Trouble brews at home as Boris Johnson plays climate hero
In this newsletter:
1) China preempts carbon border tax and fires back at US sanctions
Asia Times, 8 June 2021
2) UN climate chief urges Western governments to deliver on their $100 billion pledge or face failure
UN Climate Change News, 7 June 2021
3) Another Cop-Flop? Former COP26 chief says there is ‘question mark’ over UN climate summit taking place
The Herald, 6 June 2021
4) Trouble brews at home as Boris Johnson plays climate hero
Politico, 2 June 2021
5) Should Boris Johnson be worried that Steve Baker has taken an interest in climate change policy?
The Critic, 9 June 2021
6) Garry White: We’re going to pay a high price for the Net Zero agenda
The Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2021
7) Roger Bootle on the growing risk of Net-Zero-driven inflation
Bloomberg, 7 June 2021
8) Peter Foster: Mark Carney, man of destiny, arises to revolutionize society. It won't be pleasant
National Post, 5 June 2021
9) Lies, damned lies, and statistics: The claim 37% of heat deaths are caused by global warming is absurd
William B Briggs, 7 June 2021
10) And finally: Green lobbyists are handing the global mining industry to China & Russia
The Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2021
Full details:
1) China preempts carbon border tax and fires back at US sanctions
Asia Times, 8 June 2021
China will soon pass a law to strike back against the countries that have imposed sanctions on Chinese state organs, enterprises, organizations and functionaries, including those with links to the People’s Liberation Army.
New draft legislation, dubbed the “Anti-Foreign Sanctions Law,” was submitted to the National People’s Congress (NPC) Standing Committee for a second reading on Monday. It is expected that the draft will be approved by the top legislative body in China on Thursday.
The details of the draft have not been made public. However, according to a Xinhua report, the Chinese government will launch multiple corresponding counter-measures against entities and individuals in relevant countries, meaning the United States, from the beginning of 2021.
During the “two sessions” in early March, some members of the NPC and Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) suggested it was necessary for China to formulate a specific law to counter foreign sanctions.
Members of the NPC Standing Committee reviewed the draft for the first time in a meeting in late April and broadly agreed to formulate the law to counter foreign sanctions. They also gave some advice and suggestions on improving the draft, Xinhua reported.
“For some time, out of political manipulation needs and ideological bias, some Western countries have used Xinjiang and Hong Kong-related issues as part of their pretexts to spread rumors on and smear, contain and suppress China,” according to the spokesperson office of the Legislative Affairs Commission of the NPC Standing Committee.
“In particular, the countries, in violation of international law and the basic norms governing international relations, have imposed so-called sanctions on relevant Chinese state organs, organizations and functionaries in accordance with their domestic laws, grossly interfering in China’s internal affairs,” added the spokesperson.
The office said China would use the new law to safeguard national sovereignty, dignity and core interests and oppose Western hegemonism and power politics.
Full post
2) UN climate chief urges Western governments to deliver on their $100 billion pledge or face failure
UN Climate Change News, 7 June 2021
UN Climate Change News, 7 June 2021 – UN Climate Change Executive Secretary Patricia Espinosa has urged developed countries to make good on their promise to mobilize USD100 billion annually in climate finance to support the needs of developing nations.
Speaking at the UN Climate Talks taking place virtually from 31 May to 17 June, the UN Climate Chief expressed her frustration that the pledge of financial support, made in 2010, has not yet been met:
“We are still talking about this promise, despite greenhouse gas emissions continuing to be at their highest concentration ever; while extreme weather continues to decimate more parts of the world and with greater intensity; and while vulnerable people continue to suffer, continue to lose their livelihoods and their lives.”
Ms. Espinosa today addressed government delegates at an expert meeting on long-term climate finance. Her call to action comes shortly before leaders of the world’s largest and most advanced economies prepare to gather for the G7 summit taking place from 9-11 June in Cornwall, United Kingdom, where the issue of building back better from the COVID-19 pandemic with greener, more sustainable economies will take centre stage.
For many nations, securing the financing necessary to spur their own transition to a more sustainable future can’t happen without this promised support. This includes action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and action to build resilience to the inevitable impacts of climate change, such as frequent and severe droughts, floods and storms.
