How misfiring environmentalism risks harming the world’s poor
This is a useful warning about burdening poor countries with green goals but its starting premise is obtuse: Crope in a warmer world will THRIVE, not fail. Crops do better in warm conditions, they do MUCH beter in high CO2 conditions and a warmer world would be more rainy, which is hugely good for crops. If ever significant global warming does happen, it will create a world of food abundance. Global warming would be a vast worldwide fertiliser application
THANK GOODNESS for the enthusiasts and the obsessives. If everyone always took a balanced view of everything, nothing would ever get done. But when campaigners’ worldview seeps into the staid apparatus of policymaking and global forums, bad decisions tend to follow. That, unfortunately, is especially true in the world of climate change.
One example is the effect of global warming on the world’s poorest people. As the planet heats up, extreme events such as droughts, floods and storms are becoming more common and more severe. Many places are becoming less habitable. Over the coming decades many vulnerable farmers, from Mali to the Mekong Delta, will find their crops failing more frequently. And as resources grow scarcer, more fighting will break out.
This pattern is no longer just a warning by activists. It is accepted by the mainstream to the point where fears of a surge in climate migration are fodder for the nativist right. Because people are understandably troubled by the idea of climate change forcing poor farmers to leave behind their ancestral lands, an important goal of adaptation spending is to help them stay.
Yet the truth is more complex. The vast majority of displaced people will not cross international borders but move within their own country. By 2050, 50m-216m people could be on the move internally. And many will be rural folk moving to cities, where their lives are likely to become better. Urbanisation usually aids development, bringing people closer to schools, health care and well-paying jobs, as well as more liberal social norms, particularly for women. This is not an argument in favour of climate change. But it suggests that one cost-effective and beneficial form of climate-adaptation spending would be helping people move, rather than preserving small farms in ever-harsher conditions.
There is another, more profound, example of the danger of climate groupthink. From the panels of Davos to the pages of newspapers, it is increasingly argued that no trade-off exists between the economic development of low- and middle-income countries and reducing their greenhouse-gas emissions. This is partly because much of the rich world has successfully made some cuts in emissions while continuing to grow, and its leaders want more of the same. But more crucially, it is because governments and development banks with limited budgets struggle to admit that not all their goals can be reconciled, and that they must therefore choose between them.
Yet choose they must, because the trade-off is in plain sight. Growth is the best way to lift people out of poverty and improve average living standards. But in the developing world, more growth still leads to more emissions. Researchers at the IMF have found that in 72 developing countries since 1990, a 1% rise in annual GDP was on average associated with a 0.7% rise in emissions. By 2030, fast-growing India and Indonesia alone will have increased their annual emissions by the equivalent of over 800m tonnes of carbon dioxide—an extra Germany’s-worth of greenhouse-gas belching. In other big emerging markets such as Brazil, Egypt and the Philippines, emissions are rising, too.
Many rich-world leaders say they can square the circle by funding green development projects which, in theory, cut emissions and boost growth at the same time. That is true to a degree. But, without adequate carbon pricing and cross-border emissions trading to encourage the private sector to invest on its own initiative, it is an enormously expensive and fiendishly complex task. On June 23rd, at the conclusion of a summit in Paris, rich countries again pledged to meet a target of providing $100bn a year in “climate finance” to fund such projects. Yet that is only a fraction of the $2.8trn annual investment thought to be needed by 2030 to put the developing world on a green growth path, at least $1trn of which probably needs to come from rich countries.
The reality of limited resources worsens the trade-off. The need to spend money decarbonising big developing economies that already offer citizens reasonable services threatens aid budgets which help pay for things like vaccines and schooling in the poorest parts of Africa. Unlike Brazil or India, say, such nations are unlikely ever to contribute significantly to global emissions.
They lose out, however, when foreign aid and loans come with green strings attached. As well as facing stingier health-care and education budgets, they might find scant funding for expanding a gas-powered electricity grid, even though nobody stands ready to pay for the far greater costs of converting it to a green one. African governments rightly resent being told to cut emissions rather than help people in desperate need—especially given that Westerners continue to belch carbon.
As a result, while leaders offer bromides about sustainable growth, an epic fight for resources rages behind the scenes between those who favour development as practised in decades past and those who want the world’s foreign-aid apparatus to turn wholeheartedly towards decarbonisation. It is a battle over what is worse: a poorer today or a hotter tomorrow.
