Tuesday, July 30, 2024
Biden Admin Suggests Spending $78 Trillion to Achieve Net-Zero Global Carbon Emissions
U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said during a speech in Belem, Brazil, on Saturday that the price tag for a global transition to a low-carbon economy amounts to $78 trillion in financing through 2050.
Yellen said that in order to achieve the goal of net-zero global carbon emissions, there would need to be $3 trillion globally in annual financing for the cause, which she said is a top priority for the Biden administration, according to the speech. In order to contribute to this, Yellen vowed to finance green initiatives in developing countries through multilateral development banks and develop “clean energy technologies.”
“The transition will require no less than $3 trillion in new capital from many sources each year between now and 2050,” Yellen said during the speech. “This can be leveraged to support pathways to sustainable and inclusive growth, including for countries that have historically received less investment.”
“Neglecting to address climate change and the loss of nature and biodiversity is not just bad environmental policy,” Yellen said during the speech. “It is bad economic policy.”
Yellen boasted in her speech about the commitments the Biden administration has put forth toward forwarding these green initiatives to achieve their “climate goals.”
“At home, we are implementing the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate legislation in our nation’s history,” Yellen said during the speech. “It is driving hundreds of billions of dollars of investments in the clean energy technologies and industries that will propel us toward our climate goals and fuel our economic growth.”
The Inflation Reduction Act allocated $370 billion to subsidize climate initiatives like electric vehicles and other technologies that are essential to President Joe Biden’s green agenda.
“Climate change is literally an existential threat to our nation and to the world,” Biden said during a speech addressing climate change in July of 2022. “As president, I’ll use my executive powers to combat climate—the climate crisis in the absence of congressional actions, notwithstanding their incredible action.”
During her speech, Yellen advocated for these climate initiatives to be implemented “beyond our borders.”
“Our ambitions at home are matched by our ambitions abroad,” Yellen said during the speech. “We know that we can only achieve our climate and economic goals—from reducing global emissions to adapting and building resilience, from strengthening markets to bolstering supply chains—if we also lead efforts far beyond our borders.”
The Treasury Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Debt-Funded GB Energy to Bet on the Costliest Electricity Generation Technologies
Labour has taken to the airwaves to promote the launch of the Great British Energy Bill in Parliament.
The official press release makes a number of bold statements that do not have a very close relationship to the truth.
First, they make several claims about “cheap” renewables such as the claim that the Energy Secretary has “unblocked the production of cheap solar energy”. The Prime Minister claimed the new bill would “bring down energy bills for good” and the investment will be “lowering bills for families and businesses.”
Perhaps as a portent for what is to come, Labour appears to have dropped the pre-election pledge to cut energy bills by £300
The pledge has been reduced to a conditional “should make bills lower in the long term”. This is not surprising because as discussed here, the promised reduction has already been delivered by reduced gas prices.
This is not a surprise because they are committed to investing in some of the whackiest, most expensive energy technologies. As well as offshore wind they are also going to invest in carbon capture and storage (CCS), hydrogen, wave and tidal energy. As Figure 3 shows, these are all extremely expensive technologies.
For this financial year, the average market reference price for wind and solar, largely set by gas, has been around £65/MWh. In the latest AR6 renewables auction round they are offering fixed offshore wind £102/MWh, floating offshore £246/MWh, tidal stream £364/MWh and wave power £359/MWh.
All the renewable technologies are more expensive than gas (even when loaded with a carbon tax), with some costing many multiples of gas-fired power. Our bills can only go one way, and that is up.
The press release, the Prime Minister and the Energy Secretary all also claim that spending more money on renewables will lead to more energy security.
They fail to explain what will keep the lights on cold, calm winter evenings when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining. Of course, the flexible, dispatchable electricity required will be generated by gas-fired power stations and even more gas will be required if these are fitted with CCS.
The press release makes no mention of their commitment to ban further offshore exploration and development of gas resources in the North Sea. Even the Climate Change Committee and the National Grid ESO recognise we will need gas well beyond 2050, so building more intermittent renewables and cutting gas production both actively reduce domestic energy security.
GB Energy will form a partnership with the Crown Estate to try and accelerate offshore wind developments. GB Energy will be funded by £8.3 billion of (borrowed) money from the Government and the Crown Estate will be granted new borrowing powers.
The Crown Estate estimates this mountain of debt will lead to up to 20-30GW of offshore wind capacity being leased by 2030.. They plan to conduct early development work to de-risk projects for the private sector.
They claim this new endeavour will bring “profits back to the British people”. What they really mean is that bill payers will be stung by the cost of the eye-watering subsidies for these new projects.
And the profits that arise in GB Energy and the Crown Estate will flow through into Treasury coffers. Ordinary people will only pay the costs and receive none of the profits.
