The Political Storm Over Green Targets Will Be Even Bigger Than Brexit
In this newsletter:
1) Legal Gaps And US Elections May Turn COP26 Into Damp Squib
GWPF & Climate Home News, 5 March 2020
2) Greta Thunberg Accuses EU Of Climate Betrayal
The Times, 5 March 2020
3) Sherelle Jacobs: The Political Storm Over Green Targets Will Be Even Bigger Than Brexit
The Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2020
4) Will Coronavirus Recession Kill Green Craze That Has Infected Board Rooms In Recent Years?
Financial Times, 5 March 2020
5) Green ‘Lawfare’ A $65bn Deal Hit To Projects Down Under
The Australian, 5 March 2020
6) At Climate Meeting, German Eco-Socialist Suggests “Shooting The 1% Rich”
No Tricks Zone, 4 March 2020
7) Green Fanatics Celebrating Coronavirus Epidemic
Martín López Corredoira, Science 2.0, 4 March 2020
Full details:
1) Legal Gaps And US Elections May Turn COP26 Into Damp Squib
GWPF & Climate Home News, 5 March 2020
It’s beginning to dawn on the organisers of COP26, which will take place in November, that the international deadlock which has plagued these annual meetings since the Paris Agreement, is likely to solidify, threatening to turn the Glasgow meeting into yet another damp squib — as expected.
The outcome of the US election could send shockwaves through the climate diplomacy process as countries are expected to submit new climate plans by November. (Photo: Shealah Craighead for White House/Flickr)
Legal gaps and US election could delay climate ambition before Glasgow summit
Climate Home News
Legal ambiguities in the Paris climate agreement and uncertainties about the US presidential election may encourage some governments to sit on the fence until late 2020 to decide on climate action for the coming decade.
In the worst case, governments could wait until after a critical climate summit in Glasgow in November, known as Cop26, widely billed as a test of global ambition to address global warming at the first five-year milestone of the 2015 Paris Agreement.
Under the Paris Agreement, countries have agreed to update their climate plans to limit global warming “well below 2C” above pre-industrial times. There is stark scientific evidence and growing international pressure for this to happen this year.
The United Nations has called for steep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions as early as possible in 2020 to help limit global warming to 1.5C – the tougher Paris goal.
But it is now adjusting to the idea that submissions of some countries’ climate plans, also known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), will come late in the year.
“We are aware of the fact that some NDCs may likely be submitted in the last quarter of the year so we are adjusting our work to this reality,” the secretariat told Climate Home News in an emailed response to questions.
Full story
2) Greta Thunberg Accuses EU Of Climate Betrayal
The Times, 5 March 2020
Greta Thunberg turned on her hosts in Brussels yesterday to accuse the European Union of only “pretending” to fight climate change and betraying the future of Europe’s children.
The teenage Swedish activist had been invited by the European Commission to address a meeting of commissioners before the EU unveiled plans for its first climate law, part of its Green Deal agenda, which would make it a legal requirement for the EU to be carbon neutral by 2050. Miss Thunberg said it did not go far enough.
She told a press conference that the plan was a betrayal of science, the 2016 Paris climate accord and “seven and a half million” protesting school children.
“This climate deal is surrender because nature doesn’t bargain and you cannot make deals with physics,” she said. “You can’t escape no matter how badly you want to or how hard you try and the longer you keep running away from that truth, the bigger your betrayal to your own children.”
Critics say the proposed law fudges the issue of legally binding emissions reduction targets for all 27 member states. Carbon neutrality will only be measured at the EU level to allow individual countries, such as coal-burning Poland, extra time. The commission ducked calls for a new 2030 target of a 50 to 55 per cent reduction in emissions to keep the present target of 40 per cent.
Miss Thunberg, 17, and other environmentalists have called for a minimum 80 per cent reduction.
Her denunciation is deeply embarrassing for the EU which regards itself as the global leader on fighting climate change.
Full story
3) Sherelle Jacobs: The Political Storm Over Green Targets Will Be Even Bigger Than Brexit
The Daily Telegraph, 5 March 2020
People did not vote to take back control only to surrender to an even more imperious and destructive strain of metropolitan ideology.
Just when we thought the war was over, it is starting to dawn on some London hacks that it has only just begun. Beyond the Red Wall are rumblings of a new revolt, utterly unanticipated by No 10 and overlooked by a liberal media still shell-shocked by the election.
With its drive to “green” the economy at any cost, the Tory party has seemingly decided to celebrate its populist landslide by bogging down the country in zero-carbon paternalism. And so we career towards another People vs Establishment conflict that could be more explosive even than that sparked by the referendum.
A savvy politician like Boris Johnson can still reverse No 10’s green strategy, which moved on this week from banning petrol and diesel cars to the revival of onshore wind farms. He must – all the ingredients for another seismic uprising are already simmering.
First is the drift towards disaster at the Treasury. With the Chancellor, Rishi Sunak, reportedly poised to end the freeze on fuel duty for all motorists, voters are referring to zero carbon as “the new austerity”.
Indeed, the message to voters is sonorously clear – elites have learnt precisely nothing from the past 10 years. In 2008, people paid the price for dysfunction in the banking industry; today they must foot the bill for shortcomings in the energy industry, which is further away from a carbon-free breakthrough than it should be. Still, why tackle the source of problems when you can administer “tough medicine” to the masses?
Second is the rising sense that the UK is still being sabotaged by the zealotry of unaccountable elites. Just as the EU establishment derives its legitimacy from the teleological assumption that the future is borderless universalism, the green establishment poised to take its place sees the planet rather than the people as the highest authority. As a result, the country is heading in a direction at odds with the ambitions of ordinary people.
In particular, it is becoming disturbingly apparent that the Government prizes green targets over “unleashing” Britain’s potential. The cast-iron case for a road-building revolution, for example, clangs a little too harshly against the hollowness of eco-politan sensibilities. Whitehall is genuinely convinced that Red Wall utopia is cycling to work from a rabbit hutch on the outskirts of Birmingham. They find the idea that people might actually aspire to drive to their downtown office from their semi-detached in Dudley, and at the weekends cruise, sunroof down, to the Bullring for shopping, completely ghastly.
The gulf in understanding was ever thus. As innovation professor James Woudhuysen alludes to in his writings, after decades of post-war policymaking hostile to the very concept of cars, what with them disrupting the working classes’ “community cohesion” and causing urban sprawl, in the Blair era there was the glimmer of intellectual breakthrough. Politicians finally recognised, at least in principle, that post-industrial towns can only be revived if they are an attractive commute from thriving cities.
But there was a catch: elites could not bear to prioritise hard logic over their whimsical blueprints for car-free city centres and visceral disdain for the selfish individualism of the open road. Mr Johnson’s green-era promises to be equally irrational. There will be no relief for congested roads. A Cummings-style plan to connect the rustbelt tech hubs of tomorrow with superhighways is for the birds.
The green agenda is also botching public transport. The epitome is HS2, a serpent-shaped monstrosity which slithered from the depths of a conniving political mind to appease the environmental lobby. True, it’s not exactly common knowledge that, in 2009, Andrew Adonis persuaded the then transport secretary, Geoff Hoon, to announce a high-speed railway to placate eco-activists spitting venom over a third Heathrow runway. But with former Brexit Party campaigners organising once again, it won’t take long for people to realise that green tape is suffocating our potential on a scale that rivals red tape from Brussels.
All the more so given how quickly the project to “level up” the country has descended into fatuous virtue signalling. There is a joke going around the North that you can predict the metropolitan mayors’ latest gimmick about solar panels and cycling routes based on whatever nonsense Sadiq Khan has tweeted three weeks before in London.
Architecture firms hungry for contracts are churning out plans for triple-glazed “affordable” homes too expensive to build on a mass scale, and offices with bike basements. One source told me that, all the while, “disenchanted employees squint at each other in meetings waiting to see if anyone dares to speak out”.
Full post
4) Will Coronavirus Recession Kill Green Craze That Has Infected Board Rooms In Recent Years?
Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, Financial Times, 5 March 2020
When choosing between addressing a long-term environmental concerns and more imminent economic upheavals, many companies will shelve the less pressing demand.
How stakeholder-friendly will companies feel in a falling market? The corporate consensus has shifted remarkably quickly to the idea that executives must manage for the long-term benefit of employees, consumers, suppliers and the planet — rather than focus only on meeting investor expectations for the next quarter.
Yet this rebuke to the old doctrine of shareholder-primacy has come during a long bull market. Record profits have made it easier for chief executives to think magnanimously about constituents who have no power to oust them if they miss forecasts.
The coronavirus outbreak offers a stark reminder that such benign conditions will not last. As stock prices whipsaw and global supply chains seize up, capitalism’s
recent conversion faces its biggest test.
Central banks have moved quickly to cushion the economic impact of the outbreak, and most CEOs still hope that their profits will rebound. But the coming weeks will be fraught with unfamiliar risks for companies that have come to define themselves by their socially responsible credentials.
This heavily marketed support for a new way of doing business has raised expectations among staff and customers to a point that many of the belt-tightening moves that executives have deployed in past crises could do lasting brand damage.
A sustained downturn would also leave them with tougher choices than in previous reversals.
Full post (£)
5) Green ‘Lawfare’ A $65bn Deal Hit To Projects Down Under
The Australian, 5 March 2020
Green activists are using a back door on environmental laws to delay an estimated $65bn in projects ranging from dams to a salmon farm, with “lawfare” forcing companies into court for more than 10,000 days in total since 2000.
