… But Agrees New Unilateral CO2 Target For 2030
The European Union set out new climate and energy goals for 2030 on Wednesday, proposing less stringent targets than in the past in a reflection of tougher economic circumstances and a desire to limit rising energy costs. –Charlie Dunmore, Reuters, 22 January 2014
Today is a big day in Brussels as the EU has begun the gradual process of rolling back its bankrupting climate and green energy policies. Of course this modest climbdown is not the end of Europe’s climate hysteria that has dominated Brussels for 20 years. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is the beginning of a much deeper retreat of its unilateral approach in coming years. –Benny Peiser, 22 January 2014
The European Commission is to ditch legally-binding renewable energy targets after 2020 in a major U-turn and admission that the policy has failed industry and consumers by driving up electricity bills. The climbdown on setting mandatory national targets, enforced in the EU courts, will be welcomed by Britain, which argued to allow countries to keep the choice of how best to reduce CO2 emissions as a matter of national sovereignty. –Bruno Waterfield, The Daily Telegraph, 22 January 2014
The European Commission has outlined its plans for climate and energy policy until 2030. The Commissioners want a binding target to reduce carbon emissions by 40% from 1990 levels. Renewables will need to provide 27% of EU energy by 2030, but while the target will be binding at EU level there will be no mandatory targets for member states. The policy proposals are subject to review by heads of government. –Matt McGrath, BBC News, 22 January 2014
As country after country abandons, curtails or reneges on once-generous support for renewable energy, Europe is beginning to realise that its green energy strategy is dying on the vine. Green dreams are giving way to hard economic realities. The result of a fear-driven gamble with the continent’s industrial future is a costly shambles that threatens to undercut Europe’s economic and political position in a world that is sensibly refusing to follow its lead. –Benny Peiser, The Australian, 10 August 2013
Europe must get a grip on energy prices to protect growth and stop its industry from fleeing abroad, according to two top policy makers. German companies and consumers are shouldering costs of as much as 24 billion euros ($32 billion) a year for clean-energy aid, the country’s Economy and Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel told the same event. Europe’s biggest economy has reached “the limit” with renewables subsidies and must contain power prices or risk “deindustrialization,” he said. –Stefan Nicola and Tino Andresen, Bloomberg, 21 January 2014
It is essential that Brussels does not impose binding targets on the proportion of energy that each state must generate through renewables. This will force consumers to subsidise relatively inefficient technologies and will push up energy prices. That is something Europe does not need. —Editorial, Financial Times, 21 January 2014
The closure of Aluminium Delfzijl – the last remaining smelter in the Netherlands – last year is not going to be the last, according to Citicorp’s David Wilson. The smelter announced it was going into bankruptcy after the owners failed to negotiate a new low-cost energy deal. “There’s no reason to produce aluminium in Europe,” and “production in Europe will fall to 2 million tons this year, the lowest since 1971,” Wilson predicted, with smelters in Spain and Germany under the greatest threat.—Metal Miner, 22 January 2014
Germany must reduce the cost of its switch from atomic energy toward renewables to protect growth, Economy and Energy Minister Sigmar Gabriel said. German companies and consumers shoulder as much as 24 billion euros ($32 billion) a year for renewables because of subsidy payments, Gabriel told an energy conference in Berlin. “I don’t know any other economy that can bear this burden,” Gabriel said today. –Stefan Nicola and Tino Andresen, Bloomberg, 21 January 2014
Green taxes on energy bills will more than double by the end of the decade, despite a promise by David Cameron to “roll back” the charges, according to one of Britain’s biggest suppliers. Tariffs to fund wind turbines and solar panels will drive the average gas and electricity bill towards £1,500 a year by 2020, npower says. In a report published today, npower says that the cost of green levies will fall only temporarily after the Government’s decision last month to remove some environmental tariffs from bills. –Tim Webb, The Times, 22 January 2014
Why is employment growth so slow in Europe? Energy-intensive industries, like steel and chemicals, are not creating jobs in Europe. They’re going to the United States and other bits of the planet where natural gas and electricity prices – the two are linked – are much cheaper. – Eric Reguly, The Globe and Mail, 21 January 2014
h/t to Dr. Benny Peiser of The GWPF
They are just moving the goal posts and adding time to the clock.
The game must continue.
It wouldn’t matter if it was .00004%,as long as carbon dioxide is front and center as a driver of climate research then genuine climate research is being sidelined.
