The Death of the 1.5 Degree Climate Target
How many more U.N. climate conferences will it take for the world to admit that the current climate policy path is at a dead end?
Calls by politicians, activists, and journalists to double down ring increasingly hollow in the face of overwhelming evidence that 2024 will be the first year in which average global surface temperature is likely to be more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (or about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above that of the preindustrial period before 1900. The long-term average increase since that period will pass 1.5 degrees in 2030. Even staying significantly below 2 degrees Celsius—the target that the climate policy community used until 2015 before lowering it in order to galvanize lawmakers—now looks unlikely.
Missing the 1.5 degree target does not mean that we’re all going to boil, bake, and die. Global emissions growth has slowed down enough that the extreme warming scenarios brandished so carelessly in the public debate have become all but impossible. Deaths due to natural disasters, such as floods, droughts, storms, and wildfires, have also declined radically as countries have become richer and more resilient. And economic losses due to climate shocks have decreased fivefold between the 1980s and mid 2000s.
Sticking to an unrealistic temperature target has severe economic and geopolitical effects. Panic over not reaching the target has led to a radical push for an immediate phaseout of fossil fuels, ignoring the fact that they still make up 80 percent of the world’s primary energy supply. That call is being led by rich countries that have become wealthy using fossil fuels and continue to gobble up oil and gas—and which now want to restrict less-developed countries from using these fuels to lift themselves out of energy poverty, a primary reason for their destitution. Development advocates are rightly calling out these unfair policies, enforced through institutions such as the World Bank, as eco-colonialism.
Unrealistic temperature targets combined with continued high consumption of fossil fuels has meant that there is little to no carbon budget available for the poorest countries to grow their energy use. Sticking to the goal of freezing emissions—or even targeting negative emissions to compensate for any overshoot—turns global economic activity into a zero-sum game.
Room for one country to develop, which may require increased use of fossil fuels for the foreseeable future, means that another must shrink its economy. The distribution conflict over emissions rights will be epic and bitter, not just between rich and poor countries but also among poor countries themselves, making any new agreements to reduce emissions even more difficult.
Enter Russia and China, which have made it clear that they will not play by Western rules, including those on climate policy. Since launching the war in Ukraine, the Kremlin has sought to strengthen its ties to OPEC and secure its role in oil and gas markets. China is investing everywhere in resource extraction, including fossil fuels in Africa and the Middle East. The three main Chinese energy companies—CNPC, CNOOC, and Sinopec—have emerged as major investors in Africa’s oil and gas sectors.
Despite these concerns, Western governments refuse to support investments in poor countries’ energy sectors in hopes that starving the developing world of energy will help meet the 1.5-degree target. This has created a huge opening for Russia and China, which they will likely leverage to strengthen autocracy across these regions.
Paradoxically, acknowledging the demise of the 1.5-degree target in 2024 could reduce tensions between rich and poor countries—provided that governments seize the opportunity to reset climate goals. This could be the year when unrealistic temperature goals and endless theoretical fights over a phase-down versus a phaseout of fossil fuels are replaced by a focus on the three positive ideas that came out of the most recent U.N. climate conference, COP28, which concluded in Dubai in December.
In the conference’s outcome statement, nearly 200 signatory countries agreed on the need for transition fuels in poor countries—in other words, their use of fossil fuels will grow faster than their ability to transition away from them. Second, the signatories agreed that countries have different resource endowments and will therefore follow very different trajectories to decarbonize. Third, there was a strong commitment that nuclear energy can be an important source of clean and reliable power.
For the first time, COP28 officially recognized that transition fuels—a euphemism for fossil fuels tolerated to prevent economic collapse and allow development if abundant green energy is not yet available—“can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” COP signatories finally acknowledged, albeit implicitly, that poor countries consume only a tiny fraction of the energy gobbled up by rich countries and desperately need more electricity to power homes, schools, hospitals, and factories.
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Protesting farmers use tractors – and piles of dung – to paralyse Germany
Thousands of German farmers blocked motorways and city centres across the country on Monday as they began a week of protests against government proposals to cut their fuel subsidies.
