Monday, October 04, 2021
China's slave labor, coal-fired, mass-subsidized solar panels dominate the planet
China's "successful" foray into renewable energy has only been made possible by slave labor and massive government subsidies - which are not typically good indicators of a flourishing business endeavor.
Over the last half-century-plus, the US has signed a great many anti-US trade deals.
What would appear to be antithetical to…everything? Makes perfect sense once one learns who funds politicians’ campaigns - and hires ex-politicians.
Then-candidate Donald Trump was rich enough to end-run for president - around this vicious anti-US cabal. So he could campaign on the emperor being naked - and promise US trade deals that made some semblance of sense for the US.
And then Trump won. And the trade reforms Trump emplaced - are all much better for the US.
Most unfortunately, Trump’s addled, anti-US successor Joe Biden is now charged with ensuring they continue to benefit the US.
Meanwhile, everyone’s attempts to rip-off the US live on.
Since “green energy” is itself, in its entirety a rip-off - this is hardly surprising….
US Govt Asked to Review Chinese Solar Companies Allegedly Circumventing Antidumping Duties:
“A new group called the American Solar Manufacturers Against Chinese Circumvention (A-SMACC), represented by D.C. law firm Wiley, has filed a petition with the Department of Commerce, asking the department to investigate Chinese silicon solar panel manufacturing companies working in Malaysia, Thailand and Vietnam as a way to avoid antidumping and countervailing (AD/CV) duties.”
Why are the Communist Chinese being charged extra duties?
China Dominates the Solar Industry:
“Chinese entrepreneurs started making their own solar products, destined for places like Europe, where governments were subsidizing the installation of solar power. They benefited from the same strategies that made China so successful at manufacturing in general….
“Building up the solar manufacturing industry – at many points along the supply chain – became a national priority. The Chinese government funded research labs at solar companies and promoted upstream production of polysilicon, one of the key raw materials for solar panels.
“Also, according to Chen Gang, ‘the government gives a lot of subsidies to the energy, because this industry needs a lot of energy, and also cheap land, and bank loans. They all help Chinese industry to gain competitiveness.’ Much of the support came from local governments, about which he says little is known.…
“Some government support is alleged to have been more covert.
“In 2014, a grand jury indicted five hackers working for China’s military with hacking the solar technology of U.S. companies and then sharing it with Chinese companies.
“In 2020, prosecutors charged another group of hackers with working with China’s Ministry of State Security to steal industrial intellectual property, including around solar.
“Widmer of First Solar said the government support, in all its forms, helped Chinese companies elbow out the competition.
“‘They subsidize industries, highly motivate them to create overcapacity, which then creates pricing power. They export that product into international markets with predatory pricing behavior and squash all competition,’ he said.”
None of that smacks of free trade, does it. Well then you’ll love this….
China Helped Make Solar Power Cheap Through Subsidies, Coal And Allegedly, Forced Labor
I would have skipped the word “allegedly” - but it ain’t my article….:
“In recent years Chinese manufacturers have come to dominate world output in solar panels and components. The conventional wisdom within the renewable energy sector, until recently, was that China had taken over the market because its companies were more efficient, with better automation and more reliable supply chains.
“But events over the last few months make clear that there have been some other factors working in China’s favor: cheap coal, heavy Chinese government subsidies allowing for the dumping of solar panels on foreign markets, and the use of forced labor in conditions described as ‘genocide’ and ‘slavery.’”
The slavery is real - and an abomination.
So too is the irony of China using cheap, real energy coal - to make expensive, “green energy” solar panels cheaper.
And then China further subsidizes the heck out of the panels - to further undercut everyone everywhere else.
In response to all of this fake “free trade” behavior - we impose extra import duties.
Which China then circumvents - by running their slave-labor, coal-fired, “green energy” solar panels through nearby countries they can bully into letting them do whatever they wish.
The Biden Administration is being asked to impose the China tariffs on these Chinese products - regardless of what pass-through countries they use to get them here. Which the law requires they do:
“If Commerce finds that importers are avoiding duties by rerouting their solar panels through the Southeast Asian nations, then by law the department must impose duties.”
But adherence to the law is not something to which the Biden Administration has demonstrated a whole lot of fealty.
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Online debates over the environmental impact of eating meat are getting heated
Ten years ago, when we ranked the most controversial articles on Wikipedia, George W. Bush was at the top of the list with global warming at number five. The article on global warming has now been re-titled as climate change, but this remains among the most polarising issues of our time – and one frequently debated on social media.
This might seem like it’s due to the way climate change is often presented primarily as a political issue: something you can choose whether or not to support. But perhaps it’s as much a result of the way social media works. Our recent research shows that polarisation on social media is mathematically inevitable.
What’s more, this polarisation is allowing online discussions about climate change to be overridden by culturally-focused arguments about things like diet. This appears to be further cementing the idea that climate change is a matter of ideology, making it harder to convince people to support action to tackle it.
