Why Beijing Loves Biden and Paris
In this newsletter:
1) Andrew Montford: The good news on climate
The Spectator, 21 February 2021
2) Indur Goklany: Impacts of climate change - perception and reality
GWPF TV, February 2021
3) NOAA’s climate disaster claims are a sham
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot of People Know That, 20 February 2021
4) EU falling short on 2030 climate target
Bloomberg, 18 February 2021
5) Editorial: Why Beijing Loves Biden and Paris
The Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2021
6) Texas blackouts warning to Biden and all of us: Renewables do play a role in grid problems
John Hayes, USA Today, 22 February 2021
7) William Murray: Environmentalism, Trumpism, and the Working Class
Quilette, 20 February 2021
8) Cost of offshore wind power is high and barely dropping?
Greentechlead, 19 February 2021
9) And finally: ‘Downing Street is working hard to bring the Tory press in line with Boris Johnson’s climate strategy’
GWPF, 22 February 2021
Full details:
1) Andrew Montford: The good news on climate
The Spectator, 21 February 2021
As I watch the snow blow past my window, it’s hard not to scoff at the idea of a ‘climate emergency’. However, I’m probably in a minority. The idea that we are currently experiencing a dangerous deterioration in our weather has been pushed so hard, and for so long, that the man in the Clapham Uber is now thoroughly convinced.
Those of us who have the time and inclination to look at the evidence for such claims, on the other hand, realise that they are largely overblown. The Global Warming Policy Foundation, where I work, has just published a review of the impacts of climate change and it’s a valuable antidote to the relentless alarmism pushed by some academics.
The paper is written by Indur Goklany, an American whose involvement in the climate field goes back 30 years when he was involved in the first United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) review of the world’s climate. So he knows what he is talking about, and the story he tells is one of almost unmitigated good news. There is a great deal of evidence that mankind is able to take the effects of climate change in its stride.
Take extreme weather for example. For 30 years, everyone from the Met Office to Al Gore has been telling us that global warming is going to make things much worse. But as Goklany shows, it just hasn’t happened; three decades of shirt-tearing, tears and wailing on the subject have changed things barely at all. In most areas, this should mostly be uncontroversial: the IPCC said in 2013 that it has ‘low confidence’ that droughts and hurricanes have become worse globally, and the best it can say of extreme rainfall is that it thinks there have been more areas with increases than decreases. On heatwaves it goes further, saying that it has ‘medium confidence’ of a global increase. But while we shouldn’t shy away from discussions over how to tackle these issues, it is not the impending catastrophe that some might make it out to be.
Goklany’s report isn’t just about refuting the bald claim that extreme weather has become worse across the board. It also deals with the broader suggestion that worsening weather will adversely affect human welfare. As he shows, mortality from extreme weather events is almost a thing of the past, having fallen by 99 per cent over the last century. Similarly, mankind now seems much better equipped to deal with the impact of weather and climate. Once you have adjusted for rising population and growing wealth, records of weather damage show, if anything, a long-term decline too.
When you look at the broader impacts of climate change, it’s the same story. Take sea-level rise, for example. While it’s possible to argue about how fast it’s happening, and the relative merits of satellites and tide gauges for measuring the rate, Goklany points to a recent study that showed that siltation and reclamation are giving us new land around our coasts faster than any sea-level rise is removing it. In other words, we are taking sea-level rise in our stride — perhaps unsurprising since we have been building sea defences for the last 7,000 years.
Similarly, a few years back, we were regularly assailed by stories of the disappearance of coral atolls, but the excitement seems to have died away, no doubt prompted by a series of studies showing that most atolls are actually stable or getting bigger. Amusingly, just as global warming was previously said to cause the atolls to disappear, it is now said to be the cause of their growth. Whatever the truth, it’s surely hard for any reasonable person to portray growing atolls as an emergency.
