Asia's top nations to build more than 600 new coal power plants
In this newsletter:
1) Asia's Great Reset: Asian nations to build more than 600 new coal power plants
AFP, 30 June 2021
2) India & other developing nations may scupper COP26 over carbon border tax
Bloomberg, 29 June 2021
3) Tilak Doshi: As US and Europe push climate policies, Middle East and Russian state oil producers stand to benefit
South China Morning Post, 1 July 2021
4) Andrew Montford: Mr Net Zero and the great green smokescreen
The Conservative Woman, 3 July 2021
5) To stop climate change Americans must cut energy use by 90 percent, live in 640 square feet, and fly only once every 3 years, study claims
Ronald Bailey, Reason, 2 July 2021
6) David Whitehouse: A Canadian heatwave & the heat dome: unprecedented or unusual?
GWPF Observatory, 2 July 2021
Ronald Bailey, Reason, 2 July 2021
6) David Whitehouse: A Canadian heatwave & the heat dome: unprecedented or unusual?
GWPF Observatory, 2 July 2021
7) Peter Ridd: Great Barrier Reef groups score a spectacular own goal
The Australian, 3 July 2021
The Australian, 3 July 2021
8) And finally: Schwarzenegger worried about "constant climate alarm which cannot be sustained.”
CNS News, 2 July 2021
Full details:
1) Asia's Great Reset: Asian nations to build more than 600 new coal power plants
AFP, 30 June 2021
China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are planning to build more than 600 coal plants, think-tank Carbon Tracker said.
Five Asian countries are responsible for 80 percent of new coal power stations planned worldwide, with the projects threatening goals to fight the climate crisis, a report warned Wednesday.
The stations will be able to generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy — equivalent to around the entire electricity generating capacity of Japan.
The projects are being pursued despite the availability of cheaper renewables, and they threaten efforts to meet the Paris climate deal goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the study said.
“These last bastions of coal power are swimming against the tide, when renewables offer a cheaper solution that supports global climate targets,” said Catharina Hillenbrand Von Der Neyen, Carbon Tracker’s head of research.
“Investors should steer clear of new coal projects.”
Experts see phasing out coal, which produces greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, as key in battling a climate crisis whose impacts — ranging from species extinction to unliveable heat — are expected to accelerate markedly.
But many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, long reliant on the fossil fuel to power their booming economies, have been slow to act, even as Europe and the United States accelerate their transitions to cleaner energy.
Asia-Pacific consumed over three-quarters of all coal used globally in 2019, according to BP’s statistical review of world energy.
Full story
see also - The truth about Asian energy demand in the next 30 years
2) India & other developing nations may scupper COP26 over carbon border tax
Bloomberg, 29 June 2021
India and other developing nations will oppose plans by the European Union and the U.S. to penalize imports of carbon-intensive goods to curb emissions at the global UN climate summit to be held in Glasgow this November.
AFP, 30 June 2021
China, India, Indonesia, Japan and Vietnam are planning to build more than 600 coal plants, think-tank Carbon Tracker said.
Five Asian countries are responsible for 80 percent of new coal power stations planned worldwide, with the projects threatening goals to fight the climate crisis, a report warned Wednesday.
The stations will be able to generate a total of 300 gigawatts of energy — equivalent to around the entire electricity generating capacity of Japan.
The projects are being pursued despite the availability of cheaper renewables, and they threaten efforts to meet the Paris climate deal goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, the study said.
“These last bastions of coal power are swimming against the tide, when renewables offer a cheaper solution that supports global climate targets,” said Catharina Hillenbrand Von Der Neyen, Carbon Tracker’s head of research.
“Investors should steer clear of new coal projects.”
Experts see phasing out coal, which produces greenhouse gas carbon dioxide, as key in battling a climate crisis whose impacts — ranging from species extinction to unliveable heat — are expected to accelerate markedly.
But many countries in the Asia-Pacific region, long reliant on the fossil fuel to power their booming economies, have been slow to act, even as Europe and the United States accelerate their transitions to cleaner energy.
Asia-Pacific consumed over three-quarters of all coal used globally in 2019, according to BP’s statistical review of world energy.
Full story
see also - The truth about Asian energy demand in the next 30 years
2) India & other developing nations may scupper COP26 over carbon border tax
Bloomberg, 29 June 2021
India and other developing nations will oppose plans by the European Union and the U.S. to penalize imports of carbon-intensive goods to curb emissions at the global UN climate summit to be held in Glasgow this November.
“It is the most regressive proposal” with “no principle of equity adhered to,” Environment Minister Prakash Javadekar told Bloomberg New Energy Finance’s Vandana Gombar at the BNEF Summit held virtually on Tuesday. “This is unfair taxation, nobody will accept it.”
India will instead seek more action from European nations and the U.S., which have not kept their commitments on reducing emissions, Javadekar said. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is considering a so-called border adjustment tariff to be levied on certain carbon-intensive goods imported from countries with lax climate controls. That’s similar to plans put forth by the EU and those being discussed by the U.K. and Canada.
Javadekar listed India’s climate investments, including its solar power plans and 400 billion rupees ($5.9 billion) spending on increasing forest cover. The minister also criticized delays in plans to release the $100 billion in financial aid to developing nations to help them meet their climate goals. The funds that were supposed to be disbursed by 2020 have now been delayed to 2025.
India would push for more action from developed nations at the Conference of Parties or COP26 in November, Javadekar said. “We are paying, we are suffering from climate change which was caused by the reckless emissions for hundreds of years by the developed world,” Javadekar said.
3) Tilak Doshi: As US and Europe push climate policies, Middle East and Russian state oil producers stand to benefit
South China Morning Post, 1 July 2021
In the long term, US and EU green policies to reduce fossil fuel investments will increase the market share of Middle Eastern and Russian oil and gas producers.
