EU Could Use Carbon Border Tax Against Brexit Britain, MEP Warns
In this newsletter:
1) Boris Johnson Takes On The BBC, Moves To Decriminalise Licence Fee Evasion
Financial Times, 31 January 2020
2) Climate War? EU Could Use Carbon Border Tax Against Brexit Britain, Warns MEP
EurActiv, 28 January 2020
3) US Threatens Retaliation Against EU Over Carbon Tax
Financial Times, 26 January 2020
4) UK Warns It Will Impose A Competitive Carbon Tax In Case Of No-Deal Brexit
Dave Keating, Forbes, 9 September 2019
5) The Taming and Shaming of RCP8.5: Climate Scientists Shrug Off Criticism And Carry On As Usual
Jaime Jessop, Climate Scepticism, 30 January 2020
6) And Finally: Professor at St John's College, Oxford, turns oil row into a heated debate
The Times, 31 January 2020
Full details:
1) Boris Johnson Takes On The BBC, Moves To Decriminalise Licence Fee Evasion
Financial Times, 31 January 2020
Boris Johnson’s government will launch its first strike on BBC funding next week, opening a formal process to lift the criminal penalties on those refusing to pay the licence fee.
The consultation on decriminalisation will be one of Mr Johnson’s first domestic policy initiatives since the election — a sign of the importance he is placing on shaking-up the broadcaster and the licence fee system it has relied on since the 1920s.
BBC executives fear that if criminal sanctions were removed by law, the corporation’s ability to collect the licence fee would be badly weakened, increasing evasion and blowing a hole in the broadcaster’s programming budget of £200m or more.
Two people familiar with the government plans said the consultation — the second time the government has examined the issue in less than five years — will open next week...
Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, a media analyst group, described it as “pincer movement to cause the BBC to wither and implode”.
The decriminalisation drive follows a punishing fortnight for the public service broadcaster. Tony Hall, the BBC director-general, announced his planned departure last week, shortly before the corporation unveiled the biggest round of cuts to its news operation in more than a decade, with the loss of 450 posts.
Fran Unsworth, the head of the news division, told staff on Wednesday she had never felt the organisation so under threat in her four decades at the broadcaster.
A day later Sarah Sands stepped down as editor of BBC’s Radio 4 flagship Today programme — a show that has been boycotted by government ministers since the election.
A further blow came on Wednesday night when Julian Knight, a Tory MP and vocal critic of the BBC, was unexpectedly elected to chair the Commons select committee that is most active in scrutinising the broadcaster.
Mr Knight has described the Today programme as a “byword for metropolitan elitism” and compared the BBC licence fee to “a modern version of Charles I’s Ship Money” — a hated tax that fuelled discontent in the run-up to the English Civil War.
Full story (£)
2) Climate War? EU Could Use Carbon Border Tax Against Brexit Britain, Warns MEP
EurActiv, 28 January 2020
The EU could deploy a carbon border tax against the UK after Brexit, according to the head of the European Parliament’s environment committee, if Westminster diverges from bloc rules on issues like carbon markets.
French MEP Pascal Canfin told reporters on Monday (27 January) that the EU “should be tough” and “shouldn’t be afraid of an economic no-deal in December”, as the next round of Brexit-based negotiations loom on the horizon.
The talks will determine what sort of relationship the UK and EU will have after the transition period ends on 31 December and Canfin made clear that divergence from bloc rules will make trade relations more difficult.
“Talks haven’t started on the right path, with the UK government saying it wants full [single market] access but also divergence. To me that is like the EU asking for full alignment but with quotas,” the lawmaker warned.
Brussels’ two top officials, the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, signed off on Britain’s EU divorce agreement Friday (24 January).
As head of the Parliament’s environment committee (ENVI), Canfin will help advise negotiators on related issues during the talks, citing carbon markets as a tangible example of where difficulties might arise.
The UK is currently a part of the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) but the government plans to leave the carbon market and set up its own carbon-pricing equivalent. Canfin told reporters that “the markets have to have the same price”.
“For the EU’s industry, you can’t accept that the UK has full access” to the EU’s single market while a lower carbon price is on offer across the Channel, he insisted.
