COP26 and carbon imperialism: A looming showdown
In this newsletter:
1) COP26 crisis deepens as Boris Johnson plans last-ditch attempt to save UN climate summit
GWPF International, 12 September 2021
The Sunday Telegraph, 12 September 2021
3) UK planning last-ditch China climate talks to break impasse before Cop26
The Guardian, 10 September 2021
4) Ross Clark: The West has doomed COP26 to failure
The Daily Telegraph, 11 September 2021
5) Tilak Doshi: COP26 and carbon imperialism: A looming showdown
Forbes, 11 September 2021
6) BRICS nations collaborate to tackle climate change & COP26 challenge
Space in Africa, 11 September 2021
7) Britain is turning into the Venezuela of wind as green jobs are exported to Asia
GWPF, 11 September 2021
8) Craig Mackinlay MP: Did the Prime Minister tell the truth about Net Zero?
The Critic, 10 September 2021
Full details:
1) COP26 crisis deepens as Boris Johnson plans last-ditch attempt to save UN climate summit
GWPF International, 12 September 2021
More evidence is emerging that Boris Johnson’s COP26 plans are in serious trouble: According to reports in the Sunday Telegraph, Britain is facing global embarrassment because the government is unlikely to have passed its flagship Environment Bill in time for the UN climate summit.
What is more, at the UN conference in Glasgow, Britain and the US will be facing the BRICS nations which have joined forces to challenge Biden’s and Boris’s Net Zero agenda and are in a much stronger geopolitical position today than they were in Copenhagen back in 2009.
In light of the evident opposition by China and its BRICS allies, Boris Johnson is reported to be planning a last-ditch attempt to break the deadlock with China later this month. The question is whether he and Biden are prepared to cave in to the geopolitical concessions Beijing is demanding.
Of course, if all fails, there is always the option to pull the plug on the Glasgow confab and turn COP26 into a Zoom meeting (as we have been suggesting for a long time) or even delay the whole event until next year (as green NGOs, worried about a Cop-flop, are demanding).
Yet, despite the expected deadlocks, walk outs and collapse warnings, COP26 is most likely to follow the normal COP ritual, culminating in a convenient compromise that will allow Biden and Boris to claim to have saved the summit from near collapse while enabling China and much of Asia and Africa to burn fossil fuels for decades to come.
The Sunday Telegraph, 12 September 2021
Alok Sharma is facing embarrassment on the world stage at November’s Cop26 climate conference because the Government is unlikely to have passed its flagship Environment Bill in time for the summit, The Telegraph can reveal.
Ministers had hoped the bill – which runs to some 270 pages and includes dozens of new commitments on the environment – would receive royal assent by October 31, when the conference begins.
But following a series of successful attempts to amend the Bill in the House of Lords, Downing Street has decided to delay it entirely if the changes cannot be fought off in time.
The Telegraph understands Mr Sharma, who has spent the past eight months flying around the world securing international cooperation on measures to be agreed at this year’s conference, has been pushing for it to be completed before world leaders arrive in Glasgow.
But that would have meant agreeing to amendments passed in the Lords, including one that would force ministers to declare a climate emergency – a key demand of Extinction Rebellion.
“The sort of people who want to make the most out of Cop would like to politically say that the Environment Bill is this great landmark achievement, and therefore Britain is delivering on all that stuff around the time we do Cop,” a source said.
“The mood in No10 is now about getting a good Bill rather than getting a Bill which is sorted by Cop. Obviously, the Government is not going to agree to Extinction Rebellion-written amendments.”
Full story (£)
3) UK planning last-ditch China climate talks to break impasse before Cop26
The Guardian, 10 September 2021
Boris Johnson is planning to convene last-ditch climate talks with the president of China, Xi Jinping, at a crunch meeting of world leaders later this month, in hopes of breaking the global impasse on climate action before the COP26 climate summit being hosted in Glasgow this November.
Xi will be invited, along with the leaders of about 30 other countries, to a high-level meeting on the sidelines of the UN general assembly in New York on 20 September, the Guardian has learned.
