EU takes the ax to green farming rules
The European Commission is finalizing a series of legislative proposals that would severely weaken environmental requirements for farmers — flying in the face of advice by its top scientists that agriculture must become more sustainable or it will be decimated by climate change.
The proposals, seen by POLITICO, would end a requirement to set aside land to promote biodiversity, making it and other measures — such as minimizing tillage to prevent soil erosion — voluntary. Taken together, they would enable farmers to get EU subsidies even if they don't meet the most basic environmental standards, known as conditionality.
The dramatic policy reversal by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission comes at the urging of national governments desperate to quell protests by farmers who have taken to the streets around Europe, and in Brussels, to vent their fury at the environmental red tape they say is destroying their livelihoods.
But it also ignores a stark warning by the EU’s own scientists, in a first-of-its-kind report this week by the European Environment Agency, which singles out agriculture as a sector where urgent action is needed if the Continent is to avoid catastrophic floods, years-long droughts and scorching heatwaves.
Civil society groups and green lawmakers warn that the push would undo what little environmental reform has been added in recent years to the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the EU farm subsidy program that eats up a third of the bloc’s budget, locking taxpayers' money into subsidizing farmers to maintain the status quo for years to come.
“Wiping out decades of incremental progress towards sustainable farming for short-term electoral concerns is a huge mistake, and all of society will pay a high price,” said Marco Contiero, Greenpeace EU's agriculture campaigner.
The policy reversal by Ursula von der Leyen’s Commission comes at the urging of national governments desperate to quell protests by farmers | Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images
“Farmers are experiencing serious hardship, but these proposals do little to address that and just strip away some of the last shreds of environmental protection in the EU’s farm policy.”
Conditionality
The CAP includes a set of “good agricultural and environmental conditions” — or GAECs — that farmers must meet to receive subsidies.
The EU executive will propose to remove obligations for four of them, and instead provide financial compensation to farmers who voluntarily implement them.
https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-takes-the-ax-to-green-farming-rules/
***********************************************UK: Net Zero is dead. Only the fanatics haven’t realised it
If building new gas plants is inconsistent with Net Zero, then Net Zero is inconsistent with a functioning power grid
Rishi Sunak has made the case for building new gas-fired power plants on the grounds that reliable sources of electricity generation are needed to back up the intermittency of wind and solar generation. This simple statement of reality has prompted hostile comments from the usual suspects, claiming that this is inconsistent with Net Zero commitments.
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The response to Mr Sunak’s article illustrates that many advocates of Net Zero live in a fantasy world and are, apparently, content to sacrifice the future welfare of the UK’s population on the altar of arbitrary and artificial goals. In our world there is a simple choice to ensure reliable electricity supplies in 2035. Either we build a lot of new gas-fired generation capacity, or we extend the life of older inefficient plants. In neither case is a fully decarbonised electricity system possible, but the option of doing little or nothing is clearly worse than making the commitment to building new plants.
There are too many artificial deadlines in the climate change field, but this one is real. It takes between 3 and 5 years to build a new gas-fired power plant at an existing site under the UK’s current planning system. Another 1-2 years is required for contracts and project finance. These are minimum periods as 30 GW of plant capacity can’t be built at one time. A program of this scale must start in 2025 or 2026 to have any chance of meeting the UK’s needs in 2035. Unless we start now, we face blackouts within a decade.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/03/12/rishi-sunak-gas-power-station-net-zero-blackouts/
****************************************************Flawed Polling Study Claims That Climate Change Influences Elections
In a recent post by The Conversation, “Climate change matters to more and more people – and could be a deciding factor in the 2024 election,” one of the authors of a recent study looking at polling and Americans’ attitudes towards climate change claims that despite being low on most people’s list of concerns, it actually plays a potentially deciding role in elections. This is unsubstantiated, and not only can the results can be manipulated based on what polling you select, but the researchers appear to have -at best- some major blind spots when it comes to interpreting their data.
Matt Burgess, assistant professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, wrote the Conversation piece, and is also one of the authors on the study being referred to. Right away, he admits that American voters’ top priorities are economics, inflation, crime, health care, education, and immigration. This is consistently shown to be true, as Climate Realism has pointed out numerous times. Not only do Americans rank other issues higher than climate change, but it is actually ranked last or tied for last for the majority of people when compared to other issues, even other environmental issues.
Still, Burgess insists that actually climate change has influenced presidential elections, writing “[d]espite this, research that I conducted with my colleages suggests that concern about climate change has had a significant effect on voters’ choices in the past two presidential elections.”
The authors used 2016 and 2020 survey data from “Voter Study Group,” a subsidiary of “Democracy Fund” which is described as nonpartisan, although they seem to lean decidedly left. The study analyzed “relationships between thousands of voters’ presidential picks in the past two elections with their demographics and their opinions on 22 different issues, including climate change.”
The survey data they used was one where they asked voters to rate climate change as “unimportant,” “not very important,” “somewhat important” or “very important.” Unsurprisingly, they found that 67% of those polled rated climate change as “somewhat” or “very” important, which was an increase from previous polling from 2016. They also report that 77% of those rating climate change as important expressed support for Biden in 2020, and 69% of them supported Hillary Clinton in 2016. Burgess says this suggests “that climate change opinion has been providing the Democrats with a growing electoral advantage,” but this is obviously ignoring another fundamental criterion, which is candidate likeability.
Even among Democrats, Clinton was unpopular. Remembering, for example, that many Bernie Sanders supporters were miffed when Clinton was given the nomination, polling data from the time showed that 12% of Sanders supporters ended up voting for Trump in the general election.
This is a pretty egregious oversight on the part of Burgess, and in the Conversation article, he admits that “[o]ur analysis could not answer” the question of how climate change opinion may have “tipped” the 2020 presidential election, but he offers “educated guesses.”
First, that because recent elections have been very close, “climate change opinion would not need to have a very large effect on voting to change election outcomes.” Number two was that “candidates who deny that climate change is real or a problem might turn off some moderate swing voters,” and third was that “some voters may be starting to see the connections between climate change and the kitchen-table issues that they consider to be higher priorities than climate change.”
None of this is evidenced by the data, and outside research calls it into question. The Pew Research Center tried the same thing in 2020, as covered by Climate Realism at the time, claiming that “a majority of registered voters in the United States say climate change will be a very (42 percent) or somewhat (26 percent) important issue in making their decision about whom to vote for in the presidential election[.]” However, once again, the same poll found that out of 12 policy issues, it was at the bottom of the ranking. The question “How important, if at all, are each of the following issues in making your decision about who to vote for in the 2020 presidential election?” was asked of surveyed voters, and even in that line of questioning, the economy, health care, supreme court appointments, corona virus, economic inequality, foreign policy, gun policy, immigration, racial and ethnic inequality, and violent crime all ranked higher.
Burgess admits towards the end of the article that Democrats “risk losing voters when their policies impose economic costs, or when they are framed as anti-capitalist, racial, or overly pessimistic.” This is a death blow to the idea that climate change gives Democrats a significant benefit in elections, because climate policy is consistently economically costly, especially when discussing banning fossil fuels, and polls show that voters are unwilling to spend very much money at all on climate issues. Additionally, the climate narrative is completely pessimistic with constant alarmist claims of impending doom.
In the end, the article about Burgess’ study reads more like wishful thinking than science. It is transparently an effort to use polling in order to influence people into believing that the climate issue is more important in their peers’ minds, so that social pressure will make it a priority for them too. If past polling and the reporting on it are anything to go by, this attempt will likely not succeed either, especially as energy costs rise amid the application of climate policy.
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Collapsing El Niño spells end to year-long bout of climate hysteria
Lawks-a-mercy, the oceans have stopped boiling. Cancel the slots on cable news for rising media stars and noted climate hysterics Jim Dale and Donnachadh McCarthy, and loosen the protective clothing for the unhinged UN Secretary-General Antonio ‘Boiling’ Guterres. To be serious, the current strong and natural El Niño event is starting to dramatically collapse with critical ocean temperatures in the central tropical Pacific ocean falling from 2.1°C above normal in late November to 1.3°C. The collapse in temperatures is even more dramatic at the sub-surface 300 metre level. In the western tropical Pacific, the temperature has plummeted by nearly 1.5°C, and the water is now cooler than normal.
Apart from damaging a few budding media careers, what does this mean? El Niño is a natural transfer of heat between the oceans and the atmosphere that starts in the Pacific regions. The effects of an El Niño are far from completely understood but they are essentially large heat transfers from the tropics to the northern hemisphere. We have experienced three strong El Niños in the last 25 years – 1998, 2016 and 2023 – and in each case they have disrupted weather patterns around the world. This leads to sudden spikes in ocean temperatures and unusual weather events. Over the last year, these events have been ruthlessly catastrophised by activist scientists, politicians and journalists seeking to nudge citizens to accept the collectivist Net Zero agenda.
One of the main indicators of the progress of El Niño, and its related La Niña oscillation, is the temperature of the water at the surface and near surface. The graph below shows the very rapid recent drop in the sub-surface temperatures for the western tropical Pacific down to much cooler levels.
Atmospheric scientist Professor Cliff Mass of Washington University observes that the entire character of the northern winter has been characterised by a strong El Niño. He notes that in America the impacts have included low snowpack over Washington State, huge snowpack and heavy rain over California and warm temperatures over the Upper Plains States. Of course, similar unusual weather patterns have been recorded over many parts of the planet, along with the ubiquitous pseudoscientific claim that the climate is collapsing and it is all the fault of humans and their wicked ways.
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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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