GWPF Newsletter: India's coal use to surge as power demand is set to double

 

Coal projected to be India's largest source of power in 2040

In this newsletter:

1) India's coal use to surge as power demand is set to double
Energy Voice, 17 February 2021
 
2) Coal projected to be India's largest source of power in 2040
The Economic Times of India, 12 February 2021

 
3) Coal India approves 32 coal mining projects 
New Indian Express, 9 March 2021 

4) ‘India will create a level playing field if EU, USA impose carbon tariff’
The Hindu, 28 February 2021
 
5) US and EU search for a China climate doctrine after being snubbed
Politico, 9 March 2021
 
6) EU Parliament votes to retain free CO2 quotas for industry, making EU carbon border tax incompatibility with WTO rules
EurActiv, 10 March 2021
 
7) ‘Climate has no internal variability,’ Mann & Co. claim
GWPF Observatory, 11 March 2021
 

8) Things may not become so hot after all
GWPF Science, 8 March 2021

9) Ben Pile: Come clean about the cost of Net Zero
Spiked, 10 March 2021 

10) California horror scenario could sink Biden 
Jonathan Tennenbaum, Asia Times, 9 March 2021
 

11) And finally: Russia and climate activists target UK banks

Russia Today, 9 March 2021 

Full details:

1) India's coal use to surge as power demand is set to double
Energy Voice, 17 February 2021

Coal-fired power generation is projected to surge in India as the expanding wave of renewable energy capacity cannot keep up with electrification growth in the South Asian country, home to the world’s second biggest population.

 

India’s coal-fired power generation fell to a five-year low of 1,064 terawatt-hours (TWh) in 2020 due to the Covid-19-induced slowdown. However, this was only a dip, as coal still makes up a gigantic 70% of the country’s total electricity production. Significantly, coal-fired power is set to come back with a vengeance, expanding by 43% to 1,523 TWh in 2037, when Rystad Energy expects coal power to finally peak.

Still, the surge in coal consumption is not unexpected. India’s power generation is set to grow exponentially to 3,565 TWh by 2037, more than double the level in 2020.
 
Electricity production will already exceed 2,000 TWh from 2025 and is set to break the 3,000 TWh ceiling from 2034, as a result of an electrification boost and rapid economic expansion, the latest research from Rystad shows.

In fact, Rystad Energy expects India’s electricity generation to increase with an average yearly growth rate of 4.2%, effectively tripling its current level over the next 30 years.
 
Full story
 
 see also

* Vijay Jayaraj: Wary of the new green wave, India continues to increase its coal capacity

* India's New Coal boom

2) Coal projected to be India's largest source of power in 2040
The Economic Times of India, 12 February 2021
 
Delhi: Coal is projected to remain the largest single source of electricity in India in 2040, according to Michelle Manook, Chief Executive, World Coal Association.
 
She said that coal will continue to play a vital role in supporting intermittent renewable energy sources to underpin infrastructure development and industrialization.
 
"India is choosing to prioritize economic growth enabled by a resilient energy mix, inclusive of coal and clean coal technologies," Michelle said, adding a pragmatic and collaborative focus from international governments, industry, and investors is needed to ensure policies are in place to support the deployment of clean technologies.
 
Full story
 
3) Coal India approves 32 coal mining projects 
New Indian Express, 9 March 2021

NEW DELHI: State-run Coal India Ltd (CIL) has approved 32 mining projects in the current financial year till January, which may see investment to the tune of around Rs 47,300 crore as the company seeks to replace imports and move towards its 1 billion tonne coal production target by 2023-34.


 
While 24 of the 32 are an expansion of the existing projects, the rest eight are new greenfield projects. “Scripting a record high...CIL approved 32 coal mining projects in the current fiscal till January 2021,” the PSU said. CIL board and boards of the respective subsidiary companies have given their nod for the moveThe combined incremental peak capacity of these projects is projected at 193 million tonnes per annum (mtpa). 
 
Full story
 
4) ‘India will create a level playing field if EU, USA impose carbon tariff’
The Hindu, 28 February 2021

India will take steps to become competitive and create a level playing field for Indian manufacturers and exporters if the EU and the US impose carbon-based tariff on imports, said India‘s Commerce Secretary Anup Wadhawan.
 