The co-ordinated nationwide demonstration saw furious agricultural workers line up their tractors outside Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, while more than a thousand were massed on a single stretch of motorway near the city of Mainz.
Police also launched an investigation on Monday morning into piles of dung that were dumped outside constituency offices of Germany’s main coalition parties, including Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s centre-Left SDP party.
In a sign of rising public anger against Mr Scholz, the protests were held despite the German government announcing a partial U-turn on controversial plans to cut tax breaks and fuel subsidies for farmers.
The funding cuts had been drawn up as the chancellor struggled late last year to fill a massive hole in the German government’s budget, which was created by a surprise court ruling that prevented ministers from drawing on pandemic-era funds to support future projects.
Mr Scholz’s coalition initially planned to abolish agricultural diesel subsidies and vehicle tax breaks for farmers – but after major farmers’ protests in December they abandoned the latter policy.
They also diluted the proposal on diesel so that the subsidies would be gradually phased out over several years rather than cut instantly.
But this has not mollified the German farming association, which has vowed to unleash protests “the likes of which the country has never experienced before”.
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Political climate change in Germany
As Alternative für Deutschland approach 40% support in East Germany, a right-leaning CDU faction announce plans to break away from the Union and found a new party that will cooperate with AfD
In September, three East German states – Saxony, Thüringen and Brandenburg – will hold elections for state parliament. Alternative für Deutschland are now by far the strongest-polling party in each of these states. In Saxony, for example, they are polling at an all-time high of 37%:
The SPD – the party of federal Chancellor Olaf Scholz – has fallen to just 3% support here, well below the threshold for entering parliament, and support for the liberal FDP has all but evaporated. If these were election results and the Saxon chapter of the CDU insisted on retaining its cordon sanitaire against the AfD, it would have to enter a coalition with either the Left Party (Die Linke) or the Greens or both. This would force the CDU to continue its association with leftist policies that are deeply unpopular with its base, doing further long-term damage to the Union.
The latest poll from Thüringen likewise has the AfD at 36.5%, and when somebody bothers to poll Brandenburg again, we’ll almost surely see similar AfD gains there. Unfortunately it is very hard to peel support from the CDU, even in East Germany; a lot of people from my parents’ generation will just never stop voting for them, no matter what they do. This is why I think, in the present landscape, the ceiling for AfD support in the East stands at around 40%. In Saxony, this is just short of the outright majority necessary to govern alone without any partners.1
The pressure, however, is building within the CDU. Somehow, some way, something will give, and that something might just be a small faction within the CDU/CSU known as the WerteUnion, or the Values Union. The WerteUnion was founded in 2017 by right-leaning members of the Union parties in response to Angela Merkel’s constant flirtations with the left. The WerteUnion understands itself as a traditionalist conservative movement within the party, although CDU leadership refuses to extend the faction formal recognition and regards it with hostility.
Among the WerteUnion founders is Hans-Georg Maaßen, a lawyer and former president of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution.
Maaßen has become an increasingly outspoken opponent not only of the CDU but of German politics in general. In response, the CDU under Friedrich Merz has further alienated him by instituting proceedings to kick him out of the party, even though Maaßen supported Merz’s candidacy to lead the party.
This week, Maaßen announced his plans to split from the CDU and make the WerteUnion into its own party. If the membership agrees, as it almost certainly will, the WerteUnion could field candidates in the upcoming East German elections. Maaßen says the move is necessary because the CDU establishment under Merz have insisted on “continuing … the left-wing course” set by Angela Merkel, and have “failed to realise the catastrophic state of Germany and are not prepared to deal with Merkel’s disastrous policies.” The WerteUnion will “go its own way,” Maaßen has said, and – crucially – it will “tear down all firewalls.”
By that, Maaßen means that his party will cooperate with the AfD, a step the CDU has long refused. Come the fall, in other words, there will be a new party ready to receive the support of traditional CDU voters who have been alienated by Merkel’s centrism but cannot bring themselves to support the evil populists of the AfD. Note that the WerteUnion wouldn’t have to be wildly successful to change the political calculus. If they can capture just 5% of CDU support in Saxony, they would have enough seats in the Landtag to form a coalition with the AfD. This is clearly the strategy that Maaßen has in mind.
