New study ties solar variability to the onset of decadal La Nina events
In this newsletter:
1) The Sun’s climate role confirmed
GWPF Observatory, 6 April 2021
2) New study ties solar variability to the onset of decadal La Nina events
EurekAlert, 5 April 2021
3) UAH Global Temperature Update for March 2021: -0.01 deg. C
Roy Spencer, 2 April 2021
Top: Six-month smoothed monthly sunspot number from SILSO. Bottom: Oceanic El Niño Index from NOAA. Red and blue boxes mark the El Niño and La Niña periods in the repeating pattern. Source: Climate Etc, September 2019
If you ask most climate scientists, they will tell you that the Sun’s small variability is unimportant when it comes to influencing climate. They may have to change their minds if a new line of research holds up. It seems that solar variability can drive climate variability on Earth on decadal timescales (the decadal climatic variability that Michael Mann recently ‘proved’ doesn’t exist).
That’s the conclusion of a new study showing a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean. It’s a result that could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events, which have several global climate effects.
"Energy from the Sun is the major driver of our entire Earth system and makes life on Earth possible,” said Scott McIntosh, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a co-author of the paper. “Even so, the scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past.”
The approximately 11-year solar cycle – the appearance (and disappearance) of spots on the Sun – has been known for hundreds of years. In this new study, the researchers use a 22-year “clock” for solar activity derived from the Sun’s magnetic polarity cycle, which they consider a more regular alternative to the 11-year solar cycle. This research was published last year.
‘Coincidence unlikely‘
Applying this to climate studies the researchers found that the five estimates of the end of a solar cycle that occurred between 1960 and 2010-11 all coincided with a flip from an El Nino (when sea surface temperatures are warmer than average) to a La Nina (when the sea surface temperatures are cooler than average). The end of the most recent solar cycle – happening now – is also coincident with the beginning of a La Nina event. Robert Leamon of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County said, “Five consecutive terminators lining up with a switch in the El Nino oscillation is not likely to be a coincidence.”
In fact, only a 1 in 5,000 chance or less (depending on the statistical test) that all five terminator events included in the study would randomly coincide with the flip in ocean temperatures. Now that a sixth terminator event — and the corresponding start of a new solar cycle in 2020 — has also coincided with an La Nina event, the chance of a random occurrence is even more remote.
The paper does not delve into what physical connection between the Sun and Earth could be responsible for the correlation, but the authors note that there are several possibilities that warrant further study, including the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the number of cosmic rays that escape into the solar system and ultimately bombard Earth. However, a robust physical link between cosmic ray variations and climate has yet to be determined.
If further research can establish that there is a physical connection and that changes on the Sun are truly causing variability in the oceans, then we may be able to improve our ability to predict El Nino and La Nina events,” McIntosh said.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
see also
* David Whitehouse: The next solar cycle, And why it matters for climate
* Henrik Svensmark: Force Majeure – The Sun’s Role In Climate Change
2) New study ties solar variability to the onset of decadal La Nina events
Roy Spencer, 2 April 2021
4) Biden’s Green Deal faces backlash from US states
5) African nations planning 1250 new coal and gas power plants, study reveals
GWPF & Power Engineering International, 3 April 2021
GWPF & Power Engineering International, 3 April 2021
6) China’s Net Zero promise looks elusive as banks keep throwing cash at coal mines and power plants
Yahoo Finance News, 3 April 2021
Yahoo Finance News, 3 April 2021
7) Net Zero targets could make millions of old homes unsellable
The Times, 3 April 2021
11) John O’Sullivan: Will the U.N. Security Council rescue Net-Zero?
The Pipeline, 1 April 2021
The Times, 3 April 2021
8) Tilak Doshi: Belong to the Climate Club or get penalized: The EU’s new trade protectionism
Forbes, 6 April 2021
Forbes, 6 April 2021
9) Andrew Roman: Our “Made in China” climate policy
Andrew's Views, 5 April 2021
Andrew's Views, 5 April 2021
10) Ross Clark: Net Zero's spiralling costs will hit the poorest hardest
The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2021
The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2021
11) John O’Sullivan: Will the U.N. Security Council rescue Net-Zero?
The Pipeline, 1 April 2021
Full details:
1) The Sun’s climate role confirmed
GWPF Observatory, 6 April 2021
By Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
“The scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past” -- Scott McIntosh, National Center for Atmospheric Research
GWPF Observatory, 6 April 2021
By Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
“The scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past” -- Scott McIntosh, National Center for Atmospheric Research
Top: Six-month smoothed monthly sunspot number from SILSO. Bottom: Oceanic El Niño Index from NOAA. Red and blue boxes mark the El Niño and La Niña periods in the repeating pattern. Source: Climate Etc, September 2019
If you ask most climate scientists, they will tell you that the Sun’s small variability is unimportant when it comes to influencing climate. They may have to change their minds if a new line of research holds up. It seems that solar variability can drive climate variability on Earth on decadal timescales (the decadal climatic variability that Michael Mann recently ‘proved’ doesn’t exist).
That’s the conclusion of a new study showing a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean. It’s a result that could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events, which have several global climate effects.
"Energy from the Sun is the major driver of our entire Earth system and makes life on Earth possible,” said Scott McIntosh, of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a co-author of the paper. “Even so, the scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past.”
The approximately 11-year solar cycle – the appearance (and disappearance) of spots on the Sun – has been known for hundreds of years. In this new study, the researchers use a 22-year “clock” for solar activity derived from the Sun’s magnetic polarity cycle, which they consider a more regular alternative to the 11-year solar cycle. This research was published last year.
‘Coincidence unlikely‘
Applying this to climate studies the researchers found that the five estimates of the end of a solar cycle that occurred between 1960 and 2010-11 all coincided with a flip from an El Nino (when sea surface temperatures are warmer than average) to a La Nina (when the sea surface temperatures are cooler than average). The end of the most recent solar cycle – happening now – is also coincident with the beginning of a La Nina event. Robert Leamon of the University of Maryland-Baltimore County said, “Five consecutive terminators lining up with a switch in the El Nino oscillation is not likely to be a coincidence.”
In fact, only a 1 in 5,000 chance or less (depending on the statistical test) that all five terminator events included in the study would randomly coincide with the flip in ocean temperatures. Now that a sixth terminator event — and the corresponding start of a new solar cycle in 2020 — has also coincided with an La Nina event, the chance of a random occurrence is even more remote.
The paper does not delve into what physical connection between the Sun and Earth could be responsible for the correlation, but the authors note that there are several possibilities that warrant further study, including the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the number of cosmic rays that escape into the solar system and ultimately bombard Earth. However, a robust physical link between cosmic ray variations and climate has yet to be determined.
If further research can establish that there is a physical connection and that changes on the Sun are truly causing variability in the oceans, then we may be able to improve our ability to predict El Nino and La Nina events,” McIntosh said.
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
see also
* David Whitehouse: The next solar cycle, And why it matters for climate
* Henrik Svensmark: Force Majeure – The Sun’s Role In Climate Change
2) New study ties solar variability to the onset of decadal La Nina events
EurekAlert, 5 April 2021
A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth.
If the connection outlined in the journal Earth and Space Science holds up, it could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events, which have a number of seasonal climate effects over land. For example, the southern United States tends to be warmer and drier during a La Nina, while the northern U.S. tends to be colder and wetter.
“Energy from the Sun is the major driver of our entire Earth system and makes life on Earth possible,” said Scott McIntosh, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-author of the paper. “Even so, the scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past.”
The study was led by Robert Leamon at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and it is also co-authored by Daniel Marsh at NCAR. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor, and the NASA Living With a Star program....
