China 'is preparing for possible war' after staging military exercises near US-backed Taiwan
In this newsletter:
1) China and EU agree to deepen coordination on green agenda
Xinhua, 2 February 2021
2) China 'is preparing for possible war' after staging military exercises near US-backed Taiwan 'almost every day' in January
Daily Mail, 1 February 2021
3) First it lost its solar industry to China, now Germany's wind industry at risk of losing market to Chinese producers
Clean Energy Wire, 1 February 2021
4) EU lambasted over 'cheap' China deal after Angela Merkel's attack on Joe Biden
Daily Express, 2 February 2021
5) The EU-China investment agreement is a disaster for the West
Robert Tyler, New Europe, 23 January 2021
6) The Paris agreement: a costly and damaging failure?
John Kane-Berman, Politics Web, 31 January 2021
2) China 'is preparing for possible war' after staging military exercises near US-backed Taiwan 'almost every day' in January
Daily Mail, 1 February 2021
3) First it lost its solar industry to China, now Germany's wind industry at risk of losing market to Chinese producers
Clean Energy Wire, 1 February 2021
4) EU lambasted over 'cheap' China deal after Angela Merkel's attack on Joe Biden
Daily Express, 2 February 2021
5) The EU-China investment agreement is a disaster for the West
Robert Tyler, New Europe, 23 January 2021
6) The Paris agreement: a costly and damaging failure?
John Kane-Berman, Politics Web, 31 January 2021
7) Richard Epstein: Biden goes Deep Green
Hoover Institution, 25 January 2021
The Chinese military aircraft were spotted entering Taiwanese airspace on a total of 30 different days last month, according to Taiwanese media.
Beijing's alleged intrusions were considered as 'preparing to fight the possible war through exercises', warned Chinese nationalist tabloid Global Times.
The stark warning comes as China has increased tensions with Taiwan by stepping up military activities and declaring that 'independence means war' last week.
Taiwan has been claimed by China as one of its territories, with Beijing having deployed fighter jets and bombers into the island's airspace as recently as the weekend.
China believes Taiwan's democratically-elected government is moving the island towards a formal declaration of independence, but Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-wen has repeatedly said that the island is already an independent nation.
Despite this, China has ramped up military drills near the island in recent weeks, including deploying 15 fighter jets into Taiwan airspace twice in two days last month.
According to Taiwanese newspaper The Liberty Times, Chinese warplanes were spotted intruding the island's south-western airspace three times on Sunday by Taiwan air force's open radio communication and open-source flight trackers.
This means there was only one day in January when Chinese military aircraft were not observed by open-source intelligence in the region, the outlet said in a separate report.
In response to the Taiwanese reports, Global Times wrote in an article yesterday that Beijing is preparing for a possible war by sending warplanes and stepping up military exercises near Taiwan.
Citing an analyst, the nationalist tabloid claimed the Chinese mainland 'has sent a clear warning by formulating easily understandable words that 'Taiwan independence' means war'.
'… and is also making concrete steps to prepare for one if it happens by conducting intensive exercises in the Taiwan Straits,' the outlet added.
Full story
3) First it lost its solar industry to China, now Germany's wind industry at risk of losing market to Chinese producers
Clean Energy Wire, 1 February 2021
German labour union Nordmetall has warned that the country is at risk of losing large parts of its wind power industry to foreign competitors if domestic expansion of the technology and other energy transition projects are not pursued vigorously, the newspaper Welt am Sonntag reports.
Nordmetall head Folkmar Ukena told the newspaper that the wind industry must not meet the same fate as Germany's solar power industry, which largely succumbed to Chinese competition in the past decade. "We must preserve the wind power industry urgently," Ukena said, arguing that "overregulation" of the energy market and the absence of power transmission lines to bring wind power from the north to industrial centres in the south are among the biggest hurdles to the industry, the newspaper writes.
Even though Germany has seen a modest turnaround in onshore wind power expansion last year, after it fell to the lowest level in two decades in 2019, construction levels were still much too low. Lower Saxony, for example, Germany's biggest wind power state, only added 54 new installations in 2019 and 48 in 2020. "That's an incredibly poor record," Ukena said. But the labour union head not only criticised lawmakers, also wind power companies would have to step up their game.
"It seems we are incapable of reacting to strong international competition," he argued, warning that buying more and more parts from China because they are cheaper than domestically produced components would ultimately harm the entire industry. "This in the end will lead to entire companies with hundreds of employees going out of business."
