Tag Archives: climate lobby

Right, Wall Street Journal, John Kerry Did Fail to Persuade China to Give Up Reliable Energy

By H. Sterling Burnett

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran an article noting that despite John Kerry’s failure as President Joe Biden’s climate envoy to get China to curb its coal use in order to save the world from climate change, Kerry is now being brought over to Biden’s reelection campaign. If Kerry does as good a job with Biden’s campaign as he did in changing the course of the world’s fossil fuel use, Biden’s reelection efforts are in trouble. The WSJ is right, Kerry failed in his biggest mission as the U.S. climate czar, curbing greenhouse gas emissions from developing countries, especially China.

Describing Kerry’s lack of success, the WSJ wrote:

For three years Mr. Kerry has been preoccupied with getting China to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. But excluding emissions from land use and forestry, China’s emissions rose 13% between 2015 and 2023, according to Climate Action Tracker estimates. U.S. emissions fell by some 9% over the same period.

You can’t say Mr. Kerry hasn’t tried to persuade China, including the use of green flattery. “China has produced more renewable energy, more solar and wind than any other country,” he said last year.

But China’s CO2 emissions have still soared as demand for electricity surged. In 2022 China accounted for 53% of the world’s coal generation, the Ember think tank says, and new permits for coal power plants in 2022 reached “the highest level since 2015.” That’s the year Beijing signed the Paris climate accord Mr. Kerry negotiated, promising to reduce its emissions starting in 2030.

China also expanded it coal mining, despite Kerry’s efforts, setting a new record for production in 2023.

In September 2023, Kerry’s counterpart, Chinese climate envoy Xie Zhenhua said, “It is unrealistic to completely phase out fossil fuel energy,” echoing statement made by China’s President Xi Jinping 2022 that the country’s carbon dioxide policies, “can’t be detached from reality.”

Looking at some of those realities, one can see that regardless of what one believes about humanity’s role (or lack thereof) in climate change. Kerry’s climate outreach to China and elsewhere was largely an expensive fool’s errand.

An article on Turning Point USA points out that the salary for Kerry’s small staff cost U.S. taxpayers $4.3 million each year, with all but one of the 27 employees with the office of Special Presidential Envoy for Climate making more than $100,000 per year. This doesn’t include the costs of office space and equipment, travel, and other associated costs with running Kerry’s independent office. I say independent because Kerry’s position was created by President Biden, reporting only to him. Despite being charged with negotiating international climate agreements, Kerry’s office was outside the normal chain of command. It was not part of the State Department, and Kerry did not report to the Secretary of State.

All that money bought no climate progress. During Kerry’s time as Special Climate Envoy, coal use set new records. In 2023, the International Energy Agency reported:

“The demand for coal is seen rising 1.4 percent in 2023, surpassing 8.5 billion tonnes for the first time as usage in India is expected to grow 8 percent and that in China up 5 percent due to rising electricity demand and weak hydropower output, IEA said in a report released on Friday,” writes Al Jazeera, reporting io the IEA’s findings.

Indeed, data from Statista shows that the capacity of the coal plants announced, permitted, and under construction have risen each year since Kerry was on the job, reversing a declining trend global trend in coal power construction that existed under the Trump administration.

To be fair, John Kerry does not run China, India, or any of the other developing countries where coal use for electric power generation and industrial uses is rising, but his main job was to persuade the leaders of those countries to shift to alternative, less reliable, more expensive forms of energy, as Western Europe and the United States are largely doing. In that task, he abjectly failed. And the reason for the failure is clear, the Biden administration with Kerry as its point man, put climate pipe dreams above economic realities of the developing world.

The result was aptly summed up by the WSJ, writing, “Mr. Kerry’s problem has been a failure to recognize reality, which is typical of America’s climate lobby.”

The post Right, Wall Street Journal, John Kerry Did Fail to Persuade China to Give Up Reliable Energy appeared first on ClimateRealism.

The COP 28 threat to global food production

By Bonner Cohen, Ph. D.

Raw beef steak on a wooden cutting board

Aside from the usual commitments to reduce emissions (which continue to rise globally) and redistribute income (primarily from middle-to-lower earners to corrupt governments and well-heeled members of the climate cartel), attendees at the just-concluded COP28 conference in Dubai took a break from grazing at the many sumptuous receptions to call for farmers the world over to change their ways and practice “climate-friendly” agriculture.

