GWPF Newsletter: UN Climate Change Fund Calls Coronavirus An 'Opportunity' To Re-Shape The World

Economic Recovery At Risk As Climate Campaigners Launch Legal Bid To Stop UK Road Building Plan

In this newsletter:

1) UN Climate Change Fund Calls Coronavirus An 'Opportunity' To Re-Shape The World
Sky News Australia, 20 April 2020

2) Economic Recovery At Risk As Climate Campaigners Launch Legal Bid To Stop UK Govt’s £29 Billion Road Building Plans

Forbes, 21 April 2020

3) EU To Delay 'Green Deal' Draft Document Reveals
Reuters, 16 April 2020
 

4) Coronavirus Is Killing The Climate Agenda
The Daily Telegraph, 13 April 2020

5) How The Pandemic Upended U.S. Climate Politics

E&E News, 20 April 2020

6) John O'Sullivan: Saving The Economic Recovery From The Greens
The Pipeline, 20 April 2020

7) Terence Corcoran: Why All The Macroprudes Failed On COVID-19
Financial Post, 15 April 2020

Full details:

1) UN Climate Change Fund Calls Coronavirus An 'Opportunity' To Re-Shape The World
Sky News, 20 April 2020

The UN-funded financial arm of the Paris Agreement has labelled the killer coronavirus an “opportunity” to raise funds for climate change action and “relaunch economies on low-emission, climate-resilient trajectories”.

The extraordinary statements have been published in a document by the Green Climate Fund – an international organisation with a $10.3 billion budget (US).

Australia gifted it $200 million (AUD) in 2015 but Prime Minister Scott Morrison axed further contributions after questions were raised about funds being sent to China, the single largest CO2 emitter in the world.

“While COVID-19 is causing untold suffering, the international response to this unprecedented health crisis in modern times offers an opportunity to direct finances towards bolstering climate action. GCF will continue to make critical investments in climate-resilient water resource management, health care facilities, agriculture and livelihoods – all of which are essential to subduing and overcoming the pandemic,” the organisation wrote in an official public update.

“Similarly, we will step up our efforts to catalyse green investment to relaunch economies on low-emission, climate-resilient trajectories.

“The Green Climate Fund is confident that only a united approach – bringing together determined efforts and innovation – will provide lasting solutions to both the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change.”

The Green Climate Fund went on to suggest that climate change was a threat comparable to COVID-19 which has killed 165,000 people, infected millions more and ravaged global economies.

“The COVID-19 pandemic and the global response required to stem it shows the importance of acting together to solve unparalleled threats to people and our planet,” the GCF said.

“The far-reaching impacts of COVID-19 are a stark reminder of the catastrophic implications the world faces if we don’t.”

A Sky News special investigation last year revealed the GCF squandered $3.7 million flying staff around the world for climate change conferences.

The bureaucrats which run the GFC were paid $65 million in wages – a figure that has been steadily ballooning each year. It can also now be revealed that the fund sent $157.5 million (AUD) to China in December despite the country planning on increasing emissions by several thousand mega tonnes of CO2 by 2030. China escaped having to pay a cent towards the climate change fund by hanging on to its “developing nation” status even though it is a global superpower with the world’s second largest economy.

China’s failure to contribute to the fund led to US President Donald Trump withdrawing from the deal, clawing back billions.

However, funds Australians contributed still in part went towards financing a major antistructure project in Shandong – one of the biggest polluting cities in the world which has a $1.1 trillion GDP (US). The Green Climate Fund will finance “low carbon transport with supporting investments in new energy vehicles and bus rapid transit green corridors” in the major metropolis. 

2) Economic Recovery At Risk As Climate Campaigners Launch Legal Bid To Stop UK Govt’s £29 Billion Road Building Plans
Forbes, 21 April 2020

The U.K. government’s £28.8 billion plan to expand Britain’s road network is set to be challenged by the same legal team which, in February, halted the Department for Transport’s plan to expand Heathrow.

The Court of Appeal ruled Heathrow expansion plans were illegal because the Department for Transport had ignored the Paris climate agreement.

Lawyers acting for Transport Action Network (TAN) have asked the Department for Transport (DfT) and Highways England to scrap their five-year road building plan.

