GWPF Newsletter: Boris Johnson Snubs Climate Activists And Saves UK Airline

Tim Newark: End Unfair Air Passenger Tax And Ignore The Angry Greens

In this newsletter:

1) Boris Johnson Snubs Climate Activists And Saves UK Airline
The Guardian, 14 January 2020
 
2) Government Criticised For Prioritising Airline Over Environment 
The London Economic, 15 January 2020

 
3) Benny Peiser: Boris Johnson & Climate Change
Totnes Times, 10 January 2020
 
4) Tim Newark: End Unfair Air Passenger Tax And Ignore The Angry Greens
Daily Express, 15 January 2020
 
5) EU Green Deal In Doubt As Germany Rejects Call For More Climate Money 
The Independent, 15 January 2020
 
6) Green Madness: Germany’s Electric Car Obsession Puts ‘More Than 400,000 Jobs At Risk’
The Local, 13 January 2020
 
7) Siemens Snubs Greta Thunberg And Will Honour Australian Coal Mine Deal
Bloomberg, 13 January 2020
 
8) Gurcharan Das: And Now, The Good News: If You Can Take The Long View, The World Is Getting Better
The Times of India, 14 January 2020

Full details:

1) Boris Johnson Snubs Climate Activists And Saves UK Airline
The Guardian, 14 January 2020

The future of Flybe was secured on Tuesday night after ministers agreed a rescue deal with shareholders to keep Europe’s largest regional carrier flying.



The Treasury said it would review air passenger duty (APD), a tax that adds £26 per passenger to all Flybe domestic return flights, to “ensure regional connectivity is strengthened while meeting the UK’s climate change commitments to meet net zero by 2050”.

In addition, it is understood that the government is still in negotiations over a possible £100m loan to Flybe. Although Treasury sources denied reports that it had agreed deferral of a £106m outstanding APD bill, it is understood that HMRC could allow the airline a short-term extension to settle its debt. […]

While unions and the CBI had urged the government to help Flybe, any potential moves to ease APD were condemned by environmental groups… Greenpeace UK’s chief scientist, Doug Parr, said: “The government cannot claim to be a global leader on tackling the climate emergency one day, then making the most carbon-intensive kind of travel cheaper the next.

Cutting the cost of domestic flights while allowing train fares to rise is the exact opposite of what we need if we’re to cut climate-wrecking emissions from transport.”

Full story
 
2) Government Criticised For Prioritising Airline Over Environment 
The London Economic, 15 January 2020

Flybe’s collapse has been averted after the Government told the airline it would review air passenger duty (APD) and shareholders agreed to inject additional investment.

Climate change campaigners warned Boris Johnson that any APD review that leads to cheaper air travel would be a “complete scandal” and “rip up” the Prime Minister’s pledge to show leadership on the climate crisis.

The tax was introduced to pay for the environmental costs of aviation, and environmental groups have criticised the move saying it is a backwards step as Britain should be working towards it carbon reduction targets. Critics say FLyBe’s shareholders have more than enough funds to keep the low-cost operator flying.

The Government has announced that it will review APD on domestic routes among other measures in an effort to help struggling airline Flyby. The Treasury have announced that the loss-making carrier would continue operating after the review of the tax featured in rescue talks.

Friends of the Earth aviation campaigner Jenny Bates urged the Chancellor to instead use his next Budget to “speed up the transformation to a zero-carbon economy” and make rail travel more affordable.

“Any review of air passenger duty that leads to cheaper air travel and more polluting flights, would be a complete scandal – and rip apart Boris Johnson’s pledge to show leadership on the climate crisis,” she added.

Full story
 
3) Benny Peiser: Boris Johnson & Climate Change
Totnes Times, 10 January 2020

‘Net Zero and the problem of rising energy costs’



Dr Benny Peiser, director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, is giving a public lecture in Totnes.

In 2009, Dr Peiser launched the foundation with Lord Lawson and a group a like-minded peers and MPs.
On its website, the foundation describes itself as being “open-minded on the contested science of global warming”, but also “deeply concerned about the costs and other implications of many of the policies currently being advocated”.

