‘On thin ice’: United Nation’s grim warning over climate change
Same old, same old. Just a routine false prophecy. Sad if anyone believes it
UN Secretary-general Antonio Guterres called on wealthy G20 countries to urgently bring forward carbon neutral goals by a decade to 2040 to “defuse the climate time bomb.”
Mr Guterres warned: “Humanity is on thin ice — and that ice is melting fast,” during the release of a bleak and final Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report which he called “a survival guide for humanity.”
In a fresh plea Mr Guterres called for OECD governments to phase out coal by 2030 and for poorer countries by 2040.
And in a new target, he urged countries to have carbon-free electricity generation in the developed world by 2035, meaning no gas or coal-fired power plants and a halting of all new fossil fuel exploration.
Mr Guterres said all countries had to make a quantum leap in climate action to limit average temperature increases to 1.5C, acknowledging: “It starts with parties immediately hitting the fast-forward button on their net zero deadlines”.
He said rich G20 countries, of which Australia is a member, should aim for carbon neutrality as close to 2040 as possible. He added that emerging economies, which includes China, must aim for net zero by 2050.
New synthesis report will play a pivotal role when governments gather in Dubai in December for the UN climate…
China has a net zero goal for 2060, while India’s goal is even further away, at 2070.
“This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every time frame,’’ he said.
“Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”
The landmark IPCC “Synthesis” report brings together the latest scientific advice and was agreed after governments reviewed the documents in Interlaken, Switzerland over the past week. The report says a cut in carbon emissions has to be more extreme than the current plans because of continuing rising emissions, to ensure a “liveable and sustainable future”.
“The pace and scale of what has been done so far, and current plans, are insufficient to tackle climate change,’’ the report says, adding that keeping warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels requires deep, rapid and sustained greenhouse gas emissions reductions in all sectors. “Emissions should be decreasing by now and will need to be cut by almost half by 2030, if warming is to be limited to 1.5°C.”
As well the report notes that cash for developing countries to help them reduce emissions must be increased six times above current levels to keep climate change to the 1.5C target.
IPCC chairman Hoesung Lee said multiple, feasible and effective options are available now to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt to human-caused climate change. The report notes changes in the food sector, electricity, transport, industry, buildings and land-use can reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as encouraging low carbon lifestyles and people having a better understanding of the consequences of overconsumption.
IPCC Chair Hoesung Lee said “This Synthesis Report underscores the urgency of taking more ambitious action and shows that, if we act now, we can still secure a liveable sustainable future for all.
“Transformational changes are more likely to succeed where there is trust, where everyone works together to prioritise risk reduction, and where benefits and burdens are shared equitably.
“We live in a diverse world in which everyone has different responsibilities and different opportunities to bring about change. Some can do a lot while others will need support to help them manage the change.”
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Legalized Climate Grifting
Paul Driessen
Grifters have long fascinated us. These usually small-time lawbreakers excel at persuading their “marks” to hand valuables over willingly. If they ever represented a “distinctly American ethos,” they’ve been supplanted by con artists seeking bank accounts for funds abandoned by Nigerian princes.
Their artful dodging is epitomized by Frank Abagnale daring the FBI to “catch me if you can,” Anna Delvey inventing Anna Sorokin, Redford and Newman masterminding their famous Sting, and dirty, rotten scoundrels like Steve Martin, Michael Caine and Glenn Headly.
However, they were all pikers compared to the billion-dollar stratagems being carried off by Climate Armageddon grifters like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Elon Musk and Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry.
Their schemes are not only unprecedented in size and complexity. They represent the greatest wealth transfer in history, from poor and middle class families to the wealthiest on Earth. Most important, the plundering has been legalized by laws, regulations, treaties and executive orders, often implemented at the behest of the schemers and their lobbyists.
They and their politician, activist, scientist, corporate and media allies profit mightily, but legally, from foundation grants, government payouts and subsidies, and taxpayer and consumer payments based on claims that Earth faces manmade climate cataclysms. That we’re giving our money willingly to these wind, solar, battery and other programs is questionable.
Microsoft co-founder Gates’ estimated 2022 post-divorce net worth of some $130 billion enables him to donate hundreds of millions to social, health, environmental and corporate media causes. That usually shields him from tough questions.
