UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Science Business

Our fixation with Gross Domestic Product for over half a century as the primary indicator of economic health has rendered nature “invisible” from national finances, intensifying the biosphere’s destruction by omitting its value from the systems that govern us.

This is according to leading economists from Cambridge University and the United Nations, who meet on Tuesday 15 December to help launch a “statistical standard” that allows governments and banks to calculate the worth of natural “dividends”: from fish stocks and carbon ‘sinks’ to reduced health burdens from purified air.

Almost a decade in the making, the new statistical approach, called “Ecosystem Accounting”, had its final consultation on the first of this month, and will go before the UN General Assembly next year with hopes of ratification as the global standard for measuring how the natural world underpins national economies.

“A focus on GDP without proper regard for environmental degradation or inequality has been a disaster for global ecosystems and undermined social cohesion,” said Prof Diane Coyle, who leads ‘Beyond GDP’ research at Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy and is a key speaker at Tuesday’s public event.

“Statistics are the lens through which we see the world, but they have made nature invisible to policymakers. Twenty-first century progress cannot be measured using twentieth century statistics,” she said.

While many talk of the need to ‘build back better’ from the ravages of Covid-19, we cannot recover better without better information to guide us, says United Nations Chief Economist Elliot Harris, who will also speak at the Cambridge-hosted event.

“It is high time we moved beyond GDP and measured our wealth and success with tools that recognize the value of nature and people. The developments to our System of Environmental Economic Accounting are a giant leap in the right direction,” Harris said.

As part of a global team, economists from Cambridge’s Bennett Institute for Public Policy such as Dr Matthew Agarwala have been working with the UN to develop aspects of the new accounting methods. With his colleague Dimitri Zenghelis, Agarwala has written a guide for treasuries and central banks that the UN will roll out as a training programme.

“Some of the ways we currently value nature, what we term ‘natural capital’, are just absurd,” said Agarwala. “Most parks in the UK, including huge parks in major cities, have an asset value of £1, because they can’t be sold.

“Local Authorities have a balance sheet with a £1 asset that costs many thousands in annual upkeep. But this ignores revenues from higher property values in the vicinity. Even worse, it ignores the value of outdoor recreation, cleaner air, and the greatly reduced impact on local health services this creates.

“We now have the framework for putting that information into everyday economic decisions and scaling it up to the national level,” he said.

The Bennett Institute also works closely with the UK’s Office for National Statistics, early adopters of Ecosystems Accounting during its previous “experimental” phase. ONS work published last year used these methods to reveal the startling value of nature.

“Shading and cooling services” provided by greenery and waterways were valued at almost a quarter of a billion pounds a year in the UK through improved worker productivity and air-conditioning energy savings alone.

Just the green spaces and rivers in urban areas saved almost £163m annually in healthcare costs, and urban woodland was estimated to be worth £89m a year through carbon removal. Recreation spent in nature just in urban areas was valued at some £2.5 billion a year in the UK.

“We need statistics that can guide us through the new challenges we’re facing – biodiversity loss, inequality, climate change, and automation,” said Agarwala. “We are only just scratching the surface of what these accounting methods can reveal.”

Two Cambridge graduates at the Central Statistical Office – the precursor to the ONS – James Meade (later a University professor) and Richard Stone, laid the foundations for GDP as we know it: essentially, the value of things and services produced by a given country.

But Cambridge is also home to Prof Sir Partha Dasgupta, considered the father of the modern movement to knock GDP from its pedestal and infuse economics with the worth of life on Earth: from nature to the value of human connection.

Prof Dasgupta will also be speaking at the Ecosystem Accounting event, discussing his landmark commission from the UK Treasury to investigate the economic benefits of global biodiversity – and the costs of its rapid loss.

“Ecosystem services are simply absent from most national statistics,” he said. “Vast intellectual energy is given to estimating GDP, but there is little data on the biosphere’s capacity to meet human demand for natural goods and services.”

Dasgupta describes natural capital as a necessary step towards the creation of “inclusive wealth”, in which economics accounts for everything from health and skills to the value of communities – all fundamental to productivity, and all currently gaping holes in national balance sheets.

At the event, Prof Coyle will discuss the major Bennett Institute report she produced with Agarwala called ‘Building Forward: Investing in a resilient recovery‘. Published last month, it outlines how inclusive wealth could be developed in response to the pandemic and the UK’s longstanding “productivity puzzle”.

“Gaps in economic measurement have contributed to chronic underinvestment in natural and social capital,” said Coyle. “Assets such as public green space or personal networks do not have a market price and so are not counted in economic statistics.”

This omission of life’s fundamentals in national economic calculations is not just a missed opportunity for governments, but a massive risk. “The halls of power have yet to grasp how vital it is to include natural capital in the economy,” added Agarwala. “Look at the precipitous falls in fossil fuel value, and that’s just one small part.

“The extreme human and economic cost of the pandemic arise from a failure to manage natural capital. It has proved far more costly than it would have been to protect wild habitats and biodiversity in the first place to avoid such zoonotic spillover.”

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From EurekAlert!

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December 14, 2020 at 10:27AM

A wealth of new research in glacier and sea ice extent show modern Iceland is 2-4°C colder than all of the last 8000 years except for a slightly colder late 19th century. Even the 1700s were warmer with less ice than today in and around Iceland.