The foundation insists that it is in no sense ‘anti-environmental’, adding: “There is a wide range of important environmental issues, which call for an equally wide range of policy responses.

Our concern is solely with the possible effects of any future global warming and the policy responses that may evoke”.

Dr Peiser is travelling to Tones from London on Tuesday, January 21, to give an illustrated talk at the Royal Seven Stars at 7:30pm titled: ‘Boris Johnson and Climate Change: Net Zero and the problem of rising energy costs’.

Dr Peiser said: “We have a new Conservative Government and Britain’s departure from the EU is imminent.

“Boris Johnson has now the opportunity to reform climate and energy policy in such a way that it won’t hurt families and businesses and doesn’t undermine Britain’s international competitiveness.

“How will he deal with costly climate and energy policies? Since his mandate derives also from voters in Wales, the Midlands and the North of England, how can he help lower-income families in these regions who are struggling with ever-rising energy costs?”

The following day, January 22, Dr Peiser Will hold a more informal Q&A/discussion session in the hotel’s Assembly Room at 10:30am. Admission is free to both events.

Local organiser Ian Phillips said: The Tuesday evening lecture will allow plenty of time for questions from the floor. A more detailed question can be submitted in writing to my email address – by January 16 – that I can forward to Benny for his consideration.

Mr Phillips said the GWPF’s main function is to “analyse global warming policies and their implications, while remaining open-minded in climate science”.

He added: “It seeks to inform the media, politicians and the public on the subject in general, and on the misinformation to which they are all too frequently being subjected at the present time”.
Questions can be emailed to Mr Phillips at thelmiandev@yahoo.co.uk
 
4) Tim Newark: End Unfair Air Passenger Tax And Ignore The Angry Greens
Daily Express, 15 January 2020

If the Prime Minister wants to deliver on his pledge to improve transport connections between UK regions, he must waive this tax and encourage competitiveness.



Air Passenger Duty (APD) has always been an unwelcome tax on hard-working people flying abroad on holiday, but now it is set to cost 2,300 UK jobs at Flybe. If the Prime Minister wants to deliver on his pledge to improve transport connections between UK regions, he must waive this tax and encourage competitiveness.

UK air carrier Flybe stands on the brink of collapse thanks to the massive burden of a tax that is not imposed on either rail or coach passengers. Some £106million of tax is due this year unless the Government steps in to defer it over a longer three-year period. That’s an unfair fiscal hit on air passengers and air companies.

Last year, Flybe accounted for 38 per cent of all UK domestic flights and eight ­million passengers. Owned by a consortium of Virgin Atlantic, Stobart Group and Cyrus Capital Partners, it’s a major player in Boris Johnson’s commitment to improving infrastructure within the UK.

It’s route from London to Cornwall is so important it is already part subsidised by the Government. Other routes may be commercially unviable but are necessary nevertheless.

Fast travel between major ­cities in the UK is vital for encouraging business.

Of course, no private company should be immune from going bankrupt and the Government’s reluctance to intervene is understandable as it could encourage other failing ­businesses to seek rescue with taxpayers’ money.

Yet this is not a case of a bad business model but over-burdensome tax harming the ability of a company to survive.

It’s the same affliction harming the high street when out-of-date business rates are the last straw for many traders.

Tax needs to be tailored to provide a level playing field and APD is distorting the market.

Air passengers pay £26 per person in APD for a domestic return journey – and higher rates for longer flights abroad. It’s levied each time an aircraft takes off from a UK airport so hits domestic carriers especially hard.

That’s a lot of money coming out of the air industry and it’s not just the air companies that are suffering.

More than 25 UK regional airports serve Flybe, employing thousands of people in ancillary services and their competitiveness with other European airports is also damaged by this unnecessary tax.

If Boris does intervene, he is right to cut the tax across the entire air industry to help all passenger carriers.