At its launch alongside the budget in March, the Road Investment Strategy 2 (RIS2) was described by Chancellor Rishi Sunak as England’s “largest ever” roads programme.

A commitment to ramp up spending on mainly strategic roads was a key manifesto pledge in the Conservative party’s general election campaign last year. RIS2 revealed that £25.3 billion would be spent on freeways and A-roads, and £3.5 billion was pledged for major local routes.

TAN claims the plan breaches climate and air quality laws, and they have charged solicitors Leigh Day to act on their behalf. The firm has retained the services of David Wolfe QC of Matrix chambers and Pete Lockley of 11 KBW, the same legal team that was victorious in the Heathrow case.

TAN director Chris Todd said: “How can the DfT claim to take climate change seriously when it is set to burn billions on the ‘largest ever roads programme’ to make things worse?”

Full post

3) EU To Delay 'Green Deal' Draft Document Reveals
Reuters, 16 April 2020

(Reuters) - The European Commission will delay some climate policies under its signature “Green Deal” proposal due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the timeline to unveil a new 2030 emissions target is unchanged, according to a draft document seen by Reuters.

Eleven million jobs at risk from EU Green Deal, trade unions warn

The pandemic and economic shock have forced the EU executive to review its plans for 2020, as the novel coronavirus demands an urgent focus on ensuring an economic recovery at a time when most of the EU executive’s staff are under lockdown at home.

Initiatives including plans to protect biodiversity and reforms to make farming more sustainable, due to be unveiled on April 29, could be delayed until later in 2020.

The sustainable agriculture plan may need to be reworked if the Commission changes its proposal for the next multi-year, 2021-2027 EU budget in light of the pandemic, the draft said.

Reforms to make the transport and chemicals sectors more sustainable could also be pushed back to later this year.

Meanwhile, plans to help the bloc adapt to the impact of climate change, improve sustainable forest management, and give consumers better information on recycling and repairing products, are pushed back to 2021, the document said.

Full story
 

4) Coronavirus Is Killing The Climate Agenda
The Daily Telegraph, 13 April 2020

The pandemic is freezing up financing, lowering the price of oil and gas, and stymieing efforts to build consensus



Former energy minister Claire Perry O’Neil received a phone call on Friday January 31 from the Downing Street adviser Dominic Cummings. He had called to dismiss her from her role as president of the United Nations’ annual climate change conference due to be hosted by the UK.

Angry and shocked, she fired off a letter on the Monday morning to the prime minister, expressing her “surprise and dismay” and warning that “we are almost out of time to win the battle against climate change”.
The annual Cop conferences needed to be “re-energized and focused,” she wrote.

“[They are] dogged by endless rows over agendas[…] You can’t fault the negotiators for doing their jobs, sometimes under awful circumstances – it’s a systemic failure of global vision and leadership.”

If global leadership on climate change was lacking then, it is now at risk of disappearing altogether by the health emergency of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has killed more than 100,000 people since the first case was diagnosed in November.

At the start of April, UN officials bowed to the inevitable and postponed Cop26, the critical climate summit Mrs Perry O’Neill was due to lead. It would have seen hundreds of leading politicians and scientists descend on Glasgow in November to try and forge a deeper global consensus on cutting carbon emissions.

Coronavirus poses a major test of the gains so far made towards preventing climate change, another major public health problem. While carbon emissions have fallen as planes stay on the ground and factories close, the wider picture is more complex. It is freezing up financing, lowering the price of oil and gas, diverting consumers’ and politicians’ attention and stymieing efforts to build consensus. Hopes the health and economic crisis from coronavirus will be over soon are fading, while even a short-term loss of momentum on climate change is risky....

Five years ago, Cop21 ended in Paris with a historic agreement to limit global warming to below 2 degrees centigrade, and to try to limit it to 1.5 degrees. But progress since then has faltered.  Global emissions have risen at a rate of 1.5pc per year over the latest decade, reaching a record high of 55.3Gt in 2018. Donald Trump is pulling the US out of the climate accord. The United Nations said in November that the picture was “bleak”, with deeper and faster cuts now required because countries had not acted fast enough. Emissions now need to be cut by 2.7pc per year if the world is to meet the two-degree goal, and 7.6pc per year if it is to meet the 1.5pc goal.