But BBC media editor Amol Rajan recently asked Mr. Gates to answer charges that he’s “a hypocrite,” for claiming to be “a climate change campaigner” while traveling the world on his luxurious private jets – often to confabs where global elites discuss how we commoners can enjoy simpler, fossil-fuel-free lives: what size our homes can be, how and how much we can heat them, what foods we can eat and how we can cook them, what cars we can drive, whether we can fly anywhere on vacation, what our kids will learn in school, and more.
Caught flatfooted, Gates defended his use of fuel-guzzling, carbon-spewing jetliners by claiming he purchases “carbon credits” to offset his profligate energy consumption. He also said he visits Africa and Asia to learn about farming and malaria, and spends billions on “climate innovations.”
Indeed, Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need” calls for replacing beef with synthetic meat. Cattle emit methane, a greenhouse gas (00.00019% of Earth’s atmosphere) – so people should eat fake meat processed from vegetable oil, veggies and insects.
You may say, that’s disgusting. But Mr. Gates will profit mightily if his “recommendation” is adopted. He’s a major investor in farmland and the imitation meat company Impossible Foods, as is Mr. Gore.
How cool! Wealthy elites can save the world and get richer at the same time!
Beyond Meat’s stock may be down more than 75% from its one-time high, but investors will likely bring in lots more cash via new “climate-saving” mandates, while consumers are left holding bags of rotting bug and lab-grown burgers.
Carbon offsets? In the real world they’re part of the problem, not the solution. They don’t help Main Street; they too help rich Climate Armageddon Club members become wealthier.
Gates Foundation grants could prevent extensive African misery, brain damage and death from malaria, by spotting disease outbreaks and eradicating Anopheles mosquito infestations – today. But it’s spending millions trying to engineer plasmodium-resistant mosquitoes, which may pay off a decade from now.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. continues pocketing billions selling and trading carbon credits. In fact, between 2015 and 2020, the company received $1.3 billionfrom selling credits to other companies – more than twice what it earned from automotive sales. Times sure have changed since manufacturing tycoons got rich selling products, instead of hawking climate indulgences.
Musk also loves flying in private jets. Last summer, he even took a 9-minute, 55-mile flight from San Francisco to San Jose, instead of driving a Tesla. Wags might say that goes well with the way he’s made a science of lobbying government agencies to subsidize fire-prone cars and SpaceX rockets.
It’s all to protect the environment, of course – which is why Gore, Gates, Musk and Kerry think they’re entitled to travel by private jet and limousine. We’re also supposed to ignore how their cars and lifestyles are based on metals extracted and processed with African child labor and lakes of toxic chemicals.
Since Al Gore left the vice president’s office, he’s hauled in some $330 million railing about “rain bombs” and “boiling oceans,” and shilling for government and corporate “investments” in “green energy” that’s also reliant on supply chains running through Africa and China.
Never forget this fundamental rule: Wind and sunshine are clean, renewable and sustainable. However, harnessing these unreliable, weather-dependent energy sources to power modern economies requires millions of tons of metals and minerals extracted from billions of tons of ores, mostly using dirty, polluting processes in lands out of sight and mind.
In short, nothing about “renewable energy” is clean, renewable, sustainable, fair or equitable.
Moreover, the “climate crisis” is based on computer models that predict hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, sea level rise and other disasters vastly greater than the world is actually experiencing. The models also ignore five great ice ages and interglacial periods, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, the Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other inconvenient climate truths.
Topping it off, China, Russia and India are burning cheap coal to industrialize, lift their people out of poverty, and leave climate-obsessed Western nations in the economic and military dust. Even if the West went totally Net Zero, it wouldn’t reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases even one part per million.
The climate change movement’s deceptions and contradictions seem to have no bounds – and know no apparent limits to how much loot they can rake in by lobbying federal, state and local governments, and playing political science with similarly minded legislators and regulators who control climate and energy laws, mandates, grants and subsidies.
How can the general public be so oblivious to all of this?
FTX founder and alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried revealed the secret. He avoided media and regulator scrutiny by donating to influential media outlets, the way Bill Gates does. That garners favorable press and social media – which also ignore, cancel and deplatform critics and skeptics.
Fortunately, gutsy interrogators like Rajan are discovering and publicizing what most of the bought-and-paid-for “journalist classes” still won’t. This helps more people see behind the curtain and find the self-interest, double-dealing and pseudo-science that create the scary climate crisis monsters.