“ If something evolves in a certain way we will do whatever is necessary to maintain our competitiveness and to create a level playing field. The game can be played both ways. We will do what it takes to be competitive and create a level playing field for our manufacturers and exporters,” he said when asked about EU and the US planning a carbon-based tariff starting this year.

“ These are typically non-trade issues which are coming into the trade domain. We always opposed trade issues getting mixed up with non-trade issues and especially non-trade issues becoming a lever for achieving trade interest,” said Wadhawan.
 
Full story
 

5) US and EU search for a China climate doctrine after being snubbed
Politico, 9 March 2021

Despite years of careful relationship building with Beijing, EU officials admit that Friday’s release of a draft summary of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan was a rebuff.

U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry, Ursula von der Leyen and Frans Timmermans | Olivier Hoslet/AFP via Getty Images

“Together, we can move mountains,” EU Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans said while standing alongside U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. If only they could move China.

That's the problem the pair confronted during a full day and evening of talks in Brussels Tuesday. Kerry’s trip to Europe — the first from a Biden administration official — came just days after China indicated its intention to allow greenhouse gas emissions to continue rising beyond 2025.
 
It’s an outcome both the EU and U.S. are lobbying Beijing to avert. Ahead of the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow in November, they want the world’s largest polluter to shift its commitment to peak emissions from 2030 to 2025 and to end coal power investment at home and abroad.

But seven weeks into the Biden presidency, the revived transatlantic climate alliance is searching for a common strategy to convince China and other major emitters to, in Timmermans’ words, “do the right thing.”
 
“It is important for us to align ourselves now, which is what we will discuss today. Because no one country can resolve this crisis,” said Kerry.
 
Despite years of careful relationship building with Beijing, EU officials admit that Friday’s release of a draft summary of China’s 14th Five-Year Plan was a rebuff.

While China boosted its renewable energy goals, the plan set modest emissions targets that were “hard to square with peaking in 2025 unless you assume very low economic growth over the next few years,” said an EU official. With annual GDP growth of about 5 percent, emissions in 2025 would be 10 percent higher, Yan Qin, an analyst at Refinitiv, estimated.
 
While the demands from Washington and Brussels may be clear and common, the penalties for ignoring them are not.
 
“It doesn't seem like China sees a united front on this as the biggest of risks right now,” said Jennifer Tollmann, a policy expert from the E3G think tank. “Is there a trade consequence for Chinese inaction this year? And is that something that the U.S. and the EU want to discuss jointly or not?”

Options include deploying a carbon border tax — something the EU is working on — or shutting China out of talks on setting clean economy standards, said Tollmann. “Why would you invite somebody to the table if they are not leading the charge?”
 
Full story
 
6) EU Parliament votes to retain free CO2 quotas for industry, making EU carbon border tax incompatibility with WTO rules
EurActiv, 10 March 2021

The European Parliament has rejected proposals to phase out free CO2 pollution credits for industries covered by the EU’s Emissions Trading System (EU ETS), even as the bloc plans to gradually replace the scheme with a carbon levy at its border.

 

The move came as lawmakers voted on Tuesday evening (9 March) on plans to impose a carbon charge on imports of goods coming into the European Union, as a way to shield EU industries from environmental dumping.

Although the vote does not introduce new legal obligations for companies – a formal proposal on the EU’s border levy is expected in June – it reflected deep divisions within the EU assembly.
 
By a narrow margin, Parliament voted against scrapping free carbon emissions allowances under the ETS once a planned carbon border adjustment mechanism is in place.
 
The European Commission will unveil its proposal for a carbon border levy in June as part of a package of climate laws aimed at cutting the EU’s CO2 emissions by 55% by the end of the decade.
 
“It’s a matter of survival” for EU industry, said Frans Timmermans, the European Commission’s climate chief, who warned about the risk of “carbon leakage” if companies were to leave Europe to avoid the cost of the bloc’s emissions-cutting policies. [...]
 
The European Union currently hands out free pollution credits to heavy industries like cement, steel and chemicals, to try and stop them relocating outside Europe – a process referred to as carbon leakage.
 
But the EU executive also made clear that double compensation for EU industries was out of the question, arguing this would go against World Trade Organisation (WTO) rules and nip the carbon border levy in the bud.
 
“The heart of WTO compatibility is that the scope [of the carbon border adjustment mechanism] must mirror the Emissions Trading Scheme” in Europe, said Pascal Canfin, a French centrist lawmaker who chairs the Parliament’s environment committee.
 
