Newsbytes from Dr. Benny Peiser of The GWPF
A couple of weeks ago the great global warming bandwagon coughed and spluttered to a halt in Doha, the latest stop on its never-ending world tour. The annual UN climate conference COP18 is no small affair. This is a bandwagon whose riders number in the thousands: motorcades of politicians, buses full of technocrats and policy wonks and jumbo-jets full of hippies travelling half way round the world, (ostensibly) to save the planet from the (allegedly) pressing problem of climate change — Andrew Montford, The Spectator 9 December 2012
At the end of another lavishly-funded U.N. conference that yielded no progress on curbing greenhouse emissions, many of those most concerned about climate change are close to despair. –Barbara Lewis and Alister Doyle, Reuters, 9 December 2012
The United Nations climate talks in Doha went a full extra 24 hours and ended without increased cuts in fossil fuel emissions and without financial commitments between 2013 and 2015. However, this is a “historic” agreement, insisted Qatar’s Abdullah bin Hamad Al-Attiyah, the COP18 president. —Inter Press Service, 10 December 2012
The conference held in Qatar agreed to extend the emissions-limiting Kyoto Protocol, which would have run out within weeks. But Canada, Russia and Japan – where the protocol was signed 15 years ago – all abandoned the agreement. The United States never ratified it in the first place, and it excludes developing countries where emissions are growing most quickly. Delegates flew home from Doha without securing a single new pledge to cut pollution from a major emitter. –Barbara Lewis and Alister Doyle, Reuters, 9 December 2012
Climate negotiators at the most recent conference on global warming were unable to reduce expectations fast enough to match the collapse of their agenda. The only real winners here were the bureaucrats in the diplomacy industry for whom endless rounds of carbon spewing conferences with no agreement year after year mean jobs, jobs, jobs. The inexorable decline of the climate movement from its Pickett’s Charge at the Copenhagen summit continues. The global green lobby is more flummoxed than ever. These people and these methods couldn’t make a ham sandwich, much less save Planet Earth. –Walter Russell Mead, The American Interest, 9 December 2012
Britain faces even tougher green taxes if a climate change deal is signed in Doha that could force it to reduce emissions by another third. The country is signed up to a target to cut carbon emissions by 34 per cent by 2020, but this could go up to 42 per cent under a new United Nations deal. Experts last night warned that the new target could add hundreds of pounds to energy bills every year, and industry leaders said new carbon taxes would make British businesses less competitive. Benny Peiser, of Lord Lawson’s think tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation, said the cost to industry would be passed on to consumers. “The more renewables you build, like wind, the more you need subsidies so it pushes energy bills up. If business has to pay higher bills the costs of products goes up.” –Louise Gray and Rowena Mason, The Daily Telegraph, 8 December 2012
The UN climate conferences have descended into ritual farce, as naked money-grabbing on behalf of poor countries contrasts with finagling impossible solutions to what is likely a much-exaggerated problem. One leading question is how dubious science, shoddy economics and tried-and-failed socialist policies have come to dominate the democratic process in so many countries for so long. The answer appears to be the skill with which a radical minority — centred in and promoted by the UN, and funded by national governments and, even more bizarrely, corporations — has skilfully manipulated the political process at every level. –Peter Foster, Financial Post, 7 December 2012
It’s green, it’s cheap and it’s plentiful! So why are opponents of shale gas making such a fuss? If it were not so serious there would be something ludicrous about the reaction of the green lobby to the discovery of big shale gas reserves in this country. Here we are in the fifth year of a downturn. We have pensioners battling fuel poverty. We have energy firms jacking up their prices. We have real worries about security of energy supply – a new building like the Shard needs four times as much juice as the entire town of Colchester. In their mad denunciations of fracking, the Greens and the eco-warriors betray the mindset of people who cannot bear a piece of unadulterated good news. –Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph, 10 December 2012
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Ah, BoJo, how we love you.
These Greens are becoming Luddites with iPads.
From the Reuter’s article (comments for which are now “closed” after 24 hours – heh).
“Delegates flew home from Doha without securing a single new pledge to cut pollution from a major emitter. ”
Green Hypocrites.
They may be “close to despair,” but they still have access to essentially limitless taxpayer funding, and they will never run out of liberty-robbing, totalitarian ideas for using it.
“Obama must take the lead,” etc.:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-10/climate-treaty-hinges-on-obama-making-case-ex-aides-say.html
.
I love the article by Boris Johnson (the London Mayor), the last in the series given in the introduction to this thread.
Quote:
Britain is being forested with white satanic mills, and yet the total contribution of wind power is still only about 0.4 per cent of Britain’s needs. Wave power, solar power, biomass – their collective oomph wouldn’t pull the skin off a rice pudding.