Full post
4) EU lambasted over 'cheap' China deal after Angela Merkel's attack on Joe Biden
Daily Express, 2 February 2021
Jean-Claude Juncker blasted the European Commission's decision to sign what he called a "cheap" deal with China as he warned US President Joe Biden should have been consulted ahead of the agreement.
Speaking in Brussels at a virtual event organised by the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the former Commission president criticised Ursula von der Leyen's decision to sign a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping that fails to force the Communist state to sign up to the International Labour Organisation.
Mr Juncker said: "I spent a very long time trying to conclude this investment agreement with the Chinese president, with the Chinese prime minister.
"And this always ultimately failed because of the question of whether the Chinese, as others have been, would be prepared to sign the International Labour Organisation conventions and bring them to life.
"We must not make any compromises on this."
"To say 'best efforts,' that's cheap," Mr Juncker said, referring to a crucial clause in the deal, which commits Beijing to “make continued and sustained efforts” to pursue the ratification of two fundamental International Labour Organisation norms: the Forced Labor Convention and the Abolition of Forced Labor Convention.
He added: “They should sign and ratify the labor conventions.”
Mr Juncker also said he "would have liked that we reach an understanding with the Americans" ahead of the deal."
Full story
5) The EU-China investment agreement is a disaster for the West
Robert Tyler, New Europe, 23 January 2021
The EU-China Comprehensive Investment Agreement that was announced in December 2020 at joint virtual press conference between Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel, Xi Jinping, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron is a disaster for the western world. It fails to address human rights violations in China. It doesn’t tackle the problem of forced labour (slavery). It legitimises an authoritarian regime. And most of all, it won’t create the jobs for Europeans that it promises.
The Investment Agreement, which is yet to be made available to the public or Members of the European Parliament, is billed as being a vehicle to bring new investment from the People’s Republic of China to the European Union. Whilst on the surface this may seem fine, according to articles produced by those few who have seen the agreement, there are strings attached.
Chiefly amongst them is the insistence that the EU won’t force China to sign up to the International Labour Organisations convention on the use of forced labour. What this means is that the Communist Party in China will be given a blank cheque to continue using ethnic Uyghurs and Tibetans as forced labour across the country.
Recent evidence has demonstrated that the Chinese state has been taking the nearly 3 million ethnic Tibetans and Uyghurs that are currently held in internment camps and deploying them across the country (not just in their home regions) to be used as cheap forced labour. Often they are used for harder physical labour such as picking cotton or working in construction – without proper equipment or work breaks. Others have been taken and deployed in factories across the country to work in manufacturing.
According to a report by the Australian government Uyghur labourers have allegedly been found working in the auto-industry for major European firms.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom have reacted swiftly to these accusations by enforcing a full ban on the import of agricultural goods, including cotton from China. As well as a ban on the import of goods produced under forced labour, with heavy fines for governments found guilty of using materials produced under these conditions. The European Union by contrast has not introduced any such ban.
Equally, the agreement does nothing to protect the rights of those Chinese workers who will be arriving in the European Union as part of the agreement. One of the many leaked clauses of the agreement states that an unlimited number of Chinese workers will be able to come to the European Union with their companies and stay for up to three years. A right not afforded to even Canadians, Brits or Americans. And yet the rights of Chinese workers already in the EU are questionable at best – a recent article written by former employees of Huawei exposed a corporate culture of worker suppression.
Chinese workers in one Huawei’s European offices work on separate floors from Europeans – regardless of seniority in the company. They are banned from having romantic relations with Europeans. Those who do risk be recalled to China, and if they refuse risk being fired. In one devastating account from Spain, a Chinese worker was fired from the company for taking time off to seek fertility treatment following a miscarriage. In effect, Chinese workers in Europe are already threatened into an isolated existence without interaction with European colleagues. Little has been done to address these issues, as trade unions have found that employees are too afraid to seek representation – citing concern for family back at home.
Full post
6) The Paris agreement: a costly and damaging failure?
John Kane-Berman, Politics Web, 31 January 2021
Why the targets are both hugely expensive and probably unrealisable
The US will shortly be part of the Paris agreement once again. It will therefore be committed to helping keep the rise in the planet’s temperature by the end of this century to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above the levels prior to the industrial revolution. Better still, the rise will be kept at no more than 1.5 degrees.