“And that raises the question of free CO2 quotas for European manufacturers because we cannot have both border protection and free quotas,” he told EURACTIV in December.
 
Full story

 

7) ‘Climate has no internal variability,’ Mann & Co. claim
GWPF Observatory, 11 March 2021

Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor

The funny paper that dumps the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation (AMO) is so unconvincing it had to be published twice.

 

It’s been called a tectonic shift in climate science resulting in the junking of thousands of peer-reviewed climate research papers. It’s also been held up as a prime example of why peer-review of some aspects of climate science is broken. Strange that you might not have noticed. It was published in a major journal last week. There was also a press release.

It’s a paper whose prime author is Michael Mann of Penn State University. Its main conclusion is that there is no internal variability in the Earth’s climate system, at least not in the past thousand years. All variability is down to just two things, greenhouse gas forcing and aerosols from volcanoes. Nothing else is needed confirm computer models.
 
The main target of the paper is the Atlantic Meridional Oscillation or AMO (Mann coined the term but didn’t discover the effect), a periodic surface temperature cycle of the North Atlantic. It was shown to be an artefact, not real, the authors claimed.The AMO met its nemesis via a computer model, a useful tool but which is often regarded as superior to reality. This is the case even when the models are so complicated they need the latest supercomputers and provide a range of outputs for a given set of input parameters.
 
Mann and company find variations in AMO data, specifically a 50–70-year spectral peak seen in an analysis of 27 proxy records dating back to 1400, although other studies have yielded differing results. Comparing them to a volcanic activity dataset the authors conclude that the AMO isn’t natural but is an artefact due to a combination of greenhouse gas forcing and cooling due to sulphate particles given off by volcanoes.
 
Considering the last millennium, they say, the multi-decadal variations are due to pulses of volcanic activity. They also add that there is additional evidence for this conclusion because in the climate models there are no multi-decadal variations. That’s it then. QED.
 
Writing in her blog Judith Curry is unimpressed. “Wow. In one fell swoop, the pesky problems of the ‘grand hiatus’ in the mid 20th century, debates over the attribution of 20th century warming and the role of multidecadal internal variability, and the difficulty of attributing the recent increase in Atlantic hurricane activity to AGW, all go away. Brilliant! Almost as ‘brilliant’ as the Hockey Stick.”
 
She goes on to say, “Relying on global climate models, which don’t adequately simulate the multi-decadal internal variability, to ‘prove’ that such multi-decadal internal variability doesn’t exist, is circular reasoning (at best). How does this stuff get published in a journal like Science? Peer review is sooooo broken.”

Substantial discussion and disagreement
 
In fact, the research that dumps the AMO is so unconvincing it had to be published twice. As well as coming out in last week’s edition of Science, essentially the same findings were published in Nature Communications in January 2020. Michael Mann’s university even issued a press release about it then.

In the Nature Communications paper, the researchers say that if the AMO and the PDO (Pacific Decadal Oscillation) existed we would see them in our current simulations “given the current sophistication of climate models.” QED, again.
 
The Nature Communications paper was originally submitted in July 2019 (it had previously been submitted to another journal) and one Nature reviewer was lukewarm about its merits wondering if Nature Comms was the right place for it (“certainly interesting enough for a more specialised than Nature Communications.”) It was remarked that the computer models referred to were not good enough to be used to make definitive statements about the reality or otherwise of narrow-band natural multi-decadal or interdecadal variability.

This was pointed out by Kravtsov et al. (2018), who concluded that: “While climate models exhibit various levels of decadal climate variability and some regional similarities to observations, none of the model simulations considered match the observed signal in terms of its magnitude, spatial patterns and their sequential time development. These results highlight a substantial degree of uncertainty in our interpretation of the observed climate change using current generation of climate models.”

Judith Curry emphasises this point, “There is substantial discussion and disagreement in the climate dynamics community on this topic, which isn’t surprising given the apparent complex interactions between ocean circulations and the AMO, weather and interannual climate variability, and external forcing from the sun and volcanoes.” The paper had its supporters, and it did get through.“
 
In closing,” says Curry, “Mann’s quest to cancel the Medieval Warm Period and now the AMO, in the interests of showing that recent warming is 100% anthropogenic, is not at all convincing to scientists who understand anything about climate dynamics and global climate models.”There is another way of looking a Mann’s findings.
 