The paper does not delve into what physical connection between the Sun and Earth could be responsible for the correlation, but the authors note that there are several possibilities that warrant further study, including the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the amount of cosmic rays that escape into the solar system and ultimately bombard Earth. However, a robust physical link between cosmic rays variations and climate has yet to be determined.
“If further research can establish that there is a physical connection and that changes on the Sun are truly causing variability in the oceans, then we may be able to improve our ability to predict El Nino and La Nina events,” McIntosh said.
Full post
A new study shows a correlation between the end of solar cycles and a switch from El Nino to La Nina conditions in the Pacific Ocean, suggesting that solar variability can drive seasonal weather variability on Earth.
If the connection outlined in the journal Earth and Space Science holds up, it could significantly improve the predictability of the largest El Nino and La Nina events, which have a number of seasonal climate effects over land. For example, the southern United States tends to be warmer and drier during a La Nina, while the northern U.S. tends to be colder and wetter.
“Energy from the Sun is the major driver of our entire Earth system and makes life on Earth possible,” said Scott McIntosh, a scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and co-author of the paper. “Even so, the scientific community has been unclear on the role that solar variability plays in influencing weather and climate events here on Earth. This study shows there’s reason to believe it absolutely does and why the connection may have been missed in the past.”
The study was led by Robert Leamon at the University of Maryland-Baltimore County, and it is also co-authored by Daniel Marsh at NCAR. The research was funded by the National Science Foundation, which is NCAR’s sponsor, and the NASA Living With a Star program....
The paper does not delve into what physical connection between the Sun and Earth could be responsible for the correlation, but the authors note that there are several possibilities that warrant further study, including the influence of the Sun’s magnetic field on the amount of cosmic rays that escape into the solar system and ultimately bombard Earth. However, a robust physical link between cosmic rays variations and climate has yet to be determined.
“If further research can establish that there is a physical connection and that changes on the Sun are truly causing variability in the oceans, then we may be able to improve our ability to predict El Nino and La Nina events,” McIntosh said.
Full post
3) UAH Global Temperature Update for March 2021: -0.01 deg. C
Roy Spencer, 2 April 2021
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for March, 2021 was -0.01 deg. C, down substantially from the February, 2021 value of +0.20 deg. C.
Roy Spencer, 2 April 2021
The Version 6.0 global average lower tropospheric temperature (LT) anomaly for March, 2021 was -0.01 deg. C, down substantially from the February, 2021 value of +0.20 deg. C.
Right on time, the maximum impact from the current La Nina is finally being felt on global tropospheric temperatures. The global average oceanic tropospheric temperature anomaly is -0.07 deg. C, the lowest since November 2013. The tropical (20N-20S) departure from average (-0.29 deg. C) is the coolest since June of 2012.
Australia is the coolest (-0.79 deg. C) since August 2014.
The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).
Full post & comments
Australia is the coolest (-0.79 deg. C) since August 2014.
The linear warming trend since January, 1979 remains at +0.14 C/decade (+0.12 C/decade over the global-averaged oceans, and +0.18 C/decade over global-averaged land).
Full post & comments
4) Biden’s Green Deal faces backlash from US states
Financial Times, 4 April 2021
Republican-led state capitols are considering bills that would punch holes in President Joe Biden’s green revamp of the US electricity system by promoting fossil fuels or piling costs on to renewable energy.
The proposed legislation reverses a dynamic that played out over the past four years, when lawmakers in states controlled by Democrats moved to counteract Donald Trump’s climate rollbacks. One analyst described a “Biden backlash”.
Legislators have sharpened their focus since a winter storm caused blackouts in Texas and Midwestern states in February. Despite a varied set of causes, some have invoked the crisis to propose new constraints on solar and wind power.
If enacted, the bills would cloud Biden’s objective of driving down carbon emissions from the electricity sector, one that he intends to bolster with a $2tn federal infrastructure plan announced last week.
In Texas, where the legislature has been consumed by the blackout debacle, bills introduced by state House Republicans would tax renewable energy projects, keep new wind turbines at least a mile apart and require solar and wind farms to procure back-up power to cover some of their down time.
Full story (£)
Republican-led state capitols are considering bills that would punch holes in President Joe Biden’s green revamp of the US electricity system by promoting fossil fuels or piling costs on to renewable energy.
The proposed legislation reverses a dynamic that played out over the past four years, when lawmakers in states controlled by Democrats moved to counteract Donald Trump’s climate rollbacks. One analyst described a “Biden backlash”.
Legislators have sharpened their focus since a winter storm caused blackouts in Texas and Midwestern states in February. Despite a varied set of causes, some have invoked the crisis to propose new constraints on solar and wind power.
If enacted, the bills would cloud Biden’s objective of driving down carbon emissions from the electricity sector, one that he intends to bolster with a $2tn federal infrastructure plan announced last week.
In Texas, where the legislature has been consumed by the blackout debacle, bills introduced by state House Republicans would tax renewable energy projects, keep new wind turbines at least a mile apart and require solar and wind farms to procure back-up power to cover some of their down time.
Full story (£)
5) African nations planning 1250 new coal and gas power plants, study reveals
GWPF & Power Engineering International, 3 April 2021
Of Africa’s 2500 planned power-generation projects, half are coal and gas power plants, Oxford University study reveals
GWPF & Power Engineering International, 3 April 2021
Of Africa’s 2500 planned power-generation projects, half are coal and gas power plants, Oxford University study reveals
A new study into Africa’s energy generation landscape uses a state-of-the-art machine-learning technique to analyse the pipeline of more than 2,500 planned power plants and their chances of successful commission.
The study shows the share of non-hydro renewables in African electricity generation is likely to remain below 10% in 2030, although this varies by region.
The research, published in Nature Energy, from the University of Oxford predicts that total electricity generation across the African continent will double by 2030, with fossil fuels continuing to dominate the energy mix – posing potential risk to global climate change commitments.
“Africa’s electricity demand is set to increase significantly as the continent strives to industrialise and improve the wellbeing of its people, which offers an opportunity to power this economic development through renewables,” says Galina Alova, study lead author and researcher at the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
Aloya adds: “There is a prominent narrative in the energy planning community that the continent will be able to take advantage of its vast renewable energy resources and rapidly decreasing clean technology prices to leapfrog to renewables by 2030 – but our analysis shows that overall it is not currently positioned to do so.”
The study predicts that in 2030, fossil fuels will account for two-thirds of all generated electricity across Africa. While an additional 18% of generation is set to come from hydro-energy projects.
Full story
The study shows the share of non-hydro renewables in African electricity generation is likely to remain below 10% in 2030, although this varies by region.
The research, published in Nature Energy, from the University of Oxford predicts that total electricity generation across the African continent will double by 2030, with fossil fuels continuing to dominate the energy mix – posing potential risk to global climate change commitments.
“Africa’s electricity demand is set to increase significantly as the continent strives to industrialise and improve the wellbeing of its people, which offers an opportunity to power this economic development through renewables,” says Galina Alova, study lead author and researcher at the Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment.
Aloya adds: “There is a prominent narrative in the energy planning community that the continent will be able to take advantage of its vast renewable energy resources and rapidly decreasing clean technology prices to leapfrog to renewables by 2030 – but our analysis shows that overall it is not currently positioned to do so.”
The study predicts that in 2030, fossil fuels will account for two-thirds of all generated electricity across Africa. While an additional 18% of generation is set to come from hydro-energy projects.
Full story
6) China’s Net Zero promise looks elusive as banks keep throwing cash at coal mines and power plants
Yahoo Finance News, 3 April 2021
China’s coal mines, coal-fired power plants are still growing, funded by an endless stream of cheap financing by the nation’s state-owned banks, as they keep one of the country’s biggest industrial sectors humming amid an economic slowdown.
On an unseasonably warm autumn day last October, the world’s largest coal-fired power plant fired up in the Anhui provincial city of Huaibei in eastern China.