It is no surprise that environmental activists are up in arms over this, with Greenpeace saying it would be a “shocking decision” as flying is high in carbon emissions.

They want to see more taxes on flights so that only the rich can afford to go abroad on holiday.

Not only is that wrong, attacking the poorest in society, but it is also a massive hurdle for business.

It would be wonderful if we could all cycle to work or catch a train for a meeting.

But sometimes business people need to attend meetings quickly and efficiently, not ­dawdling along on a journey that takes a day rather than an hour to get there.

Brexit Britain must decide whether it is open for global business or not, preferring to pull up the drawbridge in pursuit of a carbon neutrality that shackles enterprise and loses jobs.

It is simply a question of striking the right balance between protecting the environment but also enabling us to work hard and create a prosperous society for all.

Constant catastrophising about climate change adds very little to what should be a ­measured debate.

Honouring the working people who backed Boris in the general election means improving our transport network across the UK.

Full post
 
5) EU Green Deal In Doubt As Germany Rejects Call For More Climate Money 
The Independent, 15 January 2020

The German government is resisting a plea by Brussels to provide more funding to get the EU's flagship climate change policy off the ground – in a blow the continent's decarbonisation hopes. 

Commission president Ursula von der Leyen on Tuesday unveiled details of the bloc's ambitious €1 trillion Green Deal, alongside a call for additional funds for the EU budget to make it happen.

But Germany's finance ministry has already started the year by rejecting calls for more funding, stating that the current EU budget is sufficient to meet the continent's climate goal of going carbon neutral by 2050.

The ministry also dismissed the idea of increasing the capital limit on the European Investment Bank, which Ms von der Leyen had suggested could also help close the funding gap.

A response to an MPs' written question provided by German ministers last week said the federal government sees "sufficient leeway to provide the necessary funds to achieve the climate protection goals by setting priorities" rather than increasing funding.

Finance minister Bettina Hagedorn was writing to Green MP Franziska Brantner, who had asked the question. Ms Brantner accused her country's government of having "torpedoed" climate goals behind the scenes despite supporting them in public.

The €1 trillion Von der Leyen investment plan includes a new "Just Transition Mechanism" to compensate and regenerate areas that currently depend on carbon-intensive industries like coal mining.

Ms von der Leyen, who leads the EU's executive arm, has made the "green deal" the centrepiece of her mandate, but needs to convince fossil-fuel dependent countries like Poland that it is worth their while.

Full post
 
6) Green Madness: Germany’s Electric Car Obsession Puts ‘More Than 400,000 Jobs At Risk’
The Local, 13 January 2020

The conversion to electric cars could cost hundreds of thousands of jobs in Germany by 2030, according to a government study. However, the car industry has slammed this forecast.



The switch to electromobility could result in serious job losses in Germany’s auto industry, a new study has found.

In the production of engines and gearboxes alone, up to 88,000 jobs could be cut, according to research by the National Platform Future of Mobility (NPM) for the German government, reported
newspaper Handelsblatt on Monday.

In total, the NPM working group, chaired by the head of union IG Metall Jörg Hofmann, believes 410,000 jobs are at risk of being slashed in Germany by the end of the decade.

The results of the report are to be presented on Monday, two days before a car summit.

To ensure that job losses are kept to a minimum, the NPM working group has called on companies to carry out strategic personnel planning. They also urged for regional qualification centres to be set up, while the employment agency, training providers and companies should work together to stem losses.

Full story
 
7) Siemens Snubs Greta Thunberg And Will Honour Australian Coal Mine Deal
Bloomberg, 13 January 2020

Siemens AG said it intends to honor a controversial contract to supply signaling systems to an Australian coal mine, defying the demands of activists that protested at locations in Germany on Friday.

The company will establish a sustainability committee that will have the power to stop or escalate projects, but the company will ultimately continue with the Adani contract, Chief Executive Officer Joe Kaeser said in a statement on Sunday.

“I do realize, most of you would have hoped for more,” Kaeser said in the statement. “While I do have a lot of empathy for environmental matters, I do need to balance different interests of different stakeholders.”

