1) Russia Pledges To Increase CO2 Emissions By 2030
Reuters, 27 March 2020
Russia has pledges to ‘cut’ CO2 emissions by a third by 2030 from 1990 levels – when the heavily industrial Soviet Union collapsed – which in reality represents an increase in Russia’s CO2 emissions from today.
ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA – Fossil fuel-rich Russia has for the first time set out a greener economic path for the coming three decades, in a long-term, low-carbon development plan released this week.
It pledges to cut planet-warming emissions by a third by 2030 from 1990 levels, when the heavily industrial Soviet Union collapsed, although that represents an increase in Russia’s greenhouse gas pollution from today.
Climate experts said the strategy and 2030 target were not ambitious enough but did signal growing political and business interest in tackling climate change in an economy that is one of the world’s biggest suppliers of oil, gas and coal.
Under the plan, Russia would not become carbon-neutral until late this century — and only if it implements the cleanest growth scenario outlined.
Russia’s Ministry of Economic Development published the draft strategy Monday, which will now be reviewed by other ministries and business associations before being submitted for government approval by executive order.
Full story
2) Japan Cools On Global Warming, Pledges Not To Increase Paris Targets
Press Association, 30 March 2020
Japan has been criticised for failing to increase its ambition to tackle climate change, as it becomes the first major economy to submit updated plans on cutting emissions.
All countries are expected to submit new or updated plans this year for cutting emissions, known as “nationally determined contributions”, under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
Existing efforts set out by countries to curb greenhouse gases are not enough to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C or the tighter restriction of 1.5C, which nations signed up to under the Paris deal.
Japan has become the first country in the G7 group of leading economies to produce updated plans, ahead of a key United Nations climate meeting “Cop26”, which is supposed to take place in Glasgow in November.
The UK is hoping to drive moves towards ambitious international action in the build-up to the talks, though British Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab has warned the meeting may have to be delayed due to the coronavirus outbreak.
But Japan has stuck with its existing target of cutting emissions by 26% on 2013 levels by 2030, which analysts tracking contributions at independent organisation Climate Action Tracker has deemed “highly insufficient”.
Japan says it will pursue further efforts in the medium and long term, and is aiming for a “decarbonised society” as early as possible in the second half of the century.
Full story
3) Dutch Govt Says Coronavirus More Important Than Climate Ruling
Dutch News, 27 March 2020
The Dutch cabinet will not come up with new measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions before April 1 as planned, economic affairs minister Erik Wiebes said after Friday’s cabinet meeting.
‘A lot of people, we included, have other things to do at the moment,’ Wiebes said. ‘The Urgenda court ruling still stands, but there are other priorities.’
Last December the Dutch Supreme Court ruled the state is required to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to protect the health of its people, under the European treaty of human rights, ending a seven year legal process.
The ruling means that the government must now reduce greenhouse gas pollution by 25% by the end of this year when compared with 1990. The plans should have been published next week.
Full story
4) Furious MEP Erupts At EU For Being ‘Too Focused On Climate Change’ To Tackle Coronavirus
Daily Express, 28 March 2020
A furious Dutch MEP has scolded European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen for acting “too little, too late” in the fight against the coronavirus.
Dutch MEP Derk Jan Eppink said that the coronavirus crisis wreaking havoc across the European Union. (Image: GETTY)
Dutch MEP Derk Jan Eppink said that the coronavirus crisis wreaking havoc across the European Union showed the bloc’s weaknesses. In a furious rant against the EU’s response, Mr Eppink told Ursula von der Leyen, who is in the European Parliament at the time, that she had failed.
This comes amid a growing rift between EU member-states over how to respond to the growing pandemic.
The scathing assessment of Brussels came during a European Parliament debate on measures to tackle the current health crisis.
Mr Eppink criticized the European Commission for its slow response, noting that it was too focused on the climate and too little on the health crisis.
The Dutch MEP said: “We have to ask the question and come to the conclusion that the EU was too late to take this crisis seriously.
“The US took action and you criticised them for cutting the aviation connections with Europe even though later you did the same!
“Were you too focused on climate change and too little on the coronavirus? We were too late to take action.”
He urged the European Commission to use the €1 trillion pledged for the EU’s Green New Deal in the fight against the pandemic.
This echoes the Czech Republic’s prime minister, Andrej Babiš, who earlier said the European Union should abandon its Green Deal and focus on fighting the spread of the coronavirus.
Full story
5) Covid-19 Shows Why There Won’t Be Global Action on Climate Change
Richard Drake, Climate Scepticism, 28 March 2020
Pretty much Jason Bordoff’s headline in Foreign Policy magazine today, except I left out the “Sorry”. And that’s because I’m not.
Sorry, but the Virus Shows Why There Won’t Be Global Action on Climate Change
Bordoff believes in what is laughably called the scientific consensus on climate change but he seems, to his credit, to be an honest policy wonk. Here are some highlights.