The virtue of hard choices
That is an excruciating choice, given the moral force of the argument that the rich world should pay the developing world’s climate bills. Global temperatures depend on the stock of carbon in the atmosphere, not the current flow of emissions. On a per-person basis, the rich world has been disproportionately responsible for rising global temperatures and has more capacity to respond to them. Poor countries lack the resources to invest to cut emissions or adapt to climate change themselves. Yet relative to the size of their economies, they face the biggest costs.
As with the decision between forestalling or accommodating climate-induced migration, pretending that this choice does not exist helps no one. Politics mean that neither an adequate carbon price nor sufficient Western money are likely. Limited resources make it essential to squeeze as much value as possible out of what is available. Squeamishness about weighing costs and benefits—stemming from a well-meaning desire to avoid every injustice—gets in the way. And the consequences of that evasion fall most heavily on those in the greatest need.
*************************************************
Hybrid cars are not as green as you think as they produce much more greenhouse gases than claimed by manufacturers, report reveals
Hybrid cars produce much more greenhouse gases than claimed by manufacturers, a report reveals today.
The Climate Change Committee says plug-in hybrids – which can run either on electric or on petrol/diesel – have performed up to five times worse than expected.
The findings come in a progress report from the CCC on how well the Government is doing on cutting emissions.
Chief executive Chris Stark said progress to reaching net zero was 'worryingly slow', and that the Government is relying on technological breakthroughs such as carbon capture rather than asking people to 'reduce their high-carbon activities'.
Mr Stark said transport's share of the country's overall emissions – the so-called 'carbon budget' – is now much higher than had been expected.
He said: 'The Government is now expecting surface transport emissions to be higher than it was in the net zero-strategy by the mid 2030s.'
He added that the Government's latest figures show carbon savings from plug-in hybrid cars 'are between three to five times lower' than previously assumed.
The sale of new hybrid vehicles will be banned in the UK by 2035, five years earlier than petrol and diesel vehicles.
Tory MP Philip Dunne, chairman of the environmental audit committee, said the Government 'risks the unravelling of the last few years of climate leadership'.
Industry experts have warned the UK's 900,000 electric cars could be exacerbating the pothole crisis after new research revealed they cause twice as much damage to roads as their petrol and diesel equivalents.
Analysis by the University of Leeds shows the average electric car – which is heavier due to its larger battery – puts 2.24 times more stress on surfaces than its petrol equivalent, and 1.95 times more than diesel.
*************************************************************
Climate cult weakening
Politically, ‘net zero’ is increasingly on the nose in many European countries. This week, the Swedish parliament officially abandoned its 100 per cent renewable energy target to meet net zero by 2045, replacing it with a ‘technology-neutral’ target. Many green-tinged Europeans were dismayed, but as Finance Minister Elisabeth Svantesson told the Swedish parliament, ‘We need more electricity production… we need a stable energy system.’
Of course, for the Swedes, blessed with huge mountains and deep lakes but little abundant sun, hydro plays a key part in their renewable energy supply: 98 per cent of their electricity already comes from hydro, wind or nuclear power, so they can afford to eschew fossil fuels. The new ‘non-renewable’ target simply means they can get more nuclear power into the grid, and essentially admits that the Nordic utopian fantasy about wind and solar being our salvation is now done and dusted.
Meanwhile, in Germany during the last winter, one town was forced to tear down the local wind farm and dig it up to get to the precious coal beneath. A more entertaining and apt metaphor is hard to find.
In an article headlined, ‘The perils of net zero coercion’, the UK Telegraph this week reported that, ‘Sweeping bans to cut greenhouse emissions in Europe is leading to widespread public backlash,’ and that, ‘Climate coercion is a very bad way to cut greenhouse gas emissions in Western democracies’.
A day earlier, the Telegraph had also warned that, ‘Germany is headed for a political meltdown. Olaf Scholz faces a reckoning as Germans resist his “Green dictatorship” of mandatory heat pumps and unaffordable technologies.’
This week, even the BBC had to admit that Britain is not capable of meeting its own net-zero targets. According to the latest report by the bed-wetting Climate Change Committee, there is a ‘worrying tendency’ of UK government ministers to avoid embracing the next stage of net zero. What a surprise! ‘The UK has lost its clear global leadership position on climate action,’ the report’s authors lament. ‘We are no longer COP President; no longer a member of the EU negotiating bloc…. We have backtracked on fossil fuel commitments.… And we have been slow to react to the US Inflation Reduction Act and the EU’s proposed Green Deal Industrial Plan, which are now a strong pull for green investment away from the UK.’
