Wednesday, December 13, 2023
Oil is everywhere at COP28, vexing those seeking its demise
There’s no way of avoiding oil and gas at the giant expo park hosting COP28 on the outskirts of Dubai.
At the world’s most important climate summit, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries — whose members supply almost 30% of the world’s oil — has a pavilion for the first time.
There, staff were giving out a children’s book about oil. A grey-haired cartoon professor named Riggs takes young readers through topics as arcane as the lightness and sourness of crude, before explaining why oil is important: "Without oil, we would not be able to continue to enjoy the same standard of living.” The book proved so popular that the pavilion ran out of copies just four days into the two weeks of COP28.
Oil and gas executives have tended to keep a low profile at the annual U.N. climate change gathering, but they have little reason to hide at COP28, hosted by the United Arab Emirates — one of the world’s largest oil exporters — and led by the CEO of its national oil company. At least 2,456 representatives of the fossil fuel industry have been granted access to COP28, according to an analysis by the Kick Big Polluters Out activist group. The number is nearly four times higher than in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, last year. If they were a country, they would outnumber all national delegations at the conference except for Brazil and the UAE.
Heads of major oil companies have attended as part of country delegations. The CEO of TotalEnergies, Patrick Pouyanne, is part of the French delegation, while Darren Woods, CEO of Exxon Mobil, is accredited to the UAE’s. Other industry representatives attend under the umbrella of influence groups such as the International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), which registered at least 110 people for the summit.
As COP28 enters its final few days, the most contentious issue is whether the final agreement will pledge to phase down fossil fuels. To many of the thousands of climate activists among the 100,000 or so people registered to attend, the prominence of the oil and gas industry is a travesty — giving the industry most responsible for climate change a seat at the table.
Oil exporters are pushing back. Saudi Energy Minister Abdulaziz bin Salman said this week that the text shouldn’t agree to a phase down, while OPEC’s secretary-general wrote to members asking them to resist the idea.
"You don’t invite the tobacco lobbyists to a health convention when you’re writing health policy,” said Emily Lowan of Climate Action Network Canada. "They have clear stated interests against the very premise of these negotiations, at this COP in particular, related to agreeing on the language on the phase out of fossil fuels.”
Others take industry’s statements of good intent at face value and argue the coalition tackling the climate crisis needs to be as broad as possible. Either way, there’s no way of avoiding oil and gas at the giant expo park hosting COP28 on the outskirts of Dubai.
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US opts out of Dutch plan to end fossil fuel subsidies at COP28
The US opted out of a Dutch-led coalition that aims to phase out fossil fuel subsidies, starting by extricating countries from the international agreements in which they are embedded.
Around 50% of government subsidies for oil, gas and coal are a result of global pacts, like those in aviation and shipping that exempt the fuels from tax, according to a statement by the coalition launched at COP28 in Dubai. Member countries will be required to report the amount of subsidies before next year’s summit.
The Netherlands had been pushing for the US to join the group, according to people familiar with the matter. US President Joe Biden has repeatedly pressed to eliminate a raft of tax incentives for the oil and gas industry — reviving a campaign former President Barack Obama launched more than a decade ago.
But the effort depends on support from the closely divided Congress and has been fought by oil industry leaders who argue they shouldn’t be singled out, since many of the targeted deductions are not unique to the sector and have corollaries through the tax code.
The Netherlands has been at the forefront of combating fossil fuel subsidies after it tallied its own and found they totaled around €40 billion. Now the country wants the European Union to undertake the same assessment as a first step to phasing out support for dirty fuels. Activists say that figure dwarfs support for renewables.
Other countries who signed up for the coalition include France, Canada, Spain and Austria. The group wants to involve international organizations like the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, as well as create a common methodology to measure support for polluting fuels.
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Net Zero requires new high-voltage power lines to be wrapped around the Earth 2,000 times within 17 years
Achieving Net Zero means building 80 million kilometres of new and refurbished power lines within 17 years, equivalent to wrapping the Earth 2,000 times with new electricity grid capacity. All the high voltage lines built in the last century will need to be built again by 2040 to benefit from all the intermittent power produced by the vast number of wind turbines. The ecological costs of all this can only be guessed at.
Electricity cables are made of aluminium and copper and strung on giant pylons made of steel and supported by large concrete bases. For their part, wind turbines are a menace to both avian and oceanic wildlife, consume vast quantities of raw materials, have a limited lifespan and are an increasing blight on both inland and offshore landscapes.
If the International Energy Agency (IEA) gets its way, you ain’t seen nothing yet. The roll-out of high voltage lines will be on an unprecedented scale. In a report on global electricity grids issued to coincide with COP28, the IEA states that “an unprecedented level of attention from policymakers and business leaders is needed to ensure grids support clean energy transitions and maintain electricity security”. Major changes in how grids operate and are regulated are said to be essential. Annual investment in grids, which has remained broadly stagnant, needs to double to more than $600 billion a year by 2030.
The Australian science journalist Jo Nova is in no mood to be understanding: “Remember, it’s not their fault that renewables need far more land, more space, more backup and more infrastructure – it’s our fault we didn’t build a world ready for their holy energy.”
The IEA paints a world where electricity grids are becoming a “bottleneck” for transitions to Net Zero emissions. While investment in renewables has been increasing rapidly, global investment in grids “has barely changed”. In Europe, policymakers can speed up progress on grids by “enhancing planning, ensuring regulatory risk assessments allow for anticipatory investment, and streamlining administrative processes”. In plain English this means ripping up local planning laws in over-populated Britain and blanketing the country with millions of giant electricity pylons. These will be required to bring energy to urban areas from power intermittently generated far away in the North Sea and off the Scottish coast.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the British Government recently set out “major plans” to speed up connections and rapidly increase capacity on the electricity grid. The press release cunningly linked it with a £960 million government investment in “green industries”. The new package is “expected” to bring forward £90 billion of investment over the next 10 years. The Government promised that it will “reward” those living closest to new infrastructure with up to £1,000 a year off their electricity bills. In another part of the release, this is downgraded to communities “could” benefit, and the bung is limited to 10 years.
