Climate News Roundup To December 2024
Todd Moss discusses the World Bank’s focus on ‘greenhouse gas’ reductions in its loans to poor countries. Thus, loans to Guinea Bissau aim at a 30 per cent reduction in its emissions
The country’s income and current emissions per capita are both about one per cent of the US’s.
At the OECD, a plan to cut off financing for ‘fossil fuel’ generation failed.
In a move that his successor is certain to disregard President Biden has increased the United States’ climate target to cut emissions by 61-66 percent by 2035, up from the 2021 pledge to slash ‘greenhouse gases’ by 50-52 percent by 2030 over 2005 levels.
Trump promised to reverse every Biden-ordered restriction on the production of US domestic energy starting on Day 1. This includes removing onerous pipeline permit processes and preventing hundreds of billions of dollars in subsidies being paid to leftist NGOs.
But New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed a law requiring “big fossil fuel polluters” to help pay to repair alleged extreme weather damage, estimated at $75 billion.
The International Energy Agency (IEA), founded to combat the OPEC cartel, has long been a tireless ‘renewables’ agitator. Incoming Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources chair John Barrasso said, “French President Macron’s observation that IEA has become the ‘armed wing for implementing the Paris Agreement’ is regrettably true,” and calls for radical reform.
The European Commission has finally told environmental NGOs including WWF and Friends of the Earth that the money they receive from the €5.4 billion fund earmarked for ‘green’ projects between 2021 and 2027 can no longer be used for advocacy and lobbying work.
The UK PM’s major policy statement promised, “building a diverse low carbon energy system, we will make the most of our abundant natural resources to keep bills down for good and protect consumers from future price shocks”.
He repeated the “clean energy superpower” goal but not the promise that it would cut bills by £300. Rupert Darwall notes, “Between 2009 and 2020, the average price of electricity rose by 67 per cent”.
This is despite the natural gas average price falling by 15 per cent over the period. The price increase was due to an eightfold increase in wind and solar supply, the effect of which will only be amplified by Miliband’s push for more offshore wind.
David Turver unearths the UK’s official estimates for committed energy subsidies. They comprise £166 billion for power purchases, feed-in tariffs and wood subsidies; £45 billion for ‘carbon’ capture and storage; and £68 billion to offset the costs of renewables!
Policy involves removing planning restrictions on windfarms and attracting £40 billion per year of private investment. At most, this can only save £6 billion of gas costs, and will increase the cost of living.
The UK also intends to reduce street lighting to save on ‘greenhouse’ emissions. A quarter of travel by car is at night during which 40 percent of serious crashes occur.
German ‘Greens’ call for ‘transport justice’ – which they say will be costless because the taxes on fuels will mean we just won’t travel much and when we do it will be powered by wind generated electricity!
This is unlikely to survive Germany’s February election.
Norway’s governing centre left coalition intends to cut the electricity link with Denmark when it comes for renewal in 2026. Norway has an abundance of hydro power but during Dunkelflauten (wind droughts) the interconnect forces its own electricity prices to German levels.
Robert Bryce showing soaring December prices, says “Germany Gets Dunkelf**ked Again,”
New York Times journalist Thomas Friedman in 2015 wrote, “Germany will be Europe’s first green, solar-powered superpower.” In fact, the ‘green’ energy transition has led to a 300 percent increase in energy costs and poor economic performance as indicated below:
Drieu Godefridi commented on German energy policy’s damage, “We only remember the big names – VW, BASF, Mercedes-Benz — but every big company that disappears or downsizes takes with it a myriad of small and medium-sized enterprises that end up collapsing along with it.”
Echoing global trends, Australian funds allocated to firms prioritising “environmental social and governance” (ESG) – mainly focussed on avoiding hydrocarbon investments – have decreased markedly.
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Mackie, Millstein and Sarafin use 47 years of iceberg satellite observations and find no trend in their surface area. This suggests that extreme calving events such as the 2017 Larsen C iceberg are statistically unexceptional and that “extreme calving events are not necessarily a consequence of climate change”.
New research from the CO2 Coalition finds, “Only about half of (human) emissions of CO2 are remaining in the atmosphere. That means that nature is sequestering the other 50 percent, primarily by increased photosynthesis (greening) and also in the oceans. In other words, nature is a net “sink” not a source for CO2.”
Tony Thomas reveals Australian catastrophian climate scientists unwittingly repudiate the “settled science” notion in seeking more funding.
The funding they seek means they have no idea:
· when and where so-called “tipping points” might arise
· about sea ice developments
· whether ‘climate change’ will increase or decrease the Murray Darling water flows
· whether an increase in CO2 will cause more or less rain for a given location
· how ‘climate change’ will impact cities and urban landscapes
· how wind droughts and cloud might undermine ‘renewables’ and ‘net-zero’ targeting.
Roger Pielke traces the politicisation of science starting 20 years ago with the phrase “science communication” as countenancing and encouraging overt or stealth advocacy; within the academic community it has institutionalized and legitimized political advocacy.
Small modular nuclear reactors: a UK firm has pioneered a welding of two pieces of metal together using a high-energy density fusion process centered on a high-powered electron gun operating in a local vacuum.
The process reduced a one year operation to one day, opening possible major cost savings.
Yet another ‘Carbon’ Capture and Storage project bites the dust. The main contractor of Project Tundra, a plan to retrofit a North Dakota coal plant with ‘carbon’ capture technology, has bowed out.
This is despite the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations last year having awarded the project up to $350 million.
See more here regulationeconomics.com
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