Full story
3) US Threatens Retaliation Against EU Over Carbon Tax
Financial Times, 26 January 2020
The EU’s plans for a carbon tax have emerged as a potential new flashpoint in transatlantic trade ties, after the Trump administration warned that it would “react” with possible punitive measures against Brussels.
Wilbur Ross, the US commerce secretary, compared the EU’s proposals to recent moves by several European countries to impose a digital services tax, which has angered US officials and caused Washington to threaten tariffs on EU products.
“Depending on what form the carbon tax takes, we will react to it — but if it is in its essence protectionist, like the digital taxes, we will react,” Mr Ross told the Financial Times.
Taxing carbon imports is one of the EU’s top priorities under the new European Commission led by president Ursula von der Leyen. But the plans look set to add to friction between Brussels and Washington over the environment.
Ever since President Donald Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the EU and US have been at odds over global policies to tackle climate change, but those tensions had not yet spilled over into the trade arena.
Mr Trump and Ms von der Leyen said last week in Davos that they would try to strike a limited truce in their trade war this year, easing fears of full-blown escalation. Officials have said there could be common ground in areas ranging from agricultural trade and standards, to technology and energy, that could be settled fairly rapidly.
But the potential for new flare-ups remains. US officials have repeatedly threatened to impose tariffs on the EU automotive sector, and the split on climate policies appears to be widening.
Ms von der Leyen outlined last week how her flagship green deal programme would need to involve some carbon border regulations or taxes to ensure that the benefits of the programme were not offset by carbon embedded in imports.
The bloc’s officials are understood to be particularly concerned that EU products could be undercut by imports from places with lax environmental standards, such as China, Russia and India, but would extend the scrutiny to other trading partners such as the US.
Full story (£)
4) UK Warns It Will Impose A Competitive Carbon Tax In Case Of No-Deal Brexit
Dave Keating, Forbes, 9 September 2019
The United Kingdom is set to impose a £16 per ton tax on carbon if it leaves the European Union without a deal on, according to government plans.
If the UK leaves the EU without a deal, it will also leave the EU’s Emissions Trade System (ETS), the centrepiece of the bloc’s efforts to meet European countries’ emissions reduction obligations. The cap-and-trade system requires power plants and industries to purchase permits to emit more carbon than they are allocated for free in the system.
In the event of no-deal, the UK would replace the ETS with a carbon tax “to help meet the UK’s legally binding greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Climate Change Act,” the governments no-deal preparedness guide states. “The tax would apply from November 4 2019 to all stationary installations currently participating in the EU ETS”.
The tax would differ from the EU’s cap and trade system because it would be a set amount rather than creating a market for buying and selling permits to emit. A flat rate of £16 would be applied to each ton of carbon dioxide emitted over and above the free allowance the installation would have received under the EU ETS.
But while a tax might sound more onerous than a market, analysts say that this tax approach will mean an easier ride for companies in the UK than in the EU – potentially distorting the European carbon market and putting the UK at risk of failing to meet its emissions reductions targets.
The price of carbon in the EU ETS is currently around £26 per ton. The UK’s rate would be £10 cheaper.
Full story
5) The Taming and Shaming of RCP8.5: Climate Scientists Shrug Off Criticism And Carry On As Usual
Jaime Jessop, Climate Scepticism, 30 January 2020
In an epic climbdown, following a long campaign by sceptics to point out the routine misuse of the RCP8.5 IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway – and particularly owing to the dogged and determined efforts of Roger Pielke Jr. – the alarmist main stream media has finally conceded that scientists wrongly applied this worst case scenario in their research, often mis-labeling it as “business as usual”.
Huge numbers of ‘impact studies’ have used this highly unlikely concentration pathway which have then been reported by the media without caveats (often because the researchers themselves have not bothered to provide perspective or have even hyped their own findings), giving the impression that climate change will be very bad or ‘worse than we thought’. So when the BBC’s Matt McGrath pens an article which is surprisingly contrite and factual, you know you are winning the war against climate crisis alarmism.