In mid-May, the International Energy Agency – the rich world’s pre-eminent adviser on energy affairs – issued a bombshell report calling for an immediate end to all new investments in the global oil and gas sector, so the world could reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
A few days later, the Group of 7 confirmed its support for the net zero goal, “by 2050 at the latest”. Yet, less than a month later, the IEA bafflingly called on OPEC+ countries to increase oil output to avoid an upward price shock as Brent crude prices – the international benchmark – hit three-year highs.
The resumption of economic growth around the world, as countries ease pandemic-related restrictions on business and travel, is driving global energy demand.
Global oil demand is now back at about 95 per cent of the pre-Covid-19 high of just over 100 million barrels a day in 2019, and is expected to be higher in 2022. Oil has been trading at over US$70 a barrel in recent weeks.
Falling inventories and the improved demand outlook have led market observers to suggest that oil priced at US$100 per barrel by the end of the year is entirely possible.
The Middle East’s oil exporters stand to gain from higher prices over the next two years, especially since in the US, the Biden administration has adopted an “all-of-government” approach to hobble domestic oil and gas production and fight climate change
In the long term, the green policies pushed by the US and Europe to reduce investments in fossil fuels will increase the market share of Middle Eastern and Russian oil and gas producers such as Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Rosneft.
Given the combined government and shareholder pressure on international oil companies – including Exxon, Chevron and BP – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the national oil companies of the Middle East and Russia will gladly step in to fill the supply gap.
The international companies, whose management now have to apologise for their core business activities, seem on the path to extinction. Shell recently lost a lawsuit in Holland, where a court found it was within its jurisdiction to determine that the company must cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared to 2019 levels.
Last month, both Exxon and Chevron lost key shareholder votes as pressure mounted on them to cut emissions.
The national oil companies in the oil-producers’ cartel OPEC+ face no such pressure. Their government owners require them to maximise the value of their assets in the national interest.
As the international oil companies shrink, national producers will welcome the opportunity to increase their global market share. Demand for fossil fuels shows no sign of slowing and will continue to rise for decades as developing countries seek rapid growth to meet the aspirations of their citizens.
This view was perhaps best articulated by India’s power minister, Raj Kumar Singh. He described the “net zero” mantra pushed by the developed world as “pie in the sky”, and also unfair.
He pointed out that in the developing world, “you have 800 million people 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.”
Despite the hype around renewable energy and electric vehicles, it is very likely that energy policies in major developing countries such as China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia will not be determined by the predilections of the climate commissariats in Washington, London and Paris.
The Opec+ producers are well aware of the need for fossil fuels outside the developed West.
Both Saudi Aramco and ADNOC plan to significantly increase their production capacity, while Qatar has committed to spending billions of dollars to expand liquefied natural gas by 50 per cent.
Russia’s Rosneft has started investing in an Arctic oil megaproject, which is expected to cost US$170 billion over a decade and will employ 400,000 workers, create 15 new industrial towns and build 800km of new pipeline.
Russia also plans to massively increase its coal production, modernise its railways and double its coal exports over the next 15 years.
There has been much debate about the energy transition in the Middle East recently. It is clear that oil and gas, and energy-intensive sectors such as aluminium and petrochemicals in the region, remain highly profitable. They are likely to remain so in the coming decades.
A premature exit from oil and gas and their derivative industries will deprive governments of export revenues and is unrealistic.
To the extent that customers in the West demand “moral” energy commodities such as green hydrogen, the national oil companies in the Middle East and Russia can always oblige, provided that the prices they command make it worthwhile.
The Middle East producers must hope that the rich member countries of the IEA continue on their net-zero path, thereby putting the international oil corporations out of business.
The rest of the world is growing fast enough to keep the oil producers in the Middle East, Russia, Africa and elsewhere in the money for at least the next few decades.
4) Andrew Montford: Mr Net Zero and the great green smokescreen
The Conservative Woman, 3 July 2021
Now that the truth is coming out, politicians have the awkward choice of admitting the deception, or continuing with the charade. In either case, political careers are likely to be shortened quite severely.
AS TCW reported this week, former energy minister Chris Skidmore acknowledges that the Government need to level with people about the trade-offs, the compromises and sacrifices involved in decarbonising the economy. ‘Trust the people’ was his rallying cry.
As the man responsible for putting the Government’s barmy ‘Net Zero’ target before Parliament in 2019, Mr Skidmore should have had a good idea of the extent of the trade-offs, compromises and sacrifices that would be involved. It’s strange then that if you refer back to his utterances at the time you find total silence on all the financial pain that families will have to endure; ‘affordable’ was the description he gave the House of Commons, to the rapturous acclaim of MPs from all sides.
Two years on and it’s clear that Parliament was tricked into voting for a policy that everyone now understands will be expensive – catastrophically so – for the country. You need only to look at the cost of ‘decarbonising’ a typical home, running into tens of thousands of pounds, to see that ‘affordable’ was simply not true. We can’t be sure where this deception began, but Skidmore made it quite clear in his speech that he was accepting the word of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) that Net Zero could be done on the cheap.
Did he know it was untrue? Look back over what was said at the time and you see everyone – including Skidmore – adopting the same careful form of words: it will cost ‘1 to 2 per cent of GDP in 2050’. In other words, there were no figures for the amounts that would need to be spent between 2020 and 2049. The CCC has now admitted that it had not calculated those figures at all. Reasonable people will therefore conclude that everyone involved in putting the Net Zero target in place knew the CCC’s numbers were a smokescreen.
And if should anyone doubt that it was a smokescreen, you should note the extraordinary contortions to which the CCC has gone to prevent anyone seeing the calculations underlying its ‘1 to 2 per cent of GDP’ figure. My Freedom of Information request for the numbers has been rumbling on for nearly two years now. The CCC’s costing is not the only ‘official’ estimate either. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has apparently produced one too, and is also refusing to let anyone see the underlying calculations. Similarly, BEIS’s estimates of the future costs of electricity generation are key inputs into both of the costings. FoI requests for those have been refused too.