Last week Britain also abandoned its proposed ‘green hydrogen levy’ on households, which, according to the Guardian, ‘[signals] a possible U-turn as households struggle with high inflation and this week’s shock interest rate rise’.
Craig Mackinlay MP, chairman of the parliamentary Net Zero Scrutiny Group, said: ‘The cancellation of the proposed £118 Hydrogen Tax on household energy bills is hugely welcome and I hope is the start of a common sense journey for the government on energy policy…. When the laudable ambition of net zero hits the reality of cost and significant changes to the way we live, the public are understandably turned off.’ Meanwhile, we also learn that EVs are looking increasingly dubious. That same UK Climate Change Committee report says that ‘plug-in hybrids have performed up to five times worse than expected’. China, too, is reportedly ‘discarding fields of EVs, leaving them to rot’.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/07/climate-cringe/
***********************************************Thanks to New Climate Change Program, Washington State Now Has the Most Expensive Gas in the Country
Washington state has unseated California as the state with the most expensive gasoline in the country, and analysts have a simple explanation for the dubious distinction — a new carbon cap-and-trade program instituted by the state in an effort to combat climate change.
An analysis of gas prices by the Seattle Times found that the average price of a gallon of fuel in the state reached $4.91 cents this week. In King County, which includes Seattle, the average price is well above $5. Oil industry officials and analysts are telling drivers in Washington, “We warned you.”
This year, a new law went into effect in Washington that requires oil companies and other fossil fuel producers to pay the state for the greenhouse gasses their products emit, also known as a cap-and-trade program. At the first two auctions for emissions allowances this year, companies had to pay more than $850 million to offset their emissions.
**********************************************
Australia: Queensland's insanely expensive pumped hydro plans
With desperately underfunded hospitals, police, schools and roads, this is gross
The Queensland government surprised many when it announced last year that the state would construct two new pumped hydro schemes, dwarfing the troubled Snowy Hydro 2.0 project in NSW.
At the core of the Energy and Jobs Plan, announced in September 2022 by Premier Annastacia Palaszczuk, is a commitment to turn off coal-fired power stations by 2035.
By the same year, Queensland would be running on 80 per cent renewable energy thanks to dozens of new solar and wind farms that would traverse the state.
To meet that target, the state needs a ready supply of stored power to draw upon when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing — enough to power the state for hours at a time.
That is where pumped hydro comes in as a large-scale storage option.
What is pumped hydro?
Pumped hydro works similarly to big batteries, filling in supply gaps when the grid needs a top-up of electricity.
The design involves two dams built at differing elevations, connected by a tunnel, with transmission lines then connecting it to the grid.
When there is plenty of sun and wind to power the grid, energy is in high supply, so water is pumped to the upper reservoir using surplus electricity.
When the sun goes down or there is no wind, water is released to the lower dam through the tunnel, generating electricity as it passes through a turbine.
That electricity is then injected into the grid via high-voltage transmission lines.
The debate
The criticism is broadly two-fold: firstly, that pumped hydro comes at a monumental cost and is being outpaced by other technologies (namely batteries), and secondly, that Australia simply does not have the workforce needed to construct such huge pieces of infrastructure by 2035.
The Energy and Jobs Plan proposed a 2-gigawatt pumped hydro scheme at Borumba Dam — west of Gympie — and another much larger plant called Pioneer-Burdekin, approximately 1,000 kilometres north of Brisbane, west of Mackay, offering an unprecedented 5 gigawatts.
The government has promised that the 2GW Borumba project would store enough energy to power 2 million homes continuously for 24 hours.
If constructed, the 5GW Pioneer-Burdekin project would be the largest energy storage (PHES) in the world.
Currently, the largest PHES schemes are in China and the United States, with plants of around 3 gigawatts each.
Pumped hydro is also expensive. The cost and delivery time frame for the Snowy Hydro 2.0 scheme bears little resemblance to what was originally announced by Malcolm Turnbull in 2017.
It was estimated to cost around $2 billion, not including power lines, and to be completed by 2021. Now, it is expected by December 2029 at a total estimated cost of $10 billion.
New transmission lines
The sheer amount of energy that will be stored in each of Queensland's pumped hydro centres means that new high-voltage transmission lines need to be built, replacing the current mostly 275kV lines that connect the grid.