Roger Pielke Jnr remarked, “Maybe it’s just me, but it would seem that it should be much bigger news that 15,000+ peer-reviewed climate research papers published since 2000 are based on a non-existent phenomenon and are thus now discredited.
 
“Among them would be a recent paper by two Harvard University scientists.They want to explain why sea surface temperatures were higher during World War 2, a longstanding topic of debate. They conclude that better corrections are needed for the way the temperature was measured using the intake of water from ships. They find a solution that accounts for the increase. Interesting then that both ways that account for the World War 2 ocean anomaly. Two examples of observational bias.
 
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com

 
8) Things may not become so hot after all
GWPF Science, 8 March 2021

When scientists create simulations of the climate in their supercomputers, two of the most important model characteristics are the climate sensitivity ­– how much warming you get for a doubling of carbon dioxide – and the cloud–aerosol forcing, the cooling influence you get as a result of pollution affecting cloud formation.
 
Nowadays, the air is becoming cleaner than it was in the past, and in the future it will be cleaner still. That means that our future is largely governed by the climate sensitivity.
 
If you were one of those scientists who enjoyed stories of impending doom, you would obviously be hoping that your climate model gave you a nice big juicy estimate of climate sensitivity. But that hope has to be tempered by the realisation that the model’s estimate of the cloud-aerosol forcing has to be strong enough to cool things down in your simulation of the 20th century so that the model matches observed reality.
 
In other words, if you have a big climate sensitivity you need a big cloud-aerosol forcing to make things look right in the 20th century. If you only have a low climate sensitivity, you need a small cloud-aerosol forcing.
 
Now climate sensitivity and cloud-aerosol forcing are not fed into climate models as assumptions – they emerge from them as outputs. It would therefore take someone more cynical than I to suggest that climate scientists might be tempted to tweak things so that just the right cloud-aerosol forcing emerged from their models in each case.
 
However, a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters makes it hard to avoid the conclusion that this is happening. The authors, led by Chenggong Wang of Princeton University, looked at the most recent generation of climate models, known as CMIP6, and found that lots of these models were rather good at simulating recent temperature history. Some suggested this had happened as a result of strong-warming offset by strong-cooling (we’ll call these the “strong models”), and some via weak warming and weak cooling (therefore, the “mild models”).
 
The authors’ most important scientific result is that the mild models seem better at reproducing the Earth’s recent temperature history. Most 20th century pollution was emitted in the north, so the balance between greenhouse gas warming and cloud-aerosol cooling has been different between the two hemispheres. This gives us an opportunity to assess whether the strong models are more realistic than the mild ones.
 
That’s because the strong models give a much more pronounced difference between the hemispheres. Unfortunately for climate alarmists, Wang reckons that the observed difference is a much better match with the mild models. This means that predictions of a very hot future are much less plausible.

Amusingly, Wang and his colleagues imply that there seems to be a surprising match between the amount of cooling and heating in the overall model cohort. Lots of models seem to get just the right amount of cooling to correctly offset their heating and so are able to reproduce 20th century temperature history. This strongly suggests that climate scientists are “tuning” (more perjorative terms are frequently used) their models to make them look credible. That they do so is not a new revelation – papers have been written on the subject of tuning of climate models – but it does show us that scientists are still unable to create plausible simulations of the climate system “out of the box”.
 

9) Ben Pile: Come clean about the cost of Net Zero
Spiked, 10 March 2021

Going carbon-neutral would mean a drastic reduction in living standards, but no politician can admit it.

The UK parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC) published a report last week that found ‘there is no coordinated plan with clear milestones towards achieving’ the 2050 ‘Net Zero’ emissions-reduction target. This lack of a plan, the committee claimed, made it ‘difficult for parliament and the general public to understand or scrutinise’ progress towards the goal.

Select Committees such as the PAC are populated by MPs from all parties, and are one of the main mechanisms parliament has to hold government departments, ministers and the government to account. But while the PAC rightly points out that the government has no idea about how to achieve the Net Zero target, neither do MPs, who bear just as much responsibility for this.
 
Of course there is no plan for how to reach Net Zero. Just as with the Climate Change Act (CCA) 2008, which demanded emissions reduction of 80 per cent, the Net Zero target was set long before anyone had ever thought about how to actually achieve it. The political consensus that gave us the Net Zero goal is confounded by three factors: the lack of a global Net Zero agreement, the lack of available technology and the lack of popular support.