Meanwhile, the trillions of dollars being spent by governments for COVID-19 recovery packages has demonstrated that the $100 billion annually could be mobilized relatively easily with the adequate political will.
Full story
3) Another Cop-Flop? Former COP26 chief says there is ‘question mark’ over UN climate summit taking place
The Herald, 6 June 2021
THE COP26 climate conference due to take place in Glasgow in November may not go ahead because of a lack of progress in lead-up talks, its former chief has said.
Claire O’Neill said there was now a “question mark” over whether the two-week event at the SEC would take place as planned or be delayed.
She also urged the leaders of the G7 countries meeting in Cornwalll this week to set the right tone, given the urgency of the climate crisis, to help ensure the Cop took place.
Ms O’Neil, a former energy minister formerly known by her married name as Claire Perry, was nominated as Cop26 president in September 2019.
However Boris Johnson sacked her a few months later in order to install a serving minister in the role, giving it to then business secretary Alok Sharma.
Speaking to BBC Scotland’s Sunday Show, Ms O’Neill the 198 parties to the Cop were currently in virtual negotiations, but were failing to advance as required.
She said: “The reason for Cop to happen is a series of negotiations which have to happen in 198 directions, and they are not as focused as people would expect on this enormous climate emergency and the need for really rapid action.
“If you think now that those negotiations are happening virtually for three weeks, there is a question mark, truthfully, over whether the negotiations will happen at Glasgow at the end of the year.
“I’m hearing from very reliable sources that at the end of this virtual negotiation period, the parties, the 198 parties, will decide whether they’ve made enough progress to go ahead in Glasgow. And of course there is then a question about in-person or virtual [attendance], because some countries find the idea of virtual negotiations to be very difficult.
Full story
4) Trouble brews at home as Boris Johnson plays climate hero
Politico, 2 June 2021
A new wave of skepticism is emerging in Britain: not sceptical of man-made climate change but sceptical of the cost of Net Zero – and suspicious of who will bear the heaviest burden.
Being a climate champion looks great when Boris Johnson is urging action at the U.N. Security Council or schooling the G7 on emissions.
But when it comes to confronting the critics within his own party and his own voters, the prime minister is hoping discretion is the better part of valor.
In his effort to live up to the hype of hosting the COP26 U.N. climate summit in November, Johnson has set world-leading emissions goals, but achieving them means a difficult conversation with the public and his own party: one experts and officials worry Johnson is avoiding.“My fear is we’re going to end up with the same sort of problem we had with the EU. It’s the policy-making elite who have all agreed with one another that this is what we should be doing and haven’t carried the public with them by clearly explaining what it’s going to mean in people’s lives,” said Steve Baker, Conservative MP and perennial thorn in the government’s side.
On the face of it, Johnson is well-suited to the tree-hugging life. He is embedded in the “turquoise” brand of Conservatism (that is: green mixed with Tory blue) through his father Stanley, a long-time conservation campaigner; his wife Carrie, who helped the party find its feet on animal welfare and anti-pollution initiatives; and his point-man on the environmental brief, minister Zac Goldsmith.
It should likewise come as no surprise that the toy bus-whittling, bike-riding former mayor of London, who never met a big infrastructure project he didn’t want to break ground on, is attracted to a shiny vision of new offshore windfarms, hydrogen technologies and electric vehicles. His support for environmental initiatives has in the past been comfortably grounded in conservatism, and a belief that business will find better solutions than state intervention.
Lately, he has shown more enthusiasm for top-down initiatives. Johnson has bolstered the headline goal of net zero by 2050 in legislating for a 78 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2035 and has started a conversation about ending financial support for coal. It adds up to the impression he’s alert to the need for big wins — for the planet and for U.K. diplomacy — at COP26.
Net Zero
“What it means” encompasses a huge range of things: moving from diesel to electric cars; cutting out car travel altogether where possible; using heat pumps rather than gas boilers; and even changing diets. Perhaps the biggest single change affecting people’s lives will be the transformation of the jobs landscape, as the country moves away from carbon-intensive industries.