Sitting in an economic development zone carved out of verdant paddy fields, phase two of Shenergy Group’s Pingshan power plant is installed with 1,350 megawatts of generation capacity, enough to meet the annual needs of 1.1 million households. Almost four years after receiving the construction approval, the plant was formally connected to the national grid in mid-December.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
The Chinese government and the nation’s state-owned power producers have set aggressive goals on renewable energy, but plans to retire or rein back coal-powered plants – they produce a third of China’s carbon emission – failed to keep up. China commissioned 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of coal plants in 2020, three times the 11.9GW fired up by the rest of the world, according to a February report by the Global Energy Monitor in San Francisco and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) in Helsinki.
After accounting for shutdowns, China’s net addition last year was 29.8GW, compared with the world’s net reduction of 17.2GW. The pace of construction approvals have also tripled to 36.9GW last year alone, five times more than those initiated outside China, according to the report.
“That has put the central government’s emphasis on new climate commitment in a bad light,” said Greenpeace East Asia’s climate and energy project manager Zhang Kai in Beijing.
“If the central government allows the current levels of coal plant development to be maintained, it will at best divert important resources away from its clean energy transition, and at worst make China’s carbon neutral goals difficult if not impossible to achieve,” said the Global Energy Monitor-CREA report.
China’s coal mines, coal-fired power plants are still growing, funded by an endless stream of cheap financing by the nation’s state-owned banks, as they keep one of the country’s biggest industrial sectors humming amid an economic slowdown. Millions of jobs and trillions of yuan of assets are at stake in the coal industry.
The nation’s big five state-owned power firms, generating more than half of China’s coal-fired electricity – State Energy Investment Group, China Huaneng Group, China Datang Group, China Huadian Group and State Power Investment Group – employ 2 million people, and have 5.5 trillion yuan (US$836 billion) of assets between them.
As many as 60 of the world’s largest banks lent or underwrote US$752 billion of debt or equity issuances to the fossil fuel industry last year, down by 9 per cent from 2019 but 6 per cent higher than 2016 when the Paris Agreement took effect, according to a March 24 study by six non-government organisations (NGOs) including the Rainforest Action Network and BankTrack.
Full story
Yahoo Finance News, 3 April 2021
China’s coal mines, coal-fired power plants are still growing, funded by an endless stream of cheap financing by the nation’s state-owned banks, as they keep one of the country’s biggest industrial sectors humming amid an economic slowdown.
On an unseasonably warm autumn day last October, the world’s largest coal-fired power plant fired up in the Anhui provincial city of Huaibei in eastern China.
Sitting in an economic development zone carved out of verdant paddy fields, phase two of Shenergy Group’s Pingshan power plant is installed with 1,350 megawatts of generation capacity, enough to meet the annual needs of 1.1 million households. Almost four years after receiving the construction approval, the plant was formally connected to the national grid in mid-December.
Do you have questions about the biggest topics and trends from around the world? Get the answers with SCMP Knowledge, our new platform of curated content with explainers, FAQs, analyses and infographics brought to you by our award-winning team.
The Chinese government and the nation’s state-owned power producers have set aggressive goals on renewable energy, but plans to retire or rein back coal-powered plants – they produce a third of China’s carbon emission – failed to keep up. China commissioned 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of coal plants in 2020, three times the 11.9GW fired up by the rest of the world, according to a February report by the Global Energy Monitor in San Francisco and the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) in Helsinki.
After accounting for shutdowns, China’s net addition last year was 29.8GW, compared with the world’s net reduction of 17.2GW. The pace of construction approvals have also tripled to 36.9GW last year alone, five times more than those initiated outside China, according to the report.
“That has put the central government’s emphasis on new climate commitment in a bad light,” said Greenpeace East Asia’s climate and energy project manager Zhang Kai in Beijing.
“If the central government allows the current levels of coal plant development to be maintained, it will at best divert important resources away from its clean energy transition, and at worst make China’s carbon neutral goals difficult if not impossible to achieve,” said the Global Energy Monitor-CREA report.
China’s coal mines, coal-fired power plants are still growing, funded by an endless stream of cheap financing by the nation’s state-owned banks, as they keep one of the country’s biggest industrial sectors humming amid an economic slowdown. Millions of jobs and trillions of yuan of assets are at stake in the coal industry.
The nation’s big five state-owned power firms, generating more than half of China’s coal-fired electricity – State Energy Investment Group, China Huaneng Group, China Datang Group, China Huadian Group and State Power Investment Group – employ 2 million people, and have 5.5 trillion yuan (US$836 billion) of assets between them.
As many as 60 of the world’s largest banks lent or underwrote US$752 billion of debt or equity issuances to the fossil fuel industry last year, down by 9 per cent from 2019 but 6 per cent higher than 2016 when the Paris Agreement took effect, according to a March 24 study by six non-government organisations (NGOs) including the Rainforest Action Network and BankTrack.
Full story
7) Net Zero targets could make millions of old homes unsellable
The Times, 3 April 2021
There are concerns that millions of normal homes will become unsellable unless owners improve their energy efficiency.
The Times, 3 April 2021
There are concerns that millions of normal homes will become unsellable unless owners improve their energy efficiency.
Homeowners with draughty properties risk being locked out of new mortgages as lenders have begun restricting deals for homes that are not energy efficient.
Paragon Bank’s new 3.99 per cent five-year fixed deal for buy-to-let landlords is one of the lowest on the market — but will only be available for properties with high energy efficiency ratings.
It is the first sign that lenders are getting ready for proposed government rules that will ban homeowners from renting out or selling inefficient properties — part of its plan to achieve its legally binding targets to combat climate change.
From April 2025 landlords will only be able to let to new tenants on properties with an energy rating of C and above, with the rules applying to all tenancies from April 2028. The likely knock-on effect is that fewer landlords will want to buy inefficient homes.
The Climate Change Committee, the government’s official advisory body, has recommended that all homes on the market should have a rating of C or above by 2028.
It did not say what could happen to homes that did not meet that criterion, but mortgage lenders are being encouraged to reward homeowners with energy efficient properties.
Richard Rowntree from Paragon said landlords are facing a burning bridge. “These deadlines are rapidly moving towards us. It surprises me that more homeowners don’t have efficiency at the forefront of their minds.”
Anyone selling or renting a home must get an energy performance certificate (EPC), which gives a score of 1-100: a higher score means lower running costs. Anything scoring 92 and above achieves an A. Only 3-4 per cent of homes have an A or B rating. The lowest rating is G (1-20). All private rented homes must achieve at least an E (39-54). The average for a house in England and Wales is D (55-68).
New-build properties are likely to be rated C and above, but the situation is trickier for older homes, which might have a low rating even if they have doubled-glazed windows and some form of insulation.
Full story (£)
see also: How absurd you may be banned from selling your own home if you don't meet draconian new eco rules (which just happen to cost the earth)
11) John O’Sullivan: Will the U.N. Security Council rescue Net-Zero?
The Pipeline, 1 April 2021
The speeches calling for the UN Security Council to push a reluctant world to implement the hairshirt economic policy of Net-Zero are revealed as a dystopian delusion.
Constructing and imposing an international orthodoxy is a never-ending task, especially when the orthodoxy imposes heavy costs on those countries and organizations that support it. That’s more clearly true about the orthodoxy on “climate change”—i.e., it’s an “emergency” that means global “catastrophe” very soon unless we take brave corrective measures to avert it—than about any other global “crisis.”
A quite small number of U.N. official have been the drivers of this diplomatic agitprop since it started at the Rio de Janeiro UN Earth Conference in 1992. Of the UN Secretariat’s estimated 37,000 officials responsible to the Secretary General, only eight enjoy the title of UN Secretary, and a further fifty are Deputy Secretaries. In short fewer than a hundred diplomats and ex-politicians have succeeded in cajoling and corralling most governments into adopting policies that require economic sacrifices on their populations for aims that are at the very least questionable. It’s a astounding achievement of sorts.
