![worldbank-support[1]](https://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/worldbank-support1.jpg?quality=83)
Guest essay by Eric Worrall
The Guardian claims that planned expansion of coal power across Asia is pushing the Paris Climate Agreement to the brink of collapse.
Plans for coal-fired power in Asia are ‘disaster for planet’ warns World Bank
Experts have offered stark warnings that proposed power plants in India, China, Vietnam and Indonesia would blow Paris climate deal if they move ahead.
Plans to build more coal-fired power plants in Asia would be a “disaster for the planet” and overwhelm the deal forged at Paris to fight climate change, the president of the World Bank said on Thursday.
In an unusually stark warning, the World Bank president, Jim Yong Kim, noted that countries in south and south-east Asia were on track to build hundreds more coal-fired power plants in the next 20 years – despite promises made at Paris to cut greenhouse gas emissions and pivot to a clean energy future.
…
On their own, China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam account for three-quarters of new coal-fired power plants expected to be built around the world in the next five years. In India alone about 300 million people live without access to electricity.
“If Vietnam goes forward with 40GW of coal, if the entire region implements the coal-based plans right now, I think we are finished,” Kim told a two-day gathering of government and corporate leaders in Washington, in a departure from his prepared remarks.
“That would spell disaster for us and our planet.”
…
The UN secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, is pushing hard for governments to formally join the agreement and bring it into force before Barack Obama leaves office in January 2017.
That would help protect the agreement from a future president – such as the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump – who denies or doubts that climate change is even occurring.
Last year WUWT reported how, in the wake of the World Bank refusing to fund affordable energy, China and Japan were competing to supply funds for new coal plants. Japan even compounded the joke, by defining investment in coal as “climate finance”.
In response, the World Bank now seems to be asking the rising superpowers of the 21st century to please desist from their economic expansion plans, because they want to block the likely next President of the United States from enacting the will of the American people, by tearing up the Paris Climate Agreement.
Somehow I don’t think the World Bank is going to win this one.
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It sounds like they are contemplating going to ware with (China, India, Indonesia and Vietnam) to prevent them from destroying the earth in a global warming apocalypses.
last i heard, the chinese were burning magic coal that was causing the pause.
That would help protect the agreement from a future president – such as the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald Trump
Did the head of the UN just stick his nose into American politics?
Don’t they have a rule against that?
Rules only apply to the little people.
It almost sounds like the World Bank has got out of the banking business and into the CAGW business.
The World Bank I feel has often done more harm than good.
I warned as far back as 2012 that the World Bank was going to become the pointy end of the stick.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/11/28/the-atlantic-magazines-5-charts-about-climate-change-that-should-have-you-very-very-worried-worried-about-scientific-illiteracy/#comment-1159657
Called it!
Quote *The World Bank’s official goal is the reduction of poverty*
They have probably caused more poverty in the way they make countries that get money via them change their agriculture to suit the market but not the people of that country.
That was a good post from years back David. 🙂
Yes, good call David. Fortunately, as your comment pointed out, Russia, China, India, and Asia have no compulsion to capitulate to these UN and WB Blackbeards. Unfortunately your request for the US to retake long their long worn mantle as leader of the free world, did not happen, and the downward spiral is rolling along. As they said in Harry Potter, “clinch your bottoms, its going to be a bumpy ride.”
This is a disaster for the first world countries who are busy de-industrializing themselves by cranking the cost of power up to $0.30+/kWhr via green initiatives. If the Asian countries can produce power at $0.15/kwHr they will own the manufacturing market of the world (what they don’t already own, that is)
Peter
Exactly.
We are all aware of how terrible warmunistas are at simple math…
Totaling China’s and India’s plans for new coal fired power plants amounts to a very impressive number. Given the GDP necessary to build power plants, there are not a lot of countries world wide that can build sufficient percentage of coal plants. i.e. unless England plans to purchase standby coal fired generators to replace those standby diesel generator farms.
That three quarters claim begins to sound like a rectally sourced alarm number meant to terrify carbon-phobics.
How many antiquated coal plants are China and India shutting down?
What does that have to do with ‘new’ coal fired plants?
‘Plans to build more coal-fired power plants in Asia would be a “disaster for the planet” and overwhelm the deal forged at Paris ‘
And I thought forging was an indictable offence.
“According to John Roome, the Bank’s senior climate change official, if all of those plants are built it will blow the world’s efforts, enshrined at Paris, to hold warming to 2C.”