Endquote.
Brilliant. Boris for prime minister, instead of that vacuous husky-hugging, wind-turbine toting idiot we have now.
Oh, and while you are at it, Boris, please can we have that nice shiney new London airport in the Thames. I am sick and tired of going around in circles above Colchester, and burning a tonne extra fuel per flight (10% extra). And that proposal for a 5.5 degree glideslope to reduce noise over London is pure madness – most dangerous thing I have heard in years. Flying is difficult enough, without placing ‘normal procedures’ on the limits of what the aircraft can do.
So come on, Boris, kick Cleggers and CaMoron in the balls and sort out this nation for us.
.
Of course they are sad . . . their gravy train is getting derailed, their ability to foist their eco religious beliefs on everyone is failing and they are starting to twig to the fact they have been conned by the Greenie leaders into honoring and praying to a false god.
Reality is such a be-atch.
Here’s a comment I made about a week ago on another thread:
Electric power-generation emissions could be reduced substantially only if switching to nuclear power were allowed to count as fulfilling obligations under the treaties–which it is not.
Why not? Because it’s not “sustainable” or “renewable”–i.e., it needs refueling. But those are minor downsides compared to the supposed CO2 catastrophe on the horizon. Correction–they are major downsides to environmental zealots who want to impose their vision of a sustainable utopia on the world. Those zealots constitute the majority of attendees at these conferences, because the attendees are mostly appointed by nations’ environmental agencies, who aren’t going to choose anyone but a greenie.
As Stewart Brand and James Lovelock (and Wired magazine) have recognized, nuclear is the only practical option. The supposed hidden high costs of nuclear are partly the result of using non-standardized plant designs; partly the result of using current technology, which has the potential for a dangerous meltdown; and partly the result of excessive costs imposed in the US by regulations.
There are lower-cost unconventional nuclear options that can vastly reduce the nuclear waste problem. One such unconventional nuclear option is described in the book Prescription for the Planet. And there are places that waste could be safely and inexpensively disposed of–e.g., in stainless steel cylinders dumped into the deep mud in the Pacific NW of Hawaii. (Oops–Clinton signed a treaty forbidding doing that, presumably at the instigation of greenie zealots. Can’t be too precautionary, after all.)
It doesn’t matter if greenies dispute those claims because, if some governments believe them, they will build nukes and thereby reduce their emissions, even at a higher cost than they had anticipated.
Renewables, once they become a large share of the supply, destabilize the power system. They are intermittent so they need spinning backup, which nearly doubles their cost. And they have other hidden costs that are now coming to light in countries that have gone for them in a big way, such as shorter life-spans than promised, higher maintenance costs than promised (including added wear and tear on the existing generating machinery), wide-scale intermittency, which was promised not to happen, high transmission costs, etc. Here’s a quote about the bottom line on those costs, from a recent German article:
“Almost all predictions about the expansion and cost of German wind turbines and solar panels have turned out to be wrong – at least by a factor of two, sometimes by a factor of five.”
–Daniel Wentzel, Die Welt, 20 October 2012, at http://thegwpf.us4.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c920274f2a364603849bbb505&id=40cadd5219&e=c1a146df99
It is the failure of renewables to remotely live up to the much-hyped promises that greenies made for them that has caused EU governments to cool on them, a failure this article deliberately avoids mentioning. According to the article, it’s just short-sightedness, penny-pinching, dog-in-the-manger veto-ing, and lack of world-wide coordination that’s causing the problem and, by implication, all that’s needed is (the imposition of?) more Will.
That’s not going to happen–the trend is going the other way—and it’s denialism to think it might turn around–countries are not going to commit economic hara-kiri, especially if others are not; and “leading the way” will not induce others to follow, as the EU’s failed pioneering has demonstrated. Quite the reverse. So it’s silly policy to bet the house on that outcome. Realistic precaution (prudence) would be to hedge one’s bet by encouraging, for now at least, the use non-renewable but less-emitting power sources like nuclear and natural gas.
By continuing to insist that “it’s my way or the highway,” greenies risk being left in the lurch.
snif, snif – it just breaks your heart.
Which leaves one simple question…
What happens when a political machinery is left in place long after it’s relevance has dried up?
Answer: usually disaster.
Regrettably the role of the EU in this isn’t mentioned. But, as they say, they’ll go for carbon reduction alone. I wonder what are they smoking.
I guess that they are close to despair because the world’s weather won’t do what the computers say it should, and ordinary people are beginning to notice.
I love the, “couldn’t make a ham sandwich” quote.
But they will sure find a way to make that sandwich cost more.
