GWPF Newsletter - New Survey: Climate Is One Of The Lowest Priorities For Americans

How To Turn COP26 Into Another Flop

In this newsletter:

1) New Survey Confirms: Climate Is One Of The Lowest Priorities For Americans
Donna Laframboise, No Frakking Consensus

2) End Of A Giant Con Trick: Wind Giants In Germany No Longer Keen On Market Rates
Bloomberg, 10 February 2020


3) Climate Crisis? What Climate Crisis? Brazil Poised For Record Grain, Oilseed Crops

Argus Media, 11 February 2020

4) Are Ocean Currents Speeding Up … Or Are They Slowing Down? Nobody Knows
GWPF Observatory, 10 February 2020

5) U.S. CO2 Emissions Decline More Than That Of Any Other Nation In 2019, IEA Reports
Fox News, 12 February 2020

6) Unlike In Europe, The US Approach To Climate Change Is Actually Working
Drew Johnson, Washington Examiner, 10 February 2020

7) Greta Thunberg Outrage: BBC Viewers Furious As It Announces Activist Series 
Daily Express, 12 February 2020

8) China’s Electric Car Market Continues To Plunge
Jim Collins, Forbes, 11 February 2020

9) How To Turn COP26 Into Another Flop: Michael Gove Criticises US And Brazil For Climate Crisis Scepticism
The Guardian, 11 February 2020

10) And Finally: Row Erupts Over UN Climate Summit
Politics Home, 12 February 2020

Full details:

1) New Survey Confirms: Climate Is One Of The Lowest Priorities For Americans
Donna Laframboise, No Frakking Consensus

A new survey by the Pew Research Center on the top priorities of US Americans shows that climate change ended up in 17th place out of 18.

There is no evidence that climate change has ever been a top concern for most Americans.

Recently I reported on a poll that Gallup has conducted in America every month of every year since 2001.

Admirably, it makes no attempt to prompt or influence. It asks people to name the most important problem facing the country, then it records their answers.

If one seeks honest, genuine insight into ordinary people’s lives, that’s a great approach.

Pew Research Center, another American polling outfit, conducts a different kind of survey. For 25 years (from 1994 to 2019 inclusive), it has read members of the public a long list of pre-selected topics in random order. People have been asked to attach a label to each one.

Should it be a ‘top priority’ for the President and Congress this year? Should it be a lower priority? Is it unimportant? Does it deserve no attention at all?
In 2007, Pew added ‘global warming’ to this list of potential top priorities. In 2016, it started calling it ‘climate change’ instead.

Last year, 44% of respondents told Pew that ‘Dealing with global climate change’ should be a top priority. That sounds significant until you notice that every single item on the list received at least 39% support.

In such cases, raw percentages are meaningless. What matters is how a topic ranks compared to its fellows. Those results couldn’t be clearer. In 2019, climate change ended up in 17th place out of 18.

Full post

2) End Of A Giant Con Trick: Wind Giants In Germany No Longer Keen On Market Rates
Bloomberg, 10 February 2020

The first time Germany auctioned offshore wind projects, developers were happy to forgo any subsidies, confident the technology was robust enough to turn a profit unaided. Now, they’re not nearly so sure.


We've told you so....

Germany’s offshore wind giants now are looking at a U.K. program that would ensure they get paid enough for their power, no matter what wholesale prices are doing.

Potential bidders in Germany’s next round of offshore auctions in 2022 including Orsted A/S and Vattenfall AB are attempting to convince Chancellor Angela Merkel to draft new auction rules to secure income from the giant machines at sea. They are concerned the government’s muddled climate policy will make investments in the technology riskier and feel they need guarantees to invest billions of euros.

It’s a stark change from the last round of auctions in 2017 when Orsted and EnBW AG won most of Germany’s maiden offshore wind auction by forgoing the crutch of subsidies. At the time, Merkel hailed the result as a breakthrough in clean power’s competitiveness that might set a precedent.

The government may need to offer the kinds of contracts-for-difference, or CfDs, that the U.K. have used to promote the technology. Those agreements, will lock in the price of power generated by new projects. Winners last year included SSE Plc, Equinor ASA and Innogy SE.

Investors seek an offshore payment regime “that makes economic sense — and that’s clearly the CfD system,” Volker Malmen, Orsted’s German managing director, said by email.