A questionable orthodoxy needs to be shored up against questions and costs, however, and plenty of both have been coming home to roost in the last year: questioning books by previous believers in the “climate emergency” such as Michael Shellenberger as well as from established sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg; and soberly realistic estimates of the costs of “Net Zero” by 2050, the main plank of UN climate policy, in terms of both greater pressures on over-burdened government budgets and downward life-style changes for the voters. Shrewd political analysts—and that describes the UN Secretariat very well—know that they need additional measure to sustain a potentially rickety consensus.
Until now, the biggest gun in their arsenal has been the notion of “legally binding” climate treaties that will compel governments to stick with the unpopular consequences of “Net-Zero” policies as they become inescapably evident. It’s a confidence trick. Politicians go along with it because it’s also a method diverting blame for Net-Zero away from them onto the treaty with the argument that “we have to accept international law.”
But there are commonsense limits to that. No government will accept massive economic damage and huge political unpopularity simply because it, or more likely one of its predecessors, unwisely signed a “legally binding” but masochistic and unenforceable treaty.
Some governments won’t even sign a treaty with such dire results in the first place. President Obama never submitted the Paris Accords on Net-Zero for Senate ratification because he knew they’d be rejected. President Trump (while delivering a greater reduction in carbon emissions than any signatory nation because “fracking” fueled a switch to cleaner greener natural gas) was therefore able to withdraw America’s signature on it because Obama’s “executive agreement” had no constitutional force.
And if President Biden seriously intends to make his own switch back to supporting the Paris “treaty” effective, he’ll have to submit the Accords for the Senate ratification from which Obama prudently shrank—or risk another withdrawal of the U.S endorsement by another Trump.
I don’t think Biden will take that risk. But if he does, and given his hostility to fracking, it’s possible that he’ll go down in history as the president who both signed the Paris Accords and presided over a large increase in net carbon emissions. Watch this space.
It’s because the “legally enforceable” gambit is not really enforceable on sovereign states, especially those with democratic governments, that the UN bureaucrats have had recourse to a weapon that is more under their control: namely, bringing the UN Security Council into play.
The UNSC is the single most important and powerful institution in the UN system. According to its own website: “All members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. While other organs of the United Nations make recommendations to member states, only the Security Council has the power to make decisions that member states are then obligated to implement under the Charter.”
This makes the UNSC a very big deal. Its enforcement powers in dealing with “threats to peace and international security” include economic sanctions, arms embargoes, financial penalties and restrictions, and travel bans; the severance of diplomatic relations; blockade; or even collective military action. And if climate change were to be declared such a threat, that would allow—in theory at least—the Security Council to employ these enforcement mechanisms in dealing with it.
Some governments and international agencies have been arguing that climate change is a threat to international security for some time. My take is a highly skeptical one:
[T]hinking about such matters should not be a priority. In comparison with countering the most advanced weaponry being developed by the Russian and Chinese militaries (and also with subversive methods of asymmetric warfare), holding down carbon emissions is a third-order consideration. Truth be told, climate change is not a question of military security at all unless some other power is weaponizing climate change against NATO. That kind of thing happens a lot in James Bond movies—usually through the agency of a mad billionaire. . . Not, however, anywhere else.
But the United Nations “Climate Emergency” caravan rumbles on regardless. One month ago the UN Security Council had a debate on whether the Council should treat climate change as a “threat to national security,” and all the international chart-toppers were present to sing along from the alarmist handbook.
The session was opened by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, and other speakers included President Macron of France, Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, the Biden administration’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, and a large host of prime ministers, foreign ministers, and other “eminent persons” (an actual UN term.) It’s not necessary to plough through the entire debate, however, because all the speeches said much the same thing, which in the case of the BBC’s long-standing television naturalist David Attenborough was: “If we act fast enough we can reach a new stable state” and the UN conference in Glasgow next November “may be our last opportunity to make this step change.”
My suspicion is, however, that Glasgow will only prove to be the next last opportunity to save the world with many more to come along as the conference circuit.
That suspicion is fueled by the fact that it’s not until paragraph nine of the comprehensive account of the discussion in the UN’s own press release that we come to the speech of the Russian Federation’s representative, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, who wondered skeptically if climate change issues were really the “root cause” of the conflicts cited by Kerry, Johnson, Macron, and almost all the other dignitaries.
The connection between the climate and conflicts can be looked at with regard to only certain countries and regions, talking about this in general terms and in a global context has no justification.
He concluded that, for Russia, climate change was an issue to be dealt with not by the Security Council with its array of diplomatic pressures and economic and military sanctions, but by the less powerful specialist UN agencies armed only with scientific and economic expertise.
China’s special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, after repeating China’s familiar pledge to meet the Net-Zero carbon targets ten years after the West when it would have enjoyed forty years of economic growth built on fossil fuels, said much the same thing:
International climate cooperation should be advanced within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In one of the conference’s most impressive speeches, India’s environment minister, Prakash Javdekar, argued that countries should meet their earlier targets for carbon emission reductions before embarking on ambitious new ones—a criticism that was all the more powerful because India is one of the few countries to have met its targets. But he too went on to express skepticism about the idea that “climate change” was the cause of conflict.
Full post
see also: UN Security Council rejects climate alarmism
Paragon Bank’s new 3.99 per cent five-year fixed deal for buy-to-let landlords is one of the lowest on the market — but will only be available for properties with high energy efficiency ratings.
It is the first sign that lenders are getting ready for proposed government rules that will ban homeowners from renting out or selling inefficient properties — part of its plan to achieve its legally binding targets to combat climate change.
From April 2025 landlords will only be able to let to new tenants on properties with an energy rating of C and above, with the rules applying to all tenancies from April 2028. The likely knock-on effect is that fewer landlords will want to buy inefficient homes.
The Climate Change Committee, the government’s official advisory body, has recommended that all homes on the market should have a rating of C or above by 2028.
It did not say what could happen to homes that did not meet that criterion, but mortgage lenders are being encouraged to reward homeowners with energy efficient properties.
Richard Rowntree from Paragon said landlords are facing a burning bridge. “These deadlines are rapidly moving towards us. It surprises me that more homeowners don’t have efficiency at the forefront of their minds.”
Anyone selling or renting a home must get an energy performance certificate (EPC), which gives a score of 1-100: a higher score means lower running costs. Anything scoring 92 and above achieves an A. Only 3-4 per cent of homes have an A or B rating. The lowest rating is G (1-20). All private rented homes must achieve at least an E (39-54). The average for a house in England and Wales is D (55-68).
New-build properties are likely to be rated C and above, but the situation is trickier for older homes, which might have a low rating even if they have doubled-glazed windows and some form of insulation.
Full story (£)
see also: How absurd you may be banned from selling your own home if you don't meet draconian new eco rules (which just happen to cost the earth)
8) Tilak Doshi: Belong to the Climate Club or get penalized: The EU’s new trade protectionism
Forbes, 6 April 2021
The EU’s plans punishes those countries that do not adopt the EU proclamation of the “climate emergency” and willingly forfeit the benefits of fossil fuel-based industrialization and economic growth for their citizens.
Forbes, 6 April 2021
The EU’s plans punishes those countries that do not adopt the EU proclamation of the “climate emergency” and willingly forfeit the benefits of fossil fuel-based industrialization and economic growth for their citizens.
Trade protectionism has venerable roots in the history of economic thought, from Germany’s celebrated Friedrich List in the 1840s to Raul Prebisch who headed the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America in 1950 and advocated import-substituting industrialization behind a wall of tariff and non-tariff barriers. Prebisch’s theories became a canon of a failed economic development strategy in post-colonial Asia, Africa and Latin America as their “infant industries” seldom grew up to compete in world markets. They instead became conduits for crony capitalism, corruption and loss-making public investments in the developing countries.