Cattle, sheep, and other farm animals now stand accused of endangering the planet by producing methane. Methane is routinely cited as a “potent” greenhouse gas, one which must be ruthlessly suppressed. Humans are being told, in no uncertain terms, that they must reduce, and eventually eliminate, their consumption of meat. Substitutes include lab meat and, everyone’s favorite, insects.

“A U.N. report last year held that about 7 gigatons of CO2 reductions – about as much emissions from global natural-gas combustion – would have to come from people eating meat,” Allysia Finley noted in her “Life Science” column in the Wall Street Journal (Dec. 4). “Livestock production accounts for about 11% to 17% of global greenhouse-gas emissions and about 32% of the world’s methane, which is 28 times as potent as carbon dioxide. Pound for pound of protein, beef production generates nearly 18 times as much greenhouse gas — and pork, four times as much – as tofu. Blame cow burps and manure.”

Livestock have joined SUVs, 18-wheelers, gas stoves, and gas furnaces on the ever-growing list of climate culprits. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) noticed that COP28 was “targeting farmers” and he is not moved by claims by environmentalists and climate officials who say change must come to the farm if the “climate crisis” is to be averted.

“I’m one farmer that’s not ready to do that,” he told E&E News (Dec. 6). Grassley, 88, is a hog farmer, and Iowa id the nation’s leader in hog production and in corn, grown mainly for livestock feed, as well as for ethanol. The Hawkeye State ranks in the top 10 for cattle, according to the Department of Agriculture.

Grassley rightly worries that government agencies will force companies to report their climate-related emissions throughout their supply chains, down to the farm level. This is exactly the approach taken by the Biden Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), which is working on a rule to require reporting on such “Scope 3” emissions from some publicly traded companies. Farms and ranches, of course, are not publicly traded companies, but they could be caught up in the regulatory web the Biden administration wants to throw over as many entities as it can.

Reduce the Supply and Increase the Cost

The Journal’s Finley sees what game is being played.

“The climate lobby knows that restricting people’s consumption of meat and dairy products would be unpopular, if not unconstitutional,” she points out. “Instead, they urge that governments use regulation, taxes, and subsidies to reduce the supply and increase the cost of meat, as they are doing with fossil fuels.”

While elites will continue to dine well under the regime being put in place, she notes, “The world’s poor will have to continue subsisting on nonnutritious gruel, just as they will have to do without cars, air conditioning, and refrigerators to achieve the global left’s net-zero nirvana.”

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is putting his money where the COP28 pledges are. He’s buying up tens of thousands of acres of prime U.S. farmland, not to plant crops to feed the world’s 8 billion people, but to use the land for projects that will reduce CO2 levels in the air. This will reduce agricultural productivity, but that is a problem for the poor, not the rich.

The post The COP 28 threat to global food production appeared first on CFACT.

Prepare For Energy Shortages In 2030

From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

More on UK FIRES:

Is Absolute Zero pessimistic about UK energy supplies?

We have come across UK FIRES before. They warned us in 2020 that If it is to achieve its target of net zero climate emissions by 2050, all UK airports must close by mid-century and the country will have to make other drastic and fundamental lifestyle changes.

They do have a habit ofpointing out the harsh realities of Net Zero, which are deliberately hidden from us by the government, CCC and the rest of the climate lobby. Just last month they published this analysis concerning the state of UK energy supplies:

The most common response we receive when we present Absolute Zero to governmental or incumbent commercial audiences is “Oh, but your forecast of future energy supplies is far too low. You should be more optimistic.”

Figure 1, shows the basis of our thinking at the time. The background of this figure is figure 1-1 in the Absolute Zero report, and here we’ve overlaid on it the government’s data on electricity generation. This data, which is available in the excellent Digest of UK Energy Statistics (table 5.6), takes a while to collect and validate, so when we wrote the report in 2019, we could draw on real data up to 2017 – which is the blue line in figure 1.