Climate Armageddon Club games are costing us trillions of dollars, in the name of saving people and planet. Hopefully, more real journalists, troves of Twitter emails (this time kudos to Mr. Musk!), and congressional investigations will save taxpayers and families from additional costly, destructive policies.
https://townhall.com/columnists/pauldriessen/2023/03/20/legalized-climate-grifting-n2620875
**************************************************Greens refuse to discuss recycling of renewables and restoration of mining locations to pristine conditions
Decommissioning, recycling, and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition is not in the cards for wind, solar, and EV battery materials.
The reality is that all the mineral products and metals needed to make wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries are mined and processed in places like Baotou, Inner Mongolia, Bolivia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo, mostly under Chinese control. Decommissioning and restoration of those mining landscapes back to their original pristine condition is not in the cards in developing countries. Recycling of worn-out turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries, in wealthy countries is also not in the cards.
The sites for the mining of materials required to build wind, solar, and EV batteries are under minimal to nonexistent labor, wage, environmental, reclamation, and worker health and safety regulations. The mere extraction of those exotic minerals presents social challenges, human rights abuses, and environmental degradations worldwide, but are of no significance to the wealthy countries benefitting from those “green” materials.
The climate cult COULD seek decommissioning and restoration standards in those developing countries down to the last dandelion, just like we have for decommissioned mines, oil, and nuclear sites in America, but the climate cult avoids the same in developing countries.
The life cycle for renewable electricity like wind and solar runs from design, procurement, and construction, through operations and maintenance, and repair, as well as the life ending decommissioning and disposal, but again, recycling and restoration of the landscaping back to its original pristine condition, is also not in the cards in the wealthy countries that are going green.
Since the blades and panels and EV batteries are very difficult to recycle, the waste stream created by them is a mounting problem. According to a 2017 study published in the scientific journal Waste Management, the world’s wind industry alone will be producing 43 million tons of blade waste annually by 2050.
Those worn out wind turbines will be the equivalent weight of 215,000 locomotives. The demand of the wealthy economies for more wind turbines are projected to cause 43 million tons of blade waste worldwide by 2050 with China possessing 40 percent of the waste, Europe 25 percent, the United States 16 percent, and the rest of the world 19 percent.
The size and weight of the blades vary, but the average length is around 120 feet, and they weigh around five tons. Some of the largest can be as long as a football field and weigh 20 tons. Currently, there are no scalable, cost-effective technologies to recycle the blades, and most of them are going to landfills.
Those 1,000-pound EV batteries present similar challenges. With more than 40 percent of all EV’s in America being located in California, there are no EV-battery recycling plants in California, and only five up and running nationwide, according to CalEPA. That’s even though used lithium-ion batteries contain valuable minerals that otherwise must be mined from the earth, mostly from overseas operations in developing countries. The” throw away” society is alive and well in America.
With wealthy countries obsessed with a “green” society, it looks like decommissioning, recycling, and restoration of the mining landscapes in developing countries and renewable generating sites in developed countries back to their original pristine conditions is not in the cards for the foreseeable future.
The vast majority of these critical minerals and elements are mined abroad, and almost all the refining of them is done by China alone.
What’s more, China is the largest single provider of most of the critical minerals and rare earths used around the globe, and is almost the only refiner of such products. This means minerals and rare earth elements mined elsewhere, often with Chinese funding, are shipped to China for processing into usable materials. Much of the mining and refining of materials in China is produced by forced or slave labor, often of persecuted religious minorities, like Falun Gong followers and Uighurs.
The Biden administration declared October 4, 2022 that batteries from China may be tainted by child labor, yet the American government continues to enforce mandates, subsidies, and tax breaks to go green, that provides financial incentives for developing countries to continue their current practices of inflicting environmental degradation to their local landscapes, force labor atrocities upon their workforce.
Concerning China, the Biden administration acknowledged the problem of slave labor, having signed the Uighur Forced Labor Prevention Act in 2021.
Now, the Biden administration is leaning more on Africa to counter China’s control over U.S. energy.
Still, the reality of today’s globalized supply chain and America’s financial incentives that continuously encourage further exploitations of humanity and the environment makes it almost a certainty the massive green energy transition being pushed by the Biden administration will be built with minerals and parts produced using Chinese and/or African slave labor.
With insufficient intelligence on the ground in China or Africa to track forced-labor manufacturing, and less still the raw materials, wealthy countries will continue to exploit the folks with yellow, brown, and black skin in developing countries.
In economic terms, the wealthier countries climate hysteria is imposing severe negative externalities on developing countries. Ethically, the West’s climate obsession is immorally condemning present generations of impoverished peoples and nations to continued perjury and early deaths in the years ahead. Make no mistake, this ruse exists to further enrich people in developed countries while they simultaneously exploit those in developing countries.