Now, there is huge confusion regarding the Representative Concentration Pathways – even among scientists themselves – and I’m not going to pretend that I understand all the nuances and intricacies involved in their development and use as tools for climate modelers, but some things seem clear – to me at least. The first is that even though they describe atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases by 2100, in ppm, they are, by necessity, intimately connected with emissions of GHGs. There are other factors which affect concentrations of course – like climate and carbon cycle feedbacks – but it seems pretty obvious that the quantity of GHGs which humans put into the atmosphere is a huge factor in determining the resulting concentrations of GHGs which accumulate in the atmosphere. Richard Betts on Twitter seems somewhat determined to underplay this fact in stressing the ‘huge difference’ between emissions and concentrations. [...]
You can immediately see where this is going, can’t you? Having finally been publicly exposed for unnecessarily scaring the pants off of people by abusing an extremely unlikely worst case emissions scenario for years, scientists are now seeking to divert attention from their failings by resurrecting the discredited precautionary principle and relying upon equally highly unlikely hyper-sensitive AR6 climate models and theoretical carbon cycle feedbacks to claim that ‘risk management’ demands a robust real world policy response to fantasy projected climate warmings. Business as usual, in other words, in the whacky world of policy advocating alarmist climate science.
Full post
6) And Finally: Professor at St John's College, Oxford, Turns Oil Row Into A Heated Debate
The Times, 31 January 2020
How do you respond when placard-waving students occupy your 15th-century quadrangle and refuse to leave until you sell the college's shares in oil companies? As this is Oxford, naturally you present them with a philosophical dilemma.
Two students at St John's College wrote to Andrew Parker, the principal bursar, this week requesting a meeting to discuss the protesters' demands, which are that the college "declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels". They say that the college, the richest in Oxford, has £8 million of its £551 million endowment fund invested in BP and Shell.
Professor Parker responded with a provocative offer. "I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice," he wrote. "But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal."
Ankit Ranjan, a biomedicine undergraduate, wrote back saying that he was willing to put the offer to the students but he suspected the bursar was being facetious. He added: "I think [the offer] will reflect poorly on the college."
Professor Parker replied: "You are right that I am being provocative but I am provoking some clear thinking, I hope. It is all too easy to request others to do things that carry no personal cost to yourself. The question is whether you and others are prepared to make personal sacrifices to achieve the goals of environmental improvement (which I support as a goal)."
1) Boris Johnson Takes On The BBC, Moves To Decriminalise Licence Fee Evasion
Financial Times, 31 January 2020
Boris Johnson’s government will launch its first strike on BBC funding next week, opening a formal process to lift the criminal penalties on those refusing to pay the licence fee.
The consultation on decriminalisation will be one of Mr Johnson’s first domestic policy initiatives since the election — a sign of the importance he is placing on shaking-up the broadcaster and the licence fee system it has relied on since the 1920s.
BBC executives fear that if criminal sanctions were removed by law, the corporation’s ability to collect the licence fee would be badly weakened, increasing evasion and blowing a hole in the broadcaster’s programming budget of £200m or more.
Two people familiar with the government plans said the consultation — the second time the government has examined the issue in less than five years — will open next week...
Claire Enders of Enders Analysis, a media analyst group, described it as “pincer movement to cause the BBC to wither and implode”.
The decriminalisation drive follows a punishing fortnight for the public service broadcaster. Tony Hall, the BBC director-general, announced his planned departure last week, shortly before the corporation unveiled the biggest round of cuts to its news operation in more than a decade, with the loss of 450 posts.
Fran Unsworth, the head of the news division, told staff on Wednesday she had never felt the organisation so under threat in her four decades at the broadcaster.
A day later Sarah Sands stepped down as editor of BBC’s Radio 4 flagship Today programme — a show that has been boycotted by government ministers since the election.
A further blow came on Wednesday night when Julian Knight, a Tory MP and vocal critic of the BBC, was unexpectedly elected to chair the Commons select committee that is most active in scrutinising the broadcaster.
Mr Knight has described the Today programme as a “byword for metropolitan elitism” and compared the BBC licence fee to “a modern version of Charles I’s Ship Money” — a hated tax that fuelled discontent in the run-up to the English Civil War.