And on it goes. Rates of death from climate-related disease — another favourite of the doom-mongers — haven’t just got better, they have collapsed, with astonishing falls in almost every category over the last 30 years. As an example, the death tolls from malaria and diarrhoea have both fallen by around a half. Of course, this is not a function of climate change; it’s all down to better medical care and the deployment of simple preventative measures such as insecticide-treated mosquito nets. The conclusion is hard to avoid: climate-related disease can be addressed with a little money and even less fuss. Like sea-level rise, it’s simply not an emergency.Global warming doesn’t seem to have damaged crops either. The food supply continues to grow, with fossil-fuel-derived fertilisers and the beneficial effects of higher carbon dioxide levels delivering new record yields across the globe almost every year. This is not to say that it hasn’t got warmer, but simply that any deleterious effects have been swamped by the benefits of carbon dioxide and by the technological advances that mankind has deployed.
Fertilisers — both manmade and natural — have also had the beneficial side effect of reducing pressure on the natural world. Since the 1960s, the global population has more than doubled, but the area devoted to farmland has increased by only 8 per cent. Indeed, if it were not for environmentalists persuading governments that biofuels were a good idea, we might have seen countless thousands of hectares returned to nature already.
Of course, Dr Goklany’s pointing this out will make not the slightest difference to the scientists, whose livelihoods depend on keeping politicians firm in a belief that the world is about to end. It’s easy enough for them to come up with new measures that seem to be getting worse. ‘Rising crop yields? Pah, take a look at the fall in crop yield potential!’ they say. ‘Millions no longer dying from malaria? But look at the... erm... couple of thousand dying from dengue fever!’.
Or they can predict that things will get worse — or more often, much worse — in the future. Soils will degrade they say, new diseases will arise, and of course extreme weather will get worse too. They say we should play it safe, therefore, altering the world’s economies and industrial practices to alleviate carbon emissions, just in case they are a threat to global climate stability. But as we career headlong into our net-zero emissions future, there is every sign that the costs of what is proposed will not only reverse many of the gains we have made in the last half-century but make things far worse than if we simply adopted a policy of adapting to what the climate throws at us. As Goklany shows, we are good at adaptation; we have been at it for a long time.
And with the government stubbornly refusing to release an array of financial figures supporting their decarbonisation plans, there is a strong suggestion that they know the course they have started us down is unsupportable on any rational grounds. Their plans to ‘build back better’ are therefore likely to be a hammer blow to an economy that is already reeling from the pandemic. So if in a few year’s time you find you are worrying about paying the heating bill, or you can’t sell your house because you can’t afford the government-mandated insulation measures, you might like to cast your eye back over Dr Goklany’s paper and wonder why we set out on the course we did.
Andrew Montford is deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Forum.
GWPF TV, February 2021
3) NOAA’s climate disaster claims are a sham
Paul Homewood, Not A Lot of People Know That, 20 February 2021
It is evident that the whole thing is totally fraudulent.
Stewgreen has tracked down the NOAA climate disaster website, which the BBC used for their video yesterday.
It is evident just by looking at it that the whole thing is totally fraudulent.
First a look at the map:
https://www.aoml.noaa.gov/hrd/hurdat/All_U.S._Hurricanes.html
However, the vast majority of these wrongly named “climate” disasters are either tornadoes, hailstorms or severe weather (which are almost all thunderstorm/tornado outbreaks).
Again, we know that tornado activity has declined significantly since the 1970s. But we are expected to believe that tornadoes and thunderstorms nowadays are far more catastrophic than in the past.
The answer to this riddle lies in how NOAA determine what a billion dollar disaster is.
The key is this sentence:
"The U.S. has sustained 285 weather and climate disasters since 1980 where overall damages/costs reached or exceeded $1 billion (including CPI adjustment to 2020)."
So, they rightly allow for inflation, but is that enough?
The simple truth is that Americans have much more “stuff” than they did back in the 1980. Bigger houses, more cars, latest technological gadgetry, expensive furniture and clothes, and all the rest of it.
If a house burns down, the cost of rebuilding it and replacing contents will have increased by much more than inflation since 1980.
The same goes for local infrastructure and services.
The best way to monitor this is by looking at GDP, not CPI, which says that $1 in 1980 is now worth $3.32:
GDP however has risen from $2857bn in 1980, to $21433bn in 2019, which is 7.3 times as big.
