Climate policies are collapsing around the world
On the United Nations’ official website for this month’s COP28 climate conference in Dubai, about four hours by plane from Gaza, the countdown is underway. At about the time this column was published, the official UN wait time for the opening of COP28 would have been 28 days, 12 hours, 39 minutes and 12 seconds. That’s not much time to overcome the current collapsing state of climate policy around the world.
The reasons for policy turmoil are at once global, national and local across a range of developments and complications. They include the wars in Gaza and Ukraine, national policy meltdowns over carbon taxes, and major issues related to technology, science and economics.
On Monday in Dubai, the head of the COP28 event — United Arab Emirates Industry Minister Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber — called for international co-operation and compromise in the face of growing political and economic divisions over the UN plan to phase out the burning of coal, oil and natural gas.
Al Jaber’s concerns were echoed with stronger language of doubt from the European Union’s Climate Action Commissioner. Wopke Hoekstra said the only real item on the COP28 agenda is to reach a consensus on phasing out fossil fuels. Given the “geopolitically very troubling times,” it has never been harder to reach an agreement, he said.
Any review of developments over the past weeks points to a declining national and international climate policy environment that could lead to some kind of breakup. Such a prediction could be wrong, of course, but consider the following evidence from all over. In the G7 alone, the political climate in four member nations — Canada, the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom — is uncertain and filled with conflict over climate policy.
* In Canada, the ruling Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau last week launched a pullback in carbon taxation that most observers believe could undermine and even kill the Canadian carbon tax. Premiers and businesses are calling for scaling back on the tax. Even the carbon tax enthusiasts on the Globe and Mail’s editorial board see doom ahead. “Why would anyone make a costly energy-saving investment when the Liberals have begun to erode carbon pricing?”
* In coming days, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is expected to deliver a major speech announcing a significant pullback in climate change policies. The United Kingdom’s wind farm strategy is in tatters. In Germany, the government is reportedly in talks “to provide a multibillion-euro bailout to the engineering company Siemens Energy to shore up its balance sheet amid increasing problems at its wind turbine division.” In August, a German company began dismantling a wind farm in Westphalia to make way for a coal mine expansion.
* Electric vehicle economics keep getting rattled by weak prices and low demand. Ford CFO John Lawler said the company will delay some of its planned multibillion-dollar investment in new EV and battery production capacity, citing “tremendous downward pressure” on prices. Ford lost US$37,000 on each EV sold in the past quarter. General Motors is also making grim statements about the EV market, reflecting a major industry problem. EVs are the focus of multibillion-dollar government-backed investments in technologies, batteries and essential minerals — all of which could come under heavy questioning if the current price and demand trends are not reversed. But how could they be?
* While the goal is to end fossil fuel production, the oil industry is booming. Oil and gas prices are rising, with oil near 10-year highs and generating third-quarter profits for such giants as Exxon (US$9.1 billion) and Chevron (US$6.5 billion). The profits are down from the all-time highs of 2022, but the fossil fuel sector is still booming. Both Exxon and Chevron are also closing in on US$110 billion in takeover deals. Investor skepticism hangs over the deals. Still, the pro-fossil-fuel trends seem to be in place.
* Nobody likes fossil fuels — except many national governments around the world, if not most governments that represent most of the world’s population. Nations within the European Union are divided, with several countries (Poland, the Czech Republic and others) fighting to keep fossil fuels and, as reported by Reuters, forcing the EU to adopt a vague plan for COP28 filled with exemptions and with no end date to fossil fuel use. In China, new coal plants have been approved through 2023 at the rate of two per week. China now has 243 GW of coal power capacity, which experts say make it unlikely the country will be able to meet its 2060 fossil fuel control targets.
* A new joint report this week from the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) and the COP28 organization starts off with a grim outlook. Despite all the policy moves, subsidies, regulations and corporate buy-ins, “the energy transition remains off-track and global greenhouse gas emissions have reached record levels.” As is typical of such reports urging decisive action, the IRENA paper is filled with urgent language on the need to “double down and triple up” the transition to renewable power by 2030.