"To slow the spread of COVID-19, governments are clamping down to force collective action when individuals fail to follow guidelines. Cities across the world are shutting down businesses and events, at great cost. Yet the effectiveness of any one government’s action is limited if there are weak links in the global effort to curb the pandemic—such as from states with conflict or poor governance—even if the world is in agreement that eradicating a pandemic is in every country’s best interest. Climate change is even harder to solve because it results from the sum of all greenhouse gas emissions and thus requires aggregate effort, a problem particularly vulnerable to free-riding, as my Columbia University colleague Scott Barrett explains in his excellent book Why Cooperate? The Incentive to Supply Global Public Goods. And whereas governments can force people to stay home, there is no global institution with the enforcement power to require that nations curb emissions...
While public concern with climate change is rising, there remains a long way to go. Only half of Americans believe climate change should be a top priority for the federal government, and the figure is far lower on the Republican side of the aisle.
Indeed, COVID-19 itself may actually erode public support for stronger climate action, as the pace of climate ambition wanes during times of economic hardship...
Full post & comments
6) Kevin Williamson: Goodbye, Green New Deal
National Review, 27 March 2020
What will happen next with the coronavirus epidemic is unknown, but it seems certain to claim one very high-profile victim: the so-called Green New Deal.
Good riddance.
The current crisis in the U.S. economy is, in miniature but concentrated form, precisely what the Left has in mind in response to climate change: shutting down large sectors of the domestic and global economies through official writ, social pressure, and indirect means, in response to a crisis with potentially devastating and wide-ranging consequences for human life and human flourishing.
What is under way right now in response to the epidemic is in substance much like the Green New Deal and lesser versions of the same climate-change agenda: massive new government spending, political control of critical industries, emergency protocols modeled on wartime practice, etc.
But the characters of the two crises are basically different.
Set aside, for the moment, any reservations you might have about the coronavirus-emergency regime, and set aside your views on climate change, too, whatever they may be. Instead, ask yourself this: If Americans are this resistant to paying a large economic price to enable measures meant to prevent a public-health catastrophe in the here and now — one that threatens the lives of people they know and love — then how much less likely are they to bear not weeks or months but decades of disruption and economic dislocation and a permanently diminished standard of living in order to prevent possibly severe consequences to people in Bangladesh or Indonesia 80 or 100 years from now?
For years, we’ve been hearing, “This is climate change” and “That is climate change,” every time there’s a flood or a storm. If that’s the fact, then climate change is, relatively speaking, manageable. There is no way Americans—or people around the world—are going to agree to endure anything like the current economic downturn in order to prevent problems of that nature.
Without failing to appreciate the severe immediate economic consequences being felt by Americans in this episode, asking retail and service-industry workers to forfeit their incomes for a few months until their establishments can reopen is a relatively manageable thing even if we are (as I believe we should be) very liberal in doing what we can to protect them financially in the meantime.
Telling everybody who works in coal, oil, natural gas, petrochemicals, plastics, and refineries — and a great many people who work in automobiles, aviation, shipping, utilities, construction, agriculture, manufacturing, food processing, utilities, and dozens of other fields — that their companies and their jobs are going away forever is a much larger thing. Telling everybody who does business with those people that they’ll have to consult Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez for solvents and industrial polymers — and, you know, lights — would send waves of chaos rippling around the world hard and so fast that you’d need Tom Araya to properly give voice to them.
“Oh, but we’ll find them jobs in the new green economy!” comes the response. “It’ll be a net positive!” As though petroleum engineers were lumps of labor that could be reshaped at will by a committee of lawyers in Washington, if only we gave them the power. Nobody is buying that. Not many people are that stupid.
Full post
7) Green Fuel Plants Are Shutting Down and Some May Never Come Back
Bloomberg, 27 March 2020
The coronavirus and cheap oil are hitting the fuel business so hard that ethanol plants are shutting down. Some may never come back.
The entire biofuel industry is facing a reckoning. Long before the pandemic emptied roads and exacerbated an oil price war, producers were battling chronic oversupply and trade upheaval. Now slumping demand and prices mean smaller producers and those with heavy debt loads will struggle to ride out the losses.
“When we come out of these two Black Swan events -- the price war in oil and now the coronavirus -- we will probably look differently as an industry,” said Todd Becker, chief executive officer of U.S. ethanol producer Green Plains Inc. “There are definitely plants out there that are going to run out of capital.”
Seen as a greener alternative to gasoline and once promoted as a way for countries to wean themselves off foreign oil, the industry is facing another crushing blow. Corn ethanol plants are closing across the U.S., Brazilian producers of sugar cane-based fuel are sinking further into debt and efforts to use more biofuel are being jeopardized in Asia. In Europe, producers are either cutting back or making feedstock for hand sanitizer.
Biofuel prices hit record lows in many markets
U.S. gasoline hit a 20-year low and prices at the pump are already below $1 a gallon in some states. That’s on the back of an oil price war between Russia and Saudi Arabia that sent crude markets into meltdown and the virus outbreak that has upended demand.