We can see the impact of rising wealth better by looking at constant GDP, which has been adjusted for CPI:
So when a billion dollar disaster in 1980 is equivalent to a $3 billion one now.
Full post
4) EU falling short on 2030 climate target
Bloomberg, 18 February 2021
The EU’s current CO2 emissions trajectory is significantly off course to hit the 55% target
Europe will need to accelerate the pace of its energy transition and expand the region’s carbon market to reach an ambitious emissions reduction goal by 2030.
The European Union is currently on track to deliver emissions cuts of 46% on 1990 levels by the end of the decade, short of its 55% target, according to energy consultant Wood Mackenzie Ltd.
Accelerating the EU’s energy transition in line with the Paris climate deal goals will help, and would require increased wind and solar capacity, retiring more coal-fired plants and electric transport making up almost all passenger vehicle sales by 2030. However this scenario would only reach a 53% emissions cut and take a further two years to reach the bloc’s target.
“To hit the 2030 target, Europe will have to do everything we have assumed, but quicker,” said Murray Douglas, a research director at Wood Mackenzie.
Crucial to meeting the EU’s carbon reduction goal is reforming and broadening its Emissions Trading System, a key plank in the bloc’s strategy of putting a price on pollution and spurring investment in green technology.
“The fact that ETS sectors will only deliver a third of the targeted reductions by 2030 underscores the need for reform,” Douglas said.
Full story
5) Editorial: Why Beijing Loves Biden and Paris
The Wall Street Journal, 22 February 2021
The U.S. rejoins a climate pact that gives China a free carbon ride.
Paris is a voluntary agreement, and nations submit their own commitments to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The Obama Administration vowed to slash emissions 26% or more from 2005 levels by 2025, but the Trump Administration withdrew from the accord. President Biden has now pledged to [ ]( https://joebiden.com/climate-plan/ )reach “net-zero emissions no later than 2050.”
Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Biden is committing the U.S. without submitting the Paris agreement to the Senate as a treaty. They know it would never get a two-thirds vote for approval, and probably not even a simple majority. Yet the Administration will cite Paris to justify sweeping environmental regulations to raise the cost of fossil fuels and subsidize renewable energy and electric vehicles. It will bypass Congress for much of this.
The economic damage will be real. A 2017 analysis of the Obama Paris commitments, by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Council for Capital Formation, predicted a $250 billion reduction in GDP and some 2.7 million lost jobs by 2025.[ ]( https://www.lomborg.com/press-release-research-reveals-negligible-impact-of-paris-climate-promises )
Meanwhile, China emitted nearly twice as much CO2 as the U.S. in 2018. Yet under Paris, Beijing gets a pass to increase its emissions until 2030. In 2020 China’s coal plants produced some 4,874 terawatt hours of energy—an increase of nearly 15% since it joined the pact, according to S&P Global Platts.
A new report by the nonprofit Global Energy Monitor highlights that “in 2020, China built over three times as much new coal power capacity as all other countries in the world combined—the equivalent of more than one large coal plant per week.” Last year Beijing also initiated more than 73.5 gigawatts “of new coal plant proposals,” five times as much as “the rest of the world combined,” the report says.
The U.S. generated an estimated 788 terawatt hours of coal-fired energy in 2020 as cheaper natural gas replaced coal. Thanks to natural gas—a fossil fuel—the U.S. has outpaced most of the world in reducing emissions, and in 2019 emissions reached their lowest level since 1992. Market forces, not Paris, drove that reduction.
Paris will have zero effect on the climate even if every nation meets its commitments. Mr. Biden will dispatch John Kerry, his climate envoy, to lobby China and everyone else to reduce emissions, which will also please President Xi Jinping. Mr. Xi will be happy to make promises about the future while demanding U.S. concessions today on Taiwan, trade and more. The Chinese Communists must sit back and marvel as they watch the U.S. undermine its own economic strength.
see also The Red and the Green: China’s Useful Idiots (pdf)
6) Texas blackouts warning to Biden and all of us: Renewables do play a role in grid problems
John Hayes, USA Today, 22 February 2021
Common-sense has already lost to political considerations — and people across Texas and the Great Plains are paying the price.