It is only a matter of time before we are exhorted to Stay Cold, Protect the Grid and Save Gas, perhaps accompanied by Patrick Vallance giving daily tallies of deaths from hypothermia.
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Air NZ scraps 2030 carbon emissions target as ‘unachievable’
Air New Zealand has become the first major airline to concede ambitious carbon emissions reduction targets are unachievable by 2030, and has made the decision to dump them.
The kiwi carrier had been aiming to slash its carbon intensity by 28.9 per cent compared to 2019 levels, through the use of sustainable aviation fuel, lower emissions aircraft and other changes.
However in a statement to the ASX, Air New Zealand said many of the levers needed to meet the target were outside of its control and remained “challenging”.
Chief executive Greg Foran said it had also become apparent in recent months and weeks, that potential delays to fleet renewal plans posed an additional risk to the target’s achievability.
“It is possible the airline may need to retain its existing fleet for longer than planned due to global manufacturing and supply chain issues that could potentially slow the introduction of newer, more fuel efficient aircraft in to the fleet,” Mr Foran said.
“As such and given so many levers needed to meet the target are outside of our control, the decision has been made to retract the 2030 target and withdraw from the science based targets initiative network immediately.”
He indicated that work had began to consider a new, near-term carbon emissions reduction target that could better reflect the challenges relating to aircraft and alternative jet fuel availability within the industry.
Last year, 600 million litres of sustainable aviation fuel was produced worldwide, which was more than double that of 2022, but still a mere 0.2 per cent of the airline industry’s needs.
In 2024, production was expected to triple to 1.875 billion litres or about 0.5 per cent of the total aviation fuel supply.
Air New Zealand chair Dame Therese Walsh said the airline remained committed to its 2050 net zero carbon emissions target, which had been adopted by the broader aviation industry.
“Our work to transition away from fossil fuels continues, as does our advocacy for the global and domestic regulatory and policy settings that will help facilitate Air New Zealand and the wider aviation system in New Zealand to do its part to mitigate climate change risks,” said Dame Therese.
Air New Zealand has previously been one of the most outspoken on sustainability issues, and was one of the first to announce plans to develop carbon neutral aircraft for regional routes in partnership with Airbus.
At last year’s CAPA aviation summit in Brisbane, chief sustainability officer Kiri Hannifin even challenged other airlines to consider if they were “worth the carbon”.
In a passionate speech, Ms Hannifin said it was a simple matter of fact that airlines “were connecting people but polluting at the same time” and they all needed to do better.
“For us in aviation, we have to ask ourselves ‘are we worth the carbon?’” Ms Hannifin said.
“That should be a driver of how we conduct ourselves as a business and as a society. It’s also a great moral compass — are we worth the carbon?”
Australian airlines remained wedded to their 2030 targets, including a 22 per cent reduction in carbon intensity for Virgin Australia, and 25 per cent emissions reduction for Qantas.
Both were banking on increased production of sustainable aviation fuel and lower emissions aircraft to achieve the interim targets.
As yet Australia is yet to produce any sustainable aviation fuel, despite being rich in the sort of material — agricultural waste and feedstock — used to make the alternative fuel.
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Hydrogen nonsense
Mining magnate Andrew ‘‘Twiggy’’ Forrest surprised many in the media on July 17 when he announced he was scaling back his green hydrogen commitments.
Yet, journalists following the global energy debate should have known this holy grail of power storage and pollution-free fuel was running into trouble around the world — even as Forrest continued to make multibillion-dollar announcements with state and federal leaders here and with governments overseas.
This is why politicians should not try to pick winners: the rush of capital looking for taxpayer-guaranteed returns is no measure of a technology’s viability. Nor does history show Australian politicians are any good at making decisions properly left to investment market professionals.
This column has long been sceptical of various firming technologies for variable wind and solar power. Back on October 17, 2022, I wrote: “Perhaps the most important question (in this area) that journalists should be asking relates to the feasibility of green hydrogen, being spruiked around the world … by Forrest.”
It quoted climate campaigner and engineer Saul Griffith estimating Forrest’s hydrogen would be between five and six times more expensive than using wind and solar only for power. Griffith said power would need to be priced at 2c per kilowatt hour to produce hydrogen for the then-new Albanese government’s $2 per kilogram target price.
Most states at the time were charging between 25c and 40c per kilowatt hour.
The week before the latest federal budget this column had a crack at Jim Chalmers for pinning so much of his government’s “Future Made in Australia” ambition on green hydrogen. The piece pointed out industry was expecting more taxpayer funds for green hydrogen in the budget the following week, but even the green evangelist Grattan Institute warned in December optimism about hydrogen was overblown.