The government is currently evaluating its auction system for offshore wind and has taken note of industry pressure to adopt CfDs, the Economy and Energy Ministry said in an email to Bloomberg on Friday, without being more specific.

Such a system would give necessary financial security while ensuring continued development of offshore wind to achieve climate targets, he said. A spokesman for Vattenfall AB, which has won offshore capacity in the Netherlands with zero-bids, said the utility also backs a roll-out of the instruments.

As Merkel gears up moves to cut emissions, policy shifts are becoming more frequent, fanning uncertainty among investors, said Stefan Thimm, managing director of Germany’s BWO offshore industry lobby, which represents some of Europe’s biggest utilities.

Full story

3) Climate Crisis? What Climate Crisis? Brazil Poised For Record Grain, Oilseed Crops

Argus Media, 11 February 2020

Brazil's 2019-20 harvest of grains and oilseeds is poised to set a record, surpassing 250mn metric tonnes (t), as corn and soybean yields climb on improved weather.

Total output is pegged at 251.1mn t, exceeding the 248mn t forecast in January and topping last season's record 242mn t harvest, Brazil's agricultural statistics agency Conab said today.

"What marks this forecast is the good climatic conditions that favor the recovery of crops, slaughtered the last cycle by the drought in key-producing states," Conab said.

Total planted area is expected to reach nearly 65mn hectares (161mn acres), up from 63.3mn hectares last season.

Full story

4) Are Ocean Currents Speeding Up … Or Are They Slowing Down? Nobody Knows
GWPF Observatory, 10 February 2020
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor

The latest research contradicts previous studies which suggested that global warming will weaken ocean circulation, especially in tropical waters.

 

Global Ocean Circulation since the 1990s.

“Global warming is speeding up Earth’s massive ocean currents,” said one headline. “Global ocean circulation is accelerating from the surface to the abyss,” said another.” But this is another of those climate stories in which the top line is not backed up by the qualifications raised by oceanic researchers when looking at the results of this fascinating paper. Published in Science Advances it suggests that for almost 25 years, ocean currents have been rapidly speeding up, partly due to global warming, according to a new study.

It contradicts previous studies that suggested that global warming will weaken ocean circulation, especially in tropical waters. This new study suggests the acceleration in ocean currents will be especially strong in tropical waters!

A key point is that there is no sustained direct measurement of the ocean’s currents, so it has to be inferred using other means. When this is done the numerous gaps in the data are filled in with results from computer models and anyone can see the caution this method should raise. Based on observations and models, study authors claim that from 1990 to 2013, the energy of the world’s currents increased by some 15% per decade. The researchers put this down to strengthening winds driving ocean currents. Ocean winds have increased over the past 30 years. The increase is about 2% per decade and is itself part of a longer-term trend.

The main evidence for this change comes from six years of Argo data whose floating and diving buoys have been operating since 2005 and have produced the most coherent database on ocean parameters we have. They do not directly measure ocean currents, but a good inference can be obtained from their movements and indications where winds are piling up regions of ocean.

Hu Shijian of the Chinese Academy of Science’s Institute of Oceanography is the lead author of the study. He points out that that this new paper is different from previous studies that looked for an ocean circulation increase. Indeed, given varying regional responses to global warming it has not been possible to deduce how and whether global ocean circulation has been altered. “So far observations haven’t shown a trend,” Shijian said. So, he set about the reanalysis route to see if he could find one.

A review article in Science noted that as yet natural fluctuations cannot be ruled out and that it will take another decade at least to see if the trend is real and possibly associated with global warming. Quoted in Science, Susan Wijffels, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution said, “It’s going to stimulate a lot of other work.”

Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com

5) U.S. CO2 Emissions Decline More Than That Of Any Other Nation In 2019, IEA Reports
Fox News, 12 February 2020

Despite media reports predicting the contrary, U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions fell 2.9 percent last year, according to a report published Tuesday.

In fact, the International Energy Agency (IEA) found that the U.S. decrease in emissions was the largest total of any country, at 140 million tons. It also noted that over the last 20 years, U.S. emissions have decreased nearly one gigaton (1 billion metric tons).

Globally, emissions flatlined in 2019. After two years of growth, global emissions remained unchanged at 33 gigatons in 2019, even as the world economy grew by 2.9 percent.

