… 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
“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?