Governments favouring important domestic political constituencies at the expense of international trade is common enough in the OECD countries as well. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, for instance, has often been called out as one of the more onerous burdens imposed on millions of developing country farmers. Showering subsidies and tariff protections on affluent European farmers, swelling food output and depressing world food prices is a well-documented part of the historical record. But what the EU is now contemplating in its protectionist arsenal is an altogether different animal. What sets off this new protectionism from its predecessors is the sheer scope of its application.
Trade Protectionism Old And New
On March 10th, the European Parliament overwhelmingly endorsed the creation of a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (CBAM) that would shield EU companies against cheaper imports from countries with “weaker” climate policies. The ‘CBAM’ will raise revenues to fund the “Green Transition” or, to use a term which has been elevated to a mantra by European policy-makers, “net zero by 2050”. The carbon border tax is one of the highlights of the European Commission’s $750 billion Green Deal.
Its adoption as EU’s policy posture could precede the G-7 meeting in Cornwall, U.K., slated for June 11 – 13. Kwasi Kwarteng, UK’s business secretary in the Boris Johnson government and host for the meeting, opined that “there will be a discussion about carbon border adjusting, carbon leakage. That has to be part of the multilateral discussion”.
By “carbon leakage”, Mr. Kwarteng means that as richer countries have tightened their green regulations, many energy-intensive industries have migrated to countries that do not have such regulations. Carbon leakage will doubtless also be a central issue at the UN’s 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) hosted by the UK when it meets in Glasgow in November. Alok Sharma, member of the Boris Johnson government and President-Designate of COP26, has called for the world to “get on track for net zero by 2050”.
By penalizing CO2 emissions, the only path up the energy ladder which allowed people in the now-developed countries to graduate to their current wealth and comfort is denied to the developing countries. The EU’s plans punishes those countries that do not adopt the EU proclamation of the “climate emergency” and willingly forfeit the benefits of fossil fuel-based industrialization and economic growth for their citizens. Even more egregiously, the EU will utilize the revenues derived from carbon border tariffs to assist itself in financing its Green recovery plans.
The Climate Club
The European Commission’s Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans said earlier in the year that “It’s a matter of survival of our industry. So if others will not move in the same direction, we will have to protect the European Union against distortion of competition and against the risk of carbon leakage.” So, according to Mr. Timmermans, many countries outside of the EU are “distorting competition” since they have not implemented similarly punitive climate rules and regulations on their own industries.
The Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus’ solution to carbon leakage would be to set up a club of countries that have similar climate change policies that would freely trade with each other while imposing some form of carbon tariffs on all others not in the club. Now that the Biden administration has elevated climate change to its highest priority across the whole of government, it would seem that the EU and the US working together with like-minded governments in Canada and the UK would be in a position to set up a “trans-Atlantic climate club” and thereby impose a global cost on carbon emissions.
For Those Outside The Climate Club
It is no surprise that many countries outside of the climate club find the EU’s proposed ‘CBAM’ to be deeply concerning. Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan labelled carbon tariffs “a new form of protectionism”. India, the world’s fourth largest carbon emitter, is not keen on joining the climate club. Referring to calls for a pledge to achieve “net zero” by 2060, Raj Kumar Singh, India's minister for power, told a meeting organised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) last week that "2060 sounds good, but it is just that, it sounds good…I would call it, and I'm sorry to say this, but it is just a pie in the sky." Even more baldly, he said that poor nations need to continue using fossil fuels and the rich countries “can’t stop it”. For most developing countries, “worries of an increasing carbon footprint generated by economic growth are second to worries that growth many not happen at all”.
It is not clear how the EU’s ‘CBAM’ proposal could be consistent with WTO rules and particularly the “Most Favoured Nation” obligations on WTO members which specifically outlaw discrimination among countries. Even John Kerry, the Biden’s administration’s international climate envoy leading the clarion call on the “global climate emergency”, raised concerns about the EU’s carbon tariff proposals as potentially causing disastrous fallout on international trade and relations. It would seem that the climate clubbers will have their work cut out for them at the UN climate conference in November.
Governments favouring important domestic political constituencies at the expense of international trade is common enough in the OECD countries as well. The EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, for instance, has often been called out as one of the more onerous burdens imposed on millions of developing country farmers. Showering subsidies and tariff protections on affluent European farmers, swelling food output and depressing world food prices is a well-documented part of the historical record. But what the EU is now contemplating in its protectionist arsenal is an altogether different animal. What sets off this new protectionism from its predecessors is the sheer scope of its application.
Trade Protectionism Old And New
On March 10th, the European Parliament overwhelmingly endorsed the creation of a “carbon border adjustment mechanism” (CBAM) that would shield EU companies against cheaper imports from countries with “weaker” climate policies. The ‘CBAM’ will raise revenues to fund the “Green Transition” or, to use a term which has been elevated to a mantra by European policy-makers, “net zero by 2050”. The carbon border tax is one of the highlights of the European Commission’s $750 billion Green Deal.
Its adoption as EU’s policy posture could precede the G-7 meeting in Cornwall, U.K., slated for June 11 – 13. Kwasi Kwarteng, UK’s business secretary in the Boris Johnson government and host for the meeting, opined that “there will be a discussion about carbon border adjusting, carbon leakage. That has to be part of the multilateral discussion”.
By “carbon leakage”, Mr. Kwarteng means that as richer countries have tightened their green regulations, many energy-intensive industries have migrated to countries that do not have such regulations. Carbon leakage will doubtless also be a central issue at the UN’s 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) hosted by the UK when it meets in Glasgow in November. Alok Sharma, member of the Boris Johnson government and President-Designate of COP26, has called for the world to “get on track for net zero by 2050”.
By penalizing CO2 emissions, the only path up the energy ladder which allowed people in the now-developed countries to graduate to their current wealth and comfort is denied to the developing countries. The EU’s plans punishes those countries that do not adopt the EU proclamation of the “climate emergency” and willingly forfeit the benefits of fossil fuel-based industrialization and economic growth for their citizens. Even more egregiously, the EU will utilize the revenues derived from carbon border tariffs to assist itself in financing its Green recovery plans.
The Climate Club
The European Commission’s Executive Vice President Frans Timmermans said earlier in the year that “It’s a matter of survival of our industry. So if others will not move in the same direction, we will have to protect the European Union against distortion of competition and against the risk of carbon leakage.” So, according to Mr. Timmermans, many countries outside of the EU are “distorting competition” since they have not implemented similarly punitive climate rules and regulations on their own industries.
The Nobel Laureate William Nordhaus’ solution to carbon leakage would be to set up a club of countries that have similar climate change policies that would freely trade with each other while imposing some form of carbon tariffs on all others not in the club. Now that the Biden administration has elevated climate change to its highest priority across the whole of government, it would seem that the EU and the US working together with like-minded governments in Canada and the UK would be in a position to set up a “trans-Atlantic climate club” and thereby impose a global cost on carbon emissions.
For Those Outside The Climate Club
It is no surprise that many countries outside of the climate club find the EU’s proposed ‘CBAM’ to be deeply concerning. Australian Trade Minister Dan Tehan labelled carbon tariffs “a new form of protectionism”. India, the world’s fourth largest carbon emitter, is not keen on joining the climate club. Referring to calls for a pledge to achieve “net zero” by 2060, Raj Kumar Singh, India's minister for power, told a meeting organised by the International Energy Agency (IEA) last week that "2060 sounds good, but it is just that, it sounds good…I would call it, and I'm sorry to say this, but it is just a pie in the sky." Even more baldly, he said that poor nations need to continue using fossil fuels and the rich countries “can’t stop it”. For most developing countries, “worries of an increasing carbon footprint generated by economic growth are second to worries that growth many not happen at all”.
