Net Zero Watch: G20 leaders forced to water down climate targets

 

In this newsletter:

1) G20 leaders forced to water down climate targets
The Australian, 1 November 2021

 

2) COP26: Biden accuses Russia and Saudi Arabia for holding back fossil fuel production 
NPR News, 31 October 2021
 

 
3) COP26: Joe Biden accuses Russia and China of climate change failure
The Daily Telegraph, 1 November 2021
 
 
4) US coal boom dealing blow to Biden's credibility as he heads to COP26 UN climate summit
Daily Mail, 31 October 2021
 

 
5) Benny Peiser on Boris Johnson's G20/COP26 statement 
GB News, 31 October 2021
  

 
6) Robert Peston: Has COP 26 already flopped?
The Spectator, 1 November 2021
 

 
7) Millions at risk of soaring energy bills as at least 'another 20' firms tipped to go under
Daily Express, 31 October 2021
  

 

8) Majority of Britons do not trust Government’s Net Zero plans
The Daily Telegraph, 1 November 2021

 

9) David Quinn: Politicians in denial over cost of going green
The Sunday Times, 31 October 2021
  

10) Kevin Williamson: The Empty Spectacle of the U.N. Climate-Change Summit
National Review, 31 October 2021

 
11) And finally: Twitter takes aim at climate  misinformation during COP26
Axios, 1 November 2021

Full details:

1) G20 leaders forced to water down climate targets
The Australian, 1 November 2021

Global ambitions for aggressive climate change action have been dealt a blow after Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron and Joe Biden failed to win support on new coal, methane and net zero pledges at the G20 summit. 

 
 

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, US President Joe Biden, French President Emmanuel Macron and German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the G20 Summit. Picture: Getty
 

The rejection of British, French and US backed resolutions at the Rome summit signalled a shattering of consensus ahead of the UN climate change conference beginning in Glasgow on Monday.

More than 20,000 people have assembled in the Scottish city for the COP26 summit, where Mr Johnson had hoped to usher in a new era of global co-operation on emissions reduction and climate change.

The final G20 communique released late Sunday revealed a softening in language around net-zero emissions by 2050 targets, with carbon neutrality goals watered down after negotiations to say “by or around mid-century”.

Despite calls to end coal-fired power generation by 2030, the G20 leaders could only agree that countries who “commit to phasing out investment in new unabated coal power generation capacity do so as soon as possible”. A vague reference was included about ending international public finance for new coal generation abroad by the end of the year.

Mr Biden’s Global Methane Pledge, which he will officially launch at COP26, also fell flat with G20 leaders.

The communique said the world’s leading economies would only “acknowledge that methane emissions represent a significant contribution to climate change, and recognise, according to national circumstances, that its reduction can be one of the quickest, most feasible and most cost-effective ways to limit climate change and its impacts”.

An emerging bloc of developing and advanced nations, most who rely on coal generation and fossil fuel exports, joined forces at the G20 to dilute the draft communique which included stronger climate change targets on shutting down coal-fired power and imposing tougher methane targets.

Before travelling to Glasgow, Scott Morrison and Energy Minister Angus Taylor ruled out Australia supporting higher methane emissions reduction targets or agreeing to a phasing out of coal-fired power generation by the end of the decade.

G20 countries including India, Australia, Russia, China, Brazil, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia and South Africa were understood to have reservations about some of the climate agenda being pushed by US, Britain and the European Union.

Speaking ahead of flying to Glasgow on Sunday night, Mr Morrison said he believed “progress” would be made at COP26 despite the setbacks at the G20 summit.

The Prime Minister is scheduled to deliver Australia’s national statement at the UN climate change conference on Monday night, outlining improved 2030 emissions projections and details of the government’s net-zero emissions by 2050 plan.
 