Despite the scale of the coming transformation, government progress is patchy. Ministers have put in place various measures to encourage the use of electric cars, even if a recent public accounts committee report warned it would have to go faster.
Phasing out gas boilers, on the other hand, remains too hot to handle.
The government’s decarbonizing transport plan and its heat strategy are both currently missing in action, as is the Treasury’s final net-zero review.
That vacuum is allowing a new wave of skepticism to creep in: not skeptical (in general) of manmade climate change but skeptical of the scientifically-recommended pathway to safety — net-zero by 2050 — and suspicious of who will bear the heaviest burden.
At the vanguard is Baker, the Conservative MP who has hounded the government over Brexit, coronavirus restrictions, and now what he calls in his latest Twitter hashtag “the cost of net-zero.” His interventions on the subject have steadily increased over the last month, reaching fever pitch when Bloomberg reported that people could face fines over failure to replace gas boilers, which he decried as “Soviet-style” planning.
“Unlike Brexit and the EU, it’s not going to be a minority pursuit when this thing really hits. It will affect every homeowner, every tenant, because tenants will see that rents go up to cover the costs,” he said.
The temptation for Baker’s opponents may be to dismiss him as representative of a small minority — after all, on coronavirus, his protests against lockdown measures never really captured the public mood.
White van man worries
But he is not alone. There is a wider section of the Conservative party which is concerned about how the shift required to reduce carbon emissions will impact their constituents, particularly the lower paid. If Johnson ignores these advocates for working-class Conservatism, who have successfully placed their finger on the pulse in the past over freezing fuel duty and funding free school meals, he may come to regret it.
The fuel protests that paralyzed the country in 2000 spooked politicians of all stripes about political impact of environmental measures that hit people's pockets, and the Yellow Jackets movement in France (and less potently in the U.K.) again showed how politically delicate the subject can be. A Continental reprise of France's backlash is consistently cited by EU climate chief Frans Timmermans as one of the greatest threats to his European Green Deal project.
One senior Conservative MP for a deprived constituency said: “I'm not aware of any communication about it apart from the grand statements that you see on the TV … It's all very well for rich people to tell people they're going to have gas-free boilers and change their cars when they're cycling from Putney to Westminster but for the white van man it's not possible to live like that.”
Full story
5) Should Boris Johnson be worried that Steve Baker has taken an interest in climate change policy?
The Critic, 9 June 2021
Is “Net Zero” achievable? Steve Baker discusses with David Scullion the cutting of carbon emissions
All major parties agree that the UK needs to cut carbon emissions but is the goal of “Net Zero” achievable or will it leave us, in the words of Steve Baker MP, “quivering under duvets in the dark on windless winter nights”? On this podcast the former Brexit rebel explains his scepticism with The Critic’s Online Editor David Scullion.
Listen to the interview here
6) Garry White: We’re going to pay a high price for the Net Zero agenda
The Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2021
Right now, the path to net zero is unaffordable for most.
How much are you prepared to pay to turn the world green? Climate change will head the agenda at the G7 Summit in Cornwall this weekend, as Joe Biden meets world leaders face-to-face for the first time as US President. The climate evangelist will no doubt secure headline-grabbing environmental aims and objectives, but there is one major problem with these fine aspirations. Right now, the path to net zero is unaffordable for most.
Clearly, there is only one direction of travel in the climate-change debate. Emissions will be cut, and tough targets will be set. But the spiralling cost of creating net-zero emission economies by 2050 is likely to be a drag on these targets, especially when it comes to personal consumer decisions. [...]
The CCC has calculated that Britain will need to ramp up to an annual installation rate of 1,149,000 heat pumps by 2030 to meet its emissions commitments and the Government committed in its 10-point Green Industrial Plan to install 600,000 heat pumps a year by 2028.
Approximately 240,000 heat pumps are operational in the UK right now, minuscule when compared with 26m fossil-fuel boilers already installed. They represent less than 1pc of all heating systems across the country. That’s because they are expensive.