It’s not just a cold front. Over a decade of misguided green energy policies are wreaking havoc in Texas and the lower Midwest right now — despite non-stop claims to the contrary.
The immediate cause for the power outages in Texas this week was extreme cold and insufficient winterization of the state’s energy systems. But there’s still no escaping the fact that, for years, Texas regulators have favored the construction of heavily subsidized renewable energy sources over more reliable electricity generation. These policies have pushed the state away from nuclear and coal and now millions in Texas and the Great Plains states are learning just how badly exposed they are when extreme weather hits.
Renewable’s defenders retort that Texas’ wind resource is “reliably unreliable.” Translation: It can’t be counted on when it’s needed most. The state has spent tens of billions of dollars on wind turbines that don’t work when millions of people desperately need electricity. As the cold weather has gotten worse, half the state’s wind generation has sat frozen and immobile. Where wind provided 42% of the state’s electricity on Feb. 7, it fell to 8% on Feb.11.
The Texas power outage was inevitable
Unsurprisingly, the failure of wind has sparked a competing narrative that fossil fuel plants were the real cause of power outages. This claim can be quickly dispelled with a look at data from ERCOT, the state’s electricity regulator. Even though the extreme cold had frozen cooling systems on coal plants and natural gas pipelines, the state’s coal plants still upped their output by 47% in response to increasing demand. Natural gas plants across the state increased their output by an amazing 450%. Fossil fuels have done yeoman’s work to make up for wind’s reliable unreliability.
Sadly, even these herculean efforts weren’t enough. The loss of wind has been compounded by the loss of some natural gas and coal generation, and one nuclear reactor, which experienced a cold-related safety issue and shut down. Things are improving, but rolling power outages are still impacting millions. Had the state invested more heavily in nuclear plants instead of pushing wind power, Texans would have ample, reliable, safe, emission-free electricity powering their lives through the cold. Instead, over 20 have died.
This sad outcome was inevitable. Renewable energy sources have taken off in popularity largely because of state mandates and federal subsidies. As they’ve become more popular, reliable energy like nuclear power and coal have felt the squeeze.
Last year, wind overtook coal as Texas’ second largest source of electricity generation. The most recent federal data indicates that, in October last year, natural gas provided 52% of the Lonestar state’s electricity, while wind generated about 22%, coal kicked in 17%, and nuclear added 8%. The rise of wind means unreliable energy is increasingly relied on for the energy grid.
This won't be the last power crisis
The Texas energy crisis isn’t a one-off, either. The same thing happened in 2019 when Michigan endured the Polar Vortex. Extreme cold paired with limited natural gas supplies and non-existent renewable energy. Residents all received text messages warning them to reduce their thermostats to 65° or less to stave off a system wide failure.
California’s rolling blackouts last summer are another example. Dwindling solar generation in late afternoon, shuttered nuclear plants, and insufficient supply from gas plants could not compete with rising energy demands due to extreme heat.
As more states mandate unreliable renewables, incidents like this will become more frequent, not less. Every new wind turbine and solar panel means less reliable energy — the energy Americans need to weather the coldest nights and the hottest days.
And then there’s Joe Biden’s $2 trillion promise to wean America off reliable energy. If Biden’s aggressive climate plan is enacted, it will push tens of thousands of wind turbines and millions of solar panels in an expensive effort to achieve net zero emissions from the nation’s electricity sector by 2050. But doing this will only further spread the problems that Texans are currently experiencing.
America can’t go down this foolish road. Common-sense has already lost to political considerations — and people across Texas and the Great Plains are paying the price. They aren’t the first victims, and they certainly won’t be the last, if politicians continue to push unreliable renewable energy instead of the reliable sources families need to stay warm and live their lives. A green future shouldn’t be this dark.
7) William Murray: Environmentalism, Trumpism, and the Working Class
Quilette, 20 February 2021
There is strong evidence that America’s environmental policies and practices over the past half-century—and their contribution to lower economic growth and rising income inequality—have brought class tensions to a breaking point.
