Climate leader or hypocrite? Germany’s green record under the microscope as Cop26 approaches

Germany likes to fancy itself as a global leader in the fight against climate change, and seldom hesitates to wag a finger at other leading industrial countries – such as China and the United States – for being laggards when it comes to making meaningful cuts in CO2 emissions.

But the reality is that Germany’s own efforts to stop the climate crisis fail to match the soaring rhetoric, and, more importantly, fall short of what scientists say is needed to avert the worst – even though some relatively easy changes, such as introducing a speed limit on its high-speed motorways, could have an immediate impact on reducing the country’s emissions.

Germany, the world’s fourth-largest economy, is also the world’s sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases.

That disconnect between the lofty talk about climate leadership and the reality in Germany is in many ways a microcosm of the dissonance around the world ahead of the United Nations Cop26 summit in Glasgow next week, where global leaders will attempt to thrash out more meaningful action to try to slow a perilous rise in global temperatures.

“There’s an enormous gap between who we are and who we think we are,” says Luisa Neubauer, 25, a leading climate activist in Germany.

We’re talking about climate change, yet at the same time expanding our national infrastructure for importing more natural gas. Germany is everything but a role model when it comes to fighting climate change. We need to face up to that reality.”

An export-driven economy that is by far the largest in Europe, Germany is behind only China, the United States, India, Russia and Japan when it comes to CO2 emissions. One of the first countries to industrialise, Germany is the fourth-largest CO2 emitter in history – having produced more than 92 billion metric tonnes of CO2 emissions since 1750.

“We are well aware of what needs to be done, we know about the problem, we discuss it but it doesn’t make a difference,” says Neubauer, who works closely with Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg.

“We’re one of the world’s biggest polluters and are betraying the younger generations. We carry a huge responsibility in Germany. Who are we to point a finger at other countries? We are far away from fulfilling our own promises. The reality is glorified here because we think we’re so green. If we can’t get what’s needed done, how can we expect other countries to get things done?”

Germany has reduced its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 per cent since 1990, helped considerably by the unintentional implosion of industry as the heavily polluting factories in Communist East Germany closed in the wake of reunification. Germany just barely managed to meet its 2020 emission targets, rather surprisingly and at the last minute, thanks to the fact that the Covid-19 pandemic throttled its powerhouse economy and cut emissions sharply in 2020.

But Germany is already projected to miss its 2021 targets due to the economic rebound and a 6 per cent rise in emissions this year, according to an estimate by the Agora Energiewende think tank in Berlin.

The absence of any speed limit on the country’s Autobahn is just one telling illustration of the disconnect between Germany’s lofty image of itself as a leader in fighting climate change and the reality. Powerful cars built by companies such as Porsche, Mercedes, BMW, Audi and Volkswagen regularly zip around at speeds of up to 130 mph or more.

The mighty car-industry lobby has prevented successive governments from seriously considering changing the law on speed limits, because it is understood that the image of high-speed German cars is vital to helping carmakers sell their vehicles in foreign markets – and to protecting millions of jobs at home in Germany.

An estimated five per cent of Germany’s transportation emissions could be reduced overnight if there were a speed limit of 80 mph. But the unlimited upper speed on the motorways is a sacred cow in Germany, where the country’s Conservative Party once even compared speed limits to communism with a campaign slogan: “Freie Fahrt für frei Bürger” (free travel speeds for free citizens).

“The speed limit is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Neubauer. “We need to be talking about a complete transformation of entire industrial sectors, but people are caught up with opposing a speed limit because they think it would limit their freedom. Too many people in Germany mix up habits with freedom. I realise people want to keep their habits. But our habits are creating terror for the rights of other people. Our habits are destroying the world and will be taking away a lot of people’s freedoms.”

https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/world/germany-climate-change-cop26-coal-b1947081.html

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The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood

Jim O’Brien, Clintel’s Irish ambassador and active in the Irish Climate Science Forum regularly organizes very interesting lectures given by prominent climate scientists. Last night the well-known US climate/policy scientist Roger Pielke Jr had the virtual floor. The full talk can be viewed above or on youtube.

In his lecture, Roger will give valuable insights on the recently‐released IPCC WG1 AR6 Report. Describing it as a “code red for humanity” (as UN Secretary-General Guterres did) was not only wrong, it was irresponsible. Instead of apocalyptic warnings about “immediate risk” a top line message of this report should be: The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood, an incredible change in such a short time since the AR5 Report, which has not been highlighted by the media.