Conservation and green groups have used 11 new legal claims in the past four years to tie up seven projects in regional areas, including the $16.5bn Adani coalmine in Queensland, a new $140m port on Melville Island in the Northern Territory, Victorian government forestry and the $30m Tassal salmon farm in Tasmania.
According to analysis from the free-market think tank the Institute of Public Affairs, legal activism using the federal environmental protection act has put $65bn of investment at risk, with delays totalling more than 28 years in court.
The tactics of activist groups have delayed 28 projects between 2000 and 2019, with an estimated value of over $65bn.
The projects include six coal and iron ore mine projects, two dam construction projects, two dredging projects, forest and pest management, a tourism development, multiple road construction projects, the construction of a pulp mill, a desalination plant and a marine supply base.
After the election of the Morrison Coalition government, the Queensland Labor government fast-tracked final approval for the Adani coal project in the Galilee Basin, after a nine-year approval process and an extra 341 days in court after an Australian Conservation Foundation appeal started in 2016.
In 2017, a Bob Brown Foundation challenge against a salmon farm in Tasmania, to protect the southern right whale, was dismissed after 237 days in court but an appeal meant another 349 days in court.
According to IPA research fellow Kurt Wallace: “A small group of green activists are using a special legal privilege to delay and disrupt $65bn of investment, which is disproportionately damaging regional Australia.”
Full story ($)
6) At Climate Meeting, German Eco-Socialist Suggests “Shooting The 1% Rich”
No Tricks Zone, 4 March 2020
At a strategy conference in Kassel last weekend, German leftist/environmentalist party Die Linke (The Leftists) discussed its plans for social change. Major German story here on this scandal.
The aim of the conference was to discuss how the leftist Die Linke could successfully intervene in fundamental social issues, “change the country for a social-ecological system change” and to protect the climate.
During a panel discussion, a Die Linke member woman in the front row, identified as Sandra L, took the floor. At the end of her ranting presentation, she felt it was important to emphasize that “a transition to renewable energies is also necessary after a revolution, and that after shooting the 1% rich people. we still want to heat.”
Some in attendance could be heard chuckling and applauding in response. But others could be heard murmuring in shock, and so Sandra L doubled down: “Well, it’s like this! We need to get off this meta-level.”
In attendance was also Die Linke leader Bernd Riexinger, who responded to the woman directly, saying: “I want to say, we don’t shoot them. We can use them for useful work!” For this he also received applause and laughter from the audience!
Full post
7) Green Fanatics Celebrating Coronavirus Epidemic
Martín López Corredoira, Science 2.0, 4 March 2020
[…] For decades, we have witnessed the struggle between the expanding forces of the economy and the restoring forces of ecology. Conclusions that may be derived from observing this confrontation are that: 1) an ecological/green/sustainable capitalist economy is an oxymoron; that is, capitalism and sustainability are mutually exclusive ideas; and 2) the economy is winning almost all of the battles hands down. A very clear example of the failure to arrive at a green solution within the current model of our western-style societies in developed countries is illustrated in global warming conferences: a perfect example of hypocrisy in which climate scientists and many politicians, administrators and people living on the green lobbies behave as a "jet-set" among the highest ratio contaminators, while they exert their moral authority to demand that people in less privileged groups of our society, such as coal miners, teamsters working on oil pipelines, and mining-dependent workers sacrifice their own economic well-being to fight climate change. One of the latest failed attempts to find solutions came from the COP25 in Madrid of 2019 summit; another one in the long list of fruitless negotiations to try to stop or mitigate the negative effects of the global warming already knocking on our doors.
The implicit or explicit explanation for the long list of unsuccessful negotiations is always the same: "yes, yes, we see the problem, but... you know, we have the economy to think about, and many people will suffer if we significantly modify any of its parameters, so let us continue to live as usual, even increasing our consumption habits, and we will meet again at next summit to eat in good restaurants, enjoy tourism and take beer with colleagues to try to find a solution". Putting it bluntly, there is no solution, and we are damned to a disaster unless a miracle happens.
Suddenly, much to the surprise of the economic and political gurus, the solution is spontaneously arising in front of our very eyes: a virus. As in H. G. Wells' The War of the Worlds, a microscopic Earth lifeform has finally proved to reverse the victory in what has so far been a losing war to reduce the excesses of a crazy, self-destructive world. Neither Greenpeace, nor Greta Thunberg, nor any other individual or collective organization have achieved so much in favor of the health of the planet in such a short time. A miracle happened, and, suddenly, all the excuses to avoid a reduction of contamination have been shown to be spurious. In less than two months, worldwide organizations have shown us how it is indeed possible to close museums, shut down whole towns, including such top touristic destinations as Venice, reduce the number of flights, and cancel many of the most important conferences and summits, etc. And this is only the beginning…..
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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