It is not clear how the EU’s ‘CBAM’ proposal could be consistent with WTO rules and particularly the “Most Favoured Nation” obligations on WTO members which specifically outlaw discrimination among countries. Even John Kerry, the Biden’s administration’s international climate envoy leading the clarion call on the “global climate emergency”, raised concerns about the EU’s carbon tariff proposals as potentially causing disastrous fallout on international trade and relations. It would seem that the climate clubbers will have their work cut out for them at the UN climate conference in November.
9) Andrew Roman: Our “Made in China” climate policy
Andrew's Views, 5 April 2021
The main beneficiary of our climate policy is not the climate. It is China.
Our carbon tax and a long list of other Canadian regulatory measures have just began to apply, so we’re not feeling any pain — yet. But the pain is coming. The reduced global CO2 emissions are not.
The faster Canada chases net zero CO2 emissions the more it offshores its emissions, largely to China’s emerging, coal-fuelled global empire – along with the jobs, income and standard of living that go with it. And India is close behind China.
Is our climate policy sustainable? Not for long.
We shouldn’t blame China for following its own self-interest in raising hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty, only ourselves for failure to recognize that that is what it is doing.
China’s Green Image and its Growing Use of Fossil Fuels
China’s equivalent of the US’ “Green New Deal” might be called the Black New Deal: more coal.
While the West is increasingly focused on CO2 emissions reductions, right down to “net-zero”, China is rapidly building more coal plants, both in its own country and in others, particularly in Asia and Africa.
Media coverage of China’s massive construction of wind, solar and electric vehicles has been very positive. However, China has continued its world-leading growth in burning fossil fuels to energize its rapidly growing economy. In energy equivalent terms, China’s coal use grew almost twice as fast as its renewable energy use. By 2019 its coal use was 12 times higher than its renewable use.
Patricia Adams, a Canadian economist and author, in her 2018 study of China’s energy developments, wrote:
“And so coal remains China’s mainstay. …. despite its talk about cutting coal-mining capacity, China, already the world’s largest producer and user of the fuel, plans to add more.
Abroad, it is the same story. By the end of 2016, as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, China is involved in 240 coal-fired power projects …. making it the most important global player in the development of coal-fired power projects..."
In comparison, Canada’s use of renewables, already high because of hydroelectricity, almost tripled in the 2009-2019 decade, while coal use declined by 38.6% between 2009 and December 2018, as per ceic.
The Paris Accord Goals Cannot be Met
In China’s most recent five-year climate plan submitted to the Paris Accord, China committed only to “peak” its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – at some unspecified level.
As I wrote in an earlier post, a key feature of the Paris Accord was the commitment of developed countries to provide at least $100 billion annually in financial assistance to the developing countries for climate mitigation and adaptation. The payments have not come anywhere close to this level, and the pandemic lockdown makes it unlikely they will do so in future.
India, which will soon surpass China in greenhouse gas emissions, will not agree to a net zero target, calling it “pie in the sky”: bbc news. India’s Minister for Energy said:
“The developed world has occupied almost 80% of the carbon space already, you have 800 million people [in developing countries] who don’t have access to electricity. You can’t say that they have to go to net zero, they have the right to develop, they want to build skyscrapers and have a higher standard of living, you can’t stop it.”
On March 30, 2021, Pakistan’s prime minister warned that developing countries would need about $400 billion a year in climate finance support to shift towards low carbon development pathways, yet developed countries had failed to deliver even the $100 billion a year promised in 2016 under the Paris Accord. If the developed countries won’t pay $100 billion a year they certainly won’t pay $400 billion a year.
The parties to the Paris Accord were to submit updated five-year plans for emissions reductions by February 2021. Only 75 of the 194 Parties to the Accord submitted these plans. Only two of the 20 largest emitters – the UK and the EU – submitted on time. There are currently no plans from China, India, the US, Canada, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines, – a group that represents 70% of global emissions.
The UN issued a report estimating that, on the plans announced to date, the Parties to the Accord will come nowhere close to meeting the goals set in Paris in 2016. This is not the first time the UN has said that.
Global Net Zero by 2050 is Sheer Fantasy
University of Manitoba Professor emeritus Vaclav Smil is a globally recognized energy transitions authority. In his several books and articles he has shown that the number of years that it has historically taken for new sources of energy to surpass just 25% of energy use in a country is typically 50-70 years, and many more decades to become a dominant energy source.
Such major energy transitions only happen when the new technology has clear advantages of cost, effectiveness and reliability over other existing technologies. Yet today, Western governments profess to believe they can force such a transition within 30 years without any new, fully developed and tested breakthrough energy technology.
Professor Smil recently wrote, here:
“The most important fact is that during those decades of rising concerns about global warming the world has been running towards fossil carbon, not moving away from it. …. emissions have nearly tripled in Asia, largely because the Chinese combustion of fossil fuels has almost quadrupled. As a result, global emissions of CO2 increased by more than 60 per cent since 1992, setting yet another record in 2018...
Designing hypothetical roadmaps outlining complete elimination of fossil carbon from the global energy supply by 2050 is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking that ignores fundamental physical realities... The complete decarbonization of the global energy supply will be an extremely challenging undertaking of an unprecedented scale and complexity that will not be accomplished—even in the case of sustained, dedicated and extraordinarily costly commitment—in a matter of a few decades.”
It’s easy for politicians, in any country, to seek power with promises that cannot be kept until long after they’re gone. China says it will reach net zero by 2060, 4 decades from now, and a decade after the UN target of 2050. But by the 2050 target date, President Xi Jinping will be 96 years old, President Joe Biden will be 107, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be 78. None of them will be leaders of their countries at that time. Biden, and perhaps also Trudeau, will be gone before 2030.
Full post
Andrew's Views, 5 April 2021
The main beneficiary of our climate policy is not the climate. It is China.
Our carbon tax and a long list of other Canadian regulatory measures have just began to apply, so we’re not feeling any pain — yet. But the pain is coming. The reduced global CO2 emissions are not.
The faster Canada chases net zero CO2 emissions the more it offshores its emissions, largely to China’s emerging, coal-fuelled global empire – along with the jobs, income and standard of living that go with it. And India is close behind China.
Is our climate policy sustainable? Not for long.
We shouldn’t blame China for following its own self-interest in raising hundreds of millions of its people out of poverty, only ourselves for failure to recognize that that is what it is doing.
China’s Green Image and its Growing Use of Fossil Fuels
China’s equivalent of the US’ “Green New Deal” might be called the Black New Deal: more coal.
While the West is increasingly focused on CO2 emissions reductions, right down to “net-zero”, China is rapidly building more coal plants, both in its own country and in others, particularly in Asia and Africa.
Media coverage of China’s massive construction of wind, solar and electric vehicles has been very positive. However, China has continued its world-leading growth in burning fossil fuels to energize its rapidly growing economy. In energy equivalent terms, China’s coal use grew almost twice as fast as its renewable energy use. By 2019 its coal use was 12 times higher than its renewable use.
Patricia Adams, a Canadian economist and author, in her 2018 study of China’s energy developments, wrote:
“And so coal remains China’s mainstay. …. despite its talk about cutting coal-mining capacity, China, already the world’s largest producer and user of the fuel, plans to add more.
Abroad, it is the same story. By the end of 2016, as part of the Belt and Road Initiative, China is involved in 240 coal-fired power projects …. making it the most important global player in the development of coal-fired power projects..."
In comparison, Canada’s use of renewables, already high because of hydroelectricity, almost tripled in the 2009-2019 decade, while coal use declined by 38.6% between 2009 and December 2018, as per ceic.