I am amazed that this website cannot follow a basic temperature graph which correlates cause with effect in order to support a really stupid late 17th century error that only makes sense to the intellectually challenged. If something so blatantly obvious as a mistake like this is overlooked or ignored then you all may as well offer your services to the politicians who will gladly pay you for the privilege of frightening the wider world for no good reason .
http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/los-angeles/hourly
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” NASA /Harvard
Backing off from the Green? No surprise there, not when it was a choice between saving the planet or their jobs … the peasants are revolting – toss ’em a bone … give ’em a break for now; we’ll go back to saving the planet next year.
Only our political whackos from ther actual german government, the “Große Koalition” (Big Coalition) here in Germany keep bashing “Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming” 24/7 to promote their political agenda.
I am waiting for the day when they will finally force pedestrians to buy carbon credits for exhaling “toxic” CO2 while crossing a road. Don’t laugh. This is Germany. I know that they will.
Anth0ny:
The article reports
Sadly, this has happened in the UK.
The Alcan aluminium smelter at Lynemouth, Northumberland, was closed as a result of high energy costs in 2012. It provided £60 million per year to the local economy prior to its closure.
The jobs have gone overseas and all aluminium now has to be imported.
Richard
LOL typical Marxist drivel. Maroons. In related news, the EU set out its utopian ideals to be achieved by 2100 including the constant raining of rose petals; communal handholding 3 hours a day across the EU; daily communal singing of love songs; love and tolerance as legally binding characteristics; and the banning of illness, bad hair, bad teeth, droopy jeans and gum chewing. Presto.
Revising targets for 2030 won’t save European industry or jobs – if revising or even abandoning green energy targets is to have have any effect it must be done now. Otherwise the closure of traditional generating plants and the shift to [fracked] gas or nuclear will take far to long and the EU will be in deeper depression than most of it is at present. That will mean continuing job losses and increases in unemployment across many EU countries as industry flees abroad.
Just one of the joys of living in the EUSSR where democratic decisions have been largely abolished and green socialism with a strongly controlling Marxist style of control is the order of the day.
Wretched IPad insisted that ‘fracking’ isn’t a word and changed ‘fracked’ to ‘cracked’ !
Those who set CO2 limits should have their food supplies similarly curtailed.
That might make ’em think–or not; They’re not thinking now!
/no sarc!
The European Commission calls cheaper energy available to industry outside the EU, “carbon leakage”!
” ‘Carbon leakage’ refers to the risk of companies moving production out of the EU to third countries where industry would not be subject to comparable carbon constraints. To prevent carbon leakage, energy-intensive sectors in the EU that are exposed to international competition receive ETS emission allowances for free according to a benchmark based on best available technologies. This system is serving as an effective safeguard: analysis for the Commission confirms that there is no evidence that carbon leakage has occurred due to the EU ETS.
“The Commission therefore proposes to continue the system of free allocation after 2020 if other major economies do not take comparable climate action. The system would be improved so that it focuses on those sectors at most risk of carbon leakage.”
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_MEMO-14-40_en.htm
GKell1:
Read a little tome one time by Isaac Asimov: Of time, space and other things. Think it was in 1969?
Old news in other words.
Ferdinand (@StFerdinandIII) Jan 2210:56 am says “LOL typical Marxist drivel. Maroons.“. To someone from New South Wales, that’s very funny!
Sorry, Ferdinand, I suspect that English is not your native language or maybe you used a spell-checker, but I couldn’t resist. (‘Maroons’ are Queenslanders)
Gkell1 says:
January 22, 2014 at 10:35 am
Gerald Kelleher: You’ve already polluted several threads with that irrelevant drivel about earth & rotations w/r to an arbitrary universal coordinate system.
mfo
“The Commission therefore proposes to continue the system of free allocation after 2020 if other major economies do not take comparable climate action. The system would be improved so that it focuses on those sectors at most risk of carbon leakage.”
Of course, not everyone gets free allocations – it helps to have the right friends.
IMO just like the book “Atlas Shrugged”, in which arbitrarily allocated Rearden Metal permits were used to loot productive companies, and to ensure the bureaucrats had a steady supply of unearned income.
22 Jan: UK Daily Mail: Ben Spencer: Climate change is NOT main cause of floods, say experts: Building on plains and cutting down trees are among the true reasons
Eminent scientists claim over-development is making flooding much worse
They say the link between global warming and flooding is less certain
It comes after David Cameron claimed climate change had caused the recent floods in the UK
The 19 scientists, from prestigious universities and institutes in Britain, the US, Japan, Australia and across Europe, said that while greenhouse gas emissions are ‘strongly linked’ to flooding, there is insufficient evidence to accurately describe the connection.
They said that until there is firm evidence about the role of climate change, it is better to concentrate on what we do know – that the way we are changing our physical landscape is making flooding worse.
Many of the authors, all respected climate change scientists, have contributed to UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. They include Professor Nigel Arnell, from Reading University’s department of meteorology, Robert Muir-Wood, a London-based consultant who advises the OECD and UN…
The paper, published in the Hydrological Sciences Journal yesterday, says: ‘There is such a furore of concern about the linkage between greenhouse forcing [the process by which man-made greenhouse gases are said to force climate change] and floods that it causes society to lose focus on the things we already know for certain about floods and how to mitigate and adapt to them.
‘Blaming climate change for flood losses makes flood losses a global issue that appears to be out of the control of regional or national institutions…
But the authors say that when it comes to climate change they had only ‘low confidence’ in models that try to forecast the impact on flooding…
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2543600/Climate-change-NOT-main-cause-floods-say-experts-Building-plains-cutting-trees-true-reasons.html?ITO=1490&ns_mchannel=rss&ns_campaign=1490
Don’t respond to Gkell1. He’s a button pushing troll who’s trying to waste your time.
Joe Prins wrote –
“GKell1:
Read a little tome one time by Isaac Asimov: Of time, space and other things. Think it was in 1969?
Old news in other words.”
Read this and read that but not one of you can read a temperature graph and the planetary dynamic behind the oscillations within a 24 hour period as the cause.
http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/usa/san-francisco/hourly
There is certainly some sort of mental block involved in the hostile and even rabid reaction to what is simply the most immediate experience of the Earth’s rotation on temperatures and it is all tied in with the type of modeling that began with Royal Society empiricism in the late 17th century. From a website that has temperature graphs 24/7 it is a fascinating spectacle watching the reaction to the common experience set down as the waving lines in that graph as temperatures respond to one rotation each 24 hours,no more and no less.
Want to stick with the 17th century guys who tried to re-invent the wheel but I assure you that it takes a very focused person to get to the bottom of the error and why it snowballed through the modeling agenda known as the ‘theory of gravitation’. The price of idol worship of the powdered wigs is very expensive for this era but then again,a confident and competent people would have already expressed horror at the loss of the most basic correlation known as to what causes day to turn to night each 24 hours and it ain’t because there is one more rotation than days in a year !.
It appears to me that Europe fears a backlash from its voters as the economic realities of [financing] “clean energy” are starting to bite.
Whether the voters make the connection between AGW doctrine, ‘clean energy’ and their increasing poverty remains to be seen.
Roger
http://www.rogerfromnewzealand.wordpress.com
http://www.thedemiseofchristchurch.com
Fining =financing
FYI, “maroon” was Bugs Bunny’s (mis?) pronunciation of “moron.”
Mike Jonas says:
January 22, 2014 at 12:51 pm
Ferdinand (@StFerdinandIII) Jan 2210:56 am says “LOL typical Marxist drivel. Maroons.“. To someone from New South Wales, that’s very funny!
Sorry, Ferdinand, I suspect that English is not your native language or maybe you used a spell-checker, but I couldn’t resist. (‘Maroons’ are Queenslanders)
I took Ferdinand’s comment to be an adaptation of Bugs Bunny’s “what a maroon” comment that’s said in many old Looney Tunes cartoons. Cleaned up for the kids, but adults get the humor.
Politicians like to think that Economics is subject to their control. It is not. SOME economic factors are under their control, such as taxation rates, but the effects are simply driven by the unchangable laws of Economics. Sadly, many generations of politicians get thier economic education at the expense of whole societies.
So they eventually learn that you can not tax yourself to riches. That driving out industry with high costs results in lower net productivity. That wages can only come from higher productivity, not lower. Etc. etc. Along the way empires evaporate…
The ONE beauty of Capitalism is that it pits Evil Bastard against Evil Bastard. Those that do not learn quickly or that try to take too much end up out of business. The sin of Socialism is that it does not so learn. It just grows and taxes until the society dies, then moves on to a new host. Never learning that it is the cause of the rot. (How folks can think having One Dear Leader E.B. is better than having them constrained by fighting among themselves is beyond me…)
At any rate, the E.B.s of the world learned a new trick of Global Cooperation somewhere along the line. Set up all sorts of NGOs and UN Agencies and held Conventions and signed Treaties… All thinking that eliminating that nasty “wasteful” competition would increase their profits. And it does. For a little while. Until the rot has reached large scale. Then the whole thing collapses into ruin.
So the E.U. will continue down the path to ruin. It is trying to use more of “Other Peoples Money” and prevent competition via a variety of laws and UN rulings and NGOs and treaties and… That may delay things for a few more years. Perhaps even a decade or two. (Though I doubt it has that long). Pretty quick the “other parties” learn to bow out of the “event” and put a hand on their wallet or purse.
That is just how economics works.
Oh, and I second the notion of not responding to Gkell1. I have not figured out if they are just obsessive about the (obvious) fact that polar earth rotations are different than day / night intervals (due to one rotation / year around the sun); or if they are a troll attempting to screw up the ambiance with a “stupid Dnr” persona: But in either case, they are a waste of time.
Earth rotations are different from total light / dark intervals due to our annual rotation about the sun. They seem to think this has some Great Significance, when in reality it is simple geometric fact of life. No idea what makes it a hot button. Tried to get an answer once. Gave up after a while (or “load of incomprehensible stuff”…)
It’s best not to feed the OCD, or the Troll, which ever it might be.
drip, drip, drip…
23 Jan: Bloomberg: Alesandro Vitelli: EU Ban on UN Carbon May Flag End of Offset Market, Nomisma Says
A proposed European Union ban on the use of United Nations carbon credits in its emissions market may signal the end of the international offset market, according to energy consultant Nomisma Energia srl…
Factories in the EU’s carbon market have been able since 2008 to offset a portion of their pollution limits with credits generated by projects in the UN’s Clean Development Mechanism. The price for UN-overseen credits slumped 98 percent in the past six years, reducing the incentive for nations to invest in less-polluting energy in developing economies.
“The EU decision might be the end of the CDM as a market,” Matteo Mazzoni, an analyst at Nomisma Energia in Bologna, Italy, said in a phone interview today. “There will still be some trading and people will try to extract something from their investments in projects, but without any new demand there isn’t much of a market anyway.” …
Trade in UN Certified Emission Reductions dropped 70 percent to 464 million metric tons in 2013 after hitting a record 1.57 billion tons in 2012, according to data from ICE Futures Europe exchange in London…
“It’s disappointing that there’s no international offsets after 2020,” even from the least-developed nations, said Andrei Marcu, senior adviser at the Centre for European Policy Studies in Brussels. “That will put a dampener on investment in emission-reduction projects” and potentially on carbon-cutting programs in emerging nations, he said…
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2014-01-22/eu-ban-on-un-carbon-may-flag-end-of-offset-market-nomisma-says.html
***
Katherine says:
January 22, 2014 at 3:40 pm
I took Ferdinand’s comment to be an adaptation of Bugs Bunny’s “what a maroon” comment that’s said in many old Looney Tunes cartoons.
***
Exactly what I thought. Bugs isn’t just funny, he even changed the cultural use of a word!
“Revising targets for 2030 won’t save European industry or jobs – if revising or even abandoning green energy targets is to have have any effect it must be done now.”
I don’t see why that would make much difference. Sure, less companies would leave, but, short of total repudiation of Greenism and publically punishing the guilty, why would any company open up a new plant in the EU where arbitrary ‘targets’ can be changed arbitrarily at any time?
This is the kind of government-induced catastrophe that takes decades to recover from.
I see a lot of positive things in the news bytes. It means economic reality is finally dawning on people, even politicians and journalists. That is good news. You can’t solve a problem if you don’t know you have one.
E.M.Smith says:
January 22, 2014 at 4:04 pm
> Oh, and I second the notion of not responding to Gkell1.
You should have stopped there. 🙂
From http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-25828181 of all sources:
As well as proposals on emissions cuts, the Commission will set out its thinking on shale gas. It is likely that they will suggest a series of non-binding recommendations as opposed to a EU wide regulation.
The Commission will also outline an effort to reform the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS).
The price of carbon has collapsed over the past year due to an excess of carbon permits.
The Commission’s proposals will go forward for consideration at heads of government meetings in March and June this year.
Some critics believe that the climate and energy plan may be watered down even further at these meetings.
“There is this huge rift within the EU on energy and climate policy. Since 2010, they haven been able to decide on anything substantial,” said Dr Geden.
E.M.Smith was dead serious when he wrote –
“Earth rotations are different from total light / dark intervals due to our annual rotation about the sun. ”
Just another way to say the Earth’s rotation is not responsible for the Sun rising and setting each 24 hours and that I find remarkable for all the wrong reasons and rightly should be for everyone else.
http://www.timeanddate.com/weather/uk/london/hourly
Try any village town or city you wish,they all tell the same story that rotation is the cause behind the temperature cycle so wake up,this is the 21st century and not the end of the world where people have not only lost their minds but also lost the most immediate experience of our planet’s motion as the temperature goes up and down as a reaction to this daily motion once a day and every day.
That is the real crisis and my prayers go to those with the courage and the intelligence to see their way out of the modeling mania and into using their interpretative faculties.
To Mark G
For those who don’t know much about how the EU operates and why energy policies are in the mess they are in I will try and shed a little light.
The problem with being stuck in the EUSSR is that it is controlled by the Commission which is made up of unelected appointees. They are answerable to no electorate and thus what the electorate think is an irrelevance to them; it’s actually worse than that as the underlying belief is that the electorate can’t be trusted to make the ‘right’ decisions. (hence when a referendum is held in an EU member state and the outcome is not what the europhiles/commission wanted it is held again, and again until the electorate get it right!). The European parliament is primarily a toothless structure which provides a fig leaf to hide the erosion of democracy from the citizens.
Many of those who are unelected, but in control, have a lifelong socialist or Marxist background which sits uncomfortably with the notion of ‘Free Enterprise’. Laws (Directives) are made by the unelected, and these are binding on all EU countries, currently around 80% of UK legislation is ‘made in Brussels” and parliament has no choice but to enact it into UK law precisely as instructed. That is why there is now virtually no difference between Socialist and Conservative parties or what they do in government because in most areas they are not making, and aren’t able to make, decisions. The EUSSR dictates those to them.
The green legislation in Europe is driven by the lobbying power of the ‘green lobby’ (watermelons); and that lobbying is funded by massive grants from the EU to lobby itself ! Even to the extent of including representatives from the green lobby in the drafting and decision making processes. That’s what happens when democracy is removed from the political landscape; and from that flow decisions (laws) which are not only damaging to industry and employment across Europe but are often aimed at achieving the watermelon agenda.
When I read about Obama’s green agenda, and the ways he seeks to subvert the democratic process to achieve his green aims, it is similar to the way democracy has been shut down at the European level. Perhaps that is why he is so keen to see the UK remaining in the EU and subjugated to the unelected dictat of the EUSSR ?
There is a long running war in progress in global politics and at the heart of it lies democracy and whether or not it is removed and replaced with unelected bodies. The EU is already well on the way to achieving that, had the Copenhagan (climate) treaty been agreed then there would now be an embryo global government controlling environmental policies for every nation, but made up of the wholly unelected.
‘Climate wars’ are a symptom of this underlying struggle, and industry and employment across much of Europe are the casualties willingly sacrificed by the unelected and unaccountable as a necessary ‘cost’ to achieve the watermelon agenda.
The cracks in the facade will continue to become wider and more numerous ultimately leading to complete collapse.
I predict, as it keeps getting colder, the EU will eventually pull out of the Kyoto Protocol altogether and THAT will be the ‘end’ of the hoax (as we know it) because leftist MSM will finally be forced to start back peddling and then eventually apologize claiming they had been … ~misled~ all along. (excepting the The Guardian – they’ll just shrivel up and disappear).
Mike M wrote –
“The cracks in the facade will continue to become wider and more numerous ultimately leading to complete collapse.”
That ain’t going to happen,at least not without undermining the organization most responsible for its general circulation.
Here I state that it is a basic human right that every child ,student and adult is entitled to the known fact that one rotation is responsible for the reaction in temperatures within a 24 hour cycle apart from when local conditions dominate. That ‘fact’ is a violation of ‘human rights’,fraud or pure incompetence so you all get to choose what type of UN law applies.
” It is a fact not generally known that,owing to the difference between solar and sidereal time,the Earth rotates upon its axis once more often than there are days in the year” NASA /Harvard
Chances are that readers here are exceptionally slow on the uptake,that is,if they are genuinely interest in seeing a stable narrative to climate research .
according to EU Referendum,
http://www.eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=84653
this appears to be a holding game until the new commission and parliament are installed in November.
Do youi really think that the Kommissioners – or do I mean Kommissars? – are going to give up their religion so easily?