Figure 2 below, certainly seems to confirm that we are less optimistic than everyone else[1]. Compared to 15 other scenarios used to inform government climate policy, our forecast of the emissions-free electricity supply is by far the lowest.  Figure 2 also demonstrates that all of these other scenarios depend on negative emissions technologies such as carbon capture and storage to deal with between 40 and 80 MtCO2e per year of “residual emissions.” In Absolute Zero we reflected the reality that to date no such technologies were operating in the UK, and therefore forecast that by 2050 we should continue to anticipate that they would not exist. So far, our prediction on that front has been absolutely correct, although – as always – there are lots of people in the oil and gas industries talking enthusiastically about projects that might happen.

Energy infrastructure is not a commodity product, like a smartphone. You can’t buy new nuclear power stations, or carbon-capture and storage facilities off the shelf. They are mega-projects. Before construction begins, a long and complex series of societal discussions has to play out, about public funding contrasted with other important priorities, about land-rights, local communities, safety, public perception, legal and environmental compliance, and the complicated processes of commercial contracting. Once construction begins, it almost always takes longer than predicted – because the contracts are often awarded to the most optimistic sounding contractors, who claim early delivery dates, but then have to push them back as “unexpected” features of the project delay their intended timelines.

Figure 4 shows how this story is playing out for the new nuclear power station at Hinckley Point C. The yellow bars show the International Atomic Energy Authority’s predictions of the timeline to introduce a new nuclear power station. The purple bars show what has happened to date – and don’t forget that when the latest delay was announced in 2022, the project owners also predicted that they would be announcing further delays later…

Yet the message isn’t getting through. Atkins in their excellent “Engineering Net Zero” reports have analysed the build-rates required to deliver the energy infrastructure predicted by the Climate Change Committee, leading to the graph in figure 5. Notice that the required build rate leapt up in 2022, to an unprecedented level with no ramp-up.

Almost unbelievably, when this report was launched, the audience response was to smile and shrug, and say “well we’ll just have to go a bit faster then, won’t we? We just need to be more optimistic.”

But surely the correct interpretation of figure 5 is that it isn’t going to happen. There is no possibility of this level of energy infrastructure being built by 2035, and if anything approaching this rate of construction is to happen beyond then, the public financing commitment needs to be made right now, before the next election.

We haven’t heard it mentioned.

When we hear people tell us that we “should just be more optimistic” we think what they’re really saying is “we don’t want to think about a future in which we don’t have all the energy we want.” But the whole excitement of the UK FIRES programme has been to recognise that that such a shortfall is (close to a certain) reality, and as a result a whole different range of innovations in technology, business, systems, governance and lifestyle are going to emerge as the enablers of real zero emissions living. By articulating and promoting those opportunities, we are aiming to open up a much more credible pathway to delivering zero emissions in reality. These are achievable goals, and it’s a pathway along which we can walk to a zero-emissions future – while living really well.

Is Absolute Zero pessimistic about UK energy supplies?

The target for 2035 is especially relevant, because the government has committed to a cut in emissions of 68% from 2018 levels by 2035.

In the last three years, a total of 6141 MW of wind and solar capacity has been added. Last year’s CfD Round 4 auction adds another 10689 MW, most of which won’t arrive until 2026/27. As UK Fires point out, there is simply no way that we will achieve 14 GW a year between now and 2035, a total of 196 GW.

Worse still, as the nuclear timeline shows, it could take another 20 years for the next nuclear plant to arrive after Hinkley.

So let’s let that final paragraph sink in again:

When we hear people tell us that we “should just be more optimistic” we think what they’re really saying is “we don’t want to think about a future in which we don’t have all the energy we want.” But the whole excitement of the UK FIRES programme has been to recognise that that such a shortfall is (close to a certain) reality, and as a result a whole different range of innovations in technology, business, systems, governance and lifestyle are going to emerge as the enablers of real zero emissions living. By articulating and promoting those opportunities, we are aiming to open up a much more credible pathway to delivering zero emissions in reality. These are achievable goals, and it’s a pathway along which we can walk to a zero-emissions future – while living really well.

They may be excited. But I suspect most people will be horrified and extremely angry when they find out they have been duped, and that we will have to drastically tailor our lives for a future without all of the energy we need.

As UK FIRES noted in their MINUS 45 report two years ago:

https://ukfires.org/minus-45/

We can’t say we weren’t warned!