debate with President Reagan that he would raise everyone’s taxes. Mr. Mondale went on to win one state and the District of Columbia.

Curtailing U.S. oil and gas production would be economically disastrous. At least $1 trillion of U.S. economic output is related to the shale revolution, and more than 1.5 million Americans are employed in the industry. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study for the American Petroleum Institute found that at least four million American jobs are tied to the shale oil and gas revolution in areas like auto production, construction, petroleum engineering, pipe fitting, service stations, steel production and trucking.

Democrats’ quest to eliminate these jobs would hurt them in the swing states they’ll need to win to unseat President Trump. Ohio and Michigan have a combined total of more than 400,000 workers in the shale industry. Pennsylvania has another 320,000. Colorado and Florida each have more than 200,000 workers in oil and gas.

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9) And Finally: Another Alarmist Hurricane Claim Blown Aside
Climate Discussion Nexus, 15 January 2020

Atlantic hurricane numbers fell sharply after 2005, the opposite of what alarmists had predicted.

When a few bad ones made landfall in 2017, rather than repeat their discredited claim of a scary increase, some alarmists claimed their so-called "translation speed", their rate of crawling horizontally over land and ocean, would decrease, so each one that did make landfall would stay longer, dumping ever more water and being Worse Than Expected^TM. Alas, someone has checked the numbers, and found no evidence that tropical cyclone translation speed has declined since the 1950s, that climate models don't predict that it would, and that on balance the speed isn't likely to change much in the future either.

The model simulations of the next century, for what they're worth, don't say nothing will change. On average the authors expect global average translation speed will increase. But they say it’s because there will be small offsetting changes between the tropics and the regions outside the tropics, so there could be a reduction in the speed depending on where you live. To which we would say, c'est la vie but ce n’est pas conditions météorologiques extrêmes. Despite which if you buy beachfront property in the path of Atlantic tropic storms, you should know by now what you're in for: some hurricanes, of varying intensity, on an unpredictable schedule.

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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.