Whatever the money is spent on, it is likely to be chickenfeed compared with the growing £12 billion annual subsidy paid by electricity consumers to the producers of renewable energy. But the next British government will face an empty exchequer and soaring state debt. Lack of finance along with the end of low interest rates and free money printing is likely to kill many of the green fantasises currently being peddled by collectivist Net Zero fanatics. It is becoming clearer by the day, to an increasing number of people, that renewable energy is unreliable and uneconomic, and has an insatiable requirement for financial subsidy.
Emeritus Cambridge Professor Michael Kelly has long been a critic of the blind, un-costed rush to Net Zero. The U.K. electricity grid will require upgrading from top to bottom, he wrote in a recent GWPF essay. Leaving aside the massive roll out of long-distance transmission lines required, he noted the inadequacies of all the local cabling and sub-stations built before the need to charge electric cars and run heat pumps. “The whole distribution system will need to be upgraded… the work will be extraordinarily expensive, but without it there will either be regular brownouts, or drivers will be told where and when they can charge their batteries,” he explained.
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Bjorn Lomborg: Net zero is not the answer to climate change
The spectacle of another annual climate conference is ongoing in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) until Dec. 12. Like Kabuki theater, performative set pieces lead from one to the other: politicians and celebrities arrive by private jets; speakers predict imminent doom; hectoring nongovernmental organizations cast blame; political negotiations become fraught and inevitably go overtime; and finally: the signing of a new agreement that participants hope and pretend will make a difference.
This circus has been repeated since the 1990s. Despite 27 previous conferences with iterations of ominous speeches and bold promises, global emissions have inexorably increased, punctuated just once, by the economic shutdown of COVID-19. This year is likely to see higher emissions than ever before.
Almost every rich country preaches far more than it delivers. This is exemplified by the European Union, which has promised more than anyone else, yet — when forced by Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine to cut off gas imports — went looking in Africa for more oil, gas, and coal. Meanwhile, almost every poor country understandably prioritizes prosperity, which means abundant, cheap, and reliable energy—which still means fossil fuels.
Underpinning the climate summit farce is one big lie repeated over and over: that green energy is on the precipice of replacing fossil fuels in every aspect of our lives. This exaggeration is today championed by the International Energy Agency, which has turned from an impartial arbiter of energy data to the proponent of the far-fetched prediction that fossil fuels will peak within just seven years.
The claim ignores the fact that any transition away from fossil fuels is occurring only with enormous taxpayer-funded subsidies. And while major energy players like Exxon Mobil and Chevron Corp. are moving back to investment in fossil fuel, big bets on green energy have failed spectacularly. Over the past 15 years, alternative energy stocks have plummeted in value, thus sending the pensions of ordinary workers tumbling due to virtue signaling pension companies while general stocks have increased more than four-fold.
What won’t be acknowledged in the UAE — because it has never been acknowledged at a global climate summit — is the awkward reality that while climate change has real costs, climate policy does, too.
In most public conversations, climate change costs are vastly exaggerated. Just consider how every heat wave is depicted as an end-of-the-world, cataclysmic killer, while the far greater reductions in deaths from warmer winters pass without being remarked on. Yet the costs of climate policy are bizarrely ignored.
Analyzing the balance between climate and policy costs has been at the heart of the study of climate change economics for more than three decades. Renowned economist William Nordhaus is the only climate change economist recognized with a Nobel prize. His research shows that we should absolutely do something about climate change: Early cuts in fossil fuel emissions are cheap and will reduce the most dangerous temperature rises. But his work also shows that highly ambitious carbon reductions will be a bad deal, with phenomenally high costs and low additional benefits.
Climate activists, who insist we should listen to the science, have consistently ignored this research and encouraged rich world leaders to make ever-greater climate promises. Many leaders have even gone so far as to promise net-zero carbon emissions by 2050.
Despite this likely being the single costliest policy ever promised by world leaders, it was made without a single peer-reviewed estimate of the full costs. Earlier this year, a special issue of Climate Change Economics made the first such analyses. It shows that even with very generous assumptions, the benefits of pursuing net zero will just slowly inch upwards over the century. By mid-century, the benefits—meaning the avoided costs from climate change—could reach about $1 trillion each year.
But the costs would be much, much higher. Three different modeled approaches show far higher costs than benefits for every year throughout the 21st century and far into the next. By 2050, the annual costs of the policy range between $10 and $43 trillion. That’s 4 to 18 percent of global GDP. Consider that the total tax intake of all governments across the world today is about 15 percent of global GDP—and politicians would potentially have us spend more than that. Across the century, the benefit is 1.4 percent of global GDP while the cost averages out at 8.6 percent of global GDP. Every dollar in cost delivers perhaps 16 cents of climate benefits. Clearly, this is an atrocious use of money.
The only thing that could avoid this summit being a retread of 27 other failures is if politicians acknowledge the real cost of net zero policy—and instead of making more carbon cut promises, vow to dramatically increase green energy research and development.
This would help innovate the price of low-carbon energy below that of fossil fuels so every country in the world will want to make the switch. Instead of subsidizing today’s still-inefficient technology and trying to brute force a transition by pushing up the price of fossil fuels, we need to make green technologies genuinely cheaper.
Sadly, that seems a far-fetched hope. Instead, this climate summit looks set to be another wasted opportunity producing yet more hot air.
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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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