Full story
 

2) COP26: Biden accuses Russia and Saudi Arabia for holding back fossil fuel production 
NPR News, 31 October 2021

President Biden said on Sunday that the world can't immediately stop using oil and said OPEC and Russia need to pump more of it, even as he pushes the world to pledge to cut climate-changing carbon emissions at the Glasgow climate summit this week.
 
After three days of meeting with world leaders in Rome, where he attended the G-20 summit, Biden said he is worried that surging energy costs are hurting working class families.

"On the surface it seems like an irony," Biden said of simultaneously calling on major oil producers to pump more as he heads to the COP26 climate change summit. "But the truth of the matter is ... everyone knows that idea that we're going to be able to move to renewable energy overnight ... it's just not rational," he said.

Biden said the idea that Russia, Saudi Arabia and other producers are holding back to boost prices "is not right." With gas prices averaging $3.40 a gallon in the US, according to AAA, Biden said families are feeling it.
 
Full story
 

3) COP26: Joe Biden accuses Russia and China of climate change failure
The Daily Telegraph, 1 November 2021

Joe Biden rounded on Russia and China ahead of the COP26 summit in Glasgow last night, accusing them of failing to show willingness to tackle climate change.

Addressing reporters after the G20 meeting in Rome, he voiced his regret at what he regarded as Moscow and Beijing’s failure to deliver concrete proposals.

“Not only Russia but China basically didn't show up in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change. And there's a reason why people should be disappointed that I found it disappointing myself,” he said.

The US president said he expected significant progress in Glasgow. “But it's going to require us to continue to focus on what China's not doing what Russia is not doing," he added.

Asked why he was pressing oil producers to increase oil supplies at the same time as pushing to cut consumption of fossil fuels, Mr Biden said petrol was still needed to enable people to drive to work.
 
Full story
 
4) US coal boom dealing blow to Biden's credibility as he heads to COP26 UN climate summit
Daily Mail, 31 October 2021

The amount of electricity produced from coal will increase in the U.S this year for the first time since 2014, according to new data, dealing a blow to President Biden's climate promises when he arrives in Scotland for a United Nations climate summit on Monday.

Cutting energy production from coal in favor of cleaner natural gas is at the forefront of efforts to tackle global warming, as developed nations tell India and China in particular to clean up.

But a surge in the cost of natural gas has seen the U.S. switching back to coal, according to U.S. Energy Information Administration

It said it expected 22 percent more coal-fired power this year than last year - the first annual increase since 2014.

The details brought fresh criticism from left and right that Biden was in danger of lecturing the developing world to 'do as I say, not what I do.'

Steve Milloy, senior policy fellow at the Energy and Environment Legal Instituteaid the surge in coal use was the result of policies that demonized natural gas.

'Utilities burn whatever is cheapest. That's coal right now,' he said.

'Biden is carrying out this war on natural gas. If he got his way fracking would go away and fracking is the only reason US emissions have gone down in the first place.

'If you do believe in reducing emissions, then you know, Biden's plan and his actions are entirely backfiring.'

Full story

 
5) Benny Peiser on Boris Johnson's G20/COP26 statement 
GB News, 31 October 2021
 
'We've heard it for the last almost 30 years, it's always the same last chance.'
 
Dr Benny Peiser, director of Net Zero Watch, reacts to Boris Johnson's G20 summit speech about climate change.

 

Click here to watch the full interview
 
6) Robert Peston: Has COP 26 already flopped?
The Spectator, 1 November 2021

'There is no chance of stopping climate change next week,' the Prime Minister told me in an interview for ITV News. 'There is no chance of getting an agreement to limit climate change to 1.5 degrees'.
 
Standing in Rome's magnificent ancient Colosseum, he warned that the cost of this failure, if not somehow rectified, would be far worse than the recent pandemic: 'The Romans thought they were going to go on forever...Then wham, the middle of the fifth century, they hit a complete crisis, uncontrolled immigration, you have the Dark Ages. The lesson is things can go backwards... for a long time. Unless we fix climate change, unless we halt that massive growth in temperatures, that's the risk we run"'

But if COP 26 has already failed, as the PM seems to be saying – because the world's biggest emitters are such a long way from promising measures to cut greenhouse gas emissions by the necessary 55 per cent before 2030 – why on earth are more than 100 world leaders descending on Glasgow for the negotiations?

Also what's the point of this weekend's preceding discussions in Rome of the G20 leaders of the world's most powerful nations? For Boris Johnson, COP 26 is what he calls a 'weigh station', a checkpoint on a route towards future agreements that would stand a chance of reducing global warming to a safe increment.

For him there remain possible constructive outcomes to be achieved in Glasgow, such as securing pledges to end the use of 'unabated' coal (that's all burning of coal where the CO2 isn't 'captured' and kept out of the atmosphere) by 2030 for developed nations and 2040 for developing nations.
 
But truthfully, though he refused to say this, the best possible outcome of COP 26 for Johnson is that in the final conclusions there is backing for what officials call a 'ratchet', which would be a mechanism such that in two or three years all countries would come back together to make ew pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions that would exceed their current nationally determined contributions (or NDCs).
 
The point is that in the absence of such a ratchet, it will be another five years before new commitments to end the use of fossil fuels would be made, and most scientists warn five years would be far too late. However, when I pressed him on the importance of the ratchet mechanism, he said he didn't want to herald it now, because it would provide dangerous reassurance to big carbon dioxide and methane emitters like China, India, South Africa and the US that they don't have to do more immediately to limit their emissions.

'We don't want at this stage to take any of the pressure off at Glasgow and what we want to achieve in Glasgow,' he said. A related question is what could might have been secured in Rome at the G20 warm up event. Finding consensus even there is also challenging, because of divergent economic interests between the mature and developing economies, and divergent cultural approaches to big politics between West and East.
 
'What is really striking,' said an official, 'is that in places like India and throughout Asia they don't see the point in making a commitment to a target like 1.5 degrees when we don't have a clear and detailed plan to achieve it'. He said many Asian governments think it's better to start with practical measures we all know we can do and then accept the degree of warming that flows from that. In the West however 'we have a history of identifying the best outcome, 1.5 degrees in this case, and then working out a route to get there'.
 
Alongside that almost ideological difference is the crude economic truth that economies like South Africa, India and China remain at an earlier stage in their development than the UK, European Union and US, and therefore retain coal power as an important engine of growth. Which is why the PM was reassured when he spoke to China’s president Xi this weekend and urged him to move faster to reduce China’s dependence on coal that Xi signalled a willingness to at least keep talking.
 
Full post

 

7) Millions at risk of soaring energy bills as at least 'another 20' firms tipped to go under
Daily Express, 31 October 2021

ENERGY bills are likely to skyrocket in the weeks and months to come as energy companies go to the wall, the chairman of an influential Parliamentary committee has warned.
 
Alan Brown, the SNP’s MP for Kilmarnock and Loudoun, believes the Government needs to step in to shield the least wealthy from the impact of spiralling prices, emphasising that firms are guaranteed to pass costs on to consumers.
 
It comes as Scottish Power Chief Executive Keith Anderson claimed Britain's energy market faces an absolute massacre which could force at least 20 more suppliers into bankruptcy in the next month alone unless the Government reviews the energy price cap.

Mr Brown, who heads up the APPG on Energy Costs, was speaking before Bulb energy became the latest company to hit the skids, with energy watchdog Ofgem suggesting it could go under as early as next week.

Bulb is the UK’s seventh-biggest energy supplier, which has an estimated 1.7 million household customers.
 
Full story
 

8) Majority of Britons do not trust Government’s Net Zero plans
The Daily Telegraph, 1 November 2021

The majority of people do not trust the Government to recommend the right solutions for making their home heating, cars and air travel more environmentally friendly. 