The fact that it’s so easy to unfriend or unfollow people you disagree with on social media has accelerated the formation of online echo chambers to the extent that even an algorithmic tool designed to break the bubbles won’t be able to help.
Get news that’s free, independent and based on evidence.
Don’t get us wrong: we’re big fans of social media and most likely have already tweeted this article by the time you read it. Social media can be seen as a marketplace of ideas, providing an open forum to exchange facts and opinions and, importantly for scientists, to inform the public about their research. But polarisation can ruin it for everyone.
An example of this relates to the UK bakery chain Greggs’ vegan sausage roll, which ignited days of social media turmoil when it was introduced to the UK in January 2019 to coincide with Veganuary, a month-long UK-based charity campaign designed to encourage veganism. Veganuary-oriented social media discussions that year were dominated by arguments over the sausage roll’s relative merits.
To understand the extent of this interference, we analysed about half a million tweets posted between 28 December 2018 and 28 January 2019 containing any of the hashtags “#vegan”, “#veganuary” and “#veganuary2019” to map out the prevalence of extreme opinions among the tweets.
Around 30% of the tweets we analysed were firmly pro-vegan, while 20% of tweets used Veganuary-related hashtags to express their protest against veganism. More importantly, many Twitter users who tweeted about Veganuary explicitly said if it wasn’t for the Greggs story, they wouldn’t have gotten involved.
On one hand, bringing extra attention to the campaign might be considered a blessing. On the other, the polarised nature of online arguments disproportionately focused on the issue of the vegan sausage roll.
This shifted what could have been a fruitful and logical discussion around the pros and cons of veganism towards unproductive fights centred around perceived threats to people’s identities tied up with what they do or don’t eat and what that means. Many quickly took sides, refusing to engage in conversation and instead attacking the personal qualities or intelligence of the “other side”.
This conflict surfaced again on social media a few months later, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN-endorsed organisation, published its Special Report on Climate Change and Land in August 2019. In order to gauge the level of public engagement with the report, we collected all tweets sent in August 2019 which contained the phrase “IPCC”. We then used software to analyse the content of some 6,000 tweets in English in order to extract the main topics of discussion.
We found that not only were a large portion of the tweets in response to the IPCC report specifically about diet, but these tweets contained the most toxic and polarised language in the sample. This is even more surprising when considering that diet was only mentioned briefly in the original IPCC report, without any explicit recommendations about meat or dairy consumption.
Evidence like this suggests that diet and cooking are now forming the core of a new culture war around climate.
This could be catastrophic for climate action. Politicians and policy makers traditionally tend to avoid issues that are culturally controversial, and polarisation of public opinion has been shown to weaken politicians’ accountability when it comes to making major decisions.
Our work recently published in Climatic Change shows how tools such as computational topic modelling and sentiment analysis can be used to monitor public discourse about topics like climate events, diet and climate policies. This could help policymakers plan more engaging communication strategies: in other words, to help them read the room.
Both scientists and science communicators who discuss reports like that produced by the IPCC must understand, and anticipate, the likelihood of emotionally charged, potentially negative responses to such polarising issues as climate change – as well as specific areas of polarisation, such as diet, that are currently more popular. This way, they can work to communicate key information in ways that allow readers to focus on what really matters.
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Australian energy giant seeks carbon credits for plan to bury emissions underground
Gas giant Santos could have one of the world’s biggest carbon capture and storage projects operational in South Australia by 2024 after the federal government made the technology eligible for carbon credits intended to drive industrial emissions cuts.
Federal Energy Minister Angus Taylor’s announcement that carbon capture and storage (CCS) had been added to the list of approved technologies under the Emissions Reduction Fund has cleared the last major hurdle for Santos to green-light the $210 million project at the Cooper Basin’s Moomba gas plant.
Santos managing director Kevin Gallagher.
Santos managing director Kevin Gallagher.CREDIT:TREVOR COLLENS
Santos managing director Kevin Gallagher said the company had begun the process of applying to register the Moomba project with the Clean Energy Regulator to access Australian Carbon Credit Units.
“Once the project has been registered, we will be in a position to make a final investment decision to proceed,” Mr Gallagher said.
“The Australian government’s focus on CCS and other low-emission technologies sets Australia up to capitalise on our natural assets and become a carbon storage superpower, building on the position we have established as an energy superpower over more than half a century.”
CCS – which traps carbon dioxide emissions produced by factories or power plants before they are emitted into the atmosphere and injects them underground – has been a divisive area of climate policy, but is being targeted as a priority for the federal government’s emissions-reduction road map.
The Greens and environmental advocates oppose the inclusion of CCS in the Emissions Reduction Scheme, which awards credits to entities that cut pollution by employing one of the approved techniques, as it would direct taxpayer dollars to fossil fuel companies and potentially delay the massive research and development push needed to switch heavy industry to clean fuel sources.