A new study (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020) now affirms peak Holocene warmth at  least “∼3–4 °C above modern in Iceland” prevailed throughout much of the last 8000 years. Data from tree growth, glacier-induced soil erosion, algae productivity, sea ice biomarker proxies (IP25), and other climate indices affirm these conclusions.

Harning et al., 2020 report an overall 7°C Holocene cooling trend In Iceland’s surrounding sea surface temperatures (SST).

“In terms of foraminifera-reconstructed SST there is an overall trend of cooling throughout the last 8 ka from ~10 °C to ~3 °C.”

It is only in the last few centuries of the modern era that temperatures sharply plummeted to their lowest values of the last 10,000 years (Geirsdóttir et al., 2020).

“The coolest climate of the last 10 ka occurred in the late 1800s CE.”

Consequent to the peak cooling, glaciers and sea ice reached their maximum extents of the Holocene just 150 years ago.

While Iceland’s glaciers and North Shelf sea ice extent did partially recover in the first half of the 20th century, the ice extents are still beyond what they were in the 1700s and earlier.

There is nothing to indicate modern warmth or ice recession in and around Iceland is unprecedented or even unusual.

Image(s) Source: Geirsdóttir et al., 2020

Images Source: Harning et al., 2020

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December 14, 2020 at 09:06AM

Governments are shielding COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits.

COVID-19 deaths recorded over the past week, ending Dec. 11, 2020. Click to enlarge; source here

Ten years ago, Germany’s weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, ran a story titled: Reconstruction of a Mass Hysteria: The Swine Flu Panic of 2009. It argued the world had overreacted the previous year to a strain of influenza also known as H1N1. Despite massive government concern, it said, that illness had turned out to be “relatively harmless.”

From our current standpoint, it’s difficult to disagree. As the chart below demonstrates, during the worst week of the N1H1 pandemic, in 29 European countries combined the weekly death toll never reached 350:

2009 and 2010 H1N1 combined deaths per week in 29 European countries; click to enlarge, source here

Last week, more than 33,000 COVID-19 deaths were recorded in Europe. An additional 16,000 were recorded in the United States. (See the chart at the top of this post.)

Then, as now, governments pre-ordered millions of doses of vaccine that didn’t yet exist. Then, as now, governments assured the public these vaccines were safe, while quietly protecting vaccine manufacturers from legal liability. As Shaun Lintern reported earlier this month:

The UK government has granted pharmaceutical giant Pfizer a legal indemnity protecting it from…legal action as a result of any problems with the [COVID-19] vaccine. Ministers have also changed the law in recent weeks to give new protections to companies such as Pfizer…

The Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine was authorised…under regulation 174 of the Human Medicine Regulations 2012 which allows an unlicensed medication to be used in an emergency such as a pandemic. [bold added]

There may be sound reasons why governments need to shield pharmaceutical companies from lawsuits in some situations. But recent history tells us that, should one or more of the COVID-19 vaccines be linked to serious harms, the public won’t necessarily be informed in a timely fashion.

As I’ve discussed previously, a small number of people who received Pandemrix, one of the N1H1 vaccines, later developed narcolepsy – an incurable, life-altering disease. The connection was first noticed in Scandinavian countries such as Sweden, where vaccination rates tend to be high.

In Finland, children aged 16 and under were diagnosed with narcolepsy 17 times as often in 2010 as had been the case between 2002 and 2009. Most developed symptoms serious enough to impair their daily lives within a few months of receiving Pandemrix.

Even after this link became apparent, documenting it within the medical literature wasn’t easy. Hanna Nohynek, who conducted some of the early Finnish research, told a journalist in 2015:

We went to the New England Journal of Medicine. They did not want to take the paper. The Lancet rejected it. The [British Medical Journal] rejected it.

In the UK, Elizabeth Miller and her co-authors similarly discovered that children who’d received Pandemrix had a “significantly increased risk of narcolepsy.” After they managed to persuade the British Medical Journal to publish their findings, they encountered a media blackout. Journalists chose to bury the story.

Five years ago, under the headline How anti-vaxxers have scared the media away from covering vaccine side effects, Vox journalist Julia Belluz began an article this way:

“It was the most startling side effect I’ve ever come across.” That’s how Elizabeth Miller, head of the immunization department at Public Health England, described some recent vaccine research you’ve probably never heard about: Pandemrix, a shot designed to stave off swine flu, also appears to be causing narcolepsy in some children.

Public health officials – especially ones that work in the politically fraught field of vaccine safety – don’t typically make emotive statements like that.

Then Miller told me about something that shocked her even more: The media didn’t pick up on this story at all. In fact, she characterized the reception to her 2013 research about vaccines and narcolepsy as “radio silence.”

Strange, isn’t it? We trust ordinary people to come to the right conclusion while sitting on a jury, deciding the fate of someone accused of murder. Yet many journalists treat us like infants, incapable of evaluating competing claims where our own health is concerned.

Kind of reminds you of those big tech companies who, rather than encouraging a marketplace of ideas, arrogantly imagine themselves to be arbiters of the truth.