April 2019: President Donald Trump signs an executive order on energy and infrastructure during a campaign event at the International Union of Operating Engineers International Training and Education Center. Credit: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
The inauguration of President Biden as the 46th US President hasn’t produced quite the catharsis that Democrats (and others) had hoped for. After only a few months of one-party rule in Washington, DC—and the sputtering finale of impeachment—there should be fear among Democrats that attention will return to the signs of real damage done to the progressive/liberal project in the wake of its collision with the Trump train.
The shifting of both American political parties into one another’s former political spaces has been head-spinning. The trend of Republicans turning into the party of labor and Democrats becoming a party of capital looks to continue in the 2020s—something few people outside of Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot would have guessed 30 years ago. And it turns out that the promise of a Democrat-voting bloc made up of well-educated whites, blacks, and the growing Hispanic population delivering a decades-long progressive era in American politics is not coming to pass.
For nearly 20 years, this promised “coalition of the ascendant” has coalesced but failed to ascend. In 2009, with the inauguration of Barack Obama, Democrats in the House of Representatives controlled 256 seats and 58 seats in the Senate. In 2021, Democrats under Biden/Harris hold 221 seats in the House, while the Senate is split 50/50.
To be fair, a major caveat to the “coalition” argument involved keeping white working-class voters in the Democrat column while the promised growing populations of Hispanic and urban singleton voters delivered on its demographic determinism. Instead, the raw numbers from the 2020 general election suggest that Trump’s class rhetoric captured parts of the working classes that the Democratic Party had previously thought were untouchable.
So, what changed in America’s politics that would cause working class Hispanics and black voters to move toward Trump? The most common answer is that Trump’s populist attacks on the status quo of immigration and trade policy broke thorough to the non-white working class in the same way it broke through with important parts of the white working class in 2016. But there is strong evidence that the country’s environmental policies and practices over the past half-century—and their contribution to lower economic growth and rising income inequality—have brought class tensions to a breaking point.
Since the Income Tax Amendment was ratified in 1913, political fights in the US have become largely about the redistribution of wealth and with it, social power. And nothing redistributes wealth more from the real, physical world and into cyber space—away from labor unions and skilled labor and into algorithmic code (where there is no regulation)—than environmental regulation.
As wide as the partisan gaps are concerning illegal immigration and free trade, none can compare to those on environmental protection and global warming. In 2019, Gallup found that 86 percent of Democrats say the government is doing too little in terms of environmental protection, while only 25 percent of Republicans believed the same. A poll by Resources for the Future found it “particularly intriguing” that 76 percent of Democrats believe that unchecked global warming will hurt them personally, but only 26 percent of Republicans believe the same.
Exit polls from the New York Times and others found that roughly 18 percent of black men voted for Trump in 2020, up from 13 percent in 2016. The same poll found 36 percent of Hispanic men voted for Trump in 2020, compared to 32 percent. And in the Midwest, the historical base of industry in the US, one in three black men voted for Trump, according to an NBC Exit Poll taken on November 3rd. Some 26 percent of Republican votes came from non-white voters in 2020, up five percent from 2016 and just below George W. Bush’s 2004 showing of 28 percent—itself the highest since Richard Nixon garnered 32 percent in the knife-edge 1960 loss to John F. Kennedy.
Trump’s populist, anti-progressive rhetoric included a climate skepticism unprecedented in the history of American politics. His climate statements served as an epiphany for many voters, who now believe that the environmental gains in the country from past industrial damage are largely complete, and that undermining job creation through climate-change policies hurts American workers in the future more than it helps.
It turns out that class warfare in America never went dormant; it has been going on for decades. Yet it has remained largely unnoticed, disguised as cultural conflict and cloaked in talk of political correctness and social justice. This would explain why environmental policy is often overlooked and undersold as the independent variable of this country’s underlying cultural battle. Why else would Trump’s rejection of the Paris Climate Accord, allowing lease activity in the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge and promoting the Keystone XL pipeline, do no net damage to him at the polls?