China, the world’s biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, is crucial to the success of Cop26, but is a focus of increasing concern as its current emissions plans are regarded as too weak.
Global experts on the talks told the Guardian the UK’s own actions – in slashing overseas aid and failing to persuade rich countries to provide more climate finance to help poorer countries – had stripped it of much of its power to influence China, imperilling the prospects of success at Cop26.
Full story
4) Ross Clark: The West has doomed COP26 to failure
The Daily Telegraph, 11 September 2021
The Chinese won’t sign up to Britain’s punitive carbon-cutting targets. And who can blame them?
From childhood, Boris Johnson wanted to be “world king”, and he has spied his chance in Glasgow in two months’ time.
Unfortunately, the king which Boris most looks like resembling is Canute. However much he might desire the co-operation of China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon emissions, that country simply will not play ball with Johnson’s government nor with the Biden administration.
US climate envoy John Kerry got what he deserved last week when he told the Chinese “climate is not ideological, not partisan and not a geostrategic weapon”. The Chinese made it clear that is exactly how they intend to use climate targets: as bargaining chips for things such as access to US markets. The idea that global energy policy is somehow above politics isn’t going to cut much ice, given how often the US has sent in its planes and warships into the Middle East to secure oil supplies. Of course China is going to use COP26 for its own political purposes – just as we will be doing.
It does China an injustice, however, to claim that it doesn’t give two hoots about climate change. True, it is still merrily building coal power stations (along with wind farms), but it does have a policy of reducing carbon emissions. It is just that, unlike Britain’s own climate policy, it allows for industrial growth. Last year Xi Jinping personally announced an aspiration of reaching net zero emissions by 2060. Moreover, the 14th Five Year Plan, published this May, makes a binding (sic) commitment: “Energy Consumption and Carbon Dioxide emissions per unit of GDP will be reduced by 13.5 percent and 18 percent respectively”.
The crucial phrase there is “per unit of GDP”. China is committed to improving energy efficiency but it is not prepared to sacrifice economic growth and make its people poorer. And why should it, not least when by doing so it would put them more at the mercy of natural disasters?
As an indication of how much better wealthy countries are at resisting flood and tempest, look at July’s floods in the city of Zhenghou, which were reported by Western media as a kind of cataclysm – the sort of climate change-induced event that the world must save itself from. Those floods killed 219 people. By contrast, in the much-poorer China of 1975, 26,000 people were killed by a typhoon in the surrounding Henan province.
It is just about conceivable that a post-industrial country like Britain could cut carbon emissions to next to zero without compromising national wealth – by building a services-based economy which earns its foreign currency through things like trading carbon permits while importing all the stuff whose manufacture, for the foreseeable future, will involve spewing out large clouds of greenhouse gases.
But that is not an option for the countries which actually still make things. They need large quantities of reliable power – and the leeway to carry on with hard-to-decarbonise industries like steel and cement. Indeed, while our government boasts of cutting UK territorial emissions, we have really just offshored a lot of them to expanding industrial economies like China. Yet then we bark at China for not cutting emissions as quickly as we are. The hosts and prime movers of COP26 are saying to developing countries: we industrialised and grew rich, but we can’t have you doing the same.
How much better COP26 would go if it wasn’t trying to extract legally-binding targets for cutting carbon emissions, if it limited itself to realistic ambitions and about sharing the technology we are going to need to invent and develop before we get anywhere near zero greenhouse gas emissions, and if it recognised that for many countries the priority is development. Then, the event might just be worth the emissions involved in flying the world to Glasgow.
5) Tilak Doshi: COP26 and carbon imperialism: A looming showdown
Forbes, 11 September 2021
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, host of COP26, while not entertaining imperial notions of conquest and rule, wants his environmental place in the sun. But he is bound to be disappointed. Carbon imperialism will not work.