“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” declared Joe Biden in his inaugural address last month. Last week he said that “climate change” was an “existential threat” to humanity. The secretary general of the United Nations (UN), Antonio Gutteres, says the world is headed for a rise of more than 3% this century and that more countries must declare states of emergency until carbon neutrality is reached. Thirty-eight have already declared states of climate emergency.
The next conference of Paris signatories, due to be held in Glasgow in November this year, will probably see demands for countries that have signed up to the Paris accord to commit themselves to more aggressive carbon cuts than the ones they have already promised.
These vary from country to country, as Paris signatories, numbering almost 200, are free to determine their own commitments and timetables, and there can be a big disparity between promises that politicians make in the global spotlight at conferences around the world and the policies they implement back home. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has no powers to enforce compliance.
Nor does the IPCC even know the cost of compliance. Two years ago it said that meeting the 1.5 degree target would require the industrial sector to cut carbon emissions by between 67% and 91% by 2050. It conceded that draconian emissions reductions would lead to higher food and energy prices, the latter delaying the transition from biomass (wood and dung) to clean cooking and so damaging the health of people in poorer countries.
But the IPCC also admitted to “knowledge gaps” about the impact this massive contraction in industrial output would have on growth, living standards, and poverty reduction. In the view of Rupert Darwall in a paper published last year by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the IPCC’s attitude is “You must do 1.5 whatever the cost.” “Net zero,” he said, “is being driven by fanatics and zealots who put little value on human welfare.”
Last year, Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School and the Hoover Institute at Stanford put forward some estimates in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Since there were no official estimates of the costs of the Paris agreement, he made use of peer-reviewed estimates used for the US, the EU, China, and Mexico, which between them make up around 80% of promised reductions in CO2 emissions.
Extrapolating these for the whole planet, he arrived at an annual cost of between $1 and $2 trillion in lost GDP, the latter being the more likely figure. This would be the cost of reducing emissions by just 1% of the quantity needed to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius. The cumulative cost of achieving this target would amount to $250 trillion, or 5.4% of future global GDP.
Dr Lomborg’s cost-benefit analysis showed that for every dollar spent on cutting carbon the claimed benefits to human welfare arising from the Paris agreement would be only 11 cents. The costs of climate policies accordingly outweighed their climate benefits....
Last month the GWPF announced that President Xi had been chosen as “the greatest climate hypocrite of the year” for 2020. He had smoothly paraded “concern” for the climate while all the time building hundreds of coal-fired power-stations in China and around the world as fast as he possibly could.
India, having denounced Western “carbon imperialism”, also has plans to expand its use of coal. According to GWPF Samizdat, that country intends to invest $55 billion in clean coal over the next decade. A recent Bloomberg newsletter said India’s plans include coal-gasification projects. Indian officials say that coal will remain the country’s dominant energy source for decades. Japan is planning additional coal-burning power plants at home and abroad over the next five years.
Full post
Hoover Institution, 25 January 2021
8) A remarkable decline in landfalling hurricanes
Roger Pielke Jr., 1 February 2021
9) And finally: Siemens slashes 7,800 jobs for green transition
Yahoo Finance, 2 February 2021
Roger Pielke Jr., 1 February 2021
9) And finally: Siemens slashes 7,800 jobs for green transition
Yahoo Finance, 2 February 2021
Full details:
1) China and EU agree to deepen coordination on green agenda
Xinhua, 2 February 2021
BEIJING, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng on Monday held the first High-level Environment and Climate Dialogue between China and the EU with Executive Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans via video link.
Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, holds the first High-level Environment and Climate Dialogue between China and the EU with Executive Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans via video link in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)
Han, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said China has vowed to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, which is a major announcement on its own climate and environmental policies.
He said that in order to achieve these goals as scheduled, China needs to make extremely arduous efforts to promote energy conservation, emission reduction and low-carbon development.
The two sides should implement the consensus reached by both leaders, give full play to the leading role of the high-level dialogue, deepen China-EU environmental and climate pragmatic cooperation, and make green cooperation a new highlight and engine of China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership, said Han.
The two sides should uphold multilateralism, safeguard the international system with the United Nations at the core, abide by the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and promote the construction of a fair, reasonable, and win-win global environmental governance system, said the vice premier.