It is good news that no deal was signed.
We will not end sqnadering by public officials until there is real accountability in public office. Unlike private practice, there appears to be no consequence to massive failures. In the UK, politicians recently wasted several hundred million on a new computer systen for the NHS, which will never see the light of day. For sure, that example is a drop in the ocean compared to the billions that are being wasted on climate change.
How is the UK going to cut CO2 emissions by over 30% by 2020, let alone by over 40%. What is involved in making such drastic reductions. What will be the effect to the consumer and to business (the consumer always paying the cost in the end). No politician ever explains how these cuts will be achieved, let alone the consequences and what life will look like if the cuts were to be made. No grown up thought has gone into this. There has been gross negligence by all the politicians backing this matter.
Everyone entering politics should be obliged to post a bond of not less than say $10million which would be available to recompense the tax payer should it later transpire that policies promoted and/or endorsed by that politician were negligently pursued causing a loss to the tax payer. This would help focus the mind of politicians on the real benfits of the policies that they promote.
Dohahahahaha
Bad news for those guys is good news for the rest of the world!
Maybe we should club together and buy them all a Mayan calendar for Christmas. It’ll be about as useful next year as they’ll be.
Why do greens hate shale gas? Because they’re leftists who hate “Big Oil” and anything even vaguely linked to it. Because they’re superstitious luddites who fear new technology. Most of all, because they believe that people should be forced to consume as little as possible to minimise the human impact on nature. Their goal is to create artificial shortages of energy as a pretext for rationing.
Their despair stems from the inexorable collapse of their cherished Belief system, and the demise of all of its inherent perks. No more buzzing around the planet to exotic locales at others’ expense, and feeling important and heroic for their “sacrifice” in trying to “save the planet”. No more government funding of pseudoscience nor of “green” boondoggles. No more telling others what kind of energy to use, car to buy, or any number of things that are supposedly “good for the planet”. Woe is them.
Seemingly not easily found by googling: List of the 194 countries attending and a list of the subset of 37 countries who signed on to the Kyoto extension… ??
Close to despair?
Good!
Good news! It looks like the IPCC is going to back away from global warming hysteria. Slashdot has a story,
http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/12/10/0320239/draft-of-ipcc-2013-report-already-circulating
that links to an ABC News story, http://abcnews.go.com/International/science-hone-climate-change-warnings/story?id=17906408#.UMVJntHQQSk
No wonder the greenies are dismayed. The raison d’etre for all these climate conferences is OFFICIALLY going away.
And to think, but a few years ago when Kyoto was formulated, on the cusp of moving towards large scale decarbonizating sectors of the economy, nuclear energy, as the clean source of base load electricity generation, was stopped in its tracks by the hue and cry from the very same Greens advocating going green. So the Kyoto Protocol, based upon the successful Montreal Protocol dealing with CFCs, had the substitute for fossil fuels taken off the table as a viable energy source. Unlike Montreal, which had DuPont’s HFC ready to substitute for CFC, Kyoto substituted an intermittent power (solar and wind) source, which is dependent upon subsidies to survive, creates fuel poverty for the developed countries’ most vulnerable (very young and elderly), and is completely out of reach for undeveloped countries. One can not imagine a worst scenario from supposedly brilliant people. Just goes to show you that some very smart people can be awfully dumb.
However, Roger Harrabin at the ‘objective impartial Do ha ha BBC’* put a different spin on things
The climate bureaucrats sound increasingly like ‘Comical Ali’, Saddam Hussein’s uber-optimistic Minister of Disinformation. Or as Robin Williams once put it…
* – http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/11/24/bbcs-kirby-admission-to-phil-jones-on-impartiality/
China’s chief climate negotiator at Doha, Su Wei, “urged developed countries to provide concrete information on fast-start finance as to ensure transparency and guarantee the money is allocated to the support of developing countries.
“Developed countries should also by 2020 fulfill the goal of providing a hundred billion dollars per year – as they’ve already committed to doing.”
http://www.china.org.cn/environment/doha_climate_talks/2012-12/10/content_27364706.htm
China supplies all those solar panels which it wants western taxpayers to pay for with money borrowed from….China:
“China’s photo-voltaic (PV) industry, better known as the “solar industry”, is in the middle of a serious crisis.
“Nearly all the “big names” of the industry, including companies such as LDK Solar, Yingli Solar (which sports fans will recognize from its sponsorship at recent international soccer events) and Suntech Power Holdings are all facing the possibility of bankruptcy, consolidation, or both following a remarkable few years in China’s solar industry.
http://thediplomat.com/pacific-money/2012/12/08/lights-out-for-chinas-solar-power-industry/