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The warmist craze is still being propped up by those who should know better
In the week leading up to Christmas, two reports were released for public consultation – the CSIRO’s GenCost report and AEMO’s Integrated System Plan (ISP). Both purport to present an enlightened perspective on our electricity system, present and future. Both should be laughed out of existence and the organisations pulled into line, in my opinion.
Always guaranteed to drive the renewables lobby and its political sycophants into a frenzy of adoration and crazed repetition across social media, the reports contain a carefully crafted combination of cherry-picked assumptions and politically-driven scenarios.
Each iteration of the reports’ conclusions are predictably pro-renewables, but the message most copied and pasted by Teals this year is the CSIRO’s findings on the high cost of nuclear power, a technology currently banned in Australia. Why does the CSIRO, while investigating the costs of electricity generation technologies for the Australian market, include nuclear power in its GenCost report? Does any other organisation consider the costs and capability of illegal products for use in Australia?
The question may be asked, why is the CSIRO injecting themselves into the nuclear energy debate? More questions revolve around CSIRO’s coal results.
To understand how GenCost potentially relates to the narrative against coal power, you have to peruse the consultant reports that estimate the capital and operating costs of various power generation technologies.
These consultant reports define the CSIRO’s version of a coal-fired power station. The headlines screaming, CSIRO says new wind and solar cheaper than coal are not referring to the coal-fired power stations currently operating in Australia. Not even close.
Let’s step through how CSIRO approach coal power in GenCost. First, the total build cost for a CSIRO 700 MW coal-fired power station is a touch under $4 billion. This mythical power station is greenfield, with $0.6 billion tied up in the procurement, approval, and development of the site. A CSIRO coal-fired power station then needs 100 km of new rail line to a coal mine, another $0.2 billion.
Before construction has started, CSIRO, in their minds, have spent over $0.8 billion. Retrofit or upgrade of an existing power station is an option not considered by the CSIRO. By excluding these land, development, and rail costs, the equipment and construction reduces to $3.1 billion.
More costs are loaded into the design itself. Using materials and techniques able to achieve higher temperatures and pressures costs more but results in higher efficiency – more electricity generated and less waste created for every tonne of coal burned. This matters when your power station is in Japan and every tonne of coal arrives by ship, but in Australia where most coal-fired power stations are built on top of their own coal mine with a lifetime of fuel reserves, efficiency matters far less and allows the option of much cheaper designs. The CSIRO has chosen the world’s most expensive coal power technology as the example – advanced ultra super-critical – not used in Australia.
These expensive high-pressure and high-temperature designs also require high-quality fuel, equivalent to Australia’s export thermal coal. Most of our local power stations burn lower quality coal that is not exported anyway, and are significantly cheaper to run.
To estimate the higher technology costs loaded into the CSIRO’s assumptions we can compare against a relatively recent super-critical unit – Queensland’s 750 MW Kogan Ck power station. Brought online in 2007 for $1.2 billion, the bill converts to around $1.8 billion today. Even if you unkindly double the original cost to $2.4 billion, the older technology matching the local coal is still $0.7 billion cheaper to build than the CSIRO’s version.
The above discusses capital costs. Operating costs are largely related to fuel, which poses a challenge because the CSIRO does not quantify their fuel assumptions. Instead, they leave us with a ‘low price’ of 4.3 $/GJ, apparently based on the coal price in Japan. By comparison, even AEMO provides fuel costs of just 1.57 $/GJ at Kogan Ck, nearly a third of the CSIRO’s figure.
To recap, the CSIRO’s coal-fired power station would be built on a brand new site, with a new 100 km rail line, using the most expensive coal-burning technology available, costing almost 80 per cent more to build, and 300 per cent more to run than a realistic alternative. This is akin to saying housing is expensive but limiting your search to Darling Harbour.
Australians are rapidly discovering that a grid run by wind and solar is more expensive than a grid run by coal. The GenCost report is an embarrassment for all Australians.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/01/csiro-tipping-the-scales-on-cost/
***************************************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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