Full story (£)
2) Climate War? EU Could Use Carbon Border Tax Against Brexit Britain, Warns MEP
EurActiv, 28 January 2020
The EU could deploy a carbon border tax against the UK after Brexit, according to the head of the European Parliament’s environment committee, if Westminster diverges from bloc rules on issues like carbon markets.
French MEP Pascal Canfin told reporters on Monday (27 January) that the EU “should be tough” and “shouldn’t be afraid of an economic no-deal in December”, as the next round of Brexit-based negotiations loom on the horizon.
The talks will determine what sort of relationship the UK and EU will have after the transition period ends on 31 December and Canfin made clear that divergence from bloc rules will make trade relations more difficult.
“Talks haven’t started on the right path, with the UK government saying it wants full [single market] access but also divergence. To me that is like the EU asking for full alignment but with quotas,” the lawmaker warned.
Brussels’ two top officials, the presidents of the European Commission and the European Council, signed off on Britain’s EU divorce agreement Friday (24 January).
As head of the Parliament’s environment committee (ENVI), Canfin will help advise negotiators on related issues during the talks, citing carbon markets as a tangible example of where difficulties might arise.
The UK is currently a part of the EU’s emissions trading scheme (ETS) but the government plans to leave the carbon market and set up its own carbon-pricing equivalent. Canfin told reporters that “the markets have to have the same price”.
“For the EU’s industry, you can’t accept that the UK has full access” to the EU’s single market while a lower carbon price is on offer across the Channel, he insisted.
Full story
3) US Threatens Retaliation Against EU Over Carbon Tax
Financial Times, 26 January 2020
The EU’s plans for a carbon tax have emerged as a potential new flashpoint in transatlantic trade ties, after the Trump administration warned that it would “react” with possible punitive measures against Brussels.
Wilbur Ross, the US commerce secretary, compared the EU’s proposals to recent moves by several European countries to impose a digital services tax, which has angered US officials and caused Washington to threaten tariffs on EU products.
“Depending on what form the carbon tax takes, we will react to it — but if it is in its essence protectionist, like the digital taxes, we will react,” Mr Ross told the Financial Times.
Taxing carbon imports is one of the EU’s top priorities under the new European Commission led by president Ursula von der Leyen. But the plans look set to add to friction between Brussels and Washington over the environment.
Ever since President Donald Trump announced America’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, the EU and US have been at odds over global policies to tackle climate change, but those tensions had not yet spilled over into the trade arena.
Mr Trump and Ms von der Leyen said last week in Davos that they would try to strike a limited truce in their trade war this year, easing fears of full-blown escalation. Officials have said there could be common ground in areas ranging from agricultural trade and standards, to technology and energy, that could be settled fairly rapidly.
But the potential for new flare-ups remains. US officials have repeatedly threatened to impose tariffs on the EU automotive sector, and the split on climate policies appears to be widening.
Ms von der Leyen outlined last week how her flagship green deal programme would need to involve some carbon border regulations or taxes to ensure that the benefits of the programme were not offset by carbon embedded in imports.
The bloc’s officials are understood to be particularly concerned that EU products could be undercut by imports from places with lax environmental standards, such as China, Russia and India, but would extend the scrutiny to other trading partners such as the US.
Full story (£)
4) UK Warns It Will Impose A Competitive Carbon Tax In Case Of No-Deal Brexit
Dave Keating, Forbes, 9 September 2019
The United Kingdom is set to impose a £16 per ton tax on carbon if it leaves the European Union without a deal on, according to government plans.
If the UK leaves the EU without a deal, it will also leave the EU’s Emissions Trade System (ETS), the centrepiece of the bloc’s efforts to meet European countries’ emissions reduction obligations. The cap-and-trade system requires power plants and industries to purchase permits to emit more carbon than they are allocated for free in the system.
In the event of no-deal, the UK would replace the ETS with a carbon tax “to help meet the UK’s legally binding greenhouse gas reduction commitments under the Climate Change Act,” the governments no-deal preparedness guide states. “The tax would apply from November 4 2019 to all stationary installations currently participating in the EU ETS”.