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ADDITIONAL INFO:

• last week, the website of a Vancouver radio station published an article titled, Trudeau government silent on drug manufacturer liability for COVID-19 vaccines. It reads, in part: “As Canada prepares for the arrival of a COVID-19 vaccine, the federal government is refusing to say if drug manufacturers can face legal liability if there are any adverse effects from their shots…It’s standard in many countries to offer some legal exemptions to drug manufacturers when a government procures vaccines in an emergency. In a statement however, Health Canada says it can’t release details of its contracts due to confidentiality clauses” [bold added by me; screen capture of the news story is here].
• Lintern’s important article, Coronavirus vaccine: Pfizer given protection from legal action by UK government (backed up here)
• in 2018, the British Medical Journal published a feature, written by associate editor Peter Doshi, titled Pandemrix vaccine: why was the public not told of early warning signs? It alleges that while data collection systems exist to track adverse vaccine reactions, this data isn’t necessarily noticed or acted upon.
• Der Spiegel‘s story, Reconstruction of a Mass Hysteria: The Swine Flu Panic of 2009, argues the World Health Organization’s declaration of an N1H1 pandemic was influenced by pharmaceutical companies who were in a conflict-of-interest.
• two 2013 research papers documenting post-vaccination childhood narcolepsy in Finland are here and here
• research published by Elizabeth Miller’s team in 2013 is here. Follow-up research, published in September 2020 is here. On page 3 of the latter, the researchers say there’s “strong confirmatory evidence of a casual association” between Pendemrix and childhood narcolepsy. On page 11, they conclude there’s no evidence the vaccine triggered narcolepsy that would have manifested in these children at a later date, anyway. Significantly, the researchers revised the UK numbers downward: “The 8-fold increased risk…was lower than that in our earlier study in which a 16-fold increased risk was found…”

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December 14, 2020 at 08:46AM

Reposted from Jennifer Marohasy’s Blog

December 9, 2020 By jennifer 

It is often reported that the Great Barrier Reef is half dead, specifically that the corals are bleached, and the water quality is degraded with pesticides and plastics. If I didn’t know better, I might never want to visit a coral reef, lest I be forced to confront this reality – apparently all our fault. Except the coral reefs that I dived last week each made me feel so alive, and in awe of their extraordinary beauty – especially Myrmidon reef which is an ancient and detached coral reef that juts out into the Pacific Ocean on the eastern edge of the Great Barrier Reef. But we didn’t see many sharks.

The coral reef called Myrmidon is perhaps as old as the city of Troy. In mythology, that city existed about 5,000 years ago and it was attacked by Achilles and 50 ships each carrying 50 Myrmidons. Paleo-climatologists will argue that that geological period, known as the middle Holocene (7,000 to 4,500 years ago), was much warmer than the present with sea levels at least 1.5 metres higher than they are today along the east coast of Australia including at the Great Barrier Reef.

Perhaps everything seemed unusually magical last Wednesday at Myrmidon because I dived into such crystal-clear water, and it was so sunny. Looking back over the video footage, Myrmidon reef did not have particularly luxurious corals, but there was an iridescence and a beauty that I’ve not seen before. It was so evident that the live corals were growing on-top of dead corals, not one or two generations dead, but representing thousands of years of growth and destruction from cyclones and bleaching events. The reef was unashamedly beautiful yet with so much exposed that represented layers and layers of dead coral. The regrowth was so clearly on eroded antecedent surfaces.

Where we first jumped in at Myrmidon, the coral was sparse and stunted and there were piles of coral rubble some newly dead and covered in green algae. My dive-buddy Shaun, and underwater videographer Stuart, swam with me around a ledge that led us down into an underwater canyon. Green parrot fish swam metres above a giant clam with an ink black body speckled with florescent blue zooxanthellae. I knelt beside it, I was 17 metres under-the-water and feeling part of another world. Stuart was not too far away, deciding which of the massive Porites along the walls of the canyon we would measure, and Shaun would photograph – then we ran the photographic transect.

Porites are the old boulder corals, which like the oldest trees in temperate forests, can be cored to reveal a climate history. I was not at Myrmidon to core the Porites, but just to find out if any still existed and to measure and photograph them – as well as running the photographic transects. But really, I just wanted to sit next to the black clam speckled blue, which had thick olive-green shiny lips and watch it breathe and feed through its two siphons.

We cruised a total of 263 nautical miles (nearly 500 kilometres) last week in search of the old corals, the Porites.

We left Cairns on Saturday 28th November, and spent the first night moored behind Russell Island, which is part of the Franklin Island Group just to the east of the town of Babinda. On the first day we dived the fringing reef of High Island, the next day Normanby, and after that Britomart. There were so many massive Porites at the reef fringing High Island and also at Normanby. We didn’t find any Porites at Britomart. That was perhaps because we only had an afternoon to search, and I made the wrong calls in terms of where we should jump-in, which is perhaps why we didn’t find any Porites at Britomart.

At the first dive site at Britomart, which had been my call, there were huge plate corals under-the-water that I had mistaken as Porites from above the water. These corals were mostly dead, probably from a severe bleaching back in 2016 and then 2017.

But it wasn’t all death and destruction at Britomart. At the second site, where only Stuart jumped-in to the strong current with just his snorkel, he found and filmed large plate corals – so alive. There was some extraordinary biodiversity at Britomart including a school of black Dory – there was also evidence of severe bleaching. We only saw a single white tipped reef shark at that reef.