All of which shows that Chris Skidmore’s call for the Government to ‘trust the people’ is really just a case of him distancing himself from the policy that he helped trick Parliament into putting in place in 2019, a policy that is clearly going to destroy the economy. Now that the truth is coming out, politicians have the awkward choice of admitting the deception, or continuing with the charade. In either case, political careers are likely to be shortened quite severely.
India will instead seek more action from European nations and the U.S., which have not kept their commitments on reducing emissions, Javadekar said. U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is considering a so-called border adjustment tariff to be levied on certain carbon-intensive goods imported from countries with lax climate controls. That’s similar to plans put forth by the EU and those being discussed by the U.K. and Canada.
Javadekar listed India’s climate investments, including its solar power plans and 400 billion rupees ($5.9 billion) spending on increasing forest cover. The minister also criticized delays in plans to release the $100 billion in financial aid to developing nations to help them meet their climate goals. The funds that were supposed to be disbursed by 2020 have now been delayed to 2025.
India would push for more action from developed nations at the Conference of Parties or COP26 in November, Javadekar said. “We are paying, we are suffering from climate change which was caused by the reckless emissions for hundreds of years by the developed world,” Javadekar said.
3) Tilak Doshi: As US and Europe push climate policies, Middle East and Russian state oil producers stand to benefit
South China Morning Post, 1 July 2021
In the long term, US and EU green policies to reduce fossil fuel investments will increase the market share of Middle Eastern and Russian oil and gas producers.
In mid-May, the International Energy Agency – the rich world’s pre-eminent adviser on energy affairs – issued a bombshell report calling for an immediate end to all new investments in the global oil and gas sector, so the world could reach net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
A few days later, the Group of 7 confirmed its support for the net zero goal, “by 2050 at the latest”. Yet, less than a month later, the IEA bafflingly called on OPEC+ countries to increase oil output to avoid an upward price shock as Brent crude prices – the international benchmark – hit three-year highs.
The resumption of economic growth around the world, as countries ease pandemic-related restrictions on business and travel, is driving global energy demand.
Global oil demand is now back at about 95 per cent of the pre-Covid-19 high of just over 100 million barrels a day in 2019, and is expected to be higher in 2022. Oil has been trading at over US$70 a barrel in recent weeks.
Falling inventories and the improved demand outlook have led market observers to suggest that oil priced at US$100 per barrel by the end of the year is entirely possible.
The Middle East’s oil exporters stand to gain from higher prices over the next two years, especially since in the US, the Biden administration has adopted an “all-of-government” approach to hobble domestic oil and gas production and fight climate change
In the long term, the green policies pushed by the US and Europe to reduce investments in fossil fuels will increase the market share of Middle Eastern and Russian oil and gas producers such as Saudi Aramco, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC) and Rosneft.
Given the combined government and shareholder pressure on international oil companies – including Exxon, Chevron and BP – to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the national oil companies of the Middle East and Russia will gladly step in to fill the supply gap.
The international companies, whose management now have to apologise for their core business activities, seem on the path to extinction. Shell recently lost a lawsuit in Holland, where a court found it was within its jurisdiction to determine that the company must cut emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared to 2019 levels.
Last month, both Exxon and Chevron lost key shareholder votes as pressure mounted on them to cut emissions.
The national oil companies in the oil-producers’ cartel OPEC+ face no such pressure. Their government owners require them to maximise the value of their assets in the national interest.
As the international oil companies shrink, national producers will welcome the opportunity to increase their global market share. Demand for fossil fuels shows no sign of slowing and will continue to rise for decades as developing countries seek rapid growth to meet the aspirations of their citizens.
This view was perhaps best articulated by India’s power minister, Raj Kumar Singh. He described the “net zero” mantra pushed by the developed world as “pie in the sky”, and also unfair.
He pointed out that in the developing world, “you have 800 million people 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.”
Despite the hype around renewable energy and electric vehicles, it is very likely that energy policies in major developing countries such as China, India, Brazil, South Africa and Indonesia will not be determined by the predilections of the climate commissariats in Washington, London and Paris.
The Opec+ producers are well aware of the need for fossil fuels outside the developed West.
Both Saudi Aramco and ADNOC plan to significantly increase their production capacity, while Qatar has committed to spending billions of dollars to expand liquefied natural gas by 50 per cent.
Russia’s Rosneft has started investing in an Arctic oil megaproject, which is expected to cost US$170 billion over a decade and will employ 400,000 workers, create 15 new industrial towns and build 800km of new pipeline.
Russia also plans to massively increase its coal production, modernise its railways and double its coal exports over the next 15 years.
There has been much debate about the energy transition in the Middle East recently. It is clear that oil and gas, and energy-intensive sectors such as aluminium and petrochemicals in the region, remain highly profitable. They are likely to remain so in the coming decades.
A premature exit from oil and gas and their derivative industries will deprive governments of export revenues and is unrealistic.
To the extent that customers in the West demand “moral” energy commodities such as green hydrogen, the national oil companies in the Middle East and Russia can always oblige, provided that the prices they command make it worthwhile.
The Middle East producers must hope that the rich member countries of the IEA continue on their net-zero path, thereby putting the international oil corporations out of business.
The rest of the world is growing fast enough to keep the oil producers in the Middle East, Russia, Africa and elsewhere in the money for at least the next few decades.
4) Andrew Montford: Mr Net Zero and the great green smokescreen
The Conservative Woman, 3 July 2021
Now that the truth is coming out, politicians have the awkward choice of admitting the deception, or continuing with the charade. In either case, political careers are likely to be shortened quite severely.
AS TCW reported this week, former energy minister Chris Skidmore acknowledges that the Government need to level with people about the trade-offs, the compromises and sacrifices involved in decarbonising the economy. ‘Trust the people’ was his rallying cry.
As the man responsible for putting the Government’s barmy ‘Net Zero’ target before Parliament in 2019, Mr Skidmore should have had a good idea of the extent of the trade-offs, compromises and sacrifices that would be involved. It’s strange then that if you refer back to his utterances at the time you find total silence on all the financial pain that families will have to endure; ‘affordable’ was the description he gave the House of Commons, to the rapturous acclaim of MPs from all sides.