“A significant decrease in emissions in advanced economies in 2019 offset continued growth elsewhere,” the IEA noted in a press release. Emission in the European Union fell by 160 million tons, or five percent, driven by reductions in the power sector.

For the first time ever, natural gas produced more electricity than coal and wind-powered electricity nearly caught up with coal-fired electricity. Japan’s emissions fell by 45 million tons, or around 4 percent, as output from newly restarted nuclear reactors upticked this year. Emissions in most of the rest of the world grew by nearly 400 million tons in 2019, with almost 80 percent coming from countries in Asia where coal-fired power generation continued to rise.

“Today’s IEA report on global emissions is proof positive that innovation and technology are the solution to the world’s climate challenges,” U.S. Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette said in a statement Tuesday. “While emissions in other regions rose, global emissions flattened and were offset by reductions in the United States and other nations that have successfully deployed carbon capture, renewable energy, natural gas and nuclear power.”

Full story

6) Unlike In Europe, The US Approach To Climate Change Is Actually Working
Drew Johnson, Washington Examiner, 10 February 2020

Speaking at the United Nations in December, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi drew cheers by saying the United States was "still in" the Paris Climate Agreement. Green activists applauded Pelosi's defense of the international climate accord, which President Trump had vowed to exit. These activists claim that remaining in the Paris Agreement will help reduce global emissions.

They are wrong.

European leaders have spent years trying and pointedly failing to solve the climate crisis with regulation. Whether intentionally or not, U.S. policymakers have mostly avoided top-down solutions. And counterintuitively, or perhaps it should have been intuitive, the U.S. now leads the developed world in reducing carbon emissions.

Policymakers can learn an important lesson from this. The key to fighting climate change is to unleash the power of the free market, not to embrace every green politician's or activist's nutty new idea.

European countries have not had much success using regulation to fight climate change. Germany recently spent 150 billion euros on an aggressive campaign to lower emissions by mandating across-the-board fossil fuel reductions. As part of this quest for renewable energy, Germany foreswore cleaner-burning fossil fuels such as natural gas. But because solar and wind don't generate enough consistent power, this means that Germany must rely on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, to generate 40% of its electricity. As a result, Germany is projected to fall short of nearly every national and European Union clean energy standard this year.

Germany's experience is typical for bureaucratic climate policies, and it stands in sharp contrast to the American experience. The U.S., though heavily criticized for not signing the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, is curbing emissions today much faster than any country that actually did sign the agreement.

That's because, instead of banning fossil fuels outright, the U.S. embraced natural gas amid a boom in its production. Thanks to a process called hydraulic fracturing or "fracking," we've managed to tap new reserves of natural gas. In 2015, the U.S. surpassed Saudi Arabia and Russia to become the world's top producer of natural gas. By 2018, energy companies produced over 60% more natural gas than they had two decades earlier. This newfound abundance of natural gas has helped our nation transition away from coal, which emits twice as much carbon dioxide.

Thanks to this shift, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions have hit 30-year lows, even as global emissions have increased by 50% during the same period. And since 2005, natural gas has done more to reduce power sector dioxide emissions than all renewable energy sources combined, according to the Energy Information Administration.

Full post

7) Greta Thunberg Outrage: BBC Viewers Furious As It Announces Activist Series 
Daily Express, 12 February 2020

LICENCE fee paying BBC viewers have voiced outrage at the broadcaster's announcement of a new series featuring Greta Thunberg.

BBC studio’s award winning Science Unit has announced a brand new series with Greta Thunberg, the 17-year-old climate activist. The young Swede took the world by storm after kick-starting the school climate change movement, coined "Friday’s for Future".

It was here that Ms Thunberg gained a name for herself, skipping school each week to protest the Swedish government’s action or lack thereof to curb climate change.

Yet, the BBC’s recent announcement of a new series, which will follow Ms Thunberg’s movement around the world, has been met with fierce criticism.

It comes as the organisation finds itself embroiled in a dispute with the government and its viewers over the licence fee that is levied in order to fund its broadcasts.

One user wrote: “More reason to ditch the TV tax!!”

Another said: “What are her qualifications to be interviewed for anything at all Zero.

“This is yet more BBC propaganda and misinformation being presented as if it was factual.

“Another reason (if one was needed) to axe the TV tax.”
 