Every reef that we dived was so variable and each of the different habitats at Pixie, Britomart and Myrmidon had a different ensemble of coral species and forms. But at each reef we only found a single shark. Each of these reefs had a distinct reef crest that might have been more luxurious, and with better coral cover, some 5,000 years ago at the time of the mythical Myrmidons – simply because back then these reefs would have been younger and growing up with the sea level that was higher back then, the corals having grown-up 120 metres since the depth of the last ice age which was just 16,000 years ago. Since at least 2,500 years ago these coral reefs have had to adapt to an overall trend of falling sea levels, not with-standing the modest increase of perhaps 36 cm over the last 100 years – as reported by the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The reef crests at Britomart and Myrmidon today are flat topped and mostly dead, as they are eroded peaks now just below mean low tide growing back after bleaching events, to be smashed again by the huge waves that come with the cyclones.

Coral cover at the crests, which is the most exposed part of the reef, is generally sparser and the corals stumpy, while only a few metres further down under the water it is sometimes possible to find delicate plate corals, at Myrmidon perhaps regrowing since the last cyclone. It is so difficult to generalize about a coral reef, when there is such diversity within and between habitats even at the same reef.

It was on the second dive at Myrmidon, that we found the garden of Porites. That was a highlight of the week at sea for me. I had gone in search of Porites. I had no idea whether I would find them or not. At Myrmidon we found a whole garden of Porites – massive corals in different colours and each so healthy. In the same coral garden were blue and also a heavenly-white Acropora – so tall, and each branch had a florescent blue tip. Little Chromis fish (Damsel fish) trimmed in yellow, swam in and out.

The skipper, Rob, had warned me in the weeks leading up to the expedition that there was no guarantee we would get all the way to Myrmidon in our 14-metre boat. It all depended on the weather, he said.

Last Wednesday, a week ago, Rob not only got us to Myrmidon, but we found so many Porites and in crystal clear waters.

Stuart and Rob made the decision about where to anchor for the second dive, they found me the garden of Porites. There were perhaps 50 of these massive boulder-shaped corals many more than 2 metres in diameter not far from the boat and at just 8 metres below the water. Perhaps there are another 50 gardens of Porites at Myrmidon reef? That can be my hypothesis!

If only we had the resources to stay, search and survey we could perhaps find as many massive Porites as there were Myrmidons (50) on each of the ships (50) that sailed with Achilles to defeated Hector in the ancient Greek tale – that would make 2,500 massive Porites just at Myrmidon reef! And Myrmidon is just one of nearly 3,000 coral reefs that make up the Great Barrier Reef.

There are certainly enough massive Porites still alive for scientists at the Australian Institute of Marine Science (AIMS), to calculate an average coral growth rate for the Great Barrier Reef over the last 100 to 300 years – as they used to do by coring Porites from inner, middle and outer reefs including Myrmidon. They stopped coring the Porites at Myrmidon more than 15 years ago.

We only found the one shark at Myrmidon – a small and curious white tipped reef shark that tasted Stuart’s flipper on the second dive, and almost head-butted Shaun at the beginning of their night dive. These sharks (Triaenodon obesus) are more curious than aggressive, which may explain why numbers have apparently declined over the last few decades – apparently as a minor bycatch of the Coral Reef Fin Fish Fishery. The last attempt to properly quantify their numbers is documented in a PhD thesis by William Robins published back in 2006. He claims fishing is the problem.

I’ve heard so many stories about shark finning, even in Great Barrier Reef waters as far south as Lady Elliot Island. Finning involves removing the dorsal, pelvic, pectoral and caudal fins and then throwing the live shark back into the water – where it can only sink to the bottom and die. Best estimates suggest 73 million (!) sharks are finned each year across the world to make soup for rich Asians.

There is so much money from the long-suffering Australian tax payer, via the Australian government, for activist scientists claiming the reef is at risk of climate change, but very little political will to address any of the many threats to sharks in Great Barrier Reef waters. Yet the evidence suggests shark numbers are in decline, not only from finning but also drumlines set by the Queensland government, ostensibly to protect those who swim at north Queensland beaches.

I’m hoping to go back to Pixie Reef, just to the north east of Cairns, in early February to finishing filming for the documentary about our week at sea – last week. In the new year, I want to film some more at Pixie Reef, including Shaun swimming with the resident white-tipped reef shark that Stuart often sees there.

The reefs at Myrmidon, Normanby, High Island and Pixie have so many old Porites, but so few reef sharks.

Working from evidence – including the photographic evidence amassed by us last week, from the photographs taken by Shaun along the underwater transects set by Stuart, and from Stuart’s drone photography in the air above, for at least two different habitat types at each of the reef we visited – I hope there can one day be more agreement about the current state of the corals at the Great Barrier Reef. It would certainly be helpful if some of the many scientists at AIMS returned in one of their big ships to Myrmidon and cored at least a few of the many massive old Porites. They could recommence the program of coring, beginning at Myrmidon, to test the hypothesis that as water temperatures increase coral growth rates will increase too. This could be determined from the annual growth rings once the cores were in the laboratory and under X-ray.

I would also sleep better knowing that there was funding to monitor white-tipped reef sharks. At the moment, about 600 sharks are killed each year on drumlines including reef sharks, then there is the by-catch from the legal fisheries, and then there are those who fin sharks because there is a market.

I surmise that the corals are not threatened by global warming, certainly not by sea level rise, but that the few remaining sharks at Myrmidon, and many other reefs, are at risk from those intent on defeating them, or eating their fins. Indeed, I’m hoping that as Achilles slayed Hector with the help of the Myrmidons, we can begin to acknowledge the hubris of trying to tame Zeus/the weather, while mercilessly denying everything good that sharks represent, including being curious and keeping mid-level predators in check, so that the algae-eating fish can thrive.

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The feature image, at the very top of this blog post, is of our boat Kiama as we arrived at Myrmidon reef. The skipper, Rob McCulloch, has put some unedited aerial drone footage taken by Stuart of our boat, Kiama, sailing into Myrmidon, at his YouTube page, here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jLtN4deEi10

I am so grateful to the B. Macfie Family Foundation and the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) for funding the expedition.

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December 14, 2020 at 08:20AM

Fritz Vahrenholt was a mastermind of Germany’s ecological movement, Senator for the environment and wind manager. Today he questions Germany’s costly climate policy.

Hamburg. Fritz Vahrenholt has shaped the environmental debate in Germany like hardly anyone else: His book “Seveso ist überall” (1976) denounced the conditions in the chemical industry, his atlas “Die Lage der Nation” (1983) assessed the environmental policy in the country.

In 1984, he joined the Hamburg environmental authority as a state councillor, and was the Senator for Environment from 1991 to 1997. The social democrat and SPD politician then moved into the business world and, from 2001, built up the wind energy manufacturer Repower. From 2008 to 2012, Vahrenholt worked as managing director of the newly founded RWE Innogy GmbH.

In recent years, the doctor of chemistry has become one of the sharpest critics of German climate protection policy. Since being fired from the Wildlife Foundation because of his views, he has made the topic his “main activity”, as he says. In his new book Unerwünschte Wahrheiten (Unwanted Truths) and on his blog, the 71-year-old deals with climate development and the consequences of climate policy.

Hamburger Abendblatt: Do you actually like arguing, Mr. Vahrenholt?

Fritz Vahrenholt No, not really. What makes you think so?

HA: In your new book “Unwanted Truths” you are taking on the entire climate science…

FV: Do I? I am not denying the need for action or climate change itself – I am just coming to different conclusions about the scale or pace of it. I believe that it is not only humans who are responsible for climate change, but that natural factors are also at work. So we have more time than is often said.

HA: How did you come up with that?

FV: There is one aspect in the climate debate that I find far too brief. Our reference value is always the year 1850, the beginning of the industrial age. But what hardly anyone knows is that the Little Ice Age, the coldest period in the last 2000 years, ended then. The average value of the last 2000 years alone is about 0.4 degrees higher than in 1850 – completely without the greenhouse effect.

HA: You represent a minority position …

FV: Maybe, but that doesn’t mean it has to be wrong. Compare that with the subject of dying forests. At the beginning of the 1980s there was a consensus that the German forest would disappear because of acid rain. I suspected as much. Almost forty years later we know that the science was wrong. Science must be open to question. But that is no longer possible because of the intertwining of science and politics.

HA: Now it can be argued that because of the horrifying forecasts, political action was taken and the forest was saved.

FV: It is quite possible to believe, as many climate scientists do, that a little exaggeration would help. This it is acceptable, within limits, to shake up a society. It was similar with my book “Seveso ist überall” – we have ¬achieved a lot in the chemical ¬industry. But we must not send society into disaster by taking incorrect or exaggerated measures. Today we live in a climate of fear.

HA: Where do you think the debate has been distorted?

FV: Take the Greenland ice sheet, for example: many people believe that it will thaw out in the near future. Even with the continuing temperatures, it will continue to exist for thousands of years. By the way, 8000 years ago there was a period of about 3000 years warmer than today. Even then the ice sheet survived. And the Sahara was green. That is the positive news even now: the earth is becoming greener.

HA: This does not apply to all regions – in many places people fear drought.

FV: In the last 100 years, neither the frequency of droughts nor heavy precipitation has increased globally. However, due to warming and increasing CO2, the area of foliage worldwide is growing by the size of the Federal Republic of Germany every year. Over the past 50 years, plant biomass has increased by 30 percent. And because of the increase in CO2, the yields of wheat, rice and other fruits have grown by 15 percent, and the world’s food situation has been significantly improved. I do not want to trivialise CO2, it is a greenhouse gas. But it is also not desirable to return to pre-1850 levels.

HA: We are far from returning there. The Paris Climate Change Agreement has set itself the goal of limiting global warming to a maximum of two degrees. Is that wrong?

FV: No. But the Paris Agreement has structural shortcomings. It has stipulated that China, as a developing country, may still emit 50% more CO2 in coming years. If we halve our emissions in Germany from 0.8 billion to 0.4 billion tonnes, than that is equivalent to China’s annual increase. There, 245 coal-fired power plants will still be connected to the grid, and there are 1600 coal-fired power plants worldwide, most of them with Chinese assistance. India is happy because 56 coal mines have been opened there and now every village is supplied with electricity.

HA: That can’t be an argument for doing nothing here!

FV: Of course not, but it shows the relation. We are not making a difference with our phase-out, and nobody will follow us if we phase out coal and nuclear power within ten years, which will mean a dramatic loss of prosperity in Germany. We cannot sustain a highly developed industrial society with wind and sun. We are threatened with deindustrialisation and loss of prosperity. We discuss hysterically: it is claimed that if we do not phase out diesel and petrol engines now, the climate will tip over. What that means for hundreds of thousands of jobs is of no further interest. We must stop the sorcerer’s apprentices: Fear is a bad advisor.