Two years on and it’s clear that Parliament was tricked into voting for a policy that everyone now understands will be expensive – catastrophically so – for the country. You need only to look at the cost of ‘decarbonising’ a typical home, running into tens of thousands of pounds, to see that ‘affordable’ was simply not true. We can’t be sure where this deception began, but Skidmore made it quite clear in his speech that he was accepting the word of the Climate Change Committee (CCC) that Net Zero could be done on the cheap.
Did he know it was untrue? Look back over what was said at the time and you see everyone – including Skidmore – adopting the same careful form of words: it will cost ‘1 to 2 per cent of GDP in 2050’. In other words, there were no figures for the amounts that would need to be spent between 2020 and 2049. The CCC has now admitted that it had not calculated those figures at all. Reasonable people will therefore conclude that everyone involved in putting the Net Zero target in place knew the CCC’s numbers were a smokescreen.
And if should anyone doubt that it was a smokescreen, you should note the extraordinary contortions to which the CCC has gone to prevent anyone seeing the calculations underlying its ‘1 to 2 per cent of GDP’ figure. My Freedom of Information request for the numbers has been rumbling on for nearly two years now. The CCC’s costing is not the only ‘official’ estimate either. The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) has apparently produced one too, and is also refusing to let anyone see the underlying calculations. Similarly, BEIS’s estimates of the future costs of electricity generation are key inputs into both of the costings. FoI requests for those have been refused too.
All of which shows that Chris Skidmore’s call for the Government to ‘trust the people’ is really just a case of him distancing himself from the policy that he helped trick Parliament into putting in place in 2019, a policy that is clearly going to destroy the economy. Now that the truth is coming out, politicians have the awkward choice of admitting the deception, or continuing with the charade. In either case, political careers are likely to be shortened quite severely.
5) To stop climate change Americans must cut energy use by 90 percent, live in 640 square feet, and fly only once every 3 years, study claims
Ronald Bailey, Reason, 2 July 2021
Researchers admit there are absolutely no current examples of low-energy societies providing a decent living standard for their citizens.
In order to save the planet from catastrophic climate change, Americans will have to cut their energy use by more than 90 percent and families of four should live in housing no larger than 640 square feet. That's at least according to a team of European researchers led by University of Leeds sustainability researcher Jefim Vogel. In their new study, "Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use," in Global Environmental Change, they calculate that public transportation should account for most travel. Travel should, in any case, be limited to between 3,000 to 10,000 miles per person annually.
Vogel and his colleagues set themselves the goal of figuring out how to "provide sufficient need satisfaction at much lower, ecologically sustainable levels of energy use." Referencing earlier sustainability studies they argue that human needs are sufficiently satisfied when each person has access to the energy equivalent of 7,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per capita. That is about how much energy the average Bolivian uses. Currently, Americans use about 80,000 kWh annually per capita. With respect to transportation and physical mobility, the average person would be limited to using the energy equivalent of 16–40 gallons of gasoline per year. People are assumed to take one short- to medium-haul airplane trip every three years or so.
In addition, food consumption per capita would vary depending on age and other conditions, but the average would be 2,100 calories per day. While just over 10 percent of the world's people are unfortunately still undernourished, the Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the daily global average food supply now stands at just under 3,000 calories per person. Each individual is allocated a new clothing allowance of nine pounds per year, and clothes may be washed 20 times annually. The good news is that everyone over age 10 is permitted a mobile phone and each household can have a laptop.
How do Vogel and his colleagues arrive at their conclusions? First, they assert that "globally, large reductions in energy use are required to limit global warming to 1.5°B." The 1.5°C temperature increase limit they cite derives from the 2015 Paris Agreement in which signatories agreed to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels."
To achieve that goal, the researchers focus on what they call provisioning factors, which are intermediary institutions that people use to satisfy their needs. Provisioning factors that affect the amount of energy a society uses include public service, public health coverage, access to electricity and clean fuels, democratic quality, income equality, economic growth, and extractivism. These provisioning factors are the basis for providing sufficient human needs such as nourishment, drinking water, sanitation access, basic education, and a minimum income, all of which help secure the basic need of healthy life expectancy.
In order to stay below the 1.5°C temperature increase threshold, they cite earlier research that calculated that the average person should be limited to using annually as little as 18 gigajoules (equivalent to 136 gallons of gasoline or 5,000 kWh) of total energy, but allocated more generously for their study a cap of 27 gigajoules (equivalent to 204 gallons of gasoline or 7,500 kWh) annually. They then checked to see if any country in the world had met their definition of decent living standards using that amount of energy per capita. "No country in the world accomplishes that—not even close," admitted Vogel in an accompanying press release.
Vogel and his colleagues are undaunted by the fact that there are absolutely no examples of low-energy societies providing decent living standards—as defined by the researchers themselves—for their citizens. So they proceed to jigger the various provisioning factors until they find that what is really needed is a "more fundamental transformation of the political-economic regime." That fundamental transformation includes free government-provided high-quality public services in areas such as health, education, and public transport.
"We also found that a fairer income distribution is crucial for achieving decent living standards at low energy use," said co-author Daniel O'Neill, from Leeds' School of Earth and Environment. "To reduce existing income disparities, governments could raise minimum wages, provide a Universal Basic Income, and introduce a maximum income level. We also need much higher taxes on high incomes, and lower taxes on low incomes."
Two things that humanity for sure doesn't need according to the study are economic growth or the continued extraction of natural resources such as oil, coal, gas, or minerals. Vogel concluded: "In short, we need to abandon economic growth in affluent countries, scale back resource extraction, and prioritize public services, basic infrastructures and fair income distributions everywhere." He added, "In my view, the most promising and integral vision for the required transformation is the idea of degrowth—it is an idea whose time has come."
Full post
Ronald Bailey, Reason, 2 July 2021
Researchers admit there are absolutely no current examples of low-energy societies providing a decent living standard for their citizens.