Strange. It seems the world had already warmed by 1.5 C since 1750 and natural temperature variability in 1750-1800 was as much as plus or minus 2 C in 50 years. To attain 2 C warming since 1750, They have to limit warming to 0.5 C for 100 years (2000-2100) It is almost certain the world will warm or cool by that much without man’s intervention. The Paris agreement is wishful thinking.
http://berkeleyearth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/annual-comparison-small.png
Coal combustion may even cause global cooling. Coal power plants are the largest man-made source of sulfur dioxide, an aerosol with negative radiative forcing (cooling effect) According to IPCC-AR4, man-made aerosol has greater radiative forcing (-2.2 W/m^2) than CO2 (+1.66 W/m^2) Hence the cooling effect of aerosol is greater than the warming effect of CO2
http://cdn.greenoptions.com/c/cd/cd93fd65_6e45b560_ipcc2007_radforc.jpg
Correction: The comparison must include the max. uncertainty range.
Total aerosol = -2.7 W/m^2
CO2 = +1.83 W/m^2
It’s possible aerosol trumps CO2
The coal fired power plants being built today will be greatly reducing any particulates. These nations will be getting aid (CO2 credits) from the west for some of these coal plants replacing older particulate producing coal plants. (Something they should be doing on their own for their own people.) Most of the planned power plants are not replacements however, which will aid in greening the world, and producing more O2, for those inclined to worry about the latest disaster of the day prediction.
When Mt. Pinatubo erupted, it ejected 20 million tons of sulfur dioxide and cooled global temperature by 0.5 C in 1991-93. China alone emits 30 million tons of sulfur dioxide every year. That’s equivalent to three Pinatubo eruptions every two years.
“Experts have offered stark warnings that proposed power plants in India, China, Vietnam and Indonesia would blow Paris climate deal if they move ahead.”
I cannot imagine how a person can be an ‘expert’ and not be aware that the Paris Agreement exempts developing countries from measures that would impair advances in their economic development,
Some may believe that China (for example) can prosper while the West commits economic suicide. But such a view fails to take account of the dependence of China upon Western markets.
The modern Green-Luddite movement threatens both Western and Eastern nations.
The most damaging consequence of the coming backlash against the Greens may be the rise of neo-fascism among the unemployed both in Europe and the US. This process may take quite a while to develop, but the persistent effort to drive up energy prices must result in reducing the demand for goods and services. That is the objective: to deindustrialize. Deindustrialization means more unemployment. This cannot happen without political consequences.
Anybody who says that the rise of Mr Trump shows this is about to happen should read some history books.
As we used to say, “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet”
I agree with much of your comment, but few have been more fascist then the current POTUS.
This is absolutely comical.
When loony leftists negotiated the Paris Climate Treaty, they didn’t include ANY penalty provisions against countries for noncompliance…
Accordingly, China (who thinks CAGW is a scam) is rapidly INCREASING their coal plant facilities and rapidly increasing their CO2 emissions.
Here’s where the magic kicks in….The more CO2 China emits, the more money Western countries will waste to offset China’s growing CO2 emissions. Moreover, this makes Western goods even more uncompetitive, leading more Western corporations to move their production facilities to China, where CO2 regulations don’t exist!!
BRILLIANT!!!
But here is the best part…. China is developing Thorium Molten Salt Reactors (a technology ironically discovered in the US, and GIVEN for free to China) that will eventually replace all of China’s coal-fired plants starting from 2025, and these MSRs will produce unlimited amounts of energy that’s 50% cheaper than coal-fired plants, and 10 TIMES cheaper than Western electricity rates, that skyrocketed after the West built expensive wind and solar facilities….
Accordingly, after China’s Thorium MSR rollout begins, a SECOND wave of Western industry will move to China to take advantage of unlimited MSR power that’s 10 TIMES cheaper than the West…
Checkmate…
I hope Trump is aware of what China is doing…. At least Trump thinks CAGW is scam that needs to end…
We’ll see.
‘Enshrined’, eh? What he just said!
==============
Yeah, right. We always consult our bankers about climatology issues.
Environmentalists are so dense when it comes to solutions, just as they are when it comes to problems.
How in the world any one who prizes nature can be in favor of windmills rather destroys any arguments they put forth. Windmills are about as obnoxious (and deadly) and land-grabbing a means of producing unreliable power as can be imagined. The fact that these folks know nothing about energy technology is
plain to see in their championed alternatives, which truly suck. Anyone with even a smal interest in energy technology knows that moltenn salt reactors are the solution that can satisfy everyone, except, most likely, greenies, who don’t abide by any logic, only rabid emotionalism and ethical elitism. Greenies get my vote as the dumbest of the dumb.
“Environmentalists are so dense when it comes to solutions, just as they are when it comes to problems.”
I’d try asking them, “How many Windmills does it take to make just 1 Windmill or how long would it take?,” but they’d have absolutely no idea what the question even means. But except for the ad hominems, it would likely shut them up, since the grammar/arrangement of words is not in their lexicon of “correct” noises and appearances, etc..
Once @ur momisugly Greenpeace I stated that Catastrophic CO2-Climate Change was Scientifically Falsified because of its [100%] Prediction Failure. A woman responded by asking me if English was my first language because she couldn’t understand anything I said, and she even backed up her ‘cred’ by adding that she was an “Ivy League Graduate”. So I tried simply explaining how this science thing works. She did not re-appear.
Funny, is it not, that the eco-marxists want to convince the public that all fossil fuels receive massive state subsidies?
And yet the countries that produce coal and use coal in the greatest quantities are, in general, getting rich in the process. In other words, they are, often, the ones experiencing the highest rates of economic growth.
Or filling up their sovereign wealth funds, or buying up all the world’s gold.
There is an obvious reason why China has so far expanded coal consumption.
Coal is cheap to mine and cheap to buy and produces the most competitively priced electricity in the world.
There is no competing source of energy in terms of price.
China is only interested in out-competing the rest of the industrial world in terms of low cost production.
And they have basically succeeded.
The fact that they have built a single 22GW hydro-electric dam, tells us that big hydro is also cheap.
And the fact that they are now expanding to about 50GW capacity of solar P.V. must also tell us something important about the cost of solar P.V. in China.
Erecting 50GW installed capacity is not something that you do for show.
I’m pretty convinced that if China does something then we can assume that there is a net profit involved.
And not a net subsidy.
They are not idiots like the politicians of the E.U. socialist nightmare, where subsidized everything is destroying market efficiency and bankrupting us in the process.
In the morass of E.U. tariffs and subsidies we have totally lost contact with the real cost of anything.
To the point where we are now placing punitive tariffs of Chinese solar panels.
To the point where we can not be critical of Russia, because we so desperately need their cheap gas.
Meanwhile, we point the finger at the producers and users of fossil fuels and accuse them of subsidizing their industries.
It all seems like a bad joke really.
When the Kyoto Accords were established, the UNFCCC excluded Countries containing ~5 Billion of the world’s ~6.5 Billion people from having to agree to follow them. Why? Because:
1] The UN knew these Countries wouldn’t follow the Accords.
2] The UN didn’t believe its own IPCC “science”.
Time to invest in DLNG (liquid nat. gas shipping), KOL (coal), MO (tobacco) and URA (uranium)!
Ya. 🙂
Jim Yong Kim MD, PhD, 12th President incumbent of the World Bank since July 1, 2012 is a physician and anthropologist, so he must be an expert on both financial and climate issues. Auch… neither.
But the most interesting part of his utterance is that “we”. He, as the President of the World Bank is obviously not authorized to speak in the name of mankind, much less the “planet”. As a self appointed speaker in the role of a private citizen he could do that, of course, but he failed miserably to make that fine distinction. Therefore we are forced to assume, that by “we” he has meant the World Bank crowd.
It makes sense. The World Bank has cut off funding for coal in 2013. If, in spite of this move, economic development in south and south-east Asia goes on unimpeded as they are able to find alternative financial resources, the World Bank is finished indeed. It is finished, because it failed its mission, which is to “End extreme poverty within a generation and boost shared prosperity.”, while others on the market took over this role. After this the institution should be defunded and dissolved, in other words… finished. So Jim Yong Kim MD, PhD is kinda right.
It leaves one wondering whether the interest of the “World Bank” is Global Prosperity or Global Control.
Thanks Eric. I used this story for a blog post, including stories where the WB is not lending for coal plants in India and Myanmar. Then China’s AIIB will be happy to lend to more developing Asian countries’ coal plants, https://electricityasia.wordpress.com/
Al the forests, all the farmland, all the gardens in the world are clapping their hands with glee. More CO2 to better satisfy our needs.
I moved to Asia last summer. The Prime Minister is already in line with his hand out for Western wealth to help us “go green.” Most of the money will end up in his pocket. That’s what happens with all the billions Western countries foolishly send him.