HA: These are also horror scenarios …

FV: No. Our energy system transformation has a structural flaw: we are concentrating what three energy sources have done so far – natural gas for heating, oil for transport and electricity for industry and households – into a single energy source: electricity. The Academy of Engineering Sciences expects electricity demand to double. I think it will triple. The generation capacities of wind and sun will never be sufficient for this. Moreover, the problem of the dark lull remains – there are many days and weeks without sun and wind. So where will our electricity come from? From pumped storage? There are calculations according to which we would have to fill all valleys from Norway to Austria with pumped storage lakes in order to store it. That is absurd.

HA: You underestimate the possibilities offered by technological progress. Green hydrogen, for example, could be used to store energy.

HA: Two thirds of the energy is lost in the wind-hydrogen-electricity generation chain. That is physics. The energy is lost during electrolysis, storage and conversion into electricity. So we would have to build more plants to compensate for this loss. The cost of electricity would multiply.

HA: We have just seen what efficiency gains are possible with solar cells.

FV: That’s true of solar energy, when I think back to my first solar cells at Shell. We can produce electricity for just a few cents at sunny locations, but the cost decline is not as significant when it comes to wind. But that doesn’t solve the problem of intermediate storage, which becomes unaffordable given the amount of electricity to be stored.

HA: Do you have something against renewable energies?

FV: No, not at all – I helped make it big, photovoltaics at Shell, wind power at Repower. RWE Innogy’s first offshore plant in the North Sea bears my name: Fritz. But it would never have occurred to me to make such a fluctuating energy the sole source of electricity, heat and mobility.

HA: What do you think should happen?

FV: If the situation is as dramatic as it is claimed, I wonder why we are not rethinking. Why are we not prepared to think about capturing CO2 from coal-fired power stations? And why are we refusing to look at new nuclear energy technologies with an open mind? Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change considers them to be an alternative. But we in Germany wear blinkers.

HA: Our chancellor is a natural scientist …

FV: Yes, but she lets herself be driven by moods. This has been demonstrated by her U-turn on nuclear power.

HA: When it comes to deindustrialisation, let’s talk about your party – the SPD.

FV: Unfortunately, the SPD no longer has its core base in mind. There is already a party for the hip, green urban clientele, but employees in the steel, chemical or car industries have been lost sight of. The little people will now be punished with a CO2 tax from January onwards. In the first year this will cost the average household €270, and this amount is set to rise steadily to over €600.

HA: Your party sees this in a positive light.

FV: Yes, unfortunately. A climate and energy policy geared to the interests of employees looks different. Helmut Schmidt was interested in this. In my last conversation with him about the causes of climate change, he told me: “Fritz, I don’t believe a word the UN says.”

HA: In your book you start with a comparison to Corona. Why?

FV: The restrictions we have made have hardly any effect on the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere. Despite the shutdown, global emissions will fall by less than ten percent in 2020. So to achieve a halving, we need five shutdowns. China emits more than 30 percent and, after a brief lockdown, continues to do so unabated and more.

HA: You accuse experts and the media of hyping news that links events to climate change. Are you not doing the same in your book? You look for news that the situation isn’t as bad.

FV: If a hurricane rages somewhere in the world today, many people see it as evidence of climate change, but hurricanes have not increased in number for decades. We had a heatwave in Siberia in summer, which was a big issue everywhere. At the same time, Brazil was the coldest in 50 years, yet nobody spoke about it. We have a selective perception. In the book we show that the number of hurricanes, heavy rainfall events or droughts has not increased. In fact, they have levelled out.

HA: In your last book, “The Neglected Sun” from 2012, you predicted cooling soon – in reality it was getting warmer. Were you wrong?

FV: We timed the cooling a little too early. Let’s wait and see. Since 2017 we have had a sideways movement in global temperature. Even the medium-term ¬climate forecast by the Federal Research Ministry does not expect significant warming in the next five years. There are other influences on the climate, such as fluctuating solar radiation, cloud cover or the 60-year cold and warm phases of the oceans.

HA: Your book could be misinterpreted as an invitation to carry on like business as usual …

FV: The book doesn’t say that. I am saying that we must phase out fossil fuels as far as possible by 2100. We are talking about 200 years of human history, during which we have used oil, natural gas and coal. Even if no one wants to hear it: these were the centuries of greatest progress in civilisation in terms of health, nutrition, life expectancy and living standards. The majority of humanity is hungry for prosperity. If we preach renunciation to them, we will not get far. We must show a technical path that combines prosperity and climate protection. Only then will we be pioneers. We will achieve a sensible energy transition in three generations, but not in three legislative periods. After that, CO2 concentrations will drop quite quickly and that will be it.

HA: How has your book been received?

FV: Our publishing house has just printed the fourth edition. Eight years ago there was a storm of discussion about our book “The Neglected Sun”. Today the corridor of opinion has narrowed, a debate is not taking place, certainly not in public broadcasting.

HA: Do you long for the debate?

FV: Yes, of course, because the stakes are high.

HA: What do you actually think about the environmentalist Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement?

FV: I agree with Norbert Bolz: prophets of doom have always been the most virulent enemies of the Enlightenment.

Full interview (in German)

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December 14, 2020 at 07:41AM

The UN has called for world leaders to declare a climate emergency. For hundreds of million in the developing world this agenda is threatening continuing energy poverty.

A declaration of climate emergency (as per UN’s emission reduction requirements) will dent the developmental goals and increase energy prices. Besides, it will also result in the tax payers funded transition to a less reliable energy system, a recipe for a potential economic collapse.