It’s worth repeating: A climate skeptic and Arctic driller received 10 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. And President Biden’s reversal of all three of these policies on his first day in office won’t bring new voters into the party, but will serve as a sustaining policy for true believers. Trumpism has left a mark, and it’s deep. […]
Biden’s campaign platform calls for zero emissions from power plants by 2035 and reaching net-zero emissions economy-wide by 2050. This action implies a dramatic upending of potentially millions of working-class jobs—not just in manufacturing and energy production, but also in transportation, utilities, and business services as well. By returning to the Obama Administration’s focus on climate regulations that includes carbon markets and cap-and-trade, the Biden White House will simply produce another market for financial speculation and another round of factory reshuffling, leaving American workers poorer and less well employed.
A cynic might even suggest the language of identity politics that drives so much elite political debate in this country is simply a diversion by the winners of the last decades of policy decisions to distract from the legitimate grievances of the losers. It turns out that Trump’s powerful class rhetoric could compete and even win votes against the progressive preoccupation with identity that has grown throughout the past decade.
The next four years will decide whether this shift of working class voters toward Republicans can outlast Trump, and with it a more explicit rejection of the uneven, unfair environmental policies pushed so aggressively by the Left. A “multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition” as described by Senator Marco Rubio and others in the wake of last November’s election would be “narrative changing” to say the least, and of great consequence to the country’s long-term social stability.
That such a new coalition would influence America’s future environmental policy choices is a forgone conclusion, and a weakened saliency of environmental policy would again surprise every determinist pundit in this country over the past 20 years.
Full essay
Greentechlead, 19 February 2021
The cost of offshore wind power is high and barely falling, a new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) shows. GWPF is calling for ministers and officials to come clean with the public.
Since 2017, renewables advocates have argued that offshore wind power is now very cheap. However, closer examination of their claims reveals a different story.
“Wind farm developers announce their budgets before they start work, so we can see that almost all the forthcoming developments are just as expensive as anything built in the last few years. Even if these new wind farms perform much better than the older ones, they are only going to give us slightly cheaper power,” the report’s author Andrew Montford said.
Beatrice, commissioned in the Moray Firth in 2019 is supposed to be 40 or 50 percent cheaper than other recent wind farms, but we now know for sure that its capital costs were higher than the average, while its operational performance is only marginally better.”
The GWPF study is the third recent review of the accounts of the UK’s offshore wind fleet to find little if any sign of cost reductions. The levelised cost (LCOE) remains 3-4 times that of a gas turbine running flat out.
9) And finally: ‘Downing Street is working hard to bring the Tory press in line with Boris Johnson’s climate strategy’
GWPF, 22 February 2021
If you wonder why Britain’s once vibrant and diverse newspapers have turned into promoters of the governments climate and Net Zero agenda, this piece explains part of the reason:
iNews, 21 February 2021
Like a shrinking Antarctic ice shelf, collapsing into the sea in the face of global warming, the climate scepticism of large parts of the UK press is finally starting to melt away.
Earlier this month, The Times, which had caused scientists to despair at its apparent support for climate change denial, ran an editorial in support of Government proposals for new taxes to combat carbon emissions. “It is the right approach,” the paper concluded.
On 30 January, Natasha Clark, political correspondent at The Sun, tweeted that she was “delighted to be taking on environment, green and climate news ahead of COP26”, the UN change conference in Glasgow in November. In October The Sun launched a Green Team campaign so that “every reader can help save the planet” (and maybe win some vegan sausages).
Most surprisingly, the Daily Express, for so long the loudest-ranting climate denier on the UK newsstand, turned its Crusader icon the colour of an avocado on 8 February and implored its readers to “Join our green Britain revolution!
Alongside that front-page headline were logos of such unlikely Express bedfellows as Greenpeace and Solar Energy UK, and a photo of Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak larking around with an electric vehicle charging gun.
Here is a clue to what’s going on. The new green face paint of the British press is not simply a consequence of public opinion. It’s also a response to new Government policy.
Downing Street is working hard to bring the Tory press in line with Boris Johnson’s strategy for a “green industrial revolution” to underpin economic recovery and establish the UK’s reputation as a champion of clean energy ahead of the UN summit.
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