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The bank crises could take down the ESG push
Only three months ago the Credit Suisse bank issued its annual Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report, promising to set the bank at the centre of the global Net Zero carbon trajectory.
As shares of the legendary Credit Suisse bank tax haven plunged 24 per cent on Wednesday and fuelled another day of alarm over the risks imbedded in the financial system, green activists at Bill McKibben’s 350.org climate operation distributed invitations to an online Earth Day event titled “Divest/Invest: How we stop banks from fuelling the climate crisis.”
The message might have rung bells of support a week ago. The plan was to stop America’s big banks from investing in fossil fuel development and “shut down” the oil and gas industry.
Such action calls are likely to fall on deaf ears this week as the global policy and investment focus is on keeping the banking industry alive and well. Instead of forcing banks to divest fossil fuels assets, the challenge now is to stop institutions from divesting bank shares.
Today it’s the banking climate that needs to be protected in an environment filled with predictions that the world financial system is in some peril. Anybody scanning commentary surrounding the banking share price crash has heard the news. “We don’t have a credit risk yet,” said a not-very-reassuring Nouriel Roubini, the “Dr. Doom” forecaster of the 2008 financial crisis who posted a tweet: “An economic & financial hard landing has been my baseline for over a year. Now it is clearly unavoidable. Economic stability & fighting inflation require raising policy rates much higher.”
The head of the world’s largest investment firm, Larry Fink at BlackRock, issued his annual letter on Wednesday with a warning that the fall of Silicon Valley Bank could signal more failures to come. “We don’t know yet whether the consequences of easy money and regulatory changes will cascade throughout the U.S. regional banking sector (akin to the S&L Crisis) with more seizures and shutdowns coming,” said Fink. His letter to shareholders is usually issued in February, but the delay this year suggests Fink was grappling with the emerging risks.
Fink is the world’s leading green corporate activist. In 2022, he warned that “Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net-zero world. The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?” But this week he raised themes and issues he has seldom mentioned in past annual missives. The 2023 letter refers to “easy money” policies deployed by central banks and contains 18 references to “inflation,” a word not used in his 2022 statement.
Another caution came from Bob Michelle, the chief investment officer at JPMorgan Asset Management, who warned that Credit Suisse is “absolutely” a sign that there is more trouble on the horizon. It is, said Michelle, the “tip of the iceberg” of banking turmoil to come.
It’s a cold metaphor that neatly brings us back to the climate activist campaign. In their easy-money world, banking icebergs have long ago melted away and there is nothing to worry about except how to get the banks to divest their fossil fuel holdings to make the world safe and green. But this idea that the only problem facing the planet is climate change is going to be more and more difficult to maintain.
There are indications that banks, central bankers and regulators have been dedicating too much effort and resources to the management of environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues. Tracking ESG risks, in other words, may well have been a distraction from managing the real risks foisted on the world economy by high government debt and inflationary monetary policies.
The Bank of England seems to be pulling back on climate change. In a report on climate-related risks issued Monday the Bank implies that climate risks in financial markets seem to be under control and “are appropriate.” It warned, however, that “Any use of macroprudential tools would need to be assessed carefully against how well they mitigate climate risks, their behavioural impacts, and the potential for unintended consequences.” In other words, now is no time to be flirting with unintended consequences of radical climate policy when real financial risks are being overlooked.
Notes of caution over climate management risk were issued in Canada last week by the federal government’s Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions. While climate change is an issue, the biggest risk seemed to be coming from “transition risks” created by government policy. “These risks can emerge from current or future government policies, legislation, and regulation to limit GHG emissions, as well as technological advancements, and changes in market and customer sentiment towards a low-GHG economy.”
Within Credit Suisse, a heavy public focus on ESG and climate issues was accompanied by less obvious failures to manage financial risk.
Only three months ago the bank issued its annual Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures report, a 106-page document signed by its top executives. The report, they said, “provides important information on how we apply our expertise as a bank.” Filled with graphs, metrics and explanations, the report promises to set the bank at the centre of the global Net Zero carbon trajectory.
Credit Suisse’s financial management regime is another story. This week — as its shares fell to near US$2 from highs of US$50 a decade ago — the bank’s annual report said there were “material weaknesses” in its internal controls over financial reporting.
When it comes to bank management of risk in the future, the new focus is likely to be on the books rather than the climate.
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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)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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