Fridays for Future activists, including Greta Thunberg, had targeted Siemens to renounce the contract for months and not work with Adani Power Ltd. on the planned Carmichael coal mine in Queensland.

“Siemens’ announcement that it will continue working on Adani’s coal mine while bushfires rage in Australia is nothing short of shameful,” environmental lobby group Australian Conservation Foundation said in a statement. “The company has shown its true colours with this decision. It has a climate change policy, but it is hollow and empty.”

Full story
 
8) Gurcharan Das: And Now, The Good News: If You Can Take The Long View, The World Is Getting Better
The Times of India, 14 January 2020

At the beginning of a new decade when so many are feeling so glum, Matt Ridley comes up with the astonishing claim that the past decade was one of the best.



“We are living through the greatest improvement in human living standards in history,” he writes in UK’s Spectator. “Extreme poverty has fallen below 10% of the world’s population for the first time… child mortality has fallen to record low levels; famine virtually went extinct; malaria, polio and heart disease are all in decline….”

We don’t notice these changes because we don’t take the long view of history. We are obsessed with headlines of the day and good news doesn’t make headlines; hence, we don’t notice the quiet but dramatic changes taking place in peoples’ lives.

The long view is fine, but what about the rise of authoritarian leaders during the past decade – Trump, Putin, Xi, Erdogan, Modi, Boris Johnson, etc – and the rapid decay in the ideals that we were brought up to believe? Closer to home, what about the unfair citizenship law against which students are protesting across India? How can one feel good?

Ridley argues that many of the good things that make the world a better place happen despite the state. They originate in scientific breakthroughs and are then spread quickly by market forces. Take for example, the cellphone, which has empowered the world’s poor in unbelievable ways and has helped achieve universal banking in India.

And what about the environmental crisis? Ridley argues unfashionably that forests are expanding, especially in rich countries, because productivity of agriculture is rising so fast that human needs can be supplied by a shrinking amount of land. We use 65% less land to produce a given quantity of food compared with 50 years ago. By 2050, he claims that an area the size of India will have been released from the plough and the cow.

As a result, the population of wild animals is growing again – wolves, deer, beavers, lynx, seals, sea eagles and bald eagles. This is a very different story from what the scaremongers have been telling us in newspaper headlines.

When it comes to India, aren’t there legitimate reasons to feel depressed at the beginning of this new decade? Our economy is in serious trouble and Prime Minister Modi has lost valuable time in fixing it, distracted as he is by a contentious social agenda that endangers the nation’s secular and democratic foundations.

Students across the country are protesting against an unfair citizenship law and there is fear of a national register of citizens. The lockdown in Kashmir continues after five months with even pro-India leaders still in detention.

Against this, there is the long view which shows that more Indians are free from poisonous indoor pollution because they now cook with clean gas. More Indians have access to toilets at home and no longer defecate in the open, and this will liberate them gradually from environmental pollution and many health hazards, including child malnutrition.

More Indians are connected with pukka roads from their villages, have access to electricity, and have a bank account in which they have begun to receive direct benefit transfers. Because India has achieved annual economic growth exceeding 7% over the last 15 years, extreme poverty has declined to 5.5%, according to a report by the respected Brookings Institution.

I began to take Ridley seriously after reading his The Rational Optimist, a fascinating history of trade and innovation. Once a talented science writer, he has shifted his focus to the economy. Even though his faith in the market seems one sided – even more one-sided than mine – his two key concepts, gains from exchange and specialisation, rank up there with important economic ideas of all time.

He believes that gains from trade in the market make possible gains from specialisation, which in turn makes technological innovation possible. Steven Pinker, another science writer, has reinforced his optimism. Pinker argues that life has been getting better for most people based on 15 different measures of human wellbeing. People live longer and healthier than ever before and our fear of terrorism is exaggerated – an American, for example, is 3,000 times more likely to die in an accident than in a terrorist attack.

Both gifted science writers offer a tonic against prevailing pessimism.

Full post

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.