Amid mass street protests and speeches by the climate activist Greta Thunberg, Cop25 in Madrid broke up last November in bitterness and disappointment, with major economies such as the US and Brazil accused of blocking progress. Key disputes including over carbon markets and financial aid to poorer countries were not resolved, heaping pressure on the upcoming Cop26. This year, 2020, is already significant as it marks the deadline for nations to submit more ambitious climate change plans.

With the Cop26 conference delayed, the pandemic is also harming the crucial pre-conference diplomacy and cajoling of countries to improve their climate measures. Attempts to meet via Zoom are said to have gone badly. A key trade meeting between the EU and China due to take place in March was postponed, denting hopes of a closer alliance on climate change. Questions remain over an investment summit in Leipzig, Germany in September.

Exactly how Britain will reach its legally-binding target of net zero by 2050 is also likely to be far from ministers’ minds. Business secretary Alok Sharma – who is also Mrs Perry O’Neill’s replacement at Cop26 – has his work cut out elsewhere, regularly on British TV screens delivering the daily coronavirus update.

On the ground, investment into renewable energy projects such as wind and solar farms is slowing down. Banks are nervous about whether big corporates who want to sign power purchase agreements with fledgling projects will be able to pay their bills amid the crisis. Factory closures and the slump in oil and gas prices have pushed down power prices, knocking the case for renewables projects that sell directly into the market. Gas-fired power stations and petrol-guzzling cars suddenly look more attractive compared to solar farms and electric cars, while falling utility bills could take the pressure off energy efficiency.

Full post
 

5) How The Pandemic Upended U.S. Climate Politics
E&E News, 20 April 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic, and the chaotic and expensive congressional response, has upended the climate politics landscape.

Before the onslaught of the coronavirus, environmentalists had unprecedented success getting the issue into the mainstream, bringing it to the forefront of the 2020 election and, potentially, the policy agenda of a new Democratic government come 2021.

But those successes are in question with Americans stuck at home and the economy in free fall, with full recovery likely a distant prospect.

In the near term, it might simply be harder to keep climate on the political map, environmentalists and academics said, even as the broader recovery effort offers new opportunities to remake the American energy system.

"We have limited attention spans. We obviously can only deal with one crisis at a time, and it's probably true that in the short term, we're going to be dealing with very, very high unemployment and massive economic dislocations," said Brett Hartl, government affairs director at the Center for Biological Diversity.

"And that often sucks a lot of the oxygen out of the room."

It was difficult for progressive activists to get the Obama administration to focus on climate in 2010 amid the response to the last recession, Hartl said. And attempts to regulate or price greenhouse gas emissions wallowed in irrelevancy for years after the Waxman-Markey bill stalled in the Senate in 2009.

"There's no question that in 2009 and 2010, the weak economy undermined attempts at carbon pricing," said Paul Bledsoe, a former climate adviser in the Clinton White House. "And I think that any attempt at carbon pricing has to wait to be initiated until the economy recovers."

That dynamic was borne out among voters in the Democratic primaries just after the pandemic's onset earlier this year.

Polls conducted after elections in Florida, Illinois and Arizona last month saw climate change tumble well below health care and economic inequality as a concern among voters, as coronavirus fears began to permeate society (E&E Daily, March 18).

"It will be very difficult to push the climate agenda, given that people are so concerned about one public health and two the economy, and just how many extreme numbers of people are out of work at this point," said Sanya Carley, an energy policy expert at Indiana University.

Full story

6) John O'Sullivan: Saving The Economic Recovery From The Greens
The Pipeline, 20 April 2020

Sensing a danger that the EU might soften its flagship Green Deal in order to revive European economies, environmental pressure groups have begun to make the case that restoring prosperity comes second to moving to the new green economy.



[ …] Those working on post-pandemic recovery policies have adopted a second aim which greatly complicates any plans to do that. The European Commission, most European governments, notably those led by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, the United Nations, the Democratic opposition party in the U.S., the Pope, the Davos crowd of morally correct CEOs, and bien-pensant liberal opinion generally supports a  “Green New Deal” of recovery on the back of a massive reduction of carbon emissions which is rather like eating without food or swimming without water.