In order to save the planet from catastrophic climate change, Americans will have to cut their energy use by more than 90 percent and families of four should live in housing no larger than 640 square feet. That's at least according to a team of European researchers led by University of Leeds sustainability researcher Jefim Vogel. In their new study, "Socio-economic conditions for satisfying human needs at low energy use," in Global Environmental Change, they calculate that public transportation should account for most travel. Travel should, in any case, be limited to between 3,000 to 10,000 miles per person annually.
Vogel and his colleagues set themselves the goal of figuring out how to "provide sufficient need satisfaction at much lower, ecologically sustainable levels of energy use." Referencing earlier sustainability studies they argue that human needs are sufficiently satisfied when each person has access to the energy equivalent of 7,500 kilowatt-hours (kWh) of electricity per capita. That is about how much energy the average Bolivian uses. Currently, Americans use about 80,000 kWh annually per capita. With respect to transportation and physical mobility, the average person would be limited to using the energy equivalent of 16–40 gallons of gasoline per year. People are assumed to take one short- to medium-haul airplane trip every three years or so.
In addition, food consumption per capita would vary depending on age and other conditions, but the average would be 2,100 calories per day. While just over 10 percent of the world's people are unfortunately still undernourished, the Food and Agriculture Organization reports that the daily global average food supply now stands at just under 3,000 calories per person. Each individual is allocated a new clothing allowance of nine pounds per year, and clothes may be washed 20 times annually. The good news is that everyone over age 10 is permitted a mobile phone and each household can have a laptop.
How do Vogel and his colleagues arrive at their conclusions? First, they assert that "globally, large reductions in energy use are required to limit global warming to 1.5°B." The 1.5°C temperature increase limit they cite derives from the 2015 Paris Agreement in which signatories agreed to hold "the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels."
To achieve that goal, the researchers focus on what they call provisioning factors, which are intermediary institutions that people use to satisfy their needs. Provisioning factors that affect the amount of energy a society uses include public service, public health coverage, access to electricity and clean fuels, democratic quality, income equality, economic growth, and extractivism. These provisioning factors are the basis for providing sufficient human needs such as nourishment, drinking water, sanitation access, basic education, and a minimum income, all of which help secure the basic need of healthy life expectancy.
In order to stay below the 1.5°C temperature increase threshold, they cite earlier research that calculated that the average person should be limited to using annually as little as 18 gigajoules (equivalent to 136 gallons of gasoline or 5,000 kWh) of total energy, but allocated more generously for their study a cap of 27 gigajoules (equivalent to 204 gallons of gasoline or 7,500 kWh) annually. They then checked to see if any country in the world had met their definition of decent living standards using that amount of energy per capita. "No country in the world accomplishes that—not even close," admitted Vogel in an accompanying press release.
Vogel and his colleagues are undaunted by the fact that there are absolutely no examples of low-energy societies providing decent living standards—as defined by the researchers themselves—for their citizens. So they proceed to jigger the various provisioning factors until they find that what is really needed is a "more fundamental transformation of the political-economic regime." That fundamental transformation includes free government-provided high-quality public services in areas such as health, education, and public transport.
"We also found that a fairer income distribution is crucial for achieving decent living standards at low energy use," said co-author Daniel O'Neill, from Leeds' School of Earth and Environment. "To reduce existing income disparities, governments could raise minimum wages, provide a Universal Basic Income, and introduce a maximum income level. We also need much higher taxes on high incomes, and lower taxes on low incomes."
Two things that humanity for sure doesn't need according to the study are economic growth or the continued extraction of natural resources such as oil, coal, gas, or minerals. Vogel concluded: "In short, we need to abandon economic growth in affluent countries, scale back resource extraction, and prioritize public services, basic infrastructures and fair income distributions everywhere." He added, "In my view, the most promising and integral vision for the required transformation is the idea of degrowth—it is an idea whose time has come."
Full post
6) A Canadian heatwave & the heat dome: unprecedented or unusual?
GWPF Observatory, 2 July 2021
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
The Canadian heatwave is obviously extreme weather, not climate, and we all know that weather can break records – it happens all the time.
High-pressure circulation in the atmosphere acts like a dome or cap, trapping heat at the surface and favoring the formation of a heat wave. Source: NOAA
Canada and parts of United States are experiencing very hot summer temperatures. This particular heatwave is mainly driven by a ‘heat dome,’ as NOAA explains:
"Summertime means hot weather — sometimes dangerously hot — and extreme heat waves have become more frequent in recent decades. Sometimes, the scorching heat is ensnared in what is called a heat dome. This happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.
A team of scientists funded by the NOAA MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the main cause was a strong change (or gradient) in ocean temperatures from west to east in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the preceding winter.”
The Guardian says nowhere on Earth is safe according to climate scientists. That is their conclusion as they see the intense record-breaking heatwave in western US and Canada over the past week. Actually, it’s just Sir David King, the former UK chief scientific adviser who says that, “Nowhere is safe … who would have predicted a temperature of 48/49C in British Columbia?”
Who indeed? So let’s look in more detail at what has happened.
The hand of climate change is not readily apparent in the basic cause of the heatwave. It’s a result of extremely rare meteorological conditions with hot desert air positioned over the Cascades. The temperature has also been increased because of air sinking after having passed over mountainous regions – the Fohn effect. It’s obviously weather, not climate, and we all know that weather can break records, it happens all the time.
Looking at weather-station data from the region shows no upward trend over the past century in any of the parameters measured. You can also look at duration of heatwaves, in particular the number of days 100F and over. These peaked in the 1990s, since when heatwave days have returned to what it was previously.
But has climate change somehow boosting an unusual weather event? It clearly didn’t start from an unusual condition that was already ramped up in temperature or some other parameter. So what could be going on?
We don’t know but we really do know is the confusing answer from many scientists. Nobody is sure what exactly is going on but many are sure what is going on even after they have expressed some uncertainty! Roger Harrabin of the BBC says “We can’t say for certain…” and speaking to LBC Professor Joanna Haig said it was “very, very likely” that it’s down to climate change,” then adding another layer of positive opinion by saying,” It’s pretty certainly exaggerated by climate change.”