Roger will also show that the IPCC has systematically and very helpfully gone through a large list of extreme‐weather phenomena in the detailed AR6 Report. Their results are quite surprising: floods, hurricanes, tropical cyclones, meteorological and hydrological droughts are not more frequent. Nor are tornadoes, hail, lightning or strong winds more frequent. However heatwaves are more frequent, as is extreme precipitation, and there are two other types of drought, namely agricultural and ecological drought, which have increased. It is very appealing, even seductive, for activists and the media to latch on to extreme events (as inaccurately summarized in the SPM), but at some point we have to say that objective science and its communication matters on this issue. This is a lecture and discussion of wide interest and is highly relevant in the lead‐up to COP26.

https://clintel.org/the-extreme-scenario-that-ipcc-saw-as-most-likely-in-2013-is-now-judged-low-likelihood/

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Big changes needed for widespread use of electric cars

Electric vehicles probably won’t end the weekend but will they turn out the lights?

EVs will be able to pull a trailer, but they will also pull a significant amount of electricity into their large batteries.

The most convenient way to charge an electric car is in your garage or driveway, if you have one. So the most obvious thing to do is plug in when you get home from work, walk inside and start doing all the things that create the evening peak load on the grid.

If the 13 million cars on the road today were made electric tomorrow – and half decided to recharge during the evening peak, the grid simply couldn’t cope. Currently the peak evening period demands 35 gigawatts. If half our cars plugged in, it would need to support a peak load of about 80 gigawatts.

Even if we assumed most of these drivers would use a standard 10 amp power point to charge their car at 2kW that would still potentially create a 50 per cent increase in peak demand.

So to avoid a blackout every evening, we would need some serious upgrades to the network. The value of the country’s electricity networks is worth north of $100 billion. Duplicating this network would impose a cost of this magnitude across all electricity consumers in the country, spread over a couple of decades.

You can imagine EV critics using this line of attack at the next election, especially with Australia to come under increasing pressure to commit to something akin to UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s commitment to ban the sale of petrol cars by 2030.

Happily, however, their concerns are unfounded. The 35 gigawatt capacity of the existing networks can do just fine with a fleet of 13 million electric cars. The trick will be spreading the load out through the day and through the night.

If we try to charge all the EVs at the same time we’re running our air conditioners, flatscreens and dishwashers, the impact on the energy grid will be like a traffic snarl in rush hour. But there is a wide range of technical solutions to allow consumers to adjust their charging behaviour.

For those with solar panels, we know the price they get for feeding their power back into the grid has been falling. If this trend continues they could decide to feed their excess power into their cars instead, especially if that car had the ability to feed power back into the home.

Consumers with smart meters are also able to access what’s known as “time of use” pricing – a contract with the electricity retailer that makes energy cheap when the electricity network isn’t usually busy. An EV driver, knowing energy is cheaper at midnight, simply sets their car to charge at that time. This solves the problem for the networks while saving the typical driver hundreds of dollars per year.

Controlled load tariffs and ripple control methods are crude, but effective. This approach is where the electricity network uses a simple signal receiver at the home to turn things on and off, or up and down. It’s been used in Australia for electric hot water heaters since the 1950s and for airconditioners in Queensland for the past ten years. It could work for EVs, but there are better ways to give consumers more choice and flexibility.

More sophisticated approaches keep the consumer in the loop, using data from smart meters and communicating via smartphone. These techniques have been rolling out in Australia since 2015. In this system the network does some forecasting based on previous energy usage and the expected weather to work out where the problems in their network are going to be the next day. They then send a text message to participants in relevant areas, along the lines of” “If you can reduce your home energy use tomorrow between 3pm and 5pm, we’ll pay you $20”. Participation by any consumer in a particular event is voluntary – so if they’ve got plans that involve using lots of electricity at that time, there’s no problem. But experience so far shows that those who receive these messages switch things off up to 70 per cent of the time. All the network needs to do is get enough people on board.

Finally, there’s the 2020s version of controlled load tariffs – cloud based orchestration. With this approach, the network talks directly to the cars or the chargers over the internet and tells them what to do. Under this system everyone plugs in and forgets about it while a software system takes over and schedules everyone’s charging to smooth out the load and make sure everyone has enough juice to get around the next day.