If my description sounds somewhat over-critical, here is the EU’s own account of what the “European Green Deal” (click on the link) means: “a modern, resource-efficient, and competitive economy where:

* There are no net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050

* Economic growth is decoupled from resource use

* No person and no place is left behind.

I will treat that last item as a meaningless piety until the EU manages to come up with a financial and currency deal that rescues the economies and unemployed youth of southern Europe left behind by the depredations of the Euro. First things first. On the other hand, I will charitably assume that the first item will not be achieved by “exporting” the EU’s carbon emissions to other parts of the world, mainly Asia, by investing in factories that operate under looser climate rules. As is done now.

That leaves item two. If my charitable assumption is correct, economic growth can only be de-coupled from resource use—to the extent that the economy grows while the carbon-based forms of energy that currently power it are massively cut—by new forms of energy as yet undiscovered or by scientific advances that allow us to use carbon-based energy while eliminating their emissions.

And here the Green New Deal faces a serious problem: Science isn’t Magic. It’s a powerful engine of progress but it doesn’t always deliver exactly what you want when you want it. For instance, most of the new alternative forms of energy currently in use—the so-called “renewables”—are either unreliable (i.e., winds don’t blow on schedule, not all days are sunny) or expensive to produce, commercially risky, and in need of subsidies.

Similarly, technologies that would allow us to “capture” carbon emissions and disperse them harmlessly have yet to be developed. That means not that they will never be developed, but that they might remain bright ideas for a long time and be prohibitively expensive compared to existing energy sources when they eventually come online.

And those caveats apply to other new technology “fixes” on which the Green New Deal implicitly relies. They explain too why the deal is so heavy on vague uplift and social justice rhetoric in its “roadmap to actions” section: “supporting industry to innovate,” for instance, and” “turning the political commitment [to making Europe climate-neutral by 2050] into a legal obligation.” Its rhetoric can’t be matched by its proposed actions.

What becomes crystal clear is that, barring some huge technological miracles, the only way that Europe can grow without net emissions of greenhouse gases by 2050 is by diverting the whole of any economic growth away from increasing the living standards of its peoples into transforming its economy along puritan green lines. Even then it will find it hard, probably impossible, to avoid actually depressing such living standards by a considerable amount.

In short, Greenery can’t rely on science to deliver the goods for it.

That, of course, is exactly how the Soviet Union destroyed itself. It diverted the proceeds of production (and of massive borrowing from abroad) from consumer living standards to investment in military technology, thus becoming as someone said: “Upper Volta with nuclear weapons.”

EU leaders can’t admit any of this, and they may well feel that—in response to pressure from their own Green parties (with whom some are in coalition)—they have gone much too far in promising this transformation. President Macron’s fierce threats to place sanctions on countries that don’t join the Paris Green accords would suggest so. It’s a classic attempt to get other countries to assume the burdens that would otherwise cripple France in competition with them.

Nations have sometimes made commitments they have no intention of fulfilling for a quiet life diplomatically. But repeated commitments create a general political atmosphere in which retreating from them looks like cowardice, bad faith, and even cynical duplicity. The existence and growing political clout of extreme Green parties and NGOs make that doubly difficult. Those movements have no qualms about adopting policies that will bring about a severe drop in the standard of living of countries, including their own, that they feel are looting the world’s resources. In fact it’s their policy is to bring about such a change—and in particular to use the transition from the recessions caused by the pandemic not to restore the living standards of 2019 but to foster a humbler, poorer, greener Western world.

In the last week, sensing a danger that the EU would begin to soften its flagship Green cause in order to revive European economies, environmental pressure groups have begun to make the case that restoring prosperity comes second to moving to the new green economy—and, more honestly and ruthlessly, to propose that some industries either shouldn’t return at all or at the very least should return in a shrunken form.

Full post

7) Terence Corcoran: Why All The Macroprudes Failed On COVID-19
Financial Post, 15 April 2020

Global policy-makers shoved pandemic risk aside and spread climate alarm instead


In 2017, Mark Carney, then Bank of England governor and head of the FSB, highlighted climate change as a new risk to the global financial system. 

One of the noble houses of global macroprudentialism, the International Monetary Fund, declared Tuesday that “The Great Lockdown” will plunge the global economy into the “worst recession since the Great Depression, surpassing that seen during the global financial crisis a decade ago.” Along with the rest of the world’s economic overseers and protectors of financial stability, the IMF seems to have been unprepared for — and overwhelmed by — the arrival of COVID-19.