But the IRENA report, like all the gung-ho calls for action at COP28, were produced before the Gaza attacks and before it became obvious that the climate crisis has been overtaken by wars and other crises — including inflation and recession risks that in the public mind rank way above changing the climate in 2050.
https://financialpost.com/opinion/terence-corcoran-real-world-crises-to-beset-cop28-climate-confab
*****************************************************EU abandons another costly Net Zero reform
Now the EU has ditched its concrete demands for building renovations. As our lofty aspirations run up against our self-imposed deadlines, they are steadily modified downwards, but never abandoned altogether.
Everything that comes out of Brussels is a foul multilayered onion. On the outside is the laughable impossible childish utopian idealism. As you peel back the layers of abstract aspirations for the concrete prescriptions underneath, you become steadily more terrified. Thus the European Green Deal, proposed by the European Commission in 2019 and approved in 2020, promised to show member states the way to climate neutrality by 2050. A key component of this Deal – one layer deeper – is a legislative package called Fit for 55, which sounds like a diet plan for menopausal women, but which in fact aims to reduce EU emissions by 55% by 2030. This is starting to sound bad, and our creeping suspicions are confirmed when we go deeper still to this thing called the Buildings Directive, which regulates building energy efficiency in the EU. In 2021, the European Commission proposed extensive revisions to bring this Directive into alignment with its ‘Fit for 55’ aspirations.
The climate neutrality envisioned by the Green Deal simply won’t happen, but the proposed changes to the Buildings Directive were both realisable and for precisely that reason deeply alarming. The Eurocrats had worked out that the building sector is responsible for 36% of all emissions in member states. To meet their 2030 goals, they decided that each member state should be required to divide their existing structures into nine efficiency classes, and to impose “Minimum Energy Performance Standards” – that is, mandatory and ruinously expensive renovations – on the two least efficient classes.
Now, there are a lot of very dumb things about this. As far as I can tell, the climate-neutral utopia of 2050 is supposed to be an all-electric world, in which we’ll travel in electric cars and harvest organic corn with electric tractors and heat our homes with electric heat-pumps. All this extremely abundant and cheap electricity will be generated by fields upon fields of wind turbines and photovoltaic panels. How the energy efficiency of buildings will matter for emissions at all in this electrical utopia is a hard thing to understand.
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Australia: Fight over cow burps looms as farmers face forced emissions cuts
Fewer cows, dearer milk??
A fight over plans to cut farming’s greenhouse footprint from methane-burping livestock looms for the Albanese government, with Agriculture Minister Murray Watt declaring the sector must reduce its emissions as the National Farmers Federation campaigns against the government’s renewable plans.
Watt declared the industry cannot rely only on carbon offsets and must change practices as he launched consultation on Tuesday on the government’s agriculture and land plan, which will guide cuts to emissions from agriculture in line with the national target to hit net zero by 2050.
The Albanese government has launched a controversial reform, which will result in a sector wide plan for agriculture to cut its greenhouse emissions, which are mostly generated by methane-laden burps from livestock.
The Albanese government has launched a controversial reform, which will result in a sector wide plan for agriculture to cut its greenhouse emissions, which are mostly generated by methane-laden burps from livestock. CREDIT:STEVEN SIEWERT
The government is also committed to the global pledge to cut methane by 30 per cent from 2020 by 2030.
That is a big task for graziers as sheep and cows’ gassy burps are loaded with the greenhouse gas – a byproduct of digesting grass. Livestock methane makes around two-thirds of agriculture’s greenhouse emissions.
New Zealand has imposed a tax on farm methane emissions that kicks in from 2025, but in news that will be welcomed by Australian farmers, Watt has already ruled this out.
Watt said the reforms “will be done without a methane tax or ag sector emissions target” but government would work industry to develop a plan.
Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen has teamed with other ministers to draw up plans for emissions reductions in six sectors of the economy. Agriculture, which generates 17 per cent of the nation’s greenhouse footprint, is first cab off the rank.
“It’s really important that agriculture does reduce its emissions,” Watt said told the ABC.
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Australian Greens in Senate walkout over Albanese government’s Israel response
The Greens have accused the Albanese government of “being complicit in the massacre of innocent Palestinians” and “aiding and abetting Israel”, after the party staged a free Palestine protest in the Senate chamber.
Attempting to ratchet up pressure on the government to “show some guts” over the Middle East conflict, Greens deputy leader Mehreen Faruqi demanded Labor endorse the United Nations’ call for Israel and its allies to agree to an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and “condemn Israel for its war crimes”.
In an attack the Jewish community said showed the Greens to be the enemies of peace, Senator Faruqi said: “History will judge the Labor Party and the Labor government for staying silent, or even being complicit in the massacre that is happening in Palestine at the moment. History will remember them as warmongers, history will remember them as aiding and abetting Israel in the massacre of Palestinians. And the people will not take kindly to it.
“What we are seeing now, we have not seen for many years, the way that thousands of innocent people are being killed indiscriminately, the way that families are being blown up to bits, whole families are being blown up to bits by the bombing of Israel. That’s what we want to stop.”
Trade Minister Don Farrell, who represented Anthony Albanese in the upper house on Monday with Senate leader Penny Wong in Beijing, said innocent civilians should not pay for the horrors perpetrated by Hamas.
“Of course we have all witnessed devastating loss of innocent life in the Middle East that all started with the attack by Hamas on innocent civilians in Israel. We as a government have affirmed Israel’s right to defend themselves after that horrific attack,” Senator Farrell said.
“We also said this, I saw the Foreign Minister (Senator Wong) reiterate that this weekend, that it also matters how Israel responds to this completely unjustified attack by Hamas. This means that Israel must observe international law and the rules of war.
“Nobody wants to see innocent lives lost in this terrible set of circumstances. And it matters that innocent civilians should not pay for the horrors perpetrated by Hamas. And it also matters for Israel’s own security, which faces grave risk if this conflict spreads and I think we’ve already seen over the weekend the potential that it’s spreading in the north and in the east.”
Executive Council of Australian Jewry co-chief executive Alex Ryvchin said the Greens’ inability to condemn the mass atrocities of October 7 “without attempting to justify crimes that no decent person would ever justify, destroyed what little human rights credentials they had”.
“The Greens have shown themselves to be the enemies of peace and launderers for antisemites at home and murderous thugs abroad,” he said.
“Their continued patronage of anti-Israel rallies with their genocidal chants and incitement to violence has endangered Australian Jews and our society. They pose as pacifists but they know that a ceasefire will hand victory to Hamas and encourage more jihadism in the West.”
Greens foreign affairs spokesman Jordon Steele-John said his party had repeatedly condemned the acts of terrorism perpetrated by Hamas last month because of a “shared commitment to humanity”.
During Senate question time, Senator Faruqi made a statement about the government’s “heartless, gutless, powerless” response to what was happening to Palestinians before raising her fist and declaring: “Today, we bring the people’s protest into parliament. Free, free Palestine.”
She then left the chamber, followed by her colleagues.
The health ministry in the Hamas-run territory said at least 9770 people, mostly civilians, had been killed in more than four weeks of war, sparked by a terrorist attack in Israel on October 7 that left more than 1400 dead.
The Prime Minister has endorsed Israel’s right to defend itself while also expressing concern for Gaza civilians.
Six of Australia’s former prime ministers - every living leader except Paul Keating - co-signed a letter last week affirming their joint stance on the war, expressing their support for Israel and condemning Hamas for the October massacres.
The letter called for an end to anti-Semitic hate speech and endorsed a two-state solution as the basis for “long-term lasting peace between the Israeli and Palestinian peoples”.
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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)
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http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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