If we get this right, far from being a problem EVs will enable the electricity networks to make better use of their assets. This should create downward pressure on the network component of energy bills for all consumers. Everyone wins in this scenario, not just the EV drivers.

https://www.news.com.au/technology/motoring/motoring-news/opinion-the-big-myth-about-electric-vehicles-dispelled/news-story/d4c61bc6450b58f726535ffbbfda9246

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Australia: Sequestration is a win for farmers

As COP26 in Glasgow fast approaches we see an increased media focus on achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and what can be achieved by 2030.

While net-zero by 2050 might be a legitimate goal much of the debate has tended to use it as a slogan in what is really a political campaign.

The debate is also focused on only one side of the net-zero equation, reducing emissions. Yet in Australia we have a huge opportunity to drive outcomes on the other side of the equation, capturing carbon which is why the Govt’s recent decision to include soil carbon sequestration as a key element in its net zero 2050 plan is a very positive move.

The solution is right under our feet – soil and soil carbon sequestration – Australia has an abundance of soil and soil that has been depleted of carbon over the past two centuries. At the Mulloon Institute we have a strategy to not only address this issue but in doing so help deliver potentially substantial financial returns for Australian agriculture and Australian farmers.

Since 2018 significant parts of Australia have experienced what Dorothea Mackellar described in her poem “My Country” as a land of “droughts and flooding rains” and “flood and fire and famine”.

When “My Country” was first published in 1908 Mackellar wasn’t focused on CO2 emissions and its ramifications on climate. She was simply recording what she experienced. We now have similar experiences albeit arguably more intensive. But Mackellar also wrote “green tangle of the brushes, where lithe lianas coil, and orchids deck the treetops and ferns the warm dark soil”.

With those words she was experiencing soils rich in carbon and that is certainly something we now have much less of. Scientists estimate we have lost between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of our soil carbon over the past 200 years. Herein lies the opportunity with a net-zero goal. Unfortunately, much of our farming sector has been spooked into thinking that working toward net-zero will be detrimental to their livelihood. The opposite is the case.

With so much soil carbon lost over the past couple of hundred years, the opportunity is now there to transfer it from the atmosphere and put it back where it belongs, in the soil. Carbon sequestration means healthier soils and more nutrient dense food. Increasing soil carbon is one of the substantial strategies required to reach net zero. Globally, soils contain more carbon than plants and the atmosphere combined. By regenerating our soils, we can sequester more carbon underground and slow climate warming. And our farmers can earn income by doing that through the selling of carbon credits.

Key to carbon sequestration is water. A hydrated landscape will speed up carbon sequestration. The recent IPCC Report particularly highlighted a future with less rain overall but more intensive events risking flooding and erosion. Therefore, the better utilisation of what rain does is crucial. Currently in Australia 50% of all rain that falls is lost through rapid run-off or evaporation due to poor ground coverage. Rectifying this can be straightforward and not necessarily expensive.

The Mulloon Institute (TMI) is demonstrating the potential in this approach in the Mulloon Creek catchment comprising 23,000ha with the support of more than 20 landholders. It is also one of just five global projects selected by the UN to assist in the development of guidelines for sustainable, profitable and productive farming.

TMI’s work has expanded to catchments in many parts of NSW, in North Queensland, WA, NT and soon Victoria. Demonstrating this work on the ground in partnership with communities helps farmers to understand the opportunity that landscape rehydration in conjunction with regenerative farming practices provides. According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) soils, if managed sustainably, can sequester up to 0.56 petagrams of carbon (or 2.05 gigatonnes of CO2 equivalent) per year, having the potential to offset yearly as much as 34% of agricultural global greenhouse gas emissions.

In Australia agriculture comprises 13% of our total emissions, so with our landmass, our farmers can contribute significantly to its reduction and at the current price of carbon of around $20 per tonne, but rising very quickly, that is not just a goal or a slogan, it is a great opportunity for our agricultural sector to get on board for net-zero.

https://www.couriermail.com.au/technology/environment/sequestration-is-a-win-for-farmers/news-story/b7928ce7613ca021f6f1df8528af8e50

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My other blogs. Main ones below

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)

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