Newsbytes from Dr. Benny Peiser at The GWPF
Climate Realpolitik: Durban & The New Wait-And-See Diplomacy
Behind closed doors, these strategic delaying tactics are not altogether unwelcome by many if not most of the key non-EU nations. What is altogether new at this year’s climate summit is that even climate alarmism appears to have received a dose of cold water. The latest scientific research findings are certainly facilitating a growing number of climate delayers who are promoting an international wait-and-see strategy, a new diplomatic approach that is becoming increasingly fashionable among advocates of climate Realpolitik. –Benny Peiser, Financial Post, 26 November 2011
One of the big arguments proponents of the ‘green jobs’ scam often bring out is that the argument that China, thanks to its support of green tech companies, will own the future while the United States is left behind. Think again. According to a report on Bloomberg, the Chinese solar power industry is on the ropes; massive over investment has run up against flat demand. Margins have turned negative at some companies where solar panels can only be sold below cost. –Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia. 25 November 2011
Britain’s huge energy-intensive chemical industry contributes £30 million a day to the UK economy. But it is clear already that new green legislation has begun to force early closures and a business exodus to foreign parts. A plague of profit-busting climate policies is sending a “clear signal” to energy-intensive industries: divest yourself of assets, shed jobs – or just plain ship out. –Peter Glover, Energy Tribune, 23 November 2011
So President Obama was right all along. Domestic energy production really is a path to prosperity and new job creation. His mistake was predicting that those new jobs would be “green,” when the real employment boom is taking place in oil and gas. The ironies here are richer than the shale deposits in North Dakota’s Bakken formation. While Washington has tried to force-feed renewable energy with tens of billions in special subsidies, oil and gas production has boomed thanks to private investment. And while renewable technology breakthroughs never seem to arrive, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing have revolutionized oil and gas extraction—with no Energy Department loan guarantees needed. —The Wall Street Journal, 26 November 2011
This is what bad energy policy looks like: as the US dithers over Canadian tar sands oil, China is ready to buy. Access to reliable oil from a friendly neighboring country like Canada is one of America’s greatest geopolitical blessings. Throwing this away would be the height of folly; those seem to be heights we are eager to scale. The greens, like the clueless disarmament and peace advocates in the 1920s and 1930s who unwittingly made it possible for Hitler and Stalin to murder tens of millions of people, are making the 21st century a more dangerous place. Those who care about world peace and the prosperity of the American middle class need to take a stand. Occupy Malibu, anyone? –Walter Russell Mead, Via Meadia, 25 November 2011
I wonder what is the best that can be expected from Durban. Is it possible to have any measures such that when it is all done and dusted, there is a realistic way of saying whether it was good or bad. For instance, if there is a genereal agreement of “wait and see” for 1 year, is that good?
Wait and see and ‘how to we address’ Climate Change in an econimcally sensible manner are one and the same.
With coal prices in most countries above $80/ton(US and Australian are exceptions) spinning up nuclear build programs makes economic sense but will take time.
“China, thanks to its support of green tech companies, will own the future while the United States is left behind. “
There would be no significant market for solar panels except for the US Government subsidies. We are paying for Chinese expertise in meeting a demand that wouldn’t be there except for US Taxpayer money.
@ harry,
http://www.upi.com/Business_News/Energy-Resources/2011/11/23/Australias-mining-tax-moves-ahead/UPI-28321322068553/
Harry, you’re forgetting about gas. But that’s a whole other controversy.
To any thinking man, the Wall Street Journal, 26 November 2011 piece would be like a knife to the heart of their ideology.
Unfortunately, people like Zero, Krugman and any number of progressive sycophants are not thinking members of the human race.
E-mail 0225
date: Wed, 23 Jul 2008 18:57:52 +0800
from: “Helen”
subject: Re: Carbon trading in the Middle East
to:
[cid:REDACTED]
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@ John
Yessiree, Bob! Come and meet the new and improved snake oil salesmen! 😉
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/26/newsbytes-durban-the-new-wait-and-see-diplomacy/#comment-809209
John, thanks for finding that e-mail. Makes it pretty clear it is all about “investments”
Amazing how even the “facts” bandied about are misleading–production from the Bakken “oil shale” is actually from only the middle third of the formation, which happens to be a porous (but highly impermeable) limestone that contains crude; it isn’t shale at all. Admittedly, were this limestone not sandwiched between the two shale members of the formation, the oil probably wouldn’t still be there, but to ascribe it as “oil shale” is dubious at best. Fracking is needed to induce the necessary permeability in the limestone or there’d be no oil flow at all, while horizontal drilling keeps fracking within this production horizon for expansive extraction. (The Bakken formation doesn’t outcrop anywhere and is typically 2 miles deep.)
Gail, you are absolutely welcome. I am pursuing some post enron issues here (grin)….
I found more interesting searching the key word AFRICA in the foia 2011 search engine. There is something for everyone there including global cooling….
Gail Combs said November 26, 2011 at 8:27 am:
Gail, I love ya, you post interesting stuff, but I think all this shows is a marketer slipped one past the spam filters, that was loaded with right terms for FOIA’s content searching to pull it out of the pile. It’s a “Dear Colleague” email, which even I have gotten lots of over the years even without such colleagues, and that opening says to me it’s just generic spam suitable for sending to many, in this case likely using a small specialized mailing list. Note how Briffa is never referred to by name in the text.
You have many pieces of great material to work with and make your points, and this email certainly ain’t becoming one of them. Let it go.
Durban: Hoping for a wholesale breakdown of the EU’s 20-20-20 madness here…
ChE says:
November 26, 2011 at 7:52 am
Harry, you’re forgetting about gas.
Nuclear is ‘reasonably’ competitive against coal at about $4/MMbtu and natural gas at about $6/MMBtu.(Depending on interest rate) The US currently has some of the lowest natural gas prices in the world.
Even then the ‘delivered price’ of Natural Gas to electric utilities in Florida is running at $6/MMBtu. http://www.eia.gov/dnav/ng/ng_pri_sum_dcu_SFL_m.htm
The US is not the world. The US and Russia account for about 1/3rd of global natural gas production and the Russian’s aren’t interested in giving away their gas for cheap. In order to export US gas it would have to be liquefied which adds a cost.
RockyRoad says:
November 26, 2011 at 8:51 am
As a geologist I find hype over the Bakken somewhat amusing…!
I have started on a little project and have decided to start at the start; email 0001.txt. What we see here is evidence of a possible “positive feedback loop”. In engineering such loops are generally unstable and dangerous and the feedback needs to be carefully managed.
What we see is Dr. Warren’s desire to carefully craft her CIAS product to the needs of the UK’s DEFRA which appears to get much of it’s guidance on “CC” (Climate Change) from the UNFCC which gets its guidance from IPCC which gets a lot of IT’S guidance from “The Cause”. So we go from CRU (et al) to the IPCC to the UNFCC to DEFRA and finally close the loop back to UEA with Tyndall Centre and CIAS. This email is a conversation with Mike Hulme.
So we have one group of UEA providing AGW propaganda to the UN who produces guidelines for national government and then another group at UEA (Tyndall Centre) positioned to profit from the resulting business that it creates at DEFRA. Very handy, and apparently all very vital.
Bob says:
November 26, 2011 at 6:19 am
“China, thanks to its support of green tech companies, will own the future while the United States is left behind. “
There would be no significant market for solar panels except for the US Government subsidies. We are paying for Chinese expertise in meeting a demand that wouldn’t be there except for US Taxpayer money.
===============================================================
You’re exactly right! We’ve produced 5.5 times the amount of soft renewable electricity than China! If China thought their technology was worth a crap, then they’d be using it themselves. But, they aren’t.
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2011/11/26/robert-f-kennedy-jr-solar-power-china-and-the-big-lie/
Solar power does make sense in some applications but for the average home in the average neighborhood it is very inefficient. What is going on here is that people are being “sold” a bill of goods. You will never be able to get a major residential PV system to break even. You *might* be able to get one to break even if it heats water but the main demand time for hot water in most residential homes is when the sun is very low in the sky or at night (people generally take showers or wash clothes in the early morning or late at night, relatively few are at home in the middle of the day when solar energy is at its peak availability).
The reason you will never get a residential PV system to break even is that the failure rate of individual PV cells that make up a PV panel is pretty high. So you not only have to deal with the linear decrease in output from the cells as they age, you have to deal with the failure of entire cells at a rate of about 10% of cells / year. So if you have an array made of 1000 cells, you are, on average, going to lose about 100 of them in the first year and you won’t be able to tell which ones have failed. The ones remaining will have lost about 2% of their efficiency so overall you have lost 12% of your power output in the first year. The voltage will look good, but the maximum current that can be provided will drop. The second year you will lose 90 more cells, then 72 more the year after that (typical individual cell failure rate for the cells made in China). You will never actually get the rated power out of that panel after the first year of operation. It will likely be quite useless in 10 years time.
If you manage another stroke of bad luck (as a friend of mine did in Southern California) you will discover an end to the subsidies that made it attractive in the first place. These will likely end before your panels pay off and that inflated rate that the utility was required to pay you for your generated power suddenly drops.
Folks, this is a huge scam of international scale and there are people laughing all the way to the bank with your money.
How green is the wind?
Look, it isn’t really about the environment. I mean, it is if you live in Britain, but it isn’t if you live in China. It is about using the environment as a mechanism to get people to buy more Chinese magnets. It creates a cash flow from the UK to China. It is global “redistribution of wealth” using the fear of CO2 as the lever.
Put another way, one single nuclear power plant would replace ALL of the UK’s wind energy and do so for several decades and wouldn’t require a single pound going to China. So therefore, it will not be a possibility.
Australia as one of, if notthe world’s latgest coal exporters has a carbon tax which exempts coal exports as the emissions haven’t been emitted yet.
So international customers get cheaper electricity than domestic Australians inthe name of reducing emissions while the government plans to double the coal exports by 2050.
Beat that for stupidity.
Rosco says:
November 27, 2011 at 1:21 pm
Australia as one of, if notthe world’s latgest coal exporters has a carbon tax which exempts coal exports as the emissions haven’t been emitted yet……So international customers get cheaper electricity than domestic Australians
By the time a tonne of Autralian Thermal coal makes it to China the cost is $6/MMbtu which woulds out to be a fuel cost of about 6 cents/KWh.
The last I checked the domestic price of Australian Thermal coal was about $2/MMBtu which works out to a fuel cost of about 2 cents/KWh. Your $23/ton carbon tax will add an additional 2 cents/Kwh.
Latest news reports do have the Chinese and Indian electric utilities either making razor thin profits or losing money. If you are paying more then them it’s because your utility is making a profit as your fuel costs are still less then what the vast majority of the world pays.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t complain about a tax raising your electric rates, but they aren’t raising rates above what the rates countries importing Australian coal are paying.
Since the JAXA satellite revealed that the US and EU are major CO2 sinks, it’s vital that China burn as much coal as possible.