A precursor to the 2021 COP26 meeting in the UK

Speaking at the Climate Ambition Summit to mark the 5th anniversary of the Paris Agreement, UN chief Antonio Guterres implored, “Today, I call on all leaders worldwide to declare a State of Climate Emergency in their countries until carbon neutrality is reached.”

He further clarified that,

We need meaningful cuts now to reduce global emissions by 45 per cent by 2030 compared with 2010 levels. This must be fully reflected in the revised and strengthened Nationally Determined Contributions that the Paris signatories are obliged to submit well before COP26 next year in Glasgow.”

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson committed 11.6 billion pounds of UK’s overseas aid to support green technology. Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan pledged not to build any new coal plants in the country.

Support for the UN leader’s call also came from the Chinese President Xi Jinping. He said China will cut down carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP by over 65% by 2030, in comparison to 2005. Given its status as the leading coal consumer and empoweree of fossil fuel technology in other developing countries, it remains to be seen how President Xi will reconcile his 65% commitment with Beijing’s fossil ambitions and energy intensive industries.

Speaking at the same event (virtually), the Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said that India will reduce emission intensity by 21% in comparison to the 2005 levels. Earlier this year, Modi had indicated that the country is aiming to reduce carbon footprint by 30% to 35% and increasing the use of natural gas, without setting a deadline for the same.

Even as per its ambitious scenario to reduce emissions, India will not be able to achieve a 45 percent reduction in CO2 emissions compared to 2010 levels without compromising on its aggressive energy policy that has enabled the country to achieve an energy surplus in recent years.

Studies on the relationship between GDP and energy growth indicate that “It is very difficult to reconcile reductions in carbon dioxide emissions with continued economic growth, especially in poor and medium rich countries,” as most of the world’s primary energy comes from fossil fuels.

A call for 45 percent reduction in carbon dioxide emission will be suicidal for the energy sectors in the developing world, most of which depend on coal, oil, and Natural gas. 84% of the world’s primary energy comes from Fossil fuels (2019) and just 11% coming from Renewables. Though the share of fossil fuels in global energy consumption may appear to be reducing by a small margin each year, the absolute value of consumption keeps increasing each year.

Despite the rapid addition of renewable technology globally, the year-on-year change in primary energy consumption value for both renewable and fossil sources were almost the same in 2019, i.e., an increase consumption of around 960 TWh for both the sources. The actual fossil fuel consumption has technically increased and will continue to increase in future, as developing economies are vary of falling back in the dark ages of energy poverty.

Riding on the renewable energy myth

Developing nation’s precaution with green transition has a reason.  Gueterres claimed that “Renewable energy is getting less expensive with every passing day.” But the claim is disputed, at least as per the current state of renewable technology, their backup mechanisms, and the evidence from the existing green grids.

Data from renewable energy dominated states like California and from countries like Germany and UK, show that excessive investment and dependency on renewable energy has actually resulted in increased electricity prices.

Renewable energy like wind and solar, which in many instances is installed with subsidies from taxpayer’s money, ends up charging the taxpayer more for their electricity use, thus technically costing the taxpayer not once but twice.

A ‘green’ Covid recovery will imperil developing countries

Gueterres insisted that, “the recovery from COVID-19 presents an opportunity to set our economies and societies on a green path in line with the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development.”

He is not alone in suggesting a marriage of COVID-19 recovery stimulus and green energy transition. The World Economic Forum’s Great Reset program suggests the same, with global leaders like Justin Trudeau already endorsing it.

Developing countries are unlikely to join this call for green transition, despite Xi’s tall pledges. India, for example, is likely to become the most populous country in the world by 2030 and it will have to risk millions of poor people falling back into the extreme poverty category if it were to amend its commitments to Paris agreement as per Gueterres’ suggestions.

With COVID-19 lockdowns adversely impacting the country’s economy (a negative growth in GDP and a long road to arrive at pre-COVID-19 levels), it is unlikely that the country’s leadership will commit to any significant CO2 reduction targets before the COP26 meetings in the UK.

India’s Economic Survey 2018-2019 categorically stated, “While there has been a tremendous increase in renewable energy capacity, fossil fuels, especially coal, would continue to remain an important source of energy.” The survey added, “Further, considering the intermittency of renewable power supply, unless sufficient technological breakthrough in energy storage happens in the near future, it is unlikely that thermal power can be easily replaced as the main source of energy for a growing economy such as India.”

This is likely the reason why Prime Minister Modi refused set a deadline for India’s proposed 30-35% reduction in emissions. India had recently doubled its mining exploration activity by implementing about 400 new projects. The mining sector is considered important to the country’s ambition to become a USD 5 Trillion economy. According to India’s Central Electricity Authority, 50% of India’s electricity generation in 2030 will continue to come from coal.

Does climate alarm justify extreme calls for energy transition?

Despite the heightened focus on emission reduction commitments, the elephant in the room has been the science used for justifying these emission reductions in first place.

During his speech, Gueterres asked “Can anybody still deny that we are facing a dramatic emergency?” Well he may be right! This is indeed a “dramatic” emergency, not a scientific one!

If we were to assess the key indicators that determine quality of life, it is evident that many of those metrics have improved drastically since the industrial revolution, despite the contrasting storyline portrayed in the mainstream media.