While cheap fuel is good news for consumers, it’s hurting biofuel producers and American farmers, who sell about a third of their corn crops to the ethanol industry.
Valero Energy Corp., the No. 2 U.S. oil refiner, is temporarily closing two plants and won’t comply with some contracts. Andersons Inc. is suspending operations at its plants and POET has “temporarily ceased corn purchases at a number of locations.” Pacific Ethanol Inc. is cutting output by as much as 60%.
Full story
8) And Finally: Soap-Opera Science
Hector Drummond, 30 March 2020
Here’s a remarkable story that no-one in the media or social media has picked up on (although you can bet that everyone in the field knows).
So we have two epidemiological teams, one at Imperial, and one at Oxford, with differing ideas about Covid-19.
The Imperial team, led by Prof. Neil Ferguson, is the team whose study has led to the UK shutdown (Ferguson is a current member of SAGE, the UK government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies). They’re the current big guns in this world, and have been for years, ever since the 2001 foot and mouth epidemic when they were led by Professor Roy Anderson, and Ferguson was his protege.
Then there’s the Oxford team, led by Sunetra Gupta. They recently brought out a study [HD: text now below] trashing the Imperial’s study, and claiming that half the country may already have had the virus.
“I am surprised that there has been such unqualified acceptance of the Imperial model,” said Prof Gupta.
There was an immediate attempt to trash the Oxford study in the media (clearly orchestrated by Imperial), for example, here.
Now, do you accept the traditional image of scientists as sober, serious, disinterested seekers of truth? Or do you have more of a Biscuit Factory sort of view of them, where quite a lot of them are very flawed human beings, egotistical shits bent on climbing the greasy pole and treading on people to get to the top? Bullshitters and networkers and operators? Actually, I think the former types do exist, there are good, serious scientists out there (including some of my personal friends, and quite a few readers of this blog), but there are an awful lot of the latter types, especially at the top, and it’s rare to hear of a science department that isn’t full of bitter hatreds and jealousies and vendettas, where every Professor turns into an arsehole no matter how nice they seemed when they were a graduate student.
You may think I’m exaggerating, so let’s take a bit of a closer look at the Imperial-Oxford situation. I’m only going to pick out a few details now, because the full story is very large and I don’t know it all, plus a lot of it is very murky and undocumented.
The Imperial team was originally led by Professor Roy Anderson, leading luminary in the 2001 foot-and-mouth disaster, which is a whole other story that I’m just starting to put together now with the help of a brilliant colleague (and any help on that in the form of recollections and inside knowledge or links would be appreciated). It was Anderson who established Imperial, allegedly in an underhand manner, as the government’s go-to team on communicable disease crises. This was a world rife with intense rivalries.
Anderson had recently come to Imperial from Oxford. Why did he leave Oxford? Turns out it was, allegedly, mainly because of two things. One, he had allegedly not declared to the Wellcome Trust the fact that he was receiving income from a scientific firm, even though he was a Trustee of the Wellcome trust, and a director of a Wellcome Trust Centre.
Secondly, he had allegedly publicly claimed that a woman in the Zoology department was only appointed to a Readership (ie. above Senior Lecturer but below Professor), after her five-year Fellowship ended, because she had slept with the head of department, who was on the appointing committee. There were also allegations that he had been a bit of a bully, but his allegation against this lecturer was the main problem, and it got him suspended for two months. In the end he decided to leave for Imperial, which offered him a very good position. He took many of his team with him, including Neil Ferguson.
I should stress that I have no idea whether any of these allegations, on either side, are true, although I note that the woman won her legal case against Anderson. Yes, it actually went to court, and it was a big deal at Oxford, it wasn’t just a little inter-departmental spat. What I am pointing out is the soap-opera nature of the whole thing. This sort of thing is not at all rare in University science departments (and other departments too), and sometimes it’s worse in the more high-powered ones.
The crowning glory in this story, though, is this. Who was the woman who Anderson allegedly accused of sleeping her way into an Oxford Readership? Her name was … Sunetra Gupta. Who is now the head of the Oxford team engaged in the bitter struggle against the Imperial team that Anderson set up, and which is still run by his protege, Neil Ferguson. You couldn’t make it up. At least, even I wouldn’t have made that up for my novel, it’s just too perfect to sound like real life. But it is real life. Real University life, at least.
The question you should now ask is, if I no longer think that these scientists are all unimpeachable examplars of rectitude, shouldn’t I perhaps be at least a little bit more sceptical of their work? If this is an ego-driven world of power politics, with a lot of glory and funding at stake, and feuds galore (and there are many more stories, especially about Anderson and some of his mates, although I stress that everything in these stories are allegations only), perhaps the shining light of truth isn’t always the end result of the research? So perhaps we should reach for a hefty dose of salt whenever some glamorous set of results is revealed? At least, we should be asking questions like, ‘What reason do we have to think this is true’, other than the appeal to authority? Because the appeal to authority isn’t going to cut it.....
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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