Full story

8) China’s Electric Car Market Continues To Plunge
Jim Collins, Forbes, 11 February 2020

China's electric car market, once pipped for "explosive growth" by Bloomberg and other publications, is crashing. 

As sales results trickle in from Chinese automakers for January, it is apparent that it was a brutal month for the domestic car industry.

It is clear that sales were pulled ahead into December as automakers attempted to burnish year-end sales figures and that the occurrence of the Lunar New Year, and the accompanying Spring Festival, knocked January sales down.  What no model could have incorporated, of course, is the devastating impact of the outbreak of the coronavirus.

The usual post-Golden Week sales snapback will not occur this year, and the Chinese automakers' association, CPCA, has suggested that sales might fall 50% year-on-year in February following what looks to have been (final sales figures will be released this week) a 20% decline in sales in January. 

Against this backdrop, the Chinese electric car (BEV) industry appears to have extended the massive slump that first manifested itself after government subsidies on BEV purchases were halved in July 2019.

China's electric car market, once pipped for "explosive growth" by Bloomberg and other publications, is crashing. The fallout is clear from early sales results from Chinese BEV makers.

State-controlled BAIC, the number one seller of BEVs in China in 2019, posted a 54.5% year-on-year decline in BEV sales in January, representing an astounding 94.5% sequential decline. BAIC's BJEV model was the clear winner in the Chinese electric car market in 2019, with about 150,000 units sold, but clearly that momentum has dissipated…. 

January was a horrible month for electric car sales in China. I don't see any light at the end of the tunnel as nCoV-2019 is still raging across the Middle Kingdom and taking an almost incomprehensible human toll.

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9) How To Turn COP26 Into Another Flop: Michael Gove Criticises US And Brazil For Climate Crisis Scepticism
The Guardian, 11 February 2020

Michael Gove has implicitly criticised the US and Brazilian presidents for their scepticism about the climate emergency, as he refused to comment on speculation that he could be put in charge of government preparations for UN climate crisis talks.



Gove, a Cabinet Office minister with a wide-ranging government role, used a speech opening an event looking ahead to COP 26 to express strong views on the UK’s likely role at the summit it is hosting in Glasgow in November.

A series of leading voices in the climate crisis have said the UK seems to be floundering in its preparations for the event, with the perceived chaos and lack of focus exemplified by the sudden dismissal of the former energy minister Claire O’Neill as president of the negotiations.

O’Neill later said that Boris Johnson had demonstrated a “huge lack of leadership and engagement” over the event, and that he did not understand the issue.

David Cameron subsequently turned down an offer from the prime minister to take over, and the spotlight has since turned on Gove, a former environment secretary whose cabinet role was formerly focused on preparing for a possible no-deal Brexit.

But asked after his speech to the Green Alliance conference in London if he would become the new president, Gove said: “I am very happy with the job that I have, and I think there are many, many, many talented people who could do the job of COP president better than I could.”

Full story

10) And Finally: Row Erupts Over UN Climate Summit
Politics Home, 12 February 2020

Nicola Sturgeon has launched a furious attack on Boris Johnson after it emerged that a major climate change summit could be moved from Glasgow to London.


 Boris Johnson has been accused of 'playing politics' by Nicola Sturgeon

A spokesman for the Prime Minister confirmed talks are underway with the ExCel centre in the capital in case the decision is taken not to stage the COP26 event north of the border.

It comes amid a row between the Scottish and UK governments over the cost of policing the November summit, with the bill currently estimated at more than £200m.

Asked if it would definitely still take place in Glasgow, a spokesman for the Prime Minister suggested it would be the Scottish government's fault if it was relocated.

He said: "We are committed to holding COP26 in Glasgow, but the Scottish government need to work with us to make sure it's a successful summit which showcases the UK as a world leader in tackling climate change and represents value for the UK taxpayer.”
On the Government's talks with the ExCel centre, the spokesman said: "It is standard practice to carry out contingency planning for major international events at this scale."

In response to the comments Ms Sturgeon, the Scottish First Minister, tweeted: This is just silly (and contradicts [Michael] Gove yesterday saying two governments [are] working well on this).

"I’ve made crystal clear the Scottish government’s commitment to making COP26 a success and offered the Prime Minister additional input from us - he hasn’t yet responded.

"If he insists on playing politics it will be on him, not me."

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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.