Noting that this year China will host the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) in Kunming, Han said that China hoped to work together with the EU side to push the conference to achieve positive results, launch a new process of global biodiversity governance and promote the building of a shared future for all life on Earth.
Timmermans, for his part, highly appreciated China's positive position on climate change and other issues. He expressed a willingness to expand and deepen EU-China dialogue and cooperation in the field of environment and climate and give full play to the role of multilateral mechanisms.
2) China 'is preparing for possible war' after staging military exercises near US-backed Taiwan 'almost every day' in January
Daily Mail, 1 February 2021
China has sent warplanes almost every day in January to conduct military exercises near Taiwan as preparation for a possible war, reports have claimed.
Xinhua, 2 February 2021
BEIJING, Feb. 2 (Xinhua) -- Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng on Monday held the first High-level Environment and Climate Dialogue between China and the EU with Executive Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans via video link.
Chinese Vice Premier Han Zheng, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, holds the first High-level Environment and Climate Dialogue between China and the EU with Executive Vice President of the European Commission Frans Timmermans via video link in Beijing, capital of China, Feb. 1, 2021. (Xinhua/Ding Lin)
Han, also a member of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau of the Communist Party of China Central Committee, said China has vowed to peak its carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, which is a major announcement on its own climate and environmental policies.
He said that in order to achieve these goals as scheduled, China needs to make extremely arduous efforts to promote energy conservation, emission reduction and low-carbon development.
The two sides should implement the consensus reached by both leaders, give full play to the leading role of the high-level dialogue, deepen China-EU environmental and climate pragmatic cooperation, and make green cooperation a new highlight and engine of China-EU comprehensive strategic partnership, said Han.
The two sides should uphold multilateralism, safeguard the international system with the United Nations at the core, abide by the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and promote the construction of a fair, reasonable, and win-win global environmental governance system, said the vice premier.
Noting that this year China will host the 15th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP15) in Kunming, Han said that China hoped to work together with the EU side to push the conference to achieve positive results, launch a new process of global biodiversity governance and promote the building of a shared future for all life on Earth.
Timmermans, for his part, highly appreciated China's positive position on climate change and other issues. He expressed a willingness to expand and deepen EU-China dialogue and cooperation in the field of environment and climate and give full play to the role of multilateral mechanisms.
2) China 'is preparing for possible war' after staging military exercises near US-backed Taiwan 'almost every day' in January
Daily Mail, 1 February 2021
China has sent warplanes almost every day in January to conduct military exercises near Taiwan as preparation for a possible war, reports have claimed.
Beijing's alleged intrusions were considered as 'preparing to fight the possible war through exercises', warned Chinese nationalist tabloid Global Times.
The stark warning comes as China has increased tensions with Taiwan by stepping up military activities and declaring that 'independence means war' last week.
Taiwan has been claimed by China as one of its territories, with Beijing having deployed fighter jets and bombers into the island's airspace as recently as the weekend.
China believes Taiwan's democratically-elected government is moving the island towards a formal declaration of independence, but Taiwan's president Tsai Ing-wen has repeatedly said that the island is already an independent nation.
Despite this, China has ramped up military drills near the island in recent weeks, including deploying 15 fighter jets into Taiwan airspace twice in two days last month.
According to Taiwanese newspaper The Liberty Times, Chinese warplanes were spotted intruding the island's south-western airspace three times on Sunday by Taiwan air force's open radio communication and open-source flight trackers.
This means there was only one day in January when Chinese military aircraft were not observed by open-source intelligence in the region, the outlet said in a separate report.
In response to the Taiwanese reports, Global Times wrote in an article yesterday that Beijing is preparing for a possible war by sending warplanes and stepping up military exercises near Taiwan.
Citing an analyst, the nationalist tabloid claimed the Chinese mainland 'has sent a clear warning by formulating easily understandable words that 'Taiwan independence' means war'.
'… and is also making concrete steps to prepare for one if it happens by conducting intensive exercises in the Taiwan Straits,' the outlet added.
Full story
3) First it lost its solar industry to China, now Germany's wind industry at risk of losing market to Chinese producers
Clean Energy Wire, 1 February 2021
German labour union Nordmetall has warned that the country is at risk of losing large parts of its wind power industry to foreign competitors if domestic expansion of the technology and other energy transition projects are not pursued vigorously, the newspaper Welt am Sonntag reports.