There are also fresh questions about the technology’s prospects of functioning at scale after Chevron’s giant Gorgon CCS project in Western Australia this year failed to meet a crucial target of capturing and burying at least 80 per cent of the carbon dioxide released from its gas reservoirs, despite several years of work and spending more than $3 billion.
Supporters of CCS argue it is a necessary and unavoidable component of the world’s decarbonisation goals to avoid the worst and most immediate impacts of global warming. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the International Energy Agency say carbon capture is needed now to start reducing the pollution from difficult-to-abate industrial processes like cement production.
If it proceeds, Moomba could eventually have the capacity to stash as much as 20 million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
Gordon Ramsay, a Sydney-based energy analyst with the Royal Bank of Canada, said Moomba was expected to be a low-cost CCS project due to Santos’s position as a leading operator in the mature Cooper Basin.
“Santos has existing CO2-separation equipment at Moomba that is already being used to meet Australian domestic gas pipeline gas specifications,” Mr Ramsay said. “Santos also has a number of existing wells that can be repurposed for CO2 injection, and it has depleted reservoirs with proven rock seal in which it can safely store hydrocarbons.”
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South-east Asia resisting climate action
Singapore: South-east Asia risks being ravaged by worsening natural disasters, according to a new report that warns the region is jeopardising the global push for carbon neutrality.
World leaders will gather in Glasgow in early November for the COP26 summit, regarded as vital for a consensus to be reached on emission reductions that could limit global warming to 1.5 degrees.
But only two ASEAN countries - Indonesia and Laos - have set firm targets for net-zero emissions and the region risks “being left behind if we do not act now”, says a report by Bain and Co, Microsoft and Singapore’s Temasek on south-east Asia’s green economy.
“Put simply, the world cannot achieve net zero without SEA coming along on the journey,” the report said.
“Compared with global benchmarks, SEA’s climate ambitions appear modest. Most of SEA’s latest NDC [Nationally Determined Contributions] targets lead to an increase in annual emissions by 2030 in absolute terms.”
Home to more than 650 million people and 15 per cent of the world’s rainforests, south-east Asia is already on the frontline of the climate crisis, with elevated exposure to cyclones, tsunamis, floods and volcanic eruptions.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in August predicated dire consequences in the region if warming rose beyond 1.5 degrees over pre-industrial levels, as scientists fear it will do by the early 2030s, with rising sea levels, heat waves, drought and flooding threatening greater devastation.
The new report, pitched at multinationals’ supply chains and investors as well as governments, says regional economies will be hit hard in the future by climate shocks “unless it takes decisive and timely action”.
It credits recent announcements including Indonesia bringing forward its net-zero goal from 2070 to 2060, the Philippines stopping new coal power plants being built and the likes of Singapore and Thailand outlining national green plans.
“However, SEA is not on track, and there is a lot of work to do,” it says, calling for the transition from fossil fuels to green energy to be sped up and urging transformation of the food sector.
The report says $US2 trillion ($A2.8 trillion) of investment in clean energy over the next decade is required for south-east Asia to properly tackle its reliance on natural resources, with only $US9 billion ($A12.5 billion) in capital channelled into renewable energy businesses and assets in 2020.
Indonesia, the world’s second biggest coal exporter, eighth largest carbon emitter and the defacto leader of the ASEAN bloc, shapes as the key player in intensifying efforts.
President Joko Widodo, who has ambitious plans to shift Indonesia’s capital from Jakarta to Borneo because of the metropolis’s vulnerability to rising sea levels, has flagged making the green economy a priority when the country takes over the G20 presidency next year.
Joko’s crackdown on logging and new palm oil plantations has reduced forest fires and rates of deforestation - the top contributor to Indonesia’s greenhouse gas emissions - and his government has also proposed a new carbon tax.
However, Indonesia doesn’t plan on phasing out coal-powered plants until the 2050s, even if China’s decision last week to stop financing new coal projects abroad looms as a global game changer.
Joko’s government in September also terminated an agreement with Norway, which had struck an incentive-based deal to pay Indonesia $US1 billion ($A1.4 billion) a year to protect its rainforests to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Norway’s failure to stump up the cash was given as the reason for the agreement being ripped up but the Indonesian government said it would not change its commitment to bring down emissions.
“Indonesia has recorded significant progress and achievements to fulfil its obligation under the Paris Agreement, which has been ratified,” Indonesia’s foreign ministry said as the ending of the deal was announced.
“Indonesia’s achievement can also be seen, among others, on the lowest rate of deforestation in the past 20 years, including the significant reduction on forest fires.”
Malaysia, which alongside Indonesia produces more than 80 per cent of the world’s palm oil, said this week it was committing to being carbon neutral “by 2050 at the earliest”.
Thailand is aiming to be net zero by 2065 to 2070.
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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)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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