Air source heat pumps are priced between £7,000 and £14,000 while ground source heat pumps, which get heat from holes drilled into the ground, cost from £15,000 to £35,000. Costs are high because of the limited number of trained installers.
Here lies the main problem that needs to be solved. Consumers are reticent to buy heat pumps because they are more expensive than their traditional boilers, but prices won’t come down to make them affordable until volumes are sufficient for mass production to bring down prices. Governments will have to force people into spending money or taxpayers will have to foot the bill.
A similar situation is seen in the automotive sector, with Germany needing to solve this conundrum fast. Consumers are holding off on purchasing vehicles as they are unsure about new technology and it costs too much. This means carmakers are starved of the cashflows they need to invest in R&D and retool into the electric-vehicle world.
The UK also needs to make significant investment in its skills base. Boilers and heat pumps are technologically different although they are manufactured from similar raw materials. The heat pump industry supported around 2,000 full-time jobs in the UK in 2019, building, installing and maintaining heat pumps. So, there is also a significant retraining needed. The main area where there is a definite skills gap in the UK is dealing with refrigerant gas in the production process. [...]
Boris Johnson’s Government is expected to reveal shortly plans to force homeowners to replace their conventional gas boilers with greener alternatives when they sell their property – or carry out significant renovations – to ensure their heating systems comply with tougher new environmental standards. A consultation on the best way to implement this is also expected to be launched soon but it looks like most of the cost will be forced on to homeowners.
So, when world leaders stand shoulder-to-shoulder this weekend trumpeting their bold environmental targets, these will be paid for by us all. It is highly likely that, a decade hence, we may need a bonfire of the long-term targets. Otherwise, it may mean a significant rise in costs extracted from Joe Public as politicians attempt to meet targets that might not be achievable anyway.
Full post
7) Roger Bootle on the growing risk of Net-Zero-driven inflation
Bloomberg, 7 June 2021
“If I had to put my money on a single factor that was going to push up costs in the years to come, I would say it was the environmental emphasis and in particular the drive towards net-zero. This is going to lead to a whole series of costs and price increases across the economy."
Roger Bootle wrote the book about the taming of consumer prices in the 1990s and now sees a different course that will shape debate at central banks around the globe.
A quarter of a century after declaring the death of inflation, Roger Bootle is seeing signs of its rebirth.
Pockets of price growth are emerging from the cost of used cars to lumber as the world starts to recover from the coronavirus pandemic. That’s pushed borrowing costs in financial markets to multi-year highs in major economies. While most central bankers seem content the higher gains are transitory, some economists are sounding the alarm.
Among them is Bootle, founder of Capital Economics and author of the 1996 book “The Death of Inflation: Surviving and Thriving in the Zero Era.” Back then, he argued decades of consistently high rates had come to an end.
While he doesn’t yet see a return to that era, in an interview with Bloomberg on June 2, Bootle argued the world is on the cusp of another turning point.
The conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.
In the 1990s you identified the start of a new era for inflation. Do you think this is the start of another sea change?
Roger Bootle: “It is the start of a sea change, I have to say. That’s not to say that we’re going to go back to the strong inflationary conditions of the 70s and early 80s. But at the very least, I think we are at the end of the crypto-deflationary period that we’ve been in for the last few years.
“The danger of deflation has passed, and the risks have definitely tilted in the other direction. How high inflation will go, and for how long, that’s debatable. But I’m not in much doubt myself that there’s been a sea change.”
What are the broad trends coloring your outlook?
“You’ve got to draw a distinction between two key influences, and then policy on top, so three things to look at. The first is on the supply side -- cost factors and institutional factors.
“Then, globalization, the collapse of trade unions and the intensification of competition -- all those things, which I thought were, if you like, acting a bit like a reverse oil shock -- presented a series of downward price shocks. There’s still room for some of those things to appear and continue. But the tide has turned, and the risks are very much the other way.”
Is there any particular areas of concern?
“If I had to put my money on a single factor that was going to push up costs in the years to come, I would say it was the environmental emphasis and in particular the drive towards net-zero. This is going to lead to a whole series of costs and price increases across the economy.