The tax would differ from the EU’s cap and trade system because it would be a set amount rather than creating a market for buying and selling permits to emit. A flat rate of £16 would be applied to each ton of carbon dioxide emitted over and above the free allowance the installation would have received under the EU ETS.
But while a tax might sound more onerous than a market, analysts say that this tax approach will mean an easier ride for companies in the UK than in the EU – potentially distorting the European carbon market and putting the UK at risk of failing to meet its emissions reductions targets.
The price of carbon in the EU ETS is currently around £26 per ton. The UK’s rate would be £10 cheaper.
Full story
5) The Taming and Shaming of RCP8.5: Climate Scientists Shrug Off Criticism And Carry On As Usual
Jaime Jessop, Climate Scepticism, 30 January 2020
In an epic climbdown, following a long campaign by sceptics to point out the routine misuse of the RCP8.5 IPCC Representative Concentration Pathway – and particularly owing to the dogged and determined efforts of Roger Pielke Jr. – the alarmist main stream media has finally conceded that scientists wrongly applied this worst case scenario in their research, often mis-labeling it as “business as usual”.
Huge numbers of ‘impact studies’ have used this highly unlikely concentration pathway which have then been reported by the media without caveats (often because the researchers themselves have not bothered to provide perspective or have even hyped their own findings), giving the impression that climate change will be very bad or ‘worse than we thought’. So when the BBC’s Matt McGrath pens an article which is surprisingly contrite and factual, you know you are winning the war against climate crisis alarmism.
Now, there is huge confusion regarding the Representative Concentration Pathways – even among scientists themselves – and I’m not going to pretend that I understand all the nuances and intricacies involved in their development and use as tools for climate modelers, but some things seem clear – to me at least. The first is that even though they describe atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases by 2100, in ppm, they are, by necessity, intimately connected with emissions of GHGs. There are other factors which affect concentrations of course – like climate and carbon cycle feedbacks – but it seems pretty obvious that the quantity of GHGs which humans put into the atmosphere is a huge factor in determining the resulting concentrations of GHGs which accumulate in the atmosphere. Richard Betts on Twitter seems somewhat determined to underplay this fact in stressing the ‘huge difference’ between emissions and concentrations. [...]
You can immediately see where this is going, can’t you? Having finally been publicly exposed for unnecessarily scaring the pants off of people by abusing an extremely unlikely worst case emissions scenario for years, scientists are now seeking to divert attention from their failings by resurrecting the discredited precautionary principle and relying upon equally highly unlikely hyper-sensitive AR6 climate models and theoretical carbon cycle feedbacks to claim that ‘risk management’ demands a robust real world policy response to fantasy projected climate warmings. Business as usual, in other words, in the whacky world of policy advocating alarmist climate science.
Full post
6) And Finally: Professor at St John's College, Oxford, Turns Oil Row Into A Heated Debate
The Times, 31 January 2020
How do you respond when placard-waving students occupy your 15th-century quadrangle and refuse to leave until you sell the college's shares in oil companies? As this is Oxford, naturally you present them with a philosophical dilemma.
Two students at St John's College wrote to Andrew Parker, the principal bursar, this week requesting a meeting to discuss the protesters' demands, which are that the college "declares a climate emergency and immediately divests from fossil fuels". They say that the college, the richest in Oxford, has £8 million of its £551 million endowment fund invested in BP and Shell.
Professor Parker responded with a provocative offer. "I am not able to arrange any divestment at short notice," he wrote. "But I can arrange for the gas central heating in college to be switched off with immediate effect. Please let me know if you support this proposal."
Ankit Ranjan, a biomedicine undergraduate, wrote back saying that he was willing to put the offer to the students but he suspected the bursar was being facetious. He added: "I think [the offer] will reflect poorly on the college."
Professor Parker replied: "You are right that I am being provocative but I am provoking some clear thinking, I hope. It is all too easy to request others to do things that carry no personal cost to yourself. The question is whether you and others are prepared to make personal sacrifices to achieve the goals of environmental improvement (which I support as a goal)."
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.
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