Life expectancy (age to which a new born baby is expected to survive), access to clean drinking water, access to affordable and reliable electricity, access to nutritious food at affordable prices, agricultural crop productivity per acre and farmer incomes are some of the key metrics that show us that the world has improved a lot, especially in the past 3 decades. We are not in a climate emergency!

The only reasoning provided for a future climate catastrophe is the temperature projections from computer climate models, collectively known as CMIP (Coupled Model Intercomparison Project). The UN uses the most recent versions of CMIP (5 & 6) to frame climate policy decisions and the mainstream media and academic institutions regard these models as the gold standard in climate forecasting.

The models are designed to forecast future temperatures, based on greenhouse gas emission scenarios. This is how the UN predicts future temperatures and the reason why Gueterres has called for an emission reduction. But the models are hypersensitive to emissions and thus have been faulty since inception.

Recent research has shown “that climate models overstate atmospheric warming”. The warming projected by these models have been found to be 4 to 5 times faster than the actual temperature observations on ground. Even if the developing nations refuse to commit to UN’s carbon neutrality initiative, there won’t be a significant impact on the climate.

So, the call by Gueterres is not only pseudo-scientific in its climate assumptions but also dependent on unreliable and unaffordable green energy. The call for emission reduction will be economically damaging and to severe extent in the developing countries.

Moreover, it completely excludes the possibility of economies becoming more stronger in future, potentially making them more resilient, thus be developed enough to adapt to climatic challenges. The prescribed reduction mechanisms and the war on fossil fuels could actually stifle their ability to mitigate and adapt to future temperature changes.

It will be interesting to see how Xi, Modi and others in developing world put their commitments into practice, and how it will impact the current energy forecasts which project an increasing reliance on fossil fuel in their respective economies.

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December 14, 2020 at 06:37AM

Natural gas wins recognition as ‘transitional technology’ to climate neutrality

The lower carbon intensity of natural gas – which produces half the emissions of coal when burned in power plants – and the emergence of new technologies like hydrogen are setting gas apart from other fossil fuels in the clean energy transition.

On Friday, the European Council, which brings together the EU’s 27 national leaders, adopted a new greenhouse gas reduction target for 2030: -55% from 1990 levels, up from the previous target of -40%.

In their conclusions, the leaders reaffirmed that it will be up to each member state “to decide on their energy mix and to choose the most appropriate technologies to achieve collectively the 2030 climate target, including transitional technologies such as gas.”

The explicit mention of gas is contentious. Gas advocates say it is ideally suited as a transition fuel for coal-reliant countries like Poland and Germany as they make decarbonisation their main priority. This is because it has a lower emissions intensity than other fossil fuels like coal: gas produces on average half the emissions of coal when burned into power plants.

But perhaps more importantly, the same infrastructure used for fossil gas could now be used in the future for new gas technologies such biomethane or hydrogen gas.

“With the current technology you can abate up to 90% of the CO2 emissions from gas, which is already a lot,” said Luca Giansanti, head of European government affairs at Italian energy company ENI. “Then you have decarbonised and low-carbon gas in the form of blue hydrogen. Technological improvement in the future could bring this percentage up to 100%,” he told a EURACTIV event last week.

“The switch from coal to gas is already underway, and through that, gas has been contributing a lot to the reduction of emissions all over Europe. Last year the contribution of gas to decarbonisation, together with renewables, has been impressive.”

Giansanti was referring to figures published at the beginning of the year, which showed that coal power generation had plunged by a record 24% in Europe last year. Half of that coal power capacity was replaced by renewables, and the other half by natural gas.

This partnership with renewables is key, Giansanti said, because renewable power sources like wind and solar are intermittent, dependent on when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. So some kind of currently available steady source of power will be needed in the short to medium term to partner with renewables to keep grids operational.

Full story

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December 14, 2020 at 06:16AM

A damning new report from GWPF outlines massive new energy projects being undertaken by the CCP which dwarf its figleaf ‘green energy’ enterprises, here’s a short excerpt, but everyone should download and read the full document.

China today relies on fossil fuels for 86% of its total primary energy consumption (58% from coal, 20% from petroleum and other liquids, and 8% from natural gas).28 Rather than curbing its appetite for fossil fuels, Beijing is voraciously seeking more. In the case of coal, China has aggressively relaxed regulations that restricted domestic coal production, seeking to rapidly raise production capacity. ‘In the first half of 2020 China approved 23 gigawatts-worth of new coal power projects, more than the previous two years combined,’ reported
AFP, citing Global Energy Monitor, a San Francisco-based environmental NGO. The CCP approved 141 million tons of new annual coal mining capacity in the first half of 2019. In all of 2018, it approved 25 million tons.

The story is similar with oil and gas, with huge new pipeline and fracking projects underway. It’s almost as if China knows that conditions are likely to get more difficult both in terms of international relations and in terms of climatic conditions, in the face of the solar grand minimum we are entering.

The western countries don’t have any ability to affect China’s decisions regarding energy, but they do have the ability, and urgent necessity, to take stock of their rush to over-reliance on intermittent power sources such as wind and solar energy. The GWPF report details the way western NGOs have been used by the CCP to act as cheerleaders for China’s duplicitous pronouncements on climate action.

The revelation that CCP operatives have been infiltrating western countries’ industries, diplomatic and non-governmental organisations should be a big wake up call to our political leaders. Get your heads out of the sand!

Full report here.

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December 14, 2020 at 06:09AM