“The second element is demand. In the era before low inflation, it was common for policymakers and academics to completely ignore supply side institutional factors as being quite irrelevant -- it’s all about money.
“When you look at the demand factors, it’s pretty striking. We’re entering in a period when demand is going to be strong. We’ve got this pent-up demand because of Covid. You’ve got people with lots of money.
Full interview
8) Peter Foster: Mark Carney, man of destiny, arises to revolutionize society. It won't be pleasant
National Post, 5 June 2021
What Carney ultimately wants is a technocratic dictatorship justified by climate alarmism
In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All, Mark Carney, former governor both of the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, claims that western society is morally rotten, and that it has been corrupted by capitalism, which has brought about a “climate emergency” that threatens life on earth. This, he claims, requires rigid controls on personal freedom, industry and corporate funding.
Carney’s views are important because he is UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance. He is also an adviser both to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on the next big climate conference in Glasgow, and to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
Since the advent of the COVID pandemic, Carney has been front and centre in the promotion of a political agenda known as the “Great Reset,” or the “Green New Deal,” or “Building Back Better.” All are predicated on the claim that COVID, and its disruption of the global economy, provides a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity not just to regulate climate, but to frame a more fair, more diverse, more inclusive, more safe and more woke world.
Carney draws inspiration from, among others, Marx, Engels and Lenin, but the agenda he promotes differs from Marxism in two key respects. First, the private sector is not to be expropriated but made a “partner” in reshaping the economy and society. Second, it does not make a promise to make the lives of ordinary people better, but worse. Carney’s Brave New World will be one of severely constrained choice, less flying, less meat, more inconvenience and more poverty: “Assets will be stranded, used gasoline powered cars will be unsaleable, inefficient properties will be unrentable,” he promises.
The agenda’s objectives are in fact already being enforced, not primarily by legislation but by the application of non-governmental — that is, non-democratic — pressure on the corporate sector via the ever-expanding dictates of ESG (environmental, social and corporate governance) and by “sustainable finance,” which is designed to starve non-compliant companies of funds, thus rendering them, as Carney puts it, “climate roadkill.” What ESG actually represents is corporate ideological compulsion. It is a key instrument of “stakeholder capitalism.”
Full essay
9) Lies, damned lies, and statistics: The claim 37% of heat deaths are caused by global warming is absurd
William B Briggs, 7 June 2021
The most important reason [for getting it wrong], is faith.
It is clear the authors began with the belief that global warming is causing heat deaths (and not lowering cold deaths). With this faith, they would be unable to see how the data could prove them wrong.
The media has been reporting that 37% “of warm-season heat-related deaths can be attributed to anthropogenic climate change”.
They gleaned this from the peer-reviewed paper, “The burden of heat-related mortality attributable to recent human-induced climate change”, in Nature Climate Change by Vicedo-Cabrera and a slew of others (opening quote from the Abstract).
The abstract opens with this true statement: “Climate change affects human health”. Every year when winter rolls in, deaths rise, peaking sometime in January in the Northern Hemisphere. Deaths begin falling in spring, falling to a low when the hot summer winds start blowing. Here, for example, are the official CDC all-cause weekly deaths, starting late 2009 and going through May of 2021. Flu and pneumonia and COVID deaths are also plotted.
In Florida and Arizona in winter, the snowbirds arrive from Michigan, Ohio, Canada, and other points north. These people are fleeing the cold weather, seeking out the heat. On purpose. They do this not in anticipation the hotter weather will kill them, but will cure or sustain them.
Yet despite all this, the authors say heat due to global warming is killing people, and killing a lot of people.
Before we get to how the authors came to that “37%,” let’s think about how to best know whether or not deaths were caused by heat, both now and in the absence of any so-called global warming. Then we’ll see how close the authors came to this ideal approach.
To properly measure deaths caused by heat, we’d search death records for those deaths in which heat is mentioned as at least a contributing cause, and the investigate the circumstances. The authors did not do this.
Perhaps it’s difficult to know whether any death was caused by heat, that information not being present in many charts. But we might be able to create a per-person model of heat-caused deaths using inputs like temperature and person characteristics (hypertension, weight, dehydration, etc.). For each person in the death database we’d have a probability that their death was associated with heat.