By the first quarter of the 19th century, a small corner of north-western Europe had conquered much of the rest of the world on the back of gunpowder, the sailing ship and an evangelizing view of the world which served both God and commerce. Two centuries later, we see a new force at work, aiming for the re-conquest of the world by the Western nations, this time with a powerful new entrant, the United States of America. The West’s weapons of war are as novel as is the ideology of conquest: gunpowder has been replaced by domination of powerful international institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund that include global finance as part of their arsenal, and an evangelizing ideology that views the trace gas CO2 as original sin. The aim of the West is of course not to directly rule the world for plunder or prestige, but to get the East to agree on foregoing the fruits of modern economic growth to “save the planet”.
To be sure, none of this is very new. The early convocations of nations in the aftermath of World War II, perhaps best marked by the Stockholm conference on the environment in 1972, were devoted to discussions of a new brotherhood of nations that would learn to live at peace not only with one another (the Cold War was still a dominating reality then) but also with “nature”.
A new Rousseauesque angst had captured the minds of the ruling intellectual elites in the West, perhaps best personified by Joschka Fischer, a left-wing activist and part of the 1968 “beat generation” who later became Germany's first Green member of parliament in 1985. This angst needed to be shared with the world. It did not matter very much that some in the East like the indomitable Indira Gandhi, Prime Minister of India, proclaimed at the 1972 Stockholm conference that the environmental problem of the teeming multitudes of East was one of poverty not affluence.
It did not take long for this angst to shapeshift. The original fears of “running out” of natural resources —as the Club of Rome, an international elite of experts, had predicted — or of over-population as warned by serial predictors of global famines and cataclysm such as Paul Ehrlich are history. By the 1980s and 1990s it had become apparent that human ingenuity and the relentless march of technology had consigned the Malthusian thesis to the dust-heap of history. The world had continuously increasing reserves of minerals and fossil fuels despite galloping consumption. The US shale revolution found more oil and gas than the world could possibly absorb.
The maverick one-term president Donald J. Trump proclaimed “energy dominance” for a country that conventional wisdom had expected to be an energy supplicant to Saudi Arabia, Russia and other oil and gas producers of the world.
An Increasingly Prosperous World
And far from fearing over-population, countries such as China are much more worried about the demography and geopolitics of “growing old before becoming rich”. Indeed, by late-20th century, demographers were already warning of all the problems associated with an impending decline of a youthful population that could sustain global living standards. While mystical believers of Gaia worried of the weight of a global population on “nature”, statistics of human welfare kept breaking historical records as never before. With respect to human welfare, virtually every metric or indicator shows significant if not dramatic improvement: life expectancy and income levels have improved; poverty levels have declined; people are living longer and healthier lives and the World Bank’s human development index has advanced virtually everywhere (ignoring the blip caused by the Covid pandemic since 2020).
Since the 1920s, the global death rate from extreme weather events, for instance, has fallen by 98% despite the tripling of the world’s population. Average global life expectancy at birth in 1850 was just over 29 years; a century later it was over 45 years, and in 2019, it was almost 73 years. In 1820, almost 90% of the global population lived in absolute poverty. By 2015, this had dropped to less than 10% despite a sevenfold increase in world population.
Carbon Imperialism To Save the World
Yet, the up-coming UN conference on climate in Glasgow is all fire-and-brimstone. With the “climate emergency” upon us, Alok Sharma — president of the UN’s “COP26” summit to be held in Glasgow in November – warns us that this is the “last chance” to agree to a radical agenda of “decarbonization” failing which the world inevitably consigns itself to climate catastrophe (never mind that this is all based on dubious “hockey-stick” global warming models concocted in the West). The UN Secretary-General António Guterres warns us that it is nothing less than "a code red for humanity. The alarm bells are deafening, and the evidence is irrefutable".
And here is where the West’s ambit at a moral carbon imperialism is upon us in the East:
Be prepared to give up cheap and affordable fossil fuels that help your people achieve higher standards of living or else the planet, with all of us in it, gets it. Yes, we promise you money (we know, the last promise was $100 billion per annum, though not yet attained). But there is more, we promise you. We all understand you cannot possibly expect European standards of living but new energy technologies are around the corner, trust us. With solar and wind power, and electric vehicles, and hydrogen and carbon capture and sequestration, we will get there. But stop new coal power plants right now and oil and gas too. We are all in this together.
"History never repeats itself but it rhymes," said Mark Twain. Now however there is nothing short of massive discordance. China, the world’s largest carbon sinner by far, has “promised” net zero by 2060. Sinner or not, it has quite clearly stated that it might consider participating in the western notion of buying Gaia’s indulgences with decarbonization, perhaps, some decades into the future, but only if the US plays ball: give up the endless tirades about Uigher oppression, consider Taiwan as part of China and stop being an aggressive competitor to the Middle Kingdom’s natural quest for Asian dominance. India, on its part, is also quite clear: “we urge G20 countries to commit to bring down per capita emissions to the global average by 2030”. In other words, you come down to not quite our levels of poverty, and give us space to become not quite as rich as you. And then we have the outliers: Australia has said quite clearly “no” to Biden, Boris and the UN in their requests that coal extraction, coal power and coal exports should stop.
The days of China being “carved up like a ripe melon” by the western powers or of the dissipated Mughals in India being easily replaced by the East India Company as overlords of the subcontinent are long gone. Australia, the ex-colony of convicts, is no pushover either. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, host of COP26, while not entertaining imperial notions of conquest and rule, wants his environmental place in the sun. But he is bound to be disappointed. Carbon imperialism will not work.
6) BRICS nations collaborate to tackle climate change & COP26 challenge
Space in Africa, 11 September 2021
As challenges from climate change and the ongoing pandemic worsen, BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa, have joined forces for continuous collaborations to tackle the deteriorating situation.
Furthermore, by adopting the ‘New Delhi Statement on Environment’, the countries have agreed to work in close proximity to tackle the challenges of climate change ahead of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity in October and the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference in November.
According to India’s Union Minister for Environment, Bhupender Yadav, BRICS countries can significantly address the contemporary global challenges of climate change, biodiversity loss, air pollution, and marine plastic litter and other identified areas of focus.
However, the nations would need to take collective actions guided by equity national priorities and circumstances. “BRICS countries being hotspots for biodiversity can tell the world how we have been conserving such mega diversity since time immemorial and can also play a very significant role in combating the Covid-19 pandemic,” said Yadav, at the 7th meeting of the BRICS Environment Ministerial, 2021.
Therefore, having agreed to focus on cooperation on waste management, observing that the “efficient management of wastes, the countries have started sharing their climate change initiatives.
For example, India shared its renewable energy target and plans in renewable energy, sustainable habitats, creating carbon sinks, transition to sustainable transport, etc. Additionally, China has also set up its goal to act on climate challenges. China pledged to peak carbon dioxide emissions by 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 in December 2020.
In August, the space agencies of BRICS countries signed an agreement to share remote sensing satellite data to help cope with climate changes and environmental protection.
Full story
7) Britain is turning into the Venezuela of wind as green jobs are exported to Asia
GWPF, 11 September 2021
A trade union has slammed the “myth” of a green jobs revolution after Scotlands only wind factory has closed permanently.
The UK’s ambition to become the Saudi Arabia of renewables with promises of a wind farm jobs bonanza are evaporating as Britain is at risk of turning into the Venezuela of renewables.
The factory, which employed around 130 people, was the only UK facility manufacturing onshore and offshore wind towers when it was bought by the South Korean company in April 2016 but has been effectively mothballed by its owners since November 2019.
According to the BBC, all staff have now either left or been made redundant.
According to recent reports, more than half of the estimated £50bn investment for Boris Johnson’s planned offshore wind farm expansion is expected to go to companies overseas as companies opt for manufacturers in Asia which produce at lower costs.
Much of the electric components are no longer made in Britain partly because most firms specialising in heavy electrical equipment closed down or moved abroad 20-30 years ago. It is thus an effect of the long run decline of the manufacturing sector in the UK.
The other factor is that there has been huge shift in the industry manufacturing turbines. 20 years ago there were at least 30 substantial manufacturers with fringe of many small firms. Today there are 3 large international companies – Vestas, Siemens and GE – plus a fringe of Chinese and Indian suppliers, primarily focusing on local markets.
Boris Johnson’s green industrial revolution will make energy and thus manufacturing ever more expensive, making what little is left in UK manufacturing even less competitive.
8) Craig Mackinlay MP: Did the Prime Minister tell the truth about Net Zero?
The Critic, 10 September 2021
It is critical that Britain’s decarbonisation policies are both affordable and technologically feasible. If the adoption of technologies such as wind and solar “farms”, square miles of batteries, hydrogen and widespread adoption of air source heat pumps leaves people colder and poorer, no-one is going to want to copy our example, and it won’t be very popular at home either. But is our example economically compelling? Is it even doable?
In response to my question on this topic at PMQs, the PM said that we were experiencing “vertiginous” falls in the prices of batteries as well as wind and solar power. It is all going to be OK if we adopt a spirit of “promethean technological optimism”. But what’s the truth about the PM’s claims?
As a matter of fact, renewable energy in Britain has not, as the Prime Minister suggests, been getting cheaper. Subsidies to renewable electricity generators cost consumers over £10 billion a year at present, and the average subsidy on top of the wholesale price can be conservatively calculated at about £80/MWh, making it extremely expensive by any standard.
The Prime Minister specifically claims that the cost of offshore wind power has dropped by 70 per cent in the last decade. That is untrue. Actual subsidies paid per MWh generated have not fallen, but as a matter of public record costs have increased sharply since their introduction in 2002, when they stood at just over £40/MWh, right up to the present when they stand at just over £110/MWh.
Perhaps the Prime Minister has been misled by his officials by the low offshore wind bids for non-binding “Contracts for Difference”. Most of these low-price contracts have not yet been taken up, and few if any seem likely to survive since, again as a matter of fact, there is no evidence that the underlying cost of offshore wind has fallen sharply. The real-life experience of offshore wind companies has been of higher maintenance costs and a shorter working life of equipment than the original business models planned for.
Audited accounts show clearly that offshore wind capital costs remain high and that their operation and maintenance costs are rising rapidly.
The PM also believes that the costs of solar have fallen sharply, but once again government estimates of these are inconsistent with data in audited accounts. Research in progress and shortly to be published shows that the total capex of solar “farms” in the UK fell by only 10 per cent in the period 2012 to 2018, and averaged about £1m per megawatt installed. Bizarrely, the government cost estimates are only about 60 per cent of that figure.
Similarly, solar industry sources claim operating expenditure at about £20,000/MW per year while audited accounts record that it is 50 per cent higher. So they cost more to build and cost more to operate than the government has been led to believe.
And then on top of all this, we have the network and system costs of connecting and managing uncontrollable renewables, which are high and have already affected consumers. In 2002, before renewables, the cost of National Grid’s “Balancing Services” were about £400m per year. They now stand at about £1.8 billion a year with gas and, just this week, coal powered traditional power stations stepping in to keep the lights on, and the trend is upwards, very largely due to renewables.
Batteries have been suggested as a way to manage this problem, and the Prime Minister clearly believes in their promise. But using storage on the scale required will be very expensive, even if batteries themselves are cheap, as the Prime Minister promises. Huge expansion in global demand of the rare metals required with unmatched growth of supply is already escalating the price of these commodities. Medium term pricing of batteries is likely to increase faster than the cost of production savings within new battery “mega-factories”.
Government cost estimates are invariably based on the predictions of the industries concerned, but when we can check those predictions against the reality of audited accounts, as we can with wind and solar, we find that the industry claims appear to be… misleading.
The Prime Minister thinks we should be optimistic, and he called on the example of Prometheus. I too like to live life with a glass half full attitude but we should be realistic and rational. The Prime Minister is confidently trying to pick winners on the basis of industry sales talk. The reality is often very different — the good residents of Lake Havasu, Arizona have a bridge to prove it.
The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment