In this newsletter:
1) Winning! France drops renewables targets, prioritises nuclear in new energy bill
France 24, 9 January 2024
2) Net Zero Germany: Industry shrinks for sixth month as recession looms
Bloomberg, 9 January 2024
3) Protesting farmers use tractors – and piles of dung – to paralyse Germany
The Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2024
4) Sabine Beppler-Spahl: Germany’s farmers are fighting back against green tyranny
Spiked, 8 January 2024
5) German government backtracks on fuel tax hikes for farmers following protests
Politico, 4 January 2024
6) Political climate change in Germany
Eugyppius, 6 January 2024
7) Shift to renewable energy would make economic growth impossible, says expert
The Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2024
8) Keir Starmer: Net Zero investment could be scaled back
The Times, 5 January 2024
9) UK car market permanently smaller because of Work from Home and Net Zero
The Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2024
10) The Death of the 1.5 Degree Climate Target
Foreign Policy, 8 January 2024
11) Neil Winton: Europe needs mass market EVs to avoid existential threat
Forbes, 7 January 2024
12) And finally: Huge blow to EV car revolution as sales to Brits plummet – with electric cars just a quarter of new purchases
The Sun, 6 January 2024
Full details:
1) Winning! France drops renewables targets, prioritises nuclear in new energy bill
France 24, 9 January 2024
Critics are deriding as a step backward a new French energy bill that favours the further development of nuclear power and avoids setting targets for solar and wind power and other renewables.
France, like other EU countries, aims to achieve carbon neutrality in 2050.
The proposed text, which is slated to go before the cabinet early next month and then be submitted to lawmakers, reaffirms France’s commitment to nuclear power to ensure “energy sovereignty”.
The country became a leader in nuclear power generation after the 1973 oil crisis, building over 50 such power plants that produced around two-thirds of the country’s electricity.
But those reactors are ageing and France has yet to bring the first of a new generation of nuclear power plants online.
The proposed text affirms “the sustainable choice of using nuclear energy as a competitive and carbon-free” source of electricity, and targets the construction of at least six but as many as 14 new reactors to pull off the transition to clean energy and meet climate change goals.
But the proposed text sets no such targets for building renewable capacity, in particular wind and solar, whereas previous energy laws did.
The Ministry of Energy Transition said “it is false to say that there is no renewables objective” as the government will set the targets itself later.
But that pledge does not satisfy activists and experts.
“It’s a terrible step back,” said Arnaud Gosse, a lawyer specialising in environmental law.
Full story
See also: A workable alternative to Net Zero. A plan for cleaner, reliable and affordable energy (pdf)
2) Net Zero Germany: Industry shrinks for sixth month as recession looms
Bloomberg, 9 January 2024
German industrial output unexpectedly declined in November, underscoring the persisting manufacturing woes in Europe’s largest economy.
Production declined 0.7% from October, led by capital goods, and intermediate goods, the statistics office said Tuesday. That’s the sixth consecutive drop and defies economists in a Bloomberg survey, who’d predicted a 0.3% increase.
Germany probably ended 2023 with its first recession since the pandemic, as analysts reckon data will reveal a second straight contraction in output in the fourth quarter. Manufacturers — Germany’s economic backbone — are struggling from costly energy, higher global interest rates and a slowdown in China.
The figures come a day after a reading for factory orders also fell short of expectations. Additionally, with the government strait-jacketed over ramping up investment and train strikes looming this week, few economists anticipate much of a pickup this year.
Full story
3) Protesting farmers use tractors – and piles of dung – to paralyse Germany
The Daily Telegraph, 8 January 2024
Thousands of German farmers blocked motorways and city centres across the country on Monday as they began a week of protests against government proposals to cut their fuel subsidies.
The co-ordinated nationwide demonstration saw furious agricultural workers line up their tractors outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, while more than a thousand were massed on a single stretch of motorway near the city of Mainz.
Police also launched an investigation on Monday morning into piles of dung that were dumped outside constituency offices of Germany’s main coalition parties, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-Left SDP party.
In a sign of rising public anger against Mr Scholz, the protests were held despite the German government announcing a partial U-turn on controversial plans to cut tax breaks and fuel subsidies for farmers.
The funding cuts had been drawn up as the chancellor struggled late last year to fill a massive hole in the German government’s budget, which was created by a surprise court ruling that prevented ministers from drawing on pandemic-era funds to support future projects.
Mr Scholz’s coalition initially planned to abolish agricultural diesel subsidies and vehicle tax breaks for farmers – but after major farmers’ protests in December they abandoned the latter policy.
They also diluted the proposal on diesel so that the subsidies would be gradually phased out over several years rather than cut instantly.
But this has not mollified the German farming association, which has vowed to unleash protests “the likes of which the country has never experienced before”.
Full story
4) Sabine Beppler-Spahl: Germany’s farmers are fighting back against green tyranny
Spiked, 8 January 2024
The Net Zero agenda poses an existential threat to European agriculture.
German farmers have begun a week of nationwide demonstrations, blocking roads with tractors in protest against government plans to phase out agricultural subsidies. As Joachim Rukwied, president of the German Farmers’ Association (DBV), put it last month, ‘We will be present everywhere in a way the country has never seen before’. And the farmers are not alone. Lorry drivers, hauliers and tradespeople have also joined in the protests.
The current wave of unrest was prompted back in December. The German government announced plans to abolish tax breaks on agricultural diesel and introduce new taxes on farm vehicles – a move which would cost farmers on average €4,000 per year.
The swift and organised response of the farmers has already frightened the government. On 4 January, it tried to backtrack by announcing that subsidies for new farm vehicles would remain, and that the tax breaks on diesel would be phased out gradually over the course of the next few years, rather than suddenly this year. But these moves have not assuaged farmers’ anger. They insist that the ‘future viability of our industry’ is at stake. And so, as Rukwied put it last week, farmers ‘remain committed’ to the ‘week of action’.
It was naïve of the government to believe that its half-hearted compromise would ever appease the farmers. This conflict goes much deeper than a fight over taxes and subsidies. It is about farmers’ long-standing resentment of the green agenda that has been pursued by successive governments. This agenda now threatens the very future of German agriculture.
Indeed, the farmers first engaged in mass protest back in 2019, after Angela Merkel’s government demanded a 20 per cent reduction in the use of fertilisers and pesticides as part of its ‘agriculture reform package’. Merkel’s successors have only increased the pressure on farmers. Plans to further reduce fertiliser and pesticide use were announced last summer, with the government keen to meet the EU’s strict directives on nitrates. At the same time, the government announced it planned to tighten animal-husbandry regulations, entangling farmers in even more red tape and paperwork.
It is no exaggeration to say that the future of farming is at stake. In the space of just two decades, countless farms have already had to close. The number of farms in Germany during this period has almost halved – from nearly 450,000 in 2001 to 256,000 in 2022.
Environmental restrictions and soaring energy costs haven’t just affected smaller farms, either. Bigger farms have also felt the squeeze. To make matters worse, the prices of fertilisers and pesticides have risen sharply, as the German chemical industry has cut back production due to high energy prices.
Thanks to the government’s embrace of the green agenda, it is incapable of addressing farmers’ concerns. Over and over again, it pursues Net Zero objectives that are directly at odds with the interests of farmers. And just to rub salt into farmers’ wounds, Germany’s agriculture minister, Cem Özdemir, is a militant vegetarian. ‘If we all eat less meat together, we can all do our bit for the planet’, he told a TV talkshow last year. No wonder farmers have lost all trust in the government.
Full post
5) German government backtracks on fuel tax hikes for farmers following protests
Politico, 4 January 2024
BERLIN — Germany's three-party ruling coalition on Thursday partly backed down from a proposal to cut tax privileges for farmers after facing emotional protests.
The government said in a statement that it would gradually phase out tax breaks on diesel fuel for farmers over multiple years rather than cut the benefit abruptly as coalition leaders had initially proposed, in order to “give the affected companies more time to adjust." The government also said it would waive planned tax increases for agricultural vehicles.
The leaders of Chancellor Olaf Scholz's coalition had previously announced the tax hikes on farmers as part of a draft budget deal for 2024 presented last month. The planned increases were part of the coalition’s attempts to plug a multi-billion-euro budget gap that appeared after the country’s top court ruled that some of its spending practices were unlawful.
In response to the coalition’s proposal, farmers organized a major protest in Berlin in which a convoy of 1,700 tractors blocked the main road leading to the Brandenburg Gate. Farmers have also planned nationwide protests for next week.
The coalition climbdown is unlikely to appease the protesters.
"This can only be a first step,” said Joachim Rukwied, president of the German Farmers' Association. “Our position remains unchanged: Both proposals for cuts must be taken off the table. This is clearly also about the future viability of our industry and the question of whether domestic food production is still desirable at all."
Full story
6) Political climate change in Germany
Eugyppius, 6 January 2024
As Alternative für Deutschland approach 40% support in East Germany, a right-leaning CDU faction announce plans to break away from the Union and found a new party that will cooperate with AfD
In September, three East German states – Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg – will hold elections for state parliament. Alternative für Deutschland are now by far the strongest-polling party in each of these states. In Saxony, for example, they are polling at an all-time high of 37%:
The SPD – the party of federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz – has fallen to just 3% support here, well below the threshold for entering parliament, and support for the liberal FDP has all but evaporated. If these were election results and the Saxon chapter of the CDU insisted on retaining its cordon sanitaire against the AfD, it would have to enter a coalition with either the Left Party (Die Linke) or the Greens or both. This would force the CDU to continue its association with leftist policies that are deeply unpopular with its base, doing further long-term damage to the Union.
The latest poll from Thüringen likewise has the AfD at 36.5%, and when somebody bothers to poll Brandenburg again, we’ll almost surely see similar AfD gains there. Unfortunately it is very hard to peel support from the CDU, even in East Germany; a lot of people from my parents’ generation will just never stop voting for them, no matter what they do. This is why I think, in the present landscape, the ceiling for AfD support in the East stands at around 40%. In Saxony, this is just short of the outright majority necessary to govern alone without any partners.1
The pressure, however, is building within the CDU. Somehow, some way, something will give, and that something might just be a small faction within the CDU/CSU known as the WerteUnion, or the Values Union. The WerteUnion was founded in 2017 by right-leaning members of the Union parties in response to Angela Merkel’s constant flirtations with the left. The WerteUnion understands itself as a traditionalist conservative movement within the party, although CDU leadership refuses to extend the faction formal recognition and regards it with hostility.
Among the WerteUnion founders is Hans-Georg Maaßen, a lawyer and former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Maaßen has become an increasingly outspoken opponent not only of the CDU but of German politics in general. In response, the CDU under Friedrich Merz has further alienated him by instituting proceedings to kick him out of the party, even though Maaßen supported Merz’s candidacy to lead the party.
This week, Maaßen announced his plans to split from the CDU and make the WerteUnion into its own party. If the membership agrees, as it almost certainly will, the WerteUnion could field candidates in the upcoming East German elections. Maaßen says the move is necessary because the CDU establishment under Merz have insisted on “continuing … the left-wing course” set by Angela Merkel, and have “failed to realise the catastrophic state of Germany and are not prepared to deal with Merkel’s disastrous policies.” The WerteUnion will “go its own way,” Maaßen has said, and – crucially – it will “tear down all firewalls.”
By that, Maaßen means that his party will cooperate with the AfD, a step the CDU has long refused. Come the fall, in other words, there will be a new party ready to receive the support of traditional CDU voters who have been alienated by Merkel’s centrism but cannot bring themselves to support the evil populists of the AfD. Note that the WerteUnion wouldn’t have to be wildly successful to change the political calculus. If they can capture just 5% of CDU support in Saxony, they would have enough seats in the Landtag to form a coalition with the AfD. This is clearly the strategy that Maaßen has in mind.
Full post
7) Shift to renewable energy would make economic growth impossible, says expert
The Daily Telegraph, 6 January 2024
Climatologist says wind, solar and hydroelectric power offer no miracle solution
Economic growth as we know it is impossible if governments shift to 100 per cent renewable energy, a renowned French climatologist has said.
Jean-Marc Jancovici, the author of World Without End, the graphic novel on climate change which has sold nearly a million copies in France, said that wind, solar and hydroelectric power offer no miracle solution and “will not allow us to maintain today’s modern industrial world”.
He said: “Globalisation is basically ships, trucks, planes and computers, and all this relies on fossil fuels. The idea that we can keep all that in a world with only renewable energies is a bold assumption and I don’t believe that such a shift is compatible with maintaining growth in physical economic output.
“It’s also an unproven assumption to claim that renewable energy will remain cheap in a world with only renewable energy.”
Controversially for many greens, Mr Jancovici argues that nuclear power is an effective way to soften the blow with an “emergency parachute” to reduce the risk of “social collapse”.
Nuclear power has seen a widespread return to favour after years in the doldrums since the Fukushima disaster. Emmanuel Macron, the French president, recently announced his intention to build another six next-generation EPR reactors to add to France’s vast fleet of 58.
At Cop28, a group of 22 countries pledged to triple nuclear capacity by 2050.
Mr Jancovici said this was doable but would “not itself save the industrial world”.
Tripling capacity means “going from 2 per cent of the final energy that we use to 6 per cent globally,” he said, adding: “It’s a good idea but will not spare us from having to make tremendous efforts on decreasing energy use.”
Given all that, he said he had sympathy for politicians such as Mr Macron and Rishi Sunak who continue to plug “green growth”.
He said: “They can’t really promise anything else because they have no alternative. France, like the UK, has no plan B for a world in structural recession. How do you manage the budget? How do you manage pensions?”
“As we are not equipped to face that situation, it’s pretty logical and human to say that it won’t happen.”
The world will have to “get rid of India starting next year” if the planet is to stick to global warming targets, he said.
Mr Jancovici, 61, a charismatic climatologist who pioneered the carbon footprint concept in France and sits on a climate commission advising the government, has a habit of dropping bombshells.
Full story
8) Keir Starmer: Net Zero investment could be scaled back
The Times, 5 January 2024
Labour’s plans to borrow £28 billion a year to invest in green industries could be scaled back further, Sir Keir Starmer said as he pledged to prioritise fiscal responsibility.
The Labour leader said reaching the spending goal would depend on whether the party met its overarching fiscal pledge to get debt falling as a share of national income after five years.
He said the policy would be funded from borrowing but it was “subject to our fiscal rules”. If public finances were insufficient then “we will borrow less,” Starmer said as he faced questions about his commitment to the policy after delivering his first speech of the year.
It is the clearest sign yet that Starmer is willing to scale back on the green spending plans amid increasing attacks on the policy from the Conservative Party. In June the Labour leader watered down the policy by saying the pledge to borrow £28 billion a year to spend on green industries would not be fulfilled until the second half of Labour’s first term.
Full story
9) UK car market permanently smaller because of Work from Home and Net Zero
The Daily Telegraph, 5 January 2024
Industry chiefs do not expect new car sales to ever return to their pre-pandemic peak
Britain’s car market has shrunk permanently since the pandemic as the rise of home working and shift towards net zero hammers sales, industry chiefs have said.
Sales of new cars in the UK hit 1.9m in 2023, the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) said, a jump of 17.9pc compared with a year ago but still 17.7pc lower than before Covid hit.
Mike Hawes, chief executive of the SMMT, said a combination of economic and social changes meant families were less likely to want multiple cars in their driveways today.
These included the rise of remote working, government policies aimed at making transport greener and the shrinking availability of lower-priced, entry level cars, as manufacturers focus on bigger, more profitable SUV models instead.
As a result, Mr Hawes said he did not expect new car sales to ever return to their pre-pandemic peak of 2.69 million per year, a record previously reached in 2016.
Full story
10) The Death of the 1.5 Degree Climate Target
Foreign Policy, 8 January 2024
The current path of climate policy is at a dead end—a welcome opportunity to rethink.
By Jun Arima, a professor at Tokyo University and a former Japanese negotiator at U.N. climate conferences, and Vijaya Ramachandran, the director for energy and development at the Breakthrough Institute.
How many more U.N. climate conferences will it take for the world to admit that the current climate policy path is at a dead end?
Calls by politicians, activists, and journalists to double down ring increasingly hollow in the face of overwhelming evidence that 2024 will be the first year in which average global surface temperature is likely to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the preindustrial period before 1900. The long-term average increase since that period will pass 1.5 degrees in 2030. Even staying significantly below 2 degrees Celsius—the target that the climate policy community used until 2015 before lowering it in order to galvanize lawmakers—now looks unlikely.
Missing the 1.5 degree target does not mean that we’re all going to boil, bake, and die. Global emissions growth has slowed down enough that the extreme warming scenarios brandished so carelessly in the public debate have become all but impossible. Deaths due to natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, have also declined radically as countries have become richer and more resilient. And economic losses due to climate shocks have decreased fivefold between the 1980s and mid 2000s.
Sticking to an unrealistic temperature target has severe economic and geopolitical effects. Panic over not reaching the target has led to a radical push for an immediate phaseout of fossil fuels, ignoring the fact that they still make up 80 percent of the world’s primary energy supply. That call is being led by rich countries that have become wealthy using fossil fuels and continue to gobble up oil and gas—and which now want to restrict less-developed countries from using these fuels to lift themselves out of energy poverty, a primary reason for their destitution. Development advocates are rightly calling out these unfair policies, enforced through institutions such as the World Bank, as eco-colonialism.
Unrealistic temperature targets combined with continued high consumption of fossil fuels has meant that there is little to no carbon budget available for the poorest countries to grow their energy use. Sticking to the goal of freezing emissions—or even targeting negative emissions to compensate for any overshoot—turns global economic activity into a zero-sum game.
Room for one country to develop, which may require increased use of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, means that another must shrink its economy. The distribution conflict over emissions rights will be epic and bitter, not just between rich and poor countries but also among poor countries themselves, making any new agreements to reduce emissions even more difficult.
Enter Russia and China, which have made it clear that they will not play by Western rules, including those on climate policy. Since launching the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has sought to strengthen its ties to OPEC and secure its role in oil and gas markets. China is investing everywhere in resource extraction, including fossil fuels in Africa and the Middle East. The three main Chinese energy companies—CNPC, CNOOC, and Sinopec—have emerged as major investors in Africa’s oil and gas sectors.
Despite these concerns, Western governments refuse to support investments in poor countries’ energy sectors in hopes that starving the developing world of energy will help meet the 1.5-degree target. This has created a huge opening for Russia and China, which they will likely leverage to strengthen autocracy across these regions.
Paradoxically, acknowledging the demise of the 1.5-degree target in 2024 could reduce tensions between rich and poor countries—provided that governments seize the opportunity to reset climate goals. This could be the year when unrealistic temperature goals and endless theoretical fights over a phase-down versus a phaseout of fossil fuels are replaced by a focus on the three positive ideas that came out of the most recent U.N. climate conference, COP28, which concluded in Dubai in December.
In the conference’s outcome statement, nearly 200 signatory countries agreed on the need for transition fuels in poor countries—in other words, their use of fossil fuels will grow faster than their ability to transition away from them. Second, the signatories agreed that countries have different resource endowments and will therefore follow very different trajectories to decarbonize. Third, there was a strong commitment that nuclear energy can be an important source of clean and reliable power.
For the first time, COP28 officially recognized that transition fuels—a euphemism for fossil fuels tolerated to prevent economic collapse and allow development if abundant green energy is not yet available—“can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” COP signatories finally acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that poor countries consume only a tiny fraction of the energy gobbled up by rich countries and desperately need more electricity to power homes, schools, hospitals, and factories.
Full post
11) Neil Winton: Europe needs mass market EVs to avoid existential threat
Forbes, 7 January 2024
If European manufacturers don’t produce mass-market electric vehicles soon they will fail to meet tough quotas for EV sales or leave the field open to cheap and cheerful little Chinese battery-powered vehicles.
Experts say there is little likelihood of any European equivalents of the BYD Seagull or Wuling Bingo city cars appearing anytime soon. The only hope for the European Union and U.K. auto industries is a relaxation of the rules sending internal combustion engines to an early grave. (SAIC owns about half of Wuling and General Motors 34%).
Green lobby group Transport & Environment begs to differ, saying European technological advances will lead to more affordable EVs.
European governments insist EVs must win at least 80% of all sales by 2030. In 2024 in Britain similarly, the quota is 22% rising steadily through 2030 to 80% and on to 100% by 2035. In the EU, a formula based on weight and carbon dioxide emissions will force a similar ratio of sales increases and penalties for failure. It has relaxed the rules in 2035 to allow a limited number of ICE vehicles powered by synthetic fuel.
U.S. rules are slightly easier, with the EPA proposing 67% of sales by 2032 are EVs. California and U.S. states, which take its lead, want to ban the sale of new ICE cars by 2035, although allowing a limited number of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles.
The European plan assumes truly affordable EVs are available in huge numbers. The trouble is European manufacturers have been asleep at the switch. EVs for average wage earners are unavailable.
European manufacturers talk about “affordable” new cars starting at around €25,000 ($27,400) after tax, but average wage earners might well scoff at the thought. Until recently little ICE cars like the Ford Ka, Citroen C1, Peugeot 108, SEAT Mii, and Renault Twingo were available from around €12,000 ($13,150). But EU regulations aimed at crippling ICE sales have raised entry-level prices closer to €20,000 ($21,900). Most EV prices start at around €30,000 ($32,900) and average more like €50,000 ($54,800).
Little EVs like the BYD Seagull sell for well under $10,000 in China and could be sold in theory in Europe for close to that figure. These little EVs would have a range of about 100 miles and a top speed close to 60 mph. They can accomplish perhaps 90% of regular motoring requirements. Most EVs now have poor long-distance utility.
Electric vehicle sales in Europe have ridden the crest of a wave of well-heeled early adopters and corporate sales driven by government subsidies. However, just as the easy sales are petering out, European Union rules demand they jump by a factor of more than four by 2030.
These targets are crucial to the future of the European automotive industry because there are huge penalties for failure. For every sale of an ICE vehicle over the limit in Britain, there’s a fine of £15,000 ($16,450). According to a report by Autovista24, Ford, Toyota and Nissan are the most exposed in the U.K. AutoVista said a complicated formula allows the uncompliant to buy EV rights from the likes of all-electric Tesla while they bolster battery power.
Full post
12) And finally: Huge blow to EV car revolution as sales to Brits plummet – with electric cars just a quarter of new purchases
The Sun, 6 January 2024
It comes as EV drivers were told they could face £500 in extra costs from next year to keep their cars on the road
EV sales have plummeted with just a quarter making up new purchases, data reveals.
It comes as a huge blow to the electric car market, and goals to move towards net zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Figures reported by the MailOnline revealed 23 per cent of vehicles bought in 2023 were EVs, compared to 33 per cent in 2022.
Meanwhile, in private sales, only 8.8 per cent of vehicles sold were electric cars.
Plus, according to the latest industry data from the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, just one in four new battery cars have been purchased by private buyers.
And while the number of car registrations across all fuel types grew 14.3 per cent last month, it seems interest in EVs is dwindling.
Recent figures suggest drivers have lost faith in the EV market, especially after Prime Minister Rishi Sunak delayed the petrol ban until 2035.
Full story
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.
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