The Paris Accord Goals Cannot be Met
In China’s most recent five-year climate plan submitted to the Paris Accord, China committed only to “peak” its greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 – at some unspecified level.
As I wrote in an earlier post, a key feature of the Paris Accord was the commitment of developed countries to provide at least $100 billion annually in financial assistance to the developing countries for climate mitigation and adaptation. The payments have not come anywhere close to this level, and the pandemic lockdown makes it unlikely they will do so in future.
India, which will soon surpass China in greenhouse gas emissions, will not agree to a net zero target, calling it “pie in the sky”: bbc news. India’s Minister for Energy said:
“The developed world has occupied almost 80% of the carbon space already, you have 800 million people [in developing countries] who don’t have access to electricity. You can’t say that they have to go to net zero, they have the right to develop, they want to build skyscrapers and have a higher standard of living, you can’t stop it.”
On March 30, 2021, Pakistan’s prime minister warned that developing countries would need about $400 billion a year in climate finance support to shift towards low carbon development pathways, yet developed countries had failed to deliver even the $100 billion a year promised in 2016 under the Paris Accord. If the developed countries won’t pay $100 billion a year they certainly won’t pay $400 billion a year.
The parties to the Paris Accord were to submit updated five-year plans for emissions reductions by February 2021. Only 75 of the 194 Parties to the Accord submitted these plans. Only two of the 20 largest emitters – the UK and the EU – submitted on time. There are currently no plans from China, India, the US, Canada, Iran, Saudi Arabia, South Korea, Malaysia and the Philippines, – a group that represents 70% of global emissions.
The UN issued a report estimating that, on the plans announced to date, the Parties to the Accord will come nowhere close to meeting the goals set in Paris in 2016. This is not the first time the UN has said that.
Global Net Zero by 2050 is Sheer Fantasy
University of Manitoba Professor emeritus Vaclav Smil is a globally recognized energy transitions authority. In his several books and articles he has shown that the number of years that it has historically taken for new sources of energy to surpass just 25% of energy use in a country is typically 50-70 years, and many more decades to become a dominant energy source.
Such major energy transitions only happen when the new technology has clear advantages of cost, effectiveness and reliability over other existing technologies. Yet today, Western governments profess to believe they can force such a transition within 30 years without any new, fully developed and tested breakthrough energy technology.
Professor Smil recently wrote, here:
“The most important fact is that during those decades of rising concerns about global warming the world has been running towards fossil carbon, not moving away from it. …. emissions have nearly tripled in Asia, largely because the Chinese combustion of fossil fuels has almost quadrupled. As a result, global emissions of CO2 increased by more than 60 per cent since 1992, setting yet another record in 2018...
Designing hypothetical roadmaps outlining complete elimination of fossil carbon from the global energy supply by 2050 is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking that ignores fundamental physical realities... The complete decarbonization of the global energy supply will be an extremely challenging undertaking of an unprecedented scale and complexity that will not be accomplished—even in the case of sustained, dedicated and extraordinarily costly commitment—in a matter of a few decades.”
It’s easy for politicians, in any country, to seek power with promises that cannot be kept until long after they’re gone. China says it will reach net zero by 2060, 4 decades from now, and a decade after the UN target of 2050. But by the 2050 target date, President Xi Jinping will be 96 years old, President Joe Biden will be 107, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will be 78. None of them will be leaders of their countries at that time. Biden, and perhaps also Trudeau, will be gone before 2030.
Full post
10) Ross Clark: Net Zero's spiralling costs will hit the poorest hardest
The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2021
As a lofty political idea, Net Zero has generated public support in the short term – but it could yet prove a devastating hostage to fortune as the full costs become apparent.
The Daily Telegraph, 5 April 2021
As a lofty political idea, Net Zero has generated public support in the short term – but it could yet prove a devastating hostage to fortune as the full costs become apparent.
How politically rewarding it must have seemed for Theresa May in one of her final acts as Prime Minister to amend the Climate Change Act giving Britain a legally-binding target of reaching net zero emissions by 2050, as opposed to the previous target of an 80 per cent cut.
Back then, in June 2019, Extinction Rebellion had just finished its two-week blockade of Oxford Circus, David Attenborough had rarely been off the telly warning of climate Armageddon, while governments everywhere were busily paying homage to Greta Thunberg.
Only slowly are the costs of reaching that target beginning to sink in. Voters, aligned in principle with climate campaigners, may well have a different view when they realise they could end up paying many thousands of pounds, or even face losing their homes.
The government’s newly-announced target of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 is just the latest indication of the massive costs that are going to be dumped on ordinary people. Together with measures to insulate homes better – heat pumps operate at lower water temperatures than ordinary boilers – it will mean extra costs of £18,000 household. One scheme, the Green Homes Grant, was supposed to help low-income homeowners with these costs – but the government abolished it last week, after less than six months in operation.
It is the same with the costs of switching to electric cars. The current government won easy plaudits by pre-announcing a ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2030. But it hasn’t even begun to grapple with the costs of that transformation on the general public.
Electric cars are fine as second cards for people who have off-road parking near their homes and have a second vehicle for longer journeys. But what about people who can’t park near their homes and who will need some sort of charging point at the roadside, or in car parks?
The switch to electric vehicles promises to make life easier for elite motorists, who will enjoy emptier roads, while pricing ordinary drivers off the road. Again, there were grants available to subsidise the purchase of expensive electric vehicles, but they have all been gobbled up by the relatively wealthy early-adopters – and will probably have been phased out before the masses are forced to go electric.
Nor has the government grappled properly with the cost of a zero carbon electricity grid. We keep being told that the cost of putting up wind turbines and solar panels has fallen – yet that is just one part of the equation. The other is coming up with ways of storing massive quantities of electricity to iron out the fluctuations in supply.
As the demand for electricity explodes thanks to electric vehicles and heat pumps, so the cost of solving this problem will grow and grow. As for the costs of decarbonising the steel industry, the cement industry and other high carbon-emitting industries, we can only guess. The technology needed to decarbonise these sectors fully has yet to be developed. In fact, it is just as conceivable that we won’t be able fully to decarbonise these sectors at all, forcing us to import steel and cement at higher prices.
Already, the official costs of reaching net zero are rising faster than the infamous estimates for HS2. In 2019, the Committee on Climate Change put it at £50 billion a year for the next 30 years. Yet the Department for Business and Industrial Strategy already has a higher figure of £70 billion a year.
As a lofty political idea, Net Zero has generated public support in the short term – but it could yet prove a devastating hostage to fortune as the full costs become apparent.
Back then, in June 2019, Extinction Rebellion had just finished its two-week blockade of Oxford Circus, David Attenborough had rarely been off the telly warning of climate Armageddon, while governments everywhere were busily paying homage to Greta Thunberg.
Only slowly are the costs of reaching that target beginning to sink in. Voters, aligned in principle with climate campaigners, may well have a different view when they realise they could end up paying many thousands of pounds, or even face losing their homes.
The government’s newly-announced target of installing 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028 is just the latest indication of the massive costs that are going to be dumped on ordinary people. Together with measures to insulate homes better – heat pumps operate at lower water temperatures than ordinary boilers – it will mean extra costs of £18,000 household. One scheme, the Green Homes Grant, was supposed to help low-income homeowners with these costs – but the government abolished it last week, after less than six months in operation.
It is the same with the costs of switching to electric cars. The current government won easy plaudits by pre-announcing a ban on petrol and diesel cars by 2030. But it hasn’t even begun to grapple with the costs of that transformation on the general public.
Electric cars are fine as second cards for people who have off-road parking near their homes and have a second vehicle for longer journeys. But what about people who can’t park near their homes and who will need some sort of charging point at the roadside, or in car parks?