More than 50 per cent of people polled said they would not trust the Government’s decarbonisation solutions, with 54 per cent sceptical of home heating plans, 55 per cent of air travel and 52 per cent of road travel, including electric cars, according to a survey by Opinium for The Telegraph.

The results underscore the challenge that the Government faces in persuading people to switch their gas boilers for low-carbon options such as heat pumps, or to choose an electric car.

The poll found that half of UK adults would be willing to spend more on a car or heating system if they were a greener option.

But the same amount of people also said they were unlikely to buy an electric car in the next five years, compared to 30 per cent who said they might.

Commenting on the results, Philip Dunne, the chairman of the environmental audit committee, said tackling climate change had clear widespread public support.

He added: “However, if we are to transition to a low carbon economy, we must be honest with consumers of the potential disruption and costs of this.”

“Tackling climate change is the responsibility of us all – but to succeed, the Government must have the public on board.”

The survey results also revealed that two-fifths of the UK adult population oppose the concept of road pricing, which automotive experts have said will be “inevitable” to bridge the gap in finances left by the loss of fuel duty as people adopt electric cars.
 
Full story

 

9) David Quinn: Politicians in denial over cost of going green
The Sunday Times, 31 October 2021
 
Prepare for a backlash when the public finds out what fighting global warming will really mean at an individual level

 

A massive 82 per cent of Irish voters have told pollsters they are opposed to increased taxes on energy or fuel to combat climate change. So the chances are high that you are one of those people. But the odds are almost as good that you are also among the 80 per cent of adults who believe that cutting our carbon emissions by at least half between now and 2030 is a great idea.

These are the seemingly contradictory findings of two recent opinion polls on climate policy, one commissioned by The Irish Times and the other by Friends of the Earth. So what’s going on?
 
The most obvious explanation is “nimbyism”. We all want more houses to be built, but not close to ours. We support additional wind farms, but somewhere we can neither see nor hear them. And we want political action to reduce carbon emissions, but would prefer if someone else paid the price.

This means that when we discuss climate change with our friends, we fret about the state of the planet and praise eco-campaigners such as Greta Thunberg, and mean every word of it. Equally, we decry anyone who seems to minimise, never mind deny, the scale of the challenge we face. We are fervently hoping the UN conference on climate change, Cop26, which starts in Glasgow today, proves a great success, and the world commits to keeping the global temperature rise to within 1.5C of pre-industrial levels.

But at the same time, deep down, we don’t seem to think the issue of climate change is quite so urgent. The Friends of the Earth survey, for example, asked people what issues rank as most pressing for them. Housing, Covid-19, the economy and health were in front with the environment in fifth place.

These polling numbers do matter, as politicians are only too keenly aware of them. They know that people pay a lot of lip service to the environment, and may even mean it to a certain extent, but they also realise the public don’t want to personally pay any great price to avert global warming.

Hence the huge opposition to carbon tax, which is set for more hikes in future budgets. The government plans to make the fossil fuels in your car, or that you use to heat your home, prohibitively expensive. They must reckon with the fact that almost three out of four people are against making it more expensive to buy petrol or diesel cars, and are against taxing homes for not being energy efficient, while 60 per cent are opposed to cutting the size of the national cattle herd.

On Monday an ultra-ambitious carbon budget was published on behalf of the government by the Climate Change Advisory Council. It set the scene for the sweeping cuts that each sector of society, including private households, needs to make to their carbon output if we are to meet our now legally enforceable target of halving emissions over the next eight years. Between now and 2026, emissions are supposed to reduce by almost 5 per cent a year, and from then to 2030, by 8.3 per cent each year. To put this in perspective, emissions decreased by only 3.6 per cent last year even though much of society ground to a halt.

Less will be asked of certain sectors, especially agriculture, because it is regarded as a vital indigenous industry but it will still be required to reduce its carbon footprint by 21 to 30 per cent by 2030.

The Irish Farmers Journal asked the accountancy firm KPMG to assess the effect of this on farming. It calculated that a 30 per cent cut in emissions would cost 56,000 jobs, would require a 20 per cent cut in cattle numbers, and farm income would collapse by a third. Even a 20 per cent reduction would result in 10,000 job losses. These calculations assume cattle farmers can successfully introduce new emission-reduction technologies in the meantime, a very tall order.

Meanwhile, private householders will be expected to spend heavily in order to do their bit. The Climate Change Advisory Council believes 600,000 homes will need to be retrofitted by 2030. We will also need to install heat pumps, and Bord Gais Energy estimates the cost of that in the average home is between €12,000 and €18,000. Heat pumps take longer to warm a house than oil or gas and only really work if you retrofit your dwelling as well, so it retains heat better.

Depending on the age and size of your house, this could easily cost tens of thousands more, not to mention the inconvenience of having workers trampling about the place for weeks on end. On top of that, we are expected to buy electric cars.

Given all these problems, I cannot see a way the government’s targets will be met, and it is a terrible reflection on the state of public debate in Ireland that the unrealistic nature of these targets are not being discussed properly in either the media or in Leinster House. It is like having a Soviet-era multi-year plan imposed on us from above, when the plan itself is barely questioned, only what sectors should bear most of the cost.

There is also an authoritarian aspect to this, given that the targets are a legal requirement and sectors will be punished for not meeting them. That could easily include ordinary members of the public through ever higher taxes if they do not switch away from fossil fuels fast enough.
 
The voice of the 82 per cent who are opposed to increases in carbon and other fuel taxes is almost absent from the airwaves.
 
Full story (£)
 

10) Kevin Williamson: The Empty Spectacle of the U.N. Climate-Change Summit
National Review, 31 October 2021

By staking out a maximalist position that leaves no room for negotiation, the climate doomsayers guarantee that nothing will get done.
 
As President Joe Biden limps into Glasgow, there are only two things holding back his big, showy climate agenda: politics and economics.

If you happen to be one of those people who insists that climate change should be “beyond politics,” then you are certainly entitled to the sentiment — but spare us any lectures about “democracy” in the future, because politics is how liberal-democratic societies go about their public business.
 
And the politics here do not favor dramatic action, whatever is said or notionally agreed to in Glasgow.
Joe Biden and his Democratic allies face the same problem as other would-be climate saviors throughout both the developed world and the poorer countries: There is very little popular support for radical social and economic change in pursuit of climate goals.
 
Even a sharp-as-a-doorknob goofus such as President Biden understands this, which is why his anti-coal program was the first thing the White House put on the altar when negotiating with Senator Joe Manchin for universal pre-K and tuition-free community college. Climate change, they tell us, is an existential threat, against which bold and radical action must be taken — but not if it means Democrat-voting millionaires in Greenwich, Conn., and Cambridge, Mass., have to pay for their own babysitters.

For the same reason, the Biden administration is expected to end up approving more oil-and-gas development on federal lands. You may think that’s a good policy — I think that’s a good policy. But if you believe, as the people we’ll all be hearing from in Glasgow do, that the end is nigh unless there is fundamental change that includes a dramatic reduction in the use of fossil fuels, then there isn’t any acceptable tradeoff there.
 
The reason Green New Dealers insist on attempting to foist upon us these fantasies that their climate agenda will produce millions of new, high-paying industrial jobs is the unspoken fact at the center of this issue: The Biden administration and other like-minded governments around the world are not going to sacrifice some large share of 10 million energy-industry and energy-adjacent jobs in pursuit of climate goals — especially when U.S. action is expected to have approximately squat in terms of global climate impact without comparable measures from governments no sane person trusts to implement them.
 
You’ve probably seen the polls: Americans say they care about climate change — until it comes time to pay for climate policy. Some 68 percent of Americans — more than two-thirds — say they would not be willing to pay $10 a month in order to fund measures to prevent or ameliorate climate change. They are not going to support paying more for gasoline, for heating and cooling their homes, or for food.
 
Maybe they should. But they won’t.

Hence the retreat into climate moralism. “It’s not your fault the world is getting hotter,” the apologists say, “it’s the wicked, naughty 1 percent. So why should you” — we — “be on the hook to pay for it?” You know it’s true — all the fashion magazines say so. The climate doesn’t care if a molecule of carbon dioxide comes out of Jeff Bezos’s tailpipe or if it comes out of the fire over which some penniless rustic cooks his dinner; greenhouse gases are greenhouse gases.
 
But left-wing moral hysterics insist that every issue is, in some ineffable way, every other issue. You’ve heard it all: “Climate is a racial-justice issue. Climate is an economic-justice issue. Climate is a trans-rights issue.” Etc. That’s teapot radicalism, a hobby for bored youngsters in the rich countries, the sort of thinking that produces the likes of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

If what you care about is human flourishing rather than gross emissions, then you might consider greenhouse-gas emissions per unit of economic output. But you don’t hear about that very much, because many of the rich countries (Switzerland, the United Kingdom, France, Norway) do pretty well by that metric, while the worst performers include many poor countries (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Moldova). The United States is not an outstanding performer by that standard (better than Canada, not as good as Germany), but it produces just a little more than half as much carbon dioxide per dollar of economic output as Russia.
 
If you care about both the climate and human prosperity, then, presumably, you’d want a world with policies that look more like those of Western Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States than like those of Turkmenistan.
 
But ask the climate activists what the real problem is and they’ll tell you it is capitalism. “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism,” Phil McDuff writes in the Guardian. “The fight against climate change is a fight against capitalism,” say the activists at Open Democracy. “We must abolish capitalism,” says climate activist and author Mark Jaccard. In the New York Times, Benjamin Fong writes: “The Climate Crisis? It’s Capitalism, Stupid.” What can save the world from climate change? “Only socialism,” says John Molyneux.

When I ask what can be done to help with climate change and someone lobs a copy of Das Kapital at my head, the conversation is over.
 
John Kennedy famously declared that Americans would “pay any price, bear any burden” in the cause of liberty. In the cause of climate change, Americans are pretty adamant that they won’t bear the cost of two frappuccinos a month. That counsels modesty in our policy ambitions. But at the same time, the hysterics and the moralists have staked out a maximalist position that makes working toward consensus with responsible parties all but impossible. Republicans in the United States don’t want to hear about climate change, but, in much of the rest of the world, the mainstream center-right parties are open to climate action and interested in it. What they aren’t interested in is neo-primitivism, anti-humanism, or Marxism — which are, experience has shown us, ultimately all the same thing.

So, expect some real Sturm und Drang in Glasgow.

And then expect — not much.
 
11) And finally: Twitter takes aim at climate  misinformation during COP26
Axios, 1 November 2021

Twitter on Monday said it will be making authoritative information about climate change more accessible to users during this year's United Nations COP26 climate summit.
 
Why it matters: It’s the latest tech giant to take aim at climate misinformation, expected to be more prevalent during the global conference, which brings together leaders from around the world to discuss the climate crisis.

Last month, Google and its subsidiary YouTube announced a new policy that prohibits climate deniers from being able to monetize their content.

In September, Facebook — introduced new measures intended to counter misinformation about climate change.
 
Details: Twitter on Monday will role out a new program designed to “pre-bunk” climate misinformation, or get ahead of false narratives about climate by exposing people to more accurate information about the crisis on its platform.
 
The pre-bunks, which include authoritative information about topics like the science backing climate change and global warming from experts, will appear in users‘ “explore” tabs, ”search” portals, and Twitter trends lists.

The company says it’s working with a range of experts globally to provide context on topics that are going to be discussed during COP26. The company will also host relevant organizations via Twitter Spaces (live conversations).

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The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.