Nordmetall head Folkmar Ukena told the newspaper that the wind industry must not meet the same fate as Germany's solar power industry, which largely succumbed to Chinese competition in the past decade. "We must preserve the wind power industry urgently," Ukena said, arguing that "overregulation" of the energy market and the absence of power transmission lines to bring wind power from the north to industrial centres in the south are among the biggest hurdles to the industry, the newspaper writes.
Even though Germany has seen a modest turnaround in onshore wind power expansion last year, after it fell to the lowest level in two decades in 2019, construction levels were still much too low. Lower Saxony, for example, Germany's biggest wind power state, only added 54 new installations in 2019 and 48 in 2020. "That's an incredibly poor record," Ukena said. But the labour union head not only criticised lawmakers, also wind power companies would have to step up their game.
"It seems we are incapable of reacting to strong international competition," he argued, warning that buying more and more parts from China because they are cheaper than domestically produced components would ultimately harm the entire industry. "This in the end will lead to entire companies with hundreds of employees going out of business."
Full post
4) EU lambasted over 'cheap' China deal after Angela Merkel's attack on Joe Biden
Daily Express, 2 February 2021
Jean-Claude Juncker blasted the European Commission's decision to sign what he called a "cheap" deal with China as he warned US President Joe Biden should have been consulted ahead of the agreement.
Speaking in Brussels at a virtual event organised by the German state of Baden-Württemberg, the former Commission president criticised Ursula von der Leyen's decision to sign a deal with Chinese President Xi Jinping that fails to force the Communist state to sign up to the International Labour Organisation.
Mr Juncker said: "I spent a very long time trying to conclude this investment agreement with the Chinese president, with the Chinese prime minister.
"And this always ultimately failed because of the question of whether the Chinese, as others have been, would be prepared to sign the International Labour Organisation conventions and bring them to life.
"We must not make any compromises on this."
"To say 'best efforts,' that's cheap," Mr Juncker said, referring to a crucial clause in the deal, which commits Beijing to “make continued and sustained efforts” to pursue the ratification of two fundamental International Labour Organisation norms: the Forced Labor Convention and the Abolition of Forced Labor Convention.
He added: “They should sign and ratify the labor conventions.”
Mr Juncker also said he "would have liked that we reach an understanding with the Americans" ahead of the deal."
Full story
5) The EU-China investment agreement is a disaster for the West
Robert Tyler, New Europe, 23 January 2021
The EU-China Comprehensive Investment Agreement that was announced in December 2020 at joint virtual press conference between Ursula von der Leyen, Charles Michel, Xi Jinping, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron is a disaster for the western world. It fails to address human rights violations in China. It doesn’t tackle the problem of forced labour (slavery). It legitimises an authoritarian regime. And most of all, it won’t create the jobs for Europeans that it promises.
The Investment Agreement, which is yet to be made available to the public or Members of the European Parliament, is billed as being a vehicle to bring new investment from the People’s Republic of China to the European Union. Whilst on the surface this may seem fine, according to articles produced by those few who have seen the agreement, there are strings attached.
Chiefly amongst them is the insistence that the EU won’t force China to sign up to the International Labour Organisations convention on the use of forced labour. What this means is that the Communist Party in China will be given a blank cheque to continue using ethnic Uyghurs and Tibetans as forced labour across the country.
Recent evidence has demonstrated that the Chinese state has been taking the nearly 3 million ethnic Tibetans and Uyghurs that are currently held in internment camps and deploying them across the country (not just in their home regions) to be used as cheap forced labour. Often they are used for harder physical labour such as picking cotton or working in construction – without proper equipment or work breaks. Others have been taken and deployed in factories across the country to work in manufacturing.
According to a report by the Australian government Uyghur labourers have allegedly been found working in the auto-industry for major European firms.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom have reacted swiftly to these accusations by enforcing a full ban on the import of agricultural goods, including cotton from China. As well as a ban on the import of goods produced under forced labour, with heavy fines for governments found guilty of using materials produced under these conditions. The European Union by contrast has not introduced any such ban.
Equally, the agreement does nothing to protect the rights of those Chinese workers who will be arriving in the European Union as part of the agreement. One of the many leaked clauses of the agreement states that an unlimited number of Chinese workers will be able to come to the European Union with their companies and stay for up to three years. A right not afforded to even Canadians, Brits or Americans. And yet the rights of Chinese workers already in the EU are questionable at best – a recent article written by former employees of Huawei exposed a corporate culture of worker suppression.
Chinese workers in one Huawei’s European offices work on separate floors from Europeans – regardless of seniority in the company. They are banned from having romantic relations with Europeans. Those who do risk be recalled to China, and if they refuse risk being fired. In one devastating account from Spain, a Chinese worker was fired from the company for taking time off to seek fertility treatment following a miscarriage. In effect, Chinese workers in Europe are already threatened into an isolated existence without interaction with European colleagues. Little has been done to address these issues, as trade unions have found that employees are too afraid to seek representation – citing concern for family back at home.
Full post
6) The Paris agreement: a costly and damaging failure?
John Kane-Berman, Politics Web, 31 January 2021
Why the targets are both hugely expensive and probably unrealisable
The US will shortly be part of the Paris agreement once again. It will therefore be committed to helping keep the rise in the planet’s temperature by the end of this century to no more than 2 degrees Celsius above the levels prior to the industrial revolution. Better still, the rise will be kept at no more than 1.5 degrees.
“A cry for survival comes from the planet itself,” declared Joe Biden in his inaugural address last month. Last week he said that “climate change” was an “existential threat” to humanity. The secretary general of the United Nations (UN), Antonio Gutteres, says the world is headed for a rise of more than 3% this century and that more countries must declare states of emergency until carbon neutrality is reached. Thirty-eight have already declared states of climate emergency.
The next conference of Paris signatories, due to be held in Glasgow in November this year, will probably see demands for countries that have signed up to the Paris accord to commit themselves to more aggressive carbon cuts than the ones they have already promised.
These vary from country to country, as Paris signatories, numbering almost 200, are free to determine their own commitments and timetables, and there can be a big disparity between promises that politicians make in the global spotlight at conferences around the world and the policies they implement back home. The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has no powers to enforce compliance.
Nor does the IPCC even know the cost of compliance. Two years ago it said that meeting the 1.5 degree target would require the industrial sector to cut carbon emissions by between 67% and 91% by 2050. It conceded that draconian emissions reductions would lead to higher food and energy prices, the latter delaying the transition from biomass (wood and dung) to clean cooking and so damaging the health of people in poorer countries.
But the IPCC also admitted to “knowledge gaps” about the impact this massive contraction in industrial output would have on growth, living standards, and poverty reduction. In the view of Rupert Darwall in a paper published last year by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF), the IPCC’s attitude is “You must do 1.5 whatever the cost.” “Net zero,” he said, “is being driven by fanatics and zealots who put little value on human welfare.”
Last year, Bjorn Lomborg of the Copenhagen Business School and the Hoover Institute at Stanford put forward some estimates in a paper published in the peer-reviewed journal Technological Forecasting and Social Change. Since there were no official estimates of the costs of the Paris agreement, he made use of peer-reviewed estimates used for the US, the EU, China, and Mexico, which between them make up around 80% of promised reductions in CO2 emissions.
Extrapolating these for the whole planet, he arrived at an annual cost of between $1 and $2 trillion in lost GDP, the latter being the more likely figure. This would be the cost of reducing emissions by just 1% of the quantity needed to limit the rise in global temperatures to 2 degrees Celsius. The cumulative cost of achieving this target would amount to $250 trillion, or 5.4% of future global GDP.
Dr Lomborg’s cost-benefit analysis showed that for every dollar spent on cutting carbon the claimed benefits to human welfare arising from the Paris agreement would be only 11 cents. The costs of climate policies accordingly outweighed their climate benefits....
Last month the GWPF announced that President Xi had been chosen as “the greatest climate hypocrite of the year” for 2020. He had smoothly paraded “concern” for the climate while all the time building hundreds of coal-fired power-stations in China and around the world as fast as he possibly could.
India, having denounced Western “carbon imperialism”, also has plans to expand its use of coal. According to GWPF Samizdat, that country intends to invest $55 billion in clean coal over the next decade. A recent Bloomberg newsletter said India’s plans include coal-gasification projects. Indian officials say that coal will remain the country’s dominant energy source for decades. Japan is planning additional coal-burning power plants at home and abroad over the next five years.
Full post
7) Richard Epstein: Biden goes Deep Green
Hoover Institution, 25 January 2021
It is amazing the difference that four years can make in environmental policy.
On January 24, 2017, at the outset of his presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order that salvaged the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from the Obama administration’s planned obstructionism. Obama had sought to upset the string of administrative approvals that the project obtained at both the federal and state levels. DAPL runs about 1,100 miles from the Bakken and Three Forks oil fields in North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois, where it is able to carry, far below ground, about 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Trump’s action allowed Congress to vote on whether to grant the last federal easement needed for the pipeline to proceed.
DAPL is now in service, even as litigation to shut it down continues. Environmental groups continue to allege attenuated theories of adverse effects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Their efforts are consistent with the common practice among environmentalists of paying inordinate attention to highly remote contingencies while completely ignoring the large and immediate safety and efficiency advantages of getting crude oil to both domestic and the foreign markets via DAPL. More concretely, the chances that any crude oil shipped by DAPL will escape in sufficient quantities to damage the fishing or water rights of the Standing Rock Sioux have always been infinitesimal, which is why the pipeline operations have caused no such harm for the past three years. The overall soundness of the pipeline grid will become truly dire if DAPL is shut down while Keystone is left incomplete.
For the moment, however, the immediate threat is to the Keystone pipeline. On January 20, President Biden issued an executive order aimed at “Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.” One component of his major order was to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline started some twelve years ago, but since that time it has been beset with legal challenges, including one in May 2020 in which a Montana judge yanked the pipeline’s permit on the grounds that the Army Corps of Engineers had not consulted sufficiently with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the alleged risks that the pipeline posed to endangered species and their habitat. Such orders overlook the benefits from that pipeline, which include its ability to ship up to 830,000 barrels per day of crude oil from the Alberta sands to American refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Completing the pipeline would substitute the risky transport of oil by railroads and trucks for the safe transport by pipeline. Most environmental harm from the construction of the partially complete pipeline has already occurred, and the stranded costs from its incomplete construction will never be recovered if this cancellation sticks. The TC Energy Corporation, the pipeline’s Canadian owner, has proposed to use only renewable energy sources and union labor in a vain effort to stave off the revoking of the permit. But the Biden administration has paid this proposal no heed.
Full post
Last week a paper published in Science concluded that worldwide, “To date, there has been no firm evidence of global trends of the frequency of tropical cyclones with maximum wind speed above the hurricane-force wind (64 knots) at landfall.” That finding, which confirms our work, was based on data since 1982. But what happens when we take a look further back in time? What we find might surprise you.
Since 2012, when we published the first comprehensive dataset of global landfalling hurricanes, we have updated the dataset annually (props to @RyanMaue for the heavy lifting).
Overall, 2020 was not an usually busy year on planet Earth for hurricanes. The figure below (via @RyanMaue) shows that 2020 had 44 total hurricanes, of which 21 reached major storm strength (technically, Category 3 or greater on the Saffir/Simpson Scale). According to Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University, since 1980 the most hurricanes observed globally in one calendar year was 59 in 1992 (major = 38 in 2015) and the least was 38 in 2009 (major = 15 in 1981).
One thing to notice about hurricanes is the large variability in their occurrence from year-to-year and decade-to-decade. Not only do hurricanes vary, but so too does the proportion that makes landfall. While storms at sea pose threats to shipping, it is of course those storms that make landfall that pose the greatest threats to life and property. [...]
Full post
9) And finally: Siemens slashes 7,800 jobs for green transition
Yahoo Finance, 2 February 2021
Siemens Energy announced plans to cut 7,800 jobs in its gas and power segment to improve its “long-term competitiveness” as it looks to focus on green energy.
Hoover Institution, 25 January 2021
It is amazing the difference that four years can make in environmental policy.
On January 24, 2017, at the outset of his presidency, Donald Trump issued an executive order that salvaged the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) from the Obama administration’s planned obstructionism. Obama had sought to upset the string of administrative approvals that the project obtained at both the federal and state levels. DAPL runs about 1,100 miles from the Bakken and Three Forks oil fields in North Dakota to Patoka, Illinois, where it is able to carry, far below ground, about 500,000 barrels of crude oil per day. Trump’s action allowed Congress to vote on whether to grant the last federal easement needed for the pipeline to proceed.
DAPL is now in service, even as litigation to shut it down continues. Environmental groups continue to allege attenuated theories of adverse effects under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). Their efforts are consistent with the common practice among environmentalists of paying inordinate attention to highly remote contingencies while completely ignoring the large and immediate safety and efficiency advantages of getting crude oil to both domestic and the foreign markets via DAPL. More concretely, the chances that any crude oil shipped by DAPL will escape in sufficient quantities to damage the fishing or water rights of the Standing Rock Sioux have always been infinitesimal, which is why the pipeline operations have caused no such harm for the past three years. The overall soundness of the pipeline grid will become truly dire if DAPL is shut down while Keystone is left incomplete.
For the moment, however, the immediate threat is to the Keystone pipeline. On January 20, President Biden issued an executive order aimed at “Restoring Science to Tackle the Climate Crisis.” One component of his major order was to revoke the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline. The pipeline started some twelve years ago, but since that time it has been beset with legal challenges, including one in May 2020 in which a Montana judge yanked the pipeline’s permit on the grounds that the Army Corps of Engineers had not consulted sufficiently with the US Fish and Wildlife Service on the alleged risks that the pipeline posed to endangered species and their habitat. Such orders overlook the benefits from that pipeline, which include its ability to ship up to 830,000 barrels per day of crude oil from the Alberta sands to American refineries along the Gulf Coast.
Completing the pipeline would substitute the risky transport of oil by railroads and trucks for the safe transport by pipeline. Most environmental harm from the construction of the partially complete pipeline has already occurred, and the stranded costs from its incomplete construction will never be recovered if this cancellation sticks. The TC Energy Corporation, the pipeline’s Canadian owner, has proposed to use only renewable energy sources and union labor in a vain effort to stave off the revoking of the permit. But the Biden administration has paid this proposal no heed.
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8) A remarkable decline in landfalling hurricanes
Roger Pielke Jr., 1 February 2021
Since 1945, the number of hurricanes that make landfall has declined by about a third
Roger Pielke Jr., 1 February 2021
Since 1945, the number of hurricanes that make landfall has declined by about a third
Since 2012, when we published the first comprehensive dataset of global landfalling hurricanes, we have updated the dataset annually (props to @RyanMaue for the heavy lifting).
Overall, 2020 was not an usually busy year on planet Earth for hurricanes. The figure below (via @RyanMaue) shows that 2020 had 44 total hurricanes, of which 21 reached major storm strength (technically, Category 3 or greater on the Saffir/Simpson Scale). According to Phil Klotzbach at Colorado State University, since 1980 the most hurricanes observed globally in one calendar year was 59 in 1992 (major = 38 in 2015) and the least was 38 in 2009 (major = 15 in 1981).
One thing to notice about hurricanes is the large variability in their occurrence from year-to-year and decade-to-decade. Not only do hurricanes vary, but so too does the proportion that makes landfall. While storms at sea pose threats to shipping, it is of course those storms that make landfall that pose the greatest threats to life and property. [...]
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9) And finally: Siemens slashes 7,800 jobs for green transition
Yahoo Finance, 2 February 2021
Siemens Energy announced plans to cut 7,800 jobs in its gas and power segment to improve its “long-term competitiveness” as it looks to focus on green energy.
The company, which was spun off last year by German industrial giant Siemens AG (SIE.DE) and currently employs 90,000 people globally, also said it will no longer bid on contracts for new coal-fired power plants.
The move come on top of an earlier plan to reduce costs by a minimum of €300m (£264m, $362m) in the same area.
“The energy market is significantly changing which offers us opportunities but at the same time presents us with great challenges,” said CEO Christian Bruch.
“With this program we want to regain our competitiveness and financial strength to shape the energy world of tomorrow. We are fully aware that this is a challenging program for our employees. Hence, we will undertake these measures in the most socially responsible way possible.”
Around three-quarters of the job cuts will be made in management, administration and sales. There will be around 3,000 cuts in Germany and 1,700 in the US while the rest will be spread across other regions.
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The move come on top of an earlier plan to reduce costs by a minimum of €300m (£264m, $362m) in the same area.
“The energy market is significantly changing which offers us opportunities but at the same time presents us with great challenges,” said CEO Christian Bruch.
“With this program we want to regain our competitiveness and financial strength to shape the energy world of tomorrow. We are fully aware that this is a challenging program for our employees. Hence, we will undertake these measures in the most socially responsible way possible.”
Around three-quarters of the job cuts will be made in management, administration and sales. There will be around 3,000 cuts in Germany and 1,700 in the US while the rest will be spread across other regions.
Full story
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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