The authors did not do this.
Neither did they compute, as a comparison, a second per-person probability of death-by-heat for temperatures different than the actual temperatures. Call this a counterfactual temperature, chosen to be that value the temperature might have been absent global warming. And they did not multiply the heat-death probability they did not compute by the different probability that the counterfactual temperature was the correct temperature absent global warming. After all, the counterfactual temperature is only a guess and we have to account for its uncertainty.
Again, the authors did none of this.
The weakest, least convincing, and even wrong approach would be to correlate daily deaths and daily temperatures. Everybody knows (or claims they know) correlation does not equal causation. To imply causation by correlation is therefore wrong. It is wrong because the correlation may be spurious, misleading, and so on.
It is also wrong because we would have the strongest correlation in winter, and we’d conclude cold causes more deaths because of the strong correlation between lower temperatures and higher deaths. Curiously, the authors limited their view to the “warmest four consecutive months in each location” and ignored times when deaths peak.
Full post
10) And finally: Green lobbyists are handing the global mining industry to China & Russia
The Daily Telegraph, 7 June 2021
"The resulting transfer of wealth and power to the east would be an act of economic self-harm and destruction on a grand scale."
It is probably no surprise that the world’s mining giants repeatedly find themselves in a hole. At Rio Tinto, they’ve turned it into an art form.
Its speciality used to be creating massive ones that weren’t worth anything, like its doomed takeover of aluminium giant Alcan in 2007, which happened to coincide with the very peak of the soft metal's price.
Five years later, Alcan’s value had sunk to just a fifth of the $38bn (£24bn) in cash that Rio had hurriedly chucked at it.
Nowadays the company prefers to cut out the middleman and just climb into the hole, as expertly demonstrated with its demolition of a sacred Aboriginal site in western Australia. Jakob Stausholm faces a monumental task to repair the damage inflicted to Rio’s reputation from the scandal.
The trick is to know when to stop digging, as Anglo American is about to discover as it attempts to extricate itself from a series of high-polluting thermal coal projects in South Africa. In a bid to boost its green credentials, the company is demerging the assets into a new vehicle that will be listed on the Johannesburg and London stock exchanges, and renamed Thungela Resources.
But short-selling outfit Boatman Capital is having none of it, accusing Anglo of “greenwashing” and attempting to dump hidden liabilities from the clean-up costs on to investors. It has a point. The move helps Anglo’s claims to be taking its environmental responsibilities seriously, but the coal mines will still exist so it does nothing to actually address the impact of coal production.
Anglo American’s advisers reckon Thungela is worth more than £500m, but Boatman claims the spin-off is effectively worthless because the clean-up costs could be three times greater than the amounts disclosed.
Boatman’s attack could not come at a worse possible time. It is a stark reminder of the challenges that miners face as the industry stands on the brink of a lucrative new commodities supercycle. As the world emerges from more than a year of enforced hibernation, kickstarting global growth, demand for many vital raw materials is outstripping supply.
The world’s mining companies don’t want to walk away from perfectly good coal mines, or any other mines for that matter, anymore than Shell and BP care to abandon oil fields that continue to spew out millions of barrels of crude every year.
But the balance of power has shifted in favour of the green lobby, as demonstrated by a landmark court ruling in the Hague that requires Shell to ramp up decarbonisation in response to intense pressure from climate change activists.
Departing Glencore boss Ivan Glasenberg has chosen a more radical path when it comes to coal, choosing to run down the company’s mines and eventually close them, a move that has been praised as more ethical than Anglo’s approach.
But the risk is that it merely hands the advantage to China and India, neither of which show any sign of reducing their dependency on fossil fuels. On the contrary, China has plans to build a series of new coal-fired power plants as it embarks on the path towards economic recovery.
The danger is that evangelical green lobbyists destroy any chance of western companies cashing in on the commodities boom; while those in China, India and Russia build, dig and explore for raw materials unhindered by their responsibilities to the planet and concerns about climate change.
The resulting transfer of wealth and power to the east would be an act of economic self-harm and destruction on a grand scale.
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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