Powerlink, the state-owned company that constructs and manages the transmission lines, estimates the new 500kV lines will cost $6-8 million per kilometre and will become the backbone of a new "super grid" that will connect the state's renewable energy network.
The company announced a compensation scheme for those that will be impacted by the new transmission lines surrounding Borumba at meetings and via letters earlier this year.
Powerlink CEO Paul Simshauser said the route had been designed to run through as much state-owned land as possible, but that some impacts on landholders were unavoidable.
"We've come up with what we think is the lowest-cost solution for Queenslanders," he said.
But the former CEO of Powerlink, Simon Bartlett, warned that the current plans would come at an exorbitant cost because Pioneer-Burdekin was so far away from the main population centre of South-East Queensland.
"A basic rule of planning is: build your generation, if you can, as close as you can to the load centre. That reduces what you spend on transmission, and it reduces the risk of long-distance transmission," Professor Bartlett said.
"But the plan doesn't do that, the plan wants to build it 1,000 kilometres from the main load centre [Brisbane] – it just makes no logic to me, I'm afraid."
Professor Bartlett also says it is high risk for Powerlink to connect the pumped storage schemes by only one new line of 500kV towers that carry a double circuit, due to the risk of fires or vandals bringing down towers.
"What they're proposing is just a single transmission line, that's a major flaw in the design because that can come down, and every half a kilometre there's a tower, and all the wires are on the one tower. So that can come down and totally blackout a large part of the state," he said.
Mr Simshauser refuted that, arguing two lines of towers were not needed.
"We believe at this point in time anyway, [it] will be a cost that we won't need. We believe we can manage it in other ways," Mr Simshauser said.
"There are always risks in running a transmission network, any of our system plans will always take into account the most probable and credible contingencies that we can envisage and make sure that the balance of the network is, you know, available to deal with those contingencies."
What about batteries?
Queensland's Energy Minister Mick de Brenni said he considered the state's plan to be "the best path possible" to transition to renewables.
Professor Bartlett is urging the government to re-think the scale of the two schemes, in favour of emerging grid-scale batteries.
"They say it's the world's largest scheme. As soon as someone says that: watch out. There's a reason that others haven't gone that big," Professor Bartlett said.
"There are other ways of getting storage besides pumped storage, and there's been incredible developments in chemical batteries, the costs have just come down dramatically.
"[Australian Energy Market Operator] AEMO's own report shows that 8-hour batteries are about half the cost of an 8-hour pump storage scheme.
"Pumped storage is expensive because of the civil engineering, the concrete, the steel, the labour … and while pumped storage has getting dearer, batteries are getting cheaper."
However, Powerlink CEO Paul Simshauser said that it needed to make decisions based on current market conditions.
"At this point in time, the only serious battery proposals that we've got on our book are lithium-ion batteries, and all of them have congested around a 2-hour storage time, which tells us that that's what the market deems as economic at this point," he said.
"In terms of long-duration storage, really the only long-duration storage project proponents we've seen are pumped hydro," he said.
Similarly, Mr de Brenni said the government had closely considered the alternatives.
"We've worked for a number of years considering all of these options, and pumped hydro energy storage is the proven technology that will enable us to reach our renewable energy targets," he said.
Who is going to build it?
The construction industry is sounding the alarm that there are too many projects in the infrastructure pipeline, and Australia simply does not have the workers to complete them.
Engineers Australia CEO Romilly Madew said governments around the country were not learning from major infrastructure delays on other big projects.
"When you take into account the infrastructure pipeline that's already in place, you've got the Queensland Olympics coming up in 2032.
"You also have AUKUS now been added into the mix from the federal government. And then you add in energy transition. The capacity isn't there," Ms Madew said.
"If we say it's going to take 10 years, let's say it's going to be 15. There are so many unknowns at the moment and we really need to make sure we have contingencies on these projects,"
"We must remember it's taxpayer money — so are we reporting transparently on the time frames, on the delivery and on our commitments, and being really realistic about those?"
Mr de Brenni agreed there were workforce issues but was not concerned the state would not be able to attract workers.
"Whilst there are challenges in the infrastructure market, today, we're confident that we'll be able to attract the very best workers so that it's delivered, and it will be a quality outcome for our state for generations," he said.
***************************************
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
*****************************************
Jim Hansen and his twin
No comments:
Post a Comment