Grattan energy specialist Tony Wood said government and industry would be wise to limit hydrogen expectations to green ammonia for fertiliser, green steel and green alumina.
Wood said even confining hydrogen ambitions to these sectors would “require more than 30 gigawatts of electricity, 60 per cent more than we have in the National Electricity Market today”.
Yet, on budget night, May 14, the Treasurer announced a further $19.7bn over 10 years under the “renewable energy super power banner”. Green hydrogen support was extended to $6.7bn over a decade.
Forrest, Chalmers and Anthony Albanese all claimed last week they remained committed to green hydrogen despite Forrest’s lay-off of 700 workers and his scaling back of several projects. He did remain committed to five hydrogen projects here and overseas.
Yet, had Chalmers and the Prime Minister read Saul Griffith’s testimony before the federal parliament last year, they might have been more cautious.
The Renew Economy website on April 6 last year quoted Griffith, also co-founder of Rewiring Australia, telling a parliamentary inquiry committing taxpayer funds to hydrogen would be a costly economic mistake.
“The idea that hydrogen will play a large role in the energy future does not make economic or thermodynamic sense,” Griffith’s written submission to the joint standing committee on the energy transition says. Griffith, like Wood, believes hydrogen will play a role in certain hard-to-abate sectors.
Griffith said people with a strong vested interest had “a heavy hand on the tiller of the hydrogen conversation”.
Forrest’s climb-down from the hydrogen pulpit came as the EU sounded a warning about hydrogen.
The Brussels-based European Court of Auditors said on July 17 — the same day as Forrest’s announcement — the EU’s hydrogen goals were unrealistic, despite the billions of euros already invested.
The EU had committed €18.8bn ($31bn) to make 10 million tonnes of green hydrogen by 2030 and to import a further 10 million tonnes by 2030. Forrest alone claimed he could make 15 million tonnes by 2030.
The following night on ABC’s 7.30, host Sarah Ferguson gave Forrest a rare, almost interruption-free, 11 minutes to obfuscate on the central question: has hydrogen been over-hyped?
It was an interview in stark contrast with her latest nuclear power exchange with opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien. Ferguson talked over the top of him throughout and interrupted during most of the points O’Brien tried to make.
Yet, nuclear power is tried, tested and reliable while green hydrogen is in early development stages and may not be viable at scale.
A paper by the conservative Manhattan Institute released on February 1 this year, Green Hydrogen: A Multibillion-Dollar Energy Boondoggle, gets to the heart of the hydrogen problem. Hydrogen creates less energy than is used to make it.
The study examines various hydrogen technologies and homes in on EROI: energy return on investment.
The EROI of green hydrogen via electrolysis is 0.5. It releases half as much energy as is invested in making it.
The EROIs of traditional power sources are 28 for natural gas, 30 for coal and 75 for nuclear power. This is the science; it’s not about climate denial but the reality of physics and chemistry.
The point of the hydrogen story for a column on journalism? Scepticism is a key quality needed for good and accurate reporting. Journalists need to be especially sceptical in testing claims in-line with their own personal biases.
In the energy transition, conservative-leaning journalists who favour nuclear power have been unable to accept the Coalition’s plan to build nuclear reactors will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions until 2040.
Therefore, unless a Coalition government were to scrap its emissions reduction targets, it would not markedly slow the rollout of wind and solar technology which, for all its problems, will reduce emissions.
Remember, too, the Coalition plan calls for nuclear as a dispatchable backup rather than a whole-of-system power source. As O’Brien has said, it would eventually operate in tandem with wind and solar.
Similarly, left-leaning journalists like those who dominate the ABC need to test their inherent biases in favour of anything claimed to reduce emissions.
Ferguson has been a prime example in recent weeks. Why the soft approach to Forrest while applying attack tactics in her nuclear interview with O’Brien in March?
Similarly, ABC Media Watch has for decades been on the hunt for any stories it thinks might hide secret climate denial.
Last Monday, July 22, it was again on its favourite hobby horse: bollocking Sky News Australia. This time it targeted the network’s coverage of EVs.
It did acknowledge what has been clear for over a year: while Australian buyers were late to the EV party, buyers in Europe and North America have been walking away from the technology.
Why? The problems reporters at this paper have been describing for almost a decade: range anxiety, price, increasing insurance premiums, fears about battery fires, the cost of battery repair and the high cost of smash repair. The latest EV hot-button issue has been deep price discounting by Tesla which has left recent former buyers out of pocket compared with new buyers.
Media Watch ignored most of these issues and failed to make the central point. Most EVs in Australia, unless powered by a home battery connected to rooftop solar, receive electricity from a power grid still largely fired by burning coal.
Now, that should make any thinking journalist a bit sceptical.
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