Around the time MPs signed off on the CCA in 2008, public disengagement with politics was at record levels. This provided an open door to the green lobby and other campaigning organisations. These special interests claimed that climate policy – including generous subsidies for green technology – would deliver green innovation and economic revitalisation. They also claimed that ‘saving the planet’ would become a popular concern and would mobilise public opinion. These promises turned out to be empty.

The problem is crystallised in the PAC report’s summary:

‘As much as 62 per cent of the future reduction in emissions will rely on individual choices and behaviours, from day-to-day lifestyle choices to one-off purchases such as replacing boilers that use fossil fuels or buying an electric vehicle. Government has not yet properly engaged with the public on the substantial behaviour changes that achieving Net Zero will require.’

But if 62 per cent of emissions reduction is to ‘rely on individual choices and behaviours’, then Net Zero policies will necessarily require the removal of the public’s ‘choices’ and the state regulation of their ‘behaviours’. And because there is no like-for-like, emissions-free replacement for your domestic heating, for your car, or for the many other everyday activities that require energy, the inevitable outcome of Net Zero is a reduction in most people’s living standards and quality of life.
 
Full post
 

10) California horror scenario could sink Biden 
Jonathan Tennenbaum, Asia Times, 9 March 2021

What will Biden's ‘clean energy future’ look like? California's sky-high energy prices and poverty rates sound a warning
 

A power blackout at a convenience store in California. Image: Facebook
 
Climate fundamentalists tend to believe in sacrifice and regimentation as the only way to avert a climate apocalypse and atone for man’s crimes against the Earth.

In his campaign, Joe Biden set a very different tone: his climate plan would make building a new zero-emission infrastructure for the US into a vehicle for restoring prosperity and high-wage employment.

That sounds great, but what will President Biden’s “clean energy future” look like? And will it be economically sustainable?

As I argued in the last installment, a policy of attempting to achieve “100% clean electricity” without massive expansion of nuclear energy will inevitably mean subjecting the population to economic austerity – among other things, through exorbitantly high energy prices and taxes resulting in a loss in buying power and, most likely, rationing and regimentation in the use of electricity. Plus blackouts.

To get a bitter taste of that future we have only to look at California – the state that has taken the lead in “clean energy.” California also leads with the highest energy prices outside of the Northeast – more than 50% higher than the national average – and the highest real poverty rate in the US.
 
California is supposed to be showcase of the Democratic Party’s environmental policies. The state has been solidly in Democratic hands since the election of environmentalist Governor Jerry Brown in 2011. Vice President Kamala Harris and powerful House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are leading California Democrats. California also has vast financial and economic resources. If California were a country, it would be one of the six richest nations in the world, with a nominal GDP of $2.6 trillion.

SO why is this state not able to provide its citizens with reliable and affordable electric power? Throughout October last year, millions of Californians suffered from a constant series of “rolling blackouts” in which electricity supply was cut off to various regions of the state on a rotating basis.

The rolling blackouts were provoked by a severe heat and dry spell, but were made possible by the desolate state of the state’s ancient electric power grid. Sparking from its overland power lines had long been a main trigger of California’s frequent forest fires.

Full post
 

11) And finally: Russia and climate activists target UK banks
Russia Today, 9 March 2021 
 
80% of board members at UK’s biggest banks linked to environmentally damaging companies – study

 

Research by [climate activists] outlet DeSmog UK has found that 80 percent of the board members at Britain’s five largest banks are affiliated with environmentally damaging companies, raising concerns about conflicts of interest.

The media group looked at 64 directors at five of the UK’s biggest banks – Barclays, HSBC, NatWest, Lloyds and Standard Chartered – ahead of discussions at their upcoming annual general meetings about the commitments each financial institution is obliged to make to combat climate change.
 
Fifty of the directors were found to have previous or current links to companies seen as environmentally damaging or producing high carbon emissions, while a quarter of the officials were identified as having direct links to the fossil-fuel industry, raising concerns about potential conflicts of interest that could influence their decision on climate change policy.

"Many of the banks’ directors have close ties to polluting industries and their financial backers, either as current directors, advisors or previous employees," DeSmog UK said in its report.
 
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.