That the IMF was blindsided is clear in the opening words of Tuesday’s World Economic Outlook. “The world has changed dramatically in the three months since our last World Economic Outlook update on the global economy. A pandemic scenario had been raised as a possibility in previous economic policy discussions, but none of us had a meaningful sense of what it would look like on the ground and what it would mean for the economy.”

That’s some statement: “None of us” had a sense of what such a pandemic might impose on the world economy. It’s not clear who is included in the collective “us,” but it seems fair to assume the IMF is referring to the host of other members of the global fraternity of institutions that have assumed the role of guardians of the stability of the global financial system.

Among the institutions that should have been preparing for and assessing the risks of a global viral pandemic, in addition to the IMF, are the Financial Stability Board, the Bank for International Settlements, the G20 assembly of finance ministers, the World Bank and the European Central Bank.

In the wake of the 2008 financial crisis, which “none of us” had anticipated, these global entities and national authorities adopted “macroprudential policy” to prevent the next global financial meltdown and, if possible, prepare plans to deal with a new blow to global financial stability.

Wikipedia has an excellent and authoritative review of the origins of macroprudentialism, describing it as an “approach to financial regulation that aims to mitigate risk to the financial system as a whole.” In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, policy-makers and economic researchers backed the need to reorient the global regulatory framework “towards a macroprudential perspective.”

As the world sinks into lockdown and decline, one wonders why the whole macroprudential policy preparations, underway since the 2008 financial crisis and formally installed in 2016, so obviously failed to prepare for the financial stability shakeup brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic?

There are two explanations. One is that the whole financial stability-macroprudential effort is an international bureaucratic collection of agencies dedicated to the pursuit of meaningless bureaucratic interventions.

The second explanation is that the macroprudential apparatus, from the IMF through to the FSB and down, was hijacked by activists pushing climate change as the dominant systemic risk of our time.

In 2017, Mark Carney, then Bank of England governor and head of the FSB, reviewed the successes of macroprudential policy and highlighted new risks. The FSB, said Carney, is assessing “emerging vulnerabilities affecting the global financial system … within a macroprudential perspective.” Among the risks identified, he said, were “risks from FinTech, climate‐related financial risks and misconduct in financial institutions.”

Carney has been something of a poster boy for climate change. In a 2015 speech at Lloyd’s of London — titled “Breaking the tragedy of the horizon — climate change and financial stability,” Carney warned the insurance industry to prepare for big climate risks — including defaults, lawsuits, stranded assets and increased liabilities related to a changing climate.

The insurance execs picked up the macroprudential warnings. The replacement of pandemic risks with climate change as a threat to the global financial and economic system was highlighted this week by Roger Pielke Jr. at the University of Colorado. In 2008, the No. 1 risk cited by insurance executives was a pandemic, described as “a new highly infectious and fatal disease spreads through the human population.” In 2019, the top risk was identified as “global temperature change.” Pandemic was not even one of the top-10 insurance risks.

Over the past several years, but especially through 2019, the major efforts of the macroprudes has been to spread alarm about the financial stability risks allegedly building around climate change. Never mind pandemics and other more mundane but genuine financial risks, such a soaring government debt buildup and U.S. political schemes to dismantle Big Tech. Instead, banks and other financial institutions have been pressed to get out of fossil fuels and shift into ethical investing, sustainable financing, green financing, social financing, impact investing, ESG investment, responsible investing.

At the turn of the 2020 New Year, Carney appeared on BBC television calling for “action on financing” from banks against fossil investments. One day later, the Communist government in China informed the World Health Organization of pneumonia cases in Wuhan City, Hubei province, with unknown cause. Carney’s get-out-of oil call caused alarm within Canada’s fossil fuel industry. At the time, oil was trading at US$55 a barrel. On Tuesday, thanks in part to the pandemic Carney and the macroprudes failed to plan for, West Texas crude continued to languish at just above US$20.

By promoting the risks of far-off climate change and ignoring the real financial and economic risks of a pandemic, the macroprudes got what they wanted by helping to usher in a global economic crisis they claimed to be attempting to prevent.

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.