It is all to be expected. During this recent heatwave Michael Mann has reiterated the prediction that as the planet warmed up such dangerous weather events would become more common, “You warm up the planet, you’re going to see an increased incidence of heat extremes.”
But it’s worse than that. Even though climate science has predicted what many say is coming to pass, that very climate science is inadequate according to Mann because it fails to capture the scale and seriousness of what was happening. It’s apparent that for some science is an ally when it comes to general supportive statements that one agrees with, but then science is abandoned when it cannot provide the evidence needed to go further and convince others one is right. In such important issues you have to go beyond science and be guided by what you think is happening, having the insight to know that science will catch up!
Extreme events are part of the pattern to be expected. Haig said, “it all fits in” adding that it’s exactly the sort of extreme events scientists have warned of, “it’s pretty certainly exaggerated by climate change,” she adds.It must be true. Such a heat dome event is according to the UK Met Office “almost impossible” without climate change being an event to be expected once every tens of thousands of years.
Michael Mann in the New York Times says it’s a “once in a millennium event,” but not under the effects of climate change, we are rolling loaded climate dice he adds. Might the heatwave has been as bad without climate change he asks himself. His answer, “almost surely not.”So let’s pause and asses the state of the rhetoric if not the science pertaining to the heatwave. Let’s just repeat a few phrases we have come across:
‘Extreme meteorological event… No long term trend in temperature… Once in tens of thousands of years… Pretty certainly… Once in a millennium… Very, very, likely… It all fits in… We can’t say for certain.’
Drawing together this admixture the Guardian quotes Sir David King who says ‘nowhere is safe’ (presumably not even Antartica) from the kind of extreme heat events that have hit the western US and Canada in recent days. He urges governments to dramatically ramp up their efforts to tackle the escalating climate emergency. 'If you want evidence of a climate emergency, look at the Canadian heatwave over the past week without putting it into any kind of historical perspective.'
‘Whilst we cannot be certain about the role of climate change in the recent heatwave the risk is growing,’ say some. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office says, “The risk of heatwaves is increasing across the globe sufficiently rapidly that it is now bringing unprecedented weather and conditions to people and societies that have not seen it before…Climate change is taking weather out of the envelope that societies have long experienced.”
Despite the historical record showing that heatwaves were just as bad in the past Stott might be right. He might be wrong. “We can’t say for certain.”
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
GWPF Observatory, 2 July 2021
Dr David Whitehouse, GWPF Science Editor
The Canadian heatwave is obviously extreme weather, not climate, and we all know that weather can break records – it happens all the time.
High-pressure circulation in the atmosphere acts like a dome or cap, trapping heat at the surface and favoring the formation of a heat wave. Source: NOAA
Canada and parts of United States are experiencing very hot summer temperatures. This particular heatwave is mainly driven by a ‘heat dome,’ as NOAA explains:
"Summertime means hot weather — sometimes dangerously hot — and extreme heat waves have become more frequent in recent decades. Sometimes, the scorching heat is ensnared in what is called a heat dome. This happens when strong, high-pressure atmospheric conditions combine with influences from La Niña, creating vast areas of sweltering heat that gets trapped under the high-pressure “dome.
A team of scientists funded by the NOAA MAPP Program investigated what triggers heat domes and found the main cause was a strong change (or gradient) in ocean temperatures from west to east in the tropical Pacific Ocean during the preceding winter.”
The Guardian says nowhere on Earth is safe according to climate scientists. That is their conclusion as they see the intense record-breaking heatwave in western US and Canada over the past week. Actually, it’s just Sir David King, the former UK chief scientific adviser who says that, “Nowhere is safe … who would have predicted a temperature of 48/49C in British Columbia?”
Who indeed? So let’s look in more detail at what has happened.
The hand of climate change is not readily apparent in the basic cause of the heatwave. It’s a result of extremely rare meteorological conditions with hot desert air positioned over the Cascades. The temperature has also been increased because of air sinking after having passed over mountainous regions – the Fohn effect. It’s obviously weather, not climate, and we all know that weather can break records, it happens all the time.
Looking at weather-station data from the region shows no upward trend over the past century in any of the parameters measured. You can also look at duration of heatwaves, in particular the number of days 100F and over. These peaked in the 1990s, since when heatwave days have returned to what it was previously.
But has climate change somehow boosting an unusual weather event? It clearly didn’t start from an unusual condition that was already ramped up in temperature or some other parameter. So what could be going on?
We don’t know but we really do know is the confusing answer from many scientists. Nobody is sure what exactly is going on but many are sure what is going on even after they have expressed some uncertainty! Roger Harrabin of the BBC says “We can’t say for certain…” and speaking to LBC Professor Joanna Haig said it was “very, very likely” that it’s down to climate change,” then adding another layer of positive opinion by saying,” It’s pretty certainly exaggerated by climate change.”
It is all to be expected. During this recent heatwave Michael Mann has reiterated the prediction that as the planet warmed up such dangerous weather events would become more common, “You warm up the planet, you’re going to see an increased incidence of heat extremes.”
But it’s worse than that. Even though climate science has predicted what many say is coming to pass, that very climate science is inadequate according to Mann because it fails to capture the scale and seriousness of what was happening. It’s apparent that for some science is an ally when it comes to general supportive statements that one agrees with, but then science is abandoned when it cannot provide the evidence needed to go further and convince others one is right. In such important issues you have to go beyond science and be guided by what you think is happening, having the insight to know that science will catch up!
Extreme events are part of the pattern to be expected. Haig said, “it all fits in” adding that it’s exactly the sort of extreme events scientists have warned of, “it’s pretty certainly exaggerated by climate change,” she adds.It must be true. Such a heat dome event is according to the UK Met Office “almost impossible” without climate change being an event to be expected once every tens of thousands of years.