The switch to electric vehicles promises to make life easier for elite motorists, who will enjoy emptier roads, while pricing ordinary drivers off the road. Again, there were grants available to subsidise the purchase of expensive electric vehicles, but they have all been gobbled up by the relatively wealthy early-adopters – and will probably have been phased out before the masses are forced to go electric.
Nor has the government grappled properly with the cost of a zero carbon electricity grid. We keep being told that the cost of putting up wind turbines and solar panels has fallen – yet that is just one part of the equation. The other is coming up with ways of storing massive quantities of electricity to iron out the fluctuations in supply.
As the demand for electricity explodes thanks to electric vehicles and heat pumps, so the cost of solving this problem will grow and grow. As for the costs of decarbonising the steel industry, the cement industry and other high carbon-emitting industries, we can only guess. The technology needed to decarbonise these sectors fully has yet to be developed. In fact, it is just as conceivable that we won’t be able fully to decarbonise these sectors at all, forcing us to import steel and cement at higher prices.
Already, the official costs of reaching net zero are rising faster than the infamous estimates for HS2. In 2019, the Committee on Climate Change put it at £50 billion a year for the next 30 years. Yet the Department for Business and Industrial Strategy already has a higher figure of £70 billion a year.
As a lofty political idea, Net Zero has generated public support in the short term – but it could yet prove a devastating hostage to fortune as the full costs become apparent.
11) John O’Sullivan: Will the U.N. Security Council rescue Net-Zero?
The Pipeline, 1 April 2021
The speeches calling for the UN Security Council to push a reluctant world to implement the hairshirt economic policy of Net-Zero are revealed as a dystopian delusion.
Constructing and imposing an international orthodoxy is a never-ending task, especially when the orthodoxy imposes heavy costs on those countries and organizations that support it. That’s more clearly true about the orthodoxy on “climate change”—i.e., it’s an “emergency” that means global “catastrophe” very soon unless we take brave corrective measures to avert it—than about any other global “crisis.”
A quite small number of U.N. official have been the drivers of this diplomatic agitprop since it started at the Rio de Janeiro UN Earth Conference in 1992. Of the UN Secretariat’s estimated 37,000 officials responsible to the Secretary General, only eight enjoy the title of UN Secretary, and a further fifty are Deputy Secretaries. In short fewer than a hundred diplomats and ex-politicians have succeeded in cajoling and corralling most governments into adopting policies that require economic sacrifices on their populations for aims that are at the very least questionable. It’s a astounding achievement of sorts.
A questionable orthodoxy needs to be shored up against questions and costs, however, and plenty of both have been coming home to roost in the last year: questioning books by previous believers in the “climate emergency” such as Michael Shellenberger as well as from established sceptics like Bjorn Lomborg; and soberly realistic estimates of the costs of “Net Zero” by 2050, the main plank of UN climate policy, in terms of both greater pressures on over-burdened government budgets and downward life-style changes for the voters. Shrewd political analysts—and that describes the UN Secretariat very well—know that they need additional measure to sustain a potentially rickety consensus.
Until now, the biggest gun in their arsenal has been the notion of “legally binding” climate treaties that will compel governments to stick with the unpopular consequences of “Net-Zero” policies as they become inescapably evident. It’s a confidence trick. Politicians go along with it because it’s also a method diverting blame for Net-Zero away from them onto the treaty with the argument that “we have to accept international law.”
But there are commonsense limits to that. No government will accept massive economic damage and huge political unpopularity simply because it, or more likely one of its predecessors, unwisely signed a “legally binding” but masochistic and unenforceable treaty.
Some governments won’t even sign a treaty with such dire results in the first place. President Obama never submitted the Paris Accords on Net-Zero for Senate ratification because he knew they’d be rejected. President Trump (while delivering a greater reduction in carbon emissions than any signatory nation because “fracking” fueled a switch to cleaner greener natural gas) was therefore able to withdraw America’s signature on it because Obama’s “executive agreement” had no constitutional force.
And if President Biden seriously intends to make his own switch back to supporting the Paris “treaty” effective, he’ll have to submit the Accords for the Senate ratification from which Obama prudently shrank—or risk another withdrawal of the U.S endorsement by another Trump.
I don’t think Biden will take that risk. But if he does, and given his hostility to fracking, it’s possible that he’ll go down in history as the president who both signed the Paris Accords and presided over a large increase in net carbon emissions. Watch this space.
It’s because the “legally enforceable” gambit is not really enforceable on sovereign states, especially those with democratic governments, that the UN bureaucrats have had recourse to a weapon that is more under their control: namely, bringing the UN Security Council into play.
The UNSC is the single most important and powerful institution in the UN system. According to its own website: “All members of the United Nations agree to accept and carry out the decisions of the Security Council. While other organs of the United Nations make recommendations to member states, only the Security Council has the power to make decisions that member states are then obligated to implement under the Charter.”
This makes the UNSC a very big deal. Its enforcement powers in dealing with “threats to peace and international security” include economic sanctions, arms embargoes, financial penalties and restrictions, and travel bans; the severance of diplomatic relations; blockade; or even collective military action. And if climate change were to be declared such a threat, that would allow—in theory at least—the Security Council to employ these enforcement mechanisms in dealing with it.
Some governments and international agencies have been arguing that climate change is a threat to international security for some time. My take is a highly skeptical one:
[T]hinking about such matters should not be a priority. In comparison with countering the most advanced weaponry being developed by the Russian and Chinese militaries (and also with subversive methods of asymmetric warfare), holding down carbon emissions is a third-order consideration. Truth be told, climate change is not a question of military security at all unless some other power is weaponizing climate change against NATO. That kind of thing happens a lot in James Bond movies—usually through the agency of a mad billionaire. . . Not, however, anywhere else.
But the United Nations “Climate Emergency” caravan rumbles on regardless. One month ago the UN Security Council had a debate on whether the Council should treat climate change as a “threat to national security,” and all the international chart-toppers were present to sing along from the alarmist handbook.
The session was opened by the UN Secretary-General, Antonio Guterres, and other speakers included President Macron of France, Boris Johnson, the UK Prime Minister, the Biden administration’s special envoy for climate, John Kerry, and a large host of prime ministers, foreign ministers, and other “eminent persons” (an actual UN term.) It’s not necessary to plough through the entire debate, however, because all the speeches said much the same thing, which in the case of the BBC’s long-standing television naturalist David Attenborough was: “If we act fast enough we can reach a new stable state” and the UN conference in Glasgow next November “may be our last opportunity to make this step change.”
My suspicion is, however, that Glasgow will only prove to be the next last opportunity to save the world with many more to come along as the conference circuit.
That suspicion is fueled by the fact that it’s not until paragraph nine of the comprehensive account of the discussion in the UN’s own press release that we come to the speech of the Russian Federation’s representative, Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia, who wondered skeptically if climate change issues were really the “root cause” of the conflicts cited by Kerry, Johnson, Macron, and almost all the other dignitaries.
The connection between the climate and conflicts can be looked at with regard to only certain countries and regions, talking about this in general terms and in a global context has no justification.
He concluded that, for Russia, climate change was an issue to be dealt with not by the Security Council with its array of diplomatic pressures and economic and military sanctions, but by the less powerful specialist UN agencies armed only with scientific and economic expertise.
China’s special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, after repeating China’s familiar pledge to meet the Net-Zero carbon targets ten years after the West when it would have enjoyed forty years of economic growth built on fossil fuels, said much the same thing:
International climate cooperation should be advanced within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
In one of the conference’s most impressive speeches, India’s environment minister, Prakash Javdekar, argued that countries should meet their earlier targets for carbon emission reductions before embarking on ambitious new ones—a criticism that was all the more powerful because India is one of the few countries to have met its targets. But he too went on to express skepticism about the idea that “climate change” was the cause of conflict.
Full post
see also: UN Security Council rejects climate alarmism
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment