From The GWPF via Dr. Benny Peiser
Sagging carbon prices lost nearly 14% of their value yesterday (2 April) as recession and a warm winter sparked a predicted 2.6% drop in carbon emissions from the 10,000 installations covered by the EU’s Emissions Trading System (ETS) last year. The already-depressed carbon price dived from €7 to a record low of €6.14 by early afternoon.–EurActiv, 3 April 2012
An internal General Motors strategy paper reveals that the US automaker wants to close its plants in Western Europe and transfer production to low-cost countries. The document means that the future looks bleak for Opel’s plant in Bochum and Vauxhall’s factory in Ellesmere Port. –Dietmar Hawranek, Spiegel Online, 27 March 2012
The British government, although not yet ready to say so, has finally rejected the bogus economics of climate change or, more likely, it always knew the figures didn’t add up but is now desperate for the internationally competitive cheap energy needed to keep our industrial base from wholesale emigration. –Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 1 April 2012
Q-Cells, once the world’s biggest maker of solar panels, is filing for bankruptcy. The German firm says it has abandoned an attempt to refinance its debts and will file for insolvency on Tuesday. Like other solar panel makers, Q-Cells has been hit by falling prices and last year the firm lost 846m euros ($1.1bn; £702m). The company started in 2001 with 19 staff and now employs more than 2,000 workers. —BBC News, 2 April 2012
China has already cancelled orders for 35 European Airbus A330 jets, and is threatening to cancel on 10 more. India has just banned its airlines from submitting any carbon emission data by the EU’s March 31 deadline. In February, the two Asian giants, along with 21 other countries including the United States, signed up to the Moscow Declaration, a strategic blueprint for global trade ‘war’. It has a single aim: to make sure the EU’s Airline Tax never gets off the ground. –Peter Glover, Energy Tribune, 30 March 2012
Middle East will go back to being an obscure backwater. It will attract scant attention in future, not because the region will have run out of oil — it will have found much more — but because the rest of the world will also be awash in oil. –Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post, 31 March 2012
The dividing line between creative writing and climate science – sometimes thin – has been triumphantly dissolved. A new postgraduate course at the University of East Anglia hopes to bring together “researchers in the environmental sciences, philosophy, history and literature to develop new ways of thinking about environmental change and social transitions”. And put that thermometer down. If you have experience writing “eco-poetry”, then the UEA wants to hear from you. UEA, the heart of the Climategate emails, already runs a project in “eco poetry” aimed at primary school children, intended to “stimulate and strengthen children’s environmental awareness”. It isn’t cheap, though. The course costs £5,000 for UK students and £11,900 for overseas students. –Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 2 April 2012
Isnt the UK forced carbon trading scheme due to come into effect I beleive they are setting carbon at £12 per tonne, all councils have to comply and have to participate in the scheme. The mony raised was to be divvied up to the top achieving participants however the treasury is now keeping all the money raised.
Gray skies are gonna clear up
Put on a happy face!
Brush off the clouds and cheer up
Put on a happy face!
Sleepy Register sub-ed must have filed this story a day late.
“The British government, although not yet ready to say so, has finally rejected the bogus economics of climate change or, more likely, it always knew the figures didn’t add up but is now desperate for the internationally competitive cheap energy needed to keep our industrial base from wholesale emigration. –Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 1 April 2012”
Unfortunately I suspect this one may be an inadvertent April Fool gag. As far as I can tell our government is demonstrating a similar level of economic illiteracy to the previous encumbents. When they show some kind of support for fracking along the NW coast I might start to believe.
From The Register’s article:
“And Hulme is nothing if not ambitious:
“The idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.”
He certainly has a way with words.”
Reminds me of this (read with a few grains of salt):
http://www.renewamerica.com/columns/fischer/120331
Mainly #’s 1,2,5,8,9,10.
Middle East will go back to being an obscure backwater.
Which means that without autocratic rulers, these countries will be more than likely run by the mad mullahs eager to export their ideal of theocracy to the west.
Most interesting bit there for me was the idea that we might be entering an Oil Boom. That would certainly shake up the world, not to mention doing wonders for the economy. I just wonder what sort of hoops the greens will jump through to try and repress this Technology. I think this could be their Waterloo, the Oil is too badly needed and valuable and spread out over too much of the world to restrict this extraction method unless they can come up with some very serious and concrete problems with it.
It’s snowing over here in the UK too, quite chilly.
Wow, without even mentioning Solyndra, one can clearly see the solar industry crumbling.
http://suyts.wordpress.com/2012/04/03/ber-successful-solar-industry-collapsing/
“Middle East will go back to being an obscure backwater. “……. only if we actually drill/mine the oil that we find. We’re going to have to rid ourselves of the econuts first.
“The dividing line between creative writing and climate science – sometimes thin – has been triumphantly dissolved.”…… I’ve never really been able to discern if they were seriously that vapid or if they were just evil. I’ll keep an eye out for a change in the writing style.
lol, there’s still a carbon market?
Unfortunately, Portugal led the way… We had to be intervened by the IMF and Europe. Now, others will follow! Please record what I wrote almost a year ago: http://ecotretas.blogspot.pt/2011/04/dark-economy-inside-perspective.html
Very interesting is also what Jorge Moreira da Silva, one of the eurocrats behind European’s carbon economy, and recently named nº 2 of the ruling party here in Portugal, said some years ago:
“conditions are created that Climatic Change and the Kyoto Protocol are no longer only theoretical items but will constitute in future an important pillar in economic and environmental politics. The Carbon Economy is born. Those who are able to produce with less greenhouse gas emission will be the winners.”
and
“Jorge Moreira da Silva, who is steering a bill through the parliament which will cap industrial emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2), said Europe would have to pay to cut the emissions seen as a contributor to global warming but the EU could show the world it can be done without bankrupting the economy.”
Definitely, he didn’t get it right!
@Peter,
I think you, and Mr. Solomon, have underestimated the amount of money that those Middle East countries plan to spend this election cycle, re-electing Obama and other reliable anti-domestic oil politicians.
And just where do outfits like WWF, NRDC, Greenpeace, et. al. get their funding?
Mr Squid says:
“Sleepy Register sub-ed must have filed this story a day late.”
I understand they spent a day rolling on the floor laughing their asses off and missed their dealine…
The first billion pound carbon capture scheme scheme didn’t work.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-15371258
So let’s try another billion pound carbon capture scheme.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17586596
Sorry, but the stupid is simply overwhelming. The bunch of morons forming what laughably passes as our government is unaware that the world is changing rapidly and that they are being left a long way behind, bankrupting the country all the while with their expensive green dreams.
If you should need any further evidence of the breathtaking arrogance and condescending attitude of the last Labour government’s stance on climate change, then Leo Hickman’s latest effort is a must read. UK taxpayers money spent to “educate” Texan policy makers. Leo’s headline its truly impressive the way it gets the main story completely arse over tits:
Rick Perry criticises UK initiative to influence US climate sceptics
A warm winter, really? AFAIK around here February was the coldest since 1931.
Developing fuels to replace oil depletion to sustain transport and food production will overrule all other strategies. See:
IMPACT OF THE PEAKING OF WORLD OIL PRODUCTION ON THE GLOBAL BALANCE OF POWER, by Lieutenant Colonel GS Pascal Eggen, 91 pages. MASTER OF MILITARY ART AND SCIENCE THESIS, U.S. Army Command and General Staff College
Abstract:
Eggen cites Roberts:
I see catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) as epitomizing the hubris that we can massively change climate, naive idealism demonizing coal, leveraged by alarmism and funding feedback. With crude oil having leveled off in 2005, we are now rapidly transitioning from “idealism” to realism as the economy experiences the consequences of high oil prices. We will soon progress to “realism” and “offensive realism” with shortages of available fuel and a crash program to develop alternative fuels from other “heavier” hydrocarbons (heavy oil, bitumen, kerogen, & coal) and sustainable sources.
Lawson’s article states: “Germany, where almost half the world’s solar energy is produced — in a country with just an hour of sun on an average December day — is now drastically cutting back […] And which energy source is ecologically correct Germany now developing faster than any other? Lignite, otherwise known as brown coal, the most carbon- intensive fuel known to modern man.”
Bummer. If they’d told us sooner, we wouldn’t have spent all our money buying their “windmills” and PV panels. Maybe they won’t bother getting them back? Few years of use, almost new?
I briefly misread “eco-poetry” as “eco-poverty”. I think I’ll keep that error as a useful encapsulation of the problem.
The terrible economics of alternative energy are finally hitting people and governments between the eyes. The coruption and dishonesty associated with the religion of leftist climate science is also sinking in to peoples minds. The finding of massive recoverable oil and gas deposits around the globe can give people a feeling of security that affordable energy will be available for at least a hundred years or more. By then, I suspect a physics breakthough will solve an eventual post oil and gas world acceptable for everyone.
We have some fire-sale coal deposits here in the US the EU might want to consider if they REALLY want to buy something substantively “carbon”.
Or not.
How an industry so heavily subsidized by the tax payers can fail so badly escapes me. It would seem people ‘just aren’t getting the message’ that this is the way of the future. That is the subsidy-fail-subsidy-fail cycle….not the ‘solar is better’ idea because it is CLEARLY not. But hey, it’s not THEIR money they’re flushing down the toilet so it doesn’t matter. And at least they are TRYING to save the world, unlike the dirty coal/gas/petroleum industry which is sustaining electricity (and human lives) throughout the world.
Maybe carbon traders are getting nervous after reading that even the IPCC is no longer supportive of their charade:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/2/abrupt-climate-change-reversal/
Reality bites!
Check out the BishopHill blog for a thread with lots of good eco-poetry.
http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2012/3/29/hulmes-new-climate-course.html
😉
If you click on the link to the Sunday Times you only get today’s issue. To get the Dominic Lawson April 1 article follow this link:
http://thegwpf.org/opinion-pros-a-cons/5352-dominic-lawson-britain-has-finally-rejected-the-bogus-economics-of-climate-change.html
Do not forget that in reality UEA has the best creative writing course in the UK with some great names to its credit. Too bad that climate science has forgotten it is not a departmental subsidiary of the creative writing one and that it should do a reality check on the data accuracy and computer models.
So right Bloke; anyone who thinks that making the Middle East an economic backwater will cure the "Middle East Problem" is an incurable optimist
Maybe WUWT should have an eco-poetry contest. We could have different categories. I might even take time to put up a haiku…if I can find enough loose change for a bottle of sake.
“China has already cancelled orders for 35 European Airbus A330 jets, and is threatening to cancel on 10 more. India has just banned its airlines from submitting any carbon emission data by the EU’s March 31 deadline. ”
Damn right too. The Chinese saved us from Copenhagen, let’s hope they can save us from this carbon butt-print bullshit.
Of course they’re not out to do us any favours, they’d be quite happy to see us destroy our own economy and then come in and buy what’s left of our country in the fire sale that follows.
Taxing carbon emissions is the economic equivalent of water-boarding.
Global cooling is real.
The Green Economy Fiasco.
The way I look at at it is real simple – you can’t fit a square peg in a round hole no matter how many $billions or $trillions you throw at it. it will always leak like a sieve. This is what renewable energy is at this point in time, a black hole without a hope of recovery!
This money is lost to the worlds economy’s forever!
and australian $25 CARBON TAX starts 1st july how stupid is that
The irony here is that heating shale oil deposits in situ to make them flow is one of the few applications of solar and wind energy that might make sense, because the variability of the energy source is irrelevant when all you need to do is heat something up over months to years.
There are a lot of barriers being put up to exploiting shale oil, so it may come more slowly than some predict, But OTOH China has plenty of shale oil and is desperate for secure oil supplies so we may end up importing oil from them alongside TVs. etc.
Bloke down the pub says:
April 3, 2012 at 11:15 am
This is wishful thinking. Much of the mid-east oil is being displaced by expensive non-conventional oil. Too much production lowers the price, the high-cost producers stop production first, and we’re back to square one. Long live the backwater.
It’s time to start gathering signatures and letter writing campaigns to appeal to leaders to save us from climate change madness policy. But you will have to direct your letters to the capitols of Brazil, Russia, China, and India to get any real action. Obama will just posture and pretend and ultimately side with Brussels and his own unsustainable circle of special interests.
A precious conceit of the Western elite
Was conceived by the East as a specially fine treat.
But wonder all eyes
At the clouds in the skies.
Anthro Cee Oh Two can’t be beat.
=====================
I am reminded of the fairground game where one wields a hammer to hit rats popping up out of holes in the ground. Our yogurt knitting tree hugging friends can only do so much before being overwhelmed.
God speed the day…
Windmill and solar
Weep in their obsolescence
fossil smiles again
Julia Gillard is charging $23 / tonne in Australia. Labor lost out big time in the Queensland state election, I can’t wait to vote her out in the Federal elections. She is history. Her most famous quote (lie) before she was elected. “There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”
The greens are also on the nose. People are slowly waking up to the scam.
Good luck to dead and dying Old Europe. When you have turned your back on truth for too long soon no one really cares. But there is some hope: after wandering in the desert for the next 40 years perhaps they’ll have stopped blaming America for the world’s problems will decide to give economic freedom and individual liberty a chance.
RockyRoad says:
April 3, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Maybe carbon traders are getting nervous after reading that even the IPCC is no longer supportive of their charade:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2012/apr/2/abrupt-climate-change-reversal/
*
Okay, what gives? What is happening behind the scenes at the IPCC? What’s in it for them to now play straight? Or am I missing something?
About Hulme.
http://buythetruth.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/climate-change-and-the-death-of-science/
“We need to reveal the creative psychological, spiritual and ethical work that climate change can do and is doing for us…we open up a way of resituating culture and the human spirit”
He basically never gave a flyin sh*t about science.
An internal General Motors strategy paper reveals that the US automaker wants to close its plants in Western Europe and transfer production to low-cost countries. The document means that the future looks bleak for Opel’s plant in Bochum and Vauxhall’s factory in Ellesmere Port. –Dietmar Hawranek, Spiegel Online, 27 March 2012
The British government, although not yet ready to say so, has finally rejected the bogus economics of climate change or, more likely, it always knew the figures didn’t add up but is now desperate for the internationally competitive cheap energy needed to keep our industrial base from wholesale emigration. –Dominic Lawson, The Sunday Times, 1 April 2012
______________________________
No surprise here. We wrote a decade ago that de-industrialization would happen as a result of global warming hysteria. See our summary points 4, 5 , 6 and 8 below.
Our eight-point summary* includes a number of predictions that have all materialized in those countries in Western Europe that have adopted the full measure of global warming mania. My country, Canada, was foolish enough to sign the Kyoto Protocol, but then wise enough to ignore it.
To date, our predictive record is infinitely better than that of the IPCC. But then, none of the IPCC’s scary predictions have materialized.
Our successful predictions were neither difficult nor high-risk – rather our points were logical and obvious to anyone with a strong technical background, who was not infected with global warming mania.
Since we wrote our 2002 article, contrary to IPCC predictions, there has been NO net global warming, and probably some moderate cooling. This very-scary global warming crisis is so reliable – it never fails to underperform.
The predictive record of the global warming movement and the IPCC is near-perfect, but in the negative – to date, it is 100% incorrect – completely false.
How does the global warming movement retain any credibility, when they deserve none?
P.S. I predicted global cooling in an article published in 2003. Bundle up!
________________________
* Summary:
http://www.apegga.org/Members/Publications/peggs/WEB11_02/kyoto_pt.htm
Kyoto has many fatal flaws, any one of which should cause this treaty to be scrapped.
1. Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming – the alleged warming crisis does not exist.
2. Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil.
3. Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity.
4. Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy – the U.S., Canada’s biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt.
5. Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment – it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution.
6. Kyoto’s CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits.
7. Kyoto will be ineffective – even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming.
8. The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply – the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels.
TIM from NZ says:
April 3, 2012 at 1:15 pm
How an industry so heavily subsidized by the tax payers can fail so badly escapes me.
Look at their business plans — “In order to make it attractive, we’ll sell for less than what it costs to produce and so we’ll make it up in volume.” Some fledgling industries are just money-pits awaiting a future scientific advance which will render them feasible *and* economical.
Thing is, future scientific advances sometimes render the original industry obsolete…
Lets see,
Russia said it might close it’s air space to European flights; so if China and India join in, that means any European wanting to fly to The East can take a very long path through Africa, or swap to a non-European carrier.
I think I like it… Now if Canada were to do the same…
Part of the silliness is that the Warmista Greens have started a tepid Jihad against fracking. This means that every single producer with wells being drilled is going to drill and frack them as fast as possible and dump the gas on the market just to show the well ‘completed’ in case any nut-law blocks future drilling; price be damned.
So we have natural gas dropping to $2 from $12 per unit. Even coal can’t compete with that and natural gas electric generators are highly efficient, so solar and wind electric are completely toast. This basically says that the Jump The Shark Greens are guaranteeing the failure of their schemes via forcing gas drillers to drill despite the economic price collapse.
If there was any confidence at all that the market was rational, not politicized, and they could hold off drilling and fracking for a couple of years, many projects would halt on the non-profitable prices. Instead they have to plan on the 20 year term and get drilled what they can NOW.
So the greens push against fracking is assuring the destruction of most of their plans.
E.M.Smith says:
Part of the silliness is that the Warmista Greens have started a tepid Jihad against fracking. This means that every single producer with wells being drilled is going to drill and frack them as fast as possible and dump the gas on the market just to show the well ‘completed’ in case any nut-law blocks future drilling; price be damned.
I’m sure that fracking is considerably safer than it’s made out to be by the press, but I would be very interested in some solid evidence of that. Can anyone here point me toward some? It would be greatly appreciated!
Lawson’s article states: “Germany, where almost half the world’s solar energy is produced — in a country with just an hour of sun on an average December day — is now drastically cutting back […] And which energy source is ecologically correct Germany now developing faster than any other? Lignite, otherwise known as brown coal, the most carbon- intensive fuel known to modern man.”
++++++++
Carbon intensive? What rubbish. Lignite has the highest H2 to C ratio of any coal type. How do they get away with this? It is fanaticism, not reality. So intent are they to demonise coal they have not even bothered to check the simplest of facts. Coal is old biomass. The older it is, the more carbon it has as % of the mass because the Hydrogen leaves with time. H2 has 4 times the energy of carbon per kg.
And, “…half the world’s solar energy’? Good grief. Biomass is an energy carrier just like LPG and ethanol. Biomass is solar energy in a storable, transportable form.
Yes that’s right Crispin, but in fact diamonds are probably the “most carbon-intensive fuel known to modern man”, just ask De Beers, who burn their rejected stones in a furnace to heat their offices…. ha ha. But seriously though honeycombed coked coal or “smokeless fuel” is probably the most used “carbon-intensive fuel known to modern man”, …. erm that is if you don’t count charcoal which is still used by millions of people the world over, mostly in 3rd world counties for cooking, but also in you own backyard bar-b-que.
Important for everyone (especially Tony Mach) to remember that Heartland can’t bring criminal charges against Gleick – only the government can do that. Heartland can approach the government prosecutors with evidence, and request that Gleick be charged, but it’s the government’s decision. Also remember that the prosecutors are beholden to the executive – federal prosecutors to the president, state prosecutors to the governor; the disposition of the executive towards a case can make the difference between prosecution and non-prosecution.
The ideal situation for Heartland would be for the government to file criminal charges against Gleick, even if he isn’t convicted. That way the government will perform and finance a lot of the discovery (of evidence). Any evidence from the criminal trial can be re-used in the civil trial.
Even if Gleick doesn’t have much in the way of assets, it might still be worthwhile for Heartland to file suit against him. Sometimes it’s not about the monetary damages, or recovering your legal expenses. If Heartland prevails Gleick will be discredited, possibly penniless. Nobody would hire him; he’d become (figuratively) radioactive.
The threat of a ruinous lawsuit against Gleick could also provide leverage to get Greenpeace, etc, to disown the fraudulent docs. Will be interesting to see whether they throw Gleick under the bus.
[I am not a lawyer, etc. Second attempt to post this here.]