Michael Mann in the New York Times says it’s a “once in a millennium event,” but not under the effects of climate change, we are rolling loaded climate dice he adds. Might the heatwave has been as bad without climate change he asks himself. His answer, “almost surely not.”So let’s pause and asses the state of the rhetoric if not the science pertaining to the heatwave. Let’s just repeat a few phrases we have come across:
‘Extreme meteorological event… No long term trend in temperature… Once in tens of thousands of years… Pretty certainly… Once in a millennium… Very, very, likely… It all fits in… We can’t say for certain.’
Drawing together this admixture the Guardian quotes Sir David King who says ‘nowhere is safe’ (presumably not even Antartica) from the kind of extreme heat events that have hit the western US and Canada in recent days. He urges governments to dramatically ramp up their efforts to tackle the escalating climate emergency. 'If you want evidence of a climate emergency, look at the Canadian heatwave over the past week without putting it into any kind of historical perspective.'
‘Whilst we cannot be certain about the role of climate change in the recent heatwave the risk is growing,’ say some. Peter Stott of the UK Met Office says, “The risk of heatwaves is increasing across the globe sufficiently rapidly that it is now bringing unprecedented weather and conditions to people and societies that have not seen it before…Climate change is taking weather out of the envelope that societies have long experienced.”
Despite the historical record showing that heatwaves were just as bad in the past Stott might be right. He might be wrong. “We can’t say for certain.”
Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com
7) Peter Ridd: Great Barrier Reef groups score a spectacular own goal
The Australian, 3 July 2021
The false stories about the Great Barrier Reef will continue to cause trouble for Australia, reputationally and financially. The solution is to make our science and management organisations reliable again.
The recent furore over China influencing UNESCO to declare the Great Barrier Reef as endangered, has ignored the real culprits – Australian reef science and reef management organisations. They have been claiming for decades that the reef is endangered based on shoddy research. They loaded the gun and pointed it at Australia. The Chinese government merely said “thank you” and pulled the trigger.
It is also inconsistent to get upset with the Chinese government when, in 2019, the Queensland government did far more reputational damage to the reef by introducing pointless legislation to “protect” the reef from the supposed dangers of farm pollution.
This legislation, albeit well-intentioned, is causing direct financial loss to Queensland farmers as well as falsely telling the world the reef is in diabolic trouble.
Statements about the imminent doom of the reef can be found in important documents such as the 2019 Reef Outlook Report produced by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. The Chinese need not have read any further for their ammunition.
But this document is riddled with factual errors, exaggerations, logical inconsistencies, irrelevancies and scandalous omissions. It clearly has not been subjected to adequate quality assurance and reads more like an ideological document.
For example, it claims the reef is at high risk from agricultural pesticides, ignoring data showing pesticides are in such low concentrations on the reef that they generally can’t be measured even with the most ultra-sensitive scientific equipment.
There also must be no doubt that the reef is in excellent shape. It certainly goes through spectacular natural cycles where large amounts of coral are killed, particularly from cyclones, but it always strongly recovers.
The death of corals makes great headlines; the recovery is ignored. The latest data shows areas worst affected by the 2016-17 bleaching has totally recovered and all but one region currently has average or above average coral cover. Some areas are at near record highs.
The science organisations and self-selected “experts” of the conventional wisdom of the reef denigrate dissenters, whether they be politicians or scientists.
For example, an influential group of reef scientists released a public statement comparing my research on the reef with corrupt scientists who denied any link between tobacco and lung cancer.
The reef science organisations never debate in public. They do not engage in an argument they certainly will lose. It is easier to blacken the reputation of dissenters and it also keeps their troops in line. This is the cancel culture of the scientific mob.
Dissenting politicians are in a similar difficult predicament as dissenting scientists. Most politicians have been deceived by the supposedly reputable science and management organisations responsible for the reef.
Environment ministers, such as Sussan Ley, are supposed to be able to trust “the science”.
Other politicians realise the advice they receive on the reef is tainted by ideology and shoddy quality assurance, but they also know that to question “the science” would be political suicide. Step out of line and the orthodoxy enforcers at the ABC and elsewhere will swing into action.
But there is a small group of state and federal politicians, mostly Queenslanders, such as Matt Canavan, Malcolm Roberts, George Christensen, Nick Dametto and Stephen Andrew, who are prepared to stand up to the abuse from the mainstream media. Dametto recently has tabled legislation in state parliament to repeal the anti-farmer reef legislation. This legislation is far worse than what UNESCO and the Chinese have done. We will soon see which state parliamentarians effectively side with China and UNESCO, and which are squarely on the side of regional Queensland and Australia – metaphorically at least.
The false stories about the reef will continue to cause trouble for Australia, reputationally and financially. The solution is to make our science and management organisations reliable again.
I have been proposing the establishment of an office of science quality assurance that would be tasked with doing an audit of reef science. Who could argue against a little more quality assurance? But, unsurprisingly, so far it is not supported by [the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority].
I understand why the federal government is reticent to fund science quality assurance measures. It is scared it will be attacked by the science mob and the media for being deniers. But this appeasement approach must end.
The international pressure and financial costs for regional Queensland will get worse unless the true state of the reef is made known. It is the most fabulous, unspoilt, ecosystem on Earth, facing insignificant threats from farming and only a small risk from changes in climate.
Peter Ridd has researched the Great Barrier Reef for decades and is the author of Reef Heresy Science, Research and the Great Barrier Reef (Connor Court). He is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council
Full post & comments ($)
The Australian, 3 July 2021
The false stories about the Great Barrier Reef will continue to cause trouble for Australia, reputationally and financially. The solution is to make our science and management organisations reliable again.
The recent furore over China influencing UNESCO to declare the Great Barrier Reef as endangered, has ignored the real culprits – Australian reef science and reef management organisations. They have been claiming for decades that the reef is endangered based on shoddy research. They loaded the gun and pointed it at Australia. The Chinese government merely said “thank you” and pulled the trigger.
It is also inconsistent to get upset with the Chinese government when, in 2019, the Queensland government did far more reputational damage to the reef by introducing pointless legislation to “protect” the reef from the supposed dangers of farm pollution.
This legislation, albeit well-intentioned, is causing direct financial loss to Queensland farmers as well as falsely telling the world the reef is in diabolic trouble.
Statements about the imminent doom of the reef can be found in important documents such as the 2019 Reef Outlook Report produced by the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority. The Chinese need not have read any further for their ammunition.
But this document is riddled with factual errors, exaggerations, logical inconsistencies, irrelevancies and scandalous omissions. It clearly has not been subjected to adequate quality assurance and reads more like an ideological document.
For example, it claims the reef is at high risk from agricultural pesticides, ignoring data showing pesticides are in such low concentrations on the reef that they generally can’t be measured even with the most ultra-sensitive scientific equipment.
There also must be no doubt that the reef is in excellent shape. It certainly goes through spectacular natural cycles where large amounts of coral are killed, particularly from cyclones, but it always strongly recovers.
The death of corals makes great headlines; the recovery is ignored. The latest data shows areas worst affected by the 2016-17 bleaching has totally recovered and all but one region currently has average or above average coral cover. Some areas are at near record highs.
The science organisations and self-selected “experts” of the conventional wisdom of the reef denigrate dissenters, whether they be politicians or scientists.
For example, an influential group of reef scientists released a public statement comparing my research on the reef with corrupt scientists who denied any link between tobacco and lung cancer.
The reef science organisations never debate in public. They do not engage in an argument they certainly will lose. It is easier to blacken the reputation of dissenters and it also keeps their troops in line. This is the cancel culture of the scientific mob.
Dissenting politicians are in a similar difficult predicament as dissenting scientists. Most politicians have been deceived by the supposedly reputable science and management organisations responsible for the reef.
Environment ministers, such as Sussan Ley, are supposed to be able to trust “the science”.
Other politicians realise the advice they receive on the reef is tainted by ideology and shoddy quality assurance, but they also know that to question “the science” would be political suicide. Step out of line and the orthodoxy enforcers at the ABC and elsewhere will swing into action.
But there is a small group of state and federal politicians, mostly Queenslanders, such as Matt Canavan, Malcolm Roberts, George Christensen, Nick Dametto and Stephen Andrew, who are prepared to stand up to the abuse from the mainstream media. Dametto recently has tabled legislation in state parliament to repeal the anti-farmer reef legislation. This legislation is far worse than what UNESCO and the Chinese have done. We will soon see which state parliamentarians effectively side with China and UNESCO, and which are squarely on the side of regional Queensland and Australia – metaphorically at least.
The false stories about the reef will continue to cause trouble for Australia, reputationally and financially. The solution is to make our science and management organisations reliable again.
I have been proposing the establishment of an office of science quality assurance that would be tasked with doing an audit of reef science. Who could argue against a little more quality assurance? But, unsurprisingly, so far it is not supported by [the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority].
I understand why the federal government is reticent to fund science quality assurance measures. It is scared it will be attacked by the science mob and the media for being deniers. But this appeasement approach must end.
The international pressure and financial costs for regional Queensland will get worse unless the true state of the reef is made known. It is the most fabulous, unspoilt, ecosystem on Earth, facing insignificant threats from farming and only a small risk from changes in climate.
Peter Ridd has researched the Great Barrier Reef for decades and is the author of Reef Heresy Science, Research and the Great Barrier Reef (Connor Court). He is a member of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council
Full post & comments ($)
8) And finally: Schwarzenegger worried about "constant climate alarm which cannot be sustained.”
CNS News, 2 July 2021
Environmentalists’ constant hyperbolic predictions of apocalyptic doom have left the public tuned out and resigned, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger told his fellow climate warriors at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna on Thursday.
Click on the image to watch video clip
“No one is going to invest huge sums of money in a movie where there is no hope,” Schwarzenegger said, warning that people won’t invest in the climate movement if they are bombarded with nothing but messages of doom – ranging from famine and war to human extinction:
“Well, let me just tell you something about the movie business: no one is going to invest huge sums of money in a movie where there is no hope. Yet, frequently, I hear environmentalists talking about the existential threat of climate change, the existential threat we are going to be eliminated.
“And what does the public hear: the icebergs are melting, the rainforests are burning, the coral reefs are dying, the polar bears are starving, our cities will be flooded, and our farms will dry up and our coastlines will wiped out and there will be famine and starvation and people will be fleeing the heat and the rising water and there will be wars – and, by the way, don’t use fossil fuels, don’t use plastic, don’t eat meat.
“So, those are kind of things that we hear. Now, of course, I am exaggerating here
“But, is it any wonder that people are confused and tuned out? This move doesn’t have a storyline, except constant alarm which cannot be sustained.”
CNS News, 2 July 2021
Environmentalists’ constant hyperbolic predictions of apocalyptic doom have left the public tuned out and resigned, actor Arnold Schwarzenegger told his fellow climate warriors at the Austrian World Summit in Vienna on Thursday.
Click on the image to watch video clip
“No one is going to invest huge sums of money in a movie where there is no hope,” Schwarzenegger said, warning that people won’t invest in the climate movement if they are bombarded with nothing but messages of doom – ranging from famine and war to human extinction:
“Well, let me just tell you something about the movie business: no one is going to invest huge sums of money in a movie where there is no hope. Yet, frequently, I hear environmentalists talking about the existential threat of climate change, the existential threat we are going to be eliminated.
“And what does the public hear: the icebergs are melting, the rainforests are burning, the coral reefs are dying, the polar bears are starving, our cities will be flooded, and our farms will dry up and our coastlines will wiped out and there will be famine and starvation and people will be fleeing the heat and the rising water and there will be wars – and, by the way, don’t use fossil fuels, don’t use plastic, don’t eat meat.
“So, those are kind of things that we hear. Now, of course, I am exaggerating here
“But, is it any wonder that people are confused and tuned out? This move doesn’t have a storyline, except constant alarm which cannot be sustained.”
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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